Interestingly enough, the reason that sea otters remain a threatened species even today is because the Russians, when they occupied the Fort Ross enclave from 1812 to 1841, they nearly exterminated them. In response to: “End of ‘no otter’ zone […]
Howard Ahmanson
Why The Dream Declined
The best single post on the decline of affordable housing that I have seen on one of my favorite sites, newgeography.com, is this by Roger Selbert. He most succinctly explains the reasons why the American dream of subsidized home ownership [discussed […]
Changing my mind about single family homes
I used to believe that social justice required that a region be overbuilt [or at least over-entitled at law] in high-density housing and other locally undesirable land uses. Now, thanks to Joel Kotkin’s influence, I believe that social justice requires […]
No Place Like Home Conference – June 3, 2013
This conference is being hosted by me and others to discuss the current state of subsidized home ownership in America, something that has been happening since the end of World War II but since the 1970s has been less successful […]
Last Call in California
Huh? It would make a lot more sense, automobile-dependent as California still is, to keep the alcohol closing hour at 2 a.m. and insist that Starbucks and other coffee houses stay open till 4 a.m. If I went pub-crawling in […]
Thoughts on St. Patrick’s Day
In a few days comes one of the strangest holidays in our American calendar, in which we honor a saint who actually deserves honoring or remembering, and at the same time the first major non-Protestant ethnic group to come to […]
Is Hawai’i the Bellwether for California?
California used to consider itself the leading state and the bellwether for the entire country. Now that the entrepreneurial initiative has mostly switched to Texas and other such places, and Texas’s infrastructure has pulled ahead of California’s in its quality […]
A New Federal Department of Cities?
Oh good grief. Don’t we already have a Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mr. Florida? As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out more than 50 years ago in Parkinson’s Law, only dictatorships have a cabinet larger than approximately 20. It […]
Allergy to Antithesis, Again
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, declares that Obama is trying to destroy the Republican party using a Marcusean strategy of ‘liberating intolerance’. But in the previous term, Obama was trying a policy of including the Republicans and everyone […]
Why ‘entitlement’ programs aren’t really entitlements
I fully agree with Jim Huffman of Lewis and Clark Law school that the ‘entitlements’ of Social Security and Medicare are not, in any moral sense, entitlements. That does not mean that I favor eliminating them. The problem with Social […]