Follow one town's actual attention for a season and the allocation stops making sense. A parks department commissions two hazard assessments on a single oak […]
Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]
Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen *Quercus* species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
[The Municipal Trilemma](/posts/the-municipal-trilemma) worked through pickleball as the cleanest small-stakes instance of the boundary problem this site keeps finding at every scale: a court's value to the players and its cost to the neighbors are both real, both large, and […]
Swap out the council, the mayor, the party in charge of a given town, and three problems stay exactly where they were. They aren't failures of any particular administration's competence or good faith. They're built into what a municipality *is* […]
Our federalism pieces have spent months on a single recurring question: at what altitude should a given decision actually be made. [Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty](/posts/splitting-the-atom-of-sovereignty) described a constitutional design that keeps that question open and arguable rather than settling […]
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