NewGeography.com blogs

Webinar: The Case for Suburbia

When: March 8, 2022 at 12PM (CT)
Where: Join on Zoom
The seeming success of compact cities and the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate have led to pushback against sprawling, car-dominated cities. Join us as we discuss the environmental case for suburbia.
 The Case for Suburbia

Standardizing the Gig Hybrid Work Week?

San Francisco Examiner reporter Jeff Elder describes efforts to coordinate hybrid work schedules that involve working part time at home and part time in the office (“Tech industry’s ‘three-day work week’ may change the future of the office forever”). Elder notes that tech workers, in the Bay Area seem to be gravitating toward working at home on Mondays and Fridays, and working in the office Tuesday through Friday.

Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute told the Examiner. “There’s going to have to be some experimentation. We’re going to end up somewhere around three days a week in the office. As we talk to companies, they increasingly say around three days in the office is what they want from employees.”

According to Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, “In 2022, employees will increasingly be required to come in on set days, with the payoff of working from home on the other days.”

A Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday work in the office week might offer employees an organized period to maximize collaboration, as opposed to less formalized arrangements in which employee attendance would be more random.

Such an arrangement would seem to have potential to maximize Tech employee productivity in the Bay Area, the world’s largest Gig labor market.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

The Start of a Counter-revolution in San Francisco

This week’s massive vote against three of San Francisco’s most woke school board members represents a triumphant outbreak of reason in one of the most insanely progressive places on the planet. But it is also, far more consequently, a rejection — in this case by over 70% of voters — of radical Left politics that is building up across the country.

To be fair, the recalled board members were defeated not just for extreme politics, but for their reluctance to open schools during the pandemic. Instead of re-opening schools during the pandemic, they advanced a plan to rename 44 public schools named after figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Dianne Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln, with one board member even claiming that “black lives didn’t matter” to the president who freed America’s slaves.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Webinar: Restoring the California Dream

A new report by Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University lays out the challenges faced by middle and working-class Californians. The January 21 presentation of the report was followed by an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.  Click here to learn more and download a copy of the report.

Watch the video:

Metro Columbus Lands Massive Intel Plants

Governor Mike DeWine announced today (January 21, 2022) that Intel will build two semi-conductor plants in suburban Licking County, in the Columbus metropolitan area. The plants will be located in New Albany’s International Business Park, which already has Google, Amazon and Facebook as tenants. The plants are to be opened by 2025.

The Governor said that the plant will be the largest private sector investment in Ohio history. The $20 billion plant is projected to increase Ohio’s Gross Domestic product by $2.8 billion.

The plant is expected to employ 3,000 initially, at an average wage of $135,000, while secondarily generating 20,000 additional jobs statewide.

Representative Troy Balderson, who represents the plant location in the US Congress said “We are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by the imbalance of foreign chip production. It’s past time to bolster this production here at home.”

Already, the Columbus metropolitan area had catapulted to leadership as a domestic migration destination, adding 53,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020, the most of any Midwestern metropolitan area.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Feudal Future Podcast: The Future of the Future — The Metaverse Explained

On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin are joined by American entrepreneur, Rony Abovitz, and Charlie Fink, AR/VR consultant and professor of Chapman University.

This show discusses the metaverse and what the future holds in a digital world.

Listen on Apple Podcast
Listen on Google Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

Watch the Video

Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.
Learn about Joel's book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

About the hosts:

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, and an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His most recent book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism is now available for order.

Marshall Toplansky is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. He co-founded KPMG’s data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.

About the guests:

Rony Abovitz is an American entrepreneur. Abovitz founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, in 2004 and recently acquired by Stryker for $1.65 billion. Abovitz is the founder of the Mixed reality/Augmented Reality (MR/AR) company Magic Leap and served as its CEO from its founding in 2010.

Charlie Fink is a Forbes Columnist, and the Author of Remote Collaboration & Virtual Conferences (2020), Convergence (2019) and Charlie Fink's Metaverse (2017). In the early 90s, Fink ran VR pioneer Virtual World Entertainment. Previously, he was a VP at Disney, SVP at AOL, and President of AG & Blue Mountain. He teaches XR at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Restoring the California Dream

Join us for a webinar on January 21st, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky to learn how we can restore the California Dream for middle and working class Californians. Following the presentation of the report, there will be an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.

Panel participants include Raul Anaya, Joe Hensley, and Karla Del Rio.

Register for the free Zoom webinar Restoring the American Dream

Restoring California Dream

To the Exurbs and Beyond in Vancouver

The Vancouver Sun reports on the dimensions of the urban to suburban, exurban and even rural exodus fueled by the pandemic. The first dimension is households taking advantage of the opportunity to regularly work remotely, which permits fewer physical commutes. This makes it practical for households to move to more space, both in housing and yards, such as to exurban Chilliwack, in the eastern Fraser Valley, where housing is severely unaffordable but much less unaffordable than in Vancouver, which rated as the second least affordable among 92 major markets in nine nations in Demographia International Housing Affordability 2021 (with a median multiple of 13.0 --- median house price 13 times the median household income.

The article also describes household movement of people from exurbs to even farther away, not only small metro areas, such as Kelowna and Kamloops but beyond to small towns like Quesnel and rural areas. Kamloops is 220 miles from downtown Vancouver (about 190 miles from the edge of the urban area, also called the population centre) and Quesnel is nearly 400 miles. Remote workers choosing locations such as these are likely to be able to work virtually all the time from home.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Meta (Facebook) Leases All Office Space in Austin's Tallest

The Austin Business Journal reports that Meta (former Facebook) has leased all 33 office floors of the under construction Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, which is due to open in 2023. The building will be Austin’s tallest building, at 66 floors and a height of 873 feet and is located downtown.

This will make the building the fifth tallest in Texas, behind the Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower (former Texas Commerce Bank), the Wells Fargo Plaza, and the Williams Tower, the tallest building in the United States outside a central business district (located in the Houston Galleria). One downtown Dallas building is also taller, the Bank of America Tower, which ranks third in the state, following Wells Fargo Plaza.

The building is mixed use and will have 349 residential units. It will be interesting to see how many Facebook employees will be able to afford living in the building, which would eliminate physical commuting almost as much as remote work.

Downtown Austin is developing rapidly and now is indicated by Cushman and Wakefield to have about 13 million square feet of office space (before Sixth and Guadeloupe), about equal to Cincinnati’s strong central business district. In this regard, Austin is following earlier models of dense downtown development in Calgary and Charlotte.

Downtown Austin is experiencing a building boom, which as of 2022 will have opened 15 buildings 400 feet high or more since 2010, when there were only four. In addition to the Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, there are a number of new residential buildings planned for the Rainey Street District, adjacent on the east to downtown.

Austin was the fastest growing among the 56 major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 population) in each of the last two decades. From 2010 to 2020, Austin added 567,000 residents, a 33% increase. Austin attracted 337,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020. This is more than all major metropolitan areas except for Dallas-Fort Worth, which is three times as large, and Phoenix, which is twice as large. Most of the new Austin residents settled in the suburban counties, which accounted for about two-thirds of the metropolitan area’s net domestic migration.

For decades, Austin has been playing a larger information technology role. Meta lease, and the new downtown “Google Tower” (Block 185) add significantly to this development.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Downtown Calgary: Not Overbuilt, But Under-Demolished?

North America’s largest post-World War II central business district has just received unwelcome news (Note). Writing in the Calgary Herald, columnist Chris Varcoe (“Staggering $17B drop in value of downtown towers fuels search for solutions”) reported that downtown property assessments were down C$1.1 billion in a single year. This is a continuation of a long term trend, in which values of 160 properties dropped by more than two-thirds since 2015. Calgary, headquarters to much of Alberta’s oil industry, has been hard hit by the decline in oil prices and provincial oil production. Over the past year, part of the decline seems likely to be related to lockdowns and the general movement of many people to exurbs and farther.

Varcoe reported the present vacancy rate to be 34%, with five buildings “completely empty.” Ominously, an industry professional said: “The problem is we’re not overbuilt; we are under-demolished.”

Read entire article here.

Note: With the decline of transit and increased auto use, emerging large metropolitan areas have generally not built dense central business districts similar to their World War II predecessors. There are two notable exceptions, Calgary and Charlotte. Cushman and Wakefield indicates that downtown Calgary has about 44 million square feet of office space. This is about twice that of the second largest post-WW2 CBD, in Charlotte. Downtown Calgary has slightly more office space than downtown Philadelphia, with a metropolitan population about four times that of Calgary.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.