At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl. Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences. Unfortunately, voting options have been whittled down through government interventions:
To the extent that we do need to [...]
From "Highway to hell revisited", a Financial Times article by Christopher Caldwell:
The Highway Act probably has more defenders than detractors. But Mr Obama should be among the latter. The act, which budgeted $25bn in federal money to build 41,000 miles of motorway, exacerbated the very problems Mr Obama has been most eager to solve – [...]
I threw up Friday’s Redistribution post somewhat hastily during my break, but there isn’t much more that I haven’t said before. As a follow-up, I’d like to tie it in with some other interesting reads.
Ryan Avent at The Bellows agreed with Yglesias’ post and added:
Anyway, I saw in Google reader that libertarian intellectual Will Wilkinson [...]
Bill Hudnut at the Urban Land Institute wrote a post that attracted some attention at Austin Contrarian and Overhead Wire. Hudnut discusses a different approach to taxing land:
How about restructuring the property tax across America to install a two-tiered system? More tax on those horizontal pieces of empty land and asphalt, less on the buildings. [...]
by Stephen Smith
It seems to be an article of faith among many land use commentators – both coming from the pro- and anti-planning positions – that Houston is a fundamentally unplanned city, and that whatever is built there is the manifest destiny of the free market in action. But is this true? Did [...]
While well intentioned, like many progressive interventions of the eary 1900s, zoning has contributed to sprawl (which has begun to be demonized by progressives over the recent decades) and served to inhibit the vitality and diversity of urban neighborhoods. The triumph of the core philosophy behind Euclid vs. Ambler later enabled destructive urban renewal projects [...]
I related to this particular post by Michael Lewyn at Planetizen, Why I fight:
Occasionally, someone familiar with my scholarship asks me: why do you care about walkability and sprawl and cities? Why is this cause more important to you than twenty other worthy causes you might be involved in?
The answer: Freedom.
Now, the article doesn’t discuss [...]
While I sympathize with the theme and agree with regards to roadway spending and “conservative” hypocrisy, a recent article in the progressive The American Prospect takes a narrow-minded view of politics and urbanism, while throwing around broad generalizations about evolution and global warming to support their assertions:
The Conservative Case for Urbanism
In fact, one doesn’t have [...]