Hydrological stuff is becoming a thing here. I had no idea about this before.

Fascinating! It's not so surprising that waterfalls can lead to rapid changes, that's a hell of a lot of power! Of course I have no idea whether the dam played a role in speeding things up, but surely this process was going to happen sooner or later.

Still, China is a bigger asshole than us. Good to know right before the 4th.

With apologies for potentially threadjacking, I wanted to add something that feels related.

I am just reading the Strong Towns book. I thought I had a fairly good sense of what it would cover, from seeing various articles by and about Marohn, but I hadn't realized that a large chunk of the book is his crankiness about the fact that there is an enormous amount of physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, water pipes) which he thinks will need to be abandoned and allowed to decay into uselessness). Do people here have a sense of how accurate his crankiness is.

[People often ask me about Detroit; offering various theories but all agreeing that] We are not Detroit and what happened there could never happen here.

My narrative of Detroit is different. It starts with acknowledging that, prior to the Great Depression, Detroit was one of the greatest cities in the world. It was certainly one of the richest. Even today, it is breathtaking to visit places like the Detroit Opera House, opened in 1922, and realize that it would be stunning even in the wealthiest of European capitals. ...

In the early 1900s, as Detroit was on its way to becoming the Motor City, it became the first major city in the world to start experimenting with what would become the American development pattern. They were the first to create automobile suburbs. The first to experience people commuting into the city by day, returning home by car at night. They were the first to run major roadways through their neighborhoods. They were the first to tear down buildings and turn over large portions of the public realm for parking.

They were the first to transform the human habitat into what we recognize today as the modern North American city. And when society reached the Great Depression and cities around the country started to experience major distress, losing jobs and dislocating populations, there was a cluster of places centered on Detroit that fared comparatively well. So much so that, by the end of World War II, it was very clear to a victorious nation what needed to happen if we wanted to keep from sliding back into economic depression: We all needed to copy the success of Detroit. That is what we did.

When you take a prosperous and stable city, spread it out at tremendous cost over an enormous area, denuding and bisecting the original fabric as part of the transition, then saddle it with decades of liabilities, you end up with Detroit. Like all bankruptcies, it happened slowly and then all at once.
Detroit is not some strange anomaly. It's just early. It's just a couple of decades ahead of everyplace else.

or

If a solution requires that we maintain every road that has been built, that we rehab every leaky pipe, that we hold on to all the neighborhoods that have been developed -- and in most places today, these are the prerequisites for any conversation -- then there is no viable solution. Our cities are going to contract geographically; we will have fewer lane miles, fewer pipes, and less urbanized land in three decades than we do today. This is built into the math . . .

That seems somewhat at odds with us needing to build a massive amount of new housing. I understand obviously that the cities that can't be maintained aren't the same as the cities that need more housing, but some of the answer is to densify existing areas to offset maintenance costs.

Also I hear the phrase "Strong Towns" all the time in the planning department and didn't realize they were referencing a book.

4: I'm inclined to agree, although that may be partly because I watched all the Not Just Bikes videos that were adaptations of precisely his work.

One outside corroboration is this analysis by the Halifax metro area of costs of all the different public services in cities vs. in suburbs. Sprawl requires more, per household, of everything linear that degrades - roads, pipes, etc. - and even makes it less efficient to provide car-based services like police, fire, ambulance, garbage, because longer travel time between each point of service. And it adds up!

Ecuador is the Detroit of South America.

4: It's probably more or less accurate descriptively, but his crankiness does kind of feel like an engineer's (or an economist's) concern that this outcome is so inefficient as a use of resources. Which, yes, it is! But, as he well knows, the status quo is itself an inefficient use of resources, so that part is really baked in as sunk costs no matter what we do in the future.

I also get a sense from those excerpts that he has maybe an exaggerated sense of the permanence of infrastructure once it's built. (This may also be an engineer-brain thing but I'm not sure.) Once we as a society actually stop maintaining that stuff it's all going to fall apart in a few years. Overbuilt infrastructure is indeed a major problem for "shrinking cities" like Detroit, but that's because they're trying to maintain too much.

I haven't read the book, or the blog except maybe the stray post linked somewhere, so this is just based on your excerpts and some quick googling on his background. I don't have a full sense of how this fits into his overall argument so some of my impressions might be off-base.

5: I think his characterization is "The only way to avoid this outcome is to densify comprehensively," because the density finally pays for the rehabilitation more organically, not that it is impossible. But I do think that in the ideal world where we build a lot more housing, some of the outermost suburbs might wither on the vine.

Here's an online version of his argument, with links to other more detailed components.

Another interesting thing I learned the other week is that for most of the 19th century in the US, property taxes included all property - not just real estate, but stocks, bonds, most forms of intangible wealth! You can see how states/cities built publicly at a more ferocious rate.

I do think his basic argument is sound, I also wonder if he is somewhat overstating the case (and, like Heebie, wonder how his concerns mesh with the YIMBY argument-- which is urbanist in outlook, but may or may not result in urban development in practice).

This recent article gives some sense of what he would endorse in terms of development (written by someone else on the Strong Towns website): https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/6/21/whats-the-sweet-spot-for-building-housing-inexpensively

11: That's a really good post. The construction cost piece is important and hasn't always gotten enough attention in YIMBY circles, although that seems to be changing recently.

I did of course expect the thread (inasmuch as it existed) would collapse into American solipsism, but was naive enough to think it would be at least somewhat relevant solipsism like, IDK, the lower Mississippi.

13 is a fair complaint. I did watch the before and after video, and it is impressive, but I didn't have anything to say about it.

(And the attempted connection wasn't geographical, but just thinking about the assumptions embodied in development and resource usage).

I'm reminded of how the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka dam is going to result in southern Ukraine reverting to not very fertile steppe and Crimea into desert. This is land that once exported about a fifth of the world's wheat.

There is no connection, Nick. The resources you're talking about are entirely artificial. The erosion you're talking about is the attrition of tarmac by tyres. It's as if I showed you a neutron star collision and you responded "That feels related to Lego." Incredible.

11: He mostly meshes policy-wise, but clashes more tonally as he's consciously trying for a bipartisan, semi-traditionalist vibe. I think he was also canceled at some point for being too open to alliance with racists or something - this was before I got deep into urbanist Twitter though.

15: Surely Ukraine was fertile before irrigation. Isn't there rich deep earth across huge parts of it?

I think natural disasters are one of the few things that lead to, if not directly cause, places with deeply entrenched approaches to urban land use to rethink what they built previously.

Oh, or was this the part that wasn't the breadbasket before 20C.

16: I agree that it was a stretch (and that you were right to complain). I disagree that there is no connection at all:

"They said it would happen, but nothing was done about it. The country should start talking about the future of the oil pipeline bases, the highway, and the catchment dam of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant," said Emilio Cobo, coordinator of the IUCN's South America water program.

15: AIUI Crimea was semi-arid but not desert. It hosted the Crimean Khanate, so presumably was good for pasture. And based on satellite at least the farms are still there despite the Dnipro canal being cut since 2014. Granted though the field outlines could remain visible long after productivity collapsed.
17: The famous black earth is further north. How much of the productivity in the south is natural soil versus artificail fertilizer I don't know, but it definitely needed irrigation to become the kind of farmland it is now.

*North Crimea Canal, before someone shows up to nitpick.

20: That quote describes inaction after the collapse of the waterfall, and refers to infrastructure built long before the collapse (indeed before even the construction of the hydro dam). AFAICT 2 is correct that the collapse was inevitable, but at the time of construction the collapse couldn't reasonably have been anticipated.

23: yes, the situations are quite different. I merely claim they are more similar than neutron stars and Legos.

13 is a fair cop and neutron stars are exactly like Legos because of how much it hurts to step on them.

Just to spite Mossy, we should turn this into a baseball thread.

Just kidding. I have nothing to say about baseball.

23 me.
15: I think (and wishcast) you're wrong. I think destroying the dam effectively lengthened the front the Russians need to defend by well over 200km and brings their defeat significantly closer.

21.1: Here's some apparent experts finding also via satellite extreme shrinkage of Crimean agriculture.

21.1 True, it was semi-arid steppe, unsuitable for agriculture. I was thinking of the desert in Kherson. Also see https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/06/ukraine-dam-environment-destruction/ and https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/aftermath-kakhovka-dam-collapse
from the latter:

Agricultural Sector. The loss of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant means that more than one million hectares of land in three Southern oblasts of Ukraine--Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblast--will be unusable for the next three to five years for lack of a water supply. Environmentalists predict that over the next twenty years, this will have a critical impact on the agricultural sector: farmland in the South will dry up and reclamation systems will be damaged without water.

Before the Kakhovka Reservoir and the reclamation system were created, most of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia was arid land. These oblasts were settled over the past 150-200 years, following the introduction of new crop cultivation technologies that permitted successful irrigation. The reclamation system helped spread the cultivation of grain crops--wheat, corn, rye, and sunflowers.

Without artificial irrigation from the Kaniv Reservoir on the Dnipro in Cherkasy and Kyiv oblasts, however, the entire agricultural industry would collapse, Vitalii Selyk, an energy history expert, said in an interview with the Ukrainian media outlet Zaborona. In the summer months, when the Dnipro is low, it will be impossible to provide water to the entire southern region, and the agricultural sector will lose a significant amount of grain and other crops.

---
Desertification. Experts also say that the destruction of the dam will affect the drainage of the Dnipro river bed, which contains a huge amount of sand, with possible consequences including sandstorms, accelerated climate change, and potential desertification of neighboring regions. These effects are most likely to be felt in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, and Donetsk oblasts, where they will add to the largest desert in Europe, the Oleshky Sands, located inland from the Black Sea.

5: I think (and wishcast) you're wrong. I think destroying the dam effectively lengthened the front the Russians need to defend by well over 200km and brings their defeat significantly closer.

Is this a response to someone else in the thread? I said nothing of the kind.

31: I think I just misread your emphasis. I was responding to
the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka dam is going to result in southern Ukraine reverting to not very fertile steppe
emphasis added. I don't think that *is going to* happen, I think it *could* happen, but won't: the Russians will lose and the dam be rebuilt. Even pessimistically, 30 indicates there's a 20-year window to get that done.

Ukraine just has every biome, huh.

You certainly don't want to rush the building of a dam. Have you heard what happened in Ecuador?

I was going to make a joke about the Ukrainian Alps, but it turns out they do have a slice of the Carpathians.

I really liked Halifax. It's my favorite medium size for a city, plus it has very interesting and beautiful geography.

32 yeah, it's unfair to infer that from my 15. We were talking about man-made environmental disasters.

Anyway, tomorrow is the celebration of when America threadjacked the British.

I am just reading the Strong Towns book. I thought I had a fairly good sense of what it would cover, from seeing various articles by and about Marohn, but I hadn't realized that a large chunk of the book is his crankiness about the fact that there is an enormous amount of physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, water pipes) which he thinks will need to be abandoned and allowed to decay into uselessness).

I haven't read the book, but from watching a lot of Not Just Bikes and other Strong Towns-inspired stuff, my sense is that of 9, ie it's specifically low density car-dependent infrastructure that is inherently unsustainable maintenance-wise.

I've gotten myself into a silly predicament.

The backstory is that my parent should be a dual citizen of the US and an EU state, but they had their citizenship revoked by the latter five decades ago due to fraudulent third-party action. It's a long story, but the bottom line is that the parent never renounced citizenship.

I would like this citizenship for obvious reasons. So would my parent, including for the purpose of potentially retiring there. Our efforts over the years to re-establish this citizenship have been unsuccessful thus far (and have generated sooooo much paperwork, in triplicate, with lots of notary stamps), but hope springs eternal.

Last week I delivered a talk to a small audience of international scholars that included a former ambassador from the EU state. We got to talking afterwards, I mentioned the situation, he seemed amenable to looking into it, and we agreed to keep in touch. I decided to invite the ambassador and a few of his fellow workshop participants to dinner at my place this week, largely for the purpose of buttering up someone who might be able to help me. I did not invite the ambassador on his own because Mr. Passport is out of town and I didn't want to send the wrong message. I envisioned four or five of us grilling hamburgers on my deck or something.

The funny part: something got lost in the translation of my invite, and now I'll be hosting at least twenty international scholars for dinner in my (quite small) house on Thursday. It's a mess, I'm a shitty cook, our grill is tiny, and I'm praying both that I can actually fit this many people into my house and that no one bumps into or breaks any of Mr. Passport's toy collectibles (and I have no idea how they'll react to those collectibles forming the bulk of our décor). I've decided not to even attempt "classy," and will instead be going with a "low-key US pizza party with beer" vibe. (Also, salads and non-alcoholic beverage options.)

tl/dr: My attempt to charm a former political appointee into doing my family a favor has become unexpectedly expensive and time-consuming. At the same time, a small part of me is delighted that I'm still capable of falling into the same kind of silly situation I used to routinely blunder into during my twenties. Am praying no international incidents result.

Oh, LUCY! Surely the solution involves pretending to be two different people at the party and lots of increasingly chaotic costume changes.

oh president passport how i wish you were in san francisco bc there are only a few things i would love more than to ghost cook for this outstanding gathering! would just adore leaving them all with a strong conviction that you are an amazing cook and effortless, chic host. not a hair turned, so relaxed and my god the food - so good! had no idea you could eat like that in the usa.

41: This is what I'm envisioning. The biggest reason I'm not using the stove is because I would be GUARANTEED to inadvertently set something on fire at the most inconvenient possible plot point.

42: To make matters worse, I suspect that my colleague who is running the program has already had them over for the kind of evening you describe (but cooked by his wife in his large, artsy house), which is why I'm not even trying to compete on those grounds. I am, however, dissembling my IKEA sofa right now so I can wash and de-fuzz the slipcovers, will be getting out touch-up paint for the walls tomorrow, and am praying no one opens the upstairs doors to the office or the spare room because that's where I'll be shoving all the excess crap.

Someone should start a betting pool as to whether this whole thing is more likely to result in citizenship for my family or being banned from that country for life.

livestream link? Also, what are the toy collectibles-- superhero figurines, handpainted mages and dragons, vintage cereal box prizes?

Trying to think what the sitcom escalation would be. Pretend you're borrowing your poor relation's apartment so they can see how the other half lives, and get increasingly snobbish as the evening continues?

am praying no one opens the upstairs doors to the office or the spare room because that's where I'll be shoving all the excess crap.

I'm now envisioning Mr. Ambassador wandering upstairs to use the bathroom, opening the wrong door, and being immediately buried under the mountain of funko pop dolls, gundam figurines and sex toys that burst out of the closet. The very last thing to topple out will be an enormous butt plug that will hit our hapless hero on the head.

This is a Wes Anderson film.

46: I'm imagining it involves hiding of pets, allergies, clogged sinks upstairs, and a culmination involving ceiling tiles crashing down in the middle of dessert, with both tidal wave of water and all the hidden cats. Onto the lap of the most senior person who had sternly warned that you are on thin ice, mister, only moments before.

Good luck Madame President!

Presidentially good news!

39: I love this, and yes, super American informal party is absolutely the answer. Get red solo cups for authenticity! Maybe KFC buckets of fried chicken? One of those enormous party subs?

Too soon.

Wings over pizza IMO. Europe is familiar with pizza, but doesn't really have wings as a fast food style, plus anecdotes about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_legs Solo cups and their lore also, absolutely, Anna Kendrick's cup song upweighted for the vibing soundtrack, maybe Iko Iko also.

Ooh, I'll definitely add wings and red solo cups into the mix! Maybe also an ice cream sundae bar for dessert.

I just did a breakdown of the party attendees by nationality, and there will be 6 Europeans (mostly southern, eastern, and Eurasian), 5 Asians (including Asia-Pacific), 3 South Americans, and 2 Africans (plus me and my cats). There will either be minor hijinks, a major international incident, or the spontaneous rebirth of Up With People.

That's a lot of people to stuff in closets or under beds. Save some space!

Not Just Bikes also Strong Towns-pilled me. And by coincidence I saw the word "stroad" for the first time on social media today.

The impermanence of built infrastructure is part of the argument. Growing North American municipalities fund new infrastructure with debt, which is fine because they offset that with massive growth. (Not Just Bikes calls this a Ponzi scheme.) That's fine until the city stops growing and the infrastructure reaches its natural end of life. A sufficiently dense city can handle that shock as it uses less services per unit of revenue generated, so there's money leftover for both debt service and capital improvements.

Good luck with ambassadorial shindig shenanigans!

More long muddy future. https://unherd.com/2023/07/russias-toxic-military-politics/

Now that other off topic stuff has brought us past 40 (Letter Not Spirit Department), can anyone point me where I can find that line from Napoleon saying the Revolution was complete, its ideals achieved in his rule, and thereby over? I'm guessing 1804 but conceivably earlier?

https://www.histoire-en-citations.fr/citations/napoleon-nous-avons-fini-le-roman-de-la-revolution

60: Thanks! That's what I was thinking of: La Révolution est fixée aux principes qui l'ont commencée : elle est finie

Day two of house cleaning has commenced, and I am also happy to report that I have purchased facsimile red Solo cups (the only red Solo TM cups in the store were, bizarrely, square shaped, so I'm going with the spirit rather than the letter myself. And hiding the non-Solo label).

Some of the newer ones are square on the bottom. Hold their shape better.

I found the before-and-after video super annoying, and not just because of the soundtrack. The guy studiously avoided matching shots, the views kept cutting out before showing full context, and it all left me hazy on exactly where the hell the water went to.

I was going to say that I didn't understand the rapid retreat of the falls, or why streambed that was stable for millennia would suddenly erode, but the Geography link helpfully informed me that it was "exceptionally uncommon", so I feel like my intuition has been vindicated. Also, I learned the term 'knickpoint'.

Co-sign 64, I was so confused by the video, but fortunately wikipedia came to the rescue.

Oh wait, no it was that Geology! link. Great illustrations there.

64.1: Comity!
And hey, dreary architecture post! I read of Canary Wharf:

The floor plates of those bank towers are too deep for conversion to residential

On the Strong Town stuff, I've never gotten too into it because I understand and agree with the basic anti-sprawl argument, and I don't really need more than that. I've actually been in a position to tell a municipality that they should just abandon some streets rather than try to maintain the infrastructure, so it's not really news to me.

That said, the Sweet Spot article is excellent. As Teo said, it's something that YIMBY types used to be completely clueless about but have since learned somewhat (although unsophisticated takes on land costs, construction costs, and density are still the norm).

Hell, I was working for awhile with a developer who was dumb about it: she bought a small lot in a small city adjacent to Pittsburgh in order to build apartments. The zoning code aligned with the building code to make feasible a small 5+1 with no parking. But she kept pushing to add a few more floors, which would require switching to steel construction, raising costs by 50% to add 40% more units. It was simple math, but she just couldn't or wouldn't accept it. She just wanted MORE.

67: Is that "What?" an exclamation or a request for an explanation? Bc that's one of my hobbyhorses, people who think residential conversions are going to be a large part of the solution to any urban problems (in the short term anyway).

A request for explanation!

just wanted MORE

Why do you hate America?

67: I'm paywalled, but that's pretty simple: too wide or deep a building makes it hard to make a floor plan where every bedroom has a window. Apartments are usually narrower, at least on one dimension. Windowless bedrooms are not illegal in most places, but they're nonstandard / frowned upon / don't rent out as well. Also the units tend to get long and skinny.

72: Thanks, that makes sense. I didn't get what dimension "depth" referred to. I wonder if the considerations you describe might come to be mitigated by cooling requirements and increasing AC ubiquity. The new build apartments around here do indeed have their long axes parallel to the exterior wall, but they also tend to have tiny windows, often deeply recessed/opening onto balconies (which support inter alia AC units).

That's hilarious, President Passport. Good luck. And I'm almost tempted to ask if you're in the DC area and if so to offer to help somehow, I have more free time than usual this week, but realistically I can't imagine what I'd do on this short notice.

As for that Sweet Spot article in 11, I found it annoyingly glib and libertarian. Leading with complaints about the ADA and parking mandates and defending a graph with no numbers - that's literally how the Laffer curve got started. But in their defense, maybe it just bugs me because I'm already in the choir it's preaching to. Despite living in a single-family home by most definitions, my house and neighborhood is clearly in that "missing middle" type of neighborhood it's trying to encourage.

Interestingly he is referencing ADA standards for elevators and accessible paths (which seems to be correct as far as it goes), but in my understanding the ADA requires zero accessible units in new residential construction - there are some such requirements under the Fair Housing Act. Required on first-level only unless there is an elevator.

Yeah, I'm a lifelong tall-building apartment dweller with strong beliefs that Density is the Only Thing That Will Save Us From The Twin Scourges Of Cars and Lawns. But even with that set of prejudices, I know that some of the densest zip codes in the country are low rise neighborhoods. Once you've got any kind of multiplex laid out on small plots, that's dense enough for walkable urbanism.

From the starting point of the US built environment, it's splendid. Places like Paris may have maxed out what they can get with low-to-mid-rise development and need to get past their hang-up about taller buildings in the core - I read a tweet asserting that Paris still works as a city because there are enough high-rises in the suburbs conveniently connected by rail to job centers, often themselves in other suburbs. Singapore, the most land-constrained, has moved to building public housing at 30+ stories. But that's a better problem to have than ours.

72 is correct, but there are additional dimensions (ha), like elevator banks and plumbing & HVAC layouts. Essentially, nothing but the structural frame and maybe the skin of most postwar (and esp. post-1970) office towers is suited to residential use, so you're looking at an incredibly expensive conversion, and even then you get, as Minivet says, suboptimal units.

There was an outstanding NYT article about this a couple months ago covering all this, and one of the examples they used was a Manhattan building that literally carved out a light well into the center of the building in order to get daylight into units (and reduce floorplate depth by removing plate). So even when/where it's possible, it's never going to result in anything like affordable housing, and the market for ultra-expensive apartments with windowless bedrooms is always going to be limited (so you don't get much bang for the buck in terms of not-affordable new units opening up lower rent units).

All that said, prewar office buildings are broadly similar to prewar apartment buildings in terms of floor depth, operable windows, plumbing, and elevator banks. They're also often eligible for Historic Tax Credits, which helps subsidize the conversion. In the long term, that's where the action will be, but nobody's waving a magic wand that will move every downtown office into the postwar buildings and leaving the prewar ones available for conversion. In 10 years I think you'll see a decent number converted, and in 25 years prewar office buildings being used as offices will probably be quite rare.

75 is semi-correct, but once there's an elevator in the building, you need to provide X% of fully-accessible units and Y% of convertible ones (where, if a tenant shows up who needs accessible features, it can be done as readily as swapping carpet). To the extent that missing middle becomes the primary source of new housing units, accessibility will be primarily on ground floors, but there would still be a big increase in accessible units if the pipeline for those buildings reopens.

(PDF)

With the CCSHP´s construction, the river lost a great quantity of bedload sediments and this situation could have been a factor that catalyzed the infiltrations already present in the cascade´s sill located behind the waterfall column, thus accelerating a process that could have taken hundreds or thousands of years to cause a total failure of the structure. Indeed, our erosion rate model showed that, after the construction of this project, there was a 42% increase in the erosion rate measured at the "Coca en San Rafael" station, figure4. These results show the impact of the project on the river's dynamics, changes that are evident in the morphology of the river and in its erosion and sedimentation patterns. However, it´s not concluding due to the lack of information about the destiny of earth removed during the CCSHP´s construction (aprox. 2,300,000 m3 of earth)

Unsatisfactory. Seems a research note rather than a full paper. But from other stuff clearly the river was woefully understudied.

79: Yes - especially considering that practically none of the existing single-family-home stock is accessible on construction.

Standards bifurcation (IRC/IBC) is a heckuva thing.

defending a graph with no numbers

I'm also in the choir, but as someone who knows exactly the numbers implicit in those graphs, I think they're great and far more helpful than numbered ones would be. The Laffer Curve was speculative, but the numbers behind those graphs are incredibly well attested.

There is a libertarian bent to Strong Towns that bugs me, but I've also come around to agreeing that the US really does overregulate building, both on the planning and code sides. And certainly any US urbanist can agree that a lot of US regs are fully captured by car-centric interests with completely malign results.

One thing on parking minimums, another of my hobbyhorse quibbles with YIMBYs: developers, and the bankers that finance them, tend to be interested in building roughly as much parking as code requires. Unless the developer has been fully walkability-pilled, almost nobody anywhere in the US goes into a project wanting much less than 1 space per unit. And when national retailers are involved, they're using the same "I need open spaces on the busiest shopping day of the year" calculus they have since 1950.

So getting rid of parking minimums will help some projects pencil out, and will definitely result in occasional small buildings with no associated spots, but I don't foresee a revolution.

Semi-seriously: could you make the numbers work with lots of mini-parking structures?

Standards bifurcation (IRC/IBC) is a heckuva thing.

What's kind of wild is that the IBC is in some ways residential-blind: there are way more specific rules for specialty uses like theaters and stadiums than there are for apartments, so it's like the people writing it are only vaguely aware that it's going to apply to millions of housing units. We'd be much better off if the IRC expanded to cover all wood/mass timber housing (with appropriate adjustments to how big those could be) and treated single family as an afterthought to that code, instead of it being the singular reason for the IRC and everything else lumped into the skyscraper code.

Twitter is now unlinkable, but a colleague there recently dug up this from someone in 1913 giving the game away:

[D]o everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind, whether it is flat, apartment house, or tenement house.... If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even when there are only three families; if we require fire-escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power. We can show the necessity of these extra precautions where many families live in a dwelling, and at the same time we have made it difficult to build apartment houses.... In our laws let most of our fire protections relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with almost no fire protection whatsoever.

Granted at the time we didn't have single-family zoning which did this more directly - a lot of people including probably the above guy thought such a thing would be struck down as unconstitutional - but we also did the fire code thing alongside.

Unless the developer has been fully walkability-pilled, almost nobody anywhere in the US goes into a project wanting much less than 1 space per unit.

I agree that's the case and a significant bar at the moment. But I think that will be something liable to change as smaller developers or social housing agencies pioneer and the opportunity becomes more obvious - especially once we finally make the 4-story 16-unit building (or so) on a single-family lot feasible again in large chunks of the country, and making that feasible requires minimal parking, as you noted.

Also a lot of rich suburbs require 1.5-2.5 spaces per unit so getting that down to 1 will make a difference on its own.

83: I'm not sure which numbers you mean, exactly, but the issue is that structured parking is stupid expensive (because cars are heavy and flammable and make fumes).

Progressive planners of the '20s and '30s developed housing concepts where the homes faced courts and lawns, with parking pushed to the perimeter roads (sometimes in the basements of the houses, but mostly in detached garages and street parking), and it's still a viable model, even at greater densities than they were mostly doing. But it's still hard to convince a banker that people will flock to buy in a place where they have to carry groceries in from a remote location.

The aforementioned apartment project was viable without parking only because it was literally adjacent to one municipal lot and around the corner from another, but of course a thriving city shouldn't have any municipal lots.

85: Yeah, I saw that as well, really remarkable. Nowadays a significant issue is the proliferating sprinkler requirements, driven not by covert segregationists, but by fire chiefs. With one notable exception, no firefighter has died in a sprinklered building, so they push for sprinklers in every building, including single family, and of course fire chiefs have huge say in building codes. It's a prohibitive expense for small apartments, and it's really hard to argue against without sounding callous. We'd be a lot better off with less flammable construction that doesn't need massive water capacity to protect, but that's a whole other path dependency.

There is a libertarian bent to Strong Towns that bugs me, but I've also come around to agreeing that the US really does overregulate building, both on the planning and code sides

That's not something I've encountered in my Strong Towns adjacent browsing, but I suppose anti-parking minimum policy can manifest either as "No parking minimums" or as "Parking maximums". One is obviously more libertarian than the other.

Similarly, the "fire regs for timber construction prevent people building family apartments" argument can come across as "relax fire regs" or as "don't build apartments with timber".

Yeah, I think libertarian YIMBYism (or -adjacency) is hard to sustain intellectually because there are too many regulations we obviously need - building codes have improved the world immensely all told - it's just we have to avoid the Reagan-era assumption that if it's a regulation, removing it must be bad. Heck, Marohn was a civil engineer and worked in the public sector (well, consulting for them).

NO INTERNATIONAL INCIDENTS WERE PRECIPITATED! (As far as I am aware at this moment.)

I don't think I've ever cleaned so exhaustively or spent so much money on a party in my life (beer, wings, pizza, and ice cream sundaes for a crowd really add up), but the party was a huge success. Yes, one of the cats scratched many people, but I warned them ahead of time and no one was upset. Nothing flooded, no one even came close to stumbling across my sex toys, and Mr. Passport's pop culture collectibles were a huge hit with the male guests. I didn't even have to hide the Funkos.

No idea if this will actually further my citizenship process, but I'm left feeling quite touched that I was able to offer so many people their first American house party. Thanks all for the moral support, and sorry to report such a banal outcome!

Well done!

94: IIRC where you are, Mr. Ambassador currently lives in your country. Or possibly the one next door (am a bit tipsy and can't think right now).

Interesting. Mine's the tiny peninsula off the larger desert peninsula though I'm currently in NY on leave (meetup post coming soon).

Interesting. Mine's the tiny peninsula off the larger desert peninsula though I'm currently in NY on leave (meetup post coming soon).

Speaking of which LB please check your email (and sorry for the double post).

93: Congratulations!!!

If anyone is in Buffalo County Nebraska, we could meet up.

93: It turns out that the curmudgeonly old diplomat actually LOVES burnt soufflés, and cookies with sugar swapped for salt, and waterfalls pouring down from ceiling tiles into his lap with cats in them, arms akimbo and freaking out! Well done.

Five of the ten least populous counties in the US are in Nebraska, which probably surprises Moby not in the least.

Alaska is of course the biggest state, but how much bigger it is, is probably not widely appreciated (though of course well known to teo). It's 431 times the size of Rhode Island, which probably isn't a helpful comparison.

The Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area is the largest county-equivalent in the US. If you took it out of Alaska, it would be the fourth-largest state, and Alaska would still be the largest state. The North Slope Borough is Alaska's next largest county-equivalent. If you then took it out of Alaska, it would be the twelfth-largest state, and Alaska would still be the largest state. If you then took out enough land to leave Alaska still the largest state at one square mile larger than Texas, the bit you took out would also be larger than Montana.

In other words, you could parcel out Alaskan land to make the fourth-, fifth- and fourtheenth-largest states -- two Montanas and a Michigan -- and still leave Alaska as the largest state in the Union.

Yes, I'm being tremendously productive at work today, why do you ask?

KEY FACT! If New York had the same number of people per square metre as the North Slope Borough of Alaska it would look different from the way it does now.

Congratulations, Passport! Also, I think this story story still has movie potential. Isn't there a subgenre of comedies in which expectations are subverted and everything miraculously goes right?

Meanwhile I am in a different kind of comedy. I should be at my brother's house in Madison, Wisconsin, but instead I am at the Comfort Inn near O'Hare Airport where the fire alarm went off at 5 am. Thanks, United Airlines!

Texas is bigger than France, or so the bumper stickers tell me.

Before Jimmy Carter, airlines were strictly regulated against pulling fire alarms in the middle of the night. Thanks, neoliberalism.

Congratulations, Passport! Also, I think this story story still has movie potential. Isn't there a subgenre of comedies in which expectations are subverted and everything miraculously goes right?

No, no, I think this is clearly the setup. Everything that's happened so far is pre-main credits - we're just setting up the main plot.
a) CHARACTER: President Passport is humorously neurotic but can actually deliver on complex tasks under pressure, despite her anxiety beforehand
b) CHARACTER: Retired Diplomat is curmudgeonly and formal but has a heart of gold, as shown by his establishing moment when Passport Cat attempted to gut him like a sturgeon and he fended her off with a benevolent chuckle
c) EXISTING RELATIONSHIP: Diplomat and President bonded at the party and President owes Diplomat a huge favour for sorting her passport issue out.

The plot proper starts when Diplomat asks President for a favour in return. By the third act she will be pursuing a gang of international jewel thieves through the streets of Klow (or Strackenz or wherever) in a state of absolute panic and a hilariously tiny car.

108: You might be on to something there. Another consequence of the party is that a scholar from India plans to have her university fly me out to give a talk next year. Anything could happen!

All the slapstick tropes from the initial dinner will make a later appearance for brief comic relief during the suspenseful part, though. This time, you have to intentionally burn the souffle but still give the appearance of bumbling idiocy.

There has to be a scene where President is held up at gunpoint in her hotel room and ordered to reveal the location of the missing jewels, she says "over there! in the wardrobe!", the thug opens the wardrobe and is instantly buried beneath an avalanche of concealed Funkos, Pez dispensers, sex toys, etc.

After the dust settles from the avalanche of toys, that cat (that stowed away in her luggage) hops out of the wardrobe as well, prissily down the mess, and lands insouciantly on the bad guy's forehead for just a moment. A few beats too late, he swats at the cat like it's a fly, and indavertently dislodges a second avalanche onto his buddy.

Perfect. Have your people call my people. This could be the next John Wick franchise.

108 is truly excellent.

I mean, the sequel set in India is already set up--just think of the international box office potential! And obviously the huge Bollywood dance scene that President "stumbles" through while sidelining the baddies.

PS Mr. Passport's oblivious entrances right after all the action wraps up will become legendary: "Why is this sci-fi Funko amongst the Marvels!? Honey, can't you do anything right?"

One of the pops has a head full of microfilm.

Pictures of the non-hijinks are up at the other place. No cats or sex toys were harmed in the making of this feature.

117: Congratulations on the party going so well!

82, etc: I also appreciated the numberless graph, since I could name most of the "steps" and the associated transitions. I do wonder if the recently introduced Mass Timber (type IV-A to C) construction types will help with the missing middle -- IV-C is good for 8 stories before worrying about podiums, and their allowable areas are pretty expansive. That might be a path to allow traditional apartment builders to build somewhat taller without having to switch to steel. Mass timber connections can be pretty different, but the same tools typically work - just a lot more bolts and screws used for the larger loads and members.

118.2: Yes, the medium-term best case would be mass timber displacing everything between 3 & 9 stories, and for 4-8 story buildings becoming common just about everywhere. Basically, save steel (and concrete) for true skyscrapers and leave light wood framing for suburban infill, if you will: the kinds of small projects that don't need professional developers and should be legal literally everywhere, from ADUs to fourplexes to 12-unit, 3-story elevatorless buildings that fit neatly on 50'x100' lots.

I just don't know how damn long it's all going to take. AFAICT there's nothing like a mature mass timber ecosystem anywhere in the US, and even places where it's most advanced, like the PNW, are seeing manufacturers struggle and fail. I don't know if it's mere growing pains or indicative of something deeper/more systemic, but it worries me. It's a steep learning curve for the entire industry, and we need to climb it ASAP.

After you've finally cleaned up and put everything away you find a stray sex toy. You go to put it in the display case but there's no empty spot. You make one only to find a new stray leaving you with the same number as before.

. . . even places where it's most advanced, like the PNW, are seeing manufacturers struggle and fail.

I would like to know more about that; can you recommend an article or two on the current state of the industry?

All I know is what Michael Eliason tweets, but he recently (as in the last few days) mentioned a couple producers up there failing, and he frequently bemoans the weak ecosystem of components. He's mostly talking about Passivhaus components like triple glazed windows and sun shading devices, but I think it applies to mass timber more generally. Certainly we have no domestic producers of prefab panels insulated with straw, which is for sure one of the only ways to build truly carbon-negative.

Larch Lab is his business, but he tweets as that as well as under his own name on these topics. To link a bit to the viral underclass thread, he's definitely a guy with a hammer seeing nails, but I don't think he's wrong so much as he doesn't always distinguish between his hobbyhorses and the real problems. Which I've come to believe is more or less inescapable with gadflies/iconoclasts/revolutionaries. On some level, it's all the supreme solipsism to believe that what's wrong with society is what bugs you personally, and that you also know exactly how to fix it, if only they'd listen.

To tie to the day's other thread, I think the vast majority of people who effect change are basically in that category, and the people who are radical and effective without being personally annoying/awful--like Daryl Davies--are so rare that we call them saints.

Like, we all think (some) things would be better if we were in charge, but most of us have enough humility--or just things going on--not to raise a big fuss about it. Or we, you know, try to do the work without talking about it until everyone rolls their eyes.

To be clear, Eliason is 100% doing the work, and plenty of gadflies/etc are as well, but they tend also to not shut up and/or not choose their battles.

More geology:
Reconnaissance of the Rio Coca Regressive Erosion and Building the Partnership (PDF)
Modeling and Projection of the Morphological Evolution of the Coca River after the Collapse of the San Rafael Waterfall (PDF)
Showing something I hadn't realized before, that while upstream erosion threatens the hydro intake structures, downstream deposition also threatens the hydro outlet.

Maybe they can reverse it?

"With 220 million tons in the system, dredging and disposal operations will quickly be overwhelmed."

With that attitude.

500 million tons.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/esp.5751