Small Cities

Report: How Will California Solve the Housing Crisis?

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This new report examines the housing crisis in California and strategies to create more housing at affordable price points. Below is a summary and a link to download the full report  read more »

America: Moving to Lower Densities Post-2020 Census Data

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Driven, at least in part, by the huge increase in the potential for remote work, US residents moved in large numbers to states with lower urban densities  read more »

Localist Living in a Shrinking Age

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I try hard to give people insights into trends affecting our world. One of them is the way that declining birth rates will ultimately translate into shrinking cities.  read more »

Observations on U.S. New Towns

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In the middle of the 20th century, there was considerable interest in developing new communities (new towns). The interest was, to some degree, driven by the establishment of new towns in nations like the United Kingdom and France, where a number of projects had been completed by 1970.  read more »

The Future of Cities: Next Generation Suburbs

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Whether hundreds of years ago or today, the far-reaching environmental impacts of urbanization are because cities are “a node of pure consumption existing parasitically on an extensive external resource base.”  read more »

Ex-Urbia

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"Town and country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”
— Ebenezer Howard, 1898"

All cities must evolve over time. Those that fail to do so end up, at best, like Venice, Vienna, or Florence: lifestyle and tourist hubs. This fate now awaits our greatest urban cores if they cannot address the demographic, social, and economic forces transforming the metropolitan landscape.  read more »

The Ghost of Ancient Rome Haunts America

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The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000.  read more »

Canadians Are on the Move, to Smaller Communities

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For decades, Canadians moved to the larger cities (census metropolitan areas, or CMAs) with their economic opportunities.  read more »

No Solar for Scranton Joe

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Last Tuesday during his State of The Union speech, President Joe Biden repeated a claim he has made many times over the past few years about renewable energy. Biden declared that the Inflation Reduction Act is “the most significant investment ever in climate change, ever. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, leading the world to a clean energy future.”  read more »

The Future of Cities: The Urban Future – The Great Dispersion

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This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.  read more »