New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Height of Power: The Washington Fiefdom Looms Larger Than Ever

    For more than two centuries, it has been a wannabe among the great world capitals. But now, Washington is finally ready for its close-up.

    No longer a jumped-up Canberra or, worse, Sacramento, it seems about to emerge as Pyongyang on the Potomac, the undisputed center of national power and influence. As a new president takes over the White House, the United States’ capacity for centralization has arguably never been greater. But it’s neither Barack Obama’s charm nor his intentions that are driving the centrifocal process that’s concentrating authority in the capital city. It’s the unprecedented collapse of rival centers of power.

    This is most obvious in economic affairs, an area in which the nation’s great regions have previously enjoyed significant autonomy. But already the dukes of Wall Street and Detroit have submitted their papers to Washington for vassalage. Soon many other industries, from high-tech to agriculture and energy, will become subject to a Kremlin full of special czars. Even the most haughty boyar may have to genuflect to official orthodoxy on everything from social equity to sanctioned science.

    At the same time, the notion of decentralized political power – the linchpin of federalism – is unraveling. Today, once proudly independent – even defiant – states, counties and cities sit on the verge of insolvency. New York and California, two megastates, face record deficits. From California to the Carolinas, local potentates with no power to print their own money will be forced to kiss Washington’s ring.

    Americans may still possess what the 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner described as “an antipathy to control,” but lately, they seem willing to submit themselves to an unprecedented dose of it. A financial collapse driven by unrestrained private excess – falling, ironically, on the supposedly anti-Washington Republicans’ watch – seems to have transformed federal government cooking into the new comfort food.

    To foreigners, this concentration of power might seem the quintessence of normalcy. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote in 1964, elites have dominated and shaped the world’s great cosmopolitan centers – from Athens to Rome to Baghdad – throughout history. In modern times, capital cities such as London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Tokyo have not only ruled their countries but have also largely defined them. In all these countries (with the exception of Germany, which was divided during the Cold War), publishing, media, the arts and corporate and political power are all concentrated in the same place. Paris is the undisputed global face of France just as London is of Great Britain or Tokyo is of Japan.

    Although each had their merchant classes, these cities were strongly hierarchical, governed by those closest by blood or affiliation to the ruling family and populated largely by their servants. In contrast, Baltzell observed, U.S. cities such as New York have been “heterogeneous from top to bottom.” Their power came not from the government or the church but from trade, the production of goods and scientific innovations, as well as the peddling of ideas and culture.

    But Washington has always occupied a unique and somewhat incongruous niche among U.S. cities. It came into being not because of the economic logic of its location, but because it was a convenient compromise between North and South. It never developed into a center of commerce or manufacturing. Nor was it meant to be a fortress. Instead, it was designed for one specific purpose: to house the business of governance.

    Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French-born classicist and civil engineer who developed the plan for the city, envisioned a majestic capital that would “leave to posterity a grand idea of the patriotic interest,” as he wrote in 1791. Yet for most of its history, Washington failed to measure up to the standards of European or Asian capitals. In January 1815, a South Carolina congressman described the capital to his wife as a “city which so many are willing to come to and all so anxious to leave.”

    This lowly status stemmed, to some extent, from what the historian James Sterling Young has defined as the “anti-power” ethos of early Americans. The revolutionary generation and its successors loathed the confluence of power and wealth that defined 19th-century London or Paris. A muddy outpost in the woods seemed more appropriate to republican ideals.

    Even as other American cities, such as New York and Baltimore, expanded rapidly, Washington grew slowly, at a rate well below the national average. Bold predictions that the city would boast a population of 160,000 by the 1830s fell far short. Instead, it had barely reached 45,000 people, including more than 6,000 slaves. It remained eerily bereft of all the things that make cities vital – thriving commerce, a busy port, decent eateries and distinguished shops. Visiting the city in 1842, Charles Dickens marveled at a city of “spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere.”

    To some observers, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Washington’s relative decrepitude reflected one of the glories of the young republic. The fact that the country had “no metropolis” that dominated it from the center struck the young noble, on his visit to America in the early 1830s, as “one of the first causes of the maintenance of Republican institutions.”

    Washington’s status improved only marginally in the next century, even as other brilliant centers of power, culture and commerce emerged on the Eastern Seaboard and then across the Midwest and West. The rapid rise of New York was challenged in quick succession by the even more sudden emergence of Chicago in the industrial Midwest and San Francisco on the Gold Rush coast of California. Washington was surely the nerve center of politics, but commerce, culture and the vast majority of the media chose to concentrate elsewhere.

    It would take enormous misfortune – the Depression – to provide Washington with its first great growth spurt. As the business empires of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland buckled and the New Deal took control of the economy, power shifted decisively to the capital. This expansion of influence continued with the onset of World War II and then during the Cold War.

    The ensuing rise of the military and domestic bureaucracies transformed Washington from a small provincial city into a major metropolitan area. The greater economic shift from a predominantly manufacturing to a high-tech, information-centered economy also played to Washington’s strengths. In his groundbreaking 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, the sociologist Daniel Bell predicted that the country’s prevailing “business civilization” would inevitably become dominated by the government bureaucracy. Corporations would eventually look to Washington’s lead for regulatory standards, to sponsor research and make critical science-related decisions.

    In the past half-century, this confluence of technology and bureaucracy has transformed Washington and its surrounding suburbs into the most dynamic large metropolitan economy in the Northeast. Between 1950 and 1996, the region’s population expanded by roughly 150 percent, three or more times faster than other cities along the Boston-Washington corridor.

    By the mid-1970s, Washington and its environs had also emerged as the richest region in the country. Since then, it has remained at or near the top of metropolitan areas in terms of both per capita income and level of education. Despite deplorable concentrations of poverty, particularly in the city proper, the region’s average household incomes remain the highest in the country – nearly 50 percent above the national average. The percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, nearly 42 percent, surpasses even such brainy-seeming places as greater Boston, Seattle and Minneapolis.

    The contrast between Washington and most of the United States has gradually become more pronounced. In good times and in bad, lawyers, lobbyists and other government retainers have continued to enrich themselves even as the Midwest industrial-belt cities have cratered and most others struggled to survive. “The vision of generations of liberals,” admitted the New Republic in the mid-1970s, “has created a prosperous and preposterous city whose population is completely isolated from the people they represent and immune from the problems they are supposed to solve.”

    In today’s crisis, the Washington area remains somewhat aloof, with the second-lowest unemployment rate among major metropolitan areas of more than 1 million. (Only Oklahoma City, largely insulated from both the financial and housing bubbles, is doing better, although collapsing energy prices could threaten its prosperity.) The rate of job growth, although slower, is still among the highest in the country, and unemployment is below the national average.

    This disparity will grow in the coming years, as rival regions reel from the recession. Many once-powerful places are already losing their independence and allure. Wall Street, formerly the seat of privatized power, has been reduced to supplicant status. The fate of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “luxury city” will be determined not in deals with London, Dubai or Shanghai but by the U.S. Treasury. Similarly, the vast auto economy of the upper Midwest will take direction from congressional appropriations and whoever is named the new “car czar.”

    This loss of power in the provinces will broaden in scope during the coming months. Even proud Texas has lost its unique political influence. Its energy barons will now be forced to do the bidding of the lawmakers and regulators, instead of carrying them in their hip pockets.

    Even industries that are well plugged in to the new Obama regime – such as venture capital and alternative energy – are facing financial ruin from the downturn in both markets and energy prices. To win new funding and subsidies for their next bubble, they’ll increasingly rely not on their ballyhooed cleverness but on their pull with the White House, Congress and the new science apparat, under the green-oriented Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Obama’s neo-Malthusian pick for White House science adviser, physicist John Holdren.

    All this is bad news for much of America, but it should mean great business for many residents of greater Washington. Sudden interest in District pied-a-terres among investment bankers, venture capitalists, energy potentates and their hired help could do a lot to restore the battered condominium market. Office buildings in the District and surrounding environs can now expect a new rush of tenants, both from the private sector and the soon-to-be expanding federal bureaucracies.

    The transfer of cultural power to Washington will also accelerate. After all, Washington is more than ever where the action is. Media outlets have already been shifting out of New York and other cities – the Atlantic Monthly moved from Boston to Washington in recent years, and USA Today, National Public Radio and XM Radio are headquartered in or near the capital. A city that, according to one 19th-century account, had a cuisine consisting largely of “hog and hominy grits” now boasts world-class restaurants, draws top-line chefs to its food scene and will continue to develop into a serious epicurean center. The area already ranks third in film and television production, largely because of a thriving news and documentary business, as embodied in National Geographic, the Public Broadcasting Service and the Discovery Channel.

    Over time, those of us in the provinces may grow to resent all this, seeing in Washington’s ascendancy something obtrusive, oppressive and contrary to the national ethos. But don’t expect Washingtonians to care much. They’ll be too busy running the country, when not chortling all the way to the bank.

    This article originally appeared at the Washington Post.

    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.

  • Infrastructure and Aesthetics

    In his 2005 book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, Brian Hayes surveys the built environment with an undaunted appreciation of the vast networks of infrastructure systems in America. Hayes, a writer for American Scientist, argues that common understanding of infrastructure is just as important as an understanding of nature itself. Without the ubiquitous power lines, the oft disparaged garbage dumps, or the controversial mining industry, the United States would not have been able to achieve status as the paragon of 20th Century modernization – a pattern now emulated by the likes of China and India.

    Yet it seems that ‘infrastructure’ has lost its fabled status in America. Our parents – or grandparents, depending on your age – celebrated achievements such as the building of the Hoover Dam or the California Water Project. But starting with the 1970s, as the environmental movement began to gain steam, and more recently after Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, large scale infrastructure has increasingly become something to be reviled.

    The only time we are reminded of our infrastructure is when tragedy strikes, be it a mining accident, a bridge falling down or a collapsed levee. It’s as if we wish to keep the very things that support our modern lifestyles ‘out of sight out of mind’. No one really wants to know where their trash ends up or what the intricate processes for treating sewage are, nor does anyone want to be a neighbor with a coal burning power plant.

    At the same time what had once been centers for productive industry have also been redeveloped into hip and trendy neighborhoods marketed to those looking for an ‘edgy’ urban experience. To be sure, part of the allure of once industrial areas such as San Francisco’s South of Market and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg lies in the gritty aesthetic and adaptability of warehouse and manufacturing buildings for reuse.

    Yet even though residential development may be halted for the foreseeable future, it is critical to not lose sight of the aesthetic value of the industrial landscape. This ‘diamond in the rough’ appeal applies not only to converted lofts and art galleries but to both our current functioning and yet-to-be built infrastructure as well.

    The potential for infrastructure to please the eye and to uplift the soul is not lacking in historical precedent. Some of the greatest monuments to the genius of ancient architects remain those which served as essential infrastructure, the most notable example the aqueducts constructed by the Romans.

    Yet today, aside from exceptions like the bridges of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the world of high architectural design has largely ignored the possibility that infrastructure could be beautiful. Instead, design media is relentlessly focused on museums and other elitist structures with the more mundane and common buildings being “left to the engineers”.

    LeCorbusier, the late Swiss/French architect and one of the ‘godfathers’ of modern architecture would be rolling in his grave if he knew this was the case. In his seminal manifesto Towards a New Architecture, LeCorbusier speaks of his appreciation for the industrial aesthetic: “Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first-fruits of the new age”.

    LeCorbusier, or ‘Corb’ as he is called, went on to apply the industrial aesthetic to socialist housing schemes while proclaiming that the “house is a machine for living in”. Although the jury is still out on whether or not living in a machine has mass appeal, Corbusier’s celebration of the simple and repetitive massing of structures such as grain silos is a good reminder that beauty can be derived from infrastructure.

    Early 20th Century American city builders also celebrated infrastructure. Willis Polk, a prominent San Francisco architect, was commissioned in 1910 to build a water temple in Sunol, California. Sunol, about 40 miles outside of San Francisco, was where converging water lines met before feeding into the city. Sensitive to the importance of getting fresh water to a growing population, some of San Francisco’s wealthiest citizens hired Polk to design the structure, which was inspired by the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. Soon after, the area around the iconic structure became a popular spot for park goers.

    Similarly, Los Angeles architect Gordon Kaufman was hired to add aesthetic merit to the Hoover Dam. Still generating power for parts of Southern California, Nevada and Arizona, the massive dam symbolizes one of the most ambitious pieces of infrastructure in American history. At the time, the dam was the world’s largest concrete structure, yet Kaufman softened the aesthetics by adding a simple and elegant Art Deco touch to the otherwise imposing structure.

    The marriage of aesthetic beauty and infrastructure does not always have to take place at the grand scale of the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge. In contrast, the barn, according to Brian Hayes, remains “the unmistakable icon of American agriculture and rural life.” The barn, a prevailing theme in American literature, represents function and flexibility of the highest order: one day it could be housing livestock while the next it could serve as a dance hall. Whatever the function, there is no questioning the charm of these structures dotting the rural landscape. With a renewed interest in family and organic farming in current popular culture, these buildings – including new barns – could assume a renewed meaning.

    With the Obama stimulus plan comes not only an opportunity to create jobs but to advance a cultural appreciation for the structures and systems that have made the United States a model to be emulated. Wind turbines, for instance, are gaining traction as the symbols of clean energy. When driving past large scale wind farms like the San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, the movement of the out-of-proportion blades coupled with the dizzying repetition of turbines results in something similar to a pleasant hallucination. The appreciation for wind turbines is a start in the right direction, yet if we are to ensure that the systems that run the country are suited to last for generations to come, the culture needs to once again celebrate, rather than demonize, our infrastructure.

    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.

  • What Way for the Stimulus? Post-Industrial America vs. Neo-Industrial America

    As a result of the economic crisis, there is a broad consensus in favor of large-scale public investment in infrastructure in the U.S., both as part of a temporary stimulus program and to promote long-term modernization of America’s transportation, energy, telecom and water utility grids. But this momentary consensus masks the continuing disagreement on whether the U.S. government can legitimately promote American industries, and, if so, which industries. This is a problem for infrastructure policy, because different national infrastructures correspond to different national economic strategies.

    Consider the antebellum U.S. in Henry Clay’s American System: federal infrastructure investment in canals and later railroads (“internal improvements”) was part of a package that included import-substitution tariffs to protect infant U.S. industries from British competition. For Clay and his Whig allies and followers, including future Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln, internal improvements and tariffs were not ends in themselves. They were instruments to be used in the pursuit of the Whig-Republican vision of a decentralized, mixed industrial and agricultural economy where business owners, mostly small, and free workers, mostly prosperous, could realize the utopia of Clay’s “self-made man.”

    From Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis, the Southern planters who opposed such ambitious schemes had no objection to infrastructure as such. They favored infrastructure tailored to suit the needs of their semi-colonial slave plantation economy, based on exports of cotton and other commodities to British and Western European factories. Local wharves and harbors that facilitated the shipment of crops to industrial Britain were acceptable to the planters. They opposed infrastructure that would encourage industrialization in the South or the U.S. as a whole, out of fear that urbanization and industrialization would threaten their local dominance over both black slaves and poor white yeoman farmers. They also feared they would be marginalized in national politics – as they indeed were – by industrialists, merchants and financiers.

    Today, the rivalry is not between the champions of an industrial America and an agrarian America. Rather, it is a rivalry between the champions of a neo-industrial America, which includes world-class industrial agriculture, and a post-industrial America, in which most if not all manufacturing and even agriculture will be outsourced. In this formulation, post-industrial America emerges as a consumerist paradise populated by investors, executives of multinational companies, rentiers, realtors, government and nonprofit bureaucrats, and a supporting cast of service sector proletarians including nursing aides, nannies, gardeners, security guards and restaurant and hotel workers.

    Just as there was one logical infrastructure for the industrializing North and one for the anti-industrial plantation South in the nineteenth century, so in the twenty-first century a different infrastructure would be appropriate, depending on whether the goal is a post-industrial America or a neo-industrial America.

    A post-industrial infrastructure can be simple, local and substantially foreign.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can be simple since it involves little more than the roads and harbors needed to bring in high-value-added imports from abroad and ship out low-value-added American commodities. Adequate harbors are necessary, as are adequate highways to help ship U.S. soybeans and timber to industrial Asia while bringing Chinese, Japanese and Korean goods to Wal-Marts for distribution.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can also be local. Just as the Southern planters were indifferent or hostile to regional or national infrastructure projects, so the elites of the service sector are interested chiefly in the infrastructure needs of the half dozen or so coastal megalopolitan areas where they live. Many favor high-speed rail to connect nearby big cities on the coasts, while denouncing federal investment in non-metropolitan areas as boondoggles. The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy of post-industrial America could function reasonably well as long as a handful of colossal city-states – Boswash, Northern California, Greater LA, the Texas Triangle – had state-of-the-art local telecom and transportation and energy grids. So what if the rest of the continent decayed?

    Finally, the post-industrial infrastructure can be largely foreign. Most of the urban service sector elite favors both outsourcing American industry and importing a new metropolitan immigrant proletariat willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits than native Americans. To be sure, someone must build the components of the metro infrastructure and put them in place. But steel can be shipped in from Asia and assembled in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Houston by immigrants, legal or illegal. Better yet, the metro-supportive infrastructure can be leased or permanently sold to foreign consortiums and even foreign sovereign wealth funds, in order to avoid the need to raise taxes to pay for upfront costs or repay bonds over the long term. The “leakage” of federal stimulus spending to benefit Chinese factories, law-breaking Latin American illegal immigrants and petrostate sovereign wealth funds will not bother elites who are not only post-industrial but to a large extent too sophisticated to worry about narrow patriotism.

    If the infrastructure of a post-industrial America would be simple, local and largely foreign, the infrastructure of a neo-industrial America should be complex, national and predominantly American.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure necessarily must be complex, because the purpose of a neo-industrial infrastructure would be onshoring – arresting and in some cases reversing the transfer of high-value-added manufacturing and services to other countries. This requires something more than freight rail bringing Chinese imports to Wal-Mart and airports helping to deliver Amazon.com boxes to urban apartments. It requires an infrastructure tailored to the needs of an entire complex ecosystem of factories, design offices, and their suppliers and contractors. And that infrastructure not only must be rebuilt in existing industrial areas like Detroit but also built from scratch in areas such as the Great Plains. It would aim to put many of tomorrow’s factories and research parks in today’s depopulating rural areas and derelict inner cities.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure must be national and inclusive in scope. Its goal resonates with the aspiration of Henry Clay Whigs, Lincoln Republicans and William Jennings Bryan Populists – a decentralized, prosperous middle-class society of small and medium-sized towns as opposed to a country where half a billion people are crammed into a few plutocratic megacities and forced to live in dense apartment blocks.

    Such decentralization – contrary to the claims of some urbanists and greens – need not mean excessive “sprawl.” This is still a very large country with lots of land, as anyone who spends time away from the coasts recognizes.

    But more important, there can only be an independent middle-class majority in a United States with 400 or 500 million people in 2050 if most Americans live and work in relatively low-density areas where homes are affordable and small business rents are not crippling. That means building new towns and new industrial centers away from the existing ones, to spread out the population and accommodate tens of millions of new immigrants with desirable skills. The rich, who will remain concentrated in a few metro areas, where they can socialize, compete and conspire with one another, must be taxed by the federal government to subsidize the infrastructure of the entire continental U.S., not just their own cities, metro areas and states.

    Last but not least, a neo-industrial infrastructure must be predominantly national with respect to its components and its workforce. It would be self-defeating to design an infrastructure friendly to American industries and workers and then hire foreign industries and foreign workers to build it. Most or all federal infrastructure spending should be reserved for corporations and suppliers whose high-value-added production takes place on American soil. And all jobs directly or indirectly related to infrastructure construction should be reserved for citizens or legal immigrants. Law-abiding American citizens should not be taxed to subsidize law-breaking illegal immigrant workers and the unpatriotic, criminal contractors who employ them. This is not “nativism.” The right kind of legal immigration would be an important part of any neo-industrial strategy, as would taking advantage of foreign direct investment by foreign companies and sovereign wealth funds in mutually beneficial ways.

    The debate about infrastructure, then, is also a debate about the future industrial profile of America. Will America in the twenty-first century be neo-industrial or post-industrial? This debate, in turn, may well determine whether the U.S. will become a decentralized, continental middle-class society or a collection of plutocratic, hierarchical city-states. The stakes could not be higher.

    Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the American Infrastructure Initiative.

  • Obama’s Friends: Enemies of the American Dream?

    President Barack Obama has rightly spoken positively about the American Dream, how it is becoming more expensive and how it needs to be reclaimed. But to do this, he may have to disregard many of those who have been among his strongest supporters and the dense urban centers which have been his strongest bastion of support.

    Indeed, the American Dream has been achieved by countless millions of households, though many have been left out of this expansion that began following World War II. Home ownership has risen from little above 40 percent to nearly 70 percent. Automobile ownership has become nearly universal, making it possible for urban areas to grown to unprecedented size. The Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute and others have published studies showing that people in low income households are far more likely to find and hold employment if they have access to cars.

    All of this has been associated with a democratization of prosperity that has never before occurred. Per capita income is now 3.5 times its 1950 level in the United States (see 1929-2007 inflation adjusted data).

    Yet, the American Dream is under serious threat – and this predates today’s faltering economy. A key component lies in the machinations of an urban policy and planning elite contemptuous of the comfortable lifestyles achieved by so many Americans. Instead they propose creating an environment in which households would have to pay more for their houses and spend more of their lives traveling from one place to another.

    Most of those who wish to create this situation come from the political left and consider themselves to be “friends of Obama.” They have achieved positions of power in some urban areas, such as throughout California, Portland, Seattle and a host of other areas. As early as 2007 some saw Obama as the dream candidate – what one called “a smart growth President”.

    This elite group starts by demonizing the very foundations of America’s inclusive prosperity. Having declared “urban sprawl” a scourge, they seek to stop further development on the urban fringe and want virtually all development to be within already developed urban footprints. These and other overly stringent regulations have served to strangle urban land markets, forcing land prices and housing prices higher, in those region where they have been imposed.

    Over fifteen years ago William Fischell at Dartmouth University demonstrated that California’s overly restrictive land use policies had made that state more expensive than elsewhere. Since 2000, with the wider availability of mortgage credit, the new demand drove prices to double or triple historic norms in areas with restrictive regulation. Price reductions have lowered prices, but they are still well above historic norms. This means that fewer households still are able to own their own homes in areas with restrictive land use regulations. Once normal prosperity is restored, the higher house prices of the restrictive land use areas can be expected to resume their increase relative to the rest of the nation.

    This is a problem for some regions now. But many planners are enthusiastic about Obama in part because he is thought to be sympathetic to recreating these conditions throughout the entire country.

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    The automobile plays the role of the Great Satan in this morality play. The goal of many ‘progressive’ urbanists is to force people into transit and stop road building. Transit, of course, has its place. There is no better way to get to your job south of 59th Street in Manhattan, to Chicago’s Loop or to a few other of the nation’s largest downtown areas. But the stark reality is that transit can not substitute for the automobile for the overwhelming majority of trips, except for these niche markets. Further, failing to expand highways to keep up with traffic growth increases traffic congestion (and air pollution) and reduces economic productivity (read: “increases poverty”).

    Higher costs for home ownership and slower commutes to work – and they will be slower because transit commutes average twice as long as automobile – impose significant burdens on people. Fewer people will have houses and fewer will have jobs. Forcing a single parent to take longer to navigate from home to the day care center to the job, whether by transit or by car, makes life more difficult – and for no rational reason. It is the equivalent of forcing people to work harder for nothing.

    Of course, this way of thinking has been around some parts of the country for decades. The new drive to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has extended its reach. The typical formulation now is that in order to reduce GHG emissions, Americans need to be crowded into dense urban areas and give up our cars.

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    In reality, nothing of the kind is required. “Green” houses are being developed that can make it possible to substantially reduce GHG emissions while Americans continue their favored suburban life styles (the lifestyles, by the way, also favored by Europeans and Japanese). Hybrid and other advanced car and fuel technologies can make it possible for the personal transportation sector to achieve massive long term GHG reductions. The answer is regulating emissions, rather than people.

    But the planning and urbanist lobbies may not fundamentally be driven by the perceived need to reduce GHGs. They would rather regulate people, just as was the case well before climate change was even on the political agenda.

    Of course, the planners don’t see their strategies as nightmarish. They have worked them all out theoretically in their heads. The problem is that the theory is not and cannot be translated into reality. There is no more comfortable place to live in the world for people – particularly those past their youthful and single years – than the American suburb. There are no metropolitan areas of similar size in the world where people spend less time traveling to and from work than in America. Take Hong Kong, which is by far the world’s most dense large first-world urban area. No other metropolitan area of its size should have such theoretically short trips, because everything is so close together. Yet, average travel time to work is almost double that of Dallas-Fort Worth, with a similar population. Indeed, even in “gridlocked” Los Angeles, so often ridiculed for its automobile-oriented “sprawl,” work trip travel times average nearly 40 minutes less per day than in that ultimate of urbanization, Hong Kong. That adds up to about a week’s worth of extra commuting time each year.

    Rather than trying to constrict the dream, President Obama should work on ways to expand it. This will not be easy. Today, less than 50 percent of African-American and Latino households own their own homes. At the same time, Anglo home ownership is about 75 percent. No program to extend the American Dream can be based on policies that unnecessarily increase the price of housing.

    For the new President, there is a clear choice. He can cast his lot with those whose strategies would extinguish the aspirations of millions of Americans, or he could make it easier for more households in the nation to achieve the American Dream.

    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.”

  • A Little Genius for the City’s So-Called ‘Art World’

    There’s a little girl – maybe 10 or 12 years old – whose family owns a store just a couple of miles from Downtown Los Angeles. She spends a lot of time at the place after her nearby school lets out for the day, sort of helping out but mostly just hanging around where her older relatives can see her.

    I call her “Little Genius” because she’s always reading a book or busy at a computer or making paper dolls or working on some other challenge.

    Little Genius is Asian/American, the daughter of immigrants, and I think the flavor of academic prowess that comes with the nickname makes her happy in part because it makes her elders happy.

    It’s not just a nickname, though. I don’t know if Little Genius will grow up to be a great scientist or legal scholar or fill some other lofty role in our society. I do know, however, that she has the soul of an artist. Her paper dolls are much more intricate than the typical cut-outs. She recently put some craft clay and left-over cardboard from around the store together to make a scaled-down village occupied by little pigs. “The Pig Empire” went on display at the store for a few days, and plenty of customers enjoyed the work. Count me among them – it interested me, drew me close. I wondered about her motive and the inspiration for her little village.

    I thought about Little Genius when 13th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Eric Garcetti recently spoke of using $2.8 million in city funds to forge greater links between the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in the gleaming Bunker Hill district of Downtown and the many ethnic and immigrant and blue-collar folks who live in nearby areas.

    Garcetti pulled off a different sort of art – for a politician, anyway. He plainly spoke some truths that seldom get much of a genuine airing in our city. His brush strokes were bold, but applied with enough finesse to avoid offending anyone but the unduly sensitive. He said he’d like to see MOCA draw more visitors “who have never interacted with art in the visceral, provocative way that contemporary art can serve.” He called MOCA an institution with the potential to “set in motion a civic dialogue that’s been lacking in Los Angeles,” adding that that he hopes to see a variety of efforts focused on linking the museum to local schools, senior citizen’s centers, and everyday working folks by offering programs that appeal to them, and which they can readily attend.

    Perhaps this seems a mild triumph of rhetoric, but art in our city is in such a state of withdrawal that Garcetti’s comments amounted to some useful provocation of his own. Hundreds of thousands of persons live within a short distance of MOCA. Many of them labor hard – for some it’s a downright struggle – to maintain themselves in the city. Not many of them, or their children, are getting to MOCA.

    Garcetti’s comments also gave a reminder that museums and galleries might serve as reflections or repositories of art, but they should not be the exclusive province of what many refer to as the “art world.” I will go a step further – making clear that these are my thoughts and not Garcetti’s – and say that the moment artists, their patrons, and institutions such as MOCA come to believe that there is a distinct “art world” they lose touch with art itself.

    Art is a reflection of culture. Our culture is all of us, all mixed up. Great art engages all of us and helps us understand this culture of ours. How can anyone claim to be an artist while carving off a separate “art world” of limited membership?

    They can’t.

    That’s the best reason for all of us to take seriously Garcetti’s recent comments. It’s time to call on MOCA to make new and stronger efforts to reach Little Genius and the teeming mass of others who might not be members of the so-called “art world” but nevertheless serve as the heart and soul of our culture – also known as the real world.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • A Bailout For Yuppies

    The recent call by the porn industry – a big employer where I live, in the San Fernando Valley – for a $5 billion bailout elicited outrage in other places. Around here, it sparked something more akin to nervous laughter. Yet lending a helping hand to Pornopolis is far from the most absurd approach being discussed to stimulate the economy.

    Some influentials close to the administration may even find the porn industry a bit too tangible for their tastes. After all, the pornsters make a product that sells internationally, appeals to the masses and employs a lot of people whose skills are, well, more practical than ideational.

    As such, they may not even qualify for what is best described as a yuppie bailout, poised to extend the welfare state to the highly educated professional set. After all, George Bush’s bailout of Wall Street has already set a precedent, using public money to secure the bonuses and nest eggs of some of the nation’s most elite professionals. Call it the Paulson principle: In bad times, steer help to those least in need.

    A yuppie stimulus differs from the more traditional approach, which aims to get the front-line, blue-collar types back to work. Instead, it would channel public funds away from those grouchy construction workers – some 30% of whom may soon be out of work – to better heeled, and, in their minds, more deserving “creative” professionals. After all, what stake do the netroots have in making things better for Joe the Plumber?

    In contrast, the yuppie bailout focuses on a sure-fire Democratic constituency, the well-educated urban professional. One advocate of such an approach, pundit Richard Florida, has urged President-elect Barack Obama to eschew crude investments in traditional production and a renewed housing market in favor of goodies directed to what he calls “the creative industry.”

    Florida sees any focus on restoring manufacturing and housing as a misguided rescue of the “old industrial economy,” in which Americans actually made things and other Americans consumed them. Instead, he suggests, “the first step must be to reduce demand for the core products and lifestyle of the old order.”

    So let’s stop worrying about what happens to Detroit, or the crisis in the housing market. In Florida’s view, cars, of course, are demonized as woefully bad for environmental reasons and not particularly friendly to the preferred dense urbanity so attractive to advocates of “hip cool” cities.

    Florida even recommends shifting away from the single-family home, which is also, all too often, in the ‘burbs. Instead, we should develop what he calls “flexible rental housing,” so people can move every time they get new jobs. I think that is what they used to do in Chairman Mao’s China, too, albeit without the granite countertops and a Starbucks around the corner.

    In a yuppie bailout, what spending takes priority? More jobs for academics and educators. Florida suggests we invest in “individually tailored learning.” We assume this means neither home-schooling nor basic skills training but something more like painting and acting classes for tots and advanced “creative” navel-gazing for tweens and adolescents. And, of course, lots and lots of new jobs for well-paid, unionized teachers.

    These ideas should not be dismissed out of hand as the impractical meanderings of a lone scholar. In fact, Florida’s views are taken very seriously among influential Obama supporters at companies like Google as well as by politicos such as Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who is widely identified as a key Obama counselor on economic issues.

    Nor is Florida alone in his views. Bigger feet among the purveyors of conventional wisdom, like The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, also think the stimulus should steer more resources into the public pedagogy. Friedman even recently suggested teachers be exempted from paying federal taxes.

    And it’s not just teachers who would benefit from a yuppie bailout. The economic stimulus, Friedman says, should also focus more on high-tech companies like Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft, all of which enjoy extraordinary valuations. This reaffirms the Paulson principle with a politically correct spin.

    Politically, a yuppie bailout would certainly appeal to powerful Democratic constituencies, not just the teachers’ unions. Select high-tech companies and venture capitalists can count on new subsidies and tax breaks. Greens and “smart growth” advocates will celebrate if money is diverted from hard infrastructure – such as improved roads, bridges, ports and transmission lines – which they insist would create enough carbon to heat the planet like a toaster.

    This “yuppie first” approach certainly would appeal to many mayors, some of whom are already adherents to the Floridian ideology. They may be further encouraged by a new report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve called “City Beautiful,” which suggests cities should not promote growth through traditional infrastructure but instead invest in frilly amenities. As a Boston Globe article on the report summarized cheerfully: “Make it fun.”

    Here’s another hint of what might be coming in a yuppie bailout. Providence, R.I., located in the state with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate, wants to sink money into a polar bear exhibit at its zoo – perhaps so we can see them before they become extinct or go on Al Gore’s payroll – as well as make improvements to a soccer field. Miami envisions spending on a giant water slide, new BMX and dirt bike trails at a local park and, of great national import, a new Miami Rowing Club building.

    Even the once-booming but now-hurting ultimate “fun city,” Las Vegas, wants in on the act. Mayor Oscar Goodman is asking the feds to kick in big time for its new Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. That’s right, taxpayers can participate in building a monument to Bugsy Segal. And with Nevada’s own Harry Reid running the Senate, the project seems well-positioned to get the “respect” it deserves.

    If Goodman, who used to defend mobsters as a criminal defense lawyer, has his way, it could spark a feeding frenzy for every under-funded tourist trap from Cleveland to Cucamonga. Pork used to mean roads, bridges and ports that, at least in theory, made the economy more productive while providing well-paid work for blue-collar workers. Soon these dollars may instead go toward yacht clubs, art galleries, museums and “creativity” training for toddlers.

    A yuppie bailout is likely to hold more money for Boston, San Francisco and other havens of the perennially hip – all of them Democratic bastions. There’s also likely to be less funding for the grotty suburban towns, industrial backwaters and Appalachian hamlets, all of which don’t usually appeal to the artistic set.

    To an old-fashioned Democrat, this all seems to miss the point. Shouldn’t we be stimulating the places already suffering the most from high unemployment, foreclosures and spreading impoverishment? Where do Toledo, Cleveland or Modesto fit in to the yuppie bailout? As Pittsburgh-based blogger Jim Russell says: “Most of the population will continue to live in ‘Forgottenville.’ Should we just forget about them?”

    In spite of all this, the mounting pressure for a yuppie bailout sadly reveals how the supposed party of the people is being transformed into just a second party of privilege. We should desperately try to create new productive capacity and better-paying jobs, especially for the denizens of Forgottenville. It certainly makes more sense than pouring taxpayer funds into new clubhouses, water slides or even better-financed pornographic movies – however much the latter may help property values in my neighborhood.

    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.

  • Advancing Economies by the Power of Industry

    For the last quarter century there has been a growing tendency among policy makers and corporate executives to downplay, and even ignore, the primary importance of the ‘real,’ or tangible, economy. It is now widely believed that the primary engine of wealth creation is the manipulation of symbols and images — ‘the new economy’ of the ‘information/creative age’ — as opposed to the manufacture of tangible products and services.

    This paper challenges these assumptions. Our research in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America suggests that rapid economic and income growth tends to occur most steadily in areas where tangible production has been readily encouraged. Although the successful strategy varies by region and country, the basic fundamentals to propel growth lie in policies that stress the construction of essential physical infrastructure, investments in basic and skill-oriented education, and favorable tax and regulatory policies.

    Increasingly, this also includes the building of what we refer to as ‘infrasystems’, also called regional innovation systems. These are policies that encourage innovation and cross-firm transactions through the development of interlocking regional institutions, such as schools and governments that work closely with local industries. These infrasystems investments represent the cutting edge of progressive economic policies that encourage wealth creation and broad based opportunities for a wide variety of citizens.

    We believe that this ‘back to basics’ approach is particularly applicable during the current global financial crisis. Attempts to ‘create’ wealth through financial manipulation and the hyping of cultural attributes have done very little except create short-lived economic bubbles on the local, national and, most ominously, global levels. The time for a reassessment, and a return to the basic principles of wealth creation, clearly has arrived.

    See attached .pdf file for full report.

    Primary Authors: Joel Kotkin, Delore Zimmerman
    Research Team: Mark Schill, Matthew Leiphon, Andy Sywak
    Editor: Zina Klapper

  • Corporate Sponsorship of the Golden Gate, the Ultimate Sign of Failed Infrastructure

    The most anticipated tourist attraction in the city where I live, The Golden Gate Bridge, is a testament to the lasting utility of a well executed infrastructure project. The world’s most famous suspension bridge still serves as the critical artery connecting San Francisco to the bedroom communities of Marin County to the north, where much of the city’s workforce resides. Remarkably, this marvel of engineering was completed in the late 1930s – a time when the U.S. was coming out of the Great Depression.

    The New Deal brought about an expansion of infrastructure that should inspire us. Yet nearly 70 years after its completion, the sobering reality remains: it’s difficult to imagine a project of that moxie being constructed today.

    One indicator of the distance between then and now can be seen in the story of Doyle Drive – the one-and-half mile southern approach to the Bridge. In 1993, USA Today reported that the elevated portion of Doyle Drive is the 5th most dangerous bridge in America. After years of EIR studies and bickering amongst a myriad of stakeholders and governmental agencies, San Francisco voters in 2003 finally passed Proposition K, a sales tax increase ensuring the city’s funding for an upgrade of Doyle Drive.

    Sales tax revenue generated from Proposition K is slated to cover only $67.9 million of the $1.045 billion estimated cost of the project. State and Federal funding has also been committed for the project, yet there is still $414 million of cost yet to be accounted for. Along with hopes of securing additional funding from the Fed, The Golden Gate Bridge District is responsible for providing $75 million for the Doyle Drive retrofit. To meet the cost of this and other projects, such as the addition of a suicide-prevention net, the Bridge District is seriously considering soliciting corporate sponsorship of the world-famous span.

    The appalling fact that corporate sponsorship is on the table for one of the most iconic pieces of infrastructure in the modern world confirms the failure of the public sector in regards to maintaining an aging infrastructure. For the past few years, politicians at all levels of the government seeking office have beaten the drum of tax reductions in order to secure votes, only to find themselves with budget crises on their hands once elected. With city and state budgets strapped, local politicians often look to the federal government in order to help pay for repairing roads and other basic services, not to mention the huge pensions of public employees.

    The other place local governments look for money to balance the budget is from the private sector. In many cities across America, elected officials have responded to these kinds of crises by partnering up with private enterprise to generate jobs and sales tax revenue by developing ‘convention and retail districts’. Oftentimes these developments will also include hotels, luxury condominiums and even sporting or arts venues. Even before the recent economic downturn, many of these developments were representing white elephants, sitting empty while the issues of sustained job creation and infrastructure repair remain unresolved.

    Examples of infrastructure from the past, such as the ruins of Roman Aqueducts on the Iberian Peninsula and the dams of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, remind us of the great lengths societies will go through in order to function more efficiently. Although today the concept of infrastructure is primarily associated with industrial economies and modernization in the developing world, the truth is that ever since the earliest agrarian communities humans have been building physical systems that harness the powerful forces of nature and make life more convenient.

    Years from now, the built environment of America will provide one of the primary measurements for historians seeking to quantify 20th Century achievements. Today the vast networks of roads, bridges, ports, airports, power plants and water lines built in the U.S. over the past 150 years remains the standard for nations undergoing industrialization. Yet while other countries are busy catching up to the American paradigm, the U.S. system is falling behind. Entropy is setting in, and repeated policy failures prevent retrofitting and repair to take place at a mass scale.

    With all the current hubris surrounding the “New New Deal” proposed by the incoming Obama administration, discussion about the fundamental role of infrastructure seems to be missing from the conversation. Primary focus about the infrastructure package remains on rapid job creation rather than long term economic health. New Orleans remains a grim reminder of how infrastructural failure can destroy an economy for good, and misplaced investments in convention centers and other ephemera have limited impact.

    There has also been much press about a ‘green revolution’. While looking for cleaner alternatives to powering our society is an important issue, there is almost no acknowledgment that the most sustainable approach lies in fixing and updating what is already in place. Already, speculators are foaming at the mouth at what will end up probably being the next bubble – clean tech.

    In the coming days, it will be critical that careful attention be paid to a basic approach to ensure that stimulus money is not squandered on pork. As state and local governments – as well as big business and special interests – vie for handouts from Papa Fed, the United States government must seek ways to allocate funds for maximum investment in future generations.

    This is not to say such investments should not be bold and even beautiful. I know it’s possible every time I look at, or cross, the Golden Gate.

    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.

  • Tough Budget Math for City Politicians: Bad Economy + Human Nature = More Cops

    Our economy is going to get better some day, step by step. But it’s bad right now, with a full recovery likely a matter of years rather than months away. Public officials should plan accordingly, keeping in mind how the vicious cycle of a bad economy turns typical decision making on its head.

    Start with a look at a virtuous cycle – the opposite of a vicious cycle – for a point of reference. Look back to the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton got a tax increase through the U.S. Congress. A lot of folks were genuinely concerned about our federal budget deficits and national debt back then. The tax hike signaled that the federal government had grown serious about getting its finances in line. That quelled fears about inflation, and sent interest rates lower.

    The relatively low cost of borrowing benefited businesses just as new strides in technology were reshaping our lives and helping keep inflation in check. The tech sector’s growth sparked other segments of the economy, leading to more payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. The federal budget came into balance, and then went into surplus. Public officials had plenty to divvy up from the virtuous cycle.

    Now we face a vicious cycle. Tapped-out consumers stop spending. Companies cut back on orders and production and payrolls. Weakness leads to more weakness. Jobs keep disappearing. Government revenues decline at every level. Budget deficits abound.

    Elected officials in Los Angeles should beware as they seek to meet those deficits with budget cuts, however. The vicious cycle is in full swing. Plenty of folks are desperate to hang on to their house, make their rent, or just get their next meal. Desperate individuals sometimes take desperate actions. Some of them lie, cheat, steal – and worse.

    This trend holds the potential to tear apart our social fabric. Examine past periods of economic hardship and you’ll see that some folks fall into cynicism, looking beyond government institutions for leadership. Some are drawn to what appears to be strong leadership but is really a criminal element sophisticated enough to exploit stress points in our societal sense of right and wrong. Yesterday’s gangsters could quickly become today’s folk heroes in a tough economy.

    That’s a particularly vicious cycle, and it will take an increased commitment to public safety to head off any such erosion to our social compact amid the current downturn.

    Now is the time for elected officials to trade across-the-board mentalities on budget cuts for a sharpened sense of priorities. They should heed the vicious cycle and find money for more cops to help keep the cynics and criminals at bay while the rest of us make an honest effort to slug our way through tough times.

    The everyday working folks and business owners who will ultimately pull us out of this mess deserve that much cover.

    The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), meanwhile, has earned the assumption that properly trained and appropriately deployed cops can do more than simply react to crimes once they have occurred. The LAPD’s recent record has earned a place for the notion that good police work can not only prevent crimes but also dispel any atmosphere of lawlessness that might otherwise take hold – with safeguards on civil liberties in place all the while.

    Indeed, it’s true that the rugged economy is pushing some of our people a rung or two down the socio-economic ladder, and it’s inevitable that some of them will resort to crime. Yet that still doesn’t mean that socio-economic factors trump cops on the beat – or that we must accept lawlessness as a natural and unavoidable by-product of a bad economy. The economic downturn means that the pool of potential criminals will grow, to be sure, but that presents a question of math rather than sociology – and the answer is more cops.

    Just in case that’s not enough, we urge our politicians to consider the bonus that’s in it for them. They should understand just how disappointed voters are with elected officials at every level. They should know that perhaps the best chance for them to recover their standing with the public is to make courageous decisions when it comes to public safety.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • The Mobility Paradox: Investing in Human Capital Fuels Migration

    China has an interesting urban development strategy. The government bypasses those areas that it considers backward and plagued by poverty and entrenched political corruption. Instead, the investment goes into those areas it presumes to be new boomtowns.

    Now imagine if that Darwinian approach was used here in the United States. A report (“City Beautiful”) authored by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia advocates pushing federal infrastructure dollars – which could soon be flowing in the hundreds of billions – not towards our tired, hard-pressed urban areas but those that have experienced the greatest extent of gentrification.

    If you don’t want to slog through the published paper, then you can read about the controversial findings in a recent Boston Globe article. The journalist, not surprisingly, sensationalizes the conclusions and the choice quotes do a great job of provocation: “‘If you have sun and a beautiful beach and 300-year-old buildings, it’s no wonder that you’re going to attract people,’ said [co-author Albert Saiz]. ‘But that’s no use for Detroit or Syracuse.’”

    The author of the Globe piece goes on to question the coming urban bailouts: “Why send another federal dollar to bolster manufacturing in Akron when it could support a golf course in sunny Phoenix?”

    I get the sense that the economists in question aren’t making such a stark distinction. But I can understand why the press would go down that road. I’ve read the research and there are concerns about the wisdom of investing in cities that currently don’t attract tourists or Richard Florida’s elite Creative Class.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report attempts to reconfigure the understanding of urban geography. People are congregating in urban centers for a new purpose: leisure. The old school of thinking identified the central business district (CBD) as the economic heart of the metropolis. Higher densities were the result of a more efficient way of doing certain types of work (e.g. financial, insurance and real estate).

    The new school sees the city as a special playground and the study tries to capture this effect by looking at tourist Meccas. In short, jobs are following talent to pleasant places to live.

    Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz try to figure out if the geographically mobile are indeed heading to sunnier climes or if the leisure amenities follow the talent. They claim that quality of life comes first. The best and brightest are not chasing top employment opportunities. They are keener on finding a “cool” place to hang out.

    Other research suggests this approach may be limited. For example, although job growth has been very strong in some sun belt cities that are cited, growth rates in other amenity-rich cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco – have been well below par. Although often attractive to twenty-somethings, these areas also suffer a persistently strong net outmigration.

    Perhaps more to the point what use is any of this to those living in the heartland cities? Should Akron start putting more money in skateparks or global warming?

    There are huge problem in spending money in order to attract the geographically fickle. Fads fade and the mobile – largely people under 30 – will move again. And what about the people who can’t move? We’ve yet to address the mobility paradox.

    Moving to a better place might be one of the most distinguishing features of American culture. However, less and less people can manage to do so. There are considerably more “stuck” than there are “mobile.” The nomads of the knowledge economy comprise the global elite. They can live wherever they like and, particularly when young, can move at the drop of a hat.

    Where does that leave the postindustrial cities currently failing to attract the twenty-something demographic? One suggestion is to better educate people tethered to their neighborhood. The rub is that greater investment in your human capital will make your young adults more likely to leave. This is the mobility paradox. Regional workforce development has the unintended effect of increasing out-migration.

    A common response to the mobility paradox is the transformation of a downtown area into a “cool city.” The theory is that the best and brightest won’t leave if there are more fun things to do. Tying up the urban budget with projects aimed at retaining the creative class has its own perils. There is little, if any, evidence indicating that this policy will decrease the geographic mobility of the well-educated. Many cities stuffed with cultural amenities also sport high rates of out-migration. Furthermore, tastes change. ”Best places to live” lists change quite a bit from one year to the next.

    We should learn from the bust of hot destinations such as Florida or even California. Today’s paradise is tomorrow’s backwater. Meanwhile most of the population will continue to live in “Forgottenville.” Should we just forget about them?

    Globalization would seem to reward such an approach. Some cities will cut it, most won’t. Good luck dealing with the political instability. China gets away with ignoring its “old” cities thanks to robust growth and iron-fisted control. Given the current economic slowdown, things may be getting tense there, particularly in the left-behind industrial towns in the interior.

    So should amenities drive President Obama’s economic strategy? These days, the Sunshine States also are in dire need of a bailout. Alabama fights Michigan for federal attention. If the Rust Belt benefits from the Chicago President, let’s hope it’s for its own sake – not just the creative class.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.