Taking the Main Street Off-ramp
To some, the $19 billion paid by Facebook for the Silicon Valley start-up What’s App represents the ultimate confirmation of the capitalist dream. After all, these riches are going first and foremost to plucky engineers whose goals are simply to make life better for the public. Got a problem with that? Yes, actually. Sure, people […]
Energy Running Out of California
The recent decision by Occidental Petroleum to move its headquarters to Houston from Los Angeles, where it was founded over a half-century ago, confirms the futility and delusion embodied in California’s ultragreen energy policies. By embracing solar and wind as preferred sources of generating power, the state promotes an ever-widening gap between its declining middle- […]
Bubble Trouble in Silicon Valley
Third-generation venture capitalist Tim Draper believes he has a solution for California’s problems that will make the Silicon Valley safe for its wealthy: secession. In a recent interview, Draper suggested that California be divided into six states, including one dominated by the Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco. By jettisoning California’s deeply troubled components […]
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 […]
Southern California has Aging Issues
Back in the 1960s, and for well into the 1980s, California stood at the cutting edge of youth culture, the place where trends started and young people clustered. “The California teen, a white, middle-class version of the American dream” raised in a world of “suburbs, cars, and beaches,” notes historian Kirse Granat May, literally shaped the […]
Possible Sign of Trouble for Los Angeles
A quarter century ago, the Los Angeles-Orange County area seemed on the verge of joining the first tier of global cities. As late as 2009, the veteran journalist James Flanigan could pen a quasiserious book, “Smile Southern California: You’re the Center of the Universe,” which maintained that L.A.’s port, diversity and creativity made it the […]
California’s Potholed Road to Recovery
California’s economy may be on the mend, but prospects for continued growth are severely constrained by the increasing obsolescence of the state’s basic infrastructure. Once an unquestioned leader in constructing new roads, water systems, power generation and building our human capital, California is relentlessly slipping behind other states, including some with much lower tax and […]
Build It, Even Though They Won’t Come
The recent decision by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Allan J. Goodman to reject as “fatally flawed” the densification plans for downtown Hollywood could shake the foundations of California’s “smart growth” planning clerisy. By dismissing Los Angeles’ Hollywood plan, the judge also assaulted the logic behind plans throughout the region to construct substantial high-rise […]
How Silicon Valley Could Destabilize The Democratic Party
Much has been written, often with considerable glee, about the worsening divide in the Republican Party between its corporate and Tea Party wings. Yet Democrats may soon face their own schism as a result of the growing power in the party of high-tech business interests. Gaining the support of tech moguls is a huge win for the […]
The Geography of Aging: Why Millennials are Headed to the Suburbs
One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit. Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) show little interest in “returning to […]