According to this article from New Geography, Yes.

An excerpt.

“Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy.

“Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery.

“What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs. The urban core would be reinvented: no longer the uncontested center of political and economic life but a vast theater of “concourse and rendezvous,” ideal for the childless wealthy, necessary for their servants and a beacon to the young and the culturally aware.

“This would surely represent a major shift away from the idea of the dominant “transactional city,” filled with workers packed in ever-higher buildings, drawn from the vast array of bedroom satellites across a huge geographic area. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century. Covid accelerated that trend.

“Although they are no longer the epicenters of economic life, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Miami retain an irresistible allure to educated young people, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase. These favored cities have become less economic capitals and more stage props for luxury-brand groups.

“Now, the bulk of new urban development takes place outside the core of the city, largely in the suburban and exurban periphery. In 1950, those living in city cores accounted for nearly 24 percent of the US population; today that share is less than 15 percent.

“Suburban, and particularly exurban, metropolitan growth has accelerated in recent years. From 2010 to 2017, 91 percent of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside central business districts. The 50 highest-growth counties in the US, almost all suburban or exurban, had an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of the others in 2019.

“These changes are generally greeted with horror by our cultural, academic and media elites. But if some analysts still predict a return to urban growth and greater office occupancy, even devoted friends of urban density admit that the urban future will be increasingly shaped by sprawl.

“The drivers here are demographic shifts and technological improvements. With the development of instantaneous communication, notes a report from Brown University, neither the size nor density of a city makes it more productive. Indeed, almost all the leading tech centers in the country are primarily suburban in nature.

“In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase.”

“The rise of remote or hybrid work is accelerating this shift. According to a study by the University of Chicago, in high-end business services and technology, a third of the workforce can function remotely – as can employees in roughly 50 percent of jobs generated by Silicon Valley.

“Demographics provide the most compelling evidence of peripheral ascendancy, which can be seen in the movement of educated young people, particularly as they hit their thirties, away from places such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of millennials favored the suburbs. The same thing is happening in other countries. Rather than signaling decay, the growth of suburban and exurban communities represents the cutting edge of 21st-century urbanism. These areas are becoming cities of a new sort, serving as domiciles but also places of employment, shopping and the arts.

“This process is in its infancy. New exurban areas are being planned, notably by Elon Musk in Texas and Bill Gates in Arizona. Rather than an abandonment of the city, this is a continuing reinvention of it.

“The rise of suburban and exurban living reflects a desire for safer, cleaner and less congested environments, and core cities will only be revitalized if they address the quality of life they provide. Donald Trump’s return has been greeted by many urban leaders with about as much enthusiasm as a reprise of the bubonic plague. But a second Trump presidency could also force mostly Democratic municipal leaders to address challenges on their own.

“The right’s drive to close off America’s international borders may slow the movement of populations to urban centers. But it could also reduce threats to public order and social cohesiveness. In New York, warns its former governor and mayoral aspirant Andrew Cuomo, the “migrant crisis” has become “the tipping point” of “the urban death spiral.” The challenge for older cities lies not in notions about diversity but in making the streets safe and creating opportunities for business and culture.

“A promising sign lies in the election of new, pro-business moderates in cities where crime has been a key issue. In Houston, more than 80 percent of voters listed it as their primary concern. In 2023 the public elected as mayor, by almost two to one, veteran state senator John Whitmire over left-wing firebrand Sheila Jackson Lee.”

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal | Newgeography.com

Very nice story in the L.A. Times.

An excerpt.

Be honest: If you were asked to list cities you’d want to visit in our great state, you’d probably go through at least 10 before you got to Sacramento, our capital. San Diego would be on it since it has beaches. Napa would be near the top because of the wine. But Sacramento? What does it have? Politicians?

Well, believe it or not, even the politicians didn’t choose Sacramento at first. When California became the 31st state on Sept. 9, 1850, its government designated San Jose as the official capital. The state capital moved twice more, to Vallejo and Benicia, before they finally settled on Sacramento in 1854. Construction of the capitol building as we know it today wasn’t completed until 20 years later.

Despite visiting many other state capitals, I hadn’t been to Sacramento. It wasn’t on my list. But some inexplicable force recently drew me to the town.

OK, maybe it was “Lady Bird.”

You, too, might have been clued into Sacramento’s charms by filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s 2017 solo directorial debut film. The loosely autobiographical coming-of-age story was Gerwig’s love letter to her hometown, and Sacramento was central to the titular character’s arc. At the beginning of the film, Lady Bird yearns to move out to a city with “culture.” But when she ends up in New York in the final scene, she admits in a touching phone call to her mother, “Did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did, and I wanted to tell you.”

So I made my first pilgrimage, booking the 1½-hour flight from L.A. to explore it for a weekend.

I admit that it wasn’t without some initial hesitation. Remembering a Stephen Colbert interview with “Lady Bird” star Saoirse Ronan didn’t help. The late-night host quipped, “I’ve been to Sacramento before. … I’m aware of how boring it is.”

But I knew Colbert was wrong as soon as I landed at Sacramento’s airport. It gleamed of glass and shimmered of chrome. New, modern and sleek, with a gigantic sculpture of a leaping red hare above baggage claim, it was one of the most impressive airports I’ve seen in the U.S. — and a sign that this city was going to surprise me.

And it did.

In that weekend, not only did I discover that Sacramento wasn’t boring, it’s got a little bit of everything. In downtown, I saw streetcars gliding along an avenue shaded under a canopy of trees. Other parts of town felt like walking in New York’s Central Park or Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue. Old Sacramento gave off both the boozy vibes of Bourbon Street and the cowboy vibes of Tombstone, Ariz. And when I saw the stately homes in East Sacramento, I fantasized about moving into one.

Food, history and glorious trees: A weekend in Sacramento – Los Angeles Times

One of the great American Catholic thinkers…article in City Journal.

An excerpt.

“In the fall of 1970, when I was a college sophomore, the first article assigned in one of my courses was titled “What Is Theology’s Standpoint?” The author argued that a “standpoint” was “a set of experiences, images, presuppositions, expectations, and operations (of inquiring and deciding),” by which human beings made sense of themselves and their relationship to the world. Late-twentieth-century theology, he continued, should operate from an “open standpoint,” engaging the human experience in full. Reading that article was my first encounter with the mind and spirit of Michael Novak. More than four decades later, it strikes me that the gist of the article nicely captures the range of Novak’s achievement, as well as suggesting its distinctive intellectual and cultural location.

“Back then, in theological circles, a fad existed for titling articles and books “Toward a Theology of” this, that, or the other thing (a fad once neatly parodied by my Toronto colleague Margaret O’Rourke Boyle, in “Toward a Theology of Garbage”). Indeed, the “toward” bug infected Novak on one occasion, when he christened an extended essay “Toward a Theology of the Corporation.” But that was, I’m sure, a literary venial sin. For Novak’s entire intellectual enterprise has never needed that faux rhetorical booster “toward.” As he showed me in his 1968 Theology Today essay on theology’s “standpoint,” authentic Catholic intellectual life, and especially Catholic theology, is always “toward”: Catholic intellectual life consciously engages the fullness of human experience, which Catholic thinkers “read” through the prism of revelation and reason, both of which, they maintain, cast the light of truth on human affairs. This conviction—that reflection on the things of the City of God can illuminate the paradoxes, tragedies, conundrums, and possibilities of the City of Man—stands at the center of Michael Novak’s thought.

“And that is why, in more than a half-century of scholarship, journalism, and public service, Novak has applied his philosophical and theological skills to virtually every consequential aspect of the human condition. He has not followed a preset itinerary but has deliberately charted previously unexplored territories and terrain. That choice—to break out of conventional patterns of thought and become one’s own intellectual GPS—has not always made for an easy life.

“Some did not appreciate having their disciplines and practices examined through lenses ground by theological reason; in fact, some of those whose turf Novak surveyed regard the very notion of “theological reason” as oxymoronic. Explorers make mistakes, and Novak would be the first to admit that what once seemed an interesting track to follow eventually turned into a blind alley, or that the account he gave of this or that form of human activity was incomplete. One of the most impressive aspects of Novak’s intellectual personality has been his openness to criticism and his willingness to say, when necessary, “you were right and I was wrong”—a confession that comes harder to intellectuals than to most.

“Like others who, in the standard political categories, made the pilgrimage from left to right, Novak has been pilloried as a traitor to his class. The truth is that he had the courage to face facts and hold fast to his deepest convictions about human dignity and human freedom, rather than adjust those convictions to the shifting fashions of political correctness. Like virtually everyone who enters the public arena with ideas that challenge the regnant wisdom, Novak must have wished, from time to time, for a better class of enemies. Unlike some of those enemies, he has maintained a commitment to charity, candor, and respect.

“It has not been easy being an intellectual trailblazer, this past half-century; perhaps it never is. Still, it’s worth noting en passant how nasty intellectual exchange—or what passes for it—often is, these days. Late in his life, which was built around debate and controversy, almost always conducted with robust good humor, G. K. Chesterton regretted that his friend Hilaire Belloc’s controversies were always so “sundering.” That had something to do with Belloc’s bulldog demeanor. But in our own time, controversy over ideas has become inexorably “sundering” because of the secular-messianic streak that dominates late-modern and postmodern intellectual life, especially at the sometimes-bloody crossroads where ideas meet public policy. Those who challenge the shibboleths of the politically correct academy aren’t merely mistaken; they are wicked and must be shunned. That this cast of mind has seriously eroded American public life has become all too clear in, for example, recent Supreme Court dictathat dismiss those who defend traditional moral norms from postmodern Gnosticism as irrational bigots. Similar shunning dynamics, rooted in the same belief that history’s ratchet only works in one direction, have too often made intra-Catholic controversy an unpleasant arena in recent decades.

“But enough about the difficulties that Michael Novak has faced over a half-century of intellectual exploration. What about his singular achievement?

“It is not within my competence to make judgments about Novak’s account of economic life; others are better equipped to determine what he got right and what has been left incomplete in his philosophical and theological analysis of markets, free enterprise, the system of democratic capitalism, and the vocation of business. But however those judgments wind up, it’s clear that Novak, with singular dedication and real effect in the evolution of Catholic social doctrine, introduced a new temper to Catholic thinking about economic life. We can describe that new temper as an empirical sensibility that never descends into empiricism.

“Novak’s account of economics begins, not with abstractions, but with keen observations of what is, which, in turn, lead to a disciplined reflection on how what is ought to be understood, casting light on moral truths and responsibilities in the process. Or, as his friend Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian social thinker, has put it, Novak’s seminal thinking about economic life raised an important question, little explored previously in Catholic social thought—or indeed in any other religiously informed social thought: Might “laws” exist in economic life analogous to the moral laws that a disciplined reflection on human moral action can discern? Is there, in other words, a deep structure to economic life that helps explain why some economies “work,” whether those economies are lodged in medieval Benedictine monasteries or in modern business enterprises? And does that deep structure reflect truths about the human person and human relationships that we can recognize by a careful, empirically informed reasoning that is attentive to the truths about the human condition that we learn from biblical religion?”

American and Catholic

All from Inside Sacrament, Arden, about River and Parkway related issues.

The first, Better Safe is by Jeff Harris aformer city councilmember and addresses levee strengthening using rocks, (riprap)—a process he supports—as do I.

The second, Spot Fix It is against the riprap approach.

The third, Take Your Tackle is about the danger discarded tackle can be to water creatures and reminds us all to protect nature.

The issue can be accessed at 2025 – Inside Sacramento