Some years ago I helped a friend plant a cherry tree in her back garden and we had a conversation about it. She specifically selected a tree that was bred to produce beautiful spring blossoms and g… | Continue reading
Yesterday a friend reached out to me. She asked my advice about how to deal with her landlady over a broken bathroom sink. Something snapped and water sprayed out everywhere. Someone was sent by to… | Continue reading
Some months ago a friend reached out to me about a problem. She and her siblings were scattered far from their elderly parents and there was some family business that needed to be managed here in S… | Continue reading
Back in 2014 a crowdfunding campaign was started to create a grocery store in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. House after house displayed signs proclaiming the inhabitants had made … | Continue reading
Regular readers will have noticed my lack of content these last few months. I intentionally put everything in my life on hold back in August in order to tend to some more important business. My fri… | Continue reading
I visited friends in a prosperous suburb and had occasion to do a little cooking. Nothing fancy. Just a simple summer dinner on the back patio. Along the way I discovered the limitations of their e… | Continue reading
My great grandparents arrived in America over a century ago from Sicily. They were dirt poor, uneducated, swarthy, and considered undesirable by the ruling Protestant standard of the day. Sicilians… | Continue reading
My great uncles returned to Brooklyn after military service in World War II and quickly discovered American cities were in a terrible state of disrepair. No one had money for maintenance in the dec… | Continue reading
The economy has a rhythm. There are several overlapping cycles that play out over time. The pattern is erratic and irregular, but it persists over the centuries. Ray Dalio narrates a cartoon video … | Continue reading
I’ve been asked to give another presentation for the Incremental Development Alliance and I’m working out the kinks of my talk here. IncDev is attempting to revive the traditional pre W… | Continue reading
Many readers are familiar with the 8/80 urban planning meme. It’s a simple concept. Can an eight year old and an eighty year old each meet their daily needs on foot, possibly with the extensi… | Continue reading
I was in Atlanta last month and was encouraged to poke around by the people who invited me. For my entire life the greater Atlanta metroplex has grown in population, geographic size, economic impor… | Continue reading
These rock outcroppings in Central Park are quiet reminders that at one time – 18,000 years ago – there was over 2,000 feet of solid ice sitting on top of New York. That’s higher … | Continue reading
Last night I had dinner at a friend’s house. The group was composed of the usual San Francisco mix: a college professor, an architect, and a collection of software engineers of various stripe… | Continue reading
Friends and relatives in Nebraska sent links to the floods they’re currently experiencing. The people we know are lucky enough to have homes that are just slightly above the icy waters, but m… | Continue reading
I attempt to balance being reasonably well informed about the goings on around the world while tuning out all the partisan blah, blah, blah. I’m just not a political animal. Much of the news … | Continue reading
I just purchased a new electronic device. It has exactly the right combination of qualities that tickle both my Granola and my Shotgun. But first some background. I’m not a tech guy. Not even… | Continue reading
People who love living in vibrant walkable mixed use urban neighborhoods sometimes look at suburban commercial corridors and suggest they can be transformed with light rail, bicycles, fine grained … | Continue reading
I’m going to draw a line from Colonial America to the near future in order to get a broad picture of infrastructure and land use patterns. For the last couple of centuries, it’s been dé… | Continue reading
There’s a podcast out of Melbourne, Australia called “Greening the Apocalypse” that I enjoy. It’s part tongue-in-cheek comic banter and part earnest exploration of what bein… | Continue reading
From my perspective the Big Picture stretching out into the future is one of recurring overlapping structural challenges of all kinds. As an individual I have zero control over any of it. But I hav… | Continue reading
Here’s the ubiquitous American landscape with a dash of central New Jersey local color. It’s not the rain and dark skies that make it look so bleak. No amount of sunshine can brighten t… | Continue reading
In 1901 John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) began purchasing hundreds of acres of land around the town of Lakewood, New Jersey an hour and a half south of New York. He then built a… | Continue reading
I was recently invited to give a talk at a housing conference down in Los Angeles. Once again my fellow speakers engaged in the usual arguments. Aging Baby Boomers asserted that we need to keep bui… | Continue reading
This house has a tiny crack in the back corner of the garage foundation. I asked all the older people in the neighborhood including a woman who grew up in the house and it’s been there for de… | Continue reading
Garden apartment complexes do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to suburban affordable housing. Young singles, the elderly, married couples saving for their first home, recently divorced folk… | Continue reading
Part of my ongoing plan to create a more resilient and adaptable life includes finding alternative ways to satisfy daily needs with simple affordable work-arounds. I want electric lights at night a… | Continue reading
In the early days of the auto industry Detroit was a dynamic machine churning out huge numbers of cars with integrated supply chains clustered tightly together around Ford’s River Rouge compl… | Continue reading
Here’s the American Dream. If you can pull together $700,000 you can live large in a beautiful home like one of these. Three car garage. Great room. Massive kitchen. Formal dining room. Four … | Continue reading
I was streaming “Killing Eve” on BBC America last night when the internet got glitchy. The picture sporadically pixilated and the audio became garbled for a few minutes at a time. Then … | Continue reading
This weekend I attended the graduation of my niece from California Lutheran University. Since I was in the area for a few days and there was a lot of down time between events I wandered around the … | Continue reading
The current conundrum for many people is simple. You might want to live in one of the expensive bubbles of economic and cultural vibrancy in order to access good paying jobs and upward mobility. Bu… | Continue reading