New Geography

Tag: middle class

  • Reviving the City of Aspiration: A Study of the Challenges Facing New York City’s Middle Class

    For much of its history, New York City has thrived as a place that both sustained a large middle class and elevated countless people from poorer backgrounds into the ranks of the middle class. The city was never cheap and parts of Manhattan always remained out of reach, but working people of modest means—from forklift operators and bus drivers to paralegals and museum guides—could enjoy realistic hopes of home ownership and a measure of economic security as they raised their families across the other four boroughs. At the same time, New York long has been the city for strivers—not just the kind associated with the highest echelons of Wall Street, but new immigrants, individuals with little education but big dreams, and aspiring professionals in fields from journalism and law to art and advertising.

    In recent years, however, major changes have greatly diminished the city’s ability to both retain and create a sizable middle class. Even as the inflow of new arrivals to New York has surged to levels not seen since the 1920s, the cost of living has spiraled beyond the reach of many middle class individuals and, particularly, families. Increasingly, only those at the upper end of the middle class, who are affluent enough to afford not only the sharply higher housing prices in every corner of the city but also the steep costs of child care and private schools, can afford to stay—and even among this group, many feel stretched to the limits of their resources. Equally disturbing, even in good times, the city’s economy seems less and less capable of producing jobs that pay enough to support a middle class lifestyle in New York’s high-cost environment.

    The current economic crisis, which has arrested and even somewhat reversed the skyrocketing price of housing, might offer short-term opportunities to some in the market for homes. But the mortgage meltdown and its aftermath will not change the underlying dynamic: over the past three decades, a wide gap has opened between the means of most New Yorkers and the costs of living in the city. We have seen this dynamic play out even during the last 15 years, as the local economy thrived and crime rates plummeted. Despite these advances, large numbers of middle class New Yorkers have been leaving the city for other locales, while many more of those who have stayed seem permanently stuck among the ranks of the working poor, with little apparent hope of upward mobility. This is a serious challenge for New York in both good times and bad. A recent survey found the city to be the worst urban area in the nation for the average citizen to build wealth. For the first time in its storied history, the Big Apple is in jeopardy of permanently losing its status as the great American city of aspiration.

    This report takes an in-depth look at the challenges facing New York City’s middle class. More than a year in the works, the report draws upon an extensive economic and demographic analysis, a historical review, focus groups conducted in every borough and over 100 individual interviews with academics, economists and a wide range of individuals on the ground in the five boroughs. These include homeowners, labor leaders, small business owners, real estate brokers, housing developers, immigrant advocates, and officials from nearly two dozen community boards.

    Throughout the course of our research, the vast majority of New Yorkers—for the most part fierce defenders of the city—were alarmingly pessimistic about the current and future prospects of the local middle class. “What middle class?” was the quip we heard repeatedly after telling people about our study.

    But for all the valid concerns of those we spoke with, our conclusion is that a strong middle class remains in New York, and that there are considerable grounds for optimism about its future. In 2007, the city recorded the second highest total of building permits issued since it started keeping track in 1965, with Brooklyn and Queens hitting records—a clear sign that large numbers of people want to live in these long-time middle class havens. Home ownership rates in the city reached their highest levels ever in 2007, another testament to the city’s desirability—even if a not insignificant share of the recent housing purchases were driven by unfair and deceptive predatory lending practices. And in many communities, there have been long waiting lists for day care centers and private schools. While the economic crisis is already leading to sharp spikes in foreclosures, a precipitous decline in housing sales and, most troubling, a massive number of layoffs, it should not reverse the sense of many middle class families that New York now offers a safe environment to raise their kids—a key factor in the decision to stay in the city rather than decamp for the suburbs.

    “The perception of New York among young people is so phenomenal,” says Alan Bell, a partner with the Hudson Companies, a real estate development company that has built housing from the East Village to the Rockaways. “It used to be that automatically you’d get married and had kids and you were out to Montclair, New Jersey or Westchester. Now they want to stay. The question is how they stay since it’s so expensive.”

    Set against this picture of progress, however, are some alarming trends. Most of the people interviewed for this report told us of middle class friends, relatives or colleagues who had recently given up on the city. “I work with a lot of people who moved to Philadelphia and commute each day,” says Chris Daly, a media director at Macy’s who now lives with his wife and three kids in Tottenville, Staten Island but plans to move to New Jersey. “It’s the cost of living. You’re going to see more people moving to Philadelphia, the Poconos and commuting.”

    Unless we find ways to reverse some of the trends detailed in this report, the New York of the 21st century will continue to develop into a city that is made up increasingly of the rich, the poor, immigrant newcomers and a largely nomadic population of younger people who exit once they enter their 30s and begin establishing families. Although such a population might sustain the current “luxury city”—as Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously described New York—it betrays the city’s aspirational heritage. Further, a New York largely denuded of its middle class will find it nearly impossible to sustain a diversified economy, the importance of which is clearer than ever in light of the current finance-led recession.

    As a final consideration, a large and thriving middle class has always provided the ballast that a great city requires. Throughout modern history, such cities at their height—for example, Venice in the 15th century and Amsterdam in the 17th—have nurtured a large and growing middle class. But no city has had a greater history as a middle class incubator than New York. As the legendary urbanist and long time New York resident Jane Jacobs once noted: “A metropolitan economy, if working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens… Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.”

    Although some may suggest that this is a role New York can no longer play, we believe it is one that the city needs to address if it is to remain a truly great city.

    Released by Center for an Urban Future, this report was written by Jonathan Bowles, Joel Kotkin and David Giles. It was edited by David Jason Fischer and Tara Colton, and designed by Damian Voerg. Mark Schill, an associate with Praxis Strategy Group, provided demographic and economic data analysis for this project. Additional research by Zina Klapper of www.newgeography.com as well as Roy Abir, Ben Blackwood, Nancy Campbell, Pam Corbett, Anne Gleason, Katherine Hand, Kyle Hatzes, May Hui, Farah Rahaman, Qianqi Shen, Linda Torricelli and Miguel Yanez-Barnuevo.

  • New York Should End Its Obsession With Manhattan

    Over the past two years, I have had many opportunities to visit my ancestral home, New York, as part of a study out later this week by the Center for an Urban Future about the city’s middle class. Often enough, when my co-author, Jonathan Bowles, and I asked about this dwindling species, the first response was “What middle class?”

    Well, here is the good news. Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s celebration of “the luxury city,” there’s still a middle class in New York, although not in the zip codes close to hizzoner’s townhouse. These middle-class enclaves are as diverse as the city. Some are heavily ethnic, others packed with arty types, many of them more like suburbia than traditionally urban.

    This New York is vastly different from the one that appears in most movies. It is more like the New Jersey portrayed in “The Sopranos” or “All in the Family” (set in Queens) than Manhattan-centric “Seinfeld” and “Sex and the City”. Largely, this middle class stays in New York – despite the congestion, high taxes and regulatory lunacy – because that is where they are from, where they worship and where they are close to their places of work.

    In many cases, they live in Bay Ridge, Bayside, Brighton or Bensonhurst, in the vast sprawl that is Brooklyn and Queens. New York’s middle class is also highly diverse. In many areas, the descendants of Italians or Poles live cheek by jowl with newer groups such as Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Jamaicans, Russians, Israelis and Pakistanis. They stay and raise their children, in large part because of their extended family networks. As Queens resident and real estate agent Judy Markowitz puts it, “In Manhattan people with kids have nannies. In Queens, we have grandparents.”

    Some of the emerging middle class also cluster in places like Ditmas Park, a reviving part of Flatbush. The new population here is made up largely of information age “artisans” – musicians, writers, designers and business consultants who cluster in New York. They may have migrated there for the culture, but they stay because they find these neighborhoods congenial and family-friendly.

    “It’s easy to name the things that attracted us – the neighbors, the moderate density,” explains Nelson Ryland, a film editor with two children who works part-time at his sprawling turn-of-the-century Flatbush house. “More than anything, it’s the sense of the community. That’s the great thing that keeps people like us here.”

    For these reasons, New York’s middle class may be hard to displace, but they certainly are under considerable stress. Urban life may have improved from its nadir in the 1970s, but our findings show that net out-migration from the city, particularly as people get into their late 20s and early 30s, has continued.

    The now-imploding economic boom did not halt this pattern. Indeed out-migration in the last few years has been greater on a per capita basis than that of the early 1990s, when “escape from New York” was a recurring media theme. The reasons: the nation’s highest cost of living, poor public schools, inadequate transit, expensive housing, high taxes and lack of broad-based economic opportunity.

    Much the same process is occurring in other great cities from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Chicago and Philadelphia. Indeed, even as gentrification brings in wealthy childless couples and students (often supported by their suburban parents) to urban areas, the number of middle-class neighborhoods has continued to decline, as demonstrated by a 2006 Brookings Institution paper.

    This is true, for example, in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, where I live. Once overwhelmingly made up of home-owning, moderate-income earners, the Valley is becoming increasingly bifurcated between the affluent and a growing class of largely minority renters.

    The hollowing of the New York middle class has been even more rapid. In 2006, Manhattan, the cradle of gentry liberalism, had achieved the widest gap between rich and poor in the nation. Overall, New York has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation: The city’s middle class – those making between $35,000 and $150,000 a year – fell to 53% between 2000 and 2005, while remaining steady nationwide at 63%.

    Up until now, these trends did not much bother New York’s media, business and political hegemons. Under its ruling Medici, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York has been shaped as a place for the masters and their servants. Such Bloombergian priorities as the Second Avenue subway, the taxpayer-subsidized construction of luxury-box-laden stadiums, as well as an orgy of a city-inspired luxury condominium construction and plans for ever more high-end office towers reflect this worldview.

    Of course Bloomberg’s “luxury city” is largely a Manhattanite vision, with a few tentacles spreading to the adjacent parts of the outer boroughs. It takes its sustenance from the enormous wealth generated by Wall Street as well as the presence of a large “trustifarian” class. This is very much the New York of The New York Times: fashionably liberal in politics, self-consciously avant-garde, and devoted, more recently, to “green” consumerism.

    At the height of the boom – say two years ago – some imagined there were enough folks such as these to sustain the city. They would now constitute a de facto new middle class, except their bank accounts would have extra zeros. When Jonathan and I interviewed a developer, he bristled at us for suggesting that New York’s middle class was shrinking. “Of course, there’s a middle class,” he stated flatly. “Why, my friend’s son just bought a place here in Manhattan.”

    “Oh really?” I asked, a bit incredulously. “And how much was the apartment?”

    “One and half million.”

    “And how did he pay for it?”

    “His dad.”

    Now, with Wall Street’s money machine in reverse and the Manhattan real estate market unraveling, the surplus capital to finance million-dollar condominiums for kids may well have evaporated. Similarly, the parade of top graduates from business and law schools could slow, now that the big bonus regime may be coming to an end. If you are going to be paid bankers’ wages, why not live somewhere cheaper?

    Yet despite the tough times, there is no real reason for New Yorkers to fear a return to the bad old days of the 1970s, as Reuters recently warned. New York used to have a diverse, middle-class economy that was remarkably recession-proof.

    It could have such an economy in the future as well. A modern version may be less reliant on manufacturing, but focused instead on the talents of its citizens in such things as design, marketing and data analysis. Still, it would be a small business-oriented economy – one that could flourish outside Manhattan.

    New York should cultivate such an economic shift and also turn its attention from the chic precincts to its middle-class neighborhoods. In the post-Wall Street era, the “luxury city” concept needs to be discarded just like other toxic manifestations from a discredited era.

    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.

  • Report: Ontario, CA – A Geography for Unsettling Times

    These are unsettling times for almost all geographies. As the global recession deepens, there are signs of economic contraction that extend from the great financial centers of New York and London to the emerging market capitals of China, India and the Middle East. Within the United States as well, pain has been spreading from exurbs and suburbs to the heart of major cities, some of which just months ago saw themselves as immune to the economic contagion.

    Without question, the damage to the economies of suburban regions such as the Inland Empire has been severe. Foreclosures in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties have been among the highest in the country, while drops in real-estate related employment have resulted in the first net job losses in four decades. This has led some critics to suggest that the entire area is itself doomed, destined to devolve along with other suburban regions to “the new slums”.

    Yet our close examination of both short and longer-term trends suggests these perspectives are wildly off-base. For one, it is critical to separate different parts of the Inland region from one another. A place like Ontario retains many characteristics that make it far more able than other locales in the region to resist the negative trends. These advantages include a diversified economy, a powerful local job center, an excellent business climate and, most of all, a location perfectly positioned along the historic growth corridors of Southern California.

    These assets have already allowed Ontario to weather the current storm far better than many other Inland Empire areas. Foreclosure rates, for example, although far too high, have remained considerably below the average for the region, and far below those in communities that lack the same strong diversified economic base and close access to employment.

    More importantly, Ontario remains well-positioned to take advantage of both the eventual recovery of the Inland region and the greater expanse of Southern California. Housing prices – particularly the availability of single family homes – has been a driver of growth for the inland region for decades. As prices fall, the rates of affordability for the region – which had been dropping dangerously – will once again rise.

    Despite the claims of some theorists, the preference of most Californians for single family housing seems likely to be unabated, particularly as immigrants seek a better quality of life and the first generation of millennials enters the home-buying market. These are populations that have been heading east to Ontario, the surrounding “Mt. Baldy region,” and to the Inland Empire as a whole for decades, and there is no reason to suppose the flow will stop.

    As the Inland Empire restarts its growth cycle, Ontario will remain uniquely suited to take advantage. Significantly, despite the current downturn in energy prices, worldwide supply shortages as well as growing political demands for regulation on carbon emissions will lead businesses to look increasingly at procuring goods and services nearby. As the Inland Empire’s premier business and transportation hub, Ontario will be well-positioned to emerge as the epicenter of the entire Inland Region.

    At the same time, Ontario residents generally have short commutes, and the city sits astride the primary transportation routes of the region. Over time, well-planned developments such as the New Model Colony will offer a wide range of residents an opportunity to live, work and spend their spare time within a relatively compact, energy-efficient place.

    Business friendliness is also a key asset. Ontario enjoys a close working relationship with expanding companies in business services, manufacturing, logistics, medical services, and other industries not directly dependent on the housing sector.

    But more than anything, Ontario’s position rests on the city’s fundamental commitment to a balance of jobs and housing, and to a long-standing focus on economic growth. Unlike many communities in the region, Ontario has grown on a solid economic basis. As the fourth largest per capita beneficiary of retail sales in Southern California, the city has a considerable surplus to meet hard times .

    Although the immediate prospects for virtually all communities will be difficult, few places in Southern California can hope to ride out the current tsunami better than Ontario. And even fewer seem as well-endowed to ride the next wave of growth that will sweep through the region – as has occurred throughout the last century – when the economy once again regains its footing and customary vitality.

    See attached .pdf file for full report.

    Primary Authors: Joel Kotkin, Delore Zimmerman
    Research Team: Mark Schill, Ali Modarres, Steve PonTell, Andy Sywak
    Editor: Zina Klapper

    Photo courtesy of Valerita

  • Florida’s Tourism Addiction

    Remember those innocent days last summer, when the biggest worry was high gas prices? Florida already felt the pinch as tourism dropped dramatically. Then, as the financial markets collapsed last fall, Florida’s leaders woke up and began talking about diversification. Like deer caught in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, economic boosters darted around looking for new safe places in the knowledge economy, ways to revitalize agriculture, and even exploring private space development to supplement the stuttering NASA program.

    But now, having passed through the last quarter, this talk is once more put aside for reliance on tourism again. It appears that the line for Disney’s Space Mountain could be an inverse indicator of the state’s appetite for healthy diversification. As wait time for the ride shortened in October, space programs, research laboratories, and business incubators fell back in the minds of public officials. Today, with lower gas prices, those who still have jobs are coming back to the theme parks, and the relief that state officials feel is audible: no more silly talk about diversification!

    Once upon a time, before all the turmoil, NASA had a space program. From afar, one may infer there is an exciting base of science and technology centered around the Kennedy Space Center, with engineering plants and satellite factories and science laboratories. A visit to this area reveals nothing of the sort: sleepy Cocoa, a beach town seemingly lost in time, housing a few small offices scattered around the town labeled Grumman, Boeing, or Lockheed Martin. NASA’s space program in Florida, as it turns out, produces spectacular launches but not much else; the winds of politics on Capitol Hill blow so hot or cold that little sustained investment is possible into this local economy. In 2008, NASA quietly eliminated 4,000 jobs in Central Florida, as the space shuttle program is phased out and replaced with a more efficient vehicle.

    Meanwhile, tourism grew and no one noticed.

    Once upon a time, before all the freezes, Central Florida had agriculture specializing in citrus. Remember Anita Bryant and the famous Florida Orange? Groves actually extended into southern Georgia a century ago, but citrus farming retreated further and further south as farmers sought less risk from the weather. By the early 1990s, more freezes caused Central Florida farmers to throw in the towel, carrying out with them orange juice processing plants, bottle manufacturers, and shipping and trucking centers. Replacement crops were neither entertained nor encouraged by the State, and the farmers sold their land to developers, who quickly rezoned the land for single family subdivisions. Population grew, and no one noticed.

    Once upon a time, East Coast businesses were moving their corporate headquarters to Florida. If anybody remembers John Naisbitt’s 1980 book Megatrends, Orlando was named one of the top ten cities of the future. AAA, the automobile travel association, moved its corporate headquarters to Central Florida, joining Tupperware and several others. It appeared that low taxes and great weather inevitably would lure more companies. It escaped most people’s notice that the other corporations moving here, such as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (now Harcourt), weren’t moving their leadership, but only back offices and computer hardware to Florida, taking state business incentives and returning the favor with service workers, not executives. As these service workers are downsized due to outsourcing and automation, Florida’s economy has been dramatically affected. Meanwhile the corporate headquarters in New York were protected. The top executives may have maintained condos in Florida, but never took the place seriously for business.

    But still tourism was growing, and no one noticed.

    Once upon a time, Florida was known as the state of low taxes. No income tax for us, thank you very much, despite a few weak attempts by the legislature. Rather, Florida depends on sales taxes and property taxes to balance its budget, and growth seemed to guarantee that these would rise. But even as low as taxes were, business leaders two years ago pressured the new Governor and legislature to propose a tax cut referendum, and like sheep, the citizens voted yes. Heck, who would not want their taxes cut? Shortly after property taxes were voted lower, the bottom fell out of Florida’s housing market, producing the perfect storm of lower taxes on properties dropping in value. Then, the wise leaders chose to cut necessities like education, rather than luxuries like the purchase of U.S. Sugar’s abandoned properties.

    But tourism was growing, and no one seemed to care.

    The litany of missed opportunities is longer than the space to list them. To anyone running a business, diversification of sources of income would seem natural to promote the long-term health of your business. But Florida consistently has shown disdain for this sort of behavior, because tourism continues to provide a steady stream of revenue. It is true that historically tourism has risen at the same rate as population growth and there is no reason to doubt that tourism will rebound. So once again, Florida’s reliance on tourism may seem its key to economic survival.

    In Central Florida, the economy is tourism, with worldwide visitorship, and compared to its next closest competitor, Las Vegas, Central Florida has come through smelling like a rose. Hotels within Disney’s property quietly finished 2008 on budget, and other hotels surrounding the theme parks suffered only modest losses. New hotel starts are halted, and owners with cash are not seeking expansion, renovation, nor repositioning while occupancy is down.

    Meanwhile, digital media and medical research remain the two most viable diversification channels for Central Florida. Partnerships between the private sector and the University of Central Florida to create a digital media development center will bear fruit in the coming years, both on campus and in downtown Orlando. Growth in medical research is already happening with the arrival of the Nemours Center for Pediatric Research. Both of these are happening because of internal decisions, windows of opportunity, and with mostly private, not government, help. On the downside, space investment dwindles, agriculture divestiture continues, and the State sits idly by, dreaming dreams of legalized gaming so as to put even more eggs into tourism’s basket.

    These are excellent times for diversifying the state’s economy. Tourism breeds not just an epehemeral city, but an ephemeral state – and the risk of this position is felt every day as jobs get scarcer and scarcer. Florida’s business leaders need to take responsibility for the future of the state, stop their addiction to tourism, and seek higher and safer ground. Only with a diversified economy will the State of Florida have long-term prospects for a prosperous future.

    So come on back, everyone, and get in line for rides at Disney! Those of us living and working in Central Florida thank you for coming. And, while you are here, pat yourselves on the back for helping Florida postpone its inevitable reckoning with economic reality.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Memorialist of Suburbia

    John Updike, the bard of the suburbs, died this week. He was one of the first great American writers to revel in the opportunity, beauty and convenience that the suburbs have long reflected. His voice, first found in the sixties, acted as a reasonable anchor in the tempest of radicalism that swept through the country. He empathized with the American dream rising in the raw suburbs being carved from agricultural land.

    Where ancestors once had wrestled a living from the soil, Updike’s generation found comfort, convenience and a dream. They found plenty where a generation previous only found enough to keep them alive. At a time when academics, avant-garde filmmakers and urban intellectuals scoffed at suburbia, Updike explained it. He understood the obvious reasons – “practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange”. That is still what draws people to the edge of town.

    Updike viewed the miles of identical houses the middle class aspired to as the pinnacle of civilization. He was never condescending. He genuinely loved what the suburbs represented and what they offered the masses moving from the cramped quarters of the ghettos and slums of the pre-war cities. He himself knew firsthand the other source of suburban migrants – the hardscrabble rural environs where life was often both difficult and limited.

    Updike wanted nothing more than the convenience and steady food and work that he could find in the suburbs of Boston. The cold, bleak, boring hell of rural life was not for him. He saw nature as something that his religious sensibilities told him it was: a chaotic force to be tamed for the benefit of man.

    His novels described the lives of characters in the sixties and seventies, caught up in the whirlwind of suppressed and released human desires which challenged these suburban dreamers. His sex scenes were more biological than erotic. They showed the new morality that was being formed in the suburbs, the breaking down of the old structures of the village and the urban neighborhood, which in many essentials were the same thing.

    In Seek My Face he talks of Manhattan by saying that each block represented a village in the old country. That was fine for the first generation, which needed that fabric of support and familiarity but that was not enough of a dream for the next generation. The Dream was the cheap Cape Cods that were being erected by the thousands over the Nassau County line by the Levitt brothers.

    Updike presented the suburbs for what they were to his generation: an escape from the villages and suffocating urban neighborhoods that trapped the previous generation. The freedom they gained was that of the nuclear family structure – the end to the rule of elders, cousins and priests. He celebrated suburbia as it rarely has been – as a peculiarly American miracle. It did not need to be demeaned, but seen as the perfection of thousands of years of evolution, the home to thousands of hoping, dreaming members of the middle class. His description of the car is no less lyrical. It was the convenience but it was more than that. In one short story he describes the purchase of a new car. The rush of excitement associated with the purchase and the affection that forms between a family and a car. He then described the neglect that crept in as the car aged until it lies abandoned in the front yard waiting to be turned in for a newer car.

    The mobility it represented is tempered with the ever present hope for the future that defines so much of what America is. The car is mobility; he describes the manner by which it frees passengers from the landscape just as it frees them from the tyranny of public transit. The car is the cocoon that is an extension of the owner’s personality, a part of who he is. It is a symbol of power and prosperity. It is an object of love.

    Then there was the chance to go to church without feeling like a freak. The multicultural downtowns are filled with houses of worship catering to all classes of people. There are numerous minority churches in Manhattan catering to different races and other houses of worship for the other sundry religions in the immigrant communities, but the middle class churches are being taken over, bought out and torn down in the center. The mainline churches and megachurches that most white middle class Americans call home are on the edge of town. Updike was a master at describing the religious experience of the suburbs. In A Month of Sundays Updike describes the breakdown of a Presbyterian pastor into a nymphomaniac. It is also filled with suburbs, sex and theology. Critics stated that the narrator’s sermons are some of the most eloquent since John Donne and are a wonderful representation of the dichotomy in an America that separates church and state but can never quite get over the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers set up a Theocracy on the banks of the Charles River. The combination of the profane and the divine is apparent on the outskirts of any American city where Wal-Marts abut megachurches; some megachurches were even built in the massive husks of abandoned big box stores.

    He was born in the depth of the depression to parents who dreamed of him being more and he described the quotidian with a lyricism that was an epiphany. The suburbs were a thing of beauty. He was a man who loved America for living in the future tense but constantly looking to the past for guidance. America lost one of its greatest voices in him.

    Kirk Rogers lives in Germany where he teaches languages and American culture at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He has been an avid reader of Updike since his early teens.

  • Obama’s Friends: Enemies of the American Dream?

    President Barack Obama has rightly spoken positively about the American Dream, how it is becoming more expensive and how it needs to be reclaimed. But to do this, he may have to disregard many of those who have been among his strongest supporters and the dense urban centers which have been his strongest bastion of support.

    Indeed, the American Dream has been achieved by countless millions of households, though many have been left out of this expansion that began following World War II. Home ownership has risen from little above 40 percent to nearly 70 percent. Automobile ownership has become nearly universal, making it possible for urban areas to grown to unprecedented size. The Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute and others have published studies showing that people in low income households are far more likely to find and hold employment if they have access to cars.

    All of this has been associated with a democratization of prosperity that has never before occurred. Per capita income is now 3.5 times its 1950 level in the United States (see 1929-2007 inflation adjusted data).

    Yet, the American Dream is under serious threat – and this predates today’s faltering economy. A key component lies in the machinations of an urban policy and planning elite contemptuous of the comfortable lifestyles achieved by so many Americans. Instead they propose creating an environment in which households would have to pay more for their houses and spend more of their lives traveling from one place to another.

    Most of those who wish to create this situation come from the political left and consider themselves to be “friends of Obama.” They have achieved positions of power in some urban areas, such as throughout California, Portland, Seattle and a host of other areas. As early as 2007 some saw Obama as the dream candidate – what one called “a smart growth President”.

    This elite group starts by demonizing the very foundations of America’s inclusive prosperity. Having declared “urban sprawl” a scourge, they seek to stop further development on the urban fringe and want virtually all development to be within already developed urban footprints. These and other overly stringent regulations have served to strangle urban land markets, forcing land prices and housing prices higher, in those region where they have been imposed.

    Over fifteen years ago William Fischell at Dartmouth University demonstrated that California’s overly restrictive land use policies had made that state more expensive than elsewhere. Since 2000, with the wider availability of mortgage credit, the new demand drove prices to double or triple historic norms in areas with restrictive regulation. Price reductions have lowered prices, but they are still well above historic norms. This means that fewer households still are able to own their own homes in areas with restrictive land use regulations. Once normal prosperity is restored, the higher house prices of the restrictive land use areas can be expected to resume their increase relative to the rest of the nation.

    This is a problem for some regions now. But many planners are enthusiastic about Obama in part because he is thought to be sympathetic to recreating these conditions throughout the entire country.

    ###

    The automobile plays the role of the Great Satan in this morality play. The goal of many ‘progressive’ urbanists is to force people into transit and stop road building. Transit, of course, has its place. There is no better way to get to your job south of 59th Street in Manhattan, to Chicago’s Loop or to a few other of the nation’s largest downtown areas. But the stark reality is that transit can not substitute for the automobile for the overwhelming majority of trips, except for these niche markets. Further, failing to expand highways to keep up with traffic growth increases traffic congestion (and air pollution) and reduces economic productivity (read: “increases poverty”).

    Higher costs for home ownership and slower commutes to work – and they will be slower because transit commutes average twice as long as automobile – impose significant burdens on people. Fewer people will have houses and fewer will have jobs. Forcing a single parent to take longer to navigate from home to the day care center to the job, whether by transit or by car, makes life more difficult – and for no rational reason. It is the equivalent of forcing people to work harder for nothing.

    Of course, this way of thinking has been around some parts of the country for decades. The new drive to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has extended its reach. The typical formulation now is that in order to reduce GHG emissions, Americans need to be crowded into dense urban areas and give up our cars.

    ###

    In reality, nothing of the kind is required. “Green” houses are being developed that can make it possible to substantially reduce GHG emissions while Americans continue their favored suburban life styles (the lifestyles, by the way, also favored by Europeans and Japanese). Hybrid and other advanced car and fuel technologies can make it possible for the personal transportation sector to achieve massive long term GHG reductions. The answer is regulating emissions, rather than people.

    But the planning and urbanist lobbies may not fundamentally be driven by the perceived need to reduce GHGs. They would rather regulate people, just as was the case well before climate change was even on the political agenda.

    Of course, the planners don’t see their strategies as nightmarish. They have worked them all out theoretically in their heads. The problem is that the theory is not and cannot be translated into reality. There is no more comfortable place to live in the world for people – particularly those past their youthful and single years – than the American suburb. There are no metropolitan areas of similar size in the world where people spend less time traveling to and from work than in America. Take Hong Kong, which is by far the world’s most dense large first-world urban area. No other metropolitan area of its size should have such theoretically short trips, because everything is so close together. Yet, average travel time to work is almost double that of Dallas-Fort Worth, with a similar population. Indeed, even in “gridlocked” Los Angeles, so often ridiculed for its automobile-oriented “sprawl,” work trip travel times average nearly 40 minutes less per day than in that ultimate of urbanization, Hong Kong. That adds up to about a week’s worth of extra commuting time each year.

    Rather than trying to constrict the dream, President Obama should work on ways to expand it. This will not be easy. Today, less than 50 percent of African-American and Latino households own their own homes. At the same time, Anglo home ownership is about 75 percent. No program to extend the American Dream can be based on policies that unnecessarily increase the price of housing.

    For the new President, there is a clear choice. He can cast his lot with those whose strategies would extinguish the aspirations of millions of Americans, or he could make it easier for more households in the nation to achieve the American Dream.

    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.”

  • The Dawn of a New Age in the War on Poverty

    An article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 29, 1992 is entitled “The Great Society’s Great Failure.” It profiles the Inez, Kentucky family that appeared in the famous front porch photo that launched LBJ’s War on Poverty in 1964. Suffice it to say without revealing the particular gory details of their thwarted lives, the family’s fate was as dismal as the outcome of the War on Poverty. Mike Duncan, an Inez banker and now chairman of the Republican National Committee – battling to retain his position – put it mildly: “The War on Poverty did not succeed.”

    In 2009 where do we stand with America’s War on Poverty? Inez and the rest of Martin County were described in the article as “one of the poorest counties in a poor state. Of its 12,526 people, all but 27 are white.” The image stuck and Inez has been digging out ever since.

    The community’s lack of progress over the past several decades has been particularly ironic: until recently, the rest of America has been experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history.

    Now we have elected our first African American to the office of the presidency, a man who cut his political teeth working among the black poor of Chicago’s Southside. Barack Obama’s election has no doubt raised hopes around the Southside and other predominately African American distressed communities. But can the same be said for the more numerous, equally intractable neglected communities – labeled poor, white, aging, and rural (PWAR) – like Inez?

    This line of thinking has become even more popular as evidenced by the racial overtones, masquerading as satire, included on a CD released by a challenger of Mike Duncan for the RNC chair position. Politicos say there is a divide within both of the major political parties – appeal to the PWAR and die or reach out to gather more under the tent. PWARs are rarely spoken of in the media except in pejorative terms

    So far, there is little evidence that poor rural whites – epitomized by Appalachia – have any strong advocates in the new administration. There is not a single cabinet officer from anywhere in the deep or mid-south nor any important figure in the majority party from the region.

    So, what happens to the fortunes of the regions – the South in particular – in the new order? Will the battle of red versus blue gain new ground or will other rivalries and labels rise up? Will a region whose economy revolves around coal have a chance in a “new green world?”

    Right now places like Kentucky – decidedly red – could well be marginalized. The media enjoys painting our citizens as ignorant rubes (how else could they have voted against Obama?) This was implied in the mainstream news. (CNN had particular fun with it while profiling Clay County, Kentucky before the election and conducting a trailer escapade in Carlisle, Kentucky after the election).

    Seventeen years after the Tribune’s article, Inez and the rest of Martin County have chosen to declare their own war to overcome the endemic national stereotype that the War on Poverty placed upon them. This new spirit of localism was born first among the community’s young professionals who left Inez as high school graduates and have now returned as educated professionals seeking to earn their own piece of the American Dream. Their hope has been burnished in the fire of experiences gained as they saw and experienced the rewards of hard work and determination in other places. They concluded that Inez and Martin County could be something different, and they have returned to make it so.

    It is clear that President-elect Obama has a choice: be a great president and a uniter, or not. They say FDR was great because he reached out to those who were not for him. The times now are eerily similar. One hopes that a man who grew up as an outsider might realize that the “hill” people of Appalachia or the deep South aren’t all pathetic as portrayed in the news media; perhaps they don’t understand the message of hope because they have been betrayed before by “outsiders” attempting to convert them to the “mainstream.” The failures of the ‘war on poverty’ are still well remembered here.

    Not all 100 or more million new Americans who will be here by 2050 will head for the eight supercities. The vast majority won’t find work that will allow them to settle in the so-called “creative” hotbeds. Many will head for small to mid-sized towns with more affordable lifestyles, and perhaps more durable values. Perhaps others will begin to believe in the old adage that we can live and work anywhere and will do so, taking the opportunity to bring change to our communities.

    For its part, Inez, Kentucky has decided to rewrite its story and believes it can do so. As an Appalachian native, I believe it too. Their story is one of grit, determination, and sheer willpower to change the course of the future in a positive way. At a recent public meeting, an African American woman who had moved to Inez from D.C. stood up and provided a testimonial of faith and belief in her newfound home. She hoped others would come and begin to appreciate the lifestyle of a small town in hill and coal country. I had to ask afterward – is she for real? “Yes” came the reply, “she is very real.”

    A recent Esquire magazine feature called on “natives” to describe each of the 50 states. Actor Harry Dean Stanton, in the midst of philosophical ramblings, said: “There’s no answer to the state of Kentucky.” I don’t believe that’s entirely true.

    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.

  • Obama Family Values

    For a generation, conservatives have held a lock on the so-called “values” issue. But Barack Obama is slowly picking that lock, breaking into one of the GOP’s last remaining electoral treasures.

    The change starts with the powerful imagery of the new First Family. The Obamas seem to have it all: charming children; the supremely competent yet also consistently supportive wife, and the dynamo grandma, Marian Robinson, who serves as matriarch, moral arbiter and babysitter in chief.

    The new president’s focus on family reflects an increasing emphasis among African-American leaders on the importance of parental values. Many prominent black activists initially scorned Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report linking poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. But today, when roughly half of all black children live with single mothers, it is widely accepted that strong families represent the most effective way to reduce “the racial gap” in incomes.

    When it came to family, the last Democratic White House residents – the highly entertaining but also obviously dysfunctional Clintons – embodied persistent conflicts among baby boomers over sex and social roles. Remember Hillary’s resentful comments about “baking cookies”?

    By contrast, the focused and disciplined Obamas epitomize the aspirations most Americans hold for their own personal lives: caring fathers, strong mothers and an involved extended family.

    These ideals may be particularly appealing for Americans under 40, whose support has been instrumental in the president’s rise to power. Younger Americans are proving to be more family-oriented, in part because close to half come from divorced homes.

    Surveys reveal that people born between 1968 and 1979 place a considerably higher value on family, and a lower value on work, than their baby-boomer counterparts. Women in the former age cohort are actually having more children than their predecessors and, particularly among the college-educated, they appear to be working somewhat less.

    And this family-friendly shift is likely to continue throughout the next wave of child-rearers. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their book, Millennial Makeover, the Millennial generation, born after 1983 and twice as numerous as Generation X, also enthusiastically embraces the notion of a strong family.

    Indeed, three-fourths of 13- to 24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the most important factor in their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% thought getting married would make them happy. Some 77% said they definitely or probably would want children, while less than 12% said they likely wouldn’t.

    What’s more, the current state of the economy is likely to strengthen ties among family members. One-fourth of Generation X-ers, for example, still receive financial help from their parents, as do nearly one-third of Millennials. As many as 40% of Americans between ages 20 and 34 now live at least part-time with their parents, an option that will only become more commonplace in areas where home prices are particularly high and employment opportunities are sharply limited.

    Yet even if family values are in ascendance, how they are expressed sharply diverges from the norms and attitudes typically associated with the Religious Right. In fact, on a host of issues – including gay rights, interracial dating and stem cell research – millennials trend more toward liberal views than earlier generations, Winograd says.

    “They are more tolerant as well as more conventional,” he notes. “They follow the social rules – they don’t want to be rebellious. They want a basically conventional suburban family life.”

    Attitudes concerning religion – the other critical part of the “values” issue – reveal a similar fusion of conventionality and pragmatism. Like other Americans, Millennials are far more religiously oriented than their counterparts in other advanced countries. Fully one-fourth of Americans in their 20s and 30s, observes Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow, consider themselves “very spiritual,” even if they rarely attend church. A 2003 UCLA study found roughly three out of four college students deem their spiritual or religious views important, but most see their (older) professors as largely indifferent to such concerns.

    Yet this spiritual orientation does not imply a shift toward any retrograde “moral majority” conservatism. Upward mobility among evangelicals and fundamentalists, as well as the increased racial integration within churches, has lessened the once-glaring gaps between conservative Protestants, particularly in the South, and the rest of American society. This liberalization is particularly acute when it comes to issues like homosexuality and censorship, but also extends to the role of women and the teaching of religion in public schools.

    I’ve observed this shift firsthand teaching at Pepperdine, a school associated with the conservative Church of Christ, and Chapman University, which has a more liberal Christian orientation. Students embracing fundamentalist or evangelical creeds usually oppose both abortion and gay marriage, but they appear remarkably tolerant and accepting of homosexuals, racial minorities and Jews – attitudes that might shock the more insulated liberal landsmen.

    My more religious students also tend to be ecumenical in their views. Like the Obamas, many are seeking the right mix of spirituality and social activism. Wade Clark Roof, the author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, describes such people as ‘grazers.’ They often meet their spiritual needs through different channels – online Bible study, meditation and even Buddhism.

    Obama seems to be honing his appeal to precisely this demographic. Tapping Orange County evangelical minister Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation opens an important avenue to a new generation of spiritually oriented young people.

    Warren should concern the increasingly marginal hard-right Christian conservatives, who face potent competition for the political loyalties of their younger congregants. With economic issues pushing the middle class to the left, Democratic progress among the so-called “value” voters could leave the already bedraggled Republican ranks even more seriously diminished.

    Also threatened are those on the cultural left, some of whom expressed outrage about Warren’s appointment. Some Democrats see it as part of a conscious strategy to subordinate their social agenda for a more mainstream, family-centered one that holds broader political appeal. “It’s good for him to let the bed-wetters go,” scoffs one well-connected Southern California labor organizer. “They are the ones who have made it difficult to get a majority for the really important things.”

    In reality, though, Obama’s jettisoning of the cultural left is relatively risk-free. No matter how offended they might be, feminist, gay-rights and ultra-secularist activists are not likely to become Republicans. Even if Obama is not as perfect as they imagined, he will be far more amenable to their causes than George W. Bush.

    Overall, Obama is playing an exceedingly smart game of cultural politics. Most Americans, particularly youth, no longer relate to the vintage 1950s sitcom Ozzie and Harriet, an illustration of the lifestyle embraced by conservatives. Too many women now work outside the home and have friends or relatives who practice “alternative lifestyles.” Demonizing “deviants” is increasingly difficult, after all, when many if not most Americans have loved ones who are gay or otherwise outside the historical mainstream.

    Yet at the same time, there is a growing rejection of the highly secularized, self-absorbed lifestyle many boomers embrace. As a result, when it comes to today’s values, the role models seem to be socially hip and strong families like the Huxtables from The Cosby Show. Or perhaps, just maybe, the Obamas.

    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.

    Image courtesy flickr user Vargas2040

  • Does Growing Inequality Mean the End of Upward Mobility?

    Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency won’t end racism, but it does mean race is no longer the dominant issue in American politics. Instead, over the coming decades, class will likely constitute the major dividing line in our society—and the greatest threat to America’s historic aspirations. This is a fundamental shift from the last century. Writing in the early 1900s, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Developments in the ensuing years bore out this assertion. Indeed, before the 1960s, the decade of Barack Obama’s birth, even the most talented people of color faced often insurmountable barriers to reaching their full potential. Today in a multiracial America, the path to success has opened up to an extent unimaginable in DuBois’s time.

    Obama’s ascent reflects in particular the rise of the black bourgeoisie from tokens to a force at the heart of the meritocracy. Since the late 1960s, the proportion of African-American households living in poverty has shrunk from 70 percent to 46 percent, while the black middle class has grown from 27 percent to 37 percent. Perhaps more remarkable, the percentage who are considered prosperous—earning more than $107,000 a year in 2007 dollars—expanded from 3 percent to 17 percent.

    Yet as racial equity has improved, class disparities between rich and poor, between the ultra-affluent and the middle class, have widened. This gap transcends race. African-Americans and Latinos may tend, on average, to be poorer than whites or Asians, but stagnant or even diminishing incomes affect all ethnic groups. (Most housecleaners are white, for instance—and the same goes for other low-wage professions.) Divisions may not be as visible as during the Gilded Age.

    As Irving Kristol once noted, “Who doesn’t wear blue jeans these days?” You can walk into a film studio or software firm and have trouble distinguishing upper management from midlevel employees.

    But from the 1940s to the 1970s, the American middle class enjoyed steadily increasing incomes that stayed on a par with those in the upper classes. Since then, wages for most workers have lagged behind. As a result, the relatively small number of Americans with incomes seven times or more above the poverty level have achieved almost all the recent gains in wealth. Most disturbingly, the rate of upward mobility has stagnated overall, which means it is no easier for the poor to move up today than it was in the 1970s.

    This disparity is strikingly evident in income data compiled by Citigroup, which shows that the top 1 percent of U.S. households now account for as much of the nation’s total wealth—7 percent—as they did in 1913, when monopolistic business practices were the order of the day. Their net worth is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s households combined. The top 20 percent of taxpayers realized nearly three quarters of all income gains from 1979 to 2000.

    Even getting a college degree no longer guarantees upward mobility. The implicit American contract has always been that with education and hard work, anyone can get ahead. But since 2000, young people with college educations—except those who go to elite colleges and graduate schools—have seen their wages decline. The deepening recession will make this worse. According to a 2008 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, half of all companies plan to cut the number of new graduates they hire this year, compared with last. But the problem goes well beyond the current crisis. For one thing, the growing number of graduates has flooded the job market at a time when many financially pressed boomers are postponing retirement. And college-educated workers today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other countries, particularly in the developing world.

    The greatest challenge for Obama will be to change this trajectory for Americans under 30, who supported him by two to one. The promise that “anyone” can reach the highest levels of society is the basis of both our historic optimism and the stability of our political system. Yet even before the recession, growing inequality was undermining Americans’ optimism about the future. In a 2006 Zogby poll, for example, nearly two thirds of adults did not think life would be better for their children. However inspirational the story of his ascent, Barack Obama will be judged largely by whether he can rebuild a ladder of upward mobility for the rest of America, too.

    This article also appears at Newsweek.

    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.

  • A Little Genius for the City’s So-Called ‘Art World’

    There’s a little girl – maybe 10 or 12 years old – whose family owns a store just a couple of miles from Downtown Los Angeles. She spends a lot of time at the place after her nearby school lets out for the day, sort of helping out but mostly just hanging around where her older relatives can see her.

    I call her “Little Genius” because she’s always reading a book or busy at a computer or making paper dolls or working on some other challenge.

    Little Genius is Asian/American, the daughter of immigrants, and I think the flavor of academic prowess that comes with the nickname makes her happy in part because it makes her elders happy.

    It’s not just a nickname, though. I don’t know if Little Genius will grow up to be a great scientist or legal scholar or fill some other lofty role in our society. I do know, however, that she has the soul of an artist. Her paper dolls are much more intricate than the typical cut-outs. She recently put some craft clay and left-over cardboard from around the store together to make a scaled-down village occupied by little pigs. “The Pig Empire” went on display at the store for a few days, and plenty of customers enjoyed the work. Count me among them – it interested me, drew me close. I wondered about her motive and the inspiration for her little village.

    I thought about Little Genius when 13th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Eric Garcetti recently spoke of using $2.8 million in city funds to forge greater links between the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in the gleaming Bunker Hill district of Downtown and the many ethnic and immigrant and blue-collar folks who live in nearby areas.

    Garcetti pulled off a different sort of art – for a politician, anyway. He plainly spoke some truths that seldom get much of a genuine airing in our city. His brush strokes were bold, but applied with enough finesse to avoid offending anyone but the unduly sensitive. He said he’d like to see MOCA draw more visitors “who have never interacted with art in the visceral, provocative way that contemporary art can serve.” He called MOCA an institution with the potential to “set in motion a civic dialogue that’s been lacking in Los Angeles,” adding that that he hopes to see a variety of efforts focused on linking the museum to local schools, senior citizen’s centers, and everyday working folks by offering programs that appeal to them, and which they can readily attend.

    Perhaps this seems a mild triumph of rhetoric, but art in our city is in such a state of withdrawal that Garcetti’s comments amounted to some useful provocation of his own. Hundreds of thousands of persons live within a short distance of MOCA. Many of them labor hard – for some it’s a downright struggle – to maintain themselves in the city. Not many of them, or their children, are getting to MOCA.

    Garcetti’s comments also gave a reminder that museums and galleries might serve as reflections or repositories of art, but they should not be the exclusive province of what many refer to as the “art world.” I will go a step further – making clear that these are my thoughts and not Garcetti’s – and say that the moment artists, their patrons, and institutions such as MOCA come to believe that there is a distinct “art world” they lose touch with art itself.

    Art is a reflection of culture. Our culture is all of us, all mixed up. Great art engages all of us and helps us understand this culture of ours. How can anyone claim to be an artist while carving off a separate “art world” of limited membership?

    They can’t.

    That’s the best reason for all of us to take seriously Garcetti’s recent comments. It’s time to call on MOCA to make new and stronger efforts to reach Little Genius and the teeming mass of others who might not be members of the so-called “art world” but nevertheless serve as the heart and soul of our culture – also known as the real world.

    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)