Even as Californians protest the crude and often brutal deportation tactics employed by President Trump’s ICE and Homeland Security agents, we’re giving too little thought to how our state, and the nation, is failing the very immigrant community we want to protect.
Los Angeles politicians have long dreamt of their city overtaking New York as North America’s dominant economic centre. Yet if LA is now becoming more like New York, it is for entirely the wrong reasons.
Zohran Mamdani may represent the future of New York, but only by destroying the secrets of its past success. The city, even under the quasi-socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, has from its Dutch days been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It is the search for success, often by less than respectable means, which led millions – including the ancestors of Donald Trump – to Gotham. Read more
More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.
As recent events in Iran have so aptly demonstrated, technological progress married to industrial might produces the most tangible form of power. In the recent conflict in the Middle East, this meant that a second-tier power like Iran was clearly outmatched – first by Israel, then by America.
“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” — Aristotle
American cities face an existential choice. They can continue down their current path – adopting policies that work against the interests of local residents – or develop new approaches to make urban life work for the broad majority.
Today, many urban centers, particularly older cities, are in decline. The proportion of Americans living in core urban areas has been decreasing for generations, a trend that has only accelerated in the wake of the pandemic, rising crime, and increasingly radical politics.
Economic and sociological trends are driving these changes. Even before the pandemic, the “transactional city” conceived by Jean Gottman – center of exchange, not production – was already facing challenges.1 Demographic and economic growth has shifted to less dense, often newer communities. The cities most identified with the transactional model – San Francisco, Chicago, and New York – are among those suffering the most.
Yet, urbanity itself – the concept of people living in proximity within a defined place – is far from dead. We continue to see the emergence of new communities on the urban periphery, as well as the revitalization of older suburban communities that are developing their own successful urban centers. In some major cities, even as office demand declines, residential construction continues to grow – particularly for the childless, young and affluent.
Rather than dismiss the urban future entirely, this paper explores how urbanism is being redefined in communities across the country. Cities, from the earliest times, have long been the cornerstones of human civilization. They will remain so – but in new and oft unrecognized forms, if local communities can organize themselves successfully.
View and download the full report here.
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.
The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.
Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances, reflects a deeper dysfunction steadily eroding the city’s foundations. Read more
The killing of two young Israeli embassy staffers, allegedly by a college-educated, left-wing activist earlier this month, provided yet more evidence – if any were needed – of the perilous situation in which Western Jews now find themselves. Read more
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