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It's my girlfriend Jocelyn's birthday today! Happy birthday Jocelyn, and thanks for always reading this thing despite living approximately 1,000 miles away from Kirkwood, I love you so much!!!
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I wrote a new piece this week on how we can simultaneously: 1) increase property values for existing homeowners, 2) make Kirkwood more affordable for young families, and 3) revive the small single-family home typology that keeps getting torn down all over Kirkwood. The discussion has been lively over on facebook, so if you haven't gotten the chance yet, give the article a read and then go wage war in the fb comments.
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How To Revive the Starter Home
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I've long maintained that Kirkwood's tear-down crisis is merely a symptom of how expensive our land has become. After you spend $500k to purchase the lot, spending another $200k to tear down the existing small home that sits on the lot and build a new bigger one seems like small potatoes. The Venn diagram of people who can afford to …
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- Some good stories in last week's Webster-Kirkwood Times:
- On pg. 5, there's a good look at the recent upswing in pedestrian collisions. This situation might seem a bit paradoxical at first glance. On the one hand, Kirkwood really has rolled out a lot of pedestrian infrastructure over the past five years and has emerged as a regional leader on the issue (although the same cannot be said for bike infrastructure), and now we're seeing all these accidents. It's important to keep in mind, though, that Kirkwood was starting from an incredibly car-centric baseline. If you look at our Walk Score, it's currently 37 out of 100, which ranks us as still a "Car Dependent City" in the verbage of the website. It's going to take many more years of leadership and bold action on the issue before we dig ourselves out of the hole that has been the last one hundred years of street policy
- On pg. 11, in the Eye on Kirkwood section, there's an awesome blurb on Kirkwood for Everyone's August 25th ADU informational event. Make sure to RSVP and share the event on facebook!
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That's it for this week! Have a great weekend and talk soon!
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