A radical idea–a city should look like a city. From the Metropolitan Planning Council’s recommendations for the new Chicago zoning code (“Issue Brief,” February): “MPC proposes that areas within a quarter mile of transit hubs (rail stations and intersections of high-ridership bus routes) be designated transit-oriented development districts. Such districts would: require ground-floor commercial uses along major streets; encourage mixed uses (from residential to office) on upper floors; prohibit auto-oriented uses like repair shops and drive-through businesses; require parking lots to be concealed from the street; and encourage higher densities.”
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I’m from the government, and I’m here to make sure child care is perfectly safe and perfectly unaffordable. In a recent working paper published by Northwestern University’s Joint Center for Poverty Research (“Policy Brief,” volume four, number one), economists Janet Currie and V. Joseph Hotz find that “requiring directors of child care centers to have more education significantly reduces the risk of both fatal and nonfatal injuries [to children], as does requiring lower child-staff ratios. However, these improvements do not come without costs. Families in states with staunch regulations are often priced out of the market, forcing parents to seek other, potentially less safe, forms of care.”
“More than 31,000 nuclear weapons are still maintained by the eight known nuclear powers,” reports the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March/April), published in Hyde Park. “Despite a campaign promise to rethink nuclear policy, the Bush administration has taken no steps to significantly alter nuclear targeting doctrine or reduce the day-to-day alert status of U.S. nuclear forces. If Russia is no longer an adversary, what is the rationale for retaining the ability to incinerate more than 2,000 Russian targets?”
