Feudal Future Podcast, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky

Environmental Dogma & Destruction: How California’s Climate Policies Hurt the Middle Class

In the fourth episode of the Feudal Future podcast, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky interview Jennifer Hernandez, a partner with Holland & Knight Law Firm in its California offices. Her firm is one of the most prominent in the world of environmental regulations, including California environmental law.
Feudal Future Podcast, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky

Rural-Urban Migration and Class Structure in China with Li Sun

In the third episode of the Feudal Future podcast, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky, interview guest Li Sun. Li is a consultant for the UN, the World Bank, the OECD, and the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, and China. Li's main areas of research interest are China’s urbanization and globalization, and she is the author of Rural-Urban Migration and Policy Intervention in China.

From Tragedy to Opportunity: We Could Live Better When Today’s Mayhem Ends

by Joel Kotkin — Beyond the depressing statistics, the deserted malls, the looted or abandoned Main Streets, lies the potential to use the pandemic to create the impetus for better, more sustainable and family-centric communities.
Studying the wrong cities will lead to repeating their mistakes

Studying the Wrong Cities Will Lead to Repeating Their Mistakes

by Ross Elliott — The junket factor must be the only logical criteria by which various industry “study tours” overseas are planned. How else to explain how entirely inappropriate the choices are? The list of cities identified for “study” by Australian development and planning industry bodies reads like the pages of a glossy weekend travel magazine
The Economist cover - and some housing facts

To The Economist: Planning, Not Home Ownership, Caused the Housing Crisis

by Wendell Cox — The January 16, 2020 cover story in The Economist magazine trumpeted “The West’s biggest economic policy mistake: It’s obsession with home ownership undermines growth, fairness and public faith in capitalism...”
Aerial view of skyscrapers

Mayors Won’t Rule the World

by Joel Kotkin — Earlier in this decade, cities—the bigger and denser the better—appeared as the planet’s geographic stars. According to the 2013 book If Mayors Ruled the World, everyone would be better off if state rule were replaced by rule from the most evolved urban areas.

Transit Planners Want to Make Your Life Worse

by Joel Kotkin — In our system of government, the public sector is, well, supposed to serve the public. But increasingly the bureaucracies at the state and local level increasingly seek to tell the public how to live, even if the result is to make life worse.
SEPTA Transit Bus

Transit Ridership Falls Another 2.9 Percent In June

by Randal O'Toole — June 2019 transit ridership was 2.9 percent lower than in June 2018, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s most recent data release. Ridership dropped in all major modes, including bus, commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail.
urban life

Population Density and Resource Abundance: Turning Malthusian Logic On its Head

by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak — A few months ago prominent naturalist David Attenborough told attendees at the World Economic Forum about humanity’s unsustainable population growth and his certainty that it has to “come to an end” quickly.
Order without Design, byAlain-Bertaud

Economics Needed for People-Based Urban Planning: Alain Bertaud Book Review

Book Review by Wendell Cox — Alain Bertaud’s new book, Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (MIT Press), is particularly timely, because of the rising concern about the challenges facing middle-income households.