Heartland

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.

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

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.

Theodore Waddell and the Urgency of the Real

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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

Most contemporary art has forgotten what a cow looks like. While the NEA funds performance artists smearing themselves with chocolate and major museums celebrate bananas duct-taped to walls, actual beauty goes unsubsidized. The art world has become a massive grift populated by many who mistake cleverness for wisdom and shock for significance.

I first saw Theodore Waddell's work at the Denver Art Museum nearly a decade ago, when Motherwell's Angus (1994) stopped me cold in a crowded gallery: six feet of Montana winter. From across the room, it read as a landscape with black cattle scattered across endless snow. Up close, it turned into paint; thick impasto ridged like frozen mud, marks more New York School than frontier postcard. For twenty minutes, maybe longer, the image toggled between abstraction and reality, between serious painting and the actual West.

At the time, it struck me as a remarkable painting. Today, it feels prophetic. In the midst of a culture war where elites peddle theory while working people navigate reality, Waddell's canvases carry urgent resonance. While MFA programs churn out theory-soaked graduates who can't draw but can certainly critique "systems of oppression," Waddell learned through calloused hands and frozen mornings about the realities he paints. Waddell’s canvasses remind us what we're losing, that some things remain stubbornly themselves. A cow is a cow. Snow is cold. Land stretches farther than ideology allows. As America's institutions drift into curated unreality and grievance performance, Waddell's work insists on the actual.

Paint with Weight

The black cattle in Motherwell's Angus aren't delicately drawn; they're dragged into being – dark incisions in a white field. The snow isn't white; it's lavender and blue sliding into gray, the color of cold that kills calves if you're careless. The tools are blunt - roofing brushes and masonry trowels that leave paint ridged like frozen mud. This is paint with consequences, paint that knows physics.

In winter canvases, the horizon drops out. Your eye keeps moving, as cattle move across frozen pasture; no destination, only persistence. These aren't animals as symbols or metaphors; they're 1,200-pound realities that need feeding when it's twenty below. Summer paintings reverse the energy: animals flicker like calligraphic marks against gold grounds, thin paint that reads as heat shimmer. Works such as Gallatin Angus and Gannett Angus reduce the animal to gesture without losing weight - abstraction that never forgets the actual.

Scale turns looking into weather. Stand before one of Waddell's twenty-foot canvases and you lose the privilege of distance. The painting surrounds you the way a blizzard does—peripheral vision fills with white, depth collapses, orientation falters. You're not observing a storm; you're in it. This is what ranchers know that museum-goers forget: weather isn't a view, it's an environment. It doesn't care about your theories or your timeline. At this scale, Waddell's paint becomes atmospheric pressure, his brushstrokes become wind. The gallery walls disappear. You're standing in Montana winter, where survival means reading the actual sky, not the weather app.

In Ruby Valley Angus (2009, 10×18 feet), held by the Booth Western Art Museum, animals blur into pattern, resolve into bodies, then blur again. You don't look at it so much as exist inside it; like actual weather, not climate abstractions peddled by activists on the far left. This is weather as ranchers know it: immediate, consequential, immune to politics.

Recent works let cattle recede into shadow while weather dominates. You can feel the barometer fall. These paintings know that nature isn't a progressive ally but an indifferent force that rewards competence and punishes wishful thinking. The sites -Monida, Lima, Beaverhead - aren't props; they're real places Waddell knows through work, not theory. Places where virtue-signaling won't keep you warm.

Against the Myth-Makers

Western art long carried the shadow of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington: the West as heroic stage, cowboys as actors. Even today, much "Western art" markets nostalgia to tourists: sunset silhouettes and noble horsemen, the West as conservative kitsch. Waddell rejects both this sentimentality and its opposite, the academy's hatred of beauty. He paints the West as workplace, where competence matters and reality doesn't care about your pronouns.

Compare him with many contemporary artists who seem to rely on their trust-funds to never hold real jobs, whose "practice" consists of writing grant applications and diversity statements. Waddell earned tenure at the University of Montana, then walked away in 1976 to ranch near Molt. He chose cattle over committees, seasons over semesters, and painted realities over fictions.

Our major institutions, meanwhile, celebrate destruction. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Jordan Wolfson's VR piece Real Violence forced viewers to watch a man beaten with a bat while Hebrew prayers played and all being subsidized by tax dollars. Critics praised its "urgency" and "confrontation with complicity." But it connected us only to nihilism, teaching nothing except that museums have abandoned their duty to preserve and transmit beauty. Waddell connects us to endurance, to the dignity of creatures surviving winter, to the sublime found not in theory but in temperature.

"I Can't Paint Anything I Can't See"

Waddell is blunt: "Montana has caused me to be who I am, and I love this place. I have to be where I am to paint what I paint." And more radically: "I can't paint anything I can't see."

In an age that treats truth as negotiable and expertise as oppression, that ethic of direct observation feels almost revolutionary. While academics insist reality is "socially constructed" and biology is a "spectrum," Waddell paints only what he knows through experience, not ideology. His statement - "I can't paint anything I can't see"- stands as a rebuke to every artist statement filled with jargon about "interrogating liminal spaces" or "disrupting heteronormative paradigms."

Out at the ranch and in the prairie, "you can see for 150 miles in any direction.” No mediation, no curation, just land and sky. Sculpture, his earlier mode, made no sense at that scale; he returned to painting cows. Not as symbols of environmental destruction or capitalist exploitation, but as cows. Imagine that.

He painted at 3:30 a.m. before chores; during calving season, at 2 a.m. after checking the herd. This is how actual knowledge is earned—through repetition, observation, and exhaustion, not through graduate seminars on "decolonizing the visual field." In 1987, a blizzard hit after calving. Waddell pulled dead calves from drifts as mothers stood over them, then painted for sixteen hours; not death as concept, but death as fact, persistence as necessity. "The understanding of death," he wrote, "brings about a feeling of wonderfulness and appreciation of life." No trigger warnings needed, no content advisories required. Just truth.

Evolution Through Constancy

Waddell stepped away from ranching in the 1990s, but the knowledge stayed in the paint. Early works were thick, almost sculptural - paint as material fact. Later, he layered oil with wax, letting marks show through, history built into surface. The paintings grew atmospheric, but never decorative, never mere aesthetic experience divorced from labor. Unlike government-subsidized "art" that requires wall text to explain why it matters, Waddell's work actually sells; beauty finds buyers, ideology needs bureaucrats.

This constancy, cattle and weather for half a century, resists both market novelty and academic fashion. While younger artists frantically rebrand themselves with each news cycle, mining Twitter for the next thing to be upset about, Waddell keeps painting the same subjects. Not from poverty of imagination but from its opposite: the knowledge that reality is inexhaustible, that each season reveals something new to those who actually look rather than theorize.

Recognition has come mostly west of the Rockies, in places where people still work with their hands: exhibitions at Denver and Eiteljorg, a 2015 Montana Governor's Arts Award. The coastal elites barely notice, for they are too busy celebrating "interventions" and "disruptions" to recognize actual achievement. Their loss, our clarity. While they chase the next trend, Waddell compounds wisdom like interest, each painting building on forty years of looking.

The Ethics of Looking

Stand before a Waddell painting long enough and something shifts. The clever ironies you brought with you - the ones that get you through museum galleries full of approved provocations - fall away. You're left with something harder: the demand to actually see. Not interpret, not decode, not "interrogate." Just see.

This is what Motherwell meant by ethical consciousness in painting; not virtue signaling on canvas but the discipline of sustained attention to what is. Motherwell believed that every mark carries moral weight, that abstraction itself could be an act of truth-telling. Waddell understood this. His cattle aren't just subjects; they're ethical commitments to seeing what's actually there. As such, Waddell doesn't paint his politics or his feelings about cattle. He paints cattle, in specific light, in particular weather. The ethics emerge from that restraint, that refusal to make the world carry his meanings.

Try explaining this at a meeting like Davos, where oligarchs with homes on three continents preach sustainability between private jet flights. They'd call Waddell's commitment to one place "narrow." But fifty years in Montana has taught him what they'll never learn from their conference panels: wisdom comes from limitation. You see past surfaces only by staying put, by watching the same field through sixty seasons until you understand that abstraction without encounter is just sophisticated lying. Simone Weil knew this: rootedness as the soul's deepest need, the one our credentialed classes can't even recognize anymore.

Watch people at galleries now, the quick phone snap, the audio guide summary, the performative appreciation. Waddell's paintings refuse this consumption. They demand what Roger Scruton called the education of the gaze: stand close enough to see paint ridged like dried mud, step back until cattle emerge from marks, wait through your boredom until the painting starts working on you instead of you working on it. In our culture of hot takes and viral moments, this is almost an act of rebellion; art that won't be reduced to content, that insists on being encountered rather than consumed.

Culture, Somewhere

Waddell's paintings rebuke placelessness. As David Goodhart argues, society splits between mobile "Anywheres" who mistake credentials for competence and rooted "Somewheres" who know what things actually cost. Waddell is firmly Somewhere. His canvases insist that place matters, that the universal flows from the particular, not from sociology departments or DEI workshops.

Here his work converges with Wendell Berry: modern life unsettles us from land and consequence. Global elites who lecture about "sustainability" from private jets have never sustained anything real, not a ranch, not a herd, not a community, not a marriage. Waddell has. For fifty years. Through Republican and Democrat administrations, through cattle prices rising and falling, through art world fashions that would make his work "problematic" (too white, too male, too focused on extraction industries), he kept painting what he saw.

This persistence itself becomes political. In an age of fluid everything - gender, borders, currency- Waddell's commitment to depicting actual cattle in actual weather reads as resistance. Not conscious resistance, nothing so programmatic, but the deeper resistance of someone who knows what he knows and won't pretend otherwise.

The Urgency of Now

That is why Waddell matters now. We live drowning in abstractions—digital, ideological, bureaucratic. We're told reality is constructed, merit is privilege, biology is optional, and math is racist. Universities that once taught Newton now teach nonsense. Museums that once preserved beauty now platform narcissism. Waddell's canvases refuse all of it. They remind us: snow is cold, cattle are heavy, winter kills if you're careless. No committee can vote otherwise. No theory makes it untrue.

The culture war will not be won in faculty lounges or on Twitter. It will be won in the recovery of sight; the ability to see what is there and to name it without apology. Every Waddell painting is a small victory against the long march through the institutions. They are proof that truth, beauty, and the American spirit survive wherever someone still chooses earned knowledge over credentialed ignorance, wherever someone values what works over what sounds smart at parties.

Look at his paintings. Look hard. Stand close enough to see the paint ridged like frozen mud. Step back to see cattle emerge from marks. Give them time - the time we no longer give anything, the time that reveals rather than consumes. The museums may be captured, the galleries corrupt, the NEA a welfare program for regime propagandists, but reality remains undefeated.

In an age drunk on abstraction and spectacle, what could be more radical than insisting that a cow is a cow, that Montana is Montana, and that both are enough? What could be more necessary than someone who refuses to paint anything he cannot see?

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Theodore Waddell with "Wood River Angus" via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Seeing the Midwest Clearly: What Robin Bailey's Photography Teaches Our Politics

Samuel J Abrams — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A single streetlamp glows over a shuttered storefront, paint cracked and signage faded to near illegibility. In Robin W. Bailey’s black-and-white frame, what might appear ordinary becomes monumental: a meditation on memory, loss, and endurance. Raised in the factory towns of Northeast Ohio and now living in suburban Chicago, Bailey turns his lens on the Midwestern landscapes that shaped him—and in doing so, reveals something essential about America’s civic condition.

The power of Bailey’s work begins with its craft. His choice of black and white is not a nostalgic flourish but a discipline. Color would distract; monochrome clarifies. Line, form, and texture emerge with uncommon sharpness. The faint glow of a lamp against brick, the shadowed outline of a warehouse against the night sky—details that slip past the casual eye become, in Bailey’s hands, carriers of memory. His compositions are balanced yet unforced, dignifying the vernacular architecture of diners, storefronts, and union halls without sentimentality. What others might overlook as decay, Bailey presents as endurance.

In this sense, Bailey belongs squarely in the American documentary tradition that stretches from Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Todd Webb. Evans, with his storefronts and signs, revealed fragility during the Depression; Lange gave the dislocated of the Dust Bowl a human face; Webb found quiet dignity in unnoticed city blocks and small-town corners. Bailey extends that lineage into the post-industrial Midwest. Where Evans chronicled collapse and Lange humanized displacement, Bailey strips people out of the frame entirely. His images insist that the landscape itself—empty streets, weathered facades, dimming neon—has become the vessel of memory.

Consider again that lone street corner. At first it seems unremarkable, even bleak. Yet Bailey’s precision makes it luminous. The absence of people is precisely the point: the corner persists, carrying the traces of lives once lived, of conversations once had, of transactions once made in its glow. The buildings remain as survivors, not ruins. They are silent witnesses to the erosion of civic life and, paradoxically, its durability.

To look at Bailey’s photographs is to understand that landscapes are never neutral. They are political texts and social commentary, written in brick, wood, and asphalt. A shuttered factory or a converted diner testifies not only to economic loss but to civic unraveling. When places lose their institutions, trust frays. A boarded-up storefront is not simply architecture; it is a marker of abandonment, a visible sign of what happens when bonds of community and belonging are allowed to collapse.

Bailey himself has said that he grew up “just before the demise of the factory towns.” The decline of manufacturing in the Midwest meant more than layoffs. It meant the dissolution of the bonds that held communities together. Unions weakened, congregations dwindled, civic associations disappeared. Robert Putnam chronicled this unraveling in Bowling Alone; Bailey shows us its physical remains. His photographs are the visual counterpart to the data, capturing absence and endurance at once.

And this is why Bailey’s art speaks so directly to our politics today. The very towns and counties he photographs are the ones that have unsettled American elections. These are the “red wall” places, the counties that swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, the exurbs where disaffection runs deepest. When we see Bailey’s images of faded signs and empty sidewalks, we are looking at the geography of realignment. They show us why populism, both left and right, finds such ready audience. His photographs are not abstractions. They are the built environments of distrust.

Our political class, meanwhile, too often refuses to see them clearly. The “middle class” becomes a polling category, not a neighborhood. The Midwest is flattened into a trope. Candidates campaign in diners for photo-ops, then forget the communities those diners once sustained. Bailey’s art refuses such flattening. His images insist on specificity: this storefront mattered to someone; this corner carried a childhood. When elites ignore these realities, they confirm the suspicion that institutions no longer belong to everyone.
That suspicion is now measurable. Gallup finds that only four in ten Americans retain confidence in higher education, once a source of civic pride in Midwestern towns. Pew surveys show trust in government and media at generational lows. These attitudes are not born in abstraction. They are rooted in lived experience—rooted in the sense that institutions have failed to sustain the communities people love. As the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observed, humans form deep bonds with place, a sentiment he called topophilia. Bailey’s photographs are exercises in topophilia. They honor the bonds between people and their landscapes even when those landscapes are scarred by decline.

It would be easy to mistake Bailey’s work for elegy, a lament for what has vanished. But that is too simple. These images are not about ruins. They are about survival. Their endurance is itself a form of hope. They remind us that continuity remains possible, that communities retain strength even after decades of neglect. The question is whether politics will recognize this endurance—or whether leaders will continue to treat the Midwest as mere backdrop while advancing policies that erase memory in the name of efficiency.

Bailey warns of that erasure himself, noting that modern development risks turning the Midwest into “a mere geographical territory”—bland, indistinct, interchangeable. That is not merely an aesthetic loss. It is a civic wound. When Main Streets give way to anonymous logistics hubs and chain outlets, residents feel more than economic dislocation. They feel their community’s story being erased. And when memory is erased, alienation deepens. Disengagement grows. Populist anger becomes inevitable.

A conservative response must begin where Bailey does, with memory and particularity. Strong communities are built by strong institutions that anchor people to place. That means schools that teach local as well as national history, cultivating pride not only in America as an idea but in the towns and regions where that idea takes root. It means supporting small businesses, civic organizations, and houses of worship that provide texture to daily life. It means infrastructure and planning that revitalize rather than obliterate—policies that preserve continuity even as they accommodate growth. Renewal does not require nostalgia, but it does require respect. Examples from Ohio and Michigan show that Main Street revival is possible without surrendering uniqueness. These efforts should be replicated.

As Yuval Levin has argued, institutions exist not only to shape individuals but to embody continuity across time. Bailey’s photographs make that continuity visible. They show us not simply buildings but communities, memory, and identity that persist against neglect. They remind us that civic trust cannot be restored in abstraction. It must be built in real places.

Bailey’s Midwest is not a stage set of decline but a landscape of survivors. Streets may be empty, facades weathered, neon dim, yet dignity endures. His photographs remind us that America is not only an idea but a collection of particular places, full of meaning and memory, still waiting to be honored.

Bailey shows us these places in stark black and white. Like Todd Webb before him, he reveals their quiet dignity. But his work is more than art. It is civic witness. And if our politics is ever to recover trust, it must learn what Bailey’s photographs already know: that to see America clearly, we must first learn to see its places.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Instagram post.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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 and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

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

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

The YIMBY Movement's Twists and Turns

Pete Saunders — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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.

A month ago, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty wrote a pretty compelling story in favor of sprawl, or the continued outward expansion of our metropolitan areas. In his article, Dougherty marvels at how the Dallas metroplex has been able to accommodate explosive growth while remaining affordable. While touring the Dallas metro area by air with an exec from Hillwood, a development company owned by Ross Perot, Jr., Dougherty sees how Dallas does it:

“The Dallas area has grown by about three million people over the past two decades, and, he predicted, it would continue to push outward for many decades more — 40 miles from downtown, then 50, until the metroplex bulges across the state line into Oklahoma, surpassing the population of the Chicago region and continuing to expand from there. “I told my kids, ‘All you got to do is fill in this map, and you’ll have a pretty good business,’” Perot said.

The executive took me around one of the firm’s projects, quaintly named Pecan Square, which has a faux downtown complete with parks and pickleball courts; a co-working space on the square has been built with exposed ductwork, to give it an industrial vibe. Once finished, Pecan Square will have 3,100 homes, starting around $415,000 for a three-bedroom.”

Relatedly, there’s growing support for the use of publicly-owned land for the development of housing, particularly affordable housing, to reduce costs. Strangely, this idea has found common ground between many YIMBYs and the Trump administration. Who would’ve thought that:

“Federal officials have estimated that 400,000 acres of federal land could potentially be made available for housing development, said Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. The estimate, which will continue to be refined, was determined after officials looked at land within 10 miles of cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more,” he said.

The effort could be most impactful in states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, Mr. Raby said. Officials said the lands vary widely and range from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests. The lands are generally uneconomical or difficult to manage because of their scattered or isolated nature and ‘must meet specific public interest objectives.’ ”

Many supporters of YIMBYism, like I assume Dougherty is, have focused for years on reforming zoning legislation to increase housing production, especially in high-cost housing cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. And they’ve had some high-profile successes, such as the elimination of purely single-family home zoning districts in Minneapolis a few years ago, allowing the construction of 2-4 unit dwellings where none could be built before. California YIMBYs have made great strides statewide in passing legislation making it faster and easier for homeowners to produce accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single-family zoning districts. YIMBYs have also been successful at implementing transit-oriented development near transit stations in cities like Portland, Denver and Arlington, VA, just outside of Washington, DC.

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

Photo: aerial view of Dallas suburbs by Alfred Twu, via Wikimedia under CC 1.0 License.

The "Great Bones" of Rust Belt Cities

Pete Saunders — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I went to St. Louis over the weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the way St. Louis neighborhoods look. The city has wonderful vernacular architecture that leads to beautiful neighborhoods at a human scale. That’s not true everywhere, since St. Louis has lost a lot of character through abandonment and demolition, and the scars of highway construction exist throughout the city. But St. Louis is perhaps the quintessential city with “great bones”.

If you’re not familiar with St. Louis, take a look at the image above, and this one below:

A view of homes in St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com

Over the years I’ve heard urbanists of all types say that Rust Belt cities were primed for a comeback, someday, because they have “great bones”. But how can we define “great bones” and make it a strategy for growth? This is an especially good question given the work-from-home era we live in now, and where we work and live aren’t necessarily connected anymore.

As for me, I view “great bones” as the quality of the built environment of a city. It’s subjective, yes, but there’s some agreement among people about community quality. Given a chance, people will choose neighborhoods (and I think we all choose neighborhoods or communities, not entire cities or metro areas) that provide us with the housing we like, good schools for our children, parks, shopping amenities, social gathering spaces, and a welcoming environment. The desire for public transit, walkability and multimodal accessibility, and the mix of housing will vary with each person, as would the level of public-facing or private-facing view wants to give.

I laid out my so-called “Big Theory” of American urban development several years ago, and brought it up again last month. I think how people look at whether a place has “great bones” or not falls somewhere into the Big Theory framing. Essentially, people prefer the kind of built environment of particular times in history, and the infrastructure and amenities that come from them, and I think they come in a general order. The strongest preferences are for new places among the public because they’re, well, new. Contemporary housing and commercial development designs, upgraded roadway and utility infrastructure that’s not in danger of deterioration. There’s also a preference for much older places that have a development character that’s difficult to replicate in our cities today. Lastly there’s a vast middle type of built environment. It’s new enough to be missing the character of older places, and old enough to be missing the contemporary comforts you might want.

For me, a good proxy for assessing development quality and character is looking at U.S. Census housing data. A table that’s been included in the Census and American Community Survey data for decades is Table S2504: physical characteristics of occupied housing units. I look specifically for Census estimates on when housing structures were built, and that gives me a sense of what kind of “bones” a place may have.

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

Photo: A view of St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com, courtesy of The Corner Side Yard.

How Federal Lands Can Be Used to Ease the Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Michael Toth — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial concern in a Gallup survey last May. Since then, it’s gotten only worse. January home sales were down 5 percent from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years.

President Trump must follow through on his campaign pledge “to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction.”

The housing market depends largely on interest rates and zoning — factors outside any president’s direct control. But the massive federal land portfolio gives middle- and lower-income Americans a better shot at homeownership. The federal government is the nation’s biggest landowner, holding one-third of all property — a land mass six times the size of California.

In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. Since President Trump launched the idea of “Freedom Cities” on federal land, the opening of federal lands for development has entered the policy mainstream. House Budget Committee Republicans have floated the sale of federal lands as an option for closing the deficit.

To create affordable homes on federal lands, the federal government shouldn’t sell lands for development — it should lease them. The sale of federal lands requires the buyer to comply with state and local regulations once the land is privatized, likely with the same awful result. Leasing the federal lands, on the other hand, cuts through the red tape.

Local land-use policies that make housing a luxury good in many parts of the U.S. — such as California’s solar mandate and the state’s aversion to suburban developments that rely on “car-oriented transportation” — do not apply on federal lands. Anti-growth locals and density-obsessed planners stay sidelined.

For more than a century, federal law has long authorized federal leases for commercial purposes such as mineral extraction. Congress should update its land-use laws, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, to authorize federal leases for housing development, subject to standard public health and environmental protections. Call it the New Homestead Act after the 1862 legislation, which — in Lincoln’s words — was enacted “so that every poor man may have a home.”

Building homes on leased federal lands will make homeownership more affordable. Instead of buying the house and the land, the homebuyer buys only the house and leases the land. To protect homeowners, Congress can require 99-year leases that can be automatically transferred to new buyers. Critics will warn that land rent can be hiked after the lease term expires, but Congress can put limits on these increases.

Federal policies that cut through the red tape by allowing new home construction on leased public lands would alleviate the undersupply of single-family homes. Homebuilders built 300,000 fewer homes in 2024 than in 1985 when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The U.S. housing market is short an estimated 4.5 million homes. Freeing up land and reducing regulatory burdens would allow market forces and consumer preference to exercise their magic, which we can see in Texas metros like Austin, where housing costs are plummeting due to an epic home-building spree.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Michael Toth is a resident fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute.

Photo: Great Valley Center, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here

Pete Saunders — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

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. Each season featured institutions – the sad ubiquity of the illegal drug trade; Baltimore’s port system, and the union desperately trying to remain relevant; government bureaucracy and corruption; troubled public school systems; and the declining influence and resources of the newspaper print industry – trying to make the city better, or simply make a way to survive.

Baltimore is not a city I include in my focus group of Rust Belt cities, but it’s undeniably Rust Belt in its experience. And The Wire spoke to what happens in cities where the foundational economy disappears and nothing enters to replace it, far better than any show I’ve seen.

A lot of people who care about cities saw the series full of metaphors, an opportunity to dig deep into the problems of the inner city without getting too close to them. It was an intellectual journey, or worse yet, lurid entertainment. The Wire’s viewers generally weren’t exposed to the issues of the show’s characters, unless they lived in similar conditions in a similar city. Viewers could watch drug deals and drug hits from the security of their living room, or ponder the moral complexities of political corruption without paying a direct cost. For many, watching The Wire was like watching a trainwreck slowly unfold from a safe distance, or riding a wild rollercoaster ride with the certainty that they would never be thrown out.

Many television shows aim to reach the kind of blunt authenticity displayed in the The Wire, but never reach it. Much of The Wire’s authenticity is attributed to David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer and showrunner of The Wire, with Burns being Simon’s his long-time collaborator in writing and production. Burns, a Vietnam War vet, got a first-hand look at Baltimore’s streets as a detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Upon retirement he later taught 7^th and 8^th grade students in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Simon gained this authenticity from his years working the city desk for the Baltimore Sun.

Rust Belt Reporter, the wonderful memoir by former Detroit Free Press journalist John Gallagher, reminds us that we need more writers who can accurately depict this aspect of the American urban experience.

As the book’s title suggests, Gallagher’s journalism career is almost entirely centered on Rust Belt cities. He starts as a young reporter with the City News Bureau in Chicago in the 1970’s, before moving on to newspaper gigs in Rochester, NY, and later in nearby Syracuse. However, the bulk of Gallagher’s career was spent in Detroit, where he worked for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years before retiring in 2019. This was the job that gave him as he said “the catbird seat over America’s greatest urban story – the rise, fall, and rise again of a great American city,” and led to most poignant and meaningful writing of his career.

It’s odd how much of Gallagher’s career touches on themes brought to the screen in The Wire. He’d covered drug-related murders; he’d written on United Auto Workers and Teamsters union negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and even on his own union experience as part of a devastating newspaper strike; he’d published investigative stories exploring local government corruption. If anyone were to write the Motor City version of The Wire, Gallagher would have the cred to do it.

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

Photo: courtesy Pete Saunders.