The recent post, Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion generated some interest and fantastic comments. I recommend reading Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty in its entirety. It is elegant in its consistently radical application of principles. It is available for free from the Mises … [Read more...]
Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…
In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions. His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism.A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about … [Read more...]
Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”?
At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl. Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences. Unfortunately, voting options have … [Read more...]
Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion
I’ve been meaning to address the public education system’s complex role in land use patterns, and found that Murray Rothbard does a better job in his 1973 manifesto, For a New Liberty than I ever could. In summary, locally-funded public education is an engine of geographical segregation, which … [Read more...]
Stadtluft Macht Frei (city air makes one free)
Thomas Schmidt wrote a great article for LewRockwell.com that covers a lot of urbanist ground, with some help from a broad selection of Jane Jacobs’ work. Here’s a snippet: Though you might blame any number of obvious villains and historical processes for this, the name Ebenezer Howard would … [Read more...]
How to Sidestep FAR Restrictions: Mezzanine Floors
Most municipalities use the Floor Area Ratio (F.A.R.) metric to restrict development within their communities. F.A.R. is calculated by dividing the total floor area of a building by the area of the site it is built upon. In achieving planners’ and neighbors’ questionable objective of … [Read more...]
Urban[ism] Legend: The Myth of Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover is not a man I consider a "Legend" - quite the contrary. I use the words "Urbanism Legend" in the context of the series of posts intended to dispel popular myths as they relate to urbanism.Myths and fallacies about Herbert Hoover are abundant these days as the media discusses the … [Read more...]
The Story of I’On: Struggles of a New Urbanist Project
I recently googled upon a post at a blog called "Rub-a-Dub" that mentioned a land development project in Mount Pleasant, SC called I'On.I imagine the developers of the I'On "Traditional Neighborhood Development" (TND) community are sympathetic with Market Urbanism, as they named … [Read more...]