Archive for Economics
July 9, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Diversity, Economics, Industrial, Revitalization, Waterfronts
Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Density, Economics, Planning, Shrinking Cities
“Are you moving poor people out of their houses?” a Detroit woman asks Jay Williams, mayor of Youngstown, at a recent symposium at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Williams was speaking about Youngstown 2010, a citywide plan adopted in 2005 that focuses on making Youngstown, a city east of Akron near the Pennsylvania border, relevant and alive. Youngstown’s population is shrinking, and downsizing, right-sizing, or whatever you want to call it, is a major component of the plan. The question of how to relocate people is huge. The thought of closing neighborhoods, cutting services and moving the widow Mrs. Jones out of the house she raised her children in touches a nerve.
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Popularity: 63% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Density, Economics, Traffic, Transit
In cities across the United States, you can find examples of “streetcar suburbs”—enclaves of mostly single-family homes built between the turn of the century and the 1930s. These are often good-looking, tree-lined places full of heterogeneous character and history, in many ways so different from contemporary suburban sprawl.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
May 4, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Density, Diversity, Economics, Real Estate, Tall Buildings
Why in the world should there be a “proper density”? A good case can be made that cities succeed by offering a diverse menu of neighborhoods that cater to a wide range of tastes. Some people love Greenwich Village, and that’s great, but I was perfectly happy growing up in a 25-story tower, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, either.
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If you love cities, then you should want more people to be able to enjoy them, and that means embracing, not eschewing, densities over 200 units per acre.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
April 27, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Economics, Master Planning, Planning, Real Estate, Revitalization, Urban Structure
The forces shaping our cities today are not municipal agencies but private organizations such as park conservancies, downtown associations, historic-preservation societies, arts councils, advocacy groups, and urban universities. Entrepreneurship also plays an important role. In projects large and small, real estate developers have replaced city planners and bureaucrats as the chief players on the urban scene, restoring neighborhoods, attracting residents to downtowns, helping to create the amenities that keep them there.
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Popularity: 30% [?]
March 17, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Economics, Resilience
Was coal a curse to Pittsburgh? Did cars destroy Detroit? Does the dominance of a single industry destroy the innovation and entrepreneurship of a region? If it does, then the economic crisis may have actually helped New York by enabling the city to avoid an over-concentration in finance.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Density, Diversity, Economics, Gentrification, Master Planning, Planning, Real Estate, Revitalization, Tall Buildings, Urban Design, Urban Structure, Zoning
Manipulative developers, shrill protesters, and a sixteen-tower glass-and-steel monster marching inexorably forward. What the battle for the soul of Brooklyn looks like—from right next door.
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Popularity: 59% [?]
March 9, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Diversity, Economics, Families, Gentrification, Place making, Social Justice
Sharon Zukin had come to Greenwich Village and the Shrine of St. Jane not as a pilgrim but to wax sardonic.
Ms. Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor, stared at the modest red-brick town house on Hudson Street that once was home to Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” celebrated the joyous hodgepodge of New York’s neighborhoods: the working-class tailor and the artist, the Italian grocer and the writer, living cheek by jowl.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
February 16, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Economics, Real Estate, Tall Buildings
Skyscrapers, then, are the physical embodiment of “irrational exuberance” in the markets. The rule is that if there’s enough money sloshing around to pay for one, then don’t be surprised if, by the time the purple ribbon’s cut, the scissors have to be on hire purchase.
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Popularity: 30% [?]
February 11, 2010 · Filed under Density, Economics, Families, Real Estate, Shrinking Cities, Suburbs
Drive along foreclosure alley, through new planned communities that look like tile-roofed versions of a 21st century ghost town, and you see what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips.
Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Nobody is home in the cities of the future.
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Popularity: 21% [?]
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