An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership. The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can […]
READ MOREThe Texas Transportation Institute estimates that commuters wasted $115 billion sitting in traffic in 2009–up from just $24 billion in 1982. But Smart Growth America is still promoting its idiotic “fix-it first” policy. Federal Highway Administration data show that the number of bridges that are “structurally deficient” has steadily declined from 79,000 in 1992 to […]
READ MORESome people are chortling over a recent Pew survey that finds the share of Americans who think that cars are a “necessity” is the lowest since pollsters started asking the question in 1973. Perhaps, some are suggesting, that’s because young people aren’t driving as much as older Americans, so we shouldn’t invest much more in […]
READ MOREThis “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
READ MOREAccording to census data, about 4 percent of American workers–5.9 million–live in households that have no automobiles. Conventional wisdom suggests that these are people who are either too poor to own a vehicle, and we should pity them; or people who for environmental or other reasons have learned to live without a vehicle, and we […]
READ MOREThe Antiplanner visited Austin over the weekend to pick up Smokey, an 8-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. Smokey is actually a nephew (several generations removed) to Chip. While waiting for the return plane, we visited a city park where I was reliably informed by several young girls that Smokey “is the cutest dog in the world.” […]
READ MORENext time someone tells you about how everyone is returning to the cities, point them to these maps based on the 2010 census. Available for the forty largest urban areas in the United States, they show, almost without exception, the central cities losing population and the suburbs gaining. According to the mapmakers, “deep blue indicates […]
READ MOREArchitects, even New Urbanist architects, seem to love a parking garage recently built in Miami. In the video below, Andres Duany–the Antiplanner’s favorite New Urban architect–praises the garage as being as “beautifully designed a place as any piazza.” In fact, Duany adds, “it is a piazza; it’s a public square in the air” where you […]
READ MOREAbout thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. […]
READ MORE“OF ALL the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense,” The Economist observed last week, that one being the Tokyo-to-Osaka route. “All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping […]
READ MOREToday we are supposed to remember the people who sacrificed themselves for our freedom. We also need to remember freedom itself, including freedom of mobility, freedom to use your own property as you like so long as you don’t harm your neighbors, and freedom to dance in a memorial to Thomas Jefferson, himself a support […]
READ MOREOne of the more common notions about the housing bubble is that it was caused by political pressures to increase homeownership. The Antiplanner’s view is that it would be more accurate to say that the bubble was caused by the conflict between policies aimed at increasing homeownership and policies aimed at reducing homeownership (or, at […]
READ MOREYou know you are in trouble when a liberal bastion such as the Washington Post questions your big-government program. So last week’s editorial questioning the California High-Speed Rail Authority for being “bound and determined to start building the railroad before its long-term funding is clear” should be one more sign that the rail project is […]
READ MOREAmerica’s transportation system needs more centralized, top-down planning. At least, that’s what the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes advocates in a 2,350-word article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. If that seems like an unlikely message from America’s leading business daily, perhaps it is because Puentes couched it in terms such as “spending money wisely,” solving congestion, […]
READ MORETax-increment financing (TIF) costs taxpayers around $10 billion per year and is growing as fast as 10 percent per year, according to a new report, “Crony Capitalism and Social Engineering,” published by the Cato Institute. Though originally created to help renew “blighted” neighborhoods, TIF today is used primarily as an economic development tool for areas […]
READ MOREAmy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
Amy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
As explained by author Marya DeGrow, conflict between some Colorado public school districts and parents led to the adoption of a 1988 legislative bill that established guidelines for home education.
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Foster and kinship children too often miss out on supplemental services and activities. A new breed of program called a Supplemental Educational Support Account (SESA) would provide a set amount of annual funding for each student that can be used for services such as tutoring, therapies, music lessons, specialized programs, transportation, and a wide variety
READ MOREWho knew it would be such a busy week? Before I head off to go play in the snow or jump in a pile of leaves or two — you never know with the weather here in Colorado — I thought you’d like to see the new results from the Association of American Educators nationwide […]
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