Upzoned

“Build it and they will come” sounds confident until the project is finished and nobody comes. The Neighborhood Playbook, a placemaking guide built around testing what people actually respond to before making larger investments, turns 10 this year. Carlee Alm-LaBar revisits it with coauthor Joe Nickol of Yard & Company and Max Musicant of The Musicant Group, asking what a decade of use says about planning places through action instead of prediction. The tension between planning and doing remains: how much should a place decide up front, and how much should it discover through action?

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Edmonton changed its zoning to allow more homes in existing neighborhoods, and Alberta has now given the city three months to undo those reforms. The fight, reported by Global News in “Edmonton Mayor Pushes Back as Alberta Orders Reversal of Infill Housing Rules,” targets changes that expanded housing options and removed parking mandates. Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Dear Winnipeg author Michel Durand-Wood and Strong Towns chief technical advisor Edward Erfurt to examine why those reforms triggered such a fierce backlash and whether the sudden jump in larger infill means the rules went too far or simply exposed demand that had been bottled up.

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A reliable bus is a big improvement, but Mobile is also looking at how appearance, comfort and the experience around the trip can make transit more appealing to people who have other options. The idea comes from “A Streetcar Named Spiro: Mobile Mayor Pushes Trolley-Filled Future,” published by AL.com and Mass Transit. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Levette Fuller, Strong Towns board member, and Wanda Cochran, an attorney in Mobile, Alabama, about what happens after the basics start working. The trolley idea gets at the gap between a transit system that technically works and one that people actually want to use, especially in a city where most residents are accustomed to driving. Better service helps close that gap, but so does making the ride feel more inviting and making the experience around the bus stop more comfortable and practical.

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States are legalizing ADUs, cutting parking mandates, and changing zoning, but it's still difficult to estimate how much housing each of those reforms will actually produce. Carlee Alm-LaBar talks with Arnold Ventures housing director Stephanie Kestelman, The Turnout’s Grace Gordon, and Strong Towns executive director John Reuter about the Housing Data and Technology Innovation Challenge, a nine-week competition asking teams to build open-source tools that estimate the effects of housing reforms using public data and transparent assumptions. Plenty of housing reforms have arrived with big promises about what they’ll produce and then fallen short; building these tools could give people a better way to challenge the assumptions behind those promises and be clearer about what the available data can actually support.

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Seven years of planning have not produced a version of Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue redesign that everyone can live with. In the Boston Globe article “More Parking, Fewer Bike Lanes: City of Boston and MBTA Release New Blue Hill Avenue Redesign,” the latest proposal restores parking and traffic space while reducing parts of the planned bike network. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with transportation historian Peter Norton and Ann Arbor transportation manager Malisa McCreedy about what happens when a street is expected to satisfy every demand, even when those priorities conflict. As each revision absorbs another concern, the challenge is whether the city can keep its focus on what will actually work best there instead of reopening the same choices again and again.

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A New York condo sold for $238 million, but the city assessed it at just $15.5 million. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has framed his new pied-à-terre tax as a way to “tax the rich,” but a recent article by Ken Girardin, “The Sheer Absurdity of New York’s Pied-à-Terre Tax,” argues that the bigger problem sits underneath it. Chuck Marohn talks with Urban Three founder Joe Minicozzi and land economist Lars Doucet about how classifications, assessment caps, and decades of special rules can shift the tax burden away from high-value property. If the system is already distorted, does adding another tax make it fairer or just harder to fix?

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What happens when something people have always treated as free suddenly gets a price tag? A USA Today article, “Shopping Malls Are Charging for Prime Parking. It’s Not Going Well,” looks at what happens when a long-standing free amenity suddenly has a visible cost. Carlee Alm-LaBar talks with Parking Reform Network founder Tony Jordan and developer Monte Anderson of Neighborhood Evolution about what changes when shoppers are asked to pay directly for that convenience. For owners, “free” parking has never actually been free: the lot still has to be paved, repaired, cleaned, secured, and eventually rebuilt, even when much of it sits empty. If the land is expensive to maintain, could it be doing something more useful?

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A Los Angeles couple set out to build a 400-square-foot backyard home for about $300,000, only to watch the final cost climb to $600,000 in a project recently profiled by Lisa Boone in the Los Angeles Times. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Tamara White of Small Housing and Mary Coddington, founder of 12 Incorporated, about what pushed the cost so high. The couple chose an ambitious design and built on a difficult site, but they also had two major advantages many small housing projects never get: they already owned the land, and they were allowed to build. If the land and permissions were already in place, what made the price skyrocket, and how much of that complexity could actually be removed?

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A six-year-old rides his scooter to a playground a quarter mile from home. Two days later, Child Protective Services is at his family’s door. His case is one of several in a recent New York Times article asking whether letting children play outside alone has effectively become a crime. Chuck Marohn talks with Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and president of Let Grow, and planner and pedestrian-safety advocate Angie Schmitt about “worst-first thinking,” neglect laws, and the decline of walking and biking to school. Parents are expected to raise capable, independent kids while also keeping them under constant watch, while the built environment often makes even short walks to school or the playground harder for children to navigate on their own.

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An eight-mile gap keeps Los Angeles from having a continuous river bike route through the heart of the city. Voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars to help close it, but years of planning have pushed the project toward a possible billion-dollar price tag. Carlee Alm-LaBar is joined by transportation advocate Dave Snyder, Pasadena city councilmember and longtime local government leader Rick Cole, and Strong Towns chief technical advisor Edward Erfurt to examine how a straightforward connection became a megaproject. Flood control, emergency access, environmental concerns, neighborhood connections, labor requirements, and long-term reliability have each added something defensible to the plan. Meanwhile, a simpler path could reportedly close the entire gap with the money already available.

This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Join fellow members discussing this episode in The Commons.