Google “Social engineering.” I hear this term a lot. It’s used by people to describe any policy they don’t like. Most recently it came up in a radio interview about water conservation here in California. It’s been a hot topic since the governor declared a statewide water emergency with a mandatory 25% reduction in usage. … Continue reading Drought and “Social Engineering”
Google My last post was about how Silicon Valley is evolving into an urban form that’s not quite leafy and open enough to be a suburb anymore, but not really vibrant and compact enough to be a proper city either. “Too thin to be jelly. Too thick to be jam.” The story got an unusually … Continue reading Silicon Valley: Jelly in the Jam
I tend to explore what happens to suburbs as they age and begin to decline. But this time I’m going to explore what happens to suburbs that thrive and continue to grow and work their way up the value chain. It isn’t exactly what many people expect. “Be careful what you wish for.” A … Continue reading Growth and the Suburban Chassis
“San Francisco is expensive so I’ll live in Oakland.” I hear this all the time from bright young people who are offered a job in the Bay Area and are looking for more affordable accommodations. Yes and no… First, Oakland is a big place in terms of both population and physical territory so there are … Continue reading Oakland: Rockridge
This week I’m helping a friend move house after watching her grapple with some unappealing options for the last couple of years. In the end she’s leaving San Francisco and moving to the suburbs forty-seven miles to the south. She absolutely hates the suburbs, but given all the possibilities it really is the right … Continue reading The Reluctant Suburbanite, Or Why San Francisco Doesn’t Always Work
I tend to fixate on certain places – sometimes because I love them, other times because I can’t help but stare at twisted wreckage. Lancaster, California has always been 30/70 leaning toward wreckage, although it does show signs of ongoing reinvention so I keep going back. Lancaster is highly representative of most places in … Continue reading The Other Side of the Tracks
I just spent a long weekend exploring Seattle, Washington where I interviewed people about why they live where they do. It’s one thing to ask a city planner, economic development official, or transportation engineer about what people want in theory, but I prefer to ask ordinary people directly about the choices they’ve actually made. … Continue reading Seattle: Trade Offs, Upsides, Downsides, and Work Arounds
This is the house I grew up in. It wasn’t a terrible house. It wasn’t a great house. It was what my parents could afford. And it was nearly identical to all the houses that everyone in suburban southern New Jersey lived in back in the 1970’s. People with more money fixed up these little … Continue reading Suburbs and Class Identity
I recently had an unexpected three day weekend in Toronto curtesy of Air Canada. We were heading back home to San Francisco from Spain with a scheduled one hour lay over that turned in to a three day ordeal due to the severe ice storm. Instead of getting bent out of shape over the delay … Continue reading Mississauga: Density Without Urbanism
Queen Street West with its quirky little shops, funky upstairs apartments, wide sidewalks, and electric streetcars has been around for well over a century and my impression is that it will endure for another hundred years in something like its present form. Mind you, the people living there will change over time. It was originally … Continue reading Queen Street Toronto: Flexible Durable Urbanism
Granola Shotgun 