Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Sprawl

Confirmed: Sprawl and Bad Transit Increase Unemployment

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 30, 2014 | No Comments

Since the 1960s and the earliest days of job sprawl, the theory of “spatial mismatch” — that low-income communities experience higher unemployment because they are isolated from employment centers — has shaped the way people think about urban form and social equity. But it’s also been challenged. The research that supporting spatial mismatch has suffered from some […]

Wowza: Scale Maps of Barcelona and Atlanta Show the Waste of Sprawl

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 3, 2014 | No Comments

This graphic was created by Alain Bertaud, a senior researcher at NYU’s Stern Urbanization Project. He was formerly principal urban planner for the World Bank. Part of his work has focused on comparing densities of world cities. In this stunning comparison of metro Atlanta and Barcelona, you can see that the two regions have almost the […]

Are There Any Affordable Cities Left in America?

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 27, 2014 | No Comments

Are Washington, San Francisco, and New York the most affordable American cities? A new report from the New York-based Citizen’s Budget Commission [PDF], which made the rounds at the Washington Post and CityLab, argues that if you consider the combined costs of housing and transportation, the answer is yes. But a closer look at the data casts […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Race, Sprawl, and Car Culture

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 25, 2014 | No Comments

Atlantic Senior Editor Ta-Nehisi Coates was in Cleveland last week talking about his acclaimed long-form article, “The Case for Reparations,” which reviews the history of economic and social oppression of African Americans. I got to attend the talk, and late in his speech Coates made a few points that touch on the subjects we cover […]

How Two Regions Reined in Job Piracy — And Two Others Failed

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 11, 2014 | No Comments

They call it “intra-regional job piracy” — when one town uses tax breaks to lure employers from neighboring towns. Job piracy is very common in regions across the United States. And it almost always results in employers moving farther from the central city. As the D.C.-based think tank Good Jobs First has shown [PDF], this job […]

Earth Day Resolution: Stop Building Projects Like the Zoo Interchange

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 22, 2014 | No Comments

Leading up to Earth Day, the New York Times ran an editorial, “Time Is Running Out,” lamenting the lack of urgency in the United States to prevent a very urgent problem: catastrophic climate change. Today, Brad Plumer at Vox explained why it may be too late to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 […]

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