Denser housing like this Duplex in Portland are better for the climate—and cheaper. Image by Sightline Institute licensed under Creative Commons.

An Oregon bill could make denser housing, like duplexes and fourplexes, legal statewide. A new game lets you build a transit system. A Vancouver grocer uses embarrassing designs on plastic bags to encourage customers to use reusable ones.

Denser housing like plexes cut carbon impacts: Reforming single family zoning to include denser housing options like duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes can provides more homes for people, and also lower carbon emissions by 20%. But zoning for this type of housing is illegal in many cities. Oregon’s House Bill 2001 is attempting to legalize “plexes” statewide. (Michael Andersen | Sightline)

Design transit stations in the ‘Overcrowd’ game: A new simulation-style management game called ‘Overcrowd’ allows players to create and manage a transit system for a large city. Launched on June 6 for PC, gamers get to do every thing from optimizing metro stations to garbage pick up in a London-like city called Lubdon. Impressed, the London Transport Museum is looking to preserve the game “in perpetuity.” (Nicole Carpenter | The Verge)

Vancouver’s humiliating plastic bags: East West Market, an independent grocery store in Vancouver, is handing out plastic bags with embarassing designs on them to discourage their use and encourage resusable bags. Bag designs include phrases like “Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium” and “The Colon Care Co-Op” on them. (Elana Shepert | Vancouver Is Awesome) Update: This tactic backfired. People liked the bags so much they began collecting them. (Anna Schaverien | New York Times)

The California bill that scares ride-hailing companies: Ride hailing companies are uniting to oppose a California bill that would reclassify drivers as employees. As Assembly Bill 5 moves up the legislative ladder to the state senate, execs at Uber and Lyft wrote a collective op-ed denoucing the bill. (Sarah Holder | Citylab)

Berlin’s accidental planners: Artists in Berlin protested evictions in their neighborhood—and ended up getting the attention of the mayor’s office and helping lead the project. Now, a coalition of architects, planners, artists, and other community members are coordinating to transform the Haus der Statistik, an abandoned business complex, into a “gentrification-proof island.” (Nate Berg | Places Journal)

Quote of the Week

“We know that they genuinely deter laundering of dirty money in the real estate market without impacting clean investment. The cost-benefit ratio for Americans is only positive.”

Zoe Reiter in Quartz discussing a pilot program that looked at money laundering in real estate.

This week on our weekly review show, Mondays at The Overhead Wire, Chrissy Mancini Nichols and I talk about drones, zero passenger vehicles, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, and more!