New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • L.A.’s Big-Bucks Plan for Upper Floors on Broadway Overlooks Facts at Ground Level

    City officials and private business owners recently gathered to celebrate the extended holiday hours of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Metro Red Line train service between Hollywood and Downtown. Private businesses put up $50,000 or so to pay for the Red Line to run an extra two hours — until 3 a.m. — on weekends through December 27. The local business community also came up with private funds for free service on city-operated DASH buses that will offer connections to late-night Red Line riders and others.

    There’s room to question the timing of those moves amid an economic slide. Yet there’s just as much reason to see good sense and courage behind efforts to kick-start economic activity in the face of the frozen confidence of consumers. The effort falls within the realm of a privately financed gamble, too, so that’s fair enough.

    It’s another thing altogether for our city officials to take such chances on an economic stimulus program, as they apparently intend to do with a plan to make $150 million a year available for loans to property owners along the Downtown stretch of Broadway.

    The plan, as stated by 14th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar, is to provide incentives for property owners to renovate some of the long-empty upper floors of buildings along the thoroughfare, where many of the structures have few tenants besides ground-floor retailers.

    Huizar has noted that the empty spaces provide no jobs and little tax revenue, and that he hopes to reverse that by lending money to property owners from a pool of federal funds. The funds would finance renovations in hopes of drawing commercial tenants and jobs to the upper floors on Broadway.

    It remains unclear why any of the property owners who didn’t see incentives to renovate their properties during Downtown’s recent boom years would find reasons to do so now. It’s also unclear what sort of tenants would fill the empty spaces. It could be several years before we see anything resembling a hot economy in these parts.

    Again, there is always room for bold ideas that are counter-intuitive. Fortune magazine launched in 1930 — just four months after the stock market crash that signaled the Great Depression — and the publication has done just fine all these years. There’s also room to figure that renovations take awhile, and such work along Broadway might be ready just as the economy picks up.

    This economic mess of ours is big and immediate, though, causing extreme difficulties for folks everywhere. There’s some irony here, because you can get a picture of the pain by walking along Broadway. Don’t bother looking at those empty spaces on the upper floor. Take a gander at the ground floors, where many of the retail shops that buzzed with customers just a short while ago have closed, and those that remain face uncertain prospects.

    It’s enough to make you wonder whether $150 million might be better spent on something other than loans to property owners on the hopes that renovations will someday bring jobs from somewhere to the upper floors along Broadway.

    Meanwhile, there’s never been a better chance of getting a change on the rules that come with federal funds. That should be enough for Huizar and other city officials to re-think their plans. They should consider that Broadway — while it’s not everybody’s cup of tea — has been one of the busiest commercial streets in the city for years. It’s a place where merchants sell, workers earn, and shoppers spend.

    Maybe the action is mostly bargain retail on the ground floor, but Broadway is a working street — and we need all of those we can get right now.

    So why not focus ways to help retailers hang on, and draw more to fill the new gaps at street level? How about renovations for storefronts, with merchants allowed a voice in the process? Or more cops for the area to help improve the atmosphere for shoppers? Or aggressive promotions of the retail scene? All of that might even entice a few more mid- and upper-scale merchants to set up shop on Broadway, sparking some organic changes in the marketplace.

    Pick a program, but keep in mind that this is no time to overlook — quite literally — Broadway’s long-standing role as a street-level heartbeat of our city.

    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)

  • Can Millennials Turn around the Housing Bust?

    Many of the nation’s youth (and a few of their elders) are expecting a magical turnaround of America’s economic fortunes as soon as their candidate for President, Barack Obama, is sworn in on January 20th 2009. But the Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2003, may be more the source of the country’s economic salvation as any initiative the new President might propose.

    Millennials are the largest generation in American history, more than 91 million strong. They are coming of age just in time to join the workforce, enter the housing market, stabilize home prices, and buy the nation’s expanding inventory of durable goods to furnish their new homes. Despite being burdened with student loan debt and graduating just when the job market is shrinking, this group of optimistic, civic-minded young Americans is ready to demonstrate that it is not only capable of electing a President, but also helping to resolve the country’s housing crisis.

    The “helicopter parents” of Millennials constantly hovered over their children as they grew up in order to protect them from anything that might harm their self-esteem. As a result, many older Americans, especially the 27 to 43 year old members of Generation X, think the Millennials’ “can do” attitude will crumble once they are confronted by the “realities of the real world.”

    But this ignores the cyclical nature of generational change. The GI Generation – the Millennial civic generation’s great-grandparents who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s – were raised in much the same way and acquired many of the same values cherished by Millennials. These members of what have come to be called “the Greatest Generation” were able to draw upon a deep reservoir of confidence and determination to lead America’s recovery from the Depression and later win the struggle against both fascism and communism.

    To give Millennials the same opportunity to rescue America, the new Obama administration should give the emerging generation the same attention in its policy initiatives that it expended getting their votes. Certainly the opportunity is there, particularly in rescuing the now devastated housing market.

    One unintended collateral benefit of the rapid drop in housing prices across the nation is to put many suburban homes within reach of first time home buyers, something that has not occurred for at least a decade. Even in pricey California, for example, the ratio between income and cost of housing has begun to drop dramatically, notes a recent paper by Chapman University graduate students Gil Yabes and Jason Goforth, with the ratio between income and mortgages dropping by one half or more in Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, close to pre-bubble levels.

    That’s a big opportunity, one that President-elect Obama’s “Home Ownership Initiative” should seize on. The Millennials could well be the demographic that could buy these more affordable homes and staunch the rise of foreclosures threatening the U.S. economy.

    It’s not that these young people don’t want to own homes. A 2004 study of students enrolled in a four-year university, a community college and an historically black college found that about the same 40-percent plurality in each group preferred to live in a “suburban community, single family home,” upon graduation. The second choice of these Millennials was to live in a “rural area, with large lots and open space.” Only about a quarter wanted to live in an “urban setting with mixed housing styles.” Luckily for them, five years later, their preferred housing stock has just become imminently more affordable.

    Now the Democratic Congress and President Obama should enact a significant tax credit incentive for first time homebuyers, many of whom would be Millennials. By rapidly expanding the universe of potential homebuyers, this program would help stabilize housing prices in the critical lower cost housing market. At the same time it would help stem foreclosures among existing homebuyers, whose loss of home equity has made abandoning mortgages more rational economically than keeping up payments.

    In 1934, during an earlier time of far greater economic pain, the Federal Housing Agency (FHA) was created to provide financing for a new type of mortgage requiring a lower down payment with the loan to be paid off over 25 or 30 years. The federal agency’s financing authority was greatly extended through Title II of the Housing Act of 1949, which provided federally guaranteed mortgage insurance and helped a flood of returning GIs own a home. Now it is time for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be given the authority to finance a new mortgage structure for homebuyers under thirty.

    By lowering down payment requirements for this select group of home buyers to 10% and stretching the terms of mortgages to the number of years these young people are likely to be active in the workforce, forty, monthly payments on starter homes could be brought in line with the Millennials‘ ability to pay. Initially, this combination of tax credits and new types of mortgage financing would slow the decline in home prices that triggered the problems in the country’s financial markets. In the longer run, it will make sure that the benefits of widespread homeownership will expand to a new generation of Americans.

    One young Millennial to whom we talked recently was concerned that the hours her retail employer wanted her to work were being cut as holiday shopping continued to sour. She expressed concern that there was still “more than a month before Obama gets sworn in and everything turns around again.”

    Her statement exhibits the kind of economic naiveté that frustrates some older Americans, but does provide an important lesson – political as well as economic – for the incoming administration. The Millennial Generation, whose votes were key in nominating and then resoundingly electing President Obama, want to see things improve rapidly. After all, they lack either the experience or the equity that Baby Boomers have acquired over the years.

    Once in office, President Obama should embrace the impatience of America’s youth as one way to insure that his economic policies are enacted quickly. By making an explicit appeal to America’s largest generation’s desire for homeownership, he would not only take a big step toward ensuring the popularity of his economic program, but its effectiveness as well.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the New York Times 10 favorite books of 2008.

  • The Housing Bubble and the Boomer Generation

    Much of the commentary on the current economic crisis has focused on symptoms. Sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps and the loosening of financial regulations are not the root cause of the financial crisis. They are symptoms of what has recently become a surprisingly widespread belief that individuals, families and even entire nations could live indefinitely beyond their means.

    The crisis has reminded everyone that, in the end, market fundamentals like supply and demand still matter and that ignoring traditional virtues like thrift and long-term planning can lead to grief. But what does this have to do with boomers?

    Ultimately, this economic crisis shines some light on some of the most important yet unresolved and paradoxical aspects of American culture as it developed in the wake of the economic, social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

    Children coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s were born into families that, on average, enjoyed the greatest material prosperity and the best housing the world had ever known. The security offered by an enormously expanded and comfortable middle class allowed these children to crusade on behalf of various causes. Those who called themselves “progressive” pushed to expand individual civil rights, sometimes at the expense of what others perceived as community rights or duties, but at the same time they were often deeply suspicious of capitalism and markets and for this reason pushed to restrict the rights of private property owners in order to expand on their own notions of community rights.

    The result was, on the one hand, a massive effort to empower racial and ethnic minorities, women, gay people and many others. This aspect of the revolutions of the 1960s era has always been highly controversial, with conservatives fighting the “reforms” every step of the way. On the other hand, starting about 1970, there was an explosion in regulations on the use of land including tighter zoning and building codes, regulations governing environmental matters, historic preservation and land conservation, growth and building caps and growth management schemes. It became harder to build at the urban edge because of the environmental rules and efforts to limit “sprawl.” It also became harder to build at the center because of substantial down-zoning and other regulations to “preserve neighborhood character,” particularly in affluent neighborhoods. This aspect of the 1960s progressive agenda has led to grumbling about NIMBYism but has otherwise generated surprisingly little negative commentary.

    Nevertheless, this movement has created one of the most paradoxical legacies of the 1960s as programs justified in the language and logic of “rights,” have turned into bulwarks for the status quo and a mechanism to transfer wealth from younger families of modest income to more affluent older families.

    In the 1950s and 1960s developers in America built a huge amount of housing, primarily on cheap land at the suburban edge of almost every city in the country. This housing was remarkably inexpensive and, together with liberal financing terms, allowed millions of Americans to enter into the ranks of home ownership and the middle class. It provided the underpinnings for the enormous wealth of the boomer generation.

    Starting in the 1970s, though, particularly in some of the most desirable markets in the country, the same people who most benefited from the developments of the early postwar years turned against those development practices. They advocated regulations for many things that most people, then as now, would agree were desirable – conserving scenic areas and wetlands, protecting coastlines and animal habitats and preserving open space, historic buildings and neighborhood character.

    Yet the net effect of all of these regulations was to limit severely the supply of land for urban uses. Even more important, existing homeowners, what I have elsewhere called the “Incumbents’ Club,” created a political system that allowed them to dictate how much growth and what kind of growth would be permitted in their cities.

    This shift of decision-making about development from private developers and individual property owners to public planning bodies, almost always controlled by homeowners, was hailed by many observers as a triumph of democratic process. The community rather than the developers, so this line of thinking went, would henceforth dictate the growth of the community. The problem with this equation was that it failed to consider who was speaking for the community and whose voices were not heard or to calculate the costs and benefits of these policies.

    For existing homeowners in affluent communities like Boulder Colorado, or Nantucket Island or San Francisco, this regulatory rush turned existing land ownership into pure gold. By limiting the supply of land for development and driving up the costs of development where the land was available, it pushed up the perceived value of all houses, including their own.

    Take the case of the Bay Area, where land prices were on par with urban areas elsewhere in the country up until 1970. Then, as the area pioneered in land use regulations of every kind, house prices started a steep climb. Where the rule of thumb had long been that the average American family in any given urban market would expect to pay about three times its annual salary for an average house, by the early years of the 21st century it had reached the point where that average house in the Bay Area would be the equivalent of ten, eleven or even twelve years of the average family’s income. At the same time, however, in lightly regulated urban areas, even extremely dynamic ones like those of Atlanta, Houston or Phoenix, house prices registered no comparable rise against incomes.

    Nor was this all. There was at the same time an increasing movement around the country to push the cost of what had been considered public goods, like new roads, street lights, sidewalks and sewers, even parks and schools, onto the developers who then passed these costs on to the eventual buyers. As a result, existing owners who enjoyed infrastructure paid for by previous generations no longer had to pay for the infrastructure of their children’s and grandchildren’s generation.

    Finally, this elaborate edifice of protection of the interests of existing landowners was capped by a series of tax revolts starting in the 1970s, particularly Proposition 13 in California. This made it possible for members of the incumbent’s club to enjoy the benefits of rapidly escalating house prices without paying a corresponding share of the property taxes that financed most municipal services.

    These land use regulations and real estate tax policies have made possible, at least in certain highly regulated markets, one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history. The primary beneficiaries have been existing landowners including a very large percentage of affluent boomers. The ones who have paid have been less affluent renters, younger people and all future generations of prospective homeowners.

    The existing homeowner in the Bay Area could watch the value of his house soar from a few hundred thousand dollars up into the millions without lifting a finger. Meanwhile the dramatic rise in land prices, because it has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in salaries, has devastated the prospects of young couples, many of whom were forced to either leave the area or obliged to take on huge mortgage debt just to afford an entry level house. These same people are now bearing the brunt of the steep decline in housing prices and the wave of foreclosures washing over the country.

    One of the most remarkable things about this enormous transfer of wealth has been how little most people were aware that it was happening or what caused it. A few people – notably Bernard J. Frieden in his book The Environmental Hustle from 1979 – had sounded the alarm. More recently Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich at Demographia.com have made a similar case using substantial data from cities in the English speaking world. Although all of these observers have been dismissed as free market enthusiasts, more mainstream commentators – like Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania – have embraced this theme. Even the noted liberal economist Paul Krugman has joined the chorus, comparing the moderate land prices in the “flatlands,” meaning lightly regulated places like Texas, with the extremely high prices in the “zoned zone” or places like heavily regulated coastal California.

    This leads us to the great challenge we face now keeping families in their homes. The sad truth is that in areas where housing prices have vastly outstripped incomes there may no easy way to do this. In many markets either housing prices will need to fall quite a bit further or income will have to rise substantially, and there is little likelihood – particularly with this weak economy – of the latter happening any time in the near future.

    One good thing that might come out of the current crisis, though, is a recognition that regulations, however well-intentioned, can come at a price, sometimes a high one, for some parts of society. I doubt very much that the boomer generation ever intended to create the current housing bubble or enrich itself at the expense of less affluent families and generations to come. This was the unanticipated consequence of a genuine desire to create a better life for everyone by individuals who, probably inevitably, defined the good life as the kind of life they themselves wanted. In many ways they succeeded all too well. We can only hope this downturn will at least open up a new chapter in the discussion of the bittersweet story of a generation that set out to remake the world.

    Robert Bruegmann is a professor of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book, Sprawl: A Compact History, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005, has generated a great deal of discussion worldwide.

  • Redrawing the Electoral Map? Not so fast.

    With Barack Obama’s historic presidential win there has been much celebratory talk about redrawing the electoral map. Obama himself boasted that he was the only Democratic candidate who could accomplish this feat.

    However, actual voting results suggest the map only shifted slightly at the margins from the 2000 and 2004 elections and that our geographic voting patterns may be more durable than we think. Here is a comparison of the famous red-blue divide:

    Exit polls show that Obama received roughly two-thirds of the non-black minority vote and about 95% of the black vote. On top of that he got more than two-thirds of the 18-29 age cohort. But none of this data captures the electoral geography that drives the Electoral College results. The true shift from red to blue was actually driven by a slight shift at the margins of the divide. The tipping point was in the suburbs where middle and upper class suburbanites congregate and 49% of the electorate resides. These voters shifted to the Democratic candidate and tipped the balance in those swing states of Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia and North Carolina. They found Obama more convincing on economic matters and fundamental change from the previous administration, but it would be a mistake to assume this means they embrace a radically new governing ideology.

    To examine the results more closely we can compare the demographic characteristics of counties won by Obama and McCain and also compare these to Bush and Kerry in 2004. The following maps illustrate county vote shares in shades from blue to purple to red to show how the underlying vote compares between 2004 and 2008. Not a big difference, is there?


    The following table compares the demographic profiles of 3115 counties and how they voted in the past three presidential elections. We can see that Obama captured more suburban counties outside the urban core than either Gore or Kerry. These counties not only have lower population densities but also higher incomes and more white inhabitants. So much for race.


    This conclusion is confirmed by looking only at those counties that flipped from red to blue (Bush to Obama) or blue to red (Kerry to McCain). Is this case we can see that Obama won more populous, whiter, and richer counties than McCain. Interestingly, the older, female heads-of-household gravitated slightly toward McCain.


    Finally, we can look at an important subset of metro counties, meaning those counties that border the 50 largest metro areas in the country. There are 417 of these counties and they are classified by concentric rings from the urban core outward to the exurbs.


    These data confirm where the major shift took place. Obama had gains of roughly 5-6% over Kerry’s results in suburban counties. Obama won handily in the mature suburbs where Bush and Kerry had evenly split. This is also where much of the non-black minority support for Obama resides. On the other hand, we again see a consistent monotonic relationship between party preference and population density: as we move outward from the urban core voting preferences shift from blue to purple to red. This suggests that the urban-rural split in American politics is still very much with us. This should not surprise us if these political differences are based on lifestyle preferences that do not change from election to election or candidate to candidate.

    *State and county maps courtesy of Mark Newman: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

    Michael Harrington is a political scientist, policy analyst and writer living in Los Angeles. He has extensively researched the red-blue divide of the past three presidential elections by focusing on county level census and voting data.

  • Back to Basics in Orlando

    By Richard Reep

    For the last decade the City of Orlando has been concentrating form, trying somehow to displace its image as the ultimate plastic city. Although tourism helped insulate Central Florida from the slowdowns of the 1970s and 1980s, the last three recessions hit Orlando harder than the national average. This metropolitan area has now been taking on a more essential task of morphing slowly away from its status as ephemeral support city for the theme parks.

    One sign of this new appreciation for the basic necessity of good jobs can be seen in two new districts: one concentrated around medical research and practice; the other concentrated around digital media.

    Both districts will greatly enhance the city’s core offering of service jobs, and are being nationally scrutinized for their viability as a new home for technological research and application. In the next phase of city-making, Orlando can make important steps towards a sustainable economy, if it grows good jobs while focusing on the basics of safety, security, and a spiritual core for its citizens.

    The first growth district, on Orlando’s ring road, is Lake Nona. Private interests have combined with institutions of higher education to create a core of medical research and technology. The most recent star addition to this, Nemours Children’s Hospital, will anchor part of the development. Medical research laboratories by Florida’s major public universities flank the hospital, and more medical facilities are on their way.

    Surrounded by residential communities and scrub pine, the medical district is in its infancy. This community already boasts two promising features. For one, the focus on good jobs sets the fundamental stage for organic and meaningful growth created. This seems logical enough, but the employment element has been largely missing from most new developments of regional impact. Secondly, the residential community, currently less than 10% developed, appears to be growing unmolested by the need to conform to pre-set ideas about cities. Lake Nona’s Master Plan promises an 11-acre oval “town center”, likely to be a mixed-use district typical of recent Southeastern town centers: shops, offices, residential, and of course, the local supermarket, Publix.

    Thankfully, the developer is leaving the town center to the future, and this new core will have a chance to reflect Lake Nona’s mature identity, rather than be thrust upon the community by the Master Developer in some kind of bland neohistorical form. This is reminiscent of Valencia, planned in the late 1950s and developed in the 1960s, where core community functions such as hospitals, government offices, and schools were built first by the Newhall family near Los Angeles. Residential areas filled in the 1960’s and 1970s; but the original Town Center, designed by Victor Gruen, was not built until the late 1980s, after Valencia matured. The lesson of Valencia is that organic growth can yield a vibrant, successful development plan. Valencia remains today a positive addition to the Santa Clarita Valley and southern California in general.

    Switch focus to the inner city: forgotten, chaotic, grim residences; sagging front porches and weedy lots. Orlando’s own inner city, Parramore, did not benefit very well from the run-up in the last six years, and by the looks on the faces of the residents who watch you as you drive by, they know it. The City of Orlando has decided that it is now their turn.

    This will be an interesting experiment to see whether the greenfield results of New Urbanism can be translated to what is essentially a classic, 1960s urban renewal project in reverse: Demolition of 20-year-old event center slums, to be replaced by new construction to further the cause of virtual reality.

    The City’s bonding capacity, sadly, has been tapped for major venues (a new sports arena and a performing arts center), but failure of the event center has led to a healthy focus on higher skilled jobs. The city envisions a partnership with higher education and the private sector to create a digital media village, similar to Laval, a suburban community just north of Montreal. Laval, an existing neighborhood in search of new life, benefited from a similar effort when the city focused on developing its bioscience and information industries. Now Laval’s status has begun to show some basic street life and has a highly successful retail complex that draws shoppers from throughout the region.

    This concept of a technopole has now been borrowed by the City of Orlando to create a similar district centered around digital media: movies, gaming, and other pursuits. The city must be careful to make sure that, like Laval, it concentrates on jobs growth first, and then seeks to integrate those jobs with the community. As a city with a strong, form-based planning outlook, Orlando will certainly be anxious that the Media Village conforms to the concepts of New Urbanism.

    The trend is ominous: Cities that allow their job base to become concentrated in a small handful of industries are risking their economic lives on a set of very outdated assumptions. On the other hand, cities that have sought out high technology jobs have become the “survivors” of the economic downturn.

    In the year 1980, there were only nine research parks in America. Today there are more than 200 in the United States, and competition from overseas is heating up fast.

    It is important to remember what a giant head start that we gave to other cities. The Triangle Research Park near Raleigh / Durham was founded back in 1959, and now houses more than 150 research and technology companies. Although Orlando is the “new kid” on this particular block, if we focus on what the employers need, we still have a lot to offer besides tourism.

    With the economy stagnating, a growing focus on jobs – and building an environment that promotes growth – should have a strong appeal. As in the 1930s, slower growth can begin to get the community to look beyond New Urbanist form-obsession and look to more fundamental elements that create jobs and wealth as opposed to seeking to win accolades from developers and the architectural and planning establishments.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • From Rhetoric to Reality on Transit

    Rhetoric always seems to trump reality in the headline department. This has been evident as a fawning press and commentators have made the most of the decline in driving from high gas prices and the related increase in transit ridership. As gas prices rose to their above $4.00 peak, driving in the nation’s urban areas had declined 2.0 percent over a year. At the same time, transit ridership rose 3.3 percent, leading to the impression that transit ridership increases had accounted for most, if not more than the loss in driving.

    Now, as gas prices dip below $2.00 nationally, $1.50 in some places and to their lowest point since well before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there are indications that the new riders are returning to their cars. Here in the St. Louis area, where I live, prices are now $1.39, the lowest in the nation.

    The Los Angeles Times, for example, notes lower transit ridership and increased freeway traffic volumes, while the Dallas Morning News notes that it is no longer a challenge to find parking places at DART rail stations.

    As gasoline prices have returned to reality, it is a good time also for the transit rhetoric to be transformed into reality.

    First, the increase in transit ridership was never significant in overall terms. Yes, ridership increases in some systems strained capacity on the already crowded buses and trains taking workers to downtown locations. But, since transit accounts for so little in urban mobility, the increases counted for little in the overall scheme of things. For example, the 10 percent increase in ridership that occurred in the Atlanta area could account, at a maximum, for only a 0.2 percent decline in automobile use.

    The reason is simple: less than two percent of travel in the Atlanta area is on transit. Atlanta was among the leaders. In most other urban areas, the impact of the transit increase was less than 0.1 percent. It is thus not surprising that the decrease in driving and increase in transit translated into a national urban market share increase somewhat greater than 0.1 percent over the last year – that is 1 out of 1,000.

    Second, as much as some commentators applauded the shift, it is important to understand why it occurred. The shift did not occur because people had been convinced that such a move would materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions (It would not – outside the New York City area, cars emit little more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than transit). The shift occurred, purely and simply, because it was in the best interests of the shifters. It saved them money and worth the time lost (transit work trip travel times are double that of the car). Now that driving is no longer prohibitively expensive, it is rational to expect much of transit’s ridership gain to be lost.

    Third, the return to the car should not be considered a reflection of the much ballyhooed “love affair” with the automobile. Simply put, people use transit where it makes sense and do not where it does not.

    This can be illustrated by six households on a typical street in Long Island’s Nassau County, an inner suburb that borders the city of New York. One in 6 Nassau County workers was employed in Manhattan in 2000. For them, travel to Manhattan from Nassau County makes total economic and psychic sense. Crossing Queens and maybe Brooklyn – particularly at rush hour – on the way to Manhattan is an experience to be avoided. In addition, train and even bus travel into Manhattan is relatively fast and, once on the island, the subway can whisk you to a dazzling array of locations. No surprise that 75 percent of Mahnattan workers take transit to work.

    But what about the other five workers? Even in New York, transit services to work locations other than Manhattan tends to be sparse. As a result, the other five neighbors who do not work in Manhattan drive to work. It’s not those five have a love affair with the automobile, any more than the Manhattan commuter has romantic attachments to the subway. It simply indicates that for 5 of the workers, using a car makes sense, while for one, using transit does.

    Indeed, if one is looking for true love affairs, look to refrigerators or toilets. It can be expected that all six houses have them. Of course, such a characterization would be ludicrous. People tend to adopt those products and practices that make their lives better. For those few (in the national context) who work in the largest downtown areas, transit makes their lives better. For those working elsewhere, cars do. Finally, it can be expected that when all six workers go to a supermarket, the furniture store or Jones Beach, they use the car. Even Manhattanites abandon transit to motor on weekends to their second homes across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania in the Poconos.

    Some transit advocates believe the answer is to expand transit service so it can be as convenient and time-effective as an automobile. There are two difficulties with this. The first is that any such expansion would likely cost more to build and operate, each year, than the total personal income of any urban area attempting it. This is probably why no one has ever seriously proposed it. There is another issue: history shows that new money for transit does not produce a corresponding increase in transit ridership. From 1970 to 2006, US transit expenditures rose 270 percent, after adjustment for inflation. Over the same period, transit use rose less than 20 percent. The result – only 7 cents of new value (new transit ridership) was obtained for each new $1.00. So any infusion of new cash to expand transit service is likely to be largely wasted.

    Talk of auto eroticism or of a transit oriented future can capture the romantic sense in people and planners. But the reality remains that people will choose the mode of transport that makes their lives better, not those that make their lives more difficult.

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

  • New Zealand Voters Swing Right: John Key’s Shower Power

    Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker opens his commentary on the New Zealand election by saying: “At least one country is responding to the financial crisis by moving to the right, not left.” This is factually correct but may overstate the case.

    Certainly, New Zealanders elected a conservative National-led coalition government and removed from office a Labour-led coalition which had served three terms of three years. While it is appealing to contrast this move to the right with America’s move to the left, it is probably unwise to claim that these were contrasting responses to the international financial crisis. Indeed, I suspect the analysis of both the New Zealand and American elections is equally flawed.

    The key mood in the New Zealand electorate was simply that it was “Time for a Change”. And given that the incumbent Government was a left-of-centre Government, the change could only be to the right of centre. In this regard, there is a strong parallel with the American Presidential race where the mood was equally that it was “Time for a Change.” In the US this meant a move from the Republican right to the Democratic left.

    The mood for change was probably stronger in New Zealand because for a three-term government (nine years) to win a fourth term is most uncommon here; Helen Clark’s nine years as leader of that Government was a record, and had she won a fourth term as a Labour Prime Minister it would have been unprecedented. The historical odds were against her. On the other hand, all US Presidents must move aside after two terms, so change is thrust upon them.

    Now that both elections are over, the new US president and the new National Government, led by John Key, must face up to the harsh reality of the inevitable recession or depression resulting from the collapse of the housing and financial bubbles that dominated both economies during the last decade. This focus may encourage analysts to believe that the financial crisis was the cause of the electoral outcomes, even if the ideological swings were opposite.

    However, I believe that Barack Obama would have won the Presidential race had there been no financial crisis, and that John Key would also now be Prime Minister of New Zealand. But both their victories might have been less emphatic.

    In both countries voters were faced with a generational change. Obama is a young man in his early prime; McCain is an old man whose mortality worked against him. Helen Clark is younger than McCain (58 vs 72), but because she entered Parliament in 1981, became Deputy Prime Minister in 1989, and has been Prime Minister since 1999, she was seen as one of the old guard. She has stepped down as leader of the Labour Party as part of conceding defeat on election night. John Key is a young man of 47 who has been in parliament only since 2002, and Leader of the Opposition only since 2006.

    The role of the financial crisis in this New Zealand election was an ambivalent one. By law, our full-on election campaign is brief – only three months – compared to US campaigns, and Parliament goes into recess during the whole of the campaign. As it happened, the full impact of the financial crisis on the NZ economy became apparent at about the same time as campaigning began, although the collapse of the housing market had begun somewhat earlier. The campaigning politicians had little time to develop solid policies in response to the threat and, given that Parliament was in recess, could do nothing about it anyhow.

    Helen Clark argued that her Labour Government had successfully managed the economy for nine years and her team had the experience to manage the New Zealand economy through the next three years. John Key argued that his party had more skills in the field, and that the Labour party benches were full of academics and trade unionists, most of whom had never run a business.

    Clark’s response was that the National Party, and John Key in particular, were part of the problem. Her trade union base saw Key as a Wall Street banker and a cause of the problem. Key’s business base saw him as a man who understood the industry and had the skills and know-how to deal with the problem.

    National Party heavyweights included Don Brash, who had stepped aside as Leader of the Opposition to allow John Key to take over. Brash had been Governor of the Reserve Bank for 14 years; since resigning from Parliament in 2007 he had served as an adjunct professor of Banking at the Auckland University of Technology (and Chairman of the Centre for Resource Management Studies). John Key began working as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Finance in Wellington, then moved to Auckland-based Bankers Trust. In 1995, he joined Merrill Lynch as head of Asian foreign exchange in Singapore. He was promoted to Merrill’s global head of foreign exchange, based in London, and was a member of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1999 to 2001.

    On election night Key’s Centrist but Conservative National Party, (combined with the soft, somewhat libertarian Act Party as a coalition partner) scored a decisive victory – probably about as decisive a victory as is possible, given our system of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP).

    There is widespread agreement, at least among the supporters of the new regime, that Labour’s massive defeat was primarily caused by New Zealanders’ rejection of the “Nanny State,” which has increasingly interfered in our daily lives. And here may lie the real lesson for the new President of the USA.

    While the US is a genuine Super Power, and New Zealand is a mere pimple on the global body politic, we always aspire to punch above our weight, and frequently do. Helen Clark had decided that New Zealand would be a world leader in fighting climate change (anthropogenic global warming), and that we would become the world’s most sustainable economy with a carbon neutral footprint. So, for some time, New Zealanders responded with some enthusiasm to this new challenge of leadership on the world stage. We were proud to be Clean and Green, and of our Tourism Board’s promotion of New Zealand as 100% Pure – presumably we are free of even impure thoughts.

    However, as commentators as diverse as the late Aaron Wildavsky and Vaclav Klaus have warned, Global Warming is the mother of all scares because it enables Government to interfere in every aspect of our lives – to claim that no price is too high if necessary to save the planet for our grandchildren. Inevitably, the High Priests of “Sustainability” began to demand that we break our “addiction” to private automobiles and learn to love public transport; that we learn to love high-density apartments and abandon our home gardens; and that we stop doing anything which consumed fossil fuel. It soon became clear to many that the main concern of these New Puritans was that someone, somewhere, might just be enjoying themselves.

    Our unsubsidized grass farmers who pay most of our way in the world began to wonder why our belching cattle should be penalized by Kyoto rules, when subsidized European cattle were not. After all, cows have been belching since the first ruminants walked the earth, and they don’t run on fossil fuel.

    Rodney Hide, leader of the Act Party, began to argue that we should dump the Emissions Trading Scheme and withdraw from Kyoto because the whole Global Warming fear was a massive scam. This was supposed to be political suicide, but the polls showed that Act’s support suddenly increased. Act is now part of the new government, and their extra five seats consolidate John Key’s comfortable majority in the 120 seat Parliament.

    If President-Elect Obama becomes a High Priest of Climate Change, he too may find that 95% of Americans, just like New Zealanders, believe that other people should use public transport so that there will be more room on the road for them. He may also find that while the costs of Kyoto are scary and may drive even more energy intensive industries offshore to non-complying countries like China and India, it is the minor interventions in daily life which are the real irritants that could turn the electorate against him and make him a one term President.

    Because when it comes down to it, John Key’s majority may have been cemented in place by New Zealanders’ affection for taking a shower.

    A few weeks before the election, the Labour Government, largely at the behest of the Green Party on whose support they depended to maintain their majority in Parliament, proposed regulations which would limit the flow of water through a shower head to about 1.5 gallons per minute. The aim was to save both water and energy and thus make our houses more “sustainable”. The standard “low flow” rose in most showers at the time delivered about 3.5 gallons per minute.

    This proved to be the last straw. The grumblings about the proposed mandatory replacement of incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, similar to the rumblings in the US, exploded into a furor on blog sites, talk-back radio and letters to the editor. A popular blogger drew up a list of 85 things the Greens want to ban. People recalled how a Green Party official had endorsed a petition calling for the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide…which just happens to be water.

    The proposal was not just irksome; it soon became evident that it probably would not even achieve its objective. People would stay in the shower longer or alternatively run a nice deep hot bath. As is so often the case in political campaigns, this single minor proposal came to symbolize a whole range of discontents, and people could use it as a focus for their latent rage and fury against the Nanny State.

    So Jesse Walker’s comment that triggered the request for this commentary on the New Zealand election might more properly have read, “At least one country is responding to global warming alarmism by moving to the right, not the left.”

    Our recent experience in New Zealand should give Barack Obama reason to pause. A stance against Global Warming is popular, right up until it starts to bite. Then the American public too, might just bite back.

    Owen McShane is a Resource Management Consultant based in New Zealand

  • Architecture in an Age of Austerity

    “Architectural publication, criticism and even education are now focused relentlessly on the enticing visual image. The longing for singular, memorable imagery subordinates other aspects of buildings, isolating architecture in disembodied vision.” – Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, from his essay “Toward an Architecture of Humility”

    Anyone paying even remote attention to the domain of high architectural design in the past decade will surely recognize the name Frank Gehry. The celebrity architect (or if you prefer to use the portmanteau word used to describe such practitioners: starchitect) is best known for his unconventional creations-buildings that billow, swoop and shimmer. Whether the project is a concert hall, museum, or university building, the clientele hiring Gehry is paying for a brand name product. In this sense, a ‘Gehry-designed building’ is akin to a piece of fashion – with the value of the building based primarily on the name of the designer and not on how well it operates for end users as a work of architecture.

    Gehry was not alone in this respect. Real estate developers were quick to jump on the trend toward ‘signature’ buildings. Hiring other marquee architects such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Santiago Calatrava, high-end condo developers everywhere from Manhattan to Dubai were willing to deal with paying exorbitant design fees for the assumed marketing advantages of associating with such big names.

    But now the obsession with starchitecture may now itself be outdated. Thanks to the financial meltdown, the party may be ending both for starchitects and their credit wielding developer patrons. Not surprisingly, ambitious projects like the Gehry designed Grand Avenue development in Los Angeles and the Calatrava designed Chicago Spire have been put on hold and perhaps consigned to oblivion.

    These are just some of the most visible examples of the construction slowdown as it relates to high architectural design. Less renown figures in the architectural profession, both sole practitioners and those working in corporate firms, also find themselves struggling to retain projects. The imagined career trajectories of wannabe starchitects may be yet another casualty of the financial slowdown.

    Ironically, the economic crisis relates back to the very thing architects are entrusted with – the built environment. Of course, architects had a hand in only a very small percentage of what is actually built in the United States. During the most recent boom cycle of construction – at least until the last year or two – the single family detached housing developments in the suburbs and urban fringes dominated the market. These developments were often promoted in a manner that made the house as an investment vehicle paramount to it being a place of long-term inhabitance and raising a family.

    The subprime mortgage crisis has since debunked the commonly accepted strategy that real estate is always a ‘safe’ investment for the average American. But this is not only a suburban phenomenon, despite the claims by many in the architecture and urban planning professions that the real estate meltdown represented the triumph of the city over the suburbs. In reality the city development scene is also collapsing, a bit later perhaps, but largely because it took a while for the financial fallout to reach large urban projects.

    Ironically the starchitecture so celebrated by the popular media may have contributed to this. The fact that the majority of architecturally revered high-rise housing developments built in the past decade are geared toward the ‘luxury market’ may have slowed the potential market for in-city living. In too many cases, developers in the urban luxury condo market have relied on cash-wealthy individuals to purchase their units as second homes, a market that is certain to crash as the asset bubble bursts.

    The current recession is a trying time for most Americans, and as such, it could prove a pivotal time for architects, planners and those who care about the built environment to reassess their roles in a democratic culture. Great or monumental architecture – from imperial Rome to Napoleon III’s Paris and Dubai today – has often been built at the discretion of powerful religious institutions, monarchies or omnipotent dictatorships. Democratic architecture, in contrast, tends more to the functional and efficient, whether in the form of William Levitt’s suburbia or the high-rise towers that accommodated corporations.

    The future of urban development in the United States is likely to follow a different trajectory. For one thing environmental sustainability is likely to frame the decisions made in regards to urban planning in the coming years. In this context, metallic structures like those favored by Gehry and his acolytes do not represent a very energy-efficient form; in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix or Dubai they reflect sunlight and heat up the surrounding environment. The next era of American architecture will have to deal with such issues and also with the restrictions of a strapped fiscal environment.

    With funding for flashy and iconic buildings screeching to a halt, the era of the architect as detached genius and artiste appears to be coming to a close. In order to retain relevance at this crucial point in time, architects would be wise to come out from their ivory towers and shift their focus to becoming more civically engaged and oriented towards the needs of the middle class.

    At the dawn of the 21st Century, as the definitions of traditional urban centers, suburbs and metropolitan regions become more blurred, so does the role of the architect and planner. After the chaos of the current economic recession is settled, most construction is likely to be focused on updating existing infrastructure and building new ‘green’ infrastructure. What America needs most right now from the architectural profession is not more Frank Gehrys but a new commitment to build an environment that is both sustainable and affordable.

    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.

  • Pittsburgh Turns 250 Years Old Today

    But instead of a nice birthday card, my home town of Pittsburgh could use a sympathy card. It’s been a tough last 100 years for a once great and powerful city.

    The first 150 years were not so bad. On Nov. 25, 1758 British Gen. John Forbes named the city for prime minister William Pitt after chasing the French from the militarily and economically strategic triangle of land where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio.

    Historically, we started off on a roll, thanks to our strategic location on the rivers, North America’s first oil and gas boom, and lots of coal. By 1909, when social scientist Paul Kellogg cataloged the city’s industrial might in “The Pittsburgh Survey,” he said it was not just “first among American cities in the production of iron and steel” but also “first in electrical apparatus and supplies.”

    “In coal and coke, tin plate, glass, cork, and sheet metal … its output is a national asset,” Kellogg wrote, adding that Pittsburgh’s banking capital exceeded “that of the banks of the North Sea empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states.” “Here,” Kellogg claimed without exaggeration, “is a town, then, big with its works.”

    Unfortunately, that world famous powerhouse of iron and steel is long gone. Today the Pittsburgh region’s de-industrialized economy runs mainly on providing health care for its aging populace, the education of about 140,000 college students and the construction of taxpayer-subsidized professional sports stadia and mass-transit boondoggles.

    In her 1969 book The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs traced the origins of Pittsburgh’s economic downturn all the way back to 1910. But its demise, she claimed, was abetted and accelerated after World War II by its downtown political and corporate powerbrokers. These are the direct ancestors of the civic movers-and-shapers, government redevelopment planners and political hacks who have been mismanaging our city so horribly for the last 20 years.

    The post-WW II power elites cleaned up Pittsburgh’s poisoned three rivers and Venutian atmosphere, but Jacobs said they also worked overtime to protect incumbent steel and manufacturing industries and discourage new industries from being born. They also launched misbegotten urban renewal projects in three poor and/or black neighborhoods – the Hill District, East Liberty and the North Side – whose destructive effects still afflict the city.

    As most Americans know, having its biggest economic eggs in heavy manufacturing turned out not to be such a good long-term plan for Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. Its metropolitan population went into its nationally famous free-fall. In 1960, there were 2.4 million people in metro Pittsburgh and 604,000 in the city of Pittsburgh. Metro Pittsburgh was the 12th biggest TV market in the USA. Today, Pittsburgh metro has a population of 2.3 million and – incredibly – there are just 310,000 souls left in a city that peaked in 1950 with 676,000 people. Metropolitan Pittsburgh is ranked 26th today.

    As its population has shrunk, the region has emulated the demographics of Western Europe and Russia. Its population is disproportionately old (24 percent are 65 or older, about twice the national average) and since 1990 more Pittsburghers have died each year than have been born – a net loss of 25,000 people since 2000 alone. It also has fewer foreign-born immigrants (about 3 percent) than any major American metro area.

    This is all the more the shame since the city boasts many priceless assets. These include a relatively low crime rate, great old middle-class city neighborhoods, affordable suburban homes in good school districts, top universities like Carnegie-Mellon and Pitt, major league sports teams, big-time cultural attractions and a beautiful landscape of hills, hollows and wide rivers.

    These assets are one reason why “Places Rated Almanac” crowned it the country’s most livable city in 1985 and again last year. In 1985 The New York Times immediately dispatched a reporter to Pittsburgh to check out the claim and he wrote back that “With its breathtaking skyline, its scenic waterfront, its cozily vibrant downtown, its rich mixture of cultural amenities, its warm neighborhoods and its scrubbed-clean skies, it no longer is the smoky, smelly, gritty mill town of yesteryear.”

    Pittsburgh – which, for the record, hadn’t been “The Smoky City” since about 1950 – is re-discovered by the bicoastal media every few years. Brendan Gill of the New Yorker came here in 1990 and famously raved about the beautiful terrain, the old architecture and ethnic neighborhoods and said if it were a European city people would travel hundreds of miles out of their way to visit it.

    So if the place is so great why are people – especially young people – leaving in droves? For one thing pay scales are low and the general populace, though friendly and unassuming, fully embraces not risk-taking but the two unofficial regional religions – unionism and Steelerism.

    When it comes to pop culture and new retail chain outlets, Pittsburgh’s at least 5 years behind L.A. or San Francisco, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Pittsburgh remains a fine city in which to raise a family, grow old and die. What travel writers never seem to notice when they parachute into town however, is the chronically sorry state of Pittsburgh’s public sector.

    A one-party (Democrat) town since 1934, the city of Pittsburgh has been run like Argentina ever since. Over-taxed, over-regulated, over-planned, quick to abuse its eminent domain powers, it’s now virtually bankrupt. Its finances are now overseen by the state. Its budget flirts with red ink each year. On the horizon loom huge pension liabilities that it can’t possibly pay.

    City Hall can barely provide a decent level of basic services. Meanwhile, they find money to subsidize downtown retailers who often go bust and leave. The city’s redevelopment gurus have handed out tens of millions of taxpayers’ cash to private businesses. The most recent example was giving PNC Financial $48 million in public subsidies to build its new and superfluous skyscraper downtown where vacancy rates, pre-recession, stood well in the double digits.

    Pittsburgh’s public school district is equally inept and even more expensive. It spends well over $20,000 a year per student while enrollment – nearly 40,000 in 1998 – is down to 26,600 and falling. The graduation rate is 64 percent, according to a recent Rand Corp. study. Local school and property taxes are among the highest in the country.

    The region’s roads and parkways are in bad shape – can you spell p-o-t-h-o-l-e? – and designed for 1950s traffic counts. The city of Pittsburgh’s parking tax could be the highest on Earth – 40 percent. City firefighters have some of the highest public salaries in town – and trade their votes for sweetheart contracts.

    The poster child for mismanaged government bodies, however, is Pittsburgh’s public transit monopoly, the Port Authority of Allegheny County. For the last 20 years, as its ridership has fallen steadily and its annual budget has hit $350 million, it consistently enriched its union workers and managers with high salaries, super-generous benefits and pensions.

    Port Authority budgets have outpaced inflation since 1980 and with fares covering about a third of operating costs, it has had to ask for higher and higher subsidies from the state to keep its mostly empty buses lumbering around town. Since the late 1970s, it has spent upwards of $2 billion (in current dollars) on three dedicated busways and a rinky-dink light-rail system that serves about 12,500 suburban round-trip commuters a day.

    The transit agency’s proudest boondoggle, however, is the North Shore Connector, aka “The Transit Tunnel to Nowhere.” Arguably the premier transit boondoggle in North America today, it’ll cost $435 million (a low-balled figure that hasn’t been adjusted to reflect reality in several years) for a 1.2-mile twin light-rail transit tunnel under the Allegheny River from Downtown to the taxpayer-subsidized pro sports stadiums and not far from the new casino.

    The tunnel’s construction currently is tearing up a huge chunk of the North Shore between PNC Park and Heinz Field. It is projected (most dubiously, of course) to carry 16,000 passengers a day – by 2030. A local think tank, the Allegheny Institute, worked out the per-trip subsidy to be $15.50. Set to be completed in 2011, it will be a miracle if the project comes in under $600 million.

    Today Pittsburgh’s regional economy is what it’s been for the last 40 years – stagnant at best. Yet perversely, but predictably, its civic boosters are trying to sell the anemic economy as something to be thankful for because it is “recession-proof.” Since Pittsburgh never had a housing bubble, the spin goes, the foreclosure crisis will hardly affect it. Because Pittsburgh has all those extra citizens on Social Security, the economic meltdown will be less severe. Maybe becoming a morgue might be even safer.

    Yet somehow the local spinmeisters continue to put a bright spin on Pittsburgh’s century-long death spiral. For example, USA Today recently cranked out a big upbeat feature on how wonderful Pittsburgh is – without mentioning such unseemly things as high taxes, bankruptcies or out-of-control government agencies.

    And on Sunday, Nov. 23, the Cleveland Plain Dealer – hometown paper of a city arguably in even worse shape – published a similarly glowing piece of chamber-of-commerce journalism with the headline “Pittsburgh’s renaissance holds lesson for Cleveland.” It began with the sentence “The city that once defined rust belt decay might show the rest of the nation how to weather a recession.”

    True to form, it went on to say that while the rest of the country “reels in debt and despair, Pittsburgh is on the move: A new $200 million downtown office tower, upscale condos, a casino, a new hockey arena and a riverfront convention center.”

    What the Plain Dealer never bothered to note, of course, was that the office tower, the pricy condos and the hockey arena were not being built in downtown Pittsburgh because they actually made economic sense. They were being built only because local politicians had handed millions of dollars in public subsidies to their private, well-connected owners. If this is the road to an urban renaissance, it’s certainly an expensive one. Most likely, it will prove the path to yet another dead end.

    Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

  • Michigration: It’s Not About Out-migration in Michigan

    Pertaining to brain drain hype, Michigan has no equal. So profound is the out-migration that a local broadcasting network coined a term: Michigration. This was in January of 2008. I did a little digging and discovered the fuel for the story was a United Van Lines study about Michigan’s net loss of residents.

    Net population loss is often confused with emigration. Upstate New York, another brain drain case for a future article, is no exception. The Federal Reserve Bank branch in Buffalo issued a report that tried to clear up the confusion, explicitly stating the challenge is attracting more people instead of the assumed issue of retention.

    Michigan is in the same boat. There is nothing remarkable about the rate of out-migration from the state. What is shocking is the lack of newcomers. Most of the Rust Belt has a problem with a distinct lack of in-migration.

    Another oversight of the media is the aging population. Rarely does natural decline make the news. Of course, that “problem” doesn’t lend itself to political gain. That is too bad because making better use of an aging workforce is a missed opportunity. Shouldn’t talent retiring in Michigan be celebrated?

    A third misconception about shrinking cities is that the best and brightest are heading to hip out-of-state destinations. The truth is many graduates go no further than the suburbs, resulting in the donut pattern of urbanization. Those that venture beyond likely end up in the next state over, not halfway across the country. A lot of talent moves from one Rust Belt city to another. Much of the rest – although perhaps not the offspring of the remaining economic and cultural elite – shifts to those areas that have been creating jobs, particularly places like North Carolina, Texas and, before the recent bust, Arizona and Florida.

    In and of themselves, reports of Michigration are harmless. But popular perception is often used to push various initiatives such as Michigan’s Cool Cities:

    Building vibrant, energetic cities that attract jobs, people and opportunity to our state is a key component of Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s economic vision for Michigan. Governor Granholm kicked-off the “Cool Cities” initiative in June, 2003 throughout the state, in part as an urban strategy to revitalize communities, build community spirit, and most importantly, retain our “knowledge workers” who are leaving Michigan in alarming numbers.

    The promise is that cooler cities will keep talent from leaving the state. I challenge Governor Granholm to list the top-10 Cool Cities in the United States and their respective out-migration rates. How do Michigan cities compare? How do you quantify “alarming numbers”?

    US cities with the fastest growth rates in population tend to have the highest rates of emigration. Ironically, shrinking cities have relatively weak out-migration. Furthermore, the college educated are much more likely to leave any state or metro than people with just a high school education. Knowledge workers leaving Michigan is normal. The low number of knowledge workers arriving, from out of state, is abnormal. Neither better urban place-making nor more tolerance on its own shows any strong positive correlation with less brain drain. In fact, the opposite may be true. Cool Cities simply hasn’t delivered.

    We do understand that knowledge workers are geographically fickle. But Governor Granholm fails to put the attraction of talent on top of the agenda. She continues to play to fears of Michigration as justification for significant investment in the state’s cities. I’m not anti-urban. On the contrary, I’d like to witness the revitalization of Rust Belt downtowns. But sprucing up an aging downtown in a region with massive job losses will not get the job done.

    The most promising research I’ve read comes from Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard University. The best investment of public money would seem to be in human capital, education. What would attract well-educated parents would be better schools, something the suburbs have mastered. Inner city Detroit’s main competition for talent is the communities ringing around it.

    Michigration will not be stemmed by being “cool” but by providing some sort of opportunity for a decent middle class life. If Michigan could combine its excellent Universities, skilled workforce and low housing costs with a decent business climate, and significant school reform, perhaps the state would again become a beacon for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers.

    Read Jim’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.