This piece was coauthored by Nolan Gray and Katarina Hall.It’s like Los Angeles, but worse. To many, that’s the mental image of Mexico City: a city of unending traffic, unbearable smog, and unrestrained horizontal expansion. Yet when one walks the streets of Mexico City, a distinct … [Read more...]
100 Years After Zoning In New York City, Government Dominates Land Use
This month marks the 100th anniversary of two pieces of legislation that revolutionized the way we live. On July 11, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the first Federal Aid Road Bill. And on July 25, 1916--exactly 100 years ago today--New York City passed the country’s first comprehensive zoning … [Read more...]
Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”
Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there's important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. … [Read more...]
Houston’s Beautiful (Yet Partial) Embrace of Market Urbanism
A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. … Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it. – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great … [Read more...]
Jane Jacobs And High-Rises
Since new urbanists (in my experience) tend to be very skittish of high-rise development, one might think that their ideological ancestor Jane Jacobs was one of these people who thought no building should be over five floors.But in her 1958 essay "Downtown Is For People," she hinted at a very … [Read more...]
How Los Angeles’ Rent Got So Damn High
[Research help for this article was provided by UCLA student Hunter Iwig]The rent in LA has gone up 30% in the last three years. What the hell?Three big things happened, two of them awesome, and one dumb. We decided living in cities was cool again (awesome), city centers are creating tons of … [Read more...]
The Bottom-Up Urbanism Of Patrik Schumacher
[editor's note: This article was originally posted at Medium.com, and republished with permission of the author, Zachary Caceres. Below are links to some of the Free Market Urbanism writings and speaking of Patrik Schumacher, Partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. Schumacher's writing is … [Read more...]
Exclusionary Zoning and “Inclusionary Zoning” Don’t Mix
Inclusionary Zoning is an Oxymoron The term “Inclusionary Zoning” gives a nod to the fact that zoning is inherently exclusionary, but pretends to be somehow different. Given that, by definition, zoning is exclusionary, Inclusionary Zoning completely within the exclusionary paradigm is synonymous … [Read more...]