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Urban Divergence in Ohio
One trend we’ve seen in many domains is the bifurcation of society into two tiers, the successful and unsuccessful. One way we see this divergence playing out is between cities in the same state. This...
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More Work at Home than Take Transit, Transit Retreats into Niche Markets
The new American Community Survey data indicates at least two significant narratives with respect to work access trends (commuting and working at home). One is transit work is becoming even more...
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Reconciling a Love for Trains with an Opposition to Subsidies
As a life-long railfan, I love passenger trains. But as a transportation economist, I hate subsidies for the way they dilute productivity and transfer wealth from the many to the few. Thus, I am a...
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California Must Stop Trying To Stomp Out Suburbia
We may be celebrating — if that’s the right word — the tenth year since the onset of the financial crisis and collapse of the real estate market. Yet before breaking out the champagne, we should...
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Why the Booster Club Won’t Save Minneapolis
Someone who took issue with my treatment of Minneapolis’ attraction issue sent me a link to this Star Tribune piece noting that migration into the region increased last year.To be clear: this article...
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Edge Cities in China: Suzhou
Nearly three decades ago, journalist and educator Joel Garreau coined a new term, “Edge cities,” to describe the rise of commercial centers outside the downtowns (central business districts or CBDs)...
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The Sordid History of Forest Service Fire Data
The latest wildfire situation report indicates that about 7.3 million acres have burned to date this year. That’s about 1.2 million acres less than this same date last year, but about 1.5 million acres...
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Summer Travel Offers Insights Into What Drives Economic Growth
Why do we travel? Alain de Botton suggests in his engaging meditation on this question, The Art of Travel, that it’s the human craving for variety that impels us to leave home and incur the headaches...
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The Sacred Cul-de-Sac: Lakewood
In 1901 John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) began purchasing hundreds of acres of land around the town of Lakewood, New Jersey an hour and a half south of New York. He then built a...
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America Keeps Winning Regardless Of Who Is President
Ever since the election of Donald Trump, many of our leading academic voices, like Paul Krugman, predicted everything from a stock market crash to a global recession. Slow growth, mainstream economists...
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San Francisco Is Eating New York
A lot has been written about how the internet undermined and destroyed media. What we are seeing today may be the more important story, however, which is the tech industry is explicitly buying out the...
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Is the Fever Breaking? Ground Zero Youngstown
Two years ago, I described the Youngstown area as “crossover ground zero” for Donald Trump and the politics of resentment in working-class and rust belt communities. In local rallies during the 2016...
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Highest Fertility & Gains Concentrated in US Midwest and South
The plunging of birth rates has emerged as one of the most significant demographic trends. For the first time, there appears to be the prospect of nations that will become materially smaller in...
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Strong Cities Have Lots of Zeros
Big cities have big responsibilities. Coming with that are big scale, scope, complexities, priorities, and challenges. Texas has growth and all the other `bigs. We are not shying away from the `bigs’...
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The Mines
There’s a literary trope in which an ambitious young man goes to work in the mines for a few years to earn an income with which to go back home. In the US it’s bundled into narratives of the Wild West...
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The Communities Changing Now
A couple days ago I referenced Pete Saunders’ observation that Sunbelt cities in their growth phase need to take advantage of their day in the sun to put in place the foundations for future next level...
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Autonomous Cars Are Our Real Future
Long a hotbed of new technologies, California insists on seeing its transit future in the rear mirror. Rather than use innovative approaches to getting people around and to work, our state insists on...
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Curated Diversity in Chicago
I came across a very intriguing premise several months ago that's stuck with me ever since. I think I've had a subconscious acknowledgement of it for some time, perhaps years, but it was only when...
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Job Dispersion Eases Growth In Australian Cities
American cities have long been known for their dispersion of employment, moving from mono-centricity, to polycentricity (and edge cities) to, ultimately, dispersion. This transition was documented by...
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How Many Really Commute by Transit?
According to the 2017 American Community Survey, about 7.6 million Americans, or 5.3 percent of commuters, take transit to work. However, the actual question on the survey asks, how do you “usually get...
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