Some shorter, “fun” posts that I’ve published over at Greater Greater Washington over the past several months. Over there, they call this the “Living Urbanism” beat.
Achoo! Every spring, we’re treated to a new round of social media posts blaming “botanical sexism” for seasonal allergies. It’s a tempting tale, especially for those inclined to find a systematic abuse of power hiding behind every wrong.
Taking the bus can help you avoid all kinds of traffic headaches in greater Washington — even weekend traffic at Shenandoah National Park. Two local hiking clubs charter buses to bring people on outdoor adventures outside of DC on most weekends.
Maybe you, too, have already swatted away – or worse, been bitten by – mosquitoes despite the early date on the calendar. Usually, mosquitoes are a problem only in DC’s notoriously damp late summer, and especially given the bitter winter that just passed. If you’re in central DC, you might be able to blame cars, or more specifically underground parking garages, for creating year-round mosquito sanctuaries.
A few years ago, our contributors offered up suggestions of places to enjoy train views around town. Continued development along the region’s rail corridors now means there are new spots to combine food and drink with a side of railroad views – perfect locations to observe trains, perhaps with summer visitors.
Multi-use trails around the Washington region come in many different shapes and sizes. Here are several types of trails graded on a scale from 1 to 3 stars.
In “a successful city district”, “Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones – or rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is, of course, a dynamic process, with what was once new in the mixture eventually becoming what is old in the mixture.” Jane Jacobs, Death and Life, page 189
The economics of redevelopment demand jarring increases in scale; throwing away an existing building is incredibly costly, and it takes a whole lot of additional density to recoup that cost. (Auto-centric suburban boxes sit in the very middle of their sites, and often must be thrown away to accommodate buildings at the street edge.) Planners have to learn to accept that there is no magically unnoticeable “incrementalist” approach, besides gentrification and 1-for-1 displacement. The only way to absorb increasing demand and maintain a uniform scale is through wholesale clearance and reconstruction at a much higher scale.
There’s an old builders’ rule called “the 4X rule,” stated by Joel Garreau as “a new house must sell for… the price of the land under it times four. If you build too much house on the land, it will not sell because it will be viewed as too expensive for the neighborhood. If you build too little, it will be viewed as substandard, given the price.” For multifamily, hard costs per square foot are higher, and it’s more like 6-10X, but at least the price can be divided among more people.
This implies that every redevelopment has to at least quadruple the value of the site. That implies a range of possibilities: – a redevelopment at the same size will be 4X more expensive per square foot – a redevelopment twice the size will be 2X more expensive – a redevelopment four times the size will be as expensive If you want prices to be lower, not higher, you have to allow much, much more building.
This was borne out by research by Tobias Peter et al into Seattle neighborhoods, where thousands of houses were redeveloped, many into townhouses. When four units replaced one unit, the new units sold for about the same price as the unit that was replaced. When five or more units replaced one unit, the new units sold for less. But when one new (and usually much larger) house replaced one old house, the new house sold for almost three times more than the old house.
Presentation given for Welcoming Neighbors Network, based on a forthcoming article submitted to Greater Greater Washington (will be updated in the future with a link).
Thank you for providing the opportunity to testify regarding Bill 26-227, the One Front Door Act of 2025. My name is Payton Chung; I am a Ward 6 resident, an infill residential developer, and a longtime contributor to, and now acting chair of, Greater Greater Washington Commons. I have written twice in GGWash about how single-stair buildings can improve overall life safety and about how single-stair buildings are already found throughout DC’s historic neighborhoods.
Building codes, like all regulations, necessarily balance public safety with cost. Today, homebuyers in our high-cost region often turn to existing buildings, or to residential code structures such as townhouses. These lack many of the fire protections found in the more stringent commercial code, such as sprinklers and fire-rated walls and doors. The One Front Door Act offers a path forward to moderate the cost of safer commercial-code structures on smaller infill sites.
Current double-egress rules force most apartments above three stories into double-loaded corridor layouts with units facing interior hallways and windows on only one side, preventing natural ventilation. Single-stair reforms would enable better-ventilated apartments with windows on multiple sides, particularly beneficial for family-friendly units, while maintaining modern fire safety standards through sprinklers and other protections.
McLean Gardens in Ward 3, built during World War II to house war workers, received a temporary Fire Escape Act waiver allowing four-story wood-framed buildings with single exit staircases. The development features narrow buildings wrapped around landscaped courtyards with 31 entrances, each serving just a few apartments.
Harbour Square in Ward 6 uses “scissor stairs”—combining two stairs in the space of one—enabling slender tower designs with cross-ventilated units. Unlike today’s double-loaded corridor buildings, these historical examples offered diverse unit types including family-sized three-bedroom apartments, with single-stair layouts allowing windows on multiple sides and units facing the outdoors rather than hallways.
Seeing a photograph of streetlights on during the day in Pittsburgh prompted me to investigate how bad air pollution really was back then. Voila: a 1979 journal article by Cliff Davidson notes that typical Total Suspended Particulates (a now-deprecated measure) in Chicago in 1913 were 0.3-2.0 mg/m3, with a maximum of 9.3. Cleveland in 1915 reported an average of 14.3 mg/m3, and Pittsburgh was estimated at <7 mg/m3. All of those are many, many times higher than the current EU limit, which is 0.15 mg/m3 – about 99% lower than Cleveland a century ago.
The Baltimore Museum of Art currently has an interesting exhibit of art from the turn of the last century, with a bit of added context: how gosh-darn smoke-filled the skies were back then. “Smog was visually stimulating and helped Monet see his urban environment in new ways.” It translates hazy scenes of London and Paris into air quality scores that would be nightmarish for present-day Americans, or challenging even for current residents of developing-world cities.
Some thoughtful things I’ve read or heard recently:
Danielle Allen was among the most brilliant profs I ever had in college, and this podcast interview with the Metropolitan Abundance Project does not disappoint. I wish I’d heard this advice from Allen before ever going to planning school: “Planner: yes, give us the macro concept. Then, ask the question of: what actions do we need to take in our local context that would actually achieve that macro concept? Then, how do we use a combination of carrots and sticks to deliver that — and along the way, how do we check that the things we’re doing… achieve alignment with our high priority values?”
Instead, the “implementation” section of a plan was always treated like an afterthought at best and a joke at worst, just taking goals and almost randomly assigning them out. Much of my “What a Planner Learned” presentation was exactly asking about the actions cities need to take to actually achieve Middle Housing abundance.
“There’s a million things we could do. It’s just a matter of shifting the status quo, building the political will, shifting the culture in order to make all of these things happen as quickly as possible. There’s room for innovation, but there’s absolutely nothing that we need to wait for.” Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us, paraphrasing Katherine W. Phillips: “It’s the mental friction that creates diversity’s productive energy”. Phillips: “When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not… This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.” In Kahnemann’s terminology, a diverse group offers a prompt to push thinking through to the slower but better System 2.
Saving this Greg Shill quote for my streetcar museum speech about the end of the era: “Lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties… Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy.”
“The American love affair with the automobile” was always a myth — corporate propaganda, in fact, coined for DuPont (then 23% owner of GM). And now cars are increasingly shunned as yesteryear’s technology.
“Once I dipped a toe into the story of preppy clothes, I quickly realized this was a much, much larger tale. It is—hear me out— perhaps, the most incredible fashion arc of the 20th century. The story is long and ramifying and extremely revealing about American notions of taste, class and democracy.” – the introduction to “American Ivy,” a podcast/blog series about the history of what in my youth I had assumed was exclusionary apparel — but turns out to be an incredibly American story about reinvention and simulacra, starring Asian photographers, Jewish tailors, and African American musicians.
Apartment buildings have lower population densities than other land uses, so office to residential conversion could reduce overall population density.
Site news! I’ve put up a searchable archive of my Tweets at https://paytonchung.github.io, principally for my own reference. I’m probably most often at Bluesky, though I also maintain a Mastodon account.
Get the crowd back together: Office conversions won’t be enough to rebuild downtowns’ population density. Just converting existing office buildings to residences won’t be enough to stop the “urban doom loop,” because apartment buildings contain many fewer people than similarly sized office buildings do. Fewer people means fewer services, which after all, serve people. Maintaining those services with a population of residents will require much higher population densities – and many new buildings – rather than just conversions.
The 1% solution: Regulating new construction is a really slow way to change an entire city. Regulating today’s new construction is a very slow way to address tomorrow’s social needs, since almost all of tomorrow’s houses and buildings were built…yesterday. Even the most radical changes to newly built homes won’t change much about America’s housing situation until decades from now. (Unless, of course, a lot more buildings start getting built.)
What’s the deal with single-tenant retail buildings? Despite thoughtful GGWash articles asking for something else, single-story retail buildings stubbornly hold on in many prominent locations, and sometimes even multiply. Surprisingly, a freestanding chain store can often be the highest-value use of a piece of land. That’s because commercial real estate investors in the U.S. offer favorable terms to owners and tenants of these ubiquitous retail boxes, making them more lucrative than other buildings.
Of course, something this different doesn’t exist in isolation; there are systemic differences between Japanese and American fire response that allow and even require smaller trucks.
There are more, but smaller, trucks. Japan has smaller, specialized fire and rescue trucks, whereas America chooses to have larger, generalist trucks. Nagata Shozo, a disaster mitigation administration professor at Kansai University, says in a recent NHK documentary (see ~5m in): “In other countries, you may see a single vehicle that combines firefighting and rescue equipment… in Japan, we have a tradition of specialization… We improve the vehicles’ specific uses and capabilities, and when it comes to dealing with emergency, vehicles with different special features are used in combination to tackle the situation.”
At many fire stations I saw vehicles parked nose-to-tail, with garage doors on both sides of the building. A peek inside the Mukojima Fire Station in eastern Tokyo shows a second set of doors behind perhaps a dozen vehicles, including conventional trucks and van-sized ambulances. That is much larger than my brand-new local fire station (Engine #13, Truck #10, Ambulance #13), which has just five bays.
Equally capable equipment is smaller. A ladder truck inside the Shiba Fire Station is about the size of a typical US fire truck. This station is surrounded by new high-rises along the waterfront just south of the Imperial Palace.
A NACTO/Volpe report from 2018 calls out ladder trucks in particular as being peculiarly over-sized: “Aerial ladder fire trucks used in major European and Asian cities can reach just as high, despite being only two-thirds as long and having only half of the turn radius as common American models.”
By the way, the Shiba station was huge, with eight ranks of vehicles and garage doors in front and back.
There are even smaller vehicles. Note the rescue motorcycle at the right edge of the garage at the Arakawa Fire Department, Otonashigawa Branch. There were even cargo bicycles parked behind it. These can reach medical situations quickly even in pedestrian zones, or after earthquakes when roads may not be clear. (Mukojima above also had motorcycles.)
Fire stations are more numerous, and often mixed-use. Shinjuku-gyoen and Shiba are 3 miles apart, and there are five other fire stations in between them – meaning about one station every half-mile. Central Tokyo is dense, but not absurdly so; these areas have the population density of Brooklyn or the Bronx, not Manhattan.
A downside of having so many fire stations is that the land footprint is extensive, but that’s mitigated by combining fire stations into mixed-use buildings. None of the urban fire stations I saw were single-story structures.
This isn’t just in urban areas; it also means putting fire trucks in remote areas, like this one stationed at the Enryaku-ji temple complex atop Mount Hiei east of Kyoto:
The small trucks respond to historically narrow streets – and enable narrow streets into the future. These tiny fire trucks can fight fires and respond to medical emergencies even though Japanese streets are famously narrow (often 4m, sometimes narrower), and just as importantly they allow new streets to be narrow as well. Contrast that with the absolute narrowest street I can build in Raleigh, which is 6.7m wide (34% wider) and requires a 40′ long fire truck turnaround.
Whatever they’re doing, it works. Japan’s fire death rate is substantially below America’s, which is notable given that its cities have historically been even more fire-prone than US cities. America’s “era of great urban fires” was over a century ago; by then, Tokyo alone had seen 49 large-scale urban fires in the preceding two centuries.
More importantly, given that the death rate for car crashes in the US (128 per million) is about ten times higher than the fire death rate (13 per million), the narrow streets and slower speeds found in Japan contribute to a traffic death rate that’s 3/4 lower per capita and 2/3 lower per vehicle.
Further reading:
99% Invisible on “First Errand” (aka “Old Enough”) and how Japan’s narrow streets are key to independent kids and family-friendly cities
Update Nov 2025: Nashville added eight pickup-truck-based “squad response vehicles” to its fleet, each of which cost 83% less than an aerial truck, and has “seen a 50% reduction in wear and tear on our larger apparatus”. The new vehicles still have fire hoses, as well as rescue and medical equipment. Ward Apparatus has an overview of its smaller equipment.
This housing type, typical of medium-density lakefront neighborhoods in Chicago (see Moss Design), is a low-rise version of a European perimeter block. Multiple apartment entrances are arrayed around a courtyard, each reaching up to six flats (one on either side, for three floors). The deep courtyard evolved (see Ultra Local Geography) from the practice of putting apartment entrances along both streets on corner lots, and a clever response to Chicago’s relatively deep lots. They’re not quite single stair point-access blocks, though: each apartment technically also accesses a second stair — an exterior fire escape, usually built as a sociable rear porch. (21st-century building codes do not count this as a legal egress.) Courtyard apartments also allow for shallower, more usable interior floor plans; unlike mid-century “garden apartments” they structure open space into urbane settings.
The Smith/Gill team found that courtyard apartments had:
lowest embodied CO2 for buildings and infrastructure combined
lowest operating energy demand
94% land savings vs. suburban houses
density that enables energy-efficient transportation modes
In some sense, this shouldn’t be surprising: the high construction costs and operating costs for high-rises are, in large part, paying for large quantities of carbon-intensive materials and energy to go into their construction and operation. The high operating energy demand reflects the large building surface areas that tall buildings have, as well as inefficient floor plans with extensive interior spaces. In a skyscraper, everyone on floor 150 has to travel indoors past everyone on floors 1-149 to get to anything outside the building; in a courtyard apartment building, most of that travel is outdoors.
Most striking to me is the density effect: high-rises aren’t incredibly more land efficient (shown by the green bars) than low-rise multifamily. For the same population, three-story apartments use 87.1% less land than suburban houses, courtyard apartments use 94.2% less, and high-rises uses 97-99% less land. Thus, low-rise apartments offer 90-97% of the land savings that high-rises do.
This paper also didn’t consider CO2 emissions from transportation: almost 1/3 of all US CO2. (The US accounts for 45% of the whole world’s transport CO2!) The greatest potential for transport CO2 reductions is to raise low densities to moderate, not high to higher: “the relationship between density and emissions is nonlinear,” says Grist about a PNAS journal article by Conor Gately — echoing Newman & Kenworthy’s finding from 1999.
