Brookline, Mass, an upscale urban suburb of Boston, has a really cool campus-style public high school consisting of several buildings clustered around a historic public park and abutting a light rail line. Located in an urban context with limited buildable land, the most recent addition to campus was built directly over the renovated Brookline Hills MBTA station. This building, the new 9th Grade Academy, was completed during the Pandemic.

Photos by William Rawn Associates —

The main narratives I’ve seen out of this fire has been that the LAFD should’ve never been defunded and needed all the money it could get to prepare for this. Yet I simultaneously see people saying that property taxes are a scam and we should never be paying them. Cities will never be properly funded as long as the general public thinks like this

Edit: I know the fire department wasn’t ACTUALLY defunded, I’m simply making an argument for how city services the public needs are reliant on taxes the public does not want to pay, and that impasse is an issue for urbanists. Obviously a wildfire with 100 mph winds is going to be out of the scope of a municipal fire department to deal with.

This graphic ranks the 10 most densely populated 2-square-mile, 4-sided polygons in US cities.

1. NYC

2. SF

3. LA

4. Hoboken

5. Chicago

6. Washington DC

7. Philadelphia

8. Boston

9. Seattle

10. Honolulu

Today a group of people decided to paint a crosswalk during a block party since the street was gonna be closed down.

The city had multiple departments represented at the block party, including the police department, who set up camp right next to the crosswalk.

They didn’t question what we were doing and even said thank you.

Thanks Cross Walks collective for the online plans.

These people are in our communities undermining our efforts for the worst reasons