New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox

  • Best Cities for Minorities: Gauging the Economics of Opportunity

    This is the overview from a new report, Best Cities for Minorities: Gauging the Economics of Opportunity by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Read the full report here (pdf viewer).

    This study provides an initial analysis of African-American, Latino and Asian economic and social conditions in 52 metropolitan regions currently and over the period that extends from 2000  to 2013. Our analysis includes housing affordability, median household incomes, self-employment rates, and population growth. Overall, the analysis shows that ethnic minorities in metropolitan regions with significant economic growth and affordable housing tend to do better than in other locations irrespective of the dominant political culture.

    Understanding the dynamics of minority economic mobility is critical to the future of all Americans. If ethnic minorities may once have been viewed as a cultural afterthought in a primarily anglo society, they are now unquestionably America’s future. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, minority children will outnumber white children by as early as 2020, and by 2050, non-white ethnic groups will equal the total number of White-non Hispanics in the population. These estimates likely understate the rate of ethnic transformation in the U.S. because of the country’s growing number of mixed race households.

    For years America has been an anglo-dominated nation and ethnic groups largely peripheral societies all too frequently marginalized by discrimination, segregation and racial strife. If W.E.B. Dubois famously noted that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” at the beginning of the 20th century,” the great historian John Hope Franklin asserted that racial issues will continue to shape our society in the 21st.

    Demographic trends suggest this is inevitable. Today, America’s ethnic population has surged to an unprecedented extent Latinos, together with African Americans and Asians, now constitute 43 percent of the population in the country’s 52 largest metropolitan areas with a population of at least one million residents, which also comprise 55 percent of the total U.S. population. This is up from 35 percent in 2000.

    African Americans, including new immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, constitute 15 percent of the population, Hispanics are now 21 percent and Asians 7 percent. These areas. Today Latinos are the nation’s largest ethnic minority and Asians the fastest growing in percentage terms.

    Despite the massive new and growing influence of ethnic minorities, there are surprisingly few studies comparing the economic performance of American’s burgeoning communities in different metropolitan areas. Fewer still have attempted to identify specific factors that correlate with the most and least favorable results in different regions. As the ethnic composition of America decisively shifts, it is vitally important to understand what regional factors work best to create and sustain economic and social opportunities for the nation’s emerging majority groups.

    Overall we found that metropolitan areas with less burdensome regulations, especially those affecting land use and housing costs, tended to do better, in the survey, but not in every instance. Some areas with more restrictive regulations were also highly ranked if other factors, such as a proximity to a relatively robust government employment base (Washington D.C. and Baltimore regions), or rapid private sector growth (Asians in the San Jose area) were sufficiently strong to overcome adverse regulatory and tax burdens.

    The data also show a strong contrast between America’s luxury cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Boston, where high costs have significantly reduced opportunities for middle and working class households, and “opportunity cities,” often located in less costly portions of the country like Texas or the South but that have also sustained more rapid and broadly based economic growth.

    Although most, if not all, luxury cities sustain strongly progressive politics African-Americans, Asians and Latino households have done relatively worse in these locations; cities in the states with the more generous welfare provisions aimed to help the minority poor – notably California, New York and Illinois –  tended to perform worse than those that were less forthcoming, notably in the sunbelt. Ironically, in many of these places, such as metropolitan New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the media and public officials may be the most adamant in attacking racial and class inequality, but their outcomes have been generally less than optimal.

    Instead, America’s ethnic population growth, has shifted away from these slower growth, higher cost regions, irrespective of the level of public assistance or political ideology, towards opportunity cities where economic, housing and other policies provide greater chances of social advancement for middle and working class Americans of all races.

    The implication of these findings is that America’s emerging majorities, like the Anglo communities before them, primarily desire and will populate regions where they can afford decent homes, earn higher incomes relative to the cost of living, and have greater independence and opportunity, as reflected in self-employment rates. These broad strategies do much more to enhance the lives of African-Americans, Asians and Latino households than the redistributive war on poverty-era programs employed in regions with high housing and living costs. These programs are usually not sufficient to improve the prospects of minorities if the business environment is burdened by high costs and regulatory burdens.

    Minorities Head to Opportunity Cities

    The data overwhelmingly show that minority populations are growing much faster in opportunity cities than in the more expensive, highly regulated luxury cities in the Northeastern corridor or on the west coast.iv In some cases, this has to do with the changing post-industrial nature of these economies. The increasing dependence on industries, such as software and social media, that employ few Latinos or African Americans. In Silicon Valley, African Americans and Hispanics make up roughly one-third of the valley population but barely five percent of employees in the top Silicon Valley firms.

    Over the past forty years States such as Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas and Florida have seen their employment base grow far more rapidly and broadly in terms of manufacturing and other blue collar sectors than either California or the Northeast corridor.vi Generally, the leading metropolitan areas in the sunbelt also have overall enjoyed higher growth in population, income and self- employment and considerably higher rates for minority homeownership. “Luxury cities” such as described by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are generally not so good for minorities.

    Read the full report (pdf viewer).

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

  • Asian Augmentation

    California, our beautiful, resource-rich state, has managed to miss both the recent energy boom and the renaissance of American manufacturing. Hollywood is gradually surrendering its dominion in a war of a thousand cuts and subsidies. California’s poverty rate – adjusted for housing costs – is the nation’s worst, and much of the working class and lower middle class is being forced to the exits. Our recent spate of high-tech growth has created individual fortunes, but few jobs, outside the Bay Area. The agricultural heartland is suffering not only from drought, but from green policies that allow a torrent of unused water to flow into the Sacramento Delta and San Francisco Bay while huge parts of the Central Valley go fallow.

    But California retains one powerful trump card that our leaders in Sacramento have not yet found a way to squander: Its link to Asia. True, the state’s growth-restrained ports are increasingly tied up, and, over time, much of our trade with China and other Asian countries might pass, instead, through the Panama Canal en route to Houston and other ports. But geography, culture and family ties have a way of overcoming even the most deluded policy environments.

    In the 19th century, many in California railed against the “Asian invasion,” and led the drive to restrict Asian immigration to America. As early as 1850, Asians accounted for one-tenth of the state’s non-native American population. Early on, Chinese, Indian and Japanese immigrants showed remarkable ingenuity, largely as farmers and merchants, which only made whites more antagonistic. “Indispensable as the Chinese are,” one grower report admitted, “they must go, as gradually as possible.”

    Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Map courtesy of U.S. Census.

  • The Evolving Geography of Asian America: Suburbs Are New High-Tech Chinatowns

    In the coming decades, no ethnic group may have more of an economic impact on the local level in the U.S. than Asian-Americans. Asia is now the largest source of legal immigrants to the U.S., constituting 40% of new arrivals in 2013. They are the country’s highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group — their share of the U.S. population has increased from 4.2% in 2000 to 5.6% in 2010, and is expected to reach 8.6% by 2050.

    Some Asian immigrant groups tend to struggle, notably Hmong, Laotians and Bangladeshis,,but on average, Indians, Chinese and Koreans do at least as well as Anglos, and in some cases better. In the 52 major metropolitan areas, Asians’ median household income is $70,600, compared to $66,100 for White non-Hispanics.

    Widening the focus to smaller cities, for the most part, the most heavily Asian communities in America tend to be prosperous, and many are tech oriented. They also tend to be overwhelmingly suburban, often in places that have good public schools.

    Shift To The Suburbs

    In the past Asians, like other immigrants, tended to cluster in “gateway cities” and often in the densest urban neighborhoods, like New York’s Chinatown. Now the center of gravity has shifted to the suburbs. Between 2000 and 2012, the Asian population in suburban areas of the nation’s 52 biggest metro areas grew 66.2% while those in the core cities expanded by 34.9%. In 2000 three large cities ranked among the 20 most heavily Asian cities with populations over 50,000: Honolulu, San Francisco and San Jose. In 2012, only the Hawaiian capital made the grade (Hawaii is the only state with an Asian majority).

    As of 2012, 18 of the 20 most heavily Asian communities were suburban, all but one of them are in California. Not surprisingly quite a few are the smaller cities of Silicon Valley, where Asians constitute roughly half of all tech employees. Cupertino, a city of 59,700 that is home to Apple’s headquarters, takes the title of the most Asian city in the U.S., with a population that was 65% Asian as of 2012, up from 45.9% in 2000. Other suburban cities around the Bay that are majority Asian include No. 2 Milpitas (64.5% Asian), Daley City, Sunnyvale, Fremont , Santa Clara and Union City. Of them, only Daley City and Milpitas were majority Asian in 2000.

    Most of the other top California cities are clustered in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, including No. 3 Rosemead (62% Asian), No. 4 Monterey Park (61.1%), Arcadia, Alhambra and Diamond Bar. Many, like once solidly middle class Arcadia, are being “mansionized” by new immigrants into what some suggest is an Asian version of Beverly Hills. The other hot spot is Orange County, long seen as more a place for right-wing politics and surfers, which now has several cities in the top 20 of our list of the cities of the most Asian-dominated cities, including Westminster, Irvine and Garden Grove.

    Shifts Beyond California

    California has long been is the natural place for Asian immigrants to land, with 4.8 million currently residing in the state, almost the population of Singapore. New York, with 1.4 million Asians, ranks  second while Texas, with 964,000, ranks third. But Asian populations are increasing quickly in the Sun Belt. Texas’ Asian population increased by 71.5% from 2000 through 2010, adding a net 402,277, second most in the country over that span behind California’s  1.1 million gain. Texas is home to the only city outside California and Hawaii in the top 20 of our list of the most heavily Asian U.S. cities: the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, where 37.1% of the 82,000 residents are Asian. The area, not known as an immigrant hub in the past, now boasts the second largest Hindu temple in the country. In Plano, a suburb of Dallas, the Asian population rose 123% between 2000 and 2012 to 50,160, the highest growth rate in the nation among cities over 50,000 in population. It’s now 18.5% Asian.

    A number of states in the Southeast posted fast growth from 2000-10. Florida’s Asian population increased 70.8% to 266,256, while Georgia’s rose 81.6% to 314,467.

    Positioning For The Asian Century

    One clear trend here is that Asian populations are growing in areas that are on the cutting edge of the economy — in tech centers like Silicon Valley, and near New York’s global service firms (across the river from Manhattan, Jersey City is now 25% Asian, and New Jersey’s Asian population expanded 51% in the first decade of the century to 480,270). Around the manufacturing and technology companies of the Detroit and Seattle areas, Asian communities are growing. Troy, Mich., the center of “automation alley,” has attracted a small but expanding Asian population, and in Washington, the Boeing-dominated town of Renton and Bellevue, near Microsoft, have taken on more of an Asian flavor in the past decade.The fact that many Asians are well-educated and ideally suited to these critical industries is likely to enhance this correlation over time, whether engineering cars or tech gear, or getting into the guts of the global transactional economy.

    Asian growth is slower in areas less integrated into the emerging global economy, notably in places like small town Florida, the rural south and parts of the still hard-hit Rust Belt. These are generally not the hot-spots for Asian investment today. What these communities may want to consider in the future is how to enhancetheir attractiveness to Asians and Asian investors, who likely will play an ever-expanding role in shaping the country’s economic future.

    No. 1: Cupertino, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 59,701
    Percentage Asian: 65.1%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +71.9%

    No. 2: Milpitas, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 44,226
    Percentage Asian: 64.5%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +34.9%

    No. 3: Rosemead, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 33,686
    Percentage Asian: 62.0%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +29.9%

    No. 4: Monterey Park, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 37,192 
    Percentage Asian: 61.1%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +1.4%

    No. 5: Arcadia, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 34,158 
    Percentage Asian: 59.8%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +42.3%

    No. 6: Daly City, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 60,137
    Percentage Asian: 58.0%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +15%

    No. 7: Honolulu, Hawaii

    Overall Population, 2012: 186,940
    Percentage Asian: 54.2%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +10.1%

    No. 8: Diamond Bar, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 29,883
    Percentage Asian: 53.2%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +25.3%

    No. 9: Fremont, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 115,948
    Percentage Asian: 52.4%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +55.1%

    No. 10: Union City, Calif.

    Overall Population, 2012: 36,374
    Percentage Asian: 50.8%
    Percentage Change In Asian Population Since 2000: +23.5%

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo “asian american” by flicker user centinel.

  • Rise of the Nation-States

    In this highly polarized political environment, states and localities, are ever more taking on the character of separate countries. Washington’s gridlock is increasingly matched by decisive, often “go it alone” polices from local authorities. Rather than create a brave, increasingly federalized second New Deal, the Obama years, particularly since the Republicans took control of the House in 2010, have seen discord rise to a level more akin to that left by James Buchanan, the last president before the Civil War, than Franklin Roosevelt.

    This makes understanding the sometimes-divergent economic and demographic trends of various states ever more important. With no compelling national vision, not only are politics more “local” but are increasingly distinct by region.

    The Main Event: Texas vs. California

    Today’s two leading economic models come, not surprisingly, from our two megastates, California and Texas. For its part, the Lone Star State follows a traditional American growth model, spread among a wide array of industries, notably energy, and prodded by population growth.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    USA map image by BigStockPhoto.

  • The U.S. Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best Economically

    Since 1980, the percentage of Americans who claim Hispanic heritage has grown from 6% to 17%. By 2040, Latinos will constitute roughly 24% of the population.

    Many Democrats no doubt see President Obama’s executive actions on immigration as a step not only to address legitimate human needs, but their own political future. But perhaps a more important question is how these new Americans will fare economically.

    We decided to look into which of America’s 52 largest metropolitan areas present Hispanics with the best opportunities. We weighed these metropolitan statistical areas by three factors — homeownership, entrepreneurship, as measured by the self-employment rate, and median household income  — that we believe are indicators of middle-class success. Data for those is from 2013. In addition, we factored in the change in the Hispanic population from 2000 to 2013 in these metro areas, to judge how the community is “voting with its feet.” Each factor was given equal weight. Our findings parallel our recent study of the economic fortunes of African-Americans, but with some important differences.

    Surviving Hard Times

    The recession was particularly tough on Hispanics, who suffered a 44% drop in household wealth from 2007 to 2010, compared to a 31% decline for African-Americans and 11% for whites. Lower home values are to blame for much of this – many young Hispanic families bought homes just before the recession hit, explains the Urban Institute, but because they generally had higher debt-to-asset ratios than other ethnic groups, the steep drop in housing prices resulted in a sharper decline in their wealth. Hispanics’ home equity dropped 49% over those years.

    The recession and the weak recovery have contributed to a change in the demographics of the U.S. Hispanic population – immigration has slowed while the U.S.-born Latino workforce has continued to expand at a brisk clip. In 2013, for the first time in almost two decades, the U.S.-born accounted for the majority of Hispanic workers in the country (50.3%), up from 43.9% in 2007, according to the Pew Foundation.

    During the recovery, U.S.-born Hispanics have made strong job gains, adding 2.3 million to the ranks of the employed from the fourth quarter of 2009 through the fourth quarter of 2013, compared with a loss of 37,000 jobs in the recession. But that has only slightly outpaced growth in the Hispanic working-age population.

    Hispanic unemployment has come down to 6.5%, but wages have been stagnant – Pew reports a slight gain in earnings of full-time Hispanic workers through the end of 2013, but that came as a result of the retreat of lower-paid illegal immigrants from the workforce.

    The Unexpected Place Where Latinos Have Done Best

    The prime U.S. cities for Latinos have long been New York, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles metropolitan area alone has more than 5 million Latinos, including an estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants. Yet it no longer is necessarily the best place for them, ranking only a middling 32nd in our survey. L.A.’s once thriving industrial economy has been in a secular decline, and in the process thousands have lost employment. At the same time, construction work has been slow, another traditional source of employment. High housing costs have also put homeownership out of reach. A 2013 Fannie Mae study found that Latinos place greater emphasis on homeownership than the rest of the population.

    Given the diminished possibilities of buying a home or finding a decent job in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Latinos have been flocking to the suburban periphery that encompasses much of adjacent Riverside and San Bernardino counties, also known as the Inland Empire, which ranks second in our survey. From 2000 through 2013, the Latino population in the area soared 74%, compared to a 15% population gain for Los Angeles.

    Not surprisingly, given its substantially lower home costs, roughly half those of Los Angeles, the Inland region has a relatively high Latino homeownership rate of 55.3%, compared to 37.7% in Los Angeles. Rates of self-employment are also higher than in L.A. (23.5% to 21.3%) and so too are median household incomes ($47,200 vs. $45,200). The metro area was devastated in the housing bust, but it’s coming back faster than the coastal economy. Although total employment is some 30,000 jobs below its 2007 level, California Lutheran University economist Dan Hamilton notes that Riverside-San Bernardino’s 2.2% job growth over the past year compares well with the 2.0% increase in Orange County and 1.3% in L.A.

    Latinos also fared middling in California’s other high-cost metro areas. San Jose ranks 22nd and San Francisco-Oakland ranks 25th.

    The same factors that make Riverside-San Bernardino a good place for Hispanics — lower housing costs and decent job growth — characterize most of the metropolitan areas that lead our list. That is particularly true of our No. 1 metro area, Jacksonville, Fla., which is just 40 miles north of St. Augustine, founded by the Spanish in 1565, making it the longest continuously settled city in what is now the United States.

    The metro area’s Hispanic homeownership rate of 55% is notably higher than the 43% average in the 52 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.  The median household income of $50,170 is also well above the major metro average of $41,740. Like many Florida cities, Jacksonville was hard-hit by the recession, but over the past year, the region has added close to 22,000 jobs. Jacksonville’s Hispanic population has grown 148% since 2000.

    Other Florida metro areas where Hispanics are prospering are Tampa-St. Petersburg (12th),  Orlando (13th), and Miami (16th).

    Not surprisingly, Latinos are also doing very well in a number of Texas cities. Like Florida, the state has relatively low housing prices, as well as a generally more buoyant economy, with strong growth in blue-collar fields such as construction, manufacturing and energy. The Lone Star State’s four big metro areas all place in the top 10, with Houston ranking fourth, followed by Dallas-Fort Worth (seventh), San Antonio (eighth) and Austin (ninth). They all are above average in terms of homeownership rates, self-employment and median household income.

    Like African-Americans, Latinos have done relatively well in No. 3 Baltimore, where their numbers have increased since 2000 by 175%, with a median household income of $59,940, second highest in the nation behind the adjacent Washington, D.C., area (No. 5), where the median household income for Hispanics is $65,736.

    Shifting Patterns

    In recent years, immigration overall has shifted to the Southeast away from many of the traditional “gateway” cities. Today the largest growth in foreign-born Americans is in the Southeast and Texas; since 2010 the old Confederacy attracted over 1.5 million foreign-born residents, more than the Northeast and Midwest together.

    None of the traditional gateway cities rank in the top 10 on our list. After Miami, the highest ranking of them is Chicago, at 18th, thanks to relatively lower home prices and a high Latino homeownership rate (51.4%).

    In contrast, New York, home to the country’s second largest Latino community after Los Angeles, ranks a poor 42nd. This reflects one of the lowest rates of Hispanic homeownership in the country, 26.5%, and modest population growth of roughly 29% since 2000, compared to an average of 96% for the 52 largest U.S. metro areas. New York Latino households earn a median of $42,980. That’s slightly above the 52 major metro median of $41,740, but given the sky-high housing costs in the Gotham area, it doesn’t go very far. In the Bronx, where the population is 55% Hispanic, roughly 30% of households are below the poverty line, the highest rate of any large urban county.

    As was the case with African-Americans, the metro areas at the bottom of our list are all faded industrial centers. Milwaukee ranks last, preceded by Providence, R.I. ; Hartford, Conn.; and Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y.

    Forging The American Future

    Identifying where Latinos are going, and doing well, is critical not just for them but the future of the country. One out of every four American children are Latino and since 2000 they have accounted for two-thirds of all net job gains made in the country. Latinos are also playing a key role in the recovery from the housing bust, accounting for 56% of all new owner households created between 2010 and 2013.

    What our research and migration trends suggest is that the geography of Latino opportunity is rapidly changing. The Latinization of America is gathering strength in parts of the South that offer a better deal for new Americans and their offspring than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. You want a little salsa on those grits?

    BEST CITIES FOR HISPANICS/LATINOS
    Metropolitan Area Rank Score Home Ownership Rate Median Household Income Share of Total Self Employment Change in Population: 2000-2013
    Jacksonville, FL       1   80.3 54.9% $50,171 17.1% 148.2%
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA       2   78.8 55.3% $47,196 23.5% 74.3%
    Baltimore, MD       3   74.0 47.5% $59,939 9.8% 175.3%
    Houston, TX       4   71.6 52.3% $43,020 22.9% 68.4%
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV       5   70.7 45.4% $65,736 11.0% 105.0%
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC       6   70.2 47.2% $50,197 9.8% 156.6%
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX       7   66.8 50.0% $41,622 22.1% 70.3%
    San Antonio, TX       8   66.3 56.9% $42,377 23.3% 43.8%
    Austin, TX       9   65.4 44.6% $43,712 20.9% 83.4%
    St. Louis,, MO-IL       9   65.4 56.5% $50,570 7.8% 92.2%
    Sacramento, CA     11   63.9 43.9% $45,667 21.8% 66.1%
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL     12   63.5 49.4% $39,757 17.1% 100.4%
    Orlando, FL     13   61.5 46.7% $38,721 17.1% 128.1%
    Pittsburgh, PA     14   59.1 48.4% $55,108 7.3% 102.4%
    Salt Lake City, UT     14   59.1 49.5% $42,232 10.8% 78.3%
    Miami, FL     16   58.2 52.6% $41,547 17.7% 46.2%
    Las Vegas, NV     17   57.7 40.8% $42,789 16.8% 101.5%
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI     18   55.8 51.4% $45,349 11.1% 36.7%
    Oklahoma City, OK     19   55.3 48.5% $38,054 10.0% 121.4%
    Seattle, WA     20   53.4 35.6% $48,903 9.9% 112.4%
    Richmond, VA     21   52.4 41.8% $38,186 9.8% 196.1%
    San Jose, CA     22   51.9 38.8% $59,150 19.9% 23.7%
    San Diego, CA     23   51.4 38.6% $46,875 21.3% 40.8%
    Charlotte, NC-SC     24   51.0 42.9% $38,843 8.6% 174.6%
    Denver, CO     25   50.5 44.7% $42,071 13.5% 53.7%
    Phoenix, AZ     25   50.5 44.9% $38,704 19.9% 61.1%
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA     25   50.5 38.5% $56,269 19.8% 34.9%
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN     28   48.1 41.3% $42,271 6.8% 190.6%
    Atlanta, GA     29   47.6 42.8% $38,919 8.8% 116.9%
    Kansas City, MO-KS     29   47.6 47.1% $40,432 7.8% 90.7%
    New Orleans. LA     29   47.6 41.7% $46,146 8.2% 74.2%
    Los Angeles, CA     32   44.2 37.7% $45,202 21.3% 15.3%
    Raleigh, NC     33   43.8 39.6% $37,572 8.4% 177.7%
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI     34   42.3 40.9% $42,764 7.6% 90.0%
    Detroit,  MI     35   41.8 61.5% $41,276 7.5% 39.8%
    Louisville, KY-IN     36   39.4 41.3% $35,571 6.5% 206.8%
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD     37   38.9 43.3% $36,365 8.9% 81.4%
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR     38   37.0 40.5% $32,041 8.1% 156.2%
    Portland, OR-WA     39   36.5 33.3% $40,486 9.6% 83.8%
    Nashville, TN     40   35.6 38.2% $36,458 7.3% 176.5%
    Grand Rapids, MI     41   35.1 47.7% $35,114 8.3% 54.4%
    New York, NY-NJ-PA     42   34.6 26.5% $42,981 13.3% 29.4%
    Birmingham, AL     43   32.7 40.3% $32,165 6.9% 174.1%
    Indianapolis. IN     43   32.7 35.5% $27,293 7.7% 195.5%
    Boston, MA-NH     45   31.7 24.5% $39,080 10.7% 65.6%
    Cleveland, OH     46   30.3 43.9% $38,762 7.6% 45.7%
    Columbus, OH     47   29.3 28.1% $38,520 6.9% 155.6%
    Rochester, NY     48   27.9 37.7% $26,315 12.2% 55.1%
    Buffalo, NY     49   25.0 33.8% $30,489 12.0% 50.8%
    Hartford, CT     50   24.5 29.9% $30,453 11.4% 54.7%
    Providence, RI-MA     51   21.2 23.8% $28,622 10.0% 64.5%
    Milwaukee,WI     52   19.2 34.7% $32,308 7.6% 68.3%
    Calculated from 2013 American Community Survey & EMSI data
    Analsys by Wendell Cox

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Jacksonville photo by Don Dearing (Flickr: Jacksonville, FL) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Gray Shadow Looms Over Home of Youth Culture

    Southern California, like the rest of America and, indeed, the higher-income world, is getting older, rapidly. Even as the region’s population is growing slowly, its ranks of seniors – people age 65 and older – is exploding. Since 2000, the Los Angeles metropolitan area population has grown by 6 percent, but its senior population swelled by 31 percent.

    The trend is stronger in the Inland Empire, where senior growth was almost 50 percent, the 14th-highest among the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas and more than three times the national average.

    Figures from the Census Bureau suggest that these trends have continued since 2010. Regionwide – Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties – the senior population has surged 9.7 percent, more than the national rate of 8.4 percent. Overall, the senior share of the Los Angeles metropolitan-area population has increased to among the 20 largest in the nation.

    These aging trends reflect in many ways the economic torpor of the region over the past decade. “We could be at the end of the period where Los Angeles thrived as a destination of choice for the working-age population, and it may simply begin to age, much like our counterparts in the Northeast,” suggests Ali Modarres, a former Cal State Los Angeles professor who now heads the urban studies center at the University of Washington, Tacoma. “Is L.A. finally out of its ‘sunbelt’ phase and entering its graying era?”

    Less movement

    Once, Modarres notes, this region was – like Florida and Arizona – a major lure to retirees, due largely to its ideal climate. But as the region has become more expensive and congested, this appeal has diminished considerably. As a result, our graying is likely the result not so much of senior migration into the region – since the L.A. area is the nation’s second-largest, after New York, exporter of people – but a case of people getting older in place.

    In 1980, notes USC demographer Dowell Myers, half of the Los Angeles population ages 55-64 had migrated from another state. By 2010, that inbound segment had dropped to 26 percent and, by 2030, he projects, only 14 percent will be from elsewhere.

    Traditionally a source of youthfulness, immigrants, too, are getting older. In Los Angeles County, the foreign-born share of the 55-64 population has risen from 30 percent in 1990 to 50 percent in 2010. By 2030, some 60 percent of this population will be foreign-born. Given the slowing rate of new immigration, Myers and others suggest that the foreign-born population will drop among the younger cohorts over the next few decades.

    Geographic divide

    Like everything else in this increasingly bifurcated metropolis, the geography of aging is divided into two main segments – high-income growth around the coast and lower-income, more minority-oriented sections further inland. In both groups, evidence suggests that they tend to generally stay close to home. Across the country, baby boomers, who are becoming seniors in ever-larger numbers – notes a recent Fannie Mae report – generally prefer staying in the homes they have occupied for years.

    An examination of data from the 2010 census mirrors these trends. Some of the largest increases in seniors occurred in such heavily Latino and working-class areas as the Coachella Valley, where the 65-plus population soared by 14,700, or 43.2 percent; the Ontario area, where it grew by 30.3 percent; and Santa Ana-Anaheim, where this population expanded by 27.1 percent.

    This pattern seems to be holding up since 2010, at least at the county level. By far the largest increase in seniors has occurred in the Inland Empire, which saw its senior population rise by 63,000 people from 2010-13. Overall, both San Bernardino (15.1 percent growth) and Riverside (13.8 percent) counties expanded their senior populations well above the regional average of 12.6 percent.

    Coastal clusters

    Looking at the 2010 Census, we see another fascinating pattern – the aging of beach communities, long the center of the Southern California youth culture. Indeed, the biggest increase in seniors over the past decade took place in coastal Orange County, where the senior population grew by 25,600, or a remarkable 50 percent. At the same time, the oldest parts of the Southland are also by the ocean, in Santa Monica and the Westside of Los Angeles. In 2010, roughly 14 percent of residents of this generally affluent area were seniors, versus 11 percent for the rest of the region.

    Why are seniors staying in these enclaves? Well, the real question is, why not? Seniors who have stayed put, for the most part, were able to buy their homes for what today would be almost impossibly low costs, even though they were more expensive than average at the time. But, over the past three decades, as house prices have exploded across Southern California, these areas have become proportionally more unaffordable, which accounts for their declining populations of children as well as young families.

    Safely ensconced with little or no mortgage debt, and with their property taxes limited by Proposition 13, many of these lucky seniors get to enjoy the fair climate and gorgeous beachfront for the rest of their active lives. Needless to say, few younger people, particularly families, will be able to join the party for quite a while.

    Southland implications

    Aging is a natural process, and virtually every city in the world, particularly in higher-income countries, now feels its effects. But the key issue is one of relativity. Until recently, this region’s populace was generally much younger than the national average but, since 2000, has seen its median age rise at nearly twice the national rate. Now, it could be on the way to resembling a sun-baked version of a Rust Belt community, as net outmigration continues by younger people, families and even immigrants.

    There arguably are some good aspects of being in an aging region, such as lower demand for schools and, often, lower crime rates. In addition, seniors are an increasingly important source of consumer demand – according to Nielsen, Americans over age 50 by 2017 will control some 70 percent of the nation’s disposable income. Seniors, notes the Kaufmann Foundation, are also the fastest-growing entrepreneurial population, critical for future job creation.

    Of course, there are dangers in taking these trends too far. Over time, young people and families are critical to creating demand for many key products, notably houses, cars and furnishings. They also are more likely to start and staff innovative companies. A declining youth population is not necessarily a good thing in a region that lives off being on, and establishing, the cutting edge of design, entertainment and technology.

    There’s nothing inevitable about the region becoming a giant retirement home. The Southland can again become a magnet for migration. It’s advantages are manifest, with the beaches, mountains and incomparable weather. But the past couple of decades have demonstrated that these inducements alone are not enough to keep millions of people from moving away.

    We need to start addressing the causes for persistent out-migration, and, more importantly, the relative dearth of new people. There are obvious candidates for remediation – one of the nation’s highest costs of living, particularly for housing, too many poor schools, a challenging business climate and a declining infrastructure. These are helping to drive the younger generations and enterprises – who should want to flock here – to Nevada, other mountain states, Texas and elsewhere.

    This piece first appeared at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    “Senior Citizens Crossing” photo by Flickr user auntjojo.

  • Southern California Stuck in Drive

    Southern California has long been a nurturer of dreams that, while widely anticipated, often are never quite achieved. One particularly strong fantasy involves Los Angeles abandoning what one enthusiast calls its “car habit” and converting into an ever-denser, transit-oriented region.

    An analysis of transit ridership, however, shows that the region is essentially no better off than when the the modern period of transit funding began in 1980, with the passage of Proposition A, which authorized a half-cent sales tax for transit. In 1980, approximately 5.9 percent of workers in the metropolitan area (Los Angeles and Orange counties) used transit for their commute. The latest data, for 2013, indicates the ridership figure has fallen to 5.8 percent.

    Never ones to let facts get in the way of fantasy, some retrourbanists and media types continue to insist our mass-transit transition is well on its way. Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias, writing in Slate, declared that Los Angeles is destined to become America’s “next great transit city.”

    This view is echoed throughout retrourbanist circles. “The City of Angels is noticeably transforming. Our once car-centric town is becoming less car-dependent,” suggests the local LA Streetsblog, “Public transit is having a comeback. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructures are improving.”

    Instead of rushing to rail, Angelenos continue to rely on their cars to get to work. From 1980-2013, the market share of drive-alone commuters has risen from 70 percent to 74.1 percent. There has been an increase in driving alone of approximately 1.4 million daily commuters. Driving alone accounted for d approximately 85 percent of the region’s increase in commuters.

    Why do people stick to their cars? For one thing, transit takes longer. The average drive-alone, one-way commute in Los Angeles was 27.0 minutes in 2013, compared with an average commute of 48.7 minutes for transit.

    The other big factor is accessibility to jobs. The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory produced an estimate for the percentage of jobs that the average L.A. resident could reach within 30 minutes by car. In Los Angeles, the average resident can reach 60 times as many jobs in that time by car as by transit.

    Transit needs downtowns

    Transit plays an important role in America, but mostly in the urban cores of a handful of “legacy” cities. These core metros (excluding their often-sprawling, low-density suburbs) – New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco – account for 55 percent of all transit-work trip destinations, just 6 percent of the country’s employment. Overall, the legacy cities’ transit ridership is nearly 10 times their proportionate combined share of jobs.

    To a large extent, this reflects history and urban form. Transit remains largely a matter of downtowns. The cities with transit legacies have an average of 15 percent of their jobs downtown, three times the average for other major metropolitan areas. In contrast, Downtown Los Angeles has 2 percent of the metropolitan area’s jobs. In Orange County, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, homes to much of the regional population, there are really no substantial downtown areas.

    In contrast, the many regions sharing L.A.’s multipolar form and large-scale transit investments – Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Portland, Ore., – have seen their transit market shares stagnate or decline, despite having built expensive rail systems.

    One problem is, like virtually all U.S. metropolitan areas (including the suburbs of legacy cities), the Los Angeles area, which pioneered the multi-polar metropolis, has been becoming more so and is even moving beyond polycentricity. The vast majority of growth in the statistical area encompassing Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties has taken place in precisely those areas – the Inland Empire, South Orange County or the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys in northern Los Angeles County – that also have the lowest transit ridership. In contrast, the core’s growth barely represents a blip. From 2000-10, the functional urban core, which has the strongest concentration of transit destinations, accounted for virtually none of the region’s growth.

    Dreaming of New York?

    For many L.A. planners and urban boosters, more transit – funded from Washington – often seems to constitute an exercise of social engineering on a grand scale. The hope is that, by pushing transit, particularly rail, we will recreate the metropolis with ever-greater density. “We are going to remake what the city looks like,” then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told an approving New York Times two years ago.

    Despite the hoopla and the subsidization of downtown Los Angeles, however, relatively few people work in, or even visit Downtown, ecept for sporting or cultural events, although many pass by it on the freeways.

    For most Angelenos, Downtown is simply not part of their day-to-day experience the way, for example, Manhattan is for many New Yorkers, or the Loop is for many residents of the Chicago region.

    Transit Class Warfare

    Developers and their planning allies tend to focus on transit as something that will get middle-class Angelenos out of their cars. But it’s difficult to see this working as long as such an overwhelming majority of jobs (98 percent) are located outside Downtown. Since 1980, driving alone, which was increasing its market share, added 15 times as many new commuters as transit, with its slipping market share.

    At the same time, there seems to be a profound unawareness of the low incomes of Los Angeles transit commuters. The latest American Community Survey data (2013) indicates that the median earnings of transit commuters at the national level is more than 85 percent higher than in Los Angeles. In the metropolitan areas around transit legacy cities, the median incomes of transit commuters is 150 percent higher than in Los Angeles.

    To some extent, poorer Angelenos, in the government’s expensive shift from buses to trains, are being sacrificed to satisfy the Utopian vision of planners, pad the profits of big urban developers, and to build the campaign war chests of the political class. Indeed, from 2008-12, the bus lines, which carry more than three times as many passengers as trains, were cut 16 percent If L.A. is experiencing a transit revolution, its most dependent riders have been largely left behind.

    So What Should Greater LA do?

    As anyone who drives the freeways knows well, L.A. has a traffic problem. But Los Angeles also has the shortest average commute time of any high-income world megacity for which data is available, despite having the highest automobile usage, the least transit and, except for New York, the lowest urban density.

    The real question is, will more transit, at least in its current form, offer the solution? Certainly, expanding and improving roads – although politically incorrect – has helped make commuting easier for many working in Orange County. Other ways to entice people off the roads, such as telecommuting, should be encouraged. Since 1980, the number of Los Angeles residents working at home has increased by approximately 240,000. This increase – 2.5 times that of transit in total numbers – has come at virtually no cost to taxpayers.

    To be sure, many Angelenos, for one reason or another, need decent transit services. Our approach would be for government to find out who these people are, and look for ways to make transit work better for them. Rather than invest huge dollars in rail megaprojects, perhaps we could reduce bus fares, a strategy attributed to the legendary Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn that increased bus ridership dramatically from 1982-85.

    Unlike today’s “progressives,” Hahn’s prime interest was serving his largely working-class and poor constituents. Besides cutting bus fares and increasingly service, other solutions, such as more competitively contracted service provided by regional agencies, such as Foothill Transit and the Antelope Valley Transit Authority, could provide less-expensive, more efficient and expanded service.

    Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, has also expressed interest in promoting the use of rideshare services, like Uber or Lyft, and, more importantly, self-driving cars.

    Ultimately, rather than try to recreate New York, or undertake the expensive and virtually impossible task of rebuilding Los Angeles in the image of the latest urban planning fad, we should explore a host of innovative solutions that will help transit riders here and now by developing workable, and effective, ways to help them get to the services and jobs they need.

    This piece first appeared at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Downtown Los Angeles toward the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley (by Wendell Cox)

  • California’s Southern Discomfort

    We know this was a harsh recession, followed by, at best, a tepid recovery for the vast majority of Americans. But some people and some regions have surged somewhat ahead, while others have stagnated or worse.

    Greater Los Angeles fails to make the grade. In per capita growth of gross domestic product since 2010, according to analyst Aaron Renn, our region ranks a very mediocre 38th out of 52 metro areas, with a measly 1.5 percent, well below the national average of 3.8 percent. It places behind up-and-comers among the Texas cities, Oklahoma City and some tech-oriented clusters – Silicon Valley ranked second, after Houston. These places have growth rates roughly twice those of the Southland.

    When we wanted to drill down to the more local level, and analyze what is happening by county, we needed to go to the Census Bureau, as opposed to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, where we could glean what is happening in our communities. Our analysis is based on those figures, and neither of us hopes the Southern California region continues to stagnate or decline.

    Poverty

    One of the saddest results of the Great Recession and the weak recovery has been the expansion of poverty across the country. The poverty rate among the country’s 52 largest metropolitan areas, according to the most recent census numbers, grew from 14.9 percent in 1999 to 15.8 percent in 2013, a 7 percent rise. At least one-quarter of that rise has taken place since the recovery began.

    Southland politicians, like those in much of California, often decry income inequality and poverty, but they have not been very effective in combatting it. The region has had higher-than-average poverty for well over a decade, and things have not gotten better recently. Since 2009, the Los Angeles region, which includes Orange County, has seen its poverty rate grow by 1.8 percent, 80 percent higher than the national norm. The area ranked 47th out of 52 in terms of increased poverty. Riverside-San Bernardino saw a similar jump, 1.7 percent, in poverty.

    The scale of the poverty problem in the Southland is much greater than many imagine. When we broke down the figures, Los Angeles County remained the area with the highest concentration of poverty. L.A. saw a slight reduction in poverty from 1999-2010, but has moved in the other direction more recently. From 2010-13, poverty in L.A. County rose from 17.5 percent to 18.9 percent, an 8 percent increase. Poverty now afflicts a considerably larger portion of the population of Los Angeles than it did in 1999.

    But if Los Angeles County endures the largest pocket of poverty, there’s not much for the surrounding counties to shout about. San Bernardino and Riverside counties have each seen rapid 20 percent increases in their poverty rates since 1999; in fact, San Bernardino’s 19.1 percent poverty rate is slightly higher than that of Los Angeles County.

    Orange County fares better, but the curse of poverty is spreading even here. Although its 13.5 percent poverty rate lies below the national average, the ranks of the O.C. poor have jumped 30 percent relative to the entire population since 1999. The expansion of poverty as a share of the population has grown by more than 10 percent since 2010.

    Low Income Growth and High Housing Prices: A Bad Combination

    As befits a region with relatively low GDP growth, incomes in Southern California have stagnated. Median household incomes have dropped in every county in the region, including Ventura and Orange, whose residents boast median household incomes above $70,000, well above the $50,000 range found in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside. Since 2010, the biggest income drops have happened in the Inland Empire, where real incomes have fallen by nearly 7 percent. Los Angeles also has experienced a drop, with real incomes down 3 percent since 2010.

    For the most part, the more-affluent suburban counties have done better, consistent with the two-speed U.S. economy. Orange and Ventura enjoy median household incomes a full $20,000 above those of Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire. This is after the smaller 2.1 percent reduction (2010-13) in Orange County real incomes. Real incomes have recovered, albeit slightly, only in Ventura. The biggest hit has been concentrated in those parts of Southern California – Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire – historically most dependent on blue-collar professions in manufacturing, logistics and construction. These are, for the most part, also the most heavily Latino and African American areas of the region.

    So, why can’t the Southland replicate the economic boom in the San Francisco Bay Area? Simply put, the Los Angeles region is not the Bay Area, or Seattle. The share of Los Angeles’ jobs that are tied to manufacturing and logistics is twice that of the San Francisco area. Our population is far less well-educated, particularly in the Inland Empire and much of Los Angeles County, and is also far more heavily African American and Latino, groups that have fared particularly poorly. Nationwide, Latino poverty rates, notes a recent Pew study, stand at 28 percent, the highest for any ethnic group.

    Alongside the stagnant economy, growing Latino poverty – which is really the key challenge for Southern California – also reflects a high cost of living. This is most profound in terms of housing costs. Overall, the Southland counties – most notably Los Angeles and Orange – suffer among the highest housing cost burdens, relative to income, than virtually anywhere in the country.

    This can be seen by looking at what parts of the country have the highest percentages of people paying more than 50 percent of pretax income for housing. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their incomes on housing, a somewhat higher rate than in the pricier San Francisco and New York areas and much higher than the national rate of 24 percent of households spending more than half of income on housing, itself far from tolerable.

    New Policy Imperatives

    Our current mix of state and local policies are neither reviving the regional economy nor reducing poverty. One key reason is that the current political environment – fostered and perpetuated by greens, urban land interests and organized public workers – places little priority on promoting the growth of the tangible economy that tends to employ blue-collar workers. High energy costs, largely due to the state’s Draconian commitment to renewable fuels, are a direct threat to any kind of industrial growth, while highly restrictive housing policies slow any hope of meeting the needs of renters and prospective homeowners.

    Of course, one could point out that the Bay Area, the one large region in California experiencing above-average income growth, labors under the same progressive policy regime. But the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, is already largely deindustrialized and its population far more attractive to digitally based companies. It boasts a far larger pool of venture capital, and a unique network to support tech.

    A Google or an Apple can easily move its energy-hungry arrays of computer servers to less-expensive states, along with its device manufacturing. The more grass-roots based, small-business-oriented Southland economy is far less able to adapt to regulatory strictures from Sacramento.

    Southern California leaders clearly need to understand that the region is not winning under the current policy environment in the state. Steps to re-energize our basic industries and restart new housing, particularly single-family housing desired by most young families, need to be taken. Other steps, from reforming the schools and rebuilding basic infrastructure to modernizing higher education, also are imperative. At risk is not just a comfortable way of life, but also the legacy of opportunity that has been so critical to this region from its earliest days, a legacy now at extreme risk.

    This piece first appeared at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

  • Aging America: The U.S. Cities Going Gray The Fastest

    For years we have been warned about the looming, profound impacts that the aging of the U.S. population will have on the country. Well, the gray wave has arrived. Since 2000, the senior population has increased 29% compared to overall population growth of 12%. The percentage of Americans in the senior set has risen from 12.4% to 14.1%, and their share of the population is projected to climb to 19.3% by 2030. There are two principal causes for this: the baby boom generation is reaching 65 years old, while the U.S. fertility rate has fallen markedly in recent decades, despite immigration, and now hovers around the replacement rate.

    To find the cities that are going gray the fastest, we looked at the change from 2000 through 2013 in the share of seniors in the populations of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, the 52 metropolitan statistical areas that have more than a million residents. Some 13.2% of the residents of these 52 MSAs are seniors, a lower proportion than nationwide.

    Before we look at where the biggest changes have occurred, let’s take a look at where the highest overall concentrations of seniors are: no big surprise, in Florida, and in the slow-growing Northeast and Midwest. Among the 52 biggest metropolitan areas, Tampa-St. Petersburg has the highest share of seniors in its population at 18.2%. The retirement mecca of Miami, where 16.7% of its population is over 65, ranks third in the nation, and Jacksonville is 18th, at 13.7%.

    Outside of Florida almost all the retirement capitals are in the Northeast and Midwest. The second most senior region, for example, is Pittsburgh, where 18.0% of the population is over 65. The old Steel City is followed by a host of Rust Belt metro areas: Cleveland, Rochester, Providence, Hartford, St. Louis and Detroit, all of which have a senior set that makes up 14% or more of the overall population.

    Austin, Texas, has the smallest proportion of seniors, at 9.2%, but its senior share is rising — more on Austin later on. Salt Lake City, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth are also below 10%, while Raleigh has the fifth-lowest proportion of seniors, at 10.2%. Not surprisingly, all of these relatively young cities are experiencing strong domestic in-migration.

    Cities That Are Aging The Most

    The metropolitan areas that have seen the biggest jumps in the senior proportion of their populations, have, for the most part, been the same ones that have drawn strong net domestic in-migration of millennials, families and working adults. The rise in the share of seniors in these cities isn’t because seniors are moving to them in overwhelming numbers — Census data shows they make major moves less than all other age groups. (In 2011-12, seniors moved to another state five times less frequently than those between the ages of 25-34, according to Current Population Survey figures.) Rather, many of those who have reached 65 since 2000 in the cities that top our list moved to them when they were younger, generally in search of economic opportunities or better lives, and have aged there.

    However, when seniors do decide to move, they can have a disproportionate impact on metropolitan economies because of their relative affluence. Over-65 households have a net worth 2.5 times the national average, according to Census Bureau data. Seniors (over 62) were far less damaged in the housing bust than younger households, and their incomes increased more with the tepid economic recovery, according to St. Louis Federal Reserve studies.

    In first place on our list is Atlanta, where the share of seniors in the population rose from 7.7% in 2000 to 10.4% in 2013, the biggest increase in the nation. In raw numbers, the over-65 population of the metro area rose to 572,534, an increase of  73.5% since 2000.

    The percentage of the population in fast-growing Raleigh, N.C., that is over 65 grew from 8.0% to 10.2% in 2013, putting it in second place.

    Austin may have a reputation as a youthful place, but it’s also getting older rapidly. The senior population has surged 91.7% since 2000 to 172,476, amid a general population boom – the share of seniors in the metro area has expanded from 7.2% to 9.2%, placing it third on our list. The metro area may be unprepared for a mounting “silver tsunami” of impoverished elderly, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

    Two of the cities that posted the biggest increases in the share of seniors in their populations also were among the largest overall domestic migration losers, San Jose, Calif., and Los Angeles. Since 2000, 1.7 million more U.S. residents moved away from the two metro areas than to them. Only Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans lost a larger share of its total population to domestic out-migration than San Jose, which ranks 4th in the increase of its senior population, going from 9.4% to 11.9%. Los Angeles, which trailed only New Orleans, San Jose and New York in the percentage of its population that it lost to domestic migration, went from 9.8% over-65 to 12.1%, the ninth biggest increase among the 52 largest metro areas. The combination of older households moving less and younger households leaving to take advantage of better job opportunities elsewhere may explain this.

    The balance of the top 10 all experienced net domestic migration gains since 2000.

    Meanwhile, the Rust Belt and Florida cities that already were among the oldest didn’t get much older. Tampa-St. Petersburg actually got younger, at least in part due to strong overall in-migration by younger people.

    Are Seniors Headed To Big Cities?

    One favorite meme of urban boosters is the assertion that seniors are heading to the inner city. The preponderance of evidence shows the opposite. Within the 52 largest metropolitan areas, the urban cores, measured at the small area level (zip codes) have lost seniors to the periphery. Between 2000 and 2010, the urban core senior population declined by  1.5 million, dropping from nearly 15% of the total population to 13%.The losses were pervasive, extending to all the 52 biggest MSAs except for San Diego (and there the urban core gain was miniscule, with 97% of the senior growth occurring in the suburbs and exurbs).

    In contrast, suburbs and exurbs together gained over 2.82 million seniors. But the largest increases were farthest from core, in the newer, outer suburbs and exurbs. Together these areas gained 2.4 million seniors. Rather than headed into the core, the prevailing trend has been quite the opposite.

    A similar pattern has been identified in Canada. A recent study of that country’s six largest cities found similar patterns, with older Canadians, if they move, tending to end up the suburban rings.

    Just The Beginning

    Over the next 15 years, cities are likely to age even faster. Those cities that attract the most among relatively few senior domestic migrants and which have seen their over-50 cohorts swelled by previous domestic migration should see the largest increases. At the same time, other cities with modest senior population gains could also age more quickly if more of the rest of the population moves away.

    Seniors in America’s Largest Metropolitan Areas, 2000-2013
    Ranked by change in share of seniors, 2000-2013
    Rank MMSA Seniors Share 2000 Seniors Share 2013 Seniors Share Change 2000-13% Number of Seniors 2013 Change in Total Seniors 2000-13%
    1 Atlanta, GA 7.7% 10.4% 34.0% 572,534 73.5%
    2 Raleigh, NC 8.0% 10.2% 28.6% 124,285 96.0%
    3 Austin, TX 7.2% 9.2% 27.2% 172,476 91.7%
    4 San Jose, CA 9.4% 11.9% 26.7% 229,062 40.1%
    5 Denver, CO 9.0% 11.3% 25.7% 304,698 57.1%
    6 Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 7.9% 9.9% 25.6% 676,537 64.4%
    7 Jacksonville, FL 11.0% 13.7% 24.2% 191,000 54.2%
    8 Houston, TX 7.7% 9.5% 24.0% 601,800 66.9%
    9 Los Angeles, CA 9.8% 12.1% 23.7% 1,584,236 31.4%
    10 Portland, OR-WA 10.4% 12.8% 23.5% 296,365 48.3%
    11 Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 9.7% 11.9% 23.1% 412,713 40.4%
    12 Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 9.0% 11.0% 23.0% 656,678 51.3%
    13 Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 10.3% 12.7% 22.7% 215,992 32.6%
    14 Grand Rapids, MI 10.5% 12.7% 20.5% 128,805 31.6%
    15 Las Vegas, NV 10.7% 12.8% 20.4% 260,156 77.5%
    16 Rochester, NY 12.9% 15.5% 20.0% 167,497 22.3%
    17 Detroit, MI 12.0% 14.3% 19.7% 616,033 15.5%
    18 Sacramento, CA 11.3% 13.5% 19.1% 298,327 46.8%
    19 Seattle, WA 10.1% 11.9% 17.9% 431,378 39.8%
    20 Richmond, VA 11.4% 13.3% 17.1% 166,173 38.2%
    21 San Francisco-Oakland, CA 11.7% 13.7% 16.8% 617,996 27.9%
    22 New Orleans. LA 11.4% 13.2% 16.4% 164,372 8.0%
    23 Memphis, TN-MS-AR 10.0% 11.7% 16.3% 156,792 28.7%
    24 Salt Lake City, UT 8.0% 9.3% 15.6% 105,993 40.3%
    25 Columbus, OH 10.1% 11.7% 15.5% 230,044 35.6%
    26 Charlotte, NC-SC 10.5% 12.0% 15.2% 281,202 56.7%
    27 Phoenix, AZ 11.9% 13.7% 15.1% 604,442 55.8%
    28 Nashville, TN 10.3% 11.8% 14.9% 208,133 46.3%
    29 Chicago, IL-IN-WI 10.9% 12.4% 14.3% 1,184,871 19.8%
    30 Baltimore, MD 12.0% 13.7% 14.1% 379,722 23.8%
    31 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 11.7% 13.3% 13.4% 283,518 21.5%
    32 Kansas City, MO-KS 11.5% 13.0% 12.8% 266,749 27.9%
    33 Louisville, KY-IN 12.4% 14.0% 12.4% 176,229 26.6%
    34 Cleveland, OH 14.5% 16.2% 11.8% 335,054 7.5%
    35 Boston, MA-NH 12.6% 14.1% 11.6% 658,710 19.0%
    36 St. Louis,, MO-IL 13.0% 14.4% 11.1% 404,297 16.3%
    37 San Diego, CA 11.1% 12.3% 10.8% 396,543 26.4%
    38 Hartford, CT 13.9% 15.4% 10.5% 187,183 16.9%
    39 New York, NY-NJ-PA 12.6% 13.9% 10.4% 2,768,694 16.3%
    40 Birmingham, AL 12.8% 14.1% 10.1% 160,686 19.3%
    41 San Antonio, TX 10.8% 11.9% 10.1% 270,480 46.5%
    42 Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 10.5% 11.5% 9.8% 502,846 47.8%
    43 Oklahoma City, OK 11.4% 12.5% 9.7% 164,481 32.2%
    44 Indianapolis. IN 11.0% 12.0% 9.5% 234,973 29.0%
    45 Orlando, FL 12.4% 13.4% 8.5% 304,660 49.7%
    46 Milwaukee,WI 12.6% 13.5% 7.4% 211,527 12.3%
    47 Providence, RI-MA 14.4% 15.4% 7.0% 247,689 8.4%
    48 Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 13.4% 14.2% 6.5% 858,313 13.0%
    49 Buffalo, NY 15.9% 16.5% 3.7% 186,693 0.5%
    50 Miami, FL 16.4% 16.7% 1.8% 975,529 18.5%
    51 Pittsburgh, PA 17.7% 18.0% 1.6% 425,102 -1.3%
    52 Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 19.2% 18.4% -4.3% 527,861 14.6%
    52 Major Metropolitan Areas 11.4% 12.9% 13.2% 22,588,129 29.2%
    Outside MMSAs 13.6% 15.7% 14.8% 22,115,945 26.4%
    United States 12.4% 14.1% 13.8% 44,704,074 27.8%

    This piece first appeared at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    “Senior Citizens Crossing” photo by Flickr user auntjojo.

  • Tracking America’s ‘Hidden Millennials’

    When it comes to attracting the hip and cool, Southern California, long a cultural trendsetter, appears to be falling behind – at least in the view of the national media. Articles about where millennials are, or should be, going rarely mention anywhere in this region as a top choice.

    Rather than hang out at the beach or enjoy poolside ambience, the conventional wisdom is that the millennial generation – those born after 1983 – would rather go anywhere else. Southern California is not on a list of the top 12 regions (although San Diego gets a mention) for millennials, published in the Huffington Post. Other “best” lists and similar compilations invariably highlight New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Texas, Raleigh, N.C., and Boston, but rarely SoCal.

    What numbers tell us

    But sometimes, before succumbing to conventional wisdom, one has to look at the numbers. We examined the percentages of millennials – we took the ages 20-29 – and their growth in all 52 major U.S. metropolitan areas. To our surprise, Los Angeles-Orange County scored very high – No. 5 – with a 15.5 percent share. That’s well above the 14 percent total nationally. San Bernardino-Riverside, at 15 percent, ranked ninth.

    This research placed Southern California well ahead of such supposed youth magnets as Seattle, Boston, New York and San Francisco, whose population is actually under-represented in terms of millennials. Nor, despite the social media bubble, are things shifting to the denser “hip,” “cool” cities so widely celebrated in the media. In fact, with the exception of Seattle, the Los Angeles area’s rate of millennial growth far outstripped that of Austin, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

    Southern California turns out to be more of a youth magnet than one might think. In terms of millennials’ share of population growth, San Bernardino-Riverside ranked second of 52 metro areas, adding 50,000 millennials, an 8.3 percent increase since 2010. Los Angeles and Orange counties – older, settled areas with far lower population growth – together registered 18th, adding 90,000 twenty-somethings since 2010. That’s the most of any metropolitan area, including New York.

    Reality and Perception

    What accounts for this gap between perception and reality? One key factor lies with the media, which, outside Hollywood, has abandoned Southern California. Like many shrinking industries, news media is consolidating in a few strongholds – New York, Washington and, increasingly, San Francisco. Reporters from these cities tend to like (at least for now) dense, urban, transit-dependent places. Many of their friends do, too,rejecting “sprawling, car-dependent cities.” Like it or not, that sums up Southern California.

    Yet, the common assertion that most millennials hate suburbs, cars and “sprawl” may be yet another urban myth promulgated by developers, planners and their handmaidens in the media. It turns out that the percentage of twenty-somethings nationally living in the denser core counties in 2013 is slightly lower than in 2010. The vast majority of millennials, roughly 70 percent, live well outside the core counties, and their numbers grew overall by three times as much over the past three years.

    In fact, virtually all the densest core areas – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston – lost millennials. Everybody’s favorite millennial destination, Portland, Ore., experienced the second-greatest loss of population ages 20-29 in its core county, surpassed only by St. Louis.

    It appears that being part of a “sprawling area,” in fact, does not discourage millennial growth. The fastest-growing millennial regions – San Antonio, the Inland Empire, Orlando, Fla. – are all renowned for spreading out. Instead of living in high-density areas, these millennials reside in apartments and homes distant from the core; many, perhaps one in three, are still at their parents’ houses.

    We refer to them as the “hidden millennials.” They are not the high-profile Brooklyn hipsters and their imitators nationally; nor are they attached to the social media oligarchy around San Francisco. They live far from the iPads of the reportorial class and the promotors of the “hip and cool” urban gospel. They are, for all intents and purposes, invisible in the minds of most media.

    One last thing to keep in mind. Many of these hidden millennials are working-class and minorities. One possible explanation for Southern California’s millennial surge lies with large Hispanic communities, which for three decades have maintained a considerably higher birth rate than that of non-Hispanic whites. Nationally, Latinos constitute 20 percent of millennials, compared with 13 percent of U.S. residents over age 30. In Southern California, Latinos account for slightly over half of twenty-somethings and 37 percent of older cohorts.

    Where do Southern California millennials Live?

    The widely embraced “back to the city core” mantra attributed to millennials is partially true but definitely overstated, particularly in Southern California. To be sure, from 2000-10, Downtown Los Angeles gained more than 4,200 twenty-somethings, an impressive 25 percent increase. But these gains were essentially offset by losses of more than 17,000 in the areas bounded by the South Bay, Southeast L.A. County, West L.A. and the Santa Monica Mountains. As we have seen in many American regions, strong gains of millennials in the core have been counterbalanced by a loss of younger people in the surrounding areas.

    In contrast, the big growth has occurred in places that are not usually associated with hip youth culture. The biggest percentage increases in millennial populations – far higher than for Downtown L.A. – have occurred in various Inland Empire communities, as well as Valencia, the Victor Valley, Irvine and Coachella. In actual numbers, the predominance of these outlying areas is overwhelming. Irvine’s and South Orange County’s gain of more than 19,000 millennials stands out, not to mention the Inland Empire’s gain of 95,000 or even the nearly 20,000 who have appeared in far-flung Valencia-Antelope Valley. Southwestern Riverside County (Temecula-Murrieta-Perris) gained nearly 50,000, the largest of any area subregion.

    Overall, millennial growth in the urban core, with the exception of Downtown L.A., is very slow or even negative. It is also negligible in extra-expensive areas of the Westside and coastal Orange County; high rents and housing prices make these areas increasingly off-limits to all but the most well-heeled millennials. Policymakers, often obsessed with the urban core and its hipster denizens, need to recognize this varied millennial geography. Most of the next generation are not hanging out in cool Hollywood cafes but in malls in the outer periphery or in middle- and upper-middle-class, family-friendly enclaves such as Valencia or Irvine.

    These millennials may be “hidden” but servicing their needs and desires deserves a far more concerted effort by policymakers. This means such things as looking to the periphery for expanding parks, cultural events and educational opportunities that may persuade these millennials to stay and help rebuild this region’s economy.

    The demographic future of Southern California will not be determined primarily on Spring Street or Rodeo Drive but across, literally, hundreds of communities, often far-flung, where the bulk of our twenty-somethings reside.

    This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available for pre-order atAmazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis public policy consultancy, and a former member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.