What’s in the ROAD to Housing Act?

Sold sign. Photo by Dave Reid.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Population decline and the built environment: Countries around the world are experiencing or will soon experience population decline. Blaine Brownell argues that people often talk about many reasons for this but tend to skip over the impact of the built environment. While we design our environments for comfort, economic success, and quality of life, those same designs also impact family formation and the ability to care for them. (Blaine Brownell | Architect Magazine)

Value capture for high speed rail: The California High Speed Rail Authority is looking into creating value capture potential around stations but cities have been wary as they also want the rewards of investment. Now the authority is working on an asset commercialization strategy that would use excess land to develop energy and transmission projects as well as data centers. There are potential drawbacks to this approach but it’s also a good way of looking at all the potential value that might be created through the construction of infrastructure. (Joe Edwards | Newsweek)

Carspreading across the Atlantic: Both Europe and the United States are seeing vehicle sizes increase dramatically with disastrous effects. Since 2009 pedestrian deaths have increased on American roads by 75% and writers at the New York Times suggest that vehicle sizes have led to 400 additional deaths per year. In Europe, researchers also believe that if vehicles aren’t “rightsized” by the year 2040, 400 additional people per year will die from collisions there too. (Keller et al. | New York Times + Ajit Niranjan | The Guardian)

What’s in the ROAD to Housing Act: While the ROAD to Housing Act is sitting on a desk in the White House, Emma Waters shares what’s actually in the legislation including changes to regulations surrounding manufactured housing, greater access to small dollar mortgages, guidelines for permitting single stair buildings, the creation of publicly owned land databases, and best practices for local zoning policy reform. There’s a lot in the bill, but this piece is pretty comprehensive. (Emma Waters | Bipartisan Policy Institute)

Reduced air pollution in London: A study out of Imperial College London has found that nitrogen air pollution mostly from cars in the city has fallen 40% while particulates have fallen 28% since 2019. Deaths from air pollution have also fallen 40%. The areas with the highest concentrations of deaths were outside parts of the city where the ultra low emissions zone existed but has now been extended to. (Gwyn Topham | The Guardian)

Quote of the Day

Anna Halprin organized interactive dance and movement events where environmental conditions and general actions were choreographed, or “scored,” but the final performances were left open-ended and completed through audience participation. Lawrence Halprin applied this notion to his work by designing open spaces as scores—choreographed by purposefully placing architectural elements—with the intention to elicit embodied awareness, giving individuals flexibility in choosing direction and pace as they navigated their way through the city.

–CM Turner in C-Ville Magazine discussing how the Charlottesville pedestrian mall was designed.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Ryan Avent to discuss his new book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. We discuss human evolution and the impact of collective knowledge and culture and the need to create a new story about the future of society. We also discuss grass is greener thinking on infrastructure, the nature of belief without the need for evidence, and the fact that there is no perfect past.

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