I recently participated in a survey in which I was asked if I thought the housing market would “improve” over the next year. I assume that they meant to ask whether I thought home prices would increase, but it does prompt the question, why are higher home prices an improvement? After all, if you thought gasoline prices would go up next year, and a survey asked you whether gas prices would “improve”, you would probably say “No”. And it would be plain bizarre to phrase the questions in terms of whether you thought the gas “market” would “improve”.

But the question surely captures the way most homeowners and many homebuyers think about housing, that higher prices are regarded as an improvement. Housing is unusual among consumer goods in its dual role as consumption good and investment vehicle. Continue Reading »

It was probably a year-and-a-half ago, while participating in a Summer-long proposal writing workshop with other members of the New York Graduate Urban Research Network, that a fellow graduate student recommended the use of mind maps to help organize some of my ideas. (This after I sketched something that looked like a Venn diagram of overlapping literatures related to my research.) I checked out some open source mindmapping software packages at the time, but it was only this last Summer that I started using one in earnest. In this post I’ll describe some of the things I use mind maps for. Continue Reading »

Andrew Cuomo has taken the reins as New York State’s new governor. He has sounded some typical Republican themes of lower taxes and cost-cutting measures. But, while talking generally about how high New York State’s tax burden is compared to the rest of the country, and promising to “veto any increase in personal or corporate income taxes or sales tax,” the tax that he has chosen to really go after is the property tax, a tax which is not even collected by the state. Furthermore, the history of property tax limitation measures suggests that statewide constraints on the property tax will only increase the demands on state governments. Continue Reading »

The New York Times just ran 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology. Two of the ideas were “Back up Your Data” and “Set up a Free File-Sharing Service”. Slightly puzzling to me was why these were two items instead of one, since it seems most of the back-up services (they suggest SOS Online Backup, Windows only) also work as file-sharing services (they suggest Dropbox, cross-platform) and vice versa. I’ve listed several of these services below, in roughly what I consider the order of their attractiveness, all things considered. And yes, SpiderOak is listed first because that’s the one I’m using. Continue Reading »

Sometimes coincidence can generate unexpected connections. I happen to be reading Jane Jacob’s incomparable The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In it, Jacobs skewers several planning archetypes that she saw as dominating (in 1961) orthodox urban planning. One of these archetypes was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, or “towers in the park”. In this design, 95% of the ground is left as open space, while all housing and commerce is contained in isolated skyscrapers. This ideal ended up being influential in the design of American public housing, mostly lower-income but some middle-income projects as well. Jacobs goes on to criticize this type of design as creating open spaces that nobody actually uses because of the lack of street level commerce.

Then, last week, I took my daughter to see the Disney movie Tangled, a modern retelling of the Rapunzel story. Continue Reading »

About 2½ years ago I made the switch to Linux. I figured getting a new home computer was as good a time as any. While I was already going off the beaten path with Linux, I decided to not go too far off by choosing Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. I kept Windows Vista (pre-installed) on its own partition, just in case I changed my mind.

While I was able (and more than willing) to tinker in order to get things to do what I wanted, my wife, who like me would be using the computer for both personal and professional purposes, needed things to “just work”. Any technical problems she had were going to get kicked to me. I asked her to give it a couple of weeks, but her verdict after one day was “This isn’t any different from Windows.”

I think most end-users would, like my wife, find no real difference for email, web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheets. Continue Reading »