@YimbyEarth

Proposing to keep the basic shape of a #YIMBY 2026 platform as the 2024 platform:

* No new motorways, or widenings of existing ones
* Ban car parking minimums
* Barcelona blocks & 15k ppl / km² as minimum zoning
* All areas mixed use
* Copenhagen street design
* E-bikes included in all new build housing
* Step-free transit stations
* Parks for all
* Renewable energy
* Build more housing
* and most of all:
Fuck
Fascism
Forever

yay/nay?

#yimby #urbanism #yimbyism

Climate change layers atop all of this.

Cities are responsible for >70% of global carbon emissions and are acutely vulnerable to sea level rise, heat stress, and flooding — especially the informal settlements of coastal South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The same governance dysfunction that blocks housing blocks adaptation.

read our essay

https://thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-urban-condition-promise-crisis

#Urbanism #HousingCrisis

The developing world copied the Western urban model — and its contradictions.

Mumbai: ~40% of residents in informal settlements. Nairobi: more than half.
São Paulo: ~15%.

These are the workers who clean offices, drive taxis, cook food for the formal city — while living at its margins, without title, without services.

https://thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-urban-condition-promise-crisis

#Urbanism #HousingCrisis #PoliticalEconomy #CityPlanning

Now two permanent classes:

Class 1: owned before prices exploded. Wealth grew through timing, not effort.

Class 2: permanent renters, transferring rising income to Class 1, indefinitely, with no path to equity.

In strict economic terms: a rentier system.

The enforcement mechanism: zoning.

Across North American cities, the vast majority of residential land is zoned
exclusively for single-family housing. Not a neutral planning decision.

#PoliticalEconomy #LandValueTax #Urbanism

The core engine of cities: agglomeration. Dense urban environments generate
measurable productivity gains — thick labor markets, knowledge spillovers,
serendipitous cross-pollination between workers, fields, & ideas.

Jane Jacobs called this before economists could model it.

But agglomeration wealth doesn't distribute automatically. Under the wrong institutional conditions, it gets captured almost entirely by landowners — who created none of it

https://thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-urban-condition-promise-crisis

#Urbanism #CityPlanning