Housing as a human right has become a rallying cry across the United States and in many countries, especially in cities. More and more people are perplexed as to why housing is out of reach for all but the wealthy. Why have the needs of… Read More »Is COVID-19 spending fueling speculative vacancies?
Property taxes are the most important revenue source for most cities and towns in the U.S., providing funding for a variety of local services and infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional property taxes’ emphasis on taxing the value of improvements – like homes and businesses – can produce… Read More »What are the on-the-ground effects of a land value tax? Lessons from the Pennsylvania experience.
This is the first in a series of articles discussing housing affordability, economic justice, and inequality in the United States. Afew months ago, I took the plunge and bought a home the traditional way, house and land packaged as one. Buying a home this way was… Read More »How Our Obsession with Owning the Land Beneath our Homes Is Driving the Housing Affordability Crisis (and What to Do about It)
The current conflict in Washington, dealing with the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, is the much anticipated, frequently promised, but poorly defined ‘infrastructure bill’. As it stands, two versions are possible – one preferred by centrist Democrats and a few moderate Republicans that… Read More »Infrastructure Problems Exacerbated by a Poor System of Taxation
Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises—and more than a few construction fires. Bloomberg Businessweek | Justin Fox These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re… Read More »Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same
January 13, 20205:04 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition Eric Westervelt Charles Gibson pushes a shopping cart toward his soggy tent on a tenuous patch of a grassy drainage ditch along a bike trail in Santa Rosa, Calif. He’s one of nearly 200 people living… Read More »Sprawling Homeless Camps — Modern ‘Hoovervilles’ — Vex California
Photo: Baldwin, Fla., is surrounded by farm country, and in late October, local green beans, tomatoes, peanuts, cabbage and milk filled the shelves of the Baldwin Market, which is owned by the town. (Antonia Noori Farzan) By Antonia Noori Farzan November 22, 2019 at 5:03 a.m. EST… Read More »When a deep red town’s only grocery closed, city hall opened its own store. Just don’t call it ‘socialism.’
As the chain opens stores at the rate of three a day across the U.S., often in the heart of ‘food deserts’, some see Dollar General as an admission that a town is failing. The Guardian | Chris McGreal When Dollar General came to Haven,… Read More »How Dollar General Took Over Rural America
On The Media WNYC Friday, August 30, 2019 Going beyond point-A-to-point-B mobility. The lion’s share of our transit-oriented program this week has centered on the personal car and its infrastructure. This is no accident. The car speeds, stalls, thrills and kills us — all because… Read More »Understanding Rights in Transit
Why is it that, every year, the average American spends almost an entire work week stuck in traffic? We are wasting so much time, money, and resources making our daily rounds, but when exploring better ways of doing things, conversations tend to be dominated by improvements to public transportation and more fuel-efficient cars. But to focus solely on transport is to ignore the elephant in the room: the problem is not getting from A to B, but that we live in cities where the long commute is necessary in the first place.
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