"Blame Jane Jacobs"

"Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn't be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans' hopes and desires alight."

At The Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum asks, "Who Killed American Mobility?"

And Derek Thompson points to similar problems in Britain.

Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006

Reuters reports the death of Jane Jacobs, author of 1961's influential urban-planning critique The Death of Life of Great American Cities.

Appreciations come in from Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times and Witold Rybczynski in Slate.


"The answer to such superficiality is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure—roads, parks, bridges—that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives."

Nicolai Ouroussoff offers a counterpoint in The New York Times.

Friedan, 1921-2006, and King, 1927-2006

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Betty Friedan, who died on February 4, and Coretta Scott King, who died on January 31. (And for Al Lewis, "Grandpa" on The Munsters, who died on February 3. They always go in threes...)

Addendum: Rebecca Solnit in The Nation connects Friedan with other authors of influential books from the early 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson.