I thought it was funny the idea that New Urbanists are this big powerful entity pushing all these regulations and codes in place, as if building developers and their investors don't have any sort of input.
Also he fails to provide any sort of evidence these new codes and regulations pushed by new urbanists are responsible for sprawl. Especially when most of the suburbs mentioned in the article are much older than new urbanist policies.
10 years ago is when Shoup's book 'The High Cost of Free Parking' came out, and it's unlikely that what you remember from Reason is older than that.
Indeed, searching the Reason archive, the oldest reference I found was from 2009, at https://reason.com/archives/2009/02/27/a-better-new-new-deal... , in reference to Shoup's book. Shoup wrote on op-ed in in the NYT in 2007 (see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/opinion/29shoup.html?_r=0) and a search finds Shoup talking about it in the NYT in 1980, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E03E0D81038E... .
So it doesn't sounds like Reason was significantly ahead of the times enough to be snarky about.
What? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Sprawl was fueled by tax and land use policy, where the urban areas were looted to subsidize McMansions and track housing.
The recent sky rocketing rents are caused by a massive demographic shift and urban areas not upzoning fast enough, allowing supply to meet demand.
Pretty simple cause and effects here. Exhaustively documented.
Urban elites? Is that the new pejorative for "reality based"?
Why New Urbanism Doesn't Work: https://reason.com/archives/2013/06/07/why-new-urbanism-does... - "Urban elitists don’t recognize that their policies helped create the “sprawl” that they disdain. It’s not as if middle-income San Jose workers would choose to live over the mountain ranges in places such as Tracy"
Self-driving cars could destroy fine-based city government! https://reason.com/blog/2015/07/15/self-driving-cars-could-d... - "What's the downside? Increasing automation limits the ability of authorities to profit off human error."