Suburbs

Report: How Will California Solve the Housing Crisis?

how-will-CA-solve-housing-crisis-report.jpg

This new report examines the housing crisis in California and strategies to create more housing at affordable price points. Below is a summary and a link to download the full report  read more »

Localist Living in a Shrinking Age

us-map-children-data.png

I try hard to give people insights into trends affecting our world. One of them is the way that declining birth rates will ultimately translate into shrinking cities.  read more »

To Reduce Costs, California Also Needs to Build New Suburbs

SanDiego_coastal-community.jpg

The three myths that have led to this predicament are the following: Nuclear power and natural gas power causes unacceptable harm to the environment; reservoirs and desalination plants cause unacceptable harm to the environment; and single-family homes nestled in sprawling suburbs cause unacceptable harm to the environment.  read more »

Urban Sprawl, the Environmentally Friendly Answer to Expensive Housing

suburban-sprawl-solution-expensive-housing.jpg

From the dawn of the colonial era, Canada, the U.S., and Australia thrived by providing what the landless have always sought. In the vast expanses of these countries  read more »

Kill Off the Old City So New Cities Can Be Born

chicago-empty-downtowns.jpg

After decades of self-celebration and relentless media hype, the great “urban renaissance” predicted by the New Urbanists—a vision of cities built by and for the creative class—has come crashing down.  read more »

Gen Z Moving Out of Cities

ChildreninSuburbs.jpg

Remember the young people who supposedly loved cities and rejected the suburbs? It turns out they are the ones who have been fleeing the cities since the beginning of the pandemic.  read more »

Observations on U.S. New Towns

The_Woodlands_Texas.jpg

In the middle of the 20th century, there was considerable interest in developing new communities (new towns). The interest was, to some degree, driven by the establishment of new towns in nations like the United Kingdom and France, where a number of projects had been completed by 1970.  read more »

Understanding Neighborhoods and Architecture as Foundation of Understanding Preservation

neighborhood-preservation-2023_01.jpg

Cities evolve by either expanding, deteriorating, tearing down or preserving. Some cities like Dallas have vast vacant land and other cities have little undeveloped land. Whether a city is expanding or declining, preservation is always healthy for a city.  read more »

The Future of Cities: Next Generation Suburbs

FOC_Next-Gen-Suburbs-Berger.jpg

Whether hundreds of years ago or today, the far-reaching environmental impacts of urbanization are because cities are “a node of pure consumption existing parasitically on an extensive external resource base.”  read more »

Things Are Different Downtown

urban-highrise-office-bldgs.jpg

We are entering a new urban epoch, with the potential to disrupt city life in ways not unlike that created in the shift from an industrial to what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as the “transactional city.”  read more »