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  • A Racially Polarized Election Augurs Ill for Barack Obama’s Second Term

    President Obama, the man many saw as curing the country’s “scar of race,” won a second term in the most racially polarized election in decades. Overall, the Romney campaign relied almost entirely on white voters, particularly in the South and among the working class. Exit polls showed that almost 60 percent of whites voted for Romney. The former Massachusetts governor even won the majority of whites in California and New York.

    In previous elections, including 2008, such a performance would have been enough to assure a GOP victory. But America’s demographics are shifting, with racial minorities constituting upwards of one quarter or more of the vote, and growing.

    Essentially, Obama’s margin of victory was made up not only by a strong base of African-Americans but also Latinos, who appear to have voted for him more than two to one, a slight improvement from his 2008 performance. And for the first time, Latinos accounted for one in ten voters, up from 8 percent four years ago.

    But—despite his poetic, inclusive victory speech—this alliance of people of color could create a potential tragedy for our democracy. This is not because of the final result, but because it suggests that, unless there is some massive change in GOP politics, we may see a re-hardening of politics along racial lines.

    The election showed the efficacy of the new racial politics. Appeals to Latinos paid off massively, even though it may have cost the president some white votes. If Latinos remain solidly Democratic, the new racial outcasts will increasingly be middle- and working-class whites.

    The Democrats will continue to press race, as some Republicans did in the past (remember Willie Horton?), because it  works. The president’s race-conscious campaigning this year was assisted in part because the media did not stress his ties to abrasive reverends like Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery. He also did well with his Latino gambit since, once again, the media, including many conservatives, were sympathetic to amnesty.

    So where does this go from here? Political revolutions—particularly successful ones—tend to shift rapidly into excess. With the recalcitrant white vote seemingly neutralized, the Obama team can now ever more openly embrace a multicultural politics of the kind Bill Clinton was careful to avoid. One sure voice pushing for race-centered politics will come from Attorney General Eric Holder, who largely embraces the idea that affirmative-action policies should be continued until Latinos and African-Americans achieve social and economic parity with whites.

    Affirmative action and other race-sensitive policies—promoted even by ersatz minorities like new senator Elizabeth Warren—could characterize our politics for the next decade or more. These divisions are already evident among millennials, where whites, particularly evangelicals, have become increasingly alienated from the president. White millennials, who backed Obama in 2008, went with Romney this year 52-44, according to an exit poll—a particularly troubling shift. The gap between white and minority millennials this year appears to be as high as 30 points—a bad augur.

    And racial divisions may become worse if the economy continues to sputter. President Obama may be beloved among Latinos and African-Americans, but his economic policies have not been friendly to them. This is particularly true, ironically, for blacks, who, as Walter Russell Mead among others have pointed out, have fared worst of all in the recession. This situation could be exacerbated by growing financial stress in cities and states, whose governments have traditionally been major employers of black white-collar workers.

    Unless growth comes back, this means minorities, particularly African-Americans, could become ever more strident in their demands. Their appeal to an administration—particularly now that it faces no new elections—that at times seems sympathetic to a racialized agenda could be stronger than could be imagined just a few years ago. This could end badly. In the long run, history has shown, groups that look too much to government (the Irish, for example) do not fare as well as those, such as yesterday’s Jews and today’s Asians, who look more to education and entrepreneurship.

    Alienation among whites is also likely to increase. Like its minority counterpart, the white working class—including millennials—has also suffered in the recession, and suffers double-digit unemployment.  Although this entire generation can be considered screwed, young whites—and young white males—are particularly so. Not only have many been left behind by the economy, but they have been deemed less worthy of assistance by the emerging new ruling class.

    In many ways, this has ominous implications. To date America’s white working and middle classes have not drifted toward the kind of nativist movements that have risen in France, Germany, and, most recently, Greece. Yet a group that feels ignored by the establishment, and feels increasingly like second-class citizens in their own country, can drift in that direction.

    The great tragedy here: the major challenges facing America are not primarily racial. They include stimulating economic growth for the broadest portion of our population. We need better jobs, roads, and bridges and less symbolism or redress for past sins. If politicians think the way to success is to open the scar of race, we will create the kind of politics that will undermine hope for our future success.

    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 Daily Beast.

    Voter sign photo by Bigstock.

  • Why Obama Won: Hispanics, Millenials Were The Difference

    President Obama won re-election primarily because he did so well with two key, and expanding, constituencies: Hispanics and members of the Millennial Generation. Throughout the campaign, Democratic pundits pointed to these two groups as being the key difference makers. They were right.

    Let’s start with Hispanics, arguably the biggest deciders in this election. Exit polling shows Obama winning this group — which gave up to two-fifths of their vote to George Bush — by over two to one. In 2008, Obama improved his winning margin with Latino voters from 67% in 2008 to 69% in 2012. And for the first time they represented 10% of the overall electorate.

    Obama and the Democrats went after this constituency, taking some risks along the way about a backlash among whites. Obama’s move to not deport young undocumented immigrants if they came to this country as a child and met certain other criteria blurred any negative impact from a still weak economy. In contrast, Romney’s platform of more or less making life so horrible that undocumented immigrants have canceled out all the GOP candidate’s credible economic and social proposals that might have appealed to this group.

    To this Republican political malpractice there is an even greater threat: the loss of younger voters. According to CNN exit polls, Millennials voted for Obama 60% to 36% and accounted for 19% of all voters, up from 17% in 2008. Although white male millennials turned slightly less enthusiastic, the President’s huge margin among white women as well as minority millennials — roughly 40 percent of this huge generation — more than made up the difference.

    Why did this happen? Generational theorists Mike Hais and Morley Winograd attribute this to several factors. One is the intrinsic optimism of millennials, even in the face of very difficult economic challenges. This blunted Romney’s main argument. Other issues such as gay marriage, favored by most millennials, as well as a more tolerant attitude towards immigration drove them away from the GOP and towards the President.

    When you combine millennials and minorities, especially Hispanics, the road to recovery for Republicans gets more and more difficult. If you win close to 60% of the white vote and lose the electoral college decisively, you are heading into very difficult territory. In addition, Hais and Winograd note, there are other constituencies — women, particularly singles as well as those with graduate degrees broke strongly for the President.

    Together, they conclude, these groups constitute what they describe as a “21st Century Democratic majority coalition for the next few decades at least.”

    So where does this leave the now hapless GOP? Certainly they can’t blame evangelicals and white working class voters who, for the most part, rallied to their cause. The problem now is based in history and demographics. The old Reagan coalition– as has been evident here in California for a decade — is literally too old, and too white, to overcome the combination of minorities, millennials and educated professionals that Hais and Winograd have identified.

    What should the Republicans do now? They certainly will need to move away from the immigrant-bashing that cost them dearly among the key ascendant voting blocs of millennials and Hispanics. They will also have to turn their family friendly message into something defined more positive; Romney’s tragedy was to embrace Rick Santorum’s views on issues of gay marriage and contraception instead of embracing family, which is a core value among millennials.

    Hais and Winograd add they will need to redefine their party as more open, and appeal to millennial preference for local, grassroots solutions. In the coming four years, there will be an opportunity to challenge the “top-down” decisions made by Obama’s now empowered clerisy. But this opportunity could be lost if Republicans continue to run against the tide of history instead of shaping it to their own advantage.

    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..

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Addis Abeba

    Addis Abeba is the capital of Ethiopia and calls itself the "diplomatic capital" of Africa, by virtue of the fact that the African Union is located here. Yet Ethiopia is still one of the most rural nations in both Africa and the world. Ethiopia also appears to be among the most tolerant. Various forms of Christianity claim account for approximately 65 percent of the population, with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Coptic) holding the dominant share. At the same time there is a sizable Muslim minority, at more than 30 percent of the population. Ethiopia has been spared the interfaith violence that has occurred in some other countries where there are large religious minorities.

    Growing Urban Area

    Addis Abeba is among the fastest growing urban areas in the world. Since 1970, the population has increased by nearly three times (Figure 1). However, the spatial expansion of the urban area has been much greater. The earliest available Google Earth satellite photos (1973) indicate that the urban land area (continuous urban development) has expanded over 12 times. Thus, the urban spatial expansion has been at least four times that of the population over the since the early 1970s (Figures 2 and 3).

    Since 1973, the urban population density of Addis Abeba has declined almost three quarters, from approximately 75,000 per square mile or 29,000 per square kilometer to 20,000 per square mile or 8,000 per square kilometer. Addis Abeba represents yet another example of the counter-intuitive reality of growing urban areas simultaneously becoming less dense, because population growth occurs the generally less  dense periphery in an organic city. It is not unusual for urban analysts to (wrongly) assume the opposite.

    One of the results of the spatial expansion is a significantly better lifestyle for residents of Addis Abeba, consistent with the view of Professor Shlomo Angel, who decries attempts to constrain cities within artificial boundaries (compact city policies) because they can deny people both a adequate housing and a decent standard of living.

    The Economy

    Ethiopia is one of the poorest nations on earth, with a 2010 gross domestic product-purchasing power parity (GDP-PPP) per capita of just above $1,000. This places it 170th out of 183 geographical areas according to the International Monetary Fund. By comparison, the GDP-PPP of the United States was $47,000 and Singapore $57,000.

    Ethiopia’s low income reflects  Ethiopia’s relativey low rate of urbanization. With 17 percent of the population in rural areas (outside urban areas), urbanization is concentrated in Addis Abeba (3.1 million), which is the only urban area in the nation with more than 300,000 population. Ethiopia can expect to experience a strong rate of urbanization in the decades to come, as people flock to the cities to seek better standards of living. By 2030, the total number of urban residents is projected by the United Nations to rise to 28.4 million from 13.9 million in 2010.

    Urbanization has its problems, but also economic advantages. The GDP-PPP in Addis Abeba, according to a Price-Waterhouse-Coopers estimate, is up to six times higher than that of the rest of the nation. Assuming that this ratio held to 2010, The GDP-PPP per capita of Addis Abeba would be $6,000 or more.

    Moreover, Price-Waterhouse-Coopers predicted that Addis Abeba would experience the 5th greatest economic growth to 2025, out of 151 urban areas. This would result in growth greater than that of Shanghai and Beijing. The four predicted to grow faster are the two large Viet Nam urban areas (Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh) and two in China (Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta and Changchun in Manchuria).

    The Urban Core

    As would be expected in a developing world urban area, there is a large urban core with mixture of government and private buildings, literally surrounded by lower income, principally informal housing. With this predominant informal housing, the population density of the urban core is by far the highest in Addis Abeba (See Photo: Informal Housing in the Urban Core: Parliament and Holy Trinity Dome in the Distance).


    Photo: Informal Housing in the Urban Core: Parliament and Holy Trinity Dome in Distance

    Major government offices and cultural facilities are in this area, such as the Parliament, the prime minister’s residence, museums, the residence of the primate of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Coptic), the most important cathedral, Holy Trinity, in which former Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie  is buried, as well as the Catholic Cathedral and the largest Mosques.

    The New Addis Abeba

    There’s been a huge expansion of the periphery around Addis Abeba. Extensive tours around the urban area provide evidence of relative prosperity. It appears that Addis Abeba is rebuilding itself around its urban core. There is major construction in three directions from the urban core.

    The greatest activity is in the Bole District, which includes Bole International Airport, to the south of the urban core. There is a substantial amount of new commercial high-rise construction within a few kilometers to the north of the airport, along two major arterials and in between (Photo: Bole Corridor Development). There are also a large number of large, private condominium buildings. The Bole Corridor represents an edge city, in the sense defined by Joel Garreau in his seminal book Edge Cities  two decades ago. This is also the location of the largest Ethiopian Orthodox Church (see top photo) in the country.


    Photo: Bole Corridor Development

    An eastern corridor stretches for 6 miles/10 kilometers from what is locally called the "Chinese Road," a ring road built largely with the support of the Chinese government. There are many new commercial buildings, government buildings, public and private condominiums, and at the edges, large new detached houses (See photo: Detached Housing in the Eastern Corridor).


    Photo: Detached Housing in the Eastern Corridor

    To the west, principally, the southwest, is a new residential neighborhood composed principally of condominiums, generally up to five floors (Photo: Southwest Residential Area).


    Photo: Southwest Residential Area

    China in Africa

    Chinese financial assistance is not limited to the ring road. Much of the funding for the impressive new African Union headquarters (photo) was provided by the Chinese government. Further, a new light rail line will be largely financed by China. At the same time, the massive construction evident in the newer, outlying districts of Addis Abeba resemble (at least in a modest way) the urban development that has occurred in China over the past few decades.


    Photo: African Union Headquarters

    Conclusion

    The economic progress evident in Addis Abeba is encouraging. The government policies  are allowing the city to expand naturally as it grows, which facilitates  better lives for its citizens. It can only be hoped that the day will come that people in developing world urban areas, such as Addis Abeba, will enjoy the high standards of living that have been achieved in the developed world.

    Photo: Holy of Holies, Bole Mehani Alem Church (Ethiopian Orthodox Churches all have a replica of the “Ark of the Covenant,” behind a screen, which is referred to as the “holy of holies”). According to the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, the Ark of the Covenant, which tradition indicates, contained the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. The Ark was maintained in the holy of holies in the Jewish temple. The Ethiopian tradition holds that the Ark was taken to Ethiopia and is now kept at a chapel at a church in Axum, which is 600 miles/1,000 kilometers north of Addis Abeba.

    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.”

  • Prairie Populism Goes Bust As Obama’s Democrats Lose The Empty Quarter

    Along Phillips Avenue, the main street of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the local theater’s marquee is a tribute to the late Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who was buried last month, and is still regarded as a hero by many here. But with McGovern gone, it seems that the Democratic tradition of decent populism he epitomized was being interred along with him.

    In his landmark 1981 book, The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau deemed the vast region stretching from the southern Plains well past the Canadian border The Empty Quarter. Along with the western strip of the neighboring Bread Basket that stretches up from central Texas through the Dakotas, the Quarter—covering much of the nation’s land and home to many of its vital natural resources—is in open revolt against the Democratic Party, threatening the last remnants of prairie populism.

    Although long conservative and GOP leaning, the Empty Quarter—containing Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and most of Alaska, along with inland California and Washington and parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Oregon—has a proud progressive tradition as well. Over the past half-century, many of the Democratic Party’s most respected leaders —McGovern, Senator Majority Leaders Mike Mansfield of Montana and Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and powerful figures like North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad—have represented the Plains.

    The tradition is still revered there, but today’s Democrats are becoming an endangered species    as the party has become ever more distinctly urban, culturally secular and minority dominated.

    While Obama lost most of the Quarter in 2008, this year polls show that he’s likely to be crushed there, despite the booming economy in many of the states. Obama’s popularity has dropped more in North Dakota, which has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate, than any other state.

    Amidst the growing anti-Obama tide, progressive Democrats in most of the Quarter have been increasingly marginalized, both by their own party and by voters.  In the past two years, Republicans picked up a Senate and House seat in North Dakota, and look likely to pick up another this year,  along with a Senate seat in Nebraska,  and quite possibly another in Montana.  They are also poised to claim the only remaining Democratic House seat in Utah, if Mia Love’s lead over Rep. Jim Matheson holds up.

    By the end of this election, it’s possible that only two classic Prairie Democrats—South Dakota’s Tim Johnson and Montana’s Max Baucus—will remain in the Senate, where they once formed a powerful caucus. The Plains states, plus Alaska, account for 50 Congressional seats and an equal number of electoral votes—more than Florida, North Carolina and New Hampshire combined.

    Why has this occurred? One problem, notes former Daschle top economic aide Paul Batcheller, lies with the “nationalization” of the Democratic Party—and its transformation from an alliance of geographic diverse regions to a compendium of narrow special-interest groups, so that under Obama, the Democratic Party has essentially become the expression of urban-dwellers, greens and minorities, along with public employees.

    This, says Batcheller, has “made it easier for Republicans to paint Democrats as in cahoots with the likes of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, etcetera.  And because politics has always been fairly civil here, having those coastal boogeymen to use has made it easier to paint Prairie Dems as having gotten Potomac Fever.”

    He also points to “changes in the media”—especially cable TV—that have made it more difficult for grassroots Democrats to make their case for their own interests, outside of the increasingly polarized national debate.  At the same time, Obama’s policies—focused largely on constituents in dense coastal cities—have widened the gap between the Plains and the Democrats.  It is increasingly difficult to be a successful Prairie progressive when that means striking out consistently against the very industries, from large-scale agriculture to fossil fuels, at the center of these economies.

    At the same time, the failings of Democratic big states, most notably California and Illinois, are not exactly advertisements for the virtues of modern progressivism. Particularly galling, notes Mike Huether, the mayor of Sioux Falls, have been the huge deficits and expanded welfare spending associated with the Obama Administration.

    “This is a fiscally conservative place, we don’t like deficits,” notes Huether, a lifelong Democrat whose city of 156,000 operates with a fiscal surplus. “People here want self-sufficiency. They are happy to give a hand up but they see that as short term and that’s it.”

    And the region’s self-sufficiency is an increasingly important part of our national debate, especially about energy independence. Although often dismissed as a land of rubes and low-end jobs, a study of the Plains  I conducted with the Praxis Strategy Group and Texas Tech University found that, overall, it has outperformed the rest of the country in virtually every critical economic measurement from job creation and wage growth to expansion of GDP.

    The area has also thrived demographically, with population growth well above the national average. Most of this has taken place in the region’s flourishing urban centers, from Ft. Worth and Midland, Texas to Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Fargo, Oklahoma City and Omaha. This growth includes migration from still de-populating smaller towns in the region, but increasingly includes migrants from the coastal areas as well as immigrants.

    More people now arrive in Oklahoma City from Los Angeles than the other way around.   And these arrivals are hardly poor Okies pushed back unwillingly; the Plains cities have become magnets for educated people. Over the past decade, the number of people with BAs in Sioux Falls has grown by almost 60 percent; Bismarck and Fargo saw growth of over 50 percent, while Oklahoma City, Omaha and Lubbock enjoyed forty percent increases. In contrast, the educated population of San Francisco grew at 20 percent and that of New York by 24 percent.

    Any coastal denizen who spends time in these cities may be surprised by the tolerance and lack of bible-thumping one encounters there. Social issues, notes Mayor Huether, have never been drivers in the Plains as they have been in parts of the Deep South. A quiet Nordic spirituality prevails here, rather than evangelical enthusiasm; people and politicians generally do not wear their faith on their sleeves. The real issue in the Plains centers around the future of the economy, and how best to bolster family and community; the Obama program, with its interest-group agendas, simply does not translate well in this environment.

    Ultimately, the red tide sweeping over the Plains is bad news, not simply for Democrats but for the country, part of the trend noted by Batcheller in which moderating regional forces within both parties—New England Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats—are losing ground.

    Prairie Democrats are crucial for ensuring that producers tangible staples—food, fiber and energy—have a space within their party’s tent, along with the big-city coastal consumers of those resources. Never mind the conservative cliché: If Democrats lose their remaining hold on the Plains, the nation’s parties will truly be split between makers and takers.

    This region is likely to become more important over the coming decades, providing much of the food needed for world markets as well as significant share of our new domestic energy. Its manufacturing, technology and service industries are also growing rapidly, integrating the area more into the national and global economies.

    Batcheller, among others, believe that the Plains Democrats may not become extinct, but their future will be limited in the increasingly polarized, and nationalized, political order. On the local level, particularly on key infrastructure projects like Lewis and Clark water project  that is being built to meet the needs of Sioux Falls and its environs, Republicans and Democrats are largely in agreement. Neither tea-party extremists nor greens can block progress towards widely accepted local infrastructure goals.

    One can only hope that the Prairie Democrats manage to survive. They have  contributed a unique brand of civically minded, decent social democracy that added much to the national debate. Egalitarian in intent, their brand of aspirational liberalism, fully content and compatible with notions of individual achievement and hard work, offers an alternative to the “know nothing” extremism increasingly dominant in both parties. This tradition of progressive decency could be sorely missed in the years ahead.

    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 Daily Beast.

    Sioux Falls photo by Jon Platek..

  • Honolulu Rail Project Legal Problems Mount

    According to the Hawaii Reporter, Honolulu’s rail transit project has lost a major legal test in The Federal Ninth Circuit Court, as Judge Wallace Tashima ruled in  HonoluluTraffic.com v. Federal Transit Administration et al that the city of Honolulu had violated federal environmental law on three counts.

    The plaintiffs included are a coalition of environmental, civic, political and taxpayer interests, including former Governor and mayoral candidate Benjamin Cayetano, University of Hawaii Law professor Randall Roth, Retired Judge Walter Heen, retired businessman and transportation expert Cliff Slater, Dr. Michael Uechi, Hawaii’s Thousand Friends, Outdoor Circle and the Small Business Hawaii Entrepreneurial Education Foundation.

    The plaintiffs and defendants differ strongly on the impact of the ruling, and the defendants are to return to court in December seeking a permanent injunction against the project.

    University of Hawaii Engineering Professor Panos Prevedouros told the Hawaii Reporter that the decision would require environmental planning revisions that could take up to 2 years.

    This setback is in addition to a previous unanimous Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that had already required construction to be suspended and which could delay project for at least a year, according to the Hawaii Reporter. The Supreme Court in Kaleikini v. Yoshioka, ruled that the city of Honolulu failed to comply with the state’s historic preservation and burial protection laws when it did not complete an archeological inventory survey for the 20-mile route before starting construction.

  • The Suburbs Could Save President Obama From Defeat

    President Obama’s disdain for suburban America has been well-documented. Yet, ironically, the current revival in housing, largely in those same suburbs, might be the one thing that could rescue his floundering campaign. Unlike the Democrat-dominated central cities and the rock-red Republican countryside, the suburbs remain the country’s primary contestable territory.

    With manufacturing facing global headwinds and Wall Street stagnating, the housing recovery is helping keep the still weak economy moving forward. Housing starts are at the highest level in four and a half years. Sales and prices are on the rise, and the vast majority of the action — despite the media’s focus on multi-family developments — is taking place among single-family homes that predominate in the suburban rings of our metropolitan area. Over the past two years, 76% of the new privately owned housing units completed were single-family homes, according to Census Bureau figures. In existing home sales, last year over 4.3 million single-family homes were purchased, compared to 520,000 condos.

    This trend is being driven by such factors as rental costs, which rose with the recession, a decline in foreclosures, low interest rates and, particularly in some markets such as Phoenix, investors who see long-run demand in single-family markets. Demand has sparked a nascent revival of homebuilding, now at the highest level since the Great Recession, although still half its historic rate.

    The housing recovery could make a particularly important difference in the election in key swing state suburban communities on the outskirts of Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Denver, and in the northern Virginia suburbs of the capital. In these areas, homes — not stocks and other financial assets — are the primary measure of wealth, and the most critical weathervane of economic wellbeing. Single-family home sales also spur other sectors of the economy, such as financial services, construction and the home furnishing industries in ways far greater than denser developments. The good feelings about the auto recovery have helped the president in industrial states; similarly the improved housing market gives him a lift in these critical suburban areas.

    Some Clinton-era Democrats, like former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Altman, recognize that expanding housing markets makes for stronger, broader-based economic growth. This is why historically Democrats favored single-family housing, from Roosevelt and Truman to Bill Clinton. Altman predicts a full-scale housing boom by 2015; if he’s right, and Democrats are in power, and on board, this could propel their ascendency for another generation.

    Of course from an ideological point of view, this emerging boom may not be much welcomed in the current administration. Most Obama backers in places like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including Secretary Shaun Donovan, have long predicted that suburbs are entering their death throes, predicting a massive movement of people from the suburbs to inner city areas. Where possible, HUD has tried to encourage “smart growth” by providing grants for projects aimed at greater densification.

    Yet these widely lauded efforts are swimming against the fundamentals of market demand, and at a cost to both the budget and longer-run economic growth. Despite misleading press reports, inspired in part by Census Bureau epistles focusing on increasing downtown populations, the vast majority of population growth has continued to take place far away from the urban core.

    Indeed over the last decade, while some downtowns have grown, they accounted for 1.3% of the overall population increase in the country’s largest metropolitan areas. At the same time, areas two to five miles from the central cores lost population while areas beyond 10 miles out grew by more than 20% and accounted for more than 60% of growth. Overall Americans have continued to vote with their feet for suburbs — overwhelmingly.

    Some urbanists, including some close to the current administration, claim that the realities of the last decade are now passé, a permanent victim of the housing bust. Yet in reality these claims appear largely off the mark. Recent Census estimates for last year, for example, were widely reported to show greater growth in core cities than suburbs, but turned out to be based on unsupported assumptions that all county growth occurred equally across geographies, making it impossible to judge the widespread claims of a massive movement “back to the cities.”

    At the same time, a new analysis by Trulia.com chief economist Jed Kolko, based on postal data, shows that growth rates were about the same. But in an attempt to discover actual preferences, Kolko then analyzed the growth rates by densities. Much of the “urban” growth, particularly in Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and throughout the Midwest, actually takes place in largely suburbanized, relatively low-density areas.

    Kolko found that the populations of “more suburban” neighborhoods grew 0.73% in the past year, more than twice as fast as the “more urban” neighborhoods, where growth was 0.35%. In fact, urban neighborhoods grew faster than suburban neighborhoods in only five of the 50 largest metro areas — Memphis, New York, Chicago, San Jose and Pittsburgh — and often by a really small margin. In the other 45 large metros, the suburbs grew faster than the more urban neighborhoods. Overall, Kolko concludes, household growth in most metropolitan areas was greatest the further from the core, and less closer to it.

    The movement of people into lower-density areas jibes with one of the biggest reasons for the current nascent housing recovery: the preference by roughly four in five Americans for a single-family house — usually but not always found in the suburbs — over an urban apartment. In a sense, then, the hostility to suburbs among the administration and the Democratic Party is both profoundly anti-democratic and anti-growth.

    Recovering housing prices provide a lifeline for our beleaguered middle class. A recovery provides greater employment to the very people — construction workers, manufacturers of home furnishings and real estate agents — who were among the biggest victims of the Great Recession. Some progressives might celebrate the diminishment of such jobs and prefer they now service the post-industrial uberclass, but it’s hard to see how a large part of our middle and working classes can maintain, much less ascend, without a strong housing sector.

    Signs of recovery, of course, extend beyond housing. Even malls, also long suffering, and under digital assault, are beginning to recover. Meanwhile rental apartments, once the darling of the speculative class, have begun to lose their momentum, in part due to improving home affordability. Massive overbuilding in some markets could lead to a new gusher of real estate tears. Something is happening here.

    Contrary to conventional wisdom, if the economy strengthens, the suburban and single-family market will do likewise in the years to come. First-time homebuyers will provide a strong source of demand for an increasingly scarce product. Rather than rejecting the ideal of owning a home, 84% of today’s renters still intend eventually to purchase their residence, according to a recent study by TD Bank.

    Homeownership and the white picket fence might be out of fashion among the cognoscenti, but not among new Asian immigrants, who are heading to the suburbs, or the rising number of 30-somethings, three quarters of whom, according to a recent Better Homes and Gardens survey, see homeownership as a “key indicator of success.”

    Although still in its early phases, President Obama would be wise to use the suburban housing recovery to help portray himself as the savior of the middle class. The most notable gains made by Romney in the polls recently have been in the suburbs. It may be too late for the president to make better strategic use of the incipient recovery for this election, but if he is victorious and can swallow his anti-suburban mindset and embrace what most Americans regard as their preferred emblem of success, he could help consolidate a strong Democratic hold on the suburbs that could play a deciding role in our politics for the decades ahead.

  • Despite the Great Recession, Obama’s New Coalition of Elites Has Thrived

    The middle class, we’re frequently told, decides elections. But the 2012 race has in many ways been a contest between two elites, with the plutocratic corporate class lining up behind Mitt Romney to try and reclaim its position on top of the pile from an ascendant new group—made up of the leaders of social and traditional media, the upper bureaucracy and the academy—that’s bet big on Barack Obama.

    As recently as 2008, the Wall Street plutocrats were divided, as Obama deftly managed to run as both the candidate of hope and change and the candidate of the banks. But this year, the vast majority of the corporate ultra-rich have backed Romney, who after all is one of their own, his top five sources of donors all financial giants: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo. As The Wall Street Journal memorably noted, in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to back Obama than Goldman Sachs—and in 2012, none has done more to help defeat him. Those titans, along with the powerful and well-heeled energy sector, have placed most of their bets on the Republican.

    But don’t mourn too much for Obama, who’s held his own in the cash race by assembling a new, competing coalition of wealthy backers, from the “new hierarchies of technical elites” that Daniel Bell predicted in 1976 in The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society. For that group, Bell wrote, nature and human nature ceased to be central, as “fewer now handle artifacts or things” so that “reality is primarily the social world”—which, he warned, “gives rise to a new Utopianism” that mistakenly treats human nature as something that can be engineered and corrected by instruction from their enlightened betters. This approach, although often grounded in good intention, can easily morph into a technocratic authoritarianism.

    Along with Hollywood, Obama’s big donors have come from the tech sector, government, and the academy—with his top five made up of the University of California, Microsoft, Google, the U.S. government, and Harvard. Tech heavyweights such as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have given maximum donations to the president, as have Eric Schmidt and four other top executives at Google.

    These idea wielders make fortunes not through tangible goods but instead by manipulating and packaging information, and so are generally not interested in the mundane economy of carbon-based energy, large-scale agriculture, housing, and manufacturing. They can afford to be green and progressive, since they rarely deal with physical infrastructure (particularly within America) or unions or the challenges of training lower-skilled workers.

    There is a growing synergy between science, academia, and these information elites. Environmental policies pushed by the scientific community not only increase specialists’ influence and funding, but also the emergent regulatory regime expands opportunities for academicians, technocrats, and professional activists. It also provides golden opportunities for corporate rent seeking, particularly among those Silicon Valley figures involved in a host of heavily subsidized “green” ventures, most famously Solyndra.

    In many senses, we are seeing a “progressive” version of the unlamented John Edwards’s two Americas. Much of the U.S. is struggling, but the Clerisy has thrived. Between late 2007 and mid-2009, the number of federal workers earning at least $150,000 more than doubled.

    As government has grown even while the economy staggers, the direct and indirect beneficiaries of that growth have hitched their carts to the administration. Many professors have been protected by tenure, even at hard-hit public institutions. Foundation and NGO heads, financed by philanthropy—much of it from often left-leaning Trustifarian inheritors—have remained comfortably secure, as have their good workers. And Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke’s money policies have funneled cash from return-starved investors into the coffers of tech and social-media companies.

    There’s an old name for this new group of winners: the Clerisy, which British poet Samuel Coleridge defined in the 1830s as an enlightened educated class, made up of the Anglican church along with intellectuals, artists, and educators, that would school the rest of society on values and standards.

    But in many ways the New Clerisy most closely resembles the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth. Most of Obama’s group serves, as Bell predicted, a “priestly function” for large portions of the population.

    This post-industrial profile has shielded the post-industrial elite from the harsh criticism meted out to Wall Street grandees and energy executives by green activists, urban aesthetes, and progressive media outlets. Steve Jobs, by any definition a ruthless businessman, nevertheless was celebrated at Occupy Wall Street as a cultural icon worthy of veneration.

    There are of course libertarians and even traditional conservatives in academia, the media, the think-tank world, Silicon Valley, and even Hollywood. But they constitute a distinct minority. For the most part, the members of the groups that make up Obama’s Clerisy, like any successful priestly class, embrace shared dogmas: strongly secular views on social issues, fervent environmentalism, an embrace of the anti-suburban “smart growth” agenda, and the ideal of racial redress, of which Obama remains perhaps the most evident symbol.

    As befits a technological age, the New Clerisy also includes now orthodox portions of the scientific community—figures such as President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren, NASA’s James Hansen, and the board of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These secular clerics have been extraordinarily influential about global warming, primarily advocating limited consumption by the lower orders.

    Energy marks the clearest demarcating issues between the plutocrats and the Clerisy. The regime of ever higher energy prices with its inevitable immediate impact of slower growth—long preferred by environmentalists and openly espoused by Energy Secretary Steven Chu—represents no real threat to the Clerisy and presents a boon to the “green” capitalists. Yet the rising hyper-regulatory state threatens to slow the overall economy, as it has in California, and to wreak havoc on the largely suburban, exposed middle and working classes.

    But energy is not the only issue dividing the two elites. The Clerisy—as can be seen clearly in the secular mecca of California—also seeks to impose mandates on more and more of private decision making, whether shaping college admissions and the composition of corporate boards, as well as basic choice in everything from housing types to food consumption.

    The Clerisy often employs populist rhetoric, but many of its leading lights, such as former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag, appear openly hostile to democracy, seeing themselves as a modern-day version of the Calvinist “elect.” They believe that power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats but with credentialed “experts,” whether operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations.

    This authoritarian tendency, often perceived as arrogant, has fueled revulsion among large parts of the nation, as evidence by the Tea Party 2010 sweep. The continued hostility of the bourgeois masses to the Clerical agenda appears to be helping Romney solidify his support in the countryside, the suburbs, and smaller cities.

    Of course, Romney himself is the very opposite of a populist. As president, he would offer four years of technocratic, corporate power. Yet at the same time, a Romney administration—contrary to the claims of Democratic operatives and at times also the mainstream media—would not embrace the savage worldview of Pat Buchanan, Sara Palin, or even Rick Santorum. It would be establishmentarian in a “sensible shoes” kind of way. Mormonism, as an old friend raised in the faith told me, combines “a Pentecostal theology with an Episcopalian mentality.” Expect something like George H.W. Bush, with a religious twist.

    The prospect of four years of plutocratic rule under Romney is no cause for celebration for those who would like to see greater social justice and reduced inequality. But it may prove less damaging to the country than allowing Obama’s new, secular priesthood to wreak damage on the economy that could take decades to unwind.

    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 Daily Beast.

    Barack Obama photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Cities Flying Too Close to the Sun

    I was honored to speak at a conference in Milwaukee over the summer called Milwaukee’s Future in the Chicago Mega-City. Chicago and Milwaukee are about 90 miles apart on I-94. There’s an Amtrak link that makes the journey in about 90 minutes. The two cities have been sprawling such that there’s now more or less continuous development along the lakefront between the two cities. Milwaukee has been a challenged city economically and demographically. Chicago has had its own serious problems, but has seen its already muscular core boom in terms of residents and investment. High end business seems to be doing well in Chicago, and the city gets pretty good press nationally.

    If you are Milwaukee, the idea of somehow tapping into Chicago naturally presents itself. Local leaders clearly see Milwaukee’s future as, if not a giant suburb of Chicago, at least a city for which Chicago’s cachet and prosperous zone somehow provides them with a leg up. As Richard Longworth put it, “Once an independent economic power of its own, Milwaukee now belongs to Greater Chicago.”

    The notion that proximity to Chicago or another mega-city* represents an unambiguous good seems nearly universal. While the mechanics and value basis of greater collaboration are often illusive, it’s assumed that such value must be present and such collaboration desirable. Not just Milwaukee, but places like South Bend, Indiana and Grand Rapids, Michigan look towards Chicago as an economic engine for them.

    But what if it this is actually backwards? What if proximity to Chicago or another mega-city is actually a curse, not a blessing?

    My friend Drew down in Indy has a model of this, clearly targeted as his own city but relevant to the discussion. He says that the Midwest is like a solar system with Chicago as the sun. As he see is it, Indianapolis is Earth – it’s the perfect distance from Chicago. A place like Cleveland is too far away – it doesn’t get enough heat and light. But Milwaukee is like Mercury – it’s too close to the sun and gets burned up.

    I suggested at the conference that one reason Milwaukee should want to active engage in shaping the interaction between the two regions is that the natural development could actually be negative. I had in mind here Providence, which is in a similar situation. Providence is 50 miles from Boston – that’s closer than Milwaukee is to Chicago, but Boston is also smaller than Chicago. Like Milwaukee, there’s a rail connection between the cities, with commuter service taking a bit over an hour.

    Providence, like Milwaukee, has struggled. In fact, it’s struggled far worse. Sticking with solar system thinking, my immediate gut take here has been that Providence is a brown dwarf of a city. Maybe at one time it generated real economic life force, but today is a shell of a metro region in many ways.

    Another similar example is New Haven, Connecticut, which is about 80 miles from NYC, and is a notoriously troubled city. And even being in the same state hasn’t helped Springfield, Mass at 90 miles from Boston. It too has struggled.

    Is this actually the pattern? Is proximity a negative indicator not a positive one? Does proximity drain vitality instead of creating it? Let’s consider further.

    I believe a lot of the thinking that being close is positive comes from the example of two very successful twin cities: Dallas-Ft. Worth and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Two things jump out at me about these, however. One, in both cases the cities are significantly closer than Milwaukee and Providence are to Chicago and Boston. Dallas is about 35 miles from Ft. Worth. Minneapolis and St. Paul actually abut each other, and the downtown-downtown trip by freeway is 14 miles. These actually are part of the same metro area by any standard.

    Two, the cities in these cases are reasonably balanced in size. Dallas is bigger than Ft. Worth and Minneapolis bigger than St. Paul, but it doesn’t have the feel of the vast disparity of say a Chicago vs. Milwaukee. Indeed, the difference is clear in how we compare the cities. With a Chicago and Milwaukee, metro area seems the way to go, but with the others municipal population seems a reasonable proxy.

    Another positive example might be Washington-Baltimore. The distance here is about 40 miles. These are separate metros, but overlap considerably and could potentially be combined. Also, Washington is only about twice as big as Baltimore, which is pretty hefty in its own right at 2.7 million people. Contrast Chicago at over six times as big as Milwaukee and Boston at almost three times as big as Providence, a number I think is understated since part of Southern Massachusetts that’s in Providence metro arguably has a strong Boston orientation as well. In any case, while the city of Baltimore remains infamous in many ways, the overall metro area has done well.

    So the idea that proximity is a positive could have originated in models that aren’t applicable. Being close works: but only if you are really, really close – say about 40 miles or better – and your size ratio is no more than about 2:1.

    Or maybe the latter might not even be necessary. There are a few examples of old industrial cities turned into suburbs in Chicago – Aurora (41 miles), Elgin (42 miles), and Joliet (44 miles) being the prime examples. These were once independent cities of sorts, and now are clearly suburbs. They aren’t nirvana yet, but proximity to Chicago has clearly invigorated them to a certain extent. The size ratio vs. the overall Chicago region or even just the city would obviously be huge. So perhaps the only question is whether you could plausibly be a true suburb.

    Interestingly, Detroit and Ann Arbor fit this and are only a bit over 40 miles apart, so also follows this rule. It may seem ludicrous to credit Detroit with injecting life into Ann Arbor, but I don’t think it would be as successful if it were isolated in the middle of the state. (Madison, Wisconsin succeeded on its own, but is a bit bigger and also the state capital).

    But it may even be worse than this. Back to my provocation a few paragraphs back, is it possible that not only does anything other than true suburban style proximity not help you, it might even hurt you? The examples of Milwaukee, Providence, New Haven, and Springfield suggest it’s at least possible. Now all of these are post-industrial cities that have clearly struggled for reasons other than proximity to a mega-city. Many similarly situated places (or even more badly troubled ones) are not near a much bigger city. But it’s worth considering the point.

    I hypothesize about it in terms of attempting to reboot a high value economy. If you are a high value business – say a biotech startup or some such – looking to locate in New England, why would you ever pick Providence over Boston? You wouldn’t – not unless they paid you a ton of money a la 38 Studios (a Curt Schilling backed video game company that went bankrupt after receiving $100 million in loan guarantees from Rhode Island). Not only is Providence itself an expensive place to live and do business, it’s talent and ecosystem disadvantaged. Why subject yourself to that when you can move 50 miles up the road to one of the world’s premier innovation areas? The kicker is that this applies to business ideas in Providence as well. You can launch your business in Boston and still basically stay where you live.

    I’m not a believer in the oft-repeated claim that these tier one cities are sucking all the talent out of smaller places. The numbers don’t back it up. Chicago has the second highest college degree attainment among large Midwest cities, but at 34.2% hardly towers over other regional cities, most of which are at least in the 30s, including Milwaukee. And Chicago’s growth in population with degrees is actually in the bottom half of large Midwest metros.

    However, perhaps there is a “dead zone” of sorts around mega-cities. This zone extends from the edge of their suburbs to some unknown outer radius. In that zone, perhaps black hole like, high value functions really are sucked into the mega-city. Or perhaps negative aspects of the mega-city like traffic and pollution act like kryptonite on the economy of cities in this zone. I don’t know for sure. It’s just a hypothesis to consider based on a few observations. I would love to see some research done into this. In the meantime, small cities near a very large one shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate their location as boon.

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

    Milwaukee photo by Bigstock.

  • Superstorm Sandy & The Beachfront Bailout

    Deadline reporters, especially in weather broadcasts from the surf line, have been wailing about “this enormous storm” or “the unfolding tragedy.” What they might also say is that hurricanes are a munificent windfall for newspapers, television stations, the federal government, construction unions, and politicians seeking reelection. In addition to classifying storms from one to five on the Saffir-Simpson scale, going forward it might also be possible to grade hurricanes as profit centers, or by the surge levels that they generate in reelection campaigns.

    By all (usually breathless) accounts, Hurricane Sandy delivered a wide band of damage and destruction to areas stretching from North Carolina to Maine. Along with a death toll now approaching 50, a 13 foot storm surge in New York harbor inundated parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and millions of residents around New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania lost power in their homes. The aftermath, unlike the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, however, is that the waters which flooded Manhattan’s streets, tunnels and subways are receding with ebb tides, although the damage from surging waves and fallen trees is widespread, especially across New Jersey.

    Although the storm will have cost the Mid-Atlantic region some $45 billion in cleanup costs, not to mention the loss of work days for many, even this perfect storm not seen in “a millennium” did not rack up the apocalypse that was predicted as Sandy “barreled” up the coast on its “rendezvous with destiny” in Atlantic City. From the teeth of the storm in New Jersey, my sister reported only an epic loss of cable and Internet.

    The reasons storms rarely appear as they are cast on television is because, instead of acts of nature with a lot of wind and rain, hurricanes are now best understood as political spectacles, somewhere between nominating conventions and state lotteries.

    Take the federalization of the disaster business. Previously storm damage and the costs of clean up were the responsibilities of states and municipalities, who in the first place made the decisions to allow homeowners to build houses and businesses on barrier islands, sand dunes, and low-lying waterfront property.

    For much of the twentieth century, insurance companies refused to write flood or hurricane policies for stilted houses perched precariously on Cape Hatteras or wherever, which angered wealthy political donors, who equate their life successes with owning beachfront property.

    Enter the federal government into the realm of disaster indemnification, when Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, to mandate that vulnerable home owners in potential flood zones purchase adequate insurance that private companies were refusing to cover. Think of it as Obamacare for beachfront homes.

    Although the legislation was designed to cover the undue risks of shore properties, it also gave the political parties a mechanism that would allow (for all those waterfront contributors) a building boom on hurricane-exposed barrier islands.

    At a time when global warming has increased the intensity and frequency of major storms and hurricanes (which are nature’s teapots blowing off steam), we are living with the fallout of an earlier era, when the federal government doubled down by writing insurance for beachfront condos from Maine to Texas.

    After the 2000 recount election came the transformation of Florida into a swing state in presidential elections, insuring that claim adjusters would reach hurricane damage zones as fast as FEMA’s first responders. Before the 2004 election arrived, four more hurricanes had passed over Florida. In their wake came billions in federal aid relief, just to insure that neither awnings nor chads would be floating in the wind.

    As powerful as hurricanes may be, they are no match for the construction lobbies, something I learned in the 1980s when writing about the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida.

    The then-director, Neil Frank, a man of ebullience and integrity, showed me a slide show on the back of his office door, explaining that it was folly to allow construction on Gulf and Atlantic barrier islands. That was thirty years ago, and since then cities of flimsy beachside construction have risen along the dunes.

    What I admired about Frank was his passion for hurricane preparedness. He had walked the beaches of Biloxi, Mississippi in 1969, after Hurricane Camille, and measured that surge at 25 feet—something he then extrapolated to other beaches around the United States, including Atlantic City. But in urging a ban on beachfront buildings, he was shouting into an ill wind.

    Not only was the federal government complicit in allowing places like Myrtle Beach to become housing projects (the poet Robert Watson called it “white Harlem by the sea”), it also assumed that its job performance could be measured by the number of blankets and water bottles that reached those crazy enough to “ride out” a major storm in their seaside mobile homes.

    No doubt this is the Katrina Effect in American politics: The truism that if a big storm hits, the best place for the president probably isn’t dockside in San Diego, playing Otis Redding tunes on a guitar. Nevertheless, it means that the federal government (not exactly a profit center these days) is on the hook for the rescues, the clean up, and the insurance claims.

    The sad reality of Hurricane Sandy is that, despite all the Weather Channel epithets that it was “the storm of the century,” a lot of it was ordinary. It wasn’t even technically a hurricane when it came ashore near Atlantic City. What made it destructive was its size, and that it arrived late in the hurricane season and, by chance, merged with other Atlantic and Canadian storm systems. Imagine, however, if it had been one of Neil Frank’s dreaded Category 4 storms?

    Undoubtedly, President Obama would love to turn Hurricane Sandy into a backdrop for reelection spots that show him compassionate to his fellow Americans in times of need. The problem is that neither Wall Street underwater nor the flooded roulette tables in Atlantic City makes an ideal photo op or headline (“President Vows: We Will Not Let This Stop Us From Gambling!”). And I doubt he wants to campaign as the Claims-Adjustor-in-Chief.

    Photo: MTA New York City Transit, Bus on the Move. Morningside Heights, 125th and Broadway, October 28, 2012, as Hurricane Sandy approached New York City.

    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 next book is “Whistle-Stopping America”.

  • Obama’s Base and Politics of Disappointment

    There may be no better illustration of President Barack Obama’s appeal than his ability to hold onto voters — minorities, single moms and young people — who have fared the worst under his presidency. But the bigger question as we approach Election Day may be whether these constituencies, having been mauled by the economy, show up in sufficient numbers to save the presidential bacon.

    Welcome to the politics of disappointment. Much has been said about the problems facing the middle class, who have been losing out since the 1970s. But the biggest recent losers have been groups like African-Americans. In the current economic downturn, middle class African-Americans have lost virtually all the gains they made over the past 30 years, according to the National Urban League. Median annual household income for blacks decline by more than 11 percent between June 2009 and June 2012, according to the Census bureau, twice the loss suffered by whites.

    African-Americans as well as Latinos have also borne much of the pain from the housing downturn. In fact, according to the Census, Latinos suffered the biggest loss of net worth, largely based by housing, in the recession of any ethnic group. The weakness in the housing market, which is now only beginning to recover, hurts many Latinos, who represent a large part of the nation’s construction industry workforce.

    Latinos have been doing so poorly under Obama’s tepid recovery that, by some estimates, more are headed back to Mexico than coming here. Many voters who might make a difference in November could be lounging in Michoacán or Oaxaca rather than Michigan or Ohio.

    As for the young, even those with college education, they still suffer high unemployment rates and constricted job opportunities. More than 15 percent of all workers between 18 and 24 are unemployed.

    A college degree does not assure success.  More than 43 percent of recent graduates now working are doingso at jobs that don’t really require a college education according to a recent report by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Not surprisingly, the stress levels among college freshman are the highest since data started to be collected, a quarter-century ago.

    Ironically the one group that has thrived under Obama — the affluent, including the dreaded “1 percent” — is also the class that has mobilized most aggressively against him. In 2008 Obama split the vote among those making more than $100,000 a year; this year. According to Gallup, the wealthier have shifted heavily to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, with those making over $180,000 favoring him by slightly more than 9 percent.

    Arguably the biggest change has taken place among those at the highest elevations. These include many of the executives of largest banks, who accepted federal bailouts and then helped themselves to huge bonuses in the ensuing years, largely due to the market impact of the Bernanke Monetary spigot. For example, both JP Morgan and Wells Fargo this month announced record profits.

    The top 1 percent of earners gained more than 90 percent of the benefits from the TARP-powered 2009-2010 recovery while the top 0.01 per cent by themselves garnered more than one-third.   They all but avoided serious investigations for their misdeeds; in fact, no major Wall Streeter has yet to go to jail for sending the world economy into disarray.

    Yet the very institutions like Goldman Sachs, who tilted heavily toward Obama in 2008, now favor Romney. Wall Street has sent Romney $37 million this year, and only $4.8 million to the president. For his big business money, the President relies instead on Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

    In contrast, the president continues to dominate his less affluent 2008 core constituencies. But it’s increasingly likely that the poor economy — particularly for these same groups — could depress turnout.  In 2008,   the record turnout of minorities, single women and young voters propelled the Obama near landslide. A weaker showing this year could make the election far close, as we are seeing in polls today, and could even allow Romney — the candidate of predominately white, married, middle class voters — to overcome his party’s chronic demographic shortcomings.

    Let’s start with Obama’s most loyal base, African-Americans. Though certain to turn out overwhelmingly for the president, Gallup reports that the number “likely” to vote has decreased somewhat from 2008. A recent Urban League report  suggested that a diminished African-American turnout could cost the president in such key swing states as Pennsylvania, Florida and even Ohio. A recent poll by Politico and George Washington University found that while 82 percent of whites are “extremely likely” to vote only 71 percent of African-Americans, and 70 percent of Latinos, expressed the same intention.

    Ominously, registration levels in many key African American areas such as Chicago  have dropped precipitously, by more than 12 percent compared to increases in some of the heavily white outer suburbs. Although Obama will still win his home state in November, prospects for Democratic house pick-ups have dimmed.

    More critical still has been a massive reduction in voter registrations    in heavily black and Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland). Recent attempts in many states to monitor voting could further reduce minority turnout.

    Latino voters are particularly affected by this move to monitor voting, since many may lack the right paperwork. But even so, there is a real enthusiasm gap, demonstrated by the unexpected decline in registrations among Latinos. Twelve million Hispanics were registered in 2008 and the number was expected to rise to 14 million by this election. Instead the total, as of the last election in 2010, was only 11 million, something that some experts link to Mexicans moving or returning home due to poor economic conditions.

    Arguably decisive in the swing states of Florida, Colorado and Nevada, mobilizing Latinos may pose the greatest challenge for the Obama campaign. In 2008, they voted two to one for Obama, and they seem likely to repeat that feat again this year.

    Even worse for the President, Latinos, like the other core constituencies, don’t appear to be as enthusiastic this year. With Latino unemployment well above the national average, support for the president has waned a bit from 2008 levels. If turnout also decline, this could prove decisive.

    This lack of enthusiasm appears among younger voters as well. Though Romney is winning white voters under age 30, particularly men, he is being hammered among both female and minority millennials. But the real issue may prove to be turnout. Growing alienation seems to have depressed enthusiasm among the young, with barely half of all under 30 pro-Obama voters now planning to turn out to the polls. If this persists, the youth vote will be less important this year from the record turnout that cemented the 2008 victory.

    As he loses ground among middle class whites and families, Obama will need for his core constituencies to show up. This where his “ground game” will be critical. If the key groups come out to the polls, forgetting or at least forgiving what has happened over the past four years, they can renew their faith in the gospel of hope and change for the next four.

    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 Reuters.com

    Barack Obama photo by BigStockPhoto.com.