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Selfies Replace Focus on Big Picture
Maybe it's my age, but, somehow, the future does not seem to be turning out the way I once imagined. It's not just the absence of flying cars, but also the lack of significant progress in big things,...
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St. Louis: Salvage City
A three installment start at a potential Discovery Channel “reality” program called Salvage City has created a minor kerfuffle in some local quarters. I haven’t seen the show, but it appears to feature...
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Moving South and West? Metropolitan America in 2042
The United States could have three more megacities (metropolitan areas over 10 million) by 2042, according to population projections released by the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). Chicago,...
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Rich, Poor, and Unequal Zip Codes
Income inequality is an increasingly dominant theme in American culture and politics. Data from the IRS covering mean and median income of filing households for 2012 by zipcode allow us to map and...
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Blue-Collar Hot Spots: The Cities Creating The Most High-Paying Working-Class...
It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred...
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America's Glass Half-empty, or Half-full?
The stock market is high, real estate prices have resurged, even the unemployment rate is dropping, yet Americans still feel pretty down about the future. A survey released in January by the AP-NORC...
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City-Specific Immigration Visas Would Be a Modern Day Indentured Servitude
An idea that’s been kicked around by many is to help turn around struggling cities like Detroit by offering geographically limited immigrations visas. That is, to allow foreigners get their green card...
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The Evolving Urban Form: The San Francisco Bay Area
Despite planning efforts to restrict it, the Bay Area continues to disperse. For decades, nearly all population and employment growth in the San Jose-San Francisco Combined Statistical Area has been...
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The Illusions of Charles Montgomery's Happy City (Part 2)
This is the second of a two-part series discussing Charles Mongomery's Happy City. Read part one here.‘The system that built sprawl’Montgomery faces the hurdle of explaining why, if low-density suburbs...
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America's Future Cities: Where The Youth Population Is Booming
To identify economic hot spots in the making, we often look for where immigrants, young people or entrepreneurs are clustering. But perhaps nothing is a better indicator than those who truly make up...
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San Francisco Photo Essay: I Used to Live Here
This is my old apartment in SF’s Mission District from way back when Mrs. UpintheValley and I were just dating. My waystation before cohabitation and matrimony. I notice the curtains haven’t changed....
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How a Few Monster Tech Firms are Taking Over Everything from Media to Space...
The iconic view of tech companies almost invariably stress their roots in people’s garages, plucky individual entrepreneurs ready to challenge all comers. Yet increasingly the leading tech firms –...
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Possible Sign of Trouble for Los Angeles
A quarter century ago, the Los Angeles-Orange County area seemed on the verge of joining the first tier of global cities. As late as 2009, the veteran journalist James Flanigan could pen a quasiserious...
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Life as a Second City
Imagine someone writes a newspaper story about you and prints the picture of your older, well-known sibling next to the column. It is clear to you why this was done: your sibling is more famous and...
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Has Scott Walker Really Turned Around Wisconsin?
I’ve seen a few pieces in the conservative press lately boasting about Scott Walker’s performance as governor of Wisconsin. For example, the American Spectator ran an article called “Wisconsin Thrives...
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Searching Out The Half-Full Glass
There is a shiny, brittle skin to the economic recovery that conceals an unhealthy flesh underneath. It is tempting to call this condition a glass half empty. But seeking the healthy and the fit in...
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The Evolving Urban Form: Suburbanizing Mexico
There is an increasing recognition – at least outside the academy, planning organization and urban core developer groups – that the spatial expansion of cities or suburbanization represents the...
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The U.S. Middle Class Is Turning Proletarian
The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since...
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Southern California has Aging Issues
Back in the 1960s, and for well into the 1980s, California stood at the cutting edge of youth culture, the place where trends started and young people clustered. “The California teen, a white,...
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Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region
This is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from...
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