Essay: How We Got Here
The experience and reasoning behind how we work
There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from working inside a large, complex planning system for a long time. We learned where the gaps were. We learned which tools worked and which ones didn't fit the problems they were supposed to solve. And we began to develop a clear sense of what a better approach might look like.
Our principals spent years developing policy and regulatory frameworks inside large municipal planning operations, working at a scale where the gap between what a zoning code describes and what a city actually is becomes impossible to ignore. That experience shaped how we think about the relationship between analysis, regulation, and place.
The landscape we worked in was not static. It was a place in profound flux — economically, demographically, environmentally, and physically. Neighborhoods that had been working-class industrial for generations were transitioning into something new. Communities built around the car were beginning to reckon with a different kind of mobility. Hillsides that had long carried some of the highest development pressure in the region were now also at the edge of a wildfire urban interface, demanding a fundamentally different regulatory response. Housing demand was reshaping block after block in ways that the existing code could not accommodate, could not guide, and often actively made worse. And yet the code remained uniform, applied, and largely indifferent to context.
The Problem With Inherited Regulation
The zoning code we worked with every day was not poorly intentioned. It was the product of thousands of individual decisions made over decades, each rational in isolation, none of them building toward a coherent picture of what the city actually was.
The result was a regulatory system that treated profoundly different places as though they were the same. A block adjacent to a major transit corridor and a block ten minutes' walk from the nearest bus stop could carry identical development rights, because they shared a zone boundary drawn in 1960. A neighborhood actively transitioning from light industrial to residential and a single-family neighborhood where zoning had remained largely untouched for decades could face the same restrictions. The code was not reading the city. It was overlaid on it. And the city — restless, growing, changing, and under pressure — was pushing back in ways that produced conflict, inequity, displacement, and missed opportunity.
Reading a Place
The answer required a different kind of analysis. We started building a picture of place from the ground up — literally from the parcel level. Not from zone boundaries or general plan designations, but from the accumulated evidence of how each piece of land actually functioned in the city's ecosystem.
We documented what was built on each parcel and how it sat on the lot. We mapped who lived there, who worked there, and how people moved through the area. We looked at adjacencies, economic conditions, and the pressures — market, demographic, environmental — that were already reshaping the block whether the code acknowledged it or not.
These were not new data points. They existed, scattered across agencies, databases, assessor records, census files, and transit ridership reports. What was new was assembling them into a single, integrated picture at the parcel level, and then asking what that picture revealed about how the place actually worked — as opposed to how it had been categorized.
The picture that emerged was not the one the zoning map described. What we found was a city of extraordinary internal diversity — places with distinct functional identities that had been flattened by decades of uniform regulation into a false homogeneity. Working at scale, in places where the pace of change outran the regulatory framework, made abstraction impossible. Diversity made generalization dangerous. The gap between what the zoning map described and what was actually happening on the ground was visible every day, in every neighborhood. The context was everything.
Understanding a place is necessary. It is not sufficient. The harder problem — the one that took longer to solve — was translating that understanding into regulation. How do you write a rule that fits a place? How do you build a code that responds to the diversity you have mapped, without becoming so complex it collapses under its own weight?
The answer, we came to believe, was calibration. Not a single standard applied everywhere. Not a bespoke rule for every parcel. But a framework that identified the distinct functional contexts within a community — the downtown hub, the wildfire-adjacent residential edge, the transitional mixed-use corridor, the neighborhood commercial node — and assigned regulatory standards calibrated to what each context actually needed.
Height not as an arbitrary number, but as a function of what a district does. Frontage requirements not as a generic amenity, but as a response to the specific pedestrian environment of a specific street. Density not as a uniform target, but as a measure of what transit access, infrastructure capacity, and community character could actually support. The regulation followed the place. Not the other way around. This process does not produce a perfect plan. It produces an honest one.
It produces regulation that has been earned — derived from evidence, tested against scenarios, and calibrated to context rather than inherited from a previous generation's assumptions about how a city should work. It produces communities that can see themselves in their own plans, not because the plan tells them what they want to hear, but because it reflects what the data actually shows about how they live, how they move, how they work, and how they want to grow. And it produces codes that can be implemented, because every standard has a reason, and that reason is the place itself.
But analysis alone does not get you there. Data reveals how a place functions. It does not reveal what a community values, what it wants to protect, or what kind of future it is willing to build together. That comes from engagement — and when community knowledge is treated as a genuine input alongside technical analysis, the standards that follow carry a reason residents can recognize as their own.
A Shared City is built from that connection. It is not a perfect city. It is one where the planning worked — where policy and regulation were held together by evidence from the first data point to the final adopted standard, and where decisions were built toward outcomes that serve the full community, not just those with the most political voice or market demand. A city where the regulatory system distributes the conditions for thriving equitably across everyone who calls it home. That is the standard we are working toward.