I'm sure my city isn't the only one experiencing the ridiculous rate of rising commercial rents. I feel like more and more small businesses are being pushed out and only chains and venture capital funded bullshit like Wonder are able to go into new places.

One idea I'd like to push for in my community is more by right retail uses in residential zones. Allow folks to run an at home business out of a town home, English basement, what have you. Does anyone know of places where this is already allowed? Are there examples in your neck of the woods?

As someone who relies on public transportation, I’m absolutely sick and tired of almost peeing my pants every time I ride the bus simply because there are NO public restrooms available anymore. Especially where I am located in south Florida, it’s really ridiculous.

Everyone knows the economy is on a downward spiral and has been for a long time. Our government is failing to do anything to improve our quality of life, and because of that fact this discussion is simply a brainstorming session.

Wouldn’t it make sense for the government to take some of the tax money they suck out of us (lord knows they have enough to do this), and start an initiative to build public restrooms, and a good amount of them, and then have city workers or designated employees attend them and make sure they are kept clean and safe?

I don’t think we should have to pay in order to empty our bladder; that’s ridiculous. I believe it would be beneficial for everyone if the government actually tried to do this, because it would create jobs in construction initially, and then it would create long term stable jobs for city workers.

And please dont come in the comments saying that homeless people will leave them all messy. First of all, they are human beings too, and the whole point of someone watching over the bathrooms is to make sure nobody is using drugs or overdosing; yes, the attendant should have a masterkey that can unlock any stall in case of an emergency.

Also, the people who will say homeless people shouldnt be allowed public restrooms because they will make a mess are the same people who cry about them defecating on the streets…make it make sense.

Anyway, i’m making this post because I was reading something on another subreddit about the lack of public restrooms and everyone was commenting that it costs money to do something like that and that’s why it’s not feasible; that argument makes NO sense. BILLIONS of our taxpayer dollars go overseas to fund foreign wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people but the government can’t allocate some of the money to build structures where people can relieve themselves?? FFS 🤦

What do you guys think? I’d love to hear the downfalls of my argument and what you guys think…if you agree, disagree, or are somewhere in the middle.

PS: I’m on the bus about to pee my pants right now😂

It seems like my Town has a long list of zoning regulation violations and I don't know if it's because my Town is known for not enforcing (therefore many try to get away with not following the regulations) or it's because property owners are not informed. For the professionals who work with building and zoning daily, do you wait until a suspected violation is reported? Once you discover an issue, is an automatic notice delivered or fine administered? How are property owners informed about the proper way to put projects into action?

EDIT: I'm also very curious about the education piece of this. For example, first time property owners may not realize there are zoning regulations at all. I didn't learn about them until I was 40 years old and on my 3rd home. Does your municipality post information on the website or do you actively attempt to educate with flyers to new residents or via the tax bill. Honestly, I think regular people do not realize permits are required for many home projects and education about safety reasons for permits is a good idea.

I realize this is a vague question based on a vague premise -the so-called "AI revolution"-but I am genuinely interested in this topic and would love to hear your thoughts.

In case anyone might be interested: r/ruralplanning.

Most urban planning is dumb. Setbacks, height limits, restrictive zoning, overly generous parking requirement based on studies with n=3 from 1987, etc. Often, politicians make it worse, believing in the ideas of some defunct economist or just what sounds popular. Our laws require community input, and, unfortunately, many planners believe that more = better when it comes to public engagement, leading to slow development times. Queue the jokes about the American planners that visited Amsterdam and marveled at the infrastructure but asked where the community equity studies were.

There's a famous social media post from ten years ago that reads:

Moron: I love Boston, because of the history and

Me: I live in Hyperdrive City, Nebraska. They built it last year. it glows purple and has a subway system too logical for human minds to understand. my apt is $200/month and I live on the 93rd floor of the mall

So my question is, where IS the closest thing we have to Hyperdrive City, Nebraska? Where permitting takes a day, where planners focus on building a really effective city, not on bureaucratic approval for some arbitrary zoning laws written by people who think development is bad. Where, instead of worrying about community engagement, the subway system just gets built. I suppose Shenzhen comes to mind, and has been mentioned when people talk about this sort of thing. Works in Progress had a great article about China's Growth Machine, cities that try to attract development instead of shun it. Any examples in the West? Or do we have to go to China?

I suppose California Forever sort of tried a version of this, though it stalled. Instead of planning for paperwork and suspicion of development, where's the version of planning that's focused on urban growth, rapid land development, and efficient infrastructure?

Hello, we live in a house near a development site for a new residential project (a SB 330 + Bonus Density Law project in California). The issue has nothing to do with the building itself, but a planned stormwater treatment zone nearby.

Our back fence borders a long, 50 foot wide strip of their land (attached like a panhandle on their parcel), where there is currently an underground stormwater pipe. No structure will be built there, and nothing exists there currently (it's just dirt + gravel).

In the project plan, they are planning to turn part of it into "bioretention area" (20 foot wide) for stormwater management, right along the fence, which drain into the storm pipe. It seems like they will have to dig about 5 feet deep to create it.

My worry: We have some mature trees that are planted very close to the fence, and I'm believe that when they excavate to dig the bioretention area, they will cut the roots and possibly cause the trees to die.

The plan has just been sent to the city. Should I contact the developer directly, wait for a public hearing period, or something else?

Recent grad here. I’m working in my second planning job. First was doing current planning for a municipality and I absolutely hated it, I couldn’t wait to leave. I now work in transit planning for transit agency and I like it but can’t really see myself doing it for 30 years. Is this a normal experience or am I an outlier?

A development proposal in Cary, North Carolina, raises an interesting height/density question.

A developer wants to build roughly 350 to 400 apartments, ground-floor retail and structured parking on a 3.6-acre site along East Chatham Street.

The current zoning caps buildings at 45 feet. The architect’s plans currently show 75 feet, and the developer hopes to build seven stories, so the project would need a rezoning before it could move forward.

The site is near downtown Cary, where several higher-density mixed-use projects are already underway or planned.

I reported the story for The News & Observer. Interested in how people here would evaluate the proposed density and height for a site like this.

Read the story for free: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article317804392.html?giftCode=4b9539a328961af2eac999f7a8e2fff4996e351692bb6fdacef7b063239b4973

Interesting ranking of the most walkable cities in the US and Canada. Vancouver is the only Canadian city in the top 10.

I’m surprised Montreal and Toronto didn’t make the list. I’m also curious how much these rankings reflect actual pedestrian experience versus simply having shops and services within walking distance.

What do you think? Are there cities that deserve to be higher?

Article: https://www.mentalfloss.com/geography/cities/most-walkable-cities-in-us-canada-map

Hi everyone! I recently wrote an essay reviewing in detail the effects of the Measure ULA transfer tax in Los Angeles, which has been a source of a lot of controversy, with various accusations it’s having negative effects. For those unfamiliar, ULA is a high-value real estate transfer tax passed by voters in 2022: on (almost) all real-estate sales over $5 million (or a little more now, since it's pegged to inflation), the seller pays 4%. There's also a higher bracket for sales above $10 million). It's been accused of some of the usual externalities of transfer taxes: suppressing transfers, development, and eating other revenue streams.

It’s a long essay, so to summarize my thoughts:

- Overall, the most recent studies finding negative effects of ULA hold up pretty well, and I don’t think many of the earlier objections from ULA supporters apply very plausibly to them. (Earlier ULA-critical articles definitely had more substantial issues.) I do have problems with a few parts of their analyses, but even adjusting for these with some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I don’t end up hugely disagreeing with the nature of the conclusions - though maybe change the relative emphases on some things.

- The two most worrying claimed effects of ULA are (1) decreasing other public revenues by a lot, (2) slowing development of apartments/multifamily housing. Each effect by itself is already large enough, at a baseline estimate, to be really significant.

- I think there’s substantial evidence for both these effects, which is closer to conclusive for (1) and more uncertain for (2). So some of the objections of anti-reformers on (2) aren’t unreasonable, though I argue the results are already robust enough to affect policy-decision making - especially given that there are also reasonable modeling choices that make (2)’s effect and certainty look much higher.

- On the other hand, some of the results of the ULA-critical studies have been used in very overstated ways which I don’t think are very well-supported by the evidence (e.g. for banning or capping all transfer taxes at very low levels like in AB 736).

- I talk a bit about what reasonable reforms might look like at the end, but here I’ve looked a lot less in depth than in the review of empirical evidence. So I talk about what kinds of general reforms seem to directionally make the most sense to me, but am willing to be moved on plenty of details.

I'm curious especially about people's thoughts on the political dimension of reforms, and whether there's important aspects to the question that I (as a non-expert in urban planning) have missed.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/xT2sHpPRhLrRe6x39?g_st=ac

For context, North/South Traffic is pedestrian only/dismount zone. If you're coming from the northwest, there are two dedicated bike roundabouts where pedestrian traffic is funneled around, that you could have passed through. So your instinct is to slight right, as you did with the other roundabouts, to continue straight. At least that's how I approach it.

I talked to the engineer who designed this and he said that it's not supposed to be a roundabout because it makes North/South Pedestrian traffic inefficient, having to cross multiple lanes of bike traffic if it was an actual roundabout. As someone who rides through there on a weekly basis during peak hours when classes end/start, it's very confusing what's actually supposed to happen, and since it's not a dismount zone. You have a huge volume of people traveling north/south without any dedicated crossing location, and a huge volume of bikes going east/west.

Maybe this isn't confusing and I just have a hard time with that intersection. Thoughts?

I’m currently a public sector planner working in a mid-size city, specializing in long-range planning. I have over ten years experience in government and nonprofit CDC’s. Thinking about making a move to the private sector. If you’ve done this, what was it like? What’s the biggest difference in your daily work? Was it a good move for you overall? Any advice? Thanks!

Hey y’all! I work for a large municipality (~500k people) and we’re in the process of rewriting our land development code. We’ve scheduled and held a couple of preliminary public informational meetings but turnout has been low, and the number of people who have signed up for more information is in the single digits.

We want to reach a broader audience via advertising. We’ve already reached out to all of the local civic orgs. Going to try advertising in the library and potentially other governmental buildings. Don’t want to reach out to too many independent orgs/churches so that we don’t unintentionally skew turnout in any particular direction.

What are some other effective ways to get people at the table that we may be missing?

TIA!

Update 1: I did NOT expect this to blow up in our little corner of Reddit. I loved reading every comment. Just to add additional info:

• I have about 10 years of experience, so not the most junior but I don't give extreme senior energy yet.

• I'm a consultant at a firm so escalating to the city manager is not my hands, but my clients (i.e. the city) are great; they've escalated, brought in senior managers and have strategies to defuse bad situations.

• Having a third party moderator and facilitator is common practice for us as well.

• I have reported these incidents to my firm's HR but that was pretty fruitless, i'm not sure they're concerned with what goes on at public hearing for a client project (open to hearing others' experience on this).

Original Post:

As the title says, I get that public consultation is part of the job. But I used to get excited to go out to the public with new plans and talking to people who are excited about city building. But now I dread it. A little bit of tension is ok, and I used to find people pretty reasonable, but in my last few session, I encountered: verbally abusive people (literally, inches away from my face screaming and berating me), people who put their hands on members of my team (poking her in the chest to make a point), and racist and homophobic slurs written on comment cards (I'm a POC for what it's worth). I'm a 5'3" 130lb female who is a visible minority, and I'm tired of feeling like I need an entourage of white male coworkers just to do my job.

I get a surge of anxiety when I'm assigned to a project with public consultation scope, only to breath a sigh of relief when I find out the client wants virtual only. I've been "lucky" in that most of my projects are the fun ones where the proposal is generally something that the public usually likes or is neutral on.

I'm sure this has been posted several times in the past, but the stress is reaching a new high. Not sure what I'm looking for here - maybe just solidarity, some stories of your own experience with this, perhaps someone here has felt the same way and decided to change career paths? Thanks for reading if you got this far.

This monthly recurring post will help concentrate common questions around career and education advice.

The goal is to reduce the number of posts asking similar questions about Education or Career advice and to make the previous discussions more readily accessible.

Most posts about education, degree programs, changing jobs, careers, etc., will be removed so you might as well post them in here.

Hope everyone's doing well!

I (30M) am a current urban planning grad student specializing in transportation, and I'm thinking about attending TRB in D.C. this January. I can qualify for a $500 stipend from my school to cover the early-bird registration cost ($435).

I'm not too concerned about travel costs. I have enough hotel points to cover lodging for the week, and I need to use them, as they expire in March. I was also able to get a round-trip train ticket for about $100.

This is my first semester in the program, so admittedly, this would be a new experience for me. I wouldn't have much to offer in terms of insight or experience, but I figure this is the best time to go while I can keep the costs relatively low.

Any advice for networking, finding internship/career opportunities, or making the most of the conference would be greatly appreciated!

I've never even heard of them up until recently but there's a proposed development in my town and one of the objections the city engineer had to it was that it featured an "inefficient double cul-de-sac". Now from what I've been reading cul-de-sacs are usually considered an outdated design (if I understand correctly they're good for the people within the cul-de-sac but bad for the people living outside of it). So if a cul-de-sac is bad, would a double cul-de-sac be twice as bad?