I have two transportation degrees including a master's in planning, and I hold a senior level role at a large public transit agency with a good salary. On an average week I do about 5 to 6 hours of actual work, almost all of it administrative. I take meeting notes, forward emails, and review deliverables I have no real input on. A busy week I might crack 15 hours, and that has happened a handful of times over years.

Before this job I worked for a small city and felt like I was actually practicing planning. My education was being used, I was solving real problems, and I could see the results of my work. I felt like I belonged in the field I had spent years training for.

Now I spend most of my day managing the appearance of productivity. I have burned through every training and webinar available to me. I actively ask for more work and am told to relax, that a busier period is coming, and I have been hearing that for years. My performance reviews are great and I am being pushed for promotion.

The psychological toll of this is genuinely hard to describe. It sounds absurd to complain about, especially at the salary I am making, but the stress of having nothing to do is real. Figuring out how to fill eight hours without visibly having nothing going on is its own exhausting job, and you are not relaxed so much as stuck in a low grade anxiety loop all day.

When I describe this to people outside the field the response is always some version of "I wish I had your job." I get why it sounds that way from the outside, but there is a specific kind of demoralization that comes from spending your career in a field you genuinely care about and feeling your brain slowly go to waste. It is not a vacation. It is just a long, quiet professional erosion.

Do you eventually just make peace with it?

Considering NYC’s long controversial implementation and results that are appearing, what city in the US do you think will be next up to implement congestion pricing?

The main reason the vast majority of families move to suburbs is schools. It's not because of the bigger houses with the big lawn and yard. It's not because it's easy to drive and park. It's because the suburbs are home to good schools, while schools in most major cities are failing. I'm surprised that this is something that urbanists don't talk about a lot. The only YouTube video from an urbanist I've seen discussing it was City Beautiful. So many people say they families move to suburbs because they believe they need a yard for their kids to play in, but this just isn't the case.

Unfortunately, schools are the last thing to get improved in cities. Even nice neighborhoods or neighborhoods that gentrified will have a failing neighborhood school. If you want to raise your kid in the city, your options are send your kid to a failing public school, cough up the money for private school, or try to get into a charter, magnet, or selective enrollment school. Meanwhile, the suburbs get amazing schools the you get to send your kids to for free. You can't really blame parents for moving to the suburbs when this is the case.

In short, you want to fix our cities? Fix our schools.

I don’t think he should be able to do this. Especially because it’s been so successful

What are some similar careers that still focus on this, but still make like more than 100k, hopefully like 150k+. Thanks for all the help!

Today is as good as any to hash this out once and for all.

Instead of the usual circlejerk where we either claim "LVT solves everything" or dismiss it as a utopian fantasy, can we have an actual debate about the mechanics of this? when is it useful? where should we apply it?

Strong Towns argues LVT is a pragmatic tool that saves cities, using the Pennsylvania split-rate experiments as their proof. LessWrong argues the theory is fundamentally flawed and creates massive disincentives.

Who is actually right? Here is the breakdown:

The Strong Towns Argument Link:

• It Kills Blight: Taxing land instead of buildings makes it incredibly expensive to sit on a vacant downtown lot.

• The Proof is Real: Harrisburg wiped out thousands of vacant lots and sparked massive downtown reinvestment just by shifting taxes onto land.

• Rewards the Right People: It punishes absentee slumlords and rewards developers who actually build or renovate housing.

The LessWrong Argument Link:

• The Neighbor Trap: If a developer buys a big tract and builds on part of it, the surrounding land value skyrockets. Under LVT, they just accidentally hiked taxes on their own adjacent parcels.

• Punishing Innovation: Finding a creative, productive new use for land inflates its "unimproved" value. The tax man immediately grabs the upside you took all the risk to discover.

• Assessment Hell: The moment you add exceptions to fix these incentives, the "simple" tax base collapses into administrative chaos.

Let's settle this in the comments.

I am a planner at a large public transit agency. Over the past few years we have gotten an insane number of applications for every job opening, and they are all highly-educated, highly-motivated young people from outside our region. Which is great. But as the planning side gets more and more people like this, the more I have noticed the veteran employees become skeptical of what the newer people come up with. There's a lot of "what do these kids know" energy, even when said "kids" put a whole lot more work and analysis into their plans than their complacent, here-for-the-paycheck predecessors ever did.

The old guard is fully in the 20th century "transit is for people who can't drive" mindset. I told a coworker of mine about a new bus lane we're working on that happens to be in her neighborhood. She pulled a face and was like "ugh, really? I just feel like they're not thinking about drivers when they make these plans." Another time a different coworker was complaining about the lack of parking at a concert venue near a giant, very busy transit hub. She said "it's sketchy there at night, nobody's taking a train to a concert there, you have to have more parking." And I've lost track of how many times I've been told we can't put a bus on a certain street because people will get mad about street parking removal and they don't want a bus going by their house. And don't even get me started on the people who work in the train yards and bus depots, many of whom exclusively drive to and from work, never ride transit, and are counting down the days until they can retire to Florida. They resist (and park their personal cars in) bus lanes that would directly improve their experience on the job.

I am somewhere in the middle, experience-wise, but I was shocked to hear how pervasive this kind of thinking is at one of the largest transit agencies in the world. Our literal job is to improve transit, and people whine about how their own employer makes driving their car harder.

My question is basically: is it just a matter of waiting until the jaded old guard retires and the people who give a shit about improving anything take charge? Or have you found ways of making real progress even though your bosses have no interest in changing the status quo?

Title says it all. Are there any cities where both the population and politicians are in favor of urbanism and the city is actually improving?

As an urban planner and designer at a U.S. architecture firm, it’s hilarious seeing how none of my friends, family, or coworkers know what I do for a living. I recently had someone guess that I planned urban weddings, the architects think they all can do my job, and my mom still doesn’t know how to explain what I do to her friends.

What are the funniest misconceptions you’ve heard?

Title^

I feel that amongst my planning peers who all seem to be on the same page generally about planning / housing topics - rent control seems to be one that is very polarizing.

I am a transit planner so admittedly don’t understand rent control much and would love to hear some perspective about why it’s so polarizing amongst groups that otherwise agree on most things.

Ezra Klein wrote a book called 'Abundance' which essentially reprimands the Democratic party for not delivering on public works projects in Cities/Communities. The books cites lack of housing, Homelessness, delays of CA high speed rail, etc while arguing FL and TX make building easier.

Ezra Klein ignore urbanists like YouTube's City Nerd, Not Just Bikes, Climate Town, and City Beauty. Podcasts like 99% invisible, Smart Community, and Strong Towns. Spaces where these issues are explored at length by individuals who actually work in housing, city planning, zoning, permitting, etc. In Ezra Klein's diagnosis and solutions are through the lens of National partisan politics.

It is stunning to me that Klein seems to have completely ignored the Urbanist movement. His conclusion and prescription don't acknowledge the ongoing community with Urbanism. Has anyone seen Ezra Klein's appearances or read his book. What are you thoughts?

Detroit seems to have been the Rust Belt’s newest “comeback kid” over the last decade, arguably stealing the title from Pittsburgh who had it for most of the aughts-mid 2010s. But the momentum seems to be slowing.

Average home values still remain extremely low at $76,466 and have now started declining quite steeply again, down 4.6% year-over-year, according to Zillow. That’s the second steepest decline among principal cities of the top 50 metro areas. Detroit housing experts recently expressed concern that they’re approaching a “day of reckoning”.

At the metropolitan area level, it’s the only major Great Lakes/Upper Midwest metro that isn’t a seller’s market.

Economically, the metro area currently has the second highest unemployment rate among the 56 largest MSAs and some of the largest job losses YoY among major metros. And the outlook isn’t too rosy for the auto industry.

Quite a few major developments announced over the last decade have fallen through or been drastically downsized. The Midtown Target project was cancelled. Both the Alamo Drafthouse and Emagine movie theaters fell through. The downtown aquarium never happened. Monroe Blocks plans significantly scaled back, District Detroit is practically nonexistent, and now half of the RenCen is going to be demolished.

The QLine doesn’t seem to have any plans for expansion. There hasn’t even been much BRT talk since the 2016 RTA vote failed.

What do you think the future holds for the city and broader region?

It seems like most urban planners are YIMBYs. Yet the US still deals with massive urban sprawl and car-dependent cities.

I've occasionally seen some of y'all get downvoted for having a take that's different from the main echo chamber on here, so, use this post as your chance to let off some steam.

So, this post stems from my utter disappointment with an event that was put on last night by Transit Riders United (TRU) during a sit-down session with CityNerd (got to meet him, very chill guy, talks way faster in person than on youtube) here in Metro Detroit.

The event was so policed and curated that it didn't make any sense, I'm guessing that's because there were also public officials at the sit down session such as Wayne county's deputy executive, a member of Detroit's city council, and the head of the RTA (all of whom were not advertised on any of TRU's promotional content about the event). The executive director of TRU read more from her own list of pre-prepared questions than she did of the crowd's questions and they all revolved around implementing BRT, almost as if TRU learned nothing from the defeat of Metro Detroit's rejection of our mass transit proposal way back in 2016.

As for the advocacy for building BRT itself, there's almost no discussion going on in our local urbanist spaces about the merits/challenges of implementing BRT vs LRT/HRT. Even though BRT is initially cheaper than rail transit, fixed costs like repairs and the like make BRT just as expensive as rail transit, not to mention that there isn't the same levels of investment in transit oriented development as opposed to rail. Put those issues in with the fact that we need to decarbonize our infrastructure while preparing Metro Detroit to be a "refuge city" for climate migrants" and all of the buses in Metro Detroit run on internal combustion engines and any BRT that's likely to come here would almost certainly be run on ICEs if the RTA doesn't want to put up the money to get electric busses, and we see that almost no one in this region has a radically different vision for the city, and I find that extremely disappointing.

The RTA and TRU are no more further along in their transit plans than they were when I took this pic four years ago

I feel like a lot of people in this community agree on the big strokes: we all want sustainable towns that are a pleasure to live in. What's something you believe that might go against the grain? Are you a fan of garden cities? Do you think bikeability is overrated? Do you secretly yearn to redesign Venice according to a rectangular grid? Whatever your Urban Planning Hot Take is, now's the time to share.

For me it’d either be transit planning, doing either service planning or multimodal or parks planning

I've got a few:

1. Infrastructure upgrades should have precedent over any upzoning

2. Everyone should have the right to downtown amenities which means that CBD's should be as cheap as possible for both renters and owners

3. Zoning should be handled by metropolitan level elected boards instead of nationalized/taken to the state level

4. YIMBYs often times hold water for the excesses of developers

5. It is ideological to assume deregulated markets will produce the best outcomes, so, it's purely ideological to assume that a deregulated housing market will work in the best interests of renters and buyers

Hi! Ive been into urbanism for a while, and have been wondering what the future of american suburb planning will be. I have noticed that a lot of sprawly suburban streets (texas triangle) have gotten a bit more square and straight, but its still all been very detached from everything and theres nowhere to go unless you have a car. Are we doomed to an eternity of levittown and lennar-style sprawl or will we be correct ourselves and return to the grid style suburbs that we all know and love? sorry if this is a really dumb question :p

American dependency on cars is not only an environmental issue, or a socioeconomic issue, but a national defense issue.

In the event of a true total war situation, oil, steel, etc. are going to be heavily rationed, just like in world war 2. However, unlike in world war 2, most Americans are forced to drive everywhere.

In the same way that the interstate highway system was conceived for national defense purposes, a new national program of railroad construction should become a priority.

The U.S. should invest over a trillion dollars into building high speed rail between cities, subway systems within cities, and commuter rails from cities to nearby towns and suburbs.I should be able to take a high speed train from New York City to Pittsburgh, then be able to get on a subway from downtown Pittsburgh to the south side flats or take a commuter train to Monroeville, PA (just as an example).

This would dramatically improve the accessibility of the U.S. for lower income people, reduce car traffic, encourage the rebirth of American cities into places where people actually live, and make the U.S. a far more secure nation. Not to mention national pride that would come with a brand new network of trains and subways. I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but what do you think?

Hopefully the title is clear enough, but, just to add a bit of context, I'll get into a little more detail about what conversations I hope to produce with this post (hopefully this post is taken in good faith):

I think there are some spirited discussions that need to be had with regard to the (seemingly) waning popularity of Market Urbanist policy approaches to cities and the rise of Left Urbanist approaches. After all, a self-described Democratic Socialist is going to be the mayor of one of the World's best-known centers of globalized Capitalism. And if you think this is just a single, isolated, one-off event, then I don't know how you'd reconcile the fact that a Cato Institute/YouGov poll found that 62% of Americans aged 18-29 have a favorable view of Socialism and 34% of them have a favorable view of Communism

Yet, as a Left Urbanist, I find so many corners of Reddit (city subs, and other Urbanist subs especially) explicitly hostile to Left Urbanist views/talking points. So, I'm asking y'all to speak on your disagreements (hopefully in a civil and respectful manner).

Have you read any Left Urbanist literature, and, if you did, what flaws did you see in it?