“This is why a project delivered in Tampa can look the same as one completed in Fargo. Despite the near opposite local contexts, it’s possible the same developer has recycled the same design to create the same building with the same team, leased to the same chain store retail tenants. Even the same vague and insufferable name like The Point can be recycled, by replacing at Tampa, with, at Fargo. Audaciously, institutional developers march forward, ignorant of what makes Portland, Maine different from Portland, Oregon, or Philadelphia from Kansas City. Unique local traditions? Completely different climates? Hah! Jokes on us. A box fits just as well in any of these places.

Everything looks the same because everything is the same!

This overall effect is exaggerated where developers acquire entire city blocks. These are banal and monotonous structures that offer little relief or stimulation to passersby. Despite how soul-crushing these may be, the scale of institutional capital necessitates the development of the largest sites possible, built out to their full extent. It doesn’t make sense for firms playing around with billions of dollars to spend time breaking up a site into several smaller, fine grained buildings. Not only is this because block long monoliths are their equivalent to smaller projects, but also because the thought and consideration put into well planned sites is beyond the scope of institutional development firms. The teams are oriented in such a way that building a 20, 30 or even 50 unit development is quite literally not worth their time. It’s just too small.”

“First, we need to view homeless people as what they are — human beings no different from those who have permanent shelter. Destigmatization is the foundational battle in the fight to eradicate homelessness. Intolerant and misinformed behavior cannot dictate our policy — directly or indirectly. In the land where everyone seeks a second opportunity, a chance at a new life, we turn our backs on those who need it most. If we don’t respect the basic humanity of homeless people, there is no chance we’ll be able to provide lasting solutions for them. The same applies to housing, generally. Housing is a human right. It’s high time we pick up the slack as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and start acting like we value our fellow humans.

Second, we need to liberate cities from the clutches of zoning and build housing where it’s needed most. The more housing there is, relative to the population, the more affordable prices are. The more affordable prices are, the less susceptible people are to becoming homeless. Until we provide more housing for the homeless (and those who oscillate between housed and homeless), we will continue experiencing a crisis. NIMBYs, hit the road.

When this housing is created, it should look no different than regular housing. In fact, we should build as many mixed-income and affordable buildings as possible, indistinguishable nationwide. We should design them such that their residents are proud to live there, and passersby admire them. This is the key to creating strong, diverse, and ultimately resilient communities.”

“Everyone needs housing that’s affordable, not just one class, group, or race. The notion that one group of people inherently deserve housing more than the next, despite making an incremental dollar or thousand more, or look a certain way, is ludicrous. This enshrines segregation. It thrives off of factionalization, where groups are pit against one another in a holy war of moral absolutism. Troublingly, it espouses class warfare as something virtuous, demonizing those who fall outside of narrow subjective boundaries.

If we believe in every human’s fundamental right to housing, then we must be honest about what that means! While someone making $60,000 might seem to have it all going on compared to someone else struggling on $20,000, they still cannot afford median rent in most markets, or support their kids, but they don’t have any programs dedicated to help them out. Selecting a few winners and losers, while ignoring the wide middle of the country, is no way to run policy. Factionalization is tantamount to pouring gasoline on a fire that has already destroyed countless lives. It’s a symptom of a broken system. A dangerously myopic and destructive symptom, but a symptom nonetheless. It is not the right way to address our most existential challenges.”

“Our built environment is not an immutable reality, but the result of a series of decisions. Far from dispiriting, this should be empowering! We have the ability to create the world of our dreams. If we want better places, we need only make better choices. And unless you’re reading this in untouched nature, everything around you is the result of human intervention. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the sublime. If we’re going to shape the built environment regardless of what we do, we might as well make it as magnificent as humanly possible.

This might seem bold, but, really, why should it be? It’s how we built for centuries. Armed with modern technology, we can make our cities and towns even better than the places we revere. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year visiting beautiful, walkable places. Is this not a sign of their perceived worth? Instead of saving years to get a glimpse of Paris, would it not be better to live in a place that has much of the same core foundation?

The truth is that it isn’t idealistic or impossible to build the world of our dreams. It’s common sense. Communities that exhibit the qualities we’re most attracted to—namely those that are more walkable, green, dynamic, diverse, and beautiful, already exist, and they perform better on just about every metric one can imagine compared to the status quo. Building a better world isn’t outrageous. But maintaining one that guarantees worse outcomes, that people don’t even really like, at greater expense, is.”

“While it may be difficult to imagine within the confines of our current development patterns, the mission of city building is more expansive than Unicorn Planning, Libertarian Free Towns, Utopian fancies, Smart Cities or Government sponsored projects borne out of national pride. We have a tradition of city building in The States that goes well beyond these straw-men. Savannah, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, St. Augustine and much of the Midwestern and Western United States (de facto via the Land Ordinance of 1785) were all planned to varying degrees of success.

In contemporary times, we’ve built cities from the ground up home to more than 100,000 people, notably Columbia, Maryland and The Woodlands, Texas. Though these are far from perfect places, they’ve served as the building blocks for a new generation of master-planned towns in the U.S. Of particular relevance, projects from the New Urbanist movement have embraced the tradition of city-building, applying traditional town planning and architectural principles to new developments. These projects have flaws too, as any place on Earth does, but they’re far superior to the alternative of exurban sprawl, and are broadly beloved by those who live within them.

Newly developed housing that’s relatively affordable is where the demand is. Much as I would love to shepherd growth to Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit or St. Louis (all fantastic places that deserve to be shared among more people), unfortunately demographic trends point to people wanting to live in growing places that feel new, exciting, and offer the modern conveniences they’ve become accustomed to. At a time where housing crises are rocking the country with increased ferocity, we can’t turn our noses down on grand plans of more places for people to live. We have to reject cynicism.

The key is to direct this growth in a responsible way in order to create more sustainable, more equitable, denser, and more mixed-use places. When we don’t prioritize coherent, urbane development patterns, we get what we’ve experienced for more than half a century: exurban and suburban sprawling growth that dominates our landscape, eviscerates natural environments, and forces car dependency within inherently stratified community structures (when every tract home looks the same and costs the same, there’s little hope for diversity of experience, background, or even thought). Instead of grand cities, we create climate destroying realms of homogeneity. More coherent visions of a comprehensive built environment are existentially mandated.”