Blogs

Houston city councilman Peter Brown, unique as a devotee of smart growth (compact development) in this city of light land use regulation, placed third in the mayoral election yesterday. Brown had long advocated Portland-style smart growth land use and development policies for the city of Houston and looked likely to garner the most votes in the four-way race. Brown, an architect and urban planner, spent more than $3 million of his own money in the election.  read more »

A few days ago BusinessWeek released a list of the top 40 metropolitan economies based on data compiled at the Brookings Institution's Metromonitor project. But, as many old media sites tend to do, they've locked the list behind a slow-loading slide show in a cheap attempt to drum up page views. Many of the commenters to the original article couldn't even find the list.  read more »

The Empire Center for New State Policy has released “Empire State Exodus,” which details New York’s continuing loss of people and their incomes to other states. The report was authored by E. J. McMahon, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute and director of the Empire Center and me.  read more »

It has been a bad media week for New Urbanism.

“The day that New Urbanism Died?” was the headline of the St. Louis Urban Workshop blog that detailed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Whittaker Builders, developer of the “New Town at St. Charles,” a premier New Urbanist community located in the St. Louis exurbs (beyond the suburbs).  read more »

Coming soon to a market near you: a bust in commercial real estate that will make the subprime mortgage crisis look like a picnic. The other shoe drops in 2010.  read more »

Climate change threatens popcorn prices, air planes, and outdoor hockey. And, in the latest tax-payer funded advertising from the UK, climate change will tell you bedtime stories of a drowning dog and the coming apocalypse:  read more »

Bifurcated means to split or divide something into two parts. It is a term often used to describe trees, but today it can also be applied to our politics in America. It seems that right and left, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democratic have never been more at odds than in our recent history.  read more »

New Geography publisher Delore Zimmerman will host a webinar next week discussing the future of rural america. The webinar is part of the Rural Broadband Initiative organized by Northern Minnesota's Blandin Foundation.

From Blandin:  read more »

The International Olympic Committee has rejected Chicago in the first round. A delegation of President Obama, Michelle Obama, Oprah, Mayor Daley and others failed to convince the IOC. President Obama made an impassioned plea to the IOC:

"Chicago is a city where the practical and the inspirational exist in harmony; where visionaries who made no small plans rebuilt after a great fire and taught the world to reach new heights," Obama told the IOC's members. "I urge you to choose Chicago."  read more »

I’ve been following this for a while and writing about it on NewGeography.com since March – not all mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are actually backed by mortgages. So when the homeowner goes into bankruptcy, there’s no way for the MBS holder to prove a lien on the house and the judge awards the bondholder bupkus.  read more »