New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox

  • The Politics of Migration: From Blue to Red

    Democratic “blue” state attitudes may dominate the national media, but they can’t yet tell people where to live. Despite all the hype about a massive “back to the city” movement and the supposed superiority of ultra-expensive liberal regions, people are increasingly moving to red states and regions, as well as to suburbs and exurbs.

    This is the basic takeaway from the most recent IRS data and Census Bureau estimates, which have been widely ignored in the established media. Essentially, Americans are rejecting what Walter Russell Mead has labelled “the blue model,” and relocating to cities, states and regions that are less dense, less heavily taxed, and less regulated.

    This suggests not an intrinsic political calculation so much as a series of very personal decisions by individuals and families. People move for varied reasons — cheaper homes, lower  taxes, employment opportunities, better schools, more value to the paycheck — but the upshot is that they are settling in states that tend to be red or, at least, purple in political coloration.

    In 2016 alone, states that supported Donald Trump gained 400,000 domestic migrants from states that supported Hillary Clinton. This came on top of an existing advantage in net domestic red state migration of 1.45 million people from 2010 through 2015. Contrary to popular perception, these blue state emigres aren’t all fleeing economically challenged places such as upstate New York or inland California. Mostly, they have left the  biggest cities, which are the electoral base of the Democratic Party. Metropolitan New York has led the way in out-migration, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago. Since 2000, these metropolitan areas have lost a net 5.5 million domestic migrants to other parts of the country.

    Even economic boom conditions have failed to reverse this trend. Overall, many big blue core cities now have overall population growth rates well below the somewhat tepid national average of 0.7 percent. So, who’s growing? Last year, all 10 of the top gainers in domestic migration were Sunbelt metropolitan areas: Austin, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Orlando, Nashville, Phoenix and San Antonio.

    Perhaps most surprising, given the almost universal dismissal of their prospects, has been a shift to smaller cities, a more Trump-oriented part of the urban archipelago. Domestic migration has accelerated to cities between 500,000 and 1 million population, while declining in those above 1 million.

    The Suburban Resurgence

    More important still has been the revival in the suburbs, particularly in Sunbelt metropolitan areas. The most recent estimates suggest that last year was the best for suburban areas since the Great Recession. In 2012, the suburbs of the major metropolitan areas (over 1 million) attracted barely 150,000 more people than core counties, an edge that grew to 556,000 last year. Between 2010 and 2015, suburban counties of major metropolitan areas added 825,000 net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost nearly 600,000.

    Critically, since 2010 more than 80 percent of all new jobs in our 53 leading metropolitan regions have been created in suburban locations. Many of the leading tech areas of the country –from Silicon Valley and Raleigh-Durham to tech centers surrounding the big Texas cities — are primarily suburban. The economic future, contrary to the common media memes, will be primarily occurring in the periphery of the hip urban cores.

    This trend may accelerate as millennials begin to enter their 30s and look for safe, affordable places to live. We already see this in the behavior of their predecessors, the X generation. Using census data of those 35-49 as our measurement, since 2000 the percentage of Gen-Xers living in the urban core has dropped by one percentage point, while the percentage living new suburbs and exurbs has grown by six percentage points. The latest estimates indicate over 80 percent of Xers in the 53 largest metropolitan areas lived in suburban areas.

    Gen-Xer shares grew most dramatically in the affordable Sunbelt, like almost completely suburban Raleigh, which saw a 50 percent growth in the share of Xers relative to the national rate. Rapid growth also took place in Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, Orlando and Salt Lake City as well as the big four Texas cities: Austin, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio.

    In contrast the Gen-X population share has remained stagnant in the San Francisco and San Jose areas, while the Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia areas have all seen declines in their Xer shares both since 2000 and since 2010.  This could be a harbinger of millennial behavior. Like the Xers, millennials are beginning to move into the suburbs, contradicting all predictions to the contrary. Since 2010, the biggest gains in millennial share have been in heavily suburban Orlando, Austin and San Antonio.

    Generally speaking, notes economist Jed Kolko, the peak years for living in higher density multi-family neighborhoods take place between ages 18 and 30. Kolko calculates that while almost a quarter of these under-30 urban dwellers live in these higher density neighborhoods, by age 40 this drops well below 20 percent, and stays there until people are into their 70s. Given that the 30-something population is destined to grow far faster than 20-somethings in the coming decades, the move to suburbia, with its detached housing — particularly in regions with lower home prices — is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.  

    This shift is likely to be driven in large part by unsustainable housing costs. In the San Francisco Bay Area, techies are increasingly looking for jobs outside the region, and some companies are offering cash bonuses for those willing to leave. A recent poll indicated that 46 percent of millennials want to leave the Bay Area. Meanwhile, these “best and brightest” have been gravitating to lower cost areas such as Austin, Orlando, Houston, Nashville, and Charlotte.

    The basics that drive people to the suburbs remain: cheaper real estate, a preponderance of single family housing, better schools, a poverty rate  roughly half  that of core municipalities as well as far lower incidence of violent crime  than in urban cores. This trend will be accelerated, as a recent policy analysis released by the consulting firm Bain shows, by services such as Uber or Lyft, the appeal of working at home as well as the development of automated vehicles.

    Political Implications

    Ultimately, the key political battlegrounds for the future will not be in blue cities but in purple suburbs, particularly in the booming periphery of major cities in red states. No matter how loud and pervasive the voices emanating from the urban core, or for that matter, ungentrified countryside, Trump won the election by taking by a significant five percentage point suburban margin nationally, improving on Romney’s two-point edge, and by more outside the coastal regions.

    This contradicts the confident assertions by the New York Times and other establishment voices that Trump would get his clock cleaned in suburbia, particularly among college-educated voters in upscale communities. Suburban voters made the difference in the crucial Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Trump came close to winning in supposedly deep blue Minnesota.

    In Michigan, Trump lost Wayne County (including Detroit) by more than 2-1, but captured four of the five surrounding suburban counties by margins that greatly exceeded that of Michigan native Romney. The pattern was similar in Pennsylvania where Clinton won in the Philadelphia metropolitan area – and Pittsburgh’s urban Allegheny County, while Trump was flipping the state with majorities in nearly every other county. Much the same can be said about Wisconsin and Ohio, states critical as well to the Trump win and the GOP future.

    This pattern is not set in stone. Trump, as the New York Times recently enthused, does suffer from continuing problems with educated suburban voters. Perhaps even more threatening to the GOP is that minorities now account for more than 40 percent of all suburban and exurban residents, growing far faster in the periphery than non-Hispanic whites. Trump lost traditionally right-leaning but rapidly diversifying places such as Orange County, Calif., and Fort Bend County outside of Houston.

    Yet, winning over suburbia in the long run may not be easy for the Democrats. As millennials and Xers, as well as minorities, begin to own property and earn more money, their attitudes on taxes tend to shift to a more conservative perspective, notes a recent Reason poll. Similarly many first-generation Asian immigrants tend to be far more conservative than second- or third-generation Chinese- or Korean-Americans, many of whom have been through college indoctrination and are comfortably ensconced in the generally Democratic-leaning high-end professional class.

    Perhaps the biggest problem for the left lies in their embrace of policies that reject suburban lifestyles and, as we see in California, make housing hard to build and all but unaffordable. Most millennials and Xers, not to mention minorities, cannot afford to live in places like brownstone Brooklyn or San Francisco. In adopting policies to curb “sprawl,” blue state politicians are assaulting the suburban lifestyles clearly preferred by the clear majority. This leftist urban policy does not constitute an ideal strategy to appeal to those, including minorities, who want nothing more than to live comfortable lives on the periphery.

    Right now, the demographic trends do not clearly favor either party. The new generation now forming families — and heading towards the red states — may not be as conservative as boomers but their politics are less lock-step progressive than many believe, even on gender-related issues. They may want health-care reform, good schools, and cleaner environments. But they also want jobs, would like to hold onto more of their paychecks, and cherish the same suburban amenities they enjoyed as children.

    Ultimately, it’s a matter of which politicians can delineate the best path toward greater opportunity and homeownership for middle-class families. The political party that addresses these aspirations is likely to be the one that wins the race in the long run.

    This piece first appeared on Real Clear Politics.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Mark Turner (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies

    Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has recovered, notably in the Bay Area and in pockets along the coast, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that domestic migrants continue to leave the state more rapidly than they enter it.

    First, the good news. People may be leaving California, but, overall, the rate of leaving is about three-quarters less than that experienced in the first decade of the millennium. In the core, booming San Francisco metropolitan area, there was even a shift toward net domestic migration after 2010, something rarely seen since the 1980s.

    Outmigration dropped with the initial economic slowdown of the last recession, particularly as housing prices in some areas, notably the Inland Empire and the Sacramento area, drifted toward the national norm of three times incomes by 2010, having been twice that high or more in the boom times. The initial recovery after 2010 may also have encouraged people to stay as well.

    Back to mounting outmigration

    The San Francisco Bay Area lost more than 600,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2009 before experiencing a five-year respite. Now, sadly, the story seems to be changing again. Housing prices, first in the Bay Area and later in other metropolitan areas, have surged mightily, and are now as high as over nine times household incomes. In 2016, some 26,000 more people left the Bay Area than arrived. San Francisco net migration went from a high of 16,000 positive in 2013 to 12,000 negative three years later.

    Similar patterns have occurred across the state. Between 2010 and 2015, California had cut its average annual migration losses annually from 160,000 to 50,000, but that number surged last year to nearly 110,000. Losses in the Los Angeles-Orange County area have gone from 42,000 in 2011 to 88,000 this year. San Diego, where domestic migration turned positive in 2011 and 2012, is now losing around 8,000 net migrants annually.

    The major exceptions to this trend can be found in the somewhat more affordable interior regions. Sacramento has gained net migration from barely 1,800 in 2011 to 12,000 last year. Even some still-struggling areas, like Modesto and Stockton, have seen some demographic resurgence as people move farther from the high-priced Bay Area.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Marco Varisco, CC License

  • California’s Racial Politics Harming Minorities

    Across the country, white voters placed Donald Trump in office by a margin of 21 points over Clinton. Their backing helped the GOP gain control of a vast swath of local offices nationwide. But in California, racial politics are pushing our general politics the other direction, way to the left.

    Some of this reflects California’s fast track toward a “minority-majority” state. Along with a few other states — Hawaii, Texas and New Mexico — California is there now, with minorities accounting for 62 percent of the population, compared to 43 percent in 1990. The shift in the electorate has been slower but still powerful. In 1994, registered Democrats held a 12 percentage-point margin over Republicans. By 2016, the margin had widened to 19 points.

    The racial shift does much to explain why Trump lost some largely affluent suburban areas like Orange County, where 53 percent the population is Latino or Asian, up from 45 percent in 2000. Perhaps most emblematic of potential GOP problems was Trump’s — and the GOP’s — loss in Irvine, a prosperous Orange County municipality that is roughly 40 percent Asian.

    California’s unique racial politics

    Ideology plays a critical role in California’s emerging politics of race. Hispanic and Asian voters outside California — for example, in Texas — have tended to vote less heavily for Democrats. In 2014, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Texas Latinos. Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott garnered 38 percent of the Latino vote in his successful re-election campaign. In contrast, that same year, Neel Kashkari, Jerry Brown’s Republican opponent, won only 27 percent of the Latino vote in California. Only 17 percent of California Asians voted for Trump, nearly 40 percent lower than the national rate (27 percent).

    These differences, ironically, have become more evident as California has become relatively less attractive to immigrants. Since the 1980s and 1990s, as California’s economy has become increasingly deindustrialized, the immigration “flood” has slowed, particularly among Hispanics. By the 2010s, other cities — notably Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston — were emerging as bigger magnets for newcomers.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

  • Generation X’s Moment Of Power Is Almost Here

    It certainly seems as if boomers are in charge in America now, with Donald Trump about to move into the White House and members of the generation in the majority in Congress. Meanwhile, huge attention has been paid over the past few years to the emergence of the boomers’ children, the millennials, on the national scene. But relatively little thought has been accorded to the group sandwiched between the two mega-generations: Generation X.

    Referred to by some pundits as a “lost generation,” the Xers, born between the mid-1960s and 1980, may be less numerous than either the boomers or millennials, the latter of whom now slightly outnumber them in the workforce, but Gen X seems likely to dominate the near future. Not only do they now make up the majority of of managers at U.S. companies, they are far more entrepreneurial than millennials, both at early ages and now. Their rate of startup formation is roughly twice that of millennials, and on the way up, while the younger generation’s rate has been on the decline. 

    Financially, they are clearly the ascendant generation. According to analysis by the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, they now have 14 percent of the nation’s wealth compared to just 4 percent for millennials and 50 percent for the boomers. But by 2030, as the boomers finally start to fade from the picture, Xers will dominate the nation’s wealth, accounting for 31 percent, twice the projected share of millennials.

    Politically they also seem destined to take power next. They are gradually replacing the aging boomers in Congress. Their politics are neither as conservative as the boomers nor as liberal as millennials: younger Xers tilted slightly to Clinton in the last election, older ones favored Trump. Right now there are 117 Xers in Congress compared to five millennials, with the most prominent being House Speaker Paul Ryan; it will likely take a generation or more for the millennials to challenge the Xers.

    To be sure, millennials will dominate the future eventually, but the question is when. Boomers are living, and working, longer than ever. Over time, though, millennials’ overlords will come from the smaller but more aggressive X generation. Unlike the millennials, who received participation trophies and “good job” plaudits, notes generational analyst Morley Winograd, the Xers were the original “latch-key” kids who were forced to make their way in a county dominated by Boomers.

    Critically, however much millennials may talk about changing the world, as a group they are entrepreneurial laggards, in large part responsible for America’s current depressed startup rates, the lowest in a quarter century. It’s the Xers — less coddled, with less college debt and just enough experience — who are starting and running more of the economy. In a word, they are tough, used to adversity and their time is coming. 

    X-Strong Metropolitan Areas

    With all these considerations in mind, we decided to take a close look at which metropolitan areas have been gaining the largest shares of 35 to 49 year olds, currently the Xers. This is critical not only because of their economic influence, but also because they are the ones who have the most children. If a metro area’s share of this age group is growing, it is likely to have more young people as well. 

    Using Census data from 2000 to 2015, we found that the share of 35 to 49 year olds grew most dramatically in the affordable Sun Belt. This makes sense as this is the age when home ownership is most critical and people are looking for the maximum income relative to costs. Being in your late 30s to 50 does not mean you have lost the ability to dream, but it does make addressing reality far more imperative than when in your 20s.

    Many of the metropolitan areas where the 35-49 population has grown the most are precisely those that have topped most of our best city lists. At the apogee is Austin, whose 35 to 49 year old population has expanded a remarkable 44.9% since 2000, compared to a 6.6% national decline in this age range over that period. This suggests that although the bar scene and liberal politics appeal to many, other characteristics — such as relatively low housing prices, attractive suburbs and good-paying jobs — seal the deal for 35 to 49 year olds. 

    Housing and rent differentials have been particularly determinative for today’s 35 to 49 year olds. They suffered the most from the housing bust of 2007 and are only now entering the market with full force. They may not be able to afford the high prices of houses owned by coastal boomers, but they seem to be entering aggressively less expensive markets. Another reason they may be heading to these areas is to buy bigger houses than the small units now in vogue among millennial-craving builders. 

    Virtually all the other places that have experienced the biggest shift in this age group follow this pattern. No. 2 Raleigh-Durham’s population of 35-49s grew 40.1 percent, or 50.1 percent compared to the national rate, for many of the same reasons as Austin. Other places that attract these ages are generally low-priced dynamos, including No. 3 Las Vegas, No. 4 Charlotte, No. 5 Phoenix, and No. 8 Salt Lake City. Texas dominates the list here with four of the top ten, including No. 7 Houston, No. 9 Dallas-Ft. Worth and No. 10 San Antonio. 

    If we tighten of measurement to the years 2010 to 2015, the pattern is largely the same except for the emergence in the top 10 of such tech havens as metropolitan Denver and Portland, which have done very well during the tech boom. Yet surprisingly the 35 to 49 year old population share has remained stagnant in the epicenter of the “new economy,” the San Francisco and San Jose areas, although these areas continue to attract people of millennials age. Housing prices may be playing a big role with roughly a third of Bay Area residents considering leaving, largely for this reason. Silicon Valley and San Francisco may remain great places to start, but are far from the easiest places to settle down for the long term.

    Gallery: Top 1o Gen X Cities

     Yet Silicon Valley is a veritable 35 to 49 magnet compared to most of the country’s big cities. Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia areas have all seen declines in their 35 to 49 shares both since 2000 and, more revealingly, since 2010 as well. In terms of 35-49s, these greatly hyped metropolitan areas actually do, however, much better than Rust Belt cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Hartford, Pittsburgh and Rochester, which experienced a survey worst 9.5 percent decline relative to the national rate in Xers since 2010 and a 19.2 percent decline since the beginning of the new millennium.

    Xers: The New Suburban Generation 

    In the popular press, youth (stretched liberally as high as 50) are widely associated with the much heralded “return to the city.” Yet in reality, all generations continue to head primarily for the suburbs, with this trend most evident among those aged 35-49. 

    Using the “city sector model” to analyze metropolitan areas by such factors as density, age of housing, transit use and housing forms, we have looked at where 35-49s have been moving over the past 11 to 15 years. Peope aged 35-49 have shown little inclination to stay in the urban core, moving out in considerable numbers to suburbs and exurbs. 

    Indeed since 2000 the percentage of Xers living in the urban core has dropped by one percentage point, while the percentage living in new suburbs and exurbs has grown by six percentage points. By 2015 over 80 percent of Xers in the 52 largest metropolitan areas lived in suburban areas, although they have in more recent years favored older suburbs (built before 1980) over exurbs.

    This reflects one of the basic demographic realities: as people age, and start families, they tend to move further out. Generally speaking, notes economist Jed Kolko, the peak years for urban living take place between ages 18 and 30. After that there’s generally a steep decline as people start families and head to the suburbs. Kolko calculates that while almost a quarter of people under 30 live in urban neighborhoods, by age 40 the urban share drops well below 20 percent, and stays there well into their 70s.

    The reasons for this move are not surprising. Suburban real estate tends to be cheaper than in good urban areas, and offers the kind of housing — single family — preferred by the vast majority of consumers. They also tend to be much safer (the rate of violent crime  in core municipalities remains almost four times higher), and have much better schools and less poverty than urban areas, things that tend to matter to people starting families and raising children.

    What It Means For Other Generations 

    The increasing importance of Xers will, of course, impact other generations. Boomers, who have had a very long run in control of just about everything, are likely to see their influence reduced as Xers hit their prime earning years. This will be accelerated by the digital revolution; the average age of venture capital-backed founders, notes the Harvard Business Review, is in their late 30s and early 40s, which puts them deep in X territory. Just as boomers had to adjust to the work culture of the previous generations, the millennials will now have to fit their careers into patterns developed by their Xer overlords. 

    For the millennials, the experience of the Xers may also presage their future lifestyle choices. Like the Xers, millennials are beginning to move into the suburbs, contradicting all claims to the contrary. Like the Xers, they too are looking for more space, something not likely to lead them to the city. Similarly they are also increasingly moving to the same lower cost cities, largely in the Southeast and Intermountain West. Since 2010, the biggest gains in millennial share have been Orlando, Austin and San Antonio. 

    Ultimately, rather than focus on boomers, the millennials will need to figure out how Xers think — their independence and entrepreneurialism — since Xers will be both their bosses and their role models. Generation X may be relatively small, and largely unsung, but what it does, and where it moves, may do more to shape the country in the next decade than the more celebrated groups born before and after them.

    Gallery: Top 1o Gen X Cities

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo by Caleb Smith; Office of the Speaker of the House [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • The Future of Racial Politics

    From its inception, the American experiment has been dogged by racial issues. Sadly, this was even truer this year. Eight years after electing the first African-American president, not only are race relations getting worse, according to surveys, but the electorate remains as ethnically divided as in any time of recent history.   

    Donald Trump has emerged in most media accounts as the candidate of Anglo voters, with a margin of 21 percentage points over Hillary Clinton among that segment of the electorate. Clinton’s embrace of “identity” politics may have played a role in turning off many of these white non-Hispanic voters, who might otherwise had voted Democratic.

    Many Democrats maintain still, with some justification, that as demographics evolve over the next decade, the increasingly diverse electorate will reward their identification with racial minorities. The country, and the electorate, seem destined to become ever less white in the coming decades.  Between 2000 and 2015, the nation’s population makeup became increasingly minority, from 31 percent to 38 percent. This trend will continue, with the country conceivably becoming 45 percent non-white by 2030 and 53 percent by 2050.

    White Men Can’t Jump, But They Can Still Vote

    It may well be that Democrats this year jumped the demographic gun. Even as the white population diminishes, it retains a dominant influence in elections. One reason: Whites tend to vote more. Most critical, the African-American share of the electorate, which reached record highs with Barack Obama atop the ticket,  actually dropped by a percentage point in 2016. Latino turnout, widely seen as a surge that would elect Clinton, represented  about the same percentage –11 percent — in 2016 as in 2012.  

     Thesedynamics keyed the Trump victory, particularly in heavily white working-class precincts in the Midwest, Pennsylvania and Florida, where he secured his electoral victory. Many of the pivotal states’ electorates remain very white indeed. In Wisconsin, for example, more than 80 percent of voters are white, and most of them are not residents of liberal college towns like Madison. This is also the case for Pennsylvania, where more than 75 percent of voters are Caucasian. Even Florida – itself a very diverse state — still has a heavily white electorate, accounting for more than 55 percent of voters.  

     These patterns will remain critical past what might be seen as their sell-by date for two critical reasons. One has to do with the concentration of minority voters. Nearly 60 percent of African-Americans live in Southern states where Trump won by dominating a very conservative white electorate. Other minority voters are clustered in big cities in the Northeast, which are not remotely contestable for Republicans.

     Latino voters, and also Asians, are likewise heavily concentrated, particularly in California,   now essentially a non-GOP zone, as well as the similarly politically homogeneous Northeastern cities and Chicago. To be sure, Latinos are also critical in Texas, and Asians too (increasingly so), but for now the Texas white population still outvotes them by a considerable margin.

     Another problem for the much-ballyhooed “emerging Democratic majority” lies in one stubborn fact: The elderly, most of whom are white, are not dying out quickly enough for Democrats to win. Although the extension of life spans may have slowed, or even slightly reversed in some demographic segments, seniors are clearly living longer than before.  

    The Limits of Identity Politics    

    Ignoring the reality of economic decline in the states that swung to Trump, some observers maintain that the increased conservatism among white working-class voters reflects deep-seated racial antagonisms. But this does not explain the considerable movement  of these voters, particularly in the Rust Belt, from support for Obama to support for Trump, as seen in such places as Youngstown, Ohio, Wheeling, W.Va., Macomb County, Mich., and Erie, Pa.

    The Democratic Party made things easier for Trump by adopting identity politics as its mantra. This is particularly maddening when charges of racism are leveled by affluent professionals, academics and bureaucrats, many from elite universities, who are themselves privileged.

    To their credit, some  progressives suggest shifting away — at least in the short run — from identity politics. But racial determinism may now be too central to their ideological core. Bernie Sanders’ campaign spokesperson Symone Sanders, for example, said that when it comes to picking a new leader for the  Democratic National Committee, whites need not apply.    

     Matthew Yglesias, always an excellent window on progressive dogma, insists that “there’s no other kind of politics” but identity politics; Democrats, he asserts, simply need “to do it better.” Progressives seem about as ready to ditch racialist politics  as Southern segregationists were willing to abandon Jim Crow in 1948.

    The Coming GOP Crisis

    For Republicans, identity politics is the gift that keeps giving, but the question is for how long. If you want a nightmare racial scenario for the GOP, just look at California. Since 1994, when the state passed Proposition 187, a measure widely perceived as anti-Hispanic, the Anglo population has dropped by more than 2 million as the state has added 9 million people, including more than 7 million Hispanics. Minorities now account for 62 percent of the population, compared to 43 percent in 1990. The shift in the electorate has been slower but still significant. In 1994, 49 percent of the electorate was Democratic and 37 percent Republican. Due in large part to ethnic change, by 2016 the Democratic margin was 45 percent-26 percent.

    In California this surge in minority voters has accompanied a gradual erosion of the white population, a large portion of which has left for other states. The Golden State  also has gone out of its way to encourage immigration of undocumented aliens by offering them driver’s licenses, subsidized health care and  financial aid for college; 74 percent of all California children under 15 are  now minorities, compared to 66 percent in 2000, and  25 percent of them live below the poverty line. This is 2.5 times the white non-Hispanic rate in California.  

    Despite largely positive results outside the blue coastal states, potentially the biggest long-term problem facing Republicans is in a dominant aspect of geography:  suburbia. Trump lost   some largely affluent suburban areas like Orange County, where 55 percent the population is Latino or Asian, up from 45 percent in 2000.  Perhaps most emblematic of potential GOP problems was Trump’s — and the GOP’s —  loss of Irvine, a prosperous Orange County municipality that is roughly 40 percent Asian.

    Republicans should be even more worried about trends in Texas, where Latinos are already close to a plurality and the Asian population is surging. There are still enough conservative whites to win elections in Texas — Trump won by 10 percentage points — but the margins will continue to shrink. This trend can already be seen in Houston’s sprawling, increasingly multiracial suburbs. Trump, for example, lost solidly middle-class Fort Bend County, by some estimates among the most diverse in the country, which voted Republican in every presidential elections since 1968.

    If this pattern continues, the die may indeed be cast for the GOP. As most minorities now live in the suburbs — a trend that continues to increase — a loss of suburban voters, given the total Democratic lock on inner city electors, would be too much for rural and small-town whites to overcome.  Simply put, by 2030, losses in the multicultural suburbs could make dreams of progressive long-term dominance all but inevitable.

    How Republicans Can Withstand the Racial Shift

    Republicans must reverse these trends if they don’t want to go the way of the dinosaur. They can take some limited satisfaction in knowing that Trump did somewhat  better than Mitt Romney or John McCain among Hispanics and blacks  as well as improving slightly among Asians.

    To expand on these modest gains, Republicans need to focus not on race but economics.  Our recent study for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism demonstrates clearly that minorities generally do far better in red states than in blue ones, based on such factors as income, homeownership, entrepreneurship and migration. Minorities all continue to move in ever larger numbers to red states because their economic climate and regulatory regime work better for them.

    Conservatives can make a case that Barack Obama’s progressive agenda actually favored the highly affluent, who tend to be disproportionately white.  According to a 2016 Urban League study,  African-American levels of economic equality are lower now than in 2009, surely a disappointment for a black middle class so understandably proud of Obama’s elevation.

    The best role model for the GOP could be in Texas. Latinos in the Lone Star State generally do better than their counterparts in California — as measured by homeownership, marriage rates, incomes — and also tend to vote more conservatively. In 2014, for example, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Texas Latinos. In contrast, that same year Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown won 73 percent of the Latino vote in California.  

    Other factors, notably upward mobility among  Latinos, African-Americans and Asians, could play a transformative role. As they continue to move to the suburbs, buy houses and start businesses, they may become less likely to support a high-regulation, high-tax and redistributionist agenda. Since 2000, more than 95 percent of the minority growth (black, Asian and Hispanic) in the 52 largest metropolitan areas has been in suburban and exurban areas. Trump did much better among college-educated black males, for example,  than those with no college education — 16 percent vs. 11 percent.

    If more minorities enter the middle class, particularly under Trump, this  could provide an opening for Republicans, just as occurred after the World War II when Italian, Irish, Polish and other eastern European voters moved to the suburbs and assimilated, even intermarried, after years of living apart. A message that targets the middle class aspirations of minorities could be more effective in the long run than appealing merely to xenophobic sentiments shared by an inexorably diminishing population.

    Critically, in the coming  decades, the vast majority of Latinos and Asians will be native-born. They will have spread out increasingly not only within regions but to more conservative parts of the country, notably Texas and the Southeast. At the same time, the population of undocumented workers, the least assimilated and generally the poorest demographic, is already declining, down by 300,000 since 2008. If it continues to decline, which may be likely under Trump, immigration may soon fade away as a primary issue for Latinos.

    Perhaps even more critical, however, may be the growing trend toward intermarriage among minorities. Among second-generation Latinos and Asians, interracial marriage is creating what could become an increasingly fluid racial identity. Intermarriage involving African-Americans is also on the upswing. The new generation of ethnic hybrids, most with one Anglo parent, will no longer be easily pigeon-holed ethnically. Overall, 15 percent of marriages were between partners of different ethnic groups in 2012.

    These are all opportunities to succeed, but the GOP can only prolong itself if it finds a way to reach minority voters based on an appeal of economic mobility. Whether they take this tack, or simply play for time until white voters lose their primacy, may determine whether it is the stupid party that some suggest, and one that, even at its great moment of opportunity, is destined to remain permanently so.

    Ultimately, Republicans could build on Trump’s economic message by demonstrating its efficacy for minority voters. This may be the party’s only hope in the future, given the demographic trends. The competition could also encourage Democrats to focus more on “bread and butter” issues. If future presidential campaigns are waged over key economic issues, rather than pitting ethnicities against one another, the nation will be both unified and stronger.

    This article first appeared on Real Clear Politics.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Steve White, Creative Commons

  • The Texas Urban Model

    This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism titled "The Texas Way of Urbanism". Download the entire report here.

    The future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: Texas. The metropolitan areas of the Lone Star state are developing rapidly. These cities are offering residents a broad array of choices — from high density communities to those where the population is spread out — and a wealth of opportunities.

    Historically, Texas was heavily dependent on commodities such as oil, cotton, and cattle, with its cities largely disdained by observers. John Gunther, writing in 1946, described Houston as having “…a residential section mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches.” The only reasons to live in Houston, he claimed, were economic ones; it was a city “…where few people think about anything but money.” He also predicted that the area would have a million people by now. Actually, the metropolitan area today is well on the way to seven million.

    It would no doubt shock Gunther to learn that Texas now boasts some of the most dynamic urban areas in the high income world. Approximately 80 percent of all population growth since 2000 in the Lone Star state has been in the four largest metropolitan areas. People may wear cowboy boots, drive pickups and attend the big rodeo in Houston, but they are first and foremost part of a great urban experiment.

    The notion of Texas as an urban model still rankles many of those who think of themselves as urbanists. Most urbanists, when thinking of cities of the future, keep an eye on the past, identifying with the already great cities that follow the traditional transit dependent and dense urban form: New York, London, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo. And yet, within these five urban areas, there are large, evolving, dynamic sections that are automobile oriented and have lower density.

    Measuring Employment Success

    Since 2000, Dallas and Houston have increased jobs by 31 percent, growing at three times the rate of increase in New York and five times as rapidly as Los Angeles. Texas’ smaller but up-and-coming metropolitan regions are also thriving, with San Antonio and Austin, for example, boasting some of the most rapid job growth in the country.

    This growth is not all at the low end of the job market, as some suggest. Over the past fifteen years Texas cities have generally experienced faster STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math-related) job growth than their more celebrated rivals. Austin and San Antonio have grown their STEM related jobs even more quickly than the San Francisco Bay Area has grown theirs, while both Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth have increased STEM employment far more rapidly than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

    The Texas cities also have enjoyed faster growth in middle class jobs, those paying between 80 percent and 200 percent of the median wage at the national level. Since 2001, these jobs have grown 39 percent in Austin, 26 percent in Houston, and 21 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth, a much more rapid clip than experienced in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, while Chicago has actually seen these kinds of job decrease.

    Recent Pew Research Center data illustrates that between 2000 and 2014, out of the 53 metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1,000,000, San Antonio had the second largest gain in percentage of combined middle-income and upper-income households; the percentage of households in the lower-income segment dropped. Houston ranked 6th and Austin ranked 13th, while Dallas-Fort Worth placed 25th, still in the top half.

    Much of the credit for this growth in jobs goes to the state’s reputation for business friendliness. Texas is consistently ranked by business executives as the first or second leading state. Needless to say, New York, California and Illinois do not fare nearly as well. The Texas tax burden ranks 41st in the country. Compare this to New York, which has the highest total state tax burden, Texas rates are also far lower than those in New York, neighbors Connecticut and New Jersey, or in California.

    The Demographic Equation

    No surprise, then, that people are flocking to the Texas cities. Over the last ten years, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston have emerged as the fastest growing big cities of more than five million people in the high-income world, growing more than three times faster in population than New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Boston. Among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, four of the top seven fastest growing from 2010 to 2015 were in Texas.

    Foreign immigration, a key indicator of economic opportunity, is now growing much faster in Texas’ cities than in those of its more established rivals. Between 2000 and 2014 alone, Texas absorbed more than 1.6 million foreign born citizens. In numbers, that’s slightly less than California took in, but in proportion to Texas’ population it is 60 percent more.

    During that same time period the Latino population of Austin grew by 90 percent; Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston each grew by about 75 percent. In contrast, the Latino population in Los Angeles grew only 17 percent.

    Houston now has a far higher percentage of foreign born residents than Chicago does. Dallas-Ft. Worth draws even with Chicago in that measurement, with an immigrant population that has grown three times as fast as that of the Windy City since 2000.

    Economic opportunity explains much of the difference. Texas’ vibrant industrial and construction culture has provided many opportunities for Latino business owners. In a recent measurement of best cities for Latino entrepreneurs, Texas accounted for more than one third of the top 50 cities out of 150. In another measurement, San Antonio and Houston boasted far larger shares of Latino-owned businesses than Los Angeles, which also has a strong Latino presence.

    Texas is not a totally successful environment for minorities. Poverty levels for blacks and Hispanics remain high, and education levels lag in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio. But the key factor is that Texas cities present superior prospects for upward mobility.

    Domestic Migration Trends

    Since 2000, Dallas-Ft. Worth has gained 570,000 net domestic migrants, and Houston has netted 500,000. In contrast, the New York area has had a net loss of over 2.6 million people, while Los Angeles hemorrhaged a net 1.6 million, and Chicago nearly 900,000. Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio were all among the top eleven in total net domestic migration gains. The smaller Texas cities have also experienced large gains in migrants.

    Many newcomers come from places — notably, California — where many Texans once migrated. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 145,000 people (net) have moved from greater Los Angeles to the Texas cities, while about 80,000 have come from Chicago and 90,000 from New York.

    As Dallas Morning News columnist Mitchell Schnurman says, “If oil prices don’t go up, Texas can always count on California — and New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey.”

    Creating the Next Generation of Urbanites

    Texas urban growth has occurred more or less in conjunction with market demand, without the strict controls and grandiose ‘visions’ that dominate planning in New York and California. Overall housing prices in Texas cities remain, on average, one-half or less than those in coastal California cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles. They are a third below those in New York, and have not experienced the huge spikes in housing inflation seen elsewhere in the Northeast Corridor, such as in Boston.

    The lower house prices in Texas facilitate greater aspirations to home ownership, particularly among young people. The financial leap from renting to owning is far less daunting in Texas than it is the Northeast, or in some western US cities.

    These lower prices have been a boon to ethnic minorities, who make up an ever-growing percentage of the population in cities nationwide. Latinos and African-Americans are far more likely to be home owners in Texas cities than in New York, Los Angeles, Boston or San Francisco.

    A review of US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis data indicates that housing costs are responsible for virtually all of the cost-of-living differences between the nation’s approximately 380 metropolitan areas. Consequently, it is far cheaper to live in Texas cities — even Austin — than in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago and, most of all, the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas.

    Some observers lament that, due to market forces, the vast majority of Texas metropolitan growth — nearly 100 percent — has taken place in the suburbs and exurbs. Yet the Texas cities mirror nationwide experiences: there is essentially no difference between the share of metropolitan development in the Texas suburbs and the share in most other areas. The average share for all major metropolitan areas is 99.8 percent, including in Portland, Oregon, the much ballyhooed model for densification.

    Ironically, dense housing development has grown more rapidly in Texas cities than it has in California, where the state has tried to mandate dense development. Building permit rates indicate that Texas cities have led the nation in both low density single family housing and in high density multifamily development. Between 2010 and 2015, Texas’ largest cities held three of the top five positions among the 53 major metropolitan areas in the issuance of multifamily building permits. Austin led the nation in these permits, while Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth had higher multifamily building permit rates than San Jose, Denver, Portland, Washington, or Los Angeles. At the same time, these three Texas cities also were in the top 10 in single-family building permits. Who occupies these new residences? Between 2010 and 2014 Texas cities, led by Austin and San Antonio, experienced higher rates of growth among college educated 25 to 34 year olds than did traditional ‘brain centers’ like New York, Boston, Chicago and even San Francisco. During the tech boom of the late 1990s, more people moved from Texas to the Bay Area than vice versa; in the current one, the pattern is reversed. A recent San Jose Mercury poll found that one-third of all Bay Area residents hope to leave the area, primarily citing high housing costs and overall cost of living.

    As young people mature, Texas’ major urban areas provide them with an array of choices. Texas city-dwellers, unlike many New Yorkers or San Franciscans, do not need to choose between living a middle class family lifestyle or staying in a city they love. Texas housing policies that allow organic growth driven by the market are attractive to young people seeking to establish careers or families, and to those who are already newly-established.

    These trends will have a long-term demographic impact, and suggest a continuing Texan ascendency. According to the American Community Survey’s ranking of elementary-age school children per family, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio rank in the top six among the 53 major metropolitan areas. By comparison, Chicago ranks twenty-second, Los Angeles twenty-seventh, New York thirty-sixth, and San Francisco 45th.

    The Lone Star State is already home to two of the nation’s five largest metropolitan areas, the first time in history that any state has so dominated the nation’s large urban centers. At its current rate of growth, Dallas-Ft.Worth, could surpass Chicago in the 2040s, as would Houston a decade later. By 2050 the Lone Star state could dominate America’s big urban centers even more than it does now.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    “Welcome To Texas” flickr photo by David Herrera is licensed under CC BY 2.0

  • It Wasn’t Rural ‘Hicks’ Who Elected Trump: The Suburbs Were — And Will Remain — The Real Battleground

    Much of the New York and Washington press corps has concluded that Donald Trump’s surprising journey to the Oval Office was powered by country bumpkins expressing their inner racist misogyny. However, the real foundations for his victory lie not in the countryside and small towns, but in key suburban counties.

    The popular notion of “city” and “country,” one progressive and “vibrant,” the other regressive and dying, misses the basic geographic point: the largest metropolitan constituency in the country, far larger than the celebrated, and deeply class-divided core cities, is the increasingly diverse suburbs. Trump won suburbia by a significant five percentage point margin nationally, improving on Romney’s two-point edge, and by more   outside the coastal regions.

    Despite the blue urbanist cant that dense metro areas — inevitably labelled “vibrant” — are the future, in fact, core cities are growing at a slower pace than their more spread out suburbs and exurbs, which will make these edge areas even more important politically and economically in the coming decade. The states that voted for Trump enjoyed net domestic migration of 1.45 million from 2010 to 2015, naturally drawn from the states that were won by Hillary Clinton. Democrat-leaning ethnic groups, like Hispanics, are expanding rapidly, but Americans are moving in every greater numbers to the more conservative geographies of the Sun Belt, the suburbs and exurbs.

    Suburbs Drive Swing States

    The future battles between the parties will have to be waged where the people and jobs are: suburbia. Suburban voters particularly put Trump ahead in the crucial Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and came close to winning him supposedly deep blue Minnesota. This is where the Democratic falloff from the Obama years was most evident, notes Mike Barone, falling from  dropping from 54 percent for Obama to 2008 to 45 percent this year.

    Clinton did win some suburban counties, especially in the Philadelphia area, but by lower margins than President Obama had in 2012. Clinton’s margin was also lower in some older rustbelt urban counties: Erie (Buffalo), Onondaga (Syracuse), Monroe (Rochester), Albany, and Hamilton (Cincinnati). A number of college towns and state capitals also invariably voted for Clinton, overwhelmingly.

    Overall, though, most suburban counties in the swing states supported Trump. In Michigan, Trump lost Detroit, and surrounding Wayne County, by better than two to one, but captured four of the five surrounding suburban counties. His margin greatly exceeded that of Romney in these counties, which, combined with his strong support in smaller cities and rural areas outside the major metropolitan areas, put him over the top in this critical state.

    A similar pattern can be seen in Pennsylvania. Clinton, of course, won overwhelmingly in the large urban counties — the city of Philadelphia went for her by 82 to 15. She also won some nearby suburban counties around the city, as was expected. But elsewhere Trump did better. He lost Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) but won all the surrounding suburban countries by piling up 54 percent to 74 percent of the votes; he lost the state capital of Harrisburg but made that up by crushing her in the suburban counties. Particularly striking was his victory in historically Democratic Erie County (population 280.000), west of Buffalo; Obama had won the county by 16 points in 2012.

    Much the same can be said about Wisconsin, where Trump was not expected to be too competitive, as well as Ohio, someplace he was expected to win. Clinton’s edge in Ohio’s smaller, blue collar urban constituencies fell well below the levels enjoyed by President Obama while surrounding suburban counties went, almost without exception, heavily for Trump.

    The Political Geography Of The Future

    Ultimately the road to recovery for Democrats does not lie in expanding the urban core vote. As Mike Lind has suggested, progressives embrace a kind of post-national “open borders” ideology that makes sense in denser, global cities — where the demand for low-end service labor is greater — than in suburban or small town and rural areas that tend to be more egalitarian and, for the most part, whiter.

    There may be growing unanimity of Democratic support in core areas, but urban cores are growing more slowly, or not at all, compared to the suburbs. Indeed the urban vote in the cores, although obviously tilted blue, has dropped in recent years, with the exception of the Obama run in 2008. Nor do attempts to call suburban or “countryside” people “deplorable,” racist and even too fat constitute much of a strategy to appeal to these areas.

    In contrast, Trump’s geographic coalition between the deep red countryside and the suburbs demonstrated an alternative that can work, particularly in key swing states. Despite the wishes of many planners, and their Democratic allies, suburbs and small towns are not about to go away in the near future. Areas outside million-plus metropolitan areas accounted for 100 percent of the vote in Iowa, 61 percent in Wisconsin, 47 percent in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and 44 percent in Ohio. They may not be demographically ascendant, but they still carry considerable heft.

    Nor can blue state advocates continue to claim that millennials will not move to suburbia, because that is clearly happening. Urbanist mythology now holds to a fallback position that millennials move to the suburbs simply because they have been priced out. However, they don’t look at other compelling reasons — notably shaped by life stage — for suburban growth. As most millennials will soon be over 30, its seems likely more will head to the periphery, as did earlier generations to gain more space to raise a family, better schools and safety. Even after the Great Recession people continued to move in large numbers from urban core counties to the less dense suburbs and exurbs. Between 2010 and 2015, suburban counties of major metropolitan areas added 825,000 net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost nearly 600,000. The real question is whether millennials will turn these red-trending areas bluer, or will their experience as homeowners and parents make them more traditional and conservatively minded suburbanites?

    The basic geographic and demographic conclusion: the balance of political power lies with suburban and exurban counties, particularly in swing states. Republicans need to build on their success by appealing more the minorities and immigrants who are also moving to the periphery. To return to power, the Democrats should   shift their attention from their urban core base and look more to the periphery. In the end, they need to provide compelling reason why these areas should support a party that, at least for now, seems generally favorable  to their exclusion and even ultimate demise.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Electoral map by Ali Zifan (This file was derived from:  USA Counties.svg) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Urbanism, Texas-Style

    Cities, noted René Descartes, should provide “an inventory of the possible,” a transformative experience—and a better life—for those who migrate to them. This was certainly true of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, about which the French philosopher was speaking. And it’s increasingly true of Texas’s fast-growing metropolises—Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. In the last decade, these booming cities have created jobs and attracted new residents—especially young families and immigrants—at rates unmatched by coastal metropolitan areas. Approximately 80 percent of all population growth in the Lone Star State has been in the four large metropolitan areas since 2000. Texas now boasts two of the nation’s five largest metros, the first time any state has enjoyed that distinction. At its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third-largest city by 2030, and the Dallas–Fort Worth region could surpass Chicagoland as the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area by the 2040s.

    Historically, those who think and write about urban living have regarded Texas cities with disdain. The midcentury journalist John Gunther dismissed Houston, now the state’s largest city, as a place “where few people think about anything but money.” Gunther predicted that the area’s population would eventually grow to a measly 1 million people. He was off by a bit: close to 7 million people now call the Houston metropolitan area home. Houston and the other flourishing Texas metros are neither downtown-focused like New York nor highly regulated and densely packed like Los Angeles. They aren’t disproportionately brain-intensive or tech-oriented; and they aren’t dominated by green politics and, generally speaking, strict planning. Though booming, they have kept living costs down. In all this, they differ from San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Boston—places that may continue to thrive in the future but that show little interest in creating the economic opportunity and affordability that attracts aspirational middle- and working-class families. In short, Texas’s cities are reshaping urbanism in America, albeit in ways few scholars or planners seem to appreciate.

    Though some east/west coastal cities—notably, San Francisco—have enjoyed vigorous growth of late, none has been nearly as proficient in creating jobs in the new millennium as Texas’s four leading metros. Overall, Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston have emerged as the nation’s fastest-expanding big-city economies. Between 2000 and 2015, Dallas–Fort Worth boosted its net job numbers by 22.7 percent, and Houston expanded them by an even better 31.2 percent. Smaller Austin (38.2 percent job-base increase) and once-sleepy San Antonio (31.4 percent) have done just as well. New York, by way of comparison, increased its number of jobs in those years by just 10 percent, Los Angeles by 6.5 percent, and San Francisco by 5.2 percent, while Chicago actually lost net employment. And the Texas jobs are not just low-wage employment. Middle-class positions—those paying between 80 percent and 200 percent of the national median wage—have expanded 39 percent in Austin, 26 percent in Houston, and 21 percent in Dallas since 2001. These percentages far outpace the rate of middle-class job creation in San Francisco (6 percent), New York and Los Angeles (little progress), and Chicago (down 3 percent) over the same period.

    The energy industry can take some credit for Texas’s impressive numbers, but only some. In fact, despite assertions that dense coastal cities are the natural incubators of innovative tech firms, an analysis of the last decade and a half shows that Texas’s sprawling metropoles are growing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs more rapidly than the Bay Area—and far faster than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Since 2001, STEM employment in Austin is up 35 percent, while Houston has increased these desirable positions by 22 percent and Dallas by 17 percent. STEM jobs have increased 6 percent in San Jose and 2 percent in New York over this same period. L.A. has seen no STEM growth; Chicago has lost 3 percent of such positions.

    Recent Pew Research Center data give further evidence of the Texas urban boom. Among 52 American metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, San Antonio had the largest gain in its share of middle- and upper-income households—that is, the percentage of households in the lower-income category in the city actually dropped—from 2000 to 2014. Houston ranked sixth, Austin 13th, and Dallas–Fort Worth 25th in the Pew survey. The performance is even more impressive, given Texas’s absorption of 1.6 million foreign-born residents since 2000, a 60 percent larger intake than California’s, proportionate to the two states’ populations.

    All this dynamism reflects Texas urbanism’s remarkable culture of opportunity. These are business-friendly cities. According to Site Selection magazine, executives consistently rank Texas as the best or second-best locale to do business in the United States. Taxes are among the lowest in the country. (New York has the heaviest tax burden; California isn’t far behind and seems determined to catch up.) Regulations are light. Coastal urban areas often impose draconian climate-change rules or favor high density, thus discouraging industries like manufacturing, logistics, and home construction—all thriving under Texas urbanism’s market-friendly reign.

    “The consensus in San Antonio,” observes former mayor and longtime Democrat Henry Cisneros, “is all about jobs. Everything is driven by that.” One can say the same about the other big Texas metros. The jobs focus can be seen in the many corporate relocations and expansions in Texas, which are often large-scale, employing many middle managers—unlike highly publicized relocations of “executive headquarters” in cities such as Chicago, which frequently employ, at most, several hundred people. The recent movement of Occidental Petroleum from Los Angeles to Houston as well as transfers of jobs from Chevron—still headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, at least for now—alone represented some 2,000 jobs.

    A key part of this opportunity culture rests on housing affordability. Property inflation plagues east/west coastal cities, largely because of restrictive planning policies that slow development, making the cost of living exorbitant. Texas cities are instead pro-development—“self-organizing,” in the words of Rice University’s Lars Lerup—and, as they happily expand their peripheries, they encourage a healthy supply of housing at all income levels. The inexpensive housing, a major draw for those relocating firms, has helped shift a long-standing migration pattern of jobs and people. In the last tech boom, more people moved from Texas to the Bay Area; in this one, it’s the other way around. Last year, at least three dozen companies either expanded away from or moved out of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties—ten of them to Texas, according to a recent report by Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine business-consulting firm that tracks corporate “divestment” from California. When Toyota recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles County to the Dallas area, for example, executives said that the L.A. area’s rising housing prices—roughly three times what they are in Dallas–Fort Worth, adjusted for income—had much to do with it.

    Dallas–Fort Worth might be the big metro that benefits most from this movement. The typical corporate expansions in the Dallas area—not just Toyota but also State Farm, Liberty Mutual, and Amazon—have included headquarters and back-office centers in the area’s northern suburbs, creating thousands of jobs. As Southern Methodist University scholars Klaus Desmet and Cullum Clark found in a soon-to-be-published study, jobs are shifting from Chicago and surrounding areas to Dallas–Fort Worth in such numbers that the Texas city is increasingly poised to replace the Windy City as the business center of the mid-U.S.

    People are coming in droves. “Gone to Texas” or “GTT”: the phrase became famous during the nineteenth century as Americans fleeing debts (especially after the Panic of 1837) headed to the Lone Star State to escape impoverishment or even prison. Texas also attracted the ambitious, the desperate, and, in some cases, the downright dishonest. The phrase may become popular again. Over the last decade and a half, Texas’s four major cities ranked among the nation’s ten fastest-growing large metropolitan areas. Since 2000, Dallas–Fort Worth has boosted its population by 33.6 percent; Houston did even better, expanding 38 percent. Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, by comparison, grew less than 10 percent over that period. Last year, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth each gained more people than New York or L.A.

    The domestic migration numbers are truly striking. Over the past 15 years, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth have gained an estimated 1 million domestic migrants, even as New York lost more than 2.4 million net migrants, L.A. bled 1.5 million, and Chicago 800,000. As a percentage of the population, the Texas cities averaged a 1 percent net migration gain annually; Chicago, L.A., New York, and San Francisco have seen strong net losses annually. San Antonio and Austin have also been gaining migrants at a rapid rate. In fact, Austin has attracted more newcomers as a percentage of its population than any major metropolitan area in the country since 2000. Texas Monthly calls it “the city of the eternal boom.”

    Many of the new Texas urbanites are arriving from places—above all, California—to which Texans had once migrated. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 145,000 people, net, have moved from the greater Los Angeles area to Texas cities, while more than 90,000 have come from New York and nearly 80,000 from Chicago. The newcomers are better educated than the average Texan, and they elevate the quality of the workforce, observes Dallas Morning News columnist Mitchell Schnurman. “If oil prices don’t go up, Texas can always count on California—and New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey.”

    The domestic migrants’ numbers include many blue-collar workers seeking a better future, so the migrants’ average education level falls slightly below that of people moving, say, to Boston or San Francisco. But the Texas metropoles are increasingly attractive to the young, educated workers who often flock to those coastal cities. According to a recent Cleveland Foundation study, three of the four major Texas cities ranked among the top-ten regions nationally in the growth in educated residents aged 25 to 34. The migrants’ imprint is evident in the expanding urban amenities of Texas cities, including a vibrant restaurant scene and innovation in the arts.

    Affordability is a major draw for these younger newcomers. The ten regions losing the most millennials last year, according to Trulia, include Chicago, New York, Washington, and the area along California’s coast—all much pricier than the Lone Star State. More than 30 percent of millennials still live at home in Los Angeles and New York City, according to Zillow data, more than one-third higher than the rate in Dallas and Houston.

    Texas is also drawing massive migration from overseas. Like the young migrants crowding the clubs and hip eateries of the Texas boomtowns, the foreign-born are, in their own ways, transforming the economy and culture of the state. Asian immigrants, barely present before 2000, have been the fastest-growing group. Over the last decade, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth had a larger increase in their Asian populations (including Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, and Koreans) than all but three American cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Houston now has the fifth-largest Asian population among the nation’s major metropolitan areas.

    Much of this growth isn’t taking place in traditional “Chinatowns” or even in core cities but instead in the less expensive suburban and even exurban areas. More than 95 percent of the expansion of Dallas–Fort Worth’s Asian population and 85 percent of Houston’s, for instance, has occurred in the suburbs. A Rice University study found Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, the most ethnically diverse county in the nation: 36 percent white, 24 percent Latino, and more than one-fifth black, Asian, or other ethnicity. The county is home to one of the largest Hindu temples in America.

    In fast-growing Cinco Ranch, a suburb built on an expanse of Texas prairie 31 miles west of Houston, one in five residents is foreign-born, well above the Texas average. “We have lived in other places since we came to America ten years ago,” says Indian immigrant Pria Kothari, who moved to Cinco with her husband and two children in 2013. “We lived in apartments elsewhere in big cities, but here we found a place where we could put our roots down. It has a community feel. You walk around and see all the families. There’s room for bikes—that’s great for the kids.”

    Over the last two decades, Texas’s big cities have also received a huge infusion of immigrants from Latin America. Between 2000 and 2014, the Latino population of Dallas–Fort Worth grew 39 percent, while Houston’s expanded 42 percent, Austin’s 60 percent, and San Antonio’s 39 percent. Texas’s population is already nearly 40 percent Latino, a percentage likely to increase in the years ahead.

    Much of this rapid demographic shift stems from, again, Texas’s opportunity urbanism. Though many of the newcomers—along with “Tejanos,” native Texas Latinos—are poor and often not well educated, they’re much better off economically than their counterparts in New York, Los Angeles, or Miami. Texas’s vibrant industrial and construction sectors, in particular, have provided abundant jobs for Latinos. In 2015, unemployment among Texas’s Hispanic population reached just 4.9 percent, the lowest for Latinos in the country—California’s rate tops 7 percent—and below the national average of 5.3 percent.

    Texas Latinos show an entrepreneurial streak. In a recent survey of the 150 best cities for Latino business owners, Texas accounted for 17 of the top 50 locations; Boston, New York, L.A., and San Francisco were all in the bottom third of the ranking. In a census measurement, San Antonio and Houston boasted far larger shares of Latino-owned firms than did heavily Hispanic L.A.

    In Texas, Hispanics are becoming homeowners, a traditional means of entering the middle class. In New York, barely a quarter of Latino households own their own homes, while in Los Angeles, 38 percent do. In Houston, by contrast, 52 percent of Hispanic households own homes, and in San Antonio, it’s 57 percent—matching the Latino homeownership rate for Texas as a whole. That’s well above the 46 percent national rate for Hispanics—and above the rate for allCalifornia households. (The same encouraging pattern exists for Texas’s African-Americans.)

    California and Texas, the nation’s most populous states, are often compared. Both have large Latino populations, for instance, but make no mistake: Texas’s, especially in large urban areas, is doing much better, and not just economically. Texas public schools could certainly be improved, but according to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress—a high-quality assessment—Texas fourth- and eighth-graders scored equal to or better than California kids, including Hispanics, in math and reading. In Texas, the educational gap between Hispanics and white non-Hispanics was equal to or lower than it was in California in all cases.

    Though California, with 12 percent of the American population, has more than 35 percent of the nation’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare caseload—with Latinos constituting nearly half the adult rolls in the state—Texas, with under 9 percent of the country’s population, has less than 1 percent of the national welfare caseload. Further, according to the 2014 American Community Survey, Texas Hispanics had a significantly lower rate of out-of-wedlock births and a higher marriage rate than California Hispanics.

    In California, Latino politics increasingly revolves around ethnic identity and lobbying for government subsidies and benefits. In Texas, the goal is upward mobility through work. “There is more of an accommodationist spirit here,” says Rodrigo Saenz, an expert on Latino demographics and politics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where the student body is 50 percent Hispanic. It’s obvious which model best encourages economic opportunity.

    Texas urbanism is also producing the next generation of urbanites. Increasingly, the dense urban cores of America’s favored cities—New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and so on—are becoming child-free, or child-scarce, zones. (See “The Childless City,” Summer 2013.) The trend is powerfully visible in San Francisco, a city with reportedly 80,000 more dogs than kids.

    In Texas cities, the situation is strikingly different. According to American Community Survey data, the four big Texas cities all rank above the national average and in the top 15 of the 50 major American metropolitan areas in children per household. Houston ranks third, Dallas–Fort Worth fourth, San Antonio fifth, and Austin sixth. New York is 31st and San Francisco 45th. Like cities throughout history—think of the Chicago described in Saul Bellow’sAdventures of Augie March—Texas cities appeal to people at every stage of their lives, not just when they’re young and unencumbered.

    By allowing the market to work, these expanding urban areas offer vibrant inner cities, where young singles and couples can congregate, as well as affordable nearby neighborhoods for families and the middle-aged and elderly. A Texas urbanite doesn’t have to contemplate the choice of staying in the city that he or she loves or having a family. How many San Franciscans or New Yorkers can say the same?

    In part because of their rapid growth, Texas’s cities face numerous challenges. One is worn-out infrastructure, as seen in recent Houston flooding. Poverty levels for Hispanics and blacks are still high in the Texas boomtowns. Urban schools in Texas require major redress. Municipal debt, particularly in the core cities, is mounting.

    The biggest threat, however, is that Texans will decide—particularly as more residents arrive from the liberal coastal cities—to abandon the culture of opportunity behind their cities’ remarkable success. Market-oriented zoning policies and pro-business regulatory and tax environments are part of what has made Texas’s urban areas private-sector dynamos and magnets for the aspirational. If Texas stays true to what has made it great, Lone Star cities will continue to shine as the new exemplars of American urbanism.

    This piece is part of The City Journal’s special Texas issue. Check it out here.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Dallas photo by Bigstock.

  • Biggest Income Gains In U.S. Accrue To Suburban Cities

    After a long period of  stagnation, last week’s announcement of the first substantial annual income gains since 2007 was certainly welcome. Predictably, analysts inclined toward a more favorable view of President Obama’s policies reacted favorably. Progressive icon Paul Krugman crowed that last year the “economy partied like it was 1999,” which he said validated the president’s “trickle up economics.”

    Equally predictably, conservative pundit Stephen Moore wrote that the stagnant longer-term numbers were actually a ”stinging indictment” of both the Obama and Bush records.

    The reality may be in between. The 5.2% increase over the past year was the largest in the nearly 50-year history of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, and does represent some progress. Yet real incomes remain approximately 2.5% below the 1999 peak. This is an extraordinarily long time for incomes not to have risen, a decade longer than the previous modern record (1989 to 1995), according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

    And there are some reasons to be skeptical about the dramatic gains, as outlined in a virtually unprecedented report by the economist Gary Burtless of the generally left-leaning Brookings Institution. He suggests that the year-to-year increase may have been much less and that the CPS had been under-reporting annual income increases since 2003. John Crudelle of the right-leaning New York Post notes that recent CPS methodology changes could also have inflated the 2015 increase.

    To be sure, there are no signs of an economic boom that will sustain income gains — the 1.1% real GDP growth in the second quarter is no indication of a miraculous recovery.

    Nonetheless, real income gains were made last year, but they were not distributed evenly across the nation. We sought to assess the areas that did the best – and worst.

    The media has spun the story as further evidence of suburban decline and the resurgence of dense, hip cities. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to point to the migration of “highly educated millennials” to downtown areas as a factor, something that simply could not be deduced from the data that was reported.

    With more than 80% of millennials residing in the suburbs, this was heroic conjecture. Within metropolitan areas, CPS reports only “inside principal cities” and “outside principal cities.” The Census Bureau abandoned “central city” and “principal city” data more than a decade ago, in recognition of the fact that many suburban communities had become major employment hubs. As a result, principal cities include such low density, sprawling suburban behemoths as Mesa, Ariz. (Phoenix), Hillsboro, Ore. (Portland), Arlington, Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth), and, Anaheim, Calif. (Los Angeles). Simply put, the data does not support the assumption that hipster urbanism played a part in the one-year upsurge.

    The numbers suggest a more nuanced picture. For one thing, downtown residents represent little more than 1% of our metropolitan population, and less than 10% of the jobs. Nor did the biggest income gains occur in the metropolitan areas with the large, elite urban cores. Indeed, it is hard to imagine results more at odds with theme of dense urban core gain and suburban malaise.

    By far the largest gain was in Nashville, where household income rose 10.2% to $57,985. Nashville’s downtown is doing well, as is the case with many metropolitan areas. However, Nashville is hardly a model of the urban density planners would like to force around the nation. Its urban density is one-fourth that of nation-leading Los Angeles, a third that of New York and half that of Portland. The vast majority of its growth has taken place outside the core, and largely in the suburbs.

    Perhaps most surprising is second-ranked, Birmingham, Ala. It is harder to imagine a more poorly performing metropolitan area in the rapidly expanding South, but last year household income there grew 9.4% to $51,459, according to the CPS data. Just after World War II, Birmingham was a third smaller than Atlanta; now Atlanta is five times as large. Nor does Birmingham set any density records. No metropolitan area the world with a population over a million has a lower urban area density.

    Atlanta ranked third, with an increase of 7.2% to $60,219. The metropolitan area has the lowest population density among world urban areas with more than 2 million residents.

    Other metro areas with suburban core cities in the top 10 include No. 5 Kansas City; No.7 Memphis, which could be argued has performed as poorly as Birmingham in recent decades; and No. 8 Orlando. None of these has an urban density much higher than the national average, which includes urban areas as small as 2,500 population. In 10th-ranked San Jose, the core of Silicon Valley, household income rose 5.7% to $101,980, the highest of any metropolitan area in the nation. It is a virtually all suburban metro area, having developed almost entirely since World War II, and among the most automobile oriented, with a miniscule 4% of commuters using its bus, light rail and commuter rail services. Milwaukee, another metropolitan area that has lagged economically for years, ranked ninth.

    To be sure, the urban elites were not shut out. San Francisco, buoyed by spillover growth from suburban Silicon Valley, ranked fourth with a center that is the very definition of a dense urban core. Urban planning model Portland ranked sixth, yet it has an urban density 40% below that of all-suburban San Jose.

    The nation’s three largest metropolitan areas did poorly. New York, ranked 39th, with income growth of 2.5%, well below the 5.2% national gain. Los Angeles, the nation’s densest region, grew slightly better, at 3.4%, but still ranked only 32nd; Chicago, the nation’s third largest ranked just above New York at 38th.

    In last place is Oklahoma City, where, amid the oil and gas bust, household income dipped 0.4% to $52,221.

    Thus, the story is not about media-favorite cities or their favored urban core, as the progressive punditry may suggest. The one-year spike is perhaps the first long overdue indication that things could be getting better for the struggling working class. The biggest gains were in poorer metro areas. It could signal, to some extent, higher wages as employment tightens, particularly at the lower end of the job spectrum.

    Overall, it’s clear that even modest economic growth, sustained long enough, would bring some blessings to the poor, particularly in the inner cities. The question is whether these gains can be sustained in an economy where growth seems to trending slower still.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photograph: Downtown Nashville from BigStockPhoto.com

  • Our Town: Restoring Localism

    This is an introduction to a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, "Our Town: Restoring Localism." Download the full report here.

    America is facing a critical moment in its evolution, one that threatens both its future prosperity and the integrity of its institutions. Over the past several decades, government has become increasingly centralized, with power shifting from local communities to the federal level. This has been accompanied by a decline in non-governmental institutions, a matter of concern to thinkers on both the right and the left.

    The issue here is not the irrelevance or intrinsic evil of government itself, nor is it a debate of liberalism vs conservatism. Rather, it is a question of how to meet society’s primary challenges. Is it most effective to try and solve our myriad problems from a central federal, state or regional authority, or from a more local one?

    We believe the right answer, in many cases, is to make a shift back towards local governing agencies, to neighborhoods, and to families. This change in direction would be a return to the roots of our current federal system, which allows different levels of government to make their own decisions, providing a market- place for various ideas and approaches.

    To be sure, local governments also make mistakes, and they can be authoritarian, corrupt, and short-sighted in meeting the needs of residents. But for the most part, locally generated negatives remain contained to local jurisdictions, and can be fixed through the democratic process at the more accessible local level.

    Download the full report here.