Urban planning guru says driverless cars won’t fix congestion,” says the New York Times. Naturally, the Times is referring to Peter Calthorpe, one of the few people who might be considered an urban planning guru and the one who has the most to lose if driverless cars are successful.  read more »

According to an October 21, 2018 Los Angeles Times article, experts “agree that the fundamental issue underlying the state’s housing crisis is that there are not enough homes.” In contrast, according to the article, is that “the public doesn’t believe it.” Only 13 percent of registered voters cited “too little homebuilding” as a principal reason for California’s housing unaffordability, in a USC/Dornsife Los Angeles Times poll.  read more »

Carmel, Indiana is an upscale business suburb of Indianapolis that I’ve written about previously, noting them as a paradigm of the new aspirational suburb. Strong Towns and Charles Marohn have been critics of Carmel, mostly because of that city’s billion dollars in debt (on a population of 93,000).  read more »

Once upon a time, the California Republican Party was a fearsome political instrument, forging the ground for two presidents. But today the California GOP is fighting rearguard actions to save its last remaining seats in once solidly Republican strongholds as Orange, San Diego and even in inland California, potentially costing them upward of seven House seats.  read more »

Among my many friends here in San Francisco is a guy who works in the field of affordable housing. In the parlance of the profession he identifies and empowers stakeholders to work synergistically to blah, blah, blah. He’s basically the lubricant in an immensely complex collection of processes involving public and private actors who are all at odds with each other. One of his recent “successes” was a dozen below market apartments for seniors in a third tier suburb of a second tier city in another state that required many years and a dozen separate funding sources.  read more »

The United States is rated as the world’s most competitive economy according to the Global Competitiveness Report 2018, which is published by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The World Economic Forum sponsors the well publicized and invitation only annual meeting at Davos, in the Swiss Alps each winter.  read more »

Almost all news coverage of the current election season has focused on cultural issues such as gender, race, and immigration. What the media have missed are deep socioeconomic trends driving parts of the country in divergent political directions. President Trump has overseen a significant transformation in the geography of the nation’s growth and prosperity. Instead of clustering along the coasts—as many progressives may have preferred—the nation’s economic expansion is now increasingly benefiting red states, notably in the southeast, Texas, and the intermountain West.  read more »

An article in CityLab purports to show “why public transit works better outside the U.S.” However, it never actually demonstrates that public transit does work better in other countries; it merely shows that governments have attempted to make it work better.  read more »

All 7.8 billion on this planet want affordable, scalable, reliable electricity. And for countries like the United States, China, India, most of Africa and the European Union (EU) the cheapest way to produce electrons is by burning coal. Carbon dioxide emissions are rising because the world will need more energy in the decades ahead in order to raise the living standard for the 1.3 billion people living in energy poverty according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).  read more »

The ship known as the American Republic sails on, but its crew is made up of irresponsible and vicious children cast from “Lord of the Flies.” Prisoners of their own emotions, they increasingly seem impervious to the notion that their gyrations might topple their own vessel.  read more »