Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

Dear Readers:

After 17 years we are closing New Geography.com.  read more »

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595  read more »

Discovered by chance at a photo book fair, Peter Mitchell’s photographs of Leeds capture a civic world that assumed legibility, continuity, and shared meaning  read more »

Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted  read more »

Last Monday I wrote a piece that lamented the state of policy movement on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America. Here’s my followup to that.  read more »

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right.  read more »

‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’  read more »

Public universities are facing a crisis of confidence. Trust in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by rising costs, ideological imbalance, and  read more »

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.  read more »

In November 2025, a version of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for HK$21.7 million — the  read more »

This is going to seem like navel-gazing for a moment, but ultimately the point emerges. Please bear with me.  read more »

Even as many scholars and pundits deny the differences between the sexes and vastly expand the concept of gender, society is increasingly dividing along these clear and simple lines.  read more »

The Ivanpah concentrated-solar project has been an environmental and economic disaster.  read more »

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – alongside the victory of similarly hard-Left candidates in other mayoral races – has left some predicting that urban America will inevitably fall into a “doom loop” of decline  read more »

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising  read more »

As South Africa hosts the G20 Summit in Johannesburg on 22-23 November 2025, the event has been overshadowed by two high-profile disputes over race policy.  read more »

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”.  read more »

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does.  read more »

The news of Martin Parr’s passing feels like a quiet rupture in the cultural record. Parr was not simply a photographer.  read more »

Two titans of American architecture — Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern — have passed within days of each other.  read more »

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic  read more »

The Roman god Janus had two faces: for comings and goings, beginnings and endings  read more »

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict  read more »

On the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures hang like breaths made visible, loops of brass and light suspended between earth and heaven, quiet reminders that beauty  read more »

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of  read more »

Executive Summary

In The Rise of Latino America, we argue that Latinos, who are projected to become America’s largest ethnic group, are a dynamic force shaping the nation’s demographic, economic, and cultural future.  read more »

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US, one of our best holidays.

This year I want to express thanks for a group of people who often drive me nuts  read more »

Some day, Donald Trump may lead America into a golden era of reindustrialisation, or perhaps one last hurrah before China’s domination of materials and manufacturing knocks the US off its number  read more »

The State of California sent a large delegation to the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Belém, Brazil, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and top officials  read more »

Kyoto is one of the most photographed cities in the world, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Most images of it feel decorative  read more »

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning.  read more »

I recently saw a good story about Gary, Indiana  read more »

After over a decade of mismanagement and misdirection under governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, Californians now can double down by electing the latest aspiring Gubernatorial candidate: billion  read more »

The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West.  read more »

The Balkan region has impressive potential for knowledge intensive jobs in Europe. While Albania is far behind, there is a strong growth of knowledge intensive jobs.  read more »

Gavin Newsom’s run for the White House is going from bad to worse.  read more »

Disneyland’s founding vision 70 years ago was civic, not commercial—a place where design made family belonging feel natural.  read more »

As in his first term, Donald Trump now presides over a visibly sinking ship as his approval ratings slide. MAGA, a movement built around the personality of one man  read more »

For some years, the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has produced major metropolitan area (labor markets) job access estimates for the average worker  read more »

In a recent focus group we held with 11 U.S. and foreign-born Latinos in Riverside, California, most of the participants expressed grave concerns about the breakup of hard-working and law-abiding families in what one participant called ICE’s “war” against Latinos.  read more »

A report came out from Crains Chicago Business (paywalled) that spoke to the uneven nature of development in Chicago.  read more »

California, described by one observer in the late 19th century as “the Jews’ earthly paradise” for the economic and social promise it held  read more »

I hope you’re fine with another Chicago-centric indulgence.  read more »

The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centered in urban areas.  read more »

During the earliest months of the pandemic, when daily rhythms fell apart and the future felt strangely suspended, I began walking Colonial Williamsburg with my son. Schools were closed.  read more »

‘Here our smart clothes are beyond our means, here in Rome. A little bit extra has to be borrowed from someone’s purse. It’s a common fault; here we all live in pretentious poverty.  read more »

The likely election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor reflects a profound shift in generational politics.  read more »

Yesterday I became aware of some fantastic news. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist in Chicago, was named  read more »

For generations, the Harmonie Club has served as a haven for New York’s Jewish elites. Founded in 1852, the club has since 1905 occupied an elegant eight-story building at 4 East 60th Street  read more »

Developer Shaheen Sadeghi’s vision of an artisanal, small-business-driven economy seems oddly incompatible with his environment.  read more »

In my book Life in the Negative World, I noted that unlike minority groups, American white Protestants had not found it necessary to create their own  read more »

Americans drove 2.8 percent more mores in August 2025 than the same month before the pandemic, according to  read more »

To the surprise of no one this side of the Sierras, Gavin Newsom is gearing up for a presidential run — a move he’s been rehearsing since succeeding Jerry Brown as California governor in 2019.  read more »

“Business as usual is broken” I’ll say to someone. Their head nods in furious agreement.  read more »

There is a lot of talk about nuclear power around the world today. However, except for China and, maybe, Russia, there is no action.  read more »

Remember the term “social contract?” It’s a term that’s been slowly gaining stream in recent years, but one that’s always been at the front of my mind, especially when it comes to cities.  read more »

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent cordial sojourn to Washington, and his claim of a  read more »

In a city that prides itself on speed, New York’s latest trend is all about slowing down. Lines now snake outside the hottest restaurants in Manhattan  read more »

New companies face obstacles growing in Stockholm, in part this stagnation is due to the combination of a regulated rental market and too high prices for new housing development.  read more »

Openness to outsiders is a liberal democracy’s greatest strength, but it can also prove a curse.  read more »

Ryan Pucyzki, publisher of the City of Yes Substack newsletter, published an excellent (and timely) article yesterday about New Haven, CT’s attempt to reinvent itself  read more »

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America  read more »

A few weekends ago, my son and I attended the Institute for Contemporary Photography’s (ICP) annual Photobook Fair in New York City.  read more »

Cheeky claims about causes and solutions for an illusory climate crisis must be challenged  read more »

Back at the beginning of this century, there was a lot of discussion on the rise of the creative or knowledge economy as being at the forefront of future of American economic prosperity.  read more »

‘President Gavin Newsom met today in Carmel, California with the representatives of the “Ten” – a consortium of giant tech and finance firms who control most of America’s business assets.  read more »

Due to the shutdown of non-essential government services, web sites for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and other statistical agencies all say that postings of new data will be delayed.  read more »

The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life — one side of a critical divide in our society.  read more »

Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, the capital of Belgium, the capital of NATO and hosts many international diplomats and UN offices. Yet the share of adults in knowledge intensive regions is lower than in many other European capital regions.  read more »

As recently as a decade ago, Portland was widely seen as a model American city, a European wannabe built around dense apartments, mass transit and every conceivable form of political correctness.  read more »

In May, Michael Polsky, the CEO of Chicago-based Invenergy, appeared on Fox Business to announce that his company was awarding some $1.7 billion in contracts to build the long-delayed Grain Belt Express transmission project.  read more »

For much of the past century, Los Angeles has been a magnet for migrants seeking a better life and tourists eager to see Hollywood up close. Yet the picture now looks very different.  read more »

In an art world drunk on theory and spectacle, a Montana painter insists on snow, cattle, and weather—and on the discipline of seeing.  read more »

Western liberalism is in decline, challenged by rising authoritarianism on the Right and the Left.  read more »

Bill McKibben may be the highest-profile climate activist in America. For more than a decade, he has been campaigning against the hydrocarbon industry  read more »

Generation Z is America’s first post-Boomer generation.

My Generation X was enculturated into the Baby Boomers’ world. Thinking about the songs from my youth in the 1980s, it’s amazing how many of my favorites were literally about the Boomers  read more »

Zombie foreclosures. They sound like the dullest disaster movie ever — but, in fact, represent the grim reality for a rising number of Americans. The theory is simple. First, giant real estate funds buy up properties, deliberately allowing them to deteriorate. That takes homes off the market, and drives up prices  read more »

New York rarely stops moving. The rhythm of the subway, the honk of impatient horns, the relentless press of footsteps on concrete - the city demands motion.  read more »

The West is about to get its comeuppance – if it does not wake up. The balance of the world economy is shifting decisively  read more »

New York has always been a city of images. From the iconic skyline to the endless stream of photos on Instagram, what we see of the city often stands apart from what it truly is.  read more »

The “anti-colonial” Left wants Western societies to atone for their “original sins”. From its historical role in slavery, imperialism and the extirpation of native peoples to class oppression, progressives argue that the West should pay penance today  read more »

São Paulo in Brazil is rated as the sixth most populous city in the world.  read more »

Fascism is in the air, on television and print. We read about American progressive celebrities and academics fleeing to other countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to exercise their notion of a free society.  read more »

On Friday, September 12, the last day of the legislative session, the California Legislature passed SB-79, a bill supposedly meant to increase high-density affordable housing near urban public transportation hubs.  read more »

Whether right or left, Muslim or Christian, anti-Semites speak of Jews as people who pull the strings in culture, politics and especially finance. They assume we are all united in this conspiracy. In reality, not only is there no conspiracy, we Jews are also as divided among ourselves as any other people.  read more »

A decade ago, Long Island City was a cautionary tale. Glass towers shot up along the East River, promising a glittering new skyline, but the streets below were eerily empty.  read more »

Boosting immigration would seem a no-brainer to address the West’s ongoing demographic implosion and revive its stagnating economies. Even Japan now recruits foreign temporary workers for its rapidly aging economy.  read more »

The US Census Bureau has released its one-year 2024 American Community Survey (ACS). This article covers the overall national data and also the major metropolitan area data  read more »

For the past half century, California has been the driving force in American technology, culture and political development.  read more »

Natural gas and crude oil are commonly needed fossil fuels to manufacture insulation, wires, and computers used in all methods of generating electricity.  read more »

The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20^thcentury.  read more »

For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities  read more »

Last year, only 34 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map even as Congress debated billions in military aid that would shape global security. This geographic illiteracy isn't just embarrassing; it's dangerous.  read more »

Paris hosts some of the world´s leading technology companies, has several of the leading technological universities and is the European region with highest total number of knowledge intensive jobs  read more »

The recent jobs report showing declines in almost all high-wage sector  read more »

In 1946, when ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose computer, was first turned on, it used so much power (about 174 kilowatts) that it caused the lights in Philadelphia to dim momentarily.  read more »

For a century, it worked, and brilliantly. The “California model” rested on massive investments in higher education, development of industrial zones in places such as the South Bay and Silicon Valley, and persistent upgrading of basic infrastructure.  read more »

The World Bank recently released its Total Fertility Rate (TFR) estimates for 2023.  read more »

Think what you will of President Trump’s chaotic-seeming tariff policies. The ostensible goal — the revitalisation of US manufacturing — is of decisive importance for the success of the nation.  read more »

Serious question, occasioned by evidence and experience: Do some members of California’s political class actually want people to die horrific deaths in wildfires and other natural disasters? Because they’re sure acting like it.  read more »

Rail transit is finally getting the attention it deserves in Washington, DC. Early this month, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) released a report describing billion-dollar boondoggles.  read more »

The Road as America's Mirror

America has always defined itself by the road. Our highways are more than infrastructure; they are metaphors for freedom, movement, and agency.  read more »

1: Introduction

Demographia World Urban Areas (Built-up Urban Areas or Urban Agglomerations) is the only regularly published inventory of population, corresponding land area and population density for urban areas  read more »

Most people may not realize that the underground black tar commonly referred to as crude oil is essentially useless unless refined  read more »

A single streetlamp glows over a shuttered storefront, paint cracked and signage faded to near illegibility.  read more »

“The first step onto the corporate ladder is vanishing for many new graduates,” argued a recent Fortune report. As a result, CEOs are warning that entry-level jobs are on the brink of extinction, with internships and opportunities for college graduates drying up.  read more »

Not long ago, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon were widely hailed as states with bright futures. For decades, they attracted scores of out-of-state migrants  read more »

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.  read more »

When globalism was hot, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau tried to be hotter by deciding that Canada has “no core identity, no mainstream,” and suggesting Canada had become a “post-national  read more »

Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks ov  read more »

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the UK is second best in the world.  read more »

Gavin Newsom may be saddled with an awful record. But the California governor is rapidly emerging as a leading bet – even a frontrunner in some polls – in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. How is this possible?  read more »

During more than 15 years of reporting on the opposition to solar and wind projects, I’ve never seen anything like the opposition to the Lava Ridge wind project.  read more »

Donald Trump’s reviled takeover of the DC police and his earlier deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles serve as a direct challenge  read more »

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.  read more »

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.  read more »

America’s public transit systems carried 80.43% as many riders in June 2025 as during the same month in 2019  read more »

Over the years, the so-called forward-thinking policymakers in California have achieved questionable results:  read more »

I’m an urbanist. If you’re reading this, you probably are one too. You, like me, want to make cities better places. That’s at the absolute core of being an urbanist.  read more »

I recently experienced Edward Burtynsky’s The Great Acceleration at New York’s International Center of Photography—and it was nothing short of remarkable.  read more »

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability.  read more »

If there's one thing that really bothers me in urbanist circles, it's that there's no real agreed upon definition for what exactly is "urban". This is a fundamental problem, because it leads to differing sides always talking past each other, often using the same data to drive home vastly different points. Could astronomers and astro-physicists talk to each other if there were similar debates about what "space" is?  read more »

As they contend with their lowest approval ratings in recent memory, Democrats may wish to reconsider some of their least popular positions. Some even suggest the party is preparing to jettison Joe Biden’s “Green New Deal” — once central to his floundering economic agenda.  read more »

According to Newsweek, some nutty group called AmeriStarRail is proposing to run high-speed trains from New York to Los Angles, which it says can be done at a profit.  read more »

When people think about media, Africa is rarely the first thing that comes to mind. And when it does come up, it is often portrayed through a very narrow lens—poverty, conflict, or outdated stereotypes.

But African media is so much more than that. It is powerful, growing, and deeply influential across music, film, fashion, and even digital innovation. That is why it is important that we start paying attention.  read more »

The Mediterranean Sea region plays a key role in global connectivity infrastructure, this is the message of a new report by DC Byte. Indeed, several knowledge intensive hubs of Europe exist in the Mediterranean region, and are increasingly interconnected as subsea cable networks are expanded. The growing IT-infrastructure will further regional integration, including the regions on the Western coast of North Africa.  read more »

The breakdown in relations between the US’s top teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group focused on tackling anti-Semitism, reflects a deeper and dangerous takeover of education by determined activists.  read more »

In answer to critics of his proposal for free bus transit, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted  read more »

For much of America’s history, the South has been a laggard, a poor region weighed down by intense racism and reactionary politics, lacking both  read more »

For years, urbanists and pundits have insisted that young Americans are rejecting the suburbs. Supposedly, Millennials and Gen Z crave walkable cities, apartment living, and dense cores filled with transit options and 24-hour vibrancy. The story goes: the white picket fence is passé, the cul-de-sac is dead, and no one under 40 dreams of mowing a lawn.

But the data—like much conventional wisdom these days—tells a different story.  read more »

Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell  read more »

The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States  read more »

In the annals of stupid and poorly run schemes, the California High-Speed Rail project ranks among the worst. Its future, even a dramatically scaled down one, has become ever more precarious  read more »

(Note: this is a post modified and updated from one written ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. I included some new reflections and context on that time. More than anything, however, I want to make clear that segregation and inequality benefits some people but also exacts deadly costs on others. Please take a look. -Pete)  read more »

In today’s Democratic Party, nothing succeeds like failure. According to a recent poll tracker, the preferred candidates to contest the 2028 presidential election are a host of proven losers.  read more »

Bret Stephens recently argued that if Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, Republicans should welcome it.  read more »

The recently released book, The Future of Labor, is an anthology that offers an exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation and technological transformation are reshaping the future of work. The first section of Chapter 4 — authored by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — is excerpted below.  read more »

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.  read more »

Even as Californians protest the crude and often brutal deportation tactics employed by President Trump’s ICE and Homeland Security agents, we’re giving too little thought to how our state, and the nation, is failing the very immigrant community we want to protect.  read more »

From the outside, Donohue’s Steak House looks like it belongs to another era—and maybe that’s part of its charm.  read more »

Los Angeles politicians have long dreamt of their city overtaking New York as North America’s dominant economic centre.  read more »

People talk today about creating a political movement around the “multi-racial working class.” But this class, and its politics, already exist. The political parties have just not yet found a way to connect with it.

The history of Northwest Indiana, my family’s southern migration from western Kentucky, and my own childhood on the fringe of the nation’s once murder capital, Gary, Indiana tells the story of the evolution of the multi-ethnic working-class, the issues they face, and what matters to them.  read more »

The recent riots in Los Angeles, sparked by President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, could be a harbinger to a new era of ethnic conflict not only in the U.S. but throughout the West, including Canada.  read more »

Just what America doesn’t need – another party dominated, and this time even started, by oligarchs. SpaceX owner Elon Musk may be able to design rocket ships, but his understanding of politics and public opinion is below elementary-school level.  read more »

Electric vehicles are being mandated in California, but Governor Newsom is oblivious to the fact that it’s just another product that cannot exist without oil  read more »

Zohran Mamdani may represent the future of New York, but only by destroying the secrets of its past success. The city, even under the quasi-socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, has from its Dutch days been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise.  read more »

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.  read more »

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.  read more »

Waymo is operating driverless taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, partnering with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanding into Miami and Washington DC soon.  read more »

Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model.  read more »

Last November, I published 10 can’t miss predictions about the presidential election. One of my predictions was that if Donald Trump won another term in the White House, he wouldn’t repeal the alt-energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. I wrote:  read more »

Canada may have severed its feudal ties less violently, but like America, it experienced far less sustained aristocratic domination than either of its two mother countries, France and Great Britain.  read more »

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature.  read more »

Revolution and disruption rarely stem from the poor and destitute, but from what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a revolution of rising expectations”.  read more »

Updated Man of La Mancha lyrics could read: “To dream the impossible dream of clean, green, net-zero electricity, to fight the unbeatable foe of manmade climate cataclysms, we must run where the brave dare not go.”  read more »

Whoever is elected New York City mayor in November, Zohran Mamdani’s impressive win this week in the Democratic mayoral primary marks a breaking point in the party, the city and US society as a whole.  read more »

As recent events in Iran have so aptly demonstrated, technological progress married to industrial might produces the most tangible form of power.  read more »

Deep tech development is dominated by North America, Europe and Asia, however the competition from Africa is also becoming noticeable. Africa´s growing economies already host some of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies.  read more »

Gavin Newsom has changed direction once again. After a brief feint as a Maga-whispering moderate, California’s governor has “woken up”  read more »

Nearly three dozen countries have legally binding targets to achieve net zero. The list has some notable countries including Russia and Ukraine. In addition, Nigeria, the European Union, Canada, and the Republic of Moldova, have all pledged to slash their carbon dioxide emissions to zero over the next two decades or so.  read more »

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” — Aristotle

American cities face an existential choice. They can continue down their current path – adopting policies that work against the interests of local residents – or develop new approaches to make urban life work for the broad majority.  read more »

I’m on a panel about this tonight.

A unicorn is a privately owned startup company worth more than $1 billion.  read more »

At first glance, it doesn’t feel like the future will be made in El Segundo. A small city of 17,000, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, it’s the sort of place you glance at from your taxi as it whisks you on from arrivals to somewhere more exciting.  read more »

The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits.  read more »

Los Angeles is reeling once again from urban disturbances, as it did in 1965, 1992 and 2020. After each outbreak the city is widely seen as a hopeless disaster  read more »

One of the more curious, not to mention consequential, aspects of modern liberalism is its reliance on assumptions that collapse under even rudimentary scrutiny. For example, the liberal “YIMBY” movement  read more »

Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest.  read more »

Here’s something I think about a lot. I believe in that Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue”, meaning that past events serve as a good indicator of what the future may hold.  read more »

The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.  read more »

The rejections keep coming. Since the beginning of May, a provincial government in Queensland has rejected an enormous wind project, a county board in Illinois spiked a solar project  read more »

Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances  read more »

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows a massive lead for the USA – however the leading edge of particularly Santa Clara Valley shows signs of gradual normalization  read more »

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country  read more »

The deepening split between Elon Musk and the Trump administration speaks to broader divisions within an increasingly shell-shocked GOP. Musk, who left the White House only last week, has since denounced Donald Trump’s hodgepodge budget bill – the so-called Big Beautiful Bill – as a ‘disgusting abomination’, as it will add almost $4 trillion to the federal deficit.  read more »

The New York Times’s jeremiad last week about AI’s impact on entry-level jobs — particularly in tech — merely underscores trends that have been clear for well over a year. Silicon Valley firms have been slashing jobs despite record profits  read more »

The concept of deep water desalination has been around for decades, but only in recent years has the enabling technology been available. Innovations pioneered by the oil and gas industry to better service offshore drilling platforms have matured.  read more »

The killing of two young Israeli embassy staffers, allegedly by a college-educated, left-wing activist earlier this month, provided yet more evidence – if any were needed – of the perilous situation in which Western Jews now find themselves.  read more »

There’s a vast difference between politics and policy. Doing politics — making speeches, giving TV interviews, and drafting talking points — is child’s play.  read more »

This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.  read more »

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry in a Gallup survey last May. It’s only gotten worse.  read more »

Have you ever given much thought to satellite cities? Cities located close to major metropolitan areas that aren’t the primary city, yet have a strong identity and history of their own?  read more »

Once renowned for widespread homeownership, the key Anglosphere countries are reverting to a feudal past, where land is owned by increasingly few.  read more »

Last month, a new media outlet called Tortoise Media launched a database called “Hot Air,” which it claims is “making sense of climate misinformation.”  read more »

The elevation of the new pope from Chicago may have excited progressive ideologues with hopes for another wokeish papacy. But the rise of little-known Robert Prevost to his new status as Pope Leo XIV comes amid a profoundly unwoke recovery of religious feeling in the West.  read more »

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America  read more »

The latest broadside in the seemingly unending war between President Trump and California Governor Newsom came with a presidential attack on the state’s long-delayed, over-budget high-speed rail project.  read more »

In 1997, Metro — Portland’s regional planning agency — issued its 2040 plan to guide the region for the next several decades.  read more »

Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests.  read more »

It’s no secret that America’s working classes - more broadly, those without college degrees and professional jobs - have been living increasingly socially dysfunctional lives.  read more »

Since the early 2000s, governors and legislators from both parties have signed onto a climate agenda in California that is making energy steadily unaffordable.  read more »

Currently India features in the news due to conflict with neighboring Pakistan. In a time when international trade is shifting, with new trade and tariff deals, India is also a key trading partner for North America as well as Europe.  read more »

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future.  read more »

In recent weeks it seems that the progression of the YIMBY movement is reaching some limits on its growth, causing it to make some unexpected twists in the logic of its supporters.  read more »

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.  read more »

This annual report assesses housing affordability in 95 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States).  read more »

Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction  read more »

Critics of plans to build more light-rail lines in Charlotte, North Carolina say that proposed new lines will fail to serve the neighborhoods of blacks who “need it most.”  read more »

In American politics, the main beneficiaries of “dark money” have in recent years tended to be Democrats.  read more »

In the early 1990s, Ken Lay and his colleagues at Houston-based Enron, were, as one veteran of the energy business told me, “the kings of the American pipeline business.”  read more »

It’s once more springtime for America doomers, those who believe the United States will soon lose its global top-dog status.  read more »

There’s a great line from the comedy show Kath & Kim, where the very suburban Kim expresses her desire to be like affluent city people. “I want to be effluent Mum," she says. "You ARE effluent, Kim," replies the equally suburban Kath.  read more »

By his supreme idiocy, U.S. President Donald Trump has stirred up anti-American sentiment, but largely to the benefit of America’s archrival, China.  read more »

Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns.  read more »

Never one to miss a reason to crow, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was out in front of the media at the weekend, bragging about how his state now boasts the world’s fourth largest GDP  read more »

Less than two years ago, climate activists in Spain celebrated after a utility announced it would close the country’s largest coal plant, the 1,468-megawatt As Pontes facility.  read more »

Can the movement we’ve come to know as the YIMBY (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) movement level up to address our nation’s inability to get things done?  read more »

Florence. No city on earth is a more miraculous testament to what entrepreneurs can do, and how hard work and grit can build beauty that endures.  read more »

Kudos to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson for pointing out that states and cities ruled by Democrats continue to demonstrate their failure to get anything built  read more »

Make no mistake, California Governor Gavin Newsom is running for the White House in 2028. In February, he launched a podcast  read more »

Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants  read more »

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the US continues to have a significant advantage. However, Europe is catching up  read more »

I thought crack-smoking had lost its appeal, but perhaps it is still a regular pastime among journalists determined to take down Trump’s America. The Economist, for example, has suggested that “the land of the free” has moved across the Atlantic, from America to Europe.  read more »

Pope Francis was a historic figure. He was the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. He was the first pope to take the name Francis, a nod to St. Francis of Assisi  read more »

New York University’s Marron Institute just released a report saying that Amtrak and commuter-rail lines could improve their service by making what the institute believes are low-cost changes to their operations.  read more »

We have lived in Austin for 40 years. And for nearly all of that time, Lorin and I have subscribed to the New York Times. For decades, we took the paper version.  read more »

I went to St. Louis over the weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the way St. Louis neighborhoods look.  read more »

Ten thousand years from now, future archaeologists will be allowed back into the wasteland that was once known as California.  read more »

As with many political movements, MAGA represents a fragile coalition of groups that often have little in common — and, at the extremes, may even detest one another.  read more »

Over the last half-century, more restrictive urban planning policies have been associated with undermined housing affordability  read more »

Hating the Southwest, particularly its burgeoning cities such as Phoenix, is de rigueur in American media. Jon Stewart has called Arizona “the meth lab of democracy.” Hunter S. Thompson described hell as an “overcrowded version of Phoenix.”  read more »

French president Emmanuel Macron had an unusually good relationship with US president Donald Trump during the latter’s first term.  read more »

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness.  read more »

The late economist Milton Friedman famously declared that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”  read more »

The Democrats are at a historic ebb and now is a good time to examine what the party believes in, who its main protagonists are and what their agenda is.  read more »

If you let the popularity of an idea – no matter how silly - dictate your stance, then you are not a very good elected official.  read more »

U.S. President Donald Trump’s mindless, and frankly pointless, comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have stirred up latent Canadian patriotism.  read more »

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year.  read more »

The second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change.  read more »

This is the first of two essays on issues facing California.

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”  read more »

Net zero and decarbonization pledges are a dime a dozen.

Earlier this month, the Australian government released an update to its “Net Zero in Government Operations Annual Progress Report.”  read more »

When the U.S. Census Bureau recently revealed a small increase in California’s population, it came as a welcome sign to some that the state was growing again.  read more »

Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office.  read more »

Donald Trump is unlikely to win a popularity contest or an election in America’s deepest blue states. But, ironically, his administration could prove a long term boon to these places  read more »

There is considerable concern about housing affordability in the United States. Housing is the most expensive element of the cost of living  read more »

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world.  read more »

A couple weeks ago, I purchased a new laptop. The laptop has Microsoft Copilot, the Microsoft AI tool launched in 2023. For kicks I thought I’d try it out.  read more »

Gavin Newsom’s new podcast reveals not only a media-savvy politico seeking more exposure to a bigger audience.  read more »

Lawmakers in Sacramento recently upped the ante in their ongoing assault on local democracy in the Golden State.  read more »

The Town of Needham is a picture-perfect Boston suburb on the Charles River, replete with a classic downtown main street with a coffee shop, a commuter rail line to the city and old New England knitting mill buildings.  read more »

One of the important distinctions to understand in our society is between the middle class and the striver class.  read more »

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained.  read more »

President Trump’s Executive Orders have ended U.S. participation in the Green New Deal and Paris climate treaty.  read more »

I’ve been a big fan of Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress for years. I first met him at a Cleveland Fed conference in Cincinnati in 2017, and later interviewed him at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy  read more »

The steady decline of fertility rates in Australia presents a multifaceted challenge with wide-reaching implications for the nation’s social, cultural, and economic future.  read more »

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial concern in a Gallup survey last May.  read more »

My, oh my, how the worm has turned.

Thirteen months ago, in the op-ed pages of the New York Times , University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann and his lawyer, Peter J. Fontaine, were crowing about their victory in federal court a few days earlier.  read more »

Two decades ago, the accepted wisdom in the energy sector was that the US was running out of natural gas.  read more »

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times.  read more »

The last few days have not been good ones for California’s high speed rail project.  read more »

U.S. President Donald Trump’s imbecilic and unnecessary suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state has led  read more »

What I’ve been reading: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by Andrew Lynn.  read more »

At a time when the world press is obsessed with US president Donald Trump and his often imbecilic machinations, perhaps a more consequential struggle is taking place on the other side of the aisle.  read more »

During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore.  read more »

When affirmative action, the predecessor of DEI, was first implemented in the early 1970s, the goal was to address cruel centuries of oppression of African Americans. It was widely supported by many white Americans, who saw it as a short-term palliative.  read more »

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills  read more »

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492.  read more »

In honor of Black History Month, I annually write some piece that honors the significance and impact of the contributions of Black people on the American urban environment.  read more »

It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas  read more »

In 2013, the World Bank declared it would stop funding coal projects and would only “in rare circumstances” provide financial support for new coal plants.  read more »

The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who  read more »

Last week, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Vice President J.D. Vance reaffirmed the Trump administration’s commitment to ensuring that advanced AI systems are developed domestically  read more »

I’ve had my differences with the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement. Over the years I’ve written multiple pieces raising a position on zoning reform that rarely gets discussed  read more »

On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,”  read more »

Three weeks ago I wrote a piece about the role that a “Rust Belt Diaspora,” or the people who relocated from Rust Belt to Sun Belt states over the last 50 years  read more »

As the U.S. southern border begins to function once again, it’s time to consider what kind of immigration policy we should adopt.  read more »

There is currently a significant shift happening in the USA, with cuts to government expenditure, and ambitions to reduce the regulatory burden.  read more »

The Palisades and Eaton fires represent thousands of personal tragedies, but they also constitute a collective disaster, adding new housing shortages to California’s already massive shortfall  read more »

California is home to 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, 3 of the largest shipping ports in America, as well as more than 30 million registered vehicles  read more »

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been hyping bogus claims about the alleged danger of natural gas stoves.  read more »

I had the privilege of seeing the gorgeous photography show Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.  read more »

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places.  read more »

One of the executive orders President Trump signed on Monday calls for ending federal subsidies to and preferences for electric vehicles. With numerous media reports that EV sales were already tanking, some think that Trump’s order will kill the market for electric vehicles. It won’t, but it will shift things around.  read more »

For generations, the ultra-rich in big American cities have been willing to go along with progressives and their policies. But now, as urban areas across the country depopulate and lose jobs, some of those oligarchs – from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Boston – appear to be increasingly willing to take on the Left.  read more »

American ingenuity advanced nuclear technology to a world-class innovation to benefit all. Interestingly, the methods used in the rest of the world are copies of the American innovations.  read more »

There’s a question I get every so often in social media – “why do you use the term “Rust Belt”?“ Usually it comes from people who live in the region, who dislike the term and wish for some kind of rebranding. I agree. But what’s better?  read more »

With a great deal of success, urban development elites have been able to sustain the illusion that Central Business Districts or downtowns are still the functional metropolitan centres they were five decades ago.  read more »

Like others, Canadians now know there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s neither polite nor gentle. The question is how to co-exist with a raging bully  read more »

Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees.  read more »

In his farewell address, mere days before leaving the White House, Joe Biden made a dramatic intervention. Warning about how an oligarchy of “extreme wealth, power and influence” risked the basic rights of every citizen, he even suggested it could threaten American democracy itself.  read more »

So the Super Bowl is set, and the Detroit Lions are not in it.

It was tough watching my Detroit Lions go down two weekends ago  read more »

Energy is vitally important for economic growth, particularly those forms of energy that can be used for planned power delivery. It is evident for example that Germany is currently suffering from the past decisions to shut down rather than upgrade nuclear energy.  read more »

It’s hard to picture Donald Trump as a civil-rights hero in the mould of Abraham Lincoln or even Lyndon Johnson. Yet through his orders to dismantle the ubiquitous regime of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), he may have accelerated America’s evolution into a post-racial society.  read more »

The numbers are nothing short of gobsmacking. On Tuesday, in a splashy announcement at the White House, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed a new company called The Stargate Project  read more »

Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas.  read more »

I’ve said for years that the issues that plague Midwestern cities, and the successful strategies they’ve employed, have gone unnoticed as the cities of the east and west coasts have pulled away economically and culturally.  read more »

Two years ago Gavin Newsom was widely seen as a rising Democratic star and likely future presidential candidate.  read more »