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

Life is going from bad to worse for the ESG movement. This weekend, activist investor Bluebell Capital began a new battle to try and force BlackRock into overhauling its commitments to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing  read more »

California’s energy woes are getting worse. According to the latest numbers from the Energy Information Administration, the state’s residential electricity prices, already among the highest in America, jumped by 3 cents per kilowatt-hour last year, an increase of 11.9%.  read more »

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its related technologies — machine learning and the metaverse — represent a watershed in the evolution of the global economy. Like other such shifts, its emergence is likely to favor certain interests, notably a handful of technology giants, the media and a small cadre of highly skilled programmers. Everyone else faces economic danger, certain to roil domestic and international politics in coming years.  read more »

When an 18-hole golf club—private and exclusive—opens in the next few years at the controversial Lewis Road luxury development in East Quogue, it will mark the latest and probably the last of 135 years of links building on and around the South Fork of Long Island.  read more »

Talk of the future of (some) cities these days can bring out the pessimists, who warn of an “urban doom loop.”  read more »

Since the year 2000, according to the California Air Resources Board, wildfires have destroyed over 19 million acres, mostly forest and chaparral, over 30,000 square miles. At the same time, these wildfires exposed millions of Californians to smoke so thick and toxic that people were advised to stay indoors for weeks.  read more »

The key voting bloc in American politics is not the black or Evangelical vote – it’s the Latinos. Now by far the largest racial minority in the nation, Latinos are also the great contested electoral territory.  read more »

Back in 2018, I attended and participated in an event called “Tools Toward Market Restoration”, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.  read more »

For years, American urbanists and city planners have looked at Canadian cities with envy, as they had managed to avoid the searing decline of their American counterparts.  read more »

Driving and flying have been hovering around 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels for the last year and Amtrak has been around 100 percent for the last six months, but transit is still stuck at just below 75 percent  read more »