Public Policy
Better Streets: Whatchu whatchu whatchu want?
“What a bunch of idiots. Don’t they know this will create a traffic nightmare?” Sound familiar? It’s the most commonly voiced complaint any time the community conversation turns to traffic calming. Taken at face value, it’s not an outrageous sentiment. After all, when you’re out and about, anything that stands between you and where you…
Read MoreUrbanism: Nothing to Fear
When the 9/11 attacks happened, all sorts of pundits started re-questioning whether cities should be decentralized, notably including Ed Glaeser. That questioning happened again after Hurricane Katrina and the continuing hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.
Read MoreWe’re all complicit in change. So now what?
For reasons both mysterious and irrelevant, Citylab’s Facebook page promoted a two and a half year old post on bike theft this weekend. What proved interesting about it, at least to me, is that in explaining market demand for stolen bicycles, it referenced a study on how people perceive different types of crime — finding…
Read MoreHere’s to Zimmerman/Volk and to ‘Attainable Housing’
I should maybe feel at least a little guilty for escaping the cold weather in the North Carolina mountains where I live and heading to Florida over the weekend. But I don’t. The destination was, after all, Panhandle Florida, the vertically challenged part of Florida that folks farther south call “LA,” as in “Lower Alabama.”…
Read MoreTalkin’ Right, Leanin’ Left: The ‘New Consurbanism’?
Here’s a quiz for you: What’s the “it” in these two quotes? And who’s talking? It “is a radical, government-led re-engineering of society, one that artificially inverted millennia of accumulated wisdom . .” It “offers conservatism a new venue, one where we can couple our desire for traditional culture and morals with a physical environment…
Read MoreTa-may-toe, Ta-mah-toe: Lessons in complexity from a fruit
Want to know where we go wrong solving single-mindedly for parking, affordability, sustainability, accessibility and all the other stuff on urban planning’s high-priority list? Consider the tomato. More specifically the winter tomato, as designed and manufactured in Florida. In Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, food writer Barry Estabrook shows how…
Read MoreDisappointment, Pessimism, Rage: Is this America at middle age?
Still wondering about why it’s so hard to have a civil conversation about planning for the future in so many places? Or why everyone seems so pissed about everything all the time? Could it have something to do with the telltale bulge in the waistline of American demography?
Read MoreIrony and Inevitability: Stumbling towards accountable public policy
By Wednesday morning, we’ll know which political party gained and which lost ground in Congress. As for learning about the direction of federal policy and its short-term impacts in states, regions and local communities: Not so much. But not for long. That’s because time is running out on the baked-in paralysis in Washington. Despite vows…
Read MoreGoing Viral, but Not in a Good Way
Hello, you in the hazmat suit. Can we talk? Though no one can authoritatively predict, from an epidemiology perspective, what will happen next, Ebola reached new levels of infection in the body politic last week. Republicans and Democrats seem pretty sure they’ve identified likely sources of toxicity. And it should come as no surprise that…
Read MoreAre We There Yet? Affordability in the ‘New Normal’
Pretty soon we’ll have something like a decade of experience in losing our innocence about housing affordability. Isn’t it about time we got over it? For a good part of the last century, we trained generations of housing consumers and housing enablers to buy and sell into what Chuck Marohn calls a “growth Ponzi scheme.”…
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