Urban Issues

California is a Bastion of Innovation Marred by Deep Inequality. Is That America's Future?

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Everyone seems to be California dreaming these days. Much of America, particularly its red parts, see California as a hopeless dystopia best understood as everything the nation should avoid. Meanwhile, for the progressive Left and many around Joe Biden, California is the Mecca, a great role model being attacked by jealous reactionaries.

As in so many cases, both sides have a piece of the truth.

To be sure, despite the many well-documented problems, California still has an impressive economy that will shape the country's and the world's economic future—through the entertainment, space, critical software and social media industries and international trade. A spirit of experimentation and innovation persists across the state and fuels this industriousness.

Sadly, along with new technical and cultural innovations, the everyday reality outside the glamor zone presents a prospect as cautionary as it is aspirational, a harbinger of innovation marred by massive social inequality.

For the parade of startups and youthful billionaires coexists with the country's highest cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, the largest gap between the middle class and the rich, the most crowded housing and second lowest homeownership rate.

California once projected the essence of our common national dream. Today, its leaders increasingly see it as a kind of post-America, with its own racial, gender and environmental standards. It's an approach welcome in Malibu or Palo Alto, but most Californians are left coping with the nation's worst homeless crisis and rising crime. A ride on Highway 33 through the impoverished expanses of the Central Valley reveals a vast and bleak landscape of abandoned cars, dilapidated houses and threadbare shops.

The pandemic has accelerated California's class divide, vastly enriching the tech elite and financial oligarchs but leaving California with the nation's highest unemployment rate and making it the second hardest place to find a job.

Silicon Valley was once among the most egalitarian regions in the nation; today, as it has become more aggressively woke and taken to massively funding progressive Democrats, it has become one of the most segregated places in the country, what CityLab has described as "a region of segregated innovation."

Times may be flush for venture capitalists and serial tech entrepreneurs, but they're not so great for those who clean their own buildings and work in the food service industry. Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley's residents rely on public or private financial assistance. African Americans and Latinos have seen declines in real incomes. The one percent pay roughly half of the state's income tax and windfalls from IPOs fund the state's ultra-generous pensions and an ever expanding welfare state—and yet, none of this creates good jobs.

Over the past decade, 80 percent of all new jobs in California paid under the median income and half under $40,000 annually, a poverty wage in the high cost state. New employment in manufacturing, construction and professional business service jobs lags national averages and is well behind rivals like Texas or Arizona. To make matters worse, California has also decided to eliminate the state's once thriving oil and gas sector, a move that according to a study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, threatens over 366,000 high-paying, largely blue-collar jobs, about half of them held by people of color.

Even the tech sector is now under threat with growth shifting to other states and major players like Oracle, HP Enterprises and Tesla all leaving the state. Since the onset of the pandemic, many leading tech firms expect a large proportion of their workforce to work remotely, with workers now increasingly seeking out cheaper, more scenic, and less congested climes. California now ranks 50^th—in other words, last—on a list of u-haul destinations.

When I moved to California in 1971, few could imagine that this state—in my mind the most dynamic place in North America for the last half century—would lose its magnetic appeal. And yet, most California counties have been losing young people; over the past 20 years, Los Angeles, once the avatar of youth, has seen its population under 25 fall by a remarkable three quarters of a million.

Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.

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.

Photo: Ian Abbott, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Next American Cities, a New Report from Urban Reform Insitute

Charles Blain — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

The urban form has shifted throughout history. This has been critical to its success. Today we are on the cusp of another transition, ushered in by new technologies and changing demographics, and accelerated by a devastating pandemic. Although these forces affect all geographies, the best chance of success and growth lies in what we define as The Next American City.

This newly released report from Urban Reform Institute examines the places that offer opportunity for a revitalized American Dream for more citizens. The introduction is excerpted below:

Can cities withstand the social, economic, and migratory challenges they face today, or will a new model prove to be the answer for Americans seeking better opportunities for their families? Cities will continue to thrive, but they seem politically and economically not well-suited for middle- and working-class families of all races.

The Next American City offers an answer to the problem plaguing those living in and around major cities. Offering a combination of affordability, amenities, and proximity to the large cities, but without the burdensome, heavy-handed regulations of local government or many of the social ills running rampant in our cities, these places – like the Woodlands and Bridgeland – are quickly shaping up to be the urban destinations of the future.

The locale of places of opportunity for new citizens and minorities have changed. The pandemic has led to people seeking more space which has driven the cost of housing. Couple that with the issues of crime, blight, cost of living, and standard of living in our large cities, it’s no surprise that the urban cores are beginning to dwindle and that homeownership rates in the suburbs far outpace that of the cities.

These Next American Cities provide opportunities that many families thought were long gone.

America needs a revitalization of what was the American Dream. The desires remain the same, opportunity, affordability, and safety. What we need are more communities that address that aspiration.

After visiting burgeoning communities across the country, interviewing industry experts and residents, and looking at data, we came up with the Next American City concept. Places that offer everything, and more, that our major cities do, but minimize the downsides. As Americans continue to seek out new, affordable, safe alternatives to the status quo, New American Cities could become centers of growth — if they do not fall prey to the policies and politics that have driven people away from urban cores.

View/download the full report here

Charles Blain, CEO of Urban Reform Institute, has focused on free market solutions to urban issues and creating opportunity for all in America's metropolitan areas. Charles has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, The Hill, and Wired. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Houston, and serves on the boards of Prison Entrepreneurship Program, Good Policy Society, and Texas Families First. In 2021, Charles was appointed to a 4-year term to the Texas State Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Ultimate Agglomeration Diseconomy: The Standard of Living

Wendell Cox — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Important new ground was broken by Judge Clark, Senior Director of and Research at the Cicero Institute in his Breakthrough Institute Journal essay. In “Sprawl is Good: The Environmental Case for Suburbia,“ he topples foundational assumptions underlying the planning battle against urban expansion (the ideological term is “urban sprawl”).

Issuing a challenge, Glock talks of the “Long Triumph of Sprawl,” describing a “clear global and long-term preference,” while the “pandemic has only made the shift toward the modern, sprawling city more rapid and obvious.”

Glock suggest that “instead of warring against sprawling cars, planners and environmentalist should recognize how the green spaces of suburbia allied to autonomous electric vehicles in green single-family houses can provide both the affordability and sustainability most Americans crave.“

Glock starts with “agglomeration effects,” often cited to justify higher densities and to discourage suburbanization.

Noting that there can be negative agglomeration effects, Glock offers congestion, crime, and pollution as examples. He says that: “that these problems explain why, as technology has evolved, people try to get more of the benefits of living near each other — the agglomeration effects — without the problems of living directly on top of one another.” This has been the historic driver of urban expansion.

Glock notes that “sprawling and car-dependent cities have grown more rapidly than dense ones for decades and are far more affordable.” The former is explained by the latter. People are moving to sprawling, car-dependent cities because they are affordable.

In a strong rebuke of the most obvious densification, Glock shows that taller buildings are more expensive: “Going from five to ten stories increases the cost of each square foot by over 50 percent.” He explains, “Those costs are the result of more—and more energy-hungry—material,” a point often emphasized by Tony Recsei, President of Save our Suburbs in Sydney.

But there’s more. Glock cites the inherent climate benefits of California, which are muted since its s prohibitive cost of living has repelled 2.7 million net domestic migrants since 2020, as many people as live in the city of Chicago. Glock points out that:

“Every home not built, no matter where it is located, is keeping at least two more people out of California, which is effectively doubling those persons’ carbon emissions. It is difficult to imagine many laws with such a deleterious climate impact, made worse because it exacerbates what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has called California’s “Green Jim Crow.”

In many metros, agglomeration economies have been swamped by diseconomies that have reverberated to the detriment of people, especially the middle class, and worse, those with lower incomes.

Ultimate Agglomeration Diseconomy: A Lower Standard of Living

On balance, agglomeration effects should be positive, and people should be beneficiaries.

In Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that the future of the middle-class is threatened by costs of living that are rising far faster than incomes. Moreover, OECD indicated that “Housing has been the main driver of rising middle-class expenditure,” and that the largest housing cost increases are in the costs of ownership rather than rents.

This was not always so. As late as 1970, there was slight variation in housing affordability between major US metropolitan areas. Virtually all major metropolitan areas of the United States were affordable — with median multiples (price-to-income ratios) of 3.0 or less. Australia, Canada and New Zealand retained similar affordability until the early 1990s.

This was to end, as housing and land use regulations were strengthened, and especially with the urban growth boundaries and greenbelts of urban containment policy. The planning literature indicates, for example, that urban growth boundaries not only drive up land values throughout the contained urban area, but also that they are intended to (Figure 1). Advocates discount this effect, assuming that densities would increase, lowering per square foot land costs and preserving housing affordability.

In reality, ruinous housing affordability losses followed. Median multiples jumped from 3.0 or less to pre-pandemic levels of 7 to 9 (2019) in San Francisco, San Jose, Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Diego and to 5 or more in the Seattle, Denver and Portland markets. Median multiples exceeded eleven in Vancouver and Sydney, over eight in Auckland, Toronto, and Melbourne, and over five in Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane. Further, house price increases were concentrated in land cost, with little real construction cost increase.

These developments were consistent with analysis by OECD, which still supported urban containment, but warned that sufficient developable land be available within urban growth boundaries to retain housing affordability (in Rethinking Urban Sprawl: Moving Toward Sustainable Cities). Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs warned that preserving a competitive land market was a necessary to retain housing affordability.

It is hard to imagine a more destructive agglomeration effect than reducing the standard of living. Yet this is what the loss of housing affordability does. The middle-income material standard of living is lowered by an excessively prohibitive cost of living. Lower-income households are even more disadvantaged, many losing their independence, cosigned to subsidized housing and other welfare programs.

The Standard of Living Important Enough to Save

Modern affluence may be the supreme accomplishment of humanity over the last two centuries, with its elevation of a large, property-owning middle class. This was most evident in the United States, Canada, and Australia, as well as in the United Kingdom, Japan, Europe, South Korea and has spread to China and beyond. This is an advance that should not be sacrificed.

Appropriately, Glock concludes, “environmentalists should embrace the same future that most Americans have already chosen.”

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.

Photo: La Citta Vita, via Flickrunder CC 2.0 License.

Why There Is an Acceleration of Highland Park Homes Being Torn Down

Douglas Newby — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

For decades, Highland Park, a wealthy older suburb two miles from downtown Dallas, homes have been torn down, however, this year this activity has accelerated. Perhaps new residents --- the great influx of home buyers from California to Dallas has exacerbated some problems, with the most troubling being the escalation of Highland Park homes in Dallas being torn down. It is not just the raw numbers of people moving to Dallas. Usually, corporate relocations move hundreds of middle level employees and a few executives. During the last two years we have seen corporate relocations, but also company owners or firm partners who are moving to Dallas but leaving their businesses in New York or California. These are the types of home buyers where money is no obstacle and if they can’t find what they want to live in, they have the resources to buy a home, tear it down and build a new one, adding to the acceleration of Highland Park teardowns.

There is no way to prevent every historic home from being torn down, but we can slow the demise of historically and architecturally significant homes. First, we need to understand why Highland Park Texas, homes are torn down.

Some Highland Park Homes are Torn Down for Good Reasons

Every decade, as our city and neighborhoods evolve, we can expect some Highland Park homes to be torn down. Some for good reason. Sometimes we are put out of our architectural visual misery. Some of the homes torn down are not architect-designed homes from the 1920s, but a builder home from the 1970s that had replaced a good home designed 50 years earlier. It is time for some inferior homes to go. Some homes were originally very nice homes that became irrevocably mangled through stylistic renovations and additions. The architecture of the neighborhood improves when these architecturally mangled homes get torn down. Other homes, excruciatingly small, are surrounded and dwarfed by gracious large homes. On occasion, the continuity and architectural flow of the street is compromised by one outlying small house. We have seen examples of inferior or uninspired homes replaced with exceptional homes that add to the rich architectural landscape.

It is Tragic When Exquisite Homes are Torn Down—Especially for No Good Reason

Architects Fooshee & Cheek trained under architect Hal Thomson and continued to design architecturally significant homes like this one at 4208 Beverly Drive. It was torn down for no other reason than the listing agent and seller thought it would be easier to sell the property as a vacant lot. The lot was on the market for over five years before someone bought it. Many homebuyers wished for the house to remain standing as it was the perfect size for the lot and had great architectural style and merit.

On the other hand, exquisite and timeless homes designed by our best Dallas architects have been torn down for no good economic reason. These architecturally significant and historic homes have been torn down because of a lack of knowledge, lack of preservation advocacy, and teardown pressure from real estate agents, contractors, architects, and even, at times, the Township of Highland Park.

Perfect Storm for Highland Park Homes to be Torn Down

For decades, homebuyers have desired vacant properties on which to build their dream homes. But in an established neighborhood like Highland Park this requires another home to be torn down. For many years, this was not a significant problem in Highland Park. Years ago, the homes being torn down were the low-hanging fruit. These were the homes with the least aesthetic and economic value. These insignificant Highland Park homes were rarely missed, and their absence was often applauded. Better Highland Park homes often replaced inferior homes and the better homes were not outlandishly larger than the Highland Park homes torn down. But that fortunate dynamic has changed.

“Homes That Make Us Happy” Create More Demand for Land

I said five years ago in my TEDx Talk, Homes That Make Us Happy, that land and its site would become increasingly important. The pandemic --- as well as the rise of inner-city crime and the disorders of 2020 --- accelerated this prediction. Dallas residents moved from denser neighborhoods and more vibrant neighborhoods to neighborhoods with more land and a calmer environment.

Homeowners who desired a larger home desired proportionally more land which precipitated landowners assembling more than one lot for a new home. Now, a new home might require two Highland Park homes to be torn down to obtain the desired land. The multiple parks, beautiful boulevards and tree-lined streets found in Highland Park are like a magnet to those moving from the increasingly dysfunctional East Coast and West Coast cities. Despite the high prices in Highland Park, these prices were relatively modest compared to California prices. In addition, the tax savings that someone moving from Los Angeles would achieve by moving to Texas, would almost pay for a home in Highland Park. The surge of East and West Coast homebuyers created a disruptive demand for land and homes in Highland Park, causing many additional homes to be torn down.

Architecturally Significant Preston Hollow Homes are Also Being Torn Down

Architect Scott Lyons for a time worked with beloved architect O’Neil Ford. When O’Neil Ford became more involved in designing commercial buildings, art and architecture patrons like Eugene and Margaret McDermott retained Scott Lyons to design an architecturally significant home for themselves. This magnificent Texas Modern home was designed for business titan Grant Fitts with a refined aesthetic quality and commercial grade construction. The primary home was 12,000 square feet and the guest house was an additional 3,000 square feet. It had been recently renovated and landscaped. This Preston Hollow estate home at 10240 Gaywood Road in the Preston Hollow estate area was torn down in 2021.

The same phenomena can be seen in Preston Hollow, which is eight miles from the heart of downtown Dallas, and two miles north from Highland Park. Preston Hollow is an estate area where most lots have at least one acre, where in Highland most of the lots are under one acre with the majority far smaller. Preston Hollow is in the elite private school corridor whereas Highland Park has its own HPISD school district with some of the best public schools in Texas.

There have also been many architecturally significant homes in Preston Hollow that have been torn down. A perfect example is a 12,000 square foot Scott Lyons architect-designed home in perfect shape on Gaywood Road in Mayflower Estates. It was torn down because it was on 2-1/2 acres of land adjacent to homes on pretty land. These Preston Hollow Dallas homes that get torn down do not receive the same attention because the homes are spread out and do not have the same 100-year-old mystique of Highland Park.

Big Homes Torn Down Bring More Attention

We notice when big homes are torn down. Large Highland Park homes make a bigger impact than when smaller houses are torn down. California buyers, along with Dallas buyers, have an appetite for large lots. Often, the grandest old homes in Highland Park are on the grandest lots. As a result, the largest historic homes in Highland Park have always been the most vulnerable for being torn down. For generations, these grand homes have been admired and enjoyed. It is only natural when one of these architecturally significant homes and sentimental favorites are torn down in Highland Park, there is immediate Highland Park community grief.

California Homebuyers Have No Sentiment for Iconic Highland Park Homes

When someone is raised in Highland Park and every day as a child they play in an architecturally significant home or ride their bike by an architecturally or historically significant home, they develop a real affection for that house, and the whole terroir of the neighborhood. Years later, when it came time for these children in Highland Park to buy a home of their own, they would be more reluctant to tear down a home they always loved. In contrast, out-of-town buyers have no sentiment for iconic homes and no prior knowledge of the favorite homes in Highland Park, a large lot underneath the house becomes the sole focus of these buyers.

Real Estate Agents Have Never Had the Financial Incentive to Save a Home When They Can Sell Just the Lot

Real estate agents have never had the financial incentive to sell a home when they can sell just the lot for almost as much money. When selling a lot, an agent only has to tell a buyer the lot dimensions, and the buyer can immediately decide and purchase the lot. For an agent to sell the home to a buyer who would renovate it, the agent would have to spend time and resources on marketing the home, arranging financing, inspections, and renovation bids. The few percentage points of commission that a real estate agent receives on a higher price for the seller is insignificant when compared to the time and cost of receiving the commission on selling just the lot. However, in contrast to a real estate agent, a seller usually thinks an extra $500,000 to $1 million is a significant amount of money if they can obtain that much more from a homebuyer versus a lot of buyers.

Architects Also Have an Incentive for Existing Homes to be Torn Down

Architects also have an incentive to advise a potential homebuyer that it is more cost effective to tear down a house and build a new home. Architects also get to create their own design, which they prefer. New construction design does not have the regulatory and physical risks of renovation design and it is more profitable. I have seen even the sincerest preservation architects, when asked to work on a renovation design for an older home, tell their potential client that they can design a new home with the same historic design for less money than renovating and expanding the historic home. I also have seen award-winning architects tell clients they are better off tearing down an architecturally significant period modern home so they can design a new modern home.

Contractors Also Encourage Homes to be Torn Down

Contractors who are hired to renovate a home may start on the project and then a few months into the project convince the homebuyer they are better off to abort the renovation and build a new home. Most builders prefer to build new homes rather than renovate old ones. Building new homes is more profitable and they come with less risk. Builders add additional pressure on homeowners for historic and architecturally significant homes to be torn down.

Highland Park Township Contributes to Homes Being Torn Down

The Township of Highland Park is another culprit. While the Highland Park town management says they are interested in preserving the existing housing stock, their regulations and construction time limits discourage preservation. To extensively renovate a historically and architecturally significant Highland Park home often takes more than the maximum time limit of two years that a renovation permit allows. The Township of Highland Park levees a $2,000 per day fine on an owner if the architect and contractor cannot complete the project during this time period. Being faithful to the original architecture and sensitive to the compatible renovation design takes talent and time. The onerous building codes, retrofitting requirements, and renovation time limits punish the homeowner and create greater hardships on the builder and architect. It is unfortunate when a conscientious homeowner renovating an architecturally significant home is faced with a bureaucratic entanglement and uncertainty of having to apply for a new building permit or pay a $2,000 per day fine when everyone knows from the beginning that quality renovation will take more than two years on a significant project.

There are many who would like the Township of Highland Park to prohibit homes being torn down. A simpler and more reasonable request would be to ask the Township of Highland Park to make it easier and less onerous to renovate a home in Highland Park.

A Strategy Is Needed to Preserve Highland Park Homes

With these pressures from all directions to tear down Highland Park homes, there needs to be a strategy that is embraced to preserve Highland Park homes. Many Highland Park homes should be saved, can be saved, and should not be torn down. In my next blog article, I will propose a practical strategy that would save Highland Park Texas homes and homes in towns and cities across the country, Historic homes anchor a neighborhood and the city to its origins and help illuminate its evolution and future. There are great homes built in every era, but a void in any architectural era caused by teardowns is a slash mark on the graceful architectural and aesthetic evolution of a city.

Douglas Newby is a national award-wining real estate broker who writes about real estate, cities, architecture and Organic Urbansim. He gave the TEDx Talk Homes That Make Us Happy. You can read more about him and his work on his website Architecturally SignificantHomes: DougNewby.com and on his blog DouglasNewby.com.

Lead photo: The Godfather of Dallas architecture, architect Hal Thomson, designed this neoclassical home that was built in 1922 on Beverly Drive in Highland Park, Texas. For 100 years this was an iconic architecturally significant home that personified the grace of Highland Park. Even though it was 9,000 square feet and renovated in 2000 by noted architect Cole Smith, it was on .84 acres, which made it vulnerable to be torn down. It was torn down in November of 2021.

Trouble in Paradise: The Crumbling California Model

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Some horrified conservatives dismiss California as the progressive dystopia, bound for bankruptcy and, let’s hope, growing irrelevance. Progressives, for their part, hail the Golden State as the avatar of a better future, the role model for a new, more environmentally friendly and socially just economic order. They often dismiss critiques as conservative misinformation.

Yet California is not doomed, at least in the near term, nor is it anything like a model of social democracy. As long as its tech oligarchs produce enormous profits and generate wealth, California remains fiscally flush for the near term, and the evolving economy, long on digitization and constant entertainment, works to the state’s historic strengths. Key industries such as space and biomedical research also offer promise.

The big problem with the California model is that it does not work for most Californians, who suffer from the highest poverty rate (cost of living adjusted) in the country. Despite being home to three of the nation’s four most expensive housing markets, California has among the lowest cost-adjusted median income of any state, as demographer Wendell Cox notes. Although not particularly hard hit by pandemic fatalities, California continues to recover more slowly than the rest of the states and now suffers the highest unemployment rate in the country — including nine of the 16 metros with the greatest joblessness. Even as the tech oligarchy has reaped record profits and expanded its wealth to unprecedented levels, California ranks as the second-worst place to find a job of all the states. Thank God for Hawaii!

A New Economic Model?

Flush from his recall triumph, Governor Gavin Newsom, along with the legislature, seems determined to double down on his attempt to shape California as the model for the progressive future. He claims that our state is “the envy of the world” and the model of social justice. “Unlike the Washington plutocracy,” he boasts, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope.”

We can see, in aggregate numbers, some justification for crowing. A writer at Bloomberg claims that the state has “the best economy” in the world, pointing to the bloated stock prices of the major tech firms, soaring home values, and the enormous wealth creation accruing to a relative handful. Other writers insist that California will continue to dominate most of its key industries, owing to its innovation and capital resources.

Yet it’s time now to see what California’s “success” is all about. It reflects a new kind of economy — dominated by a few large companies, with an elite workforce, a large service class, and a population increasingly dependent on wealth redistribution. This emerging oligarchic regime, however progressive it likes to label itself, is more feudal than egalitarian, more hierarchical than competitive, financed largely by the same tech giants who help fund Newsom’s successful defeat of the recall.

For most, the reality on the ground is increasingly challenging. The state is now the second-most unaffordable state for home-buyers, a particular challenge for Millennials, and it suffers the highest rate of “doubling up” — only our friend Hawaii does worse. California has the largest gap between middle and upper wage quartiles in the nation, and it has a level of inequality greater than that of Mexico and closer to that of Central American countries such as Guatemala and Honduras than to such “progressive” developed counties as Canada and Norway. According to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, 20 percent of state wealth is held within 30 zip codes that account for just 2 percent of the population. Less than 33 percent of state wealth is held within 1,350 zip codes that house 75 percent of Californians.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.

Photo: On the street in Pomona, California by Russ Allison Loar via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

U.S. Road Conditions and Performance in 2020

Randal OToole — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 20:28:58 -0500

While Americans drove their cars only 84 percent as many miles in 2020 as in 2019, according to data recently published by the Federal Highway Administration, they drove semi-trucks 101 percent as many miles. These and other data are from the 2020 Highway Statistics, an annual compilation of data on the condition, use, and financial status of the nation’s highway network.

Click here to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Unlike the annual National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration releases as a group of two dozen or so tables together each fall, the Federal Highway Administration releases Highway Statistics incrementally. To date, it has released most of the 2020 tables relating to the extent and performance of highways, but very few financial tables. This policy brief will review some of the non-financial tables that have been released.

Much of the data are divided into functional systems, which include interstate freeways, other freeways, other principal arterials, minor arterials, major collectors, minor collectors, and local roads and streets. These are further broken down into urban and rural. Over time, the number of urban roads has grown, but not entirely because of new construction: some of the growth is due to expansion of urban areas. For example, in many years the number of rural interstate freeways declines because some of the highways have been reclassified as urban roads.

Urban Transit and Driving

One of the tables in Highway Statistics shows the amount of driving people did in each of each of the nation’s 493 urban areas of more than 50,000 people. This can be compared with transit data for those same urban areas to reveal the pandemic’s influence on travel. A table below shows the results for the nation’s largest urban areas; a downloadable file shows the results for all urban areas.

To make the table, a few adjustments were necessary. Most important, the National Transit Database presents passenger-miles for the fiscal years of each transit agency, but I wanted calendar year data to compare with Highway Statistics. The transit data also includes passenger trips by month that can be totaled by calendar year. I converted calendar year trips to passenger miles by multiplying the number of trips carried by each agency and mode by the average length of each trip (passenger miles divided by trips) in the 2019 and 2020 databases.

Using this method, the number of passenger miles carried by transit in calendar year 2019 was 54.14 billion. This compares with 54.10 billion carried in transit agency fiscal years 2019. Similarly, the number of passenger miles carried in calendar year 2020 was 23.46 billion compared with 31.55 billion in fiscal years 2020. The larger difference in 2020 is because most transit agency fiscal years included only three to six months of the pandemic.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Richard Klein, via Flickrunder CC 2.0 License.

The Carpetbagger's Guide to Homeownership

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

In March I bought a modest house in Madison, Wisconsin as a rental property. I worked with good local professionals to bring that house up to a better standard and in July I found excellent high quality tenants. We have cordial relations and I’m confident they feel they’re getting excellent value for their money and are happy in their new home. That property is now contributing to my long term diversified retirement plan. Along the way I took an aging home that needed some love and gave it new life.

Then in October, much to my surprise, I bought a very similar house right across the street from the first one. I’m now employing the same group of local trades to renovate it as well. If all goes to plan it should be rented by spring to equally qualified and respectable tenants.

In a perfect world I’d much prefer to use my financial resources to build genuinely affordable new housing which society desperately needs. But this isn’t a perfect world. It’s decidedly imperfect. I learned that the hard way. So I’m essentially reaching back into the past and shining up the leftovers from a previous era.

My real estate agent Ben was instrumental in these transactions. Not only did he identify the right properties for me, but he helped assemble a team of trusted trades to upgrade the mechanical systems, paint, install solid wood floors, new appliances, countertops, look after the landscape, and so on. I honestly couldn’t have done any of this without his guidance or the great people he introduced me to. The first project was such a smooth experience that it gave me the confidence to move forward with the second sooner than I might have planned.

Ben recently invited me to be on his podcast on the topic of real estate investing. I hesitated. I didn’t want to be perceived as the token out-of-state carpetbagger driving up housing costs for locals and pushing up rents. The problem, of course, is I might be exactly that… So I asked if we could take a different approach.

Instead of me talking about my real estate activities as a comfortably middle aged guy with some extra cash to deploy, what if we had a conversation about how I first bought property when I was much younger and infinitely poorer? If I somehow managed to buy property in a crazy expensive place like San Francisco on a super tight budget that might help people in Madison explore their own options in a more moderate economic environment.

There are alternative routes to acquiring real estate for those feeling the squeeze. Being angry at investors or landlords doesn’t get people into the housing they need. Understanding the institutional structures of real estate and exploring creative work-arounds just might. I’ve written about my adventures in property before, but the subject matter is worth repeating. These options may not appeal to everyone, but they worked for me.

I’ll start off by saying I’m a housekeeper. I clean other people’s homes for a living. Are we clear on this? I’m a maid. I grew up in an unstable household that limped from crisis to crisis. I dropped out of high school, left home, and moved to the other side of the country. Leaving allowed me to find more fertile soil to plant myself, and my absence meant one less problem for the family to deal with.

When I first arrived in San Francisco I lived in a variety of “alternative” accommodations including this little 9’ x 18’ (15 m²) garden shed behind an old Victorian in a questionable neighborhood. There was a toilet and a shower stall in a little closet in one corner, and a minimal kitchenette in the other. There was just enough room for a bed and a cafe size table. It was affordable on my housekeeper’s income and I loved having a diminutive place of my own.

It was also sub rosa and illegal like most truly affordable housing in San Francisco. Nothing about this place met minimum code requirements or zoning parameters, yet it was perfectly safe and healthy. I sanded and varnished the old wood floors, painted the walls, installed a few cabinets, and generally personalized the space while I lived there. It was a fantastic spot that I’m still a bit nostalgic about decades later. The shed was never about the things I didn’t have. It was about the freedom it gave me.

Read the rest of this piece at Granola Shotgun.

Johnny Sanphillippo is an amateur architecture buff with a passionate interest in where and how we all live and occupy the landscape, from small rural towns to skyscrapers and everything in between. He travels often, conducts interviews with people of interest, and gathers photos and video of places worth talking about (which he often shares on Strong Towns). Johnny writes for Strong Towns, and his blog, Granola Shotgun.

Vehicle Miles Traveled vs. Pay-at-the-Pump Gas Tax

Thomas Buckley — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 20:28:59 -0500

For some years now, policy wonks have proposed replacing the pay-at-the-pump gas tax with a “vehicle miles traveled” system. The reasons take a few different paths but are mostly centered around the issue of the fairness of “user fees” compared to purchase taxation, an idea made more relevant by the proliferation of non-gas using electric cars.

A few states have already and/or are conducting pilot programs to test the idea and others – and quite possibly the federal government – are looking at how a VMT tax would not only work from a practical standpoint but also part of a drive to modify driving habits.

As the concept is definitely gaining steam – or electricity, as it were – amongst transportation planning types and certain politicians, it may be best to look at a general primer on the subject and the terms and ideas that will soon be coming to a legislative body near you.

Basically, a VMT would be just that – a tax based on how many miles a vehicle moves over the roadways instead of paying a tax every time the gas tank is filled. Proponents say it is intended to be “cost neutral” for the typical driver.

For example, right now – and these are general AVERAGES – Americans drive each personal car about 12,500 miles per year. At a typical miles per gallon figure of 25, that means that – using a national usage-weighted average of about 57 cents a gallon in state and federal gas taxes - a typical motorist will pay about $285 per year, or 2.3 cents per mile, in taxes each year. (It must be stressed that these are national averages – for example, in California the per mile tax works out to more than double at 4.8 cents. Also, these numbers do not apply to diesel fuel usage, though any VMT would include those vehicle types, presumably at a higher per mile rate). Most VMT concepts, depending upon the state, have so far floated a per-mile number in a range close to the current cost as their target.

That is the basic top-line concept– but exactly how it would be implemented is not at all clear.

There are five basic ways the VMT per-mile rates could be calculated:

Straight miles – turn the car on, drive 10 miles – no matter where or when – and pay 10 miles in taxes.
Highway/major artery miles – no (or a lower) fee for driving around town but the rate would ramp up when one entered a designated freeway and/or major artery.
Congestion miles – a lower tax on any driving during “off-peak” hours, but miles driven during typically heavy traffic times for that specific roadway would be taxed at a higher rate.
Time miles – Similar to congestion miles, but not tied to specific traffic patterns or roadways, but just the time of the trip – middle of the night lower tax, mornings higher tax, etc.
Cordon miles – Driving in certain areas and/or on certain roads would be taxed more while driving elsewhere would be taxed less (this could also be done not just by the mile but also an added flat tax/fee upon entering a particular area or based on how long the vehicle remained in the area).

In theory, the following taxing scenarios could occur on a single 50-mile drive.

Under “straight miles only,” it would be about 50 miles of tax and that would be that.
Under highway/arterial miles, it would be the miles you drove on those designated roadways. The same would hold true for congestion and/or time miles, but the tax rate could vary depending upon when you take the trip.

How cordon mile pricing works is rather intricate. Under a VMT system, a government agency (local, state and/or federal) would pre-determine which areas – not specific roads – have the most problematic traffic and charge additional fees when the driver is in that neighborhood (akin to the charge – about $20 - drivers in London, England now must pay each time they cross the imaginary line into the hub of the city). If in this speculative 50-mile trip, the vehicle passed through one – or even multiple - cordon areas, the additional fees would be added onto the regular rate (cordon taxes could also be imposed as flat per-entry fee or as a stand-alone charge, separate from and/or in addition to any gas tax replacement scheme).

And now for the complicated part – each of these types of fees could be imposed separately or be combined in some fashion depending upon the system installed. For example, a distance plus cordon fee would result in a combination of actual miles traveled with where those miles were traveled; a distance plus time fee could mean that the driver is paying 2 cents a mile when they leave and 4 cents when they arrive, a miles plus congestion model would charge based on which route is taken.

As to cordon fees, they are usually justified not as an overall gas tax replacement but as a way to decrease traffic in highly congested areas and are the most likely “add-on” concept. Most – but not all – cordon proposals discussed so far exempt people who live in the area from paying the fee for that area.

And now for another complicated part - how any VMT would be actually charged is not yet determined. The pilot programs have relied on highly motivated volunteers self-reporting mileages, but it is highly improbable that such a system could work on any large scale as it would rely solely on the memory and honesty of the average taxpayer.

Almost certainly the implementation would involve either a transponder in each vehicle or an app that drivers could download and sync to their car. Either system would track exactly where and when a car was driving and calculate the tax based on whichever fee structure(s) is being used. If a transponder is used, it would simply trace the car moving while the smart phone app would, presumably, track the location of both the car and the specific driver.

Both the app and transponder solutions raise serious data privacy issues . Even VMT proponents admit that is a major stumbling block to eventual implementation, as the chances that the public will embrace allowing the government to know exactly where they are at any given time is minimal, to say the least. There have been various privacy protection proposals made, but, given the interconnected nature of society in general and the VMT concept specifically, it is not clear that any amount of data security assurance would be enough for the public.

And now for another complicated part - beyond the personal liberty issues are the myriad ways the system, once in place, could be modified to benefit certain people, potentially negating its core concept of everyone paying their proper proportional part.

First, there is the income differential issue. Some envision a sliding scale component to the tax, meaning that lower-income residents would actually pay a reduced per mile fee. In other words, if a person receives any public assistance, they could automatically qualify for lower per mile charge. Alternatively, the system could simply compare vehicle registration information to state and/or federal tax return data to determine who gets the discount, etc. (and, yes, that could mean the DMV and the IRS would have to closely “cooperate,” perhaps a scary thought).

Other fee modifications – which could cause the concept to be viewed not strictly as a fair tax but as an attempt to leverage the system to modify public behavior – could include:

Fuel efficiency – if it is decided to use the fee to encourage cars that use fewer fossil fuels, then a discount could be applied to cars that getter better mileage and/or some form of the current discount drivers of electrics – which pay no gas taxes - now receive could be kept.
Age of vehicle – to weed them out older, more polluting vehicles could face a higher per mile tax.
Single car discount – to encourage carpooling and just driving less in general, a household that has only one vehicle could pay a lower rate.
Transit discount – a person who regularly uses public transit (say they have an annual bus pass, for example) could also see a different rate.
High use rates – to discourage “over driving” – read commuting – the rate could be a sliding one that charges more per mile the more you drive (3 cents for the first 15,000 miles, 4 cents beyond that, etc.)

It should be noted that each of the above concepts would/could be applied to commercial vehicles and diesel trucks under different rate structures and accounting for other factors inherent to those types of uses.

A significant concern is how a VMT would affect people based upon where they choose to live.

If a VMT is implemented as a one-to-one revenue swap, the impacts would be relatively similar to the current gas tax system. However, the likelihood of that being the case is minimal as the VMT system opens up multiple opportunities to guide driving - and, therefore, living - habits that few legislators and bureaucrats and planners would willingly eschew. That means that the VMT will impact city dwellers only slightly, while, conversely, heavily penalizing suburban, exurban, and rural populations and could be seen as another pincer movement in the on-going push to increase urban housing and population densities.

And now for another complicated part – borders. If, for example, the tax at the pump is removed on a state-by-state basis, how would out-of-state drivers be made to pay their “fair share?”

A federal system would seem to solve certain problems associated with the VMT concept, including the ability to properly and accurately apportion the revenue (X percent for the feds, Y for the state, Z for any local taxes, etc.). The federal concept could also simplify the transponder issues by making such tracking devices mandatory, like seat belts for example, for all new cars.

The downsides to any federal effort are obvious, particularly the political firestorm that would erupt in Congress. The legality of a federal law is also in doubt, though this could be wiggled around in the same way the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit (and the 21-year-old drinking age) was imposed.

And none of the above addresses if there would be any modification to how the money – once collected – is spent in theory, the tax income could be divvied up immediately, with, for example, 20 percent going straight to the state, 15 percent to the city, 20 percent to the county, 10 percent dedicated to transit, 20 percent for the feds, etc.

In whatever form the VMT concept presents itself – no matter its possible technical benefits - it will be a hard sell to the public - and very possibly deservedly so.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at thomas699.substack.com.

Photo credit: Ted Eytan Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Left Doesn't Own Minority Voters

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Demographic transitions present political opportunities, but do not protect politicians from their own folly. The shift in most Western countries to a more racially and ethnically diverse demographic has been widely seen by left-wingers as an opportunity to cement their ascendancy.

Yet after early successes with this strategy, the parties of the left have witnessed the departure of some minority voters – Hindus in Britain, Asians in Australia, and Asians and Hispanics in the United States. In some cases, minorities are opting out of the intersectional bandwagon, which includes certain cultural attitudes, imposed progressivism in schools, and an increasing tolerance of crime.

Sadly, racialism and constant campaigns to address ‘systemic racism’ have driven a certain element of working-class whites not only in Trumpian America, but also in France, Britain, Germany and even Scandinavia, towards nativist, even openly racist, politics. As Michael Lind among others suggest, the fashionable focus on ‘white privilege’ and assigning original sin based on someone sharing DNA with settlers and slave owners also doesn’t work with the majority of Americans, who come from families who came to America after the Civil War. Meanwhile, crowing about ‘the end of white America’ might be popular in ethnic-studies departments, but it does not translate into a better life for most minorities.

Racial minorities’ shift to the centre and the right represents a healthy step, as it undermines the racialist, us-versus-them rhetoric shared both by the nationalist right and the intersectional left. Once politicians begin addressing people as people, with their own interests, and not as artefacts of their own heritage, we can look to employ diversity not as a weapon, but as an asset.

When you ask them, most people of color do not generally share the politics of the faculty-lounge racialists. Nor do most Americans. The overall PC agenda, built around identity politics, is rejected by 52 per cent of Americans, according to a recent NPR poll. Opposition to PC is even greater among Latinos. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the woke anti-racist meme, even as it is widely adopted by the billionaire class and corporate HR departments.

Critically, the vast majority of Americans – including millennials and minorities – do not favour defunding the police, even as these policies are pushed in their name. Most American voters – by wide margins – also reject the notion of teaching concepts derived from critical race theory in schools, even though this effort is supported by most Democrats, powerful teachers’ unions and the White House.

Given these dichotomies, minority pushback was inevitable. Last month New Yorkers, and particularly the African-American community, voted in a former cop, Eric Adams, as mayor. Minority voters also backed more conservative candidates in Buffalo and Seattle. Many Asian voters in New York did not find Adams conservative enough, and instead switched to the Republican, Curtis Sliwa. They also shifted towards Trump in 2020.

These are not isolated incidents. Minorities tilted more strongly to the GOP in the remarkable win in Virginia in November, which delivered a West Indian as lieutenant governor and a Cuban-American as attorney general. The most critical shift to the right is taking place among Latinos, the US’s largest minority, with support for Democratic house candidates down from over 60 per cent to 37 per cent in just a year. The shift is profound in the predominantly Latino, historically Democratic stronghold of South Texas. In part, this is a reaction to Joe Biden’s seeming abandonment of border defences, resulting in a five-fold increase in a year in ‘encounters’ between migrants and law enforcement.

At the heart of this shift lies a cultural chasm of historic proportions. The growing disconnect between minorities and progressives reflects how tone deaf progressives are to the diverse views and interests of racial minorities. This is particularly evident on social issues.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Tony Webster, via Flickr, CC 2.0 License.

New U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates: A New World?

Wendell Cox — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

The United States Census Bureau released its July 1, 2021 population and annual net domestic migration estimates for states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, December 21. This article highlights trends from that release. The table at the end of the article summarizes the data.

California: Exodus Reported to be Stronger

The new data was released just days after the California Department of Finance released state population and net domestic migration figures for the same period. The state release was on Friday, December 17 and we reported on that release on Monday, December 20. The Census Bureau report indicated a larger population loss and a larger net domestic migration loss (Figures 2 and 3).

California lost 262,000 residents according to the Census Bureau, more 50% above the state’s estimate of 173,000. The Census Bureau also reported a greater net domestic migration loss, at 367,000, more than a quarter above the state estimated loss of 277,000. Both the population loss and the domestic migration loss were increased by the 56,500 Covid pandemic related deaths (Figures 4 and 5, below).

The population loss figure is the largest in California history. The domestic migration loss is the largest in the 21st century, greater than the 313,000 in 2006, as the housing bust was unfolding. The domestic migration percentage loss in 2021 was minus 0.93% (as a percentage of the 2020 population), slightly above the 2006 loss of minus 0.87%.

New York: Proportionately Worse than California

New York’s state population loss was 319,000, 22% more than the California loss. New York’s population decline was minus 1.58%, compared to minus 0.66% in California. The difference is attributable to the fact that the state of California has about twice the population of New York.

New York’s domestic migration loss was nearly equal to that of California, at minus 334,000. This is a loss of minus 1.75%, about double that of California’s 0.89%. It is an increase in net domestic migration from New York’s 2010-2020 annual average of minus 155,000.

New York, Florida and Texas

Finally, the 2020 census was the first time in history that the population of New York exceeded 20 million. The 2021 estimate indicates a drop back to 19.84 million. At the beginning of the year starting July 1, 2020, New York, the third more populous state, was 1.415 million behind number two Florida. In a single year, Florida, with the second strongest state growth (210,000) increased its margin over New York by more than 500,000, to 1.945 million. Number one Texas added 310,000 residents, the largest gain of any state.

The Northeast, Midwest and West: Moving to the South

At the regional level, all net domestic migration was to the South, compared to the previous decade when the West had net domestic migration gains in each year (Figure 1).

The West Falls to Equal the Rising Midwest

In an astounding development, the West fell to the Midwest level net domestic migration. That had never occurred in the annual state estimates, at least back to 2000. In 2021, the Midwest lost 0.18% of its population to net domestic migration, virtually the same as the West which stood at. By comparison, from 2010 to 2020, the Midwest lost 0.27% of its population annually to net domestic migration compared to a 0.10% annual gain in the West.

In the longer run, this could presage a demographic shift, or a rebalancing of domestic migration outside of the south and Intermountain West.

Changing Domestic Migration in the West?

Despite the West’s regional net domestic migration loss, the three strongest states in net domestic migration percentage (compared to 2020 population) also were in the West: Idaho, Utah and Montana. Altogether, these states gained 100,000 net domestic migrants. This is an increase in the total average annual domestic migration in these states of 30,000 in the 2010s.

At the same time Oregon and Washington have seen their net domestic migration plummet. Oregon, which attracted an annual average of 25,000 net domestic migrants in the 2010s, fell two-thirds, to a gain of only 8,000 in 2021. Washington, which had gained 37,000 net domestic migrants annually in the 2010s, fell to a small loss in 2021. Colorado, which averaged an annual net domestic migration gain of 38,000 in the 2010s fell by two-thirds to 13,000. Thus, Idaho, Utah and Montana, with about 6 million residents, had a 2021 net domestic migration gain nearly five times that of Washington, Colorado and Oregon, with their nearly 18 million residents.

This is another trend that could be short term or long term. However, it is not implausible that the increased opportunities in remote and hybrid work, along with the increasingly unaffordable housing in Seattle, Portland and Denver, could have contributed to the larger net domestic migration numbers in Idaho, Utah and Montana.

Remote Work Dispersion from Urban Centers?

The District of Columbia lost 23,000 net domestic migrants, and at a 3.34% loss exceeded that of New York, which at a minus 1.75% had the largest net domestic migration loss of any state. This is down from an average annual gain of 3,000 in the previous decade. This could be related to the rise of remote working and the associated dispersion away from dense urban centers this has made possible.

Interestingly, West Virginia, well within range of a remote worker spending just a few days in the month on-site, saw its net domestic migration total increase to 2,300 from its previous decade average of minus 4,600. Delaware, similarly close to Washington, as well as to Philadelphia, with the nation’s sixth largest downtown, saw its net domestic migration gain rise to 12,000, from its previous decade average of plus 5,000.

Other states in the Northeast experienced strong gains in net domestic migration that could be related to population shifts, especially from the New York City, Philadelphia and Boston employment markets (Massachusetts net domestic outmigration increased to 46,000 from its 2010s annual average loss of 19,000):

Connecticut had 5,000 net domestic migrants, compared to an annual loss of 21,000 in the 2010s.
New Jersey lost 28,000 net domestic migrants, down from its 52,000 annual loss in the 2010s.
New Hampshire gained 14,000 net domestic migrants, compared to 1,000 annual previous loss.
Vermont gained 4,600 net domestic migrants, compared with a 1,200 previous loss.
Rhode Island gained 900 in 2021, compared to its 4,100 average previous loss.
Maine gained 15,000 in 2021, up from its 2,000 annual gain in the 2010s.
Pennsylvania, with good access also to the Washington market, saw its net domestic migration loss drop to 3,000 compared to the annual loss of 28,000 in the 2010s.

Net domestic migration losses in Maryland and Virginia in 2021 were similar to their 2010s averages. This means that every state from Virginia and West Virginia to Maine had a substantial improvement in net domestic migration or remained about the same , except for the big losses in New York and Massachusetts.

There are plenty of attractive places for remote workers to settle in these recently improving domestic migration states.

A More Fluid Employment and Housing Market?

The 2021 US Census Bureau population estimates indicate some new trends, highlighted above. But the game has clearly changed, and we will see how much in the next few years.

Table 1 (back to reference)

US Census Bureau Population Estimates: July 1, 2021
US, States & DC
	Population in millions				Net Domestic Migration
	2020	2021	Change	%	Number	Rank	% of 2020	Rank

United States	331.501	331.894	0.393	0.12%

REGIONS
Northeast Region	57.526	57.160	-0.366	-0.64%	-0.390	4	-0.68%	4
Midwest Region	68.935	68.841	-0.094	-0.14%	-0.123	2	-0.18%	2
South Region	126.409	127.225	0.816	0.65%	0.658	1	0.52%	1
West Region	78.631	78.667	0.036	0.05%	-0.145	3	-0.18%	3

STATES
Alabama	5.025	5.040	0.015	0.30%	0.022	12	0.44%	19
Alaska	0.732	0.733	0.000	0.03%	-0.004	36	-0.53%	43
Arizona	7.178	7.276	0.098	1.37%	0.093	3	1.30%	3
Arkansas	3.012	3.026	0.014	0.45%	0.016	14	0.53%	17
California	39.500	39.238	-0.262	-0.66%	-0.367	50	-0.93%	48
Colorado	5.784	5.812	0.028	0.48%	0.013	19	0.23%	21
Connecticut	3.600	3.606	0.005	0.15%	0.005	24	0.14%	26
Delaware	0.992	1.003	0.011	1.16%	0.012	20	1.23%	5
Florida	21.570	21.781	0.211	0.98%	0.221	1	1.02%	7
Georgia	10.726	10.800	0.074	0.69%	0.051	7	0.47%	18
Hawaii	1.452	1.442	-0.010	-0.71%	-0.013	42	-0.87%	47
Idaho	1.848	1.901	0.053	2.88%	0.049	8	2.65%	1
Illinois	12.785	12.671	-0.114	-0.89%	-0.122	48	-0.96%	49
Indiana	6.786	6.806	0.020	0.30%	0.014	17	0.21%	24
Iowa	3.189	3.193	0.004	0.14%	0.001	30	0.03%	30
Kansas	2.936	2.935	-0.001	-0.04%	-0.005	38	-0.18%	39
Kentucky	4.504	4.509	0.005	0.12%	0.010	21	0.22%	22
Louisiana	4.651	4.624	-0.027	-0.58%	-0.030	46	-0.65%	44
Maine	1.362	1.372	0.010	0.73%	0.015	15	1.14%	6
Maryland	6.173	6.165	-0.008	-0.12%	-0.020	44	-0.32%	42
Massachusetts	7.022	6.985	-0.037	-0.53%	-0.046	47	-0.66%	45
Michigan	10.068	10.051	-0.017	-0.17%	-0.008	40	-0.08%	34
Minnesota	5.707	5.707	0.000	0.00%	-0.013	43	-0.24%	40
Mississippi	2.957	2.950	-0.007	-0.23%	-0.004	37	-0.14%	37
Missouri	6.154	6.168	0.014	0.22%	0.015	16	0.24%	20
Montana	1.086	1.104	0.018	1.66%	0.019	13	1.77%	2
Nebraska	1.961	1.964	0.002	0.11%	-0.003	35	-0.17%	38
Nevada	3.114	3.144	0.030	0.96%	0.025	10	0.81%	12
New Hampshire	1.378	1.389	0.011	0.81%	0.014	18	0.99%	8
New Jersey	9.280	9.267	-0.013	-0.14%	-0.028	45	-0.30%	41
New Mexico	2.118	2.116	-0.002	-0.08%	-0.002	32	-0.10%	35
New York	20.155	19.836	-0.319	-1.58%	-0.352	49	-1.75%	50
North Carolina	10.457	10.551	0.094	0.90%	0.089	4	0.85%	11
North Dakota	0.779	0.775	-0.004	-0.52%	-0.006	39	-0.83%	46
Ohio	11.791	11.780	-0.011	-0.09%	-0.003	33	-0.03%	33
Oklahoma	3.962	3.987	0.025	0.62%	0.025	11	0.62%	15
Oregon	4.242	4.246	0.005	0.11%	0.008	22	0.19%	25
Pennsylvania	12.990	12.964	-0.026	-0.20%	-0.003	34	-0.02%	32
Rhode Island	1.096	1.096	-0.001	-0.06%	0.001	29	0.08%	28
South Carolina	5.131	5.191	0.060	1.17%	0.065	5	1.26%	4
South Dakota	0.887	0.895	0.008	0.93%	0.006	23	0.63%	14
Tennessee	6.920	6.975	0.055	0.80%	0.061	6	0.89%	10
Texas	29.218	29.528	0.310	1.06%	0.170	2	0.58%	16
Utah	3.282	3.338	0.056	1.72%	0.032	9	0.98%	9
Vermont	0.642	0.646	0.003	0.48%	0.005	25	0.71%	13
Virginia	8.632	8.642	0.010	0.12%	-0.009	41	-0.10%	36
Washington	7.719	7.739	0.020	0.26%	0.000	31	0.00%	31
West Virginia	1.790	1.783	-0.007	-0.38%	0.002	27	0.13%	27
Wisconsin	5.892	5.896	0.004	0.06%	0.003	26	0.06%	29
Wyoming	0.577	0.579	0.002	0.27%	0.001	28	0.22%	23

DC
District of Columbia	0.690	0.670	-0.020	-2.90%	-0.023		-3.34%

Derived from US Census Bureau data

Photo: New Jersey exurbs of New York (by author).