Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent […]
National Planning for America’s Cities
One of the disappointments for many urban planners about the stimulus bill was the lack of innovation for urban development. Funds for community development, foreclosure response, and transportation funding flowed through existing programs and formulas, meaning the stimulus funds would share their idiosyncrasies. Perhaps this is for the best: for the interest of expediency and […]
Preservation Debate Rages Over Silver Spring’s Falkland Chase Apartments
A red-hot urban development controversy will move one step closer to resolution at a hearing tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the 3rd Floor Council Hearing Room in the Montgomery County office building in Rockville, Maryland. At stake is nothing less than the purpose of historic preservation, and how preservation should be balanced with affordable housing […]
Nostalgia is Not Urban Planning
A cover story in yesterday’s Boston Globe asked “Would car traffic bring back the crowds?” for Boston’s historic retail district Downtown Crossing. A partial pedestrian mall since 1978 (commercial traffic is allowed), the Globe pondered whether the “solution” to the neighborhood’s woes would be a return of automobile traffic. The story quotes business owners who […]
Data and Decisions in Government
When I first heard about Baltimore’s CitiStat program, which uses city data to “provide timely, reliable services to Baltimore’s residents,” I envisioned a public sector version of an executive dashboard. The mayor (the program started under Martin O’Malley, it continues under Sheila Dixon) would have data at their fingertips through a computer interface or screen […]
Public Works and … Internet Voting?
Recently, a major city decided to take a different approach to investing in public works. Instead of deciding what new facilities to build for the population, they put it up for an online vote. Elected officials set aside $11 million taxpayer dollars to build the most popular proposals in each of the city’s nine wards. […]
Book Review: Rybczynski’s Last Harvest
Witold Rybczynski’s 2007 book Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town is truly a unique book: an accessible, detailed narrative of the process of real estate development. The book describes the construction of a subdivision named New Daleville in southern Chester County in suburban Philadelphia. Or exurban, rather, since the development is over 45 miles […]