Ryan Atwood was the juvenile delinquent from the slums of Chino, just east of the county line, as depicted in the popular show The O.C. However, Chino was not a crime-ridden pocket in the Golden State, just somewhat down-market from places like Newport Beach. It was not poor; it was not rich; it was just…
Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated. —Walt Wriston1 From the end of World War II until 1970, owner-occupied housing was broadly affordable across the…
“The future ain’t what it used to be,” Yogi Berra famously observed. Nowhere is that truer than regarding the future of work, particularly in cities. The economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, partial de-globalization driven by Sino-American geopolitical rivalry, and the collapse of the asset bubble that triggered the decade-long Great Recession of the 2010s—all…
For decades, a large majority of black Americans have aligned with the Democratic Party, but the modern-day Democratic Party’s leftward shift may cause a reevaluation of that relationship. The welfare of black people has not been made better from their support of the Democratic Party. Failing school systems, communities rampant with crime, and a steadily…
The proper size of government permeates public policy discussions about homelessness, poverty, and health care. The left and right debate varying degrees of government involvement, typically failing to act and often deteriorating into a state of policy paralysis. The size of government matters, but so does the nature of what government does and, even more…
Whether hundreds of years ago or today, the far-reaching environmental impacts of urbanization are because cities are “a node of pure consumption existing parasitically on an extensive external resource base.”1 These environmental impacts have been catastrophic, with 78 percent of carbon emissions, 60 percent of residential water use, and 76 percent of wood used for…
Human prosperity never abides long in the same place —Herodotus1 Over five millennia, through pestilence, war, economic dislocation, and mass migrations, cities have demonstrated their essential resiliency. Yet at the same time, they have many times been transformed—becoming bigger, denser, and then less dense; shifting from having a walking- to a transit-based culture; and then…