Sprawl
Streetsblog Basics
Confirmed: Sprawl and Bad Transit Increase Unemployment
Since the 1960s and the earliest days of job sprawl, the theory of "spatial mismatch" -- that low-income communities experience higher unemployment because they are isolated from employment centers -- has shaped the way people think about urban form and social equity.
October 30, 2014
Are There Any Affordable Cities Left in America?
Are Washington, San Francisco, and New York the most affordable American cities? A new report from the New York-based Citizen's Budget Commission [PDF], which made the rounds at the Washington Post and CityLab, argues that if you consider the combined costs of housing and transportation, the answer is yes.
August 27, 2014
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Race, Sprawl, and Car Culture
Atlantic Senior Editor Ta-Nehisi Coates was in Cleveland last week talking about his acclaimed long-form article, "The Case for Reparations," which reviews the history of economic and social oppression of African Americans.
August 25, 2014
How Two Regions Reined in Job Piracy — And Two Others Failed
They call it "intra-regional job piracy" -- when one town uses tax breaks to lure employers from neighboring towns.
July 11, 2014
Earth Day Resolution: Stop Building Projects Like the Zoo Interchange
Leading up to Earth Day, the New York Times ran an editorial, "Time Is Running Out," lamenting the lack of urgency in the United States to prevent a very urgent problem: catastrophic climate change. Today, Brad Plumer at Vox explained why it may be too late to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels -- the threshold that climate scientists have been warning about.
April 22, 2014
Smart Growth America: Sprawl Shaves Years Off Your Life
Want to live a long, healthy, prosperous life? Don’t live in sprawlsville.
April 2, 2014
HUD and U.S. DOT Embrace Housing + Transportation Metric for Affordability
A few years ago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology gave a wonderful gift to urbanists and planners: the Housing + Transportation Index. This simple calculation clarified and popularized a key concept: that transportation costs must be taken into account in any measurement of “affordability.”
November 12, 2013
Paul Krugman Links Sprawl to Persistent Social Inequality
Is sprawl holding back social mobility in America? Paul Krugman didn't mince words yesterday in a follow-up to a post he wrote soon after the Detroit bankruptcy was announced. In that initial blog post, he compared Detroit to Pittsburgh and concluded that it wasn't just the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurt Detroit -- it was also the dispersement of jobs away from the city core. Yesterday, in a column titled "Stranded by Sprawl," he took the argument further, arguing, "Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger."
July 29, 2013
How Sprawl Got Detroit Into This Mess
It wasn't de-industrialization that bankrupted Detroit, wrote Paul Krugman in a New York Times column yesterday. If that was all there is to it, then how do you explain the fact that Pittsburgh, once so dependent on the steel industry, is now recovering? No, what brought Detroit to this low point, more than the loss of factory jobs, was decades of unsustainable development patterns.
July 22, 2013