Free Cities
Blog
Read exclusive book excerpt
Cities in Crisis: How to fix municipal government budgeting
Read an excerpt from The Municipal Financial Crisis: A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting by Mark Moses (reprinted with permission). There was an alleged exchange in the 1950s between golfing great Sam Snead and baseball legend Ted Williams regarding which sport is more challenging. Ted pointed out that a ...
Agriculture
Urban Ag Promotes Healthy Food, Thriving Gardens
Urban Ag Promotes Healthy Food, Thriving Gardens MARCH 27, 2023 Watch as Steven Greenhut of the Free Cities Center tours City Slicker Farms in Oakland, an urban agriculture program that promotes access to healthy food, thriving gardens and urban green spaces.
Blog
How Eminent Domain Obliterated the Character of Cities
No city can possibly express its character – the many urban quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as the strangely appealing grittiness and shining luxury that often coexist side-by-side – when government planners use the bulldozer to “improve” cities. Writing about the “wave of urban renewal that swept the world in ...
Blog
Urban gentrification beats alternative of deterioration
Of all places, Houston – famous for its minimal zoning – now faces a “gentrification” crisis
Free Cities
PRI Sacramento Policy Conference – Reimagining Our Cities
This is the final podcast recording of PRI’s Annual Sacramento Policy Conference. The theme of this panel discussion is “Reimagining Our Cities.”
Blog
Automated vehicles: Driving us toward dystopia or utopia?
Humanity may be a long way from allowing an Artificial Intelligence program to navigate a spacecraft from Earth to the planet Jupiter, a trip of over a half-billion miles, but we’re very close to giving AI control of every other mode of transportation we’ve built to date here on Earth. ...
Blog
War on cars is a war on lower-income Californians
Recent research focusing on Los Angeles finds that the city’s poorest neighborhoods have the largest percentage of “hyper-commuters” – people who commute 90 minutes or more one way to work. The preponderance of those long-distance commuters – often construction workers and laborers who drive from inner-city Los Angeles to far-flung ...
California
PRI Sacramento Policy Conference: Improving the Quality of Life in Our Cities
Our podcast this week features a panel from PRI’s 5th Annual Ideas in Action Conference in Sacramento.
Blog
Government Size Boosts Corruption
Government Size Boosts Corruption John Seiler | March 10, 2023 Does the size of government reflect the level of corruption? I’ve come up with a way to test that. It involves two variables. First, U.S. city corruption scandals, 2020 to the present, where an official was convicted. Wikipedia lists 12. ...
Blog
Costly union-only agreements result in fewer city projects
From street repairs to building construction, municipal infrastructure projects are costly, but often necessary, endeavors. To get them done in the most cost-effective manner possible, city taxpayers are best served by having open, competitive markets for contracts to complete such projects efficiently and at the best price. This might sound like ...
Read exclusive book excerpt
Cities in Crisis: How to fix municipal government budgeting
Read an excerpt from The Municipal Financial Crisis: A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting by Mark Moses (reprinted with permission). There was an alleged exchange in the 1950s between golfing great Sam Snead and baseball legend Ted Williams regarding which sport is more challenging. Ted pointed out that a ...
Urban Ag Promotes Healthy Food, Thriving Gardens
Urban Ag Promotes Healthy Food, Thriving Gardens MARCH 27, 2023 Watch as Steven Greenhut of the Free Cities Center tours City Slicker Farms in Oakland, an urban agriculture program that promotes access to healthy food, thriving gardens and urban green spaces.
How Eminent Domain Obliterated the Character of Cities
No city can possibly express its character – the many urban quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as the strangely appealing grittiness and shining luxury that often coexist side-by-side – when government planners use the bulldozer to “improve” cities. Writing about the “wave of urban renewal that swept the world in ...
Urban gentrification beats alternative of deterioration
Of all places, Houston – famous for its minimal zoning – now faces a “gentrification” crisis
PRI Sacramento Policy Conference – Reimagining Our Cities
This is the final podcast recording of PRI’s Annual Sacramento Policy Conference. The theme of this panel discussion is “Reimagining Our Cities.”
Automated vehicles: Driving us toward dystopia or utopia?
Humanity may be a long way from allowing an Artificial Intelligence program to navigate a spacecraft from Earth to the planet Jupiter, a trip of over a half-billion miles, but we’re very close to giving AI control of every other mode of transportation we’ve built to date here on Earth. ...
War on cars is a war on lower-income Californians
Recent research focusing on Los Angeles finds that the city’s poorest neighborhoods have the largest percentage of “hyper-commuters” – people who commute 90 minutes or more one way to work. The preponderance of those long-distance commuters – often construction workers and laborers who drive from inner-city Los Angeles to far-flung ...
PRI Sacramento Policy Conference: Improving the Quality of Life in Our Cities
Our podcast this week features a panel from PRI’s 5th Annual Ideas in Action Conference in Sacramento.
Government Size Boosts Corruption
Government Size Boosts Corruption John Seiler | March 10, 2023 Does the size of government reflect the level of corruption? I’ve come up with a way to test that. It involves two variables. First, U.S. city corruption scandals, 2020 to the present, where an official was convicted. Wikipedia lists 12. ...
Costly union-only agreements result in fewer city projects
From street repairs to building construction, municipal infrastructure projects are costly, but often necessary, endeavors. To get them done in the most cost-effective manner possible, city taxpayers are best served by having open, competitive markets for contracts to complete such projects efficiently and at the best price. This might sound like ...