• City Planning
• housing

Building Cities for the People Who Will Live Here, Rather Than Who Live Here Now

Its normal to assume that future households will be pretty much the same as today’s, yet if we look back just a few decades, most houses in Portland had many more people living in them. Over half had children in the home in the 1960s and many also had grandparents or aunts and uncles under the same roof. Today, over a quarter of households consist of one person and only one in five has school age children. What about the future?

• City Planning
• housing
• Non-car Mobility

Scholarly article re: the impact of parking requirements on Affordability

Following up on the recent spate of articles on mandating off-street parking, here in Portland and nationally, here’s a research article based on real world experience in Los Angeles: Parking requirements as a barrier to housing development: regulation and reform in Los Angeles Abstract: Using a partial deregulation of residential parking in downtown Los Angeles, […]

• Climate Change
• Economic Development
• energy
• Energy Management
• housing
• Sustainable Economy

Can Renewable Energy Fill the Gap?

One of the big questions hurled by the defenders of the fossil fuel age is that low-carbon energy technologies just can’t be ramped up to meet the burgeoning need of growing economies worldwide. And, of course, they shed alligator tears at this point over their concern for the billions of poor people yearning for refrigerators and cars who, they contend, would be left in poverty by the heartless “climate alarmists.” But it is a great question. Can we produce the energy for a vibrant, equitable economy without fossil fuels?