planning

Owen McShane: 1941-2012

Newgeography.com lost a one of its first columnists, a regular contributor and good friend with the passing of Owen McShane.

Owen McShane (Robert Ivan Owen McShane) was born in 1941 and died on March 6, 2012. His long and successful career in public policy was built on a strong academic foundation.  read more »

Subjects:

Why Housing is So Expensive in Metropolitan Washington

Anyone familiar with housing affordability in the Washington (DC-VA-MD-WV) metropolitan area is aware that prices have risen strongly relative to incomes in the last decade.

However, a recent Washington Post commentary by Roger K. Lewis both exaggerates the contribution of higher construction costs and misses the principal factor that has driven up the price of housing: more restrictive land-use regulations.  read more »

Blight Envy - How Development Works in LA

I never thought I’d say this, but I think I want to live in a blighted neighborhood. Well, actually, a community redevelopment area (CRA). They used to be one and the same, but no longer. Apparently you have to live or do business in a redevelopment area to get any “love” in Los Angeles … love being when the government takes your tax dollars and gives them to someone else no more needy.

Let me explain.  read more »

Planning Decisions Must be Based on Facts

While the misreporting of city population density comparisons commented on by  Wendell Cox was probably inadvertent, it is indicative of a general problem relating to contemporary planning – misrepresentation of facts.  read more »

Mega-City Semantics in China’s Pearl River Delta

Recently an article ran in The Telegraph about China ‘creating the largest mega-city in the world with 42 million people‘. The title of the piece is a bit misleading as the government is not planning a new city per se, but rather combining a group of nearby cities into one huge ‘mega-city’. The targeted group of cities makes up the Pearl River Delta region in China’s southern Guangdong Province.  read more »

Gifting China

Listening to public radio, the host was interviewing a college professor as to why China has brought more innovation and progress in many areas of its growth, leaving other countries behind. In particular they mentioned high speed rail, low energy vehicles, and construction. The entire show was based solely upon how China’s universities educate differently than America, as if somehow a graduate student would suddenly posses the knowledge, experience, and drive to make major changes in transportation, science, design, and construction.  read more »

Satellite Cities for Beijing? Yes, But....

China Daily ran an article on the continuing urbanization of Beijing. In Build upward or outward: City’s growth dilemma, Daniel Garst notes that Beijing is not as centralized as other urban areas, with its multiple business districts and comparatively low density in its inner areas.  read more »

Property Values 11 Times Higher Across Portland's Urban Growth Boundary

One of the starkest impacts of smart growth policies is the huge differentials in property prices that occur on virtually adjacent properties on either side of an urban growth boundary.  read more »

City of Austin Approves Big Greenfield Development

Despite its smart growth policies, the city of Austin has approved a new development on the urban fringe that will include new detached housing starting at $115,000.

Austin is the third fastest growing metropolitan area with more than 1,000,000 residents in the United States, following Raleigh, North Carolina and Las Vegas. The city of Austin accounted for 53% (672,000) of the metropolitan area's 1.27 million population in 2000, but has seen more than 70% of the growth since that time go to the suburbs. Now the metropolitan area has 1.65 million people, and the city has 785,000.  read more »

Year 1959

Get a glass of wine. Then click on this link, which plays a video called Community Growth, created in 1959.

Once you've seen the video, read on…

You're probably sitting with a puzzled look – 1959? Aren’t these the exact same issues that are plaguing us today? Don’t those 1959 developments look like many of today’s latest developments? Even the way they bulldozed through the land and stick-built the homes looks just like the methods used today!  read more »