Tag Archive for: housing

Joel Kotkin Talks with Amanda Vanstone about the Limits of Libertarianism

By: Amanda Vanstone
On: Counterpoint

What are the limits of libertarianism? Joel Kotkin explains that ‘in recent years, libertarians increasingly seem less concerned with how their policies might actually impact people. Convinced that markets are virtually always the best way to approach any issue, they have allied with many of the same forces – monopoly capital, anti-suburban zealots and the tech-oligarchy – which are systematically undermining the popular rationale for market capitalism’. He goes through some core libertarian beliefs and how they’ve changed and says that ‘in many ways, libertarians, like all of us, are victims of history’ and that to become relevant again, libertarians need to go beyond their dogmatic attachments, focus on bolstering the vitality competitive free markets’. That ‘libertarian ideas still have great relevance, but only so much as they reflect markets that are open to competition and capable of improving everyday lives’.

Listen to this episode:

Read more

The Power Hungry Podcast: Joel Kotkin Talks with Robert Bryce

By: Robert Bryce
On: The Power Hungry Podcast

Joel Kotkin is a demographer, journalist, author, and executive editor of NewGeography.com. In his second appearance on the Power Hungry Podcast, Kotkin discusses his recent article for Quillette, “The New Great Game,” how China and Russia are allying against the West, why America needs “a new nationalism” to counter this alliance, how California’s administrative state is crushing the poor and the middle class, Michael Shellenberger’s gubernatorial bid, energy, housing, and why despite his many concerns, he remains bullish on the future of the United States.

 

Listen to this episode on The Power Hungry Podcast

Related:

The Great New Game
Welcome to the End of Democracy and It’s Not Trump’s Fault
Buy The Coming of Neo-Feudalism

What’s Left? is a weekly podcast hosted by Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) and Oliver Bateman (@moustacheclubUS). Among other topics, we usually discuss politics, current affairs, culture, and the sleazy world of bourgeois media.

Tarnishing the Golden State

No state advertises its egalitarian bona fides more than California. Governor Gavin Newsom brags that his state is “the envy of the world,” a place that is “not going to abandon our poor people.” In his inauguration speech, he claimed that “unlike the Washington plutocracy, California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope. The California Dream is for all.” Yet even as Newsom and his progressive allies have backed Black Lives Matter and enacted a racialized “ethnic studies” curriculum in public schools, reality tells a less positive story. The Golden State’s racial minorities are far from thriving. Increasingly, they’re seeking fortunes elsewhere—often to redder, less “enlightened” states.

The minorities leaving California are not running away from beautiful weather or scenery but toward an opportunity horizon that no longer seems achievable in the Golden State. In a new report for Chapman University, my coauthors and I found that African-American and Latino Californians’ real earnings ranked between 48th and 50th among the states. Blacks in California earn roughly the same, or slightly less, than do their counterparts in Mississippi. The state has the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate and the third-highest Gini Inequality index (behind New York and Louisiana). According to the United Way of California, over 30 percent of California residents lack sufficient income to cover basic living costs even after accounting for public-assistance programs; this includes half of Latino and 40 percent of black residents.

It was different once. Ever since the nineteenth-century Gold Rush, people from around the world rushed to California to seek their fortunes, giving the state a diverse population of whites, Asians, Latinos, and blacks. Deeply afraid of an “Asian invasion” into what newcomers called Gold Mountain, incumbent Californians limited the rights of Chinese, Japanese, and other migrants from the East and backed racially oriented bans originating from Washington, D.C. that lifted only in the early 1950s. The Asian population has risen since. Until 1990, Asians were not systematically enumerated in the decennial census but were instead combined with Pacific Islanders; this larger grouping increased from 2.0 percent to 9.6 percent of the state’s population, according to Census Bureau research. The state’s Asian population increased from 10.9 percent in 2000 to 15.1 percent in 2020.

Immigrants also entered from Mexico, at first to escape the chaos of that country’s brutal 1910–1920 revolution. Controls on Mexican migration tended to follow economic conditions, but a liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, and a mass amnesty in 1986, assured that Latinos would be the Golden State’s largest group. Census Bureau research indicates that California’s Hispanic population rose from 6.0 percent in 1940 to 13.7 percent in 1970 and 32.4 percent in 2000. A figure of 37.6 percent was reached in 2010, rising to 39.4 percent in 2020.

Finally, African-Americans started coming to the state in the 1920s and 1930s, with their numbers increasing during World War II. Lured by good jobs in the state’s burgeoning aircraft, automobile, and construction economies, blacks may have faced some discrimination, but far less than they did elsewhere. In L.A., wrote Ralph Bunche, blacks were “eating high up” off the hog. As late as 1940, less than 2 percent of the population was black—a number that more than doubled by 1950 and reached a peak of 7.7 percent in 1980. Since 2000, however, California’s black population has dropped from 6.7 percent to 5.4 percent.

Today, the California opportunity structure is no longer so promising. Once seen as a mecca of sorts for blacks, L.A. now ranks toward the bottom of the Urban Reform Institute’s Upward Mobility Index, which measures such factors as income, housing affordability, unemployment, educational attainment, and homeownership. San Francisco does poorly by the same metrics. The best American cities for upward mobility today are not Los Angeles or San Francisco but Atlanta; Phoenix; Virginia Beach and Richmond, Virginia; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.


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: City Journal.

The Limits of Libertarianism

Over the past half-century, libertarians have played a critical role in the ever-growing war against governmental nonsense. If you want to read the best critiques of wasteful transit policy, sports stadia, government pensions or cancel culture, you can find it among liberty-minded outlets like Reason magazine, the Cato Institute and numerous free-market think tanks. They have provided a strong and necessary voice for free-market capitalism at a time when it faces serious challenges, notably from China and other state-directed systems.

Read more

You Can’t Fix Housing with New Houses. We Need New Cities

Housing is rapidly becoming the key economic issue facing America’s beleaguered middle class. Even as interest rates rise, rents are on a wild binge, up near 20 percent in the past year or more in some cities. Meanwhile, home prices have hit a high and appear to be climbing further still. Higher prices are emerging even in what have long been relative bargain communities in the southeast, as refugees from the high-priced Northeast pour in with their greater resources.

The property gold rush has been made more problematic by the growing role of professional, well-funded investors and speculators, to whom the housing market is more attractive than a sometimes unsteady stock market. Read more

The Tech Breakdown

The record meltdown of Meta stock earlier this month suggests turbulence in the tech world and a difficult period ahead for the company formerly known as Facebook. But even as Meta’s stock has fallen, the record profits being posted by fellow oligarchical tech firms Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon indicates that Silicon Valley’s hegemony is far from over. Read more

What’s Left? Podcast: The Work of Housing with Joel Kotkin

By: Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman
On: What’s Left?

Urban Reform Institute executive director Joel Kotkin returns to the podcast to discuss housing and development issues with Aimee and Oliver.

 

Listen to this episode on What’s Left? podcast

Read more

Fresno Business Council Meeting

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky join a Fresno Business Council Board Meeting to discuss unaffordable housing and solutions to housing costs.

California’s Economy is Weaker Than it Looks

Whisper it, but the $45 billion surplus Gavin Newsom has projected for California next year isn’t quite what it seems. In fact, the bulk of that surplus is largely due to the earnings of a few giants such as Google, Apple and Meta (formerly Facebook), as well as a handful of IPOs. Read more

California is a Bastion of Innovation Marred by Deep Inequality. Is That America’s Future?

Everyone seems to be California dreaming these days. Much of America, particularly its red parts, see California as a hopeless dystopia best understood as everything the nation should avoid. Meanwhile, for the progressive Left and many around Joe Biden, California is the Mecca, a great role model being attacked by jealous reactionaries.

As in so many cases, both sides have a piece of the truth.

Read more