Urban Issues

In a post-7 October world, many have finally woken up to the reality that the locus of anti-Semitic sentiment now resides on the left.  read more »

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 »

Age is a big deal. We saw just how big a deal it is from the deterioration of President Biden evident during the recent debate with Donald Trump. There’s a growing sense that the world is being run by a gerontocracy  read more »

KPMG Australia analysis shows the country is in the midst of a baby recession as births across the country fall by 4.6 per cent year on year.  read more »

The new data on net domestic migration between major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 residents) over the last three years (July 2020 to July 2023) shows a strong movement of people away from higher urban densities to lower urban densities.  read more »

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

Time to answer that question: what would a 2016 Olympics meant to Chicago? After looking at the examples of the last two American Olympics, in Los Angeles in 1984 and Atlanta in 1996, I’ve come to some conclusions on how it could have played out in the Windy City.  read more »

For more than 75 years America has been dispersing away from dense urban cores, with nearly all population growth in neighborhoods with a suburban form  read more »

Read Part 1

When I asked the “what if” question about Chicago being awarded the 2016 Olympics, it was just prior to the event itself. I noted some possible outcomes of a Chicago Olympics, but eight years beyond that today offers even greater perspective.  read more »

One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs.  read more »

The latest American Community Survey data (2022) indicates that higher density condo living is strongly correlated with lower rates of home ownership than among detached or attached houses. The table below provides US data as well as data for the 56 major metropolitan areas by residential building density.

National Home Ownership by Type of Residential Building: Overall, 65.2% of US households owned their own homes  read more »