We got quite a bit of interest on our post last week about how the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts had written itself a zoning code that would have prevented the construction of virtually the entire city of 80,000 people if…
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on…
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest…
What City Observatory did this week 1. In previous installments of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we’ve calculated the billions of dollars that longer distances between homes and workplaces cost American commuters, and shown that US workers pay more for transportation,…
A little while ago, in a post called “Sprawl beyond zoning,” we argued that even though Houston doesn’t technically have a zoning code, it still regulates the built environment in lots of ways that make it difficult or impossible to…