In our time, politics and culture are increasingly oriented to the national scale on the one hand, and the immediate neighborhood on the other. A book, The Increasingly United States, by Daniel J. Hopkins, highlights this. However, in my view, besides […]
The “WWHD Conference — What Would Howard Ahmanson, Sr., Do?” — was held August 1, 2018, the year marking the 50th anniversary of my father’s death. I decided I wanted to sponsor it, mostly to honor him. In the tumultuous year […]
First, we often have two inconsistent objectives. The first is good housing for all and ownership for many. The second is that home ownership should be a ‘wealth builder’ for those who achieve it. You can’t have it both ways. […]
Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley tycoon who gave us the ‘Six Californias’ plan a couple of years ago, has come up now with a ‘Three Californias’ plan. It is not acceptable in its current form. The main point of dividing […]
A lot of people, especially families with children, would prefer a single-family home. Of course they would, and I’m not going to find fault with that lifestyle as long as it’s not forced on everyone. Perhaps they should be required […]
Daniel Kay Hertz, a young urbanist from Chicago, [his website is https://danielkayhertz.com] has written the most succinct expression yet of why the whole issue of housing is a dilemma for Americans. It got a fair bit of notice, and was reproduced […]
People like Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox have argued, to some extent rightly, that the majority of Americans prefer a suburban environment; and even the younger Millennial generation, willing to live in more urban places during their single and cohabiting years, […]
Josh Barro, an economics columnist at the New York Times who used to be at Forbes, has written an interesting column on what the food marketplace would be like if we owned lifetime resaleable futures in our food instead of […]
Matthew Gerken, in Philanthropy Daily, has a nice essay entitled “Why We Love College.” For all the problems with the American university experience – they’re not preparing the kids for jobs! – they’re not preparing the kids for anything but […]
There are two political movements in urban development that have a lot of overlap but are not the same. ‘New Urbanism’ advocates the legalization and building of communities resembling the 19th century American town, with a fair number of single […]