Wartime housing for defense workers in Richmond, California, near San Francisco.

In yesterday’s New York Times, two law professors from Vanderbilt put forward a startling argument: The federal government should solve the housing crisis by billing a million homes, just as it did during World War II.

“We continue to rely overwhelmingly on a single policy response: deregulation,” they wrote. But, they argued: “During World War II, the country understood that housing was not just another commodity. It was essential infrastructure for a functioning society. We should remember that lesson now.”

Nobody up to now –at least not that I know of – has suggested that the federal government should built a million houses. But the debate about whether housing is a commodity or a form of public infrastructure is very much alive. And increasingly it is shaping the debate about how to generate more housing production.

Which raises the question of who exactly will develop, build, and own the housing.

There is a lot of infatuation these days with models of “social housing” from other countries, meaning the government builds massive amounts of housing, which is made available to people at all incomes at a relatively low price or rent. (This allows people to build wealth in other ways than owning homes, which has become the default wealth-producer for the middle class in the United States.) But is that where we are headed?

As the Times article points out, the federal government has not been involved in much actual housing production for decades. Public housing began during the Depression and continued after World War II, while wartime housing was built in many locations to accommodate defense workers. But the perceived failure of public housing from the ‘60s onward has meant that the federal government doesn’t really build any housing and no one expects that to happen.

The Feds Have Focused on Financing

Rather, the federal role has been mostly financing – setting up and maintaining the financing system for mortgages (through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government-chartered companies), providing tax credits to help finance low-income housing, and of course providing vouchers and other subsidies for individual low-income households to help pay their rent.

And the recent 21^st Century Road to Housing Act, which received broad bipartisan support, didn’t change that. Rather, Road to Housing focuses on deregulation and housing production and, as the federal government typically does, uses financial carrots and sticks to try to encourage production.

These carrots and sticks include things like:

— Providing guidance and best practices on zoning reform, as well as grants to encourage reform.

— $1 billion for housing innovation, including improving housing construction technology.

— Penalties and bonuses for housing production (or lack thereof) through the community development block grant program.

— Environmental review streamlining for housing projects subject to the National Environmental Policy Act.

I wrote a more detailed accounting of what’s in the law, albeit from a California perspective, for California Planning & Development Report here. It’s now out from behind the paywall so check it out.

Levittown was built by private developers, often using VA loans after World War II

Notably lacking in the 21^st Century Road to Housing is the idea that the federal government should actually build housing. The same is true, by large, for state and local efforts to encourage the production of housing, both affordable and market-rate. By and large state and local governments provide one or more layers of financing – especially for affordable housing – but they don’t actually build it.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the actual development and construction of affordable housing is left up to the private market entirely. Affordable housing in particular is what you might call a blended effort: Private lenders provide as much financing as they can and government sources (including tax credits) fill in the rest. But the actual development and construction is done by affordable housing developers, both for-profit and non-profit.

The Nonprofit Affordable Housing Industry

In fact, there is now a robust sector of nonprofit affordable housing developers in the United States who not only develop and build affordable housing but manage the housing projects as well.

It’s true Affordable housing is often criticized for being expensive to build. Given all the uncertainty, the many layers of financing, the built-in time delays, and government-imposed requirements (such as, for example, labor compensation standards in California), that’s not too surprising.

But does anybody really think that if state or federal governments actually built and managed housing, the situation would get better? After all, the wartime housing mentioned in the Times by the Vanderbilt professors was built more than 80 years ago at a time when the federal government was “moving fast and breaking things” because of the urgency of the war and before environmental standards and community involvement became the norm.

An affordable housing project in East Los Angeles built by the giant nonprofit developer BRDIGE housing.

Should there be more government involvement in the financing of housing? Yes, probably, because the private sector can’t or won’t do the job. Should this financing include housing for middle-income folks who are getting priced out of the housing market? Probably, even though there’s always a political fight with low-income housing advocates who believe that all government funding of housing should flow to the very bottom of the market.

But should the government develop, build, and manage housing? We have one good example from a wartime crisis situation almost a century ago and not much in the way of success since.

It’s the dog days of August, so The Future Of Where be taking a little time off between now and Labor Day. This week I’ll be traveling to Orlando to meet with some right-of-center state policy wonks, and next week I’ll be headed to the mountains of North Georgia to celebrate my brother’s birthday. I’ll let you know whether these Eastern excursions provide me with any insights into the future of where.

Jake Wegmann from the University of Texas asks: Do you think that there is any realistic prospect in the US for transit becoming relevant to the daily lives of the middle class in the vast majority of places where it isn’t already?

I think the short answer is “no” in most places. The relatively low-density land-use patterns are extremely entrenched and investment in both transit infrastructure and transit service isn’t good enough. By “transit infrastructure,” I don’t only. Mean putting rails down but investment that improves the mundane, day-to-day experience of riding transit, like good bus shelters, good sidewalks leading to transit stations, and streets you can actually cross without getting killed.

However, I’d make a couple of exceptions. First, if people are traveling into a dense area where parking is expensive and difficult, they’re take transit. Second, there’s a success story in Seattle, which has aggressively pursued transit and land-use changes in tandem and now has surprisingly, about the same level of transit ridership as Oakland or some suburbs of Boston, Chicago, and D.C. Finally is the possibility – and I emphasize possibility – of pairing ride-hailing with transit in the suburbs, as Arlington, Texas, has tried to do.

Jake actually asked a much longer question:

I am old enough to remember all of the optimism about transit in the US in the 1990s. TOD! New light rail lines in Sunbelt cities that never had them before! But it’s been 30+ years, and I don’t think the vision has really panned out. There are so many examples, but one that comes to mind is the Denver region’s massive light rail/commuter rail buildout. After all that effort and all those billions of dollars spent, my understanding is that per-capita transit ridership in Greater Denver is less now than it was before the region had built its first LRT. Nationwide transit ridership (not per-capita, but in raw numbers) had its 21st century peak in 2014, I believe, long before it got crushed by COVID. Canada, where I grew up, also mostly has low-density suburbs like we do, but its transit ridership is much higher--I think it may be something like 3X higher per capita. Are we holding onto the dream of widespread transit use too tightly in the US? We just seem incapable of making any real sustained progress. Do you have any optimism that transit will ever play an important role here beyond the big 6 “legacy” transit cities (Bos, NYC, Philly, DC, Chi, SF)? Or should we focus more on building up urbanism where it exists, promote biking/micromobility, take the isolated transit victories where we can (things seem to be going well in Seattle), but let go of the dream of Houston or LA or Phoenix becoming places where the importance of transit is widely understood and accepted?

Are middle-class folks going to make transit their preferred choice of moving around in places in the U.S. where this is not already the case? I’d say no – not because most people would prefer to drive (driving is increasingly frustrating everywhere) but because transit is inconvenient in a lot of different ways. For suburbanites, transit service is usually infrequent and getting to the bus or train stop on foot is a harsh experience at best and perilous at worst. (One thing most transit advocates don’t write about is how difficult it can to cross a “stroad” – which you have to do at least once if you are traveling both ways by transit.)

Of course, there are two major exceptions I have come to see as as the result of personal experience in both Houston and San Diego. One is when the destination is extremely dense and parking is difficult or expensive. The other is special events, which often has the same conditions.

In Houston, I used to ride the Red Line light rail into the Texas Medical Center, which is not only the largest medical center in the world but also one of the densest activity centers in the United States. (There are 100,000 employees in a one-square-mile area.) Although midday travel involved encountering the typical homeless riders, rush hour was always jammed. (Many commuters would take Houston’s excellent express bus system to downtown, then transfer to the Red Line.)

In San Diego, I often ride the Blue Line from downtown, where I live, to the UC San Diego campus. This line, which opened in 2021, is the most successful new transit line in the country, and that’s because it feeds extremely dense locations in the La Jolla area – specifically, a VA hospital, the main UCSD campus, and the UCSD health campus. The demographics on this line are dramatically different from the demographics on other transit lines in San Diego. Yes, there are a lot of students. But there are also a lot of middle-class folks going to work or to medical appointments.

The same goes for special events – sports, entertainment, conventions. The destination conditions are the same as these dense activity centers, so middle-class folks take transit for at least part of the trip. I saw that in Houston, where people crowded the Red Line to go to events at NRG Stadium (just past the Texas Medical Center), and I see it every day in my neighborhood near Santa Fe Depot in San Diego, where suburban middle-class folks who wouldn’t think of riding a bus come streaming off the commuter rail line to go to Petco Park.

The one new success story that I can think of other than the legacy Big 6 that Jake mentioned is Seattle – not historically a transit stronghold but doing pretty well today. Seattle has invested a lot not only in light rail and bus rapid transit lines but also in infill development, in part because of the strength of Washington’s growth management act, which has essentially pushed a lot of new development to the north-south spine of the region and into the city. (Seattle is the only non-sprawling large American city to add population since the pandemic.) The results are significant: Transit ridership was 20% of the population before the pandemic and is now 15%, which is about the same as Oakland, which has run off of both BART and AC Transit for 50 years. Seattle’s also about got the same level of transit ridership as Alexandria and Berkeley (though a bit less than Arlington, Virginia). The Seattle lesson is that transit ridership is about land use as well as service.

The more typical situation – if you can make it work – is Arlington, Texas, the largest city in the nation without a bus transit system. Arlington has tried to fill the gap by providing rail-hailing service to DART stations. This probably works for people doing long-haul trips where ride-hailing would be very expensive but the truth of the matter is that for day-to-day travel going pretty short distances, middle-class folks are going to use ride-hailing as the primary alternative to driving.

So the bottom line in answer to the long question: I don’t think you give up on metro areas completely. I think you give up on places within the metro areas where transit isn’t a viable alternative and focus on those areas (like central Houston) where transit can thrive even in an auto-oriented metro.

Can APA and ULI Ever Work Together?

Gary Mitchell, the Kendig Keast zoning guru from Houston, asks:

I know there is some degree of collaboration between the American Planning Association and Urban Land Institute worlds (joint research, publications/guides, etc.). But are we too siloed in how we approach land use and development “planning” in this country as summed up by this AI response: “The American Planning Association (APA) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) interact as complementary national authorities in the built environment, where the APA represents public-sector and community-focused urban planners, and the ULI represents private real estate development, investment, and market-driven land use professionals”? Or, from your wide-ranging experience, are the public- and private-sector mindsets and approaches interacting about as well as they can within our U.S. framework? Exhibit A: the current housing situation that has been decades in the making.

Well, both planners and developers shape the built environment, but obviously they come at it from different perspectives. And the organizations have different perspectives too. The APA is the basic professional association for planners, while ULI is more of an elite, “belong-by-choice” organization – the place where, as my old Houston friend Ann Taylor used to say, “Developers go to wear their white hats.” I would say a better analogy is APA and the National Assocation of Home Builders, or ULI and the Congress for the New Urbanism, also an elite, “belong-by-choice” organization (though one more narrowly focused on a particular type of development).

Planners and developers obviously play different roles in shaping the built environment and come at the process form different perspectives. Historically – especially here in California – there has been a somewhat antagonistic relationship between the two groups: developers saw planners are getting in the way, while planners saw developers are exploitative. (This has changed since the housing crisis became the predominant issue in California and elsewhere: A new generation of planners is more sympathetic to developers because they see the problem as too little development, not too much.)

Beyond that, however, the two organizations serve different roles.

On the one hand, the APA is the basic professional association: Everybody belongs to it, it runs the certification and continuing education programs, and it has to represent everybody in the profession, which – as it the case with so many membership associations – often leads to a “lowest-common-denominator” approach.

On the other hand, ULI is more of a “belong-by-choice” organization. As my Houston friend Ann Taylor, who used to be the ULI executive director there used to say, “ULI is where developers go to wear their white hats.” Not everybody belongs and not everybody wants to belong. ULI holds itself up as a kind of elite, cutting-edge-best-practices organization, which is obviously different from an everybody-belongs-membership organization.

So they are fundamentally different.

A better analogy to APA in the development world is the National Association of Home Builders, which is, admittedly, primarily geared toward single-family homebuilders. But it’s the same kind of organization: a big-tent place (which admittedly is moving toward the multifamily world more and more).

Meanwhile, a better analogy – though far from a perfect one – for ULI might be the Congress for the New Urbanism, which also views itself as a kind of an elite, cutting-edge-best-practices outfit. The big difference there is that CNU advocates for a particular kind of development, while ULI views itself as the champion of the best development no matter what the kind.

Does this mean APA and ULI can’t work together? Of course not. But this is more likely to occur at the local level, where a local APA section and a local ULI chapter has common membership and is focused on specific local issues. I’ve seen that in many places.

The one thing that drives me crazy is their conferences tend to overlap and I never know which one to go to. The spring ULI conference often conflicts with the APA’s National Planning Conference, while the fall ULI conference often conflicts with the California APA conference. One year the two fall conferences were in the Bay Area at the same time, which simplified things. But even when they don’t directly conflict, it’s hard to go to both of them.

How Do You Invest In Neighborhood Without Gentrifying It?

Los Angeles planner Marco Anderson asks:

Thinking about the challenges in downtown LA just east of the River and other communities: Is there anyway to improve streetscapes, active transportation and parks without causing gentrification and/or displacement?

This is actually a live question in a research project I am currently working on – the question beign, not how to do prevent displacement, but how do you invest in neighborhoods in a way that makes live better for the people who already live there. I think the answer is you can do it, but we have to look at this more broadly than, “What anti-displacement strategies should we put into place?” If that’s your only perspective, you fall into the trap of thinking that investment itself is bad, and that just consigns the non-gentrified neighborhood to a future no better than the past.

I think this is one of the biggest struggles – ideological, political, economic – in urban planning today. What’s the goal? To improve the lives of people who live in low-income neighborhoods? Or to protect the exact way of life they have now, no matter what their current circumstances are?

I think the answer has to be the first, not the second. Otherwise the goal becomes to repel investment altogether.

The first step in understanding this is, to me, separating out the gentrification question between investment and displacement. At least at the residential level, it’s displacement that’s the bad thing, not investment per se.

Some researchers, including Nick Marantz of UC Irvine, argue that the whole displacement issue is overstated. Low-income people tend to move around a lot no matter what, for a variety of (unfortunate and economically driven) reasons. The amount of additional displacement due to gentrification may not be that much.

In addition, Marantz and Jake Wegmann (who asked the first question this month!) have argued that investment in new development in a low-income neighborhood is far preferable to investment in upgrading existing housing, because that may be less likely to cause displacement.

And then there is the difference between gentrification in the sense of taking a neighborhood more upscale and gentrification in the sense of changing its demographics. These are interrelated I know, but here’s one story from the historically Hispanic East End of Houston (which I’ll get back to in a minute): One time I was facilitating a focus group of longtime Hispanic homeowners, who admittedly were getting a lot of pressure from aggressive developers to sell out. They viewed their new white neighbors with amusement – but not hostility: “We think they’re crazy. They walk their dogs at 10 o’clock at night! We would never go out at 10 o’clock at night. But we’re glad they do it because it makes the neighborhood safer.”

But to me, almost as big an issue is the question of commercial gentrification and displacement. Yes, maybe you can stay in your house. But can you afford to buy – or do you want to buy – a six-dollar latte or 20-dollar avocado toast? To me, this is a a tough one.

That’s why I admire developers who try to straddle this problem, such as my friends at Concept Neighborhood, which has been developing and redeveloping several parcels in that same East End neighborhood in Houston. The Concept Neighborhood folks are very aware that they are going to gentrify the neighborhood and they get some pushback as a result. But they’re also scaling their commercial rents so that businesses that cater to the locals can stay – for example, they brought in an 800-square-foot bodega and they take a share of the revenue rather than a fixed rent.

Obviously, not every developer in a gentrifying neighborhood is going to take that approach. But I think that when you have major public improvements that might drive gentrification – such as parks and bike trails along the L.A. River – maybe you can combine those with commercial activities on public land that cater to the local residents, not to the gentrifiers.

If you want to help the folks in Spokane, consider donating to Innovia’s Wildfire Response Fund.

The tragic fires in Spokane, which I wrote about last week, have yet again raised the question of what strategy – if any – we in the United States should adopt to deal with the increasing number of extreme natural disasters that appear to be afflicting us.

Whether it’s floods in Houston, hurricanes in Florida, or wildfires in the West, natural disasters have gone from becoming the exception to the norm. And so the question about how to deal with them – and how to minimize the damage to people and property – has become an urgent one.

Increasingly, that question has boiled down to: flee or fight? By which I mean to say, do we try to avoid putting people and their property in harm’s way in the first place? Or do we try our beset to mitigate the damage to people and property when a natural disaster occurs.

As a land use planner, I’ve always been inclined toward avoidance. After all, if land use planning can’t arrange the landscape in a way that protects people from harm, what’s the point of doing it in the first place?

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But in the course of my life experience (including serving as mayor of a wildfire-prone city), I’ve come to realize that mitigation is also necessary, because there are tens of millions of people already living in harm’s way and the harm is getting more frequently.

Of course, it would be nice if we stopped putting more people in harm’s way, but that isn’t really happening. The riskiest places are also often the prettiest. Meaning there will always be people willing to buy houses in risky locations and gamble that a natural disaster won’t hit them during their lifetime, as well as developers willing to turn a profit building and selling those houses.

And while it’s theoretically possible to retreat from risky locations – and remove people from them – as I have written previously it’s unbelievably expensive (because putting people there in the first place creates value). And it’s almost impossible emotionally for the people who live there to accept, since people become so attached to the idea of place.

And, in an event, our definition of risky areas is expanding on a daily basis as more natural disasters occur. People who always thought of themselves as safe simply aren’t.

So what do you do?

How Much Can We Mitigate The Risk?

Well, there are mitigation practices and then there are ways to rebuild that might reduce the risk.

Living in Southern California most of my adult life, I’ve watched the evolution of wildfire mitigation efforts. (It’s interesting to me that we used to be afraid of earthquakes but we’ve vastly improved our mitigation there, so we are not focused on wildfires.)

There are the obvious steps that individual homeowners can – and in many cases – must take, such as removing brush and plants from around their house and making sure tree branches don’t touch their roof. But there are larger-scale steps we can take as well.

In my book Guide To California Planning, which most planning students and practicing planners in California use, I specifically call out the steps taken by the developers of Stevenson Ranch, a subdivision north of Los Angeles.

Stevenson Ranch near Los Angeles has taken unusual steps to protect from wildfire.

Among the measures taken are the following:

· A 200-foot-wide greenbelt containing judiciously spaced fire-resistant plants nearly surrounds Stevenson Ranch.

· Drainage basins and steeply sloped areas adjacent to homes are covered with rock, concrete or other material that won’t burn, providing buffers within the subdivision.

· Roofs are made of ceramic or concrete tiles, attic vents are covered with tight wire mesh, and all chimneys are covered with metal caps. These measures resist the threat caused by flying embers, which are a primary method wildfires advance into developed areas.

· Exterior walls are covered with stucco or similar material, rather than flammable wood siding. In addition, the areas under roof eaves are boxed off with an inflammable material so that roof timbers do not catch fire.

· Windows that are dual-paned, glazed and made of tempered glass. Whereas the heat from a wildfire can cause ordinary windows to explode into the building, these much more expensive windows redirect a fire’s heat away from the building.

Of course, these steps are mostly taken in new subdivisions – and they’re expensive, driving up the cost of housing. But they do reduce the risk and so far, at least, Stevenson Ranch has not been hit by a wildfire.

Can We Protect Older Subdivisions?

Older subdivisions are not likely to have these measures in place and so they’re at greater risk. There’s considerable evidence that older houses are much more likely to be destroyed by a wildfire. And there’s a growing idea in California that if you surround older neighborhoods with newer neighborhoods like Stevenson Ranch, you’ll protect them. Given how embers fly around, I’m skeptical, but …

Then there’s the question of how to rebuild after a wildfire. This has been the subject of considerable debate in Los Angeles given the destructive wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in 2025, and it will undoubtedly become an issue in Spokane as hundreds of homeowners decide what to do.

A rebuilt house in Altadena.

There’s no question there merely replacing an older home with a newer home meeting current building codes will reduce the likelihood that that home will burn in the future. And homeowners who have lived through wildfires are obviously more likely to be aware of the need to be vigilant about mitigation measures they can take, such as removing brush.

But the idea of rearranging land use patterns in a way that reduces risk usually falls by the wayside. The impulse is always to allow people to build their homes back in exactly the same way as before – no matter how risky that was – and this impulse usually prevails. That will probably happen in Spokane – and so the people there will still be at considerable risk that they’ll be affected by a future wildfire.

After four decades as an urban planner, a former mayor, and a consultant who’s sat through more city council meetings, market studies, and zoning fights than I can count, I’ve built up a lot of context that rarely makes it into a quick post. An “Ask Me Anything” – or AMA – is a good excuse to share some of it.

So, ask me anything. To get you started, here are a few things people asked me about last month:

— Why do planners require mixed use in high-density housing projects when the commercial space never seems to get rented out?

— What ever became of the “smart growth” movement"?

— Why do we still name our metropolitan regions after a central city many people have never been to?

To get a sense of what this interaction looks like, check out my responses to last month’s questions here and here.

But don’t be limited by what people have asked before. Ask the big-picture questions, the in-the-weeds policy ones, the practitioner questions, or the personal ones about how I got into this work. Nothing is too basic or too wonky.

How to ask: Just leave your question in the comments — that way others can see it and “like” the ones they’re curious about too, which helps me know where to start. If you’d rather ask privately, simply reply to this email.

I’ll gather questions through August 14 and answer the best ones in an upcoming newsletter.

Free subscribers will get a basic answer. Paid subscribers will get a fuller treatment that goes much deeper into the question. It’s easy to become a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on your mind.

Bill

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The truth is, I was going to write about Spokane today anyway.

I’ve been working in Spokane for the past several months and I’ve come to love it. It’s exactly the kind of city that is thriving these days. It’s a relatively small city, but still an important regional center – the biggest city between Seattle and Minneapolis, as the locals like to say. It’s a picturesque river town with an historic downtown. And it’s been attracting a lot of folks from other places, which has both run up housing prices and brought a lot of new energy to the city.

So there’s a lot of energy in Spokane these days. There’s a Safe and Healthy Spokane Task Force dealing with behavioral health and criminal justice issues, there’s been a lot of zoning and housing reform, and there’s a lot of focus on revitalization of downtown and older cordiros.

But now all that energy will be redirected for the foreseeable future toward recovering from the devastating wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of structures and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate – so far. It could get a lot worse before it gets better.

And it forces all of us to come back to a theme I’ve had to deal with over and over again in The Future Of Where: Is anywhere safe? Especially in the bone-dry Western U.S., is anywhere safe from wildfire. And if not, what can you do – to recover from disaster, to mitigate the risk, and the avoid the problem in the first place?

The wildfires in Spoken are still burning and we don’t know how much damage we will eventually see. So it’s premature to predict just how devastated the Spokane community will be.

Spokane Will Never Be The Same

But one thing is for sure: Spokane will never be the same.

When I arrived in Spokane for the first time back in March, I was told over and over again that the place is in a unique position. I was skeptical at first, because as a longtime journalist and consultant, the first thing I am always told when I arrive is that the town is unique, and it’s usually not true. But since then I have come to believe that Spokane, though similar to many other freestanding regional centers in the U.S., is in a unique position – a position that is threatened by the wildfires.

Virtually all cities of any size in the Intermountain West have seen home prices skyrocket since COVID, primarily because of the arrival of “home equity refugees” from the Pacific Coast. Think of Boise, Bozeman, and Bend, for example – all cities of over 100,000 that have been profoundly changed by this trend.

This trend has also been evident in Spokane, where home prices have doubled in the last decade, from around $250,000 to around $500,000. This has become such a concern locally that when Conor Dougherty of The New York Times wrote about the housing market in Spokane, the story was headlined: THE NEXT AFFORDABLE CITY IS ALREADY TOO EXPENSIVE.

Yet to a certain extent Spokane remains undiscovered compared to the other cities I mentioned above. It doesn’t quite have the same cache or the outdoor recreation opportunities. It’s drawn a lot of folks from elsewhere – especially Seattle, not California – but it has not been overwhelmed by newcomers.

And so over and over again what people there have told me is that Spokane is just far enough behind the curve that the city and the region can learn from the experiences of those other places. If enough policies and financial mechanisms can be put in place, and if enough energy is applied to the problem of housing and economic stability, Spokane might be able to escape the fate of spiraling housing prices that has afflicted almost every other city in a desirable natural setting in the Intermountain West.

Can Spokane Not Just Recover But Thrive?

Now, ironically, the wildfire will make that harder. For two reasons: one short-term and one long-term.

First, the short-term problem: As we learned last year from the Los Angeles wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, recovery for a devastating wildfire requires all of the attention of every civic institution in the community. The housing market will be upended, as people who own homes will suddenly be out there looking for places to rent, competing with people already in the rental market. Philanthropies and nonprofits will have to focus on helping displaced families no matter what other priorities there might be. Banks and credit unions that may have been otherwise focused on helping people into starter homes and startup businesses will have to focus instead on customers who have lost their homes. And on and on. The project I have been working on – helping facilitate more financing for affordable and workforce housing – will likely to have wait until the crisis passes.

But the long-term problem is even tougher to deal with: Weirdly, the end result of a devastating wildfire is almost always that a community goes more upscale than it was before.

Why? Because any community has a lot of residents who are older, have lived there a long time, and often are under-insured. After losing their cherished longtime home and all their belongings, a lot of these folks won’t rebuild. If they’re under-insured, they can’t afford to. And if they’re older, they simply don’t have the heart or the motivation or the time. So they sell their lot and move. And the people who replace them are different.

Maybe the best example of this trend is in Paradise, California, 75 miles north of Sacramento, which burned to the ground in 2018.

Early last year I had a conversation with the mayor of Paradise, which was a modest community before the wildfire, with a median household income of around $65,000. That meant a lot of people couldn’t afford to come back and COVID meant that a lot of equity-rich Bay Area folks started looking at what a good deal Paradise seemed to them. Only a third of the town has been built back and home prices have doubled. Demographically, Paradise is a very different town that it was before the wildfire.

This is likely to happen in some of the neighborhoods in Spokane that are burning. Take, for example, the Indian Trail neighborhood, which burned to the ground over the weekend. Indian Trail’s not in the middle of town by any means; it’s northwest of the city in a largely forested area (which was one of the reasons it burned). And it’s not especially affluent: Before the fire, home prices were running $500,000-$550,000, a little over the median price for Spokane.

In other words, Indian Trail was, by Spokane standards, a fairly affordable suburban neighborhood, which probably also had a lot of longtime homeowners who incomes aren’t really that high. Those folks will probably all leave. Their lots will be purchased by higher-income folks, who will build new, bigger, fancier houses.

Like I say, all these problems will get much worse before the wildfires are brought under control. Sadly, the end result will be that the next affordable city will be even less affordable as a result. Let’s hope Spokane’s civic leaders can bring the same kind of energy to solving the long-term affordability problem that they will undoubtedly bring to the short-term recovery.

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The truth is, I was going to write about Spokane today anyway.

I’ve been working in Spokane for the past several months and I’ve come to love it. It’s exactly the kind of city that is thriving these days. It’s a relatively small city, but still an important regional center – the biggest city between Seattle and Minneapolis, as the locals like to say. It’s a picturesque river town with an historic downtown. And it’s been attracting a lot of folks from other places, which has both run up housing prices and brought a lot of new energy to the city.

So there’s a lot of energy in Spokane these days. There’s a Safe and Healthy Spokane Task Force dealing with behavioral health and criminal justice issues, there’s been a lot of zoning and housing reform, and there’s a lot of focus on revitalization of downtown and older cordiros.

But now all that energy will be redirected for the foreseeable future toward recovering from the devastating wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of structures and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate – so far. It could get a lot worse before it gets better.

And it forces all of us to come back to a theme I’ve had to deal with over and over again in The Future Of Where: Is anywhere safe? Especially in the bone-dry Western U.S., is anywhere safe from wildfire. And if not, what can you do – to recover from disaster, to mitigate the risk, and the avoid the problem in the first place?

The wildfires in Spoken are still burning and we don’t know how much damage we will eventually see. So it’s premature to predict just how devastated the Spokane community will be.

Spokane Will Never Be The Same

But one thing is for sure: Spokane will never be the same.

When I arrived in Spokane for the first time back in March, I was told over and over again that the place is in a unique position. I was skeptical at first, because as a longtime journalist and consultant, the first thing I am always told when I arrive is that the town is unique, and it’s usually not true. But since then I have come to believe that Spokane, though similar to many other freestanding regional centers in the U.S., is in a unique position – a position that is threatened by the wildfires.

Virtually all cities of any size in the Intermountain West have seen home prices skyrocket since COVID, primarily because of the arrival of “home equity refugees” from the Pacific Coast. Think of Boise, Bozeman, and Bend, for example – all cities of over 100,000 that have been profoundly changed by this trend.

This trend has also been evident in Spokane, where home prices have doubled in the last decade, from around $250,000 to around $500,000. This has become such a concern locally that when Conor Dougherty of The New York Times wrote about the housing market in Spokane, the story was headlined: THE NEXT AFFORDABLE CITY IS ALREADY TOO EXPENSIVE.

Yet to a certain extent Spokane remains undiscovered compared to the other cities I mentioned above. It doesn’t quite have the same cache or the outdoor recreation opportunities. It’s drawn a lot of folks from elsewhere – especially Seattle, not California – but it has not been overwhelmed by newcomers.

And so over and over again what people there have told me is that Spokane is just far enough behind the curve that the city and the region can learn from the experiences of those other places. If enough policies and financial mechanisms can be put in place, and if enough energy is applied to the problem of housing and economic stability, Spokane might be able to escape the fate of spiraling housing prices that has afflicted almost every other city in a desirable natural setting in the Intermountain West.

Can Spokane Not Just Recover But Thrive?

Now, ironically, the wildfire will make that harder. For two reasons: one short-term and one long-term.

First, the short-term problem: As we learned last year from the Los Angeles wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, recovery for a devastating wildfire requires all of the attention of every civic institution in the community. The housing market will be upended, as people who own homes will suddenly be out there looking for places to rent, competing with people already in the rental market. Philanthropies and nonprofits will have to focus on helping displaced families no matter what other priorities there might be. Banks and credit unions that may have been otherwise focused on helping people into starter homes and startup businesses will have to focus instead on customers who have lost their homes. And on and on. The project I have been working on – helping facilitate more financing for affordable and workforce housing – will likely to have wait until the crisis passes.

But the long-term problem is even tougher to deal with: Weirdly, the end result of a devastating wildfire is almost always that a community goes more upscale than it was before.

Why? Because any community has a lot of residents who are older, have lived there a long time, and often are under-insured. After losing their cherished longtime home and all their belongings, a lot of these folks won’t rebuild. If they’re under-insured, they can’t afford to. And if they’re older, they simply don’t have the heart or the motivation or the time. So they sell their lot and move. And the people who replace them are different.

Maybe the best example of this trend is in Paradise, California, 75 miles north of Sacramento, which burned to the ground in 2018.

Early last year I had a conversation with the mayor of Paradise, which was a modest community before the wildfire, with a median household income of around $65,000. That meant a lot of people couldn’t afford to come back and COVID meant that a lot of equity-rich Bay Area folks started looking at what a good deal Paradise seemed to them. Only a third of the town has been built back and home prices have doubled. Demographically, Paradise is a very different town that it was before the wildfire.

This is likely to happen in some of the neighborhoods in Spokane that are burning. Take, for example, the Indian Trail neighborhood, which burned to the ground over the weekend. Indian Trail’s not in the middle of town by any means; it’s northwest of the city in a largely forested area (which was one of the reasons it burned). And it’s not especially affluent: Before the fire, home prices were running $500,000-$550,000, a little over the median price for Spokane.

In other words, Indian Trail was, by Spokane standards, a fairly affordable suburban neighborhood, which probably also had a lot of longtime homeowners who incomes aren’t really that high. Those folks will probably all leave. Their lots will be purchased by higher-income folks, who will build new, bigger, fancier houses.

Like I say, all these problems will get much worse before the wildfires are brought under control. Sadly, the end result will be that the next affordable city will be even less affordable as a result. Let’s hope Spokane’s civic leaders can bring the same kind of energy to solving the long-term affordability problem that they will undoubtedly bring to the short-term recovery.

Whitewater rafting in Downtown Reno.

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On Monday, I wrote about how many “bucket list” cities such as Venice, Barcelona, and Edinburgh are trying to stop the constant influx of tourists. They’ve become so popular that they actually want to dampen market demand for visitation to their cities.

But even though they may be able to repel some of the tourists, they’re not really going to dampen overall demand to experience places. And that creates a tremendous opportunity for cities that aren’t on the bucket list to pick up more tourists. Shut out of Barcelona/New York/Venice/Nashville? Just go somewhere else instead and maybe it’ll be just as good.

But how can you be that somewhere else?

I think there are four fundamental steps familiar to most economic development and tourism experts: understand your assets, fix the assets you need to fix, assess the competition, and devise the right marketing strategy. But the fundamental question is: Do you want to be a copy of a crowded and expensive place, or do you want to be yourself and hope for the best?

Marketing and branding is an important part of economic development, but it can’t take the place of substance. Which means, of course, that you can’t brand your place successfully unless you have a place to begin with. After all, how many times have you seen a Chamber of Commerce advertisement with a giant picture of two six-lane highways and big parking lots? Whatever they’re trying to sell with that advertisement, it’s not place.

So you have to have place to begin with. And for tourists, even if they live in an autobound suburb most of the time, that usually means a walkable commercial district where they can hang around and socialize, as well as destinations that you can walk to or, increasingly, get to with a short Uber right (since who rents cars anymore?). These destinations have to be compelling: sports and entertainment venues, museums and other cultural destinations, historic sites. They usually have to be located near robust outdoor recreation areas or spectacular outdoor scenery. And they have to be unique: If you want people to come to your town, there have to be things there that you can’t find anywhere else.

Or not, depending on how busy the Bucket List Cities are.

Valencia is often seen as a “Designated Dupe” to Barcelona.

The Designated Dupe Strategy

That’s because the most popular marketing strategy for these other cities is to show that they’re just like some Bucket List City or other, only cheaper. This approach is called the Destination Dupe strategy, and it’s increasingly being used even by travel guides and web sites to give people ideas. Think, for example, of Valencia instead of Barcelona.

I have to admit that I lived for a long time in a city that sometimes considered itself a Destination Dupe. Ventura, where I lived for 25 years, is 30 miles away from Santa Barbara, one of the most expensive Bucket List Cities in the United States. Ventura was traditionally much more down-market and working-class, but it still had beaches, mountains, good hiking, a Mediterranean climate, an historic Downtown, and access to Channel Islands National Park. (Better access than Santa Barbara, actually, since the boats to the Channel Islands leave from Ventura Harbor.) What it didn’t have, traditionally, was hotel accommodations that rivaled Santa Barbara’s but were cheaper, though this is beginning to change now that upscale lodging in Santa Barbara can run $500-$900 a night.

But is being a Destination Dupe the right approach? After all, isn’t uniqueness traditionally a key to drawing visitors?

Well, and I hate to answer the question this way, yes and no.

Destination Duping might be a shortcut to attracting tourists. You target

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La Bouqueria is Barcelona has soon local businesses driven out by businesses catering to tourists.

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Well, last weekend we got out of town because the Comic-con crowd had arrived – more than 100,000 visitors converging on Downtown San Diego, many of whom are wearing crazy Superhero outfits.

The spectacle is fun to watch, but as a resident of the neighborhood I can say it’s a little hard to take. I’m on record as saying I like living in the middle of a tourist destination because the tourists keep a lot of businesses thriving that I get to take advantage when the tourists are gone. And I have to say that dealing with the fallout from the typical (for San Diego) three-day convention of 10,000 to 20,000 people is no big deal. But Comic-con is a bit much. Restaurants are crowded, Ubers are expensive – the things that make urban life so fulfilling most of the time are just a hassle.

So it’s not surprising to me that tourist towns across the globe are tired of getting too much love – and they’re taking extreme steps to do something about it.

The “Bucket List” Cities

Social media sites like TripAdvisor – to say nothing of user-generated content on sites like Instagram and Flickr – have made it possible for anybody, anywhere in the world, to learn about any cool destination anywhere else in the world. And increasing affluence means more people are traveling as tourists around the world. There are about 1.5 billion tourists per year worldwide, up about 25% since 2015 (after a huge dip during the pandemic).

Unfortunately, an awful lot of these tourists go to – and post online about – the same iconic few places. Machu Piccu. Barcelona. Yosemite. Paris. Venice. And those are the places getting worn down by what has come to be known as overtourism.

Eric Fischer’s famous map of tourists in Paris. The redder it is, the more pictures tourists post on Flickr.

A lot of the iconic locations like Machu Piccu and Yosemite have literally imposed limits on the number of people who can visit them at one time. Cities have a harder time doing that – using both sticks and carrots to keep the numbers down.

The latest city to crack down on overtourism is Barcelona. As The New York Times reported recently, the city has a new tourism commissioner whose job is not to attract more tourists – but to discourage them from coming.

Barcelona attracts about 16 million tourists a year, or more than 40,000 tourists a day on average. The city can’t literally put a cap on the number of tourists, but it is taking a number of steps to discourage them, including banning all short-term rentals by 2028.

Driving Out Authenticity By Seeking It

And the problem is not only about the numbers but the effect. Tourists from around the world come to the famous La Boqueria mercat seeking an authentic Catalan experience – but businesses catering to tourists have driven out the authentic businesses. La Rambla has the same problem. The city has capped accommodations as a way of capping tourists and it’s subsidizing authentic businesses.

“It’s important to us that any resident can buy a loaf of bread, a book or a screw in their neighborhood,” the new commissioner said. “That’s what makes someone feel emotionally connected to their city. We also believe that tourists will be more interested in a city where urban space isn’t entirely souvenirs, phone cases and kebabs.”

Barcelona is not alone. Edinburgh just imposed a 5% surcharge on hotel stays. Santorini has limited cruise ship passengers. Amsterdam and Venice now have day-tripper taxes. Kyoto has imposed a tourist ban on it geisha district. And on and on.

Overtourism is an inevitable outcome from our current social and economic situation: You’ve got a billion people with enough money to travel and a deep-seated desire to check places off of their “bucket list,” along with a system of communications – social media – that tends to highlight a few bucket list locations.

An Opportunity for Cities That Aren’t On The Bucket List?

The sad thing is that no matter all the ways you can think of to limit or discourage tourism – day-tripper fees, hotel taxes, limitations on accommodations, requiring reservations in advance – will drive up the cost of visiting the bucket-list locations. And so only the most affluent international travelers will get to check things off their bucket list. It’s the same problem that we have with sports and concerts – affluent folks can travel anywhere and pay a lot of money, so the locals are priced out of seeing events in their town.

The flip side is this: In theory, this should be an opportunity for other places to move up the bucket-list rankings. You make it hard to visit Barcelona, and people will seek out other locations. But if you’re not on the bucket list now, how do you get on it – helping out your local economy and spreading out the tourism business to more places? That’s got to be good for everybody from Barcelona to Podunk. I’ll deal with that in another post later this week.

So Where Did We Escape To?

Well, not surprisingly, we went to a nearby tourist area that’s growing fast in popularity: the Temecula Wine Country, an hour away from San Diego in Riverside County.

Temecula’s an interesting example of both the good and bad associated with the rapid increase in tourism. It’s been a serious wine destination for more than 50 years – but now it’s growing fast. It’s close to Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego, with about 12 million people living within 60 miles. And fast-growing Western Riverside County, with about 1.7 million people, provides a big local market.Meanwhile, wineries from Paso Robles are opening a second outlet there.

Bottom line: Temecula’s currently drawing about 4 million visitors a year, which works out to a little more than 10,000 a day (about a quarter of Barcelona’s total).

Temecula is not a world-class location like Napa Valley, but it’s very good and improving all the time, as wineries add hotels, resorts, and events. (This is a pattern in all wine areas, at least in the U.S. these days.) But of course that’s making it more expensive as well. A good room can run you $300 at a minimum, and dinner at the nicest restaurants can cost you the same. So, like so many other places, the Temecula Valley is gradually morphing so that it caters to a very upscale market.

That’s the downside. The upside is that most of those affluent folks drive in from elsewhere and the people who work at the wineries can, at least for the moment, afford to live there. The City of Temecula itself is getting pricey, with median home price creeping toward $800,000. (In addition to the wine country, Temecula has a great Old Town. But there are plenty of places within a half-hour drive where home prices are in the $500,000-$650,000 range, which is about as cheap as it gets in Southern California. Let’s hope it somehow stays that way.

Last Week’s Posts: Chasing The Nonstop Flight

Speaking of visitors, last week’s Future Of Where posts both dealt with cities chasing air passenger service, which is big news in the heat of the summer tourist season. As I wrote on Monday, there’s been a huge post-COVID surge in air service to “small hubs,” ranging from metropolitan-adjacent airports like New Haven to outdoor recreation destinations like Chattanooga and Bozeman. And as I wrote on Thursday, this isn’t an accident. These smaller cities have become very savvy in chasing airlines, using a four-step process that includes (1) a study showing latent demand, (2) a wooing process with the airlines, (3) the use of subsidies, including federal grants, and (4) aggressive marketing to local passengers who currently drive elsewhere to save a few bucks. It’s a really interesting economic development yarn.

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The Harrisburg Airport used aggressive marketing to lure local folks away from BWI, 80 miles away.

The other day I wrote about “small hub” airports and how their passenger boardings are growing much faster than boardings at larger airports (or smaller ones, for that matter). It’s a remarkable trend: Since COVID, passenger boardings at what the Federal Aviation Administration categorizes as small hub airports – everywhere from White Plains to Bentonville to Sarasota – have grown 15% compared to less than 5% for big airports like JFK, O’Hare, Atlanta, and DFW.

But, like most successful economic development efforts, this trend didn’t just happen. It’s the result a deliberate set of steps undertaken by airports, cities, and especially regional economic development organizations. And the way cities and regions go about this is an object lesson in how economic development strategies shape the way places functions.

As I pointed out in my previous post, host cities and regions – especially smaller ones – are in a tough spot when it comes to air service. The United States has around 500 airports. But it only has about 10 viable airlines, dominated by “The Big Four” – United, American, Delta, and Southwest – which together control about 75% of the market. So, in similar fashion to professional sports franchises, cities are constantly competing with each other to attract air service to their airport.

So cities and their economic development organizations are constantly marketing the airlines trying to get service. And almost all of them follow the same steps.

First comes the inevitable “leakage study,” showing how many local passengers are going to other airports.

Second comes a kind of wooing process, where airports and economic development organizations try to win the attention of the airlines and sell them on their markets.

Third comes money: fee waivers from the airports and often direct subsidies (“revenue guarantees”), sometimes from the local community and sometimes from a federal grant program.

And finally comes marketing: selling the actual local residents on the idea of flying out of their local airport, which can be a surprisingly tough sell sometimes.

I’ll dive into these four steps in detail down below, but first I want to address a step that is often overlooked at the front end, which is deciding what economic development goal are you trying to achieve with more air travel. Because some economic activities is highly dependent on passenger air service, while others are not.

Mayors and economic development leaders often try to make headlines with announcements of the latest nonstop flight, claiming it’s a huge step forward for the city and the region. Sometimes the reason for the hulabaloo is clear. Not long ago, for example, I happened to board what turned out to be the first nonstop flight ever from San Diego to Reagan Airport (DCA) and happened upon a party hosted by Mayor Todd Gloria. Given San Diego’s dependence on the Navy and other federal spending, it made sense that it was a big deal for folks from San Diego to no longer have to get from Dulles Airport to the Pentagon or Capitol Hill.

Tweed Airport in New Haven used a leakage study, a tax argument, and a federal grant to help lure Avelo and increase passenger boardings by 1,100 percent.

At other times, it’s not so clear. A few years ago I was privileged to participate in a meeting in Jerusalem between the late Sylvester Turner, then the mayor of Houston, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu’s agenda was big and obvious: He couldn’t get the large energy companies from Houston interested in the natural gas leases in the Mediterranean that Israel controlled, and he wanted Turner to lean on them. Turner’s ask in return? A nonstop from Ben Gurion Airport to George Bush International Airport. This sure seemed like an asymmetrical situation to me.

So step one has to be knowing why you want the flights. If you’re a resort community or a place targeting tourism – and some of the fastest-growing small hubs have been places like Jackson Hole and Bozeman – it’s obvious. Academic research has also suggested, unsurprisingly, that high-income service industries such as law and consulting value nonstop air service and partly for that reason tend to congregate in big metropolitan areas near major airports. But if you’ve got an economy based on goods and manufacturing, the truth is that air service doesn’t matter nearly as much. It’s a mistake to devote a lot of time, effort, and money to pursuing flights just to have them.

That said, let’s look at the four steps in detail – which helps us understand how a particular economic development effort unfolds, one in which lots of cities are in competition with each other for the attention of a few private companies (airlines) they need to succeed.

The Leakage Study

There’s a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with passenger air service. Academic research suggests that service drives demand (and economic growth), not the other way around. That means you have to prove to the airlines that the demand already exists and they can capture that demand if they come into your (small, local) airport. So the first thing economic development leaders typically do is commission a “leakage study,” showing how many local passengers are using airports farther away.

The other day I mentioned that the small hub airport with the biggest increase in passenger boardings post-COVID is Tweed New Haven in Connecticut, which has seen an eleven-fold increase primarily because Avelo came in. But even before COVID, New Haven officials started making the case by showing that Tweed’s “catchment area” includes 1.5 million residents who make 4 million flights a year – a lot per capita, partly because of Connecticut’s affluence. Furthermore, about half of these passengers traveled to JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark – 75 to 100 miles away through awful traffic in a gigantic metropolitan area – to get a flight. (The public policy argument was that Connecticut was losing revenue to New York and New Jersey as a result.

Similarly, when Chattanooga focused on getting more air service, local leaders commissioned a study that found most local passengers drive two hours to either Atlanta or Nashville to get a flight. Atlanta, of course, is the Delta hub that has nonstop service to practically everywhere, and as Nashville became a hot destination air service improved. (Flights from Atlanta and Nashville were also cheaper than flights from Chattanooga, and passengers often overlook the time and expense of driving a long way in their quest for a cheap ticket.)

So that’s the solution to the chicken-and-egg problem: Proving that latent demand already exists.

The Wooing Process

With a leakage study in hand, the cities them begin the wooing process. Some of the wooing takes place

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New Haven Airport in Connecticut is the nation’s fastest-growing airport, thanks to Avelo’s decision to plant a flag there.

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The other day I was at the small airport in Redmond, Oregon – an airport I regularly pass through to visit my daughter and her family, and one that’s almost always dead. But it was a Friday in July at lunchtime and so it was more crowded than I’d ever seen it, mostly with families going on vacation. Not a seat to be had anywhere – at the restaurant, in the waiting areas, at the gates.

July is the peak of air travel season, with about 3 million people a day boarding planes in the United States, including lots of families crowding onto airplanes alongside regular business travelers like me. Of course, leisure air travel is a drop in the bucket compared to vacationers who drive – about 90% of vacationers drive somewhere – but every day we push the air system to its limit in order to keep our economy on the move. So it’s a good time to think about the role air travel plays in our understanding of the future of where.

The bottom line is that there’s a noticeable shift in air travel patterns after COVID that both reflects and foreshadows the kinds of places that Americans are seeking out.

The Hot Big Cities: Nashville, Austin, Miami

Obviously there was a huge drop in air travel during COVID, so the best thing to do is to compare the Federal Aviation Administration’s tracking of “emplanements,” as they are called, from 2019 – before COVID – and 2024, the last year for which numbers are currently available.

Overall, passenger boardings increased 5% between 2019 and 2024. And, both before and after COVID, the vast majority of boardings – about three-quarters – came in the 30 airports the FAA categorizes as “large hubs”. These include huge airports that serve as destinations – LAX, JFK – and the major airport hubs, like Atlanta (which still has more boardings than anybody else), Chicago, Dallas, and Denver. (Boardings are the hub airports, of course, come in large part just from people changing planes, so it’s hard to know what the impact of all that activity is on the local economy.)

Austin-Bergstrom Airport has seen a huge increase in passengers.

But here’s what’s interesting: the three large hubs that had the biggest increase in boardings.

In order: Nashville, Austin, and Miami. The three hottest cities in the country post-COVID – the ones that are consistently pointed to as the new tech and innovation hubs likely to dislodge Silicon Valley and attract Californians. This dislodgment isn’t really happening at a huge scale, but it’s apparently big enough to drive a significant shift in the pattern of air travel.

These three airports together accounted for 30% of the increase in air travel among large hubs. Each saw their boardings increase by about a third. The Denver hub was in fourth place, and it wasn’t even close. (By comparison, boardings at LAX were down 12%.)

But from my perspective at jam-packed RDM the other day, this wasn’t the most interesting shift. The FAA’s figures show that large hubs increased their boardings by around 4% and “medium hubs” (places like Jacksonville, Charleston, Boise, and secondary airports in large metros like Burbank, Dallas Love, and Houston Hobby) grew by only 2.5%.

Why “Small Hubs” Are Where The Action Is

But small hubs like RDM increased their boardings by 14.5% -- far more than larger airports.

Admittedly, these small hubs – there are about 75 of them – are a mixed bag. They include what you might call tertiary airports near major cities (White Plains, New Haven, Long Beach), resort destinations (Palm Springs, Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Panama City in Florida’s panhandle), and just plain hot smaller markets like Redmond (which services the zoomtown of Bend), Sarasota, and Bentonville (where Walmart is headquartered). This category also includes Spokane and Chattanooga, two hot cities where I’ve been working lately.

As I mentioned above, this is not a huge shift when you look at overall air passenger service. There are about 1 billion boardings a year in the U.S., and the small hubs only capture about 100 million of them. Still, this shift suggests that for small to mid-size regions, air service is becoming more important – especially for regions that are laying an economic bet on outdoor recreation.

What makes it tough for cities and regions wanting to pursue this strategy is the chicken-and-egg nature of increased air service’s impact on a region’s economy. There’s no question that increased air service increases a region’s economic activity. (You can find a dense economic analysis of this question here.) But it’s a little like sports franchises: There are 500 airports in the country and only about 10 viable airlines. So does demand drive service? Or does service drive demand.

A Lot Of Airports And Not Many Airlines

Take, for example, the small hub that had the biggest increase in passenger boardings between 2019 and 2024. New Haven, Connecticut, is, of course, home to Yale University. It’s a metro area of 570,000 people 80 miles away from New York. But it’s proximate to the affluent New York suburbs in Connecticut. Between 2019 and 2024, passenger boardings at New Haven rose elevenfold, from 48,000 to 560,000.

Was that because New Haven was suddenly a hot market or vastly increased its population? Not really – it’s because a brand-new discount airline, Avelo, initiated service there. Following the path of new discount airlines all the way back to Southwest, Avelo planted a flag in a small, underutilized airport near a major population center. (It’s easy to forget that Southwest originally cracked the New York market by flying out of Islip on Long Island.)

It’s not surprising that RDM is undergoing a major expansion (using jetways for the first time) and New Haven just got a big expansion approved.

Small hubs are hot. And they have great potential to expand the economy of a small region, a hote region, or a resort region. But they’re extremely dependent on the decisions of a small number of privately owned airlines. So cities and regions have to have an extremely nuanced understanding of how airlines approach markets – and which economic development targets require better air service.

The CP&DR Podcast Is Back

For California planners who follow our sister publication California Planning & Development Report, the CP&DR podcast is back! Check out the stimulating conversation I had the other day with my colleague Josh Stephens, talking about reform of the California Environmental Quality Act, the controversial zoning reform law SB 79, and the dampening effect Los Angeles’s “mansion tax” has had on housing construction. You can find the podcast in front of the CP&DR paywall here.

The Indaba coffee shop in a former auto showroom on a commercial strip in Spokane

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Smart Growth in the 2020s?

Alan Kandel asked:

How is smart growth faring these days?

Better than you might think at first glance. The term has gone out of vogue. But the underlying concepts are still being used.

The fundamental concept of smart growth was to create more compact, walkable neighborhoods, put them close to transit, and also put a good mix of things in them. So, for example, you might want to be a heavily used government building in a smart growth neighborhood rather than out in an auto-oriented suburban area.

Not all of this translates effectively from the 2000s to the 2020s, but a lot of it does. We talk a lot these days about “transit-oriented development” and “walkable communities,” both of which are fundamental to smart growth. The biggest change from the height of the smart growth era 20 years ago, of course, is that now housing supply is viewed as a major crisis – so far more effort is being put on building more housing.

The risk there, of course, is building high-density housing and not much else. (See my response to Schaf below.) That can cut into the whole idea of smart growth. After all, if you are going to have walkable communities, there has to be someplace to walk to.

Climate Migrants

Fred Lazare asked:
Will climate refugees help drive Rust Belt city revivals?

I think the short answer is yes, though to what extent I don’t know. Mostly on this one I’d defer to my Substack buddy Pete Saunders, the master of Midwestern urbanism, who wrote about it here only two weeks ago. Pete even imagines Rust Belt cities using climate migration as a marketing tool, just as Sunbelt cities use temperature as a marketing tool today: “Water restrictions getting you down? Coastal flooding ruining your beaches? Homeowner insurance skyrocketing? In Cincinnati, we have amazing affordability, charming neighborhoods, a great downtown – and plenty of fresh water.”

Do We Want Just Housing Or Something More?

My old Ventura buddy Schaf asked:

Is Mixed Use broken? It appears that the empty ground floors of MU buildings all over are just underutilized or empty, and out of scale (20’ head heights in a 9’ neighborhood), and we keep approving them like they’re going to attract organic butchers, bespoke candlestick makers, and artisanal cheesemongers, as if Costco doesn’t have a hold of us. You could put another floor of residential units in most of that space, but then it wouldn’t be mixed.

Yeah, I suppose there are only so many bespoke candlestick makers and artisanal cheesemongers to go around, and that’s a problem. But as you say, the alternative is walls of nothing but housing, and that’s a problem too.

The notion that the ideal urban form is a few stories of residential above retail on the ground floor is an old one – centuries old in practice, of course, but more recently revised as American urban planners have tried to figure out how to get past the suburban form. My own introduction to the idea came in large part from the work of William H. Whyte Jr., who created both the book and film called The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces (and not incidentally had been Jane Jacobs’ editor at Fortune magazine).

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Holly White strongly believed that you had to have ground-floor retail to have a vibrant street life and he was right. That view – and his films – influenced a couple of generations of planners grappling with the question of higher density development, especially housing, along commercial strips.

As developers became interested in building multistory housing in formerly commercial areas, planners – especially in the Los Angeles area – got into the habit of requiring ground-floor commercial space as a condition of approval. Developers went along with this in order to get their projects approved, even though they didn’t really like it. They viewed the commercial space as a giveaway amenity, kind of like a park. Their lenders wouldn’t let them include any potential revenue from the commercial space in their pro forma, so they didn’t put a whole of effort into leasing the space.

An empty commercial space in a mixed-use building. Source: Strong Towns

And at the same time, of course, the demand for small retail spaces in apartment buildings on commercial corridors wasn’t as great as it was in Holly Whyte’s day. As Schaf points out, we all go to Costco now, or at least Target, or we order everything through Amazon. There’s simply not as much call for a corner store as there used to be.

So somebody builds one four-over-one podium building on a commercial strip, surrounded still by used car lots and stuff like that, and the building has retail space that’s hard to lease. Maybe a small coffee shop moves in. The developer just

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With 5 million people, California’s Inland Empire is both a separat metropolitan area according to the Census and still a suburb of Los Angeles.

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In my recent call to have readers “Ask Me Anything,” David Baab – a longtime urban designer in Irvine – challenged me to think about metro areas and suburbs in a different way.

He did so by asking two questions:

1. Why do we name our metro areas after the central city?

2. How come we call any city outside the central city as a “suburb”

What David is really calling for is a complete rethinking of the geographical nomenclature of our metropolitan areas. (That was three long words, sorry.) And maybe we’re past time for a rethinking.

After all, the federal government first created our modern definition of “metropolitan areas” in 1949 and hasn’t really updated that definition since 1983 (though more and more counties are being added to our ever-sprawling metropolises). The “micropolitan” areas – regions so small in population they cannot be considered “metropolitan” – were added in 2003.

And through all of this, the Census Bureau still used the central city as the basis for the nomenclature, just as it has done since it first began defining metropolitan areas in 1910.

We’ve had various attempts over the years at creating a new and more informal nomenclature for overgrown suburbs. Back in the early ‘90s, for example, journalist Joel Garreau came up with the term “Edge City,” which got a lot of publicity. But Garreau was describing a very particular type of suburban development: densely built job centers like Century City in Los Angeles, The Galleria in Houston, and Tysons Corners in Virginia (or suburban D.C., depending on how you name it). It wasn’t really an attempt to rethink the whole suburban landscape.

And as our metro areas have sprawled farther and farther afield, the Census Bureau has struggled to keep up. For example, in 2003 the Bureau finally gave Southern California’s Inland Empire separate metropolitan status (naming it the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, for three “central” cities ranging in population from 200,000 to 300,000).

There’s no question the Inland Empire is huge – at almost 5 million people, it has about the same population as Boston and it’s much larger than Seattle. But it’s hard to argue that it’s anything more than the world’s biggest suburb. The IE’s ratio of jobs to residents is by far the lowest of any big metro area in the country – about the same as the resort community of Hilton Head, S.C. (It’s worth noting that the Inland Empire is still part of the Los Angeles consolidated metropolitan statistical area as defined by the Census and also part of the L.A. regional planning agency, the Southern California Association of Governments. And there’s that phrase “Southern California” – more on that later.)

Renaming Our Suburbs and Region

But none of this quite captures what’s really going on. What we don’t have is two things:

First, a word that describes and unites the concept of human settlements. Community, ot quote.

And second, a word that accurately describes the modern archipelago of separate but interconnected communities that make up the typical American landscape.

I’m not sure I have a good answer for the first one. “Cities” is too limiting, since it has too many different meanings (a municipality as well as a place) and it turns small-town and rural folks off. My friend Henry Cisneros, the former Mayor of San Antonio and Clinton housing secretary, often used to use the phrase “cities and towns,” but this too can be confusing, because the term “town” can have many meanings. (In the United Kingdom, city planning is usually called “town planning,” and in the U.S. towns and townships are often subdivisions of counties, not specific human settlements.)

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I often try to get around this problem by using the term “community,” which sort of gets at the idea of a human settlement that hangs together. But “community” is oftern overused in other contexts, since we tend to use is to describe communities of interest as well as geographical communities. (For example, “the development community,” “the gun community,” “the gay community”.)

So if we’re going to come up with a new name for a suburb that reflects the fact that it is more than a suburb, I’m not sure what it is. I’ve often thought of a suburb as a place where you have to drive everywhere, but that means Orange County in California is a suburb, which it’s clearly not. (It’s got a gross domestic product that’s about the same size as South Carolina.)

But on David Baab’s second question – why do we name metropolitan areas after central cities that people who live in the region may have never been to and may be trying to avoid – I think there’s a better answer, and one that has profound implications for the sense of belonging people might feel for their metropolitan region.

Tysons Corners is in “suburban” Virginia but it’s not really a suburb.

People in Orange County don’t want to be part of Los Angeles. People in central New Jersey probably won’t want to be part of New York. People in semi-rural Maryland don’t want to be part of D.C.

But they all can feel like they are part of a region if the region is not named for the central city.

And, increasingly, these regions – for local purposes – name themselves after the geographical location where they are located rather than the central city. So we have Southern California (originally a marketing term for Los Angeles), South Florida (for Miami/Broward/Palm Beach Counties), the Wasatch Fron (Salt Lake City), the Puget Sound region (Seattle), DMV (for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), Central Texas (Austin), Northeast Ohio (Cleveland), and on and on and on.

Of course, this hasn’t happened everywhere. In the sprawling Atlanta region, the City of Atlanta has only about 8-10% of the metropolitan region’s population, but the term “Atlanta” seems ubiquitous Even the regional planning agency is called the Atlanta Regional Commission. (And it has published an interesting take of its own on the Atlanta region’s ever-changing boundaries.)

But You’re Still From Cleveland

This does not mean these terms travel well around the world or even around the country. If you’re in Tokyo, you’re not going to say you’re from Northeast Ohio. You’re going to say you’re from Cleveland, or at least Near Cleveland, or maybe Near Where Lebron James Grew Up.

Which is a point worth making for two reasons. First, because it’s still the names of the big cities that are the brand names worldwide. And second, because the origins of almost all of our metropolitan areas emanated from the original central city. There would be no Orange County or Inland Empire without Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, using Southern California instead of L.A. and South Florida instead of Miami has the effect of inviting people in to the idea that they belong to a region. You can hate the central city – living in what we will call, for want of a better term, a “suburban area” and deliberately never going to the central city – and still feel like a citizen of the region.

Yes, you can still feel like you have little in common with those poor schlubs who live back in the central city. You can define yourself mostly by separating you and your community from others. And yet you can still feel like you belong to something geographically larger than your neighborhood or your suburban city. And that’s a really good thing.

Check Out My Appears On The Talking Headways Podcast

I had fun talking with Jeff Wood on his well-known Talking Headways podcast. Jeff is one of the most astute observers of urban and suburban trends in the U.S. – he lives in San Francisco but grew up in suburban Houston – and we had a wide ranging conversation covering all kinds of topics, including migration trends in the U.S., California’s zoning reform, and lots of other things that I often talk about here at The Future Of Where. So check it out!

The old EDS headquarters in Plano, Texas, which will be revamped at AT&T’s global headquarters.

Well, my first “Ask Me Anything” generated an extremely wide range of questions – and today I’m answering a couple of questions about the shape and scope of metropolitan regions! Readers submitted several other questions that I’ll answer next week.

The basic answers are available to everybody – but paid subscribers will find deeper answers behind the paywall.

How Do We Name Urban Regions?

A question – or two questions actually – from David Baab

The case for more inclusive names for urban regions

How can people influence government agencies to adopt names for American metropolitan areas that more accurately describe the urban region?

For example, the national news industry often uses the term “Los Angeles” when describing the urban region of Southern California, which wrongly implies that the majority of Southern Californians live, work, shop, and spend leisure time in a place they hardly ever visit.

This leads to a second question:

Is it time to retire the term “suburb” to describe a small district in an urban region that just happens not to be located inside the city limits of the largest municipality in the region?

The reality is that many urban regions consist of a network of distinctive districts without one central core.

This reminds me of the time when I gave a presentation to a group of elected officials in the L.A. area and kept referring to “Los Angeles” when I meant the entire region. I got reamed by Mike Antonovich, the county supervisor from northern L.A. County, who of course insisted that he didn’t live in L.A. I learned my lesson to refer instead, whenever possible, to “Southern California” (even though I now live south of Southern California).

Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States are all named after their central cities.

In any event I think this is sort of happening already – but only in some contexts and not others. You see a lot of regions basically renaming themselves – and, often, their regional planning organizations – for their region rather than their core city, like North Central Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth) and Northeast Ohio (Cleveland). In my experience, local folks tend to do this way more than folks from out of town. You’ll hear “Northeast Ohio” all the time in Cleveland. Same thing with Orange County in California. It’s gotten its own separate identity.

But very often the only way people from out of town can truly relate to or identify with a metropolitan region is by glomming into the name of the central city. “Los Angeles” is known worldwide. So are certain cities in the region, like “Santa Monica”. But mostly, if you live in Long Beach and you run into somebody in Tokyo and they ask where you’re from, you’re going to say “LA”. As my friend Mick Cornett, the former mayor of Oklahoma City says, you can’t be a suburb of nothing.

More detailed discussion behind the paywall down below.

Can Civic and Political Leaders Stop Corporate Decentralization?

Meanwhile, my fellow Texifornian Jake Wegmann from UT Austin asks:

What, if anything, can elected officials and planners do to “steer” where jobs go within a metro area? The specific example that is on my mind is Dallas--the region is an unstoppable economic juggernaut, but Downtown Dallas specifically is sucking wind. The biggest employer, AT&T, just announced its departure to the suburbs, downtown missed out on a Goldman Sachs campus (though it’ll be nearby in Uptown), and the Mavericks and Stars are both abandoning their arena which is only something like 20 years old. It seems that the job location center of gravity in the DFW Metroplex “wants” to be something like 15 miles to the north of Dallas’ CBD, in places like Frisco, Allen, and the like. Are these economic forces that are just too big for officials to fight back against, or is there something productive they should be doing to counter them?

IBM Headquarters in Armonk, N.Y.

This has been an issue for 70 years, ever since corporate headquarters began to leave Manhattan for the New York suburbs. What has happened traditionally is that as the whole concept of a job center breaks down, companies tend to gravitate toward affluent suburbs where the bosses live, even if the new location is less convenient – with more stressful commuting – for the rest of the employees. In 1964, for example, IBM moved from Manhattan to a corner apple orchard in Armonk, N.Y. – in affluent Westchester County, close to affluent Connecticut, and far from working-class neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey and on Long Island. (One weird counterexample is Chevron, which moved its corporate headquarters from San Francisco to suburban San Ramon while setting up most of its management and operations in downtown Houston.)

You’re right that the “job location center of gravity in the DFW Metroplex ‘wants’” to be somewhere in Collin County, around Frisco and Plano. To a certain extent, I don’t there’s anything anybody can do about it, especially in a fast-growing metro with plenty of land like DFW (or the Metroplex, or North Central Texas, or whatever you want to call it.) To some extent it may depend on how dominant the central city is in the region. Dallas is not very dominant and the city is shrinking in population at the same time that the region is the fastest-growing metropolis in the country.

But it’s also worth noting that the northern Dallas suburbs have long attracted a corporate presence. Think about Las Colinas for example. And Plano, where AT&T is moving, has had corporate headquarters for so long that it now has to rethink its corporate campus strategy – the first step of which is AT&T’s move into the old Ross Perot/EDS headquarters in Plano.

More detailed discussion of both questions behind the paywall.

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The Fourth of July Street Fair in Ventura (via Ventura Sun)

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If ever there was a holiday that needs a Main Street, it’s the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday where American communities celebrate themselves as much as they celebrate American Independence, complete with parades, street fairs, and fireworks.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a town in Upstate New York with a Main Street that had a July 4 parade every year, which my parents took me to religiously – and which I dutifully covered, as a young reporter, on America’s 200^th anniversary. My adopted hometown of Ventura, California, has a truly American set of celebrations. It begins with the truly (small d) democratic “pushem-pullem parade” (in which anybody with non-motorized wheels can participate) and continues for the rest of the day with a truly great street fair. And Saturday night here in San Diego, as we stood on our balcony, we saw that every single car on Broadway stopped so that the drivers could watch the 20-minute fireworks extravaganza.

Yes, the 250^th anniversary of American independence was celebrated with true exuberance in communities all across the country. But setting aside the big-picture political turmoil and sharp divisions that we see across the nation, I have great fear that our communities and places are struggling. Where is not easy to maintain in troubled times.

As I often said when I was in elected office, a successful place is the result of a covenant between a community (meaning the local government and all the institutions that serve that community) and the people who live there. The community is committed to the well-being of the people, and the people, in turn, are committed to contributing to sustaining the community and making it better.

Increasingly, unfortunately, this isn’t what I see, and many of the struggles our communities face are a result of the fact that this covenant is beginning to break down. Many of these struggles are the result of larger societal trends, and it is not always possible for people at the “local place level” to effectively counteract those trends. But there’s no question that the threads are becoming frayed.

The most obvious example is housing, which has become unaffordable almost everywhere in the last decade. The bottom line is not enough of the right type of housing is being built at the right price for the way our society is currently organized. Again, not all of this is a community-level problem – interest rates are higher than they’ve been in a while, construction techniques are outmoded, and so forth. And so local action won’t solve the problem alone. But it is true that we have zoned most of the country for a Norman Rockwell-style ideal of the nuclear family living in single-family houses, and that’s just not our society today. It won’t be – and can’t be – the future of where in the United States, no matter how much we may want to wish this to be true.

The Big Sort

Then there’s the political and cultural sorting of people into different communities. This isn’t so much a problem of one community but of the relationship between communities. And it changes the nature of the covenant.

We have always clustered in some way or another into specific communities and specific neighborhoods. We have always separated ourselves by race, by ethnicity, and by economic class. But we used to do that within our communities or at least within our local cluster of communities (often at the county level). One of the most miraculous things about my time as an elected official in Ventura was the breadth of political and cultural diversity we saw within our city. There were usually a mixture of Democrats and Republicans on the city council, thus reflecting the city as a whole. And one of my most memorable experiences as mayor was to visit a different house of worship every weekend, which helped me to see just how culturally diverse our community was.

The 2024 county-level election results. Increasingly, we are isolating ourselves politically and culturally.

Increasingly, however, this political and cultural diversity is going away. Even as our society becomes more diverse, cities and communities are becoming more less diverse and more monolithic. And this creates a complicated relationship with the covenant I mentioned above. Because if our communities become more insular and unwelcoming to people unlike ourselves, then the covenant becomes a mechanism for reinforcing this insularity. In theory, the covenant is still working – the community is supporting individuals and vice versa. But people who work in our communities, who serve us – even sometimes our own children – are shut out.

The Strain on the Community Covenant

This strain on the covenant becomes even more evident in zoomtowns and zoomburbs, where a large number of people work remotely for companies that are located somewhere else. On one level, this is a good thing: Instead of commuting long distances, these folks have more time to devote to community life and many of them do exactly that. You might even say that remote work is part of the solution to the Bowling Alone problem of declining civic life.

Yet even as remote workers commit themselves to their local communities, they are accelerating the sorting. If you can work anywhere you can live anywhere, and increasingly people who can live anywhere cluster together. But these folks tend to be of a particular cultural and economic class, and they tend to drive up housing (and other) prices in the zoomtowns and zoomburbs where they settle. People with more modest incomes – especially service workers vital to the local community – get pushed out.

And, of course, remote workers are separated from the economic engines that sustain them. They draw a salary (or, if they are tech workers, they get a bunch of stock), but they are not invested in the community where their business is located and the business they work for is no invested in the community where they live. You can coach soccer, but your employer isn’t going to sponsor the local soccer team.

When I ran a small business in Ventura, I used to joke that my job was to import money into Ventura and then circulate it around town. My company sold its services throughout California and the nation, and with the money I received I employed local folks, bought local services, and donated to local causes all of which helped support my business as we moved forward in selling our services.

A 1906 parade on Genesee Street in my hometown of Auburn, New York

In that sense, the economic and cultural life of my community could not be separated. The covenant encompassed not just individuals and the municipal government, but everybody in the community and every institution that served the community, including businesses like mine. That’s the essence of a successful place. And I have to admit, as we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of our great nation, that’s what worries me the most about the future of where.

“Ask My Anything” Answers Coming Later This Week!

I was astonished at the breadth of questions I got in response to my “Ask Me Anything” pitch. I’ll respond with all the answers later this week!

Small single-family lots in Celina, Texas, north of Dallas

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Today I want to flip it around. I’d like to hear your questions, and answer them.

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The Overland Park Convention Center in Kansas, which has generated only 40% of the hotel nights predicted before it was built.

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Last week I wrote about the phenomenon of what might be called the “Showtime City” – the city that tries to build an economic development strategy around visitors and special events. Cities large and small are now trying this strategy, and we’re seeing a real-time experiment right now with World Cup games in several large cities around the country.

The challenge for people who work in city government is how to manage the Showtime City. Can you successfully build an event-based economy in the first place? Once you have those events, how do you make sure they don’t bankrupt or overrun your city? And how can you avoid a backlash from local residents if you succeed?

I think there are four lessons that cities have to bear in mind in order to make a Showtime Economy work. These are:

1. Begin with realistic expectations

2. Use existing venues and facilities whenever possible

3. Manage the event situations carefully

4. Make sure the locals benefit from all this activity

1. Begin With Realistic Expectations

Just as every city seems to want a tech economy that allows them to become the next Silicon Valley, cities trying to build a Showtime Economy all seem to aspire to be the next New York or Las Vegas. But the thing to bear in mind is that there are only so many concerts, so many conventions, so many youth sports tournaments. There is only going to be one Las Vegas, one New York, one Orlando. You have to begin with realistic expectations.

And that begins with a realistic understanding of the role your city can play in the regional or national Showtime economy. Is your city small but well situated geographically in a large metropolitan area? Then your aspirations may be well placed. We are seeing this right now with Inglewood, the city where Sofi Stadium is located. Inglewood is a traditionally African-American working-class town of 200,000 people. But it’s in the heart of gigantic Los Angeles, close to LAX, and has a long history of hosting sports venues, dating back to the opening of the (now closed) Hollywood Park Race Track in the 1930s and what is now known as the Kia Forum, which was built in the 1960s for the Lakers NBA team.

But not every city is in that situation. More often, we see cities reaching for the stars when they are either

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The Big “Where” Picture

What is the future of place, proximity, and location after COVID. That’s the theme of these “big picture” posts that will provide sweeping examinations of major trends like remote work, migration, and the role of travel and telecommunications as we adjust to a new reality in which “where” has a completely different meaning than it…

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An image from LaBella Associates’ village-style land use study for the Town of Clay, New York, near where Micron’s semiconductor plant will be built.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the idea that villages, rather than conventional subdivisions, will be a necessary part of the revival of my home territory of Central New York when a new growth boom hits driven by the arrival of Micron’s major semiconductor plant.

As suburban and rural towns deal with growth for the first time in memory, villages are a cost-effective way to provide a variety of housing types and activities that traditional suburban development simply can’t provide – at least not without huge fiscal strain.

But, as I pointed out, existing villages in a place like Central New York have limited capacity. To take advantage of the benefit villages provide, you have to build new ones. And that’s not easy.

Oftentimes, planners seem to think that the way to create new villages – or strengthen existing ones – is simply to change the regulatory regime. It’s a common refrain, especially among New Urbanists and form-based code devotees, that traditional villages are “illegal” to build and therefore regulatory reform is required to make them “legal” again. How many planners have applauded wildly when Andres Duany, in the middle of an acerbic speech, throws the zoning code into a trash can. Sometimes, they applaud even when it’s their own zoning code.

But here’s the thing: Zoning alone won’t solve the problem. Rural/exurban America is littered with form-based codes that haven’t been used. (I wrote about this a while ago in reference to Ramona, a rural village in the mountains of San Diego County.) In writing new codes – especially in the South – Duany and his colleagues have generally not been working for local governments. They’ve been working for developers who want to build New Urbanist communities in unsophisticated cities and towns.

And that experience makes it clear that while yes, you need zoning, you also need four other things to successfully create new villages that can help alleviate growth pressure in a fiscally sustainable way.

Main Street, Skaneateles, New York

First, you need significant infrastructure – principally roads, sewer, and water – and this is a new thing to many communities, especially those that have lived off of wells and septic forever.

Second, you need a variety of housing types – not necessarily apartments, but certainly smaller houses and townhomes.

Third, you need retail that will attract beyond the village – because the village alone will not be big enough to support anything more than maybe a coffee shop.

And finally, you need developers willing to take all this on – and that usually doesn’t mean the developers you’ve had forever, who are used to building low-density single-family subdivisions.

In the absence of thee four things, all you’ll have is pretty pictures. So let’s take a look at these four things, one at a time.

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