New York City is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers, new research shows, which could put its population of more than 8 million people at an increased risk of coastal flooding. [...]

Researchers estimated the weight of all of New York City’s buildings to be around 842 million tons. But to find the areas more vulnerable to sinking — or, as they call it in more scientific terms, “subsidence” — a key factor to consider was the type of soil beneath the buildings. — The Verge

Not so long ago, density was promoted as a way to enliven underpopulated cities, particularly their downtowns. Then it became a tool for fighting climate change. Now, density is increasingly seen as an equity issue. [...]

Two notorious projects help us understand the difference between density that enhances a neighborhood and projects that big-foot their surroundings. — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Supporters saw [SB 1122] as a way to ease California’s affordability problems that most economists blame on a lack of supply that has forced people to bid up home prices and rents to find a place to live. [...]

But like previous efforts to upend California zoning rules, SB 1120 faced pushback from community groups concerned it would ruin single-family neighborhoods, making them into denser places with too much noise and traffic. — The Los Angeles Times

Now SB 50 allows cities two years to adopt their own plans to achieve the bill’s central goal, which is to greatly increase the amount of market-rate and affordable housing built near transit and job centers [...] without increasing car travel or concentrating the new homes in low-income areas while leaving more affluent areas untouched. — The Los Angeles Times

The Roosevelt neighborhood has the makings of a huge transit-oriented development success story. A building boom is underway, protected bike lanes have recently gone in, and the station site will be home to an affordable housing complex right around the time trains begin operating.

Northgate Link, along with an underground station in Roosevelt, will open in 2021, and the neighborhood–like others along the line–are already transforming — The Urbanist

The four-person California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, or CaRLA, has one reason for being — to sue cities that reject housing projects without a valid reason. The litigious nonprofit with YIMBY roots struck again last month, suing Los Altos after the city rejected a developer’s bid to streamline a project of 15 apartments plus ground-floor office space. — The Mercury News

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago.

Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010. — Curbed New York

It’s 2027 (or 2037) and the age of the self-driving car. City-dwellers have traded in their car keys for ride hails. Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing.

That’s one vision of how self-driving cars will affect U.S. real estate, laid out in a report by MIT’s Center for Real Estate. But it’s not the only one. — bloomberg.com

Researchers from the Urban Displacement project, a joint UCLA and UC Berkeley effort, recently released a gentrification map of Los Angeles.

They examined the city from 1990 to 2000 and up to 2015, focusing on neighborhoods near transit stops. The goal was to see if these areas saw higher rents and more displacement than other areas.

The answer? Yes — with some exceptions. — scpr.org

Throughout his neighborhood of Lanier Heights, developers are buying up two-story townhouses and building an extra floor or two, additions that are known as pop-ups. They’re also extending the structures as far back as allowed, to within 15 feet of the property line, obliterating backyards in the process. [...]

A few doors down the other way is a deafening construction site, where a single-family home is being turned into eight units, taking full advantage of what was once the backyard. — washingtoncitypaper.com

In so-called hot cities [...] battles are raging over height limits and urban density, all on the basis of two premises: 1) that building all these towers will increase the supply of housing and therefore reduce its costs; 2) that increasing density is the green, sustainable thing to do and that towers are the best way to do it.

I am not sure that either is true. — theguardian.com