I’m not in the business of gentrifying anybody’s city. I’m just trying to get by till the day I die. — The other day, a Charlie Brown article hit my inbox. Charlie and I are friends. We often promote one another’s work, as we tend to see eye-to-eye on our overlapping themes. However, as I started to read this particular story, I thought — for just a second, or maybe a…

Other than homelessness — The best U.S. cities have something wrong with them that, no matter how much progress we make, we’ll likely never fix. It ties directly to a couple of things happening over the next few days and weeks. One, my girlfriend and I leave for a month-long trip to Spain and…

This bodes well for cities of all sizes — When I say dead big city downtown referring to Downtown Los Angeles, consider my frame of reference. It goes back to 2008 and an article I wrote for an urban planning site about the time I spent doing research in Skid Row. The neighborhood on the eastern edge of DTLA. 'Broken Windows' Rebuffed: The Social Life of Skid Row As an urbanist I grow weary of repeated references to Jane Jacobs. Large numbers of planners and architects have heeded…www.planetizen.com

They’re mostly psychological — So much of what we’ve been discussing in recent weeks deals with people living beyond their means. Crazy stories of $1,000-plus car payments and people making six figures apparently living paycheck to paycheck. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are people truly struggling in the face of…

Maybe you can relate? Because it’s critical to reducing stress and doing better with money — Depending on where you live — or want to live — there’s a good chance you make this one money decision multiple times. Hopefully you know you’re making it. Because it might be one of the most important decisions you make in your life. For me, it wasn’t all that…

Focus on the in-the-moment, on-the-spot money decisions we all make most days — As if it couldn’t get any more absurd. Last week, we discussed the inanity of a $1,000-plus car payment. Apparently, 15.7% of new vehicle buyers decided to go down this road at the end of last year. Now, we learn that, as of Q3 last year, 19% of new and…

A positive prediction on the future of increasingly urban Los Angeles — When I studied urban planning in college between 2002 and 2008, most professors used the following North American cities to illustrate all the good things about cities and emerging urban planning — New York, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Mexico City first followed by the occasional mention of Boston, Chicago, Denver…

Medium readers dropping wisdom and great personal stories in the comments — The Medium article I wrote the other day is one of those Medium articles where, after reading the responses, I feel a whole lot better about things than when I was writing the article. A Pathetic Example of Living Beyond Your Means That We Have Normalized You’re better off buying a $30 pizza, twice a week, every weekthemakingofamillionaire.com

It’s not really a budget because budgeting sucks — My girlfriend and I watch our fair share of reality TV. Particularly some variation of matchmaking shows. Quite frequently, you’ll see singles say they’re looking for somebody to build an empire with. Or they refer to their legacy. Beyond the self-centered nature of those modern cliches, references to my legacy…