Economics

The Problem with Energy Blinders

Randal OToole — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:42:56 -0500

Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.

A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the point of the new paper was that “significant decreases in future energy consumption can only be achieved by reducing the average energy used per hour of human travel.”

In other words, people don’t substitute energy for time: if they use a slower but more energy efficient form of travel, they won’t travel more hours (thereby using more energy) to make up for the slower speed. The paper presents this as some kind of revelation: saving energy means forcing people to use more energy-efficient forms of travel. As a practical matter, this means emphasizing walking and cycling.

The problem is that such a policy ignores numerous other important social goals. Want to maximize productivity to keep the nation competitive with other parts of the world? Increasing the average speed of travel is a key component of national productivity.

Want to reduce income inequality? Increasing the average speed of travel among low-income people will give them access to more and better jobs. That necessarily means increasing auto ownership. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has found that the average resident of one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost three times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as a 60-minute bike or transit ride, and more than three times as many jobs in a 10-minute auto drive as a 60-minute walk.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Bicycles may be the most energy-efficient mode of travel, but that doesn’t mean they are always the best mode. Photo by Carlton Reid, under CC 2.0 License.

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:28:14 -0500

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.

No other state outside Washington DC has been cutting so many jobs, and California now suffers from America’s highest unemployment rate at 5.5%. But this is nothing new. The state has been haemorrhaging jobs in fields such as manufacturing, construction and business services since Joe Biden’s presidency.

Michael Bernick, who previously served as the director of California’s labour department, has pointed to the state’s “Upstairs, Downstairs economy”, in which a wealthy college-educated class relies on service economy workers. California manages to be at once the state with the most billionaires and the nation’s poverty capital. Its teenage unemployment rate tops 21%, just short of twice the national average; for those under the age of 30, it ranks second nationally behind Mississippi.

This shortage of jobs, particularly high-quality ones, has steadily built into a crisis in recent years as politicians look away. Affordability, particularly for housing, is a big issue but California is also by far the worst state at creating jobs which pay above average, losing 1.6 million such roles in the last decade. In the past year, the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Tech is supposedly California’s strong point, yet even here things are murky. While venture-financed AI startups descend on the Bay Area, the overall picture is one of tech job losses. This year, according to the LA Times, thousands of workers at the likes of Amazon, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros have been laid off. Worse still, many tech jobs are headed elsewhere. Texas is leading the charge, followed by Florida, as Southern states including Tennessee and Georgia make significant gains.

One factor here is that California’s nationally high energy prices are undermining its AI industry. Firms such as Nvidia and Samsung are now looking to establish data centres in locations with lower prices, so that they’ll be better placed to develop advanced chips and processors. For instance, the University of Texas at Austin is planning a substantial new quantum computing centre, while energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania are now seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate traditional industrial sectors.

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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Felton Davis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Randal OToole — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic with creation of the transit capital investment grants program, also known as New Starts. Since then, federal, state, and local taxpayers have spent more than half a trillion dollars on transit capital improvements. Transit agencies have also spent nearly $1.2 trillion on transit operations, only $355 billion of which was covered by passenger fares.

These numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series, the 2024 edition of which the Federal Transit Administration released last week along with the 2024 annual transit database that was featured here yesterday. While the above figures are in nominal dollars, after adjusting for inflation to 2024 dollars using GDP deflators, taxpayers have spent more than $1.8 trillion subsidizing transit since 1991.

What have we gotten for this excessively generous subsidy? In 1991, the average urban resident rode transit more than 40 times a year. Transit ridership grew between 1991 and 2014, but so did urban populations, so trips per resident increased to just 42. Ridership fell after 2014 and by 2019 the average urban resident took only 36 transit trips per year. As of 2024, it was around 27 trips per year.

This does not seem like a great return on a $1.8 trillion investment.

Transit has not relieved congestion. It hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It hasn’t helped many low-income people, the vast majority of whom have their own cars and don’t use transit. All this $1.8 trillion has done is enrich a few special interest groups.

The historic time series consists of five different spreadsheets. The first two, tables TS1.1 and TS1.2, focus on how much transit funding comes federal, state, or local sources. More interesting is table TS2.1, which lists operating expenses, fares, route miles, revenue miles, revenue hours, riders, and passenger-miles, all broken down by both transit agencies and modes for each agency. Table TS2.2 is the same but broken down only by transit agencies, not by modes. Table TS3.1 has capital expenses broken down by agency and mode while table TS3.2 inventories assets by agency and mode. I use mainly 2.1 and 3.1.

Previous issues have included most data back to 1991, though capital costs began in 1992 and fares in 2002. For some reason, this year the FTA began many of the time series in 2015, so I turned to the 2023 time series to get earlier years.

The American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transit Fact Book includes capital costs and fares for the years that are missing from the historical time series. Though APTA’s data aren’t broken down by mode, they add to the continuous series of national data.

Transit advocates talk endlessly about the advantages of transit over driving. Americans are paying for it but they aren’t using it.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

An Anti-woke Counter-revolution is Sweeping Through the Media

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: IMDB/House of David

New Report: The Rise of Latino America

Joel Kotkin and Jennifer Hernandez — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Executive Summary

In The Rise of Latino America, we argue that Latinos, who are projected to become America’s largest ethnic group, are a dynamic force shaping the nation’s demographic, economic, and cultural future. Far from being a marginalized group defined by oppression, Latinos are integral to America’s story. They drive economic growth, cultural evolution, and workforce vitality. Challenges, however, including poverty, educational disparities, and restrictive policies, threaten their upward mobility. Policymakers who wish to harness Latino potential to ensure national prosperity and resilience should adopt policies that prioritize affordability, safety, and economic opportunity over ideological constraints.

We urge policymakers to reject ideologically driven policies that hinder Latino progress, such as restrictive land use, costly climate mandates, and reduced personal mobility. Embracing policies that align with Latino aspirations rooted in work, family, and opportunity will not only empower this vital population but also strengthen America’s economic and demographic future in a competitive global landscape.

Introduction

Migration has shaped America’s history. The earliest migrants, the ancestors of the American Indians, arrived from far east Asia. Migration from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was voluntary but thousands of enslaved people also arrived here from Africa at the same time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw waves of Germans, Italians, Russians, East Asians, Indians, and Jews.

Each group has faced sometimes brutal discrimination from the dominant majority. Many on the left see such racial prejudice as the American experience’s defining characteristic. From this perspective, Latinos are simply the latest group to live under an oppressive regime and whose lands “settlers” stole.

Yet the Latino experience is unique and far more uplifting. Latinos differ from Europeans: notably, they migrated to a country whose territory Anglo immigrants had conquered—in Texas initially and later across the entire Southwest—and taken from them.

But contrary to the narrative of “settler colonialism,” very few of today’s Latino residents can trace themselves to earlier settlers; the vast majority are recent arrivals. Indeed, the Southwest’s entire Mexican population in 1848 was barely 48,000. Yet the dominant academic and progressive narrative remains one of unending oppression and seizure of land. Latinos, writes one leftist writer, have “been forgotten by the nation” and have “nothing but their angers and their hungers.” Like the Anglos who settled areas seized from Mexico, they too want a piece of the pie, someplace safe and prosperous for their families to live and where they can acquire wealth.

At the same time there are some on the political right who fear America’s ongoing Latinization. Some influential right-wing theorists continue to hold the notion that Latinos are intrinsically inferior to whites and Asians. Others fear that the Latinos blend of Catholic and Indio culture makes them less digestible than earlier immigrants.

This report disputes both perspectives, and focuses instead on the progress, as well as the very real challenges Latinos face in America. The rise of Latinos does not constitute a departure from the American story; it is both wrong and dangerous to speak about them as if they were. Latinos, soon to be America’s largest ethnic group, are in a prime position to shape America’s future. Although the bulk are from Mexico, a large contingent comes from the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Read the rest of this report at: Civitas Institute.

Download the full paper

Authors

Jennifer Hernandez has practiced land use and environmental law for more than 30 years, and leads Holland & Knight's West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. She is a former longtime co-chair of the firm's national Land Use and Government Team. Ms. Hernandez divides her time between the firm's San Francisco and Los Angeles offices.

Researchers

Wendell Cox is a leading proponent of adopting land use and transport policies based on their effectiveness in improving the standard of living and alleviating poverty. He is principal of Demographia (Wendell Cox Consultancy) in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He specializes in urban policy, transport and demographics and is author of Demographia World Urban Areas and co-author of Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. He is also author of Toward More Prosperous Cities, a framing essay on urban areas, urban planning, urban transport and sustainability.

Marshall Toplansky is an award-winning Innovation Professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. Marshall co-founded KPMG's data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

Erika Ozuna is a senior consultant at Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. She currently works on multifamily and senior housing analysis and market studies throughout the country. Ozuna has over ten years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, including experience in all types of senior housing appraisals. Prior to her multifamily housing experience, Erika worked for seven years in the banking and investments fields, has conducted quantitative and qualitative research and analysis for numerous projects and entities, and was a high school teacher. Erika holds a M.P.P. in international relations and economics from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in business administration from the University of Texas RGV.

Photo: report cover and pages from the report, Civitas Institute.

Universities Have Sold a Whole Generation a Lie

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Some day, Donald Trump may lead America into a golden era of reindustrialisation, or perhaps one last hurrah before China’s domination of materials and manufacturing knocks the US off its number one perch. Yet what if we start to build new factories and ports but no one shows up to work in them?

Trump claims to have dragooned some $12tn in new foreign investment, but even he questions whether we have the bodies, and minds, to fill American jobs. He recently defended H-1B visas for migrants with “special” talents (after first questioning them), alarming some of his more nationalist Maga allies.

H-1B visas are typically used by tech firms, but the row over their future illustrates why America is facing a critical shortage of skilled workers across the board. To some extent, both sides of the debate are right.

As the populist Right points out, H1-B visas have a record of abuse – including a notorious case at Disney, which replaced some of its American IT workers with foreign ones and even effectively required the departing US staff to train their replacements. Roughly three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s jobs were in 2018 estimated to be held by non-citizens. Of course, the oligarchs look at these “technocoolies” not so much as a genius input as a way to save money.

But still, as Vivek Ramaswamy has acidly pointed out, foreign workers are needed because of profound failures in the US education system.

Today, US fourth and eighth graders are performing worse not only than students in East Asia, but also those in the likes of Poland and Sweden. Overall, some 40pc of US public school students fail to meet standards in either maths or English, worse than pre-pandemic. The country was hardly doing spectacularly before then. In maths, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

This lack of achievement at the grade school level is felt not only in the elite professions but even in more mundane careers such as truck drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. By 2030, the US could be short about two million industrial workers; the American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Even well-paying jobs of this kind have been hard to fill. Ford chief executive Jim Farley notes that the carmaker has 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 annually that can’t be filled.

America’s inability to produce a new generation that can do these jobs reflects a deeply-ingrained tendency to ignore practical skills in favour of the supposed Valhalla of a four-year liberal arts education. The problem is not just universities. High schools have removed shop classes – where students are taught basic skills like woodwork – thinking them too declassee and demeaning.

One proposed solution is mass immigration, but Biden’s disastrous open border policy largely attracted migrants from Latin America, who tend to be less skilled than those from east and south Asia, as well as far less educated than earlier waves. Most are likely to remain at the bottom of the employment chain throughout their lives. These newcomers primarily compete with other poor people for living space, jobs, and social services.

In reality, what is needed most is to reclaim our increasingly disengaged native-born workforce; the percentage of prime age men not in the labour force has risen in recent decades. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

To address this issue, the education system needs to shift away from consciousness-raising, a favourite of progressive faculty, towards developing productive skills. Many are already ditching traditional academia. From 2010 to 2021, US undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to about 15.4 million. Over the past decade, more than 500 US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.

In contrast, the number attending vocational schools was up 16pc in 2023 to the highest level since 2018. This marks a major shift in attitudes. A recent Gates Foundation study suggested decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year college degrees and greater interest in trade schools. This appears to be particularly true among working class families. Americans have more faith in two-year colleges, where over 40pc of all undergraduates are enrolled, than in four-year schools.

For many young people, a shift towards tactile skills is well-advised. The digitisation of the economy has weakened the status of many professions, including code-writers. Even among those who manage to finish university, more than 40pc of recent graduates aged 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

Moreover, the supposed “jobs of the future” are already in danger of evaporating. The automation of information, computer scientist Kai -Fu Lee suggests, will end up wiping out the “coders”. Lee, a venture capitalist and author of AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, predicts, “a lot of employees are going to feel like turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving”.

This means that the future may be less about analytical skills than actually fixing and building things. “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work,” virtual reality pioneer Rony Abovitz, now the founder of AI startup Sun and Thunder, told me. Instead, he predicts that the future will be shaped more by “the rise of this sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”.

If Trump, like many Democrats, is seeking a resurgent America, the critical challenge will lie not in financial manipulation, computer games, or supervising AI as it analyses everything in minute details. The future is in developing and nurturing the skilled hands needed to resist and surpass the United States’ competitors.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Telegraph

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning. Many architects might tell you that planning is a subset of architecture. Whether true or not, architects have had a lot of influence in the development of the planning profession.

One architect who fits that mold is Louis Sullivan. I don’t think he ever identified with being a planner, but his influence on urban design, by being one of the first designers of the modern skyscraper and a key leader in the formation of the Chicago School and Prairie School of architecture, which also influenced planning, links Sullivan to planning.

Sullivan was also famous for a quote that fits planning as well as architecture: “form follows function”. Sullivan made that statement when thinking about his architectural designs. However, he just as easily could have said the same about cities. In other words, how cities look depends on what they do.

The industrial cities in the Rust Belt took on the form they did because of the function they had. Many of them cared far less about how they looked or performed as cities and cared more about how they could house the factories that employed workers, the homes they lived in, and their commercial needs.

Gary, IN is a great example of this. When U.S. Steel employed more than 30,000 workers and nearly 200,000 people lived in Gary, few people put lots of thought into the city’s form; it served the function of an industrial city. Over the last half of the 20^th century, however, that function collapsed, leaving behind a city that was ill-prepared for the next step. As I wrote in Part 1 about the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize Gary’s downtown, I liked the premise of relying on “mom-and-pop developer capital” and “patience and persistence” to establish a new urban form. But trying to establish a new form (or even an updated form) is not possible without knowing the function. That’s why I think Notre Dame’s School of Architecture in Gary is admirable, but flawed.

Gary’s existential moment

Gary must determine its new function first and establish the form that allows it to flourish. But how does it do that?

Let’s use the city typology from the Encie study I referenced in Part 1 as a starting point. Of the nine city typologies the report identified, the researchers are most gloomy on the prospects of industrial cities in highly-developed economies. We know now that manufacturing is no longer the kind of economic function that can support cities in the way they used to. That doesn’t mean it’s not financially viable anymore, it means it doesn’t fulfill the needs of people living in developed economies. Using the Encie study as an example, the researchers note that future prospects for existing industrial cities are dim in developed economies, but strong in developing or emerging economies. Let’s suppose the industrial city model is gone and never coming back into American cities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Indiana Dunes National Park — near the city of Gary, via Picryl in Public Domain.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I recently saw a good story about Gary, Indiana on the CityLab website. The article highlights work being done by the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture through its Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative.

The HCR’s work in Gary noted that the city had been hurt by numerous one-off projects (Genesis Convention Center, museums, minor league stadiums, casinos) that created little spinoff impact. A quote explaining the HCR’s approach:

“They’re promoting traditional city-building as part of a wider critique. In too many cities, they say, corporate developers have sought a quick return on shoddy, suburbanized projects that were racially and economically segregated as well as unsustainable. Where this process has failed — like Gary — might hold the key to reclaiming a better way of creating urban community.”

I would agree that cities like Gary need to get back to city-building. But there are two big steps cities like Gary need to achieve before getting back into city-building. It must establish an economic future. But more importantly, cities like Gary need to establish a new reason for being.

Cities begin with a reason for being there

There are many cities that came into existence because of a certain quality that distinguished it from other locations. New York City, for example, was founded by the Dutch to serve as a port and trading center that had access to hinterlands via the Hudson River. The port, and the expertise gained from becoming a trading center, made the city a great location for global trade and finance very early on, and continues to this day. Chicago started as a fur trading post, but its location next to an easily transversed mid-continent watershed divide (between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds) made it a critical transportation link for the middle of a rapidly growing nation. The waterway connection soon grew into an extensive railroad network centered on Chicago, giving it easy access to food produced in the agricultural Midwest for national and global distribution.

In the best cases, cities pivot from one existential function to another, just as New York and Chicago did. Older cities like New York and Chicago aren’t alone in this. Orlando built on its Disney World tourism foundation to expand its role in film, television and entertainment industries, even giving it a foothold into the industrial and high-tech sectors. Legalized gambling made Las Vegas a tourist destination, and eventually into a prime convention destination that fuels its hospitality industry.

But cities founded on manufacturing, like Gary, have really struggled to find the next reason for being. There’s been tons of research on why this is the case. I came across a report written five years ago that explains cities’ reasons for their existence – and continued relevance.

Read Part 2 here.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Paul Sableman, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Spectre of Communism Haunts the West — Mamdani is Only the Beginning

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.

This shift is fairly universal, particularly in big cities. Virtually all the leading U.S. and European cities are ruled by progressives, in Europe, like New York, often as an odd alliance of Islamists, greens and leftists. Socialists, Islamists and Greens dominated such major European cities as Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Toronto, once ruled by moderate conservatives, has also turned to the progressive left.

Neither ethnicity nor class are the keys to this transition, but age. Mamdani’s election epitomizes these trends; he won an astounding 70 per cent of the vote among New Yorkers under 40, while losing badly among older folks and those who grew up, or lived long in Gotham.

Many on the reinvigorated left see Mamdani’s cost of living emphasis as a promising strategy for progressives often on the wrong side of many cultural issues. In the primary, Mamdani lost many predominately Black and Latino areas like the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, all who favoured Andrew Cuomo, as did traditional ethnic working class areas in places like Canarsie in south Brooklyn.

But younger people, even those making decent incomes, catapulted a totally inexperienced, pro-Hamas, self-proclaimed Marxist to run the world capital of capitalism. Cost of living was the key, as New Yorkers pay the highest proportion of their income; it has by far the lowest percentage of homeowners in the country, half the national average.

Lack of affordable housing is now widely common in English speaking countries. Ireland which just elected a far-left Marxist as president, is among the worst. In the U.S., housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded while one in three Americans now spend over 30 per cent of their income on mortgage payments or rent. In the U.S., homeownership for people under 35 has fallen fairly steadily for decades and is now half that of people over 45. A similar erosion in homeownership is clear in Britain and Australia.

Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, is in a similar fix. According to a 2024 Scotiabank poll, home ownership declined for Canadians between the ages 18 and 34 to 26 per cent today from 47 per cent just a few years earlier, in 2021. Renters are also not well off as two in five renter households in Canada spend 30 per cent or more of income on rent and utilities.

Read the rest of this piece at: Yahoo News.

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Photo: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.