friend of the built environment

Conservatives are often boisterous in their opposition to healthcare reform. Specifically, most conservatives are opposed to a single-payer national government insurer or provider.
Personally, I don’t think the legislation currently on the block goes far enough. From what I’ve been able to glean so far it seems mainly to compete with current state-regulated insurance plans to [...]

A new bakery/coffeehouse opened in my San Francisco neighborhood. When I visited, they were out of most of their baked goods but the kitchen staff were rushing frantically to prepare more bagels and pastries.
They apologized and said they’d have lots more in another hour. I chuckled and commented that hopefully this means they’re doing better [...]

Jackson death probe.

This is quite possibly the best essay I’ve read on the problem with mid-sized cities (those outside of the top-10 super-urban set) and how they market themselves.
Richard Florida managed to sell them all the “Young Hip Alcoholic” vision and they went out of their minds because so many of them still had to convince responsible [...]

I agree with this, for the most part: timing is half the success in the modern world of investment-speculation (I consider them interchangeable these days).
I do have a bit of an ethical problem with a similar animal, though: I’ve often recently heard financial ‘guru’ types talk about how they ‘called the housing crash’ - [...]

Just a reminder to those who think that just a few more recessionary quarters and it’ll be back into full-swing 2005 all over again:
Debt is included in the GDP calculation. This means that economic indicators will show the “economy” growing at a very healthy clip if all we do is borrow enough to make our [...]

Dear ‘Progressive’ Americans,
Please support and actually start using regular public transit and existing stuff like Greyhound and Amtrak and support the expansion and improvement of these services before you start calling on the government to blow its wad on “High Speed Rail corridors” all around the country. Do you have any idea how grotesquely expensive [...]

…Is what you get for thinking this guy’s hawt.
We have a ways to go when it comes to equality before law, it seems; though I guess I could understand if the jury may have acquitted the guy because they thought anyone who thought he was hawt must have deserved to die.

…That uses the word “boutique” this many times has got to go.

What a great discussion going on at NullSpace:
As flights from Pittsburgh have collapsed, the Pittsburgh story has gotten a whole lot brighter. I DO NOT imply any causality like that for the record. But what was equally baseless was the causality many just assumed went the other way.
Followed up by MH:
Your last two sentences sort [...]

A nice side-effect of building Creative cities during the housing boom: gentrification made rich white people flood into urban cores, and the gradual regearing of federal housing subsidies encouraged the poor to migrate to the vast swathes of cheaply-built, overpriced, but marginally-cheaper suburbs, as they were priced out of their own neighborhoods, wherein they now [...]

An interesting proposal by Rustbelt Intellectual: lowering speed limits (and enforcing them, of course) could be a way of not only saving lives and gas, but encouraging density and making sprawl more painful to the sprawlers…
…lowering the speed limit back to 55 would increase the time exurbanites spend in their cars by over 15% (roughly), [...]

Many economists often like to point out that the cost of basics has trended down over the past few decades: things like food, shelter, clothing. This is a big lie: the cost to replicate the quality of food the average family enjoyed fifty or seventy years ago is vastly higher today as a percentage of [...]

I thought this screen capture from my WSJ widget was a perfect example of the interesting times we live in…

The “Dow” is “up”, even though everyone is losing their job. Oh, and Wal-Mart thinks fast health care reform is good. Sheesh - where’s my umbrella?

In recent months I’ve been getting friendly notes in my inbox from Zillow every few weeks telling me how wonderfully well my new house in Pittsburgh has been performing in the market - Up 5%! Up 10%! Up 9381346fqrqbsdhh3947WTF%!
I finally managed to dump the top 50 sold homes from my neighborhood from Zillow’s recent sales [...]

Said better than I could ever try to paraphrase:
Do you know anyone who actually buys insurance – either someone in the individual market or someone who buys insurance for an employer – who is happy about what he or she is getting these days?
And:
All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, [...]

No, this is not going to be a tirade about skewed statistics, unfunded liabilities, or funny munny. Though it’s true that our GDP is much lower than general statistics admit due to weighting and hedonics and our perpetual habit of underreporting inflation; and though we’ve been spending social security receipts as they come in and [...]