For some urbanists in Los Angeles’ smart growth crowd, the only thing better than the destruction of one faux-Italian megablock apartment complex would be the destruction of four faux-Italian megablock apartment complexes.
Not All NIMBYs Are Alike
The ethics of NIMBYism depend largely on the kind of environment that you’re trying to save.
Explaining the Country’s Worst Rental Market
Surely, homeowners are entitled to worry about traffic, sight lines, city services, and all the rest. What I suspect, though, is that many homeowners really want to do is what any rational, self-interested actor would want when he or show owns a valuable asset. They want to constrain supply.
Transit Branding’s Virtuous Cycle
If a beer company can fool the public into throwing away its money on the same old product, then aren’t transit agencies doing the very same thing when they promoting and rebrand themselves?
Beware the ‘Density Cult’
Joel Kotkin, Los Angeles-based urban theorist and persistent critic of downtown revitalization, would have you believe that advocates of smart growth. . . all want to turn their cities into putrid slums.
Hysteria Over California’s Decline Reaches New Heights
It’s true that liberals generally tend to oppose sprawl. But opposing sprawl doesn’t necessarily equate with constraining housing supply.
The Chemistry of Safer, Denser Cities
Reporter Kevin Drum recently revealed lead for what it was: one of the keys to the epidemic of American crime and violence that ruined our cities in the mid-20th century.
Shared Hardship and the Souls of Cities
No one moves to a place with a worst-case scenario in mind. But sometimes the worst-case scenarios are what define cities — and, paradoxically, perversely, sometimes for the better.
L.A. Tries Bringing Subway to Land of Maseratis
The city that inspired a million Tudor-style McMansions is blocking the transit authority’s plans with a demand that it reroute the subway extension to avoid running below the high school that inspired everyone’s favorite bit of 1990s high school television greatness.
Smart Growth Strategies Prompt Dumb Objections
For whatever reason, the Journal really has it cut out for California, because Kotkin’s piece—which isn’t actually an op-ed but rather a sycophantic quasi-interview by Allysia Finley—levies similar criticisms of California’s land use policies, but with some even more strained logic and offensive biases.
50 Years Later, Jacobs Still Leads a Sorority of Dissent
There must have been something in the water affecting women in the early 1960s, and it wasn’t just DDT.
Deconstructing A Tea Party Muse
For some lucky candidates, tomorrow’s election will have a storybook ending. Unfortunately for anyone who understands architecture, planning, and land use, that storybook will, in many cases, turn out to be The Fountainhead.
You Can’t Spell Subsidy Without B-U-S
A certain radical fringe contends that the benefits of free transit — that is, transit with a 100 percent subsidy (a la schools) — would pay for itself many times over. That might sound a little nuts, except that it’s hard to define a substantive difference between the argument in favor of fare-free transit and that in favor of toll-free roads.
Shoup Shows Cities How to “Just Say No” to Parking
Cities that have no money for infrastructure investments, are crushed by byzantine planning codes, or are otherwise skittish about upsetting the status quo now have no excuse not to consider parking reform.
Subway Extension Would Make More than a Token Difference for L.A.
If I’m guilty of anything, it’s hometown pride, except without the real town. The subway might change that. I
Light Rail Pits Planning Against Parenthood
The latest country heard from to oppose or otherwise gum up the Expo Line are the concerned parents and educators of L.A.’s Dorsey High School, past which the line would run.
A Down-to-Earth 9/11 Memorial
one of us intended to ignore Bolourchi’s memory or deny the enormity of 9/11. We who braced ourselves to speak against the proposal did not, however, wish to limit our support to the memory of a single soul when sadness still fell all around the nation.