City Planning Matters (Alex Hoffman)

In this week's episode, we discuss missing middle housing (like duplexes, triplexes and quads) and why housing choice is important to your City. While City's like Minneapolis and Berkeley make headlines for their so-called ban on single family housing, we cover intermediate steps you can take in the interim.

In this episode, we discuss Vision Zero and how to implement the program successfully.

This week's episode dives into the political aspects of the field as we look at Planning and Politics and how planners can navigate this difficult landscape.

Walkability is a nebulous term to that means lots of things to different people. In today's episode, we examine whether walkability matters in terms of the price people are willing to pay for housing. Using data from real estate website such as Zillow and Redfin and combining it with walkability metrics from Walkscore, you can examine the correlation between walkability and sales data. Interested in learning more? Leave leave me a message or contact me on anchor.fm/planning.

Building on the last week's episode, we examine how urban form and zoning join forces to have a powerful shaping effect on cities. The smallest unit of development in cities is the block and its shape, configuration and dimension determine the ability of buildings to change adapt over time. Listed below are the resources referenced in the episode with links to learn more about the topics discussed.

References:

• Image of the City by Kevin Lynch or read the Summary
• The Evolution of Urban Form by Brenda Case Scheer

Traditional measures of equity typically consider only a fraction of person's day, as they rarely examine things other than where people live. In this week's episode, we look at how mobile location data can unlock and reveal larger patterns of equity or inequality by looking at where people shop, work and socialize. 

In the episode, we discuss a methodology for how you can examine this same issue for your City. A link to the results of my analysis are below.

The El Paso Equity Atlas is available here: https://arcg.is/11HKjr

Do walkable places result in people actually walking? Check out the Storymap I created for this episode to see the analysis and resources for what was discussed in today's episode.

In today's episode, we look at how zoning regulations and mortgage lending practices have priced out an entire generation of Americans from owning homes. This episode discusses the Opportunity Atlas to provide local context of what has happened in local housing markets. Check out the resource by going to OpportunityAtlas.org

Most people traditionally think of parking being an issue in their City because they believe there isn't enough. The truth is that your City does have a parking problem; there is too much of it. In this week's episode, we discuss ways to visualize the oversupply of parking in your City and some of the challenges having too much parking creates.