Category: Up To Speed

Links to keep you up to speed on what’s happening in Cincinnati and what we can learn from other cities.

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Up To Speed

Development patterns appear to be not so free market-driven after all

Development patterns appear to be not so free market-driven after all.

There tends to be agreement among Americans that the way our communities are built is due to free-market demand. But as it turns out, government incentives have long influenced the way our communities develop, and have long favored suburban development patterns. More from The Atlantic:

According to a new report released by Smart Growth America, the federal government influences our real estate sector – with tax credits here, loan guarantees there, grants and other programs – to a tune of more than $450 billion a year. All that money (and the incentives implied by it) subtly skews what we build. Meanwhile we keep talking about about other, more obvious interventions in the real estate market, like regulation through zoning codes and infrastructure decisions about where to put roads and sewer lines.

Stepping back and looking at the whole collection, it’s clear that the federal government has favored many types of development at the expense of others, often with weak or outdated logic. The government dramatically favors homeowners over renters. Its support is heavily skewed toward single-family homes over multi-family developments (the FHA, for instance, funneled just one-tenth of its $1.2 trillion in loan guarantees over the past five years toward multi-family housing).

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New York City, Chicago rapidly advancing progressive transport policies

New York City, Chicago rapidly advancing progressive transport policies.

New York City and Chicago are blazing a progressive path towards a sustainable transport network. Cincinnati has made minor strides with regards to bicycle infrastructure and Complete Streets, but much is being left on the table in the Queen City and elsewhere. More from Grid Chicago:

I hadn’t been to New York since 2008 when I checked out their Summer Streets ciclovia. Since then Manhattan has gone through an amazing transformation under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik Khan. Besides implementing the bike lanes, they pulled off the ultimate road diet on Broadway, removing car lanes and shutting down sections of the island’s main diagonal thoroughfare to calm traffic and make space for some amazing new car-free spaces. And I didn’t even have time to check other first-rate bike facilities in Queens and Brooklyn, or the new segments of the Highline, the sleek, 1.5-mile elevated linear park which paved the way for Chicago’s Bloomingdale.

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Residential zoning laws may be preventing natural economic evolution

Residential zoning laws may be preventing natural economic progression.

The “convergence” theory suggests that poorer states like Mississippi should have caught up to richer states like Connecticut over time. This economic projection held true in America’s history until about 1980, and some researchers blame overbearing residential zoning laws. More from the Boston Globe:

During the 100 years of high convergence, Americans moved in droves from poorer states to richer states in search of higher wages. As more people crowded into richer states, average wages there began to fall in response to the relative oversupply of workers; meanwhile wages in the poorer states began to rise for the relatively few workers who remained behind, creating a kind of economic balancing effect between American regions.

Theoretically this process should have continued until Mississippi and Connecticut were more or less equally desirable places to work and Shoag and Ganong propose a three-step explanation why it did not: Convergence stopped because labor migration stopped; labor migration stopped because housing prices in the richest states grew so out of whack that low-skilled workers could no longer afford to move in; and housing prices skyrocketed in response to zoning laws written in the 1970s that artificially restricted the amount and type of housing that could be built in richer locales.

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Why hyper-local won’t save newspapers (and what will)

Why hyperlocal won’t save newspapers (and what will).

Newspapers have been desperately trying to figure out how to make the finances work as the ground shifts beneath them in an increasingly digital world. In Cincinnati, much like elsewhere throughout the country, local newspapers attempted to compete with bloggers by shifting towards “hyper-local” coverage, but it has yet to work. More from Per Square Mile:

Whenever a business or industry falls on hard times, people trip over themselves to propose turnaround plans. Newspapers are no exception, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be left out of the fray. My diagnosis? Too many newspapers have placed their bets on intensely local coverage, or hyper-local as they call it in the biz. That’s a mistake. To remain profitable, they need to concentrate on a particular topic instead of a geographic region.

That epiphany occurred to me Christmas morning over a bowl of cereal at my in-laws. I was flipping through the Houston Chronicle when I noticed the paper had branded their energy coverage, FuelFix. Not the best name, but it’s a sound idea. Houston is a major hub for the oil and gas industry, and Chronicle reporters have spent years, even decades reporting on it. Who else would be so positioned to cover the industry?

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The rise of downtowns and resurgence of inter-city bus travel

The rise of downtowns and resurgence of inter-city bus travel.

The resurgence of center cities and urban living has been well-documented. When combined with the inability of the United States to significantly invest in inter-city passenger rail, it appears to be only natural that inter-city bus travel has boomed. More from Chicago Magazine:

“In 1960, there were 454 daily arrivals and departures by bus in and out of Chicago. In 1980, 290; in 2002, 147 (O’Hare has about 2,400 flights every day). From 2002-2006, intercity bus service across the country declined eight percent. Then it turned around…With the resurgence of central-business districts, travelers too young to remember the stigma associated with bus travel, especially those living on college campuses and in large cities, are turning to motor coaches in especially large numbers.”