Planning

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.  read more »

Urban containment has significant costs. In commenting on the association between London’s urban growth boundary,¹ and the higher costs of housing, The Economist said: “Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully.  read more »

This won’t start off about real estate but it will end there — like so much of life.

At the Shed in Hudson Yards, “Straight Line Crazy” is enjoying a sold-out run of months, if not longer. It is the story of Robert Moses, who outfoxed every politician in New York to create a proprietary stream of public money that financed his role as the city’s lynchpin builder from the 1920s into the 1960s.  read more »

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²  read more »

Some Confuse a Homeowner’s Greatest Property Right With How Many Uses the Homeowner can Utilize for Their Home

A homeowner’s greatest property right is not how many uses a homeowner can use their home, but neighborhood protection from uses not beneficial to single-family homes.

Dallas is Losing Homeowners  read more »

The first phase of the Honolulu rail transit system is supposed to open at the end of this year, with trains serving nine of the planned 21 stations. But those plans may be put on hold because  read more »

Recently, exciting plans for Fair Park were unveiled at an architectural forum by Fair Park First, the nonprofit selected to transform and manage Fair Park’s transformation.  read more »

I hear a great deal about sustainability in the built environment that sounds both encouraging and delusional. These messages come from well intentioned environmentalists as well as corporate marketing departments. The general tone of the conversation is similar either way. Everyone can continue to live the way we do now, but by making a few minor adjustments we’ll transition away from coal, oil, and natural gas to benign materials and clean renewable energy. This transition will save households money, preserve nature, and be profitable for private enterprise.  read more »

In addition to restoring allegedly crumbling highways and transit lines, the 2021 infrastructure bill was supposed to provide tens of billions of dollars for building new infrastructure.  read more »

In a controversial ruling, the New York Court of Appeals recently decided that elephants are not people with constitutional rights. While this would seem to be a no-brainer, animal rights advocates believe that giving animals more rights is a natural progression from a few hundred years ago when only the aristocracy had what we conventionally regard as human rights.  read more »