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Special Report: America's Emerging Housing Crisis
This is the executive summary from a new report, America’s Emerging Housing Crisis, published by National Community Renaissance, and authored by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox. Download the report and the...
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Stop Favoring Investors, Speculators over Middle Class
I, like most members of the middle class, particularly in California, just paid a tax bill that seemed less like my fair share than a shakedown by the Mafia. Increasingly, for people who run small...
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Tambora vs. Krakatoa: Which was Worse?
An April 27 Wall Street Journal book review by Simon Winchester descends into a petty squabble about whether the volcanic eruptions on Mount Tambora (1815) and Krakatoa (1883), both located in...
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Replay: Are States an Anachronism?
Obviously states aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, but a number of folks have suggested that state’s aren’t just obsolete, they are downright pernicious in their effects on local economies.One...
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Ukraine Watch: Kiev in the Media Center Spotlight
This spring I traveled from St. Petersburg to Kiev, by way of southern Russian and eastern Ukraine. The newspapers were filled with reports of American policymakers gushing over how mobs in Kiev...
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Urban Core Jurisdictions: Similar in Label Only
The fortunes of U.S. core cities (municipalities) have varied greatly in the period of automobile domination that accelerated strongly at the end of World War II. This is illustrated by examining...
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The Best Small And Midsize Cities For Jobs 2014
In the classic television show “The Honeymooners,” many jokes were wrung out of bus driver Ralph Cramden’s membership in the International Brotherhood of Loyal Raccoons, headquartered in Bismarck,...
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Thinking About Housing in the Northwest
With one of the most successful economies in the nation, the real estate news in the Pacific Northwest is positive and gives hope for a housing sector recovery, albeit at different rates in different...
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Connecting Citizens to Economic Opportunity
I recently received an email from the folks behind the Meetings of the Minds conference asking if I’d participate in a group blogging event they were doing by writing a post on the topic of “How can...
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May the (Insidious) Force Be With You
Google Earth pic to the left of the boundary between Detroit and suburban Grosse Pointe Park, MI. Alter Road (cutting from upper left to lower right) is the boundary between the two. Take note of the...
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Population Growth as the Cure for the Incredible Shrinking City?
The 1957 sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man reads like a Rust Belt city script. In it, the lead actor is afflicted with the anti-natural: shrinkage in a world of growth. The rest becomes...
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Reversing American Decline
Across broad ideological lines, Americans now foresee a dismal, downwardly mobile future for the country’s middle and working classes. While previous generations generally did far better than their...
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Taking a Back Seat to Texas
The most important news recently to hit Southern California did not involve the heinous Donald Sterling, but Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of...
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China's Ascent in World Transport
After years of closing the gap with the United States, China built enough freeways in 2013 to amass the greatest length of freeways in the world. Between 2003 and 2013, China expanded its national...
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Is Something Wrong With Chicago’s Suburbs?
I previously talked about Connecticut becoming a suburban corporate wasteland as well as the rise of the executive headquarters in major global city downtowns. What we see is that high end functions...
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From Anecdotes to Data: Core & Suburban Growth Trends 2010-2013
According to the Wall Street Journal, there are "Signs of a Suburban Comeback." This is a turnaround from the typical media coverage of US population estimates in recent years, which have more often...
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Three-headed Democratic Party
As they face the midterm elections with the wind in their faces, Democrats increasingly stake their collective political future on the issue of inequality. The topic has great resonance, given the...
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The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2014
In the town of Verona on the rural fringes of Madison, Wisc., there’s a Google-like campus that houses one of the country’s most rapidly growing tech companies, and one of the least well known. Founded...
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Know Your City's Marketplace Leverage
I’ve noticed so often that urbanist policy suggestions or case studies are treated as universals. That is, with a presumption that a good idea or policy can be replicated pretty much anywhere. Clearly,...
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California’s Green Bantustans
One of the core barriers to economic prosperity in California is the price of housing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Policies designed to stifle the ability to develop land are based on flawed...
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