Urban Issues

Mamdani Heralds the Radical American City

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centered in urban areas. Having survived the pandemic and the 2020 “summer of love”, America’s cities — most critically, New York — are adopting politics that seem designed to make the much-feared “urban doom loop” a reality.

Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in liveability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in the smaller cities of Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation”.

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favourable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23%, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets”.

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalising the hipsters. They face a job market that is getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

“High-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities.”

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favoured destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently, New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good”. Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive disorder during the “summer of love”. There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. Its economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.

Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device.

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalisation of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

This piece first appeared 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: Marco Verch via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Zohran Mamdani's Rise is Fueled by Generational Resentment

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The likely election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor reflects a profound shift in generational politics. As the era of boomer domination finally draws to a close, a new cohort is bringing fresh energy to an already polarised landscape on both right and left – with potentially devastating results.

Diminishing economic prospects for younger workers have played a key role in undermining faith in free-market capitalism, making the case for socialism seem viable again. Cast largely in traditional Marxist terms, many on the reinvigorated left see the ‘cost of living’ focus as a promising strategy for progressives otherwise out of step on cultural issues.

Yet it would be wrong to view Mamdani’s rise as driven primarily by the working class. In the primary, he lost in many predominantly black and Latino areas such as the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, and traditional working-class districts like Canarsie in south Brooklyn, all of which backed his rival, Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s support instead came largely from the gentrified zones of Lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, particularly Williamsburg, where a cadre of educated young voters drove record turnouts. A recent New York Times poll shows Mamdani with 73 per cent of the vote among 19- to 29-year-olds, compared with just 32 per cent among voters over 65. Only a massive mobilisation of older New Yorkers, who generally favour Cuomo, threatens his momentum.

Whether he wins or not, Mamdani epitomises a youthful politics defined by the primacy of social media. His followers tend to be less conventionally literate and more prone to political extremes. Their politics – epitomised by the media-savvy Mamdani – is largely performative, based more on emotion than on even remotely practical policy. His candidacy is merely the latest cause célèbre, following a sequence of ‘progressive’ enthusiasms from climate change to transgender rights to the Palestinian cause.

Some young activists also display a disturbing acceptance of political violence. A YouGov poll in September 2025 found that among adults under 30, 19 per cent said political violence could sometimes be justified, compared with 11 per cent of Americans overall. In one survey, nearly 38 per cent of respondents – and more than half of progressives – said the assassination of Donald Trump would be ‘justified’.

In this new political configuration, gender now plays a central role. The existence of a gender gap in politics is nothing new, but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times larger than in 2000. Indeed, it is especially pronounced among Generation Z where Trump’s approval rate among young men hovers near 45 per cent, compared with just 24 per cent among women.

The left is increasingly dominated by women. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, 52 per cent of women identify as Democrats, compared with 35 per cent of men, while 38 per cent of young men lean Republican – nearly twice the share of young women. A similar divergence has appeared abroad. In South Korea’s 2022 presidential race, 59 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 voted conservative, while women overwhelmingly backed the ‘progressive’ candidate. Across Europe, 21 per cent of young men support right-wing and populist parties compared with 14 per cent of young women.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Eden, Janine and Jim via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The "Don't Go" Narrative and Its Enduring Impact on Communities

Pete Saunders — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Yesterday I became aware of some fantastic news. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist in Chicago, was named one of 22 people worldwide awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often called the “Genius Grant”. Each recipient was awarded $800,000 of no-strings-attached money in recognition of their groundbreaking, innovative and courageous work in a wide range of fields: arts, science, medicine, technology, media, and more.

Tonika won the MacArthur Fellowship because of her work on the Folded Map Project and the book that emerged from it, Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It. As the MacArthur Foundation’s website puts it, “Johnson uses photography, maps, and multimedia storytelling to articulate the vast disparities in conditions, infrastructure, and investment between Chicago’s neighborhoods. At the same time, she creates pathways for residents to begin the process of restitution and repair.”

I find Tonika’s work fascinating because it’s at the heart of why I became an urban planner — to document and address disparities in cities, particularly in Rust Belt cities like Chicago. Her work is reminiscent of the work of artists like Tyree Guyton, whose work in Detroit on the Heidelberg Project seeks to use art as a catalyst for revitalization. It’s also similar to the work of Theaster Gates, like Tonika from Chicago, whose social practice installation artwork challenges our perceptions and encourages the use of art to uplift disinvested communities.

Tonika’s work, however, takes this approach to the personal, individual level. How much should we trust what we think we know about disinvested neighborhoods? What happens to communities that are only viewed in the abstract, and not in their totality? How do individual actions contribute to the disinvestment of communities?

I interviewed Tonika (and her research colleague and activist partner Dr. Maria Krysan of the University of Illinois-Chicago) earlier this year on behalf of Planning Magazine, for an article. The article was published online yesterday. Please click Challenging Perceptions of ‘Don’t Go’ Neighborhoods Can Create Opportunities to read. I’m proud of this work, and even prouder of how people like Tonika demonstrate that strong neighborhoods deserve to be everywhere, for everyone.

This piece first appeared 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: Tonika Lewis Johnson. Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

New York's Jews Fear a Mamdani Win

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

For generations, the Harmonie Club has served as a haven for New York’s Jewish elites. Founded in 1852, the club has since 1905 occupied an elegant eight-story building at 4 East 60th Street, a townhouse with lovely painted ceilings and a handsome Victorian facade designed by Stanford White. The names of its most illustrious members — the Bloomingdales, the Guggenheims, Alfred Ochs, founder of the New York Times Company — are intimately connected with the history and character of New York. Whatever persecution Jewish people faced elsewhere in the world, here was a place they could thrive.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalise the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

Having travelled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th-century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Jörg Schubert via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Rise of the Artisan Economy

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Developer Shaheen Sadeghi’s vision of an artisanal, small-business-driven economy seems oddly incompatible with his environment. After all, Orange County, Calif., where the 71-year-old Sadeghi has worked for four decades, bristles with mass-produced fabrication. Home to several of the nation’s most successful malls and endless shopping centers, the region has incubated such firms as McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Cheesecake Factory, Marie Callender’s, Taco Bell, and the epicenter of faux American conformism, Disneyland.

Yet walking around his expanding development, called the Camp, it’s clear Sadeghi has made his vision real. Located on four acres in Costa Mesa — just one mile from the South Coast Plaza — one of the most successful mega-malls in the country — is a collection filled with dozens of independent, small businesses including oddball boutiques, diverse independent restaurants, and even a bar — Cowboy and Poodles — that celebrates southern California’s cowboy heritage, with Western images and artifacts matched with kitschy images of well-groomed dogs.

“Most of retail may be dying,” Sadeghi notes, “the next generation of customers won’t go to the big stores but are seeking out a direct human experience.” Moreover: “The traditional middleman role is obsolete. People may go online to buy necessities but when they go out to shop, they want something real, something that offers the possibility of serendipity.”

Sadeghi, who grew up in Michigan, is the child of Muslim Iranian immigrants. He graduated from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and worked in the surf-wear industry — eventually running Huntington Beach–based Quiksilver — for a decade until he came up with his concept of “the anti-mall” in 1993. His LAB company, which stands for “Little American Business,” has some 40 projects spread across the county. For many young residents, including my daughters, the Camp and Anaheim’s Packing House (both LAB developments) replaced the conventional mall as their preferred place to hang.

Sadeghi says he believes that his developments tap an unmet demand for personal, unique experiences and, most of all, human interaction. “The rise of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, a world of robots, suggests we don’t need to interface with people,” he says over lunch at Aba, a crowded and popular Israeli restaurant at the Camp. “But people need more than that. They want that personal experience, the unexpected. Providing that is what excites me.”

The notion of an artisan economy may seem odd in an age dominated by online sales and artificial intelligence. Yet, as Sadeghi points out, this is the opportunity. As we buy routine, depersonalized products online or at a mega retailers such as Target or Costco, there remains a desire for something more human. We seek to connect more closely to the farmer, the maker of products, and to products sourced close to the community.

This counterfactual development can be seen in such things as the rapid growth of flea markets, farmers’ markets, and that ultimate symbol of grassroots free markets, garage sales. The 2000s and 2010s saw the growth of the “buy local” movement and the rapid expansion of farmers’ markets in the U.S. — from fewer than 1,800 in the mid-1990s to more than 8,770 by 2019. Flea markets have also proliferated around the world, growing at 4.5 percent a year. By 2033, U.S. flea market sales are expected to grow from $12.5 billion to almost $17.5 billion. Similar growth is projected in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

The shift is reflected as well in surging yard sales. A July survey by Morning Consult found that about half of U.S. consumers said they have shopped secondhand, and a quarter said they sold something secondhand within the previous three months. According to a recent report from online resale shop ThredUp and the retail analytics firm Global Data, the U.S. market for secondhand apparel grew by 14 percent in 2024, its strongest annual growth since 2021, and is expected to hit $74 billion by 2029.

The roots of this shift are both psychological and technological. In a digital age, when direct human contact is increasingly optional, there remains a clear market for originality and serendipity. At a yard sale or farmers’ market, you never quite know what you will find and how much it might cost. “It’s an experience that AI cannot do,” notes Randy Hild, another surf-wear executive whose Redo Market runs flea markets throughout Southern California.

“There’s something even for surfers who like something old,” he suggests. People like to buy the older American-made products featured in Hild’s “redo markets” that sell vintage records, surfboards, and all sorts of memorabilia. Hild runs two shows a year, each one visited by upwards of 15,000 people.

The attraction of artisan firms, which produce their own products, is an alternative often lost in the era of Yelp, online ordering, and “bucket list” consumerism. As the recently retired New York Times food critic Pete Wells notes, even some more elite restaurants — much like the numerous chains that have closed stores, or entirely — have become formulaic and not really interested in cultivating relationships, something that artisanal smaller businesses, without the ability to afford expensive advertising, depend on to find customers. He observes:

It’s not that we don’t want to have relationships with the owners and cooks and baristas in our lives. Tiny pop-up restaurants and micro-bakeries are still riding a wave of popularity that started during the pandemic. A large part of the appeal of these places is the chance to meet the person who baked the croissant or cooked your Vietnamese bun cha.

One can see the market for the (genuinely) personal touch throughout Southern California. These small businesses are located in the ubiquitous strip centers detested by urban planners and new urbanists that are faring far better economically than is often assumed. There you can experience a wide range of choices, from sari shops to thriving Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Mexican shops.

Such developments, anchored by small, local businesses, are spread throughout the region, notably in working-class Latino cities, usually occupying deserted big-box or retail spaces. Larger developments tend to be in redundant warehouse spaces, such as Sadeghi’s Camp. Others rise adjacent to supermarkets. For example, the Latino-themed Mercado, located next to the Gonzalez family–owned Northgate market, features more than 20 stalls covering 11,361 square feet and offers a wide diversity of Mexican food from largely independently owned stalls.

It’s ironic that these innovations are taking place in supposedly homogeneous suburbia, even as many cities have become inundated with chain stores. “This is not suburbanization but localization,” suggests Sadeghi. Many suburbanites, he notes, left the big city but did not have their taste buds removed at the same time. “Suburbia is no longer bland,” he notes. “Orange County is local like New York and L.A. are local.”

Wherever it is located, artisanal business appeals to deep-seated public sentiment. Big companies, banks, and media receive low marks from the public, but small business continues to enjoy widespread support across party lines. Self-employment has grown somewhat faster, at least until recently, than regular employment, especially among skilled professionals like plumbers, electricians, and those who work in food service and management. Since 2020, the number of self-employed people has jumped by nearly 2 million. The largest percentage of these new businesses are in retail, but many others are in tech, professional services, and construction, all populated by the new artisanal class.

Europe has not experienced a similar entrepreneurial explosion but has retained much of its traditional artisan economy. Surveys reveal that more than 70 percent of EU citizens consider the origin of food products important, with a significant portion expressing a willingness to pay more for locally sourced goods that they perceive as fresher and more trustworthy.

In America, post-globalism appeals to the progressive left as well as to the MAGA right. It also could become a key source of new employment, particularly in the era of artificial intelligence. Public companies have been slashing white-collar staff since 2022 by more than 3.5 percent a year, with the most precipitous drops in executive and management positions. The once-booming idea of “career” training faces a reality where some CEOs, like Ford’s Jim Farley, now predict that “literally one half of white collar jobs” at major corporations will soon be redundant.

For many young people, artisan skills training offers a more promising alternative. Indeed, one recent survey found that roughly 83 percent of Gen Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college — including 90 percent of those who already hold college degrees. By fall 2021, total undergraduate enrollment was 15 percent lower than it was in fall 2010. In contrast, trade schools have grown by 10 percent since 2020. Coders may be systematically culled by artificial intelligence, but there has been steady growth among those who can actually build something — whether as skilled tradespeople or as industrial, chemical, or civil engineers, reflecting a shift among tech investors and CEOs toward the production of goods as opposed to bytes.

Of course, some economic functions, particularly those dependent on low wages, will never likely return to the U.S., but there’s clearly some decline in support for and in the viability of globalist mass production. Some of this can be traced to mercantilism (particularly from China) and ever more stressed supply chains and shipping lanes. These, as analyst Peter Zeihan suggests, are undermining what he calls the globalized order, forcing production back toward the consumers.

New technology, traditionally the bane of small firms, also makes local, small-scale production easier. The spread of affordable digital manufacturing tools — 3D printers, CNC machines, and other artisanal technologies — enables microenterprises to design, produce, and sell locally, reducing reliance on long supply chains. E-commerce platforms like Etsy, Shopify, and Alibaba have democratized access to markets, allowing millions to start businesses with minimal capital and fostering direct competition.

These innovations allow craft entrepreneurs to create a vibrant ecosystem of small-scale production, sometimes using robots, where competition thrives on creativity, quality, and direct connection with consumers rather than just economies of scale. This is next on Sadeghi’s list. Over the past five years — thanks to slow permitting in California — he has been putting together a 100,000-square-foot artisanal center in San Marcos, an exurb of San Diego, with room for 50 vendors.

Sadeghi is excited by the emergence symbolized by the opening of the first MIT Fab Lab in 2002 — which offers tools and skills that once belonged only to large manufacturers. By the late 2010s, more than 1,600 Fab Labs were operating globally, with hundreds in North America. This could provide new life in both the U.S. and Europe, where the embedded artisan tradition — deeply rooted in family businesses, regional craft, and protected appellations — has shown greater resilience than the continent’s large firms in the face of globalizing pressures. Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, and France) maintained dense webs of artisanal food producers and small manufacturing firms. In Italy, artisan businesses accounted for 27 percent of all firms as recently as 2018.

This pattern is even emerging in East Asia, the region that has most benefited from the globalist era. Japan has protected traditional crafts and small producers through a blend of national policy and local initiative. The One Village, One Product movement, which began in Ōita Prefecture in 1979, had by the 2010s spread nationwide and inspired similar efforts in Thailand and China. Taobao villages, clusters of entrepreneurs leveraging Alibaba’s online platform, became a model for rural regeneration, with more than 5,000 such villages by 2020.

In Africa, the drive to artisanal production grows not so much from lifestyle considerations but from the failure of state policy and the resilience of individual agency. In South Africa, the continent’s most advanced economy, these firms have helped provide services, including security, that the central government has failed to deliver. By 2023, some 2.7 million small businesses operated in the country, two-thirds in the informal sector, employing more than 9 million people. Across sub-Saharan Africa, informality is not an exception but the rule: 80 to 90 percent of employment in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and elsewhere is outside the formal economy.

It’s a long way from Africa’s villages or rural Japan to Southern California, but the trend toward the artisan economy continues.

Some urban planners, like San Juan Capistrano’s development services chief, Joel Rojas, realize that whatever their efficiencies, chain-driven development does little to enhance a city’s uniqueness or sense of community. In a world full of duplicate stores, he notes, it is key for a city to project uniqueness of feel and experience.

This is why he has worked hard to allow for the development of the River Street Marketplace, which opened last year. “It’s a community asset, not a mall,” Rojas suggests, as we picnicked in its ample open area, which was crowded with young families. He particularly appreciates the walk’s agrarian look — which includes barnlike structures — as well as its location near an operating farmstead.

The marketplace, developed by Dan Almquist (who owns several other artisan-based centers), features butcher shops, quirky fashion outlets, and ethnic food stands. Located next to the city’s unique Los Rios district, its buildings are purposely reminiscent of Orange County’s agricultural past. It is built around a mission and California’s oldest continually urban area, occupied since Spanish times.

“People come here for an artisan experience, dealing with real things, not spending their time staring at a computer,” notes Almquist, who lives walking distance from the development. This is one way to get away from isolation and enjoy a community feeling. Two-thirds of the stores in his development are either stand-alone or locally based small chains.

The artisan economy will never fully replace the large global system, even as this slowly dissembles into regional or national economies. But arguably its greatest service may be in helping to reshape perceptions of capitalism. Today, our market system is not much-loved globally and even in the U.S., particularly among the young.

The tendency to identify capitalism primarily with numbing commercial sameness and with the antics of the ultrarich and famous does not do it any favors. Small businesses, like those arising in the artisan movement, validate capitalism’s dynamism and sense of opportunity. Indeed, Vladimir Lenin well understood that “small scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie. . . . Wherever there is business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears.” Capitalism, he noted, “begins in the village marketplace.”

This is an important message. The return of the owner and the producer to the marketplace breathes life — not just in monetary terms — and essentiality into community and social life. A buffer against both the progressive nanny state and overwhelmingly conformist global capitalism, the rise of the artisan restores the human face of the market system. Capitalism can still perform brilliantly, but it cannot long survive if its essential humanity is stripped away.

This piece first appeared at National Review.

The Catholic Model for a Post-Protestant America

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:40:58 -0400

In my book Life in the Negative World, I noted that unlike minority groups, American white Protestants had not found it necessary to create their own social institutions to sustain their religion and way of life because the mainstream institutions of society were de facto already designed around that.

As America has secularized, and these institutions have become explicitly de-Christianized or otherwise reoriented to other ends, it becomes incumbent on evangelicals to build their own infrastructure.

I suggested that one potential source of inspiration could be early 20th century Catholicism. America was basically an anti-Catholic country prior to World War II. Catholics of that era were also large in number and heterogeneous in origin. This makes them a better fit than looking at more niche minority groups.

I’ve been reading a new book called Crabgrass Catholicism by Stephen M. Koeth, which is about the suburbanization of Catholics in New York. I’ll be writing a full review of the book, but one thing it provides is a picture of what urban Catholic life looked like in early 20th century America. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, as it’s included mostly to provide the backstory to the author’s primary focus, but it can help us get a sense of what that was like.

Koeth writes:

It was European immigration from the 1820s to the 1850s that first made the US Catholic Church a highly urban and ethnic institution. In an era of rapid urbanization Catholic immigrants built American city life by fusing the neighborhood with the ethnic parish which was dominated by its priests and religious sisters, centered on the church and school, and bound together by its communal worship and devotions. At the same time, these immigrants built an entire parallel Catholic world - what John McGreevy has labeled as Catholic “milieu” - of educational, social, and service institutions to rival Protestant and secular peers….More than any other element of this parallel world, it was the parish school that became the “hallmark of American Catholicism.”

Here we see the creation of parallel institutions. These were fused with particular ethnicities. Catholicism was thus one factor that distinguished these communities as ethnic groups. While there were geographic parishes, there were also many “national” parishes designated for particular ethnic groups. Even within a geographic parish, practices might be heavily inflected by particular ethnic practices. For example, the Irish and Italians approached Catholicism very differently. Different ethnic groups might prefer to venerate their own saints. And so on.

The highly ethnicized nature of these Catholic parishes suggests that evangelical groups could not replicate them precisely. White evangelicals aren’t and do not think of themselves as an ethnic group, and despite what you might hear, evangelical churches are rarely monolithically white, even in the suburbs. Urban evangelical churches are often very diverse.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Catholic parish school in Long Beach, New York via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

August Driving Up 2.8% from 2019

Randal OToole — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Americans drove 2.8 percent more mores in August 2025 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Apparently, data gathering is just as much an “essential service” in the highway agency as it seems to be in the Federal Transit Administration, which released August transit data earlier this month despite the federal government’s shut-down of non-essential services.

August driving was ahead of 2019 numbers on both urban and rural roads and on all categories of roads tracked by the monthly traffic volume trends: interstates, other arterials, and other roads. Driving exceeded 2019 miles in 30 states, urban driving exceeded 2019 numbers in 31 states, while rural driving exceeded them in 32 states.

Arizona saw the largest increase in driving: 39 percent overall with 26 percent in rural areas and 37 percent in urban areas. (Urban and rural count only driving on arterial roads while totals include driving on collector and local roads.) The next highest was Idaho at 19 percent overall with 21 percent in urban areas and 17 percent rural. Other states with more than a 10 percent increase in driving include Arkansas, Maine, and Texas. The greatest shortfalls were in DC (81%), Delaware (84%), Hawaii (87%), Rhode Island (84%), and West Virginia (89%).

The above chart shows that driving was the first form of transportation to recover from the pandemic, but since then it hasn’t grown as fast as flying or Amtrak. Some analysts think this is because Gen Z — which includes people born between 1997 and 2012 — is driving less than older generations. They may be more likely to work at home, rely on ride-sharing services when they leave home, and associate with friends on-line than in person.

Some of Gen Z’s reluctance to drive is also blamed on the high cost of driving. Previous generations know there are many ways to make driving more affordable, including buying used cars, settling for fewer luxuries, and getting basic rather than more comprehensive insurance. Maybe those techniques don’t work as well as they used to, but I suspect that as Gen Zers age they will increase the amount of driving they do.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

How to Create the New American Middle Class

Pete Saunders — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Remember the term “social contract?” It’s a term that’s been slowly gaining stream in recent years, but one that’s always been at the front of my mind, especially when it comes to cities. Simply put, our nation has been operating without a social contract now for decades, and that has a lot to do with our political, social and cultural issues today.

The definition of “social contract” will vary, but it usually means there is an implicit agreement between government and institutions and the public. Government and institutions agree to provide certain policies and services that allow people to prosper, and the people agree to, well, not rebel. Seriously, the people will often agree to sacrifice some individual freedom for state and institutional services.

The prosperity that followed World War II in America represented a unique time in our history, in world history, and led to the establishment of a unique American social contract, especially in economic terms. Essentially, with Europe’s economic powers recovering from the Depression and a devastating war, America took on the role of being the world’s economic and political superpower. America helped rebuild Europe. Yet America also led the world in manufacturing and industrial production when other nations could not. That was at the heart of the social contract that was established.

There were many facets to the post-WWII social contract. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to establish their post-war lives – go to college, get generous terms for mortgages. Federal support for unions, which would’ve been unheard of in the first half of the 20^th century, was especially strong as America became the world’s manufacturer. A happy and plentiful workforce, employed by booming industrial corporations, were supported by unions that ensured their gains. You could also include interstate highway development and the expansion of suburbia as elements of the social contract of the era.

That began to fray in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I won’t go into much detail here, but a period that saw political and social upheaval in the U.S., troubling economic issues due to rising energy prices and shortages, rampant inflation and the rise of other nations as they returned to the economic world stage, changed the American calculus.

By the 1980’s a split was becoming evident in the American social class structure. Upper-middle class people, the professional workforce I usually call the “salary class”, got a boost in the changing world. Improving technology heightened their production, and they were able to huge advances in computing technology, finance, medicine and health care, and more. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and middle classes, or what I’ve called the “wage class”, struggled with changes in the automation of manufacturing facilities, as businesses sought to reduce costs and lower prices on goods.

From my perspective, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s in the Midwest, I felt the loss of a social contract, without a new one replacing it.

So here we are today, after a tech boom and bust, a housing bubble that burst, continued economic growth without corresponding wage growth at all levels, and we have a societal dilemma now. Over the years I’ve viewed improving cities as one part of the reimagining of the middle class. I’ve written about this many times over. But now the moment seems to particularly demand it.

I wrote recently about the Economic Innovation Group’s proposed wage subsidy as a way to get our low-wage workforce on a course toward the middle class. But it turns out EIG has far more ideas than just a wage subsidy. They have a larger worker policy program. In EIG’s Agglomerations Substack, they rolled out a seven-point plan designed to strengthen and stabilize all segments of the American workforce.

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

Photo: Ken Mattison, composite of photos from album of People Working, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License and CC 2.0 License.

The New York Line: Patience as the New Status Symbol

Samuel J Abrams — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

In a city that prides itself on speed, New York’s latest trend is all about slowing down. Lines now snake outside the hottest restaurants in Manhattan - Ha’s Snack Bar on Broome Street, Kiki’s on Division, Breakfast by Salt’s Cure in the West Village - filled with diners who could eat anywhere but choose to stand in the rain for hours. The New York Post recently reported that teenagers are crossing state lines for pancakes, professionals are camping outside bistros for pho-inspired soup, and parents from Italy and Connecticut are waiting shoulder to shoulder with their kids just to be part of the scene. In a culture obsessed with convenience, this fixation on delay seems paradoxical. Yet it may reveal something deeper about where post-pandemic urban life, and American social life more broadly, may be heading.

On the surface, this is about status. To wait at the right place signals taste, knowledge, and stamina. As longtime New York food writer Andrea Strong explained, restaurants have become stages for social ranking. The line itself is a badge of belonging. Sociologist Erving Goffman would recognize the performance: the queue has become a form of public theater, where patience stands in for exclusivity and endurance signals cultural capital. The most prestigious thing about dinner is no longer the dish, it is the evidence that you earned it.

But that explanation only goes so far. In a strange way, these lines are restoring something that New York - and much of the country - has lost: a sense of shared experience in real space and time. After years of isolation and digital substitution, people crave friction and proximity. Standing together, waiting together, offers a fleeting reminder that life is not all about algorithmic efficiency. The sidewalk line – like summer blockbuster movies during my teenage years of the 1990s - is now a small civic arena. It has become a space where strangers exchange glances, chat about the menu, and exist for a moment in the same rhythm. It may be performative, but it’s also real, shared, and commonly understood and represents authentic collective experiences.

This is not new to New York. Katz’s Deli has had lines for decades; so have Gray’s Papaya and Di Fara Pizza. What’s changed is the meaning of the wait. In the post-pandemic era, the line has become an act of participation rather than an inconvenience. People now see standing in public as part of the experience, not just the prelude to it. The anticipation itself becomes valuable. As one diner told the Post, “There’s something romantic about being crammed elbow-to-elbow in a tiny space. We spend so much time isolated; being human-to-human is lovely.”

Psychologists note that scarcity plays a role. When reservations vanish in seconds, standing in line restores a sense of agency. Waiting outside a restaurant feels democratic - you earn access through patience, not privilege. It also satisfies a subtle emotional hunger. As psychologist Deborah Vinall told the Post, people associate long waits with exclusivity and specialness, and equate that difficulty with value. It’s easy to sneer at that as consumer vanity, but it’s also an expression of the human desire to belong to something meaningful, however fleeting.

The deeper irony is that these lines emerge in a society built to eliminate them. Technology promises to deliver everything instantly, but that speed has stripped life of texture. The line offers the opposite: inefficiency as intimacy. For a city that once bragged about its impatience, New York is quietly learning to linger again. People are rediscovering the small pleasure of waiting: of earning an experience, of talking with strangers, of inhabiting the city’s rhythms rather than bypassing them.

That, in turn, says something about our civic recovery. When so much of public life has turned antagonistic or virtual, the humble act of waiting - of surrendering time to others - takes on new meaning. There is a thin line between performance and community, and New Yorkers are walking it in real time. What looks like vanity may in fact be a search for connection, an attempt to feel human again in a city that never stops moving.

The critic might call this another symptom of influencer culture, and in part, that’s true. But there’s also an undercurrent of sincerity here; a recognition that the shared moment, even when curated, still matters. Sometimes the new thing turns out to be something very old: standing together, waiting for something worth having. In a city that measures itself in minutes, the rediscovery of patience might be more than a fad. It might be a small sign that even in our hyper-individual, digitized age, people still long for shared presence, for the slow, collective rituals that remind us we are not alone. The meal, when it finally arrives, may be the least important part.

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: Juan Monroy, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Housing Reforms are Needed to Stop Stockholm from Stagnation

Peter Zonabend - Per Arwidsson - Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:28:38 -0400

New companies face obstacles growing in Stockholm, in part this stagnation is due to the combination of a regulated rental market and too high prices for new housing development. Growing companies find it difficult to expand in urban regions with lack of housing, this adds to Sweden already being at a disadvantage due to relatively high taxes.

A study written by Tobias Lundberg, senior partner at McKinsey warns that Sweden is stagnating in growth and prosperity, with 70 percent of the total value of startup companies ending up in other countries.

This is not only because Sweden has high taxes on business and labor, but also because new companies have a hard time expanding in a city that has insufficient housing growth. The need for construction is 20,000 homes per year, in the capital city of Stockholm, but the households of the region can only afford 13,600.

Stockholm can be compared with the Irish capital region of Dublin and the Swiss capital region of Zurich. In Zurich, 13.9 percent of the residents are engineers and researchers, in Dublin the level is clearly lower, 9.2 percent. Stockholm has the second highest level in Europe; 13.1 percent of adults are engineers and researchers.

At the same time, Dublin and Zurich now have just over 50 percent higher prosperity per inhabitant compared to Stockholm, illustrating the need for growth reforms. This is shown by a report about conditions for a growing Stockholm, commissioned by Arwidsro real estate company and produced by ECEPR. In Stockholm, GDP per capita, expressed in the equivalent March 2025 krona exchange rate, is 787,100 kronor. That is how much value creation takes place in the economy per adult inhabitant. The level can be compared with 1,269,050 kronor per capita in Dublin and 1,199,350 in Zurich.

Europe's second most knowledge-intensive capital region has a stagnant housing market, which leads to stagnant growth. The new study calculates the economic value that would be created if reforms lowered the cost of construction, so that a thousand more households could afford to establish themselves in the housing market. In that case, individuals could contribute an additional SEK 2.2 billion ($230 million) in value added to the total gross domestic product in Sweden over the course of their careers. Discounted because future gains are worth less today, the social gain is converted to a present value of SEK 1.2 billion ($130 million). This is the productivity gain created by more housing on the margin in the capital region, on top of which there is also extensive value created through capital formation. If the reforms that are implemented are long-term, there will be a similar growth effect every year.

Three reforms that are needed include lowering of the VAT on housing construction, to the lowest level of 6% that is allowed in Sweden. It is problematic that VAT is even charged at all on the construction of private housing, as renting out property is generally exempt from VAT. Balance targets in the planning process are needed, so that social benefit is also weighed up, not just formalities. Planning processes are currently treated so that they are analyzed for what could be considered reasons to stop the plans, without considering the opportunity cost of not building housing.

The Swedish Real Estate Association has pointed out in an analysis that overall Sweden has the highest moving taxes in the EU, and that reforms such as a phased-down capital gains tax where those who have owned the same home for a long time are eventually exempted from the tax. By lowering the thresholds for mobility, moving chains can make more homes available.

Stockholm needs to be a city where more affordable housing is built, allowing more individuals to join the more productive capital region economy, and more of the growing companies of the region to keep growing at home rather than relocating due to growth obstacles.

Authors
Peter Zonabend is CEO of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Per Arwidsson is President of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Nima Sanandaji is Director of ECEPR (European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform).

Photo: Stockholm, by Jonatan Svensson Glad via Wikimedia, under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License. Chart: Comparison of real wealth per inhabitant of Stockholm vs. other European capital regions since 2014; courtesy the authors.