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M. Nolan Gray Profile picture
M. Nolan Gray
@mnolangray
the once and future city planner // senior director @cayimby // kentuckian // AICP // author of hit broadway musical arbitrary lines
3 subscribers
Aug 29 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
A big day in the legislature for pro-housing legislation! Three pieces of California YIMBY-sponsored legislation moved out of the second chamber. Combined with laws we've helped to pass in recent years, it will never be easier to build missing middle housing in California. 🧵 Image Background: In 2021, California made history by adopting SB 9, which aimed to allow duplexes and lot splits. When combined with robust ADU law, the goal was to allow for up to four units on lots in residential areas—key for ending our shortage. Image
Jul 23 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
It's important to remember that the idea of "expensive cities" and "affordable cities" is new. Historically, variation in home prices could be explained by variation in (a) incomes and (b) available flat land. Since 1960, variation in development regulation has changed that. 🧵
Image Yes, home prices were always higher in wealthier SF and NYC and lower in poorer Columbus and OKC. But account for variation in incomes—and the fact that the former are hemmed in by oceans, and the latter are flat, featureless plains—and the variation was predictable. (And tiny!) Image
Jul 2 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
In explaining why it gave a $3.3 million Baby YIMBY grant to Philadelphia, a city that has recently tightened regulatory barriers to housing, HUD favorably cites...a broken, unfunded IZ mandate that acts as a tax on housing. Ooph. h/t @christianbrits hud.gov/sites/dfiles/C…
Image @christianbrits Ditto for the Seattle—a city that deserves credit for actually building housing. In a long list of recent wins, HUD oddly chooses the biggest L, another unfunded IZ program that research suggests has suppressed development in affected areas. furmancenter.org/files/publicat…

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Jun 19 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
YIMBYs are clearly divided on this. I think it's a good project with a lot of potential. Some people I respect disagree. Fair enough. But the amount of silliness floating around, some it from people who don't know basic details about the proposal, warrants a thread. 1. "This threatens valuable naturally valuable or hazardous lands."

In nearly bill California YIMBY has sponsored since 2017, we've excluded any land that might be remotely sensitive or dangerous—habitat, prime farm, flood zones, wildfire areas, etc...
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavC…
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Mar 17 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Seven ideas for hosting a good monthly happy hour—something every serious YIMBY group should do:
1⃣ Host it on the same day/time, ideally at the same place—only move if you live in a massive fragmented city. You want this to become a habit. 2⃣ Host it at a local open bar—the point is to mingle. Weather allowing, host it at a place with outdoor space, e.g. a beer garden, to accommodate all.
3⃣ Don't waste your budget, assuming you have one, buying drinks or appetizers—better off members will voluntarily do that.
Jan 5 • 27 tweets • 9 min read
Wow. Kentucky State Representative Steven Doan that would implement...basically the entire YIMBY program! I'm still learning details, but this is a great model for a zoning reform omnibus bill. Let's dive in. 🧵 (h/t @robmolou) apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb… Right off the bat, Section 3 forbids jurisdictions from arbitrarily mandating larger homes and apartments, which effectively place a price floor on housing. Jurisdictions must default to the building code, which is rooted in actual health and safety considerations. Image
Dec 18, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
The best case scenario for contemporary vexillology: completely unremarkable flags. This generation of uninspired vector flags is going to feel so unfashionably dated, "of the 2020s" in 15 years. A sample of flags adopted in 2022: Image
Aug 21, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
For thousands of years, city planning focused on drawing out a street network, with water and sewer underneath, and reserving regular public spaces, and was mostly agnostic on uses or densities. One hundred years ago, that flipped.


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Image Today, few cities have anything more detailed than an arterial plan, leaving streets and public spaces to be defined in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way, producing the hot mess that is American suburbia. As long as the rights-of-way are designed like freeways, have at it!
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Jun 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Pro-housing zoning reform in Arizona wasn't killed by any genuinely popular opposition. Arizona families were demanding solutions on affordability! It was killed by the League of Cities and Towns, using taxpayer dollars to lobby on behalf of exclusionary jurisdictions. In at least four states I'm aware of, Leagues threw everything they had into killing pro-housing reform this year. Impossible to understand contemporary zoning reform without understanding the pernicious role played by these groups.
reason.com/2023/06/01/nim…
Jun 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
A few thoughts on this piece, which I think encapsulates a peculiar kind of market suburbanism that has happily faded with the advent of the market urbanists, a set of views that reflected libertatian opinions on zoning when I got into this issue.🧵 Characterizing single-family zoning as an implicit contract with the state has some odd implications for libertarians. Did the taxi cartel have an implicit property right in medallion scarcity? Do the sugar barons have an implicit property right in restrictive tariffs? ... Image
Mar 25, 2023 • 18 tweets • 11 min read
GM Renaissance Center is not great for a lot of reasons. (Not the least of which, it was designed to be the off-center vista of a side road?) But I would contend that it's significantly less bad than most of the Silicon Valley HQs that have been built lately. There are at least four different generations of urban renewal thinking in this photo.
Jan 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Before the holidays, a rather strange article questioned whether building more housing would help with Ontario's housing affordability—stranger still, it questioned whether Ontario had a crisis at all. I debunk a few major claims here: cayimby.org/yes-ontario-ac… 1. The article (linked below) suggests that Ontario may not actually need more housing because household sizes are inflating. But rising household sizes—and overcrowding—are a symptom of a housing shortage, not an excuse to ignore it.
thestar.com/opinion/contri…
Jan 10, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
US zoning is incredibly weird, for the worse, in at least two major respects; one procedural, one substantive:
1. In the US, zoning codes are written completely by local governments, with little—if any—involvement from higher levels of government... tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… ...in most other developed countries that do zoning, zoning districts are written by national or provincial governments, with local powers limited to mapping predefined zoning districts. (At most with limited overlay powers.) Image
Dec 29, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Deromanticizing Japan:
1. There is rarely soap, sanitizer, or paper towels in restrooms. This probably helps to keep costs low and allow for lots of public restrooms, and bidets help a little, but also...gross! Anecdotally, few men seem to wash their hands. 2. The Internet is, as a rule, quite bad. As with restrooms, public Wifi is quite common, but it's generally only slightly better than nothing. (Not that mobile data is particularly reliable.) I suspect this is why there's still a big culture of buying physical media.
Dec 27, 2022 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
If NYC is going to have sidewalk sheds be de facto permenant, the city should install permenant covers, which are quite common here in Tokyo. A bunch of totally "legitimate" shed businesses would lose money, yes, but the city would be a lot more pleasant! ImageImage A wonderful unintended side effect of ending street parking and off-street parking mandates is that it provides a huge incentive to reduce vehicle sizes. ImageImageImageImage
Oct 5, 2022 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
As a test case of the YIMBY agenda, California's 2016 legalization of ADUs is almost too perfect—besides the fact that the homes are in literal backyards, it has been a runaway success, permitting ~60,000 new homes in five years. My latest in @TheAtlantic: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… @TheAtlantic California spent nearly 40 years nudging cities and suburbs to legalize ADUs on their own terms—the first ADU bill was passed in 1982. Many local governments altogether ignored the nudge, and many more adopted ordinances that were totally unworkable, resulting in few ADUs.
Oct 3, 2022 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
A dead mall is turning into a new neighborhood in Reno. (ongoing) The scale of the building boom underway here is pretty impressive. Reno is building far, far more than the Northern California cities that are sending so many residents its way, and mostly multifamily.
Oct 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
A vacant 6,000 square foot lot in West Los Angeles. It's a five minute walk to a light rail station and within 30 minutes of a few of the largest job centers in the US. What should be built here? If you said anything other than a mansion, maybe with an ADU, I have bad news. This lot is in one of the most obscenely underzoned neighborhoods in Los Angeles (and thus the world) an R1-1 zone next to a light rail line, and less than a few miles from UCLA, Century City, and Culver City. Is this in any sense planning? No, this is zoning.
Sep 21, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I'll be giving the keynote address at today's AEI Housing Center Fresno conference, but in the meantime, some fascinating charts by their team... Image Not only does single-family zoning not preserve neighborhood "character," if land prices are going up, it's almost guaranteed to change the character. Image
Aug 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
AB 2097 is up! senate.ca.gov/media/senate-t… Ladies and gentlemen, minimum parking requirements are on the way out in California. AB 2097 has passed.
Aug 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
A few highlights from today's Census housing vacancy data: the most important takeaway is that we're hitting levels of housing scarcity not seen in recent memory and rents are skyrocketing as a result. census.gov/housing/hvs/in… ImageImage This crisis is at its most acute in New England, with states like Connecticut and Vermont topping the vacancy charts. But it's also creeping into the interior: states like Idaho and Kentucky. (The situation in California is bad, but you already knew that.) Image