One the exact same day last week, the Toronto Star published two articles about housing. The first one, this one here, is about how “Toronto has protected huge parts of the city from anything denser than detached or semi-detached houses” and how this has resulted… Read More
All posts tagged “sprawl”
Zoning controls, sprawl, and housing affordability
Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I continue to feel like there is a groundswell of interest in trying to improve housing supply and overall affordability. The YIMBY movement continues to gain steam. Here are are few excerpts from a recent M. Nolan Gray article where… Read More
Three in four Americans believe it’s better for the environment if houses are built farther apart
Living in a low-density place with lots of greenery and open space can feel like a pretty “green” way to live. Maybe you’ve even got a little garden where you grow delicious tomatoes. And indeed, a lot of people seem to think this is the… Read More
New land development across the US between 2001-2019
The Washington Post just published this interactive feature showing new developed land (i.e. urban sprawl) across the US between 2001 and 2019. It is based on these land cover maps which were published by the US Geological Survey earlier in the summer. Their findings show… Read More
Intraprovincial migration across the Greater Toronto Area
This is a chart from a recent blog post by Ryerson University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. It shows net intraprovincial migration across the regions of the Greater Toronto Area. And what you are seeing here is people moving from expensive and built-up… Read More
The Great Dispersion
It’s that time of year again. It’s time to make predictions for the upcoming year and time to look back on the ones we all got wrong from a year prior. I don’t recall many people (if any) predicting that a pandemic would cripple the… Read More
Atlas of Urban Expansion
Since 2012, a team at New York University has been working on something called the Atlas of Urban Expansion. What they are doing is collecting and analyzing data related to the quantity and quality of urban growth around the world. Everything from population densities to… Read More
Fastest growing large cities in the US
Last week the US Census Bureau released its 2017 population estimates for the largest cities in the country. All of the figures are for the city itself and not the broader MSA or some other boundary. Here are the top 15 cities with the largest… Read More
The Great Recession only paused suburbanization
According to newly released US census data for 2010-2017 – which Brookings analyzed here – the “back to the city” movement appears to have peaked in 2012. (This is something that we’ve looked at before on the blog.) Here is a graph from Brookings showing the… Read More
Hmm…architecture and basic income
Albert Wenger recently published a post on his blog about architecture and basic income. Albert is a venture capitalist and is currently working on a book called World After Capital, which I have mentioned before on this blog. He is also an advocate of basic… Read More