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  • What is a Half-Urban World?

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

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

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

    What is Urban?

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

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

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

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

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

    Distribution of the World Urban Population

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

    Historical and Projected Distribution of World Urban Population

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

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

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

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

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

    Share of Growth

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

    An Urbanizing, But Not Heavily Urbanized World

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

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

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

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

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

  • Single Family Houses Sales Up, Builders Register Confidence

    A continuing increase in new single-family house sales has fueled the substantial increase in the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) to 46 in November. This indicates that nearly one half of surveyed home builders are positive about future sales of single family houses. This is a strong increase from the HMI of 41 in October. The HMI had reached its low point in the midst of the housing bus in January 2009 at 8 and is now higher than at any point in more than six years.

    NAHB reported that national single-family house sales in September were nearly 30% above the September 2011 rate, though remained approximately one-half the 2007 rate.

    The National Association of Realtors also reported that single family houses continued to dominate existing house sales, garnering approximately 88% of sales in October.

    The strengthening of the single-family housing market Is to be expected as the economy improves. These developments are further indication that the claimed change in housing preferences from single-family to multifamily is not occurring. In a related development, the latest available data indicates a preference in California for single-family housing on conventional sized lots, which is described in A Housing Preference Sea Change: Not in California.

  • Faking It: The Happy Messaging of Placemaking

    Picasso said “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. Nowadays, there’s less truth to that, as the creative process is increasingly about prettying up and papering over what’s broke.

    More on that shortly, but first, about the breakage: it’s legitimate. Said Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz in a recent NY Times piece that plain-talks our economic conditions: “Increasing inequality means a weaker economy, which means increasing inequality, which means a weaker economy.”

    That assessment—from a very smart man studying the problem—isn’t good. But in the American feel-good milieu you wouldn’t know it: “We’re coming out if it.” “Tomorrow is forever.” “Start-ups will save the U.S.” Etc. And while tone deaf, this kind of brushing off of problems isn’t new, but part of what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich refers to as America’s “cult of cheerfulness”, and it’s a “cult” that has spawned a longstanding and growing American feel-good industry.

    Recently, researcher Jeff Faux—in his book The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class—says the feel-good industry has disarmed social urgency and unrest with “cheerful denial”, particularly as it relates to declining standards of living. Faux writes:

    [T]he positive-thinking industry has gone from publishing self-improvement books and training sales people to smile even when they don’t feel like it to loosely constructed system of social engineering that distracts and discourages Americans from dealing with what is happening to their society.

    This form of social control is wide and far-reaching, ranging from the smiley face Wal-Mart logo to motivational seminars for laid off workers that spoon feed a “can do” attitude like it’s castor oil, regardless if it is the context that really “can’t.” Increasingly, cheerful denial has become the purview of artists and designers; that is, instead of using aesthetics to tear down—like did Picasso, Duchamp, and Matta-Clark—we use aesthetics to prop up.

    Enter placemaking, or that medium of developing “place” in our cities through shared efforts of artists and designers alike.

    Placemaking does a lot of good. Parks, festivals, and various urban design interventions can create for a myriad of positive attributes related to happiness, worth, and reinvestment. But placemaking in its pervasive search for vibrancy can often come off as Pollyannaish, or yet another means at happy messaging. At its worst, placemaking not only distracts from pressing concerns if only to provide a place to collectively clap, but—when done in exceedingly high rent spots continuously immune to economic downturns—can also serve to reinforce the bubble mentality of the elite.

    One needs to go no further than America’s cultural capital, New York City, to see this operating. For instance, in a recent article called the “How Rust Became the New Urban Luxury Item”, the author talks about how the aesthetic of rust is being remade from a reality into a motif. The new billion-dollar Barclays Center was made rusty on purpose, and a new section of the High Line—the park made from an abandoned rail line—will most certainly retain its wear, with its decay polished if need be.



    Courtesy of Techcat

    Why is this occurring? The author writes:

    [R]ust has become fashionable. It’s a sign of street cred, kind of like the pre-fab holes in a pair of $500 designer jeans…

    …The kind of rust you find on the Barclays Center and in the refurbished High Line park is a luxury item. In places like Cleveland and Detroit and the parts of New York without corporate sponsorship, rust is still just rust.

    There is a lot of truth there: rust is still just rust in places that have come to exist in post-industrialization, but for others: rust is luxury, rust is christened from the landscape of one’s hard times up to the decor of the powerful’s play areas.

    On one hand, there is nothing new here. Beautification efforts to attend to social ills is a longstanding method of inflicting good feelings over hard realities. There was the City Beautiful Movement, the Urban Renewal Movement, etc. But what’s rarer is the fact that the aesthetics of disinvestment—in this case rust, and its “hard time” connotations—are being brought in to “dirty” the pretty up. In other words, by “street cred-ing” spaces for the elite, design is used to legitimize the extravagant via images of the honest-to-god consequences of the all-too every day.

    The problem of course is that it elevates how things look and feel in places like the Rust Belt into a luxury status. But in reality, the Rust Belt has been anything but. And while rust is a genuine and pulsating aesthetic in post-industrial America, it is more so akin to the look of a scar: or a character-molding image of resilience that’s now part of the culture’s flesh, and as such can come off as lame when it’s fabricated to make the appearance of something look “harder” than what is.



    Courtesy of Vagabondish

    Of course this adopting of the Rust Belt aesthetic is but part of a cultural authenticity movement that has been going on for some time. People are tiring of the flighty, ephemeral, and the rootless. People want reminders of where America came from and the fight it has in it. But designing for authenticity, according to scholar Jeanne Liedtka, is not only foolhardy—“the authentic emerges; it is not summoned…”—but yet another indication that America is spending more energy on faking it then fixing it.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. This piece originally appeared at his blog.

    Happy smiley photo by Bigstock.

  • Review: Driving Detroit, The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

    For more than a century, the city of Detroit has been an ideological and at times actual battleground for decidedly different views about the economy, labor and the role of government.  At one time it was the center of a can-do entrepreneurialism that helped launch the American automobile industry.  By 1914, for example, no fewer than 43 start-up companies were manufacturing automobiles in the city and surrounding region.  Following a wave of sit-down strikes that began almost immediately after FDR’s landslide victory in 1936, the economic character of the city changed dramatically.  Detroit soon became the quintessential union town, producing in the first decades after World War II the closest facsimile of Social Democracy that the United States has ever seen and in all likelihood will ever see again.    

    Detroit also specialized in race riots.  In 1943, for example, a brawl that broke out at a popular getaway on a Sunday evening in June quickly escalated into mob attacks that resulted in the death of nine whites and 25 blacks.  Because the white police force could not or would not restrain the violence, the mayor asked the governor to call in federal troops.  Twenty four years and one month later in 1967, another Sunday riot broke out.  This time most of the violence occurred between black residents and the police and National Guard.  The death toll was similar, 10 whites and 33 blacks.  Property damage, on the other hand, was far more extensive.  Before the week was out, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to make sense of the conflict and the growing unrest that was afflicting numerous cities all across America. 

    The next major event in the history of Detroit occurred in 1973, when Coleman Young was elected as the city’s first African-American mayor.   He would go on to serve five terms.  While clearly a reflection of the changing demographics in Detroit, Young also personified the city’s long history of union activism, having first gained prominence in the early 1950’s as the leader of the National Negro Labor Council.  In the early 1980’s, in response to persistent economic decline, Young also led the fight to increase the city’s income tax, which included a tax on commuters.  This signaled an important shift in progressive politics in Detroit and elsewhere.  Rather than trying to wring additional revenue from private sector shareholders, labor and its political allies would now focus on the public sector as the preferred vehicle for income redistribution.

    In Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City, George Galster employs a multi-layered technique to bring the history of the city to life and help explain its current economic predicament.  The title, for example, invokes the R&B classic “Respect” released by Aretha Franklin in 1967.  Lyrics from other popular songs are also quoted, as well as a steady stream of poems by local Detroit poets.  In addition, Galster weaves the stories of select individuals and families into the broader narrative that he constructs.  At the very end, we learn that among the people we have gotten to know are his German-American parents and their forebears.   And finally, Galster, who is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University, tries to explain the development of the city and region through what he calls geology, but in urban economics would more commonly be called geography.  This may be the book’s most interesting contribution.

    Galster emphasizes respect, which he defines as a combination of physical, social and psychological needs, because he argues that for many people in Detroit, for a long period of time, these needs were not adequately met.  This was true for blacks, who faced racial prejudice.  It was also true for factory workers, who historically had to endure dangerous working conditions, the monotony of the assembly line, and cyclical unemployment.  The labor movement helped soften the sharper edges of factory work, but Galster shows that it was far less successful at promoting racial harmony.  In part, this was a function of history.  The largest boom in Detroit occurred during World War II, when the city was dubbed the Arsenal of Democracy.  Because immigration had been stopped in the 1920’s, many of the new transplants came from the old South, often bearing well practiced well animosities.  Solidarity in this context was difficult to achieve.   

    Along with the burden of history, another major challenge that Detroit faces today, surprisingly enough, is geography.  In traditional terms, Detroit was an excellent place to build a city, located on a river that has never flooded and soon reaches Lake Erie.  But in modern times, the local topography has proven something of a curse in disguise.  Galster calls this topography a “featureless plain.”   From the beginning, the city and region grew in a land extensive way.   Assembly line manufacturing contributed to lower land use density, because efficiency required large, one story buildings.   Typically, these factory buildings were interspersed among residential communities.  This arrangement made for an attractive and prosperous lifestyle, but with de-industrialization, Detroit has not been able to fall back on a vibrant “old city” that could attract new and creative businesses.

    So what kind of future can Detroit expect?  Galster does not address this question directly, but clearly he appreciates the magnitude of the challenges at hand.  The phenomena that characterize the metropolitan region are not unique, he says, but “Greater Detroit is distinguished by the intense degrees of all these phenomena and their special origins.”  So perhaps the best take-away of Galster’s analysis is that the experience of Detroit should not be used to reach broad conclusions about the prospects of older industrial cities in general.  Rather, it should be used as a cautionary case study.  Detroit cannot alter its topography, but it can address problems like political chauvinism and sub-standard governance that Galster demonstrates have clearly had a negative impact on the business climate.  Progress here in combination with a low cost-of-living and the revolution in natural gas production might then make it possible to attract the investment that the economy needs to re-invent itself.   Certainly that would be the best case scenario.

    Eamon Moynihan is Managing Director for Public Policy at EcoMax Holdings, a specialty finance company that focuses on the redevelopment of previously used properties. 

  • For the truly Bored…

  • Petraeus’s Turf: The South Tampa Scene

    Bimbo eruptions are never fortunate occurrences, least of all for the bimbos involved. When they occur in South Tampa, they carry the sordid spectacles to new frontiers. A gentle but feisty cultural mix of blue-collar, white-collar, and varied ethnicities stretches between Old Tampa Bay and Hillsborough Bay on a peninsula tipped with MacDill Air Force Base. Local reactions in Tampa to the news vortex that now surrounds General David Petraeus will likely range from shock, to “meh,” to a certain pride in being in the spotlight, and to the addition of yet another notorious figure to Tampa’s colorful history.

    Tampa has always played in the shadow of New Orleans, with a good music and ethnic food scene, and a quirky local culture that isn’t quite mainstream American and isn’t quite Caribbean. A somewhat white bread version of New Orleans, Tampa has a local parade and festival that occurs the first week of February, but instead of Mardi Gras, Tampa’s party honors the apocryphal José Gaspar, a pirate who reportedly operated out of Tampa Bay.

    A spicy cultural mix to be sure, but it is meek and heavily regulated compared to the out-of-control scene in New Orleans. Perhaps the city’s overbearing white leadership has something to do with this; no one wants to be responsible if things get really wacky. Gasparilla is a kind of Mardi Gras you can take your kids to, perhaps in deference to Florida’s reputation as a family vacation destination.

    Cuban cigars, once made in Tampa by the case, linked the city to male hedonism early in its history, and this link has been reinforced ever since. Once home to Cuba’s freedom fighter, José Marti, Tampa’s Cuban heritage has faded from its fierce past glory as well. By the 1980s, the Miami Cuban community’s brash voice had taken over. “Yellow-rice Cuban” had become a putdown, implying one was from Tampa instead of Miami.

    The city itself started as a Caribbean freight port in the 1880s. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders stopped for provisions in Tampa along their way. A young British war correspondent, Winston Churchill, rode with Roosevelt into nearby Ybor City to sample a local bordello, before sailing on to Cuba. The city’s colorful past traditions includes military scandals that even date back to the straight-laced Victorian era.

    South Tampa blossomed as a streetcar suburb in the early part of the 20th century, and when Plant’s Hotel failed in the Great Depression, it was converted to a private college. The bay shore was sculpted into a 4-1/2 mile linear public park, still one of the most beautiful civic spaces in America. This boulevard reads like a spicy historical narrative of the city, with uniquely styled, Edwardian-era houses giving way to newer homes and condominium towers as one travels its length. Along this road, the magnates that helped build Tampa made their homes: Hugh Culverhouse, a tax lawyer who started the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, lived one condominium away from legendary George Steinbrenner Jr., who came to town to manage his shipping concerns when he wasn’t hollering at the Yankees.

    MacDill Air Force Base started as a training base for B-26 pilots during World War II. The bomber was so hot and difficult to handle that it was nicknamed the widow-maker, and its reputation gave MacDill its first catchphrase: “One a day in Tampa Bay.” Conviviality between town and base became an instant tradition, along with the town’s reputation for hosting a good time for all. And this reputation did not go away after the war.

    In the meantime, the infill neighborhoods behind the affluent waterfront residences acquired a unique flavor. Not quite as tropical as Miami, the over-scaled flora — huge banana trees, traveler’s palms, figs – are interwoven with gorgeous craftsman-style bungalows with deep, shady porches and high windows to let hot air escape. Like Boston, the little neighborhoods and districts of South Tampa are distinct, colorful, ‘hearty and vibrant. Along South Howard Avenue, a string of commercial and restaurant properties marks a definite dividing line between old and new.

    Bern’s Steakhouse dominates South Howard, where stars like Johnny Carson would stop and tuck into a prime rib when in Florida. Bern’s is emblematic of Tampa itself: a proud, independent, homegrown restaurant, known for its excellent food, but ungracefully crammed underneath an interstate overpass and about as charming on the outside as a warehouse. Inside, the fifties era red velvet and gold leaf decor conjure up visions of a Parisian brothel.

    Back behind Bern’s lies Parkland Estates, a quiet, depression-era neighborhood where Santos Trafficante Jr. retired in the 1960s. Considered the last of the old-line mafia dons, with territory stretching far into Cuba, the Trafficante family lived in his modest, blond brick home. While Tampa may seem remote from the action, it actually was an active territory for syndicates that reportedly controlled road construction and other businesses. And Tampa was the location for scenes in Good Fellas, a source of pride to many Tampa natives.

    By the time Trafficante died, however, Joe Redner had overtaken him in notoriety, operating a string of strip clubs and striking a highly visible profile in the city’s business and political circles. Never quite accepted enough to win his many bids for mayor, yet still a persuasive leader, Redner’s success may have had something to do with MacDills presence. Prurient behavior, tolerated but never quite accepted, gives Tampa a decidedly old-world flavor in the South’s entrenched white Protestant mainstream culture.

    MacDill still has a strong influence on South Tampa, employing some 3,000 people and actively participating in community projects. Its open house days, hugely popular, are a source of patriotic pride among locals, as are the jets flying overhead. Otherwise lacking a presence on the national scene, Tampa hosts the United States Central Command, with top military brass acting as local heroes. MacDill is immediately surrounded by base housing and service workers, but it’s pressed up next to high-net-worth neighborhoods for those who prefer the quiet anonymity of South Tampa to flashy, overheated South Florida.

    This week, as a warrior fell in Tampa, the event was fawned over by spotlight-hungry locals. The spectacle diminished not one, but multiple institutions, beginning with the FBI, the CIA, and the Army. What Taliban bullets could not do, our own culture did.

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

    Flickr photo: by amanderson2: A very tame pirate ship in Gasparilla, 2010.

  • The Rise of the Third Coast

    In the wilds of Louisiana’s St. James Parish, amid the alligators and sugar plantations, Lester Hart is building the $750 million steel plant of his dreams. Over the past decade, Hart has constructed plants for steel producer Nucor everywhere from Trinidad to North Carolina. Today, he says, Nucor sees its big opportunities here, along the banks of the Mississippi River, roughly an hour west of New Orleans by car.

    “The political climate here is conducive to growth,” Hart explains as he steers his truck up to the edge of a steep levee. “We are here because so much is going on in this state and this region. With the growth of the petrochemical and industrial sectors, this is the place to be.” Already, some 500 people are working on the project. When completed in 2013, the plant—which is expected to process more than 3.75 million tons of iron ore a year—will create about 150 permanent jobs immediately. Another 150 are expected after a second development phase.

    Nucor isn’t alone in coming to Louisiana, or to the vast, emerging region along the Gulf Coast. The American economy, long dominated by the East and West Coasts, is undergoing a dramatic geographic shift toward this area. The country’s next great megacity, Houston, is here; so is a resurgent New Orleans, as well as other growing port cities that serve as gateways to Latin America and beyond. While the other two coasts struggle with economic stagnation and dysfunctional politics, the Third Coast—the urbanized, broadly coastal region spanning the Gulf from Brownsville, Texas, to greater Tampa—is emerging as a center of industry, innovation, and economic growth.

    The Gulf area long lacked industry. Even when the Spaniards and the French ruled it, the Gulf was a planters’ region, and its economy was largely dependent on exports of indigo, sugar, and cotton. The economy also relied on the slave labor that made such exports possible, a state of affairs that continued until the Civil War. After the war, the region therefore lost much of its economic influence as growth shifted to the rail-dominated east-west axis, though the construction of the Panama Canal eventually helped New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, again become busy ports. Developing slowly, the Third Coast’s agricultural economy was dominated largely by tenant farmers, who in 1930 constituted more than 60 percent of the agricultural producers in an arc from Texas to Georgia.

    The Gulf region also suffered from vulnerability to natural disasters. In 1900, more than a century before Katrina, the deadliest hurricane in American history all but destroyed Galveston, Texas. In 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood inundated a 27,000-square-mile area, much of it in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. And then there was the hot and humid climate, especially miserable in those pre-air-conditioning days.

    What Joel Garreau, in his landmark book The Nine Nations of North America, writes about the South as a whole—that it became a “region identified with stagnation—backward, rural, poor and racist, a colony of the industrialized north, enamored of an allegedly glorious past of dubious authenticity”—applied with particular force to the Gulf Coast, whose major cities, especially New Orleans, were seen as hopelessly corrupt and decadent. It’s no surprise that for much of the last century, the region exported people, particularly those with skills, to other parts of the United States.

    So it’s particularly striking that the region’s steady economic growth is now attracting so many people. Over the past decade, Texas and Florida have ranked first and second among the states in net domestic immigration, combining for a gain of roughly 2 million people. Together, Houston and Tampa have gained more than 1.5 million people over the course of the decade; in fact, in 2008 and 2009, net domestic migration to Houston was the highest of any major metropolitan area. An examination of migration flows to Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa by Praxis Strategy Group, where I work as a senior consultant, shows that many of their new citizens are coming from the East and West Coasts, especially New York and California. Also over the past decade, Houston has attracted as many foreign immigrants, relative to its population, as New York has—a considerably higher rate than in such historical immigration hubs as Chicago, Seattle, and Boston, though still lower than in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.

    What’s more, the Third Coast is winning the battle of the brains. Over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau, 300,000 people with bachelor’s degrees have relocated to Houston. Between 2007 and 2009, as demographer Wendell Cox has chronicled, New Orleans—which had hemorrhaged educated people for the previous few decades—enjoyed the largest-percentage gain of educated people of any metropolitan area with a population of over 1 million. The New York Times reported in 2010 that Tulane University, the city’s premier higher-education establishment, had received nearly 44,000 applications, more than any other private school in the country. The largest group of applicants came not from Louisiana but from California, with New York and Texas not far behind.

    Thanks to all this immigration, the population of the Third Coast has grown 14 percent over the past decade, more than twice the national average. The growth continued even when the Great Recession struck in 2008. Between 2008 and 2011, Houston grew by 6.7 percent, according to census estimates, while New Orleans expanded by 6.9 percent; over the same period, the nation’s population increased by only 2.5 percent. New Orleans, the biggest population loser in the first half of the last decade, is now the fastest-growing U.S. metropolitan region. Many smaller cities in the region—Brownsville, Gulfport, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge, for example—have also grown faster than the national average. Overall, the Gulf region is expected to be home to 61.4 million people by 2025, according to the Census Bureau.

    Many of the region’s new arrivals are attracted by the low cost of living. The median home-price-to-income ratio in Houston, Tampa, and New Orleans is roughly one-half that of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or San Jose. Over the last decade, Houston boasted the highest growth in personal income of any of the country’s 75 largest metropolitan areas.

    The region’s most dramatic appeal, however, is its remarkable employment growth. Between 2001 and 2012, the number of jobs along the Third Coast, according to Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI), increased by 7.6 percent, well over three times the national growth rate. The vitality of the Third Coast persisted even during a brutal recession, with four metropolitan areas—Houston, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and New Orleans—gaining jobs between 2008 and 2012, even as the nation’s job rolls shrank by 3.6 percent. Of the three states that have recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, two—Texas and Louisiana—are on the Third Coast.

    The region’s job-creation engine is powered by the growth of basic industries: manufacturing, energy, and agricultural commodities. The region from south Texas to Florida now bristles with scores of new steel plants, petrochemical facilities, and factories producing everything from airplanes to canned food. Along with the Great Plains and the Intermountain West, the Gulf Coast has enjoyed a huge boost from energy and other commodity growth. Over the past decade, Texas alone has added nearly 200,000 oil- and gas-sector jobs, with an average salary of about $75,000. Thanks largely to expansion in energy, manufacturing, and engineering services, Houston now boasts a considerably higher per-capita concentration of STEM jobs—those relating to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics—than Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, according to an analysis by EMSI.

    The magazine Site Selection says that four of the Gulf states are among the nation’s 12 most attractive states to investors: Texas topped the list, with Louisiana ranking seventh, Florida tenth, and Alabama 12th. Texas and Louisiana also ranked first and third among the 50 states in terms of new plants built or being constructed. “There’s been a drastic change in the business climate here,” says Chris McCarty, director of the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “A lot of regulations have been moved aside, and there’s a big push by the state to get out of the way.”

    Energy is the key driver. The Third Coast already accounts for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s oil and gas employment, despite the federal crackdown on offshore drilling after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The region boasts new shale plays, such as those now being developed in northern Louisiana, and massive crude reserves, which follow the arc of the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to New Orleans.

    The future for American energy is bright. According to the consultancy PFC Energy, the United States is on course to surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil and gas producer sometime during this decade. With the Atlantic and Pacific coasts either banning or sharply curtailing energy production, the Gulf’s pro-business, right-to-work states have emerged as the likely staging ground for this energy resurgence. Here, unlike in California or New York, support for energy development tends to be highly bipartisan. Third Coast Democrats—such as Louisiana U.S. senator Mary Landrieu, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (her brother), and Houston mayor Annise Parker—can be as ferocious in their defense of the industry as any Republican. “Texas and Louisiana understand the oil business,” says Ralph Phillip, vice president of a Valero oil refinery located just a few miles from the rising Nucor steel plant. “They understand what this industry is all about and expect you to manage the risks. If you want to do a permit in California, they won’t return your call. But here they want everything to work.”

    Not only does the energy industry employ people and pay them well; the effect works in reverse, too, with a growing pool of skilled workers offering companies like Nucor and Valero a compelling reason to expand into the Third Coast. “When you are building a petrochemical facility, you have a great need for skills in such things as maintenance and construction,” Phillip points out. “If you open up in another part of the country, you have to bring in people to run things. Here, the skills are all over the Gulf.”

    Another important part of the region’s economy is exports, since trade patterns are shifting away from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and toward the Gulf. Since 2003, the Third Coast’s total exports have tripled in value, and its share of total American exports has grown from roughly 10 percent to nearly 16 percent. Last year, trade reached record levels at the Port of New Orleans, says Donald van de Werken, director of the U.S. Export Assistance Center in that city. Louisiana has become a dominant player in the agricultural-export industry, with half of the nation’s grain exports going through the state’s ports. Houston now ranks as the top port in the United States in terms of total value of exports; New Orleans ranks fifth.

    The trends favoring the Third Coast will accelerate further once the $5.25 billion Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2014, as I pointed out in Forbes last year. The wider canal will be able to accommodate Asian megaships, which are currently forced to dock in California. That will open the Gulf to more Pacific trade, since most northeastern and West Coast ports have been reluctant to make the necessary capital investments to capture it. China’s abandonment of the Maoist ideal of self-sufficiency and its growing willingness to rely on imports of food and other items represent a huge opportunity for the region.

    When Garreau published Nine Nations 30-some years ago, he predicted that as growth kicked in, the Gulf region would “clot” into an archipelago of cities similar to the Boston–New York–Washington megalopolis, or to the band stretching from San Diego through Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle. If he proves right, Houston will be the hub of this new system, much as New York anchors the East Coast and Los Angeles the West.

    The greater Houston metropolitan area is one of the fastest-growing in the country; its population, now 6 million, is expected to double over the next 20 years. Houston is also the nation’s third-largest manufacturing city, behind New York and Chicago. Over the past decade, the city and its surrounding communities have added almost 20,000 heavy-manufacturing jobs, the most of any metropolitan area in the United States. Further, Houston has the third-largest representation of consular offices, after Los Angeles and New York, and it hosts more Fortune 500 companies—22, as of 2011—than any city other than Gotham. Over the past half-century, says Federal Reserve economist Bill Gilmer, Houston has consolidated its position as the center of the global fossil-fuel industry. In 1960, Houston was home to just one of the nation’s large energy firms, ranking well behind New York, Los Angeles, and even Tulsa; by 2007, 16 such companies were headquartered in Houston, more than in those three cities combined.

    The burgeoning health-care industry is also finding a home in Houston, especially at the Texas Medical Center—“the largest medical complex in the world,” its website boasts. Like so many things in Houston, this cluster of 48 nonprofit hospitals, colleges, and universities owes its existence largely to the energy industry. According to its chief executive, Richard Wainerdi, the center benefits from “probably the biggest confluence of philanthropy in the world, and a lot of it is oil money.” Every day, 160,000 people enter the vast campus, equal in size to Chicago’s downtown Loop; its office space, now over 28.3 million square feet, exceeds not only that of downtown Houston but also that of downtown Los Angeles. The figure is expected to surpass 41 million square feet by the end of 2014, making the center the seventh-largest business district in the nation.

    Houston’s solid business climate empowers entrepreneurs. Between 2008 and 2011, according to a study by EMSI, the number of self-employed workers grew more quickly in Houston than in any other large metropolitan area. Greater numbers of educated workers are coming, too: Houston’s total increase in people with bachelor’s degrees over the past decade bested Philadelphia’s, was three times that of San Jose, and was twice that of San Diego. “I don’t get the pushback I used to get” from potential recruits, says Chris Schoettelkotte, who founded Manhattan Resources, a Houston-based executive-recruiting firm, 13 years ago. “You try to find a city with a better economy and better job prospects than us!”

    Though Houston has always been a good place to do business, it continues to suffer from a bad cultural image. In 1946, journalist John Gunther described Houston as a place “where few people think about anything but money.” It was, he added, “the noisiest city” in the nation, “with a residential section mostly ugly and barren, a city without a single good restaurant and of hotels with cockroaches.” The miserable city that Gunther described no longer exists, but residents on the other two coasts have been slow to acknowledge that development, despite Houston’s first-class museums and lively restaurant scene. “Let’s face it, we have a bad reputation,” says L. E. Simmons, a legendary Houston energy investor. “But the good news is, it keeps the stylish opportunists out. It makes us kind of an urban secret.”

    Houston’s cultural weakness—more perceived than real these days—has long been New Orleans’s strong suit. Yet the Big Easy’s long-standing appeal to artists, musicians, and writers did little to dispel the city’s image as merely a tourist haven, and a poor one at that. The problem, as Hurricane Katrina made all too plain, was a corrupt city plagued by enormous class and racial divisions and one of the lowest average wages in the country. The city’s urban core continues to endure one of the highest violent-crime rates in the nation.

    Though energy is responsible for much of New Orleans’s recent economic growth, the city has also begun attracting the information industry. Since 2005, New Orleans’s tech employment has surged by 19 percent, more than six times the national average. And at a time when movie production has dropped nationally, Louisiana has nearly tripled its production of motion pictures, from 33 per year in 2002–07 to 92 per year in 2008–10.

    East of New Orleans, Mobile has a different strength: manufacturing. Nearly 1.5 million cars and trucks are made within four hours of the city. In fact, the Third Coast, together with the adjacent southeastern manufacturing belt, is now competing with the Great Lakes as the center of the automotive industry. And Tampa, with robust population growth and Florida’s largest port—including a container terminal expanding from 40 acres to 160 acres—is poised perfectly to take advantage of any opening of Cuba, a country with which the city has had a long economic relationship.

    The region’s ascendancy, however, faces significant impediments. Gilmer says that the greatest risk to growth comes from Washington, especially if a second-term Obama administration cracks down even more aggressively on offshore oil development. Federal regulators’ reluctance to let drilling resume in the wake of the BP oil spill ruined hundreds of New Orleans–area businesses. Potentially strict new controls on extracting gas by means of hydraulic fracturing could slow the energy boom further, which in turn would derail the expansion of petrochemical and other manufacturing facilities.

    Perhaps more troubling are social problems, some the legacy of centuries of underdevelopment. Despite the influx of skilled and college-educated workers, Third Coast states continue to lag in college graduation rates and the percentage of their adult populations with college degrees. Of the 18 metropolitan areas across the Third Coast, only two—Tallahassee and Houston—have a higher percentage of college grads than the national average of 30 percent. When you rank states by their students’ proficiency in math and science, only one Third Coast state—Texas—sits near the middle of the list. Efforts to reform public education—notably, Louisiana’s new statewide voucher program and aggressive expansion of charter schools—offer some hope of addressing these weaknesses. In a new report, government efficiency expert David Osborne describes New Orleans’s reforms as a “breakthrough.” The results, he says, are “spectacular: test scores, graduation rates, college-going rates, and public approval have more than doubled in five years.” He adds, “I believe this is the single most important experiment in American education today.”

    And the obstacles facing the Third Coast today aren’t so different from those that once confronted other American economic dynamos. In the nineteenth century, New York was seen as a hopelessly corrupt sewer. In the early twentieth century, Los Angeles was dismissed as superficial and equally corrupt, with only one industry: fantasy. Few would make those claims today.

    It is much the same with the Third Coast. Weather, education, and, in some places, a legacy of corruption still present considerable challenges to its ascendancy. But if the region can surmount these challenges—and it appears to be succeeding at this—the Third Coast could become one of the major forces in twenty-first-century America.

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

    This piece originally appeared at The City Journal.

    New Orleans photo by Bigstock.

    Joel Kotkin is a City Journal contributing editor and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.

  • The Emerging Professional, Scientific, and Technical Sector

    Although the professional, scientific, and technical industry sector makes up only 6% of the U.S. workforce, it was responsible for 10% of national job growth from 2010 to 2012. In addition, the broad industry (NAICS 54) grew by 6% in the past two years, which illustrates our nation’s march toward a more technical, STEM type workforce. There are over 9.2 million jobs in this industry, which is driven by sub-sectors like computer system design services and management, scientific, and technical consulting services.


    The Industries

    In this post we’d like to give you a better picture of the top sub-sectors that are driving the professional, scientific, and technical sector. To do this, we’ve selected 16 six-digit industries that fall into this sector. Each one is either:

    1. A big employer (offices of lawyers or engineering services),
    2. Showing impressive % growth since 2010 (media buying or translation and interpretation services), or
    3. Adding a lot of jobs (computer systems design or custom computer programming).

    We have included the 2010 and 2012 job totals, change, % change, and top occupations that staff each industry. Many of these sectors can be thought of as “specialists” that generate their income by providing consulting or professional services to their consumers. NOTE: We have not included every sub-sector of NAICS 54 on this list.

    NAICS Code Description 2010 Jobs 2012 Jobs Change % Change Top Occupations
    Source: QCEW Employees, Non-QCEW Employees & Self-Employed – EMSI 2012.3 Class of Worker
    541512 Computer Systems Design Services 726,989 815,729 88,740 12% Software Developers, Computer Systems Analysts
    541511 Custom Computer Programming Services 697,318 768,093 70,775 10% Software Developers, Computer Systems Analysts
    541611 Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services 487,428 544,976 57,548 12% Management Analysts, Services Sales Representatives
    541330 Engineering Services 911,012 947,188 36,176 4% Civil Enginners, Mechanical Engineers
    541613 Marketing Consulting Services 207,357 234,470 27,113 13% Management Analysts, Market Research Analysts
    541712 Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Biotechnology) 440,152 463,887 23,735 5% Medical Scientists, Biological Technicians
    541211 Offices of Certified Public Accountants 415,253 436,074 20,821 5% Accountants, Bookkeeping Clerks
    541810 Advertising Agencies 200,344 214,083 13,739 7% Advertising Sales Agents, Public Relations Specialists
    541380 Testing Laboratories 147,147 160,565 13,418 9% Chemical Technicians, Chemists
    541214 Payroll Services 151,406 164,762 13,356 9% Accountants, Bookkeeping Clerks
    541711 Research and Development in Biotechnology 141,037 148,561 7,524 5% Medical Scientists, Biological Technicians
    541614 Process, Physical Distribution, and Logistics Consulting Services 105,799 112,025 6,226 6% Management Analysts, Business Operations Specialists
    541110 Offices of Lawyers 1,256,437 1,260,717 4,280 0% Lawyers, Paralegals
    541930 Translation and Interpretation Services 25,534 29,794 4,260 17% Interviewers, Interpreters and Translators
    541830 Media Buying Agencies 12,510 15,336 2,826 23% Advertising Sales Agents, Public Relations Specialists
    541360 Geophysical Surveying and Mapping Services 17,409 18,898 1,489 9% Surveying and Mapping Technicians, Architects
    Total 5,943,133 6,335,157 392,024 7%

    Observations:

    • Computer systems design and custom computer programming services are the clear leaders and have added a ton of jobs — 89,000 and 71,000 jobs respectively, representing 12% and 10% increases. Software developers and computer system analysts are key occupations for these two sectors. If you are looking for a job, these are fantastic occupations and industries to focus on.
    • While not a large sector, media buying agencies has the fastest % growth (23%) since 2010. This translates to nearly 3,000 new jobs in an industry that employs 15,000. From a talent perspective, advertising agencies (which grew by nearly 14,000 new jobs, or 7%, since 2010) is similar to media buy agencies. Advertising sales agents and public relations specialists are two common occupations that should be in demand across these two sectors.
    • The biggest sector on this list is offices of lawyers. It employs 1.26 million, but has had zero job growth since 2010.

    These are the big “E’s” on the eye chart, but other sub-sectors are also worth noting. Research and development (research and development in the physical, engineering and life sciences and research and development in biotechnology) as well as testing laboratories are showing good growth. Together they have added 45,000 new jobs since 2010. They all employ medical scientists, biological and chemical techs, and chemists.

    Industries related to business operations also appear to be thriving:

    • Offices of certified public accountants (436,000 total jobs, 21,000 new jobs in two years, 5% growth)
    • Payroll services (165,000 total jobs, 13,000 new jobs in two years, 9% growth)
    • Process, physical distribution, and logistics consulting services (112,000 total jobs, 6,000 new jobs in two years, 6% growth)
    • Administrative management and general management consulting services (545,000 total jobs, 58,000 new jobs in two years, 12% growth)

    Geography

    Before we take a closer look at the actual occupations, let’s consider how these jobs are distributed. Using Analyst, we filtered for which states have the highest concentration of the 16 sub-sectors. Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia have by far the highest concentration of these industries. These three geographies are also the only areas that we would call “highly specialized” for these jobs, which means that the concentration of professional, scientific, and technical jobs is more than 60% greater than the national average, and is actually getting closer to twice what a typical region has. After that, we see that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, New Mexico, and California have concentrations between 1.2 and 1.59, which means the jobs are 20-60% more concentrated in these states (the national average equals 1.0).

    The other states’ concentrations are closer to or (in most cases) below the national average. Why are most states below the national average? Good question. This is because the states with higher concentrations have such a huge number of these jobs: they throw off the average. This is a great illustration of “clustering.”

    Now, if your state doesn’t have a high concentration of these jobs at the moment, fear not. Quite a few states out there have shown some pretty impressive growth for these industries over the past two years. In particular, North Dakota (17% since 2010), Delaware (13%), Georgia (12%), Utah (11%), Vermont (11%), New York (11%), Washington (11%), and South Carolina (10%). A lot of states have shown moderate growth and just a handful have actually declined.

    Finally, here are the large MSAs with the highest concentrations (1.2 and up). The San Jose and Washington, D.C. MSAs have concentrations more than twice as high as the national average. See the table for more detail:

    MSA Name 2010 Jobs 2012 Jobs Change % Change 2012 Avg. Annual Wage 2010 National Location Quotient
    Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 374,638 391,991 17,353 5% $124,495 2.85
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 99,801 109,231 9,430 9% $157,425 2.55
    San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 167,627 187,350 19,723 12% $133,194 1.88
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 192,212 207,628 15,416 8% $127,130 1.79
    Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 119,558 132,099 12,541 10% $95,774 1.61
    San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 99,262 102,426 3,164 3% $112,513 1.61
    Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 81,553 87,155 5,602 7% $102,484 1.50
    Raleigh-Cary, NC 32,701 35,499 2,798 9% $89,675 1.48
    Baltimore-Towson, MD 81,539 87,509 5,970 7% $102,246 1.44
    Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX 49,224 55,773 6,549 13% $102,732 1.42
    New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 505,778 551,933 46,155 9% $121,856 1.38
    Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 159,168 165,037 5,869 4% $110,591 1.36
    Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 124,980 142,268 17,288 14% $95,338 1.27
    Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 144,338 154,709 10,371 7% $110,109 1.26
    Kansas City, MO-KS 53,424 58,580 5,156 10% $90,296 1.25
    Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI 227,237 238,150 10,913 5% $108,363 1.24
    Columbus, OH 48,404 52,078 3,674 8% $90,348 1.23
    Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 90,243 101,010 10,767 12% $100,138 1.18

    The Occupations

    So what jobs are we talking about? We’ve mentioned a few already, but you’ll see a list of the top occupations for the 16 aforementioned sub-sectors below. These are jobs that we could consider “emerging” as these sectors continue to thrive. Note: The growth of these occupations isn’t quite as high as we’ve seen for some of the sub-sectors. This is mostly because the occupations are staffed across other industries that aren’t growing quite as much (or not at all).

    For this table, we’re including the occupations from our previous table, their total employment (across all industries — not just the ones above), their 2010-2012 growth, average hourly wage, and typical education level:

    Occupation Total Employment, 2012 2010-2012 Growth Avg Hourly Wage Avg Ed Level
    Computer Systems Analysts 527,350 5.0% $38 45% Bachelor’s
    Software Developers and Computer Systems Analysts 996,902 8.0% $44 50% Bachelor’s
    Management Analysts 727,348 5.0% $36 41% Bachelor’s
    Services Sales Reps 710,385 2.5% $25 38% Bachelors
    Civil Engineers 269,908 1.4% $37 57% Bachelor’s
    Mechanical Engineers 253,033 6.5% $38 52% Bachelor’s
    Biological Technicians 75,167 1.6% $19 37% Bachelor’s
    Accountants 1,273,877 3.7% $30 56% Bachelor’s
    Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing Clerks 1,859,752 2.5% $17 39% Some College (no degree)
    Medical Scientists 104,396 7.0% $37 64% Doctoral
    Busuiness Operations Specialists 1,004,963 1.2% $30 33% Bachelor’s
    Lawyers 768,596 0% $51 97% Professional Degree
    Paralegals and Legal Assistants 269,061 2.7% $23 34% Bachelor’s
    Interviewers 228,666 2.8% $15 35% Some College (no degree)
    Interpreters and Translators 68,895 8.2% $22 30% Bachelor’s
    Advertising Sales Agents 186,417 1.4% $22 47% Bachelor’s
    Public Relations Specialists 233,604 3.5% $26 56% Bachelor’s
    Surveying and Mapping Technicians 51,896 0% $20 37% Some College (no degree)
    Architects 110,512 0% $33 52% Bachelor’s

    Observations:

    • All but four of the 18 occupations are dominated by a workforce that has attained at least a bachelor’s degree. The only jobs where this is not the case are bookkeepers (39% have some college, no degree), medical scientists (64% doctoral degree), lawyers (97% professional degree), and surveying and mapping technicians (37% some college, no degree).
    • Translators and software developers have the highest growth percentage (8.2% and 8.0%, respectively) since 2010. They are followed by medical scientists (7%) and mechanical engineers (6.5%).
    • Lawyers, architects, and surveying and mapping techs did not experience any growth since 2010.

    Here are a few helpful definitions if you’d like to explore some of these jobs further:

    1. Computer systems analysts – Analyze science, engineering, business, and other data processing problems to implement and improve computer systems.
    2. Management analysts – Conduct organizational studies and evaluations, design systems and procedures, conduct work simplification and measurement studies, and prepare operations and procedures manuals to assist management in operating more efficiently and effectively.
    3. Biological technicians – Assist biological and medical scientists in laboratories. Set up, operate, and maintain laboratory instruments and equipment, monitor experiments, make observations, and calculate and record results. May analyze organic substances, such as blood, food, and drugs.
    4. Medical scientists – Conduct research dealing with the understanding of human diseases and the improvement of human health. Engage in clinical investigation, research and development, or other related activities. Includes physicians, dentists, public health specialists, pharmacologists, and medical pathologists who primarily conduct research.
    5. Interviewers – Interview persons by telephone, mail, in person, or by other means for the purpose of completing forms, applications, or questionnaires. Ask specific questions, record answers, and assist persons with completing form. May sort, classify, and file forms.
    6. Advertising sales agents – Sell or solicit advertising space, time, or media in publications, signage, TV, radio, or Internet establishments or public spaces.
    7. Surveying and mapping technicians – Perform surveying and mapping duties, usually under the direction of an engineer, surveyor, cartographer, or photogrammetrist to obtain data used for construction, mapmaking, boundary location, mining, or other purposes.

    Conclusions

    So, quick summary:

    • Though it is small, the professional, scientific, and technical sector is responsible for a greater and greater share of jobs.
    • The jobs tend to be more concentrated in specific areas, namely Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.
    • The jobs tend to be associated with four-year degrees.
    • The industries tend to be more highly specialized — meaning, they add value and do a lot of consulting work based on that expertise.
    • Business operations, logistics, software, scientific research, and engineering are the major areas of focus.

    Data and analysis from this report came from Analyst, EMSI’s web-based labor market tool. Please contact Rob Sentz (rob@economicmodeling.com) if you have questions or comments. Follow us @desktopecon.

    Lab technician photo by Bigstock.

  • For A Preview Of Obama’s America In 2016, Look At The Crack-Up Of California

    Conservatives of the paranoid stripe flocked to the documentary “America: 2016” during the run up to the election, but you don’t have to time travel to catch a vision of President Obama’s plans for the future. It’s playing already in California.

    Some East Coast commentators like Jeff Greenfield saw the election as “a good night” for the Golden State, which the President carried by 20 points, 10 times his margin elsewhere — a massive bear hug from Californians. It certainly was a great night for Democrats, who now have a two-thirds majority in the state legislature and can spend a massive tax increase that targets families making over $250,000 a year.

    These results assure that California will serve as the prime testing ground for President Obama’s form of post-economic liberalism. Every dream program that the Administration embraces — cap and trade, massive taxes on the rich, high-speed rail — is either in place or on the drawing boards. In Sacramento, blue staters don’t even have to worry about over-reach because the Republicans here have dried into a withered husk. They have about as much influence on what happens here as our family’s dog Roxy, and she’s much cuter.

    California now stands as blue America’s end point, but contrary to the media celebration, it presents not such a pretty picture. Even amidst our decennial tech bubble, the state’s unemployment is among the highest in the country, and is trending down very slowly. Over the past decade, California has slowed as a source of fast-growth companies, as a recent Kauffman Foundation study shows, while other states such as Washington, Virginia, Texas and Utah have gained ground.

    Old-style liberals might point out that California’s progressive policies have not done much for the working- or middle-class folks often trumpeted as its beneficiaries. Instead income inequality has grown far more than the national average. True, the fortunate sliver of dot-com geniuses make billions, but the ranks of the poor have swollen to the point that the state, with 12% of the nation’s population, account for one third of its welfare cases. Large parts of the state, notably in the interior regions, suffer unemployment in the 15% range and higher.

    Demographics may be working to the Democratic Party’s favor, but not so much for the state. As California loses its allure as a place of opportunity for all but a few — the best connected, educated and affluent — the state is losing its magnetic appeal to migrants from both inside and outside the state. Domestic migration has been negative for 18 of the past 20 years; immigration from abroad is at the lowest point in the past two decades. In terms of growth in college-educated residents, only San Diego managed to add more than the national average from 2000 to 2010; both the Bay Area and Los Angeles were considerably below. (See “The U.S. Cities Getting Smarter The Fastest“)

    The growing diversity, a good thing in itself, masks a demographic stagnation. California, remarkable for its population growth over the past century, now is heading toward “zero population growth,” notes economist Bill Watkins; the state now barely grows 1% a year. Los Angeles, the state’s largest urban area, grew less, in total numbers, in the last decade than at any time in the last 100 years.

    Although this might elicit hosanas among greens, who generally would like to see fewer people, the emerging reality is sobering. Increasingly the state bifurcates between a generally older, predominately white and Asian coast, and an interior increasingly populated by generally less affluent Hispanics and African-Americans. California now ranks near the bottom in science skills, and while its population over 65 is the fifth largest in the nation, the number of those under 35 is only 23rd. And the future looks even bleaker: California’s eighth graders rank a pathetic 47th in terms of science test scores.

    So how did the ladder of opportunity crack in a state that has massive natural and human resources, not to mention a kind climate and spectacular scenery?

    To some extent, California is suffering the aftereffects of a century of success. Over that period, a large coastal affluent class, now increasingly elderly, enjoyed a spectacular run of rising real estate prices and in some places, like Silicon Valley, a progression of stock windfalls. Once split among liberals and conservatives, this group is now almost uniformly deep blue, as epitomized by Marin County, which voted almost three to one for Obama.

    Blacks, Hispanics and young people may be the new core of the Democratic Party, but  aging affluents may be the most important constituency. Unlike minorities or young people, they have increasingly little reason to support growth. After all, they have theirs and more people simply means more traffic, congestion and crowded schools. Increasingly many affluents also don’t have children — the liberal heartland of San Francisco has among the lowest fertility rates on the continent — the need to create jobs and opportunities for the next generation is not a pressing priority. Feeling “good” about themselves, by voting for the progressive agenda, is good enough for themselves.

    Perhaps the most shocking impact of California’s shift to one-party rule has been the complicity of the once powerful business community. In recent years, California’s business community has accommodated itself to the state’s ever higher taxes and regulations. They acquiesced meekly to the state’s climate change regulations, making the development of anything than largely undesired dense housing developments all but impossible. Industries that use energy — including oil refineries but also chip-makers and server farms — simply go elsewhere, either to another country or across the border to less relentlessly regulated states.

    In the battle over the Proposition 30 tax hike, notes small business advocate Joel Fox, Governor Brown and his legislative allies prevented business leaders from opposing the tax hike. “It was a lot of support the Governor — or else,” he says. Some business organizations, like the establishmentarian Bay Area Council, even actively promoted the income tax increase, which makes the state’s rate the highest in the continental United States. For this, they get praise from progressive mouthpieces like The San Francisco Chronicle as “brave business leaders.”

    To me, this “bravery” looks like a lot more like “Stockholm syndrome,” where a hostage, as famously happened with Patty Hearst, begins to identify with their captors. Once world-beaters and fierce political competitors, California’s business leaders know that if they oppose the Governor or the legislative leadership’s tax or regulatory agenda, he can threaten them with measures specifically targeted at their industry. So the magnates meekly accept an impossible business climate, knowing, like much of the state’s middle class, that they will be welcomed elsewhere.

    In this sense California business has devolved into something analogous to Mexican enterprise under the old PRI regime. If you want to survive, you bow, curtsey and pay up — or else. Business demanded little in return, for example, insisting that education funds be conditional on comprehensive reform. After the election some business types belatedly have started to express concerns about the new Democratic supermajority and what they will do with those new tax revenues. But their inevitable fallback strategy will likely be falling on one knee to beg Governor Brown to save them from an ever more invigorated progressive majority.

    This cringing and economically counterproductive approach to governance will soon make its appearance in a Washington. In the next few months, business lobbyists will wear out their knee pads trying to appease the increasingly all powerful regulatory clerisy. Some of the new players may also be the very people who have been killing California. There’s already widespread talk of bringing L.A.’s term-limited Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to Washington for a big cabinet posting, perhaps as Transportation Secretary. All this rewards an empty suit who has presided over Los Angeles’ economic and demographic decline, leading that great city to the brink of bankruptcy, and a political system rife with cronyism.

    But in Barack Obama’s America, failure can often pave the road to success. In this age, incompetence is no barrier to promotion, and failed states like California and Illinois are taken not as examples to avoid but as models to emulate. So if you want to get an advanced look at what America could look like in 2016, don’t go to the movies. Just hop a plane to California; after all, the Golden State is a wonderful place to visit in winter. And , as things are going, we will need the cash.

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

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Barack Obama photo by Bigstock.

  • A Housing Preference Sea Change? Not in California

    For some time, many in the urban planning community have been proclaiming a “sea-change” in household preferences away from suburban housing in the United States.

    Perhaps no one is more identified with the "sea-change" thesis than Arthur C. Nelson, Presidential Professor, City & Metropolitan Planning, University of Utah. Professor Nelson has provided detailed modeled market estimates for California in a paper published by the Urban Land Institute, entitled The New California Dream: How Demographic and Economic Trends May Shape the Housing Market: A Land Use Scenario for 2020 and 2035 (He had made generally similar points in a Journal of the American Planning Association article in 2006).

    Professor Nelson says that the supply of detached housing on what he defines as conventional sized lots (more than 1/8 acre) is far greater than the demand in California (Note 1). He further finds that the demand of detached housing on smaller lots is far greater than the supply. Professor Nelson’s conclusions are principally modeled from stated preference surveys, which can mislead if people act differently when they make choices in the real world.

    The Modeled Demand Estimates

    Nelson models the demand for housing types in California’s largest four planning regions (Southern California Association of Governments for the Los Angeles area, and the Bay Area Association of Governments for the San Francisco-San Jose area, the San Diego Association of Governments and the Sacramento Area Council of Governments). He estimates 2010 both supply and demand. His demand estimates rely strongly on data from three early 2000s stated preference surveys conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

    • Nelson’s data indicates a strong preference for multi-family housing, which he places at 62% of demand in 2010, compared to the 2000 supply of 42%. Thus, the demand for multi-family housing is suggested to be one half above the supply.
    • The most stunning conclusion, however, is an over-supply of detached housing on conventional lots that Nelson estimates. Compared to a 2000 supply of 42% of the market, Nelson estimates the demand to be only 16%. This would indicate the supply of such housing to be more than 2.5 times the demand as is indicated in Figure 1.

    Nelson’s findings on conventional lot detached housing have obtained the most attention. He surmises that virtually all of the demand over the next 25 years can be met by the existing stock of conventional lot detached housing. This is music to the ears of many urban planners, who have for decades demonized  the suburbanization that has been preferred by the overwhelming majority of Californians (and Americans, and people elsewhere in the world where they can afford them).

    Actual Demand: Revealed Preferences: 2000-2008

    To perform a similar analysis, we used revealed preference data: the actual change in housing by type from the 2000 Census data to the latest American Community Survey (ACS) 2006-2010 data at the census tract level (Note 2).  

    In contrast to Professor Nelson’s estimates, the demand data indicates a strong continuing preference among Californians for detached housing on conventional lots. From 2000 to 2008 (the middle year for the 2006-2010 data), 51 percent of the new occupied housing in the four planning areas is estimated to have been detached on conventional lots (Figure 2). This is more than three times the 16% demand estimate in Professor Nelson’s data. In fact, the actual demand was higher than the 2000 supply (42%), indicating that the demand for detached houses on conventional lots has increased.

    If there is a sea change, it would appear to be in multi-family housing. In contrast with the 62% share for multi-family dwellings modeled by Nelson, the actual demand indicated in the census tract data was two-thirds less, at 19% (Figure 3), well below the supply of 43 percent in 2000. This suggests a tanking of demand for multi-family housing, even as builders, in California and elsewhere, put more product on the market.

    Why Accounts for the Difference

    Various factors appear likely to contribute to the difference between the modeled demand and the actual demand.

    Smaller Lots and Higher Density Do Not Mean Shorter Commutes: The PPIC survey questions implied a connection between larger lots (lower density) and longer commutes. This is the broadly shared perception, but in reality houses on smaller lots (necessarily in higher density neighborhoods) do not mean shorter commutes. This is illustrated in a chart by Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) researchers on page 62 of The New California Dream. In the original SCAG document, the authors note that "commuting time is about the same for all density" (Figure 4).  This is not surprising, since higher densities are associated with more intense traffic congestion and with greater transit use, both of which lengthen commutes (Note 3).

    The "higher density means shorter commute" myth is rooted in the obsolete mono-centric conception of the city. Almost all US urban areas have become poly-centric with job locations highly-dispersed, as jobs have followed people to the suburbs. Gordon and Lee (Note 4) have shown that work trip travel times in the United States are shorter to dispersed employment locations than to central business districts or secondary business centers (such as "Edge Cities").  

    Invalid Perceptions of Transit Mobility: Professor Nelson also stresses stated preference responses showing that many people would prefer to live near transit service. All things being equal, who wouldn’t?

    But all things are not equal. Living near transit does not mean practical transit access to most of the urban area. In most cases, only a car can provide that. Transit systems are necessarily focused on downtown areas (central business districts), which contain, on average, only 8% of employment in the four planning regions. , Travel to other destinations is usually inconvenient, because of time-consuming transfers, or   not available at all.

    A Brookings Institution report indicated that 87 percent of people in California’s major metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Diego and Sacramento) live within walking distance of transit. Yet, the average employee can reach only 6% of the jobs in their respective metropolitan area in 45 minutes (Figure 5). By contrast, the average work trip travel time ranges from 25 minutes to under 30 minutes in the four planning regions .

    Households thinking about a move to higher density could have been, upon more serious examination, deterred by transit’s severe mobility limitations. 

    Data Insufficiently Robust for the Modeling: There is also the potential that the PPIC surveys, with their general questions, were not of sufficient robustness to support Professor Nelson’s assertions. For example, PPIC did not define the size of small lots.

    Planning and Reality

    If households were so eager to move from detached houses on conventional lots to smaller lots, 2000 to 2008 would have been the ideal time. The mortgage industry was literally falling over itself to fund home purchases. Urban core wannabes could have flooded the market pursuing their smaller lot "stated preferences." The actual, revealed preference data says they did not, which is also indicated by the continuing strength of suburban growth relative to central city growth (Note 5).

    Thus, the modeled demand estimates in The New California Dream appear to be at substantial odds with the actual demand.This is much more than an academic issue. The conclusions of The New California Dream have achieved the status of sacred text in the canon of urban planning and are mouthed unquestioningly by organizations like the Urban Land Institute.

    Worse, demand estimates from The New California Dream are being relied upon in regional transportation plans being developed by California’s metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). This is particularly risky because these same MPOs have been granted greater power over housing under California’s Senate Bill 375, goaded on by a sue-happy state Attorney General’s office. The attempt by MPOs to impose their housing plans and regulations on consumers could well backfire, for investors in condominium and multifamily housing.  This would not be a first time that   developers followed urban planning illusions like lemmings over a cliff, to which huge losses in the last decade attest. The more destructive effects, however, are likely to be paid by households and the economies of California’s metropolitan areas.

    ———

    Note 1: More than 70% of the detached housing stock was on conventional lots in 2000.

    Note 2: There is no census tract data on detached house lot size. We scaled the detached housing data from the 2000 census to match Professor Nelson’s distribution of detached housing supply by lot size, using population density. Nelson’s method and ours were sufficiently similar that the results should have been roughly comparable. As the text indicates, they were not.

    Note 3: In each of the three PPIC surveys, respondents are asked to choose between housing alternatives that are high in the questions to commute "lengths." From the description and survey instruments in the PPIC reports, there is no indication that respondents were given any idea what commute "length" means. There are two way to judge commute "length." One is distance or miles, while the other is time. Based upon the PPIC survey instrument, it cannot be known which definition was perceived by the respondents.

    Even so, it seems more likely that the term "commute length" was perceived by respondents in time rather than in distance by respondents. Each day, people have only so many hours and minutes available. However, distance is not so constrained, depending upon the speed of the commute. Further, the extensive research on commuting often refers to "travel budgets," which are expressed in time, not distance.

    Note 4: Reference: Gordon, P. and B. Lee (2012), "Spatial Structure and Travel: Trends in Commuting and Non-Commuting Travels in US Metropolitan Areas," draft chapter for the International Handbook on Transport and Development edited by Robin Hickman, David Bonilla, Moshe Givoni and David Banister.

    Note 5: The most recent year (2010-2011), for which the Census Bureau had issued invalid municipal population estimates, indicated a continued the trend toward suburban rather than urban core growth, as has been shown by Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko (see: Even After the Housing Bust, Americans Still Love the Suburbs).

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    Photograph: Suburban San Diego

    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.”