New Geography

Tag: Heartland

  • Obama: Only Implement Green Policies that Make Sense in a Time of Crisis

    With the exception of African-Americans, the group perhaps most energized by the Barack Obama presidency has been the environmentalists. Yet if most Americans can celebrate along with their black fellow citizens the tremendous achievement of Obama’s accession, the rise of green power may have consequences less widely appreciated.

    The new power of the green lobby — including a growing number of investment and venture capital firms — introduces something new to national politics, although already familiar in places such as California and Oregon. Even if you welcome the departure of the Bush team, with its slavish fealty to Big Oil and the Saudis, the new power waged by environmental ideologues could impede the president’s primary goal of restarting our battered economy.

    This danger grows out of the environmental agenda widening beyond such things as conservation and preserving public health into a far more obtrusive program that could affect every aspect of economic life. As Teddy Roosevelt, our first great environmentalist president, once remarked, “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

    Today, the “green” fringe sometimes seems to have become the mainstream, as well. While conservationists such as Roosevelt battled to preserve wilderness and clean up the environment, they also cared deeply about boosting productivity as well as living standards for the middle and working classes.

    In contrast, the modern environmental movement often seems to take on a different cast, adopting a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. Our “addiction” to economic growth, noted Friends of the Earth founder David Brower, “will destroy us.” Other activists regard population growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and increasing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

    For such people, the crusade against global warming trumps such things as saving the nation’s industrial heartland, which is largely fueled by coal, oil and natural gas, even if it means the inevitable transfer of additional goods making it to far dirtier places such as India and China. Of course, the current concern over global warming could still prove to be as exaggerated as vintage 1970s predictions of impending global starvation or imminent resource depletion.

    Certainly experience suggests we should not be afraid to question policies advocated by the true believers — particularly amid what threatens to be the worst economic downturn in generations. Actions taken now in the name of climate change could have powerful long-term economic implications.

    We don’t have to imagine this in the abstract; just look at the economies of two of the greenest states — Oregon and California — whose land use, energy and other environmental policies have helped contribute to higher housing and business costs as well as an exodus of entrepreneurs.

    Bill Watkins, head of the forecasting project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that these two environmentally oriented states now have among the nation’s highest unemployment rates, pushing toward 10 percent — ahead of only the Rust Belt disaster areas farther east. In some places, such as central Oregon, it could hit close to 15 percent next year.

    Many green activists, along with “smart growth” advocates and new urbanists, laud Oregon’s long-standing strict land use controls as a national role model. Recently imposed land use legislation in California, concocted largely to meet the state’s restrictions on greenhouse gas, has been greeted by them with almost universal hosannas.

    Of course, there is nothing wrong at all with trying to curb excessive sprawl or energy use. Promoting a dense urban lifestyle is also commendable, but it is an option that appeals to no more than 10 percent to 20 percent of the population. This is even truer of middle-class people with children, few of whom can hope to live the urban lifestyles of the Kennedys, Gores and other elites — much less also afford one or two country homes to boot.

    Tough land use policies are not only hard on middle-class aspirations, but they appear to have played a role in inflating the extreme bubble that affected the California and Oregon real estate markets. Limiting options for where people and business can locate, notes UCSB’s Watkins, tends to drive up the prices of desirable real estate beyond what it would otherwise cost.

    Perhaps worst of all, it is not at all certain that a forced march back to the cities would necessarily produce a better, more energy-efficient country. Sprawling and multipolar, with jobs scattered largely on the periphery, most American cities do not lend themselves easily to traditional mass transit; in many cases, this proves no more energy efficient than driving a low-mileage car, using flexible jitney services or, especially, working at home. Big cities also have a potential for generating a “heat island” effect that can result in higher temperatures.

    Energy policy represents another field where hewing too close to the green party line could prove problematic. Obama already has endorsed California’s approach as exemplary. And indeed, some things — like imposing tougher mileage standards, stronger conservation measures and more research into cleaner forms of energy — could indeed bring about both short-term and long-term economic benefits.

    However, there are also downsides to adopting a California-style single-minded focus on renewable fuels such as solar and wind. Right now, these sources account for far less than 1 percent of our nation’s energy production. Even if doubled or tripled in the next few years, they seem unlikely to reduce our future dependence on foreign oil or boost our overall energy supplies in the short, or even medium, term.

    Looking at the experience of these two states, bold claims about vast numbers of green jobs created by legislative fiat seem more about offloading costs to consumers, business and taxpayers than anything else, particularly at today’s current low energy prices. In contrast, new environmentally friendly investments in natural gas, hydro, biomass and nuclear are more likely to find private financing and may work sooner both to reduce dependence on foreign fuels and to keep energy prices down.

    The Obama administration certainly should listen to the arguments of environmentalists. But given the clear priority among voters to deal first with the economy, the president should implement only those green policies that make sense at this time of crisis. A sharp break from the Bush approach is certainly welcome, but not in ways that promise more pain to ordinary Americans and our faltering economy.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    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.

  • Infrastructure and Aesthetics

    In his 2005 book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, Brian Hayes surveys the built environment with an undaunted appreciation of the vast networks of infrastructure systems in America. Hayes, a writer for American Scientist, argues that common understanding of infrastructure is just as important as an understanding of nature itself. Without the ubiquitous power lines, the oft disparaged garbage dumps, or the controversial mining industry, the United States would not have been able to achieve status as the paragon of 20th Century modernization – a pattern now emulated by the likes of China and India.

    Yet it seems that ‘infrastructure’ has lost its fabled status in America. Our parents – or grandparents, depending on your age – celebrated achievements such as the building of the Hoover Dam or the California Water Project. But starting with the 1970s, as the environmental movement began to gain steam, and more recently after Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, large scale infrastructure has increasingly become something to be reviled.

    The only time we are reminded of our infrastructure is when tragedy strikes, be it a mining accident, a bridge falling down or a collapsed levee. It’s as if we wish to keep the very things that support our modern lifestyles ‘out of sight out of mind’. No one really wants to know where their trash ends up or what the intricate processes for treating sewage are, nor does anyone want to be a neighbor with a coal burning power plant.

    At the same time what had once been centers for productive industry have also been redeveloped into hip and trendy neighborhoods marketed to those looking for an ‘edgy’ urban experience. To be sure, part of the allure of once industrial areas such as San Francisco’s South of Market and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg lies in the gritty aesthetic and adaptability of warehouse and manufacturing buildings for reuse.

    Yet even though residential development may be halted for the foreseeable future, it is critical to not lose sight of the aesthetic value of the industrial landscape. This ‘diamond in the rough’ appeal applies not only to converted lofts and art galleries but to both our current functioning and yet-to-be built infrastructure as well.

    The potential for infrastructure to please the eye and to uplift the soul is not lacking in historical precedent. Some of the greatest monuments to the genius of ancient architects remain those which served as essential infrastructure, the most notable example the aqueducts constructed by the Romans.

    Yet today, aside from exceptions like the bridges of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the world of high architectural design has largely ignored the possibility that infrastructure could be beautiful. Instead, design media is relentlessly focused on museums and other elitist structures with the more mundane and common buildings being “left to the engineers”.

    LeCorbusier, the late Swiss/French architect and one of the ‘godfathers’ of modern architecture would be rolling in his grave if he knew this was the case. In his seminal manifesto Towards a New Architecture, LeCorbusier speaks of his appreciation for the industrial aesthetic: “Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first-fruits of the new age”.

    LeCorbusier, or ‘Corb’ as he is called, went on to apply the industrial aesthetic to socialist housing schemes while proclaiming that the “house is a machine for living in”. Although the jury is still out on whether or not living in a machine has mass appeal, Corbusier’s celebration of the simple and repetitive massing of structures such as grain silos is a good reminder that beauty can be derived from infrastructure.

    Early 20th Century American city builders also celebrated infrastructure. Willis Polk, a prominent San Francisco architect, was commissioned in 1910 to build a water temple in Sunol, California. Sunol, about 40 miles outside of San Francisco, was where converging water lines met before feeding into the city. Sensitive to the importance of getting fresh water to a growing population, some of San Francisco’s wealthiest citizens hired Polk to design the structure, which was inspired by the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. Soon after, the area around the iconic structure became a popular spot for park goers.

    Similarly, Los Angeles architect Gordon Kaufman was hired to add aesthetic merit to the Hoover Dam. Still generating power for parts of Southern California, Nevada and Arizona, the massive dam symbolizes one of the most ambitious pieces of infrastructure in American history. At the time, the dam was the world’s largest concrete structure, yet Kaufman softened the aesthetics by adding a simple and elegant Art Deco touch to the otherwise imposing structure.

    The marriage of aesthetic beauty and infrastructure does not always have to take place at the grand scale of the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge. In contrast, the barn, according to Brian Hayes, remains “the unmistakable icon of American agriculture and rural life.” The barn, a prevailing theme in American literature, represents function and flexibility of the highest order: one day it could be housing livestock while the next it could serve as a dance hall. Whatever the function, there is no questioning the charm of these structures dotting the rural landscape. With a renewed interest in family and organic farming in current popular culture, these buildings – including new barns – could assume a renewed meaning.

    With the Obama stimulus plan comes not only an opportunity to create jobs but to advance a cultural appreciation for the structures and systems that have made the United States a model to be emulated. Wind turbines, for instance, are gaining traction as the symbols of clean energy. When driving past large scale wind farms like the San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, the movement of the out-of-proportion blades coupled with the dizzying repetition of turbines results in something similar to a pleasant hallucination. The appreciation for wind turbines is a start in the right direction, yet if we are to ensure that the systems that run the country are suited to last for generations to come, the culture needs to once again celebrate, rather than demonize, our infrastructure.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • What Way for the Stimulus? Post-Industrial America vs. Neo-Industrial America

    As a result of the economic crisis, there is a broad consensus in favor of large-scale public investment in infrastructure in the U.S., both as part of a temporary stimulus program and to promote long-term modernization of America’s transportation, energy, telecom and water utility grids. But this momentary consensus masks the continuing disagreement on whether the U.S. government can legitimately promote American industries, and, if so, which industries. This is a problem for infrastructure policy, because different national infrastructures correspond to different national economic strategies.

    Consider the antebellum U.S. in Henry Clay’s American System: federal infrastructure investment in canals and later railroads (“internal improvements”) was part of a package that included import-substitution tariffs to protect infant U.S. industries from British competition. For Clay and his Whig allies and followers, including future Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln, internal improvements and tariffs were not ends in themselves. They were instruments to be used in the pursuit of the Whig-Republican vision of a decentralized, mixed industrial and agricultural economy where business owners, mostly small, and free workers, mostly prosperous, could realize the utopia of Clay’s “self-made man.”

    From Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis, the Southern planters who opposed such ambitious schemes had no objection to infrastructure as such. They favored infrastructure tailored to suit the needs of their semi-colonial slave plantation economy, based on exports of cotton and other commodities to British and Western European factories. Local wharves and harbors that facilitated the shipment of crops to industrial Britain were acceptable to the planters. They opposed infrastructure that would encourage industrialization in the South or the U.S. as a whole, out of fear that urbanization and industrialization would threaten their local dominance over both black slaves and poor white yeoman farmers. They also feared they would be marginalized in national politics – as they indeed were – by industrialists, merchants and financiers.

    Today, the rivalry is not between the champions of an industrial America and an agrarian America. Rather, it is a rivalry between the champions of a neo-industrial America, which includes world-class industrial agriculture, and a post-industrial America, in which most if not all manufacturing and even agriculture will be outsourced. In this formulation, post-industrial America emerges as a consumerist paradise populated by investors, executives of multinational companies, rentiers, realtors, government and nonprofit bureaucrats, and a supporting cast of service sector proletarians including nursing aides, nannies, gardeners, security guards and restaurant and hotel workers.

    Just as there was one logical infrastructure for the industrializing North and one for the anti-industrial plantation South in the nineteenth century, so in the twenty-first century a different infrastructure would be appropriate, depending on whether the goal is a post-industrial America or a neo-industrial America.

    A post-industrial infrastructure can be simple, local and substantially foreign.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can be simple since it involves little more than the roads and harbors needed to bring in high-value-added imports from abroad and ship out low-value-added American commodities. Adequate harbors are necessary, as are adequate highways to help ship U.S. soybeans and timber to industrial Asia while bringing Chinese, Japanese and Korean goods to Wal-Marts for distribution.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can also be local. Just as the Southern planters were indifferent or hostile to regional or national infrastructure projects, so the elites of the service sector are interested chiefly in the infrastructure needs of the half dozen or so coastal megalopolitan areas where they live. Many favor high-speed rail to connect nearby big cities on the coasts, while denouncing federal investment in non-metropolitan areas as boondoggles. The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy of post-industrial America could function reasonably well as long as a handful of colossal city-states – Boswash, Northern California, Greater LA, the Texas Triangle – had state-of-the-art local telecom and transportation and energy grids. So what if the rest of the continent decayed?

    Finally, the post-industrial infrastructure can be largely foreign. Most of the urban service sector elite favors both outsourcing American industry and importing a new metropolitan immigrant proletariat willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits than native Americans. To be sure, someone must build the components of the metro infrastructure and put them in place. But steel can be shipped in from Asia and assembled in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Houston by immigrants, legal or illegal. Better yet, the metro-supportive infrastructure can be leased or permanently sold to foreign consortiums and even foreign sovereign wealth funds, in order to avoid the need to raise taxes to pay for upfront costs or repay bonds over the long term. The “leakage” of federal stimulus spending to benefit Chinese factories, law-breaking Latin American illegal immigrants and petrostate sovereign wealth funds will not bother elites who are not only post-industrial but to a large extent too sophisticated to worry about narrow patriotism.

    If the infrastructure of a post-industrial America would be simple, local and largely foreign, the infrastructure of a neo-industrial America should be complex, national and predominantly American.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure necessarily must be complex, because the purpose of a neo-industrial infrastructure would be onshoring – arresting and in some cases reversing the transfer of high-value-added manufacturing and services to other countries. This requires something more than freight rail bringing Chinese imports to Wal-Mart and airports helping to deliver Amazon.com boxes to urban apartments. It requires an infrastructure tailored to the needs of an entire complex ecosystem of factories, design offices, and their suppliers and contractors. And that infrastructure not only must be rebuilt in existing industrial areas like Detroit but also built from scratch in areas such as the Great Plains. It would aim to put many of tomorrow’s factories and research parks in today’s depopulating rural areas and derelict inner cities.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure must be national and inclusive in scope. Its goal resonates with the aspiration of Henry Clay Whigs, Lincoln Republicans and William Jennings Bryan Populists – a decentralized, prosperous middle-class society of small and medium-sized towns as opposed to a country where half a billion people are crammed into a few plutocratic megacities and forced to live in dense apartment blocks.

    Such decentralization – contrary to the claims of some urbanists and greens – need not mean excessive “sprawl.” This is still a very large country with lots of land, as anyone who spends time away from the coasts recognizes.

    But more important, there can only be an independent middle-class majority in a United States with 400 or 500 million people in 2050 if most Americans live and work in relatively low-density areas where homes are affordable and small business rents are not crippling. That means building new towns and new industrial centers away from the existing ones, to spread out the population and accommodate tens of millions of new immigrants with desirable skills. The rich, who will remain concentrated in a few metro areas, where they can socialize, compete and conspire with one another, must be taxed by the federal government to subsidize the infrastructure of the entire continental U.S., not just their own cities, metro areas and states.

    Last but not least, a neo-industrial infrastructure must be predominantly national with respect to its components and its workforce. It would be self-defeating to design an infrastructure friendly to American industries and workers and then hire foreign industries and foreign workers to build it. Most or all federal infrastructure spending should be reserved for corporations and suppliers whose high-value-added production takes place on American soil. And all jobs directly or indirectly related to infrastructure construction should be reserved for citizens or legal immigrants. Law-abiding American citizens should not be taxed to subsidize law-breaking illegal immigrant workers and the unpatriotic, criminal contractors who employ them. This is not “nativism.” The right kind of legal immigration would be an important part of any neo-industrial strategy, as would taking advantage of foreign direct investment by foreign companies and sovereign wealth funds in mutually beneficial ways.

    The debate about infrastructure, then, is also a debate about the future industrial profile of America. Will America in the twenty-first century be neo-industrial or post-industrial? This debate, in turn, may well determine whether the U.S. will become a decentralized, continental middle-class society or a collection of plutocratic, hierarchical city-states. The stakes could not be higher.

    Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the American Infrastructure Initiative.

  • The Mobility Paradox: Investing in Human Capital Fuels Migration

    China has an interesting urban development strategy. The government bypasses those areas that it considers backward and plagued by poverty and entrenched political corruption. Instead, the investment goes into those areas it presumes to be new boomtowns.

    Now imagine if that Darwinian approach was used here in the United States. A report (“City Beautiful”) authored by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia advocates pushing federal infrastructure dollars – which could soon be flowing in the hundreds of billions – not towards our tired, hard-pressed urban areas but those that have experienced the greatest extent of gentrification.

    If you don’t want to slog through the published paper, then you can read about the controversial findings in a recent Boston Globe article. The journalist, not surprisingly, sensationalizes the conclusions and the choice quotes do a great job of provocation: “‘If you have sun and a beautiful beach and 300-year-old buildings, it’s no wonder that you’re going to attract people,’ said [co-author Albert Saiz]. ‘But that’s no use for Detroit or Syracuse.’”

    The author of the Globe piece goes on to question the coming urban bailouts: “Why send another federal dollar to bolster manufacturing in Akron when it could support a golf course in sunny Phoenix?”

    I get the sense that the economists in question aren’t making such a stark distinction. But I can understand why the press would go down that road. I’ve read the research and there are concerns about the wisdom of investing in cities that currently don’t attract tourists or Richard Florida’s elite Creative Class.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report attempts to reconfigure the understanding of urban geography. People are congregating in urban centers for a new purpose: leisure. The old school of thinking identified the central business district (CBD) as the economic heart of the metropolis. Higher densities were the result of a more efficient way of doing certain types of work (e.g. financial, insurance and real estate).

    The new school sees the city as a special playground and the study tries to capture this effect by looking at tourist Meccas. In short, jobs are following talent to pleasant places to live.

    Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz try to figure out if the geographically mobile are indeed heading to sunnier climes or if the leisure amenities follow the talent. They claim that quality of life comes first. The best and brightest are not chasing top employment opportunities. They are keener on finding a “cool” place to hang out.

    Other research suggests this approach may be limited. For example, although job growth has been very strong in some sun belt cities that are cited, growth rates in other amenity-rich cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco – have been well below par. Although often attractive to twenty-somethings, these areas also suffer a persistently strong net outmigration.

    Perhaps more to the point what use is any of this to those living in the heartland cities? Should Akron start putting more money in skateparks or global warming?

    There are huge problem in spending money in order to attract the geographically fickle. Fads fade and the mobile – largely people under 30 – will move again. And what about the people who can’t move? We’ve yet to address the mobility paradox.

    Moving to a better place might be one of the most distinguishing features of American culture. However, less and less people can manage to do so. There are considerably more “stuck” than there are “mobile.” The nomads of the knowledge economy comprise the global elite. They can live wherever they like and, particularly when young, can move at the drop of a hat.

    Where does that leave the postindustrial cities currently failing to attract the twenty-something demographic? One suggestion is to better educate people tethered to their neighborhood. The rub is that greater investment in your human capital will make your young adults more likely to leave. This is the mobility paradox. Regional workforce development has the unintended effect of increasing out-migration.

    A common response to the mobility paradox is the transformation of a downtown area into a “cool city.” The theory is that the best and brightest won’t leave if there are more fun things to do. Tying up the urban budget with projects aimed at retaining the creative class has its own perils. There is little, if any, evidence indicating that this policy will decrease the geographic mobility of the well-educated. Many cities stuffed with cultural amenities also sport high rates of out-migration. Furthermore, tastes change. ”Best places to live” lists change quite a bit from one year to the next.

    We should learn from the bust of hot destinations such as Florida or even California. Today’s paradise is tomorrow’s backwater. Meanwhile most of the population will continue to live in “Forgottenville.” Should we just forget about them?

    Globalization would seem to reward such an approach. Some cities will cut it, most won’t. Good luck dealing with the political instability. China gets away with ignoring its “old” cities thanks to robust growth and iron-fisted control. Given the current economic slowdown, things may be getting tense there, particularly in the left-behind industrial towns in the interior.

    So should amenities drive President Obama’s economic strategy? These days, the Sunshine States also are in dire need of a bailout. Alabama fights Michigan for federal attention. If the Rust Belt benefits from the Chicago President, let’s hope it’s for its own sake – not just the creative class.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • Moving to Flyover Country

    As the international financial crisis and the US economy have worsened, there have been various reports about more people “staying put,” not moving from one part of the country to another. There is some truth in this, but the latest US Bureau of the Census estimates indicate the people are still moving, and in big numbers.

    In the year ended June 30, 2008, 670,000 people moved between states. This is down substantially from the peak years of 2005 to 2007, when housing prices in California and its suburbs of Nevada and Arizona, Florida, the Northeast and the Northwest reached record heights never seen before. In those years, people could elicit considerable and unprecedented financial gain by moving to parts of the country where the housing bubble had not visited or had done less damage. A household could buy in Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth or Atlanta and save more than $1,000,000 in purchase price and mortgage payments compared to a comparable house in San Diego, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area. In 2006, net domestic migration between states peaked at 1,200,000.

    Still, despite the reduction from the most extreme bubble years, last year’s interstate migration numbers still exceeded those of 2001, 2002 and 2003 and nearly equaled 2004. Lost in the discussions of the decline has been the continuation of a seemingly inexorable secular trend: the continued migration to the “Flyover County” that many of the coastal urban elites tend to dismiss as insignificant and even unlivable. What residents of Elitia reject, millions are embracing.

    Can 3,500,000 Movers be Wrong? The new data shows a strong trend of domestic migration to Flyover Country. Between 2000 and 2008, 3,500,000 residents moved to Flyover Country. This is roughly equal to the movement of the entire population of the City of Los Angeles. Moreover, the trend has been accelerating. In the last four years, the number of people relative to the population leaving Elitia’s promised lands has increased by 60 percent.

    The Lost Empire: New York has lost residents at a rate exceeding that of any other state or the District of Columbia. Not even the destructive winds of Katrina and Rita, the malfeasance of the Army Corps of Engineers or even mis-governance – from Washington to Baton Rouge and New Orleans itself – could drive people out as effectively as the Empire State. New York has lost 1,575,000 domestic migrants since 2000, nearly equal to the population of Manhattan.

    New York’s net domestic migration loss is equal to 8.1 percent of its 2000 population, compared to Louisiana’s 7.1 percent loss. New York has even outdone that perpetual exporter of residents, the District of Columbia, which lost a mere 7.6 percent through domestic migration.

    From Golden State to Fool’s Gold State: Then there is California, which has added more people over the past 50 years than live in Australia. How things have changed. Early in the decade, the Golden State was suffering somewhat modest domestic migration losses. But by 2005, with house prices escalating wildly relative to incomes, California won the race to the bottom. Each year since then, California has driven away more people than any other state.

    What’s Right with Pennsylvania: There are anomalies, however. One of the leading parlor games is “what’s wrong with Pennsylvania” stories. From the Philadelphia Inquirer to Washington’s Brookings Institution, there has probably been more hand wringing about Pennsylvania than about all other states combined. Yet things have changed materially, and largely for the better. Although Pennsylvania continues to lose domestic migrants, the rate has been far less than elsewhere in the Northeast. Between 2000 and 2008, Pennsylvania lost less than 50,000 domestic migrants. Its neighboring states – New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Ohio (Delaware and West Virginia have had small gains) – have lost more than 2,300,000 domestic migrants or nearly 50 domestic migrants for every one leaving Pennsylvania. Among states with more than 10,000,000 population, only Florida and Texas have done better in domestic migration than Pennsylvania.

    That’s pretty good company for a state so many have declared to be on life support. Indeed, it is time to ask “what’s right about Pennsylvania?” One answer might be that Pennsylvania home prices did not explode relative to incomes (a distortion avoided because of Pennsylvania’s generally more liberal land use regulations). The American Dream – at least for those who are aspiring to achieve it – has shifted from New York, New Jersey and Maryland to Pennsylvania. This is evident from the housing construction on the west bank of the Delaware River and just over the Maryland line in York, Adams and Franklin counties.

    Florida: A Changing Story: Flyover Country’s gains are impressive. Florida has attracted the largest number of residents from other states, at 1,250,000 since 2000. This amounts to a 7.6 percent increase compared to the state’s 2000 population. However, things are changing. As the state’s housing became unaffordable, domestic migration dropped and then stopped. By 2007, domestic migration fell more than 80 percent from average of earlier years. Then, Florida slipped into a loss of 9,000 domestic migrants in 2008.

    Southern Gains: The rest of the South generally avoided the worst of the housing bubble. Texas has added 700,000 domestic migrants since 2000. The state displaced Florida as the leading destination for domestic migrants and has held that position since 2006. North Carolina has added 580,000 domestic migrants; Georgia added 525,000, South Carolina 270,000 and Tennessee 240,000. Even Arkansas and Alabama, although held in low esteem on the coasts, gained more domestic migrants than any state in the Northeast.

    Escaping from California: Nevada has been a big draw for domestic migration, adding 365,000 new residents. This is 18.3 percent of its 2000 population, the highest rate in the nation. Arizona added 700,000, or 13.7 percent of its population. Much of this growth has been driven by Californians fleeing out of control housing prices, though their own more recently developing bubbles have probably contributed to somewhat reduced domestic migration gains In recent years.

    Basket Cases in Flyover Country: However, not all is well in Flyover Country. Michigan lost 109,000 residents to other states in 2008 alone, for the deepest percentage loss in the nation (1.1 percent). Since 2000, Michigan experienced a 4.7 percent domestic migration loss, equal to the decline in Massachusetts. Further, based upon current rates, Michigan next year will probably be the first state to ever drop from above to below 10,000,000 residents. Illinois and Ohio have also suffered substantial domestic migration losses, at 4.6 percent and 3.0 percent respectively.

    Where from Here? It is, of course, impossible to tell whether these trends will continue. Domestic migration could fall even more precipitously if economic times continue to worsen.

    We cannot predict whether seemingly unlikely trends, such as net in-migration to South Dakota and West Virginia, will continue in the longer run. Will Florida’s losses continue or intensify, or will it resume its position as a magnet for residents of other states? Has the magnet of California truly lost its attraction? Will the improving trends in the Midwest begin to make up for half a century of migration losses? Only time will tell.

    Resource: State Population & Migration: 2000-2008 (http://www.demographia.com/db-statemigra2008.pdf)

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Oregon’s Fringes: A New Rural Alternative

    Once the bastion of a thriving rural middle class, Oregon’s rural communities are now barely scraping by. The state’s timber industry employed 81,400 residents at its peak in 1978. At the time, the industry made up 49% of all manufacturing jobs in the state according to the Oregon Employment Department.

    Since then, the recessions of the early eighties and nineties, increased land-use restriction, decreased timber supply, global competition and automation of the timber industry have devastated rural communities that relied on once-plentiful timber jobs. Total timber industry employment has dropped to barely 11,000. Long term forestry prospects are glum. The benefits of carbon sequestration, endangered species protections, growing green building industry and the desire to protect Oregon’s forests for recreation will continue to hamper extraction and employment opportunities.

    Meanwhile, residents of such places as the southwest town of Oakridge (pop, 4,000) are left with few options. As the last mill went in the early nineties, so did the jobs. Many left for employment in surrounding cities. Those who stay often work multiple minimum-wage retail shifts; a trailer or shared space is many times their only living option.

    Oregon’s rural places were wrecked not just because of the necessary industry shift (away from logging) but because of the lack of long-term planning required to accommodate that shift.

    The obvious decline in timber employment called for a multi-generational plan to re-invent the state’s rural communities. Instead, towns like Oakridge were allowed to sink until the situation became bleak enough to gain state attention. What followed was reactionary policy that mandated mostly welfare and other band-aid solutions.

    The current situation calls for a more drastic plan that will once again restore Oregon’s proud rural tradition. The initial step is recognizing that rural Oregon – if the state is to preserve its natural resources and provide healthy communities for its residents – must transition from a rural layout to denser small town formations. The state lacks the resources, population density and geographic appeal to allow all of rural Oregon to make this change.

    Instead, select areas with the potential for turn-around should be identified across the state and given special attention in making the transition. At best, this should come from the ground up: through the initiative of local communities. These “New Towns” will be allotted state resources and special legislation to reinvent themselves as more compact and sustainable communities with the capacity of attracting skilled workers and business alike.

    Rather than attempt to wrestle with every factor in the discussion of the New Town model, what follows is a broad outline of the more crucial considerations suggested by such an approach . This leaves much open to discussion, to which the reader is invited to contribute.

    First, Oregon’s historically strict land-use regulations need to be re-evaluated. Instead of discouraging development, it should be encouraged within the New Town boundaries by incentive packages to developers who add an element of “community value” to their projects. Projects that are built sustainably, offer employment, scenic access, cultural attractions, restaurants, and/or retail options will qualify for the incentives.

    Of course many oppose almost any further development across rural Oregon. But in reality we really have two options: either accept a future of rural disenfranchisement and resource extraction; or concentrate resources, re-zone, and intelligently build new, economically as well as environmentally sustainable towns across Oregon.

    Alternative energy companies such as SolarWorld, Vestas and Solaicx, Inc. are just a handful of the dozens of renewable energy companies running or planning new facilities in Oregon.

    Initially, these firms have clustered around Portland or its surrounding suburbs. But factors such as dwindling space and access to workers could drive these firms further outwards. The right incentives package, inexpensive land and labor would make the New Towns an attractive option for the green industry in the coming years.

    Green business could provide one foundation for these places. Once the green industry demonstrates confidence in the New Town model, other economic players would likely follow. These include industries – such as food processing, data centers and specialized services – that could also be nurtured successfully, as has occurred in smaller communities elsewhere in the region.

    The New Town proposal also offers a viable solution to Oregon’s expected population growth. Between 1980 and 2006, the Oregon population grew from 2.6 million to 3.7 million, an increase of 40.5 percent. By 2050 population growth for the state is projected at 5.8 million according to the Northwest Rural Development Center using U.S. Census data.

    The state’s population growth – mainly from immigration and domestic migrants – will be attracted to locales with affordable housing and job opportunities. So far this has translated into a largely urban migration. Growth within cities or in their surrounding suburbs increased by as much as 50%, while non-metro growth increased by only 19%.

    As long as jobs remain in or near the handful of cities Oregon has to offer, these trends will continue. Fortunately, the majority of newcomers are not drawn primarily by urban amenities. Inexpensive housing, job opportunities, and scenic attractions could compensate nicely for the increasing cost and congestion that accompanies urban living.

    The development of the suburbs stemmed from the desire to escape the urban core’s problems. The suburbs continue to surround our cities because of the resources and job availability. However, there is little reason that with the digital revolution and the coming green revolution, once-isolated towns cannot become self sustainable and very desirable.

    Many readers will feel uneasy by the suggestion of deliberately spurring growth in particular places while allowing others to wane. It seems to go against free market ideology and even to be unauthentic.

    Yet a change is needed. These places initially thrived because they were located near natural resources. By shifting from extraction industries, the basis of the local economy has shifted. The whole approach to town development needs to be readjusted to meet these new realities.

    Without a complete shift in how planners view and design for the spaces across the entire state, the rural poor will continue to struggle, while population increases will make our metropolitan areas less and less attractive. The New Town model could present a viable option to the contemporary problems Oregonians face and perhaps to other problems now only on the horizon.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions.

  • Postindustrial Strength Brain Drain Policy

    In the discussions of the stimulus and infrastructure problem, little attention has yet been paid to addressing brain drain. Yet for many regions – particularly in the old industrial heartland – no issue could be more critical.

    Perhaps the most important investment in regional human capital occurs at local schools. Enterprise looks to the secondary and post-secondary institutions within the area for labor. In this regard, it makes sense to fund better learning with local and state taxes as long as that talent remains within that geography.

    Older industrial age cities and states are particularly dependent on a parochial labor pool. That’s the political legacy of the industrial economy. Workers tended to put down deep roots and this lack of geographic mobility made unions the only means to fight depressed wages.

    But the conventional solution for regional decline has been greater ‘investments’ in education. Yet increasingly high local and state taxes for education no longer make sense. In fact it can be argued that Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh have often been victims of their own success. Excellent schools – particularly in the suburban periphery – increased the geographic mobility of the next generation. When tough times hit in the late 70s and early 80s, these young adults were ready to embrace opportunity wherever it may be. When they left for Houston, Phoenix or Tampa, they took all those tax dollars with them.

    Out-migration isn’t a problem when your region is benefiting from some other place’s investment in human capital. But if no one is moving to your city or state, then retention of talent becomes a matter of economic survival. This is difficult to accomplish when your graduates are smart enough to know about greater opportunities that exist all the way across the country. It is also made worse when your local businesses are loath to pay the prevailing national market rate for the labor it needs.

    In this sense then, plugging brain drain can help depress wages and make a place like Charlotte that much more attractive to Rust Belt graduates. Remember, captains of industry made a lot of money exploiting captive labor markets.

    The dependence on local talent also disrupts network migration. Cities that must attract “foreign” workers develop pathways that make it easier for future workers to move there. It also helps connect the local economy to the global one, as has occurred on the west coast, with Asian immigrants opening connections to Pacific Rim economies and in south Florida, where Cuban migration has created a dynamic international business sector.

    Furthermore, getting newcomers helps outsource the costs of cultivating human capital. Low tax regimes bank on in-migration. Poor local schools don’t really matter when the best and brightest from the Rust Belt are moving into your brand spanking new crystal palaces. In this sense, the “legacy economy” is subsidizing Sun Belt boomtowns.

    The Rust Belt needs to learn from the Sun Belt. The game is all about attraction. The geographic mobility of talent within the Rust Belt would be a good place to start. Instead of squeezing the local labor pool, pave a new path to a fellow postindustrial city with a similar tax burden and effectively starve the boomtowns. Your neighboring legacy economy feels the same pain you do. Talent churning between the two locales beats the futility of fighting brain drain.

    Even growth states such as Georgia are overly concerned with who leaves. Sun Belt (i.e. growth) states obsess the out-migration of native graduates as much as Rust Belt (i.e. shrinking) states do. The same policy boondoggle in Ohio exists in Georgia. Across the board, there is a prejudice for homegrown talent.

    In contrast, I think older, now shrinking cities must embrace out-migration and focus more on growing the numbers of newcomers. These people will bring the new ideas and connections regions like ours need. Leave the self-destructive nativism to the Sun Belt.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • How To Save The Industrial Heartland

    You would think an economic development official in Michigan these days would be contemplating either early retirement or seppuku. Yet the feisty Ron Kitchens, who runs Southwest Michigan First out of Kalamazoo, sounds almost giddy with the future prospects for his region.

    How can that be? Where most of America sees a dysfunctional state tied down by a dismal industry, Kitchens points to the growth of jobs in his region in a host of fields, from business services to engineering and medical manufacturing. Indeed, as most Michigan communities have lost jobs this decade, the Kalamazoo region, with roughly 300,000 residents, has posted modest but consistent gains.

    Of course, Kalamazoo, which is home to several auto suppliers, has not been immune to the national downdraft that has slowed job growth. But unlike the state – which he describes as “a hospice for the auto industry” – Kalamazooans are already looking at expanding other emerging industries, including advanced machining, food processing, medical equipment, bioscience and engineering business services. Unemployment, although above the national average, is more than two points below the horrendous 9.3% statewide average.

    As Kitchens notes, this relative success came through often painstaking and laborious work, a marked departure from the “magic bullet” approach to economic recovery that often dominates Michigan and other rustbelt states. In the past, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has touted ideas about developing “cool cities” to keep young people from bolting to more robust locales and, more recently, on the promise of so-called “green jobs” tied to sustainable energy.

    “People don’t want to talk about ‘blocking and tackling,’” Kitchens suggests. “You keep your head down and keep pushing. It’s not sexy but it works over the longer term.”

    For his part, Kitchens never much embraced the idea of coolness – a “cool Kalamazoo” effort even received $100,000 from Gov. Granholm as part of her strategy of promoting “creative urban development” as a way to keep talent in the state.

    Of course, this gambit failed miserably almost everywhere, even before the recent economic meltdown. Nearly one in three residents, according to a July 2006 Detroit News poll, believes Michigan is “a dying state.” Two in five of the state’s residents under 35 said they were seriously considering leaving for other locales.

    Kitchens does not express much faith either in Granholm’s latest gambit, developing Michigan into a green energy superpower. After all, states like Texas and California have a wide lead in these technologies and other areas, notably the Great Plains, possess a lot more wind and biofuel potential. And in terms of low-mileage “green” vehicles, the Big Three lag way behind not only the Japanese but even some European competitors.

    So instead of believing in reincarnation or finding some miraculous cure, Kitchens believes places must rely on exploiting their historic advantages. In the case of Michigan, those are assets like a powerful engineering tradition and a hard-working and skilled workforce that can be harnessed in fields outside the auto industry. In addition, the area enjoys a cost of living significantly below the national average and far less than those in the coastal states.

    “There’s no easy way to get out of the trouble the region is in,” Kitchens suggests. “You can’t make it by trying to be ‘cool places’ or be the green capital. Instead we have to focus on who we are, a place that has a great tradition of advanced engineering, and take advantage of this.”

    So far this approach has paid off, leading to the creation of some 8,000 new jobs over the past three years. The region has focused both on bringing in new companies as well as helping existing ones expand. Perhaps most importantly, it has also raised a $50 million venture capital fund from local investors to help launch fledgling entrepreneurs.

    The region also boasts an extensive set of business incubators, which seek to leverage the engineering skill of those just out of school or those who have left bigger companies.

    The Kalamazoo experience shows one way out for not only Michigan but also other struggling Midwestern industrial hubs. Another promising example can be seen in Cleveland’s recently developed “District of Design,” which seeks to capitalize on the regions historic strengths in specialty manufacturing. It is all about taking advantage of the embedded DNA that exists in these once wondrously productive places.

    This approach can even revive the residues of the automobile industry. There may be widespread and deserved contempt for the top management of firms like General Motors, but industry veterans repeatedly point out that the region – most particularly the area around Detroit – retains an enormous reservoir of engineering talent, which could provide the linchpin for regional recovery.

    One recent sign validating this was the opening of a new $200 million Toyota research and development center in suburban Detroit. The key reason for making the investment, noted Japanese Consul-General Tamotsu Shinotsuka, was Michigan’s “abundant human resources.” If you are looking for “resources” who know the business of building cars and engines, locating in Michigan has certain logic.

    Of course, this talent pool long has been available to the Big Three. However, as retired automotive engineer Amy Fritz has suggested, they have been ill-used by top management. American engineers, the British-born and educated Fritz suggests, are not inherently less talented than their Asian or European counterparts. They tend be more innovative but their creativity is often stifled by the short-term oriented management priorities of their bosses.

    “With or without a bailout, the Big Three as we have known them will not be the same,” writes Fritz. “One or two could disappear. Others will no doubt shrink. However, the intelligence that exists within the engineering and industrial talent of Michigan remains. This is what the country should look to save from extinction, not the mediocrities who have ruled from highest management.”

    Indeed, even in a future with a shrunken Big Three – and perhaps the extinction of at least one of them – the industrial heartland does not have to die. Nor does it have to become a permanent “hospice” for failed once-great companies. The way to a long-term prosperous future cannot be built by depending on the administrations of Washington or the political clout of the United Auto Workers.

    Instead, Michigan, and much of the industrial heartland, should build a strategy that taps into culture that once made it the envy of the manufacturing world. These people are the key to any recovery, the ones who can both transform fading companies or start new ones. As the late Soichiro Honda once told me, “What’s important is not gold or diamonds, but people.”

    This is the basic lesson of business that the current leaders of the Big Three, most Michigan politicians and perhaps too many on Capitol Hill have forgotten, or perhaps never learned. The industrial heartland may be down but as long as the talent and will is there, it is far from out.

    If you do not believe it, take a little trip up to Kalamazoo, which may be quietly showing how to take the Great Lakes toward a new and brighter future.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    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.

  • Bailing out on the Dreamland…And Returning Home

    My father, who was from eastern Kentucky, headed with millions of other Appalachian people for the “promised land” after the great depression. The promised land in that day consisted of cities such as Dayton, Detroit, Gary, and Cincinnati, out of which rose great factories that employed thousands on giant “campuses.” They thrived through the vigor of this transplanted workforce – uneducated like my father but full of gumption, tenacity and work ethic.

    My father tells of begging for a job: when turned down by Personnel, he went running, not walking, to see the foreman who put him “right to work that night.” It was in those factories that my dad and other “immigrants” found good middle-class pay…if little in the way of inspiring work. But, he and the others were not picky, as necessity was the mother of this invention.

    Today the world is different. Many of the workers who left for jobs in other cities are returning home to Appalachia – and not entirely by choice. Many of them are being laid off from the auto factories with little else to turn to but family and ties to “place”.

    This creates a new challenge to areas like Appalachia and my region, eastern Kentucky. These are no longer inevitable geographies of distress; certainly they are no more challenged that those of the former dreamscapes up north around the Great Lakes.

    The media will be slow to see this change. Recently CNN focused on the poorest of the poor in Clay County, Kentucky in ways that fit the media stereotype as a home to the ignorant, the racist and the sexist. They even quoted a Clay County woman who observed that “Hillary’s place was in the home.”

    The media is not the only group stuck on the old images. From Kennedy’s famous tour to LBJ’s announcement of the War on Poverty in 1964 from a front porch in Inez, Kentucky to John McCain’s visit during the primary, the region has proven to be an enigma to presidents and policy makers who abhorred the intractable poverty they saw there. It just wasn’t right that an America of plenty would have that “other” “third” world so resistant to the policies and dollars designed to provide transformation.

    In the past, policies were implemented that alternately featured the fundamental nature of the people – not always flattering – to absentee ownership and the exploitation of its rich minerals by outside interests. Or they reflected radical policies and programs that did not take into account the unusual ties to local culture and the strong sense of place and community – attributes that are not often in line with of the culture of consumerism and national mega-corporate prominence.

    Have we reached a turning point where the peeling away of the onion reveals not a past assessment of red America as epitomized by sound bite depictions but one of lessons that can be learned? We were surprised if not alarmed by a Greenspan who admitted that he too was caught off guard by the crash of 2008. We were lulled into believing that Harvard and Yale graduates really do know more and are smarter than the rest of us. We were lulled into believing that just one more plastic Santa or TV set made in China was going to fill the void in our busy lives.

    Have we turned a corner? My father tells of his father making mandolins to supplement his small income as a dirt farmer. He also tells of crops failing and of meager, if existent, Christmas presents. But each spring this man with ties to the land and place reminds me to “plant my corn when tree buds are the size of squirrel ears.” Now I don’t know the first thing about planting corn or even what a squirrel ear looks like. But as we move through the current crisis and a reassessment of the American Dream, I hear echoes of a desire here not to embrace modernity but to seek a return of front porches; local foods and farms; a desire for something beyond the cold flickering computer screen in the middle of the night; and an understanding that we may have, if not more information, perhaps more wisdom than those who hold themselves out as experts.

    All this will be critical as we consider people returning from the Great Lakes and the big cities back to Appalachia. Rather than seeing them as new victims, or unreconstructed red staters, the Obama Administration needs to regard these people as assets for renewing a part of the country that, always close to last, can begin to fulfill its own potential on its own terms.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Make Sure All That Infrastructure Spending Is Well Supported

    It’s the new buzzword: infrastructure.

    President-elect Barack Obama has promised billions in infrastructure spending as part of a public works program bigger than any since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. Though it was greeted with hosannas, his proposal is only tapping into a clamor for such spending that’s been rising ever since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 and a major bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last year. With the economy now officially in recession, the rage for new brick and mortar is reaching a fever pitch.

    But before we commit hundreds of billions to new construction projects, we should focus on just what kind of infrastructure investment we should – and shouldn’t – be making. More important, we should think beyond temporary stimulus and make-work jobs and about investments that will propel the economy well into this century.

    After all, it’s not that we stopped spending on infrastructure over the past decade. It’s that mostly, we haven’t spent on the right things.

    New York City, for example, has wasted billions on its bloated bureaucracy and on constructing new sports stadiums and other ephemera deemed necessary to maintain Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “luxury city.” Meanwhile, many of its subway and rail lines have deteriorated. Over the decades, brownouts and blackouts, caused in part by underinvestment in energy infrastructure, have become common during periods of high energy use in the summer.

    Similarly, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has extolled the Golden State as “the cutting-edge state . . . a model not just for 21st-century American society but the world.” Yet California’s once envied water-delivery systems, roadways, airports and schools are in serious disrepair. Many even more hard-pressed communities – Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans – have similarly wasted limited treasure on spectacular new convention centers, sports arenas, arts and entertainment facilities and hotels while allowing schools, roads, ports and other critical sinews of economic life to fray.

    Convention centers and other tourist attractions create reasonably high-paying construction jobs in the short term, but over time, they create an economy dominated by lower-wage service jobs. Take New Orleans. It was once one of the nation’s great industrial and commercial centers. But then the city turned its back for decades on its diverse economic base and invested not in levees, port development and basic infrastructure but in the arts, culture and tourism. The tourism and convention business surged, but the result was a low-wage economy. Nearly 40 percent of New Orleans households, or twice the national average, earned less than $20,000 a year in 2000.

    Other places have followed a similar trajectory of folly, heavily subsidizing luxury condominiums, restaurants and other amenities to help lure the so-called creative class. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s 2003 plan to turn her state around focused on creating “cool cities” aimed at attracting hip, educated workers to Detroit and other failing urban centers. Instead of sparking an economic revival, Granholm has presided over a mass exodus of younger workers who can’t find jobs in her state.

    Perhaps no place epitomizes misplaced priorities better than Pittsburgh. Widely hailed in the media as a poster child for the urban “renaissance,” Pittsburgh has suffered a precipitous decline in population: Its 310,000 residents are less than half its 1950 peak. It now shares with parts of the former East Germany the gloomy demographic of having more residents die each year than are born.

    Like other cities, Pittsburgh has sought to revive itself with billions in new stadiums, arenas and cultural facilities. Meanwhile, its roads and bridges are in a constant state of disrepair. Most recently, the city embarked on a scheme to create a 1.2-mile, $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River to connect downtown’s heavily subsidized towers with taxpayer-funded pro sports stadiums and a new casino. This “tunnel to nowhere,” derided by a local columnist as the nation’s “premier transit boondoggle,” will no doubt be the sort of thing many states and localities will seek federal infrastructure funds for, justifying them on the basis of both short-term economic stimulus and some kind of “green” agenda.

    Although some new spending on efforts such as developing alternative fuels could improve efficiencies, many “green” projects seem destined to devolve into little more than expensive boondoggles. A recent program passed by the Los Angeles City Council, for example, calls on the city-owned utility’s ratepayers to subsidize installing solar panels on office buildings. This plan, heavily promoted by labor lobbyists, mandates that the project be carried out by the Department of Water and Power, whose employees are among the most well-paid public workers in the nation. By some estimates, it would raise the price of electricity by as much as 8 percent. But it will do nothing to slow the continued flight of industrial and other employment from Los Angeles or its suburbs.

    A “red-green” tilt to infrastructure programs – essentially marrying the labor and environmental lobbies – also seems sure to raise spending on public mass-transit projects. Some transit or rail spending can, of course, promote efficiency and productivity. A significant incentive to increase rail freight, for example, could boost productivity in the critical manufacturing, agriculture and energy industries because rail can generally carry far more goods on less fuel than long-haul trucking.

    Spending on upkeep of transit systems in older centralized cities such as New York, Washington and Chicago also seems logical. But with few exceptions – the heavily traveled corridor between downtown Houston and the Texas Medical Center, for instance – ridership on most new rail systems outside the traditional cities has remained paltry, accounting for barely 1 or 2 percent of all commuters. Such projects are almost absurdly expensive on a per-capita basis; the Allegheny Institute, a Pennsylvania think tank that pursues free-market solutions to local questions, estimates that the cost to the taxpayer of each trip through the new Pittsburgh tunnel could be as much as $15.

    Infrastructure investment requires a strong litmus test. Where the cash goes should be determined chiefly on the basis of how the spending will enhance the nation’s productive capacity and raise incomes across the board. This also means looking beyond traditional brick and mortar investments to critical skills shortages. Businesspeople nationwide complain repeatedly of a chronic shortage of skilled blue-collar workers and technicians. More than 80 percent of 800 U.S. manufacturing firms surveyed in 2005 reported “a shortage of qualified workers overall.” Nine in 10 firms said that they faced a “moderate-to-severe shortfall” in qualified technicians.

    In sharp contrast to sports stadiums and convention centers, programs in skills training for U.S.-based industries such as aerospace, energy, machine tools and agricultural equipment tend to create high-wage jobs, which have expanded over the past decade even as the overall number of industrial positions has declined. Many industrial companies are increasingly desperate for skilled workers and often consider locating wherever they can be found. These companies also produce many jobs that, though not located on the factory floor, are critical to the nation’s competitive edge. For example, the Manufacturing Institute estimates that manufacturers employ one-fourth of all scientists and 40 percent of engineers.

    A forward-looking infrastructure program would also target places that would most benefit from new roads, bridges, ports and other critical facilities, including underperforming regions such as the Great Plains, Appalachia and rural Pennsylvania, as well as the depressed Great Lakes area. These areas offer cheaper labor and housing, prime locations and access to natural resources. Making them more accessible to markets and more energy efficient could replicate the great New Deal success in modernizing much of the South and West.

    Perhaps most critical, we need to look at how to combine new physical investments with new initiatives in skills training, incubating small companies and promoting better ties with local universities and research facilities. This “infrasystems” approach has been implemented successfully in places as diverse as North Dakota’s Red River Valley, the area around Wenatchee, Wash., and in various Southern locales such as Charleston and Savannah.

    The call for more spending on infrastructure represents a unique opportunity to rebuild our productive economy and create long-term middle-class jobs. But if the effects are going to last, the trick is to concentrate on the basics and forget the flashy, feel-good kinds of projects that have characterized many “infrastructure” investments in recent years.

    This article originally appeared at Washington Post.

    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.