NewGeography.com blogs

California may be the incubator of some of the worst political trends of our times — affirmative action, climate hysteria, identity politics — but it is also capable of reversing those trends, and those of the nation as well. Yesterday the Golden State shattered the Left’s urban wall, replacing a far-Left prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, in San Francisco. There is now a growing drive to remove LA’s leftist DA, George Gascon, Boudin’s predecessor, who will face Rick Caurso in a run-off.

LA’s election represents arguably the biggest pushback thus far to progressivism. The city, which has been solidly left-of-centre for a generation, placed Caruso, a former Republican billionaire, in first place for LA’s Mayoralty against longtime progressive political leader, Karen Bass. There’s even growing talk of a similar takedown next winter in Chicago, the home of Barack Obama, where crime problems and economic challenges easily match those of its Californian counterparts.

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.

When it comes to preening, no American politician excels more than California Governor Gavin Newsom. His latest achievement, if you want to call it that, has been signing America’s first “reparations” bill for African-Americans. Although the terms are vague, there are promises of new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone proving they are descendants of slaves. All this is supposed to be overseen by an Office of African American/Freedmen Affairs.

Given that California was never a slave state (in 1852 it was home to a total of 1500 enslaved people), the adoption of this statute seems a bit absurd. Generally the most persistent racial discrimination was aimed at larger populations — native Americans, the old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, with the worst occurring in Los Angeles in 1871.

Indeed, despite the existence of racism and often hostile relations with law enforcement, African-Americans saw California as a liberation from far more oppressive conditions in the South. Moving to LA en masse in the 1920s and 1930s, their numbers increased during World War II thanks to good jobs in the burgeoning aircraft, automobile, and construction economies. While black people no doubt faced some discrimination during this period, they experienced far less than they did elsewhere; in L.A., wrote Ralph Bunche, black people were “eating high up” off the hog.

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.

Related Companies, developer of Hudson Yards in New York, the largest private real estate development in the nation’s history has announced a 270 housing units geared toward the needs of top management executives working hybrid schedules. This would provide such executives housing nearby their offices when they work in the city, splitting their work schedules with remote work from home or elsewhere at other times. Peter Grant describes the project in a Wall Street Journal article that also summarizes similar high-amenity executive products under offer by other companies. The full article is here.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Joe Biden’s Presidency is unravelling, but Democrats hope that Republicans will snatch victory from the maw of their own miscalculations. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has energised warhorses like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to see a way to rescue their now fading prospects.

Chiding California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, a strong abortion rights activist, for not being hysterical enough, Pelosi wants to throw some red meat to her downbeat progressive Democratic base, and even persuade some centrist suburbanites. The New Republic, once a respectable source of opinion but now largely a mouthpiece of the Democratic party, warns of “devastating political fallout for the Republicans”.

But the abortion issue may not be the silver bullet issue for Pelosi and her minions. Given that the administration has been tied to such things as high crime, inflation and now a troubled stock market, abortion barely registers for most voters.

Indeed, if the Democrats read the polls better, they would see that their absolutist position could prove as problematic for them as the abortion ban zealots are for the GOP. Gallup reveals, for example, that over the past decade, barely one in five Americans support a total ban on abortion, but only one-third favour no restrictions at all. Most Americans, according to a recent Pew survey, including in both parties, favour generally limited rights to abortion, but the current Democratic Party line of essentially no restrictions wins barely one-fifth of the electorate.

Read the rest 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.

What primarily intrigues me about people who willingly show themselves and their oversized properties off in places like the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section is…why? I know we are in the age of oversharing, but these are obviously wealthy people, usually with children–just the sorts you’d expect to want privacy.

Of course, if they seek to peddle their supposed dream home, that would explain it, but often, as in this Mansion piece from last week from Montana and Idaho, the profiled households say they’re staying. So then I figure someone involved in the property–the architect, the designer, maybe the Realtor–leans on the homeowner to put their prize on parade.

Read the rest of this piece at Tim W. Ferguson.

Tim W. Ferguson, the former editor of Forbes’s Asia edition, writes about business, economics and society.