Sprawl

This week, Jeff and Tanya take on the Atlanta Braves' terrible, no-good, very bad decision to move their stadium to Cobb County, Georgia. We discuss cities that are (and are not) shaped like wedding cakes, and whether that means you need to smoosh your spouse's face in it. Tanya makes a pedestrian-rights argument against high-heeled shoes (and Jeff abstains from taking sides). We parse the differences between "shared streets" -- without marked-out space for cars, bikes, and people on foot -- and vehicular cycling.

Urban real estate is a hot commodity in Canada. Suburban real estate, not so much. PricewaterhouseCoopers, in coordination with the Urban Land Institute, analyzed urban and suburban properties and found a lot more office space in the central city worth buying or holding than in the burbs [PDF].

The premise behind journalist Charles Montgomery's new book -- Happy City -- is a bold one: That the way we design cities can have a profound impact on well-being and mood -- in essence, personal happiness.

With Terry McAuliffe about to move in to the Virginia governor's mansion, it’s unclear what will become of one of the state’s most contested transportation proposals -- the Bi-County Parkway, a $440 million highway in the outer D.C. suburbs.

Cleveland's metropolitan planning organization was one of those transportation agencies that had never quite gotten over the Eisenhower era. Sure, it threw some money at the transit agency every year. But for the most part, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) treated its mission as a simple matter of expanding roads to reduce congestion.

The sprawling-est city in the Southeast -- Atlanta -- is entering a whole new phase, according to a new report from Christopher Leinberger at the George Washington University School of Business.

All of a sudden, I feel like all anyone is talking about is whether it’s a good idea to raise kids in the city. I’m raising a kid in the city. I feel great about it when she has a blast on the back of the bike, or makes friends on the bus, or gets excited about pressing the beg button at the corner. I feel a little less certain when we toddle down the sidewalk and come upon guys peeing on the dumpster or passed out on the stoop. When I look at the test scores for our neighborhood schools, I get a knot in my stomach.

Is sprawl holding back social mobility in America? Paul Krugman didn't mince words yesterday in a follow-up to a post he wrote soon after the Detroit bankruptcy was announced. In that initial blog post, he compared Detroit to Pittsburgh and concluded that it wasn't just the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurt Detroit -- it was also the dispersement of jobs away from the city core. Yesterday, in a column titled "Stranded by Sprawl," he took the argument further, arguing, "Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger."