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

It has been a difficult time for newspapers. The industry has experienced serious challenges due to multiple factors going back at least to the early 1960s when the three major television networks began their extensive and widely popular evening news programs, with the likes of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Recent Setbacks  read more »

The common image of American manufacturing, as Harold L. Sirkin wrote in Bloomberg Businessweek, is of huge plants with waves of assembly-line workers producing cars and refrigerators. But there’s a whole other world of niche manufacturers in the U.S., and these small firms are more typical — and should be more of a priority, Sirkin argued — than you might think.  read more »

“[T]he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Writer David Foster Wallace

The story of the three Cleveland women kidnapped over 10 years ago and recently found alive in a house on the city’s Near West Side has captivated the national imagination. There is the miracle aspect from the fact that such situations rarely end this way.  read more »

Are public banks the answer for the recession-induced decline in municipal revenue and other ills that plague our cities? It’s a solution being discussed in more than one American city.  

Mike Krauss, a founder of the Public Banking Institute and a chairmen of the Pennsylvania Pubic Bank Project, both non-profits that promote public banking, said this month an ad hoc committee made up of Philadelphia City Council members and civic groups started working on the adoption of language for a public bank in the city. He also said the measure is being adopted out of a need for “affordable and sustainable credit.” The PPBP is leading the effort for public banking in the city.  read more »

The 2013 edition of our list shows many things, but perhaps the most important is which cities have momentum in the job creation sweepstakes. Right now the biggest winners are the metro areas that are adding higher-wage jobs thanks to America’s two big boom sectors: technology and energy.  read more »

For the 2013 Job Growth Rankings, Needle Analytics has mapped out every city sampled in the survey and visualized their positions on the list of rankings. While a list of data can impart interesting revelations to the reader, visualizing the data can highlight differences by region or across regions.  read more »

As Millennials, America’s largest generation, enter their thirties in ever greater numbers, their beliefs about how and where to raise a family will have a major impact on the nation’s housing market. This follows as their media and political preferences have helped shape how we entertain ourselves and who is the president of the United States.   A 2012 survey indicated that seventy percent of Millennials would prefer to own a home in the suburbs if they can “afford it and maintain their lifestyle.” Now a new survey of 1000 18-35 year olds conducted for Better Homes and Garden Real Estate (BHGRE) by Wakefield Research provides a much more detailed picture of the type of home Millennials believe best fits their needs and desires.    read more »

Having collected the Nobel peace prize in 2007, Al Gore’s fortunes as a climate crusader slid into the doldrums.  But 8th November 2011 arrived as a ray of sunshine. On that day Australia’s parliament passed into law the world’s first economy-wide carbon tax. Rushing to his blog, Gore posted a short but rapturous statement, cross-posted in The Huffington Post. His fervent language echoed in progressive circles across the globe.  read more »

Ninety years have made a world of difference in the United States. Between 1920 and 2010, the nation's population nearly tripled. But that was not the most important development. Two other trends played a huge role in shaping the United States we know today. The first trend was increasing urbanization, a virtually universal trend, but one which occurred earlier in the high income countries, while the other was a rapidly falling average household size. 

National Trends  read more »

Having run out of options to solve its bigger problems, European Union commissioners, in the spirit of famed bank robber Willy Sutton, have decided to go after depositors’ money on Cyprus for a simple reason: “That’s where the money is.” Will the current shake down of bank depositors on Cyprus save or sink the Euro? It stretches the imagination to fathom how putting bank depositors in play will comfort European Union bondholders or other EU banks.  read more »