MLewyn's blog
My new book
Submitted by MLewyn on Tue, 05/08/2012 - 9:19amMy book, "A Libertarian Smart Growth Agenda" is available at amazon.com . If you don't want to pay for the book, you can read the article that it was based on here.
Three-cornered politics
Submitted by MLewyn on Sun, 05/06/2012 - 1:47pmIn metro Atlanta, the Sierra Club is allying with Tea Party activists to fight a one-cent sales tax increase designed to raise additional funds for both roads and transit, primarily because of concerns about increased funding for sprawl-creating expressways.
Minimum parking requirements upheld- or, when will they ever learn?
Submitted by MLewyn on Sun, 04/29/2012 - 10:09amLast month, a New York appellate court upheld minimum parking requirements in Syracuase, on the ground that such rules are reasonably related to the city's goal of "enhanc[ing] traffic safety by removing cars from the [City’s] streets”(1)
zoning budgets- one way to keep NIMBYism under control
Submitted by MLewyn on Fri, 04/27/2012 - 9:50amRoderick Hills and David Schleicher, two law professors, have proposed one way to limit NIMBY-inspired downzonings: a "zoning budget." Specifically, they propose that cities require every downzoning to be matched by an upzoning somewhere else, so that the city's "budget" was always balanced. (See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1816368 for the article, or http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv34n3/regv34n3-6.pdf for a shorter version).
Housing costs and centralization
Submitted by MLewyn on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 10:43amIn my limited experience, commentators who oppose regional land use regulations like urban growth boundaries (or at least worry about the impact of such regulations on housing costs) tend to favor keeping cities constrained within their 1950 boundaries, while people who favor such regulations tend to favor city-county mergers, revenue sharing, and other ways to essentially merge city and suburb.
Why we shouldn't get too obsessed with congestion
Submitted by MLewyn on Thu, 04/08/2010 - 4:37pmAs I explain in my most recent Planetizen blog post, there isn't really a strong correlation between regional growth and traffic congestion.
Maybe transcripts as well as presentations?
Submitted by MLewyn on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 7:37pmI just started reading the slideshows of CNU 17 presentations- certainly an excellent resource, since there were typically several presentations going on at one time (which means that I inevitably mis
What I remember most about CNU 17
Submitted by MLewyn on Sun, 06/14/2009 - 12:20am*The tours. Boulder's success in building a prosperous, pedestrian-friendly downtown and its utter failure in promoting affordable housing.
another environmental cost of sprawl
Submitted by MLewyn on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 1:37pmRandall O’Toole has another piece out on Cato Institute letterhead (http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9325 ) in which he argues that rail transit is less efficient than bus service.