George Matysik
Congratulations to George for being the first respondent to identify all of the first three pictures correctly.  Only one other person got all three correct: friend of It’s Our City (yes, he gets FoIOC status), Greg Heller. No one else even answered two of the three correctly.
As it turns out, my bonus picture was [...]

“I’m not sure that the era of sprawl is over, but the paradigm of unlimited suburban and exurban growth has definitely shifted.” - Ed McMahon, senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute (from High Country News).
Smart Growth Around America checked in on the one-year anniversary of Chris Leinberger’s much discussed Atlantic article foretelling the rise [...]

So if reading my live blog from earlier this evening just wasn’t enough and you want to see how some of the most powerful officials in state government are tackling the issues outlined in the Economy League’s budget primer, tune to WHYY-TV on Sunday, May 3 at 6 p.m.  That’s when we’re airing the program [...]

By Dan Pohlig
(Live blog) Is there a governmental body that isn’t experiencing “tight times” these days?  Heck, is there a household or corporation that hasn’t had to cut back?
Everywhere you turn, there’s more news about layoffs, program cuts, loss of funding, unemployment, bankruptcy and just pure budgetary chaos.  The government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [...]

Atrios points out that the city’s parking meter rate increases in Center City and University City are going perfectly according to plan:
Parking is getting easier in Center City, apparently because of higher parking meter rates enacted in January, according to the most recent “meter occupancy rate” survey by the Philadelphia Parking Authority.
A year ago, 97 [...]

I remember the last time we were talking about magic numbers. It was during those brisk fall days in 2008 when a minor blip in the subprime housing market had only begun to be an economy crippling downturn. A young Johnny McCain still held out hope that he would pull off an upset for the [...]

[UPDATE: I forgot to turn comments off so to my commenter who got through before I turned off comments, I have your submission and I'll send to Masashi.  Everyone else, please email mhanada (at) whyy.org with your replies.)
We got some great response to weeks 1 and 2 of our photo scavenger hunt so we’re going [...]

Last week when I revealed the answers, I feel like I buried the lede and relegated our contest winners to the bottom of a long post that most folks probably lost interest in about 200 words in. So without further ado, the first person to email Masashi with the correct answers to this week’s contest [...]

Two days ago I wrote with some interest about a little bit of information that I came across in a story about the South Street bridge reconstruction.  Long story short, traffic on I-76 seems to be moving along pretty well without the South Street entrance and exit ramps and it seems that street traffic in [...]

Philadelphia Research Initiative Poll (.pdf) as reported today on Philly.com:
Of the 800 respondents, 48 percent said they preferred to receive fewer services but pay no more in taxes, and 35 percent indicated they would rather pay higher taxes and not reduce services.
…
Among its other findings, 53 percent of those asked opposed Nutter’s plan to raise [...]