Urban Issues

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.  read more »

Urban containment has significant costs. In commenting on the association between London’s urban growth boundary,¹ and the higher costs of housing, The Economist said: “Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully.  read more »

This won’t start off about real estate but it will end there — like so much of life.

At the Shed in Hudson Yards, “Straight Line Crazy” is enjoying a sold-out run of months, if not longer. It is the story of Robert Moses, who outfoxed every politician in New York to create a proprietary stream of public money that financed his role as the city’s lynchpin builder from the 1920s into the 1960s.  read more »

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.  read more »

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²  read more »

Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.  read more »

Every politician, pundit and other apparatchik should have heard the elderly lady who didn’t even say a word about politics during my encounter with her on the streets of Manhattan.  read more »

Returning to New York City from a trip to Salisbury, Maryland, it is clear why so many younger Americans are so open to giving up the displeasures of a dense metropolis—high crime, high costs, and constant competition for amenities—for affordable, easy-to-navigate small-town environs like this fantastic city nestled within the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore.  read more »

Even in the era of digital marketing and online home-page “takeovers” by brands with something to announce, it’s full-page ads in major newspapers where companies still turn when they want to make an important statement.  read more »

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.  read more »