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

Ontario Land Use Policies Make Housing Unaffordable

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A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.  read more »

A Neo-feudal War on the People

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An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides  read more »

The Future of Cities: Indianapolis

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Indianapolis was an unlikely candidate to emerge as a midwestern demographic and economic leader. It is an artificially created city, chosen by fiat as a centrally located capital for the state of Indiana.  read more »

Between Rent Control and Crazy

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Tune out the noise of various tenant-landlord tiffs in our pandemic-altered world and consider this fundamental question that carries actual signal from—of all places—the Broadway stage: What is the purpose of rent control?  read more »

Beyond Davos

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Few annual events produce more paranoid commentary than the World Economic Forum’s recently completed Davos conference.  read more »

Race, Class, and Culture

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Racial divisions have become the stalking horse of our politics and social discourse, with racism defined as white on black (often extending to Western vs. non-Western ethnicities). Google Trends reveals how the online topic of racism has steadily risen over the past decade, spiking like a seismic reading of an earthquake in June, 2020 that marked the George Floyd tragedy and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed.  read more »

Are Asians the New Jews?

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In countries where Asians and Jews immigrated in large numbers, they have long followed a common path. Both groups occupy a dual position: discriminated against for standing out, while at the same time held up as models of success.  read more »

Subjects:

Canadians Are on the Move, to Smaller Communities

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For decades, Canadians moved to the larger cities (census metropolitan areas, or CMAs) with their economic opportunities.  read more »

The Future of Cities: Recalibrating Expectations: Lessons From Youngstown, Ohio

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In September 1977, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced the first major shutdown in the American steel industry. It was closing its largest mill, the Campbell Works, displacing over 10,000 workers.  read more »

The Fall of the Jewish Gangster

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Antisemitism has always partly been driven by envy; Jews attract a unique resentment for their disproportionate intellectual achievements in literature, science, education and, particularly, finance. At the same time, however, this success can be inverted.  read more »