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The Triumph Of Trumpism Will Outlast Trump
Given the endless scandals swarming around him, Donald Trump’s presidency may prove, to quote Thomas Hobbes, to be “nasty, brutish and short.” But even if Trump ends up out of office sooner than...
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The Great Re-homing: Why People Are Moving Back To Their Hometowns To Start...
I have my gas station diet down pat. Coffee, water, bananas, nuts, hard-boiled eggs, and the occasional peanut butter cup indulgence. Ok, sometimes I also eat beef jerky. You have to learn these things...
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Northern Cities Need to Ramp It Up on Attraction
The Economist just ran a nice article on “the flourishing Midwest.” Milwaukee in particular gets singled out for some favorable coverage, so congratulations to them.Many Midwest cities have been doing...
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Auckland: “A Vancouver of the South Pacific; Beautiful, but Utterly...
New Zealand’s Minister of Housing and Urban Development Phil Twyford reasserted the coalition government’s intention to abolish Auckland’s urban growth boundary at a recent environmental summit....
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Thoughts on AI: Some High-Probability Predictions on a Very Uncertain Future
Will AI cause mass unemployment?No. New technologies have always enabled the economy to produce existing products with fewer workers, freeing up people’s resources for new products and freeing up...
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The Unbearable Sameness of Cities
The person who sent me Orianna Schwindt’s New York magazine piece on the “unbearable sameness of cities” asked if I had written it under a pen name. Indeed, she hits so many of my themes about American...
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America Is Moving Toward An Oligarchical Socialism
Where do we go after Trump? This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise. Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now...
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Labor’s Day, More or Less?
It’s hard for most of us to recall any period in the last fifty years that we could call the “good times” for labor in the U.S. Membership density in American unions has been on a steady decline. The...
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Another Look at Venture Capital Concentrations
Noah Smith at Bloomberg has a new column where he provides another look at the geographic distribution of venture capital investing. Below is his chart of VC deals by market in 2017.His take:In 2017,...
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Sanity in the Valley of the Sun
The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on...
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Ethnic Flight
For the first decades of mass suburbanization, the movement from urban cores often has been referred to as “white flight” (Note 1). But now major metropolitan area living patterns indicate something...
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Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
I was recently invited to give a talk at a housing conference down in Los Angeles. Once again my fellow speakers engaged in the usual arguments. Aging Baby Boomers asserted that we need to keep...
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A Generation Plans An Exodus From California
California is the great role model for America, particularly if you read the Eastern press. Yet few boosters have yet to confront the fact that the state is continuing to hemorrhage people at a higher...
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Cleveland and the Fight for Talent
Mark Rantala recently wrote an op-ed for Crain’s Cleveland Business that talks about Cleveland’s need for talent:"As executive director of the Lake County Ohio Port and Economic Development Authority,...
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A Walk Around Chicago’s Loop
Chicago has a storied history in skyscraper development, so much so that it has been called the birthplace of the skyscraper. Nearly all of that history occurred in and around the “Loop,” which is the...
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Streetcar Roundup
Milwaukee and Oklahoma City are both planning to open new streetcar lines later this year, so it is worth taking a look at how the dumbest form of transit is working in other cities. The table below...
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“Middle America” in America’s Urban Century
In the late 1990s and the early Aughts, when the last Gen Xers and the first Millennials were launching into their adult lives, “Urban America” was a very different place. On many fronts, the choices...
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Ten Years After Lehman Collapsed, We’re Still Screwed
The collapse of Lehman Brothers 10 years ago today began the financial crisis that crippled and even killed for some the American dream as we had known it. Donald Trump might be starting to change...
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The Value of All Things Crazily Rich and Asian
Neither Kevin Kwan’s novel “Crazy Rich Asians” nor the movie based on it should win any prizes as literature or film. Yet the “Crazy” phenomena — both the best-selling book, its sequels and the smash...
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Welcome to Park Forest
Recently a follower sent me an interesting e-mail. He said he recently re-read The Organization Man by William Whyte, originally published in 1956. The suburban Chicago village of Park Forest, IL,...
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