Aaron Lubeck is an urbanist, land planner, and builder in Durham, North Carolina. He’s also the founder of Southern Urbanism, an action-tank committed to building better cities in the South. Aaron writes about housing, urbanism, placemaking, and politics on his own Substack, onHousing. In this episode, Aaron discusses incrementalism, local development, New Urbanism, and more, sharing in Geoff’s optimism about the future of urbanism in America.
You can find Yeoman on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, and elsewhere.
Links and things mentioned
Ross Chapin on the scale of sociability
Nabeel Hamdi Small Change book
Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale book
Mapping Decline St. Louis book
Town Builders podcast
Timestamps
0:00 – intro
1:48 – how Aaron found his way into the built environment
4:07 – getting starting in tech, similarities between the web world and urbanism, micro-communities
13:20 – why things are too big in America, data obsession, homogenization, corporatism
20:40 – current difficulties building new urbanism, changes in financing, rising awareness
23:26 – Jane Jacobs’s followers, Robert Moses
28:11 – New Urbanists, emergent order, comparison with YIMBYism, tensions between planners and individual initiative
33:09 – New Urbanism and oppressive central zoning, historic neighborhoods, HOA requirements, comparison to zoning
39:28 – issues of scale, civic infrastructure, emergent rules, stormponds, neighborhood vs developer responsibilities
43:20 – tedium in real estate development, seeking permission to do things, technology and regulations
46:22 – awareness of the harm of planning, optimism, status quo and NIMBY freakout
48:48 – legislative backlash at state level, California example, state intervention in the local
50:37 – zoning liberalization in practice, Euclid v Ambler
52:20 – Dylan’s rule states and home rule states
53:40 – origins of Southern Urbanism
56:41 – Better Cities film festival
1:00:04 – urbanism in the south, changing regulatory environment
1:05:27 – development in Durham, hostile environments for good developers, alignment between NIMBYs and financialized development
1:09:44 – regulatory climate, the California effect, medium-sized developers
1:15:35 – the future of the Euclid decision
1:19:20 – deed restrictions, building elasticity into neighborhoods
1:23:55 – Seaside, resort communities, Airbnbs, tourism
1:25:21 – Las Catalinas
1:29:33 – you can’t legislate beauty
1:33:02 – rigidity of the modern world, optimism for the 2030s, the boomer mentality, younger generations
1:37:47 – conclusion
Yeoman 