The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

This past Wednesday, Amtrak debuted the newest high-speed rail service in the country, and the first outside of the northeast corridor. Where you ask? California? Florida? Nope, it's is Kalamazoo, Michigan.

February 19 - Chicago Sun-Times

Kaid Benfield brings attention to HUD's new Sustainable Communities Resource Center website, which provides best practices case studies and other information resources.

February 19 - Switchboard

Scott James reports on the ironic application of rent control laws in San Francisco, which results in people of relatively modest means subsidizing the housing of the extraordinarily wealthy.

February 19 - The Bay Citizen

BLOG POST

<p class="MsoNormal"> If you run a google.com search for “The Death of Suburbia” you will find about 24,000 ‘hits.’   Some of the gloating over suburbia’s alleged demise is based on the facts that (some) suburbs have been hit hard by the current economic downturn, and that (some) city neighborhoods have become more expensive per square foot than than suburbs. (1)  But suburbia as a whole continues to gain population. </p>

February 18 - Michael Lewyn

In response to recent emphasis by President Obama on strengthening the country's manufacturing sector as a key to economic recovery, Richard Florida sees knowledge-based jobs and new skills as the foundation for a new economic blueprint.

February 18 - The Atlantic Cities

Jonathan Massey pens an essay in the journal <em>Places</em>, in which he probes the implications of homeownership as the vehicle by which the microeconomics of household finance and the macroeconomics of a globalized economy are mediated.

February 18 - Places

The CA High Speed Rail Authority hopes to work with Caltrain in the Bay Area and Metrolink in the South Coast by allowing them to use state HSR Bond funds provided they match the amount. Electrification and grade crossing separations are eligible.

February 18 - San Francisco Chronicle

Over the past two years, German funding and Israeli philanthropy led to the construction of solar installations for Palestinians living in "Area C" in the West Bank. Now Israel says the panels are illegal and wants them demolished.

February 18 - Spiegel Online

Zak Stone reports on a campaign in Chattanooga, Tennessee to distill the city's artistic and entrepreneurial spirit into a font, and asks the question - can a font help a city make a comeback?

February 18 - Good

Pat Doyle reports on a new effort to reduce nuisances at a Minneapolis area light-rail station by using offensive music -- classical music in this case -- as a deterrent.

February 17 - Star Tribune

Seemingly as hard to find as the mythic Sasquatch or a Unicorn, we've searched high and low for a conservative who supports transit (or at least who will say so in public) and have found one, in the region around Charlotte, North Carolina.

February 17 - The Herald Weekly

Michael Tortorello pays a visit to the futurist desert colony to see what's in store as its legendary founder retires and it struggles to remain a bulwark against modern capitalism.

February 17 - New York Times

Ambitious plans to revamp the Metropolitan Museum's Fifth Avenue plaza, more than 40 years after its last makeover, are being criticized by the Museum's affluent neighbors, who fear that the project might be too successful.

February 17 - DNAinfo.com

As cities such as Chicago and Detroit put forth programs to turn their neglected alleyways into urban amenities, JoAnn Greco speaks with Daniel Toole, a 26-year-old, Seattle-based architect, who has accidentally become an expert on the topic

February 17 - The Atlantic Cities

Eric Laine and Suzanne Steelman present LiveWork, a new take on the changing nature of living and working in a design for a mixed use development in Athens, GA.

February 17 - Fast Company

Christopher Mims reports on L. Brooks Patterson, county executive of Oakland County, Michigan, who is perhaps the country's most vocal advocate of sprawl.

February 17 - Grist

In an interview with the <em>San Diego Union-Tribune</em>, Geoffrey Anderson and Bill Fulton reflect on the new normal for development across the country, which astonishingly to anyone looking back twenty years, has absorbed Smart Growth principles.

February 17 - UT San Diego

In a rousing rebuke to the Museum of Modern Art's new show "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream," Bryan Bell takes aim at the out-of-date thinking represented in top-down architecture by star architects and curators.

February 17 - Metropolis POV Blog

Ariel Schwartz reports on the findings of a new study from Urban Affairs Review that surveyed residents from 10 major international cities on what qualities make them most happy.

February 17 - Fast Coexist

After moving swiftly through preliminary hearings in the Senate last week, that body's supposedly bipartisan transportation bill has been stopped in its tracks according to its sponsor Sen. Barbara Boxer, reports Keith Laing.

February 16 - The Hill