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Cronyism on an Industrial Scale to Blame for Inflated New York Subway Costs
Just before year end, the New York Times dropped a bombshell report on what they term “the most expensive mile of subway on earth.”An extensive investigation by the Times finally starts to get at the...
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Case Studies in Autonomous Vehicles, Part 3: Will Autonomous Vehicles Be Able...
Parts 1 and 2 of this series explored the practical challenges of adopting shared use autonomous vehicles from a human behavior standpoint. In this final piece, I explore the issues AVs might face in...
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Is There A Niche For Sensible Politics In America?
Given the current state of American politics, and those of our state of California, our founding fathers might well consider not just turning over in their graves but boring deeper towards the earth’s...
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Thoughts on Boston and Northern Exclusion
The Boston Globe's Spotlight investigative team recently touched a lot of nerves with its seven-part series about Boston's perception and reputation as a racist city. The Spotlight team should be...
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Minnesota's Millennial Mobility
With both metro and rural areas projected to face a labor force slowdown by 2025 as more baby boomers exit the workforce than millennials enter, where millennials chose to live and work becomes...
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Should the Midwest Play a Game It Can’t Win?
Noah Smith at Bloomberg wrote a recent column on how to revive the Midwest that channels the ideas of Michigan based Brookings scholar John Austin. This strategy has two main planks: lure more...
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Tech's New Hotbeds: Cities With Fastest Growth In STEM Jobs Are Far From...
The conventional wisdom sees tech concentrating in a handful of places, many dense urban cores that offer the best jobs and draw talented young people. These places are seen as so powerful that, as The...
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Immigration and Trust
Do we only really trust people who are like us? And if so, is that a mistake? Distrust of the unfamiliar and the foreign is a natural survival mechanism for most species, including the human species....
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A New Vision For Southern California
Since the start of the last century, Southern California has been a pioneer in building ways of living, and an economy, that broke with normal convention. Our region created a new paradigm, one both...
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The Cities Where African-Americans Are Doing The Best Economically 2018
The 2007 housing crisis was particularly tough on African-Americans, as well as Hispanics, extinguishing much of their already miniscule wealth. Industrial layoffs, particularly in the Midwest, made...
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A Tale of Two Socals: Poverty in Southern California
For many, Southern California is heaven on Earth. For urbanites, it’s a world-renowned capital of art, culture, and entertainment, and technology, rivaled by few locales across the globe. But even for...
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Metropolitan New York and San Jose: Highest Property Tax Burdens
This article examines median residential property tax levels and rates among the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). The data is from the 2016 American Community Survey...
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Chicagoans Are Getting Older And Smarter
Chicagoans are getting older, as is the rest of the United States. The median age of Chicagoans has increased from 31.5 in 2000 to 34.4 in 2016. What is particularly noteworthy is that Chicago is...
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Can the Trump Economy Trump Trump?
President Trump’s critics find it hard to give him credit for anything, especially given his extraordinary boastfulness. Yet Trump’s economic policies seem to be working. New job numbers are robust,...
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Housing Affordability and the Standard of Living: The 14th Annual Demographia...
For the eighth year in a row, the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows Hong Kong to be the least affordable housing market (metropolitan area) in nine nations. Hong Kong's...
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The Millennial Dilemma: A Generation Searches for Home… On Their Terms
In the latest release from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, "The Millennial Dilemma: A Generation Searches For Home... On Their Terms," Anne Snyder and Alicia Kurimska examine how millennials are...
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Housing And The California Dream Are At A Crossroads
“The Plains of Id, urbanophiles might sniff. Can anything good come from suburban Nazareth? Yes, the suburbanites were responding. Everything good was coming from this Holy Land: a house, a job, the...
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Hamtramck: Scale and Institutional Frameworks
I recently published an article that explored some of the ways regulations make it difficult for small businesses to get off the ground and function. Among the examples I used from around the country...
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Would You Move to Wisconsin to Save Ten Minutes?
Next City pointed me at a new ad campaign the state of Wisconsin is running aimed at luring Chicago Millennials to move north.The focus of the campaign is on Wisconsin’s lower cost of living and...
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U.S. Infrastructure: Not About To Collapse
A recent report from the RAND Corporation looks at America’s infrastructure and concludes that “not everything is broken.” In fact, what is broken, more than the infrastructure itself, is “our approach...
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