• Transforming trailers

    Andres Duany of DPZ CoDESIGN thinks that houses on wheels could be a good answer to America's affordable housing problem, and to housing adapted for climate change.
    For more than a half-century, mobile homes have provided a major part of the unsubsidized affordable housing in the US. But mobile homes have not associated with traditional cities or urbanism—or good design in general. Duany would like to change that. He thinks that the humble house on wheels...Read more

  • How sprawl makes walkable places less affordable

    Many cities are growing faster than they have since the 1940s as Americans rediscover the joys of human-scale neighborhoods, but their expansion is constrained by sprawl.
    The clustering and cramming of people and economic activity into small slivers of space drives real estate prices into the stratosphere, forming the land nexus that shapes the fundamental contradiction of late capitalism— Richard Florida, epilogue, The New Urban Crisis . In Richard Florida’s recent...Read more

  • Rebuilding for victims of California wildfires

    Model cottages will provide temporary housing for Habitat families who lost their homes to the fire, and these cottages can eventually be relocated for use as permanent housing.
    In October of 2017, wildfires in Northern California burned at least 245,000 acres and over 5,000 acres in Sonoma County alone. Since then, Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County has explored ways to expand its programs across the board to serve households displaced by October’s devastating...Read more

  • New Pioneers: Lean Urbanism in America

    An entertaining book outlines how ordinary citizens can rebuild cities without the help or hindrance of big developers, big finance, and government bureaucrats.
    The New Pioneers: How Entrepreneurs are Defying the System to Rebuild the Cities and Towns of America, is one of the more entertaining and readable books on urbanism that I have come across in a long time. The subject is Lean Urbanism—“Making Small Possible”—a concept that has gained a fair amount...Read more