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  • Welcome to Chicagoland

    As part of his plan to boost sagging ratings at the network, CNN chief Jeff Zucker commissioned an eight part reality series about Chicago and its mayor called Chicagoland that premiers tonight at 10pm ET. The show is produced by the same people who did the Brick City series about Newark Mayor Cory Booker, with support from mega-star executive producer Robert Redford.

    Rahm and the Media

    Given that Brick City seems to have only helped Booker’s reputation, cynics in Chicago have already noted the fact that show’s producers are represented by the William Morris Endeavor Agency, which just so happens to be the home of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ari. This is as much because of as in spite of a well-publicized move by directors Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin to ask the agency to recuse themselves from representing them when it comes to the show.


    Trailer for CNN series “Chicagoland” – click here if the video does not display.

    One need not believe in such a conspiracy to see this show as yet another example of Rahm’s media power – and his fearlessness in pursuing high profile opportunities to get his message out even in venues where he’s not in complete control. Rahm has had significant success in getting high profile national and global attention – for example, a glowing profile from NYT columnist Thomas Friedman – since taking office. He didn’t shy away from getting out there even when a spike in murders made global headlines Chicago of the type Chicago didn’t want – a time when many mayors would have crawled into their bunkers. And although he’s been in office a while now, Rahm fatigue seems not to have set in. Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has a lengthy piece on him in the March issue of Esquire with the colorful title of “And Now For the Further Adventures of Rahm the Imapler.” The Financial Times recently ran a mostly positive piece called “Rahm Emanuel: Mayor America.” It even includes a high production quality six and a half minute video that will give you a flavor of it (if the video doesn’t display, click here):



    With his ambition for Chicago as a global city, Rahm clearly sees global media as the ones that really count. Chicago’s status as a media center afterthought means few out of town reporters actually know that much about the city, hence Rahm has a huge opportunity to shape the message. This must infuriate the local media, which to a great extent Rahm is free to ignore because of his ability to go direct at the national and global level. Chicagoland should thus be seen as part of Rahm’s global media push, both for Chicago and for himself.

    Reality TV vs. Journalism

    The series is probably as good for Rahm and the city as it could possible get. Certainly the problems – high crime, poor schools, and labor troubles – are not glossed over. But given that they’ve been well publicized globally, it’s hard to imagine how they could be without sacrificing all credibility. Within the context of realism, this is a big win for the city.

    Whether it’s a big win for journalism is another story. Like most modern documentaries or reality TV shows, Chicagoland is non-fiction in a sense, but also heavily scripted and edited to provide a compelling narrative. This makes for great TV drama and characterizations, but whether it represents truth as a reporter would tell it is much more doubtful.

    Just as one example, the producers clearly had extensive access to Rahm and he’s frequently shown as concerned about crime, battling with unions, boosting the local economy, talking to school kids and even mentoring an inner city kid he brought on as an intern. But is that a fair representation of how Rahm Emanuel spends his time? The Chicago Reader did a two part series analyzing Rahm Emanuel’s schedule and published a two part series about it called “The Mayor’s Millionaire Club” (see part one and part two). They show that access to Rahm is heavily dependent on your wealth, influence, and donations. Yet that doesn’t come through in Chicagoland at all. Instead when the occasional powerful people are shown, they are always doing a good turn for the city, such as a group of tech executives donating products to schools.

    I’m not suggesting this series should have been a bulldog investigative piece. However, I strongly suspect that CNN’s actual journalists will be seething at seeing their network and its relatively strong reputation being used for what is clearly not the type of work they themselves would undertake. Right or wrong, the CNN brand carries an expectation of a certain type of journalistic standard that the Sundance Channel (where Brick City originally ran) doesn’t. Right now on CNN’s Chicagoland page there’s an ad for Anderson Cooper 360. Something tells me that were Anderson Cooper in charge of Chicagoland, it would look quite different.

    Compelling Drama and Characters

    However, taken on the terms of a Sundance series, Chicagoland succeeds, and my guess is that Rahm will be overall pleased. The show sets up the drama by structuring the series as battles between opposing forces. In the first couple episodes, this is the battle between Rahm and Chicago Public Schools leadership on the one hand, and the teachers union and some affected parent groups on the other over plans by CPS to shutter 50 schools. Frankly, I thought it overly portrayed Chicago as if it were Newark. The segments were introduced by short positive vignettes of some aspect of Chicago (like the Stanley Cup playoffs), followed by more extensive coverage of the school closing dispute, and educational and crime problems in Chicago’s impoverished South Side. It would be like doing a flyby of Times Square before doing a deep dive on some of the worst blocks in Newark. While I myself have written on the two Chicagos theme, I was feeling that Chicago was being unfairly stigmatized.

    I need not have worried. After the initial focus on the school closing dispute, the focus shifts. The drama is now between the good guys (basically every single person featured in the show) and the bad guys (gangsters and such who exist almost entirely offscreen, or so we’re led to believe). Almost without exception, the good guy characters are shown as 100% white knight types. Instead of positive vignettes followed by something Newarkesque, there’s a more balanced take in time allocation and the threads start merging across the two Chicagos. The show also starts laying the Chicago sales job on with a trowel. In Chicagoland’s coverage of things like the food scene, the music scene, the comedy clubs, or even footage of Rahm protesting a neo-Nazi march back in the 70s as a teenager, it’s hard to see how this could have been any more positive in its portrayal of the city if it had been produced directly by the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau. This is a huge win for the city.

    The show also manages to create several compelling characters. One of them is the surgeon who leads the trauma unit at Cook County Hospital, a job I certainly would not want. How that guy manages to balance family life in Roscoe Village (my old neighborhood) with the reality of what he deals with every night at his job is beyond me.

    But the star of the show is clearly Elizabeth Dozier, principal at Fenger High School in the South Side neighborhood at Roseland. She’s shown fighting not only to only educate her students, but keep them safe over the summer, and even invest in their lives after graduation when they get in trouble. (Dozier trying to help a former student who’s in jail for robbery realistically shows the need for “retail” 1:1 or N:1 investment in the lives of specific troubled people, not just programs, to make a real difference in a troubled person’s life – and even so the difficulty in seeing life change happen). Her obvious passion and dedication in the face of tough odds clearly come through. Yet even here there’s a sense of manufacture. Dozier is a young, attractive, stylish black professional who not only runs a South Side High School, but also gets personal face time with Rahm, knows Grant Achutz of Alinea, and hangs out with Billy Dec on his boat. How much of this A-list hob-nobbing was happening prior to Chicagoland coming to town I wonder? Regardless, it makes for compelling TV.

    While I have my quibbles, I think on the whole Chicagoland is an enjoyable watch that will end up being good for the city and the mayor. Just don’t go in expecting journalism. This is first and foremost reality TV style drama. With that caveat in mind, I recommend watching it.

    Takeaways From the Chicagoland

    Watching Chicagoland made me think again two bigger picture issues.

    First, in watching gangs take revenge on each other in an endless cycle of retaliation that literally stretches on for years and in which no one can actually recall the original offense, I was reminded of Hannah Arendt writing on the role of forgiveness:

    Forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is a natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

    Forgiveness is not the only way to put a stop to a cycle of revenge. Arendt posits official punishment as another. But forgiveness is clearly the fastest and surest route. Until either the police are able to impose order and mete out genuine justice, or the grieving family and aggrieved gang compatriots of these murder victims are able to forgive and forswear vengeance, the cycle is unlikely to ever end.

    I don’t want to judge too harshly teenagers in a ghetto living out the only life script they’ve ever known. But what’s our excuse? We too often live out in miniature the same process ourselves. How often do most of us forgive genuine wrong done against us, even of a much less consequential nature? Tune into the internet any day of the week and see untold amounts of shrieking over some offense or another, real or imagined. I suspect the vast majority of us would be behave no differently from those gangbangers in similar circumstances. We are blessed not to be there, however. But will we use that privileged position to end or perpetuate cycles of wrong in our own lives?

    Secondly, Chicagoland made me think about the bigger picture of leadership in our cities and the major problems they face. I voted for Rahm as mayor, for three reasons. 1) I saw him as like his mentor Bill Clinton, namely someone to whom getting elected and staying in power is more important than pushing any ideological agenda. In short, I saw him as a pragmatist, not an ideologue with a policy ax to grind like Bill de Blasio. 2) Rahm spent a lot of time outside of Chicago. He’s got a global perspective and a global network that’s critical in this era. He’s also got the gravitas to interact at the highest levels of power in America, which is something few mayors can say. 3) Rahm has no natural constituency in Chicago. So if he wants to be re-elected, he needs to perform. He clearly has future political ambitions, and flaming out as mayor wouldn’t be helpful in pursuing them.

    Looking back, while I’ve criticized Rahm for an excessive focus on the elite, I believe my judgment then was correct and on the whole I think he’s done a decent job in a very difficult situation. Apropos of point #3, if Chicago thinks differently, the popular and competent Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is waiting in the wings. Whatever you think of his neoliberal policies, it’s clear Rahm is an actual leader, one with a ton of intelligence, drive, power, and the will to get things done.

    Yet watching Chicagoland, it’s evident that even leadership ability of Rahm’s caliber struggles mightily with the city’s huge challenges. Chicago has a massive fiscal hole, and a very serious problem with a two tier society that has left vast tracts of the city behind. It’s by no means certain that Rahm will be able to make Chicago soar in the way that Daley did in the 90s, or even get re-elected if a there’s any stumble and a credible candidate like Preckwinkle gets into the race.

    When I think about the difficulties in solving the problems in Chicago, which has not only Rahm’s leadership but a massively successful global city economy in the Loop and hundreds of thousands of well-heeled residents, it makes me pause. If Chicago struggles with its problems, how much more so other cities facing similar or worse problems but with much weaker leadership and no global city money and firepower? It really makes me wonder if a lot of places are simply going to die a slow death barring some lucky break from a change in the marketplace.

    This ultimately is what I’d challenge the residents of other cities to think about when watching this show. Look at Chicago and what it is dealing with. Think about your own problems and your resources for combating them vis-a-vis Chicago. If that doesn’t make you sober up, I’m not sure what will.

    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 originally appeared.

  • Bubble Trouble in Silicon Valley

    Third-generation venture capitalist Tim Draper believes he has a solution for California’s problems that will make the Silicon Valley safe for its wealthy: secession. In a recent interview, Draper suggested that California be divided into six states, including one dominated by the Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco.

    By jettisoning California’s deeply troubled components – the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles – the Silicon Valleyites can create their own enclave, where incomes will be far higher – $63,288 per capital compared with the $46,477 for the whole state. If adopted, Draper’s proposal would mean our self-styled cognitive leaders wouldn’t have to deal with interior California’s massive poverty, double-digit unemployment, farmer demands for scarce water supplies or manufacturers seeking reasonable energy prices.

    Yet, for some in the Valley, Draper’s proposals don’t go far enough. Another venture capitalist recently suggested that the Valley do away with this whole United States thing entirely and form its own Republic. “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like,” venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya argued.

    The notion here is that Silicon Valley might do best if detached from the limitations of American citizenship, with firms essentially running their own countries from islands or man-made, offshore facilities, as proposed by libertarian investor Peter Thiel. What the Valley wants, then, is to be left alone – unencumbered by the masses – so that the clever crowd can live with low taxes, in a perfectly socially liberated environment, but without the encumbrances that come with having to worry about the less-cognitively gifted.

    “People,” as technology author Jaron Lanier has noted, “are the flies in Moore’s Law’s ointment.”

    This can be seen in the growing pushback over such things as massive wealth accumulation for dubiously useful ventures, and egregious privacy violations. The luxurious Google employee buses shuttling in and out of San Francisco are resented by some residents stuck riding the often poorly maintained, sometimes awful Muni.

    One top venture capitalist, Thomas Perkins was so upset over what he sees as scapegoating of the rich that he compared their condition to Jews in Nazi Germany. His directness upset some, but may have expressed more of what is really thought by smoother, younger, more PC-conscious executives.

    This is more than simply the usual case of rich people being out of touch. These are not media constructs like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton but very powerful, incredibly wealthy people who increasingly are a dominant force in California and national politics. Yet, their political positions often have a “let them eat cake” character. And to be sure, some new oligarchs lean right, mostly on the libertarian side, but these are a distinct minority. The notion of some in the Republican Party who see the Valleyites as saviors is nothing short of delusional.

    For the most part, executive and workers at firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter are strong proponents of every politically correct idea from climate change legislation to opposing the expansion of suburbia and favoring gay marriage. Yet they are also becoming the wealthiest entities in the nation; besides GE, a classic conglomerate, the largest cash hoards now belong to Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Google, all of which sometimes have more dollars on hand than the U.S. government. Seven of the eight biggest individual winners from stock gains in 2013 were tech entrepreneurs. They were led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who added $12 billion to his paper wealth; Mark Zuckerberg, who raked in an additional $11.9 billion; and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who each gained roughly $9 billion.

    Given their phenomenal wealth, one observer compared Silicon Valley politics to those of a mall outlet selling Che Guevara t-shirts. They no doubt nod their heads when President Obama speaks of economic inequality, but when it comes to doing something about it, their general response is: Nevermind.

    However they color themselves politically, the oligarchs live above and apart from the rest of society – and, like Draper, want to keep it that way. Their desire to separate from the hoi polloi is natural and stems, in part, from their notion of being a class apart from mere mortals. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt boasted to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. “And what a world it is. Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in a daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”

    Certainly, politically correct gestures, like support for climate change legislation, don’t change this calculus. Google executives, for example, urge the middle class and working class to pay for subsidized, expensive energy – which they also invest in – but maintain their own fleet of private planes.

    The distinct sets of rules for oligarchs and everyone else extends even to the most personal issues. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, banned telecommuting options for employees – particularly critical for those unable to house their families anywhere close to Yahoo’s ultrapricey Sunnyvale home town. Yet, Mayer, pregnant at the time, saw no contradiction in building a nursery in her office.

    Nor can it be said that the Valley elite gives at the office. Rather than “share the pain,” tech firms are notorious for not paying much in the way of taxes, including taxes on their properties. Facebook, for example, paid no taxes in 2012, despite making a profit of over $1 billion. Apple, which the New York Times recently described as “a pioneer in tactics to avoid taxes,” has kept much of its cash hoard as part of its basic corporate strategy.

    Individuals like Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates have voiced support for higher taxes on the rich, yet Microsoft has saved nearly $7 billion on its U.S. tax bill since 2009 by using loopholes to shift profits offshore, a Senate panel said in a recent report. As former congressman Barney Frank noted recently, Microsoft and other tech titans “have as good a record of tax evasion as anybody.”

    Such miserliness also extends to private philanthropy. There is no equivalent financed by Silicon Valley of anything comparable with the energy-industry-financed Texas Medical Center, nor can we expect any of the tech elite to leave behind anything so durable as the Carnegie libraries. For all their loud advocacy on environmental and education issues, the Valleyites are generally considered miserly when it comes to charity, as only four of the top 50 charitable contributors in 2011 came from the tech sector.

    They may give big to the elite universities, like Stanford, but they seem oddly unengaged in the struggles of the vast working-class population around them: Poverty rates in the Valley’s home of Santa Clara County since 2001 have soared from 8 percent to 14 percent, a jump of 75 percent. The self-proclaimed “capital of Silicon Valley,” the city of San Jose,notes urban geographer Jim Russell, is beginning to resemble a post-industrial “rust belt” city. To expect the Valley elite, ensconced in superpricey Palo Alto or San Francisco, to concern themselves with the Central Valley, beyond the Diablo Range to the east, is beyond wishful thinking.

    Remarkably some people, on both the right and left, believe that the Valley’s tech community should reform the nation, and recreate the government in their image. True, the likes of Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell do not inspire much confidence, but a society run by the tech lords would be very cold, and highly stratified.

    Silicon Valley’s problem, as author Jaron Lanier has put it, “is people.” Ultimately, human beings will resent being transformed into little more than digits in a Google algorithm that is then sold to advertisers. Most Americans reject being looked down on by a group that, given accidents of birth, access to money, social networks or even high intelligence, wishes not to share a state, or even a nation, with those who have less. That these attitudes now emanate from people who consider themselves both progressive and uniquely enlightened is not only hypocritical, but almost qualifies as obscene.

    This story originally appeared at 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.

  • Boeing’s Long Shadow

    The recent wrangling over decisions on where to build the next version of Boeing’s 777 has left a residue of bitterness and rancor around the Puget Sound region. Were the Machinists forced to give too much? Were the taxpayers squeezed too far? While views will differ on those questions, one thing is clear: jobs lost at Boeing are very difficult, if not impossible to replace.

    In the Seattle region we can easily forget how insanely fortunate we are to have Boeing Commercial Airplanes located here. As much as we love to talk about software, gaming, life sciences, internet commerce and other 21st century industries, Seattle owes its status as a large and prosperous metropolitan area almost entirely to the economic base established by Boeing fifty years ago.

    And if we can avoid becoming another San Francisco, with high levels of income inequality, outrageous housing prices, a shrinking middle class and a consequent increase in social tensions, we will owe Boeing for that too.

    Maybe we paid too much for the 777. But the alternative – Puget Sound minus Boeing – is a frightening idea. Ever since the Boeing Bust of 1969, Seattle area leaders have been trying to diversify the region’s manufacturing economy, and with few major successes. The reason for this is obvious: our location in the upper left hand corner of the map.

    Manufacturing industries tend to locate near their customers and suppliers to minimize transportation costs. Puget Sound is simply too far from national markets to make sense as a location for heavy industry. By the 1950s, the region had maxed out its potential in timber, fishing and shipping, and the economy stagnated. The manufacturing boom that followed World War II largely passed the region by, and in 1957 a prominent businessman accurately described the Northwest as "America’s most important colony."

    Then came Boeing’s entry into the commercial jet aircraft business. Prior to World War II Boeing had served as a sort of R&D shop for the U.S. government, developing innovative military and airmail planes that never sold very well. Boeing developed the first modern commercial transport, the 247, which was immediately eclipsed by the Douglas DC-3. Boeing had some commercial success, but was still a minor player in the propeller age.

    After World War II the military stopped buying B-17 and B-29 bombers, for obvious reasons, and Boeing fell into a slump. It gradually revived itself with the successful B-47 and B-52 jet bomber programs. But it was another military program–developing a jet powered refueling tanker that could keep up with the new jet bombers–that was the key. That tanker airframe was repurposed into the 707, an aircraft that revolutionized civilian air transport and led to the transformation of the Puget Sound economy.

    With commercial jet aircraft factories, the region finally had a large, scalable manufacturing industry that did not depend on low transportation costs. In fact, the products deliver themselves! With the success of the 707 Boeing began a very aggressive strategy, launching four new airplane programs during the 1960s: the 727, 737, 747 and the ill-fated SST. Before the bust of 1969, Boeing employed well over 100,000 people in the region, accounting for nearly all the net job growth of the decade.

    Since then, Boeing’s Puget Sound area employment has fluctuated between 60,000 and 110,000. And although it is gradually shrinking as a share of the economy, Boeing provides one thing that fewer and fewer industries can offer: large numbers of secure, high-paying blue collar jobs. Boeing investments are measured in decades, and even with recent give-backs, the machinists enjoy a very nice compensation package. The layer of middle class employment at Boeing is what makes the Puget Sound region different from San Francisco, and holds the line against our evolution into a Superstar City.

    Yes, Boeing’s tactics have wounded pocketbooks and left a bad taste in the region’s mouth. And its status as a largely Midwestern company (just try to find any Northwest connections on its board) further diminishes the emotional tie. But we cannot lose sight of the value it brings. There is simply no better industry around which to build a regional economy and we are incredibly lucky to have it here. So we’ll swallow some pride and hold tight to a company that every region in the world would kill to get its hands on.

    The Seahawks 12th Man paint job that Boeing workers put on a brand new 747 freighter just before the Super Bowl brought back a glimpse of the Boeing connection that we used to take for granted. The challenge for Boeing and for regional leaders is to rebuild that connection. In Seattle we will always live in the "Jet City."

    Michael Luis is a consultant in public affairs and communications, based in the Seattle area, and is the author of Century 21 City: Seattle’s Fifty Year Journey from World’s Fair to World Stage. He also serves as councilmember and Mayor of the city of Medina, Washington. He can be reached at luisassociates@comcast.net.

    Seattle photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Love

  • Drought Stokes California’s Class War

    As all the Californians who celebrated the deluge of rain that fell the week before last know, it did not do much to ameliorate the state’s deep drought. We are likely to enter our traditionally dry spring, summer and fall in a crisis likely to exacerbate the ever greater estrangement between the state’s squabbling regions and classes.

    There are two prevailing views about how to deal with the drought. Farming interests in the Central Valley want the state to fund construction of additional water storage capacity so that the 700,000 acres of some of world’s richest farmland now fallowed by steep water cutbacks can be put back into production.

    The predominant view embraced by the media and ruling political class identifies the drought as yet another manifestation of relentless global warming, which means the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Greens balk at the idea of massive new spending on water storage for the agriculture sector, the state’s biggest water user, advocating instead for more conservation. New dams and reservoirs would have high environmental impacts, they argue, and their benefits may not justify the costs.

    Yet many believe more storage is precisely what the state needs, including Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and the state Assembly’s Democratic leadership, under pressure from Republicans and Central Valley Democrats, recently added $1 billion in funding for water storage projects to a draft water bond proposal.

    The southern part of the state, which tends to be drier than the north, has managed to avoid the worst of the drought by investing in its own storage facilities, something the more green-oriented north largely has avoided.

    “Pat Brown understood you had to build capacity and store a lot of water,” former Salinas Mayor Dennis Donahue, a lifelong Democrat and radicchio grower, told me. “As a state we have decided not to build capacity that we could have built. To make this a morality tale about climate change is an insult to the 40% of people who are unemployed in some of our rural towns.”

    California’s drought has become a national partisan issue, but storage is hardly a Tea Party or libertarian obsession. Hard-hit farming regions, in fact, are not calling so much for less government, but an expansion of water facilities largely owned and operated by state and federal agencies.

    Their strongest arguments are economic and, equally important, basic social justice. California produces upwards of of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, and the economy of the interior, and much of the central coast, revolves around agriculture. The interior region suffered the brunt of the Great Recession in California but now must endure the lost of some $5 billion in farm-related revenues; 11 of the 20 metropolitan areas with the highest unemployment in the countryare already located in the interior region of the Golden State.

    Not surprisingly many in the interior and rural parts of California see themselves as victims of wealthy coastal counties, whose economies have been bolstered by rising stock prices and absurd home valuations in Silicon Valley. These people regard high-priced water, like expensive energy, as a relatively minor inconvenience. San Francisco actually depends as much or more as any place in California on imported water, but rich urbanistas do not make their living from growing food, manufacturing or logistics. For them, high prices for resources is a kind of moral penance for lives that contribute to the threat of global warming.

    At the same time, the basic claim that California’s drought is an inevitable product of warmer temperatures seems a stretch. Anyone somewhat familiar with California water issues — as I have been for the better part of 40 years — knows that the state has a history of alternating wet and dry periods dating back hundreds of years. Indeed, while the most recent rains may not augur a new, wetter period, statewide precipitation has now rebounded to levels much closer to historic parameters.

    To be sure, human-caused environmental degradation is real and must be acknowledged, but it’s clear that  droughts have occurred, in California and elsewhere, for thousands of years. Some have lasted for a century or more. The worst dry periods, according to tree records, took place in the 1500s, somewhat before the first SUV hit the road. The 1860s saw massive rains and flooding throughout the state, followed by a severe drought that almost wiped out the state’s cattle industry.

    In the last century, California suffered from severe droughts in the 1920s, the late 1970s and again in the 1990s; all ended when rainfall resumed in subsequent years. Even over a period in which greenhouse gas concentrations were increasing dramatically, three California droughts began and ended in much the same way.

    More generally, the notion that the United States is entering an era of deep and abiding water shortage also remains dubious. A 2008 federal report on climate and drought concluded that the last decade was not as dry as either the 1930s or the 1950s.

    Just a few years ago climate activists were claiming that a major drought throughout the Southeast was a clear harbinger of howglobal warming would affect everyone. Similar claims have been made for a recent drought in the Midwest. According to the U.S. drought monitor map, neither the southeast nor the vast majority of the heartland suffers from serious drought conditions. Indeed over the last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the percentage of the country suffering any drought at all has dropped from 66% to close to 50%.

    To be sure there needs to be more attention paid — in California and elsewhere — to water issues and conservation, as many greens suggest. But  that’s  no reason to abandon prudent water management, like storage, in the belief that massive desertification is inevitable. California’s Inland leaders are simply calling for  retrofitting and improving water facilities, many of which were built a half century ago, and create additional wet-period storage capacity. If it does not, a large part of the state’s heartland will return to a  desert more by fiat than climate, leaving behind a huge, largely unemployable, and predominately Latino underclass.

    Fortunately, not all is lost. For all his sometimes obsessive concern on climate change, Governor Jerry Brown has proposed major improvements in the state water system, much of which was built by his father. In this, he has been willing to challenge the green interests, who inevitably will try to block any new facilities. In the past, even Brown has found changing any of California’s complex environmental laws very difficult given the power of the green lobby, particularly within the courts and the regulatory agencies.

    Clearly the  more reasonable water conservation measures urged by the environmentalists should also be adopted. Vast lawns and golf courses watered from the Sierra make little sense in a state whose population and economic centers are totally dependent on imported H20. Yards consume more than half of California’s urban water supply; using more drought resistant plants — my family is replanting our front yard with desert cover — and expanding already available, highly treated recycled water for exterior irrigation are commonsense changes cities and towns throughout the southwest should pursue. Agriculture, which uses more that 75% of the state’s water supply, must also become more conservation-oriented.

    Water-hungry crops, like rice and perhaps even cotton, may need to be phased out. More use should be made of drip irrigation, which is employed extensively in other dry climates such as Israel. A greater emphasis on California’s unique advantages for specialty crops like nuts, green vegetables and fruits inherently makes more sense than growing water-hungry crops in competition with more water-rich locales.

    But unless Brown can fashion a compromise, the drought will continue to serve as propaganda fodder for the climate change community while promoting the demise of yet another basic industry, joining fossil fuel energy and, increasingly, manufacturing. This assault on tangible industries  devastates scores of poorer, less media-savvy communities. The social results of such an approach is already apparent in the state: the highest poverty rate in the nation and one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. It may seem moral to link this drought to warming for the sophisticates who control California, but from here, the whole approach seems pretty cold indeed.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    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.

    Los Angeles aqueduct photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Will London Embrace the Monaco Model?

    London’s goal — admirable for any city of medieval invention — is to drive the private car underground and replace it with a web of mass transit, suburban trains, bike lanes, taxi stands, and walkways. All of those are well calibrated to an urban grid that consists of mews, squares, and quirky side streets with names like Shoulder of Mutton Alley.

    Despite the winds and rains, I recently pedaled all over London and came to the conclusion that it has an excellent chance to get past the automobile era. It could be Europe’s city of tomorrow, one that moves forward with its work/life balance on a human scale. Its future as Europe’s finance center, though, and its real estate forecast, as well as the outlook for its pubs, remain open questions.

    I enrolled in Mayor Boris Johnson’s shared bikes — it took a few credit card swipes — and headed off to the City, London’s financial district, which lies north of London Bridge.

    Will London remain one of the world’s top finance centers? The continuing economic crisis, the threat of the U.K. pulling out of the European Union, Scottish independence, and strict new regulations could all spell doom for its merchant banking.

    The City’s accommodating genius is that while it is as established as the House of Lords or the East India Company, it is, among other things, a go-go offshore financial center — the Cayman Islands with bowler hats.

    Neither continental European nor American nor Asian, London straddles all three markets, funneling money from one part of the globe to another. By comparison, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, and Amsterdam are staid regional financial centers. Only New York can give it a run for its money.

    At G8 meetings Prime Minister David Cameron bemoans corporate-shell tax dodging and come-by-chance balance sheets, but when he gets home he might as well don a visor and leather sleeves. London is a casino cashing in the chips of a capital-intensive world.

    During the Crimean crisis, London has been all for economic sanctions, provided, however, that they don’t hurt the City, where Russian oligarchs still get their phone calls returned.

    While I was there, London experienced its wettest January since 1670. But one of the city’s virtues is that it copes well with bad weather. Houses and hotels are short walks to shops and trains. In most London neighborhoods you will pass many restaurants, drug stores, newsstands, and pocket supermarkets. On television, England was sinking; in London, it was business as usual.

    The pleasure of London on a bike is that its very quickly reduced to an overlapping series of small towns, with such well known names as Chelsea, Fulham, Soho, Sloane Square, Lancaster Gate, and Hampstead Heath.

    Fewer pubs were in evidence. I read later that about 1400 have been closing every year around England, victim to archaic licensing laws and restrictive franchising, not to mention the iPhone culture that does not cozy up with a pint to dank interiors with ersatz slot machines and pinball games. Industrial Britain has become a service economy, and the servers prefer bistros, bars, and Pret A Manger.

    A downside to London is that the world’s happy money has made its property market an international savings bank, where apartments routinely sell for $6 million and some hotels (not mine) cost $700 a night.

    Nevertheless, the excellent Tube, buses, commuter trains, and Boris bikes make it easier to stay in less fashionable quarters and connect to the bright lights. London has spent billions on upgrading its railroad stations, which soon will be the iron standard in Europe. By contrast, Moscow is choking on its gridlocked exhaust fumes, Paris prefers tourism to trade, and Berlin still has a hole in its heart.

    When I lived in London in the 1970s, King’s Cross had the air of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal, and St. Pancras appeared only to offer connecting service to The Slough of Despond. The renovated St. Pancras International, where Eurostars depart for Paris, Brussels, Lille, and Avignon, is alive with spoken French, fresh croissants, trendy restaurants, and a five-star hotel. With a soaring glass interior, King’s Cross could be an Asian airline terminal.

    The East End and Canary Wharf still feel like warehouse districts, although now the only cargoes are winking screens in trading rooms. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine in the next fifty years a second London growing up around the Thames docklands. It has the infrastructure in place — trains, an airport, businesses, nearby housing stock, and open spaces — to support a major city, one part Venice with canals, another part Shanghai with skyscrapers.

    The risks to London’s future are political. Insular Tories could lead Britain out of the European Union, the British pound could become a second-tier currency, and the city’s cost structures could make it only an amusement park for Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks, not the working or middle classes. Call it the Monaco Model.

    Still, I would bet on London’s sustainability at all levels of a city’s food chain… if only because it is so eccentrically welcoming to bikes, banks, brokers, and bookstores.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Photo of King’s Cross by Matthew Stevenson

  • Andrey

  • High Tech Leaves NYC Behind

    Is New York City ready to contest in high-tech against Silicon Valley? Fuggedaboutit.

    Gotham is so far behind in every conceivable measurement — from engineering prowess to employment and venture funding — that even the idea is somewhat ludicrous.

    While Madison Alley has marketed the city’s tech prowess before, going back to when owners of lower Manhattan real estate promoted “Silicon Alley,” the action has been elsewhere.

    And while some urban boosters such as Richard Florida and Bruce Katz predict that new tech centers will not be the traditional suburban nerdistans, but instead the dense places where “smart” people cluster, there’s reason to be skeptical.

    To some extent, their ideas do apply in San Francisco, though mostly because of its proximity to the people and, more importantly, the venture capital in nearby Silicon Valley. It may even apply to Seattle, where large tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are based.

    But most tech employment has continued to be concentrated in suburban locations. Even as the social media boomlet has created a few high-profile urban firms, core counties nationwide actually lost about 1.1% of their tech jobs over the last decade, while more peripheral areas gained 3.5%.

    Despite a few modest successes, New York has not produced any business that approaches the top five firms of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google and LinkedIn are all based in the Valley or its urban satellite city, San Francisco.

    Crucially, New York remains a laggard in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (or STEM) employment, with slightly fewer tech jobs per capita than the national average, or a third as many as Silicon Valley.

    And it’s not only the Bay that New York is behind — it also trails less hyped locales such as San Diego, Raleigh, Portland, Seattle, Houston and Dallas.

    New York’s most glaring weakness is a lack of engineering talent. Behind venture capital, the greatest asset of Silicon Valley is its huge proportion of engineers, roughly 45 out of every 1,000 workers. Other high concentrations can be found in such varied burgs as San Diego, Boston, Houston and Denver.

    While the coming Cornell Technion may start to change that dynamic, Gotham has a long way to climb. Right now its concentration is 78th out of 85 metros — just behind Omaha.

    And it’s been headed in the wrong direction. Between 2001 and 2011, the New York area ranked a dismal 44th out of 52 metropolitan areas in tech growth, losing a net 84,000 jobs.

    Even as things picked up after 2009 with the social-media boom, tech employment here expanded about one-tenth as quickly as in Silicon Valley, as well as Columbus, Salt Lake City and Raleigh. Growth in Seattle was eight times faster.

    Without deep engineering talent, regions have a difficult time adjusting to technological changes that periodically reshape the high-tech industry. Silicon Valley is already beginning to move beyond social media; Google and Apple are focused increasingly on building their own pipes to move their content, and expanding into other promising tech fields from household appliances, electric cars and robotics to space exploration. New York simply does not have the engineering heft to make this transition.

    Inevitably, the social media boomlet, like the previous dotcom version, will slow, as companies merge and start moving operations to less expensive areas such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Austin and even Columbus, Ohio. Urban tech firms, particularly in media-drenched places like New York, nearly collapsed when the last bubble burst, with Silicon Alley hemorrhaging 15,000 of its 50,000 information jobs between 2000 and 2005.

    What’s more, the new tech oligarchs are gaining at the expense of New York’s traditional media industries and their elites. Since 2001, the book publishing industry, dominated by New York, has contracted nationally by 17,000 jobs. Newspapers lost 190,000 positions and magazines 50,000 in that same span. But internet publishing, dominated by the Bay Area, expanded by 77,000 jobs.

    Given the cultural tepidness of Silicon Valley, the oligarchs may still exploit talent in places like New York or LA, where artists concentrate. But while New Yorkers talk a good game, money, power and control are shifting away, perhaps permanently, to the left coast.

    This story originally appeared at the New York Daily News.

    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 by Mike Lee

  • Urban Planning 101

    Former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud has performed an important service that should provide a much needed midcourse correction to urban planning around the world. Bertaud returns to the fundamentals in his "Cities as Labor Markets."

    Bertaud begins by reminding us that without well functioning labor markets, cities will not be successful. This requires mobility, which he defines as "the ability to move quickly and easily between locations within a metropolitan area" and "the ability to locate one’s house or one’s firm in any location within a metropolitan area." This mobility, he maintains, is indispensable in facilitating growth of the city.

    There is just one exception, according to Bertaud. These are retiree cities, which do not principally rely on mobility for their growth. Yet, Bertaud notes that these are themselves products of the much more numerous conventional cities, where mobility has facilitated growth and in which future retirees accumulate the resources that permit migration to the retirement cities.

    There are also the planned cities for government, such as Brasilia and Washington. Bertaud contends that they have become successful because "more diversified labor market "was grafted " onto the government activities."Before that, however: "The ‘cost is no object’ concept presided over their construction and insured their initial survival as they were financed by taxes paid by the rest of the country." This should give pause to nations, especially in the developing world proposing to build and thereby divert resources from improving the lives of people (see;  Unmanageable Jakarta Soon to Lose National Capital?).

    Imaginary "Urban Villages"

    Bertaud insists on the importance of cities as unified labor markets. Metropolitan areas will be hampered in their development and innovation to the extent that they are fragmented.

    He is particularly critical of planning attempts to create "urban villages" within the unified labor markets (metropolitan areas). He contends that: "The urban village model” implies a systematic fragmentation of labor markets within a large metropolis and does not make economic sense in the real world."

    Bertaud does not accept the notion that:

    "… everybody could walk or bicycle to work, even in a very large metropolis. To allow a city to grow, it would only be necessary to add more clusters. The assumption behind this model is either that urban planners would be able to perfectly match work places and residences, or that workers and employers would spontaneously organize themselves into the appropriate clusters."

    He is concerned at the "prevalence of this conceit in many urban master plans," which he characterizes as "utopian trip patterns."

    According to Bertaud, the urban village "model does not exist in the real world because it contradicts the economic justification of large cities: the efficiency of large labor markets." The cold water of reality is that "… the urban village model exists only in the mind of urban planners."

    Uncontained Self-Contained Satellite Towns

    He supports his claim. Seoul’s satellite communities were intended to be self contained towns (urban villages), in which most residents both lived and worked. Yet, most of the workers employed in the satellite towns live in other parts of the metropolitan area. At the same time, most of the residents of the satellite  work in other parts of the Seoul metropolitan area. He cites Stockholm regulations requiring neighborhood jobs – housing balances as having no impact on shortening commute distances even when such a balance is achieved.

    My own research using 2001 census data indicated that the London area new towns, also intended to be populated principally by people who work in them, had average work trip travel distances more than their diameter (See: Jobs-Housing Balance and Urban Villages in Southeast England). This means that large numbers of people were traveling to work outside the towns. In London as in Seoul, the planners can conceptualize the self-contained satellite towns, but it is beyond them to force the behaviors to make them work.

    Similarly misguided efforts elsewhere, from the San Francisco Bay Area and other California metropolitan areas to Montréal and beyond are destined for similar failures.

    Commuting and the City

    Bertaud cites research by Remy Prud’homme and ChoonWong Lee at the University of Paris showing that the efficiency of cities tends to increase up so long as a large share of the commutes are less than 60 minutes, though optimal efficiency occurs at shorter commute distances. Lest there be any misunderstanding, American cities have average commute times of approximately 25 minutes, according the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, not the hour or two hour journeys of urban legends.

    Defining the City

    This large commuting radius makes it clear that Bertaud does not accept the distorted urban definition that would, for example, define the urban form to not extend beyond the borders of New York City, or worse beyond the Hudson, East and Harlem Rivers – the boundaries of the island of Manhattan. If the city is limited to dense cores, then the "half urban" world recently announced won’t be here for many decades. The city is the metropolitan area – the labor market, which extends to the far reaches of the commuting shed.

    The Bottom Line

    According to Bertaud, 

    "Increasing mobility and affordability are the two main objectives of urban planning. These two objectives are directly related to the overall goal of maximizing the size of a city’s labor market, and therefore, its economic prosperity." 

    That brings us back to first principles. Cities are about people. Planning is justified to the extent that it facilitates the aspirations of people. The city requires prosperity, which Bertaud shows in a much needed first installment of Urban Planning 101.

    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.

    —–

    Note: Alain Bertaud’s "Cities as Labor Markets," was published by the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment at New York University and is intended to be a chapter in his forthcoming book, tentatively titled Order without Design.