Centralized systems are good at getting us cheap food, cars, and toilet paper—until they’re not. They’re also really bad at isolating deadly outbreaks.
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What’s missing from most comprehensive plans? Dollars and cents. Here’s a simple reform that will focus the conversation on development patterns that create real wealth.
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Conventional approaches to annexation — and even annexation reform — have failed to create stronger cities and towns. Here’s a modest proposal for a better way.
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This is Part 1 in a three-part series about why our cities deserve better than cookie-cutter, state-level land use reforms.
Read MoreCentralized systems are good at getting us cheap food, cars, and toilet paper—until they’re not. They’re also really bad at isolating deadly outbreaks.
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How modifications to one city’s development codes are making it possible to add wealth and vibrancy to its struggling neighborhoods… without taking on huge future liabilities.
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Two very different buildings in Spokane illustrate the unfulfilled promises of the post-war suburban experiment and the potential for new life in even the unlikeliest of neighborhoods.
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Doing the math on a routine, uncontroversial street paving project reveals an investment that will never pay for itself, in a city that has thousands of such investments. That we do it anyway reflects the cultural consensus at the root of our towns’ financial problems.
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Spokane is an excellent illustration of a “soft default”. Like virtually every other city in the US, it is functionally insolvent, but functional insolvency rarely results in legal bankruptcy—just diminished services and deferred maintenance.
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The history of Spokane, Washington is a microcosm of what American cities as a whole have experienced. Spokane has lessons to teach us, including the power of incremental (but rapid) growth.
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Unless we change the underlying rules that govern the design of our cities, we'll be fiddling with radio dials instead of zeroing in on exactly what we need.
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We must work to reduce the negative impacts on our cities and towns before we try the next trendy planning intervention to solve our problems.
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Our ancestors had the same impulse toward big, risky projects, but today we have the tools to amplify that impulse to even more dangerous proportions.
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Our collective failure to make the bicycle a viable transportation option for most Americans says more about our confused approach to city management than it does about a movement to rid the world of bike lanes.
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Here are the 5 immutable laws of affordable housing that cities must recognize if they want to move forward — plus 3 strategies for achieving true housing affordability.
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Lasting change can only be accomplished through a shift in our collective culture.
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A mechanistic approach to city problems exposes us to two harms: one is that we employ the wrong solutions. The other is that we actually make things worse.
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To build strong towns, we need to adopt the ways of the ecologist, which involve far more observation and far less intervention than our current approaches to urban development.
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The real impetus for the invention of zoning regulations was a desire to protect and enshrine the single-family home as the most virtuous and sacrosanct urban form.
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With each new regulation, new justification for even more regulation tends to arise.
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