New Geography

Tag: Obama’s America

  • Suburban Nation, but Urban Political Strategy

    Ideologues may set the tone for the national debate, but geography and demography determine elections.

    In America, the dominant geography continues to be suburbia – home to at least 60 percent of the population and probably more than that portion of the electorate. Roughly 220 congressional districts, or more than half the nation’s 435, are predominately suburban, according to a 2005 Congressional Quarterly study. This is likely to only increase in the next decade, as Millennials begin en masse to enter their 30s and move to the periphery.

    Now the earth is shaking under suburban topsoil — in ways that could be harmful to Democratic prospects. “The GOP path to success,” according to a recent Princeton Survey Research Associates study of suburban attitudes, “goes right through the suburbs.”

    The connection between suburbs and political victory should have been clear by now. Middle- and working-class suburbanites keyed the surprising election win of Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts in January. Suburban voters were also crucial to the 2009 Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, two key swing states.

    Nationally, suburban approval for the Democrats has dropped to 39 percent this year, from 48 percent two years ago. Disapproval for President Barack Obama is also high — nearly 48 percent of suburbanites disapprove, compared to only 35 percent of urbanites. Even Obama’s strong support among minority suburbanites, a fast-growing group, has declined substantially.

    Many suburban voters, notes Lawrence Levy, executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, appear to be undergoing “buyer’s remorse” for backing Obama and the Democrats last time around .

    Much of the suburban distress, of course, stems from the still perilous state of the economy. Obama’s mix of fiscal and monetary policies has provided much succor to Wall Street, where stock prices have soared 30 percent, and to big corporations, whose profits have risen by 42 percent. This has been great for Manhattan plutocrats — but not particularly helpful for the suburban middle class.

    Indeed the indicators most important to suburbanites – private sector employment, weekly earnings, home prices and disposable income – have all stagnated or even fallen since Obama took office. Fifty-three percent of suburban residents, according to the Princeton study, described their financial situation as “bad.” The vast majority have either lost their job or know someone who has lost theirs. Almost 40 percent have either lost their home or know someone who did – up from 27 percent in 2008.

    Given the stubbornness of this recession, neither the current administration or Congress gets credit for improving conditions. Barely 10 percent of suburbanites polled think the stimulus helped, one-third thought it hurt and the rest said it made little difference.

    But there may be other, perhaps more nuanced, reasons for the administration’s suburban disconnect. Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

    When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

    More recently, Obama made clear that he is more interested in containing suburbia than enhancing it. In Florida last February, the president declared, “the days of building sprawl” are “over.”

    Much of the Obama policy agenda – from mass transit and high-speed rail to support for “smart growth” policies – appeals to city planners and urbanistas. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has spoken openly of “coercing” Americans out their cars and the Department of Housing and Urban Development is handing out grants to regions which support densification strategies that amount to forced urbanization of suburbs.

    This is a problem since the vast majority of Americans – consistently more than 80 percent – do not prefer to live in dense big cities. Most want a house rather than being forced to live in an apartment. And for all but a handful, a car, not a bus or train, remains not only the preferred way to get to work, but often the only feasible means to get work — mostly in the suburbs.

    If the Democrats want to mount an electoral comeback in suburbia, they need to take these realities into account . There are just not enough votes in core cities, upscale close-in suburbs or college towns to knit together a majority.

    Recovering suburbia s is not impossible for Democrats. Obama himself proved this in 2008, by essentially tying for the suburban vote — a remarkable achievement. Bill Clinton won in 1992 and especially 1996 by competing well in suburbs and exurbs. In the last two election cycles, the shift of suburbanites to the Democrats keyed the party’s steady gains in the Congress – accounting for, according to GOP sources, as many as 24 seats in the last two congressional elections.

    Most important, suburbanite identification with the Republican Party has continued to erode over the past two years, according to the Princeton survey. Instead the big winners have been independents, who have grown to 36 percent from 30 percent of the suburban electorate.

    These voters, for the most part, also tend to be less strident in their cultural views than either secular urbanites or rural evangelicals. More than one in five suburbanites is an ethnic minority — which could also help the Democrats.

    But to win even these suburban voters, the Democrats must offer solutions to suburbanites that go beyond devising their forced conversion to dense urbanity. They could refocus their efforts on climate change to suburbs-friendly strategies like telecommuting — perhaps the cheapest, quickest and most socially acceptable way to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

    Outside of greater New York, which has half the nation’s transit users, there are already about as many telecommuters as transit riders. Why not work to expand this phenomena, so well suited to the vast majority of the country?

    These suburb friendly approaches should be examined as the Democrats reflect on what many expect to be midterm electoral setbacks. They can only compete successfully on a national basis by jettisoning their apparent disdain toward the aspirations of suburban homeowners and begin treating them with respect.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. 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 Caesar Sebastian

  • Shifting Voter Demographics: America is a Different Country

    As we head to the unpredictable 2010 elections, many pundits have been left scratching their heads and admitting that they really have no idea how this election is going to turn out. Nate Silver, today’s most careful analyst of election statistics and forecasting, examined a variety of indicators and concluded that there were more closely contested and hard-to-predict congressional races this election than ever before.

    The biggest reason for this uncertainty lies in the fact that America’s electorate is changing as fast as the country’s demographic and generational characteristics, and in the process these changes overturn old assumptions about how politics works – and too often doesn’t work – in America.

    In 1965 the nation was 89% white and 11% black, about the same as it had been during the previous century. Since then, high levels of Asian and Latin immigration have produced an America today which is 66% white and 33% “people of color,” a tripling of the minority population in only four decades. Remarkably, 10% of Americans are of Mexican descent and about 5% of the electorate speaks primarily Spanish. For the first time in US history a president of mixed race, although one who considers himself to be African-American, resides in the White House.

    The second big demographic change is the emergence of the largest, most diverse generation in American history: the Millenials. Like it or not, this generation will dominate the political and cultural life of 21st century America as much as the Boomers did in the late 20th century. The Millennial Generation, born from 1982-2003, is sometimes condescendingly referred to as the “youth vote,” but it should be more accurately recognized as the biggest and most important new voting cohort in America. There are about 95 million Millennials, about half of whom are now of voting age. One out of four eligible voters in 2012 will come from this generation. That will expand to more than one out of three voters by 2020.

    This is the fundamental driver of American political change: Every two years the percentage of non-whites and Millennials increases, a trend likely to continue in the decades ahead. Non-whites will grow from 33% of the population today to as much 50% by 2042. There will also be a rapid increase in the “mixed race” population, which might further complicate matters.

    As these populations grow, a new political reality will take hold in areas most immediately affected, especially in the Southwest and coastal areas of the country. The power of these population shifts to upend conventional political wisdom was demonstrated by Barack Obama’s victories over heavily favored establishment candidates in both the Democratic primary and the general election in 2008

    These demographic transformations are changing the political loyalties and beliefs of the American electorate. Democrats now have their largest lead in national party identification since the early 1960s. In the most recent Pew survey, only 15% of Americans claimed to be completely unaffiliated independent voters, while about half (48%) identify with the Democratic Party and 37% with the Republican Party. By contrast, in 1994, the last time in which a newly elected Democratic president faced a midterm election against an aroused GOP, the two parties were tied in party identification at 44% each. This Democratic advantage is due in large part to Millennials and Hispanics who identify as Democrats by a 2:1 margin over Republicans.

    Survey data also shows that most Americans continue to favor using government to address their economic concerns and societal challenges. This summer, in a survey conducted for the progressive think tank NDN, a clear majority (54% vs. 31%) of Americans favored a government that actively tries to solve societal and economic problems rather than one that takes a hands-off approach.

    These numbers virtually unchanged since Barack Obama’s inauguration. More recently, only 29% of those surveyed this fall told Pew they wanted all of the Bush-era tax cuts to remain in place, while a majority (57%) preferred either that those on the wealthy should be allowed to expire or that all of the Bush tax cuts should end. Forty percent of adults told an Associated Press survey they didn’t think the new health care law went far enough, while only 20% felt the federal government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare at all. These pro-government attitudes are likely to grow as more and more Millennials enter the electorate. By a 60% to 36% margin the generation favors a bigger government providing more services over a smaller government providing fewer services.

    Rather than being surprised every two years by the changing politics of a nation altered by a rapidly changing demography, pundits would be wiser to anticipate that American politics is going to keep changing and evolving every two years, and will never again look like the politics of the 20th century. In the shorter run, the operative question in this year’s midterm elections is the extent to which the rising elements in the electorate make their presence felt at the polls in November. President Obama, who is concentrating his final campaigning efforts on college campuses and minority neighborhoods, clearly recognizes the challenge—but also the rare opportunity—presented by the 21st century electorate. His success in energizing these newest members of the Democratic Party’s base will determine the still uncertain outcome of the midterm elections.

    But the longer term direction of American politics will clearly continue to be driven by the demographic and generational changes now sweeping the country. And unless the Republican Party finds a way to appeal to the emerging groups, they may find themselves enjoying only the most fleeting kind of renaissance.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of the New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the 10 favorite books by the New York Times in 2008.

  • Living In Denial About Transportation Funding

    The reaction of various advocacy groups to President Obama’s recent call for a $50 billion stimulus spending plan for transportation infrastructure was predictable. They applauded the President’s initiative and thought that Congress should promptly approve the spending request. The benefits of investing in infrastructure are undisputable and the need for funds is urgent and compelling, they (or their press releases) proclaimed.

    But convincing the next Congress of the need to act, whether to fund the infrastructure “down payment” of $50 billion or to authorize a proposed $500 billion multi-year surface transportation program, will not be easy. Most congressional lawmakers do not perceive infrastructure as an urgent priority. They see no signs of a popular outcry about the stalled transportation reauthorization, nor do they perceive a groundswell of grassroots support for massive transportation investments.

    Indeed, what the lawmakers see is just the opposite. They witness New Jersey voters strongly approving Governor Chris Christie’s decision to cancel work on the long-planned rail tunnel under the Hudson River because, says the Governor, “the state simply doesn’t have the money” to pay for overruns in the potential $9-14 billion project. Mr. Christie, no doubt, has in mind the experience of Boston’s Big Dig which was projected in 1982 to cost $2.8 billion and ended up costing $15 billion.

    The lawmakers also see Republican candidates for governor in California (Meg Whitman), Florida (Rick Scott), Ohio (John Kasich) and Wisconsin (Scott Walker) pledging to cancel high-speed rail projects in their states if elected — and running ahead of their Democratic opponents who unanimously support President Obama’s $8 billion high-speed rail initiative. They see the public greeting with a yawn a bold and visionary Amtrak proposal to link Boston and Washington with a dedicated high-speed rail line. They read in a much noticed Sunday Times Magazine article “Education of a President,” (October 12) that the President himself thinks “there’s no such thing as ‘shovel-ready projects’ when it comes to public works.” And they hear an Administration unable to explain how the $50 billion infrastructure initiative will be paid for. When asked, a top administration official could only lamely reply “Stay tuned, we’ll let you know.”

    More evidence of public reluctance to spend on infrastructure comes from the findings of a new October 2010 survey by the Pew Center on the States and the Public Institute of California titled “Facing the Facts: Public Attitudes and Fiscal Realities in Five Stressed States.” By a large margin, respondents in five states (California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois and New York) showed a strong unwillingness to support additional transportation funding and offered to put transportation on the chopping block when asked which of their state’s biggest expenses they would least protect from budget cuts.

    It may be impolitic to suggest it, but dire warnings about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure seem to come largely from organized interests — stakeholders and advocacy groups. That is not to say that the nation’s transportation infrastructure has not been neglected or that America does not need better roads and transit systems. But rightly or wrongly, congressional lawmakers often discount cries about “crumbling infrastructure” as self-serving demands for more government money, often for projects that yield small economic return.

    Moreover, many lawmakers come from rural districts that experience little traffic congestion, whose roads are well maintained and which never hope to benefit from high-speed rail service. Their reluctance to spend more money on public works also has been fueled by what they see as disappointing results from the stimulus initiative. As Rep. John Mica (R-FL), ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and potential future T&I Committee chairman in the 112th Congress likes to point out, more than 60 percent of the stimulus infrastructure dollars still remain unspent, while unemployment in the construction industries remains high. All this adds weight to the legislative reluctance to tackle an ambitious infrastructure spending bill any time soon.

    As one of our colleagues, a sincere and lifelong transportation advocate, put it, “the transportation community is mostly talking to itself and living in denial about the changing political mood.” That mood—in the nation at large as well as in the next Congress— is unmistakably becoming more conservative and skeptical of big government. An overwhelming 70 percent of Americans think the government does not spend taxpayers’ money wisely, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Newly elected members of Congress will be marching to the drum of fiscal discipline and looking for ways to curb out-of-control spending, a GOP aide told us. Congress will be closely questioning costly new federal initiatives no matter how well intentioned, he added. The expansive federal-aid surface transportation program as we have known it in the past may no longer be thought politically acceptable or fiscally affordable.

    And who knows, the new mood of fiscal restraint may even infect the White House. As one senior White House adviser, quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine story, put it, “there’s going to be very little incentive for big things over the next two years unless there’s some sort of crisis.” And we doubt that by this he meant “infrastructure crisis.”

    Ken Orski has worked professionally in the field of transportation for over 30 years.

    Photo by woodleywonderworks

  • The EPA: Leading Into A Rain Garden?

    Newly-installed solar Panels on the White House are an obvious signal that this administration wants to lead by example. Conservatives will no doubt find ways to ridicule the panels, and liberals will praise them as a display to the world that we are a green nation. About one year ago, on Oct. 5, 2009, the President signed Executive Order (EO) 13514, “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance.” Like the white house solar panels, this EO also is intended to urge federal agencies to lead by example. It sets as policy that federal agencies shall “…conserve and protect water resources through efficiency, reuse, and storm water management.”

    How far have we come… and how far are we likely to be able to go in achieving these goals?

    For federal facilities, the EPA’s green infrastructure solutions , biological systems and engineered systems include, but are not necessarily limited to:

    • Rain gardens, bioretention, and infiltration planters
    • Porous pavements
    • Vegetated swales and bioswales
    • Green roofs
    • Trees and tree boxes
    • Pocket wetlands
    • Reforestation/revegetation
    • Protection and enhancement of riparian buffers and floodplains
    • Rainwater harvesting for use (e.g., irrigation, HVAC make‐up, non‐potable indoor uses)

    For new facilities, these would be good moves. For many years, our design firm has been planning new developments with very low environmental impacts, using approaches that have been either volunteered by the developer or mandated by the local regulations. We accomplish low impact designs by reducing the infrastructure needed for new development, which reduces both economic and environmental impact. Land development can be more efficient, when designed properly, than conventional or Smart Growth design methods; it can allow lower development costs while still complying with EPA mandates. It can be done by harnessing new design methods made possible by the development of new technologies. While “green” brings an image to builders’ minds of expensive, problematic development, being “green” can be less expensive if done right.

    Speaking from my experience in designing 700 neighborhoods in 46 States (and 13 countries), all with innovative design methods, and building a Net-Zero home in 1983, as well as a dual-certified Green home in 2009, here’s how I evaluate the likelihood of success of the current EPA options:

    Rain gardens, bioretention, and infiltration planters: These organic methods are possibly the most economically viable, but they do come with constant maintenance costs that the building facility owner must be aware of. A bio-retention that is not designed properly or maintained constantly will quickly fail. Unlike concrete pipes and iron sewer grates along curbs which can be left alone for decades, an organic solution to storm water must be installed by an experienced expert with a proven track record, and maintained by personnel that know what they are doing. If built correctly and maintained constantly, this can be the lowest cost solution IF there is enough land area and proper topography (flow of the land) to design the system properly in the first place. Typically, these systems rely on surface flow with no curbing or special curbing to allow drainage off paved areas. On newly developed sites, this could mean a significant cost saving. On existing development, replacing curb may be expensive.

    Porous pavements: Sounds simple – install a pavement that allows rain to flow through to the ground. The big problem and huge expense comes from making sure that the ground under the pavement also porous. In other words, if you were to remove an asphalt parking lot and replace it with porous asphalt, the environmental impact would not change. Why? Because under the original asphalt is likely a non-porous class 5 (or similar) base. In a genuinely porous paved surface, the storm water moving through the pavement must continue through the ground below. This means a base that allows storm water to be held and filtered slowly to the ground below, or directed elsewhere. Sounds expensive? You betcha! Two other major problems: heavy vehicles used at federal facilities could damage these systems, and, if the ground freezes, expansion could be a problem. Long term lifespan of porous pavements may be less than that of solid surfaces.

    Vegetated swales and bioswales: See rain gardens, above.

    Green roofs: Retrofit Green Roofs on to buildings not originally designed for them? Green roofs did not work well in 1983 when I built my Net-Zero home during the first (failed, somehow forgotten) green movement, so I’m not sure what has changed to make them feasible. Green roofs can absorb the sun’s energy to solve the heat island problem of large facilities, but simply coating a dark roof with a light or white color solves the heat island problem with little expense.

    Trees and tree boxes: Trees and tree boxes will have little impact on reducing storm water impacts. Of course there are other benefits for planting trees, so, while a good thing, this does little to comply with the mandate.

    Pocket wetlands: See rain gardens, above.

    Reforestation/revegetation: Assumes the federal facility has plenty of space to allow such a thing.

    Protection and enhancement of riparian buffers and floodplains: Assumes there are riparian buffers and flood plains on the site, or adjacent to the site, that can be altered.

    Rainwater harvesting for use (e.g., irrigation, HVAC make‐up, non‐potable indoor uses): Also a good solution when possible. For example, when 90% of the surface is paving and rooftop, the resulting storage of rainfall could be tremendous, depending upon where in the country the facilities are located, and ample to irrigate the remaining small surface.

    Nobody is an expert on all issues, so there may be new factors that I’m not aware of that would make a method more feasible than what we have experienced.

    What is completely missing from the EPA options here are ways to make an existing facility more efficient by removing excessive paved areas. When an existing facility was originally designed, was it efficient in the first place? Keep in mind that being efficient is not necessarily profitable. If the original consulting engineer and architectural firm fees were based upon a percentage of construction costs, then creating excessive construction costs meant larger fees. Paving contractors maximize profit by covering the most land possible with asphalt or concrete.

    The EPA order can be an opportunity to help design solutions that are cost effective to comply with the mandate. For my firm, the mandate could leverage our low impact software system sales, a technology that can be used to reduce wasteful construction while in redevelopment, so we may directly benefit from this mandate. But before that can happen — and before we can know how successful the EPA directives will be — many questions remain to be answered.

    Photo: Pigeons in front of the EPA building by benchilada

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

  • Latino Dems Should Rethink Loyalty

    Given the awful state of the economy, it’s no surprise that Democrats are losing some support among Latinos. But they can still consider the ethnic group to be in their pocket. Though Latinos have not displayed the lock-step party loyalty of African-Americans, they still favor President Barack Obama by 57 percent, according to one Gallup Poll — down just 10 percentage points from his high number early in the administration.

    This support is particularly unusual, given that probably no large ethnic group in America has suffered more than Latinos from the Great Recession. This is true, in large part, because Latino employment is heavily concentrated in manufacturing, and even more so in construction.

    A half-million Latino workers in the construction sector — in which their share of the work force is double what it is in the broader economy — have lost their jobs since the start of the recession.

    Unfortunately, the Obama stimulus plan was light on physical infrastructure. It favored Wall Street, public-sector unions and large research universities. Big winners included education and health services — in which Latinos are under-represented.

    Not surprisingly, Latino communities across the country are in trouble. Today, of the 10 most economically “stressed” counties, seven are majority or heavily Latino, according to The Associated Press.

    Theoretically, Republicans should be able to take advantage of this situation. But not with the party’s increasing embrace of its noisy nativist right — evident not only in support of the controversial Arizona immigration law but also in the strong move against “birthright citizenship.” This makes the prospect of earning back President George W. Bush’s 40-plus-percentage-point support difficult at best.

    Thus, Latinos remain allied with Democrats whose policies inhibit the growth of construction and manufacturing jobs. This dichotomy puzzles many in the business community.

    “You have all these job losses in Latino districts represented by Latino legislators who don’t realize what they are doing to their own people,” said Larry Kosmont, a California business consultant. “They have forgotten there’s an economy to think about.”

    Despite that economic logic, Latino Democrats mindlessly follow liberal Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Henry Waxman of California and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who represent largely white, affluent white-collar constituencies on issues such as cap and trade and federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Whatever the intent, these policies are likely to further decimate blue-collar employment in Latino districts.

    If they had independent thoughts, Latino Democratic politicians would be advocating positions that create new opportunities for their districts — particularly among young people. They could push, for example, a Works Progress Administration-like public works program that could provide new opportunities and skills training.

    One possible reason for not doing so is the opposition of public employee unions, which dominate Democratic politics, particularly in urban districts, and would see such a program as competing against their special interests.

    In contrast, Obama administration policies favor Ivy League schools, high-speed rail and light-rail service — issues with predominantly well-to-do, Anglo constituencies.

    This disjunction between interests and politics is particularly evident in California, the state with the largest Latino population. Latino Democrats have generally embraced the state’s draconian environmental and planning policies.

    The state’s fertile Central Valley offers one example. A green-inspired diversion of water from farms to save an obscure species of fish has forced more than 450,000 acres to lie fallow. Thousands of agricultural jobs — held mostly by Latinos — have been lost, perhaps permanently. Unemployment, which stands at 17 percent across the valley, reaches upward of 40 percent in towns like Mendota.

    These policy positions speak to the limits of the current Latino leadership. Latino political power has waxed in Sacramento since 1999 — the state Assembly has had three Latino speakers. But on the ground, things have waned for the state’s Latino working class. During the past decade, according to research from California Lutheran University, the state has experienced one of the nation’s most dramatic drops in household earnings — between $35,000 and $75,000 in lost income.

    The pain at the bottom of the economic ladder is even greater. Indeed, according to Deborah Reed of the left-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, when housing and other costs are factored in, three heavily Latino counties — Los Angeles, Fresno and Monterey — rank among the 10 poorest metropolitan areas in the United States. Increasing numbers of working- and middle-class Latinos have been migrating to more job-friendly areas such as Texas and the Plains states.

    Latino Democratic politics are equally dysfunctional at the local level. In the largely Hispanic industrial belt south of downtown Los Angeles, for example, a sprawling Latino machine, marked by near Chicago-scale corruption, now controls most elective posts. Many of its leaders — most outrageously in the city of Bell — have proved far more adept at feathering their own nests than at reviving local economies.

    A similar disconnect can be seen in the City of Los Angeles, where corruption and inefficiency have led some local entrepreneurs to invest in other regions. “It’s extremely difficult to do business in Los Angeles,” said retail developer Jose de Jesus Legaspi. “The regulations are difficult to manage. … Everyone has to kiss the rings of the [City Hall politicians].”

    L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa epitomizes this self-defeating ethnic politics. Last year, for example, Cecilia Estolano, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, supported shifting resources from building high-end housing and amenities downtown to rejuvenating the large industrial district, a major employer of blue-collar Latinos.

    Her efforts quickly ran afoul of Villaraigosa, whose staff favors pouring more money into downtown amenities — even if doing so drives out industrial jobs. Estolano, who now works for a local nonprofit, says the lack of interest in manufacturing and the blue-collar economy is easy to explain: campaign contributions.

    “The problem is manufacturers in L.A. are mostly small and don’t contribute to campaigns,” Estolano said. “L.A.’s politics are controlled by real estate interests, their lawyers and consultants.”

    As Latinos become a critical part of our emerging economy, they need to develop a policy agenda that focuses less on old-style, machine ethnic politics and more on the critical issue of upward mobility.

    Latino voters might also consider avoiding the African-American one-party model by embracing both growth-oriented Democrats and enlightened Republicans. This is most likely to increase their political leverage, while creating a politics that supports their most fundamental interests.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. 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 chadlewis76

  • Health Care: Booster Shot for Jobs?

    As a former health care human resources executive, I’m often drawn to the local hospital in whatever city I’m visiting. A city’s health care environment reflects its social, cultural and economic state. Because the local medical center complex is often the largest employer in town, it would seem that strong fiscal returns would be rewarded to those cities that strategically aligned their economic development efforts to capitalize on growing this sector. Unfortunately, the health industry has historically been viewed as a local disaster, replete with quality of care issues, bureaucratic inefficiencies and high costs.

    While the spiraling costs, the inefficiencies, and the future of reform are often talked about, little attention is given to health care jobs as springboards to enliven local and regional economies. The steady parade of doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff at our medical establishments provide cities with a huge multiplier effect on nearby housing, restaurants and retail businesses. The trickle-down effect spreads outward to hospital manufacturers, suppliers, pharmaceutical companies, and other ancillary firms that serve as the lifeblood of a functioning health care system. The economic activity of the medical business extends well beyond hospital walls; it’s a high-octane job engine, with the buying power of health professionals helping to sustain struggling communities.

    With current U.S. unemployment rates stagnating at high levels, the robust quantity of workforce activity resonating through hospital corridors is good news for our nation’s cities and regions. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1.7 million new jobs have been added to the health care sector since 2001. This figure includes employment gains in health insurance, construction, pharmaceuticals, biotech, the life sciences and other complementary fields. More impressively, the DOL estimates that by 2018 there will be a 21% employment increase in health practitioners (1.6 million jobs) and a 29% increase in health care support roles (1.1 million jobs). Health care also currently boasts the lowest unemployment rate of any industry, and salaries average a respectable $43,700.

    Cleveland, Ohio, is a prime example of a city that has undermined its economic potential by permitting dubious redevelopment efforts – centered on sports complexes and museums – to overshadow assets such as the Cleveland Clinic and the University Hospitals Health System, which together encompass 51,000 employees.

    Like most Rust Belt cities, Cleveland sorely needs an infusion of jobs outside of the long diminished blue collar sector. It could build collaboratively on its health care niche, creating complementary clusters of medically related firms in the life sciences and health information systems that would bring new opportunities and life to the area. The city’s world-class medical establishments could supply the ideal springboard for branding Cleveland as a global medical hub, rather than as the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum.

    One Cleveland-area organization, BioEnterprise, is taking the lead in fueling the growth and commercialization of health care companies in the bioscience sector. A collaborative effort between top medical and higher education institutions in the region, BioEnterprise is a promising attempt to alleviate Cleveland’s persistent difficulties in generating jobs and economic growth.

    The potential economic impact of new health related establishments is also gaining attention in Shawnee, Kansas, where the Economic Development Council is pursuing plans for a Biosciences Development District to attract high-paying job opportunities. And in Solano County, California, local leaders have made savvy use of existing infrastructure, new capital investments and local tax policies to fuel growth in the emerging medical sciences corridor between Sacramento and San Francisco.

    To build a successful future around health care jobs, cities must make creative use of their local and regional assets. For example, a four-year medical school in Spokane, Washington, according to a recent report entitled “America’s Next Great Academic Health Center,” would support more than 9,000 new jobs by 2030 and generate nearly 1.6 billion in new economic activity for the area.

    Here’s a concept of a model for job creation and economic growth: the Medical District Oriented Development (MDOD). These multidisciplinary districts would consist of a cluster of complementary stakeholders: health care entities (hospitals and medical centers, imaging facilities, community health centers, and private and specialty clinics); durable equipment manufacturers and providers, and pharmaceutical and life science research institutions. Livable communities, these districts would include housing, retail, and transportation options operating on the fringe of the medical campus setting.

    Unlike the much discussed Transportation Oriented Development paradigm, MDODs would not be faced with the “cart before the horse” issue; there wouldn’t be a question of whether to create demand before building the infrastructure or vice-versa. The magic behind MDODs would be a health care sector that already possesses a mature yet growing cadre of physicians, nurses, technicians and researchers who would serve as a captive audience for new development initiatives.

    In Sacramento, the U.C. Davis Medical Center campus possesses many of the building blocks of a successful medical district. As the flagship safety-net hospital for Northern California, the Medical Center has successfully collaborated with local task forces and associations to support the redevelopment of nearby neighborhoods, bringing new jobs to the immediate area. It has also spawned new workforce housing, restaurants and other amenities in an area that has faced hard times.

    In addition to collaboration between municipalities and medical institutions, and leveraging a region’s local assets, what else can cities do to manifest economic prosperity through health care centers? Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, note that successful transformations begin when this question is asked: What’s working now and how can we do more of it? For city leaders, the question becomes: How can we capitalize on the booming health care sector through new investments in multidisciplinary medical districts, including housing and transportation options?

    When cities and regions choose to create synergies between their communities and their medical campuses, the prognosis is promising for an economic cure.

    Photo: Christiana Care health workers submit Magnet Recognition Program documents to the American Nursing Credentialing Center.

    Michael P. Scott is an associate with Centro, Inc, a Denver-based consulting firm focused on the future of our city centers. He can be reached at michael@becentro.com

  • The Suburbanization of Religious Diversity

    You can see the changes. A drive through suburban Lake County, IN, an hour from downtown Chicago makes you feel like you are somewhere between the set of Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and the movie Hoosiers. Cultural and religious diversity would probably be the last two things on your mind in a region known more for its steel industry than its sacred space.

    Yet a quick glance to the east side of Colorado Street heading south makes you question your assumptions. Neatly tucked between farm land and homes sitting on lots of an acre or more, you see two structures that cause you to scratch your head and wonder, “Am I really in Indiana?” The Northwest Indiana Islamic Center and the region’s Sikh Temple of the Sikh Religious Society of Indiana sit side by side. They provide a visual reminder that suburban America has changed.

    In fact, much has changed. Religion in America is alive and well, but it’s different. Although Christian churches continue to dominate the religious landscape in the United States, there are new religious neighbors. Cultures and religious traditions that once existed “somewhere over there”, have moved beyond the large cities of the U.S. into the suburbs and exurbs, places where evangelical mega-churches have flourished for decades.

    Today, the United States is arguably the most religiously diverse place on the planet. And if the ethnic makeup of the U.S. stays its course for the next half-century, religious diversity will grow exponentially. The Census Bureau predicts that minorities will become the majority in the U.S. within 40 years. Religion in America could have a more robust Latino-Catholic flavor, with Hispanics numbering one in three U.S. residents by 2050. American religious geography will also include influences from Asian Indian cultural traditions. In Bible Belt states like Georgia, Hinduism is one of the fastest growing religions with more than 40,000 Hindus in the state, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. By 2000, Islam had already surpassed Southern Baptists in Chicago, with more than 120,000 adherents. Less than 10 years later, Chicago’s Muslim population is estimated to be around 400,000. The big new thing is that this diversity is increasingly found in suburbs. Throughout the country’s history, the places where religious and cultural diversity have been most concentrated were her cities. In fact, this has been the case around the globe. Immigrants journeyed to urban contexts en masse. The city provided the best place for jobs, people networks, and ethnic and cultural affinities. And, a smorgasbord of religious enclaves in the city made it easy for spiritually-minded people to connect and worship with other adherents in their particular tribe.

    On the other hand, the suburban and rural places were viewed as narrow-minded and ethnically homogenous. They were often seemed – and sometimes were – hostile to different religions and cultures.

    In the not-too-distant past, the suburbs were, for the most part, devoid of religious adherence outside of Catholic, mainline, or evangelical groups. However, demographic shifts have put the suburbs on a different trajectory. And religious traditions have followed suit.

    From an ethnic and religious standpoint, cities and suburbs have changed. Some would say they have changed sides. Of course cities will continue to grow, as more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in city-regions today. City-regions will undoubtedly become more diverse. However, there are major changes to the way we think about communities and their populations in an area of globalization and urbanization. Demographers like Audrey Singer of the Brookings Institution have pointed out that cities have become more suburban-like, and suburbs have become more city-like, though this transition has been slowed to some degree by the current recession.

    Newer cities like Atlanta and older ones like Baltimore share this same pattern. It does not matter if the city is more suburban-like, or if the city is more like the archetypical city built with an infrastructure suitable for immigrants. Both are regions where foreign-born populations bypass the city altogether. This process was well under way before the turn of the last century, when census data revealed that foreign-born populations preferred suburbs over cities.

    Not surprisingly, this phenomenon also brought changes in the country’s religious landscape. Yes, the city and her urban districts remain a viable context to find places of faith, but things have shifted a bit.

    For example, in the past century, Islam, by design an urban religion, certainly migrated to large cities in the U.S. – notably Detroit, Chicago, and New York. But today the ummah has spread to smaller cities and suburban settings. Many Muslims have moved beyond the urban perimeter. Dearborn, MI and Northwest Indiana’s Lake County are two good examples, but these are by no means the exceptions.

    Suburban-friendly cities with large evangelical populations like Atlanta have also seen an increase in other faith traditions. In 2006 and 2007, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, said to be the largest Hindu temple of its kind in the United States, was built in suburban Gwinnett County in Lilburn, GA. Much of Georgia’s Hindu population is centered in the sprawling suburbs around Atlanta. The Daily Beast recently ranked Atlanta #6 on their list of the 30 leading cities for Muslims in America (see America’s Muslim Capitals). Two other smaller cities in Georgia made the list, — Albany and Columbus.

    Not only are other religious traditions navigating the suburbs and smaller cities well, but non-Anglo evangelical populations are trending suburban too. Atlanta’s large Korean population is primarily suburban, as are the city’s Korean churches. In the ethnically diverse Atlanta suburb of Duluth, a city of roughly 26,000, the majority of new churches started since 2000 have been Korean. The Korean Church of Atlanta (UMC) is on the path to become a mega-church with new construction and an estimated 1700 people who regularly attend. Korean churches in Duluth and the surrounding area are very diverse themselves, denominationally speaking. Korean congregations include churches from Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Independent denominations.

    Back in Northwest Indiana, despite the decline of manufacturing jobs and high unemployment rates, the region continues to grow, albeit incrementally. Perhaps the most intriguing statistic is the number of immigrants who have moved to the region in recent years. Between 1990 and 2000, more than 70 percent of Lake County’s growth was attributed to immigration, according to a Purdue University study on immigration in Indiana. Ethnic changes in Lake County brought shifts to the area’s religious geography, too. In the county’s suburban communities of Merrillville and Crown Point, residents can find the aforementioned Islamic Center, an Islamic school, an Indian Cultural Center, the Sikh Temple, and Serbian, Macedonian, and Croatian congregations.

    Some of these changes to Lake County’s religious community came during a period of rapid decline in church attendance. In 2008, The Northwest Indiana Times reported a drop in church attendance of almost 30 percent between 1990 and 2000. This does not mean that all churches in the county are shrinking. Some, in fact, have become quite large. But their biggest source of growth may not be from less familiar religious traditions.

    Economic and social values will continue to intersect new religious traditions in the suburbs as minorities and immigrant populations grow. The culture of suburbs, with individualist values, will continue to have a varying affect on how religious groups establish and sustain themselves. It will be interesting to see how new religious groups affect the culture around them in the suburban neighborhoods they now call home.

    Religion is not going away as some 20th century scholars presumed. What is changing is the country’s religious complexion. How communities grapple with this change may say much about how they thrive in the future.

    Since 2006, Travis Vaughn has conducted community studies in a number of U.S. cities. He is a visiting instructor at Covenant Theological Seminary and is the catalyst behind cityandcitizen.com, coming in the fall of 2010.

  • America’s 21st-Century Business Model

    Current attitudes aren’t too kind to the old American way of doing business. In our globalized economy, the most enthusiastically touted approaches are those adopted by centralized, state-dominated economies such as China, Brazil and Russia as well as–somewhat less oppressively–those of the major E.U. states.

    Yet the U.S. may well be constructing the best sustainable business model for the 21st Century. It is an approach built on the country’s greatest enduring strength–an innovative business culture driven increasingly by a diverse pool of immigrants.

    This model, of course, lacks the kind of centralized control beloved by many pundits. Yet its virtues are also missing from statist-oriented European or East Asian capitalism. These other regions’ systems may be more disciplined in their thinking, but they do not draw as well on the diversity of human experience and connections that drive America’s post-racial economy.

    This is not to suggest that state-based, national capitalism is inferior, but that it may not apply so well to this vast, highly diversified economy–just look at the stimulus. If the U.S. wants to retain pre-eminence, it needs to go with what makes it a great country: its protean national and increasingly post-racial business culture.

    This evolution is increasingly evident at the very top of our economy. Between 1990 and 2005 immigrants started one quarter of all venture-backed public companies. Large American firms are also increasingly led by people with roots in foreign countries, including 14 of the CEOs of the 2007 Fortune 100. Even the top tier of corporate America–once the almost-exclusive reserve of native-born Anglo-Saxon–increasingly reflects the diversification of the larger society.

    Already, for example, eight Indian American CEOs run U.S. corporations with over $2 billion in sales, including companies like Citicorp, Adobe Systems and Pepsico. Pepsi’s historic rival, Coca Cola, is now run by Muhtar Kent, a native of Turkey. Foreign CEOs also include Kellogg’s Australian-born David Mackay and Ethan Allen’s M. Farooq Kathwari, yet another native of India.

    This process will intensify in the coming decades. Take for instance the case of Li Lu, a former Tiananmen Square activist now widely expected to take the helm of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway when the old billionaire retires. Imagine if a former American radical was placed in charge of one of China’s huge state-supported enterprises. Not likely.

    One critical harbinger can be seen in the current crop of students at top U.S. business schools. Between one-third and one-half all students at Stanford, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and UC Berkeley come from abroad. These schools are training camps for immigrants transitioning into careers as American entrepreneurs.

    Equally important, immigrant commerce also thrives at the grassroots level. It manifests most visibly in the proliferation of small stores, restaurants, food-processing businesses, garment factories and trucking lines. Overall, immigrants are 60% more likely to start a new business than native-born Americans. The number of self-employed immigrants has grown even in New York City, where the number of self-employed among the native-born has dropped.

    Immigrant businesses have thrived by providing basic services, such as banks, insurance agents, funeral homes and grocery stores. Some of these businesses arose because the mainstream community had failed to identify opportunities in these markets or had consciously decided to exclude them.

    This follows a historical pattern. In the past many immigrants succeeded by focusing on an economic specialty–Jews in the garment industry, Chinese in laundries, Greeks in diners, and Italians in green groceries, barbershops and fish stores. Ultimately, some moved beyond these niches and began to develop whole new business models. One clear example is A. P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy in San Francisco, which eventually became Bank of America, a pioneer in mass market branch banking. Other ethnic businesses, often drawing on ways of doing business brought from abroad, have propelled the growth of whole industries, such as the garment industry in New York and later Los Angeles.

    There is clearly something in the immigrant experience that encourages innovation–one can call it the advantage of non-acceptance. Take the founding generation of the film industry–Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor. They had their roots in the Jewish enclave economy in the eastern cities. The great historian Irving Howe notes that the immigrant need to find an unoccupied or underserved niche shaped these often “vulgar, crude and overbearing” men. That they became founders of the nation’s premier cultural industry, Howe noted, “was something of a miracle and something of a joke.”

    We are now witnessing a continuation of this process, and on a scale simply not seen in other countries. In 2005 the U.S. swore in more new citizens than the next nine countries put together. The national immigration debate may focus largely on low-skilled newcomers, but more than half of all skilled immigrants in the world also come to the U.S. Even with the continent’s slow-growing population, Europe continues to be a major source of American immigrants, particularly skilled workers, with some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates residing in the U.S.

    These newcomers are a prime source of entrepreneurial vitality. In the 21st century Asians, like the Jews and Italians before them, have concentrated in specific niches and expanded outside the boundaries of historic ghettos. Indians from the subcontinent, who arrived in large numbers starting in the 1970s, specialized in hotels and motels across the country. Koreans opened up green groceries in New York and Los Angeles. Vietnamese became well-known for nail parlors, and Cambodians for owning doughnut stores. Overall Asian enterprises expanded roughly twice the national average through the first several years of the new century.

    This pattern can be seen particularly in food-related businesses. In Houston, once dominated by Southern cooking, nearly one in three restaurants serves Mexican or Asian cuisine. Together they account for more establishments than hamburger, BBQ and Italian restaurants put together. Nationwide, as pizza, hamburger and “traditional” fast-food restaurants have stagnated, new chains that sell quick, inexpensive Mexican or Asian food have flourished. Immigrant-founded firms such as El Pollo Loco, Wolfgang Puck and Panda Express, are emerging as the McDonalds of 21st-century America.

    The emerging post-racial economy provides two distinct opportunities for American business. First the newcomers offer a new domestic “emerging” market. Taken together, purchases by African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, have exploded, growing far more rapidly than the national average. Combined with Latinos, these minorities could account for over $2.5 trillion by 2010, close to $1 in every $4 in total U.S. consumer spending.

    But perhaps even more important may be the uniquely international cast of American business. Heads of corporations and senior executives of many leading American firms will not have to go to graduate school in international training; they will have received theirs at home, talking to parents or grandparents who migrated from Mexico, Cuba, Russia, Iran, China, India, Israel or a host of other countries.

    This diversity will allow Americans to tap the global market, and culture, in ways other countries and their state-based enterprises just can’t match. It is in this model, not in imitating foreign ones, that American business can find the path to greater success in the globalized, dispersed economy of the 21st century.

    This article 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. 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 SEIU International

  • Millennials Are Looking for Something Completely Different

    As the country’s political distemper grows, many commentators, reflecting their own generational biases, mistakenly assume that voters are looking for less government as the solution to the nation’s ills. But survey research data from Washington think tank, NDN, shows that a majority of Americans (54%), and particularly the country’s youngest generation, Millennials, born 1982-2003, (58%), actually favor a more active government, rather than one that “stays out of society and the economy.”

    “Dissatisfaction with Obama and the Democratic Congress,” generational expert Neil Howe has observed, “is probably more fed by their failure to use government boldly and vigorously to face hard challenges than by their excessive boldness.”.

    What Millennials are looking for in terms of public policy, to borrow John Cleese’s warning to his Monty Python audience, is something completely different. They are not buying into the tired approaches of either party that have produced the current partisan gridlock in Washington.

    Millennials are not interested in letting ideological posturing stand in the way of “getting stuff done,” as they like to say. Their generation’s idealism – in sharp contrast to the more ideological approach adopted by Boomers – is characterized by a pragmatic impulse focused on finding practical solutions to problems. Much like the civic generations – most notably the World War II era “greatest generation” – before them, Millennials want to reinvigorate the nation’s institutions utilizing government to improve basic conditions in areas as diverse as health care, education and environmental protection.

    However, unlike America’s last civic generation, the GI Generation (born 1901-1924), Millennials do not want to place responsibility for achieving their desired results in a remote, opaque bureaucracy. After all, Millennials were not shaped either by the New Deal era or the Second World War, when government expanded to deal with economic and international concerns that threatened the very existence of American democracy. . Instead they tend to see government’s role more like that of their parents who set the rules but left room for negotiation on what the rewards would be for abiding by the rules as well as the consequences for not doing so. In this Millennialist approach, government provides information and resources to help individuals connect and learn from each other but let’s each person decide how best to discharge their civic obligations.

    The healthcare reform legislation that was forged out of the white heat of the political debate in Congress came surprisingly close to this model. It disappointed ideological Boomers on both sides of the aisle. Liberals didn’t get their dream of a single payer system or even its “nose-under-the-tent” counterpart, the so-called public option. But conservatives were unable, even after Republican Scott Brown’s surprise election as a United States Senator from deep blue Massachusetts, to prevent Congress from mandating that every person in America buy health insurance in order to achieve the goal of universal access. By building a framework for universal coverage on the scaffolding of the existing private insurance system, the final legislative solution used the liberal approach of regulation and national mandates to create a new role for government, but kept government out of the business of actually providing health care.

    The final shape of that reform reflects a new Millennialist approach to the making and implementation of public policy. This approach will result in setting new national standards in many aspects of our national life while, at the same time, allowing individuals to make their own choices about how to comply with those standards.

    The recent adoption by a majority of states of national curriculum standards for what students must learn in core disciplines such as English, math and science is further evidence of this trend. These standards, developed and coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers, outlines “the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers,” without dictating how schools should teach the material.

    Meanwhile the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” grant program, has sparked a firestorm of educational reform legislation in states competing for the money that weaken the hold of administrators and teachers’ unions on what goes on in the classroom. The demands of the parents of Millennials for bottom line results, reflected in such grass roots initiatives as the Parent Revolution in California and Connecticut, is providing the political support needed to take on the current educational monopoly. This will help open the door to widespread experimentation about what works best at the local school level.

    As of yet, there is no sign at the national level that a more Millennialist approach to addressing concerns over global warming and environmental degradation has been achieved. But the failure of Congress to pass more bureaucratic approaches, such as cap-and-trade, suggest there is an opportunity for such ideas to take hold in the future. For instance, a campaign to reduce the carbon intensive nature of the nation’s infrastructure could include a government sponsored effort to display the carbon footprint of most consumer products. This would allow individuals decide how to alter their personal purchasing decisions to produce the most environmentally favorable results.

    Similarly, the goal of reducing fuel consumption per family could be achieved by providing tax incentives for telecommuting or for trading in aging gas guzzlers for vehicles that exceed the newly strengthened fuel economy standards for passenger cars. These policies, and others like them, would leave it up to each individual to decide the extent to which they wish to contribute to environmental improvement. Just as anti- smoking campaigns financed by taxes on cigarettes has been found to be an effective deterrent to smoking , the strategy would be to “nudge” rather than command behavior in order to achieve the desired policy goal. Given the strong environmental sensitivity of the younger generation, this approach will likely accomplish more in terms of actual carbon usage reduction than the ideologically-driven schemes proposed by Boomers in Congress.

    The trajectory of public policy in a Millennial Era is becoming increasingly evident. The push for an increasing number of national standards and preferred behavior will cause libertarians to decry the evolving “nanny state” and argue strenuously against an increasingly intrusive government. But liberals, too, may be upset by approaches that eschew “top down” bureaucratic solutions and focus on using government to improve society without new administrative burden.

    In the future the public, led by Millennials, will be the one forging sustainable solutions. National consensus, coupled with localism and individual choice, will become the watchwords of the nation’s newest civic era.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of the New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the 10 favorite books by the New York Times in 2008.

    Photo by Vincent J. Brown

  • We Trust Family First

    Americans, with good reason, increasingly distrust the big, impersonal forces that loom over their lives: Wall Street, federal bureaucracy, Congress and big corporations. But the one thing they still trust is that most basic expression of our mammalian essence: the family.

    Family ties dominate our economic life far more than commonly believed. Despite the power of public companies, family businesses control roughly 50% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the research firm Gaebler.com. Some 35% of the Fortune 500 are family businesses, but so too are the vast majority of smaller firms. Family companies represent 60% of the nation’s employment and almost 80% of all new jobs.

    And despite the glowering about impersonal corporate agriculture and the overall decline in the number of farms since the 1950s, almost 96% of the 2.2 million remaining farms are family-owned. Even among the largest 2% of farms, 84% are family-owned. The recent surge in smaller, specialized farming may actually increase this percentage in the future.

    Family life also often determines the economic success of individuals–something widely understood since the controversial 1965 Moynihan Report linked poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. Today more than half of black children live in households with a single mother, a number that has doubled since the 1960s, and they are much more likely to live in poverty than non-blacks. When you consider intact African-American families the so-called “racial gap” diminishes markedly.

    The confluence between upward mobility and strong family networks remains extraordinary not only among African-Americans but among all groups. Only 6% of married-couple families live in poverty, and most of them, like previous generations of newcomers, are likely to climb out of that state. “Families,” suggests Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, “are the major source of inequality in American social and economic life.”

    The critical importance of family runs against the mindset of pundits, corporate marketers and planners. Starting with Vance Packard’s 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, Americans have been sold the notion of a more atomized, highly individualized future. Similar alarms have been issued both on the left, from the late Jane Jacobs, and by conservative observers, like Francis Fukuyama and William Bennett.

    Yet despite these predictions, our mammalian instinct to trust family first has remained very strong. Some 90% of Americans, notes social historian Stephanie Coontz, consider their parental relations close.

    This back-to-family trend has been building for at least a decade. For example, over the past 30 years the percentage of households with more than one generation of adults has grown and now stands at the highest levels since the mid-1950s. Meanwhile the once irrepressible growth of single-family households has begun to slow down, and has even dropped among those over 65. Meanwhile the numbers of adults aged 25 to 39 living with their parents jumped 32% between 2000 and 2008, before the full impact of the recession; the increase in single-centric Manhattan, notes The New York Times’ Sam Roberts, was nearly 40%.

    Unlike the typically “nuclear” families of the mid-20th century, the current crop, much like earlier generations of American families, tend to be more “blended.” In its contemporary form this includes same-sex partners, uncles, aunts, grandparents and stepparents.

    Today childrearing extends beyond the biological parents and is often shared by divorced parents, their new spouses and other family members. Grandparents and other relatives help provide care for roughly half of all preschoolers, something that has not changed significantly over time and is unlikely to do so in the future. This is even true in the Obama White House, where Marian Robinson, the First Lady’s mother, has moved in to help raise the couple’s two children.

    Of course, some still celebrate the purported demise of the family unit to support various feminist, green or dense urbanist agendas. They point out with enthusiasm that barely one in five households consists of a married couple with children living at home, even though these households account for more than one-third of the total population ,according to the Census. Yet they miss one critical point: Parents usually continue to care for and be deeply involved with their offspring even after they leave the nest.

    When people move somewhere, for instance, they tend not to do so because it is closer to their favorite jazz club or a Starbucks or even because they would get a better job–instead, their main motivation for moving is to be closer to kin. Family, as one Pew researcher notes, “trumps money when people make decisions about where to live.”

    These nesting patterns are being further buttressed by hard times. People who might have struck out on their own are staying close to home–if not at home.

    Last year Pew reported that some 10% of people under 35 moved back in with their parents. Pressed by the bad economy, the number of adults 18 to 29 who lived alone dropped from nearly 8% in 2007 to 7.3%. People are less likely to form new households in tough times.

    Similarly if people are looking to start a business, they are more likely to do so within the family. In a time of constricted credit from banks, Pew also reports a growing dependence on family members for loan. In bad times, who else can you trust besides your kin?

    Of course, the very affluent can afford to have it all–easy credit, a country house and ease of travel between their “places.” But for the middle and working classes, family ties often trump all other considerations. Real estate agent Judy Markowitz, once explained to me that being close to parents remained the primary motivation for young people staying in neighborhoods like Bayside or Middle Village in Queens, N.Y. “In Manhattan they have nannies,” she explained. “In Queens we have grandparents.”

    These basic trends are not likely to be reversed once the economy recovers. For one thing, our increasingly non-white populations remain very committed to inter-generational living; over 20% of African-Americans, Asians and Latino households–compared with 13% of whites–live in such households. Many minorities, particularly immigrants, also often tend to own small family businesses, which rely on credit and labor from extended family networks.

    And then we have to consider the new generation. The millennials, note researchers Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, are very family-oriented. Indeed three-quarters of 13-to-24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the greatest source of their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% think getting married will make them happy, and some 77% say they definitely or probably will want children.

    Anyone looking into the future of the country’s economy cannot do so without considering the continued importance of the family. Americans’ most important decisions–where to move, what to buy, whether to have children–will continue to revolve largely around the one institution most can still trust: the family.

    This article originally appeared in Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. 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: driki