Congestion Pricing Moves Ahead in New York City

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

The next evolution of the McMansion: The Great Recession imprinted the McMansion on the collective conscious of Americans. Kate Wagner started her blog McMansion Hell to ridicule these huge homes with mixed architectural styles, but worries her focus on pre-recession architecture makes her think she’s giving the more recent aesthetic a pass to be more pervasive in American suburbs. She also wonders if it will ever end. (Kate Wagner | Baffler)

Let’s randomize America: Dalton Conley suggests we should think about how we can randomly reshuffle America to make everything far more equitable. The idea is that we’ve already sorted ourselves by neighborhood and politics and income, but should rethink ways our social contract is based on place. One way could be a randomized system of tax pods that allow us to pay into a system that distributes value across the country. (Dalton Conley | The New Yorker)

Lessons from Barcelona’s radical governance: After the Great Recession, housing and other advocates began organizing a new way to govern outside of political parties and were wildly popular as people wanted change. Now eight years later after a lot of positive reforms, the group are now the incumbents and have to figure out how to continue progressive reforms and long lasting change while other forces chip away at their support. (Mark Engler and Paul Engler | Waging Nonviolence)

Congestion pricing moves forward in NYC: The Federal Highway Administration has signaled that it will allow New York to move forward with a congestion pricing scheme by approving an Environmental Review of the project. A draft “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI) will be up for review for a month. Implementation is not likely to happen for another year as the MTA officials will need to set up tolling infrastructure in Manhattan. (Danielle Muoio Dunn | Politico)

El Paso climate charter vote fails: Environmental activists in El Paso Texas gathered enough signatures to get a proposition on the ballot that would enshrine climate change policies into the city charter including bringing the electric utility back under the city’s purview and tracking air pollution. Though once set for the ballot, the measure received opposition from organizations such as the El Paso Chamber and a Houston based oil and gas front group. The measure failed by 82% of the vote and was dominated by voters over 65. (Diego Mendoza-Moyers | El Paso Matters)

Quote of the Week

Among the most exciting parts of the IRA is the invitation it presents for organizers to create proof of concept for public power as an alternative to for-profit energy. While for decades only private companies with massive tax liability were able to use renewable energy tax credits, public power providers, local and tribal governments, and others can now take advantage of an uncapped pool of IRA-provided funds to construct their own not-for-profit clean energy installations.

–Kate Aronoff in Dissent Magazine discussing how the Inflation Reduction Act could lead to more publicly owned power companies.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Mike Salisbury of Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency to talk about the city’s e-bike rebate program.

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