In my travels I enjoy seeking out especially beautiful streets lined with artful buildings filled with pedestrians and little cafes and shops. In North America they can be hard to find since that’s really not our strong suit. We tend to build generic functional tract homes and shopping centers that provide people with “what … Continue reading The Ugliest Building in Portland
This is my old college room mate Dimitri. At the end of my first year in the dormitories he approached me and asked if we could share a place in September. We didn’t know each other very well. We were vague acquaintances. We said hello to each other in the corridor, but that was … Continue reading The Real Value of Subcultures
No, my millionaire heroes aren’t computer whiz kids or international hedge fund managers. These are my friends Cali and Lou. They’re my heroes and I model much of my life after them. Aside from being endlessly charming, patient, kind, and generous they’re also smart and industrious. Here’s a little back-story that helps explain why … Continue reading My Millionaire Heroes: Not Who You Think
Check out these photos and try to guess where they were taken. If you thought Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, or a dozen other Rustbelt towns you’d be mistaken, although your confusion is completely understandable. It’s actually Portland, Oregon – that bastion of liberal, crunchy, hippie, yuppie, hipster, eco-friendliness. Go figure. I’m not putting … Continue reading The “Inner Cleveland” of Trendy Cities
Here’s what a tradition street grid looks like from Google Earth. This is how most towns in America were organized until about 1945. Kids walked to school. Families walked to church on Sunday. People could easily get to work and access the local bakery, hardware store, library, etc. without a car. This was Norman Rockwell’s … Continue reading Paved to Death
NOAA After three years of punishing drought the heavens finally opened up this week and have given us some much needed relief here in California. The rain comes curtesy of a tropical weather system from Hawaii we like to call the Pineapple Express. If we’re lucky we’ll get sufficient snowpack in the mountains this winter … Continue reading Climate Change, Yes and No
I have an Australian friend who works on an oil drilling platform off the coast of Tasmania. He sent these photos from his phone. Pretty cool, huh? These photos got me thinking about the Peak Oil meme. For the uninitiated there are two camps on the subject. One camp says there’s an unlimited amount of … Continue reading Peak Oil, Yes and No
Earlier this year I got to know a woman who was in the process of building a tiny off-grid shop she’s calling the Locastore. See here. Back in May she was working with local authorities to meet all the necessary regulations and code compliance parameters in order to make the building legal. A couple of … Continue reading Locastore Follow Up
There’s plenty of blight out there. Inner city blight, failing suburban blight, long lost rural small town blight… empty storefronts, boarded up buildings, dead streets. There’s simply no government program that’s going to bring these places back to life. No Wall Street investment scheme is likely to revive these places. Developers have no economic … Continue reading Good Enough Urbanism: Faster, Cheaper, Smarter
I was at a company Christmas party (not mine, by the way) last night and after about half an hour I ran out of my extremely limited supply of social skills. I ducked out into the city and started taking photos in the misty drizzle – a serious gift after a three year drought. … Continue reading Belden Place: Dark Alley Urbanism
Granola Shotgun 