The proposed annual budget for Winnipeg, MB, reveals the true cost of the Suburban Experiment, and the vibrancy that the city (and so many others like it) has sacrificed in many of its neighborhoods.
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The town council in Castle Rock, CO, received a shocking briefing at a recent meeting: that their single, mid-sized region within a single, mid-sized state has accrued almost a billion dollars of debt. But how?
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How does the suburban development pattern present itself in a smaller island space, versus in the contiguous United States?
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For seven weeks Jackson’s residents had to bear the brunt of a failing water system, and unfortunately it was bound to happen.
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The Suburban Experiment is a bad business model, and nothing demonstrates that more clearly than Jackson, Mississippi’s, ongoing water crisis.
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This Canadian city made an unprecedented decision to stop expanding its urban growth boundary. What comes next?
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Don’t be fooled: Winnipeg’s newly proposed “rapid transit” project is actually a road-widening project in disguise. And it aims to borrow money so the City can destroy millions of dollars of its own tax base.
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You don’t want to miss this CNBC documentary video about the financial fragility of the suburban development pattern.
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Sarasota County, FL, is viewed as a trailblazer in the prevention of unchecked suburbanization. So why has its growth management plan has not resulted in a better pattern of development?
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The recent tragedy in Surfside, Florida, is both a harbinger of things to come and emblematic of the nation’s larger problem with maintaining our built environment.
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Collier County is poised to spend over $200 million extending utilities to a whole new, previously rural, portion of the county. Let's #DoTheMath on this plan.
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We live in a society where the tendency is to scale up more and more, but are we actually on the path to a small-town revival?
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A great credit rating is not a blessing for a young community if it is interpreted as a license to borrow without discipline.
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If you pull back the curtain on North America’s financially insolvent cities, you’ll see what’s REALLY propping them up.
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El patrón de desarrollo estadounidense crea la ilusión de riqueza. Hoy estamos en el proceso de ver esa ilusión destruida ... y con ella la prosperidad que hemos llegado a dar por sentada.
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The “growth machine” is too big to fail. What if it fails anyway?
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Ponzi schemes fail because they are built on illusions: there is no there there. So what happens when an entire continent of towns and cities is caught up in a kind of Growth Ponzi Scheme? We are finding out.
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After World War II, the federal government subsidized a massive suburban experiment that was completely unprecedented in human history. But—as a mostly-forgotten 1942 manual by the Department of Commerce makes clear—it didn’t have to be that way.
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For decades, we’ve built like there was no tomorrow, prioritizing short-term growth over longterm stability, prosperity, and safety. Exhibit A: 20,000 high-risk dams that are emergencies waiting to happen.
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The American pattern of development creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed…and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.
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