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  • Michael Lind’s New Paradigm and the “End” of Social Conservatism

    Michael Lind has released a new essay titled “The Coming Realignment” in The Breakthrough Journal, one of the most innovative magazines around today. He predicts that social conservatism as we know it will fade away, but that does not mean we will have political consensus; only that the terms of engagement may change.

    Lind suggests will be two camps, one he calls “liberaltarian” based in the denser urban areas that he calls “Densitaria”; the other, “populiberalism,” will flourish in more  loosely settled suburban areas he calls “Posturbia.” He contends that Densitaria will be primarily occupied by wealthy urbanites and their poor, often immigrant servants, while Posturbia, being dominated by the single family home, will occupy the middle ground. It may not be accessible to the poorest, and not very desirable to the richest; but it will be, however, racially diverse. In many regions  already, suburbs are now more diverse than core cities.

    Neither of these cultures will be hostile to the welfare state, but they will have different preferences about what to expect from it. Densitaria will support the means tested welfare programs that have been called “welfare” in American political discourse, but it will want to control their costs, and will want to put restrictions on things that damage the health of potential welfare clients, like smoking and getting fat.  The Posturbians will favor the type of welfare that comes out of the New Deal, which in American political discourse has not been called “welfare”; non-means tested programs like Social Security and Medicare and other forms of social insurance, public libraries and schools, and other government programs available to all and not just the “poor.” The Republican Party could actually become representative of either camp, depending on how things go.

    The Republican Party, as of 2014, could have become the representative of either camp, according to Lind. But with the appearance and rise of President Trump, that decision has now been made!

    I would add that polls of Millennials seem to indicate that opposition to abortion and euthanasia continue to resonate with them, even as other forms of social conservatism, such as opposition to same sex marriage at civil law, fade. Pro-lifers will no longer be able to consider sexual abstinence as the only solution to unwanted pregnancy; they will tolerate contraception, especially Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives, or LARCs. I hope that pro-lifers will not automatically hook up with one of the two camps but will operate in both. But since Densitarians are so concerned with controlling the costs of welfare, Densitarians may be reluctant to accept restrictions on abortion and euthanasia.

    Lind says “the property-owning majorities of Posturbia are likely to be more sensitive to restrictions on what property owners can do with their property” than Densitarians, who will mostly rent or live in condos anyhow, and largely live off Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries. I am not so sure. In most of Posturbia, as opposed to small towns or rural areas, “property values” are set not by what you can do with your property, but from what surrounds it; and because of this, and because of not wanting to be densified, the Posturbians will probably favor stringent regulations on the use of their neighbors’ property. Also, they will not be abandoning the automobile, but they will want restrictions on the use of land to keep too many other cars from crowding the roads that they use.

    But not everything about the Posturbians will be restrictive. They are expected to be a lot more open to fracking and to other things that will enable them to have the affordable energy supplies that they need. I think the class divisions in Posturbia will be a little greater than Lind thinks; the 1% will probably not be there, but fair numbers of the top 20% will be there, and if not the poorest of the poor, fair numbers of the bottom 40%. I personally believe that class hatred in America is not between the poorest and the richest – class resentment tends to be directed mainly at the classes (or income brackets, often misunderstood by Americans to be classes) just above and below one’s own. The desire to “soak the rich”, except among the near-rich, arises not from resentment but from fantasy, the belief that “the rich” have enough resources to bear most of the burden of society without raising taxes on the rest. They do not, although I admit they have more than they used to.

    I’m not sure where I would end up in such an alignment. My preference will be swayed most by which alternative is better for the poor and for the marginalized among us.

    Howard Ahmanson of Fieldstead and Company, a private management firm, has been interested in these issues for many years.

  • There Will Be No Real Recovery Without The Middle Class

    What if they gave a recovery, and the middle class were never invited? Well, that’s an experiment we are running now, and, even with the recent strengthening of the jobs market, it’s not looking very good.

    Over the last five years, Wall Street and the investor class have been on a bull run, but the economy has been, at best, torpid for the vast majority of the population. Despite blather about our “democratic capitalism,” stock ownership is increasingly concentrated with the wealthy as the middle class retrenches. The big returns that hedge funds, real estate trusts or venture capitalist receive are simply outside the reach of the vast majority.

    A recent study by the Russell Sage Foundation suggests these patterns of inequality, which have been developing over the last several decades, have become more pronounced in the post-Recession years. In 2013 the wealth of those at the 90th and 95thpercentiles was actually higher than 10 years ago. Everyone else is lower.

    The labor market may be strengthening, with the unemployment rate falling to 6.1% last month, but too many of the new jobs are low wage or part time. They aren’t providing the kick the economy got in the last, more broad-based expansion from robust consumer spending.

    Wage growth has been weak, rising 2.5% annually since 2009, according to Bloomberg, compared with a 4.3% annual rise from 2001 to 2007. Consumer spending, which makes up roughly 70% of the economy, has expanded an average 2.2% since the recession ended, behind the 3% advance in the prior expansion.

    And many working-age people are still sitting discouraged on the sidelines – the labor force participation rate remains the lowest since 1979.

    People in marginal or part-time jobs are not likely to drive consumer spending. Instead we have seen the emergence of a new, top-heavy consumer market. Since 1992 the top 5% of households have increased their share of total spending to almost 40%, up from 27% in 1992.

    Former Citigroup economist Anjay Kapur has described this situation as a “plutonomy,” in which the economy is increasingly based on the global wealthy and their tastes and predilections.

    Meanwhile broader consumer confidence remains weak. Last year some two-thirds of Americans polled by the Washington Post and the Miller Center said they felt life had become tougher over the last five years compared to just 7% who thought theirs had improved. Pollsters also have found almost two-thirds of parents felt their children would do worse in life, a stunning shift from far more optimistic readings back in 1999.

    The Housing Market

    Historically housing has been the primary asset held by the middle and working class. Despite government efforts to keep mortgages affordable, post-crash, growth has been slow, and much of the buying restricted to investors, including major financial interests. Particularly damaging, there has been a marked decline in the “trade up market” and even more so, sales to first-time buyers, whose share of the market has declined to under 30%, well below the historic average of 40%. This reflects the weak economy, tighter lending standards, and, for younger customers, the heavy burden of student loans.

    Some on Wall Street hope to profit from a perceived shift in America to a “rentership society.” Housing more of the population in rental apartments would do little to improve social mobility, as people end up working not for their own equity but to pay the mortgage of their landlords. Nor can the economic payoff from apartment construction come close to that of single-family homes. According to the National Association of Home Builders, building 100 new single-family homes adds 324 jobs to the average metropolitan economy in the year of their construction and 53 jobs annually in the following years. This compares to 122 jobs per 100 new apartments in the year of construction and 32 in the following years. With home starts at less than a third their 2005 level, lack of construction employment also deals a body blow to one of the primary sources of higher-paying blue collar jobs.

    The Emasculation Of Small Business

    In previous recoveries, small businesses have provided much of the spark and job creation. Not so this time. Small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50% in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010, while its share of employment dropped down from 20% to 12%. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report revealed that small business “dynamism,” measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.

    Nor is the future prognosis too good. The rise of the regulatory state, including the Affordable Care Act and higher taxes, amplified in deep blue states such as California, has hit smaller businesses hard. The gradual culling of smaller banks, traditional lenders to entrepreneurs, and the growing concentration of assets in the “too big to fail” banks, historically unfocused on the needs of small companies or individual proprietors, suggests credit may remain tough for grassroots entrepreneurs.

    Needed: A New Paradigm

    The recession and the weak recovery have taught us you cannot have strong economic growth without the participation of the vast majority of Americans. We’ve run an experiment under Bernanke, Bush and Obama to pump up the economy from above, and what we’ve done is squash the aspirations of those middle orders, particularly small business and the self-employed.

    This issue should be at the center of the political debate.  I would welcome suggestions from the right and left about how best to restart a broad-based economic recovery. The best ideas may come from across the spectrum, such as flatter taxes, supported by many conservatives, as well as new spending on major infrastructure projects as improved roads, rivers and ports that generally come from more liberal groups.

    The good news is the fundamentals for a broader-based prosperity, including the creation of high-paying blue-collar jobs, remain in place. Progress is already evident in the energy and some manufacturing-oriented regions. Restarting the housing sector — particularly the single-family home component — would do wonders for middle and working class people in many regional economies, as can be seen, for example, in Houston, where more homes will be built this year than in the entire state of California. Nationwide, the gap between  between demand and potential housing, according to the NAB, is roughly 1 million homes, which translates into close to 3 million jobs.

    How to drive growth to these and other productive sectors may require not only changes in government policy but also reacquainting the investor class with the virtues of long-term growth, productivity and the revival of the mass economy. Perhaps once they do investors might earn something other than intense dislike from the rest of the population.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • The California Economy: A Strength Vs Weakness Breakdown

    Part two of a two-part report. Read part 1.

    The problem with analyzing California’s economy — or with assessing its vigor — is that there is not one California economy. Instead, we have a group of regions that will see completely different economic outcomes. Then, those outcomes will be averaged, and that average of regional outcomes is California’s economy. It is possible, even likely, that no region will see the average outcome, just as we rarely see average rainfall in California.

    California’s Silicon Valley region continues to be a source of innovation, economic vigor, and wealth creation. But the Silicon Valley, named because silicon is the primary component of computer chips, no longer produces any chips. The demands for venture capital are also changing, with the demand for cash falling because new products often take the form of apps instead of something that is manufactured. This type of investing doesn’t need the infrastructure that the Silicon Valley provides. Increasingly, other communities such as Boston, Northern Virginia, and Houston are becoming centers of technological innovation.

    Workers recognize the changes. They may not know the reasons, but they know the impacts, and they are voting with their feet. Domestic migration — migration between states, — is a good measure of how workers see opportunity. California’s domestic migration, in a dramatic reversal of a 150-year trend, has now been negative for over 20 consecutive years. That is, for over 20 years more people have left California for other states than have come to California from other states. Workers simply haven’t seen opportunity in California. How can this be? Why would people be leaving when jobs are being created in the Silicon Valley?

    The Silicon Valley jobs are rather specific. They require higher skill sets than most workers possess. One consequence is that the Silicon Valley’s prosperity hasn’t helped California’s other workers much. We are left with a situation where California’s tech firms search worldwide for workers, while California workers search for work.

    It didn’t have to be this way. High housing prices and environmental regulations, a result of state policies, have driven away the jobs that could be performed by typical California workers. Those jobs are now in Oregon, Texas, or China.

    A short distance away, in California’s Great Central Valley, there is poverty as persistent, deep, and widespread as anyplace in the United States. A recent report shows that California has three of the 20 fastest growing US cities in terms of jobs. It has four in the bottom 20.

    For a while, at least, the differences between California’s fastest growing regions and its slowest (or declining) areas will grow. In general, coastal areas will see more rapid economic growth than inland ones. Even within these broad regions, there will great heterogeneity. Bakersfield, boosted by a booming oil sector, will see stronger growth than Stockton. San Jose, with its thriving tech sector, will see far more growth than Santa Barbara or Monterey. Furthermore, the best performer among California’s inland cities will probably see faster growth than the slowest growing coastal city.

    On average, California’s economic growth will be far below its potential. In most of the state it will be disappointingly low to dismal, as California’s economy is held back by well-meaning but seriously flawed regulations. At the same time, a few super-performing cities may see spectacular growth, at least for a few years.

    Eventually, even California’s most vibrant economies will slow, gradually strangled by the lack of affordable housing and of an infrastructure necessary to move people from affordable housing to their jobs. People are willing to drive very long distances daily in pursuit of the twin goals of income security and the American dream of a home in the suburbs. The traffic on Highway 14 between Palmdale and Los Angeles reminds us of this twice every working day. But, they need roads, and affordable housing within commuting distance.

    Different growth rates and different levels of economic vitality will exacerbate the vast gulf that exists between California’s wealthiest communities and its poorest. Inequality will increase as California’s fabulously wealthy become ever wealthier, and California’s poor suffer in surprising silence, living on whatever aid we give them, denied the hope and the basic dignity that comes from a job.

    Domestic outmigration will increase, but the people who leave won’t be California’s poorest. Instead, young middle-class people will lead the exodus, as they move to wherever opportunity is more abundant. This, of course, will further increase California’s inequality and decrease its economic vitality.

    We will also see an increase in consumption communities. Already, many of California’s coastal communities are reflexively averse to any new activity that actually creates value, opting instead to become ever more exclusive playgrounds for the very rich. These communities will see rising home prices as they restrict new units, and will see rising demand, a result of ever greater concentrations of wealth worldwide and the unmatched amenities available in Coastal California.

    By contrast, some inland areas will see declining home values and eventually declining populations, as the lack of opportunity drives potential home buyers to places like Phoenix and Houston.

    For many of us, this is a depressing forecast, and it is fair to ask whether or not it is inevitable. It isn’t. Few things are. At a statewide level, I hope that representatives of California’s large and growing minority communities demand policies that support the opportunity that previous generations of Californians enjoyed. Absent such demands, California’s policies are unlikely to change.

    At a local level, cities would do well to eliminate all policies that contribute to economic stagnation. When a business is making locational decisions, it reviews lists of positive and negatives for the candidate communities. No place has only positives, and few places have only negatives. California cities are endowed with one huge positive: California is a wonderful place to live. That’s not enough, though. A city would do well to minimize the list of negatives.

    For businesses, an aggressive minimum wage is a negative, as it raises costs. Uncertainty and delay in a city’s response to an economic proposal increases the risk and costs of proposals. It’s a negative. So is unaffordable housing, as it increases wage demands and makes it harder for businesses to recruit top talent. The best way for a city to encourage the supply of affordable housing is to allow new-home development.

    Finally, areas of economic blight increase crime, raise city costs, reduce city revenues, and are unattractive to businesses considering moving to or expanding in an area. Cities need to be flexible in responses to proposals for these areas. Our work at CERF convinces us that we will need less commercial space in the future. Therefore, almost any proposal for dealing with these areas is preferable to inflexible adherence to existing zoning or plans.

    California cities are constrained by California policy. That doesn’t mean that California cities are without tools for economic development. Almost any California city — no matter which region it is in — is a better place to live than almost any city in, say, Texas. If that can be leveraged by minimized costs, flexibility, and creativity in adapting to the needs of job-creating businesses, a California city, even today, can assist businesses creating opportunity for its citizens

    This is the second part of a two-part report. Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org

    Flickr photo by Aude Lising: The Central California Coast, viewed from the Pacific Coast Highway — one of California’s unmatched amenities.

  • The California Economy: When Vigor and Frailty Collide

    Part one of a two-part report

    California is a place of extremes. It has beaches, mountains, valleys and deserts. It has glaciers and, just a few miles away, hot, dry deserts. Some years it doesn’t rain. Some years it rains all winter. Those extremes are part of what makes California the attractive place that it is, and, west of the high mountains, California is mostly an extremely comfortable place to live.

    Today, we have some new extremes. Some of our coastal communities are as wealthy as any in the world. At the other extreme, we have some of America’s poorest communities. San Bernardino, for example, has America’s second-highest poverty rate for cities with population over 200,000.

    From the beginning, we’ve had the fabulously wealthy. For the first 140 years after gold was found, California was a place where people could find, or, more correctly, build, success. The new part is the poverty. It used to be that the poor were mostly newcomers, people who hadn’t yet had time to show that they had what it takes. Today, our poverty is dominated by families who have been here a long time. While San Bernardino certainly has some newcomers, it is mostly a city of native Californians.

    The change became visible in the early 1990s. Many analysts will tell you that the change was caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting peace dividend, which led to a dramatic downsizing of America’s defense sector, once a major component of California’s economy.

    I believe the way to think about this is that the downsizing of the defense sector exposed the weaknesses in California’s economy, as opposed to causing them. Sure, the downsizing had an economic impact. California lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. But the defense sector eventually bounced back and again became a source of good jobs. The problem is that it bounced back someplace else. It didn’t come back in California. In fact, it continues to decline in California.

    The decline in California’s economic opportunities began way before the 1990s. As the 1960s progressed, Californians, or at the least the ones making decisions, changed their priorities. California’s spending for infrastructure had once consumed between 15 and 20 percent of the State’s budget. It precipitously fell to five percent or below.

    In the ’50s and early ’60s, governors Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown presided over a fabulous investment boom in universities, highways, water projects and the like. None of their successors has even attempted anything on that scale. The profound prosperity that accompanied and followed California’s investment boom hid the impacts of subsequent policy changes for decades.

    The decline in public capital spending wasn’t the cause of our changed priorities. It was the change in priorities that caused the change in spending. It is as if we decided that we were wealthy enough, and that future spending would be on social and environmental programs. If we weren’t looking for economic growth, why invest?

    At California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, we’ve created a vigor index. It’s composed of net in-migration, job creation, and new housing permits, each equally weighted. It is quite sensitive to changes in economic opportunity. For example, in 2000, North Dakota had the nation’s lowest score, 0.9, and Nevada led the nation with a score of 24.1. By 2013, North Dakota led the country with a score of 20.0, while Nevada had seen its index value fall to only 6.4.

    In the following chart, we show California’s index (red bars) compared to that of Texas, Oregon, and Tennessee, from 1980 through 2013.

    California is apparently different than the comparison states. The Tennessee, Oregon, and Texas indexes have behaved more similarly to each other than to California since the late 1980s. Texas’ index behaved uniquely in the early 1980s, because of its dependency on oil and the long-term decline in oil prices that occurred during the 1980s.

    California appears to be different than the other states throughout the period, but the nature of the difference has changed. Prior to the late 1980s, California tended to outperform the others. For example, its score didn’t decline nearly as much as the others during the early 1980s recession. Given California’s resource endowment, we think this is natural.

    Since 1990, though, California’s vigor index has generally remained below those of Texas, Tennessee, and Oregon. Indeed, since 1990, California’s score has rarely exceeded the score of any of the comparison states, and it has never led them all.

    The index also shows that California’s investment in infrastructure during the 1950s and 1960s helped drive economic opportunity for two decades. It took two decades without any investment before we saw the consequences of the decision to not invest.

    Recently, California has seen budget surpluses and faster job growth than the average American state. The forces for the status quo now claim that this confirms the wisdom of their policies. They are wrong.

    California’s budget surpluses are a product of a temporary tax, and an incredible bull market in equities. Our dependence on a highly progressive income tax means that California’s fiscal condition swings on the fortunes of a small group of wealthy individuals.

    Equity markets have been amazing over the past few years. The Dow has increased by over 10,000 since it bottomed out on March 9, 2009, and it appears to be divorced from economic activity. It increases on good news and bad, propelled by an unprecedented monetary expansion. Right now, California’s largest taxpayers are reaping huge profits in the stock markets, and California is reaping huge windfalls in its tax revenues.

    Someday, the market gains will cease, or worse reverse. Someday, too, the temporary tax will expire. California’s surpluses will wash away like sand on a beach. The state will face a new crisis, a result of a progressive tax structure where revenues swing on paper profits and losses, not on economic activity.
    As for our job gains being better than the average state’s, California should not be average.

    Employment should be far higher than it is. Even the weak job growth we’ve seen is largely a legacy of a previous age. California has the world’s best venture capital infrastructure, partly because of the investment previous generations of Californians made in the university system. It is also, in part, a result of chance.

    An amazing period of innovation was initiated in Coastal California by a few incredibly talented individuals, who were funded by a few far-sighted capitalists. It was one of those rare coincidences that happen from time to time and change the world. The eventual result was the Silicon Valley and economic powerhouses such as Intel, HP, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more.

    Another result was the creation of a private, capitalist, vibrant infrastructure. It takes time and vast sums of money before a new idea generates profits. Product design is just the first step. An organization needs to be created to produce and sell the product. Factories need to be designed. Marketing plans need to be put in place.

    No inventor or entrepreneur can be expected to have all of the necessary skills or money to turn an idea into a profitable firm. So, an infrastructure appeared. The Silicon Valley’s world-leading venture capital markets and the support structure to enable the fabulous innovation and economic value created there was not the result of any government program or initiative. It was the spontaneous result of lots of people driven to innovate and profit from those innovations. It was capitalism at its very best.

    California’s Silicon Valley became the place for talented young people to turn great ideas into reality. It was also the place to go if you had money and wished to invest in vibrant, risky new technologies, or if you knew how to design factories, how to market products, how to build organizations, or how to finance rapid growth. The infrastructure that arose is supporting California today. This amazing capitalist engine of jobs, innovation and wealth is the source of most of California’s economic vigor. But it is a legacy that will eventually slip away, unless California changes its priorities.

    This is the first part of a two-part report. Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

    Flickr photo by mlhradio. A California extreme: Mountains on The Trona-Wildrose Road, at the edge of the Panamint Valley. One of the most remote deserts in North America, in one of the most remote corners of California; the salt flats of Panamint Valley to the west, and Death Valley to the east.

  • About Me

  • Dispersing Millennials

    The very centers of urban cores in many major metropolitan areas are experiencing a resurgence of residential development, including new construction in volumes not seen for decades. There is a general impression, put forward by retro–urbanists (Note 1) and various press outlets that the urban core resurgence reflects a change in the living preferences of younger people – today’s Millennials – who they claim are rejecting the suburban and exurban residential choices of their parents and grandparents.

    There is no question that the millennial population has risen in urban cores in recent years. Yet the growth in the younger population in urban cores masks far larger increases in the same population group in other parts of major metropolitan areas and in the nation in general.

    Functional Analysis of Metropolitan Areas

    This article continues a series examining the 52 major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1,000,000 residents) using the City Sector Model, which allows a more representative functional analysis of urban core, suburban, and exurban areas, by using smaller areas, rather than using municipal boundaries. The City Sector Model thus eliminates the over-statement of urban core data that occurs in conventional analyses, which rely on historical core municipalities, most of which encompass considerable suburbanization.

    The City Sector Model classifies 9,000 major metropolitan area zip code tabulation areas using urban form, density, and travel behavior characteristics. There are four functional classifications: the urban core, earlier suburban areas, later suburban areas, and exurban areas. The urban cores have higher densities, older housing and substantially greater reliance on transit, similar to the urban cores that preceded the great automobile oriented post-World War Two suburbanization. Exurban areas are beyond the built up urban areas. The suburban areas constitute the balance of the major metropolitan areas. Earlier suburbs include areas with a median house construction date before 1980. Later suburban areas have later median house construction dates (Note 2).

    20-29s and the Urban Core

    The age band best approximating millennials for the period of 2000 to 2010 is people of from 20 to 29 years of age.

    Between 2000 and 2010, the total population of 20-29’s living in the functional urban cores increased by 300,000, from 4.3 million to 4.6 million from 2000 to 2010. Yet, the share of 20-29s living in the urban cores actually declined over the decade.

    In 2000, 20.2 percent of the major metropolitan area 20- to 29-year-old population was in the urban core. By 2010, it had dropped to 19.3 percent, a 4.4 percent share reduction. This happened because the 300,000 increase in 20-29s in the urban core was dwarfed by the overall 2.6 million increase in the same age group throughout the major metropolitan areas. As a result, only 12 percent of the 20-29 population growth was in the urban core, 40 percent below its 2000 share.

    While 80 percent of the 20-29s lived outside the urban cores in 2000, 88 percent of the 20-29 population growth was outside the urban core between 2000 and 2010 (Figure 1). Overall, the suburban and exurban millennial population grew nearly 8 times than in the urban core.

    The 20-29s and the Balance of Major Metropolitan Areas

    The trend among the 20-29s also tended away from the areas adjacent to the urban cores. These tend to be   earlier suburban areas (generally with median house construction dates before 1980). Between 2000 and 2010, the share of 20-29s living in the earlier suburbs fell from 46.1 percent to 42.0 percent. This was double the urban core loss noted above (4.4 percent), at 8.9 percent.

    At the same time, millennials, long said to hate suburbs, have embraced dispersion. The more recently built suburban areas saw their share of 20-29s rise from 20.6 percent to 24.4, an 18 percent gain. A smaller gain was registered in exurban areas, where the share of 20-29s rose from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent; an 8 percent share gains (Figure 2).

    The net effect from 2000 and 2010: a full five percent more of all 20-29s in major metropolitan areas lived in the later suburban and exurban areas, while 5 percent fewer lived in the urban cores and earlier suburbs. The later suburbs and exurbs added 1,500,000 more 20-29s than the urban core and earlier suburbs.

    Millennials and the Nation

    The numbers of 20-29s continued to increase in the rest of the nation’s small towns and cities, as well as rural areas. In 2000, approximately 44.6 percent of the 20-29 population lived outside the major metropolitan areas. In the next decade, these areas added 20-29s at a lower rate (40.9 percent of the increase), yet this was enough to keep the share of 20-29s at 44.2 percent. In 2010, more than four times as many 20-29s lived outside the major metropolitan areas as lived in the urban cores. Between 2000 and 2010, the growth in 20-29’s living outside the major metropolitan areas was almost six times the growth in the urban cores (Figure 3).

    Overall, only 7 percent of the growth in the 20-29 age group was in the functional urban cores between 2000 and 2010. That left 93 percent of the growth to be outside the urban core (Figure 4).

    Consistency with Other Research

    The trend among the 20-29s in the urban core may seem surprising. However, it is consistent with an analysis of 2000-2010 data by the US Census Bureau, which indicated that the population gains within two miles of the city halls of the largest cities were more than offset by losses in the ring between two and five miles from City Hall. While the gains in the course of the urban cores are impressive, they are much smaller when considered in the context of the entire urban core and even smaller in the context of the entire metropolitan area.

    More recent data suggests the dispersion of Millennials is continuing. According to Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at Trulia.com Millennials located in larger numbers in suburban areas  than in the urban cores between 2012 and 2013 (more recent data for the city sector analysis is not yet available) 

    Dispersing, But Not Quite as Quickly

    Essentially what we see here is myopic prejudices of contemporary journalism. More than 300,000 new 20-29 residents in the urban cores was more than enough to be noticed by analysts and reporters, since that’s where many of them spend much of their time. Moreover, the share of 20-29s living in urban cores dropped less than one-half the rate for all ages in the urban core.

    Simply put, despite the conventional wisdom, 20-29s are not abandoning the suburbs and exurbs for the urban core. The data indicates that the 20-29s have been more inclined to choose the urban core than other age groups, but not enough to prevent their overwhelming numbers living in suburban and exurban communities. Nor has this inclination been sufficient to counter the continuing relative decline in the urban core among the 20-29s.

    ————-

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Note 1: The term retro-urbanist is applied to the currently popular strain of urban planning that favors urban cores over the rest of the urban area and metropolitan area (the suburbs and exurbs).

    Note 2:. The previous articles in this series are:
    From Jurisdictional to Functional Analyses of Urban Cores & Suburbs
    The Long Term: Metro American Goes from 82 percent to 86 percent Suburban Since 1990
    New York, Legacy Cities Dominate Transit Urban Core Gains
    Functional v. Jurisdictional Analysis of Metropolitan Areas
    City Sector Model Small Area Criteria

  • Confessions of a Rust Belt Orphan

    How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Northeast Ohio

    Go to sleep, Captain Future, in your lair of art deco
    You were our pioneer of progress, but tomorrow’s been postponed
    Go to sleep, Captain Future, let corrosion close your eyes
    If the board should vote to restore hope, we’ll pass along the lie

    -The Secret Sound of the NSA, Captain Future

    As near as I can tell, the term “Rust Belt” originated sometime in the mid-1980s. That sounds about right.

    I originated slightly earlier, in 1972, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Rubber Capital of the World. My very earliest memory is of a day, sometime in the Summer of 1975, that my parents, my baby brother, and I went on a camping trip to Lake Milton, just west of Youngstown. I was three years old. To this day, I have no idea why, of all of the things that I could remember, but don’t, I happen to remember this one. But it is a good place to start.

    image
    Image Source: Wikipedia: Change in total number of manufacturing jobs in metropolitan areas, 1954-2002. Dark red is very bad. Akron is dark red.

    The memory is so vivid that I can still remember looking at the green overhead freeway signs along the West Expressway in Akron. Some of the signs were in kilometers, as well as in miles back then, due to an ill-fated attempt to convert Americans to the Metric system in the 1970s. I remember the overpoweringly pungent smell of rubber wafting from the smokestacks of B.F. Goodrich and Firestone. I recall asking my mother about it, and her explaining that those were the factories where the tires, and the rubber, and the chemicals were made. They were made by hard-working, good people – people like my Uncle Jim – but more on that, later.

    When I was a little bit older, I would learn that this was the smell of good jobs; of hard, dangerous work; and of the way of life that built the modern version of this quirky and gritty town. It was the smell that tripled Akron’s population between 1910 and 1920, transforming it from a sleepy former canal-town to the 32nd largest city in America. It is a smell laced with melancholy, ambivalence, and nostalgia – for it was the smell of an era that was quickly coming to an end (although I was far too young to be aware of this fact at the time). It was sometimes the smell of tragedy.

    We stopped by my grandparents’ house, in Firestone Park, on the way to the campground. I can still remember my grandmother giving me a box of Barnum’s Animals crackers for the road. She was always kind and generous like that.

    Who were my grandparents? My grandparents were Akron. It’s as simple as that. Their story was Akron’s story. My grandfather was born in 1916, in Barnesboro, a small coal-mining town in Western Pennsylvania, somewhere between Johnstown, DuBois, and nowhere. His father, a coal miner, had emigrated there from Hungary nine years earlier. My grandmother was born in Barberton, in 1920. Barberton was reportedly the most-industrialized city in the United States, per-capita, at some point around that time.

    They were both factory workers for their entire working lives (I don’t think they called jobs like that “careers” back then). My grandfather worked at the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. My grandmother worked at Saalfield Publishing, a factory that was one of the largest producers of children’s books, games, and puzzles in the world. Today, both of the plants where they worked form part of a gutted, derelict, post-apocalyptic moonscape in South Akron, located between that same West Expressway and perdition. The City of Akron has plans for revitalizing this former industrial area. It needs to happen, but there are ghosts there…

    My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, 
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

    My grandparents’ house exemplified what it was to live in working-class Akron in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My stream-of-consciousness memories of that house include: lots of cigarettes and ashtrays; Hee-Haw; The Joker’s Wild; fresh tomatoes and peppers; Fred & Lamont Sanford; Archie & Edith Bunker; Herb Score and Indians baseball on the radio on the front porch; hand-knitted afghans; UHF/VHF; 3, 5, 8, and 43; cold cans of Coca-Cola and Pabst Blue Ribbon (back when the pop-tops still came off of the can); the Ohio Lottery; chicken and galuskas (dumplings); a garage floor that you could eat off of; a meticulously maintained 14-year-old Chrysler with 29,000 miles on it; a refrigerator in the dining room because the kitchen was too small; catching fireflies in jars; and all being right with the world.

    I always associate the familiar comfort of that tiny two-bedroom bungalow with the omnipresence of cigarette smoke and television. I remember sitting there on May 18, 1980. It was my eighth birthday. We were sitting in front of the TV, watching coverage of the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State. I remember talking about the fact that it was going to be the year 2000 (the Future!) in just twenty years. It was an odd conversation for an eight year old to be having with adults (planning for the future already, and for a life without friends, apparently). I remember thinking about the fact that I would be 28 years old then, and how inconceivably distant it all seemed. Things seem so permanent when you’re eight, and time moves ever-so-slowly.

    More often than not, when we visited my grandparents, my Uncle Jim and Aunt Helen would be there. Uncle Jim was born in 1936, in West Virginia. His family, too, had come to Akron to find work that was better-paying, steadier, and (relatively) less dangerous than the work in the coal mines. Uncle Jim was a rubber worker, first at Mohawk Rubber and then later at B.F. Goodrich. Uncle Jim also cut hair over at the most-appropriately named West Virginia Barbershop, on South Arlington Street in East Akron. He was one of the best, most decent, kindest people that I have ever known.

    I remember asking my mother once why Uncle Jim never washed his hands. She scolded me, explaining that he did wash his hands, but that because he built tires, his hands were stained with carbon-black, which wouldn’t come out no matter how hard you scrubbed. I learned later, that it would take about six months for that stuff to leach out of your pores, once you quit working.

    Uncle Jim died in 1983, killed in an industrial accident on the job at B.F. Goodrich. He was only 47. The plant would close for good about a year later.

    It was an unthinkably tragic event, at a singularly traumatic time for Akron. It was the end of an era.

    Times Change

    My friend Della Rucker recently wrote a great post entitled The Elder Children of the Rust Belt over at her blog, Wise Economy. It dredged up all of these old memories, and it got me thinking about childhood, about this place that I love, and about the experience of growing up just as an economic era (perhaps the most prosperous and anomalous one in modern history) was coming to an end.

    That is what the late 1970s and early 1980s was: the end of one thing, and the beginning of a (still yet-to-be-determined) something else. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s because I was just a kid.

    In retrospect it was obvious: the decay; the deterioration, the decomposition, the slow-at-first, and then faster-than-you-can-see-it unwinding of an industrial machine that had been wound-up far, far, too-tight. The machine runs until it breaks down; then it is replaced with a new and more efficient one – a perfectly ironic metaphor for an industrial society that killed the goose that laid the golden egg. It was a machine made up of unions, and management, and capitalized sunk costs, and supply chains, and commodity prices, and globalization. Except it wasn’t really a machine at all. It was really just people. And people aren’t machines. When they are treated as such, and then discarded as obsolete, there are consequences.

    You could hear it in the music: from the decadent, desperately-seeking-something (escape) pulse of Disco, to the (first) nihilistic and (then) fatalistic sound of Punk and Post-Punk. It’s not an accident that a band called Devo came from Akron, Ohio. De-evolution: the idea that instead of evolving, mankind has actually regressed, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society. It sounded a lot like Akron in the late 1970s. It still sounds a little bit like the Rust Belt today.

    As an adult, looking back at the experience of growing up at that time, you realize how much it colors your thinking and outlook on life. It’s all the more poignant when you realize that the “end-of-an-era” is never really an “end” as such, but is really a transition to something else. But to what exactly?

    The end of that era, which was marked by strikes, layoffs, and unemployment, was followed by its echoes and repercussions: economic dislocation, outmigration, poverty, and abandonment; as well as the more intangible psychological detritus – the pains from the phantom limb long after the amputation; the vertiginous sensation of watching someone (or something) die.

    And it came to me then 
    That every plan 
    Is a tiny prayer to Father Time

    As I stared at my shoes
    In the ICU
    That reeked of piss and 409

    It sung like a violent wind
    That our memories depend
    On a faulty camera in our minds

    ‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room
    Just nervous paces bracing for bad news

    Love is watching someone die…

    -Death Cab For Cutie, What Sarah Said

    But it is both our tragedy and our glory that life goes on.

    Della raised a lot of these issues in her post: our generation’s ambivalent relationship with the American Dream (like Della, I feel the same unpleasant taste of rust in my mouth whenever I write or utter that phrase); our distrust of organizations and institutions; and our realization that you have to keep going, fight, and survive, in spite of it all. She talked about how we came of age at a time of loss:

    not loss like a massive destruction, but a loss like something insidious, deep, pervasive.

    It is so true, and it is so misunderstood. One of the people commenting on her blog post said, essentially, that it is dangerous to romanticize about a “golden age”; that all generations struggle; and that life is hard.

    Yes, those things are all true. But they are largely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

    There is a very large middle ground between a “golden age” and an “existential struggle”. The time and place about which we are both writing (the late 1970s through the present, in the Rust Belt) is neither. But it is undoubtedly a time of extreme transition. It is a great economic unraveling, and we are collectively and individually still trying to figure out how to navigate through it, survive it, and ultimately build something better out of it.

    History is cyclical. Regardless of how enamored Americans, in general, may be with the idea, it is not linear. It is neither a long, slow march toward utopia, nor toward oblivion. When I look at history, I see times of relative (and it’s all relative, this side of paradise) peace, prosperity, and stability; and other times of relative strife, economic upheaval, uncertainty, and instability. We really did move from one of those times to the other, beginning in the 1970s, and continuing through the present.

    The point that is easy to miss when uttering phrases like “life is hard for every generation” is that none of this discussion about the Rust Belt – where it’s been, where it is going – has anything to do with a “golden age”. But it has everything to do with the fact that this time of transition was an era (like all eras) that meant a lot (good and bad) to the people that lived through it. It helped make them who they are today, and it helped make where they live what it is today.

    For those that were kids at the time that the great unraveling began (people like me, and people like Della) it is partially about the narrative that we were socialized to believe in at a very young age, and how that narrative went up in a puff of smoke. In 1977, I could smell rubber in the air, and many of my family members and friends’ parents worked in rubber factories. In 1982, the last passenger tire was built in Akron. By 1984, 90% of those jobs were gone, many of those people had moved out of town, and the whole thing was already a fading memory. Just as when a person dies, many people reacted with a mixture of silence, embarrassment, and denial.

    As a kid, especially, you construct your identity based upon the place in which you live. The whole identity that I had built, even as a small child, as a proud Akronite: This is the RUBBER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD; this is where we make lots and lots of Useful Things for people all over the world; this is where Real Americans Do Real Work; this is where people from Europe, the South, and Appalachia come to make a Better Life for themselves; well, that all got yanked away. I couldn’t believe any of those things anymore, because they were no longer true, and I knew it. I could see it with my own two eyes. Maybe some of them were never true to begin with, but kids can’t live a lie the way that adults can. When the place that you thought you lived in turns out not to be the place that you actually live, it can be jarring and disorienting. It can even be heartbreaking.

    We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.

    –Tyler Durden, Fight Club

    I’m fond of the above quote. I was even fonder of it when I was 28 years old. Time, and the realization that life is short, and that you ultimately have to participate and do something with it besides analyze it as an outside observer, has lessened its power considerably. It remains the quintessential Generation X quote, from the quintessential Generation X movie. It certainly fits in quite well with all of this. But, then again, maybe it shouldn’t.

    I use the phrase “Rust Belt Orphan” in the title of this post, because that is what the experience of coming of age at the time of the great economic unraveling feels like at the gut-level. But it’s a dangerous and unproductive combination, when coupled with the whole Gen-X thing.

    In many ways, the Rust Belt is the “Generation X” of regions – the place that just doesn’t seem to fit in; the place that most people would just as soon forget about; the place that would, in fact, just as soon forget about itself; the place that, if it does dare to acknowledge its own existence or needs, barely notices the surprised frowns of displeasure and disdain from those on the outside, because they have already been subsumed by the place’s own self-doubt and self-loathing.

    A fake chinese rubber plant
    In the fake plastic earth
    That she bought from a rubber man
    In a town full of rubber plans
    To get rid of itself

    -Radiohead, Fake Plastic Trees

    The whole Gen-X misfit wandering-in-the-Rust Belt-wilderness meme is a palpably prevalent, but seldom acknowledged part of our regional culture. It is probably just as well. It’s so easy for the whole smoldering heap of negativity to degenerate into a viscous morass of alienation and anomie. Little good can come from going any further down that dead-end road.

    Whither the Future?

    The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
    –     Milan Kundera, Ignorance

    So where does this all leave us?

    First, as a region, I think we have to get serious about making our peace with the past and moving on. We have begun to do this in Akron, and, if the stories and anecdotal evidence are to be believed, we are probably ahead of the region as a whole.

    But what does “making our peace” and “moving on” really mean? In many ways, I think that our region has been going through a collective period of mourning for the better part of four decades. Nostalgia and angst regarding the things that have been lost (some of our identity, prosperity, and national prominence) is all part of the grieving process. The best way out is always through.

    But we should grieve, not so we can wallow in the experience and refuse to move on, but so we can gain a better understanding of who we are and where we come from. Coming to grips with and acknowledging those things, ultimately enables us to help make these places that we love better.

    We Americans are generally not all that good at, or comfortable with, mourning or grief. There’s a very American idea that grieving is synonymous with “moving on” and (even worse) that “moving on” is synonymous with “getting over it”.

    We’re very comfortable with that neat and tidy straight, upwardly-trending line toward the future (and a more prosperous, progressive, and enlightened future it will always be, world without end, Amen.)

    We’re not so comfortable with that messy and confusing historical cycle of boom-and-bust, of evolution and de-evolution, of creation and destruction and reinvention. But that’s the world as we actually experience it, and it’s the one that we must live in. It is far from perfect. I wish that I had another one to offer you. But there isn’t one on this side of the Great Beyond. For all of its trials and tribulations, the world that we inhabit has one inestimable advantage: it is unambiguously real.

    “Moving on” means refusing to become paralyzed by the past; living up to our present responsibilities; and striving every day to become the type of people that are better able to help others. But “moving on” doesn’t mean that we forget about the past, that we pretend that we didn’t experience what we did, or that we create an alternate reality to avoid playing the hand that we’ve actually been dealt.

    Second, I don’t think we can, or should, “get over” the Rust Belt. The very phrase “get over it” traffics in denial, wishful thinking, and the estrangement of one’s self from one’s roots. Countless attempts to “get over” the Rust Belt have resulted in the innumerable short-sighted, “get rich quick” economic development projects, and public-private pyramid-schemes that many of us have come to find so distasteful, ineffective, and expensive.

    We don’t have to be (and can’t be, even if we want to) something that we are not. But we do have to be the best place that we can be. This might mean that we are a smaller, relatively less-prominent place. But it also means that we can be a much better-connected, more cohesive, coherent, and equitable place. The only people that can stop us from becoming that place are we ourselves.

    For a place that has been burned so badly by the vicissitudes of the global economy, Big Business, and Big Industry, we always seem to be so quick to put our faith in the Next Big Project, the Next Big Organization, and the Next Big Thing. I’m not sure whether this is the cause of our current economic malaise, or the effect, or both. Whatever it is, we need to stop doing it.

    Does this mean that we should never do or dream anything big? No. Absolutely not. But it does mean that we should be prudent and wise, and that we should tend to prefer our economic development and public investment to be hyper-nimble, hyper-scalable, hyper-neighborhood-focused, and ultra-diverse. Fetishizing Daniel Burnham’s famous “Make no little plans…” quote has done us much harm. Sometimes “little plans” are exactly what we need, because they often involve fundamentals, are easier to pull-off, and more readily establish trust, inspire hope, and build relationships.

    Those of us that came of age during the great economic unraveling and (still painful) transition from the Great American Manufacturing Belt to the Rust Belt might just be in a better position to understand our challenges, and to find the creative solutions required to meet them head-on. Those of us that stuck it out and still live here, know where we came from. We’re under no illusions about who we are or where we live. I think Della Rucker was on to something when she listed what we can bring to the table:

    • Determination
    • Long-game focus
    • Understanding the depth of the pit and the long way left to climb out of it
    • Resourcefulness
    • Ability to salvage
    • Expectation that there are no easy answers
    • Disinclination to believe that everything will be all right if only we do this One Big Thing

    When I look at this list, I see pragmatism, resilience, self-knowledge, survival skills, and leadership. It all rings true.

    He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

    “Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”

    -F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

    So, let’s have our final elegy for the Rust Belt. Then, let’s get to work.

    This post originally appeared in Jason Segedy’s Notes From the Underground on November 2, 2013.

    Segedy is the Director of the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation Study, the Metropolitan Planning Organization serving Akron, Ohio.  As a native of Akron, and as an urban planner, he has a strong interest in the future of places throughout the Great Lakes region, and in the people that inhabit them.

  • New York City Net Domestic Migration Losses Improving

    A New York Times article by Sam Roberts indicates that

    "According to Census Bureau estimates released last week, in the year ending July 1, 2013, the city recorded the third consecutive gain in its non-Hispanic white population.

    During that same period, the city gained more people than it lost through migration. Neither of those gains has probably happened since the 1960s, according to demographers."

    It is true that net migration, domestic and international, was positive between 2012 and 2013. However, net migration was also positive in the years ended 2012 and 2011, according to Census Bureau data.  Among the three recent years, the lowest net migration total was in 2013 (Table).

    New York City Net Migration: 2011-2013
    Year Domestic International Combined
    2011    (55,807)           69,076       13,269
    2012    (64,383)           71,752         7,369
    2013    (67,629)           73,615         5,986
    Total  (187,819)         214,443       26,624
    Data from Census Bureau

    Further, net domestic migration has continued to be negative. The city has lost a net 187,000 domestic migrants in the first three years of the decade. This is an average of more than 60,000 annually. This is, however, an improvement from the 2000s, when net domestic migration averaged a minus 135,000.

  • One-party Rule is No Party in California

    Forty years ago, Mexico was a one-party dictatorship under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, hobbled by slow growth, soaring inequality, endemic corruption and dead politics. California, in contrast, was considered a model American state, with a highly regarded Legislature, relatively clean politics, a competitive political process and a soaring economy.

    Today these roles are somewhat reversed, and not in a good way for the Golden State. To be sure, corruption remains endemic in Mexico, where the PRI ruled for some seven decades. But now, there is a vibrant, highly competitive political culture, with three strong parties and at least some movement toward economic reform. Thirty percent of Mexicans, according to Gallup, trust their federal government, a level not all that different than in the United States.

    But if Mexico’s governance can be seen as at least gradually improving, it’s more difficult to reach that conclusion about the Golden State. California is now a one-party state, with increased corruption and little to no willingness to reform its creaky, scarily unbalanced economy. Californians, by a large margin, think things are getting worse, rather than getting better.

    We can call this trend PRI-ization, and nowhere is it more evident than in our state’s increasingly torpid politics. As there is no real competition for power or for ideas, voter turnout, at both the local and state levels, has plummeted to the lowest levels on record. June’s primaries attracted barely 25 percent of the electorate, while the Los Angeles County turnout was just over 17 percent.

    When I voted this month in my San Fernando Valley precinct, I brought my 9-year-old daughter, but she didn’t get to see democracy in action. She saw an empty church basement with a bunch of pleasant election workers sitting around with not much to do.

    This lack of voter enthusiasm could be explained, in part, by a lack of competition between the parties statewide. But it goes deeper than that; even the nominally nonpartisan recent Los Angeles mayor’s race, while highly competitive, also broke modern records for low turnout.

    Monopolistic mess

    Let’s be frank. California’s democracy is fading, the result of one-party politics, a weak media culture and a sense among many that politicians in Sacramento (or city hall) will do whatever they please once in office. As under the old PRI in Mexico, a lack of competitive politics has also bred the kind of endemic corruption with which California, in recent decades, was not widely associated.

    The case of state Sen. Leland Yee, the Bay Area crusading liberal now accused of being a wannabe gun-runner, was just the most extreme example. If Yee is convicted and sent to jail, he might be joined by two Senate colleagues, one convicted of voter fraud and the other of bribery. The scandals have damaged the Legislature’s approval ratings.

    Republicans and conservatives tend to blame such embarrassments on Democrats, just as the long out-of-power outsiders linked Mexico’s corruption to the PRI monopoly. But, in many ways, it reflects the dynamic, also seen in Republican-dominated states, such asMississippi, or in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, of those who see no threat to their monopoly taking license to steal or otherwise abuse the law.

    Arguably more disturbing than petty corruption is the inability of our politicos, as during the PRI’s heyday, to confront serious challenges facing the state. Low voter turnouts basically mean politicians don’t have to answer to middle-class or working-class voters; instead, they listen mostly to outside special interests such as public employee unions, environmentalists and social-issue lobbies. Union members have an incentive to show up at the polls to protect their pay and pensions, and issue activists will vote for those who support their line. It just seems that the rest of us have given up.

    Perhaps the biggest shift in California’s balance of power is in the diminished role of business. In the days when California produced contending political giants – like the late Govs. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and Ronald Reagan – businesses lined up on both sides of the aisle, albeit more on the Republican side – but there also was a strong contingent of “business” Democrats.

    Today, California business operates solely for the purposes of accommodating the economic agenda of an increasingly left-oriented Democratic Party; supporting an opposing party – or even more moderate Democrats – increasingly is no longer an option to influence policy.

    Mainstream doesn’t matter

    Indeed, one of the negative products of one-party politics has been an ever greater shift away from the political mainstream. With turnouts tiny and business largely gelded, the “base” of the ruling party tends to get its way. So, California gets to try being the greenest state in the land, even as much of the state lives in a virtual permanent recession. In the process, politics becomes ever more marginal, and ever less responsive to what is happening to the citizenry.

    We see much the same on the local level. Los Angeles, even much of its establishment admits, is becoming a “city in decline,” with the highest job losses, some 3.2 percent, of any of the 32 largest U.S. metro areas since 1990. But L.A. city and county leaders have little stomach for the reforms that would be necessary to turn the region around, in large part because it might offend their public employee paymasters. Fixing the potholes mightplease neighborhood residents, but since they mostly don’t vote, who cares?

    So instead of a tough problem solver, we have a mayor who likes to take “selfies” to show how “with it” he is, and a City Council that thinks ultraexpensive solar energy projectsand subsidizing Downtown hotels will actually turn around a torpid municipal economy. But such largesse will reward the special interests who build these systems, the unionized workers at the new hotels and speculators in Downtown real estate.

    None of this will do anything to help the Valley, East L.A., Watts or even the Westside.

    Chances for rebound?

    Sadly, it’s hard to see how this trend will turn around soon. Tax and regulatory policies are making the state toxic for many businesses and middle-class families. The number of poor, state-dependent voters grows, and business, outside of a few sectors, is stagnant or in decline. In the glory days of California politics, Democrats and Republicans vied for suburban middle-class voters; now, they don’t have to bother.

    This is all made worse by the descent of the Republicans into near irrelevancy. The GOP barely escaped nominating for governor a nativist, Tim Donnelly, who accused his Hindu opponent Neel Kashkari of wanting to import Shariah law. It might have occurred to Donnelly that Hinduism is very different from – and often in serious conflict with – Islamic fundamentalism.

    Until the Republicans develop some basic sense and offer a compelling social and economic message for an increasingly diverse state, they will remain bit players.

    Oddly, unless this trajectory is reversed, we may look back at this time and wax nostalgic about the Jerry Brown years; Brown may be a bit over-the-top on some issues, such as his dodgy high-speed rail plan, but at least he’s not mindlessly ideological.

    Just wait four years, when a full-bore true believer, the glamorous Attorney General Kamala Harris, could well become governor and tries to remake this amazing, diverse state into a more impoverished version of California’s real political capital, San Francisco. If business finds getting along with the somewhat mercurial Brown to be, literally, taxing, they will find the more pure-left regime that may follow him a far more onerous task.

    Ultimately, the only hope may come when the grand delusions of our political elites – financed by the social media bubble, the stock market and high-end real estate speculation – finally come crashing down. When there is no one left to tax, and no way to borrow more, and the shift elsewhere of high-wage employment too obvious, perhaps then middle-class and working-class Californians will demand alternatives to the status quo. At that point they might even find reasons to go to the polls again.

    This article first appeared in the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Photo: Troy Holden

  • Watch 220 Years of U.S. State Population Growth

    Around this time of year, some of us can’t help but think of the history of this great nation. What was life like back in the days of the founding fathers, and how have they changed in the decades since? Using the population data of every Census since the first, which occurred in 1790, at MyLife.com we’ve put together an animation showing the growth of every state’s population from then till now. The states are in order of the date they became admitted, and you may notice that some were being counted prior to statehood. These states were at the time either U.S. territories, or part of another state.

    The graphic shows the interesting pace of change in the United States – California is now the most populous state, but there were some interesting changes in tempo over the years. At one point New York and Pennsylvania were neck and neck for most populous, only to be quickly outpaced by California and later on, Texas. The sheer velocity of California’s growth is also interesting to watch, as the state saw growth of more than 15 million residents in the past 50 years.

    Floridians might be surprised to learn that the during first 80 years of statehood, their population only grew to less than one million, while the next 80 years saw an increase of 15 million! It remains one of the fastest growing states today and may pass New York to become the third most populous state by the next Census.

    You can see the graphic below or at full size here.