Housing

About a month ago I asked a simple question on Twitter, hoping to get Urbanist Twitter’s consensus opinion. I posted an aerial picture of a residential neighborhood (see above) and asked, “is this urban?” I was quite surprised by the responses.  read more »

Redlining and Bluelining Are Detrimental to a Neighborhood, But Bluelining Is Devastating to Low-Income Blacks and Other Groups  read more »

Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”  read more »

In California we pride ourselves on being very tolerant of a diverse array of lifestyles and lifestyle choices. Dress how it suits you; love whom you love; define yourself in accordance with your own preferences. Do your own thing. Sing your own song. Dance your own dance. The Californian thing is to live and let live.  read more »

My mother-in-law was born in a small town in rural Nebraska in 1941. Her father was oversees fighting World War II for the first few years of her life, so she and her mother lived on her grandparents’ farm in a society absent of young men.  read more »

Australia’s response to Covid-19 has quickly turned from laudable to laughable. For a nation which only a few months ago seemed to be the toast of world leaders for having so effectively limited the spread of the virus and still growing its economy, to a nation now lagging on vaccination and struggling with lockdowns, the turnaround has been dramatic.  read more »

In March I bought a modest, two-bedroom 1950 tract house in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s not going to win any awards for cutting-edge design, but it’s solid, respectable, and in a safe, quiet neighborhood with a premium school district.  read more »

President Joe Biden has nominated Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India. Assuming the Senate confirms him, Garcetti, who would leave office early (his second term ends in December 2022), might find India familiar in certain respects. Like Mumbai or Delhi, Los Angeles now has massive homeless encampments throughout the city  read more »

There continues to be a perception among many that America’s suburbs and exurbs are overwhelmingly White-Non-Hispanic, with little minority population. Nothing could be further from the truth, is indicated by an analysis of major metropolitan area growth, using the City Sector Model  read more »

Although master-planned communities are quite common on Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, they are few and far between in California thanks to strict land-use laws and an anti-development mentality.  read more »