Columnist Gustavo Arellano, in his inimitable way, defends the fire pits. He even threatens to name the director of the AQMD to the ‘Scariest People’ list that he keeps, a list that I made once in previous years due to […]
Howard Ahmanson
Nashville: The Nation’s New ‘It’ City
Well, Nashville has been the nation’s third media city – and that in regard to book publishing, not just music – for at least 40 years! It is the one red-state place where someone leaving Hollywood would feel reasonably comfortable. […]
A Strategic Political Realignment for Evangelicals?
Darryl Hart, of Hillsdale College, in these two links (“From Culture to Party Wars?” and “Abandon the GOP, Join the Democratic Party”) proposes that evangelicals, probably soon to be rejected by Republicans, could consider joining the Democratic party to evangelize […]
California, Sea Otters, and the Russians
Interestingly enough, the reason that sea otters remain a threatened species even today is because the Russians, when they occupied the Fort Ross enclave from 1812 to 1841, they nearly exterminated them. In response to: “End of ‘no otter’ zone […]
Why The Dream Declined
The best single post on the decline of affordable housing that I have seen on one of my favorite sites, newgeography.com, is this by Roger Selbert. He most succinctly explains the reasons why the American dream of subsidized home ownership [discussed […]
Changing my mind about single family homes
I used to believe that social justice required that a region be overbuilt [or at least over-entitled at law] in high-density housing and other locally undesirable land uses. Now, thanks to Joel Kotkin’s influence, I believe that social justice requires […]
No Place Like Home Conference – June 3, 2013
This conference is being hosted by me and others to discuss the current state of subsidized home ownership in America, something that has been happening since the end of World War II but since the 1970s has been less successful […]
Last Call in California
Huh? It would make a lot more sense, automobile-dependent as California still is, to keep the alcohol closing hour at 2 a.m. and insist that Starbucks and other coffee houses stay open till 4 a.m. If I went pub-crawling in […]
Thoughts on St. Patrick’s Day
In a few days comes one of the strangest holidays in our American calendar, in which we honor a saint who actually deserves honoring or remembering, and at the same time the first major non-Protestant ethnic group to come to […]
Is Hawai’i the Bellwether for California?
California used to consider itself the leading state and the bellwether for the entire country. Now that the entrepreneurial initiative has mostly switched to Texas and other such places, and Texas’s infrastructure has pulled ahead of California’s in its quality […]