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Why Gentrification?
The mostly commonly chosen means, or at least attempted means, of revitalizing central cities that have fallen on hard times is gentrification. Gentrification is the process of replacing the poor...
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America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters
When Steve Jobs died in October 2011, crowds of mourners gathered outside of Apple stores, leaving impromptu memorials to the fallen businessman. Many in Occupy Wall Street, then in full bloom, stopped...
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America's New Manufacturing Boomtowns
Conventional wisdom for a generation has been that manufacturing in America is dying. Yet over the past five years, the country has experienced something of an industrial renaissance. We may be far...
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America’s Off-The-Radar Tech Hubs
At the moment, the technology sector is the focus of a lot of attention — and with good reason. Tech industries have helped turn San Jose and Austin into major economies and brought other large metros,...
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The Evolving Urban Form: Toronto
Toronto is the largest city (metropolitan area) in Canada and its principal commercial center. However, this is a relatively recent development. Toronto displaced Montréal is Canada's largest city...
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Religious Freedom Lures Many to U.S. from Asia
It's been two decades since California Gov. Pete Wilson used grainy ads of undocumented immigrants – "They keep coming" – as an effective means of stoking fear of newcomers and assuring his...
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Rust Belt: Can Micro-Suburbs Stay Independent?
The Ohio suburb of East Cleveland abuts the core city to its west and north, and in terms of physical appearance the boundary between the two is indistinct. A century ago, the City of Cleveland...
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Poverty and Growth: Retro-Urbanists Cling to the Myth of Suburban Decline
In the wake of the post-2008 housing bust, suburbia has become associated with many of the same ills long associated with cities, as our urban-based press corps and cultural elite cheerfully sneer at...
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Visions of the Rust Belt Future (Part 2)
There are interesting developments being played out in the Rust Belt. Some cities, like Detroit, seem to be embarking whole hog down the creative class path. Others, like Pittsburgh, have their own...
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The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs
The information industry has long been a darling of the media — no surprise since the media constitutes a major part of this economic sector, which includes publishing, software, entertainment and data...
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Texas Suburbs Lead Population Growth
The US Census Bureau has reported that eight of the fifteen 2011-2012 fastest-growing municipalities with at least 50,000 population were in Texas. Three of them were in the Austin metropolitan area....
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Southern California Economy Not Keeping Up
One of Orange County's top executives asked me over lunch recently why Southern California has not seen anything like the kind of tech boom now sweeping large parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. In...
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Driving Trends in Context
There are grains of reality, misreporting and exaggeration in the press treatment of a report on driving trends by USPIRG. The report generated the usual press reports suggesting that the millennial...
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Addressing Housing Affordability Using Cooperatives
Our country is six years into the Great Recession, the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. It’s been replete with reports of home foreclosures, collapsing commuter towns, and young...
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The Vatican Bank: In God We Trust?
When the cardinals sent billowing white smoke from their conclave and elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I, little did the Catholic Church realize that two millennia of ecumenical liturgy...
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The Cities That Are Stealing Finance Jobs From Wall Street
Over the past 60 years, financial services’ share of the economy has exploded from 2.5% to 8.5% of GDP. Even if you believe, as we do, that financialization is not a healthy trend, the sector boasts a...
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Market Surge Confirms Preference for Homeowning
Ever since the housing bubble burst in 2007, retro-urbanists, such as Richard Florida, have taken aim at homeownership itself, and its "long-privileged place" at the center of the U.S. economy. If...
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Retrofitting the Dream: Housing in the 21st Century, A New Report
This is the introduction to "Retrofitting the Dream: Housing in the 21st Century," a new report by Joel Kotkin. To read the entire report, download the .pdf attachment below.In recent years a powerful...
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Florida's Pinellas County: Growth Gone Wild
In the seventeen years since my last visit, Florida's Pinellas County hasn't much changed. It's still a low-grade carpet of commercial junk space from coast to coast, and the edges - where the value...
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Toward a Self Employed Nation?
The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has...
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