Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.
~Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 1969  read more »

In recent weeks, more and more commentators are suggesting that house prices in New Zealand have started to fall, and are expected to fall further.

For many homeowners, especially those who have bought within the last year or two, this news will be terrifying, and for them I have a great deal of sympathy. They were sold the lie that house prices would always and everywhere rise much faster than incomes, and that therefore the best way to financial independence was to borrow to the maximum extent possible and buy a house – better still, several houses, the more the better.  read more »

The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong connections between an organically expanding city, housing affordability and upward mobility.  read more »

Supposedly, European high-speed trains are so successful that the airlines stop operating when new high-speed rail corridors open. The reality is much more dismal  read more »

There is considerable confusion with respect to the terms of urban geography, not only among the population in general, but also among the media, and sadly, among academics. Perhaps the greatest confusion is between the terms “metropolitan area” and “urban area.”  read more »

For today’s progressive left and its corporate backers, the past increasingly determines the future. At home and abroad, they seek to remedy historical guilt.  read more »

A critical mass of forces finally may be understanding the benefits of what I’ve been advocating for years: that separate political actors in Flyover Country unite to promote our region as a whole, rather than our cities and states always competing with one another for the fruits of economic development and government favor.  read more »

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice as she grew taller and taller in Wonderland.

Curiouser and curiouser, said everyone paying even the slightest attention as the high-speed rail fantasy grew bigger and more expensive and further behind schedule and more incomprehensible and more ludicrous and now, yes, even possibly taller and taller in California.  read more »

In 1912, James Weldon Johnson wrote that New York City is “the most fatally fascinating place in America”. The city, he explained, “sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments — constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther.”  read more »

My father, a retired AME Church pastor, on occasion would start a sermon with a story about a pastor preaching a particularly fantastic sermon. The pastor was heaped with praise by his congregants after service. The following Sunday he preached the exact same sermon, to the puzzlement of the church members.  read more »