I love hearing about a company for the first time and hating them immediately
Blue sky nice ghost
A triplex with (3) three bedroom units on a 2500 square foot lot gets you to a bedroom density of 157 bedrooms/acre in a three story wood frame building, if you do 4 bedroom units you get to 210 bedrooms per acre.
Shipping containers do not make good homes
Honestly I feel like this understood by just about everyone except for certain types of architects and planning consultants, and elected officials looking for "anything but conventional multifamily housing" solutions to housing problems
If you look at older cities like Brooklyn the parcels are even narrower and you get a higher density even in low rise buildings
Proposing sand-set pavers is pretty much an automatic no in any American municipality. That’s sometimes just conservatism but its also a rational reaction to the unfortunate reduction in maintenance budgets in favor of capital projects.
Given the weird psychology people have about attached, semi-detached, and detached houses I think whether or not they have a party wall is actually super important!
Everywhere I go in America I am trying to push the houses closer together with my mind
Density is good and side setbacks reduce density. What makes San Francisco dense is 25' x 100' parcels. If you put 3-4 units on those lots (or even a duplex with very large 3+ bedroom units) you get a pretty high density that can be served by transit
An underrated addendum to the Bowling Alone story is that North America's largest bowling operator (Bowlero) is a publicly traded company whose business model involves buying mom and pop alleys, shutting down the leagues, and trying to attract casual, higher paying, one-off players.
BART needs 186k signatures by June to get a transit-saving tax measure on the ballot. More from @esksf.bsky.social at @missionlocal.org here:
missionlocal.org/2026/03/bart...
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
What's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?
