urban sprawl

Show notes from this episode are available at Urbanism Speakeasy. [read more]

After finishing Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights by David Kushner, I have spent the past week educating myself in the Levitt Brothers and their enormous contribution to housing, land use, and race relations in America.By David KushnerThe Levitt family were a team of three men: Abraham (father), and...[read more]

  We’ve made such a mess of the suburbs we constructed in the last fifty or so years that one wonders whether they can ever be made into something more sustainable.  Strip malls, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions, diminished nature, almost no sense of outdoor community.  We all know the drill: there are nice places...[read more]

It seems like progressive urbanism is starting to sell papers. Two pieces on suburban sprawl, that ever creeping bogey man facing every urban planner under 50, have graced the front pages of the New York Times website over the past three days. I won’t talk about Louise Mozingo’s essay, an excellent piece on the reconceptualization of...[read more]

The New York Times recently published a haunting piece about the black middle class in America. It isn't discussed enough that the sub-prime crisis not only brought the economy to its knees but also destroyed the public-sector job market upon which so many black middle-class lives have been built for half a century. Black households have...[read more]

    I was impressed by an editorial a few days ago in the Raleigh News & Observer, suggesting that North Carolina’s capital city might do well to encourage entrepreneurs to locate start-up businesses in downtown Raleigh.  The editorial takes the position that, just as Richard Florida has been telling us for a...[read more]

Seems like my chapter "The Death of Sprawl" from The Post Carbon Reader is taking on a life of its own. Friday, Christopher Leinberger had an Op-ed in the New York Times, titled "Death of the Fringe Suburb," which built upon concepts I had published (and sent Leinberger last year) namely, that the US mortgage crisis and Recession were set off by upsidedown economics of sprawl speculation in US exurbs or "Boomburbs" and we can't ever do that again.[read more]

    Here’s what Madoff did:  He took people’s money, promising a return on investment.  In other words, he borrowed it.  But the returns weren’t real; the only way Madoff had to repay the investor was to borrow more money from a second investor, using the second investor’s money to pay the first....[read more]

A new report on China's rapid motorization highlights the importance of developing sound policies to address congestion and air pollution. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a new report last week as part of its Energy and Climate Program on China’s fast-paced motorization and possible strategies to reduce...[read more]

A study on emergency response times to vehicle accidents from University of Virginia researchers has been published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Here are the results:"Urban sprawl is significantly associated with increased EMS response time and a higher probability of delayed ambulance arrival...[read more]