Free Cities

Denver is using it to “speed up the approval and delivery of … coupons” that allow “residents to recycle televisions, monitors and other electronics at a discount.” The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada is using it to “understand traffic patterns and safety issues at select intersections in the Las Vegas Valley.” ...

Do recent election results show a rightward shift in San Francisco? Join Free Cities Center’s Steven Greenhut as he visits the City by the Bay and talks with two experts about what’s really going on in the City. They discuss whether things are really as bad as some media outlets ...

“Drill, baby, drill!” Those words were first popularized at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Republicans were widely mocked at the time for their sloganeering, but they largely carried the day. Domestic oil extraction came to 302.2 million metric tons in 2008. That was a 10-year low according ...

District Attorney Thien Ho tested how much his office directly can affect homeless policy by suing the city for not doing its job to deal with its festering homelessness crisis. Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Jill H. Talley ruled on May 6 that Mayor Darrell Steinberg and the City Council ...

Failed wildfire policy hikes cities’ housing, energy costs By Kenneth Schrupp | June 7, 2024 Two years of rain have finally ended California’s drought, leaving reservoirs full and hills in bloom. However, the prospect of new growth feeding future wildfires looms over a state where the costs of damage and ...

Figure 1 below shows the share of the major minorities living in either the urban core or the suburbs of the 51 metropolitan areas included in the City Sector Model. It is based on 2015-2019 zip code data and the urban form as defined in Figure 2 (which is independent of ...

LA shouldn’t abuse ‘historic’ zones to stop new housing by Sal Rodriguez | May 31, 2024   Land-use restrictions and NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard-ism) come in many forms. One of the more creative is the invoking of “history” as a means of regulating or prohibiting housing some people ...

Advocates for San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center have never lacked a sense of grandiosity about their goals. “The ability to envision the future and to transform aspirations into reality is what sets leaders apart,” boasted a glossy brochure published by the joint powers authority in charge of the project. “No ...

Improving cities better than subsidizing weight-loss drugs By Kenneth Schrupp | May 24, 2024 Legislation that would cover weight-loss drugs and surgery to mitigate the state’s ballooning weight crisis fortunately died in the Senate this year, but lawmakers still have productive ways to deal with a problem that’s leaving 28% ...