MLewyn's blog

I just did something I wanted to do since moving to New York: visited Levittown, a historic postwar suburb.  Photos of my visit are here.  

There's been a lot of hubbub about the Bloomberg Administration's proposal to make city-owned land available for 275-square-foot apartments.  The city proposes to allow developers to build these "micro-units" and rent them for $2000 a unit.  If you read some of the comments in the press, you might think this was somehow unprecedented.

But when I lived in Toronto, I had 140 square feet of living space (not counting the bathroom) and had enough space for everything but houseguests.  

When California passed SB 375 (a law requiring local planners to create strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions) environmentalists were enthuasiastic, while pro-sprawl commentators used hyperbolic rhetoric to attack the law. 

There will always be those who argue that the suburb-dominated status quo is inevitable.  

When cities were declining, they had an easy case to make.  They could argue: "look, cities are declining so suburbia is inevitably the wave of the future!"

Then when cities started to gain population, defenders of suburbia moved the goal posts.  They argued: "Sure, cities are growing, but suburbs are growing faster."

In a recent post on Planetizen's group blog, Todd Litman discusses the pros and cons (mostly cons) of lawns.  

Today I began my apartment search, looking at an apartment in the neighborhood next to mine (a neighborhood less high-income than Forest Hills, Queens, where I now live).  In addition to being in a cheaper area than mine, the building is a fairly long walk to the subway (about 15 minutes, farther than numerous competing buildings) and across the street from a cemetery.  Yet the cheapest apartment rin this new building rents for 30 percent more than in my current building (closer to the subway and in a fancier area).  Why?

A recent article by Josh Barro admits that cars are subsidized through road spending, but argues that roads are less subsidized per capita because so much of car-related spending is private.  

Congress recently passed a two-year transportation funding bill, to less-than-glowing reviews from environmentalist-oriented transportation lobbies.

According to some media commentary, any form of civic improvement (such as, say, light rail) is dangerous because it might lead to something called gentrification (i.e. middle-class people moving back into cities) which allegedly leads to displacement (i.e. poorer people being priced out of an area by rising rents).

A recent video on the Reason Magazine website criticized Washington, DC's bikeshare program, on the ground that the program's primary beneficiaries are well-off whites.