Dear friends, colleagues, and cityfolk,
I think I speak for many journalists when I say that I’m glad my mentions of “covid,” “coronavirus,” and “pandemic” plummeted in 2022. Likewise, much of the insufferable speculation about the “future of this” or the “future of that” quieted down too (pro tip: we still can’t predict the future!). Absent the pressures of an epidemiological crisis, my writing returned to its regularly scheduled programming.
I’m pleased to, belatedly, share some highlights.
Planners Across America — The Book!
The first chapter of this retrospective feels more like seven years in review. Planners Across America began as an interview series in 2015. We quickly amassed enough material for a book and had it mostly set up in the first quarter of 2020.
At long last, the Planetizen team and I are pleased to present Planners Across America, a snapshot of the planning profession in America’s largest cities. It’s available directly from the Planetizen Store — at a discount, with code PAA-JSTEPHENS-50 — and it’s reviewable and rateable on Amazon and Goodreads. And, of course, my first book, The Urban Mystique, is going strong and available from Solimar Books.
News & Features
California’s housing crisis has not let up. At the California Planning & Development Report, neither have we. It was a wild year, and it promises to get wilder still. Early in the year, I wrote about how cities struggled to meet (or weasel out of) state housing goals, and, toward the end of the year, I wrote about how inflation, interest rates, and the cost of lumber might impede housing production no matter what cities do. And I had some fun with new transit lines across the state.
For InTransition, I wrote about one of the latest trends in public transportation: microtransit. Finally, with thanks to editor Sam Lubell, I fulfilled a longstanding goal of contributing to Metropolis, with a story on a very cool department store conversion in LA.
Commentary
I argued that a $1.1 billion climate change institute at Stanford was, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, like brining coals to Newcastle. In a similarly paradoxical vein, I celebrated the internal combustion engine–for being just awful enough to inspire some pretty good urban planning and emissions regulations in California. I had some fun with Anaheim, where the make-believe world looks great but the real built environment could use a little magic, and I took issue with the utterly bonkers notion that California should build a brand-new city to solve its housing crisis (how about we actually fix the ones we have?). One, of many, solutions is to reform Prop 13 so Californians who are lucky enough to own their homes aren’t forced to live in them for eternity.
More Books
The literary highlight of my year was moderating a panel with some distinguished urban planning authors at the conference of the California Chapter of the American Planning Association in September. The conference included a “little planning library,” featuring some familiar titles. I also spoke to the Los Angeles Planning History Group about The Urban Mystique.
I reviewed Super Tall, about the new generation of skyscrapers, for Common Edge Collaborative, and contributed to Planetizen’s Top Books of 2022. My favorite: A People’s Guide to Orange County, which brings social history and urban history to life in surprising ways.
Coda: Remembering Crypto
What a difference a year makes. In late 2021, I lamented, and lampooned, the renaming of Los Angeles’s Staples Center arena to Crytpo.com Arena. Cryptocurency seemed silly, and the “metaverse” terrified me.
The real world has its flaws, but it’s better to put our efforts into fixing them than into a fake world that enables us to ignore them. A year later, the Crytpo name is hanging on, but surely not for long. For now, at least, the real world still stands. And it’s still fun to write about.
Thank you to everyone who read, edited, commented on, critiqued, and otherwise supported my work in 2022. I’ll do my best to drum up good stuff throughout 2023.