Urban Issues

Ex-Urbia

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"Town and country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”
— Ebenezer Howard, 1898"

All cities must evolve over time. Those that fail to do so end up, at best, like Venice, Vienna, or Florence: lifestyle and tourist hubs. This fate now awaits our greatest urban cores if they cannot address the demographic, social, and economic forces transforming the metropolitan landscape.  read more »

The Future of Cities: The Evolution of New York City Politics

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It's always been a mug's fame to best against New York City, which was counted out only to quickly bounce back after 9/11 and again in 2008 after the financial system nearly collapsed and took the world economy with it.  read more »

The 15 Minute City: An Idiotic Dream

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One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations.  read more »

2022 Residential Building Permits by Housing Market

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The US Census Bureau has released preliminary data for residential building permits by metropolitan area (housing market). This article provides data for all of the 384 metropolitan areas, with emphasis on the 113 with populations exceeding 500,000 residents (Note).  read more »

California Has a Population Problem – At a Minimum

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There’s not much reason to expect more than a churn of mediocrity from the Los Angeles Times these days.  read more »

The Future of Cities: The Texas Triangle

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The metropolitan areas that form the “Texas Triangle” —Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio— are emerging as distinctive models of 21st century urbanism.  read more »

The Ghost of Ancient Rome Haunts America

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The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000.  read more »

Ontario Land Use Policies Make Housing Unaffordable

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A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.  read more »

A Neo-feudal War on the People

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An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides  read more »

The Future of Cities: Indianapolis

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Indianapolis was an unlikely candidate to emerge as a midwestern demographic and economic leader. It is an artificially created city, chosen by fiat as a centrally located capital for the state of Indiana.  read more »