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

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills  read more »

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492.  read more »

In honor of Black History Month, I annually write some piece that honors the significance and impact of the contributions of Black people on the American urban environment.  read more »

It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas  read more »

In 2013, the World Bank declared it would stop funding coal projects and would only “in rare circumstances” provide financial support for new coal plants.  read more »

The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who  read more »

Last week, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Vice President J.D. Vance reaffirmed the Trump administration’s commitment to ensuring that advanced AI systems are developed domestically  read more »

I’ve had my differences with the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement. Over the years I’ve written multiple pieces raising a position on zoning reform that rarely gets discussed  read more »

On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,”  read more »

Three weeks ago I wrote a piece about the role that a “Rust Belt Diaspora,” or the people who relocated from Rust Belt to Sun Belt states over the last 50 years  read more »