New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward Review

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New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward ReviewDr. Gruen has provided a very readable presentation of fundamental economic theory and then exposed in practical terms how some of the value judgements underpinning various planning, zoning & financial regulatory policies have, over time, worked to produce a variety of unintended but predictable consequenes in residential and commercial real estate markets.
Whether analyst, developer or member of a policy-making authority, this is a thought provoking must read. I am greatful for the contribution.New Urban Development: Looking Back to See Forward OverviewThe recent recession is one result of how local planning laws and practices have stifled competition, discouraged innovation, and artificially pushed up prices in America's most economically vibrant regions. Economist and consultant Claude Gruen unravels the story behind how these unintended consequences have resulted from the evolution of local zoning, growth controls, and laws intended to increase housing affordability.New Urban Development traces how locally induced housing cost increases led federal policy-makers to toss out the safeguards against lending excesses that had been put in place during the 1930s. But the story begins much earlier, during the colonial era, continuing up through the mortgage collapse that ushered in the recession of 2008. In his sweeping history of these issues, Gruen considers gentrification, environmentalism, sprawl, anti-sprawl movements, and more. His clarification of how urban development change occurs backs up his recommendations for increasing the production of housing and replacing obsolete commercial and industrial spaces with development that serves the twenty-first-century economy. New Urban Development specifies thirteen changes to policies at the federal, state, and local levels to provide better and less expensive urban housing, desirable neighborhoods, and thriving workplaces across the country.

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Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) Review

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Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) ReviewColin Gordon has put together an excellent reference for those interested in the economic history of St. Louis over the last 80 years, but with lessons that could easily apply to any other central city in the United States. We've all seen anecdotal evidence of these problems in run-down inner city neighborhoods, empty buildings in inner suburbs, and gleaming new parking lots in the outer suburbs, but Gordon uses data to back up these assumptions.
The book is roughly 1/2 maps and 1/2 text - and strikes the right balance at that. The maps serve to illustrate visually the scope and scale of "white flight," poor planning decisions, and the lunacy of a fractured metro government. While the city atrophies, suburbs further and further away compete for the same employers, the same stores, and the same residents.
While Gordon shies from making many overall conclusions based on the data and focuses more on presenting the history of what happened - this book provides a model blueprint for civic, business, and academic leaders to understand what to avoid in promoting "growth."Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) Overview
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form."Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history.Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.


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Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 Review

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Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 ReviewAnyone who is thinking about adopting a child or already has done so really should read this clearly written, engaging study of the history of adoption in the United States. Berebitsky's book is history that is relevant to our lives today and to the problems so many of us have confronted as we have explored how adoption relates to the so-called "real" biological family. To put it simply, the author shows that the issues and problems that adoptive parents face today are hardly new, but have a long and rich history. The best example of how the past illuminates the present is what Berebitsky discovers about the many unmarried women living before 1920 and who adopted children even though they either had no husband or were living with a female partner. Such women were not only accepted as mothers, they were encouraged to adopt such children. At a time when people believed that women's natures suited them to rear children, even women without a man in the house were sufficient as mothers. Beginning in the 1920s, though, single women fell out of favor as adoptive parents. That was when child "experts" and social critics began worrying that women without the tempering hand of a husband might "smother" their children with excessive affection or that mature unmarried women were really lesbians who would pass their deviance on to their children. What Berebitsky's work shows, then, is that there really is no such thing as a "real" or "natural" family that the rest of us must measure ourselves or our domestic arrangements against. In the recent past there were real alternatives to the "natural" family of married mother and father. Any adoptive parents today, as well as single women and gay or lesbian couples who are creating their own families through adoption will find plenty of evidence here to show that the unnatural or deviant ones are those who say there is only one kind of real family.Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 OverviewTalk about adoption has become increasingly politicized, as debates swirl around the morality and viability of various forms of adoption: interracial, international, "open," and those involving single parents or gay and lesbian couples. Paramount in many minds is the threat to the traditional (or mythical) nuclear family. But, as Julie Berebitsky shows, such concerns are fairly recent developments in the history of adoption.Berebitsky reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rules governing adoption were much less rigid and adoptive parents and families were considerably more diverse. In Like Our Very Own, she chronicles the experiences of adoptive parents and children during a century of great change, illuminating the prominent role adoption came to play in defining both motherhood and family in America.Drawing on case histories, letters from adoptive parents, congressional records, and fiction and popular magazines of the day, Berebitsky recovers the efforts of single mothers, African American parents, the elderly, and other marginalized citizens to obtain children of their own. She contends, however, that this diversity gradually diminished during the hundred years between the first adoption laws in 1851 and the postwar "baby boom" era. Adoption social theory and practice was gradually transformed into a highly homogenized model that tried to match children to parents by class and background and that ultimately favored conventional middle class American families.Changing attitudes about adoption, as Berebitsky shows, have also mirrored changing definitions of motherhood. At a time when womanhood and motherhood were socially synonymous, both birth mothers who gave up their children and adoptive mothers seeking a maternal role were viewed as transgressors of the natural order. This eventually changed, but only after proper training and outside expert approval replaced an assumed maternal instinct as the keystone of good mothering.A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history, Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence that adoption has always been an important factor in our evolving efforts to define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family.

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