A long post about urban infrastructure finance via “Land Value Capture” from Next American City. The general idea is that the provision of public goods — roads, sidewalks, transit lines, sewers, utility lines, etc — adds value to the property which it serves. This value pertains to the location, not the improvements any developer might have built (or refrained from building) on the property. Land value capture mechanisms seek a slice of that incremental value to re-pay (or finance) the provisioning of those improvements. It’s a feedback loop that results in density without lots of debt financing on the part of the city.
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
Cars? Not For Us
The Atlantic recently had a piece looking at the decline in home and car ownership amongst the young, and their migration to urban centers, dubbing this “The Cheapest Generation” This demographic felt the need to explain the freedom of not owning in their own words, pointing out that cheap and broke are not the same thing, even though they can be similar, behaviorally.
The Case for Separated Bike Lanes
Even just barely physically separated bike lanes command much more deference from motorists than paint on the ground. Would-be urban cyclists consistently (and Boulder is no exception here) cite fear of traffic and the desire for separated infrastructure as the number one reason they don’t bike at all, or don’t bike more. And it doesn’t have to be a big infrastructure investment — even just red plastic cups taped to the edge of the bike lane will keep cars at bay!
An American Made All-in-one Thermal Appliance
Newell Instruments in Illinois has developed an all-in-one “magic box” heat management appliance, to compete with the ones currently manufactured in Europe, which are often prohibitively expensive in the US. The Newell CERV can both add and remove heat and humidity from a building and provide fresh air supply when needed. It can also be coupled with a heat-pump based hot water heater. Brought together in a super-insulated, airtight building this integration simplifies and increases the efficiency of space conditioning. Here’s hoping they can make it affordable too.
Boulder Food Rescue is Hiring
Boulder Food Rescue is hiring their currently volunteer volunteer coordinator, and raising the funds via Indiegogo. Hana Dansky already works coordinating BFR drops and pickups pretty much full time, but that’s not sustainable in the long run without some kind of compensation. Help add stability to this great organization by pledging whatever you can!
A Love Story And A Clearance Sale
A Love Story And A Clearance Sale, musings of an arctic sea ice researcher on the fact that he will probably outlive the object of his professional affections. A minimum of zero sea ice appears likely between 2015 and 2020, and models suggest that once you get to a minimum of zero, the ice-free season is likely to expand quickly, with significant impacts to northern hemisphere weather patterns.
Parking in Portland
Many new apartment complexes in Portland have no parking, because many of their residents have no cars, and building parking spaces would bump rent from $750 to $1200. Cities that don’t require you to drive are often more affordable than those that do. And nicer to live in, too…
Vaclav Smil – Drivers of environmental change: focus on energy transitions – YouTube
Vaclav Smil on the the scale and difficulty of executing an energy transition for the civilization. “Calculate with me!” he says, before diving into a bunch of order-of-magnitude demonstrations that this is all much harder than we might like to think. He’s very pessimistic about the large-scale integration of intermittent resources, and also about humanity’s ability to initiate a change voluntarily. Would like to understand those positions better… and still continue to disagree with them. The talk is long and rambling, but he’s so clearly engaged and emphatic that it doesn’t matter.
US Extradition – Justice for Assange
A summary of the arguments that Assange will face extradition to the US upon transfer to Sweden. It’s a legalistic hairball.
Rare and Superior Gene Variants
It turns out that there’s a rare variant of a gene involved in Alzheimer’s Disease that protects the carriers against age-related cognitive decline. It even, apparently, protects against other known genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s. This is totally the kind of thing I can imagine parents paying big bucks to have inserted into their kids — rare genes that already exist in the broader population, that confer disease resistance or other advantages, but which haven’t had time to become prevalent under natural selection, or which confer an advantage that won’t have obvious reproductive consequences. We’re going to start accumulating a library of these potential genetic revisions and, I suspect, within a couple of decades, making sure that our descendants carry them disproportionately.