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

The hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus money are working their way through various systems, en route to a city near you.

Give President Barack Obama credit for acting boldly to pump the funds into the economy – or take him to task for printing up money on the cuff.

Either way, the time has come to shift your focus from Washington, D.C., and onto State Houses and City Halls throughout our land.  read more »

The site plan logically should be the key to approval of a development project. Yet in reality, the plan is secondary to the presentation. My conclusions are based upon experience with well over a thousand developments over four decades, most in the mainland USA. And what I’ve observed is that the best site plan is only as good as the presentation that will convince the council or planning commission to vote “Yes” on it. No “yes” vote, no deal, no development.  read more »

INTRODUCTION

During the first ten days of October 2008, the Dow Jones dropped 2399.47 points, losing 22.11% of its value and trillions of investor equity. The Federal Government pushed a $700 billion bail-out through Congress to rescue the beleaguered financial institutions. The collapse of the financial system in the fall of 2008 was likened to an earthquake. In reality, what happened was more like a shift of tectonic plates.

In 1912 a German scientist, Alfred Wegener, proposed that the continents were once joined together as one giant land mass called Pangea.  read more »

United States Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Washington Post columnist George Will have been locked in debate over transit. Will called LaHood the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his policies intended to reduce car use, citing Portland’s strong transit and land use planning measures as a model for the nation.  read more »

This month, the Obama administration moved to regulate the so-called ‘invisible’ financial instruments that have come to rule the world of finance. Variations of the ‘shadow’ banking system — or, in the preferred language of financiers, market ‘risk management tools’ — have increasingly taken the spotlight during the current crises.  read more »

These are times that thrill some easterners' souls. However bad things might be on Wall Street or Beacon Hill, there's nothing more pleasing to Atlantic America than the whiff of devastation on the other coast.

And to be sure, you can make a strong case that the California dream is all but dead. The state is effectively bankrupt, its political leadership discredited and the economy, with some exceptions, doing considerably worse than most anyplace outside Michigan. By next year, suggests forecaster Bill Watkins, unemployment could nudge up towards an almost Depression-like 15%.  read more »

By Nima Sanandaji and Robert Gidehag

Sweden is a nation with extraordinary high tax rates. The average worker not only pays 30 percent of her or his income in visible taxes, but, additionally, close to 30 percent in hidden taxes. The defenders of the punishing tax burden argue that it is needed to maintain Sweden’s generous welfare system. While this claim may seem reasonable on its surface, a deeper look suggests that it is based on flawed analysis.  read more »

With their tails between their legs, Central Florida’s leaders returned from Tallahassee in early May without funding from the Florida Senate for Sunrail, the region’s proposed commuter rail system. This failure to convince the state Senate to fund Sunrail is a major political defeat for the 1.8 million people who were said to be served by this train.  read more »

The Midwest has a deserved reputation as a place that has largely failed to adapt to the globalized world. For example, no Midwestern city would qualify as a boomtown but still there remain a diversity of outcomes in how the region’s cities have dealt with their shared heritage and challenges. Some places are faring surprisingly well, outpacing even the national average in many measures, while others bring up the bottom of the league tables in multiple civics measures.  read more »

It is well known that the largest percentage losses in house prices occurred early in the housing bubble in inland California, Sacramento and Riverside-San Bernardino, Las Vegas and Phoenix. These were the very southwestern areas that housing refugees fled to in search of less unaffordable housing in California’s coastal metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose).  read more »