In his appraisal of the war between Iraq and Iran, Henry Kissinger famously remarked that “it’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” Increasingly that’s how the upcoming battle between the Trumpian GOP and the woke Democrats seems to many Americans, whose faith the political system, notes Gallup, is at a nadir. Only 7%, for example, express a great deal of confidence in Congress and barely a quarter in the Presidency.
A solid majority of Americans dislike both parties. No surprise here as they continue to alienate all voters outside their base constituency. Under such conditions, a victory by either will simply serve to confirm their political direction ever further from the mainstream and set the conditions for a thumping in 2024.
Instead, it may also be better for each party to take a hit this November. Losing, it turns out, can be the precondition for winning big. Republicans, for example, took to heart the lessons of the Goldwater rout in 1964 and embraced a more moderate, pragmatic Richard Nixon who then won two consecutive elections. Democrats did the same after the 1972 McGovern disaster, shifting closer to the centre and winning big with the original New Democrat, Bill Clinton.
Big victories, sadly, don’t teach anything but hubris. Many Republicans would take a big win — meaning control of the Senate and a big House majority — as a vindication for both their policy agenda and their insane Duce, Donald Trump. Yet the elevation of the widely unpopular Trump, with barely 40% support, may be the best weapon the Democrats have, and is perhaps the one candidate that even the hapless Joe Biden, or even the pathetically ill-suited Kamala Harris, could possibly beat.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Ashwin Rangan, CIO of ICANN, and Rand Simberg, aerospace engineer to discuss the future of space.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Robert Casanova, director of industry and economic policy at the Semiconductor Industry Association, and Bill Amelio, CEO of DoubleCheck Solutions, to discuss America’s need to reshore the semiconductor industry.
The latest California corporate headquarters move is to the cloud. Venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz made the July 21 announcement, which was also reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal: “…its new headquarters would be in the cloud after a pandemic driven shift to remote work changed the need to be concentrated in one geographic region.”
In the announcement, co-founder Ben Horowitz noted that “Silicon Valley became the place that attracted most of the great national and international talent,” but that the adoption of remote work during the pandemic proved have substantial advantages:
“It turns out that running a technology company remotely works pretty darned well. It’s not perfect, but mitigating the cultural issues associated with remote work turns out to be easier than mitigating the employee satisfaction issues associated with forcing everyone into the office 5 days/week. As a result, nearly every technology company has moved to a remote or hybrid approach to work and this change is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley network effect.”
For Andreeson Horowitz, the answer is principally a remote work model:
“Concentrating all of those companies into one or two geographies cuts off great opportunities from anyone who can contribute, but cannot easily move. Remote work is opening up many new locations for entrepreneurs and technology workers. We embrace that by changing our own operating model.”
Horowitz added: “headquarters will be in the cloud and we will continue to create physical offices globally where needed to support our teams and partners.”
New York. Los Angeles. Boston. San Francisco. Call them America's "superstars." With mega populations, these urban hubs have long reigned as the nation's economic, social, and cultural capitals. But big cities have also been the hardest hit by the pandemic. "Zoom towns" are springing up across the country as professionals leave the city in droves. Even more, the pandemic has brought economic and social inequality into sharp focus for the nation's lawmakers. And some, particularly in large cities that boast the most obvious cases of such inequality, are enacting new progressive policies and laws that seek to combat inequality. For some, this means a new financial structure that makes city life less compelling for those in higher income brackets. Will megacities keep their magnetism in the wake of Covid-19? Or are their best days behind them?
Scholar & Author Joel Kotkin joins Jennifer Hernandez, Attorney & Environmental Advocate, along with Historian & Professor Margaret O'Mara and Ed Glaeser, Economist & Author, to debate the topic.
Recently, the high density of Los Angeles became an issue in a proposed city of Vancouver high rise development project (six buildings of from 12 to 40 stories). A July 4 Vancouver Sun article, by Susan Lazarak (“Vancouver proposes huge housing development at north end of Granville Bridge”) cited University of British Columbia regional planning professor Michael Hooper to the effect that concentrating tall towers but allowing lower density elsewhere doesn’t necessarily translate into a high overall density. In particular, he noted that Los Angeles has higher overall density than New York City because L.A. has “vast swaths of middle-density buildings” throughout the city.
Professor Hooper makes a valid and often misunderstood point on tall towers. Indeed, the Corbusian towers, which have been built in many cities, and famously rejected in Paris, are not required to achieve higher densities.
But first, some background…
This article clarifies often misunderstood urban density issues.
First of all, the city (municipality) of Los Angeles is not denser than the city of New York.
However, the Los Angeles urban area is considerably denser than the New York urban area. The urban area is the area of continuous development, and excludes all rural land (by definition, all land that is not urban is rural, according to both Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau).
For example, the Vancouver urban area (the Statistics Canada term for urban area is “population centre”), stretches from Horseshoe Bay to Langley and Richmond to Maple Ridge and Port Coquitlam (Figure 1, Statistics Canada map of the Vancouver population centre).
Urban areas/population centres are defined by Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau based on data from small census enumeration zones, without regard to municipal limits or even provincial or state boundaries (such as Ottawa-Gatineau, ON-QC, or Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD).
Moreover, the suburbs of Los Angeles (the part of the urban area outside the city), are about twice as dense as those of New York. This more than compensates for the higher municipal density in New York.
Urban areas are not metropolitan areas (census metropolitan areas). Population centres/urban areas are the highest geographical level at which urban density can be measured, because any higher level is at least partially rural. Metropolitan area densities are combined urban and rural densities.
In the United States, 81% of the land in metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 residents was rural in 2010 (see: Rural Character in America’s Metropolitan Areas). The 2021 census indicates that the Vancouver population centre comprises only 32% of the land in the Vancouver census metropolitan area.
Back to Los Angeles and New York…
The United States Census Bureau delineates the land area of urban areas in its census. The current release is based on the 2010 census. The Los Angeles urban area had a population density of 2,702 per square kilometer, more than 30% higher than New York’s 2,054. The Toronto population centre had a density of 3,088 according to the 2021 census, nearly 15% higher than Los Angeles (Figure 2).
The latest data from the American Community Survey (see Note 1) shows that the largest difference in housing types between the Los Angeles and New York urban areas is among single-family detached houses (Figure 3, see Note 2). In Los Angeles, 40% more of the housing stock is detached than in New York (48.4% compared to 34.0%).
The higher density, detached housing suburbs of Los Angeles are contrasted photographically with those of New York, at distances of 24 kilometers/15 miles and 56 kilometers/35 miles from the urban cores (Figures 4 and 5).
Even the San Francisco (2,249) and San Jose (2,267) urban areas have higher urban densities than New York. Like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose have a larger share of single-family housing and a lower share of multi-family housing than New York — the opposite of what would be expected. As with Los Angeles, the higher densities of the San Francisco and San Jose urban areas compared to New York are driven by their detached housing on smaller lots (Figure 6).
Ironically, Los Angeles has long been considered the epitome of urban sprawl — probably more than any other urban area. If this perception were true, then every large population centre/urban area in Canada and the United States would be denser than Los Angeles. The reality? Only Toronto is denser (Figure 2).
Note 1: The later American Community Survey data for urban areas is based on the land area as defined by the Census Bureau in 2010.
Note 2: The factors contributing to urban density in this article relate only to residential densities. There is no readily available source for the extent of land use by non-residential functions, such as commercial, industrial and public facilities.
These are strange times in American politics. Slowly but surely, the Democrats have been losing their historically working class and multi-racial base, with Hispanics in particular drifting Right. This shift was starkly evident in the recent New York Times/Siena poll which showed that, for the first time ever, Democrats had a larger share of support among white graduates than among non-white voters, achieving effective parity with Republicans over the Hispanic vote.
The shift has unsettled each party in less than attractive ways. The Democrats’ growing reliance on college-educated affluent white people reflects the policies pursued by the Biden Administration, which is both inept and widely unpopular. Although there are the de rigeur calls to help the middle class, the President has identified himself with the issues that animate the activist element in the upper classes. These include aggressive climate change policies, near limitless abortion access, lax immigration controls (opposed by two-thirds of Americans) and the implementation of critical race theory in schools. Amid soaring inflation, working class voters have been worst affected, many of which include the increasingly influential Latino voter as well small business owners, whose confidence is at a near half-century low.
The Census Bureau has released an ”America Counts: Stories Behind the Numbers” issue entitled: “Fewer Younger Adults Drives Population Loss in Some U.S. Cities.” According to the Census Bureau, “Previously released population estimates for counties showed core counties of many large metro areas experienced large declines in their population from July 1, 2020-2021.” The net domestic migration dimension of this was the subject of our article Huge Spike in Domestic Migration from Urban Cores, which documented a 1.1 million net domestic migration loss by urban core counties of the major metropolitan areas (those over 1,000,000 population in the single year of 2021. By contrast, suburban counties gained about 400,000.
The new Census Bureau analysis shows, in the urban core counties covered, a disproportionate share of the 2021 population loss was “due largely to a loss of population in one specific group — younger adults in their early 20s to mid-30s.”
The article focuses on New York, San Francisco, where particularly large declines occurred among younger adults. This is an ominous trend for large core municipalities with the largest central business districts (downtowns), which have been particularly attractive in the past to this younger demographic and are most at risk of reduced office occupancy as a result of remote working. New York has by far the largest central business district in the United States, while San Francisco and Boston are among the top five.
On June 19th Douglas Newby’s opinion piece titled, “Democracy Needs to Replace City Manager Ward System” was published with the assertion that the council-manager form of government (under which the City of Dallas, Texas is currently formed), is undemocratic. As the CEO of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), the former City Manager of Austin, Texas, and a city administrator who served under a strong mayor system like the one proposed by Mr. Newby, I’d like to address a couple of critical points and bring clarity to the ways in which the forms of government actually operate.
First, I’d like to address the idea that the council-manager form of government is somehow less democratic than the strong mayor system recommended by Mr. Newby. Understand that neither system is a pure democracy. That is, neither system allows residents to have a direct vote on all matters before the government. Certainly, there are certain issues that require a voter referendum, but most policy decisions are made through a representative democracy where the residents elect individuals to speak and act on their behalf.
The primary argument given to support the claim that the council-manager form is less democratic is that the City Manager is not elected by the people and therefore is not accountable to the people. However, the City Manager is appointed by the people’s representatives to Council and can be fired by the people through their elected representatives. Mr. Newby’s frustration seems to be that the mayor was not permitted to unilaterally fire the City Manager. And herein is the critical distinction that makes the council-manager form more democratic than the strong mayor system. Specifically, the council-manager form of government requires all elected officials (who represent the actual voices of the people) to work together, collaborate, and come to consensus on the best path forward for the city. No single official, not even the mayor, may act unilaterally against the will of the people – a will that can only be formulated through the collective voice of the people’s duly elected representatives.
The second issue I’d like to address is Mr. Newby’s argument for a strong mayor system, which is predicated, largely, upon a mischaracterization of the role of the City Manager and Council. First, is the claim that “each district is controlled by its City Councilperson and the City Manager.” The reality is that no policy may be advanced without the majority consent of the Council. Certainly, the council member in whose district a particular zoning decision is based will be given some deference considering that council member was elected by the people in the district who are most directly affected by the decision. However, that council member must convince a majority of the council to affirm their position. This is the case in both council-manager and strong mayor systems. However, in a council-manager system, the mayor has no authority to unilaterally veto council decisions or deny the will of the people. That power is, however, granted to the mayor in a strong mayor system.
The final issue is the claim that the City Manager controls the City Council. The ICMA Code of Ethics explicitly prohibits city managers from engaging in political activities or elections. While elected Council members and mayors rely on support from like-minded organizations and residents to support their campaign, these are areas of influence where the City Manager should not engage. Instead, the City Manager is a public servant employed by the people’s elected representatives. City Managers only hold their position if the democratically elected representatives of the people agree that the manager is running the city and implementing their policies effectively. Contrary to Mr. Newby’s assertion, the City Manager has no power to “defiantly refuse to pursue the priorities of the mayor and the City Council.” And recent actions taken by the Dallas City Council and the Mayor demonstrate this very issue.
The Mayor and members of City Council raised concerns regarding specific process improvements they’d like to see implemented by the City Manager. Yet, they also recognize the progress made to advance many of their goals and policies. And so, through a professional performance evaluation process, the Mayor and City Council clarified specific process improvements they’d like to see in the city. The City Manager now must deliver on those improvements. This is how any effective organization is managed. The governing body establishes policies and sets expectations for the organization, and their employee (in this case the City Manager) is held accountable for achieving those goals and expectations. In well-run cities, elected officials, the city manager, and staff all work collaboratively to strengthen the city. Yet, Mr. Newby’s solution is to advocate for a strong mayor system in the hopes that a like-minded mayor will be elected in order to “do more to push [his] ideas further forward.”
At ICMA, we recognize that local governments are essential to meeting the needs of the people. Public servants in local government deliver programs and services to assure public safety, provide public amenities, build essential infrastructure, and deliver quality public utilities. They do this to enhance the quality of life for all people and businesses within their jurisdiction.
Certainly, there will be disagreements on how best to move forward. That is why strong democracies encourage robust debate and public engagement. The ability to cast a ballot to be heard is an important aspect of democratic societies. Yet, the real power of democracy is only realized when we value diverse views and opinions in making decisions that affect our communities. In the council-manager form of government that includes granting the Council the power to hire and fire a manager based on their proven ability to carry out their vision of the future and assuring all the people’s representatives have an equal voice in determining how government serves the people.
Marc Ott is CEO/Executive Director of the International City/County Management Association.
Southern California has always had a casual relationship with reality, but West Hollywood’s decision to stop funding the LA Sheriff amidst a mounting crime tsunami takes the fantasy to a new — and dangerous — level. As usual this policy was concocted by woke politicians and not approved by the voters, who might be less than enthusiastic about the notion of replacing police officers with 30 unarmed “security ambassadors”.
We will see if this action gets pushback, particularly in a heavily gay city that has long embraced progressive politics. Yet there are signs that a struggle is emerging even within the Left-of-centre space, as people begin to weigh their ideological fixations against their personal safety.
Right now, remarkably, the defund movement is far from dead. Los Angeles, which has its own crime surge, just elected or placed first several new members who favour the so-called “people’s budget”, which seeks to take funds from cops to give to “community” groups. In Los Angeles, these Left-of-centre candidates have had strong support in media and gained much of their backing from the far-Left Democratic Socialists, in one case displacing a liberal labour-oriented Latino LA councilperson with an ally of Black Lives Matter.
It would be one thing if this insanity was restricted to LA-LA land. Despite the election of pro-police Mayor Eric Adams the New York City council has become, if anything, more amenable to defunding policies. Much of this could be ascribed to low turnouts, the media’s race obsessions, or the continued contraction of middle-class households in big cities across the nation.
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.
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