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

President Trump recently decided to rescind the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which put pressure on suburbs to construct more low-income, high-density housing in their communities. Trump’s decision met with a predictable outcry.  read more »

In Ma Jian’s new novel, the protagonist, Ma Daode, may be a corrupt, womanizing local official, but he is a corrupt, womanizing local official with a mission. His goal is to develop a drug that will allow President Xi Jinping’s vision of a glorious Chinese future to dominate not only citizens’ daily lives but their sleeping hours as well. This is his utopian quest. The China dream, Ma Daode suggests, “is not the selfish, individualist dream chased by Western countries.  read more »

A new study from accounting firm KPMG predicts that auto travel in the United States will be 9 to 10 percent less after the pandemic than it was before. Telecommuting, says the report, will lead to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in commuting by car while on-line shopping will lead to a 10 to 30 percent reduction in shopping trips.  read more »

If there is a single American development pattern or style that I love most, it is the streetcar suburb.  Bringing more of this pattern back to our cities would be a great thing.  read more »

China, which many see as the exemplar of rapid urban growth, is accelerating its own shift towards greater dispersion.

During the 2000s, the largest municipalities (formerly called prefectures) of China grew very quickly. Much of this was a result of an increasing “floating population,” people who moved to the cities from rural areas for employment, especially in factories producing goods for export and in construction. Between 2000 and 2010, according to the China Statistical Yearbook: 2019, the floating  read more »

America’s downtowns, particularly those of the major cities at the heart of large metro regions of over one million people, have seen significant residential development and population growth in the recent years. Downtown Chicago, for example, has nearly 100,000 more residents than it did in the 1980s. Visit almost any downtown and see many nearly identical apartment buildings sprouting.  read more »

As the United States sees its politics and economic systems become increasingly nationalized, pundits and professors have a tendency to highlight our different regions—and the unique histories and subcultures that are inherent to them—to explain our differences in terms besides “red vs. blue” or “right vs.  read more »

Rather than defund the police, re-fund the police by having neighborhoods hire off-duty uniformed police officers and police squad cars to patrol their neighborhoods for periodic four-hour shifts.  read more »

No state advertises its green credentials more than California. That these policies often hurt the economy, driving up housing costs and narrowing opportunities for working-class people while not even doing much for the environment, has not discouraged the state’s environmental overlords.  read more »

The COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 150,000 Americans is likely to end the woeful presidency of Donald Trump.  read more »