• Ten songs for urbanists

    I offer a personal selection of music on topics that urbanists care about—I hope you enjoy it.
    My City Was Gone This angry and powerful Pretenders favorite has it all: A dying downtown, transit, sprawl, malls, development of the countryside, highways, and loss of innocence—all structured around an amazing guitar riff and back beat. What more could an urbanist ask? Chrissie Hynde sings about...Read more

  • A diverse new neighborhood in the city

    A beloved amusement park closed in Denver, CO—luckily, Highlands Garden Village was built in its place.
    For a century, the 27-acre Elitch Gardens amusement park was an exciting destination for Denver, CO—until the facility moved in the 1990s. Luckily for residents, developers Perry Rose built an amazingly diverse neighborhood called Highlands Garden Village amidst the northwest Denver bungalows. An...Read more

  • The unintended consequences of housing finance

    Federal programs that were created in another era continue to pose barriers to financing mixed-use, compact, sustainable communities—despite lower risk.
    Growing numbers of young and old Americans prefer to live in communities where they can walk to stores, school, services, parks and public transportation. But federal housing rules make it difficult to meet this demand. By capping the amount of com­mercial development permitted in federally-backed...Read more

  • The missing middle of our social lives

    The social village has withered in the US, according to The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, by Marc Dunkelman. How do we restore it?
    The social village has withered in the US, according to The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community , by Marc Dunkelman, a research fellow at Brown University and a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation. The strength of America, from the colonial days to about 40 years ago,...Read more