D.C.'s Uline Arena – once a trash transfer station, now an indoor parking lot American cities have been on the rebound for about two decades now, with once moribund residential and commercial neighborhoods springing back to life. … [Read more...]
Does Urban Growth Have to Mean Gentrification?
When libertarians (and liberals) argue that increasing the supply of urban housing will lower the price of urban housing, they’re drawing on some pretty basic and well-established economic concepts. And yet, the coexistence of gentrification and housing supply growth seem to put a lie to that theory … [Read more...]
E-books for everyone!
The era of liberals writing e-books about market urbanism is upon us! I knew about Matt Yglesias' upcoming "Kindle Single" The Rent is Too Damn High, but Ryan Avent's The Gated City took me by surprise. Ryan's book has a "print length" of 90 pages, costs $1.99, and despite the name "Kindle Single," … [Read more...]
Obama’s sprawl-promoting industrial policy: electric cars
During the past few decades, "industrial policy" was an epithet, and you still won't see Obama going around calling his "green jobs" projects industrial policy in speeches any time soon. But some think it's time to shed the stigma, and the flagship Obama industrial policy seems to be electric … [Read more...]
FRA interview
I'll (hopefully) be doing an interview with someone at the Federal Railroad Administration (probably a PR person, but since its via email, hopefully they'll be able to go ask bureaucrats and engineers the answers to some technical questions) for Streetsblog DC next week, so, if you've got any … [Read more...]
“The art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion”
A paragraph on what we might today call "good transit" in Railroaded: What distinguished railroads from the natural geography through which they ran was their centrality to measures of value; they transformed everything around them. There is no such thing as a badly placed river on a mountain, … [Read more...]
PSA
I've you have any interesting in Philadelphia or architectural history, you should be reading Philaphilia (scroll down past the weird drawing – I know). I think the Empty Lot of the Week feature (most recent one here) is my favorite. That is all. … [Read more...]
Then and now, financial ruin edition
So I bought Richard White's Railroaded based on the interview Emily blogged about earlier, and so far I'm enjoying it. It can be a bit polemical ("He was an eclectic hater who hated people who often hated one another") and by page 34 I've already gotten lost a few times in railroad finance jargon, … [Read more...]