Urban Issues

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year.  read more »

Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office.  read more »

There is considerable concern about housing affordability in the United States. Housing is the most expensive element of the cost of living  read more »

Lawmakers in Sacramento recently upped the ante in their ongoing assault on local democracy in the Golden State.  read more »

The Town of Needham is a picture-perfect Boston suburb on the Charles River, replete with a classic downtown main street with a coffee shop, a commuter rail line to the city and old New England knitting mill buildings.  read more »

I’ve been a big fan of Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress for years. I first met him at a Cleveland Fed conference in Cincinnati in 2017, and later interviewed him at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy  read more »

The steady decline of fertility rates in Australia presents a multifaceted challenge with wide-reaching implications for the nation’s social, cultural, and economic future.  read more »

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times.  read more »

During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore.  read more »

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills  read more »