New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • How Houston Will Weather The Recession

    In the past year or so, traveling the various geographies of this country has become increasingly depressing. From the baked Sun Belt suburbs to the green Valhallas of Oregon and the once luxurious precincts of Manhattan, it is hard to find much cheer–at least from entrepreneurs–about the prospects for the economy.

    Until recently Texas, and particularly Houston, has been one of the last bastions of that great traditional American optimism–and for good reason. Over the past few years, Houston has outperformed every major metropolitan area on virtually every key economic indicator.

    Last year, the region was rated among the major metropolitan areas as the best place for everything from earning a living to college grads to manufacturing, according to such publications as Forbes, Business Week and Kiplinger’s.

    But the city that could may soon not. Like a couple of bad storms, the recession is barreling in from east and west, shutting off credit to even the most successful businesses. Just last month, Hanley Wood’s Builder ranked Houston the “healthiest” housing market in the nation. But when you get on the ground, things appear far less sanguine.

    Particularly hard hit has been the once-vibrant inner city condominium market, which has been attracting a whole new generation of young professionals to urban living. Now some condominiums, suggests developer Tim Cisneros, are being abandoned by younger workers who have become the prime victims of a contracting economy. As seen in other regions, others are turning to rentals as potential buyers fail to qualify even at Houston’s reasonable prices.

    However, the biggest problem facing Houston today revolves around the energy industry, which represents to this region of well over 5 million what finance does to New York. Already lower energy prices, along with the global slowdown, have taken a dent in job growth. Just last week, the Texas Workforce commission reported a 0.7% employment increase for the area in 2008, compared with a robust 3.5% the year before.

    Bill Gilmer, a veteran economist who covers energy for the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, reports that proposed new taxes and regulations plus falling prices have started to decimate the domestic oil and gas industry. Over the past year, he reports the number of rigs in operation across the country dropped from 2,000 to some 1,300.

    The impact of this on Houston’s energy economy, Gilmer suggests, will be severe, and it will drag the region and much of Texas down with it. “We are talking about a Texas recession now without question,” he says. “I lived through the Jimmy Carter era before, and now it’s déjà vu.”

    Of course, some high-end jobs in energy will remain, particularly for those who work on massive new projects overseas, like in Saudi Arabia. Instead, the biggest hits will affect the production sector, which until recently was a prodigious creator of high-wage blue-collar jobs. Over the coming years, the production downturn could devastate places like western Texas, the Dakotas, Louisiana, California’s Kern County and anywhere else that produces American crude and gas.

    Indeed, it may turn out to be one of the great ironies that the Obama administration, which campaigned earnestly against our “dependence on foreign oil,” will in the end make us more so. Barring an unexpected shift toward nuclear power, it is hard to see how the country–given the administration’s stance–will produce enough energy to meet its need in the near or even mid-term without turning increasingly to the Saudis and others overseas.

    Of course, the Houston-centered domestic energy industry may not go quietly into the night. The D.C. correspondent for the Energy Compass, Bill Murray, expects a “battle royal” in Congress over climate change legislation this fall.

    Houston Mayor Bill White, who is running for the Senate in 2010, also seems ready to fight the anti-oil and gas prejudices of key administration insiders. Natural gas, he suggests, “has to be a big part of the future if [we] have any chance at all to have electric power that is affordable and cleaner.”

    It is critical to point out that White is not some Neanderthal GOP “ditto head” but a former assistant energy secretary under Bill Clinton, a one-time chairman of the Texas Democratic Party and a widely popular figure in majority non-white Houston. He has a long record championing energy conservation and alternative fuels, but he says he cannot embrace an inquisitional approach to his city’s signature industry.

    “There’s a difference,” he said, with obvious reference to the Democrats in Washington, “between mandating one kind of technology and reality.”

    Yet even if the green Torquemadas have their way, White thinks Houstonians will find a way to keep their city ahead of the country’s other urban sad sacks. Throughout the expansion of recent years, when other cities went on insane spending sprees, Houston has kept the cost of services low and focused on basic infrastructure. Critically, Houston is also among the few big cities that has streamlined its pensions for public employees.

    Houston may also benefit from its historical experience dealing with near-depression conditions. When energy prices collapsed after 1983, the region went through a decade-long recession. The city went from being one of the country’s busiest construction sites to being filled with empty “see-through” office buildings and expanses of foreclosed homes.

    Under another Democratic mayor, the revered Bob Lanier, Houston gamely recovered, without much help from Washington. Lanier and other Houston leaders drove to diversify the economy–particularly in medical services, international trade and manufacturing–by investing in basic infrastructure and keeping costs low.

    “We’ve already lived through one depression,” says local real estate investor David Wolff, who also serves as chairman of the region’s transit agency, Metro. “We have already learned humility, and we have learned how to prepare for the world when everything shifts under our feet.”

    So despite all the problems surrounding energy and the encroaching recession, Houstonians continue to be cautiously optimistic about their future.

    They still excel at all the hallmarks of a progressive economy, such as improving both road and rail transport, reforming the school system and working to expand new industries, such as medical services, that have not yet been targeted by the Obamamians.

    To be sure, Houston, which missed the Bush recession, is beginning to feel the pain during the new administration’s watch. But Houstonians long have displayed remarkable grit and creativity in the face of tough times. Having survived catastrophic energy price declines, several huge hurricanes and endless humid summers, Houston is still among the best bets to survive these tough times and come out, in the end, a strong winner.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Is Obama’s Urban Focus Bad News for the Rest of the Countryside?

    To much of the media, Barack Obama is the ultimate dream president, a sophisticated urbanite whose roots lie in top-tier academia and big-city politics. This asset could also become a glaring weakness, blinding him to the fundamental aspirations for smaller places and self-government that have long animated the American experience.

    It has been a half-century since have we seen a presidential inner circle so identified with our densest urban centers. The three most recent Democratic presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all had substantial roots in small-town America that also helped them understand the aspirations of middle-class suburban and exurban voters.

    In contrast, this is an administration steeped in the mystique of big cities. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

    As the continuing Roland Burris saga reveals, the Chicago connection, in particular, seems likely to wreak continued damage. Chicago’s corruption could run like a sore through this administration, much like Arkansas with the Clintons. But rather than deal with almost laughable hillbillies, we may witness the exposure of some of the toughest, and brazen, baddies in American politics.

    Yet for the most part, the big media have been too captivated by the president’s urbane mystique to delve too deeply into the Chicago morass. Largely denizens of big cities, the top media generally embrace the notion that dense urban places are inherently better, more efficient, culturally and environmentally sound than less glamorous, more spread-out places.

    You can see this worldview almost daily in The New York Times or, more substantially, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, where writers often like to envision an American future bright for top-tier cities and pretty bleak for everyone else.

    Given the composition of the president’s inner circle, one can imagine such views are widely accepted at the highest levels. Over the coming years, this could precipitate a policy agenda that, though perhaps well intentioned, could work to the disadvantage in the suburbs, exurbs and small towns where most Americans live. Their policies — particularly the new taxes on the so-called $250K-a-year rich — may not even work so much to the advantage of middle-class urbanites; but this may take time to unfold.

    More important, Obama’s urban policy also marks a critical shift from the traditional American preference for decentralization of power — including at the city level — to one that embraces ever greater concentration. It could also mark a public embrace of hierarchy every bit as serious — and perhaps less reversible — than has occurred in the relatively unregulated marketplace environment of the past quarter century.

    The most recent Pew study confirms that some 77 percent of Americans prefer to live in suburbs, small towns or the countryside. But this prevailing preference for deconcentration disturbs many urban planners and policymakers, including some close to the Obama team. A key transition adviser of urban policy, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, has been pushing the notion of “regionalism” under which there would be a major shift of power away from individual towns, counties and even urban neighborhoods to mega-regional agencies.

    Katz, like many regionalists, seeks to diminish such local interests — which they fear as too parochial and insufficiently enlightened. His views about small-town politics are scathing as evidenced in an anti-Sarah Palin screed, published in The New Republic last October, revealingly titled “Village Idiocy.”

    To be sure, regional agencies sometimes are useful, for example, in the management of air and water basins. But almost automatically regionalism favors more powerful entrenched interests over smaller communities and businesses. For example, in Southern California, the vast majority of the population lives in suburban cities, but power at the mega-regional agencies — such as the Southern California Association of Governments — usually reliably reflects the interests of large developers, public employee unions, big architects and planners.

    Speaking in Florida recently, the president denounced “sprawl,” saying its days were now “over.” Although hardly a declaration of war on suburbia per se, his comments thrilled those offended by low-density suburbs and who want government to promote ever denser urban development — even if often opposed by grass-roots urbanites.

    The emerging centralizing impulse can be seen in the stimulus, with unprecedented funds for light-rail projects and high-speed rail. Although such projects may seem logical in a few concentrated cities like Washington or New York, they seem poorly suited for most American cities and the vast majority of suburbs. In such places, a more practical, market-friendly way to curb greenhouse gases would be to promote decentralization of work, the creation of flexible low-cost transit and providing incentives for home-based business.

    Over time, such tendencies could present potential dangers for the president. Despite the preferences of most people around the president, and perhaps he himself, nearly 80 percent of Americans consistently report they favor living in less dense places and overwhelmingly prefer single-family homes. They may also be reluctant to surrender ever more control over their daily lives to either distant regional authorities or the federal apparatus. Ultimately, the administration may be forced to choose between acting on its urban mystique and maintaining its political majority.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • NEW GEOGRAPHY SPECIAL REPORT: America’s Ever Changing Demography

    America’s demography tells not one story, but many. People concerned with looking at long-term trends need to familiarize themselves with these realities – and also consider whether these will continue in the coming decades.

    Losers and Winners

    It’s common to read about rapidly growing places, but what about those that are losing? Perhaps it’s fitting in this time of economic decline first to tell the story of areas of loss of population, of out-migration and of natural decrease, more deaths than births. Such areas are not of course necessarily “losers.” They may be prosperous, with a high quality of life; they are just not “growing.”

    The map below shows the 40 percent of counties which lost population, 2000-2007. 216 lost more than 10 percent, and 1139 lost up to 10 percent. These contrast the 33 counties which grew more than 40 percent in these seven years. So overall, well over half the territory of the country lost population. The largest population losses, by far, were in and around New Orleans (Katrina), followed by the metropolitan cores of the Rust Belt axis from Pittsburgh, through Cleveland to Detroit, and extending west into Indiana, and east through Pennsylvania and western New York.

    The largest contiguous area of counties with losses remains the same as it was in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: the “high plains” from Mexico to Canada (actually continuing in Canada). Probably 90 percent of counties lost population, especially in Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota, and extending into the Midwest agricultural heartland of Iowa, northern Missouri, southern Minnesota and western Illinois.

    Other traditional areas of losses which continue from the 1970s through 1990s include the coal counties of Appalachia (Kentucky, West Virginia), and the “Black Belt” from Arkansas and Louisiana through the Mississippi Delta and on through parts of Alabama, Georgia, South and North Carolina into Virginia.

    Again repeating past patterns are losses in some of the large core counties of Megalopolis, as Philadelphia and Baltimore, and elsewhere (St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis and even San Francisco). The highest rates of loss were again in and around New Orleans, small counties in Mississippi and Nevada, and Montana, North and South Dakota.

    The 33 rapidly growing counties are ALL suburban except for the new metropolitan area of St. George, Utah. Suburban Atlanta dominates, followed by northeastern Florida, and selected suburbs of Columbus, OH, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Des Moines, Denver, Reno, Houston, Dallas, and Austin. The largest absolute gains (many areas are now hurting economically) were Maricopa (Phoenix), Harris (Houston), Riverside and San Bernardino, Clark (Las Vegas), Los Angeles, and suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio.

    Migration

    Immigration dominates the news, but there is also emigration, and the difference between these is ‘net’ international migration. Data on immigration and emigration are not very certain or reliable, as people leaving don’t have to tell anyone, and many entering are equally reticent. Yet there is a clear pattern from the map of the 416 counties. Overall the areas of net loss tend to be the same as for losses in overall population.

    Counties where immigrants greatly exceed emigrants are both the core counties of the largest metropolitan areas and their largest suburban counties, but especially in the west, Texas, Florida, and the Atlantic coast metropolitan cores from Atlanta to Boston, California, Texas, Florida, and metropolitan New York city. Mexican immigration is the largest, but there is significant immigration from the rest of Latin America, from Asia and from Eastern Europe. Most of the immigrant destinations are metropolitan, but include some rural small town areas, typically with food processing, an industry dependent on low wage immigrants (TX, AR, OK, KS, NE, IA).

    Largest absolute gains are to Los Angeles, Cook, New York City, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Orange County, Phoenix and Santa Clara, with a bias to the southwest, Florida and New York City. The highest immigration rates are in part the same, Miami, Queens, Hudson NJ, Santa Clara, but high rates also characterize Washington DC suburbs, two Kansas counties (food processing), and a Colorado county (workers for ski resorts).

    Significant numbers of non-immigrants also move, and as many as a third probably crossed county lines since 2000. In much of America the balance between in and out migration is close, but for many regions, “net” migration is the most important component of change.

    Overall two thirds of American counties reported a net loss from internal migration, 29 at a level more than 20 percent of the base population. Only 118 have high rates of net in-migration (over 20 percent). Large absolute losses characterize most large metropolitan core counties, including coastal California, Dallas, Miami, New Orleans, megalopolis core counties (from Maryland to Massachusetts), and the Great Lakes and Midwest. Smaller absolute net out-migration prevails over most rural small-town America, especially the Great Plains, and agricultural Midwest and Great Lakes, the Black Belt across the south, and includes much of the southwest.

    Internal domestic migration represents a distinctive geography. In the west many were inland smaller metropolises, as well as many rural small town environmentally attractive counties that received many of the out-migrants from the large coastal metropolises. In the Midwest and northeast gains were strongly suburban (often local flows from the core counties). In the south rapid gains continued to dominate much of Florida, and metropolitan suburbs, especially around Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, and Austin-San Antonio, fueled both by continuing in-region rural to urban flows and by migration from the north to the south.

    The losses include the usual suspects, the core counties of the largest metro areas, including Dallas, Miami, and Orange counties, with the native-born displaced to the suburbs and beyond. The largest absolute gains include some central counties, like Maricopa and Clark (but which are also themselves suburban), major suburban counties of Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Chicago, and a newcomer, Wake county NC (Raleigh). The highest rates of net in-migration are mostly suburban, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington DC, Denver, Chicago, but also a few smaller counties, as in Pennsylvania and South Dakota.

    The Role of Natural Increase

    One of the indicators of diversity in America is the remarkable variation in the role of natural increase (or decrease) – that is the difference between births and deaths in an area – in the story of population change.

    Almost 30 percent of US counties experience natural decrease, and only a little over 10 percent (337) have high rates of natural increase (6% or more growth in 7 years). Natural decrease is mainly a function of age structure, where the young of child-raising age have left, OR where unusual numbers of the elderly have moved in, dominating the population.

    There are four distinct regions of natural decrease. The largest, absolutely and relatively, is Appalachia, from extreme northern Georgia, through smaller parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, western Virginia, most of West Virginia, and both the greater Pittsburgh and the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region of northeastern Pennsylvania. Much is a historic region of coal (and steel) production, and often poor transport links to the rest of country. The region has suffered loss of the young, often for 40 years or more.

    The second large region of natural decrease is entirely different in character, namely mid-Florida, centered on Tampa-St, Petersburg and Sarasota, as a result of the aging in place of massive numbers of retirees from the north moving to Florida over the last 50 years.

    The third region is much more extensive, covering most of the Great Plains and rural Midwest, from Texas and Arkansas to the Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana, regions again suffering long-term loss of the young population to greater opportunities in the city.

    The last smaller region is the Michigan-Wisconsin upper peninsula, where losses can be traced to the result of declining mining and forestry. Counties in New Mexico, Arizona, and northern California are somewhat like Florida with large numbers of retirees, while those in coastal Oregon and Washington are in part like upper Michigan, but with many retirees as well.

    The 112 counties where births greatly exceed deaths, not surprisingly, reflect a very different geography. They do represent, as is often pointed out, a shift to metropolitan areas but importantly not to the core cities but the suburban hinterlands. Most prominent areas of high natural increase are primarily suburban areas around metropolitan Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, Minneapolis and Raleigh, NC. Many of these areas are also affected by in-migration of Hispanic families.

    The other reason for high natural increase is higher fertility – families with above replacement numbers of children, often for reasons of religion or ethnicity, and also reinforced by in-migration of young adults. On the map, Native American Indian reservations stand out, as in North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Montana, and Alaska, although these numbers are still slow. Mormon Utah and Idaho demonstrate high fertility, family size and shares of births, in rural as well as urban counties. But the dominant area of high natural increase is clearly the extensive southwestern region of Mexican heritage and in-migration over recent decades, in Texas, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and eastern Washington, plus selected counties in the high plains, e.g., Kansas and Oklahoma. The final bastions for young families and higher natural increase are military dominated counties, as in Georgia, North Carolina and Kansas.

    In absolute losses, parts of Florida and Pennsylvania and the northern Great Plains stand out. Relative gains are highest in Hispanic, Native American Indian and Mormon counties. These are impressive numbers – the surplus of births over deaths as a share of the total population.

    Why the Differences?

    What makes counties lose or gain people? The US has a diverse and restless population. Counties vary greatly in attractiveness to immigrants from abroad or migrants from other states, broadly because of real or perceived “opportunities,” characteristics of jobs or amenities which may lure migrants from less competitive or attractive areas.

    The map divides the counties into nine sets, based on the relative importance of natural increase or decrease, emigration and immigration and in-migration and out-migration. The 1439 counties which lost population include 165 for which the main reason for loss is from natural decrease; of these one subgroup lost overall despite net immigration, the other’s loss was aggravated by net out-migration as well. The larger set of counties with population losses, 1184, are those for which the loss is mainly attributable to net out-migration, with two subgroups, one with loss despite natural increase, the other with loss magnified by natural decrease.

    On the map the “darker” green counties (89) had a large natural decrease and a smaller net out-migration; the “lighter” green (76) had natural decrease, exceeding a smaller net in-migration. These counties for which natural decrease dominates are scattered across the Great Plains from Texas to Canada, together with clusters from Appalachia (VA, WV, PA, and NY), northern MI-WI, and a few declining natural resource areas in the west.

    The “darker” blue counties (486) are dominated by net out-migration, but also had natural decrease. The “lighter” blue counties (698) had natural increases but these were much exceeded by net out-migration. These counties are often interspersed with the “green” counties, dominated by natural decrease. These 1184 counties – over one-third of counties and of US territory – constitute a large swath of the Plains and Midwest, large parts of New York and Pennsylvania, the coal counties of Kentucky and West Virginia, and the “Black Belt” across the south from Louisiana and Arkansas to southern Virginia. Finally they include sparsely populated resource counties in Alaska and parts of the west. Overall, the counties losing population tend to be non-metropolitan and interior, except for the declining industrial metropolitan counties of the “Rust Belt”.

    Gainers

    The gaining counties consist of three broad groups — 755 for which natural increase is the main contributor to growth, with subsets of 420 growing despite net out-migration, and 335 with net in-migration as well. The second consists of 104 counties for which immigration is the predominant basis for growth. Finally there are 933 counties for which net in-migration is the main contributor to growth, with subsets with natural decrease with natural increase.

    The “yellow” counties (755) gained population mainly because of natural increase; the light yellow counties (420) grew despite often substantial net out-migration; the darker yellow counties (335) also had a smaller net in-migration, and are thus among the more ”successful” more rapidly growing US counties. The former are especially prevalent in cities of the west – e.g. Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Dallas – with sizable immigrant populations (see the table) and higher fertility and displacement of the native-born, but yellow counties are also common in non-metropolitan and small metropolitan and suburban areas of the Great Lakes states, the outer Megalopolis, and urban industrializing parts of the south. The “dark” yellow areas are in the same regions, and are very often the areas gaining migrants from the “light” yellow areas, as can be seen in California, Arizona, Utah, Washington and Colorado.

    The “orange” counties, only 104, are those where immigration is the main source of growth. These are somewhat scattered, but especially common in New England and Middle Atlantic states, selected counties of the Plains (often with food processing plant growth) and northern Pacific Coast metropolitan regions, as the San Francisco bay region, Portland and Seattle.

    The “magenta” counties (933) are those for which net in-migration dominates growth. The lighter magenta for those with natural decrease (213), the darker magenta for those with natural increase as well. All these tend to be the most rapidly growing counties in the country, and tend to occur together. The main difference with counties with natural decrease are those with an older age structure, but which are nevertheless attractive to in-migrants. From the map these occur in two main settings: traditional areas of amenity migration, most obviously covering much of Florida, but also widespread in northern New England, northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the Ozarks, parts of the Tennessee valley, and across much of the west, with particular swaths in western Montana, coastal Oregon and Washington and northern California. The second setting is the exurban environs of major metropolitan areas, where new growth is invading formerly rural areas.

    The final, largest set of counties with natural increase as well as high in-migration (720 counties), are the stereotypical winners in the contemporary “growth races” – based on a combination of employment growth and metropolitan or environmental amenities. These tend especially to be southern and western metropolitan areas, small as well as large. The most dominant regions are greater Washington DC, greater Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, Portland, Denver, Phoenix, most of Florida, and – perhaps surprisingly – substantial parts of the north-south borderlands, including Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

    What about the recession? It’s hard to judge the relative effects of the current severe recession on likely near- or longer-term growth. Clearly, the collapse of housing markets are slowing the growth of such rapidly growing places as Phoenix and Las Vegas, but this does not mean they won’t regain their general attractiveness and economic viability. The particularly severe job losses in the already hurting western Rust Belt will likely aggravate the recent pattern of decline which predated the recession and could get much worse.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • The Former East Germany: Is It Time for Red Nostalgia?

    2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany into one country. Germany was divided into two separate nations with competing economic and political ideologies. Now it’s time to reassess the results of this melding of two very different systems and the impact on the urban environment.

    Emerging from the ashes as one of the world’s most powerful economies, Germany may be the quintessential example of the triumph of capitalism over communism. Yet now with Frankfurt’s powerful banking sector reeling from the global economic meltdown, reticent Marxists may well be coming out of the woods to proclaim the death of capitalism.

    The sentiment for a bygone communist dream still exists for a small minority of those living in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the unemployment rate has hovered around 18% since reunification. After a recent trip, it seems clear economic growth has stagnated. Job opportunities remain very limited. Rather than attract people with its lower costs and new opportunities, the region continues to see a strong outflow, particularly among the young.

    Yet all is not hopeless in the area comprising the former GDR. The crumbling of the wall and subsequent mass exodus of East Berliners to the west may remain the most vivid symbol of reunification, but the story remains decidedly mixed in Leipzig – the second largest city in the former GDR after Berlin.

    Leipzig can be considered the birthplace of the anti-communist revolution. On October 9th, 1989, in what is known as the “Monday Demonstrations”, protests in Leipzig (pronounced lipe-tsig) came to a head. In what some feared at the time would become another Tiananmen Square nightmare, 70,000 demonstrators peacefully took to the streets chanting, “We are the people”. The Monday Demonstrations served as a turning point in the quest towards reunification. Having witnessed the courage of the citizens of Leipzig, others trapped in the GDR came out and made their voices heard. One month after the Monday Demonstrations, the Berlin Wall came down.

    With just over 500,000 residents, Leipzig is the largest city in the German state of Saxony. Roughly 90 miles south of Berlin, the city lives in the shadow of the much more “sexy” and culturally apt German capital.

    The city has a considerable history, even prior to the events following World War II. Leipzig residents included such notable individuals as the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz and composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Richard Wagner, and Felix Mendelssohn. The playwright Goethe attended the University of Leipzig and referred to the city as ‘little Paris’ in his seminal work Faust. In 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte and his troops were dealt a strategic defeat there in what became known as ‘The Battle of Nations’. More recently, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the Mayor of Leipzig from 1930 to 1937, is remembered as being one of the staunchest opponents of the Nazi regime.

    It is difficult to imagine the breadth of this history while traversing the streets of Leipzig today. The city still certainly has its share of old and beautiful architecture, but much of this is now abandoned, with many structures adjacent to the central core covered in graffiti. In this regard, Leipzig looks like the German equivalent of a decaying American rust-belt city.

    The derelict atmosphere that a new visitor may sense upon arriving in Leipzig is at least partly due to the fact that many long-time residents still live in Soviet-style communist housing blocks at the peripheral edges of the city. Known as Plattenbau, or “plate buildings”, these ubiquitous and dehumanizing structures were communism’s answer to the issue of quickly re-housing East German citizens displaced by the ravages of war. Building these massive housing structures far outside the center also had the advantage of locating workers closer to places of industry.

    Taking into account Leipzig’s urban planning policies under communism, it is no wonder that neighborhoods near the city center appear neglected. Yet, stepping into the pedestrian-only heart of the city also tells a much more encouraging story. Unlike the often failed policies of many American cities to spur a “downtown renaissance”, Leipzig has had considerably more success at revitalizing its once thriving core.

    This is apparent by the number of construction sites around Leipzig’s central core. The city still has the advantage of possessing a significant stock of aesthetically appealing buildings, ranging in style from Baroque to Neoclassical. Furthermore, the University of Leipzig, one of Germany’s oldest, has taken the lead in making the city center a destination by consolidating its operations there. Currently, the University is constructing a new main building off of the city’s main square, Augustusplatz (formerly known as Karl-Marx-platz during the GDR).

    Public transportation is also a bright spot for Leipzig. Modern streetcars ride above ground to the outer limits of this concentrically laid out city. The efficiency of the streetcar system would turn any American public-transportation proponent green with envy. Moreover, the construction of an ambitious underground metro system is slated to be completed next year, further easing mobility for Leipzigers.

    Leipzig’s location in the central-north portion of continental Europe also has its advantages. As a node for the transport of goods and people through central Europe, the city serves as a bridge between Germany and the once burgeoning but now suffering Eastern European nations. Even so, over time it would be in the city’s best interest to further capitalize on this asset.

    Adding clout to Leipzig’s location as a transportation hub is the city’s central train station – one of Europe’s largest and most historically significant. Grand in scale, Leipzig’s Hauptbahnhof not only sees a great deal of rail traffic from all over Germany, the station doubles as a shopping center for those living in the city. Practically a second “downtown”, the central station boasts everything from a constantly busy grocery store to clothing boutiques, numerous cafes and even two McDonald’s franchises.

    Despite its inspiring history, famous university and state-of-the-art transportation, Leipzig still faces tremendous challenges ahead. The city is not only struggling to attract newcomers but to retain a new generation of Germans born to parents who still remember what it was like to live in the GDR. Economically speaking, Leipzig stands little chance competing with other German cities in the west such as Frankfurt, Cologne or Munich where there are many more job opportunities. Aside from a plant that assembles Porsche’s struggling Cayenne line of SUVs – itself now threatened for both economic and environmental reason – industrial activity in Leipzig is limited. And with the Bohemian behemoth of Berlin not far away, Leipzig would be hard pressed to realize a full renaissance of its status as a prime destination for arts and culture.

    What does this mean for the future? In a sense, Leipzig’s problem is the same problem facing the entire region that comprises the former German Democratic Republic. The issues have been hotly debated in Germany since reunification. Some in the western parts of the country regard cities in the east as a lost cause. Contributing to the contentiousness of the debate is the ‘Solidarity Tax’ instituted to aid in the reunification process. At a rate of 5.5% of annual income tax, many Germans feel their tax dollars are being squandered on frivolous projects in the former GDR – projects that will have little to no impact on those living in the west.

    The renovation of the city center and the construction of the new Leipzig underground metro are examples of projects that benefit from funding from the Solidarity Tax. The key issue now is to see if the eastern cities themselves can use the generous government support and newfound infrastructure to stimulate economic activity and create jobs that will keep people from leaving for good. If this is not addressed immediately, the future of the former GDR looks bleak. The last thing Germany needs, especially in these times of global economic turmoil, is for those living in the east to become nostalgic for the days before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • Sunbelt Indianapolis

    For decades, the overwhelming majority of population and economic growth has occurred in the Sun Belt – the nation’s South and West as defined by the United States Bureau of the Census. This broadly-defined area stretches south from the Washington-Baltimore area to the entire West, including anything but sunny Seattle and Portland. Any list of population growth or employment growth among the major metropolitan areas will tend to show the Sun Belt metropolitan areas bunched at the top and the Frost Belt areas (the Northeast and Midwest regions) bunched at the bottom. Since World War II, no state has experienced the growth that has occurred in California.

    However, the trends in the last decade indicate a shift, certainly away from California, which has experienced a net domestic migration (people moving to other parts of the nation). The overall loss reaches over 1.2 million people; the state’s overall population growth rate is now only little more than average. Some metropolitan areas in the Frost Belt have begun to perform better in population and domestic migration, but most continue to experience growth that is well below that of the Sun Belt.

    The exception to this is Indianapolis, which has developed growth rates that would put it right in the middle of Sun Belt metropolitan areas, if it were not in the Frost Belt.

    Indianapolis is a metropolitan area of 1.7 million population. Indianapolis added nearly 11 percent to its population between 2000 and 2007 (latest data available) and ranks 19th in population growth among the 50 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population (New Orleans has been excluded from this analysis because of the hurricane related population losses). Indianapolis is growing faster than Washington, DC or Seattle and nearly as fast as Portland or Denver. Its population growth rate has been double that of San Diego, triple that of Los Angeles or San Jose and more than six times that of San Francisco, which has seen its growth slow to a rate no better than that of Italy. Overall Indianapolis would rank 18th out of the 32 largest US Sun Belt metropolitan areas in total population growth. It is the fastest growing of the 18 largest Frost Belt metropolitan areas.

    Between 2000 and 2007, the Indianapolis metropolitan area added 55,000 domestic migrants, equal to 3.6 percent of its 2000 population. No other Frost Belt metropolitan area comes close. Columbus and Kansas City had domestic migration gains, at 1.2 percent of their population. All other Frost Belt metropolitan areas lost domestic migrants. Indianapolis, however, would have ranked 17th out of the 32 largest Sun Belt metropolitan areas trailing Portland, but leading Seattle and Denver.

    The distribution of domestic migration within the Indianapolis metropolitan area is also significant. For one-half century various analysts have predicted the decline of the suburbs. Indianapolis, like most metropolitan areas around the country, shows exactly the opposite: the suburbs continue to attract central city residents and have yet to fall into this seemingly inevitable decline.

    While the Indianapolis metropolitan area gained 55,000 domestic migrants from 2000 to 2007, Marion County, the central county which is nearly co-existent with the central city of Indianapolis, lost 46,500 domestic migrants. All of the domestic migration growth was in the suburbs, which attracted 101,800 new residents from Indianapolis/Marion County and the rest of the nation.

    What is it that has allowed Indianapolis to experience Sun Belt growth despite being in the Frost Belt? This is not the place for a full attempt to identify all of the causes, but some observations can be made.

    Perhaps it is most important to understand what is not the cause of the superior growth in Indianapolis. It is not the city’s “unigov” governance structure. In the early 1970s, to the great fanfare of urban planners, Indianapolis merged with most of Marion County, increasing the city’s population by approximately 50 percent. Proponents of local government consolidations often (and speciously) suggest that these consolidations will make metropolitan areas more attractive (this issue is discussed in detail in our Pennsylvania report on local government consolidation). Yet, Indianapolis, one of the nation’s largest consolidated local governments, is losing residents to the suburbs. It is also worthy of note that state taxpayers provided a $1 billion pension bailout to the city last year.

    One factor that clearly makes Indianapolis attractive is its housing affordability, which is the best among metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 residents in six nations. According to our 5th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, Indianapolis had a Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) of 2.2 in the third quarter of 2008, well below the historic norm of 3.0. Indianapolis has been ranked near the top in each of the preceding four editions as well. In recent years, new suburban starter houses of 1,500 square feet have been advertised at less than $110,000, less than the price of land for a house in many metropolitan areas.

    Superior housing affordability constitutes a critical important attractor. At the height of the housing bubble, a household living in the median priced house in Indianapolis would have saved more than $1,000,000 in down payment and mortgage payments over 30 years, compared to San Diego.

    Indianapolis also has the advantage of a comfortable lifestyle. Commuters spend 2 minutes less per day than the national average getting to work, according to the 2007 United States Bureau of the Census American Community Survey. The Texas Transportation Institute indicates that traffic congestion is less severe in Indianapolis than average and that it has become better in the last 10 years. Indicating its usual irrelevance to traffic congestion, Indianapolis has the smallest transit market share of any urban area over 1,000,000 in the nation, at approximately 0.2 percent. This compares to 11 percent in New York, 5 percent in San Francisco and 2 percent in Los Angeles and Portland.

    Where does Indianapolis go from here? So far, Indianapolis has shown resiliency in the current economic crisis. The December 2009 unemployment rate was 6.7 percent, which is below the 7.2 percent national rate. Other parts of Indiana are not doing nearly as well, especially in smaller metropolitan areas that rely to a greater extent on manufacturing. For example, unemployment has reached 15 percent in Elkhart.

    To some extent, the metropolitan area’s huge advantage in housing affordability has been eroded by the collapse of prices in the most expensive Sun Belt metropolitan areas, such as in California and Florida. Yet, Indianapolis remains far more affordable, even after these losses.

    Indianapolis also has an advantages for business. In the State Business Tax Climate Index, Indiana is ranked highly, at 14th in the nation. With the prospect of higher taxes, both at the federal level and in many states, this should help Indianapolis retain an impressive advantage and continue to perform as if it were a Sun Belt metropolitan area, but without the problems associated with the housing bubble, massive congestions and growing social inequality.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Don’t Mess With Census 2010

    The announcement last week that Congressional Black Caucus members plan to press President Obama to keep the 2010 census under White House supervision, even if the former Democratic Governor of Washington, Gary Locke, is confirmed as Commerce Secretary, brought back memories of a movie I’d seen before — a bad movie.

    The statement came from Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., the caucus’ leading voice on the census, and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, which has jurisdiction over the decennial count. His assertion that the White House needs “to be hands-on, very much involved in selecting the new census director as well as being actively involved and interested in the full and accurate count,” suggests that the partisan gap about what the census should accomplish is no closer to being closed than it was ten years ago when we last undertook the constitutionally mandated exercise in counting everyone living in America. The gap was so big last time that it helped bring about the complete shutdown of the United States government.

    When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House he decided, in his own paranoid way, that Bill Clinton and the Democrats would use their executive authority to produce a biased census whose over-count of minorities would shift, in his opinion, twenty-four House seats from the Republicans to the Democrats after the 2000 census. Of course, it was ludicrous to think such an outcome would occur, since legislative boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state. Whatever numbers the census produces in our decennial exercise can be manipulated to produce any outcome each state’s ruling party desires, as Congressman Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican cronies proved a few years ago. Nevertheless, Gingrich was determined to use the Congressional appropriations process to undercut any attempt by the Democrats to overstate minority populations in the several states.

    The method by which this nefarious plot was to be carried out, in the Republican party’s opinion, was by the use of a large sample of Americans to be surveyed at the same time as the actual count, or enumeration, required by the Constitution was taking place. In response to concerns about previous census inaccuracies — both overcounts and undercounts — the National Academy of Sciences had recommended that the Census Bureau use survey sampling techniques to validate not just the overall count but the individual demographic sub-groups that the census’s enumeration process would identify. But this was a hugely expensive undertaking. To gain statistical accuracy, about 1.3 million Americans would have to respond to a lengthy survey that would cost about a half a billion dollars to execute. And it was this expenditure that Gingrich refused to appropriate. When he and Clinton came to the ultimate showdown on funding the government Gingrich blinked.

    As part of the budget settlement that reopened the government after the shutdown, Clinton forced him to reinstate funding for the sample survey. But despite having established the primacy of the White House in the conduct of the census, matters actually got worse for awhile. When I became Director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) under Vice President Al Gore, I was asked to monitor the implementation of the census to be sure it was done as effectively and as efficiently as possible. But the first idea on how to accomplish that came straight out of the same White House partisan playbook that is now being invoked by the Congressional Black Caucus.

    In order to assure that the process was “bi-partisan,” it was suggested that a commission be established made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who would oversee the activity on behalf of the Congress. Since the commission was to be equally divided, the Clinton White House wanted to make sure that only the most partisan Democrats — those who would never concede an inch to their Republican counterparts on issues such as funding and methodology — were selected. Names like Harold Ickes, Supervisor Gloria Molina, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters were discussed as representative of the type of Democrat who would make sure the use of sampling to confirm the accuracy of the count was preserved. Fortunately, thanks to the eloquence of Rob Shapiro, the Undersecretary for the Department of Commerce who had the actual authority to supervise the Census, cooler heads in the Vice President’s office were able to prevail over their White House counterparts, and the Commission notion was abandoned.

    But that didn’t stop the two parties from continuing their warfare over the value of a sample supplemented census vs. a straight enumeration. Republicans sued the Census Bureau in federal court, demanding that only the actual count of residents as provided in the Constitution be used for any Congressional redistricting by the states. The Federal Appeals court dismissed the Republican lawsuit as none of the Court’s business. Foreshadowing the outcome of Gore v. Bush in 2000, the Supreme Court surprisingly took up the case and overturned the Appeals court ruling. As a result, all subsequent redistricting efforts have used only the enumeration count from the 2000 census. On the other hand, formulas used to allocate federal funds based on population characteristics were unaffected by the ruling and could have used the sampling process, had it not met an untimely and unnecessary death.

    As soon as George W. Bush was elected and the incredibly professional Director of the Census Bureau, Ken Prewitt, was removed from office, the Commerce Department’s new partisan Secretary, Donald Evans, determined that the sample that had been prepared over the strong objections of Congressional Republicans was not useable. Sampling, as originally conceived, was never implemented, and the country ended up relying on a very strong effort to count households and those living in them for its 2000 census. This method tends to overcount families with two houses, who respond to the census form at both of their addresses, and college students who generally answer the form from their dorm room while their parents report them as still in their household back home. And, of course, it tends to undercount less affluent populations with fewer physical ties to a specific dwelling, particularly Native Americans, and to some degree Hispanics and African Americans.

    Despite these problems, a sampling approach could not be used to help correct inaccuracies in this year’s census, even if Rahm Emanuel himself were to oversee it. We are too far along in the process to recreate it. There is, however, a substitute available that should alleviate the concerns of all but the most stubborn partisans on both sides of the issue. Under the Gore reinvention initiative, the Census Bureau conceived of a concept now known as the American Community Survey. It was designed to survey a vast quantity of households over time to acquire the kind of detailed demographic data that was usually obtained from the subset of the population, about one in ten, who were asked to complete the “long form” of the census questionnaire every ten years. Republicans hated this form and the type of questions it asked; they saw it as an unlawful intrusion on the privacy of families by the federal government. Those of us in charge of reinventing the federal government thought the ACS could be a much more scientific and efficient way of collecting this essential data, but our challenge was to keep it from becoming a political football in the partisan warfare over the census.

    Finally, it was agreed that the Clinton administration budget proposals would include a continuing increase in funds for the ACS. In order to garner Republican support, ACS would be justified as a way to eliminate the long form by 2010. The budget request was forwarded by the head of ACS directly to the Vice President’s office, which made it a priority each year, but which never publicly acknowledged any interest in the concept. The ruse worked and the project became a reality. The long form will not be used in the upcoming census because the ACS has gathered, over time, sufficient data on the demographic details of America’s population as to make it unnecessary.

    Given the existence of the ACS, those now waging a battle over sampling vs. enumeration are truly guilty of fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons. In this new era, those who have a legitimate interest in as complete and accurate a census as possible should instead direct their efforts to the neighborhoods where the accuracy of the count will actually be determined. During the last count, the Census Bureau formed hundreds of thousands of partnerships with community groups interested in making sure that everyone they knew got counted. Today, these programs, as well as projects such as former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer’s “Nosy Neighbors” campaign, are the best way to ensure an accurate outcome.

    The responsibility for America’s next census does not and should not rest with the White House. But President Obama’s experience does offer some direction: neighborhood organizing is key. Let’s hope that community leaders will follow the advice to ‘pick yourself up and dust yourself off’… and undertake the huge task of ensuring that every person is present and accounted for in America’s next census.

    Morley Winograd is co-author, with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, now available in paperback. Both of them are fellows with NDN, a progressive think tank, which is also home to his blog.

  • Urban Inequality Could Get Worse

    President Obama’s stated objective to reduce inequality, as laid out in public addresses and budget plans, is a noble one. The growing income gap – not only between rich and poor, but also between the ultra-affluent and the middle class – poses a threat both to the economy and the long-term viability of our republic.

    But ironically, what seems to be the administration’s core proposal, ratcheting up the burden on “rich” taxpayers earning over $250,000, could have unintended consequences. For one thing, it would place undue stress on the very places that have been Obama’s strongest supports, while providing an unintended boost to those regions that most oppose him.

    At the heart of the matter is the age-old debate about who is “rich.” If you define wealthy as $250,000 a year for a family of four, that means different things in different places. America is a vast country, and the cost of living varies widely. What seems a princely sum in, say, red state Oklahoma City is barely enough to eke out a basic middle-class life in blue bastions like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

    In the recent study on the New York middle class that I conducted with Jonathan Bowles at the Center for an Urban Future, we compared the cost of a “middle class” standard of living in New York and other cities. The report found that Manhattan is by far the most expensive urban area in the country, with a cost of living that’s more than twice the national average. (This is according to a cost of living index developed by the ACCRA, a research group formerly known as the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association.)

    But even Queens, the city’s middle-class haven and the only other borough included in the ACCRA analysis, suffers the eighth highest cost of living in the country.

    What does that mean? An individual from Houston who earns $50,000 would have to make $115,769 in Manhattan and $81,695 in Queens to live at the same level of comfort. Similarly, earning $50,000 in Atlanta is the equivalent of earning $106,198 in Manhattan and $74,941 in Queens. (See “New York Should End Its Obsession With Manhattan.”)

    The cost of housing constitutes one critical part of the difference. Average monthly rent in New York was $2,720 in the fourth quarter of 2007, by far the top in the nation. That total was both 55% higher than the second place city, San Francisco, where average effective rents are $1,760, and nearly triple the national average of $975.

    Even in relative boom times, such high costs have been driving many out of New York, and now it could get worse. During tough times, people’s incomes drop, so they are less able to absorb high costs and taxes, which are rising in many blue cities and states. Imposing more taxes on some label-rich New Yorkers or Angelenos, who earn $250,000 a year, won’t make them more likely to stay.

    Perhaps even worse, higher taxes probably won’t help the inequality issue. True, historically and to this day, the greatest levels of inequality occur in low-tax areas like the Mississippi Delta, the Rio Grande Valley and Appalachia. But, increasingly, this unsavory distinction is shared by big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In contrast, the most egalitarian states are generally deep red places – such as the Dakotas, Alaska, Nebraska and Wyoming.

    Higher costs – manifested in everyday expenses like sales taxes and energy bills – now contribute in a large way to growing inequality even in the richest, most elite cities. When housing and other costs are factored in, notes researcher Deborah Reed of the left-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, deep-blue mainstays Los Angeles and San Francisco rank among the top 10 counties in America with respect to the percentage of people in poverty. Only New York and Washington, D.C., do worse.

    Worst of all, the rise of inequality in these high-cost blue cities seems to be connected to policy decisions. High taxes and strict regulations have expelled relatively well-paying blue collar jobs in manufacturing and warehousing from expensive urban areas. Without them, an extremely bifurcated economy and society forms because no traditional ladders for upward mobility remain; they are critical to a successful urbanity.

    Back in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs predicted that Latino immigrants to New York, mainly from Puerto Rico, would inevitably make “a fine middle class.” Yet four decades later, in the Bronx, the city’s most heavily Latino county, roughly one in three households lives in poverty – the highest rate of any urban county in the nation.

    At the other extreme, in Manhattan, where the rich are concentrated, the disparities between socioeconomic classes have been rising steadily. In 1980, the borough ranked 17th among the nation’s counties for social inequality; today it ranks first, with the top fifth of wage earners earning 52 times that of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.

    To an old-fashioned Truman Democrat like me, this is bad news. But some modern-day “progressives,” like Richard Florida, celebrate the concentration of rich people. They see them as guarantors that places like New York will be the winners of the post-crash economy. The losers? Goods-producing regions of the Great Plains, the industrial Midwest and, of course, those unenlightened, suburban middle-class people.

    Yet it seems more and more likely that raising taxes for urban middle-income workers will, over the long term, add to the flood of people fleeing to less costly locales with lower taxes. This will be particularly true for the growing ranks of information economy “artisans” who might find critical write-offs for home offices and other business expenses cut from their next tax return.

    None of this is necessary. The “creative destruction” resulting from the downturn might actually prove a boon to these big cities – by making them more affordable for the urban middle class. This help would be accelerated if city governments – as in Los Angeles, New York, Houston and even San Francisco during the early 1990s – nurture local businesses.

    But “growth” – a word not widely embraced in this greenest of administrations – does not seem to be a priority in either Washington or in most city halls. There are murmurs that investment in high-cost, subsidized alternative energy will create vast numbers of new jobs, but this is likely just wishful thinking for everyone but Al Gore’s business partners.

    This is not to say cities’ policies need to return to Bush-style Republicanism. Tax breaks for big-time investors and real estate speculators do not make a sustainable urban policy either. What’s needed is something closer to lunch-bucket liberalism, which focuses on productivity-enhancing initiatives and sparking entrepreneurial growth. America – its cities in particular – could do with more private-sector stimulation and a lot less high-minded social engineering.

    With policies geared toward the latter at the expense of the former, one of the great ironies of the Obama era will continue to unfold.

    By targeting the urban middle class to pay for its deficit and new social programs, the president’s plan could end up draining wealth – and boosting inequality – from our nation’s great cities, where he currently draws overwhelming support, to its hinterlands. Not exactly what the White House had in mind, no doubt, but, sadly, it’s a distinct possibility.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Democrats Could Face an Internal Civil War as Gentry and Populist Factions Square Off

    This is the Democratic Party’s moment, its power now greater than any time since the mid-1960s. But do not expect smooth sailing. The party is a fractious group divided by competing interests, factions and constituencies that could explode into a civil war, especially when it comes to energy and the environment.

    Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

    Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor.

    In the post-World War II era, the gentry’s model candidate was a man such as Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee who lost twice to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stevenson was a svelte intellectual who, like Barack Obama, was backed by the brute power of the Chicago machine. After Stevenson, the gentry supported candidates such as John Kennedy – who did appeal to Catholic working class voters – but also men with limited appeal outside the gentry class, including Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas and John Kerry.

    Hubert Humphrey, a populist heir to the lunch-pail liberalism of Harry Truman (and who was despised by gentry intellectuals) missed the presidency by a hair in 1968. But populists in the party later backed lackluster candidates such as Walter Mondale and Dick Gephardt.

    Bill Clinton revived the lunch-pail Democratic tradition; and the final stages of last year’s presidential primaries represented yet another classic gentry versus populist conflict. Hillary Clinton could not match Barack Obama’s appeal to the gentry. Driven to desperation, she ended up running a spirited populist campaign.

    Although peace now reigns between the Clintons and the new president, the broader gentry-populist split seems certain to fester at both the congressional and local levels – and President Obama will be hard-pressed to negotiate this divide. Gentry liberals are very “progressive” when it comes to issues such as affirmative action, gay rights, the environment and energy policy, but are not generally well disposed to protectionism or auto-industry bailouts, which appeal to populists. Populists, meanwhile, hated the initial bailout of Wall Street – despite its endorsement by Mr. Obama and the congressional leadership.

    Geography is clearly a determining factor here. Standout antifinancial bailout senators included Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jon Tester of Montana. On the House side, the antibailout faction came largely from places like the Great Plains and Appalachia, as well as from the suburbs and exurbs, including places like Arizona and interior California.

    Gentry liberals, despite occasional tut-tutting, fell lockstep for the bailout. Not one Northeastern or California Democratic senator opposed it. In the House, “progressives” such as Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank who supported the financial bailout represent districts with a large concentration of affluent liberals, venture capitalists and other financial interests for whom the bailout was very much a matter of preserving accumulated (and often inherited) wealth.

    Energy and the environment are potentially even more explosive issues. Gentry politicians tend to favor developing only alternative fuels and oppose expanding coal, oil or nuclear energy. Populists represent areas, such as the Great Lakes region, where manufacturing still plays a critical role and remains heavily dependent on coal-based electricity. They also tend to have ties to economies, such as in the Great Plains, Appalachia and the Intermountain West, where smacking down all new fossil-fuel production threatens lots of jobs – and where a single-minded focus on alternative fuels may drive up total energy costs on the farm, make life miserable again for truckers, and put American industrial firms at even greater disadvantage against foreign competitors.

    In the coming years, Mr. Obama’s “green agenda” may be a key fault line. Unlike his notably mainstream appointments in foreign policy and economics, he’s tilted fairly far afield on the environment with individuals such as John Holdren, a longtime acolyte of the discredited neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, and Carol Browner, who was Bill Clinton’s hard-line EPA administrator.

    These appointments could presage an environmental jihad throughout the regulatory apparat. Early examples could mean such things as strict restrictions on greenhouse gases, including bans on new drilling and higher prices through carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade regime.

    Another critical front, not well understood by the public, could develop on land use – with the adoption of policies that favor dense cities over suburbs and small towns. This trend can be observed most obviously in California, but also in states such as Oregon where suburban growth has long been frowned upon. Emboldened greens in government could use their new power to drive infrastructure spending away from badly needed projects such as new roads, bridges and port facilities, and toward projects such as light rail lines. These lines are sometimes useful, but largely impractical outside a few heavily traveled urban corridors. Essentially it means a transfer of subsidies from those who must drive cars to the relative handful for whom mass transit remains a viable alternative.

    Priorities such as these may win plaudits in urban enclaves in New York, Boston and San Francisco – bastions of the gentry class and of under-35, childless professionals – but they might not be so widely appreciated in the car- and truck-driving Great Plains and the vast suburban archipelago, where half the nation’s population lives.

    If he wishes to enhance his power and keep the Democrats together, Mr. Obama will have to figure out how to placate both his gentry base and those Democrats who still see their party’s mission in terms that Harry Truman would have understood.

    This article originally appeared at Wall Street Journal.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Chevy Chase Circle Fountain: A Call To Rededicate A Memorial To Racism

    On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, C-SPAN watchers nationwide saw an especially poignant symbolic moment. Assembled on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda, along with House and Senate members, were hundreds of guests. Behind every speaker stood the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, bending benignly, holding in his outstretched hand a folded Emancipation Proclamation.

    When the speaker’s spot was taken by the current occupant of Lincoln’s office — a black man, an African-American — President Obama spoke in honor of the Great Emancipator. The fruition of Lincoln’s sacrifice stood, proven and achieved, before the statue of the murdered President.

    Symbols — statues, plaques — matter. Sprinkled about our cities, they come into being as the result of contemporary interests and priorities. But who can tell, as time flows on, whether history will welcome their enduring presence, or wish to wipe them out?

    One such memorial that ought to be wiped out is a monument to a man who stood against everything Lincoln stood for. It is a memorial that disgraces the City of Washington, the capitol of the nation: A memorial fountain that honors the perniciously racist U.S. Senator Francis G. Newlands. The current Majority Leader of the Senate, Harry Reid – who was on the speaker’s platform at the celebration, and who spoke after President Obama did – holds the seat that Newlands once held.

    The fountain, built and dedicated in the mid-1930s, is not located in some obscure spot where few stumble upon it. No, it is positioned at one of the major commuter entrances to the City, right at the border, on Connecticut Avenue at Chevy Chase Circle. I live not far away, and I know that every day, tens of thousands of people see it; not only commuters, but those who come into the city from Interstate 95 and the Beltway.

    The circle is an urban design whose symbolic function is to create a visual focal-point. Those entering or leaving the City must make-way, defer, bend aside to accommodate whatever the planners of the city choose to place there. This particular circle is one of only four circular entrances into the Capital. One of those circles honors Lincoln. Another honors Robert F. Kennedy. A third is vacant. And the fourth honors the racist Newlands.

    Newlands was a U.S. Senator who died in office in 1917. He openly called, as late as 1912, for amending the constitution to strip the vote from African-Americans. His segregated land development plans established a precedent for segregated suburbs that spread across America. He openly called for African-American education to be limited to education for domestic and menial work. A leading contemporary African-American newspaper editor put Newlands on the same lowest level of dishonor as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina and “Great White Chief” Jim Vardeman of Mississippi. But Newlands, who as a young man started his career in California and was elected from Nevada, could not even make the feeble excuse, as they might have, of being the product of a people historically conditioned to race prejudice.

    Newlands’ race bigotry was the product of greed and ambition, not upbringing, and it encompassed animosity towards Asians and everyone else not of the white race. He saw racism as a means of winning votes, and of making money. Lots of money.

    Anyone who looks at urban residential patterns sees the de facto racial segregation of neighborhoods. But only students of the history of urban and suburban development recognize that these segregated patterns were not the result of mere happenstance.

    In the decades after the Civil War, the newly-freed slaves may nominally have held legal rights, but whites still held all the money and all the land. Before Newlands began his political career, he was the manager and trustee of a vast fortune made by his wife’s family in western gold and silver, and he used that fortune to buy vast tracts of what is now the northwest section of Washington D.C.

    In the 1880s and 1890s, Rock Creek Park was set-aside, nominally as a region of recreation, but also as a barrier to racial integration. East of the park might be integrated, but not West. From Florida Avenue north, Connecticut Avenue and the neighborhoods surrounding it are all Newlands’ creation, all the way past the District Line several miles into Maryland. Newlands instituted racist policies over all this land, including at the fancy Chevy Chase Club which he founded and of which he was the first President. (Chief Justice Roberts recently joined that racially-insensitive institution, and I see it as a telling “freudian slip” that Roberts would strike the one false note at the historic inauguration’s key moment.)

    The Newlands’ land extended west all the way to Wisconsin Avenue. Today, anyone can log-on to Google Earth and see the line of expensive shops along the east side of Wisconsin Avenue, north of Western Avenue. Those shops – promoted by the still-operating company that Newlands founded, the Chevy Chase Land Company – call themselves the “Rodeo Drive” of the East Coast.

    The land under every single one of those shops would be owned by African-Americans, and not by Newlands’ legacy company, were it not for Newlands’ racism. In 1909, when Newlands discovered that the sub-developer to whom he had sold the land intended to develop it as residences for African-Americans, Newlands sued the developer for fraud and got the land back. Rather than let African-Americans live near whites, the company left the land largely unused for almost 100 years.

    Newlands’ segregated approach became a model for racist land development nationwide. White Americans who look with fear on the poverty and danger of many African-American urban neighborhoods can blame developers like Newlands and his progeny, who, by creating white enclaves, necessarily also created black enclaves.

    The fountain at Chevy Chase Circle is the legacy of Newlands’ land development efforts. His widow paid for it, and her friends lobbied for it. It was not the work of anyone from Nevada who might have wanted to honor their Senator. It was merely an effort to beautify a suburban development. No one knew in the mid-1930s that Connecticut Avenue would become a major thoroughfare into the City.

    To honor Lincoln and Robert Kennedy, city planners may justly ask the citizens to “bend aside” at a traffic circle, but not to honor Newlands. We are fortunate that the memorial is not a statue, but a fountain. A statue cannot be renamed; it looks like the person it originally honored. But a fountain can be renamed with the stroke of a pen and the replacement of a plaque. The Chevy Chase Circle fountain instead should honor one or more notable and historically significant African-Americans whose lives stand for the achievement of equal rights and for human dignity for all.

    The matter should ultimately be in the hands of the people’s elected officials. But I have proposed that a woman born enslaved in the District, who attained a college degree and became a leading educator – Fanny Muriel Jackson Coppin – should be one person honored. Another should be, not the obvious choice of Frederick Douglass (who is already honored in several places), but his oldest son, Lewis Henry Douglass, who was a heroic sergeant in the Colored Troops who fought in the battle immortalized in the motion picture Glory, and who, as a legislator for the District during the short-lived period of Reconstruction, authored the District’s first anti-discrimination law.

    When Congress restructured the District government and abolished the seat Lewis Douglass once held, the new government conveniently “forgot” Douglass’ anti-discrimination law, by leaving it out of the statute-books. But in the 1950s a diligent researcher re-discovered the law. The DC prosecutor applied it, and the Supreme Court affirmed it.

    The racism of Newlands, however conveniently hidden, has also been rediscovered. A people that has just elected the first African-American US President should no longer need to suffer this embarrassment. Action is necessary to strike Senator Francis G. Newlands from the roster of Americans honored in our capital city.

    Edward Hawkins Sisson is a Washington D.C.-based attorney. See The Chevy Chase Fountain for an album of photographs and documents. Selected Sisson papers available at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

  • The Decline of Los Angeles

    Next week, Antonio Villaraigosa will be overwhelmingly re-elected mayor of Los Angeles. Do not, however, take the size of his margin – he faces no significant opposition – as evidence that all is well in the city of angels.

    Whatever His Honor says to the media, the sad reality remains that Los Angeles has fallen into a serious secular decline. This constitutes one of the most rapid – and largely unnecessary – municipal reversals in fortune in American urban history.

    A century ago, when L.A. had barely 100,000 souls, railway magnate Henry Huntington predicted that the place was “destined to become the most important city in this country, if not the world.” Long run by ambitious, often ruthless boosters, the city lured waves of newcomers with its pro-business climate, perfect weather and spectacular topography.

    These newcomers – first largely from the Midwest and East Coast, and then from around the world – energized L.A. into an unmatched hub of innovation and economic diversity.

    As a result, L.A. surged toward civic greatness. By the end of the 20th century, it stood not only as the epicenter for the world’s entertainment industry, but also North America’s largest port, garment manufacturer and industrial center. The region also spawned two important presidents – Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – and nurtured a host of political and social movements spanning the ideological spectrum.

    Now L.A. seems to be fading rapidly toward irrelevancy. Its economy has tanked faster than that of the nation, with unemployment now close to 10%. The port appears in decline, the roads in awful shape and the once potent industrial base continues to shrink.

    Job growth in the area, notes a forecast by the University of California at Santa Barbara, dropped 0.6% last year and is expected to plunge far more rapidly this year. Roughly one-fifth of the population depends on public assistance or benefits to survive.

    Once a primary destination for Americans, L.A. – along with places like Detroit, New York and Chicago – now suffers among the highest rates of out-migration in the country. Particularly hard hit has been its base of middle-class families, which continues to shrink. This is painfully evident in places like the San Fernando Valley, where I live, long a middle-class outpost for L.A., much like Queens and Staten Island are for New York.

    In such a context, Villaraigosa’s upcoming coronation seems hard to comprehend. By most accounts, he has been at best a mediocre mayor, with few real accomplishments besides keeping police chief Bill Bratton, a man appointed by his predecessor. So far, Bratton has managed to keep the lid on crime, a testament both to his skills and to the demographic aging of much of the city.

    Besides this, virtually every major initiative from Villaraigosa has been a dismal failure; from a poorly executed program to plant more trees to a subsidized drive to refashion downtown Los Angeles into a mini-Manhattan. Instead of reforming a generally miserable business climate, Villaraigosa has fixated on fostering “elegant density” through massive new residential construction. This gambit has failed miserably, with downtown property values plunging at least 35% since their peak. Many “luxury” condominiums there, as well as elsewhere in the city, remain largely unoccupied or have turned into rentals.

    More recently the mayor has presided over a widely ridiculed scheme to hand over the solar business in Los Angeles to a city agency, the Department of Water and Power (DWP), whose workers are among the best paid and most coddled of any municipal agency anywhere. Most solar plans by utilities focus more on competitive bidding by outside contractors. Villaraigosa’s plan, which recent estimates suggests will cost L.A. ratepayers upward of $3.6 billion, would grant a powerful, well-heeled union control of the city’s solar program.

    This has occurred despite years of overruns on previous DWP “clean energy” projects. Not surprisingly, the plan was widely blasted – by the city’s largest newspaper, the rapidly shrinking Los Angeles Times, the feistier LA Weekly and the last independent voice at City Hall, outgoing City Controller Laura Chick, who proclaimed that the whole scheme “stinks.” Yet despite the criticism, a ballot measure endorsing the plan – opponents have little money to stop it – seems likely to be approved next week.

    With his firm grip on political power, Villaraigosa likes to think of himself as a West Coast version of New York’s Michael Bloomberg or Chicago’s Richard Daley. Yet at least they have demonstrated a modicum of seriousness about the job.

    In contrast, Villaraigosa, according to a devastating recent report in the LA Weekly, spends remarkably little time – about 11% – actually doing his job. The bulk of his 16-hour or so days are spent politicking, preening for the cameras and in other forms of relentless self-promotion.

    So how is this person about to be re-elected with only token opposition? Rick Caruso, the developer of luxury shopping center The Grove and one of L.A.’s last private sector power brokers, ascribes this to a growing sense of powerlessness, even among the city’s most important business leaders.

    “People feel it’s kind of hopeless. It’s a dysfunctional city,” Caruso, who once considered a run against Villaraigosa, told me the other day. “They don’t think there’s anything to do.”

    Certainly, odds against changing the current political system seem long to an extreme. The once-powerful business community has devolved into a weak plaintive lobby who rarely challenge our homegrown Putin or his allies in our municipal Duma.

    Of course, entrepreneurial Angelenos still find opportunities, but largely by working at home or in one of the city’s surrounding communities. They tend to flock to locales like Ontario, Burbank, Glendale or Culver City, all of which, according to the recent Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey, are less expensive and easier to do business in than L.A.

    “It’s extremely difficult to do business in Los Angeles,” observes Eastside retail developer Jose de Jesus Legaspi. “The regulations are difficult to manage. … Everyone has to kiss the rings of the [City Hall politicians].”

    Legaspi, like many here, still regards Southern California as an appealing place to work, but takes pains to avoid anything within the purview of City Hall. As the economy recovers, I would bet the smaller cities around L.A. and even the hard-hit periphery rebounds first.

    The only immediate chance of relief for us Angelenos is if Villaraigosa (who will soon face term limits) takes off to run for governor. As the sole southern Californian and Latino candidate, he could prevail in a crowded Democratic primary. But the idea of this empty suit running the once great state of California – not exactly a paragon of good governance – may be enough to push even more people to the exits or, at very least, think about taking a very strong sedative.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.