Tag Archives: Cities

Time to leave: America’s biggest cities too dangerous, too expensive, too dirty to stay

Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”

Important Takeaways:

  • New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., are all seeing a net exodus of college graduates (as is San Jose). Those four cities were typically the finish line for those seeking jobs in media, politics, entertainment, finance, or tech. As New Yorkers used to boast, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” For many college graduates, the goal was to make it in one of those four big brand cities
  • No longer. All four are plagued by a crime crisis that has bled out from those icky poor areas of the cities that college graduates avoided and into the rest of the city. New York City’s public transportation isn’t safe. San Francisco is plagued by homelessness. Los Angeles actively refuses to keep violent criminals and gang members off the streets. Washington can’t even guarantee the safety of members of Congress in their own apartments.
  • Combine that with the stupidly expensive cost of housing in those cities, and you have the least desirable professional destinations imaginable. You can hardly blame the college graduates who are making their way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, among the many cities seeing an increase in working-age college graduates. Arizona, Florida, and Texas are also winners…

Read the original article by clicking here.

U.S. governors want say on Trump’s infrastructure plan

President Donald Trump

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. governors are flagging hundreds of “shovel-ready” projects they regard as high-priority for President Donald Trump’s plan to fix the nation’s infrastructure.

Scott Pattison, executive director of the bipartisan National Governor’s Association, said on Monday his group, at the request of the White House, has assembled a list of 300 projects costing billions of dollars from 43 states and territories, with more expected to come.

“The good part from a bipartisan standpoint is there seems to be full consensus that we have a lot of infrastructure problems in the U.S., a lot of maintenance issues, also things that need building,” he said in an interview.

In his inaugural address Friday, the Republican president said the nation’s infrastructure “has fallen into disrepair and decay.”

“We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation,” Trump said.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Monday told reporters that “infrastructure continues to be a huge priority.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers’ infrastructure report card has estimated the United States needs to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020.

Pattison said while it was still early in the process, disagreements are likely over how to fund infrastructure. He added that governors want “all the tools” to be made available, including cash, municipal bonds, public-private partnerships and federal matching programs.

“One of the biggest issues that has to be faced is that the gas tax has been primarily the way in which we funded a lot of our transportation projects, and that’s a declining revenue source,” Pattison said.

Governors also want to make sure their project priorities are immune from congressional earmarking, Pattison said, adding that states have developed “robust” prioritization programs.

(Reporting by Karen Pierog; Editing by Matthew Lewis)