Episode 13: September Updates
Welcome new subscribers! This is an email about the city of Golden, software development, and other things. I treat it more as a scratchpad for current thinking than something polished and well-edited.
Ahoy! It's a beautiful day today in Colorado. I apologize for an email that went out a few hours to some of you, a bit of a "dead-man's switch", inspired by Google's Inactive Account Manager.
For this edition, I'm going to share some links , and some updates:
Links
The housing theory of everything (works in progress institute)
How Seatle Killed Micro Housing (sightline institute)
When did things go wrong in San Francisco? (Stephen Buss, Substack)
Updates
The property across the street from my house: A project I've not talked about a lot, but will start talking about more, is this property across the street from my house.
Months ago, it went on the market, for $1.5 million dollars. It's currently a rental property, not in great shape. The plan was obviously to sell it to an investment group, build multiple luxury duplexes (or a fourplex) and call it a day.
The price came down to $1.2 million, then $1million, and then I saw on Zillow that it was under contract at $800k. It's a 9,000 sq ft lot.
The current tenants were told they had a month to vacate the property.
I didn't like how this was all going down, so I managed to get in touch with the property owner (not easy), met him in person, chatted for an hour, then did it again, for another hour. He agreed to cancel the sale, and give me time to work on the plan I have in place.
What's that plan? More next time.
Neighborhood Traffic Problems: There's a lot of traffic through my street, and the street next to me. (Iowa St and Ford St, respectively.)
These roads are manifestly dangerous, and people have not yet died on them, but there have been numerous car accidents, and on North Ford St, children walk along it to get to school, and the sidewalks are like 24 inches wide, directly adjacent to fast traffic.
I was at an extremely interesting meeting with the City Engineer, Joe Puhr, and the Mayor, Laura Weinburg.
It quickly became aparent that they are what might be considered highly constrained actors from many levels. Regulatory constraints, budgetary constraints, etc. The neighborhood has all the tools it needs already to make necessary improvements to the roadway, and, well, I'm looking forward to implementing ideas from Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Materials and Design v.1.0 in our neighborhood.
-Josh