The reform agenda is not mysterious:
• Tax land value, not buildings or labor
• Build social housing at permanent scale
• Zone for density and mixed use
• Invest in transit (which creates affordable land)
• Stop treating rising home prices as prosperity indicators

Knowledge is not the obstacle. Power is.

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

#SocialHousing #CityPlanning #Housing #YIMBY

What works — we actually know:

→ Vienna: 60% of residents in publicly subsidized, well-managed housing.
Still working after 100 years.
→ Tokyo: central government land use authority + liberal upzoning. Relatively
affordable by global city standards.
→ Minneapolis: abolished single-family zoning citywide (2018). Supply rose.

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

#SocialHousing #CityPlanning #Housing #YIMBY

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

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