Back in August, we wrote about the phenomenon of the “missing middle”: the fact that today’s urban (and suburban) development tends to take the form of either single-family homes or very large apartment buildings, but not so much in the…
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called…
There are two big theories about who controls the pace of development in American cities and suburbs. One is the “growth machine.” In this telling, developed by academics like Harvey Molotch in the 1970s, urban elected officials and zoning boards…
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt…
What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about “ethical landlording” as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But substituting the private…