Planning

Once again, I feel compelled to write about house prices. Why? Because it is the most important cause of social distress in New Zealand today, and that by a large margin. There would still be social problems if house prices were half their present level, but they would be vastly more manageable – child poverty would be much reduced, mental health would be better, there would be less homelessness, there would be fewer suicides, and educational progress would be better if kids didn’t have to move between one over-crowded home and another at too frequent intervals.  read more »

“Hey!” says someone in Cincinnati every few years. “Here’s some obsolete infrastructure that should never have been built in the first place. Let’s spend a few billion dollars finishing it!”  read more »

Important new ground was broken by Judge Clark, Senior Director of and Research at the Cicero Institute in his Breakthrough Institute Journal essay. In “Sprawl is Good: The Environmental Case for Suburbia,“ he topples foundational assumptions underlying the planning battle against urban expansion (the ideological term is “urban sprawl”).  read more »

While Americans drove their cars only 84 percent as many miles in 2020 as in 2019, according to data recently published by the Federal Highway Administration, they drove semi-trucks 101 percent as many miles.  read more »

Sidewalks have long been considered to be essential parts of America’s social and communal infrastructure. As Jane Jacobs recognized many decades ago, sidewalks are “the main public places of the city’’ and ‘‘its most vital organs.’’ For Jacobs and subsequent scholars of urbanity, sidewalks are active sites of socialization and allowing for open interactions and accidental encounters; they also serve as conduits to easily connect people to their communities as well as create spaces of contention and conflict.  read more »

Four years ago, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase wrote, or led the effort to write, ten principles of shared mobility for livable cities.  read more »

Sacramento politicians and the urban growth lobby they so diligently serve have created a narrative that there is something very wrong with living in (or wanting to live in) a single-family neighborhood. Single-family neighborhoods are -- so the narrative goes -- “racist,” “immoral,” and “evil.”  read more »

Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished.  read more »

“Almost all theories of the city are largely qualitative, developed primarily from focused studies on specific cities or groups of cities supplemented by narratives, anecdotes, and intuition.” Geoffrey West, Scale, 2017

This recent quote recalls Jane Jacobs’s seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)  read more »

Visionary images of resilient cities that save the US, or even the world, from climate change. Of downtowns transformed by technology into smart ecotopias. Of urban oases that sprout from scratch in the deserts of the Southwest or the Middle East or Mars.  read more »