MLewyn's blog

Roderick Hills and David Schleicher, two law professors, have proposed one way to limit NIMBY-inspired downzonings: a "zoning budget."  Specifically, they propose that cities require every downzoning to be matched by an upzoning somewhere else, so that the city's "budget" was always balanced.  (See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1816368 for the article, or http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv34n3/regv34n3-6.pdf for a shorter version).

In my limited experience, commentators who oppose regional land use regulations like urban growth boundaries (or at least worry about the impact of such regulations on housing costs) tend to favor keeping cities constrained within their 1950 boundaries, while people who favor such regulations tend to favor city-county mergers, revenue sharing, and other ways to essentially merge city and suburb. 

As I explain in my most recent Planetizen blog post, there isn't really a strong correlation between regional growth and traffic congestion.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/43543

I just started reading the slideshows of CNU 17 presentations- certainly an excellent resource, since there were typically several presentations going on at one time (which means that I inevitably mis

*The tours. Boulder's success in building a prosperous, pedestrian-friendly downtown and its utter failure in promoting affordable housing.

Randall O’Toole has another piece out on Cato Institute letterhead (http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9325 ) in which he argues that rail transit is less efficient than bus service.

Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Matt Kahn of UCLA have a new study out, showing that sprawling cities really do consume more energy and pollute more. Some of their conclusions:

Interesting article in today's New York Times Magazine at

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406Lede-t.html?...

It is an article of faith among some defenders of the sprawl status quo that China is inevitably trending towards sprawl (thus allegedly proving that the human desire for sprawl is universal).

A recent AAA study on the costs of car accidents lists the areas with the highest accident costs per capita. (See http://planetizen.com/node/30024 )