Blogs

The Province in Vancouver reports (in "15% of downtown Vancouver condos sit empty, turning areas into ghost towns: Study") that "much of the downtown core is starting to look like B.C.’s ghost towns — with apartments languishing empty, businesses closing down and residents not feeling the sense of community they bought into." The study, by University of British Columbia (UBC) planning professor Andy Yan, indicate  read more »

Frustrated young children confined in the small apartments proliferating in New South Wales are naturally inquisitive and incapable of judging risks.  They climb onto window sills or balustrades to fall onto concrete many metres below.

The results have been appalling. In Sydney during the period 1998 to 2008 169 children have fallen to serious injury or death, and, as the proportion of apartments increase, so do these tragic incidents, of which there is now one a week.  read more »

In an article entitled "Portland area's college-educated workers depress metro earning power by choosing low-paying fields, shorter hours," The Oregonian's Betsy Hammond reports on a new study decrying the less than robust economic impact of Portland's younger college graduates, especially males.  read more »

Metropolitan America continues to expand. The new Office of Management and Budget metropolitan area definitions, based upon the 2010 census indicate that the counties composing the 52 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million population increased by 1.65 million from the previous definition. This includes more than 1.4 million new residents in the previous 51 major metropolitan areas and more than 200,000 in Grand Rapids, which has become the nation's 52nd metropolitan area with more than 1 million population.  read more »

The New South Wales government has proposed a new Metropolitan Strategy for the Sydney area which would significantly weaken the urban containment policy (also called urban consolidation, smart growth, livability, growth management, densification, etc.) that has driven if house prices to among the highest in the affluent New World (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States) relative to household incomes.  read more »

It seems like not a week goes by without fresh warnings about the nation’s”crumbling infrastructure" and renewed appeals to rebuild our aging highways and bridges.  President Obama reinvigorated the campaign with his State-of-the-Union proposal for a $50 billion program of infrastructure investments, $40 billion of which would be devoted to a "fix-it-first" program targeted at urgent improvements such as "structurally deficient" bridges.  read more »

The website nerdwallet.com mixes apples and oranges in producing a list of the 10 worst "cities" for car drivers in the United States. The ratings hardly matter, since the nerdwallet.com score is based on a mixture of urban area and municipality data.  read more »

Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee and Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee have expressed serious reservations on the proposed taxpayer loan to the Xpress West high-speed rail line that would operate two thirds of the way between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (from Victorville).  read more »

There has been a huge spike in the number of New Yorkers relocating to Texas in recent years, even at a time when fewer city residents were departing for Charlotte, Atlanta, Philadelphia and other traditional destinations.  read more »

Over the last year, celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Robert Redford, Mark Ruffalo, Mario Batali, Scarlett Johansson, Alec Baldwin, and Matt Damon have spoken out against the expansion of natural gas drilling. “Fracking kills,” says Ono, who has a country home in New York. “It threatens the air we breathe,” says Redford.   read more »