That’s Bruce Fisher’s question, posed in this piece for Buffalo’s alt-weekly Artvoice.
What do you think?
-KG

Some good reporting from Tube City Almanac on the efforts of McKeesport, PA, to demolish vacant and abandoned properties.
-KG

A native of Indianapolis, I could always tell that there was a difference between my hometown and Cleveland, where I lived for several years. Both were Midwest, working-class types of towns, but Indy was more suburban, less dense, kind of like Cleveland without the hard edges.

According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, The State of Metropolitan America, understanding the differences between Indy and Cleveland — or Columbus, or Pittsburgh, or Minneapolis — is a crucial part of understanding each city’s individual fix. The 172-page report, which already has received praise from mainstream pundits such as David Broder, compiles data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to paint a demographic portrait of the United States, focusing on the 100 largest metropolitan areas.

Above: The party’s not over in Vegas.

Some urban thinkers thought one silver lining of the economic crisis could be a slowdown in unsustainable sprawl, particularly in overbuilt areas of the southwest, like Las Vegas.
But that appears not to be the case at all, according to this New York Times story.
Despite home prices having declined 60 percent in four years, and despite the fact that there are nearly 10,000 empty homes with 5,600 more expected on the market soon, the Times reports, “builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they …

Spend a few minutes looking at this report from The Center for Public Integrity.
The study details how unfocused policy can lead to lots of goodies for special interest groups, especially developers.
From the report: “Virtually all players agree there is no coordinated vision in setting priorities for federal transportation projects. That vacuum has led to a tidal wave of earmarks by Congress. Quite naturally real estate developers and other interests make great efforts to influence which projects get funded. As a group, more than 100 real estate development interests – including …

Check out this neat site that shows the relative affordability of the city verses the suburbs by calculating housing plus transportation costs.

Did you know that transportation costs represent the number two household expense for most Americans and that US homeowners consistently underestimate their transportation expenses?

This a timely post because the federal government recently began working to include transportation costs in its housing affordability index, according to Streetsblog. This is part of the President’s Building Sustainable Communities initiative.

“Cleveland won’t be reborn until it buries its dead,” a Cleveland Magazine article explains, and the ghosts haunting Cleveland are some 8,000 vacant and abandoned homes.
They draw drug dealers and prostitutes while dragging down surrounding homes’ values. Mayor Frank Jackson has stepped up efforts to bring the problem under control in recent years. But annual foreclosure rates hovering around 14,000, means the city is aiming at a moving target.
“There’s a lot more supply than there is demand,” says Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis. “If there was huge demand for this …

Here’s a good visual on what sprawl looks like - and its economic impact - from the folks at Buffalo Rising.
It’s a bit old but I wanted to link to it anyhow. I can’t say it better than they did - “Three times the stuff - fewer people.”
-KG

Why not Detroit? Or Cleveland? Or a more compact, less-sprawled out city like Pittsburgh?
This Reuters story says Houston, the “petro metro” is aiming to be the electric car capital of America.
Stories like this make me so mad.
A city in the Great Lakes region would be much better suited to this, yet some folks in Houston are showing more leadership on this issue. For instance, Houston has signed a deal to build public charging stations. “Such agreements are key to easing skeptical consumers’ fears of running out of juice if their …

Between 2000 and 2008, large metropolitan areas saw their suburban poverty rates grow at twice the rate of inner cities, according to a new report by the Brookings Institution.
For example, in 2008, 23 percent more people were living in poverty outside the city of Cleveland’s borders than inside it. That’s a 44 percent jump since 2000, for a total of 9 percent of the suburban population. Meanwhile the number of poor in the city of Cleveland decreased, WCPN Ideastream reports.
Similar trends were reported in Akron and Youngstown.
Also of note:
-Social service …