Free Republic

Suburbanites of Ohio, listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you. President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It...

Plans to create a neo-liberal start-up city in Honduras with its own laws, tax rules and police force suffered a setback on Friday when the economic guru who inspired the project said he has been unable to act as its guarantor and watchdog.

“Cities come and go.” That’s the message from Rupert Murdoch, who spoke recently about immigration at an event hosted by the New England Council in Boston. This view found disagreement from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who advanced a vision of giving citizenship to any foreigner who would move to Detroit and homestead, reasoning that immigrants would establish a new economy and revive the city. Mayor Bloomberg was being guided by the prevailing sense that government can solve the problem of dying cities; it’s just a matter of finding the right solution. Detroit cannot be revived to the economic power it once...

Virtually no location in the U.S. is 100% safe from dangerous weather. According to the National Weather Service, the combination of flooding, lightning, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, snow/ice storms, extreme heat, extreme cold, high winds, and rip currents claims almost 600 lives each year in the U.S., on average. Of course, catastrophic events in any year (Hurricane Katrina, spring 2011 tornadoes) can skew the averages. However, there are locations in the U.S. where the weather is generally "safer."

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com Burn Down the Suburbs? By Stanley Kurtz August 1, 2012 4:00 A.M. Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities,...

A handful of local officials in California who say the housing bust is a public blight on their cities may invoke their eminent-domain powers to restructure mortgages as a way to help some borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth. Investors holding the current mortgages predict the move will backfire by driving up borrowing costs and further depress property values. "I don't see how you could find it anything other than appalling," said Scott Simon, a managing director at Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, a unit of Allianz SE. Eminent domain allows a government to forcibly acquire...

In many ways, the contemporary history of America's economy is really a story about cities. Metro areas rise and fall with each generation, buoyed or sunk by the industries and trends that support them. The chart below, from the McKinsey Global Institute, does a beautiful job telling that story. On the left, we have the top 30 U.S. metro areas ranked by real GDP as of 1978. On the right, the top 30 for 2010. That cross-hatch of red and blue lines shows just how much churn there has been in the economy. But I think there are three main...

During the housing bust, two hypotheses made the rounds. The first one stated that the American attachment to homeownership is over. The second one was homeowners are going to eschew suburbs in favor of the convenience and vitality of urban living. I don’t believe either of these to be true. Yes, the homeownership rate crested at almost 70 percent in 2004, just before the housing bubble burst, and is now down to 65 percent. But this retrenchment doesn’t represent a rejection of the premise of homeownership. The current level of homeownership is now around its long-term historical average. Frankly, homeownership...

New FBI data shows that violent crime rates are improving across America, but among cities with the highest crime problems, murder rates continued to rise in 2011. The FBI finds that violent crime dropped 4% in 2011, compared with a 5.5% drop in 2010. The 2011 FBI crime data shows that violent crime rose in more than half of the cities that have among the highest rates in the country. In seven of the 10 cities, murder rates increased. In eight of the 10, burglary went up. Many are cutting police forces through planned layoffs and attrition. More than half...

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying. Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families. Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness. Millions of good jobs...

A Chinese group known as "Sino-Michigan Properties LLC" has bought up 200 acres of land near the town of Milan, Michigan.  Their plan is to construct a "China City" with artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.  Essentially, it would be a little slice of communist China dropped right into the heartland of America.This "China City" would be located about 40 minutes from both Detroit and Toledo, and it would be marketed to Chinese business people that want to start businesses in the United States.  Unfortunately, this is not just an isolated incident. ...

If Economy Is Recovering, Why Are U.S. Cities Going Bankrupt? Interest-Rates / US Debt Mar 09, 2012 - 01:16 PM By: EWI As pundits chatter about an economic recovery, 80 miles east of San Francisco you'll find a city (pop. 292,000) facing bankruptcy: Stockton is on the verge of becoming the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy... San Francisco Chronicle (3/4) Bloomberg reports (2/25) that it costs the city $175,000 just to get a consulting firm's fiscal evaluation. Management Partners issued a report which said: ...the city took on a large amount of debt in anticipation of...

Many Americans still are holding off on buying homes in some of the country’s most expensive cities. While home prices fell 23% on average in the largest cities since the housing crisis began, for many home buyers the drop was not enough. Based on a new report released by Trulia, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 metropolitan areas to which no one wants to move. Trulia ranked the 100 largest metropolitan areas by their Metro Movers ratio, which measures homebuyer activity and interest in metropolitan areas. The ratio compares the number of online searches of local residents looking to buy...

<p>Which is worse when you’re traveling: the local driver who blithely cuts you off in traffic or the surly cabbie who gives you attitude right to your face?</p> <p>Such skirmishes no doubt fueled this year’s America’s Rudest Cities contest, voted on by Travel + Leisure readers. Three-time-champion Los Angeles, home of road rage, went head-to-head with classically brusque East Coast cities such as Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. — all of which landed in the top five.</p>

There are a 154 million workers in the U.S., and the current 8.5%, unemployment rate means about 13.1 million Americans are still out of work. A new report commissioned by the United States Council for Mayors and prepared by IHS Global Insight shows that only 26 of 363 metropolitan statistical areas have completely recovered the jobs they lost during the recession. We drew on the report to show the number of jobs these metros lost during the recession, their pre-recession peak level, and the metro area's employment level as a share of overall state employment. Note: The “pre-recession peak” date...

The Advocate, an LGBT magazine, has released a list of what it says are the "gayest" cities in the U.S. The equation breakdown used is a bit different from what you may have expected. The magazine takes into account such parameters as LGBT bookstores and "International Mr. Leather competition semifinalists" among the nine criteria used to compile the list.

Cities have played an important role in human history for over 9,000 years. Jericho, the oldest city on record with a population of 2,000, was the center of commerce and learning in its day. So was Uruk, Mari and other great cities through history to Tokyo, which is the largest city today. Cities are becoming even more important as we passes through the biggest wave of urbanization in human history. Determining the population of any city prior to the late 1700's is no easy task. Even the most casual census was unheard of before then, and studies to nail down...

I'm in a conversation with a lib. I'm sure that the welfare receiving populations are concentrated in the cities... but I can't find an article to show that (and you know libs need proof from a published source). Can anyone help me prove my assertion?

All across America there are cities and towns that were once prosperous and beautiful that are being transformed into absolute hellholes. The scars left by the long-term economic decline of the United States are getting deeper and more gruesome. The tax base in many areas of the nation has been absolutely devastated as millions of jobs have left this country. Hundreds of cities are drowning in debt and are desperately trying to survive. Last year, city government revenues in the United States fell by another 2.3 percent. That was the fifth year in a row that we have seen...

Of the 7,800 bonds in the U.S. secured by state or local governments, only 25 are currently speculative-grade, or junk-bonds, rated by Moody’s Ba1 or lower. Only municipalities received such low ratings, and the reasons vary. Moody’s report, “A Look at Speculative-Grade Local Governments in the Wake of the Recession,” details the economic issues that have lead each into junk-bond territory. 24/7 Wall St. has analyzed the nine worst cities, whose credit rating is Ba2 and lower. Each of these municipalities faces a unique situation, Moody’s explains, and the list is not indicative of a greater trend. Most municipalities, Moody’s...