• Midwest cities invest in transit

    Three heartland cities are investing to strengthen the downtown core and build a framework for regional multimodal transportation.
    Three Midwest cities—Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Columbus, Ohio—are expanding their transit systems to become more competitive with bigger cities that have legacy transit systems, according to City Journal . Given the limited resources and automobile-oriented infrastructure, technology, and...Read more

  • From extractive investment to community wealth

    There's another side to Opportunity Zones: They could be a catalyst for an emerging system of building community wealth that is bottom-up and local—focusing on the "whole neighborhood."
    Above the fold in Sunday’s The New York Times was a blistering piece on Opportunity Zones: “How a Trump Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Windfall for the Rich.” The article is grounded in evidence and a depressing account of parasitic capitalism that generates wealth for just a few...Read more

  • Highway, gutting a town (or not)

    Urban designer and architect Tom Low recently drew this side-by-side comparison of how a highway can gut, or work in harmony with, a city or town. The cloverleaf option, at left, is ideal for a highway interchange in the country, but creates an enormous barrier in or between neighborhoods. In the...Read more

  • Quick Build: Tactical Urbanism on steroids

    For about a quarter of typical road diet costs, semi-permanent street transformations have been successfully demonstrated in two cities.
    The economic and public safety advantages of walkable streets are manifold, and have been demonstrated time and time again . Yet well-designed thoroughfare transformations are also costly, time-consuming, and require substantial political capital. CNU wrote case studies on street transformations...Read more