A rendering of one of Los Angeles' "You ADU" options by the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

LA moves forward with affordable ADU design templates. Suburbs look to reinvent their office parks. How the Biden administration is doing little to curtail highway expansions around the country.

LA’s pre-approved ADU plans: Working with local architects, the City of Los Angeles has developed pre-approved plans for accessory dwelling units, called “You ADU,” that would cut down on permitting and approval times. While the city hopes this will mean increased production of less expensive housing and fewer headaches, housing advocates worry that the homes won’t be as affordable to renters, and sewer and utility charges are still wild cards. (Anjulie Rao | Dwell Magazine)

Rethinking suburban office complexes: As large companies decide to move on from suburban office parks and demand for offices declines, what happens to the space they once occupied? Suburbs are taking different approaches: some provide space to Amazon and logistics warehouses, while others redevelop into mixed-use spaces with housing and commercial space with a town center-like feel. (Robert Reed | Chicago Magazine)

Is Buttigieg’s equity push slowing down?: At the start of his tenure as Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg was adamant about centering equity considerations in federal transportation policy. In 2021, his administration intervened to slow down the I-45 expansion in Houston, Texas, and he openly discussed the past wrongs of highway construction and expansion. The expansion would displace residents in majority Black and Hispanic communities. Two years later, however, USDOT greenlit the I-45 expansion with promises to rehouse displaced residents. Critics say Secretary Buttigieg hasn’t gone far enough at pushing for change in how these big expansion projects marginalize communities. (Minho Kim | Politico)

Learning more about vehicular homelessness: About 20,000 Angelenos live in their vehicles, and about one in 20 University of California, Los Angeles students struggle with homelessness. M Nolan Gray writes about his experience living out of his car as a Ph.D. student at UCLA and what might push people into these precarious positions. (This article is behind a paywall). (M. Nolan Gray | The Atlantic)

The slow death of AC Transit: AC Transit serves the East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley, California, and should be keeping ridership on par with San Francisco Municipal Railway (SF Muni) and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). But transit advocate Darrell Owens argues that they made a number of austerity decisions including “temporary” secession of service that has led to big drops in ridership and put the agency in a bad spot. The best way to fix it, he argues, is changing state funding restrictions and having the Metropolitan Transportation Commission stop disproportionately subsidizing rail operations more than the bus. (Darrell Owens | The Discourse Lounge)

Quote of the Week

“The amount that housing prices have gone up has varied tremendously, depending on whether the city or the community next door had a similar cap. Whenever the adoption of a growth cap inspired an adjacent city to adopt a similar measure – usually from fear of receiving the spillover from their neighbor – significant increases in housing costs followed.”

John Landis, professor emeritus of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses cities using growth caps to restrict housing in The Guardian.

This week on the podcast, we’re chatting with David Wasserman of Alta Planning and Mike Flaxman of Heavy.AI about generative artificial intelligence.