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Suburbs and Sacred Space
Suburbs are often unfairly maligned as lacking the qualities that make cities great. But one place that criticism can be fair is in the area of sacred space. There most certainly is sacred space in the...
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Falling In Love With Where You Are
Where I live is where most Californians live: in a tract house on a block of more tract houses in a neighborhood hardly distinguishable from the next, and all of these houses extending as far as the...
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Is Michael Bloomberg Finally Ready for His Close-Up?
After being elected New York City’s mayor in 2002, Michael Bloomberg quickly expanded on the city’s progress during the 1990s. He combined predecessor Rudolph Giuliani’s reforms in welfare and policing...
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Housing Boom Is The Best Chance For A Recovery For The Rest Of Us
Our tepid economic recovery has been profoundly undemocratic in nature. Between the “too big to fail” banks and Ben Bernanke’s policy of dropping free money from helicopters on the investor class,...
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The Mad Drive to Subvert Democracy in Toronto
Let me stipulate that I think Toronto’s Rob Ford is a terrible mayor. In fact, while I might not go so far as Richard Florida, who labeled Ford“the worst mayor in the modern history of cities, an...
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The Unexotic Underclass
The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the...
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No Solar Way Around It: Why Nuclear Is Essential to Combating Climate Change
Nobody who has paid attention to what's happened to solar panels over the last several decades can help but be impressed. Prices declined an astonishing 75 percent from 2008 to 2012. In the United...
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The Evolving Urban Form: The Rhine-Ruhr (Essen-Düsseldorf)
Rhine-Ruhr, or Essen-Düsseldorf, is among the world's least recognized larger urban areas (Figure 1). Germany does not designate urban areas according to the international standard, and for that...
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Kid-Friendly Neighborhoods: Takin' It To The Streets
Planners and parents have been concerned about two widely reported, and most likely related, trends: the increasing percentage of overweight children, and the growing number of hours that kids spend...
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The Culture War That Social Conservatives Could Win
For the better part of a half century, social conservatives have been waging a desperate war to defend “family values.” However well-intentioned, this effort has to be written off as something of a...
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The Associate’s Degree Payoff: Community College Grads Can Get High-Paying...
For some students, the decision to enroll at a community college is simple. A two-year school offers the credential they need at a much lower cost than a university, and the earnings post-degree are on...
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How the Left Came to Reject Cheap Energy for the Poor
Eighty years ago, the Tennessee Valley region was like many poor rural communities in tropical regions today. The best forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were being rapidly...
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Angry Young Men
“'Angry young men' lack optimism.” This was the title of a BBC News story earlier this year, exploring the deeply pessimistic views that some young working class British hold about their own future....
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Beware the Herbivore Effect
In the 1980s, American commentators and best-selling authors repeatedly sought to convince companies and workers to be more "Japanese." After all, for two generations, the men of Japan, supported by...
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Crime Down in Urban Cores and Suburbs
The latest data (2011) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) indicates that violent crime continued to decline in both the suburbs and historical cores of major...
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The Hall of Gimmicks
Occasional Urbanophile contributor Robert Munson has talked about how Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was among the first to recognize that there was a “taxpayer strike” in America. That is, given the...
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Public Unions for Private Benefits: Public Sector Unions Enrich their Members...
Concerned citizens of California are already familiar with the undue political influence of California’s prison guard union. According to Tim Kowal of the Orange County Federalist Society, the union...
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Fantasy Baseball Leagues: Let the Cities Compete!
When a city bankrupts itself on the debt service of municipal bonds that were issued to keep some local pro team from bolting, residents and fans get the worst of both worlds. Losing teams and...
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Suburbia's Sacred Spaces
From the earliest times, cities have revolved around three basic concepts – security, the marketplace and what I call "the sacred space." In contemporary America, everyone wants safe streets and a...
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A Million New Housing Units: The Limits of Good Intentions
In May 2013, the district of Husby in suburban Stockholm, Sweden was shaken by “angry young men” engaging in destructive behavior for about 72 hours,1 including the burning of automobiles and other...
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