What is good human habit and where do we find it?

Why don’t we have more of it?

What must we do to create it?

Everything you’ll find here ties back to the above.

Good Human Habitat advocates for municipal governments to pursue four objectives that are necessary to halt urban sprawl’s expansion and to consistently build at the human scale. These objectives are derived from best practices in municipalities (suburban and urban) where walkability can be validated analytically.

Consider the following two points.

1. Surveys show that most adults would prefer living in vibrant, walkable, human-scale communities if they were available. Yet urban sprawl prevails.

2. Over 60% of CO₂ emissions tie back to two key things that municipal governments do, namely deciding what and where things get built. And what most municipalities build is urban sprawl, in both its vertical (high-rise) and horizontal (suburban) variants.

There’s a connection here.

Many municipal governments across the United States and Canada have ostensibly made commitments to “walkability” and “climate action.” Yet most continue to mandate development patterns that diminish the pedestrian experience and maximize emissions. Often, the gap between rhetoric and reality is wide.

Good Human Habitat (GHH) promotes independent, third-party assessments of local governments, helping evaluate whether their stated commitments are being realized in practice.

Importantly, these assessments bring tangible benefits to those living in established suburban areas.

Third-party assessments clarify where a municipality stands regarding the four objectives, namely critical mass, strategic vision, clarity of entitlement, and design competence. Absent these objectives, urban sprawl will prevail.

Research conducted over the past several years has consistently shown that human-scale development produces far fewer emissions relative to urban sprawl.

Additional research indicates that human-scale development offers social, financial, environmental, and health-related advantages over urban sprawl.

Independent assessments contribute to better conversations about the places we live, and the impact development choices have on the climate and the natural world.

These conversations need to take place at the local level, as it is within municipal planning offices that most development decisions are made.

Third-party municipal assessments provide four key benefits:

1. Help to bring informed conversations into the orbit of municipal elections to support candidates for elected office who can provide the leadership required to produce the four preconditions for human-scale development. Local journalism is relevant here. 
2. Help both municipal staff and community members to understand the work required to overcome barriers to creating affordable, safe, well-designed, walkable, neighborhood-centered places to live.
3. Respond credibly to the unfolding climate crisis by ending the practice of expanding urban sprawl in both its vertical and horizontal dimensions, as both produce worst-case outcomes in terms of CO2.
4. Identify the gap between rhetoric and reality in terms of what policymakers say and do regarding commitments to “walkability” and “climate action.”

Good Human Habitat’s end goal is to create opportunities for wage-earning, middle-income families to raise children in safe, affordable, thriving, urban environments where quality of life comes first.

A well-designed, vibrant, walkable environment that works for the middle-class child works for everyone. And the climate benefits are significant.

Articles at Good Human Habitat explore the intersection of urban planning and culture. Collectively, they:

• clarify the value of living at the human scale,
• explain why such places are so rare, and
• outline what specifically need occur in any municipality to make more of it available.

Municipal assessments take place in a social context. To this end, Good Human Habitat considers quality of life in both the United States and Canada. The two nations face different but overlapping challenges.

In the U.S., the biggest challenges to quality of life are urban sprawl and an unresolved racial history.

In Canada, the biggest challenges are urban sprawl and government-engineered mass immigration used as a crude form of economic development.

Articles at Good Human Habitat appear under one of four categories below and are accessible via main menu.

The Human Scale
Natural World
Governance
Society

These categories come directly from the four-part definition for quality of life referred to in many GHH articles.

GHH organizes articles based on their principal focus.

Human Scale articles focus on what the human scale entails and the benefits it brings to our lives.

Natural World articles focus on two questions. First, how does living in proximity to nature affect our well-being? Second, how does urban sprawl impact the natural world differently than human-scale development? (e.g., High-rise development produces worst-case outcomes for the climate.)

Governance articles focus on municipal policies and regulations that produce either urban sprawl (in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions) or human-scale development.

Society articles examine the key challenges — beyond urban sprawl — that the United States and Canada face in creating good human habitat. As mentioned above, the challenges are an unresolved racial history in the U.S. and mass immigration used to fuel development in Canada.

Most of the material at Good Human Habitat is “evergreen” content. The articles are relevant to today, and they’ll be relevant ten years from now. Where this is not the case, dates will be included. With this said, the articles are periodically reviewed and updated if necessary.

Patrick Moan is a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen born in Philadelphia. He and his wife live in Montreal.

When raising children, they lived in Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Patrick holds a master’s degree in urban planning from Dalhousie University and has worked as a municipal planner in both Canada and the United States. His work in graduate school and municipal government focused on regulatory reform and public engagement to support human-scale development.

Patrick split his undergraduate years between Annapolis and Drexel University, receiving a BS in Computer Science. Starting at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he spent several years focused on internetworking and eventually landed a position implementing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards.

His field of work provided flexibility in terms of job location. Over time, a growing dissatisfaction with the impact of auto-dependency on quality of life led him to exercise this flexibility and explore a handful of places around the country, looking for the “right place” to live.

This discontent led him to return to school to study urban planning at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His thesis identified approaches local governments in the United States were taking to overcome barriers to getting walkable, human-scale development built.

After working as a policy planner in Halifax during grad school, he took a position as a legislative planner in Baltimore County, MD. Their planning department had expressed an interest in his thesis and was ostensibly planning to take steps to “modernize” outdated zoning laws.

There, he conceived of a redevelopment policy to incentivize the creation of human-scale development. Through this experience, he witnessed how organizational dysfunction and the political process can co-opt a good idea, dilute it, and ultimately render it impotent.

Experience as an urban planner led him to understand why so little changes regarding creating the human-scale places that surveys say a majority of people want. Twenty years after leaving municipal planning, most local governments still build horizontal sprawl (i.e., suburban sprawl) outside established city centers and vertical sprawl (i.e., high rises) inside. Good Human Habitat is a response to this reality.