New Geography

Tag: New York

  • New Central Business District Employment and Transit Commuting Data

    Photographs of downtown skylines are often the "signature" of major metropolitan areas, as my former Amtrak Reform Council colleague and then Mayor of Milwaukee (later President and CEO of the Congress of New Urbanism) John Norquist has rightly said. The cluster of high rise office towers in the central business district (CBD) is often so spectacular – certainly compared with an edge city development or suburban strip center – as to give the impression of virtual dominance. I have often asked audiences to guess how much of a metropolitan area’s employment is in the CBD. Answers of 50 percent to 80 percent are not unusual. In fact, the average is 7 percent in the major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000) and reaches its peak at only 22 percent in New York (Figure 1), which sports the second largest business district in the world (after Tokyo).

    Only seven of the 52 major metropolitan areas have CBDs with 10 percent or more of employment. Some are much lower. For example, Los Angeles and Dallas have had some of the nation’s tallest skyscrapers outside New York or Chicago for decades, yet these downtowns have only 2.4 percent and 2.3 percent of their metropolitan area employment respectively (Figure 2).

    This and similar information has been summarized in the third edition of Demographia Central Business Districts, which is based on the 2006-2010 Census Transportation Planning Package, a joint venture of the Census Bureau and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). The two previous editions of the report summarized data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses.

    The Declining Role of Downtown

    Downtowns have become far less important than before World War II, when a large share of American households did not have access to automobiles and when employment was far more concentrated than today. Indeed, the highly concentrated American downtown area is "unique," as Robert Fogelson indicates in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall: 1880-1950, and could be easily located as the destination of the "street railways." Downtown was a product of transit and remains transit’s principal destination today. The concentrated US style CBD form is really quite rare outside other new world nations, such as Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Some, but only a few Asian cities have also followed the example, most notably Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nanjing, Chongqing, Singapore, and Seoul.

    The US, however, for all its role as originator of the downtown paradigm has also led the world in employment dispersion. This reflects the dominance in the US of automobiles. Dispersion is more amenable to mobility by the car, which dominates motorized mobility in virtually all major metropolitan areas of North America and Western Europe. This has led in the US to generally shorter work trip travel times and less traffic congestion, according to Tom Tom and Inrix. The continuing expansion of working at home could improve the situation even more.

    New York has the largest CBD in the nation by far, with nearly 2,000,000 jobs. Chicago’s CBD (the Loop and North Michigan Avenue) has about one-quarter as many jobs (500,000) and Washington approximately 375,000. San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia, also ranked among the nation’s transit "legacy cities," have between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs. Automobile oriented Houston and Atlanta are the largest otherwise, with Houston’s downtown being much more compact than Atlanta’s. Atlanta’s downtown has expanded strongly (and less densely) to the north and includes "Midtown" (Figure 3)

    Transit is About Downtown

    Transit is about downtown. Approximately 55 percent of transit commuting in the United States is to jobs in just six municipalities (not to be confused with metropolitan areas), which I have called transit’s "legacy cities." Most of that commuting is to the six downtown areas. Of course, the city of New York is dominant, which alone accounts for 55 percent of the country’s CBD transit commuting (Figure 4), with much of the balance in the other five legacy cities (Figure 4). Only 14 percent of the CBD commuting is to the other 46 smaller downtowns.

    More than 1.5 million transit commuters converge on jobs in Manhattan every day. In the other five legacy cities, the figure ranges from 100,000 to 300,000 daily. All of the other central business districts draw fewer than 100,000 daily commuters. Seattle ranks 7th, at 60,000, and has double or more the CBD transit commuters of any of the other 44 CBDs (Figure 5). 

    New York has by far the highest transit commuting share of any downtown in the nation. Approximately 77 percent of people who work in the New York central business district commute by transit. The other legacy cities post impressive market shares as well, though well below those of New York. The CBDs in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco draw between 50 percent and 60 percent of their commuters by transit. Downtown Philadelphia and Washington attract more than 40 percent of their commuters by transit (Figure 6).

    Transit is About Downtown II

    The importance of downtown to transit is also indicated by its predominance in transit commuting destinations. In the New York metropolitan area, with a transit market share of approximately 30 percent, 57 percent of all transit commuting is to downtown jobs. Chicago’s transit commuting is concentrated in downtown to a slightly greater degree than in New York. One half of all the transit commuting in the San Francisco metropolitan area is to downtown. The CBDs of Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington account for between 40 percent and 50 percent of all transit commuting in their downtown areas. Seattle and Pittsburgh also are in this range (Figure 7). Seven of the eight metropolitan areas with the largest transit market shares have a CBD commuting dominance of 40 percent or more (Pittsburgh is the exception).

    The 52 major metropolitan area CBDs combined have less than five percent of the nation’s jobs. Elsewhere, downtowns and otherwise, the other 95 percent of American commuters use transit at only a three percent rate.

    Other Employment Centers

    In a new feature, Demographia Central Business Districts also provides data for selected employment centers other than the principal central business districts. These also include some surprises. For example, downtown Brooklyn, long since engulfed by the expansion of New York, has the second highest transit market share of any employment center identified other than New York, at 60 percent. Across the river, the Jersey City Waterfront area achieves a transit market share of more than 50 percent, greater than the downtowns of legacy cities Philadelphia and Washington.

    Data on supplemental employment center and corridor data is selected and therefore not representative. It is notable that some employment corridors and centers have employment totals that dwarf those of the principal downtown areas in their respective metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles, Portland, Dallas, and Kansas City.

    With a few exceptions, the transit commuting shares for most of these selected centers and corridors is modest. Many are served by new rail systems, which are simply not up to the task of providing mobility to these dispersed centers. Nor can they provide the radial, high quality service that makes transit such a success in the six legacy city downtowns. For example, the Dallas light rail system provides service along virtually the entire US-75 corridor from north of downtown to Plano. Transit’s share of commutes in this corridor is only 2 percent, far below the downtown Dallas share of 14 percent and the legacy city downtown average of 65 percent.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

  • Where Inequality Is Worst In The United States

    Perhaps no issue looms over American politics more than worsening  inequality and the stunting of the road to upward mobility. However, inequality varies widely across America.

    Scholars of the geography of American inequality have different theses but on certain issues there seems to be broad agreement. An extensive examination by University of Washington geographer Richard Morrill found that the worst economic inequality is largely in the country’s biggest cities, as well as in isolated rural stretches in places like Appalachia, the Rio Grande Valley and parts of the desert Southwest.

    Morrill’s findings puncture the mythology espoused by some urban boosters that packing people together makes for a more productive and “creative” economy, as well as a better environment for upward mobility. A much-discussed report on social mobility in 2013 by Harvard researchers was cited by the New York Times, among others, as evidence of the superiority of the densest metropolitan areas, but it actually found the highest rates of upward mobility in more sprawling, transit-oriented metropolitan areas like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; Pecos, Texas; and even Bakersfield, Calif., a place Columbia University urban planning professor David King  wryly labeled “a poster child for sprawl.”

    Demographer Wendell Cox pointed out that the Harvard research found that commuting zones (similar to metropolitan areas) with less than 100,000 population average have the highest average upward income mobility.

    The Luxury City

    Most studies agree that large urban centers, which were once meccas of upward mobility, consistently have the highest level of inequality. The modern “back to the city” movement is increasingly less about creating opportunity rather than what former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called “a luxury product” focused on tapping the trickle down from the very wealthy. Increasingly our most “successful cities” have become as journalist Simon Kuper puts it, “the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”

    The most profound level of inequality and bifurcated class structure can be found in the densest and most influential urban environment in North America — Manhattan. In 1980 Manhattan ranked 17th among the nation’s counties in income inequality; it now ranks the worst among the country’s largest counties, something that some urbanists such as Ed Glaeser suggests Gothamites should actually celebrate.

    Maybe not. The most commonly used measure of inequality is the Gini index, which ranges between 0, which would be complete equality (everyone in a community has the same income), and 1, which is complete inequality (one person has all the income, all others none).  Manhattan’s Gini index stood at 0.596 in 2012, higher than that of South Africa before the Apartheid-ending 1994 election. (The U.S. average is 0.471.) If Manhattan were a country, it would rank sixth highest in income inequality in the world out of more than 130 for which the World Bank reports data. In 2009 New York’s wealthiest one percent earned a third of the entire municipality’s personal income — almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

    The same patterns can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, in other major cities. A 2006 analysis by the Brookings Institution showed the percentage of middle income families declined precipitously in the 100 largest metro areas from 1970 to 2000.

    The role of costs is critical here. A 2014 Brookings study showed that the big cities with the most pronounced levels of inequality also have the highest costs: San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago and Los Angeles. The one notable exception to this correlation is Atlanta. The lowest degree of inequality was found generally in smaller, less expensive cities like Ft. Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City; Raleigh, N.C.; and Mesa, Ariz. Income inequality has risen most rapidly in the bastion of luxury progressivism, San Francisco, where the wages of the 20th percentile of all households declined by $4,300 a year to $21,300 from 2007-12. Indeed when average urban incomes are adjusted for the higher rent and costs, the middle classes in metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Miami and San Francisco have among the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area.

    Rural Poverty

    But cities are not the only places suffering extreme inequality. Some of the nation’s worst poverty and inequality, notes Morrill, exist in rural areas. This is particularly true in places like Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Appalachia and large parts of the Southwest.

    Perhaps no place is inequality more evident than in the rural reaches of California, the nation’s richest agricultural state. The Golden State is now home to 111 billionaires, by far the most of any state; California billionaires personally hold assets worth $485 billion, more than the entire GDP of all but 24 countries in the world. Yet the state also suffers the highest poverty rate in the country (adjusted for housing costs), above 23%, and a leviathan welfare state. As of 2012, with roughly 12% of the population, California accounted for roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.

    With the farm economy increasingly mechanized and industrial growth stifled largely by regulation, many rural Californians particularly Latinos, are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents; native-born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to a2011 report. Although unemployment remains high in many of the state’s largest urban counties, the highest unemployment is concentrated in the rural counties of the interior. Fresno was found in one study to have the least well-off Congressional district.

    The vast expanse of economic decline in the midst of unprecedented, but very narrow urban luxury has been characterized as “liberal apartheid. ” The well-heeled, largely white and Asian coastal denizens live in an economically inaccessible bubble insulated from the largely poor, working-class, heavily Latino communities in the eastern interior of the state.

    Another example of this dichotomy — perhaps best described as the dilemma of being a “red state” economy in a blue state — can be seen in upstate New York, where by virtually all the measurements of upward mobility — job growth, median income, income growth — the region ranked below long-impoverished southern Appalachia as of the mid-2000s. The prospect of developing the area’s considerable natural gas resources was welcomed by many impoverished small landowners, but it has been stymied by a coalition of environmentalists in local university towns and plutocrats and celebrities who have retired to the area or have second homes there, including many New York City-based “progressives.”

    Where Inequality Is Least Pronounced

    According to the progressive urbanist gospel, suburbs are doomed to be populated by poor families crowding into dilapidated, bargain-priced former McMansions in the new “suburban wastelands.” Suburbs, not inner cities, suggests such urban boosters as Brookings Chris Leinberger, will be the new epicenter of inequality, even though the percentage of poor people, as shown above, remained far higher in the urban core.

    Yet , according to geographer Morrill, in comparison with urban cores, suburban areas remain heavily middle class, with a high proportion of homeowners, something rare inside the ranks of core cities.The average poverty rate in the historical core municipalities in the 52 largest U.S. metro areas was 24.1% in 2012, more than double the 11.7% rate in suburban areas. Between 2000 and 2010, more than 80% of the new population.

    in America’s urban core communities lived below the poverty line compared with a third of the new population in suburban areas, although the majority of poor people lived there, in large part because they are also the home to the vast majority of metropolitan area residents.

    An analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of American Community Survey Data for 2012 indicates that suburban areas suffer considerably less household income inequality than the core cities. Among the 51 metropolitan areas with populations over 1 million, suburban areas were less unequal (measured by the Gini coefficient) than the core cities in 46 cases.

    The Racial Dynamic

    There is also a very clear correlation between high numbers of certain groups — notably African Americans but also Hispanics — and extreme inequality. Morrill’s analysis shows a huge confluence between states with the largest income gaps, largely in the South and Southwest, with the highest concentrations of these historically disadvantaged ethnic groups.

    In contrast, Morrill suggests, areas that are heavily homogeneous, notably the “Nordic belt” that cuts across the northern Great Lakes all the way to the Seattle area, have the least degree of poverty and inequality. Morrill suggests that those areas dominated by certain ethnic backgrounds — German, Scandinavian, Asian — may enjoy far more upward mobility and less poverty than others.

    Some, such as UC Davis’ Gregory Clark even suggest that parentage determines success more than anyone suspects — what the Economist has labeled “genetic determinism.” None of this is particularly pleasant but we need to understand the geography of inequality if we want to understand the root causes of why so many Americans remain stuck at the lower ends of the economic order.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • No Fundamental Shift to Transit: Not Even a Shift

    The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is out with news of higher transit ridership. APTA President and CEO Michael Melaniphy characterizes the new figures as indicating "a fundamental shift going on in the way we move about our communities.” Others even characterized the results as indicating "shifting consumer preferences." The data shows either view to be an exaggeration.

    1935 and 2013

    This is hardly a reliable time for making judgments about fundamental shifts or shifts in consumer preferences. Economic performance has been more abysmally abnormal only once in the last century –during the Great Depression – than at present.

    The last year, 2013, is the sixth year in a row that total employment, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was below the peak year of 2007 (Figure 1). This run of dismal job creation was exceeded only between the Great Depression years of 1929 and 1936 in the last 100 years (Note 1). From World War II until the Great Recession, the maximum number of years that employment fell below a previous peak was two, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001 to 2003). The Great Recession may have ended, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, but the Great Malaise continues as the economy is performing well below historic levels. Judgments about fundamental shifts and consumer choice today are not more reliable than they would have been in the Great Depression year of 1935.

    Transit’s Market Share: Stuck in Neutral

    But more importantly, there is no shift to transit.  APTA is right to point out that transit ridership has grown faster than vehicle travel in the United States since 1995. Nonetheless, transit’s share of urban travel has barely budged, because its 1995 share of travel was so small. This is indicated by Figure 2, which compares the overall market share of transit to that of cars and light trucks from 1995 to 2013. Indeed, the top of Figure 2 (the 100 percent line) is virtually indistinguishable from the personal vehicle share over the entire period. The bottom of the chart (the zero percent line) is virtually indistinguishable from the transit share. This is not the stuff of fundamental shift.

    Commuting: The Story is Not Transit

    A similar pattern of little or no change is indicated by the commuting (work access) data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

    Over the past five years, as with virtually all the years since such data has been collected, the overwhelming majority of new commuters have driven alone (Figure 3). Indeed, transit has not taken a single net automobile off the road since 1960, and not in the last five years. Between 2007 and 2012, 93 percent of the additional commuters drove alone (Note 2). The drive alone market, which might have been thought to be saturated, actually rose from 76.1 percent to a 76.3 percent market between 2007 and 2012.

    The biggest change has been the continuing loss in carpool use, which dropped from 10.4 percent to 9.7 percent from 2007 to 2012. It is estimated that nearly 450,000 passengers left carpools (excluding drivers), approximately 1.8 passengers for each additional commuter using transit (250,000).

    The largest gain from 2007 to 2012 was in working at home, including telecommuting. Working at home increased from 4.1 percent to 4.4 percent. In actual numbers, working at home added 1.9 times the increase in transit commuting. Its change in market share was greater than that of transit in 42 of the 52 major metropolitan areas. Surprisingly, this includes New York, with its incomparable transit system (by US standards).

    Transit’s share of commuting inched up only 0.1 percentage points between 2007 and 2012. This is so small that if this rate of annual increase were sustained for 50 years, transit’s commute market share would  edge up to only 6 percent (Figure 4), approximately transit’s 1980 market share (doubling to 10 percent would require 130 years). The latest data indicates both gains and losses for transit, with market shares up in 28 major metropolitan areas and down in 24.

    Transit Losses

    In Atlanta, with the nation’s second largest Metro (subway) system built since 1975, a declining overall employment base was accompanied by a loss of 13,000 transit commuters, at the same time that there was an increase in working at home of 19,000.

    In Portland, considered by many around the world to be an urban planning Utopia, the data is hardly favorable. Since 1980, the last year with data before the first of five light rail lines and one commuter rail line opened, transit’s market share has dropped from 8.4 percent to 6.0 percent. While spending billions of dollars on rail, working at home – which involves little or no public expenditure – increased by triple the number of people drawn to transit. And things have not changed materially, even during the claimed "fundamental shift." In the last five years, the working at home increase is more than double that of transit.

    In Los Angeles, ridership at the largest transit agency continues to languish below its 1985 peak, despite having opened 9 light rail, Metro, and rapid busway lines and adding more than 1.5 million residents. Even this decline may be under-stated because of how transit counts passengers. Each time someone steps on a transit vehicle, they are counted (as a boarding). A person who transfers between two or three buses to make a trip counts as two or three boardings, which is what the APTA data reports.

    When rail is added to a transit system, bus services are reconfigured to serve the rail system. This can mean many more boardings from transfers without more passenger trips. This potential inflation of ridership is likely to have occurred not only in Los Angeles, but in all metropolitan areas that added rail systems.

    Transit Gains

    At the same time, gains are being made in some metropolitan areas. Ridership has risen more strongly in transit’s six "legacy cities," the municipalities (not metropolitan areas) of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington. Between 2007 and 2012, 68 percent of the additional transit commuting occurred to employment locations in these six municipalities. This is higher than the 55 percent of national transit commuting that these areas represented in 2012. The much larger share being attracted by these areas in the last 5 years is an indication that transit ridership, already highly concentrated in just a few places, is becoming even more concentrated.  Further, 50 percent to 75 percent of commuters to the corresponding six downtowns reach work by transit.

    Rational Consumer Behavior

    Even when the nation finally emerges from the Great Malaise, only vain hope will be able to conceive of a large scale consumer preference driven shift toward transit. The rational consumer will not choose transit that is slower or less convenient than the car. Where transit access is impractical or impossible, people will use cars. This is the case for most trips in all US metropolitan area, as the Brookings Institution research cited below indicates

    The Brookings Institution research indicated that the average employee in the nation’s major metropolitan areas are able to access fewer than 10 percent of jobs in 45 minutes. This is not only a small number of jobs, but it is a travel time that is approximately twice that of the average employee in the United States (most of whom travel by car).

    More funding for transit cannot solve this problem. The kind of automobile competitive transit system needed to provide rational consumer choice between cars and transit would require annual expenditures rivaling the total personal income in the metropolitan area, as Jean-Claude Ziv and I showed in our 2007 11th World Conference on Transport Research paper (2007). It is no wonder that not a single comprehensive automobile competitive transit system exists or has been seriously proposed in any major US or Western European metropolitan area (Note 3).  Transit is about the largest downtowns and the largest urban cores.

    Unbalanced Coverage

    All of this appears to have escaped many media outlets, which largely parroted the APTA press release. For example, The New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were as parish newsletters commenting on a homily by the priest, for their failure to report both sides. A notable exception was USA Today, whose reporter consulted outsider Alan Pisarski (who has written for newgeography.com). Pisarski placed the APTA figures in historical context and expressed reservations about restoration of the transit commuting share numbers of 1980 or before. 

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photograph: DART light rail train in downtown Dallas (by author)

    ———————

    Note 1: Current Employment Statistics Survey data, 1939 to 2013. 1913 to 1938 estimated from data in Historical Statistics of the United States: Bicentennial Edition.

    Note 2: The source for the commuting data is the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau, which indicates an employment level in 2012 that is higher than in 2007. The Current Employment Statistics Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates a decline.

    Note 3: I would be pleased to be corrected on this. In 2004, we issued a challenge on this subject, and while there were some responses, none met the required criteria (see http://demographia.com/db-challenge-choice.htm). The criteria are repeated below:

    To identify an actual system or propose a system that provides the following in an urban area of more than 1,000,000 population:

    · Transit choice (automobile competitive public transport service) for at least 90 percent of trips and passenger kilometers in the particular urban area.

    · Automobile competitiveness is defined as door to door trip times no more than 1.5 times automobile travel time.

    The description of any system not already in operation should also include an estimate of its cost, capital and annual operating.

  • High Tech Leaves NYC Behind

    Is New York City ready to contest in high-tech against Silicon Valley? Fuggedaboutit.

    Gotham is so far behind in every conceivable measurement — from engineering prowess to employment and venture funding — that even the idea is somewhat ludicrous.

    While Madison Alley has marketed the city’s tech prowess before, going back to when owners of lower Manhattan real estate promoted “Silicon Alley,” the action has been elsewhere.

    And while some urban boosters such as Richard Florida and Bruce Katz predict that new tech centers will not be the traditional suburban nerdistans, but instead the dense places where “smart” people cluster, there’s reason to be skeptical.

    To some extent, their ideas do apply in San Francisco, though mostly because of its proximity to the people and, more importantly, the venture capital in nearby Silicon Valley. It may even apply to Seattle, where large tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are based.

    But most tech employment has continued to be concentrated in suburban locations. Even as the social media boomlet has created a few high-profile urban firms, core counties nationwide actually lost about 1.1% of their tech jobs over the last decade, while more peripheral areas gained 3.5%.

    Despite a few modest successes, New York has not produced any business that approaches the top five firms of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google and LinkedIn are all based in the Valley or its urban satellite city, San Francisco.

    Crucially, New York remains a laggard in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (or STEM) employment, with slightly fewer tech jobs per capita than the national average, or a third as many as Silicon Valley.

    And it’s not only the Bay that New York is behind — it also trails less hyped locales such as San Diego, Raleigh, Portland, Seattle, Houston and Dallas.

    New York’s most glaring weakness is a lack of engineering talent. Behind venture capital, the greatest asset of Silicon Valley is its huge proportion of engineers, roughly 45 out of every 1,000 workers. Other high concentrations can be found in such varied burgs as San Diego, Boston, Houston and Denver.

    While the coming Cornell Technion may start to change that dynamic, Gotham has a long way to climb. Right now its concentration is 78th out of 85 metros — just behind Omaha.

    And it’s been headed in the wrong direction. Between 2001 and 2011, the New York area ranked a dismal 44th out of 52 metropolitan areas in tech growth, losing a net 84,000 jobs.

    Even as things picked up after 2009 with the social-media boom, tech employment here expanded about one-tenth as quickly as in Silicon Valley, as well as Columbus, Salt Lake City and Raleigh. Growth in Seattle was eight times faster.

    Without deep engineering talent, regions have a difficult time adjusting to technological changes that periodically reshape the high-tech industry. Silicon Valley is already beginning to move beyond social media; Google and Apple are focused increasingly on building their own pipes to move their content, and expanding into other promising tech fields from household appliances, electric cars and robotics to space exploration. New York simply does not have the engineering heft to make this transition.

    Inevitably, the social media boomlet, like the previous dotcom version, will slow, as companies merge and start moving operations to less expensive areas such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Austin and even Columbus, Ohio. Urban tech firms, particularly in media-drenched places like New York, nearly collapsed when the last bubble burst, with Silicon Alley hemorrhaging 15,000 of its 50,000 information jobs between 2000 and 2005.

    What’s more, the new tech oligarchs are gaining at the expense of New York’s traditional media industries and their elites. Since 2001, the book publishing industry, dominated by New York, has contracted nationally by 17,000 jobs. Newspapers lost 190,000 positions and magazines 50,000 in that same span. But internet publishing, dominated by the Bay Area, expanded by 77,000 jobs.

    Given the cultural tepidness of Silicon Valley, the oligarchs may still exploit talent in places like New York or LA, where artists concentrate. But while New Yorkers talk a good game, money, power and control are shifting away, perhaps permanently, to the left coast.

    This story originally appeared at the New York Daily News.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Photo by Mike Lee

  • Where New Yorkers are Moving

    The American Community Survey has released domestic migration data that was collected over a five year period (2007 to 2011).  There is newer domestic migration data available, such as is annually provided by the Census Bureau’s population estimates program, but not in the detail that the latest data provides.

    The new release is significant because domestic migration data is provided between each of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties. Because the survey was taken over a five-year period, the data represents, in effect, a one-fifth snapshot of domestic migration for each of the years from 2007 to 2011. Each year respondents are asked where they lived a year ago. It is thus a rolling annual figure, rather than a picture of a single year.

    The Uniqueness of New York City

    The city of New York provides an interesting case for many reasons. The city is by far the largest municipality in the United States and the only municipality composed of at least two complete counties. New York is coterminous with five counties. New York also has by far the greatest extent of high density in the United States, comprising more than 85 percent population of zip codes with greater than 25,000 per square mile density (10,000 per square kilometer).

    Finally, New York is at the center of the largest metropolitan area in the United States, which in its expanded, combined form (combined statistical area) has a population of 23.1 million, most of which (20.7 million) is in a built-up urban area that covers the largest land area in the world (has the largest urban footprint). This is more than a third larger than Tokyo, the world’s largest urban area by population, with an 80 percent higher population. It is surprising to many that New York’s urban area covers nearly twice the land area of Los Angeles and is nearly one-quarter less dense.

    Domestic Migration and New York City

    New York’s broad suburban expanse generally resembles the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle or Toronto and much of its Staten Island borough (county of Richmond) looks more like suburban New Jersey than New York, most of its urban core – the city of New York – is unique.

    And the city continues to export large numbers of people – 90,000 more than arrived in the rolling year represented by the latest ACS data. This is a big number, representing 1.1 percent of the city’s 2010 population. This is a larger loss than Philadelphia (0.5 percent), but smaller than Washington (1.4 percent).

    This has been evident in the large numbers net domestic migrants reported each year in the Census Bureau estimates. The data shows that people are leaving not only the city of New York not only for the suburbs, but moving in even greater numbers to beyond the metropolitan area. Approximately 27,000 more New Yorkers moved to the suburbs than to the city of New York over the period. However, an even larger 63,000 net domestic migrants left the city of New York for areas outside the metropolitan area.

    Approximately 30,000 of these inter-regional migrants moved to other major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1 million population). By far the largest share – 74 percent – of the city’s net domestic migrants to other major metropolitan areas moved to the South. Four of the five largest major metropolitan gainers at the city’s expense were Miami (net 5,600) and Atlanta (net 4,300), followed by Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

    Another 13 percent of the city’s net domestic migrants moved to other major metropolitan areas in the Northeast. Rochester was the largest gainer with nearly 1000 net domestic migrants from the city of New York, followed by Philadelphia. The city gained more than 250 residents from Boston.

    Approximately 9 percent of the city’s net domestic migrants moved to major metropolitan areas in the West. Los Angeles led in the West, gaining 1,800 net migrants from the city. The outlier was the Midwest, which sent more than 300 net migrants to the city (Figure 1).

    City residents tended to move to the suburbs of the major metropolitan areas, which attracted 60 percent, while the core cities received 40 percent of the net migrants.

    Dispersing Beyond the Larger Metropolitan Areas

    However, the most striking trend is that most of the net domestic migrants who left the city of New York to move outside the New York metropolitan area moved to areas outside the major metropolitan areas. In this regard, New Yorkers who move seem to be more inclined toward the greater dispersion of the nation’s smaller metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas.

    Over the period, approximately 32,500 net domestic migrants left the city for areas outside major metropolitan areas. This is more than moved to the other major metropolitan areas or to the New York metropolitan area suburbs (Figure 2).

    The most surprising finding is that the majority (65 percent) of net domestic migrants from the city who moved to outside the major metropolitan areas settled in the Northeast. Most of these 23,000 residents moved to smaller areas in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. Virtually all of the other migrants not moving to major metropolitan areas moved to states in the South (41 percent). In contrast, there was a small amount of migration to New York from the West and Midwest totaling less than 2,000 (Figure 3).

    Outside New York and New Jersey, which contain nearly all of the New York metropolitan area, Florida received the largest number of net migrants from the city (11,000), followed by Pennsylvania (8,000). Only 100 of the Pennsylvania migrants were to Pike County, which is in the New York metropolitan area. Georgia, Texas and North Carolina all received approximately 5,000 net migrants from the city. The top ten destinations were rounded out by Virginia, Connecticut and South Carolina. A total of 37 states received net domestic migrants from the city. Only Alaska and the District of Columbia sent more than 1,000 net domestic migrants to New York City.

    Conclusion

    The New York City migration data indicates continuing dispersion of the population. People are moving from the core to the periphery in New York, and many going beyond to less urban areas in the Northeast. More are moving to other major metropolitan and other smaller areas, located for the most part in the South. This year’s brutal winter could make the South look even better to New Yorkers.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photo: Leaving New York City via the Holland Tunnel (by author)

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Greater New York Expands

    The term “Greater New York” was applied, unofficially, to the 1898 consolidation that produced the present city of New York, which brought together the present five boroughs (counties). The term “Greater” did not stick, at least for the city. When consolidated, much of the city of New York was agricultural. As time went on, the term "Greater" came to apply to virtually any large city and its environs, not just New York and implied a metropolitan area or an urban area extending beyond city limits. By 2010, Greater New York had expanded to somewhere between 19 million and 23 million residents, depending on the definition.

    Greater New York’s population growth has been impressive. Just after consolidation, in 1900, the city and its environs had 4.2 million residents, according to Census historian Tertius Chandler. Well before all of the city’s farmland had been developed, New York, including its environs, had become the world’s largest urban area by the 1920s, displacing London from its 100 year predominance. Yet, even when Tokyo displaced New York in the early 1960s, there was still farmland on Staten Island. 

    New York became even larger in two dimensions, as a result of geographic redefinitions arising from the 2010 census.

    The Expanding New York Metropolitan Area

    The New York metropolitan area grew by enough land area to add more than 700,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, even after the decentralization reported upon in the metropolitan area as defined in 2000. The expansion of the metropolitan area occurred because the employment interchange between the central counties and counties outside the metropolitan area in 2000 became sufficient to expand the boundaries by more than 1,000 square miles (2,500 square kilometers).

    Summarized, metropolitan areas are developed by identifying the largest urban area (area of continuous urban development with 50,000 or more population) and then designating the counties that contain this urban area as “central counties.” Additional (“outlying”) counties are included in a metropolitan area if 25 percent or more of their resident workers have jobs in the central counties, or if 25 percent or more of the employees in the outlying county live in the central counties (There are additional criteria, which can be reviewed at 2010 Office of Management and Budget metropolitan area standards). In addition, adjacent metropolitan areas can be merged into a combined statistical area at a lower level of employment interchange (see below).

    For example, one of the counties added to the New York metropolitan area in the 2010 redefinition was Dutchess (home of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library). A resident of Dutchess County who works across the county line in Putnam County (a central county) would count toward the 25 percent employment interchange with the central counties of the New York metropolitan area. Contrary to some perceptions, metropolitan areas do not denote an employment interchange between suburban areas and a central city, even as major an employment destination as the city of New York.

    The OMB concept of “central” counties is in contrast to the more popular view that would consider the central counties to be Manhattan (New York County) or the five boroughs of New York City. In fact, out of the New York metropolitan area’s 25 counties, all but three (Dutchess and Orange in New York and Pike in Pennsylvania) are central counties. Sufficient parts of the urban area are in the other 22 counties, which makes them central.

    The Expanding New York Combined Statistical Area

    OMB has a larger metropolitan concept called the "combined statistical area." The combined statistical area is composed of metropolitan and micropolitan areas that have a high degree of economic integration with the larger metropolitan area. Essentially, adjacent areas are merged into a combined statistical area if there is an employment interchange of 15 percent. This occurs where the sum of the following two factors is 15 percent or more: (1) The percentage of resident workers in the smaller area employed in the larger area (not just central counties) and (2) The percentage of workers employed in the smaller area who reside in the larger area.

    On this measure, New York became greater by more 1 million residents as a result of the changes in commuting patterns. The addition of Allentown (Pennsylvania – New Jersey) and the East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania metropolitan areas expanded the New York combined statistical area by another 2,700 square miles (7,000 square miles), bringing the population to 23.1 million. Altogether, the metropolitan area and combined area land area increases added up to 3,700 square miles (9,700 square kilometers). The 35 county New York combined statistical area is illustrated in the map (Figure 1).

    Organized Around the World’s Largest Urban Area (in Land Area)

    The New York combined statistical area is very large. It covers approximately 14,500 square miles (37,600 square kilometers). From north to south, it measures 235 miles (375 kilometers) from the Massachusetts border of Litchfield County, Connecticut to Beach Haven, in Ocean County, New Jersey. It is an even further east to west, at more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Montauk State Park in Suffolk County, New York to the western border of Carbon County in Pennsylvania (Note 2). Despite containing the largest urban area  in the world, at 4,500 square miles (11,600 square kilometers), more than 60 percent of the combined statistical area is rural (see Rural Character in America’s Metropolitan Areas).

    Dispersion of Jobs and Residences

    The dispersion characteristic of modern metropolitan regions is illustrated by the extent to which jobs have followed the population in the New York combined statistical area. In all “rings” outside the city of New York, there is near parity between resident workers and jobs. The greatest employment to worker parity (0.97) is in the metropolitan and micropolitan areas outside the New York metropolitan area (Allentown, PA-NY; Bridgeport, CT; East Stroudsburg, PA; New Haven, CT; Torrington, CT; and Trenton, NJ). There is 0.94 parity in the inner ring suburban counties, which include Nassau and Westchester in New York as well as Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Passaic and Union in New Jersey. The outer balance of the New York metropolitan area has slightly lower employment to worker parity, at 0.87 (Figure 2).

    The lowest employment to worker parity in the New York combined statistical area is in the four boroughs of New York City outside Manhattan, at 0.70. The greatest disparity is in Manhattan, where there are 2.80 jobs for every resident worker. Combining all of New York’s five boroughs yields a much more balanced 1.17 jobs per resident worker.

    Example: Commuting from Hunterdon County

    Hunterdon County, New Jersey provides an example of the dispersion of employment in the New York area. Hunterdon County is located at the edge of the New York metropolitan area. It is well served by the commuter rail services of New Jersey Transit. With a line that reaches Penn Station in New York City, approximately 55 miles (35 kilometers) away. Yet, the world’s second largest employment center (after Tokyo’s Yamanote Loop), Manhattan south of 59th Street, draws relatively few from Hunterdon County to fill its jobs.

    Among resident workers, 45 percent have jobs in Hunterdon County. Another 36 percent work in other outer counties of the combined statistical area. This leaves only 19 percent of workers who commute to the rest of the combined statistical area. The New Jersey inner suburban counties attract 16 percent of Hunterdon’s commuters and Manhattan employs just three percent of Hunterdon’s resident workers (Figure 3). Fewer than 0.5 percent of Hunterdon’s commuters work in the balance of the CSA, including the outer boroughs of New York, the other New York counties and Connecticut). The detailed area definitions are included in the Table.

    DISTRIBUTION OF COMMUTING FROM HUNTERDON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
    To Locations in the New York Combined Statistical Area (2006-2010)
    NY CSA Sector Commuting from Hunterdon County Areas Included
    Hunterdon County 45.0% Hunterdon County, NJ
    Outer Combined Statistical Area 35.6% Monmouth County, NJ
    Morris County, NJ
    Ocean County, NJ
    Pike County, PA
    Somerset County, NJ
    Sussex County, NJ
    Allentown metropolitan area, PA-NJ
    East Stroundsburg metropolitan area, PA
    Trenton metropolitan area, NJ
    Inner Ring (New Jersey only) 16.1% Bergen County, NJ
    Essex County, NJ
    Hudson County, NJ
    Middlesex County, NJ
    Passaic County, NJ
    Union County, NJ
    Manhattan 2.8% New York County, NY
    Elsewhere 0.4% Bronx
    Brooklyn
    Queens
    Staten Island
    Dutchess County, NY
    Nassua County, NY
    Orange County, NY
    Putnam County, NY
    Rockland County, NY
    Suffolk County, NY
    Westchester County, NY
    Bridgeport metropolitan area, CT
    Kingston metropolitan area, NY
    New Haven metropolitan area, CT
    Torrington metropolitan area, CT

     

    From Commuter Belts and Concentricity to Dispersion

    Metropolitan areas are labor markets, as OMB reminds in its 2010 metropolitan standards, which refer to metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas, and combined statistical areas as geographic entities associated with at least one core plus “adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties. ”

    Yet metropolitan areas have changed a great deal. Through the middle of the last century, metropolitan areas were perceived as monocentric with core cities and a surrounding “commuter belt” from which the city drew workers to fill its jobs. However, metropolitan areas have become more polycentric, as Joel Garreau showed in his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In more recent years, metropolitan areas have become even more dispersed, with most employment located in areas that are hardly centers at all. Of course, some people still commute to downtown and edge cities. Others work even further away, but most find their employment much closer to home. That is the story of New York and, which has just become greater, and other metropolitan areas as well.

    ——

    Note 1: OMB revised its metropolitan terms in 2000. The term “core based statistical area” (CBSA) is used to denote metropolitan areas (organized about urban areas of 50,000 population or more) and micropolitan areas (organized around urban areas of 10,000 to 50,000 population). The former “consolidated metropolitan statistical area,” was replaced by the combined statistical area, which is a combination of core based statistical areas. OMB also notes that the term “urban area” includes “urbanized areas” (50,000 population or more) and “urban clusters (10,000 to 50,000 population).

    Note 2: Part of the reason for this large geographic expanse is the use of counties as building blocks of core based statistical areas. If the smaller geographic units were used (such as census blocks, as in the delineation of urban areas), the geographies would be smaller, though populations would be similar.

    ——-

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photograph: 59th Street, Manhattan (by author).

  • Affordable Housing in Suburbia

    Like many older suburbs in high priced regions, Long Island faces two great crises: a loss of younger residents and a lack of affordable housing for the local workforce, including those employed as nurses, teachers and other professionals.

    Often, proposed developments on Long Island are tailored to be geared towards “luxury” or are age-restricted for residents 55 or older. These proposals serve to almost completely ignore the middle class or the region’s young professionals. While the depth of the "Brain Drain", or flight of the young from Nassau and Suffolk Counties is debatable, the fact remains that housing stock for the area’s younger families is woefully deficient. Thanks to limited job opportunities and affordable housing, Long Island isn’t the attractive bedroom to Manhattan that it once was.  

    Long Island’s housing woes have been in the public eye for the last few months and it’s critical for residents and policymakers alike to understand the issues. The Town of Huntington recently issued a press release announcing that applications are being accepted for 43 affordable rental apartments that are part of the 379-unit Avalon at Huntington Station development. The rents range from $932 a month for a one-bedroom to $1,148 for a two-bedroom to $1,646 for a three-bedroom.

    “Affordable” vs. “Attainable”

    For once, the rents being billed as “affordable” seem aligned with the term. Hypothetically, a Young Islander making $45,000 and renting the single-bedroom option would pay roughly 24.8 percent of his or her salary toward housing, far less than the 35 percent threshold that is considered by the Long Island Index as a “high housing cost burden.”

    Compare these rents to the “attainable” 300- to 400-square-foot micro-unit options that were presented by a group recently, which, when rented at $1,400 a month, would account for about 37 percent of someone’s $45,000 salary (both examples are calculated without utilities, Internet, cable, etc.).

    The Avalon project contains a total of 303 rentals and 76 for-sale townhouses. Forty-three apartments and 11 townhouses will be affordable, while the remaining 260 apartments and 65 townhouses will be market-rate. The project site is a 26.6-acre parcel roughly half a mile from the Huntington Long Island Rail Road station.

    A drop in the bucket

    The Avalon Huntington Station project has rents that seem affordable, but the total amount of units are a drop in the larger bucket when it comes to addressing the Long Island’s greater affordable housing need of 41,429 units. After Avalon is constructed, there will be 41,375 units to go. Is that progress?

    Compare both projects: The microunit approach is “attainable” at $1,400 a month, while Avalon is “affordable” at $932-$1,646 a month. Both terms lack the standardization and definite boundaries necessary to legitimize them in the minds of the public. Is attainable really worth $500 more than the term affordable? Where does “workforce” fall into this ever-sliding scale?

    Our patchwork approach to affordable housing needs to change. For every press release issued touting two affordable units here or 11 workforce homes shoehorned there, the elephant in the room is tackling the monumental demand in the face of our paltry, undefined supply.

    Some big questions

    The issue of overall demand is a very big question that our region has faced for the last 50 years and will continue to face in the immediate future. What Long Islanders must move toward is first quantifying the issue. How many truly affordable units do we have? How many can we reasonably build? What is the true market demand for housing in Nassau and Suffolk counties? Are municipalities able to successfully increase density while preserving land elsewhere?

    Countless times, important planning terms like “sustainable,” “smart growth,” “walkable,” “green” and now “affordable” and “attainable” are cheapened by misuse. These terms once represented important and innovative planning techniques that were once progressive tools in crafting a better community. When the terms are misused by stakeholders and industry insiders the result is a volatile cocktail of higher density suburban sprawl and poor urban design that further leads to suburban blight, and the public’s broken faith in the system.

    A democracy gets the policy it deserves. Currently, Long Islanders are disengaged with the land-use process, and have allowed it to become dominated by biased stakeholders who have much to gain by allowing those important terms to become shallow. It’s easy to sell a project as “green” or “smart” when few, if any, people know what the term means.

    The beauty of it all is that a democracy also can create the policy it needs. This is why it’s so important to take the time to give these critical issues the attention they deserve, and work towards a better Long Island.

    Why do we issue press releases celebrating the creation of 54 affordable units, or 0.13 percent of our regional need? It is because, at this point, not much else is or can be done to tackle this massive problem until we fully understand it.

    Richard Murdocco is a digital marketing analyst for Teachers Federal Credit Union, although the views expressed in this post are Murdocco’s alone and not shared by TFCU. Follow him on Twitter @TheFoggiestIdea, visit thefoggiestidea.org or email him at Rich@TheFoggiestIdea.org.

    Photo from Avalon Communities

  • Are Special Service Districts a Boon or a Bane?

    America’s cities have been under fiscal pressure for an extended period of time. To cope with this, and better manage assets, they’ve increasingly turned to various forms of special purpose districts or entities for service delivery. Traditional independent service districts such as sewer districts or transit districts were often designed to circumvent bonding limits or to deliver services regionally, so were larger in scale. These newer service districts are much smaller in scope. They consist of two basic components:

    1. A private sector, usually non-profit management agency that operates a public asset or delivers services under contract to the city in a form of public-private partnership.
    2. Special purpose funding sources to finance this entity’s activities. These funds can include private donations, proceeds raised from Tax Increment Financing (usually for capital purposes), and taxes raised from so-called Business Improvement Districts (or BIDs, with special property taxes collected from businesses in a given area on a semi-voluntary basis, generally after a super-majority of property owners vote to agree to impose the tax).

    Examples of these special service districts abound. One of the most famous is the Central Park Conservancy, which manages Central Park in New York under contract to the city.  The conservancy was founded in 1980 to raise funds to restore Central Park.  It received funds from the city budget, but also does significant private fundraising as well, for both capital and operating purposes.

    Another well-known example in New York is the Bryant Park Corporation, which runs Bryant Park in Manhattan.  Once known as “Needle Park” because it was taken over by drug users and deals, today Bryant Park is a lavish showplace right down to fresh cut flowers in its marble restrooms.  Bryant Park is only 9.6 acres, but has an annual budget of $7 million. As Bryant Park Corporation CEO Dan Biederman once noted, that is more than the entire $4.3 million parks budget of the city of Pittsburgh.  This cash is raised from a BID, sponsorships, and commercial concessions in the district.

    A different type of entity is the Chicago Loop Alliance.  As with similar groups in many cities, Chicago uses the Alliance as a downtown management agency, responsible for marketing, beautification, public art, events, etc. in downtown Chicago. It’s backed by local businesses, especially retailers, but also receives funding from a BID (known as a Special Service Area (SSA) in Chicago).

    As a final example, when the city of Indianapolis built the eight mile downtown Indy Cultural Trail, a non-profit called Indianapolis Cultural Trail, Inc. was created maintain and promote it. The trail was the brainchild of Central Indiana Community Foundation President Brian Payne. To ensure that the trail would be well maintained over the long term in an era of tight budgets, he included a maintenance endowment in the original private fundraising to build it.  Additionally, ICT, Inc. raises private funding to supplement this.

    These four examples are different in various ways, but something they obviously all have in common is that they serve prosperous areas or are focused on showplace type amenities. While not all such districts around the country are quite so upscale, in general they tend to be most prominent and effective in central business districts or wealthier neighborhoods.

    These special service districts are part of a trend towards privatized government in America. Given the state of Central and Bryant Parks when their respective organizations where formed, obviously those two have been a success. Many of these districts are very well run because they depend at least in part on private sector cash raising and because as private entities they are free from many cumbersome government rules.

    On the other hand, it’s not hard to see these as perpetuating the move towards two-tier municipal services, in which wealthier areas receive higher services levels than elsewhere. In effect, techniques like BIDs enable relatively thriving areas to purchase better levels of service for themselves without having to help finance similar services elsewhere.  That’s not necessarily a good thing.  For example, New York City has been criticized in some quarters for a lack of investment in outer borough parks.  State Senator Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn said in AM New York, “Large conservancies get millions every year from private donors. But the parks that find it hardest to get that support are the ones that need it the most.” He wants to force the Central Park Conservancy to pass long 20% of its donations to smaller parks.

    However, it isn’t always bad if a central business district, clearly a unique area in a city, has different services delivered there. Its dense concentration of employment and visitors almost necessitates it.  The same is true for special regional attractions. Central Park truly is unique.

    In fact, the move towards privatized services in wealthier areas could be a good thing for the rest of the city if it is used to free up funds for use where there isn’t as much private capital available.  In this case a city could look to move parks, street cleaning, and other items “off the books” via special service districts in areas that can afford to fund such services largely by themselves. The city would then concentrate public funds in poorer or middle class areas. The tradeoff would be that the wealthier areas might be allowed to purchase higher quality services for themselves, but that would be structured in a way that let service quality be raised for others.

    On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how this could evolve as a mechanism for “strategic abandonment” as well.  In this case the city would cut general service levels then allowing wealthier areas to buy them back.  Critics have charged that special service districts are exactly the legal mechanism that will be used to implement planned shrinkage in Detroit.

    In short, how this plays out will depend greatly on the strategic intent (or neglect) of city leaders. But regardless, in an era of financial extremis for cities, the trend towards more privatized government and special service districts is sure to continue.  The key is for the public to demand that these deals be structured as win-wins that don’t just benefit the already thriving areas of the city, but enable investments in struggling areas that are often overlooked.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile.

    Bryant Park photo by Jean-Christophe BENOIST

  • The Revolt Against Urban Gentry

    The imminent departure of New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his replacement by leftist Bill DeBlasio, represents an urban uprising against the Bloombergian  “luxury city” and the growing income inequality it represents. Bloomberg epitomized an approach that sought to cater  to the rich—most prominently Wall Street—as a means to both finance development growth and collect enough shekels to pay for services needed by the poor.

    This approach to urbanism draws some of its inspiration from the likes of Richard Florida, whose “creative class” theories posit the brightest future for “spiky” high cost cities like New York.  But even Florida now admits that what he calls  “America’s new economic geography” provides “ little in the way of trickle-down benefits” to the middle and working classes.    

    Some other urbanists don’t even really see this as a problem. Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, a favorite of urban developers, believes De Blasio should celebrate the huge gaps between New York residents as evidence of the city’s appeal; a similar argument was made recently about California by an urban Liberal (and former Oakland Mayor) Jerry Brown, who claimed the state’s highest in the nation poverty rate reflected its “incredible attractiveness”.

    Couched in progressive rhetoric, the gentry urbanists embrace an essentially neo-feudalist view that society is divided between “the creative class” and the rest of us. Liberal analyst Thomas Frank suggests that  Florida’s “creative class” is numerically small, unrepresentative and self—referential; he describes them as  “members of the professional-managerial class—each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well.”

    The Voters rebel.

    The revolt against this mentality surfaced first in New York perhaps because the gaps there are so extreme. Wall Streeters partied under Bloomberg, but not everyone fared so well. The once proudly egalitarian city has become the most unequal place in the country, worse even than the most racially divided, backward regions of the southeast.  In New York, the top 1 percent earn roughly twice as much of the local GDP than is earned in the rest of country. The middle class in the city is rapidly becoming vestigial; according to Brookings its share of the city’s population has fallen from 25 percent in 1970s to barely sixteen percent today.   

    De Blasio rode this chasm between “the two cities” to Gracie Mansion, but his triumph represents just part of a growing urban lurch to the left. Voters in Seattle, for example, just elected an outright Socialist who promptly called on Boeing workers to take over their factory. More reasonably, she is also campaigning for a $15 an hour minimum wage, a reaction against the surging inequalities in that   historically egalitarian Northwest city.

    Similarly  San Franciscans turned down a new luxury condo development along their waterfront, in large part because it was perceived as yet another intrusion of the ultra-rich. Even as the city enjoys its most recent tech bubble, resentment grows between the tech elites, including those traveling on private buses to Silicon Valley, and ordinary San Franciscans, struggling to cope with soaring housing costs.

    The New Urban Demography

    Bloomberg’s “luxury city” was ultimately undermined by its own demographic logic. Bloomberg’s gentry urbanist policies have undermined New York’s private sector middle class, a group that was critical to his own early rise to power and even more decisive in electing his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani. This same group of middle class voters, largely clustered in the San Fernando Valley, also drove the election of Richard Riordan in Los Angeles in 1993 and his comfortable re-election four years later. But the private sector middle class

    The fading of the old middle class came with the rapid decline of industries, like manufacturing and logistics that once employed them.  Since 2000, the New York metropolitan region has lost some 1.9 million net domestic migrants, the most of any  in the country. $50 billion in lost revenue has bled out of the city along with the people departing. Florida alone, the largest destination has gained almost $15 billion in income. Other major cities, notably Los Angeles and Chicago, have suffered similar losses since the 1970s, notes Brookings, as middle income neighborhoods have declined while both poor and very affluent areas have grown.    

    Becoming the ultimate playground to the rich made things worse for most middle class New Yorkers by imposing higher costs, particularly for rents. In fact, controlling for costs the average New York paycheck (costs) is among the lowest in the nation’s 51 largest metro areas, behind not only San Jose, but Houston, Raleigh, and a host of less celebrated burgs. A big part of this is the cost of rents. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference , 31 percent of New York’s working families pay over 50% of their income in rent, well above   the national rate of 24 percent, which itself is far from tolerable.

    Conditions for those further down the economic scale, of course, are even worse. The urban poor in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Philadelphia , notes analyst Sam Hersh, find their meager resources strained by high prices not  common in less fashionable cities like Buffalo or Dallas. “In some ways,” he notes, “ the low cost of living in “unsuccessful” legacy cities means that quality of life is in many cases better than in those cities widely regarded as a success.”

    The dirty little secret here is the persistence of urban poverty. Despite the hype over gentrification, urban economies—including that of New York—still underperform their periphery. Nearly half of New York’s residents, notes the Nation are either below the poverty line or just above it. Just look at the penultimate symbol of urban renaissance, Brooklyn. The county (home to most of my family till the 1950s) suffers a median per capita income in 2009 of just under $23,000, almost $10,000 below the national average (PDF).

    Marquee cities haven’t “cured poverty” or exported it largely to the suburbs, as is regularly claimed. Cities still suffer a poverty rate twice as high as in the suburbs. Demographer Wendell Cox notes that  some 80% of the population growth over the past decade in the nation’s 51 largest cities came from the ranks of those with lower incomes, most likely the children of the entrenched poor as well as immigrants.

    The resilience of poor populations has occurred even as there has been a much ballyhooed surge into some cities of younger people, primarily single, often well-educated, childless and less traditional in their values. This demographic shift has further pushed urban politics to the left as singles, particularly women, have become, next to African-Americans, the most reliable Democratic constituency.

    By the time these young people get older and develop more interest in issues like schools, parks and public safety, Census data suggest they leave in cities large numbers, depriving them of a critical source of political, social and economic stability. By the age of 40, according to the most recent data, going up to 2012, more desert the core city than ever came there in the first place.   

    Urban Politics Left Turn

    This new demography—essentially a marriage of rich, young singles and the poor—has created an urban electorate increasingly one-dimensional, and less middle class, not only in economic status, but also, perhaps more importantly, in attitude. This can be seen in the very low participation rates in de Blasio’s victory in New York, where under one quarter of the electorate voted in the election compared to some 57 percent in the 1993 Giuliani vs Dinkins race. Historically, middle class voters were the most reliable voters and their decline has led to record low participation not only in New York, but also in Los Angeles, where new Mayor Eric Garcetti was elected with the lowest turnout, barely twenty percent, in a contested election in recent memory.

    The decline in voter participation occurs as cities are becoming ever more one-party constituencies. Two decades ago a large chunk of the top twelve cities were run by Republicans, but today none are. America’s cities have evolved into a political monoculture, with the Democratic share growing by 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.

    Under such circumstances the worst miscues by liberals are largely ignored or excused as politics and media take place in a kind of left-wing echo chamber. Even the meltdown of the healthcare law, which has hurt the president’s approval rating in national polls, seems to have not impacted his popularity in urban areas.  

    In New York and other cities this shift leftward, ironically, has been enabled by the successes of Bloomberg and other pro-business pragmatists whose successful policies on issues like crime have shifted the political agenda to other matters. “This election is not going to be about crime, as some previous elections were,” de Blasio told National Journal last month. “It used to be in New York you worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?”

    Policy Directions.

    With crime a less urgent issue and no sizable right or even centrist voting blocs, urban leaders can now push a set of initiatives—for example on policing—that would have been unthinkable in the New York of Rudy Giuliani or Los Angeles under Riordan. There are also likely to be fewer pushes for education reform, a critical issue for retaining the middle class, since most left-wingers, like de Blasio, largely follow the union party line.

    This is not to suggest that we should long for a return to the Bloombergian  “luxury city.” The gentrification-oriented policies did indeed foster the evolution of  two cities, one preserved by tax increment funding and donations by wealthy and businesses and another, heavily minority city, notes analyst Aaron Renn facing budget constraints, the closing of schools, parks and other facilities  

    But revoking these policies alone does little to expand the middle class and diminish social inequality. A more direct step would be to boost the minimum wage in cities—as suggested by Seattle’s firebrand socialist council member and endorsed by the new Mayor— for the vast numbers of working poor who labor in hotels, fast food restaurants and other service businesses.  This, to his credit, is what Richard Florida suggests as part of his proposed “creative compact” to boost the pay workers who work in service jobs for his dominant “creatives.”

    This policy does address inequities but it may also have the effect of reducing overall employment as companies seek to downsize and automate their operations. Although conceived to help the working poor, it could further reduce job opportunities for those most in need of work.

    Can Social Media Save New York?

    The key issue is how to expand high wage jobs in cities with high rents and costs of living. One approach, embraced by many urban boosters, is to lure social media firms. Tech companies tend to concentrate in denser urban areas and are also a good fit with urban left-wing politics as they tend to be dominated by young, alternative lifestyle types.

    However, this is a risky proposition, given the historic volatility of these companies. After the last bubble, Silicon Alley suffered a downward trajectory, losing 15,000 of its 50,000 information jobs in the first five years of the decade.

    Although some claim, in a fit of delusion, that the city is now second to the Silicon Valley in tech this ignores the long-term trends. In fact, since, since 2001, Gotham’s overall tech industry growth has been a paltry 6% while the number of science, technology, engineering, and math related jobs has fallen 4%. This performance pales compared not only to  the Bay Area, but a host of other cities ranging from Austin and Houston to Raleigh, Salt Lake and Nashville.

    The chances of Gotham becoming a major tech center are further handicapped   by a severe lack of engineering talent. On a per capita basis, the New York area ranks 78th out of the nation’s 85 largest metro areas, with a miniscule 6.1 engineers per 1,000 workers, one seventh the concentration in the Valley and well below that of many other regions, including both Houston and Los Angeles.

    Finally for most cities, and particularly in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the rise of social media has been a mixed blessing. Whatever employment is gained in social media has been more than lost by declines in book publishing, videos, magazines and newspapers—all industries historically concentrated in big cities. Since 2001 newspaper publishing has lost almost 200,000 jobs nationwide, or 45% of its total, while employment at periodicals has dropped 51,000,or 30%, and book publishing, an industry overwhelmingly concentrated in New York, lost 17,000 jobs, or 20% of its total.

    Restoring the Aspirational City

    Instead of waiting for the social media Mr. Goodbars to save the day, or try to force up wages by edict, cities may do better to focus on preserving and even bolstering existing middle-income jobs. In New York, for example, more emphasis needs to be placed on retaining mid-tier white collar jobs, which have been fleeing the city for more affordable regions, including the much dissed suburbs.    

    New York’s middle class has been a primary victim of the wholesale desertion of the city by large firms.  In 1960 New York City boasted one out of every four Fortune 500  firms; today it hovers around 46. And even among those keeping their headquarters in Gotham,  many have shipped most of their back office operations elsewhere. Amidst a record run on Wall Street, the financial sector’s employment has fallen by 7.4 percent since 2007. The city’s big employment gains have been mostly concentrated in low-wage hospitality and retail sectors—service jobs that often don’t provide benefits and are vulnerable to fluctuations in the market.

    Other potential sources of higher wage jobs include those tied to   international trade, logistics and, in some areas, manufacturing. Many progressive theorists denigrate these very industries, which tend to pay higher than average wages across the board. Traditional employment sectors like these  have   bolstered urban economies in Houston, Oklahoma City, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Charlotte.  

    Equally important, cities need to shift away from the gentry urbanist fixation on the dense urban core and focus on more diverse neighborhoods. As more workers labor from home, and make their locational decisions based on factors like flexible hours and time with family, cities need to stop viewing neighborhoods as bedrooms for downtown, and begin to envision them as their own generators of wealth and value. The era of the office building has already peaked, and increasingly employment, even in cities, will become dispersed away from the cores.

    Sadly, it’s doubtful the new left-wing urban leaders will embrace these ideas, in some part due to pressure from the “green” lobby. Though he was elected based on a message that assailed the city’s structural inequality, ulitimately de Blasio   may end up more dependent on Wall Street than even his predecessor since his plans to fund expanded social and educational programs depend squarely on extractions from the hated “one percent.”

    What our cities need is not a return to theatrical leftism or hard left redistributive policies, but a new focus on improving the long-term economic prospects of the middle and aspirational working class. Without this shift, the new leftist approach will fail our cities as much, if not more so, than the rightfully discredited gentry urbanism it seeks to supplant.

    This story originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Photo by Mike Lee

  • Biking New York City: The Handlebar Tour

    In case it has been a while since you have ridden a bicycle around Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens — as I have in recent weeks — here is a shortlist of some developments around New York City: midtown sidewalks are overflowing with tourists and too narrow for the pedestrian flow (especially around the many Elmos posing in Times Square); the South Bronx, while still very poor, has an emerging middle class; cruise ships dock in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the same piers that were once the provenance of gangland; potholes and deteriorating asphalt are everywhere, despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reputation for elevating the city’s infrastructure; and Queens is still struggling with all the Robert Moses expressways and bridges that make traffic patterns there a maze of dead ends, even on a bike.

    Here are some observations from my handlebar social survey:

    Uptown: The nicest neighborhood I discovered is what realtors now call South Harlem, from about 145th Street south to Central Park. The crime rates are down, the bistros are up, and the wide sidewalks and relatively quiet streets make for lovely strolling or, in my case, bike riding.

    Because the scale of the neighborhood is often limited to four-story brownstones (East Harlem has more projects, but also a Target and a PetSmart), gentrification has spread like a wildfire. A mansion on Strivers Row, the once and future dream of Harlem homeowners, costs about $1.8 million. One-bedroom apartments on West 116th Street and Lennox go for about $350,000.

    On the Waterfront: It’s sixty years since unionism, pilferage, and mob violence killed off New York’s ports, eventually sending cargo ships and containers to Baltimore, Norfolk, Newark, and Boston. The city has now reclaimed its rotting piers and empty warehouses with waterside parks, ferry stops, exhibition centers, and cruise terminals, including the one in Brooklyn that’s large enough to tie up the Queen Mary.

    Especially on the West Side of Manhattan — with fewer mobsters gasping at the ice picks in their backs — the piers are part of an expanding and vibrant dockland scene, complete with picnic tables, skateboard jumps, arboretums, and restaurants, all of which have splendid views of the Hudson River.

    Gridlock: One of the downsides of New York’s continuing prosperity is that it risks becoming a gridlocked city of Asian proportions. One Sunday I biked the length of Fifth Avenue, stunned at the number of cars clogging the streets and the bad quality of the pavement.

    Coming into Manhattan across the East River bridges is free, and New Yorkers love their cars with a demolition-derby passion. I even saw motorcyclists popping wheelies down Fifth Avenue, to the indifference of the police, who clearly weren’t in the mood to confront biker rebels without much of a cause.

    The Freedom Tower: The new One World Trade Center looks like the cookie-cutter office buildings in Shanghai and Hong Kong, or perhaps an enormous shower stall. It is long on defiance but short on urban grace.

    The city would have done more for downtown if it had returned the blocks and cross streets lost to the footprint of the first World Trade Center development, improved the rail network, and allowed the Battery Park and Wall Street areas to flow together into a vibrant neighborhood.

    The Freedom Tower is more a symbol than a practical city project. Four billion dollars (with myriad subsidies loaded into the budget) will be spent essentially for a large, mostly public, office building at a time when everyone prefers to work from home.

    The Mayoral Race: In the November election to replace Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat Bill de Blasio (public activism) defeated the Republican Joe Lhota (Harvard MBA). Neither had a large political base before the primaries, although both have been active in city politics for the last generation.

    Lhota was a disciple of former mayor Rudi Giuliani and ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for Bloomberg, but despite managerial competence had no chance of winning. New Yorkers want it all: neither higher crime or taxes, nor stop-and-frisk and budget cuts (“fuhgeddaboudit”).

    Critics of de Blasio say his feel-good liberalism will set New York’s clock back to 1977, when television announcer Howard Cosell told America from Yankee Stadium: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” which is also the title of a book on the low water mark of New York’s urban decline. His supporters say he will bring a degree of social justice to what is otherwise a capital intensive city.

    The Bronx: Also in 1977, President Jimmy Carter went to the smoldering South Bronx, to publicize the extent of New York’s decay. Ronald Reagan went during the 1980 campaign, to highlight that Carter had not done anything to haul away the rubble and fill in the vacant lots.

    By the time Bill Clinton got there in 1997, the heavy slum lifting had been done (thanks to New York city and state officials), and all he could do was bask in the success. Despite or because of the presidential grandstanding, Charlotte Street, which became the South Bronx’s signature photo op, is now a suburban enclave, with 89 single-family houses and graceful fenced lawns.

    More than anything else, however, what brought back the Bronx was a wave of immigrants in the final decades of the 20th century. They came to wealthy New York looking for jobs, and needed affordable neighborhoods where they could raise their families.

    Queens for a Day: I rode from Randall’s Island, a splendid oasis in the East River, through Astoria and Flushing to College Point and Whitestone. Even with some new bike paths, Queens suffers from too many highways cutting across its underbelly. I got lost near Citi Field and rode 500 yards on the Van Wyck Expressway.

    My destination was the old army base at Fort Totten, once the Gibraltar of Long Island Sound (built to keep Confederates out of New York harbor), now a forlorn park and reserve training center, although with stunning views of the water and the New York skyline.

    The future of Fort Totten could be another bellwether of New York City. Should its dilapidated historic houses — from the genteel, 1930s U.S. Army base — be renovated and sold off, part of a mixed-use plan to get more families into the lovely park and historic base? The same decisions need to be made about Governors Island and parts of Ellis Island. Or should all private development in historic areas be banned, even if the parks remain shabby without enough public money for renovation?

    Because I grew up in and around the New York City that for much of my life was deteriorating, I view most recent development around New York (except for the ugly destruction of Pennsylvania Station) as positive. To me, Fort Totten should be both a park and a place for families to live. Why leave a waterfront partly in ruins?

    Will it happen when Bill de Blasio is mayor? Somehow I doubt it. I wouldn’t think a mayor could win reelection with privatization projects in a faraway Queens park — although I never thought that the Bronx would again be thriving, South Harlem or Red Hook would be safe, or the West Side piers would become part of a stunning city revival. All of this has been accomplished with a blend of private and public money.

    Conclusions? As Woody Allen said, “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?”

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by Charles16e: East River Bicycle with Fishing Rod Attachment