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

As a college professor who meets with thousands of students nationwide, I regularly tell students that the bedrock of my own college experience almost 20 years ago was the meeting and mixing with students from around the world. My classes were generally unremarkable, but what made the collegiate bubble so exceptional were the early Saturday morning tailgates, midnight runs for donuts with close friends, or long hikes exploring areas around San Francisco.  read more »

It will be months, likely years, before we understand how COVID-19 has reshaped our communities. Yet there is enough data, based on just the last three months, to get some notion of what areas and populations are most vulnerable.  read more »

Korea’s success, to date, in limiting the spread of the new coronavirus without extensive lockdowns has been widely acknowledged. A May 6, 2020 Atlantic article provides an excellent description of the “trace, test and treat” system employed here. The text messages used to trace new infections are even more detailed than described.  read more »

Once widely seen in the media as “the next great transit city”, the Los Angeles area’s rapid transit boom was turning to a bust — and well before the Covid19 crisis. As we can see below, transit ridership in greater Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban region, has been declining for years, and things are not likely to get much better with the impact of the pandemic.  read more »

When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered — Ibn Khaldun, 14^th Century Arab historian  read more »

In the nearly eight years since I first described millennials as “the screwed generation,” things have only worsened for those born between 1982 and 2000—and the coronavirus is now accelerating that slide.  read more »

In what could turn out to be a “dry run” for the post-COVID19 era, net domestic migration has strongly shifted away from the larger metropolitan areas, to smaller areas. This “sea-change” has occurred since 2015, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. Domestic migration is reported by the Census Bureau when a resident or household moves from one US county to another (No migration below the county level is reported in Census Bureau population estimates).  read more »

The pandemic has brought panic to the once-confident ranks of urbanists promoting city density.  read more »

The glory of cities is to serve as places of interaction between people and economies. Yet throughout history—from Roman times to the present—this advantage has also entailed exposure to deadly contagions.  read more »

Michael Moore’s surprising anti-renewable’s and environmental-movement documentary “Planet of the Humans” unmasks the trillions being spent on wind turbines and solar panels that do not deliver as advertised.  read more »