There’s a lot of talk these days about how Texas is the new California, but you need to take that concept with a grain of salt. It’s a short term phenomenon.
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Neither raw commerce nor government bureaucracies can ever deliver the same quality results as a close-knit subculture. This is quite evident in the community kitchens of the Sikhs.
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We need to read all of Jacobs’ books in order to put her more popular work into a larger perspective.
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What we’re witnessing isn’t a modern aberration of multi-story buildings being imposed on the traditional city. It’s actually a return to the historic pattern after an odd twentieth century hiatus.
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I have a unique perspective on the topic of the working class, the poor, and the homeless. It isn’t an abstraction for me. I experienced these things directly in my own life.
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How exactly do you live a normal mainstream life in a way that also happens to allow you to ride out an unexpected storm – be it natural, economic, medical, or political?
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For those of you who expect to be sitting in your own personal car being whisked around in effortless comfort and privacy as you commute to distant suburban locations… Not quite.
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Andrew Price and Johnny Sanphillippo host today's slackchats.
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Walking away from a neighborhood is seen as a harmless passive act. Moving in is viewed as an act of aggression and displacement.
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The low density auto-dependent development pattern will persist for a few more decades. So will hyper dense concentrated city centers. And then both will decline as they become overwhelmed by multiple physical, economic, and political constraints.
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I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of improving public schools, building affordable housing, and more. But the truth is, we as a society don’t want to solve these problems. So we won’t.
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Are the suburbs the new frontier for artists, musicians and other countercultural communities?
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What will happen to stagnant, poorly aging neighborhoods that are neither verdant and exclusive like the most desirable suburbs, nor vibrant and urbane like rapidly gentrifying city centers? They might actually be a sweet spot at an affordable price.
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What does the actual global middle class looks like? Take all 7.3 billion people on the planet and line them up according to material wealth like a statistician. Then look toward the center.
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There’s a weird war raging these days between people who advocate high rise living in the urban core and folks who can’t stand to live in anything but a fully detached home on a quarter acre lot. I always choose the thing in the middle. I’m a Main Street kind of guy.
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I was in Atlanta earlier this month to attend a conference for small scale developers. The focus was on the “missing middle” which has long been neglected by production builders, bankers, and regulators. I should start with some basic definitions.
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The vast majority of everything ever built in North America has been constructed since World War II. And almost all of it is auto-oriented suburban development.
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All the talk about urbanism these days is dominated by places like Brooklyn, Portland, Vancouver, and San Francisco because they’re prosperous and fashionable. It’s so easy to dismiss them as anomalies.
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Four examples of strong households from travels of Johnny Sanphillippo.
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What would our neighborhoods look like if we voluntarily reduced the amount of infrastructure? This isn’t a purely academic question. As municipal, state, and federal budgets get squeezed there’s going to be a point at which we have no choice but to stop building new roads and even reduce the amount of maintenance on the roads we already have. We could approach this situation with dread and a sense of loss, or we could embrace it as an opportunity to get a better quality of life for a whole lot less money.
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