an irregular view on cities
In “a successful city district”, “Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones – or rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is, of course, a dynamic process, with what was once new […]
Presentation given for Welcoming Neighbors Network, based on a forthcoming article submitted to Greater Greater Washington (will be updated in the future with a link).
[DC Council Committee of the Whole testimony] Thank you for providing the opportunity to testify regarding Bill 26-227, the One Front Door Act of 2025. My name is Payton Chung; I am a Ward 6 resident, an infill residential developer, and a longtime contributor to, and now acting chair of, Greater Greater Washington Commons. I […]
Two presentations given at YIMBYtown 2025: 2. Who killed Missing Middle Housing – and how?
Presentations given at CNU, 13 June 2025 Payton Chung Alex Dickson Joel van der Weele
Seeing a photograph of streetlights on during the day in Pittsburgh prompted me to investigate how bad air pollution really was back then. Voila: a 1979 journal article by Cliff Davidson notes that typical Total Suspended Particulates (a now-deprecated measure) in Chicago in 1913 were 0.3-2.0 mg/m3, with a maximum of 9.3. Cleveland in 1915 […]
Presentation given at the Smart Growth America Equity Summit, March 2025.
Apartment buildings have lower population densities than other land uses, so office to residential conversion could reduce overall population density. Site news! I’ve put up a searchable archive of my Tweets at https://paytonchung.github.io , principally for my own reference. I’m probably most often at Bluesky, though I also maintain a Mastodon account. Three recent posts I’ve written for Greater…
Wee Japanese fire trucks, as some Stateside auto enthusiasts have discovered, are adorably, I-wanna-pinch-your-cheeks tiny. Here’s one on the streets of Onomichi: Of course, something this different doesn’t exist in isolation; there are systemic differences between Japanese and American fire response that allow and even require smaller trucks. There are more, but smaller, trucks. Japan […]
Earlier, I’ve written about how high-rise residential buildings have higher construction costs, land costs, floorplan efficiency, and maintenance costs than low-rise buildings. But leave it to some supertall skyscraper architects to make the ecological case for low-rise multifamily, with the book Residensity. The Chicago-based architects ran analyses on nine different arrangements for 2,000…
Here’s a Google-translated ad for new houses for sale in suburban Hiroshima; just this one small advertisement for new houses required a lot of research and explaining to make sense! Building and zoning codes reference link: www.iibh.org/kijun/japan.htmBrookings Institute overview www.brookings.edu/articles/japan-rental-housing-markets/English blog on Japanese housing: catforehead.com/ If those…
A short presentation with an overview of commercial real estate (specifically housing construction) development finance, illustrated with examples drawn from ULI case studies. Created this at YIMBYtown in 2018 by request; do note that dollar figures are outdated as a result of severe construction cost inflation.