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The Regression of America’s Big Progressive Cities

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If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas.

Baltimore represents an extreme case, but sadly it is not alone. Last year our three largest urban centers — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — lost people while millennial migration accelerated both to the suburbs and smaller, generally less dense cities. These demographic trends, as well as growing blight, poor schools, decaying infrastructure and, worst of all, expanding homelessness are not merely the result of “racism” or Donald Trump, but have all been exacerbated by policy agendas that are turning many great cities into loony towns. Read more

U.S. Undercounts Homeless Population By a Lot

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Americans are enjoying summer, lighting up the barbeque, enjoying the freedom of flip-flops, and thinking about weekend road trips with the family. It’s also the time of year when cities sneak out their annual homeless counts.

This year the numbers are particularly grim. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) reported in June that homelessness increased by 16% in the city and 12% in the county between 2018-19. According to the official count there were 36,300 homeless people in the city and 58,936 in the county at the time of the count. Overall LAHSA estimated that 100,000 people experienced homelessness in the county in 2018. The news is equally disheartening elsewhere: San Francisco reported a 17% increase, while communities in Ventura, Kern, and San Bernardino Counties saw more than 20% increases. Even where the news is less dire there is cause for alarm. New York, which spends some $2 billion annually on homelessness, barely managed a 1.3% reduction.

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In Defense of Houses

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Single-family homes are the backbone of American aspiration—so why do so many people oppose them?

A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in countries like Holland, Canada, and Australia, where it was closely linked with greater civil and economic freedom. In its early days, this dispersion was largely rural, but after the Second World War, it took on a largely suburban emphasis in the U.S., including within the extended metro regions of traditional cities like New York and Los Angeles. American homeownership soared between 1940 and 1962, from 44 percent to 63 percent.

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The Rise of the Intolerant Left

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In the past, the right, notably the segment affiliated with religious belief, was closely associated with censorship and control of thought. Today, enforced orthodoxy derives primarily from the left, emboldened by near total control of the media, university curricula and cultural products.

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China’s Urban Crisis

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China stands as the primary exhibit of twenty-first-century urbanism. At a time when elite cities in the West barely manage to grow in population, Chinese cities have emerged out of virtually nothing, as hundreds of millions of people have moved from farm to city. The nation’s urbanization rate has exploded from 19 percent in 1979 to nearly 60 percent today; it is expected to hit 80 percent by 2050. In 1980, China, still laboring under the antiurban Maoist regime, was home to none of the world’s megacities; today, it is home to six. By 2035, ten of the world’s 50-plus megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million people) will be located in the Middle Kingdom. Read more

What Do the Oligarchs Have In Mind For Us?

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There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific
dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
~Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited

The recent movement to investigate, and even break up, the current tech oligarchy has gained support on both sides of the Atlantic, and even leapt across the gaping divide in American politics. The immediate concerns relate to such things as the control of key markets by one or two firms, the huge concentration of wealth accruing to the tech elite and, increasingly, the oligarchy’s control over and manipulation of information pipelines. Read more

The New Shame of Our Cities

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A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. . . . Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.
  —Jane Jacobs

Perhaps no song has been belted out more often than the one that claims that America is moving “back to the city.” Newspapers, notably the New York Times, devote enormous space to this notion. It gained even more currency when the Obama administration sec­retary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Do­novan, pro­claimed that the suburbs were “over” as people were “voting with their feet” and moving to dense, transit-oriented urban centers. Read more

After Amazon: What Happened in New York Isn’t Just About New York

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The fiasco surrounding Amazon’s recent escape from New York reflects a broader, potentially devastating trend. By driving the Seattle-based behemoth out of the Big Apple, New York’s increasingly militant progressives have created a political paradigm that could resonate in cities across the country.

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Our Suicidal Elites

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The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could relieve them of their fortunes, if not their heads. In this sense, they could end up serving, in Lenin’s words, as “useful idiots” in their own destruction.

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Clippers Offer A Better Model For SoCal Than The Lakers

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This year’s basketball season, with the collapse of the Lakers and the surprising rise of the Clippers, poses a metaphor for the region. On the one hand, there’s the Laker obsession with the “star system” and impressing outsiders, notably on the East Coast. The Clipper model, reflecting a culture of hard work and teamwork, relies not only on celebrity but the raising of often obscure people into prominence.

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