Planetizen

San Francisco housing advocates are suing both the city and the state of California for overriding a bill intended to increase housing supply. On July 1, California Senate Bill 79, titled the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, took effect to override local zoning limitations and allow greater heights and densities for residential development near transit stops.

Artist Justin Blinder aims to make the burden of high rent palpable with a new device called Ground Truth — a gadget that can be attached to any bicycle to cause it to slow down through rent-burdened neighborhoods, making them physically harder to move through. Blinder, a Brooklyn artist and contractor at Meta, built the gadget to cross reference location information with household economic data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is stored on the device, reports Wired.

In recent weeks, I have been reading the work of two of the more interesting thinkers on housing costs: Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia and author Kevin Erdmann of the Mercatus Center (affiliated with George Mason University). Unlike most housing policy commentators I have read in recent years, Condon does not focus on the United States; instead, he focuses more broadly on the rise in housing costs throughout the Anglosphere, particularly in Vancouver where he lives.

Los Angeles officials say they don't have a plan for assisting the hundreds of unhoused people that will likely be displaced by security arrangements for the 2028 Summer Olympics, which the city is hosting. As Libby Rainey explains in LAist, "Exactly how many people might be forced out around venues is not yet clear.

San Diego State University is building 250 apartments for seniors, including 26 memory care units, as part of an initiative to "serve our intergenerational SDSU community," according to SDSU President Adela de la Torre.

A new 12-story parking garage in Houston, Texas will hold over 2,000 cars and take up an entire city block, reports Molly Wilhelm in the Houston Chronicle. "The garage is set to take over the block at 1215 Walker St., adjacent to the Houston Center office and retail complex, according to a news release from Houston Center co-owner Stream Realty Partners." The project is expected to break ground in 2027 and will give the complex a parking ratio of 2 spots per 1,000 square feet of space.

Walk through the older commercial districts of almost any American city and you can feel the problem before anyone shows you a spreadsheet. The restaurant that anchored the block for 30 years is gone. The machine shop owner is ready to retire. The corner store has a handwritten sign in the window and no clear successor behind the counter. We talk a lot about downtown megaprojects, stadium districts, tax incentives and the next big corporate relocation. Those things matter.

Fewer kids are walking to school now than they did decades ago — and that's largely due to unsafe pedestrian infrastructure, writes Evan Porter in an article for Upworthy. "The number is at about 11% today, down from about half of all kids under 15 in the 1960s.

A new study published in the journal Science indicates that even considering the environmental impacts of building new electric vehicles, swapping out a gas-powered car for an EV is the more eco-friendly choice. As Tik Root explains in a piece in Grist, "swapping even a two-year-old gas car for an EV leads to a lifetime emissions savings of roughly 50 percent," according to the study.

A study funded by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission found that hundreds of rain gardens installed throughout the city are having a major positive impact on San Francisco Bay, keeping out over 90% of many common pollutants. As Carl Smith explains in Governing, the PUC has funded nature-based approaches to stormwater management to reduce the chance that stormwater will overwhelm its sewer system, which is one of the few in the nation that combines wastewater and stormwater.