The government exercises tremendous power over residential design in the US. Its influence is nearly invisible, because it works through complex financing programs, insurance incentives, and secondary markets. These mechanisms go unnoticed, but their effect is hard to miss—they remade the United … [Read more...]
Subsidizing Suburbia: A forgotten history of how the government created suburbia
This is the first article of a five-part series on suburbia in the United States.In primary school, one of my friends lived in a duplex. This fact blew my mind. To my inexperienced 7-year-old mind, a duplex barely registered as a house. Her family shared a driveway with their neighbors, and their … [Read more...]
The folly of measuring transportation costs per passenger-mile
When comparing costs of various modes of transit, units measured "per passenger-mile" are very common. It makes sense intuitively – people take trips of varying length, and longer trips are more expensive than shorter trips, so the desire to standardize and compare makes us want to simply divide … [Read more...]
O’Toole Under More Fire
At Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor - Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy: The Cato Institute's Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and … [Read more...]
Urban[ism] Legend: Creating Jobs With Infrastructure
This post is part of an ongoing series featured on Market Urbanism called Urbanism Legends. The Urbanism Legends series is intended to expose many of the myths about development and Urban Economics. (it's a play on the term: “Urban Legends” in case you didn’t catch that)Last week … [Read more...]