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Every city seems to have one of these: a dying mall that feels like it would take limitless money to bring back to life.

But maybe the problem is trying to bring it back to what it was.

In Lafayette, Louisiana, Jacoby Landry is doing something different. Instead of forcing an old model to work again, he’s making the property work for the people who are there now, then building and adapting based on what the community actually needs.

These places aren’t impossible to fix. We just have to let them become something new.

And that’s where small-scale developers have an advantage. They have their ears to the ground. They can respond, experiment, and adapt in ways that investors with all the money in the world often can’t.

Land is a nonrenewable resource, so it needs to be thoughtfully productive and, whenever possible, serve more than one purpose.

Raccoon Mountain does both through a pumped-storage plant begun more than 50 years ago.

In Building Postcarbon Futures, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Billy Fleming highlights it alongside other existing projects that can help shape our energy future.

Paid partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Small scale developers have to bring value to a community because they need their projects to have staying power.

And staying power means making money.

That’s why doing good and making money aren’t opposing goals. If you’re not making money, you might not be meeting the community where it’s at. And you definitely won’t be able to keep serving that community for very long.

Preapproved plans aren’t the silver bullet for fixing the housing crisis.

But instead of one silver bullet, we need lots of little solutions. And this is definitely one of them.

Groups like the Incremental Development Alliance exist to empower developers at the smallest scale, helping them cut through red tape while encouraging cities and towns to make small-scale development easier in the future.

Last week I got to see the still under construction Oxford Bend Park, part of the Great Rivers Greenway network in St. Louis.

(Read: not quite open to the public!)

What I love is that they’re asking one piece of public land to do many things: rain garden, pavilion, playground, gathering space, and skate features.

Instead of concentrating skaters into a separate skate park, the design integrates skating into the everyday life of the park.

Cities have a tendency to concentrate everything. One big store instead of lots of little shops. One megachurch instead of neighborhood churches. One skate park instead of places to skate throughout the city.

I love seeing a park designed around the idea that different people and different activities can simply exist alongside each other.

Thanks to:

Emma! For making this whole trip happen.

Randy, the professional skateboarder who gave me an idea for the skate prison video!

And to Brittany, a local advocate who showed up and gave a broader perspective on how to think about St. Louis.

Small businesses aren’t enough. We need tiny businesses.

We need low-cost, low-red-tape opportunities for people to experiment with an idea. And when it succeeds and they outgrow the space, someone else gets their chance.

A daisy chain of small-business success.

Incremental Development matters because homes and small businesses affect more than the people inside them. They shape the public realm.

The more small businesses a neighborhood has, the more ownership and care it experiences from the people who live, work, and spend time nearby.

Shoutout to the theroyale

A pocket neighborhood is a small cluster of homes organized around a shared common space.

It sounds like a new idea, but the spatial pattern is ancient: homes facing courtyards, commons, gardens, and pedestrian lanes instead of being organized primarily around cars.

It’s a small shift in geography that can completely change how neighbors encounter each other.

If our built environment is the hardware for the software that is culture, we can’t expect to update our software until we have hardware that can facilitate it.

On September 15 at 7 p.m., I’ll be at the St. Louis County Library’s Clark Family Branch talking about Building Places that Build Community.

Presented by the St. Louis County Library Foundation + Great Rivers Greenway.

If you’re in St. Louis, come hang out!

Stitch with 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕪𝕝𝕒✨💜

It’s not just you. School car pickup lines are getting longer, and one major reason is larger catchment areas.

Catchment refers to the area serviced by a school. As we’ve become more reliant on cars, we’ve transitioned away from small neighborhood schools toward larger regional schools.

That means longer drives, longer bus rides, and fewer kids who can realistically walk or bike to school.

Larger schools + larger catchments + more kids arriving by car = a lot more concentrated traffic.