YIMBY News for 5/18

[Eric Budd]

Manufactured Housing’s Unrealized Promise

Governing

---

KEYWORD SCORE: 35.91. affordable, affordable housing, density, development, homeowner, house, housing, housing and urban development, income, parking, rent, single-family, supply, urban, zoning

More states are enacting “equal-treatment” laws requiring localities to permit manufactured housing wherever traditional single-family homes are allowed. At least five states — Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana and, most recently, Virginia — have passed such laws since 2024. Legislators hope that knocking down local zoning barriers to affordable factory-built homes, particularly those intended to be installed on a permanent foundation, will help fill the country's housing gap. But the evidence suggests these reforms have not worked. In new research for my organization, I find that states with

Share via:

Data centers could actually be good for your hometown

Vox - Politics

---

KEYWORD SCORE: 34.88. construction, development, growth, house, housing, project, rent, supply, urban, zone

[image: An aerial view of a large data center.] An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center (C) with closed-loop cooling system on April 14, 2026 in Vernon, California. | Getty Images The only good data center is a canceled data center. Or so a growing number of Americans seem to feel. Throughout the United States, citizens are mobilizing against the construction of new data centers in general — and the massive, “hyperscale” ones that fuel artificial intelligence, in particular. Key takeaways - Data centers can increase local air pollution, though their emissions vary widely between different

Share via:

Kansas City’s Streetcar Grows Up

Governing

---

KEYWORD SCORE: 23.38. apartment, bus route, construction, development, downtown, multimodal, parking, project, rent, transportation, walk

In Brief: The Kansas City Streetcar is opening a new extension to the Missouri River waterfront today. In combination with an extension opened last year, the route is now three times as long as it was when it opened a decade ago. Officials credit it with spurring development and boosting transit ridership. The Kansas City Streetcar began service 10 years ago as a two-mile loop, primarily serving tourists visiting downtown attractions. But lately it’s begun to grow up, evolving into a useful piece of infrastructure for a bigger share of the city’s transportation needs. Last year the streetcar a

Share via:

Street Safety and Police Reform Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Streetsblog Net

---

KEYWORD SCORE: 19.27. development, income, mobility, project, rent, transportation, vision zero, walk

America’s broken approaches to roadway safety and criminal justice are profoundly intertwined, a provocative new report argues — and until reformers in both fields reckon with how deeply their battles are connected, neither will notch any real progress. Researchers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law closely examined how mass car dependency amplifies harm in the criminal legal system, like rampant traffic stops that disproportionately turn deadly for people of color or traffic fines that trap low-income earners in “inescapable

Share via: