New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Born Into Ruin: How the Young are Changing Cleveland

    It’s true. I am not happy all the time living in Cleveland. But I don’t want to be happy all the time. That’s unnatural. Said Nietzsche:

    “Sometimes, struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were to go through our life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been.”

    Cleveland is a struggle. But that is how I know it. That is how many Clevelanders in their 20’s to 40’s know it. We didn’t know the city of Mr. Jingeling and Bob Hope—the city of a near million—the “Best Location in Nation”. No, we knew Cleveland on its knees. We knew Cleveland praying. But being born into post-industry is a good first lesson. Life is an obstacle. Cleveland prepares you.

    For what?

    Bullshit, or at least the proclivity of it.

    Aspirations abound now. If you were only creative enough, rich enough, worldly and knowledgeable enough, then: you can become something, a star—evolved from your basic beginnings. Fine. But it’s this ambition-before-all-else mindset that has also extended our eyes from our feet, or our aspirations from our selves, and so for long the country has left its principles behind to build castles in the air with no foundation. Consequently, our culture—our sense of being from somewhere, of bleeding the aesthetic of someplace—has taken a hit. It’s no surprise, then, that our castles keep falling down into a pile of broken promises that never seem to be able to feed, clothe, or employ us properly.

    To hell with it. Time to be proud in the gift of being grounded. It is the only way up.

    Grounded. It’s how we are grown here in the Rust Belt. For you see it everywhere: the reality of things. You see it in the cracked sidewalks, and in the seriousness on the faces of the people all around you. You see it in the empty brownfields behind chain link fences. Yet there is a comfort in the Rust Belt aesthetic, one tied to the fact there’s little pretentiously precious. From the bodies we are built with to the handshakes we make to the food we eat to the buildings we see, shit is heavy here. And it’s a ritual you learn simply by living on Rust Belt ground.

    I am watching this unfold first hand with my 2-year old daughter. You see, I have a place near the rail ties, and each time the train rides through my girl runs to the window to see the power of the “choo choo”. I watch her with a smile as she watches with awe as the force of the box cars enter our bodies through the vibrations coming up from the ground. She is becoming Rust Belt, I think. I do this every time this happens.

    But this groundedness, this Rust Belt-ness, it’s not a settling or a lack of aspiration, but rather—for Clevelanders populating the city that never knew its heights— a chance to look around and see nothing but work to do, and an opportunity to do it. There are a lot of fresh eyes around. The city psychology is changing. And I think this may save Cleveland, because people are no longer waiting for Cleveland to save us.

    This is happening all across the Rust Belt. For instance, Detroit native Bill Morris recently wrote about his trip back to Motown to “see that Detroiters had stopped waiting for salvation from above – a new auto factory, a new government program, a new housing development – because they were too busy saving themselves down at street level.”

    Morris goes on to interview Jack Kushigan, a Detroiter who grew up working in the family’s machine shop before moving to San Francisco and then back. He writes of Kushigan:

    I met him in the woodworking shop he’d set up in a church basement on the city’s hard-hit East Side, where he was teaching neighborhood people how to make furniture out of wood harvested from abandoned buildings, a virtually limitless source of raw materials. “Detroit for years, during its decline, has been hoping for a Messiah,” Kushigian told me. “Detroit has finally given up on that. A lot of people in Detroit have a fire burning inside them that I don’t see anywhere else. My feeling is that the Messiah is us.”

    I feel the same thing is happening in Cleveland. The work the young people are doing. The fact they are entering the broken dreams of past generations with no illusions, little skeletons, but with a determination that comes with being grounded. And it is this kind of collective turn-the-page energy that will end the endless recent history of our decline.

    Call it the benefit of struggle, or of not having your castles yet crumble because you’d been born into the ruin.

    This piece originally appeared on Cool Cleveland.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

  • What Is a Global City?

    We hear a lot of talk these days about so-called “global cities.” But what is a global city?

    Saskia Sassen literally wrote the book on global cities back in 2001 (though her global cities work dates back well over a decade prior to that book). She gave a definition that has long struck with me. In short form, in the age of globalization, the activities of production are scattered on a global basis. These complex, globalized production networks require new forms of financial and producer services to manage them. These services are often complex and require highly specialized skills. Thus they are subject to agglomeration economics, and tend to cluster in a limited number of cities. Because specialized talent and firms related to different specialties can cluster in different cities, this means that there are actually a quite a few of these specialized production nodes, because they don’t necessarily directly compete with each other, having different groupings of specialties.

    In this world then, a global city is a significant production point of specialized financial and producer services that make the globalized economy run. Sassen covered specifically New York, London, and Tokyo in her book, but there are many more global cities than this.

    The question then becomes how to identify these cities, and perhaps to determine to what extent they function as global cities specifically, beyond all of the other things that they do simply as cities. Naturally this lends itself to our modern desire to develop league tables.

    A number of studies were undertaken to produce various rankings. However, when you look at them, you see that the definition of global city used is far broader than Sassen’s core version. Wikipedia lists some of the general characteristics people tend to refer to when talking about global cities. It cites a very lengthy list, but some of them are:

    • Home to major stock exchanges and indexes
    • Influential in international political affairs
    • Home to world-renowned cultural institutions
    • Service a major media hub
    • Large mass transit networks
    • Home to a large international airport
    • Having a prominent skyline

    As you can see, this is quite a hodge-podge of items, many of which are only tangentially related to globalization per se. In effect, many of them seek to define cities only in term of global prominence rather than functionally as related to the global economy. That’s certainly a valid way to look at it, but it raises the point that we should probably clarify what we are talking about when we talk about global cities.

    To clarify our thinking, let’s look at how various ranking studies have defined global city for their purposes.

    One oft-cited such ranking was a 1999 research paper called A Roster of World Cities. The authors, Jon Beaverstock, Richard G. Smith and Peter J. Taylor, explicitly reference Sassen’s work, seeking to define global cities in terms of advanced producer services.

    Taking our cue from Sassen (1991, 126), we treat world cities as particular ‘postindustrial production sites’ where innovations in corporate services and finance have been integral to the recent restructuring of the world-economy now widely known as globalization. Services, both directly for consumers and for firms producing other goods for consumers, are common to all cities of course, what we are dealing with here are generally referred to as advanced producer services or corporate services. The key point is that many of these services are by no means so ubiquitous; for Sassen they provide a limited number of leading cities with ‘a specific role in the current phase of the world economy’ (p. 126).

    They took lists of firms in four specific service industries – accounting, advertising, banking, and law – and determined where those firms maintained branches and such around the world in order to determine the importance of various cities as production nodes of these services. This has some weaknesses in that it doesn’t necessarily distinguish whether say a particular accounting firm is doing routine type work of the sort accountants have always been doing, or performing advanced work of a type specific to globalization, but it at least tries to derive lists related to the production of services.

    As the global city concept grew in popularity, various other organizations entered the fray. Most of these newer lists take a very different a much broader approach closer to the Wikipedia type lists of characteristics rather than a Sassen-like definition.

    One example is AT Kearney’s list, developed in conjunction with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Their most recent version is the 2012 Global Cities Index. This study uses criteria across five dimensions:

    • Business Activity (headquarters, services firms, capital markets value, number of international conferences, value of goods through ports and airports)
    • Human Capital (size of foreign born population, quality of universities, number of international schools, international student population, number of residents with college degrees)
    • Information Exchange (accessibility of major TV news channels, Internet presence (basically number of search hits), number of international news bureaus, censorship, and broadband subscriber rate)
    • Cultural Experience (number of sporting event, museums, performing arts venues, culinary establishments, international visitors, and sister city relationships).
    • Political Engagement (number of embassies and consulates, think tanks, international organizations, political conferences)

    The Institute for Urban Strategies at The Mori Memorial Foundation in Tokyo published another study called “The Global Power City Index 2011.” This report examined cities in terms of functions demanded by several “actor” types: Manager, Researcher, Artist, Visitor, and Resident. The functional areas were:

    • Economy (Market Attractiveness, Economic Vitality, Business Environment, Regulations and Risk)
    • Research and Development (Research Background, Readiness for Accepting and Supporting Researchers, Research Achievement)
    • Cultural Interaction (Trendsetting Potential, Accommodation Environment, Resources of Attracting Visitors, Dining and Shopping, Volume of Interaction)
    • Livability (Working Environment, Cost of Living, Security and Safety, Life Support Functions)
    • Environment (Ecology, Pollution, Natural Environment)
    • Accessibility (International Transportation Infrastructure, Inner City Transportation Infrastructure)

    Another popular ranking is the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global City Competitiveness Index. They rank cities on a number of domains:

    • Economic Strength (Nominal GDP, per capita GDP, % of households with economic consumption > $14,000/yr, real GDP growth rate, regional market integration)
    • Human Capital (population growth, working age population, entrepreneurship and risk taking mindset, quality of education, quality of healthcare, hiring of foreign nationals)
    • Institutional Effectiveness (electoral process and pluralism, local government fiscal autonomy, taxation, rule of law, government effectiveness)
    • Financial Maturity (breadth and depth of financial cluster)
    • Global Appeal (Fortune 500 companies, frequency of international flights, international conferences and conventions, leadership in higher education, renowned think tanks)
    • Physical Capital (physical nfrastructure quality, public transport quality, telecom quality)
    • Environment and Natural Hazards (risk of natural disaster, environmental governance)
    • Social and Cultural Character (freedom of expression and human rights, openness and diversity, crime, cultural vibrancy)

    Note that these were not all equal weighted. Economic strength is paramount.

    Yet another ranking comes from the Knight Frank/Citibank Wealth Report. This ranking is purely subjective and was based on surveying wealth advisors as to which cities they felt would be most important to their clients today and in the future based on four areas: economic activity, political power, knowledge and influence, and quality of life.

    It’s worth noting that Sassen contributed to various of these surveys.

    Looking at the newer surveys versus the Roster of World Cities, it’s clear that the game has changed. Rather than attempting to look at specific global economic functions, the global city game has become effectively a balanced scorecard attempt to determine, as I like to put it, the world’s “biggest and baddest” cities.

    There are quite a few differences in methodologies, which is inevitable. But a few things jump out at me. First the focus on aggregate measures in these surveys. For example: total GDP, total foreign population, number of headquarters. There is a remarkable lack of attention to dynamism variables such as growth in various metrics, though the Economist survey includes a couple.

    The focus on static totals versus dynamism tends to reward large, developed world cities versus rapidly growing or emerging market cities. (The AT Kearney survey has a separate emerging cities list). In a sense, these rankings are biased in favor of important legacy cities.

    It’s also interesting to see what was included vs. not included in quality of life type ratings. For example, items like censorship, media access, the rule of law, and the environment are listed. But measures of upward social-economic mobility or income inequality or not.

    Lastly, a number of the rankings suggest a self-consciously elite mindset, such as shopping and dining options. As with many quality of life surveys, these seem to orient them towards expatriate executive types rather than normal folks.

    Looking at these, I can’t help but think that the criteria were the product of an iterative process where the results were refined over time. Thus in a sense the outcomes were likely somewhat pre-determined. That’s not to say that the game was rigged necessarily. But I suspect if anyone were doing a global city survey and London and New York did not rank at the top, the developers would question whether they got the criteria right. In a sense, a global city is like obscenity: we know one when we see it, but we don’t necessarily have a widely agreed upon objective set of criteria to measure it by.

    I sense that these rankings attempt to look at global cities in four basic ways:

    1. Advanced producer services production node. This is basically Sassen’s original definition. I think this one remains particularly important. Because the skills are specialized and subject to clustering economics, the cities that concentrate in these functions have a Buffett-like “wide moat” sustainable competitive advantage in particular very high value activities. For cities with large concentrations of these, those cities can generate significantly above average economic output and incomes per worker.
    2. Economic giants. Namely, this is a fairly simple but important view of that simply measures how big cities are on some metrics like GDP.
    3. International Gateway. Measures of the importance of a city in the international flows of people and goods. Examples would be the airport and cargo gateway figures.
    4. Political and Cultural Hub. An important distinction should perhaps be made here between hubs that may be large but of primarily national or regional importance, and those of truly international significance. For example, there are many media hubs around the world, but few of them are home to outlets like the BBC that drive the global conversation.

    There may potentially be other ways to slice it as well. The fact that these various ways of viewing cities can often overlap can confuse things I think. For example, New York and London score highly on all of these. And there are surely underlying reasons why they do. Yet trying to sum it all up into one overall ranking or score, while making it easy to get press, can end up obscuring important nuance.

    So when thinking about global cities, I think we need to do a couple of things:

    1. Clarify what it is we are talking about at the time.
    2. Relative to the definition we are using, seek to identify the specific parts of the city in question that generate real above average value at the global level.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece first appeared.

    Chicago photo by Bigstock.

  • Separation of Church and Urban Planning

    Recently, the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) published research that directly challenged prevailing views in urban planning. In an article entitled Growing Cities Sustainably, Marcial H. Echenique, and Anthony J. Hargreaves from Cambridge University, Gordon Mitchell (University of Leeds) and Anil Namdeo (University of Newcastle) found that compact development (smart growth) had only a marginal impact on sustainable development and should not "automatically be associated with the preferred spatial growth strategy" (See Questioning The Messianic Conception of Smart Growth). This was particularly unsettling to the powers-that-be in urban planning, who have struggled for years – predating the current greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reduction concerns – to make anything but smart growth virtually illegal.

    The Reaction

    Soon after, the JAPA editor (Randy Crane of UCLA) was criticized by fellow academics in the "PLANET" listserv for permitting publication, at least partly because the research questioned the value of compact development (smart growth) in achieving environmental sustainability.

    In early November, a session was held at the 53rd Annual Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference in Cincinnati entitled "Spinning Wheels and Witch Hunts: Debating the Merits of Planning Research," devoted to discussion of what at least some considered the heresy of Echenique, et al. The conference program description of the session included questions such as the following:

    "What are the dangers of applying the “scientific method” in planning?"

    My comment: Any dangers are problems of planners, not the scientific method

    "How do ethics, politics and normative values factor into what gets published?"

    My comment: It is hoped as little as possible, which is why concern is expressed here.

    "On the issue of compact cities, are we spinning our wheels, or are we provocatively challenging conventional wisdom? Is the problem of sprawl still an open question? Do these debates ever end, or, with JAPA’s help, do they keep going indefinitely?"

    My comment: The debates must continue until perfect knowledge has been achieved and all relevant information has been objectively considered (with or without JAPA). Neither condition has been satisfied.

    A Report from the Front

    Professor Lisa Schweitzer of the University of Southern California provided comments on the session in an article entitled ACSP Reflections #1 Should Researchers be Allowed to Question Smart Growth?. Professor Schweitzer describes only the beginning of the session, indicating that she left because the room was too crowded and out of a concern that the authors would not be represented. This is despite the fact that the purpose of the session was, in effect, to discuss whether the researchers were "out of bounds" in raising the issue. Even abbreviated, Professor Schweitzer’s account raises substantial concerns, which are described below.

    The session began with a critique of the Echenique, et al research by Professor Emily Talen of Arizona State University. Professor Schweitzer characterized Talen’s criticism as boiling down to "practitioners have a tough time convincing people to pursue smart growth."

    Censoring Criticisms of Smart Growth?

    Professor Schweitzer continues: "The problem with Talen’s idea is that it suggests researchers ‘owe’ it to practitioners to only inquire within the framework that compact development is unambiguously meritorious and sprawl is ambiguously not." Professor Schweitzer rightly questions how compact development can be considered "unambiguously good" if it is not examined closely.

    In fact, there is no room for icons or the sacred in academic inquiry. The imperative to question is the very justification for publication of the Echenique, et al research.

    Avoided Issues

    Indeed, there is considerable evidence that compact development has not been examined closely enough. For example, urban planning research has usually discounted, ignored or even denied the association of compact development with inordinately higher house prices relative to incomes – despite massive evidence to the contrary. This is because housing is the largest element in the cost of living, higher house prices necessarily reduce discretionary incomes and increase poverty.

    This is an issue not only for high-income cities but also for developing ones. New York University Professor Shlomo Angel expresses concern that: …strict measures to protect the natural environment by blocking urban expansion could "choke the supplies of affordable lands on the fringes of cities and limit the abilities of ordinary people the house themselves." (See: A Planet of People: Angel’s Planet of Cities).

    Similar concern is raised by Brandon Fuller of Charter Cities: … if governments respond by trying to contain urban expansion with greenbelts or urban growth boundaries that artificially restrict the supply of developable land, the result will be prices and rents higher than many arriving families can afford.

    The association between higher densities and more intensive traffic congestion is also avoided in much of the planning press. Echenique, et al are an exception, citing research showing that when density rises, vehicle travel rises almost as much. This is no small matter, since expanding mobility throughout metropolitan areas means more economic growth (read more affluence and less poverty). This is before considering the negative impacts of greater traffic intensity on localized air pollution and health.

    Sanctioning Objective Inquiry?  

    The need for greater openness in academia also caught the attention of Australian transport and urban development consultant Alan Davies (in Will Compact Cities Deliver on the Environment), who wrote:

    There needs to be more consideration of evidence-based research by those interested in cities. One reason why there isn’t is illustrated by the reaction to the Echinique et al paper by some members of the US Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSA).

    On a similar note, Professor Schweitzer noted that it is common for advocates of compact development to charge skeptics with unethical behavior. This creates an environment that is not conducive to developing objective and reliable strategies that effectively addresses objectives such as environmental sustainability.

    Back to the (17th Century) Future?

    Open minds have always been a threat to dogma and its proponents. Progress comes from the objective application of science, which is the very opposite of dogma.

    Yet, there is a long tradition of sanctioning thought and publication that questions the conventional wisdom. It is not an honorable tradition. In the 17th century, Galileo was bold enough to challenge the doctrines of the Church about the relationship of Earth to the sun. The Church determined that it was inappropriate for him to publish such views and Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Of course, doctrines change, especially when exposed to the light of new or ignored evidence.

    Researchers like Echenique, et al should not be confined to an ivory tower equivalent of house arrest. Their work and that of researchers disagreeing with them should be roundly debated in an open, academically free environment. All of this requires a separation of church and urban planning.

    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.”

    ——

    Photo: Sather Tower, University of California, Berkeley (by author)

  • The Blue-State Suicide Pact

    With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest. The almost uniform support of blue states’ congressional representatives for the administration’s campaign for tax “fairness” represents a kind of  bizarre economic suicide pact.

    Any move to raise taxes on the rich — defined as households making over $250,000 annually — strikes directly at the economies of these states, which depend heavily on the earnings of high-income professionals, entrepreneurs and technical workers. In fact, when you examine which states, and metropolitan areas, have the highest concentrations of such people, it turns out they are overwhelmingly located in the bluest states and regions.

    Ironically the new taxes will have relatively little effect on the detested Romney uber-class, who derive most of their income from capital gains,   taxed at a much lower rate. They also have access to all manner of offshore dodges. Nor will it have much impact on Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, or the Hollywood moguls and urban land speculators who constitute the Democratic Party’s “good rich,” and enjoy many of the same privileges as their wealthy conservative counterparts.

    The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.

    The ironic geography of the Democratic drive can be seen most clearly by examining the  distribution of the classes now targeted by the coming purge. The top 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama formula include true blue bastions Washington, D.C., which has the highest concentration of big earners, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii. The only historic “swing state” in the top six is Virginia, due largely to the presence of the affluent suburbs of the capital. These same states, according to the Tax Foundation, would benefit the most from an extension of the much-lambasted Bush tax cuts.

    The pattern of distribution of “the rich” is even more marked when we focus on metropolitan areas. Big metro areas supported Obama, particularly their core cities, by margins as high as four to one. Besides New York, the metro areas with the highest percentage of high-earning households include such lockstep blue cities as San Francisco, Washington, San Jose, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

    The income tax hit may not be the only pain inflicted on these areas in the President’s drive for greater “fairness.” Moves to curb mortgage interest deductions for affluent households also would fall predominately on these same areas. The states with the highest listing prices — and the biggest mortgages on average – are the president’s home state of Hawaii, followed by the District of Columbia, New York, California and Connecticut. According to the Census Bureau and the Federal Housing Agency, median home values in California are 200% higher than the national median, and in New York they’re 150% higher; in contrast, red Texas’ prices are below the median.

    The contrast in prices is even greater between metropolitan areas. The highest prices — and thus largest mortgages — are in the deep blue havens of San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. If the mortgage interest deduction is capped for loans, say, over $300,000, homeowners in these cities will suffer far more than in key red state cities like Dallas or Houston, where homes are at least half the price.

    The curbing of the mortgage interest deduction constitutes only one part of a broader effort to cut back on all itemized deductions. This would hit states with the highest rates of people taking such deductions: California, New York, the District of Columbia, Connecticut and New Jersey, according to the Wall Street Journal. In contrast, the states least vulnerable to this kind of leveling reform would be either red states such as Indiana, Alaska or Kentucky, or classic “swing” states such as Iowa and Ohio.

    Of course, one can argue that these changes follow the precepts of social justice: Rich people and rich regions should pay more. Yet being “rich” means different things in different places, due to vast differences in costs of living. The cost of living   in New York and Los Angeles, for example, is so high that the adjusted value of salaries rank in the bottom fifth in the nation. In other words, a couple with two children with a $150,000 income in Austin or Raleigh may be, in terms of housing and personal consumption, far “richer” than one making twice that in New York or Los Angeles.

    What would a big tax increase on the “rich” mean to the poor and working classes in these areas? To be sure, they may gain via taxpayer-funded transfer payments, but it’s doubtful that higher taxes will make their prospects for escaping poverty much brighter. For the most part, the economies of the key blue regions are very dependent on the earnings of the mass affluent class, and their spending is critical to overall growth. Singling out the affluent may also reduce the discretionary spending that drives employment in the personal services sector, retail and in such key fields as construction.

    This prospect is troubling since many of these areas are already among the most unequal in America. In the expensive blue areas, the lower-income middle class population that would benefit from the Administration’s plan of  keeping the Bush rates for them is proportionally smaller, although  the numbers of the poor, who already pay little or nothing in income taxes, generally greater. Indeed, according to a recent Census analysis, the two places with the highest proportions of poor people are Washington, D.C., and California. By far the highest level of inequality among the country’s 25 most populous counties is in Manhattan.

    Finally we have to consider the impact of the new tax rates on the fiscal health of these states. Four of the five states in the poorest shape fiscally, according to a recent survey by 24/7 Wall Street, all have congressional delegations dominated by Democrats — California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Illinois (the one red state is Arizona). Slower economic growth brought about by higher taxes — compounded by high state taxes — is unlikely to make their situation any better.

    So what can we expect to happen if the fiscal cliff appears, or if the President and his party get their taxes on the rich? One can expect a proportionally greater impact on citizens and the budgets of the already expensive, high-tax states, where the new kulak class is concentrated. It may also spark a greater migration of people and companies to less expensive, lower-tax areas.

    Perhaps the greatest  irony in all this is that the Republicans, largely detested in the deep blue bastions, are the ones most likely to fall on their swords to maintain lower rates for the the  mass affluent class in the bluest states and metros. If they were something other than the stupid party, or perhaps a bit more cynical, they would respond to the President’s tax proposals by taking a line from their doddering cultural icon, Clint Eastwood: make my day.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Income tax photo by Bigstock.

  • No Reservations Cleveland

    There is a new video out marketing Cleveland and a new slogan: “Downtown Cleveland: It’s here”. Now, I struggle with critiquing it. One the one hand, I get its energy and optimism: the energy in Downtown is palpable, real—there is a bit of a youth movement to the core—and hence the compilation of images, sounds, and narratives that are trying to capitalize and communicate what is going down.

    On the other hand, I see it as another missed opportunity. The message reads blasé. Tastes like a spoon of new car smell. In fact it could be about anywhere—Nashville, Cincinnati, Tampa, etc.; that is, instead of exposing what Cleveland really is and what’s unique about it, it’s distinctiveness as an attraction is buried in amenity-driven microphone-ing that screams we have sports teams and a casino and restaurants and the yet-spoiled exuberance of the young. But when you think about Cleveland—I mean honestly think about Cleveland: about its guts and soul and heart and people—is this the kind of stuff that comes to mind?

    Of course not. So why do it?

    Firstly, it speaks to a larger method of city revitalization that has been running America for some time. Here, the creative classification method entails imposing a rather homogenous, universal cool over a given city topography. Glitz, glamor, glass condos, and sports heroes. Bike paths and food trucks. Millennium Park Jr.’s. Etc. But with this whitewashing comes the chipping away at Cleveland’s Rust Belt soul. And it is this soul, mind you, that is a real attraction. After all, what is so hot about going everywhere when you can go somewhere?

    And yes: Cleveland is a somewhere and has a something. This thing is part cultural, part aesthetic, part historical, and part a consequence of having to go on in the face of adversity. It is part wit, part ironic, part self-deprecating, but also part stand your ground in the defense of where you came from. And it’s all real, not ephemeral: our distinctiveness arising less from donning another city’s success than stripping naked and showing our nuts and bolts. Our warts. Our knuckles and heart.

    Secondly, and this speaks to the marketing machine in general, but outfits that produce messaging at this level just cannot get beyond the culture of the boardroom from which the message emerges. Corporatism repels risk. And this not only relates to branding professionals but also to the customers seeking the brand. It’s like everyone knows their audience and their audience is everyone. It’s all about that one type we want, they say, and we want thousands of them. It is a safe strategy, riskless. But Cleveland doesn’t need safe. Playing it conservative has just kept us secure in our knowledge that we are always revitalizing. Instead, step outside, show your face to the world, as branding is and always has been about differentiation. But to do that you need to be aware and secure in knowing what makes you different.

    It is alright. People will like you. And if they don’t, so be it. The coolest will. Said Anthony Bourdain in his “No Reservations: Cleveland” trip:

    I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will “attract business”, always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a “normal” city — or a “perfect” or “safe” one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philharmonic.

    A friend recently commented to me that authenticity and grit can’t be marketed. Well, check this new video out from Memphis. They got it. I get a feel for who they are. And it makes me want to check the city out.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic, where this piece originally appeared.

    Cleveland nuts photo by Flickr user The Cleveland Kid.

  • The Expanding Economic Pie & Grinding Poverty

    A review of data from the past 200 years indicates not only a huge increase in the world’s population, but an even more significant increase in real incomes. This is illustrated using the data series developed by the late Angus Maddison of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that included historic estimates of economic performance by geographical area (nations and other reported geographies) from 1500 to 2000. The Maddison data is expressed in international dollars adjusted for purchasing power, so that the impact of inflation and differing prices is factored out, to the extent feasible. Caution is required, however, because there are difficulties with longer term purchasing power and inflation time-series, not least because technological advances make it nearly impossible to accurately account for the changed standard of living. For example, there were no telephones of any sort in 1820, yet today, low-income Nigeria has 143 million mobile phones, nearly 90 for every 100 persons.

    I extended the Maddison data for another 10 years, to 2010, using the database of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and converted all data to 2010 inflation adjusted international dollars.

    Fast Population Growth and Faster Economic Growth

    Between 1820 and 2010, the world population grew from 1.0 billion to 6.8 billion as indicated in the databases. This 550% increase, however, pales by comparison to the increase in the world real gross domestic product (GDP), which grew nearly 13 times as fast as the population (Figure 1). The relationship between rising urbanization and increasing wealth is evident in comparing Figure 1 to Figure 2 from the recent feature What is A Half-Urban World.   Between 1820 and 1900, the real economic growth rate was 1.5 times of that of population growth. This improved to 2.2 times between 1900 and 1950. In each of these succeeding decades, the economic growth rate relative to population growth was even greater, except in the decade of the 1980s when economic growth was 1.9 times population growth. Despite the economic difficulties, particularly in Japan and the West, 2000 to 2010 showed the largest rate of economic growth compared to population growth, at 3.0.

    GDP Per Capita (Purchasing Power)

    The real GDP per capita data strongly indicates the expanding economic pie. In 1820, the world GDP per capita was approximately $1100, expressed in 2010$, adjusted for purchasing power. By 1900, this had nearly doubled to $2100. The largest gains came after 1950 when the GDP per capita reached $3500. Since that time the GDP per capita has risen to $12,200 (Figure 2).

    A History of Poverty

    Even so, the history of economics is a history of poverty. University of Rochester (NY) Economist stated the case this way:

    Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture – but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level.

    The $1100 GDP per capita from 1820 would rank among the poorest areas in the world today. The world’s richest area at that time was the Netherlands, which had a GDP per capita of $3100. This is more than Nigeria today, with its 143 million mobile phones and nearly as high as the GDP per capita of India.

    Distribution of Income

    Today, the large majority of the world’s population lives in lower income areas.

    • 16% of the population lives in areas with a GDP per capita of less than $2500. The largest of these are Bangladesh and Tanzania.
    • 29% of the world’s population is in areas with a GDP per capita of $2500 to $5000. The largest are India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and the Philippines.
    • 26% live in low middle income areas with a GDP per capita of between $5000 and $10,000, such as China and Ukraine.
    • 14% live higher middle income areas (a per capita GDP of $10,000 to $20,000). The largest such areas are Brazil, Mexico and Russia.
    • 10% of the population lives in relatively well off areas (a GDP per capita of $20,000 to $40,000) including France, the United Kingdom, Korea and Japan.
    • Only 5% of the world’s population enjoys a GDP per capita exceeding $40,000, the largest of which are the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia. (Figure 3).

    The Richest Areas

    The very richest countries in the world on a per capita basis are generally small. Oil rich Qatar has the highest GDP per capita at nearly $100,000 annually. Europe’s Luxemburg is the second most affluent, followed by the city-state of Singapore. Resource rich Brunei-Darassalam is the world’s fifth richest area. The United States ranks sixth and is by far the largest of the richest areas. More than 55% of the world’s population in areas with more than $40,000 GDP per capita lives in the United States. The balance of the richest 10 is completed by the United Arab Emirates, another oil rich Gulf state, the world’s other large city-state, Hong Kong,  as well as the Netherlands and Switzerland in Europe (Figure 4).

    Generally, IMF data indicates that the largest high-income world economies have experienced real GDP per capita growth of from 40% to 80% since 1980. The UK has grown the most among the examples, while Italy has grown the least (Figure 5). Germany’s lower growth rate is, at least in part, due to the complexity of combining virtually bankrupt East Germany with far healthier West Germany in the early 1990s. The US has been hobbled by its housing bubble-induced economic bust, which hurt other economies as well. Canada’s recent stronger growth could presage an improved ranking in the years to come. Other areas, such Italy, Spain, Japan and France could experience slower growth in the future, due to the seemingly intractable fiscal difficulties and, in some cases, demographic stagnation or even decline.

    Who’s Growing Rich Fastest?

    A number of countries have experienced spectacular growth in their GDP per capita over the past three decades, according to the IMF data (Figure 6). Oil rich Equatorial Guinea experienced the greatest growth, reaching a GDP per capita more than 16 times the 1980s figure. Equatorial Guinea is small, with a population of only 700,000 people (similar to the size of metropolitan areas such as Colorado Springs, Colorado, Hamilton, Ontario or Florence, Italy).

    The broadest and most significant progress has been made by China. According to the IMF data, in 1980 China had the second lowest GDP per capita of any reporting area, ranking above only Mozambique. This was approximately the same time that the economic reforms began, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.  By 2010, China’s GDP per capita had reached more than 12 times the 1980 figure. China’s gross GDP-PPP grew more than that of any other area. Once on the low end of the poverty league table    China now has entered the middle rank in terms of wealth.

    Other areas have also done well, especially in Asia. The largest of these include Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore. One African area is included among the fastest growing per capita economies, Botswana (Figure 6). Each of these areas grew from four to five times in GDP per capita from 1980.

    The Poorest Areas

    All 10 of the world’s poorest areas are located in Africa. The poorest is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a GDP per capita of less than $400.   Torn by civil war  its GDP per capita would rank it among the poorest areas even in the 1820 listing. The four next poorest areas have also faced severe domestic disruptions, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Eritrea (Figure 7).

    Some Areas Getting Poorer

    The severity of the world’s poverty is indicated by the fact that 26 of the 138 areas for which there is data experienced declines in their GDPs per capita from 1980. The population of these declining areas was about 300 million, or approximately four percent of the world’s total. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s poorest area, experienced a 60% decline in real GDP per capita, which was the largest decline.

    Conclusion

    While the economic pie has expanded much faster than its population, there is still plenty of poverty in the world. It is no surprise that the developing world focused the attention of the recent 2012 Rio +20 conference on poverty, with a declaration that eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world today.

    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.”

    Photo: Regency Park, Shanghai (by author)

  • Where Americans Are Moving

    The red states may have lost the presidential election, but they are winning new residents, largely at the expense of their politically successful blue counterparts. For all the talk of how the Great Recession has driven people — particularly the “footloose young” — toward dense urban centers, Census data reveal that Americans are still drawn to the same sprawling Sun Belt regions as before.

    An analysis of domestic migration for the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas by demographer Wendell Cox shows that the 10 metropolises with the largest net gains from 2000 through 2009 are in the Sun Belt, led by Phoenix, and followed by Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Atlanta; Dallas-Ft. Worth; and Las Vegas.

    Migration has slowed from a high of nearly 2 million annually in 2006 to less than 800,000 last year, but the most recent numbers show that the Sun Belt states, though chastened by the recession, are far from dead, as often alleged. This part of America, widely consigned to what the Bolshevik firebrand Leon Trotsky called the “dustbin of history” by Eastern pundits, somehow manages to continue to draw Americans seeking opportunities, in particular from the large coastal metropolitan regions.

    Migration data for the most recent one-year period available, July 2010 t0 July 2011, show the Great Recession has shaken the rankings up quite a bit within the circle of fast-growth regions. The biggest winner has been Texas. The Lone Star state boasts four of the 10 metro areas with the largest net migration gains for the past two years.  Dallas ranks first, followed by Austin in third place, Houston in fifth and San Antonio in eighth. In contrast, some of the growth leaders over the 2000-09 period, notably Las Vegas, and to a lesser extent Phoenix, have tumbled considerably in the rankings. The lesson here: a strong economy has to be based on something more than gaming, tourism and home construction. Energy, technology, manufacturing and trade are far preferable as an economic base.

    Also posting strong net migration gains for 2010-11 were Miami (second place), Washington, D.C. (sixth), and Seattle (ninth). In each of these areas, economic conditions appear to have improved. The once disastrous condo glut in the Miami area, which includes Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, has begun to clear up as foreign buyers pour into the region. Taxpayer-funded Washington is surging with new jobs and the highest incomes in the land. Seattle continues a long-term evolution toward the healthiest of the blue-state private economies. San Francisco, a consistent big loser for the last decade, jumped to 19th, presumably as a result of the current dot.com bubble.

    Another huge turnaround can be seen in New Orleans, which ranked a dismal 43rd for 2000-09 as residents fled not only Katrina but a stagnant, low-wage, corruption-plagued economy. But in our 2010-11 ranking, the Crescent City surged to a respectable 16th, one of the biggest migration turnarounds in the country.

    How about the biggest losers? From 2000-09, the metropolitan areas that suffered the biggest net domestic migration losses resemble something of an urbanist dream team: New York, which saw a net outflow of a whopping 1.9 million citizens, followed by the Los Angeles metro area (-1,337,522), Chicago, Detroit, and, despite recent improvements, San Francisco-Oakland. The raw numbers make it clear that California has lost its appeal for migrants from other parts of the U.S., and has become an exporter of people and talent (and income).

    And despite the cheap money Bernanke-Geithner policies of the past few years that have benefited giant banks centered in the bluest big cities, people continue to leave these areas.  The 2010-11 numbers show the deck chairs on the migratory titanic have stayed remarkably similar, with New York still ranking first among the 51 biggest metro areas for net migration losses, followed by Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. In most of these cases only immigration from abroad, and children of immigrants, have prevented a wholesale demographic decline.

    What can we expect now? It seems clear that the urban-centric policies of the Obama administration have not changed Americans’ migration patterns. The weak recovery has slowed migration, but expensive, overregulated and dense metropolitan areas continue to lose population to lower-cost, less regulated and generally less dense regions. This may speed up as recent tax hikes squeeze the hard-pressed middle class and if, as appears likely, the social media bubble continues to deflate.

    If the economy somehow gains strength, it may only serve to further accelerate these trends. The incipient recovery in housing prices seems likely, at least in places like California and the Northeast, to create yet another bubble. This will give people more incentive to move to less expensive areas, particularly those who can cash in by selling a house in a pricier city and moving to a less expensive one. The differential in housing costs between New York and Tampa-St. Petersburg now stands at historic highs, and near peak bubble highs between Los Angeles and Phoenix; the traditional growth states are looking more attractive all the time for people looking to make quick money in an economy with shrinking opportunities elsewhere. This includes the massive wave of aging boomers, many of whom may see selling a house in California or the Northeast as a way to make up for less than adequate IRAs. The combination of low prices and warmer weather in the past has proven an irresistible one for those retiring or simply down-shifting their careers. This appeal is likely to grow as the senior population expands.

    Other demographic factors could further drive this trend. As the millennial generation ages and starts looking for places to buy homes and raise families, many will seek out places that are both affordable and offer better economic opportunities. These will tend to be in the South and Southwest, particularly Texas, and Plains States metro areas such as Oklahoma City.

    Finally we can expect immigrants, particularly from Asia, to continue to seek out housing bargains and new opportunities primarily in the Sun Belt states, as our recent study of changing Asian settlement patterns revealed. More will be shifting from the high-priced, low-growth big metros for opportunity cities such as Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh and Charlotte.

    Overall we can  expect domestic migration to pick up, and to follow the well-trodden path from the great cities of the Northeast and California to the Sun Belt’s  resurgent boom towns. This may be bad news to many urban pundits and big city speculators, but it also should create new opportunities for more perceptive, and less jaded, investors.

    2010-2011 Net Domestic Migration for the Nation’s 51 Largest Regions
    Rank by Net Flow Metropolitan Area Net Flow Rate Per 1,000 Residents Rank by Rate
    1 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 39,021 6.04 10
    2 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 36,191 6.43 9
    3 Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX 30,669 17.47 1
    4 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 27,157 9.68 3
    5 Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 21,580 3.58 16
    6 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 21,517 3.80 15
    7 Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 19,565 7.59 7
    8 San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX 19,515 8.97 4
    9 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 17,598 5.07 13
    10 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 15,131 3.54 17
    11 Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC 13,778 7.74 6
    12 Raleigh-Cary, NC 13,262 11.53 2
    13 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 12,419 2.33 18
    14 Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA 11,388 5.07 12
    15 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL 10,394 4.82 14
    16 New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA 10,153 8.59 5
    17 Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN 9,323 5.81 11
    18 Oklahoma City, OK 8,746 6.90 8
    19 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 5,880 1.35 22
    20 Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ 5,585 1.32 24
    21 Pittsburgh, PA 3,740 1.59 20
    22 Jacksonville, FL 2,911 2.15 19
    23 Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA 2,856 1.32 23
    24 Columbus, OH 2,219 1.20 26
    25 Indianapolis-Carmel, IN 1,940 1.10 27
    26 Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN 1,886 1.46 21
    27 Richmond, VA 1,546 1.22 25
    28 Salt Lake City, UT 915 0.80 28
    29 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 816 0.26 29
    30 Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 536 0.16 30
    31 Baltimore-Towson, MD -1,341 -0.49 32
    32 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH -1,627 -0.36 31
    33 Birmingham-Hoover, AL -2,452 -2.17 35
    34 Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY -2,558 -2.25 38
    35 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA -2,704 -1.46 34
    36 Kansas City, MO-KS -2,820 -1.38 33
    37 Memphis, TN-MS-AR -2,933 -2.22 37
    38 Rochester, NY -3,320 -3.15 40
    39 Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT -4,749 -3.92 45
    40 Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI -4,862 -3.12 39
    41 Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA -6,254 -3.91 44
    42 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV -6,353 -3.24 41
    43 Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC -7,086 -4.22 47
    44 Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN -7,149 -3.35 42
    45 St. Louis, MO-IL -10,260 -3.64 43
    46 Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH -12,521 -6.04 51
    47 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD -13,133 -2.20 36
    48 Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI -24,170 -5.64 49
    49 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA -50,549 -3.92 46
    50 Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI -53,908 -5.68 50
    51 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA -98,975 -5.22 48

     

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Dallas photo by Bigstock.

  • Millennials Ready to Play Key Role in Housing Market Recovery

    Recent data from a survey commissioned by Better Homes and Garden Real Estate (BHGRE) suggests a pent up desire among 18-35 year olds to own a home of their own that could easily fuel a real estate boom for at least the rest of this decade. 

    In contrast to predictions from some futurists that the Millennial generation, born 1982-2003, will be content to be lifelong renters, BHGRE’s survey found home ownership still ranked as young Americans’ most important definition of personal success.  Overall, three-fourths of those surveyed named home ownership as an indicator of having succeeded financially, more than seven times the number who named other major expenditures such as taking extravagant vacations, buying an expensive car, or owning designer clothing. Even among those living in the Northeast or in cities, seventy percent identified home ownership as the best indicator of having made it financially. This is fully in line with earlier studies by Pew Research that found home ownership was among the top three priorities in life for members of the Millennial generation.

    Unlike comments often made about this generation by some of their elders, most Millennials didn’t express sentiments suggesting that they feel entitled to be simply handed this badge of success.  Seventy percent of those in BHGRE’s survey said they needed to possess the skills to own a home; only thirty percent said they “deserved it.” Respondents also made it clear they were prepared to sacrifice to achieve their dream of home ownership.  About sixty percent were willing to eat out less and/or only spend on necessities to save the money needed to buy a home. These sentiments were most strongly expressed by those who had grown up in a home  owned by their parents.  In addition, forty percent were willing to take a second job. And, almost a quarter  of the generation accused of  “failing  to launch”  were prepared to live with their parents for a couple of years to save the money they would need to own a piece of the American Dream.  

    The collapse of the housing market that triggered the Great Recession also has made Millennials sophisticated, knowledgeable consumers when making decisions about how and when to purchase a home.  Rather than thinking they should buy a home as soon as they get married or qualify for a mortgage, seventy percent of BHGRE’s respondents said the time to buy a house is when a person can “afford it and maintain their lifestyle.” 

    Millennials are careful consumers, as befits a group shaped by the most lengthy economic downturn in decades. Sixty-one percent suggested they would want to have a secure job before buying a house and more than half said people should wait until they had saved enough for the down payment before making such a purchase.  When asked to indicate the factors they would research in determining whether to buy a home, financial considerations were cited by a majority of the respondents.

    They understand the power of money. Interest rates, home prices and how those two factors impacted their ability to secure a mortgage, all ranked much higher in importance than the type of neighborhood a house was in, school district ratings or foreclosure rates.  With the median sales price of both new and existing homes up almost five percent this year, Millennials are likely to jump into the market soon before it becomes too expensive for them to do so.      

    These findings suggest the current policies of the Federal Reserve and its Chairman, Ben Bernanke to keep interest rates low in order to stimulate this key part of the U.S. economy are right on target. If home builders and sellers can tailor their offerings to these technologically sophisticated, family-oriented potential buyers, Millennials could well play an important role in reinvigorating the nation’s housing market, further spurring the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

    Homes image by BigStock.

  • Detroit: America’s Whipping Boy Needs a Second Chance

    Every so often, Detroit seems to pop up in our popular consciousness in a negative way.  Ever since the ’67 riots, a steady stream of bad press has altered the national perception of the Motor City.  Right now the city’s efforts to prevent state takeover because of its fiscal problems seems to shape discussion about Detroit.  The most recent demonstration of this is the State of Michigan’s proposal to make Detroit’s Belle Isle Park, the jewel of the city’s park system, into a state park through an extended lease agreement. 

    But I’ve had a rather counterintuitive thought for some time – Detroit is our nation’s urban “boogeyman”, our poster child for urban decline, and we are the ones who prevent the city’s revitalization because we won’t let that image go.  America needs Detroit to be our national whipping boy. 

    Whipping boys came into prevalence in 15th Century England.  I think Wikipedia’s entry on the subject captures it well:

    They were created because of the idea of the divine right of kings, which stated that kings were appointed by God, and implied that no one but the king was worthy of punishing the king’s son. Since the king was rarely around to punish his son when necessary, tutors to the young prince found it extremely difficult to enforce rules or learning.

    Whipping boys were generally of high status, and were educated with the prince from birth. Because the prince and whipping boy grew up together they usually formed a strong emotional bond, especially since the prince usually did not have playmates as other children would have had. The strong bond that developed between a prince and his whipping boy dramatically increased the effectiveness of using a whipping boy as a form of punishment for a prince. The idea of the whipping boys was that seeing a friend being whipped or beaten for something that he had done wrong would be likely to ensure that the prince would not make the same mistake again (emphasis added).

    If that doesn’t accurately describe Detroit’s position in our nation’s collective conscience, I don’t know what does.

    I grew up in Detroit.  Like so many others, I’ve long since moved away (been gone for 30 years), but I occasionally come back to visit family.  I left the city as a teen, but I remain an avid fan of the city’s sports teams.  I regularly read about events and happenings in the city via the Internet.  And, if given a chance, I could still navigate pretty easily throughout the city.  I heartily root for the city’s revitalization.

    I sincerely believe that growing up in 1970s Detroit contributed to my ultimate career path.  As a kid, I remember news reports of people leaving the city for the suburbs or any number of Sun Belt cities – Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix.  I remember reports of arson fires to abandoned buildings.  I remember Mayor Coleman Young taking such a defiant political stance on most issues that he may have urged (if not necessarily directly so) continued “white flight” and suburban expansion.  And, of course, I remember the tag that dug deep – “Murder Capital of the World”.  That kind of environment might prompt – did prompt – many people to just give up on cities in general and Detroit in particular, but I always had the vague notion that someone should stick around and try to make the city better.  I was first exposed to the field of urban planning during an eighth-grade career fair, and I later made it my career choice.

    It was clear, however, that most people did not react to Detroit’s decline as I did.  The city’s decline allowed it to be pushed into the recesses of the American mindscape.  It was only to be recalled as a foreboding reminder of the evils of cities.

    In my mind, four films from the last fifteen years seem to capture the general national image of Detroit and continue to shape our perceptions.  The 1997 film Gridlock’d features Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth as heroin addicts traversing a bleak urban environment, trying without success to get the help they need to drop the habit.  The much more celebrated 2002 Eminem film 8 Mile takes place in the same stark physical environment and details the visceral world of MC battling.  The 2005 film Four Brothers covers yet again the same desolate setting as four adopted young men seek to avenge the senseless murder of their mother.  And 2008’s Gran Torino, featuring Clint Eastwood, put a different spin on the meme by putting an elderly white widower into the same gritty landscape, full of resentment toward the people around him who represent the city’s demise. 

    Of course, we don’t need films to tell us what to think about Detroit.  Journalists, business leaders, artists, and others are more than happy to report on a physical environment that is a gray and gritty, post-industrial collection of smokestacks, abandoned buildings.  Everyone knows that Detroit is a city with huge swaths of vacant land and substandard housing.   Time Magazine famously purchased a house in Detroit to provide a launching pad for reporters to chronicle the city’s collapse.  On more than one occasion I’ve heard people suggest that Detroit is undergoing a “slow-motion Hurricane Katrina”.  The image of the city’s people is one of, at best, ordinary blue-collar, hockey-loving, working-class slugs, holding on but facing inevitable economic obsolescence because of an inability to compete in today’s bottom-line global economy.  At worst, they are poorly educated and isolated miscreants who relish burning buildings every October 30th (“Devil’s Night”), and causing mayhem when one of the local sports teams actually wins a championship.

    There are aspects of this in virtually every large city in America.  You can find Detroit in Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Philadelphia.  You can find it in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus and Louisville.  You can find it in Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas and Phoenix.  You can find it in Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland.  And yes, you can definitely find it in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.  You can find elements of the Detroit Dystopia Meme ™ in every major city in the country.  Yet Detroit is the only one that owns it and shoulders the burden for all of them.

    Why is Detroit our national whipping boy?

    The image of Detroit serves as a constant reminder to cities of what not to become. This is the real Boogeyman syndrome right here.  City leaders around the nation can always refer to Detroit as the quintessential urban dystopia, invoking images of crime and crumbling infrastructure.  By doing this they can garner support for (or just as likely, against) a local project, because if this project does or doesn’t happen, you know what could happen to our fair city?  We could become like Detroit!

    The image of Detroit allows the rest of the nation’s cities to avoid facing their own issues – urban and suburban. As long as Detroit’s negative image remains prominent in people’s minds, they can forget about trying to improve what may be just as bad, or even worse, in their own communities.  I remember visiting Las Vegas about twelve years ago, and was astounded by the amount of homelessness I saw, away from the Strip.  No one immediately associates homelessness with Las Vegas, but such an issue would be completely understandable for discussion to the average guy when talking about Detroit.  Cities like Miami and New Orleans have long histories of high crime rates, but that perception rarely registers like Detroit’s because they have other assets like South Beaches and French Quarters to mitigate it.  Cities like Memphis and Baltimore have a violent crime profile similar to Detroit’s, but they fail to excite in the way Detroit does.

    The image of Detroit allows the rest of the nation to maintain a smug arrogance and sense of superiority. I imagine a nation pointing its collective finger at Detroit and saying its situation is the result of its own bad decisions.  Shame on Detroit, they say, for going all in on auto manufacturing.  Shame on Detroit for aligning itself so closely with labor unions.  Or the Big Three.  Shame on Detroit for not dealing with its racial matters.  Shame on Detroit for its political failures and corruption.  And I imagine this being said without the slightest bit of irony by the American people.  We are not you, they say, because we made better choices.  But the truth is dozens of cities made the same choices but escaped a similar impact, or had other physical or economic assets that could conceal the negatives.  This is a conceit that prevents not only Detroit’s revitalization, but that of former industrial cities around the nation.

    Detroit needs a reprieve.  It needs a second chance.  Motown needs our nation to let go of its past and allow it to move on into the future.  There are millions of people who have had troubled lives in the past, but do we continually hold that against them?  There are corporations that betray the public trust, but we go back to buying their products.  There are Hollywood actors who make atrocious movies, but we go back to see their latest flick.  There are politicians who’ve been disgraced out of office, and even they are able to come back.  Detroit needs to be allowed to move into its next act.

    More importantly, we must recognize that Detroit’s story is not unique.  It is the story of every American former industrial city, just writ large.  America is the land of second chances – we need to let go of our “at-least-we’re-not-Detroit” smugness and support this city.  Detroit has paid its dues, and it is long past time for the city to cash in.

    By allowing Detroit to move on, we’ll find that it will free up other communities across the nation to actually focus on their own problems.  There’s a checklist of activities that require urban leadership.  Dealing with foreclosures.   Crushing income inequality and economic disparities.  Mind-numbing traffic congestion on our roads.  Crumbling infrastructure.  Unsustainable sprawl development.  The impact of global climate change on water availability in the Sun Belt.  That represents just the tip of the iceberg. Certainly, other cities certainly have their fair share of problems.

    But I look at Detroit like this.  To paraphrase Frank Sinatra in his song “New York, New York” – if it can be fixed there, it can be fixed anywhere.

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

    Photo: The “Detroit” we’ve all come to love — and expect

  • What is a Half-Urban World?

    Within the last couple of years, the population of the world has become more than one half urban for the first time in history. By 2025, the world’s urban areas are expected to account for 58% of the world population, rising further to two-thirds in 2050. This represents a huge increase from the 29% that was urban in 1950, or estimates of approximately 10% (or less) in 1800. (Figure 1).

    Urban areas have also gotten much bigger. In 1800, only Beijing had a population over 1,000,000. A number of others, such as Baghdad, Rome, Xi’an, Hanghzhou and Ayutthaya (Thailand) are reported to have reached between 1.0 and 1.5 million in the more distant past, but all had fallen back below the 1.0 million threshold by 1800 (Note 1). These population declines occurred for a variety of reasons, such as military losses, disease, as well as political and economic instability. In short, before the 19th century, large urban populations were largely unsustainable (Figure 2).

    Over the intervening two centuries there has been an exponential increase in the number of large urban areas. By 1900, there were at least 15 urban areas over 1,000,000 population. By 2010, the figure had grown to approximately 450. New York had become the world’s first megacity (over 10 million population) by 1950, now there are at least 25 over 10 million.

    What is Urban?

    However, it would be a mistake to imagine that "half urban" means a world of large cities, or that the world is highly urbanized. The principal source for urban population data is the United Nations, which relies upon individual countries to provide the urban versus rural data. These nations each have their own definitions, which can vary markedly.

    For example, in the United States, a settlement must reach 2,500 population before it is considered urban. Thus, Van, Texas, with a population of 2,502 in the 2010 census is urban, like New York with its 18 million. Canada requires settlements to have 1,000 residents. This means that Nobleford, Alberta, with a population of 1,000 in the 2011 census is urban, along with Toronto with its 6 million population. It seems curious that, with their similarities, United States and Canada have such different urban definitions.

    However, as the UN indicates, differing definitions make sense in some cases. For example, agricultural villages in China can be larger than small urban areas in the United States, Canada or Western Europe. However, given the common view that agricultural dependence is an important difference between rural and urban, a Western urban definition would be inappropriate in China.

    The differences in urban definitions can be substantial. According to the UN, urban definitions can require a population of as much as 50,000, and as little as 200, as in Sweden. With thresholds so low as 200, 1,000 or 2,500 population, the world urbanization data includes not only "cities," but also smaller settlements like small towns and villages (though there is no standard definition to differentiate between cities, towns and villages and the definitional problem is made worse by the sometimes use of these terms for administrative boundaries).

    It is generally recognized that the world’s largest urban area is Tokyo, with a population of more than 35 million. However, there is no consensus about the smallest urban area in the world. Our candidate is Godegård, located in the Motala municipality (Östergötland County) in Sweden. The 2010 census indicated that Godegård had a population of 200 residents, at the urban definition threshold for Sweden.  Godegårdians live in an urban area of 0.10 square miles or 0.26 square kilometers (see Google Earth image above).

    Distribution of the World Urban Population

    Urban areas are becoming physically larger and that a larger share of the urbanization is moving to the larger urban areas (areas of continuous urban development, including both urban cores and surrounding areas, generally called suburbs). However, a majority of the world’s urban population lives in smaller urban areas. In 2000, 30% of the world urban population lived in urban areas of less than 100,000 population (Note 2). Another 20% of the population lived in urban areas with between 100,000 and 500,000 population. Thus, nearly 55% of the world’s urban population lived in small and medium-sized urban areas in 2000 (Figure 3).

    Historical and Projected Distribution of World Urban Population

    The United Nations data is available back to 1950 and includes projections to 2025, based upon the size of urban areas in each year in five-year increments. The data is specific to the population categories, so that as an urban area changes categories (generally moving to a higher category), its population is reflected in the higher category and subtracted from the lower category.

    Despite all of the attention given to the world’s megacities, only 10% of the world’s urban residents are in urban areas with more than 10 million population. However, both the number and share of people living in megacities has increased substantially. From 1950 to 2010, the share of world urban population living in megacities more than tripled, from 3% to 10%. By 2025, the United Nations projects that the megacities will have nearly 14% of the urban population.

    Strong growth has also emerged among the urban areas with from 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 population. Their share of the population has more than doubled since 1950 and is expected to rise further by 2025.
    The share of the population in urban areas with from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 population has grown more slowly, but accounted for 20% of world urbanization in 2010 and is expected to rise to nearly 25% by 2025. These urban areas are projected to add more people than the world’s megacities by 2025.

    Urban areas from 500,000 to 1,000,000 population have increased their share even less, rising from 9% of the world urban population in 1950, to 10% in 2010 and a projected 11% by 2025.

    Virtually all of the loss in urban population share has been in the urban areas with populations below 500,000. In 1950, these urban areas represented more than two thirds of the world urban population. This has since fallen to one-half and is expected to drop to 42% by 2025. (Figure 4)

    Share of Growth

    This does not mean the smaller urban areas are losing population. Between 1950 and 2010, these urban areas added more than 1.3 billion residents, and are expected to add nearly 150 million more between 2010 and 2025. However, urban population growth has been increasingly to the larger urban areas. Between 1950 and 2010, 47% of the urban population growth was in areas with less than 500,000 people. This dominance continued from 2000 and 2010, with a 38% share of the growth. However, it is expected that between 2010 and 2025 the greatest growth will be among urban areas with from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 population (47%) and in the megacities (26%), while the smaller urban areas are expected to account for less than 13% of growth (Figure 5). Even so, the smaller urban areas will still have nearly three times as many residents as the megacities.

    An Urbanizing, But Not Heavily Urbanized World

    A half urban world is a world of settlements that includes villages, small towns, larger urban areas and megacities. Even as the population becomes more concentrated in the larger urban areas, smaller urban areas will continue to account for a large share of the world urban population for the foreseeable future. Thus, a half (or more) urban world will continue to include the likes of Godegård, Nobleford and Van as well as megacities that could approach 50 million.

    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.”

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    Photo: Google Earth image of Godegård, Sweden, which may be the smallest urban area in the world (see text above).

    Note 1: There is a considerable range of research on the size of the largest urban areas throughout history. The authoritative source is Tertius Chandler (Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census).

    Note 2: This estimate is developed from data in Angel, Parent, Civco, Blei and Potere (2010) and United Nations data. Angel, et al (also see A Planet of People: Angel’s "Planet of Cities") provide estimates for urban areas from 100,000 to 500,000 population in 2000, which makes it possible to estimate the population of urban areas below 100,000 population, using UN data for 2000. Estimates for urban areas under 100,000 population is not available for other years.