Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 630

This is a chart from Abundant Housing LA (a YIMBY group), via City Observatory, showing the relationship between median household income and single-family zoning across the 88 cities that make up L.A. County. On average, about 80% of the land in the County is zoned for single-family housing. This is also true for Los Angeles, which is not surprisingly its biggest city. What is pretty clear from this chart is that the richest areas tend to have a higher percentage of single-family homes. If you read Anthony Dedousis' post , you'll also see that the housing tends to be more expensive (makes sense) and that the homeownership rates are higher in these single-family areas. One obvious takeaway is that it shows you how clearly we are dividing our cities. Zoning is regulation. And here we are seeing some of the socioeconomic implications. But I'm curious if this relationship would be as strong in other cities around the world and at different scales (i.e. neighborhood levels). When it's made available (not all cities have this much space), how universal is this pull toward single-family housing?

https://youtu.be/CkZYHSyv-64

This is a really nice kitchen extension. In response to an "oppressively" low ceiling height, the architects -- DGN Studio -- lowered the existing ground floor by about 500mm. At the same time, they created a kind of "concrete tray" that fills the width of the Victorian home's property and extends outward to create a sunken patio space off said kitchen. From the outside, this drop makes the house feel as if it's sitting on a concrete plinth -- hence the name. (A good photo of this can be found here .) It's a simple move, but a good one. Sometimes you just have to play with the section. If you can't see the above video, click here .

I don't think I'm supposed to take any action or feel particularly alarmed after reading about this global mapping of urban subway microorganisms , but it is kind of neat nonetheless. A team of researchers recently spent over 3 years collecting "metagenomic samples" from the transit systems of 60 cities around the world. Everywhere from Stockholm's handrails to Shanghai's subway poles.

The process involved nearly 5,000 samples and the result is this research paper , providing a full atlas of the microbial strains that live throughout our subway systems. Supposedly, none of the findings are anything that we should be worried about though. So carry on riding the subway.

But it is interesting (and very geeky) to note that the researchers discovered something that they are calling a "core urban microbiome." What this means is that they identified 31 different species of bacteria that show up in pretty much all of the cities that they surveyed -- some 97% of their samples.

At the same time, each city, because of things like climate and geography, also has its own microbial profile. In fact, these profiles are so distinctive that the geneticist who lead the study is quoted in the New York Times saying that if you gave him a shoe that was a worn in a particular subway system, he could sequence it and tell you the city with 88% accuracy.

Is this neat or gross?

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash