Today’s Headlines

Republican Presidential Hopeful Pawlenty Wants to Privatize Amtrak (The Hill)
Public Pays the Price for Privatizing Infrastructure (Politico)
Google Robot Cars Would Promote Sprawl (Fast Company)
NRDC’s Kaid Benfield: City of Detroit isn’t Shrinking, ‘Right-size’ the Suburbs (Grist)
Corporations Realizing Best & Brightest Don’t Want to Work in Suburbs (The New Republic)
New Book Tells the Secret History of America’s Interstate Highway System (Infrastructurist)
DC Commuter Ferry Service Struggles to Stay Afloat (Washington Post)
Sprawl Lobby Still Trying to Make DC Look Like Houston (Greater Greater Washington)
China Set to Lap USA with High Speed Rail (Baltimore Sun)

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Brookings Report: “Bright Flight” Transforming Cities and Suburbs

By Sarah Goodyear | May 10, 2010

Not as appealing as they once were. (Photo: Scorpions and Centaurs via Flickr) The suburbs of America are not what they used to be. And neither are the cities. This morning, The Political Environment pointed us to an article on the Huffington Post about "The State of Metropolitan America," a new Brookings Institution report on […]

Suburban Poverty and the Transit Connection

By Sarah Goodyear | Jan 22, 2010

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic looks at the new Brookings Institution report on suburban poverty levels and the connection to future transportation planning in those regions. Freemark, who recently wrote about how the city of Paris is extending its transit infrastructure to its traditionally lower-income suburbs, points out that […]

For Some Businesses, Suburbs Have Lost Their Glow — the City Beckons

By Sarah Goodyear | Apr 28, 2010

Does this look like the future to you? (Photo: mattmarque via Flickr) Today on the Streetsblog Network, Mary Newsom at The Naked City points us to an article in the new Harvard Business Review about how some major corporations are looking to move operations from the suburbs to the city. The HBR article suggests that […]

The Urban Core as Regional Economic Indicator

By Sarah Goodyear | Jan 25, 2010

The importance of core urban areas to a region’s economy is the subject of a post today from the always thoughtful Aaron Renn, who blogs at The Urbanophile. Renn examines data that suggest job growth (or decline) in a metro region’s core counties is a good indicator for the overall health of those regions. Renn […]

Suburbs Aren’t the Problem — It’s Bad 20th Century Design

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 9, 2013

It’s easy to take shots at “the suburbs,” a catchall term that evokes big box stores, fields of parking lots, and social exclusion. But suburbs don’t have to be designed around driving, writes David Levinson at Streets.mn. Many of these places just had the misfortune to be developed at a time when awful planning practices […]

The Suburbs Aren’t Dying — They’re Growing Differently

By Tony Dutzik | Jan 26, 2015

Cross-posted from the Frontier Group. Sommer Mathis said much of what needed to be said about the recent round of “the suburbs are back, baby!” stories on housing trends, including this analysis from Jed Kolko, housing economist at Trulia.com, and the related commentary from Matt Yglesias at Vox. Mathis argues that the concept of a battle for supremacy between cities and […]