We had not been there in two years. My daughter was old enough this time to follow what was happening, or at least to understand that something was happening. My son vaguely remembered parts of the park from our last visit, but was trying to act like parts of it didn't freak him out a little before, now that he's older.

Enchanted Forest is not large. The whole property is twenty acres, much of it steep enough that I got winded on the initial ascent after entering the gates. Within those twenty acres, however, Roger Tofte (its creator) managed to fit several centuries, a number of fairy tales, an Old West town, an English village, a haunted house, a log flume and a roller coaster called Ice Mountain. It would appear the park has never been overly concerned with the border between homage and theft. Alice in Wonderland makes an appearance, as do Snow White's seven dwarfs, albeit under names that have clearly been advised not to discuss their former identities.

I wondered whether Disney had ever objected. I could not find a lawsuit or a public cease-and-desist letter. That does not mean nothing ever happened. It only means that if an attorney once wrote to the Tofte family about the legal status of a dwarf, the letter has not become part of the public record.

The park itself offers a small museum about its origins. Museum may be too grand a word. There are photographs and documents arranged in a few rooms, showing Roger Tofte building figures and structures on the hillside, looking less like the founder of an institution than a man who had not yet realized how much work he had created for himself. Having grossly underestimated more than one home improvement project, I found that part immediately believable.

In this museum, it is the family telling the family story, and everyone in the photographs appears to know where this is headed.

I went home and started looking through old newspaper stories to dig up some details, because I was curious. Tofte worked as a draftsman for the Oregon State Highway Department. He had wanted to become an illustrator, but illustration was not supporting a young family, so he took the state job and kept the other part of his brain occupied however he could. He repaired watches on the side. In 1964, he and his wife, Mavis, bought the wooded hillside for $4,000.

Tofte was a licensed watchmaker, and the money helped finance the park. The purchase of the hill was not easy on the family, and Mavis said they went without.

Roger thought construction would take two years. It took seven.

His coworkers at the Highway Department called the property "Idiot Hill" and the "Funny Farm." Roger later admitted that the teasing got to him. At some point he began to wonder whether he should keep going. Susan, his oldest daughter, remembered confronting the men as a little girl and telling them that her father was not crazy.

It is easy to make persistence look admirable after a thing succeeds. Before it succeeds, persistence can be difficult to distinguish from irresponsibility. A man has bought twenty steep acres and spends his evenings carrying cement into the woods. He has four children and a state job. Years pass, and the park is still not open.

There must be a point where a hobby quietly becomes the rest of your life. I imagine it happens somewhere around the time it starts costing more than a drinking problem.

Susan later described her childhood as the park. In a 1972 newspaper story, the children were not merely living near their father's project. Sixteen-year-old Susan worked the register and gift shop. Her brother Ken cleared trails and handled odd jobs. Mary stuffed envelopes. Lori, who was six, wiped tables when she could.

Susan said something in an NPR interview years later that sounded generous. She said that loving someone meant allowing that person the time to fulfill a dream.

I'm married with young children. Around our house, that usually means negotiating trades. Bedtimes, dinner, dishes, Saturday mornings, or whatever else was supposed to happen while someone disappeared to the gym or into the garage.

Roger built the original fairytale figures from rebar, wire mesh, cement and plaster. He had no formal art training and little experience working with cement, which did not prevent him from making permanent objects out of it. He would buy a sack after work and build another part. His grandson Derek described the process as one bag of cement at a time, then called the whole idea insane.

Derek works at the park now. He also described arguing with his grandfather over stonework. Roger continued using a cement trough that was older than Derek and could spend forever positioning one stone because it had to face a particular way. No explanation was necessary or apparently available. The stone had to be that way, and everyone else had to deal with it.

Visionary is what people call a stubborn person once the evidence has accumulated in his favor.

On August 8, 1971, after seven years of construction, Roger wrote OPEN on a piece of butcher paper and attached it to the fence. Seventy-five people came through. He was still running around installing lightbulbs in the Seven Dwarfs' mine while the park was open.

That night the family dumped the money onto a bed. The children threw bills in the air. They thought they had made it.

The following Sunday, around a thousand people came.

I do not know when the point of no return arrived. Perhaps it was that second Sunday. Perhaps it was two years later, when the park was earning enough for Roger to leave the Highway Department. By then, Idiot Hill had customers. Once an obsession has paying customers, people use different words for it.

The park never really reached a final form. The 1972 newspaper article, written less than a year after opening, already described it as unfinished and suggested it might remain that way. Roger said the family kept coming up with ideas. He planned a haunted house, an old-fashioned train and a replica of Gulliver. Some ideas were built; others presumably remained ideas.

That may be part of why the park feels unlike a contemporary attraction. It does not appear to have opened with a complete theory of itself. The English village and Tofteville do not need to reconcile. A castle can be near a mining town because both were things Roger wanted to make. Somewhere along the way the family added rides, then larger rides, then performances, food service and the other machinery required to keep people on a hillside for most of a day.

The current stage production was Pinocchio. Susan wrote it.

There was something strange about learning that afterward. My children had watched a play written by the daughter who once stood up to her father's coworkers and told them he was not crazy. She had gone from defending the imaginary park to writing scripts inside the real one. The actors made jokes about their wages and their abandoned dreams, and the adults laughed harder than the children. The performance was much better than it needed to be.

I had assumed the park's theatrical self-awareness came from employees making peace with where they worked. It turns out the family had written it into the show.

Roger had his own ideas about what children needed. He thought children were too confined and that the park gave them room to roam. Some of it was meant to be scary, and he considered that good for them.

Watching my daughter, I could see what he meant. She did not require the park to be convincing. She required it to contain another place she could enter. Children seem to accept that a doorway is enough. Adults want to know whether the room beyond it is authentic, what the building is supposed to represent, whether the upper story is occupied and how the project was financed.

Some of what makes the place work is obvious. The cars remain outside. Paths narrow and turn, trees conceal whatever is fifty feet ahead, and buildings press close enough together that a modest number of visitors can feel like a crowd. The hillside creates transitions almost by accident, although very little about hauling cement up a hillside was accidental for the person doing it.

Planning school taught me to take street width, enclosure and the placement of buildings seriously, and I still do.

Then you reach the Old West town and notice that much of it is scenery, and that the boardwalks are violently non-accessible. Nobody lives above the saloon, and the upper windows suggest activity that isn't happening behind them. The street below, meanwhile, is full of actual people. The pizza is real, though, even if it arrived a couple hundred years ahead of schedule.

I have seen the reverse condition often enough: real mixed-use buildings with technically correct storefronts that remain empty, their windows papered over beneath several floors of occupied apartments. The form is there. The reason to be there is not.

At Enchanted Forest, the storefronts are fake and the activity is real.

Of course, this is an unfair comparison. Everyone at Enchanted Forest has paid to enter and arrives with roughly the same purpose. The park programs the day for them. There are rides, performances and small discoveries around the next turn. A city street cannot charge admission at the boundary and promise that a puppet will begin speaking at regular intervals.

Still, the distinction bothers me. Planners sometimes talk as though the right physical container will produce the desired social life. Developers have learned the language too. A large building occupies several former parcels, so the façade is divided into sections to suggest several smaller buildings. The brick changes color, the cornice rises and falls, and ground-floor commercial is required whether or not anyone can afford to operate a business there.

I thought about old commercial streets I have watched disappear in Michigan and Oregon, although I did not want Enchanted Forest to become an excuse to write that essay again. The comparison fails in several obvious ways. Roger Tofte owned the whole property. He was not one of thirty independent owners making unrelated decisions over a century. The park is closer to a private shopping center than an organically accumulated town, except that no shopping center developer would tolerate its chronological confusion or the uncertainty of its original business plan.

Maybe ownership is not the useful distinction. Maybe time is. A contemporary project generally has to explain itself before it exists. The program, financing, phasing and expected return are worked through in advance. Enchanted Forest seems to have become legible only after years of building, and perhaps not even then. It had to survive long enough for the explanation to catch up.

The original work may also have occurred outside any permitting system we would recognize today. Later accounts say the early park was built without permits, and Marion County eventually maintained a comprehensive plan for the site to simplify approval of later additions. Roger said directly that he did not believe they could have done it under modern conditions because the red tape would have cost too much.

I would still like to see the file. There must be decades of correspondence about additions, repairs, inspections and changes of use. Somewhere a public employee had to classify the giant shoe. Someone reviewed the haunted house. The rides are inspected, presumably with considerably more rigor than the original concrete tunnels and bridges.

This is not an argument against building codes. Roller coasters need serious inspection, accessibility matters, and old attractions do not become safe merely because people are fond of them.

The more difficult question is what happens when every individual requirement is reasonable and the cumulative process leaves no room for anything unreasonable enough to become Enchanted Forest.

Roger died in February of this year at ninety-six. Three generations of the family now work at the park. He kept planning attractions, making repairs and riding his moped around the property almost until the end. During COVID, the park raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through crowdfunding to survive. People gave money to preserve a place where fake medieval heads speak from windows and a rebuilt Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall because the previous Humpty Dumpty had, in fact, suffered a great fall.

Two visitors knocked him down while trying to take a photograph. Roger was eighty-four and spent fifty days building another one.

That may be the clearest description of the place. A figure made from rebar, wire mesh, cement and plaster breaks after decades in the weather, and the elderly man who built the first one spends fifty days making another.

By the end of our visit, the kids were tired and we still had two tickets they bought back on the way out. I had spent part of the day taking pictures, part of it counting heads, still more of it staring up at the trees, an unreasonable amount of it thinking about drainage, and eventually wondering how any of this appeared in the building code. My daughter had not asked who financed the park or whether Roger's devotion had been fair to his family. She had ridden what she could ride and entered what she could enter.

We walked back down the hill toward the parking lot, where we realized just how hot and smoky the day had become.

Roger Tofte had imagined children doing that before I was born. At the time, the hill had no castle, no Western town and no family history attached to it. His coworkers saw him carrying cement into the woods and named the place accordingly.

They were not entirely wrong.

We flew out from Portland, connecting through Seattle before arriving at Pittsburgh International. Stepping outside, I was not prepared for the humidity. I haven't left the west coast in two years and it set the tone for a long weekend of sweating and chaffing my way through those 20,000+ step-count days.

Pittsburgh is not a flat-grid city. It folds, drops, climbs, bends, and reappears around water and hillsides. That topography gives the whole place a cinematic quality. You are constantly turning a corner and seeing another layer of city above or below you.

We stayed in Bloomfield, which ended up being a just okay home base because the transit ended up being a real struggle. I wanted to ride buses and trains around the city more than we did, but in practice the headways were awful and connections were sometimes awkward for where we were trying to go. We ended up taking a lot of Lyfts, more than I would have preferred, but that also gave us a weirdly broad cross-section of the city. I loved seeing the residential hillsides, old commercial corridors, sudden views, tight streets, and neighborhoods that changed quickly from one ride to the next. I didn't see too many places that were sketchy. Not by my standards of growing up in places like Saginaw and Detroit, anyway.

Bloomfield itself was easy to like. On Saturday morning we walked through the Bloomfield Saturday Market, where there were musicians playing, people moving between stalls, etc. I like see that kind of casual neighborhood life with everyday people enjoying the weekend. It was not polished in a sterile way. It felt lived in. Pittsburgh, at least from this short visit, seems to have a lot of that. Places that have been used, reused, patched, faded, loved, and kept going. I couldn't help but think about how the owners of row houses negotiate expenses of shared walls and roofs, especially if anything went wrong. No HOAs here.

The Strip District was one of the highlights. Old warehouses, market storefronts, produce stands, sidewalks full of people, rail remnants, and businesses packed into buildings that still carry their industrial past. It felt touristy in places, sure, but not in a way that erased the older city underneath. The Heinz History Center, the rail lines, the brick facades, the crowds, and the food shops all layered together into something that felt distinctly Pittsburgh. We hit the famous spots, caught some World Cup games, took lots of photos.

We also spent time around downtown, which has a surprisingly grand architectural presence. Some cities flatten out when you get into their business district, but Pittsburgh’s downtown still feels shaped by its geography. The buildings stack against the hills and streets open into views. Older towers and newer office buildings sit close together, and then suddenly you are near a station entrance, a plaza, or a bridge approach. The city feels compressed, but not small, especially from the baseball stadium (we took in two Pirates games).

One of my favorite parts of the trip was seeing how much older infrastructure still defines the experience of moving through Pittsburgh. The light rail, the stations, the inclines, the bridges, the rail corridors, the old industrial buildings — they all give the city a strong physical memory. Even when something has been adapted or repurposed, you can still feel what it used to be. That is one of the things I love most in cities. Not preservation as a museum exercise, but continuity. Pittsburgh has a lot of continuity.

The Monongahela Incline was probably the clearest example of that. It is both practical infrastructure and civic icon, a piece of transit that is also a reminder that Pittsburgh’s terrain demands different solutions than a flatter city. Looking up the incline tracks, you understand immediately why the city developed the way it did. The hills are not scenery; they are part of the transportation system, the neighborhood structure, and the psychology of the place. I was surprised to learn that some of these are actually run and maintained by nonprofits.

We made it to Lawrenceville, Allentown, Mt. Washington, the North Shore, Oakland, and a few other pockets over the weekend. We caught the Allentown night market, which was incredible. I spent half a day in the Carnegie museums and the Phipps Conservatory.

Some of it was planned, some of it was improvised, and some of it was just following the logic of where the next meal, drink, coffee, or view seemed to be.

What stuck with me most, though, was the density of character. Pittsburgh has a lot of what I wish more American cities had. For a city of its size, it has an insane amount of mojo in its neighborhood identities, architectural depth, visible history, all mixed with enough strangeness to keep it from feeling overdetermined. It is beautiful, but not in a tidy way. It is beautiful because it is complicated. The hills complicate it. The rivers complicate it. The industrial past complicates it. The old buildings complicate it. The result is a city that feels unusually textured.

I left wanting more time. More neighborhoods, more transit, more bridges, more staircases, more wandering. A long weekend was enough to confirm that Pittsburgh is one of America’s great cities, but not enough to feel like I had really figured it out. That is probably a compliment.

We were there to meet up with one of my wife’s longtime friends from Asheville. They had known each other for years, but living on opposite sides of the country meant our families had never really had the chance to meet. They were in the area for a graduation ceremony, which gave us the opportunity to finally connect.

There is something strange and wonderful about meeting people who have been part of someone’s life through stories for so long. The boys took to each other immediately, which made everything feel easy, if a little exhausting. They ran around, built their own little world, and seemed completely unbothered by the rain.

The house sat right on the river. The family brought fishing poles, and my son caught two fish. It felt like one of those moments you recognize as a core memory while it’s happening.

We did venture into town, including a stop at the brewery, where the food was, generously, not the highlight. Fortunately, the library nearby was open. Visiting local libraries has become one of our family’s favorite travel traditions, so the outing ended up being a success anyway.

We ended the visit with a hike, which included finding a mole and some strange flora. I'm already looking forward to our next visit to the area.

First, a little bit of background from the NPS website:

John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is comprised of more than 14,000 acres within three separate units located in eastern Oregon: Sheep Rock , Painted Hills, and Clarno . The three units of the monument hold some of the best fossil bearing locations within the larger John Day Fossil Beds, which cover most of eastern Oregon.

You will find no dinosaurs here; this area was underwater during that time. The John Day Fossil Beds preserve plant and animal fossils from most of the Age of Mammals and Flowering Plants, covering a time period from 44 million years ago until 7 million years ago. With such a vast span of time covered in one place, this area provides unparalleled insight into how the world as we know it came to be.

I have to admit that despite wanting to visit, I wasn’t entirely sure what was in store for this trip due to some misconceptions or preconceived notions I had of the place, and Eastern Oregon in general. Secondly, we took my electric vehicle to save on costs. While things were mostly fine in this regard, there were some stretches in the middle that gave me some range anxiety, mostly because it was pretty hot out and we ended up using the air conditioning a lot, particularly if we had to leave the pup in the car for a little bit (with the car in Dog Mode). This is the route we ended up taking:

We ended up staying The Dalles at Cousins Country Inn. Affordable, good breakfast (not free), pool, not fancy, allows dogs. There’s also superchargers onsite, which was really convenient. We took the kids to Sorosis Park, a really great urban park with beautiful views of Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood. They had disc golf and pickle ball courts there, trails, and nice playground equipment. It seemed like a great resource for people living in The Dalles, but was also a nice break from the hotel when the kids needed to burn off some energy.

I finally went skiing on Mt. Hood after living in Oregon for over a decade! In the worst year for snow in a generation! I switched from snowboarding to skiing to same if I'd enjoy it more and I'm glad I did. It was much easier on my body.

We rented a place near Rhododendron, a nice little cabin with a fireplace and hot tub. Staying with friends and their kids was an experience I'm not sure we were ready for, but overall it was a good experience. I'm hoping I can make it back at least one more time this before the end of the season.

Meet massive mosasaurs, a spine-chilling Spinosaurus, and bizarre creatures as you travel through millions of years, witnessing the rise and fall of Earth’s most awe-inspiring aquatic creatures as well as their present-day descendants. Highlighted by amazing fossils, daily educational programming, and some unbelievable live animals, this exhibit brings guests face-to-face with the real-life monsters who defy imagination and have inspired myths and legends.

Since they're working on updating the upstairs exhibit space, only the smaller downstairs area had programming, so this made for a quicker than usual run-through.

We ended up watching the 30th Anniversary showing of Jumanji on the really big screen. I probably hadn't seen it in a few decades. The graphics were cornier than I remembered, but it was still nice to see a show I didn't have to think too much about. I think my son had a good time as well.

Today my wife and I celebrated 10 years since our first date, which was at a now-closed bar called Kask, which was a few blocks from my old apartment in the West End. Today we went to a Sri Lankan restarant called Mirisata. We shared their special, which consisted of Pumpkin Curry, Deviled Potatoes, Tempered Okra, and green Bean Mallum. I added on the Jaggery "Beef" Curry and she had a spiced cider. Everything was very good, but we both agreed that the vegan beef curry was the best.

Mirisata · 2420 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97214, Vereinigte Staaten

★★★★★ · Restaurant mit Küche aus Sri Lanka

Mirisata · 2420 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97214, Vereinigte Staaten

Afterward, we went for a couple mile stroll around Belmont, Stark and Kerns. We frequently find ourselves in cemeteries, and today took us to Lone Fir. It was a beautiful day. Dry and warm enough for mid-November. Things seamed pretty quiet for such a nice day and we both agreed that people must be taking advantage of it and heading out to be in nature.

We found ourselves in Kerns again and had some soft serve at the same place we brought the kids over Pride weekend.

We wrapped things up at Creo Chocolate, where we got an education in the manufacture and distribution of the stuff. While not at all what I was expecting, it was a nice experience. The owner, who was certainly a character, talked about how he and his wife got into the business 12 years ago and taught us about the various types of chocolate they manufacture. If you ever end up checking it out, bring water. Lots of samples!

We even made our own chocolate bars at the end.

In the same way, this morning I also went to my second ever Catholic mass. I went alone to the 8 am. I’ve been trying a few churches out to see how I feel about them, community-wise.

While I’m agnostic, I’ve always been interested in Catholicism from a community perspective. I recently realized—or had the epiphany—that many of the best people I’ve ever known have been Catholic. I definitely prefer the hocus pocus over the worship rock bands at Protestant churches, too. At very least, it’s a great personal ethnography.

As someone who rides TriMet relatively frequently, I recognize that some perceptions about safety may be overstated today, but the past several years have left a lasting impression on families like mine. Judging by the results of TriMet's 2024 Attitude & Awareness Survey, our perceptions were from from being outliers:

About 46% of those surveyed said personal safety concerns have kept them from riding MAX at times, with about 37% saying they had opted out of a bus trip due to concerns. The primary reason people felt unsafe while riding was “other riders’ behavior.” The second reason was “lack of Transit Police” and the third was “time of day.”

As a parent of two young children, our experiences on buses and trains in the wake of the pandemic included exposure to public drug use, verbal outbursts, and threatening behavior—situations I never wanted my kids to be around. I’ve worked in affordable housing and can talk to my children about homelessness in honest and age-appropriate ways, but there is a big difference between those conversations and having your family caught in volatile, unsafe moments on public transit. Even trips to kid-friendly places like the zoo became daunting.

The podcast effectively outlines TriMet’s financial challenges and how shifts like remote work and micromobility have changed travel behavior, but it doesn’t fully address a major barrier to restoring ridership: land use. Suburban MAX stations surrounded by parking and low-density development do little to support daily transit use beyond park-and-ride commuting.

To rebuild trust and ridership, Portland must focus on increasing density near stations, especially with mixed-use development that includes a heavy focus on grocery stores and other basic services at—not just near—transit stations. These changes would make it more practical for people to give up car dependence.

The Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities (CFEC) Executive Order could be pivotal here, especially if it helps cities reframe priorities away from parking and toward walkable, transit-oriented living. Similarly, relaxing BOLI standards that have long hindered development above 5 stories, as well as temporarily suspending system development charges, could go a long way toward creating thousands of new housing units in close proximity to fast and frequent transit that should translate into increases in ridership.

TriMet is making strides in both land use and safety, and I hope it can escape drastic cuts to service in the coming years.

SB 1051 required communities with more than 10,000 people to remove certain barriers to housing production, including giving regulated affordable housing projects priority in the land use decisions by limiting the timeline for approval to 100 days. The bill went on to define all housing types as "needed housing," requiring all land use and design requirements related to housing be "clear and objective". This had the effect of outlawing subjectivity in the approval process. While many planners already aspired to remove barriers to housing production, they were limited by local politics. SB 1051 gave planning departments cover--particularly this in higher income communities--to implement needed changes.

Hot on the heals of SB 1051, Oregon became the first state in the U.S. to effectively eliminate single-family zoning with the passage of House Bill 2001 (HB 2001). This groundbreaking law required cities with over 10,000 residents to allow duplexes on all residential lots previously zoned for single-family homes, and for cities with over 25,000 residents, including all of Metro Portland, the law went even further, mandating the allowance of triplexes, fourplexes, and cottage clusters.

The goal was to increase housing diversity, improve affordability, and combat urban sprawl by enabling more middle housing options in established neighborhoods. Now that several years have passed, the effects of this policy on housing production, affordability, and neighborhood dynamics are becoming clearer, offering a critical look at how statewide zoning reform shapes the housing landscape.

Portland’s Residential Infill Project (RIP), finally adopted in 2020 after many years of planning and setbacks, was a landmark zoning reform aimed at increasing housing options and affordability in the city‘s single-family neighborhoods. By allowing for duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and cottage clusters on previously single-dwelling lots, the policy sought to address Portland’s housing shortage and promote more diverse, walkable communities. Now, several years in, the real-world impacts of these changes are coming into focus.

Some interesting data and considerations from the Portland City Auditor's monitoring report on Middle Housing in Single-Dwelling Zones, Progress Report 2018-2024.

My takeaways:

While middle housing is much needed and has provided 1400 more units between 2021 and 2024, most of these units are still out of reach of median income families. For example, the average closing price for middle housing units was $614,223 in 2024, which would require over double the median income cited ($213k+).

That said, smaller units are being produced at a higher rate since RIP's adoption (500-1500 sq ft) and are averaging below 500k. The most common size seeking SDC exemptions was 2 bedroom, 750-999 sq ft.

Between the PHB tax incentives for moderate income homebuyers and the SDC exemptions, developers were able to produce more sub-500k units. Approximately 868 units participated in one or the other program, while 251 of those units qualified for both programs between 2018 and 2024.

Middle income units were $250-300k less on average than attached units. Despite this, they have a higher cost per square foot, which is to be expected.

PHB's sale price limit is $455k, which is presumably affordable to those making 120% AMI. However, by my math, a 455k loan requires ~$172k in income when assuming 1% property tax (which the auditor used) and $450 in other monthly liabilities, which is a low assumption. This drops to about 141k in income required under normal underwriting guidelines with the tax abatement - a HUGE advantage. So without the tax abatement, even these smaller units are unaffordable to median income families unless they are debt free.

As a leader in progressive planning policies, Oregon‘s statewide land use planning program embraced this vision as early as the 1970s. The Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) adopted the first 14 Statewide Planning Goals in 1974. Goal 9 mandated that local governments ensure adequate land availability for various economic activities essential to the well-being of Oregon citizens. This includes planning for commercial developments that serve local communities. Goal 12 required cities and counties to develop Transportation System Plans (TSPs) that promote public transit, biking, and walking as alternatives to car travel. It also encourages compact, mixed-use development to reduce travel distances. Nearly a quarter century ago now, ODOT and DLCD released the Commercial and Mixed-Use Development Code Handbook. So these ideas are far from new.

These statewide planning goals and best practices led many municipalities to zone some corner lots and corridors as neighborhood commercial and mixed use districts with the expectation that, as density increased, small businesses would emerge to serve local needs.

More recently, Oregon‘a Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities rules eliminated parking minimums in areas within a half-mile of frequent transit, making it easier to build housing and commercial uses without dedicating space to cars. Planners hope these changes will help create the walkable, mixed-use communities they have been designing on paper for decades.

Yet, despite these efforts, the small corner grocery store remains elusive. While convenience stores persist and often are the only source of food accessible by foot in many neighborhoods, these establishments don’t typically offer many healthful food options. Pricing can also be predatory. Absent a gas station or convenience store, land designated for commercial uses can sit vacant for years and is sometimes rezoned for housing when the market fails to support retail. Former residential districts rezoned for commercial can even limit what homeowners can do with their legal, non-conforming residential buildings while communities wait for commercial uses that may never materialize. The disconnect between zoning theory and economic reality is stark.

The Economic Shift

The failure of small-scale retail to materialize is not simply the result of zoning or a lack of density. It is the product of larger economic forces that have made neighborhood commercial development difficult to sustain.

For much of the twentieth century, small grocers and independent retailers thrived because they occupied a secure place in the supply chain. That changed when antitrust laws like the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 were weakened, allowing big-box retailers to negotiate bulk discounts that independent stores could not match. Large grocery chains expanded. E-commerce reshaped shopping habits. Many daily errands that once required a short walk to the store now happen through delivery services or at a supermarket on the drive home.

Even in neighborhoods that could theoretically support small-scale retail, developers hesitate to build it. A café or market must survive on razor-thin margins while competing with national supply chains and online convenience. Meanwhile, housing remains a far safer investment, making it the default choice for vacant commercial parcels.

Retrofitting the Suburbs

The 15-minute city movement has gained traction as planners and advocates push for more complete neighborhoods. However, transforming suburban areas built for cars into walkable communities is not an overnight process. Decades of land use decisions have prioritized large-format retail and auto-oriented infrastructure, making it difficult for small businesses to compete. Neighborhood-scale retailers no longer develop their own buildings but instead rely on the market of existing commercial real estate, which has increasingly become centralized in large shopping centers or in auto-dominated strip malls, sometimes far from transit.

Even in places with progressive zoning policies, many of these barriers persist. Developers often lack financial incentives to take a risk on small retail. Many communities remain tethered to a suburban pattern of development that cannot be undone with zoning reform alone.

Developers sometimes pay lip service to the commercial requirements of mixed use properties in order to gain certain incentives. For example, by providing a small retail space, a developer might gain tax advantages or density bonuses knowing that it may ultimately be used as a leasing office or live-work unit it if goes unleased for a neighborhood oriented commercial use.

This process will take time. Planners working in established suburban areas recognize that meaningful change may take decades. While cities and counties can remove barriers and create more flexibility, true mixed-use, walkable communities will require a broader shift in economic policy, infrastructure investment, and consumer behavior. Finally, it will take bold and creative action from transit and other land-owning public agencies to forge public-private partnerships that prioritize creating places worth caring about instead of places for people to park their cars.

Why Zoning Alone Won’t Fix This

For all the focus on zoning reform, the economic structure that once made corner stores viable has largely disappeared. The elimination of parking minimums and the expansion of mixed-use zoning have removed most land use barriers for developers, but these tools alone cannot create a market where one does not already exist.

If cities want to bring back neighborhood-scale retail, they will need to do more than zone for it. They will need policies and incentives that actively support small businesses. They will need to rethink the structural advantages given to large retailers. They will need long-term investment in transit and pedestrian infrastructure. Land use restrictive covenants adopted by HOAs will need to be made unenforceable by new laws.

Until these shifts happen, the corner store will remain an idea that planners and urbanists believe in, but one the market does not.

Like many in my field, I became a planner to help create better places. In fact, very few of us enter the planning profession to defend outdated zoning, reinforce sprawl, or entrench car dependency. My goal has always been to foster communities that are more sustainable, connected, and livable. Despite this, planners often find themselves in the crossfire between deeply entrenched interests and advocacy groups. Some accuse us of blocking development. Others blame us for the very housing shortages they want to solve. The reality is that planners do not set the rules. We work within a political system where elected officials make the final decisions.

Balancing neutrality with the desire to advocate for better places is not always easy. Anti development groups fight to keep things the same. Pro housing voices demand urgent reform. Both frustrations land on planners, even when the challenges we face are driven by forces far beyond our control.

The Rise of the YIMBY Movement

For decades, suburban expansion shaped American cities. Federal policies encouraged low density sprawl, while zoning laws blocked housing diversity. Redlining and white flight deepened racial and economic divides. By the late twentieth century, many communities fought density to protect exclusivity and home values. Zoning became a tool for restriction rather than growth.

While rooted in earlier advocacy, a counter movement took shape in the 2010s. The Yes in My Backyard movement, or YIMBYs, pushed back against restrictive zoning and car centric planning. They championed denser housing, transit oriented development, and walkable neighborhoods. With social media and grassroots organizing, YIMBYs challenged policies that had constrained housing supply for decades.

Their advocacy, while necessary, sometimes oversimplifies planning’s role. I have seen growing hostility from YIMBY voices toward planners, even in cities that are working toward the very changes they demand. Many seem to misunderstand that planners do not have free rein. We research, analyze, and recommend policy shifts, but local governments set the course. Planning is a long game, constrained by laws, budgets, and political will.

Planners and the Political Landscape

By some estimates, there are nearly 35,000 municipalities engaged in planning in the United States. The system is fragmented and deeply local. The idea that planners wield unchecked power ignores the reality of local governance. Still, I understand the frustration. Change is slow, and the stakes are high. Housing costs continue to rise. Infrastructure remains car dependent. Outdated zoning laws persist.

What is ironic is that while YIMBYs criticize planners, their activism strengthens the case for the very policies many planners support. Those of us working in local government cannot always be public advocates. We frame policy discussions, craft alternatives, and shape decisions, but we do not make the final call. Many planners welcome the push from YIMBYs because it gives elected officials cover to approve bolder policies.

Yet planners remain an easy scapegoat. At public meetings and online, we take heat from all sides. It comes with the job. Most of us gave up utopian visions early in our careers. Still, it can feel misplaced. Many of us root for reform from behind the scenes, even as we sit quietly behind the dais.

The Urbanist Identity Crisis

As the YIMBY movement has grown, the term urbanist has become a catch all for anyone interested in cities. It once referred to planners, architects, and designers working to improve urban form. Now it includes cycling advocates, transit enthusiasts, and social media influencers. Some of this is good. The movement needs broad support. But much of the online conversation lacks depth.

Urbanist debates often mirror those in popular psychology. Just as TikTok has given rise to self help gurus, urbanism has found its way into bite sized infographics and viral slogans. Five signs your city is failing. The real reason traffic is worse. Why parking minimums are killing your town. These posts can be helpful, but they rarely capture the complexity of policy change.

That said, planners have done little to control the narrative. The profession remains filled with aging bureaucrats who are slow to adapt to modern platforms. While some have broken through, like City Nerd and The Happy Urbanist, most planning discussions still happen in committee meetings, journal articles, and dry conference panels. Meanwhile, YIMBYs and self proclaimed urbanists are shaping public perception of what planning is, and often, what it is not.

The Cost of Sprawl and the Myth of Choice

For all the arguments about density, car dependency, and zoning reform, one fact remains clear. Sprawl is expensive. Low density development costs more to maintain. New infrastructure subsidizes old suburban systems, creating a financial cycle that many cities cannot sustain. Urbanists often describe this as a Ponzi scheme.

Yet even in places like Portland, where zoning allows for greater density, the market does not always respond as expected. Development follows economic trends, financing realities, and local politics. The idea that zoning changes alone will transform cities overnight ignores the deeper structural barriers at play.

Developers are still building housing with abundant parking, even next to our light rail system, despite Oregon’s policy eliminating parking minimums within a half-mile of transit. I am also seeing prime land used for low-rise, four-story buildings when zoning allows for far greater height. This often happens because federal Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements make taller buildings significantly more expensive for nonprofits that receive federal funds from sources such as the HOME and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit programs. As a former affordable housing professional and current advocate, I see these patterns all the time. Many YIMBYs push for density without fully understanding the financial and regulatory forces that shape what actually gets built. While I do want restrictive planning to get out of the way, the market is extremely complicated.

YIMBYs often argue that the higher costs of urban living are balanced by lower spending on cars, as if choosing a denser lifestyle is simply a matter of preference. In reality, many people have little choice at all. High housing costs push them to the edges of cities. Job locations force long commutes. School closures eliminate walkable options. Daycares end up wherever they can find space. Limited transit leaves few alternatives. Decades of car-centric development have made sprawl the default, not a conscious choice.

Even in cities like Portland, where density is encouraged, housing costs remain high, leading to gentrification and neighborhoods that few can afford. Zoning reform has made way for denser housing, yet the market has been slow to deliver it at the scale needed. More housing and transit options are essential, but too often, YIMBYs mistake necessity for preference and overlook the deeper economic forces at play. Expanding supply alone does not guarantee affordability when land values, wages, and market pressures remain unchanged.

Beyond the Hashtags

The rise of online urbanism has done more than elevate land use debates. It has created a new wave of advocates who challenge outdated policies and push for smarter development. But slogans and hashtags are not enough. Real change takes time. Political structures move slowly. The path to better cities requires both vision and patience.

Planners know this better than anyone. We work within a system designed to resist sudden change. That does not mean change is impossible. It means the process is messy, layered, and often frustrating.

The most effective urbanism is not about winning arguments online. It is about showing up to city meetings, engaging local officials, and working within the constraints that exist. It is about shifting policies one step at a time while recognizing that progress does not happen overnight.

There is no perfect city. No single reform will solve everything. But the work continues, and planners, whether seen or unseen, will keep moving it forward.

Having grown up in Saginaw, Michigan, I witnessed firsthand the fallout of deindustrialization. The once-thriving city was marked by vacancies, crumbling infrastructure, and a declining tax base. As a kid, I often daydreamed about living in a place with vibrancy and life—something Saginaw lacked. Later, as I became more aware of the systemic forces that shaped my hometown, I started to ask deeper questions: Why was it like this? Could it have been avoided?

When I was introduced to urban planning, I naïvely thought planners were benevolent actors, fighting against the damage inflicted on industrial cities by the forces of capitalism. That’s why Jacobs’ critique of planners—delivered with unflinching candor—was so jarring to me. It challenged my core assumptions about the field. Her account of political figures like Robert Moses and the catastrophic decisions of mid-century planners was hard to digest. Projects like urban renewal, slum clearance, and highway construction—initiatives that were touted as progress—often caused irreparable harm, particularly to communities of color.

Jacobs exposed planning’s paternalistic streak, where decisions made “for the greater good” disregarded the lived experiences of the people most affected. Reading her work in the 2010s, it was almost offensive to me that this book was being used as an introduction to planning. It forced me to question whether this was the right field for me at all. Perhaps in that way the book was used in the most appropriate way possible.

After graduate school, I gravitated toward housing and community development, working with federal grants and local nonprofits at a state housing authority and later in local government. It was an enlightening experience and I got to work with some great people. I was a grant manager on several high profile projects in Detroit and later in Portland. After about 10 years, though, I grew frustrated with the limited impact I felt I was making. That led me back to land-use planning, where I stayed for another six years.

Over time, I came to realize that municipal planning is largely administrative. Grand visions and master planning? Those are often reserved for the private sector—or for architects, landscape architects, and engineers. My idealistic notions of planning as a transformative profession gradually gave way to a more measured understanding of its limits.

When I returned to Jacobs’ book recently, with more than 15 years of experience in community development and land-use planning behind me, her critiques resonated differently. I could see the validity of her skepticism toward the government’s ability to manage the countless complexities of urban life. At the same time, I found myself questioning her faith in the free market to deliver the kind of neighborhoods she championed.

Jacobs celebrated the organic development of neighborhoods like those in Boston and New York, where fine-grain commercial spaces and mixed-use buildings emerged seemingly without regulation. But modern development doesn’t happen that way. Today, large-scale developers dominate, creating projects that cater to automobiles rather than pedestrians. Even when new buildings mimic the façades of traditional urban neighborhoods, their functionality often falls short.

In my experience, small-scale developers who might build the kind of vibrant, walkable neighborhoods Jacobs loved are rare. Instead, large tracts of land are developed in ways that prioritize parking lots and inward-facing designs. Housing above retail—a hallmark of Jacobs’ ideal urban fabric—is almost nonexistent in new developments, especially in suburban areas.

In Portland’s suburbs, I see the opposite dynamic of my Michigan hometown. Here, rapid economic growth fueled by industries like tech and apparel has led to sprawling development that’s difficult to manage. Despite a relatively robust transit system, much of the land use still prioritizes cars. It’s hard not to feel that planners missed an opportunity to mold this region into something more human-scaled and accessible. While positive changes are being made and less auto-dominated development is occurring, much of it still feels like urban intensity of development and population density without urban levels of amenities.

As much as I respect Jacobs’ prose and the timelessness of some of her ideas, her lack of empirical evidence is striking. Her observations are compelling, but they rely heavily on anecdotes and personal experiences. It’s easy to criticize a book written half a century ago, but I wonder what Jacobs would think of today’s cities. Would she still be so critical of government programs, especially considering that some have been among the few examples of humanistic, dignity-centered development since her time?

Reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities again, I’m left with as many questions as answers. It’s a book that continues to challenge me, even after years of working in the field. Perhaps that’s its greatest strength—forcing us to reckon with the complexities of planning and reminding us that cities, like people, defy easy solutions.

However, we can’t compel businesses to utilize these spaces as intended. More often than not, a tenant’s main entrance remains on the side where vehicles are parked. It’s unfortunate that we can’t recreate authentic Main Streets anymore; most new developments are merely strip malls disguised as urbanism. Too often, the street-side entrances are closed off to pedestrians and "this is not an entrance" is all too common signage.

Take several examples from communities near me:

We left Venice early, heading north toward the Dolomites. We took a water taxi from San Marco, and then a short train ride into Mestre to rent a car. The drive from Mestre felt like a steady climb through layers of landscape and time. My great-grandparents came from Cadore, a group of small towns in the mountains near the Austrian border. The one that matters to my family is Vigo di Cadore, which includes the nearby village of Laggio di Cadore. It's where my children and I are registered as Italian citizens living abroad.

This part of the trip was the most personal. My grandmother, born in the United States to two Italians, had visited the area more than twenty years ago. She passed away several years back, but I inherited many of her documents and photos, including the photos and notes from her trip.

My grandmother had no interest in dual citizenship herself. She was deeply patriotic and skeptical of Italy's politics, but she was a primary and only living source of some of the records I'd eventually need, particularly my formerly estranged and now long-deceased father's name change. Without her, I wouldn't have been able to complete the application.

The citizenship process took seven years and more paperwork than I could have imagined. Perhaps in some cosmic fate plugged into my own sense of humor, my citizenship was recognized and approved on Election Day in 2020 while I was biting my nails waiting for the results to come in for the presidential race. A small but meaningful moment. Soon after, I registered my son, and later my daughter. It gives me some comfort to know that they'll have the option to live, study, or work in Italy someday if they choose.

Outside of fleeting daydreams, or more recently my political nightmares, I don't romanticize the idea of moving abroad permanently anymore. Maybe this is because I'm more settled now with a family and career, or maybe because I've moved great distances before and acquired the painful wisdom that life follows you wherever you go. There was certainly a time where I believed otherwise, but I no longer believe place alone can solve everything. Surely it can meaningfully impact an underlying mindset, opportunities, and even health. But it rarely will satisfy on its own, for any length of time, pangs of longing to be someone different. But I digress. Still, I can imagine spending longer stretches in Italy someday. Half a year at a time, maybe a summer as a family.

Cadore felt different from the Italy most travelers picture. The architecture leans alpine with its wooden chalets and steep roofs, deep balconies, and neatly stacked firewood. The language shifts between Italian and Ladin, a regional dialect still spoken there. We arrived between seasons, after skiing but before the summer hikers arrived in droves, so the towns were pretty quiet.

I visited Vigo and Laggio and found the building where my great-grandparents once lived after returning from Michigan. My great-great-grandmother, Ursula, disliked life in America and brought their family back to Italy after each successive birth of their five children, including my great-grandfather. I walked the narrow streets, stopped by the small cemetery, and learned that graves there aren't permanent. When a family's connection fades, remains are moved and space is reused. Practical, though it still caught me off guard.

We based ourselves in Cortina d'Ampezzo for this leg of the trip, about an hour away. It's more polished and commercial than Cadore and closer in feel to a ski town like Breckenridge, but it was a convenient base for a short visit. We stayed at the Franceschi Park Hotel, which was quiet in the off-season and surprisingly affordable.

The room looked out on snow-capped peaks, and the breakfast spread was the kind you remember (and we still talk about it). Fresh fruit, eggs, pancetta, espresso made to order, and honey dripping from the comb.

Late snow kept us from some of the higher hikes, but we made the best of it. Lago di Braies was a highlight. The drive was a bit long but idillic, with a calm, green lake ringed by mountains that greeted us upon arrival. This was the busiest place we visited in the Dolomites, likely with higher than usual traffic due to the other locations being inaccessible. We hiked the circle on foot, taking photos and pausing just to take it in.

That afternoon we crossed into Austria for lunch in Sillian, enjoying how language and signs shifted while the scenery and architecture remained unchanged, or at least in a way that was imperceptible to my unfamiliar eye.

Cortina itself was pleasant to walk in. In the evenings I explored while my wife rested, noticing the local schools, churches, and public spaces tucked among the boutiques. As a co-host of the next Winter Olympics, I noticed signs of change as hotels readied for guests and large cranes dotted the edge of town.

The area felt quiet and a bit subdued. Beautiful but in need of the next season to wake it up again. Still, it was meaningful to finally stand in the place where that part of my family's story began. The drive south the next morning felt less like leaving and more like closing a small loop and contemplating how I'll spend future visits to the area.

Venice: First Light

In 2020, I was officially recognized as an Italian citizen. It felt like walking into a part of myself I had only known through stories and photographs. Four years later, I set out to see Italy for myself.

The months leading up to our 2024 trip were a blur of lists and logistics, nine days of travel crammed with expectation. I wanted to honor where I came from--or at least the people two generations back who did. But travel is always a balancing act between personal longing and shared experience. I reminded myself it wasn't all about me.

We spent time in four places--Venice, the Dolomites, Cinque Terre, and Rome. This part of the story belongs to Venice.

After a red-eye flight and too many airport coffees, we were met in Italy by a driver and a private water taxi. It carried us from Leonardo da Vinci Airport across the lagoon and into the soft light of San Marco. This was just before Venice began charging a daily entry fee for visitors. We had booked a third-floor Airbnb after giving up on hotels that cost too much and offered too little. From the apartment's windows we could see the rooftops blush in the sunrise. The city was quiet. The bells still sounded like they did in another century.

Venice, without cars, feels like a dream someone remembered perfectly. The air holds a kind of stillness. Even the working boats move deliberately, contained to the broader canals. For a few hours every morning before the crowds, before my wife woke, I walked. I watched caretakers sweep Piazza San Marco clean. I listened to footsteps echo in the alleys. I took photographs, not to document but to make sense of the peace I felt.

It reminded me of Mackinac Island in my home state of Michigan--another place that banned cars and kept a fragile peace because of it. By 10 a.m., Venice begins to hum with motion, but in those early hours, it was just me and the stones and the rising sun.

I found myself wondering what it meant to live in a place like this--a lived-in museum, beautiful but burdened. I'd read about how short-term rentals pushed locals out, how the city was hollowing into a kind of stage set. The guilt of being a tourist wasn't lost on me. Yet our budget was tight, and the apartment gave us what hotels could not. I understood why the city introduced its daily fee for visitors, though I doubted it would make much difference. Limiting the number of beds might do more than limiting wallets.

Even so, I felt unexpectedly at ease in Venice. I thought I'd feel like a cliché, one more visitor flattening an experience that deserved reverence. But it wasn't like that. The city opened up in quiet ways. I read about the old Venetian Republic, how it had kept itself separate from the powers of Rome and beyond. That independence stirred something in me--a small, irrational pride, as if some fragment of it might have traveled through my bloodline. Maybe that's what belonging feels like, when you don't have to prove it.

We ate constantly. My wife tried sardines with onions, a local specialty that smelled as sharp as it looked. I stuck with lasagna--probably not a regional dish but one of the best I've ever had. There was pizza, gnocchi, and gelato near the Palazzo Ducale. We walked until the day faded into gold, from the Rialto Bridge through narrow streets toward the park at Sant'Elena. Parco delle Rimembranze was one of the few broad green spaces we found--a real breathing space amid the density. Dogs ran free, kids played, and for a moment it felt like an ordinary neighborhood.

Posters for the Biennale hung along the paths. We didn't have time to go inside, but seeing the art spill into the city felt fitting. Venice has always blurred the line between living and exhibiting.

When it came time to leave, we packed up and took a water taxi to the Piazzale Roma, caught the people mover across to Mestre, and picked up a small rental car for the road north to the Dolomites. I remember watching the skyline fade behind us, thinking how much quieter my mind had grown in just a few days.

I knew then that Venice would not be my last stop in Italy. But it was the first that made me feel, in the simplest way, like I had finally arrived.

In a landmark decision on Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that developers and home builders in California have the right to challenge fees imposed by cities and counties to fund essential public infrastructure such as roads, schools, and sewers. The justices expressed concerns that these "impact fees" could be deemed unconstitutional if they unfairly burden developers with the lion's share of public project costs.

This ruling marks a crescendo in what proponents describe as "market urbanism," a trend where public entities increasingly turn to market-based approaches to address urban challenges. Elected officials have recently gone to great lengths to accommodate developers in a bid to boost housing production, often at any cost. At a time when many communities can't afford to maintain the infrastructure they have, eliminating impact fees (system development charges) knee-caps cities' ability to improve pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, maintain parks, and make other infrastructure improvements to support added housing units.

This is a train wreck in slow motion. Who, for example, defines what constitutes an "unfair share" of infrastructure expenses? Low-density sprawl costs the most to build and maintain – subsidized by higher intensity development in the central city.

In their efforts to sidestep protracted legal battles, it will be communities that end up bearing the brunt of compromises as they find themselves in this no-win situation.

For more information, check out this article from the National Association of Counties.

These unit types have become more popular in recent years and a growing number of cities have made them legal to build. ADUs are great because they often allow aging parents or grandparents to live onsite with their kids or grandkids while maintaining some semblance of independence and privacy. Still others use them as short-term rentals to supplement their incomes and make their own housing more affordable. Middle Housing products also make housing more affordable by allowing more people to get into homeownership or into previously out-of-reach neighborhoods at a cost that can be considerably less than detached single-family homes.

Yet while these housing products do provide greater housing options at more affordable prices, urbanist online publications like Strong Towns would have us believe that these types of housing are illegal in most places and like to craft a narrative that if only cities and towns would change their policies, all our walkable city and affordable housing dreams would come true. And while there are many suburban areas across the country that don’t allow Middle Housing types, you’d be hard pressed to find any large central city or older inner-ring suburb anywhere worth living that doesn’t allow these housing types, and ADUs are allowed most places in America today.

Overall, it’s a great thing. These types of homes used to be more widely available in the early 20th Century, but became illegal with the rise of suburban areas across the county in the post WWII era, likely as a way to zone out lower income people in an attempt to maintain property values. Now, they are much more widely accepted, with some states are even mandating that cities allow them, which has the biggest impact in wealthy areas that try to zone them out.

But even if the products themselves are a little bit more affordable than detached single-family homes, Middle Housing is frequently lauded as a silver bullet to our housing affordability crisis, which I just don’t believe to be true. In my eyes, while certainly necessary, they are just the socially acceptable alternative for many communities not willing to build or take on the level of urban density that is truly needed.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, all of the big cities have allowed ADUs for decades, and Cities like Vancouver, Canada and Seattle, Washington are still some of the most expensive places to live in North America. Likewise, Oregon has legalized duplexes on any lot zoned for single family residential, and depending on the square footage of the lot, many properties can legally accommodate quadplexes. Oregon has even removed requirements for on-site parking for any property within 1/2 mile of a transit stop. But these cities don't allow apartment buildings above a certain height in most neighborhoods outside of their downtowns and certain commercial districts.

Furthermore, just allowing these housing types doesn’t mean that the market can or will build these products at levels that will have a meaningful impact on housing prices, particularly in areas of high demand on the coasts. Having worked at a municipality who processes these types of development applications, very few have come through and are actually in the pipeline.

Cities in North America need to get more comfortable with real density, like mid-rise and high-rise apartments and condos, because they are coming. The U.S. population in 1950 was less than half it is now and we cannot continue to accommodate that population in detached single-family homes in ever far-flung suburbs. Last I checked, we are not building many new cities from scratch, and people need to live somewhere.

Unfortunately, urban density gives Americans indigestion. Even so-called progressive places like Berkeley, California and Ann Arbor, Michigan are frequently in the news as their vocal residents come out to oppose new housing projects. Portlanders often lament “tear downs” in their neighborhoods - a phrase that means removing a traditional single-family residence to build higher density multifamily buildings. Berkeley was recently in the news after Cal started moving forward with student housing in a neighborhood park after years of protests from neighbors. This was so controversial that they stacked shipping containers at double height around the entire perimeter of the property as a safety measure.

But unlike conservative opposition, which is usually based in matters of income and class segregation, liberals more often use topics such as environmental protection, historic preservation, or neighborhood character as thinly-veiled arguments to maintain the status quo.

I understand people don't like change, but cities are dynamic places that need to adapt to our needs and change is on the horizon. Middle Housing, while one tool to assist in our housing woes, will never solve our housing affordability problems.

Most planners in the United States work within one of the country’s 89,000 local governments, each with its own set of rules, politics, and funding constraints. It is a slow-moving system shaped by history, bureaucracy, and competing interests. It is frustrating and messy, sometimes by design. Inside that system, the everyday work looks far less like visionary city-building and more like endless paperwork.

The day-to-day work of a planner is not glamorous. Many of us spend our days processing permits, reviewing site plans, and explaining the same zoning code sections to developers, realtors, and residents over and over again. We sit in countless meetings where ordinances are revised, debated, and revised again. We adopt land use changes based on new state or regional legal requirements that are sometimes deeply unpopular in our communities. And that's just the technical side of the job.

Beyond the paperwork, there is the public. We are shouted down at uncompensated night meetings with pleas from impassioned mothers or frustrated small business owners. We listen quietly to testimony about increased traffic congestion by the same person who vocally opposed the public transit bond. It's no wonder why so many of my planning school peers are no longer practicing planners. Burnout is real.

And yet, the biggest frustrations we face have little to do with the daily grind. For better or worse, we knew what we were signing up for. What frustrates us most is that much of the research about what makes communities successful, vibrant, and healthy places is already settled. Despite what we know from data, science, and best practices, planners are often asked to make recommendations that are ignored in favor of short-term political or financial decisions.

The projects many planners care about the most--such as expanding or improving sidewalks, bike lanes, transit, parks, affordable housing--depend on funding sources that are scarce or on decisions from leaders that are politically unpalatable. No planner can force a city to change its zoning code or fund infrastructure if its leaders or constituents oppose it. We are public servants who, despite expertise in our field, are ultimately beholden to political direction. In many communities, this reduces the role of planners to paper-pushers, stripped of creativity and public trust. Trying to set our own agenda risks being labeled as advocates--something many agencies discourage and that can even jeopardize a career. Even so, the profession continues to draw people who care deeply about their communities.

Of course, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all plan or code. Location, climate, local history, geography, and geology (to name only a few) all contribute to a city's character and success. Still, the impacts of land use and transportation planning decisions--on everything from housing affordability to happiness--is already well documented by existing research. That research is what keeps many planners engaged, because they see the world differently everywhere they go.

Most planners entered the profession because they wanted to make their communities better. We move through the world scanning streets, parks, and buildings for lessons, always asking how a place could function or feel better. We take mental notes from other cities when something works well, hoping to bring those ideas home. We read legal challenges and books about parking for fun. It's more than just a job. It's a lens through which we view the entirety of the world. It's with us everywhere we go. It's passion as much as affliction. And yet for all that passion, public debate still circles around short-term fixes instead of long-term truths.

So without further ado, below is a list of things planners know. Here are some of the strongest, evidence-based findings:

• Traffic congestion is primarily associated with dispersed, low-density development patterns and limited street connectivity (e.g. cul-de-sacs) and chronic underinvestment in public transit, not just the number of vehicle lanes provided.
• Abundant surface parking creates places people don't value and can deaden neighborhoods. They lower land values, reduce walkability, and are correlated with higher vehicle miles traveled.
• Human-centered transportation, such as sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails create healthier, safer, and more resilient communities than car-only design.
• Land use and transportation projects that displace or fragment low-income or marginalized populations are associated with long-term social and economic harm.
• Conservation of natural resources and provision of parks and open space are associated with improved public health and higher property values.
• Housing supply constraints, including exclusionary zoning and restrictive land use regulations, are some of the biggest contributors to higher housing costs and reduced affordability.
• Compact, mixed-use development patterns are correlated with lower per-capita infrastructure costs, shorter trip lengths, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
• Communities with diverse transportation options and higher densities have lower household transportation costs and reduced energy use.
• Low-density sprawl typically generates less tax revenue per acre than is required to cover the full cost of its infrastructure and services.
• The construction and maintenance of road networks are often subsidized by higher-density, higher-value properties (including but not limited to apartments), which produce greater tax revenues relative to their infrastructure costs.
• Access to green space and walkable environments is associated with lower stress levels, reduced depression and anxiety, and improved overall mental health.
• Neighborhoods with accessible public spaces and opportunities for informal social interaction are linked to stronger feelings of belonging, higher levels of trust, and greater social cohesion.
• Walkable, mixed-use districts tend to generate higher retail sales per square foot and support more small businesses compared to auto-oriented commercial corridors.
• Regions with diverse housing options are more likely to retain and attract workforce talent, a factor directly tired to economic competitiveness.

What planners know and what planners do will probably never fully align. The work will always be shaped by politics, budgets, and public opinion. But the research is clear and lessons are consistent. Our challenge (as well as our hope) is to keep finding ways to translate that knowledge into action, even when the system makes it difficult.