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...]
Urbanism In A Time Of Terror
Brussels, Belgium--I had recently moved from Los Angeles, my home of twenty years, to Brussels. It would be my first time living in a traditional city since becoming interested in urban design. So I was constantly looking for little urban insights and pleasures on the ground. For instance, I … [Read more...]
Autonomous Vehicles: Expect the Unexpected
A recent trip to the tax attorney’s office put me in close proximity to a fellow client as we waited. This guy was one of the lead developers of autonomous vehicles so I picked his brain for a while. He said his company is on track to have products on the road in four or five years. Here’s a little … [Read more...]
Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning
Cities are fantastically dynamic places, and this is strikingly true of their successful parts, which offer a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people.- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities For most of the field’s history, prominent urban planning theorists have … [Read more...]
A Public-Private Shopping Mall
Forest City Enterprises recently received approval from Arlington County to redevelop its Ballston Common Mall. The deal is a public-private partnership in which the county will pay for $10 million in infrastructure improvements around the mall and provide $45 million in tax increment financing for … [Read more...]
A Smart City in Your Pocket: From top-down command centers to bottom-up app markets
Cities, for most of human history, were dumb. At least, that’s what the “smart cities” movement might lead you to believe. Over the past few years, a chorus of acquisitive multinational tech corporations, trend-savvy politicians, and optimistic developers—an odd mixture of former SimCity … [Read more...]
The deal-making behind the Silver Line
In political transactions, players cannot make deals using dollars, but nonetheless they engage in trades to pursue their goals. Policymakers may engage in trades both with other policymakers and with private sector actors . While these deals are not denominated in dollars, their gains from trade … [Read more...]
How land use regulations hurt the poor
Sandy Ikeda and I have published a new Mercatus paper on the regressive effects of land use regulation. We review the empirical literature on how the effects of rules such as maximum density, parking requirements, urban growth boundaries, and historic preservation affect housing prices. Nearly all … [Read more...]