Heartland

Today, Heartland Forward published new research, "Reshoring America: Can the Heartland Lead the Way?," which finds the U.S. poised for an industrial comeback led by the Heartland and fueled by reshoring, the return of manufacturing centers to the U.S. from abroad.  read more »

Call Your Mother is lame enough as it is. But a major extra shortcoming of ABC’s latest sitcom, which recently debuted with a pilot episode, is that one of its foundations is a banal juxtaposition of Flyover Country with the coasts.

Get this: A central premise of the show is that an empty-nester widow moves to Los Angeles from Iowa to be near her two adult kids who like living in California right now. In that important regard, Call Your Mother is so, well, 2019 – and so heedless of the current zeitgeist.

Anyone who's been in the urbanism game as long as I have (or longer) is probably familiar with the annual Places Rated Almanac, the annual metro area ranking reference produced by David Savageau. First published in 1981, I remember seeing each year's edition in bookstores while I was in high school and college, and it was the first attempt I could remember at evaluating the positives and negatives of place, and ranking them accordingly.  read more »

The mess in Washington underscores the harsh reality that our national fissures aren't going to be healed any time soon – if ever. Among other things, that means America will have to progress on the local and regional levels, where people actually live, whatever happens on the fractured plane of national identity and politics.

Call it a new localism.  read more »

Happy New Year, everybody.

My latest column in Governing magazine is about another possible piece of fallout from the coronavirus, namely the undermining of the regional unity and solidarity that metropolitan areas have worked hard to build in recent years. Here’s an excerpt:  read more »

Now that Trump has been edged out of office, Joe Biden may emerge as the harbinger of a brighter, better blue future or as a version of Konstantin Chernenko, the aged timeserver who ran the Soviet Union in its dying days. To succeed, he will have to confront massive pessimism about America’s direction, with some 80 percent thinking the country is out of control. The Atlantic last year compared the U.S. to a “failed state,” while The Week predicts “dark days ahead.”  read more »

For the past half-century, California has dominated America’s tech industry. From the development of precision farming to the incubation of aircraft, space, semiconductors and computer systems, this state has emerged time and again at the cutting edge of future industries.  read more »

Denizens of the Great Lakes watershed long have looked at those five vast, deep, shimmering pools not only as an unmatched economic and cultural resource but also as the ultimate trump card.  read more »

A crazy week with a *ton* of new items I'll only be able to partially get through in this post, including some followups to last week's post about California tech companies moving to Texas:  read more »

On December 1st, Hewlett-Packard–which has been headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1939–announced that its corporate headquarters would move to Houston.  read more »