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Alan Ehrenhalt

Alan Ehrenhalt

Contributing Editor

Alan Ehrenhalt served for 19 years as executive editor of Governing Magazine, and is currently one of its contributing editors. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and op-ed page, the Washington Post Book World, New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of four books: The United States of Ambition, The Lost City, Democracy in the Mirror, and The Great Inversion. He was also the creator and editor of the first four editions of Politics in America, a biennial reference book profiling all 535 members of Congress. Alan Ehrenhalt is a 1968 graduate of Brandeis University and holds an MS in journalism from Columbia. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard from 1977-1978; a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987-1988; a Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA in 2006; an adjunct faculty member at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, at the University of Richmond, from 2004 through 2008; and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland Graduate School of Public Policy in 2009. In 2000 he received the American Political Science Association’s McWilliams award for distinguished contributions to the field of political science by a journalist. He is married, has two daughters, and lives in Arlington, Virginia.

He can be reached at ehrenhalt@yahoo.com.

Modular houses assembled from factory-built components are cheaper to build and the governor of Colorado is all in on them. They won't solve the housing problem but can be part of the solution.
Just not many that pay much.
It’s been a topic for decades. Some blame cars. Some blame uninviting public spaces. Maybe there are some small things communities could do that would help.
No longer isolated by a freeway, San Francisco’s Ferry Building doesn’t have the worldwide fame of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. But a new book argues that it has shaped both its own city and the built environment in many others.
Chicago is pondering city-owned grocery stores in its poor neighborhoods. It might be a worthwhile experiment.
Investing in poor neighborhoods or dispersing the poor citywide each have their proponents. But place-based strategies — improving neighborhoods — may be our only feasible option.
One scholar thinks we have carried our penchant for urban tree-worship a bit too far, giving nature too much credit for city-dwellers’ mental health.
Dissident counties are joining quixotic efforts to secede from their states in much of the country. They’re a manifestation of real political resentments and a way to attract some attention.
Pollution-control laws were never intended to block residential and transportation development. But that’s how they’re being misused all over the country.
North Carolina, where cities large and small are creating open-container “social districts,” is about to find out.