I’m a big fan of walkable neighborhoods, like where I live in Woodley Park, Washington, DC. I’ve become a student of town planning and design, and was surprised to learn how overregulation and zoning have made walkable communities nearly impossible to build these days. I am working to change this and help build new, walkable towns. I serve as a consultant to Big Lands Transect Collaborative in Texas, and as a cofounder of the Urban Flourishing Project. Below are books I’ve found influential to my thinking.
Build, Baby, Build
In Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan makes the case for housing deregulation in clever, graphic novel form. Bryan argues that housing is expensive because housing regulations have manufactured scarcity. How much scarcity? Bryan reviews the economic literature and estimates that housing would be 50% cheaper with housing deregulation. Housing deregulation would increase their overall living standards by 11%. Not in a one-time gain, but 11% year after year. Estimating the increase in production, economists estimate that housing deregulation would cause the whole country’s GDP to rise by 14% on the conservative end and 36% on the optimistic end. Adding these effects together, the average American would be anywhere from 25% to 47% richer, year after year. Two of my favorite comic panels are Caplan’s updated take on French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s classic essay, “What is Seen and Unseen.” (See photos nearby.)
Suburban Nation
In Suburban Nation, authors Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck brilliantly unpack how suburban misery came to be, with suburbanites spending so much of their life stuck in cars and traffic—shuttling kids to and from mediocre schools and activities, driving to suburban retail centers, and commuting to an office.
Strong Towns
In Strong Towns, author Charles Marohn, founder of the preeminent think tank on American city infrastructure, coined the term “Municipal Growth Ponzi Scheme” to capture the ever deepening insolvency of our city infrastructure. According to Strong Towns, this fiscal hole is so deep that even federal bailouts cannot maintain the installed base of city infrastructure, eventually requiring local officials to triage in deciding which parts of town to outright abandon. See Detroit. I found this quote from Marohn chilling: “Detroit is not some strange anomaly. It’s just early. It’s just a couple decades ahead of everyplace else.”
Smart Growth Manual
In Smart Growth Manual, Duany and Speck, give a step by step guide to how to build new livable, walkable communities. They draw from the long-forgotten wisdom of historical town builders and their ample experience from designing over 45 new urbanist towns around the country.