New Geography

Tag: Obama’s America

  • California: The Republic of Climate

    To some progressives, California’s huge endorsement for the losing side for president reflects our state’s moral superiority. Some even embrace the notion that California should secede so that we don’t have to associate with the “deplorables” who tilted less enlightened places to President-elect Donald Trump. One can imagine our political leaders even inviting President Barack Obama, who reportedly now plans to move to our state, to serve as the California Republic’s first chief executive.

    As a standalone country, California could accelerate its ongoing emergence as what could be called “the Republic of Climate.” This would be true in two ways. Dominated by climate concerns, California’s political leaders will produce policies that discourage blue-collar growth and keep energy and housing prices high. This is ideal for the state’s wealthier, mostly white, coastal ruling classes. Yet, at the same time, the California gentry can enjoy what, for the most part, remains a temperate climate. Due to our open borders policies, they can also enjoy an inexhaustible supply of cheap service workers.

    Of course, most Californians, particularly in the interior, will not do so well. They will continue to experience a climate of declining social mobility due to rising costs, and businesses, particularly those employing blue-collar and middle-income workers, will continue to flee to more hospitable, if less idyllic, climes.

    California in the Trump era

    Barring a rush to independence, Californians now must adapt to a new regime in Washington that does not owe anything to the state, much less its policy agenda. Under the new regime, our high tax rates and ever-intensifying regulatory regime will become even more distinct from national norms.

    President Obama saw California’s regulatory program, particularly its obsession with climate change, as a role model leading the rest of the nation — and even the world. Trump’s victory turns this amicable situation on its head. California now must compete with other states, which can only salivate at the growing gap in costs.

    At the same time, foreign competitors, such as the Chinese, courted by Gov. Jerry Brown and others to follow its climate agenda, will be more than happy to take energy-dependent business off our hands. They will make gestures to impress what Vladimir Lenin labeled “useful idiots” in our ruling circles, but will continue to add coal-fired plants to power their job-sapping export industries.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: By User “Neon Tommy” (https://www.flickr.com/photos/neontommy/8117052872) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Obama’s not so glorious legacy

    Like a child star who reached his peak at age 15, Barack Obama could never fulfill the inflated expectations that accompanied his election. After all not only was he heralded as the “smartest” president in history within months of assuming the White House, but he also secured the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office. Usually, it takes actually settling a conflict or two — like Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter — to win such plaudits.

    The greatest accomplishment of the Obama presidency turned out to be his election as the first African American president. This should always be seen as a great step forward. Yet, the Obama presidency failed to accomplish the great things promised by his election: racial healing, a stronger economy, greater global influence and, perhaps most critically, the fundamental progressive “transformation” of American politics.

    Racial healing

    Rather than stress his biracial background, Obama, once elected, chose to place his whiteness in the closet and identified almost entirely with a particular notion of the American black experience.

    Whenever race-related issues came up — notably in the area of law enforcement — Obama and his Justice Department have tended to embrace the narrative that America remains hopelessly racist. As a result, he seemed to embrace groups like Black Lives Matter and, wherever possible, blame law enforcement, even as crime was soaring in many cities, particularly those with beleaguered African American communities.

    Eight years after his election, more Americans now consider race relations to be getting worse, and we are more ethnically divided than in any time in recent history. As has been the case for several decades, African Americans’ economic equality has continued to slip, and is lower now than it was when Obama came into office in 2009, according to a 2016 Urban League study.

    The economic equation

    On the economy, Obama partisans can claim some successes. He clearly inherited a massive mess from the George W. Bush administration, and the fact that the economy eventually turned around, albeit modestly, has to be counted in his favor.

    Yet, if there was indeed a recovery, it was a modest one, marked by falling productivity and low levels of labor participation. We continue to see the decline of the middle class, and declining life expectancy, while the vast majority of gains have gone to the most affluent, largely due to the rising stock market and the recovery of property prices, particularly in elite markets.

    At the same time, Obama leaves his successor a massive debt run-up, doubling during his watch, and the prospect of steadily rising interest rates. Faith in the current economic system has plummeted in recent years, particularly among the young, a majority of whom, according to a May 2016 Gallup Poll, now have a favorable view of socialism. Economic anxiety helped spark not only the emergence of Bernie Sanders, but later the election of Donald Trump.

    Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: The Official White House Photostream (originally posted to Flickr as P012109PS-0059) [CC BY 2.0 or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Carrier and the Commonwealth

    I was asked by Fortune to contribute a piece about Trump’s Carrier deal. They had gotten a lot of people criticizing it and were looking for someone who would give a different perspective. I think many of the criticisms are valid in a sense, but miss the larger context. So I wrote the piece which is now online. Here’s an excerpt:

    Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that one of the keys to America’s unique success was its sense of enlightened self-interest. Americans worked and competed hard for themselves, their families, and their businesses, but they understood that a purely selfish mindset was self-destructive in the long term. Tocqueville observed inDemocracy in America, “Each American knows when to sacrifice some of his private interests to save the rest; we [the French] want to save everything, and often we lose it all.

    Businessmen once understood this link between national, local, and personal success. The men of the Commercial Club of Chicago who commissioned Daniel Burnham to create his famed 1909 plan for that city had personal fortunes deeply tied to Chicago. They needed the city as a whole to succeed for them to succeed. Likewise, General Motors CEO Charles Erwin Wilson once famously said, “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” He understood that his company’s fortune and America’s were intertwined: GM couldn’t make any money if no one could afford to buy its cars.

    …

    As these restrictions were lifted, these businesses left enlightened self-interest behind in favor of quarterly profits. They forgot their community in favor of global capital. Their business models evolved to delink profits and executive compensation from broad-based American prosperity. They could take a portfolio view of local communities and even countries. It was all very economically efficient. These firms and their managers could thrive even while much of America fell into ruin. Or so they thought.

    Click through to read the whole thing.

    Some people were a bit critical, saying, “Why not say this when Obama bailed out the auto industry?” or “Why is it only good when Trump does it?” In fact, I’ve actually written on this theme before.

    Back in November 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, I posted a piece in which I criticized the auto companies’ management and came out in favor of a federally backed restructuring of the auto industry. While I am critical of some aspects of how Obama handled this, the idea of bailing out the car companies was something I was on record as supporting before it happened. Here are some excerpts from that:

    Even if you assume a lot of this [auto company management behavior] is exaggerated for effect or outright BS, I’ve heard so many similar type things from people who’ve been associated with the auto industry that there must be a kernel of truth in it somewhere. I lead with this because it is so common to blame the UAW and its $73/hour or some such wage packages for the problems facing the Big Three. And indeed in the modern era that is not sustainable. But there has been particularly little focus on the management excesses of the auto industry, and the corporate cultures of those companies, and by analogy that of Detroit.

    …

    I’ve seen estimates that 2-3 million jobs could be lost and that chaos would ensue if the auto makers went bankrupt. That’s probably true if GM, Ford, and Chrysler just waltz down to the court house and file. But it is not the case if they have a government sponsored, pre-packaged bankruptcy.

    …

    Even so, we can’t lose track of the fact that there are real human beings, labor and management, with real trauma in their lives. Even if they are at least partially to blame for the mess they are in, that doesn’t mean they deserve what they are getting. It’s like a Greek tragedy: the suffering is disproportionate to the crime. And there but for the grace of God go you and I. I also work in a restructuring industry, and may yet join the auto workers in their pain.

    The stories you hear in the Detroit papers are heartbreaking. One that really stuck with me was about people losing their life’s possessions when they couldn’t pay the rental fees on storage lockers. People who had already lost their homes to foreclosure put their possessions in storage, only to lose them too as the storage companies auctioned them to pay the bills. I’m not an emotional guy, but this makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think this should be happening in a country like America. People who made decisions in good faith, who showed up to work every day, who did the right things to care for their families, shouldn’t be left to lose everything because of the action of economic forces they can’t understand or control. Not in America. That’s why we absolutely need a federal safety net program here. Michigan alone can’t fund this.

    I probably anticipated more of a bite the bullet approach than actually happened (which is one reason restructuring is still ongoing), and my views have probably changed somewhat in eight years, but clearly the same general themes are present.

    Where I would take issue with Trump, is in the idea of “bringing the jobs back” as the theme. This sort of nostalgia for a bygone idyllic era that never really was is powerful in the Midwest. It’s very backwards looking and based on a language of resentment. I can understand why the appeal to this works rhetorically, but as an actual policy goal it’s not realistic. The ship has already sailed too far to return to the harbor. That doesn’t mean we should double down on the status quo, but we’ll have to chart a different path forward to the future, not roll back the clock. (Fortunately, Trump’s working class supporters seem realistic on this point and don’t expect him to literally do every single thing he said).

    This perhaps explains why I’m more positive on intervention to save existing jobs than to try to lure new ones. That and the difference in the price tags. It’s one thing to try to preserve actually existing businesses already woven into the fabric of the community, but it’s another to try to speculatively create something new. I’m not under any illusion that we’ll get rid of economic incentives, but it does seem excessive to me to spend, say, $750 million (corruptly, as it appears to have turned out) to lure a solar panel factory to Buffalo. I’m ok with the idea of spending a billion dollars of state money in Buffalo, but there have to be better ways to do it. (Mayor Stephanie Miner of Syracuse said if she had a billion, she’d spend three fourths of it to fix her city’s water pipes – a prescient pledge made prior to the Flint debacle).

    It’s also the case that we need to be willing to face the unpleasant reality that many communities are poorly positioned for the future economy. That doesn’t mean abandoning them, but we do have to level with them. And those communities, not just the federal government, also need to be willing to make some changes.

    But all that doesn’t mean that simply pushing forward with more of what we’ve already been doing is a viable option. Trump understood that, and beyond the politics of it, the Carrier deal was a symbol that he intends to pursue a new direction.

    Update: In line with these themes, a commenter pointed me at this recent blog post by South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.

    Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

    Photo: By Carrier Corporation (http://www.teamworkmarinesxm.com/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • How Silicon Valley’s Oligarchs Are Learning to Stop Worrying and Love Trump

    The oligarchs’ ball at Trump Tower revealed one not-so-well-kept secret about the tech moguls: They are more like the new president than they are like you or me.

    In what devolved into something of a love fest, Trump embraced the tech elite for their “incredible innovation” and pledged to help them achieve their goals—one of which, of course, is to become even richer. And for all their proud talk about “disruption,” they also know that they will have to accommodate, to some extent, our newly elected disrupter in chief for at least the next four years.

    Few tech executives—Peter Thiel being the main exception—backed Trump’s White House bid. But now many who were adamantly against the real-estate mogul, such as Clinton fundraiser Elon Musk, who has built his company on subsidies from progressive politicians, have joined the president-elect’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Joining Musk will be Uber’s Travis Kalanick, who half-jokingly threatened to “move to China” if Trump was elected.

    These are companies, of course, with experience making huge promises, and then changing those promises to match new circumstances. Uber, for instance, touted itself as a better deal than a cab for both riders and drivers before it prepared to tout a better deal for riders by replacing its own soon-to-be obsolete drivers with self-driving cars.

    Silicon Valley and its leading mini-me, the Seattle area, did very well under Barack Obama, and expected the good times to continue under Hillary Clinton. Tech leaders were able to emerge as progressive icons even as they built vast fortunes, largely by adopting predictably politically correct issues such as gay rights and climate change, which doubled as a perfect opportunity to cash in on Obama’s renewable-energy subsidies. Increasingly tied to the ephemeral economy of software and media, they felt little impact from policies that might boost energy costs or force long environmental reviews for new projects.

    No wonder Silicon Valley gave heavily to Obama and then Clinton. In 2016, Google was the No. 1 private-sector source of donations to Clinton, while Stanford was fifth. Overall the electronics and communications sector gave Democrats more than $100 million in 2016, twice what they offered the GOP. In terms of the presidential race, they handed $23 million to Hillary, compared to barely $1 million to Trump.

    Yet, there is one issue on which the Valley has not been “left,” and that is, predictably, wealth. It may have liked Obama’s creased pants and intellectually poised manner, but it did not want to see the Democrats become, God forbid, a real populist party. That is one reason why virtually all the oligarchs favored Clinton over Sanders, who had little use for their precious “gig economy,” the H-1B high-tech indentured-servants program, or their vast and little-taxed wealth.

    Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder with a net worth close to $70 billion, used his outlet, The Washington Post, to help bring down Bernie, before being unable, despite all efforts, to stop Trump. So now Bezos sits by Trump’s side, hoping perhaps that the president-elect’s threats to unleash antitrust actions against Amazon will be conveniently forgotten as an artful “deal” is struck.

    For these and other reasons, there’s little doubt that the tech elite would have been better off under Clinton, who likely would have, like Obama, disdained antitrust actions and let them keep hiding untaxed fortunes offshore. Now, they will have to share the head table with the energy executives they’d hoped to replace with their own climate-change-oriented activities.

    The tech oligarchs have long had a problem with what many would consider social justice. Although the tech economy itself has expanded in the current period, its overall impact on the economy has been less than stellar. For all of its revolutionary hype, it’s done little to create a wide range of employment gains or boost worker productivity.

    To be sure, there have been large surges of employment in the Bay Area, Seattle, and a handful of other places. California alone has more billionaires than any country in the world except China, and nearly half of America’s richest counties.

    But for much of the country, notably those areas that embraced Trump, the tech “disruption” has been anything but welcome news. This includes heavily Latino interior sections, home to many of America’s highest employment rates. Overall, the “booming” high-wage California economy celebrated by progressive ideologues like Robert Reich does not extend much beyond the Valley. In most of California, job gains have been concentrated in low-wage professions.

    Despite its vast wealth, California has the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, with a huge percentage of the state’s Latinos and African Americans barely able to make ends meet. California metropolitan areas, including the largest, Los Angeles, account for six of the 15 metro areas with the worst living standards, according to a recent report from demographer Wendell Cox. Meanwhile, the middle and working class, particularly young families, continue to leave, with more people exiting the state for other ones than arriving to it from the, in 22 of the past 25 years.

    Even in Silicon Valley itself the boom has done little for working-class people, or for Latinos and African Americans—who continue to be badly underrepresented at the top tech firms as many of those same firms aggressively promote diversity. A study out of the California Budget and Policy Center (PDF) concluded that with housing costs factored in, the poverty rate in Santa Clara County soars to 18 percent, covering nearly one in every five residents, and almost one-and-a half times the national poverty rate. Since 2007, amidst an enormous boon, adjusted incomes for Latinos and African Americans in the area actually dropped (PDF).

    Much of this has to do with change in the Valley’s industrial structure, which has shifted from manufacturing to software and media. The result has been a kind of tech alt-dystopia, with massive levels of homelessness, and housing costs that are prohibitive to all but a small sliver of the local population.

    With a president whose base is outside the Bay Area, and dependent on support in areas where jobs are the biggest issue, the tech moguls will need to find ways to fit into the new agenda. The old order of relentless globalization, offshoring, and keeping profits abroad may prove unsustainable under a Trump regime that has promised to reverse these trends. In some senses the Trump constituency is made up of people who are the target of Silicon Valley’s “war on stupid people.” Inside the Valley, such people are seen as an obstacle to progress, who should be shut up with income supports and subsidies.

    So can Silicon Valley make peace with Donald Trump, the self-appointed tribune of the “poorly educated”? There are two key areas where there could be a meeting of minds. One is around regulation. One of the great ironies of the tech revolution is that the very places that are home to many techies—notably blue cities such as San Francisco, Austin, and New York—also tend to be the very places most concerned with the economic impacts of the industry.

    Opposition to disruptive market makers in the so-called sharing economy like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb is greatest in these dense, heavily Democratic cities. What’s left of the private-sector union movement and much of the progressive intelligentsia is ambivalent if not downright hostile to the “gig” economy. Ultimately, resistance to regulations relating to this tsunami of part-time employment could be something that Trump’s big business advisers might share in common with the techies.

    More important will be the issue of jobs. It may not work anymore for firms to lower tech wages by offshoring jobs or importing lots of foreign workers under the H-1B visa program, since Trump has denounced it. IBM’s Ginni Rometty, who had been busily replacing U.S. workers with ones in India, Brazil, and Costa Rica, has now agreed to create 25,000 domestic jobs. Other tech companies—including Apple—have also been making noises shifting employment to the United States from other countries. Trump may well feel what “worked” with Carrier can now be expanded to the most dynamic part of the U.S. economy.

    If the tech industry adjusts to the new reality, they may find the Trump regime, however crude, to be more to their liking than they might expect. Companies like Google may never again have the influence they had under Obama, but many techies may be able to adjust. As long as the new president “deals” them in, the techies may be able to stop worrying about Trump and begin to embrace, if not love, him.

    This article first appeared on The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

    Photo: MCR World

  • The Future of Racial Politics

    From its inception, the American experiment has been dogged by racial issues. Sadly, this was even truer this year. Eight years after electing the first African-American president, not only are race relations getting worse, according to surveys, but the electorate remains as ethnically divided as in any time of recent history.   

    Donald Trump has emerged in most media accounts as the candidate of Anglo voters, with a margin of 21 percentage points over Hillary Clinton among that segment of the electorate. Clinton’s embrace of “identity” politics may have played a role in turning off many of these white non-Hispanic voters, who might otherwise had voted Democratic.

    Many Democrats maintain still, with some justification, that as demographics evolve over the next decade, the increasingly diverse electorate will reward their identification with racial minorities. The country, and the electorate, seem destined to become ever less white in the coming decades.  Between 2000 and 2015, the nation’s population makeup became increasingly minority, from 31 percent to 38 percent. This trend will continue, with the country conceivably becoming 45 percent non-white by 2030 and 53 percent by 2050.

    White Men Can’t Jump, But They Can Still Vote

    It may well be that Democrats this year jumped the demographic gun. Even as the white population diminishes, it retains a dominant influence in elections. One reason: Whites tend to vote more. Most critical, the African-American share of the electorate, which reached record highs with Barack Obama atop the ticket,  actually dropped by a percentage point in 2016. Latino turnout, widely seen as a surge that would elect Clinton, represented  about the same percentage –11 percent — in 2016 as in 2012.  

     Thesedynamics keyed the Trump victory, particularly in heavily white working-class precincts in the Midwest, Pennsylvania and Florida, where he secured his electoral victory. Many of the pivotal states’ electorates remain very white indeed. In Wisconsin, for example, more than 80 percent of voters are white, and most of them are not residents of liberal college towns like Madison. This is also the case for Pennsylvania, where more than 75 percent of voters are Caucasian. Even Florida – itself a very diverse state — still has a heavily white electorate, accounting for more than 55 percent of voters.  

     These patterns will remain critical past what might be seen as their sell-by date for two critical reasons. One has to do with the concentration of minority voters. Nearly 60 percent of African-Americans live in Southern states where Trump won by dominating a very conservative white electorate. Other minority voters are clustered in big cities in the Northeast, which are not remotely contestable for Republicans.

     Latino voters, and also Asians, are likewise heavily concentrated, particularly in California,   now essentially a non-GOP zone, as well as the similarly politically homogeneous Northeastern cities and Chicago. To be sure, Latinos are also critical in Texas, and Asians too (increasingly so), but for now the Texas white population still outvotes them by a considerable margin.

     Another problem for the much-ballyhooed “emerging Democratic majority” lies in one stubborn fact: The elderly, most of whom are white, are not dying out quickly enough for Democrats to win. Although the extension of life spans may have slowed, or even slightly reversed in some demographic segments, seniors are clearly living longer than before.  

    The Limits of Identity Politics    

    Ignoring the reality of economic decline in the states that swung to Trump, some observers maintain that the increased conservatism among white working-class voters reflects deep-seated racial antagonisms. But this does not explain the considerable movement  of these voters, particularly in the Rust Belt, from support for Obama to support for Trump, as seen in such places as Youngstown, Ohio, Wheeling, W.Va., Macomb County, Mich., and Erie, Pa.

    The Democratic Party made things easier for Trump by adopting identity politics as its mantra. This is particularly maddening when charges of racism are leveled by affluent professionals, academics and bureaucrats, many from elite universities, who are themselves privileged.

    To their credit, some  progressives suggest shifting away — at least in the short run — from identity politics. But racial determinism may now be too central to their ideological core. Bernie Sanders’ campaign spokesperson Symone Sanders, for example, said that when it comes to picking a new leader for the  Democratic National Committee, whites need not apply.    

     Matthew Yglesias, always an excellent window on progressive dogma, insists that “there’s no other kind of politics” but identity politics; Democrats, he asserts, simply need “to do it better.” Progressives seem about as ready to ditch racialist politics  as Southern segregationists were willing to abandon Jim Crow in 1948.

    The Coming GOP Crisis

    For Republicans, identity politics is the gift that keeps giving, but the question is for how long. If you want a nightmare racial scenario for the GOP, just look at California. Since 1994, when the state passed Proposition 187, a measure widely perceived as anti-Hispanic, the Anglo population has dropped by more than 2 million as the state has added 9 million people, including more than 7 million Hispanics. Minorities now account for 62 percent of the population, compared to 43 percent in 1990. The shift in the electorate has been slower but still significant. In 1994, 49 percent of the electorate was Democratic and 37 percent Republican. Due in large part to ethnic change, by 2016 the Democratic margin was 45 percent-26 percent.

    In California this surge in minority voters has accompanied a gradual erosion of the white population, a large portion of which has left for other states. The Golden State  also has gone out of its way to encourage immigration of undocumented aliens by offering them driver’s licenses, subsidized health care and  financial aid for college; 74 percent of all California children under 15 are  now minorities, compared to 66 percent in 2000, and  25 percent of them live below the poverty line. This is 2.5 times the white non-Hispanic rate in California.  

    Despite largely positive results outside the blue coastal states, potentially the biggest long-term problem facing Republicans is in a dominant aspect of geography:  suburbia. Trump lost   some largely affluent suburban areas like Orange County, where 55 percent the population is Latino or Asian, up from 45 percent in 2000.  Perhaps most emblematic of potential GOP problems was Trump’s — and the GOP’s —  loss of Irvine, a prosperous Orange County municipality that is roughly 40 percent Asian.

    Republicans should be even more worried about trends in Texas, where Latinos are already close to a plurality and the Asian population is surging. There are still enough conservative whites to win elections in Texas — Trump won by 10 percentage points — but the margins will continue to shrink. This trend can already be seen in Houston’s sprawling, increasingly multiracial suburbs. Trump, for example, lost solidly middle-class Fort Bend County, by some estimates among the most diverse in the country, which voted Republican in every presidential elections since 1968.

    If this pattern continues, the die may indeed be cast for the GOP. As most minorities now live in the suburbs — a trend that continues to increase — a loss of suburban voters, given the total Democratic lock on inner city electors, would be too much for rural and small-town whites to overcome.  Simply put, by 2030, losses in the multicultural suburbs could make dreams of progressive long-term dominance all but inevitable.

    How Republicans Can Withstand the Racial Shift

    Republicans must reverse these trends if they don’t want to go the way of the dinosaur. They can take some limited satisfaction in knowing that Trump did somewhat  better than Mitt Romney or John McCain among Hispanics and blacks  as well as improving slightly among Asians.

    To expand on these modest gains, Republicans need to focus not on race but economics.  Our recent study for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism demonstrates clearly that minorities generally do far better in red states than in blue ones, based on such factors as income, homeownership, entrepreneurship and migration. Minorities all continue to move in ever larger numbers to red states because their economic climate and regulatory regime work better for them.

    Conservatives can make a case that Barack Obama’s progressive agenda actually favored the highly affluent, who tend to be disproportionately white.  According to a 2016 Urban League study,  African-American levels of economic equality are lower now than in 2009, surely a disappointment for a black middle class so understandably proud of Obama’s elevation.

    The best role model for the GOP could be in Texas. Latinos in the Lone Star State generally do better than their counterparts in California — as measured by homeownership, marriage rates, incomes — and also tend to vote more conservatively. In 2014, for example, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Texas Latinos. In contrast, that same year Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown won 73 percent of the Latino vote in California.  

    Other factors, notably upward mobility among  Latinos, African-Americans and Asians, could play a transformative role. As they continue to move to the suburbs, buy houses and start businesses, they may become less likely to support a high-regulation, high-tax and redistributionist agenda. Since 2000, more than 95 percent of the minority growth (black, Asian and Hispanic) in the 52 largest metropolitan areas has been in suburban and exurban areas. Trump did much better among college-educated black males, for example,  than those with no college education — 16 percent vs. 11 percent.

    If more minorities enter the middle class, particularly under Trump, this  could provide an opening for Republicans, just as occurred after the World War II when Italian, Irish, Polish and other eastern European voters moved to the suburbs and assimilated, even intermarried, after years of living apart. A message that targets the middle class aspirations of minorities could be more effective in the long run than appealing merely to xenophobic sentiments shared by an inexorably diminishing population.

    Critically, in the coming  decades, the vast majority of Latinos and Asians will be native-born. They will have spread out increasingly not only within regions but to more conservative parts of the country, notably Texas and the Southeast. At the same time, the population of undocumented workers, the least assimilated and generally the poorest demographic, is already declining, down by 300,000 since 2008. If it continues to decline, which may be likely under Trump, immigration may soon fade away as a primary issue for Latinos.

    Perhaps even more critical, however, may be the growing trend toward intermarriage among minorities. Among second-generation Latinos and Asians, interracial marriage is creating what could become an increasingly fluid racial identity. Intermarriage involving African-Americans is also on the upswing. The new generation of ethnic hybrids, most with one Anglo parent, will no longer be easily pigeon-holed ethnically. Overall, 15 percent of marriages were between partners of different ethnic groups in 2012.

    These are all opportunities to succeed, but the GOP can only prolong itself if it finds a way to reach minority voters based on an appeal of economic mobility. Whether they take this tack, or simply play for time until white voters lose their primacy, may determine whether it is the stupid party that some suggest, and one that, even at its great moment of opportunity, is destined to remain permanently so.

    Ultimately, Republicans could build on Trump’s economic message by demonstrating its efficacy for minority voters. This may be the party’s only hope in the future, given the demographic trends. The competition could also encourage Democrats to focus more on “bread and butter” issues. If future presidential campaigns are waged over key economic issues, rather than pitting ethnicities against one another, the nation will be both unified and stronger.

    This article first appeared on Real Clear Politics.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). 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 served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Steve White, Creative Commons

  • Five Ideas to Make America Greater

    Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was based on the notion that he could “Make America Great Again.” But beyond the rhetoric — sometimes lurching into demagoguery — the newly elected president comes to office, as one commentator suggests, “the least policy-savvy president in history.”

    To succeed, Trump must adopt innovative policies that transcend traditional right-left divides. He needs to find ways to help his heavily white, working-class base while expanding his appeal to minorities, millennials and educated people who are now largely horrified by his ascendency.

    In the short run, his biggest problem may lie with his own Republican Party establishment, which, rather than “drain the swamp,” would simply like to create one of its own. The looming presence of corporate lobbyists, swarming around the administration like hungry flies, is not encouraging at all, nor are GOP congressional plans to re-establish “earmarks.”

    The key lies not in empowering a different set of K Street parasites, but rather in reversing income stagnation. If he cannot, his triumph may prove to be no more consequential than an absurdist, Latin American-style telenovela.

    A flatter, fairer tax

    The basic instinct among many Republicans tends toward reducing taxes on their richest donors and making life easier for the ultrarich, including some on Trump’s economic team. Trump’s imperative should, instead, be to make the tax system fairer for the middle and working classes. One way would be to make a graduated flat tax that would mean that the rich, who make most of their money from investments, pay the same rate for capital gains as the rest of us do for income.

    Democrats will, no doubt, still charge Trump with being “unfair,” but, as Ronald Reagan proved 20 years ago, Americans support incentives for work if they don’t unfairly tilt conditions to the ultrarich. Main Street business owners, the most hostile constituency to the Obama administration’s policies, pay taxes based on their income and can’t manipulate the system like Apple, Google, Wall Streeters or, for that matter, real estate developers like Trump himself.

    A middle ground for immigration

    Opposition to illegal immigration helped drive the Trump campaign early on, but, outside of the GOP base, there is little support for a mass roundup of the undocumented. The vast majority of Americans, over 70 percent, also oppose “open borders.” After all, even President Obama evicted 2 million people during his two terms in office.

    Trump also can begin reordering our immigration policies toward skilled workers who are interested in becoming citizens. At the same time, Trump could score points by undermining the H1-B visa program, which allows Silicon Valley firms, along with corporations like Disney and Southern California Edison, to lay off American workers and replace them with temporary indentured servants.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Make America Great Again hat) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Memo to the Next President: Don’t Forget the Working Class

    At the end of most US presidential elections, most Americans are ready to see the last of campaign ads, social media commentaries and tension-fraught news coverage. That’s even more true this year. But more than in most recent elections, we shouldn’t expect the frustrations and divisions that have surfaced over the past 18 months to disappear after the ballots have been counted. Tensions over class and race, especially, may die down, but they aren’t going away. If a new president will take them on, something good might yet emerge from this ugly election.

    Although it’s true that working-class voters are declining in number, they have drawn increasing attention over the past several elections, in part because, as Ruy Teixeira and his colleagues at The Democratic Strategist have been arguing for a while, they remain a crucial demographic. And this year, the white working class has not only been recognized as a key voting bloc, it has been an active player, demanding that the country and its leaders recognize the economy does not work for many Americans.

    Amid far too many reports that have pinned Donald Trump’s success on the white working class, this year’s election coverage also has drawn attention to real problems, many of them rooted in class and racial inequalities. If the next president wants to succeed she (or he) must address what design experts call “wicked problems” — big, complex issues that resist simple explanations or one-dimensional solutions. It won’t be easy.

    The election has created the conditions for addressing the first of those: class resentment. I don’t mean the resentment poor and working-class people feel toward the wealthy. I mean the resentment they feel toward a government that doesn’t seem to care about them or have the will to address economic inequality. I’m also talking about resentment toward a public discourse that denigrates and blames working-class people for not being more like the middle class. WNYC’s On the Media provided a terrific overview of that discourse in a series of reports about common and problematic assumptions that shape reporting on poverty. As host Brooke Gladstone explained, reliance on these assumptions generates media that reinforces the idea that people are poor because they don’t work hard or because they make bad choices. No matter how much we might deplore some of the behavior and attitudes that have surfaced in the election, we can’t address the class-based cultural divide by dismissing poor and working-class people as “deplorables” who lack the critical thinking skills that college education provides.

    Good leadership could address class resentment not only with better policies — more on that below — but also by taking it seriously. While claims that Trump’s support comes primarily from the white working class are problematic, both he and Bernie Sanders won votes this year because they addressed working-class people’s sense of being left behind by the economy and put down by the media. Both also recognized a simple truth about American culture: Class is a central and increasingly important divide. A good president will acknowledge that, but also will lead the way in fostering deeper and more critical conversations about the economic, social and cultural roots of those divisions.

    Of course, the cultural divide reflects a very real and serious economic gap, and a good leader must be willing to talk about its sources and consequences — including the way contemporary global capitalism, neoliberal ideology and technology drive economic changes that deepen inequality. We need to create more jobs through infrastructure projects among other strategies. But we also need policies that address not only the quantity of jobs but also their quality — what they pay, how they are structured and how workers are protected from exploitation as well as physical and psychological injuries. Raising the minimum wage is just a start. American economic leaders need to look critically at the effects of the “gig economy” and rising precarity, a term some scholars have coined to describe the uncertainty facing many workers who can’t count on a regular paycheck. Instead of pushing for everyone to go to college, we need to focus on ensuring that the thousands of working-class jobs that our economy will continue to produce are good jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing back manufacturing. It probably does mean bringing back the labor movement, with a broader and more inclusive social unionism.

    Inequality doesn’t stem only from employment, however. As Jack Metzgar has argued, we need tax policies that focus less on the persistent fantasy of trickle-down economics and instead put cash into the pockets of the working class, who will spend it. We could expand the earned income tax credit and increase credits to help families pay for child care, housing or college. We also need to take another look at health care. The Affordable Care Act was a step in the right direction, with in its emphasis on providing insurance to those who hadn’t had it previously, but it still relies on the private insurance industry. It’s time to develop a single-payer system that puts first the needs of ordinary people, not those of a profit-based industry.

    Perhaps the most troubling problem that has surfaced in this year’s election is racism. While some have challenged stories that present racism as a white working-class problem, we also know that racism and racial divisions are real problems for working-class people. Racism is a class issue, in multiple ways. First, racial division undermines the class solidarity that could generate social change movements. It also distracts people from the real source of their problems — not other poor and working-class people, but the economic and political system that, as Guy Standing has suggested, is rigged against workers and what, in today’s economy, he has named the “precariat.”

    At the same time, racism presents a threat to working-class people. While the profiling and anxieties that underlie police violence toward black people sometimes target middle-class (and upper-middle-class) African-Americans, working-class black men are probably at greater risk. Here, too, we need policies that more forcefully address racial injustice and divisions, to ensure that citizens are protected by the police rather than needing protection from them. But we also need policies that facilitate more racial interaction. Among the most interesting insights on this year’s election was Jonathan Rothwell’s analysis of Gallup poll data, which revealed that Trump’s strongest support came from white people living in highly segregated areas. Racism is a structural issue, not just a matter of morality or attitudes, and we need to address it with policies that challenge housing and education segregation and inequities.

    None of this is easy, and these “solutions” are as limited as they are idealistic. I’m sure there are better ideas out there. Our next president needs to find them. She (or he) must pay attention — not only to the anger and frustration of working-class people but also to the complex nature of the problems that generate those feelings.

    In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign tried to keep his supporters’ momentum going by creating Organizing for America, which became Organizing for Action, a network of community organizing groups that largely faded from the national picture. This year, we need more.

    Whatever the result of Tuesday’s election, neither the media nor the new president should stop talking about and listening to the working class. It’s time to move from campaign mode to action, from courting working-class voters to addressing the conditions of their lives.

    Note: This essay was first published by Moyers & Company.

    Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University.  She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.

    Photo by: By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Richard Florida’s Federal Fantasy

    Urbanist Richard Florida, in a New York Daily News op-ed, has called for President Obama to define his legacy not only by focusing on gun control, immigration and climate change, but by zeroing in on an even more important issue: America’s urbanization.

    This is because today, he explains, the nation’s 50 largest metros contain two-thirds of US population, produce three-quarters of its economic output, and are home to a great concentration of its innovations. Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and one of New Urbanism’s prime theoreticians, believes that these metros have been neglected by a government that romanticizes suburbs and small towns, while ignoring the greater productivity of dense areas. The answer to this misallocation of resources, he writes, would be for Obama to form a Department of Cities.

    According to his proposal, this would fold into the now-dated Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and would represent a shift in how government approaches cities. While HUD was “created to mitigate poverty at a time of wide-scale suburban flight” by providing housing and jobs for vulnerable populations, this new department would enact reforms more in fitting with urban America’s renewed prosperity. That would include redirecting infrastructure money back into city centers, and funding bike lanes, mass transit and pedestrian zones. Zoning and building codes would be modified to allow for greater densities.

    What’s wrong with this idea? It’s hard to know where to begin.

    The proposed department would tread beyond just growth and infrastructure, and become a comprehensive bureaucracy. Its modifications to zoning laws, for example, would interfere with traditionally local police power. And the department would “absorb pieces” from a half-dozen agencies, like the Departments of Commerce and the Interior. That way, it could deal with climate change, immigration and gun control, as well as crime, education, and inequality. The department’s bipartisan advisory board, which would include mayors, developers, and academics, could even dabble in foreign affairs, by demonstrating how “urbanism and sustainability should underpin a new US ‘grand strategy’.”

    Florida justified such a department by saying it would make government leaner, through the better coordination of different agencies. That, in turn, would help it streamline economic vitality and job creation in cities, using a “cut to invest” approach. But Florida didn’t note that such a department would only be possible if approved by the Obama administration that would be forming it. And that seems unlikely, given that the president’s current urban vision is little different than the old HUD model Florida bemoans. Obama’s choice for HUD secretary was Shaun Donovan, a former New York City housing commissioner who launched the city’s “inclusionary zoning” program, making it available even for six-figure households.

    Obama, after all, came of age in Chicago, a city long mired in that department’s policies. He has continued funding some of its more anachronistic programs, like Community Development Block Grants, and started Choice Neighborhoods, which is an expanded version of the old Hope VI program. Meanwhile, the economic benefits of his new HUD measures are no more evident than past ones. The Strong Cities Strong Communities Initiative gave grants to six declining cities, including Detroit, which has received gobs of federal money before, but has failed to improve largely because of problems within city hall. Both the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative and the Promise Neighborhoods grants are all-encompassing attempts by the federal government to solve poverty, going beyond just housing, to include schools, policing, and health care.

    The Sustainable Communities Initiative is meant to centralize the various municipalities within a given metro area. While the strategy can have advantages, it has been used by Obama merely to advance a far-left agenda: its been known to restrict suburban development.

    So how likely is it that Obama would fill this new Department of Cities with the market-oriented appointees suggested by Florida, like economist Edward Glaeser, and Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, the online shoe retailer? Probably less so than Obama filling it with ones who, like himself, seem to believe the government can solve every urban problem if only given more money. Such thinking has led to continued wastefulness within HUD, and might inhibit a new city department from its stated goal of spurring growth.

    Even if such a department did spur growth, it might, like other top-down entities, do so abusively—a point that seems lost on Florida. While discussing the article on MSNBC, he explained that “HUD was great for its time,” as “the bulwark of both urban renewal…and providing affordable public housing,” and that the new department would simply need to adapt to modern conditions. But the “renewal” he celebrates caused the widespread destruction of neighborhoods—and arguably cities altogether—in the 1950s and 1960s, while the public housing that replaced them was crime-ridden.

    There’s no reason to think that those who ran a Department of Cities would learn from these mistakes. Yesterday’s urban renewal exists today merely in different forms. There has been a vast expansion of eminent domain powers because of 2005’s Kelo v. New London, which legalized taking private property for other private uses, and is now being used for local economic development strategies, particularly in New York City. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg—Florida thinks he would make a great cabinet member—there have been attempted condemnations of large areas, including the Atlantic Yards project underway in Brooklyn. Property would be confiscated from thousands of owners, while reshaping whole swaths of the city into master-planned projects. Who is to say a Department of Cities wouldn’t implement this method nationwide, wiping out poor neighborhoods to build yet more “redevelopments”—aka convention centers, malls, and stadiums—that perform even more poorly than the original neighborhoods did?

    Florida ends his article about federalizing urban policy by, ironically, repeating a quote Bloomberg once made about the virtues of local governance: “While nations talk, but too often drag their heels—cities act.”

    This just summarizes the problem with a “Department of Cities.” It would concentrate power at a level of government that is known for sluggishness in some cases, and arbitrariness in others. While a department that focused only on redirecting infrastructure into dense areas might be beneficial, the comprehensive one described by Florida would prove politically toxic, since it would veer into multiple other issues. And it would be controlled by someone who, like Obama, might use it not for economic growth, but to further propagate the growth—and wastefulness—of the federal bureaucracy.

    Flickr photo by Anthony Fine: Atlantic Yards construction, Brooklyn.

    Scott Beyer is traveling the nation to write a book about revitalizing U.S. cities. His blog, Big City Sparkplug, features the latest in urban news. Originally from Charlottesville, VA, he is now living in different cities month-to-month to write new chapters.

  • The Suburbs Could Save President Obama From Defeat

    President Obama’s disdain for suburban America has been well-documented. Yet, ironically, the current revival in housing, largely in those same suburbs, might be the one thing that could rescue his floundering campaign. Unlike the Democrat-dominated central cities and the rock-red Republican countryside, the suburbs remain the country’s primary contestable territory.

    With manufacturing facing global headwinds and Wall Street stagnating, the housing recovery is helping keep the still weak economy moving forward. Housing starts are at the highest level in four and a half years. Sales and prices are on the rise, and the vast majority of the action — despite the media’s focus on multi-family developments — is taking place among single-family homes that predominate in the suburban rings of our metropolitan area. Over the past two years, 76% of the new privately owned housing units completed were single-family homes, according to Census Bureau figures. In existing home sales, last year over 4.3 million single-family homes were purchased, compared to 520,000 condos.

    This trend is being driven by such factors as rental costs, which rose with the recession, a decline in foreclosures, low interest rates and, particularly in some markets such as Phoenix, investors who see long-run demand in single-family markets. Demand has sparked a nascent revival of homebuilding, now at the highest level since the Great Recession, although still half its historic rate.

    The housing recovery could make a particularly important difference in the election in key swing state suburban communities on the outskirts of Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Denver, and in the northern Virginia suburbs of the capital. In these areas, homes — not stocks and other financial assets — are the primary measure of wealth, and the most critical weathervane of economic wellbeing. Single-family home sales also spur other sectors of the economy, such as financial services, construction and the home furnishing industries in ways far greater than denser developments. The good feelings about the auto recovery have helped the president in industrial states; similarly the improved housing market gives him a lift in these critical suburban areas.

    Some Clinton-era Democrats, like former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Altman, recognize that expanding housing markets makes for stronger, broader-based economic growth. This is why historically Democrats favored single-family housing, from Roosevelt and Truman to Bill Clinton. Altman predicts a full-scale housing boom by 2015; if he’s right, and Democrats are in power, and on board, this could propel their ascendency for another generation.

    Of course from an ideological point of view, this emerging boom may not be much welcomed in the current administration. Most Obama backers in places like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including Secretary Shaun Donovan, have long predicted that suburbs are entering their death throes, predicting a massive movement of people from the suburbs to inner city areas. Where possible, HUD has tried to encourage “smart growth” by providing grants for projects aimed at greater densification.

    Yet these widely lauded efforts are swimming against the fundamentals of market demand, and at a cost to both the budget and longer-run economic growth. Despite misleading press reports, inspired in part by Census Bureau epistles focusing on increasing downtown populations, the vast majority of population growth has continued to take place far away from the urban core.

    Indeed over the last decade, while some downtowns have grown, they accounted for 1.3% of the overall population increase in the country’s largest metropolitan areas. At the same time, areas two to five miles from the central cores lost population while areas beyond 10 miles out grew by more than 20% and accounted for more than 60% of growth. Overall Americans have continued to vote with their feet for suburbs — overwhelmingly.

    Some urbanists, including some close to the current administration, claim that the realities of the last decade are now passé, a permanent victim of the housing bust. Yet in reality these claims appear largely off the mark. Recent Census estimates for last year, for example, were widely reported to show greater growth in core cities than suburbs, but turned out to be based on unsupported assumptions that all county growth occurred equally across geographies, making it impossible to judge the widespread claims of a massive movement “back to the cities.”

    At the same time, a new analysis by Trulia.com chief economist Jed Kolko, based on postal data, shows that growth rates were about the same. But in an attempt to discover actual preferences, Kolko then analyzed the growth rates by densities. Much of the “urban” growth, particularly in Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and throughout the Midwest, actually takes place in largely suburbanized, relatively low-density areas.

    Kolko found that the populations of “more suburban” neighborhoods grew 0.73% in the past year, more than twice as fast as the “more urban” neighborhoods, where growth was 0.35%. In fact, urban neighborhoods grew faster than suburban neighborhoods in only five of the 50 largest metro areas — Memphis, New York, Chicago, San Jose and Pittsburgh — and often by a really small margin. In the other 45 large metros, the suburbs grew faster than the more urban neighborhoods. Overall, Kolko concludes, household growth in most metropolitan areas was greatest the further from the core, and less closer to it.

    The movement of people into lower-density areas jibes with one of the biggest reasons for the current nascent housing recovery: the preference by roughly four in five Americans for a single-family house — usually but not always found in the suburbs — over an urban apartment. In a sense, then, the hostility to suburbs among the administration and the Democratic Party is both profoundly anti-democratic and anti-growth.

    Recovering housing prices provide a lifeline for our beleaguered middle class. A recovery provides greater employment to the very people — construction workers, manufacturers of home furnishings and real estate agents — who were among the biggest victims of the Great Recession. Some progressives might celebrate the diminishment of such jobs and prefer they now service the post-industrial uberclass, but it’s hard to see how a large part of our middle and working classes can maintain, much less ascend, without a strong housing sector.

    Signs of recovery, of course, extend beyond housing. Even malls, also long suffering, and under digital assault, are beginning to recover. Meanwhile rental apartments, once the darling of the speculative class, have begun to lose their momentum, in part due to improving home affordability. Massive overbuilding in some markets could lead to a new gusher of real estate tears. Something is happening here.

    Contrary to conventional wisdom, if the economy strengthens, the suburban and single-family market will do likewise in the years to come. First-time homebuyers will provide a strong source of demand for an increasingly scarce product. Rather than rejecting the ideal of owning a home, 84% of today’s renters still intend eventually to purchase their residence, according to a recent study by TD Bank.

    Homeownership and the white picket fence might be out of fashion among the cognoscenti, but not among new Asian immigrants, who are heading to the suburbs, or the rising number of 30-somethings, three quarters of whom, according to a recent Better Homes and Gardens survey, see homeownership as a “key indicator of success.”

    Although still in its early phases, President Obama would be wise to use the suburban housing recovery to help portray himself as the savior of the middle class. The most notable gains made by Romney in the polls recently have been in the suburbs. It may be too late for the president to make better strategic use of the incipient recovery for this election, but if he is victorious and can swallow his anti-suburban mindset and embrace what most Americans regard as their preferred emblem of success, he could help consolidate a strong Democratic hold on the suburbs that could play a deciding role in our politics for the decades ahead.

  • Declining Birthrates, Expanded Bureaucracy: Is U.S. Going European?

    To President Barack Obama and many other Democrats, Europe continues to exercise something of a fatal attraction.  The “European dream” embraced by these politicians — as well as by many pundits, academics and policy analysts — usually consists of an America governed by an expanded bureaucracy, connected by high-speed trains and following a tough green energy policy.

    One hopes that the current crisis gripping the E.U. will give even the most devoted Europhiles pause about the wisdom of such mimicry. Yet the deadliest European disease the U.S. must avoid is that of persistent demographic decline.

    The gravity of Europe’s demographic situation became clear at a conference I attended in Singapore last year. Dieter Salomon, the green mayor of the environmentally correct Freiburg, Germany, was speaking about the future of cities. When asked what Germany’s future would be like in 30 years, he answered, with a little smile,  ”There won’t be a future.”

    Herr Mayor was not exaggerating. For decades, Europe has experienced some of the world’s slowest population growth rates. Fertility rates have dropped well below replacement rates, and are roughly 50% lower than those in the U.S. Over time these demographic trends will have catastrophic economic consequences. By 2050, Europe, now home to 730 million people, will shrink by 75 million to 100 million and its workforce will be 25% smaller than in 2000.

    The fiscal costs of this process are already evident. Countries like Spain, Italy and Greece, which rank among the most rapidly aging populations in the world, are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. One reason has to do with the lack enough productive workers to pay for generous pensions and other welfare-state provisions.

    Germany, the über-economy of the continent, has little hope of avoiding the demographic winter either.  By 2030 Germany will have about 53 retirees for every 100 people in its workforce; by comparison the U.S. ratio will be closer to 30. As a result, Germany will face a giant debt crisis, as social costs for the aging eat away its currently frugal and productive economy. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Nick Eberstadt, by 2020 Germany debt service compared to GDP will rise to twice that currently suffered by Greece.

    Europe, of course, is not alone in the hyper-aging phenomena. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore face a similar scenario of rapid aging, a declining workforce and gradual depopulation.

    In the past, it seemed likely America would be spared the worst of this mass aging. But there are worrisome signs that our demographic exceptionalism could be threatened. One cause for concern is rapid   decline in immigration, both legal and illegal.  Although few nativist firebrands have noticed, the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. has decreased by 1 million from 2007.   Legal immigration is also down.  Meanwhile, the number of Mexicans annually leaving Mexico for the U.S. declined from more than 1 million in 2006 to 404,000 in 2010 — a 60% reduction.

    More troubling still, fewer immigrants are becoming naturalized residents.   In 2008, there were over 1 million naturalizations; last year there were barely 600,000, a remarkable 40% drop.

    The drop-off includes most key sending countries, including Mexico, which accounts for 30% of all immigrants. Since 2008 naturalizations have dropped by 65% from North America, 24% from Asia and 28% for Europe.  In fact the only place from which naturalizations are on the rise appears to be Africa, with an 18% increase.

    This drop off, if continued, will have severe consequences. Since 1990 immigrants have accounted for some 45% of all our labor force growth and have increased their share from 9.3% to 15.7% of all workers. These immigrants, and their children, have been one key reason why the U.S. has avoided the deadly demography of Europe and much of east Asia.

    This decline can be traced, in part, by rapid decreases in birthrates among such traditional sources of immigrants such as China, India, Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Mexico’s birthrate, for example, has declined from 6.8 children per woman in 1970 to roughly 2 children per woman in 2011. This drop-off has reduced the number of Mexicans entering the workforce from 1 million annually in the 1990s to about 800,000 today. By 2030, that number will drop to 300,000.

    A second major cause lies with the improved economy in many developing countries like Mexico. According to economist Robert Newell, per-capita  Mexico’s GDP and family income have both climbed by more than 45% over the last 10 years  . Not only are there less children to emigrate, but there’s more opportunity for those who chose to remain.

    Asia not only has lower birthrates, and, for the most part, better performing economies. As a result, immigrants — many of them well educated and entrepreneurially oriented — who in earlier years might have felt the need to come to the U.S. now can find ample opportunities at home. Many educated immigrants and graduate  students, notably from Asia, are not staying after graduation. America’s loss is Asia’s gain.

    Finally the weak U.S. economy is also depressing birthrates to levels well below those of the last decade — birthrates that could soon reach its lowest levels in a century. Generally, people have children when they feel more confident about the future. Confidence in the American future is about as low now as any time since the 1930s.

    Other factors could further depress birthrate. High housing costs and a lack of opportunities to purchase dwellings appropriate for raising children have contributed to the growth of childless households in countries as diverse as Italy and Taiwan. Until now, American home prices — including those for single-family units — were relatively affordable outside of a few large metropolitan areas.

    But now many local and state governments — often with strong support from the Obama Administration — are implementing European-style “smart growth” ideas that would severely restrict the number of single-family houses and drive people into small apartments. For decades, areas with affordable low-density development (such as Houston, Dallas, Nashville, Raleigh and Austin) have attracted the most families. If we become a nation of apartment-dwelling renters, birthrates are likely to slide even further.

    What does this suggest for the American future? History has much to tell us about the relationship between demographics and national destiny. The declines of states — from Ancient Rome to Renaissance Italy and early modern Holland — coincided with drops in birthrates and population.

    To many in Europe our entrance to the ranks of hyper-aging countries would be a welcome development. It would also cheer many academics and greens, and likely some members of the Obama Administration, who might see fewer children as an ideal way to reduce our carbon footprint. Perhaps happiest of all: the authoritarian Mandarins in Beijing who can send their most talented sons and daughters to American graduate schools, increasingly confident they will return home to rule the world.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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

    Photo by flickr user Sigs24141