M. Nolan Gray 🥑 (@mnolangray) / X

M. Nolan Gray 🥑

52.6K posts

M. Nolan Gray 🥑

@mnolangray

the once and future city planner // senior director at CALIFORNIA YIMBY // AICP // kentuckian // #BBN // author of hit broadway musical arbitrary lines

Sacramento

islandpress.org/books/arbitrar…

Joined June 2009

Pinned
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Jul 25, 2024
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It a.co/d/aPlq04R
173K
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Dec 4, 2023
Gmail search is amazing. You can search something like "flight sacramento receipt 2023" and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn't the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.
4.3M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Jul 24, 2024
It's wild how Starbucks went from classic "third place" to the cutting edge of hostile architecture in a span of like a decade.
3.3M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Aug 7, 2025
Pennsylvania is low key the king of American urbanism. It's like a time capsule, you've got hundreds of little towns and dozens of midsized cities where normal middle class people are still living in townhouses, shopping at corner shops, and walking for a daily errands.
Alan Fisher
@alanthefisher
Aug 5, 2025
I love Pennsylvania because you'll find random towns in the middle of nowhere that are more dense and walkable than every sunbelt city
2.2M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Oct 31, 2023
I've literally never clicked copied and pasted text and thought, "I'm so glad it kept the formatting and font from the other document."
1.2M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Aug 21, 2023
I'm forever thinking of this Reddit thread: "What did a Roman parking lot look like?"
Peter Norton
@PeterNorton12
Aug 20, 2023
Without history we tend to consider the status quo normal, and other possibilities anomalous. But the original proponents of today's status quo on US streets called their own position "radical," and the status quo we live with every day was their far-fetched, radical aspiration.
3M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Jun 16, 2021
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Apr 11, 2024
For the price of Santa Monica bungalow, you can own the largest building in St. Louis.
unusual_whales
@unusual_whales
Apr 11, 2024
Oh, no. The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ. In 2006, it sold for $205 million.
1.3M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Apr 1, 2024
For 40 years, the Los Angeles mandated that every new high-rise install a helicopter pad on the roof on the basis of fire safety. The theory? A helicopter might land on a burning building and evacuate occupants.
2.5M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
May 20, 2023
Parts and labor, I'm confident we can install a bus shelter for $500.
Kounkuey [KDI]
@Kounkuey
May 20, 2023
Replying to @Kounkuey
Typical bus shelters often cost $50k or more and require coordination among 8 departments. La Sombrita (in its most expensive, prototype form) costs approximately 15% of the price of a typical bus shelter and can be installed in 30 minutes or less.
2.4M
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Jul 25, 2024
The entire point of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is to protect its fragile contents from direct sunlight while allowing for a warm glow through the marble, you philistines.
The Culturist
@the_culturist_
Jul 22, 2024
Replying to @the_culturist_
First is sacrifice. Buildings must have visible proof of the love and dedication that went into them. Today, we generally produce the largest result for the least cost, shaving any "unnecessary" detail or material from the design...
426K
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Jul 6, 2022
To whoever is doing this to scifi book covers: I just want to talk.
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
Aug 22, 2025
Something I've been thinking about a lot: In a recent 5Cast episodes, Andrew Callaghan made an off-hand comment about how nearly all of the recently-minted conspiracy theorists he has talked to mention "Ancient Aliens" as being a watershed moment.
Kevin Gaughen 🇺🇸
@gaughen
Aug 21, 2025
One of the greatest Russian psyops was convincing millions of crayon-eating pudding brains that they could do their own research. The idea was to break down trust in the West in institutions, education, and experience - and it worked.
666K
M. Nolan Gray 🥑
@mnolangray
May 29, 2021