Urban Issues

Goodbye and Hello from New Geography

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:18:28 -0500

Dear Readers:

After 17 years we are closing New Geography.com.

You'll now find Joel Kotkin's articles on his new Substack page, jkotkin.substack.com, which will also feature articles from past NG contributors.

We owe much to those who kept the site together over the years, including Alex Lotz, Alicia Kurimska, Zina Klapper, Rhonda Howard, among others. And of course we owe most to you, our readers, who have followed us over the past 17 years.

We will see you on Substack!

With our best wishes for the new year,
Joel Kotkin, Mark Schill and Delore Zimmerman

Strangely Familiar: Peter Mitchell and the Civic World We Forgot How to See

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Discovered by chance at a photo book fair, Peter Mitchell’s photographs of Leeds capture a civic world that assumed legibility, continuity, and shared meaning - before cities became abstract, branded, and hollowed out.

The cover of Peter Mitchell’s Strangely Familiar tells you almost everything you need to know - if you know how to look.

A tiny newsagent’s shop stands alone on muddy ground on the outskirts of Leeds. The sign reads, READ THE NEWS OF THE WORLD. BEST FOR NEWS & SPORT. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, stand in the doorway, neither smiling nor performing. To the right, a Methodist church rises in brick solidity, its cross fixed firmly in place. Between them: churned earth, pause, uncertainty. Something has been removed. Something has not yet replaced it.

Nothing in the photograph is sentimental. Nothing is ironic. Nothing is explained.

The image assumes that you understand what you are seeing - or that you are capable of learning how.

That assumption is Peter Mitchell’s great gift. And Strangely Familiar is built around it.

I did not go looking for Peter Mitchell. I stumbled onto him at a photo book fair, amid tables crowded with contemporary photography that often leans hard on provocation, cleverness, or spectacle. Mitchell’s book sat quietly, modestly, almost shyly. But once opened, it refused to let go.
This is not a plea to freeze cities in amber or to romanticize decline; it is a reminder that change need not erase legibility.

What I encountered was not nostalgia, nor documentary moralizing, nor aestheticized decay. It was something rarer and more demanding: a record of ordinary civic life before it was abstracted, optimized, or erased. A world that assumed its own legibility.

Mitchell was born in Doncaster in 1943 and trained at the London College of Printing in the 1960s. He began photographing Leeds in the early 1970s and stayed with the city for decades - not as a tourist, not as a provocateur, but as a witness. His work was among the first serious uses of color in British documentary photography at a time when galleries still treated color as commercial, unserious, or disposable.

Mitchell understood something institutions did not: color is not decoration; it is evidence. The everyday world, rendered faithfully, carries meaning precisely because it is ordinary.

That conviction runs through Strangely Familiar. Shopfronts declare their purpose plainly: S. Tunick & Son, Stationers. East End Tool Stores, Est’d 1896. Robinson’s Famous Fisheries. Typography matters. Windows matter. The buildings assume permanence. They expect memory to accumulate.

People, too, stand differently in Mitchell’s photographs. They are not “subjects.” They are participants. Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Clayton stand in front of their fish shop without performance. The building’s meaning depends on their presence; their presence depends on the building. Work and person remain legible together.

Even when Mitchell photographs decline or demolition, the images do not plead or accuse. A red telephone box stands marooned amid the flattened remains of Quarry Hill Flats. The drama is not loss alone, but the disappearance of civic grammar - the cues that once told people where they were and what was expected of them.

Mitchell understands this explicitly. In his accompanying texts, he writes about walking through “new canyons of glittering emptiness,” places that promise progress while erasing meaning. Bulldozers do not merely remove buildings; they sever the chain of recognition between people and place.

Modern cities are intensely visible but rarely legible. Buildings announce brands rather than functions. Storefronts rotate. Churches become condos. Public space is curated, programmed, optimized. Where Mitchell shows shops that announce their purpose, today we more often encounter blank facades wrapped in branding that tells us nothing about who is inside or why they are there.

What Mitchell photographs aligns, quietly but unmistakably, with a tradition of urban thought that took legibility and lived experience seriously. Cities work when streets communicate purpose and responsibility - when people can read who belongs where and why. A humane city is one whose paths, edges, landmarks, and districts form a mental map that ordinary citizens can hold in their heads. The danger of modern planning is not change itself but abstraction: efficiency replacing meaning, scale replacing intimacy, management replacing recognition. Mitchell’s Leeds is a visual record of what that earlier wisdom described in words—a city whose everyday architecture, signage, and social rituals made sense without instruction. His photographs do not illustrate theory; they confirm it.

In an era when cities increasingly treat space as content, experience, or investment rather than as a shared moral environment, Mitchell’s photographs remind us what is lost when places stop expecting to be understood.

One caption near the end of the book captures his sensibility perfectly. A postcard shows a ghost train stranded on Woodhouse Moor while its generator is repaired. The ride of death must “take a nap until the power gets fixed.” Mitchell borrows a lyric from a pop song: “I’ve been riding on the ghost train… I don’t know where I’m going but I’ll always tell you where I am.” There is humor here, but also steadiness. Life pauses. It resumes. Place can still be named.

This is what gives Strangely Familiar its quiet authority. Mitchell is not photographing an aesthetic. He is documenting a structure of civic attentiveness - a way of seeing that assumed continuity, coherence, and mutual recognition in everyday life.

The cover image makes this plain. The small newsagent and the Methodist church do not compete. Neither overwhelms the other. Both simply are. Different institutions, different purposes, sharing the same ground. Today, such coexistence feels almost implausible.

Mitchell’s Leeds operates on a different principle. Seeing is acknowledgment. Architecture speaks before it is interpreted. Ordinary places expect to be known. People stand in front of their work not to advertise themselves but to acknowledge responsibility.

This is not nostalgia. It is orientation.

Mitchell does not claim the past was perfect. He insists it was coherent. Places knew what they were for. Signs told the truth. Belonging was built into the visual order of everyday life - not curated, not branded, not performed.

That is why Strangely Familiar feels so bracing when encountered unexpectedly. It does not shout. It does not instruct. It simply says: This was here. This mattered. You can see it if you look.
The renewed attention to Mitchell’s work - through Strangely Familiar and the careful reproduction of his prints - is not a backward-looking revival. It is a reminder that cities once trusted ordinary people to read their surroundings, to understand where they were, and to locate themselves within a shared landscape of meaning. When places speak clearly, citizens do not need constant explanation; they learn the city by moving through it.

I closed the book with gratitude and unease. Gratitude for encountering a photographer who saw so clearly. Unease because his clarity throws our present condition into relief.

We live among images that demand attention but offer little recognition. Mitchell shows us a world that did the opposite - one in which streets, buildings, and faces formed a comprehensible whole, and where seeing was itself a civic act.

Strangely familiar indeed - not because it flatters memory, but because it reminds us that cities once made sense. And once you look with Peter Mitchell’s eyes, the ordinary world begins to speak again - and you are no longer free to pretend that its silence is inevitable.

______________

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

What Urbanism Lost When DEI Was Defeated, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Last Monday I wrote a piece that lamented the state of policy movement on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America. Here’s my followup to that.

First, here’s a quick summary of that article. Over the last ten years or so, DEI saw a rise in national coverage and discourse nationally that peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid pandemic. DEI gradually received more negative connotations starting around 2022, as it came to be associated with what’s now termed “woke” ideology. I saw that as backtracking on progress being made to improve cities since the start of the 21 century, because urbanism became associated with DEI/wokism. I also noted how the “woke” backlash was reflected in the Google Trends mentions of Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, whose research on economic mobility in America peaked and declined similarly, and even my own Corner Side Yard readership.

I concluded the article with this:

“(The) BLM and woke/DEI (movements) became an albatross around the neck of urbanism. The rising YIMBY movement, with its focus on housing affordability, took hold of urbanism, and allowed urbanists to toss aside the other, more intractable and deeply imbedded aspects of our society, like segregation, economic inequality and economic immobility.

How these became linked is understandable; how these became separated deserves exploration.”

How did urbanism become connected with DEI and the “woke” phenomenon? Is it realistic to address matters of segregation, economic inequality and economic mobility get addressed in an economic fashion, and not a moral fashion?

The Urbanism/DEI framing

Here’s the “how” part.

Starting as early as the 1960s in some cities, more Americans began showing deeper interest in cities. Early advocates like Jane Jacobs touted the virtues of cities and increasingly saw them as places of value. By the 1990s–early 2000s, many urbanists, planners and scholars saw a shift in the American economy – more knowledge and technology-driven, less manufacturing-driven – that fit well with what was happening in cities. They recognized that the rising knowledge and technology-driven economy and their own interests were connected and increasing numbers of people were looking to remake places that fit the new mold. That meant urbanists were targeting the policies that created America’s contemporary suburban development landscape and handicapped the dominant urban model that preceded it.

We can all agree what urbanists at the time were responding to: postwar suburban sprawl; increasing auto dependency; urban renewal and highway construction that destroyed many urban neighborhoods; environmental degradation.

Racial segregation and concentrated poverty were considered as part of the same mix of challenges. However, they were mostly viewed in an even deeper social context than the other challenges, framing them as societal issues, not necessarily economic ones.

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: graph by Rhonda Howard, under CC 4.0 License.

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe.

The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump. What it found was a group “marked by desensitization”. They viewed politics as a form of entertainment, more like a video game. To them, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, despite their promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, are not excluded from conservatism; even where their views are disavowed, they are treated as legitimate fixtures of the movement.

The roots of these disturbing shifts likely lie in the impact of social media and a startling lack of historical knowledge. The Survey Center on American Life confirms that young adults have become increasingly distant from their families and from one another. Instead, they tend to experience the world through the prism of social-media self-expression. As one recent report notes, they are far more focused on themselves than previous generations.

According to academic Jean Twenge, the online world brings “instant communication and unrivaled convenience” but also leaves young people “more isolated from each other” and more polarised, creating “a mental health crisis among teens and young adults”. The new ideal is to optimise the self; interactions with other people, particularly those with different views, are increasingly rare.

For the politically engaged, on both Right and Left, politics increasingly functions as another mode of self-expression. Among women this tendency skews Leftward, while among men it skews Right. For conservatives, this means grappling with an emerging, largely youthful constituency which is prone to conspiracy thinking and increasingly willing to adopt views that include Holocaust denial and open antisemitism.

Some may argue that these troubling trends are merely transitory. After all, many who embraced the far Left during the Vietnam War later became patriotic citizens, and some even turned into Reaganites. Yet much of this shift was tied to young people eventually assuming adult responsibilities: spouses, homes, children. Many in the new generation either reject these paths or see them as unattainable. Unable to establish stable adult lives, they may cultivate a politics that is unanchored, alienated, and potentially violent.

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: screenshot from America First/YouTube channel.

Once Again, Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Academic Freedom

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Public universities are facing a crisis of confidence. Trust in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by rising costs, ideological imbalance, and repeated assurances from campus leaders that Americans should simply ‘trust us’ about what happens in the classroom. Gallup reports that only about four in ten Americans now have high confidence in higher education—a steep decline that helps explain rising demands for transparency. Against that backdrop, the University of North Carolina system’s proposal to require faculty to post syllabi publicly has triggered fierce opposition from some professors; faculty who now insist that transparency itself threatens academic freedom.

They are wrong. And their reaction helps explain why public confidence continues to erode.

The UNC policy is straightforward. Beginning as early as next fall, faculty would be required to upload syllabi to a searchable public database, formalizing what UNC System President Peter Hans described as the principle that ‘public university syllabi should be public records.’ The policy does not dictate course content, ban readings, or impose ideological constraints. It simply makes visible what courses aim to cover, how students are evaluated, and what materials are assigned.

Yet faculty opposition has been swift and intense. Professors quoted in Inside Higher Ed warn that public syllabi could be ‘weaponized,’ chilling inquiry and inviting political harassment. A petition circulated by faculty groups and signed by over 2,000 argues that posting syllabi would ‘invite political actors to attack free inquiry’ and could endanger students and instructors. Others claim the policy undermines faculty governance or intellectual property rights.

These concerns deserve to be heard—but they do not justify the conclusion faculty opponents draw.

Academic freedom exists to protect intellectual inquiry from coercion, not to shield publicly funded instruction from public view. Transparency about course structure and readings is not ideological surveillance. It is basic accountability. Syllabi are not private correspondence. They are formal documents outlining expectations for students who pay tuition and, in public institutions, rely on taxpayer support.

The claim that academic freedom depends on opacity is a category error. Universities already publish course catalogs, learning objectives, degree requirements, and faculty research. Many professors voluntarily post syllabi online. What UNC proposes is consistency, not control.

Nor is this primarily about safety. Faculty opponents frequently cite the possibility of harassment, pointing to past controversies involving public records requests or outside criticism. But harassment is not caused by transparency; it is caused by institutional failure to defend faculty when warranted. The proper response to bad-faith pressure is leadership—not secrecy. Universities must be prepared to stand behind their faculty and explain why rigorous, intellectually diverse instruction serves the public good, rather than hoping that obscurity will protect them from scrutiny.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Carmen Murray via Pixabay.

Why the Great Wave Still Commands the Modern Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

In November 2025, a version of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for HK$21.7 million — the highest price ever paid for the iconic print. The figure drew predictable attention, but price alone cannot explain the hold this image continues to exert. Japanese woodblock prints are plentiful and often extraordinary. The ukiyo-e tradition produced a vast world of beauty — landscapes, city scenes, actors, courtesans, and seascapes rendered with remarkable discipline and grace. Yet among this abundance, The Great Wave stands apart. It is no longer merely a famous artwork. It has become one of the defining images through which modern people interpret instability, scale, and the feeling of living beneath forces larger than themselves.

What distinguishes this work is not just craftsmanship, rarity, or fame. It is its precision in capturing a psychological reality that feels unmistakably contemporary.
Three narrow fishing boats move across churning water as a vast wave rises overhead, its crest frozen in the instant before collapse. The men do not battle the sea; they brace for it. In the distance, small and unwavering, Mount Fuji remains still, its quiet geometry anchoring the entire scene. The moment is tense but not theatrical. There is danger without exaggeration, energy without chaos. The composition is both dramatic and disciplined.

That restraint is essential. The image does not shout; it measures. It does not glorify struggle; it renders it with clarity.

The modern world increasingly feels like a version of this seascape. Economic volatility, technological acceleration, civic uncertainty, environmental strain, and cultural fragmentation have produced a quiet sense of exposure. Many people move through systems they cannot fully understand and forces they cannot meaningfully control. We experience motion without mastery, pressure without clear authorship. Hokusai gave visual form to that sensation long before it had a name.

The wave is not simply water. It is disruption itself — impersonal, relentless, indifferent. The boats are not merely fishermen; they are ordinary people and communities navigating conditions that demand endurance rather than heroism. And Mount Fuji, distant yet immovable, represents something increasingly scarce: steadiness. A fixed point in a world defined by churn.

What makes The Great Wave singular is its refusal to romanticize control. It offers no fantasy of dominance over nature. There is no triumph here, no promise of conquest. Instead, it presents humility as wisdom. It suggests that survival depends less on bravado than on proportion, awareness, and disciplined posture in the face of overwhelming force.

Many Japanese prints celebrate pleasure, seasonal change, or the fleeting beauty of everyday life. Many are visually stunning. But this one engages something more enduring: the strain of existing inside immense systems that neither indulge nor destroy us outright. It reveals what it means to persist under pressure without illusion.

There is also something unmistakably modern in the viewer’s position. We do not hover above the scene, safely detached. We are placed inside it. Our eye travels along the boats, feels the looming presence of the wave, and rests briefly on the distant calm of Fuji. That immersive perspective mirrors contemporary life, where individuals are no longer buffered by distance or hierarchy but drawn directly into economic, social, and environmental turbulence.

Yet for all its immediacy, the image insists on coherence. The wave is wild, but not formless. The threat is immense, but intelligible. Everything remains legible, held within careful design. Even at the brink, there is structure. That, too, feels instructive: motion need not dissolve into disorder, and danger need not become collapse.

The record-setting sale only sharpens the irony. An image that so powerfully illustrates modesty, vulnerability, and proportion now circulates as a high-value luxury object. But despite its absorption into the marketplace of prestige and spectacle, it refuses decoration. It still unsettles. It still instructs. Its meaning has not thinned with repetition; it has deepened.

Most images become ornamental. A few become fashionable. Almost none retain explanatory power. The Great Wave does. It continues to clarify rather than soothe, to remind rather than distract.

Japanese prints may be many and magnificent. But this one occupies a different category. It has become a visual shorthand for what it feels like to live within vast, impersonal forces and still attempt to keep one’s bearings. Its power lies not in affirming modern confidence, but in tempering it — insisting, quietly and with precision, that balance matters, that limits exist, and that steadiness remains vital even when the sea rises.

In an age addicted to speed, scale, and spectacle, The Great Wave offers something increasingly rare: proportion. It does not promise safety, but it does offer clarity. And in doing so, it reminds us that survival — personal, civic, and cultural — depends not on domination, but on the disciplined ability to face what we cannot command and remain upright anyway.

That is why, nearly two centuries later, this image still commands the modern imagination — not because it flatters our sense of power, but because it quietly tells us the truth.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Art Institute of Chicago, under CC 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

This is going to seem like navel-gazing for a moment, but ultimately the point emerges. Please bear with me.

Remember Raj Chetty? Of course you do. He is the professor of economics at Harvard University who rose to fame in the 2010s articulating his research on economic equity and mobility in America. This paragraph on his Wikipedia page sums up his work well:

“Chetty’s contribution to economic mobility started with his 2014 paper, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” In this paper, Chetty discussed the effects of geography on economic mobility. He used information from deidentified federal income tax records, which gave him records from 1996 to 2012. The research’s main focus was on intergenerational mobility in the United States as a whole. Chetty used the parent’s income between the years of 1996-2000 when the participants were between the ages of 15–20. Chetty concluded that 5 significant variables strongly correlated with intergenerational mobility. Those variables are residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. The authors concluded that intergenerational mobility is primarily a local problem. Meaning that place-based policies are better fitting for each city. This allows for each city to be able to make a plan and policy that will best help the people in that city that is affected by the constrictions of intergenerational mobility.”

I’m not an economist, but an urbanist who wants to make cities into better places. My non-academic perspective has led me to a position very similar to Chetty. My takeaway from Chetty’s work has always been that the five variables he highlights are the critical missing pieces in the revitalization of the cities I care for most in this country, the cities of the Rust Belt, Great Lakes, and broader Midwest. I don’t know what his views are on this, but I’ve always believed these kinds of findings would result in greater attention being given to these issues, and better policies to improve cities.

Chetty was a hot commodity in the 2010s. In 2019, Chetty was a keynote speaker at a Cleveland Fed conference called “Connecting People and Places to Opportunity.” I presented a session at the same conference on segregation and declining economic mobility in Chicago’s south suburbs. I remember his presentation. I thought it was great, and I thought the five variables he highlighted were going to move into the forefront of urbanism discourse.

I started the Corner Side Yard on the Blogger platform in 2012. Running that blog was a lot of fun. I think I was able to produce some pretty good urbanism insights from a Black and Rust Belt perspective. I think it was especially useful in providing a countering view to the prevailing perspectives around cities in the 2010s.

However, it only recently dawned on me how closely linked my blog’s success was tied to the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the later, broader woke movement (or DEI if you like; I was never a fan of the misappropriation of the Black slang term “woke” anyway).

The first real surge in traffic with the first iteration of the blog happened in 2013, coinciding with the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman. I first wrote about that sad event shortly after it occurred in 2012, but reposted this post a year later, after Zimmerman’s acquittal. From that point on the blog took off, reaching a peak in the summer of 2015. Afterwards the blog slipped some before reaching a lower peak in 2017. Then there was a steady decline from 2017 until 2019, and another lower peak in 2020, immediately following the murder of George Floyd.

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

Photo: protests against police brutality in 2016, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Equal but Separate

Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Even as many scholars and pundits deny the differences between the sexes and vastly expand the concept of gender, society is increasingly dividing along these clear and simple lines.

Mountains of data and broad-based studies show that men and women increasingly inhabit separate psychological, relational, and civic universes that interpret adulthood, authority, intimacy, and obligation in profoundly different ways.

The most visible sign of this cleaving of the sexes is the steady decline of marriage and childbearing. The share of U.S. adults ages 25–54 without partners rose from 29% in 1990 to 38% in 2019. In 2021, one-quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds had never married. Even as fertility rates continue to fall, the percentage of children born out of wedlock and living with one parent has risen.

This physical separation is mirrored in our politics, where the gender divide is now a prime determinant of party affiliation – especially among the young. The fierce tribal divide in America is not merely a clash of Democrats and Republicans, but also a contest between the very different visions and priorities of women and men. The growing antagonism between the parties increasingly reflects the distance between the sexes.

Once the central cooperative engine of civilizational continuity, the relationship between men and women is increasingly seen as a zone of tension, risk, negotiation, and withdrawal.

Some of this is due to the battle women have had to fight for greater freedom in the last 60 years, which, of course, has had many positive effects. It has not just expanded women’s opportunities in education and the workplace. It has also allowed women to imprint their values on a patriarchal culture that was long ruled by men – but this time increasingly for their own benefit.

As much as “women’s liberation,” as it was originally known, has been shaped by modern ideas about gender and selfhood, it has also given greater expression to enduring differences between the sexes. It is generally understood that men tend to be more aggressive, competitive, and individualistic, while women tend to place more value on cooperation, compassion, and safety. Various studies – especially those in egalitarian-minded societies of Scandinavia – suggest that the movement toward gender equality has allowed differences to flourish. As Swedish researcher Agneta Herlitz observed: “Some sex differences in personality, negative emotions and certain cognitive functions are greater in countries with a higher standard of living.”

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of this ongoing transformation suggests growing challenges not only for the United States but also for many Western and Asian nations, where this cleaving of the sexes is occurring. It’s undermining the traditional basis for stable families and communities and will have enormous implications for future demography, politics, and social stability.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Investigations.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Tim Mossholder

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – alongside the victory of similarly hard-Left candidates in other mayoral races – has left some predicting that urban America will inevitably fall into a “doom loop” of decline, with an exodus of the super-rich leaving cities in the control of a resentful lower class. Yet in reality, the socialist takeover will prove no great win for the working class. If anything, it leaves the haute bourgeoisie even more the masters of places like Gotham than before.

Contrary to many predictions, surging sales of luxury apartments indicate that New York will remain home to the ultra-rich – those with more than $50m (£37m) in assets. In fact, the evidence of the past few years is that, even as the overall population of the city has declined, the number of the super-rich has been growing. Rents, outside those under control, have continued to rise. Even if a few of the ultra-rich leave, New York is likely to remain comfortably the most popular city for the group, ahead of rivals such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and London.

With their massive fortunes, these rich folk, 21,000 in New York alone, are also reshaping the urban landscape. Increasingly, global cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Miami are functioning less as centres of economic activity for the masses, and more as showcases for luxury brands such as LVMH, which continue to invest heavily in such markets. Even once powerful business landmarks like the Rockefeller Centre are actively reinventing themselves as destinations for recreation, tourism, and the arts.

Mamdani’s election also does not appear to have stopped developers and speculators from looking to transform former office buildings – places of employment – into yet more luxurious apartments. This reflects long-established national patterns. New US office construction has plummeted since the 1990s, while the number of residential high-rises has continued to surge.

This transition makes sense given that office vacancies, largely due to persistently high levels of remote work, remain elevated. Although less pathetic than many downtowns, New York offices are far emptier than they used to be, with midtown office occupancy at around 65 to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to make things worse.

Today, New York, once the world’s unchallenged financial capital, is shifting into an “amenity city” with a priority for building casinos and other tourist-oriented development. Despite the much ballyhooed construction of JP Morgan’s new tower in midtown Manhattan, finance jobs have declined as a proportion of total city employment, with jobs headed more to places like Dallas and Miami.

These shifts will change the world of many native New Yorkers. They are also likely to be exacerbated by the election of Mamdani. Working class and middle class families are already leaving cities. Socialist policies, which almost guarantee poor-performing schools and lax law enforcement, impact the hoi polloi far more than the elite bourgeois or young single professionals.

Some may think that Mamdani’s policies will turn the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. But given the US federal system, Mamdani can’t expropriate fortunes by edict from Gracie Mansion, however he might like to do so. Instead, his biggest victims are likely to be among the lower social orders, not least the mostly minority owners of bodegas and small businesses. His rent control freeze, notes the perceptive analyst Nicole Gelinas, is likely to hit hardest small property owners, who own 30 to 50 per cent of all rent control units but may not be able to handle Mamdani’s proposed freezes.

Worse yet, Mamdani and his socialist cadre do not seem concerned about improving working class communities by creating better jobs; the emphasis is almost totally on free goodies, not people being empowered to improve themselves. As the analyst Martin Gurri has suggested, unlike past socialists, whether in Stalin’s Russia or among Sweden’s social democrats, today’s variety regards economic growth with “remarkable indifference”, a tough stance in an economy where good jobs are already headed elsewhere.

Despite all this, New York will not turn into the next Third World hellscape. It is more likely to end up like London. Under Labour, that city has become more global but can hardly seem British anymore, with many recent immigrants apparently reluctant to integrate into society. It also hosts post-national financial and cultural elites who often seem to mock the sensibilities of the British population.

In other words, London today seems less like the capital of the UK, and more like a refuge for people and capital from the rest of the world. Tourists drive much of the economy, including wealthy free spenders from distant locales.

This seems like the likely road for New York. Rather than following its commercial focus, a legacy stretching back to Dutch times, New York’s economy will become oriented to serving the rich, their offspring and tourists. In the new order, the city becomes what the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark has described as an “entertainment machine ”. The tourism industry also serves the new configuration by becoming a key employer of a largely poor, often immigrant, workforce.

Lost in the process is the notion of the city as an engine of upward mobility. The true mission of great cities, noted the late Jane Jacobs, “is transforming many poor people into middle class people... Cities don’t lure a middle class. They create it.”

Great cities with history and culture, like New York and London, may remain alluring for the young, the wealthy and for those immigrants who have yet to adapt to their adopted country. But with the road to opportunity blocked by their own policies, the socialists may end up leaving their cities ever more bourgeois, albeit under a red flag.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Mamdani for NYC, social media.

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

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

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Urban Issues

Goodbye and Hello from New Geography

Strangely Familiar: Peter Mitchell and the Civic World We Forgot How to See

What Urbanism Lost When DEI Was Defeated, Part 2

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Once Again, Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Academic Freedom

Why the Great Wave Still Commands the Modern Imagination

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

Equal but Separate

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About *Four* Housing Markets?

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?