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  • Searching for Los Angeles by the Gateway Arch – a Reminiscence

    The obsession started before the earthquake.

    I was driving on Manchester Road, and something about the slant of light off the car dealerships, the particular combination of Mexican-food diner/meat market/bank/shoe store/train-whistle-in-the-distance, and the unending nature of my errand was enough to take me back. I was on San Fernando Road, and for a just a split second, I was happy – happy to be in traffic, happy to have the glare of the sun in my eyes, happy, even, to be hopelessly late — because I thought that I was back in Los Angeles.

    I was obsessed with Los Angeles. I had lived there for three years. I started my first real job there as a history professor at Cal State Northridge. My son was born there, in Hollywood no less, right across the street from the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology. But my husband worked in St. Louis, and after my son was born, I took leave from my job and we started family life in St. Louis together.

    I told this story to just about anyone who would listen. Random mothers in the park, random co-workers of my husband, random grocery store clerks, random anyone. I wanted the whole world to know I belonged back in LA. And when there was no one there to listen, I stole moments to look at web sites filled with jacaranda trees and the views from Griffith Park. Motherhood proved readily adaptable to the aesthetic of studied dishevelment followed by the young filmmakers, writers, and web designers of my old neighborhood, and I eagerly embraced it (at least the dishevelment part). When winter came and St. Louis’s farmers’ markets ended, I would grill my husband upon his return from the grocery store. “Are you sure this was the best produce they had? Are you sure you even bought this today?”

    I didn’t just miss the sunny days and the fresh vegetables and our hipster neighbors (although I did miss those desperately, even the hipster neighbors). I missed LA’s problems. I’m a historian of the American West; I have a fondness for the twentieth century. And LA just happens to be THE twentieth-century western city. It’s not just the highways or the cars, although I thought about them too, especially when I was on Manchester Road. When I was in LA, I couldn’t drive to work without thinking about managing the water supply or the way Angelenos had covered over the desert in their yards with bougainvilleas. I couldn’t stop by the hardware store or look at a bus stop or pick up some of that fabulous lettuce without thinking about unionization. I would exit the highway early just to drive through a neighborhood and think about immigration. When my cousin asked why I liked Los Angeles so much, I said without even pausing at the irony: “The people there are so real.”

    So at first it seemed like more obsession, and no one was having any of it. When I proposed that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to line St. Louis and Los Angeles up side-by-side and compare them – to look a little harder for that bit of LA that I thought I had seen on Manchester Road, virtually no one heard me out.

    My mother: “You must remove LA’s weather from your browser’s start-up page.”

    My aunt, distastefully: “That sounds like a blog.”

    My husband, who saw just the faintest echo of an earlier obsession with my home state of New Mexico: “Not everyone measures success in terms of proximity to mountains.”

    For those who knew me, this was just one more ploy to get back, if only in my imagination, to the city that had, with its smog and its traffic and its astronomical housing prices and its gross inequalities and its devotion to surface appearances and its unrelentingly bright days, won my heart.

    For those that didn’t know me, it just sounded weird. “This must feel really different,” said the grocery store clerks and the mothers at the park and my husband’s co-workers and the teachers at my son’s day care. “Oh, no,” I would say. When I first fell in love with LA, I had heard the urban historian Greg Hise lecture on how Los Angeles was not the great urban exception, how it actually had great similarities to Pittsburgh and St. Louis. ST. LOUIS!

    “St. Louis,” I would say when anyone gave me the slightest opening, “is a combination of neighborhoods like LA. It has the same public transportation problems, a large Catholic population, a history of racial segregation and a deracinated downtown.” I didn’t actually say deracinated.

    When I started looking, I found more parallels, large and small. Prominent Armenian populations in both cities, a history of fraught public education, both were once part of Spanish territory, both had an elite oddly fascinated with itself (“What high school did you go to?” ask St. Louisans. “Are you in the industry?” say Angelenos), and a similar wackiness in small corners of each city – the drag queen in a wheel chair I once saw in Hollywood; the cigar-smoking elderly man who jogs near Forest Park.

    But there must have been something about the exercise that seemed kind of pathetic. “What’s wrong with St. Louis?” asked my friends from elsewhere. “Nothing,” I’d rush to tell them. “It’s a great town — Forest Park is awesome; there are good restaurants; we can walk to the art museum AND the zoo AND to work AND to day care all from our apartment. It’s a great city for kids. It has a world-class symphony.” “So what’s wrong with St. Louis?” they’d say again. “Nothing,” I’d say, “It’s just…this will seem melodramatic, but it’s just that I don’t feel fully awake here.”

    It seemed best to let the idea drop. Sure, cities are more than climate and topography, and there might just be a few scraps of St. Louis that shared whatever magic I had found in LA, but it did seem kind of silly. I let it go.

    When my husband tried to wake me, I could feel the shaking. “What is it?” I said. “An earthquake,” he said. “hmmm,” I said. “What do we do?” he asked. I wasn’t fully awake, and I didn’t want to be. I thought about getting up. For a St. Louis earthquake? “I don’t know what to do here,” I said and went back to sleep. But the next day, everyone was talking about it — the grocery store clerks and the teachers at my son’s day care, and my husband’s co-workers. “Did you feel it?” “The epicenter was in Illinois.” “It was a 5.2.” “Is this common?”

    It’s not common, but it wasn’t the first time either. There are earthquakes in St. Louis. I had known that already, but this one made me think again. Maybe there are other similarities, things I had come to consider distinctly LA, when really they were things places shared.

    I decided I would go looking for Los Angeles right here in St. Louis. I don’t know what I will find. Maybe something about what it means for people to live together in a city. Maybe something about the homogenization of America. Maybe something about why we’re willing to call some places, but not all places, home. I know it makes little sense to go looking for Los Angeles where it is not. I do, after all, know where it is. I’ve been there before. But I’m fully awake now.

  • A New Model for New York — San Francisco Anyone?

    From the beginning of the mortgage crisis New York and other financial centers have acted as if they were immune to the suffering in the rest of country. As suburbs, exurbs and hard-scrabble out of the way urban neighborhoods suffered with foreclosures and endured predictions of their demise, the cognitive elites in places like Manhattan felt confident about their own prospects, property values and jobs. So what if the rubes in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa and Riverside all teetered on the brink?

    Now only a deluded real estate speculator — or a flack for Mayor Michael Bloomberg — could deny that the mortgage crisis wolf is now at Gotham’s door. Having underwritten and profited obscenely from the loans that launched the crisis, Wall Street is now reeling from the collapse of several of its strongest linchpins, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, while Merrill Lynch has become little more than an annex to Charlotte-based Bank of America. AIG has been forced on the federal teat and other giants, even Citibank, could be next.

    With perhaps tens of thousands of high-paying jobs about to evaporate, and with them the rich bonuses that fueled Mayor Bloomberg’s grandiose vision of a “luxury city,” New Yorkers should brace themselves for hard times. Bloomberg’s brave talk about media, tourism, bioscience or the arts making up the difference should not be taken too seriously. In reality New York has never been more dependent on Wall Street than it is today, in large part because most other middle class sectors, like manufacturing and warehousing, declined massively over the past seven years.

    As a result, nearly one out of four dollars earned in New York — although accounting for less than five percent of all jobs — are tied to the financial sector. Overall job growth has been slow in finance, and stood well below historic highs even at the crest of the boom, and are now dropping radically. This means, as a result, a group of relatively few big earners are more and more important as overall employment in finance declines.

    Tourism certainly cannot make up the balance since it is a notoriously low wage sector and may soon be subject to a major decline in visitors due to higher airline prices and a growing downturn in Europe. New York has a decent bioscience sector, but Gotham is far as dominant here as in finance or media. There’s strong competition from a host of places, notably St. Louis, Houston, Boston, San Diego and Silicon Valley.

    So where can a plutocratic Mayor look for inspiration for the future? He may not like it but arguably the best model for New York may be San Francisco. More than any American city, San Francisco epitomizes one possible future for American urbanism of the “luxury” variety.

    The parallels between San Francisco and underlying trends in New York, and to some extent Chicago, are striking. Like New York on a smaller scale, San Francisco was once a corporate headquarters town and a powerful financial center. But starting in the 1980s and 1990s that all started to change. Corporations fled for the suburbs, or got merged with firms located elsewhere. It started with the exodus of Crocker Bank. In 1998 its most important company, started by an Italian immigrant in the city, the Bank of America, fled to North Carolina. Like New York, it has flushed away virtually its entire industrial sector and lost ground as a port.

    Yet through this all, San Francisco managed to reinvent itself. First it anchored itself to Silicon Valley, becoming the playground, advertising and media center for the nerdistan to the south. Then, after the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the city fell back on its intrinsic appeal as a place, relying largely on tourism and its ability to attract high-end residents.

    This discreet charm has allowed San Francisco to enjoy a reasonable economic comeback, not so much as a corporate or economic center, but as a high-end destination for the nomadic rich, the culturally curious and the still adolescent twenty and even thirty somethings. Many of this last group have strong skills sets and remain a powerful asset to the city.

    You can see the changes just by walking the streets. Three decades ago, when I worked in the City, San Francisco was still in large part a city of suits and blue-collar workers; today it’s black-garbed cool and casually elegant. There are more wealthy residents and decidedly less minorities, even Hispanics, and ever fewer children.

    This pattern could represent the future — and even the present — in parts of New York and even on the fringes of Brooklyn. We have seen that the “baby boom” in Manhattan does not last much past age five. When Wall Streeters lose their ability to pay for nannies, summer camps, private schools, etc, many affluent families may not be able to hang out that long.

    But then again there are those residents there will not lose their jobs. These include those tied to “luxury” industries, media, and non-profits. Not to be ignored also are the growing ranks of trustifarians, wealthy people living off their parents or grandparents’ labor. These are not the prototypical New Yorker on the make, like Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street,” but they have spending power, connections and often political influence.

    None of these groups are likely to disappear because of a mere trifle like a financial system collapse. These are committed denizens of the urban pleasure dome, content either to live minimally or (for the time being at least) pursue such generally non-remunerative activities like working in the arts or making documentary films.

    Of course, cities like New York and Chicago, also likely to be hard hit by the securities industry meltdown, may not be able to live as richly in hard times like San Francisco. Parts of Manhattan and Manhattanized Brooklyn might endure a metropolitan recession, but it may be tougher on the mostly minority, poor and working class residents who inhabit the outer reaches of the outer boroughs . These residents will suffer from the inevitable cutbacks in city services as well as the loss of retail, hospitality and construction jobs.

    In contrast, “The City,” as San Francisco likes to be known, is both small, compact and surrounded largely by affluent, low-density suburbs. It effectively has no real analogue to the outer boroughs. To see the dark side of America’s urban reality, you increasingly have to go east across the Bay to the crime-infested streets of Oakland, where the once proud dream of civic renaissance appears to be slowly fading.

    Of course, New Yorkers may reject this vision of their future. San Franciscans, have long prioritized joie de vive over imperial visions. In contrast, New Yorkers derive much of their civic self-esteem from their city’s role as the “capital of the world.”

    But if New Yorkers want to keep this slogan to be more than a marketing jingle, they will have to transcend the lame “luxury city” zeitgiest. Spending nearly four billion on new sparkling sports stadiums, and even Bloomberg’s media mastery, won’t get it done. It will take hard work, a commitment to infrastructure and broad-based job growth.

    It’s hard to know if New York still has the stomach for this kind of hard work. As someone whose familial roots in the city span over a century, I hope so. New Yorkers are a resilient lot, as they have shown many times in the past. But if they have lost their appetite for hard struggle, well, they can always consider becoming the next San Francisco.

    Joel Kotkin is Executive Editor of NewGeography.com

  • Job Growth Index, Manufacturing, Transportation and Warehousing

  • New York City’s Declining Role – Regional Share of Nation’s Finance and Insurance Jobs

  • Total Employment, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco

  • Finance Industry Employment, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco

  • Sports Complexes: Economic Prosperity or Pompousness?

    In the heart of downtown Indianapolis lies a recently constructed monolith, the envy of other cities aspiring for new digs for their NFL football team. Lucas Oil Stadium has 63,000 seats and features a retractable roof allowing for comfort control during Indiana’s fickle fall weather season. And for those urban enthusiasts in the crowd, when open, the roof provides a captivating view of an Indy skyline that in years past was barely visible to the naked eye.

    Many of the state’s residents though are asking why a new sports venue was built in Indianapolis. In fact, one only needs to take a drive along I-65, the main interstate bordering downtown, to get a taste as to why this issue keeps surfacing. Namely, if you look directly across the street from Lucas Oil Stadium, you’ll see a much larger structure that appears to be in relatively good condition. While many have confused it with a large spaceship, Indiana sports enthusiasts know it as the infamous RCA Dome.

    Home of the Indianapolis Colts for over 15 years and the site of numerous NCAA basketball regional and national championships, the RCA Dome has in many ways come to symbolize Indianapolis’ distinction as the sports capital of the world. The “Dome” also reflects Indiana’s lore and history as the hotbed of high school basketball, having served as a venue for annual state tournaments, including the highest attended game in our nation’s high school basketball history.

    So part of the argument among Indiana residents is that the RCA Dome was more than adequate (it actually has a larger seating capacity than Lucas Oil Stadium). The other gripe has been the cost: $720 million to be exact, financed by a nine-county food and beverage tax that passed in 2007. In other words, many of the state’s residents are footing the bill.

    Advocates for low taxes would certainly argue that building the new stadium was a pompous act on the part of city leaders, interested in only the local economic and financial implications. The argument can also be made that the stadium only benefits a small segment of Hoosiers, as many state residents, struggling to make ends meet in today’s tepid economic times, can’t even afford to purchase a ticket to the game, let alone a hot dog and parking.

    Indianapolis is not alone in terms of public outcry regarding new sports complex projects. The San Francisco 49ers are currently exploring a move to a yet-to-be built new stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., a city embedded in the ever prosperous environs of the Silicon Valley where money continues to flow like “milk and honey” despite the dot-com bust of several years ago. Recently the Santa Clara City Council put off a public vote on a whopping $916 million stadium initiative for at least a year in order to assess funding options as well as to allay environmental impact concerns raised by local residents.

    In the state capitol of Sacramento, where legislators have spent months grappling over an exploding state budget deficit, the talk of the town for months has been the proposed arena for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings–a movement championed by renegade owners Joe and Gavin Maloof with the support of opportunistic NBA commissioner David Stern.
    Caustic battles have ensued between supporters of the Kings who believe the sports franchise is vital for the city’s economic vitality and state voters who have been historically hostile to taxes for private sports facilities. The latter concern has been further fueled by the Maloof brothers who as millionnaire owners seem willing to cough up only a pittance of the new construction investment.

    Then there is Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, who led the construction of a new shopping complex next to Gillette Stadium that at $300 million ended up costing as much as the stadium itself. Decked out with a football museum, four-star hotel and spa, restaurants and cool stores, “Patriot Place,” as this complex is affectionately named, aspires to provide year round pedestrian foot traffic as a major dining and entertainment destination.

    As the aforementioned examples highlight, there are certainly arguments that can be made against these sorts of expenditures, particularly during uncertain economic times for cities and counties. I would also argue that there may be strong reasons for constructing these sports complexes in terms of the boost they can provide to the economic and social prosperity of an area. Indianapolis is an excellent example of this in terms of branding itself as America’s premier sports city. It is clear that the city’s efforts to attract sports buffs from far and wide is vital to the sustainability of its local economic engine.

    The Colts are not the only game in town here: Indianapolis hosts more Olympic trials and NCAA basketball finals than any other city in the nation. It is also the home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, a franchise that plays its games in yet another downtown sports venue–Conseco Fieldhouse. There are also the Indianapolis Indians who play in one of the finest minor league baseball parks anywhere. And not to be overlooked is arguably the largest sporting event in the world, the Indianapolis 500. Mark Rosentraub a Professor at Indiana University, estimates that the speedway generates $36.5 million in state and local taxes annually. It should also be noted that the track is privately owned and races occur without public expenditures beyond local law enforcement.

    So what’s the verdict? A study by Dennis Coates, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County sheds some light on the “economic prosperity versus pompousness” argument. First of all his research reveals that there is little evidence that large increases in economic impact, particularly in income or employment, ensue from the construction of new stadiums. He does say however that Downtown stadiums are likely to have larger benefits than suburban stadiums.

    As I see it, this latter point is the magic behind Indianapolis’ efforts to promote sporting events as an economic catalyst — that outside of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, all of the sports facilities are located in the downtown, central district. The evidence is clear that sports venues in the “Circle City” continue to generate loads of foot traffic and activity in downtown Indianapolis, from the bustling Circle City Mall to burgeoning crowds in downtown restaurants and music venues. One could in fact argue that all of this economic and community vitality in the city’s urban core would have made America’s preeminent urban activist Jane Jacobs proud and maybe even a frequent visitor to the city for a hot dog and a game.

  • Is the heartland the economic armpit of America?

    Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, native Kansan Thomas Frank isn’t too complimentary on the state of affairs:

    …you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

    While the windshield tour may yield an array of sorry small towns, much of the mostly rural Heartland has beaten the national job growth rate since the early 1970s. Like the rest of the nation, the heartland of America is urbanizing — producing many small growth nodes of prosperity.

    While many of the small prairie towns are dying on the vine, the biggest reason is not “electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town’s mortal enemies,” as Frank suggests, but rather a combination of larger factors including the re-balancing of 100-year old settlement patterns and the macro effects of automating the ag industry.

    So what’s the prevailing politics in small towns? Here’s the Iowa Independent’s Douglas Burns writing about Obama’s “bitter” rural American’s gaffe:

    …does any thinking person believe Obama’s brief and failed turn as a rural anthropologist will hurt him more than what Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today in Alabama?

    “We must reduce barriers to imports, to things like ethanol from Brazil, and we’ve got to stop subsidizing ethanol in my view,” Senator McCain said.

    If the ivory-towered urban elites hawking their tiresome flyover views on cable television each night want to see what a bitter small-town American looks like, they can come to western Iowa during the second year of what we have every reason to expect would be a decidedly anti-rural John McCain presidency.

    Barack Obama misspoke. John McCain didn’t.

    Rural Americans know the difference.

    Burns also correctly predicted Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination. What all three of us can agree on is that many rural voters seem to elect candidates who enact policies contrary to their interests. Can Obama make any real inroads with Great Plains rural voters?

  • Job Growth in the Great Plains States, 1971 – 2007

  • Finance and Insurance Employment in Charlotte Metropolitan Area, 1990-2008