Strengthening Places: A Look At The Strong Towns Organization
Founded as a blog in 2008 by Charles “Chuck” Marohn, a land use planner and civil engineer, Strong Towns has since developed into a non-profit media advocacy organization with a fulltime staff and thousands of members. The organization posts media content, including articles and podcasts, and provides a growing variety of educational services on topics…
Book Review: Unleash the Swarm
Published in October of 2021, Daniel Herriges’ book “Unleash the Swarm: Reviving Small-Scale Development in America’s Cities” is concise and fascinating, yet underdeveloped in some key ways. The following article will take a brief look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of the book and close with an invitation to further discuss the ideas…
National: Federal Housing Agency (United States)
We are in the midst of the greatest affordable housing crisis in American history. Even before the pandemic, increases in rents and home prices in urban areas outpaced the increase in wages for most working families. Now, pandemic-induced unemployment is about to cause more people to lose their homes, and many more tenants to be…
Regional: RPA Report ‘Be My Neighbor’ (New York Metro)
The Regional Plan Association (RPA) is a planning organization for the New York Metropolitan Area including New York City, Westchester County, eastern New Jersey, and southwest Connecticut. Since its founding a century ago, the RPA has released a total of four major regional plans related to transportation, land use, and economic development. The Fourth Regional…
Local: Open Woodbridge Campaign (Connecticut)
In late September 2020, a group of affordable housing development advocates convened a press conference in front of a Connecticut community’s Town Hall. Representatives of Open Communities Alliance and Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School organized the event to announce their submission of a 145-page document to the Woodbridge Town Plan…
State: Desegregate Connecticut Platform – Part 2
In essence Desegregate CT aims to liberalize what are, in the movement’s view, exclusionary and restrictive land use regulations and review processes across Connecticut. By streamlining zoning approval and building permitting procedures for housing development, the hope is that the supply and diversity of housing products available in the marketplace will increase.
State: Desegregate Connecticut Platform – Part 1
In June 2020, Desegregate Connecticut publicly launched an initiative to address residential segregation with statewide zoning reform. Through an ongoing series of news media articles and well-attended virtual meetings, the role of restrictive land use regulations, like exclusionary zoning, are being discussed. Curious residents, academics, and design and planning professionals from around the State are…
National: Universal Housing Assistance (United States)
The following post discusses the current state of Federal housing assistance in the United States, ongoing efforts to make rental assistance an entitlement available to all qualifying households in the era of COVID-19, and why Housing Choice Vouchers is not the right model for a universal housing assistance program. Many proponents of social justice believe…
Local: Yale Law School ‘Preventing Displacement’ Report (New Haven)
Several major American cities and States across the country have recently enacted land use reforms to encourage higher density, mixed-use, and walkable development. A clinic at the Yale Law School, working in collaboration with the City of New Haven, recommends amending the City’s zoning regulations in accordance with popular planning trends. The following article, however,…
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