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Some more good, or at least interesting, news for 2004:  teen birth rates in Cascadia hit an all-time low. There were just under 27 live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, according to final data for the year.  That’s probably not just the lowest rate in recent history, but the lowest since humans first inhabited this place. (Just to be clear: we spend a lot...

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and all that.  But, apparently, not if you want to accuse someone—or a lot of someones—of being naughty.  This past Sunday, author Joel Kotkin launched a broadside against Portland, Oregon by publishing a dismissive op-ed in the Oregonian that derides the city thus… Portland is becoming what I call an Ephemeral City. What do ephemeral cities do? Not much by traditional standards. They don’t...

By virtue of its size, the baby boom generation influenced consumer trends at each stage of its life cycle. When boomers were younger, suburbs expanded to house all the new (and larger) families. But now that boomers are reaching their senior years, developers should recognize their new housing needs: smaller homes with better access to services. Census projections suggest that in the next twenty five years Cascadia will gain nearly...

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Hans Peter Meyer writes on community development issues from Courtenay, British Columbia. Saturday, November 19, is local government election day in British Columbia. It’s too late to nominate anyone, and it’s too late to really organize. By the time British Columbians read this, there won’t be much left to do but vote for whoever you think has the vision and the energy to put the pieces...

This Bill McKibben piece on Curitiba, Brazil—which has been held up for years as an international model of people-friendly urban design—may seem like old news to those who are in planning or transportation circles. But I still found it inspiring. If Curitiba—with a per capita income of $2500 a person, 300 percent population growth since 1970, and no lush beaches or obvious tourist attractions—can make its city a model of...

This Slatebook review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it’s hard to know where to begin. In a nutshell:  Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann arguing—quite correctly—that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia.  In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas.  Just so, the walled cities of medieval...

NYC may be leading the next wave of driving-reduction initiatives as it considers congestion pricing for parts of Manhattan. According to the NY Times: "The idea is to charge drivers for entering the most heavily trafficked parts of Manhattan at the busiest times of the day. By creating a financial incentive to carpool or use mass transit, congestion pricing could smooth the flow of traffic, reduce delays, improve air quality...

Interesting stuff in today’s "Rethinking Portland" issue of the Portland Tribune. The Trib explains the rationale for the special series thus: For decades, Portland has been viewed across the nation as an icon of livability and progressiveness, a community that introduced the nation to regional planning and prevention of big city sprawl, a steward of the environment and a proponent of diverse transportation systems, including light rail. But as we...

Whoops: it looks like I got much of this post simply wrong.  To recap, Brookings Institution scholar Margy Waller wrote an article in the Washington Monthly promoting car ownership for the working poor (which strikes me as reasonable, on balance), and also proposing a $100 billion annual federal tax credit to subsidize commuting costs (which stuck me as wrong-headed). But one of the reasons I so strongly disliked Waller’s commuting...

I’m a day late on this, but the Seattle P-I had an interesting series on Seattle’s ailing urban forests. The principal threat is the rapid spread of invasive species, which essentially throttle standing trees and smother healthy new growth: "At first glance, the most prolific tree-killers seem pleasant enough, aesthetically speaking—a splash of green on a bare tree trunk, a burst of pretty flowers on the ground. But tendrils of...