D. Dowd Muska
Blog
If you build it, they will socialize? Public spaces and loneliness
If you build it, they will socialize? Public spaces and loneliness By D. Dowd Muska | October 17, 2025 Urbanists have a new item for cities’ to-do lists: Fix America’s loneliness crisis. And their preferred tool? Public spaces. The William Penn Foundation’s Shawn McCaney is typical. He believes the nation’s ...
Blog
Yes In God’s Back Yard: YIGBYs fight for more housing
Yes In God’s Back Yard: YIGBYs fight for more housing by D. Dowd Muska | October 3, 2025 When it’s time to thwart an unwanted land use, NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) consult a list of hardy perennials. Parking. Traffic. Crime. Noise. Property values. “Preserving the character of the ...
AI
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Cities should rethink their zeal for subsidizing AI data centers
Kate Gallego has had it. In her 2025 State of the City address, Phoenix’s mayor called on lawmakers to eliminate Arizona’s special tax treatment for “new data centers.” Calling it “a holdover from a time before our economy was the magnet for job growth that it is today,” Gallego declared ...
Blog
Disaster plans: Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’
Disaster plans: Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’ “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.” — Jody Freeman, Director, Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School “We’re not doing that climate change, you ...
Blog
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics By D. Dowd Muska | August 8, 2025 Three years to go. The opening ceremony for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad is scheduled for July 14, 2028. And the men and women of the organizing committee are working feverishly ...
Blog
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform In a recent piece for RealClearInvestigations, urban experts Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox lamented that “housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.” Try telling ...
Blog
Parking deregulation helps cities and promotes property rights
Parking deregulation helps cities and promotes property rights By D. Dowd Muska | July 11, 2025 You can fight city hall. But if the dispute involves parking, don’t expect the battle to be brief. That’s the bitter and expensive lesson learned by Azael “Oz” Sepulveda, an auto mechanic in Pasadena, Texas. For ...
Blog
Getting it all wrong about the other city by the bay
To be charitable, miners brave enough to go digging can discover occasional nuggets of value in Madrigal’s ponderous, and entirely predictable, jeremiad. For example: Oakland had its own version of the urban-renewal thuggery that would eventually lead to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In ...
Blog
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Dwelling on it: ADUs advance on the coasts and inland
Comedian George Carlin believed that the word “bipartisan” means a “larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” But the comedian’s legendary cynicism might dissolve, at least a bit, if confronted by the across-the aisle progress underway with a key affordable-housing tool. Neighbor Blog’s Grant Ongstad defines an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) ...
Blog
Radar love: Do automated speed cameras make cities safer?
Radar love: Do automated speed cameras make cities safer? By D. Dowd Muska | May 23, 2025 Earlier this year, San Francisco garnered national headlines when it activated California’s first “speed safety cameras.” The city-county’s ticketing tech, however, wasn’t the focus of the spotlight. Under the state law authorizing the new system, “drivers with low ...
If you build it, they will socialize? Public spaces and loneliness
If you build it, they will socialize? Public spaces and loneliness By D. Dowd Muska | October 17, 2025 Urbanists have a new item for cities’ to-do lists: Fix America’s loneliness crisis. And their preferred tool? Public spaces. The William Penn Foundation’s Shawn McCaney is typical. He believes the nation’s ...
Yes In God’s Back Yard: YIGBYs fight for more housing
Yes In God’s Back Yard: YIGBYs fight for more housing by D. Dowd Muska | October 3, 2025 When it’s time to thwart an unwanted land use, NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) consult a list of hardy perennials. Parking. Traffic. Crime. Noise. Property values. “Preserving the character of the ...
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Cities should rethink their zeal for subsidizing AI data centers
Kate Gallego has had it. In her 2025 State of the City address, Phoenix’s mayor called on lawmakers to eliminate Arizona’s special tax treatment for “new data centers.” Calling it “a holdover from a time before our economy was the magnet for job growth that it is today,” Gallego declared ...
Disaster plans: Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’
Disaster plans: Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’ “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.” — Jody Freeman, Director, Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School “We’re not doing that climate change, you ...
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics By D. Dowd Muska | August 8, 2025 Three years to go. The opening ceremony for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad is scheduled for July 14, 2028. And the men and women of the organizing committee are working feverishly ...
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform In a recent piece for RealClearInvestigations, urban experts Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox lamented that “housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.” Try telling ...
Parking deregulation helps cities and promotes property rights
Parking deregulation helps cities and promotes property rights By D. Dowd Muska | July 11, 2025 You can fight city hall. But if the dispute involves parking, don’t expect the battle to be brief. That’s the bitter and expensive lesson learned by Azael “Oz” Sepulveda, an auto mechanic in Pasadena, Texas. For ...
Getting it all wrong about the other city by the bay
To be charitable, miners brave enough to go digging can discover occasional nuggets of value in Madrigal’s ponderous, and entirely predictable, jeremiad. For example: Oakland had its own version of the urban-renewal thuggery that would eventually lead to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In ...
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Dwelling on it: ADUs advance on the coasts and inland
Comedian George Carlin believed that the word “bipartisan” means a “larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” But the comedian’s legendary cynicism might dissolve, at least a bit, if confronted by the across-the aisle progress underway with a key affordable-housing tool. Neighbor Blog’s Grant Ongstad defines an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) ...
Radar love: Do automated speed cameras make cities safer?
Radar love: Do automated speed cameras make cities safer? By D. Dowd Muska | May 23, 2025 Earlier this year, San Francisco garnered national headlines when it activated California’s first “speed safety cameras.” The city-county’s ticketing tech, however, wasn’t the focus of the spotlight. Under the state law authorizing the new system, “drivers with low ...
