CityLab Daily: Your Building Code Won't Save You
Also: Saarinen gets a New Urbanist reboot, and Barcelona’s bold play for affordable housing.
What We’re Following
Waiting for the Big One: As San Francisco rethinks its seismic regulations, the message from experts is clear: The building code won’t save you from the earthquakes. The New York Times maps where the biggest risk exists today and looks back to the last time an earthquake devastated the city, on April 18, 1906. The big unknown is that modern skyscrapers have yet to be tested by the unpredictable power of earthquakes. “It’s kind of like getting in a new airplane that’s only been designed on paper but nobody has ever flown in it,” one skeptic told the Times.
- Here’s some tough love from the CityLab archives: Why You Don’t Really Care About the Next ‘Big One’
Cleaning up: A toxic waste site in Houston has been removed from the EPA’s “Emphasis List” of Superfund sites, with the agency citing progress on a cleanup plan since Hurricane Harvey, NPR reports. The two companies responsible for the site have agreed to a $115 million clean-up plan for the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a heavily contaminated area near homes and schools that was exposed by the September hurricane. The site has been on the Superfund list since 2008.
More on CityLab
Map of the Day
Times up, taxes are due! The spatial analytics firm Esri has a sparkly map that shows how people did their taxes in 2017. The maps show where more people used a certified public accountant (purple), H&R Block (blue), TurboTax (yellow), or did their taxes manually on their own (green) at the state, county, and neighborhood level. See an interesting pattern in your city? Drop us a line at hello@citylab.com (h/t Fast Company).
What We’re Reading
Airbnb wants to point people to lesser-known towns that want tourists (Fast Company)
China made solar power cheap. Now it’s doing it for electric buses. (Vox)
How Phoenix’s real estate market is faring 10 years after the housing crisis (NPR)
Tesla says its factory is safer. But it left injuries off the books. (Reveal)
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