Free Republic

At first glance, it looked like Greg Perdue was stretching. The 58-year-old sat cross-legged on the matted wall-to-wall carpet in his Aberdeen, Maryland, apartment, a head of shaggy, graying hair bent toward his knees. But when medical examiners gingerly turned him over, they found his bloated face was a deep purple, his nose and mustache covered with crusted blood. Next to a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table were three clear pill capsules: two empty, one containing an off-white powder that was later identified as heroin. After being prescribed painkillers to treat a work injury, he started snorting heroin...

Allison and Michael Busam recently took their three daughters, ages 11, 9 and 7, to a school fair near their home in Summit, N.J., where they found a teacher they knew sitting on the bench in a dunking booth. He was promptly dunked three times. The soggy teacher told the Busams he was attending his reunion at Summit High School that night. Since moving to Summit from Hoboken 10 years ago, the Busams hear stories like that all the time. “I know a million people here who grew up here,” Ms. Busam said. Summit, a city of around 21,000 with...

Many people watching Milwaukee burn on the news from the safety of their homes in the suburbs feel immune. It seems like this only happens in big cities, right? “These people are burning down their own neighborhoods, how ridiculous,” observers say. They feel safe in their belief that the issue is merely a war on cops, and it’s nothing that could happen to them. While cities like Milwaukee and Baltimore have been hard hit, keep in mind that Ferguson, Missouri is a relatively small town with a population of just over 21,000 people at the last census. Suburbia isn’t the...

After some grandstanding to placate outraged constituents, establishment Republicans in Congress quietly voted to fund Obama's unconstitutional plan to fundamentally transform your neighborhood by bringing in more federally funded “diversity.” In short, if Big Brother's race-obsessed data-gathering machine determines that there are not enough poor or minority residents on welfare living in your city, town, zip code, or neighborhood, Obama wants to change that using your tax dollars. The scheme also sidelines states and borders by considering “regions” instead, a key element of the agenda to break down the traditional United States and its federalist system of government. But the...

Fairfield, Connecticut, doesn’t look like the Donald Trump country you’re used to seeing. The stately homes in Greenfield Hill, with its two-acre zoning requirement, and the charming waterfront in Southport, with sailboats docked in the calm waters of Long Island Sound don’t gibe with the raucous rallies thrown by the Republican frontrunner. But these wealthy Connecticut suburbs are as much hotbeds of Trump support as some coal-mining counties in Kentucky. Statewide, Trump won the April 26 primary with 58% of the vote, including all but three cities in Fairfield County, home to some of the richest communities in America and...

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy. The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real-estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs. Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods. It’s all part of...

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in

NORFOLK, Va.—With J.C. Penney Co. and Sears Holdings Corp. racing to close stores, America's weakest malls are being pushed to the brink. Nearly half of the 1,050 indoor and open air malls in the U.S. have both of those struggling chains as anchor tenants, according to real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors. Of those malls, nearly a quarter are struggling with sales below $300 per square foot and vacancy rates above 20%, meaning they will have a hard time finding new tenants if old ones leave. For an already-weakened mall industry, the negative turn for two once-reliable anchors is promising...

Tumbleweeds overtake neighborhood and trap families in their homes Recent tornado-like winds have covered a Colorado Springs, Colorado neighborhood in tumbleweeds. The large dried plants have invaded the Cuchares Ranches subdivision to such a degree that some residents said they were trapped in their homes and had to call 911 for help. “I look outside and tumbleweeds are literally blowing up and over our house,” Melissa Walker told KRDO NewsChannel 13. “I didn’t expect to be able to jump from my second story window into a pile of tumbleweeds.” In some places, the tumbleweeds are stacked 10-feet high. As reported...

American politics turn on a now familiar set of categories: red states vs. blue states, rich states vs. poor states, Frostbelt vs. Sunbelt. But these generalizations mask deeper, less visible fissures in our political geography. We have written a great deal about the role of density in metropolitan voting patterns, highlighting the remarkably consistent and robust political red-to-blue tipping point that occurs when a metro reaches a density of roughly 800 residents per square mile. I took a deeper look at our emerging political geography in a recent feature for Politico magazine, where I argued that the suburbs have become...

Not surprisingly several of these fast-growth areas are in burgeoning Texas metro areas. The population of Williamson County, on the outskirts of Austin, has expanded 7.94% since 2010, the strongest growth in the nation over that period. Far from turning into a slum, over the past 25 years the county’s residents have enjoyed the Lone Star state’s fastest rate of income growth and the sixth-highest in the nation.

Using Census data, we've figured out that half of the United States population is clustered in just the 146 biggest counties out of over 3000. Here's the map, with said counties shaded in. Below the map is the list of all the counties, so you can see if you live in one of them. See link for list of names.

The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance. In...

On a clear morning in May, Ron Douglas left his home in exurban Denver, eased into his Toyota pickup truck and drove to a business meeting at a Starbucks. Douglas, a bearded bear of a man, ordered a venti double-chocolate-chip Frappuccino — “the girliest drink ever,” he called it — and then sat down to discuss the future of the growing survivalist industry. The fact that Douglas not only told me where he lives but also invited me to visit him would be considered a huge mistake by many in the prepping world. Revealing your location runs the risk of...

The laziest lighting job in Christmas history. Sometimes extreme apathy can lead to extreme ingenuity. With one simple word and a miniscule fraction of the effort, the guy on the right is expressing the exact same level of Christmas spirit as his show-offy, bigger-budgeted neighbor. Plus that guy borrowed a rake from him like three years ago, so it all evens out.

This past weekend the New York Times devoted two big op-eds to the decline of the suburb. In one, new urban theorist Chris Leinberger said that Americans were increasingly abandoning “fringe suburbs” for dense, transit-oriented urban areas. In the other, UC Berkeley professor Louise Mozingo called for the demise of the “suburban office building” and the adoption of policies that will drive jobs away from the fringe and back to the urban core. Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing...

White flight? In a reversal, America's suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as younger, educated Whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes. An analysis of 2000-08 census data by the Brookings Institution highlights the demographic "tipping points" seen in the past decade and the looming problems in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, which represent two-thirds of the U.S. population. The findings could offer an important road map as political parties, including the tea party movement, seek to win support in suburban battlegrounds in the fall elections...

There are many reasons why families face foreclosure, like loss of income or rising health care costs. But several new studies show there's another factor closely linked with foreclosure rates: gas prices.

Suburban Democrats are bracing to defend their recent gains amid unmistakable signs of volatility among an electorate that is impatient with the pace of economic recovery. Their concerns are coming into sharp focus amid ongoing developments in Nassau County, N.Y., where County Executive Tom Suozzi, a rising star in New York politics and a prominent suburban Democratic politician, might lose his seat in a recount. Suozzi’s predicament comes on the heels of other troubling developments in some of the nation’s largest suburban counties, including nearby Democratic Westchester County, where voters tossed out County Executive Andrew Spano in a startling...

Even a five-point shift would mean big Democratic losses in 2010. Tuesday's elections should put a scare into red state Democrats—and a few blue state ones, too. Barack Obama was said to have redrawn the electoral map by winning Virginia last year with 53% of the vote. On Tuesday, Republican Bob McDonnell flipped the state back to the GOP, winning his election for governor with 59% of the vote. Mr. Obama carried New Jersey easily last year with 57% of the vote. This year, despite being outspent 3-to-1, Republican Chris Christie ousted Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine there by 49% to...