Our local economy continues to become even more like an hourglass--rich people on top, poorer people on the bottom, and nobody in the middle. Joel Kotkin explores the roots of this development in National Review.
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Roger Scruton, in “How to Be a Conservative,” explores how tenuous the road to fairness and prosperity can be, in a world where opinion is swayed by those that yell loudest.
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VTA's budget woes and dubious expenditures are all the news, but these are just the latest faceplants for one of the worst-performing transit agencies in the U.S. Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute explores the issue in this exclusive analysis for Opportunity Now.
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In his exclusive report for Opportunity Now, Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute explores how New Urbanist thinking and misguided anti-market policies created one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world--and how to fix it.
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Since the 1930s, civils rights litigation and legislation has gone a long way to providing equal opportunity in voting, business, schools, transportation, and employment. But there's a place they missed: our neighborhoods. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, explains in Reason magazine.
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Spending goes up. Test scores go down. California's attempts to track what happens in the bottomless pit of education management gets a harsh review from the San Jose Mercury News editorial board.
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Atari goes bust. Netscape tanks. The Newton wouldn't sell. Is it such a bad thing? Deidre McCloskey explores the upside of free-market competition in her review of Capitalism in America, by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Woolridge, in the Claremont Review of Books.
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If all you did was read the Merc and the local online news sites, you'd think that Santa Clara County resembled an undergraduate seminar at Oberlin on Critical Social Justice Theory: a hotbed of far left identity politics. Friend of Opportunity Now and senior in Political Science at UC Berkeley Susie Murillo offers a thoughtful take on election results.
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San Jose and surrounding communities muddle through another election cycle talking about housing affordability but offering nothing substantial to fix the problem. Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute explores the historical roots of the current mess in Santa Clara County in this exclusive three-part series for Opportunity Now.
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Contrary to urban planners' promises, growth boundaries and the push for greater densities ended up making local housing more expensive and lowered tax revenues. Randal O'Toole explains in the second of his three-part exclusive to Opportunity Now.
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In the final segment of his three-part analysis of Santa Clara County's housing crisis, Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institutes outlines how to start undoing the failed policies of the past that led to the current affordability debacle, with an eye toward increasing tax revenues as well.
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What to learn from the SVO's collapse under charges of racist campaign advertising? Opp Now co-founder and ex-SVO PAC member Christopher Escher takes a look at how bad business practices may have contributed to the debacle.
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