sprawl
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Developer to make sprawl slightly less bad by putting solar panels on it
Oh man, one more of these and it's a New York Times trend story: First it was sprawl developers who had to give away cars in order to sell their McMansions in the eighth circle of exurban hell, now it's some developer in Phoenix who wants to attract baby boomers to purchase 11,200 new homes by […]
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Desperate sprawl developer gives away cars with houses
Desperate measures.My head nearly exploded at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. I was reading a piece in The New York Times about an Illinois developer who has finally found a way to unload the new houses he has built some 50 miles from downtown Chicago, in a place he has seen fit to dub […]
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Suburbs and cities: Stop the name-calling, already
What’s in a name?Photo: Ryan BowmanWhat is the difference between a city and a suburb, anyway? It’s an important question because so many times, the debate about the allocation of resources in our country is framed this way, as if there were some kind of obvious dichotomy between suburbs and cities, some bright line that […]
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The drugstore chains that ate America’s suburbs [VIDEO]
What is the fabric of the modern American community? Well, a big part of it consists of an endless parade of chain drugstores selling the kind of stuff chain drugstores sell (including booze!). That’s the landscape that Chris Weagel shows us from his hometown of St. Clair Shores, Mich. It is also a landscape that […]
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Does sprawl development drive away talented professional people?
Troy, Michigan: can this place be saved?Photo: Wayne Senville, Planning Commissioners JournalThere’s a great discussion going on at the indispensable blog about the industrial Midwest, RustWire.com. It was prompted by their posting last week of a letter from Andrew Basile, Jr., the CEO of a legal firm with offices in Troy, Mich., entitled “Why our […]
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Edward Glaeser: Tea Party-style libertarianism could be good for our cities
Cities: Land of the free, home of the brave.Photo: Thomas HawkWhen I talked with economist Edward Glaeser last month about his new book Triumph of the City, he touched briefly on the idea that Tea Party activists, rather than being natural adversaries of city-dwellers, are actually natural allies — if only unwittingly. Here’s what he […]
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Check out Helsinki’s underground shadow city
Itakeskus underground swimming complexPhoto: Lewis Martin From the country that brought you the world’s spookiest children’s series, please meet the underground city. Helsinki, Finland’s capital, has decided to defeat sprawl by building down instead of out. Incised into the city’s bedrock are a swimming pool, a shopping area, a church, a hockey rink, and a […]
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New evidence cities rule and suburbs drool
Suck it, Thoreau: Looks like big cities are the way to go if you’re looking to lower your environmental impact. According to a new study published in the journal Environment and Urbanization, carbon emissions in cities are lower than in the car-dependent burbs. Okay, so you’ll still come out ahead if you live in an […]
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Residents of award-winning transit-oriented development say no to transit
Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Photo: thecourtyard So much for the widely-touted concept of “transit-ready” development. The residents of an acclaimed New Urbanist village built around planned light rail (or bus rapid transit) stops have decided that they don’t actually want the transit their community was designed for. So let’s be more careful […]
