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I (Stephen) have been focused on trying to find a job recently (speaking of which – if anyone’s got any freelance or permanent work or knows of anyone who might, I’m interested! [email protected]), so as you can see, posting has dropped off. Adam also hasn’t been posting much lately, but, as you may have noticed, we have a new blogger – market urbanists, meet Emily Washington! She’s already posted a few articles, and hopefully we’ll see many more. As for me, you can still read my writing, but you’ll have to accept it in 140-character chunks. Adam gave me the password to the Market Urbanism Twitter account (@marketurbanism) a few weeks ago with the idea that I would post links there and then collect them every few days in a post. I started tweeting a lot more than I though I would, though, and have been too lazy to collect them in a post. But, since I post about a dozen links a day there’s a lot of content, and even if you don’t use Twitter you can still check it out. Unfortunately, though, the webpage and RSS feed include what are sort of conversations with other users – basically any message that starts with an “@” sign, though not things that start with “RT @” – so you’ll get a lot of tweets that are just my half of the conversation with someone else. I don’t have a solution for this in the RSS feed (anybody know how to filter them out of the RSS feed, as Twitter would if you were following them?), but if you sign up and make a Twitter account and “follow” @marketurbanism, you’ll see the tweets on your twitter.com homepage as they were intended, without all the annoying half-crosstalk – it’s free and easy, […]

In the past week I’ve been asked twice why, essentially, I have to be so mean: Steven [sic!], I’m struck by how well you couple true insight with meaningless insults that undermine your credibility to those who don’t share your point of view. Stephen– I like your work here quite a bit, but I find the tone is sometimes accusatory and demeaning rather than informative. I think you should explain why the NY Times is “wrong” rather than saying they “utterly humiliate” themselves. First of all, I apologize for not giving these topics – and many others – the time they deserve. Up until early January I was unemployed and had a lot of time to write, and this blog really grew, but since I started interning at Reason I’ve had much less time. Beyond that, I certainly won’t deny that I’m more bombastic and harsh than most land use bloggers. But why? One reason is that I think that the issues that Adam and I write about are far more important than they’re given credit for, and, quite honestly, it makes me angry. There are plenty of people who make a living writing about green energy, about racism and tolerance, and about culture, but few people recognize the land use origins of all of these debates. Would we have gay marriage by now if zoning and state road building projects didn’t turn us into a suburban nation? To what extent do our land use decisions impact our energy consumption and the forces of global warming? To what extent does anti-density zoning affect racial segregation? These are all interesting questions, but they aren’t ones that are often asked by journalists and commentators, who instead choose to spend their time rehashing tired but news-worthy themes. A second reason is that I […]

…okay, so it’s not really the 250th post – that passed a few weeks ago, uneventfully. But we did recently pass 100,000 total page views (at least, so says Sitemeter…WordPress seems to think it’s more), so I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself and maybe ask you guys for a favor. First of all, my name is Stephen Smith (as you can now see above), and while this is Adam’s blog that he’s had for a few years now, I’ve been putting up most of the posts for the last few months. (I did post occasionally before August, but that’s when I really started ramping up the postings.) I graduated last spring from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else.  I’m currently biding my time with this (entirely unremunerative) blog until I can find a job in journalism or thinktankdom somewhere on the East Coast (or in any field, any place, really…).  So, if you have any leads on that, send me an e-mail at smithsj[at]gmail…you figure out the rest. Paid or unpaid, East Coast or East Africa (I can speak Romanian, French, German, and Spanish, in descending order of fluency…so maybe West Africa would be better) – I can’t promise you that I’ll take it, but I’ll at least consider it! Anyway, I also thought I’d take the time to ask you guys if you had any feedback on the blog. Anything you like in particular that you want more of, or that you didn’t like and want less of? Anything that I haven’t written about that you think I should? What field do you work […]