This summer, I co-organized a month-long 1,300-person "popup village" in Healdsburg, CA called Edge Esmeralda. This gathering was incredibly fun and rewarding, and it was also a huge accelerant to the creation of the permanent village we are building, Esmeralda. Edge Esmeralda is happening again next year! Mark your calendar: May 24 - June 21, 2025 A huge challenge when building a town is that the feedback loops are very, very long. Instead of accepting this fact, I decided that we have to get creative to find ways to learn and adjust, because within a few years we will literally be laying our plans in concrete. Edge Esmeralda was essentially a prototype to learn about how we want to approach building the Esmeralda permanent community, both the "hardware" (urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, etc) and the "software" (events, programming, culture, etc). The Edge Esmeralda "popup village" was 30 days long, and it took place scattered throughout a charming 11,000-person town in Sonoma County called Healdsburg. This extended gathering gave us an opportunity to put our ideas into practice and learn firsthand which ones we want to incorporate as we the permanent community — more importantly, which ones we'll want to leave behind, or at least adjust. These learnings ranged widely, such as: What makes a great town square How to integrate kids while maintaining expert-level programming Where to provide the lightest amount of structure and routine for the group to allow the emergent creativity of the attendees to make awesome things happen How to approach local outreach to make existing residents feel included Which restaurant layouts and acoustics make for the best nightly community dinners How far apart is too far apart for things to feel easily accessible on foot It's hard to capture EE in a blog post — it was really more of an ecosystem like a college campus or city than a single tracked event — but these stats will give you a sense of what the month looked like: ~1,300 people joined us during the month of June 80 kids attended Edge Esmeralda 6 weeks old & 86 years old, the ages of the youngest & oldest attendees 25 expert-led program tracks 551 sessions throughout the month 93% were organized by attendees, with just 7% planned directly by the Edge Esmeralda organizing team! 167 unique session hosts 3x increase in Bird Bike usage in the town during the event – and that doesn’t even count the bikes people rented or brought, separate from Bird, which was a much larger number! 350 redwood trees funded by donations from a solar-powered night market, organized entirely by attendees Read the Edge Esmeralda 2024 recap → The coolest thing to me is that our design principles focused on emergence, so we didn’t actually know precisely what would happen. Instead, we created the container and then watched it unfold. In other words, all the cool things that happened were because the attendees saw it as an opportunity to make something awesome out of it. One of my favorite examples was the Solar A-frames project, catalyzed by Nick Foley and Anson Yu/ Over the course of a few weeks, they led a group of attendees to build an A-frame made out of solar panels up in a formerly burned redwood forest close to town, which ended up hosting the spectacular Golden Future Night Market and the memorable Closing Ceremony. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to collaborate with Edge City to make Edge Esmeralda a reality. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever worked on, and they were incredible partners in bringing this to life. "Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected — and most fun — things I’ve ever watched unfold in Healdsburg." — Simone Wilson, Healdsburg Tribune In fact we had such a good time, and so many people asked us to do it again so they could come longer next time, that we have decided to organize Edge Esmeralda again! Mark your calendars: May 24 - June 21, 2025. Hope to see you there! .post .post-content table { margin: 18px 0 18px 0; } .post .post-content tr div {padding: 6px 0 0 0 } .post-content b a, .post-content b {font-weight: 900;} @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

In the US, it's common for local governments to focus on tax revenue produced by a property, without considering the costs it adds to the city's budget. This is like measuring how far a car can drive without considering how much gas it uses to get there. Different properties create different long-term cost burdens for the city. One of the biggest contributors to that variance is the amount of infrastructure they require, which correlates with the amount of space they take up. For just 1 building per acre, you need far more roads/pipes/etc per building than if you build 10 buildings per acre. Lower density doesn't really increase tax revenue per building, so you're essentially taking on a lot more infrastructure liability to support the same revenue. Spreading development across a lot of land requires more infrastructure, resulting in higher costs per building. Clustering development on less land reduces per-building costs, because the cost of the infrastructure is spread over more units. Consider two properties in Asheville: a Walmart and a small downtown building. The Walmart is worth $20M and uses 34 acres, while the downtown building is worth $11M and uses 0.2 acres. At first blush, the Walmart seems better because it generates more tax revenue. But once you look at the denominator, you see that the downtown building generates 100x more tax revenue per acre! $20,000,000 / 34 acres = $588,000 / acre $11,000,000 / 0.2 acres = $55,000,000 / acre When we build sprawl without accounting for the long-term liabilities, we create unsustainable infrastructure costs that can overwhelm city budgets in the long-run. For example, Detroit's sprawling layout and declining population left it with extensive infrastructure to maintain but insufficient tax revenue, contributing to its 2013 bankruptcy. This doesn't mean we should never build low density places, but we should be aware of the tradeoffs. We have to to consider the costs and not just revenues, otherwise we will continue to build ourselves into a hole! Detroit pioneered the sprawl development pattern, which depends on perpetual growth in order to continue working. This development pattern was a major contributor to its financial troubles a few decades later when its infrastructure bills came due. Cities that emulate traditional development patterns like downtown Charleston earn more revenue in a small area while costing far less in infrastructure expenses. Thanks to Urban3 for the analysis that inspired this post. Also, Strong Towns has a bunch of great posts on this topic, including: The Question Every City Should Be Asking We Are All Detroit What Charleston Can Teach us About the Value of Place We measure car value based on miles per gallon, not miles per tank. Why don't we do the same for our cities' developments? 2022: The Year in Maps and Charts From Urban3 Mansion Blight: How the Most Expensive Homes Drain Community Wealth The Power of Information Equity .post .post-content table { margin: 12px 0 12px 0; } .container .post .post-content ul { margin-bottom: 24px !important; } .post .post-content tr div {padding: 6px 0 0 0 } @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 20px 0 !important;}

One thing I like about Georgist land taxes is they reflect a deep-seated intuition many people have that land should be owned by the community, while still employing markets to ensure efficient use of this limited resource. People feel that land is special and should serve the collective good and reflect community interests. This intuition manifests in behaviors like NIMBYism, where residents oppose changes to their neighborhood and try to stop people from doing what they want to their own property. These behaviors essentially reflect a belief that they as a community have rights over the property in question, even if they don't own it. One reaction is to scoff at this behavior, because it violates a basic interpretation property rights. But another reaction is to ask ourselves, why do people have such strong intuitions that land is different than other forms of property? One way in which natural resources (including land) are qualitatively different than other forms of property is that you can't make more of them (with minor exceptions). As a result, natural resources aren't the fruits of someone's labor. One reaction is to say that no one should be able to individually own them, and that they should be collectively owned by the community. However, the history of the 20th century shows us that giving over the land to the state isn't a great idea either — government's aren't exactly known for making best use of opportunities to their best and highest use, to say the least! Henry George proposed a different solution – tax the land rent while allowing private ownership. Land rent is the value of the property created by society rather than individual landowners (e.g. its location, views, and other natural resources), so taxing it would essentially recapture this socially-created value for public benefit. While society is recapturing the socially-created value of the land, use of the land is in the hands of private actors who have the incentive to use it efficiently, so the system maintains the productivity benefits of private ownership while addressing issues of unearned wealth. Markets are still generally the best tools we have for organizing human activity and resources, so by allowing private actors to own land but then simply tax them on the land rent leaves us with the best of both worlds!

I’ve now done two egg retrieval cycles. Given that I had a zillion questions before I started, I thought I’d share my notes for others who might have similar questions. Things I would’ve loved to know beforehand Overall the process was way easier and less intense than I expected. It was mostly annoying, because I had to go to tons of doctor’s appointments and get my blood drawn multiple times a week, but in terms of symptoms and pain it was very low key. I also had a very serious hand injury and series of three surgeries shortly before starting this process, so this may have felt minor in comparison. A lot of people report IVF being very difficult and uncomfortable, and I also may have just gotten lucky. But I wanted to share my experience so people can understand the range. Shockingly, I came to look forward to the injections each night. This was shocking because before this, I had a medium phobia of needles. Mixing the medications is a relaxing process (took ~20 mins each time), and I’d always feel really proud of myself after doing the injection. To be clear, I never enjoyed doing the injection itself, and the very first time it was really scary, but I was really proud of myself for how quickly I got used to it. Neuroplasticity for the win! Symptoms during/after the retrieval: After the first 4-5 days, I had minor discomfort in abdomen if I moved or bounced, but really almost nothing. Slightly more acne for the first round, but not the second. Maybe because I had to go off Tretinoin? Or maybe because of hormones? The day of the retrieval itself, I felt groggy and sleepy and ended up napping all afternoon. The very next day after, I was up and about and felt almost totally normal, to the point where I was already gardening and lifting heavy things (which in retrospect was probably pushing myself sooner than I should have, but I think it turned out fine!). Things to know regarding medications: Prenatal vitamins – wish I’d started sooner the first time around; the longer you do them ahead of time, the better. The second round I started them sooner. Since I am young and had a particularly large number of eggs, I’m at higher risk of OHSS (Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome), so they gave me meds to reduce that risk. I believe the category of drugs is called "GnRH antagonists". If you have a lot of follicles, make sure they give it to you. A friend of mine didn’t get it for her first round, and she got OHSS and her recovery was awful; when she did her second round, they gave it to her, and it was way better. The genetic reports (PGT-*) take a while to receive (as you can see in the calendar below). The funnel math is brutal from eggs → fertilized → frozen → genetic testing → implantation. Make sure you understand it well, otherwise you may be very disappointed and surprised by the results, even if you get a ton of eggs! Calendars One thing I was surprised to not have more information ahead of time was the scheduled of appointments and medications I would be taking. The dosage and timing of everything are determined based on your day-to-day blood test results, but I thought there would at least be some example calendars I could look at to get a sense of the rhythm to expect. Nope! So for anyone who's looking for the same thing I was, below you'll find the calendars of the two retrieval cycles I've gone through (and here's a link to the Google Doc, in case that's easier to read). Round 1 calendar: June 2023 Round 2 calendar: March 2024 table tr > * {padding: 0 8px !important} .heading {margin: 16px 0 8px 0; font-weight: 600 !important; font-size: 24px;} table .caption {line-height: 1.4} .center {text-align: center !important; text-wrap: balance} .post h3 {font-size: 18px; padding-top: 8px !important} .post .post-content table {margin-top: 12px !important; margin-bottom: 16px !important;} .grey-border{padding: 0 !important;} .grey-border img {border: 1px solid #eee; } .grey-border {padding: 0 !important;} /* Use to make the images bleed past the text */ @media (min-width: 1200px) { table {min-width: calc(100% + 190px) !important; margin-right: -90px !important; margin-left: -90px !important}} @media (min-width: 768px) { table { min-width: calc(100% + 140px) !important; margin-right: -70px !important; margin-left: -70px !important}} @media (max-width: 768px) { table tr > * {flex:none !important; width: calc(100% - 12px) !important}} .row hr {margin: 30px 0 30px 0 !important;} img {box-shadow: none !important}