In a recent blog post at Planetizen, I criticized the idea that higher birth rates can only be achieved in car-dominated suburbia. In this post, I pointed out that a) not all walkable places have as little floor space as my Manhattan apartment, b) that some (admittedly unusual) urban places have … [Read more...]
Do People Travel Less In Dense Places?
Every so often I read something like the following exchange: "City defender: if cities were more compact and walkable, people wouldn't have to spend hours commuting in their cars and would have more free time. Suburb defender: but isn't it true that in New York City, the city with the most … [Read more...]
Interrogating the Strong Towns “Ponzi Scheme”
NYU professor Arpit Gupta has channeled the annoyance of economists into a blog post directly calling out the Strong Towns "growth Ponzi scheme" line of argument. Like Arpit, I've never found a clear accounting for the Strong Towns argument. The basic evidence, as Arpit shows, is in the opposite … [Read more...]
The urban economics of sprawl
Should YIMBYs support or oppose greenfield growth? Two basic values animate most YIMBYs: housing affordability and urbanism. Sprawl puts those values into tension. Let's take as a given that sprawl is "bad" urbanism, mediocre at best. Realistically, it's rarely going to be transit-oriented, … [Read more...]
Do The Cities Need The Suburbs?
Aaron Renn has an interesting article in Governing. He suggests that even though urban cores are responsible for a significant chunk of the regional tax base, "[t]he city is dependent on the suburbs, too." In particular, he notes that downtowns are dependent on a labor and consumer pool that … [Read more...]
An Anti-Anti-NIMBY article
During the Trump Administration, liberals sometimes criticized conservatives for being anti-anti-Trump: that is, not directly championing Trump's more obnoxious behaviour, but devoting their energies to criticizing people who criticized him. Similarly, I've seen some articles recently that were … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen's … [Read more...]
Reasons to be a Census skeptic
Over the past week, the press was chock full of 2020-style headlines like "Census Bureau Confirms Pandemic Exodus from SF." That's because according to the Census Bureau, virtually every urban county in the U.S. (even urban counties in growing metros like Dallas and Atlanta) lost population between … [Read more...]
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