Two to pass along:
NeoHouston has a great piece comparing the street interfaces of good urbanism and bad urbanism, with a nice use of Houston projects to illustrate his point.
Julio Gonzalez at Keep Austin Wonky argues against Austin "exceptionalism"; i.e., perhaps we're not as great as we thing. A nicely contrarian piece.
I like his conclusion but am less confident about his analysis. He runs a regression purporting to show that, among Texas cities, Austin's median household income is low given its high share of residents with masters, professional and doctoral degrees. My criticisms: (1) he should run his regression on metropolitan areas rather than municipalities because high-wage earners tend to cluster together in exclusive suburbs (this would require using a national panel since there aren't enough Texas metropolitan areas); (2) he should use gross metropolitan product rather than household income; and (3) we should keep in mind that Austin has an unusually high proportion of masters and Ph.D. because of UT; it is an outlier.
