Category: Demographics

Five Ideas to Make America Greater

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was based on the notion that he could “Make America Great Again.” But beyond the rhetoric — sometimes lurching into demagoguery — the newly elected president comes to office, as one commentator suggests, “the least policy-savvy president in history.”

To succeed, Trump must adopt innovative policies that transcend traditional right-left divides. He needs to find ways to help his heavily white, working-class base while expanding his appeal to minorities, millennials and educated people who are now largely horrified by his ascendency.

In the short run, his biggest problem may lie with his own Republican Party establishment, which, rather than “drain the swamp,” would simply like to create one of its own. The looming presence of corporate lobbyists, swarming around the administration like hungry flies, is not encouraging at all, nor are GOP congressional plans to re-establish “earmarks.”

The key lies not in empowering a different set of K Street parasites, but rather in reversing income stagnation. If he cannot, his triumph may prove to be no more consequential than an absurdist, Latin American-style telenovela.

A flatter, fairer tax

The basic instinct among many Republicans tends toward reducing taxes on their richest donors and making life easier for the ultrarich, including some on Trump’s economic team. Trump’s imperative should, instead, be to make the tax system fairer for the middle and working classes. One way would be to make a graduated flat tax that would mean that the rich, who make most of their money from investments, pay the same rate for capital gains as the rest of us do for income.

Democrats will, no doubt, still charge Trump with being “unfair,” but, as Ronald Reagan proved 20 years ago, Americans support incentives for work if they don’t unfairly tilt conditions to the ultrarich. Main Street business owners, the most hostile constituency to the Obama administration’s policies, pay taxes based on their income and can’t manipulate the system like Apple, Google, Wall Streeters or, for that matter, real estate developers like Trump himself.

A middle ground for immigration

Opposition to illegal immigration helped drive the Trump campaign early on, but, outside of the GOP base, there is little support for a mass roundup of the undocumented. The vast majority of Americans, over 70 percent, also oppose “open borders.” After all, even President Obama evicted 2 million people during his two terms in office.

Trump also can begin reordering our immigration policies toward skilled workers who are interested in becoming citizens. At the same time, Trump could score points by undermining the H1-B visa program, which allows Silicon Valley firms, along with corporations like Disney and Southern California Edison, to lay off American workers and replace them with temporary indentured servants.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Make America Great Again hat) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 22, 2016
Should Children Vote?

The rising cost of entitlements will test inter-generational harmony.

In the week following the Brexit vote, a recurrent complaint from the losing side was that a majority of older people voted to leave while a majority of younger people voted to remain. In the eyes of the complainers, this rendered the leave outcome less legitimate because younger people have more years of life ahead of them and therefore would allegedly suffer more than old people from a decision to leave the European Union. So much for the wisdom of old age knowing what is best. And so much for the principle of one person one vote, regardless of age, gender or race or whatever.

Instead of disenfranchising a group of older voters, we may consider allowing children some representation in our voting system. In the United States, the voting age is 18 which means that there are approximately 74 million US citizens aged under 18 who do not have the right to vote. That is a sizable 23% of the entire population who will all be adults by 2034 and who may not in the future take kindly to the long-duration budget commitments that were made in their absence.

Entitlements Demand and Supply

When Social Security was introduced in 1935, US life expectancy at birth was 62 years. When Medicare was introduced in 1965, it was 74 years. Today, it is approaching 80 years. What is more, people who are now middle-aged or older can expect to live past the age of 80. Life expectancy at birth is 80 years, but an American aged 70 can now expect to live to 85. And one aged 80 can expect to live to 89. Meanwhile the retirement age has remained around 65 since 1935, which means that the demand for these entitlements has increased in line with or faster than the rise in life expectancy.

In recent years, two other factors have put this demand on an accelerating trajectory. One is the rising number of retired baby boomers. The other is the relentless increase in health care costs.

On the other side of the equation, US households have fewer children today than in the past. The US Total Fertility Ratio (TFR) was a low 2.0 children per woman in the mid 1930s due to the Great Depression. It then zoomed to 3.5 at the height of the baby boom in the late 1950s before settling back back to 3.0 in the mid 1960s. But today, the TFR is back to its Depression era levels of 2.0 children per woman. It is a cruel irony that Medicare was enacted in 1965, just as the baby boom was ending. Because there are fewer workers per retiree today, the supply of dollars for entitlements has become less abundant.

Pros and Cons

Going back now to the question of the children’s vote, there are at least two reasons to maintain the status quo, which is a right to vote at 18.

First you could say that before a certain age, a person is not mentally equipped to make a critical choice between several candidates. Some people may argue, and not just for comic effect, that many adults from any demographic group are similarly ill-equipped, but that is a more subjective appraisal.

Perhaps this question is better addressed by re-examining what the voting age should be. Is 18 the proper age to get the right to vote? It would not be hard to make a case that 16 is old enough. If you can drive, you can vote.

Second you could say that young people should not have the right to vote because they don’t pay taxes. But as we know, a large percentage of adult Americans also don’t pay taxes. If there is a case for eliminating representation without taxation, there is no reason why this restriction should be confined to the under 18 cohorts.

On the other side of the argument, the logic of giving children some representation would be obvious if we hadn’t lived without it for so long. For one, it would place a check on government actions and decisions that create economic benefits for older generations while imposing a financial burden on the young. If the very young had some representation, the magnitude of this wealth transfer would certainly be smaller.

Two Steps for Representation

In theory, Americans aged less than 18 are represented indirectly by their parents’ votes. But in practice, the idea that a teenager would agree with his parents’ political choices sounds realistic only to someone who has never met a teenager. Therefore Step One would be to provide some representation by lowering the voting age to 16.

That would still leave 66 million Americans aged 0 to 15 with no direct representation. Today, a family of two parents and three children has two votes. But a childless couple also has two votes. We may then consider Step Two which is to give parents a fractional vote for every child. For example, a family would get an additional one third of a vote if the family has one child, two thirds for two children and one full vote for three or more children. The extra fractions would be attached to one of the parents’ votes. So if that parent pulled the lever for a certain candidate, his vote would count not as one vote, but as 1.33 votes if he has one child, 1.67 votes if he has two and two votes if he has three or more.

Of course, this could get complicated quickly if the parents disagree on whom to vote for. Which parent would become the custodian of the fractional votes to use on Election Day? This can easily be addressed by having parents take turns at every new electoral cycle, by having the fractional votes randomly allocated to either parent, or by giving each parent half of the fractional votes. In the latter case, for a family with three children, Mom and Dad would each have 1.5 votes.

Yet another proposal is to let each child decide his/her vote and to allocate to him/her a fractional vote that starts at one tenth of a vote at the age of nine and grows by one tenth every year until it reaches a full vote at eighteen. In this case, a ten year old would have 2/10 of a vote and a fifteen year old would have 7/10 of a vote and both would choose their own candidates instead of piggybacking their parents’ preferences.

As things stand today, giving children some representation would tip the scale to the Democrat candidate in many contests. In the most recent election for example, Pew Research estimates that voters aged 18 to 29 favored Hillary Clinton by an 18% margin and those aged 30 to 44 favored her by 8%. Meanwhile, voters aged 45 or higher preferred Donald Trump by an 8% margin.

Notwithstanding probable resistance from some quarters, the issue ought to be decided on its own merits rather than on whether it helps or hurts one or the other party. If one party’s platform appeals mainly to the older generations, the children’s vote would be a healthy jolt and an incentive for that party to start addressing issues that are of greater import to the young.

Further, any concern that children representation would skew the results unfairly is mitigated by the fact that, in a typical election, as many as 45% of eligible voters don’t even bother to show up. Because the margin of victory is small in most elections, a low turnout also leads to a skewed outcome.

Sami Karam is the founder and editor of populyst.net and the creator of the populyst index™. populyst is about innovation, demography and society. Before populyst, he was the founder and manager of the Seven Global funds and a fund manager at leading asset managers in Boston and New York. In addition to a finance MBA from the Wharton School, he holds a Master’s in Civil Engineering from Cornell and a Bachelor of Architecture from UT Austin.

November 19, 2016
San Francisco Observations

I made quite a few trips to San Francisco during the late 90s into the early 2000s, but hadn’t been back in a very long time – probably close to 15 years.

Recently I was there for a conference and a long weekend and got to spend some time exploring the city. I won’t claim a comprehensive review, but I did have a few takeaways to share.

1. Fewer homeless than expected. Based on the rhetoric you read in the papers, I expected SF to be overrun with aggressive homeless people. This wasn’t the case. There were visible homeless to be sure, but no more than I remember from 15 years ago and no more than I see in New York. And they were not particularly aggressive in any way.

2. A curiously low energy city. It’s tough to judge any American city’s street energy after living in New York, but San Francisco felt basically dead. Tourist areas around Union Square and the Embarcadero were crowded, and the Mission on a Friday night was hopping, but otherwise the city was very quiet. Haight-Ashbury was nearly deserted and many neighborhoods had the feel of a ghost town. It’s very strange to be walking around a city with such a dense built fabric but so few people.

3. San Francisco is too small to support a centralized economy. The Financial District has a number of skyscrapers, and SOMA is awash in construction – the biggest changes I observed were in this district – but central San Francisco is too small to serve as a global city business center. And the city as a whole is not big enough to support that kind of a resident base. The bottom line is that San Francisco’s constrained geography renders the construction of a CBD in the style of a Chicago or New York very difficult. Also, at only around 856,000 people – an all time record high – the absorption capacity of the city is limited. Contrast with NYC at 8.5 million, LA with 4 million and Chicago with around 2.7 million in much bigger geographies. Also, the transport geography of San Francisco does not include the type of massive commuter rail system that NYC, London, Chicago, etc. have. In short, I don’t see SF having the capacity for a much greater degree of employment centralization.

4. Major construction is undesirable in San Francisco. As I’ve written before, San Francisco is one of America’s most achingly beautiful cities with a very unique building stock. It’s also, like Manhattan, mostly fully developed. So new construction in most places would involve demolition of the existing building stock. No surprise SOMA is where the construction is, because there’s room to do it and/or lower quality buildings to replace. To make a serious increase in the quantity of residential or office space would involve significant damage to the character of the city and would not in my view be desirable. Nor, given the point above about its small size, is it likely to make much of a difference anyway. It’s hard to see how the city of San Francisco itself changes its trends without an economic pullback.

5. San Francisco doesn’t feel like it has the services of a high tax city. Taxes are high in San Francisco, but it many ways it doesn’t feel like it. In New York, our taxes are high, but the level of services is highly visible, at least in Manhattan. Just as one small example, SF’s storm drains were often partially blocked with leaves, and there were pools of standing water even on Market St. In NYC, BID employees or building supers regularly clear storm drains and sweep water into sewers. Our parks are in better shape. I was surprised to see that SF still has curbs with no ADA ramps. In short, while the city is beautiful and such, it doesn’t radiate the feel of high services.

6. Barrier and POP transit system. I ran into a curious situation while riding transit. Muni, the city’s transit agency, has a light rail system called Muni Metro. It runs as a subway under Market St. Because it runs on street elsewhere, the trainsets are pretty short. I rode the subway portion, which has a barrier system. But then on the train my ticket was checked again by a conductor. Why have barriers if you are running a POP system on top of it? I’m glad I saved my ticket.

7. San Francisco Opera. I attended my first opera in San Francisco. The San Francisco Opera is a very globally respected company. The opera, Janacek’s The Makropulous Case, was very good. It was well-patronized but there were plenty of empty seats too. It has the feel of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where the majority of attendees are subscribers. The average age was very high – much higher than the Met Opera, which although suffering a serious attendance problem draws quite a few young people. The SF Opera’s patron base is getting up there. I also took a look through the program. I did not see a single tech company on their list of corporate sponsor, nor did I see any tech names I recognized on their major donor list. Opera in San Francisco appears to be an old money affair, with the emphasis on old. This doesn’t bode well for the future of this flagship cultural organization if it can’t find a way to tap into younger attendees and donors. I’d have to caveat this somewhat given that my investigation is very limited. But this is a trend affecting many similar organizations.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

November 18, 2016
Overcrowded California

In its decades of unprecedented population growth, California was a land of superlatives. Regrettably, the superlatives have changed from mostly positive to largely negative. For example, the latest Census Bureau Supplemental Poverty Estimates, indicated that California continues to have the highest poverty rate of any state, after adjustment for housing costs (Figure 1). Not even Mississippi can compete with that, sitting 3.6 percentage points lower. California metropolitan areas undoubtedly resemble this shameful performance, though the Census Bureau does not provide data below the state level.

It should not be surprising that this backdrop is accompanied by some of the highest rates of housing overcrowding in the nation, according to the latest American Community Survey data (2015). Overcrowding is estimated by the number of people living in a dwelling unit per room. That raises the critical question of what is a room? The American Community Survey gives the following instruction on how to count rooms:

"When counting the number of rooms in a home for the American Community Survey (ACS), please count rooms separated by built-in archways or walls that extend out at least 6 inches and go from floor to ceiling. Include only whole rooms used for living purposes, such as living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, finished recreation rooms, family rooms, enclosed porches suitable for year-round use, etc.

DO NOT count bathrooms, kitchenettes, strip or pullman kitchens, utility rooms, foyers, halls, open porches, balconies, unfinished attics, unfinished basements, or other unfinished space used for storage."

Overcrowding is generally defined as a household having more than one person (of any age) per room in a dwelling unit. Severe overcrowding is more than 1.5 persons per room. A household is the people living in a housing unit, whether a detached house, an apartment, a mobile home or other.

Degrees of Overcrowding

California generally leads in both overcrowding and severe overcrowding. The state’s share of overcrowded households in the nation is 27 percent, while the state has 30 percent of severely overcrowded households, almost 3 times its 11 percent share of households.

Only Hawaii has a higher severe overcrowding rate than California, at 3.8 percent of households California’s severe overcrowding rate is 2.9 percent. By contrast, average for the United States is a much lower 1.1 percent. Alaska has the third most severe overcrowding rate, at 2.3 percent, while New York has the fourth most severe overcrowding, at 2.1 percent. Arizona ranks fifth at 1.5 percent (Figure 2).

The situation is similar with respect to basic overcrowding, more than one person per room. Hawaii also leads in this category at 9.7 percent, followed by California at 8.4 percent. The national overcrowding rate is 3.4 percent. Again, Alaska ranks third at 6.1 percent, followed by New York and 5.4 percent and Texas at 4.9 percent (Figure 3).

Metropolitan Areas

California metropolitan areas dominate in terms n both of the highest severe overcrowding rates and the highest overcrowding rates, to a far greater extent than one would expect from a highly developed, still affluent state.

California is home to 12 of the 106 metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 population (as of 2015). 10 of the 15 most severely overcrowded metropolitan areas are in California. My birthplace of Los Angeles has the worst rate in the United States, with 4.5 percent of its households in living in severely overcrowded conditions. This is more than four times the national rate of 1.1 percent. McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, is the second most severely overcrowded (4.2 percent), leading the third ranked Honolulu (4.2 percent) in the second digit.

Two of California’s and the nation’s most wealthy metropolitan areas are among the most severely overcrowded (more than 1.5 persons per room), both in the San Francisco Bay Area. These include San Francisco itself (#4) and San Jose (#5). New York is the sixth most severely overcrowded.

Other California metropolitan areas among the most severely overcrowded are Oxnard (#7), in the Los Angeles area, Bakersfield (#8) and Fresno (#11) in the San Joaquin Valley, San Diego (#9), Riverside San Bernardino (#10) in the Los Angeles area as well as Santa Rosa (#12) and Stockton (#14) in the San Francisco Bay Area (Figure 4).

Only two of California’s metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents do not rank in the most severely overcrowded metropolitan areas, Sacramento and Modesto.

California’s dominance in basic overcrowding (over one person per room) is more complete, with 11 of its 12 largest metropolitan areas represented in the most overcrowded 15. Only Sacramento was exempted.

The same three metropolitan areas lead the pack, though in a somewhat different order. McAllen has an overcrowding rate of 13.2 percent, nearly 4 times the national rate of 3.4 percent. Los Angeles is the second most overcrowded, at 11.1 percent, while Honolulu repeats its third ranking at 10.3 percent.

The next at nine most overcrowded metropolitan areas are all in California, including Fresno (#4), Bakersfield (#5), San Jose (#6), Riverside-San Bernardino (#7), Stockton (#8), San Diego (#9),
San Francisco (#10), Modesto (#11), in the San Joaquin Valley and Oxnard (#12). Santa Rosa has the 14th largest overcrowding rate (Figure 5).

Contributing Factors

Two characteristics stand out with respect to the states and metropolitan areas most overcrowded, high international immigration rates and high housing costs. High housing costs were cited as a factor in California’s high overcrowding rates by the state Legislative Analyst. High housing costs are also a problem in Hawaii and New York, which are among the 10 most crowded states in both categories as are there largest metropolitan areas. In addition, states that are magnets for international immigration are also represented among the most overcrowded, such as California, New York, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Overcrowding has important social consequences, especially for children. For example, Claudia D. Solari at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Robert D. Mare of UCLA found in research focused on the city of Los Angeles that overcrowded housing significantly harms children, regardless of socioeconomic characteristics, negatively impacting school achievement, behavior and physical health. They conclude that these factors can persist throughout life, affecting their future socioeconomic status and adult well-being.”

California, with its progressive ideals, needs to match its performance with its rhetoric. The state’s working class is clearly being hemmed in, and face a future that is hardly that promised by its political class.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: Downtown Los Angeles toward the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley (by author)

November 17, 2016
Ivanka Trump, Chelsea Clinton, and the Emerging Female Electorate

The 2016 election is in the rear-view mirror. But the votes and views of a key demographic group—young women—will reverberate significantly in future elections. Two members of this group, Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton, were the most visible representatives of their peers during the campaign. Examining their unique demographic characteristics and attitudes provides clues about what we can expect from the emerging female electorate going forward.

Diversity
Let’s start with the basics. While very close in age, the two women fall into different generations. At 35, Ivanka Trump is at the front end of the much-discussed Millennial cohort. Millennials are now the largest generation, making up more than one quarter of the nation’s population. Chelsea, at 36, is a young Gen Xer, a group with a less distinctive profile in public opinion. Together, Millennials and Gen Xers make up the largest share of eligible (not actual) voters (56%).

The United States is experiencing what demographer Bill Frey calls a “diversity explosion,” with Millennials the most diverse generation in our history. Ivanka and Chelsea are part of the declining national white share of America’s population. Among Millennials, 56% are now white, 21% Hispanic, 14% African-American and 7% Asian.

The Millennial generation is also the most educated generation in history, especially its women. Women surpassed men in bachelor’s degrees conferred in 1982, master’s degrees in 1987, and doctoral and other professional degrees in 2006. Ivanka and Chelsea’s Ivy League educations are not the norm for most young women, but their levels of education illustrate the impressive gains their female peers are making. This election, women with a college degree were 51 percent of voters and voted for Hillary Clinton, 58%-38%.

The Future Family
Ivanka married at age 27, just days before her 28th birthday; Chelsea at age 30. Like many other women their ages and younger, they married later (and will be married longer if they stay married). In 2015, the average age of first marriage was 27 for women and 29 for men, up from 21 for women and 23 for men of the Silent generation (born 1928–45). Around 20% of Millennials are married today. A quarter are the children of divorce or parental separation, true for Ivanka but not for Chelsea.

While these two women have married, the rise of the nonmarried electorate may be more consequential politically. In the AEI/Brookings Institution/Center for American Progress report “States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974–2060,” we note that in 1974, 70% of eligible voters were married. Today, the married share of the eligible electorate is down to 52%. The nonmarried share is almost as large at 48%. Among female eligible voters, the nonmarried share has surpassed the married share. Strong majorities of nonmarried women (a group that includes single, divorced and widowed women) have voted Democratic in every presidential election since the 1980s, the first time the exit pollsters collected these data, and they have become more Democratic over time. Nonmarried women voted 62 percent for Hillary Clinton. Sixty-seven percent voted for Barack Obama in 2012.

Religious intermarriage is becoming more common, and both Ivanka and Chelsea married someone of a different faith. Pew’s 2014 religious landscape survey found that people who married after 2010 were more than twice as likely to be in religious intermarriages as those who married before 1960 (39%-19%).

Millennials are leading another significant religious change in America: the rise of the “nones.” More than a third of Millennials (35%) say they have no formal religious affiliation. Still, around 50% of Millennials say they are absolutely certain they believe in God.

Declining fertility is another big story of our time, and the current fertility rate of 1.9 births per woman now falls below the replacement rate of 2.1. Ivanka has three children at this point, and Chelsea, two. Today, according to Gallup, American women say their ideal family size is 2.6 children, down from 3.6, a figure that remained constant until the late 1950s. In the same survey, 40% of Americans 18-40 years old who do not have children said they want them someday. Young adults still want kids; they just aren’t having as many.

Women at Work—And at Home?
Ivanka and Chelsea are working mothers, as both have highlighted in recent public appearances. They are both working moms of newborns, to boot. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 68% of married mothers in 2015 were in the labor force, as were three-fourths of mothers not married or living apart from their spouse. Fifty-eight percent of mothers with infants under a year old were in the workforce either full- or part-time last year.

As more women have entered the U.S. workforce, their attitudes about working have shifted. Since 2007, around 50% of women, up from 36% when Gallup first asked the question in 1974, have consistently told the pollsters that if they were free to do either—a big “if” for most women—they would prefer to have a job outside the home than to stay home and take care of their house and family. While a majority of younger women and women with a college degree said they would prefer to work, a majority of women with children said they would not. In Gallup’s 2014-15 data, 54% of employed women with children under 18 preferred to stay home, as did 57% of women not currently employed with children.

In 2015, both parents worked in 61% of married-couple families with children under 18, according to the BLS. Ivanka and Chelsea have more resources than most working mothers to help them navigate the work-family balance. More millennial husbands than husbands in earlier generations say they help at home. Fifty-nine percent of parents employed full-time say they share household chores equally, but women still handle most child-rearing responsibilities.
Ivanka is not alone in professing the joys of parenthood, as she did in her September Wall Street Journal article. In a 2015 Pew study, more than three in four parents with children under 18 described being a parent as enjoyable and, separately, rewarding. Mothers and fathers both gave equally as high responses.

Political Laggards, Social Leaders?
In terms of partisan identification, Ivanka spoke for many in her generation when she said at the GOP convention: “I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat.” More young people describe themselves as independents than as Republicans or Democrats. This election, more young voters cast ballots for third-party candidates than older voters did. But in recent elections, young voters have voted heavily Democratic. They voted solidly for President Obama in 2008 (66%) and 2012 (60%), fueled largely by the preferences of minority youth. In 2016, they voted 55% for Clinton to 37% for Trump. White young people voted narrowly for Trump, 48%- 43%. Minority millennials voted heavily for Clinton. Young white women voted for Clinton, 51%- 42%. Their older sisters, white women ages 30–44, voted more closely for Trump, 49%- 45%.

Younger voters pay some attention to politics. In the Spring 2016 Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) poll, over half of 18- to 29-year-olds said they are following closely this year’s presidential election (60%) and, separately, news about national politics (52%). But unlike Ivanka and Chelsea, most do not actively participate. Although 37% have liked a political issue on Facebook and 29% a political candidate, most are passive and don’t engage in traditional political activities such as volunteering.

Even though Ivanka and Chelsea haven’t made explicit their opinions on many mainstream issues, polling data show clear patterns in young people’s attitudes. Both Gen Xers and Millennials strongly support gay marriage, but until recently, young women were much more supportive than young men. Today their views are similar. Young men and women support marijuana legalization, but young women are more dubious about it than men. On abortion, the young, like other generations, want to keep abortion legal but are willing to put restrictions on its use. Young women are less supportive about women being drafted than are young men. Although these issues get substantial media attention, the top issues for most young people—as for their parents—are the economy, terrorism and health care.

The granddaughters of feminism are charting their own course. In the Harvard IOP poll, 37% of women 18-29 years old identified themselves as feminists, while 58% did not. That’s not to say young women don’t think there’s progress to be made. In another poll from Pew earlier this fall, 63% of women 18-34 said there are still significant obstacles that make it harder for women to get ahead than men, compared with 38% of men this age who gave this response. When asked if they’ve ever personally experienced discrimination because of their sex, more women say they haven’t than say they have (53%-46%).

Life at the Local Level
Ivanka and Chelsea campaigned on behalf of a parent for the country’s highest elected office, but young people aren’t very confident in government. They want the federal government to do many things and at the same time have little trust in it. Nearly two-thirds don’t think Social Security will be available when they retire. Similarly, young people are neither cheerleaders for nor hostile to big business. Many observers have commented on their distrust in central institutions, but this could have a silver lining. As they grow up, they are likely to be more self-reliant and perhaps more active in their local communities, where they have higher confidence that problems can be solved.

Both Ivanka and Chelsea appear to have close relationships with their parents, another factor that defines the younger generations. Young people often talk to or text with their parents, and 32% of 18- to 34-year-olds live with a parent, surpassing for the first time the number of those living with a spouse or partner in their own household. Many also live near their parents. In the 2014 General Social Survey, over half (53%) of young adults said they lived in the same city as when they were 16 years old. Of those who moved away, one in five lived in the same state, while slightly more (one in four) moved to a different state.

A Younger Direction
Ivanka and Chelsea didn’t sign up to be presidential surrogates, but both were a credit to their families on the campaign trail. Both have said their friendship will continue after the dispiriting political brawl that was this year’s campaign, something that could serve as good advice for the rest of us. And in an interview with 60 Minutes this week, Ivanka said she is “going to be a daughter” in her father’s presidential administration, rather than having a more formal role. As she and Chelsea return to their lives off the campaign trail, the demographic and attitudinal footprint of young women gives us a sense of how this emerging electorate will reshape the country’s political and cultural landscape for generations to come.

This piece is adapted from an article that first appeared on WSJ.com.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and Heather Sims a program manager at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo by Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 16, 2016
Memo to the Next President: Don’t Forget the Working Class

At the end of most US presidential elections, most Americans are ready to see the last of campaign ads, social media commentaries and tension-fraught news coverage. That’s even more true this year. But more than in most recent elections, we shouldn’t expect the frustrations and divisions that have surfaced over the past 18 months to disappear after the ballots have been counted. Tensions over class and race, especially, may die down, but they aren’t going away. If a new president will take them on, something good might yet emerge from this ugly election.

Although it’s true that working-class voters are declining in number, they have drawn increasing attention over the past several elections, in part because, as Ruy Teixeira and his colleagues at The Democratic Strategist have been arguing for a while, they remain a crucial demographic. And this year, the white working class has not only been recognized as a key voting bloc, it has been an active player, demanding that the country and its leaders recognize the economy does not work for many Americans.

Amid far too many reports that have pinned Donald Trump’s success on the white working class, this year’s election coverage also has drawn attention to real problems, many of them rooted in class and racial inequalities. If the next president wants to succeed she (or he) must address what design experts call “wicked problems” — big, complex issues that resist simple explanations or one-dimensional solutions. It won’t be easy.

The election has created the conditions for addressing the first of those: class resentment. I don’t mean the resentment poor and working-class people feel toward the wealthy. I mean the resentment they feel toward a government that doesn’t seem to care about them or have the will to address economic inequality. I’m also talking about resentment toward a public discourse that denigrates and blames working-class people for not being more like the middle class. WNYC’s On the Media provided a terrific overview of that discourse in a series of reports about common and problematic assumptions that shape reporting on poverty. As host Brooke Gladstone explained, reliance on these assumptions generates media that reinforces the idea that people are poor because they don’t work hard or because they make bad choices. No matter how much we might deplore some of the behavior and attitudes that have surfaced in the election, we can’t address the class-based cultural divide by dismissing poor and working-class people as “deplorables” who lack the critical thinking skills that college education provides.

Good leadership could address class resentment not only with better policies — more on that below — but also by taking it seriously. While claims that Trump’s support comes primarily from the white working class are problematic, both he and Bernie Sanders won votes this year because they addressed working-class people’s sense of being left behind by the economy and put down by the media. Both also recognized a simple truth about American culture: Class is a central and increasingly important divide. A good president will acknowledge that, but also will lead the way in fostering deeper and more critical conversations about the economic, social and cultural roots of those divisions.

Of course, the cultural divide reflects a very real and serious economic gap, and a good leader must be willing to talk about its sources and consequences — including the way contemporary global capitalism, neoliberal ideology and technology drive economic changes that deepen inequality. We need to create more jobs through infrastructure projects among other strategies. But we also need policies that address not only the quantity of jobs but also their quality — what they pay, how they are structured and how workers are protected from exploitation as well as physical and psychological injuries. Raising the minimum wage is just a start. American economic leaders need to look critically at the effects of the “gig economy” and rising precarity, a term some scholars have coined to describe the uncertainty facing many workers who can’t count on a regular paycheck. Instead of pushing for everyone to go to college, we need to focus on ensuring that the thousands of working-class jobs that our economy will continue to produce are good jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing back manufacturing. It probably does mean bringing back the labor movement, with a broader and more inclusive social unionism.

Inequality doesn’t stem only from employment, however. As Jack Metzgar has argued, we need tax policies that focus less on the persistent fantasy of trickle-down economics and instead put cash into the pockets of the working class, who will spend it. We could expand the earned income tax credit and increase credits to help families pay for child care, housing or college. We also need to take another look at health care. The Affordable Care Act was a step in the right direction, with in its emphasis on providing insurance to those who hadn’t had it previously, but it still relies on the private insurance industry. It’s time to develop a single-payer system that puts first the needs of ordinary people, not those of a profit-based industry.

Perhaps the most troubling problem that has surfaced in this year’s election is racism. While some have challenged stories that present racism as a white working-class problem, we also know that racism and racial divisions are real problems for working-class people. Racism is a class issue, in multiple ways. First, racial division undermines the class solidarity that could generate social change movements. It also distracts people from the real source of their problems — not other poor and working-class people, but the economic and political system that, as Guy Standing has suggested, is rigged against workers and what, in today’s economy, he has named the “precariat.”

At the same time, racism presents a threat to working-class people. While the profiling and anxieties that underlie police violence toward black people sometimes target middle-class (and upper-middle-class) African-Americans, working-class black men are probably at greater risk. Here, too, we need policies that more forcefully address racial injustice and divisions, to ensure that citizens are protected by the police rather than needing protection from them. But we also need policies that facilitate more racial interaction. Among the most interesting insights on this year’s election was Jonathan Rothwell’s analysis of Gallup poll data, which revealed that Trump’s strongest support came from white people living in highly segregated areas. Racism is a structural issue, not just a matter of morality or attitudes, and we need to address it with policies that challenge housing and education segregation and inequities.

None of this is easy, and these “solutions” are as limited as they are idealistic. I’m sure there are better ideas out there. Our next president needs to find them. She (or he) must pay attention — not only to the anger and frustration of working-class people but also to the complex nature of the problems that generate those feelings.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign tried to keep his supporters’ momentum going by creating Organizing for America, which became Organizing for Action, a network of community organizing groups that largely faded from the national picture. This year, we need more.

Whatever the result of Tuesday’s election, neither the media nor the new president should stop talking about and listening to the working class. It’s time to move from campaign mode to action, from courting working-class voters to addressing the conditions of their lives.

Note: This essay was first published by Moyers & Company.

Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University. She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.

Photo by: By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 15, 2016
There are “Left-behind” in the Blue States Too

The 2016 presidential election revealed a strongly divided nation. Donald Trump’s victory has been characterized as a “landslide” by some, noting the surprisingly high electoral vote tally. Others note the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote. In any event, the result is far different than many expected. In its last pre—election prediction of the electoral vote, the Los Angeles Times gave Hillary Clinton one-half more electoral votes (352) than she will apparently receive (232). Her apparent popular vote victory (approximately 300,000 at this point) is so concentrated that without California she would have lost the popular vote by more than 3,000,000 (based on trends at this writing).

Just about everyone agrees that the pollsters got this election very wrong. It appears that Trump voters, especially rural voters were significantly under sampled in polling. Generally, it is agreed, that the secret to the success of the Trump campaign was the mobilization of voters who believed that they had been “left-behind” by the “system.” This was the key to the strong Republican performance in the Rust Belt and especially in “coal country.”

In these areas, working households who had depended on manufacturing or mining employment have seen jobs disappear and incomes drop in the last two decades. It was, overall, an election pitting the more fortunate “elite,” especially the West Coast and in Northeastern metropolitan areas against middle and lower middle income households that have not done well. These are households that feel they have been “left-behind” in a national economy that has yet to restore inflation-adjusted 1999 median incomes.

Yet the “left-behind” were evident in voting patterns even in the more prosperous Blue State metropolitan regions (combined statistical areas), especially in outer suburban counties, which often have smaller populations.

New York

The New York metropolitan region, with its high nominal household income, has a number of counties in which Donald Trump polled well.

The four most highly urban boroughs of the city delivered overwhelming mandates to Clinton, with as much as 89 percent of the vote in Manhattan and the Bronx, 80 percent in Brooklyn and 75 percent in Queens. She also received strong support from inner suburban counties, 65 percent in Westchester, 74 percent in Hudson (Jersey City), 77 percent and Essex (Newark) and 66 percent in Mercer (Trenton) and Union (Elizabeth).

However, some of the outer counties showed strong support for Donald Trump. For example, he received 66 percent of the vote in New Jersey’s Ocean County, and more than 60 percent of the vote in Sussex County, New Jersey and won other suburban New Jersey counties such as Monmouth, Hunterdon, Morris. Trump also took Suffolk County in eastern Long Island, and the Hudson Valley counties of Putnam, Orange and Dutchess, where the FDR Library is located.

Even farther out, Trump managed above 60 percent majorities in Pennsylvania’s Pike and Carbon counties and also won Northampton County (Bethlehem).

Washington-Baltimore

There was strong support for Trump in Washington – Baltimore metropolitan region, with its lucrative government jobs machine. Northernmost Franklin County, Pennsylvania provided a 71 percent majority to Trump, while Maryland’s Washington County, just across the border, provided 64 percent. Closer to Baltimore, Carroll and Harford provided Trump 65 percent and 60 percent majorities. Across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from an Annapolis, Queen Anne’s County voted 66 percent for Trump. Southeast of Washington, St. Mary’s County voted 60 percent for Trump.

West Virginia’s Hampshire County provided the largest majority in the metropolitan region to Trump at 78 percent, while Berkeley County provided a 60 percent vote. Amazingly, every county in the state of West Virginia voted for Trump, despite its decades of Democratic Party domination, providing Trump a 62 to 27 percent landslide.

The situation was similar in outer counties across the Potomac River in Virginia. Warren County voted 66 percent and Frederick County 65 percent for Trump. Facquier and Culpepper counties supported Trump at 60 percent.

The “Left” Coast

There were even pockets of strong Trump support in some metropolitan regions of the so-called “Left Coast.”

For example, in the Portland metropolitan region, Linn County voted 60 percent for Trump. Among the 11 suburban Portland counties, six supported Trump. Perhaps most surprisingly, Marion County, home of Oregon’s capital (Salem) supported Trump. Marion County was one of only two Clinton supporting states in which the capital county supported Trump (the other being Storey County in Nevada).

California was not to be left out. In the Sacramento metropolitan region, five of the seven suburban counties supported Donald Trump.

Minneapolis-St. Paul

Trump managed to command surprisingly strong support in the suburbs of high-income Minneapolis-St. Paul. Beyond Clinton’s predictably strong support in core Ramsey (St. Paul) and Hennepin counties (Minneapolis), all but two of the 19 suburban counties supported Trump. Support was strongest in the outer suburban counties. The entire northeastern corner of the metropolitan region provided strong support to Donald Trump. In Stearns County (St. Cloud), Trump received 60 percent of the vote and an even higher 65 percent in adjacent Benton and Shelburne counties.

Wright County, which is adjacent to central Hennepin County, voted 63 percent for Trump. There was a wall of strong support across the remainder of the metropolitan region’s northern tier, with a 65 percent majority in Isanti County, 64 percent in Mille Lacs County and 61 percent in Chisago County. The southeastern corner of the metropolitan region also supported Trump strongly, with Le Sueur County providing 62 percent and Sibley County providing the largest Minneapolis – St. Paul area majority for Trump at 67 percent.

Denver

Denver, with its information technology industry and its high nominal household income supported Hillary Clinton strongly. Yet, four suburban counties supported Trump, Douglas, Weld, Park and Elbert.

What is Behind the Trump Support in Blue States?

While the metropolitan regions discussed above have not endured the huge manufacturing and resource industry losses of the Rust Belt metropolitan regions, some households have faced serious economic challenges. Here the culprit is a high cost of living, most evident in especially high house prices. Many middle income residents are “driving until qualified” to find the housing they desire at a price they can afford.

Like those in the less economically favored parts of the nation, they are having difficulty sustaining their standard of living. With the prospect of mortgage interest increases and price increases from strengthening regulation, the ranks of the “left-behind” could grow, and with it the Trump coalition. Or, a Democratic Party returning to its roots could seize the opportunity, though that seems less likely.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Electoral map by Ali Zifan (This file was derived from: USA Counties.svg) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 11, 2016
The Improbable Demographics Behind Donald Trump’s Shocking Presidential Victory

n an election so ugly and so close, one is reluctant to proclaim winners. But it’s clear that there’s a loser — the very notion of the United States of America.

Instead we have populations and geographies that barely seem to belong in the same country, if not on the same planet. The electorate is so divided that many states went for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by lopsided margins. The Northeast was solidly Democratic, with Clinton winning New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with three-fifths of the vote or more. Washington, D.C., heavily black and the seat of the bureaucracy and pundit class, delivered an almost Soviet-style 93% to 4% margin.

On the other side were a series of states where Trump won just as easily, including Tennessee and Kentucky, with three-fifths of the vote, and West Virginia, by a margin of two-to-one – higher than those attained by 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Much of the rest of the map has followed the usual patterns: Democratic domination of Illinois and the West Coast, while Republicans held the South. Where the election was decided was in previous battleground states: Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.

The Revolt of Middle America

America is a nation of many economies, but those that produce real, tangible things — food, fiber, energy and manufactured goods — went overwhelmingly for Trump. He won virtually every state from Appalachia to the Rockies, with the exceptions of heavily Hispanic Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and President Obama’s home base of Illinois.

Some of his biggest margins were in energy states — Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota — where the fracking revolution created a burst of prosperity. Generally speaking, the more carbon-intensive the economy, the better the Republicans did. Many of his biggest wins took place across the energy-producing regions of the country, including Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, Idaho, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable margin of 68% to 27%. The energy industry could well be the biggest financial winner in the election.

The Green Trap

Clinton’s support for climate change legislation, a lower priority among the electorate than other concerns, was seen as necessary to shore up support from greens threatening to attack her from the left. Yet the issue never caught on the heartland, which tends to see climate change mitigation as injurious to them.

This may have proven a major miscalculation, as the energy economy is also tied closely to manufacturing. Besides climate change, the heartland had many reasons to fear a continuation of Obama policies, particularly related to regulation and global trade, which seems to have been a big factor in Trump’s upset win in normally moderate to liberal Wisconsin.

Trump either won, or closely contested all the traditional manufacturing states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa and even Michigan, where union voters did not support Clinton as they had Obama and where trade was also a big issue. Trump did consistently better than Romney in all these states, even though Romney was a native of Michigan. Perhaps the most significant turnaround was in Ohio, which Obama won with barely 51% of the vote in 2012. This year Trump reversed this loss and won by over seven points.

Agricultural states, reeling from the decline of commodity prices, not surprisingly, also went for the New Yorker.

Premature Epitaphs For The White Voter

Race, as is often the case, played a major role in the election. For much of the election, commentators, particularly in the dominant Eastern media, seemed to be openly celebrating what CNN heralded as “the decline of the white voter.” The “new America,” they suggested, would be a coalition of minorities, educated workers and millennials.

To be sure, the minority share of the electorate is only going to grow — from less than 30% today to over 40% in 2032 — as more white Americans continue to die than be born. Just between 2012 and 2016, the Latino and Asian electorate grew 17% and 16%, respectively; the white electorate expanded barely 2%.

In Colorado the new minority math was seen, with a strong showing among Latinos, the educated suburbs around Denver and millennials.

That may be the future, but now is now. Exit polling nationwide showed Trump won two-to-one among people without a college degree, matched Clinton among college graduates, losing only those with graduate degrees, a group that has voted for the Democrats since 1988.

But there’s simply more high school graduates then those with graduate degrees. And for now there are a lot more whites than minorities. As we look into the future, these groups will fade somewhat but right now they can still determine elections. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s decisive win in Florida, a state that is home to many white retirees, including from the old industrial states.

Latinos may be the one group in the “new America” that made a difference for Clinton, not only in Colorado, but also in Nevada. Republicans paid a price for Trump’s intemperate comments on immigration and about Mexico.

They also made states like Texas and North Carolina closer, and may have helped secure Clinton’s win in Virginia. In contrast, neither African-Americans or millennials seem to have turned out as heavily, both in numbers and percentage terms, as they did for President Obama. Trump appears to have made some modest gains with both groups, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Class Warrior

Class has been a bigger factor in this election than in any election since the New Deal era. Trump’s insurgency rode largely on middle- and working-class fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the “progressive” cultural elite. This is something Bill Clinton understandsbetter than his wife.

Trump owes his election to what one writer has called “the leftover people.” These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing. They have noticed, as Thomas Frank has written, that the Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.”

Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed. And they include a large swath of the middle class, whose fury explains much of what happened tonight. Trump has connected better with these voters than Romney, who won those making between $50,000 and $90,000 by a narrow 52 percent margin. Early analysis of this year’s election shows Trump doing better among these kind of voters.

At the same time, however, affluent voters — those making $100,000 and above — seem to have tilted over to the Democrats this year. This is the first time the “rich” have gone against the GOP since the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Obama did better among the wealthy, winning eight of the 10 richest counties in 2012. In virtually all these counties, Clinton did even better.

What does this mean for America’s traditional middle class, whose numbers have been fading for a generation? Long the majority, notes Pew, they are no longer, outnumbered by the lower and upper classes combined. Yet like the Anglo population, in this election what’s left of America’s middle class has shown itself not ready to face the sunset.

Now What?

Given the unpredictable nature of Trump, it’s hard to see what he will do. Although himself a businessman, he was opposed overwhelmingly by his own class. Clinton won more support from big business and the business elite. If you had a billionaire primary, Clinton would have won by as much as 20 to 1.

Initially many of those business interests closest to both Obama and Clinton — Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood — will be on the outside looking in. Their advantages from tax avoidance could be lessened. Merger-mania, yet another form of asset inflation, will continue unabated, particularly in the tech and media space.

The clear challenge for (I can’t believe I am writing these words) President Trump will not be so much to punish these enemies, but to embrace those people — largely middle class, suburban, small town and white — who are not part of his world, but made him President. If he embraces his role as a radical reformer, he could do much good, for example with a flatter tax system, restoring federalism, seizing the advantage of the energy revolution and reviving military preparedness.

The question is whether he will, or is capable, of doing these things. A Hillary Clinton administration would have been safer, and predictable, but it would not have addressed the very things that made Americans turn to this bizarre political poseur. Now it’s up to Trump to live up to his promise to restore the country’s self-confidence, and, for the rest of us, to make sure he does it in accordance with the Constitution and basic decency.

This piece first appeared at Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 9, 2016
Cat and Mouse in Frogtown

A friend recently expressed an interest in how some cities are reforming their land use regulations. “I mean, there are places like LA that say they’ve thrown out the code books and are rewriting their zoning.” My short response was… No. The reality is that the city plays an expensive and byzantine game of cat and mouse with each individual neighborhood.

There’s a little sliver of brassiere shaped land wedged between the Los Angeles River and the Golden State Freeway that sums up a lot of what constitutes the land use regulation process in LA. When poor Mexicans were forcibly removed in order to build Dodger Stadium in the late 1950’s they resettled in this inexpensive semi-industrial zone called the Elysian Valley, which is also commonly known as Frogtown.

It’s been a solid working class neighborhood for decades. Families have long managed to own modest homes and live in respectable obscurity among the auto body shops, plumbing supply warehouses, and municipal maintenance facilities.

In recent years the adjacent neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles, Echo Park, Silver Lake, Atwater Village, and Glassell Park (all previously ignored and undervalued) have become newly fashionable and prohibitively expensive. Pent up market demand acts like a balloon – if you squeeze the middle the ends bulge. In this case home buyers, renters, and businesses have scoured the area looking for alternatives. Frogtown is a centrally located and relatively affordable compromise.

Design firms, architects, photographers, tech incubators, high end specialty fabricators, and other such enterprises have moved in to the nondescript buildings of Frogtown. If you’re willing to celebrate concrete block walls and corrugated steel as honest industrial materials you can create the trendy Dwell look with paint and landscaping on the cheap. Compare this process with the expense of restoring a more exotic historic property in a tony neighborhood.

Art Yanez is a Los Angeles native and the son of immigrants. He’s also the principal of FSY Architects. He purchased three contiguous parcels in Frogtown and created a campus for his firm.

The space incorporates pre-existing industrial warehouses as well as new construction with shops and offices that are now rented for supplemental income. The architecture firm’s own offices are currently oversized to accommodate anticipated expansion as business continues to ramp up. But construction is a cyclical industry, so the space can be subdivided and rented during future downturns.

The new building achieves the legally required off street parking standard as well as the fire marshal’s demand that a full size fire engine be able to drive around the entire structure in an emergency. The parking is convenient (this is Los Angeles after all), but the outdoor space does double duty as a plaza for human activities on occasion. Strings of cafe lights, movable furniture, potted plants, and people transform the place quickly and easily.

Part of FSY’s strategy was to create a place that would activate the entire community, not just a building containing offices. The initial concept involved repurposing shipping containers and pressing them into service as small shops. The building code wouldn’t permit that so a stick built version mimics the container look and scale. Actual containers are parked in back and are used for low cost storage. Local artists were invited to install distinctive motifs for the exterior of the corner cafe. All of this was as-of-right construction within the established city code.

For the last century the Los Angeles River has been a concrete industrial drainage canal sealed off by barbed wire fences and cinder block walls. Most people in LA have no particular relationship to the “riverfront.” But that’s changing as city officials have announced a billion dollar program to transform the river into a ribbon of green and blue public amenities lead by none other than starchitect Frank Gehry.

The success of small infill developments in Frogtown along with the city’s plans to transform the river have attracted large scale production developers. Previously ignored sites began to sprout upscale apartment buildings and condo complexes on dead end streets at the river’s edge.

This process was viewed with scorn by existing property owners and community organizers who haven’t forgotten how their families were bulldozed to make way for Dodgers Stadium. So they lobbied for new regulations to make it harder to build anything new and to work around the perception that political figures are corrupt and on the take for developer’s money. The new regulations now make projects like Art Yanez’s building non-conforming and subject to special review processes for height, bulk, and so on.

The result is that now only very small projects can be built as-of-right, and only very large and expensive projects can overcome the newly implemented regulatory hurdles. All the incremental in-between projects that might have been built are now much less viable and far more expensive to push through. This is what land use policy actually looks like on the ground.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Top photo: John Sanphillippo

November 5, 2016
Were Urban Freeways a Good Idea?

It’s almost a truism in urbanist circles that construction of urban freeways was a bad idea.

Indianapolis Monthly magazine takes a somewhat more charitable view in its retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the completion of the downtown “inner loop” freeway.

“But even before its grand opening, the inner loop—31 miles of interstate within I-465, built at a cost of nearly $300 million—had begun paying downtown dividends. Real estate values around the superhighway increased in the early 1970s, reversing a 35-year decline, and Mayor Hudnut also credited the road with stimulating such projects as the Hilton Hotel, the Indiana National Bank building, and the $150 million expansion of Eli Lilly & Co.

Hudnut predicted the new freeway would spur 20,000 new jobs, and state legislators embraced the spirit: In 1973, when a federal reimbursement slowdown threatened to add 10 years to its completion date, they fronted the money for the last leg of I-65/I-70.”

The conventional wisdom is that downtown freeways were unmitigated disasters. It says they destroyed vast tracts of urban neighborhoods, with a racist targeting of black ones, then remained as huge barriers to redevelopment.

The Indy Monthly article acknowledges the downsides of the construction:

“But little relief awaited the neighborhoods that were carved up for the inner loop. The project displaced a total of 17,000 residents, including 6,000 from Fountain Square (one-fourth of the population).

Linda Osborne, owner of Arthur’s Music Store, remembers Fountain Square as a vibrant full-service community during the 1950s and early ’60s. “There were theaters, grocery stores, shoe stores—all the things you have in a small town,” says Osborne, whose family business opened in 1952. Interstate construction, however, dug a wide channel that isolated Fountain Square from downtown. Then as now, a Virginia Avenue bridge carried traffic over the chasm, but the commercial district soon tanked, Osborne says.”

I previously posted an article documenting the destruction in Fountain Square. It features pictures from Historic Indianapolis, including this one showing the scale of the destruction.

I don’t have Fountain Square’s demographics at the time, but what evidence I do have suggests it was a largely white community, which it remains to this day. So in this case the place with the most destruction wasn’t a minority area.

Indy Monthly also points out the example of downtown Ft. Wayne. That city decided to go with a bypass option rather than a downtown alignment. The result was that they did indeed prevent neighborhoods from being destroyed, but those neighborhoods and the city’s downtown severely declined anyway. While there are some interesting things going on downtown Ft. Wayne to be sure, it’s unarguable that Indy’s downtown is on a completely different plane of development, though to be sure Indy is a much larger city.

In fact, this is the pattern we see. Urban decline happened pretty much everywhere, urban freeway or no. When there’s a downtown freeway to blame, people do that. Where there’s not, people blame the bypass. Hence most attributing of blame for decline to urban freeways is simply incorrect.

Indy Monthly argues that the freeway system provided for convenient access to downtown. Without that access. businesses would have fled, it would be impossible to host large events, etc.

There is something to this, I think. If there were no freeway access to downtown Indianapolis, it seems likely it would be a much diminished urban center. Keep in mind, there was limited transit access and no real prospect of creating it.

But we should separate two things, the freeways that provide access to downtown and the ones that run through it. It’s certainly possible that freeway spurs could have been built into the center of the city without building them as through-routes. This is the idea behind much of the boulevarding advocacy movement.

Twice within the last decade, the state implemented multi-month closures of the Indianapolis inner loop to through traffic. This was a good real world test of whether it was needed at all.

I wasn’t living there at the time but did do some driving around rush hour during one of the closures. The best alternate route for through traffic is to use I-465 to the south. This did get heavily congested, suggesting that this road would need to be widened prior to removing the inner loop. Some folks did say some surface routes near downtown were more congested during rush hour. But there didn’t seem to be any show-stoppers to permanent closure.

In my view, removal of the inner loop is feasible, though highly unlikely to ever occur. But it goes to show that the benefits of freeway access to downtown could have been implemented in ways that were less invasive, using freeway spurs and boulevard distributors. In this scenario, the inner loop itself would no longer be a barrier, and the demolition associated with its construction could have been largely avoided. The freeway spurs could have been build with lower capacity, since no through traffic need be designed for. Some interchange complexes would have been eliminated.

Removing or never building the inner loop would indeed likely add to peak of the peak congestion. The extent to which this dominates local thinking is hard to overstate. It’s revealing that the biggest source Indy Monthly used for quotes was Bill Benner, a sports columnist, and sports and events loom large.

“To fully appreciate Indy’s middle-aged expressway, imagine 65,000-plus NFL fans spilling out of Lucas Oil Stadium and heading home on the stoplight-laden likes of Meridian Street, Washington Street, Kentucky Avenue, and other prime thoroughfares of yesteryear. Or don’t imagine it—because without this key piece of infrastructure, there might never have been a Lucas Oil Stadium.

“It was a series of dominoes,” Benner recalls. “Without the interstate, it would have really held back downtown development. So maybe you don’t have the Hoosier Dome, or the Indianapolis Colts, or the Super Bowl. And maybe you don’t have Circle Centre or Victory Field.”

Designing a transport system around sports event peaks, particularly low-frequency ones like NFL home games, illustrates the Faustian bargain Indianapolis made to revive its downtown.

Indianapolis made its downtown America’s most friendly to major events. So you can get people to and from the Super Bowl the one time the city hosts it. (I would suspect getting people to and from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for so many decades powerfully shaped this mode of thinking).

But the design of the transport system is very hostile to almost everything else, whether that be residential uses or pedestrian access. This has changed somewhat with the Cultural Trail, Georgia St. and others. But to truly change the game would require a major change in psychological orientation to be able to care less about peak of the peak congestion after Colts games and more about the average ordinary experience of the city. I suspect a similar dynamic is at play in many other places.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: By reddit user MikeSanborn. Cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/indianapolis/comments/3jx7n5/my_favorite_view_of_indianapolis/cut6n4k?context=3 (https://imgur.com/oJLlvTS) [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 4, 2016