This week, a few stories circulated around our office that generated some discussion. One was a piece in The New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten on commuting in America entitled "There and Back Again". The tease at the beginning sums up the entire piece: "People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains."
In this story, the writer accompanies commuters in Manhattan and Atlanta while attempting to understand the life of an "extreme commuter."
Inner-Ring Suburbs
Inner-City Suburbs Rebranded as 'Classic Towns'
The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the MPO for the Philadelphia metropolitan region, has introduced an innovate way of making people aware of the benefits of older, established suburbs: market them.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Fulton to Kotkin: Those Aren't Suburbs
Joel Kotkin's recent LA Times Op-Ed is critiqued by Bill Fulton of the California Planning and Development Report. Fulton argues the suburban areas Kotkin defends are actually urbanizing, whereas true suburbia show signs of becoming the new slums.
California Planning and Development Report
If You Lived In This Inner-Ring Suburb, You'd Be Home By Now
Tue, 04/24/2007 - 08:00
Who Pays for the Subprime Lender Meltdown?
Mon, 03/05/2007 - 13:24
Scrambling to grab that elusive “American Dream” of homeownership, millions plunged into the subprime mortgage market to build wealth through appreciation (if not speculation). Pundits cheered as the ownership rate crept up, lauding the pluck of aspirational minority and immigrant families.
There’s a reason it is called subprime, though. Lenders offered a smorgasborg of loan “products,” but the bottom line was that they are all very costly for the borrower – often entailing adjustable-rate surprises in the 30 percent or higher range.
