Messaging the climate benefits of urban density
Hi all - here are my favorite tweets on urbanism from the past few days.
All comments or suggestions are welcome to coby.joseph@gmail.com.
Home (i.e. land) value appreciation is really just a straight transfer of wealth from future homebuyers to current homeowners and from younger people to older people. It's not creating wealth for anyone, just moving it around in extraordinarily inequitable ways.
As Adam notes, land value appreciation isn't inherently bad; it's a consequence of economic growth. Our problem is that we actively encourage land value appreciation while prohibiting the necessary next step: to build more intensively on high-value land.
Adam Smith @LaissezWhere
To this point, I think a goal of most policy should be to make the "right" choice the easy or automatic choice. Or put another way, to not force people to min-max their lives in order to feel financially secure. Our housing policies do the exact opposite.
Joshua G. Schraiber🌹 @jgschraiber
The more money people dump into their homes (which we're all increasingly forced to do), the less money they have for entrepreneurship, investment in genuinely productive ventures (including education), etc. It's really bad.
luispedro.substack.com🌻 @luispedrocoelho
Large study on London school children finds that a "higher daily exposure to woodland (but not grassland) was associated with higher scores for cognitive development, and a 16% lower risk of emotional and behavioural problems two years later."
Nails it:
"Tesla is still using its existing owners and their vehicles to beta-test the new [FSD] features...Other drivers, as well as cyclists and pedestrians, are unaware that they’re part of an ongoing experiment that they did not consent to."
Some folks are lamenting the loss of greenspace here, but by building high density just on farmland, HK was able to grow while keeping the rest the island's land wilded
Old Photos In Real Life @oldphotosinreal
The comments are a good reminder that most people see the bottom photo as an example of environmental devastation rather than as the most sustainable way to share the planet. We need to do a better job at messaging the climate benefits of density.
Old Photos In Real Life @oldphotosinreal
People are willing to:
◾️ Travel further & more often to visit retail environments with mature tree cover.
◾️ Spend more time in retail areas with trees.
◾️ Pay 9 to 12% more for goods and services in a shopping area with large, well-cared for trees.
greenblue.com/gb/encouraging…
E-scooter companies are making it harder to unlock and operate a scooter if you're inebriated. Makes sense.
Remind me again why we don't do this for automobiles, which weigh 100x more and travel 5-10x faster than an e-scooter?
techcrunch.com/2021/07/19/the…
People talk about it being impossible to make the suburbs walkable. But my dad lives a 5 minute walk from the grocery store. All they need is a sidewalk and all of a sudden the suburban townhomes turn into a walkable community.
The CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic dictates any successful network must reflect five principles:
Cohesion: youtu.be/s2R29AWGjyU
Directness: youtu.be/A2kg-FviR5M
Safety: youtu.be/aN_Pmgp_6gU
Comfort: youtu.be/uL8PzMx8jHo
Attractiveness: youtu.be/UcguP8B6lsI
Plaza Mayor, Madrid.
Ten entrances and 237 balconies facing onto it (photo: instagram.com/p/CRUYO1VL9SR/…)
Click the tweet below for a thread on the importance of helping people visualize what good density and transit can mean for cities.