New Geography

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  • Number of 18-24 year olds in United States, 2000 – 2050

  • Job Growth in College Towns, 2002 – 2008

  • Net Domestic Migration Rate of Baby Boomers age 55-64 from College Towns, 2004 – 2005

  • Number of people age 65 and older in the United States, 2000 – 2050

  • Number of People in the United States by Age Group, 2000 – 2050

  • Joe Sertich

  • Minnesota’s Iron Range Colleges Attracting Business

    Being a college president for thirteen years convinced me of the importance of addressing the interdependence between a campus and its town. Inspired by my third presidency, I saw the need to brand a strategy needed to revitalize community.

    We gathered 90 stakeholder partners for a full day meeting at Ironworld, a discovery center for the region to preserve its rich heritage and history. The local residents focused efforts on a place-based institution with the capacity to serve as a catalyst for pulling up the towns across Northeast Minnesota. That was in November, 2000.

    “True North,” in navigational terms, is a precise measurement used to calculate one’s direction. In this part of the world, “True North” came to symbolize a drive to unleash the potential of unique and resourceful college towns for what has been a hard-hit region. The goal was to use colleges as a catalyst to help local communities become viable places to live, learn, work and grow. Through a structured process of guided intervention, colleges and their communities learned how to change. I guess you could call it the first steps of reinventing college towns.

    We believed we had a society and lifestyle worth sustaining in the northland of America. Small to medium-sized towns represent the very foundation of society. These towns are the primary source of many aspects of our religious beliefs, traditional notions of family and property, and work ethic. These communities also afford an environment where we can enjoy the great outdoors, those things we love doing, whether it’s bicycling, hiking, skating, or just meeting with other people. These are things we believe are important to a good quality of life.

    Healthy communities require a strong economy, dependable healthcare, and basic infrastructure, including service and faith-based organizations. But demographic changes, usually driven by the economy, can overpower the healthy pillars of a community. That’s what happened on Minnesota’s Iron Range, mostly because of its reliance on a natural resource-based economy under increasing global pressure. We identified three existing industries critical to the future of the region: taconite mining and processing to make steel; timber; and tourism. In the face of challenges to these industries, people became very resilient; people were able, again and again, to respond to changes in the economy. This can also create a kind of lassitude, thinking the economy will eventually come back on its own. That’s why higher education, government, and the private sector needed to come together to guide a process for change.

    There was no better part of my job than getting our college faculty, staff, and students engaged with the town in ways that changed the traditional pattern of interaction. Each college town created a TechNorth Prep Center on its main street – for high-skill technology education and business development. We developed an ongoing alignment strategy to bring problem solvers, leaders and resource managers together in order to facilitate economic growth.

    All economies evolve and change. That’s why we didn’t sugarcoat those challenges that were frankly overwhelming, like an aging population, migration of young people and families out of the area, mines closing, and high unemployment rates. But we also knew our communities had many assets — including a strong tradition of public education .Our schools had to be more than temporary homes for students as they went off elsewhere We needed to create an environment and opportunities to keep at least some of them close to home.

    Today there are $6 billion dollars of private investments in development throughout the region. Once hard-hit communities are preparing for housing expansions, public infrastructure improvements, and increased population, including a migration of “downshifting“ Boomers. The area is building off of its unique assets, like natural beauty and quality of life, while utilizing its higher education institutions as catalysts for this change. Each college towns is reinventing itself to attract wealth to the community.

    So, if you’re still wondering why a college president is concerned with investments, economic growth, community development and jobs, it’s because of the saying, “As communities go, so go their colleges, and vice versa.” No one has or should have a greater stake in the future of their town than those of us who live in it and love it. Geography, history, economics, and politics combine to create an environment where strong community ties can help people to work together.

    The critical components of a healthy community are ultimately about the individual. Minnesota’s Iron Range is a remarkable place: stunningly beautiful and resource rich geography; diverse immigrant history; often turbulent economics; and “boot strapping iron range” politics. But now thanks to True North and the on-going process of reinventing college towns across the region we are gathering the resources to help prepare our communities for new opportunities.

  • Atlanta’s Atlantic Station: The Suburbs Come to the City

    Atlantic Station is a new development near the core of Atlanta being built on disused railroad tracks. It combines residential, housing and retail uses and, among proponents of the New Urbanist movement and is often held up as a model for developments to come.

    Atlantic Station is traditionally urban but is surprisingly suburban. On the surface, Atlantic Station appears to fit many of the New Urbanist design criteria. The buildings start at the sidewalk (pavement) line, rather than being behind parking lots. There are no indoor shopping malls. Instead the stores are directly on the streets, reminiscent of old downtowns or the first shopping centers, like Country Club in Kansas City.

    Some of the normally superficial New Urbanism, however, is even more ephemeral in Atlantic Station. For one thing, prime New Urbanist lynchpins — anti-automobile design, pedestrian orientation, transit orientation, paid parking, banning of big box stores — do not apply there.

    Throughout the development there are entrances at the sidewalk level that look like New York subway entrances. As in New York, they go down. But they don’t go down to a subway — that’s well beyond walking distance, across one of the nation’s widest freeways in Midtown. Instead, the stairs — at least 16 such entrances — lead down to a three-story parking lot that appears to be under the entire development. Houston could not have done it bigger or better.

    The architects did not design Atlantic Station from the ground up — they designed it with three levels of parking under the stores, residences and streets. Thus, this “pedestrian oriented development” sits on a foundation of automobile orientation. And don’t think that the parking lots are only below the surface. Virtually all of the tall office and residential towers have a number of floors above the parking lot platform, though to the credit of the architects, they are not obvious.

    Another rather suburban feature is free parking. A staple of current urban planning is that parking should not be free. The opponents of free parking believe that if only free parking were outlawed, people would flock to inner cities and transit. And to be sure, the little street parking provided in Atlantic Station is metered, which means people must pay. But on all of the parking meters there are signs to the effect that two hours of free parking are offered in the underground lots.

    As would be expected in a development theoretically designed for pedestrians, the sidewalks are sufficiently wide. Indeed, the sidewalk on the 17th Street overpass from Midtown to Atlantic Station is more than 30 feet wide (perhaps 10 meters). Yet it is a lonely place and ultimate proof that if you build sometimes they don’t come. There is another pedestrian oriented dimension in which Atlantic Station fails — for all the sidewalks and sidewalk store entrances, Atlantic Station provides a free shuttle bus for travel around the development.

    Toward the west side of the development is a “Millennium Gate,” which the Atlantic Station calls “Atlanta’s greatest monument.” This seems a bit hyberbolic. Millennium Gate is an imitation of the Arch d’ Triumph in Paris, even to the point of Latin inscriptions around the top. One doesn’t need the American flag hanging from the center to realize that this miniature imitation fails abjectly — it is reminiscent of the Paris Arch d’ Triumph no more than the pathetic Eiffel Tower is on the Las Vegas Strip. Something original would have been more appropriate.

    Then there is the general new urbanist problem with affordability. The lowest priced apartments in Atlantic Station rent for $1,100 per month, at least one-quarter above the median rent for the Atlanta metropolitan area. The lowest priced two bedroom residences appear to sell for at least 2.5 times the median house price in the area, except that the median house is almost four bedrooms.

    For all this, Atlantic Station is rather full of itself as visionary, noting that people can reduce their journey to work time by living and working there. The Atlantic Station website notes that “Atlantans spend more time commuting to work than most anywhere in the world.” In reality, Atlantans spend less time commuting than most people who live in large urban areas outside the United States. True, Atlantans spend more time commuting than most people in the United States and that is to be expected with what is close to N underpowered freeway and arterial street system.

    What sets Atlanta’s Atlantic Station off is not so much its unique design as the abandonment of old freight rail yards near the center of Atlanta that allowed it to be developed. The same kind of disuse made Portland’s Pearl District possible, and an abandoned airport made Denver’s Stapleton possible. They are all attractive, in my view, but with an important caveat: such developments cannot be replicated without using large swaths of abandoned land, which is not readily available or through massive condemnation (takings), which only the city of Portland’s radical political machine seems to be insensitive enough to do.

    Yet I would not suggest that Atlantic Station is simply faux New Urbanism. There are some legitimate New Urbanist touches. Although the development sprawls significantly, the housing elements are rather dense — and as in many New Urbanist efforts — also well-subsidized.

    Further, Atlantic Station appears to be urban on a much larger scale than other developments. Its buildings are much larger than in Portland’s Pearl District and its retailing more intense. But that is to be expected in Atlanta, which, in my view achieved world class status some time ago.

    In a sense, Atlantic Station may well reflect one aspect of the urban future in our newer cities. It remains fundamentally auto-oriented (note all that parking) and full largely of suburban-like chain shops. This may seem a somewhat contrived notion of urbanism, but at its core one that accommodates modernity. Atlantic Station does it largely by bringing the comforts of suburban living to the center city.

    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.”

  • Rebuilding the Idea of the City: The Present Crisis in Perspective

    New York long was a product of the harbor economy. Before there was a Times Square or a Grand Central Station, Lower Manhattan, then ringed with docks, was oriented to the railroads and factories of the Jersey coast to its west and the merchants and manufacturers of Brooklyn across the East River. The decline of Lower Manhattan as an economic engine is in large measure a reflection of the fall of that harbor economy as first Manhattan and then its partners in Brooklyn and Jersey City de-industrialized.

    Still, there’s cause for optimism. In the last two decades, the old harbor economy of trade and industry, severed by the collapse of manufacturing, has been re-knit on the basis of the service economy. By the middle of the 1970s, even as New York was at its nadir, the growth in service sector jobs began to exceed the decline in manufacturing jobs. And despite the impact of 9/11, New York continues to attract the key element of the modern economy, talented people; college applications are up for next year.

    One sign of New York’s vitality is that so many places want to be considered the city’s ‘sixth borough’ — Fairfield County, Conn., Jersey City and even Philadelphia. This dispersion has brought both opportunities and challenges to New York itself.

    My optimism has been tempered by two questions and a frightening possibility. First, attempts to accommodate all the interest groups has slowed the entire rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. Second, the Bloomberg administration — for all its posturing about rebuilding downtown — continues to focus as well on expanding the far west side of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn as well as various new stadia. With a recession already underway, one that is centered in part on the critical financial industry, it would seem more prudent for the city to narrow its priorities.

    Perhaps a better focus would be to seek how to revive the harbor economy first envisioned by ironmaster and former Manhattan mayor Abraham Hewitt, the son-in law of Peter Cooper, and the corporate lawyer and anti-Tammany reformer Andrew Haslett Green. Their vision was one of a vast united city united by new bridges across the East River as well as a rebuilding program for the city’s crumbling docks, streets and transit facilities. In the late 19th Century, basic infrastructure and opportunity were inextricably intertwined.

    The upshot was extraordinary. New York became “the engineers’ city.” New York City bonds were issued to build bridges across the Harlem and East Rivers, and tunnels under the Hudson connecting New York to New Jersey as well as the subway system that became the city’s circulatory system for labor. These tied Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan together into a single economic unit. With this New York became not only the largest city in the U.S. but its busiest port, a paradise for small manufacturers and a headquarters city for national corporations.

    New York’s consolidation also promoted a rapid expansion of the urban area. Even at a time when centralization seemed to be in the saddle, the wildly crowded and extraordinarily expensive downtown began to shed some of its functions. Given the extraordinary cost of land, those who stayed increasingly worked in skyscrapers like the Woolworth Building, which opened in 1913.

    In the 1920s, even as New York surpassed London as the world’s financial center — a designation that may not be reversing again — the functions of the downtown were narrowing. The opening of Penn Station in 1910 gave Long Island and New Jersey easy access to midtown. It helped set off a real estate boom in Times Square, which was intensified three years later when Grand Central Station opened. The Holland Tunnel followed in 1927. Not surprisingly in the 1920s most new construction was in midtown, a trend that continued even into the depression years when Rockefeller Center was built, with midtown beginning to eclipse Lower Manhattan.

    While midtown grew, the port thrived; in the 1920s half of U.S. export and import traffic moved through the harbor. Eighty-five percent of the traffic landed on the New York side and then had to be moved across the Hudson on “lighters.” This was the so-called “Manhattan Transfer.” The problems of cross-harbor traffic were magnified by the control exerted on both sides of the harbor by the local political machines.

    As a response harbor congestion during World War I — at one point trains were literally backed up to Pittsburgh — the new bi-state Port of New York Authority turned very effectively to constructing the Lincoln Tunnel and the Outerbridge, Goethals, George Washington and Verrazano bridges linking New York to New Jersey by car and truck. By 1950 New York had it all, including a vast and varied manufacturing sector, the largest port and undisputed dominion over the financial, cultural and media life of the nation.

    What Went Wrong and Right
    In the early 1970s the harbor economy fell apart. Even though the financial sector grew, the fastest growth was in government workers engaged not in basic city services but rather in social services and make-work health care jobs. Between 1960 and 1975 spending tripled in constant dollars, while the city population was declining slightly. The money went to public assistance, health social services and housing. Redistribution rose from 26 percent of NYC expenditures in 1961 to 36 percent in 1969 and has stayed at about one-third.

    This change in economic character transformed New York from a city that fared well in recessions to one more susceptible to wide swings in employment and growth. Taxes rose, city services deteriorated and businesses fled.

    The city, of course, is in much better shape today, largely due to the reforms of mayors Koch and Giuliani and some favorable trends in the global economy. New York is clearly a better place to live and work than it was just two decades ago.

    In part, the decline of manufacturing finally began to pay off for New York. De-industrialization, a disaster for some sections of the city, had been an opportunity for others to upgrade their quality of life by turning manufacturing lofts into living spaces. Old manufacturing districts like SoHo became “funky.” First, they attracted artists who were soon followed by Wall Street yuppies. New York became a magnet for twenty-somethings, a dating bar for young college graduates. Brooklyn also is bustling with business and shopping districts, with a wave of gentrification beginning in the brownstone neighborhoods of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Fort Greene.

    “The restoration of the brownstone belt,” explained Carl Weisbrod of the Downtown Alliance, “was a crucial element in the revival of Lower Manhattan. Just as at the turn of the century, Brooklyn’s tony neighborhoods were once again the neighborhood of choice for many location decision-makers, senior managers in investment banks, partners in law firms, and bank executives.”

    With the nexus between Manhattan and Brooklyn restored — intertwined by the best mass transit connections anywhere in the county — the chance to reinvent the great harbor economy is better now than any time in fifty years. Instead of turning its back on the harbor that created and sustained the city or centuries, the future depends, in large part on n turning the waterfront into an asset.

    It’s beauty and recreational possibilities can make downtown into an attractive live-work location. And then there are the extraordinary possibilities presented by 172 acre Governors Island, a five-minute ferry ride from either Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn’s Red Hook, Governors Island, with its golf course, playing fields and historic buildings.

    The future of the city once again will depend on capitalizing on the waterfront. Born a harbor city, New York can be reborn once again as a city the lives and thrives on its waterways — if the city can decide that this again represents its priority for the future. We will probably have to wait for a Mayor with a name other than Bloomberg for that process to start.

    Fred Siegel is a Professor of History at Cooper Union in New York.

  • Creating the Next American System

    Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has just published an excellent and inspiring article in Democracy Journal about the need for a new financial and physical infrastructure.

    “One of the goals of reforming and regulating finance is to ensure that American industry and American infrastructure have access to the private and public investment they need,” Lind writes. “Industry, infrastructure, and finance form a system—an American System. And a new American system, well-designed and well-implemented, will be crucial in revitalizing American economic prosperity in the twenty-first century.”

    Lind talks about previous “American systems” of finance and organization that were adopted over time to adjust to the economic realities of the age and how today, we are in dire need of creating a new system that reacts to the new realities we face.

    Some of these ideas include the creation of a National Investment Corporation and a National Research & Development Bank and the creation of a Department of Infrastructure that merges some of the transportation agencies together. These are bold ideas explained in clear prose with illuminating historical examples.

    Many of his ideas lend themselves towards centralization and thus remind me of the New Deal a bit. The existence of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration was one of the rare times in American history when infrastructure finance was centralized. It was also one of the most prolific times in our history for the construction of vital and long lasting public infrastructure that still stands today.