Davis, CA, is a small college town a twenty minutes' drive outside of Sacramento (on a good day). It has a vacancy rate on par with Manhattan despite being surrounded by flat, developable farmland. Some critics attribute this absurd vacancy rate to Measure R, a ballot initiative approved by Davis … [Read more...]
Suburban Market Gardening
I filmed this video about Whisper Farms in suburban Pasadena, California. It’s an ordinary home that’s been pressed in to service as a for-profit market garden. My friend Kirsten Dirksen was kind enough to edit it in conjunction with her website www.faircompanies.comThis sort of small scale … [Read more...]
9 Barriers To Building Housing In Central City Austin
The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America's two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in … [Read more...]
Chief Resiliency Officers Versus Antifragility
This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog about state and local policy and economic freedom.At The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about a new program from the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities, focused on equipping cities with a new … [Read more...]
Real CEQA Reform, or Just Another Special Interest Handout?
California has, since the ’70s, had some of the strictest environmental laws in the country, but urbanists have recently been frustrated by what are known as CEQA lawsuits, named after the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act that serves as the basis of the challenges. CEQA battles have … [Read more...]
Duany bashes LEED standards
Andrés Duany, leader of the New Urbanism movement, comes out against LEED standards: He said that high-density development in urban locations which entail less reliance on private cars should get a free pass on energy efficiency or energy generation standards. "Don't make apartment dwellers … [Read more...]
HSR Urbanists: “We Are All O’Tooles Now”
I probably won't make any friends today, but now I’ve read one too many urbanist (many who’s ideas I usually respect) use unsound logic to support high speed rail. This argument often includes something like this: “…and furthermore, highways and airports don’t come close to paying for themselves, … [Read more...]
“Misbuilding” the Future, Again…
From "Highway to hell revisited", a Financial Times article by Christopher Caldwell: The Highway Act probably has more defenders than detractors. But Mr Obama should be among the latter. The act, which budgeted $25bn in federal money to build 41,000 miles of motorway, exacerbated the … [Read more...]