A study released a few weeks ago, conducted by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, documented a significant increase in the death rate among the white working class in the US, much of it due to suicide and substance abuse. In one interview about the report, Deaton suggests that the reason for the increase is the increasing economic insecurity this group faces. As he told Vox’s Julia Bellus, they have “lost the narratives of their lives.” Not surprisingly, op-eds flew right and left about this report, from Rod Dreher in The American Conservative and R.R. Reno in First Things to Paul Krugman in the New York Times and Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. This study is the latest contribution to an expanding public discussion about changes in white working-class culture, which Jack Metzgar has traced in a series of posts here about books by Andrew Cherlin, Robert Putnam, and others.

As both Ross Douthat and Krugman note in their New York Times columns responding to the study, the rising death rate cannot be explained solely in economic terms. Douthat rejects the claims of some conservatives, including Reno, that the report reflects the consequences of liberal policy and moral decline, arguing that we must recognize that “stagnating wages” play a part in changing social patterns. But, he argues, what matters most is how economic changes have left white working-class people with “a feeling thatwhat you were supposed to have has been denied you.” As Krugman puts it, they were “raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.”

While, as Metzgar has pointed out, recent studies of white working-class culture often begin with problematic assumptions, they nonetheless (and sometimes inadvertently) make clear that economic restructuring has social consequences that extend far beyond the factory floor or corporate offices. We are rightly concerned not only with what this means for income inequality and social justice but also for the quality of people’s lives and the way working-class experience translates into politics. As Dreher argues, we can draw a clear connection between the “dispossession” of the white working class and the popularity of Donald Trump. The “politics of resentment” that John Russo and I traced in Youngstown twenty years ago seems to have become a national pattern.

If we want to understand the social and cultural patterns fully, I would argue, we must consider not only the material conditions or social structures that shape economic experience but also how people interpret those experiences and construct their identities in response to them. We would do well to attend not only to statistical evidence but also to stories, which provide insight into how people experience and make sense of economic and social changes. This is the kind of insight that literature can provide. By representing the social world through the stories of individuals, fiction, especially, can help us understand what large-scale change looks and feels like on a personal, subjective level.

The long-term effects of deindustrialization – what I refer to as its half-life – have generated not only measurable social patterns like rising death rates but also a growing body of literature. If you want to understand the “lost narrative” of contemporary working-class lives, you might well begin with these books.

In Coal Run, by Pennsylvania writer Tawni O’Dell, we meet a character who exemplifies the lost sense of self as well as the addiction, anger, and self-destructive behavior reflected in the rising death rates. Ivan Zoschenko is a former high school and college football star who has returned to his home town, where the last of the local mines is about to shut down. He feels like a failure, especially in comparison with his hard-working miner father, who taught him the importance of finding a sense of purpose through one’s work. Working as a deputy sheriff, Ivan mediates domestic disputes spurred by the town’s economic struggles, and in the process he reconnects with his working-class community and gains a renewed sense of purpose and belonging.

Philipp Meyer offers a less hopeful story in American Rust, which follows two young men in a former steel town, both struggling to figure out their futures. One, known as the smartest kid in his high school class, dreams of escaping his hometown, studying astrophysics, and working at a research institute, but as the sole caregiver for his father, who was seriously injured in an accident in the steel mill, he cannot bring himself to leave. His dream remains beyond his reach. His best friend, Billy Poe, can’t even imagine a future for himself, and when he is jailed for a murder he didn’t commit, he gives up. In his eyes, “this place had been waiting for him. There were those who had capabilities and those who didn’t and even in his glory days he had known it, known they would figure it out one day, a bullet he would never dodge.” Meyer’s characters are younger than the middle-aged white working-class people whose death rates Case and Deaton tracked, but they display a similar sense of hopelessness.

Indeed, deindustrialization literature suggests that – as Jennifer Silva found in her study, Coming Up Short – younger working-class people have inherited a feeling of being at once trapped and betrayed, though often with a fuzzier idea of exactly how they have been let down. Two contemporary novels focused on workers in service jobs highlight this well. In Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, we follow restaurant manager Manny DeLeon through his last shift at a suburban Red Lobster that is about to close. He takes pride in his work, but that provides only partial compensation for the conflicts he experiences in his interactions with both the corporation and the other workers, yet he sees no other options for himself.

Finally, one of the most entertaining but also troubling novels I’ve read about contemporary working-class life is Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör. Designed as a mock-Ikea catalog, the novel highlights the soul sucking working conditions of corporate retail through the encounters of the “partners” (sales clerks) of Orsk, an Ikea knock-off, with a horde of zombies. The zombies were imprisoned on that site in the 1830s, when it was the Cuyahoga Panopticon, run by a sadistic warden who believed that hard labor was a “moral treatment that will mend your degraded minds,” while also generating profits for him. While readers may laugh at the line drawings of torture devices like the Alboterk treadmill desk, complete with spikes and shackles, the novel also critiques the limitations that working-class people face when working conditions are exploitative and wages stagnant. As the main character laments, “for all the fighting, all the struggle, all the scrimping, and saving, and double shifts” of recent years, she never has enough money to buy gas and food, and she is always in debt. Rather than recognizing the external causes of her difficulties, however, she internalizes the situation and accepts her fate, believing that this is what she deserves, what “she’d been born to do: wear a uniform and work a register. . . . to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks.”   Reading this novel, it’s easy to understand why some might turn to drugs and alcohol, or even to suicide.

Among the most troubling insights from these novels is this: most of these novels focus on characters who are younger than the subjects of Case and Deaton’s study, which suggests a disturbing pattern as the next generation of working-class people come of age. High rates of addiction, depression, and suicide may well continue as some struggle with what has become a long-term “dispossession,” while others accept low expectations as a new normal, as Silva observed in her study. Like the protagonist of Horrorstör, working-class people may come to believe that low wages, poor working conditions, and perpetual struggle are what they deserve. And that is the stuff of tragedy.

This article first appeared at Working-Class Perspectives.

Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University.  She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown(Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.

American cities seemed to be re-centralizing in the years immediately following the Great Recession, but new American Community Survey data indicates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Americans continue to disperse though at a much reduced rate. The Census Bureau has just released the five year American Community Survey (2010-2014) small area data used by the City Sector Model to report on population trends within functional sectors of metropolitan areas. The City Sector Model classifies small areas as the urban core, suburban or ex-urban without reference to the more traditional analysis method that relied on core cities and suburbs (Note 1). The principal purpose is to compare finer-grained data and trends in parts of the metropolitan area that are more reflective of pre-World War II urban forms and lifestyles (the Urban Core: CBD and the Urban Core Ring) and the balance of the metropolitan area, which is automobile oriented (the Earlier Suburbs, Later Suburbs and Exurbs).

These data were collected over a five year period, with the middle year being 2012. General trends can be examined in comparison to the 2008-2012 American Community Survey, with a middle year of 2010. At the same time, caution is warranted since the American Community Survey is not a count, such as is collected in the decennial censuses. For simplicity, this article refers to the 2010 to 2014 data as 2012 and the 2008 to 2012 data as 2010.

More Modest Dispersion

The continuing dispersion was most evident in the rising 0.4 percentage point share (from 26.9% to 27.3%) in the Later Suburbs – with mid-point construction dates of 1980 or later. Two of the other four functional city sectors experienced declines in their shares, with the higher density, transit-, walking- and cycling-oriented Urban Core Ring dropping from 13.5% to 13.4% and the Earlier Suburbs dropping from 41.9% to 41.6% of the major metropolitan population. The earlier suburbs are automobile oriented and have houses with median construction dates of 1946 through 1979. The Urban Core CBD sector and the exurbs have retained their previous share of the population since 2010 (Figure: Growth Share by City Sector: 2010-2012 and Population Share by City Sector).

Overall the Urban Core, which consists of the CBD and Ring dropped from 14.8% of the population to 14.7%. If this rate were to continue through the 2020 census, the Urban Core share of the major metropolitan area population would drop by 0.5 percentage points, considerably less than the 1.7 percentage point loss between 2000 and 2010. Nonetheless, the suburbs and exurbs accounted for nearly 90% of the growth between 2010 and 2012 (Figure: Population by City Sector). Suburbia, even exurbia, is where the growth is

The new data also suggests that much of that growth was in the suburban areas of the historical core municipalities (newer and automobile oriented). For example, large areas of core cities are functionally suburban, such as in Phoenix, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, Charlotte, and elsewhere.

The bottom line , as we have indicated in previous articles, is this: the data shows virtually no “return to the city.” Between 2010 and 2012 the suburbs and exurbs gained 3.5 million residents, while the Urban Cores gained 400,000. The Exurbs alone gained more population than the Urban Core (CBD and Ring combined). This has also been evident in each year of this decade by the continuing domestic migration to suburban and exurban counties, which has exceeded that of counties that contain the urban cores.

New York, Other Legacy Cities and the Balance

There is considerable variation in the size and growth of Urban Cores among the major metropolitan areas. The Urban Cores in the “legacy cities” are far larger and are capturing a far higher share of their metropolitan area growth. The legacy cities are the six metropolitan areas that have downtowns (central business districts or CBD’s) with more than 200,000 jobs (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington), These are generally older cities and the strength of their Urban Cores is illustrated by the fact that, combined, the core cities of these metropolitan areas account for 55% of the destinations of transit committing trips in the nation.

Even among the legacy cities, strong distinctions exist. New York, with central business district employment of nearly 2 million, has nearly 4 times the jobs that of its Chicago counterpart. Indeed, New York’s central business district employment exceeds that of the combined employment in the downtowns other five legacy cities. Thus, as in other indicators of intense urbanism (such as transit ridership and the share of the national transit ridership increase), New York is in a “league” of its own.

As of 2012, New York’s Urban Core included approximately 53% of the metropolitan area population. This is more than double the 26% share of the metropolitan population in the urban cores of Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington (Figure Legacy Cities and Others: Population).

The difference between the legacy cities and the other 46 metropolitan areas is even more stark. On average, other metropolitan areas have on average only approximately seven percent of their populations in their urban cores, compared to 53 percent in New York and 26 percent in the other five.

There are even greater disparities in population growth. Between 2010 and 2012, 73% of the population growth in the New York metropolitan area was in the Urban Core. This is 2.7 times the average 27% of metropolitan growth in the urban cores of the other five legacy cities. Thus, by two measures, population concentration and population growth in the urban cores, Chicago, Boston and the other legacy cities cannot even present themselves as “little New York's”.

Most other cities are not even in the same league as Chicago or Boston. None achieved a 20 percent Urban Core growth percentage, though St. Louis was close (19.8 percent), and Seattle was next (15.0 percent). The urban core growth in the other 46 cities was less than 6% (Figure Legacy Cities and Others: Growth). Even in Portland, with its strong densification policies biased toward urban core development and discouraging towards suburban development, no more than average 10% of its growth took place in its Urban Core. Nearly 90 percent of Portland’s growth was in the suburbs and exurbs.

Back to Normalcy?

The 2010-2012 data does not indicate a return to the near monopoly on growth enjoyed by the suburbs and exurbs in the 1990s and 2000s. But more recent data suggests stronger suburban performance, as chronicled by William Frey at the Brookings Institution and Jed Kolko at Trulia. At the same time, it is good to see the upward trends in the in the urban cores, which as metropolitan areas as diverse as St. Louis and Seattle show, do not depend on suburban misfortune to prosper. The cores are an important part of a healthy metropolitan system, although in most places they are far smaller in population, and growth, than the suburban rings.

Note: The “City Sector Model” provides data for areas (Zip Code Analysis Zones) within metropolitan areas, as opposed to data based on jurisdictional boundaries, such as city limits. The data is based on small areas, Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA’s). The criteria for classification is indicated in the Figure: City Sector Model Criteria.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: New York's Growing Skyline by Citizen59 (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s Black Friday and I thought I’d do something out of character for me, but entirely in keeping with the season. I went to a shopping mall. For those of you not used to the customs of the United States, the day after Thanksgiving is the official start of the Christmas present purchasing period. Most people have off from work, kids don’t have school, so everyone hits the malls.

This mall is pretty typical with all the usual chain stores. Families were out in force. Young people were milling about. Old folks were enjoying a leisurely walk in the climate control since the weather outside was a bit harsh.

And of course there’s a food court with a Texas Roadhouse, a P.F. Chang’s with the trademark fiberglass horse statue, a Tim Horton’s, a little Italian, a little sushi, a little Mexican, and a few upscale white tablecloth places.

The twist? This mall happens to be in Dubai. Go figure.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

At a recent breakfast in Washington, D.C., a rising young Republican senator explained the divisions in his party in a particularly succinct manner: a conflict between the donor base and the GOP rank-in-file.

“The donor class,” this senator told me, “really cares about one thing: lower taxes. Most in the party don’t see this as the most crucial issue.”

Although some donors care about other issues, including Israel and, sometimes, social issues, the big money in the party is focused on reducing tax burdens. After all, if you are an investment bank, pharmaceutical firm or oil company, your concerns involve finding ways to avoid, or at least slow down, the taxman.

In the past, many grass-roots Republicans may have shared this concern, but other issues – like a weak economy, rising inequality and crime, as well as terrorism – increasingly may become more important. The very nature of the current recovery, beneficial to the donor class but not so much for the vast majority of Americans, works against the traditional antitax focus of the GOP. Does anyone on Main Street believe lower capital-gains taxes, which would preserve more of the wealth of hedge funders, corporate hegemons and venture capitalists, helps them?

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

As 2015 wanes, many swimming in Florida’s new wave of growth are still being carried by a swift current. Everywhere one gazes, new apartments can be seen that accommodate some of the million-plus new residents who have moved here in the last five years. With over 140,000 people migrating to Florida from other states during 2014, and over 100,000 people moving to Florida from other countries, Florida’s GDP is predicted to have grown 3.2% in 2015, the highest in the country and well ahead of the national average. The tide has definitely come in.

For natives and long-term residents, it feels like everyone up north woke up one Tuesday morning and said, “Hey honey, let’s quit our jobs, move to Florida, and get an apartment overlooking the interstate.” From Tampa to Daytona, mid-rise wood frame structures loom over semi-trucks and cars that whizz by, a new voyeur culture in the making.

At first glance, the recent growth seems low quality and monolithic, blandly designed and structured to meet a uniform real estate development formula. The land along Interstate 4 is cheap and available for development. Like coral reefs that grow on the poisonous crags of undersea volcanoes, however, these apartments are an infrastructure for an ecology of both dreams and nightmares. Dispossessed by capitalism, many laid-off Americans seek a new start in the apartments of the Sunshine State. In these drywall-lined niches grow polyps of hope.

Some newcomers come to Florida with job offers. Along with those taking advantage of the economic climate, there are others who show up without employment; many without jobs move to Florida and fill apartments only with the hope of a new life and prosperity. Such is the Florida of the nation’s imagination, a place of such bountiful employment opportunities that one can pick a job off a tree, like a wild orange. Do-over dreams hang in the air around these giant rental reefs, interwoven with expectations of an easy, low-cost retirement lifestyle. “I have several friends,” writes one retiree,“who all went south from Connecticut to Ft. Lauderdale years ago, and drifted north to Melbourne over the years… it seems like a nice place to live.” An image of retirees drifting around the state, like so many jellyfish drifting along a reef face, seems idyllic.

Many have suffered more severe economic hardships. The third busiest bankruptcy court in the nation none other than the Middle District of Florida, housed in sunny Ft. Myers. Those without the means or the qualifications for a mortgage often retreat into Florida’s apartment culture, licking their financial wounds. Setting one’s sights a little lower and squeezing into a small apartment cosigned by a family member may be a humiliating, but necessary step towards a new beginning. The symbiotic relationship between debt and dreams can be seen through the glass walls of these buildings.

Quite a few renters are also paying off student debt. “We cannot afford a house right now. Maybe not ever,” writes Selena in Florida about the student loans she and her husband have. The rental life, tinged with a very bitter dose of recent reality, is the color of all of the aspirations that swirl around the stucco, false mansard roofs, clubhouses and glittery swimming pools.

The Florida resort lifestyle, jammed up against the interstate highway, is an unlikely scaffold for dreams. Percolating between the swaying palms are new beginnings, fresh starts, and resolutions to do better. Some of these dreams may blossom and grow out of the balconies and windows of these monolithic blocks of monthly rent, making these apartments a nomad’s brief sanctuary on the journey back to prosperity. These are the lucky ones, the temporary renters; those who stay in an apartment for a year or two while getting back on their feet.

As viewed from the middle lane of I-4, these giant rental shoals, and the thought of the imagination that supports them, seem at once reassuring and terrible. Reassuring, because the idea that Florida is universally beloved still makes Floridians smile. Terrible, because this new biodiversity is voracious, and brings with it congestion. These mid-rises inhale a dense population, only to exhale them out onto Florida’s flat expanse of rooftops that spread ever further into Florida’s vanishing natural environment.

Like coral reefs, which grow in the ocean where the surf is most active, these apartments grow in Florida where the weather is most active. The hurricane capital of America, the lightning capital of the world, and the humid heat are the real parts of the lingering illusion of a tropical wilderness that comes with this postcard paradise. Once arrived, many of the newcomers find the weather intense. Hopes and dreams cling to the apartments like barnacles, fluttering from the windows and balconies, despite the heavy summer rains.

Apartment dwellers are a transient lot, often staying not longer than their lease term. When one moves out, workers clean and repair the unit to be ready for the next. Each new dweller from out-of-state brings his or her own illusions of Florida. Others bring a more grounded reality from their previous Florida experience. Either way, the dwellers' new impressions blend with the redolent ecosystem of hopes and dreams surrounding the edifice.

These Florida apartments are inspiration-gardens, attracting migrants seeking a better life. Only the individuals who dwell within them can activate their hopes. As rather expensive offerings, they are not analogous to the New York tenements of the nineteenth century, which were full of families crowded off of the European boats. Instead, these are high amenity, middle-income places to live. They act in the same way, as a distribution system for dreams, but are far more luxurious and appointed than the slums of old.

The urgent, massive dream-reef construction project that has gone up alongside I-4 is in its peak phase, with a few nodes already complete between Tampa and Daytona. Apartments are clustered like a gigantic fringe along the denser population centers: Lakeland, Lake Buena Vista, Orlando, and Winter Park. Those living in earshot of the interstate’s mighty roar of traffic must have an ironic, contemporary sense of place. As a concrete reality, the I-4 corridor is not a particularly prestigious address. But as an abstraction that speaks of today's politics, it has an importance of the first magnitude. If these two opposites— the dream of the America we desire and the reality of the America being constructed now — can be reconciled, then Florida’s growth is a healthy ecosystem that offers hope for the future.

Richard Reep is an architect with VOA Associates, Inc. who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

Photo by Cooper Reep: Typical new mid-rise on I-4 in Florida

New York City has prospered since the great recession of 2008, buoyed by an endless supply of free money from Washington that's elevated the stock and real estate markets. But the broader metro region has struggled, in an ominous sign of tougher times to come.

Little acknowledged in the discussion of New York's "tale of two cities" is something beyond the control of Mayor de Blasio: the fading of the city's once-thriving suburbs, even as the city grows more populous and more expensive.

Although some urban boosters blame suburbs for city ills and wish for their demise, the truth is they depend upon one another. Suburbs, including in New York, have long provided a local outlet for people to migrate to from the urban core as they start families and otherwise age out of cloistered living. But in the outskirts of Gotham, this model now appears to be in decline.

At a time when New York City itself is growing, the suburban dream here has slowly died, choked off by a difficult commutes, stagnant local economies, rapidly rising house prices and punishing property taxes. House prices in New York's suburbs in New York and New Jersey have doubled relative to incomes since 2000. In Suffolk and Passaic, N.J., they've tripled. The suburbs in New York also have among the nation's highest property taxes.

When New Yorkers get to the point they want to start a family and buy a house, those who can — the best and brightest — are no longer decamping for places like Great Neck or Scarsdale but appear to be leaving the region entirely.

The decline is evident in Long Island, where there is very little new building and time seems to have stopped around 50 years ago. New restaurants, malls and cultural facilities are rare. Long Island and New Jersey have lost sports franchises to Brooklyn. Unlike in other regions, few businesses leave the city for the surrounding suburbs.

Nor is this just a matter of mass migration to one or two places. Greater New York loses net migrants to virtually every big urban region of the country, including Los Angeles as well as such diverse places as Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

To some urbanists, this decline of New York's suburban belt represents welcome news. After all, between 1950 and 2010, more than 95% of the region's growth took place on its periphery, and worries focused on the hollowing out of the urban core.

Since 2010, those trends have had a stunning reversal: The boroughs have added 316,000 people — a growth rate four times that of the burbs.

But what makes urban boosters trill in ecstasy also suggests that greater New York is no longer a place that accommodates upward mobility.

A lot of that comes down to the bottom line. Between property values and property taxes, the cost of suburban living in Nassau and Westchester no longer offers the relief it once did. Throw in arduous commutes, and even the appeal of a yard and a good school fades for many.

The point comes into especially sharp focus when you stack New York City up against other big metro areas. Across the country, suburbs are still growing faster, often much faster, than cities, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census statistics.

Many of those places — including Austin, Charlotte and Nashville — are experiencing a revival of both their cores and their suburban rings. In Houston, which has enjoyed one of the biggest inner-city booms in the nation, two-thirds of all new units are single-family houses, usually in the suburbs. This preponderance of single-family homes is common in the areas that New Yorkers are going to, such as Charlotte, Orlando and Dallas.

Of the nation's 52 largest metropolitan areas, New York had the lowest percentage of single-family homes, some 26%. Nor are enough new apartments being built to accommodate New Yorkers. Between 2011 and 2014, the New York region was 42nd in the percentage increase in the number of building permits issued.

To some extent, the ailment reflects Gotham's unique economic climate, increasingly dominated by key industries — tourism and hospitality, media and finance — that tend to concentrate in high-cost, high-density urban centers. These sectors, along with tourism, have driven New York's recovery, unlike in the Bay Area, Raleigh or Austin, where technology has played the key role.

Once, greater New York boasted a large and important technology industry (remember IBM?), but no longer. Despite the endless hype about New York being a "high-tech" capital, today the region suffers one of the lowest percentages of engineers per capita — 77th out of 85 large metro areas. Greater New York City is never going to be the next Silicon Valley.

With no economic engine, but with property taxes among the highest in the nation, New York's suburbs are a drag. In a recent ranking of the best places for jobs we developed for Forbes, New York City, although slipping somewhat, ranked a respectable 17th. But Northern New Jersey, Long Island and close-in parts of Connecticut were all near the bottom of the 70 metropolitan areas studied.

The result is that even as the city swells, giddy with gentrification and Brooklynization, the region continues to hemorrhage people at the highest rate of any large metropolitan area. Over the past four years, 528,000 more people left for other parts of the country than came here from them.

New Yorkers tend to think of the city as diverse and of suburbs as lily-white. But in other parts of the country, suburbs are increasingly the geography of opportunity not just for young families, but for immigrants and minorities in particular.

New York is the exception. Few African-Americans head to Westchester, but many leave for the sprawling reaches of Atlanta, Dallas or Houston — places where they are twice as likely to own their own homes.

It may be fine for the jaded offspring of the wealthy who can afford to stay in Gotham to look down on these new sunbelt residents and suburb-dwellers. But for many, these geographies offer unprecedented opportunity to live in safer and less poor areas.

And the New Yorkers who leave — like migrants in general — tend to be those who are most ambitious. One doesn't move to Texas to gain access to government benefits, which are much less generous there than in New York, but for greater opportunity.

One could argue that New York City can thrive simply by drawing ever more highly educated millennials to the five boroughs. Between 2010 and 2014, the city gained 106,000 college-educated people ages 25 to 34, with nearly half of them moving to Brooklyn. The suburban rings gained barely 38,000.

But new research shows the millennial rush to Gotham is already slowing. Between 2008 and 2010, according to an analysis by demographers at Cleveland State University, New York ranked a respectable eighth among the 40 largest metropolitan areas in terms of attracting young, college-educated people, growing by 15.6%. But it dropped to 27th between 2010 and 2013 with a growth rate of barely 5%.

One reason for this shift: the rising cost of shelter. In New York City, market-rate renters now spend 40% of their incomes on rent, well above the national average of under 30%. Rents increased between 2010 and 2015 by a staggering 50%, while incomes for renters between ages 25 and 44 grew by just 8%.

Some suggest that young New Yorkers will be willing to live in ever-smaller places, like the "micro-apartments" now being pushed by developers and the mayor, in order to stay in the city. But basic research does not support this assertion. As the price of housing in the city has skyrocketed, young people have instead begun opting for less expensive metropolitan areas entirely. People move to such places to live an urban lifestyle that, although hardly as exciting as New York, does not require living in a glorified shipping crate.

Half-hearted attempts in places like Nassau to become a bit more urban haven't helped, since they ignore the fundamental advantage — particularly to families — of a less dense, village-like atmosphere.

And ignore trend stories about retirees moving back to the city. In fact, urban residence drops precipitously with age. Between 2000 and 2010, America's dense urban cores registered a decline of more than 100,000 seniors, while the suburbs and exurbs gained 2.8 million.

A final note of warning: If trends hold, and middle-class families with no affordable place to settle flee the region entirely, it is likely that New York's already deepening inequality will get worse.

As Mayor de Blasio continually reminds us, poverty here co-exists cheek-to-jowl with wealth. If it were a country, New York City would have the 15th highest inequality level out of 134 countries, landing between Chile and Honduras.

To bridge this growing gap, the larger New York area needs homes not only for investment bankers and media moguls, but also for ordinary middle-class families. In a functioning economic ecosystem, those homes are naturally found in Levittown and other towns in the suburban rings.

Which means the fate of de Blasio's project to build a fairer city depends in no small part on the revival of the suburbs once considered escape valves from the five boroughs. If the suburbs continue to flail, the region — and the city itself — will suffer.

This piece originally appeared in The New York Daily News.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Rahm Emanuel, a man of obvious talent, drive, and leadership capacity, should have been an ideal person to run a big city like Chicago. Unfortunately, because of his stubborn unwillingness to admit and compensate for his flaws, that was not to be.  After barely limping across the finish line in his re-election bid and tamping down the fallout from Moody’s downgrading the city’s debt to junk status, Emanuel has now been rocked by a truly huge scandal. The Chicago Police Department shot 17 year old Laquan McDonald 16 times, killing him, then did not release a video of it for over a year – including sitting on it during the entire election season. And that’s just the start of it.

My latest piece in City Journal, The Fall of Rahm Emanuel, looks at Rahm’s tragic trajectory:

Emanuel’s leadership style came with fatal flaws. A political streetfighter by inclination, he lacks an operational orientation. He didn’t appear to grasp the scope of the city’s financial problems until four years after he was first elected, when Chicago’s bond rating was cut to junk. His infrastructure trust fizzled. The schools went from bad to worse, with his first CPS leader forced out and his secondpleading guilty to corruption. He didn’t get it that Chicago’s police department hadn’t been fundamentally reformed the way New York’s and Los Angeles’s had been.

Emanuel’s governing style has been all tactics, no strategy. He’ll pick up the phone to twist the arm of a CEO or fight to win the day’s media cycle. But what’s his vision for the city? He has no idea how to make Chicago as a whole work over the long term. Nobody is great at everything, but Emanuel’s arrogance seemingly won’t allow him to address his own shortcomings. Famously vindictive, he alienated the local press and others, turning those who might have helped him into enemies. He also brought a Washington-style spin-control mindset to Chicago. In Washington, an army of apparatchiks and a compliant media lets politicians like Obama create a reality bubble. In national politics, perception is often is reality. But in local government, reality is reality. The West Side isn’t Benghazi. The people who live in Chicago can walk out their front doors and see for themselves what’s going on.

Click through to read the whole thing.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

Photo: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, left, greets U.S. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta upon his arrival at a CEO roundtable in Chicago, May 20, 2012, courtesy of the Department of Defense.

America is suffering from the severest undersupply of housing since the end of the Second World War. Although population growth has slowed significantly since the 1950s and 1960s, production has slowed down even more so. It’s not surprising that homebuilding declined after the housing bubble burst in 2008, but from 2011 to 2015 it continued to fall, dropping almost a quarter.

Meanwhile, housing price inflation has re-emerged. Housing now accounts for roughly 35% of household expenditures, up from about 30% in 1985, while expenditures on food, apparel and transportation have dropped or stayed about the same.

High home prices help to boost rents by forcing potential buyers into the apartment market. As of midyear, rental costs were eating up the largest share of renters’ income in recent U.S. history, 30.2%. Since 1990, renters’ income has not increased, but rents have soared 14.7% (both inflation adjusted).

In high-priced markets like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, the average renters spend from 42% to 48% of their income on rent, well above the national average. In New York, rents increased between 2010 and 2015 by 50%, while incomes for renters between ages 25 and 44 grew by just 8%.

The Cities Building The Most New Homes

Some metropolitan areas are doing a much better job than others at meeting this pent-up demand by building new housing.

We looked at the volume of construction permits for single and multifamily units in the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country from 2011 through 2014, and compared them to those metro areas’ existing housing bases.

To a large extent, the superstars of the past four years have been those areas that have enjoyed both the greatest job and population growth. The top of our list of cities that are increasing their housing supply the most is dominated by metro areas that have generally better housing affordability, with a multiple of median incomes to median housing prices between three and four.

Leading the way is Austin, Texas, which issued permits for the construction of roughly 71,000 housing units from 2011 through 2014, equal to 11.5% of its existing housing base in 2010. Austin’s new construction was split almost 50-50 between single family and multifamily units.

Other Texas cities in our top 10 include No. 3 Houston, which permitted the construction of 189,634 new units from 2011-14, the most in the nation over that span, equal to 9.7% of its 2010 base. Dallas-Ft. Worth ranks seventh, with a total of 148,329 units, second most in the nation behind Houston, for a 6.7% expansion of its housing supply from 2010. Most of the rest of our top 10 — including the North Carolina boom towns Raleigh (No. 2) and Charlotte (No. 4) — are located in or adjacent to the southern rim of the country. Only No. 10 Seattle can be considered a “smart growth” region, with the predictable high prices relative to incomes.

Families vastly favor single-family homes, and they can still find them at a relatively affordable price in many Southern cities. Some two-thirds of housing construction permits in Houston from 2011-14 was for single-family homes, and six of the top 10 metro areas for single-family construction over that span were located in the South. Houston alone produced nearly as many new single-family homes in 2014 as the entire state of California, which has about six times as many residents.

If you go by new single-family construction as a percentage of the existing housing base, sprawling, suburban, smaller and mid-sized metropolitan areas in the South are in the lead: Raleigh, Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando, Oklahoma City and Jacksonville.

But it’s important to recognize that as these areas “sprawl” they are also densifying. Houston ranks second nationally for new multifamily units over the span we looked at with 65,261; Austin, seventh (35,687, representing 18% of its 2010 base); and Charlotte ranks 15th. Some of this growth is concentrated near their urban cores, which have revived in recent years.

The Doyennes Of Density

In expensive parts of the Northeast and the West Coast, the favored solution to the housing affordability crisis is to pack more people into a smaller space: force households into smaller homes and apartments by raising the price of single-family dwellings for middle-income buyers through land-use restrictions.

This approach may produce some units, but it hardly addresses the affordability issue. By most measures, higher-density housing is far more expensive to build. Gerard Mildner of the Center for Real Estate at Portland State University, notes that a high rise over five stories costs nearly three times as much per square foot as a garden apartment. Even higher construction costs are reported in the San Francisco Bay Area, where townhome developments can cost up to double that of detached houses per square foot to build (excluding land costs), and units in high rise condominium buildings can cost up to 7.5 times as much.

New York epitomizes the limitations of density to address the affordability crisis. The Big Apple ranks third behind Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth in total residential construction permits from 2011-14 at 140,041 units, but that’s underwhelming given that it’s the most populous metro area in the nation by far. That total represents only 2.0% of the metro area’s 2010 housing base, 42nd best out of the nation’s 53 largest MSAs.

Nearly 75% of the New York area’s housing construction over that span was multifamily, with permits for 103,000 units from 2011-14, but that only makes for a 2.6% increase in apartment supply over 2010, placing it a meager 39th among the major metro areas over that span.

That 75% multifamily proportion is common in other expensive, highly regulated markets such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Boston, regulatory and land costs have boosted the cost of building a 1,600 square foot apartment to $438,000.

The failure of high-density housing to relieve the affordability crisis is most evident in the Golden State. The state’s largest metro areas have among the highest ratios of home prices to income. Prices in San Diego, Los Angeles have all risen considerably above the national average, despite only meager economic recoveries. San Jose and San Francisco have also experienced huge home price increases and are among the most unaffordable major metropolitan markets in the nation. Among these, only San Jose ranks in the top 10 in multi-family building permits as a percentage of the 2010 base (fifth).

The Metro Areas That Are Lagging, And What Lies Ahead

The lowest rung of our rankings are mostly smaller, old industrial cities with little in the way of population growth. Providence, R.I., barely eked out 1% growth in its housing supply since 2011. Other low-ranking areas include Hartford, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago and Rochester.

Overall, future prospects seem to be brighter in cities that have both reasonable prices and strong economies. These metro areas, which dominate our list, have the advantage also of being able to offer millennials, as they age, the sort of affordable single-family housing that they tend to move into during their 30s and beyond, notes economist Jed Kolko.

By building both single-family and multifamily housing at a higher clip, these areas are building the foundations for future growth, particularly for the next generation. There will be ups and down in the years ahead, but metropolitan areas producing adequate, diverse and affordable housing seem likely to enjoy future advantages in the race for talent and jobs.

No. 1: Austin, TX

No. 2: Raleigh, NC

No. 3: Houston, TX

No. 4: Charlotte, NC

No. 5: Orlando, FL

No. 6: Nashville, TN

No. 7: Dallas, TX

No. 8: Oklahoma City, OK

No. 9: Jacksonville, FL

No. 10: Seattle, WA

This piece first appeared at Forbes.com

.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo by LoneStarMike (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Every age produces its own brand of oligarchs – feudal lords, banking gnomes, captains of industry. Our age has its own incipient ruling class, the tech oligarchs.

The ascendency of these new hegemons is barely complete, and could conceivably be slowed or even reversed. But the tidal wave of new wealth, and even greater influence, will not be easily turned back. Six of the world’s 20 richest people are from tech or related industries like media and entertainment. In America, the media-tech sector in 2014 accounted for five of the top wealthiest people. Not surprisingly, most self-made billionaires are either quite old (the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, Warren Buffett) or got rich the traditional way: they inherited it. In contrast, virtually all self-made billionaires under 40 are techies.

The making of a new ruling class

With their massive, and early, accumulated wealth, the tech oligarchs will dominate us long after the inheritors have financed the last art museum or endowed the newest hospital. Two decades from now, many tech oligarchs will still be young enough to be counting their billions and thinking up new ways to ‘disrupt’ our lives – for our own good, of course.

This tech elite differs from the founding generation of Silicon Valley. The early leaders – Bob Packard, Bob Noyce, Andrew Grove, Jerry Sanders – tended to be centrist and pragmatic. After all, the early Valley was heavily subsidised by the military and NASA, and produced industrial products that faced enormous competition. They also managed vast organisations with large numbers of ordinary employees. Like other industrialists, they were concerned with low-cost power and water, reasonable labour regulation and the health of the overall manufacturing economy.

This changed when a combination of keen Asian competition and Californian regulation gradually shifted the chip and computer manufacturers out of Silicon Valley, which has lost roughly 80,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000. The new Valley is predominately post-industrial. For example, only 30 of about 16,000 production workers for the iPod are based in the US.

As Silicon Valley became software valley, tech firms no longer needed large numbers of semi-skilled workers and the network of small subcontractors to keep the industrial machine going. Those services, if needed, could be performed in India, China, Utah, Texas or North Carolina. ‘The job creation has changed’, notes long-time San Jose economic development official Leslie Parks. ‘We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle-class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future – we just think about it. That makes some people rich, but not many.’

What has made ‘the sovereigns of cyberspace’, to quote author Rebecca MacKinnon, so wealthy is precisely what made John D Rockefeller so rich: control of markets. Google, for example, accounts for over 60 per cent of search, while, alongside Apple, it control almost 90 per cent of the operating systems forsmartphones. Similarly, over half of American and Canadian computer users use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social-media site.

More important still, the tech oligarchs control portions of their companies that would make most oilmen or auto executives fantastically rich. Indeed, owners of only one energy-related firm, Koch Industries, have made it into the top 10 of the Forbes 400. The CEO and chairman of Exxon-Mobil, America’s largest oil company, Rex Tillerson, controls 0.04 per cent of Exxon stock, while Google’s Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt control roughly two thirds of the company’s voting stock. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg also control outsized shares of their firms.

These firms are now so rich that they resemble countries. Besides General Electric, a classic conglomerate, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Google often have more dollars on hand than the US government. And their influence can be felt in every office, home and phone through intrusive software that provides a trove of personal data that would make the old KGB turn from red to green with envy. As Google’s Eric Schmidt put it: ‘We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.’

The politics of the intangible class

The liberation from the constraints of the tangible economy has inflamed the ambitions of the oligarchs. ‘Politics for me is the most obvious area [to be disrupted by the web]’, suggests former Facebook president Sean Parker. The success with which social media assisted President Obama’s re-election effort offers clear support to Parker’s assertion.

In allying with Obama, tech is moving in the opposite direction to much of the business community, particularly small business, which Gallup finds a hotbed of anti-Obama sentiment. Other traditional industries like oil and gas have also turned overwhelmingly to the right, as Obama has targeted them for their role in climate change. In 1990, energy firms gave out almost as much to Democrats as Republicans; in 2014 they gave over three times as much to the GOP.

In contrast, the oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In 2000, the communications and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012, it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to the Democrats with their donations.

The transformer and the disrupters

There seems a natural affinity between President Obama, who sees himself as a force for transformation, and the tech oligarchs, who love ‘disruption’. Each shares a high estimate of their basic intelligence and foresight; it is an alliance of those who feel they should own and shape the future.

‘We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like’, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently argued. This effort could appeal to a public that tends to regard the tech firms as better than more mundane businesses or the government. Indeed, when Steve Jobs, a 0.000001 per center worth $7 billion, and rugged capitalist of the classic type, passed away, protesters openly mourned his demise.

One critical PR advantage the tech firms enjoy is that most, with a notable exception of Amazon, don’t mistreat blue-collar workers, or unions, since they have few of either. This gets them a free pass from social-justice warriors unavailable to traditional firms. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford mostly exploited workers in Pittsburgh or Detroit, and paid a price; the exploitation of the oligarchs takes place far away in Chengdu, Guangzhou or India.

This alliance with the Democrats will not fade after Obama leaves office. Obama has enlisted several tech giants – including venture capitalist John Doerr, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla – to help plan out his no doubt lavish and highly political retirement. Many former Obama aides have gone to work for tech firms. Uber, for example, uses Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to lead its PR team, while other former officials have descended to other tech firms such as AirBnB, Google, Twitter and Amazon.

What is the ideology of Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley may be progressive in its social or environmental positions, but it has little interest in class politics, an issue being pushed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. ‘They don’t like [Bernie] Sanders at all’, notes San Francisco-based researcher Greg Ferenstein, who has been polling internet company founders for an upcoming book. Sanders’ emphasis on income redistribution, protecting union privileges and pensions hardly reflects the views of the tech elite. ‘He’s an egalitarian liberal’, Ferenstein explains, ‘these people are tech liberals. Equality is a non-issue in Silicon Valley.’

What are ‘tech liberals’? Ferenstein provides a picture of an unconscious elitism that runs through their worldview. Although their industry is overwhelmingly based in the San Francisco Peninsula’s suburban sprawl, the internet oligarchs, he claims, want ‘everyone’ to move to the urban centre, something not remotely practical for most middle- and working-class families. They also advocate for strict environmental laws and ever higher energy prices, which don’t threaten their lifestyles, but are often devastating to those below them.

Yet there is a danger that the issue of inequality could eventually affect the tech industry’s PR. Unlike the earlier products, such as computers or semiconductors, the products the tech industry now develop have provided little of value to the rest of society, whether in terms of jobs (outside of the Bay Area) or boostingproductivity. The social-media industry has made the likes of Mark Zuckerberg fantastically wealthy, but it’s difficult to maintain it has improved living conditions for most Americans.

At the same time, well-financed Valley ‘disruption’ can be seen as a threat to many businesses and individuals. These already include groups such as cab drivers, owners and workers at small hotels, realtors and travel agents, and newspaper scribblers, all of whom are being driven out of the middle class. The much-needed ‘sharing economy’ often offers these workers part-time employment without much in the way of benefits.

Even in the tech industry itself, American workers find themselves increasingly replaced by imported foreign workers. Oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg are anxious to expand H1B and other ‘guest-worker programmes’ that bring in low-cost indentured tech workers to the Valley, as well as to IT departments across corporate America.

Of course, this hardly makes the tech oligarchs unique – after all, capitalists have always sought out the cheapest source of labour, and understandably so. But it does mean that, in oligarchic America, where even getting a degree in computer science and software does not guarantee a bright future, the hip, PR-friendly ‘don’t be evil’ appearance of tech companies may soon be looking a little less cool.

Techies on the green team

Perhaps nothing separates the oligarchy from the rest of business than its support for Obama’s climate-change policies. Many industries see these policies as a direct threat to their very existence, but this means little to moguls, who can shift their energy needs to cheaper locales, such as the Pacific Northwest or the South. In California, such policies have less an impact on the temperate coast than in the less glamorous interior. As one recent study found, the summer electrical bills in rich, liberal and temperate Marin come to $250 monthly, while in impoverished, hotter Madera, the average is twice as high.

Not that there’s anything cynical about the tech oligarchy’s commitment to green policies. It is entirely sincere – the oligarchs really do believe, as do many liberal, Democratic types, that they are fighting the good fight. But that doesn’t mitigate the effects of their worldview.

Still, the oligarch’s energy politics are not entirely based on the greater good. ForSilicon Valley and Wall Street supporters, there are also some business opportunities in the assault on fossil fuels. Cash-rich firms like Google and Apple, and many high-tech financiers and venture capitalists, have invested in subsidised green energy firms. Some, like Elon Musk, exist largely as creatures of subsidies. Neither SolarCity nor Tesla would be so attractive, or might not even exist, without generous handouts.

The brave new world of the oligarchs

If we want to get some idea how an oligarch-dominated economy works, take a look at my adopted home state – of over 40 years – of California, the home of the most powerful oligarchs. The Golden State sees itself as the ‘brains’ of the tech culture and proof of the bountiful ingenuity of ‘the creative class’.

Yet behind the media glitz, California is increasingly a bifurcated state, divided between a glamorous software- and media-based economy concentrated in certain coastal areas, and a declining, and increasingly impoverished, interior. Overall, nearly a quarter of Californians live in poverty, the highest percentage of any state, including Mississippi, and, according to a recent United Way study, close to one in three people are barely able to pay their bills.

So how do the oligarchs make this work politically? One way is simply to make alliances – through contributions and media support – with politicians who are most hurt by California’s regulatory vice. This strategy is evident in the odd coupling of San Francisco hedge-fund billionaire, Tom Steyer, the biggest funder of climate-change hysteria, and his Latino sidekick, California Senator Kevin de Leon, who represents impoverished East Los Angeles.

The new political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs. With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates, subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of ‘green jobs’.

This ‘upstairs-downstairs’ California coalition could presage the country’s political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their profits and expansion into other markets.

In the oligarchic era, the bottom line is an increasing concentration of power in ever fewer hands. Romantic notions that the high-tech era would be marked by a surge of small, independent companies are belied by the market domination of a few firms and their expansion into ever more business areas. Companies like Google begin to morph into conglomerates, or American versions of Japan’skeiretsu, with interests in such businesses as health, media and autonomous vehicles.

Similar keiretsu are forming around companies such as Apple, Amazon and Facebook, which now can buy their way into what were once seen as unrelated markets. This is married to increased media power, which will allow them to set the agenda in coming decades. This is being accomplished both through the purchase of old media – the most important being the purchase by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos of the venerable Washington Post – or by new sites controlled by firms like Yahoo, the No1 news site in the US, with 110million monthly viewers, or Google’s news site with 65,000,000 users.

The intrusion of tech firms into media is likely to become even more pervasive as the millennial generation grows up and the older cohorts begin to die off. Among those over 50, only 15 per cent, according to a Pew report, get their news over the internet; among those under 30, the number rises to 65 per cent.

Ultimately the ambitions of the oligarchs are boundless. Firms like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Elon Musk’s Space X, seek to lead the world in space exploration. If NASA continues to retreat from many areas of space exploration, it is likely that, in the future, the heavens may end up belonging to the oligarchs as well.

When historians write the history of this age, their attention likely will focus on the rise of these oligarchies. They already control California, with its unparalleled creative and technical prowess, as well as the dominant cultural power centre in the English-speaking world. Tomorrow the new oligarchs will be looking to consolidate their power in Washington. And the day after that, maybe the world and galaxy as well.

This piece originally appeared at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

“People rather than places” should be the focus of urban policy, according to Urban Economics and Urban Policy: Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom. (paperback, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015 $39.95). The book is among the most effective critiques of contemporary urban planning thought,  characterized by such approaches as urban containment, compact city, and densification. The authors are Paul C. Cheshire, Max and Nathan and Henry G. Overman, all economists at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Cheshire has a long list of publications analyzing urban planning policy. The authors characterize the central thesis of urban planning’s misdirected priorities stating that:

"… that the ultimate objective of urban policy is to improve outcomes for people rather than places; for individuals and families rather than buildings."

They argue that there is a place for urban planning, but that it must be in the appropriate context.

"This is not to say that we should stop caring about what is happening in different cities and neighbourhoods but serves to remind us that improving places is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself." (emphasis added)

This theme is applauded and characterized as “revolutionary” in the Foreword by Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser, who posits:

"All policies need to be judged by the impact on people, not places."

Basic Economics

It has long been known that urban containment policy is fundamentally flawed, principally by its inconsistency with the fundamentals of economics, which leads to destructive housing affordability losses.

Cheshire et al begin with the basics:

“…there are some things on which nearly all mainstream economists would agree. Perhaps the nearest to unanimity one could find would be the proposition that if the supply of a good does not vary much as its price changes, and if the demand for that good rises proportionally more than incomes as incomes rise but is subject to cyclical fluctuations, then the price of that good will rise over the long run relative to other prices and its price will be volatile over the cycle.”

They remind us that this is: “…one of the fundamental elements of economic analysis with a history of research and application going back at least 200 years.”

The Problem

This denial of economic realities, rooted in human nature itself, sets urban containment policy up to inflict major consequences, when evaluated based on outcomes for people.

Urban containment’s forbidding or severely limiting house construction on the urban fringe has been associated with huge house price increases. This is particularly evident across the United Kingdom, which receives the principal attention from the authors. There house prices have doubled and even tripled compared to incomes. Obviously, being forced to spend more money on housing, people have less discretionary income to spend on other goods and services (and discretionary income virtually defines the standard of living and poverty).

Rather than improving the standard of living and reducing poverty, which are fundamental domestic policy objectives, urban containment leaves in its wake “rising real house prices, falling affordability and increasing price volatility.” The authors note that price fluctuations are significantly greater where restrictions on development do not allow the supply of new housing to sufficiently respond to increases in consumer demand. To this they add concerns that all of this is leading to greater inequality.

The problems with urban containment policy have long been known, not only to economists, but also to urban planners dispassionately examining the outcomes. On this score, the authors give well-deserved credit to a team of researchers led by the late Sir Peter Hall, one of history’s pre-eminent urban scholars. Hall led a team that was “…seriously sympathetic to the ideals of planning but who saw that the rigid policy of urban containment and the specific way in which the boundaries of the Greenbelts had been determined during the 1950s was perverting what they saw as the underlying purpose of town planning.” (See The Costs of Smart Growth Revisited: A 40 Year Perspective.)

According to the authors, Hall et al had become convinced that “Far from providing people with greener environments and garden cities, the planning system had developed in a way which produced higher densities and made housing space more difficult to acquire.”

Glaeser expands on this in the Foreword:

“…we must never forget that any time we say ‘no’ to new building, whether in the city centre or on the edge, we are saying ‘no’ to families that want to experience the magic of urban life. We also ensure that every other family that lives in the city is paying more for their own homes.”

Ignoring the Consequences

The authors suggest that the planning objective of a compact city may “be a planner’s dream but for ordinary people it is more like a nightmare." They further imply that urban planning establishment has been “tone deaf” on the consequences of urban containment policy, noting that it is well and good to:

“…argue that the costs imposed by the planning system are prices worth paying to ‘protect the countryside’ or achieve other policy objectives. However, it is not helpful for public debate to pretend that the costs we have documented do not exist; or even that they are negligible. Existing research shows that this is simply not the case; indeed research shows the costs are very substantial even if some are difficult to measure exactly."

Cheshire et al express concern that the planning system is spreading beyond Great Britain. They continue: “…the British experience also provides some idea of what the future might hold for other countries as planning systems become increasingly restrictive.” Indeed that prediction is already being fulfilled with a vengeance.

This can be seen across Australia and New Zealand, where the housing affordability losses have been at least as severe as in Britain. In the United States the predicament is highly regionalized. We can see its impacts in Portland, as well as huge losses in housing affordability in California, Seattle, Denver and elsewhere. And in Canada there is Vancouver, with the second worst housing affordability among the major markets in the 11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, and Toronto, where house prices have nearly doubled relative to incomes since 2000, under the Places to Grow Greenbelt initiative.

They add a sobering assessment:

"The problem is it is utterly unviable in the long term. With every passing decade the problems would get worse, the wider economic costs would become more penalising, the economy and monetary policy more unmanageable and the outcomes – the divide between the property haves and the property have-nots – more unacceptable."

They add a perspective that should be appreciated by both students of history and politics:

"In our judgment there is no doubt that if things go on as they are then at some point there will be a system breakdown and perhaps serious social unrest."

Towards Resolution

Cheshire and his colleagues suggest that: “any useful and rational debate should attempt to rigorously quantify the benefits conferred by the system rather than just assert them as ‘fact’.”

More importantly, they offer workable solutions that can put urban policy back “on track” by seeking ends rather than means. Generally, they say that land use restrictions should be relaxed except where “there are amenity reasons not to do so.”

This would start with an understanding that the large urban containment policy land price discontinuities be recognized for what they are --- price signals that the demand for housing in an area is far greater than the supply.

According to the authors,

“…observed price discontinuities – the difference in market prices across boundaries of use categories – should become a ‘material consideration’ leading to a presumption in favour of any proposed development unless (a very important ‘unless’) it could be shown that the observed monetary value of the discontinuity reflected wider environmental, amenity or social values of the land in its current use.” (emphasis added)

This would make sufficient land for development available to serve the economic well-being of households: “there is a very large amount of land where the ‘wider’ values are negligible.”

A similar proposal was offered by the Productivity Commission of New Zealand in its recent report, which suggested setting a discontinuity maximum standard. When the standard is violated, land would be released.

Getting Urban Policy Back on Track

The authors say that “the economic and welfare – even environmental – damage done by Britain’s current planning system is overwhelming.” Moreover “the impact will get progressively more damaging over time.” The same damage can be expected beyond Britain, to the United States, Canada and wherever else urban containment policy is implemented, because of its fatal aversion to the realities of economics.

Cheshire et al describe the dilemma that the policy detour urban containment has created.

“The question is not will we reform it but when will we reform it and will that be before a catastrophic collapse? … The problem is that any radical reforms are politically unpalatable, but no alternative strategy will work.”

Forty years ago, Hall and his colleagues lamented the disinterest of economists in urban planning. Cheshire et al similarly noted that economists have “contributed very little to the development and evaluation of real-world urban policy.” That needs to change and Urban Economics and Urban Policy: Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom could be an important first step.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: The Shard, London © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

You want something truly scary? Take a look at these mockups of what San Francisco might look like if we build all the housing that the developers say we need.

According to writer Greg Ferenstein,

The city probably needs somewhere north of 150,000 more units: most high-rises would be concentrated in the Eastern, Downtown, and mid-market areas, while every block in the entire city would need at least one 7-story building. Essentially, San Francisco would be Manhattan downtown and Paris everywhere else.

Set aside that I never want to live in Manhattan (at any price), and that the infrastructure to handle 200,000 more people would be horrendously expensive (and developers are already refusing to pay their fair share for far lower levels of need).

It’s not just “how to we build that much housing.” It’s how do we build maybe $20 billion or more worth of transportation capacity to handle that density. Manhattan has a citywide underground transit system with high capacity and no surface traffic issues. SF doesn’t, and won’t, as long as we can’t raise property taxes and refuse to charge developers for the cost of that new system.

Never mind, let’s take Ferenstein’s idea and play it out. Suppose we decided as a city that we are willing to accept a lot more density in exchange for affordability. (This is something the mayor is promoting). Let’s say that the city really needs to build highrises all over the eastern side of town (why only the east?) and put mid-rise buildings everywhere.

Let’s say we decide that 47.5 square miles of space are enough for1 million people, and that we are willing to give up everything about San Francisco that we would lose in the process.

Remember, the streets in the highrise districts in Manhattan are much broader than the streets in SF, able to handle more traffic, with big sidewalks that can handle more pedestrians – and still it’s often overwhelming.

Right now in SF, for example, I am able to walk down the streets at 5pm without being jammed in a pack of stressed-out pushing people, which is life in parts of NYC. It’s possible to able to take your young kids and your dog for a walk in a place where there’s actually room to walk.

Imagine Mission and Valencia, being packed with thousands more pedestrians. Don’t even think about the traffic.

In fact, unless we took entire streets and banned cars, forget about the bicycle lanes – they are narrow and limited and can’t easily handle say 200 percent more traffic.

But again, whatever. Let’s say that it’s elitist to try to keep the charm of a human-scale city in a world-class city like SF, which Ferenstein calls “quaint.” Let’s say that our only hope of avoiding being a city of just the rich is to build all the apartments and condos anyone could every want to build.

Let’s say we have that debate and decide that the need for affordable housing trumps all, and we will just have to live with the implications.

So what happens if we let the developers build 200,000 new units – and prices don’t come down?

That’s actually a pretty likely scenario. It’s happened in other places (NYC, for example, where lots of new housing is being built and prices are not in any way coming down.)

It’s happened in SF so far, where we have built more market-rate housing in the past four years than at any point since the 1960s, and prices continue to soar.

Ferenstein talked to an econometrics expert at a credit agency. Okay. No idea if this person has ever studied housing or housing price trends in San Francisco, but he has a model. It assumes that we have to build housing faster than the population grows. Nice.

Except that market-rate housing causes population growth as fast as it solves it – that is, if your model is the traditional capital-market model, you can’t keep up with population growth by building. You might as well try to decrease traffic by building freeways; never works, never has – not in San Francisco.

And how come we never talk about why the population is growing so fast, and why so much of that growth comes from one industrial sector that hires one type of workers?

I emailed Ferenstein with my questions, and here’s what he said:

Well, prices don’t fall here because we don’t build enough. It’s been an issue for decades. And, if you build enough units, prices will fall. You just have to build more supply than people. The question is whether it is possible to do so. But, I’m actually not advocating for that. I’m advocating for *some* solution. If the city decides it doesn’t want to grow, then it should be responsible for finding some solution where people can live and work in the same city–somewhere. Maybe it’s San Francisco. Maybe it’s Oakland. Maybe it’s a new city. But there has to be a giant metropolis somewhere. And, San Franciscans must realize, if jobs relocate elsewhere, they will suffer massive inequality and terrible commutes.

Interesting argument. Of course, we are not talking about a city where people live and work; San Francisco’s housing crisis in large part the result of people living here and commuting to Silicon Valley, on private buses. The Valley cities build no housing at all, and expect us to solve the problem.

And I would argue that if some tech jobs went elsewhere, we would have less inequality and less terrible commutes – it’s the displacement from too many people moving here for jobs when housing doesn’t exist that has created the problem. Most of San Francisco does better when there is slower growth in bubbly tech industries.

There’s a much more interesting question that we might want to address: Suppose we built may 20,000 new units, or 30,000, or 50,000, spread all over the city – and every one of them was social housing, that is, housing that was never in the private sector? Would that bring down prices? Would that provide the same level of affordability, or maybe much more, than the Manhattan West model?

Would that be a better deal?

At the very least, we would know that the new housing would be affordable, instead of taking a huge gamble that the (failed) free market, and the (failed) econometric projections of the past, would save us.

Oh, and what if we said that SF no longer wants to be the bedroom community for Silicon Valley, and will stop entitling things like private buses that make that trend possible?

That’s a bit of a different picture.

This piece originally appeared at 48hills.org.

Photo: A mockup by Alfred Two for a Medium story on what an “affordable” SF might look like

“Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture’s got to go.

– Slogan from 1988 Stanford University protest led by Jesse Jackson.

In the aftermath of San Bernardino and Paris massacres, our cognitive leaders – from President Obama on down – have warned Americans not to engage in what Hillary Clinton has described as “a clash of civilizations.” But you can’t have a real clash when one side – ours – seems compelled to demean its traditions and values.

Leaders in America and Europe don’t want to confront Islamic fundamentalism, or other nasty manifestations of post-Western thinking, because they increasingly no longer believe in our own core values. At the same time, devoted to the climate issue, they are squandering our new energy revolution by attempting to “decarbonize,” essentially leaving the field and the financial windfall to our friends in Riyadh, Moscow, Tehran and Raqqa.

Western ethos deconstructed

As the great 15th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun observed, societies that get rich also tend to get soft, both in the physical sense and in the head. Over the past two centuries, Western societies, propelled by the twin forces of technology and capitalist “animal spirits,” have created a diffusion of wealth unprecedented in world history. A massive middle class emerged, and the working class received valuable protections, not only in Europe and America, but throughout parts of the world, notably East Asia, which adopted at least some of the Western ethos.

Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Payton Chung from DCA, USA (Polar bear protestUploaded by AlbertHerring) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

After three decades of breakneck urban growth, there are indications of a significant slowdown in the largest cities of China. This is indicated by a review of 2014 population estimates in the annual statistical reports filed individually by municipalities with the National Bureau of Statistics.

For context, municipalities in China, which are also translated as “cities” in English are nothing like cities as is commonly understood in English. In China, municipalities are large geographic areas that have their own governments, but also control rural lands often far beyond the urban area. Indeed, in China, counties are subdivisions of cities, while in Anglo heritage nations, cities are within counties, with the notable exception of the city of New York or in a few, like San Francisco, are identical with counties. Some cities, like Kansas City and Atlanta stretch into adjacent counties, though occupy only part of their main county).

This article examines municipality population growth trends, from 2010 to 2014 and comparing to the 2000 to 2010 period. The analysis focuses on 21 municipalities, which include 20 of the 25 largest built-up urban areas in the nation (areas of continuous development. The 21st municipality is Foshan, which shares its built-up urban area with Guangzhou. The statistical reports the other five municipalities did not provide sufficient data to be included in this analysis (Table).

Back in 1980, as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were beginning to take effect, China was approximately less than 20 percent urban. By 2010, 55 percent of Chinese citizens lived in urban areas, a near tripling of the urban share. A large share of this growth was the so-called “floating population,” which was made up largely of rural residents who moved to the urban areas to take jobs in the export oriented factories and the massive building and infrastructure construction sites.

The Roaring 2000s

In the 2000s, the largest Chinese municipalities experienced some of the most rapid growth in world history. Shanghai and Beijing added between 6 and 7 million residents. Both had annual growth rates of between 3% and 4%. During the same period, the U.S. annual growth rate was about 1.0 percent.

But even these growth rates were not the highest in the country. Xiamen, in Fujian grow at an annual rate of 5.6%, while Suzhou (in Jiangsu, adjacent to Shanghai on the west) and Shenzhen (in Guangdong, just north of Hong Kong) expanded their population at rates between 4% and 5%.

The Slowing 2010s

The last four years have been very different. Overall, these 21 municipalities added population at a rate of 2.2% annually between 2000 and 2010. Between 2010 and 2014, the annual growth has been reduced by nearly half, to 1.2%. This is a far greater rate than that of the national population decline, which is gradually moving from modest growth to eventual decline. The 2010 to 2014 annual national population growth rate was 0.50 percent, a 12 percent reduction from the 0.57 percent 2000 to 2010 annual rate, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The cause of the larger decline in these municipalities thus seems likely to be the result of reduced domestic migration from more rural areas.

Nearly all --- 19 of the 21 municipalities --- are experiencing slower growth in this decade than in the last. Only one, Tianjin, is experiencing the growth similar to the fast-growing municipalities of the last decade. Between 2010 and 2014, Tianjin grew 4.1%, annually, a considerable increase over its 2.8% rate from between 2000 and 2010. During this decade, Tianjin added approximately 560,000 residents annually, the largest increase among the 21 municipalities. This fits well with national priorities, since the high densities of Beijing and related consequences have led to a plan to decentralize the population of nearby Beijing (100 miles or 160 kilometers away), encouraging the movement of residents, businesses and government agencies to Tianjin as well as to the municipalities of Tangshan (location of the great 1976 earthquake), and Langfang (midway between Beijing and Tianjin) and Baoding in the province of Hubei. The newly integrated area would be called Jin-Jing-Ji.

Chongqing has begun to grow, after having lost 1.7 million residents in the last decade. . But Chongqing itself is uncharacteristic and the most “uncitied” of Chinese municipalities. Chongqing is a largely rural province, governed directly from Beijing (like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin). The principal built-up urban area, Chongqing, has a population of less than 7.5 million, or one-quarter of the municipality population. Chongqing has grown 0.9 percent annually since 2010 and is adding 267,000 residents per year. The population losses of the last decade occurred principally in the rural areas, as the Chongqing metropolitan area added more than three million residents, according to United Nations data.

Strong growth continues in Beijing, but at a much reduced rate. The annual population growth rate in Beijing has dropped 38%, to 2.3% annually. Beijing is adding 475,000 residents annually, second only to nearby Tianjin.

Shanghai’s growth has fallen even further, to 60% below the 2000 (1.3%). Shanghai is adding 310,000 residents annually. Other municipalities in the Yangtze Delta region are not doing as well. Suzhou’s annual growth has dropped more than 90% to 0.3%. Hangzhou and Nanjing have seen their growth drop more than 70 percent, with Hangzhou growing 0.5 percent annually and Nanjing 0.7 percent.

The Pearl River Delta, in Guangdong, was at the heart of China’s three decade economic miracle, with its export driven growth. All four of the Delta’s largest municipalities have seen their population growth rates dropped by 70% or more. Shenzhen grew 4.0% in the 2000’s and grows barely 1.0% today. Guangzhou has fallen from 2.5% in the 2000 to 0.7%. Foshan, which grew 3.0% in the 2000’s, now grows only 0.5%. Dongguan has fallen from a growth rate of 2.5% in the 2002 0.4% over the past four years, the slowest among the Pearl River Delta giants.

Some other municipalities have grown nearly as quickly as before. Zhengzhou, the capital of Hebei, grew rapidly during the 2000’s, at 2.6%, and has maintained a growth rate of 2.1%. With the third fastest growth rate, after Tianjin and Beijing, Zhengzhou is adding 186,000 residents annually, Quanzhou (Fujian), one of the best world examples of “in situ” urbanization is growing at 85% of its previous rate, though only 0.9% annually. Wuhan (Hubei), a long-time central China manufacturing center has been similarly successful in retaining its growth, and now has an annual growth rate of 1.4%.

Without complete information on all of China’s largest municipalities, it is difficult to assess the extent to which (if any) urban growth has slowed. Certainly, the national government remains committed to strong urban growth. On the other hand, with China’s slowing economic growth rates, there may be less reason to leave the countryside for the city.

Photograph: Still fast growing Zhengzhou (by author)

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

The experience of China provides a useful policy template for countries with booming populations in south and southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa. The Chinese boom showed that a growing working-age population combined with a declining fertility ratio can result in a large demographic dividend if certain conditions are met. As noted in this recent post, two important drivers of lower fertility are an increase in female literacy and a decline in child mortality.

At the same time, better governance, lower corruption, an improvement in business conditions and increased investments in infrastructure and education would lead to higher foreign and domestic investments and greater job creation. Greater urbanization and an expansion of foreign trade can also be byproducts or causes or effects of the demographic dividend.

After the demographic dividend, a country can remain on a growth path through additional political and regulatory reforms that encourage innovation and strengthen institutions.

Sami Karam is the founder and editor of populyst.net and the creator of the populyst index™. populyst is about innovation, demography and society. Before populyst, he was the founder and manager of the Seven Global funds and a fund manager at leading asset managers in Boston and New York. In addition to a finance MBA from the Wharton School, he holds a Master's in Civil Engineering from Cornell and a Bachelor of Architecture from UT Austin.

Prior to the holidays City Journal published  my major essay on Buffalo in their fall issue.  Here’s an excerpt:

Local planner Chuck Banas observes that while Buffalo’s regional population today is roughly the same as it was in 1950, the urbanized footprint of the region has tripled. “Same number of people, three times as much stuff to pay for” is the quip—and it’s true. Physical capital must either be maintained at great cost in perpetuity or ignored and allowed to become a drag on the city. Between 1980 and 2011, according to the University of Buffalo Regional Institute, Buffalo-area governments issued permits for almost 60,000 new single-family homes—while regional population declined. Given the gargantuan scale of state aid to the region, this is clearly not market-rate development.

While Buffalo’s urban advocates agree that investing in sprawl is misguided, they’re less critical about new construction in the urban center. The city’s $550 million light-rail line was an epic civic folly, yet Buffalo is currently reconstructing a downtown station on the line. More ill-conceived spending lies ahead. The region’s long-range transportation plan projects a need for an additional $100 million in capital expenditures through 2040, just to keep the existing line running—plus more operating subsidies every year. Seen in this light, neither cranes on the skyline nor bulldozers paving the countryside are necessarily good signs for Buffalo.

I learned a lot in Buffalo and it stimulated my thinking about post-industrial cities generally. What is the best way to bring some of these places back? What does it even mean for them to be back?  If you wanted to inject a billion dollars of state or federal money into them, where would it most profitably be spent? These and other questions are ones I’ll be looking at in more detail during 2016.

Read the entire piece at City Journal.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

I could be a pompous prick and brag about how I live in a compact, walkable, mixed use, transit served neighborhood in a seven hundred square foot apartment. My commute to work is measured in blocks not miles. Compared to the average North American I use tiny little sips of water and power. I already own all the physical stuff I’m ever going to need or want. I’m practically invisible in terms of my personal impact on the environment. Yet I enjoying a very high quality of life.

Where’s my halo, damn it!

Except…

I fly a lot. I mean… a lot. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the air more than on the ground. I fly primarily because I can. I have access to various personal and business connections that allow me to travel at heavily subsidized rates which in no way reflect the real cost of the flights – on many levels. I may as well live in a giant house on the edge of the metroplex and drive a massive SUV two hours to work every day as far as my environmental footprint is concerned. I’m really just a cheap carbon whore.

I occasionally attempt to rationalize my activities. For example, I know for a fact that if I exercise restraint and stop flying entirely for the rest of my life someone else somewhere on the planet will burn up that fuel instead. The oil isn’t going to stay in the ground just because I don’t use it. The global demand for fuel is insatiable. It might be burned by an entire village of rural peasants in India over a lifetime of heating and cooking. Or it might be used in an instant to convert sea water into irrigation for a golf course in Dubai. But it’s going to be burned regardless of my individual piety.

Like I said. This is a self serving rationalization. But it still reflects reality. And I have 7.3 billion data points to back me up. That’s the current human population all dipping in to the oil well together – and it’s a race to the bottom.

So here’s how I think about my nasty flying habit instead. It’s entirely discretionary. So is driving, which I do very little of. So is eating meat, which I could live without. So are most of the things I do in my life. My base consumption is very very low and it can get even lower without me feeling deprived in any way. I have a degree of personal resilience in my life. There’s slack and wiggle room. If I believed that I was part of a much larger global movement to voluntarily pull back, to make modest adjustments in order to serve a larger cohesive cause for social justice… I absolutely would. But for the moment, I see no point. We either all do this together or we don’t do it at all.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Why is Saudi Arabia suddenly the pit stop of choice for an impressive laundry list of major companies? How is it positioned among the growing number of Middle-Eastern industrial free zones? And should Rust Belt cities like Cincinnati look this way for answers?

If a nation's cities are the products of their ingredients, the Saudi Arabian pantry leaves much to be desired, with a grueling climate, a monopolistic economy built on the extraction of fossil fuels, looming regional threats, and conservative social practices that hinder freedoms, especially for women.

The resulting menu reflects the bleak inputs. Expansive wealth has combined with poor urban design to generate an unsavory cocktail of high-speed pedestrian-hostile highways and walled single-use compounds. Erratic industrial development and heavy utility infrastructure haphazardly dot the desert landscape. For decades, Saudi Arabia’s physical development has emulated American suburbia, prioritizing privacy over community to the extent it’s been organized at all. The nation’s prosperity, driven by oil, yields few private sector jobs. Reform has been slow and modest, and educational advances, primarily for men, have focused on growing computer and technical skills with little attention to intellectual fields.

But, despite all of its downsides, Saudi Arabia is advancing because it has recognized that oil wealth cannot drive the country forever. Much like America’s Rust Belt, Saudi Arabia is confronting the reality that, in the future, the economy needs to find new drivers.

To do this, Saudi Arabia committed to developing several new cities designed to generate opportunities for the country’s exploding young population to stay at home. The intent was to invest existing surpluses to develop new and different kinds of economies to fuel the country’s future. This contrasts with the region’s reputation for lavish “living in the moment.”

Rather than pressing solely for an emergence of finance or innovation that it is ill-equipped to attract, Saudi Arabia has made a tactical decision to leverage its industrial infrastructure, considering the regional advantage of its unique global positioning along the Red Sea at the confluence of busy shipping routes.

One of these cities, the King Abdullah Economic City, is by some measures the biggest development project in the history of the world. KAEC includes an unusual confluence of many modes of industrial transport, matching a seaport with a rail port and highways connecting the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal into the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Smartly, much of its investment has focused on increasing and humanizing its industrial infrastructure, leveraging the location by luring major industrial and shipping outfits to conduct midstream logistics activities here, midway through their global journey.

By increasing the attractiveness of this junction to global companies, KAEC is hoping to trade one heavy industry — oil — for a diverse array of others. Unlike recent Chinese megaprojects designed to passively accommodate inevitable increases in demand around existing economic drivers, KAEC is endeavoring to actively spur the organic emergence of a new economy by making the world take notice: first, of the things that Saudi Arabia’s population is capable of handling today, and later, of more cosmopolitan industries that can only thrive once slowly-materializing social advances have taken root. It's well-understood that, as part of the logical phasing by which most cities historically have grown, short-term industrial growth is the key to driving future gains in white collar fields over time.

KAEC is also the world’s first publicly-traded city. While growth has been slow, the city has stayed afloat through investment by half of the Saudi population and a rising stock price that over the last three years has outpaced the Dow. Its growth is predicated on continued public buy-in of its strategies; its fortunes are intrinsically tied to national transformations.

KAEC is one of many industrial free zones that are all the rage in this part of the world. The Middle East is now dotted with hundreds of them, and their power and attractiveness is leading the world to slowly reshape logistics activities around them. The massive economic shifts that these strategic investments have attracted seem by and large to be working. Another economic zone known as Al Duqm is rumored to be high on the military’s list of landing spots for relocating US military operations in the Middle East; it is a site that a few years ago could barely sustain a small fishing village.

On the other side of the world, thousands of miles away in the heartland of the United States, dozens of cities once buoyed by manufacturing are similarly trying to reshape their identities, among them Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Cincinnati. For some of them, a Saudi-inspired back-to-the-basics industrial approach could be part of the answer.

Many of these cities have already identified an increased midstream logistics role brought on by the ripple effect of the planned expansion of the Panama Canal. Chicago, the traditional link between the Mississippi River and the St. Lawrence Seaway, is reducing its water-based industrial volumes as it orients its river toward tourism. This further emboldens the ambitions of cities like Cincinnati to take up the slack — it has recently worked to up the profile of its river port from forty-ninth to ninth-largest by merging with adjacent cities.

A realignment in the nation’s energy transport arteries is also opening the door for smaller inland cities to become energy transport hubs. A decrease in energy from the Middle East, an increase from Canada and the northern United States, and increased local cultivation through renewables, natural gas, and small-scale drilling are broadening the energy transport infrastructure beyond well-established coastal ports.

As America’s manufacturing profile has shifted, freight transport has remained steady between water, rail, ground, and air modes. As a result, cities that link them are well-positioned as potential logistics hubs. New trends in shipping demands also suggest positive prospects for ports that can accommodate water-based deliveries further inland. Cincinnati is particularly well-positioned, because its proximity to the wide Ohio River makes it more attractive than similar cities on smaller rivers.

Despite many reasons for cities like Cincinnati to embrace a logistics-based future, obstacles have stood in the way. For one, trends in modern urban design and economic development do not favor industry. Even though manufacturing makes up 35 percent of the American economy, most planning theory has focused on eliminating or reusing industrial sites for dense urbanism, rather than embracing them for industry, taking humane factors into greater account. The latter would be a logical approach, given that many industrial nuisance qualities have been eliminated. Instead, planners have shunned most industrial activity as inherently hostile to cities, even amid a chorus of advocates for an increase in local production.

Many Midwest mayors have paid lip service to manufacturing, recognizing the need to accommodate the logistics needs of major companies. Simultaneously, however, planners have been empowered to transform large swaths of industrial land into developments full of the urban frills popular on the East Coast. Uniquely positioning cities to spur organic growth seems far less popular than trying to out-duel other cities for a share of millennial and corporate migration to duplicate versions of generic amenities. The limited embrace of industry has come through so-called “innovation districts,” geared at capturing a piece of the creative tech economy, rather than more place-specific heavier logistics.

Today, many hot spots are emerging that will be barometers of the struggle between the industrial opportunists and the urban development hegemony. In Cincinnati, these battles are subtly being waged over sites like Queensgate, a rare swath of intact industrial land at the precious confluence of water, rail, and highway. Its proximity to downtown has won it attention – and made it a prized trophy – in the strategy struggle between those who want to capitalize on a strategic industrial position and those who want to grow Cincinnati’s urban core. As Cincinnati works to attract companies away from flashier cities, it can do both, by embracing Queensgate’s unique industrial potential as an asset.

As Cincinnati looks for an answer, it may consider turning to the unlikeliest of case studies. Somewhere between the character of Midwestern cities and those on the East coast, there may be an answer that lies in the Middle East.

Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

Flickr photo by Joel Willis: John A. Roebling Bridge, Ohio River, Cincinnati

This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among  the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as  the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

The Authoritarian Impulse

Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.

Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find  his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

Already the disconnect between the hoi polloi and the new bureaucratic master race has spawned a powerful blowback, as evidenced by the rise of rightist, even quasi-fascist parties throughout the old continent. The people at the top—including much of the business leadership—may like the idea of a central European master-state, but support for the EU is at record low. Increasingly Europeans want, at the very least, to dial down the centralization and bring back some control to the local level, and something of the primacy of traditional cultures and what are still perceived  as “European values.”

In some ways, the extreme discontent in America—epitomized by the xenophobic Trump campaign—reflects a similar opposition to bureaucratic overreach. This conflict can be expected to grow as new federal initiatives—initiatives that seek, among other things, to enforce racial and class “balance” in neighborhoods and high-density housing in low-density suburbs—stomp on even the pretense that cities might have any control over their immediate environment. This policy is being adopted already in some regions, notably Minnesota, where planners now seek to change communities that are too white and affluent populations need to meet new goals of class and economic diversity.

The Rule of the Wise-people

Historically, advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right. Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century, the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national socialism.

In contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition, Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead at the altar of expertise and political correctness.

Ironically this is occurring at a time when many progressives celebrates localism in terms of food and culture. Some even embrace localism as an economic development tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever greater centralized big-business control.

Yet some of the same progressives who promote localism often simultaneously favor centralized control of everything from planning and zoning to education. They may want local music, wine, or song, but all communities then must conform in how they operate, are run, and developed. Advocates of strict land-use policies claim that traditional architecture and increased densities will enable us to once again enjoy the kind of “meaningful community” that supposedly cannot be achieved in conventional suburbs.

In the process, long-standing local control is being squeezed out of existence. Ontario, California, Mayor pro-tem Alan Wapner notes that powers once reserved for localities, such as zoning and planning, are being systematically usurped by regulators from Sacramento and Washington. “They are basically dictating land use,” he says. “We just don’t matter that much.”

The Road to Imperium

As the Obama era grinds to its denouement, grassroots democracy, once favored by liberals, is losing its historic appeal to the left. Important progressive voices like Matt Yglesias now suggest that “democracy is doomed.” Other prominent progressives, such as American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, see the more authoritarian model of China as successful while the U.S. and European political systems seem tired.

Increasingly the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations.

The new progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy” to determine energy, economic, and land-use policies. According to this article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a drive to impose energy austerity on analready fading middle class, limiting mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and single-family housing.

The vagaries of America’s political system have contributed to the left’s growing embrace of centralism. The Republican ascendency in virtually all states away from the coasts all but guarantees their control of most legislative branches. In contrast, the Democrat control of major cities, particularly along the coasts, and their ability to woo voters who come out only every four years, gives them a tremendous advantage on the presidential level.

This creates the ideal preconditions for  what Ross Douthat accurately notes is a rising “Caesarism of the left” since the 2010 Republican congressional sweep. There is broad backing among liberals for President Obama’s tack of avoiding Congress through presidential decrees. Nor is this tendency likely to end soon. Hillary Clinton, whose husband’s success was in part derived from working with Republicans, is already stating her intention to go over Congress if they don’t go along with her ideas.

My word to liberal friends: Think a bit about this embrace of  imperial presidential power if the person ruling from above was, say, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or, worst of all, Donald Trump.

Slouching towards Imperium

The centralization of power reflects disturbing tendencies in our economic life. Despite all the hopes for a more distributed, less concentrated “new economy,” we appear to be moving ever more toward economic centralization on a massive scale. Indeed, after decades of losing market share to smaller firms, the share of GDP controlled by the Fortune 500 has risen from 58 percent of nominal GDP in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013. 

Part of this is driven by the relentless growth of large financial institutions, the very folks who precipitated the financial crisis with their ill-advised speculations. They have taken advantage of new regulations to greatly increase their share of the financial market to an unprecedented 44 percent.

This economic consolidation, and how it plays into centralization, is rarely recognized by Republicans, living in mortal fear of offending their cherished K Street collaborators. A powerful central state often rains money on well-connected capitalists who have flourished under state-dominated systems in places as varied as Venezuela and Iran. Similarly, a draconian climate regime certainly enhances the fortunes of  capitalists such as Elon Musk as well as other Silicon Valley and Wall Street supporters who seek to force consumers and businesses into purchasing expensive, often unreliable renewable power from favored wind and solar projects.

The increasing power of the central state, in contrast, is the bane of small companies, who are far less well-positioned to deal with ever-increasingly regulation. Washington’s efforts to control financial activities proved a disaster for the country’s entrepreneurial economy, long dependent on small community banks for loans. Overall for the first time in recent memory (PDF), more businesses are being destroyed than created. Concurrently, if unsurprisingly, themiddle class is shrinking, and seeing its share of the economy steadily diminish.

There are some alarming parallels between these developments and the last days of the Roman Republic. There, too, developed a similar tendency toward vicious partisanship and a growing concentration of wealth in a few hands. In Rome’s case, the old middle classes and yeoman farmers were gradually replaced by patricians with access to slave labor; in our society, cheap foreign labor has been perceived as doing much the same for our oligarchs. Much as in Rome, our republican virtues are also fading. Instead, society seems to require a sure hand, particularly if the central authorities decide to transform society in ways that the vast majority might not like (for example, essentially banning suburban development or gas-powered cars). It may take a strict nanny state, to paraphrase Mary Poppins, to make the bitter medicine go down.

The Coming Conflict

Yet there’s a problem with centralization: People don’t trust the very institutions that would be charged with carrying out their policies. Levels of trust for the dominant institutions like the federal government, Congress, the courts, big banks, media, and the academy are at historically low levels.

Roughly half of all Americans, according to Gallup, now consider the federal government “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. Even in my home state of California—now a mecca for ever-expanding government—large majorities favor transferring tax dollars out of Sacramento to the localities, according to a December Public Policy Institute of California poll.

Critically this blowback is not among conservatives or exurbanites. Much of the strongest opposition to the federal and state planning regimes are in areas such as California’s Marin County, north of San Francisco, where residents have objected to densification schemes that, they maintain, would undermine the “the small-town, semi-rural, and rural character of their neighborhoods”—the very qualities that attracted them there in the first place.

Similar attempts to enforce density on suburban population have also led to uproars in  blue bastions such as the northern Virgina suburbs, the famously progressive University of California at Davis, and hip Boulder, Colorado. The New York Times’s Tom Edsall notes that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s dictates may have already shifted politics in affluent Westchester County, an early target of the social engineers seeking to enforce HUD policies, to the right.

Some leading progressives, like Nation contributor and Bay Area activist Zelda Bronstein, attack the growth of regional governments, designated to force compliance with state and federal mandates, as fundamentally undemocratic, embracing “insular, peremptory style of decision making.” Even millennials, who have tended to the left, are skeptical about over-centralized government. A recentNational Journal poll showed that they, like most Americans, are not enamored of top-down solutions: Less than a third favor federal over locally-based solutions.

Simply put, there is no huge appetite for ever expanding federal power among the majority of the populace. What is missing, outside of nihilistic opposition to all government, is a strong movement advocating for more authority in the hands of local communities, families, and volunteer organization. This does not necessarily mean a decline in environmental standards, since most people care most about the places where they and their families reside. Even with climate change, a carbon tax could be approved without adopting the California formula of ever more mega-regulations covering virtually every aspect of life.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, the genius of this republic lies not in its central state, but in its dispersion, voluntary association, and ideological diversity. If we undermine the legacy of our federal structure to something more akin to that, say, of France or Russia, the United States could no longer play its historic role as a rare beacon of independence and self-government in a world increasingly dominated by various manifestations of centralized tyranny.

This piece first appeared at The Daily Beast

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Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Barack Obama Photo by Bigstock.

“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been falling nationally since the start of the Great Recession.

But it’s not buses that are being abandoned. It’s bus riders.

The drop in bus ridership over the last several years has been mirrored by a decline in bus service, even as transit agencies have managed to resume increasing frequency and hours on all types of rail lines – heavy, light, and commuter.* (In this post, “service” means vehicle revenue miles – literally, multiplying a city’s bus or rail vehicles by the number of miles they run on their routes.) After a post-recession low in 2011, by 2013 rail service had increased by over 4% nationally in urban areas of at least one million people. Light rail in particular has continued its decade-plus boom, with a service increase of more than 12% in just two years. By contrast, bus service – which already took a heavier hit in the first years of the recession – was cut an additional 5.8%.

And it turns out that when you disaggregate the national data by urban area, there’s a very tight relationship between places that cut bus service between 2000 and 2013 and those that saw the largest drops in ridership. If you live in a city where bus service has been increased, it’s likely that your city has actually grown its bus ridership, despite the national trends. In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be that bus riders are deciding they’d rather just walk, bike, or take their city’s new light rail line. It’s that too many cities are cutting bus service to the point that people are giving up on it.

Admittedly, this is a crude way to demonstrate a very complicated relationship. To rigorously test the impact of bus service on ridership, you’d want to take into account all sorts of other things: the presence of other transit services; population density; gas prices; demographics; and so on.

Fortunately, we don’t have to do that, because researchers at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute just did it for us. And they found that even if you control for those other factors, service levels are still the number one predictor of bus ridership.

Still, I can imagine two big objections to the idea that cuts to bus operations are behind ridership declines. First, a lot of cities have opened new rail lines since 2000 – many of which, if not most, replaced heavily-trafficked bus routes. In those cases, cities are adding rail service and reducing bus service, but it obviously wouldn’t be right to say that those bus riders are being abandoned.

But while that has surely happened in some places, it just doesn’t match the overall data. Rail service, including new lines, has been booming since long before the recession – but up until about 2009, bus service was growing, too, or at least holding steady. If rail expansions were driving bus cuts, you’d expect to see those cuts all the way back to the beginning of the data. But you don’t. Instead, cuts to bus routes appear right as transit funding was hit hard by the recession.

Second, you might argue that service and ridership are linked, but the other way around: as ridership declines, agencies cut back on hours and frequency to match demand. Teasing out which way the causation runs would be difficult – and the answer would almost certainly include at least some examples in both directions. One quick-and-dirty way to get an idea, though, is to compare ridership changes from one year to service changes in the next year. If agencies cut service because of earlier ridership declines, then you’d expect to see that places with larger drops in ridership in “Year One” tend to be the places with larger cuts to service in “Year Two.”

But, again, they don’t. In fact, just 3% of the variation in service cuts is explained by ridership changes from the year before.

So while that’s hardly ironclad – and I look forward to further research that sheds more light on this problem – it does appear that a major part of the divergence in bus and rail ridership is a result of a divergence in bus and rail service: since the recession, transit agencies have cut bus service year after year, while returning service to rail relatively quickly.

Why did they do that? I don’t know. But I can speculate that it has something to do with the fact that bus transit supporters are not always the same kinds of people as rail transit supporters. Even though more people take buses than trains in nearly every metropolitan area in the country, train riders, on average, tend to bewealthier and whiter. Not only that, but many civic and business leaders who don’t use transit at all are heavily invested in rail service as an economic development catalyst for central city neighborhoods. In other words, rail tends to have a more politically powerful constituency behind it than buses.

As a result, when the recession blew a hole in transit budgets around the country, it may have been politically easier for local governments to fill those holes by sustaining cuts to bus lines, rather than rail.

To be clear, the problem here has nothing to do with whether transit agencies are running more services that are rubber-on-asphalt or steel-on-tracks. As Jarrett Walker has eloquently argued, the technology used by a particular line matters far less than the quality of service: how often it runs, how quickly, for how much of the day.

But there are at least two problems here. First, because of the spread-out nature of even relatively dense American cities, it will be a very, very long time before rail transit can connect truly large numbers of people to large numbers of jobs and amenities. When Minneapolis opened the 12-mile Blue Line light rail in 2004, for example, it was a major step forward for Twin Cities transit – but still, only 2% of the region’s population lived close enough to walk to one of the stations. For everyone else, transit still meant taking the bus, even if they were taking the bus to a train station.

And even in places with well-developed rail networks, those systems are usually oriented to serve downtown commuters. Especially in outer neighborhoods, crosstown trips in places like Chicago, Boston, or DC are heavily reliant on buses. Abandoning buses means abandoning those trips, and the people who depend on them.

Boston’s T reaches both Dorchester and Jamaica Plain, but a bus is by far the easiest way to get from one to the other on transit. Credit: Google Maps

Second, there are serious equity issues with shifting resources from bus to rail – again, not because of anything inherent to those technologies, but simply because of who happens to use them in modern American cities. In most cases, shifting funding from bus to rail means shifting funding from services disproportionately used by lower-income people to ones with with a stronger middle- and upper-middle-class constituency. And while transit ought to be viewed as much more than just a service for the poor, we can’t ignore the equity impacts of transit policy.

In light of all this, we have to stop talking about America’s bus woes as a ridership problem. All the evidence suggests that when service is strong, and buses are a reliable way to get to work, school, or the grocery store, people will take them. Instead, the problem is that fewer and fewer people have access to that kind of strong bus line. If we care about ridership, we need to restore and enhance the kind of transit services that people can rely on.

* “Heavy rail” includes traditional subways and elevated trains found in cities like New York, Washington, and Chicago. “Light rail” includes many newer systems, with smaller train sets that are sometimes designed to run on streets as well as in their own right of way. Rail lines in Seattle, the Twin Cities, and Dallas are typical of light rail. “Commuter rail” services generally reach from central business districts far out into the suburbs, and are meant almost exclusively for peak-hour workers.

This piece was first published by City Observatory on its CityCommentary blog.

Daniel Kay Hertz is completing his graduate studies at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He has written about urban demographics, neighborhood change, housing policy, and public transit for the Washington Post, CityLab, Next City, and other publications, as well as on his personal blog.

Image from BigStockPhoto.com: A metro bus in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is the introduction to a new report: “Building Cities for People” published by the Center for Demographics and Policy. The report was authored by Joel Kotkin with help from Wendell Cox, Mark Schill, and Ali Modarres. Download the full report (pdf) here.

Cities succeed by making life better for the vast majority of their citizens. This requires less of a focus on grand theories, architecture or being fashionable, and more on what occurs on the ground level. “Everyday life,” observed the French historian Fernand Braudel, “consists of the little things one hardly notices in time and space.” Braudel’s work focused on people who lived normal lives; they worried about feeding and housing their families, keeping warm, and making a livelihood.

Adapting Braudel’s approach to the modern day, we concentrate on how families make the pragmatic decisions that determine where they choose to locate. To construct this new, family- centric model, we have employed various tools: historical reasoning, Census Bureau data, market data and economic statistics, as well as surveys of potential and actual home-buyers.

This approach does not underestimate the critical role that the dense, traditional city plays in intellectual, cultural and economic life. Traditional cities will continue to attract many of our brightest and most capable citizens, particularly among the young and childless. But our evidence indicates strongly that, for the most part, families today are heading away from the most elite, more congested cities, and towards less expensive cities and the suburban periphery. (See report appendix “Best Cities for Families”)

New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles long have been among the cities that defined the American urban experience. But today, families with children seem to be settling instead in small, relatively inexpensive metropolitan areas, such as Fayetteville in Arkansas and Missouri; Cape Coral and Melbourne in Florida; Columbia, South Carolina; Colorado Springs; and Boise. They are also moving to less celebrated middle-sized metropolitan areas, such as Austin, Raleigh, San Antonio and Atlanta.

Traditional cities will continue to attract many of our brightest and most capable citizens, particularly among the young and childless. But our evidence indicates strongly that, for the most part, families today are heading away from the most elite, celebrated cities, and towards less expensive cities and the suburban periphery.

Download the full report (pdf).