Neoliberal

For the first time, six fast-growing states in the South — Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee — are contributing more to the national GDP than the Northeast, with its Washington-New York-Boston corridor, in government figures going back to the 1990s. The switch happened during the pandemic and shows no signs of reverting.

A flood of transplants helped steer about $100 billion in new income to the Southeast in 2020 and 2021 alone, while the Northeast bled out about $60 billion, based on an analysis of recently published Internal Revenue Service data.

Desalination is an idea that keeps reappearing in the Golden State, where overdrawn groundwater and shrinking reservoirs are critical problems. On a superficial level, it seems simple: take the salt out of the abundant salt water just offshore. But typical desalination facilities are big, expensive to operate, and environmentally unfriendly, especially when the resource-intensive process is powered by fossil fuels. The Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, for example, sits on 2.4 hectares of land and uses 246,156 megawatt hours of electricity per year—equivalent to the usage of roughly 23,000 homes.

Oneka’s experimental water desalination device isn’t like California’s other desalination plants: it’s a 6.5-meter-wide buoy. The small footprint is a bonus, but the device’s main advantage is that it’s ocean powered. As the buoy moves back and forth with the waves, it draws water through a filter and then through a reverse osmosis membrane, which removes the salts and other tiny particles. “Surprisingly simple,” says Smith.

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Sales tax emphasis is the wrong strategy for the future. By 2028, every baby boomer will be over 65. Statistically speaking, this means that every boomer will have cut their spending by 40% on average. This is the generation most devoted to brick and mortar retail transactions. Keep in mind that millennials prefer to shop online and members of Generation Z are more than twice as likely as millennials to do so.

I could list countless lost opportunity costs of cities that instead choose to have large boxes remain empty or parcels undeveloped. The most common reason: the uses selected are the ones the market wants (storage, multifamily, or industrial), but are not boujie enough for decision-makers. Take the bird in the hand — pretty soon there are not going to be new birds.

City leaders need to understand other uses pay off better in the long term. Retail is inexpensive to build — among the least expensive. Often, we see small retail buildings cost $3 million or less. You can expect lower and lower ad valorem taxes as well as the decline in sales tax.

Multifamily, however, is expensive to build. Typically, the taxable value is $250,000 to $350,000 per unit, or more. The value of these buildings holds up much stronger than retail buildings, despite how much people hate on multifamily.

Milton Freidman’s famous example of a pencil to demonstrate the pricing system and global free markets