April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot once wrote. Thankfully, this has rarely been true in my own life. But it seems wrong to begin any urban news and ideas column for this April 2022 without briefly foregrounding the cruelty and destruction imposed by the Russian military on Mariupol and Read more…
The world’s attention swerved hard to Ukraine this month, and so did my news consumption. If you haven’t listened already, I especially commend Ezra Klein’s sequence of seven podcasts on the war. Klein is back from paternity leave in a big way. In particular, check out the episode on how Read more…
Several events and ideas have caught my attention this gorgeous, perhaps too gorgeous, California February. Among them are the effort to redress the wrongs of urban renewal in Santa Monica, the use of the ballot to force change on homelessness in Sacramento, the intersection of education policy and building restriction Read more…
I’ve been sitting for a while with Bryce Covert’s July 20 New York Times Guest Essay “8 Hours a Day, 5 Days a Week is Not Working for Us.” The piece makes an affirmative case that Americans ought to spend less time on the job. It struck a chord with Read more…
The assertion that beauty must somehow play a role in shared urban prosperity seems obviously true, not to mention a healthy challenge to the notion that prosperity is only about economics. In fact any ideal-type definition of urban prosperity ought to include several essential qualities that, like beauty, are simultaneously Read more…
Back in March, in the middle of another year’s push with my middle students on our statistics unit, I noticed a statistical claim that, if true, struck me as nothing short of a miraculous. According to researchers at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, changes in the Read more…
I’ve been thinking about pools this sunny California March. One reason is that I’ve decided to plunk myself back in the chlorinated waters of the slow lane at master’s swim. But the bigger reason is that I’ve been reading Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and Read more…
Healthy urban areas are important national assets. As Farhad Manjoo notes in The New York Times, “… neither the United States nor the world can do without cities. They are indispensable as engines of economic growth, catalysts of technological and cultural innovation — and they are one of the most Read more…
In December the California Department of Finance announced in this press release that the state grew more slowly in percentage terms than at any time since 1900. Yes, that’s 1900, not 1990. The July to July growth rate was 0.05 percent, down from 0.23 percent the previous year, also a Read more…
“Regardless of the possible errors in this study, we have to conclude that prehistorically a large amount of California burned every year. From 1950-1999 the average annual area burned by wildfire in all vegetation types in California was approximately 102,000 ha/year. This amounts to 5.6 percent of what would have Read more…