Has your property tax bill skyrocketed this year? It’s worth taking a deeper look into how your county or city does their assessments...
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How one Colorado town is breaking away from its former dependence on mining.
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A model of what the future could look like for communities that depend on extractive industry, if they make the right investments.
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Cities in Wyoming have become dependent on extractive industry. Here’s how and why they need to get out of this impossibly fragile situation.
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The suburban growth model might as well be called an extractive industry: it deals just as much of a beating to communities that embrace it.
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Are you a data geek? Do you enjoy creating stories and visuals to simplify complex concepts?
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Decades of disinvestment have trapped neighborhoods in poverty. Cities can do something about it—with tools they already have—and build lasting prosperity that benefits everyone.
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It can be intimidating to try and wade through a 200-page government PDF filled with obscure acronyms and confusing charts. It doesn’t have to be. We’re lifting the veil on city budgets.
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Kansas City was once described as the “Paris of the Plains.” Today it is the freeway capital of America. A look at the city’s history of gobbling up land on its outskirts shows why Kansas City could be considered a poster child for America’s radical experiment in suburbanization.
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Commentators have speculated that density has been toxic during the coronavirus crisis. But Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 did what he does best—he ran the numbers—and found a different story. This is why data should prevail during a pandemic.
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Turns out, the things worth writing home about are the same things that make a place worth calling home. What would it take to develop postcard-worthy places again?
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The most brilliant innovations in building cities are already embodied in the traditional development pattern, a foolproof approach to creating resilient and productive places that was developed the hard way.
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Information about our city’s revenue, expenses and liabilities is usually presented in ways that disempower most people from making informed decisions. But what about folks who aren’t a Level 20 Spreadsheet Wizard? How can we use data to better tell the story of where we are now — and empower more people to write the story of their city’s future?
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South Florida is known for its luxurious lifestyle and extravagant beachfront homes. These mansions must reel in big bucks for the city, right? Let’s see how productive they really are when we #DoTheMath.
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Would you rather have a pizza, or the ingredients of a pizza arranged in separate piles? This analogy has something to teach us about the consequences of how we organize our cities.
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How much road does your city have—and how much does it actually have the money to maintain? We compare “calories in” to “calories out” before we binge on ice cream; what if we took the same approach to our infrastructure budgets? One city did, and here’s what they found out.
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Two small Tennessee towns reveal the mighty power of a traditional downtown square—even one that isn’t designed to achieve its full potential. It’s simply the most foolproof and financially productive style of development there is.
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Leander, Texas, a suburb of Austin, is a quiet bedroom community that recently found itself with a commuter rail station. Can it afford to waste the opportunity to create the transit-oriented downtown it never had?
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When we do the math, we find that preserving historic buildings and districts is the best thing we can do for our cities’ economic futures. Utica, New York should consider this when choosing where to locate a new hospital campus.
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When property near water holds a higher value than landlocked properties, we call it the “lake effect.” How can this be used to build a stronger, healthier community?
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