The people Trump proposes for the cabinet are mostly unqualified. And except for the fact that Trump wants to tear down government ("Trump takes aim at government as public faith in US institutions continues to erode," USA Today, "A big win for the Blow It Up Party, but what then?," Washington Post) not aiming for innovation ("Healthcare innovation: process redesign and innovation in DC and Prince George's County," 2011), so goes it for Dr. Oz, who has promoted Medicare Advantage plans, which tend to be a bad deal for patients and government spending ("Mehmet Oz loves promoting this inferior M ..read more

I owe Marc Fisher (I wrote about a similar controversy he fostered on historic preservation 18 years ago!, "Preservation takes it on the chin (updated)" 2006) thanks for getting me off my ass to write--I haven't blogged in months--although I had been on the cusp recently.  My "eating disorder" led me to consume not enough calories to be motivated to write and do other stuff. His column, "The truth about bike lanes: They’re not about the bikes" asks the wrong question.  He writes about people complaining about the construction of bike infrastructure in their neighborhoods since fewer ..read more

 (I haven't been writing much since my heart disease relapse in June, but finally in mid-later-November I returned to a much better trajectory.  I hope my writings have been missed.  But I doubt it.) I wrote a series in March and April about "gaps in parks planning" but really about parks planning more generally.  I was re-reading it in preparation for a meeting this week and I realized it's quite good.  I also have the intent to write some additional pieces for the series. -- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service" -- "Gaps in Parks Master P ..read more

Roger Lewis was an architect and consultant on community design matters, and professor at the University of Maryland.   The way most anyone has heard of his is that he wrote a newspaper column running in the Washington Post Real Estate section for many years, starting in the mid-1980s, called "Shaping the City." and he wrote about "good urbanism."   He often drew a cartoon to accompany the column. -- Obituary At the time, his column, along with a then similar column in the Washington City Paper, educated me a lot about good urbanism--I was always into cities but after 1972 ..read more

Today we had a ribbon cutting for the new Fabian Lakeside Pavilion at Sugar House Park in Salt Lake, where I am on the board.  One of seven pavilions, they are about 60 years old.  The Park is about 70 years old, a regional park, and unusually, owned by the City and County jointly but overseen by an independent board. The pavilion project is interesting for a bunch of reasons: the original pavilion study dates to 2016.  So it took 8 years to construct the first new pavilion. the park, being jointly owned by the city and county, has interesting problems with capital funding, as ..read more

Is the subject of a good article in the New Yorker, Ras Baraka's Reasonable Radicalism.  Particularly interesting points are (1) dealing with activist roots and running a city, (2) dealing with police as a safety measure and more broadly in public safety, and (3) he's running for Governor of New Jersey.  Plus his activist pedigree as a son of Amiri Baraka. WRT (1), this is always a challenge for activists, standing for something but also being able to work within government systems to get things done.  He seems to be particularly good at this. I always forget that he had be ..read more

While I haven't written for awhile, I have been thinking about things at a bigger scale, which will come out in some of the next entries. As I get older, I become a little less doctrinaire, and given that in the US 92% of all trips are by car, I've resigned myself to having to accommodate them.  This is less the case in DC than SLC--which is the epitome of sprawl--but it's still an issue in DC. Even though in DC on the major routes, bus riders make up a significant amount of the total people "throughput" on the street--e.g. on H Street NE, at least pre-covid, 40% of people throughput was ..read more

 Salt Lake City and the core of the County have decent transit, although it's best in the light rail transit shed which I don't live in. The problem for me is that my mobility mindset is really shaped by the bike and point-to-point movement, that is going directly from origin to destination. While there are a bunch of bus lines serving my area, and I can get within 5 miles pretty easily riding buses--since my congestive heart failure I am not supposed to drive, and I don't have the stamina to bike--mostly I get driven places. The problem with point to point thinking is when bus routes a ..read more

Call them “boommates.”  Surging costs for housing and other expenses are prompting baby boomers to take on roommates. A Harvard study estimates that almost a million Americans over age 65 now live with unrelated housemates ("NYC's Rent Surge Drives 86-Year-Old to Move in With a 'Boommate'").  To make ends meet, an increasing number of those 65 and older are choosing shared housing arrangements, helping save money in an era when many have fallen behind on retirement savings and there’s increasing concern about a loneliness epidemic. ... Versions of these shared living setups have exi ..read more

I came across an interesting case study by the Chicago Business School, The Pullman Historic District: A partnership in place-based community investment, about the revitalization of the distressed neighborhood of Pullman, in Chicago.   The effort was sparked by Park Bank, a locally focused community bank ("It shouldn't be a surprise that big banks are more comfortable dealing with large businesses | Community banking"), and its community development corporation which was doing a lot of housing rehabilitation.  It was also very much committed to community organization and involve ..read more