- 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.
- Three recent posts I’ve written for Greater Greater Washington:
- 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.
- Speaking of things I wrote about in GGWash (ten years ago), economists Michael Eriksen and Anthony Orlando discovered the “hidden height limit” (aka construction cost discontinuity) that keeps buildings below eight stories.
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