Urban Issues

An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.  read more »

For all the talk about how the pandemic, remote work, social distancing and other huge new developments have dislodged traditional patterns in business and life in America and created vast new opportunities in the process, Flyover Country has left a lot on the table.  read more »

Note: This is a revised version., which reflects a correction by the Census Bureau to the San Francisco-Oakland urban area, into which has been combined the San Rafael-Novato urban area. San Francisco-Oakland remains the 14th largest urban area, but now ranks behind Los Angeles in density. The revised data is in the table at the end of this article. The fully revised replacement article is available here.  read more »

If you’ve read this blog over the years you know that I’ve increasingly written about a general staleness in urbanist discourse. I’ve characterized it as seeing a need for new ideas in urbanism discourse, superstar cities becoming the victims of their own success, or the needs of interior cities being glossed over in favor of the coasts.  read more »

The newly published US Census Bureau state and District of Columbia population estimates contain some surprises about changing growth and net domestic migration (movement between states) patterns.  read more »

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times recently wrote a piece in which he questioned several top academics in economics and real estate on whether two outcomes of the Covid pandemic  read more »

Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.”  read more »

In recent weeks, more and more commentators are suggesting that house prices in New Zealand have started to fall, and are expected to fall further.

For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great deal of sympathy. They were sold the lie that house prices would always and everywhere rise much faster than incomes, and that therefore the best way to financial independence was to borrow to the maximum extent possible and buy a house – better still, several houses, the more the better.  read more »

The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong connections between an organically expanding city, housing affordability and upward mobility.  read more »

There is considerable confusion with respect to the terms of urban geography, not only among the population in general, but also among the media, and sadly, among academics. Perhaps the greatest confusion is between the terms “metropolitan area” and “urban area.”  read more »