New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin

  • America Needs The Texas Economy To Keep On Rolling

    In the last decade, Texas emerged as America’s new land of opportunity — if you will, America’s America. Since the start of the recession, the Lone Star State has been responsible for the majority of employment growth in the country. Between November  2007 and November 2014, the United States gained  a net 2.1 million jobs, with 1.2 million alone in Texas.

    Yet with the recent steep drop in oil prices, the Texas economy faces extreme headwinds that could even spark something of a downturn. A repeat of the 1980s oil bust isn’t likely, says Comerica Bank economist Robert Dye, but he expects much slower growth, particularly for formerly red-hot Houston, an easing of home prices and, likely, a slowdown of in-migration.

    Some blue state commentators might view Texas’ prospective decline as good news. Some, like Paul Krugman, have spent years arguing that the state’s success has little to do with its much-touted business-friendly climate of light regulation and low taxes, but rather, simply mass in-migration by people seeking cheaper housing. Schadenfreude is palpable in the writings of progressive journalists like the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, who recently crowed that falling energy prices may finally “snuff out” the detested “Texas miracle.”

    Such attitudes are short-sighted. It is unlikely that the American economy can sustain a healthy rate of growth without the kind of production-based strength that has powered Texas, as well as Ohio, North Dakota and Louisiana. De-industrializing states like California or New York may enjoy asset bubbles that benefit the wealthy and generate “knowledge workers” jobs for the well-educated (nationwide, professional and business services employment rose by 196,000 from October 2007 through October 2014), but they cannot do much to provide opportunities for the majority of the population.

    By their nature, industries like manufacturing, energy, and housing have been primary creators of opportunities for the middle and working classes. Up until now, energy  has been a consistent job-gainer since the recession, adding  199,000 positions from October 2007 through October 2014, says Dan Hamilton, an economist at California Lutheran University. Manufacturing has not recovered all the jobs lost in the recession, but last year it added 170,000 new positions through October. Construction, another sector that was hard-hit in the recession, grew by 213,000 jobs last year through October. The recovery of these industries has been critical to reducing unemployment and bringing the first glimmer of hope to many, particularly in the long suffering Great Lakes.

    Reducing the price of gas will not change the structure of the long-stagnant economies of the coastal states; job growth rates in these places have been meager for decades. Lower oil prices may help many families pay their bills in the short run. But there’s also pain in low prices for a country that was rapidly becoming an energy superpower, largely due to the efforts of Texans.

    Already the decline in the energy economy, which supports almost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs, is hurting manufacturers of steel, construction materials and drilling equipment, such as Caterpillar. Separately, the strengthening of the dollar promises harder times ahead for exporters  in the industrial sector, and greater price competition from abroad, amid weakening overseas demand. Factory activity is slowing, though key indicators like the ISM PMI are still signaling that output is expanding.

    Right now in Texas, of course, the pain is mounting in the energy sector. Growth seems certain to slow in places such as Houston, which Comerica’s Dye says is “ground zero in the down-draft.” Also vulnerable will be San Antonio, the major beneficiary of the nearby Eagle Ford shale. The impacts may be worst in West Texas oil patch towns like Midland, where energy is essentially the economy.

    Yet there remain reasons for optimism. Cheaper energy prices will be a boon for the petrochemical and refining industries, which are thick on the ground around Houston and other parts of the Gulf Coast. The Houston area is not seeing anything like the madcap office and housing construction that occurred during the oil boom of the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1986 the metro area added 71 million square feet of office space; including what is now being built, the area has added just 28 million square feet since 2010. Compared to the 1980s, the residential market is also relatively tight, with relatively little speculative building.

    The local and state economies have also become far more diversified. Houston is now the nation’s largest export hub. The city also is home to the Texas Medical Center, often described as the world’s largest. Dallas has become a major corporate hub and Austin is developing into a serious rival to Northern California’s tech sector.

    Texas needs to increase this diversification given that oil prices could remain low for quite a while, and even drop further after their recent recovery.

    This is not to deny that the state is facing hard times. Energy accounts for 411,372 jobs in Texas, about 3.2% of the statewide total, according to figures from Austin economist Brian Kelsey quoted in the Austin American-Statesman. If oil and gas industry earnings in Texas fall 20%, Kelsey estimates the state could lose half of those jobs and $13.5 billion in total earnings.

    Low prices also could also devastate the state budget, which is heavily reliant on energy industry revenues. A reduction in state spending could have damaging consequences in a place that has tended to prefer low taxes to investing in critical infrastructure, and is already struggling to accommodate break-neck growth. The only good news here is that slower population growth might mitigate some of the turndown in spending, if it indeed occurs.

    But in my mind, the biggest asset of Texas is Texans. Having spent a great deal a time there, the contrasts with my adopted home state of California are remarkable. No businessperson I spoke to in Houston or Dallas is even remotely contemplating a move elsewhere; Houstonians often brag about how they survived the ‘80s bust, wearing those hard times as a badge of honor.

    To be sure, Texans can be obnoxiously arrogant about their state, and have a peculiar talent for a kind of braggadocio that drives other Americans a bit crazy. But they are also our greatest regional asset, the one big state where America remains America, if only more so.

    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.

    Photo:
    “West Texas Pumpjack” by Eric Kounce TexasRaiser – Located south of Midland, Texas. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

  • Go East, Young Southern California Workers

    Do the middle class and working class have a future in the Southland? If they do, that future will be largely determined in the Inland Empire, the one corner of Southern California that seems able to accommodate large-scale growth in population and jobs. If Southern California’s economy is going to grow, it will need a strong Inland Empire.

    The calculation starts with the basics of the labor market. Simply put, Los Angeles and Orange counties mostly have become too expensive for many middle-skilled workers. The Riverside-San Bernardino area has emerged as a key labor supplier to the coastal counties, with upward of 15 percent to 25 percent of workers commuting to the coastal counties.

    In a new report recently released by National Core, a Rancho Cucamonga nonprofit that develops low-income housing, I and my colleagues, demographer Wendell Cox and analyst Mark Schill, explored the challenges facing the region. Although we found many reasons for concern, the region’s overall condition and its long-term prospects may be better than many might suspect.

    Population trends

    The region’s once-explosive growth has slowed considerably. From 1945-2010, the area’s population soared from 265,000 to 4.25 million. Already the nation’s 12th-largest metropolitan area, the I.E. could pass San Francisco and Boston by 2020 (unless faster-growing Phoenix does so first).

    Yet, contrary to expectations (and, perhaps, hope among anti-sprawl campaigners), the area continues to be a beacon for people from the rest of the region. There is a notion, widely expressed in the mainstream media, that Southern California’s growth will now focus more on the urban core around Downtown Los Angeles. Yet, as is often the case, what planners and pundits desire is not widely shared by the vast majority of people.

    People continue to vote for the Inland Empire – and other peripheral areas – with their feet. Census Bureau data indicates that, from 2007-11, nearly 35,000 more residents moved from Los Angeles County to the Inland Empire than moved in the other direction. There was also a net movement of more than 9,000 from Orange County and more than 4,000 net migration from San Diego County.

    Several long-standing demographic trends favor a continued shift to the Inland region, according to Cox and Schill. Immigrants and their offspring may prove the critical factor. Over the past decade, the Inland region dramatically increased its population of foreign-born residents, more than three times the number and at nearly 18 times the rate of the coastal counties.

    The influx of immigrants and their children is largely responsible for the region’s relatively young population, compared with the rest of Southern California. As recently as 2000, the proportion of population ages 5-14 in Los Angeles and Orange counties stood at 16 percent, the sixth-highest level among the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas. Thirteen years later, that proportion had dropped to 12.8 percent, 33rd among the 52 largest metropolitan areas. In terms of a dropping share of youngsters, the area experienced a 20 percent reduction, the largest in the nation.

    In contrast, the Inland Empire remains a bastion of familialism, with 15.3 percent of the population aged 5-14, among the highest levels in the nation. This follows a general pattern; according to recent analysis of Census data, high-cost areas tend to repel families. Of the nation’s most expensive areas, such as the Bay Area, New York and Boston, all tend to have well below national norms in terms of families among their populations.

    Perhaps more surprising, younger educated workers also are heading to the region. In fact, from 2011-13, according to American Community Survey data, Riverside-San Bernardino witnessed the 12th-largest increase among the 52 major metro areas in the share of college-educated residents ages 25-34. No major California metro area, including Silicon Valley, could match it. From 2000-13, the Inland region experienced a 91 percent jump in population with bachelor or higher degrees, just less than twice the increase for either Orange or Los Angeles counties.

    Overall, the I.E. has become something of a growth area for millennials – basically, adults ages 20-29. San Bernardino-Riverside ranked second among 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.

    Economic Restructuring

    These trends also may reflect improving prospects for the region’s economic recovery. The area remains some 30,000 jobs below its 2007 level, notes California Lutheran University economist Dan Hamilton, but is now growing faster than the rest of the Southland. The region created jobs over the past year at a 2.2 percent rate, well above the 2.0 percent increase in Orange County and almost twice that of L.A.’s 1.3 percent. Foreclosures have diminished to the lowest levels since 2007 and appear back to something resembling normalcy.

    One important source of new employment is grass-roots entrepreneurship. Overall, the Inland Empire accounted for a large proportion of the new businesses created statewide from 2012-13 – despite hosting only 7.4 percent of the total businesses in California. A recent report by Beacon Economics suggested that growth will accelerate over the next five years.

    At the same time, some of the core industries – such as manufacturing and warehousing – have shown signs of recovery. Industrial vacancy rates have fallen from nearly 12 percent in 2009 to roughly half that level today.

    Much of the growth has been for “middle-skilled jobs,” paying $14 to $21 per hour, including positions in medical services, trucking and customer service. Overall, according to one recent survey, the Inland Empire ranked 13th among the nation’s large metropolitan areas in creating such positions. These jobs, notes economist John Husing, are critical to a region where almost half the workforce has a high school education or less.

    Even the housing sector, the driver of the post-crash employment decline, has improved considerably. Today, the Inland Empire is experiencing a far greater increase in construction permits than either Los Angeles or Orange counties. This has also helped boost construction employment, although not to anything like the levels experienced a decade before. Construction employment, although up recently, still totals barely half the people it did in 2006.

    Some, such as University of Redlands economist Johannes Moenius, express concern that important industries, like warehousing and manufacturing, are increasingly using part-time workers. Positions paying $15,000 to $30,000 annually constitute nearly half of all new jobs.

    The ambiguity in the recovery is reflected in a recent survey by Cal State San Bernardino, which found the percentage of those saying the economy was excellent or good had almost doubled since 2010, from 9 percent to 17 percent, but this was considerably below the 40-plus percent seen before the crash.

    The Path Ahead

    The fate of the Inland Empire remains in the balance. The recovery of the region depends largely on continued widespread population growth, largely stimulated by the production of affordable housing. Yet, at the same time, state regulations, spurred on by the environmental lobby, which seeks to slow, or even eliminate, single-family construction, threaten to force up prices and drive young families outside the state.

    Many other core industries of the area – such as warehousing and manufacturing – also face growing regulatory barriers. High taxes and energy costs originating from Sacramento are particularly difficult for industries that require power to operate. Southern California Edison’s rates, for example, are almost twice those found in Salt Lake City, Seattle or Albuquerque.

    Some may celebrate these policies that encourage people to say “good riddance” to a region too sprawling and insufficiently cultured. Yet, it’s hard to see how Southern California can continue to add workers – notably, younger middle-class families – without a vibrant Inland Empire. It remains the one Southern California region with the land, and the housing cost structure, to accommodate much of the hard-pressed middle class. Without growth inland, Southern California will be largely relegated to a torpid economy and rapidly aging demographics, a fate that would compromise the aspirations of future generations.

    This piece originally appeared in 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.

  • America A House Divided Over Race

    The election of Barack Obama six years ago was hailed as a breakthrough both for minorities, particularly African Americans, and for his being the first “city guy” elected president in recent history. Both blacks and urbanistas got one of their “own” in power, and there were hopes that race relations and urban fortunes would improve at a rapid pace.

    Instead, the recent controversies over police killings of African American men have revealed a shocking deterioration of race relations not seen in a generation. Since the racial euphoria that accompanied the president’s election, views of race relations held by blacks and whites, according to Pew, have become decidedly less optimistic. Nearly half of whites and roughly two in five blacks, according to a recent Politico poll, say race relations have worsened under Obama. Only 4 percent of whites and 13 percent of African Americans thought relations had improved. Another recent survey, this one by Bloomberg, finds 53 percent of Americans opining that race relations have declined under Obama.

    For the most part, the current racial discord has been traced largely to the long, uneasy relationship between minorities, notably African Americans, and the police. The disparity in perceptions between whites and blacks are most notable here, says Pew, with 70 percent of African Americans, but barely 25 percent of whites, disputing that police do a good job treating the races “equally.”

    Here’s the real tragedy: Some 50 years after the passage of sweeping nationwide civil rights legislation, the institutionalization of affirmative action and billions poured into addressing urban poverty, many African American youth remain well outside the mainstream, unmoored to the economy and far too liable to get into confrontations with law enforcement. This is clearly connected with such factors as the preponderance among African Americans of 70 percent single-female-headed households, nearly half of which are poor.

    Then, there are the murder statistics. Columnist Walter Williams has noted that, out of roughly 7,000 blacks murdered last year, 94 percent were killed by another black person. Half of all homicide victims are black, while blacks account for barely 13 percent of the nation’s population. Williams calculates that the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, more than 22 times higher.

    Pervasive poverty

    Not surprisingly, these sad numbers are also reflected in economic statistics. African American unemployment remains twice that of whites. The black middle class, so responsible for, and understandably proud of, Obama’s elevation, according to the Urban League, in the past decade has conceded many of the gains made over the prior 30 years.

    Despite the hoopla about urban revival, a recent study reveals that entrenched urban poverty – places where 30 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line – actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, from 1,100 to 3,100 neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the population of these areas doubled, to 4 million. “This growing concentration of poverty,” notes researchers Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, “is the biggest problem confronting American cities.”

    These trends dwarf the oft-celebrated movement of young professionals and empty-nesters into the urban core. Indeed, notes demographer Wendell Cox, roughly 80 percent of population growth in cities during 2000-10 was from poor people. Not surprisingly, many African Americans have moved to suburbs, where a majority of them now live, according to the Census Bureau.

    Also not surprising is that poverty and conflicts with law enforcement are now found in some suburban areas, as was clear in the case of Ferguson, Mo. Yet, poverty in the core cities remains considerably worse than in the suburbs. Despite trite talk about “suburban ghettos,” the poverty rate in the suburbs remains roughly half that of urban centers (as of 2010, 20.9 percent in core compared with 11.4 percent in the suburbs).

    Much the same can be said about crime. The overall violent-crime rate in urban cores, although down from 2001, remains almost four times higher than in the suburbs, according to FBI data. Many of the most crime-ravaged cities are heavily African American: Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Cleveland and Atlanta.

    Big-city class chasms

    The fundamental preconditions for increased racial tensions can be seen in the growing class chasm within cities, particularly gentrifying ones. In New York City, the epicenter of the current debate over policing, good times on Wall Street and among the glitterati has not trickled down into the ghetto. The majority of people in hip Brooklyn, notes researcher Daniel Hertz, have seen their incomes drop over the past decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, a cohort overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Over the entire borough, he points out, residential patterns have become more segregated, and Brooklyn now is second, only to Milwaukee, in terms of racial separation.

    In Chicago, like most cities, areas of concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years. Chicago is widely hailed as the progenitor of Alan Ehrenhalt’s “great inversion,” which predicts a continuing shift of rich people into cities while the poor exit to the dreary suburban wasteland. But the reality is far more complicated, as employment in Chicago has dropped below 2001 levels, and middle-class neighborhoods have continually shrunk.

    Essentially, amidst renewal, there is greater bifurcation. Prosperous and greatly hyped “super-global Chicago,” notes urban analyst Pete Saunders, enjoys income and education levels well above those of the suburban areas. Most Chicagoans, however, live in “rust belt Chicago,” with education and income levels well below suburban levels. Rather than simply bifurcated, Saunders suggests, “Chicago may be better understood in thirds – one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.”

    The tensions exacerbated by this growing divide are widely evident. Violence is slowly shifting from Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods and into some of the city’s nicest redoubts; Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 17-year-old son was mugged outside his home. Chicago’s violent-crime rate remains far higher than that of New York or Los Angeles; by some estimates, the city is more dangerous now than during the Al Capone era during Prohibition.

    Chicago’s predicament – with a slight increase in murders in 2014 – could prove a harbinger. In some big cities, like Chicago, New York and Atlanta, populations entrenched in poverty will likely remain for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine East New York or the westside of Chicago, much of south Atlanta, or Watts, for that matter, gentrifying anytime soon.

    Indeed, Los Angeles, which also experienced a big drop in violent crime over the past decade, now expects to report a 7 percent increase this past year. Late last month, L.A. also experienced a possible attempted assassination of police officers, although the assailants, thankfully, missed.

    In some cities, usually smaller and whiter to start with, we are seeing a pattern of what amounts to “ethnic cleansing,” as increasingly isolated communities get driven out of their enclaves by relentlessly rising rents and the loss of blue-collar jobs.

    This process is particularly notable in San Francisco, where the black population already is roughly half what it was in 1970. In the nation’s whitest major city – Portland, Ore. – African Americans are being pushed out of the urban core by gentrification, partly supported by city funding. Similar phenomena can be seen in Seattle and Boston where longtime black communities faced near extinction.

    Under these circumstances, a degree of racial animus seems inevitable. Some Brooklyn residents, reports theDaily Beast,even justified the targeting of law enforcement officers. For their part, many NYPD officers feel betrayed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sympathetic comments about anti-police demonstrations. Some officers have expressed their distaste, inappropriately, by being rude to the mayor and staging slowdowns in arrests.

    These racial tensions already are seeping into the political realm. African Americans in New York supported de Blasio’s policing strategy, 2-1, while a strong majority of whites opposed his stance.

    The resurgence in racial animus remains arguably the biggest surprise – and one of the greatest failures – not only of Obama, but of our society. In this respect, neither conservative attempts to blame increased racial discord on the president and, now, attempts by his progressive claque to absolve him of any responsibility, really address the more serious issues behind the widening of the racial divide. Cities and communities, divided against themselves by race and class, cannot thrive in the long run, no matter how many publicists and pundits proclaim the battle for urban America already has been won.

    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. 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.

  • U.S. Economy Needs Hardhats Not Nerds

    The blue team may have lost the political battle last year, but with the rapid fall of oil and commodity prices, they have temporarily gained the upper hand economically. Simultaneously, conditions have become more problematical for those interior states, notably Texas and North Dakota, that have benefited from the fossil fuel energy boom. And if the Obama administration gets its way, they are about to get tougher.

    This can be seen in a series of actions, including new regulations from the EPAand the likely veto by the president of the Keystone pipeline, that will further slow the one sector of the economy that has been generating high-paid, blue collar employment. At the same time, housing continues to suffer, as incomes for the vast majority of the middle class have failed to recover from the 2008 crash.

    Manufacturing, which had been gaining strength, also now faces its own challenges, in large part due to the soaring U.S. dollar, which makes exports more expensive. Amidst weakening demand in the rest of the world, many internationally-oriented firms such as United Technologies and IBM forecast slower sales. Low prices for oil and other commodities also threatens the resurgence of mainstream manufacturers such as Caterpillar, for whom the energy and metals boom has produced a surge in demand for their products.

    Left largely unscathed, for now, have been the other, less tangible sectors of the economy, notably information technology, including media, and the financial sector, as well as health services. In sharp contrast to manufacturing, energy, and home-building, all of these sectors except health care are clustered in the high-cost, blue state economies along the West Coast and the Northeast. As long as the Fed continues to keep interest rates very low, and maintains its bond-buying binge, these largely ephemeral industries seem poised to appear ever more ascendant. No surprise then that one predictably Obama-friendly writer called the current economy “awesome” despite weak income growth and high levels of disengagement by the working class in the economy. If Wall Street and Silicon Valley are booming, what else can be wrong?

    Should the whole economy become more bluish?

    One consistent theme of blue-state pundits, such as Richard Florida, is that blue states and cities “are pioneering the new economic order that will determine our future.” In this assessment, the red states depend on an economy based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl. By this logic, growing food for mass market consumers, building houses for the middle class, making cars, drilling for oil and gas—all things that occur in the red state backwaters—are intrinsically less important than the ideas of nerds of Silicon Valley, the financial engineers of Wall Street, and their scattered offspring around the country.

    But here’s a little problem: these industries do not provide anything like the benefits that more traditional industries—manufacturing, energy, housing—give to the middle and working classes. In fact, since 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the information and technology sectors have lost more than 337,000 jobs, in part as traditional media jobs get swallowed by the Internet. Even last year, which may well prove the height of the current boom, the information and technology industry created a net 2,000 jobs. And while social and on-line media may be expanding, having added 5,000 jobs over the last decade, traditional media lost ten times as many positions, according to Pew.

    In contrast, energy has been a consistent job-gainer, adding more than 200,000 jobs during the same decade. And while manufacturing lost net jobs since 2007, it has been on a roll, last year adding more than 170,000 new positions. Construction, another sector hard hit in the recession, added 213,000 positions last year. The recovery of these industries has been critical to reducing unemployment and bringing the first glimmer of hope to many, particularly in the long suffering Great Lakes region.

    These tangible industries seem to be largely irrelevant to deep blue economies. A prospective decline of energy jobs, for example, does not hurt places like California or New York, which depend heavily on other regions to do the dirty work. Overall, for example, California, despite its massive energy reserves, created merely 15,000 jobs since 2007, barely one-tenth as many as in Texas. Energy employment in key blue cities such as New York and San Francisco has remained stagnant, and actually declined in Boston.

    Similarly, a possible slowdown in manufacturing—in part due to an inflated dollar, depressed international demand, and the loss of industrial jobs tied to energy—will affect different regions in varying degrees. Since 2009, the manufacturing renaissance has been strongly felt in traditional hubs like Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Louisville, as well as energy-charged places such as Houston and Oklahoma City. All saw manufacturing growth of 10 percent or more. Meanwhile New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston all lost industrial positions.

    Finally, there remains the housing sector, a prime employer of blue collar workers and the prime source of asset accumulation for middle class families. Sparked by migration and income growth, construction growth has been generally stronger in Texas cities but far more sluggish in New York and California, where slower population growth and highly restrictive planning rules make it much tougher to build affordable homes or new communities. Last year at the height of the energy boom, Houston alone built more single family homes than the entire state of California.

    If you think inequality is bad now …

    The new ephemera-based economy thrills those who celebrate a brave new world led by intrepid tech oligarchs and Wall Street money-men. The oligarchs in these industries have gotten much, much richer during the current recovery, not only through stocks and IPOs, but also from ultra-inflated real estate in select regional areas, particularly New York City and coastal California. As economist George Stiglitz has noted, such inflation on land costs has been as pervasive an effect of Fed policy as anything else.

    Even in Houston, some academics hail the impending “collapse of the oil industrial economy,” even as they urge city leaders to compete with places like San Francisco for the much ballyhooed “creative class.” Yet University of Houston economist Bill Gilmer notes that low energy prices are driving tens of billions of new investment at the port and on the industrial east side of the city. This growth, he suggests, may help offset some of the inevitable losses in the more white collar side of the energy complex.

    The emergence of a new ephemera-led economy bodes very poorly for most Americans, and not just Texans or residents of North Dakota. The deindustrialized ephemera-dominated economy of Brooklyn, for example, has made some rich, but overall incomes have dropped over the last decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Similar patterns of increased racial segregation and middle class flight can be found in other post-industrial cities, including one-time powerhouse Chicago, where areas of  concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years.

    Nowhere is this clearer than in ephemera central: California. Once a manufacturing juggernaut and a beacon of middle class opportunity, the Golden States now suffers the worst level of poverty in the country. While Silicon Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco, have flourished, most of the state—from Los Angeles to the Inland regions—have done poorly, with unemployment rates 25 percent or higher than the national average. The ultra-“progressive” city now suffers the most accelerated increase in inequality in the country.

    Similar trends have also transformed Silicon Valley, once a powerful manufacturing, product-producing center. As the blue collar and much of older middle management jobs have left, either for overseas or places like Texas or Utah, the Valley has lost much of its once egalitarian allure. San Jose, for example, has long been home to the nation’s largest homeless encampment. Black and Hispanic incomes in the Valley, notes Joint Venture Silicon Valley, have actually declined amidst the boom, as manufacturing and middle management jobs have disappeared, while many tech jobs are taken by predominately white and Asian younger workers, many of them imported “techno-coolies.”

    In contrast, the recoveries in the middle part of the country have been, to date, more egalitarian, with incomes rising quickly among a broader number of workers. At the same time, minority incomes in cities such as Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Phoenix tend be far higher, when compared to the incomes of Anglos, than they do in places like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. In these opportunity cities, minority homeownership—a clear demarcation of middle income aspiration—is often twice as high as it is in the epicenters of the ephemeral economy.

    To succeed in the future, America needs to run on all cylinders.

    The cheerleaders of the ephemeral economy often point out that they represent the technological future of the country, and concern themselves little with the competitive position of the “production” economy—whether energy, agriculture, or manufacturing. They also seek to force the middle class into ever denser development, something not exactly aspirational for most people.

    Nor is the current ephemera the key to new productivity growth. Social media may be fun, but it is not making America more competitive or particularly more productive (PDF). Yet there has been strong innovation in “production” sectors such as manufacturing, which alone accounts for roughly half (PDF) of all U.S. research and development.

    What is frequently missed is that engineering covers a lot of different skills. To be sure the young programmers and digital artists are important contributors to the national economy. But so too are the many more engineers who work in more mundane fields such as geology, chemical, and civil engineering. Houston, for example, ranks second (PDF) behind San Jose in percentage of engineers in the workforce, followed by such unlikely areas as Dayton and Wichita. New York, on the other hand, has among the lowest percentage of engineers of major metropolitan areas.

    To be sure, an aerospace engineer in Wichita is not likely to seem as glamorous as the youthful, urbanista app-developers so lovingly portrayed in the media. Yet these engineers are precisely the people, along with skilled workers, who keep the lights on, planes flying and cars going, and who put most of the food on people’s tables.

    The dissonance between reality and perception is most pronounced in California. The state brags much about the state’s renewable sector to the ever gullible media. But in reality high subsidized solar and wind account for barely 10 percent ofelectrical production, with natural gas and coal, now mostly imported from points east, making up the vast majority. In terms of transportation fuels, the state has a96 percent dependence on fossil fuels, again large imported, despite the state’s vast reserves. Los Angeles, although literally sitting on oil, depends for 40 percent of its electricity on coal-fired power from the Intermountain West.

    Equally critical, the now threatened resurgence of the industrial and energy sectors could reverse trends that have done more to strengthen the U.S. geopolitical situation than anything else in recent decades. Foreign dictators can easily restrict a Google, Facebook, or Twitter, or create locally-based alternatives; for all its self-importance, social media has posed no mortal danger to authoritarian countries. In contrast, the energy revolution has undermined some of the world’s most venal and dangerous regimes, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Russia and Venezuela.

    In no way do I suggest we don’t need the ephemeral sectors. Media, social and otherwise, remain important parts of the American economy, and testify to the country’s innovative and cultural edge. But these industries simply cannot drive broader based economic growth and opportunity. Part of the problem lies in the nature of these industries, centered largely in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, which require little in terms of blue collar workers. Another prime issue is that these areas can only import so many people from the rest of country due to extraordinary high housing costs.

    Under current circumstances, the centers of the ephemeral economy such as New York or San Francisco cannot accommodate large numbers of upwardly mobile people, particularly families. These, for better or worse, have been vast gated communities that are too expensive, and too economically narrow, to accommodate most people, except those with either inherited money or elite educations. This is why Texas—which has created roughly eight times as many jobs as California since 2007 and has accounted for nearly one-third of all GDP growth since the crash—remains a beacon of opportunity, and the preferred place for migrants, a slot that used to belong to the Golden State.

    As a country, we stand at the verge of a historical opportunity to assure U.S. preeminence by melding our resource/industrial economy with a tech-related economy. Our strength in ephemera can be melded with the power of a resource and industrial economy. In the process, we can choose widespread and distributed prosperity or accept a society with a few pockets of wealth—largely in expensive urban centers—surrounded by a downwardly mobile country.

    The good news is America—alone among the world’s largest economies—has demonstrated it can master both the ephemeral and tangible economies. To thrive we need to have respect not for one, but for both.

    This piece first appeared at 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 Los Angeles, CA.

  • Obama Pushes the Pace of Policy

    With his recent series of executive actions on U.S. policies ranging from climate to energy, immigration and, most recently, Cuba, Barack Obama is working to fulfill his long-held dream of being a “transformative” president. By decisively circumventing Congress with bold decrees, the president has won the plaudits of his core media supporters, with predictable “amens” from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post and from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who described him as a more “transformative” president than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.

    From his earliest days in office, Barack Obama made no secret of his desire to be a “transformational” president. And in Washington’s alternate reality, many in the media still revere Obama, a president with approval numbers in the low 40s, according to RealClearPolitics.com. One giddy CNN commentator even compared our chief executive to “Superman.” Obama insiders have little doubt about his greatness. Former campaign manager Jim Messina calls him not only “transformative” but among the “all-time great presidents.”

    Yet, despite these huzzahs, it seems that voters are less than impressed. One reason: Americans may want some change – and may even be willing to sacrifice some to achieve it – but appear less enthusiastic about being “transformed.” They seem more comfortable with change done through the evolutionary swamp of congressional politics, reaching consensus on important issues and being presidential the old-fashioned way.

    The most recent transformational president, ironically, was George W. Bush. In his case, this was less a matter of ambition (or even narcissism) than a reaction to the events of 9/ll. Bush’s transformational reordering of American foreign and military policy left us with a persistent mess that his successor, and, likely, Obama’s successors, will have to clean up.

    Foreign Policy

    Likewise, it’s hard to see this president’s “transformative” foreign policy ideas as particularly successful, or even well-considered. In many ways, notes Harvard’s Joseph Nye, our best foreign-policy presidents – such as George H.W. Bush or Dwight Eisenhower – are “transactional,” while rejecting what he calls “the cult of transformative leadership” pursued by such idealists as Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

    When he took office nearly six years ago, Obama was determined to “reach out” to the Islamic world. Given his own multicultural background, not to mention his famously silvered tongue, Obama seemed sure to turn the Islamic world into our ally. But, as is so often the case, in reality, the U.S. has become steadily less popular since his election. It appears that Muslims have been no more mollified by Obama’s words, not to mention his drones, than by George W. Bush’s bolder bombs-away interventions.

    Another exercise in transformational futility has been Obama’s much-hyped “pivot to Asia.” He’s ended up pivoting in circles while China begins to construct its own version of wartime Japan’s imperialist “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” As China’s military capacities grow, the president is stripping down, something that terrifies our friends in East Asia.

    Climate Change

    Perhaps no issue has less resonance with ordinary Americans than climate change, ranking consistently at the bottom of voters’ expressed concerns. In survey after survey, economic issues such as unemployment, the economy and the federal budget resonate with voters, while climate change barely registers.

    But among those closest to Obama, and to the gentry liberals who are his primary funders, there is no issue more “transformational” than climate change. After all, only a transformative president, like a modern-day Moses, can keep the waters from rising over us as we flee the evil pharaohs of the fossil fuel industry.

    This is not to say climate is not a concern, even if you are skeptical about some advocates’ more hysterical claims. It is probably a good idea to address carbon emissions, if for no other reason than pollution is bad and that the scientific “consensus,” although far from unimpeachable, is strong enough to suggest taking steps not to overheat the planet. So the question is how to best address this issue, and at what cost.

    Unfortunately, the president’s transformational addiction has led to some poor, and likely counterproductive, decisions. This actually hurts the green cause, as most Americans, according to a recent study appearing in the journal Nature Climate Change, are more interested in adapting to climate change than radically reorienting their lifestyles to prevent it. They may fear a changing climate, but not so much that they want to disrupt their lives in the kind of radical ways suggested by many environmental activists and their business backers.

    One thing Americans are not enthusiastic about is – in the name of climate change – sending more of their jobs to developing countries. Obama’s recent much-ballyhooed pact with China on emissions allows the world’s fastest-growing polluter, with a terrible record on this issue, to reject scrutiny of its efforts to limit carbon emissions until 2030. India, another rising greenhouse emitter, refuses even to set a similarly bogus deadline.

    This all leaves America, and its even more clueless European allies, slouching toward the nirvana of an energy base dependent on “renewables.” In Germany, and here in California, radical steps have raised energy prices and pushed industries to seek out places with less-Draconian regulations. Sadly, neither greens nor the administration has embraced the more evolutionary approach: substituting natural gas for far-dirtier coal. This switch has already helped the U.S. reduce its carbon emissions faster than any major country, far more, indeed, than the self-righteous Europeans, whose expensive and inefficient green policies have left them burning more coal.

    Immigration

    As with climate change and foreign policy, good intentions no doubt underpinned the president’s recent orders affecting undocumented U.S. residents. But the way the measure was carried out – after the election, and without the support of Congress – all but guarantees deeper conflict over immigration policy in the coming years. Although most Americans support some form of legalization, most, including many Latinos, also opposed using executive authority to do so.

    Getting legislation through Congress may well be painful, and slow, but there is something worthwhile in achieving broad support within both parties. This is particularly true when the opposition, as it does now, has a near-record degree of control of the House and a solid majority in the incoming Senate. The Reagan 1986 amnesty plan had its critics, but it allowed this critical issue to be handled in a bipartisan way. Reagan, clearly a more transformative president than either George W. Bush or Obama, still followed the basics of the Constitution, and acknowledged the importance of getting broad congressional buy-in on his policies.

    But, given the imperial manner that Obama employed, immigration policy can be dismissed by some as little more than an effort to expand big government’s – and the Democratic Party’s – client base into the next century. One can argue that this strategy is, indeed, transformational, but in a way that threatens to exacerbate ethnic tensions and worsen the economic plight of citizens – Latino and otherwise – already in the country.

    Back to Evolution

    The president’s bids, without popular or congressional support, to achieve transformation by decree represents a dangerous turn for the entire political process. This is unhealthy in the long term, not only for Republicans and conservatives, but, down the road, likely for liberals as well. Liberals like law professor Jonathan Turley believe his fellow liberals may someday “rue” their support for Obama’s “uber-presidency” when a conservative president, citing the Obama precedent, also rules by decree.

    The overall growth of transformational politics endangers the country. If conservatives sometimes overreach in terms of military affairs or regulations in the bedroom, modern transformational liberalism sees itself as blessed by the gods of science, while, of course, ignoring those things – such as the efficacy of natural gas or the need for GMO foods – that are not compatible with their worldview. These polarized positions leave as many as three in five voters, according to Gallup, wishing for a third party.

    A healthy political system, of course, changes, but needs to do so – outside of a major emergency – at a pace that the population can absorb. Every significant change in recent years – from growing legalization of marijuana and gay marriage to bold experiments in educational reform – has come, as it should, from states and localities. This allows change to occur congruent with the values of specific locales, and go national only when this stance appeals to the majority of legislators and voters.

    As we know from nature, evolution is often messy, and sometimes how it works is surprising. But, with patience and time, natural systems, like political ones, tend to be able to rebalance and adapt. By jettisoning evolution for transformation, President Obama, following a predecessor seen by many as inept, has made this adjustment process far more difficult and contentious than it would otherwise be.

    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.

    Barack Obama photo by Bigstock.

  • The Cities Where African-Americans Are Doing The Best Economically

    The U.S. may have its first black president, but these have not been the best of times for African-Americans. Recent shootings of unarmed black teenagers and the murder of two New York City police officers have inflamed racial tensions. A Bloomberg poll in December found that 53% of respondents believed that race relations have declined since Obama was elected in 2008.

    Even if the results were not skewed by the immediate, impassioned responses to the recent tragedies, the persistent economic gap between whites and blacks is a more serious and deep-rooted problem. The unemployment rate for African-Americans stood at 10.4% in December, more than twice that of whites, as it has been formost of the past 40 years.

    Blacks’ real median household income ticked up to $34,598 in 2013, roughly 59% that of whites’, a ratio that has also not varied much since the Census Bureau began tracking this data in 1967.

    Where African-Americans took a significant step back in recent years was in household wealth, which plunged 31% during the recession, including a steep 35% decline in their retirement assets, which the Urban Institute suggests was partially due to the unemployed drawing down savings to cover living expenses. The wealth of white families fell a comparatively mild 11% from 2007-10.

    Yet economic conditions for African-Americans vary widely throughout the country. We decided to look into which of America’s 52 largest metropolitan areas present African-Americans with the best opportunities. We weighed these metropolitan statistical areas by three critical 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 added a fourth category, demographic trends, measuring the change in the African-American 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.

    Southern Exposure

    In the first half of the 20th century, African-Americans fled the former Confederate state for economic opportunity, to escape from institutional racism and, sometimes, for their lives. This pattern,notes demographer Bill Frey, began to reverse itself in the 1970s, with Southern states becoming destinations for black migrants. Since 2000, when the Census registered the first increase in the region’s black population in more than a century, this trend has accelerated, with African-Americans leaving not just the Northeast or Midwest, but the West Coast as well.

    Today, Dixie has emerged, in many ways, as the new promised land for African-Americans. In our survey the South accounts for a remarkable 13 of the top 15 metro areas.

    At the top of our list is Atlanta, long hailed as the unofficial capital of black America. The city, which in the 1960s advertised itself as “the city too busy to hate,” has long lured ambitious African-Americans. With its well-established religious and educational institutions, notably Spellman and Morehouse, which are ranked first and third, respectively, by US News among the nation’s historically black colleges, the area has arguably the strongest infrastructure for African-American advancement in the country. The region’s strong music and art scene has also made it an “epicenter for black glitterati” and culture.

    The superlatives extend well beyond glamour to the basics of everyday life. Some 46.9% the metro area’s black population owned their own homes as of 2013, well above the 38% major metro average for African-Americans. Atlanta’s African-Americans have a median household income of $41,800, also considerably above the major metro average, while their rate of self-employment, 17.1%, is second only to New Orleans.

    Clear evidence of the Atlanta area’s appeal can be seen in the growth of the black population, up 50% from 2000 through 2013. This is also well above the of 28% average growth in the African-American population in the nation’s 52 biggest metro areas during the same time.

    This shift of African-Americans to Southern metro areas is widespread. Population growth since 2000 above 40% was posted by No. 2 metro area Raleigh, N.C.; Charlotte, N.C. (sixth); Orlando (seventh) as well as the three cities that tie for eighth place: Miami; Richmond, Va.; and San Antonio. The same can be said of Texas’ other big cities: Austin (11th), Houston (12th) and Dallas-Fort Worth (13th).

    If there’s a challenger to Atlanta and the renewed Southern ascendency for African-Americans, it’s the greater Washington, D.C., area which ranks third. The median black household income in the metro area is $64,896, more than $20,000  above that of Atlanta and other top-ranked southern cities. Home ownership rates, at 49.2%, are also the highest in the nation.

    As in Atlanta, Washington’s black community has strong institutions of culture and higher education. The District is home to Howard University, the nation’s second-ranked historically black university. Washington’s urban core may be becoming less black — down from 60% in 2000 to under 50% in 2013– but this has been more than made up for by the burgeoning population of surrounding suburban areas such as Prince George’s County, which is majority black and relatively prosperous, with poverty rates well below those of the city. The key plus here appears to be the the federal government, which employs many people at high wages in the area.

    Incomes also have been boosted by the government in No. 4 Baltimore, which enjoys the third highest black median income and the third highest self-employment rate after Atlanta and New Orleans. As in Washington, much of this prosperity is not in the hardscrabble city core, but in surrounding suburban areas such as Baltimore County, where the black population grew from 20% of the total in 2000 to over 26% in 2010.

    Where African-Americans Are Struggling

    Many of the metro areas at the bottom of our list are the once mighty manufacturing hubs where Southern blacks flocked in the Great Migration: last place Milwaukee, followed by Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cincinnati (50th); Pittsburgh (tied for 48th) Cleveland (47th) and Buffalo (46th). African-Americans in these old industrial towns earn on average $10,000 to $15,000 less than their counterparts in Atlanta. Self-employment rates are half as high as those in our top 10 cities.

    Of course, none of this is too surprising, given the long-term economic malaise in the Rust Belt. But some of our most prosperous metro areas are also not working out well for blacks. These include San Francisco-Oakland, which tied with Pittsburgh for 48th, Los Angeles (40th) and Seattle (36th). In these cities, homeownership rates for African-Americans tend to be 10 to 15 percentage points lower, and self-employment close to half of what we see in greater Washington, Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte and the four big Texas cities.

    Blacks populations have declined in some of these metro areas, including San Francisco, which has seen a 9.1% drop since 2000, and Los Angeles, where the African-American population has fallen 8%. Chicago (31st), long a major center of black America, has seen a 4% drop since 2000, while the black population of the New York metro area (24th) has grown just 2.4%.

    Ironically, many of the metro areas at the top of our list tend to vote Republican. But many local Democratic politicians in the South support generally pro-business economic agendas. African-Americans, who tend to have fewer economic assets than whites, need growth to expand their opportunities; that’s one reason they do so well, relatively, in the South.

    But it’s not just growth. Places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area are losing black population because of their high housing prices. Hollywood stars and tech titans may not mind, but it’s tough for most everyone else to buy a house in the big California cities and New York. Housing prices in Atlanta and Houston, relative to incomes, are about half or more less than those in the Bay Area.

    Best Cities for African Americans
    Metropolitan Area Rank Score Home Ownrshp Rate Median Hshld Income Share of Self Emplymt Change in Population: 2000-2013
    Atlanta, GA 1      87.0 46.9% $41,803 17.1% 49.9%
    Raleigh, NC 2      84.6 46.7% $42,285 12.8% 55.9%
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 3      83.2 49.2% $64,896 15.1% 19.7%
    Baltimore, MD 4      74.5 46.2% $47,898 15.0% 15.6%
    Charlotte, NC-SC 4      74.5 43.9% $36,522 13.6% 47.8%
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 6      72.6 43.8% $40,677 13.2% 34.6%
    Orlando, FL 7      71.6 44.7% $33,982 11.0% 58.9%
    Miami, FL 8      68.3 44.9% $36,749 11.2% 32.4%
    Richmond, VA 8      68.3 47.7% $38,899 12.7% 17.9%
    San Antonio, TX 8      68.3 40.8% $41,681 9.3% 43.3%
    Austin, TX 11      67.8 43.6% $42,514 9.0% 39.2%
    Houston, TX 12      66.3 41.6% $40,572 9.9% 37.5%
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 13      64.4 38.7% $40,239 9.5% 45.2%
    Nashville, TN 13      64.4 41.8% $37,716 10.9% 31.9%
    Birmingham, AL 15      63.0 50.0% $33,092 15.0% 12.0%
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 16      61.1 47.2% $31,981 13.5% 18.5%
    Jacksonville, FL 17      58.7 46.3% $32,469 10.8% 24.2%
    Boston, MA-NH 18      58.2 31.7% $46,556 9.1% 38.9%
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 18      58.2 40.9% $42,673 7.6% 32.6%
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 20      57.2 47.3% $36,595 9.1% 13.3%
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 21      52.9 36.6% $31,665 10.8% 40.9%
    Columbus, OH 22      51.4 35.9% $33,451 9.3% 40.0%
    Hartford, CT 22      51.4 33.3% $46,097 8.3% 24.4%
    New York, NY-NJ-PA 24      49.5 32.0% $43,381 10.9% 2.4%
    New Orleans. LA 25      46.6 45.5% $27,812 17.4% -13.4%
    Denver, CO 26      46.2 38.9% $41,215 6.3% 29.6%
    Las Vegas, NV 26      46.2 29.0% $34,281 8.3% 77.7%
    Phoenix, AZ 28      45.7 31.5% $36,779 6.8% 93.4%
    Portland, OR-WA 29      44.2 39.7% $33,699 5.8% 42.5%
    Kansas City, MO-KS 30      43.8 39.4% $35,277 8.3% 15.8%
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI 31      42.3 39.4% $34,287 9.4% -4.3%
    Oklahoma City, OK 32      41.8 39.2% $34,745 7.8% 18.4%
    San Jose, CA 33      40.9 32.9% $53,645 7.2% 11.4%
    Detroit,  MI 34      39.9 43.8% $30,162 9.5% -4.9%
    St. Louis,, MO-IL 35      39.4 42.4% $31,215 9.1% 6.9%
    Seattle, WA 36      37.5 28.3% $41,081 6.7% 36.4%
    Providence, RI-MA 37      36.5 29.3% $32,907 7.3% 52.5%
    Indianapolis. IN 38      35.6 35.4% $31,452 7.8% 29.1%
    San Diego, CA 39      33.7 30.1% $46,650 7.1% 2.6%
    Los Angeles, CA 40      32.2 32.9% $40,980 7.7% -8.0%
    Rochester, NY 41      31.7 34.2% $28,104 8.9% 16.2%
    Sacramento, CA 41      31.7 31.6% $33,530 7.2% 26.4%
    Salt Lake City, UT 41      31.7 18.7% $32,102 5.5% 94.2%
    Louisville, KY-IN 44      30.8 35.7% $28,826 7.4% 21.0%
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 44      30.8 26.3% $31,564 6.4% 69.2%
    Buffalo, NY 46      26.9 33.7% $26,210 9.4% 1.6%
    Cleveland, OH 47      26.0 37.8% $26,646 8.8% 0.0%
    Pittsburgh, PA 48      25.5 37.3% $28,088 8.0% 2.5%
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA 48      25.5 30.8% $40,152 7.3% -9.1%
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 50      23.6 31.4% $28,684 8.7% 10.7%
    Grand Rapids, MI 51      21.6 29.9% $25,495 8.0% 19.3%
    Milwaukee,WI 52      14.4 29.9% $27,438 7.2% 10.8%
    Calculated from 2013 American Community Survey & EMSI data
    Analysis 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. 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.

  • California’s Rebound Mostly Slow, Unsteady

    California, after nearly five years in recession, has made something of a comeback in recent years. Job growth in the state – largely due to the Silicon Valley boom – has even begun to outpace the national average. The state, finally, appears to have finally recovered the jobs lost since 2007.

    To some, this makes California what someone called “a beacon of hope for progressives.” Its “comeback” has been dutifully noted and applauded by economist Paul Krugman, high priest of what passes for the American Left.

    In reality, however, California’s path back remains slow and treacherous. California Lutheran University economist Bill Watkins, like other economists, is somewhat bullish on the state’s short-run situation, but suggests that the highly unequal recovery, particularly for the middle class, could prove problematic over time.

    “It’s very narrow and not broad-based,” he observes. “That is very troubling.”

    Things certainly are better than they were, a few years back but still are far from ideal. Right now, California employment is about 1.1 percent above 2007 levels, slightly below the 1.4 percent growth for the country. In contrast, Texas’ economy has created jobs at roughly 10 times that rate. With a population much smaller than California’s, the Lone Star State added more than 1.2 million jobs, compared with 162,000 for California. No great surprise, then, that California has become, by far, the largest exporter of domestic migrants – more than twice that of any other state – to Texas.

    Our unemployment rate, while falling, at 7.3 percent in October was still the nation’s fifth-highest. Even as California has improved, Texas continues to grow as fast, or faster, than the Golden State. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas ranked third in growth over the past year, while California achieved a respectable ninth. It’s possible, though, that with falling oil prices, California might edge out Texas in growth for 2014, but the performance gap – due to the narrowness of the recovery – is likely to remain huge for the foreseeable future.

    Regional Disparities

    Most of the gains in high-wage jobs in California since 2007 have been in professional and business services – up almost 200,000 – a sector that clusters along the coast. Most strong job gains have been concentrated in the Bay Area, primarily along the 50-mile strip from San Francisco to San Jose. At the same time, conditions have remained sluggish both in less tech-oriented Los Angeles and the Inland economies.

    The Sacramento region, for example, remains down 32,000 jobs from 2007 levels; most other Central Valley communities, with the exception of oil-fired Bakersfield, remain stuck at or below their 2007 levels. The Inland Empire may be improving, but remains down 30,000 jobs. Other blue-collar economies, such as Oakland, just across the Bay from booming San Francisco, remains 9,000 jobs below its 2007 level. Los Angeles County, historically the linchpin of the state economy, is down 44,000 jobs.

    Improving the economy in these areas may be very difficult as California’s regulatory environment makes it hard for many firms to expand as easily as they can in Nevada, Arizona, Utah or Texas. Under current circumstances, even when Silicon Valley firms expand their middle-management workforce, they are likely to do it in other more business-friendly states – or abroad – than move further east toward the Central Valley.

    Blue Collar Bust

    One of the great success stories in America the past few years has been the growth of the blue-collar economy. Credit goes to, first and foremost, the energy boom that accelerated growth not only in states like Texas, North Dakota and Oklahoma, but also in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where fracking has expanded. This energy boom has also spilled over into the industrial sector, creating new demand for such things as pipes and sparking a recovery in the auto industry, both in the traditional Rust Belt and the newly industrialized zones of the Southeast.

    California, sadly, has remained largely on the sidelines during this great boom, which is one reason why its population suffers the highest poverty rate in the country. Since 2007, for example, Texas has added some 54,000 jobs in the natural-resource extraction sector. California, with some of the nation’s largest oil reserves, has added 15,000. Critically, this sector provides high-wage jobs not only to geologists and managers, but also to an assortment of blue-collar workers, who earn wages, according to Economic Modeling International, of roughly $100,000 annually.

    A similar pattern can be seen in manufacturing. As the economy has recovered, U.S. industrial expansion has increased, with employment up 2 percent in the past year. Manufacturing in California, meanwhile, has grown at half that rate. Over the past seven years, the Golden State has lost some 200,000 manufacturing jobs, and, with the state’s high energy costs, it’s difficult to see how this pattern will reverse in the foreseeable future.

    Wholesale trade and warehousing represents another key blue-collar industry but California has had virtually no growth here since 2007, while Texas has gained well over 100,000 positions. Future growth for the state in this area may be slowed as trade moves away from the chronic congestion, environmental and labor conflicts surrounding California ports, particularly the key Los Angeles-Long Beach complex. Instead, traffic is headed to more business-friendly facilities along the Gulf Coast and Southeast, as well as to the west coasts of Canada and Mexico.

    Similarly, construction, a critical blue-collar sector, and the one that employs more Latinos than any other, has been slow to grow in California, where construction employment remains 190,000 jobs below 2007 levels. Even in the past year, with rising home prices, California construction growth has lagged well behind that of Texas. Looking forward, with ever stricter restraints on single-family housing, the prospects for growth are limited.

    Silicon Valley a savior?

    Today, most of the hope about California centers on Silicon Valley. “Silicon Valley,” notes economist Watkins, “is the last goose laying golden eggs in California.” It’s hard not to be impressed with the massive wealth accumulation around Silicon Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco. This growth has boosted the state’s improved short-term financial position. But it’s highly improbable that the Valley’s information sector – even at today’s often-absurd valuations – can create enough jobs to sustain the rest of the state. Since 2007, notes economist Dan Hamilton, the state has gained less than 11,000 information jobs, hardly sufficient to make up for the massive losses from the recession.

    So, in what sectors are the job gains concentrated? Generally, not necessarily the sectors that create middle-class jobs. The biggest winners, outside of business services, have been generally lower-wage sectors such as education and health care, up 24 percent since 2007 – a remarkable 464,000 jobs – as well as leisure and hospitality, which has grown 10 percent, or almost 158,000 positions.

    The class implications of this unbalanced growth are profound. Even in Silicon Valley, Latinos and African Americans have seen wages fall, and the area has been home to the nation’s largest homeless encampment. Meanwhile, many solid middle-class employers – Boeing, Chevron, Charles Schwab and Toyota – continue to shift jobs out of state; Occidental Petroleum, a longtime boon to the Southern California economy, pulled up stakes and moved to Houston.

    So, rather than break out the organic champagne to toast California’s comeback, as the Jerry Brown administration would have us do, we would do better to address the ever-growing economic divide in the state. And, to be sure, with little prospects for renewed middle-class and blue-collar job growth, California should not be held up as a model for other states, particularly those that lack both California’s innovation economy and its remarkable natural advantages.

    In fact, neither is this situation ideal for most Californians – particularly if you are concerned about the state’s middle class and the consequences of an expanding, often undereducated population with little prospect of ascending the economic ladder.

    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.

  • Don’t Boost Cities by Bashing the ‘Burbs

    There is nothing like a trip to Washington, D.C., to show how out of touch America’s ruling classes have become. I was in the nation’s capital to appear on a panel for a Politico event that – well after I agreed to come – was titled “Booming Cities, Busting Suburbs.”

    The notion of cities rising from the rotting carcass of suburbia is widely accepted today by much of our corporate, academic and media leadership. This notion has been repeatedly embraced as well by the Obama administration, whose own former secretary of Housing and Urban Development declared several years back that the suburbs were dying, and people were “moving back to the central cities.”

    Some on Wall Street also embrace this notion. Having played a pivotal role, along with regulators, in the housing crash of the late 2000s, some financiers have been buying up foreclosed homes for rental income and also back many high-density projects, which are built to house, in large part, those who cannot buy a home, particularly the younger generation.

    As the Economistrecently pointed out, the suburban house, or a house in less-crowded parts of cities, is an aspiration of upwardly mobile people in the United States and around the world. Surveys, including those conducted by Smart Growth America, demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans prefer single-family houses; most millennials seem to feel that way, too, according to both a Frank Magid Associates survey and a more recent one from Nielsen. As the economy improves, and the people in the millennial generation enter their thirties, it is likely that they – as did other generations – will start buying houses as they start families.

    At the very least, suburbia clearly predominates among Americans. Roughly 85 percent of people in our major metropolitan areas, notes demographer Wendell Cox, inhabit suburban neighborhoods, dominated by cars and single-family houses, even though they live within the boundaries of the largest cities. They are definitively not moving en masse into the urban core. In the most recent census, from 2010, the urban core, defined as territory within two miles of city hall, grew by 206,000 people. In contrast, areas 10 or more miles away from an urban center grew by some 15 million people.

    Nor has this appreciably changed over time. Since the housing bust, the growth rates of core cities and suburbs are now basically even, but the preponderance of suburban population means that the periphery is adding many more people. From 2010-13, the suburbs added 5.4 million people, while the core cities have added 1.5 million, accounting for less than 30 percent of all major metropolitan population growth.

    Other recent analyses, such as from the real estate website Trulia, confirm that this pattern continues. Meanwhile, demand for suburban office space, often seen as dying by urban boosters, now is recovering faster than that of the central core, according to the consultancy CoStar.

    The boom in U.S. energy production, and the resulting drop in energy prices, could accelerate the suburban recovery. For years, smart-growth advocates counted on pricey “peak oil” to turn suburbs into “remote slums.” Brookings has estimated that every 10 percent rise in oil prices lowers suburban housing prices by several thousand dollars while raising prices closer in. Not surprisingly, cheaper energy does not sit well with the progressive clerisy, as epitomized by a recent New Yorker article, which likens it to “an industrial form of crack.”

    No one buys the mindless embrace of higher housing density and expanding rail transit more than urban mayors. At the Politico event in Washington, Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker insisted gamely that transit is “less expensive” than building and maintaining roads, which is not even remotely the case. Transit’s fully loaded capital and operating expenditures per passenger mile are more than four times that of the automobile and road system. Nor is the Salt Lake City area about to become a region of strap hangers: 3.2 percent of workers in the Salt Lake City region commute by transit, down slightly since 2000.

    The real Salt Lake City, Becker’s perception notwithstanding, is very much a sprawled one. The downtown may have been spiffed up a bit, largely due to a massive investment by the Mormon church, but, since 2010, the periphery has grown by 48,000 people, compared with 5,000 in the city. In 1950, Salt Lake City accounted for 66 percent of the region’s population; today that is a mere 17 percent.

    Another of my fellow panelists, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, is fantastical in his embrace of transit and the future of metropolitan geography. Reed counts on millennials transforming his city, but, overall, the millennial population share in urban cores has dropped since 2010, with strong percentage declines registered in such varied core counties in New York, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., as well as Atlanta.

    Reed, something of a darling of the Davos crowd, presides over something around 8 percent of the Atlanta metro area’s population, down from half in 1950. The most recent estimates from the Census Bureau, suggest that Atlanta may have gained 28,000 people since 2010, compared with 209,000 gained in the suburbs. But even this must be taken with a grain of salt; in the most recent census, it turned out that estimates in many cities, including New York, Chicago and St. Louis, were greatly inflated – in metro Atlanta’s case, by over 100,000.

    Although poverty has seeped out of central Atlanta and into the periphery, in part due to the relatively small size of its urban core, the poverty rate in the city is close to twice that of the suburbs, which mirrors the national trend. Its crime rate ranks among the nation’s worst, up there with Detroit, Oakland and St. Louis. An Atlanta resident is roughly more than three times more likely than an average Georgian to become the victim of a violent crime. Although worse than most, Atlanta’s metropolitan core is not unusual; overall, the rate of violent crime in urban cores, although down from 2001, is almost four times higher than that of suburbs, where the rate has also declined.

    Nor is Atlanta about to turn into a Southern version of successful transit “legacy” cities like New York or even Washington. Despite a massive investment in rail transit, the regional share of transit commuting today, according to Census Bureau estimates, is a mere 3.1 percent, compared with 3.4 percent in 2000. In reality, transit ridership has risen mostly in a handful of “legacy” cities, notably New York, while overall the share of transit commuters nationally is almost a whole percentage point lower than in 1980. In most U.S. metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, more people telecommute than take transit.

    To be sure, Atlanta is, in certain spots, looking better. Upscale districts, like Midtown and Buckhead, have rebounded smartly from the real estate crash, but downtown Atlanta has among the highest vacancy rates in the country. The once-ballyhooed Underground Atlanta downtown shopping and entertainment district is widely seen as something of a disaster. Progressive rhetoric aside, Atlanta, according to the liberal Brookings Institution, has the greatest income inequality of any large city in America, even worse than luxury cities like San Francisco, New York or Boston.

    To be sure, one can still make a sounder case for Atlanta’s evolution. There is a sizeable youth demographic, particularly students and childless households, who are attracted to such places, and some companies find the central location better than that of the suburban periphery. It is still a liveable city with many nice, relatively low-density neighborhoods that could accommodate middle-class families. It possesses a canopy of trees – leading some to call it “a city in a forest.”

    Cities like Atlanta are important, and it’s great that they are doing better than they were three decades ago. But the urban turnaround, more tentative in places like Atlanta than in Manhattan, does not have to be predicated, as the Politico event seemed to suggest, on the projected ruin of suburban aspirations. Despite the hopes nurtured in places like Washington, D.C., and among parts of financial oligarchy, suburb-dwelling Americans are likely to dominate our housing market, economy and demography for generations to come.

    Rather than target suburbia for extinction, cities should focus on the hard work ahead of them. Even as pundits worry about the loss of artists in high-cost cities, the urban future really depends on holding onto middle-class families and millennials as they age. To keep them, mayors need to focus not just on the densest sections of the urban core and rail transit, but on improving the roads, reducing crime, improving both neighborhoods and the broad-based economy. And they must radically reform the schools, critical to luring middle-class families with children. Rather than celebrating the supposed demise of suburbia, city leaders like Mayor Reed should take heed of the biblical injunction: “Physician, heal thyself.”

    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.

  • Seven Years Ago, Wall Street was the Villain. Now it Gets to Call the Shots

    The recent passage by Congress of new legislation favourable to loosening controls on risky Wall Street trading is just the most recent example of the consolidation of plutocratic power in Washington. The new rules, written largely by Citibank lobbyists and embraced by the Obama administration, allow large banks to continue using depositors’ money for high-risk investments, the very pattern that helped create the 2008 financial crisis.

    This move was supported largely by the establishment in each party. Opposition came from two very different groups: the Tea Party Republicans, who largely represent the views of Main Street businesses, and a residue of old-line progressive social democrats, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

    Support for big finance is no surprise from Republicans, who are used to worshipping at the altar of Wall Street. But the suborning of “progressivism” to Wall Street has been a permanent feature of this administration. From the onset of his presidential run, Barack Obama had strong ties to Wall Street grandees. New York Times Wall Street maven Andrew Ross Sorkin noted in 2008 how Obama had “nailed down the hedge fund vote”.

    The ultra-rich so backed the president that, at his first inaugural, noted one sympathetic chronicler, the biggest problem for donors was finding parking space for their private jets. Since then, despite occasional flights of populist rhetoric, the president has kept close ties with top financial firms, including the well-connected Jamie Dimon, chairman of JP Morgan, often called Obama’s “favourite banker”. He appears to have been instrumental in getting Democrats to support the recent loosening of financial controls on big banks.

    These Wall Street connections have continued to play dividends for the president, in terms of contributions. The financiers benefited from Obama’s choice of financial managers, such as former treasury secretary Tim Geithner, widely known as a reliable ally of the financial sector. (He liked to explain his support by equating its importance to that of the technology and manufacturing industries.) To no sensible person’s surprise, Geithner, when he left the Treasury last winter, found his reward by joining a large private equity firm. (By way of completing the circle, Geithner’s successor, Jacob Lew, used to work for Citibank.)

    The Justice Department has also been cosy with the plutocracy. Attorney general Eric Holder allowed Wall Street a kind of “get out of jail free card” by failing to launch tough prosecutions of the grandees. In contrast to the situation under previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, the financial plutocrats have not been forced to pay for their numerous depredations. Instead, most prosecutions have been aimed at low-level traders, Ponzi schemers or inside traders.

    So if you still think 2008 and the financial crisis changed everything, still think of it as a progressive triumph, think again. Instead of the brave new world of reformed finance, what’s been created in the US is something close to a perfect world, policy-wise, for the plutocrats. The biggest rewards have come from an economic policy, backed by the Federal Reserve and the administration, that has maintained ultra-low interest rates. This has forced investors into the market, at the expense of middle-class savers, particularly the elderly. The steady supply of bond purchases has essentially given free money to those least in need and most likely to do damage to everyone else.

    The results make a mockery of the Democrats’ attempts to stoke populist sentiments. In this recovery, the top 1% gained 11% in their incomes while the other 99% experienced, at best, stagnant incomes. As one writer at the Huffington Post put it: “The rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years – and the ones it’s lifted have been mostly yachts.” If this had occurred during a Republican administration, many progressives would have been horrified. But Democrats, led by New York senator Charles Schumer, Wall Street’s consigliere on the Hill, have been as complicit as Republicans in coddling Wall Street. Democrats, for example, despite their rhetoric about inequality and fairness, have refused to challenge the outrageous discount on taxes for capital gains as opposed to income. A successful professional making $300,000 a year is often taxed at rates twice as high as the rate paid by hedge fund investors, venture capitalists, tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street stock jobbers.

    At the same time, the Obama years have been something of a disaster for Main Street, where most Americans work. A 2014 Brookings report revealed that small business “dynamism”, measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter of a century.

    Small banks, long a critical source of funding for small businesses, have also been pummelled by the very regulatory regime that also allows mega-banks to enjoy both “too big to fail” protections as well as their sacred right to indulge their most cherished risk-oriented strategies. In 1995, the assets of the six largest bank holding companies accounted for 15% of gross domestic product; by 2011, aided by the massive bailout of “ big banks”, this percentage had soared to 64%.

    These trends do much to explain what happened in the recent midterm elections, which saw a massive shift of middle- and working-class voters, especially whites, to the Republicans. Increasingly, Americans suspect that the economic system is rigged against them. By a margin of two to one, according to a 2013 Bloomberg poll, adults feel the American Dream is increasingly out of reach. This pessimism is particularly intense among white working-class voters and large sections of the middle class .

    The other major cause for the Democratic demise in November was the low turnout among minority voters. They certainly have ample reason to be indifferent. Both African American and Latino incomes have declined during the current administration, in large part because neither group tends to benefit much from the appreciation of stocks and high-end real estate.

    In caving in to Wall Street and its economic priorities, members of both parties have demonstrated where their primary loyalties lie. Amid the obscene levels of compensation going to the financial grandees, it seems the ideal time for politicians, right or left, to challenge Wall Street’s control of Washington. High finance has so devastatingly rocked the world of the middle and working classes. Voters, it might be thought, now need leaders who will take these grandees down a notch or two.

    This piece first appeared at The Guardian.

    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.

    Wall Street bull photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

  • Measuring Economic Growth, by Degrees

    In this information age, brains are supposed to be the most valued economic currency. For California, where the regulatory environment is more difficult for companies and people who make things, this is even more the case. Generally speaking, those areas that have the heaviest concentration of educated people generally do better than those who don’t.

    Nothing more illustrates this trend than the supremacy of the Bay Area over Southern California in the past five years. Since the 2007-09 recession, the Bay Area has recovered all of its jobs, as has San Diego, but Los Angeles-Orange and the Inland Empire, although improving, lag behind.

    Overall, the San Jose and San Francisco areas boast shares of college graduates at around 45 percent, compared with a 34 percent average for the 52 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The San Diego area clocks in at 34.6. In comparison, the Los Angeles-Orange County area has roughly 31 percent college graduates while the San Bernardino-Riverside area has the lowest share of four-year degrees – 20 percent – of any large region in the country – this is worse even than backwaters like Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala.

    Dividing this region by counties shows Orange County well in the lead, with 37.6 percent college-educated, well above Los Angeles County’s 30 percent.

    Recent Trends

    To see where these metrics are headed, Mark Schill, an analyst with the Praxis Strategy Group (www.praxissg.com), was asked to identify the share growth of bachelor’s degrees in the country’s largest metropolitan areas during 2000-13. The share of the adult population with college educations rose by 6.8 percent in San Jose and 6.4 points in the San Francisco-Oakland region. Some regions did better, including Boston, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Mich., Baltimore, New York and St. Louis. All these were considerably above the national average increase of 5.2 percent.

    In contrast, most areas of Southern California have shown more meager growth in their educated workforces. Los Angeles, overall, enjoyed a very average increase of 5.2 percent. San Diego, despite its high-tech reputation, notched a 5 point jump while the Inland Empire increased by 3.8 points, one of the lowest performances in the country. The biggest gainer in the Southland was Orange County, where the share of educated workers grew by a healthy 6.3 percent.

    Whither young, educated workers?

    The picture, particularly for the Inland Empire, is not totally bleak. In a recent survey conducted by Cleveland State University, there have been some promising developments in the growth of younger educated workers. This key cohort, notes researcher Richey Piiparinen, appears to follow a very different path than do older educated workers, with many seeking out careers in less-expensive locales.

    Indeed, looking at educated growth among 25-34-year-olds from 2010-13 finds that the most rapid expansion is taking place in unlikely places, such as the areas around Nashville, Tenn., Orlando, Fla., and Cleveland, all which experienced increases of roughly 20 percent or more. This is better than twice the growth rate in such noted “brain centers” as San Jose and San Francisco, which were around 10 percent, and New York at 9 percent. The Los Angeles-Orange County area saw a similar increase.

    The reasons for these surprising, and somewhat encouraging results, particularly for the Inland Empire, may vary. One thing, of course, is the low base from which the area starts. After all, until the past decade, the employment profile of the Inland Empire favored manufacturing, logistics and construction, all fields not dependent on large contingents of highly educated workers.

    Another critical factor may well be price, as we saw in our surprising findings on millennials. Simply put, many of the areas attractive in the past to educated workers have become extraordinarily expensive – as demonstrated by San Francisco-based writer Johnny Sanphillippo – while some more affordable locales have become “sweet spots” for younger educated people, particularly as millennials enter their family formation years.

    County, city breakdowns

    The Southland, of course, is a vast region, and even every county contains hosts of cities that are very different from each other. In terms of counties, the biggest gains – albeit from a smaller base – took place in the Inland Empire, notably Riverside, which saw a 93 percent jump in its educated population since 2000. Orange County saw a 37.6 percent gain, ahead of Los Angeles’ roughly 36 percent gain.

    More intriguing, and revealing, is the distribution of college degrees by city areas. Here, the supremacy of a few areas is very clear. In three Southland communities, more than 60 percent of the adult populations have college degrees: Santa Monica, Newport Beach and Irvine. Yorba Linda, Pasadena and Redondo Beach all boast rates close to, or above, 50 percent.

    Obviously, these towns are something of outliers in the region. Los Angeles, by far the region’s largest city, has roughly 31 percent of its adults with college degrees. Many communities do far worse, most of all, Compton, where less than 6 percent have four-year degrees. Hesperia, Southgate, Lynwood and Victorville have educated percentages under 10 percent.

    Adjacent communities sometimes have radically different rates of education. Santa Ana, for example, abuts Irvine, but has an educated population of barely 12 percent. And while some areas have shown meager growth in their share of educated residents, several areas have seen double-digit percentage increases, including Burbank, Yorba Linda, Rancho Cucamonga and Santa Monica.

    Implications

    As the Southland economy evolves, it makes sense to look at those areas most likely to have more of the educated workers that high-end industries need. These increasingly are clustered in a few places, such as Irvine, Newport Beach, Rancho Cucamonga and Costa Mesa, that are both suburban in form but tend to have better schools than much of the region. These areas also tend to have lower-than-average unemployment rates. Educated people tend to migrate, for the most part, to areas where others of their ilk are concentrated, and often where their children have the best chance at a decent education.

    These statistics and trends suggest that our leaders, in education and politics, need to focus on reality. It is dubious that many communities throughout the Southland will develop large shares of educated people in the immediate future. Indeed, given the quality of public education throughout most of the region, it seems almost inevitable that much of the region will lag in terms of skills well into the next decade.

    This means that local leaders cannot expect to duplicate in the near future the success of places like Boston, the Bay Area, or even Pittsburgh. Instead, there needs to be a two-pronged attempt to address this issue. One is to boost preparatory and higher education throughout the region, which will allow for Southern California to better compete at the highest-end of employment.

    But the other strategy, not to be discounted, is a full-scale commitment to skills training for those unlikely to earn bachelor’s degrees. This also means taking measures allowing the industries that would employ such workers – largely manufacturing, logistics, medical and business services – to flourish, so this training will have rewards. The Southland’s already large educated population is one key to its future, but finding a decent work environment for those without a four-year degree merits equal, if not greater, emphasis.

    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.

    Graduation image by BigStockPhoto.com.