NewGeography.com blogs

In too many metropolitan areas, housing is no longer affordable for middle-class households, especially in markets subject to "urban containment," now the world's dominant planning regime. According to planning experts Arthur C. Nelson and Casey Dawkins, urban containment draws "a line around an urban area"; it includes urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. It is "explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging" infill, to limit or block organic urban expansion.

Urban containment is intended to increase urban land costs. Shifting demand inside the contained area produces an abrupt increase in land values at the boundary, distorting the land value gradient. As Nelson and Dawkins say, "This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside the boundary"(emphasis added), which effectively sets a higher "floor value" for urban land. This is the "urban containment effect."

Read the full discussion at: the May issue of Reason.

Wendell Cox (Demographia): Affirmative
Christian Britschgi (Reason magazine): Negative

The Calgary Herald reports that some office tenants are being forced out of their buildings in the city of Calgary’s program to convert office buildings to residential uses.

We had covered this program recently, noting that “that the City has adopted an aggressive program to reduce downtown’s office footprint. With 14 million square feet vacant, the city has adopted the “Downtown Calgary Incentive Program,” a goal of which is to reduce CBD office space by 6 million square feet by 2021. The purpose of the program is to encourage the removal of vacant office space in the downtown to help address vacancy rates and stabilize property values over the next decade.” The program provides subsidies to building owners undertaking conversions.

The Herald cites the case of one business that signed a sublease for space on April 12, just over a month ago. The company learned shortly thereafter that they would need to relocate before the end of 2023. Four years before their sublease was to expire.

Conversion of office buildings to residential may be the greatest hope for the survival of downtowns where until the pandemic, there were far more jobs than resident workers. The experiences cited in the Herald story could make downtown Calgary even less competitive with other office locations in the metropolitan area, as firms face uncertainty about being able to rely on agreed upon lease expiration dates.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Gavin Newsom, the would–be president many Democrats hope might be an alternative to the current dodderer–in–chief, has landed himself in hot water. Once an enthusiastic backer of just about every progressive cause, the California Governor must now cope with a budget deficit that has already ballooned to $32 billion. This will no doubt limit his ability to spread largesse to the party’s loyal constituencies.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the coming battle over reparations for African Americans. Newsom approved a reparations task force in the midst of the frenzy which followed the murder of George Floyd, but he now faces a bill that could top $800 billion. Newsom has already hinted that the reparations discussion is about “more than cash payments”, but in reality cash — estimated as at least $125,000 per individual  but sometimes much higher — is what this is all about.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Humanity’s future is an urban future, yet that future is in jeopardy as many cities suffer from bad decisions and policies. Please join us as this panel discusses their recent release, The Future of Cities, and how urban areas can move forward in a reimagined vision of our urban future. Please stay afterward for a reception with the panelists.

Date: May 24, 6:00–9:00PM
Location: The Harmonie Club, NYC

RSVP: Please RSVP to AEI Development Events at Michael.Pugh@aei.org

For more information, please download the event flyer here. (pdf opens in new tab or window) or visit AEI to register.

John F. Early’s excellent discussion in Saturday’s Opinion section on the statistical establishment’s struggles with defining and describing race is a question we all need to address seriously. It seems that OMB, which tried and failed to introduce similar thoughts for inclusion in the 2020 decennial census, seems to be trying it again on perhaps a more hospitable administration. Their clumsy efforts to somehow make America divide comfortably into five easy to label World groups (and two smaller ones) is an immense struggle with reality. Few outside Washington could respond to their new race question categories or care about them. A large part of it comes from having failed to convince Central and South Americans that they are something called an “ethnicity” and so OMB created “Some Other Race” as a categorization in order to make the data collection process fit.

My first experience with racial data collection was for the New York metropolitan area to meet federal requirements for travel data to support public investment analyses. At first, the survey we designed included race. We were told that was divisive and ordered to take the questions on race out. About a year after completing that survey I arrived in the Washington metropolitan area, again working on developing transportation survey data, and when I presented my draft designs I was asked why there’s no race questions in there. How can we tell what’s going on with different people? So race was back in. That was all about 50 years ago.

Some current comic effects of the OMB struggle:

The OMB says Europeans are White, except Spaniards, who are given as an example of Hispanics. Hmmm! That makes it a little clumsy in that the little country next to Spain on the Iberian peninsula called Portugal will be white, but not Spain? In Spain the Catalans have never wanted to be Spanish anyway, so maybe they’re still white – – should we ask them? My wife is from Catalonia and was labeled Hispanic at work years ago to up the percentage for government reporting.

Oh, then there’s the small matter of a place in South America called Brazil which is Portuguese-speaking and constitutes the majority of South American population, so are they white like the Portuguese or are we making them Hispanics to fit the geography? So maybe we make the Portuguese Hispanics because they almost share the language, and White Europe stops at the Pyrenees.

The Census Bureau seems intent on creating a "race" or "ethnicity" out of MENA - Middle Eastern & North African populations, a compartmentalization of the North African Middle Eastern, sort-of-Arabic world. It includes old friends such as Israel, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s unclear where MENA begins and totally not clear where it ends -- around Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan? Who might voluntarily identify themselves as a MENA?

Then there’s the Asians in America, about 5% of our population, but more than half of the world’s so we’ll squeeze Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, all into that meaningless but convenient phrase. When they describe Asian, Indonesia is never mentioned. I’m sure they won’t mind! We could shift the Indonesians to the Pacific Islanders and Hawaiians Race category and up their population by about a quarter of a billion people.

Finally, will African-Americans and Africans be comfortable with that single word appellation?

These have become tangled labeling tools to make summary reporting convenient for the US statistical system to which probably none of the respondent populations would recognize. Perhaps geography is the easier answer? As Mr. Early suggests, maybe just forget the whole thing that has so clumsily, been drawn again and again.

Alan Pisarski is a writer, analyst and consultant in the fields of transportation research, policy and investment.

The geographical resorting of America continues apace–the separation of peoples based broadly on ideology. You see this population movement on both coasts, accentuated by the pandemic and remote work.

It’s about other things, of course–costs, space, weather–but it’s a lot about politics. And after Tuesday’s mayoral election result in Chicago (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/us/elections/chicago-mayor-election-brandon-johnson.html), we can expect more resorting in the middle of the country. A majority of the closely-divided city electorate chose a higher-tax, less-policing candidate backed by most of the powerful public-employee unions. On top of the immediate worries that conservative Chicagoans might have, there’s the ongoing pensions deficit that the city, Cook County and the state of Illinois (also dominated by Democrats of the left) are running, which is a lien on taxpayers who hang around.

Unless attempts succeed to garnish the higher income of fleeing residents (moves under consideration in a few states), or a bailout from Washington is forthcoming, Illinoisans-in-place are squarely under this cloud. So the movement into “two Americas” can expect another rush. I don’t know whether this pace and degree of separation is unprecedented (obviously blacks had reason to escape the Antebellum and Jim Crow South) or necessarily harmful on balance in such an already-sundered society, but it is happening nonetheless.

This piece first appeared on Tim W. Ferguson blog.

Tim W. Ferguson, the former editor of Forbes’s Asia edition, writes about business, economics and society.

The recent sparring between Starbucks’s longtime CEO Howard Schultz and Senator Bernie Sanders reflects a conflict within the Democratic Party that is likely to get far more intense in the years ahead. Sanders accused Schultz, a self-described progressive who once considered a presidential run, of conducting “illegal union busting” at the coffee chain’s shops — something that the Starbucks CEO vehemently denied.

Schultz is finding out the hard way that liberal intentions are not enough to prevent his employees from seeking better wages and conditions. This dilemma mirrors that of his gentry progressive allies, who represent the Democrats’ increasingly affluent, well-educated base. They are now primary funders of the party and it is their agenda that has come to achieve dominance.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the United States exported a record 3.6 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2022, a 22 percent increase from 2021. According to the EIA:

“Since early 2022, trade patterns have shifted because of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions of Russia’s crude oil exports. Prior to 2022, OECD Europe had been the largest regional importer of Russia’s crude oil, receiving 2.3 million b/d from Russia in 2021.

Less crude oil was exported to India and China from the United States in 2022 than in 2021 because the two countries imported more discounted crude oil from Russia. India was the largest export destination of U.S. crude oil exports in 2021; China had been in 2020. Decreased demand for U.S. crude oil exports to India and China was more than offset by increased demand from other destinations, particularly in Europe.”

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Just implemented service adjustments will reduce Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) services to nine percent below pre-pandemic levels.

A Toronto Metropolitan University report (2023 TTC Service Changes and Transit Equity in Toronto), while acknowledging TTC’s challenging fiscal situation, notes that “Toronto’s most marginalized neighbourhoods will likely be disproportionately affected by the TTC service cuts.” The report continues: “These neighbourhoods may not generate the highest amounts of public transit trips, but residents in these neighbourhoods may be more dependent on public transit for their everyday needs compared to other parts of the city.” This “will likely make these neighbourhoods more mobility poor, creating additional barriers to the residents’ participation in employment, education, and society in general.”

Moreover, the report finds “At a time when all levels of the government are committing to address affordability and inequality, the proposed TTC service cuts are not justified.”

Note: The TTC principally serves the city (municipality) of Toronto, which accounts for 45% of the Toronto census metropolitan area population.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

The rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and its large depositors has drawn together unlikely bedfellows. Both the Right-wing Free Beacon and the Leftist Stranger magazine, to give two examples, have denounced this federal largesse as “socialism for the rich”.

Whether this is true or not lies in the eye of the beholder, but one thing is for sure: this is a crisis that could reshape the 2024 election.

Americans, particularly progressives, no longer see the Silicon Valley elites as “enlightened plutocrats” eager to create a better world. Now they view these same people as sinister far-Right figures, as evidenced by the treatment of Elon Musk since his takeover of Twitter. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans now also fear the tech elite, and the industry’s approval dropped dramatically in the years before the pandemic.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.