New Geography

Tag: Los Angeles

  • Playing with the Big Boys: The Costs of Fruitless Passenger Rail Tours

    In these hard times the New Zealand public is somewhat excited about the travel costs incurred by our Government Ministers and MPs. Overseas travel attracts particular rage and fury.

    A particularly galling example is a proposal by Christchurch City Mayor Bob Parker, his CEO Tony Marryat, and an urban planner, to visit the US to investigate the performance of light rail in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Vancouver.

    These cities seem unlikely to provide any relevant information, if only because their populations are many times those of Christchurch, a metropolis of roughly 370,000 and a downtown population of a mere 8000. In comparison:

    • Los Angeles – 13.8 million
    • San Francisco/San Jose – 5.3 million
    • Seattle – 3.3 million
    • Vancouver – 2.1 million

    The reason the Christchurch team cannot investigate a rail system in the US serving a metropolitan area of only some 350,000 people, and with a CBD of only 8,000 people, may be that because so far, at least, even the most enthusiastic Smart Growth planners in the US are not that silly.

    Randal O’Toole, who has made many studies of urban rail systems, points out in “Unlivable Strategies” that spending money on expensive forms of rail transit is fundamentally inefficient because other transportation systems cost far less to build.

    Light rail, he argues, has become popular in the United States precisely because it is expensive. Congress gives transit grants to cities on a first-come, first-served basis. So the cities that build the most expensive transit systems get the largest share of federal transit funding.

    Naturally, dozens of cities are in line to get their share of the pork.

    But that does not prove that light rail is worthwhile. Too many cities have built expensive rail lines and then found that, due to overruns, high operations and maintenance costs, or heavy mortgages, they have to cut back bus service. The result is that rail construction has actually led to reduced transit ridership in many, if not most, cases.

    The Grand Tour: My Version

    Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay

    Here is what the Christchurch Mayor and his team should learn from their visits to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay.

    • Los Angeles reinforces the Portland experience (a much smaller city) where cost overruns forced Portland to raise bus fares and cut bus service during construction of its first light-rail line in the 1980s. As a result, a smaller proportion of Portlanders ride transit to work and other places today than did so in 1980. A similar situation in Los Angeles led to a 17 percent decline in transit ridership between 1985 and 1995. The NAACP sued the transit agency for cutting bus service in low-income neighborhoods while building rail to middle-class neighborhoods. The suit forced the agency to scale back its rail plans and restore bus service, which led to a recovery of ridership.
    • In the San Francisco Bay Area, due to heavy rail debt, San Jose was forced to drastically cut bus and rail service in 2001 and lost 35 percent of its riders. The transit system had to make further cuts in 2007.

      Furthermore, despite (or because of) several extensions of the BART line, transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area has fallen by more than 10 percent since 1982. Several transit advocacy groups, including the Sierra Club (Piper, 2004), the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition (BATLUC, 2003), and the Bay Rail Alliance (Carpenter, 2007), actively oppose a proposed extension of BART to San Jose because they know investments in other forms of transit are much more cost effective.

    Overall, US urban areas with rail transit have not fared as well as areas with bus transit. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people in regions with rail transit who commute to work by transit actually declined, while the number in regions with bus-only transit systems increased.

    The saddest part of these stories is that the people who lose tend to be those most dependent on transit due to low incomes or an inability to drive, while the people who end up riding rail lines tend to have higher incomes and plenty of auto-mobility. (Winston and Shirley, 1998, p. 9).

    Rail transit actually represents a transfer of resource from the poor to the well-off – Robin Hood at work in reverse gear.

    Seattle

    After getting voter approval for rail transit in 1996, Sound Transit began operating 31 miles of commuter rail service between Tacoma and Seattle in 1999. It also built a 1.6-mile streetcar line in downtown Tacoma at a cost of $50 million a mile, a third more than planned. As of December, 2003, Sound Transit also operates a 35-mile commuter rail line from Everett to Seattle.

    Sound Transit’s Seattle-Tacoma commuter-rail line is one of the least productive in the nation, carrying less than one seventh as many passenger miles per route mile as the average commuter-rail line. As a result it has one of the highest operating costs per trip or per passenger mile of any commuter rail line. Despite starting out with free service, the Everett line has been running more than 70 percent empty.

    Transit’s growth in travel and market share is almost entirely due to bus transit, not rail transit. But the growth in the region’s congestion is due to decisions made early in the decade to concentrate on rail transit rather than highway construction. Those decisions have harmed Seattle area residents in many ways, including cost overruns, congestion, transit’s cost ineffectiveness, and housing prices.

    Future plans: The Sound Transit agency originally projected that the cost of building a 24-mile light-rail line from the Seattle-Tacoma airport to the University of Washington and Northgate would be $2.4 billion. Shortly after receiving voter approval, the agency increased this estimate to $3.6 billion.

    After many stops and starts, last year voters endorsed an $18 billion Sound Transit plan for a 53 mile network which they hope will attract 25,000 daily riders by 2030.

    Our Christchurch team should learn from the Seattle story that, once embarked upon, these rail plans tend to eat ever increasing amounts of money.

    Vancouver

    We can only wish them luck on getting useful information out of Vancouver. There seem to be no collections of the statistics on the performance of the transit systems as are available to US researchers here and here (Excel files).

    However, we do note that in 2008 the operating cost of the Translink Sky Trains was C$773,737,000 and this was ‘covered’ by C$359,911,000 of fares and advertising, $262,298,000 motor fuel taxes,$255,741,000 property tax, parking site taxes $8,758,000 and others of $33,313,000.

    So the transfers from motorists and property owners are greater than the fare revenues.

    In 2008 the Long-term debt was C$1,822.7 million.

    Grand Plans

    Christchurch Mayor and his team are presumably looking at these rail systems as a means of supporting their Smart Growth plans for the Greater Christchurch area.
    If the Mayor and his team ask the right questions, and collect the right data, it will be evident to Blind Freddy’s dog that if these boondoggle systems have failed in these major cities, with their major concentrations of employment, then there is no way that light rail can provide a cost effective and efficient service to Christchurch and its environs.

    Sorry about that. Enjoy the trip.

    Owen McShane is Director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, New Zealand.

  • Glimpsing the Good in Police Chief Bratton’s Goodbye to L.A.

    Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Chief William Bratton’s pending departure makes now a good time to give him credit for a habit that draws scant attention amid talk of his traveling ways and unapologetic ego: The guy works very hard at every aspect of his duties.

    It’s a habit that can touch other lives as a matter of course. It touched me one morning at the Los Angeles Police Academy. Bratton had invited me there to address a graduating class with a reading of a column I had written about the challenges of policing our city. I sat on the main dais with my wife, while some of my other family members were in a front row to the right, where the sun soon drew a bead on them.

    At one point Bratton had finished an inspection of the graduates arrayed on the greensward and was returning to the main dais when he stopped smartly and told my family members to feel free to move back a row or two for some shade.

    It was a considerate gesture amid a precisely timed ceremony – made all the more so because Bratton had no way of knowing that one of my sisters had recently been treated for skin cancer. This is a younger sister of mine, and it’s been some time since she’s needed me to look out for her, but I still do in small ways.

    I took Bratton’s courtesy personally, as a helping hand. It was one of those moments when someone extends themselves without knowing the full effect of their effort. It was the residue of a solid work ethic. It was the by-product of a constant dedication to the protocol that helps inform a sense of duty.

    Bratton has it – and he will be missed.

    There are also plenty of very public reasons to regret Bratton’s departure. Crime has gone down consistently on his watch. Relations between LAPD and the city’s ethnic communities are better than ever, although there’s still work to be done. In any case, the agency has seen broad reform and earned a release from federal oversight.

    Yet there’s an opportunity to be found in taking a break from the intensity Bratton brings to his work. This is a fellow who comprehends much more than the core of policing, taking pains to understand anything that could have a significant bearing on the job, including technology and statistical analysis. Lately he’s talked about using those disciplines in something called predictive policing, an effort to pinpoint who is likely to commit crimes, at what times, and in which locations.

    I think we should all appreciate the fact that substantial individuals are dedicated to an exhaustive pursuit of new tools for law-enforcement.

    We should also remember, however, that Bratton is a cop who views the world from a cop’s perspective. That is altogether appropriate for him — and it leaves us with the responsibility of considering whether a hard-charging chief who is intrigued by predictive policing could hold the potential to bring serious erosion to our civil liberties.

    It’s true that we have elected officials and a judicial system to stand guard against incursions on our civil liberties, adding more than a cop’s view to the debate.

    That’s a bit shaky, though, given political trends of recent years.

    Bratton adds to my worries because he’s as good at politics as any politician in our city. I worry about having a police chief who not only has the ability and drive to get a grasp on something like predictive policing but might also have enough political skill to sell the notion in a way that bypasses healthy debate.

    Perhaps Bratton’s departure will provide time for Mayor Antonio Villaragiosa and others at City Hall to ponder the balance of liberty and security – and to consider how much of one we are willing to trade for the other.

    I thank Bratton for his dynamic approach to reshaping law enforcement in our city, and I certainly don’t intend to diminish his success at fulfilling the mission he took on in Los Angeles.

    I address my concerns to our elected officials, all of whom should recalibrate their relationships with the sort of authority figures who possess the ability to make folks feel safe.

    It could be downright unsafe to get in the habit of relying on a top cop to handle the whole job.

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

  • California Wastes Its Public Space

    California’s favorable climate makes it a haven for outdoor activity. Enlightened and forward-looking planning has largely preserved the waterfronts for public access and set aside a lot of space for public use and activity. Yet despite this, there are few great urban gathering spaces. This is most obvious in the two largest population centers – Los Angeles and San Francisco.

    As a result, potentially great urban districts are dragged down by a dearth of desirable activity, something exacerbated by an already damaging real estate slump. Although all is not lost in these cities, some of the most high profile public spaces fail to attract large numbers of visitors on a daily basis, particularly when no special events are planned.

    Pershing Square, Los Angeles – Located in the heart of downtown, Pershing Square is poorly designed, both as its own project and in a contextual sense. In an already warm climate made even hotter by its CBD location, there is too much hardscape. Extensive softscape, whether flowers, grass, and/or trees, would provide a cooling effect. There are also too many symbolic structures serving no purpose. These are expensive to install and maintain; they provide very little benefit. Also, an already bad relationship to the street was made worse by restricting access points and hiding the interior space. Although some changes over the past several years have softened the space somewhat, it still lacks some basic creature comforts, such as adequate lighting and clean restrooms, to make it a daily destination for the scores of office workers within easy walking distance.

    County Mall, Los Angeles – County Mall, located west of Los Angeles City Hall between Broadway and Grand Avenue, is in the unenviable position of being relatively unknown. Poor graphics and signage do little to improve its profile. Although there was extensive softscape in the design, many of the original shrubs and flowers have eroded. Further, the large space is not properly organized to allow and encourage different types of activity. Adjacent uses alone are not enough to sustain the park. Unlike in Pershing Square, the design here is not the primary issue. Instead, more programming and better maintenance would make County Mall successful, and provide for a dramatic promenade connecting City Hall and the Los Angeles Music Center.

    Union Square, San Francisco – Despite an expensive redesign nearly five years ago, Union Square is still not the central urban gathering space for San Francisco. Although it does serve as an incidental focus of pedestrian activity within the immediate neighborhood, the primarily hardscaped design is too fussy and too formal to encourage casual passive use and extended stays, except, perhaps, within limited zones at the fringes. The little available seating is poorly designed, intended to prevent homeless use rather than to promote use by casual park visitors. Primarily a concrete space with grass at the corners, Union Square lacks the “warmth” that makes such spaces comfortable. Imagine a Union Square with a great lawn in the middle, rather than cold (and expensive) hardscape.

    Market Street, San Francisco – Punctuated by intermittent triangular plazas along most of its downtown stretches, portions of Market Street’s public space are more the domain of homeless panhandlers than workers, residents, strollers, and the like (it should be noted, however, that some parts of Market Street, such as in the Financial District, can be pleasant at times). The plazas, quality architecture, and mix of uses create potential. But the pedestrian environment discourages extended dwell times, except by the homeless, panhandlers and drug dealers, many of whom, the city has documented, commute daily to Market Street from elsewhere in the Bay Area. The design offers little in the way of seating options and softscape. Sanitation and maintenance need to be substantially upgraded and programming is needed.

    Proper seating, adequate lighting, and extensive horticultural displays would serve to populate these public spaces. Proper management and maintenance would ensure long-term success. Places such as Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, itself the beneficiary of a remarkable turnaround masterminded by Daniel Biederman of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, have shown what visionary management can do to struggling urban public spaces. [Kozloff worked for BRV Corp., Biederman’s private consulting company that is independent of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, from 2001-2004.] Although once run on a city budget of $200,000, Bryant Park is now managed on a privately-funded budget. Biederman turned Bryant Park – once the domain of drug dealers and other such undesirables – into Manhattan’s premier address without using public coffers.

    Given the warm weather, long growing seasons, and urban renaissance occurring in adjacent portions of Los Angeles and San Francisco, even in the midst of our current downturn, there are opportunities to improve the public realm so that it serves its intended purpose, including boosting civic pride and, in turn, encouraging public stewardship. And, these improvements could be made without costly redesigns and extensive capital construction. Urban environments do not need places that drain public funds and then are shunned by the citizenry; there are enough other issues for urban mayors to deal with. Great cities need comfortable and inviting gathering places that both anchor and bolster civic pride, and simultaneously provide backdrops for special events and day-to-day activity.

    Howard Kozloff is Manager of Development Strategies and Director of Operations at Hart Howerton, an international strategy, planning and design firm based in New York, San Francisco and London. Kozloff is also a lecturer on Urban Real Estate Markets at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Immigrants Are ‘Greening’ our Cities, How About Giving them a Break?

    Debate about immigration and the more than 38 million foreign born residents who have arrived since 1980 has become something of a national pastime. Although the positive impact of this population on the economy has been questioned in many quarters, self-employment and new labor growth statistics illustrate the increasingly important role immigrants play in our national economy.

    There has also been an intense debate within the environmental community about the impact of immigrants. Yet there has been relatively little research done about how immigrants get to work and where most immigrants live. As the ‘green’ movement in the U.S. has increasingly pushed for higher-density housing and transit-oriented development in order to improve public transportation (specifically rail), few have considered how immigrants use transit and what might be the best way to accommodate their needs. In fact, all too often, “green” policies advocate transit choices – favoring such things as light rail over buses – that may work against the interests of immigrant transit riders.

    Based on the 2007 American Community Survey, 117.3 million native-born and 21.9 million foreign-born individuals commuted to work. As Table (1) illustrates, a higher percentage of immigrants rode buses (5.7% vs. 2.1%) and subways (4.1% vs. 1.2%) and many walked to work (3.7% vs. 2.7%). A much smaller percentage drove to work (79.8% vs. 87.7%). Unfortunately, despite their higher usage of alternate means of transportation to work, or perhaps because of it, the commute to work time was on average longer for the foreign-born commuters than their native-born counterparts (28.8 minutes versus 24.7).

    Clearly in terms of using public transportation, immigrants are a bit greener than those born here. But why? Is this habit formed elsewhere? In that case, are recent immigrants even more likely to use public transportation than those who immigrated earlier? Or is it their income that affects their transportation choices?

    Table (2) provides the answer to the first question. Recent arrivals are clearly less likely to drive to work and have a higher propensity toward using public transportation, compared to all foreign-born individuals (and significantly more than the native-born). Additionally, over 6% of the immigrants who have arrived since 2000 walk to work.

    Overall, more than a quarter of the immigrants who have arrived since 2000 use an alternative mode of transportation to work. If the rest of America could do the same, we’d be a bit ‘greener’ already. However, it seems that as immigrants stay longer, they eventually tend to use cars more often because automobile usage allows for access to better jobs, better shops, and better schools. For example, immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in the 1970s (which means they have been here over three decades) drive a bit more and use public transportation less.

    Even so, their rates are still slightly better than the native-born (compare Tables 1 and 2). This may be in part because of their lower incomes (see Table 3) yet at every level of income they are still more likely to take transit. Table (4) illustrates this point by grouping commuters into income categories and their nativity. In every income category, immigrants use their cars less and are more likely to use public transportation, even though their car ridership increases with income.

    The message from these statistics is loud and clear. Immigrants are more likely to ride public transportation than those born in the U.S., regardless of their income. The ones arriving more recently are even more likely to do so. Overall, this suggests that familiarity with public transportation, combined with the effects of income and place of residence, has made the immigrants’ lives in the U.S. a bit ‘greener’ than those of the native-born. In fact, one factor that may contribute to their higher usage of public transportation stems from their living in neighborhoods whose densities are, on average, 2.5 times higher than those of the native-born. Immigrants, in essence, are doing precisely what planners want the rest of us to do.

    Moving to Southern California

    Southern California still stands as the icon of immigration and multiculturalism and is home to a large number of immigrants in the urban region that extends from eastern Ventura County to the southern tip of Orange County and the Inland Empire. As Figure (1) illustrates, in a number of neighborhoods in Southern California, the foreign-born population outnumbers the native-born by large margins. For example, in areas west and south of downtown Los Angeles, immigrants are more than three times as numerous as the native-born.

    A comparison of Figures (2) and (3) suggests a wide geographic difference between the native-born and the foreign-born and how long it takes them to get to work. The foreign-born population experiences much longer commutes in highly urbanized areas around downtown Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. Conversely, in the more rural areas, such as northern Ventura County, the foreign-born population experiences shorter commutes compared to their native-born counterparts.

    Figure (4) provides a clear comparison of average travel time to work for both populations (visually comparing Figures 2 and 3). In all areas appearing in the darkest shade of green, the foreign-born population experienced shorter commutes compared to the native-born. These shorter commutes, however rarely occur in high density areas (compare with Figure 5). Conversely, in areas such as Santa Monica, the Wilshire corridor, East Los Angeles, and southern sections of downtown Los Angeles, the foreign-born population experiences much longer commutes than the native-born.


    Statistically speaking, there is a positive relationship between average travel time and density – i.e., the higher the density, the higher the reported average travel time. For the foreign-born population who live in higher density areas, this means much longer commutes, a problem caused by a number of factors, including their dependency on slower public transportation systems and the long distances they have to travel to reach job centers outside the city center.

    Figure (6) illustrates the geographic pattern of bus ridership among the foreign-born commuters. As with national patterns, immigrants in Southern California are more likely to settle in high density areas and use public transportation to work, but unfortunately, they also suffer much longer commutes.

    What should the policy responses be? One may be to promote increased car ownership among immigrants and low-income populations in the U.S. This may be objectionable to some environmentalists and planners, but it’s clear that those people who live by the principles of higher density and public transportation use are not rewarded and indeed suffer longer commutes.

    An even more relevant question is why advocates for public transportation focus disproportionately on rail, when buses are so frequently used by low income populations, including immigrants. In California, these riders outnumber the native-born on buses. The situation is reversed on rail and subways. An intelligent policy response to public transportation planning would suggest that buses should receive much more attention. Major metropolitan areas have become polycentric in their employment patterns, and most major employment centers are located at long distances from the central city. Specially-designed buses for reverse commutes could help alleviate transportation problems while helping working immigrants reach their destinations more quickly.

    This challenges the priorities of some public transport advocates, who tend to focus on very expensive rail projects designed primarily to draw more middle class, largely native-born riders who commute to places like downtown Los Angeles. Meanwhile those ‘new’ Americans who already live by a number of ‘green’ standards suffer from the misallocation of transit resources. Those who are already doing what we hope the middle class will do deserve better.

    Ali Modarres is an urban geographer in Los Angeles and co-author of City and Environment.

  • Why The ‘Livable Cities’ Rankings Are Wrong

    Few topics stir more controversy between urbanists and civic boosters than city rankings. What truly makes a city “great,” or even “livable”? The answers, and how these surveys determine them, are often subjective, narrow or even misguided. What makes a “great” city on one list can serve as a detriment on another.

    Recent rankings of the “best” cities around the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Monocle magazine and the Mercer quality of life surveys settled on a remarkably similar list. For the most part, the top ranks are dominated by well-manicured older European cities such as Zurich, Geneva, Vienna, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Munich, as well as New World metropolises like Vancouver and Toronto; Auckland, New Zealand; and Perth and Melbourne in Australia.

    Only Monocle put a truly cosmopolitan world city – Tokyo – near the top of its list. The Economist rankings largely snubbed American cities – only Pittsburgh made it anywhere near the top, at No. 29 out of 140. The best we can say is most American cities did better than Harare, Zimbabwe, which ran at the bottom. Honolulu got a decent No. 11 on the Monocle list and broke into the top 30 on Mercer’s, as did No. 29 San Francisco. But regarding American urban boosters, that’s all, folks.

    To understand these rather head-scratching results, one must look at the criteria these surveys used. Cultural institutions, public safety, mass transit, “green” policies and other measures of what is called “livability” were weighted heavily, so results skewed heavily toward compact cities in fairly prosperous regions. Most of these regions suffer only a limited underclass and support a relatively small population of children. In fact, most of the cities are in countries with low birthrates – Switzerland’s median fertility rate, for example, is about 1.4, one of the lowest on the planet and a full 50% below that of the U.S.

    These places make ideal locales for groups like traveling corporate executives, academics and researchers targeted by such surveys. With their often lovely facades, ample parks and good infrastructure, they constitute, for the most part, a list of what Wharton’s Joe Gyourko calls “productive resorts,” a sort of business-oriented version of an Aspen or Vail in Colorado or Palm Beach, Fla. Honolulu is an exception, more a vacation destination than a bustling business hub.

    Yet are those the best standards for judging a city? It seems to me what makes for great cities in history are not measurements of safety, sanitation or homogeneity but economic growth, cultural diversity and social dynamism. A great city, as Rene Descartes wrote of 17th century Amsterdam, should be “an inventory of the possible,” a place of imagination that attracts ambitious migrants, families and entrepreneurs.

    Such places are aspirational – they draw people not for a restful visit or elegant repast but to achieve some sort of upward mobility. By nature these places are chaotic and often difficult to navigate. Ambitious people tend to be pushy and competitive. Just think about the great cities of history – ancient Rome, Islamic Baghdad, 19th century London, 20th century New York – or contemporary Los Angeles, Houston, Shanghai and Mumbai.

    These represent a far different urbanism than what one finds in well-organized and groomed Zurich, Vienna and Copenhagen. You would not call these cities and their ilk with metropolitan populations generally less than 2 million, “bustling.” Perhaps a more fitting words would be “staid” and “controlled.”

    Peace and quiet is very nice, but it doesn’t really encourage global culture or commerce. Growth and change come about when newcomers jostle with locals not just as tourists, or orbiting executives, but as migrants. Great cities in their peaks are all about this kind of yeasty confrontation.

    Alas, comfort takes precedence over dynamism in these new cities. Take the immigration issue: Unlike Amsterdam in its heyday or London or New York today, most northern European countries have turned hostile to immigration and many have powerful nativist parties. These are directed not against elite corporate executives or academics, but newcomers from developing countries. In some cases, resentment is stoked by immigrants taking advantage of well-developed welfare systems that worked far better in a homogeneous country with shared attitudes of social rights and obligations.

    Of course, these cities aren’t total deadweights. After all, Switzerland has its banks, Helsinki boasts Nokia and Denmark remains a key center of advanced and green manufacturing technology. For its part, Vancouver gets Americans to shoot cheap movie and TV shows with massive tax breaks and will host the Winter Olympics. But none can be considered major shapers of the modern world economy.

    The one American city favored by The Economist, Pittsburgh, represents a pale – and less attractive – version of these top-ranked European, Canadian or Australian cities. Its formerly impressive array of headquarters has shrunk to a handful. Once the capital of steel, it now pretty much depends on nonprofits, hospitals and universities.

    You will be hearing a lot more about Pittsburgh – the city has a prodigious PR machine funded largely by nonprofit foundations and universities – as it gets ready to host the G-20 meeting next month. Fans claim that the former steel town has developed a stable – if hardly dynamic – economy. Its torpidity is being sold a strength; boom-resistant in the best of times, it’s also proved relatively recession-proof as well.

    In this sense, Pittsburgh represents the American model of the slow-growth European city. This may appeal to those doing quality-of-life rankings, but not to those who have been fleeing the Steel City for other places for generations. Immigrants are hardly coming in droves either – Pittsburgh ranks near last among major metropolitan areas in percentage of foreign-born residents. As longtime local columnist and resident Bill Steigerwald notes, since 1990 more Pittsburghers have been dying than being born. If this represents America’s urban future, perhaps it’s one that takes its inspiration from Alan Weisman’s “A world without us.”

    Yet the future of urbanism, here and abroad, will not be Pittsburgh. Based on current preferences, something like 20 million – or more – people will have moved to U.S. cities by 2050. Most will likely settle in more dynamic places like New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago and Miami. These cities have become magnets for restless populations, both domestic and foreign-born. They also contain all the clutter, constant change, discomfort and even grime that characterize great cities through history.

    But it’s economics that drives migrants to these dirtier, busier metropolitan centers. Many of the cities at the top of the livability lists, by contrast, are also among the world’s most expensive. They generally also have high taxes and relatively stagnant job markets.

    Many U.S. cities, however, offer far more materially to their average residents than their elite European counterparts do. American cities, when assessed by purchasing-power parity, notes demographer Wendell Cox, do very well indeed. Viewed this way, the U.S. boasts eight of the top 10 – and 37 of the top 50 – metropolitan regions in terms of per capita income.

    The top city on Cox’s list, San Jose, Calif., epitomizes both the strengths and weaknesses of the American city. The heartland of Silicon Valley, the San Jose region has generated one of the world’s most innovative – and well-paid – economies. On the other hand, its mass transit usage is minuscule, its cultural attributes measly and its downtown hardly a tourist destination.

    Meanwhile, pricey and scenic Zurich, No. 2 on the Mercer list and No. 10 on The Economist rankings, comes in 74th when considering adjusted per capita income. Economist favorite Vancouver, one of the most expensive second-tier cities on the planet, ranks 71st. For the average person seeking to make money and improve his or her economic status, it usually pays not to settle in one of the world’s “most livable” cities.

    This is not to say that rambunctious urban centers like Los Angeles, New York or London couldn’t learn from their more “livable” counterparts. Anyone who has braved the maddening crowds in Venice Beach, Times Square or London’s Piccadily knows a city can have too much of a good thing. Los Angeles could use a more efficient bus system. Better-maintained subways and commuter trains in New York would be welcome by millions as they would in Greater London.

    Ultimately great cities remain, almost by necessity, raw (and at times unpleasant) places. They are filled with the sights and smells of diverse cultures, elbowing streetwise entrepreneurs and the inevitable mafiosi. They all suffer the social tensions that come with rapid change and massive migration. New York, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, Mumbai or Dubai may not shoot to the top of more elite, refined rankings, but they contain the most likely blueprint of our urban 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. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.

  • It’s Not the Economy Stupid: Crime Still Dropping in L.A.

    Unemployment may be at 11.4% in LA County, pundits may mock the dysfunctional state budget system, but crime is still dropping from already historic lows in the City of Los Angeles.

    According to statistics released by the LAPD yesterday, homicides are down a third compared to the first half of last year with violent crime down 6% and assaults down 8%.

    It seems to be received wisdom – I’ll call it pop criminology – that a spike in criminal activity always accompanies an economic crisis and a drop in employment. The recent movie “Public Enemies” milks this association most explicitly, and it may have been more true in the Depression. Overall, however, this is not the case in the U.S. these days and the numbers for property crime in LA also show a decrease: auto thefts fell 17% and property crime 7% overall compared to Jan. 1-June 30, 2008.

    Obviously, the relationship between crime and economic hardship is more complex and requires critical thinking about a host of sociological factors to attempt to explain the causality of crime. But these numbers, and similar findings in other cities, should debunk the common assertion that economic downturns correlate with criminal resurgence.

    The forthcoming book, “When Brute Force Fails” by UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman is an important contribution to the subject which I look forward to reading. It should be read by pop criminologists and criminologists alike.

    For those of you who have incredible interest in the subject, the LA Times Homicide Blog is an interesting resource. Increasingly, strapped papers like the L.A. Times (which recently discontinued its California section, merging it into the main section) are putting content like this on-line.

  • Tracking Business Services: Best And Worst Cities For High-Paying Jobs

    Media coverage of America’s best jobs usually focuses on blue-collar sectors, like manufacturing, or elite ones, such as finance or technology. But if you’re seeking high-wage employment, your best bet lies in the massive “business and professional services” sector.

    This unsung division of the economy is basically a mirror of any and all productive industry. It includes everything from human resources and administration to technical and scientific positions, as well as accounting, legal and architectural firms.

    Overall there are roughly 17 million professional and business services jobs, 4 million more than manufacturing. This makes it twice as big as the finance sector and five times the size of the much-ballyhooed tech sector. While its average salary – roughly $55,000 a year – is somewhat lower than in those other elite sectors, its wages are still higher than those in all the other large sectors, like health. The sector’s $1 trillion in total pay per year accounts for nearly 20% of all wages paid in the nation; finance and tech together only account for $812 billion.

    More than that, the business and professional services sector has encompassed the fastest-growing part of the high-wage economy. Employment in lower-wage sectors like education has also grown quickly. But employment in other sectors that pay their employees well, such as technology, has remained stagnant; jobs in some, such as manufacturing, have fallen sharply. Critically, the business services sector – particularly at the better-paying end – seems to have weathered the current recession better than these other high-wage sectors.

    The crucial question remains: In what regions is this critical economic cog booming? In a new analysis with my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group, we examined Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data for this sector, keeping an eye on trends over both the last year and the last decade. Some of the metropolitan areas that boasted short-term growth in this sector also maintained steady employment success over the long-term, which suggests that these particular cities have sturdy economies that aren’t as prone to intense boom-bust cycles.

    At the top of our list of best places is greater Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. Government jobs may drive that economy, but it is the lawyers, consultants and technical services firms who harvest the richest benefits. As New York University public policy professor Mitchell Moss observes, Washington has emerged as the “real winner” in the recession – not just for public-sector workers but private-sector ones too.

    Fastest Growing Professional and Business Services Sectors
    Area Name Jobs in Sector 2009
    (thousands)    		 Sector Share of Jobs 2009
    (percent of total)    		 Growth 2008 – 2009
    (percent growth)    		 Cumulative Growth 2001 – 2009
    (percent growth)    		 2001-2009 Job Change (thousands) 2008-2009 Job Change (thousands)
    Northern Virginia, VA 355.2 27.2% 1.5% 22.4% 65.0 5.2
    Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 558.7 23.0% 0.9% 22.8% 103.6 5.1
    Austin-Round Rock, TX 112.4 14.4% 3.3% 18.7% 17.7 3.6
    Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 382.3 14.7% 0.9% 19.2% 61.5 3.2
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC 106.6 14.0% 2.8% 8.0% 7.9 2.9
    Bethesda-Frederick-Rockville, MD 125.7 21.9% 2.1% 9.0% 10.4 2.6
    Wichita, KS 31.5 10.1% 3.5% 16.4% 4.4 1.1
    Chattanooga, TN-GA 25.9 10.6% 4.3% 11.8% 2.7 1.1
    Peoria, IL 23.0 12.1% 4.5% 43.2% 6.9 1.0
    Rochester, NY 61.8 11.9% 1.5% 1.9% 1.1 0.9
    Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC 31.0 14.5% 3.0% 7.5% 2.2 0.9
    Mansfield, OH 5.1 9.1% 19.4% 4.1% 0.2 0.8
    Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, WA 20.8 22.2% 4.2% 20.2% 3.5 0.8
    St. Louis, MO-IL 195.4 14.6% 0.4% 3.9% 7.4 0.8
    Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR-MO 33.5 16.2% 2.2% 34.2% 8.5 0.7
    Macon, GA 12.1 11.9% 5.5% 31.2% 2.9 0.6
    Pittsburgh, PA 158.9 13.9% 0.4% 14.5% 20.1 0.6
    Fresno, CA 30.7 10.3% 1.9% 23.3% 5.8 0.6
    Provo-Orem, UT 23.3 12.4% 2.5% 16.7% 3.3 0.6
    Charleston-North Charleston-Summerville, SC 42.2 14.3% 1.3% 31.1% 10.0 0.5

    Over the past year, parts of northern Virginia – ground zero for the so-called “beltway bandits” who work in industries the government depends on to do its job – have enjoyed the fastest growth in business and professional services, adding over 5,200 jobs despite the current downturn.

    Other areas around the nation’s capital have also seen strong growth. The Washington D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria area, for example, came in second on our list, gaining nearly 5,100 positions, while No. 6 the Bethesda-Frederick-Rockville, Md., metro area added 2,600. In addition, yet another Virginia area – No. 5-ranked Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, a center for military-related industries – gained nearly 2,900 jobs in this sector.

    It’s far too early to thank the free-spending ways of Barack Obama’s administration for all this growth. As anyone can tell you, the Bush White House and its Republican Congress were not exactly models of fiscal restraint. Plus, Washington and Northern Virginia have seen growth in their business services sectors over the last several years, in the period stretching from 2001 to 2009. Together those two metros added over 165,000 new jobs in this critical, high-wage sector.

    Of course, you don’t have to head to Washington to find a high-paying job – although you might not be able to escape unpleasant summer weather. The other major group of business-services hot spots includes Austin, Texas, at No. 3, and Houston, at No. 4. These Lone Star local economies have continued to thrive not only during the current recession but also over the last decade.

    The others winners include farther-afield locales in Kansas, Tennessee, Illinois and New York. These areas could be gaining both from companies seeking to lower costs and from the new capabilities for remote work due to the Internet. Even though they didn’t make our list, a host of smaller communities – like Mansfield, Ohio; Provo, Utah; and Charleston, S.C. – also enjoyed significant growth in the business services sector over the past year.

    So if these are the places where this segment of the economy is growing and high-paying jobs are easier to come by, where is the opposite true? The worst cities on our list span three archetypes: Rust Belt basket cases, Sunbelt flame-outs and expensive big cities. Perhaps the toughest losses were in Michigan: Detroit and the Warren-Troy metro area suffered big setbacks both in the last year and over the last decade.

    Fastest Declining Professional and Business Services Sectors
    Area Name Jobs in Sector 2009
    (thousands)    		 Sector Share of Jobs 2009
    (percent of total)    		 Growth 2008 – 2009
    (percent growth)    		 Cumulative Growth 2001 – 2009
    (percent growth)    		 2001-2009 Job Change (thousands) 2008-2009 Job Change (thousands)
    Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ 289.2 16.0% -10.8% 7.9% 21.2 -35.1
    Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI 202.5 18.5% -12.0% -21.2% -54.4 -27.7
    Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL 633.6 16.8% -4.1% -2.9% -19.0 -27.0
    Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA 574.7 14.3% -4.2% -3.4% -20.4 -25.2
    Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 390.3 16.4% -5.9% -1.3% -5.1 -24.4
    Orlando-Kissimmee, FL 170.9 16.2% -8.5% 7.7% 12.3 -16.0
    Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, CA 261.9 18.0% -4.7% 4.0% 10.2 -12.8
    Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 253.4 14.4% -4.6% -4.6% -12.2 -12.3
    Edison-New Brunswick, NJ 164.5 16.3% -6.7% -2.6% -4.4 -11.9
    Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, MI 108.9 14.7% -9.5% -20.9% -28.8 -11.4
    Indianapolis-Carmel, IN 120.3 13.4% -8.3% 13.6% 14.4 -10.8
    Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 133.7 11.2% -6.5% 36.0% 35.4 -9.2
    Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 223.2 18.5% -3.7% 12.3% 24.5 -8.6
    New York City, NY 595.7 15.8% -1.4% -0.8% -5.1 -8.4
    Newark-Union, NJ-PA 163.5 16.0% -4.7% -0.5% -0.8 -8.0
    Bergen-Hudson-Passaic, NJ 130.6 14.6% -5.8% -9.1% -13.0 -8.0
    Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI 107.6 12.9% -6.6% -1.7% -1.8 -7.6
    Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, FL 139.1 13.4% -4.7% 2.2% 3.0 -6.8
    Oakland-Fremont-Hayward, CA 158.0 15.6% -4.0% -7.1% -12.2 -6.7
    Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 108.2 12.1% -5.8% 38.1% 29.9 -6.6
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA 308.8 18.2% -2.0% -6.8% -22.5 -6.4
    Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA 106.1 12.3% -5.6% -1.8% -1.9 -6.3
    Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH 137.8 13.3% -4.3% -5.2% -7.6 -6.1
    Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 207.0 16.9% -2.9% 4.0% 8.0 -6.1

    Consistent job losses in business services in these areas – some 54,000 in the Troy area since 2001 – reveal the clear connection between employment in business services and in the region’s fundamental auto industry. It turns out that elite services often prove dependent on basic industry. When industrial plants shut down, it’s not just blue-collar workers and company executives that suffer; as a result, these firms will use fewer lawyers, accountants, architects and technical consultants.

    A similar picture emerges in cities like Phoenix, which lost about 35,000 business-services jobs in just one year. This loss stems from the collapse of the housing bubble, which powered the rest of the regional economy. The same meltdown caused smaller but still significant reversals in one-time boomtowns like Orlando, Fla., Atlanta and Southern California’s Santa Ana region, which encompasses Orange County, where business service employment dropped by double-digit rates over the past year.

    Yet these same areas should see some recovery, perhaps more so than the traditional auto manufacturing-focused towns. Phoenix, Orlando and other Sun Belt locations – including a host of other areas in Florida – all saw increasing employment in business services over the past decade. If the economy comes back, along with a stabilization of the residential real estate market, business-services job growth will likely begin to take off again. After all, the fundamental reasons for the success of these areas, such as warm weather, lower costs and the need to serve a growing population, have not fundamentally changed.

    Perhaps most perplexing is the fate of some of the other places on our worst cities list, particularly the biggest metropolitan areas. The professional and business services sector is widely considered ideal for large, cosmopolitan centers, since lots of industries require support. But Chicago experienced a huge chunk of job losses – almost 25% – in this sector during the last year. Other big cities, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York, also suffered.

    This is not a new phenomenon. These and other big cities, like Boston and San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland in California, have been shedding these types of jobs since 2001. These losses, however, have been concentrated at the lower-wage end of the business service pyramid, in areas like human resources and administration. These are the positions that companies can fill more easily and cheaply using the Internet or by hiring in less expensive outposts.

    That’s why Washington and its environs, which has seen across-the-board business growth, remain the great exception. Many business-services jobs outside the beltway appear to be becoming more nomadic, based in places where firms face lower costs and where workers can afford to live well on middle-income salaries. Even the long-term resiliency of higher-wage employment like law and accounting in traditional business hubs like New York could be at risk over time, with some jobs shifting to less expensive locales or even overseas.

    The changing nature of business services presents a boon to some communities and a challenge to others as they seek to survive and thrive in spite of the current recession. How some cities manage to grow this segment of their economies may well presage which parts of the country will thrive best during the years of recovery – and beyond.

    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. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.

  • Enviro-wimps: L.A.’s Big Green Groups Get Comfy, Leaving the Street Fighting to the Little Guys

    So far, 2009 has not been a banner year for greens in Los Angeles. As the area’s mainstream enviros buddy up with self-described green politicians and deep-pocketed land speculators and unions who have seemingly joined the “sustainability” cause, an odd thing is happening: Environmentalists are turning into servants for more powerful, politically-connected masters.

    On March 3, voters shot down Measure B, a controversial solar energy initiative pushed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and endorsed heartily by many prominent environmentalists. The stunning defeat in this liberal city came after critics accused the mayor and his friends of secret deals that rushed the measure onto the ballot as a favor to a city union whose workers be guaranteed almost all of the resulting solar jobs.

    Then, on April 29, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder placed a temporary injunction on part of the “clean trucks” program at the Port of Los Angeles, whose air pollution is so foul that the EPA warns its emissions cause cancer in suburbs like Cerritos, miles upwind of the port. Judge Snyder rejected efforts by Villaraigosa and the Teamsters to force port truckers to give up their independence and work for companies – spun as a green rule, but ridiculed as a move to pressure the truckers to become Teamsters.

    Today, labor unions, big businesses, and politicians are embracing a green economy to solve their own political and financial woes. And the green agenda – repairing a damaged planet and protecting the local environment in which we live – is at risk of ending up an after-thought.

    “I don’t think the traditional environmental organizations are up to speed,” says Miguel Luna of Urban Semillas, a grassroots environmental group. Alberto B. Mendoza, president of the Coalition for Clean Air, concurs: “If we don’t become more modern in our approach, we’ll become obsolete.”

    In Los Angeles, developers now market, or “green wash,” big new buildings as “sustainable” – meaning healthy for the planet over the long term. The city of Los Angeles requires large buildings to follow “LEED” rules – low flush toilets, on-site renewable energy and the like. But do these projects cause more congested streets filled with idling cars, for example, than the energy they claim to save? In truth, nobody knows. “If you have a project that would normally be four stories high and now it has 20 stories,” says Hollywood activist Bob Blue, there’s a “net increase in power, water, sewer, traffic, pollution – and impact.”

    Yet among many greens, LEED is a closed debate – and represents a profound shift. In the 1990s, greens like Marcia Hanscom, Rex Frankel, Bruce Robertson, Cathy Knight, Sabrina Venskus, and Patricia McPherson took on Los Angeles City Hall, preventing it from wiping out the Ballona Wetlands to erect a vast housing development, Playa Vista. Those greens publicly trounced the pols and their speculator friends over absurd “sustainability” claims — including an effort to count the grassy median strips as “open space.”

    Nowadays, though, Los Angeles enviros are sliding toward the argument that big development is good for the air, land and water – and small bits of green are enough. Environmentalists rarely engage in the city’s intense development hearings. “Maybe one time an environmentalist showed up,” Blue says, “but it was on the behalf of the developer.”

    Within the green movement, Andy Lipkis, the founder of Tree People, and Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, have reputations as heavyweights with access to Villaraigosa and other politicians. Neither of them, though, wants to jump into rough-and-tumble politics. Lipkis, a likeable and dedicated activist, proudly says he is politically “naive.” Gold, a smart and equally dedicated environmentalist, says he is not “even a little” worried that politicians, labor unions or speculators are hijacking the greens’ issues.

    But today, developers regularly peddle their proposed apartments near L.A. freeways as “sustainable” – claiming they bring workers closer to jobs. The developments are backed by Villaraigosa and the L.A. City Council – to the horror of health experts. Researchers now know, for certain, that children living in these projects are burdened with often lifelong lung disease. “They are putting individuals at risk,” says USC professor Jim Gauderman, whose 2007 study confirmed it.

    Heavily focused on lowering emissions region-wide to fight global warming, greens now praise freeway-adjacent housing projects, utterly forgetting about the young humans involved. Incredibly, city Planning Commissioner Michael Woo, a Villaraigosa-appointee, hasn’t heard a word of opposition from them. Two years after USC’s study, he says, “I’m not sure there’s a political will to stop housing projects at these locations.”

    Grassroots activist Marcia Hanscom, who has never gotten anything by staying quiet, worked for years with other environmentalists to save the Ballona Wetlands. In 2003, that relentless effort paid off – the state bought more than 600 acres to protect and restore. But now, she says, the environmental movement in L.A. has lost its way. It’s time to talk openly about a “mid-course correction.”

    L.A. politicians “sometimes call me as if I’m one of their staff members,” she notes, “and I’m supposed to do what they say. They have their roles mixed up. I’m here to advocate for the environment, not to advocate for them.”

    Pro-green politicians control the office of mayor, almost every Los Angeles City Council seat, every Los Angeles Unified School Board seat, and, for years, have controlled the legislature. Yet the greens seem oddly incapable of asserting power. Mark Gold of Heal the Bay, for example, went out of his way to endorse solar power Measure B, even though Villaraigosa clearly dissed him by dreaming it up utterly without Gold’s input. What L.A. union boss would stand for that?

    Stefanie Taylor, interim managing director interim of the Green L.A. Coalition, a group of over 100 organizations, says, “We have to make sure we’re at the table when these decisions are made about the new green economy.” But right now, says enviro-lobbyist John White, environmentalists are “more like the menu.”

    The stark difference between the daily work of Hanscom, the grassroots environmentalist, and Jonathan Parfrey, the political insider and mainstream environmentalist, is instructive. When the Weekly talked with Hanscom, she was in the middle of an almost surreal battle to keep glaring, Vegas-style digital billboards, made up of 480,000 piercingly bright LED light bulbs, from being allowed adjacent to the blue herons and wildflowers of the Ballona Wetlands.

    Says Hanscom, “The city has the Ballona Wetlands as a part of a billboard ‘sign district?’ It’s outrageous! I even had [developer] lobbyists and lawyers ask me what they were thinking.”

    As Hanscom aimed her firepower at City Hall, environmentalist Parfrey, one of Antonio Villaraigosa’s newest political appointees, was getting ready to visit a Department of Water and Power wind farm way out of town, with the idea of creating “educational tours” for environmentalists. Nothing wrong with that, but it sounded like a public relations campaign for the big utility.

    It’s hard to escape the fact that Los Angeles power brokers regard the environmental movement not as a passionate force they can tap to improve the quality of life and to clean the air, water, and open spaces, but, increasingly, as just another jobs program. And some of the greenest greens have begun to wonder if their own leaders are taking part in the movement’s demise.

    Patrick Range McDonald is a staff writer at L.A. Weekly, and this piece appears in full at www.laweekly.com. Contact Patrick Range McDonald at pmcdonald@laweekly.com.

  • Who Killed California’s Economy?

    Right now California’s economy is moribund, and the prospects for a quick turnaround are not good. Unable to pay its bills, the state is issuing IOUs; its once strong credit rating has collapsed. The state that once boasted the seventh-largest gross domestic product in the world is looking less like a celebrated global innovator and more like a fiscal basket case along the lines of Argentina or Latvia.

    It took some amazing incompetence to toss this best-endowed of places down into the dustbin of history. Yet conventional wisdom views the crisis largely as a legacy of Proposition 13, which in effect capped only taxes.

    This lets too many malefactors off the hook. I covered the Proposition 13 campaign for the Washington Post and examined its aftermath up close. It passed because California was running huge surpluses at the time, even as soaring property taxes were driving people from their homes.

    Admittedly it was a crude instrument, but by limiting those property taxes Proposition 13 managed to save people’s houses. To the surprise of many prognosticators, the state government did not go out of business. It has continued to expand faster than either its income or population. Between 2003 and 2007, spending grew 31%, compared with a 5% population increase. Today the overall tax burden as percent of state income, according to the Tax Foundation, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation.

    The media and political pundits refuse to see this gap between the state’s budget and its ability to pay as an essential issue. It is. (This is not to say structural reform is not needed. I would support, for example, reforming some of the unintended ill-effects of Proposition 13 that weakened local government and left control of the budget to Sacramento.)

    But the fundamental problem remains. California’s economy–once wondrously diverse with aerospace, high-tech, agriculture and international trade–has run aground. Burdened by taxes and ever-growing regulation, the state is routinely rated by executives as having among the worst business climates in the nation. No surprise, then, that California’s jobs engine has sputtered, and it may be heading toward 15% unemployment.

    So if we are to assign blame, let’s not start with the poor, old anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis (who helped pass Proposition 13 and passed away over 20 years ago), but with the bigger culprits behind California’s fall. Here are five contenders:

    1. Arnold Schwarzenegger

    The Terminator came to power with the support of much of the middle class and business community. But since taking office, he’s resembled not the single-minded character for which he’s famous but rather someone with multiple personalities.

    First, he played the governator, a tough guy ready to blow up the dysfunctional structure of government. He picked a street fight against all the powerful liberal interest groups. But the meathead lacked his hero Ronald Reagan’s communication skills and political focus. Defeated in a series of initiative battles, he was left bleeding the streets by those who he had once labeled “girlie men.”

    Next Arnold quickly discovered his feminine side, becoming a kinder, ultra-green terminator. He waxed poetic about California’s special mission as the earth’s guardian. While the housing bubble was filling the state coffers, he believed the delusions of his chief financial adviser, San Francisco investment banker David Crane, that California represented “ground zero for creative destruction.”

    Yet over the past few years there’s been more destruction than creation. Employment in high-tech fields has stagnated (See related story, “Best Cities For Technology Jobs“) while there have been huge setbacks in the construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agricultural sectors.

    Driven away by strict regulations, businesses take their jobs outside California even in relatively good times. Indeed, according to a recent Milken Institute report, between 2000 and 2007 California lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs. All that time, industrial employment was growing in major competitive rivals like Texas and Arizona.

    With the state reeling, Arnold has decided, once again, to try out a new part. Now he’s posturing as the strong man who stands up to dominant liberal interests. But few on the left, few on the right or few in the middle take him seriously anymore. He may still earn acclaim from Manhattan media offices or Barack Obama’s EPA, but in his home state he looks more an over-sized lame duck, quacking meaninglessly for the cameras.

    2. The Public Sector

    Who needs an economy when you have fat pensions and almost unlimited political power? That’s the mentality of California’s 356,000 workers and their unions, who make up the best-organized, best-funded and most powerful interest group in the state.

    State government continued to expand in size even when anyone with a room-temperature IQ knew California was headed for a massive financial meltdown. Scattered layoffs and the short-term salary givebacks now being considered won’t cure the core problem: an overgenerous retirement system. The unfunded liabilities for these employees’ generous pensions are now estimated at over $200 billion.

    The people who preside over these pensions represent the apex of this labor aristocracy. This year two of the biggest public pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTERS, handed out six-figure bonuses to its top executives even though they had lost workers billions of dollars.

    Almost no one dares suggest trimming the pension funds, particularly Democrats who are often pawns of the public unions. Some reforms on the table, like gutting the two-thirds majority required to pass the budget, would effectively hand these unions keys to the treasury.

    3. The Environment

    Obama holds up California’s environmental policy as a model for the nation. May God protect the rest of the country. California’s environmental activists once did an enviable job protecting our coasts and mountains, expanding public lands and working to improve water and air resources. But now, like sailors who have taken possession of a distillery, they have gotten drunk on power and now rampage through every part of the economy.

    In California today, everyone who makes a buck in the private sector–from developers and manufacturers to energy producers and farmers–cringes in fear of draconian regulations in the name of protecting the environment. The activists don’t much care, since they get their money from trust-funders and their nonprofits. The losers are California’s middle and working classes, the people who drive trucks, who work in factories and warehouses or who have white-collar jobs tied to these industries.

    Historically, many of these environmentally unfriendly jobs have been sources of upward mobility for Latino immigrants. Latinos also make up the vast majority of workers in the rich Central Valley. Large swaths of this area are being de-developed back to desert–due less to a mild drought than to regulations designed to save obscure fish species in the state’s delta. Over 450,000 acres have already been allowed to go fallow. Nearly 30,000 agriculture jobs–held mostly by Latinos–were lost in the month of May alone. Unemployment, which is at a 17% rate across the Valley, reaches upward of 40% in some towns such as Mendota.

    4. The Business Community

    This insanity has been enabled by a lack of strong opposition to it. One potential source–California’s business leadership–has become progressively more feeble over the past generation. Some members of the business elite, like those who work in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, tend to be too self-referential and complacent to care about the bigger issues. Others have either given up or are afraid to oppose the dominant forces of the environmental activists and the public sector.

    Theoretically, according to business consultant Larry Kosmont, business should be able to make a strong case, particularly with the growing Latino caucus in the legislature. “You have all these job losses in Latino districts represented by Latino legislators who don’t realize what they are doing to their own people,” he says. “They have forgotten there’s an economy to think about.”

    But so far California’s business executives have failed to adopt a strategy to make this case to the public. Nor can they count on the largely clueless Republicans for support, since GOP members are often too narrowly identified as anti-tax and anti-immigration zealots to make much of a case with the mainstream voter. “The business community is so afraid they are keeping their heads down,” observes Ross DeVol, director of regional economics at the Milken Institute. “I feel they if they keep this up much longer, they won’t have heads.”

    5. Californians

    At some point Californians–the ones paying the bills and getting little in return–need to rouse themselves. The problem could be demographic. Over the past few years much of our middle class has fled the state, including a growing number to “dust bowl” states like Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas from which so many Californians trace their roots.

    The last hope lies with those of us still enamored with California. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled by a motley alliance of self-righteous zealots, fools and cowards; now we must do something. Some think the solution is reining in citizens’ power by using the jury pool to staff a state convention, as proposed by the Bay Area Council, or finding ways to undermine the initiative system, which would remove critical checks on legislative power.

    We should, however, be very cautious about handing more power to the state’s leaders. With our acquiescence, they have led this most blessed state toward utter ruin. Structural reforms alone, however necessary, won’t turn around the economy’s fundamental problems and help California reclaim its role as a productive driver of the American dream.

    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. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.

  • Lessons from the Left: When Radicals Rule – For Thirty Years

    Contrary to popular notions held even here in southern California, Santa Monica was never really a beach town or bedroom community. It was a blue-collar industrial town, home to the famed Douglas Aircraft from before World War II until the 1970s.

    When I first lived there in the early ’70s, the city was pretty dilapidated, decaying and declining (except for the attractive neighborhoods of large expensive homes in the city’s northern sections). I remember a lot of retirees, students, and like me and my wife, renters of small apartments in old buildings. The tiredness of the place was incongruous with its great location and weather. But then the first of several spectacular rises in real estate values took off. Rents started rising precipitously as well, and in a city where 80% of residents were renters, a political earthquake shook the establishment: in 1979 voters passed rent control and soon after that elected a slate of politicians backed by the SMRR – Santa Monicans for Renter Rights – to a majority on the city council. It has now been 30 years that the city of Santa Monica has been dominated by the politics and politicians of SMRR. What have they wrought?

    There have been some momentous battles. Property owners, denied the full use and fair value of their property, came to calling the place “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” As economists would predict, rent control resulted in the loss of rental units (and therefore the number of renters), slowed construction of new units, led to the deterioration of existing units as landlords deferred maintenance, decreased the city’s diversity, and increased its exclusivity. These were all opposite effects the original intentions of the new radical rulers.

    But rent control was not the only “social justice” concern on the SMRR agenda; “homeless friendly” policies led to an explosion of homeless people in the city, which comedian Harry Shearer reminds the nation every week on his NPR radio show is “The Home of the Homeless.”

    Other battles fought over the years have involved traffic issues, a living wage ordinance, preferential parking zones, McMansions, development and redevelopment, planning, zoning, schools, affordable housing requirements, and the height of fences and hedges – a thousand things big and small one would expect in a city of 85,000 residents and an annual budget of over $500 million. At some point in the 1980s, the SMRR-dominated City Council, once anti-development, realized that development could generate millions of dollars for city government necessary for funding its political agenda. Massive rezoning and redevelopment were approved.

    One might think that inconsistent policies often causing opposite effect of their intentions would have weakened the left. But two large factors have come into play over time. First, SMRR does not rule without consent and consensus – many, perhaps more than half, of home owners have supported the progressive politics and policies of the SMRR-controlled city council. Secondly, despite the concerns of some property owners and economists, Santa Monica has prospered. Despite powerful regulation, hotels, arts, jobs, and restaurants continue to flow into the city. Opponents on both sides concede most of the population is content and satisfied with the status quo.

    This has been accomplished with pragmatism and a willingness to change policies that were not working. The worst effects of rent control are in the past due to a state law that allowed vacancy decontrol. Same with homelessness: residents wanted to be “progressive” but realized that being kind to the homeless only increased their numbers. The city still overdoes it on permits, regulations, etc., but homeowners and business want to be “progressive,” so they go along with it (and they like regulation when it benefits their interests).

    The city decided to make itself a tourist destination, and it is, but when it looked like nothing but hotels would be built, voters passed a proposition to halt hotel development. On the other hand, last November voters defeated Prop T, which would have limited most commercial development in the city to 75,000 square feet a year for the next 15 years.

    Santa Monica Place, a huge indoor shopping mall, outlived its usefulness, so now it’s being rebuilt as an outdoor mixed-use development. A living wage law was passed by the City Council, and then repealed by voters.

    SMRR is a political machine that has dominated the city for 30 years, using money, favors, jobs for the connected (and bupkis for those not) to build voting blocs for power and control. It inserts its people onto all the boards and commissions with input into policymaking. Their power ultimately comes from persuading renters, who are still a big majority of the city’s inhabitants, that they need SMRR for protection from “greedy landlords.”

    So SMRR dominates political life in the city of Santa Monica, but it does so with the consent of many homeowners, property and business owners, as well as renters. Santa Monica is green, PC, insufferably “tolerant,” self-satisfied, etc., but still doing well for itself. Taxes, rules, regulations and restrictions are onerous, but people and businesses still want to be there.

    I have lived through and observed the political battles of the last 30 years as a renter, homeowner and briefly as a landlord (never again, thanks). The transformation of Santa Monica reflects an interesting story: left-leaning activists who realize they can bend the establishment by controlling it from the inside. They then become the new establishment, but like in today’s left-leaning academia, work to make sure they themselves are never similarly deposed. And yes, I wonder if it holds lessons for the nation, with President Obama and the Democrats now in control and looking to implement a left-leaning agenda.

    What might those lessons be? One, particularly difficult for conservatives to accept, is that the time-tested machinations of leftist political machines sometimes work. They work for the powerful and the connected (who get to have their cake and eat it too: financial reward with a patina of progressivism), and they are perceived to work for the powerless and unconnected (however deleterious in reality). And that the left can come to power and rule with the consent of the governed, if it doesn’t “push the envelope” beyond a certain point, changes course when warranted, rewards cronies and allies, co-opts opponents where possible (and freezes them out where not). It worked for Tammany Hall, it has worked for Mayor Daley, and it seems to be working for Obama. Saul Alinsky would be proud of his protégé.

    Perhaps at the heart of its success is that like all successful political machines, SMRR “fixes potholes.” Frank Gruber, who writes a weekly column about life and politics in Santa Monica for The Lookout News, calls this “squeaky wheel government.” SMRR council members try to turn every complaining resident – and there are many – into happy SMRR voters. Whatever the aims of SMRR, they have created a popular government.

    Gruber, who considers himself an “old leftie” of the “jobs, housing, education, environment” school, takes SMRR to task for putting the needs of comfortable voters (traffic, for instance) ahead of the needs of the larger community (such as jobs for minority youth). (A collection of Gruber’s columns has recently been published in a book called, fittingly, Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal.)

    In the 2008 elections, in which Santa Monicans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, all four incumbents of the City Council won easily. SMRR seems as entrenched as always. In at least this paradisiacal portion of Southern California, left-wing government appears to be working – even if sometimes at odds with its own old radical objectives.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a trend analyst, researcher, writer and speaker. Growth Strategies is his newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends; IntegratedRetailing.com is his web site on retail trends. Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis and its US Consumer Demand Index, a monthly survey of American households’ buying intentions.