Planning

Fair Park First Might Prompt 21st Century Urban Renewal, Wiping Out Neighborhoods

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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 »

Learning From Las Vegas: Sustainable vs. Susceptible

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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 »

Inflation Eats Infrastructure Bill

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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 »

Why Elephants Are Not People

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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 »

Subjects:

America's Two Housing Markets

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Imagine that, on top of all our other problems, the United States had a shortage of pickup trucks. While many pickups are purchased for recreational purposes, they also play vital roles in construction, farming, forestry, and other industries.  read more »

Americans Prefer Single-Family Neighborhoods

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Many surveys have found that the vast majority of Americans, including Millennials, prefer or aspire to live in single-family homes. But surveys rarely ask whether they prefer that single-family home to be in a low-density neighborhood or if they would mind living next to a bunch of apartment buildings.  read more »

Serfing the Future?

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Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them.  read more »

Urbanists: "Fundamentally Misaligned"

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The story I’m writing today is very different from the one I started out to write.

The single issue that seems to drive debate in urbanist circles is our nation’s housing crisis. Urbanists of all types agree that home prices and rents are hurting communities and entire metropolitan markets.  read more »

The Limits of Libertarianism

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Over the past half-century, libertarians have played a critical role in the ever-growing war against governmental nonsense. If you want to read the best critiques of wasteful transit policy, sports stadia, government pensions or cancel culture, you can find it among liberty-minded outlets like Reason magazine, the Cato Institute and numerous free-market think tanks.  read more »

You Can't Fix the Housing Crisis with New Houses. We Need New Cities

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Housing is rapidly becoming the key economic issue facing America's beleaguered middle class. Even as interest rates rise, rents are on a wild binge, up near 20 percent in the past year or more in some cities. Meanwhile, home prices have hit a high and appear to be climbing further still. Higher prices are emerging even in what have long been relative bargain communities in the southeast, as refugees from the high-priced Northeast pour in with their greater resources.  read more »