Category: Demographics
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Kotkin Swings… He Misses.
by James A. Bacon Joel Kotkin is at it again. The urban geographer whose life mission seems to be debunking smart growth and creative-class worship, makes many well-founded observations… and manages to totally miss the point. In a column just published in The Daily Beast, Kotkin argues that the economic trend-setters of the United States…
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IG of the Day: Race Distribution in Virginia
I give the demographers at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service a hard time for their long-range population projections, but I also must credit them for doing some really interesting work. A case in point is the map shown above, which uses 2010 U.S. Census data to show Virginia’s population distribution visually in a…
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The North-South Divide
Battle lines are forming over the north-south transportation corridor in Northern Virginia. Backers say it would serve a growing population and stimulate economic development. Foes say the state has more urgent priorities for spending $1 billion or more.
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The Limits of the Creative Class
In a blog post on “New Geography,” Joel Kotkin unloads with both barrels on Richard Florida and the ailing cities that paid him big consulting fees to help reinvent themselves — for the most part unsuccessfully — as “hip and cool” places appealing to the creative class. Kotkin’s riff was inspired, apparently, by a recent…
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“I Got Mine from Mah Daddy!”
By Peter Galuszka One of the stranger attributes of Virginia’s conservatives is their cheesy, Calvinist streak. Their world view tends to celebrate the rich and powerful, regardless of whether the individual worked diligently and creatively to generate the wealth or if it was inherited. For example, one man (not a Virginian) whom I respect described…
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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children. Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly…
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Virtuous Virginia?
In my never-ending quest for insight into social and economic differences between Virginia and other states, I stumbled across an unusually revealing data set. Blogger Jon Millward analyzed a database of 10,000 porn stars to build a profile of sex actors on a range of attributes from ethnicity to cup size. Among the data points…
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Judge Carrico and Southern Mythology
By Peter Galuszka One of the infuriating things about Virginia is that one can never get away from its tendency to spin myths and construct a separate universe especially when it comes to what actually happened in its history. A case in point is the coverage of the death of 96-year-old Harry Lee Carrico, the…
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Who’s Really Behind These Capitol Coups?
By Peter Galuszka Coup II seems well underway among Virginia’s Republican legislators. According to The Washington Post, state-level Republicans in the Old Dominion and several other states including Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania are trying to redistrict voting more along the boundaries of federal congressional districts that typically are more heavily lopsided to one party or…
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The Virginia GOP’s Destructive Palace Coups
By Peter Galuszka Just how out of control are Virginia’s Republicans? This week’s redistricting coup attempt staged by prominent Republicans John Watkins and his cohort Thomas K. Norment in the otherwise evenly divided state Senate is as cynical as it is destructive. On Monday, the pair took advantage of the absence of a key Democratic…
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Is Virginia a Leader in Gun Control?
By Peter Galuszka For all of the sound and fury over guns in Virginia — panicked shooters are draining firearms shops of ammunition — the Old Dominion actually has been a leader among states on the gun control issue on a couple of fronts. For details, see my story in this week’s Style Weekly. First,…
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Who You Gonna Believe?
Is the population of Arlington County growing or shrinking? The latest 30-year projection by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service in Charlottesville forecasts that the county will decline by nearly 10,000 to under the 200,000 mark by 2040. But Arlington planners, looking out their windows at the 1,380 new housing units under construction, project…
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Uranium Mining on Slate.com
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & TechnologyBy Peter Galuszka Just in time for your weekend reading, here’s a piece I did for Slate on the uranium mining controversy.
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Factoids of the Day: Virginia’s Prison Population
If you encounter an Asian walking down a dark alleyway in Virginia, you probably don’t have anything to fear. If you bump into an Hispanic in a dark alleyway, you still don’t have much to fear. Both racial/ethnic groups are significantly less likely to wind up in Virginia prisons than other groups, according to the…
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Another Hint that Virginia is Losing Its Mojo
Virginia has never been one of the fast-growth states, but it has long experienced steady domestic in-migration from other states. Bolstered by a relatively strong economic performance, we have consistently grown faster than the national average. Moderate growth is beneficial in many ways — it stimulates the economy without overloading the fiscal ability of state…