Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

If you’ve read this blog over the years you know that I’ve increasingly written about a general staleness in urbanist discourse. I’ve characterized it as seeing a need for new ideas in urbanism discourse, superstar cities becoming the victims of their own success, or the needs of interior cities being glossed over in favor of the coasts.  read more »

One of the reasons I started writing my newsletter was that I saw so many young men turning to online gurus for life advice rather than seeking direction from traditional institutions and authority figures, particularly the church.  read more »

The newly published US Census Bureau state and District of Columbia population estimates contain some surprises about changing growth and net domestic migration (movement between states) patterns.  read more »

Americans drove 0.6 percent more miles in October 2022 than the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration.  read more »

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times recently wrote a piece in which he questioned several top academics in economics and real estate on whether two outcomes of the Covid pandemic  read more »

In a recent YouTube video Avoid These Cities (Housing Crash 2022) EPB Research provides an analysis of the national market. In general, West Coast is bad and East Coast is OK, especially the southeast. The overly regulated western states with higher raw land prices and huge city fees result in higher home prices.  read more »

Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.”  read more »

If you have an extra 10 million dollars lying around, little Ralphie Parker’s house from A Christmas Story (1983), is for sale. The iconic mustard colored house, located on the outskirts of Cleveland, is currently owned by Brian Jones, a superfan of the film.  read more »

The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.
~Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 1969  read more »

In recent weeks, more and more commentators are suggesting that house prices in New Zealand have started to fall, and are expected to fall further.

For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great deal of sympathy. They were sold the lie that house prices would always and everywhere rise much faster than incomes, and that therefore the best way to financial independence was to borrow to the maximum extent possible and buy a house – better still, several houses, the more the better.  read more »