pro - higher turnout, cheaper to run one set of elections
Con - voters probably less informed about local issues of national politics dominate news cycle. I also worry it’s harder to maintain non-partisan nature of local races If local candidates are running against national election backdrop
Tantissimo or Otto’s
Also to @neilkornutick.bsky.social original question, I think there is a much broader political constituency for ped safety than bike. Everyone is a pedestrian. Biking (as much as I love it!) is pretty niche
Agree on both fronts. That seems way cheaper than sidewalk. Use precast concrete drilled in like a flex post. Any reason we aren’t building these all over town? I can think of tons of places near me with plenty of right of way where you could pop these in
this seems like something we could use way more of (ideally with sturdier and more visually appealing than flex posts). We aren’t going to get good sidewalk coverage at the 1000+ per foot cost that it takes to build traditional sidewalk with curb and gutter. $5m a mile is too much money
i never suggested turning McCabe into housing (understand others did). I’m just responding to your claim the golf course serves a lot of people. My math is that, at peak usage, it serves 5 people per acre per day, which is not the best way to use urban recreational land
if a group of 4 starts every 6 minutes On each of the 3 9-hole courses, that’s fewer than 1k golfers per day on a 200 acre piece of land. >10k people per day walk the greenway which takes up a fraction of the space. It could be far more used as an 18 hole course with 1/3 of it used as a real park
As a starting point with McCabe, they should take down the non safety related fences they’ve just put up and let people go for walks on the course paths after hours again
He’s carving it out of a bill that reduces heights. I get that the truly correct answer may be to zone it for more density, but what’s the benefit of reducing allowable heights in an urban core neighborhood? i feel like I’m misunderstanding something
But the parcels he is exempting aren’t currently zoned DTC are they?
Isn’t he carving it out from a bill that reduces heights? That seems good?
Only in the residential character area
And not just on that lot! Supply helps the most further down the affordability spectrum
www.pew.org/en/research-...
Does replica do simulations - eg what happens if I build a new apartment building here or upzone an area and it adds people over time? I don’t understand why developers pay for traffic studies when we have replica.
Maybe the Boring Company can dig a tunnel from the main terminal to the new satellite terminal at the airport so you don’t have to take a bus to the budget airlines
Here is a link to a non paywalled prepub version of the paper. Worth a read in full www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...
To be clear, this chart just the relative cost of homes before and after on that parcel. This (afaik) doesn’t give any credit for the fact that a 4 home development also takes 3 families out of competition for other homes nearby
New cars are expensive and mostly bought by affluent people. But when there was a chip shortage in 2021, used car prices went way up because there wasn’t enough new car supply for people to trade up. Our zoning code is a self-imposed shortage of well-located land. It drives up prices of all housing
Don’t love this take. One of the best things about Metro is that it’s non-partisan and you can work with people you usually disagree with. I haven’t thought deeply (read: at all) about the merits of this issue, but CMs should work with everyone.
For example, there are lots of good reasons we don’t let healthcare work as pure market especially for elderly people. Just don’t see the same types of issues in housing
For me, the thing that would change my mind would be a clear articulation of why housing is somehow intrinsically different than other important things we buy (eg food, transportation, etc) that it warrants an extraordinary level of government control or that market forces don’t apply the same way
Real question - I promise I’m not trolling. Are you open minded on this issue? Is there a set of facts that could persuade you that we should zone for greater housing supply? If so, what kind of evidence would move your position?
You’re right - tomatoes are probably a bad example. Our ag policy does include a lot of weird subsidies and is widely agreed to be a debacle. I’d like housing policy to look less like that.
Yeah - it’s not how we run anything else in our economy. We don’t pass laws to make sure we build just the right number of cars or plant just the right number of tomatoes. Centrally planned economies have a pretty poor track record. Yet for this one big thing, we insist on central planning.
Ah I see. Seems like no matter how you slice it the city has grown a ton in the last decade despite several atypical years around a pandemic and has returned to growth post COVID. Seems like we need to build more housing!
It’s not wfh. Job growth in Davidson county is faster than population growth. Maybe more people are commuting from the suburbs because the city is too expensive! If they just want a bigger yard, then fine, upzoning won’t produce much development because the homes won’t sell!
And the city lost ~3-4 years of growth around COVID as people moved to suburbs. Would probably be 750+ but for that
I’m not sure I follow. 200k over 25 years is 8k per year people added. If we were at 645 in 2015 (your number above), then 8k per year over the intervening 9 years would be 717. We are at 729 according to census/ACS data for 2024.
Census says 729k in 2024. Agree that if we built more housing to reduce gentrification pressure it would be higher instead of pushing so much development to Rutherford and Wilson Counties
www.census.gov/quickfacts/f...
