friend of the built environment

As David recently mentioned, Pittsburgh’s managed decline seems to be ubiquitous in the news lately, or it could just be the fact that we are paying more attention to it. Either way, I think one extension of this theme could potentially be the lessons a place that successfully and gracefully manages a decline could teach [...]

From the (now online-only) PI:
The Miami, Riverside, Calif., Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Los Angeles areas all had a 99.9-percent probability of declines. Las Vegas, Tampa and Orlando were just behind, at 99.8 percent, 99.7 percent and 99.6 percent, respectively.
At the other end, Pittsburgh had the lowest risk, 1.7 percent, followed by Cleveland, 2.3 percent, and [...]

This is not a new story, but I was just on an oversold Amtrak train twice this weekend, which made me very conscious of the fact that our country subsidizes auto owners so perversely much more than transit riders, and as this chart illustrates (but which the accompanying story seems unable to specify), denser, urban [...]

In one of the first sources I’ve seen to admit that the overbuilding of the boom years included retail and commercial building; The glut of space to be vacated by fallen Fresno icon Gottschalks is a case in point for California. The mall in my childhood town of Clovis is a good example of what may [...]

The inn-keepers, porters, servants multiplied and soon the butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, the smiths, carpenters and masons added their services and created new consumer demands. Before long the town… became itself a burg or fortified place, and its inhabitants were described as burgenses, the dwellers of the burg, the bourgeoisie…
The towns, fortified, administering their own law, [...]

I always get a chuckle when I see charitable causes blow immense amounts of cash of advertising. The Breast Cancer 3-Day is a case in point. I see the TV commercials for this between 10-20 times each day, and I only watch a couple hours of TV at the most. It’s saturating more than election campaign [...]

Pretend for a moment that a far-right political party emerged in France or England. It claimed that the interest of the state and the interest of the party were identical; it insisted that any opposition to that party was a form of treason; it drew thinly-veiled racial distinctions between the “real” French and those others; it [...]