Lots of Maps, Little Insight in Richard Florida’s Latest
The New Urban Crisis treats a complicated and demanding subject with depressing inadequacy, offering little or nothing in the way of constructive, creative insights or strategies for advocates or practitioners seeking to combat these trends.
Housing and The “Flyover” Mentality
Right around the New Year, an article by Wired’s Emily Dreyfuss popped up on one of my newsfeeds titled, “The Middle Class Can’t Afford to Live In Cities Anymore.” My […]
Myths and Realities About Cycles: Avoiding the Inevitability Trap
About a year ago I wrote a post about Paul Krugman and whether building luxury housing could mitigate the effects of gentrification. For whatever reason, I just noticed one of […]
Malign Neglect? Urban Policy in the Trump Era
To paraphrase physicist Niels Bohr, (or maybe it was Yogi Berra), “predicting is difficult, especially when it’s about the future.” One would think even more so, looking at this subject, […]
How Not To Do Economic Development
Camden is one of the most distressed cities in the United States, and if any city needs state help to build its economy, it’s Camden. While the state of New […]
Does Place Matter Anymore? Cities and the 2016 Election
I’m not the only one, I suspect, who’s been struck by how little, if at all, cities have figured into the 2016 presidential election up to now.
Millennials, Revisited
As both Joe Cortright of the City Observatory and I have written, Millennials—people who have reached adulthood since the beginning of the millennium—and their in-migration, are largely driving the changes […]
Don’t Build Mixed-Income Communities, Buy Them
Building when you could buy is inefficient—and contributes to economic segregation.
Canada Is Looking Better and Better (The Regent Park Story)
High-density public housing may seem like an idea whose time has come and gone, buried along with the ruins of notorious projects like St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe and Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Since […]
Using the Wrong Tools to Build Affordable Housing
Along with most Rooflines readers, I believe that having some portion of a community’s housing as long term or permanently affordable is a desirable policy goal. That said, though, I’ve […]
The REAL Rental Housing Issue
We know a few things about the majority of very low-income renters: They live in private market housing, not tax credit projects or public housing. They receive no housing subsidies. […]
Even Homer Nods: Paul Krugman Gets It Wrong on Housing
As the saying goes, even Homer nods. Paul Krugman must have been having an off day at the end of November 2015, when he devoted his op-ed column in The […]