A recent Wall Street Journal op ed combines two of my favorite topics: Franz Kafka's The Trial and the inefficiencies of zoning. Roger Kimball explains the roadblocks he has faced in trying to repair his home after it was damaged in Hurricane Sandy. He writes: It wasn't until the workmen we hired … [Read more...]
Meetup this Saturday
This weekend Anthony Ling who writes the blog Rendering Freedom (and has previously written here) will be in DC. Stephen Smith will also be in town, and we're planning a meetup on Saturday. Anthony is an architect in São Paolo. He writes about architecture, economics, and urbanism, and I'm excited … [Read more...]
Irrelevant real estate trends
Earlier this week Wendell Cox wrote a piece at New Geography arguing that projections for increasing demand for multifamily housing relative to single family homes are incorrect. He was criticizing a study by Arthur Nelson that predicts increased demand for multifamily housing relative to … [Read more...]
Campaign season is over links
Stephen had great twitter coverage of urbanist election issues last night, but here are a few more links to significant outcomes:1. Washington state and my home state of Colorado voted to legalize marijuana possession, private use, and in Colorado limited production. Drug policy liberalization … [Read more...]
A message to journalists and academics from George Haikalis
I spoke to George Haikalis (trust me, he's a lot smarter than his HTML looks), a regional planner and former NYCTA official, about the high cost of New York City transit. He had a message to the press and academia: Part of the problem is that we don't really have a very strong independent technical … [Read more...]
A Moral Case for More Immigration
This is a post outside of the typical urbanist issues we write about here, but one that I think is very important to cities. At Forbes, Adam Ozimek writes that economics bloggers are failing to make the case for the importance of permitting increased high-skilled immigration: I think it is … [Read more...]
David Gunn on Amtrak’s $151bn NEC plan and how he rebuilt the Harrisburg line
First order of business: I wrote two articles for Bloomberg View (the opinion counterpart to Bloomberg News) on the high cost of US transit – one on private-sector gouging, and one on public-sector gouging.Secondly, I've been talking to former Amtrak president David Gunn a lot recently – at … [Read more...]
Anthony Ling on private buses
A guest post from Market Urbanism's Brazil correspondent, Anthony Ling, who blogs in both Portuguese and English at renderingfreedom.blogspot.com...For a long time I’ve been thinking about why collective transportation is a synonym to public transportation. Is there anything special about the … [Read more...]