New Geography

Tag: Heartland

  • Why Affordable Housing Matters

    Economists, planners and the media often focus on the extremes of real estate — the high-end properties or the foreclosed deserts, particularly in the suburban fringe. Yet to a large extent, they ignore what is arguably the most critical issue: affordability.

    This problem is the focus of an important new study by Demographia. The study, which focuses largely on English-speaking countries, looks at the price of housing relative to household income. It essentially benchmarks the number of years of a region’s household income required to purchase a median-priced house.

    Overall, the results are rather dismal in terms of affordability, particularly in what Wharton’s Joe Gyourko dubs “superstar cities.” These places — such as London, New York, Sydney, Toronto and Los Angeles — generally tend to be more expensive than second-tier regions commonly found in the American South and heartland.

    Even with their usually higher incomes, these regions, for the most part, still have a ratio of five years median income to median house price; this is far higher than the historical ratio of three. In some areas the ratios are even more stratospheric. Sydney and Melbourne, for example, have ratios over nine; London, New York, San Jose and Los Angeles approach six or more.

    Urbanists often assume that these high prices — unprecedented in a tepid economy — reflect the greater attractiveness of these regions. This is somewhat true, particularly for parts of London and New York, which can survive high ratios because their markets are less national and middle-income and more tied to the global upper classes.

    In places like Mayfair or New York’s Upper East Side, the buying “public” extends beyond the local market to high-income markets in places like the United Arab Emirates, Moscow, Shanghai, Singapore or Tokyo. Many owners are not full-time residents and consider a home in such places as just another expression of their wealth and privilege.

    Yet such markets are exceptional. In most regions, the vast preponderance of homebuyers are either natives or long-term migrants. Their less glamorous tastes — notably access to affordable single-family dwellings — drives migration  from one region to another. Over the past decade, and even since the crash, this has meant a general trend of migration from high-end, unaffordable markets to less expensive regions. In the U.S., for example, people have been flocking to the South, particularly the large metropolitan areas of Texas.

    One factor driving this migration, the Demographia study reveals, is differing levels of regulation of land use between regions. In many markets advocacy for “smart growth,” with tight restrictions on development on the urban fringe, has tended to drive up prices even in places like Australia, despite the relatively plentiful supply of land near its major cities.

    More recently, “smart growth” has been bolstered by claims, not always well founded, that high-density development is better for the environment, particularly in terms of limiting greenhouse gases. Fighting climate change (aka global warming) has given planning advocates, politicians and their developer allies a new rationale for “cramming” people into more dense housing, even though most surveys show an overwhelming preference for less dense, single-family houses in most major markets across the English-speaking world.

    Limits on the kind of residential living most people prefer inevitably raises prices. As the Demographia study shows, the highest rise in prices relative to incomes generally has taken place in wherever strong growth controls have been imposed by local authorities.

    Perhaps the poster child for “smart growth” has been the U.K. Long before the climate change debate, both of England’s major parties embraced the notion of strict constraints on suburban development — not only in London, but across the country. As a result, even places with weak economies are not as affordable as they should be. Liverpool, Newcastle and the Midlands have affordability rates higher than Toronto, Boston, Miami and Portland — and not much lower than those of New York or Los Angeles.

    But the most remarkable impact of “smart growth” policies has been in Australia, which once had among the most affordable housing prices in the English-speaking world. Houses in Sydney and Melbourne, for example, are now less affordable than in London or San Francisco.  Even secondary markets like Adelaide and Perth are more expensive than Toronto, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Most recently these policies have even caught the attention of the OECD, which linked overly regulated housing markets not only to the Great Recession, but to a continued slow economic recovery.

    Compared with the U.K. and Australia, the U.S. housing market is more hopeful, with a host of regions — notably Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix and Kansas City — with affordability rates around three and under. Low prices by themselves, of course, are no guarantor of success; in economically challenged places like Detroit and Cleveland, out-migration and high unemployment have driven prices down.

    But in many, if not most, cases affordability has promoted economic and demographic growth.  Generally speaking, affordable markets tend to draw migrants from overpriced ones, for example to Houston or Austin from Los Angeles or New York.

    Nor is this necessarily a case of “smart” people heading to dense, expensive cities while the less cognitively gifted head to the low-cost regions — as news outlets like The Atlantic have claimed. In fact, the American Community Survey reveals that between 2007 and 2009 college graduates generally gravitated toward lower-cost, less dense markets — such as Austin, Houston and Nashville — than to the highly constrained, denser ones. Overall  growth in affordable markets — with a ratio of three or four — among college graduates was roughly 5%; in the more expensive places , it was barely 3%.

    How could this be, if everyone with an above-a-room-temperature IQ supposedly favors hip, cool, dense cities? Perhaps it’s because of factors often too small or mundane for urban pundits to acknowledge. Most people, particularly as they enter their 30s, aspire to a middle-class lifestyle — and being able to afford a house constitutes a large part of that.

    So what does this tell us about future growth? Clearly affordability matters. Areas that combine strong income and job growth, along with affordable housing, are poised to do best. This will be particularly true once the economy recovers and a new generation of millennial buyers, entering their 30s in huge numbers over the next decade, start their search for a place where they can settle down and start raising families.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

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

    Photo by Je Kemp

  • Agglomeration Vs. Isolation for Science Based Economic Development

    Earlier this month President Obama signed the reauthorization of the COMPETES Act, which provides federal funding for science initiatives aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. In addition to shoring up agencies like the National Science Foundation, the bill called on the Department of Commerce to create a new program charged with supporting the development of research parks and regional innovation clusters. Unheard of before World War II, these entities today represent the cutting edge in what insiders call TBED: technology-based economic development. By leveraging existing strengths and promoting cooperation between universities and private industry, TBED-minded regions seek to attract outside investment and carve out a niche in the global economy.

    Research parks and innovation clusters both draw on the logic of agglomeration: when smart people (or up-and-coming firms) gather in a concentrated area, the story goes, they bounce ideas off each other and push each other to innovate and eventually outperform other people or firms who are more widely dispersed. This is the logic at the heart of Geoffrey West’s grand unified theory of urbanism featured in the New York Times back in December. It’s the logic of Silicon Valley. But is agglomeration always good for science? What assumptions do clusters and science parks make about how research gets carried out? That is, does science cluster of its own accord? Or can the political and economic arguments for clustering come into conflict with strains of science that are best kept at arm’s length?

    An instructive case to consider is that of the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), an animal disease research facility set to be built in Manhattan, Kansas. After the anthrax attacks of 2001, bioterrorism experts convinced the Bush administration that biological agents and, specifically, diseases affecting American livestock could constitute a threat to the nation’s security. American agriculture was, in the words of one presidential directive, “an extensive, open, interconnected, diverse and complex structure providing potential targets for terrorist attacks.” So the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) dreamed up a new, state-of-the-art laboratory for animal disease research, and after a long, involved site selection process, Kansas was selected to host the new lab in December 2008. As the Daily Yonder recently reported, concerns persist about whether it’s a good idea to conduct research on deadly livestock diseases smack in the middle of cattle country.

    Then what brought NBAF to Kansas, if DHS acknowledged that a mainland location was riskier than a lab located offshore? The answer, as far as I can tell, is agglomeration. NBAF’s predecessor, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, was located in the middle of Long Island Sound to minimize the risk of an accidental pathogen release. Scientists took a ferryboat to work in the morning, and in the early years nothing could leave the island, not even library books. NBAF, on the other hand, was always envisioned as part of a constantly circulating network. DHS’s request for proposals explicitly mentioned “proximity to other related scientific programs and research infrastructure” as one of the selection criteria. Others included proximity to vaccine manufacturers and access to an international airport. If the geographical logic of animal disease research after World War II was one of isolation, then the new logic of post-9/11 science was one of hyperconnection.

    The sites that were well connected—literally—were the ones that moved forward in the NBAF site selection process. Georgia and North Carolina offered access to nearby veterinary schools, while Mississippi vowed to work with contract research giant Battelle to drum up the necessary workforce. Backers in San Antonio proposed locating the lab in, you guessed it, the Texas Research Park. But it was the Kansas bid that best exemplified the new logic of agglomeration, by envisioning NBAF as the anchor for an emerging Kansas City Animal Health Corridor. Kansas State University, where the lab would be located, offered DHS “surge capacity” in its new Biosecurity Research Institute if a crisis were to ensue. And as for the half-million cattle in nearby counties? Those, too, became part of the cluster, with the Kansas Livestock Association issuing a letter of support arguing that “having this facility in close proximity to the nation’s geographic concentration of meat production is extremely logical.” The proximity that a previous generation of researchers understood as a vector of contagion was now being repackaged as a source of reassurance and a boon to scientific discovery.

    You can’t fault Kansas, of course, for wanting to secure its slice of the knowledge economy. In a report for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mark Drabenstott argues that Midwestern states need to be looking beyond silos and smokestacks, and the Kansas Bioscience Authority estimates that NBAF will have a positive economic impact of $3.5 billion over the next two decades. That’s pretty good. Except, according to a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office, the cost of a large-scale outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease would be even greater. There are no easy answers here. The point is that science-driven development carries risks, and concentrating brainpower in one place can also mean concentrating the harmful substances that those knowledge workers handle each day. Without being hobbled by irresponsible fearmongering, states and regions pursuing an innovation agenda need to be honest about the associated risks—and to ensure that the people who bear those risks also stand to reap the rewards.

    After all, confining science to uninhabited islands means asking scientists to live like monastics, and risks isolating them in an echo chamber of their own assumptions. That’s neither desirable nor practical. So, if the science cluster is here to stay, then the question becomes how to build a research infrastructure that maximizes the benefits of clustering and minimizes the drawbacks.
    Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology just put forward a promising template, which calls for decentralizing scientific research from the southern cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to other parts of the country. Too much concentration in the south, the ministry concluded, could actually quash innovation and exacerbate existing inequalities. But a growing research economy in the north could ease the strain on the region’s natural resources and help incoming president Dilma Rousseff to make good on her pledge to combat poverty in the South American nation.

    Let’s be clear: there’s no neatly replicable way of manufacturing scientific breakthroughs, and people around the world will continue to have good ideas without ever setting foot in an innovation cluster. Still, modern science thrives on linkages, and managing those linkages has become an increasingly central part of modern statecraft. As policymakers use the new tools at their disposal to promote cooperation between universities, companies, and local economies, they would do well to think of agglomeration, not as an inherent good, but as a means of securing real, sustainable prosperity.

    Marcel LaFlamme is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. His research focuses on science-driven development on the American Great Plains.

    Photo: NBAF draft rendering, K-State.edu

  • Self-Employment Key to Expanding Rural America’s Revival

    In many ways, these are the best of times for rural America. Rising commodity prices for food, fiber and energy have revived the economy in much of the nation’s heartland. But still, many rural communities still are losing population, particularly among the young, and suffering unacceptably high rates of poverty. What accounts for this “best of times, worst of times” scenario?

    Part of the problem lies with the highly productive nature of industries like agriculture, which now require less and less human input. In addition, the U.S. economy has undergone, and continues to undergo, structural changes beginning with the 2001 recession and continuing today. Permanent employment growth among America’s largest employers began stagnating before the 9-11 (2001) recession. During the recovery, the share of U.S. employment by America’s largest employers declined from 34% to 26% (or by -24%) of all employment (youreconomy.org). This trend coincided with the movement among large corporations to outsource work. Jobs that in the past would have been filled by permanent, salaried-with-benefits employees are today contracted out, allowing firms to lower legacy worker costs and increase workforce flexibility.

    This slower rate of job creation may be structural and permanent, not just part of the recession and recovery cycle. Coping with these changes will most likely require an expansion of small-scale entrepreneurship, enabling rural residents to enjoy the quality of life benefits of “rural living” and also to tap economic opportunities. Some of these opportunities are even created by the outsourcing of work by larger employers. Our work with the RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship over the past 10 years suggests that the rise in self-employment – small-scale entrepreneurship – and slow job creation are related and could present a development “silver lining” opportunity for many communities in the United States.

    The potential behind this phenomenon can best be observed in the rise of necessity entrepreneurship. Necessity entrepreneurs are driven into business by the lack of jobs in their region – many clearly would prefer to take a job if those opportunities were available. But, once in business, these entrepreneurs could help create the foundation of a whole new generation of ventures that will help re-invent and renew the rural American economy.

    Fortunately, the trend towards small, “microenterprise” has been evolving for a generation. Over the past decade, the number of Americans who are self-employed has risen by 4.3 million. The percentage of the American workforce that is self-employed has risen from 2.5% of all workers in 1993 to 7% in 2008 based on research from the Edward Lowe Foundation (www.youreconomy.org).

    Why is this important for rural places and how might this shape rural development strategies?

    Freedom to Choose. For one thing, entrepreneurs have far greater freedom to live where they want, including in rural towns and the countryside, and still make a living in our outsourced economy. Our work, particularly across the heartland, suggests that communities can stimulate development and growth by acting upon this emerging trend. The key to success appears to be rooted in an integrated strategy that emphasizes and preserves rural quality of life and values while at the same time creating a strong and supportive entrepreneurial environment.

    Rooted Economic Opportunity. Self-employment – creating your own job – represents an opportunity for rural places to intentionally connect strategies to improve “quality of place” and “economic development”. We are seeing rising interest in designing community development strategies that include targeted “people attraction” in combination with efforts to create jobs and career pathways brough on by transplanted entrepreneurial ventures.

    Social & Economic Renewal. The lament in rural communities and in rural policy circles has been the “brain drain” or the perceived loss of the “best and brightest.” Based on our field research throughout North America we would argue that the dominate group leaving rural areas are not necessarily the best and brightest, but those with a greater capacity for taking risk. This distinction is strategically important in that losing risk takers erodes a community’s fundamental capacity for innovating and embracing necessary change. Attracting entrepreneurs introduces “change agents” back into declining rural communities. This introduction enhances social and economic renewal.

    There are rural communities across the Heartland that illustrate this transformation including larger communities like Dickinson, North Dakota, Kearney, Nebraska and Salina, Kansas. But the emerging success stories are not restricted to the larger of the rural communities and include very small communities like Rawlins County, Kansas (population 2,425), Chase County, Nebraska (population 3,625), Valley County Nebraska (population 4,108) and Linn County, Missouri (population 12,606). Rawlins County is a particularly important example in that this community has over the last 15 years embraced a development strategy focusing on both entrepreneurship and people attraction with impressive emergent results. Rawlins County has begun to rebuild a more dynamic and competitive economy via area entrepreneurs, dramatically improved its migration balance and stabilized the decline in student enrollment through the attraction and retention of younger families. (Read more about the Rawlins County story.)

    More work needs to be done to fully understand these trends. Further clarification on how communities can act on them to build brighter futures are suggested below:

    Necessity Entrepreneurs. There is a compelling need to learn more about the size and nature of rising numbers of self-employed and necessity entrepreneurs. This research needs to be national in scope, but with detail at regional and community levels as well. Deeper understanding can form the basis of better development strategies.

    Targeted People Attraction. More and more communities are exploring people attraction. There is considerable room to learn more and build more targeted and effective strategies. Current efforts need to be documented and evaluated. Promising practices need to be tested and developed.

    Necessity to Opportunity Entrepreneurs. Lack of job opportunities is driving more people to necessity entrepreneurship. But necessity entrepreneurship can become a personal trap and a dead end strategy for communities. We need to learn more on how the increasing pool of necessity entrepreneurs can grow into a new generation of opportunity entrepreneurs who can create greater long term, sustainable economic prosperity.

    Don Macke is Co-founder and Director of Strategic Engagement, RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship.

    Photo by Tom Haymes

  • Fuzzy Thinking by Famous Economists

    Edward L. Glaeser, in an end-of-year piece for the New York Times, claims that generous housing supply is the reason that Texas’s economy is performing so well. As he says in his final paragraph:

    “Housing regulations, more than those that bind standard businesses, explain the Sun Belt’s population growth. If New York and Massachusetts want to stop losing Congressional seats, then they must revisit the rules that make it so difficult to build. High prices show that the demand would be there if the supply is unleashed.”

    This can’t be true.

    If it were true, Fresno, Modesto, and other cities in California’s Central Valley would be booming. They are not. Instead, six of the ten worst U.S. Metro Areas for joblessness are in California’s Central Valley.

    It is not just California. There are lots of places where housing is abundant and inexpensive and economic activity is dismal, Michigan for example. Maybe bringing up Michigan is a little unfair, Glaeser does mention demand for housing in the essay, and there is clearly little demand for Michigan housing. Still, it brings up the question of where demand for housing comes from. It’s a question Glaeser does not address.

    We’ll get back to the question of demand for housing.

    Glaeser claims that building homes causes prosperity, but Michigan’s housing abundance is not because of recent construction. He mentioned Georgia and Arizona, but those economies have been performing worse than the national average in terms of jobs and unemployment since the crash of the housing bubble. Now Nevada leads the nation in the AP’s Economic Stress Index, the sum of unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy rates.

    As it turns out, Texas is the only state among the ones that Glaeser discusses that has outperformed the national average since the recession. Something else is going on, and that something is opportunity, but Glaeser makes a fundamental mistake early in the paper:

    “If economic productivity – created by low regulations or anything else – was causing the growth of Texas, Arizona and Georgia, then these places should have high per capita productivity and wages. Yet per capita state product in Arizona in 2009 was $35,300, 16 percent less than the national average. Per capita state products was $36,700 in Georgia and $42,500 in Texas.”

    It is a mindboggling mistake for an economist to claim that business decisions are made based on productivity, without consideration of costs. If productivity was all that mattered, little manufacturing would take place in China, as United States factory workers are about five times more productive than their Chinese counterparts.

    Paul Krugman, in another New York Times piece, takes up where Glaeser leaves off and makes another amazing mistake:

    “Part of the answer is that reports of a recession-proof state were greatly exaggerated. It’s true that Texas job losses haven’t been as severe as those in the nation as a whole since the recession began in 2007. But Texas has a rapidly growing population — largely, suggests Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that; but given that rising population, Texas needs to create jobs more rapidly than the rest of the country just to keep up with a growing work force.”

    Krugman goes on to say that people move to cheap housing, and economic growth follows.

    People make locational decisions based on far more factors than housing costs, factors like job prospects and opportunity, climate, cultural amenities, taxes and the like. In economic terms, we say that job growth and population growth are jointly determined. There is nothing sequential going on at all. Instead, population growth (and housing demand) reflects job growth prospects, housing costs, and other factors. Job growth reflects population growth prospects (and housing supply), productivity, wage rates, and other costs and resources.

    Krugman also asserts that Texas’s economy is not exceptional among the large states, citing unemployment rates equal to New York or Massachusetts. But he ignores the fundamentals here – like higher job growth and more in-migration. During its boom period, California often suffered higher unemployment because so many people were coming there. In contrast, the workforces in both Massachusetts and New York are among the slowest growing in the country. New York, in particular, competes with California and Michigan for the highest rates of domestic outmigration. People would stay if there was opportunity.

    In his rush to denounce Texas, Krugman exaggerates or dismisses facts. Yes, Texas has a twenty billion deficit now, but that the Lone Star State budget is for two years, something he neglects to mention. These estimates may soon be downgraded, as the price of oil rises. In addition, he fails to acknowledge Texas’s stellar performance in creating both high-tech and middle skill jobs at many times the rate of such favored blue states as Massachusetts, New York and California. People are not as stupid as many Nobel Prize winners might think; they move for opportunity, not just for cheap houses or low-paid work.

    You do not have to be a free market fundamentalist to recognize that, in relative terms, we can see a band of prosperity from North Dakota to Texas. In general, economic performance declines as you move from this Heartland band to the coasts, particularly the West Coast. People who want to believe that policy doesn’t matter give oil and agriculture as the two major reasons for the Heartland’s relative prosperity. Krugman suggests that high oil prices are a key reason for Texas’s economic performance.

    No doubt, oil is important to Texas, but prices have been generally low throughout the recession, while the oil companies’ domestic capital budgets have been small. Similarly, agriculture is booming nationwide, not just in the Heartland, a result of high prices caused by growing global demand. California certainly has lots of oil and agriculture, and no one would claim that California is booming. There is more to the Heartland’s growth than agriculture and oil, and that includes states which are governed by Democrats, such as Montana.

    A region’s job growth is a result of business locational decisions. A business moves to or expands in a region based on a whole host of reasons. These include available infrastructure, resource availability, market size and location, labor supply and costs, worker productivity, facilities costs, transportation costs, and other costs. Those other costs include what I call DURT (Delay, Uncertainty, Regulation, and Taxes).

    There is no reason for every location to have the same DURT. On the contrary, a location blessed with an abundance of the other factors of business locational decisions could afford to have more expensive DURT, while locations less blessed need to have cheaper DURT to attract businesses.

    This is what we see. The coasts tend to be more intrinsically attractive than the Heartland, but they also tend to have more expensive DURT. But now many of these states – driven by such factors as public sector costs or environmental regulations – have raised the price of their DURT so high that they have driven business to expand more to less attractive locations with cheaper DURT, demonstrating once again that policy matters.

    Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

    Photo by Dean Terry

  • The Heartland Rises

    The change in congressional power this week is more than an ideological shift. It ushers in a revival in the political influence of the nation’s heartland, as well as the South.

    This contrasts dramatically with the last Congress. Virtually its entire leadership — from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on down — represented either the urban core or affluent, close-in suburbs of large metropolitan areas. Powerful old lions like Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) of Harlem, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) of Los Angeles and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) of Newton, an affluent, close-in Boston suburb, roamed. The Senate was led by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who loyally services Las Vegas casino interests while his lieutenant, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), is now the top Democratic satrap of Wall Street.

    The old Senate tandem remains in place — but with greatly reduced influence. Many remaining Democrats, particularly those from the heartland, now live in justifiable fear for their political lives. But the most radical shifts in political geography are in the House.

    The new House leaders are, for the most part, from small towns, suburbs and interior cities. Most GOP pickups came from precisely these regions — particularly in the South and Midwest.

    The new speaker, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), for example, represents a southern Ohio district that includes some Cincinnati suburbs. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the majority leader, comes from suburbs west of Richmond. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Budget Committee, hails from Janesville (population: 63,000).

    Power is moving within state delegations. Before the elections, California’s most influential House members hailed from coastal districts. In contrast, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the new majority whip, represents Bakersfield, an oil-rich, largely agricultural area known as “Little Texas” — a far cry from the urbanity of Pelosi’s San Francisco.

    This change in geography also suggests a shift in the economic balance of power. The old Congress owed its allegiance largely to the “social-industrial” complex around Washington, Wall Street, public-sector unions, large universities and the emergent, highly subsidized alternative-energy industry. In contrast, the new House leaders largely represent districts tied to more traditional energy development, manufacturing and agriculture.

    The urban-centered environmental movement’s much-hyped talk of “green jobs,” so popular in Obama-dominated Washington, is now likely to be supplanted by a concern with the more than 700,000 jobs directly related to fossil fuel production. Greater emphasis may be placed on ensuring that electric power rates are low enough to keep U.S. industry competitive.

    The Obama administration’s land-use policies will also be forced to shift. Sums lavished on “smart growth” grants to regions, high-speed rail and new light-rail transit are likely to face tough obstacles in this Congress.

    Ken Orski, a former senior Transportation Department official and longtime observer of Washington land-use and transportation policy, said that no member of the GOP majority on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee comes from a big-city, transit-oriented district. The new committee, dominated by members from rural, suburban and interior smaller cities, represents areas that rely little on mass transit. These members are expected to steer money back to the roads and bridges their constituents rely on.

    Even more important are pending changes in energy policy. Many conservatives disdain what they consider “green pork” — subsidies for renewable fuels like solar and wind as well as the electric car and battery industry. Many firms involved in renewable fuels, already struggling to compete with cheap natural gas, could be driven out of business without continued federal nurturing.

    Another top priority for GOP leaders — and perhaps some energy-state Democrats — may be to choke off funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s announced new regulations for greenhouse gases. Three out of four jobs in the oil and gas extraction industry are in GOP-dominated Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. California’s still-large oil industry includes many who work in the state’s increasingly Republican-leaning interior.

    Similarly, more than two-thirds of the nation’s coal mines, a prime EPA target, are in just three, increasingly red-leaning states — Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to the Energy Information Administration.

    Yet urban areas can expect some benefits from this Congress. The recent extension of the Bush tax cuts largely benefits wealthy professionals, who cluster in a handful of expensive, liberal-oriented cities and their leafy, affluent suburbs. San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan liberals may groan about “breaks” for the rich, but many may be cursing the GOP all the way to the bank.

    Over time, the new emphasis on fiscal austerity could also play to Wall Street’s advantage — probably the last intention of most tea party activists. Reductions in public borrowing should drive more money into the private economy. This approach, adopted by Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron, has helped create a smart recovery for London — even as the rest of Britain suffers from government cutbacks.

    The drive for austerity could also threaten traditional heartland staples like agricultural price supports and military spending. Major defense budget reductions, a necessity for any credible cut, could prove painful for military-oriented, red states like Virginia, Arizona, Alabama and Texas.

    This new regional balance of power poses a profound existential question for Democrats in states like California, New York and Illinois. The unlikely possibility of any future bailout for states or cities should help concentrate their minds on things like cutting spending and restoring their ability to create new jobs.

    Overall, it may be better for all regions to have a divided government. With President Barack Obama still in charge of the executive branch, we are not likely to see a repeat of the Bush-era excesses that favored traditional energy companies, suburban housing speculation and agribusiness.

    Optimistically, we may now see a canceling out of both parties’ regional tilts, spurring greater competition among localities for both investment and human talent. This could ultimately benefit the entire economy — taxpayers and communities — shedding an enlightened pragmatism on the current dreary landscape that is U.S. politics.

    This article first appeared at Politico.

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

    Photo by Smaku

  • Younger Crowds are Right in the Middle

    When looking for a place to settle down, one might consider cities with active cultural scenes or intellectual communities. However, young people today are looking beyond those factors and moving to where the jobs are. Portland, for example, has a thriving social scene and is one of the nation’s leaders in attracting college graduates, but it ranks 40 as the best place for young adults. A high cost of living, stagnant job growth, and a 9.6 percent jobless rate among 18 to 34 year-olds have tarnished Portland’s reputation as the dream city for life after graduation.

    You can see the economic shift in this country by looking at the best cities for young people. The Southwest is now the haven for those in their 20s and 30s looking to establish their lives and careers. Austin, which ranks number one on the list, has the highest annual employment-growth rate in America at 2.8 percent. This has increased the concentration of 18 to 34 year-olds in its metro area to 28 percent, the most of all cities in the study and well above the average of 23.1 percent. Washington, D.C., Raleigh, Boston, Houston, Oklahoma City, Dallas-Fort Worth and Tulsa round out the top eight.

    However, economics do not dictate everything. North Dakota, which has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, is still not a major draw for those right out of college. The cities that have attracted young people in droves not only offer employment and lower costs of living, but also provide some sort of cultural scene. However, if the recession continues to limit job growth on the coasts, North Dakota may build its metro areas to cater to younger crowds, and thus provide them with more than just a steady, good-paying job. Fargo has seen positive net migration every year since 2003, and the state of North Dakota was positive for the first time this decade in 2009. The middle of the country is slowly becoming hot place to be.

  • Education Wars: The New Battle For Brains

    The end of stimulus — as well as the power shift in Congress — will have a profound effect on which regions and states can position themselves for the longer-term recovery. Nowhere will this be more critical than in the battle for brains.

    In the past, and the present, places have competed for smart, high-skilled newcomers by building impressive physical infrastructure and offering incentives and inducements for companies or individuals. But the battle for the brains — and for long-term growth — is increasingly tied to whether a state can maintain or expand its state-supported higher education. This is particularly critical given the growing student debt crisis, which may make public institutions even more attractive to top students.

    The great role model for higher-education-driven growth has been California. The Golden State’s master plan for education — developed under Pat Brown in 1960 — created an elaborate multi-tiered public system that offered students a low-cost and generally high-quality alternative education. Over the next half century, California became, in historian Kevin Starr’s phrase, a “utopia for higher education,” as well as a model for other states and much of the world.

    Today many of the states that copied California’s model — notably North Carolina, Texas and Virginia- — threaten to upend the Golden State’s dominance of public higher education. These states now all spend far more than traditional leader California when you look at percentage of state expenditures; Virginia, for example, spends twice as much of its state budget on higher ed than California does. New York and Illinois spend an even a smaller percentage.

    The combination of fiscal woes and misplaced priorities has engendered spending cuts in California. Tuitions for higher public education have soared: In 2009 they were raised 30%, and they have been raised over 100% over the past decade.

    To be sure, the University of California (disclaimer: I attended the Berkeley campus) retains a huge reservoir of talent, with courses taught by 111 Nobel Laureates. It still dominates lists of top public universities;  six of the top 14 schools in the US News and World Report 2010 rankings are UC schools.  But the signs of relative decline are clear. In 2004, for example, the London-based Times Higher Education ranked UC Berkeley the second leading research university in the world, just behind Harvard; in 2009, that ranking, due largely to an expanding student-to-faculty ratio, had tumbled to 39th place.

    Other states are now looking to knock California further off its perch. In 2009 alone the University of Texas lured three senior faculty members from UC. As departments shrink at places like Berkeley, those in schools such as the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M and Texas Tech have expanded rapidly, adding students and buildings.

    Of course, these schools also have budget problems, and they have increased tuition too–albeit at a significantly lower rate. But for the most part, these up-and-coming state systems are more focused on expansion than on retrenching and survival. While some in California question the viability of some of the newer UC campuses, Texas is busily expanding its roster of tier-one, public research universities, seeking to add the University of Houston as well as UT campuses in north Texas, Arlington, Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio to the ranks of UT Austin, Texas A&M and Rice, a private school in Houston.

    Texas Tech,  best known for its engineering and agriculture-oriented programs, for example, is thriving. Located on the windy Great Plains on the western side of the state, it is far from the state’s major metropolitan areas, and its home town of Lubbock (population: 225,000) is likely not high on anyone’s list of hip and cool college towns. Yet the school, which enjoys strong alumni and business support, is in the midst of a major building boom and a $1 billion capital campaign. When I visited there earlier this month, the campus was full of construction crews; Texas Tech has added over 3000 students in the past two years and now has over 31,000 students.

    Other unlikely upstarts include the University of North Dakota, which has boosted spending by 18.5% in 2009, a luxury afforded by the state’s booming energy, agriculture and increasingly high-tech economy. North Dakota, which historically has suffered significant loss of young talent, has set a goal to rank No. 1 in the average education of its population. Today it already ranks No. 3 in terms of college-educated residents between the ages of 25 and 34.

    These shifts could presage — and to some degree enhance — what is already a powerful trend toward states that, in the past, have been educational also-rans. Although Texas also faces budgetary constraints, its annualized $9 billion deficit is dwarfed by those of California, Illinois and New York. And those bluish states already have much higher tax rates, which leave less room for revenue increases. Texas also has the luxury of an $8.2 billion “rainy day” fund, as well as a more vibrant economy.

    More important still, states like North Carolina, Virginia and Texas continue to grow more rapidly than the older brain-center states. This is particularly true in terms of the high-tech jobs many graduates would likely seek.  Indeed since 2002 these states have all enjoyed far greater growth rates in high-tech employment than California, Illinois, Michigan or New York. They also have added more new tech jobs in actual numbers than California–despite their significantly smaller size.

    Migration patterns are also changing among college-educated workers. Between 2005 and 2007, Texas, Virginia and North Carolina already enjoy higher rates per capita of net migration of educated workers between the ages of 22 and 39 than California, New York or Massachusetts.

    This advantage could expand as the upcoming states increase their educational offerings along with employment opportunities. Students may end up tempted to attend schools closer to where there is job growth. Unlike Austin and Raleigh-Durham, which have rapidly expanded tech employment, Silicon Valley has produced virtually no new net tech jobs for the past decade.

    The second impact may  be more subtle, as declining revenues from businesses and individuals reduces the opportunity to boost education spending. As the country stumbles into this recovery, the greatest advantage will fall not only to states with the most natural resources, but those with the best-educated human resources. For a half century this is a game that states like California have played to perfection, but it is one in which other places are likely to catch up, and perhaps even pass. The long-term implications for the nation’s economic geography could prove profound.

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

    Photo by Luca Zappa

  • The Rise of the Efficient City

    Smaller, more nimble urban regions promise a better life than the congested megalopolis.

    Most of the world’s population now lives in cities. To many academics, planners and developers, that means that the future will be dominated by what urban theorist Saskia Sassen calls “new geographies of centrality.” According to this view, dense, urban centers with populations in excess of 20 million—such as metropolitan Tokyo, New Delhi, Sao Paolo and New York—are best suited to control the commanding heights of global economics and culture in the coming epoch.

    In fact, the era of bigger-is-better is passing as smaller, more nimble urban regions are emerging. These efficient cities, as I call them, provide the amenities of megacities—airports, mass communication, reservoirs of talent—without their grinding congestion, severe social conflicts and other diseconomies of scale.

    Megacities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Sao Paolo and Mexico City have become almost unspeakably congested leviathans. They may be seen as “colorful” by those engaging what writer Kennedy Odede calls “Slumdog tourism.” They may also be exciting for those working within the confines of “glamour zones” with high-rise office towers, elegant malls, art galleries and fancy restaurants. But most denizens eke out a meager existence, attractive only compared to even more dismal prospects in the countryside.

    Consider Mumbai, with a population just under 20 million. Over the past 40 years, the proportion of its citizens living in slums has grown from one in six to more than half. Mumbai’s brutal traffic stems from a population density of more than 64,000 per square mile, fourth-highest of any city in the world, according to the website Demographia.

    Many businesses and skilled workers already are moving to smaller, less congested, often better run cities such as Bangalore, where density is less than half that of Mumbai. Much of this new growth takes place in campus-like settings on the edge of town that take advantage of newer roads, better sanitation systems and sometimes easier access to airports. Companies like Alcatel-Lucent and Infosys offer their employees facilities more similar to those of Silicon Valley or suburban Austin than to Mumbai or Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).

    Consider also Singapore and Tel Aviv, which are among the best models for the efficient cities of the future. At its founding in 1965 after independence from Malaysia, Singapore’s per capita GDP was about that of Guatemala and well below that of Venezuela and Iraq. Today it equals, on a purchasing power basis, that of most Western cities including London, Sydney and Miami.

    The city-state bears no resemblance to the typical unsanitary and disorderly tropical metropolis. Singapore’s roughly five million citizens live under efficient (if heavy handed) government. With its modern port, airport and excellent transport network, Singapore consistently ranks as the No. 1 locale for ease of doing business by the World Bank. Over 6,000 multinational corporations including Seagate, IBM and Microsoft have a large presence in Singapore.

    Tel Aviv represents a decidedly different approach to building the efficient city. With roughly two million people in its metropolitan area, this little dynamo produces the vast majority of Israel’s soaring high-tech exports, is home to a preponderance of the country’s financial institutions and has established itself as the global center of the diamond industry. Incomes in the region are as much as 50% above Israel’s national average.

    Tel Aviv’s pleasure-loving denizens may differ markedly from more controlled Singaporeans—or the usually more religious citizens of Jerusalem—but they employ many of the key efficient city advantages: a sharp focus on business, a well-developed sense of place and a first-class communications infrastructure. The city’s tech industry includes firms such as Microsoft, Cisco, Google and IBM. It is home to Israel’s only stock exchange and most of the country’s resident billionaires.

    The U.S. is also embracing the efficient city. Between 2000 and 2008, notes demographer Wendell Cox, metropolitan areas of more than 10 million suffered a 10% rate of net outmigration. The big gainers were generally cities with 100,000 to 2.5 million residents. The winners included business-friendly Texas cities and other Southern locales like Raleigh-Durham, now the nation’s fastest-growing metro area with over one million people. You can add rising heartland cities like Columbus, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Oklahoma City and Fargo.

    Some of these—such as Austin, Columbus, Raleigh-Durham and Fargo—thrive in part by being college towns. Others like Houston, Charlotte and Dallas have evolved into major corporate centers with burgeoning immigrant populations. But they thrive because they are better places for most to live and do business.

    Take the critical issue of getting to work. According to the American Community Survey, the average New Yorker’s daily trip to work takes 35 minutes; the average resident of the Kansas City or Indianapolis region gets to the office in less than 13 minutes. That adds up in time and energy saved, and frustration avoided.

    The largest American cities—notably New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—also show the most rapid decline in middle-class jobs and neighborhoods, with a growing bifurcation between the affluent and poor. In these megacities, high property prices tend to drive out employers and middle-income residents. By contrast, efficient cities are where most middle- and working-class Americans, and their counterparts around the world, will find the best places to achieve their aspirations.

    This article originally appeared at the Wall Street Journal.

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

    Photo by wili_hybrid

  • The Toto Strategy: How Kansas Can Save Barack Obama’s Presidency

    Here’s an idea that could save Barack Obama’s presidency: Give up those troubling Chicago roots and get back to Kansas. If, as Dorothy observed in the Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” get the Wizard to send you back there soon.

    Barack Obama owes much to Kansas–and the Great Plains in general–something he used to acknowledge often enough. Not only was he largely raised by products of that region (his mother and grandmother hail  from  the Sunflower State), but also his remarkable victory over Hillary Clinton during the presidential primaries was built largely by winning first in the Iowa caucuses, followed by surprising victories in Kansas, North Dakota, Minnesota and Illinois.

    But the midterm elections saw much of the central region’s Congressional Democratic contingent “annihilated,” using Ron Brownstein’s word. Stalwart senators like Byron Dorgan of North Dakota politely gave up without a fight, and the Democrats lost House seats in both of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Kansas. They lost four in Illinois. The political imperative for Obama to shift his focus to the Heartland has never been clearer.

    By embracing  his mother’s families historic heartland roots–as he did in the early part of the primary campaign–Obama could energize a listless presidency increasingly disconnected from much of mainstream America.  This would help the president and his party emerge from their coastal redoubts, college towns and big cities like Chicago–which is crucial since there aren’t enough electoral votes in these areas in win re-election, particularly after the reapportionment coming following the census.

    A Kansas–or “Toto”–strategy would provide the economic focus or bringing the country out of the recession. Illinois teeters on the edge bankruptcy, but Kansas and most Plains states remain fiscally healthy  states.  Although hardly a high flier, Kansas’ unemployment rate — a mere 6.6% — stands well below the national average; of the ten states with the lowest unemployment rates, five are in the Plains, including Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Over the past decade, the region between Texas and the Dakotas has created more jobs per capita than the Northeast, the West Coast, the Great Lakes or the Southeast.

    Kansas and the rest of Great Plains also represent the part of America best positioned to benefit from changes in the global economy. Much is made about the “new economy” based on high-end intellectual products like software and biotechnology, venture capital and tech companies. Kansas is widely seen as falling way beyond coastal states like Massachusetts, Washington and Maryland, according to a recent survey by the Kansas City-based Kaufmann Foundation.

    But our country’s economic future may rely even more on more mundane fields, notably agriculture, manufacturing and energy, than the increasingly competitive information economy. Kansas ranks seventh among the nation’s agricultural states; Plains states Iowa, Texas, Nebraska, Illinois and Minnesota also rank in the top 10.  Growing demand for food from China, India and other developing countries places this part of the country in a fortuitous position. The U.S. agricultural trade balance jumped from roughly $5 billion in 2005 to $35 billion in 2008. This year’s corn crop, notes North Dakota State business professor Debora  Dragseth, could be the largest in the nation’s history. Overall the U.S. produces almost two-thirds of the world’s product of this much sought-after commodity.

    Of course, the Plains has its share of the large corporate farms detested among blue-state intellectuals, but most are family owned, including a growing number of smaller, specialized and organic producers. Due to strong demand from around the world, notes Creighton University economist Ernie Goss, the Plains’ “rural Main Street economy“ has picked up steam both in terms of jobs and income over the past year.

    The Plains also figures prominently in the country’s critical energy future.  Energy constitutes the largest component by far in our persistent trade deficit, accounting for roughly half the total. Texas has become a national leader in wind-driven energy, while the whole region has been described as “the Saudi Arabia of wind.”

    But wind, like solar power, is not a game-changer in the short run–in the Plains or anywhere else for that matter. For one it depends on huge subsidies roughly five times per kilowatt hour those for fossil fuels . More troubling still the industries associated with them–the supposed sources of miraculous numbers of “green jobs”–also are increasingly dominated by China.

    For the foreseeable future fossil fuels, which generate 84% of our power (all but 1% or 2% of the rest comes from nuclear or hydro-electrical power), will be more pertinent to our economic resurgence than renewables;  by 2035, according to federal Energy Information Administration, they will still account for roughly 75%.

    Unlike green energy, in which China and Europe remain stronger, the U.S. remains the world leader in fossil fuel technology. The industry’s global hub is in Houston, but many Plains cities, like Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Bismarck, play important roles. Kansas ranks eighth among oil producers; Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Montana also stand among the nation’s top 10 oil-producing states. More important, unlike carbon-crazed California, which still ranks third in total oil production, these states seem in favor of producing more of the gooey stuff.

    The Plains are also emerging as big players in what should be the key energy source of the next decade: natural gas. The country’s reserves of natural gas have grown rapidly; it is widely estimated we have 100 years supply of the stuff. Far cleaner than either coal or oil, our nation’s natural gas reserves are so great that energy executives in Texas are now talking about the possibility of becoming an energy exporter again.

    Kansas, for its part, is among the top 10 gas producers–along with Texas and Oklahoma. Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming, other top ten producers, inhabit the western end of the Plains. A shift to natural gas for everything from electrical generation to fuel for trucks, cars and buses would do more to improve the country’s sagging finances than anything else on the horizon. It will also generate a lot of both high-end engineering and skilled blue collar jobs.

    Finally, the Plains are becoming the new frontier of America’s still potent manufacturing capacity. This is the region where, over the past year, goods-producing jobs have been growing fastest.   A steady, relatively well-educated workforce–North Dakota now ranks just behind Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts for percentage of people 25 and 34 with a college degree–is becoming a major lure.

    As a born-again Kansan, President Obama can rebuild his reputation and our economy. Rather than being dissed as a taciturn intellectual, he can be respected as reticent, self-controlled Plainsman, a Gary Cooper, if you will. And he wouldn’t be out of place: Kansas is far less homogeneous than when Obama’s grandparents left there. Whites are already a minority in four Kansas counties, with immigrants coming from places as diverse as Mexico, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia.

    The culture of the Plains produced the mother who bore our president, and the grandmother who raised him. He certainly owes more to Kansas than to Kenya or Indonesia–or maybe even Illinois. A revival of Obama Kansasness may not thrill all his coastal fans, but it could help the President and his party find a way out of the political wilderness.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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

    Photo by earlycj5

  • How Liberalism Self-destructed

    Democrats are still looking for explanations for their stunning rejection in the midterms — citing everything from voting rights violations and Middle America’s racist orientation to Americans’ inability to perceive the underlying genius of President Barack Obama’s economic policy.

    What they have failed to consider is the albatross of contemporary liberalism.

    Liberalism once embraced the mission of fostering upward mobility and a stronger economy. But liberalism’s appeal has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome.

    Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.

    This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.

    Modern-day liberalism, however, is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.

    In the short run, the diminishment of middle-of-the-road Democrats at the state and national level will probably only worsen these tendencies, leaving a rump party tied to the coastal regions, big cities and college towns. There, many voters are dependents of government, subsidized students or public employees, or wealthy creative people, college professors and business service providers.

    This process — driven in large part by the liberal attachment to economically regressive policies such as cap and trade — cost the Democrats mightily throughout the American heartland. Politicians who survived the tsunami, such as Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia, did so by denouncing proposals in states where green policies are regarded as hostile to productive local industries that are major employers.

    Populism, a traditional support of liberalism, has been undermined by a deep suspicion that President Barack Obama’s economic policy favors Wall Street investment bankers over those who work on Main Street. This allowed the GOP, a party long beholden to monied interests, to win virtually every income segment earning more than $50,000.

    Obama also emphasized an urban agenda that promoted nationally directed smart growth, inefficient light rail and almost ludicrous plans for a national high-speed rail network. These proposals appealed to the new urbanist cadre but had little appeal for the vast majority of Americans who live in outer-ring neighborhoods, suburbs and small towns.

    The failure of Obama-style liberalism has less to do with government activism than with how the administration defined its activism. Rather than deal with basic concerns, it appeared to endorse the notion of bringing the federal government into aspects of life — from health care to zoning — traditionally controlled at the local level.

    This approach is unpopular even among “millennials,” who, with minorities, represent the best hope for the Democratic left. As the generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, millennials favor government action — but generally at the local level, which is seen as more effective and collaborative. Top-down solutions from “experts,” Winograd and Hais write in a forthcoming book, are as offensive to millennials as the right’s penchant for dictating lifestyles.

    Often eager to micromanage people’s lives, contemporary liberalism tends to obsess on the ephemeral while missing the substantial. Measures such as San Francisco’s recent ban on Happy Meals follow efforts to control the minutiae of daily life. This approach trivializes the serious things government should do to boost economic growth and opportunity.

    Perhaps worst of all, the new liberals suffer from what British author Austin Williams has labeled a “poverty of ambition.” FDR offered a New Deal for the middle class, President Harry S. Truman offered a Fair Deal and President John F. Kennedy pushed us to reach the moon.

    In contrast, contemporary liberals seem more concerned about controlling soda consumption and choo-chooing back to 19th-century urbanism. This poverty of ambition hurts Democrats outside the urban centers. For example, when I met with mayors from small, traditionally Democratic cities in Kentucky and asked what the stimulus had done for them, almost uniformly they said it accomplished little or nothing.

    A more traditional liberal approach might have focused on improvements that could leave tangible markers of progress across the nation. The New Deal’s major infrastructure projects — ports, airports, hydroelectric systems, road networks — transformed large parts of the country, notably in the West and South, from backwaters to thriving modern economies.

    When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century.

    Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: “You will never see another federal dam.”

    Harold Ickes, FDR’s enterprising interior secretary, must be turning over in his grave.

    The administration would have done well to revive programs like the New Deal Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. These addressed unemployment by providing jobs that also made the country stronger and more competitive. They employed more than 3 million people building thousands of roads, educational buildings and water, sewer and other infrastructure projects.

    Why was this approach never seriously proposed for this economic crisis? Green resistance to turning dirt may have been part of it. But undoubtedly more critical was opposition from public- sector unions, which seem to fear any program that threatens their economic privileges.

    In retrospect, it’s easy to see why many great liberals — like FDR and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia — detested the idea of public-sector unions.

    Of course, green, public-sector-dominated politics can work — as it has in fiscally challenged blue havens such as California and New York. But then, a net 3 million more people — many from the middle class — have left these two states in the past 10 years.

    If this defines success, you have to wonder what constitutes failure.

    This article originally appeared in Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and an adjunct fellow with the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo: Tony the Misfit