New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Gazing Into A Post-Ethnic Future

    Last week’s updated Census projections showing whites becoming a minority by 2042 – far more rapidly than previous estimates – is sure to turn up the heat in some quarters of American society. While it no doubt re-ignites predictable dooms-day scenarios among anti-immigration activists who warn about the “death of the West” and the gradual erosion of American values, it may also give some average Americans pause as well.

    Why? Because when one envisages the average American, it is highly likely they are picturing someone with Anglo features rather than one with the skin tones and hues of Hispanics, Asians, or some exotic admixture of different ethnicities. Even as the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and the rising global prominence of star athletes like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James at this year’s Olympics are changing these perceptions, all-American looks, for the most part, is still equated with ‘white’ for most people around the world.

    And who is to argue? After all, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population is currently white. But according to new Census Bureau figures, this image is set to undergo a fundamental makeover in just a single generation. To summarize:

    • By 2050, whites will decline to just 46 percent of the U.S. population. At that time, they will also constitute the vast majority of persons over the age of 85 years — a population that is set to triple to 19 million. Demographers refer to this as the “graying of America.”

    • At the same time, the “browning of America” is marching forward in full force. Both Hispanics and Asians are scheduled to double their share of the population by mid-century — up to 30 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively. A majority of that share in growth will originate from births, and not immigration.

    • These two countervailing forces — “graying” and “browning” of the country — are impelled by widely disparate fertility levels between whites on the one hand, and Hispanics on the other. While the average American white woman is now producing 1.8 children — a steadily declining figure over the past two decades — the average fertility rate for Hispanic women is 2.3.

    It would be unwise to jump to too many firm conclusions based on these figures — especially if one underestimates the power and role of assimilation. Historically, numerous forecasters, pundits, and commentators have made the error of adhering to a fixed, static notion of culture. Benjamin Franklin once famously warned that German immigrants threatened to turn Pennsylvania into “a colony of aliens” and cautioned they would “never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can adopt our complexion.” Likewise, an annual report written in 1892 from the U.S. Superintendent’s Office of Immigration cautioned that rising immigration levels would bring about “an enormous influx of foreigners unacquainted with our languages and customs,” thereby forming a “new undesirable class.”

    Of course the Jews, Italians, Irish and Germans who comprised the “third great wave of immigration” at the turn of the 20th century did not develop into America’s underbelly as predicted. On the contrary, most of them eventually weaved into the fabric of mainstream society—epitomizing the famous metaphor used to describe their integration: the American “melting pot”.

    Moreover, immigration projections themselves are often based on precarious assumptions, many of which do not account for the malleability of culture, particularly when it faces the compelling force of assimilation. To illustrate, back in 1990, California’s demographers forecasted a major population surge due to assumptions made about Hispanic immigration and birthrates. At the time, the fertility rate for Latina women in the Golden State was 3.4 babies.

    By 2005, actual population figures demonstrated the state had grossly miscalculated its population estimates. The state’s bean counters had wrongly assumed that high birthrates among Latina mothers would continue to persist across generations. But they didn’t. Fertility rates dropped to 2.6 babies overall among Latina moms. Declines in fertility rates were a direct result of acculturation: as Hispanic women acculturated, they began to adopt upwardly mobile lifestyles that reflected their increasingly mainstream attitudes. For many second-generation Hispanic women, rearing many children simply did not fit into the lifestyles they aspired to have.

    In study after study, the data tracking of immigrants show that the longer they remain in the U.S., the better they do economically. Unemployment levels drop dramatically while income earnings increase considerably the longer immigrants have been in the country.

    Nevertheless, the true gauge of immigration’s genuine impact is generational — it rests among the children and offspring of immigrants themselves. Historian Oscar Handlin once wrote: “the history of America is the history of immigrants’ children.” A study by the Rand Corporation in 2005 showed that educational progress among three generations of Mexican Americans — from the first generation immigrant all the way to their grandchildren — gradually increases with each succeeding generation group. This progress is the same or greater than those achievements made by those previous European immigrants who came to the U.S. during the early 20th century.

    These results are supported by the research conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center. According to Jeffrey Passel, a researcher at the institute, “We have a tendency to romanticize the experience of past immigrants. Yes, there was progress. But the real progress came with their children and grandchildren.”

    In light of last week’s new revised Census forecast, what are we to gain from all this? Just that despite the fact the “average” American may have a much different “look” or physical appearance in 2042, they will still be firmly, recognizably — and very proudly — American.

    Thomas Tseng is Principal and Co-Founder of New American Dimensions, a market research and consulting agency based in Los Angeles.

  • Sprawl Beyond Sprawl: America Moves to Smaller Metropolitan Areas

    For those interested in demographics or economic trends, domestic migration — people moving from one county to another in the United States — offers a critical window to the future. Domestic migration, which excludes international migration and the natural increase of births in excess of deaths, tells us much about how people are voting — with their feet. Domestic migrants are also important because they generally arrive at their new residences with more resources than the average immigrant or newborn.

    For decades, for example, people have been moving from the state of New York to just about everywhere else. In fact, since 2000, New York has bled more domestic migrants per capita than Louisiana after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. While 7.8 percent of the Empire State’s 2000 population was packing, the nation’s worst disaster (natural and man-made) drove only 7.5 percent of Louisiana’s population away.

    But New York’s story is an old one. The big surprise is how smaller sized metropolitan areas are now attracting a large share of movers. For generations Americans have crowded into ever larger metropolitan areas — including suburbs and exurbs — but more recently they have been heading to smaller regions. You could call it “sprawl beyond sprawl.”

    Overall, between 2000 and 2007, U.S. Bureau of the Census data indicates that the metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population in 2000 have lost two million domestic migrants, or 1.3 percent of their population. In contrast, smaller metropolitan areas — those with populations between 50,000 to 1,000,000 — gained 2.2 million domestic migrants, or 2.2 percent of their population. Smaller areas (under 50,000, including rural areas) also gained, attracting 700,000 domestic migrants, or 1.6 percent of their population.

    But the real the growth is concentrated not in small towns but among the metropolitan areas between 100,000 and 500,000 population. Overall, these medium sized metropolitan areas added 1.6 million domestic migrants — a very healthy 7.6 percent of their population.

    Among the nearly 500 metropolitan areas in this category, 120 have added more five percent or more to their population through domestic migration. Seven metropolitan areas have added more than 25 percent to their population through domestic migration, including Palm Coast, FL, The Villages, FL, St. George, UT, Cape Coral, FL, Bend, OR, Ocala, FL and Prescott, AZ.

    Some of these patterns may change in the short run. For example, nearly one-third of the national increase in smaller regions has been in 16 Florida metropolitan areas, which have added 700,000 domestic migrants. These areas, with only one-quarter of the Florida’s 2000 population, accounted for almost 55 percent of the state’s domestic migration gain. The latest year’s domestic migration data indicates a declining rate of increase in Florida, probably due to its over priced housing and newly higher insurance costs.

    On the other side, expect more from North Carolina, which enjoys a relatively strong economy and stable housing prices. Over the past seven years, North Carolina’s medium sized metropolitan areas gained the second largest number of domestic migrants, at 150,000. These eight areas accounted for 15 percent of the state’s population in 2000, yet captured 30 percent of the domestic migration gain.

    Idaho placed third, gaining 107,000 domestic migrants, as people continued moving from coastal states inland. There’s no reason to expect this trend to slow significantly. Other states rounding out the top ten were South Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Alabama.

    Pennsylvania and Arkansas are the big surprises. Pennsylvania is the big domestic migration success story of the 2000s. The state has lost only 44,000 domestic migrants at the same time that its neighbors have lost more than 2,000,000. Pennsylvania’s mid-sized metropolitan areas have gained 65,000 domestic migrants, many of whom were fleeing the over-heated housing markets in the adjacent New York City and Washington-Baltimore areas. Arkansas reflects, at least partially, the Wal-Mart effect, with more than 50,000 domestic migrants moving to Fayetteville, which includes Bentonville and the headquarters of the world’s largest retailer.

    The same trend towards smaller metropolitan areas can be seen in other states. In Utah, the medium sized metropolitan areas (Provo and St. George) have accounted for more than 160 percent of the state’s net domestic migration. In Oregon, nearly one-half of the domestic migration has been in five medium sized metropolitan areas with less than 15 percent of the state’s population in 2000. In Missouri, more than 125 percent of the domestic migration has been to three medium sized metropolitan areas, with the largest gain in Springfield.

    The same pattern can be seen even in highly urbanized states. Maryland is losing domestic migrants overall, but the exurban metropolitan areas of Hagerstown, Salisbury and Lexington park managed to add more than 50,000. Another exurban success has been Colorado, where four metropolitan areas with 16 percent of the 2000 population accounted for more than 60 percent of the states domestic migration, led by Fort Collins and Greeley.

    Finally, it is notable that Sioux Falls, SD and Bismarck, ND are among the medium sized metropolitan areas that are attracting so many domestic migrants. It is obvious that things are changing when more people are moving to Bismarck or Sioux Falls than to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or Washington.

    What does all this say? Clearly, the shape of America’s demography has been shifting, with a strong movement toward smaller metropolitan areas. Generally, these areas are newer, with little in the way of a traditional urban core. Many are wholly suburban. Indeed, the decentralization of the United States appears to be accelerating — from moving to the suburbs of large metropolitan areas to moving away from large metropolitan areas altogether.

    There are good reasons for this to be so, from overly costly housing, to overly stressful traffic congestion to telecommunications advances. Some argue that high gas prices and the mortgage melt-down will now reverse this trend. Although the housing slowdown likely will slow out-migration down, it is unlikely to reverse the longer-term pattern. And as for high gas prices, the 1970s energy crisis did not result in a ‘back to the city’ movement, but actually quite the opposite. And in the 1970s, we did not have the Internet, which now allows people in smaller communities access to information once limited to those living in large metropolitan areas.

    References:
    Demographia Metropolitan Population & Migration 2000-2007

    Demographia State Population & Migration: 2000-2007:

  • Minority America

    Recent news from the Census Bureau that a “minority” majority might be a reality somewhat sooner than expected — 2042 instead of 2050 — may lead to many misapprehensions, if not in the media, certainly in the private spaces of Americans.

    For some on the multicultural left, there exists the prospect of America firmly tilting towards a kind of third world politics, rejecting much of the country’s historical and constitutional legacy. Some left-leaning futurists, like Warren Wagar envision a nation of people fundamentally torn by “racial conflict.” By mid-century, Wagar sees an America suffering from a “gigantic internal struggle” that will eventually lead to its ultimate decline.

    The xenophobic right, probably much larger but no less deluded, sees the similar potential for mischief, where American values are undermined by what 19th century Nativists called “ a rising tide of color.” It is part of a scenario that the likes of Pat Buchanan and Samuel Huntington envision as the rise “revanchist sentiments” along the nation’s Southern border.

    Yet in reality America’s ability to absorb newcomers represents not so much a shift in racial dominance but a new paradigm, where race itself begins to matter less than culture, class and other factors. Rather than a source of national decline, the new Americas represent the critical force that can provide the new markets, the manpower, and, perhaps most important, the youthful energy to keep our city vital and growing.

    You can see this in all sorts of geographies. The most dynamic, bustling sections of American cities — places like the revived communities along the 7-train line in Queens, Houston’s Harwin Corridor, or Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley — often are those dominated by immigrant enterprise. At the same time many of our suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse, a sign of decline according to some urban boosters but in reality just another proof of the ability of suburbs to reinvent themselves in a new era.

    Even small communities have been enlivened by immigrants, where refugees often have an even greater impact than they do on the biggest cities. In the 1990s, newly arrived Bosnians and Russians in Utica, New York were widely seen as sparking new growth and jobs in a stagnating community, bringing values of hard work and sacrifice. “How long before they become Americanized?” asked the head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “Right now all we know is we love them, and we want more.”

    This is where America’s future diverges most clearly from that of its competitors, both the older industrialized societies and the newly emergent powers. In recent decades Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, across the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia — became more constricted in their concept of national identity. In countries such as Malaysia, Nigeria, India and even the province of Quebec, preferential policies have been devised to blunt successful minorities. Because of such policies, sometimes accompanied by lethal threats, Jews, Armenians, Coptic Christians, and Diaspora Chinese have often been forced to find homes in more welcoming places.

    Europe, too, has received many newcomers, but to a large extent its society and economy have proven far less able to absorb them — a far different result than one would expect from a supposedly enlightened society widely admired by American ‘progressive’ intellectuals. This is particularly true of the roughly twenty million Muslims who live in Europe, but who have tended to remain both segregated from the rest of society and economically marginalized.

    In European countries, it is often easier for immigrants to receive welfare than join the workforce, and their job prospects are confined by levels of education that lag those of immigrants in the United States, Canada or Australia. And in Europe, notably in France, unemployment among immigrants — particularly those from Muslim countries — is often at least two times higher than that of the native born; in Britain, as well, Muslims are far more likely to be out of the workforce than either Christians or Hindus.

    Similarly, European immigrants often separate themselves from the dominant culture. For example, in Britain, up to forty percent of the Islamic population in 2001 believed that terrorist attacks on both Americans and their fellow Britons were justified; meanwhile, ninety five percent of white Britons have exclusively white friends.

    In contrast, only one-quarter of whites in a 29-city U.S. survey reported no interracial friendships at all. This measure of racial isolation ranged from a low of eight percent in Los Angeles to a high of 55 percent in Bismarck, North Dakota. Overall, it’s clear the integrative process in the United States, which over the past century has experienced the largest mass migration in history, is well advanced.

    This contrast is particularly telling when looking at Muslim immigrants. In the United States, most Muslims — themselves from diverse places of origin — are comfortably middle class, with income and education levels above the national average. They are more likely to be satisfied with the state of the country, their own community, and prospects for success than other Americans.

    More important, more than half of Muslims — many of them immigrants — identify themselves as Americans first, a far higher percentage of national identity than is found in western Europe. More than four in five is registered to vote, a sure sign of civic involvement. Almost three quarters, according to a Pew study, say they have never been discriminated against. “You can keep the flavor of your ethnicity,” remarked one University of Chicago Pakistani doctorate student in Islamic Studies, “but you are expected to become an American.”

    Even if immigration slows down dramatically, these groups will grow in significance as we approach mid-century. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants; by 2015 they will make up as much as one third of American kids. Demographically, the racial and ethnic die is already cast. The forty-five percent of all children under five who are non-white will eventually be the 20-somethings having children of their own. Whether they achieve a majority by 2043 or 2050, many of these Americans are likely to share more than one ethnic heritage.

    So rather than speaking about growing separation and balkanization we are witnessing what Sergio Munoz, a Mexican journalist and long-time Los Angeles resident, has described as the “the multiculturalism of the streets.” Street level realities differ from those seen by political reporters or academics. People still talk about the South, for example, and its racial legacy. Years ago economic leaders in southern cities like Dallas, Atlanta and Houston recognized that to preserve institutionalized racism would be bad for business. By the mid-2000s these very cities, were seen as among the best places for black businesses and families.

    The remarkable progress on race, even in the Deep South, has in many ways forged the path for the new Americans, including Mexican-Americans and Chinese-Americans who have also faced discrimination. More important, the road to economic success, unobstructed by institutionalized racism, will be even more open for their children.

    This does not mean that there remains a great deal of confluence between particular ethnicities and higher rates of poverty. Massive immigration has brought to many cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, large numbers of poorly educated and non-English speaking newcomers. Critics may be correct that current policies tend to foster too much immigration among the less skilled. Although newcomers often increase their wages over time, the influx of even newer arrivals tends to keep wages for groups such as Latinos consistently below native levels, and likely depresses wages for the least skilled natives.

    Immigrants by their very nature constitute a work in progress. In the move to highly skilled positions — including in the blue collar sectors — the average immigrant income grows and the percentage of children who finish high school or enter college tends to rise (in some groups more decisively than in others). Rates of homeownership also rise with time, reaching native levels after about three decades.

    What is too often missing today is a focus on how to spur this upward mobility. This requires less racial “sensitivity” sessions and cultural celebrations, and more attention to the basics that create a successful transition to the middle class — like decent schools, public safety, better infrastructure, skills training as well as preservation and development of high paying blue as well as white collar jobs.

    The bottom line is that neither political nor the cultural arguments about immigration are central to everyday life: Concepts such as “ethnic solidarity,” “people of color” or “cultural community” generally mean less than principles such as “Does this sell?” “What’s my market?” and, ultimately, “How do I fit in?”

    In essence, if the economy can continue to work and expand over the coming decade, America’s increasing racial diversity not only will do no considerable harm, but lay the basis of a more remarkable, unique and successful nation in the decades to come.

    Joel Kotkin is the Executive Editor for Newgeography.com.

  • Black Migration out of California

    This recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle discusses how politicians in the city are trying to stem the flight of blacks from the city – who now only make up 6.5 percent of the city’s population (it was 13.4 percent in 1970).

    There are two problems with this article. One is it fails to contextualize the pattern of black migration in America. As this report from William Frey of the Brookings Institute points out, black population growth is shifting to the South and to newer communities in the West with a lower cost of living. If you look at a map of California in Frey’s report, you’ll see 25 percent population growth of blacks in some suburban communities.

    Secondly, the article doesn’t link this occurrence to current economic trends in San Francisco. The city is increasingly becoming a haven for the very wealthy which is pushing out the middle and lower earners – and blacks in the city are more likely to fall into this income bracket.

    Finally, albeit a small reason, Section 8 vouchers are moving some working class blacks to the suburbs.

    If you read the Chronicle article, it sounds like the City is being very antagonistic towards the black community. Perhaps it is in an inadvertent economic way. I think that perhaps the bigger culprit is that the city is not hospitable to the middle class and families any longer. And secondly, college-educated and affluent blacks are choosing to live in cities like Atlanta where there is a higher concentration of black professionals and business and cultural centers.

  • Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape

    One of the greatest ironies of our time is the fact that today’s leading progressives tend to despise the very decentralized landscape that an earlier generation of New Deal liberals created.

    Franklin Roosevelt and his successors from Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sought to shift industry and population from the crowded industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. They did this through rural electrification based on hydropower projects, factories supplying the military and federal aid to citizens seeking to buy single-family homes in low-density suburbs.

    This is precisely the environment – which brought so much opportunity and improved living conditions to so many – that today’s progressives so often despise. Since the 1960s, environmentalists, for example, have waged a campaign against the great dams that symbolized New Deal economic development policies. Artificial lakes that generate electricity for millions of suburban homeowners and businesses, and have brought an end to devastating, cyclical floods, are condemned by progressives for having wiped out local fauna and flora. And it goes without saying that the middle-class swimmers, picnickers and motor-boaters that enjoy government-created lakes on weekends are… well, vulgar.

    Similarly, the defense plants that the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy-Johnson administrations scattered throughout the country are often lambasted as emblems of the fascistic “military-industrial complex,” part of a wicked “Gun Belt.” In fact, industry is increasingly seen as undesirable by today’s Arcadian progressives, who appear to believe that it would have been better to leave the farmers of rural America as quaint specimens of authentic folk life.

    But nothing riles the progressives of today than the low-density, single-family home suburbs made possible by New Deal liberal homeownership policies. Since the 1950s, intellectuals on the left have been bemoaning the alleged cultural sterility and conformity of the suburbs. Now anti-sprawl campaigners allege that the suburbs are also destroying the planet.

    So the question is: How did the American left, in a short period of time, come to repudiate the New Deal and the American landscape it created? The answer is simple: today’s center-left, which calls itself progressive rather than liberal, is not the heir of New Deal liberalism. It is the heir instead of early twentieth century elite Progressives, who were shoved aside and marginalized during the heyday of New Deal liberalism.

    The original Progressives were overwhelmingly professionals and patricians of old Anglo-American stock in the Northeast and Midwest, many of them the children of Protestant clergymen, teachers or professors. They despised the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age, but also tended to view European immigrants and white and black Southerners as benighted primitives.

    Their vision of the ideal society, influenced by the Hegelian Idealist culture of Bismarckian Germany, was one in which a university-trained elite ran everything with minimal interference by ignorant voters and crass politicians. As heirs of the moralistic Northern Protestant Whig and Republican traditions, these Progressives also had a strong interest in the social engineering of private behavior, from prohibition to eugenic sterilization.

    From Reconstruction until the Depression, Progressive moralism and elitism alienated European immigrants and rural Southerners and Westerners alike. This benefited the industrial capitalists of the dominant Republican party. Franklin Roosevelt created a powerful, but fundamentally unstable, Democratic majority by adding many former Republican Progressives to the old Democratic coalition of Northern white “ethnics” and white Southerners.

    Yet in the process Roosevelt helped undermine many of the signature initiatives of the progressives, starting with the repeal of Prohibition, a policy loathed by German and Irish Catholic voters. It signaled a repudiation of the Whig-Republican-Progressive ambition to use the federal government for moral reform and social engineering. (FDR’s tactical appeasement of Southern segregation had a similar tactical logic).

    Another goal of Progressives, economic planning, died with the collapse of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in the first Roosevelt term. Jettisoning the Progressive dream of a planned economy run by technocrats, the Roosevelt administration instead focused pragmatically on state-capitalist public infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Association (TVA) and the Lower Colorado River Association (LCRA).

    Plans for an all-powerful executive civil service subordinate to the White House – a progressive reform that FDR unwisely favored – were rejected by a Congress jealous of its prerogatives and suspicious of executive power. Finally, nanny-state supervision of the poor, another Progressive theme, found little sympathy among New Deal Democrats, who preferred universal social insurance to means-tested public assistance, and preferred employing the able-bodied poor in public works to what FDR called “the narcotic” of the “dole.”

    The New Deal ultimately left little of the old Progressive project but created what could be considered a Golden Age that lasted until the 1970s for the white lower middle class majority. Progressive intellectuals and activists, however, sensed that they had been marginalized. Over-represented in the prestige press and the universities, they increasingly denounced what they saw as the vulgarity of the New Deal’s constituency.

    The assault on the suburbs was one of the most powerful expressions of this discontent. It was led by two figures. One was Jane Jacobs, the romantic chronicler of dense urban life, and its villain in New York’s highway-building Robert Moses. A rival school, headed by Jacobs’ enemy Lewis Mumford, sang the praises of planned “organic” villages – “highwayless towns” connected by “townless highways.” The Mumfordian strain of Progressive planning is represented today by the New Urbanism, with its hyper-regulated low-rise pedestrian communities.

    The resurgent progressives also clung to their vision of a society in which an enlightened, nonpartisan elite governs the ignorant masses from above. The Civil Rights Revolution, and the era of judicial activism that followed, permitted progressives to transfer power from the elected political class to the federal judiciary. By the 1970s and 1980s, federal judges were regulating practically all aspects of American life. Social engineering schemes like busing for racial balance and race-based affirmative action, which “color-blind” New Deal liberal opponents of segregation like Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson opposed, now became critical pillars of progressive ideology.

    The New Dealers had been ardent conservationists, but their conservationism focused not only on nature but also the well-being of people. New Deal soil conservation and agricultural productivity policies allowed the amount of land in cultivation to decline, freeing up vast tracts of land for wilderness or habitation. Farmers, middle class suburbanites and nature all gained.

    This approach is repudiated by most contemporary progressives, who know nothing about farms except that they are cruel to livestock. By the 1970s many progressives abandoned liberal conservationism for radical environmentalism, which seeks to protect nature by separating it from humanity and industry. Radical environmentalism tends to shade into misanthropy, as in the proposal by two New Jersey environmentalists to turn much of the Great Plains into a human-free “Buffalo Commons.” (Curiously, nobody seems to have proposed evacuating New Jersey in order to create a “Migratory Bird Park.”) The radical Green goal of “rewilding” North America by creating “wildlife corridors” from which humans are banned repudiates the New Deal liberal vision of allowing working-class Americans to enjoy the scenery of national parks.

    So in every respect except racism and opposition to immigration, today’s progressives are genuine heirs not of the New Deal liberals but of the capital-P Progressive economic planners and social engineers of the early twentieth century. Even their social base is the same as in 1908 – college-educated professionals, particularly those in the nonprofit sector and education, like public school teachers and academics.

    This class – enlarged ironically by New Deal liberal programs like the G.I. Bill and student loans – has been increased in number by upwardly-mobile Americans to whom mass university education imparts a blend of the worldviews of old-fashioned Northeastern progressives and the old Bohemian left-intelligentsia. This enlarged college-educated professional class has allied itself with African-Americans and Latinos in the identity centered post-McGovern Democratic party.

    With perfect symbolism, the two bases of the alliance of white progressives and nonwhite Democrats – college campuses and inner cities, allied against the middle-class and working-class suburbs – correspond to the alternate urban utopias of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs respectively, if we consider the college campus to be a Mumfordian paradise.

    With good reason, then, today’s progressives despise the suburban, middle-class America created by yesterday’s New Deal liberals. Today’s progressives may invoke the New Deal, but they are the heirs not of mid-century liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson but rather of the Progressive social engineers who believed that enlightened elites should alter both the built environment and human behavior to meet their social goals. Some things never change.

    Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics” (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and “What Lincoln Believed” (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest.

  • Thoughts on the Future of Seattle: A Vision of 2040 for Pugetopolis

    I have been attacked as a defender of ‘sprawl’ although I consider myself a man of the left, with a political-economy philosophy that is ‘social democratic – far to the left of the contemporary Democratic party. I view global warming as very serious, but consider continuing global warfare over resources, land and religion, and increasing national and global economic and political inequality as even more critical.

    As a realist/naturalist/skeptic, rather than idealist, I believe a scientist’s goal is to understand and explain the rich variety of actual needs, motivations and behavior of individuals, groups and institutions. I chose geography instead of planning, because I am uncomfortable with a normative approach of telling people how they ought to behave (in the absence of adequate theory and evidence).

    In my long career in planning I have become skeptical about many things that are widely considered “progressive.” This includes disbelief in two icons of a normative New Urbanist planning: urban growth boundaries and rail transit. In my original testimony to the Growth Strategies Commission 20 years ago, I warned that use of a crude geographic tool (growth boundaries) would lead to land and housing price inflation, leapfrog development and would benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Sadly, this proved to be the case. Rather than use zoning to create open space, I believe fairness dictates it be acquired through public purchase for public use.

    On rail, my skepticism grew out of considerations of class fairness, since it squanders limited public resources for limited results, and again benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. The real transit problem is not capacity but accessibility to people and jobs. I like trains and have been on dozens of rail or subway systems around the world, many successful, others relative failures. Unfortunately, the geography of Seattle militates against rail’s success here.

    Before we try to guess what greater Seattle might or could (not “should” or “will”) look like in 2040, we must be clear about the nature of the geographic setting, and needs and preferences of its people. For example, there are distinct populations who prefer denser urban living (structures and neighborhoods), and those who prefer less dense living (single-family homes and neighborhoods). Some economic activities require dense agglomerative settings; others need greater horizontal space or external connections.

    In the immediate Seattle region currently about 40 percent of people and jobs are at the denser more agglomerative and 60 percent at the less dense, more dispersed end. Unfortunately for New Urbanist idealism, far more than half of people do not live within walking or biking distance to work or school. By 2040 the share of people preferring or accepting denser urban living in the close in areas could rise to 50 percent (for demographic and land cost reasons) but that will still leave 50 percent or 2.5 of 5 million people preferring a lower density environment. Planners should have learned that many people need private space (yards) as well as public (parks and playgrounds). And it is truly difficult to envision a higher share of more agglomerative jobs; costs of transportation will likely bring residences and workplaces closer to the peripheral communities.

    Another inescapable reality is that trucks will remain the dominant mode for goods transport and that the car, personal transport, will still, yes, be the dominant mode of person movement. Transit (and walking and bicycling) could rise to 25 percent and carpooling could become a lot higher, but cars, far more efficient and greener, will still be the rule. It is absurd to imagine otherwise – this is precisely the kind of innovation that at which American technology excels.

    Most political leaders and senior planners know these “realities” perfectly well but seem to have trouble reining in the their often overly idealistic staff. Yet an intelligent view of what will be in 2040 rests on facts and people’s demonstrated preferences, not on New Urbanist theorizing.

    So what does 2040 look like? The population will likely grow but the forecast of a 50 percent increase is far from sure. The odds are better than even that growth will be moderately less, because of demography (aging population, lowering fertility of past immigrants), and the high cost of Seattle for residence and for business. Instead we likely will see growth spill over to less costly and restrictive cities like Spokane, Bellingham, Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

    We don’t know the likely degree of housing affordability and of the relative severity of constraints on the land supply. Again based on history and demography/education, I’d say the odds are in favor of continuing constraints, over-regulation and housing unaffordability.

    Personal transport will still prevail in 2040, but much of transport technology and policy is uncertain. There will probably be new trains, because people seem to want them, although their contribution to mobility will be modest.

    Smaller communities around Seattle would be well-advised not to allow themselves to be pulled too closely into a downtown-centric transit network since, as Nobel economist Paul Samuelson showed in 1956, this almost guarantees that the outlying centers will lose high level functions and income to the central node. Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue would each be better off developing themselves than subordinating their destiny to downtown Seattle. Bellevue’s success as a competitive edge city is because of the barrier effect of Lake Washington!

    So given these considerations, what will Seattle and its region look like in 2040? Look around you because the future city will look and feel amazingly like the present city, just as the city today is much like the city of 1975. It will be somewhat denser, especially in the core region but overall the urban footprint will grow only slightly and begrudgingly. Instead, most substantial growth in Pugetopolis will occur in satellite towns and adjacent counties and beyond, which is not necessarily a bad thing but may offend many planners.

    In this new configuration, the central city of Seattle will do fine – due to its popularity, site and situation benefits (and the high land prices). There will be continued gentrification, dominated by the childless affluent, and displacement of the less well off to some of the older, less amenity rich suburbs. Inequality will remain high and segregation by class will probably increase. Transportation congestion and substantial long distance commuting will not have lessened, despite trains or the implementation of demand management, because of likely over-investment in large glamour projects, and the continued separation of residences and jobs.

    Experience suggests to me that the future Pugetopolis will continue to be the uneasy compromise between the idealist visionaries of the golden city and the dictates of the human condition and the economy. This is not a pessimistic forecast, rather a realistic one. The metropolis of 2040 may well be a somewhat better place than it is now, but just not very!

    Richard Morrill came to Seattle 53 years ago for graduate school, and after stints in Illinois and Sweden, returned to the University of Washington Geography department in 1961, where he has taught for 44 years.

  • Questioning Conventional Wisdom: Should Poor Folks Stay Put?

    There is reason to think again about the now-current idea of dispersing the population of poor folks in the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles and similar precincts in other cities across the U.S.

    There’s cause to pause over notions such as mixing “affordable housing” that’s priced in the range of working-class or poor folks alongside spiffy market-rate units.

    There’s some research going on that combines data analysis in the law-enforcement profession with efforts in the social sciences, and it’s far enough along to raise questions about some commonplace assumptions among policy makers.

    One questionable assumption is the notion that it’s best to do away with old-fashioned, densely developed centers of subsidized housing – places such as Skid Row, or the many areas of cities across the U.S. known as “the projects.” Conventional wisdom currently holds that such clusters on the low end of the socio-economic scale are best relegated to history and replaced with scattered sites.

    Here’s a simpler way of putting it: Recent years have seen government authorities ditch the old “projects” model – literally blowing them up, in some cases – in favor of programs that shift poor residents from the inner city to residences in outlying areas. They don’t bunch the poor folks together, at least not in the cheek-by-jowl way of the old neighborhood. The idea is to mix things up and put a relatively small number of poor folks into any given middle-class neighborhood that is safer and has better schools. The presumption is that spreading poverty out will give the poor a greater chance to work their way up the socio-economic scale.

    Such thinking bears a similarity to efforts by some public officials in Los Angeles who aim to make similar shifts possible based on regulations requiring builders to subsidize lower rents for certain numbers of units in their developments.

    It’s not exactly the same, and you can argue the finer points. But the truth is that the efforts to change the residential patterns of poor folks – and the talk of dispersing the social service agencies that serve low-income residents of neighborhoods such as Skid Row – aim for a goal that’s similar to the top-down approach of blowing up the projects and moving folks to places beyond the city’s center.

    Also similar is the reason behind some of the efforts to move poor residents out of the downtown areas of many cities: gentrification. Cities want to spruce up their historic cores. They want new retail and residential developments that will generate more tax revenue than any densely populated housing project or collection of low-rent residence hotels will ever provide. Public officials have often presented such efforts with a two-birds-with-one-stone argument – poor folks get to go off to nicer, safer neighborhoods and the city gets a shiny new trophy in a redeveloped downtown.

    There’s an article in the current issue of the Atlantic that looks at recent developments in Memphis, Tennessee, where sociological researchers have been comparing law-enforcement data on crime trends to recent programs to relocate poor folks from the inner city to outlying areas. Some of the findings have the researchers leaning toward a different two-birds-with-one-stone argument on subsidized housing. They think it might just be that both the folks who were shifted from those hard-pressed areas and their new neighbors far away from the inner city are worse off for all the manipulations.

    The research has not reached any definitive conclusions, and there are plenty of variables that must be considered with care. Still, there seems to be enough to raise serious questions about a trend in urban planning and public policy that has gone nearly unexamined for some time.

    The Garment & Citizen yields to the Atlantic on this matter, urging anyone who is interested to give careful consideration to the piece, “American Murder Mystery.”

    We also urge all involved in the debate to ask themselves a few questions:

    What is a neighborhood? Do common economic circumstances bring a sense of community that is necessary to any neighborhood? Is a poor neighborhood necessarily a bad neighborhood? If so, why?

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen.

  • Windy City Triumphalism at Odds with Souring Economy

    Mayor Daley said this week that the economy in Chicago is the worst that he’s seen since becoming mayor.

    You’d never guess this judging by the article about “demographic inversion” published in the New Republic by Alan Ehrenhalt . The author prints a lot of anecdotal evidence about on-going gentrification he witnesses in his hometown but unfortunately offers precious few statistics about job growth.

    The vacancy rate for industrial real estate in the Chicago area recently climbed to its highest level in 14 years. The governor also called violence in the city “out of control.”

  • Urban America: The New Solid South

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).

    Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.

    As a result, places where Republicans such as Ronald Reagan could once win a respectable share of the vote — including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City — by 2004 were delivering 80 percent or more to the Democrats. Even in the losing year of 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry won almost every city of more than 500,000 people.

    This fall, Barack Obama, a resident of Chicago, can comfortably expect to triumph in virtually every major urban county, often by ratios of 2-to-1 or more. He can count just as much on cities in decline as he can on those that have been gentrified; he will rack up big margins both in heavily white core counties such as those around Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., as well as overwhelmingly minority Baltimore, Philadelphia and the Bronx, N.Y.

    Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban mono­culture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

    This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans. Today in some cities — mostly old industrial centers in the East and Midwest — this population remains dominant and is likely to vote in huge numbers for Obama. Most of these cities suffer poverty rates at least 50 percent higher than the national average.

    At the same time, some other cities — such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland — have done far better. They have done so by attracting a population of well-educated, white professionals. Pockets of this demographic, to be sure, also exist in some hard-hit industrial cities, but the new urban affluents tend to concentrate in cities with industries, such as financial services and media, that provide excitement and the prospect of high-wage employment in a glamorous setting.

    Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center. As they grow older, marry and raise families, many in this cohort — particularly those who do not ascend into the upper classes — leave the urban core for the suburbs or other more affordable regions.

    Yet if the urban base — roughly 30 percent of the population — offers Obama a huge edge in the election, he must not identify too much as an urban candidate. In the past, the danger for Democrats lay in being perceived as paying too much heed to poor, minority voters. Fortunately, Obama, as an African-American, has little need to compete for their affections.

    More tempting, however, might be to embrace the emerging agenda of the benefactors of gentrification: powerful real estate interests and other groups. Among them are vocal constituencies who are openly hostile to people in suburbs and small cities. This ideology first emerged in 2004 in John Sperling’s “Retro vs. Metro” thesis, which envisioned the eventual triumph of a sophisticated urban population over backward-seeming rural, small town and suburban constituencies.

    An even clearer example of this urbanist ideology came in the wake of Kerry’s 2004 defeat, largely at the hands of rural, small-town and exurban “retro” voters. Editors of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, pointed out in an article that “if the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide.” Their solution was not to reach out to the other geographies, but to build an “urban identity politics” to counter Republicans’ hold over suburban and rural voters.

    “From here on out, we’re glad red-state rubes live in areas where guns are more powerful and more plentiful, cars are larger and faster, and people are fatter and slower and dumber,” The Stranger proclaimed. Given the editors’ uninhibited sense of superiority, they felt confident that in the emerging Darwinian struggle, the suburban and exurban Neanderthals would be forced to give way to the clear superiority of the urban Cro-Magnons.

    Since 2004, this ideology has become stronger, ironically bolstered by two bubbles fostered by President Bush’s fiscal policy: the boom in city condominium development and the rapid expansion of the financial services industry. Even as 80 percent to 90 percent of metropolitan growth redounded to the suburbs, the rising affluence of the urban cores persuaded the media that cities were not only back but were also reasserting their historic ascendance over the periphery.

    In recent months, the city-centered media such as CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio have jumped on the urbanist bandwagon. They have promoted urban chauvinists’ contention that high gas prices and legislation to limit global warming would end the era of dispersion. This return to a more urbanized demography, some Democratic bloggers suggest, would assure a new liberal ascendancy.

    Whatever Obama may believe personally, he would be well-advised to distance himself from such sentiments. For one thing, identifying with people who celebrate the demise of other geographies may offend the majority of Americans who prefer to live in “retro,” lower-density environments. Suburb- and countryside-bashing may turn on editors and readers of The New York Times, but it hardly constitutes good politics.

    In terms of political strategy, Obama would be far better off stressing the commonalities between people in differing geographies. His time on the campaign trail should tell him that laid-off paper industry workers in central Wisconsin, hard-pressed suburban homeowners in San Bernardino, Calif., and struggling inner city residents in Brooklyn have ample cause to reject an extension of Republican rule. Why repeat the Bush tactic of dividing people from each other, this time based on where they choose to live, when the economic misery is so well-distributed?

    By displaying genuine empathy for Americans living in suburbs and small towns as well as in cities, Obama could achieve more than a small tactical victory, à la Karl Rove. With a strong showing in the other geographies as well as his inevitable landslide in cities, he could instead realize a historic triumph closer to Rooseveltian proportions.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. Mark Schill is the website’s managing editor and a community strategy consultant with Praxis Strategy Group.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Other articles in the Three Geographies Series:
    The Three Geographies
    Rural America could bring boon to Dems
    Suburbs will decide the election

  • Cities are Changing, But Urban Living Remains Optional

    Starting with the first oil crisis in 1973, it’s become de rigueur for the press to accompany every spike in energy prices with a spate of stories explaining how the higher costs will inevitably lead to the revival of the long declining industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. But don’t count on a boom in Baltimore or Cleveland anytime soon.

    This iteration’s model might be the June 25 New York Times article entitled “Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs,” neatly encapsulated in the photo caption, “As gas prices climb, people who once considered an exurban commute are now considering center-city living.”

    Such wishful thinking from news reporters, who live in cities, and urban planners, who have an even more direct stake in them, enhanced by the mortgage crisis and the presidential election, has obscured the fundamentals that will continue to determine where people choose to live and, by extension, which cities thrive. Job demand, tax levels, well-provided services — especially garbage, police, transportation infrastructure and schools — and a resilient and diversified job base remain key.

    In New York, for example, even as the economy has grown since 9/11, it still has less jobs than it did on September 10, 2001, meaning the city now depends on a relative handful of high-paying positions, and is at the mercy of a relative handful of large employers and very well-paid employees.

    As job growth continues to occur mostly on the periphery, where space is cheaper and taxes tend to be lower and the inclination is to fight to attract businesses, not see how much tax and fee money can be extracted from them without inspiring them to leave, people still have options. And despite the cries of the New Urbanists, it’s not always the easiest thing to go from, say, one part of Chicago to another. To the extent that job growth occurs mostly on the periphery, people still have options, and clustering in the exurbs seems more likely than a mass return to the center.

    While white flight seems to have stabilized, city life remains most appealing to the youngest and oldest members of the middle class — meaning those without children or whose children have left the home. In short, urban living remains an appealing, but optional mode of existence most appealing to the very poor, the very rich, young singles and older empty nesters.

    There are, though, a few new and relatively little-noticed developments in play that will have dramatic and unpredictable effects on the urban experience over the next several decades. Here are three worth tracking:

    • Telecommuting. High gas plays into it, but more generally there’s little reason to have many workers sharing a physical space, purchased or rented by their employers, for 40 hours a week. Expect a new model that compels many information workers, in the broadest definition, to show up for a day or two a week for face time, but otherwise to rent shared work spaces or to work from their homes. While this trend may have begun with freelancers bringing laptops and surge protectors into Starbucks, much more is coming, even if the trend has been retarded by the reluctance of managers to serve as early adaptors to the trend.

      The upshot will be a retrofitting of office space to residential use, which will serve as a countervailing pressure to sky-high residential rents in high-demand cities like New York and Chicago, while adding to the excess unoccupied inventory in shrinking cities. Purchasers will benefit from lower prices, but the repurposing of hundreds of millions of square feet should be a serious damper on the new construction industry and market.

    • Intelligent pricing (sunk costs raised). Bloomberg’s slap-dash congestion pricing plan may have happily gone down, but other more serious ones with elements like congestion parking and variable fees will emerge. The danger here can be seen in one early, if clumsy, example of this trend—smoking taxes, which were pushed through, as were smoking bans, through arguments about the sunk health costs smokers incur.

      The trouble, of course, is that any time fees are used both to influence behavior and to generate revenue, the need for money eventually trumps all other goals.

    • Continued reductions in privacy. London is again the model city here, but really this is a national and international trend. As governments are able to collect and store more information, they will, and information that can translate into imperative and immediate actions naturally consolidates in the executive branch. DNA databases, fingerprinting, security camera footage, phone record and even metrocards and EZ passes, along with storage and sifting of publicly accessible information, will redefine privacy downward, even as civil rights-and-liberties types fight a rear-guard battle against a technological fait accompli. Much as governments will always spend all of the monies available to them, they will collect and use such information.

    Working out safeguards — and reporting on already accomplished abuses — will be a major sport in years to come, and will likely bring down at least one national-profile big city mayor in the next decade.

    Harry Siegel is an editor for Politico.