Do you know Robert Moses? I feel like those two people have pretty much ruined America, and almost no one has heard of them.

I just purchased a house in Golden, CO, where I have all of the things you're talking about - walkable, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores in tolerably close distance.

I'm trying to get Golden to legalize a style of building that would make all of these good things more plentiful and more affordable.

I am writing about two competing "visions" for a block of what is currently a surface parking lot in downtown Golden.

One option is not pleasant, the other option is delightful, and illegal.

I bet it'll all be right up your alley:

https://josh.works/#what-this-newsletter-is-about

A lot of my interest in this area comes from a life-long appreciation of (non-pejorative) anarchist philosophical thought. It's a lot harder to build organization from the bottom-up, but top-down organization loses so much implicit knowledge and context that it seems reasonable to investigate the former approach.

I'll check out your newsletter, it seems so interesting, thank you for linking. :)

criminally undervalued for people trying to understand why the world is the way that it is.

I talk extensively about Robert Moses in my newsletter, but as you might imagine it's hard to summarize a 1400 page book in a handful of emails, so I haven't quite figured out exactly how well the looping Robert Moses's story into the greater narrative I'm trying to convey.

I would love your thoughts on the newsletter as you read through it!

I just started rereading Jane jacobs's "the death and life of great American cities"

I'm sure at some point I'll be looping it into the newsletter as well.

I'm with you on the non pejorative anarchist philosophical thought.

Not necessarily anything to do with anarchy, but more about the value generation of spontaneous, self-organized, responsive, iterative, goal-seeking behavior at an individual level.

Have you heard of "The problem of political authority: the right course and the duty to obey" or "seeing like a state: why schemes to improve the human condition fail"

as if you're reading list isn't already long enough, these might be worthwhile additions.

It's more interesting to me than video games (though at times it can be vastly more frustrating than even the worst video game!)

I expect this is a project I will be working on for a very long time. It's actually rather comforting to feel like I have something that could span decades, and remain satisfying, relevant, and renumerative.

Thanks for the kind words!

A move abroad seems likely in the next 10 years.

Which city is that? I'm not aware of any US cities with sane zoning.

To me that means no minimum square footage, minimal set back rules, no garage restrictions, no height restrictions, no restrictions on multi-units and ADUs, and limited or no restrictions on mixed use.

It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/28/a-history-of-z...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/the-birth...

https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/

https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2016/02/american-zoning-as-...

The first zoning laws in SF were used to selectively drive out Chinese people.

Just want to make sure that this often hidden part of zoning is above the fold.

It's also largely why racial segregation and housing wealth has not changed at all over the past 50 years. The laws are used to prevent integrations if communities, ensure that infrastructure like schools are unevenly distributed, and enforce our current racial divisions.