The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has just published a free book called, The Next Urban Renaissance: How Public-Policy Innovation and Evaluation Can Improve Life in America’s Cities.

Here’s an excerpt from the foreword:

This collection of essays brings together the best ideas from scholars with expertise across a broad spectrum of urban issues. The common theme of the papers is to innovate, evaluate, and leverage the remarkable private talent that is so abundant in America’s great cities. Public capacity is sharply limited; the ingenuity of urban entrepreneurs seems practically boundless. Local governments should be more entrepreneurial and do more to use the talents of the entrepreneurs around them.

As a further preview, two of the ideas suggested in the book include: 1) reducing or eliminating parking requirements for new developments (which is something I’ve written about before on ATC) and 2) implementing a split-rate property tax for land and its improvements.

If you’d like to download the free PDF, click here.

Yesterday the Washington Post published a great chart showing the housing types of the 40 largest cities, by population, in the US. The list is ordered from lowest to highest according to the percentage of single-family houses in the city (green bar).

Here’s the chart:

Not surprisingly, many of the cities at the top of this list (meaning they have the lowest percentage of single-family houses) are in the older east coast cities. 

It’s also interesting to see just how much the rowhouse dominates the urban landscape in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, almost 60% of the housing stock is an attached rowhouse.

Housing is the backdrop for such a big portion of our lives. And when you live in a particular kind of home, it impacts your life whether or not you realize it. The dense rowhouses of Philadelphia and the single-family houses of Oklahoma City are the result of two very different kinds of urban landscapes.

In Toronto, that backdrop is in the midst of a dramatic change. More and more of us are now living in high-rise condos. That hasn’t always been the case, of course. It’s a recent shift. But it looks like it’ll be a big part of our future.