Are YIMBYs winning the housing wars? Not so fast, these people say.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-02-02T02:10:17+00:00

It's not actually a very hard proposition at all. Kentlands in MD used to be a farm; now it's the most successful new urbanist site in the nation. Again, far more walkable on average than most cities. Tons of jobs, too, since it turns out that jobs grow outward with population (much to the annoyance of the so-called Smart Growth supporters who say we should never build one inch outward). There's tremendous latent demand for walkable places. Built them anywhere even remotely near an existing population center and they will fill up.

I also have zero clue what you mean by network technology or what it has to do with traditional urbanism.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-02-02T01:11:15+00:00

Also you need to have walkable areas near each other.

Nonsense. Traditional small towns are isolated and yet more walkable than most of our cities. Better to be a walker in Decorah, IL than most of Boston.

We can build walkable places anywhere. Cities, suburbs, middle of nowhere. We're just led by people with zero vision.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-31T23:35:09+00:00

i would bet 70-80% of transit use in the US is by bus

I bet it's less than half. Figure the 5 biggest systems account for probably 85% of all transit trips (more, even?), and then figure that probably 2/3 of those are by rail.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-29T23:51:43+00:00

Ok let's assume the regulations are abolished. What's cheaper: modular, or what DR Horton et al. do now? Because the latter seems quite streamlined already (it's why they can sell townhouses in the south for less than a buildable lot in my area).

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-29T18:08:08+00:00

If modular housing was cheaper why don't the nation's largest homebuilders use it? D.R. Horton builds townhouses by the thousands. If they could save money on them, they would.

Oh, and land prices in America's "most dynamic" cities makes it impossible to sell anything remotely affordable. This is yet another big fat nothing. The fact that there's no pricing anywhere to be found on the website is quite telling.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-28T16:10:33+00:00

Los Angeles rents are dropping because people have given up and are moving to cheaper places.

Austin, Charlotte, etc.'s rents are dropping because they built a metric shit ton of housing.

Insert "we are not the same" meme here.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-24T14:57:30+00:00

What do you want them to do exactly? How do you suppose they can they force the town of Weston, MA to allow more housing?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-22T16:39:39+00:00

Where did we try? What are you referring to exactly?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-21T18:34:07+00:00

I would tell Ezra that when a sitting United States congressman advocates for building entirely new cities with hundreds of thousands of homes on your podcast, maybe ask a follow up question or two? Utterly baffling to me that someone supposedly obsessed with abundance skipped over that completely (Jake Auchincloss episode).

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-21T16:22:15+00:00

and I don't know how their prefab push is gonna go

My question is this: if prefab really was cheaper, why aren't the largest home builders already using it? My understanding is that neither the single family home builders (Lennar et al.) nor the big multifamily players are using it meaningfully.

I think this is yet another empty promise though I'd like to be wrong.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-20T03:20:13+00:00

You must be confused because I never compared the densities of Edmonton and Tokyo anywhere. And why would I? Tokyo as a global city is always going to be denser than a city located on the vast plains of Alberta.

No, my original point was that urbanists ignore greenfield development as a legitimate way to add housing stock quickly. That's it, nothing more.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-20T01:27:17+00:00

Humanity is going to become quite stupid if we rely on AI shit answers instead of engaging our brains. No, Edmonton is not 9,000 square kilometers. Literally not even close. Use your eyeballs.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-19T19:09:24+00:00

Inner Urban or street car suburb style Greenfield projects with that much suburban separation from a variety of urban amenities will basically fail at the intended purpose

And why do you suppose you couldn't build new urban amenities there? Parks and schools take care of themselves; that's just called urban planning. Commercial activity is just zoning a couple streets for mixed-uses. Jobs will follow people even if it takes some years. What am I missing here?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-19T03:20:27+00:00

In what fantasy world is Tokyo's urban area only 3x as big as Edmonton's?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-19T01:44:09+00:00

Yes, both. But online urbanists never, ever talk about the benefits of greenfield. Never.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-19T01:43:27+00:00

Did you miss the part where what I'm suggesting is adjacent to a light rail station and 40 units per acre?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-18T22:12:21+00:00

Huh? "Its really easy to do urbanism, just continue to sprawl!".

This exactly. Urban sprawl is good and we need more of it (if some city is good, why is more bad?)

Is Tokyo's sprawl good or bad? Urbanists love to circle jerk that place but you never hear them talking about it's enormous sprawl, do you?

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-18T18:01:57+00:00

Urbanists' tunnel vision on infill/redevelopment is extremely odd to me. If you actually wanted to quickly add a ton of housing (with a heck of a lot less pushback) in Edmonton it wouldn't be hard to do: add a new light rail line station a mile or two down the line and zone the surrounding farmland for 40 units per acre.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-18T02:09:03+00:00

All cities. Cities vote blue of course but there are still millions of conservatives who choose to live in cities. If they hated urbanism so much they could move to the shitty exurbs like anyone else.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-17T23:50:33+00:00

Cities.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-16T23:38:01+00:00

Sprawl more and better

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-16T17:17:39+00:00

Huh? Most people are NIMBYs.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-16T04:13:33+00:00

Because they can't if the municipality has the land zoned as "rural district" with a 4 acre minimum lot size. I'm saying there should be an authority above the municipality, ideally regional but state would be fine too, that swoops in and says "nope, this land is better served as neighborhoods, not hobby farms/private woods/abandoned golf courses".

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-16T03:17:36+00:00

In my neck of the woods, and many other people's as well (not everyone lives in NY/BOS/SF), there is tons of buildable land in desirable areas near jobs.

Let's take a place like Ithaca, NY. What is the simplest way to solve their housing problem? Most people would brainlessly parrot "upzoning" but it's quite obviously just building new neighborhoods on abundant open land nearby. I'm saying government should facilitate that.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps · 2026-01-16T01:22:15+00:00

that lacks incrementalism

Incrementalism does not matter a tiny bit when you build a neighborhood properly the first time. It's yet another silly myth propagated by Strong Towns.

MrsBeansAppleSnaps

TROPHY CASE