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- [00:00]
Abby
Okay, so you know that the future of your community depends on the Strong Towns approach. But now you need a plan. Well, we're going to help you make that plan. We have a few slots available in the Strong Towns accelerator program where you'll get a self guided curriculum for real world use. Small group coaching sessions with other elected officials, city professionals and community leaders, and two one on one sessions with Edward Erfert and Chuck Marone. Learn more and sign up@strongtowns.org accelerator. This is Abby and you are listening to upzoned.
- [00:51]
Chuck Marone
In January 2025 wildfires swept across Los Angeles with record breaking destruction and really heartbreaking consequence. There were nearly 48,000 acres burned, over 16,000 structures damaged or destroyed and thousands of families left displaced. If you were like me, this was a horrible thing to watch. In the immediate aftermath, Governor Newsom responded by suspending environmental regulations, hoping to speed up the rebuilding process. We're now six months later and only a fraction of homeowners have even received permits, let alone started the rebuilding process. Today on Upzoned we're going to talk about an article in Vox titled why it's taking LA so long to rebuild. The article looks at loosening environmental laws like CEQA and how that didn't necessarily produce the swift recovery people were hoping for. And what this all says about the deeper challenges of rebuilding places in fire proned areas. I'm Chuck Marone, I'm filling in for Abby this week I am joined by Edward Erfert, he's our director of community action here at Strong Towns. Edward, welcome to Upzoned.
- [02:05]
Edward Erfert
Hey, thanks Chuck. It's a pleasure to be with you today. And I'm sad Abby is missing out on this opportunity.
- [02:13]
Chuck Marone
Well, this is not usually a podcast with two dudes chatting, so we'll try to vibe maybe the different side of ourselves. Two technical geeks talking about environmental laws. We'll do our best.
- [02:30]
Edward Erfert
Well, usually when Abby's on, we get a geek out on zoning and planning stuff, so this will be good.
- [02:37]
Chuck Marone
That's true. She does bring all of that. I read this article and I'm like, okay, what's the real bottleneck? You know, the article was kind of critical of the idea that CEQA would solve everything. I don't know if you want to just start by talking about maybe that gut reaction and why that was the response and like what maybe people were thinking of here when like let's just repeal environmental laws and you know, that will make things better. What's, what's missing in that? Or maybe what was the thought. And why didn't it work?
- [03:12]
Edward Erfert
I saw this happen too in my time in Florida, Florida's pass laws and to bypass some of the land use requirements, some of the development requirements after hurricanes. So when you have thousands of homes that are damaged and you want to get people back into these homes, it would make sense to provide relief on the environmental areas because this isn't virgin land. We have houses that already exist, the roads already exist. We just need to put the houses back. If I'm thinking about this from a top down approach, what could a governor do? Well, let's look at our state requirements that would hinder local development. So that's the one thing that a governor could peel back with doing that. So that all makes a lot of sense in this process. And the article is it gets muddy because all of our housing advocates, all of our YIMBY advocates in California are saying, well, if it works here, why not other places where there is an environmental crisis? And at that point now a well intentioned relief to a policy becomes highly political and it adds more confusion to this process where you have neighborhoods in one of the states that has the biggest housing Crisis, there's like 16,000 homes lost that you need to replace and you're bogging it down. But yeah, and I could see this at a zoning desk or a building department desk where you would be waiting on the building permit just like you'd have the utility letter and your impact fee letter, you'd be waiting for the environmental letter to come from the state agency to say oh yeah, it meets all of that. So that's one less thing on the checklist at a local level, but it doesn't actually address the local level review process of getting homes out for permit.
- [05:15]
Chuck Marone
I feel like with CEQA with environmental rules in general, and I hope people hear this with a generous mind and spirit, I've always felt like we had two kind of absurdities that built into really all environmental laws when it comes to land use and building and permitting and that kind of regulation. The first one is that in urban areas, in existing cities, in existing places where we had, you know, whether we agreed or not, we can look on the ground and say there are houses here, there are roads here, there are people here, there is environmental impact here. We tended to, or we tend to say past tense because we still do this, we tend to apply environmental regulations to those places and in a way that is over regulatory and overburdensome without any real like environmental upside to it. In other words, we're not Getting like great environmental outcomes by requiring, you know, the, the houses across the street from my office here to go through six months or 12 months of environmental reviews, or if in California, you know, even more and then lawsuits and what have you to build a simple apartment building. Like, you know, to me these things didn't apply in those areas. But then if I go out to like a true undeveloped area, you know, where, where you were in southern Florida when you worked for Martin county, you know, you get out past the highway and all of a sudden you're into the Everglades. I go here, you know, north. And we were doing permitting, you know, 20 years ago around here. I was working on places where they were tearing down 40 acres of forest and building homes in those places. I found the environmental review process to be almost laughably lenient. In other words, okay, we've got a forest here. We want to deal with A, B and C. Here's the process you go through to tear down this forest. Here's the process you go to, to deal with the stormwater. Here's the process you go to deal with all this negative environmental impact. In one place, we were overly concerned about no impact. And in the place where we should have had lots of concern for the impact, what we, we applied the same thing, which was just a process to screw things up. Am I way off base? Like, is that your experience as well?
- [07:44]
Edward Erfert
Yeah. And it's easier when you think about these applications on a, on a tiny site, let's say just a three acre site, to fulfill all of your preserve area management, to mark out wherever the environmental things are at. It's way easier to do that. Not on those small sites, but on these really big sites. So basically, you just push everything off to a corner and you do the worst suburban sprawl, the things that stretch out all of our utilities the furthest or even worse on those big parcels, they, they'll encourage these, like clustering. So, okay, you've clustered a bunch of homes all in one area, but you have to drive all of your utilities and roads another mile to the next cluster, just spreading that out. None of that ever made sense to me. And even on some of the environmental review, imagine in these neighborhoods, if every single house has to do this. It's kind of like a traffic study. We know the impact is going to be, it's almost going to be the same application for every single home in this neighborhood. Nobody has really looked at this as the impact of the entire neighborhood. At one phase, we get really good professionals that know how to fill out the form to make us feel good, but it actually doesn't result in those things that would make our environment cleaner and more resilient.
- [09:18]
Chuck Marone
I remember working on a project up in the little city of Emily in Minnesota here, and we had done, as part of their comprehensive planning, some mapping of their forest system. And, you know, when you look at a forest network, you have what's called deep forest or inner forest, and then you have outer forest or edge forest. There are actually different species that require inner forest and edge forest. If you think of, like, a deer, a deer wants to be on the edge of the forest because they're going to go out in the field and eat grass and then retreat back to the forest for safety. But if you think of, like, a bear, a bear is going to want inner forest. In other words, inner forest, where they kind of have a thousand feet of forest around them at any time. If you look at them as, like, two species, there's a whole bunch of an ecosystem there of birds and rodents and what have you that thrive in inner forest and thrive in edge forest. We had this whole system, like, worked out in this city, and we had created zoning regulations because they were very environmentally conscious. They had created zoning regulations that aligned with this. So we were going to actually protect our inner forest. And the county came in and wanted to build a road. Right. Because they wanted to log. They were going to build a big road and then kind of open up for development right through the middle of one of these inner forests. The environmental rules actually just facilitated that happening. Kind of was like, okay, let's do this. Let's go make this happen. And here's the process. Here's the public hearing you would have. Here's the investigation you would need to do. Here's the mitigation that would need to happen. But the end result is no inner forest anymore. Like, we literally, like, destroyed this habitat.
- [11:08]
Edward Erfert
Yeah, I've seen that, too. It's like, oh, we're going to mitigate it. So we're going to get another piece of land that doesn't have that, and we're going to create a planting plan to try to recreate age forests on old farmland. Yes, but none of that.
- [11:25]
Chuck Marone
None of it makes sense. No, but this is the way the environmental law is written here in Brainerd. We have a brownfield site. And, yes, I mean, obviously, there's cleanup things we need to do at the brownfield site, and we don't want people living on places with creosote. There's stuff that needs to happen. But the idea that we would open up and study a thousand things and have a three or four year permitting process to address this brownfield site before we were able to do anything with it, to me always was like, okay, why do we make it easy to build the stuff that from an environmental standpoint is environmentally destructive and we make it really, really hard to build and use the stuff that isn't. And I feel like what I saw going on in California after the forest fires was, and I'm going to say this and push back, I feel like you saw decades of pent up frustration with environmental laws and an opportunity to in a sense kill, you know, stab Caesar in the back when he was weak and not looking because you had this emergency going on. In other words, this is something that we would have done a long time ago if it was not an environmental law that could be villainized, but was, you know, something else that people weren't as emotionally attached to.
- [12:58]
Edward Erfert
Yeah, yeah, it, and it emerges in a different way in these communities. Like, oh my gosh, we built for years in an area that was fire prone. So our response now we're going to use the environmental laws to determine which houses won't be built on, like which lots. We're not going to allow building so we can accommodate fire breaks or we can hold water in a location in the event there's a future fire. I saw this on the Gulf coast after Katrina and Rita. There are many neighborhoods, like many communities that were washed away far inland to hit storm surge in. When the planners would come through, it was like, look, this is an area that's going to be a high disaster. What if we just tell people you can't move back to your neighborhood and we'll build them something nice and new up on raised ground somewhere else. This is not the way we'll make them whole.
- [13:54]
Chuck Marone
Will help, you know. Yeah, yeah.
- [13:56]
Edward Erfert
But it's hard to tell somebody that the home that you grew up in or that your family has been there, that all of a sudden you're the sacrificial lamb to protect the other 200 homes in the block.
- [14:09]
Chuck Marone
Right.
- [14:09]
Edward Erfert
But yeah, these environmental, a lot of it's well intentioned, but these are communities that have actually gone through quite a bit of time. I mean, these are some of the oldest neighborhoods in the LA area that have lasted the test of time. It's unfortunate that they've, that this disaster has hit, but it could have hit anywhere. I don't think we could write an environmental ordinance or state law that would Put a bubble that would stop all of that risk.
- [14:43]
Chuck Marone
What do you think of when you read the line in this article that says 800 homeowners, we've got 16,000 structures that need ostensibly rebuilding permits. 800 people have applied for that. But the question that I've got for you is, what do you see when it says 800 have applied and only 200 have gotten permits so far? And the average time to issue that has been 55 days.
- [15:11]
Edward Erfert
That's in the city.
- [15:12]
Chuck Marone
It's.
- [15:13]
Edward Erfert
It's over a hundred in the county.
- [15:15]
Chuck Marone
Oh, really? Okay.
- [15:16]
Edward Erfert
Yeah. So, like, there are so many emotions to that. So just imagine a municipality, every municipality across North America right now, if you go to their permitting office, they're overwhelmed. There are not enough inspectors. There are not enough people at planning desks. So we put in ordinances and we try to narrow this down to speed up the process. What we miss on that, I get it. I get. Staff is overwhelmed. And now all of a sudden, an influx of double or triple of what your normal cycle is. It's a, it's really hard to get through that. And after a disaster. Well, in a lot of these municipalities, the folks that are reviewing the permits have also been impacted by the disaster. They've lost their homes, they know family members. These are cities they serve. So this emotional bit, and you want. Yeah, yeah, you want to, you want to be sure on these reviews you're doing the very best you can. You're going to double check everything to make sure that these buildings are going to be built back stronger and more resilient. But when I look at all of that and I think about efficiencies of that, what are we checking, what are we reviewing that's resulting in that many days for that permitting? Where could we be more efficient? Or what are the things that aren't that we don't need to look at? If somebody just on their honor is going to build on an existing footprint, could we cut zoning out? Like, we're going to assume the setbacks. We're going to build on that. If you don't have building inspectors could do all this stuff. Well, could we use the federal things? Could we go and suggest modular that all we have to do is like, if you pick the modular unit, it goes on the site and in 24 hours we can do an inspection and be done. Those are the things that I just can't imagine the volume of stuff and the depths of paper that they're in right now.
- [17:17]
Chuck Marone
I was thinking about myself, like utility connections. If you're going to put. Oftentimes what we see struggling when people want to put in a backyard cottage or put in an infill unit or what have you. The utility people get all bureaucratic on you and are like, okay, where's the sewer connection? Where's the water connection? How do we. I want to come out and see it. It sits on their desk for 45 days while they compare it to as built plans that, you know, they've got from the 1980s. These are all places that had sewer and water. These are all places that had like connections. Do we really need to have that level in time of review in order to get these things approved and out the door? I feel like hiring five people to do on site work when the plumber's. There would be like a way better way to move this along than have a permitting process where you had to, in a sense, review on paper how they're going to do it.
- [18:13]
Edward Erfert
I would do all like in an emergency situation, what's good. And this is what I thought was happening with the, the cities and the county taking over the removal of debris on the properties. They wanted to be by street. When you have a disaster like this, the meters are damaged, the hydrants are damaged, you have open pipes, you don't know where the valves are. So if you were building a block block, you turn the water on for the block, you're going to have a dozen of the homes or you're going to see water squirting up in the yard no matter what. And, and I can tell you from somebody that worked in a city with the utility department, no matter what the engineers show, no matter what's on the drawings, when you get in the field, it's not what's in the ground.
- [18:58]
Chuck Marone
Right.
- [18:59]
Edward Erfert
Field inspectors and utilities, they would complain about engineers because nothing like whatever the standard was, that's not what they wanted. That's not what worked for this site. It was the archeology of digging up and figuring out where all this stuff was in the field. Yeah. I mean in a disaster like this, I would beef up my team that's in the field. I'd have trucks with all the pipes and fittings and valves. I'd have the equipment in the neighborhoods and just say we're going to, we're going to go down the street and when water squirts up, we're going to go out there and cap it off. When somebody's going to connect, they're going to give us a phone calls or do something in the computer to tell Us, they're working on this and we're going to be already in the neighborhood doing work. We're going to field observe that as it gets put in. And if there's a legal thing to it, the residents can write a form that they're going to waive away liability of a yard flooding or basement flooding because we're going to deal with the urgency of getting people into housing. That would be getting everybody out of the office and fixing the pipes. That's where I would be focused.
- [20:11]
Chuck Marone
Yeah, yeah. And even when I was listening to you say that, you know, basement flooding and all this, there's always this, I'm going to say this. And again, I want people to be generous with me. Oftentimes we design these codes and these regulations and these processes based on the 1 in 10,000 thing that happened that we never ever want to have it happen again. And you know, I get that, I do. But then I watch things like, you know, fire codes that have built up over time that, you know, were basically designed to prevent the great Chicago fire where you had tenements like with no separation between them and lots of, you know, how units stacked on top of each other with one staircase and no exterior windows. And you apply that kind of mentality then to urban homes that are 10ft apart, have a natural fire break between them because they don't have shared walls and they have spacing and all this stuff. And you're still applying the same kind of rigor and response. I don't think we're saying do this and a certain number of homes will have sewer backups or do this and a certain number of homes will burn down. I think what we're saying is that a lot of this tedium of care is the result. Let me put it this way. I almost feel like this is, and I think this is what you see with ceqa, a good time to reset some of the barnacles of regulation that have built up over years of kind of reactionary regulation. Oh my gosh, we never want that to happen again. So let's write a 20 step process to ensure that that like weird, strange outcome never occurs. And oh sure, that adds 15 days to the permitting process. But like times of plenty, who cares? In times of emergency, this is where you can rethink some of those things and clear some of those things out. You've been on the other side of this more than I have. Is, is this reactionary barnacle creating something that I'm just making up or does this actually occur?
- [22:16]
Edward Erfert
It actually occurs I've yet to meet a building official or a fire marshal that does building review. That is in the back of their mind. They are trying to review for a building that will never burn and never collapse. That is the bar that they're at. When I think about places like Oklahoma that deals with natural disasters, we cannot build a house that can withstand 250 mile per hour winds in a tornado. There's a level of understanding and acceptance that there is a chance that a tornado will come through your community in Oklahoma and cause great damage. They offset that by creating shelter to withstand the storm so that you could survive that tornado blowing over your house. There's an acceptance that your house may not stand. Oh, the likelihood of a fire coming back through this area or the likelihood of this type of disaster. Like we can even go back to the management of these areas. What could we learn beyond just a building that's going to be fireproof? What do we need to do from a land management side to deal with that? Are there additional fire prevention things we need to include? Do we need additional fire trucks? Do we need more hydrants? These are things that we can think about at a larger scale through that. But yeah, we layer all this on because we want buildings that will never collapse and never burn. We want structures and neighborhoods that are dealing with, with everything they're dealing with. You know, Jimmy from 1970, wild wiring, right? Yeah. Drywall company that you, you know, we don't want any more asbestos because we learned from that. We don't want to. In the Chinese drywall. We don't want to import that. Again, we've layered on all of these pieces. We have to sit back and realize that the way that our construction techniques are today, our building scientists, our builders, the engineers, the architects, we're at a building system today that uses the least amount of material that is the highest energy efficiency and can be built in the shortest amount of time. Through that, we make compromises in the. We've. We've thinned down every piece of wood, every piece of window and insulation so we can do stuff quickly. These are buildings that unfortunately, they're not going to be like the Romans and last forever. It's not going to be like a Pompeii.
- [25:02]
Chuck Marone
Let me ask you this last thing because I, I do feel like one of the, one of the side effects. And I think we can see this now in Southern California. But I'm going to even back up further and say, I remember when we passed the big infrastructure bill in the last administration and the answer Was, hey, we're going to go build all this stuff now. And my question was, who's going to build this? Okay, we're going to go build a bunch of bridges because we got a trillion dollars now, money for infrastructure. And it's like, well, okay, you're going to surge the existing system. In case you haven't noticed, the existing construction system costs rise at multiples of inflation every year for the last 50 years because we don't have enough people here. And we're essentially having the same dollars chase fewer, fewer people. If you are building a concrete bridge, you're not building a concrete nuclear power plant or like, name your other facility that you're building. So again, what is our overall priority as a society? If you say we got to build 16,000 homes in southern California now to replace the ones that are there, how do you do that without importing a ton of labor? How do you do that without importing a ton of people? And then if you do that, you already have a housing shortage. Where do those people live? How do those people perform? To me, this is just a recipe for, in a sense, like accelerating costs across the spectrum. And I guess I'm not surprised that no homes are getting built.
- [26:36]
Edward Erfert
Well, just think about front doors. Where do you get a supply of 16,000 front doors?
- [26:43]
Chuck Marone
Yeah.
- [26:44]
Edward Erfert
So this is what happens in Florida when these hurricanes come through. It's not just the labor force, it's the material. So there are. Every time the big storms come through, there are groups, and I know people that have done this. They rent a U Haul truck somewhere in Georgia, they go to Home Depot and they fill it with as much.
- [27:07]
Chuck Marone
Piece of plywood and whatever. Yeah.
- [27:09]
Edward Erfert
And they drive south to the first house that's damaged, and they fix that house. Then they go and they drive north to the first Home Depot that has supplies. They fill it up and they go back, they're importing these pieces. So it's importing and they're sleeping in the trucks because there aren't hotel rooms. The hotel rooms are filled with the displaced individuals. I mean, it's. You don't have the materials, you don't have the resources. When the infrastructure bill came out, I was in municipal government. We had all the projects we wanted to have done our city. I got phone calls from contractors and they saw what we were eligible for in the funding for these projects, and they said, hey, that project on page six of your capital improvement plan, I could build that. Guess what? It's the exact amount of money that you're getting awarded from the federal government. And it's like, well, we did a budget analysis of it. It's half that price. I said, that's fine. Go find, you know, contractors that. Go find that. The very next day after that bill was adopted, all of our contracted work went up 40% overnight because the contractors knew they had a corner on the market. When it comes to housing, and we're seeing this in every disaster area that this occurs, how do we get people back into housing and more importantly, on housing on their property. In Florida, in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew came in and blew away Miami and Homestead, they brought in those FEMA trailers, the white FEMA trailers. Fifteen years later, they were still there.
- [28:53]
Chuck Marone
Yeah.
- [28:53]
Edward Erfert
That led after Katrina and Rita, changes in HUD and FEMA to allow for modular housing. The Katrina cottage, these cute looking small homes that could be built anywhere in the country and shipped in by boat or by truck to get people on their property in a place like this, how do you do that and why is that not an option there? When you look at a disaster, the way the insurance rates are. So not only are there aren't people to build stuff, the prices have gone up because of the scarcity of materials. Our insurance companies and most people's appraisals haven't kept up to that.
- [29:37]
Chuck Marone
Right.
- [29:38]
Edward Erfert
So you may only get 40% of the value of your, what it would cost to build your house today, or you might be in litigation for the next five years waiting for the insurance company to pay. What could we put on these properties immediately and what we're outpaying for, people just being displaced in rental and hotels, we could actually make an investment that adds value back to their neighborhood and get them back into the place they know.
- [30:12]
Chuck Marone
It was surreal, and I think this is an experience we all share. It was surreal watching the Palisades burn. And I don't say that from a gawking standpoint. I'm saying that from a. It's one of those things where you statistically know, just like with Katrina, you knew this would happen. Like the roll of the dice would come up in the wrong way at some point. Just this week, you know, you and I are chatting. I was spending the night in a hotel this past week, and when I got there late at night, I turned on the TV and it said, hey, there's been this 8.8 magnitude earthquake off of Russia, which is a massive, massive earthquake, and there are tsunami warnings all over. And then they had a live stream from Hawaii where the tsunami is approaching. And then it was like A nothing. It was like a four foot wave. It was like not even noticeable. And you just realize that these natural disasters, if we just want to use that umbrella term, are in any one place a statistical outlier in any year. But in aggregate as a country, are a statistical, in a sense, inevitability. And it continues to baffle me that we are so bad at responding to them and so bad at helping move things along afterwards. I don't, I don't know if, before we go to the down zone, you have any final thoughts on that.
- [31:43]
Edward Erfert
Yeah, I mean, the Palisades are unique because this is something people had hours of notice. When you have a hurricane, you've got weeks of notice that this is coming. You have an awareness that this is occurring. We're really good as the disaster is emerging in that first initial time, we get the National Guard out. Everybody does whatever they can. Every one of these types of areas I've been to, you hear about the camaraderie of neighbors coming together, working through that first survival, that first week or two, and then after that, we seem to abandon individuals. And this is what's surreal to me. I mean, that here are these lots. People are still paying mortgages on houses and their properties. People are trying to sell them and they aren't able to sell them because you can't get a permit for these sites. We're waiting for cleanup to occur. That's surreal.
- [32:43]
Chuck Marone
Yeah.
- [32:43]
Edward Erfert
That's not the way that our grandparents and great grandparents built places, but the work we did in the community action lab up in Chisholm. Chisholm, Minnesota, had big fire burnt to the ground. They rebuilt in the matter of months and they decided as a town that they wanted to be fire resistant. So all the downtown buildings had to be made out of brick. It was a pact that they all were going to do. It wasn't until another 15 years until they could afford a fire brigade. That was the Civic building built 15 years after the great fire was the fire department. In the past, we would go and help people not just at the emergence of the disaster, but afterwards to get them stabilized back in their community after these disasters. These places traditionally look different, but they adapt to all of the things we've described. I. I just feel we've put so many.
- [33:41]
Chuck Marone
It's a really good example. Yeah, I forgot about. The Chisholm story is great because they literally did like, all right, let's rebuild this sucker. And they got out and they did it and they did it really quickly. Yeah.
- [33:56]
Edward Erfert
So we just need to get out of our own way and let people do these things. There's a lot of barnacles that need to come off and now's the time to examine that. Release it for the next year or six months and see what gets built. There are at least 800 people that are willing to get that started of 16,000 homes. Right. And let's observe what happens.
- [34:19]
Chuck Marone
Let's get them going. Yeah. Do you have anything for the down zone? I have not been on upzone for a while, so I have like a ton of stuff to share, but I picked out one for today. I'll let you go first if you've got something. I don't want to put you on the spot, but go for it.
- [34:33]
Edward Erfert
No, you start, you're super excited. Let's see what you've got.
- [34:37]
Chuck Marone
You know, I'm a book person. I came across this book, it was referenced in a different book I was reading and I'm like, wait a sec, hang on. This book is called Dr. Calhoun's Mousery. The strange tale of a celebrated scientist, a rodent dystopia and the future of humanity. This was a guy like an ecologist who became fascinated with the behavior of animals in terms of like population scaling and what he ultimately did. And the story is really fascinating because like what got him to this point is a real interesting tale of, you know, you intersect the fear of Malthusian growth in society. This is the 70s and 60s and 70s, the population bomb, all these things. He wanted to look, if you took a bunch of rats, which we've studied, like the social behavior of rats in different environments, if you created a utopia for rats, what kind of behavior would they have? So in other words, a place that was perfectly safe, perfect amounts of food, like everything that a rat needed to have their, you know, their, their, their daily maslow's hierarchy of needs met perfectly. What would evolve out of that? And the, the results are crazy, just nuts. And I, you know, I did not understand because I've never really took any courses on this, that Calhoun's experiments are a big part of sociology courses and psychology courses and they've been disputed and debated. He interpolates some things to humans that it's not clear that they do apply to humans. I mean, obviously humans have more complex societies than rats. But some of the behavior that you see out of rats where, you know, they don't need to fight, they do, they don't need to form packs, they do some check out completely and you know, like go nuts. The population actually drops at some point and Just kind of collapses because there's no purpose to existing. It's, it's. It's. I can understand the criticisms because rats are not humans and humans are more complex, and I get that. But it's also very surreal. And I don't, like, fault this scientist for looking at this and saying, I think you can draw some connections here to human society as a book. It's a really kind of rip, roar and read. It's an interesting look at how science works and how scientists work. And then I think also how they maybe step out of their area of expertise and become evangelists for their work in ways that are less than helpful. But, yeah, Dr. Calhoun's Mousery, it came out just last month, so it's a rather new book. It is really, really good. Really good. It will be one of my top books for the year. The book came out in October of 2024, so it's been out almost a year. The audible version just came out last month, so.
- [37:44]
Edward Erfert
So we'll be hearing about rats and mice. Yeah, I hope that. No, I've been bouncing around this summer. What happens is I go to our national gathering and all of our friends have all their latest books, and they have all the things. I've got a pile of books on my desk that I'm trying to get through this summer, but one that somebody recommended to me that's been around for a long, long time is the Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. When I draw and do stuff and try to explain what that design work occurs, that whole creative process, that black box you learn in architecture school, there have been only a couple of authors and scholars that have really captured what that design process is that I do. So this is one of those books that really explains observing, seeing how things work, adapting that and adjusting to fulfill those needs. The other series of books that kind of follow this is the work of Christopher Alexander. It's a little more directed towards city building with Alexander's work, but I just found it fascinating because I just listened and it was just like, yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. This is what you do. And it made me sit back and really understand the. The. Oh, when I get markers out and draw and people are like, well, how does that happen? Or how do you. When. Whenever you're an architect or you identify that that's what you went to school for. People want input. They want a critique of where they live, which is the worst thing to do because, like, people don't want any. They want you to. To give them all the superlatives about what they live not be critical. And architects are just overly critical. But I found it to be an incredible read to really outline that design thought process. So anybody that's out there thinking critically about the built world around them or just the objects around you, it helps to put into a thought process of what I would consider what I would call design. And it really pulls back that black box. So I know it's an old book. Lots of people have said, oh, you should read it. I took the time, really enjoyed it, and would encourage others to pick it up and give it a read.
- [40:14]
Chuck Marone
I know your wife does music, and I don't call myself a musician because I'm a percussionist. And there's an old joke there about drummers not being musicians, but I listen to music and I can pick up all the different percussion parts. But I found this Instagram channel where they actually. I think they use AI to split out different vocal tracks and harmonies and things, and then they show you what is going on underneath the music, the depth of it. And it's fascinating to me because it's opened up songs for me that I knew really well in ways that I hadn't. I get that feeling every time you and I hang out and you draw something for me or you point something out to me, because I feel like I'm a drummer in that I understand music. But a true musician can unwrap things for you that you didn't see. I feel like I'm a planner and I get some of this urban design stuff. But when you draw, when you show me stuff, it is another level of unwrapping that I just have always appreciated. So. Cool book, man.
- [41:20]
Edward Erfert
Yeah, I just. I found a. Somebody shared a cartoon out on LinkedIn and I put it on my profile, and it is a husband and wife behind the wheel sent me this. And it says on there, like, they look kind of frustrated. And the wife goes, well, I mapped out all the places that, you know.
- [41:40]
Chuck Marone
That you Robert Moses built.
- [41:42]
Edward Erfert
Yeah, that Robert Moses built. So, like, we're gonna have a nice vacation. This is what happens when I go out. Anybody's been in a walking audit with me. Anybody that's read Michelle's blog posts about being married to a new urbanist. You just see the world in different place. And it's unfortunate sometimes when I share that because you can't unsee it. But there is that no matter where I go out, even though I think I've seen everything, I usually blind to so many things. And walking out with folks like when you and I go out and. And look at things or kick the tires on stuff, it's two really unique perspectives. And I always catch something that I wouldn't normally observe. But, yeah, that's the whole idea of observation and experience. It just cannot be understated how important that is. Getting out from your desk, walking in the built environment, that's part of my restlessness. But yeah, a lot of our vacations have been rerouted and we don't go certain places because we just. We need to enjoy where we're at and not be so critical of it.
- [42:53]
Chuck Marone
That is Edward Erfert. I'm Chuck Marone. You're listening to Upzoned. We're filling in for Abby this week. Ed, thanks for. Thanks for being here and chatting.
- [43:01]
Edward Erfert
Great. Thanks, Chuck. It's always a pleasure.
- [43:03]
Chuck Marone
Thanks, everybody, for listening and keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care. Let me show you what I'm about to do. I'm about to.