Building Better Cities

Mayors today inherit decades of decisions they didn’t make: deferred city infrastructure maintenance, underfunded pensions, and land use policies that limited what could be built. Now, as residents demand action on affordability, mayors are expected to fix the past while setting their cities up for the future. In this episode of Building Better Cities, Kate Gasparro sits down with San Diego Mayor...

We have more data and research about cities than ever before—but is it actually leading to better decisions? In this episode of Building Better Cities, Kate Gasparro sits down with Robert Puentes , President and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy , to explore how research can move beyond reports and into action. Drawing on Robert’s leadership at Lincoln and his previous roles at the Brook...

Homeownership has long been sold as a single path with a single set of rules — but what happens when that path stops working for most people? In this episode of Building Better Cities, Kate Gasparro sits down with Tony Pickett , CEO of Grounded Solutions Network , to explore how community land trusts and shared equity models are reshaping the relationship between housing, wealth, and city developm...

Neighborhoods have experienced dramatically different economic trajectories. Decades of redlining, discrimination, and disinvestment has shaped where capital flows — and once those patterns were established, they became self-reinforcing. In 2016, bipartisan lawmakers envisioned a new tool that would interrupt that cycle: Opportunity Zones. The idea was to make it more attractive for private invest...

What if the cities we build are also building something within us? In this episode of Building Better Cities , Kate Gasparro sits down with behavioral scientist and University of Virginia engineering professor Dr. Leidy Klotz to explore how the built environment shapes how we live, behave, connect, and feel. Drawing from his new book, In a Good Place , Leidy argues that the places around us can ei...

What if the biggest obstacle to building more housing and creating more sustainable urban development isn't zoning or financing — it's how we tax land? In this episode of Building Better Cities , host Kate Gasparro sits down with Greg Miller , founder of the Center for Land Economics , to unpack land value tax (LVT) and why it might be the missing lever for building more housing, increasing infras...

Walk through any major American city and notice what's missing. Not coffee shops or co-working spaces — those are everywhere. What you won't see much of are children. Families with kids. People who chose the city not just for a season of life, but permanently. That absence is telling a story — and the data backs it up. Young families with children are a shrinking part of the U.S. population in maj...

In 2014, the Philadelphia school district auctioned off a shuttered vocational school in South Philly — 340,000 square feet, built like a bomb shelter. Seven developers looked at it. Some bid a dollar. Lindsey Scannapieco bid $1.75 million. That building is now Bok : home to more than 200 businesses, the majority owned by women and people of color, and one of the most celebrated adaptive reuse pro...

What does it actually take to invest in a neighborhood — not just a building — and get it right? In this episode, Brian Murray , CEO and co-founder of SHIFT Capital , takes us inside 15 years of community development projects that started with a few neglected industrial buildings in Kensington, Philadelphia and evolved into a national impact investment platform. Brian shares how SHIFT's "Whole Nei...

The zoning debate is about what we build and for whom . The building code is supposed to be about how we build it. But the "how" has a way of quietly dictating the "what" and "whom" — making the building code just as political and just as consequential to our cities as anything that happens at a planning commission. In this episode, host Kate Gasparro talks with Eduardo Mendoza , Policy Manager at...

For generations, cities were built by the people who lived in them. That's why so many of our most beloved neighborhoods feel like quilted fabrics of architectural styles, mixed uses, interwoven public spaces, and human-scale details. These vibrant neighborhoods weren't delivered all at once through a single master plan — they emerged gradually through incremental urban development, one building,...

For generations, California has approached housing growth through a familiar playbook: long planning processes, neighborhood-by-neighborhood debates, and major reforms that often struggle to deliver homes at scale. But every so often, an incentive structure quietly changes the system. In this episode of Building Better Cities , we explore one of those policies: California’s Density Bonus Law , and...

How do you measure whether a city is actually getting better? Most people know LEED as the gold standard for green buildings. But cities are more than buildings—they’re systems made up of housing, transportation, public space, infrastructure, resilience, health, and opportunity. In this episode of Building Better Cities , Kate Gasparro sits down with Dr. Vatsal Bhatt , Vice President at the U.S. G...

Transit ballot measures are often seen as a long shot — especially when affordability is top of mind and voters are being asked to raise their own taxes. But in November 2024, 66% of Nashville voters said yes to Choose How You Move , a half-penny sales tax funding $3.1 billion in transit expansion, sidewalk construction, and urban infrastructure improvements across Davidson County. So what made it...

You pay rent or a mortgage every month and you know exactly what that costs. But how much are you spending just to get where you need to go? For a lot of Americans, transportation is the hidden cost of where they live — and it's a cost that's baked into the way we've built our cities. In part two of this series, Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute stays with us and we're joined by Sam Sklar — th...

Upzoning is often pitched as the silver bullet for the housing crisis — change the rules, let developers build, and supply will bring prices down. But the reality is a lot more complicated. In this episode, host Kate Gasparro sit down with Yonah Freemark to unpack what the research actually tells us about the relationship between zoning reform and housing production across U.S. cities. Yonah is a...

Building better cities requires getting the relationship between cities, counties, and the state right. And few people understand that dynamic better than someone who's lived on both sides of it. In this episode of Building Better Cities, host Kate Gasparro sits down with Michael Tubbs — former Mayor of Stockton, Special Advisor to Governor Newsom, and candidate for Lieutenant Governor — to unpack...

For decades, communities across Appalachia have watched jobs disappear, resources drain, and local wealth flow outward. But in Morganton, North Carolina, a nonprofit called The Industrial Commons has been quietly rewriting that story — building cooperative businesses, training workers, and keeping wealth rooted in place through circular textile manufacturing and community-owned enterprise. In this...

California has record levels of federal infrastructure funding and some of the most ambitious climate goals in the country. But why are transportation emissions still rising?  In this episode of Building Better Cities, we explore how infrastructure funding impacts urban development and sustainable infrastructure strategies. Join host Kate Gasparro as she sits down with Adie Tomer and Ben Swedberg...

If we know how to build healthier, more sustainable and regenerative buildings, why do so few of them actually get built? This conversation focuses on the execution gap holding cities, developers, and institutions back from delivering better places for people. Despite decades of innovation in materials, design strategies, and performance data, progress often stalls when good ideas collide with ris...

Downtowns across the country are struggling after COVID — with empty storefronts, declining foot traffic, and major uncertainty about the future of office districts and city centers. In this episode of Building Better Cities , host Kate Gasparro sits down with Mayor Knox White of Greenville, South Carolina to unpack what it really takes to save a downtown — and why Greenville’s approach has become...

One year ago, the Los Angeles wildfires made one thing unmistakably clear: climate risk is no longer peripheral to urban life — it is a defining condition for many cities . The loss of thousands of homes has forced urgent questions about how to rebuild in climate-risk areas. Homeowners are facing rising insurance costs — further exacerbating the affordability crisis. Earlier this year, we explored...

How do you make mission-driven development pencil in a neighborhood shaped by decades of disinvestment? In this episode of Building Better Cities , host Kate Gasparro sits down with J. Byron Brazier , lead developer of Woodlawn Central , a nearly $895 million mixed-use development on Chicago’s South Side anchored by the Apostolic Church of God . Together, they explore how community-led, faith-base...

Why is housing so expensive — and what are states doing about it? Well... California has passed SB 79 to spur transit-oriented development. This upzoning will leverage infrastructure investments to increase supply and build more sustainable cities. To unpack what that means, host Kate Gasparro sits down with Ben Metcalf , Managing Director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley...

When the Building Better Cities podcast launched just over a year ago, we set out to explore how we design and deliver the infrastructure and buildings that shape our lives. So this week, Kate is revisiting the very first episode of the podcast — a conversation with Dr. Andrew Sonta that explores the connection between the urban form and social cohesion. His work at EPFL focuses on human interacti...