The New Republic

You’re a local government. You have a mostly minority population in an impoverished post-industrial area. You’re in debt by the billions, but paying it off would require taxes that residents can't afford. But wait, you’re in luck! Or maybe you’re out of luck? Either way, get ready: You’re about to get taken over. READ MORE >>

On a sunny, freezing cold January at the main entrance to Washington, D.C.'s Union Station, with cabs jostling for position to drop passengers off, Travis Kalanick searched his pockets and black backpack for his iPhone—the same one that he, the CEO of sedan-hailing app Uber, had used to summon the black SUV that just dropped us off. Phone located, we forged past a scrum of people waiting for people to be paired with taxis. READ MORE >>

This past Sunday, the front page of the New York Times Book Review ran a caustic essay by DePaul University professor Rachel Shteir about "poor Chicago." Disguising it as a review of three new volumes about the city's past, Shteir wrote a blistering epitaph for its present and future. She complains about the murder rate, rightly, but also about the weather, a certain baseball team, the cost of parking, and even the sales tax. READ MORE >>

First came the smoky streets, then the deserted ones. So much about the past few days has felt like a particularly twisted action movie—fire, explosions, injured and discombobulated people running helter-skelter—but certain images coming from Boston and its suburbs in the past 24 hours have seemed more like stills from a post-apocalyptic film than anything else—the kind where emptiness is eerie, and anything but peaceful. READ MORE >>

Over the past decade or so, an influx of young professionals has transformed the character of faltering urban neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Bushwick and working-class preserves in Chicago and Atlanta. READ MORE >>

On Wednesday morning, in a ground-floor auditorium at the headquarters of the Washington Post,  Donald Trump and daughter Ivanka–who last year won the right to redevelop the iconic Old Post Office as a 250-room luxury hotel–had their formal introduction to polite D.C. READ MORE >>

It’s been a rough week for the much-touted urbanization of the Washington DC suburbs. As much as any place in the country, they have emerged as a major test of whether municipalities can redeem the planning and development sins of the second half of the 20th century. READ MORE >>

It starts with the local brewpub. Always with the goddamn local brewpub, located in some renovated craftsman schoolhouse or 1920s fire station with the locally sourced Czechoslovakian-style hops and the brewmaster with the certification from the Golden Barley Council or whatever governing body oversees alcoholic hipsterdom. READ MORE >>

A funny thing happened in the half century since Jane Jacobs published her classic treatise excoriating the planning establishment for clear-cutting American cities and replacing eclectic neighborhoods with sterile housing towers: Her vision of urban change won the day. READ MORE >>

Let no one fault local governments for hiding from the networked era. Nearly every official and government agency in a major metro area uses Facebook and Twitter, and some cities have hosted app development contests to get their citizens coming up with ways to use public data for good. Local electeds can even establish their popular bona fides simply through the assiduous use of social media. READ MORE >>