A week and a bit ago, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel entitled Choosing the Future We Want, thanks to a kind invitation from Sustainable San Rafael. I got to see a couple of the regular commenters beforehand, bust out some market urbanism and Charles Marohn afterwards, and talk about Marin's history as a transit-oriented county on the panel itself. Honestly, it was a whole lot of fun. It's much more rewarding to talk with people who are skeptical of change than to comment at them online. I hope I sparked some interest in suburban urbanism and shed some light on where our county comes from. I hope I'll have a chance to post about some of this in the future.

Below is the video in full. You can download Linda Jackson's presentation here and mine here. You can also download the maps of the Interurban either in the Map Room or on the original post.

One point of clarification. The last commenter said that if the examples I gave were representative of the kind of affordable housing we'd get under Plan Bay Area she'd be all for it. Lucky for her, every one of the latter building examples are affordable housing. That's not to say affordable housing is all grand in Marin (I'm hoping to write a piece highlighting some of the worst examples I came across while preparing for my talk), but it's a representative sample. We need people like her fighting for good development, not fighting against all development because some will be bad. We can't rely on design review boards and planning commissions to promote good design if all they hear from the public is negativity.

Okay, enough of my soapbox here. Go watch the video. I start at 50:22.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChM4dJy5M3Y]