Deregulate Parking, Says Obama Administration

Great to see the Obama administration come out in favor of housing for people over storage for cars:

“Parking requirements generally impose an undue burden on housing development, particularly for transit-oriented or affordable housing,” the paper states. “When transit-oriented developments are intended to help reduce automobile dependence, parking requirements can undermine that goal by inducing new residents to drive, thereby counteracting city goals for increased use of public transit, walking and biking.”

The anti-parking stance came from a “Housing Development Toolkit,” a broadside against zoning. The report says zoning “reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand,” making affordable housing hard to find in high-price areas.

Nixing off-street parking is not the paper’s only recommendation. It also advocates taxing vacant land, making it easier to get permits and making cities more dense.

This is the opposite of a big government mandate - it's the Obama White House urging communities to get rid of local regulations that restrict new housing and smart growth.

Sustainable Cities Have Slimmer Residents

Michael Humphrey writes at Salon.com about how he lost 80 pounds after moving to New York City:

Back in the Midwest, where I lived my entire adult life, the most common question was, "How did you do it?" Some people asked with a wink and nod -- you know those vain coastal people and their shortcuts. No, I didn't have surgery, didn't take supplements, didn't hire a trainer or even buy a miracle-cure book.

I walked more, and I ate less.

Part of my diet plan was simple necessity. Back home, I drove a car everywhere I went. I cherry-picked parking spots to get as close to the door as possible, shaving my walk to the minimum. But my normal daily walk in New York City was about three miles, just getting to school, walking to work either in Greenwich Village or Midtown and meeting my friends and wife for dinner.

It's not just living in the city - it's about living in a city designed to facilitate walking & biking:

Cities and states with more sidewalks and bike paths tend to have slimmer residents than locations where people must rely on non-active, car transportation, a new study finds.

Those cities with the highest levels of active commuting and lower obesity rates tended to be the older U.S. cities with well-developed public transit systems in the Northeast (Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.) and on the West Coast (Seattle and San Francisco). More than 10 percent of work trips in these cities involved walking or biking, said study researcher David Bassett, of the Obesity Research Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Do Environmentalists Have a Fear of Heights?

Must-read article from The Atlantic on why, in most cases, conservationists shouldn't support height restrictions on new construction.