(Note: Last week I was fortunate enough to have an opinion piece written by Ed Zotti and myself published in Crain's Chicago Business. It's on the continuing loss of Chicago's Black middle class, at least as defined by its ability to attract Black college graduates. The article is behind a paywall, but as a co-author I took the liberty of posting it here. It's a theme I've written extensively about, and Chicago's not the only city or metro to experience this. However, I think Chicago's (and other Rust Belt cities) particular brand of segregation is an under-recognized feature that holds them back. Please take a look. -Pete)

Opinion: Chicago needs to attract more Black talent. Right now, we're not even trying.

Crain's Chicago Business, March 21, 2024

The past few years have seen much handwringing about the supposedly dire state of Black America, with one local business leader warning that "without significant intervention, Black people will become a permanent underclass."

We beg to differ. We're well aware of the challenges Black Americans face. But the alarmist talk ignores the substantial progress that has been made and perpetuates the myth that Black people are doomed victims incapable of helping themselves.

That's nonsense. Our analysis of the latest Census Bureau data for the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest Black populations clearly shows that, in many regions, Black Americans have built strong middle-class communities that collectively are home to millions of people.

Granted, we found wide variation. Pessimism in the Midwest surely stems from the fact that Chicago and Detroit — where one of us, Pete Saunders, grew up — are at the bottom of the list on important metrics such as Black income growth, education, geographical mobility and integration. That's because huge numbers of middle-class Black Chicagoans have bailed for other parts of the country and we're not attracting enough ambitious newcomers to replace them.

Why not? Other cities have become magnets for the Black middle class and are booming as a result. Chicago has had no difficulty attracting people of other ethnicities. Setting aside fluctuations due to the pandemic, if the number of Black residents was increasing at the same rate as the rest of the city, the overall population would be growing rather than flat, and the Black community would get a much-needed boost.

That's not happening now, but we don't see that as cause for despair. On the contrary, the fact that other cities are far ahead of us shows the problems of Black Chicago can be solved — but only if we understand why we're so far behind and decide to do something about it.

Some important findings from our research:

More Black people have left the Chicago region than any other U.S. metro except New York. For decades, Black people have been moving back to the South from elsewhere in the U.S., a phenomenon demographers have termed the New Great Migration. Many of these people have come from Chicago. Our calculations suggest the area experienced net out-migration of 857,000 Black people between 1980 and 2022, more than any other metropolitan area except New York, which lost just over a million, and New York is a much larger place.

The majority of those departing were, or went on to become, middle class. We calculate that, had no Black migration occurred, the number of Black people living in middle-income communities in metro Chicago would have grown to 1.2 million by now. Instead, the number has fallen to 746,000. Chicago is one of only two of the top 10 metros to have experienced a decline in middle-income Black residents since 1980. The other is Los Angeles.

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Justin Brown, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

The greatest threat to Western civilisation comes not from China, Russia or Islamists, but from the very people who rank among its greatest beneficiaries. In virtually every field, the midwives of our demise are not working-class radicals or far-right agitators, but, as the late Fred Siegel called it, the ‘new aristocratic class’, made up of the well-credentialed and the technologically and scientifically adept.

Virtually every ideology that’s undermining the West has its patrons in these ruling cognitive elites. This includes everything from the purveyors of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter to transgender activists and, perhaps most egregiously, campaigners for the climate jihad. In each case, these elite activists reject the market traditions of liberal capitalism and instead promote a form of social control, often with themselves in charge. The fact that these ideologies are destructive, and could ultimately undermine the status of these very elites, seems to matter little to them. That they also infuriate the middle and working classes doesn’t seem to register, either.

A huge shift has taken place among the elites in recent years. In the past, wealthy people overwhelmingly favoured the political right or the centre. Some billionaires still do, including oil and chemicals magnate Charles Koch, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and real-estate billionaire Donald Bren, all of whom are well into their seventies or eighties or beyond. Today, these folks are being supplanted by more youthful and supposedly more ‘enlightened’ oligarchs, who have consistently outraised and outspent their right-wing rivals by a margin of nearly two to one.

In the US, nonprofits’ assets have grown 16-fold since 1980. In 2020, nonprofits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting more than five per cent of the US economy. Ironically, foundations that are funded with the great fortunes of Henry Ford, John D Rockefeller and John D MacArthur, all right-wing figures, have become some of the key financiers of ‘progressive’ causes.

In the coming decades, we can expect more of this pattern. Not only do we have to deal with the beliefs of the oligarchs, but also those of their forsaken wives and their offspring. Jeff Bezos’ former spouse, MacKenzie Scott, worth an estimated $60 billion, has already given $133million to a group pushing for a ‘progressive’ takeover of education. Melinda Gates, the former wife of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, worth at least $13 billion, is also backing woke causes.

The current cadre of elites seem uniquely hostile to meritocracy and individual rights – values that once stood at the heart of liberal, capitalist societies. Rather than promote upward mobility for the plebs, they want to divide them into ‘identity’ groups based on race, sexuality and gender. Black Lives Matter, the enforcers of critical race theory, for years enjoyed lavish support from top tech companies, including Microsoft, Cisco and TikTok. It also became a poster child for a host of nonprofits, like the Tides Foundation, which in turn gets much of its money from oligarchs and their descendants, including George Soros and the MacArthur, Hewlett, Ford, Packard and Rockefeller foundations.

Nowhere is the gap between the elites’ political activism and the interests of the public more evident today than when it comes to the overhyped climate crisis. To a remarkable extent, the current ruling oligarchy in tech and on Wall Street have embraced the ideology of Net Zero, even though this threatens to undermine Western industrial power and raise the cost of living for the masses. Elite opinion, in general, is far more engaged on climate issues than the general population. In one recent poll, those living with graduate degrees in big dense cities and making over $150,000 a year are far more likely to favour such things as rationing meat and gas than the vast majority of Americans.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Spiked.

Due to budget concerns, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proposed cuts to the New York City public library budgets, forcing the majority of public libraries to cut their hours and open only five days a week. Public libraries in the city, since November, have already been closed on Sundays to offset the surging cost of the local migrant crisis. These moves show how intent the mayor is on driving people away from important third spaces—and even away from the city itself.

I recently had the chance to chat with a handful of families who left New York and settled in the Yardley, Pennsylvania area over the past 18 months or so. Some still worked in New York and commuted occasionally, while others were remote or found jobs elsewhere. Although their professional tracks and life stages were all a bit different—some had young children, others had adult children, and some had no children—each family appeared extremely relieved to have left New York.

The former New Yorkers loved the city and never thought they would leave. Yet, life had become untenable since the pandemic. They cited their concerns about corruption and partisanship, as well as concerns with public safety, policing, and unending taxation and climbing charges. It was hard for me to argue with them; the city’s streets are dirty and in disrepair, the city feels unsafe and chaotic, violence and disruption have become commonplace, all the while, costs are skyrocketing, and congestion zones and failing public transit have made moving around the city even harder. The public school system is seeing a shortage in space, the city is not protecting property and ownership rights, and businesses are struggling because they cannot protect their goods from unending crime.

These new Pennsylvanians are not exceptions. Census data shows that in 2023, New York City lost almost 78,000 residents, shrinking its population to 8.26 million people. This is on top of the city losing more than 126,000 residents in 2022 after the pandemic ended. New survey data from the Citizen Budget Commission of 6,600 New Yorkers reveals that just 30 percent of New Yorkers think the quality of life in the city is good and only 50 percent plan on staying in the city in the next four years. Over the past six years, the Commission found that only 30 percent of New Yorkers rated the quality of life in the city as “excellent” or “good,” down from 50 percent in 2017. Just 49 percent of New Yorkers said that they felt safe riding the subway during the day, a stark drop from the 82 percent who reported feeling safe in 2017.  

The reasons for leaving offered in the survey match my informal sample—New Yorkers feel notably more unsafe in the city in today than they did six years earlier. Residents are unsatisfied with many public services, public education, the cleanliness of their neighborhoods, and the traffic. Sadly, I have seen random assaults on the streets, know families who have had their homes invaded, and a teacher in my children’s school was randomly pushed onto the subway tracks resulting in multiple surgeries and missing half a year of work.

New York is letting its institutions—which not only promote law and order, but stability and investment—disintegrate, and we are seeing the consequences. What must be understood here is that this decline is a matter of bad public policies, poor governance, and incorrect choices, not a pandemic. The city must pause and strategically think about how to shore up its institutions and stop destroying them or its numbers will continue to drop.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a profesor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Ajay Suresh, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

If Joe Biden loses to Donald Trump this November, he can apportion blame towards his administration’s many unforced errors, from the botched Afghanistan bug-out to the mess at the southern border. But the biggest blunder of all has yet to fully reveal itself: the ill-conceived drive to push electric vehicles into making up over three-fifths of all car purchases by the 2030s.

Just last week the administration issued a draconian mileage requirement, one of many ‘nudge’ policies attempting to usher in an all-electric future. Replacing a massive $3 trillion industry with a singular technology represents a severe economic threat under any circumstances, but ramming through changes just as EV sales are slowing is nothing less than madness.

Rarely has a policy brought such negative economic and ultimately political implications. EVs today are simply not practical for most people, unable to afford the higher costs and wary of a charger infrastructure that is far from ready for prime time.

The average price for a brand-new EV is over $60,000, about $12,000 more than the average four-door sedan. Even with tax credits, it is hard to see how consumers come out ahead, at least for now. The electric version of the base version of the Ford F-150 pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in America, costs an additional $26,000 over the gasoline-powered variety. EVs are not affordable for most Americans: it’s little wonder that only 16 per cent of them are seriously considering a purchase.

It’s not that consumers are opposed to all electric-aided cars. Customers are willing to line up for gas-saving hybrids, which are cheaper to produce and infinitely more practical for most people at this time. But the EVs promoted by the Biden administration are simply unaffordable. As even the Washington Post admitted, electric vehicles are turning the automobile back into a luxury – “out of reach for many”.

Yet Biden and his green backers seem impervious to any reality that doesn’t fit their ideology. In addition, there’s big money to be made by cashing in on government mandates, much as state monopolies have done over the centuries. These mandates have helped make Elon Musk among the world’s richest people, and left Tesla valued far above a more profitable competitor like Toyota.

The current EV market cannot sustain the unionised, Detroit-centered auto industry that depends overwhelmingly on trucks, SUVs and traditional gas cars. A move to produce electric cars would be a job-shredder: the production of electric cars requires 30 per cent less domestic labour in the US.

Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Durian, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has a new book out called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The Atlantic recently posted a very interesting excerpt and adaptation.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.


Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

…

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theoriesabound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.


I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Ron Lach via Pexels.

The recent decision by the National Health Service to ban puberty blockers under prescription outside of upcoming clinical trials is a rare indication that common sense and biological reality are staging a comeback. However, this ruling is but a small victory against a growing trend that places ever less emphasis on family, marriage and children.

The battle of the sexes shifting into a battle of infinite sexes represents a key front in this age of familial and gender confusion. Today over 28 per cent of all Gen-Z women identify as LGBTQ, more than twice the rate for millennials and almost three times that for young men.

This break with heterosexual norms has many sources. Women generally outnumber men: 75 per cent of Ivy League presidents, 66 per cent of college administrators, and 58 per cent of recent graduates are now female. On college campuses, as author and longtime feminist Susan Jacoby notes, even the most sensitive and sympathetic men “have been robbed of their true nature and humanity.”

Alienation from heterosexuality has its cheering section in the scientific community, which increasingly denies even the existence of biological sex. The media is, unsurprisingly, on board: Andrea Chu’s New York Magazine’s cover The Freedom of Sex openly advocates letting children decide about their own gender while still young. Colleges do their part by allowing transgender women to compete against biological women, to the consternation of many female athletes.

Transgenderism even gets a boost from the highest echelons of government. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken may fail to address Russia, Hamas or Iran, but has time to urge diplomats to eschew “sexist” words like father. The President himself has promoted transgenderism as the “civil rights issue of our time.”

In such circumstances, it’s no surprise that relations between men and women increasingly resemble those of almost different species. Young men, for example, are generally heading to the political right while young women trend far more towards the left. Politically engaged women, notes the American Enterprise Institutes Sam Abrams, support cancel culture far more than their male counterparts. This divergence is not only felt in America but exists in other countries including the UK, Germany and South Korea.

Faltering relations between men and women are likely to worsen a mounting demographic crisis now evident in virtually all high-income societies. In the US, a quarter of all people have not married by age 40, a historic record. Much the same is occurring in the EU, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China. Last year, the UK’s birthrate hit a record low, with fertility rates for women under 30 at their lowest levels since records began in 1938. A fifth of all British women are childless by mid-life.

Even when people have children, they increasingly do it on their own. In the United States, the rate of single parenthood has grown from 10 per cent in 1960 to over 30 per cent today. Between 1972 and 2019, the number of marriages in Britain dropped by half. Post-familial attitudes are, if anything, even more common in continental Europe. By 2000, more than half of births in Sweden were to unmarried women (though most of them cohabiting).

Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Ted Eytan via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Moving Away from the Major Metros: The recent Census Bureau population estimates release revealed a massive shift of domestic migrants away from the major metropolitan areas (the 56 with more than 1,000,000 population) to the rest of the nation. In just three years (2021 through 2023), the major metros lost 1,920,000 net domestic migrants to other places .Relative to the 1.92 million gain outside the major metros, the major metro loss of 1.92 million was 3.84 million relative to the gain outside the major metros. This rising “net migration gap” is illustrated in Figure 1. By comparison in the first three years of the last decade (2011-2013), the major metros gained 352,000 net domestic migrants, indicating a drop of 2.27 million relative to 2021-3.

Moving from the Urban Cores to the Suburbs and Beyond: There has also been a significant change in net domestic migration from the major metro urban core counties within the major metros. The urban core counties include the city hall of the core municipality (Note), with the exception of New York, where all five of the city’s counties are considered urban core counties. People are migrating out of urban core counties at a considerably higher rate, while suburban counties are gaining net domestic migrants (overall).

Net domestic outmigration from the urban core counties was 2.6 million from 2021 to 2023. This is nearly equal to the 2.7 million for the entire 2011-2020 decade. Further, urban core net domestic migration was offset somewhat by major metro suburbs (75%) in the 2010s (Figure 2). But this phenomenon seems to have stalled. By 2021-2023 net domestic migration was only 27% to major metro suburbs (Figure 3)

Major Metropolitan Areas Summary: Designated based upon commuting data by the Office of Management and Budget, metropolitan areas are composed of complete counties. The latest delineation of counties within metropolitan areas was in July 2023.

Overall, the 56 major metropolitan areas accounted for 56.8% of the nation’s population in 2023, with 43.2% outside the major metropolitan areas. Detailed population and domestic migration data is in the Table, which includes all 56 metropolitan areas with at least 1,000,000 residents in the 2020 census.

Major Metropolitan Areas — Notable Recent Changes: Some counties were removed in July 2023 from major metropolitan areas, as working from home reduced the number of commuters crossing into interior counties from more remote counties. These areas are no longer suburbs or even exurbs of large metro areas.

Two of those metropolitan areas have fallen below 1,000,000 population since then, including Honolulu and New Orleans. The population reduction in New Orleans was principally the result of removing St. Tammany Parish (county) to become its own metropolitan area (Slidell, LA).

Further, Pike County, Pennsylvania was removed from the New York metropolitan area, reducing that metropolitan area to two states, New York, and New Jersey.

The Chicago metropolitan area lost Kenosha County, Wisconsin, the only part of Wisconsin that had been included in the Chicago metro.

The Top 15 Major Metropolitan Areas: 2021 to 2023: The largest net domestic migration loss over the past three years (2021-2023) was in the New York metropolitan area, which fell by 910,000. Most of this loss occurred within the urban core (the five boroughs of New York), with a net 689,000 moving away. While the suburbs lost 221,000.

• Overall, the New York metro lost 492,000 residents, including net domestic migrants, natural increase (births minus deaths) and net international migration.
• The Los Angeles metropolitan area lost 554,000 net domestic migrants, of which 457,000 left the urban core, while the suburban loss was 96,000. The overall population loss was 379,000.
• The Chicago metropolitan area lost 290,000 net domestic migrants, of which 247,000 left the urban core. The suburban loss was 43,000. The overall population loss was 173,000.
• The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area gained 214,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 95,0000. The suburban gain was 309,000. The overall population gain was 434,000, which narrowed the gap with third ranked Chicago by 419,000. The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area now trails Chicago by 1,150,000.
• The Houston metropolitan area gained 103,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 83,000. The suburban gain was 186,000. Overall, the Houston metro gained 342,000 residents.
• The Atlanta metropolitan area has become the sixth largest in the nation. Metro Atlanta gained 69,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 13,000. The suburban gain was 82,000. Overall, Atlanta gained 198,000 residents.
• The Washington metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 158,000 net domestic migrants, and the urban core lost 13,000. The suburban loss was 143,000. Overall, Washington gained 45,000 residents.
• The Philadelphia metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 52,000 and the urban core lost 78,000, while the suburbs gained 25,000. Overall, Philadelphia gained 4,000 residents.
• The Miami metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 147,000 and the urban core lost 127,000. The suburban counties lost 20,000. Overall, Miami gained 50,000 residents, due to a large net international migration.
• The 10th ranked Phoenix metropolitan area had a net domestic gain of 129,000 and the urban core gained 78,000. The suburbs gained 51,000. Overall, Phoenix gained 195,000 residents. The urban core county, Maricopa, is largely suburban in form, giving it the capacity to attract domestic migrants by virtue of its large land supply.
• The Boston metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 128,000 and the urban core lost 60,000. The suburbs lost 68,000. Overall, Boston lost 15,000 residents.
• The Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area had a net domestic migration gain of 49,000 and the urban core lost 17,000. The suburbs gained 67,000. Riverside-San Bernardino passed San Francisco during the 2010s to become California’s second largest metropolitan area. Overall, Riverside-San Bernardino gained 82,000 residents.
• The San Francisco metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 270,000 and the urban core lost 73,000. The suburbs lost 197,000. Overall, San Francisco metro lost 174,000 residents.
• The Detroit metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 270,000 and the urban core lost 73,000. The suburbs lost 18,000. Overall, Detroit lost 43,000 residents.
• The Seattle metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 87,000 . The urban core lost 74,000. The suburbs lost 12,000. Overall, Seattle gained 17,000 residents due to strong net international migration.

Among the 15 largest metropolitan areas, only five gained net domestic migrants in the years from 2021 to 2023 (Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino). Only one of the 15 largest metropolitan areas had a core county net domestic migration increase (Phoenix). Finally, only six of the top 15 metropolitan areas gained suburban net domestic migration: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino. Philadelphia is particularly surprising, being the only among the top 15 outside the South and outside comparatively the Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino metros, which have gained substantially from the flood of outmigration from the Los Angeles metros.

(back to reference)

Note: The core municipality is the historical core municipality (https://www.newgeography.com/content/002401-suburbanized-core-cities) which the original metropolitan area was delineated. This is generally the largest municipality in the metropolitan area, except in Riverside-San Bernardino, where San Bernardino County is the urban core county and Virginia Beach-Norfolk, where the urban core county is the independent city of Norfolk.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: aerial view of urban core of Phoenix, Arizona; the only one of top 15 metros with an urban core gain from 2020 to 2023. Via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Will putting more police in subway stations solve the crime problem? Probably not if BART’s experience is any guide.

Some people say transit crime is dropping so it’s safe to ride transit. Others say it is getting worse. Who’s right? We can get some answers from the Federal Transit Administration’s Major Safety Events Database, which was recently updated with data through the end of 2023.

The database lists more than 88,000 safety and security events since 2014. Safety events include things like collisions between transit vehicles and other vehicles. Security events include assaults and murders. The database counts suicides as security events, but I think they reflect safety problems and have adjusted the data to account for this. Suicides appear to be way down since the pandemic, possibly because transit agencies have stopped blaming accidental fatalities on suicides.

The database does not include commuter rail as apparently that mode is monitored by the Federal Railroad Administration. Crime rates on commuter buses are much lower than other buses and it is likely that crime rates on commuter rail are similarly low.

Some other security events are also not crimes. If someone accidentally leaves a backpack on bus or train, transit police may decide to evacuate the vehicle in case the backpack contains a bomb. The event gets written up even if the backpack turns out to be innocent. Rather than go through all 88,646 events recorded in the database, I’m going to assume that such innocent events are distributed equally among all agencies and modes. If true, then the crime rates reported below will be a little higher than the truth, but the relative rates between cities and mode will be about the same.

Modes of transit that collect fares using the honor system tend to have the greatest security risks for passengers. MB=conventional bus; TB, CB, & RB are trolley, commuter, and rapid bus; YR is hybrid rail meaning Diesel-powered light rail; SR=streetcars.

In recent years, heavy rail has seen far more security problems than any other mode of transit. But heavy rail also carries far more riders than any other mode except conventional buses. To assess the risk people take when riding various transit systems, I’ve calculated the number of safety or security events per billion passenger-miles. Passenger-miles from 2014 through 2022 are in the National Transit Database historic time series, table TS2.1. For 2023, I estimated passenger-miles by multiplying the average trip length in 2022 (passenger-miles divided by trips) by the number of trips in 2023.

I last reviewed transit security in 2022 using data through 2021. The most recent data show that transit crimes, per billion passenger-miles, have slightly dropped from 2021, but are still worse than from before the pandemic. However, crime rates were already growing before the pandemic began, meaning that crime rates today are much worse than in 2014.

Not counting suicides, bus and rail riders suffered an average of 274 crimes and 0.3 murders per billion passenger-miles in 2014. This rose to 431 crimes and 1.6 murders per billion in 2019, then leapt to 1,046 crimes and 4.9 murders in 2021, declining to 781 crimes and 2.9 murders in 2023. The 2023 numbers make transit look safe compared with 2021, but transit riders were still almost three times more likely to be crime victims and ten times more likely to be killed in 2023 than in 2014.

The highest crime rates are on light rail, streetcars, and trolley buses. Light rail and streetcars both collect fares using the honor system, and the broken windows hypothesis suggests that making it easy to evade fares invites more crime. Trolley buses are only found in a few cities and crime rates on this mode are skewed by high rates in San Francisco, which also collects fares using the honor system on its trolley buses. It is worth noting that many cities are addressing transit crime on heavy rail by installing better fare gates and St. Louis is planning to install such gates for its light-rail system.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Elvert Barnes, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

If you live in an urban area, you may mistakenly believe that everyone has access to reliable Wi-Fi, personal computers, and cellular networks. However, millions of rural Americans live without these increasingly essential amenities.

This sentiment is echoed by data collected by the Pew Research Center. Researchers discovered that, despite recent gains, roughly three in 10 rural households do not have broadband. Similarly, 20% of the rural population do not own a smartphone, and 28% do not have a laptop or PC.

The idea of living without smartphones or the internet may sound romantic at first, but the reality of living without connectivity can be harsh. In today’s digital age, those who do not have access to the web are at risk of being left behind. That’s because folks with access to the web cannot utilize telehealth, have limited access to educational resources, and may miss out on employment opportunities due to poor connectivity. This means that addressing the digital divide is crucial for today’s policymakers.

Healthcare

The pandemic forced many healthcare providers to invest in their telehealth services. Telehealth appointments increased by 766% in the first 3 months of the pandemic alone, and 40% of physicians now use some form of telemedicine in their day-to-day practices. This is great news for providers and patients alike, who can give and receive medical attention from the comfort of their home or office.

However, rural patients are at risk of being left behind. This is a serious issue, as people who live in rural locations already tend to be sicker than their urban peers. This is largely due to healthcare access disparities that are exacerbated by economic status and poor transportation access.

Addressing the connectivity gap can help rural people receive the help they need and significantly improve their quality of life. This is particularly important for rural folks who experience acute illnesses or injuries like broken teeth or abscesses. Rural people who are connected via reliable Wi-Fi can access virtual care via teledentistry. Dentists and hygienists can then perform remote triage to ensure that remote patients are able to see a specialist at a time that works for them.

Education

Addressing the rural-urban education gap should be a priority for today’s policymakers. Today, 13% of rural graduates left school without a high school diploma, while just 21% went on to receive a bachelor's degree. By comparison, only 11% of urban graduates left school without a diploma and 36% received a bachelor's degree or higher. This underlines the gap in educational access between rural and urban learners.

Closing educational attainment may be possible if we invest in connectivity. Students who can connect to reliable internet access are in a much stronger position to access resources and attend remote classes. This is key, as many universities and higher learning institutions now offer a blend of in-person, hybrid, and remote courses.

Of course, it may be that more rural students do not want to seek further education at a university. While this is understandable, those who do want to pursue higher education should be empowered to do so with consistent access to digital educational materials.

Energy

Addressing the connectivity gap won’t just improve access to the internet in the US; it will empower rural populations around the world to take control of their energy production, too. This is important since energy colonialism threatens to worsen the global urban-rural divide.

Bridging the connectivity gap can help more rural homeowners make the switch to smart meters and renewable energy systems. These high-tech solutions rely on a stable Wi-Fi connection and are typically connected to a wider grid via Wi-Fi. Making the switch can save homeowners money and help them build a more resilient home energy supply. This is particularly important for folks who live in areas with high sunlight hours, and who may be able to take advantage of solar panel installation.

Currently, rural families who are weighing the costs and benefits of solar energy may be put off due to limited internet access. While internet access isn’t necessary for panels to work, it does allow folks to monitor the output of their panels and their energy savings in real time. This can encourage solar energy adoption since effective solar panels enable rural residents to save $20,000 to $90,000 in energy bills.

By closing the connectivity gap, rural homeowners can take control of their energy production and reduce energy waste. This is crucial, as many rural homes are in prime position for solar panel installation and would qualify for incentives like federal solar credits, rebates, low-interest loans, and business tax benefits. This saves homeowners money and insulates them against the rising cost of nonrenewable energy.

Bridging the Gap

Connecting rural households to reliable broadband can improve healthcare outcomes, increase access to education, and undo the damage caused by energy colonialism. However, bridging the gap is no easy feat.

That’s why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has recently stepped up efforts to gather connectivity data. Using this data, the FCC plans to update the “Fabric” of broadband across the country and improve bulk availability by the end of 2024. This plan is bold and multifaceted but may result in lasting change for millions of rural Americans.

As ever, it’s worth noting that many rural Americans have a higher quality of life and may not want to connect their homes to a wider Wi-Fi network. The point of bridging the gap, therefore, is not to force folks to start surfing the Web but to ensure that it is an option for all Americans.

Conclusion

Bridging the urban-rural connectivity gap can significantly improve rural people’s quality of life. By addressing connectivity disparities, we can improve access to telehealth providers and ensure that all Americans have access to high-quality educational materials. Improving broadband access can democratize energy supply and help more people take advantage of renewable energy systems like solar power.

Amanda Winstead is a freelance writer and blogger, covering political and economic trends. Follow Amanda on Twitter @AmandaWinsteadd.

Photo: NASA via Unsplash.

This newly released report covers the challenges and successes of Latinos, their history in California, and present day role in the economy. Soledad Ursúa is the principal researcher for this project; contributors include Jennifer L. Hernandez on housing; Karla López del Río on policy, and Sen. Gloria Romero (Ret.) on education. Below is an excerpt from the report.

Key Findings:

From 2010 to 2020, the Latino populace has witnessed a notable uptick of 23%, presently constituting 62.1 million individuals, equivalent to 18.7% of the overall U.S. population. Within California, this demographic has experienced rapid expansion, now representing nearly 40% of the state’s population, with much potential for economic and social progress, but their prospects are marred by various challenges.

The Livelihood of Latinos: Vulnerabilities Amidst Sacramento’s Environmental and Regulatory Policies: Latinos hold a significant presence in California’s economic landscape, particularly in agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, and construction. Pivotal players within the state’s ‘carbon economy’, they are most threatened by California’s draconian carbon-neutrality initiatives.

Challenges in Housing Affordability for Latino Families: Homeownership bears profound cultural and aspirational significance for Latinos, optimizing familial stability and the realization of the American Dream. But the dream of homeownership has become increasingly elusive for many Latino families within California, due to exceedingly high costs, and the state’s stringent environmental regulations. Today California’s Latino homeownership rate ranks an abysmal 41st nationwide.

Challenges in California’s Education System and Implications for Latino Mobility: Constituting 56.1% of California’s public-school demographic, Latino students are falling behind both their counterparts elsewhere and other ethnic groups in state. Recent testing data a indicates that merely 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency benchmarks in English Language Arts (ELA), with an even lower 22.69% achieving similar standards in mathematics. Latino students in the state exhibit an average score 27 points lower than their White counterparts, underscoring the entrenched disparities within the educational framework.

Potential for Political Engagement and Influence: Despite commendable strides in Latino voter turnout, between 2000 and 2020, Latino voter turnout nearly tripled, a sizable proportion of eligible voting-age Latinos in California, estimated at approximately 4 million individuals, abstain from participating in the electoral process, signaling untapped potential for political influence.

Optimism and Resilience Among Latinos: Latinos exhibit a notable penchant for optimism regarding the future far more than their non-Latino counterparts. Latinos steadfastly retain their faith in and reverence for the American Dream, with a majority expressing confidence in their ability to attain it. When queried about the paramount factors contributing to success in the United States, an overwhelming 94% cited ‘a strong work ethic and diligent labor’.

Read/download the full report.

About the Authors:

Soledad Ursúa is the Principal Researcher for this project. Soledad is Principal at Orinoco Equities and is a member of the board of directors of the Venice Neighborhood Council in the Los Angeles area. Her undergraduate degree from University of California Santa Barbara was in Global and International Studies and Spanish. She has a master’s in finance from the New School and worked in the New York venture capital industry.

Jennifer L. Hernandez (housing) has practiced land use and environmental law for 40 years, and leads Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. Ms. Hernandez is the longest-serving minority board member (23 years) of the California League of Conservation voters, was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a trustee for the Presidio National Park in San Francisco, serves on the board of directors for Sustainable Conservation, and teaches environmental justice at the Univeristy of Southern California Law School. Ms. Hernandez graduated with honors from Harvard University and Stanford Law School. She and her husband live in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Karla López del Rio (policy) is dedicated to empowering working families to achieve their potential. She actively leads as a community development executive, grounding her research in real-world experience to drive equitable public policies that foster financial wellness, upward mobility, and wealth creation. Her innovative approach generates public-private partnerships that promote civic engagement and attract multi-million dollar investments to Southern California’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. A native of Mexico City, Karla currently works as Executive Director of Riverside County’s Community Action Partnership, serves on Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy Advisory Board, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Development Studies from UC Berkeley. Her work has earned numerous awards from esteemed institutions at the local, state, and national levels.

Sen Gloria Romero (Ret.) (education) was elected to the 24th Senate District in 2001 and served as Senate Majority Leader—the first woman to ever hold that leadership position in the history of the California State Senate. Romero holds a PhD in Social/Personality Psychology and is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the author of California’s groundbreaking Romero Open Enrollment Act, also known as the “Parent Trigger” law, which provides opportunities for school choice for parents of children trapped in chronically academic under-performing, failing schools. She is the co-founder of the innovative independent charter school, Explore Academy, in Orange County, California.

Every few years within the energy sector, a new 'entrepreneur' emerges with a supposedly 'revolutionary' idea that often turns out to be nothing more than a repackaging of an old concept that failed to gain traction. The latest contender for this title is 'the hydrogen economy'.

My scepticism stems from the physical characteristics of hydrogen gas. While all technologies experience learning curves and adhere to an equivalence of Moore’s Law, which revolutionised the semiconductor industry, it is important to remember that ultimately, learning curves are constrained by the laws of physics. This is why internal combustion engines haven’t significantly improved in fuel efficiency in over 40 years, why the supersonic concorde was never economically viable and why certain sceptics argue that battery electrical vehicles might not see mass adaptation for the middle income groups.

One simply cannot squeeze blood out of a rock.

The S-curve, bound by physical constraints, explains why politicians cannot simply lower the price of electricity, and why decarbonization poses a significantly greater challenge than the environmental advocates typically recognize.

These are not “limits to growth”, they are rather limits to what a particular technology can achieve and why we should look elsewhere for innovation. It’s my belief that economic bubbles are likely to occur when investors fail to grasp that technologies eventually reach a plateau when their learning curves approach their physical limits.

Below, I'll explain why I doubt that hydrogen will be able to perform in the long run when compared to synthetic fossil fuels - that share the same physical properties as traditional fossil fuels. Synthetic fuels do require hydrogen production, with the advantage that hydrogen is consumed where it is produced. Therefore, all additional infrastructure adaptation and transportation challenges will be prevented.

If we are genuinely committed to effectively utilising the surplus power generated from renewable electricity sources, I believe one viable option is to invest in the creation of synthetic fuels to supplant traditional fossil fuels. While renewable energy boasts the advantage of having no associated fuel costs, its drawback lies in its high coefficient of variation , necessitating capacity overbuilding as is currently the case in Germany. Despite this overbuilt renewables have a second challenge, which is reliability during periods of no wind or no sun, known as Dunkelflaute. It is the reason why the Germans have not yet managed to shut down their fossil fuel plants, simply because they are necessary to firm the electricity supply.

Read the rest of this piece at Hügo's Newsletter.

Hügo Krüger is a South African born Structural/Nuclear Engineer, writer and YouTube podcaster, commentating on topics relating to Energy and Geopolitical Matters, Hügo is married to an Iranian born Mathematician and Artist; the couple resides in Paris.

Photo: Joseph Brent, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Few states are more ostentatious in their concern for racial equality and minority uplift than California. The Golden State leads the nation in promoting racial reparations, doggedly supports affirmative-action quotas, and pays students to teach educators about implicit bias. From his first day in office, Governor Gavin Newsom has deemed addressing inequality a “moral imperative” in his fight for “a California for all.”

A new report from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy, to which we both contributed, suggests the state is falling short of these lofty ideals. We and our coauthors demonstrate how California’s Latinos, who account for nearly 40 percent of the state’s population and over half of its residents under age 18, lag significantly behind their peers in rival states like Texas and Florida in terms of incomes, homeownership, and education. California’s policy agenda, with its dual focus on welfare expansion and climate alarmism, has undermined the economic potential of the state’s Latinos—and undercut the governor’s promises.

The problems start at the aggregate level. California has the nation’s highest unemployment rate and slowest pace of job growth, along with a huge structural budget deficit. California creates middle-income jobs—critical for Latinos seeking to climb the income ladder—at among the lowest rates in the country. Over the past decade, the state has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs, and 85 percent of its new positions have been in the lower-paying service sector.

Here the aspirations of both Latino entrepreneurs and workers could be crushed. The Small Business Regulation Index ranks California’s as the worst business climate for small firms, which disproportionately harms Latinos, whose businesses tend to be smaller and less capitalized. California’s recently mandated $20 minimum hourly wage for fast-food workers, for example, may help some individual Latinos, but it could both reduce total employment and threaten the livelihoods of smaller franchisees, many of whom are minorities.

Latino residents also are particularly vulnerable to California’s war on the carbon economy. Hispanics make up well over 90 percent of the state’s agricultural workers, more than 50 percent of its construction workers, and roughly 30 percent of its oil and gas workers—precisely the kinds of jobs that California’s green agenda disfavors.

For Latinos in California, the impact of that agenda shows up most clearly in the logistics industry. As Chapman University Business School professor Marshall Toplansky notes, Hispanics make up roughly 50 percent of California’s transportation workers, the highest percentage of any state. The Golden State’s green mandates, which encourage shipping companies to pursue rapid electrification, will likely send shippers to other ports. Electric trucks, with their huge batteries, can cost over $400,000 per vehicle; they cannot run long hauls without stopping for lengthy charging periods, undermining the economics of a trucking fleet.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Soledad Ursúa is Principal at Orinoco Equities and is a member of the board of directors of the Venice Neighborhood Council in the Los Angeles area. Her undergraduate degree from University of California Santa Barbara was in Global and International Studies and Spanish. She has a master’s in finance from the New School and worked in the New York venture capital industry.

Photo: Omar Lopez, via Unsplash under CC 1.0 License.

On the last working day before the Holidays the OMB of the White House announced a notice of decision regarding the statistical treatment of race and ethnicity topics in all government statistical programs and analyses. In a revised Statistical Policy Directive 15 it stated: These revisions to SPD 15 are intended to result in more accurate and useful race and ethnicity data across the Federal government. (emphasis mine)

That last sentence is a little tough to swallow. Rather than straightforward and easily comprehensible categorization, the agency is imposing assemblages of warped race and ethnicity labels which have little useful purpose or applicable meaning. People’s views on their own ethnic identity are complex, particularly with historical mixed groups like Hispanics, many of whom are of mixed race and most of whom traditionally consider themselves white.

One particularly sad note here is that the US Government is classifying residents by categories that the residents would not themselves select or even recognize. Costa Ricans think they are Costa Rican, Brazilians think they are Brazilian, and soon after coming to America they are Americans. OMB has decreed that people from Spain are no longer White Europeans— which they clearly were up till now —even though they speak (and originated) the language used by many decidedly mestizo (mixed) people from places like Mexico, Guatemala, or Brazil.

So, the Iberian peninsula apparently now consists of a small Portuguese population, classified as White Europeans and maybe also the Catalans and Basques of Northern Spain. Years ago, my wife, from Spain, was asked by her employers if it would be ok if they counted her as Hispanic to up their percentage with a report to US DHUD. She actually was born in Barcelona so she could well claim to be Catalan!

Which brings us to South America, pretty much all labeled Hispanic, except for those pesky Portuguese-speaking Brazilians – merely half of South America’s population. So, are Brazilians now White Europeans like Portuguese based on their language? And there’s English speaking Guyana , with a distinctly mixed rate population of Asian Indians and descendants of Africans, or Dutch speaking Surinamese or r French speaking residents of Guiana. Are we going to call them Hispanics or perhaps Latinos by dint of their geography? This is absolutely meaningless and insulting, and then expect them to adopt/accept such labeling.

The list of categories below shows the expected structure required in future surveys.

Middle Eastern or North African MENA as a new minimum category. As a result, the new set of minimum races and/or ethnicity categories are:

• American Indian or Alaska Native
• Asian
• Black or African American
• Hispanic or Latino
• Middle Eastern or North African, MENA
• Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
• White

The MENA idea was proposed early on by the Census Bureau for the 2020 Census but withdrawn given strong pushback. It has been pushed by residents descended from those countries to gain greater access and recognition of some sort of constructed ethnic grouping in public policy debates and funding. A side benefit in some eyes is it would reduce the size of the White population and divide America nicely into 6 or 7 competing ethnicities. The overall category goes like this:

Middle Eastern or North African: Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Israeli, Another group (for example, Moroccan, Yemeni, Kurdish as well as others.

Hmmm! These are all countries that pretty much hate each other and are often trying to destroy each other. Some are Sunni, others Shia or some splinter group/ Neither Algeria, Tunisia nor Libya is mentioned. What do Moroccans have to do with Kurds or Iraqis? Iranians and Kurds are not even primary Arabic speakers. The Kurdish are recognized as an entity suggesting that the Turks, never mentioned anywhere here, belong to the White Europeans? Would a Saudi Arabian label themselves or accept a label of being a MENA? Why?

Black person has been dropped from the race category of Black or African American. Yet many of the organizations created and serving those group are still labeled as Black person. US agencies, United Negro College Fund, traditionally Negro Colleges, etc. My age is showing; when I was younger the mandated survey term was Black; Black was considered pejorative, and I was told to delete it from my survey designs. I also remember in my youth when people were Irish Americans or Italian-Americans or Swedish-Americans – those labels are long gone. They are just Americans.

Two very small groups Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders and American Indians and Alaskan Native are sustained, but their populations are so small that often sample surveys are forced to meld them with the general US population.

In contrast, Asians, who inhabit roughly a third of the world’s land area and a majority of the world’s population are odd to put together in one category. The OMB listing strangely manages to ignore polyglot Indonesia, about 280 million, and the Philippines, 116 million, both immense populations. Asians are approximately only five percent of the current US population but the diversity of their countries of origin and distinct cultural and demographic makes labelling them together of little sense.

What does all of this accomplish? At best it creates a handy 6 categories clumping together of world groups that tell us little about the nation’s true demographic structure. Based on incomes and education, Asians far exceed the US White population, and the MENA could be second putting Whites third. So, should we compare the various population groups to Asians the highest income race/ethnicity grouping? I found this useless in my work, so I compared groups to the total population not to the White or Asian portion.

At worst it divides up America into strangely assembled groups that will compete for public benefits and power not as citizens or individuals but as members of some bureaucratically assembled clumps of people. A bonus for the country’s booming racing industry. Sometimes comic: sometimes tragic this seems a step back both from the reality on the ground, and the notion that we come from a real place and aspire to become Americans all.

Alan Pisarski studies transportation as the collision of demography with geography – with a little technology and social values added.

One 19^th century Gentile described California as “the Jews’ earthly paradise”. It is paradise no longer. Reports of attacks on Jewish businesses, homes and institutions are becoming ever more commonplace, while university campuses – hardly considered to be bastions of hate – have allowed acts of flagrant anti-Semitism to go unpunished.

Just last week, pro-Hamas students interrupted a graduation party for UC Berkeley law school graduates at the home of the school’s Jewish dean. The ‘protest’ occurred on private property, but that didn’t prevent the leader of ‘Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine’ from smearing the professor who confiscated the microphone from the interrupting student’s hand as an “Islamophobe”, accusing her of “assault”.

It appears that California’s Jews can’t even relax in their own homes without being confronted by zealous radicals. Prior to the event, posters had been shared on social media showing the dean holding a bloody knife and fork, captioned “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.” It’s little wonder that dean Chemerinsky, a well-known progressive, wrote in response that “nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism” currently festering on Berkeley campus.

What happens in California says much about the future of the beleaguered Jewish diaspora. California, with 1.2 million Jews, has almost three times as many Jewish people as the three largest foreign diaspora countries – France, England and Canada.

The redefinition of Jews as serial oppressors harbouring genocidal ambitions has its roots in the educational and cultural industries that constitute the heart of progressive power. The anti-Jewish shift is all the more heartbreaking given that Universities like Berkeley, which I attended a half century ago and where some of my family have lived for 70 years, produced numerous Jewish Nobel prize winners.

Today in the University of California system pro-Hamas professors and students run riot on campuses, with the school seemingly unable or unwilling to stand up to them. Jay Sures, a member of the UC Board of Regents, characterised a statement released by the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council to the board, as being full “falsehoods, inaccuracies, and anti-Semitic innuendos” that “seeks to legitimise and defend the horrific savagery of the Hamas massacre of October 7”.

More worrisome still are efforts in grade schools to push a deeply divisive political agenda. Steeped in progressive ideology, California schools have rejiggered their math curricula to emphasise “social justice”. The state’s adopted ethnic studies program, shaped by ‘Critical Race Theory’, is openly anti-Zionist, all but erasing a millennia of Jewish history and experience.

Anti-Semitism isn’t just restricted to the schools. Recent pro-Hamas demonstrations have forced at least one LA synagogue to relocate its services; others have been vandalised while demonstrators halted traffic in the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district. The home owned by AIPAC President Steve Tuchin was recently attacked with smoke bombs and red paint. Many Jews, including members of my own congregation, are increasingly concerned about their safety. Gun sales in Jewish neighbourhoods have soared.

Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Progressive anti-Semitism is sweeping California. Source: Anadolu.

With the COVID-19 pandemic declared over, a significant question for politicians, planners, and pundits alike is what to do with city centers and old urban cores after the pandemic pushed many Americans to move away from dense urban areas. For many, the central city remains an idealized version of spatial organization, serving as an engine of creativity, innovation, opportunity, upward mobility, and the height of civilization itself. But most Americans feel differently, preferring to live in environs well outside urban cores and not just within suburbs but in small towns and rural areas as well. Even younger generations of Americans—who traditionally flocked to big cities for careers, social lives, and cultural amenities—show greater interest in suburban living than dense city living.

A frequent concern amongst theorists involves community cohesion and spatial organization. One real question now is how population diffusion away from urban areas is impacting democratic vitality; as individuals move to less dense areas with more privacy, it is widely believed that they will naturally start to isolate themselves from the wider public, impoverishing the public sphere. Fortunately, these concerns are deeply overblown. Data from PACE’s 2021 Civic Language Perceptions Project, which sampled 5,000 voters in 2021, shows that attitudes toward democracy and community participation vary minimally when one moves from urban to suburban and rural areas.

When presented with a list of activities and behaviors that voters think are important to ensure democracy works, responses change little depending on the respondent’s environment. For example, 71 percent of urban respondents believe that voting is critical behavior for a democracy to be successful, while 74 percent of rural and 80 percent of suburban residents feel the same way. While non-urban residents may be less likely to share residential spaces with their neighbors and they may directly interact a bit less often with their immediate neighbors than their city dweller counterparts, the residents of the often mischaracterized “lonely and desolate suburbs” are anything but electorally disengaged.

Turning to other forms of direct local engagement, non-urban areas edge out the urban cores again, but the spatial differences are negligible. When it comes to the salience of volunteering, just under a third (31 percent) of urbanites recognize the importance of volunteering with slightly higher numbers of rural (34 percent) and suburban (34 percent). On attending public meetings such as town halls, community forums, school board meetings, and library events, non-urban areas are again slightly more inclined to engage. Thirty-nine percent of rural and 39 percent of suburban residents believe that being part of communal events is valuable compared to 34 percent of urban residents. Discussing politics with neighbors is important to 29 percent of city-dwellers areas, compared to 26 percent of suburbanites and 24 percent of people in rural areas, presumably due to distance—but these are minimal differences.

Predictably, interest in protests is higher in urban cores (16 percent) compared to suburban (12 percent) and rural (12 percent) areas. This is presumably because there are fewer central and often historic locales to demonstrate and advocate for positions. Residents of urban areas are only slightly more likely to advocate for social or political issues, with 15 percent of residents stating that this is important for democracy compared to 10 percent of residents in both rural and suburban areas. These figures are relatively small across all populations and have little more than a trivial impact on Americans’ beliefs on how to have a thriving civil society. Therefore, the notion that rural and suburban areas are civic wastelands compared to cities is simply untrue. Values toward participatory and democratic norms are fairly consistent across urban form. Even if activism and demonstrations in older, urban spaces with historical buildings and halls capture the imagination of civic vitality—like Union and Washington Squares in New York City—it is wrong to write off leafy, quiet suburbs as civic wastelands.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo credit: David Harmantas via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.