Free Republic

City planners in Los Angeles are shocked to discover that people moving into downtown apartments are unwilling to give up their cars and live the way many Manhattanites and San Franciscans do - using the expensive subway, bus system, and taxi cabs for their daily transportation. And now local officials, who just a few years ago stopped requiring developers to build parking spaces in most loft buildings, are scrambling to accommodate automobiles — and their owners — downtown.

As transportation congestion increases, Americans are indeed focused on shortening their commutes, according to a newly released survey. Conducted on behalf of Smart Growth America and the National Association of Realtors, the survey of 1,130 adults aged 18 and older confirmed what commercial developers have suspected: Americans would rather live near transportation and within 45 minutes of their workplaces. In all, 79 percent of respondents rated a maximum 45-minute commute as their top priority in choosing where to live (and 87 percent of those planning to buy a home within the next three years), while 75 percent rated high easy...

FREEDOM, Calif. -- Traffic calming is not just physically hazardous. It harms our way of life as well. Most people have experienced nightmares at some point in their lives. One that’s quite common is to dream you are trying to get somewhere, but can't. One version of the nightmare goes like this: You are driving home from a very long day at work. The freeway is normally congested at this hour because few improvements have been made to increase traffic flow in decades even though the population of your town has grown significantly. Unfortunately for you today, the traffic is...

<p>In 1960, Jane Jacobs lashed out against the highway construction and so-called slum clearing that defined development of the time in her groundbreaking book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Now 88 and living in Toronto, Jacobs remains as passionate and positive about her convictions today as she did half a lifetime ago. Her latest book, “Dark Age Ahead” (Random House), goes beyond the scope of city planning to examine the foundation upon which North American civilization itself is built. Jacobs identifies five pillars of American society—the nuclear family, higher education, scientists and scientific inquiry, governmental representation and the concept of self-regulation—and argues that each is showing evidence of breaking down, an early sign of a coming Dark Age. But, there is hope, she adds. The damage is not irreparable nor irreversible. She only wants her book to serve as a "wake-up call" to North Americans to reverse the decline so that their civilization will not go the way of the Roman Empire or other mighty civilizations that have fallen in the past. “A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant,” she writes. “This is what I fear for our own culture, and why I have written this cautionary book, in hopeful expectation that time remains for corrective actions.” NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett spoke with Jacobs about the continent’s societal problems and her suggested solutions.</p>

People should be let to live, work where they like Guest perspective: Debate tackles merits of free-range urban planning ___ Participants in an Internet e-mail discussion list recently engaged in a heated debate on the impact of libertarian principles on urban planning in the United States. Here we present an edited version of the original e-mail debate, which centered on the "The Lone Mountain Compact," which appears at the end of this perspective. Kenneth Orski, editor and publisher of Innovation Briefs: The Lone Mountain Compact, of which I am proud to be a signatory, is a collection of principles, the...

Future Vision: Future Cities sponsored by the Transport Research Group and LSE Cities Programme A one-day conference to be held at the London School of Economics, Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2 Saturday, December 6th 2003 Tickets: £12 and £8 Speakers include: Laurie Taylor (broadcaster); Miranda Sawyer (BBC Late Review and author 'Park & Ride'); Jonathan Glancey (architecture critic, The Guardian); Dr Henry MacCracken (Paris Observatory); Dea Birkett (author and travel writer); Sean Topham (author 'Where's My Space Age'); David Satterthwaite (UN Human Settlements Programme); Penny Lewis (Prospect magazine); Phil Mullan (author 'The Imaginary Timebomb); Daniel Ben-Ami (author 'Cowardly Capitalism);...

For decades urban planners have adhered to the mantra that urban sprawl increases pollution and housing costs, more driving time to work and shopping, stress, and the escalating consumption of scarce farmland and open space. Urban planning to implement what Al Gore calls “smart growth” supposedly corrects these problems and creates more livable, inexpensive homes for all. Irrefutable evidence, however, shows that urban planning creates the very nightmares it is supposed to eliminate. In the process, it strips urbanites of one of their most fundamental civil liberties — property rights. Land-use control has been a goal of socialists for many...

GREENWICH TOWNSHIP, N.J. — New Jersey, far more densely populated than any other state — more crowded than Japan or India, for that matter — is on course for another distinction: it will be the first state, land-use experts say, to exhaust its supply of land available for development. The prospect of running out of open space to build on, a phenomenon that planners call buildout, is at the heart of Gov. James E. McGreevey's well-publicized campaign against sprawl. In poll after poll, voters in this most suburban of states say they hate what they see, and elected officials on...

An urban development in the US says the secret of a thriving city is having large gay and immigrant populations. Professor Richard Florida says homosexuals are one of the best indicators of a new "creative class" of thinkers and artists who drive economic growth. He also says a large and varied ethnic minority population enriches the cultural diversity of cities. Professor Florida uses a gay index, a melting pot immigrants' index and scores on high-technology and creative occupations to predict a city's long-term economic potential. "Gays tend to gravitate toward the types of places that will be attractive to many...

One of the key missions of the Department of Housing and Urban Development is to encourage home ownership, which to most Americans means achieving the dream of owning a free-standing house with a yard. But urban planners and anti-property rights activists have other ideas about housing. The urban design fad of the moment is "smart growth," which means highly dense housing, practically no yards and firm boundaries on urban growth - all of which not only drive up housing costs but also deliver the very sort of ugly housing development many Americans abhor. HUD, as the Heritage Foundation notes in...

<p>Pittsburgh will get a long-promised new hotel at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, even if the city has to build it.</p> <p>Steve Leeper, executive director of the Sports & Exhibition Authority, said Tuesday that he wants the Downtown hotel under construction by spring.</p>

Despite the insistence of America's artistic elites and environmental activists that people abandon the suburbs in favor of denser living arrangements, most Americans continue to exhibit a decided preference for single-family, detached, suburban-style housing on lots large enough to ensure some measure of privacy and easy access to nature's blessings. Efforts to force people into densely packed town and cluster housing or multifamily high-rise buildings consistently fail to attract public support. For the most part, many of those who choose to live in denser multifamily housing and townhouses do so for reasons of limited income and often forgo these arrangements...