Demographics

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe.

The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump. What it found was a group “marked by desensitization”. They viewed politics as a form of entertainment, more like a video game. To them, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, despite their promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, are not excluded from conservatism; even where their views are disavowed, they are treated as legitimate fixtures of the movement.

The roots of these disturbing shifts likely lie in the impact of social media and a startling lack of historical knowledge. The Survey Center on American Life confirms that young adults have become increasingly distant from their families and from one another. Instead, they tend to experience the world through the prism of social-media self-expression. As one recent report notes, they are far more focused on themselves than previous generations.

According to academic Jean Twenge, the online world brings “instant communication and unrivaled convenience” but also leaves young people “more isolated from each other” and more polarised, creating “a mental health crisis among teens and young adults”. The new ideal is to optimise the self; interactions with other people, particularly those with different views, are increasingly rare.

For the politically engaged, on both Right and Left, politics increasingly functions as another mode of self-expression. Among women this tendency skews Leftward, while among men it skews Right. For conservatives, this means grappling with an emerging, largely youthful constituency which is prone to conspiracy thinking and increasingly willing to adopt views that include Holocaust denial and open antisemitism.

Some may argue that these troubling trends are merely transitory. After all, many who embraced the far Left during the Vietnam War later became patriotic citizens, and some even turned into Reaganites. Yet much of this shift was tied to young people eventually assuming adult responsibilities: spouses, homes, children. Many in the new generation either reject these paths or see them as unattainable. Unable to establish stable adult lives, they may cultivate a politics that is unanchored, alienated, and potentially violent.

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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: screenshot from America First/YouTube channel.

America's Great Migration

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘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.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones. People – and, more recently, capital – migrate to places that offer greater opportunities.

This was certainly true in the time of Herodotus. He was born in Greek colonies in what is now Turkey and died in another Greek colony in Italy. The search for better conditions – whether for grazing, farming or, more recently, manufacturing and technology – unravels older orders and paves the way for new ones. As a result, centres of power move. As French historian Fernand Braudel noted, between the 16th and 18th centuries, capitalism shifted from one hub to another – Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam, and then to London.

With these shifts in power often come shifts in migration patterns. Where droves once headed to Western Europe from the former Soviet bloc, as the old centres stagnate, many may consider returning to the Eastern bloc, and even parts of the once-cursed ‘Club Med’, including Herodotus’s Greece.

Nowhere is this pattern more dynamic than in the United States. Most settlers who flocked there from the old world were motivated by hopes for a better life, not as a quest to impose racial supremacy, as is so often claimed today. Whereas Europe’s density tends to anchor power in London, Paris or Berlin, all of them capitals, the balance of power is constantly shifting in the US, from New England, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to the mid-Atlantic states, followed by the rapid rise of the upper Midwest, which was then supplanted first by California and the West Coast, and more recently by Texas and the South.

Travel across America and the differences between regions can seem almost like those between nation states. The elite classes – and their chattering-class interlocutors – remain concentrated in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, places that retain much of the world’s ultra-rich. Yet the supremacy of these cities is being undermined by their growing failure to offer working- and middle-class citizens, particularly the young, the prospect of a better life.

Over the past decade, economic and demographic momentum has accelerated towards Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas and Florida – places once dismissed as economically and culturally backward. None of America’s major growth hubs is now located in the north-east or California. The rising cities of today include Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Nashville and Salt Lake City.

This shift has been fuelled by stronger job growth in states such as Idaho, Utah, Texas, the Carolinas and Montana. By contrast, large urban states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts sit near the bottom of the rankings. The same pattern applies to smaller metropolitan areas where job growth has surged, such as Fayetteville, Arkansas; Greenville, North Carolina; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Ogden, Utah.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Aerial view of Austin, via Goodfon under CC 4.0 License.

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

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, with an exodus of the super-rich leaving cities in the control of a resentful lower class. Yet in reality, the socialist takeover will prove no great win for the working class. If anything, it leaves the haute bourgeoisie even more the masters of places like Gotham than before.

Contrary to many predictions, surging sales of luxury apartments indicate that New York will remain home to the ultra-rich – those with more than $50m (£37m) in assets. In fact, the evidence of the past few years is that, even as the overall population of the city has declined, the number of the super-rich has been growing. Rents, outside those under control, have continued to rise. Even if a few of the ultra-rich leave, New York is likely to remain comfortably the most popular city for the group, ahead of rivals such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and London.

With their massive fortunes, these rich folk, 21,000 in New York alone, are also reshaping the urban landscape. Increasingly, global cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Miami are functioning less as centres of economic activity for the masses, and more as showcases for luxury brands such as LVMH, which continue to invest heavily in such markets. Even once powerful business landmarks like the Rockefeller Centre are actively reinventing themselves as destinations for recreation, tourism, and the arts.

Mamdani’s election also does not appear to have stopped developers and speculators from looking to transform former office buildings – places of employment – into yet more luxurious apartments. This reflects long-established national patterns. New US office construction has plummeted since the 1990s, while the number of residential high-rises has continued to surge.

This transition makes sense given that office vacancies, largely due to persistently high levels of remote work, remain elevated. Although less pathetic than many downtowns, New York offices are far emptier than they used to be, with midtown office occupancy at around 65 to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to make things worse.

Today, New York, once the world’s unchallenged financial capital, is shifting into an “amenity city” with a priority for building casinos and other tourist-oriented development. Despite the much ballyhooed construction of JP Morgan’s new tower in midtown Manhattan, finance jobs have declined as a proportion of total city employment, with jobs headed more to places like Dallas and Miami.

These shifts will change the world of many native New Yorkers. They are also likely to be exacerbated by the election of Mamdani. Working class and middle class families are already leaving cities. Socialist policies, which almost guarantee poor-performing schools and lax law enforcement, impact the hoi polloi far more than the elite bourgeois or young single professionals.

Some may think that Mamdani’s policies will turn the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. But given the US federal system, Mamdani can’t expropriate fortunes by edict from Gracie Mansion, however he might like to do so. Instead, his biggest victims are likely to be among the lower social orders, not least the mostly minority owners of bodegas and small businesses. His rent control freeze, notes the perceptive analyst Nicole Gelinas, is likely to hit hardest small property owners, who own 30 to 50 per cent of all rent control units but may not be able to handle Mamdani’s proposed freezes.

Worse yet, Mamdani and his socialist cadre do not seem concerned about improving working class communities by creating better jobs; the emphasis is almost totally on free goodies, not people being empowered to improve themselves. As the analyst Martin Gurri has suggested, unlike past socialists, whether in Stalin’s Russia or among Sweden’s social democrats, today’s variety regards economic growth with “remarkable indifference”, a tough stance in an economy where good jobs are already headed elsewhere.

Despite all this, New York will not turn into the next Third World hellscape. It is more likely to end up like London. Under Labour, that city has become more global but can hardly seem British anymore, with many recent immigrants apparently reluctant to integrate into society. It also hosts post-national financial and cultural elites who often seem to mock the sensibilities of the British population.

In other words, London today seems less like the capital of the UK, and more like a refuge for people and capital from the rest of the world. Tourists drive much of the economy, including wealthy free spenders from distant locales.

This seems like the likely road for New York. Rather than following its commercial focus, a legacy stretching back to Dutch times, New York’s economy will become oriented to serving the rich, their offspring and tourists. In the new order, the city becomes what the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark has described as an “entertainment machine ”. The tourism industry also serves the new configuration by becoming a key employer of a largely poor, often immigrant, workforce.

Lost in the process is the notion of the city as an engine of upward mobility. The true mission of great cities, noted the late Jane Jacobs, “is transforming many poor people into middle class people... Cities don’t lure a middle class. They create it.”

Great cities with history and culture, like New York and London, may remain alluring for the young, the wealthy and for those immigrants who have yet to adapt to their adopted country. But with the road to opportunity blocked by their own policies, the socialists may end up leaving their cities ever more bourgeois, albeit under a red flag.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Mamdani for NYC, social media.

South Africa: Still the World’s Most Race-Regulated Country?

Hügo Krüger — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

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.

First, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a full boycott by U.S. officials, declaring on Truth Social that holding the G20 in South Africa was “a total disgrace” because of alleged government-sponsored discrimination against Afrikaners, including claims of killings and land confiscations.

Second, and directly tied to the same debate, the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity in November 2025 erected more than 30 digital billboards and banners along key G20 routes proclaiming South Africa “the most race-regulated country in the world”.

Johannesburg authorities removed most of them within hours, citing lack of permits. Solidarity immediately obtained an urgent interim interdict from the High Court, replaced the boards, and—in protest—escalated by erecting over 50 additional banners across Gauteng highways and airport approaches. Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi publicly welcomed the initial removals as a defeat of “racism” and labelled Solidarity members “racists” on X, while the union accused him of censorship and incitement. Meanwhile, the South African Presidency dismissed the campaign as the work of a “tiny right-wing minority” intent on embarrassing the nation.

With regards to race laws, South Africa currently has 142 pieces of national legislation that explicitly or implicitly make race a legal criterion for rights, benefits, obligations or penalties. This is more than existed at the height of apartheid (123 in 1980), according to the Institute of Race Relations’ continuously updated Index of Race Law, last revised on 11 June 2025. Of the 142, 116 have been enacted since 1994.

The list includes major framework laws such as the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (2003), the Employment Equity Act (1998), the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (2000) and recent amendments to sector charters (mining, water services, electricity, etc.) that impose minimum Black ownership or management percentages as licensing conditions.

A significant portion of the 142 statutes are, however, outdated or partially obsolete. At least 26 pre-1994 laws still on the statute book contain racial references that have never been repealed or amended (for example, old group-areas extensions, certain pension-fund racial clauses, and remnants of the Population Registration Act repeal process that left stray provisions intact). Critics of the IRR index therefore argue that the “142” figure is inflated because it mixes active transformative legislation with dormant apartheid-era relics.

Read the rest of this piece at Hügo's Newsletter.

Hügo Krüger is a South African born Structural/Nuclear Engineer, writer and YouTube podcaster, commentating on topics relating to Energy and Geopolitical Matters, Hügo is married to an Iranian born Mathematician and Artist; the couple resides in Paris.

Photo: courtesy Hügo's Newsletter.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

New Report: The Rise of Latino America

Joel Kotkin and Jennifer Hernandez — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

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. Far from being a marginalized group defined by oppression, Latinos are integral to America’s story. They drive economic growth, cultural evolution, and workforce vitality. Challenges, however, including poverty, educational disparities, and restrictive policies, threaten their upward mobility. Policymakers who wish to harness Latino potential to ensure national prosperity and resilience should adopt policies that prioritize affordability, safety, and economic opportunity over ideological constraints.

We urge policymakers to reject ideologically driven policies that hinder Latino progress, such as restrictive land use, costly climate mandates, and reduced personal mobility. Embracing policies that align with Latino aspirations rooted in work, family, and opportunity will not only empower this vital population but also strengthen America’s economic and demographic future in a competitive global landscape.

Introduction

Migration has shaped America’s history. The earliest migrants, the ancestors of the American Indians, arrived from far east Asia. Migration from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was voluntary but thousands of enslaved people also arrived here from Africa at the same time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw waves of Germans, Italians, Russians, East Asians, Indians, and Jews.

Each group has faced sometimes brutal discrimination from the dominant majority. Many on the left see such racial prejudice as the American experience’s defining characteristic. From this perspective, Latinos are simply the latest group to live under an oppressive regime and whose lands “settlers” stole.

Yet the Latino experience is unique and far more uplifting. Latinos differ from Europeans: notably, they migrated to a country whose territory Anglo immigrants had conquered—in Texas initially and later across the entire Southwest—and taken from them.

But contrary to the narrative of “settler colonialism,” very few of today’s Latino residents can trace themselves to earlier settlers; the vast majority are recent arrivals. Indeed, the Southwest’s entire Mexican population in 1848 was barely 48,000. Yet the dominant academic and progressive narrative remains one of unending oppression and seizure of land. Latinos, writes one leftist writer, have “been forgotten by the nation” and have “nothing but their angers and their hungers.” Like the Anglos who settled areas seized from Mexico, they too want a piece of the pie, someplace safe and prosperous for their families to live and where they can acquire wealth.

At the same time there are some on the political right who fear America’s ongoing Latinization. Some influential right-wing theorists continue to hold the notion that Latinos are intrinsically inferior to whites and Asians. Others fear that the Latinos blend of Catholic and Indio culture makes them less digestible than earlier immigrants.

This report disputes both perspectives, and focuses instead on the progress, as well as the very real challenges Latinos face in America. The rise of Latinos does not constitute a departure from the American story; it is both wrong and dangerous to speak about them as if they were. Latinos, soon to be America’s largest ethnic group, are in a prime position to shape America’s future. Although the bulk are from Mexico, a large contingent comes from the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Read the rest of this report at: Civitas Institute.

Download the full paper

Authors

Jennifer Hernandez has practiced land use and environmental law for more than 30 years, and leads Holland & Knight's West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. She is a former longtime co-chair of the firm's national Land Use and Government Team. Ms. Hernandez divides her time between the firm's San Francisco and Los Angeles offices.

Researchers

Wendell Cox is a leading proponent of adopting land use and transport policies based on their effectiveness in improving the standard of living and alleviating poverty. He is principal of Demographia (Wendell Cox Consultancy) in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He specializes in urban policy, transport and demographics and is author of Demographia World Urban Areas and co-author of Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. He is also author of Toward More Prosperous Cities, a framing essay on urban areas, urban planning, urban transport and sustainability.

Marshall Toplansky is an award-winning Innovation Professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. Marshall co-founded KPMG's data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

Erika Ozuna is a senior consultant at Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. She currently works on multifamily and senior housing analysis and market studies throughout the country. Ozuna has over ten years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, including experience in all types of senior housing appraisals. Prior to her multifamily housing experience, Erika worked for seven years in the banking and investments fields, has conducted quantitative and qualitative research and analysis for numerous projects and entities, and was a high school teacher. Erika holds a M.P.P. in international relations and economics from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in business administration from the University of Texas RGV.

Photo: report cover and pages from the report, Civitas Institute.

Universities Have Sold a Whole Generation a Lie

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

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 one perch. Yet what if we start to build new factories and ports but no one shows up to work in them?

Trump claims to have dragooned some $12tn in new foreign investment, but even he questions whether we have the bodies, and minds, to fill American jobs. He recently defended H-1B visas for migrants with “special” talents (after first questioning them), alarming some of his more nationalist Maga allies.

H-1B visas are typically used by tech firms, but the row over their future illustrates why America is facing a critical shortage of skilled workers across the board. To some extent, both sides of the debate are right.

As the populist Right points out, H1-B visas have a record of abuse – including a notorious case at Disney, which replaced some of its American IT workers with foreign ones and even effectively required the departing US staff to train their replacements. Roughly three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s jobs were in 2018 estimated to be held by non-citizens. Of course, the oligarchs look at these “technocoolies” not so much as a genius input as a way to save money.

But still, as Vivek Ramaswamy has acidly pointed out, foreign workers are needed because of profound failures in the US education system.

Today, US fourth and eighth graders are performing worse not only than students in East Asia, but also those in the likes of Poland and Sweden. Overall, some 40pc of US public school students fail to meet standards in either maths or English, worse than pre-pandemic. The country was hardly doing spectacularly before then. In maths, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

This lack of achievement at the grade school level is felt not only in the elite professions but even in more mundane careers such as truck drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. By 2030, the US could be short about two million industrial workers; the American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Even well-paying jobs of this kind have been hard to fill. Ford chief executive Jim Farley notes that the carmaker has 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 annually that can’t be filled.

America’s inability to produce a new generation that can do these jobs reflects a deeply-ingrained tendency to ignore practical skills in favour of the supposed Valhalla of a four-year liberal arts education. The problem is not just universities. High schools have removed shop classes – where students are taught basic skills like woodwork – thinking them too declassee and demeaning.

One proposed solution is mass immigration, but Biden’s disastrous open border policy largely attracted migrants from Latin America, who tend to be less skilled than those from east and south Asia, as well as far less educated than earlier waves. Most are likely to remain at the bottom of the employment chain throughout their lives. These newcomers primarily compete with other poor people for living space, jobs, and social services.

In reality, what is needed most is to reclaim our increasingly disengaged native-born workforce; the percentage of prime age men not in the labour force has risen in recent decades. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

To address this issue, the education system needs to shift away from consciousness-raising, a favourite of progressive faculty, towards developing productive skills. Many are already ditching traditional academia. From 2010 to 2021, US undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to about 15.4 million. Over the past decade, more than 500 US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.

In contrast, the number attending vocational schools was up 16pc in 2023 to the highest level since 2018. This marks a major shift in attitudes. A recent Gates Foundation study suggested decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year college degrees and greater interest in trade schools. This appears to be particularly true among working class families. Americans have more faith in two-year colleges, where over 40pc of all undergraduates are enrolled, than in four-year schools.

For many young people, a shift towards tactile skills is well-advised. The digitisation of the economy has weakened the status of many professions, including code-writers. Even among those who manage to finish university, more than 40pc of recent graduates aged 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

Moreover, the supposed “jobs of the future” are already in danger of evaporating. The automation of information, computer scientist Kai -Fu Lee suggests, will end up wiping out the “coders”. Lee, a venture capitalist and author of AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, predicts, “a lot of employees are going to feel like turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving”.

This means that the future may be less about analytical skills than actually fixing and building things. “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work,” virtual reality pioneer Rony Abovitz, now the founder of AI startup Sun and Thunder, told me. Instead, he predicts that the future will be shaped more by “the rise of this sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”.

If Trump, like many Democrats, is seeking a resurgent America, the critical challenge will lie not in financial manipulation, computer games, or supervising AI as it analyses everything in minute details. The future is in developing and nurturing the skilled hands needed to resist and surpass the United States’ competitors.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Telegraph

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning. Many architects might tell you that planning is a subset of architecture. Whether true or not, architects have had a lot of influence in the development of the planning profession.

One architect who fits that mold is Louis Sullivan. I don’t think he ever identified with being a planner, but his influence on urban design, by being one of the first designers of the modern skyscraper and a key leader in the formation of the Chicago School and Prairie School of architecture, which also influenced planning, links Sullivan to planning.

Sullivan was also famous for a quote that fits planning as well as architecture: “form follows function”. Sullivan made that statement when thinking about his architectural designs. However, he just as easily could have said the same about cities. In other words, how cities look depends on what they do.

The industrial cities in the Rust Belt took on the form they did because of the function they had. Many of them cared far less about how they looked or performed as cities and cared more about how they could house the factories that employed workers, the homes they lived in, and their commercial needs.

Gary, IN is a great example of this. When U.S. Steel employed more than 30,000 workers and nearly 200,000 people lived in Gary, few people put lots of thought into the city’s form; it served the function of an industrial city. Over the last half of the 20^th century, however, that function collapsed, leaving behind a city that was ill-prepared for the next step. As I wrote in Part 1 about the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize Gary’s downtown, I liked the premise of relying on “mom-and-pop developer capital” and “patience and persistence” to establish a new urban form. But trying to establish a new form (or even an updated form) is not possible without knowing the function. That’s why I think Notre Dame’s School of Architecture in Gary is admirable, but flawed.

Gary’s existential moment

Gary must determine its new function first and establish the form that allows it to flourish. But how does it do that?

Let’s use the city typology from the Encie study I referenced in Part 1 as a starting point. Of the nine city typologies the report identified, the researchers are most gloomy on the prospects of industrial cities in highly-developed economies. We know now that manufacturing is no longer the kind of economic function that can support cities in the way they used to. That doesn’t mean it’s not financially viable anymore, it means it doesn’t fulfill the needs of people living in developed economies. Using the Encie study as an example, the researchers note that future prospects for existing industrial cities are dim in developed economies, but strong in developing or emerging economies. Let’s suppose the industrial city model is gone and never coming back into American cities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Indiana Dunes National Park — near the city of Gary, via Picryl in Public Domain.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I recently saw a good story about Gary, Indiana on the CityLab website. The article highlights work being done by the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture through its Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative.

The HCR’s work in Gary noted that the city had been hurt by numerous one-off projects (Genesis Convention Center, museums, minor league stadiums, casinos) that created little spinoff impact. A quote explaining the HCR’s approach:

“They’re promoting traditional city-building as part of a wider critique. In too many cities, they say, corporate developers have sought a quick return on shoddy, suburbanized projects that were racially and economically segregated as well as unsustainable. Where this process has failed — like Gary — might hold the key to reclaiming a better way of creating urban community.”

I would agree that cities like Gary need to get back to city-building. But there are two big steps cities like Gary need to achieve before getting back into city-building. It must establish an economic future. But more importantly, cities like Gary need to establish a new reason for being.

Cities begin with a reason for being there

There are many cities that came into existence because of a certain quality that distinguished it from other locations. New York City, for example, was founded by the Dutch to serve as a port and trading center that had access to hinterlands via the Hudson River. The port, and the expertise gained from becoming a trading center, made the city a great location for global trade and finance very early on, and continues to this day. Chicago started as a fur trading post, but its location next to an easily transversed mid-continent watershed divide (between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds) made it a critical transportation link for the middle of a rapidly growing nation. The waterway connection soon grew into an extensive railroad network centered on Chicago, giving it easy access to food produced in the agricultural Midwest for national and global distribution.

In the best cases, cities pivot from one existential function to another, just as New York and Chicago did. Older cities like New York and Chicago aren’t alone in this. Orlando built on its Disney World tourism foundation to expand its role in film, television and entertainment industries, even giving it a foothold into the industrial and high-tech sectors. Legalized gambling made Las Vegas a tourist destination, and eventually into a prime convention destination that fuels its hospitality industry.

But cities founded on manufacturing, like Gary, have really struggled to find the next reason for being. There’s been tons of research on why this is the case. I came across a report written five years ago that explains cities’ reasons for their existence – and continued relevance.

Read Part 2 here.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Paul Sableman, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Spectre of Communism Haunts the West — Mamdani is Only the Beginning

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

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. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.

This shift is fairly universal, particularly in big cities. Virtually all the leading U.S. and European cities are ruled by progressives, in Europe, like New York, often as an odd alliance of Islamists, greens and leftists. Socialists, Islamists and Greens dominated such major European cities as Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Toronto, once ruled by moderate conservatives, has also turned to the progressive left.

Neither ethnicity nor class are the keys to this transition, but age. Mamdani’s election epitomizes these trends; he won an astounding 70 per cent of the vote among New Yorkers under 40, while losing badly among older folks and those who grew up, or lived long in Gotham.

Many on the reinvigorated left see Mamdani’s cost of living emphasis as a promising strategy for progressives often on the wrong side of many cultural issues. In the primary, Mamdani lost many predominately Black and Latino areas like the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, all who favoured Andrew Cuomo, as did traditional ethnic working class areas in places like Canarsie in south Brooklyn.

But younger people, even those making decent incomes, catapulted a totally inexperienced, pro-Hamas, self-proclaimed Marxist to run the world capital of capitalism. Cost of living was the key, as New Yorkers pay the highest proportion of their income; it has by far the lowest percentage of homeowners in the country, half the national average.

Lack of affordable housing is now widely common in English speaking countries. Ireland which just elected a far-left Marxist as president, is among the worst. In the U.S., housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded while one in three Americans now spend over 30 per cent of their income on mortgage payments or rent. In the U.S., homeownership for people under 35 has fallen fairly steadily for decades and is now half that of people over 45. A similar erosion in homeownership is clear in Britain and Australia.

Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, is in a similar fix. According to a 2024 Scotiabank poll, home ownership declined for Canadians between the ages 18 and 34 to 26 per cent today from 47 per cent just a few years earlier, in 2021. Renters are also not well off as two in five renter households in Canada spend 30 per cent or more of income on rent and utilities.

Read the rest of this piece at: Yahoo News.

Authors

Photo: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.