On October 18, AEI’s Ryan Streeter discussed the changing global urban demographics with a panel of contributors to the forthcoming volume The Future of Cities (AEI, 2023). The panel began by addressing the need for a new perspective on cities, particularly after cities recover from the pandemic.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Francis H Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University, to speak about progressive conservatism.
Latest Research: From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the new report on restoring The California Dream.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
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.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin are joined by Gallup's senior editor, Jeff Jones to discuss US society and economy and the state of the consumer.
New Report: From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the brand new report on restoring The California Dream.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
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.
Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has been a magnet for those seeking wealth. A backwater barely a century ago, with just over 3 million residents compared to nearly 40 million today, the Golden State established dominance over everything from agriculture and film to space travel and the internet.
But new data suggests that the tide may be turning, and a rich hegira is afoot.
Researchers found that 39,000 San Franciscans who had filed federal tax returns for 2018 had moved out of the city before filing 2019 returns, taking away a net of $7 billion in income in one year. A soon-to-be released report from the San Francisco Business Times, sources tell me, will see a similar phenomenon in Silicon Valley.
Once able to hold onto its rich, the Golden State seems to be following the course of high-tax places like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. For years, these cities and states have been oozing billions in tax revenues as wealthy residents fled to the likes of Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee. While California still lags behind New York State in the money-losing sweepstakes, it is catching up: in 2020 the state lost $17.8 billion in tax revenue, with the loss spreading into the Bay Area, whose tech-rich economy historically kept the state solvent.
The specific aim for the hot topic of water abundance is to hold this one-day conference September, 15, 2022 hosting experts from industry, business, and academe to speak on the nuts and bolts of water shortages and the significant and real impact water issues have on our communities.
California policy makers seem to focus a great amount of energy on housing affordability and homelessness issues, which are extremely important, but forget to include related relevant and vital water issues. Lawns are shrinking as our ability to care for lawns and landscape declines due to water shortages, which are literally going down the toilet. Desalinization will likely increase and will be expensive to operate and the price of water will increase to unsustainable levels causing more and more Californians to consider moving to more affordable (and sane) states with better policies and practices. Water is probably the hottest and least understood issue affecting Californians now more than ever
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by President Emeritus of Chapman University, Jim Doti, to discuss the state of the US economy and the recession.
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Related Report:
From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the brand new report on restoring The California Dream.
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.
NASA’s recent decision to scrub their big moon flight — with rescheduling weeks away — is yet another illustration of how this once mighty federal agency has lost its way. It is already 2022 and the space agency has failed to send another person on the moon for a half century. It is far from tackling the more critical project of visiting Mars.
So with NASA locked in bureaucracy, the momentum has shifted to private industry, which increasingly dominates the burgeoning space industry. Here there is a parallel with what historian J. H. Parry called the “Age of Reconnaissance” in which the initial moves for the creation of the modern world economy were state-sponsored, but the development of the global shipping and the establishment of mercantile colonies was private. Many of the boldest explorers of that era were figures like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, privateers seeking profits as well as personal glory.
We are now entering the “Commercial Space Age”, replacing the era of state-led exploration. Today exploration is being driven by billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, and a host of young companies like Space X, Relativity Space, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, which recently announced a mission to explore the gases of Venus.
Government is still a large player in countries as diverse as India, Japan, Russia and Israel. China, which is considering a mile-long spaceship, will not likely allow entrepreneurs to lead its dreams of a galactic mandarinate. But in the West, the drive will not be led to NASA, suffers from what author and space expert Rand Simberg notes calls “risk aversion”.
The reasons for the rise of privateers resonates with that of the sea-going privateers — the lure of lucre. The government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that the space industry contributes approximately $200 billion to the U.S. economy and employs 354,000 people today. New research sees that number growing substantially, and projects the global space economy will be worth $1.0 trillion by 2040. This unscripted opportunity, of course, can expect opposition from the green progressives who dub it just a reflection of capitalism’s flawed obsession with growth.
The once-great state of California is now in a dire condition. With a heatwave now in full force, Governor Gavin Newsom is preparing to cut energy use, which may result in blackouts, brownouts and water rationing.
How did this happen? Ask any of the state’s legacy media, Democrats, and big green non-profits and the answer you’ll get is “climate despair”. But this does not tell us the whole story. Indeed, a key reason for California’s energy shortfall is the state’s harmful green policies; Jerry Brown’s plans to rebuild the state’s water capacity, for example, elicited a hostile green response from a state commission that refused to consider new dams or desalinisation, let alone spending money on already voter-approved new water storage projects. They are even pressuring Washington to demolish four dams in northern California for not being environmentally pure enough.
A similar dunderheadness extends to energy. For the last twenty years, the state has looked toward “green” energy — solar and wind — as the sole acceptable energy source. But despite billions spent, the state continues to struggle with the intermittent nature of solar and wind power. In order to prevent a total electricity shortfall, Governor Newsom — faced with a potentially devastating energy shortage this summer — was forced to reprieve the Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear plant. He has also allowed some gas plants to remain open.
America’s latest bout of realty mania may finally be dying down, as home prices and particularly sales volumes decline after a rise of interest rates. With mortgage payments more costly, and expectations of equity appreciation diminishing, the fees charged by brokers may become a rub again. Five percent off the top, a typical full transaction commission, shouldn’t escape so much notice when prices aren’t rising by double digits each year.
This brings us to one of America’s biggest and most Apple Pie guilds, the residential real-estate sales trade. A few friends or family members may be part of it. The common term is Realtor, although as the capital letter suggests, that is a membership subset of the 3 million Americans who hold state-issued licenses to sell homes. But the Realtors are a big enough subset—roughly half, and likely the most active–to provide a data window into a field that otherwise might be difficult to track.
And the National Association of Realtors latest survey finds that 2021 was a banner year, with median gross income rising 25% (off a lesser dip in 2020, when Covid lockdowns hit early in the year). If $54,430 was the midway point among the 9,220 who self-reported to the questionnaire randomly sent to 176,494 Realtors, one might guess that the better sellers skewed well north of that. And the Realtors said they could have done even better with more to sell.
What if, instead, there were more realty agents competing to do the selling? Does the supply and price of brokerage help shape the real-estate market, or is that market (as this realty consultant and surely many Realtors believe) determined solely by buyers and sellers, leaving the sales professionals simply (and fairly!) to divide a fixed pie?
Occupational licensing covers a quarter of the American workforce. Such a barrier to entry is justified as a protection against physical or financial hazard to others. In residential real estate, the handling of what is usually the biggest household investment would seem to call for a professional floor. Unclear, however, is how high that training and testing standard needs to be, and how much consumers effectively must pay for it. To put the previous paragraph’s question another way: Was the 2021 bounty a notorious rent capture, or just a cyclical blowout?
State licensure data over recent years paints a general picture of a market calling the shots: In the 22 jurisdictions I could see, the salesperson ranks varied widely and in tandem with the economy (big drops around the 2008-09 financial crash, for instance). Brokers, a more credentialed and usually senior status, show less variance and, even in the most recent bullish years, less growth. This may be related to changes in the selling-firm organizations, to “teams” built around one or two notable brokers. Overall, there’s considerable apparent capacity for expansion—Realtor membership in fact was up 50% over the 8 latest years.
Sure, obtaining a license requires instructional time, and renewing that license every couple of years or so can be an administrative chore, but so many people manage this—even part-timers who may not sell anything in a given year—that it’s hard to argue that transactions are being lost for want of agents.
Yet that is what a recent academic paper does, with respect to at least one state. Bobby W. Chung, economist at St. Bonaventure University in New York, found in a paper published this spring in Labour Economics that a tightening of Illinois’ license requirements in 2011 decidedly cut into sales. And, perhaps more significant to the core justification for licensure, his data suggest that more “qualified” sales personnel did not lead to fewer reported abuses of consumers.
Chung noted that the 2011 Illinois revision “was a rare occasion both new entrants and existing practitioners” by ending the salesperson classification and requiring broker license as a first step, while also specifying that no broker could work independently without upgrading to a “managing broker” classification. As a result, after a grace period, salespeople declined from 50,000 to zero, while the broker licenses rose by only 10,000 and managing brokers amounted to 20,000. Hence, a net loss of 20,000 in real-estate sales.
Building on a 1979 study that linked restrictive licensing to property-vacancy durations, Chung concluded, “There was a significant reduction in home sales on average, implying that the decreased agent availability had an immediate consequence on consumers.” And, there was this labor-market effect: “I find that female and novice agents are more likely not to renew the license after the policy.” The new strictures required fees and doubled the training time, some of it at inflexible hours of the day.
Chung’s analysis of disciplinary actions in Illinois real-estate sales, extending five years beyond the reforms, “does not indicate strong evidence of reducing misconduct,” although he cautions that because of statistical challenges in building a multi-state comparison set, “the quality effect warrants further discussions.” This and other work does suggest that factors other than simply adding more training time are more critical to shaping broker ethics.
A minimal competency in transaction procedure and law is desirable in housing sales. The state can certify this, as of course can employment by a brokerage or mentoring in the now-popular sales teams.. Just as is true with a paralegal or physician’s assistant, however, there are many tasks vital to sales that could be performed by someone short of full professional licensure. (Indeed, in states like New York, it is rare for a home deal to close without buyer and seller having a full-fledged lawyer present, on top of the broker and with a separate escrow officer.)
At bottom, does it matter to homebuyers (and sellers) how constrained the supply of sales agents is? Yes, it is possible for abrupt and onerous legislation to affect a state’s experience. But, over a national range, the “heat” of property markets themselves seems to regulate the sales ranks pretty well. And the mixed record so far of discount- brokerage options—some involving algorithmic transaction models, such as Opendoor—leads to doubt about how many consumers cared about breaking the 5% commission mold anyway.
But most of America has had successive generations of barely-interrupted home price appreciation. A sustained bear market might change this picture, and give regulation scholars like Bobby Chung more to reckon with.
In his appraisal of the war between Iraq and Iran, Henry Kissinger famously remarked that “it’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” Increasingly that’s how the upcoming battle between the Trumpian GOP and the woke Democrats seems to many Americans, whose faith the political system, notes Gallup, is at a nadir. Only 7%, for example, express a great deal of confidence in Congress and barely a quarter in the Presidency.
A solid majority of Americans dislike both parties. No surprise here as they continue to alienate all voters outside their base constituency. Under such conditions, a victory by either will simply serve to confirm their political direction ever further from the mainstream and set the conditions for a thumping in 2024.
Instead, it may also be better for each party to take a hit this November. Losing, it turns out, can be the precondition for winning big. Republicans, for example, took to heart the lessons of the Goldwater rout in 1964 and embraced a more moderate, pragmatic Richard Nixon who then won two consecutive elections. Democrats did the same after the 1972 McGovern disaster, shifting closer to the centre and winning big with the original New Democrat, Bill Clinton.
Big victories, sadly, don’t teach anything but hubris. Many Republicans would take a big win — meaning control of the Senate and a big House majority — as a vindication for both their policy agenda and their insane Duce, Donald Trump. Yet the elevation of the widely unpopular Trump, with barely 40% support, may be the best weapon the Democrats have, and is perhaps the one candidate that even the hapless Joe Biden, or even the pathetically ill-suited Kamala Harris, could possibly beat.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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