The Problem with Schools and Housing Supply
In an earlier post, I discussed how the population of young adults and young children is rapidly declining in the wealthy suburbs of New York City, a trend previously noted by the New York Times....
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Going Driverless, or Not
A heated debate over the significance of Google's so-called driverless car has been raging over the past several weeks. On one side of the aisle are those hailing it as a "revolutionary" technology...
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Where Zoning Went Wrong
In previous posts on zoning, I’ve been pretty hard on the Supreme Court’s Euclid v. Ambler decision, which upheld the use of single-use, and specifically single family-only, zones. In doing so, the...
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Demise of the Duplex
The New York YIMBY website has complied Census building permit data to reveal how construction of single-family and small multifamily dwellings in New York City's five boroughs has plummeted since...
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Housing Innovations in Texas
Citylab recently posted an interesting profile of a new development in Harlingen, Texas by Amanda Kolson Hurley. Having written about this area of the country earlier this year, I was curious to take...
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Reconciling Bridges and Urbanism
Bridges have been a feature of urban design ever since King Nabopolassar spanned the Euphrates River with a causeway around 620 B.C, joining together the two halves of the city of Babylon and much...
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Sonia Hirt on the Origins of American Zoning
I've written about Professor Sonia Hirt's work previously, so I was glad to find out several months ago that she had a forthcoming book, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American...
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Auto Costs and Housing Costs, or, One Reason the Suburbs are So Appealing
Simon Vallee has a post from some time back about filtering vs. gentrification in which he analogizes the process of gentrification, in North America, to the car market in Cuba, noting that...
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Single Family Zoning: It's All About the Lot Sizes
Contemporary critiques of zoning take several forms. First, and probably most common, is the critique of strict use segregation in the Euclidean manner, with commercial and residential areas...
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Fall and Rise of the "Euro Block"
In a recent post, Urban Kchoze's Simon Vallee discusses the traditional "Euro block," that characteristic urban form of European cities from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. He makes the...
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Single Family Zoning in Seattle and The Limited Logic of Euclid
I'd wanted to write a few words about the recent controversy over single-family zoning Seattle, but that debate has been addressed so well and thoroughly by other writers that I'm not going to rehash...
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Urban Governance: Merger and Fragmentation
Let's consider two hypothetical cities. For convenience, I'll call them "Hartford" and "Nashville." Both are state capitals. Both are favorably located on bluffs overlooking large rivers and are...
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Lot Sizes: Regional Trends and Causes
In a prior post, I examined minimum lot sizes as a general concept with reference to a few examples. Another way of approaching the subject is to examine regional and national patterns and trends on...
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The Old(er) Way of City Planning
I've been reading through the 1912 "Plan of the City of Hartford" by the legendary firm Carrère and Hastings, a document which encapsulates some of the best conventional wisdom of that or any era in...
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That 70s Urbanism
1970s suburb, Birmingham, AL.The 70s, as much as any decade from the 1920s to the 1990s, has gotten a bad rap in contemporary urban planning circles. It was the golden age of the suburb and the nadir...
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That 70s Urbanism, Part II: Fixing Urban Renewal
On Twitter, Cap'n Transit appreciated my focus on Stamford in the previous post, so to continue on the prior topic with an ongoing focus on the 1970s, I'll return to that city to offer some perspective...
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When the Market Built Housing for the Low Income
In a recent post, Daniel Kay Hertz examines residential filtering, the process by which housing units depreciate and therefore become available to lower-income buyers or renters over time. In...
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Is the Decline in the Homeownership Rate Even Greater Than Thought?
One of the most heavily reported stories of the post-housing bubble economy has been the decline in the American homeownership rate, which has supposedly fallen to levels not seen since the days of the...
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Are Millennial Families Really Seeking a Car-Based Suburban Lifestyle?
A recent article by Lyman Stone makes the argument that the return to cities observed during the late 2000s, rather than being primarily a reflection of increasing preferences for urban living, was a...
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Homeownership Postscript: An Even Grimmer Appraisal
In a recent post, I pointed out how, when adjusted for age and life expectancy, homeownership in the United States is lower than is has been for many decades. In the comments, it was further pointed...
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