Demographics

In every pursuit these days, “the narrative” seems to be the thing. Tell a story that checks enough of the right boxes in the zeitgeist, the thinking goes, and you can get citizens, taxpayers and consumers to “buy” what you want them to buy.

This is a reality that’s being used against Flyover Country – but one that also provides us with opportunities to flip the script.  read more »

I grew up in the Louisville metro area (Southern Indiana), but somehow never managed to visit Lexington, Kentucky, which is only about 70 miles down the road.

A grant from the Knight Foundation gave me the opportunity to correct that oversight and write an article about Lexington. I’ll admit to a certain selfishness in pitching that idea. I wanted to learn more about Lexington and finally get the chance to visit the city.

Fortunately I was able to get that visit in pre-pandemic. Lisa Adkins, President of the Bluegrass Foundation, even graciously gave me a tour.  read more »

"There should be a real liberal party in this country, and I don't mean a crackpot professional one." – Harry Truman.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden's new climate czar, took a private jet to accept an environmental award in Iceland in 2019.  read more »

California’s coastal urban centers, once the ultimate land of opportunity, suffer notorious traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and a social chasm defined by a shrinking middle class, a small wealthy sector, and a sizable population seemingly locked in poverty.  read more »

We need parks and libraries and town squares for gathering. We also need shops, restaurants, and other commercial amenities.  read more »

Political progressives have an opening to rewrite recent U.S. history, and they don’t intend to stop with the Trump years. The deepest left has already gone way back (as far as the celebrated 1619 Project), but for most social welfare Democrats, it’s enough to erase the stain of Ronald Reagan.  read more »

Donald Trump’s finally gone, but if Joe Biden wants his return to normalcy to be any more successful than his predecessor’s appeal to greatness, he’ll need to take on the real issues dragging red and blue America down: economic torpor, ever increasing inequality, and policies that diminish people’s prospects of making it into or maintaining their positions in the middle class.  read more »

Bill Clinton may have been lionized as the “first black President,” and Barack Obama actually was half African, but no politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His campaign never smoldered, much less caught fire, until he was embraced by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate.  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 »