By: Mark Calvey and Allison Levitsky
On: San Francisco Business Times
More companies are making the leap outside California. How can the Golden State bring back its golden touch?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein might as well have been talking about California’s corporate exodus when he said that quote, once spotted on the walls of Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters.
By: Tony Semerad
On: Salt Lake Tribune
More people are moving to Utah just as many millennials are taking a new look at homebuying instead of renting.
To offer enough affordable homes and keep the state’s economy on the mend in the COVID-19 era, cities and developers may need to do something radical. They may need to go back in time.
At least, back to when homebuilders focused more on single-family houses with bigger lots, an approach to growth that many planners now view as “sprawl” and that rapidly expanded the Wasatch Front metropolitan area.
Top researchers at a Houston think tank brought that vision to Utah leaders this week, arguing the state should put aside its “smart growth” strategies of higher-density homes around business centers in favor of what they call “smart sprawl.”
They point to the rising exodus from places like San Francisco and New York, with people fleeing closely built apartments and condominiums for Utah’s more open spaces and lower cost of living.
“If we’re going to see future lockdowns, which is not beyond the pale, what you’ll find is that you’re a lot better off in a house with a backyard than you are in a one-bedroom apartment,” said Joel Kotkin, an author and presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University in Southern California.
Casey Chalk reviews The Coming of Neo-Feudalism
Perhaps one of the great cons of the twenty-first century has been corporate America’s success in deceiving middle-class and lower-class Americans that corporations are on their side, while profiting from international tax havens and cheap foreign or immigrant labor that reduces American jobs and keeps money from American taxpayers. Major American businesses declare their woke credentials vis-à-vis Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and other activist causes, while they send their jobs (and even sometimes their headquarters) overseas. Companies denounce “toxic masculinity” while benefiting from foreign child labor. Read more
Robert Grant Price reviews The Coming of Neo-Feudalism
Feudal times are here again. This is a thesis Joel Kotkin hammers to a fine point in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, a clarifying study-of-the-moment presented as sweeping history.
The idea behind the book is simple: Kotkin says the social hierarchy of the Middle Ages closely traces the lines of today. If our society continues down the current path of economic disparity and social disintegration, the feudalism we left behind will return. With force. And it will be the middle class, the benefactors of liberal capitalism, who will suffer most. Read more
Join us for a presentation on Kotkin and Toplanksky’s research brief titled California Feudalism: A Strategy to Restore California’s Middle Class, discussing inequality in California and how a change in state policy could restore our state’s dream. Kotkin and Toplansky will be joined by distinguished panelists for commentary and Q & A. The event will be moderated by Lisa Sparks Dean of the School of Communication at Chapman University. Read more
Like many contemporary social movements—#metoo, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March—the environmental lobby has tended to create an atmosphere of unanimity. In its struggle to win public and elite opinion, it has frequently evoked “science” as something settled and immutable, warning that those who dissent are either self-serving or seriously deranged.
Yet in recent months, there has been growing criticism about the current green orthodoxy, including from people long associated with environmental causes. Read more
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Fred Murphy, used under CC 2.0 License
