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Geography. Environment. Urbanism. And other stuff.
Browsing All Posts filed under »economy«
So Walmart kills local businesses … um, didn’t we already know this?
Stories of local, mom & pop businesses going under in the wake of a newly-opened Walmart are old hat by now. But even so, all those anecdotes – numerous though they may be – lack a certain amount of concrete-ness (which is why the plural of anecdote is not data). But no longer. Now we […]
Remember when Tampa was America’s Next Great City? Yeah, me neither.
August 30, 2012
Tampa is a city with an inferiority complex. This has been clear to me since I first moved there, when I was just twelve years old. For one thing, for as long as I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area, there’s been something going on with Orlando. Those Mickey Mouse punks have always thought they’re […]
Places that never were
August 1, 2012
Some places never get a chance to be. That, I fear, will be the case with the new Angolan city of Kilamba, a pre-planned, Chinese-built city designed for half a million residents, but which currently has only 220 occupied apartments. I’m not sure I know of another example of a city of this size being […]
The mall fights for survival
July 20, 2012
Is emphasizing the “experience” of going to the mall enough to save it from extinction? Perhaps that sounds like a ridiculous question. When I think of the “experience” of going to the mall, I think of parking lots with their own ZIP codes, surly teenagers, and pervasive homogeneity. A company named Glimcher Realty Trust is […]
What’s in the Big-Box? Increasingly, nothing
June 19, 2012
It’s been about a year since Borders Books & Music closed for good, and during that time many suburban shopping centers that rely on big-box stores like Borders have been having difficulties. There seems to have been a chain reaction after Borders closed, in which no new tenants stepped forward to fill the void left […]
The value of trees
June 8, 2012
Wealthier cities and neighborhoods have more trees than poor ones – so much so that you can apparently see the difference from space. The existence of this disparity isn’t news, exactly – the basic research on tree disparity between rich and poor neighborhoods was done a few years back. According to Tim De Chant at […]
What should be downtown?
May 29, 2012
In a lot of cities, you can get a good sense of the character and strength of the urban economy simply by paying attention to what is downtown. For example, a lot of art galleries and funky shops suggests that an urban revitalization is probably well underway, and that it’s more or less an organic […]
Spare a few bucks for a new bridge?
May 17, 2012
Does a worthwhile public investment always have to have direct and measurable economic benefits? This is a question that’s been on my mind a bit lately – I wrote about it in my last post about public expenditures on sports stadiums, a post in which I argued that the lack of any real and lasting […]
Private profits, public costs
May 15, 2012
In yet another example of a practice that has gone on for too long, the Minnesota Vikings have managed to convince the Minnesota legislature to help pay for a brand new stadium. Just about every city with a major league franchise has been through pretty much the same thing: the owners of a local sports […]
Can cities “buy” tech hubs?
May 1, 2012
Photo captured by FormerWMDriver and used with permission. http://www.flickr.com/formerwmdriver In a recent post at Next American City, Ken Archer described Washington, DC’s efforts to transform itself into a tech hub via tax cuts for LivingSocial, which is apparently threatening to move just outside the district to northern Virginia if it doesn’t get nearly $33 million […]
Your host
September 20, 2012
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