A Series of Essays on the Urban Future

The Future of Cities

Ryan Atwood was the juvenile delinquent from the slums of Chino, just east of the county line, as depicted in the popular show The O.C. However, Chino was not a crime-ridden pocket in the Golden State, just somewhat down-market from places like Newport Beach. It was not poor; it was not rich; it was just an extension of middle-class America and its particularly Californian variant.

This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published, with links to each chapter.

Click or tap a link below to read or download each chapter. (PDFs open in new tab or window)

California’s Inland Empire: Harbinger of the New Multiracial Suburb – Celia López del Río and Karla López del Río (new this week)

Celia López del Río is a research associate at Connexions Consulting, where she advances knowledge in the community development field and its effects on American families. She is passionate about helping working families build wealth through homeownership and entrepreneurship. Her expertise in commercial real estate empowered many minority-owned micro- and small businesses throughout Southern California. As a new resident of Colorado, López del Río follows her own migration path to build on her work and research from the West Coast.

Karla López del Río is a community development executive with a track record of creating collaborations and leading research initiatives that promote more equitable public policies. Her research focuses on demographic changes, drawing on her perspective as a first-generation immigrant, real-estate background, and social-enterprise experience. She served as the US Census Bureau’s lead partnership specialist in the Inland Empire during the 2020 Decennial. Her team helped significantly improve census response rates, equating to billions of dollars of increased federal funding and political representation for the region. López del Río serves as the executive director of Community Action Partnership of Riverside County, and she is a member of the board of advisers for the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University.