Top Highlights

• California, home of the nation’s worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured
• Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, so there’s no serious plan for climate change that doesn’t begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work. One way or the other, many of the biggest challenges in America
• Affordable housing sounds like an apartment that has low rent for some obvious reason—maybe because it’s small and in an old building that sits next to a truck depot. Actually, it refers to subsidized buildings that are built with help from the federal government and have apartments that are restricted to people who make below their area’s median i...
• William Fischel called them “homevoters.” Fischel was an economist who spent the 1970s and 1980s developing a theory of suburban behavior that he eventually called “the homevoter hypothesis.” The theory went like this: Homes are an all-eggs-in-one-basket kind of investment. You can’t diversify them like a stock, and you can’t buy insurance on falli...
• PRETTY MUCH BY DEFINITION, the basic concept of government is to spread the costs of an organized community across the entire populace. You can’t have a fire department for one house, and unless the block is very wealthy, you can’t have a fire department for ten houses or fifteen houses either. Nor could you have cops, a sewer system, parks, librar...