demographics

A few weeks ago, The New York Times touted purported savings that a household would save by living in the core city of New York (in Brooklyn) instead of the suburbs (South Orange, New Jersey). The article downplayed the 1,000 fewer square feet the money bought in Brooklyn and did not consider the 40% higher cost of living.  read more »

If Tara Siegel Bernard of The New York Times is right, (city of) New Yorkers must be among the most irrational people in the world. In "High-Rise or House with Yard," she describes the purported financial advantages of living in a co-op apartment in Brooklyn versus suburban South Orange, New Jersey.  read more »

The Bureau of the Census has updated its city (municipality or local government area) population estimates for 2009. Predictably, anti-suburban interests saw more indication of the elusive (read non-existent) exodus from the suburbs to the central cities. One analyst even suggested that a "high quality" of life in one central city (Washington, DC) might have kept people from moving to the suburbs.  read more »

Andrew Batston of The Wall Street Journal writes of China's decentralization, with the growing employment in interior urban areas.  read more »

The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity produced good news for the year 2009: Americans have created businesses at its fastest rate in 14 years. This past year, 558,000 businesses were created each month, marking a 4% increase from 2008. Though this comes in the midst of economic recession, president and CEO of the Kauffman foundation Carl Schramm seems to think the unsavory results of massive layoffs have fostered these higher rates of entrepreneurship, serving as “a motivational boost” for the newly unemployed to become their own boss.  read more »

Los Angeles has been "gentrified" and made more stable in many of its areas by immigrant settlement, but the phenomenon of Anglo “gentrification” – what used to be "yuppies" or their more contemporary counterparts (original "yuppies" are now in their 50s) upgrading a formerly "bad" neighborhood by pushing up rents and squeezing out existing relatively poor folks – is rarer in Los Angeles than in almost any other American city.  read more »

For the past six years, Hugh Pavletich of Performance Urban Planning (Christchurch, New Zealand) and I have authored the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. The Survey assesses structural housing affordability by the use of the Median Multiple (median house price divided by the median household income). This measure is in wide use and has been recommended by the United Nations and the World Bank.  read more »

There has been a lot written lately about the return to the city. I’ve noted myself how places like central Indianapolis have reversed decades of population declines. That’s exciting. And the New York Times, for example, just trumpeted how “smart growth is taking hold” in America.  read more »

Former chief economist of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development David Henderson coined the appellation, “Global Salvationism,” to describe the kind of behavior one witnesses at gatherings such as this past week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. WEF was created in 1971 so that elites from around the world could gather to “map out solutions to global challenges,” according to WEF’s website.  read more »

Here’s a disturbing thought as Veterans Day approaches: Some teachers and administrators of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) refuse to allow visits to high school campuses by representatives of the service academies that train young officers.  read more »