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Let L.A. Be L.A.
Victor’s Restaurant, a nondescript coffee shop on a Hollywood side street, seems an odd place to meet for a movement challenging many of Los Angeles’s most powerful, well-heeled forces. Yet amid the...
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State of Chicago: Explaining the 1990s Versus the 2000s
In my article “The Second-Rate City?” I noted Chicago’s very strong economic and demographic performance in the 1990s and contrasted it with the very poor performance in the 2000s. Then I outlined...
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How Marketing Could Boost Land Development
Zoning ordinances, land use maps and comprehensive plans used by cities to guide growth rarely provide the kind of insight required to make informed decisions about what will truly be best for the city...
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The Uncertain Future of the California Bullet Train
On July 18, at a site pregnant with symbolism — the future location of what HSR advocates hope will become San Francisco’s terminus of the state’s bullet train — California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a...
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Characteristics of the Self-Employed
With EMSI’s new data categories, we can now more closely parse data on the major classes of workers in the labor market. This is a significant shift in how we present employment data, and one of the...
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Swing State Geography: The I-4 Corridor
Overheated presidential politics have done few favors to Florida, except to put 132 miles of hot asphalt on everyone’s lips: Interstate 4. Completed in the late 1960s, this interstate (in fact, the...
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Evolving Urban Form: Dhaka
A few weeks ago, we suggested that Hong Kong was the "smart growth" ideal, for having the highest urban population density in the high income world. But, if you expand the universe to the poorer,...
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Why I Don’t Live In Indianapolis
It’s no secret that Indianapolis has been a huge focus of my blog over the years. One of the biggest criticisms I get here, especially when I ding some other city, is that I’m nothing more than a...
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The U.S. Cities Getting Smarter The Fastest
It’s a commonplace among pundits and economic developers that smart people flock to “smart” places like sparrows to Capistrano. Reflecting the conventional wisdom, The New York Times recently opined...
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The Screwed Election: Wall Street Can’t Lose, and America Can’t Win
About two in three Americans do not think what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, according to the 2012 Harris poll, but do think people who work there are less “honest and moral than other...
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Vermont's 'New Agriculture': Mini-Farms and the Urban Boundary
The “new agriculture” is typically small-acreage, intensively-managed, organic (in contemporary terms) in that it avoids both chemical use and genetic modification, and uniquely adaptable to such...
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Sex (Or Not) And the Japanese Single
Back in June 2011, British prime minister David Cameron backed proposals tackling the sexualisation of British children, in a bid to dilute the culture of sex that has swept western nations. The...
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The Evolving Urban Form: Istanbul
Istanbul is unique in straddling two continents. The historical city was concentrated on the European side of the Bosporus, the wide, more than 20 mile long strait linking the Sea of Marmara...
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Is California the New Detroit?
Most Californians live within miles of its majestic coastline – for good reason. The California coastline is blessed with arguably the most desirable climate on Earth, magnificent beaches, a backdrop...
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Why I Do Live in Indianapolis
When a friend constantly tells you how much he or she likes you and then one day says, “But I’d never live with you,” the predictable reaction is to feel hurt and angry. That’s how I felt when The...
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Cities of Aspiration
Drew Klacik’s recent post on how he ended up in Indianapolis got me thinking about the unique status of what I’d describe as “cities of aspiration.” Pretty much all cities seem to be reasonably good at...
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Form Follows Zoning
When Louis Sullivan, purveyor of modern American high-rise architecture, said more than 100 years ago that ‘Form Follows Function’, he perhaps didn’t realize the extent to which building form would not...
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America's Baby Bust: How The Great Recession Has Jeopardized Our Demographic...
At the turn of the century, America’s biggest advantage was its relatively vibrant demographics. In sharp contrast with its major competitors — the E.U., Russia, China, Japan — the United States had...
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Utah Up, Chicago Down: Why Mitt Romney Should Embrace His Mormonism
In his run for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney downplayed his Mormonism—referring only to “faith” or “shared values”—in the face of small-minded members of the Christian right and the occasional...
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Regionalism: Spreading the Fiscal Irresponsibility
Stanley Kurtz's new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities describes political forces closely tied to President Obama who have pursued an agenda to destroy...
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