Exclusives

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November 1 - Barbara Knecht

FEATURE

The results of our crowdsourcing project, in collaboration with the Project for Public Spaces, reveal not an objective Top 100 but instead a handful of communities passionate about their own local public spaces.

October 27 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

<p style="margin-top: 6pt" class="MsoPlainText"> <span>Let me tell you a scary story that you can use to frighten fellow planners at next week’s Halloween party. It’s not just fun and games – this story is true and may cause nightmares.</span> </p>

October 27 - Todd Litman

BLOG POST

October 26 - Ki Kim

BLOG POST

<p class="MsoNormal"> With the proliferation of new media planning practitioners have new ways to find out about the continuing work of planning faculty members who have retired. Not all of them blog of course, but the list below demonstrates some of the variety of these efforts. </p>

October 24 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

<p> Before moving to New York, I&#39;d viewed street design through a fairly simple lens: narrow streets good, wide streets bad.  By and large, I still hold this view.  But after living here for a few months, I have learned that not all wide streets are equally bad.   The wide roads of the South are generally terrible, but New York has made some of its wide streets a bit more pedestrian-friendly.  To see why, go to <a href="http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/learn/using-street-view.html">Google Street View</a> and examine three addresses: 5019 U.S. 23 in Chamblee, Georgia, 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn&#39;s Crown Heights neighborhood, and 107-43 Queens Boulevard in my current Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills. </p>

October 24 - Michael Lewyn

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<p class="MsoNormal"> As readers of this blog will know I encourage people to find out about planning programs in multiple ways. Reading the work of faculty is a crucial first step as is reading the program’s web site. Visiting open houses or connecting with students (programs often set up some kind of chat space around admission time) are also options. Increasingly schools are using multiple forms of social media to reach current students and alums providing a useful window onto the programs for prospective students. This list highlights a few of these sources used specifically by planning programs.

October 22 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

<p> <span><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS">One of the bedrocks of the Vancouver city-building story, which we often refer to as &quot;the most important decision Vancouver ever made&quot;, was the dramatic rejection of inner city freeways in the late 60&#39;s/early 70&#39;s.<span>  </span>This left our city frequently referenced as the only major North America city without a freeway. That decision led us down the very different and counter-intuitive path for livability, mobility, inner city density and urbanism that has come to be referred to as &quot;the Vancouver Model&quot;.</span></span></span> </p>

October 21 - Brent Toderian

BLOG POST

<div> <br /> </div> <div> I am writing this missive from the living room of a Starbucks. Not that you&#39;d care where I&#39;m writing from. Except this time it&#39;s relevant.  </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> Here on Montana Avenue, in Santa Monica, I&#39;m joined by other folks who are also on their laptops, recovering from yoga, or just biding their time. The guy sitting at my table just sold a pilot to Fox. That&#39;s nice for him. A few weeks ago I sat next to Hillary Swank here. She&#39;s not hurting either.   </div> <div> <br /> </div> <div> But others aren&#39;t so lucky. To its credit, Starbucks seems to want to do something about it. </div> <div> <br /> </div> <div>

October 18 - Josh Stephens

FEATURE

Despite its cold weather and spread-out development patterns, a Midwestern city beat Portland, San Francisco and Boulder for the title of #1 Bike City. Jay Walljasper explains how.

October 17 - Jay Walljasper

BLOG POST

The terms Central city, Inner city and urban have long been synonymous with the poorer, disadvantaged minority sections of metropolitan areas. Conversely, the suburbs have been associated with whites, affluence and job growth. For a long time, however, this dichotomy has failed to capture the gradual blurring of distinctive patterns that demarcate city from suburb. A recent <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/1011_housing_suburbs_covington_freeman_stoll.aspx">Brookings report</a> by Kenya Covington, Michael Stoll and yours truly underscores this point. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, the single largest affordable housing program in the country is almost as prevalent in the suburbs as in central cities.

October 13 - Lance Freeman

FEATURE

Driving makes people fatter and less healthy, right? Fanis Grammenos warns planners and urban designers that the answer is not so simple, and misusing the statistics will weaken effective debate.

October 13 - Fanis Grammenos

FEATURE

October 6 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

<p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Garamond, serif">In many ways, the Great Recession has been a frightening time for planners. As development slowed, the flow of applications submitted for new development slowed from its torrent at the height of the housing boom to the trickle it is today.<span>  </span>With the decline in applications came a decline in workload for public-sector planners working in current planning roles and a decline in revenue for the jurisdictions that employed them.<span>  </span>The end result was hundreds of planners being laid off, and private-sector planning firms competing with one another for ever-decreasing shares of work from public- and private-sector clients.</span> </p>

October 4 - Justin Steinmann

BLOG POST

<p> In a <a href="/node/51680">recent post</a>, Todd Litman criticized the Texas Transportation Institute&#39;s <a href="http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/">Urban Mobility Report</a>.  In this post, I&#39;d like to do something a little different: assume that TTI&#39;s congestion estimates are more or less reliable, and try to learn something from them.  So here are a few observations: </p>

October 4 - Michael Lewyn

FEATURE

October 3 - Tatiane de Jesus

BLOG POST

<span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small"> </span> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNoSpacing"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt">The Los Angeles Times recently had a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fi-solyndra-20110925,0,1536191.story" target="_blank" title="Solyndra's collapse is a tale of too much dazzle">story</a> about the collapse of Solyndra – the once heralded poster-child of the Obama administration’s green jobs plan.  A big part of Solyndra’s demise was due to the rapidly falling price of their competitors’ solar panels.  In 2008, the cost of solar panels was a bit over $4 for each watt generated.  Solyndr

October 1 - Marlon Boarnet

BLOG POST

In April 2009, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan spoke to the ULI Spring Council Forum in Atlanta; he stated that his administration’s goal was “to put the UD back in HUD,” and explained that HUD’s over-reliance on housing solutions wasn’t helping cities address their complex revitalization needs. Just over two years later, this small new funding program caught my eye on a list of new HUD announcements: <p class="MsoNormal"> *** HUD HOPE VI – $0.5 million<br /> Application Due: August 22, 2011<br /> Eligible Entities: Local governments </p>

October 1 - Jess Zimbabwe

BLOG POST

This past weekend I attended a memorial service for a local activist. Eric Quezada was important in many planning-related issues here in San Francisco – how we create space that reflects the cultural traditions of our large immigrant communities, the importance of preventing displacement of low-income people, the development of affordable housing and institutions that meet the needs of all of our citizenry. I had known Eric for many years, but had the privilege of working most closely with him when I served on our city’s Planning Commission and he was a lead organizer in the Mission District, an historically Latino neighborhood threatened by dot-com fueled gentrification. In his short 45 years on earth, Eric touched the lives of thousands here and around the world.

September 28 - Lisa Feldstein

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<br /> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <p class="MsoNormal"> One of the greatest challenges for US cities is the perceived failure of public schools. Both as a means for attracting and retaining the middle class and for providing upward mobility public schools are crucial. Consequently, any effort to build livable cities must include successful public schools so as to provide a ladder for the poor and to attract and retain the middle class. Although education typically falls out of the purview of planning, planners can ill afford to ignore such a key component of what makes a place livable in the minds of many.

September 26 - Lance Freeman