by Joel Kotkin 01/24/2015 With his recent series of executive actions on U.S. policies ranging from climate to energy, immigration and, most recently, Cuba, Barack Obama is working to fulfill his long-held dream of being a “transformative” president. By decisively circumventing Congress with bold decrees, the president has won the plaudits of his core media […]
by Wendell Cox 01/27/2015 There is an impression, both in the press and among some urban analysts that as cities become larger they become more densely populated. In fact,
by Joel Kotkin 01/25/2015 The blue team may have lost the political battle last year, but with the rapid fall of oil and commodity prices, they have temporarily gained the upper hand economically. Simultaneously, conditions have become more problematical for those interior states, notably Texas and North Dakota, that have benefited from the fossil fuel […]
by Matthew Stevenson 01/23/2015 Back in New York, no one quite believed my accounts of urban renewal across the Midwest, through a piece of the Rustbelt, and then back — that St. Louis is the Brooklyn of the heartland, or that even downtown Buffalo has charms. I tended to be on safer ground when I […]
by KONRAD YAKABUSKI Of all the lofty attributes Canada’s world-class cities have touted in recent years, making a home unaffordable for average folks is perhaps the least enviable. It was also avoidable. But self-proclaimed “smart growth” policies have proven the opposite of smart, contributing to an affordability crisis with little to show in the way […]
by Sean Benesh 01/22/2015 The flashpoint for the gentrification conversation along Portland’s North Williams revolves around the bicycle. The cultural appetite for what the creative class likes and enjoys is in stark contrast to that of the African-American community. “North Williams Avenue wasn’t hip back in the late 1970s. There was no Tasty n Sons. […]
by Alicia Kurimska Over time, suburbs have had many enemies, but perhaps none were more able to impose their version than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In its bid to remake a Russia of backward villages and provincial towns, the Soviets favored big cities – the bigger the better – and policies that […]
by Joel Kotkin 01/16/2015 The U.S. may have its first black president, but these have not been the best of times for African-Americans. Recent shootings of unarmed black teenagers and the murder of two New York City police officers have inflamed racial tensions. A Bloomberg poll in December found that 53% of respondents believed that […]
by Aaron M. Renn 01/15/2015 People advance two main sorts of arguments in favor of things for which they advocate: the moral argument (it’s the right thing to do) and the utilitarian one (it will make us better off). As it happens, in practice most people tend to implicitly suggest there’s a 100% overlap between […]
by Ed Ring 01/14/2015 A frequent and entirely valid point made by representatives of public sector unions is that their membership, government workers, need to be able to afford to live in the cities and communities they serve. The problem with that argument, however, is that nobody can afford to live