New Geography

Tag: Financial Crisis

  • Glimpsing Reasons to Give Thanks in the City of Angels

    This is one tough Thanksgiving coming up for a lot of folks in Los Angeles, where so many have been left vulnerable by the economic downturn.

    This place of ours, this city, looked good for the ride just a few months ago.

    Now it looks different.

    There are different faces on our streets. Some are new, out of place, in a daze over where they have landed.

    Some others are the same folks we used to see, but they look hungrier now, or less healthy.

    There are different faces in the stores and restaurants, too. Merchants look worried, and their employees seem just as wary.

    Friends and neighbors, shopkeepers and strangers — everyone, it seems, looks different these days. Concern has crowded out confidence.

    But look a bit closer and you’ll start to see something else, a certain characteristic that resides somewhere among the worries. The initial shock of the economy’s dive is wearing off. Resolve is beginning to show in folks’ eyes, offering a down payment on the promise that optimism will return in time.

    It will take some time, to be sure—and not every story will have a happy ending as we work our way through the economic storm.

    I am quite certain, though, that the vast majority of us will make it through, and that we’ll find the capacity to aid those who fall hardest.

    I am confident of this because I have learned quite a bit about the people who make up this city. I have seen what can be accomplished when resolve digs in against uncertainty.

    I received a reminder from a man at a bus stop on Broadway not long ago. I’ve known him for years because he has spent years working as a janitor at a Downtown office building that I have occasion to frequent. He has always struck me as a modest fellow — polite, constantly working, cleaning up after others.

    The man had his daughter with him, and the two of them were unsure whether they had the right bus stop. He called to me and asked if I could help. The young lady had to get to the Westside. I directed her to the correct stop across the street.

    The man thanked me, and told me that his daughter had to get to UCLA, where she is currently studying. He said he has another daughter enrolled at UCLA, too.

    It occurred to me that the modesty I had long attributed to this man is actually resolve. Oh, he may be a modest sort, but his accomplishments are not. His high-reaching daughters attest to the resolve in his character.

    It also occurred to me that this man is an immigrant who pulled up stakes somewhere far away to come here and pursue a better future. Think about the uncertainty of such a move — and then consider how often you encounter individuals who have done the same thing. Ponder how many others have faced similar uncertainty upon arriving here from another state — or even moving from one neighborhood to another in search of better circumstances.

    I spent some time thinking about this after I saw my acquaintance at the bus stop. I became lost in thought for a moment, and then a rumble of hunger brought me back. I had a cold and didn’t want to go out to eat, so I called a regular lunch spot for a delivery. It’s a small restaurant, and the owners are among the many to travel a long way to cast their lot in Los Angeles. They’re feeling the economic slump, their faces creased with concern lately.

    A familiar voice came on the line and took my order. She noticed that I sounded a bit off. She inquired about my health, and I told her about my cold.

    My lunch arrived 20 minutes later with something extra in the bag—a bowl of soup with a get-well note.

    It dawned on me that, yes, it will be a tough Thanksgiving for a lot of folks — but this is still the City of Angels.

    Look for them — they walk among us.

    Give thanks for them — they will not fail us.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • Blame Wall Street’s Phantom Bonds for the Credit Crisis

    The “credit crisis” is largely a Wall Street disaster of its own making. From the sale of stocks and bonds that are never delivered, to the purchase of default insurance worth more than the buyer’s assets, we no longer have investment strategies, but rather investment schemes. As long as everyone was making money, no one complained. But like any Ponzi Scheme, eventually the pyramid begins to collapse.

    For the last couple of months trillions of dollars worth of US Treasury bonds have been sold but undelivered. Trades that go unsettled have become an event so common that the industry has an acronym for it: FTD, or fail to deliver.

    What’s the result? For the federal government, it’s an unnecessarily high rate of interest to finance the national debt. For states, it’s a massive loss of potential tax revenue. And for the bond buyers, brokerage houses, and banks, it’s yet another crash-and-burn to come.

    First, a primer: The Federal Government issues as many bonds as Congress authorizes (the total value is an amount that basically covers the national debt). Many are purchased by brokers and investors, who then re-sell them in “secondary” trades. The way the system is supposed to work is that the broker takes your bond order today and tomorrow takes the cash from your account and ‘delivers’ the bonds to you. The bonds remain in your broker’s name (or the name of a central depository, if he uses one). If there is interest, the Treasury pays the interest to your broker and he credits your account for the amount.

    What is happening today that strays from this model? Because the financial regulators do not require that the actual bonds be delivered to the buyer, your broker credits you with an electronic IOU for them, and, eventually, with the interest payments as well. But the so-called “bonds” that you receive as an electronic IOU, called an “entitlement”, are phantoms: there aren’t any bonds delivered by your broker to you, or by the government to your broker, or by anyone.

    The significant result of the IOU system is that brokers are able to sell many more bonds than the Congress has authorized. The transactions are called ‘settlement failures’ or ‘failed to deliver’ events, since the broker reported bond purchases beyond what the sellers delivered. Since all of this happens after the US Treasury originally issues the bonds, the broker’s bookkeeping is separate from US Treasury records. That means there is no limit on the number of IOUs the broker can hand out…and there are usually more IOUs in circulation than there are bonds.

    The ramifications are far reaching for the national budget. Wall Street, by selling bonds that it cannot deliver to the buyer — in selling more bonds than the government has issued — has been allowed to artificially inflate supply, thereby forcing bond prices down. These undelivered Treasuries represent unfulfilled demand by investors willing to lend money to the US government. That money — the payment for the bonds — has been intercepted by the selling broker-dealers. The subsequently artificially low bond prices are forcing the US government to pay a higher rate of interest than it should in order to finance the national debt.

    The market for US Treasury bonds has been in serious disarray since the days immediately following September 11, 2001. Despite reports, reviews, examinations, committee meetings, speeches, and advisory groups formed by the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and broker-dealer associations, massive failures to deliver recur and persist. Somehow, government, regulators and industry specialists alike believe that it’s OK to sell more bonds than the government has issued. It shouldn’t take a PhD-trained economist to tell you that prices are set where supply equals demand. If a dealer can sell an infinite supply of bonds (or stocks or anything else for that matter), then the price is, technically-speaking, baloney. And the resulting field of play cannot be called a “market”.

    If regulators and the central clearing corporation would only enforce delivery of Treasury bonds for trade settlement — payment — at something approaching the promised, stated, contracted and agreed upon T+1 (one day after the trade), there would be an immediate surge in the price of US Treasury securities. As the prices of bonds rise, the yield falls. This falling yield then translates into a lower interest rate that the US government has to pay in order to borrow the money it needs to fund the budget deficit and to refinance the existing national debt.

    This week’s drop in the yield on US Treasuries was accompanied by a spike in bond prices. The data won’t be released until next week, but you can expect to see that a precipitous drop in fails-to-deliver occurred at the same time. Don’t get your hopes up, though. One look at the chart above will tell you that the good news won’t last until real changes are made to the system.

    As a bonus insult to government, consider the $270 million in lost tax revenues to the states. This is because investors (unknowingly) report the phony interest payments made to them by their brokers as tax exempt; interest earned on US Treasury bonds is not taxed by the states.

    For the bond buyer, the situation poses other problems and risks. As an ordinary investor, you’re not notified that the bonds were not delivered to you or to your broker. Of course, your broker knows, but doesn’t share the information with you because he or she plans to make good on the trade only at some point in the future when you order the bond to be sold.

    The electronic IOU you received can only be redeemed at your brokerage house, and no one knows what will happen if it goes under, although I suspect we’ll find out in the coming quarters as more financial institutions get into deeper trouble. You’re probably not aware that, in order to cash in that IOU when you’re ready to sell, you depend not on the full faith and credit of the US government, but on your broker being in business next month (or next year) to make good on the trade. In other words, you’re taking Lehman Brothers risk, and receiving only US Government risk-free rates of return on your investment.

    Your broker, meanwhile, enjoys the advantages of commission charges for the trade, maybe an account maintenance fee and – more importantly – they use your money for other purposes. Wall Street is not sharing any of this extra investment income with you. In my analysis of Trade Settlement Failures in US Bond Markets, I calculate this “loss of use of funds” to investors at $7 billion per year, conservatively.

    Despite this, rather than require that sold bonds be delivered to the buyer, the Treasury Market Practices Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York merely points out FTDs as “examples of strategies to avoid.”

    Now for the really bad news. The tolerance for unsettled trades and complete disregard for the effect of supply on setting true-market prices is also responsible for the “sub-prime crisis,” which everyone seems to agree on as the root of the current global financial turmoil. You see, there are more credit default swaps — CDS — traded on mortgage bonds than there are mortgage bonds outstanding. A CDS is like insurance. The buyer of a mortgage bond pays a premium, and if the mortgage defaults then the CDS seller makes them whole. CDS are sold in multiples of the underlying assets.

    A conservative estimate is that $9 worth of CDS “insurance” has been sold for every $1 in mortgage bond. Therefore, someone stands to gain $9 if the homeowner defaults, but only $1 if they pay. The economic incentives favor foreclosure, not mortgage work-outs or Main Street bailouts.

    In the same process that is multiplying Treasury bonds, sellers are permitted to “deliver” CDS that were not created to correspond with actual mortgages; call them “phantom CDS”. According to October 31, 2008 data on CDS registered in the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s (DTCC) Trade Information Warehouse, about $7 billion more CDS insurance was bought on Countrywide Home Loans than Countrywide sold in mortgage bonds. That provides a terrific incentive to foreclose on mortgages.

    Countrywide is the game’s major player: The gross CDS contracts on Countrywide of $84.6 billion are equivalent to 82% of the $103.3 billion CDS sold on all mortgage-backed securities (including commercial mortgages) and 90% of the total $94.4 billion CDS registered at DTCC sold on residential mortgage-backed securities.

    General Electric Capital Corporation is the fifth largest single name entity with more CDS bought on it than it what it has sold; someone is in a position to benefit by $12 billion more from consumer default than from helping consumers to pay off their debt. Only Italy, Spain, Brazil and Deutsche Bank have more phantom CDS than GECC, according to the DTCC’s data.

    The US auto manufacturers also have net phantom CDS in circulation: $11 billion for Ford, $4 billion for General Motors, and $3.3 billion for DaimlerChrysler (plus an additional $3.5 billion at the parent Daimler). Of course, these numbers change from week to week and only represent CDS voluntarily registered with the DTCC, so the real numbers could be much greater.

    Who stands to gain? There is no transparency for CDS trades, which means that we don’t know who these buyers are. But in order to get paid on these CDS, the buyer must be a DTCC Participant… and that brings us to Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley – all Participants at DTCC and instrumental in designing and developing CDS trading around the world. By the way, these firms are also in the group that reports FTDs in US Treasuries; the top four firms represent more than 50% of all trades. You can do the math from there.

    The US government and regulators are in the best position to end these fiascos, turn us away from casino capitalism, and return our financial industry back into a market. It won’t require any new rules, laws or regulations to fix the situation. If someone takes your money and doesn’t give you what you bought, that’s just plain stealin’, and we already have laws against that.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets.

    More on the US Treasury market’s structural failure: The US treasury market reaches breaking point

  • California’s Inland Empire: Is There Hope in the Heart of Darkness?

    Few areas in America have experienced a more dramatic change in fortunes as extreme as Southern California’s Inland Empire. From 1990-2008, the Inland Empire (Riverside & San Bernardino counties) has been California’s strongest job generator creating 20.1% of its employment growth. The area also consistently ranked among the nation’s fastest growing large metropolitan areas. However in 2008, the mortgage debacle has sent this area, which had not seen year-over-year job losses in over four decades, into a steep downturn. Understanding what happened and how to put the region back on its historical growth path offers an important public policy perspective not only for the Inland Empire but for other once fast-growing metropolitan areas.

    The Economic Problem. The California Employment Development Department (EDD) reported an Inland Empire loss of 17,900 jobs from August 2007-2008. The bulk of this was directly tied to the housing meltdown. Within shrinking sectors, the loss was 32,600 with 82% (26,800) tied to the demise of residential construction. This included construction losses (-16,000); non-vehicle manufacturing (mostly building materials: -5,600), non-vehicle retail sectors (mostly furniture or home supplies: -3,200); and financial groups like escrow, title, insurance and real estate (-2,000). By September 2008, unemployment was 9.1%, the highest in 49 metropolitan areas with over 1,000,000 people.’


    Note: EDD’s report is an underestimate as more accurate U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the area began 2008 with job losses 61.7% higher than EDD’s estimates.

    Housing Market Creates A Recession. Some history is necessary to understand how the housing sector got into trouble and set off the inland recession. The last housing downturn ended in 1996. Analysts agree that from 1997-2003, California’s many building restrictions prevented housing supply from matching demand by families needing homes. Prices rose to chase away excess potential buyers:

    • Seasonally adjusted homes sales rose from 13,227 quarterly units in early 1997 to 25,328 by late 2003, an annual rate of 10.1%.

    • In this period, median price increased from $105,643 to $246,807, an annual rate of 12.9%.

    Starting in 2004, speculators began wanting to capitalize on these 12.9% gains by buying and flipping homes. Simultaneously, foreigners awash in dollars from U.S. trade imbalances started flooding investment markets with cash looking for “safe” returns. A belief that home prices never fall led to the development of variable rate mortgages with extremely low “teaser” rates and loose underwriting standards, plus AAA rated mortgage backed securities based on them. The low rates financed the speculators and convinced many families to buy over-priced homes or borrow newly found “equity.” Thus:

    • Median home prices increased even more aggressively from $246,807 in late 2003 to a $404,611 peak in third quarter 2006, up at a 19.7% compound rate.

    • Seasonally adjusted sales increased from 25,328 in late 2003 to a peak of 29,670 in fourth quarter 2005, up a modest 2.29% compound rate.

    • However, by first quarter 2006, volume began declining as affordability reached just 18% and even speculators no longer saw much upside.

    • By the price peak in third quarter 2006, seasonally adjusted sales were down 27.6% to 21,478 units.

      Once the fall in demand became evident, median prices started down. The descent began slowly. However, by mid-2007, with the myth of ever-rising prices debunked:

      • Housing demand plunged.

      • Housing supply took-off as sub-prime mortgages began resetting from teaser to market rates with investors and homeowners trying to sell homes they could no longer afford.

      • Price declines thus accelerated causing ever more homeowners to be upside-down on their homes.

      • Unable to sell, many houses entered foreclosure and were aggressively marketed by the lenders, further accelerating price declines.

      By 2008, the market began changing:

      • Supply, with 60% of inland activity from foreclosures, continued to overwhelm demand with prices falling to a median of $237,784 by third quarter, equal to the mid-2003 level.

      • Demand hit a trough in late 2007 at 11,398 units. By third quarter 2008, lower prices caused it to rebound to 18,453, up 61.9%, equal to volume in 2001.

      • Demand rose as inland housing affordability reached 50% (assuming 3% down, 6.19% mortgages, 1% taxes, $800 property insurance, 0.5% FHA insurance, payments 35% of income).

      Crucially, by third quarter 2008, home construction all but halted as price competition from foreclosures caused developers to lose money on every unit built -even with land treated as free. Hence, the steep downturn and a 9.1% inland unemployment rate. In the short run, conditions will worsen as office construction stops once existing projects are completed. Already, the loss of tenants in fields like escrow and finance has pushed vacancies from 7.0% to 19.9%.

      The Routes Out? With the Inland Empire’s construction sector shutting down, economic hardship has spread far beyond those whose terrible decisions created the crisis. This is also is true in numerous markets, particularly in Arizona, Florida and Nevada.

      Until national action reduces the rising flow of foreclosures into the supply side of the nation’s housing market, supply will continually overwhelm demand sending prices downward. Residential construction will not return until markets see fewer foreclosures and prices move to higher levels. Two strategies are available:

      • Mortgage servicers can lengthen the term of mortgages and reduce rates. allowing families to afford staying in homes. However, given the principal owed, they will not be able to move until prices return to recent highs. Many are thus walking away.

      • Servicers can reduce the principal owed, allowing families to refinance and both remain in their homes and have equity in them.

      Modern housing finance has generally barred the second and more effective strategy. When banks originate mortgages, they typically sell them to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or investment houses to get their money back and make more loans. They are paid to service loans they no longer hold. Meanwhile, secondary mortgage holders often formed them into groups and then sell “mortgage backed securities” (MBS) worldwide. Both the originating bank and those creating MBS’s signed contracts barred them from harming investors. Unless a servicer owns 100% of a mortgage or MBS, they cannot lower mortgage principals.

      Unless national policy can convince secondary mortgage holders and/or MBS investors to allow the principal owed them to be reduced, the foreclosure crisis and residential construction depression will persist … prolonging the recession. The state attorneys general, Congress, some major banks and the FDIC have tried to lure mortgage investors to allow this or to buy them out. The results have been very mixed. The idea of allowing bankruptcy judges to lower principals has been offered as a club to force this result. Yet this raises fear of long term damage to international belief in the consistency of U.S. contract law.

      Finally, at the local level, officials could favorably impact construction costs through the developer impact fees imposed on new homes. These are justified by the need to build the infrastructure required by population increases. Inland Empire fees are $40,000 to $50,000 per home. An analysis shows that at today’s low prices, a fee holiday of 80% by local agencies and 40% by schools would put the industry profitably back return to work. The re-imposition of fees could be tied to an index like median existing home prices.

      So far, the reaction of local decision makers has been that this is legally, programmatically and politically impossible. Their traditional worry is not having the money to build the infrastructure needed as new homes cause population growth. However, for construction dependent economies like the Inland Empire, the choice appears to be temporarily foregoing such funding, or finding a broader source of infrastructure financing. Otherwise, they must face the reality of a multi-year deep recession with double digit unemployment.

      John Husing, Phd. is president of Economics & Politics, Inc. based in Redlands, CA

  • In Ethnic Enclaves, The U.S. Economy Thrives

    Dr. Alethea Hsu has a strange-seeming prescription for terrible times: She is opening a new shopping center on Saturday. In addition, more amazingly, the 114,000 square foot Irvine, Calif., retail complex, the third for the Taiwan native’s Diamond Development Group, is just about fully leased.

    How can this be in the midst of a consumer crack-up, with credit card defaults and big players like General Growth struggling for their existence? The answer is simple: Hsu’s mostly Asian customers – Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese – still have cash. “These are people who have savings and money to spend,” she explains. “Asians in Orange County are mostly professionals and don’t have the subprime business.”

    To Hsu, culture explains the growing divergence between ethnic markets and that of the general population. Asians, she notes, whether in their native lands or here in California, tend to be big savers. In tough times, they still have the cash to buy goods, while others stay home or go way down-market.

    Nor is the Diamond Development Group’s experience an isolated case. Throughout the country, ethnic-based businesses continue to expand, even as mainstream centers suffer or go out of business. The key difference, notes Houston real estate investor Andrew Segal, lies in the immigrants’ greater reliance on cash. “When cash is king,” observers Segal, president of Boxer Properties, “immigrants rule.”

    This is true not just of well-heeled Asians or Middle Easterners, but also for Hispanics, who generally have lower incomes, notes Segal’s partner, Latino retail specialist Jose de Jesus Legaspi. For example, the recession has barely taken hold at La Gran Plaza, the recently opened 1.1 million square foot retail center in Ft. Worth, Texas, where Legaspi serves as part owner and operating partner.

    The center, reconstructed from a failing old mainstream mall purchased in 2005, is now roughly 90% occupied. “We are doing so well that we are expanding the mercado,” Legaspi says, referring to the thriving centers dominated by very small businesses run from attached stalls that are a popular feature of many Latino-themed centers. “It’s all cash economy. They pay their bills with cash. The banks and credit card companies are not involved. It’s true capitalism, and it works.”

    Latino shoppers, he suggests, also have been less impacted by the stock market collapse than other consumers. After all, relatively few, particularly immigrants, have large investments on Wall Street. In addition, even if they have lost their jobs, particularly in construction, Legaspi adds, they tend to pick up other employment, even at lower wages, often in the underground economy. “They get paid in cash, and they pay in cash.”

    Another key advantage lies in close connections many ethnic merchants have to economies such as Korea, China, Taiwan and India, where enormous amounts of cash have accumulated in recent years. “Many of these merchants have family and other ties to the international economy,” observes Thomas Tseng, a principal at New American Dimensions, a multicultural marketing group in Los Angeles.

    The media focuses on huge surpluses spent by major corporations or sovereign wealth funds, but a substantial amount of the money being made in places like China or India also accumulates into family networks. They often funnel this cash to relatives’ enterprises in North America, where many also retain second homes and often educate their children.

    This combination of cash-spending customers and well-endowed investors explains why in many places, the immigrant market remains one of the few still aggressively expanding. Even in thriving Houston, notes architect Tim Cisneros, the credit crunch has stopped many projects by clients from the mainstream real estate development community. In contrast, Cisneros’ Chinese, Indian and other Asian clients continue to build and expand.

    “I am doing an Asian-Mexican sushi chain that isn’t hurt by the credit crunch since they are doing this out of the checkbook,” Cisneros told me. “And the Indian reception hall I am building is doing well. The action is from these developing companies much more than the old Anglo groups.”

    If the immigrant markets helping Cisneros through the credit crush represent one of the few bright spots in the present, they also will likely become even more important in the future – even if immigration slows down dramatically. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015, they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Given these underlying trends, look for developers like Dr. Hsu to keep prescribing more of what she calls “multicultural shopping centers,” focused both on immigrants and their children. As long as these newcomers, both affluent and working class, continue to save, covet cash and work hard, they are likely to continue thriving through the recession and beyond.

    “We are leased up, and we think the supply [of shopping] is not enough,” Hsu says. “We are ready to go Saturday and feel great trust in the future.” At a time when most mainstream American retailers are hiding under their desks, such sentiments are not only welcome; they may also indicate who might be leading the retail recovery when it finally comes.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Island of Broken Dreams

    A The New York Times editorial wonders why foreclosure rates are so high in the two Long Island counties it rightly calls the “birthplace of the suburban American Dream.” After all, the area has “a relative lack of room to sprawl.” which in Times-speak should be a good thing, since “sprawl” is by definition both bad and doomed.

    Yet it is precisely the constraints on new housing that has served as a principal cause for Long Island problems. Long Island was the birthplace of the suburban American Dream, in principal measure because new housing development was permitted to occur at land prices reflecting little more than its agricultural value plus a premium to the selling farmer. The same financial formula expanded the American Dream throughout the country and many parts of the world, at least until urban planners were able, in some instances, to drive the price of land so high that housing was no longer affordable to average households.

    Indeed, land use regulation throughout the New York suburbs downstate, in New Jersey and Connecticut has long since rationed land for development. As a result, once loose mortgage loan standards became the practice, house prices escalated. Throughout the New York metropolitan area, the Median Multiple – median house prices divided by median household incomes rose from 3.2 to 7.0, in the decade ending in 2007. In traditionally regulated markets – like Long Island in the past and still much of the country in the present – the Median Multiple has been 3.0 or less for decades.

    Various regulations have led to this precipitous decline in the area’s housing affordability, virtually all of them falling under the category of “smart growth.” There are the regulations that have placed large swaths of perfectly developable land off limits for housing. There are large lot zoning requirements that have forced far more land than the market would have required to house the same number of people, producing an entirely artificial “hyper-sprawl.” Much of this ostensibly has been done in the interests of controlling “sprawl.” Where quarter acre lots would have been the market answer, planning authorities often have required one-half acre, one-acre and even more as minimum lot sizes.

    In fact, however, Long Island’s housing cost escalation has not been visited anywhere with more traditional liberal land use policies. From the first world’s three fastest growing metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, to much of the South (excluding Florida), to the Midwest, housing prices rose little relative to incomes during the period of profligate lending. The difference, of course, was that the liberal land use regulations in these places allowed sufficient housing to be built that supply kept up with demand, thus accommodating new demand. Speculators saw no potential windfall profits to bring them into the market.

    The Times is not alone in misunderstanding the dynamics of land use regulation and housing affordability. But there is a very clear, demonstrated relationship – where land use regulations constrain development, prices are forced upward. This is because scarcity raises prices of goods that are in demand.

    Fortunately, not everyone at the Times shares the wrongheaded views of its editorial department. Had the editors walked down the virtual hall of their own department, or taken the train down to Princeton, where he lives, they would have encountered someone who understands all this. He is Paul Krugman, Times economic columnist and, much more importantly, Nobel Laureate. In August of 2005, Krugman noted that house prices had escalated strongly in the more regulated markets, but had changed little in the less regulated markets. He further rightly associated the less regulated markets with more sprawl, not less. In January of 2006, Krugman noted: that the highly regulated markets accounted “for the great bulk of the surge in housing market value over the last five years.” Krugman further predicted “a nasty correction ahead.”

    Meanwhile the non-Nobelist Times also make a point to bemoan the high levels of racial segregation on Long Island. Is it beyond them to understand that the very policies they favor are at fault? When one considers that ethnic minorities tend to have lower than average incomes and that land rationing nearly doubled the price of housing relative to incomes, it’s not surprising that they have not moved en masse to expensive places like Long Island, with the exception of Hempstead and a few other pockets. There are costs to restrictive land use regulation. One of the most pernicious consequences is the denial of the American Dream to groups of citizens that have so long been excluded from the economic mainstream.

    It is time to recognize that the regulations that raise the price of housing – however well-intentioned – work against housing affordability and represent one of the prime contributors to the high levels of foreclosures in many communities across the country.

    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”

  • Up Next: The War of the Regions?

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    It’s time to throw away red, blue and purple, left and right, and get to the real and traditional crux of American politics: the battle for resources between the country’s many diverse regions. How President-elect Barack Obama balances these divergent geographic interests may have more to do with his long-term success than his ideological stance or media image. Personal charm is transitory; the struggle for money and jobs has a more permanent character.

    To succeed as president, Obama must find a way to transcend his own very specific geography – university dominated, liberal de-industrialized Chicago – and address the needs of regions whose economies still depend on agriculture, energy and industry. In the primaries, most of these went to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    The geographic concentration of manufacturing prepared by Praxis Strategy Group presents a particular complex roadmap for the new president. Although Indiana and Wisconsin top our list of states most dependant on manufacturing employment, the next four are either in the Great Plains, Iowa, or in the south, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. In fact eight of the top 13 industrial states on a per capita basis are located in the South; only one of these manufacturing hotbeds, North Carolina, supported the new president.

    In terms of industry, the auto industry represents the most difficult challenge. Great Lakes political leaders, like Michigan’s clueless Gov. Jennifer Granholm, now a top Obama advisor, will twist the new president’s arm to bail out the crippled U.S.-based auto manufacturers, essentially socializing the industry. Yet in bailing out Detroit, Obama could undermine a thriving, growing auto complex developing in the old Confederacy and along the southern rim of Midwest.

    Although also hit by the recession, companies like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes and BMW have brought unprecedented prosperity to these areas, which include some of historically poorest regions of the country. This is also where many of the most fuel-efficient “green” vehicles in America are being produced. The workers they employ may not belong to the unions so influential among liberals, but their interests matter mightily to Democrats as well as Republicans who represent them.

    Energy issues may be even more challenging from a regional perspective. The nation’s fossil fuel resources are heavily concentrated in the west and South, led by Wyoming, Alaska, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, North Dakota and Kentucky. Sen. Obama only took one of these states, New Mexico. The new president’s statements against coal and other fossil fuels were not popular in areas where these provide not only reliable low cost energy but also well-paying jobs.

    Not just oil-riggers, heartland miners and coal companies have an interest in an expansive approach to energy policy. If enacted, Obama’s “cap and trade” proposals could raise the cost of Midwestern energy, largely coal-based, by between 20 to 40 percent, according to a recent study by Bernstein Research. This would create yet another disadvantage for U.S. manufacturers, particularly against largely unregulated competitors in developing countries.

    In contrast, reliable and affordable domestic energy supplies from all sources – including from nuclear facilities – would be a major boon manufacturers across the country. Obama must recognize that many states with coal and oil reserves also possess strong wind and bioenergy potential. He should favor expansion of both. The resulting lower cost electrical power could boost an incipient electric car industry that may be the last, best hope for hard-pressed General Motors.

    Here’s another case where regional politics could prove sticky for Obama. Any attempt to boost non-renewable energy supplies would run into opposition from the largely coastally-centered green lobby. These groups generally oppose virtually any fossil fuel development, and most remain hostile to nuclear power. While well-intentioned, increasingly restrictive environmental regulations on manufacturing could push production to parts of the world with dirtier industries and over reliance on shipping long distances. The net reduction in carbon emissions, as a result would seem somewhat ephemeral.

    The current recession and falling energy prices could provide political cover for Obama to shift his energy policies. Hard times have already eroded support for strict curbs on greenhouse gases in Europe and strong advocacy for carbon taxes clearly hurt the Liberals in the recent Canadian elections. A similar reaction could also emerge in this country, excepting the deepest blue coastal enclaves.

    Finally there remains one other regional constituency that must be addressed, that of the financial community. Our analysis shows securities and commodity trading industries to be regionally concentrated, with the largest clusters in greater New York, vice President-elect Biden’s home state of Delaware, followed by New Hampshire and Illinois. They are all now bedrock “blue states” and backed Obama generally by large margins.

    Yet this presents yet another regional dilemma. Simply put, the rest of the country detests Wall Street. They see the bailout benefiting big players in cities like New York or Chicago, but doing little for smaller banks who do much of the lending outside the big money centers. This sentiment cuts across party lines, particularly in the West and South, as the initial anti-bailout votes in the House show.

    All presidents face such regional challenges in governing this vast and diverse country. The weak politicians, like George W. Bush, tend to fall back on an ever-narrower band of regional alliances that, once threatened, easily break apart.

    Transformative leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, learn to extend their appeal to as many industries and regions as possible. In the next four years, we will get to see what kind of leader Barack Obama intends to be.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.com

    Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of NewGeography.com. Mark Schill, a strategy consultant at the Praxis Strategy Group, is the site’s managing editor.

  • The Case for Optimism on the Economy

    With the prospect of a long, deep recession staring us in the face, are there any reasons for optimism?

    You betcha!

    The central characteristic of the American economy – resiliency – is now being severely tested. But there are ample reasons to believe it will pass that test. Simply put, even after this crisis the US will still have the world’s largest, most dynamic, most productive, most innovative, most technologically advanced, most competitive and most venturesome economy. Combined with population and household growth (the only first-world, industrial economy that can so claim), the US still has the best prospects for sustainable economic growth (which is a good thing, because we will need to return to a growth path to be in a position to solve the many challenges we will be facing in the years and decades ahead).

    What is the case for optimism? Past experience and the fundamentals.

    Globalism
    “If sensible rescue efforts continue – and they will – the immediate crisis will quickly pass. Shell-shocked businesses and consumers won’t recover rapidly from the trauma of recent months, especially as we now cope with recession. But the downturn shouldn’t be prolonged: The economy here and those overseas should start to pick up no later than next spring.” So writes Steve Forbes, publisher of the magazine that bears his family name, in an essay entitled “Capitalism Will Save Us.”

    Despite the crisis, Forbes points out, the global economy still retains enormous strengths. Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age: worldwide, 70 million people a year were joining the middle class. Even the much-maligned US economy has been doing well in recent years. Between year-end 2002 and year-end 2007 US growth exceeded the entire size of China’s economy.

    As a result, the world is flush with cash. It’s frozen because of fear, but the important things is: cash is there. And the US remains the premier destination for investment capital. So the global boom should resume next year, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum.

    One word of caution: if we continue down the path of criminalizing business failures (think KMPG, Arthur Andersen), we risk undermining the basic idea of limited liability, and the risk-taking it encourages and engenders. That would be catastrophic. Limited liability is arguably the single most important innovation of the modern age, the most significant enabler of the explosive economic growth, development and widespread affluence we have seen since the 19th century. The punitive and costly Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in a fit of Congressional pique to punish financial crime, has done no good but lots of harm.

    Monetary Policy, Energy Costs, Housing
    Jeffrey Lacker of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond agrees growth will return next year; he expects the US economy to regain positive momentum sometime in 2009 for several reasons. First, monetary policy is now quite stimulative. The federal funds target rate is 1 percent, below the expected rate of inflation. Second, the major shocks that dampened economic activity this past year have already subsided or are in the process of doing so. Energy prices have reversed most of the earlier run-up; that will free up a portion of consumer budgets for spending on other goods and services. And third, the drag from housing seems likely to lessen in the next year, and in fact, we should see a bottom in housing construction around the middle of 2009.

    These are trying times, admits Lacker, but we have weathered economic downturns and banking distress before, both nationally and globally. The fundamental creative process that drives innovation and improves well-being over time has not been mortally wounded, and that bodes well for the long-term.

    Velocity
    If there is a slowdown in the turnover of money – say a 5% decline – the impact on nominal GDP growth is no different than if the money supply itself shrinks by 5%. And that’s exactly what caused the sharp drop in growth (with some panic thrown in for good measure). This sharp drop in growth is due to a temporary drop in velocity, not a typical recession caused by fundamental, economy-changing events such as higher tax rates, tighter money, protectionism or other public policies that stifle innovation or entrepreneurship.

    But there is good news. After ham-handing the rescue operation for months, the cavalry has finally arrived. The Fed has injected massive amounts of liquidity, driving the federal funds rate to roughly 1%.

    Moreover, the Treasury Department has drawn a line in the sand. It has decided that no more banks will fail due to a lack of liquidity. Despite the downside this represents for the ideal of free markets, these actions by the Fed and Treasury will help unlock the credit markets and turn velocity upward. With velocity and the money supply both heading up, a “V” shaped recovery is likely.

    Rather than being the first of several negative quarters of economic growth, economists like Brain Wesbury and Robert Stein of First Trust Advisers predict a healthy period of growth in the second half of 2009. To be precise, they expect real GDP to be flat in Q1-2009 but then grow at an average annual rate of 3% in the final three quarters of next year, with only a temporary hit to earnings. The Dow Jones industrials average should recover to 11,000 by the end of this year, with another 20% climb in 2009 all the way up to 13,250.

    We Have Been Here Before
    The US economy has blossomed for 25 years, and can and will again. If, however, we regress by adopting protectionism, higher taxes, too much regulation and other key policy mistakes, the effect on our economy could be devastating. With the prospect of a new Democratic administration and Congress, these are not insubstantial fears. The Bush tax cuts will expire after 2010 if action is not taken to extend them. The capital gains tax rate will go up; the dividend tax rate will go up; the death tax will jump from 0% to 55% in 2011. These automatic tax increases we have the makings of an economic calamity. Same goes for increased protectionism and new regulations. But it will be with eyes wide open.

    Innovation is Key
    Pessimism about America’s future has been growing, at least until the recent election of Barack Obama. Yet beneath the gloom, economists and business leaders across the political spectrum are slowly coming to an agreement: Innovation is the best – and maybe the only – way the US can get out of its economic hole. New products, services, and ways of doing business can create enough growth to enable Americans to prosper over the long run.

    But here’s the conundrum: If money alone were enough to guarantee successful innovation, the US would be in much better shape than it is today. Since 2000, the nation’s public and private sectors have poured almost $5 trillion into research and development and higher education, the key contributors to innovation. Nevertheless, employment in most technologically advanced industries has stagnated or even fallen.

    The new field of innovation economics addresses this gap between spending and results. Economists are increasingly studying what drives successful innovation to learn how companies can get more bang from the bucks spent on R&D and higher education.

    One of the hottest areas in the field is the use of government aid to cultivate “innovation clusters,” or collections of local companies and academic institutions working together to create new products and processes. Ideally, those alliances would build on existing expertise in a region.

    It’s possible the longstanding partisan debate over tax rates and budget deficits may soon become a sideshow. If it is realized that the main purpose of economic policy is to spur innovation and growth, then the two political parties will have to stop fighting and coalesce around policies that promote innovation.

    So let’s keep things in perspective. Reports of our demise are premature.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He publishes Growth Strategies, a newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends, and is a professional public speaker (www.rogerselbert.com). Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis in Copenhagen, and North American representative for its US Consumer Demand Index.

  • The Purpose of Finger-Pointing on Financial Crisis

    The presidential campaign is over and the global financial crisis remains. President-elect Barack Obama offers hope for a fresh start even as he prepares to face a backlog of enormous problems. I believe that our nation is up to any and all challenges, able to achieve a new unity and purpose in these trying times.

    Yes We Can, indeed.

    You’ll hear some others say that these challenging times leave no room for finger-pointing over the origins of the financial mess we face.

    I beg to differ, based on the firm belief that our nation will be served well by understanding how this mess came about. This is part of the challenge, and it will require some sorting through the rubble and—yes—some finger-pointing.

    A lot of time could be spent on the Wall Street big shots who played significant roles in the whole affair.

    There’s certainly room for a hard look at the culture of monetary hedonism that grew in Corporate America over the past several decades.

    There are bigger culprits out there, though. I’m talking about the elected officials who the voters of this nation have trusted to keep an eye on those Wall Street big shots. That’s a basic part of the job for Washington politicians—voters don’t expect
    Wall Street big shots to behave themselves.

    You’ve probably noticed that politicians generally don’t do very well when it comes to facing their own shortcomings on the job.

    You’ve also probably noticed a phrase that’s been on the lips of politicians who want to dodge any blame for what ails our financial system. It began making the rounds during the presidential campaign, as so many elected officials performed the circus act of scurrying for cover even as they lusted after airtime on cable TV shows. Here is the basic message, although you’ll hear plenty of slight variations:

    “The problem is that we have a 20th-century regulatory system for a 21st-century financial market.”

    Keep in mind that many of the Washington politicians who have uttered this sentiment have the authority to keep an eye on our financial regulatory system. They have been—and most of them remain—in positions to raise questions and seek changes to the system at any time.

    Remember also that our financial regulatory system has never been chiseled in stone. It can and has been changed over the years. The truth is that the system itself cannot be outdated—it can be adjusted as needed by our elected officials. They have always had the standing to consider new developments in the marketplace—exotic investment instruments and lax mortgage-lending standards, to name a couple—and seek changes to regulations on such practices.

    The only thing outdated in recent years has been the elected officials who have had oversight of our financial regulatory system.

    The world changed, and the financial industry changed, too. The politicians who were supposed to ride herd on the financial industry didn’t change.

    Go ahead and give some of the politicians in Washington a back-handed benefit of the doubt on the motives behind their lack of oversight—it’s become clear that most of them had little understanding of the forces tearing the financial system to shreds. That still leaves room to suspect that some of them didn’t know because they didn’t want to know—because they were taking in all the campaign donations they needed right up to the point of the meltdown.

    Readers can decide how all of that shakes out.
    Whatever you decide, though, don’t let any politicians off the hook by accepting the notion that events simply overtook an outdated regulatory system, and there was nothing to be done until the whole thing broke down. This is the worst sort of bunk—the kind that will embolden ignorance and influence peddling in our political class if left unchallenged.

    There is good reason to be hopeful about the incoming Obama Administration, and cause to believe that the U.S. can beat this bad spell.

    There’s also good reason for all of us to complete the full exercise of getting a grip on what has occurred.

    That will require some finger-pointing.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • Financial Bailout Shortchanges Taxpayers and Does Little to Fix the Economy

    Last month, Congress gave the treasury secretary $700 billion, which he said he urgently needed to buy toxic securities from the balance sheets of some of our largest financial institutions that were in financial trouble.

    The secretary said that the economy was in danger, and the bailout funds were necessary to prevent a collapse.

    I agree the economy is in trouble. And I am anxious to support emergency measures that will give our economy a lift.

    But I voted against the $700 billion dollar fund for the secretary because I insisted that any bailout had to include measures that would stop the reckless behavior that caused this financial wreckage.

    Unfortunately, the bailout fund was approved without the tough, new regulations necessary to prevent the actions that steered our economy into the ditch.

    In recent weeks, the treasury secretary changed his mind. He decided not to buy toxic securities. Instead, he used the first big chunk of bailout money to buy $125 billion of capital in the nine largest banks. It would free up some lending in the credit markets, he claimed.

    But, strangely, he gave the big banks the money “with no strings attached.” He didn’t require them to use it to expand lending. He didn’t stop the payment of big bonuses to their executives. And in a final insult to common sense, his department is encouraging the big banks to consider more mergers.

    Weeks later, we learn that the big Wall Street banks plan to pay over $20 billion in executive bonuses to their employees.

    What’s wrong with this picture? The American taxpayers, who are struggling through this economic crisis, are told they have to fork over a pile of money to bailout some big banks, while the big banks are busy calculating their year-end bonus payments — maybe to the same geniuses who built this financial house of cards and were last seen driving the getaway car from the scene of the wreckage.

    I think it’s nuts!

    Should anyone in Washington be surprised that the American people are steamed?

    During the past few decades and especially in recent years, the big financial firms were having a field day trading in complicated derivatives, creating a sub-prime loan scandal and engaging in risky, reckless business practices. All the while, many of the government regulatory agencies were doing their imitation of a potted plant.

    Finally, the speculation bubble burst, some big financial firms failed, and it is causing major damage throughout our economy.

    By contrast, on Main Streets across America, community banks and small businesses were still doing business the old-fashioned way.

    A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting across the table from a North Dakota community banker. I asked him if, in light of the financial crisis, his small-town bank had any money to lend if a business from his town wanted to expand.

    “Oh, sure,” he said. “We didn’t get involved in all of those fancy, risky business practices that the big banks were involved in. We take in deposits, and we make good loans.”

    Good for him. It is the way business is supposed to work.

    We do need to take urgent steps to put our economy back on track, but it needs to be smart, effective action that will work. So far, that hasn’t been the case.

    When Congress is back in session in mid-November, I am going to push the following changes to the misguided policies of recent weeks:

    • Prohibit the payment of big bonuses in the firms that are getting the federal bailout money.

    • Attach conditions to any bailout money to make sure the funds are used for the purpose intended and to prohibit the reckless business practices that created this crisis.

    • Restrict further mergers by big banks. It was many of the big banks that caused this crisis, while the smaller community banks largely steered clear of the reckless behavior in high finance.

    • Immediately create a Federal Investigative Task Force to investigate and establish accountability for this financial crisis. Criminal behavior should be investigated and prosecuted.

    Dorgan, a Democrat, represents North Dakota in the U.S. Senate.

  • Washington Wins…Everyone Else (except maybe Chicago) Loses

    What could prove to be the worst economic decline since 1929 may also have the unintended consequence of creating a booming real estate market for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area over the next few years. Ironically this has been brought on not, as one might expect, by Democrats – traditionally the party of Washington – but by the often fervently anti-DC Republicans.

    This process was set in motion by the Bush Administration’s $700 billion financial bailout. This has caused a potential geographic shift in power from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. By concentrating decision-making power and institutional ownership in the Nation’s Capital, the Administration has essentially drained power away from financial institutions historically headquartered in New York City. The local real estate market impacts of this shift in the locus of private-sector financial power will only be accelerated by the impact in that real estate market by the changing of the guard in Washington following the November 4th election.

    To start with, the $700 billion federal bail-out of Wall Street being spearheaded by the Treasury Secretary is certain to involve a spate of new Treasury Department hirings, bringing in the employees needed to manage this herculean task. And, while that in and of itself does not a real estate boom make, there is a remarkable confluence of other factors to be considered as well.

    For example, the November 4th election results are projected to generate 40,000 real estate transactions in the metro Washington marketplace over the next nine weeks, as those currently in power leave the Nation’s Capital and those elected to power move in. That is 40,000 transactions that otherwise would not be occurring in the prevailing economic climate. Any time you introduce a large number of buyers into the marketplace competing for product that might not be entirely fungible in terms of geography (in-town versus out of town; D.C. vs. suburban Maryland vs. Northern Virginia) or housing typologies (pied-a-tier versus exurban McMansion, for example), you drive prices up. Add to the equation that not everyone voted out of power actually ever leaves the D.C. area – this is after all the center of the universe for many law firms and lobbyists, as well as both major political parties – and there is the potential for increased demand for and a constrained supply of houses.

    Add to this residential real estate boom a coincident commercial development boom. Consider that the federal government will become a major owner of some of the country’s most important financial institutions with, at the very least, monitoring and oversight responsibilities (if not also investment policy input). Under this scenario it is easy to imagine a whole new industry being born almost overnight in the District of Columbia, with private interests seeking debt and equity financing not by meeting with Wall Street investment bankers but by meeting with their investment bankers’ new regulator at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. (the headquarters for the U.S. Treasury Department).

    This is not nearly as far-fetched a notion as it may first appear. Forty years ago most Washington, D.C. law firms and lobbyists were focused primarily on what today are viewed as pretty stodgy federal agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission; the Federal Trade Commission; the Food and Drug Administration; the Interstate Highway Commission. Lobbying became more sophisticated, impacting to a much greater degree federal policies related to taxation, banking, and capital markets, as well as emerging policy areas like healthcare, energy, and the environment, causing the private-sector workforce feeding off of the federal presence in Washington, D.C. to grow exponentially.

    The District of Columbia has the third-largest downtown in the U.S., ranking only behind New York and Chicago. More than 10 million square feet of commercial office space was added to the District between 1996 and 2005, with another 10 million having been brought on-line or underway since then. Additionally, geographic areas that in the 1960s were entirely rural farmland – such as Tysons Corner, VA, and Gaithersburg, Maryland – have grown so fast that they are today unrecognizable. For example, Tysons Corner has over 46 million square feet of office and retail space, and a daytime population of over 100,000. The Washington metropolitan area is the eight largest market in the country – and comprises the fifth largest market when combined with the Baltimore metro area – with a 2007 population of over 5.3 million people, yet almost nothing is manufactured here. It makes one wonder exactly how many people are required to properly rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

    Finally, add to the foregoing scenarios the very real prospect for a major expansion of our federal government under the incoming Obama Administration and an energized and slightly larger Democratic majority in the House and Senate. There is the distinct possibility (if not, in reality, the promise) of a New Deal Era federal program to re-build the nation’s infrastructure both to meet long overlooked needs but, more-importantly, to also create a vast number of new public sector-financed jobs . The stage is set for what could be the greatest Washington, D.C. real estate boom since the New Deal (the residential population exceeding 500,000 for the first time in the 1930s) or the Second World War (in 1950 Washington, D.C. reached its peak population of over 800,000 residents, although today that number is just under 600,000). The last boom transformed a sleepy southern town into a major northern metropolis; the next could turn greater Washington into first-rank conurbation on the scale of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

    Under less ominous circumstances this might all be considered the natural order of things. And from a purely personal perspective, I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to see my home appreciation return to the double-digit annual escalations to which Washingtonians have become accustomed.

    But then there are questions of whether this is good for the country. Most metropolitan areas are suffering (some, like Miami, Las Vegas, and Phoenix are hemorrhaging) while only perhaps Chicago – the geographic power base of President-Elect Obama – seems well-positioned to gather in the spoils of the new political order. Meanwhile DHL’s recently announced layoffs in Wilmington, Ohio, may impact an estimated one-third of the employable residents in that community. By way of this stark contrast, there’s something truly unseemly in the notion that the very place fundamentally responsible for many of our current economic woes should benefit from being both the cause and the cure of the economic maladies plaguing the country.

    Peter Smirniotopoulos, Vice President – Development of UniDev, LLC, is based in the company’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and works throughout the U.S. He is on the faculty of the Masters in Science in Real Estate program at Johns Hopkins University. The views expressed herein are solely his own.