If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen's … [Read more...]
California should indeed build new cities – but don’t let Nathan J. Robinson anywhere near them
Urbanist and YIMBY Twitter had a field day dunking on Nathan J. Robinson, whose essay in his publication Current Affairs (yesterday's tagline: "the one thing left that isn't disappointing") called for building new cities in California.The essay was a typical of the "anti-anti-NIMBY" genre: he … [Read more...]
Where investors invest
One argument I have run across recently is that the high cost of housing is caused by mysterious corporate investors are buying up real estate and forcing up the cost.The stupidest version of this argument is that investors are hoarding all the real estate. Why is it stupid? Because … [Read more...]
Confounding Diversity with Segregation Again
In July, I showed that an otherwise careful group of researchers at the Othering and Belonging Institute were using a measure of statistical racial segregation that confounds diversity with segregation. Briefly, regions with more variety in the racial makeup of their neighborhoods will show up as … [Read more...]
The “Renters Are Evil” Argument For Zoning
Charles Marohn's recent article in The American Conservative on the evils of single-family zoning received over 200 comments. The most provocative responses were the ones forthrightly defending exclusion, on the grounds that renters are dangerous and must be excluded at all costs. For … [Read more...]
More on Subways and COVID-19
After reading an article suggesting that New York's subways seeded COVID-19, Salim Furth's response to that article on this blog, and one or two other pieces, I decided to write a more scholarly piece summarizing the various arguments. The piece is at https://works.bepress.com/lewyn/196/For … [Read more...]
The “everybody left Manhattan” argument (updated 5-15 to reflect recent data)
The COVID-19 epidemic has led to a lot of argument about the role of urban form; defenders of the Sprawl Faith argue that New York's high infection and fatality rate is proof that transit and density are bad, bad, bad. On the other hand, urbanists point out that within the New York metro area, … [Read more...]
Automobiles Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City
New York City is an epicenter of the global novel coronavirus pandemic. Through April 16, there were 1,458 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents in New York City. Always in the media eye, and larger than any other American city, New York City has become the symbol of the crisis, even as suburban … [Read more...]