Blogs

Anyone else notice that Orange County continues to square up on homelessness in a way that escapes neighboring Los Angeles?

Sure, LA’s challenge is larger. But so are the resources that both the City of LA and County of LA have at their disposal.  read more »

Most Houstonians are familiar with Houston's most famous piece of graffiti, the "Be Someone" message in giant letters on the Union Pacific bridge over I45 north of downtown. It's gone through a lot of iterations and defacement over the years, including recently, but the fact that it keeps coming back is a testament to its popularity.  read more »

A new report by Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which rates the “Ten Best and Worst Metro Areas to Live in for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Jobs,” comes to some apparently surprising conclusions (full report).  read more »

The 15th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey covers 309 metropolitan housing markets (metropolitan areas) in eight countries (Australia, Canada, China [Hong Kong Only], Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States) for the third quarter of 2018. A total of 91 major metropolitan markets (housing markets) --- with 1,000,000+ population --- are included, including three megacities, with more than 10,000,000 residents (New York, London and Los Angeles).  read more »

Apple has picked Austin as the site of its new $1 billion campus, one that will ultimately have 15,000 employees. The Verge has the initial details:  read more »

The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (DFW) will be the new headquarters of McKesson, the nation’s largest pharmaceutical distributor, the company announced this week. DFW will now have three of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 (ranked by total revenue). No other metropolitan area has more than one of the top 10. Dallas-Fort Worth is also home to Exxon-Mobil, the second largest company and AT&T, ranked ninth.  read more »

With news that GM is closing its Lordstown assembly plant near Youngstown, I thought back to a short film I saw in grade school that made such an impression on me at the time that I never forgot it. In the wake of a strike at the plant in 1972, film makers interviewed workers at the plant and created a short documentary from it. Note at the scenes inside the plant are not from Lordstown. In fact, I think they are from a Ford plant.  read more »

Maine governor Paul LePage has announced that he will move to Florida after his term expires in 2019. According to The Hill, taxes are driving the Governor away. He said: “I will pay no income tax and the house in Florida’s property taxes are $2,000 less than we were paying in Boothbay,” LePage said. “At my age, why wouldn’t you conserve your resources and spend it on family [rather] than spend it on taxes?”

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that young people are returning "to upstate cities such as Buffalo." The Governor continued, “This is reality, these are numbers.” Cuomo was quoted in a 27 September article on the population and economic stagnation in New York. Actually, the latest American Community Survey domestic migration data for the Buffalo metropolitan area, there was net outmigration in 2011-2015.  read more »

After years of substantially increasing numbers, working at home has now exceeded transit as an employment access mode. In 2017, 8 million people worked at home, compared to 7.6 million riding transit in the U.S. Since 2010, the share of workers at home has risen 21 percent, compared to transit’s 1 percent rise. More details will follow on newgeography.com shortly.