Pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high last year, according to preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association.

By the numbers: Drivers struck and killed more than 7,400 people in 2021, and the percentage of children killed by speeding drivers more than doubled since 2018.

On the I-57 highway through Illinois, time seems to go backward with each southbound mile.

The houses and cars in the yards get older. As years pass, town populations shrink. Eventually, homes turn back into piles of disconnected wood and glass, then empty lots. At the end of the highway, the town of Cairo slowly sinks back into the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

It is nearly noon, and a Los Angeles sanitation crew is wrapping up dismantling the home of Jack Rivers.

A yellow-vested worker rakes the narrow strip of dirt where the veteran’s tarp-covered dwelling once stood – part of a highly controversial homeless encampment of about 200 people jammed along the iconic boardwalk at Venice Beach.

Urbanists lament the fact that the average American knows and cares little about the built environment, but this sad reality has a significant upside. Because urban policy is a relatively fringe topic, it presents what is in today’s political climate a rare opportunity: the chance to make converts to conservative principles through rational persuasion.

The coronavirus pandemic has affected every part of the United States, but some of the most dramatic impacts have been felt in the nation’s biggest cities. New York City was the early epicenter of the outbreak. More recently, Los Angeles has become the country’s biggest COVID-19 hot spot.

KIM WALESH HAS lived steps from downtown San Jose for two decades, and she readily admits that her neighborhood is not what you'd expect for the so-called “capital” of Silicon Valley—“small” and “undeveloped” are her first words to describe it. But Walesh, who directs economic development for the city, has long worked to enliven it, and four years ago she helped secure a crown jewel: a new Google campus on the west side of downtown. Unlike the region’s infamously cloistered office parks, Google’s plan embraced a newer model integrating tech offices with housing, transit, and public spaces.

Roughly a net of 70,000 New York City residents have left the area since COVID-19 first hit the country earlier this year, resulting in approximately $34 billion in lost income, according to a study released Tuesday by location analytics company Unacast.

The report, which examined the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on three New York City neighborhoods — Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Astoria in Queens and Tribeca in Lower Manhattan — found that about 3.57 million people in total left the city this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7.

During the months of the Covid-19 lockdowns, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers fled the city, some for second homes in the country and some to resettle in the suburbs. The flight began in March and April, and got turbocharged after Memorial Day with the riots and looting that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. City life had practically overnight become a low-value deal: no more restaurants, stores vandalized, museums and theaters shuttered. All the amenity trade-offs for cramming your family into a 900-square-foot apartment were gone.

The crime and chaos in Democrat-run cities have gotten so bad that liberals are even getting out of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Rather than rethink their destructive policies, the left wants to make sure there is no escape. The plan is to remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern. As usual, anyone who dares tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were virtually no zoning laws in the United States. By 1921, zoning had come to 48 large U.S. cities, representing a fifth of the country's population. By 1932, 1,165 municipal governments had adopted zoning, covering more than two-thirds of the urban population. By 1968, nearly every metropolitan government had zoning, as did large swaths of rural America.