Urban Issues

The extreme and rising inequality of income and wealth in the United States has been exhaustively reported and analyzed, including by me. Incomes are strikingly unequal just about everywhere, but not to the same degree. To discover a more egalitarian America, I used US Census American Community Survey data (2007-2011) estimates of the Gini coefficients of all US counties and equivalents.  read more »

An analysis of the just-released municipal population trends shows that core city growth is centered in the municipalities that have the largest percentage of their population living in suburban (or exurban) neighborhoods.

Improved Urban Core Analysis  read more »

Maybe it’s that reporters don’t like malls. After all they tend to be young, highly urban, single, and highly educated, not the key demographic at your local Macy’s, much less H&M.

But for years now, the conventional wisdom in the media is that the mall—particularly in the suburbs—is doomed. Here a typical sample from The Guardian: “Once-proud visions of suburban utopia are left to rot as online shopping and the resurgence of city centers make malls increasingly irrelevant to young people.”  read more »

Before I get to the urbanism portion of this post I need to do a quick geography and geology lesson for those readers who are unfamiliar with Hawaii. The state is made up of a chain of islands: Oahu, Maui, Kauai, Molokai, Lanai, the Big Island (that’s the largest island called “Hawaii”) and numerous lesser islands. All the islands formed from the same volcanic hot spot on the sea floor over a period of 70 million years.  read more »

Since the U.S. economy imploded in 2008, there’s been a steady shift in leadership in job growth among our major metropolitan areas. In the earliest years, the cities that did the best were those on the East Coast that hosted the two prime beneficiaries of Washington’s resuscitation efforts, the financial industry and the federal bureaucracy. Then the baton was passed to metro areas riding the boom in the energy sector, which, if not totally dead in its tracks, is clearly weaker.  read more »

Australia’s inner city areas and CBDs are a focus of media and public policy attention, with good reason. But it’s also true that the real engines of employment are outside the inner city areas and that the dominant role of our suburban economy as an economic engine is grossly understated, even ignored. This is not good public policy. It’s not even common sense. 

I have a view that the focus on urban renewal and inner urban economic development has become a policy obsession of late.  read more »

Discouraging employment data have recently dampened optimism about America’s economic recovery. These challenges are nothing new for developed regions long beset by manufacturing decline amidst globalization. Exemplars of this trend, America’s rust belt cities have battled unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and social challenges since economic decline emerged in the 1960s. In response, some now cultivate service, knowledge, and tourism industries.  read more »

Working at home, much of it telecommuting, has replaced transit as the principal commuting alternative to the automobile in the United States outside New York. In the balance of the nation, there are more than 1.25 commuters who work at home for each commuter using transit to travel to work, according to data in the American Community Survey for 2013 (one year). When the other six largest transit metropolitan areas are included (Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston and San Francisco), twice as many people commute by working at home than by transit.  read more »

In the aftermath of the Baltimore riots, there is increased concern with issues of race and opportunity. Yet most of the discussion focuses on such things as police brutality, perceptions of racism and other issues that are dear to the hearts of today’s progressive chattering classes. Together they are creating what talk show host Tavis Smiley, writing in Time, has labeled “an American catastrophe.”  read more »

This is the overview from a new report, Best Cities for Minorities: Gauging the Economics of Opportunity by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Read the full report here (pdf viewer).

This study provides an initial analysis of African-American, Latino and Asian economic and social conditions in 52 metropolitan regions currently and over the period that extends from 2000  to 2013. Our analysis includes housing affordability, median household incomes, self-employment rates, and population growth. Overall, the analysis shows that ethnic minorities in metropolitan regions with significant economic growth and affordable housing tend to do better than in other locations irrespective of the dominant political culture.  read more »