“Detroit, Cleveland, and other Rust Belt burgs were yesterday’s Sun Belt boomtowns. They serve as a cautionary tale about the risks of not having a quality calling card to fall back on when your allure as a growth story fades”
My latest post is up over at New Geography. It’s called the “Urban Quality vs. Quantity Dilemma.” In this piece I examine what we might call “high quality” cities ranging from New York to Portland vs. “high quantity” cities like Austin or Atlanta. The data are very interesting. It looks to me like each sort of place has only got half the puzzle figured out.
The dilemma in America is that it seems that to some extent you can have per capita income and GDP growth or you can have population and job growth, but you can’t have both easily.
As an aside, the most interesting stat I found when looking at the data is that Portland, Oregon had the highest per capita GDP growth of any metro over one million in the US from 2001 to 2008, the full range for which data is available. It’s number one. Portland grew GDP per capita by 22.4%. That’s particularly impressive when you consider how many people are unemployed or underemployed there. Clearly, something about the talent program there is working, because they are really ratcheting up their economic output. So my hat’s off to Portland on this one.
The rock rose, Pavonia laiopetala, is blooming with wild abandon now. Hot pink blooms are open and beaming everywhere across our front garden.
Rock rose is a really great woody perennial, small shrub landscape plant in Central Texas. It requires very little water and little maintenance (unless you feel like pruning it back from time to time).
It reseeds itself very easily in my garden, and so far, I’m just letting it spread around. Many of the plants blooming across the front yard now are seedlings from last year. After the big front garden hardscape project, I just decided to let them fill in some space for a while until I can get more serious about planting design up there.
They are gorgeous and do great in the heat of summer. The species is originally from the Edward’s Plateau and westward, but do just fine in my black gumbo soil.
And, there’s a great blog you should check out named after this fabulous plant: Rock Rose.
Seriously. I dare you to try to follow what’s going on with Traylor’s amorous relationships.
Louisiana Republicans are facing a choice between a family values incumbent who solicited prostitutes and a family values challenger who is currently sleeping with his stepson’s estranged wife.
Over at my own blog, I’ve complained about the focus in the livable streets movement on environmental benefits to urbanism. It’s not that those issues aren’t important - it’s that for most people, and certainly for most local governments, it’s the pocketbook issues that get all the attention. So I was happy to see this piece today that discusses the opportunity costs of having your city build a Walmart surrounded by a sea of parking rather than a compact mixed-use district:
[Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter] Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.
[…]
But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.
It’s worth clicking through to read the whole thing (and printing it out for your next local planning commission meeting about that TOD project you really like).
You mean restricting parking hasn’t made parking better? Shocking.
The ‘residents only’ parking ordinance, in the neighborhoods that surround South Congress Avenue, was intended to give homeowners better access to their property, but some say they don’t see much of an improvement.
Federal authorities said Friday they are conducting the largest Medicare fraud bust ever in five different states and arrested dozens of suspects accused in scams totaling $251 million.
