Suburbs

Building the Future: Fixing the Global Housing Crisis

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This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.  read more »

A Look at Satellite Cities

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Have you ever given much thought to satellite cities? Cities located close to major metropolitan areas that aren’t the primary city, yet have a strong identity and history of their own?  read more »

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal

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Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future.  read more »

The YIMBY Movement's Twists and Turns

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In recent weeks it seems that the progression of the YIMBY movement is reaching some limits on its growth, causing it to make some unexpected twists in the logic of its supporters.  read more »

Do Blacks Deserve to Have Money Wasted on Them Too?

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Critics of plans to build more light-rail lines in Charlotte, North Carolina say that proposed new lines will fail to serve the neighborhoods of blacks who “need it most.”  read more »

Moving Away from Density to Less Dense Detached Housing Areas

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Further evidence of the continued dispersion of the US population is revealed by an examination of net domestic migration data  read more »

I'm Not an Urbanist. I'm an Urban Sociologist.

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I’ve written a lot about how growing up in Detroit was instrumental in my desire to improve and revitalize cities. Watching a city being hollowed out and disgraced in the ‘70s and ‘80s can have that impact.  read more »

City Suburb Relationships — Where the Midwest is Worst

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Does anyone really think about the relationship a city has to its surrounding metro area? It means a lot more than you might think.  read more »

Four Decades of Work Access (Commuting) in Los Angeles

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This article describes work access in the Los Angeles combined statistical area (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties) from 1980 to 2022, using US Census Bureau data.  read more »

Downtowns Don't Matter Anymore

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Joseph Lawler’s learned essay on induced demand, looking at the case of highway expansion in Austin, Texas, is fair-minded, but somehow seems more about theory than actual reality. He talks about downtown as if it really mattered all that much. It doesn’t.  read more »