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

The Zoning History of Barcelona’s Eixample


Server glitch wiped the last few articles, so here’s a repose of the Barcelona one. Also, comments should be working now, should you deign to leave one…

Somehow I managed to visit Barcelona a few years ago and not learn about the history of the city’s Eixample (x pronounced sh in Catalan), or extension/widening [...]

The Zoning History of New York’s White Brick Apartments


530 Park Ave.

The rehabilitation of the postwar glazed white brick apartment building continues apace, with the condoization of 530 Park Ave., a 1941 (okay, almost postwar) 19-story white brick building. I happen to like New York’s postwar white brick buildings, and am even warming up to the red brick variants – I’ve [...]

“This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law…”


Inclusionary zoning – everyone wants to talk about it! Dave Alpert at GGW started the discussion with his pro-IZ piece, and hot on the heels of Emily’s post earlier today, I got an email from a California developer who wishes to remain anonymous:

This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law: it’s [...]

Look beyond Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn for solutions to a lack of retail


Robbie Whelan’s got a column in today’s Wall Street Journal on Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I moved to Brooklyn earlier this year. If you don’t recall, last year the City Council passed a zoning amendment to require new residential developments on the transit-rich, pedestrian-unfriendly avenue [...]

TRD: Bushwick is staying industrial – no residential rezoning for East Williamsburg!


The Real Deal says that Bushwick, a neighborhood on the L that’s seeing a lot of housing demand spill over from Williamsburg, is not getting a residential rezoning.

TRD describes how the “sought-after northwestern area [...] is zoned for manufacturing, so residential building is largely banned there,” but then buries the lede deep down:

[...]

Garden apartments and letting go, then and now


In doing research for a post the other day, I stumbled upon this excerpt from a book called A History of Housing in New York City by Richard Plunz that I think has a useful lesson about development and regulation:

The garden apartment would not have emerged unless it was profitable. In this aspect the [...]

Links


1. NYT reports on dense suburban projects being scaled back across Long Island not because of financing constraints or the recession, but because local governments are refusing to accept the density. At the end it cites AvalonBay as saying that after the its rebuke on the Island, it will reconsider “whether we would stay [...]

Links


1. NYT A-1 headline! Number of new single-family homes sold in February was at its lowest point since data was first collected in 1963, but multi-unit sales are up.

2. Lydia DePillis with an example of some abhorrent NIMBYism from DC.

3. Anti-laneway housing propaganda from Vancouver. It looks like some are bucking the [...]