Analytical reports on public affairs and policy
Throughout my adult life, I have maintained a strong interest in area development. I have been especially interested in urban development and redevelopment, and therein, I have given much attention to our return to the denser and more traditional urban development patterns of the past, which I believe, with Jane Jacobs and others, produce inherently more interesting, stimulating, vital, healthy, sustainable, efficient, and productive places. Indeed, cities are exciting, and they bring us together as we are in our own circumstances, with our own perspectives, so that we might face the challenges of those whose preferences, proclivities, and perspectives may be very different from our own. And it is in the challenges and blessings of these meetings that human societies have always produced the greatest fruits of human creativity and material, cultural, and social advancement. Cities move humanity forward, and no society can grow and thrive without them. And, in truth, the virtual substitute for the these effects of cities, has not proven itself to be anything above or beyond a conversation of conversations all grounded most essentially in the physical world, and the agencies and activities which we may practice and know therein. The Internet and the World Wide Web, then, have become, undoubtedly, important venues of social, cultural, and economic exchange, but these exchanges, I believe, are only reflections, embellishments, or outgrowths of those competitions and conversations which are happening in our urban regions, and especially at their centers, and which make America, in essence and in truth, very much an urban nation. Having said that, however, having been raised in a small city, perched amongst the heavily eroded remains of the Allegheny Plateau, which are amongst the northernmost reaches of the Appalachian Region, I have maintained an interest in rural development as well, which I exercised especially in my work with the Appalachian Regional Commission, as I served as their sole Graduate Governors' Intern for the State of New York. And so, here are a selection of the policy analysis reports which I have prepared for a number of organizations, for a number of purposes, all of which i believe in heartily.