Building the New America: Report on trends shaping the migration of people and jobs

Report: Building the New America

How do we build a new urban model for America — one that is better aligned with the aspirations of most Americans? This newly released report examines the housing trends that are driving today's migration of people and jobs.
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...”

California Preening: Golden State on Path to High-Tech Feudalism

by Joel Kotkin — “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta....” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate.
San Joaquin county aerial photoWendell Cox

The Expanding and Dispersing San Francisco Bay Area

by Wendell Cox — This decade has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area (the San Jose-San Francisco combined statistical area or CSA), with the addition of three Central Valley metropolitan areas, Stockton, Modesto and Merced. Over the same period, there has been both a drop in the population growth rate and a shift of growth to the Central Valley exurban metropolitan areas.
Urban Midrise area with light rail

Three Studies That Show Density Doesn’t Determine Car Travel

by Fanis Grammenos — Recent research sheds new light on the critical issue of the link between car travel and urban density. Conventional planning wisdom has it that increasing development density bestows benefits, most importantly that of reducing driving.
Greater Los Angeles area aerial view

Greater Los Angeles Area Growth Tanking and Dispersing

by Wendell Cox — For decades, there has been substantial dispersion of population in Greater Los Angeles (Los Angeles combined statistical area or CSA), as the suburban areas outside the urban core have dominated population growth.

Younger Americans Don’t Hate Suburbia

by Samuel J Abrams — new data from AEI’s “Survey on Community and Society shows that suburbs are also politically diverse places where younger Americans report having vibrant social lives and dynamic economic opportunities.

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.

Ending the War on Communities: 14 Suggestions to Protect Neighborhoods While Providing Meaningful Housing Solutions

by John Mirisch — The debate on solving California’s housing affordability crisis has reached a fever pitch, and the level of noise is drowning out solutions. We are facing a push to indiscriminately force density on neighborhoods and a war on single-family housing
Suburbia at sunset

Stop Bashing Suburbs As Worst Places For Older People To Live

by Stephen M. Golant, Ph.D. — Suburbs and automobiles are necessary bedfellows in the United States, but this is why many experts believe that these low density, physically spread-out communities are the worst places for older persons to live.
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.