Tag Archive for: housing

Connecting Suburbia: A Conversation with Joel Kotkin and June Williamson

By: June Williamson
At: Three Sixty City

Two of the world’s sharpest thinkers in design and demography discuss ways to make suburbs better: Joel Kotkin joins June Williamson to discuss some of the challenges of the sprawling suburbs, and how the thoughtful design and retrofit of low density neighborhoods could lead to more connected, equitable and environmentally sustainable futures.

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How the Boomers Robbed the Young of All Hope

“Young people do not degenerate; this occurs only after grown men have already become corrupt.”Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748.

The great test of a generation is whether it leaves better prospects for its descendants. Yet by virtually every indication, the baby boomers, and even the Gen Xers, are leaving a heritage of economic carnage – as well as a growing social and cultural dissipation that could shape our future and the fate of democratic self-rule, and not for the better. This legacy comes not from outside forces, but the investment bankers, tech oligarchs and their partners in the clerisy who have weakened their national economies and undermined the chances of upward mobility for most young people.

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What the New York Times Won’t Admit About California

Even the New York Times has to admit unpleasant realities, like the departure of people from California and other deep blue states. But one thing the paper, and other similarly-minded reporters based here, will never admit: the connection between the California economy and regulation and the rising out-migrations.

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Serfing the Future?

Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those that favored greater concentration.

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California’s Vanished Dreams, By the Numbers

Even today amid a mounting exodus among those who can afford it, and with its appeal diminished to businesses and newcomers, California, legendary state of American dreams, continues to inspire optimism among progressive boosters.

Laura Tyson, the longtime Democratic economist now at the University of California at Berkeley, praises the state for creating “the way forward” to a more enlightened “market capitalism.” Like-minded analysts tout Silicon Valley’s massive wealth generation as evidence of progressivism’s promise. The Los Angeles Times suggested approvingly that the Biden administration’s goal is to “make America California again.” And, despite dark prospects in November’s midterm elections, the President and his party still seem intent on proving it.

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Texas Is The Future

In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.

This view was widespread at the time, and has lingered well into the 21st century. Forget Houston. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the cities most frequently associated with the urban American dream.

Fast forward to today, however, and a new urban renaissance is taking shape — and this time, it’s in the heart of Texas. Never before in American history have two metros in one state — Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth — been in the nation’s five largest. So much for its cockroaches; at its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third largest municipality by 2030.

What’s driving this Texan resurgence? Traditionally, American cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis all tried to copy the model set by New York and, to a lesser extent, Chicago, with high-rise offices crowded into central business districts. But Texas urbanism is different. They may wear cowboy boots, drive pickup trucks, and attend rodeos, but Texans have created a new model of American urbanity rooted in the demands of the consumer market — an idea deeply offensive to many planners and retro-urbanists.

Some observers lament the fact that the vast majority of Texas’s metropolitan growth — nearly 100% — has taken place in the suburbs and exurbs. But this has its benefits, not least the fact that its cities haven’t been turned into rabbit warrens that only provide high living standards to the rich. Over the past decade, Texas has built three times as much housing as California. This has allowed its cities, despite massive demographic and economic growth, to keep housing prices significantly lower than in coastal Californian cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles.

But while affordability has been the secret sauce for Texan cities, its urbanism also thrives by embracing the realities of the marketplace. Over the past decade, Austin and Dallas have created jobs two to three times faster than New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. And this growth is not all at the low end of the job market, as some like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman suggest. Over the past five years, for instance, Austin has displaced San Francisco as the fastest growing tech market. Indeed, Austin is now arguably the strongest rival to Silicon Valley, home to the headquarters of Tesla, and Oracle, as well as Apple’s engineering division and Meta’s latest expansion, 33 floors downtown.

But the most significant expansion has been in professional and business services, the core of the new urban economy. Over the past five years, Austin and Dallas-Ft. Worth have created more than twice as many new business service jobs as San Jose; all four big Texas cities have grown this sector many times the rate of New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. The Dallas metroplex is now home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, trailing only New York and Chicago by a small number; 40 years ago, the region had fewer than five.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.


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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: from PxHere under CC 0.0 Public Domain.

Welcome to the New Middle Ages

By: Ed West
On: UnHerd

Today the richest 40 Americans have more wealth than the poorest 185 million Americans. The leading 100 landowners now own 40 million acres of American land, an area the size of New England. There has been a vast increase in American inequality since the mid-20th century, and Europe — though some way behind — is on a similar course.

These are among the alarming stats cited by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, published just as lockdown sped up some of the trends he chronicled: increased tech dominance, rising inequality between rich and poor, not just in wealth but in health, and record levels of loneliness (4,000 Japanese people die alone each week, he cheerfully informs us). Read more

Joel Kotkin on Big Cities are Past Their Prime at Intelligence Squared Debate

By: John Donovan
On: Intelligence Squared Debates

New York. Los Angeles. Boston. San Francisco. Call them America’s “superstars.” With mega populations, these urban hubs have long reigned as the nation’s economic, social, and cultural capitals. But big cities have also been the hardest hit by the pandemic. “Zoom towns” are springing up across the country as professionals leave the city in droves. Even more, the pandemic has brought economic and social inequality into sharp focus for the nation’s lawmakers. And some, particularly in large cities that boast the most obvious cases of such inequality, are enacting new progressive policies and laws that seek to combat inequality. For some, this means a new financial structure that makes city life less compelling for those in higher income brackets. Will megacities keep their magnetism in the wake of Covid-19? Or are their best days behind them?

Listen to this episode at Intelligence Squared Debates

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Next California Migration: Video

By: USC Sol Price School of Public Policy

California poses many challenges for the middle- and working-class. As a result, there is a significant migration of people, jobs, and opportunities— both within and outside the state. Who is leaving California, and who is no longer seeking to move to the golden state? Are there incentives for job creation and how can the state remain competitive?

Dr. Jorge De la Roca, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky tackle these questions and more. This expert panel offers an overview of current demographic trends in California, followed by a discussion around future implications for the state and possible solutions to reinvigorate the California dream. The event concluded with audience Q&A.

Watch the full event:

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The Biggest Cities Are Past Their Prime

As the centers of media and political discourse, large cities, notably New York, have a unique ability to promote themselves, asserting that dense, core urban areas own the future. Yet in reality, even during good times, and well before the pandemic, Americans have been headed, in increasing numbers, to suburbs, exurbs and to smaller cities. Romantic illusions to past urban recoveries may make people feel better, but they ignore both long-lasting trends and new realities.

People vote with their feet, and today, only a small percentage of Americans live in or around the core urban counties. In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24% of the U.S. population; today the share is under 15%. In contrast, the suburbs and exurbs grew from housing 13% of the metropolitan population in 1940 to 86% in 2017, a gradual increase of 2% a year. Despite all the talk of young people and families and others coming “back to the city,” suburbs accounted for about 90% of all U.S. metropolitan growth since 2010; over that time, suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million.

Much the same can be said about the economy. During the last decade, roughly 80% of all job growth has been in the suburbs. Suburbs also generate the bulk of patents; in fact, three-quarters come from areas with less 3,500 people per square mile, less than half the density associated with urban centers.

The pandemic accelerated these already existing trends. New census numbers show that San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles led the population loss sweepstakes over the past year, while people headed to the Sunbelt, suburbs, exurbs or even small towns.

But the real issue now is not so much the pandemic per se but the rise of dispersed work. Midtown offices are still more than half empty — and that’s not just the pessimist’s way of seeing the glass. While they will recover some, they will likely not replace a large portion of what was lost. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom suggests that remote workers will ultimately constitute at least 20% of the workforce, more than three times the pre-pandemic rate.

This leaves the large central business districts such as Midtown particularly exposed. As long-time urban booster Richard Florida notes, central business districts represent “the last gasp of the old Industrial age.” He adds, “This idea that you have to pack and stack these office workers and they have to commute in at 9 and leave at 5 and work in cubicle farms— it’s just silly. It is completely out of touch with the way people work.”

Read the rest of this piece at NY Daily News.


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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo:Steve Guttman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.