Economics

From the beginning of the mortgage crisis New York and other financial centers have acted as if they were immune to the suffering in the rest of country. As suburbs, exurbs and hard-scrabble out of the way urban neighborhoods suffered with foreclosures and endured predictions of their demise, the cognitive elites in places like Manhattan felt confident about their own prospects, property values and jobs. So what if the rubes in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa and Riverside all teetered on the brink?  read more »

In the heart of downtown Indianapolis lies a recently constructed monolith, the envy of other cities aspiring for new digs for their NFL football team. Lucas Oil Stadium has 63,000 seats and features a retractable roof allowing for comfort control during Indiana's fickle fall weather season. And for those urban enthusiasts in the crowd, when open, the roof provides a captivating view of an Indy skyline that in years past was barely visible to the naked eye.  read more »

By Bernard L. Schwartz, Sherle R. Schwenninger, New America Foundation

The American economy is in trouble. Battered and bruised by the collapsing housing and credit bubbles, and by high oil and food prices, it is having trouble finding its footing. The stimulus medicine the Federal Reserve and Congress administered earlier this year is already wearing off, while home prices are still falling and unemployment continues to creep upward.  read more »

The takeover of Merrill Lynch by Charlotte-based Bank of America represents another step in the emergence of a true full-tilt competitor to New York as a financial capital. Already dominant in commercial banking, the acquisition places the North Carolina metropolis into the first ranks of cities in wealth management.  read more »

With the sale of Lehman Brothers seen as imminent — possibly as soon as this weekend — New York's commercial real estate market is bracing itself for the loss of a key financier responsible for tens of billions of dollars in commercial loans.

"It would be one less major player," a commercial real estate finance expert at New York University Schack Institute of Real Estate, Lawrence Longua, said. "It is probably more of a psychological effect, but it is one more piece of bad news."  read more »

The paper and pulp industry has been good to Wisconsin, the number one papermaking state in the nation. Wisconsin produces more than 5.3 million tons of paper and over a million tons of paperboard annually. The pulp and paper industry employs more than 35,000 people in the state representing roughly eight percent of all manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin. These are good jobs with good benefits. Papermakers earn over 20 percent more than the manufacturing sector average and over 50 percent more than the average wage in the state.  read more »

Phoenix may be one of the nation’s most misunderstood urban areas. The conventional wisdom is that Phoenix is one of the most suburbanized (or if the pejorative is preferred, “sprawling”) urban areas in the United States. Not so. According to 2000 U.S. Census data, Phoenix ranked number 10 in population density out of the 36 urban areas with more than one million in population.  read more »

Fifty years ago, Phoenix was Tiny Town in the Desert, smaller than Oshkosh or Santa Fe today. Now, it is larger than Philadelphia and the metro area has the bulk of Arizona’s population. That does not mean it gets any respect; on the contrary, it is, to many, a joke, with all of Los Angeles’ traffic and smog but without the ocean, the celebrities or the Lakers.  read more »

By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

Much has been said about the rootlessness of our two Presidential aspirants, but both men have spent their political lifetimes representing real places and specific constituencies. Newgeography.com has already looked into the realities shaping Senator Barack Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago. Now we turn to the city that has most shaped Senator John McCain’s career: Phoenix.  read more »

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The report of Phoenix’s death has been greatly exaggerated.” To be sure, the Phoenix metropolitan area, for the first time in years, is suffering through a period of economic distress both in absolute and relative terms.  read more »