Author Archives: Niloo Nouri

Patrick Kennedy gave a tribute to Betty Olds at her retirement party eight years ago. Olds died on July 16, but, Kennedy says, what he said applies as much today as it did then.

Advocates and cities see challenges and opportunities in tiny homes’ path to the mainstream

“Of course, ‘tiny home’ is a term that has no meaning.”  Dan George Dobrowolski firmly believes that the best spaces are small spaces.

From Los Angeles to London, civic leaders are searching for creative ways to combine technology and high design to shelter their cities’ growing homeless populations. In Sacramento, where tent villages have brought unwelcome national headlines, a home-builder-turned-councilman and an ambitious MIT-trained developer believe they may have the answer to solving the housing predicament.

High housing costs continue to be at the center of policy debates in Los Angeles—and across much of the state. This intensifying focus is warranted now more than ever given how the crisis has moved from simply eating up the disposable income of residents to slowing overall employment growth in coastal economies – something driven by a lack of available workers, which in turn is driven by the housing shortage.

I have bad news for those who oppose new housing, support suburban sprawl, enjoy subjecting working people to long commutes, and who think preserving gas stations is more important than allowing kids to grow up in vibrant cities: YIMBY’s  from across the country are gathering in Oakland this week.

Richard Florida, urban studies professor at the University of Toronto and author of “The New Urban Crisis” discussed how cities are increasing inequality and how pockets of concentrated wealth and poverty are squeezing out the middle class.

After an hour of debate, Herb Perez had had enough. Perez, a councilman in the Bay Area suburb of Foster City, was tired of planning for the construction of new homes to comply with a 50-year-old state law designed to help all Californians live affordably.

YIMBYs! Socialists! The only thing the Bay Area’s tenant activists hate more than high rent is each other.

Local politics is always, in one way or another, about housing. In San Francisco, a deep blue city whose fault lines long ago ceased to resemble America’s, that politics is a vitriolic civic scrimmage, where people who agree about almost every national issue make sworn enemies over zoning, demolition, and development.