You are here: / / Urban Affairs

Our Anemic Suburbs: Every Urban Area Needs its Outskirts — and New York City’s Are in Trouble

/in
Appearing in:

New York Daily News

New York City has prospered since the great recession of 2008, buoyed by an endless supply of free money from Washington that’s elevated the stock and real estate markets. But the broader metro region has struggled, in an ominous sign of tougher times to come.

Little acknowledged in the discussion of New York’s “tale of two cities” is something beyond the control of Mayor de Blasio: the fading of the city’s once-thriving suburbs, even as the city grows more populous and more expensive. Read more

Light Rail in the Sun Belt is a Poor Fit

/in
Appearing in:

Houston Chronicle

There is an effective lobby for building light rail, including in cities such as Houston. But why build light rail? To reduce car use? To improve mobility for low-income citizens? This certainly seems a worthwhile objective, with the thousands of core-city, low-income residents whose transit service cannot get them to most jobs in a reasonable period of time.

ut rather than accept the flackery that accompanies these projects, maybe we should focus on effectiveness, judged by ridership, and the impact of such expensive projects on the transportation of the transit-dependent.

Read more

The Cities Americans Are Thronging To And Fleeing

/in ,
Appearing in:

Forbes

Cities get ranked in numerous ways — by income, hipness, tech-savviness and livability — but there may be nothing more revealing about the shifting fortunes of our largest metropolitan areas than patterns of domestic migration. Read more

China’s Planned City Bubble Is About to Pop—and Even You’ll Feel It

/in
Appearing in:

The Daily Beast

Seven years after the last housing debacle devastated the world economy, we may be on the verge of another, albeit different, bubble. If the last real estate collapse was created due to insanely easy lending policies aimed at the middle and working classes, the current one has its roots largely in a regime of cheap money married to policies of planners who believe that they can shape the urban future from above.

This time, the potential property blowout has roots in large part outside the United States. Many of China’s current problems, in fact, can be traced in part to its unhealthy inflation of real estate values spurred by a drive to increase urbanization and density. Last year, The Economist estimated median home price to median income of nearly 20 in Shenzhen, 17 in Hong Kong, and more than 15 in Beijing, between 50 percent and 100 percent higher than ultra-expensive places (PDF) like San Francisco, Vancouver, or Sydney.
Read more

An Improbable And Fragile Comeback: New Orleans 10 Years After Katrina

/in
Appearing in:

Forbes

In the fall of 2005, many saw in postdiluvial New Orleans another example of failed urbanization, a formerly great city that was broken beyond repair.Yet 10 years after a catastrophe that drove hundreds of thousands of its citizens away, the metro area has made an impressive comeback.

New Orleans’ resurgence since Katrina has come courtesy of $71 billion in federal funds and the determination and verve of New Orleanians themselves, as documented by Tulane geographer Rich Campanella, who provided research and direction for this article. It also benefited from the generosity of thevolunteers who worked in the recovery efforts as well as that of neighboring cities, notably Houston, which housed thousands of evacuees. Read more

What Jane Jacobs Got Wrong About Cities

/in
Appearing in:

The Daily Beast

Few people have had more influence on thinking about cities than the late Jane Jacobs.

The onetime New Yorker turned Torontonian, Jacobs, who died in 2006, has become something of a patron saint for American urbanists, and the moral and economic case she made for urban revival has been cited by everyone frompundits and think tanks to developers.
Read more

The Cities Creating The Most White-Collar Jobs

/in ,
Appearing in:

Forbes

In our modern economy, the biggest wellspring of new jobs isn’t the information sector, as hype might lead some to think, but the somewhat nebulous category of business services. Over the past decade, business services has emerged as easily the largest high-wage sector in the United States, employing 19.1 million people. These are the white-collar jobs that most people believe offer a ladder into the middle class. Dominated by administrative services and management jobs, the sector also includes critical skilled workers in legal services, design services, scientific research , and even a piece of the tech sector with computer systems and design. Since 2004, while the number of manufacturing and information jobs in the U.S. has fallen, the business services sector has grown 21%, adding 3.4 million positions. Read more

Countering Progressives’ Assault on Suburbia

/in
Appearing in:

Real Clear Politics

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.
Read more

Homebuyers Confront China Syndrome

/in ,
Appearing in:

Orange County Register

China has hacked our government, devastated or severely challenged our industries and enjoyed one of the greatest wealth transfers in history – from our households to its. China also benefits from by far the largest trade surplus with the United States and also owns 11 percent of our national debt.

Sometimes it seems to be increasingly China’s world, and we just happen to live in it. Some, such as columnist Thomas Friedman and Daniel A. Bell, author of the newly published “The China Model,” even suggest we adjust our political system to more closely resemble that of the Chinese.

Yet, a funny thing has happened on the way to global domination – the Chinese are coming here with their money, and, often, with their families. Rather than seeing China as the land of opportunity, more Chinese have been establishing homes in America, particularly in California, where they account for roughly one-third of foreign homebuyers, with upward of 70 percent paying cash. Overall Chinese investment in U.S. real estate has grown from $50 million in 2000 to $14 billion in 2013, surpassing all other foreign investors.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2015

/in ,
Appearing in:

Forbes

We are supposed to be moving rapidly into the “information era,” but the future, as science fiction author William Gibson suggested, is not “evenly distributed.” For most of the U.S., the boomlet in software, Internet publishing, search and other “disruptive” cyber companies has hardly been a windfall in terms of employment. As jobs in those areas have been created, employment has shriveled in old media like newspaper, magazine and book publishing (these industries lost a net 172,000 jobs from 2009 through 2014). In the 52 largest metropolitan areas that we studied, information employment declined for roughly half from 2009 through 2014. Read more