—In our latest featured essay, Informationist Bruce Abramson examines ironies of eminent domain in San Francisco.

—The new urbanist vacation home? Slate architectural critic Witold Rybczynski's slideshow of the model town of Seaside, Florida, 25 years after its founding.

—Julia Vitullo-Martin takes a smart and nuanced look at the announced (though not certain) sale of Brooklyn's immense Starrett City housing project to private investors.

—Are pay-offs from big developers in exchange for zoning variances the best way to subsidize affordable housing? Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels thinks so.

—From Florida, a tough view of how government subsidized "affordable housing has migrated from 'low-income' people to non-career workers in the 'service economy' and now to the professionals and craftsmen long thought of as the ballast of our society -- firefighters, police officers, teachers, construction workers and others who have good jobs."

—Edward Glaeser's review of Nathan Glazer's collection of essays on modernism, From a Cause to a Style. From 60 years out, it's striking to recall modernism as a social movement, offering inexpensive quarters to the urban masses. We'll post a review of Glazer's book by President and CEO of the Congress for New Urbanism and former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist next week.

—Daley easily wins a sixth term in Chicago, matching his father's record. While this is rumored to be his last term, he's wasting no time flexing his political muscle, reviving an old plan of his father for the Crosstown to serve as both a new rapid transit line and a way for trucks to bypass downtown.

—Are free rapid transit fares the carrot to go along with the stick of congestion pricing? One member of the Los Angeles Board of Transportation Commissioners makes the case. Meanwhile, San Francisco's already heavily-subsidized mass transportation system has a big problem with farebeaters.