It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Buy a Home

Whitnall Avenue homes. Photo by Carl Baehr.

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. Each 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.

Harder to afford a home: A new report from the National Housing Conference finds that middle class people are finding it harder and harder to buy a home. Now 32% metropolitan areas require double the salary needed to afford a home in 2019 and 45% require an income above $100,000 per year. But the changes are not just in high cost coastal areas, but in areas that previously were seen as affordable.  (Brittany Webb | National Housing Conference)

Why China builds faster: A new book by Canadian Dan Wang suggests that the reason why China can build and the US is stuck is the difference between society being led by engineers in China and lawyers in the United States. In a podcast discussion with vox, he suggests that both mindsets have their drawbacks. In the United States our crumbling infrastructure is a sign of a system that works for the rich, whereas in China the engineering mindset begets project development but also treats people as a math problem. (Sean Illing | Vox)

30th street porch goes permanent: An experimental public space at 30th street station in Philadelphia is set to become permanent. The program run by the University City District, which turned a parking lot into an important public space for residents in 2011, has become a successful example of rethinking space, especially during the pandemic. The plaza will now be managed by Amtrak which serves the station. (Alan Garry, Nate Hommel | Philadelphia Inquirer)

A new electric company: Ann Arbor Michigan is creating a power company that would build renewable energy inside the city limits through microgrids and rooftop solar. The existing power company didn’t want to focus on renewable energy, so the city set out to build something that would help them reach their climate goals faster. The new power company created despite an existing one won’t have to worry about legacy infrastructure maintenance. (Adele Peters | Fast Company)

Dutch cities want to regulate e-scooters, fatbikes: Five large Dutch cities are asking the Netherlands for the ability to regulate e-scooters, big wheeled bikes, and other motor powered conveyances that have been using bike lanes. Local transportation officials have noted that bike lanes are not safe for the increasingly different vehicles that have been using them and would like a 30km/h speed limit. Mopeds and super fast e-bikes have already been banned from center cities. (DutchNews.nl)

Quote of the Week

If there is one thing that can be described as a phenomenon of the City of Brno, it is the night departures. They are a symbol of reliability, safety and the availability of transport even at night. I am proud that we have been operating this system for 25 years and people are satisfied with it.’

–Miloš Havránek, General Director of public transport company DPMB in Brno Czech Republic discussing the city’s successful night bus program.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined once again by Colin Parent of Circulate San Diego to discuss a new report entitled The Powerless Brokers: Why California Can’t Build Transit.

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