Every day, The Overhead Wire collects news about cities and sends the links to their email list. At the end of the week they take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to Streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. They are national and international links, sometimes entertaining or absurd but often useful.
Rethinking La Rambla: In Barcelona, officials are worried about over-tourism in the form of rowdy bachelor and bachelorette parties and the proliferation of what some see as tacky souvenir shops and restaurants along La Rambla. To remedy this, the street will be redesigned with sidewalks widened to five meters (16 feet) and vehicle lanes reduced for internal trips and buses while three new public squares will be created. Not in the plans are a focus on housing and commercial support to bring a more diverse crowd. (Ianko López | El Pais)
HUD considers cash over vouchers: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering restarting an experiment it started over 50 years ago that gave cash aid to people seeking housing instead of vouchers. Vouchers’ social stigma has kept some landlords from renting to people with them despite federal laws against housing discrimination. Studies show 40% of voucher holders can’t find a place within the first six months of looking. (Jennifer Ludden | NPR)
As sea level rises, Galveston keeps building: After a 1900 hurricane devastated the island community of Galveston, Texas, and moved the state’s center of gravity to Houston, the city raised the land and built a 17-foot sea wall around the city. Now, as sea level rise gathers pace, so does the likelihood of future flooding and disasters. But developers are still keen to build in unprotected areas because there is money to be made — and because, it seems, they believe they can beat nature. (Chris Mooney, John Muyskens and Brady Dennis | Washington Post)
A narrow townhouse in Pittsburgh: Developers surveyed 10,000 homeowners and renters during the pandemic to find out how the ordeal changed people’s thinking about their homes. The result was a home called the “Picket Fence,” a three-story design with an accessory dwelling unit on the bottom floor. At just 16 feet wide, it can be pre-fabricated offsite and brought in on trucks while also fitting on the small 20-foot-wide lots that dominate older manufacturing cities. (Adele Peters | Fast Company)
Risks of the self-fulfilling travel model: A new U.S. Department of Transportation forecast of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) predicts increased driving out to 2050 — in other words, past trends will continue into the future. Todd Litman argues this is bad planning because it doesn’t take into account underlying factors that may impact travel activity. Nor does it recognize that, in fact, vehicle travel peaked in 2004. These sorts of forecasts can be self-fulfilling and may force us to spend money on adding road capacity for a predicted future that may never come. (Todd Litman | Planetizen)
This week on the podcast, we’re joined by podcaster and transit expert Paul Comfort and former California State Transportation Agency Secretary David Kim to talk about their ensemble book, “The New Future of Public Transportation.”
Quote of the Week
“There was no [other] study like that. There was no literature, so I had to start from scratch…. I found that…from the 1930s…until 1978, [roughly] 82 percent of all the garbage disposed in Houston was disposed in predominantly Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks made up only 25 percent of the population during that period.”
— Dr. Robert Bullard, father of the environmental justice movement, discussing his early work. He was awarded the ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development