New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin

  • The Comeback Of The Great Lakes States

    For generations the broad swath of America along the Great Lakes has been regarded as something of a backwater. Educated workers and sophisticated industries have tended to gather in the Northeast and on the West Coast, bringing with them strong economic growth.

    Yet increasingly these perceptions are outdated. The energy hotbeds of Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota may have posted the strongest employment growth since 2007, and were among the first states to gain back all the jobs lost in the recession. But a group of less heralded places from Minnesota to western Pennsylvania have also enjoyed a considerable revival, as energy, manufacturing, logistics and other basic industries have rebounded.

    Every Great Lakes state except for Illinois now has an unemployment rate below the national average, a stunning reversal from previous decades.

    Ironically the state most popularly associated with long-term economic decline, Michigan, has been lauded in a Pew study as perhaps the ”biggest success story.” From the state’s nadir of household employment in November 2009 through this July, the Wolverine State has added 302,543 jobs, a 7.2% increase.

    An Industrial Comeback

    One clear key to improving conditions in Michigan and elsewhere is the revival of America’s industrial economy. Following a generation of falling employment, the sector has been on something of a rebound since 2010, adding some 855,000 jobs. Although many of these new jobs are in the Southeast and Texas, Great Lakes states have been at the center of the turnaround. The fastest growth in industrial employment over the past five years has been in three Michiganmetro areas — Detroit, Warren and Grand Rapids – and Toledo, Ohio.

    Structural and political factors are behind the Midwestern recovery. Rising wages in China and the North American energy boom have helped make U.S. companies more cost competitive. German electricity prices, for example, are almost three times the average for the United States. Energy production has been a major driver in large swaths of the heartland, notably Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma, where fracking has sparked new development.

    This growing competitiveness can be seen in a surge of capital investment. Four of the top 10 statesfor new plant and equipment investment in 2014 are in the Great Lakes region, according to Site Selection Magazine: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

    Changing Geography Of Human Capital

    For generations the Great Lakes has been hemorrhaging people to the rest of the country, mainly the South and West. But that outflow has recently slowed, and in some cases reversed. According to demographer Wendell Cox, the rate of outmigration from Cleveland and Detroit has been cut by half or more while some metro areas, including Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, are firmly in positive territory. In contrast, Los Angeles, New York and even the Silicon Valley hub of San Jose continue to lose people to other regions.

    More surprising is the movement of younger college-educated people. American Community Survey numbers show some of the fastest growth in the population of educated workers between 2005 and 2013 occurred in places such as Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis and, yes, Cleveland, which, according to Cleveland State’s Richey Piiparinen, are attractive due to lower costs and a more family-friendly environment.

    Another analysis of the changes in the population of educated workers since 2005, by Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, reflects this shift. The rate of increase in the population of people 25 to 35 with graduate degrees was slightly higher in Pittsburgh than in San Francisco. Grand Rapids, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Columbus and Louisville did even better (albeit off low bases). These citiesare even considered something of new “hipster havens,” as young people look to these old industrial cities as better bargains for life and work.

    This brain gain parallels another important shift — the growing relevance of the Great Lakes workforce to companies here and around the world. The region already possesses the nation’s largest store of engineers in the country. STEM employment in a host of fields from manufacturing and medicine to business services is surging fast in many of these areas. Between 2004 and 2014, according to an analysis by Schill, several Midwestern states — Iowa, Michigan, Oklahoma, the Dakotas — added STEM jobs at double digit rates, equaling the percentage increases enjoyed by California and easily outpacing New York.

    It turns out that much STEM growth takes place out of the high-profile world of search engines, social media and “disruptive” business service firms. In many cases technical innovations, in the words of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, constitute “a traditional action made effective,” often in manufacturing, medicine and other fields not always associated with “tech.” The social media and search explosion, so prominent in the Bay Area, home to a remarkable 40% of such jobs, often obscures the serious innovation taking place in the Midwest. For example, much of the earliest advances in self-driving vehicles came not from Google but tractor maker John Deere.

    As it looks to develop auto software for cars, Google looks to, in the words of the autonomous car project’s director, “a lot of amazing companies in the Detroit area and international than know how to make cars.”

    The Great Lakes position as an innovation center is based on a unique combination of engineeringschools and a high concentration of engineers. Dayton and Detroit rank among the top 12 metro areas in the country in terms of engineers per capita, with a higher concentration than Boston, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

    One particular hot spot is the area around Warren and Troy, Mich., sometimes referred to “automation alley.” This is where software meets heavy metal, with a plethora of companies focusing on factory software and new computer-controlled systems for automobiles. It is home to engineering software firms like Altair, which has been expanding rapidly, and also where General Motors recently announced plans for a $1 billion tech center, employing 2,600 salaried workers.

    Other tech development has been tied to the health care industry, including such regional standouts as the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic. Madison, Wisc., has a strong government and education employment base but also is home to growing number of technology firms, with information employment since 2009 up an impressive 36.1%. But much of the growth is related to health care, with the leading local company being medical software maker Epic, which employs 6,800 at its sprawling campus in nearby Verona.

    Qmed ranks California as the best state for medical device makers, but also ranking highly are Minnesota, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    In the coming years, more talent should be heading to these area. Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York are at least two to three times higher than most Great Lake metro areas. This is a boon to those who bought far in the past, but a barrier to entry to young aspirational families. To live in San Francisco, particularly for those who hope to raise a family, is increasingly impossible.

    It has also led some companies to locate elsewhere, particularly to the Pacific Northwest. In 2011, 1 in 7 people in the Bay Area searched Redfin.com for homes outside of the Bay Area. Now it’s 1 in 4. Adam Wiener, Redfin’s chief growth officer, announced to other executives last month: “The dam has broken.”

    Potential Threats

    Ultimately the durability of the Great Lakes recovery depends on building off its natural strengths in engineering, its central location along water routes, ample natural resources and low living costs. Pro-business policies have enhanced these advantages and made several Midwestern governors intoserious national political figures, namely Snyder in Michigan, Walker in Wisconsin, and Ohio’s Kasich.

    Yet there are serious clouds on the horizon, perhaps the biggest of which is looming EPA greenhouse gas regulations, which could shut down many coal-fired power plants in the region and raise electric rates. 

    International forces – notably the devaluation of the Chinese yuan – threaten the industrialresurgence. A strong dollar tends to make exports pricier and imports more competitive. Such changes may not matter too much on the coasts, but Midwestern states are far more dependent on manufacturing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, many of the states with the highest percentage of their GDP tied to manufacturing are in the region, led by Indiana, where 25%of GDP is tied to industry, followed closely by Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

    Ultimately the Great Lakes cannot recover fully unless it continues the revival of its core industries, while expanding in other fields based on the movement of skilled labor coming to the region. If the region can continue its progress, it will be a major boon not only to the people who live there, but to the country that needs an infusion of economic sanity, and down to earth production, to complement the growth of finance, media and communications that dominate so many business headlines.

    This piece first appeared in 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 Orange County, CA.

    Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • As Rivals Stumble, America Steps Up

    As its former rivals in Asia and Europe slip into torpor and even decline, America, almost despite itself, is recovering its perch as the world’s bastion and predominant power. This is all the more remarkable given that our government is headed by someone who largely rejects traditional ideas about American exceptionalism, preferring to “lead from behind.”

    Just a quick look around the world makes clear that the United States has emerged as a relative hot spot in a chilly global economy. China is devaluating its currency and ratcheting down its growth expectations. Japan and Europe continue to lag, as they have for the past decade or two. Indeed, with the possible exception of India, no major country appears on the rise, and several once-ballyhooed rising stars – Russia, Brazil, South Africa – now seem headed for prolonged economic eclipse.

    Time for new thinking

    America’s mainstream media and intellectual classes now face a quandary. Generally attracted over the past century to economic models other than our own, they have shifted their admiration from Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s and, in the 1960s and beyond, Japan, Germany and, most recently, China.

    Now all those fashionable role models are clearly unravelling. Instead of seeking to imitate other countries, perhaps it’s time to find ways to bolster our own capabilities. President Obama may prefer to lead from behind, but that has not turned America into the world’s caboose. The country, in its fundamentals, is potentially far stronger and resilient than many believe.

    This is not to say that we cannot learn from abroad. There are specific things we should try to emulate, like the Chinese commitment to infrastructure building, northern Europe’s craft training, Japanese industrial precision, Korean technological development and water management strategies from Israel. Even Stalinism produced a terrific subway system in Moscow that still puts ours to shame.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Baby photo by Bigstock.

  • Economic Progress is More Effective Than Protests

    The election of Barack Obama promised to inaugurate the dawn of a post-racial America. Instead we seem to be stepping ever deeper into a racial quagmire. The past two month saw the violent commemoration of the Ferguson protests, “the celebration” of the 50th anniversary of the Watts riots, new police shootings in places as distant as Cincinnati and Fort Worth, and renewed disorder, tied to a police-related shooting, in St. Louis last week.

    When President Obama was elected, two-thirds of Americans thought race relations were good. Now six in 10 think they are bad, according to a New York Times poll, including some 68 percent of African Americans.

    This extreme alienation creates a rich soil for resurgence of a cramped form of black nationalism, as revealed in such widely read books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Coates, like the black nationalists of the ’60s, is fawned over by today’s progressive gentry. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott gushed that Coates’s writing is “essential, like water or air.” Yet the new nationalists do not, like many previous iterations, look to Africa for salvation, and as a potential place of re-settlement. Instead they may look to Africa for inspiration, but seem content to stew in the American racial cauldron, always apart but also here.

    Yet to this reader, it’s hard to regard Coates’s book as anything more than a narrow selfie that holds little hope for any future racial progress. To Coates, America itself seems irredeemable, its very essence tied to racial oppression and brutality. America is not about ideals not yet fulfilled, but a legacy of “pillaging,” the “destruction of families,” “the rape of mothers,” and countless other outrages. Today’s abusive police—and clearly some can be so described—are not outliers who should be punished but “are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” His alienation from America is so great that he admits to little sympathy for the victims of 9/11.

    He has particular contempt for those blacks who seek to succeed within the American system, although Coates, a talented rhetorician, has clearly done well for himself. To him, they are deluded into believing they can make their way by “acting white, of talking white, of being white.” African-American families that have broken away from the inner city or the poor small town and found a home in the suburbs, he suggests, “would rather live white than live free.” In language no doubt reassuring to New York urbanistas, he even accuses these blacks of participating in a grand global destruction merely because they drive cars and live in suburbs.

    Coates’s book also reinforces other nationalist voices such as can be found in certain vocal corners of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which seems to have little room for the inclusive humanism that characterized the early ’60s civil rights campaigners. They shout down genuine progressives like Bernie Sanders and poseurs like Martin O’Malley for insisting that “all lives matter.” In this world-view all police are tarred similarly; in this construct, clear abuses, such as the Eric Garner case, are no different than that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which even the Obama Justice Department found unworthy of federal prosecution.

    The current radicalization of some prominent black thinkers poses some challenges to Democrats in particular, reflecting their increased dependence on lopsided support from African Americans. Republicans may be doomed to become “the white man’s party,” as my old friend Harold Meyerson suggests, but who thinks the GOP’s insularity deserves emulating? Do the new black nationalists think they have anything to sell outside the confines of liberal bastions or inner-city African-American communities?

    Ultimately this program represents a dead end, both for the country and its increasingly diverse population. Ta-Nehisi Coates can’t expect to castigate whites as brutes who need to oppress blacks for both self-esteem and economic survival and then expect these same brutes to get on board with concessions, subsidies, and even reparations. Many academics and mainstream journalists may go along with such a program, but this is not a reasonable strategy for the rest of the country.

    ***

    When desegregation began in earnest in the ’60s, the hope was that we would see the emergence of greater equality between minorities and whites. And to be sure, there was reduction in black poverty in the booming ’60s, and then again during the Reagan and Clinton expansions. Yet in ensuing years, and especially with the onset of the Great Recession, this progress reversed, in large part because black and Latino families bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis. African Americans saw their household wealth plunge 31 percent during the recession, including a steep 35 percent decline in their retirement assets, according to the Urban Institute. By comparison, the wealth of white families fell a relatively mild 11 percent from 2007 to 2010.

    This growing disparity has prompted demands for expanded racially-derived benefits that, according to advocates like former Attorney General Eric Holder, should be a permanent part of national policy. “The question,” says Holder, “is not when does it end, but when does it begin … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

    This idea has been further expanded by the Obama administration’s commitment to correcting what it calls “disparate impact,” which would force communities—presumably middle-class suburbs—to accommodate poor and minority residents at taxpayer expense, if the federal Housing and Urban Development or the courts deem it appropriate.

    Such an approach negates the aspirations of middle-class families, including many African Americans who have headed to the suburbs for a better life.Upwardly mobile African Americans have been deserting core cities for years: Today, only 16 percent of the Detroit area’s African Americans live within the city limits.

    The big problem here is the emphasis on legal remedies and identity politics, rather than focusing on economic empowerment for Americans of all ethnicities. Perhaps as much as any senior government official, Holder argued in support of a quota regime, which at its logical extreme guarantees that even the children of black billionaires get preferences easier than a white kid brought up in an Appalachian hovel.

    Yet this is the same official who gently treated Wall Street malefactors—the very people in large part responsible for millions of foreclosures, including those that affected many blacks—to an extent that even the usually pro-Obama Rolling Stone openly wondered if he was a “Wall Street double agent.”

    The Obama years—following the previous disasters left over from the Bush regime—have been largely an economic disaster for black America. Child poverty is at the highest level in 20 years, and among African Americans it stands at a disastrous 38 percent, rising even during the recovery. After decades of gradual decline, concentrated urban poverty has grown rapidly over the past decade.

    Nor have African Americans benefited much from the recovery. White American unemployment is either about the same or below what it was before the recession levels, while the gap with African Americans has grown, in some states two and a half times that of the majority population. In Washington, D.C., the fundamental center of blue-state America, it’s five times as high.

    Far more helpful than expanding racial quotas would have been steps to put African Americans to work, particularly teenagers, who suffer nearly 30 percent unemployment rate, twice the national average. Many African Americans, for example, could have benefited more from a revival of the old Works Progress Administration, which would have put unemployed and underemployed people to work, than from any extension of affirmative action in universities. It’s hard to see how doling out “green” subsidies and breaks to Silicon Valley and Wall Street crony capitalists has been much of a benefit to African-American communities, or other underserved minorities.

    Nor is the overall Obama environmental program—particularly on energy—helpful to African-Americans who need jobs in basic industries and in some places, such as California, are stuck with high electricity bills. Harry Alford, head of the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce, accuses the EPA of “apparent indifference to the plight of low-income and minority households,” which he calls “inexcusable.”

    For Coates’s part, he claims several times in his book that America depends on the oppression of blacks—who, he claims, represent “the essential below,” an oppressed class of workers whose sweat and blood propel America’s economy. This may well have been true in the times when cotton was king and the South produced most of our exports. But for many states in 2015, the fact is that the low-wage labor force is now made up of workers largely from Latin America or Asia, who do the grueling work that blacks too often performed in the past.

    In a multi-racial society—where African Americans are in many places the second- or third-largest minority—black communities must focus on developing a competitive economic advantage. There are traditions here to draw on, from such disparate figures as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, who emphasized the need to be competitive with other peoples. The role models are not posturing Black Panthers but those who built institutions like Tuskegee Institute or even Howard University, Coates’s “Mecca.” Instead, Coates seems to prefer the theatrical racialism of the Panthers, whose legacy of violence left little in terms of tangible accomplishments, but who, like him, can count on the continued fawning approval of white intellectuals.

    Revolutionary posturing and racial redress may appeal to New York publishers, but economic success requires more than identity politics. Community members must loan to each other, start banks and nonprofits, and seek to dominate specific niches. In contrast, how much independent wealth or how many jobs have been created by the likes of Al Sharpton, whose career is largely one of extracting money from frightened corporate donors seeking anti-racist absolution?

    Ultimately the fate of black America is no different from the fate of the country as a whole: Both depend on economic progress more than political agitation. In a recent study I conducted with colleagues at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, we found that the cities where African Americans and other minorities did best—measured by employment, income, homeownership—were those that created the most jobs, particularly for mid-skilled workers, and kept costs, particularly for housing, low.

    These included primarily regions in the least “progressive” parts of the country, such as the Southeast. Since 2000, when the census registered the first increase in the region’s black population in more than a century, the “Great Migration” to the North has now reversed and is heading back South. In our survey, the South accounted for a remarkable 13 of the top 15 metro areas for African Americans. Blacks in Texas, for example, suffer an unemployment rate 50 percent lower than blacks in California. School segregation, notes the University of California’s Civil Rights Project, is greatest in the Northeast and urban areas and least pronounced in the Southeast and the suburbs. 

    ***

    Despite all the negative aspects of America’s tortured racial history, comparing today’s situation to that of the early 20th or even 19th centuries—most particularly in the South—is misleading and hyperbolic. America is no longer a black-white country and many newcomers, such as Asians, also suffered severe discrimination but have made enormous progress. Yet today Asians enjoy higher incomes and levels of education than whites. Increasingly they are no longer the subjects of affirmative action, but among its primary victims.

    Perhaps even more revealing has been the progress of African immigrants, who represent one of the fastest-growing parts of our newcomer population. Between 2000 and 2010, their numbers grew from 800,000 to more than 1.6 million, and since 2010 grew by another 100,000, expanding faster as an immigrant group than those from any part of the world. Like African Americans, they are moving increasingly to Southern states, notably Texas and Virginia. As a group, they have done well in terms of income, education, and entrepreneurship.

    To be sure, most Africans in America, like Latinos and Asians, do not carry with them the burdens of slavery, or as consistent a long history of legal discrimination. They came here by choice and this no doubt influenced their behavior. Yet the success of other minorities does suggest that lingering racism, so deeply entwined in the analysis of Coates and other neo-black nationalists, does not present an insurmountable barrier.

    Of course, there is no clear pattern of such discrimination by police against Asians, and no way to distinguish the experiences of African immigrants from other blacks in terms of crime. Yet each group each is physically distinct, and they have not allowed this fact to prevent their ascendency in American society. This is not to say that serious changes in policing are not necessary—there certainly are—but that the focus of ethnic uplift needs to be focused not on what “they” do to you, but what you can manage to accomplish yourself despite their depredations.

    America’s racial divide cannot be bridged anymore by demonizing the country than by ignoring the issue. America is not, and won’t be, entirely “color blind” any time soon. But that is somewhat beside the point—the key to economic success lies not in celebrating or exploiting victimhood but in people moving forward both as individuals and groups.

    Simply put, to suggest that America is as racist today as in 1865 or 1965 is absurd, given the reality of the Obama presidency or, more specifically, given the demonstrable change in national attitudes. In 1958, a mere 4 percent of the population endorsed racial intermarriage, while today that percentage has risen to 87 percent. These views are particularly deeply felt among millennials, who are themselves the most diverse generation in American history.

    In the long run, demanding an economy with sufficient opportunities represents the best way to address racial disparities. The new black nationalists may be feted by the intellectually chic, but in the end their strategies can only leave their people in a cul-de-sac of disappointment, anger, rage, and, ultimately, impotence.

    This piece first appeared in The Daily Beast.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Photo by flickr user ａｍｉｒ ａｚｉｚ

  • Tech Oligarchs Tightening Their Grip on Democrats

    The current state of the Republican Party may seem like a demolition derby, but there’s an equally fascinating, if less well-understood, conflict within the Democratic Party. In this case, the disruptive force is largely Silicon Valley, a natural oligarchy that now funds a party teetering toward populism and even socialism.

    The fundamental contradictions, as Karl Marx would have noted, lie in the collision of interests between a group that has come to epitomize self-consciously progressive megawealth and a mass base which is increasingly concerned about downward mobility. For all his occasional populist lapses, President Obama generally has embraced Silicon Valley as an intrinsic part of his political coalition. He has even enlisted several tech giants – including venture capitalist John Doerr, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla – in helping plan out Obama’s no-doubt lavish and highly political retirement.

    In contrast, Hillary Clinton is hardly the icon in the Valley and its San Francisco annex as are both her husband and President Obama. But her “technocratic liberalism,” albeit hard to pin down, and close ties to the financial oligarchs seems more congenial than the grass-roots populism identified with Bernie Sanders, her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    “They don’t like Sanders at all,” notes researcher Greg Ferenstein, who has been polling Internet company founders for an upcoming book. Sanders’ emphasis on income redistribution and protecting union privileges and pensions is hardly popular among the tech elite. “He’s an egalitarian liberal,” Ferenstein explains, “These people are tech liberals. Equality is a nonissue in Silicon Valley.”

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

  • An Improbable And Fragile Comeback: New Orleans 10 Years After Katrina

    In the fall of 2005, many saw in postdiluvial New Orleans another example of failed urbanization, a formerly great city that was broken beyond repair.Yet 10 years after a catastrophe that drove hundreds of thousands of its citizens away, the metro area has made an impressive comeback.

    New Orleans’ resurgence since Katrina has come courtesy of $71 billion in federal funds and the determination and verve of New Orleanians themselves, as documented by Tulane geographer Rich Campanella, who provided research and direction for this article. It also benefited from the generosity of thevolunteers who worked in the recovery efforts as well as that of neighboring cities, notably Houston, which housed thousands of evacuees. Many have now returned, joined by newcomers from around the country, determined to turn around the city. “A city,” notes urban historian Kevin Lynch, “is hard to kill,” and New Orleans is proving that assertion.

    New Orleans’ comeback reflects not only improved levees and disaster management planning but a break from the region’s famously corrupt politics. Author Joel Garreau once described the city as a “marvelous collection of sleaziness and peeling paint.”  Today the metro area, and Louisiana, is earning higher marks for efficiency and business friendliness.  In Forbes’ annual ranking of the Best States For Business, Louisiana has risen from dead last in 2006 to 29th place in 2014, while Chief Executive Magazine ranks the state as having the ninth best business climate in the country, up from 45th in 2008.

    Perhaps most compelling has been the improvement in the public schools, which were  once among the worst in the country. After the storm, most of the campuses were converted to charter schools, which now educate over 80% of the parish’s schoolchildren. New Orleans now outperforms not only the rest of the state but the nation in terms of high school graduation rates, which have risen to 73% in 2014 from 54% in 2004, and the percentage of students on grade level in grades 3-11 is at 68%, up from 25% in 2000.  As Allison Plyer, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, put it in 2013, “Greater New Orleans is in some ways rebuilding better than before.”

    Growth, But Also A Rebound In Poverty

    The improvements in governmental institutions have, along with federal aid, sparked something of a jobs boom in New Orleans. The metro area recovered all the jobs lost in the recession by 2012 while the nation remained 3% below its pre-recession level.  The economy has expanded into some new sectors, such as digital media, while there has been a strong recovery in longtime core sectors liketourism and shipping, with an expansion of the port. After lagging the country for a generation, post-Katrina New Orleans surprised everyone by outperforming it.

    But there are signs that New Orleans’ rate of growth is leveling out, as might be expected with the tailing off of federal recovery spending. In our annual ranking of the cities creating the most jobs, themetro area has dropped from 26th place in 2013 to 43rd. This slowdown could worsen the biggest challenge facing New Orleans: its historic legacy of poverty.

    Greater New Orleans and the central city in particular have among the nation’s highest poverty rates and inequality. Even before Katrina, the city had over 26,000 blighted properties, a number that doubled after the storm.

    As more evacuees have returned, poverty rates in the city and the metro area have resurged. Between 2007 and 2013 Orleans Parrish’s poverty rate rose from 21% to 27%, just about where it was in 1999. At the same time, the gap between white and African-American incomes and poverty rates remain well above the national averages.  Incarceration rates in Orleans parish are almost four times as high as the national average, and  the rest of the metro area also has incarceration rates considerably above the national average.  New Orleans’ murder rate fell to the lowest level last year since 1971, but it was still the ninth highest among major U.S. cities.

    A Demographic Resurgence

    Yet some new demographic trends offer hope.Critically, the region finally has begun to reverse a demographic decline spanning more than a generation in which the urban core steadily lost young, educated people and families to the suburban periphery and beyond.  

     The immediate aftermath of Katrina saw an influx of “YURPS,” or Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals — urbanists, environmentalists and social workers who headed South to work in the recovery efforts, in nonprofits and government programs, seeking to be part of something important.After that came a wave of well-educated professionals, who saw personal opportunity in the region’s rebounding economy. Campanella estimate this latter group at around 15,000 to 20,000strong.   Along with them, says Campanella, have come a fair number of artists, musicians, and creative types seeking to join in what they perceived to be an undiscovered bohemia in the lower faubourgs of New Orleans.

    The New Orleans metro area’s population of college graduates increased by roughly 44,000 from 2007 to 2012, a 25% increase, double the national average of 12.2% over that span.

    These educated newcomers are widely credited not only with helping rebuild New Orleans, but also sparking an increase in start-up companies well above the national pace and boosting the city’s economic diversification. Employment in the New Orleans area’s information sector — high-paying jobs in entertainment, games, software — grew 21.2% between 2007 and 2012, more than twice the national average, according to Praxis Strategy Group.

    Is Gentrification A Threat?

    This promising development, however, brings with it a set of problems, among them concern, particularly among African-Americans, about gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods. Many African-Americans, notes city employee Lydia Cutrer, have “trust issues after many broken promises, and feel like outsiders are taking over.” Or, as former New Orleanian Sherby Guillory, a health care worker and now a Houston resident put it acidly, “They want to build a shining city on a hill, but without the people.”

    A map of the city by Campanella (below) shows where this turnover in population is the most advanced. He observes that the newcomers are attracted to a particular type of neighborhood – places with distinctive, historic housing stock, and close to areas that have already gentrified, or that never economically declined, like the Garden District. The arc of gentrification spreads through uptown New Orleans, around Audubon Park and Tulane and Loyola universities, with a curving spout along the St. Charles Avenue/Magazine Street corridor through the French Quarter and into the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater. These areas have in many cases been incubators of New Orleans’heavily African-American music and food culture, and now are losing some of those old connections.

    Courtesy of Richard Campanella

    Courtesy of Richard Campanella

    As elsewhere gentrification is widely welcomed in the real estate and business communities, but also poses dilemmas, even for newcomers. Indeed gentrification threatens to undermine one of the very reasons young people are so attracted to New Orleans — its unique local culture. Boilerplate yuppie restaurants selling beet-filled ravioli is no substitute for fried okra and other traditional specialties.

     The Physical Challenge Of Rebuilding

    As Katrina demonstrated all too well, poverty in New Orleans is deeply intertwined with  the geographic challenges of the region. Most predominately African-American neighborhoods were located in the low-lying areas of the city, easily susceptible to flooding, while more affluent, usually white neighborhoods were on higher ground.  

    Some have suggested moving the region’s entire population to higher ground, but political and fiscal realities, plus social resistance to closing down heavily damaged, far-flung neighborhoods, paved the way for resettlement patterns that have not reduced human exposure to the hazard of surge flooding.

    But there’s no question that $14.5 billion in taxpayer dollars have gone to good use in keeping thosehazard at bay — at least for the next few decades. The Army Corps of Engineers’ new Hurricane Storm Surge Risk Reduction System — composed of heightened levees, floodwalls, surge barriers, gates, and pumps — now  protects the metropolis from storms that have a 1% change of occurring in any given year. That’s much less than the city needs, but it’s a lot more than it had before Katrina, and the Risk Reduction System (note that it’s no longer called a “flood protection system”) worked well during Hurricane Isaac in 2012.

    That’s the good news. The bad news, Campanella observes, is that the coastal wetlands beyond the system, starved of sediment and freshwater, continue to subside and erode at rapid paces in the face of rising sea levels and intruding sea water.

     A Difficult Road Ahead 

    Solving New Orleans’ geophysical problems is critical for long-term growth.  “We have to approach this as a win-win proposition,” says the Nature Conservancy’s Seth Blitch. “Everyone knows if we do nothing, it’s a lose-lose for everyone.”

     In the near term obstacles include the growing disparities of race and class, the fall in oil prices, and the strengthening dollar,which could slow the recent surge in capital investment into Louisiana’s industrial economy that has come on the heels of the surge in natural gas production.  

    While challenges abound, progress over the past 10 years is undeniable, and few  would have predicted the city would have come this far so soon in addressing its long-term challenges. “None of this would have happened without Katrina,” says Loyola theologian and philosopher Michael Cowan. “It changed forever what had been an inertial environment. After Katrina, it was like operating in zero gravity. Katrina broke the pattern.”  

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.com.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Photo montage by Richard Campanella.

  • Obama, the Left Downsizing the American Dream

    Barack Obama has always wanted to be a transformational president, and in this, at least, he has been true to his word. The question is what kind of America is being created, and what future does it offer the next generation.

    President Obama’s great accomplishment, arguably, has been to spur the evolution of a society that formerly rested on individual and familial aspiration, and turn it into a more regulated and centralized regime focused on broader social and environmental concerns. This tendency has been made much stronger as the number of Americans, according to Gallup, who feel there is “plenty of opportunity ahead” has dropped precipitously – from 80 percent in 1997 to barely 52 percent today.

    The shift away from the entrepreneurial model can also be seen in the constriction of loans to the small-business sector. Rates of business start-ups have fallen well below historical levels, and, for young people in particular, have hit the lowest levels in a quarter century. At the same time, the welfare state has expanded dramatically, to the point that nearly half of all Americans now get payments from the federal government.

    In sharp contrast to the Bill Clinton White House, which accepted limits on government largesse, the newly emboldened progressives, citing inequality, are calling for more wealth transfers to the poorer parts of society, often eschewing the notion that the recipients work to actually improve their lives. The ever-expanding regulatory state has powerful backing in the media, on campuses and among some corporations. There is even a role model: to become like Europe. As the New York Times’ Roger Cohen suggests, we reject our traditional individualist “excess” and embrace, instead, Continental levels of material modesty, social control and, of course, ever-higher taxes.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Barack Obama Photo by Bigstock.

  • The Changing Patterns Of U.S. Immigration: What The Presidential Field Should Know, And You

    Public concern about illegal immigration, particularly among older native-born Americans, as well as the the rising voting power of Latinos, all but guarantees that immigration is an issue that will remain at the forefront in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Nor is this merely a right-wing issue, as evidenced in the controversy over “sanctuary cities”; even the progressive Bernie Sanders has expressed concern that massive uncontrolled immigration could “make everybody in America poorer.”

    Yet despite the political heat, there is precious little dispassionate examination of exactly where immigrants are coming from, and where in the U.S. they are headed. To answer these questions, we turned to demographer Wendell Cox, who analyzed the immigration data between 2010 and 2013 for the 52 metropolitan statistical areas with populations over a million.

    One would think listening to the likes of Donald Trump that the country is awash with hordes of unwanted newcomers from Mexico and Central America. But sorry, Donald, the numbers show a changing picture in terms of who is coming, as well as the places that they choose to settle.

    Perhaps due to Mexico’s stronger economy and lower birthrates, Mexicans are no longer as dominant in the ranks of new immigrants as in the last decade. Mexico is still the single largest place of origin of new immigrants, but from 2010 through 2013, Mexican migration to the U.S. dropped 17.7% to an average of 140,266 a year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Meanwhile the inflow from Asia has increased: immigration from China is up 25.8% to 74,458 a year, and 10.7% from India to 65,336 a year. Asia now equals the Americas as a source of new immigrants, with each accounting for 40% of the annual total.

    European immigration, once the mainstay of growth for the U.S., fell 32% from 2010 to 2013 to an average of 91,000 a year, surpassed by the number of African immigrants, which has soared 29.6% to 98,000 annually.

    America’s new African population tends to be well-educated — considerably more than the national average: they are more than 60% more likely to have a graduate degree than other Americans. The vast majority are fluent in English and fully one-third hold management or professional level jobs. Not surprisingly, they are generally doing well in their new country. The places where they settle — notably New York, greater Washington, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth — will likely benefit from their presence in coming years.

    Just as Mexican and Asian immigration changed the ethnic geography of America, boosting economies and changing local culture, one can expect the Africans to do much the same in the coming years.

    The Largest And Fastest-Growing Immigrant Hubs

    The largest foreign-born communities in America reflect both size and longstanding immigrant populations. The leader remains the New York metropolitan statistical area, which was home in 2013 to 5.69 million people born elsewhere, following by Los Angeles with 4.3 million, Miami with 2.2 million, Chicago with 1.69 million and Houston with 1.39 million.

    But a look at the metro areas with the fastest-growing foreign-born communities tells a different story, one of growing migration into the more interior and central parts of the country. In many ways, this reflects the attraction of areas with relatively low housing prices and buoyant local economies. In contrast, the economies of many traditional immigrant hubs like Los Angeles and Chicago have not done so well, while places in coastal California and near New York suffer from high housing prices.

    Pittsburgh ranks first for recent pace of growth, with a 17.4% jump in its foreign-born population to 89,000 from 2010 through 2013, almost four times the 4.3% national rate over the same span. The western Pennsylvania city has built a robust economy based on energy, medical services and technology. Its housing prices are low — roughly a third those of the Bay Area based on median income — and the city is situated in an attractive setting with rolling hills. Pittsburgh is attracting both less educated immigrants from more expensive places, and also educated newcomers, notes demographer Jim Russell, some due to the strong universities in the area.

    Other surprising heartland destinations for immigrants include Indianapolis, whose foreign-born population expanded 14.3% in 2010-13 to 127,767, the second fastest rate of growth among the largest metro areas; Oklahoma City (third fastest, up 12.9% to 110,269); and Columbus, Ohio (up 9.8% to 139,562). Generally, these cities, like Pittsburgh, have strong economies, low housing prices and favorable state regulatory climates.

    The Move South Continues

    Until the 1970s, the South was an also-ran in immigration, with the exception of Florida. But today many of the fastest-growing foreign-born communities are in the South. These include still-recovering New Orleans, whose numbers of foreign born surged 12.4% in 2010-13 to 91,412, as well as Charlotte (up 11.2% to 225,673) and Austin (up 10.7% to 279,923).

    This  movement to the South in recent decades has changed the geography of the most immigrant rich parts of the country. Three of the 10 metro areas with the largest number of foreign born residents are in the south. Miami has some 2.26 million immigrant residents make  up with 38.8% of its population, the highest proportion of any large metro area in the country. The Houston metro area has the fifth biggest foreign-born population, Dallas-Ft. Worth, the eighth.

    The Texas metro areas, and their emerging southern counterparts, offer much of what the prospering Rust Belt cities also provide — strong broad-based economies and an affordable cost of living, particularly housing. Immigrants tend to prioritize home ownership and often work in thriving blue-collar fields such as manufacturing , logistics and construction.

    Coastal Growth Follows The Economy

    The Atlantic and Pacific coasts have long dominated immigration, but there appears to be some subtle changes in this picture. Most big coastal metro areas have logged steady but below average growth of their foreign-born populations, including New York, with a 3.67% increase. (Note that even with relatively slow growth in percentage terms, New York added a net 208,800 immigrants, more than the total foreign-born populations of any of the four fastest growers.) Some blue areas are doing much better in terms of growth rate, including Seattle (9th), Boston (11th) and San Jose (15th). All tend to be expensive, but have done very well in the recovery, largely due to technology-related growth.

    In contrast, some traditional immigrant hubs with weaker economies have lagged behind. Chicago’s foreign-born population increased 1.71%, less than half the national average. Los Angeles’ foreign born population ticked down 0.1% amid economic stagnation and rising housing prices. When it comes to immigration, it is the geography of opportunity that still prevails.

    U.S. Metropolitan Areas with the Highest Share of Immigrants

    No. 1: Miami, Fla.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 2.26 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 38.8%

    No. 2: San Jose, Calif.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 719,460

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 37.5%

    No. 3: Los Angeles, Calif.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 4.39 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 33.2%

    No. 4: San Francisco, Calif.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 1.34 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 29.7%

    No. 5: New York, NY-NJ-PA

    Number of Foreign-Born: 5.69 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 28.5%

    No. 6: San Diego, Calif.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 761,580

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 23.7%

    No. 7: Houston, Tex.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 1.42 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 22.6%

    No. 8: Washington, D.C.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 1.31 million

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 22.0%

    No. 9: Las Vegas, Nev.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 440,866

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 21.7%

    No. 10: Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

    Number of Foreign-Born: 932,747

    Percentage of Population, 2013: 21.3%

     

    This piece first appeared in 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 Orange County, CA.

    Photo by telwink

  • The Peril to Democrats of Left-Leaning Urban Centers

    Twenty years ago, America’s cities were making their initial move to regain some of their luster. This was largely due to the work of mayors who were middle-of-the-road pragmatists. Their ranks included Rudy Giuliani in New York, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, and, perhaps the best of the bunch, Houston’s Bob Lanier. Even liberal San Franciscans elected Frank Jordan, a moderate former police chief who was succeeded by the decidedly pragmatic Willie Brown.   

    In contrast, a cadre of modern mayors is minting a host of ideologically new urban politics that put cities at odds with millions of traditional urban Democrats. This trend is strongest on the coasts, but is also taking place in many heartland cities. Bill de Blasio is currently its most prominent practitioner, but left-wing pundit Harold Meyerson says approvingly that many cities are busily mapping “the future of liberalism” with such policies as  the $15-an-hour minimum wage, stricter EPA greenhouse gas regulations, and housing policies intended to force people out of lower density suburbs and into cities.

    For the Democrats, this urban ascendency holds some dangers. Despite all the constant claims of a massive “return to the city,” urban populations are growing no faster than those in suburbs, and, in the past few years, far slower than those of the hated exurbs. This means we won’t see much change in the foreseeable future in the current 70 to 80 percent of people in metropolitan America who live in suburbs and beyond. University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill  notes that the vast majority of residents of regions over 500,000—roughly 153 million people—live in the lower-density suburban places, while only 60 million live in core cities.  

    This leftward shift is marked, but it’s not indicative of any tide of public enthusiasm. One-party rule, as one might expect, does not galvanize voters. The turnout  in recent city elections has plummeted across the country, with turnouts 25 percent or even lower. In Los Angeles, the 2013 turnout that elected progressive Eric Garcetti was roughly one-third that in the city’s 1970 mayoral election.

    Bolstered by this narrow electorate, liberal pundits celebrate the fact that 27 of the largest U.S. cities voted Democratic in 2012, including “red” state municipalities such as Houston — but without counting the suburbs, where voter participation tends to be higher. An overly urban-based party faces the same fundamental challenges of a largely rural-oriented one—for example, the right-wing core of the GOP—in a country where most people live in neither environment.

    Demographic and Political Transformation of American Cities

    City dwellers have historically voted more liberally than their country or suburban cousins, but demographic trends are exacerbating this polarizing impulse. Simply put, the cities that could elect a Giuliani or a Riordan no longer exist. The centrist urban surge of the 1990s was both a reaction to the perceived failures of Democratic “blue” policies as well a reflection of the makeup of white-majority, middle-class neighborhoods in places like Brooklyn, Queens and the San Fernando Valley that featured healthy numbers of politically moderate “Reagan Democrats”—or Bill Clinton Democrats, circa 1992

    Since then, these communities have been largely supplanted by groups far more likely to embrace a more progressive political stance: racial minorities, hipsters, and upper-class sophisticates. These groups have swelled, and gotten much richer, in places like brownstone Brooklyn  or lakeside Chicago, while the number of inner city middle-class neighborhoods, as Brookings  has demonstrated, have declined, to 23 percent of the central city—half the level in 1970.

    This new urban configuration, notes the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark, tend to have different needs, and values, than the traditional middle class. Since their denizens are heavily single and childless, the poor state of city schools does not hold priority over the political power of the teachers unions. The key needs for the new population, Clark suggests, are good restaurants, shops and festivals, not child-friendly parks and family-oriented stores. Sometimes even crazy notions—such as allowing people to walk through the streets of San Francisco naked—are tolerated in a way no child-centric suburb would allow.

    These tendencies underscore as well the increasingly homogeneous political culture emerging in cities. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan took 31 percent of the vote in San Francisco, and 37 percent in New York. He actually carried Los Angeles. By 2012, a Republican with a more moderate history could not muster 20 percent of the vote in San Francisco. And Mitt Romney lost Los Angeles by more than a 2-1 margin, while garnering barely 20 percent in all New York boroughs besides Staten Island.

    Economic Hubris

    These changes also reflect a shift in the economic role of cities. Until the 1970s, cities were centers of production, distribution and administration. Then the industrial base of urban areas, and related jobs such as logistics, began moving away from the traditional manufacturing cities  to overseas, the suburbs or the Southeast.  In 1950 New York, according to economic historian Fernand Braudel, 1 million people worked in factories, mostly for small companies. Today the city’s industrial workforce now stands at a paltry 73,000, a dramatic decline from some 400,000 as recently as the early 1980s.

    A similar, if less spectacular, decline has taken place in what are still the two largest industrial metropolitan statistical areas, Chicago and Los Angeles. The one-time “City of Big Shoulders” and its environs had 461,600 industrial jobs in 2009. Today it has fewer than 300,000. Los Angeles, in a process that started with the end of the Cold War, has seen its once-diverse industrial base erode rapidly, from 900,000 just a decade ago to 364,000 today. 

    In some cities, a new economy has emerged, one that is largely transactional and oriented to media. The upshot is that denizens of the various social media, fashion and big data firms have little appreciation of the difficulties faced by those who build their products, create their energy and food. Unlike the factory or port economies of the past, the new “creative” economy has little meaningful interaction with the working class, even as it claims to speak for that group.

    This urban economy has created many of the most unequal places  in the country. At the top are the rich and super-affluent who have rediscovered the blessings of urbanity, followed by a large cadre of young and middle-aged professionals, many of them childless. Often ignored, except after sensationalized police shootings, is a vast impoverished class that has become ever-more concentrated in particular neighborhoods. During the first decade of the current millennium, neighborhoods with entrenchedurban poverty actually grew, increasing in numbers from 1,100 to 3,100. In population, they grew from 2 million to 4 million.Some 80 percent of all population growth in American cities, since 2000, notes demographer Wendell Cox, came from these poorer people, many of them recent immigrants.

    Such social imbalances are not, as is the favored term among the trendy, sustainable. We appear to be creating the conditions for a new wave of violent crime on a scale not seen since the early 1990s. Along with poverty, public disorderliness, gang activity, homelessness and homicides are on the rise in manyAmerican core cities, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New York. Racial tensions, particularly with the police, have worsened. So even as left-leaning politicians try to rein in police, recent IRS data in Chicago reveals, the middle class appears to once again be leaving for suburban and other locales. 

    Urbanity and Politics

    These social and economic changes inform the new politics of the Democratic Party. On social policy, the strong pro-gay marriage and abortion positions of the Democrats makes sense as cities have the largest percentages of both homosexuals and single, childless women. When the party had to worry about rural voters in South Dakota or West Virginia, this shift would have been more nuanced, and less rapid.

    Yet with those battles essentially won, the new urban politics are entering into greater conflict with the suburban mainstream, which tends to be socially moderate, and even more so with the resource-dependent economies of rural America. The environmental radicalism that has its roots in places like San Francisco and Seattle  now directly seeks to destroy whole parts of middle America’s energy economy.

    Such policies tend to radically raise energy costs. In California, the green energy regime has already driven roughly 1 million people, many of them Latinos in the state’s agricultural interior, into “energy poverty”—a status in which electricity costs one-tenth of their income. Not surprisingly, those leaving California, notes Trulia, increasingly are working class; their annual incomes in the range of $20,000 to $80,000 are simply not enough to make ends meet.

    Geography seems increasingly to determine politics. Ideas on climate policy that seem wonderfully enlightened in Manhattan or San Francisco—places far removed from the dirty realities of production—can provide a crushing blow to someone working in the Gulf Coast petro-chemical sector or in the Michigan communities dependent on auto manufacturing.

    It’s more than suburban or rural jobs that are on the urban designer chopping block. Density obsessed planners have adopted rules, already well advanced in my adopted home state of California, to essentially curb  much detested suburban sprawl and lure people back to the dense inner cities. The Obama administration is sympathetic to this agenda, and has adopted its own strategies to promote “back to the city” policies in the rest of the country as well.

    But as these cities go green for the rich and impressionable, they must find ways to subsidize the growing low-paid service class—gardeners, nannies, dog walkers, restaurant servers—that they depend on daily. This makes many wealthy cities, such as Seattle or San Francisco, hotbeds for such policies as a $15-an-hour minimum wage, as well as increased subsidies for housing and health care. In San Francisco, sadly, where the median price house (usually a smallish apartment) approaches  $1 million, a higher minimum wage won’t purchase a decent standard of living. In far more diverse and poorer Los Angeles, nearly half of all workers would be covered — with unforeseen impacts on many industries, including the largegarment industry.

    These radicalizing trends are likely to be seen as a threat to Democratic prospects next year, but instead will meet with broad acclaim among city-dominated progressive media. Then again, the columnists, reporters and academics who embrace the new urban politics have little sympathy or interest in preserving middle-class suburbs, much less vital small towns. If the Republicans possess the intelligence—always an open question—to realize that their opponents are actively trying to undermine how most Americans prefer to live, they might find an opportunity far greater than many suspect.

    This piece first appeared at Real Clear Politics.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Kevin Case from Bronx, NY, USA (Bill de Blasio) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Progressive Policies Drive More Into Poverty

    Across the nation, progressives increasingly look at California as a model state. This tendency has increased as climate change has emerged as the Democratic Party’s driving issue. To them, California’s recovery from a very tough recession is proof positive that you can impose ever greater regulation on everything from housing to electricity and still have a thriving economy.

    And to be sure, the state has finally recovered the jobs lost in the 2007-09 recession, largely a result of a boom in values of stocks and high- end real estate. Things, however, have not been so rosy in key blue-collar fields, such as construction, which is still more than 200,000 jobs below prerecession levels, or manufacturing, where the state has lost over one-third of its employment since 2000. Homelessness, which one would think should be in decline during a strong economy, is on the rise in Orange County and even more so in Los Angeles.

    The dirty secret here is that a large proportion of Californians, roughly one-third, or some 3.2 million households, as found by a recent United Way study, find it increasingly difficult to keep their heads above water. The United Way study, surprisingly, has drawn relatively little interest from a media that usually enjoys highlighting disparities, particularly racial gaps. Perhaps this reflects a need to maintain an illusion of blue state success. If Republican Pete Wilson were still governor, I suspect we might have heard much more about this study.

    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 Orange County, CA.

  • More Local Decisions Usurped by Ideological Regulators

    In hip, and even not-so-hip, circles, markets, restaurants and cultural festivals across the country, local is in. Many embrace this ideal as an economic development tool, an environmental win and a form of resistance to ever-greater centralized big business control.

    Yet when it comes to areas being able to choose their urban form and for people to cluster naturally – localism is now being constantly undermined by planners and their ideological allies, including some who superficially embrace the notion of localism.

    In order to pursue their social and perceived environmental objectives, they have placed particular onus on middle- and upper-class suburbs, whose great crime appears to be that they tend to be the places people settle if they have the means to do so.

    Central planning

    Nothing is more basic to the American identity than leaving basic control of daily life to local communities and, as much as is practical, to individuals. The rising new regulatory regime seeks decisively to change that equation. To be sure, there is a need for some degree of regulation, notably for basic health and public safety, as well as maintaining and expanding schools, parks, bikeways and tree-planting, things done best when supported by local voters.

    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 Orange County, CA.

    City Hall photo by Flickr user OZinOH.