Los Angeles

The death last week of former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan is a reminder of both how low the city’s political culture has sunk and how strong leaders can help turn around a seemingly hopeless situation.  read more »

The immutable law of supply and demand is nevertheless pulling off a mutation in Downtown Los Angeles when it comes to one of the least glamorous and most interesting asset classes of commercial real estate in the area: parking lots.  read more »

There’s not much reason to expect more than a churn of mediocrity from the Los Angeles Times these days.  read more »

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

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

California continues to lose population, according to the latest State Department of Finance estimates for the year ended July 2022.  read more »

The 2020 Census reveals California to have both the highest urban population density and the highest urbanization share of total population among the states.  read more »

For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing.  read more »

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.  read more »

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²  read more »