Congestion Pricing and Unwanted McMansions

McMansion. Photo by Paul Sableman.

Every day at The Direct Transfer 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 links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Transit advocates seek congestion pricing for New York: Transit advocates in New York City are calling for the city to override the State of New York and implement congestion pricing in Manhattan, but it’s unclear whether Mayor Bill de Blasio would support that. The push from advocates references a 1957 state law which supposedly allows the city to set its own bridge toll rates. (Curbed NYC). Read more.

Nobody wants these McMansions: Baby boomers don’t want to live in big McMansion-style suburban houses anymore, and nobody wants to buy them either. Both younger generations and old want more urban environments with proximity to amenities, creating a mismatch in demand. (Realtor) Read more.

Air pollution, mapped (by Google): Researchers are using Google’s Street View vehicles to measure different air pollutants. Through 14,000 miles of travel and three million measurements, the cars saw high levels of black carbon, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants in area of Oakland known for instances of childhood asthma and other diseases that come from poor air quality. (Google Keyword). Read more.

Should we have an infrastructure garage sale? The Trump Administration wants to copy an infrastructure financing scheme popular in Australia called asset recycling. The idea is to sell of old infrastructure and reinvest the money into… new infrastructure. The idea isn’t without its challenges, including that local governments want to keep public control of assets and that the tax laws related to this are complicated. (Governing). Read more.

For delivery in densifying cities, no need to reinvent the wheel: As European cities grow and become more crowded, delivery demand is going to go up. New ideas (which may not be so new) include possibly sharing warehouses in dense urban areas, sharing transportation delivery methods the same way we share transit rides, relying on time-tested modes like water transportation and trucking. (JLL Real Views). Read more.

Quote of the Week

Working class whites or African Americans could have afforded a home [in Levittown] especially with a mortgage that was FHA-insured and a Veterans Administration loan, perhaps, that required no down payment. It wasn’t affordability—African Americans were as able to afford those homes as whites were—but they were prohibited from doing so by the federal government. Now those houses sell for $300,000 or $400,000, so the white families that moved there gained $200,000 or $300,000 in equity while black families gained nothing.

– Richard Rothstein in Slate discussing his new book The Color of Law, in which he points at the federal government as responsible for neighborhood segregation.

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