1. Maps of sprawl and gentrification in Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. At first the picture looks bleak for cities, but Jesus – even downtown Detroit is growing! (More here.)
2. A real, live Texan (just kidding – he lives in Austin) replies to O’Toole on parking.
3. Why aren’t (more) urbanists cheering on Jerry Brown’s attempt to kill sprawl-inducing California redevelopment agencies? (Streetsblog SF/LA, I’m looking at you!)
4. NY lawsuit alleges that LEED standards are meaningless, and Charlie at Old Urbanist takes the opportunity to review the case against America’s most popular “greenness” metric.
5. This is awesome: The DC Office of Zoning makes the code and all the overlays accessible on Google Maps. Is there any other city with anything like it?
I lost all respect for LEED, when I learned that LEED could possibly consider this sprawling single-family home energy-efficient: http://inhabitat.com/the-white-house-takes-aim-at-leed-certification/
we have something like that in sf http://www.zonability.com
“At first the picture looks bleak for cities, but Jesus – even downtown Detroit is growing! (More here.)”
Yes, the census shows that many downtowns have grown substantially over the past decade. But in most cases the downtowns are simply too small a component of the city to have much effect on the overall metropolitan area trend, which is a continued shift in population and jobs to the suburbs. Cox and Kotkin note that in only 3 of the 51 metropolitan areas with populations greater than one million did the core city grow faster than the suburbs. Basically, cities are continuing to decline relative to suburbs, but within cities certain small areas are gentrifying and gaining residents.