New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Voting and Families: America’s Second Demographic Transition

    It has been widely accepted that geographic areas with more unconventional forms of family formation – cohabitation; children born to cohabitors; postponement of partnership, marriage and parenthood to much later ages; acceptance of interference with fertility through abortion and efficient contraception – would vote for Democrats. Conversely, those geographic areas that retain classic forms of family formation – early marriage and parenthood – and more conventional gender roles would display a preference for Republicans.

    The “Culture War” issues were prominent during the George Bush-Al Gore and the George Bush-John Kerry contests of 2000 and 2004. One of the consequences was that the spatial pattern of the election results, both by state and by county, exhibited a marked correlation with the prevalence of new patterns of family formation The shift to these new demographic patterns is often referred to by demographers as “the second demographic transition,” or SDT.

    One of the criticisms formulated against the theoretical underpinning of the Election-SDT correlation for the US was that this link was only a temporary phenomenon. If economic issues instead of cultural ones would dominate the debate during the presidential elections, critics theorized, this correlation would become unstuck.

    The 2008 elections provided us with a very nice test indeed. Both candidates initially shunned the culture war issues as too divisive, and only with the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate was there a brief revival of this debate. Shortly thereafter, the banking crisis and the resulting economic upheaval took center stage. And very forcefully so.

    Did the link between the maps of the second demographic transition and of election results weaken or vanish as the “It’s-the-economy, dummy-” proponents predicted? The answer is a resounding ‘No,’ as our studies showed empirically.

    We examined the SDT-dimension in an analysis of a set of 22 indicators, all dealing with patterns of family formation. We looked at typical SDT features such as the postponement of marriage, greater prevalence of cohabitation and same sex households, postponement of parenthood, sub-replacement fertility, and a higher incidence of abortion.

    Two maps were prepared for the counties we studied. The first is a classic map with blue shadings for counties that are further advanced on the “second demographic transition” dimension and red ones for those with the slowest shift in that direction. The second map is a cartogram with the counties now drawn proportionally to the size of their population in the 2000 census.

    Now take a look at the scattergrams and correlations at the state level between the SDT-dimension and the Republican vote for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (Figure 1). The conclusion is obvious: the correlation that existed in 2004 is very largely replicated in 2008, and the relative positions of the states in the scattergram are essentially maintained.

    For those who like details: Indeed, Arizona voted in 2008 for McCain more than would be expected on the basis of its SDT-score, while the reverse holds for Hawaii. Also, Utah had to yield its top position on the Republican vote to Wyoming and Oklahoma, despite its very low score on the SDT.

    Nevertheless, when the correlations between the “second demographic transition” features and the vote for the Republican candidate are calculated for more than 3000 counties, the results are even stronger for the 2008 elections than they were in 2004 (corr. coeff. improves from -.57 to -.65). Moreover, that statistical link remains highly significant after controlling for competing explanations based on the degree of urbanity, income and education levels, ethnic and religious composition, and relative size of immigrant populations. And Appalachian and Southern counties, which were not following the fit so closely in 2004, now conform much better to the overall pattern.

    Hence, the spatial differentiations of the last presidential elections at the levels of states and counties have remained over this period of time. The maps may color darker or lighter, depending on the issues in the period preceding the elections and the themes that dominate the debate, but the position of counties is relatively stable.

    In other words, we cannot possibly predict the winner, but we can produce a pretty good guess when it comes to predicting in which counties each of the candidates will do well or poorly. When it comes to this type of prediction, the SDT-dimension is by no means sufficient, but it is definitely a necessary ingredient of the engine.

    While many western countries have displayed a close connection between voting results and patterns of family formation and fertility, the correlation holds particularly well in the US. The predominance of the two party system, the philosophical link of these parties to the defense of different life styles, and the very wide ideational spectrum particularly contribute. No other developed nation has retained the presence of a vocal and large “religious right” capable of organizing reactions against secular and non-conformist tendencies. The US continues, therefore, to be a textbook example of spatial connections between demographic innovation and political orientation.

    Economic issues definitely played a role in designating the winner in 2008. But the spatial map of the election results is more a reflection of sociological differences in lifestyles and their underpinning ideologies – issues which are captured so well via the “second demographic transition” features.

    Ron Lesthaeghe is emeritus professor of demography at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and has been visiting professor at the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and of California (Irvine). Lisa Neidert is senior research associate at the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan. Relevant materials pertaining to the SDT concept and 2004 election results (maps, cartograms, articles) can be downloaded from our University of Michigan website.

    The map and cartogram of the SDT by county has been produced by Didier Willaert at the Interface Demography Unit of the Free University in Brussels.

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    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).

  • Euroburbia: A Personal View

    The image of the European city as a tourist’s paradise of charming inner-city neighborhoods interconnected by high-speed rail networks is not entirely false, but it does not give the full picture of how most Europeans live. Contrary to the mythology embraced by romantics among planners and ‘green’ politicians, urban areas of Europe sprawl just as much as any American or Western city.

    Of course, there are the wealthy and often childless few who live in the renovated urban cores – but at much lower density than at any time in their history. Instead of crowding picturesquely into city, the teeming hordes of the middle class have sought their refuge in the arboreal outskirts. They drive from their single-family homes and townhouse developments to their offices in old city centers, in business parks on the edge of the center and to other villages with massive industrial parks attached to them.

    As a result Germany has long since ceased to be the country that one sees in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Goethe. Much of it looks like America or Canada. Freeways interconnect exurban villages swelling with housing developments and industrial parks. The German dream is a lot like the American one, only with more rules.

    The most interesting factor is the diversity of these suburbs. They are still predominantly German, but then again so is the country. I live in an exurb of Nuremberg in northern Bavaria. It was the city of Dürer and Hans Sachs as well as the infamous Nazi rallies and post-war trials. It still has castles from the Medieval past, but the need for labor to rebuild destroyed cities – and eventually the resulting prosperity – in the post-war years saw new faces and cultures arrive with immigrants from countries like Turkey.

    Just like in America, many of these newcomers worked until they retired and decided that they wanted to stay. Some of their children are having trouble but not all of them. The children that move out of their neighborhoods to the suburbs integrate better because their parents tend to be more prosperous and thus resent Germany less. The other reason is the fact they are more exposed to the language. Cem Ozdemir was just elected as leader of the Green Party here and he does not speak the pidgin common among a lot of Turkish immigrants. I moved to the suburbs for much the same reason. My wife and I are both non-native speakers but we know that if our children are going to succeed they will need to speak German well and act like Germans. Ideally they will become hyphenated Germans, as in American-Croat-Germans, which is roughly what they would be.

    Of course, some recent newcomers still huddle in their ghettos here, the soulless housing estates built to satisfy Le Corbusier’s destructive urban fantasies. But a lot of them are moving out and up. Their ultimate dream is not a castle or a turn of the century apartment. They want their own house. They want decent schools for their kids, a place to park their cars and easy access to work. That is why they are here and not in their old neighborhoods.

    But diversity is a relatively new benefit of German suburbs. We also moved here for a basic need of space. We had lived in the inner city in a charming apartment but one that simply could not hold kids. It felt cramped just as our offspring popped out.

    There’s also one often-unrecognized advantage to our suburbia: a stronger feeling of neighborhood. Germany is a country of renters. It can be fairly alienating when the residents have little vested interest in where they live. A lot of rental apartments are in buildings that are anything but charming. Here in the suburbs of Germany almost everybody owns their own home. One street is actually named Eigenheimstraße, which translates to Privately-owned-home Street. It is an indication of the pride that Germans have in being able to say that a house belongs to them. They also lovingly tend their yards and fill them with garden gnomes – some harmless, some borderline obscene – and other bric-a-brac that fills countless yards across the urban expanses of America.

    Then there are the schools. The school system here in Germany is fairly uniform with secondary schools more or less standardized. Performance at the elementary school level is vital: children are clearly, quickly and brutally sorted here. At the age of ten, the teachers decide if a child is going to go to college, vocational school or rot in the festering hell of the Hauptschule. The latter is nothing more than a storage facility for tomorrow’s losers.

    We moved to make sure that our neighborhood was mainly German. We wanted to make sure that our children were comfortable with the language and they needed friends who spoke German to feel that way. Most immigrant children fail for the simple reason that they don’t speak German at home, and in pre-school most of their friends speak their parents’ native language as well. This means that they speak Turkish or Russian well but can barely express themselves in German. This then puts them at a disadvantage when working their way through the school system. They have to take remedial language courses. The suburbs allow them to avoid all that.

    The last reason is a place to park our cars. Germans love cars. They love engineering and are very proud of their car industry. They design cars that are the epitome of luxury and performance. Most Germans do not drive cars like this, yet stubbornly continue to own cars despite the government’s multiple efforts to make it too expensive. We pay hefty gas taxes in an effort to fight the “Green House effect,” but most of us feel that it’s just an excuse for the government to steal our money in order to pay for its bloated welfare system.

    Car-ownership in Europe is almost at American levels and Europeans, despite the much-ballyhooed efforts to introduce bikes in Paris, will continue to drive. As in America, the anti-car and anti-suburban ideologues are loud and active, but as long as people prize security, privacy, space and mobility, it’s likely Europe’s version of the suburban American dream will continue to thrive for years ahead.

    Kirk Rogers resides in Bubenreuth on the outer edges of Nuremberg and teaches languages and Amercan culture at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg’s Institut für Fremdsprachen und Auslandskunde. He has been living in Germany for about ten years now due to an inexplicable fascination with German culture.

  • Can Millennials Turn around the Housing Bust?

    Many of the nation’s youth (and a few of their elders) are expecting a magical turnaround of America’s economic fortunes as soon as their candidate for President, Barack Obama, is sworn in on January 20th 2009. But the Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2003, may be more the source of the country’s economic salvation as any initiative the new President might propose.

    Millennials are the largest generation in American history, more than 91 million strong. They are coming of age just in time to join the workforce, enter the housing market, stabilize home prices, and buy the nation’s expanding inventory of durable goods to furnish their new homes. Despite being burdened with student loan debt and graduating just when the job market is shrinking, this group of optimistic, civic-minded young Americans is ready to demonstrate that it is not only capable of electing a President, but also helping to resolve the country’s housing crisis.

    The “helicopter parents” of Millennials constantly hovered over their children as they grew up in order to protect them from anything that might harm their self-esteem. As a result, many older Americans, especially the 27 to 43 year old members of Generation X, think the Millennials’ “can do” attitude will crumble once they are confronted by the “realities of the real world.”

    But this ignores the cyclical nature of generational change. The GI Generation – the Millennial civic generation’s great-grandparents who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s – were raised in much the same way and acquired many of the same values cherished by Millennials. These members of what have come to be called “the Greatest Generation” were able to draw upon a deep reservoir of confidence and determination to lead America’s recovery from the Depression and later win the struggle against both fascism and communism.

    To give Millennials the same opportunity to rescue America, the new Obama administration should give the emerging generation the same attention in its policy initiatives that it expended getting their votes. Certainly the opportunity is there, particularly in rescuing the now devastated housing market.

    One unintended collateral benefit of the rapid drop in housing prices across the nation is to put many suburban homes within reach of first time home buyers, something that has not occurred for at least a decade. Even in pricey California, for example, the ratio between income and cost of housing has begun to drop dramatically, notes a recent paper by Chapman University graduate students Gil Yabes and Jason Goforth, with the ratio between income and mortgages dropping by one half or more in Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, close to pre-bubble levels.

    That’s a big opportunity, one that President-elect Obama’s “Home Ownership Initiative” should seize on. The Millennials could well be the demographic that could buy these more affordable homes and staunch the rise of foreclosures threatening the U.S. economy.

    It’s not that these young people don’t want to own homes. A 2004 study of students enrolled in a four-year university, a community college and an historically black college found that about the same 40-percent plurality in each group preferred to live in a “suburban community, single family home,” upon graduation. The second choice of these Millennials was to live in a “rural area, with large lots and open space.” Only about a quarter wanted to live in an “urban setting with mixed housing styles.” Luckily for them, five years later, their preferred housing stock has just become imminently more affordable.

    Now the Democratic Congress and President Obama should enact a significant tax credit incentive for first time homebuyers, many of whom would be Millennials. By rapidly expanding the universe of potential homebuyers, this program would help stabilize housing prices in the critical lower cost housing market. At the same time it would help stem foreclosures among existing homebuyers, whose loss of home equity has made abandoning mortgages more rational economically than keeping up payments.

    In 1934, during an earlier time of far greater economic pain, the Federal Housing Agency (FHA) was created to provide financing for a new type of mortgage requiring a lower down payment with the loan to be paid off over 25 or 30 years. The federal agency’s financing authority was greatly extended through Title II of the Housing Act of 1949, which provided federally guaranteed mortgage insurance and helped a flood of returning GIs own a home. Now it is time for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be given the authority to finance a new mortgage structure for homebuyers under thirty.

    By lowering down payment requirements for this select group of home buyers to 10% and stretching the terms of mortgages to the number of years these young people are likely to be active in the workforce, forty, monthly payments on starter homes could be brought in line with the Millennials‘ ability to pay. Initially, this combination of tax credits and new types of mortgage financing would slow the decline in home prices that triggered the problems in the country’s financial markets. In the longer run, it will make sure that the benefits of widespread homeownership will expand to a new generation of Americans.

    One young Millennial to whom we talked recently was concerned that the hours her retail employer wanted her to work were being cut as holiday shopping continued to sour. She expressed concern that there was still “more than a month before Obama gets sworn in and everything turns around again.”

    Her statement exhibits the kind of economic naiveté that frustrates some older Americans, but does provide an important lesson – political as well as economic – for the incoming administration. The Millennial Generation, whose votes were key in nominating and then resoundingly electing President Obama, want to see things improve rapidly. After all, they lack either the experience or the equity that Baby Boomers have acquired over the years.

    Once in office, President Obama should embrace the impatience of America’s youth as one way to insure that his economic policies are enacted quickly. By making an explicit appeal to America’s largest generation’s desire for homeownership, he would not only take a big step toward ensuring the popularity of his economic program, but its effectiveness as well.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the New York Times 10 favorite books of 2008.

  • Redrawing the Electoral Map? Not so fast.

    With Barack Obama’s historic presidential win there has been much celebratory talk about redrawing the electoral map. Obama himself boasted that he was the only Democratic candidate who could accomplish this feat.

    However, actual voting results suggest the map only shifted slightly at the margins from the 2000 and 2004 elections and that our geographic voting patterns may be more durable than we think. Here is a comparison of the famous red-blue divide:

    Exit polls show that Obama received roughly two-thirds of the non-black minority vote and about 95% of the black vote. On top of that he got more than two-thirds of the 18-29 age cohort. But none of this data captures the electoral geography that drives the Electoral College results. The true shift from red to blue was actually driven by a slight shift at the margins of the divide. The tipping point was in the suburbs where middle and upper class suburbanites congregate and 49% of the electorate resides. These voters shifted to the Democratic candidate and tipped the balance in those swing states of Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia and North Carolina. They found Obama more convincing on economic matters and fundamental change from the previous administration, but it would be a mistake to assume this means they embrace a radically new governing ideology.

    To examine the results more closely we can compare the demographic characteristics of counties won by Obama and McCain and also compare these to Bush and Kerry in 2004. The following maps illustrate county vote shares in shades from blue to purple to red to show how the underlying vote compares between 2004 and 2008. Not a big difference, is there?


    The following table compares the demographic profiles of 3115 counties and how they voted in the past three presidential elections. We can see that Obama captured more suburban counties outside the urban core than either Gore or Kerry. These counties not only have lower population densities but also higher incomes and more white inhabitants. So much for race.


    This conclusion is confirmed by looking only at those counties that flipped from red to blue (Bush to Obama) or blue to red (Kerry to McCain). Is this case we can see that Obama won more populous, whiter, and richer counties than McCain. Interestingly, the older, female heads-of-household gravitated slightly toward McCain.


    Finally, we can look at an important subset of metro counties, meaning those counties that border the 50 largest metro areas in the country. There are 417 of these counties and they are classified by concentric rings from the urban core outward to the exurbs.


    These data confirm where the major shift took place. Obama had gains of roughly 5-6% over Kerry’s results in suburban counties. Obama won handily in the mature suburbs where Bush and Kerry had evenly split. This is also where much of the non-black minority support for Obama resides. On the other hand, we again see a consistent monotonic relationship between party preference and population density: as we move outward from the urban core voting preferences shift from blue to purple to red. This suggests that the urban-rural split in American politics is still very much with us. This should not surprise us if these political differences are based on lifestyle preferences that do not change from election to election or candidate to candidate.

    *State and county maps courtesy of Mark Newman: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

    Michael Harrington is a political scientist, policy analyst and writer living in Los Angeles. He has extensively researched the red-blue divide of the past three presidential elections by focusing on county level census and voting data.

  • Michigration: It’s Not About Out-migration in Michigan

    Pertaining to brain drain hype, Michigan has no equal. So profound is the out-migration that a local broadcasting network coined a term: Michigration. This was in January of 2008. I did a little digging and discovered the fuel for the story was a United Van Lines study about Michigan’s net loss of residents.

    Net population loss is often confused with emigration. Upstate New York, another brain drain case for a future article, is no exception. The Federal Reserve Bank branch in Buffalo issued a report that tried to clear up the confusion, explicitly stating the challenge is attracting more people instead of the assumed issue of retention.

    Michigan is in the same boat. There is nothing remarkable about the rate of out-migration from the state. What is shocking is the lack of newcomers. Most of the Rust Belt has a problem with a distinct lack of in-migration.

    Another oversight of the media is the aging population. Rarely does natural decline make the news. Of course, that “problem” doesn’t lend itself to political gain. That is too bad because making better use of an aging workforce is a missed opportunity. Shouldn’t talent retiring in Michigan be celebrated?

    A third misconception about shrinking cities is that the best and brightest are heading to hip out-of-state destinations. The truth is many graduates go no further than the suburbs, resulting in the donut pattern of urbanization. Those that venture beyond likely end up in the next state over, not halfway across the country. A lot of talent moves from one Rust Belt city to another. Much of the rest – although perhaps not the offspring of the remaining economic and cultural elite – shifts to those areas that have been creating jobs, particularly places like North Carolina, Texas and, before the recent bust, Arizona and Florida.

    In and of themselves, reports of Michigration are harmless. But popular perception is often used to push various initiatives such as Michigan’s Cool Cities:

    Building vibrant, energetic cities that attract jobs, people and opportunity to our state is a key component of Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s economic vision for Michigan. Governor Granholm kicked-off the “Cool Cities” initiative in June, 2003 throughout the state, in part as an urban strategy to revitalize communities, build community spirit, and most importantly, retain our “knowledge workers” who are leaving Michigan in alarming numbers.

    The promise is that cooler cities will keep talent from leaving the state. I challenge Governor Granholm to list the top-10 Cool Cities in the United States and their respective out-migration rates. How do Michigan cities compare? How do you quantify “alarming numbers”?

    US cities with the fastest growth rates in population tend to have the highest rates of emigration. Ironically, shrinking cities have relatively weak out-migration. Furthermore, the college educated are much more likely to leave any state or metro than people with just a high school education. Knowledge workers leaving Michigan is normal. The low number of knowledge workers arriving, from out of state, is abnormal. Neither better urban place-making nor more tolerance on its own shows any strong positive correlation with less brain drain. In fact, the opposite may be true. Cool Cities simply hasn’t delivered.

    We do understand that knowledge workers are geographically fickle. But Governor Granholm fails to put the attraction of talent on top of the agenda. She continues to play to fears of Michigration as justification for significant investment in the state’s cities. I’m not anti-urban. On the contrary, I’d like to witness the revitalization of Rust Belt downtowns. But sprucing up an aging downtown in a region with massive job losses will not get the job done.

    The most promising research I’ve read comes from Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard University. The best investment of public money would seem to be in human capital, education. What would attract well-educated parents would be better schools, something the suburbs have mastered. Inner city Detroit’s main competition for talent is the communities ringing around it.

    Michigration will not be stemmed by being “cool” but by providing some sort of opportunity for a decent middle class life. If Michigan could combine its excellent Universities, skilled workforce and low housing costs with a decent business climate, and significant school reform, perhaps the state would again become a beacon for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers.

    Read Jim’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • Understanding the Geography of the 2008 Election

    Scholars as well as pundits and politicians will study this remarkable election exhaustively. Many, including me, will use county data, because they are convenient and available. From a statistical point of view, counties are lousy units, because of huge variation in size and excess internal variability. But we can’t resist, so here are some at least suggestive findings.

    First, what correlates with the percent voting for Obama? By far the strongest variables are negative – characteristics associated with voting Republican: a county’s share of husband-wife families (-.64), the rate of home ownership (-.55), percent working in craft occupations (-.52), and religious membership (-.51) all work against Obamamania. Other high negative correlations were with percent rural (-.48), with percent white (-.47), other positive were median rent (.45) and percent foreign born (.45). These are not at all surprising, and are what the exit polls told us.

    The highest positive correlations for Obama lay in percentages of non-family households with 2 or more persons (partners, roommates, .50), percent in urbanized areas (.49), or using public transit (.48), and percent with a BA or higher degree (.46). What these figures highlight is the continuing basic polarization between large metropolitan (+ variables) and non-metropolitan (- variables) areas, and simultaneously between the more modern and diverse character of the big city and the more traditional and conservative values of much of non-big city America.

    But, you may protest, we thought race, ethnicity and age played a big role in this election? Indeed, they did, but the correct dependent variable should be the degree of change in the share voting Democratic. In other words, what helps distinguish the 2008 from the 2004 results? The largest effect, of course, is simply the quite large 5-6 percent shift in national sentiment because of economic uncertainty and disillusionment with the Republican regime.

    But beyond that, the pro-Obama variables tend to be the percent of women in the labor force, percent with a BA degree, median household income (yep, time to toss out the traditional wisdom of Republicans being the party of the ‘rich’), non-family households, professional-managerial occupations, and, yes, percent Hispanic, percent Black and percent aged 25-34. In contrast variables leading to a lesser shift, no shift, or even more Republican, were again church membership, percent rural, percent in crafts jobs, and percent 45-64 or over 65, and percent with less than a 9th grade education.

    Overall, education, occupation, age, race and ethnicity help us understand Democratic strength in large metropolitan America and also in rural and small-town American Indian, Black and Hispanic areas, especially in parts of the South and West. But areas and regions with a less educated and professional populace, with higher rates of religious persuasion, with fewer women in the labor force, and with older populations remained loyally Republican. This helps us understand the resistance to Obama and the Democrats in Appalachia and across the border South, from WV, through KY and TN, AR, LA and OK.

    An interesting geographic phenomenon should be noted: the emergence of Chicago and the upper Midwest as part of the new Democratic coalition. Metropolitan Chicago provided Obama with a margin of almost 1.5 million votes, more than New York or Los Angeles. This presaged a gigantic increase in Democratic margins throughout the upper Midwest, including IN, IL, MI, WI, IA, and MN. In this one part of the country more than 150 counties moved from the Republican to the Democratic column. In addition to the big shifts on the coasts, this is where Obama gained the most ground.

    If this pattern continues, the Democrats may well have achieved a critical mass in their core support, adding a powerful upper Midwest base to their almost total control of both coasts. These would leave the GOP with little more than the heart of the Old Confederacy – even that is threatened in places like North Carolina and Virginia by modernization – as well as more socially conservative regions such as Appalachia and parts of the Great Plains. It’s not a pretty picture if you are a Republican.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • In Ethnic Enclaves, The U.S. Economy Thrives

    Dr. Alethea Hsu has a strange-seeming prescription for terrible times: She is opening a new shopping center on Saturday. In addition, more amazingly, the 114,000 square foot Irvine, Calif., retail complex, the third for the Taiwan native’s Diamond Development Group, is just about fully leased.

    How can this be in the midst of a consumer crack-up, with credit card defaults and big players like General Growth struggling for their existence? The answer is simple: Hsu’s mostly Asian customers – Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese – still have cash. “These are people who have savings and money to spend,” she explains. “Asians in Orange County are mostly professionals and don’t have the subprime business.”

    To Hsu, culture explains the growing divergence between ethnic markets and that of the general population. Asians, she notes, whether in their native lands or here in California, tend to be big savers. In tough times, they still have the cash to buy goods, while others stay home or go way down-market.

    Nor is the Diamond Development Group’s experience an isolated case. Throughout the country, ethnic-based businesses continue to expand, even as mainstream centers suffer or go out of business. The key difference, notes Houston real estate investor Andrew Segal, lies in the immigrants’ greater reliance on cash. “When cash is king,” observers Segal, president of Boxer Properties, “immigrants rule.”

    This is true not just of well-heeled Asians or Middle Easterners, but also for Hispanics, who generally have lower incomes, notes Segal’s partner, Latino retail specialist Jose de Jesus Legaspi. For example, the recession has barely taken hold at La Gran Plaza, the recently opened 1.1 million square foot retail center in Ft. Worth, Texas, where Legaspi serves as part owner and operating partner.

    The center, reconstructed from a failing old mainstream mall purchased in 2005, is now roughly 90% occupied. “We are doing so well that we are expanding the mercado,” Legaspi says, referring to the thriving centers dominated by very small businesses run from attached stalls that are a popular feature of many Latino-themed centers. “It’s all cash economy. They pay their bills with cash. The banks and credit card companies are not involved. It’s true capitalism, and it works.”

    Latino shoppers, he suggests, also have been less impacted by the stock market collapse than other consumers. After all, relatively few, particularly immigrants, have large investments on Wall Street. In addition, even if they have lost their jobs, particularly in construction, Legaspi adds, they tend to pick up other employment, even at lower wages, often in the underground economy. “They get paid in cash, and they pay in cash.”

    Another key advantage lies in close connections many ethnic merchants have to economies such as Korea, China, Taiwan and India, where enormous amounts of cash have accumulated in recent years. “Many of these merchants have family and other ties to the international economy,” observes Thomas Tseng, a principal at New American Dimensions, a multicultural marketing group in Los Angeles.

    The media focuses on huge surpluses spent by major corporations or sovereign wealth funds, but a substantial amount of the money being made in places like China or India also accumulates into family networks. They often funnel this cash to relatives’ enterprises in North America, where many also retain second homes and often educate their children.

    This combination of cash-spending customers and well-endowed investors explains why in many places, the immigrant market remains one of the few still aggressively expanding. Even in thriving Houston, notes architect Tim Cisneros, the credit crunch has stopped many projects by clients from the mainstream real estate development community. In contrast, Cisneros’ Chinese, Indian and other Asian clients continue to build and expand.

    “I am doing an Asian-Mexican sushi chain that isn’t hurt by the credit crunch since they are doing this out of the checkbook,” Cisneros told me. “And the Indian reception hall I am building is doing well. The action is from these developing companies much more than the old Anglo groups.”

    If the immigrant markets helping Cisneros through the credit crush represent one of the few bright spots in the present, they also will likely become even more important in the future – even if immigration slows down dramatically. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015, they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Given these underlying trends, look for developers like Dr. Hsu to keep prescribing more of what she calls “multicultural shopping centers,” focused both on immigrants and their children. As long as these newcomers, both affluent and working class, continue to save, covet cash and work hard, they are likely to continue thriving through the recession and beyond.

    “We are leased up, and we think the supply [of shopping] is not enough,” Hsu says. “We are ready to go Saturday and feel great trust in the future.” At a time when most mainstream American retailers are hiding under their desks, such sentiments are not only welcome; they may also indicate who might be leading the retail recovery when it finally comes.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Sundown for California

    Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I coauthored a book called California, Inc. about our adopted home state. The book described “California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.”

    As relative newcomers at the time, we saw California as a place of limitless possibility. And over most of the next two decades, my coauthor, Paul Grabowicz, and I could feel comfortable that we were indeed predicting the future.

    But much has changed in recent years. And today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.

    Since 2000, California’s job growth rate— which in the late 1970s surged at many times the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration. Texas has replaced California as the leading growth center for Hispanics.

    Out-migration is a key factor, along with a weak economy, for the collapse of the housing market. Simply put, the population growth expected for many areas has not materialized, nor the new jobs that might attract newcomers. In the past year, four of the top six housing markets in terms of price decline have been in California, including Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles. The Central Valley towns of Stockton, Merced, and Modesto have all been awarded the dubious honors of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation during the past year.

    Even with prices down, many of the most desirable places in California are also among the most unaffordable in the nation. Less than 15 percent of households earning the local median income can afford a home in L.A. or San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, or San Jose, it’s less than a third. That’s about half the number who can buy in the big Texas or North Carolina markets. Moreover, state officials warned in October that they might have to seek as much as $7 billion in loans from the U.S. Treasury. This is a disappointing turn for a state that once saw itself as the harbinger of the future.

    Not surprisingly, few Californians see a turnaround soon. In the most recent Field Poll in July, a record high 63 percent of Californians said they are financially worse off than they were a year ago, while a record low 14 percent described themselves as better off. Poll director Mark DiCamillo called it “the broadest sentiment of pessimism we’ve ever seen.”

    Of course, California can still attract many newcomers, particularly young and ambitious people who dream of a career in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. The problem is that when you grow up and have failed to secure your own dotcom or television series, life in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, or even Kansas starts looking better. According to real estate analysts, the only thing preventing the current outflow from being worse is that homeowners cannot sell their residences in order to move.

    All of this suggests a historic slide of California’s role as a bastion of upward mobility. In 1946, Californians enjoyed the nation’s highest living standards and the third highest per-capita income, noted journalist John Gunther. As recently as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans did. Now, median household income growth trails the national average while the already large divide between the social classes—often bemoaned by the state’s political left—grows faster than in the rest of the country.

    Today, notes a recent Public Policy Institute of California study, California has the 15th highest poverty rate in the nation. Only New York and the District of Columbia fare worse if the cost of living is factored in. Indeed, after accounting for cost of living, L.A., Monterey, and San Francisco counties—all places known for concentrations of wealth—have poverty populations of 20 percent. “San Francisco,” says historian Kevin Starr, a native of the city, “is a cross between Carmel and Calcutta.”

    The Political Roots of the California Ascendancy

    You can blame many factors for California’s fall from grace: too much immigration from poor countries, the impact of global competition on technology and aerospace industries, the end of the Cold War, failing schools, and the 12 years of political control by the Texas-centric Bushes. Yet other states have weathered similar storms and still gained ground on the Golden State.

    The real problem lies in the decline of the state’s political culture. “Our society may be evolving spectacularly but our politics are devolving,” suggests Starr, the state’s most eminent historian. “California is in no way a role model for anyone from outside the state.”

    For much of the 20th century, California—already blessed by climate, topography, and fertility—was also relatively well governed. California’s schools, universities, and infrastructure were considered among the finest anywhere. From the 1920s on, its prevailing ideology was a kind of business-like progressivism. Californians in both parties embraced the idea that government could be a positive force in the economic and social life of California. However, they also embraced the latest notions of scientific management. One report from the administration of California’s Republican Governor Hiram Johnson, produced in the early part of the 20th century, stated that the goal was “to systematize the business of the State of California.”

    California’s state government laid the foundation for its remarkable ascendancy. Progressivism’s pragmatic orientation, the melding of science and technology into government, the large-scale investment in infrastructure, and a strong nonpartisan tradition produced spectacular results. In his famous book Inside USA in 1946, Gunther gushingly described California as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.”

    Another Republican California governor, Earl Warren, who served between 1943 and 1953, epitomized progressive virtues—pragmatic in policy, nonpartisan in approach, and activist in his manner. Later on, as the GOP became more conservative, the progressive mantle shifted to the Democrats. Under Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, elected in 1958, the state continued with an aggressive program of public works, a rapid expansion of higher education, and the massive California Water Project.

    Like his Republican progressive predecessors, Brown advocated civil rights for minorities but also promoted business interests, notably in real estate development, Hollywood, aerospace, and agribusiness. Equally important, the Democrat embraced the traditional good government principles of the progressives. Shortly after taking office, Brown initiated a thorough reorganization of state government, attempting to make it more businesslike. California, Brown himself noted, needed “to apply the latest concepts of management, organization, and cost control just as modern corporations have done.”

    The End of the Progressive Era

    By the mid-1960s, Brown’s traditional progressivism was being undermined by rising interest-group liberalism. State employees, left-liberal lobby groups, and minorities were demanding more and more from the governor. Fed up with ever-growing taxes and social spending, business interests became increasingly alienated. Once seen as a boon to the private sector, state government was becoming perceived by corporate interests as overly meddlesome and hostile.

    Perhaps even more damaging was the cultural rift that developed. Many white middle- and working-class voters felt threatened by the rise of new militant minority and student groups. Riots at Berkeley and Watts deepened resentments against the university and African Americans, two linchpins of Brown’s support.

    In the 1966 gubernatorial election, Ronald Reagan smashed Brown and the remnants of the old progressive coalition. The former actor captured both business support and grassroots votes in previously Democratic-leaning areas in suburban L.A. and the Central Valley. Numerous interviews conducted with his closest confidants at the time make clear that they did not intend to impose a conservative social agenda, but hoped to slow the regulatory regime and restore order on the state’s campuses and ghetto streets.

    One scholar has claimed that Reagan “destroyed” progressivism, but some of the blame should also be laid at the feet of the Democrats. To be sure, Reagan slowed the growth of government, but infrastructure building continued and the state university grew, as did many social problems. Much the same could be said of later Republican governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, whose policies were only moderately conservative.

    Enter Governor Moonbeam

    The real problems for the progressive model, ironically, began to surface with the rise of Pat Brown’s son, Governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. He veered away from the traditional focus on nonpartisan governance and infrastructure spending—what long-time advisor Tom Quinn called “this build, build, build thing”—and instead focused on an environmentally friendly, “small is beautiful” approach.

    However, the real problems did not ultimately reside with the brash, creative, and sometimes unpredictable young governor himself. Entrenched Democratic interest groups, particularly public employees, resisted property tax relief for California’s middle-class homeowners. Ultimately, this failure brought about the passage of Proposition 13, a strict limit on property taxes that would sharply curtail infrastructure spending and reduce the ability of local governments to address serious problems.

    During Brown’s watch, and even despite his occasional opposition, the Democratic Party came increasingly under the sway of public employees, trial lawyers, and narrow interest activist groups. Their ability to raise money and impose their political will often outweighed that of even the most powerful business interests.

    The full bill for this transformation would eventually be paid not by Brown, but by his former chief of staff, Gray Davis. Becoming governor in 1998, Davis became the prisoner of the special interest groups with whom his predecessors, Deukmejian and Wilson, had struggled.

    By then, California’s shift to the Democrats had become inexorable and, with the fading of a GOP counterweight, influence within the party flowed to its more radical factions further to the political left. As a result, the state moved decisively away from the economic growth focus of Pat Brown. It seemed determined to wage war against its own economy. As pet social programs, entitlements, and state employee pensions soared, infrastructure spending—the hallmark of the Pat Brown regime and once 20 percent of the state budget—shrank to less than 3 percent.

    The educational system, closely aligned with the Democrats in the legislature, accelerated its secular decline. Once full of highly skilled workers, California has become increasingly less so. For example, California ranks second in the percentage of its 65-year-olds holding an associate degree or higher and fifth in those with a bachelor’s degree. But when you look at the 25-to-34 age group, those rankings fade to 30th and 24th.

    Instead of reversing these trends, the state legislature decided to spend its money on public employees and impose ever more regulatory burdens on business. Davis, a clever and experienced public servant, understood this but could not fight the zealots in his own party. When the state’s revenues shrank after the high-tech bust in 2000, he appeared to be their complete captive. Perhaps the most telling example of the misplaced priorities of the state’s majority party took place amid the state budget crisis when legislators, facing an imminent fiscal disaster, took time to debate legislation about providing more protections for transgender Californians.

    Enter the Girlie Man

    Davis’s apparent inability to gain control of the looming budget crisis opened the door to his 2003 recall and the election of a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The former bodybuilder and action hero promised to clean up “the mess” in California. He took aim at what he derided as the “girlie men” in the legislature, promising to get the state’s affairs in order. It was not to be. After a bruising defeat by liberal interest groups over a series of propositions, the onetime tough guy embraced what he called “bipartisanship.” The media, particularly on the national level, cooed, but in reality the governor simply ceded initiative to the very “girlie men”—the left-leaning state legislators—that he formerly promised to rein in.

    Under Schwarzenegger, notes former GOP Assemblyman Keith Richman, the state budget actually grew even faster—10 percent annually as opposed to 7 percent—than under his spendthrift Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis.

    Dan Walters, the dean of California political reporters, argues that Schwarzenegger never bothered to learn the basics of state governance. As a result, state spending, particularly on state employees and their pensions, continued with no notion that another budget crisis was looming.

    The Economic Crash

    The Terminator and his advisors also never understood the economic rot undermining the state. The governor assumed little could be done to preserve manufacturing, warehousing, and other high-paying blue-collar jobs in California. Instead, he bought the idea that “creative” professionals in technology, finance, and entertainment could keep the state economically vibrant.

    To be sure, the big players in technology and entertainment still often keep their main offices, and sometimes their research facilities, in California. However, they also tend to locate their middle management and production jobs to more affordable, enterprise-friendly states and countries. This is one reason, notes the Milken Institute’s Ross DeVol, that tech growth has been relatively weak even during the much-ballyhooed Internet 2.0 boom.

    Worst of all, the governor’s economic team did not see the danger of the state’s growing reliance on the real estate bubble. According to my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group and others, as much as 50 percent of the state’s job growth in the 2000s relied on an inflated property market. It worked for a time, keeping many people—investors, homeowners, construction workers, financial types—gainfully employed and the state, for a while, solvent. A better-informed governor might have known it would all unravel. Indeed, in early 2007, even as it was clear that the bubble was deflating, Schwarzenegger continued to play vaingloriously to the klieg lights, promoting California as “the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state … a model not just for 21st-century American society, but the world.”

    Instead of addressing the fundamental fiscal and economic problems, the governor preened for the local and national media by making California the focal point for addressing global climate change. He also proposed a gigantic $14 billion healthcare program largely funded by a state that has beleaguered smaller businesses.

    Fiscal reality scuttled the healthcare plan, but business is still trying to figure out how to cope with a carbon regime faced by few of their competitors. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment is now over 7.3 percent, fourth worst in the nation, behind only Michigan, Mississippi, and Rhode Island.

    In wide regions of the state—from San Diego up through the Central Valley—the only boom is in the foreclosure business. Nor are the inner-city revivals doing much better. Shining condominium towers in Oakland, L.A., and San Diego have either cut their prices or, in many cases, gone rental, a fitting tribute to an age of diminished expectations.

    …and Now the Return of Governor Moonbeam?

    The state’s Republicans might be expected to exploit such a record of Democratic failure but seem incapable of doing so. Since the mid-1990s and Pete Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187, the ballot measure designed to restrict social services provided to illegal immigrants, many grassroots elements of the party have tended to demonize the immigrants who make up almost 40 percent of the workforce.

    The state is already close to a minority majority; Latinos alone make up half of the current kindergarten class. Republicans could blame the Democrats for the state’s persistent fiscal crisis. They could score points against the elitist aspects of ultra-green policies, the gluttony of public employees, the prospect of higher taxes, and the more radical parts of the left’s social agenda. However, that argument must be addressed toward, not against, the state’s increasingly minority middle class.

    Instead, the most probable political scenario is more of the same, or worse. The two leading candidates for governor, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and 70-year-old Attorney General Jerry Brown, are considerably to the left of and even greener than Schwarzenegger.

    Brown is clearly the stronger candidate, with a demonstrated appeal to minority voters that Newsom lacks. And Brown enjoys greater name recognition and better access to the big urban land interests, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, the main money sources of the party other than the unions. In addition, Newsom is particularly ill suited to make even Jerry Brown seem out of touch. In a campaign, Newsom will have to justify his city’s policy of shielding illegal alien felons. He has spoken publicly about fining residents up to $1,000 for failing to sort their garbage correctly, something sure to repel most Californians.

    Yet a second Brown administration poses enormous risks. Although somewhat pragmatic as mayor of Oakland, Brown has become an increasingly strident apostle of Al Gore’s global warming ideology. Brown calls global warming “the most important environmental issue facing the state and the world.” He has made it clear that he hopes to use legislative and executive power to curb suburban growth and induce people to cram themselves into California’s already congested, often crime-ridden cities.

    Brown also seems determined to declare a holy war against the state’s already weakened agricultural and industrial base. As attorney general, he has pledged to block a proposed northern California plant that violates green values by using plastic bottles, a policy which, if he carries it out to its logical end, will decimate almost every blue-collar and industrial industry in the state.

    So is there hope for the Golden State? Perhaps, although California likely will never regain the preeminence of a quarter century ago. Brown is many things, but he is also smart and flexible, as he showed by embracing Proposition 13 after its passage in 1978. He could still find a way to push the legitimate part of the green agenda, such as expansion of renewable fuels, without forcing every carbon- consuming business or single-family homebuilder out of the state.

    Finally, there is this: no place in North America enjoys California’s combination of fertility, natural beauty, and diversity. Many Californians accept high housing prices, silly regulations, and noxious lawyers as part of the price of paradise. In a country of 50 states and more than 300 million people, there should still be a niche for an exceptional place, even if it no longer can pretend to lead the nation.

    This article originally appeared at American.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Pittsburgh’s Brain Drain Game

    Rust Belt communities are obsessed with brain drain. The demographic losers of economic restructuring, cities are employing a variety of strategies to stop the bleeding and keep the talent from leaving the region. Akron, OH recently voted down a proposal to lease the city’s sewer system in order to fund a scholarship program designed to plug the holes of out-migration. The voters balked at the initiative partly as a result of the 30-year residential commitment necessary to reap the full benefits of the funding for post-secondary education in Akron schools.

    You would think plugging the brain drain seems like a good idea. I thought so when I decided to help Southwestern Pennsylvania solve its declining population problem. However, a few months into the project I determined that the exodus from Pittsburgh ended almost two decades ago. The devastating loss of young adults in the early 1980s still echoed throughout the area and informed a great deal of policymaking.

    The most comical anti-brain-drain campaign was Border Guard Bob, a product of the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance who was invented to keep local graduates around home. The pitch was that Pittsburgh is too great of a place to leave, if you knew where to look. Bob was retired before his unveiling, hopefully because he was too ridiculous even for our local leaders, but the spirit behind it remained.

    I’m not aware of any successful anti-brain-drain program, but Pittsburgh continues to try despite having more college graduates than the region can employ. If anything, Greater Pittsburgh suffers from a glut of talent that stubbornly tries to stay. Average wages are below even those in nearby Cleveland, which sports notably more unemployment and a much more acute foreclosure crisis. Yet the initiatives keep coming.

    The Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project (PUMP) claims to better enfranchise young adults living in the city. The ultimate goal is to retain talent by giving them reasons to stay. Empowering residents is noble enough, but I doubt PUMP can deliver the population boost the City of Pittsburgh desperately seeks.

    Maybe the problem is not that Pittsburgh or other Midwest cities are unattractive places to live. Instead the roots of the out-migration lie elsewhere – in dysfunctional economies and wretched politics. It’s not lack of “cool places” to hang out but things like a declining tax base and a growing pension debt that effectively hamstring the city.

    Frustrated job seekers aren’t heading to the Sun Belt because they need a cooler place to hang out. They are looking for jobs and opportunities. And if they hang around until their thirties, they then leave to the surrounding suburbs and their better schools.

    The Pittsburgh Promise, a child of the Kalamazoo Promise, offers a better alternative. Thanks to money from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the City doesn’t have to lease its sewers in order to provide graduates from Pittsburgh public schools with scholarships. The suburban schools don’t look quite so attractive when we are talking about a free ride for college.

    But even if it’s a step in the right direction, the Pittsburgh Promise still won’t keep families from moving to Charlotte, NC. It certainly won’t attract families from Austin, TX. Therein lies the flaw. There are no mechanisms to bring new talent into the region. Without substantial in-migration, particularly immigration, no Rust Belt city is likely to experience an economic renaissance. But the focus is always on the people who leave. The real problem is why people don’t come.

    Just about anywhere in the Rust Belt, the perception of brain drain and actual rates of out-migration are horribly out of whack. This past summer, the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University issued a report that concluded that the number of young adults in the state was growing faster than the national average during the period of 2000-2006. The cry to stop brain drain in Michigan – epitomized by Governor Jennifer Granholm’s “cool cities” program – has never been louder. The rhetoric doesn’t concern me, but the ineffectiveness of the programs should give everyone pause.

    Basically fighting out-migration is a losing cause. The US Census found a positive correlation between increasing levels of education and the greater likelihood of leaving a region. Should Pittsburgh stop investing in its schools in order to better retain residents? Of course not. But this is no more absurd than spending a lot of money to keep people from seeking opportunity elsewhere.

    If you are a parent, then the idea of moving in order to improve your children’s opportunities makes sense. However, for a community to invest in a student likely to leave the economic area presents a conflict of interest.

    The Pittsburgh Promise isn’t a bad idea. Maybe it will encourage people to stay or even move in from the suburbs given the carrot of subsidized college tuition. But that won’t alleviate anemic regional population growth. Pittsburgh needs to sell itself globally as a place where you can access opportunity, either for yourself or your children. Pittsburgh must attract new blood. Pittsburgh, essentially, needs economic growth.

    I’ve labored over the best way to align the interests of individuals with that of the community concerning geographic mobility. I think the solution is, counter-intuitively, to promote out-migration. Pittsburgh’s exodus during the early 1980s was impressive, perhaps uniquely so. The result is what I call the Burgh Diaspora, the scattered expatriates who still retain an unusual preoccupation with their hometown.

    My idea is to use the Burgh Diaspora like an alumni network, to help Pittsburghers get a leg up on globalization. You can always find an ex-neighbor prepared to help you. Facilitating this odyssey could deepen loyalty and might eventually spark a return migration. But my hope is that non-natives would also appreciate this value proposition, seeking access to the diaspora network.

    Read Jim’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.