Chase DiFeliciantonio reports in the March 28, 2020 San Francisco Chronicle that efforts to attract office workers back to downtown San Francisco, and consequently to restore the busy “happy hours” at bars are faltering. “Monday and especially Fridays are seeing less foot traffic downtown, which makes midweek after-work happy hours more likely. Some people still working from home are also choosing neighborhood saloons closer to home rather than venturing to other parts of town.”
A financial district bar owner characterized the phenomenon of a packed bar after work is “not dead, but in a coma.”
A bartender aid that “Thursday is the new Friday.”
The article also referred to research findings predicting that workers will use “three midweek days for in-office work, while working remotely on Mondays and Fridays.”
In his second appearance on the Power Hungry Podcast, Kotkin discusses his recent article for Quillette, “The New Great Game,” how China and Russia are allying against the West, why America needs “a new nationalism” to counter this alliance, how California’s administrative state is crushing the poor and the middle class, Michael Shellenberger’s gubernatorial bid, energy, housing, and why despite his many concerns, he remains bullish on the future of the United States.
Joel Kotkin is a demographer, journalist, author, and executive editor of NewGeography.com.
California poses many challenges for the middle- and working-class. As a result, there is a significant migration of people, jobs, and opportunities— both within and outside the state.
Who is leaving California, and who is no longer seeking to move to the golden state? Are there incentives for job creation and how can the state remain competitive?
Join Joel Kotkin, alongside Jorge De la Roca, and Marshall Toplansky as we tackle these questions and more. This expert panel will offer an overview of current demographic trends in California, followed by a discussion around future implications for the state and possible solutions to reinvigorate the California dream. The event will conclude with audience Q&A.
Date: Thursday, March 24, 2022 Time: 10:00AM - 10:45AM Pacific
Statistics Canada reports that remote work reached a pandemic era recently.
“Since the onset of the pandemic, the Labour Force Survey has been tracking the proportion of non-absent workers who worked from home. During the week of January 9 to 15, more than 4 in 10 (43.0%) of those employed worked most of their hours from home, the highest proportion since the initial lockdown in April 2020. Among those who did not usually work any of their hours at home, 30.3% worked at home for at least part of the week.”
Automotive News reports that Nissan will produce two new electric vehicles in metropolitan Jackson, Mississippi at its suburban Canton assembly plant. Nissan announced that: “it will invest $500 million to transform its … assembly plant into a ‘center for EV manufacturing and technology’” In addition, “The investment will include the addition of battery pack assembly operations in Canton.”
The plant will produce Nissan and Infiniti models. Read more here.
Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University, plus Holland & Knight Partner Jennifer Hernandez and Raley’s President and CEO Keith Knopf join a Bay Area Council webinar to discuss how we can restore the California dream. The webinar was moderated by Jim Wunderman, President and CEO, Bay Area Council.
"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it is made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe?
The Tällberg Foundation, launched in 1981, exists to explore the issues that are challenging —and changing— our societies. Today, those challenges are profound: the world that we have known since the mid 20th century, which produced unprecedented peace as well as human advance, is changing at a pace and in directions that threaten to evolve towards Orwellian dystopia.
As inflation continues to soar in America, few things have become more precious than hard assets like property. And with the stock market as unsteady as our political leadership, big dollars from Wall Street are pouring into real estate, snapping up both multi-family and single-family homes.
Rents are on a wild binge, up near 20% in the past year, while home prices have hit a record high. As people can no longer afford to buy homes, they have been forced into the rental market, driving up prices towards absurd levels in fashionable cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Like a pestilence of its own, high rents are spreading to the realm of the “wannabe” places where the “creative class” types are moving to: cities like Miami, Austin, Nashville, and Las Vegas as well as more prosaic places such as Tampa and Memphis.
When: March 8, 2022 at 12PM (CT) Where: Join on Zoom
The seeming success of compact cities and the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate have led to pushback against sprawling, car-dominated cities. Join us as we discuss the environmental case for suburbia.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.