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Gen Xers Mark the Spot in California
Generation X, the group between the boomers and the millennials, has been largely cast aside in the media and marketing world, victims of their generation’s small size and lack of identity. In contrast...
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The Quest for Food Freedom
Mariza Ruelas currently faces up to two years in jail in California for the crime of selling ceviche through a Facebook food group. Welcome to the mad world of American food regulation. In Biting the...
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Portland Housing Stupidity Grows
Here’s an incredibly stupid idea to deal with Portland’s housing affordability problems: Multnomah County proposes to build tiny houses in people’s backyard. The people will get to keep the houses on...
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Outsmarting Crime Together: CityCop CEO Nadim Curi
In a new podcast, Sami J. Karam speaks to Nadim Curi, CEO of the anti-crime app CityCop.Powered by its successful rollout in Latin America started in 2014 and further boosted by funding from startup...
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A Victory for Localism in Australia: Court Blocks Forced Amalgamation
In a rare victory for grassroots activists, The New South Wales Supreme Court has blocked the forced local government amalgamation of northern suburban councils Ku-ring-gai and the Shire of Hornsby in...
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The Shape of Things to Come
After several years of traveling around the country in the presence of city planners, economic development officials, elected representatives, engineers, production home builders, professional...
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California: The Republic of Climate
To some progressives, California’s huge endorsement for the losing side for president reflects our state’s moral superiority. Some even embrace the notion that California should secede so that we don’t...
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What Do We Do With Shrinking Cities?
Shrinking Cities: Understanding Urban Decline in the United States By Russell Weaver, Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, Jason Knight, and Amy E. Frazier Routledge (2017)Cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and...
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The End of the Asian Era
For the past 40 years, the Pacific Rim has been, if you will, California’s trump card. But now, in the age of President Donald Trump and decelerating globalization, the Asian ascendency may be changing...
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Seven Ways Life Has Gotten Better in Rural America
Rural America is taking a beating in the news. Part of it is deserved. I grew up in rural Indiana and am shocked at some of what is going on there: severe hard drug problems, HIV outbreaks, serious...
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The Sad State of the University Degree for Planners & Designers
For the past four decades, technology has improved nearly all aspects of our life - except for the physical land development patterns of our cities. The 1960's suburban pattern, still in use today, is...
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The Ghost of Mamie Eisenhower
There’s a certain amount of nostalgia these days for 1950’s suburbs when men were men and ladies mopped linoleum floors in white pumps and pearls. I’m not entirely sure that world ever really existed...
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The other California: A flyover state within a state
California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal...
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Transit Ridership Down 2.3% in 2016
With little fanfare, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) released its fourth quarter 2016 ridership report last week. When ridership goes up, the lobby group usually issues a big...
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To Reunite America, Liberate Cities to Govern Themselves
Time magazine’s 2016 Person of the Year was elected president, as the magazine’s headline writer waggishly put it, of the “divided states of America.”Donald Trump did not, of course, cause America’s...
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Urban leaders should plan for the public transit of the future
Self-driving, automated cars are coming. There will be teething pains in many forms: Some people will want highly automated vehicles while others will fear them. Some will be privately owned, and...
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Bay Area Residents (Rightly) Expect Traffic to Get Worse
In a just released poll by the Bay Area Council a majority of respondents indicated an expectation that traffic congestion in the Bay Area (the San Jose-San Francisco combined statistical area) is...
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Welcome to South Chicago
If you've been reading my stuff here long enough, you probably know that cringe when I hear people talk about Chicago's South Side as a monolith, as code for black and poor. The truth is, there are...
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Trump’s Choice: Populism or Corporatism
The real division in American politics today is no longer right or left, but rather between populism and an increasingly dominant corporate ruling class. This division is obvious within the Trump...
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Universal Basic Income: A “Social Vaccine” for Technological Displacement?
John Kenneth Galbraith once said that the beginnings of wisdom were to never trust an economist. Those of us that spent most of our adult lives in deindustrialized communities understood his point.As...
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