Planning

Australia is a continent sized country with total urbanized area of only 0.3%.  As is the case with the USA, the population is increasing as a result of natural growth and immigration. The country is blessed with a sunny climate and enough space to enable its inhabitants to enjoy a relaxed, free lifestyle.

Given this, one would expect there would be little support for the higher density housing ideology of the Smart Growth advocates. Yet since the early 1990s the Australian Federal Department of Housing has been pushing exactly this approach.  read more »

At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, responding to comments about large transit subsidies, remarked that the last federal highway bill included $200 billion in subsidies for highways.

The Senator should know better. The federal highway bill builds highways with fees paid by highway users, not by subsidies.  read more »

The living room of my electrician friend Harry Gres was filled with solar panels which were destined for his roof to demonstrate the advantages of his new eco-business venture. In the spirit of Herbert Hoover's campaign pledge of a car in every garage, Harry envisions solar panels on every roof (including garages).  read more »

So far, 2009 has not been a banner year for greens in Los Angeles. As the area's mainstream enviros buddy up with self-described green politicians and deep-pocketed land speculators and unions who have seemingly joined the “sustainability” cause, an odd thing is happening: Environmentalists are turning into servants for more powerful, politically-connected masters.  read more »

The internet has become part of our nation’s mass transit system: It is a vehicle many people can use, all at once, to get to work, medical appointments, schools, libraries and elsewhere.

Telecommuting is one means of travel the country can no longer afford to sideline. The nation’s next transportation funding legislation must promote the telecommuting option...aggressively.  read more »

Contrary to popular notions held even here in southern California, Santa Monica was never really a beach town or bedroom community. It was a blue-collar industrial town, home to the famed Douglas Aircraft from before World War II until the 1970s.

When I first lived there in the early ’70s, the city was pretty dilapidated, decaying and declining (except for the attractive neighborhoods of large expensive homes in the city’s northern sections). I remember a lot of retirees, students, and like me and my wife, renters of small apartments in old buildings. The tiredness of the place was incongruous with its great location and weather. But then the first of several spectacular rises in real estate values took off.  read more »

An article in the London Daily Telegraph suggesting that President Obama might back a major program of bulldozing parts of cities in the Rust Belt has put so-called “shrinking cities” back in the spotlight. Many cities around the country, especially in the Rust Belt have experienced major population loss in their urban cores which has sometimes spilled into their entire metro area. They have thousands of abandoned homes, decayed infrastructure, environmental challenges, and no growth to justify a belief that many districts will ever be repopulated.  read more »

The person who caused the current world recession can be found not on Wall Street or the city of London, but instead could be you, and your next-door neighbor--the people who put so much of their savings and credit to buy a house.

Increasingly, conventional wisdom places the fundamental blame for the worldwide downturn on people's desire--particularly in places like the U.K., the U.S. and Spain--to own their own home. Acceptance of the long-term serfdom of renting, the logic increasingly goes, could help restore order and the rightful balance of nature.  read more »

Treasury Secretary Ken Henry’s recent address to business economists was an apt prism through which to survey Sydney’s immediate past and distant future. According to reports, he said ‘the [Chinese] resources boom had produced a “two-speed” economy, with unemployment rising in the south-eastern states but falling in the west and north’. Dr Henry is reported to have told his Sydney audience, ‘I don’t think everybody in this room should be moving to Perth.  read more »

In what are tough times for most states, conditions for business remain surprisingly good in Nebraska. Like other states in the “zone of sanity” Nebraska is especially supportive of small businesses.

Nebraska is one of a series out of mid-American outliers. In 2008 – a year of a severe national contraction – the state experienced a 3.6 percent growth in gross domestic product. Its current unemployment rate of just 4.4 percent stands at less than half the U.S. rate of 9.4 percent  read more »