New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Where Manufacturing Is Thriving In The U.S.

    Throughout the dismal presidential campaign, the plight of America’s manufacturing sector played a central role. Yet despite all the concerns raised about factory jobs leaving the country, all but 18 of the country’s 70 largest metropolitan regions have seen an uptick in industrial employment since 2011. And despite the slowdown in car sales, the job count continues to expand, albeit more slowly. 

    Although the share of industrial jobs has shrunken from 10.5% of all nonfarm employment in 2005 to 8.5% today, manufacturing continues to have an outsized influence on regional economies, as is spelled out in the latest paper from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. This stems in large part from the industrial sector’s productivity gains since 2001 –– almost twice as much as the economy-wide average,  according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and it has a far higher multiplier effect (the boost it provides to local job and wealth creation) than virtually any other sector. Manufacturing generates $1.40 in economic activity for every dollar put in, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, far greater than the multiplier generated by business services, information, retail trade or finance. 

    To determine the places where manufacturing growth is the strongest, we looked at employment in the sector over time, assessing short-, medium- and long-term trends going back to 2005 and adding in variables for persistence and momentum as well. The results of these trends, based on three-month averages, are normalized and each MSA is assigned a score based on its relative position in each area. (For a more detailed description of the methodology, click here.) The rankings this year produced some surprising results, as well as some familiar stories. 

    Gallery: The U.S. Cities Where Manufacturing is Thriving

    Red States And The Rust Belt Win

    Nine of this year’s top 10 regions for manufacturing job growth are in red states, led by top-ranked Louisville-Jefferson County, which straddles the border between Kentucky and Indiana. Since 2011, manufacturing employment in the metropolitan area has expanded 30.2% to a total of 83,300 jobs, led by a resurgent auto industry that accounts for 27,000 jobs in the area. Due to a slowdown in auto sales, the job count may be peaking, but the hub of the Bluegrass State has had a pretty good ride. 

    Louisville is no outlier in the old Rust Belt. Second-ranked Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., has logged a 22% gain in industrial jobs over the same span, spread across a range of sectors including aerospace, advanced metals, automotive, office furniture and medical device manufacturing. In the longtime furniture-making center, 20% of jobs are in manufacturing, the highest proportion among the nation’s largest metro areas.  

    Our ranking features several other Midwestern cities on the industrial upswing: No. 4 Kansas City, Mo., No. 5 Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., and No. 10 Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia. Taken together the latter two Michigan metro areas are now home to over 245,000 manufacturing jobs, up dramatically from the 205,500 manufacturing jobs they accounted for in 2011 and just below the 252,300 jobs they tallied a decade ago, before the Great Recession hit. 

    Among the other red state winners are Florida with third place West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach, where the industrial job count has grown 27.67% since 2011, in part from older industries such as food as well as technology, and No. 8 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, where manufacturing growth is tied to the burgeoning aerospace sector. And then there’s the Beehive State’s economically buzzing capital of Salt Lake City in ninth place, where manufacturing job growth is spread along many industries, including aerospace, construction materials, metals and oil and gas-related manufacturing. 

    Blue State Surprises 

    Only one region outside the red states made it to the top 10: seventh-place Albany-Schenectady, N.Y. In a state and region that has been losing industrial jobs since the late 1960s, Albany has bucked the trend with a 17.6% gain in manufacturing jobs from 2011 to 2016 to to 25,800 positions. The area boasts factories that produce steam and gas turbines, computer chips and medical supplies — an impressive and diverse collection of cutting–edge industries. Meanwhile the industrial workforce in once-mighty New York City continues to whither. In 1950 the city had nearly a million manufacturing workers; now there are 74,100 after 4.7% shrinkage in 2016. New York ranks second to last in our survey among the 70 largest metro areas in the U.S. 

    Gallery: The 15 U.S. Cities Leading An Industrial Renaissance

     Even in heavily regulated California, which has been continuously shedding industrial jobs since 1988 (about 800,000 manufacturing jobs lost to date), some areas are showing surprising new strength. Take Oakland-Hayward-Berkeley, which has seen a 12.7% jump in industrial jobs to 89,600 since 2011, ranking it 13th on our list. The big player here appears to be Tesla, whose Fremont factory employs 6,500. The Fremont area has become something of a hotspot, with more than 900 manufacturing companies including AlterG and LAM Research. 

    Some believe it’s a byproduct of the Valley’s attempt to lay claim to “the Internet of things,” but other parts of the Bay Area are showing some signs of an industrial renaissance, including No. 18 San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco and 22nd-ranked San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara. One big problem in some of these areas is attracting enough skilled workers given ultra-high housing prices. 

    Industrial Players In Decline 

    Many of the largest industrial areas are not doing so well. Houston, the nation’s third-largest manufacturing center, has seen industrial employment drop since 2011 by 5.49% to 220,900 jobs amid the skid in energy prices. Other oil patch economies have lost industrial jobs, including No. 57 Oklahoma City and No. 64 New Orleans-Metairie, La. Hopefully improved conditions for energy companies, particularly under President Trump, may improve prospects there as well. 

     It’s somewhat harder to find much hope for the nation’s two largest industrial regions. The Chicago-Arlington-Naperville region ranks 56th, having lost 1.85% of its industrial jobs since 2011, continuing decades of decline. Manufacturing in the City of Broad Shoulders has slumped from just under a million jobs in 1966 to 520,000 in 1990, 465,000 in 2000 and 281,000 today.  

    Even worse is the performance of Los Angeles-Glendale-Long Beach, which still has the most industrial jobs in the nation, some 356,000. Since 2011, the region has lost 3.47% of its industrial jobs, and 2.10% last year alone. On paper the L.A. region should be benefiting from hosting the headquarters of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and buzzy startups like Hyperloop and AIO Robotics. But whatever is being gained by way of these companies has been more than canceled out by downsizing, outsourcing and automation across the sector, as well as continuing losses in the aerospace and apparel industries. 

    Ultimately the future of high-cost metro areas like L.A. and the Bay Area may rest to a surprising extent on their ability to link up with cutting–edge tech industries. Elsewhere lower–cost regions should experience some continued growth as the current presidential administration seeks to encourage more on-shoring of basic production.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

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

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by Industrial Traffic.com, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • Las Vegas Lessons, Part 1

    I spent much of last week in Las Vegas for the International Council of Shopping Centers’ RECON 2017, the world’s largest real estate convention. It’s a gathering for developers, brokers, property owners, retailers, architects, landscape designers, construction companies, municipalities and more to get together to discuss real estate possibilities, in the one city that owes its very existence to aggressive real estate ventures.

    I had a good time, at least as much as I could; being there for a convention is far different from being there for pleasure. In fact, I’ve been to Vegas many times before, but always within a business context and never for pleasure. Also, I had not been in about 15 years, which is important for two reasons: 1) in Vegas time, with the rapid pace of development there, 15 years is an eternity; and 2) it completely predates the establishment of this blog, so I can include my thoughts on the city in this forum.

    In that vein, here’s a Corner Side Yard take on the Sin City — part urbanist, part sociologist, part economist, all observational — that details my thoughts on a truly unique place.

    The Strip and the city of Las Vegas are two entirely different entities. I think this subtle distinction, which few outsiders really know about, is key to understanding Las Vegas’ growth and development. Hal Rothman’s book Neon Metropolis, published in 2003, notes that the Las Vegas Valley grew in three distinct phases: the Union Pacific Railroad, the construction of Hoover Dam and military investment enter the picture prior to 1945; organized crime arrives and Nevada legalizes gambling, driving investment and perceptions through the 1960s; and the passage of two Corporate Gaming Acts in 1967 and 1969, which drew corporate investment into the area (partly as a means to dilute criminal investment). In that second phase, and continuing into the third, casino developers sought to avoid city development and permitting regulations by setting up outside of the city boundaries, which is at Sahara Avenue on Las Vegas Boulevard (aka the Strip). What most people recognize as Las Vegas is actually the unincorporated communiites of Winchester, Paradise and Spring Valley — significantly sized communities of their own, but under the jurisdiction of Clark County, Nevada. The county, which has two-thirds of Nevadans within its boundaries, takes a far more laissez-faire approach to development than the city of Las Vegas does, and directly reaps the benefits of development without having to pass through the city. That being said…

    The Strip is a great pedestrian experience. Anyone familiar with the Strip knows that a stroll of the roadway is an experience unto itself. From north to south, the Strip builds as a visual spectacle beginning at the Stratosphere toward Circus Circus and continuing to the Wynn and Encore, before reaching a crescendo at the intersection of the Strip with Flamingo Road, where the Bellagio, the Venetian, the Flamingo, Caesar’s Palace, Paris, and Planet Hollywood converge (see the picture above). The dense concentration of resorts continues southward past the MGM Grand to include the Tropicana, the Escalibur, the Luxor, and Mandalay Bay. Architects and urbanists Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Scott Izenour wrote of the Strip in their 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas, and one of their criticisms at the time was the isolation of the resorts via massive parking lots. If anything, the developers should be commended for revising their thinking on the Strip by creating the pedestrian environment. Yes, it’s gaudy, yes, it’s a jarring juxtaposition of architectural styles, but it does what so many other cities still fail to do — bring the experience right to the street. A great addition to the Strip is the usage of escalators and pedestrian bridges to minimize pedestrian interaction with the high-traffic Strip, serving a dual purpose as entrances into connected resorts. Which means…

    The Strip is an exclusively private space. It might be better to think of the Strip as the world’s largest mall, because its private management reminds me of enclosed shopping centers, writ very large. It’s clear that every inch of the Strip has been thought out as a way to collect and divert traffic into the resorts — the Monorail stops, the signage on the pedestrian walkways. If you’re looking dial down the Strip’s intensity through quiet public open spaces, you’re out of luck. The best you can do is find something inside one of the many resorts.

    Downtown Las Vegas is quite different from the Strip. Continue northward on Las Vegas Boulevard and eventually you will enter downtown Las Vegas. This is where the earliest hotels and casinos were established, the ones that drew visitors in by railroad as opposed to automobile. Resorts here are smaller and less overwhelming. It has a long-standing reputation for being a little more downscale, even seedier, than the Strip further south, but the city has worked hard to clean up its image and make it a fantastic destination in its own right. The Fremont Street Experience, an open-air pedestrian mall with a super-sized LED canopy display, unites several of the downtown casinos with an experience that’s completely different from the more well-known Strip. However, downtown Las Vegas probably maintains a secondary status in the Las Vegas Valley because…

    There are poor linkages between downtown Las Vegas and the Strip. The Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas sits about two miles north of the city’s southern boundary, where the Stratosphere hotel and casino are located. Downtown is about three miles north of where the real action and activity begins near the Wynn and Encore resorts. In between are the kinds of warehousing, light industrial, marginal commercial and grimy multifamily structures often found on the outskirts of downtown areas. There are wedding chapels, auto repair shops, convenience stores, and the like. There’s nothing that easily draws visitors between the Strip and downtown. Why?

    The north end of the Strip is plagued with high-profile failed projects. The Fountainbleau Resort Las Vegas and Echelon Place stand out as two high-profile casualties of the Great Recession, proposed just as the Strip was developing a continuous string of modern resorts that would reach from the Strip all the way into downtown. The Fountainbleau, a $2.8 billion project first proposed in 2005 with the second tallest structure in the Las Vegas Valley, managed to reach 70 percent completion before construction stopped in 2009 when the project went into bankruptcy. The $7.2 billion Echelon Place was announced in 2004, and the implosion of the Stardust Hotel and Casino, which it was to replace, happened in 2007. However, there were fits and starts in its construction due to the economy, until the developers sold the site in 2013. The new owners are proposing a new venture called Resorts World Las Vegas, but that project too has been plagued with delays. It’s clear that had these two projects been developed, they would have had a catalytic impact on further development northward toward downtown.

    That’s enough about the city and the Strip; I’ll follow up soon with more thoughts on the overall region’s built environment, economy and potential future.

    This piece originally appeared on The Corner Side Yard.

    Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years.  He is also the author of “The Corner Side Yard,” an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

    Photo by Carol M. Highsmith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • America’s Most Suburbanized Cities

    Recently, The Wall Street Journal and Newsday, in a photographic spread, trumpeted the 70th anniversary of Levittown, the New York suburban development that provided the model for much of the rapid suburbanization that occurred after the Second World War in the United States. Levittown’s production line building also set the stage for the similar suburbs of cities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

    Over the last seven decades, the United States has become a predominantly suburban nation. In 2011-2015, 85 percent of the population in the 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lived in the suburbs or exurbs. This is based on analysis at the small area level (zip code tabulation areas) from the American Community Survey that classifies population based on demographic data (Figure 1).

    Generally similar findings have been made about Canada and Australia by research teams led by Professor David L. A. Gordon of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Gordon and his Canadian team pioneered this type of analysis, which is not dependent on core municipality versus surrounding area analysis. Core municipalities often do not reflect the realities of metropolitan areas because they vary so greatly in their share of metropolitan area population. For example, the city of Atlanta has only 8 percent of the metropolitan area population, while San Antonio has more than 60 percent of the metropolitan area population.

    Suburban Nation: United States

    Many people, including urban analysts, are unaware of the extent to which American cities have become suburbanized. But the former mono-centricity that characterized most metropolitan areas at the end of World War II has been replaced first by multi-centered suburban employment development (polycentricity) and more recently by dispersion of employment. As early as 2000, more people worked in dispersed worksites in the major metropolitan areas, including New York, than in the downtowns (CBD’s) and suburban office centers, according to research by Bumsoo Lee and Peter Gordon. City Sector Model analysis shows that CBDs lost two percent of their market share from 2000 to 2015, based on a City Sector Analysis of County Business Patterns data. It seems likely that the trend of dispersion has continued (Figure 2).

    We took a look at the population distribution of the 53 major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1,000,000 population) to rate down by the extent to which they are suburban. The City Sector Model classifies the population of any area where there is an employment density of 20,000 or more as a CBD considers the urban core inner ring to have population densities exceeding 7500 per square mile. Such densities were characteristic of pre-automobile urban areas in the United States. According to estimates prepared by the Urban Land Institute, in 1920 the 24 urban areas with more 250,000 residents had an average population density of 7500.

    As it turns out, 10 metropolitan areas have virtually no urban core population by this definition. To rank these metropolitan areas by their extent of suburbanization, we broke the 10 way tie by ranking the metropolitan areas by the extent of their exurban population. Exurban areas have very low population densities (250 per square mile or less) and are generally outside the urban area, which includes all contiguous built up area, surrounded by rural territory.

    Seven of the 10 most suburban cities are in three states. Three are in Florida and two each in North Carolina and Arizona. They are listed in the Table 1, and data is provided for all 53 in Table 2.

    Table 1
    Most Suburban Cities: (Metroplitan Areas)
    1 Charlotte, NC-SC
    2 Riverside-San Bernardino, CA
    3 Raleigh, NC
    4 Orlando, FL
    5 Birmingham, AL
    6 Jacksonville, FL
    7 Phoenix, AZ
    8 San Antonio, TX
    9 Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL
    10 Tucson, AZ
    Out of 53 with more than 1,000,000 population

    The Most Suburban: Charlotte, NC-SC

    Charlotte turns out to be the country’s most suburban metropolitan area. The exurban commuting patterns of Charlotte expanded substantially over the 2000 to 2010 decade, which resulted in the largest geographic expansion of any major metropolitan area. Its exurban population is 51 percent and its urban population density is approximately 1,700.

    2nd Most Suburban: Riverside-San Bernardino, CA

    Second ranked Riverside-San Bernardino, which in many ways is an extension of the Los Angeles metropolitan area (and is included in the Los Angeles combined statistical area), ranked as the second most suburban city. However, like other California cities, Riverside-San Bernardino is comparatively dense as an urban area, ranking above both Chicago and world renown densification model Portland as the 11th densest major urban area in the nation.

    3rd Most Suburban: Raleigh, NC

    At the opposite end of the density scale is third ranked Raleigh, a high tech center with an exurban population of 42 percent. Raleigh has an urban area population density of approximately 1,700, about the same as top ranked Charlotte and 16th ranked Atlanta.

    4th Most Suburban: Orlando, FL

    Fourth ranked Orlando has an exurban population of 34 percent and is suburban by nature. This is not surprising considering that it is virtually all new, having principally been developed since Walt Disney World made its decision to locate there and other entertainment venues followed.

    5th Most Suburban: Birmingham, AL

    Fifth ranked Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, had far slower growth than most major metropolitan areas of the South. In 1950, the metropolitan population was approximately 20 percent behind Atlanta, according to the 1950 census. Now, virtually all-suburban Atlanta has grown to nearly 5 times that of Birmingham since that time. Even so, Birmingham has expanded to have the lowest density of any principal urban area in a major metropolitan area.

    6th Most Suburban: Jacksonville, FL

    Sixth ranked Jacksonville, another all-suburban metropolitan area has an exurban population of 25 percent.

    7th Most Suburban: Phoenix, AZ

    Phoenix, like Orlando is virtually all a postwar product. With its 100 percent suburban population, 19 percent of it is in the exurbs ranking Phoenix as seventh most suburban. Phoenix is the largest among the all-suburban cities, with more than 4.6 million residents and is likely to displace San Francisco to become the nation’s 11th largest metropolitan area this year, and could take 10th position away from Boston by the 2020 Census.

    8th Most Suburban: San Antonio, TX

    San Antonio, ranked as eighth most suburban, with an exurban population of 17 percent.

    9th Most Suburban: Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL

    Tampa – St. Petersburg ranks as the ninth most suburban city, with a 14 percent exurban population. Like San Antonio, Tampa has a comparatively strong downtown area, but its inner densities do not reach the levels necessary for population to be classified as urban core.

    10th Most Suburban: Tucson, AZ

    Tucson, the newest entry among the nations 53 major metropolitan areas takes the 10th position and rounds out the cities that are 100 percent suburban.

    Other Cities

    Nashville and San Jose ranked 11th, but are very different. Nashville, as the capital of Tennessee, has a comparatively strong CBD, but the urban area is one of the least dense. On the other hand, San Jose, which is really an extension of the San Francisco metropolitan area and a part of the San Francisco Bay combined statistical area has a weak CBD, but a very high urban area density. San Jose ranks after only Los Angeles and San Francisco in its urban density and ahead of the sprawling New York urban area.

    There are a total of 34 metropolitan areas that are 95 percent or more suburban. These include examples such as Atlanta, at 99.2 percent San Diego at 98.9 percent Sacramento at 98.3 percent, Austin and 97.9 percent, Denver at 96.9 percent and Portland at 90.0 percent.

    Los Angeles, with the nation’s densest urban area, is 89.4 percent suburban, nearly matched by Seattle’s 89.3 percent.

    A number of older cities are overwhelmingly suburban as well, such as St. Louis at 88.4 suburban, Minneapolis-St. Paul at 86.8 percent, Washington at 83.3 percent, and Milwaukee at 76.6 percent. Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence, San Francisco – Oakland and Buffalo are all more than 70 percent suburban.

    Boston and New York are considerably less suburban than the other 51 major metropolitan areas. Boston is 64.3 percent suburban, while New York is the only major metropolitan area that has a larger urban core population than its suburban and exurban area. New York is only 46.7 percent suburban.

    Fast Growing and Automobile Oriented

    As with all suburban areas, these suburban cities are automobile oriented. The journey to work transit market shares average 1.7 percent, one third of the national average for all areas. They are also among the fastest growing, with six ranking in the top 10 for 2010 to 2016 growth. A close look shows that the American urban form is changing, but not in ways commonly discussed among planners, urban land speculators and many academics.

    Table 2
    Cities (Metropolitan Areas) Ranked by Extent of Suburbanization
    Major Metropolitan Areas: 2011-2015
    Share (%) of Metropolitan Population by Sector
    Rank Metropolitan Area % Suburban CBD Urban Core: Inner Ring Earlier Suburbs Later Suburbs Exurbs
    1 Charlotte, NC-SC 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 10.2% 39.2% 50.6%
    2 Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 28.9% 29.6% 41.5%
    3 Raleigh, NC 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 7.4% 56.8% 35.8%
    4 Orlando, FL 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 15.7% 50.6% 33.7%
    5 Birmingham, AL 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 41.6% 25.2% 33.2%
    6 Jacksonville, FL 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 25.6% 49.0% 25.4%
    7 Phoenix, AZ 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 29.1% 52.0% 18.9%
    8 San Antonio, TX 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 38.6% 44.1% 17.3%
    9 Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 44.2% 41.7% 14.1%
    10 Tucson, AZ 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 46.9% 41.0% 12.2%
    11 Nashville, TN 99.8% 0.2% 0.0% 24.4% 36.9% 38.5%
    12 San Jose, CA 99.8% 0.1% 0.1% 77.5% 9.3% 13.0%
    13 Houston, TX 99.6% 0.4% 0.0% 33.2% 50.0% 16.4%
    14 Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 99.5% 0.2% 0.3% 33.7% 43.1% 22.7%
    15 Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 99.5% 0.0% 0.5% 45.9% 38.0% 15.7%
    16 Atlanta, GA 99.2% 0.2% 0.6% 14.8% 70.8% 13.6%
    17 San Diego, CA 98.9% 0.0% 1.1% 61.3% 30.9% 6.7%
    18 Sacramento, CA 98.3% 0.0% 1.7% 37.7% 40.9% 19.8%
    19 Memphis, TN-MS-AR 98.1% 0.0% 1.9% 39.9% 35.3% 23.0%
    20 Austin, TX 97.9% 0.4% 1.7% 15.4% 63.0% 19.6%
    21 Las Vegas, NV 97.6% 0.4% 2.0% 16.2% 77.7% 3.8%
    22 Oklahoma City, OK 97.2% 0.4% 2.4% 34.1% 32.6% 30.6%
    23 Miami, FL 97.1% 0.3% 2.6% 50.0% 44.8% 2.4%
    24 Denver, CO 96.9% 0.5% 2.7% 42.7% 42.7% 11.4%
    25 Grand Rapids, MI 96.5% 0.0% 3.5% 33.0% 15.4% 48.0%
    26 Salt Lake City, UT 96.5% 0.0% 3.5% 47.9% 39.2% 9.3%
    27 Richmond, VA 95.6% 0.0% 4.4% 38.5% 38.4% 18.6%
    28 Columbus, OH 95.3% 0.0% 4.7% 28.5% 38.6% 28.3%
    29 Indianapolis. IN 95.0% 0.3% 4.6% 27.3% 42.6% 25.2%
    30 Kansas City, MO-KS 94.8% 0.2% 5.0% 37.5% 26.9% 30.4%
    31 Detroit,  MI 93.7% 0.1% 6.1% 60.2% 16.6% 17.0%
    32 Louisville, KY-IN 91.2% 0.5% 8.3% 44.5% 26.0% 20.8%
    33 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 90.0% 0.6% 9.4% 40.3% 27.9% 21.8%
    34 Portland, OR-WA 90.0% 0.7% 9.3% 36.0% 39.7% 14.3%
    35 Los Angeles, CA 89.4% 0.4% 10.1% 76.1% 5.3% 8.0%
    36 Seattle, WA 89.3% 1.1% 9.7% 35.9% 40.7% 12.6%
    37 New Orleans. LA 89.1% 0.2% 10.7% 50.3% 7.0% 31.8%
    38 Hartford, CT 88.7% 0.1% 11.2% 77.4% 1.0% 10.3%
    39 Rochester, NY 88.6% 0.3% 11.1% 46.8% 7.9% 34.0%
    40 St. Louis,, MO-IL 88.4% 0.1% 11.5% 39.6% 26.1% 22.7%
    41 Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 86.8% 0.5% 12.7% 31.4% 33.7% 21.7%
    42 Baltimore, MD 84.3% 1.4% 14.3% 42.0% 20.6% 21.8%
    43 Pittsburgh, PA 84.1% 1.3% 14.5% 56.0% 5.0% 23.1%
    44 Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 83.3% 1.6% 15.1% 28.2% 36.6% 18.4%
    45 Cleveland, OH 78.3% 0.0% 21.7% 48.5% 13.6% 16.2%
    46 Milwaukee,WI 76.6% 1.6% 21.7% 50.7% 10.5% 15.4%
    47 Chicago, IL-IN-WI 74.2% 1.2% 24.6% 44.9% 18.5% 10.8%
    48 Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 74.1% 0.9% 25.0% 50.5% 15.1% 8.5%
    49 Providence, RI-MA 73.9% 0.6% 25.5% 47.9% 2.8% 23.1%
    50 San Francisco-Oakland, CA 73.0% 3.3% 23.7% 54.0% 7.6% 11.4%
    51 Buffalo, NY 71.0% 0.3% 28.7% 51.3% 3.1% 16.6%
    52 Boston, MA-NH 64.3% 3.2% 32.5% 48.6% 3.6% 12.2%
    53 New York, NY-NJ-PA 46.7% 6.5% 46.8% 35.2% 5.5% 6.0%
    Derived from American Community Survey using City Sector Model

     

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

    Top photograph: Exurban Charlotte, by author.

  • The Coming Democratic Civil War

    Even before the election of Donald Trump, and more so afterwards, the dysfunction of the GOP has been glaringly obvious. Yet, despite the miserable favorability ratings for both Trump and the Republicans, those of the Democrats, notes Gallup, also have been dropping, and are nearly identical to that of the Republicans.

    What gives? Simply put, the Democrats seem to know only what they are against — Trump — but have provided no clear sense of where they want to take the country. The party, and much of the nation, despises Trump, but there does not seem to be any huge pent-up national demand for the Democrats to take over — at least, not yet.

    Part of the problem is major chasms underneath the absurd faux solidarity of the “resistance” movement on the left. These have been largely hidden in the increasingly uniformly pro-Democratic media. These differences extend beyond personal fiefdoms or stylistic differences. They reflect deep divides in terms of class and geography, and will not be easy for the party leadership to reconcile.

    The gentry vs. populists

    The two most remarkable campaigns of 2016 — those of Trump and Bernie Sanders — were driven by different faces of populist resentment. Yet, increasingly, the Democrats’ populist pretensions conflict with their alliance with ascendant “sovereigns of cyberspace,” whose power and wealth have waxed to almost absurd heights. Other parts of their upscale coalition include the media, academia and the upper bureaucracy.

    This affluent base can embrace the progressives’ social agenda — meeting the demands of feminists, gays and minority activists. But they are less enthusiastic about the social democratic income redistribution proposed by Bernie Sanders, who is now, by some measurements, the nation’s most popular political figure. This new putative ruling class, notes author Michael Lind, sees its rise, and the decline of the rest, not as a reflection of social inequity, but rather their meritocratic virtue. Only racism, homophobia or misogyny — in other words, the sins of the “deplorables” — matter.

    The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, reflects this socially liberal, but oligopolistic, worldview. Last spring, Bezos worked assiduously to undermine Sanders’ campaign, then promoted Clinton, and now has become a leading voice in the anti-Trump “resistance.” The gentry wing of the party, which dominates fundraising and media, as the opposition to Sanders reveals, likes its money. The tech community is famously adept at avoiding taxes.

    How long can this odd pairing of socialism and oligopoly persist? There are growing sentiments on the left to begin confiscating some of the massive wealth of the tech firms. Bank of America’s Michael Harnett recently warned that continued growth of stock market wealth in a handful of tech stocks “could ultimately lead to populist calls for redistribution of the increasingly concentrated wealth of Silicon Valley.”

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

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

    Photo by AFGE, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • The Great Betrayal of Middle America

    America’s vast midsection, a region that has been hammered by globalists of both parties, has been abandoned by the great corporations that grew fat on its labor and resources.

    To many from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Donald Trump projected a beacon of hope. Despite the conventional wisdom among the well-heeled of the great coastal cities, these resource and manufacturing hubs elected the new president.

    Yet barely six months after his election, Trump is emerging as the latest politician to betray middle America.

    Some of this is his awful management and communications style, which may well leave the country frozen until it is returned to the care of the coastal hegemons, tech oligarchs, high-level bureaucrats, academics, and media elitists whose views of the Heartland range from indifferent to hostile. The rise of China may have been a convenient source of cheap labor and more recently investment capital and lots of full load tuitions for universities, but according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, our deficit cost the country 3.4 million jobs, most in manufacturing.

    Trump’s trade rhetoric, like that of Bernie Sanders, excited the people and communities affected by these policies, but it remains questionable whether his own voters will benefit from his regime. Certainly the president’s tax proposals have been tailored to appeal to his billionaire friends more than the middle class. His health care reforms failed to prioritize those who feel threatened by loss of coverage, however much they gripe about the inanities of Obamacare.

    Meanwhile promises that could help middle-America, like a massive infrastructure program, appear to be roadkill squashed beneath Trump’s staggering ineptitude and his Republican Party’s dysfunction.

    There is no chance he will succeed in convincing voters he’s making America great again, let alone in actually doing so, if he cannot address the reasons why companies desert our towns and cities for all but elite functions, leaving so much of America in tatters.

    A Failed Peasant’s Revolt

    In its incoherence and lack of organization, Trump’s victory less resembled a modern social movement than a peasant’s revolt from the Middle Ages. His campaign lacked a coherent program, although its messenger, a New York narcissist, possessed a sixth sense that people “out there” were angry. Trump’s message was negative largely because he had nothing positive to say, though that had the useful effect of driving his enemies slightly insane.

    So while he’s succeeded in stirring the blue hornet’s nest, he’s created no productive movement. Successful social movements—the Jacksonians, the New Dealers, the Reaganites, and the European social democrats—directly appealed to the working class with policies that for better or worse, challenged the existing social and economic hierarchy.

    Trump, like Jackson, identified with the plight of the “left behind” America, notably rural areas and small towns that have seen their business communities shrink, while larger metropolitan areas have grown much faster. The new economic order, evident throughout the Obama era, represents what urban analyst Aaron Ren describes as “the decoupling of success in America. Those who are succeeding in America no longer need the overall prosperity of the country to personally do well. They can become enriched as a small, albeit sizable, minority.”

    Trump brilliantly played off this geographic and class segmentation. But unlike others who successfully played populist themes, Trump did not emerge from and understand the mindset of those further down the social order, as did Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan, Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Trump simply stoked resentments, many but not all well-justified.

    Trump has taken few concrete steps to address the causes of his supporters’ distress. Changes in trade negotiations and jawboning corporations are good first steps but limited in their effect. There is little in what he’s proposed since January that would help the middle and working class. Unlike Reagan, who cut rates across the board, Trump seems to be listening mostly to the Goldman Sachs grandees to whom he has entrusted our economy.

    In the end Trump’s modern-day peasants will be left stranded like the supporters of European peasant rebellions of the European middle ages, like England’s Jack Cade in the 15th century, or the Taiping rebels in mid-19th century China. These movements grew bright, stormed across the countryside, and conquered cities, until the forces or order imposed themselves and eliminated the most rebellious of their subjects. Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping, committed suicide in 1864, as the 14-year rebellion failed. Cade, of course, was killed, as recounted in Shakespeare’s Henry the 6th, still proud of his “unconquered soul” but nevertheless despised by the ruling classes.

    The Revenge of the Clerisy

    Trump, of course, won’t end up executed, but simply excommunicated from polite society. He will creep back to his Manhattan keep, surrounded by gold and glitter, celebrated by as many retainers as he can afford. The same, however, cannot be said for those who rallied to his cause in the thus-far unrealized hopes that we could protect them from the cognoscenti’s plans to refashion, and largely diminish, ordinary American’s daily lives and economic prospects.

    Trump’s faltering rebellion has been manna from heaven for the same swamp people—in both parties—who have been steering our democratic republic toward feudalism for a generation. Their ideology, notes author Michael Lind, sees themselves as a deserving meritocracy rather than a reflection of the persistence of social class.

    In the end, Trump may succeed in doing something that, a few months ago, would have seemed impossible. He has elevated the very people who concocted policies, from “free trade” to open borders to the wars of the Middle East and Obamacare, that alienated millions of Americans. He has woken up the entire apparatus, from the CIA and FBI to the State Department and the EPA, who now send their insider effluence to the remaining journalists who consider bringing down the president as the new crusade.

    It is not too much of an exaggeration that the media is now a fundamental part of progressive clerisy. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 96 percent of all media outlet donations went to Hillary Clinton last year. This process has been accelerated by the shift of media to an ever smaller, and ever more blue series of cities. More than half of all journalism jobs are now in cities which Clinton won by over 30 points; in 2008 they had less than a third.

    This may explain why celebrating and even being participants in the “deep state resistance”—which would seem to be contrary to traditional liberal views about popular sovereignty—has become a critical part of the media messaging. Yet, particularly after Trump, the clerisy no longer feels it needs to contain its contempt for the population. One does not have to be a Trump supporter to see the long-term dangers to democratic governance from over-empowered civil servants openly contemptuous of voters and the people they vote for.

    Over the next few years, Trump’s failure will elevate these “experts” who, in the anti-expert Trump, have found a perfect foil. Every time the president, or his minions, say something stupid (which is often), the talking heads and academics can harrumph about how the country should be run by Ph.D.s and J.D.s who, they feel, should direct rule on the unruly masses from above. To combat them, Trump lacks the eloquence of a Reagan, or the ferocity of a Jackson.

    Oligarchs Restored

    The notion of “Making America Great Again” had its flaws, but appealed to people who hoped to see middle-class jobs return to the country. It energized the suburbs and small cities who now find themselves led by an incompetent leader who appears to have used them, like patrons of a casino. Lured by an image of glamour they will find their wallets lightened rather than their spirits lifted.

    The big winners long-term as Trump fails to deliver will be the country’s emergent tech oligarchy. Allied with the clerisy, and with an expanding, soon to be dominant, role in the media, they will create the conditions and define the future culture. Hollywood and Wall Street will be partners, but the nerds of the Valley will rule the economy.

    To be sure automation and digitization brings many benefits, but Silicon Valley firms have secured advantage for reasons beyond being technically adept. Firms like Apple pay little in the way of taxes (thanks as much to Republicans as Democrats), and companies like Google manage to avoid anti-trust action. The rules are different for the oligarchs; they can afford to raise money without making a profit, as was the case of Amazon, Uber, and others. The shop on Main Street, or the store owner in the strip mall, enjoy no such advantage.

    It is almost impossible to overestimate the power of these corporations. Apple alone for example has more cash on hand than the total reserves of both the United Kingdom and Canada. Four of the world’s richest people come from either the Seattle or Silicon Valley tech community. More important for the future, techno-nerds account for the most of 23 American billionaires under 40; 12 live in San Francisco, the de facto blue capital, alone.

    The triumph of the oligarchs may spell the end of America as we have known it. Increasingly the core functions—and the big rewards—are concentrated in fewer hands and in fewer places. The distress being felt in rural areas and second-tier cities has its roots in globalization which, as Chicago sociologist Richard Longworth suggested two decades ago, undermines the industrial and routine business functions while boosting the already fantastic wealth of top echelon of executives, and those who serve them.

    To keep the voters and the people they vote for at bay, the oligarchs will make common cause with the social justice warriors (as we saw during the election) and the greens to confine and control the terms of our national conversation as they work to expand and enforce a neo-feudal order.

    The hoi polloi? They will get a stipend from the wealth generated by the oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg. Likely not enough to start a business or own a home, but good enough to stave off homelessness or starvation. Silicon Valley and its media tools will forge a generation plugged into its phone but that owns little, and spends its limited capital on media, gadgets, and other idle pursuits. Americans will become more like a nature of serfs, their daily bread dependent on the kindness of their betters, their iPhone serving as both the new confessional and ephemeral town square.

    This is precisely the America that Trump’s supporters sought to prevent, but may soon be stuck with. Not because the middle and working class has failed, but because Trump, due to his dysfunctional ways and inborn class biases, has betrayed the very people who put him in office.

    This piece originally appeared on The Daily Beast.

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

    Photo by Jax House, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • The Silicon Valley Mindset

    The tech industry is one of the most powerful entities affecting our world. But who are these people? And what do they believe and how do they think about the world? A couple of recent articles provide a window into this.

    Rationalist Demographics

    The first is a set of demographics from the reader survey (unscientific, but with 5500 respondents) of the popular blog Slate Star Codex. SSC is the web site of Scott Alexander, pen name of a Midwest psychiatrist. It’s explicitly associated with the Rationalist movement and especially the Less Wrong community. If you’d like to get a feel for the Rationalist way of life, see the New York Times Magazine profile of them. One site says of them:

    …typical rationalist philosophical positions include reductionism, materialism, moral non-realism, utilitarianism, anti-deathism and transhumanism. Rationalists across all three groups tend to have high opinions of the Sequences and Slate Star Codex and cite both in arguments; rationalist discourse norms were shaped by How To Actually Change Your Mind and 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong, among others.

    They analyze the world in terms of Bayesianism, game theory, trying to become aware of personal biases, etc. They are trying to improve themselves and the world through a clearer sense of reality as informed by their philosophical worldview above. Their heartland is Silicon Valley, though there’s a group of them NYC too of course.

    Alexander is a psychiatrist, but this community, and the Rationalists generally, is highly tech centric. Alexander himself is a defender of Silicon Valley. His readership is predominantly in computer science and other related tech professions, and overlaps heavily with Silicon Valley.

    His readers are 90% male, 89% white (Asians under-represented vs the Valley), and 81% atheist or agnostic. They skew significantly left in their politics. 55% of them are explicitly politically left, with another 24% libertarian. A higher percentage actually describe themselves as neoreactionary or alt-right (6.3%) than conservative (5.7%).

    The following table shows their responses on various topics:

    Item Left/Globalist Position Right/Populist Positions
    Immigration 55.8% more permissive 20.3% more restrictive
    Feminism 48.1% favorable 28.4% unfavorable
    Donald Trump 82.3% unfavorable 6.6% favorable
    Basic Income 60.1% favor 18.6% oppose
    Global Warming 72.8% requires action 13.7% does not require action
    Weightlifting 64.4% no/rarely 22.5% yes/often

    Silicon Valley Founders Survey

    A second source comes from a recent City Journal article by former Tech Crunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein. He used the Crunchbase database to survey 147 tech founders, including a few billionaires and other influentials, to get a sense of their belief system.

    One of his core findings is that Silicon Valley founders are strong believers in income inequality.

    The most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

    The founders he surveyed (a tiny subset so beware of error margins) 2/3 believed that the top 10% of people would collect 50% or more of all the income in a meritocracy (the system they endorse).

    Y Combinator Paul Graham got in trouble for openly talking about inequality as inevitable. Not because other Valley execs thought he was wrong, but because the optics are bad. It’s similar to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. His real crime was being so gauche as to put a picture of Ayn Rand as his Twitter avatar. He should have known that he was supposed to spout politically palatable bromides while running his company in a Rand-like mode, which seems to be how many of these firms in fact operate.

    Speaking of which, the politics of Silicon Valley are an odd mix of leftism and hyper-market economics. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley donates money to the Democrats and to progressive causes. (They also largely hate Donald Trump with a passion). What’s more, they have a communitarian streak and don’t think of themselves as hard core individualists:

    Indeed, in my survey, founders displayed a strong orientation toward collectivism. Fifty-nine percent believed in a health-care mandate, compared with just 21 percent of self-identified libertarians. They also believed that the government should coerce people into making wise personal decisions, such as whether to eat healthier foods. Sixty-two percent said that individual decisions had an impact on many other people, justifying government intervention.

    But they also support a neoliberal vision of the economy.

    Silicon Valley’s reputation as a haven for small-government activists isn’t entirely off base: the Valley does support some staunchly libertarian ideas, and the tech elite are not typical Democrats. They don’t like regulations or labor unions. For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have both given hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools and supported policies that would allow public schools to fire teachers more readily and dodge union membership. Big tech lobbyists are also strong supporters of free trade. According to Maplight, several telecommunications companies have lobbied for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that union groups and many Democrats oppose.

    …

    Theirs is a move to make public schools more like charters—a different focus from a libertarian vision of simply privatizing the education system. The tech elite want to bring the essence of free markets to all things public and private. Using traditional American political categories, this would land them in the Republican camp.

    This is most evident in their techno-utopianism and belief that unbridled creative destruction always brings long run benefits:

    On the capitalistic side, tech founders were extraordinarily optimistic about the nature of change, especially the kind of unpredictable “creative destruction” associated with free markets. Philosophically, most tech founders believe that “change over the long run is inherently positive.” Or, as Hillary Clinton supporter and billionaire Reid Hoffman told me: “I tend to believe that most Silicon Valley people are very much long-term optimists. . . . Could we have a bad 20 years? Absolutely. But if you’re working toward progress, your future will be better than your present.”

    They in part reconcile all these through a belief in high taxation and redistribution, especially in the form of a basic income. This policy idea, nowhere fully implemented, is probably completely unknown to most Americans, yet has strong majority support in Silicon Valley (60% of SSC’s readers).

    The Silicon Valley State of Mind

    Combining these, what we see is that Silicon Valley is made up overwhelmingly of men, who are highly intelligent and with extreme faith in their intelligence and rationality, largely atheist, and largely leftist in their thinking, but who believe in an aristocracy of talent.

    They exhibit extreme faith in the goodness of technical progress and seem to believe that human problems can be resolved almost entirely through the realm of technology and engineering. They believe in policy, but a technocratic vision of it in which their rationalist designs, powered by technology, inform government decisions.

    One might say they are naive, but their track record of success gives them reasons for confidence. Consider Uber. Uber is effectively a technological workaround to dysfunctional politics and regulation. It has revolutionized transportation in many cities were taxis were before almost not available. Where almost all other reform efforts failed, Uber was a spectacular success. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely successful at what they do. And in any case, Silicon Valley’s “fail false” mentality means that they don’t necessarily see their failures – say, Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million schools fiasco in Newark – as a reflection on their capabilities. Many failures and a handful of grand slams is how their system is designed to function.

    What’s more, it’s not just them who thinks they can fix things. Much of the rest of society seems to believe it too. For example, Alon Levy just put up a post examining the composition of NY Gov. Cuomo’s “MTA Genius Grant” panel, and how it is heavily slanted towards tech people vs. transportation people. Of course, the politicians and transport people have failed with the MTA to date. So they lose credibility by failures as Silicon Valley gains it with successes.

    However, their techno-optimistic view perhaps leads them to underestimate second and third order consequences and overestimate their ability to deal with them. For example, perhaps more than anyone else, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey made Donald Trump’s presidency possible. Without his social media impact, and the ability of his troll army to drive news cycles, I very much doubt he would have gotten over the top. That’s a second order effect they never anticipated.

    Also, Trump himself is a classic example of creative destruction. He disrupted the politics business in the same way Netflix disrupted the video rental one. Yet they despise him and don’t think this is a positive change. It seems that they only like disruption when they are the ones controlling it, and don’t really believe in creative destruction per se. Instead it’s just another term of art for their taking over one industry after another.

    They themselves have no problem at all radically reordering society with unproven policies at levels far beyond what almost any political figure would do. Their blasé acceptance of massive job destruction and embrace of a speculative basic income scheme to compensate illustrate that. It’s no surprise to me that Mencius Moldbug, the founder of neoreaction (one of the sub-tribes commonly grouped with the alt-right that believes in absolute monarchy or the state as a publicly traded sovereign corporation), is a Silicon Valley techie and startup founder who reportedly started out in the Rationalist movement.

    They are also comfortable with an almost feudal distribution of wealth, so long as it’s based on an aristocracy of talent rather than heredity. And it’s an aristocracy that believes it should rule as well as profit. When they talk about a communitarian ethos in which the government needs to compel people to act properly, it’s pretty clear who the determinant of that is. It will of course be intelligent “rationalists” like them, who know what is right, have the technology to bring it into being, and whose motivations are beyond question (at least in their own mind).

    It’s a stunningly grandiose vision. Much like the EU, I suspect the public’s tolerance for it will be directly proportional to benefits continuously delivered. To the extent that Silicon Valley is able to deliver benefits to the common good, few will stand in their way. If the benefits slow, or the costs (including second and third order costs) start exceeding the benefits, we’ll see how it turns out for them.

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

    Photo by Maurizio Pesce via Flickr, using CC License.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Prague

    Prague is the capital of Czechia, a nation most readers have probably never heard of. Last year, the Czech Republic adopted a new name that does not reveal its governance structure (republic). The new name has not enjoyed widespread acclaim. The union of Czechoslovakia, which dates from the end of World War I, split peacefully in 1993, resulting in the creation of Czech Republic and Slovakia.

    Prague, like its central and eastern European cousins, Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest, has experienced substantial decentralization of its population following the collapse of communism. As economies improved and more housing choices opened up, many residents opted to move to outer parts of the core cities or even beyond to suburban and exurban areas.

    Today, the municipality of Prague has approximately 100,000 more residents than in 1980. Yet, the distribution of the population is quite different than before. Then, the central and inner districts of the city had a population of approximately 980,000, while the outer districts were home to 200,000. The latest Czech Statistical Office estimates (for January 1, 2017) show the center and inner districts have declined to approximately 785,000 residents. The city’s outer districts have experienced all of the population increase, more than doubling to above 460,000.

    Meanwhile, two-thirds of the growth (Graphic 1) has been in the suburbs of the Středočeský region (Central Bohemia), which surrounds Prague (Graphic 2).

    The Historic Inner District

    Prague’s central district (District 1) comprises the pre-transit walking core of the city. It stretches across the Vltava River (Smetana’s “The Moldau”) from Wenceslaus Square across the Charles Bridge to Prague Castle, the site of St. Vitus Cathedral. The district also includes the Old Town Square. The population of District 1 dropped from 53,000 in 1980 to 29,000 in 2017, a decline of 44 percent.

    The most recent historic events have virtually all taken place in District 1. The 1968 revolt against Soviet control occurred in Wenceslaus Square and was put down by Warsaw Pact military action and tanks, with a loss of 500 Czechoslovakian citizens.

    This was the end of Alexander Dubček’s “Prague Spring” attempt to liberalize communism. Dubček rose from head of the Slovak communist party to leader of the Czechoslovakian communist government. Dubček, however, was luckier than Imre Nagy of Hungary, the communist leader who paid for his liberalizing tendencies by being executed after the 1956 rebellion.

    Wenceslaus Square, named after St. Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia, was also the center of the “Velvet Revolution”. Led by Václav Havel, he became Czechoslovakia’s first president following the fall of communism. The communist parliament building (Graphic 3) played a major role, as described by prague-stay.com:

    “This Communist eyesore, loathed by many, loved by few was built after the old Exchange building was destroyed from 1966 – 1973. This glass monstrosity with its two giant pillars is still complete with nuclear shelters. The demands of the Velvet Revolution were accepted here in 1989 and the building was once home to Radio Free Europe who rented the location from former president Vaclav Havel for a very small fee per year (rumor has it that the fee was 1 CZK).”

    I watched Dubček, an unsurprising supporter of the Velvet Revolution, from the building’s gallery in his role as chairman of the national parliament in 1991. Soon after, the national parliament relocated from the building, which is now part of the National Museum. The main building is shown in the top photograph (my photo was not used because of the present scaffolding being used in its refurbishment).

    There is a memorial to victims of the 1968 Warsaw Pact action in front of the main building (Graphic 4), with a barbed wire wreath. Graphics 5 to 7 are also of Wenceslaus Square, which some travel guide books point out is more of a boulevard than a square.

    Old Town Square is shown in Graphics 8 to 12. Charles Bridge is illustrated in Graphics 13 to 16. This historic bridge was built between 1357 and 1402. The approach to Prague Castle and related views are in Graphics 17 to 21. Other views of the inner district are in Graphic 22 (the National Theatre) and Graphic 23.

    Inner and Outer Districts of Prague

    The inner districts (2 through 10) were mainly developed during the mass transit area. The outer districts, where all the city’s growth has occurred, have generally lower population densities. There are some detached houses in the outer districts. Besides the historical buildings, Prague, like other European cities, is in many ways spatially dominated by the automobile, with its narrow, crowded streets and parking on sidewalks. (Graphics 24 to 27).

    The Suburbs

    The Středočeský region surrounds Prague and contains both suburban and exurban development (Graphics 28 to 36), including new construction (Graphics 30 to 36). The Středočeský suburbs exhibit a high quality of suburban infrastructure for eastern Europe, including sidewalks in most cases and curbs. However, the quality of the visible suburban infrastructure falls considerably short of that enjoyed by suburban residents of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where for decades nearly all suburban development has included these features, as well as streets wide enough for parking and cars to pass one-another in opposite directions.

    The Prague Area: Dominating Czechia’s Population Growth

    As is occurring in Tokyo-Yokohama and Budapest, the Prague area is capturing nearly all the national growth, at 86 percent. This includes 58 percent in the suburbs and 28 percent in the outer districts. This is a far greater percentage than Prague’s 25 percent of the population in 1980. (Graphic 37).

    Prague’s Popularity

    For nearly three decades, Prague has been the capital of a nation free to set its own course, the longest period since the 1918 establishment of Czechoslovakia. Prague has become particularly popular among foreign tourists. Trip Advisor ranked Prague 5th among the cities of Europe last year, trailing London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona and ninth in the world. It is no minor accomplishment to edge out cities like Vienna, Amsterdam, and Budapest.

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

    Top photograph: National Museum. Main building. By Jorge Láscar [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Seattle Booms in Latest Census City-Level Estimates

    Seattle tops the growth charts among the top 25 cities in the Census Bureau’s latest release of 2016 city and town population estimates.

    Seattle, a land-locked (no annexation) city in the Pacific Northwest with a limited history of high density, managed to add 20,847 people last year, a growth rate of over 3% – tops among the 25 largest cities. Seattle has added about 94,000 people just since 2010. That’s over 15% growth. The total population growth in Seattle last year was about the same as that in New York City. Even if you rank by total change instead of percentage, Seattle would still be 5th out of the top 25 – ahead of some much larger places and some much sprawlier places.

    Seattle’s urban and regional population growth are strong. It is a national bright spot for transit growth. Its tech economy is nova hot. I haven’t been there in a while, but it seems to me that Seattle is a city undergoing a significant transformation to the next level.

    All but three of the top 25 cities posted growth in population, showing that there’s definitely central city growth happening in many places, even if the preponderance of national growth is suburban. The older cores of NYC, SF, DC, Boston, and Philly are all growing. Even the cities of Dallas and Ft. Worth grew nicely. Only Chicago, Detroit, and Memphis lost population. Houston, a geographically gigantic central city, posted fairly weak growth compared to what one might have expected.

    In the Midwest, Columbus passed Indianapolis to become the 14th largest city in the country. Detroit, despite enormous population loss, is still about the same population as Boston and Washington, DC.

    Here are the 25 largest cities in the country in 2016, ranked by year over year population growth rate:

    Rank City 2015 2016 Total Change Pct Change
    1 Seattle city, WA 683,505 704,352 20,847 3.05%
    2 Fort Worth city, TX 834,171 854,113 19,942 2.39%
    3 Phoenix city, AZ 1,582,904 1,615,017 32,113 2.03%
    4 Denver city, CO 680,032 693,060 13,028 1.92%
    5 Austin city, TX 930,152 947,890 17,738 1.91%
    6 Charlotte city, NC 826,395 842,051 15,656 1.89%
    7 San Antonio city, TX 1,468,037 1,492,510 24,473 1.67%
    8 Washington city, DC 670,377 681,170 10,793 1.61%
    9 Dallas city, TX 1,297,327 1,317,929 20,602 1.59%
    10 Jacksonville city, FL 867,164 880,619 13,455 1.55%
    11 Columbus city, OH 850,044 860,090 10,046 1.18%
    12 San Diego city, CA 1,390,915 1,406,630 15,715 1.13%
    13 Boston city, MA 665,984 673,184 7,200 1.08%
    14 San Francisco city, CA 862,004 870,887 8,883 1.03%
    15 Nashville-Davidson metropolitan government (balance), TN 654,078 660,388 6,310 0.96%
    16 Houston city, TX 2,284,816 2,303,482 18,666 0.82%
    17 Los Angeles city, CA 3,949,149 3,976,322 27,173 0.69%
    18 El Paso city, TX 678,570 683,080 4,510 0.66%
    19 Indianapolis city (balance), IN 852,295 855,164 2,869 0.34%
    20 San Jose city, CA 1,022,627 1,025,350 2,723 0.27%
    21 New York city, NY 8,516,502 8,537,673 21,171 0.25%
    22 Philadelphia city, PA 1,564,964 1,567,872 2,908 0.19%
    23 Memphis city, TN 654,454 652,717 -1,737 -0.27%
    24 Chicago city, IL 2,713,596 2,704,958 -8,638 -0.32%
    25 Detroit city, MI 676,336 672,795 -3,541 -0.52%

    And here are the top 25 ranked by the 2010-2016 growth rate.

    Rank City 2010 2016 Total Change Pct Change
    1 Austin city, TX 815,587 947,890 132,303 16.22%
    2 Seattle city, WA 610,403 704,352 93,949 15.39%
    3 Denver city, CO 603,329 693,060 89,731 14.87%
    4 Fort Worth city, TX 748,719 854,113 105,394 14.08%
    5 Charlotte city, NC 738,561 842,051 103,490 14.01%
    6 Washington city, DC 605,183 681,170 75,987 12.56%
    7 San Antonio city, TX 1,333,952 1,492,510 158,558 11.89%
    8 Phoenix city, AZ 1,450,629 1,615,017 164,388 11.33%
    9 Dallas city, TX 1,200,711 1,317,929 117,218 9.76%
    10 Houston city, TX 2,105,625 2,303,482 197,857 9.40%
    11 Nashville-Davidson metropolitan government (balance), TN 604,893 660,388 55,495 9.17%
    12 Columbus city, OH 790,864 860,090 69,226 8.75%
    13 Boston city, MA 620,701 673,184 52,483 8.46%
    14 San Francisco city, CA 805,766 870,887 65,121 8.08%
    15 San Diego city, CA 1,306,153 1,406,630 100,477 7.69%
    16 San Jose city, CA 955,290 1,025,350 70,060 7.33%
    17 Jacksonville city, FL 823,318 880,619 57,301 6.96%
    18 El Paso city, TX 650,604 683,080 32,476 4.99%
    19 Los Angeles city, CA 3,796,292 3,976,322 180,030 4.74%
    20 New York city, NY 8,192,026 8,537,673 345,647 4.22%
    21 Indianapolis city (balance), IN 821,659 855,164 33,505 4.08%
    22 Philadelphia city, PA 1,528,427 1,567,872 39,445 2.58%
    23 Chicago city, IL 2,697,736 2,704,958 7,222 0.27%
    24 Memphis city, TN 652,456 652,717 261 0.04%
    25 Detroit city, MI 711,088 672,795 -38,293 -5.39%

    And the top 25 ranked by total 2016 population:

    Rank City 2016
    1 New York city, NY 8,537,673
    2 Los Angeles city, CA 3,976,322
    3 Chicago city, IL 2,704,958
    4 Houston city, TX 2,303,482
    5 Phoenix city, AZ 1,615,017
    6 Philadelphia city, PA 1,567,872
    7 San Antonio city, TX 1,492,510
    8 San Diego city, CA 1,406,630
    9 Dallas city, TX 1,317,929
    10 San Jose city, CA 1,025,350
    11 Austin city, TX 947,890
    12 Jacksonville city, FL 880,619
    13 San Francisco city, CA 870,887
    14 Columbus city, OH 860,090
    15 Indianapolis city (balance), IN 855,164
    16 Fort Worth city, TX 854,113
    17 Charlotte city, NC 842,051
    18 Seattle city, WA 704,352
    19 Denver city, CO 693,060
    20 El Paso city, TX 683,080
    21 Washington city, DC 681,170
    22 Boston city, MA 673,184
    23 Detroit city, MI 672,795
    24 Nashville-Davidson metropolitan government (balance), TN 660,388
    25 Memphis city, TN 652,717

    This post originally appeared on Urbanophile.

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

    Photo by Rattlhed at English Wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • The Best Small and Medium-Size Cities For Jobs 2017

    Much of the U.S. media tends to see smaller cities as backwaters, inevitably left behind as the “best and brightest” head to the country’s mega-regions. The new economy, insists the Washington Post, favors large cities for start-ups and new businesses. Richard Florida has posited the emergence of a “winner take all urbanism” that tends to favor the richest cities, such as New York and San Francisco.

    However this paradigm may reflect cosmopolitan attitudes and rivalries between large cities more than reality, with its complications and nuances. Smaller cities have long been disadvantaged in their ability to attract the most elite companies and Americans on the move, but that may well be changing. Following a post-financial crisis period in which many domestic migrants headed to the big cities, the latest Census data suggests that the flow is now going the other way, with the native born moving to smaller places with between 500,000 and a million people. The new trend in migration, notes the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, a confirmed big city booster, has been a “great hollowing out,” with Americans leaving places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for the suburbs and less costly, usually smaller cities. (Note that at least in New York’s case, foreign immigrants have been taking their places.)

    To be sure, many smaller towns are suffering, and the bottom of our annual survey of employment trends in America’s 421 metro areas is dominated by them, starting with last place Beckley, W.V.; followed by Johnstown, Pa.; Charleston, W.V.; Weirton-Steubenville, Ohio; and Peoria, Illinois. Yet at the same time small city America — which we define as metro areas with less than 150,000 jobs — accounted for seven of the 10 cities where job growth has been the strongest.

    2017 Best Cities Rankings Lists

    Methodology

    Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2005, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. We have compiled separate rankings for America’s 70 largest metropolitan statistical areas (those with nonfarm employment over 450,000), as well as medium-size metro areas (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small ones (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs), the latter two of which are our focus this week, in order to make the comparisons more relevant to each category. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here).

    The Utah Model

    What makes for successful smaller cities? There’s no simple formula, but several characteristics loom prominently. One is the extent and quality of its amenities: Many of our top cities are in attractive locations near mountains or the ocean, and tend to be home to colleges and universities. And, almost without exception, they are located in less costly, lower-tax states. Finally, it doesn’t hurt to be relatively close to a bigger urban area and a large airport.

    All these characteristics apply to the best metro area for jobs in 2017 — Provo-Orem, Utah. Located an hour south of Salt Lake City and its big airport, the Provo-Orem area has a population of 603,000 and sits alongside the scenic Wasatch Mountains. It’s home to the well-regarded Brigham Young University. Last year the metro area’s job count expanded an impressive 4.4%, and employment is up 29.2% since 2011. As one might suspect in a college-oriented area, the biggest growth has been in fields that tend to hire educated people, such as business and professional services, in which employment grew 5.8% last year, financial services (up 6.7%) and the information sector (plus 5.8%).

    But Provo is not alone in outstanding job growth in the Beehive State. In addition to its largest metro area, Salt Lake City, which ranks 13th, the small city of Saint George ranks third. Also benefiting from a scenic location in the state’s rugged southwestern corner, it’s less of a college town than a retirement and tourism magnet, which explains much of its 5.7% job growth last year. This was driven in large part by big expansions in health and education, with employment in those sectors up 4.6% last year and some 31.8% since 2011.

    Another Utah superstar is 18th-ranked Ogden-Clearfield. Its 2.9% job growth last year was driven in large part by financial services, with employment up 5.7%, and education and health, up 5.9%.

    So what accounts for one relatively small state that’s home to only 3.1% of the U.S. population placing four cities in the top 20? Among the factors: the nation’s fastest population growth, a highly favorable business climate (Gov. Gary Herbert has made cutting red tape a priority of his administration), a burgeoning tech sector and a Mormon-influenced social culture that seems to encourage citizen engagement in local affairs.

    Other Hot Spots

    The other smaller boom towns are a varied lot, although all share locations in low tax, light regulation states. Some bigger cities — San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose — seem to have found a way to keep growing in higher cost environments, but this does not seem to be the case for smaller cities. Virtually all the small communities in our top 20 — with the exception of No. 8 Fort Collins, Colo., — come from such reddish states as the Carolinas, Texas, Idaho and, of course, Utah.

    Most of the fastest-growing metro areas tend to be in what some have called “amenity regions.” This is certainly the case for Ft. Collins, No. 9 Gainesville, Ga., No. 10 The Villages, Fla., and No. 17 Boise, Idaho. Many of these places, notably the Villages, are attractive to retirees and downshifting boomers while others may also lure young families.

    Yet there are some wide differences among our top small cities. Smaller cities often have very distinctive economies dominated by one or two industries. Sixth-ranked Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, a metropolitan area that sprawls between Missouri and Arkansas, is dominated by two forces, Bentonville-based Walmart, and a burgeoning retirement/tourism sector tied to its location in the scenic Ozarks. The area which enjoyed 3.3% job growth last year, and 20.4% since 2011, was paced by an expanding professional and business services sector, up a sizzling 8.0% last year; other dynamic sectors include financial services, up 4.5% last year, as well as the education and health, which grew 4.0%.

    Charleston-North Charleston, which ranked 4th on our list with a 3.2% job growth rate last year and 17.6% since 2011, epitomizes the new dynamic small cities. Not only does the area boast a charming ante-bellum urban core, and some of the country’s best food, it has also become attractive to companies seeking to lower costs. The city is home to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner assembly plant and to Mercedes-Benz’s $500 million Charleston plant, which will add 1,300 jobs over the next few years. It is also about to house Volvo’s first North American manufacturing plant – a $500 million investment that could add up to 4,000 jobs home. Charleston has also emerged as something of a millennial draw as well, with the largest percentage of residents aged 25 to 34 of any midsized city.

    2017 Best Cities Rankings Lists

    The Future of Smaller Cities

    In contrast to the conventional wisdom, smaller cities may have a brighter future than many expect. Of course, it’s hard to see a rapid turnaround in some deindustrialized cities, particularly in the Midwest. Many energy-dependent cities are down sharply in our ranking from a year ago, including Baton Rouge, La., which dropped 97 places to 191st, and Bismarck, N.D., which plummeted 119 places to 221st. The Trump administration certainly has made noise about helping the energy industry, but the cold reality of the current global oversupply of oil suggests these places won’t be rebounding much in the near term.

    Right now, prospects seem best for amenity rich areas, in part because they appeal to both aging boomer and younger families. The scenic Pacific Northwest is home to many gainers this year, including Olympia-Tumwater, Wash., which gained as impressive 64 places from last year to 21st, Wenatchee, which rose seven spots to 22nd, and Bellingham, which jumped 100 places to 63rd.

    In the South, the attractive coastal city Wilmington, N.C., rose 76 places to 54th, and the Florida beach towns Northport-Sarasota-Bradenton, climbed 28 spots to 35th while Punta Gorda gained 26 places to 39th.

    The future of smaller American cities, in some senses, parallels that of their larger counterparts. Some areas seem positioned for further growth, while many others are stagnating or even dropping. The small city is far from obsolete, with a good number of them poised to expand strongly in the years ahead.

    This piece originally appeared on Forbes.

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

    Dr. Michael Shires primary areas of teaching and research include state, regional and local policy; technology and democracy; higher education policy; strategic, political and organizational issues in public policy; and quantitative analysis. He often serves as a consultant to local and state government on issues related to finance, education policy and governance. Dr. Shires has been quoted as an expert in various publications including USA Today, Newsweek, The Economist, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He has also appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, KTLA and KCAL to name a few.

    Photo by City of St. George (City of St. George) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • What Trump has wrought

    Just a few short months ago, we seemed on the brink of a new political era. Donald Trump improbably was headed to the White House, while the Democratic Party, at near historic lows in statehouse power and without control of either house of Congress, seemed to be facing a lengthy period in political purgatory.

    Today some progressive voices still see a “bleak” future, but it is increasingly the Republican Party, and its shattered conservative core, that is reeling. Bitterly divided among themselves, and led by a petulant president with record-low ratings, the Republicans seem to be headed to a major crash just six months after a surprising victory.

    Gone from view now are visions of a renewed Republican Party uniting its traditional base with historically Democratic parts of Middle America. Rather than a realignment in the mode of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, the Trump administration seems to be devolving into a remarkably early interregnum, a pause between alternating progressive eras.

    Trump supporters, not Trump, the real losers

    Donald Trump’s nationalist agenda started with a natural appeal to much ignored non-cosmopolitan America. Unlike the seemingly diffident and distant Barack Obama, Trump offered a laser-like focus on growing high-wage jobs for the declining middle and working classes. A reform agenda on everything from deregulation and taxes seemed to have the potential to escape the low-growth “new normal” and restore broad-based opportunity across the country.

    Due to his obsession with media relations and personal peccadilloes, Trump now has managed to undermine any chance of developing a coherent program to restore dynamism in Middle America. Although some regulatory relief has been imposed, mainly by reversing President Obama’s rule-by-decree, the president has failed to pass a program — for example, new infrastructure spending — that might expand productivity and expand employment opportunities. Instead, he has regressed, in his rare coherent moments, to the GOP corporatist, free-market theology, which threatens many entitlements, notably health care, on which so many Trump voters now depend.

    Trump’s failure to achieve long-term change will end up hurting not just his precious “brand,” but, more importantly, voters and states that backed him. To many who work in manufacturing, energy, homebuilding or agriculture, the president seemed to be a savior. Now these industries may only have four years — at most — before the hammer comes down again, with only the U.S. Supreme Court serving as a possible restraint.

    Read the entire piece at the Orange Country Register.

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

    Photo by Michael Vadon, obtained via Flickr, using the CC License.