What Joel Kotkin thinks about America
American writer on cities and demography; Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University. Executive editor of NewGeography.com until it closed at the end of 2025; author of The Human City (2016) and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism (2020); argues for suburbs and dispersed growth.
Joel Kotkin did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Joel Kotkin has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsAt a time when many Europeans decry America's mass consumption culture, the artisans of Amelia - stone masons, farming entrepreneurs, construction specialists - may provide a surprising window to an emerging future.
- 6 weeks earlier
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Europesoftware performancehousing
Their wordsEven if a politician like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez captures the White House, Congress may be reluctant to raise the trillions needed to finance the DSA program of massive new public housing, more mass transit and a 32-hour working week with no reductions in pay. This would not merely be a repeat of Europe's bloated welfare states but would eat up virtually the whole of the United States's GDP.
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Their wordsUnless paid for by Washington, it is clear that urban socialists will not be able to afford the promises made to their core constituencies - poor recent immigrants and the mass of underpaid, overeducated professionals.