🏙🔎 America’s missing megalopolis mystery

What happened to the supercities of BosWash, ChiPitts, and SanSan that never were?

Kamala Harris is making housing affordability central to her economic agenda as she runs for US president. This is a good thing, even though I like some of her ideas (cutting “red tape and needless bureaucracy”) more than others (tax incentives and payment support). Perhaps Donald Trump will counter with his own pro-housing agenda — beyond just restating his somewhat-forgotten idea of building ten futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land. (By the way, the housing agenda outlined in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is anti-density. Blah!)

In any event, we need our politicians talking more about an issue that helps explain many chronic problems of modern America beyond housing costs, including inequality, fertility rates, and productivity. As I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, “America’s cities are the economy’s high-productivity engines. They’re also where wages are highest.”