Category Uncategorized

1. I’ve been writing for Market Urbanism for about a year now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Getting your comments and hearing from readers is so rewarding. To provide more of what you’re interested in, I would really appreciate any comments about what topics or types of posts you would like to see covered here. 2. This summer I’m hoping to read two urbanist staples that I’ve read a lot about but am ashamed to say I’ve never actually read: The Economics of Zoning Laws: A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls by William Fischel and Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. If anyone else would like to tackle these in the next few months or has already read them and would like to contribute to some discussion on them, I’d be happy to set up a Google Group for that.

1. For anyone who doesn’t follow Stephen on Twitter at @MarketUrbanism, he’s now a real estate reporter at International Business Times. Here he covers criticism of the National Association of Realtors’ forecast that housing prices have bottomed out. 2. In the debate over whether or not to ban food on the Subway, a rider whom the New York Times interviews brings up the key issue of enforceability. The state senate proposed the ban to mitigate the system’s rat problem. While the state could certainly change the rules about eating on the Subway, the informal law wouldn’t be so easy to change. Metro has always (?) been food-free, and the ridership culture generally supports this, but New Yorkers who are in the habit of eating on their commute are unlikely to stop due to a small probability of a fine. 3. At the risk of turning Market Urbanism into an EconTalk fan blog, Russ Roberts has another great urbanism-related podcast with David Owens, author of The Conundrum. The book is about the unintended consequences of environmental activism. While the podcast (and I believe the book) deals primarily with climate change and cities’ relatively low per-capita carbon usage, the problem of unintended consequences is abundant throughout urban planning. As much as they’d like to, planners can’t change human behavior in a vacuum. 4. Yes! Melbourne Planning Minister Matthew Guy proposes not some wimpy upzoning, but abolishing height limits in the city’s CBD. The plan has a long road to implementation, but it’s a first step in allowing developers to meet the growing city’s demand for space. The opposition predictably cites the fallacy that density makes traffic worse. 5. Penelope Trunk ponders the fundamental differences between city people and non-city people and concludes that city dwellers are relatively unhappy because they are “maximizers.” I’m not totally sold […]

In Maine, a group of residents are hoping to start a new community based on the principles of urban design advocated by Nathan Lewis at New World Economics and J.H. Crawford at Carfree.com. The group, led by Tracy Gayton, is hoping to attract enough individual investors to buy 125 acres of land which will be home to Piscataquis Village, a community of narrow streets. They’re using a Kickstarter-like investment model, in which individuals pledge to buy land contingent upon the group reaching the critical mass needed to get the project underway. The development would use covenants to limit building to require attached buildings, arcade sidewalks, and a building height limited to four stories based on the Really Narrow Streets model of dense low- to mid-rise buildings. On a previous post, some commenters came out strongly against covenants as a means for determining land use restrictions. What do you all think of them here? To me, this case illustrates the effectiveness that covenants have for shaping land use over an area broader than individual lots without the coercion of zoning. Tracy has created a presentation on the preliminary objectives for Piscataquis Village. He writes: We envision a settlement evolving organically and growing incrementally. Those people or groups of people that wish to pursue their own, various versions of the Good Life within the bounds of the Village are welcome. This project reminds me a bit of seasteading, the libertarian vision of a bottom-up society living on a water vessel to escape government coercion and violence. While I believe that most of the initial Piscataquis Village investors are from Maine and wish to continue living there, the projects’ rural location draws attention to the impossibility of a similar village emerging in the open space of, say, Howard County or Loudoun County because the […]

For readers in the DC area, the movie Battle for Brooklyn is playing at the Dome Theater in Arlington this weekend. The film explores eminent domain in the Forest City Ratner development at Atlantic Yards. It will be playing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with a Q&A with the directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley after each screening. The Atlantic Yards development relied on obtaining many properties through the standard of eminent domain made possible by the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London . Before the Kelo decision, eminent domain could only be used for public use, accepted to mean government purposes such as road or transit building. That landmark decision widened the potential use of eminent domain to any development that will benefit the public by, for example, increasing the tax base. Battle for Brooklyn has received positive reviews and has been shortlisted for and Oscar. The film follows the work of Daniel Goldstein, the Jane Jacobs-style community activist who has been leading the losing battle against eminent domain. I’m planning to attend the  movie this Sunday, January 15th at 6:00 pm. If any of you would like to go to that showing as well, would you like to meet up for drinks before or after? I would suggest Galaxy Hut but I’m open to somewhere closer to the theater also. If you’re interested, please comment or send me an email at [email protected]. The film is also playing this week in Chicago, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. In March it will be in Boston, so check the movie’s website if you’re interested in seeing it in any of these cities.

2011 is almost over, so it’s the last week I’ll be able to run random NYC street grid facts with the excuse that it’s the 200th anniversary of New York‘s 1811 Commissioners’ Plan! This WSJ blog post on the high cost of filming in Manhattan rare alleyways reminded me of these bits from Richard Pluntz’s A History of Housing in New York City: Even in 1811, the gridiron did not work well. For the small single-family row house which predominated at that time, the solar orientation of the gridiron was reversed from the ideal….

Quick, are you at the computer reading this around 2 a.m. Wednesday eastern time??…

Surprise surprise, students at New York‘s existing universities are choosing to go into computer science even without a bling-y contest over land, favors, and cash worth hundreds of millions of dollars! Reporteth the WSJ: When city officials launched a competition last year to build an applied-sciences campus on Manhattan‘s Roosevelt Island, they hoped an outpost of a top-tier school would draw elite students and boost New York‘s burgeoning technology and engineering scene. …