You are here: / / Urban Affairs

Three Things Trump is Getting Right and Democrats Ignored

/in

Right on cue, the country’s dominant political and media voices, after wildly applauding Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have responded to Donald Trump’s week in the spotlight with laughter, derision and anger for its supposed amateurism, lack of star power, and racism.

And the convention has given critics plenty to laugh at, or cry if you are a Republican. The use of the gun-wielding wealthy St. Louis couple was a strange way to address the Democrats’ very real plans for undermining the nation’s suburbs. Placing the utterly clueless and unsympathetic Donald Trump Jr. on the podium, while elevating the Trump family over the party faithful, revealed a serious cognitive shortcoming worthy of the Bourbons. Read more

Kamala’s America?

/in

By virtue of being chosen Joe Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California has reasonable odds of becoming president someday—and probably better odds than the average running mate, given Biden’s advanced years and sometimes shaky public presentation. That’s cause for concern, not because she represents, as some conservatives fret, the far Left but because she will promote the spread of California’s increasingly feudal political and economic order, which undermines the upward mobility that long defined the California experience.

Read more

Podcast Episode 8: Making Sense of Urban Density, Death Rates & Dispersion with Wendell Cox

/in , ,

In this episode of the Feudal Future podcast, urban policy expert and noted demographer Wendell Cox joins hosts Joel and Marshall for a conversation on the COVID-19 pandemic, death rates, and public policy.

Read more

The Twilight of Great American Cities is Here. Can We Stop It?

/in ,

The dreadful death of George Floyd lit a fire that threatens to burn down America’s cities. Already losing population before the pandemic, our major urban centers have provided ideal kindling for conflagration with massive unemployment, closed businesses and already rising crime rates. Read more

How Race Politics Burns Out

/in ,

No future awaits those who rage against family, work, and community.

Where there is no bread, there is no Law. Where there is no Law, there is no bread.
— Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah

Racial identity politics has become the rage in the media, entertainment, and political worlds. You cannot read a mainstream publication, attend a sporting event, or browse a new educational curriculum without running a gauntlet of admonitions about America’s “systemic” racism and how it must be addressed, including through violence.
Read more

Chinese Science Fiction’s Disaster Dystopias

/in ,

In Ma Jian’s new novel, the protagonist, Ma Daode, may be a corrupt, womanizing local official, but he is a corrupt, womanizing local official with a mission. His goal is to develop a drug that will allow President Xi Jinping’s vision of a glorious Chinese future to dominate not only citizens’ daily lives but their sleeping hours as well. This is his utopian quest. The China dream, Ma Daode suggests, “is not the selfish, individualist dream chased by Western countries. It is a dream of a people, a dream of the entire nation, united as one and gathered together into an invincible force.” This mindless worship of hierarchy and control permeates his thinking.

Read more

Podcast Episode 7: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All With Mike Shellenberger

/in , ,

On the 7th Feudal Future episode, Mike Shellenberger joins hosts Marshall Toplansky & Joel Kotkin to talk about how environmentalism and housing policies are mismanaged and why environmental alarmism hurts us all.

Read more

Is the Big Cities Boom Over? Joel Kotkin and Richard Florida Debate on Munk Debates

/in ,

Does the COVID-19 pandemic spell the end of the big cities boom?

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the globe, but it’s our cities that have felt the greatest impact. Research shows that 95% of people infected with the virus live in urban areas. Read more

GateWay Second Chance: Why We Need Education & Life Skills For At-Risk Youth

/in ,

On this Feudal Future episode, Nink Carter joins hosts Marshall Toplansky & Joel Kotkin to talk about education & life skills for at risk youth, and how his nonprofit organizations seek to make a difference.

Read more

Is the California Dream Finished?

/in , , ,

For all the persistent rhetoric from California’s leaders about this state being on the cutting edge of social and racial justice, the reality on the ground is far grimmer.

Our new report on the state of California’s middle class shows a lurch toward a society in which power and money are increasingly concentrated and where upward mobility is constrained, amid shocking levels of poverty. Most of this data doesn’t even account for the recent effect of the coronavirus outbreak, which has pushed the state’s unemployment rate to 15.5%, higher than the nationwide rate of 14.7%. Read more