New Geography

Author: admin

  • Keeping Kids Downtown – A Philadelphia Approach

    As children return to classes in Philadelphia this week, more than half of the kindergarteners attending three downtown public elementary schools will come from their immediate middle-income neighborhoods. Three private schools that also serve this area, drawing over 70 percent of their enrollment from downtown families, are bursting at the seams. Having doubled and tripled pre-school programs over the last half decade, each is now physically expanding to accommodate the 11,200 children, born to downtown parents between 2000 and 2005. But you don’t need birth or enrollment numbers to see what’s happening; just look for strollers, new toy and book stores, and parents and babysitters in the playgrounds.

    For almost two decades, journalists and academics have been heralding the return of the middle class to the downtown of American cities and their transformative effect on housing, retail and the use of public spaces. But there haven’t been many stories on children because, until recently, there haven’t been many kids downtown. Downtown markets have largely been driven by young, childless professionals and empty-nesters.

    In a detailed look at downtown demographics, Eugenie L. Birch’s “Who Lives Downtown” (The Brookings Institution, November 2005) also noted that the number of new housing units and residents downtown may be welcome, but still represent a quite small phenomena both in absolute and relative regional terms. As with any new product, most downtowns started with what’s easiest: catering to those who value proximity to work and have more interest in theaters and cafes than schools and playgrounds.

    In a typology of 45 central cities, Birch also highlighted five fully-developed downtowns – Boston, Midtown and Lower Manhattan, Chicago, and Philadelphia – which were relatively large (averaging 43,623 households), densely settled (averaging 23 households per acre) and were home to almost half of the nation’s downtown households. These cities share several characteristics: strong downtown employment, well-developed middle class neighborhoods with diverse housing options, and the fact that they’ve been at it awhile – adding households each decade since 1970. Terms like pioneers and early settlers went out of vogue in these cities more than thirty years ago.

    For mayors, business and civic leaders in places just beginning to repopulate downtown, these more developed places suggest an agenda for the coming decade. As cities got cleaner and safer in the 1990s, as employers sought more tech-savvy workers, downtown populations got larger and younger. In 2000, nearly a third of dwellers in the five fully-developed downtowns were between the ages of 25 and 34. It’s become a cliché to note how television programs like “Seinfield” and “Friends” reflected and influenced the attitude about cities among the generation that came of age in the 1990s. Well here’s another truism: when downtowns fill with young professionals who all have been watching “Sex and the City,” someone’s bound to get pregnant.

    The experience in Philadelphia is illustrative. Since the 1960s, the downtown population has been steadily growing. But as families had children, most moved to the suburbs. Some remained for pre-school, but the 2000 census counted 26 percent fewer 5-9 year olds downtown than the number of children under age five. But a citywide, ten-year tax abatement passed in 1997 altered the trend, prompting over 10,000 new units of city center housing and pushing downtown’s population over 90,000. Between 1970 and 2000 the number of 25-34 year-olds also doubled from 15 to 30 percent of downtown’s population.

    While young professionals and empty nesters initially defined the market, a 2006 survey of downtown residents found that 21.6 percent of 35-44 year olds and 22.3 percent of 45-54 year olds had children living with them. After deferring child-rearing for careers in downtown office buildings, hospitals and universities, a growing number were staying in town as they had children. A 2005 survey of 37 downtown day-care centers documented a 43 percent increase in enrollment.

    The state takeover of the Philadelphia school district in 2001 created an opening to capitalize on this trend. Like many big city school districts, the majority of Philadelphia public school students come from disadvantaged families. Underfunded schools were plagued by poor performance, inflexible bureaucracies and union rules. But the new School Reform Commission (SRC) was empowered and funded by the state to make dramatic change. A dynamic new superintendent, Paul Vallas, aggressively pushed diversified management, operating some schools as public, some as charter, contracting others out privately. But all schools were given new resources; principals were empowered to make change; and teachers and students were held equally accountable for improved performance.

    With school test-scores and public image rising, the Center City District (CCD), a business-supported improvement district, partnered with the Philadelphia School District on a downtown schools initiative. Recognizing that the primary mission of the public schools was to provide quality options for families with limited means and limited choice, both the SRC and the CCD saw advantages if public schools could capture a growing share of families who traditionally selected private schools or simply left the city.

    Working with school principals and parent groups, the CCD built websites for the first time for 13 elementary public schools in and adjacent to downtown. A master website, www.CenterCitySchools.com, highlights all public, private, charter and parochial schools that serve downtown and “the opportunity to be more involved in your child’s life through the unique shared experiences that come from working, playing, living and learning right here.” Ads placed in parent-oriented newspapers and civic association newsletters promote the website and school events. The CCD, school district and nearly all the private, parochial and charter schools participated in two well-attended school fairs in the fall of 2005 and 2006 that showcased the educational options available for parents.

    Five years on, the leadership of the school district has changed. But the momentum continues to build as energized parent groups this fall continue to reshape their schools, pushing for improvements to curriculum, arts programs and playgrounds. Demographic trends have provided an opportunity for Philadelphia and for all center cities to reinvent themselves again: this time as places for families and children.

    Paul R. Levy is President and CEO of the Center City District in Philadelphia. Information about the organization and reports on demographic and housing trends can be found on the website www.CenterCityPhila.org.

  • Hillraisers: The New Naderites?

    I don’t know about you, but I’m still pretty astonished that aging white men – especially working class, blue-collar workers – have become “Hillary voters.” Who could have predicted that? Once upon a time, Hillary was a card-carrying member of the liberal elite, a corporate lawyer who didn’t stay home to bake cookies and have teas, who ruthlessly fired travel office workers and carted off loot from the White House, who carpet-bagged her way to a Senate seat in New York, and got booed by firefighters in the wake of 9/11.

    It just goes to show how true the old cliché is: politics makes strange bedfellows. Run a young(ish) upstart black man with Harvard Law degree against Mrs. Clinton, and next thing you know she’s doing shots of whiskey with a beer chaser, eating pizza and talking about manufacturing jobs in Crown Point, Indiana – and not getting laughed out of the joint!

    A little more understandable are the die-hard Hillary women – Hillraisers – mostly older white feminists whose day had finally arrived. They rallied, they fund-raised, they phone-banked, and now they are angry! As one editorial writer put it mildly, “these women are trying to get used to the fact that a new generation is taking center stage here: one represented by Michelle Obama.” I feel ya, sisters, I really do.

    But ya’ll are flirting dangerously with becoming this election’s Naderites — that is to say, political suicide bombers. It’s not just your bras that are going to be on fire, ladies. It’s going to be planet earth. Hyperbole? Think back to the 2000 election when Naderites argued there was little difference between Bush and Gore, and even if Bush won, it would be by such a narrow margin he would have to govern from the center. Really. Think. About. That.

    I don’t hold out much hope that Obama is going to vacuum up the blue-collar vote. Nor will Obama get a plurality of the white vote; a Democrat hasn’t done that since LBJ. But the white baby-boomer’s lack of support for Obama is nothing short of shocking. Charlie Cook – hands down the best political analyst working today, and you won’t see him bloviating on The Countdown with Keith Olberman – revealed the nasty truth back in June.

    “It finally dawned on me that white Baby Boomers are the group that is really hurting Barack Obama,” Cook wrote in his National Journal column. “Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack.” Cook pointed out that among whites between 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent. I don’t know if the numbers have moved much since June, but that was after Hillary “suspended” her campaign.

    Cook concludes, “By doing very well among African-Americans and reasonably well among Hispanics, Obama could easily overcome his deficits among whites under 50 and over 65. But losing whites born between 1944 and 1958 — pretty much the lion’s share of the Baby Boomers — by 18 percentage points? Wow. That’s a burden.”

    Obama, of course, brought some of this on by positioning himself as the post-boomer candidate, repeating the mantra that it’s “time to turn the page.” About the elections of 2000 and 2004, Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

    But I suspect there’s something more going on here than simply a generation gap, which Charlie Cook also hints at: “Is [Obama’s] difficulty that these are voters in their prime earnings years, when they are most sensitive to the issue of taxes?” Hmm. I wonder.

    Like politicians confirming their own worst characterizations – Bill Clinton the narcissist, Hillary the ruthless, Edwards the smarmy lawyer – boomers as a whole are living up to their worst stereotype: selfish, greedy, self-absorbed, and worse – willing to bequeath to younger generations an economic and environmental disaster of global proportions, just so long as their assets are protected.

    I can forgive the misguided Naderites who were too young to know better – hell, I’ll admit to having been one. But when it comes to boomers, age does not seem to equal wisdom. It’s like a Dennis Hopper retirement commercial writ large, as The Onion brilliantly satirized: “Retirement planning means a lot of decision making, and thank God I have the soothing presence of that amyl nitrite–huffing, obscenity-screaming, psychosexual lunatic from Blue Velvet to guide me through it.” Substitute “retirement planning” for “voting,” and that approximates how I’m starting to feel about Election 2008, thanks to the soothing presence of bra-burning, man-hating, post-menopausal ‘feminists’ to guide me through it.

    Lisa Chamberlain is the author of “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” She lives in New York City.

  • aullman

  • Chicago Ascendent?: A Questionable Proposition

    Recently, Chicago-based lobbyist and election attorney Dan Johnson-Weinberger wrote a rather positive blog entry for The Huffington Post. The subject matter was how great a place Chicago is. Here’s a quote:

    Proudly multi-racial, ruthlessly pragmatic, open to hustling newcomers and somewhat audacious, Chicago’s unique culture is ascendant.

    The most recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates suggest something not mentioned in the Johnson-Weinberger puff piece. Since the year 2000,Chicago is the only city of America’s top five largest to lose population. While New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix all gained population: Chicago lost over 59,000 people. From 2000 to 2007, Chicago had a greater population loss than Detroit’s decline of 39,000. If things are moving in Chicago, it’s not all “positive.”

    Take crime. According to the Chicago Tribune, the murder rate in Chicago is ascending:

    Violent crime continued to rise in Chicago after a deadly July in which 62 people were killed, according to unofficial numbers provided by a police source.

    For the first seven months of 2008, murders rose by 18 percent over the same period in 2007 and by nine percent for the same period in 2006. According to internal police data, 291 people were killed from January through July, up from 246 in 2007 and 266 in 2006.

    Few cities can claim over one murder a day.

    Overall, despite the political success of Senator Obama, 2008 has been a rather difficult year for Chicago. The city is currently in an economic recession. Mayor Daley estimates a budget shortfall of $400 million. Government worker layoffs are being proposed. Mayor Daley is throwing around numbers of 1000 to 2000 workers. Some suggest the number may reach 5000 to 7000 due to shrinking revenues. The revenue shortfall may even lead to Chicago’s credit rating being downgraded.

    One key reason for the slowing down of revenues lies with the reduction of new real estate transaction. Sales tax revenues are also slowing. Recently, Cook County raised the sales tax rate. Chicago now has the highest sales tax rate in the country at 10.25 percent. In downtown Chicago, which is designated as a special taxing district to fleece tourists, the sales tax rate is 11.25 percent. Higher oil costs have cut down on air travel which has affected the tourist trade in downtown Chicago.

    On top of all this, corruption, particularly relating to the Mafia, continues to thrive. As former Chicago criminal defense attorney Robert Cooley has stated, no amount of accomplishment or image-boosting can reverse this reality. A “high ranking made member” of the Chicago Mob was elected to Chicago’s City Council for 23 years. Today, in 2008, the FBI is still dealing with the fallout of this. No wonder the FBI has its largest public corruption squad located in Chicago. For the rest of the country to view Chicago as something positive or “progressive” reveals the ultimate triumph of good PR and hype over a far grittier reality.

  • Gazing Into A Post-Ethnic Future

    Last week’s updated Census projections showing whites becoming a minority by 2042 – far more rapidly than previous estimates – is sure to turn up the heat in some quarters of American society. While it no doubt re-ignites predictable dooms-day scenarios among anti-immigration activists who warn about the “death of the West” and the gradual erosion of American values, it may also give some average Americans pause as well.

    Why? Because when one envisages the average American, it is highly likely they are picturing someone with Anglo features rather than one with the skin tones and hues of Hispanics, Asians, or some exotic admixture of different ethnicities. Even as the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and the rising global prominence of star athletes like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James at this year’s Olympics are changing these perceptions, all-American looks, for the most part, is still equated with ‘white’ for most people around the world.

    And who is to argue? After all, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population is currently white. But according to new Census Bureau figures, this image is set to undergo a fundamental makeover in just a single generation. To summarize:

    • By 2050, whites will decline to just 46 percent of the U.S. population. At that time, they will also constitute the vast majority of persons over the age of 85 years — a population that is set to triple to 19 million. Demographers refer to this as the “graying of America.”

    • At the same time, the “browning of America” is marching forward in full force. Both Hispanics and Asians are scheduled to double their share of the population by mid-century — up to 30 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively. A majority of that share in growth will originate from births, and not immigration.

    • These two countervailing forces — “graying” and “browning” of the country — are impelled by widely disparate fertility levels between whites on the one hand, and Hispanics on the other. While the average American white woman is now producing 1.8 children — a steadily declining figure over the past two decades — the average fertility rate for Hispanic women is 2.3.

    It would be unwise to jump to too many firm conclusions based on these figures — especially if one underestimates the power and role of assimilation. Historically, numerous forecasters, pundits, and commentators have made the error of adhering to a fixed, static notion of culture. Benjamin Franklin once famously warned that German immigrants threatened to turn Pennsylvania into “a colony of aliens” and cautioned they would “never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can adopt our complexion.” Likewise, an annual report written in 1892 from the U.S. Superintendent’s Office of Immigration cautioned that rising immigration levels would bring about “an enormous influx of foreigners unacquainted with our languages and customs,” thereby forming a “new undesirable class.”

    Of course the Jews, Italians, Irish and Germans who comprised the “third great wave of immigration” at the turn of the 20th century did not develop into America’s underbelly as predicted. On the contrary, most of them eventually weaved into the fabric of mainstream society—epitomizing the famous metaphor used to describe their integration: the American “melting pot”.

    Moreover, immigration projections themselves are often based on precarious assumptions, many of which do not account for the malleability of culture, particularly when it faces the compelling force of assimilation. To illustrate, back in 1990, California’s demographers forecasted a major population surge due to assumptions made about Hispanic immigration and birthrates. At the time, the fertility rate for Latina women in the Golden State was 3.4 babies.

    By 2005, actual population figures demonstrated the state had grossly miscalculated its population estimates. The state’s bean counters had wrongly assumed that high birthrates among Latina mothers would continue to persist across generations. But they didn’t. Fertility rates dropped to 2.6 babies overall among Latina moms. Declines in fertility rates were a direct result of acculturation: as Hispanic women acculturated, they began to adopt upwardly mobile lifestyles that reflected their increasingly mainstream attitudes. For many second-generation Hispanic women, rearing many children simply did not fit into the lifestyles they aspired to have.

    In study after study, the data tracking of immigrants show that the longer they remain in the U.S., the better they do economically. Unemployment levels drop dramatically while income earnings increase considerably the longer immigrants have been in the country.

    Nevertheless, the true gauge of immigration’s genuine impact is generational — it rests among the children and offspring of immigrants themselves. Historian Oscar Handlin once wrote: “the history of America is the history of immigrants’ children.” A study by the Rand Corporation in 2005 showed that educational progress among three generations of Mexican Americans — from the first generation immigrant all the way to their grandchildren — gradually increases with each succeeding generation group. This progress is the same or greater than those achievements made by those previous European immigrants who came to the U.S. during the early 20th century.

    These results are supported by the research conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center. According to Jeffrey Passel, a researcher at the institute, “We have a tendency to romanticize the experience of past immigrants. Yes, there was progress. But the real progress came with their children and grandchildren.”

    In light of last week’s new revised Census forecast, what are we to gain from all this? Just that despite the fact the “average” American may have a much different “look” or physical appearance in 2042, they will still be firmly, recognizably — and very proudly — American.

    Thomas Tseng is Principal and Co-Founder of New American Dimensions, a market research and consulting agency based in Los Angeles.

  • Lisa Chamberlain

  • Excavating The Buried Civilization of Roosevelt’s New Deal

    A bridge crashes into the Mississippi at rush hour. Cheesy levees go down in New Orleans and few come to help or rebuild. States must rely on gambling for revenue to run essential public services yet fall farther into the pit of structural deficits. Clearly we have gone a long way from the legacy of the New Deal.

    The forces responsible for this dismantling are what Thomas Frank calls “The Wrecking Crew,” the ideological (and sometimes genealogical) descendants of those who have waged war against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal since its birth 75 years ago. Few today articulate any vision of what Americans can achieve together because “the public” is the chief and intended casualty in that long war.

    Those whom the mass media routinely refer to as conservatives better know themselves as counterrevolutionaries against what FDR wrought. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government is the problem as he made it so. Almost two generations after President Roosevelt’s death, President Reagan and his conservative surrogates depended upon the amnesia of those who know little about what the New Deal did and what it still does for them to undo parts of its legacy.

    I was not much more enlightened when I began what became the California Living New Deal Project four years ago. I thought that — with a generous seed grant from the Columbia Foundation — photographer Robert Dawson and I could document the physical legacy of the New Deal in California. Since the New Deal agencies were all about centralization, I thought, I would find their records neatly filed back in Washington at the National Archives and Library of Congress. I was wrong on all counts.

    I discovered, instead, a strange civilization buried beneath strata of forgetfulness, neglect, and even malice seventy-five years deep. Aborted by the Second World War FDR’s sudden death, then covered with the congealed lava of the McCarthy reaction, the half dozen or so agencies that had created the physical and cultural infrastructure from which grew America’s post-war prosperity left few accessible records of their collective accomplishments. So many-pronged and multitudinous was the Roosevelt administration’s onslaught upon the Depression that even FDR’s Secretary of the Interior and head of the Public Works Agency (PWA), “Honest Harry” Ickes, admitted that he could not keep track of it all.

    With the help of hundreds of photographs scanned at the National Archives and other collections, journal articles of the period, historical surveys, mimeographed WPA reports, as well as local historians and other informants, an indispensable matrix of public works was revealed to me. Most of our urban airports and rural airstrips, it now appears, began as projects of the WPA and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), while California’s many community colleges are similarly New Deal creations. (Between two illustrated talks I recently gave to large audiences at Santa Rosa Community College, Professor Marty Bennett led the first New Deal tour of a campus almost entirely built by Ickes’ PWA.) Committed to public education in all of its manifestations, the WPA and PWA built and expanded literally hundreds of schools throughout the state to replace older buildings that were seismically unsafe, inadequate, or nonexistent. Most are still in use.

    The availability of plentiful and cheap labor as well as PWA grants and loans made the Bay Area one of the most desirable regions in the country by giving it a vast network of public parks and recreational areas. A WPA report on that agency’s accomplishments in San Francisco noted that WPA workers had improved virtually every park in the city: that now appears to be true of most older towns in California where federally employed workers left a legacy of handsome stonework, public stadia, tennis courts, golf courses, swimming pools, baseball diamonds, and restrooms but few markers. Other federal employees built a network of all-weather farm-to-market roads enabling growers to get fresh produce to towns and tourists to visit every corner of the state. Still others completed and expanded public water supplies and electrical distribution systems as well as sewage treatment plants that, for the first time, insured the majority of Americans safe and plentiful drinking water.

    As the scale and extent of that often forgotten civilization grew ever larger, cataloging and mapping it fast outpaced my organizational and technical skills. With the joint sponsorship of the California Historical Society, the California Studies Center, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley, the California Living New Deal Project morphed into an unprecedented collaborative effort to use informants throughout the State to inventory and map what New Deal agencies achieved and to suggest what might have been. In particular, I am grateful to the IRLE Library whose staff maintains and continually expands the CLNDP website with input from research assistants and informants.

    The Roosevelt Administration and those it brought to Washington envisioned a collectively built America whose immense productive capacities could benefit all. A profusion of splendid public spaces such as Mount Tamalpais State Park’s Mountain Theater and the Santa Barbara Bowl would, they believed, make citizens and community of a polyglot populace. Together with a plethora of well-built public schools, libraries, post offices, parks, water systems, bridges, airports, hospitals, harbors, city halls, county courthouses, zoos, art works and more, New Deal initiatives spread the wealth and enriched the lives of uncounted Americans.

    In his last State of the Union address, FDR’s firm and confident voice enunciated the need for a second bill of economic rights that would ensure everyone a modicum of freedom, a freedom that his country promised but so often failed to deliver. If extended worldwide, Roosevelt suggested, that Bill of Rights could short-circuit future wars such as the one still raging as he spoke. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he told the nation, a condition afflicting the vast majority of people today.

    Gray Brechin is a Visiting Scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and the Project Scholar of the California Living New Deal Project. He is the author of “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin” and, with photographer Robert Dawson, “Farewell Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream.”

  • Samuel R. Staley

  • Dayton, Ohio: The Rise, Fall and Stagnation of a Former Industrial Juggernaut

    What Dayton can tell cities about staying competitive in the global economy

    Few people would recognize Dayton, Ohio of 2008 as the industrial powerhouse it was less than one hundred years ago. Once a beacon of manufacturing success, Dayton claimed more patents per capita than any other U.S. city in 1900. Its entrepreneurial climate nurtured innovators such Charles Kettering, inventor of the automobile self-starter and air travel pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. As the U.S. economy took off after World War II, Dayton was home to the largest concentration of General Motors employees outside of Michigan.

    The city also nurtured companies that would became stalwarts on the Fortune 500, including National Cash Register (NCR), Mead Paper Company, business forms companies Standard Register and Reynolds and Reynolds, Dayco and Phillips Industries. To put this in context, just 14 U.S. cities could claim six or more Fortune 500 headquarters in 2007. Not a bad performance for an urban area that peaked as the 40th largest city in the U.S. in 1940.

    These early industrialists were more than just business men. They were also visionaries. The founder of NCR, John H. Patterson, is widely credited with laying the foundation for the first modern factory system, pioneering the basic principles that still drive much of modern advertising, and redefining the relationship between labor and management.

    NCR may also have been America’s first truly global business. “The cash register,” writes Patterson biographer Samuel Crowther, “is the first American machine which can claim that on it the sun has never set.” Even as Patterson was toiling away in a little shop in Dayton, cash “registers were being sold in England and Australia.” The company’s first non-US sales office was established in England in 1885 and its first European factory was established in Germany in 1903.

    It’s difficult to underestimate Patterson’s influence on American industry. By 1930, an estimated one-sixth of all U.S. corporate executives had either been an executive at NCR or been part of Patterson’s management training programs. Among NCR’s alumni were IBM’s visionary CEO Thomas Watson as well as the presidents of Packard Motor Car Company, Toledo Scale, Delco (now Delphi) and dozens of others.

    What may separate men like Patterson to their equivalents today in places like Silicon Valley was their intense civic involvement. Patterson was one of the first business leaders to try to apply scientific management to local government, testing out his ideas in rebuilding the city after a disastrous flood ruined downtown Dayton in 1913. He also helped create the Miami Conservancy District, one of the nation’s first flood control districts that still manages a system of low-level dams and levies that keep downtown flood-free to this day. Perhaps one of Patterson’s most prescient civic innovations was bringing the city manager form of local government to the first large city in the U.S.

    As significant as Patterson was as an individual, he was not alone. The Dayton area benefited from the entrepreneurial drive and civic commitment of hundreds of businessmen that built large companies, many publicly traded. Patterson was the most iconic of the icons.

    Dayton’s Economic Descent
    Today one would not expect such vision in Dayton, and you would be unlikely to find it. Since the early 1970s, nearly 15,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared at NCR. Automobile plants cut payrolls as the economy restructured toward services, and foreign competition outsold domestic manufacturers. As late as 1990, five General Motors plants employed more than 20,000 people regionally. Now, fewer than 12,000 work in these factories and Delphi is on the cusp of closing two more plants. NCR’s world headquarters employs fewer than 3,000 people. Mead Paper Company has merged with a competitor, becoming MeadWestvaco and its corporate headquarters has moved to Richmond, Virginia.

    As the economy has tanked, the city has shrunk. After peaking at more than 260,000 people in 1960, the city is barely clinging to a core city population of less than 160,000. In the 2000 census, Dayton ranked 147th in size nationwide. Its metropolitan area is now ranked 59th.

    Meanwhile, the suburbs have grown. Nearly 74 percent of Montgomery County’s population lived in Dayton in 1930. The growth of suburban cities shrunk that proportion to less than a third by the mid 1980s. Now, less than 20 percent of the metropolitan area’s population lives in the city of Dayton.

    Lessons for Other Cities
    Dayton’s early dependence on traditional manufacturing, with a particular emphasis on assembly line work, put the region at a competitive disadvantage as growing international trade and dramatically reduced transportation costs allowed for the global dispersion of factory work.

    Yet perhaps most remarkable is not the region’s decline, but its resilience. Despite the ongoing decline of manufacturing sector, the metropolitan area still knits together a population of over one million people. What accounts for this?

    First, the regional economy has diversified. Now, as in other metropolitan areas, the growth in employment is in services. Two local major health care networks – Premier Health Partners and Kettering Medical Network – employ 15,300 in facilities that are nationally recognized for their quality of care. Wright Patterson Air Force Base is a center for scientific research and development and employs another largely civilian workforce of 21,000.

    Second, some of the large industrial companies of the past have evolved to meet the needs of an information economy. NCR, while its presence has diminished, is now a high tech company. Reynolds & Reynolds, a former business forms manufacturer, now provides software in niche markets such as auto sales. The region is also home to the legal information services provider Lexus/Nexus, now a division of Reed Elsevier but originally a division of the Mead Paper Company’s investment in data management services.

    Third, core parts of the traditional manufacturing base literally retooled to become globally competitive. In the early 1980s, more than 600 machine shops employed nearly 20,000 people. As the 1990s unfolded, this number had fallen by half. As the 21st century got its start, the number of tool and die shops had revived and employment was rebounding close to 15,000. The shops remain small, but they are deeply invested in global trade. Productivity is up along with incomes.

    Fourth, the region remains at a strategic logistical and demographic location in the Midwest. The city of Dayton is at the cross roads of two major interstate highways – the major east-west link I-70 and the north-south connector of I-75. Combined with access to three major airports, the Dayton region can easily benefit from and tap into economic growth in nearby metropolitan areas such as Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Ironically, many of the highway improvements some believed would “empty” the downtown – the interstates plus a partial beltway, I-675 – ended up tying the city and suburbs to other larger urban areas and enhanced the region’s geographic importance.

    Dayton’s economy may no longer provide the flash and glitter of 20th century economic leadership, but the region has demonstrated a remarkable robustness that holds lessons for other cities striving to remain competitive in a global economy. All cities or economic regions pass through periods of growth and decline. The real question is whether they can adapt to changing economic circumstances.

    Dayton survived by building on the secrets of its past success. Its innovative manufacturing base has become more tech-centric and service-oriented. New areas of vitality such as health services have been enhanced. The city may no longer be what it was at its peak a century ago, but its future is far from grim.

    Sam Staley, Ph.d., is director of urban and land use policy at the Reason Foundation and teaches urban economics at the University of Dayton. He is a fourth generation native and current resident of the Dayton area.

  • Sacramento: A City on the Verge?

    Sacramento is a city on the verge. Over the last 20 years, I have watched it emerge from a “cow town” lassitude. This has been viewed as a well earned epithet by newcomers from either coast and a fond trademark to many long time Sacramento traditionalists. Although there was evidence of hyperbole in both camps, the city’s lack of cultural and intellectual activities, its dependence on an economy driven by agricultural and state government has contributed to creating an often torpid local environment.

    But much has changed in recent years. The city has grown both up, constructing several notably lofty skyscrapers, and out, growing ganglion like suburbs up and into the hills. The affordability of its housing has attracted entire towns of more cosmopolitan immigrants from the San Francisco area and beyond. This and a rising world class university at Davis have much enriched Sacramento society at all levels. Such emerging influences as the headquarters of Calpers and Calsters suggest a possible path to ascendancy as a serious financial capital of the west coast. Parallel to this, various other segments of the community, most prominently business, have taken a leadership role on land use, flood prevention and civic elevation in general.

    Recently, the area’s housing market, along with much of that for inland California, has gone bust. This ultimately may be beneficial, in that the rapid run up in housing prices threatened to subvert one of the region’s core competencies — affordable housing.

    What will make the difference will be whether Sacramento successfully capitalizes on its assets as an affordable, economically dynamic place. Quite simply, this is largely a matter of local leadership. All the other ingredients are present to achieve the region’s ascendancy. But this can not happen without a substantial change in the local economic and political leadership.

    Frank Washington is the Chairman/CEO of Tower of Babel LLC, which owns KBTV-CA, channel 8 in Sacramento, a multilanguage programming service carried throughout California’s Central Valley. He is also a past Chair of the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce and KVIE, Sacramento’s public TV station.