Category: Book Reviews

Review: Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion

In the acknowledgements section at the end of his book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, author Alan Ehrenhalt demurred he is “no Jane Jacobs” but says he followed her advice for researching cities, namely to study them through close personal observation using a minimum of preconceptions. The results of this […]

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Zoning Conflict Heats Up In Cambridge

Exiting the Trader Joe’s near my home in Cambridge recently, I was approached by an intense man who asked: “Are you a registered voter in Cambridge?” He was collecting signatures for a petition that would put a recent zoning amendment adopted by the City Council on the ballot for a referendum. The City Council was […]

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Zoning Out Guns

Just because the D.C. handgun ban has been overturned doesn’t mean you will ever be able to buy one in Washington. The reason? Zoning. This from the Wall Street Journal: Washington has no federally licensed gun stores, so nowhere in the city can residents buy a handgun legally. Under federal law, buying one in neighboring […]

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The Wrong Way the Solicit Participation on the Web

I noticed two flawed attempts to solicit public participation on the web recently. First, on Tuesday Hillary Clinton said the following during her nationally televised speech: “Now the question is, where do we go from here … But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and […]

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Review: A Better Way to Zone

I have mixed feelings about zoning, which may explain my thoughts about Donald Elliott’s new book about it, A Better Way to Zone. A land use law consultant in Colorado, Elliott’s book is dedicated to making “simplicity and understandability not just an aspiration but a guiding principle in zoning.” While I agree with much of […]

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