The continuing dispersion of employment in the nation’s major metropolitan areas has received attention in two recent reports. The Brookings Institution has publishedresearch showing that employment dispersion continued between 2000 and 2010, finding job growth was greater outside a three mile radius from central business districts between 2000 and 2010 in 100 metropolitan areas Note 1). [...]
Australia’s New South Wales state government has proposed a new Metropolitan Strategy for the Sydney area which would significantly weaken its highly restrictive smart growth policy (also called urban containment, smart growth, livability, growth management, densification, etc.) that has driven if house prices to among the highest in the affluent New World (Australia, Canada, New [...]
There has been a flurry of action on Capitol Hill regarding the need to improve our knowledge of the amounts of rare earths in the country, our current resource needs, constraints and bottle-necks and need to streamline mining laws. There is no easy link to this material so I post the full article below: MINING: [...]
We have just released the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey covering 337 metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong), Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. As usual, the most unaffordable markets are those in with urban containment policy (also called by other names, such as smart growth and [...]
Jeb Kolko, Chief Economist of the real estate website firm, Trulia has provided the only believable sub-county population change data available for 2010 to 2011. In a Trulia website posting republished at newgeography.com (Even After the Housing Bust, Americans Still Love the Suburbs), Kolko shows that household growth was generally greater in less dense areas [...]
With any luck, Seattle’s urban forests will soon be certified dolphin safe. That may seem strange, but it would be just about as meaningful as the city recently receiving a forest certification it promises it will never use. With predictable fanfare, the City of Seattle has announced its urban forests have received certification from the [...]
Paul Miner, Senior planning officer for the Campaign to Protect Rural England took exception to The Economist’s liberal view that it might be time to open up London’s Green Belt to housing development, at least in part to improve housing affordability. We had commended The Economist for allowing a view that average households in the [...]
Atlanta area voters said “no” to a proposed $7 billion transportation tax that was promoted as a solution to the metropolitan area’s legendary traffic congestion, despite a campaign in which supporters outspent opponents by more than 500 to one. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the measure lost 63% to 37%. This 26% margin of loss [...]
There is a great piece of bumper sticker humor: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Unless one has been living under a rock, this statement is widely recognized as an ironic warning of sorts – if you hear these words, count your money, lock up your kids and pray for your property, [...]
Voters in Atlanta, with some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation, are being asked to approve a new tax that would spend more than 50% on transit, in an urban area where transit carries only 1% of travel (Figure). No one is naive enough to think that the new billions for transit [...]