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Peyton Manning for President?
Is the free agency of Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, or the trade of the evangelic Tim Tebow to the New York Jets a far more compelling story than anything yet to emerge from the presidential...
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Still Moving to the Suburbs and Exurbs: The 2011 Census Estimates
The new 2011 Census Bureau county and metropolitan area population estimates indicate that Americans are staying put. Over the past year, 590,000 people moved between the nation's counties. This...
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Enjoying the Kool-Aid in Omaha
I left Santa Monica for Omaha less than 3 months before the collapse of the global financial infrastructure in September 2008. The impending problems in housing and credit markets – obvious from early...
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The Urban US: Growth and Decline
The urban population of the United States is now 249 million, according to the 2010 Census, 81 percent of the total. This is impressive, and not all surprising for a large developed economy. Yet the...
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Alternative Growth Paths for Sydney: A New Report and its Implications
Population growth in Australia is double the world average and the New South Wales Department of Planning has projected that the population of the Sydney region will increase by 57,000 people annually....
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The Right Steps to a Post-College Job
What will become of today's middle class college students after they graduate? Opposing points of view come, on one side, from a voice of the education establishment, the American Association of...
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A Little Snooki in the French Presidential Campaign
As a reality television series, it’s hard to beat the prime-time adventures of the French presidential election; as endless as the Republican primaries, but racier than Snooki's antics on “Jersey...
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Millennial Generation Safe at Home
Each emerging American generation of adolescents and young adults tends to have a distinctive relationship with its parents. For the Baby Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s, that relationship was often...
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California Recovery: No, It Is Not East vs. West
Every now and then, some East Coast based publication sends a reporter out to California to see how the West Coast's economy is doing. I think they write these things sitting at a restaurant patio...
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The Myth of the Republican Party’s Inevitable Decline
The map is shifting, and Democrats see the nation’s rapidly changing demography putting ever more states in play—Barack Obama is hoping to compete in Arizona this year, to go along with his...
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California Declares War on Suburbia II: The Cost of Radical Densification
My April 9 Cross Country column commentary in The Wall Street Journal (California Declares War on Suburbia) outlined California's determination to virtually outlaw new detached housing. The goal is...
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Census Estimates: Slowing Metropolitan Growth and the Future of the Exurbs
Recently the Census Bureau released 2011 county and metro area population estimates that showed overall slowing population growth and particularly showing slow to halting growth in exurban counties....
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As Filmmaking Surges, New Orleans Challenges Los Angeles
For generations New Orleans‘ appeal to artists, musicians and writers did little to dispel the city’s image as a poor, albeit fun-loving, bohemian tourism haven. As was made all too evident by Katrina,...
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Review: The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
Is gentrification the “fifth great migration,” that will fill old downtowns with upper-middle-class white folks, while the tract mansions of the outer ring become slums for immigrants? So suggests Alan...
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Megalopolis and its Rivals
Jean Gottman in 1961 coined the term megalopolis (Megalopolis, the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the Unites States) to describe the massive concentration of population extending from the core of...
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Goodbye, Chicago
Odd as it may seem for someone known as The Urbanophile, I actually grew up in the countryside. I spent most of my childhood on a country road about four miles outside the town of Laconia, Indiana,...
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Homebuilding: Recovery & Red Tape
The Recovery Blueprint is a multipart series of articles that offers suggestions on how to recover from the homebuilding recession. Since the recession began, there haven't been any significant changes...
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Understanding Chongqing and the Fall of Bo Xilai
The demise of Bo Xilai, the former Party Secretary of Chongqing, has turned into one of the biggest political scandals in China in recent memory and now includes allegations that Bo’s wife Gu Kailai is...
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Staying the Same: Urbanization in America
The recent release of the 2010 US census data on urban areas (Note 1) shows that Americans continue to prefer their lower density lifestyles, with both suburbs and exurbs (Note 2) growing more rapidly...
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As California Collapses, Obama Follows Its Lead
Barack Obama learned the rough sport of politics in Chicago, but his domestic policies have been shaped by California’s progressive creed. As the Golden State crumbles, its troubles point to those...
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