Urban Issues

The 2020 Census reveals California to have both the highest urban population density and the highest urbanization share of total population among the states.  read more »

For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing.  read more »

Too many urbanists start their analysis of cities too late. They look at booming urban areas and see the amenities and jobs as the essential building blocks of urban dynamism. But before those amenities and jobs existed, these were places of aspirations with ambitious founders.  read more »

Last week, I complained that, under the Census Bureau’s new definition of “urban,” Bandon, Oregon is rural.  read more »

The newly released Census Bureau urban area reveals all 10 or the densest urban areas are in California, as well as 39 of the densest 50, and 70 of the 100.  read more »

Whatever the future holds for humanity, it is likely to take place in an urban context. Yet, as this book will demonstrate, there are many, and sometimes divergent, urban futures.  read more »

I'm going to make a little deviation from the bulk of the "Welcome to..." stories you see below, which mostly focus on South Side Chicago neighborhoods (the exceptions are Rosemont, in Chicago's northwest suburbs, and Park Forest, in the south suburbs).  read more »

An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.  read more »

For all the talk about how the pandemic, remote work, social distancing and other huge new developments have dislodged traditional patterns in business and life in America and created vast new opportunities in the process, Flyover Country has left a lot on the table.  read more »

Note: This is a revised version., which reflects a correction by the Census Bureau to the San Francisco-Oakland urban area, into which has been combined the San Rafael-Novato urban area. San Francisco-Oakland remains the 14th largest urban area, but now ranks behind Los Angeles in density. The revised data is in the table at the end of this article. The fully revised replacement article is available here.  read more »