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.
Denver bike experiment: In 2020, Denver voters approved a sales tax to create a Climate Protection Fund. This year, the fund was used in part to test ways in which the city could boost biking, contracting with community groups to offer people different incentives to bike. The one that worked best was a $1-per-mile program; many of the riders kept going on two wheels after the program ended. (Kyle Harris | Denverite)
Traffic deaths reduced in Wales: One hundred fewer deaths and serious injuries were reported in the first year after implementation of 20-mph speed limits on many Welsh roads; collisions were down 26% from the year before. The period from July to September 2024 saw the lowest rate of casualties for that quarter since records began in 1979. Wales’ chief statistician urges caution about using the information until there are several years’ worth of data, but the initial results are promising. (David Deans | BBC)
Converting offices to co-housing: A new report from Pew Charitable Trusts and Gensler (a design and architecture firm) looked at the feasibility of converting vacant office space to dorm-style co-housing in Los Angeles and Houston. Plumbing in office buildings is concentrated in the center of the structure, making this design — with small apartments around the perimeter and shared kitchens, laundry, bathrooms, and living rooms in the center — much less expensive than conversion to traditional apartments. Tenants would pay about half the current median rent in each city, and the conversions would require a relatively low public subsidy per unit. (Alex Horowitz & Tushar Kansal | Pew)
Home buyers versus investors in Philadelphia: Researchers at a Philadelphia area CDFI (community development financial institution) divided the city’s housing market into nine categories and found that the neighborhoods in the most affordable four categories saw prices increase at a much faster rate than prices citywide over a five-year period. This has been driven by investors, who are more likely to purchase homes not in “hot” neighborhoods, but in areas where they can exploit the rent gap — areas that are also more likely to be “majority minority.” This creates the toxic mix that leads to displacement and denial of opportunities for moderate-income home buyers of color. Advocacy organizations and nonprofits could help by creating more opportunities to get people into homes or ensuring that they can remain in the homes they own. (Emily Dowdall, Katharine Nelson and Michelle Schmitt | Nonprofit Quarterly)
Microplastics filling our brains: Microplastics are becoming more prevalent in human tissue, including the brain. From 2016 to 2024, samples taken from the brain tissue of people after their deaths, no matter their age, have shown a 50% increase. Microplastics have numerous sources but often come from car tires, synthetic textiles, and the inside of disposable water bottles. The impacts of this invasion could include increased inflammation and a connection with many poor health outcomes. (Shannon Osaka | Washington Post)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Professor Sara Bronin to talk about her book Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.
Quote of the Day
“On the face of it, the memo’s commitment to ‘the accessibility of transportation to families with young children’ might sound benign — until you consider that truly doing so would require confronting the devastating cost of universal car dependence on American families, something neither Duffy nor Trump is proposing.”
— Kea Wilson in Streetsblog USA discussing a new U.S. Department of Transportation memo that would use birth and marriage rates as criteria for transportation funding.