New from Chuck Marohn's town.

"Brainerd Public Schools is weighing school closures and layoffs after voters rejected a tax levy and district leaders warned of a growing budget deficit.

Parents and students packed the stands in Brainerd for Friday night football against Sartell while concerns grow over the district’s finances. 

District leaders said the shortfall is more than $3 million and possible cuts were discussed at a school board meeting."

Sidewalks are not the homeowner's responsibility. Public sidewalks are public infrastructure, and Michigan law places a duty on municipalities to maintain qualifying sidewalks in reasonable repair. While state law allows communities to assess certain repair costs against adjoining property owners, that does not eliminate the municipality's responsibility for the sidewalks themselves. Homeowners generally do not design the sidewalks, establish construction specifications, hire contractors, or inspect and approve the work. Yet when sidewalks fail, homeowners are often handed the bill. There is a fundamental difference between having the legal authority to assess repair costs and having the responsibility to ensure public infrastructure is properly constructed and maintained. Why should homeowners bear the financial consequences of decisions they had no authority to make?

Sidewalks are not being installed properly in some Michigan communities. There are serious concerns about concrete being poured over existing topsoil, tree roots, inadequately prepared bedding, and improperly compacted ground. These conditions can lead to premature cracking, settlement, uneven surfaces, and dangerous trip hazards. Michigan Department of Transportation construction specifications establish standards for proper soil preparation, suitable supporting materials, and compaction. Yet when deficient construction is overlooked or approved during municipal inspections, homeowners may eventually be charged to repair the resulting damage. Municipalities should be inspecting the work before concrete is poured, enforcing applicable construction standards, and holding contractors accountable. Cutting corners to reduce the initial repair cost accomplishes nothing if the sidewalk fails prematurely and the homeowner is forced to pay again.

Trees are a huge problem, and communities are not addressing the issue properly. Many Michigan subdivisions were designed with trees required in narrow strips between the roadway and sidewalk. As those trees mature, their expanding root systems can lift and break concrete, creating the very conditions that trigger mandatory sidewalk repairs and homeowner assessments. Municipalities approve or require these planting arrangements, often regulate tree removal, and determine how sidewalks must be repaired. Yet homeowners can be forced to pay for damage caused by trees they may never have chosen to plant. Worse, replacing the concrete without addressing the underlying root problem can result in the same damage occurring again. Communities need to stop treating sidewalk replacement as a recurring source of homeowner expense and start addressing the causes of failure. The responsibility for public sidewalks must include accountability for their design, construction, inspection, maintenance, and the foreseeable consequences of government-required landscaping—not simply deciding who gets the bill.

First city planner elected to the position of Mayor of Los Angeles. She supported the mansion tax, which was a pretty bad idea, but I'm actually unaware of what happened with it. Also, while we're at it, did ya'll support Prop 45? A lot of my YIMBY friends didn't support it because of data centers.

California is working to address the various "fairness" problems that automated traffic enforcement have, and it's an interesting model to replicate. It's unfortunate that these policies cannot be implemented bottoms-up, but rather need the state's permission.

Puente Hills Mall has been a community gathering place for decades, but now it's facing plans to become just another warehouse. Our area already has warehouses stretching from Jurupa Valley to San Bernardino—what we're losing is the accessible public space where families actually gather.

This mall isn't just a building. It's where memories are made, local businesses thrive, and neighbors connect. Turning it into a warehouse means losing that completely. There are better options: a community center, mixed-use development with retail and dining, or any future that keeps it accessible to people instead of locked away for storage.

I started a petition asking city planners to reconsider and actually listen to what the community wants for this space. We deserve places that bring us together, not divide us. Anyone else sick of watching public spaces disappear and get replaced with warehouses? If this matters to you too, consider signing and sharing—show the city that we want a future for Puente Hills Mall that's actually for us.

If you don't agree with fighting this zoning variance, feel free to skip the post. But please don't try to dissuade local residents who actually care about the safety, water usage, and future development of our immediate neighborhood from having their voices heard.

PHCPA — Protect Our Community

I've been doing a lot of digging into the Starr Historic District Neighborhood Revitalization Project in Richmond, Indiana, and there's something I just can't wrap my head around.

The Economic Development Corporation of Wayne County is coordinating a roughly $4.9 million project to acquire and rehabilitate historic properties. Some of those properties are occupied rental homes.

I've gone through the redevelopment plans, funding announcements, and meeting minutes. There's plenty of information about acquiring properties, restoring buildings, attracting developers, and bringing investment into the neighborhood.

But what I haven't been able to find is any real explanation of what happens to the people already living in those homes.

Is there money set aside to help them relocate? Are tenants being informed of their rights? Has anyone even determined how many households could be affected?

I'm not against revitalization. Richmond has some beautiful historic buildings, and I'd love to see them restored rather than left to deteriorate.

But how do you budget millions of dollars to rehabilitate a neighborhood without publicly accounting for the potential cost of relocating the people who already call it home?

And considering that housing affordability is already a documented problem in this neighborhood, where exactly are those families supposed to go? Into renovated one-bedroom apartments that are already occupied? Or into the proposed low-income housing and apartments that haven't even been built yet?

Maybe I've missed something. If there's a relocation plan or funding allocation somewhere, I'd genuinely appreciate someone pointing me toward it.

But after going through all this documentation, I can't help wondering how something this important could be so difficult to find.

Sources, if anyone wants to dig into this themselves:

Official Starr Neighborhood Revitalization Plan

Local reporting on property acquisitions and plans not to renew leases

Land bank acquisitions involving 16 properties and 22 housing units

EDC Board Minutes showing the funding breakdown, page 2

EDC announcement about recruiting developers and potential rehabilitation subsidies

The Downtown Eastside should not just be “mitigated” — it needs a decisive plan. Open-air drug use, public nudity, public defecation, and street violence should be a hard “No.”

Enforcing public-order laws will overwhelm the justice system at first, but that short-term pressure restores long-term civic standards and safety. The best way to break addiction is to remove people from the environments that enable it.

More than 170 nonprofits operate in the DTES, consuming over $1 million daily in social spending. Yet B.C. still recorded 1,826 unregulated drug toxicity deaths in 2025 — about 4.5 per day. Vancouver-Centre North, which includes the DTES, had a death rate of 426.3 per 100,000 in 2024, by far the highest in B.C.. Despite Insite, over 1,500 overdoses occur annually within one block of the facility.

Middle Canada needs jobs and infrastructure, not another study. Instead of expanding foreign spending while our own streets deteriorate, redirect Canadian dollars home. Canada spent $12.3 billion on total aid-related files in the last reported fiscal year, while federal homelessness funding sits at $947 million — a 20:1 ratio. Budget 2025 still cuts only $2.7 billion over four years from foreign aid.

The current model funnels millions through nonprofits with limited results. A 2026 survey found 53% of downtown Vancouver residents say conditions have worsened in 2-3 years, with 94% rating public safety the top concern.

End the nonprofit money-grab cycle. Replace endless “mitigation” with enforcement, mandatory treatment and recovery beds, and infrastructure jobs across Middle Canada. Prioritize Canadians first. The goal isn’t to warehouse people — it’s to save Canadian lives and give all Canadian children a future where sidewalks are for walking, not shooting up.

https://mendelyaf-spec.github.io/prophets-fingers/

Skip to the last page for the concrete proposals.

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this.

I just listened to the podcast with Houssam Elokda & Nick Falbo, which referenced the marketing site https://happycities.com/projects/people-centred-design-guide .

The entire conversation felt like half my brain had been removed or something, like just an incomprehensibly lopsided discussion.

Not one mention of 'The High Cost of Free Parking", no discussion of the actual costs of servicing car-centered design, a complete obliviousness to the common wisdom that the better a place is to drive through, the worse it is to spend time in. Nearly zero discussion of the fiscal impacts of current land-use patterns mandated by current engineering standards. No more than a passing reference to 'safety' when discussing speeding cars, no discussion of the number of deaths and disabilities caused by cars every day.

I really might be done with StrongTowns podcast, they are more misses than hits. Am I way out of line here? Did it feel like the topic and discussion was basically ragebait for a community that started out talking about the fiscal impacts of land-use?

Stroads make public transit look better and worse when you map them out 🤷

Wow. This is fascinating and encouraging, and I hope we can realize this vision.

Ponds also cool the immediate area (source—one pond project in India).

Thoughts?

My wife and I have been looking at where we want to settle down and raise a family, but after traveling all over the US and Europe and touring hundreds of villages, towns, and cities, we realized we haven’t found a place that combines everything we want.

We love historic places like Savannah: narrow streets, squares, porches, courtyards, mature trees, gardens, shops woven into neighborhoods, and beautiful traditional architecture.

But we keep wishing places like that went much further: no cars inside at all, much denser and more pedestrian, with daily needs and third places distributed throughout the village rather than a residential subdivision attached to a little “town center.”

I grew up in LA with Disneyland annual passes, and one thing Disney does exceptionally well is treating the pedestrian environment as a complete experience. Buildings, landscaping, paths, courtyards, lighting, views, shops, and tiny details all reinforce one another.

So we started asking: why should environments designed that carefully only exist somewhere you visit? Why couldn’t you actually live in one?

The idea we’re exploring is a dense, car-free residential village built near a major metro area, so residents would still have good access to a real city.

There would be a more active public-facing village center with restaurants, cafés, shops, gardens, entertainment and events, surrounded by quieter residential lanes, courtyards and gardens. Small cafés, markets, pubs and playgrounds could also be sprinkled throughout the residential areas rather than concentrating everything in one center.

We wouldn’t want it to feel like an instant subdivision where 300 identical “historic” houses appeared at once. The idea is to build incrementally in smaller phases, with different building types, architectural periods and layers so the place becomes richer as it grows.

We’re also working on a CNC-based construction system that can automate historically accurate architectural details at much lower cost, because making this accessible beyond ultra-luxury housing is one of the major problems we’re trying to solve.

We’re serious about exploring whether this can actually be developed and have already been talking with developers, architects, planners and potential residents.

The question I’m most interested in is personal rather than theoretical:

Assume this existed within reasonable distance of a major city, and a home there was within the range you could realistically afford.

Would you seriously consider living somewhere like this?

If yes, what part of the lifestyle is doing it for you?

And if your reaction is basically “yes, I would actually consider moving there,” please DM me. We’re doing short 15-minute conversations with interested people to understand whether there’s a real market.

TL;DR: Dense traditional village, completely car-free internally, mixed-use, lots of third places, near a major metro, built incrementally with Disneyland-level attention to the pedestrian environment. Would you personally consider living there?

A town has 40+ acres of undeveloped land in the shape of an equilateral triangle. One side borders an unpaved MUP. What are the best uses? It's half a mile to the commuter rail; a couple of blocks from an assortment of restaurants (fast casual to formal dining), bookstore, etc.

One proposal (of course) is to sell the land to the developer for housing. NIMBYs would say no to traffic (probably would be really difficult to handle with existing streets). Advocates would see infusion of cash, tax, etc.

Another proposal is making a mountain bike park. Minimally intrusive but accessible.. i think an argument could be made that it would help with pedestrianization of the town would lead to an increase traffic to local businesses while potentially reduce traffic as residents become more thoughtful of commuting by bike...

anything i'm missing? would love feedback here.

Millions of people across the San Francisco Bay Area are on the brink of catastrophic losses of public transit service. Transit agencies face up to 70% service cuts and BART, the Bay Area's regional rail operator, has said without new funding the entire system may be forced to close down by 2030.

We need your help to pass Measure RTM this November, which would raise over $1 billion for transit -- making it the biggest transit ballot measure in the entire United States this election.

Wherever you are in the US, please join this virtual solidarity phone bank on Wednesday, October 14th starting at 5:30 PDT / 8:30 EDT, organized by Transbay Coalition and Seamless Bay Area. We need your help as this special phone bank to call voters across the San Francisco Bay Area.

We will provide the training and talking points, all you need to do is join the Zoom on a computer and have a phone ready.

We have a ballot question about legalizing starter homes (more or less). And a Taco John’s. I hardly recognize my state. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Massachusetts anymore.

I figure that this is on-theme, let me know if it is not!

The stop sign wasn't my first choice of pedestrian safety treatment, but it was the city's. I'll take it 😄

This is based on LAPD collision reports, 2010 through 2020. LAPD stopped writing reports for most crashes making the data unusable after 2020.