Sublime

I want to brag about something here: in thirty years we never had a layoff of full-time employees. Seasonal swings in business were handled with overtime pay to full-time employees, and by adjusting part-time hours. The stability of full-time employment at Trader Joe’s was due in part to caution in opening new stores, and insisting on high-volume s

Tenants who fell behind either had to accept unpleasant, degrading, and sometimes dangerous housing conditions or be evicted. But from a business point of view, this arrangement could be lucrative. The four-family property that included Doreen’s and Lamar’s apartments was Sherrena’s most profitable. Her second-most profitable property was Arleen’s

Victor Gruen’s The Heart of Our Cities

External economies of scale lower certain costs; meanwhile, network effects make co-location more valuable.

I liked semi-decayed neighborhoods, where the census tract income statistics looked terrible, but the mortgages were all paid-down, and the kids had left home. Housing and rental prices tend to be lower, and more suitable for those underpaid academics. Related to this, I was more interested in the number of households in a given area than the numbe

The theory is very elegant: Elites agree that growth is good, so all effort must be put into assuring each parcel of the city has reached its “highest and best use” and extracting the profit that comes with it. Because the most powerful people in any given city agree that growth is good, planning, zoning, and government in general aid in the arrang