From health care to the economy, the pandemic is exposing the fragility of institutions we’ve long taken for granted.
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The fallout from the pandemic is spurring a housing re-shuffling in San Francisco. And not just from people fleeing the city—but people moving to the city and within the city.
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An urban photographer reflects on the reactions he got when he started capturing what the American urban landscape is really like—parking lots, declining neighborhoods, tract homes, and all.
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Towns and cities whose economies relied on tourism are in major trouble. Even when the economy recovers, these places won’t soon go back to business as usual. Nor should they.
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Cities won’t die in a vacuum. When you see a vacant office building, what you’re really looking at is your pension fund going belly-up, a loan that won’t get repaid, services that will have to be cut.
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Laws and rules often prohibit the very things that could make our neighborhoods more resilient. Like producing more of our own food — no small consideration during a time of social distancing and fragile supply chains.
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We were vulnerable to a crash long before coronavirus appeared. We all made promises to ourselves and each other that we never meant to keep.
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Tracing the origins of a single meal reminds us how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the global supply chain. How do we create redundancies at home?
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A cautionary tale from the superheated housing market of San Francisco.
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What if the “beautiful dream” of a Main Street urbanism isn’t available? What can be done to adapt that dream to auto-dependent suburbs? More than you might expect.
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This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
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No name better symbolizes idyllic 1950s suburbia than Levittown. How these massive, master-planned communities—the epitome of America’s suburban experiment—have fared over 70 years tells a less rosy story.
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Trying to navigate opaque bureaucracies, just to get permission to build something that used to be legal everywhere, is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks: tedious and unsatisfying. No wonder people find pragmatic work-arounds instead.
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Bringing a neighborhood back from the brink of ruin, one building at a time, is hard, thankless work—like raising bees when you could just go buy a jar of honey. But when it works, each successful project helps “pollinate” the surrounding area with the seeds of revival, in a virtuous cycle.
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The newer generation of public housing projects offer a superficially pleasant facsimile of a New Urbanist neighborhood. But these are places built all at once, to a finished state, and deeply dependent on fragile institutional arrangements.
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The allure of a silver-bullet economic development project is like that boat you buy for a low, low down payment. You know, the one that ended up sitting in your driveway under a tarp for years. Just ask Memphis.
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Our collective willingness to maintain infrastructure that has outlived its economic rationale will evaporate in due course. Only the truly productive bits will survive the fullness of time.
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Change may come, but it isn’t going to be planned or voluntary. Instead we’re all going to absorb a variety of unintended consequences.
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One of the reasons Ocean Grove, New Jersey has endured intact is the presence of a religious community that had a higher calling and a longer event horizon than the dominant secular culture. There are lessons to be learned here even by people who may not identify with the church.
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Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our current institutions are in the process of failing and are unlikely to be reformed. Once the dust settles, we’ll create new institutions and a fresh cultural consensus that respond to pressing needs on the ground.
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