Samuel Staley

Sam Staley is Associate Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

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Full Bio

Sam Staley is Associate Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee where he also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in urban and real estate economics, regulations, economic development, and urban planning. He is also a senior research fellow at Reason Foundation. Prior to joining Florida State, he was Robert W. Galvin Fellow at Reason Foundation and helped establish its urban policy program in 1997.

Jane Jacobs on "Truth," Discovery and the Future of the Soviet Union

As just about everyone in the planning profession now knows, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Cities-Modern-Library/dp/0679600477/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304357036&sr=1-1">The Death and Life of Great American Cities</a> by urbanist icon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs">Jane Jacobs</a>. While Death and Life was itself iconic, Jane Jacobs was also a great public intellectual who continually built on her ideas in subsequent books and articles.

Planning for Tea Parties

Republicans appear set to make significant political inroads in Congress this November, perhaps taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives and knocking on the door of majority control of the U.S. Senate. Their success will be in no small part due to the so-called Tea Parties, a grassroots political movement reacting to the perceived excess of the federal government. Planners should take note. While the Tea Party Movement is largely a national and statewide, its effects may well be felt on the local and regional level as well.

How Cities Will Survive Global Warming

Climate change has become a focal point of urban planning in the U.S. and abroad as cities grapple with so-called sustainability. <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1562561&show=html">I’ve been a critic</a> of many attempts to implement sustainability plans, not so much because I disagree with the intent as much as I believe the tools used to achieve sustainability are not particularly effective.

Internalizing the Externalized: The Case of Roads

In a <a href="/node/44927">previous blog post</a>, my discussion of externalities, public goods and roads spurred an unexpectedly lengthy set of posts and repostes. In this article, I want to address a trickier topic: Whether road users have effectively shifted the burden for paying for roads to non-users and whether the reason we pay for roads out of general taxes is a result of that lobbying effort.

Roads, Oil Spills, and Externalities

Planners are quick to criticize roads and highway investments for the vast sums spent to build, operate and maintain them, often questioning the value of these subsidies. Recently, on a planning list-serve, these subsidies were labeled an “external cost” of automobiles, but they are not.