Urban Issues

Little over a decade ago, the housing sector almost brought down not only the American but the world economy. Today the reprise of the housing decline will be playing a very different tune.  read more »

I'm the oldest of three siblings. My siblings left the Rust Belt for the East Coast; my sister and her family are in suburban Washington, D.C., and my brother's family lives in Brooklyn. Both have been encouraging me for years to make the leap and join them. I stay in touch with friends and other family from my birthplace of Detroit and my current hometown of Chicago via Facebook, and they have fanned throughout the country -- Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas, Houston.  read more »

Two audacious quotes in planning literature underpin this article and substitute for an introduction:  read more »

It turns out that tech oligarchs aren’t much better than old dogs at learning new tricks. By splitting his much coveted supposed second headquarters between New York City and greater Washington D.C., Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is repeating what worked for him in Seattle while saying “yes, sir” to power.  read more »

On any given night in California, there are about 134,278 people without a home. California, with 12 percent of the U.S. population, has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless people. California’s homeless population increased 13.7 percent between 2016 and 2017. About 36 percent of the homeless population are families with children. About 25 percent of the homeless population have jobs.  read more »

A couple of folks had interesting counterpoints to the superstar effect. Neil Strickland gave me permission to post the following email he sent:  read more »

Amazon, obviously embarrassed at the way their HQ2 process has been received, leaked the results of the competition the night before Election Day, ensuring coverage will be largely muted.

Amazon has reportedly decided to split HQ2 between two locations, New York City (Long Island City, Queens) and Washington (Crystal City, VA).  read more »

The Pearl River (Zhujiang) Delta has developed into the world’s ultimate city (Figure 1). More people live in the urbanization there than in any space of similar size in the world (Figure 2). Once home to separate urban enclaves comprising 9 million residents in 1980, the now adjacent urban areas of the Pearl River Delta are home to 55 million residents, nearly one-half more in either the Yangtze Delta adjacent urban areas (which have undergone a similar development process) or the Tokyo-Yokohama urban area with 38 million residents (Note 1).  read more »

Urban planning guru says driverless cars won’t fix congestion,” says the New York Times. Naturally, the Times is referring to Peter Calthorpe, one of the few people who might be considered an urban planning guru and the one who has the most to lose if driverless cars are successful.  read more »

Among my many friends here in San Francisco is a guy who works in the field of affordable housing. In the parlance of the profession he identifies and empowers stakeholders to work synergistically to blah, blah, blah. He’s basically the lubricant in an immensely complex collection of processes involving public and private actors who are all at odds with each other. One of his recent “successes” was a dozen below market apartments for seniors in a third tier suburb of a second tier city in another state that required many years and a dozen separate funding sources.  read more »