I wanted to take a moment to highlight a site I've grown fond of in recent months, and I think it's an incredibly important site to boot. Chuck Marohn, a civil engineer in Minnesota, is the author of Strong Towns, a site that chronicles at length the unsustainable development path our nation has been on for decades. It seems that several years ago, as an active civil engineer doing projects across the Gopher State, he had an epiphany -- sprawl development can never pay for the infrastructure needed to support it, and our sprawl preference is driving our nation into debt. This is best described in his Growth Ponzi Scheme series. He has since turned his profitable civil engineering work into nonprofit advocacy for Smart Growth policies in small places -- Strong Towns.
I find this to be supremely important because this is the flip side of disinvestment in inner cities. People like Michael Porter of Harvard have been touting the competitive advantage of inner cities for ages, with only incremental success. It's only when we realize the folly of much of the Suburban Experiment (not all of it, much of it) that the equilibrium will shift.
On another sort of related note, I'm going officially acknowledge the shift of focus of this blog. I originally intended to discuss things such as the plight of midsize Midwestern industrial cities, but I seem to have found a niche writing about inner city decline and renewal in general, and Detroit in particular. They say the number one rule of writing is to write what you know, and that is certainly where my passion is. Look to see more articles with similar themes in the future.