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Related Companies, developer of Hudson Yards in New York, the largest private real estate development in the nation’s history has announced a 270 housing units geared toward the needs of top management executives working hybrid schedules. This would provide such executives housing nearby their offices when they work in the city, splitting their work schedules with remote work from home or elsewhere at other times. Peter Grant describes the project in a Wall Street Journal article that also summarizes similar high-amenity executive products under offer by other companies. The full article is here.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Joe Biden’s Presidency is unravelling, but Democrats hope that Republicans will snatch victory from the maw of their own miscalculations. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has energised warhorses like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to see a way to rescue their now fading prospects.

Chiding California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, a strong abortion rights activist, for not being hysterical enough, Pelosi wants to throw some red meat to her downbeat progressive Democratic base, and even persuade some centrist suburbanites. The New Republic, once a respectable source of opinion but now largely a mouthpiece of the Democratic party, warns of “devastating political fallout for the Republicans”.

But the abortion issue may not be the silver bullet issue for Pelosi and her minions. Given that the administration has been tied to such things as high crime, inflation and now a troubled stock market, abortion barely registers for most voters.

Indeed, if the Democrats read the polls better, they would see that their absolutist position could prove as problematic for them as the abortion ban zealots are for the GOP. Gallup reveals, for example, that over the past decade, barely one in five Americans support a total ban on abortion, but only one-third favour no restrictions at all. Most Americans, according to a recent Pew survey, including in both parties, favour generally limited rights to abortion, but the current Democratic Party line of essentially no restrictions wins barely one-fifth of the electorate.

Read the rest at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

What primarily intrigues me about people who willingly show themselves and their oversized properties off in places like the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section is…why? I know we are in the age of oversharing, but these are obviously wealthy people, usually with children–just the sorts you’d expect to want privacy.

Of course, if they seek to peddle their supposed dream home, that would explain it, but often, as in this Mansion piece from last week from Montana and Idaho, the profiled households say they’re staying. So then I figure someone involved in the property–the architect, the designer, maybe the Realtor–leans on the homeowner to put their prize on parade.

Read the rest of this piece at Tim W. Ferguson.

Tim W. Ferguson, the former editor of Forbes’s Asia edition, writes about business, economics and society.

Even the New York Times has to admit unpleasant realities, like the departure of people from California and other deep blue states. But one thing the paper, and other similarly-minded reporters based here, will never admit: the connection between the California economy and regulation and the rising out-migrations.

The Times accepts that people are leaving in part due to costs, but puts much emphasis on other factors, like the decline in immigration under the monstrous Trump, Covid deaths and falling birthrates. Yet these factors have occurred across the country, and other regions, notably in the sunbelt and the South, have experienced rapid population growth. It turns out that policy choices that California has made seems the likely prime cause for the state’s shocking demographic decline.

This net out-migration, as the Times admits, has been going on for decades. Some people, particularly in academia and the mainstream media, continue to label claims of an “exodus” as essentially false; the LA Times, a good barometer of political correctness on the West Coast, called it “a myth” reflective of the political bias of “haters.” But as we show in our recent Chapman University report, since 2000, California has lost 2.6 million net domestic migrants — more than the current combined population of San Diego, San Francisco, and Anaheim (the cities).

In 2020, California accounted for 28% of all net domestic out-migration in the nation — about 50% more than its share of the US population (19%).

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Domestic migration has accelerated in the past few years as Americans relocate — typically from larger urban areas to mid-sized and smaller metros. Whether this trend ultimately will reshape parts of America by voting with their feet and moving and reduce the polarization between red and blue states remains to be seen.

See a U.S. map using relocation data, from Allied Van Lines: visit the interactive map.