Sublime

A mayor who can better educate a city’s children so that they can find opportunity on the other side of the globe is succeeding, even if his city is getting smaller.

“The ultimate question that I have: how can we create cities that are big enough to give people economic opportunity, but small enough to give people love and others in their lives that touch their hearts?”

The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all that supply of structure and so little demand, it makes no sense to use public money to build more supply. The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren’t structures; cities are peopl... See more

Urban poverty should be judged not relative to urban wealth but relative to rural poverty.

Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown

Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

We must recognize that if we try to make one neighborhood greener by stopping new building, we can easily make the world browner, by pushing new development to someplace far less environmentally friendly.

you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul.