Urban Issues

The metropolitan areas that form the “Texas Triangle” —Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio— are emerging as distinctive models of 21st century urbanism.  read more »

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000.  read more »

A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.  read more »

An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides  read more »

Indianapolis was an unlikely candidate to emerge as a midwestern demographic and economic leader. It is an artificially created city, chosen by fiat as a centrally located capital for the state of Indiana.  read more »

Tune out the noise of various tenant-landlord tiffs in our pandemic-altered world and consider this fundamental question that carries actual signal from—of all places—the Broadway stage: What is the purpose of rent control?  read more »

For decades, Canadians moved to the larger cities (census metropolitan areas, or CMAs) with their economic opportunities.  read more »

In September 1977, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced the first major shutdown in the American steel industry. It was closing its largest mill, the Campbell Works, displacing over 10,000 workers.  read more »

Los Angeles has been restored to the position of densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the nation, according to Census Bureau data (complete file).  read more »

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”
— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915” (1973)  read more »