Duncan Mackenzie

Waterways surrounding cities were once filled with toxic industrial sludge. Now they're the new recreation frontier - Duncan Mackenzie

I spent a fascinating day this week at the Techonomy conference in Detroit, and came away with a new appreciation for why I should get out of Washington more than I do. - Duncan Mackenzie

More than one in seven young Americans are "disconnected" from work and from school, according to a report released Thursday by the Social Science Research Council's Measure of America project. - Duncan Mackenzie

Voting began today for America's Transportation Award, the annual infrastructure competition organized by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). So what sort of offerings have made the cut? Pittsburgh's new, free section of a subway line? New York City's bike lanes? Dallas' new freeway-capping downtown park? The suspense is killing me... Wrong and wrong again! All ten projects that AASHTO selected for the final round are highways. - Duncan Mackenzie

When rail goes in, ridership goes up. At least, that's what's happened in Los Angeles, where the county's transportation authority, Metro, has gone on a more than two-decade binge of light rail and subway development. A new analysis of transit ridership before and after the four lines opened shows that overall ridership has dramatically increased with rail in the picture. - Duncan Mackenzie

Do neighborhoods work like habitat for different kinds of households? City populations have rebounded in the past two decades as people who like city habitats have grown in numbers and in their share of the population. - Duncan Mackenzie

Mariela Alfonzo remembers when she really got the message about what’s important to real estate developers. She was discussing big-box stores with an investor in Orange County, California, who had put a lot of dollars into strip malls and megastores. - Duncan Mackenzie

Real-estate website Trulia's "Summer 2012 Rent vs. Buy" report, released Thursday, points to the large U.S. metros where owning a house, when taxes and other transaction and opportunity costs are included, is actually considerably cheaper than renting one. These latest findings echo numbers found in prior reports. - Duncan Mackenzie

Over the past half-decade, Yelp has become the king of the crowd-sourced-reviews hill, with some 27 million reviews and an average of 70 million unique visitors per month. But despite its prominence, its effects have been difficult for researchers to pin down. How much do Yelp ratings affect a restaurant's business? - Duncan Mackenzie