Adam is passionate about urbanism, and founded this site in 2008, after realizing that free market advocates and urbanists actually share many objectives, despite being at odds in many spheres of the intellectual discussion. His mission is to improve the urban experience, and overcoming obstacles that prevent aspiring city dwellers from living where they want. He intends to pursue these objectives through this website and his entrepreneurial endeavors.
Adam is the Founder of the Center for Market Urbanism and Co-founder of Parafin, a software that helps real estate developers acquire development sites by generating optimized building configurations, budgets, and financial models.
Growing up in suburban Chicago, Adam suspected there was something inefficient about the land patterns and transportation of the suburbs. When introduced to urbanist ideas in freshman architecture/planning coursework, the concepts made sense, despite the paternalistic bent of the professors who presented them. Thus, he became conflicted between the urbanist instinct and the free market instinct. Through study and practice of building design, infrastructure design, construction, economics, planning, development, and urban economics Adam concluded that our problems with sprawl, congestion, and automobile dependency were largely the result of socialistic oversupply of transportation systems and top-down regimentation of land use, not due to market failures as many urbanists proclaim.
In starting this conversation, Adam intended to present arguments and articles which help spread the results of his inquiry. He doesn’t expect to convince everyone to completely adopt his point of view, hopes to convince everyone that there are many cases in which better outcomes would be achieved if the government intervened less. He seeks to convince those with ambitious plans for society to be more humble in asserting how society should be laid out.
We hope you find the site interesting.