Subscribe to Market Urbanism

 Subscribe in a reader

 Subscribe to the audio version

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Categories

Book Store

Book Store

Cities and the Tax Code


We spend a lot of time here talking about the local regulations that harm cities, from parking minimums, to height limits to restrictions on mixed-use development. I’ve been thinking recently about another policy that impacts cities at the federal level: the tax code. I bring up this topic not to stoke the political debate [...]

Socialism and the roads, then and now


I’ve been reading Stephen Goddard’s Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, and it’s a great book with lots of excerpable content, but here’s one thing that caught my eye on page 170. I should note that when Goddard talks about “the highwaymen,” he’s talking about the old [...]

David Alpert calls out Virginia Tea Party group as land use statists


David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington has been on top of a story out of Virginia about a Virginia Tea Party group and its bizarre and seemingly anti-free market opposition to a state law forcing local governments to make room for dense growth.

The law – which was passed a few years ago by Republicans, [...]

Must Read: The Demand Curve for Sprawl Slopes Downward


Sandy Ikeda’s latest article at FEE’s “The Freeman” is a great summary of the libertarian sprawl debate.

There has been a lot of Internet chatter lately about what libertarians ought to think about urban sprawl and its causes, including pieces by Kevin Carson, Austin Bramwell, Randal O’Toole, and Matthew Yglesias. The title of Ben [...]

HSR Urbanists: “We Are All O’Tooles Now”


I probably won’t make any friends today, but now I’ve read one too many urbanist (many who’s ideas I usually respect) use unsound logic to support high speed rail. This argument often includes something like this: “…and furthermore, highways and airports don’t come close to paying for themselves, therefore high speed rail need not [...]

O’Toole Under More Fire


At Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor – Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy:

The Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and green metropolitan geography, but in many ways he’s [...]

Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…


In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions.  His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism.

A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about regulation of neighborhood retail, quoting a DC blog:

“In DC, [...]

Are You a Wright or Friedman Urbanist?


In a post blogger Eric Orozco called, ‘forerunner candidate for “most incisive blog post” of the year,’ Daniel Nairn of Discovering Urbanism discussed the seemingly conflicted camps of libertarianism when it comes to Urbanism.  His observations are based upon the comments in the Volokh article on planning and walkability linked in the previous post.

[...]