New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Forget What the Pundits Tell You, Coastal Cities are Old News – it’s the Sunbelt that’s Booming

    Ever since the Great Recession ripped through the economies of the Sunbelt, America’s coastal pundit class has been giddily predicting its demise. Strangled by high-energy prices, cooked by global warming, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, this vast southern region was doomed to become, in the words of the Atlantic, where the “American dream” has gone to die. If the doomsayers are right, Americans must be the ultimate masochists. After a brief hiatus, people seem to, once again, be streaming towards the expanse of warm-weather states extending from the southeastern seaboard to Phoenix.

    Since 2010, according to an American Community Survey by demographer Wendell Cox, over one million people have moved to the Sunbelt, mostly from the Northeast and Midwest.

    Any guesses for the states that have gained the most domestic migrants since 2010? The Sunbelt dominates the top three: Texas, Florida and Arizona. And who’s losing the most people? Generally the states dearest to the current ruling class: New York, Illinois, California and New Jersey.  Some assert this reflects the loss of poorer, working class folks to these areas while the “smart” types continue to move to the big cities of Northeast and California. Yet, according to American Community Survey Data for 2007 to 2011, the biggest gainers of college graduates, according to Cox, have been Texas, Arizona and Floria; the biggest losers are in the Northeast  (New York), the Midwest (Illinois and Michigan).

    For the most part, notes demographer Cox, this is not a movement to Tombstone or Mayberry, although many small towns in the south are doing well, this is a movement to Sunbelt cities. Indeed, of the ten fastest growing big metros areas in America in 2012, nine were in the Sunbelt. These included not only the big four Texas cities—Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio—but also Orlando, Raleigh, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

    Perhaps the biggest sign of a Sunbelt turnaround is the resurgence of Phoenix, a region devastated by the housing bust and widely regarded by contemporary urbanists as the “least sustainable” of American cities. The recovery of Phoenix, appropriately named the Valley of the Sun, is strong evidence that even the most impacted Sunbelt regions are on the way back. 

    A look at the numbers on domestic migration undermines the claim that most Americans prefer, like the pundit class, to live in and near the dense Northeastern urban cores. People simply continue to vote with their feet. Since 2000, more than 300,000 people have moved to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte; in contrast a net over two million left New York and 1.4 million have deserted the LA area while over 600,000 net departed Chicago and almost as many left the San Francisco Bay region. These trends were slowed, but not reversed, by the Great Recession.

    The Sunbelt’s recovery seems likely to continue in the future. Immigrants, who account for a rising proportion of our population growth, are increasingly heading there. New York remains the immigrant leader, with the foreign-born population increasing by 600,000 since 2000 but second place Houston, a relative newcomer for immigrants, gained 400,000, more than Chicago and the Bay Area combined. The regions experiencing the highest rate of newcomers were largely in the south; Charlotte and Nashville saw their foreign-born populations double as immigrants increasingly beat a path to the Sunbelt cities.

    The final demographic coup for the Sunbelt lies in its attraction for families. Eight of the eleven top fastest growing populations under 14, notes Cox, are found in the Sunbelt with New Orleans leading the pack. Generally speaking, roughly twenty percent or more of the population of Sunbelt metros are under 14, far above the levels seen in the rustbelt, the Left Coast, or in the Northeast.

    This all suggests that the Sunbelt is cementing, not losing, its grip on America’s demographic future. By 2012 and 2017, according to a survey by the manufacturing company Pitney Bowes nine of the ten leading regions in terms of household growth will be in the Sunbelt.

    If the population growth rates predicted by the US Conference of Mayors continue, Dallas-Ft. Worth will push Chicago out of third place among American metropolitan areas in 2043, with Houston passing the Windy City eight years later. Now seventh place Atlanta would move up to sixth place and Phoenix to 8th. Of America’s largest cities then, five would be located in the Sunbelt, and all are expected to grow much faster than New York, Los Angeles or the San Francisco area. Overall, the South would account for over half the growth in our major metropolitan areas in 2042, compared to barely 3.6 percent for the Northeast and 8.7 percent in the Midwest.

    What drives the change? Not just the sun, but the economy, stupidos!

    From the beginning of the Sunbelt ascendency, sunshine and warm weather have been important lures and this may even be more true in the near future. But the key forces driving people to the Sunbelt are largely economic—notably job creation, lower housing prices and lower costs relative to incomes.

    Until the housing bust, states like Arizona, Nevada and Florida were typically among the leaders in creating new jobs but their performance fell off with the decline of construction. But other Sunbelt locales, notably Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma have picked up much of the slack. This resurgence has been centered in Texas, which created nearly a million new jobs between 2007 and 2013. In contrast, arch-rival California has lost a half a million.

    Many other Sunbelt states have yet to recover jobs lost from the recession, but most of their big metros have shown strong signs of recovery. Since 2007 five of the seven fastest growing jobs markets among the twenty largest cities were in Sunbelt states. Looking forward, recent estimates of job growth between 2013 and 2017, according to Forbes and Moody’s project employment to grow fastest in Arizona, followed by Texas. Also among the top ten are several states hit hard by the Recession, notably Florida, Georgia and Nevada. No Northeastern state appeared anywhere on the list; nor did California.

    For all its shortcomings, including what some may consider the overuse of tax breaks and incentives, the much-dissed Sunbelt development model continues to reap some significant gains. The area’s history of lagging economically has long spurred Sunbelt economic developers to utilize a policy of light regulation, low taxes and lack of unions to lure businesses to their area. Sunbelt states—Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arizona—dominate the ranks of the most business friendly states in the union, notes Chief Executive magazine, findings they often cite when courting footloose businesses.

    The clear economic capital of the Sunbelt is now Houston, with some stiff competition from Dallas-Ft. Worth. Houston, the energy capital, now ranks second only to New York in new office construction and is the overall number one for corporate expansions. There are fifty new office buildings going up in the city, including Exxon Mobil’s campus, the country’s second largest office complex under construction (after New York’s Freedom Tower). Chevron, once Standard Oil of California, has announced plans to construct a second tower for its downtown Houston campus while Occidental Petroleum, founded more than fifty years ago in Los Angeles, is moving its headquarters to Houston.

    Houston’s ascendance epitomizes the shift in the geographic and economic center of the Sunbelt. The “original in the Xerox machine” for Sunbelt style growth, Los Angeles’ rise was powered by new industries like entertainment and aerospace and oil, ever expanding sprawl and a strong, tightly knit business elite. Pleasant weather and Hollywood glitz still inform the image of Los Angeles, but under a regime dominated by government employee unions, greens and developers of dense housing, it suffers unemployment almost four points higher than Houston . Nine million square feet of space is currently being built in Houston, compared to just over one million in Los Angeles-Orange which has more than twice the population. It is not in the rising Sunbelt but in places like Southern California, where jobs lag amidst high costs, that the American dream now seems most likely to die.

    Movin’ on Up

    In Houston particularly but throughout the Sunbelt, job growth critically is not tied to cheap labor, but to  industries like energy which pay roughly $20,000 more than those in the information sector. According to EMSI, a company that models labor market data, energy has  generated some 200,000 new jobs in Texas alone over the past decade. Although Houston is the primary beneficiary, the American energy boom is also sparking strong growth in other cities, notably Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Oklahoma City.

    Once dependent on low-wage industries such as textiles and furniture, the energy boom is pacing a  Sunbelt move towards generally better paying heavy manufacturing. Texas and Louisiana already lead the nation in large new projects, many of them in petrochemicals and other oil-related production. Of the biggest non-energy investments, three of the top four, according to the Ernst and Young Investment Monitor, are in Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina, which are becoming the new heartland of American heavy manufacturing, notably in automobiles and steel. Since 2010, Birmingham, Houston, Nashville and Oklahoma city all have enjoyed double digit growth in high paying industrial jobs that used to be the near exclusive province of the Great Lakes, California and the Northeast.

    The Sunbelt resurgence is important in part because it offers some hope to millions of Americans who may not have gone to Harvard or Stanford, but have work skills and ambition. The region’s growth in what might be called “middle skilled jobs” that pay $60,000 or above has been impressive.

    It may come as a surprise to some, but the Sunbelt is also pulling ahead in high tech jobs. In a recent analysis of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) job growth for Forbes we found that out of out of the 52 largest regions, the four most rapid growers over the past decade were Austin, Raleigh, Houston and Nashville, with Jacksonville, Phoenix and Dallas also in the top fifteen. In contrast New York ranked #36th out of 52 and Los Angeles, a long-time tech superpower, now a mediocre #38.

    In another example of how much things are changing, when college students in the South now graduate, noted a recent University of Alabama study, they do go to the “big city” but their top four choices outside the state are in the Sunbelt—Atlanta, Houston,  Nashville, Tenn., and Dallas—and followed then by New York. The biggest net gains in people with BAs and higher are primarily in the sunbelt, led by Phoenix,   Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin, Houston and San Antonio; the biggest losers, according to Cox’s calculations, have been New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and, surprisingly given its reputation, Boston.

    These trends may become more pronounced as the current millennial generation starts settling down into family life. Housing costs could prove a decisive factor. In terms of the median multiple, median housing cost as share of median household income, Sunbelt cities tend to be about half as expensive as New York, Boston or Los Angeles, and one third of the Bay Area.  

    To be sure, many of the “best and brightest” will continue to flock to New York, the Bay Area or Los Angeles, but many more—particularly those without Ivy degrees or wealthy parents—may migrate to those places where their paycheck stretches the furthest. The Sunbelt, with its job growth, strong middle class wages and lows housing costs, is a good bet for the future.  

    What will the future bring?

    Prosperity, Herodotus reminded us, “never abides long in one place.” Certainly the Sunbelt economy could lose its current momentum but fortunately, having been schooled by the housing bust, many Sunbelt communities are increasingly focused on improving their basic economy—jobs, income growth, and skills-based education. Tennessee and Louisiana, for example, have led the way on expanding working training, and some of most ambitious education reform is taking place in New Orleans and Houston.

    Yet, there are many threats to continued growth, both internal and external. Given his penchant for executive orders and his close ties to wealthy green donors, President Obama could take steps—for example clamping down on fossil fuel development—that could reverse the steady growth along the Gulf Coast. Any draconian shift on climate change policies would be most detrimental to the energy sector Sunbelt states.

    But President Obama will not be in office forever. In the long run, the biggest threat to the Sunbelt ascendency is internal. Some fear that as more easterners and Californians flock to the area, they will bring with them a taste for the very regulatory and tax policies that have stifled growth in the states they left behind . Most worryingly, so called “smart growth” regulations could drive housing costs up, as occurred in Florida and several other states in the last decade, and erode some of the Sunbelt’s competitive advantage.

    Perhaps the most immediate threat comes from the angry, reactionary elements on the right, who tend to be more powerful in the sunbelt than elsewhere. These groups, sometimes including the Tea Party, have taken   positions on issues like immigration and gay rights that local business leaders fear could deprive their regions of energetic and often entrepreneurial newcomers. Equally important, the right’s anti-tax orthodoxy, although perhaps not as devastating as the huge burdens placed on middle class individuals in the North and California, could delay critical outlays in transportation, parks and other essential infrastructure in regions that are growing rapidly. This is particularly true of education, a field in which most Sunbelt cities, while gaining ground, remain below the national average.

    Whatever one thinks of the motivations of the green clerisy, there are clearly environmental measures, particularly in the Sunbelt’s western regions, that these cities need to enact to protect future growth. This includes reducing the amount of concrete that creates “heat islands,” expanding parks, and shifting to more drought resistant plants.

    Fortunately, many leaders throughout the Sunbelt, particularly in its cities, are aware of these challenges, and are looking for ways to tackle them. This is driven not by the doomsday environmentalism common in California and Northeast, but grows instead out of a practical concern with stewarding critical resources and creating the right amenities to foster continued growth.

    Combined with basics like lower housing costs and taxes, it’s a common optimism about the future that really underlies the resurgence now occurring from Phoenix to Tampa. The long-term shifts in American power and influence that have been underway since the 1950s have not been halted by the housing bust. Disdained by urban aesthetes, hated by much of the punditry, and largely ignored except for their failings in the media, the Sunbelt seems likely to enjoy the last laugh when it comes to shaping the American future.

    This story originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Houston skyline photo by Bigstock.

  • ‘Lone Eagle’ Cities: Where The Most People Work From Home

    In an era of high unemployment and limited opportunity, more Americans are taking matters into their own hands and going to work for themselves out of their homes.

    Normally small businesses have led the way during economic recoveries, but this time around they’re not creating many jobs. Instead much of the growth we are now seeing is in “lone eagle” businesses, to borrow a phrase from Phil Burgess, often operating out of the worker’s residence. This reverses the trend from 1960 to 1980, when there were steady reductions in the number of people who worked at home. Indeed, despite all the talk of increased mass transit usage, the percentage of Americans working at home has grown 1.5 times faster over the past decade; there are now more telecommuters than people who take mass transit to work in 38 out of the 52 U.S. metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 residents.

    One clear driver of this trend is technology, particularly the growing ubiquity of high-speed Internet. A consultant in New York can now serve customers in Fargo, and vice versa, greatly expanding the range of places where people can live. This is particularly true for aging boomers, as well as younger workers having problems finding a full-time job in this tough economy.

    Not surprisingly, of America’s 52 largest metro areas, the ones with the highest proportions of home-based workers are generally those with high-tech, information-based economies. Tops is San Diego, a major center for digital and biomedical businesses, where 6.6% of workers are based at home.

    The next five metro areas, which have home worker concentrations ranging from 6.1% to 6.4%, all boast a high number of STEM workers and tech firms: Austin, Portland, Denver, Raleigh and San Francisco-Oakland. They all also have another thing in common: They tend to be popular destinations for millennials, who seem far more comfortable with unconventional work arrangements than older generations.

    High real estate costs may be accelerating the trend in San Francisco, San Diego and Portland —  if office space isn’t affordable, why not stay at home? All are also plagued by traffic congestion, most notably the Bay Area, which has among the longest commute times in the country. Rather than drive down snarled freeways, or take slow mass transit, individuals may do better working from home and heading into the traffic maelstrom only when absolutely necessary.

    College Towns, Suburbs And Exurbs

    Many metro areas, of course, are huge, and have many different kinds of geographies. But when we looked at the percentage of home-based workers in all municipalities with populations above 25,000, two types dominated the top of the table: college towns and tech-oriented exurbs. Boulder, Colo., for example, has the third highest proportion of people who work at home, at 11.6%, almost three times the national average. Other college towns with large proportions of telecommuters and one-person businesses include Berkeley, Calf. (tied for fifth, 10.6%), and Columbia, S.C. (12th, 9.9%), home to the University of South Carolina.

    But the bulk of our leading work-at-home locales are tech-oriented suburbs or exurbs. These include several communities around the often traffic-clogged greater Atlanta area, including No. 2 John’s Creek (13.1%) and No. 6 Alpharetta (10.6%).

    There are even more in the sprawl of Southern California. As many  longtime Southland residents can attest, the best workday is one that does not involve either driving or taking transit. The top municipalities on our list in the region tend to be more affluent communities, including two suburbs of our top-ranked metro area, San Diego: Carlsbad (16th, 9.4%) and Encinitas (fourth, 10.7%).

    The Codger Economy

    Yet it would be a mistake to think cities with large home-based workforces are necessarily youthful ones. Nor are they all in large metropolitan areas. Although still slightly below the average for metropolitan areas, the pace of new telecommuter growth is now much faster outside the major metro areas.

    More than 5 million Americans aged 55 or older run their own businesses or are otherwise self-employed, according to the Small Business Administration, and their numbers soared 52% from 2000 to 2007. As research from the Kauffmann Foundation suggests, many of these aging workers are not ready to hang up their workboots.

    This entrepreneurial push could correlate with  the movement of aging boomers to more rural communities, and sleepier outer suburbs. Contrary to the much-hyped notion of a “back to the city” movement among boomers, Census research suggests that if they move at all, most head further to the periphery. At the top of our list of communities over 25,000 is the coastal North Carolina city of Jacksonville, home to the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune and a good number of military retirees. A remarkable 13.8% of the people in this highly affordable, scenic community of 70,000 work out of their homes, roughly three times the national average. The median home price in Jacksonville: $141,000.

    Other retirement hot spots with high telecommuter shares include Boca Raton, Fla. (9.8%), Scottsdale, Ariz. (9.8%), and Bend, Ore. (9.0%). These communities tend to attract well-educated boomers, many of whom have kept their business connections and work as consultants. In many cases, telecommuting allows people to continue their careers, but in an atmosphere of comfort, without the burden of commuting and, in many cases, sans the high income taxes of places like California and New York.

    We can expect the wired economy to expand to other smaller communities. Already numerous smaller towns in the Midwest, such as Albert Lea, an hour and a half from Minneapolis, Brainerd, Minn., and Hastings Neb., all have home worker shares well above the national average. Many of the areas with the fastest growth in the number of self-employed people, notes EMSI is in small, somewhat isolated communities.

    Many analysts who follow these trends expect stay-at-home workers to become more common in the future. According to research by Kate Lister and Tom Harnish of the Telework Research Network, the typical teleworker is a 49-year-old, college-educated, salaried, non-union employee in a management or professional role, earning $58,000 a year at a company with more than 100 employees.

    This suggests that, as more workers enter their 50s, the telework population will expand further.  These numbers will continue to be buttressed by both economic and social factors. The shift towards outsourcing by companies seems unlikely to slow in the years ahead, with more work going to subcontractors who can often work at home. At the same time more boomers, particularly those with skills and connections, will continue to move to places that offer more attractive lifestyles — a process that Joel Garreau has labeled “the Santa Fe-ization of the world,” which he links to people with enough money to have choices.

    In the future, however, less well-heeled workers can also be expected to increasingly shift to affordable locales that appeal to them. This can be almost anywhere — a beach community, a rural hamlet, an exurb or even a dense urban location, as we can see by the geographic diversity in these rankings. As USC grad student Jeff Khau writes, this should encourage the development of wired coffee shops and casual restaurants in smaller communities and exurbs.

    Finally, there are both familial and environmental reasons for this trend to expand. With more two-worker households, it has become more attractive to have at least one person working from home, part-time or full-time. And then there is the environmental desire to reduce carbon admissions. Compared to being forced to live in dense cities, or taking mass transit, the best way by far to reduce energy use – not to mention stress – is to not leave home at all.

    Top Places Where Residents Work at Home

    No. 1: Jacksonville, NC – 13.8%

    No. 2. Johns Creek, GA – 13.1%

    No. 3: Boulder, CO – 11.6%

    No. 4: Encinitas, CA – 10.7%

    No. 5 (tie): Berkeley, CA – 10.6%

    No. 5 (tie): Alpharetta, GA -10.6%

    No. 5 (tie): Santa Monica, CA -10.6%

    No. 8: Frisco, TX – 10.2%

    No. 9 (tie): San Clemente, CA – 10.1%

    No. 9 (tie): Columbus, GA – 10.1%

    No. 11: Bethesda CDP, MD – 10.0%

    No. 12: Columbia, SC – 9.9%

    No. 13 (tie): Boca Raton, FL – 9.8%

    No. 13 (tie): Scottsdale, AZ – 9.8%

    No. 15: Newport Beach, CA – 9.5%

    Journey to Work Market Share by Mode (2012 ACS.1 & Year)
      Total Drive Alone Car Pool Transit Cycle Walk Other  @ Home
    United States 100% 76.3% 9.7% 5.0% 0.6% 2.8% 1.2% 4.4%
    Outside Major Metropolitan Areas 100% 79.9% 10.2% 1.2% 0.6% 2.8% 1.2% 4.1%
    Major Metropolitan Areas (52) 100% 73.5% 9.3% 7.9% 0.7% 2.8% 1.2% 4.6%
                     
    Atlanta, GA 100% 78.0% 10.5% 2.9% 0.1% 1.4% 1.1% 5.9%
    Austin, TX 100% 76.0% 11.0% 2.3% 0.9% 2.0% 1.4% 6.4%
    Baltimore, MD 100% 76.5% 8.9% 6.5% 0.3% 2.7% 1.0% 4.1%
    Birmingham, AL 100% 85.7% 9.1% 0.6% 0.1% 1.0% 0.5% 2.9%
    Boston, MA-NH 100% 68.6% 7.5% 12.2% 1.0% 5.4% 1.0% 4.4%
    Buffalo, NY 100% 82.9% 7.5% 3.0% 0.5% 2.9% 0.8% 2.3%
    Charlotte, NC-SC 100% 78.8% 10.3% 2.1% 0.2% 1.6% 1.2% 5.9%
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI 100% 70.9% 8.8% 11.1% 0.7% 3.2% 1.1% 4.2%
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 100% 83.5% 8.3% 1.8% 0.1% 2.0% 0.7% 3.5%
    Cleveland, OH 100% 82.3% 7.4% 3.2% 0.3% 2.3% 0.9% 3.6%
    Columbus, OH 100% 82.1% 8.4% 1.6% 0.5% 2.0% 1.1% 4.3%
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 100% 80.9% 10.2% 1.5% 0.2% 1.2% 1.5% 4.6%
    Denver, CO 100% 75.6% 9.1% 4.4% 1.1% 2.4% 1.1% 6.3%
    Detroit,  MI 100% 83.7% 8.9% 1.6% 0.3% 1.3% 0.8% 3.4%
    Grand Rapids, MI 100% 82.7% 9.2% 1.2% 0.5% 1.8% 0.6% 4.0%
    Hartford, CT 100% 81.4% 7.6% 3.4% 0.2% 2.7% 0.9% 3.7%
    Houston, TX 100% 79.6% 11.1% 2.6% 0.3% 1.4% 1.5% 3.5%
    Indianapolis. IN 100% 82.6% 9.4% 1.2% 0.3% 1.6% 0.9% 4.0%
    Jacksonville, FL 100% 80.7% 9.9% 1.3% 0.7% 1.3% 1.3% 4.7%
    Kansas City, MO-KS 100% 83.2% 8.9% 1.1% 0.2% 1.3% 1.1% 4.2%
    Las Vegas, NV 100% 78.5% 10.7% 3.8% 0.3% 2.0% 1.6% 2.9%
    Los Angeles, CA 100% 74.1% 10.1% 6.0% 0.9% 2.6% 1.2% 5.1%
    Louisville, KY-IN 100% 82.9% 9.3% 1.8% 0.2% 1.8% 0.8% 3.2%
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 100% 83.0% 10.5% 1.2% 0.1% 1.2% 0.9% 3.0%
    Miami, FL 100% 77.6% 9.5% 4.2% 0.6% 1.8% 1.3% 5.0%
    Milwaukee,WI 100% 80.2% 8.6% 3.7% 0.6% 2.9% 0.7% 3.2%
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 100% 78.2% 8.6% 4.3% 1.0% 2.2% 0.7% 5.0%
    Nashville, TN 100% 82.4% 9.6% 1.1% 0.1% 1.2% 1.0% 4.7%
    New Orleans. LA 100% 79.2% 10.4% 2.7% 1.0% 2.5% 1.6% 2.6%
    New York, NY-NJ-PA 100% 49.8% 6.7% 31.0% 0.6% 6.1% 1.6% 4.1%
    Oklahoma City, OK 100% 82.9% 10.2% 0.4% 0.3% 1.7% 1.2% 3.3%
    Orlando, FL 100% 80.8% 9.2% 2.0% 0.6% 1.2% 1.7% 4.6%
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 100% 73.3% 7.9% 9.4% 0.7% 3.8% 0.7% 4.2%
    Phoenix, AZ 100% 77.3% 11.0% 2.1% 0.8% 1.4% 1.8% 5.6%
    Pittsburgh, PA 100% 77.3% 9.0% 5.5% 0.3% 3.4% 0.9% 3.6%
    Portland, OR-WA 100% 70.8% 9.7% 6.0% 2.3% 3.8% 1.0% 6.4%
    Providence, RI-MA 100% 80.4% 8.8% 2.9% 0.3% 3.2% 1.1% 3.2%
    Raleigh, NC 100% 80.3% 9.8% 1.0% 0.4% 1.1% 1.2% 6.2%
    Richmond, VA 100% 81.5% 9.3% 1.6% 0.5% 1.5% 0.9% 4.7%
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 100% 77.7% 13.4% 1.5% 0.4% 1.6% 1.0% 4.4%
    Rochester, NY 100% 82.4% 7.9% 1.9% 0.3% 3.6% 0.7% 3.2%
    Sacramento, CA 100% 75.5% 11.2% 2.3% 1.9% 2.2% 0.9% 6.0%
    Salt Lake City, UT 100% 75.0% 12.1% 3.9% 0.9% 2.0% 1.3% 4.7%
    San Antonio, TX 100% 79.7% 11.1% 2.3% 0.1% 1.7% 1.0% 4.1%
    San Diego, CA 100% 76.2% 9.9% 2.8% 0.7% 2.7% 1.2% 6.6%
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA 100% 60.4% 10.1% 15.6% 1.8% 4.3% 1.6% 6.1%
    San Jose, CA 100% 76.5% 10.6% 3.4% 1.9% 1.6% 1.4% 4.6%
    Seattle, WA 100% 69.6% 10.5% 8.5% 1.2% 3.6% 1.1% 5.5%
    St. Louis,, MO-IL 100% 82.4% 8.1% 2.3% 0.3% 1.7% 0.9% 4.2%
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 100% 80.0% 9.6% 1.2% 0.8% 1.7% 1.3% 5.4%
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 100% 80.9% 8.9% 1.9% 0.4% 2.7% 0.9% 4.3%
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 100% 65.8% 10.2% 14.1% 0.8% 3.2% 0.9% 5.0%

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photo by By Rae Allen, “My portable home office on the back deck”

  • Where New Yorkers are Moving

    The American Community Survey has released domestic migration data that was collected over a five year period (2007 to 2011).  There is newer domestic migration data available, such as is annually provided by the Census Bureau’s population estimates program, but not in the detail that the latest data provides.

    The new release is significant because domestic migration data is provided between each of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties. Because the survey was taken over a five-year period, the data represents, in effect, a one-fifth snapshot of domestic migration for each of the years from 2007 to 2011. Each year respondents are asked where they lived a year ago. It is thus a rolling annual figure, rather than a picture of a single year.

    The Uniqueness of New York City

    The city of New York provides an interesting case for many reasons. The city is by far the largest municipality in the United States and the only municipality composed of at least two complete counties. New York is coterminous with five counties. New York also has by far the greatest extent of high density in the United States, comprising more than 85 percent population of zip codes with greater than 25,000 per square mile density (10,000 per square kilometer).

    Finally, New York is at the center of the largest metropolitan area in the United States, which in its expanded, combined form (combined statistical area) has a population of 23.1 million, most of which (20.7 million) is in a built-up urban area that covers the largest land area in the world (has the largest urban footprint). This is more than a third larger than Tokyo, the world’s largest urban area by population, with an 80 percent higher population. It is surprising to many that New York’s urban area covers nearly twice the land area of Los Angeles and is nearly one-quarter less dense.

    Domestic Migration and New York City

    New York’s broad suburban expanse generally resembles the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle or Toronto and much of its Staten Island borough (county of Richmond) looks more like suburban New Jersey than New York, most of its urban core – the city of New York – is unique.

    And the city continues to export large numbers of people – 90,000 more than arrived in the rolling year represented by the latest ACS data. This is a big number, representing 1.1 percent of the city’s 2010 population. This is a larger loss than Philadelphia (0.5 percent), but smaller than Washington (1.4 percent).

    This has been evident in the large numbers net domestic migrants reported each year in the Census Bureau estimates. The data shows that people are leaving not only the city of New York not only for the suburbs, but moving in even greater numbers to beyond the metropolitan area. Approximately 27,000 more New Yorkers moved to the suburbs than to the city of New York over the period. However, an even larger 63,000 net domestic migrants left the city of New York for areas outside the metropolitan area.

    Approximately 30,000 of these inter-regional migrants moved to other major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1 million population). By far the largest share – 74 percent – of the city’s net domestic migrants to other major metropolitan areas moved to the South. Four of the five largest major metropolitan gainers at the city’s expense were Miami (net 5,600) and Atlanta (net 4,300), followed by Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

    Another 13 percent of the city’s net domestic migrants moved to other major metropolitan areas in the Northeast. Rochester was the largest gainer with nearly 1000 net domestic migrants from the city of New York, followed by Philadelphia. The city gained more than 250 residents from Boston.

    Approximately 9 percent of the city’s net domestic migrants moved to major metropolitan areas in the West. Los Angeles led in the West, gaining 1,800 net migrants from the city. The outlier was the Midwest, which sent more than 300 net migrants to the city (Figure 1).

    City residents tended to move to the suburbs of the major metropolitan areas, which attracted 60 percent, while the core cities received 40 percent of the net migrants.

    Dispersing Beyond the Larger Metropolitan Areas

    However, the most striking trend is that most of the net domestic migrants who left the city of New York to move outside the New York metropolitan area moved to areas outside the major metropolitan areas. In this regard, New Yorkers who move seem to be more inclined toward the greater dispersion of the nation’s smaller metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas.

    Over the period, approximately 32,500 net domestic migrants left the city for areas outside major metropolitan areas. This is more than moved to the other major metropolitan areas or to the New York metropolitan area suburbs (Figure 2).

    The most surprising finding is that the majority (65 percent) of net domestic migrants from the city who moved to outside the major metropolitan areas settled in the Northeast. Most of these 23,000 residents moved to smaller areas in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. Virtually all of the other migrants not moving to major metropolitan areas moved to states in the South (41 percent). In contrast, there was a small amount of migration to New York from the West and Midwest totaling less than 2,000 (Figure 3).

    Outside New York and New Jersey, which contain nearly all of the New York metropolitan area, Florida received the largest number of net migrants from the city (11,000), followed by Pennsylvania (8,000). Only 100 of the Pennsylvania migrants were to Pike County, which is in the New York metropolitan area. Georgia, Texas and North Carolina all received approximately 5,000 net migrants from the city. The top ten destinations were rounded out by Virginia, Connecticut and South Carolina. A total of 37 states received net domestic migrants from the city. Only Alaska and the District of Columbia sent more than 1,000 net domestic migrants to New York City.

    Conclusion

    The New York City migration data indicates continuing dispersion of the population. People are moving from the core to the periphery in New York, and many going beyond to less urban areas in the Northeast. More are moving to other major metropolitan and other smaller areas, located for the most part in the South. This year’s brutal winter could make the South look even better to New Yorkers.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photo: Leaving New York City via the Holland Tunnel (by author)

  • Post-Nagin, New Orleans Is On Way To Becoming A Model City

    Last week’s conviction of former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on 20 charges of bribery and fraud marks the end of a tumultuous era in the city’s history, and perhaps also the beginning of a new era in American urban politics. Perhaps most remarkable was the almost total lack of protest in New Orleans over the downfall of Nagin, who had relied heavily on polarizing racial politics in his last five years in office.

    This is among the many hopeful signs in the Crescent City and its environs. Over the past year as I’ve put together a report on the future of New Orleans, I have seen a city once described by Joel Garreau in his Nine Nations of North America (1981)as a “marvelous collection of sleaziness and peeling paint,” clean up its politics, restart and diversify its economy, and begin the slow process of reducing its deep-seated crime problem.

    In the past, the “pay to play” politics and corruption epitomized by Nagin and former congressman William Jefferson were widely winked at in New Orleans as if it were just local color. “We like our politics like our rice — dirty,” a Katrina evacuee in Houston once told me with a knowing smile.

    Katrina changed that. The natural disaster was made far worse by the corruption and incompetence of virtually every key institution, starting with police and the levee boards. With the city largely underwater and much of its population forced to flee, some urban experts, such as Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, wondered if we would be better off to encourage people to leave the area permanently, perhaps with vouchers, to seek a better life elsewhere.

    Yet it is here that the real turnaround began. Business leaders, who had seen Nagin as an ally during his first term, realized he was not up to the extraordinary challenges posed by the disaster. The man who some called “Ray Reagan” for his business-friendly policies was morphing into the worst kind of racial demagogue, a kind of bayou version of Coleman Young or Sharpe James. His appeal to keep New Orleans a “chocolate city” and his now well-documented graft frustrated those who wanted to revive the city and its surrounding region.

    “When Nagin came in, he was seen as a reformer,” recalls Greg Rusovich, former chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, which includes 70 of the Crescent City’s largest businesses. “But after Katrina he really turned into a racial politician and surrounded himself with incompetents.”

    This incompetence, Rusovich suggests, slowed New Orleans’ recovery as Nagin proved unable to help direct the massive federal aid, and the many private donations, that came into the city. Eventually, voters tired of poor public services and began to demand a more competent regime.

    The current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, first elected in 2010 and easily re-electedwith strong black support this month, has brought a climate of technocratic competence to the city. With the active backing of business leaders, the city has attracted large-scale corporate investment, including a 300-person General Electric software development center, as well as a surge of videogame and entertainment companies.

    This growth was in large part sparked by a steady movement of young, educated people into the city. For decades, New Orleans’ “best and brightest” tended to move elsewhere; now the flows for the Crescent City have turned positive, including from the West Coast and the Northeast. By last year, theAtlantic Cities, the leading mouthpiece for “hip” urbanism, proclaimed New Orleans potentially the nation’s “next great innovation hub.”

    Yet for all the hoopla surrounding the growth in the information sector, it is unlikely to be enough to sustain the New Orleans region’s recovery. Not only are the total numbers of such jobs still small, in the realm of 2,600 for entertainment, STEM employment is lower than a decade ago due to cutbacks at the NASA facilities at Michoud as well as in aerospace. More important, the growth of tech and entertainment jobs will likely be insufficient to address the fundamental issues of race and poverty that have bedeviled the city throughout much of its history.

    Today, in part due to the return of evacuees, the poverty rate for the metro area stands at 19%, close to the pre-Katrina level and well above the national average of 15%. The differential between white and black incomes is some $6,000 per household above the national average and some observers, including many African-Americans, fear that the gentrification of parts of the city is reinforcing the class and racial divides that existed before the flood.

    Many African-Americans, notes city employee Lydia Cutrer, have “trust issues after many broken promises, and feel like outsiders are taking over.” Or, as Sherby Guillory, a health care worker who now lives in Houston, described the recovery efforts: “They want to build a shining city on a hill, but without the people.”

    Ultimately, to deal with these concerns, New Orleans needs to focus on the industries that drove its economy for much of its history: energy and trade. These are the primary providers of high-wage jobs, many of which are blue collar. The New Orleans area lost energy jobs from 2007-12, in part due to the Gulf drilling moratorium in the wake of the BP disaster, but activity is rising again and low natural gas prices have prompted a surge in chemical and refinery investment in south Louisiana.

    A recent report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center concluded that over 10,000 energy, petrochemical and related advanced manufacturing jobs could be added in the region by 2020; in contrast the digital media sector was projected to expand by roughly 2,200 positions. Finding ways to accelerate this development, while using new revenues to shore up the fragile ecosystem, needs to become the primary focus of new development efforts.

    This vision for post-Katrina New Orleans will no doubt meet opposition from those who would like the city to evolve into a humid, southern version of San Francisco. Yet this makes little sense for a place whose history, location and ethnic heritage suggest a more economically diverse future. Having survived Katrina and Ray Nagin, the next task should be to see how to make sure that the recovery reaches into those neighborhoods that have historically been left behind. Rather than stand only as a charming artifact of its past, New Orleans can become a role model in showing how cities can not only survive, but create a prosperous future.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    New Orleans photo courtesy of Jon Sullivan.

  • Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region

    This is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from GNO, Inc. here: gnoinc.org/sustainingprosperity

    The recovery of greater New Orleans represents one of the great urban achievements of our era. After decades of slow economic, political and social decline, hurricane Katrina seemed a kind of coup de grâce, smothering the last embers of the region’s vitality. In the fall of 2005 it was entirely logical to see New Orleans as just a potential exemplar of failed urbanization, much as we might see in Detroit1, Cleveland, and a host of other once great cities – for example Naples, Lisbon, Antwerp and Osaka – that have tumbled from their once great importance.2

    Yet in New Orleans’ case, disaster engendered not continued decline, but the revival of the en­tire region, its economy, and social and political institutions. Like Chicago after the great fire of 1871, San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire, or New York following 9-ll, New Orleans has rebounded in ways that have defied expectations.

    Critical to making New Orleans a resilient city has been the transformation of the civic culture. This has much to do with the commitment of New Orleanians to their city – like Chicagoans, New Yorkers and San Franciscans in the past. “A city,” notes urban historian Kevin Lynch,” is hard to kill if it possesses unique cultural appeal, geographic assets and people who are determined to save the city they love.”3

    New Orleans resiliency since Katrina constitutes much more than improved levees or better evacuation procedures; more than new brick and mortar applied to what had been an aging, deterio­rating region. New Orleans has made enormous progress in cleaning up its famously corrupt political system, and also made huge strides in improving its educational infrastructure. Once considered one of the worst places to do business, the region, and the state of Louisiana, has undergone a marked improvement to its reputation. It has emerged as a good place for commerce – something of a “Cin­derella” in economic development terms.4 Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center put it, “Greater New Orleans is in some ways rebuilding better than before”.5

    Our analysis shows this progress in a host of indicators. Once a below-average job producer, the region has expanded its employment since the 2007 recession far faster than the national average. It recovered all the jobs lost in the recession by 2012 – and then some – while the nation remained three percent below its pre-recession level. Entrepreneurial activity also has grown faster than the national average by a wide margin.6

    More important still, the region finally began to reverse a demographic decline that, for a gen­eration or more, saw young, educated people and families depart for other locales to seek out a better life. The concentration of 25 to 35 year olds has increased far more quickly in the region than it has in the nation as a whole. Indeed since 2007, New Orleans region has experienced the fastest growth in educated population in the nation.7

    Many economic trends favor the region’s continued ascendency. These include the still nascent US energy boom, which represents arguably the greatest shift in global economic power since the end of the Cold War and the rise of China; the massive flow of investment, domestic and foreign, into lower-cost locales and most particularly into the Third Coast, the burgeoning region around the Gulf of Mexico; and finally the expansion of US trade with Latin America and the Caribbean basin.

    To these powerful forces we can also add demographic and social factors that work to the region’s advantage. One key is a relatively low cost of living, which, in effect, gives area residents and businesses a leg up on their East and West coast rivals. This is critical in attracting net migration from those regions, with their storehouse of educated residents and skilled workers.8 Another force is the breadth of skills that can be easily found in the region, including higher paid skilled professionals ex­perienced in transportation and material moving, installation, maintenance and repair, construction, manufacturing and energy.

    A future scenario can be constructed where greater New Orleans emerges as one of the bright­est spots in the North American economy. Not only does the region have natural advantages in terms of energy resources and transportation, it can claim primary sources of higher-wage employment. It also possesses a cultural cachet that attracts educated workers, but in a cost and regulatory environ­ment that appeals to business investors.

    This is most notable in the growth of the region’s rapidly evolving information industry, in­cluding software, videogames and an expanding film/television industry. Over the past five years, New Orleans has come to enjoy a locational concentration equal to that of New York, and has emerged as a major player in this sector.

    Challenges Ahead: Economic, Social and Environmental

    As the region moves further from the immediate post-Katrina crisis, the great momentum of the last five years is clearly slowing down. Job creation remains positive, but has gradually fallen towards national norms. Indeed, since 2010, after years of running ahead, the region’s job growth rate actually trailed the national average. This could be simply a sign that, after recovering more slowly, the rest of the country is now catching up. But the slowdown relative to other cities should be taken seriously, as it could represent a loss of critical momentum.

    “Concert Of Economic Forces” That Can Make Recovery Permanent

    To overcome its legacy of poverty and inequality, the New Orleans region needs to focus not on just one sector but on five critical ones. In a highly competitive national and global economy, re­gions need to work on their unique strengths, establishing advantages that can lead to more, and bet­ter, job creation. Most particularly, the region needs to develop a broad, but still highly selective, base of industries that can create the higher-wage jobs necessary for the uplift not of a few New Orleani­ans, but for the many.

    1. The first, and most evident, is the region’s cultural legacy, which serves as a major source of jobs for local people as well as a lure for talented people from elsewhere. This, of course, includes the still very important tourism industry, but also encompasses generally higher-wage professions in film, television, video game software and even medical research.

    The growth in information sector employment, something relatively new to the region, rep­resents a clear breakthrough. It allows the region to take advantage of its essential cultural assets, by attracting companies and highly skilled workers. Although it is unlikely that the New Orleans region will ever become as tech-dependent as, say, Silicon Valley — which may prove a good thing, given that industry’s volatility — New Orleans can look forward to a sustained increase in high-paying, and high-visibility, employment. Perhaps most critically, it has an excellent opportunity to make itself the cultural capital of the Third Coast, the burgeoning region around the Gulf, something the region desperately needs and a role that New Orleans is uniquely positioned to fulfill.

    Yet although these industries are important, they alone cannot sustain a long-term, broad recovery. Wages in the tourism industry and the arts tend to be low – one reason for the city’s per­sistently poor income distribution in the past – and higher-wage jobs, except in engineering services and entertainment, remain below national norms in total jobs and will take many years to reach true critical mass. Perhaps most critically, these industries alone cannot produce enough high-wage skilled jobs for the region’s working class population.9

    2. The river system. Its location at the shipping terminus of the Mississippi River, across the regions the region’s ports – New Orleans, South Louisiana, St. Bernard, Manchac, Plaquemines and Grand Isle Port – is the historic reason for the region’s existence and one of the key factors in its future success. The region needs to work to compete successfully with its Third Coast rivals, notably Houston, as well as Mobile and Tampa. Growing trade with the Caribbean and the completion of the Panama Canal expansion project increase the opportunities for expanded logistics and cargo han­dling. In addition, the river provides an ideal spur to new industrial production, such as the Nucor Steel plant in St. James Parish, which some see as the precursor of a new zone, akin to Germany’s Ruhr Valley, that could emerge between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

    Given the devastation of the region’s unique ecological environment, the river presents unique challenges to be addressed. At the same time, the river offers the region new opportunities to develop yet another nascent sector: environmental remediation. The RESTORE Act funds will bring billions to the Gulf help alleviate the region’s own environmental issues, but could also support the unique expertise and skills related to the profound challenges of maintaining coastal regions. This can be seen already in the over $210 million that has flowed to expert Louisiana companies as a result of Hurricane Sandy.10

    3. The energy revolution. Perhaps no sector has more potential to generate higher wage jobs across the region, particularly for working class residents, than the current energy revolution. This is rapidly shifting economic power to North America, and it’s a shift for which the region has a front row seat. Louisiana and the greater New Orleans area boast enormous oil and gas reserves, but the region has not kept up with Houston or even smaller cities in terms of energy-related jobs. Yet there has been continued growth in many upstream services, such as petro-industrial development and exploration, even if headquarters employment has dropped. With the resolution of the BP disaster, it is hoped that the region will recover more employment in this high-wage sector.

    4. Environmental remediation. This is both a major challenge and an opportunity for economic development. Simply put, there is no long-term future for the region if the environment that sup­ports it collapses. Katrina, after all, was not the first ecological disaster to hit the region, and it won’t be the last. Finding ways to restore coastal wetlands and manage the river and other water resources in a sustainable manner not only preserves the environment that New Orleanians cherish, but could also create significant business opportunities down the road; More than 4% of Dutch GDP is related to water management, and more than 50% of that is related to international projects and the export of water expertise and services.11

    The region has already received $1.3 billion from various BP criminal settlements that will be applied to river diversion and barrier island restoration projects. Over $600 million is already budget­ed for projects being let in 2014 alone, signifying great potential to expand the region’s expertise and capacity in this sector.12

    5. The construction of infrastructure. New industries require new or improved roads, better freight and harbor access, reliable, inexpensive electricity, and improved air service. The region is moving ahead on many of these fronts, from the expansion of the airport to major port improvements and the development of a new biomedical district along the Canal Street corridor. A region that has historically lagged in forward-looking improvements is showing clear signs of determination to catch up with competitors in the country and around the world.13

    Yet all these efforts must be done in conjunction with a long-term commitment to preserve the very environment that New Orleanians treasure. This is the ultimate challenge to sustaining and expanding regional prosperity in the era ahead.

    This concert of economic forces is critical to driving down poverty rates and raising incomes across class and racial lines. This can only be realized if there is a conscious effort to promote broad-based, sustainable growth in a diversity of industries. This requires placing a greater emphasis, among other things, on higher education, particularly on engineering and the biosciences, and, per­haps even more, on community colleges, technical schools and certificate training. The area may now be attracting more college-educated workers, but it still lags behind the national average, reflecting a legacy of out-migration of skilled workers over the past few decades.14

    This is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from GNO, Inc. here: gnoinc.org/sustainingprosperity

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Endnotes
    1 http://www.newgeography.com/content/003897-root-causes-detroit-s-decline-should-not-go-ignored
    2 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/the-10-fastest-growing-and-fastest-declining-cities-in-the-world/251602/#slide16
    3 Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, “Conclusion: Axioms of Resilience”, in The Resilient City, editors, Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Oxford University Press, (New York: 2005), pp.335-353
    4 http://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-for-business-2012
    5 The New Orleans Index, by Allison Player, 2013
    6 Allison Plyer, Elaine Ortiz, Ben Horwitz and George Hobor, The New Orleans Index at Eight: Measuring Greater New Orleans Progress Towards Prosperity, Greater New Orleans Community Data Center August 13, 2013, p.6-7
    7 newgeography.com/content/002044-americas-biggest-brain-magnets
    8 http://www.newgeography.com/content/002950-the-cities-where-a-paycheck-stretches-the-furthest
    9 Author’s analysis of data from EMSI, Inc.
    10 http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environment/managing-our-impact-on-the-environ­ment/complying-with-regulations/clean-water-act-provision.html; http://www.restorethegulf.gov/council/about-gulf-coast-ecosystem-restoration-council
    11 Dale Morris, Senior Economist, Royal Netherlands Embassy
    12 http://www.nfwf.org/gulf/Pages/home.aspx;
    13 http://biodistrictneworleans.org/
    14 Plyer, etal, op. cit., p.12

  • Southern California has Aging Issues

    Back in the 1960s, and for well into the 1980s, California stood at the cutting edge of youth culture, the place where trends started and young people clustered. “The California teen, a white, middle-class version of the American dream” raised in a world of “suburbs, cars, and beaches,” notes historian Kirse Granat May, literally shaped the national image of youth, from the Beach Boys and Barbie to Gidget.

    In those times, California, particularly the Southland, was literally becoming ever younger, as more families and migrating 20-somethings moved in. The beaches of Southern California, so attractive to youth, evoked a care-free, athletic, somewhat hedonistic culture; California also was the place where young people, free from the traditional constraints of places East, felt free to innovate, in everything from music and board shorts to the earliest PCs.

    Yet today, you increasingly have to color California, particularly Orange and Los Angeles counties, a pale grey. Once evocative of youth, almost mythically so, these counties are aging far faster than the national average. From 2000-12, notes demographer Wendell Cox (www.demographia.com), the average median age of Los Angeles and Orange County residents rose by 10 percent, almost twice the national rate and well above the 6.6 percent rise for the state overall.

    This aging trend will continue, if current conditions remain in place. One recent USC study predicts that the Los Angeles area, due in large part to declining immigration, will continue aging rapidly. In the next two decades, the study projects, Los Angeles County will gain 867,000 senior citizens and have 630,000 fewer residents younger than 25.

    In contrast, the Bay Area – even rapidly aging Marin County – has been graying more gradually. In part, the Bay Area’s slower aging is less a reflection of rising birth rates, as was the case in California’s youthful heyday, than the movement of 20-somethings, particularly since 2007. Since then, the San Francisco area has led the nation in migration by the 20-34 age group. It does far worse as people get into prime child-bearing years, ranking 30th in migration among the 52 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

    Not surprisingly, San Francisco – with 80,000 more dogs than kids – has the lowestpercentage of youngsters of any major American city. Even when more-suburban San Mateo County is added, the Bay Area ranks 40th in growth among people under age 4. San Jose-Santa Clara shows a very similar pattern, with people arriving in their 20s and leaving in their child-bearing years.

    Southern California right now is not experiencing much youth migration. Hollywood, great weather and the beaches are still all here – in a climate enhanced by a greater cultural diversity – but young people still are not moving here in droves. From 2007-12, this region ranked a mediocre 31st in migration by 20-somethings. Overall, we are losing millennials, while other regions, such as Washington, D.C., Houston, Denver and Austin, Texas, are luring them.

    Perhaps even more troubling, the region also ranks 47th for migrants in their prime child-bearing years and 32nd in terms of newborns. If not for the Inland Empire, which does markedly better with the 30- and 40-something groups, Southern California would be starting to look like a multicultural version of supergrey Japan. A recent report for theU.S. Conference of Mayors projected that, by 2042, Los Angeles will rank 58th of 70 U.S. regions for population growth, with the slowest growth of any major city in the South or West.

    This low youth migration combined with a steady erosion of the key parental cohorts, suggests that rapid aging could soon replace rambunctious youth as the region’s greatest demographic challenge. An ever-shrinking percentage of families and young workers is not good for the local economy. It deprives local companies of both new employees and an expanding customer base. Older people may be great for lower crime rates and filling hospitals, but not so much for the overall economy, as they often do not work and tend to consume less than younger people.

    Why is this occurring, and can anything be done to address this descent into regional senility? One answer lies in the region’s high housing prices. The L.A. area’s median multiple – the ratio of home price to a homeowner’s annual income – is now more thantwice that of more economically dynamic regions like Houston, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Phoenix.

    This price pressure has sharply reduced opportunities for young couples to buy houses, while older residents, often working into their sixties, seventies or even eighties, stay in their homes, further reducing opportunities for the next generation. Mortgage applications have fallen dramatically in recent months, after some signs of resurgence. It’s now largely investors who are holding the market up.

    In Southern California, the combination of inflated house prices and weak job growth means not only that fewer young people are coming but, once here, they are having fewer babies, or will move once they take that plunge. This trend is spreading to the Inland Empire, the region’s primary nursery, where declining incomes and higher rents are making family formation an ever-more dicey proposition.

    Once a major lure for the parental age groups, the Inland area has dropped to 26th in attracting people in their 30s. This is not surprising given the toxic combination of a weak economy and rising costs; the percentage of Inland Empire households paying at least half their incomes in rent has risen from 20 percent to 30 percent since 2007, a reflection of rising rents amidst shrinking salaries. In Los Angeles, roughly a third of households see half their earnings go to rent.

    How can we address this decline? The response of many homebuilders, spurred by the planning agencies, is to reduce the size of houses, even in far-flung suburban areas. This may solve some problems in the eyes of density-obsessed planners but, is not likely to be attractive to families at a time when American house sizes, after a short period of contraction, are expanding again. Less space at higher prices in Southern California may not be so appealing to families who can get more, at lower cost, in a host of markets across the country.

    This leaves the Southland with the alternative, seen in the Bay Area, of attracting younger professionals who eventually may leave. But a torpid economy does not help in luring ambitious millennials, and building high-density housing in the absence of expanding incomes and opportunities seems something of a fool’s errand. If they can’t afford the urban-hipster enclaves of New York or San Francisco, the coveted member of the “creative class” may find themselves better off settling first in the burgeoning urban districts of less-expensive cities like Houston, Dallas or Nashville, places where they also can eventually hope to get a decent job and buy a home.

    Clearly, this region, with its still-impressive assets, should be attracting both new families as well as younger singles. But this cannot reliably be done unless we begin looking at ways to encourage older people to move out of their homes, perhaps by reforming Proposition 13 and providing other incentives. We could also start allowing builders again to construct the kind of housing families need and clearly want – detached homes where land is affordable. As for the 20-somethings, what they need most is not forced density or transit-oriented development but the whiff of opportunity, something a “smart” policy agenda seems best-suited to stifle.

    The premature aging of this region represents an existential challenge, a harbinger of further, long-term decline. Unless addressed by policies that reignite economic growth and expand opportunities, the youthfulness of this region will exist merely a cherished myth, seen in old sitcoms on Nickelodeon but increasingly not in our neighborhoods.

    This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • Business Insider: “Americans are Still Moving to the Suburbs”

    Andy Kiersz’s article in the Business Insider  (see Americans are Still Moving to the Suburbs) summarizes data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) to conclude that "Americans still love the suburbs, and are still moving there from big cities."

    This has long been and continues to be indicated in the data, even as major media rely on anecdotes are to suggest that large numbers of people are leaving the suburbs to "return" to the core cities (from which, by the way, most never moved). There is no doubt that the core cities are doing much better than before, and that is a good thing. Much of this is because the cities are safer than in the 1970s and 1980s. The historic urban core has been restored as an integral part of the modern urban area. However, promoting the health of core cities does not require demeaning or dismissing the suburbs, which are just as integral to modern urbanism as core cities.

    Kiersz refers to a list of the 25 largest met migration movements between counties as reported by the ACS for 2007 to 2011. In every case, the 25 largest net domestic migration movements are from more highly urban core environments to more suburban environments (domestic migration is measured only at the county level).

    The list shows that even within the nation’s largest core city, New York, people are moving to more dispersed areas. This includes net migration from Manhattan to the Bronx and Brooklyn to Queens. Then there is the suburban movement, with a stream of migrants from Queens, in the city to adjacent, suburban Nassau County. Migration from Nassau County even further out, to Suffolk County also made the top 25.

    The outward movement is not limited to New York. A net 50,000 people left the Los Angeles metropolitan area than arrived, just among the 25 largest county migration pairs. Most went to the Riverside-San Bernardino area (which depending on the definition can be called "exurban") and a large number to the Bakersfield metropolitan area. Within the metropolitan area, 10,000 moved from Los Angeles County to Orange County.

    The city (also a county) of San Francisco, which has had the strongest growth of any fully developed major US municipality that has not annexed since 1950, lost 5,000 people to nearby suburban San Mateo County.

    The top 25 also includes nearly 20,000 people moving from Chicago’s core Cook County to three suburban counties.

    It will probably be quite a long time, if ever, before the top 25 migration list has meaningful representation showing movement from suburban counties to core counties. Yet, today’s more healthy cities will do better if they genuinely tackle their remaining challenges. Most important are their education systems that send a disproportionate share of young families to the suburbs. However, from the United States to Europe, Japan, and China, the natural order is that cities (metropolitan areas with their core cities, suburbs, and exurbs) tend to disperse as they add population. That reality is again confirmed by the new data.

  • America’s Future Cities: Where The Youth Population Is Booming

    To identify economic hot spots in the making, we often look for where immigrants, young people or entrepreneurs are clustering. But perhaps nothing is a better indicator than those who truly make up generation next — America’s children.

    Several major factors determine where the most children are being born, and more importantly, raised, says demographer Wendell Cox. Three key ones are economic growth, affordability and lower population densities.

    Using the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey, Cox looked at the under 14 populations of the nation’s 51 metropolitan statistical areas with over a million residents, and also traced the changing numbers in this age group since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Finally he broke down each of these metro areas between their core cities and suburbs to determine where within the region children are the most predominant.

    Thesuburbs have sometimes been described as the nurseries of the nation, but surprisingly the outer rings generally did not outperform core cities in terms of births over the period we examined. In the core cities of our 51 largest MSAs, newborns to 4-year-olds made up 6.9% of the population in 2012, compared to 6.3% in the suburbs. But even here, it’s not the “hip and cool” cities leading the way – San Francisco, Seattle and Boston were all well below the average. Generally the highest proportions of young children were in lower-density cores of such cities as Oklahoma City, Dallas, Charlotte, N.C., and Houston. (Two metro areas with denser urban cores, Milwaukee and Hartford, also made the top  10.)

    But something dramatic happens as children age: They and their parents start moving to the suburbs in massive numbers. In both the 5-to-9 and 10-to-14 cohorts, suburbs easily surpass core cities in virtually every major metropolitan area. So while the popular perception that many downtowns are now overrun by baby strollers is not necessarily an urban myth, it ignores what happens to families as children get older and ambulatory, requiring more space, needing to go to school and more susceptible to getting into trouble.

    In addition, Cox notes, not only are there higher concentrations of children in suburbs in the vast majority of metro areas, the overall greater population on the periphery makes the suburbs home to the preponderance of families. This is one reason that most of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. are either suburbs or exurbs. Roughly 23.9 million children below the age of 14 live in the suburbs of our 51 largest metro areas compared to 8.6 million in the core cities.

    Families and Opportunity

    Perhaps nothing attracts families on the move more than economic opportunity. The old adage “the rich get richer and the poor have babies” may no longer fit in the United States. In fact, in most high-income societies, the birth rate is shaped increasingly by economic conditions. The Great Recession, for example, reduced fertility in most major countries, including the United States, which traditionally has enjoyed somewhat higher birth rates than its high-income competitors in East Asia and Europe.

    But with the gradual economic recovery in the United States, the decline in birthrates has endedand could return to the levels of the more prosperous 1990s and early 2000s.  This dynamic plays out as well on the local level. Birthrates tend to have remained stable in metro areas with stronger economies during the recession. In booming North Dakota, births actually increased.

    Not surprisingly, metropolitan areas with the consistently strongest economies in terms of job creation and income growth dominate our list of the cities with the highest share of children under 14 in their populations. In our top-ranked metro area, Salt Lake City, children make up 24.7% of the population, and in second place Houston, they account for 23.0%.

    Affordability

    The second major factor driving child demography is the cost of housing, which is the principal driver of the cost of living. Virtually all the areas with high proportions of children have median home price to annual income ratios of three to four. In some cases, low home prices seem to trump economic malaise. This may help explain the relatively high under 14 population in No. 4 Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

    Conversely high housing prices can also limit the ability of even prospering areas to grow families. This is most obvious in the relatively low ranking of the New York metro area (41st), with a median home price to income multiple of 6.2.  San Francisco-Oakland, home to the highest housing prices in the nation with a median multiple rapidly approaching 9, ranks 45th place. Pricey Boston ranks 46th. Policies designed to prevent the construction of single-family homes, particularly in the Bay Area, all but guarantee that housing prices will remain high, and toxic for all but wealthy households.

    Density

    Despite the hopes of some urbanists, most families prefer lower-density living, particularly single-family houses. Between 2000 and 2011, detached house accounted for 83% of the net additions to the occupied housing stock in the United States. A survey sponsored by the National Association of Realtors suggests that roughly 80% of Americans prefer a single-family house to either an apartment or townhouse.

    Correspondingly, expansion in the number of families and children has been occurring overwhelmingly in less dense areas. The fastest growth in the under 14 population since 2007 has been almost entirely in what can be described as heavily suburbanized low-density areas, led by greater New Orleans, Raleigh, San Antonio, Charlotte, Nashville, and Houston. In contrast, the biggest drop off in the number of children has been in metropolitan areas with higher urban densities, with the most dense, Los Angeles, also suffering the largest decline. The 10 metropolitan areas with the largest declines in their youth populations had urban densities averaging 45 percent more than the 10 with the greatest gains.

    The Urban Future and Fertility

    What does this tell us about the future of our urban regions? Since families are a critical component of growth in any metropolitan areas, those with higher percentages of children are likely to grow far faster than those that are made up increasingly of childless households. This trend should accelerate as the millennials, now entering their 30s, begin to form families. Children boost the demand for certain goods, notably houses and certain kinds of retail, and also increase demand for many services, notably schools.

    Given the current economy, most of our top metropolitan areas can be expected to continue growing, particularly those, like Houston and Dallas, that have become increasingly hospitable to immigrants; the foreign-born account for one out of every four women giving birth in the country. Minorities overall are the ones driving population growth; last year  there weremore white deaths than births.

    But some traditionally fertile metropolitan areas might see a real slowdown, notably Riverside-San Bernardino, where income and job growth is lagging well behind housing costs.  At the same time, we can expect continued slow growth in the populations in those areas towards the bottom of the list. To be sure, migration of older people from cold climates will keep Miami (47th on our list) and Tampa-St. Petersburg (second from last) growing, particularly as the boomers age. Such a movement can not anticipated in many other low-ranked cities ranging from relatively prosperous Pittsburgh (last place) to less affluent Buffalo, Providence and Cleveland.

    We can also anticipate the evolution of some metropolitan areas with low percentages of children — such as Boston, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles — will slow not just demographically, but also economically as younger workers look to establish families elsewhere.  This may be somewhat counterbalanced by foreign immigration, but these newcomers, particularly those without huge financial resources, are also increasingly migrating to lower-density cities.

    Having children in your region certainly does not guarantee success, but without them, metro areas will face a more rapid aging of their populations and workforces, something that historically does not produce robust economies but gradual decline.

    YOUNG POPULATION: MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS: 2012
    Ages 0-14
    MMSA MMSA% Core City % Suburban %
    Atlanta, GA 21.6% 15.9% 22.1%
    Austin, TX 21.2% 18.9% 23.1%
    Baltimore, MD 18.6% 18.3% 18.8%
    Birmingham, AL 19.7% 19.0% 19.9%
    Boston, MA-NH 17.3% 14.4% 17.7%
    Buffalo, NY 17.1% 19.5% 16.4%
    Charlotte, NC-SC 21.4% 19.6% 22.8%
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI 20.2% 19.0% 20.6%
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 20.3% 19.5% 20.5%
    Cleveland, OH 18.3% 19.4% 18.0%
    Columbus, OH 20.4% 19.6% 21.1%
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 22.9% 22.0% 23.1%
    Denver, CO 20.5% 19.0% 21.0%
    Detroit,  MI 19.1% 20.7% 18.8%
    Hartford, CT 17.4% 21.1% 17.0%
    Houston, TX 23.0% 21.8% 23.6%
    Indianapolis. IN 21.6% 21.2% 22.0%
    Jacksonville, FL 19.3% 19.7% 18.6%
    Kansas City, MO-KS 21.1% 20.8% 21.2%
    Las Vegas, NV 20.4% 20.1% 20.6%
    Los Angeles, CA 19.4% 18.7% 19.7%
    Louisville, KY-IN 19.5% 19.3% 19.7%
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 21.6% 20.9% 22.2%
    Miami, FL 17.3% 16.2% 17.4%
    Milwaukee,WI 20.1% 22.9% 18.4%
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 20.4% 19.5% 20.7%
    Nashville, TN 20.1% 18.7% 20.9%
    New Orleans. LA 19.2% 18.3% 19.6%
    New York, NY-NJ-PA 18.4% 17.9% 18.9%
    Oklahoma City, OK 21.0% 22.1% 20.1%
    Orlando, FL 18.8% 20.2% 18.6%
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 18.8% 18.9% 18.7%
    Phoenix, AZ 21.4% 22.9% 20.7%
    Pittsburgh, PA 16.0% 12.9% 16.5%
    Portland, OR-WA 19.2% 16.5% 20.2%
    Providence, RI-MA 17.2% 18.3% 17.0%
    Raleigh, NC 21.6% 19.8% 22.7%
    Richmond, VA 18.8% 17.0% 19.2%
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 22.8% 23.9% 22.7%
    Rochester, NY 17.6% 19.2% 17.3%
    Sacramento, CA 19.9% 19.9% 19.8%
    Salt Lake City, UT 24.7% 18.5% 25.9%
    San Antonio, TX 21.7% 21.8% 21.6%
    San Diego, CA 19.0% 17.1% 20.3%
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA 17.4% 13.6% 18.8%
    San Jose, CA 20.0% 20.5% 19.4%
    Seattle, WA 18.7% 13.4% 19.8%
    St. Louis,, MO-IL 19.2% 17.9% 19.3%
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 17.1% 18.7% 16.8%
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 19.1% 18.0% 19.3%
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 19.5% 14.8% 20.1%
    Calculated from American Community Survey Data

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Crossing the street photo by Bigstock.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: The San Francisco Bay Area

    Despite planning efforts to restrict it, the Bay Area  continues to disperse. For decades, nearly all population and employment growth in the San Jose-San Francisco Combined Statistical Area has been in the suburbs, rather than in the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland. The CSA (Note) is composed of seven adjacent metropolitan areas (San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Napa, and Stockton). A similar expansion also occurred in the New York CSA.

    The San Francisco Bay Area is home to two of the three most dense built-up urban areas in the United States, the San Francisco urban area, (6,266 residents per square mile or 2,419 per square kilometer) with the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland and the all-suburban San Jose urban area (5,820 residents per square mile or 2,247 per square kilometer), according to US Census 2010 data. Only the Los Angeles urban area is denser (6,999 per square mile or 2.702 per square kilometer). The more spread out New York urban area trails at 5,319 per square mile (2,054 per square kilometer).

    The San Francisco Bay & Central Valley Area

    The continuing dispersion was reflected in commuting patterns that developed between 2000 and 2010, with the addition of the Stockton metropolitan area, which is composed of San Joaquin County, with more than 700,000 residents. San Joaquin County is located in the Central Valley and is so far removed from San Francisco Bay that it may be appropriate in the long run to think of the area as the "San Francisco Bay & Central Valley Area." The distance from Stockton to the closest point shore of San Francisco Bay is 60 miles, and it is nearly another 25 miles to the city of San Francisco.

    Ironically, this continued dispersion of jobs and residences is, at least in part, driven by the San Francisco Bay Area’s urban containment land use policies designed to prevent it. What the planners have ignored is the impact on house prices associated with highly restrictive land use planning. The San Francisco metropolitan area and the San Jose metropolitan area are the third and fourth most unaffordable major housing markets out of 85 rated in the recent 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, trailing only Hong Kong and Vancouver.

    Historical Core Cities: San Francisco and Oakland

    The historical core municipalities (cities) of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco and Oakland have held their population very well. Each essentially retains it 1950 borders. Among the 40 US cities with more than 250,000 residents in 1950, only San Francisco and Oakland managed population increases by 2000 without substantial annexations and substantial non-urban (rural) territory within their city limits. For example, New York and Los Angeles, both of which have grown, have nearly the same city limits as in 1950 and 2000, yet much of New York’s Staten Island was rural in 1950 as was much of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.

    Yet both San Francisco and Oakland have had difficult times. Between 1950 and 1980, both San Francisco and Oakland suffered 12 percent population losses, which were followed by recoveries. The losses were modest compared to the emptying out of municipalities like St. Louis. Detroit, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Paris, which remain one quarter to nearly two-thirds below their 1950s figures. Further, population gains from annexations masked losses within the 1950 boundaries of many cities, such as Portland, Seattle, and Indianapolis, etc.

    San Jose: Now the Largest City

    San Jose is now the Bay Area’s largest city. San Jose has grown spectacularly, from a population of 95,000 in 1950 to nearly 1,000,000 today. San Jose passed San Francisco by the 1990 census and Oakland by the 1970 census (Figure 1). Virtually all of San Jose’s population growth has occurred during the postwar period of automobile suburbanization. The pre-automobile urban form familiar in San Francisco and central Oakland simply does not exist in San Jose. Even attempts to pretend the pre-war urban form has returned have been famously unsuccessful. Even after building an extensive light rail system, San Jose’s transit work trip market share is barely one quarter that of the adjacent San Francisco metropolitan area.

    Nonetheless, suburban San Jose has become a dominant force in the "Silicon Valley", which stretches through San Mateo County in the San Francisco metropolitan area and into Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose. The Silicon Valley has been the capital of the international information technology business for at least a half century. The highly suburbanized region has done more than its share to elevate the San Francisco Bay Area to its high standard of living (According to Brookings Institution data), a phenomenon that has spread also the urban core of San Francisco. At the same time, San Jose is the second most affluent major metropolitan in the world and San Francisco ranks seventh. The Silicon Valley, which includes much of San Mateo County (adjacent to Santa Clara County in the San Francisco metropolitan area), is clearly the economic engine of the region with twice as many jobs as San Francisco (which is both a city and a county).

    Metropolitan Growth

    Overall, the San Francisco Bay Area has grown approximately 180 percent since 1950, considerably more than the national average from 1950 to 2012 of 107 percent. The Bay Area’s growth was strong, but well behind the 280 percent growth achieved in the Los Angeles CSA (Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, and Oxnard MSAs).

    However, growth has since moderated substantially. Between 1950 and 2000, the Bay Area grew at an annual rate of 1.9 percent but since 2000, the annual growth rate has dropped to 0.7 percent annually. Even so, in recent years, the Bay Area has nearly equaled the much slowed growth of the Los Angeles CSA, adding 23.6 percent to its population since 1990, compared to 25.5 percent in Los Angeles. Both areas, however, grew at less than the national population increase rate (25.8 percent), and slowing, in the 2000s to the slowest growth rates since California became a state in 1850.

    Suburban Growth

    Despite the decent demographic performance of the cities of San Francisco and Oakland since 1950, nearly all Bay Area growth occurred in the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2012, only one percent of population growth in the CSA occurred in the two historical core municipalities and 99 percent in suburban areas. Things have been somewhat better for the two cities since 2000, with seven percent of the growth in the historical core municipalities and 93 percent of the growth in suburban areas (Figure 2).

    Since 1950, the San Jose metropolitan area has grown by far the fastest in the CSA, with the more than 500 percent increase in population. The outer metropolitan areas (Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Napa, and Stockton) have grown nearly 300 percent, while the parts of the San Francisco metropolitan area outside the two core cities grew more than 200 percent. San Francisco and Oakland grew approximately 5 percent (Figure 3).

    Domestic Migration

    As house prices increased before the subprime crisis, the Bay Area lost more than 600,000 domestic migrants, a rate of more than 85,000 per year. Since 2008, however, with substantially lower house prices, and a renewed tech boom, there has been an annual gain of approximately 4,000 to the Bay Area in domestic migration. However, if the substantial house price increases since 2012 continue, the area could again become a net exporter of people.

    Future Urban Evolution

    Like much of California, San Francisco Bay CSA exhibits much slower population growth than before. How much of this is tied to the regional and state policies constricting suburban housing remains an open question, but it seems much growth that might have occurred in the original San Francisco metropolitan area or the later developing San Jose metropolitan area will instead occur in the Vallejo or Stockton metropolitan areas, where housing prices  tend to be much lower, particularly for larger homes that are increasingly unaffordable closer to the urban core. Indeed, it is not impossible that Modesto (Stanislaus County) could be added  to the San Francisco Bay CSA by 2020, which is even farther away from the historical core than the Stockton metropolitan area.

    At the same time, many potential new residents may find either the high prices near the core nor the long commutes associated with Central Valley residence unappealing. Many households may instead seek their aspirations in Utah, Colorado, Texas, and even Oklahoma, not least because the "California Dream" has been made affordable.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    —–

    Note: Metropolitan areas are labor markets. Their building blocks in the United States are complete counties. Metropolitan statistical areas are organized around built up urban areas with counties reaching a threshold of the urban area population being considered central counties and included in the metropolitan area. In addition, any county with an employment interchange of 25 percent or more with the core counties is also included in the metropolitan area. Adjacent metropolitan areas are added together to form Combined Statistical Areas if there is a 15 percent or more employment interchange. This is a simplified definition. Complete details are available from the US Office of Management and the Budget.

    Photo: Market Street, San Francisco (by author)

  • City-Specific Immigration Visas Would Be a Modern Day Indentured Servitude

    An idea that’s been kicked around by many is to help turn around struggling cities like Detroit by offering geographically limited immigrations visas. That is, to allow foreigners get their green card if they agree to live in a particular city for a certain number of years.

    Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has now officially endorsed the concept, calling for Detroit to be awarded 50,000 city-specific immigration visas for skilled workers over five years. As the NYT put it:

    Under the plan, which is expected to be formally submitted to federal authorities soon, immigrants would be required to live and work in Detroit, a city that has fallen to 700,000 residents from 1.8 million in the 1950s.

    “Isn’t that how we made our country great, through immigrants?” said Mr. Snyder, a Republican, who last year authorized the state’s largest city to seek bankruptcy protection and recently announced plans to open a state office focused on new Americans.

    Later, he added, “Think about the power and the size of this program, what it could do to bring back Detroit, even faster and better.”

    The appeal of the idea is obvious. I’ve probably said positive things about it myself in the past. But examine it more closely and it’s clear this is an idea that’s fatally flawed. By requiring immigrants to live and work in the city of Detroit for a period of time, this program would effectively bring back indentured servitude, only instead of having to work for the people who paid for their trip to America, these immigrants would have to work for Detroit.

    I’ve got to believe that the courts would look skeptically at such a scheme that so radically restricts geographic mobility and opportunity. What’s more, I think it’s plain wrong to invite people into our country with the idea that they are de facto restricted to one municipality.

    L. Brooks Patterson, county executive of wealthy Oakland County in suburban Detroit, took huge heat again this week when he was quoted in the New Yorker saying “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn.’” Yet isn’t this idea of city specific visas almost literally treating Detroit like a reservation, only for immigrants instead of Indians?

    Some have likened this to programs to entice doctors to rural areas by paying for medical school. I’m not sure how all of those are structured, but they may have questionable elements as well. But more importantly, my understanding is that they are purely financial, where medical school loans are paid off in return for a certain number of years of service. If a doctor elects to leave the program, they are in no worse shape than someone who didn’t sign up would be. They are still licensed to practice medicine and have to repay their loans just like every other doctor.

    I don’t think Gov. Snyder is motivated by any ill will in this. I think he’s genuinely looking for creative solutions to the formidable problems Detroit faces. He’s taken huge heat for finally facing up to the legacy of problems there, and hasn’t shied way from making tough calls. He’s even willing to call for some bailout money, which many in his own party don’t like. But this idea is a bad one. He should withdraw it, and the federal government should by no means open to the door to these types of arrangements.

    Immigrants remain a great way to pursue a civic turnaround, however. Detroit just needs to lure them on the open market the same way Dayton, Ohio and others are trying to do.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

    Photo by telwink