Urban Issues

Fix the Subways in Hours?

Randal OToole — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny.

Even if those problems were solved, they are really just symptoms of the real problem, which is that transit agencies have no incentive to operate efficiently or even to attract riders. Instead, all of their incentives are to increase costs as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. These perverse incentives are not the fault of the New York MTA or any other transit agency but are due the federal government, which began throwing money at transit in the 1960s and responds to every transportation issue by increasing the flow of money.

I understand why Trump appointed non-experts to run his departments and agencies. You can’t fight the Deep State by putting members of the Deep State in charge. At the same time, the people fighting the Deep State need to understand the real problems or they are just going to flounder around.

Last November, I urged Musk to take a scalpel to the federal budget, cutting wasteful programs and making sure such cuts are sustainable by combining them with new policies that will give government agencies incentives to operate efficiently. Instead of a scalpel, he is using a chainsaw, and the cuts he is making are not going to solve the government’s problems.

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: EmperorOfNYC via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

A Pro Family Housing Agenda

Wendell Cox and Lyman Stone — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

There is considerable concern about housing affordability in the United States. Housing is the most expensive element of the cost of living, which makes it an important issue to both households and governments. Indeed, the high cost of housing relative to income (i.e. the degree of affordability) is an existential threat to the future of the middle-class in some housing markets (metropolitan areas), and even threatens to jeopardize the demographic future of the republic. While the housing situation has not become a crisis everywhere—and for older Americans remains relatively affordable—for young Americans, housing has become crushingly expensive in most of the country, crippling their economic and family futures.

Highlights

Americans across all demographic groups and political persuasions prefer single-family housing to apartments.
For young Americans, housing has become crushingly expensive in most of the country, crippling their economic and family futures.
The American dream of owning good housing at a good price is increasingly unobtainable, especially for Americans under age 35.

Whereas in 1969, the price of a median home cost about five years of a young adult’s income, today it costs nearly nine years. As we show in a new Institute for Family Studies report, Homes For Young Families: A Pro-Family Housing Agenda, since 1970, the share of young adults who own the home they live in has declined from 50% to around 25-30 percent. Moreover, across metro areas, the share of housing markets we define as “Seriously Unaffordable” or worse (i.e. median homes worth 10 years or more of a young adult’s income) rose from 1% to 37 percent. By far, these increases were the most severe in large coastal markets, which is why Americans are increasingly migrating away from these markets in pursuit of affordability.

Many factors have conspired to worsen housing affordability for young adults, but two sets of policies in particular have dramatically boosted housing costs without producing economic benefits to offset cost: 1) local land-use rules limiting housing supply, and 2) urban growth boundaries preventing greenfield development. We find that the most unaffordable housing is overwhelmingly likely to have both urban growth boundaries and very strict local land-use rules. As a result, it is no exaggeration to say that the housing affordability crisis facing American young adults has substantially been caused by bad urban and regional planning, and bad local land-use policies.

Since the housing affordability crisis facing young adults is largely policy-induced, we propose a wide range of policy fixes for every level of government, including: extremely local HOAs; municipal zoning related to parking, ADUs, renovations, policing priorities, and lot size; state rules governing municipalities and educational programs; and federal housing programs and housing assistance. Our proposals are focused on ensuring that obstacles to new housing supply are removed, and especially on encouraging policymakers to focus on the regulations that substantively burden the transition into family life.

Read the rest of this piece at: Institute for Family Studies.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and 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 author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Lyman Stone is the Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also the Director of Research for the population consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, a Senior Fellow at the Canadian think rank Cardus, and a PhD Candidate at McGill University. His work on demography and fertility has been covered widely in most papers of record in North America, as well as many in Europe and Asia.

Photo and chart courtesy of Institute for Family Studies.

California Tyranny, Part 2

Christopher LeGras — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Lawmakers in Sacramento recently upped the ante in their ongoing assault on local democracy in the Golden State. Earlier this year State Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill called SB 79. If passed, it would all but eliminate local authority over zoning, land use, and development. It would place the fate of thousands of neighborhoods not in the hands of the people who live in them and want to live in them, but in the hands of for-profit real estate speculators and the financial class behind them. The bill is part of an assault on the foundations local democracy that, as I wrote two weeks ago, trace their origins back 800 years to Magna Carta itself.

SB 79 would allow real estate speculators to cram five, six, and seven story luxury apartment and condo buildings into single-family neighborhoods and neighborhoods currently characterized by small multifamily buildings (duplexes, fourplexes, and smaller apartments and condos). If a speculator takes advantage of other recent laws, including so-called “density bonus,” they could build 10 or even 20 stories in a single family neighborhood. The only requirement is that the new structures be within one half mile, and in some cases a quarter mile, of a bus stop. That’s it. Doesn’t matter where the bus goes. Doesn’t matter if that bus doesn’t go anywhere near your workplace, your kids’ schools, your local grocery store, and so forth. Just has to be a bus.

What’s more, some city officials are on the same page, hell bent on self-immolation. For example, multiple sources have told me that officials at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) have rerouted segments of bus routes and changed the locations of bus stops in order to make existing “transit oriented development” incentives applicable to specific parcels. Some California transit agencies aren’t serving the people, they’re bowing to the whims of for-profit real estate speculators, many of whom aren’t based in California and could care less about neighborhood character or quality of life.

This is how local democracy dies

It’s madness. This is how local democracy dies. Agencies like LA Metro increasingly are in the land use business. This is how mass transit functioned in the Soviet Union, in which housing and mass transit were inextricably linked (because, of course, none but the most privileged and powerful owned their own cars).

It’s almost impossible to overstate the threat SB 79 poses to neighborhoods. It would all but eliminate local governments’ power to control their own communities’ destinies. City councils and boards of supervisors, the members of which most closely reflect the people they represent, would be reduced to bystanders as rapacious developers — many of whom in this context are less than scrupulous — literally bulldoze hundreds of thousands of homes, irreversibly transforming and destroying countless neighborhoods. It’s the state dictating where and how 39.8 million will live. The state dictating to cities what kind of housing they must approve, under penalty of crippling fines, legal action, even a complete state takeover of local zoning, land use, and construction decisions. Sounds an awful lot like tyranny.

Read the rest of this piece at The All Aspect Report.

Chistopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), in an unintentionally perfect picture. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

The Massachusetts Backlash Against Forced Housing

Howard Husock — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

The Town of Needham is a picture-perfect Boston suburb on the Charles River, replete with a classic downtown main street with a coffee shop, a commuter rail line to the city and old New England knitting mill buildings. But, since last fall’s Town Meeting — whose 240 elected members control the budget and zoning — Needham has become an unlikely ground zero in a battle over how, or if, to allow higher-density housing construction to help address the Massachusetts combination of housing shortage and high prices. It’s come to exemplify, in the process, what can happen when an overly-prescriptive state government tries to override a history of local control — and creates more backlash than the new homes the state needs, Or, as Kevin Keane, chair of the Needham Board of Selectman puts it, “when you talk density in the suburbs, people get hesitant.”

That understates what happened here, when a plan to permit construction of 3296 new apartments in a town of 32,000 sparked a referendum that rolled it back, and called into question the practicality of a state law aimed at forcing “upzoning” in 177 towns. The phrase “forced housing” comes to mind. It’s a case study in how not to do YIMBY.

The background is a consensus that Massachusetts needs more new housing, if it is to attract and retain newcomers to provide the talent for its biotech and financial services industries, and research universities. A February report released by Democratic Governor Maura Healy found that “the state needs to increase its year-round housing supply by at least 222,000 units from 2025 to 2035.” Said Healy, “High housing costs are holding too many of our residents and our businesses back.”

One can imagine lots of ways to address that problem, including allowing newcomers to keep more of their earnings by lowering the state’s 8.5 percent capital gains tax rate or permitting new pipelines to bring in more natural gas that powers the state’s electricity grid. But the Commonwealth had a very specific approach in mind: through its “MBTA Communities Act”, a law requiring every town in or near the Boston transit system to “have one district of reasonable size in which multifamily housing is permitted”, “that must have a minimum density of 15 dwelling units per acre” and “must be located within .5 miles of a rail station”. In other words, green, “transit-oriented”, mid-rise development or bust. What’s more, new housing would also subtly force Needham and other towns to permit more subsidized “affordable” housing somewhere — thanks to a state law requiring every community to have at least 10 percent of its residences in that category. Not just green development, in other words, but “inclusionary” development, based on the social engineering premise that all communities should include an income mix.

It would all mean no small change for a town such as Needham, with a population of just 32,000 and almost exclusively single-family zoning. When its Town Meeting last October went even further — backing a plan permitting more than 3200 new apartments — the backlash began.

It was led by Town Meeting member Gary Ajamian, who says that the “extremely controversial plan” led to “anger and distrust”. Ajamian, however, did more than speak out; he helped start and lead “Needham Residents for Thoughtful Zoning”. In the dead of New England winter, the group had 20 days to gather enough signatures to force a referendum on the 3200-unit plan, the first such vote to overturn a Town Meeting decision in decades. They did it, and the vote in January was decisive: 6,904 residents opposed the zoning changes, 4,914 in favor—passing the required bar not only for a majority vote but a majority of registered voters. “If I were a betting man, “says Selectman Kevin Keane, “I wouldn’t have bet that they’d get the signatures, or bet they’d get enough turnout. As it turned out, there were more voters than in the presidential primary” (7635). The perceived threat to the New England tradition of local control mattered.

In Massachusetts, this is an issue that goes well beyond one town. Another near-in Boston suburb, Milton, has also voted against a Communities Act rezoning plan — a vote which led to litigation at the state’s Supreme Judicial Court testing the law’s. constitutionality. Although the Court upheld the law in January, it deemed its regulations as written to be “legally ineffective and must be repromulgated in accordance with state law,” throwing the situation into limbo. The backlash has, perhaps most surprisingly, has split the progressive Democrats who run the state. State Attorney General Andrea Campbell has backed the law, including before the state’s highest court, while state auditor Diana DiZiglio has deemed it an “unfunded mandate” in response to a protest by yet another town, Wrentham, over the costs involved with redoing its zoning laws. Her office is conducting a broader review of costs the law will impose on municipalities; in Needham those costs were seen as including a potential need for new water and sewer lines or school classrooms.

The town manager’s office in the Town points out that, even if a plan is ultimately adopted — it will be on the agenda at the upcoming May Town Meeting — land costs in the Town are so high, that it’s far from inevitable the rezoning will actually mean new building. Or that the current owners of the land will choose to sell. Market forces, in other words, can’t be repealed, even in Massachusetts.

The Bay State and the whole Northeast needs new home construction. But there are many ways imaginable to spark it, including such historic expedients as permitting two and three-family homes in single-family districts. Or accessory dwelling units in large, empty yards, as even California is encouraging. Rolling back local control for a bureaucrat’s idea of what historic towns should look like today seems destined to lead to resistance, not construction. Exclusionary zoning has, without doubt, stood in the way of home construction and pushed prices artificially high. But overcoming it must be handled with political care.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Husock was vice president for research and publications at the Manhattan Institute.

Former Needham Center Station Building, repurposed as a cafe, Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

We Don't Need Policy When Practice Will Do

Pete Saunders — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

I’ve been a big fan of Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress for years. I first met him at a Cleveland Fed conference in Cincinnati in 2017, and later interviewed him at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy regarding his book The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America. I’m grateful to have him as a regular reader of this newsletter. And, since he said I could use this quote as a blurb, let me add that via email he said the Corner Side Yard is “consistently interesting and often thought-provoking.” Thanks!

Anyway, he reached out to me last week after I’d written about the lack of research on Rust Belt-to-Sun Belt migration in America, and its impact. He noted, quite correctly in my opinion, that there’s also been little research on white flight as well – the migration of whites from cities to suburbs throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, while a major influx of Blacks into Northern cities was also taking place. In his email, he said that “from a social/cultural perspective, it's clearly problematic, and thus not an acceptable topic for research. The fact remains that, in round numbers, while the Great Migration led to 5 million Black people moving to northern cities, simultaneously 15 million white people left those cities.” (Note: this is something I first saw documented in an academic paper by Leah Platt Boustan published in 2007).

“White flight” all along

Mallach wrote and published his own academic paper last year on a similar topic. Mallach’s paper entitled Shifting the Redlining Paradigm: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Maps and the Construction of Urban Racial Inequality resulted in some fascinating findings. From his paper abstract:

“While it is important to recognize the racist roots of contemporary urban conditions and Black disadvantage, the focus on the HOLC redlining maps of the late 1930s, which have become a staple of both research and popular literature, is misplaced. Despite statistical associations between the maps and contemporary measures of racialized disadvantage, extensive research has found no evidence to support a connection between them. Instead, the Second Great Migration and white flight, both acting in the context of the exclusion of Black buyers from the growing suburbs, led to the spatial and economic bifurcation of urban Black populations within cities and the reconfiguration of the formerly predominately white ethnic redlined areas as segregated areas of concentrated Black poverty.”

In other words, redlining didn’t segregate American cities. White flight, fed by the Second Great Migration that brought millions of Black people to Northern cities between 1940-1970, did. White flight perhaps wasn’t always racist in its intent, but it was definitely racist in its practice.

That’s too bad, because redlining, and a whole host of other policies, did a lot of heavy lifting in the 2010s to describe racial inequality. Turns out America didn’t need a racist federal policy to resegregate Northern cities; it just needed an economy in need of workers, and a housing development industry finally willing accommodate the needs of a housing-starved public. Sound familiar?

Mallach says that the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “residential security” maps, developed between 1935 and 1940, assessed sections of cities on a scale of A to D, with associated color codes: A (green, meaning excellent residential security), B (blue, for good residential security), C (yellow, for fair residential security) and D (red, indicating poor residential security). Neighborhoods with higher grades were deemed safer for bank investments; lower grades were considered “hazardous”.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: A map showing Black and Latino segregation in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas in 2010. Source: https://metroplanning.org/the-cost-of-segregation-2/

Housing Affordability Is Killing the Aussie Dream – And Our Birth Rate

Rob Burgess — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

The steady decline of fertility rates in Australia presents a multifaceted challenge with wide-reaching implications for the nation’s social, cultural, and economic future.

Fertility rates are a critical indicator of societal health, influencing inter-generational stability, economic growth, and family dynamics. Sustained low fertility leads to shrinking workforces, increased dependency ratios, and growing financial pressure on public services such as healthcare and pensions. These systemic strains hinder productivity and innovation, making it imperative for Australia to address the factors contributing to its fertility decline.

At the heart of this issue is the growing gap between Australians' aspirations for family life and the realities imposed by financial and systemic constraints—chief among them being housing affordability. Despite a consistent desire for family formation, young Australians are finding it increasingly difficult to achieve their ideal family size due to rising property prices and limited access to suitable housing. This phenomenon is reshaping Australia’s demographic landscape, particularly in major cities like Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, where fertility rates have dropped to historic lows.

Australia stands at a pivotal moment, with its largest demographic cohort of individuals in their prime childbearing years poised to shape the country’s demographic future. Failure to implement meaningful policy reforms that enables access to affordable, family housing will only deepen the demographic and economic crisis for generations to come.

Fertility Decline in Australia

Healthy fertility rates are fundamental to the functioning of society, influencing its cultural, economic, and social structures. It therefore follows that any prolonged decline will impact these systems, reshaping family dynamics and slowing national economic growth. As Richard Reeves, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution observed, “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.”

As already evidenced in countries such as Japan and Italy, the economic impacts of sustained fertility declines are significant. As the workforce shrinks, the tax base needed to fund essential services like healthcare, pensions, and aged care diminishes, even as demand for these services grows due to an aging population. Over time, this strains resources and fosters systemic inefficiencies. With a reduced future labour force, economic growth slows, limiting innovation and productivity.

Furthermore, weakening birth rates erode intergenerational ties and increase dependency on government institutions to provide support that families once provided while undermining personal responsibility and individual rights. Any shift from family-based support to government dependence poses several risks and challenges, a concept perhaps best summed up by Ronald Reagan when he quipped that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Separate to the societal effects of declining fertility, yet no less severe, is the more personal and deeply emotional impact associated with the profound grief being experienced by those facing involuntary childlessness. The subject of increasing research, childlessness often proves to be not only isolating but acutely painful, not just for the individuals directly affected, but also their parents who often grieve the absence of grandchildren. With childlessness on the rise, these impacts will only worsen creating long-term repercussions for family cohesion and societal well-being.

Given these far-reaching consequences, it is crucial to examine the factors driving fertility decline. While cultural and lifestyle shifts play a role, financial barriers—particularly housing affordability—have emerged as the dominant constraint on family formation.

Read/download the rest of this piece (PDF opens in new tab or window).

Rob Burgess is a town planner with over 25 years of experience, having worked in both the public and private sectors. Applying evidence-based insights, Rob’s expertise lies at the intersection of population dynamics, town planning, and property markets. He is regularly engaged to undertake market research, provide strategic advice to clients, and sharing his thoughts on current and future trends. Rob is a Principal with Quantify Strategic Insights.

In Southern L.A., These Cities Are Making a Comeback

Joel Kotkin and M. Andrew Moshier — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 15:01:30 -0400

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.

Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.

Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”

Much of Paramount’s relative success comes from paying attention to little things. The city has focused on parks, urban space, and landscaping, helping local neighborhoods improve their look by subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences to improve the curb appeal of homes.

Under its elected leadership, Paramount has seen job growth in the hospital, education, small industrial, and retail sectors. The city’s income levels are significantly higher, and unemployment lower, than the L.A. County average. Unlike the dysfunctional L.A. school system, Paramount’s independent school district has improved its graduation rate from 71 percent to over 90 percent in recent years, according to city manager John Moreno.

Much of this success stems from the city’s strong community spirit and close collaboration between local government, businesses, and schools. Moreno notes that Los Angeles operates in a more “siloed” manner. In contrast, Paramount’s tight-knit community—now increasingly led by young families, many of them homeowners or aspiring to be—has driven its turnaround. “We went from a place with shootings and murders to one that attracts young families who see this as an up-and-coming place,” Moreno says. “We had a lot of blight, but the citizens and churches brought it back. When I go to L.A., I’m amazed they’re not doing these basic things.”

The turnaround in Paramount and a host of other South L.A. cities may seem like an obscure data point in the vastness of the Los Angeles Basin. Spreading 1,200 square miles, the basin encapsulates an immense area stretching from Hollywood to Orange County. The area is home to roughly 10 million people and 80 cities, including some of the country’s best-known locales like the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles, Venice, Koreatown, and East Los Angeles. In the recent fires, several of these communities, notably in the Pacific Palisades and Hollywood, went up in flames.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

M. Andrew Moshier is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Chapman University, where he recently served as the Dean of the School of Communication.

Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here

Pete Saunders — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore. Each season featured institutions – the sad ubiquity of the illegal drug trade; Baltimore’s port system, and the union desperately trying to remain relevant; government bureaucracy and corruption; troubled public school systems; and the declining influence and resources of the newspaper print industry – trying to make the city better, or simply make a way to survive.

Baltimore is not a city I include in my focus group of Rust Belt cities, but it’s undeniably Rust Belt in its experience. And The Wire spoke to what happens in cities where the foundational economy disappears and nothing enters to replace it, far better than any show I’ve seen.

A lot of people who care about cities saw the series full of metaphors, an opportunity to dig deep into the problems of the inner city without getting too close to them. It was an intellectual journey, or worse yet, lurid entertainment. The Wire’s viewers generally weren’t exposed to the issues of the show’s characters, unless they lived in similar conditions in a similar city. Viewers could watch drug deals and drug hits from the security of their living room, or ponder the moral complexities of political corruption without paying a direct cost. For many, watching The Wire was like watching a trainwreck slowly unfold from a safe distance, or riding a wild rollercoaster ride with the certainty that they would never be thrown out.

Many television shows aim to reach the kind of blunt authenticity displayed in the The Wire, but never reach it. Much of The Wire’s authenticity is attributed to David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer and showrunner of The Wire, with Burns being Simon’s his long-time collaborator in writing and production. Burns, a Vietnam War vet, got a first-hand look at Baltimore’s streets as a detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Upon retirement he later taught 7^th and 8^th grade students in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Simon gained this authenticity from his years working the city desk for the Baltimore Sun.

Rust Belt Reporter, the wonderful memoir by former Detroit Free Press journalist John Gallagher, reminds us that we need more writers who can accurately depict this aspect of the American urban experience.

As the book’s title suggests, Gallagher’s journalism career is almost entirely centered on Rust Belt cities. He starts as a young reporter with the City News Bureau in Chicago in the 1970’s, before moving on to newspaper gigs in Rochester, NY, and later in nearby Syracuse. However, the bulk of Gallagher’s career was spent in Detroit, where he worked for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years before retiring in 2019. This was the job that gave him as he said “the catbird seat over America’s greatest urban story – the rise, fall, and rise again of a great American city,” and led to most poignant and meaningful writing of his career.

It’s odd how much of Gallagher’s career touches on themes brought to the screen in The Wire. He’d covered drug-related murders; he’d written on United Auto Workers and Teamsters union negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and even on his own union experience as part of a devastating newspaper strike; he’d published investigative stories exploring local government corruption. If anyone were to write the Motor City version of The Wire, Gallagher would have the cred to do it.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: courtesy Pete Saunders.

Britian is Committing "National Economic Suicide"

Robert Bryce — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills and what he thinks of the British government. For the next 12 minutes, we got an earful. Our driver, Adrian, who was in his 50s, ranted about the British government and its climate policies.

He explained that over the past four years, his energy bill has gone “from three hundred pounds a month to now a thousand pounds a month...Yeah, a thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights on in my house.” When I asked why the prices were increasing, he replied, “It’s the energy policy on green renewables right? It's not letting the market dictate things. We've got, I think, we've got the most expensive energy in the world now. It’s a suicide policy.”

Adrian isn’t far off. As Matt Ridley pointed out last month on Twitter/X, Britain now has the most expensive electricity in the OECD. “That’s what happens,” Ridley said, “if you try to rely on using the landscape to try to extract useful energy from the thin, weak, dispersed and unreliable source that is wind.”

Adrian, the cab driver, isn’t the only Briton talking about suicide. At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Sir Paul Marshall delivered a scathing assessment of Europe’s infatuation with alt-energy. He said Britain’s push for net zero -- and the staggering energy costs that have come with it -- are “acts of national economic suicide.”

After spending a week in London, the signs of the country’s decline and the frustration of Britain’s citizens are apparent.

Near the entrance to the British Museum is a room that discusses the museum’s future. Near an impressive model of the envisioned additions, a placard on the wall talks about the museum’s “ambitious cultural redevelopments” and notes that among the next steps is to “build a new Energy Centre to make the Museum more sustainable and pave the way to reach net-zero targets.”

While Britain’s elites are talking about net zero, the country’s industry is heading for the exits. And despite massive oil and gas resources, the British government refuses to allow more drilling and continues its idiotic ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Last September, Tata Steel closed the last two blast furnaces in Britain. The shuttering of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales resulted in the loss of 2,800 jobs. However, the symbolism may be as significant as the job losses. By closing the blast furnace, Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution, will no longer be able to produce virgin steel from iron, coal, and limestone. Instead, it must now rely on electric arc furnaces that recycle scrap steel. The union that represented many of the workers at Port Talbot called the closure of the blast furnaces “industrial vandalism.”

In mid-January, INEOS closed the Grangemouth synthetic ethanol plant in Scotland, which resulted in the loss of several hundred jobs. The facility was one of only two in Europe that produced synthetic ethanol, which is used in the production of numerous pharmaceuticals. Here’s how one trade publication described the closure:

High energy prices and high carbon taxes have forced the closure of this strategic UK asset. The UK, which used to be a major force in chemicals, employing a large and highly skilled workforce, has seen the closure of ten large chemical complexes in the last five years alone and, in complete contrast to the USA, has not had one new chemical plant built for a generation. Energy prices have doubled in the UK in the last five years and now stand five times higher than those in the USA. The UK cannot compete with such a huge disadvantage.

When the plant closed, the chairman of INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, said, “We are witnessing the extinction of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it.”

Britain has enormous oil and gas resources and could quickly reduce its energy prices if it began drilling. Earlier this month, Deloitte published a study commissioned by Egdon Resources, which estimated that the shale formations in Lincolnshire, in a formation known as the Gainsborough Trough, could contain 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough fuel to supply all of Britain’s gas needs for several years. Deloitte estimated the gas field could generate some $180 billion in GDP for Britain and dramatically reduce its need for imported gas.

The Labour government quickly pooh-poohed the idea of producing domestic shale gas. A spokesman for the government said, "We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations. The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect both family and national finances from price spikes.”

This is national insanity. As seen above, 20 years ago, thanks to drilling in the North Sea, Britain was self-sufficient in gas. Since then, production and consumption have been falling, and the country now relies on imports for nearly half of its gas needs.

Further, the idea of “sprinting to clean energy” is not working. As I reported here on February 5 with the launch of the Global Renewable Rejection Database, rural Britain is in an uproar over the encroachment of massive alt-energy projects. Local regulators rejected four solar projects in January alone, including ones in Wakefield, Springwell, Norfolk, and Kelham.

At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Marshall, who owns GB News, The Spectator, and Unherd, said Britain and Germany are “the patsies of Net Zero.” (My speech at ARC on energy humanism was also on Tuesday. The video has not been posted on YouTube yet.)

Marshall noted that electricity prices for British industry are five times higher than those in the US and seven times China’s. He said renewables are “essentially a parasitic form of energy.” In the 1990s, he said, nuclear energy provided a quarter of Britain’s electricity, “but now Britain only has five remaining plants, four of these are slated for closure in the next five years.” And this: Britain and Germany, he said, are “the patsies of Net Zero.”

Britain, he noted, has “enough gas reserves in the North Sea to cover 35 years of consumption, yet since 2019, the UK has refused to grant any new oil and gas licenses and we’ve even levied a specially designed windfall tax on the existing producers.” He concluded that net zero is immiserating and its main victims are the poor...Cheap and abundant energy is the foundation that underpinned our prosperity. Industry knows this. America knows this. Nations in the Gulf know this. And China knows this.” He went on, saying that unless Britain changes course, it will “simply continue down the path to unilateral economic disarmament.”

During our stay in London, I have asked numerous people about energy costs. In nearly every instance, the response has been a shake of the head or a raising of hands in despair. A bartender at the pub across from our hotel said his energy bill has doubled over the past four years, Our friend, Maddie, who is in London studying journalism, told us she is paying $150 per month to heat her tiny flat.

British citizens understand what is happening to them but feel powerless to do anything about the situation. They have been betrayed by the current Labour government and the Tories. In November, the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, traveled to Azerbaijan to the UN climate meeting to declare that Britain would aim to cut its emissions by 81% by 2035. The BBC noted that the new “target updates a 78% pledge by 2035 under the previous Conservative government.” Starmer claimed that the British government would not “tell people how to live their lives” and that the “race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future.”

What total and utter bullshit.

While the rest of the world is awakening to the disaster that is alt-energy, Starmer continues to push the discredited notion that “clean energy” creates jobs. It doesn’t. It destroys jobs. Britain is now losing jobs at the fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.

While at the British Museum on Sunday, I struck up a conversation with an American who lives in Britain. He runs a private equity firm and splits his time between New York and his place in the English countryside. I asked him about Britain’s economy. He replied, “The last place people are putting money these days is in central Europe. The second-to-last place they are putting it is in Britain.”

London, of course, is as charming as ever. The pubs and shops seem busy, and there appear to be plenty of tourists on the streets, even in the gray days of February. The manager at our hotel told me that 90% of his rooms are booked. But tourism doesn’t create durable, high-paying jobs.

Britain became a world power by making ships, steel, and automobiles. Today, it’s becoming a place that has to rely on sales of pub grub and hotel beds. Short of a massive course correction on energy – that exceeds what President Trump is doing in the US -- it’s clear that Britain’s days as an industrial and economic power are finished.

‘Tis a pity.

This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

The Revival of Black Town Centers

Pete Saunders — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

In honor of Black History Month, I annually write some piece that honors the significance and impact of the contributions of Black people on the American urban environment. In the past I’ve written about the people, historical and in the present-day, who made our communities better through their research, their professional endeavors, their political acumen, and their art, advocacy and activism. Taken together, the contributions of individuals has led to a distinct view of how Blacks can and should live in cities – what I call Black Urbanism.

Today, however, I won’t focus on the people and their contributions to the American urban environment. Instead, I will focus on the significant physical imprint that Blacks had on cities, as they moved from the rural South to the urban North throughout the 20^th century, despite the constraints placed on them by segregation.

Black Town Centers

As a kid I often heard many older Black people say that Blacks lost as much, if not more, through integration than we gained. Most referred to the strength and cohesiveness of their segregated neighborhoods, by saying things like, “we saw Black success all around us,” or “we had everything we needed right where we were.” They were talking about how segregation ironically created tight-knit, self-sufficient, mixed-income communities that were walkable – the things urbanists and planners seek in communities today. Unfortunately, as Blacks became more geographically dispersed by income and wealth, the strength of those communities was eroded.

But for roughly two generations, between the 1910s and the 1960s, the influx of Blacks into major cities led to the creation of Black town centers that served the needs of a community that had to become self-reliant. Despite barriers, Blacks created thriving business hubs that provided goods, services, and cultural sustenance to their communities. These commercial districts were not just economic centers but also social and cultural hubs, fostering a sense of solidarity and identity among its residents.

The mid-20^th century Black town centers had everything we urbanists talk about today when referring to “15-minute cities”. There were grocers, clothing shops, and restaurants. There were doctor’s and lawyer’s offices, banks, and insurance companies. There were bars, jazz clubs and venues that attracted the top names in Black entertainment. And the town center’s amenities were predominantly owned by Black entrepreneurs.

The decline of black-owned commercial districts began in the mid-20th century, influenced by several factors. The most significant was urban renewal policies, which often resulted in the displacement of African American communities. Highways and new developments were frequently constructed through thriving black neighborhoods, leading to the destruction of these commercial districts.

Additionally, the desegregation of the 1960s, while a monumental step towards equality, had unintended economic consequences. African Americans gained access to previously white-only businesses, leading to a dispersal of their economic power. The rise of large chain stores also undercut smaller, black-owned businesses, which struggled to compete.

Economic recessions, discriminatory lending practices, and lack of access to capital further exacerbated the decline. The 1968 Fair Housing Act aimed to address some of these issues, but the damage to black-owned commercial districts had already been severe.

By the 1980s, many Black town centers had been so decimated that their presence had largely been lost to history.

However, they were never completely forgotten. My first planning job assignment, with the City of Chicago in the early 1990s, was to work on what we called the Mid-South Plan, covering the city’s south lakefront communities. Residents attending community meetings remembered the vibrancy of the area’s heyday in the 1950s when it was referred to as Bronzeville and sought to revive that long-forgotten name.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Hollywata via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.