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…
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines…
This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference by Carol Coletta, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. Could there be a more apt place to…
In the first installment of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we explained how laws and patterns of development that make our homes, businesses, and schools farther apart cost us time and money—on average, nearly $1,400 a year per commuter in America’s…