Housing Architect + Advocate Recovering Developer + General Contractor Director of Housing at EYRC Architects USC✌️ LAFC ⚽️
Los Angeles
Joined February 2009
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Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
19% of people aged 20-24 don’t have a driver’s license.
30-40% of people over 85 don’t have a driver’s license.
Planning and designing places that force everyone to be dependent on cars is cruel.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
A typical European car is parked 92% of the time. It spends 1/5th of its driving time looking for parking. Its 5 seats only move 1.5 people. 86% of its fuel never reaches the wheels, & most of the energy that does, moves the car, not people.
Sound efficient?
HT @circulareconomy
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Crazy San Francisco new ADU stats:
Since 2021, only 40% of submitted ADU permit applications were issued. 60% abandoned or still waiting! And the average issued permit took 404 days!
California law requires a complete application to be approved or denied in 60 days.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Enough is enough. It's time to round up the software engineers who, in the year 2025, are still not making "paste plain text" the default. There is virtually no use case for retaining formatting, except to inconvenience and annoy users.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
First cafe as our baseline is 450 sq ft (15x30).
Just the 2 ADA bathrooms (required regardless of biz size in many places) w/ hallway to them would use ~180 sq ft, 40% of the total space.
Even if legal, building code makes these impossible as a small business.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
The real reason housing is so expensive in LA:
Time = Money
Average timeline:
18-24 months: Entitlements
6-8 months: Plan Check
24-30 months: Construction
That's 4-5 years of:
- Carrying costs
- Rising material costs
- Labor inflation
- Market risk
Speed = More Affordability
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people.
Good trade.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
There are thousands of opportunities like this one in U.S. cities.
Trading unused car space for new pedestrian space is a major upgrade.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Boston bragging about how a third of the pitiful amount of housing it builds is “affordable” irritated me enough to write this week’s newsletter all about just how misguided that view is.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
To carry 50,000 people per hour in each direction, a city needs a 175m wide road for for cars.
Even if those cars are electric.
And then there’s the parking.
OR a city can move A LOT MORE people in a lot less space, with A LOT LESS public money and pollution.
Via @UITPnews
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
The Elizabeth Line this year moved more people than the 18 lanes of the 401 freeway, the widest in North America.
Traffic is simply a geometry problem, and adding one more lane won't fix it.
ALT Stock image of the 401 freeway.
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Find someone who fights for you like the city of LA fights against housing
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Americans excel at walkable, mixed-use development when they’re designing ski resorts.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
America vs Europe.
Concentrating density on just one street creates less livable neighborhoods.
Medium density projects should be spread over a bigger area.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
This iconic @FabianTodorovic cartoon is still one of the best at illustrating the amount of space we surrender to cars, leaving little space left for everyone/everything else. The newer @london_chrisp text makes the bonus point that many drivers still manage to complain about it.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
Need a visual reminder that paint is NOT infrastructure?
HT @77_mgm teapawt.net/77_mgm/status/14044966…
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
The most important thing about this amazing Paris transformation is how fast it happened — how fast people on bikes “appeared” — once streets were transformed. You can’t write this off as “Paris was always this way,” because it wasn’t.
It took leadership.
Derek Leavitt, AIA retweeted
New Measure ULA data drop!
Just got all LA County transactions above $1 million, back to 1/1/2020 -- about 160,000 data points.
It lets us compare what happened in LA under Measure ULA to Culver City under its Measure RE transfer tax.
The difference is staggering.
