Urban Issues

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.  read more »

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²  read more »

Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.  read more »

Every politician, pundit and other apparatchik should have heard the elderly lady who didn’t even say a word about politics during my encounter with her on the streets of Manhattan.  read more »

Returning to New York City from a trip to Salisbury, Maryland, it is clear why so many younger Americans are so open to giving up the displeasures of a dense metropolis—high crime, high costs, and constant competition for amenities—for affordable, easy-to-navigate small-town environs like this fantastic city nestled within the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore.  read more »

Even in the era of digital marketing and online home-page “takeovers” by brands with something to announce, it’s full-page ads in major newspapers where companies still turn when they want to make an important statement.  read more »

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.  read more »

There is probably no issue more requiring resolution in California than poor housing affordability. It is a threat to the preservation of the middle-class and the competitiveness of the state.  read more »

There’s a museum dedicated to Esperanto in Vienna—an archive and testament to one of the more ambitious movements to enter the world’s consciousness in recent centuries.  read more »

One of the principal justifications of public subsidies for transit has been to provide mobility for those with low incomes. There continues to be a presumption that low-income workers rely principally on transit for getting to work.  read more »