New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Advancing Economies by the Power of Industry

    For the last quarter century there has been a growing tendency among policy makers and corporate executives to downplay, and even ignore, the primary importance of the ‘real,’ or tangible, economy. It is now widely believed that the primary engine of wealth creation is the manipulation of symbols and images — ‘the new economy’ of the ‘information/creative age’ — as opposed to the manufacture of tangible products and services.

    This paper challenges these assumptions. Our research in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America suggests that rapid economic and income growth tends to occur most steadily in areas where tangible production has been readily encouraged. Although the successful strategy varies by region and country, the basic fundamentals to propel growth lie in policies that stress the construction of essential physical infrastructure, investments in basic and skill-oriented education, and favorable tax and regulatory policies.

    Increasingly, this also includes the building of what we refer to as ‘infrasystems’, also called regional innovation systems. These are policies that encourage innovation and cross-firm transactions through the development of interlocking regional institutions, such as schools and governments that work closely with local industries. These infrasystems investments represent the cutting edge of progressive economic policies that encourage wealth creation and broad based opportunities for a wide variety of citizens.

    We believe that this ‘back to basics’ approach is particularly applicable during the current global financial crisis. Attempts to ‘create’ wealth through financial manipulation and the hyping of cultural attributes have done very little except create short-lived economic bubbles on the local, national and, most ominously, global levels. The time for a reassessment, and a return to the basic principles of wealth creation, clearly has arrived.

    See attached .pdf file for full report.

    Primary Authors: Joel Kotkin, Delore Zimmerman
    Research Team: Mark Schill, Matthew Leiphon, Andy Sywak
    Editor: Zina Klapper

  • The Mobility Paradox: Investing in Human Capital Fuels Migration

    China has an interesting urban development strategy. The government bypasses those areas that it considers backward and plagued by poverty and entrenched political corruption. Instead, the investment goes into those areas it presumes to be new boomtowns.

    Now imagine if that Darwinian approach was used here in the United States. A report (“City Beautiful”) authored by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia advocates pushing federal infrastructure dollars – which could soon be flowing in the hundreds of billions – not towards our tired, hard-pressed urban areas but those that have experienced the greatest extent of gentrification.

    If you don’t want to slog through the published paper, then you can read about the controversial findings in a recent Boston Globe article. The journalist, not surprisingly, sensationalizes the conclusions and the choice quotes do a great job of provocation: “‘If you have sun and a beautiful beach and 300-year-old buildings, it’s no wonder that you’re going to attract people,’ said [co-author Albert Saiz]. ‘But that’s no use for Detroit or Syracuse.’”

    The author of the Globe piece goes on to question the coming urban bailouts: “Why send another federal dollar to bolster manufacturing in Akron when it could support a golf course in sunny Phoenix?”

    I get the sense that the economists in question aren’t making such a stark distinction. But I can understand why the press would go down that road. I’ve read the research and there are concerns about the wisdom of investing in cities that currently don’t attract tourists or Richard Florida’s elite Creative Class.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report attempts to reconfigure the understanding of urban geography. People are congregating in urban centers for a new purpose: leisure. The old school of thinking identified the central business district (CBD) as the economic heart of the metropolis. Higher densities were the result of a more efficient way of doing certain types of work (e.g. financial, insurance and real estate).

    The new school sees the city as a special playground and the study tries to capture this effect by looking at tourist Meccas. In short, jobs are following talent to pleasant places to live.

    Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz try to figure out if the geographically mobile are indeed heading to sunnier climes or if the leisure amenities follow the talent. They claim that quality of life comes first. The best and brightest are not chasing top employment opportunities. They are keener on finding a “cool” place to hang out.

    Other research suggests this approach may be limited. For example, although job growth has been very strong in some sun belt cities that are cited, growth rates in other amenity-rich cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco – have been well below par. Although often attractive to twenty-somethings, these areas also suffer a persistently strong net outmigration.

    Perhaps more to the point what use is any of this to those living in the heartland cities? Should Akron start putting more money in skateparks or global warming?

    There are huge problem in spending money in order to attract the geographically fickle. Fads fade and the mobile – largely people under 30 – will move again. And what about the people who can’t move? We’ve yet to address the mobility paradox.

    Moving to a better place might be one of the most distinguishing features of American culture. However, less and less people can manage to do so. There are considerably more “stuck” than there are “mobile.” The nomads of the knowledge economy comprise the global elite. They can live wherever they like and, particularly when young, can move at the drop of a hat.

    Where does that leave the postindustrial cities currently failing to attract the twenty-something demographic? One suggestion is to better educate people tethered to their neighborhood. The rub is that greater investment in your human capital will make your young adults more likely to leave. This is the mobility paradox. Regional workforce development has the unintended effect of increasing out-migration.

    A common response to the mobility paradox is the transformation of a downtown area into a “cool city.” The theory is that the best and brightest won’t leave if there are more fun things to do. Tying up the urban budget with projects aimed at retaining the creative class has its own perils. There is little, if any, evidence indicating that this policy will decrease the geographic mobility of the well-educated. Many cities stuffed with cultural amenities also sport high rates of out-migration. Furthermore, tastes change. ”Best places to live” lists change quite a bit from one year to the next.

    We should learn from the bust of hot destinations such as Florida or even California. Today’s paradise is tomorrow’s backwater. Meanwhile most of the population will continue to live in “Forgottenville.” Should we just forget about them?

    Globalization would seem to reward such an approach. Some cities will cut it, most won’t. Good luck dealing with the political instability. China gets away with ignoring its “old” cities thanks to robust growth and iron-fisted control. Given the current economic slowdown, things may be getting tense there, particularly in the left-behind industrial towns in the interior.

    So should amenities drive President Obama’s economic strategy? These days, the Sunshine States also are in dire need of a bailout. Alabama fights Michigan for federal attention. If the Rust Belt benefits from the Chicago President, let’s hope it’s for its own sake – not just the creative class.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • Moving to Flyover Country

    As the international financial crisis and the US economy have worsened, there have been various reports about more people “staying put,” not moving from one part of the country to another. There is some truth in this, but the latest US Bureau of the Census estimates indicate the people are still moving, and in big numbers.

    In the year ended June 30, 2008, 670,000 people moved between states. This is down substantially from the peak years of 2005 to 2007, when housing prices in California and its suburbs of Nevada and Arizona, Florida, the Northeast and the Northwest reached record heights never seen before. In those years, people could elicit considerable and unprecedented financial gain by moving to parts of the country where the housing bubble had not visited or had done less damage. A household could buy in Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth or Atlanta and save more than $1,000,000 in purchase price and mortgage payments compared to a comparable house in San Diego, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area. In 2006, net domestic migration between states peaked at 1,200,000.

    Still, despite the reduction from the most extreme bubble years, last year’s interstate migration numbers still exceeded those of 2001, 2002 and 2003 and nearly equaled 2004. Lost in the discussions of the decline has been the continuation of a seemingly inexorable secular trend: the continued migration to the “Flyover County” that many of the coastal urban elites tend to dismiss as insignificant and even unlivable. What residents of Elitia reject, millions are embracing.

    Can 3,500,000 Movers be Wrong? The new data shows a strong trend of domestic migration to Flyover Country. Between 2000 and 2008, 3,500,000 residents moved to Flyover Country. This is roughly equal to the movement of the entire population of the City of Los Angeles. Moreover, the trend has been accelerating. In the last four years, the number of people relative to the population leaving Elitia’s promised lands has increased by 60 percent.

    The Lost Empire: New York has lost residents at a rate exceeding that of any other state or the District of Columbia. Not even the destructive winds of Katrina and Rita, the malfeasance of the Army Corps of Engineers or even mis-governance – from Washington to Baton Rouge and New Orleans itself – could drive people out as effectively as the Empire State. New York has lost 1,575,000 domestic migrants since 2000, nearly equal to the population of Manhattan.

    New York’s net domestic migration loss is equal to 8.1 percent of its 2000 population, compared to Louisiana’s 7.1 percent loss. New York has even outdone that perpetual exporter of residents, the District of Columbia, which lost a mere 7.6 percent through domestic migration.

    From Golden State to Fool’s Gold State: Then there is California, which has added more people over the past 50 years than live in Australia. How things have changed. Early in the decade, the Golden State was suffering somewhat modest domestic migration losses. But by 2005, with house prices escalating wildly relative to incomes, California won the race to the bottom. Each year since then, California has driven away more people than any other state.

    What’s Right with Pennsylvania: There are anomalies, however. One of the leading parlor games is “what’s wrong with Pennsylvania” stories. From the Philadelphia Inquirer to Washington’s Brookings Institution, there has probably been more hand wringing about Pennsylvania than about all other states combined. Yet things have changed materially, and largely for the better. Although Pennsylvania continues to lose domestic migrants, the rate has been far less than elsewhere in the Northeast. Between 2000 and 2008, Pennsylvania lost less than 50,000 domestic migrants. Its neighboring states – New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Ohio (Delaware and West Virginia have had small gains) – have lost more than 2,300,000 domestic migrants or nearly 50 domestic migrants for every one leaving Pennsylvania. Among states with more than 10,000,000 population, only Florida and Texas have done better in domestic migration than Pennsylvania.

    That’s pretty good company for a state so many have declared to be on life support. Indeed, it is time to ask “what’s right about Pennsylvania?” One answer might be that Pennsylvania home prices did not explode relative to incomes (a distortion avoided because of Pennsylvania’s generally more liberal land use regulations). The American Dream – at least for those who are aspiring to achieve it – has shifted from New York, New Jersey and Maryland to Pennsylvania. This is evident from the housing construction on the west bank of the Delaware River and just over the Maryland line in York, Adams and Franklin counties.

    Florida: A Changing Story: Flyover Country’s gains are impressive. Florida has attracted the largest number of residents from other states, at 1,250,000 since 2000. This amounts to a 7.6 percent increase compared to the state’s 2000 population. However, things are changing. As the state’s housing became unaffordable, domestic migration dropped and then stopped. By 2007, domestic migration fell more than 80 percent from average of earlier years. Then, Florida slipped into a loss of 9,000 domestic migrants in 2008.

    Southern Gains: The rest of the South generally avoided the worst of the housing bubble. Texas has added 700,000 domestic migrants since 2000. The state displaced Florida as the leading destination for domestic migrants and has held that position since 2006. North Carolina has added 580,000 domestic migrants; Georgia added 525,000, South Carolina 270,000 and Tennessee 240,000. Even Arkansas and Alabama, although held in low esteem on the coasts, gained more domestic migrants than any state in the Northeast.

    Escaping from California: Nevada has been a big draw for domestic migration, adding 365,000 new residents. This is 18.3 percent of its 2000 population, the highest rate in the nation. Arizona added 700,000, or 13.7 percent of its population. Much of this growth has been driven by Californians fleeing out of control housing prices, though their own more recently developing bubbles have probably contributed to somewhat reduced domestic migration gains In recent years.

    Basket Cases in Flyover Country: However, not all is well in Flyover Country. Michigan lost 109,000 residents to other states in 2008 alone, for the deepest percentage loss in the nation (1.1 percent). Since 2000, Michigan experienced a 4.7 percent domestic migration loss, equal to the decline in Massachusetts. Further, based upon current rates, Michigan next year will probably be the first state to ever drop from above to below 10,000,000 residents. Illinois and Ohio have also suffered substantial domestic migration losses, at 4.6 percent and 3.0 percent respectively.

    Where from Here? It is, of course, impossible to tell whether these trends will continue. Domestic migration could fall even more precipitously if economic times continue to worsen.

    We cannot predict whether seemingly unlikely trends, such as net in-migration to South Dakota and West Virginia, will continue in the longer run. Will Florida’s losses continue or intensify, or will it resume its position as a magnet for residents of other states? Has the magnet of California truly lost its attraction? Will the improving trends in the Midwest begin to make up for half a century of migration losses? Only time will tell.

    Resource: State Population & Migration: 2000-2008 (http://www.demographia.com/db-statemigra2008.pdf)

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Class and the Future of Planning

    Economic segregation may be a foregone conclusion, as studies have long suggested. For one thing, our first tendency is to buy the best place we can afford, intentionally locating to those parts of a region that appeal to others with similar buying power. Secondly, we tend to buy something most suitable to our tastes, which steers us into areas populated by those with similar viewpoints.

    The implications for contemporary planning processes are profound, especially since current best practices revolve so much around form and style and take so little measure of economics, choice, and consequence. It troubles me that my own decisions purchasing houses in the past – made after careful scrutiny of what evidence I could gather about the people living in the neighborhood – showed me that even a planner aware of attempts to integrate could choose segregation.

    But if planning is anything, surely it is the idea that what seemed inevitable can be bypassed with careful consideration, sequencing, and reorganization of inputs. Why plan for a different future if the results are the same as when you started? The idea of inevitable segregation narrows the planning options considerably.

    As a result, planners and community developers have focused not on enlarging the pie, but on figuring out how to appeal to those residents who show up for meetings. Whether these groups are affluent NIMBYs or poor advocates for low-cost housing, the status quo remains completely undisturbed.

    There are two main ways I’ve seen this occur. First is through the comprehensive planning process. The comprehensive planning process attempts to bring together connected but distinct elements – housing, transportation, the environment, the economy – and reassemble them into a cohesive, publicly vetted whole. But what really happens during such efforts?

    Planning staff assembles data. The contours of the process get articulation. Citizens get to describe their vision of their community. Flavor of the day ingredients dominate the discussion – pedestrian malls, node development, open space, wetlands preservation, smart growth, and now green collar jobs, sustainability, and social equity (whatever that is).

    The strong neighborhoods show up in force, working the system to their advantage. They often transform any land use or zoning issue into a referendum on the impacts on property values. The water treatment facility gets sited far away from such neighborhoods. Low-income housing becomes an articulated virtue, so long as its located elsewhere. This occurs in supposedly enlightened and ‘progressive’ neighborhoods like mine – Rosemont in Alexandria, Virginia – and places like Kensington near Berkeley, or in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where addressing homelessness is a rising priority – if it’s handled in Bridgeport and not Danbury or Shelton or Norwalk. Planning nearly always yields good results for neighborhoods like mine.

    In contrast, residents of struggling areas are skeptical of processes that have not benefited them very much in the past. In places like low-income parts of Norfolk, Virginia, “planning” has come to mean either 1950s style urban renewal or 1990s style gentrification. New Urbanism in Norfolk has often meant the very opposite of practical economic inclusion for low-income working households. The very idea that real change could both come and be beneficial to them is laughable. Their issues are not about landscaping with native plants: their concerns are jobs, crime, services, and housing affordability. Astute (cynical) planners soon discover that “respect” is also in play in these neighborhoods; merely listening with sincerity becomes a stand in for actual change. Listening requires no real work, certainly not compared to the heavy lifting of actually improving these areas for their current residents. Planning rarely adds much to these places.

    Middle-class neighborhoods want to preserve what they have. They don’t want their small claim on prosperity threatened by those from the troubled areas in town. They want nothing more than to preserve their safety and the small patch of grass they mow on the weekends. For families in these neighborhoods, the suburbs have for decades been a bastion from a changing urban setting that appears to always grant the rich a pass and provide unearned opportunity to the poor.

    Unable to migrate into the ranks of the upper middle class and penetrate the neighborhoods of lawyers and accountants and physicians, middle neighborhood residents often simply leave and form a place of their own. Plumbers and carpenters dislodged from Del Ray (an old blue collar neighborhood in Alexandria, VA) drive their pick-up trucks to Springfield, where they have a mall and plenty of ranch houses, and where they can safely raise their family while holding a job that does not require a college education.

    Planners generally dismiss these areas since they often come from the upper echelons and maintain a theoretical concern for the poor. But there are consequences when these middle income residents leave. Indeed the migration of these households out of the urban core and inner ring suburbs may be the most pressing social challenge facing planners. Unsexy as the housing concerns of the plumber may be, they are often the critical ones in terms of maintaining strong neighborhoods.

    Take a look at what has happened in the City of Geneva, New York, which is emblematic of so many communities in the middle of a city-county struggle for the middle class. The City’s pre-war manufacturing and agricultural history was sufficient to build a sophisticated infrastructure going into World War II. The arrival of the Depot and Naval Base in nearby Seneca brought overcrowding and congestion and triggered something of a building boom to Geneva. When the base closed, the city’s middle class left for newer housing and retail outside the city.

    As middle income residents have fled, the city itself has become a place of many have-nots and a few haves. Rather than invest to engender pride, safety, and a sense of community in the city’s neighborhoods – the small unstylish work of organizing – the doctrine sought to make downtown attractive, livable and appealing by applying the “edifice complex” or the “Field of Dreams theory”: if you build it they will come. Then the planners and developers get to stand around and wonder why downtown still feels empty.

    Along the way the city opened its doors to a raft of social service providers, inviting them to locate their business and clients downtown. The middle class watched, grew frustrated, and left for the periphery. Despite some of the most glorious – and reasonably priced – architecture in America, the middle class has left, taking with them much of the urban tax base. This creates a hole out from which few cities emerge.

    This is not at all unique to Geneva, as any planner and community developer knows. Its the case in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia and in neighboring Arlington where programs do an admirable job of enabling some of the working poor to remain, while the middle has found greater comfort in leaving for other counties.

    There may be a way out of this dilemma. The central aim of community development should be to work the system in ways that generate wealth-building probabilities – both for individual households and for neighborhoods. The central aim of our work should be to expand the zone of acceptable and livable neighborhoods: to make more places more worthy of affection, not some extremely worthy and others barely so.

    Planning efforts must concern themselves less with process and more with outcome. Every block in every city can be objectively scored in terms of livability, as defined locally. In this approach, the community development process may be judged a failure if in service of a few individuals concentrated poverty and economic segregation grows. Marin County would no longer be able to balance its affordable housing ledger on the backs of Marin City and a few parts of San Rafael. Montgomery County, Maryland would no longer be able to use Prince George’s County as its de facto affordable housing policy. And genuinely struggling places like Ontario County, NY would not be able to look to the City of Geneva as their repositories of poor families and the hub of the area’s social service network.

    In the last thirty years, planners have reduced our field of vision. We have fostered an exodus of our middle class and focused on creating environments for the rich and poor. If we really want social equity, growing the middle is the best place to start.

    This means we have to change our priorities. We should stop trying to reinforce concentrations of wealth. Poor neighborhoods should not be defined solely as places and people who primarily “need” and never exercise choice. Instead our priority should be to help plan for an expanding middle class – even if it ruffles the feathers of some gatekeepers in both poor and affluent neighborhoods.

    Charles Buki is principal of czb, a Virginia-based neighborhood planning practice.

  • Oregon’s Fringes: A New Rural Alternative

    Once the bastion of a thriving rural middle class, Oregon’s rural communities are now barely scraping by. The state’s timber industry employed 81,400 residents at its peak in 1978. At the time, the industry made up 49% of all manufacturing jobs in the state according to the Oregon Employment Department.

    Since then, the recessions of the early eighties and nineties, increased land-use restriction, decreased timber supply, global competition and automation of the timber industry have devastated rural communities that relied on once-plentiful timber jobs. Total timber industry employment has dropped to barely 11,000. Long term forestry prospects are glum. The benefits of carbon sequestration, endangered species protections, growing green building industry and the desire to protect Oregon’s forests for recreation will continue to hamper extraction and employment opportunities.

    Meanwhile, residents of such places as the southwest town of Oakridge (pop, 4,000) are left with few options. As the last mill went in the early nineties, so did the jobs. Many left for employment in surrounding cities. Those who stay often work multiple minimum-wage retail shifts; a trailer or shared space is many times their only living option.

    Oregon’s rural places were wrecked not just because of the necessary industry shift (away from logging) but because of the lack of long-term planning required to accommodate that shift.

    The obvious decline in timber employment called for a multi-generational plan to re-invent the state’s rural communities. Instead, towns like Oakridge were allowed to sink until the situation became bleak enough to gain state attention. What followed was reactionary policy that mandated mostly welfare and other band-aid solutions.

    The current situation calls for a more drastic plan that will once again restore Oregon’s proud rural tradition. The initial step is recognizing that rural Oregon – if the state is to preserve its natural resources and provide healthy communities for its residents – must transition from a rural layout to denser small town formations. The state lacks the resources, population density and geographic appeal to allow all of rural Oregon to make this change.

    Instead, select areas with the potential for turn-around should be identified across the state and given special attention in making the transition. At best, this should come from the ground up: through the initiative of local communities. These “New Towns” will be allotted state resources and special legislation to reinvent themselves as more compact and sustainable communities with the capacity of attracting skilled workers and business alike.

    Rather than attempt to wrestle with every factor in the discussion of the New Town model, what follows is a broad outline of the more crucial considerations suggested by such an approach . This leaves much open to discussion, to which the reader is invited to contribute.

    First, Oregon’s historically strict land-use regulations need to be re-evaluated. Instead of discouraging development, it should be encouraged within the New Town boundaries by incentive packages to developers who add an element of “community value” to their projects. Projects that are built sustainably, offer employment, scenic access, cultural attractions, restaurants, and/or retail options will qualify for the incentives.

    Of course many oppose almost any further development across rural Oregon. But in reality we really have two options: either accept a future of rural disenfranchisement and resource extraction; or concentrate resources, re-zone, and intelligently build new, economically as well as environmentally sustainable towns across Oregon.

    Alternative energy companies such as SolarWorld, Vestas and Solaicx, Inc. are just a handful of the dozens of renewable energy companies running or planning new facilities in Oregon.

    Initially, these firms have clustered around Portland or its surrounding suburbs. But factors such as dwindling space and access to workers could drive these firms further outwards. The right incentives package, inexpensive land and labor would make the New Towns an attractive option for the green industry in the coming years.

    Green business could provide one foundation for these places. Once the green industry demonstrates confidence in the New Town model, other economic players would likely follow. These include industries – such as food processing, data centers and specialized services – that could also be nurtured successfully, as has occurred in smaller communities elsewhere in the region.

    The New Town proposal also offers a viable solution to Oregon’s expected population growth. Between 1980 and 2006, the Oregon population grew from 2.6 million to 3.7 million, an increase of 40.5 percent. By 2050 population growth for the state is projected at 5.8 million according to the Northwest Rural Development Center using U.S. Census data.

    The state’s population growth – mainly from immigration and domestic migrants – will be attracted to locales with affordable housing and job opportunities. So far this has translated into a largely urban migration. Growth within cities or in their surrounding suburbs increased by as much as 50%, while non-metro growth increased by only 19%.

    As long as jobs remain in or near the handful of cities Oregon has to offer, these trends will continue. Fortunately, the majority of newcomers are not drawn primarily by urban amenities. Inexpensive housing, job opportunities, and scenic attractions could compensate nicely for the increasing cost and congestion that accompanies urban living.

    The development of the suburbs stemmed from the desire to escape the urban core’s problems. The suburbs continue to surround our cities because of the resources and job availability. However, there is little reason that with the digital revolution and the coming green revolution, once-isolated towns cannot become self sustainable and very desirable.

    Many readers will feel uneasy by the suggestion of deliberately spurring growth in particular places while allowing others to wane. It seems to go against free market ideology and even to be unauthentic.

    Yet a change is needed. These places initially thrived because they were located near natural resources. By shifting from extraction industries, the basis of the local economy has shifted. The whole approach to town development needs to be readjusted to meet these new realities.

    Without a complete shift in how planners view and design for the spaces across the entire state, the rural poor will continue to struggle, while population increases will make our metropolitan areas less and less attractive. The New Town model could present a viable option to the contemporary problems Oregonians face and perhaps to other problems now only on the horizon.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions.

  • Will the Bubble Burst Aspen?

    Aspen is a great town. Its uniqueness extends beyond its spectacular geography to its amenities, people and community spirit. It’s a world-class, year-round Rocky Mountain resort offering great food, music, skiing, shopping – great everything – right in the middle of a real, functioning, small American community.

    It’s no surprise people like it, want to keep it going. And not just the good, smart people who live in Aspen full-time and those who own second homes there (including some of the wealthiest people on Earth), but the thousands of good, smart people who visit every year to address big issues at the Aspen Institute and numerous other forums. These include elites of American arts, sciences, politics and economics with amazing amounts of brainpower and money at their disposal.

    But geographic realities plus inexorable economic, demographic, and social trends are conspiring against the best of intentions. The future of Aspen – playground to the smart, rich and famous – may soon become untenable.

    The financial crisis dominates thinking now. Could it be the catalyst that signals the beginning of the end of business as usual: the start of a major, long-term and permanent change?

    The list of interested parties includes a wide cross section of year-round residents, second homeowners, business and property owners, public officials, visitors, employers and employees, builders and construction companies, managers and personnel at SkiCo (the town’s largest employer).

    I have both personal and professional interests in trends in Aspen, and have been fortunate to visit many times and spend considerable time there over the past 35 years. My in-laws have been gracious and generous hosts (how lucky is that?), and in my role as an analyst of economic and demographic trends, I have been invited to speak, make presentations and attend seminars on many occasions (I always accept!).

    Over the years I have personally seen the transformation from funky (I think the first time I skied there was in jeans and a sweatshirt) to glam and chic. To me it has always posed the classic development problem: how do you both improve and preserve what you’ve got, without setting forces in motion that undermine what you were trying to protect?

    Before the housing and economic meltdown Aspen’s future was considered in State of the Aspen Area 2008, a report commissioned by the Aspen City Council and Pitkin County Board of Commissioners to provide guidance for future decisions on issues ranging from housing to growth management to transportation. The goal was to generate a 10-year community vision for the future, but that future may have to be put on hold.

    The report highlighted several trends that seemed to pose serious challenges for Aspen. Most prominently, it suggested that the Aspen economy was becoming dangerously dependent on real estate and construction, as opposed to the original drivers of skiing, lodging and retail/restaurants. There were many new jobs, but a decrease in available housing for workers.

    Aspen backs up to the Continental divide (closed all winter)! The Roaring Fork Valley is steep and narrow. Low- and middle-income workers must all live and commute “down valley.” But down-valley communities, where one used to be able to find cheap housing, have themselves become too crowded and expensive.

    On top of this the Roaring Fork Valley has moved within sight of being “built out.” Traffic congestion is expanding up and down the valley (there is only one road – Route 82 – to get in or out of town), reaching intolerable levels during rush hours which start earlier and end later. A population of primary and second homeowners increasingly “aging in place” (with large percentages intending to retire in place), taking both their labor and residences off the market, exacerbate existing housing/lodging/worker imbalances.

    The only reason the town “works” now is massive cross-subsidization. The fabulously wealthy subsidize the town budget with high property taxes on their mansions (even though some are in residence only a few weeks a year). They also subsidize the many arts, cultural attractions and charities so ubiquitous to Aspen as well as a range of services for year-round residents, from child care to education, health services, senior services, and police and fire departments.

    Revenues from the rich and ultra-rich also pay for a town government that has a budget of $100 million plus for a town of 6000 permanent residents. In other words, Aspen could not afford itself if it had to rely on itself. Yet it was assumed the system would continue to work indefinitely because of the belief that “there will always be [a need for] an Aspen,” a playground for the ultra wealthy who spent freely and gave generously.

    The burst of the housing bubble, and now the financial and economic crisis, throw that assumption into doubt. Even before the financial meltdown, the usual source of funds – more building to generate more fees, and/or raising taxes on visitors and residents (those both full-time and part-time) – were reaching limits. Now many construction projects have come to a virtual halt; it is no longer certain there will be buyers or a market for the completed structures – developers need to stop bleeding cash immediately. The value of building permits issued in Aspen this year is down 47 percent through Dec. 10.

    Meanwhile the all-important non-profit sector has fallen into a tailspin. Contributions to the arts and other charities are primed to plummet. Endowment funds have lost millions. Sales tax revenue, which is the main tax source, will soon crash due to decreased tourism. Visitor reservations are dramatically down this Holiday season; retail stores are posting “Help Not Wanted” signs.

    As a result, Aspen, a city unused to troubles, now has about all it can handle. Budget cuts threaten to cause havoc. Cuts in services, both governmental and those subsidized directly by the wealthy patrons, seem inevitable. Conflicts among elected officials, business, full- and part-time citizens could get ugly.

    Of course, there is always the possibility that Aspen will weather the storm: after one or two down seasons at most, the number of visitors and dollars collected, spent and donated will resume their inexorable rise. After all, the ultra rich, trendy and connected will always need a playground. The problems listed above are not impervious to solutions; those bridges will be crossed when encountered by lots of brainpower and money.

    In addition, not everyone is alarmed by the economic crisis and housing crash; some Aspen residents are indeed rooting for it, welcoming a lull in the constant construction, development and traffic, and hoping a slowdown will ameliorate such problems as the housing and worker shortages. Fiscal constraints will also bring some sanity back to (what they feel has been) the town government’s extravagance.

    Long, slow decline is certainly possible: less spending, fewer visits, tax receipts, and charitable contributions could unravel the entire structure of cross-subsidization. Could it mean a reversion to the “old Aspen,” the laid-back, counterculture, easy-going, hippy-dippy, live-off-the-land Aspen?

    Maybe so. But perhaps Aspen is facing systemic problems that can not be easily solved. Obviously, there are a great many demands on the area’s land, people, government and businesses. There has never been a consensus in Aspen that growth and development are desirable, even though the town has been dependent upon them. Now that certain limits are within sight of being reached, the already politicized town could become even more polarized.

    The city government has always been composed and supported by year-round local residents, of course, who have always had a love/hate relationship with growth and development: the tourists and wealthy second homeowners bring the city great wherewithal, but they also bring great demands on the area’s carrying capacity and inevitably change the character of the place.

    Of course, these conflicts have always existed, but as the stakes and money involved have grown, they have become more intense. It’s going to be an interesting next few years. See you at the Nell.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He publishes Growth Strategies, a newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends, and is a professional public speaker. Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis in Copenhagen, and North American agent for its US Consumer Demand Index.

  • Postindustrial Strength Brain Drain Policy

    In the discussions of the stimulus and infrastructure problem, little attention has yet been paid to addressing brain drain. Yet for many regions – particularly in the old industrial heartland – no issue could be more critical.

    Perhaps the most important investment in regional human capital occurs at local schools. Enterprise looks to the secondary and post-secondary institutions within the area for labor. In this regard, it makes sense to fund better learning with local and state taxes as long as that talent remains within that geography.

    Older industrial age cities and states are particularly dependent on a parochial labor pool. That’s the political legacy of the industrial economy. Workers tended to put down deep roots and this lack of geographic mobility made unions the only means to fight depressed wages.

    But the conventional solution for regional decline has been greater ‘investments’ in education. Yet increasingly high local and state taxes for education no longer make sense. In fact it can be argued that Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh have often been victims of their own success. Excellent schools – particularly in the suburban periphery – increased the geographic mobility of the next generation. When tough times hit in the late 70s and early 80s, these young adults were ready to embrace opportunity wherever it may be. When they left for Houston, Phoenix or Tampa, they took all those tax dollars with them.

    Out-migration isn’t a problem when your region is benefiting from some other place’s investment in human capital. But if no one is moving to your city or state, then retention of talent becomes a matter of economic survival. This is difficult to accomplish when your graduates are smart enough to know about greater opportunities that exist all the way across the country. It is also made worse when your local businesses are loath to pay the prevailing national market rate for the labor it needs.

    In this sense then, plugging brain drain can help depress wages and make a place like Charlotte that much more attractive to Rust Belt graduates. Remember, captains of industry made a lot of money exploiting captive labor markets.

    The dependence on local talent also disrupts network migration. Cities that must attract “foreign” workers develop pathways that make it easier for future workers to move there. It also helps connect the local economy to the global one, as has occurred on the west coast, with Asian immigrants opening connections to Pacific Rim economies and in south Florida, where Cuban migration has created a dynamic international business sector.

    Furthermore, getting newcomers helps outsource the costs of cultivating human capital. Low tax regimes bank on in-migration. Poor local schools don’t really matter when the best and brightest from the Rust Belt are moving into your brand spanking new crystal palaces. In this sense, the “legacy economy” is subsidizing Sun Belt boomtowns.

    The Rust Belt needs to learn from the Sun Belt. The game is all about attraction. The geographic mobility of talent within the Rust Belt would be a good place to start. Instead of squeezing the local labor pool, pave a new path to a fellow postindustrial city with a similar tax burden and effectively starve the boomtowns. Your neighboring legacy economy feels the same pain you do. Talent churning between the two locales beats the futility of fighting brain drain.

    Even growth states such as Georgia are overly concerned with who leaves. Sun Belt (i.e. growth) states obsess the out-migration of native graduates as much as Rust Belt (i.e. shrinking) states do. The same policy boondoggle in Ohio exists in Georgia. Across the board, there is a prejudice for homegrown talent.

    In contrast, I think older, now shrinking cities must embrace out-migration and focus more on growing the numbers of newcomers. These people will bring the new ideas and connections regions like ours need. Leave the self-destructive nativism to the Sun Belt.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • Go North Young Man

    With his foreign policy team now in place, President-elect Barack Obama certainly will be urged to make his first forays into high profile places like Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, as well as to greet his devoted fan base in Europe.

    But before heading off on the diplomatic grand tour, he might do well to turn his attention first to the country with which we have the closest political, economic and environmental ties: Canada. Although not as momentous or sexy a locale as Paris or Jerusalem, Ottawa could well hold the key to developing a bold new strategy for America in an increasingly incoherent and multi-polar world.

    A focus on Canada and to some extent Mexico as well, would require a reversal of the kind of wide-ranging foreign policy focus that has dominated the country since the 1940s. In that period, the United States has extended – one might increasingly say overextended — its economic and political reach ever further from its continental base.

    In the process, the country has become ever more intertwined with unreliable and often malicious regimes on the Asian continent and subservient to the interests of an often jealous and uncomprehending Europe. As a result, the country has sacrificed its own economic health, becoming ever more dependent on fuel, manufactured goods and even its self-esteem from countries with which we often share distressingly little.

    Instead, the new President should place greater emphasis on the fundamental basis of our uniqueness and economic strength: the enormous continent we share with our Canadian as well as Mexican neighbors. This would represent a return to a version of the politics – so important in our 19th Century emergence – that understood resources, natural and human, constitute the true foundation of national greatness.

    This shift also would help us establish significant psychological distance between the United States and Europe. Although there are segments of the country, notably in the Northeast, who would prefer America become a clone of the Old Continent, our demographic and physical realities are diverging every day from those of a rapidly aging and resource-poor Europe.

    In contrast, Canada shares with America a somewhat more vibrant demography. This is driven largely by immigrants who are rapidly integrating and invigorating both countries. With Australia, the two countries have emerged as the preferred location for immigrants in part because they are where they are – in sharp contrast with that of Europe – most likely to succeed.

    Being a country of immigrant aspiration represents just one aspect of our close cultural ties with Canada. Our northern neighbor ranks among the largest senders of immigrants as well; roughly 840,000 Canadian citizens now have established themselves south of the border. On a familial level millions of Canadians have relations with Americans; in fact, places like Los Angeles, if current and former Canadians were counted, would constitute among the largest cities in that country.

    Canada is also our country’s largest source of visitors – there are parts of Florida where French is the second language – and a major player in our national real estate and financial market. Whole sections of the northern Great Plains depend on consumers coming from over the border. (Full disclosure: Joel Kotkin’s wife is a native of Montreal, Quebec and the Schills live in Grand Forks, an icy spit from the Manitoba border).

    Most critically our economic ties to Canada represent the largest bilateral relationship in the world while Mexico has emerged as our third largest trading partner. And unlike our chronically poor terms of engagement with countries like China and Japan, our trade with Canada and Mexico also includes healthy transactions in basic manufactured goods, technology and farm products.

    At the same time, Canada and United States together share a critical interest in agricultural commodities, a market where they are the undisputed world leaders. In a world that is likely to get too crowded and short of basic resources, a strong North America should be well-positioned in comparison with relatively resource-poor competitors such as Western Europe and East Asia.

    But perhaps the most critical relationship lies in the energy arena. The globally Saudi-centered energy policy of recent years, particularly during the Bush-Cheney era, has fueled our deadliest enemies and also threatens both our environment and long-term economic viability.

    A U.S.-Canada energy consortium — with the eventual involvement of Mexico — provides an out from our fundamental geopolitical dilemma: how to grow our economy while reducing our dependence on imported energy and, over time, carbon-emitting fuels. This could take the form of something like a North American Energy Community, which would help coordinate research, development and environmental resources across the continent.

    This approach would offer a way to shift our economic interests away from unreliable and unfriendly regimes towards countries with whom we have far better personal, political and economic ties. Current estimates indicate we will increase oil imports from 12.6 million barrels a day today to 16.4 million in 2030. More than half of that is expected to come from OPEC suppliers, with much of the rest from Russia and the Central Asia autocracies.

    A continental strategy would halt this dangerous slide. Taken together, the resources of our three countries are both immense and extraordinarily diverse. Overall, North America ranks second only to the Middle East in proven oil reserves. Canada, for example, has the world’s second largest proven crude oil reserves, outpaced only by Saudi Arabia; the United States ranks 11th and Mexico 14th. The three North American states rank in the top fifteen in natural gas production, as well.

    This alliance can work both in the short run on fossil fuels and will, over time, blossom with the shift to renewables. Canada, well known for its surplus of fossil fuels, also possesses promising potential in hydroelectric and wind energy. Wind alone, Canadian researchers believe, could provide 20 percent of that nation’s power. Prince Edward Island, on the country’s east coast, is already conducting a major experiment to shift its primary energy dependence towards wind and biomass.

    Mexico, long an oil exporter, needs new technology both to upgrade its current energy industry and to exploit its potential in renewable fuels. Over time, experts say, Mexican production of fossil fuels will drop, but the nation has an almost totally unexploited potential in solar and sugar-based ethanol fuel, following the Brazilian model. For its part, the United States also has considerable solar, wind, and biofuels, of which we are already the world’s second largest producer.

    This energy alliance would also help spark employment and growth across the continent. Money spent on development and importation of energy from Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Iran offers few benefits for our economy. We conduct pathetically little export trade with these nations; we constitute less than 5 percent of Russia’s imports, less than 14 percent of Saudi Arabia’s, and virtually none of Iran’s. Europe, Japan, and, increasingly, China – not the United States – are the growing and primary beneficiaries of the energy-producers’ wealth.

    The same dollars spent within North America have a very different effect. Canada and Mexico together constitute by far the largest export market for the United States. Over one third of our exports now go to our North American allies, compared to less than 5 percent to OPEC and less than one percent to the Russian Federation.

    Investment in Mexico’s Peninsula de Atasta, an ethanol plant in Iowa, or a hydroelectric plant in Quebec enriches customers for whom the United States is a primary source of both manufactured goods and of services, including tourism. A wealthier Mexico also means more visitors to the parks of Orlando, Anaheim or to Houston’s Galleria. Canadians, for their part, flock first to New York, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles or Florida when they have extra change to spend.

    So as he considers his options, President-elect Obama may want to consider this continental strategy as a means to create new wealth here and to strengthen our hand abroad. We know these proposals are radical, and will be subject to all sorts of opposition by well-organized pressure groups.

    But by focusing on our continental economy, the United States can begin facing the world not as another slowly declining European descended power but once again as a youthful, defiantly multi-racial and ascendant one.

    This piece originally appeared at Politico.com

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and is finishing a book on the American future. He is executive editor of www.newgeography.com. Mark Schill is the site’s managing editor and an associate at the Praxis Strategy Group.

    December 19, 2008

  • Hyde Park, St. Louis: Are We Almost There Yet?

    Among potential titles for this article about the Hyde Park neighborhood of St. Louis, I played with The Archaeology of Stasis. My husband suggested It’s Not Happening Here. But neither seemed right. Both were too depressing to describe a place where people are working hard for change. I wanted a title that suggested a lot of hard work, but hope nonetheless.

    I recently toured the neighborhood on a chilly Sunday morning with a former graduate student of mine, Dan Gaeng. Hyde Park is in north St. Louis, near downtown. Its roots extend to the 1830s and ‘40s, when large numbers of German Americans settled there. Today, it is predominantly African-American. Dan, whose dad grew up in Hyde Park, had written a paper about the neighborhood, and it captured much of what I feel about the city of St. Louis in general. All the ingredients are here for a city that can turn the corner and make urban living a reality for a wide swath of folks – a few solid industries, devoted locals, an ideal location for communication and transportation with the rest of the nation, beautiful old housing stock, at least the bones of a viable public transportation network, ongoing local traditions, and affordable living. Yet St. Louis never seems to get there.

    There are some neighborhoods that have done it, to be sure. And downtown looks a lot better than it did when it served as the post-apocalyptic setting for “Escape from New York.” But there’s still a sense that St. Louis is stalled, moving neither toward recovery nor toward total desolation.

    The negative tinge to my headline candidates no doubt owed something to Kenneth Jackson’s 1985 Crabgrass Frontier. The author traces the construction of interstates, federal housing programs, mortgage lending practices, and white flight to explain the abandonment of urban cores for increasingly distant suburbs. St. Louis is a poster child of the phenomenon. Jackson quotes former St. Louis mayor Raymond Tucker, who explained in frustration, “We just cannot build enough lanes of highways to move all of our people by private automobile, and create enough parking space to store the cars without completely paving over our cities and removing all of the economic, social, and cultural establishments that the people were trying to reach in the first place.”

    Excoriating a 1973 RAND study that suggested that St. Louis could become “one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life,” Jackson suggests that “such advice is for those who study statistics rather than cities. Too late, municipal leaders will realize that a slavish duplication of suburbia destroys the urban fabric that makes cities interesting.”

    And he paints a grim picture of neighborhoods like Hyde Park, as he notes St. Louis’s declining population. “Many of its old neighborhoods have become dispiriting collections of burned-out buildings, eviscerated homes, and vacant lots. Although the drone of traffic on the nearby interstate highways is constant, there is an eerie remoteness to the pock-marked streets. The air is polluted, the sidewalks are filthy, the juvenile crime rate is horrendous, and the remaining industries are languishing. Grimy warehouses and aging loft factories are landscaped by weed-grown lots adjoining half-used rail yards. Like an elderly couple no longer sure of their purpose in life after their children have moved away, these neighborhoods face an undirected future.”

    Twenty-three years after Jackson’s words, Hyde Park’s perseverance suggests that his portrait, while apt, misses a remarkably resilient local pride. Indeed, one title I considered was On the One Hand, On the Other Hand. It’s not that Hyde Park hasn’t suffered from the very trends that Jackson describes. In the mid-1950s, I-70 split the residential side of the neighborhood from its industrial workplaces. Pedestrian traffic virtually stopped. The decline of industrial employment in the city and white flight followed. The neighborhood appeared to hit bottom in the late 1960s, when youths began stealing from elderly residents.

    Since then, a series of revitalization efforts have made their own mark. The result is a patchwork of hope and despair. Renovated nineteenth-century homes mix with recently constructed townhouses, shuttered and crumbling row houses, and piles of burnt-out bricks. Some owners clearly take pride in their houses and yards (many yards still proudly displayed Obama signs on my post-election tour), while other properties appear barely occupied. The traces of old business names are visible on the bricks. It’s just the kind of local color that proponents of gentrification are fond of preserving, but there are few local businesses in operation now. An artist has purchased a former library, which he hopes to turn into a gallery, but it’s not yet open, and there’s no public art in the neighborhood.

    There is a full grocery store on the northern edge, but it’s a hike from the most vibrant part of Hyde Park, the cluster of homes that surround the still-active Holy Trinity Catholic Church and parish school. The church has bought up some of the area’s property and encouraged resettlement, much of it in Section 8 housing, but three of the most recent homes are shuttered because no one has purchased them. Former locals and parish school graduates do return to church on Sundays, but the neighborhood is now mainly non-Catholic.

    A local developer, who calls his company Blue Shutters (to contrast with the ubiquitous red shutters that signal the city’s purchase of a desolate building), has renovated several houses. He also has plans for the Turnverein, a one-time German exercise hall, which could serve as a community center. Dan mentioned that his parents held their wedding reception there. Unfortunately, the Turnverein had a serious fire in 2006. As the St. Louis blog “Ecology of Absence” noted, the fire received hardly any attention in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The neighborhood received historic district status in the 1970s, but when I mentioned to my co-workers, students and neighbors that I had toured Hyde Park, none of them knew where it was.

    And maybe that doesn’t matter. I see no way that Hyde Park could become the kind of gentrified neighborhood that lures hipsters and boutiques, and makes city council members salivate. Moreover, the folks who have committed themselves to the slow and steady efforts of revitalization don’t seem to want their home to be such a place. As one of the residents whom Dan interviewed said, “Other people have wondered why I haven’t left, and I say, ‘Why should I? I’m fine here’. The neighbors look out for each other, and I like the house and neighborhood. There is a nice mixture of people, from the poor to the college educated and well-off. That’s important to me. I don’t want to live in just a homogeneous upper-middle-class area.”

    A remarkably diverse selection of institutions and people are involved in Hyde Park’s revitalization: “Ecology of Absence” blogger Michael Allen (also the Assistant Director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis), Holy Trinity Church, and the Friedens Neighborhood Association, which is training local high school drop-outs in construction trades and providing G.E.D. preparation. Of course, there are also the dedicated folks who patiently turn out for one redevelopment meeting after another to plot the painstaking steps – the creation of an entry monument, for example, or streetscape enhancements – that could turn Hyde Park into a place that feels fully inhabited.

    It’s possible that twenty-three years from now Hyde Park will make me think not about Crabgrass Frontier, but about another book I read with my graduate students: Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, a study of the grassroots efforts behind the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Activist Ella Baker called the day-to-day efforts behind the movement “spade work.” It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t get a lot of credit, but there’s no real movement without it. There’s a lot of spade work going on in Hyde Park. It just might build a place.

    For more on Hyde Park, see:
    Ecology of Absence Blogspot, Friedens Neighborhood Foundation, Landmarks Association of St.Louis, St.Louis Development Corp.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • City Planning and The Politics of Pollution

    Part Two. Yesterday, in Part One, Critser discussed scientific advances in understanding air pollution. Today, he addresses the social implications.

    The new science of air pollution, with its emphasis on dose-response mechanisms, may remake the traditional advocacy realm of social and environmental justice. In the past, that world has been focused on class, race and ethnicity, classic markers of inequality and vulnerability. Today, the focus is more “exposure driven.” “Dosage… may be something people who have ignored environmental justice can get their heads around,” one researcher at last month’s Environmental Epidemiology conference in Pasadena noted. “It may get people’s attention on something that affects us all.”

    Other new observations are recasting ancient (and highly suspect) urban-suburban dichotomies as well. If one parses the science of small, regional temperature increases—the kind we may see more of in the future—and how those spikes “activate” ultrafine particles, one discovers a disturbing phenomenon: The combination of heat and UFPs makes airborne plant pollens more inflammatory. Such was the finding of Italian researchers studying how traffic emissions and high temperatures in Naples fortify the toxicity of urtica, the common allergen known as the nettle plant. One wonders how the same combination remakes the lovely sage and chaparral environment surrounding Southern California suburbs, even when the region isn’t burning. It is a disturbing prospect for those who believe they have escaped inflammation by exchanging big cities for exurban greenlands.

    What, besides moving to Iceland, can be done? Few have thought more about that, at the practical level, than Andrea Hricko, an associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC, where she is trying to translate epidemiological data about pollution into practical public health policy. For years, Hricko’s focus was the Port of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods and schools surrounding that diesel-saturated realm. What she found were huge spikes in childhood chronic diseases, especially asthma, as well as other heart and lung problems. She and others succeeded in getting one school relocated—pushed back from the most truck-intensive route near the Alameda Corridor—but even that victory was a lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.

    “Come over here, you have to see this,” she said to a visitor one day in her crammed office on the medical school campus. On her computer appeared a picture of a group of kids playing soccer. In the immediate background loomed trucks belching the substances that eventually make the port air so heinously foggy. “See, this is where the school was. This was supposed to be the buffer zone, but… being that it is also rare, unoccupied space, and LA schools have so little recreational area, it is now a defacto playground. So you have kids better protected inside, but doing their deepest breathing part of their day right on top of the trucks.” It’s a perfect public health storm, she notes, because “getting kids outside and exercising more is a huge priority in the obesity-diabetes crisis.”

    Hricko’s focus on the ports, arguably the octopus of contemporary industrial Los Angeles, has taught her some hard lessons. You can always get a regulation that says, for example, don’t build a school within X distance of a freeway, but you can rarely switch the scenario around, say, with a ruling that says don’t widen a freeway when it is within X distance of a school. The same is true of building a new rail yard, as is the case just north of the port today. For years, area residents waged war with the railroad and the port to simply locate the new yard closer to the water, which would have drastically reduced the number of short, emission-intensive trips by trucks, and thus hopefully cut down the high rate of respiratory disease in the area. The solution, instead, was to go ahead and build the yard right by the homes, with a promise by state regulatory agencies to install new, high efficiency filters in all area homes. While that protects the children while they’re inside—and, it would seem, suggests a possible boom enterprise for the filter industry—it’s far from an ideal solution. “They’re still spending most of their time outside, and we still need to get them to exercise more while they’re out there. It’s a frustrating exercise.”

    Hricko has also wondered if the same impasse won’t obtain in the arena of the low-income housing juggernaut led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. One recent hearing concerned an affordable housing complex proposed alongside the 5 freeway near East Los Angeles. As Hricko tells it, that project would be sandwiched between one of the most emissions-choked portions of the freeway and the mass transit Gold Line, which would run just behind it. “There was all kinds of talk about filtering, etcetera, but the real question was never brought to the fore: Perhaps this shouldn’t be considered for housing in the first place.” She notes that a member of the LA County Public Health staff made precisely this point… privately.

    One can understand why. Affordable housing is an important, unmet need in Los Angeles, one with a substantial political establishment behind it and a charismatic mayor in front of it. There is, as a result, an understandable reluctance to get in the way of the parade, especially after years of political impasse. The mayor recently upped the ante and proclaimed a new $5 billion housing initiative, much of which would center on building new housing near mass transit stations. The essence of this transit pod strategy has a fairly sustainable logic: If you can get people to live near mass transit, you’ll dramatically reduce one of the biggest single factors in urban pollution: the numerous short, one-to-five mile trips that people make every day, whether to work or to the store or to pick up the kids at school. You’ll also reduce traffic jams.

    The problem, of course, is human nature, and the naughty desire by poor people, especially in Los Angeles, to be like the rich people, driving whenever and to wherever they want. Compounding this, for the scheme to work, we still must get from the station to work and people will use a car to do that. “For Antonio’s plan to work, you’d basically have to make it a condition of ownership that you don’t have a car. Or, that if you are going to buy this housing, you have to work somewhere on the trainline,” Hricko said with a knowing smile. “Because if you don’t, you still have people driving. You’re defeating your purpose before you ever get started.”

    That’s one realm where a leader like Villaraigosa, with his celebrity status and megawatt smile, could lead by example. But that hasn’t happened so far. Mike Woo, who describes himself as a supporter of the mayor, says “I want to say that I think the mayor’s people are on top of this. I wish I could say that. I really wish I could say that.” Woo notes that there is a slightly bigger time window for solving the housing crunch than is popularly acknowledged. The Planning Commission’s most recent staff report holds that meeting the need for housing in most transit corridors for the next 8-10 years does not require raising the density of housing.

    That’s a rare breather, Woo says. Let’s make the most of it.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).