[eschaton]

1. There is absolutely nothing wrong with urban public schools in the U.S. in general. If the youngish parents who move to the suburbs "for the schools" just enrolled their kids in the city school in their neighborhood, the kids would have functionally identical life outcomes. Our entire system of valuing neighborhoods based upon school districts is a sham.

2. Streetcar suburban neighborhoods are boring and interchangeable across a huge swathe of the country. In much of the U.S. real urban neighborhoods stopped being built closer to 1890 than 1950, or even 1920.

3. Walkability is great if you can afford it, but not the end-all for urbanity. I think being in a neighborhood without great commercial amenities but solid transit links to your job is more transformative than one which is a walkers paradise but where you need to use a car to get to work.

4. It's possible to overdo both historic preservation and street trees.

5. We need to develop a paradigm of walkibility which goes beyond access to formalized commerce.