Seven Years Ago, Wall Street Was the Villian, Now It Gets To Call the Shots
Seven Years Ago, Wall Street Was the Villian, Now It Gets To Call the Shots
The recent passage by Congress of new legislation favorable to loosening controls on risky Wall Street trading is just the most recent example of the consolidation of plutocratic power in Washington. The new rules, written largely by Citibank lobbyists and embraced by the Obama administration, allow large banks to continue using depositors’ money for high-risk investments, the very...
By Joel Kotkin
America’s Opportunity City
America’s Opportunity City
David Wolff and David Hightower are driving down the partially completed Grand Parkway around Houston. The vast road, when completed, will add a third freeway loop around this booming, 600-square-mile Texas metropolis. Urban aesthetes on the ocean coasts tend to have a low opinion of the flat Texas landscape—and of Houston, in particular, which they...
By Joel Kotkin
America's New Industrial Boomtowns
America's New Industrial Boomtowns
David Peebles works in a glass tower across from Houston’s Galleria mall, a cathedral of consumption, but his attention is focused on the city’s highly industrialized ship channel 30 miles away. “Houston is the Chicago of this era,” says Peebles, who runs the Texas office of Odebrecht, a $45 billion engineering firm based in Brazil....
By Joel Kotkin
Reversing American Decline
Reversing American Decline
Across broad ideological lines, Americans now foresee a dismal, downwardly mobile future for the country’s middle and working classes. While previous generations generally did far better than their predecessors, those in the current one, outside the very rich, are locked in a struggle to carve out the economic opportunities and access to property that had...
By Joel Kotkin
America’s Emerging Housing Crisis
America’s Emerging Housing Crisis
From the earliest settlement of the country, Americans have looked at their homes and apartments as critical elements of their own aspirations for a better life. In good times, when construction is strong, the opportunities for better, more spacious and congenial housing—whether for buyers or renters—tends to increase. But in harsher conditions, when there has...
By Joel Kotkin
The City of Villages – Los Angeles
The City of Villages – Los Angeles
Los Angeles is unique among the big, world-class American cities. Unlike New York, Boston, or Chicago, L.A. lacks a clearly defined core. It is instead a sprawling region made up of numerous poly-ethnic neighborhoods, few exhibiting the style and grace of a Paris arrondissement, Greenwich Village, or southwest London. In the 1920s, the region’s huge...
By Joel Kotkin
The Geography of Inequality
The Geography of Inequality
Perhaps no issue looms over American politics more than worsening inequality and the stunting of the road to upward mobility. However, inequality varies widely across America. Scholars of the geography of American inequality have different theses but on certain issues there seems to be broad agreement. An extensive examination by University of Washington geographer Richard...
By Joel Kotkin
The U.S. Cities Profiting the Most in the Stock Market and Housing Boom
The U.S. Cities Profiting the Most in the Stock Market and Housing Boom
If anything positive can be said for the current tepid economic recovery, it has been very good to those who invest in the stock market or own real estate. Property owners have been able to reap higher rents and sale prices, and the stock market has soared while the overall economy has registered only modest...
By Joel Kotkin
The U.S. Middle Class is Turning Proletarian
The U.S. Middle Class is Turning Proletarian
The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility. The decline...
By Joel Kotkin
Blue-Collar Hot Spots: The Cities Creating The Most High-Paying Manufacturing Jobs
Blue-Collar Hot Spots: The Cities Creating The Most High-Paying Manufacturing Jobs
It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred and even an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.” Yet in recent years, according to research by...
By Joel Kotkin
Los Angeles: Will the City of the Future Make it There?
Los Angeles: Will the City of the Future Make it There?
When I arrived in Los Angeles almost 40 years ago, there was a palpable sense that here, for better or worse, lay the future of America, and even the world. Los Angeles dominated so many areas — film, international trade, fashion, manufacturing, aerospace — that its ascendency seemed assured. Even in terms of the urban...
By Joel Kotkin
Fixing California: The Green Gentry’s Class Warfare
Fixing California: The Green Gentry’s Class Warfare
Historically, progressives were seen as partisans for the people, eager to help the working and middle classes achieve upward mobility even at expense of the ultra-rich. But in California, and much of the country, progressivism has morphed into a political movement that, more often than not, effectively squelches the aspirations of the majority, in large...
By Joel Kotkin
California's New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude
California's New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude
California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a...
By Joel Kotkin
Anti-Sprawl Policies Threaten America's Future
Anti-Sprawl Policies Threaten America's Future
Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering. More recently density advocates cite...
By Joel Kotkin