Author Archive
NYTimes.com | In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Comeuppance
"For every person who moves to San Francisco, another two start commuting to work here. Traffic is down to a crawl: The average afternoon speed on the roads feeding into the highways has dropped 20 percent in the last two years. And the BART trains [...]
Rooflines | Seeking True “Multifamily” Housing
Image by Aaron Burden from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/aaronburden) "City planners and real estate professionals use the term 'multifamily' to describe apartment and condominium buildings. But is there a greater misnomer in our field? Most of [...]
CityLab | Historic Preservation Districts Are Key to Great Cities
"Historic preservation districts also help Americans to tell the story of their nation, in all its complexity and diversity. No one would argue that certain historic districts feature grand historic homes and affluent residents. But for every [...]
The Guardian | San Francisco tech worker: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff-raff’
"In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are 'riff raff' whose 'pain, struggle and despair' shouldn’t have to be endured by [...]
The New Yorker | Google’s Driverless Car
"At first, it was a little alarming to see the steering wheel turn by itself, but that soon passed. The car clearly knew what it was doing. When the driver beside us drifted into our lane, the Lexus drifted the other way, keeping its distance. When [...]
Better! Cities & Towns Online | A city street is a terrible thing to waste
"November 13th—Friday the 13th—marked the 13th day in a row that a pedestrian died on a New York City Street, all killed by cars or buses going too fast. These fatalities occurred because despite all the progress New York has made since Mayor de [...]
The Guardian | Who owns our cities – and why this urban takeover should concern us all
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/24/who-owns-our-cities-and-why-this-urban-takeover-should-concern-us-all "The corporatising of access and control over urban land has extended not only to high-end urban sites, but also to the land [...]
The Guardian | Guardian ‘mayors for a day’ demand more public spaces in their cities
Image from the Guardian (click through for photo information) "Throughout the past year, bloggers from across the world have been asked to name one thing they would change about their city if they were mayor for a day. Almost half of the 36 who [...]
Digital Journal | Power robs the brain of empathy
Image from Digital Journal (click through for photo information) "Researchers have some new insights into how power diminishes a person's capacity for empathy. According to scientists, a sense of power shuts down a part of the brain that helps us [...]
The Atlantic | The Supreme Court Barely Saves the Fair Housing Act
"From a distance, the result in Inclusive Communities looks like a win. Writing for himself and the four moderate-liberals, Justice Kennedy explained that the disparate-impact interpretation had a lot going for it: it tracks two other Court [...]
