Urban Issues

(Note: this is a post modified and updated from one written ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. I included some new reflections and context on that time. More than anything, however, I want to make clear that segregation and inequality benefits some people but also exacts deadly costs on others. Please take a look. -Pete)  read more »

Bret Stephens recently argued that if Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, Republicans should welcome it.  read more »

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.  read more »

Even as Californians protest the crude and often brutal deportation tactics employed by President Trump’s ICE and Homeland Security agents, we’re giving too little thought to how our state, and the nation, is failing the very immigrant community we want to protect.  read more »

From the outside, Donohue’s Steak House looks like it belongs to another era—and maybe that’s part of its charm.  read more »

Los Angeles politicians have long dreamt of their city overtaking New York as North America’s dominant economic centre.  read more »

Zohran Mamdani may represent the future of New York, but only by destroying the secrets of its past success. The city, even under the quasi-socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, has from its Dutch days been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise.  read more »

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.  read more »

Canada may have severed its feudal ties less violently, but like America, it experienced far less sustained aristocratic domination than either of its two mother countries, France and Great Britain.  read more »

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature.  read more »