“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree?  read more »

Here in California we’ve just received our first rain since last winter after another brutal round of massive forest fires. Our Mediterranean style climate cycles from a long dry hot period to a few short cool wet winter months. October is our most fire prone time of year. It’s hot, the earth is bone dry, the vegetation is brittle, and windstorms stir up fires like a giant hair dryer. Cyclical burns are part of the ecosystem here and are normal and necessary.  read more »

The principal reason that large cities have developed is that they provide large labor (and housing) markets. A labor market is also a housing market, since virtually all who work in the metropolitan area also live there. The metropolitan area is the one location where there is one-to-one balance between jobs and resident workers (see: Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities).  read more »

Despite statements by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he was changing the mission of his company to “bring the world closer together,” data from the recent AEI survey on Community and Society make it abundantly clear that  read more »

Taxpayers spent nearly $3.75 billion more subsidizing transit in 2018 than the year before, yet transit carried 215 million fewer riders, according to the latest data released by the Federal Transit Administration. The increase in spending didn't even translate to an increase in service, as transit agencies provided 44 million fewer vehicle miles of service in 2018.  read more »

For the poorest in the world there are more things that are far more important to survival than climate change. Third world countries are the big losers of today’s climate activism. Why? Because they still lack purified drinking water, sewage sanitation, adequate nutrition, reliable electricity (or any at all), adequate health care, i.e., the infrastructures and products we take for granted that are all based on deep earth minerals and fuels.  read more »

The fate of the 2020 election, whether for Congress or the White House, will be decided in the suburbs. Neither the pro-Trump countryside nor the intensely anti-Trump urban core have enough voters to put their preferred candidates in office.

It’s the suburbs that are home to the majority of all voters and over 80 percent of residents of the major metropolitan areas.  read more »

Although Governor Gavin Newsom promised to deliver 3.5 million new housing units in eight years, California severely missed this mark: as reported by the Public Policy Institute of California, housing production actually decreased during each of the past 2 years, and in 2019 is on track to fall about 80% short of the annual mark required to build 3.5 million new homes in 8 years. At this pace, it will take 39.6 years for the Governor to achieve his 8-year goal.  read more »

Transit work trip ridership is strongly concentrated in the urban cores of the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population), as is indicated by City Sector Model (Note). In the two urban core categories, the Urban Core: CBD and the Urban Core: Inner Ring, the share of total transit work trips is from four to six times the share of population (Figure 1) The percentage of transit commuters in the Urban Core: CBD was six times that of its overall metropolitan population share.  read more »

A couple weeks ago I was privileged to be the guest speaker at a wonderful event. The Cultural Inclusion and Diversity Committee of the Village of Hanover Park, a northwest suburb of Chicago, asked me to speak on the suburban black experience. It was part of a series the committee is conducting on the various demographic groups that make up their community. I had a wonderful time and I was honored to be invited.  read more »