Learning from Atlanta’s Data-Driven Housing Initiative

Atlanta, GA. Photo from Pexels.

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.

Street design targeted: Idaho is the most recent participant on the state preemption circuit as the governor signed a bill that would limit narrowing roads below 50 feet wide to accommodate bikes and pedestrian paths. The bill drew harsh criticism from critics complaining that safety wasn’t a priority of the lawmakers that wrote the bill. This state level action is bolstered by new USDOT policy that looks unfavorably on lane reductions as safety measures. (Nick Rosenberger | Idaho Statesman and Kea Wilson | Streetsblog USA)

People first in Tokyo: Living in Tokyo has made public policy professor Daniel Aldrich realize how much America has allowed cars to literally drive transportation policy. In Tokyo, people are prioritized ahead of vehicles and it shows but even in a “pro-transit” city like Boston where he lives now, the opposite is the case. One solution is to disincentivize driving through more regulations on parking, driving, and requiring proof of storage availability for vehicles. (Jeremy Siegel | WGBH Boston)

Regulating warehouse impacts: With the rise in e-commerce has come an explosion of warehousing all over the country. This has lead to huge community impacts from increases in truck traffic in areas like the Inland Empire in California. But last year, California passed AB98, which requires warehouses over 100,000 square feet the mitigate noise, become more energy efficient, and program truck traffic to control air quality. (Aryana Noroozi | Black Voice News)

Learning from Atlanta: A data driven housing initiative in Atlanta is being held up as a model for other cities to follow by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Data Smart City Solutions program. The Atlanta initiative looks to build or preserve 20,000 housing units by 2030 and has already delivered 7,000 of them. The approach works according to officials because of collaboration between departments and the specific focus on neighborhood health in seven highly distressed neighborhoods. (Jabari Simama | Governing)

When keeping warm kills: In the coldest capital city in the world, Ulaanbataar Mongolia, carbon monoxide poisoning and respiratory issues are common place in residents young and old. There’s not enough housing for everyone, so people build round buildings called “gers” and burn on average 23kg of coal a day to keep them warm. The result is more children in hospitals with lung issues and more pregnancies that result in miscarriages and premature births. (Tracy McVeigh | The Guardian)

Quote of the Week

It’s pretty much unarguable that an unchecked five-person oligarchy is a lousy system for managing a county of 10 million people. But what is the right size government for a huge metropolitan area? There’s no easy answer to that question.

–Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing discussing LA County moving to a governing system with a county executive and more representatives at the end of this decade.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Congressman Rick Larsen of Washington State, Ranking Member for the Democrats on the House Transportation Committee.

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