At 4:30 am, alarms on my cellphone and tablet start beeping, just enough out of sync to prompt me to get up and turn them off. By 5:00 am, I riding as a passenger along an unusually sedate New Jersey Turnpike, making friendly conversation with my driver and survey partner to make sure he stays … [Read more...]
Nolan Gray
I am a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area. I studied philosophy, political science, and history at the University of Kentucky and will pursue a Master of City and Regional Planning degree at Rutgers University this fall. My research interests include urban economics, land-use regulation, and urban planning theory.
Send your questions, comments, and frustrations to me on Twitter at @mnolangray. You can find my personal blog here.
How Suburban Parking Requirements Hold Back Downtown
You wake up thirty minutes before your alarm, jerking up after having a nightmare about a car crash. Reluctantly, you clean up, eat breakfast, and hop into your car. Work is only three mile away—easy biking distance—and there are 15 or so people in your neighborhood who work where you work—enough … [Read more...]
Towards A Liberal Approach To Urban Form
It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.— Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty Imagine the … [Read more...]
Same Old Story: How Planners Continue to Drive Gentrification
Planners, like all professions, have their own useful mythologies. A popular one goes something like this: “Many years ago, us planners did naughty things. We pushed around the poor, demolished minority neighborhoods, and forced gentrification. But that’s all over today. Now we protect the … [Read more...]
Episode 05: Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring on Vital Little Plans
This week on the Market Urbanism Podcast, I chat with Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring on the wonderful new volume Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs. From Jacobs' McCarthy-era defense of unorthodox thinking to snippets of her unpublished history of humanity, the book is a … [Read more...]
Episode 04: Anthony Ling on Brazilian Cities and the Future of Transportation
My guest this week is Anthony Ling. Anthony is founder and editor of Caos Planejado, a Brazilian website on cities and urban planning. He also founded Bora, a transportation technology startup and is currently an MBA candidate at Stanford University. He graduated Architecture and Urban Planning at … [Read more...]
Episode 03: Sanford Ikeda on Jane Jacobs
My guest this week is Sanford Ikeda, a professor of economics at SUNY Purchase and a visiting scholar at New York University. He has written extensively on urban economics, policy, and planning.Professor Ikeda introduced me to urban economics and urban planning when he gave a … [Read more...]
How Houston Regulates Land Use
If you regularly read about cities, you might notice that Texas cities rarely seem to come up. We make cases for why Detroit is definitely coming back—just you wait! We come up with elaborate theories of how cities can become the next Silicon Valley. We spend hours coming up with a solution to New … [Read more...]