Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Suburbia

Streetfilms: Interview With the Transportation Engineer

By Ben Fried | Sep 26, 2008 | 5 Comments

In his storied career at New Jersey DOT, Gary Toth played an indispensable role changing the culture of the agency, promoting a place-based ethic instead of the auto-centric transportation planning dogma. Today Toth heads transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, where he has written "A Citizen’s Guide to Better Streets." The book, which will […]

Richard Florida: Decline of the Burbs is Not Just About Gas Prices

By Aaron Naparstek | Jul 18, 2008 | 9 Comments

Via Planetizen, Richard Florida argues the decline in the popularity of suburbs is not just a product of rising oil prices, but a result of a new "spatial fix" that is reorganizing how and where people live their lives. From Florida’s column in the Globe and Mail: What’s happening here goes a lot deeper than […]

Cities Stake Claim to Being America’s ‘Best Places to Live’

By Ben Fried | Jul 17, 2008 | 5 Comments

In a story about the housing downturn, BusinessWeek had some numbers crunched to see where home prices have remained most stable and where they have declined most precipitously: The results are fascinating. Annual price changes in most of the largest metro areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington D.C., […]

Historic Town Chooses to “Retain Its Charm” By Enabling Sprawl

By Ben Fried | May 12, 2008 | 23 Comments

On Friday, Streetsblog looked at how northern Virginia can’t get enough road widening. As a follow-up, Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces directed us to another example of how smart growth faces hurdles in the places that need it most — in this case, the Trenton suburb of Bordentown, New Jersey (right: the main […]

Northern Virginia Locked In to Congested Roads

By Ben Fried | May 9, 2008 | 11 Comments

Suburbanites in northern Virginia are finding their streets more clogged with traffic than ever, and, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they aren’t about to get bailed out by road-widening projects. Here’s the crux of the problem, told from the Post reporter’s decidedly windshield perspective: Thoroughfares like Rolling Road are the blood vessels […]

Today’s McMansions, Tomorrow’s Tenements

By Aaron Naparstek | Feb 22, 2008 | 19 Comments

This weekend’s must-read article is "The Next Slum?" by Christopher B. Leinberger in the Atlantic Monthly. He posits that the suburban American dream that was launched at the 1939 New York City World’s Fair appears to be running out of gas. Emerging in its place is the growing desire of many Americans to live in […]

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