So this weekend we learned that condos are bizarre and pretty much guaranteed to cause problems in the longrun, when maintenance bills skyrocket, the buildings are out of date, and the land beneath them appreciates, but you can't redevelop the property because all the owners will never agree. You … [Read more...]
Archives for 2012
Why do condos even exist?
It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic. The main problem, as I see it, is that a building … [Read more...]
Tokyo’s surprising lack of density
Wendell Cox has received his fair share of criticism from this blog, but his post last week about Tokyo's surprising lack of density is very interesting. Sure, Tokyo's suburbs are dense enough to be connected by job centers by rail, but the core is almost completely low- and lower-mid-rise, and thus … [Read more...]
The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 5-9
This post follows on the earlier discussion of the first four chapters of The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 5- A Great Planning Disaster Shoup sets up parking requirements as a great planning disaster. If an individual developer chose to dedicate more of his land to parking than his … [Read more...]
A quick primer on CBTC and driverless trains
While doing some research for an article about driverless trains, I came across this document by Mircea Georgescu (who most recently worked at Thales [I think?] and whose email I can't track down! Mircea, if you're reading this, trimite-mi si mie te rog frumos un email la [email protected]!), that's … [Read more...]
Where is the Canadian real estate bubble going to hit hardest?
We've been hearing for a while now about a coming crash in Canadian property values, and it's really reached a fever pitch lately – seems like denying a Toronto bubble, at least, is pretty rare. What's interesting to me, though, is how different the bubble seems to be from the American one about … [Read more...]
Transpo bill gridlock staves off federal transit regulation
There are two general attitudes among urbanists towards the transportation omnibus bill that Congress has been struggling to pass in recent years (?). Some, like Streetsblogs and a number of political advocacy groups, hope for swift passage because of the bill's transit spending. Others, like Cap'n … [Read more...]
Libertarians at the Reason Foundation oppose latest California parking minimum reform bill
From Baruch Feisenbaum, who's the Reason Foundation's transportation analyst (disclaimer: I did an internship at Reason magazine a few years ago), surprising agreement with the American Planning Association's California branch on the parking minimum reform bill (or at least, it surprised me): The … [Read more...]
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