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Will The Democrats End Up Saving The California Republican Party?
Left to its own devices, California’s Republican Party would be ready to be embalmed for display at the Museum of Natural History. But there’s one last hope for the state GOP: the growing lunacy among...
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Ending The War On Communities: 14 Suggestions To Protect Neighborhoods While...
The debate on solving California’s housing affordability crisis has reached a fever pitch, and the level of noise is drowning out solutions. We are facing a push to indiscriminately force density on...
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A Comparison of the World’s 1,000 Largest Urban Areas
A tourist or even a demographer may sit at a café near the Louvre and imagine that the architecture and development of Paris looks the same, all the way to the urban fringe. Yet Paris is much more than...
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Can the Working Class Trust the Democrats?
Two years ago, we compared the opioid epidemic to the mortgage crisis that nearly cratered the global economy, noting how both were caused by corporate greed. Recent reporting in the Washington Post...
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Green Technology’s Dark Side
The hype these days is to stop using those dirty fossil fuel driven cars and trucks and convert everyone to those clean electric vehicles. But wait!Before you jump onto the EV train, those EV’s have a...
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A Blast from the Past in Charlotte and Columbus
I saw a couple of recent reposts containing very interesting material from several decades ago in Charlotte and Columbus.The first is a 25 minute TV special from the 1960s looking at a proposal to...
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Australia's Long Suffering Commuters
Daily commute times are ballooning in Australia's largest capital cities (metropolitan areas, called Greater Capital City Statistical Areas). This is a finding of the latest Household, Income and...
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Ridership Falls Another 2.9 Percent in June
June 2019 transit ridership was 2.9 percent lower than in June 2018, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s most recent data release. Ridership dropped in all major modes, including bus,...
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The World’s $86 Trillion Economy Visualized in One Chart
The world’s GDP still grew a healthy 6.9% in 2018, up from $80.2 trillion in 2017 to $85.8 trillion. Nearly half of this growth came from the world’s two largest economies: the United States, at $20.5...
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Public Schools Should Be Places of Learning, Not Propaganda
California likes to think of itself as the brain center of the universe, but increasingly much of that intellectual content comes from somewhere else. Once a leader in educational innovation and...
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A Review of Alan Mallach's The Divided City
The astounding revival of American cities is real. However, the inequality evident in virtually all of them is real as well, and built into the system. Much of the urban discourse has centered on the...
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Indy’s Cost Effective Transit Improvement Plan Is a Model for Low Density Cities
My latest piece is online at CityLab. It’s a look at the transit improvement plans in Indianapolis as the city’s first Bus Rapid Transit line on September 1st. Indy’s system is a model for how lower...
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Decarbonization In Homes And Businesses At What Cost?
The California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) plans to make all homes and businesses use electricity only means electricity will need to take up the duties that natural gas has been performing,...
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Where Salaries Go Furthest in 2019: The Small-City Advantage
Big cities are the engines of the modern economy. They offer workers a range of opportunities — and employers a range of workers, customers, and infrastructure — that smaller places generally can’t...
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Around San Francisco’s New South of Market Transit Center
In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco experienced a strong reaction against continued development of its dense financial center skyscraper district north of Market Street. that the term...
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The American Working Class Dilemma
For the past 125 years, Labor Day has been a time to celebrate the relevance, and political power, of the American working class. As recently as the 1990s, organized labor’s big day was an important...
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Debunking the Fake Farmland Crisis
“Our farmland is disappearing at an alarming rate,” claims Hanna Clark of the American Farmland Trust. According to the trust, 31 million acres of farmland and ranchlands “disappeared” between 1992 and...
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The Community and Economic Development Hierarchy
I've spent many, many years of my career working to improve the economic development prospects of communities. Wanting to make a meaningful, positive contribution to the revitalization of cities is...
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The Politics of Procreation
Throughout most of history, starting a family was a task that most people either aspired to or dutifully performed. Today, that is increasingly not the case—not only in Europe, Japan, Australia, or...
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High Metabolism Money
As part of my usual exploration of towns and cities around the country I wander up and down streets taking photos. I have an inexhaustible supply of pictures of the generic American landscape. But...
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