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 […]
Urban Renewal
Agriculture in the ‘burbs and exurbs’
Looks like the plummeting housing market has given a new lease of life to agriculture in the ‘burbs and exurbs.’ Related: “U.S. Farmers Reclaim Land From Developers,” by Robbie Whelan at The Wall Street Journal
The Suburban Paradox
The attached article criticizes the effect of ‘greenbelts’ in Britain, and calls for ‘green patches’ instead of ‘green belts.’ The paradox is that a lot of what people move out to the suburbs for is precisely what these anti-suburban NIMBYs […]
A New Word – ‘Blurb’
In the old days a ‘blurb’ was a positive promotional recommendation statement on a book jacket. I have done a few myself. Now we are informed by the developer of Civita, an urban infill project in San Diego, that ‘blurb’ […]
New Urbanism: Not Suitable for Large Families
Jonathan V. Last has written an excellent article on natality in America and why we have few large families now, whereas 50 years ago they were very common. (I can testify, being of a certain age myself, that I as […]
One Reason to be a Red Sox Fan…
One reason to be a Red Sox fan is that they were the one team to rehab their stadium without using any government money – and this in blue big-government Massachusetts! Mark Yost describes this in the Wall Street Journal […]
A Return to City Life After 20 Suburban Years
Ah, so the real reason people with kids live in different places than people without kids – it’s hard to find a three bedroom place in the hip parts of town. In Response To: “A Return to City Life After […]
More Atlanta Oddities
The territory of Incorporated cities in Georgia is often circular, giving a stroking appearance on the map. They do not cover most of the urbanized territory. I would guess that half of Atlanta’s population of 5.9 million lives directly under one of the […]
Atlanta
As I take more of the tours provided by the New Urbanism conference I am attending, I get to find out some of the attractive and interesting things about Atlanta. It’s easy to dismiss: “Sprawlanta” When people from here want […]
LA the Least Gentrified Major City?
Los Angeles has been “gentrified” and made more stable in many of its areas by immigrant settlement, but the phenomenon of Anglo gentrification by what used to be called “yuppies” or their more contemporary counteparts (most of the original “yuppies” […]