Welcome to The Planning Desk.
If you're reading this, you are probably here because something about city planning, zoning, or a proposed development in your area caught your attention. Maybe a development was proposed near your neighborhood. Maybe you work in urban planning or related profession and want some additional insight . Maybe you're a developer that makes more enemies than friends.
Whatever brought you here — welcome. This newsletter is built for you.
What The Planning Desk Is
The Planning Desk is a land use and urban planning education platform. We do focus on Florida, but many other states reflect these processes and most states use zoning, so the applicability is very universal. Every week we cover one topic in plain English.
The content is written for three audiences, and we're deliberate about serving all three:
Citizens and HOA Boards
If you want to know what's happening near your neighborhood — or what could happen — The Planning Desk gives you the knowledge to participate effectively. Not just show up to city hall and object. Participate in a way that builds a legal record, influences decisions, and has the potential to hold up if a decision gets challenged.
Developers and Private Sector Professionals
If you're a developer, real estate professional, land use attorney, or related consultant — The Planning Desk is a structured reference for how the public side of the process works. Understanding what citizens and boards are looking for, what arguments carry legal weight, and how Florida's regulatory landscape is shifting helps you navigate more effectively and anticipate friction before it becomes a problem. We want to provide you with the tools to work with the community more effectively. This will lead to smoother development review processes.
Planning and Local Government Professionals
If you work in government, in planning, public works, transportation, utilities, parks, property management, engineering, or any other area that touches land use — The Planning Desk covers your professional world. We will go deep on professional specialties, related topics, and how urban planning connects to many adjacent fields. This is the stuff that helped me grow in my career as a public servant. This isn't general-audience content dressed up in professional language. It's built for practitioners.
What You Get — Free
Every week, free subscribers receive:
• One free newsletter — published weekly — with the core content in written form
• Link to occasional YouTube video — 5 to 10 minutes — covering the week's topic on the channel at YouTube.com/@ThePlanningDesk
• Website archive access — every free issue stays live and searchable at theplanningdesk.net
What You Get — Paid
The paid subscription is ten dollars a month or $100 annual. Paid subscribers receive everything in the free tier, plus:
Citizen Content
• One expanded newsletter — going well beyond the free issue for that week which may include:
• Tools and templates
• Scripts for meetings
• Steps to take when the Public Notice sign shows up
• Questions to ask
• Things you need to know that no one will tell you upfront
• Deep dives into best citizen, developer, and local government practices and strategies
Professional Content
• Focus on planning subspecialties including transportation planning, utilities planning, community / neighborhood planning, environmental review
• How planning intersects with other departments to include public works, utilities, finance, parks, property management, and other local government functions
• Identifying areas where the role of planning does not exist but should
• Ways to build professional engagement before land development applications get applied
The paid content is built for people who are actually in the room — at the hearing, on the board, managing the application, preparing the staff report, or advising a client. It's practitioner-level detail.
Publications and Training Materials
In addition to the weekly content, The Planning Desk publishes standalone topical guides and professional training materials available for individual purchase. These are deeper, longer-form resources on specific subjects — comprehensive, annotated, and designed to be kept and referenced rather than read once.
Current and forthcoming publications include guides on Florida's comprehensive plan amendment process, professional training content for entry-level planning staff, and topic-specific reference documents tied to the newsletter's content calendar.
I've also written Not Just NIMBY: A Citizen's Handbook for Fighting Smart and Planning Better — a full-length book covering the citizen engagement process in Florida land use from first notice through final appeal. I'll reference it regularly in the newsletter and on the channel. The link is at the bottom of every issue.
What's Coming — The Foundation Series
We launch next week with the Foundation Series — ten weeks of baseline planning knowledge every subscriber needs, regardless of which audience they're coming from. Here's the schedule:
• Week 1 (July 21) — Comprehensive Plan: the document that governs all land use decisions in Florida
• Week 2 (July 28) — Future Land Use Element: the map that tells you what can be built near you
• Week 3 (Aug 4) — Transportation Element: how your comp plan controls traffic and road capacity
• Week 4 (Aug 11) — Utilities Element: water, sewer, and what it means for development
• Week 5 (Aug 18) — Capital Improvements Element: where government invests, development follows
• Week 6 (Aug 25) — Land Development Regulations: the rulebook that implements the comp plan
• Week 7 (Sep 1) — Zoning: how land use districts control what gets built near you
• Week 8 (Sep 8) — Zoning Map and Overlay Districts: the regulatory layers most people miss
• Week 9 (Sep 15) — Special Areas and Districts: CRAs, DRIs, CDDs, and area-specific plans
• Week 10 (Sep 22) — Engineering Standards Manual: the technical rules for how things get built
After the Foundation Series, we move into topic-specific content — applying that knowledge to real situations, professional development, and the planning specialties.
One More Thing
I've spent thirty years in urban planning — as a practitioner, consultant, and an expert witness. I've sat at the applicant table, the staff table, the community table, and on the dais as a planning director for a local government. I know what effective engagement looks like from all three positions.
The Planning Desk is the resource I wish had existed when I started in my profession. My goal is to make land development and the planning process easier to understand to everyone who participates in it — not just the professionals who are paid to understand it.
I'm glad you're here.
— John Osborne, AICP
CEO-Urban Planner, Green Street Associates LLC | theplanningdesk.net