New Geography

Category: Politics

  • Is There A Civilization War Going On?

    “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” — Arnold J. Toynbee

    From the heart of Europe to North America, nativism, sometimes tinged by white nationalist extremism, is on the rise. In recent elections, parties identified, sometimes correctly, as alt-right have made serious gains in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, pushing even centrist parties in their direction. The election of Donald Trump can also be part of this movement.

    Why is this occurring? There are economic causes to be sure, but perhaps the best explanation is cultural, reflecting a sense, not totally incorrect, that western civilization is on the decline, a movement as much self-inflicted as put upon.

    French intellectuals first to see the trend

    In 1973 a cranky French intellectual, Jean Raspail, published a speculative novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” which depicted a Europe overrun by refugees from the developing world. In 2015 another cranky Frenchman, Michael Houellenbecq, wrote a bestseller, “Submission,” which predicted much the same thing, ending with the installation of an Islamist government in France.

    Both novels place the blame for the collapse of the Western liberal state not on the immigrants but on cultural, political and business leaders all too reluctant to stand up for their own civilization. This is reflected in such things as declining respect for free speech, the importance of citizenship, and even the weakening of the family, an institution now rejected as bad for the environment and even less enlightened than singlehood.

    Critically, the assault on traditional liberalism has come mostly not from the reactionary bestiary, but elements of the often-cossetted left. It is not rightist fascism that threatens most but its pre-condition, the systematic undermining of liberal society from within.

    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: JÄNNICK Jérémy [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • The New State Role Models

    With Congress on what appears to be a permanent hold, the search for a workable political model now shifts increasingly to states and localities. Today America’s divergent geographies resemble separate planets, with policy agendas from immigration and climate change that vary wildly from place to place.

    The greatest divide lies between the deep blue states, notably California, and progressive America’s network of large urban centers and the generally less dense, more suburban-dominated red states. Their policy prescriptions may vary, but, if allowed to continue, the differing jurisdictions could end up serving as what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called “laboratories of democracy.”

    So, the critical question remains what policies work best. The answers may not be as simple as ideologues on the left and right might claim, but instead suggest, as President Bill Clinton once did, that our stunning diversity cannot easily follow a single political script.

    California and the blue state model

    Democrats may be at a historic low in terms of control of states and local jurisdictions, but they boast almost total domination in many of the richest, most influential and powerful locales. New York, California, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey are all tilting left with policies driven by powerful public employees, greens, urban real estate speculators as well as ethnic and gender activists.

    To be sure, kowtowing to these interests has landed these states among the worst fiscal situations in the nation. Yet some blue regions also have grown economically well above the national average since 2010, largely driven by asset inflation, particularly real estate and stocks, and technology. California’s robust growth, although now slowing, and its world-dominating tech sector has made it a creditable role model for similarly minded states.

    But what has been good in the aggregate has not worked so well for most Californians. Despite all the constant complaining about inequality and racial injustice, California, notes progressive economist James Galbraith, has also become among the most economically unequal parts of the country, topped only by Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. Particularly damaged have been the prospects for the young and minorities, particularly in terms of achieving homeownership.

    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: Entheta (talk)Salt_Lake_Temple,_Utah_-_Sept_2004.jpg: Diliff (Salt_Lake_Temple,_Utah_-_Sept_2004.jpg) [CC BY 2.5, GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Local Empowerment Should Be About Local Matters

    I’ve generally been someone who wants to see local governments have more power and flexibility to meet local needs. My rationale is simple. States are full of diverse communities that are a bad fit for one size fits all policies. Chicago, Danville, Peoria, Cairo, etc. are radically different places. They have different circumstances, needs, and local priorities. Hence it makes sense for them to have the ability to chart their own course to some degree. Some states have accommodated this to some extent through classes of cities with different powers based on size. Others give even more flexibility through home rule or individualized city charters.

    A good example of responding to local needs was Austin’s regulation of Uber. They were responding to specific local complaints about sexual assault by Uber drivers. And they put in place regulatory requirements including fingerprint background checks directly targeted at this problem.

    Similarly Oklahoma City used its sales tax powers to put forth a series of referendums to approve temporary tax hikes to fund capital improvements like parks, sidewalks, and school renovations. (This was their Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) initiative).

    Today though we are seeing cities abuse their local authority. Rather than using them for bona fide local matters, they are deploying them to politically grandstand and/or affect federal or state policy.

    For example, we hear about cities and mayors being the locus of the “Resistance” to Trump. We also see explicit strategies like the “Fight for $15” minimum wage effort that is attempting to create a new national minimum wage through bottoms up change at the local level. Note at the $15/hr minimum wage has little to do with local economic conditions, but is the target in all kinds of places. It may well be that people can’t get the full $15/hr through, but it’s being promoted as the new base.

    Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of any of these items, when cities explicitly state their desire to, for example, subvert US foreign policy, this weakens the case against state preemption laws and for local empowerment generally. When local leaders get outside the areas where they are clearly chartered to do business (infrastructure, education, sanitation, etc) and get into areas traditionally more heavy on state or federal rulemaking and not nearly so obvious a local function (economic regulation, climate policy, etc), don’t be surprised when the other levels of government who see themselves running the show in those matters swoop in and drop the hammer.

    Obviously, this won’t necessarily protect you. Austin was not trying to tell the state or national government or any other city how to regulate Uber. The Texas legislature, wrongly in my view, override their ordinance anyway. But it’s still not a good idea to gratuitously invite trouble.

    Mayors do not in fact rule the world. In the US, municipalities are structurally weak entities in most cases. We can debate all day long whether things should be different, but at this point that’s reality. To earn the right to go to legislatures to get more authority, or even to just keep the authority that they have, cities should be good stewards of that authority and use it for matters and reasons they make very clear are local, not national or state in scope.

    This piece 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: w:en:User:Soonerfever [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Bringing Soviet Planning to New York City

    New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to bring the same policies that worked so well in the Soviet Union, and more recently in Venezuela, to New York City. “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he says. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

    As shown in the urban planning classic, The Ideal Communist City, soviet planners also believed they were smart enough to know how every single plot of land in their cities should be used. The cities built on their planning principles were appallingly ugly and unlivable. They were environmentally sustainable only so long as communism kept people too poor to afford cars and larger homes.

    If de Blasio believes in this planning system so much, why doesn’t he implement it in New York City? The biggest obstacle, he says, is “the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He blames housing affordability problems on greedy developers who only build for millionaires.

    The reality is that, under the control of private property owners, New York City housing was quite affordable in 1969. It was only when planners began to interfere with private property rights that housing prices spiraled out of control.

    In 1969, New York City median family incomes were $,9692 and median home prices were $25,700, for a value-to-income ratio of 2.7. This was affordable because, at 5 percent interest, someone could devote 25 percent of their income to a mortgage that is 2.7 times their income and pay off the loan in 15 years. Housing was even more affordable in the suburbs, as value-to-income ratios in the New York metropolitan area were 2.6.

    By comparison, value-to-income ratios in 2015 were 8.8 for the city and 5.1 for the metropolitan area. Even at today’s 3 percent interest rates, someone buying a home that is 8.8 times their income could devote a third of their income to the mortgage and not be able to pay it off in 40 years.

    What happened since 1969 to make housing so much less affordable? Contrary to de Blasio, one thing that didn’t happen is that developers got greedier. While there is no accurate measure, I am sure that people were just as greedy in 1969 as they are today. The human desire to accumulate wealth hasn’t changed in thousands of years, which is one reason why the kind of socialism that de Blasio favors never works.

    Instead, one thing that happened was rent control. New York state first imposed rent control in 1950, but the law exempted rental housing built after 1947, and other housing was gradually deregulated through 1969. But in 1969, New York passed a new law that applied rent control to all housing, thus discouraging anyone from building new rental housing.

    Another thing that happened was the city’s historic preservation ordinance, which was passed in 1965 and which has gradually restricted more and more of the city from redevelopment. More recently, New York City responded to unaffordable housing by passing an inclusionary zoning ordinance which provides affordable housing for a tiny number of people at the expense of making it less affordable for everyone else.

    New Jersey and Connecticut did their part by passing statewide growth management laws, thus restricting people’s ability to escape New York City’s high housing prices by moving to the suburbs. Connecticut first passed its law in 1974 and New Jersey in 1986.

    All of these actions are examples of the kind of government control that de Blasio supports, and all of them contributed to the high housing costs that de Blasio objects to. The next time he wants to find a greedy person to blame for unaffordable housing, he should look in a mirror.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo: Kevin Case from Bronx, NY, USA (Bill de Blasio) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • The Bottom Line of the Culture Wars

    America’s seemingly unceasing culture wars are not good for business, particularly for a region like Southern California. As we see Hollywood movie stars, professional athletes and the mainstream media types line up along uniform ideological lines, a substantial portion of the American ticket and TV watching population are turning them off, sometimes taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the bottom line.

    This payback being dealt out to urbane culture-meisters by the “deplorables” are evidenced by historically poor ratings for such hyper-politicized events as the Oscars last year as well as this year’s Emmys. The current controversy surrounds the NFL player protests, which are lowering already weak ratings, down 10 percent since the national anthem protests, as well as plunging movie ticket sales. The oddly political sports network ESPN has seen declines close to catastrophic, although how much their often strident “resistance” turns off viewers is widely debated.

    Jettisoning your audience

    Historically, the genius of American entertainment, particularly Hollywood, lay in the appeal to the everyman. American movie stars, whatever their background, were Anglicized and could, at very least, “pass” for northern Europeans. In recent decades, the definition of “everymen” thankfully expanded, albeit imperfectly, to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims and gays.

    In the process, Hollywood and sports managed to expand their market by appealing to an ever more diverse consumer base both here and abroad. But with the rampant politicization of culture, sports and information, the notion of a common cultural market has all but disappeared.

    Among those in control of mainstream media culture — newspapers, magazines, movie studios and television networks — attention is focused on an affluent, progressive audience concentrated in urban centers. The ignored, or disdained, are not just the roughly 46 percent of voters who voted for Donald Trump, but a wider section of middle-class America.

    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: BDS2006 [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Big Tech Finds Itself Lacking Political Allies

    Our nation’s ruling tech oligarchs may be geniuses in making money through software, but they are showing themselves to be not so adept in the less quantifiable world of politics. Once the toast of the political world, the ever more economically dominant tech elite now face growing political opposition, both domestically and around the world.

    For its part, the right has been alienated by the tech establishment’s one-sided embrace of progressive dogma in everything from gender politics and the environment to open borders and post-nationalism. The left is also now decisively turning against tech leaders on a host of issues, from antitrust enforcement to wealth redistribution and concerns about the industry’s misogynist culture, so evident in firms such as Uber.

    This mounting bipartisan opposition is placing the oligarchs into an increasingly uncomfortable political vise. As left-leaning Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith put it recently, there’s “a kind of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.”

    Politics after Obama

    It’s hard to recall that Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in 2011 actually celebrated the life of Apple founder Steve Jobs — a brilliant, but ruthless, capitalist, but also one who founded a religion-like technology cult. President Barack Obama also clearly embraced the techie economic model, and used Google and other tech talent in his data-driven campaigns.

    Obama was their kind of progressive — socially liberal but comfortable with hierarchy, particularly of the college-educated kind. Just a few years ago, author Greg Ferenstein suggested that Silicon Valley would forge an entirely new liberal political ideology built around its technocratic agenda. Big tech’s ascendency was further bolstered by a “progressive” Justice Department that allowed the large tech firms to buy out and squeeze competitors with utter impunity.

    Advocating antitrust at a nonprofit organization dominated by tech oligarchs, as one of my former colleagues at the liberal-leaning New America Foundation recently found out, can be dangerous for your employment status. Gradually, the image of spunky, enlightened entrepreneurs has morphed into one of monopolists reigning over what is rapidly becoming the most consolidated of our major industries.

    No one really expects competition to rise against venture capital-created firms like Google, which owns upwards of 80 percent of the global search ad market, or Facebook, which uses its power to undermine upstarts like Snap, and calls for greater government oversight are now found on both sides of the aisle.

    Kowtowing to the left has not turned out to be as clever a move as the tech oligarchs believed.

    The Democrats, as it now appears, have been taken over by Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose redistributionist, pro-regulation agenda does not sit well with the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, who last year used the Washington Post to try to undermine Sanders during his presidential campaign.

    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: TechCrunch [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Trouble in Trump County, USA

    By rights, Scott County, a rural Indiana community of 24,000, should be flourishing. It’s in a pro-business state. It’s part of the large, successful 1.2 million-person Louisville, Kentucky, metro area that’s been growing total jobs (75,300, or 12.9 percent) and manufacturing positions (19,600, or 31.6 percent) in the last five years. Scott County is an easy half-hour commute from downtown Louisville.

    Yet for years, Scott has struggled with severe economic and social challenges. Changes to the economy from automation and globalization eliminated many jobs and sent employers elsewhere. The Great Recession made things worse. The county is also grappling with a major public-health crisis, driven by drugs and HIV. It made national headlines in 2016 after recording 203 new cases of HIV in only about a year and a half. National media—NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times—swooped in to cover the story. The HIV outbreak resulted from needle-sharing among drug addicts, particularly to inject the prescription opioid Opana.

    Last November, Donald Trump, who stressed economic stagnation and the drug crisis during his campaign, won two-thirds of the vote in Scott—a substantial improvement on Mitt Romney’s 52 percent take in 2012 and even more impressive in a county that often votes Democratic in state and local elections. Thus, Scott makes a good case study for understanding the working-class dynamics that drove Trump to victory—and what prospects these places have for renewal.

    Located about 30 miles north of the Ohio River, along I-65 between Indianapolis and Louisville, Scott dates its origins to 1820, when the young state of Indiana created it from portions of five other counties. Southern Scott County includes a section of the original land grant that Virginia gave to George Rogers Clark and his men for their service in capturing what became the Northwest Territory from the British during the Revolutionary War. Lexington, one of the towns originally considered for Indiana’s first capital, became the county seat. The county jail briefly held members of the infamous Reno Gang, perpetrators of the nation’s first train robbery, after the Pinkerton Detective Agency captured them. Throughout the nineteenth century, Scott remained small, with the principal excitement being frequent debates and litigation involving moving the county seat to a more central location. Ultimately, the county seat did move, to land adjacent to Centerville, along the Jeffersonville Railroad. This became Scottsburg, today the county’s largest municipality, with 6,700 people.

    Agriculture anchored Scott’s economy. The area’s plentiful produce attracted several canning companies, especially in the northern part of the county, where Austin became a quasi-company town for Morgan Foods, founded there in 1899 and still family-controlled and operating in the city today. Morgan remains a major employer, with workers making private-label soups and other products.

    Scott County was never especially prosperous and suffered repeated economic reversals. Agriculture has always been a high-risk affair. In the postwar years, automation and improved efficiency dramatically reduced local farm employment. Farmers had once worried about keeping their children on the farm after they finished school—but by the 1950s, that concern was obsolete, since there were fewer farming jobs for them to come back to. Economic changes affected other areas, too. In the early days of the car, Scott’s economy flourished along the US 31 corridor, but the construction of I-65 in the late 1950s transformed everything. William Graham, a Republican who has served as Scottsburg’s mayor since 1988, worked originally as a civil engineer and spent a decade helping build the interstate system. He says that within five years of I-65’s opening, half the businesses that had lined US 31 through town were gone; within ten years, 90 percent of them had closed. Yet it took about 20 years for the interstate interchange to develop as a commercial location.

    The community took another blow in the 1980s, when Public Service Indiana canceled its Marble Hill nuclear power-plant project in adjacent Jefferson County. The move, made in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident, ended construction after $2.5 billion had already been spent—the costliest U.S. nuclear power-plant project ever abandoned. Many Scott County residents had worked on it. Graham believes that as much as a quarter of the community wound up unemployed as a result.

    Like many working-class communities, then, Scott County was no stranger to economic hardship—and the Great Recession delivered more of it. The local American Steel plant, which made steel cords for tires, closed. Auto-parts supplier Freudenberg-NOK also shuttered, moving its jobs to Mexico. In 2009, Scott County unemployment soared into double digits and stayed there for four years, peaking at 15.3 percent in 2010.

    The county has since rebounded somewhat. Unemployment declined sharply, to 4.8 percent in 2016; jobs are up 16.1 percent in the last five years. But the jobless rate has dropped so substantially partly because Scott’s labor force has declined by more than 800 people, or 7 percent, since peaking in 2006. And Scott County’s per-capita income of $34,400 is only 82.1 percent of the statewide average and 71.6 percent of the national average.

    Economic woes are only part of the gloomy picture. Scott County is also reeling from a drugs and HIV crisis, fueled by the increasing availability of hard drugs. As Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Jerome Adams puts it, whereas people once self-medicated with moonshine, now they use drugs such as Opana.

    Changes in medical-industry practices and government policy played an important role in making such drugs more widely available. Until the 1990s, the prescribing of pain medication had been tightly regulated, but that changed as pain management became a key medical goal. In 1996, the American Pain Society declared pain “the fifth vital sign.” The federal standard hospital-patient satisfaction survey asked patients questions, including: “How well was your pain controlled?” And: “How often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your pain?”

    “Only 12.2 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher—and that’s up from just 7.3 percent in 2000.”

    The result was a major rise in the quantity of opioid pain prescriptions. Indiana is one of only a few states averaging more than one opioid prescription per resident per year. “Before, you wouldn’t give anyone any Vicodin for a dental procedure,” observes Adams. “Now we’re sending them home with 90 Vicodin. The patient takes nine, leaving 81 in the bottle in the medicine cabinet.” As a consequence, he says, “It’s actually harder [for minors] to get alcohol than it is to get pills in the community.”

    Another problem is family dysfunction. Previous eras of economic hardship took place against the backdrop of a largely intact social structure and stable homes. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births are now far more widespread. As recently as 1990, only about 20 percent of Scott County births were out of wedlock. By 2002, this figure had doubled to more than 40 percent. The causes and effects of these shifts are subject to debate, but it is indisputable that legal reforms facilitated divorce and changing social mores dramatically reduced the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births. Americans broadly want divorce and even single motherhood to remain socially acceptable choices—yet these behaviors are associated with poor life outcomes.

    Scott County and places like it are dealing with the fallout. Conditions in the county now sometimes resemble stereotypes of the inner city, where parents are unfit or unable to raise their own kids. Graham observes: “One of the biggest changes is grandparents raising grandchildren, where you used to never see that—never.” These social changes occurred nationally but have hit communities like Scott hardest, leaving a sizable segment of the eligible population unemployable, regardless of how many jobs might be available. The problem in many working-class American communities today is as much social as economic.

    But even if they stay off drugs and graduate high school, people in these kinds of communities still face employment hurdles. Today’s jobs require increasingly sophisticated skills, but, like many rural communities, Scott County has low rates of college-degree attainment. Only 12.2 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher—and that’s up from just 7.3 percent in 2000. Even many blue-collar jobs—from welding to computer-drive manufacturing—now require significant postsecondary-school training. The skill shortage limits access to jobs, both locally and regionally, and poses an obstacle to business recruitment.

    Taken together, the employment crisis and the social dysfunction produce a sense of malaise in some places. People almost always wave, smile, and say hello in small-town Indiana; but in Austin, for instance, only one person I saw even acknowledged my presence while I drove around. The rest just shambled about with blank stares. One local assured me that had my wife not been with me in the car, prostitutes would surely have approached me, soliciting for money to buy drugs. Scottsburg looks much better, with a healthy business district centered on its interstate interchange, but it, too, has troubles, such as significant retail-storefront vacancy on its courthouse square.

    The difficulties of communities like Scott are all the more striking, considering the region’s economic strengths. Scott is part of the federally defined Louisville metro area. The inclusion of rural areas within metro regions is not unusual. America’s metro areas are defined by commuting patterns, and they include large rural zones. To say that America is a metropolitan nation—86 percent of the country lives in metro areas—doesn’t mean that it all looks like Chicago or New York. Most of the metropolitan population is in suburban and even rural areas, and many rural areas, like Scott, are within easy commuting distance of a city. In Scott’s case, that city is the center of a bustling regional economy that is home to major corporations like Brown-Forman, Humana, and Yum! Foods (parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell). In the last five years, the Louisville metro area added 75,300 jobs—a growth rate of 12.9 percent. Manufacturing grew 31.6 percent, adding 19,600 jobs. Ford maintains a major auto-assembly plant there, and General Electric still manufactures appliances in the city. Louisville is also the site of UPS’s primary global air hub. The shipping firm employs more than 20,000 people and supports a major distribution infrastructure.

    The state of Indiana is economically strong, too, enjoying a budget surplus—with savings equivalent to 14 percent of the state’s annual budget—and an AAA credit rating. It has the eighth-best business-tax climate in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation. It’s a right-to-work state that has implemented nearly the full panoply of state-level conservative best practices for boosting business, and it has seen solid results in many places. But smaller, working-class communities without assets like a university have continued to struggle. Even within thriving Indianapolis, working-class neighborhoods and less educated residents have also lagged behind. These results pose a philosophical challenge for conservatives, who have typically assumed that economic prosperity will follow from implementing such business-friendly policies. For Indiana, a favorable tax and regulatory climate may be a virtue, but it hasn’t been sufficient to help everyone.

    Other factors have played a role in making places like Scott County especially vulnerable to pathology and stagnation. Scott was always a more hardscrabble place than some surrounding areas. One suggestive way to compare small towns is to look at their infrastructure, especially the existence of sidewalks and the quality of the houses. More historically prosperous small towns often have sidewalks through much of the city. Sidewalks are scarce in Austin; in Scottsburg, they line the courthouse square but are otherwise not prevalent. In many surrounding towns, by contrast, sidewalks stretch throughout much of their historic areas. Nearby Seymour, hometown of John Mellencamp, doesn’t just have sidewalks but also alleys and landscaped medians in some sections. Similarly, Scottsburg and Austin boast fewer grand old Victorian houses than one often finds even in many small towns; instead, small workers’ cottages predominate.

    Demographics are another drag on the county. Much of southern Indiana, like the Ohio River Valley in general, was heavily settled by German immigrants. To this day, 24 percent of the people in Clark County, to the immediate south, list their ancestry as German. To the immediate north, in Jackson County, that figure is nearly 29 percent; there’s even a Lutheran high school in Seymour. Scott County, by contrast, is only 15.6 percent German, being more Scotch-Irish-dominated. The area saw a heavy influx of Appalachian migration, with former residents of Hazard, Kentucky, flocking to Austin, in particular, drawn by jobs at Morgan Foods. Scott’s largest listed ethnicity, at 20 percent, is “American”—an appellation commonly used by the Scotch-Irish. Appalachia has long been known for its entrenched poverty and social dysfunction. The Centers for Disease Control recently released a list of counties at high risk for HIV and hepatitis C infections, and Appalachian areas were heavily represented. J. D. Vance’s best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy describes the tragic struggles of Appalachians in the modern world. Thus, communities like Scott County have a smaller reservoir of economic and social capital to recover from the big technological, economic, and social forces acting on them.

    Still, for all its drawbacks, Scott County is working hard to improve its circumstances. The first priority was to address the HIV outbreak, and here, the state has played a vital part. The tight-knit Austin community had a long history of believing that it could solve its own problems, but the outbreak was too much to handle on its own. Even in this rural area, it turns out, many people didn’t drive or own a car, making effective treatment a struggle. So the state set up a “one-stop shop” in an Austin community center. The national media focused almost exclusively on the needle-sharing dimension. But the facility also provided HIV testing and treatment, addiction-recovery counseling, health-insurance enrollment, state identification cards, and birth certificates. The result: a dramatic decline in the rate of new infections. The drug crisis isn’t over, but tremendous progress has been made in stopping the spread of HIV.

    The one-stop shop was created by then-governor Mike Pence’s executive order. Results suggest that it could be a model for how to deal with disease outbreaks in communities similar to Scott. Adopting it might be politically contentious in red states because it would involve spending more money to open field-office locations rather than relying on regional or countywide service centers; states have preferred service consolidation in rural areas, on efficiency grounds. But that old approach might not work anymore for deeply troubled communities.

    Other developments offer hope on the addiction front. Medical and government officials are taking steps to reduce prescription opioid abuse. Last year, the American Medical Association recommended that the “pain is the fifth vital sign” concept be dropped. Washington is planning to eliminate the pain questions from the patient-satisfaction survey form. In March 2017, an FDA panel concluded that the benefits of Opana no longer outweighed the drug’s risks; the FDA is now considering whether to take regulatory action. This is just a start, though. The drug epidemic in America goes beyond Opana or OxyContin—it involves many illegal substances, including meth, fentanyl, and heroin. While reducing the scourge of legal-painkiller abuse is a worthy goal, stopping the flow of drugs like heroin will be much tougher.

    Beyond fighting back against drugs and HIV, Scott County has also made a good start on retraining workers to help them find jobs and offering inducements to attract employers. The main effort on both counts is Scottsburg’s new $10 million Mid-America Science Park, financed half from stimulus funds and half from reserves in the local Tax Increment Financing district. Despite its own serious troubles, the county generously delayed the science park’s planned 2012 opening so that it could be used as a temporary high school after a tornado destroyed nearby (Clark County) Henryville’s building. Today the science park hosts training facilities for workers and high school students. IvyTech, Indiana’s community-college system, has opened a campus there.

    Some training is employer-specific. For example, Jeffboat in nearby Jeffersonville, America’s largest inland shipbuilder, donated a special welding training machine to help people learn how to perform the extra-thick welds needed on the barges that it constructs. The science park’s goal is to become, in effect, an outsourced training department for employers—albeit one they don’t have to pay for. Mayor Graham tells local companies: “My goal is that if you need any training done, I’ll do it. You won’t have to do it.” This wouldn’t just be for new hires. “It’s also for our incumbent workers,” Graham says. “If they need to get their skills upgraded—and they do—they can come here and take some training.”

    In a community that needs jobs, Graham’s can-do attitude is admirable. But it prompts the question: Why can’t companies do their own training, as they did before? The answer, in part, has to do with globalization. Businesses still manufacturing in the U.S. face such stiff competition from foreign firms that they often can’t afford to invest in workforce development. Nor can they always pay their workers much, which helps explain the low personal incomes in Scott County. (It’s notable that Jeffboat is protected from global competition by the notorious Jones Act, which requires domestic water transportation to be done using only American-made boats.) Scottsburg did lose one major employer, Freudenberg-NOK, to Mexico, but Graham is reluctant to blame trade deals like NAFTA. “I’m not sure that any of us here are qualified to say. I question it, but I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing.” Railing against trade may play well politically, but Graham would rather focus on what he can do with the tools available to him.

    The outcome, so far, is encouraging. Globalization gave back some of what it took away when the Japanese firm Tokusen bought the shuttered wire plant and reopened it. Electronics firm Samtec merged two regional locations into one facility at the science park that will employ 300—a big jobs number in a community the size of Scott County.

    These local business expansions are important because the purpose of Mid-America Science Park isn’t only training local workers for jobs but also attracting employers. Indiana local governments rely heavily on property taxes. The state’s tax-cap system limits single-family-home taxes to 1 percent of property value; commercial property is capped at 3 percent of value. This puts a premium on attracting commercial development. So the science park includes infrastructure targeted at business attraction, including generous meeting space, ultrahigh-quality videoconferencing capabilities, and rooms certified as secure enough for secret military-related teleconferences.

    State and local government have had some success in adjusting to globalization and technology-driven disruption, but they’re weak actors in the face of broad economic forces. Only the federal government can hope to shape them fundamentally. Donald Trump was elected in part because he promised to change the status quo on globalization and the economy. The challenge will be reforming the system to help working-class communities without harming the aggregate economy. That’s not likely to be a simple task.

    Even favorable federal policies will make little difference if communities like Scott can’t do something to address their crippling social problems—especially family breakdown, which enables all the others. Job openings go unfilled in communities with high proportions of drug addicts and dropouts. If changing economic conditions is hard, reversing negative social trends is even harder. A sense of humility about what can be accomplished is wise.

    Scott County has made a good start on retraining workers to help them find jobs while offering inducements to attract employers. (MARK CORNELISON/KRT/NEWSCOM)

    Does Scott County have a long-term future? “Give me two to three years,” says Scottsburg’s Graham, on his plans to improve the struggling downtown. One key area of focus in these localities is preserving historic downtown architecture, which even hardened urbanites love. Local leaders in Scott County understand the importance of these unique districts, not only to their community’s identity but also to the long-term viability of attracting and retaining residents. But they have little money to spend on such efforts. Overall, Graham is realistic but hopeful. “Do we have a terrible situation?” he asks, referring to the HIV outbreak. “We certainly do. We’re doing something about it.”

    His confidence may seem unwarranted to outsiders, but Scott County does have a track record of coming through crises. It survived agricultural automation, the disruption of the interstate highway, the closure of Marble Hill, and other setbacks. More recently, when businesses threatened to leave over poor Internet quality in the early 2000s, small-town Scottsburg built one of America’s first wireless municipal broadband systems to provide web service after the local providers refused to upgrade the community’s capacity. And Scott County retains its significant geographic advantages.

    While Scott and other working-class American communities may never be highly prosperous or glamorous, they might yet pull through this trial, as they have through others in the past. “What makes Scott County unique?” Adams asks. “My honest answer is: absolutely nothing. There are Scott Counties all throughout the country. All of the ingredients exist in many communities.” How Scott and its brethren fare will tell us a lot about America’s fate in the Trump years.

    This piece originally appeared in City Journal.

    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 source: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/opioids-problems-for-chronic-pain-patients

  • The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism

    When Donald Trump was elected president, much of American Jewish leadership reacted with something close to hysteria. To some, Trump’s presidency reflected the traditional face of the anti-Semitic right — xenophobic, nationalist and culturally conservative.

    Trump’s handling of certain events, notably the Charlottesville white nationalist rally, have revived earlier charges that the president winks at right-wing racist supporters, even considering them part of his base.

    The disdain toward Trump in the rabbinical community — often more liberal than congregants — was reflected in its cancellation of the annual New Year (Rosh Hashanah) call with the president. Yet, for all of the justifiable worries about the extreme right, the more consequential threat may well come from the left side of the spectrum.

    The European model

    I first became aware of this shift almost 15 years ago, when my wife, Mandy, and I visited the famous Nazi hunters, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, at their offices in Paris. One would expect Serge, whose father died in the concentration camps, to focus his concern on aspiring brown shirts, but, instead, he suggested that the biggest long-term threats would come increasingly from the left and parts of Europe’s expanding Muslim immigrant communities.

    Some Jewish groups seem slow to realize how much things have changed since 1940. To be sure, the rise of right-wing nationalism across Europe is frightening, but, increasingly, the primary locus of European anti-Semitism can be found in heavily Muslim communities around cities such as Paris, as well as in Europe’s universities, where anti-Israel sentiments are increasingly de rigueur.

    Of course, one can question some Israeli policies — as I do regarding the expansion of settlements — without being an anti-Semite. But the anti-Israel focus of groups like those in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement clearly represents a new face of anti-Semitism. As the liberal French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues, this movement targets the Jewish state, but leaves totally unscathed far more brutal, homophobic and profoundly misogynist Muslim states. A double standard for Jews remains an enduring feature of anti-Semitic prejudice.

    Some, like the chief rabbi of Barcelona, think it’s time for Europe’s Jews to move away, as many, particularly from France, are already doing. Overall, Europe’s Jewish population is less than half of what it was in 1960.

    Nor is the immediate prospectus positive, as many leftist parties in Europe are increasingly dependent on Arab and other Muslim voters, many of whom come from places where over 80 percent of the public holds strongly anti-Jewish views. Even in the United Kingdom, opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn has cavorted openly with leaders of vehemently, and openly, anti-Semitic groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. If elevated to the prime minister’s post — which is no longer inconceivable, given his strong run in the last election — the consequences for Israel and Britain’s dwindling Jewish community could prove difficult.

    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: Chatham House, London [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Integration — We’ve Been Doing It All Wrong

    I recently had a revelation about the American approach to racial integration. We’ve been doing it all wrong, and its had disastrous impacts on African-Americans. Our cities are facing another integration challenge today, and we’re in danger of repeating the same mistakes.

    Let me present a few provocative counter scenarios to show you what I mean.

    What if, when the time came for baseball integration, the major leagues merged with the Negro Leagues? Instead of identifying a handful of early players who had the grit and toughness to deal with the ostracism, perhaps 2-4 Negro League teams in the 1940’s could’ve become full MLB teams, and the rest of the Negro League players are put into a supplemental draft for all teams. Four Negro League teams from four markets untouched by MLB at the time — the Baltimore Elite Giants, the Newark Eagles, the Indianapolis Clowns and the Kansas City Monarchs — could’ve become full-fledged MLB members, and more players would’ve had a shot at major league play.

    What if, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, segregated white schools were required to admit not only black students, but black faculty and administrators as well? When segregated white schools finally addressed integration, they did so by dispersing black students among several white schools, and generally shutting down the black schools they came from. Black teachers and principals were often left completely out of the integration process, and black students lost a critical support group during a difficult period.

    What if, instead of outlawing housing discrimination by race, religion, national origin and all other protected classes, the federal government outlawed specific practices (exclusionary zoning, redlining, discriminatory public housing and urban renewal, discriminatory real estate practices like steering or contract buying, among others) and at the same time required all local jurisdictions to provide housing for all persons at all income levels? Mid-century American suburbs would likely have seen an increase in working-class and low-income housing, becoming far more diverse far earlier than it has. Cities would’ve seen an uptick in high-end construction far earlier as well. On the whole, there would’ve been greater balance in urban and suburban property values, then and now.

    America did something quite different in reality. Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey sought out someone with the talent and fiery personality like Jackie Robinson. The Little Rock NAACP was forced to find the Little Rock Nine to push Little Rock Central High School toward integration. Individual homebuyers or renters were sent into sometimes hostile neighborhoods in the name of integration.

    In reality, the burden of integration was always on black people.

    This hit me with full force after hearing a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell at Revisionist History. In his story about integration, entitled Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment, he talks about the aftermath of the Brown v. Board decision — how the Brown family’s intent was misread by so many, including the Supreme Court, and how it led to tragic unintended consequences. One of those consequences: the number of African-American teachers in the South, to this day, has never recovered from its heights during the Jim Crow Era, because school systems, administrators and school parents believed they could deal with black students in the classroom, but could not abide being taught by black teachers.

    In each of the real scenarios, two systems were (or are) at work, and African-Americans were seeking to operate on a level playing field. There were two baseball “systems” — MLB and the Negro Leagues. There were two school “systems”, explicitly so in the South but implicitly so in the North — one for whites and one for blacks. There are two housing “systems” in our metro areas, for blacks and whites.

    Here’s the problem. When our nation’s power structure looks at these dual systems, the assumption is that one is superior and the other is inferior. Barriers must be broken so that people can flow to the clearly superior system. In pursuing integration, our society destroyed one system in the name of inferiority, while never fully accommodating the needs of those dependent on another.

    But really, were those “inferior” systems really inferior? There are many accounts of Negro League teams playing exhibitions against MLB teams and winning with regularity. The Brown family in the Brown v. Board case? They were quite pleased with the quality of education, the excellence of the faculty and staff, at the segregated school their daughter attended; they brought up the case because their daughter was forced to attend a school several miles away, when another school was available just four blocks away. But because of the assumption of inferiority, the power structure sought to be expansive rather than inclusive: meaning that it would expand one system in the hopes that it would accommodate more participants, rather than fully include the other system fully into the mix.

    In fact, when it could, the power structure effectively destroyed one system in favor of the other. The Negro Leagues were effectively defunct by the mid-1950’s. The expansion of suburban school districts at the time of rapid suburban expansion, accompanied by policies that kept blacks out of suburbs, led to resegregation and negative impacts in urban school districts.

    Back to housing, where we have another conflict of systems. Urban revitalization has produced a lot of angst. There are newcomers with lots of anxiety about their imprint on formerly low-income communities. There are longtimers fearful about the change coming to a neighborhood they hold near and dear. Increasingly, the newcomer response has been to expand its options. Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY), they say; build more housing and prices and rents become more affordable, and we can rid ourselves of the displacement angst. Longtimers, in voices that are seemingly heard less and less, call for an inclusive approach to revitalization. Something that allows them to stay in place, and benefit from positive change as well.

    History suggests it won’t go well for the longtimers.

    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: A painting of East-West All Star Game participants at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, undated. Source: tiki-toki.com

  • How To Deal With An Age of Disasters

    When Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, followed by a strong hurricane in Florida, much of the media response indicated that the severe weather was a sign of catastrophic climate change, payback for mass suburbanization — and even a backlash by Mother Nature against the election of President Donald Trump.

    Yet, these assumptions are often exaggerated. Although climate change could well worsen these incidents, this recent surge of hurricanes followed a decade of relative quiescence. Hurricanes, like droughts and heavy rains, are part of the reality along the Gulf Coast and the South Atlantic, just as droughts and earthquakes plague those of us who live in Southern California.

    The best response to disasters is not to advance hysterical claims about impending doom, but rather resilience. This means placing primary attention on bolstering our defenses against catastrophic events, whether in protecting against floods, ice storms, earthquakes or droughts.

    The limits of original sin

    Days after Hurricane Harvey hit, Quartz opined that “Houston’s flooding shows what happens when you ignore science and let developers run rampant.” The Guardian’s climate columnist, George Monbiot, even portrayed the event as a kind of payback for being the world capital of planet-destroying climate change.

    In ascribing every disaster — even the Syrian civil war — to human-caused warming, we may be venturing into something more akin to the religious notion of original sin than to rational science. We should want to reduce greenhouse gases, but, as both rational skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and true believers like NASA’s James Hansen agree, such things as the Paris climate accord are unlikely to make much of an impact on the actual climate in the near term — or even in the medium term.

    In the short run, then, who sits in the White House is pretty irrelevant. Having Barack Obama, or even Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” in the White House would not make an appreciable difference in addressing nature’s fury.

    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: Jill Carlson (jillcarlson.org) from Roman Forest, Texas, USA (Hurricane Harvey Flooding and Damage) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons