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Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It a.co/d/aPlq04R
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
52.4K posts
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
the once and future city planner // senior director at CALIFORNIA YIMBY // AICP // kentuckian // #BBN // author of hit broadway musical arbitrary lines
- Gmail search is amazing. You can search something like "flight sacramento receipt 2023" and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn't the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.
- It's wild how Starbucks went from classic "third place" to the cutting edge of hostile architecture in a span of like a decade.
- Pennsylvania is low key the king of American urbanism. It's like a time capsule, you've got hundreds of little towns and dozens of midsized cities where normal middle class people are still living in townhouses, shopping at corner shops, and walking for a daily errands.I love Pennsylvania because you'll find random towns in the middle of nowhere that are more dense and walkable than every sunbelt city
- I've literally never clicked copied and pasted text and thought, "I'm so glad it kept the formatting and font from the other document."
- I'm forever thinking of this Reddit thread: "What did a Roman parking lot look like?"
Without history we tend to consider the status quo normal, and other possibilities anomalous. But the original proponents of today's status quo on US streets called their own position "radical," and the status quo we live with every day was their far-fetched, radical aspiration. - For the price of Santa Monica bungalow, you can own the largest building in St. Louis.Oh, no. The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ. In 2006, it sold for $205 million.
- For 40 years, the Los Angeles mandated that every new high-rise install a helicopter pad on the roof on the basis of fire safety. The theory? A helicopter might land on a burning building and evacuate occupants.
- Parts and labor, I'm confident we can install a bus shelter for $500.
Replying to @KounkueyTypical bus shelters often cost $50k or more and require coordination among 8 departments. La Sombrita (in its most expensive, prototype form) costs approximately 15% of the price of a typical bus shelter and can be installed in 30 minutes or less. - The entire point of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is to protect its fragile contents from direct sunlight while allowing for a warm glow through the marble, you philistines.
Replying to @the_culturist_First is sacrifice. Buildings must have visible proof of the love and dedication that went into them. Today, we generally produce the largest result for the least cost, shaving any "unnecessary" detail or material from the design... - To whoever is doing this to scifi book covers: I just want to talk.
- Something I've been thinking about a lot: In a recent 5Cast episodes, Andrew Callaghan made an off-hand comment about how nearly all of the recently-minted conspiracy theorists he has talked to mention "Ancient Aliens" as being a watershed moment.One of the greatest Russian psyops was convincing millions of crayon-eating pudding brains that they could do their own research. The idea was to break down trust in the West in institutions, education, and experience - and it worked.
