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Hooked on a Feeling: Unique Experiences Help Fill Wisconsin’s Talent Pipeline

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By all measures economists use to assess the quality of life a place offers—job availability, cost of living, commute times, recreation, etc.—Wisconsin stacks up pretty well. Very well, in fact. Problem is, people don’t consult economists when choosing the best place to pursue their passions. As CEO of NEWaukee, I devote my professional life and much of my personal life to promoting Milwaukee and Wisconsin as a career and lifestyle destination. My pitch has very little to do with the metrics you find in national rankings of “best places to live” and everything to do with what it feels like to call a place home. Instead, the marketing we do is much more experiential. And it works.

Well-kept secret?

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard of a place referred to as a “well-kept secret.” Really?

If a place is truly awesome, word will spread, especially in today’s social media age. Granted, achieving national awareness of your city, region or state is challenging, but you need to ask yourself if such attention is actually warranted.

In Wisconsin, we too tell ourselves that life is good here. And we have data to back it up. For example, 85 percent of all UW System graduates remain in Wisconsin after they leave school and 60 percent of all college graduates now living in Wisconsin were also born here, the eighth highest percentage in the nation. So, clearly, there’s something that keeps people here. It is, after all, a beautiful state with plenty to do. Nonetheless, there are so many ways in which our state could be even better, and I can’t help but worry that we suffer from a feedback loop in which we talk ourselves in circles about how great we’ve got it while the rest of the world moves on about their business, leaving Wisconsin behind.

I’ve made it my life’s mission to change this place for the better, leveraging national and international placemaking’s best practices.

How I got hooked

I am not from here, and candidly, I didn’t pick Wisconsin. It picked me.

I grew up with a set of parents who were from the southside of Milwaukee. Salt of the earth type folks who often found the coldness of the Californian culture disconcerting. Wisconsin was referred to as “home” in our house throughout my childhood, but it looked nothing like the home I knew in the Bay Area. We visited Milwaukee during hot, sticky summers and attended the Wisconsin State Fair, where I have distinct memories of eating cream puffs and watching a calf being born.

Cut to a visit with my empty-nester parents in Milwaukee nine years ago. I was working in Athens, Greece, reveling in the freedom of a life as a young expat in a mega metropolitan area and the ability to order takeout at all hours of the night. Milwaukee was comparatively small and quaint, and never a real option for me, given my restlessness. Or, so I thought.

During that visit, I attended a party hosted by my future business partner and was totally swept away by the energy of the young people in Milwaukee.

The inklings of a new kind of networking organization was being explored by a group of friends that were eager to meet others their age interested in both exploring and shaping the city. I was impressed and humbled by the group’s combination of altruism and creativity and ended up dropping everything—my life in Athens and my fledgling career as an international journalist—to figure out what this “thing” could actually be.

Even before we knew where we were going, we knew what we were doing would change things. We envisioned a future in which people connected in new ways—with one another, with the city, with a future job or a future spouse. The momentum was intoxicating, and it seemed like nothing could stop us.

This “thing” became NEWaukee, a social architecture firm whose mission is to realize Milwaukee’s full potential and to empower its citizens to shape the city’s future in fulfillment of their inclusive vision.

Settling in, but not settling down

Mine is not an overnight success story (is there such a thing?). In the last decade, I have founded three businesses, all before the age of 30. Two have failed, but added to my confidence and resilience in taking the path less traveled.

Living here allowed me to get to the point. To get to the good stuff—a phase of my life that others spend years working for and often never achieve: the freedom to pursue my true passion. Unlike my peers who opted for big, coastal cities, I could afford to start a business at age 23, and do so again, and then again. I could afford to buy a house at age 26. I could afford to continue my travels—one of the best parts about being in the middle of the country is that you can go to either coast with relative ease and no long-haul flights.

While Wisconsin offers countless individual perks to its residents, the state is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Because I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck, I was able to devote all of that spare energy and time into making this a better place.

And that is why Wisconsin is an incredible place for millennials. Of all the stereotypes about my generation, the one I can attest to is our deep desire to contribute to the greater good. In Wisconsin, you have the time, space and support system to discover your passion, and to make it happen.

Yes, but is it scalable?

I have seen my experience in Wisconsin replicated over and over again across the state. And that same fervor that fueled the formation of NEWaukee has sparked similar social engagement throughout Wisconsin, most visibly in YPWeek.

YPWeek is a week-long conference of discovery, adventure and conversations about the issues that matter among young professionals in Wisconsin. YPWeek brings together community leaders in purposefully chosen locations representing unique cultural assets for meaningful learning and social interaction.

YPWeek began in 2012 as a simple showcase of Milwaukee’s offerings for young professionals eager to establish their lives in the city. Based upon the event’s early successes, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation asked NEWaukee whether the initiative could be expanded statewide. To which, we responded, “Why not?”

This year, YPWeek included nearly 30 communities throughout Wisconsin. Hundreds of events were designed to leverage the perspectives young professionals bring to their communities and workplaces as Wisconsin seeks to maintain and grow its talented workforce and foster its exceptional quality of life. Through collaboration with dozens of partners from across the state, we have created the nation’s largest and strongest statewide network of young professionals.

Young people in small and large towns across Wisconsin have united in a way that no other state can claim. Brandi Cummings, president of Y-Link in Kenosha, Wisconsin, reflects, “The network we have built together showcases what is fantastic about being young in Wisconsin while also providing the momentum for moving in the direction we need to make our communities even more desirable for the next generation to live and work. Having the opportunity to work with a statewide network of leaders with similar passions, experiences, and goals not only inspires me to do greater things in my community, but encourages me to rethink how I look at our state as a whole.”

NEWaukee is a small and nimble team fortunate to have found soulmates across Wisconsin who share our dedication to the state’s future. Together, we have moved mountains, devoting time, sweat, and in some cases our own personal resources to bring YPWeek to life in Wisconsin. In the process, we have set Wisconsin apart from any other location in terms of fulfilling millennials’ desire to shape their communities.

In the process, we have proven that place-based engagement strategies are the solution to the talent shortage that plagues every industry in Wisconsin. As Nick O’Brien from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, put it, “As a transplant to the state, the network of peers that YPWeek introduced me to is without a doubt the primary reason I’ve fallen in love with Wisconsin. Not only has the YPWeek experience been the biggest factor in my decision to stay in Wisconsin, but more importantly, it’s been the sole driver of my motivation to contribute to my community and to many other statewide efforts.”

There’s still plenty to do here in Wisconsin, and we welcome everyone eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and make a difference.

Angela Damiani is a serial entrepreneur and currently the co-founder and CEO of NEWaukee, her third venture. NEWaukee is a social architecture firm that specializes in community-based signature experiences centered on high-profile issues of importance for the state of Wisconsin. NEWaukee also provides consumer, employer brand and talent engagement services to employers looking to attract and retain talent necessary to grow their businesses. For more information about NEWaukee, please visit: www.newaukee.com.

Photo: NEwaukee, via Flickr.


Patriarchy Or No, It’s Good To Have Dad Around On Father’s Day

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This Father’s Day takes place amid growing assault on what is widely called “patriarchy.” In the era of #MeToo-inspired militant feminism, it’s become increasingly fashionable to reject maleness and castigate fatherhood, as largely irrelevant and even damaging.

To be sure, patriarchy has its faults, as #MeToo and feminists well before them have rightly pointed out. But today’s wrath is not confined to chronic abusers like Harvey Weinstein, but the entire gender.

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Superstar Effect, Harvard Graduate Edition

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The Harvard Crimson just published a piece on where the Harvard class of 2018 is going after graduation.

22% of them are going to New York (state I believe), 20% to Massachusetts, and 15% to California. The next biggest destination is Washington, DC at 4.9% (District of Columbia only?)

Another 9.1% are going international and 7.3% are undecided on where to go.

Add these numbers up and we see that 57% of Harvard grads are in NY, MA, or CA.

We also see that less than 22% of graduates definitively chose a US location other than NY, MA, CA, and DC.

Here’s the Crimson’s map, which doesn’t fully show the degree of concentration, but is interesting nevertheless.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

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: Jonathan E. Shaw, via Flickr, using CC License.

What is Middle-Income Housing Affordability?

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Few local or metropolitan issues receive more attention than housing affordability. This article provides a perspective on housing affordability. The focus is on the approach used by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which I co-author annually with Hugh Pavletich (of performanceurbanplanning.org). The Demographia Survey has been published for 14 years. This edition includes housing affordability data and ratings for nearly 300 cities (metropolitan areas) in nine nations (Note 1).

What is Housing Affordability?

Housing affordability is the relationship between housing costs and income. Affordability can only be evaluated if there is a comparison to income. Yet, analysts and journalists often use refer to house prices or rents or their increases without relation to incomes to describe housing affordability. Prices are not an indicator of affordability if they are not compared to incomes but have only anecdotal value. Nor are house price or rent trends an indicator of affordability without comparison to incomes.

What is Middle-Income Housing Affordability?

Middle-income housing affordability is important, because affordable access to quality housing has been pivotal to the democratization of prosperity that occurred in the last century in most high-income nations. Normally, the competitive market has provided middle-income housing without the need for subsidies.

Middle-income is different from low – income housing (also called "affordable housing" or “social housing”), which relies on public subsidies to serve the needs of households unable to afford the house prices or rents prevailing on the open market. Focusing on middle-income does not indicate a lesser interest in low-income housing, because subsidy eligibility requirements are tied to house prices. Better housing affordability translates into fewer households seeking housing subsidies through affordable housing programs (and less public expense).

There are two principal dimensions of middle-income housing affordability --- between housing markets and within individual market over time.

Owned and Rented Housing Affordability

Housing affordability can be measured for both owned and rented housing. Price-to-income ratios are typical for owned housing, including the “median multiple” used in the Demographia Survey (below). Percentage of incomes spent on rents are often used to evaluate rental housing affordability.

The Importance of Middle-Income Housing Affordability

Housing is usually the largest budget item for households. The differences in housing costs between major metropolitan areas now increasingly drive differences in the costs of living. Housing costs also vary far more in their high to low range than in the other two major expenditure categories, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which are services not including rents and goods. (Figure 1).

The differences are even greater when the costs of owned housing are included, as is illustrated by the COU "movers" cost of living index. This index estimates the cost of living for a domestic migrant household moving into the housing market and captures both the differences in rental and owned housing affordability. It is estimated that in the high-cost markets, 85 percent of the higher cost of living stems from higher housing costs (Figure 2).

Middle-income housing affordability is also important to the economy. Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics and Wouter Vermeulen of VU University wrote, "... [h]ousing being the dominant asset in most households’ portfolios, there are also repercussions on saving, investment and consumption choices.” Where housing is more affordable, households will have more discretionary income to purchase additional goods and services and to save (which generates investment). All of this can contribute to job creation and a stronger economy.

Not only do higher house prices lead to a lower standard of living, but can also increase poverty. For example, California has the highest housing cost adjusted poverty rate among the 50 states of the United States, at 20.4%. This compares to California's 14.5% rate without adjustment for housing costs.

Owned Housing Affordability Metrics

One of the most utilized owned housing affordability metrics is the price-to-income ratio. A United Nations publication indicated:

"If there is a single indicator that conveys the greatest amount of information on the overall performance of housing markets, it is the house price-to-income ratio. It is obviously a key measure of housing affordability. When housing prices are high relative to incomes, other things being equal, a smaller fraction of the population will be able to purchase housing."

The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey uses the median multiple (median house price divided by median household income). The evaluation criteria is in Figure 3.

The Geography of Housing Affordability

Demographia evaluates housing affordability between housing markets: Housing markets are coterminous with labor markets (metropolitan areas).Within housing markets, there will typically be a large urban area, which is defined an expanse of contiguous built-up land (see Demographia World Urban Areas). The area beyond the urban periphery is defined as the urban fringe, which is generally the land between the principal urban area and the boundaries of the metropolitan area. Typically, the urban fringe contains virtually all of the greenfield (undeveloped) land that can be used for new housing. Much of the growth of urban areas that has occurred since World War II in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States has been in detached housing tracts in greenfield areas.

Thus, for example, the New York housing market includes the entire New York metropolitan area, which stretches from Montauk Point on Long Island (east) to Pike County, Pennsylvania (west) to Ocean County, New Jersey (south) and to Dutchess County (north). The city of New York and other municipalities are only parts of the New York housing market.

Housing affordability may also be evaluated within a housing market. For example, the housing affordability in Brooklyn can be compared to that of White Plains. Or, housing affordability can be compared between more local neighborhoods, like Rainier Valley and Ballard in Seattle. Demographia evaluates housing affordability only at the housing market level and thus does not evaluate housing affordability between areas within housing markets.

The Time Dimension of Housing Affordability

The other important housing affordability comparison is historical, or over time. Thus, housing affordability may be compared for the same or multiple housing markets between 2000 and 2017.

The Need for Clarity

As many cities evaluated by Demographia suffer severe housing affordability, evaluations need to be conducted with sufficient clarity. Serious housing affordability evaluation requires comparison that includes incomes, as well as comparisons between housing markets and over time. In fact, much of the nation remains affordable by historic standards --- severe unaffordability is limited to a minority of markets. The public is misled by analyses that fail to include both prices and incomes (See related article: "Housing Affordability from Vancouver to Sydney and Toronto: Time to Do What Works").

Note 1: Metropolitan areas are "economic cities," generally not related to the physical jurisdictions of cities as local government authorities, which may be larger or smaller than metropolitan areas.

Note 2: Parts of this article are adapted from published materials I have authored or co-authored.

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.

Photograph: Exurban Charlotte, NC-SC (by author)

Which Downzoning Is Evil?

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Another day, another story about how evil single-family zoning makes housing expensive. This one is from Seattle, whose urban-growth boundary was drawn more than 30 years ago and, as far as I know, has never been changed.

This article starts from the premise that someone said that families want single-family homes so turning single-family neighborhoods into multifamily housing is “anti-family.” The writer’s response is that most of the city’s new residents are single, not families. Of course that’s true: thanks to the urban-growth boundary, most families with children can’t afford to live in the city and so choose to live in the suburbs.

Another article, this one from Los Angeles, blames affordability problems on downzoning. Only the writer doesn’t mean downzoning of rural land to prevent urban development but downzoning that took place forty years ago that took existing neighborhoods of single-family homes that had been zoned for higher densities and rezoned them for the single-family uses that were there.

None of these writers ask what kind of housing people want. They assume that people will accept the housing that is available, and if planners create an artificial land shortage, that means more multifamily housing.

When smart-growth planners do ask what people want, they load the questions and ask something like: “Would you rather live in a house with a large yard and drive everywhere or live in a house with a tiny yard and walk to shops and transit?” A more-accurate question would be: “Would you rather pay $200,000 for a 2,200-square foot home on a large lot that is easy driving distance from shops or pay $400,000 for an 1,100-square-foot condo that is easy walking distance from shops and transit or pay $600,000 for a 1,500-square-foot house on a tiny lot that is within walking distance to transit but not many shops?”

Even Millennials don’t aspire to live their lives in dense cities. At least two-thirds say they prefer to live in suburbs.

Answers to survey questions are less important than the choices people actually make, which is what economists call “revealed behavior.” And the vast majority of new households, regardless of age, are choosing suburb-like housing areas, not dense inner cities.

For reasons that have never made sense to the Antiplanner, urban planners want to change those choices. So they make a big deal of single-family zoning even though housing prices are determined more by what happens in undeveloped areas on the urban fringe than by existing developments.

The last time I brought up this subject, I wrote that “no city in the world has ever become more affordable by growing denser.” Someone pointed out a Wall Street Journal article saying that New York City has become more affordable thanks to a multifamily housing boom. American Community Survey data show that the ratio median home value to median family income in Manhattan declined from 10.6 in 2010 to 10.1 in 2016, while in Brooklyn it declined from 12.1 to 10.8 in the same years. That seems to support this idea.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, however, growth management not only makes housing more expensive, it makes prices more volatile. So we can expect to see some small fluctuations in affordability over time. However, anywhere with a price-to-income ratio greater than 10 is far from affordable — I draw the line at a ratio of 3. To be accurate, I should say that “once made unaffordable due to growth management, no city in the world has ever become affordable by growing denser.”

This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

Photo: Joe Mabel [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

America’s Vacant Housing Challenge

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Alan Mallach is out with a new study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy called “The Empty House Next Door.” It’s a look at vacant housing in America’a cities. This chart should give you a feel for the problem in a number of places.








Here are a couple of excerpts from the study:

Concentrated vacancy, what we call hypervacancy, is a particular challenge for these cities. Hypervacancy is not merely the existence of large numbers of vacant properties; it is a condition in which vacant properties—either buildings or vacant lots or both—are so extensive and so concentrated that they define the character of the surrounding area.

Hypervacancy has been rising steadily in legacy cities since the 1990s. Although only one out of sixteen census tracts in Cleveland was hypervacant in 1990, by 2010, one out of two tracts in that city had reached hypervacancy. When vacancies rise above approximately 20 percent of an area’s total properties, the number of vacant buildings and lots may continue to grow indefinitely. Although vacancies rarely reach 100 percent—because even the most distressed neighbor- hood may have a few long-term owners—the market effectively ceases to function. Houses sell, if they sell at all, only to investors at rock bottom prices while the neighborhoods become areas of concentrated poverty, unemployment, and health problems.

The number of vacant properties in the United States has been steadily rising for more than a decade. Although vacancies spiked after the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession and have dropped significantly since then, there are still far more than there were in 2000. More importantly, the number of vacant properties has not diminished everywhere. Although they have dropped back to pre-crisis levels in Sunbelt cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas, vacancies are still at epidemic levels in many older cities, particularly in the nation’s legacy cities. In many blocks or neighborhoods of legacy cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, for example, the number of vacant buildings and lots has come to outnumber the occupied ones. Typically, the areas in which these deserted structures are located also have the city’s highest concentration of poverty.

Click over to read the whole thing.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

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: *Hajee, via Flickr, using CC License.

The Big Move

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I spent the afternoon yesterday helping my neighbors pack, clean, and complete a series of fix-it projects around their apartment. They’re moving from San Francisco to a semi-rural town of 28,000 in western Massachusetts.

My neighbor bought her one bedroom apartment a decade ago for what seemed like the outrageously high price of $400,000. Today the place is worth $900,000. Now that her and her husband have a child they need more space and were confronted with the reality of what it would cost to upgrade to a slightly bigger place with a patch of garden. The numbers didn’t add up. Moving to a suburb anywhere in a two hour drive of San Francisco didn’t help since the price of anything approximating what they want is insane, and the vaguely “affordable” options were horrifying for a long list of reasons. Hence the 3,000 mile move to Massachusetts. The median home value in their new place is $280,000 – and they’re getting a big fully renovated Victorian era home on a third of an acre.

The question now is whether to rent the old apartment or sell it outright. Holding it will provide a steady rental income that will cover all their expenses in Massachusetts. Selling it will provide a lump sum of cash that will allow them to live mortgage free in their new home and have plenty of money left in savings. They still haven’t decided.

At the moment they’re leaning toward the rental option. One bedroom apartments in this location routinely fetch north of $4,700 a month. The space is relatively low maintenance. With proper screening of tenants for credit worthiness and references it should theoretically be a pretty straightforward arrangement. But being a landlord in San Francisco’s regulatory environment is not for the faint of heart. Any number of things can (and often do) go terribly wrong in a place where landlord/tenant relations are notoriously fraught with legal action. We’ll see how that goes.





































For the moment my neighbors are absorbed with the quotidian concerns of moving house and settling in to their new place. I’ll note that while they definitely wanted more space and a garden, they also wanted to be in a town with a Main Street and other “urban” amenities close at hand. I see this repeatedly with my millennial friends as they have children and migrate away from the city. They want an older neighborhood close to a smaller version of what a city offers. It doesn’t need to be San Francisco. But it isn’t all Burger Kings and Jiffy Lubes either.

This piece first appeared on Granola Shotgun.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Europe Has Lost Its Way In Culture And Economics

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In recent years, many of America’s leading lights have embraced Europe as the model for America. Books like “The European Dream” and “The United States of Europe: The New Super-power and the End of American Supremacy”, both published in 2005, as well the 2010 “The European Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” reflected a broadly progressive view that Europe represented the essence of an enlightened future. Many Western journalists, horrified by Donald Trump, have designed Germany’s Chancellor Merkel or France Emmanuel Macron as “new leaders of the Western world.”

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: SV [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons


California, Greenhouse Gas Regulation, and Climate Change

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This is an excerpt of a new report, California, Greenhouse Gas Regulation, and Climate Change, from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. The report is authored by David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez, and edited by Joel Kotkin. Read the full report (pdf) here.

California has adopted the most extensive climate change policies, laws and regulations in the United States, and the state’s climate leaders are routinely heralded for taking bold and generally unilateral action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within California’s borders to combat climate change. Although California can also claim to be the fifth largest economy in the world if it were a separate nation, the state’s actual GHG emissions account for less than 1% of the world’s anthropogenic GHG emissions. Given the state’s minuscule share of global GHG emissions, Governor Brown has often proclaimed that California’s GHG reductions will be “meaningless” unless other states and countries can be persuaded to follow California’s example.

This paper examines California’s GHG reductions between 2007 (when the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) took effect), to 2017, when the California Air Resources Board adopted the most recent “Scoping Plan” prescribing existing and proposed new GHG reduction mandates (Scoping Plan) that CARB deems required to achieve the state’s legislated mandate of reducing GHG 40% below the state’s 1990 GHG emission inventory by 2030, and the unlegislated Executive Orders issued by the current and prior governor directing the state to achieve an 80% reduction in GHG by 2050.

This paper also examines the performance of California’s economy as experienced by California residents, which presents a substantially different story than the aggregated statewide data used by CARB to conclude the state is enjoying a successful boom. In fact, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate, and by far the largest number of Americans living in poverty: about 8 million Californians, and more than 2 million children, live below the federal poverty level. California also has the nation’s highest homeless rate, and again by far the largest number of homeless Americans, including more than a quarter of a million families, children, and adults. California’s largest city, Los Angeles, counted more than 50,000 homeless individuals in 2017. California has a low unemployment rate, but extraordinarily high costs for basic necessities, including housing, electricity and transportation. For decades, California has also declined to authorize new housing construction, and experts as well as political candidates now concede that California now has a shortfall of about 3 million homes.

Read the full report (PDF) here.

Cautionary Tales from the Cities of Seattle and Philadelphia

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For some time now urban core proponents have boasted about a "return to the cities" from the suburbs. And while the urban core cities (historical core municipalities) have done better in recent years than before, the claim has been significantly overblown. Suburbs have continued to capture the "lion's share" of metropolitan growth in the United States. Moreover, suburban growth since the beginning of the overwhelming automobile oriented suburban expansion since World War II has been far greater than could ever have been explained by central city population losses (Note).

The Cities Have Done Better Lately, But Threats Loom

Nonetheless, the catastrophic population losses in the urban core cities, especially 1970 through 1990 have slowed down or stopped completely in many areas. Sadly, some of the cities that have experienced the most significant turnarounds appear not to have learned important lessons of their previous declines. Take, for example, the cities of Seattle and Philadelphia (a combined city-county), whose city councils have revealed inclinations likely to raise concern among corporations seeking expand or locate under their jurisdictions.

City of Seattle

Seattle is thought by many to be the logical successor to the San Francisco Bay area, with its information technology industry and the new wealth it has produced.

Metropolitan Seattle has become one of the world's premier information technology hubs, with Amazon in the central business district of the city and Microsoft headquartered in the suburbs. The city of Seattle's progress is of rather recent vintage. Like other urban core cities, Seattle had lost population from mid-century to 1990. In 1960, following a decade of major annexation, the city had 558,000 residents. By 1990, the population had dropped to 516,000. All the metropolitan area's growth for the last 30 years had been suburban. By the 2000 census, the city had reached 563,000, little above its population 40 years before. But the last two decades have seen much stronger growth. Since the 2010 census, the city has grown at a faster rate than any municipality with more than 500,000 population in 2017. Yet, even so, the city of Seattle accounted for only 12 percent of the metropolitan area's rapid growth between 1990 and 2017. Since 2010, the city's share of growth has risen to 27 percent.

Emboldened by the growth, support developed on Seattle's city council to deal with its mounting homelessness problem and a head tax was proposed on companies with more than $20 million in annual Seattle earned revenue. After Amazon placed a hold on an under-construction downtown tower, and business interests objected, at least in part because "Past Council action on homelessness does not inspire confidence that they would use new revenue wisely and with accountability measures that track outcomes," the council halved the proposal and adopted it. Then a campaign for repeal by voters obtained enough signatures and money to frighten the city council into repealing the tax.

The business concern about use of funds and accountability suggests that priorities and execution need improvement. That could lead to better results on the important issue of homelessness.

Despite the temporary setback some proponents continue to believe that Seattle can just about do anything it wants, since it is perceived to be so desirable. For example, an Associated Press article quoted a proponent of the Seattle tax who said "It's frustrating to see the council be so spineless when the city has so much leverage for businesses to come here despite the tax." That is precisely the kind of thinking that could kill the "golden goose" not only of the city, but also the metropolitan area. The Seattle area lost its world headquarters of Boeing some years ago. Then Boeing started building passenger jets in the Charleston area of South Carolina. The extent to which local (and state) tax policies contributed to Boeing's significant reduction of its Seattle presence is known only to the Boeing officials who weighed the factors and made the decision.

Moreover, there may be storm clouds on the horizon. Seattle has become one of the nation's most severely unaffordable metropolitan areas. The culprit is its urban containment policy, with its urban growth boundary. Seattle's house prices are now double their level relative to incomes compared to before imposition of the urban growth boundary, a pattern repeated in a number of metropolitan areas around the world.

As the cost of living rises, metropolitan areas begin to lose businesses people to elsewhere. Already, King County (where the city of Seattle is located), has seen its domestic migration drop in recent years. In 2011 through 2013, King County accounted for between 60 percent and 86 percent of the metropolitan area's net domestic migration. That has dropped to 13 percent in 2017. Seattle's high rising costs, driven by its worsening housing affordability, could soon turn the metropolitan area's net domestic migration negative, just as it has in previous growth leaders Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area. No city or metropolitan area can, in the long run, continue to attract businesses and residents if it allows its costs of living to get out of control.

City of Philadelphia

The city of Philadelphia is much different than the city of Seattle. From its peak population of 2,072,000 in 1950, Philadelphia lost about as many residents as lived in the city of Seattle at the beginning of the century, falling to 1,510,000 in 2003. But with its attractive urban core, and with improved crime rates, Philadelphia began growing again. By 2017, the city had 1,581,000 residents.

But unlike Seattle, Philadelphia does not have a huge information technology presence. Its growth is more fragile, having added 55,000 new residents since 2010, less than one-half the 126,000 gained by much smaller Seattle. After having obtained none of the metropolitan area's growth from 1960 to 2000, the city accounted for 16 percent of the growth since 2000 and an impressive 42 percent since 2010. A factor, however, in that performance is the Philadelphia area's very slow growth. Among the nation's 10 largest urban core cities, only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have grown more slowly since 2010.

Philadelphia's city council seems to be at least as emboldened as Seattle's, despite the city's far more fragile economic fundamentals. A proposal to implement a one percent tax on new construction has gained considerable support. The money would be used for affordable housing programs. To their credit, Mayor Jim Kenney, the building trades unions (whose business manager calls the proposal "dumb"), and business interests are opposed. They, at least have learned an important lesson about how to snuff out the essentials of competitiveness.

Urban Core Cities: Shaky Competitive Positions

Urban core cities continue to battle structural challenges. Our own reports have documented the higher taxes, higher spending and higher debt levels per capita of larger municipalities in Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and Ohio. Further expenditures per capita in the United States as a whole were found to be higher in larger municipalities. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, state programs to identify and assist municipalities that have fallen into fiscal distress have much higher per capita tax rates of such designation among larger municipalities. Some urban core cities may perform a greater array of functions than suburban jurisdictions, whose citizens often a slimmer package of government services.

The urban core cities need to avoid policies that weaken their competitive situations and could lead to exporting people, jobs and businesses. The recent developments in Seattle and Philadelphia suggest that, with their special interest pressures, they may face unique challenges to maintaining their competitiveness in the years ahead.

Note: There is considerable confusion about the origins of suburban growth. Much more of the gains came from outside urban areas, which attracted millions of new migrants. Indeed, since 1950, US urban areas have added more than 150 million residents, while rural areas added only 5 million. Overall, urban areas, ranging from populations of 2,500 to 20 million, had only 64 percent of the population in 1950. Yet through the next 6 censuses attracted 97 percent of the US population gain. The rest of the growth, only 3 percent was in rural areas. This was a significant turnaround, since in 1950, only 64 percent of the population was in urban areas and 36 percent in rural areas.

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.

Photograph: Downtown Seattle by Jamies [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Can Detroit's Suburbs Survive The City's Rebirth?

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I've written quite a bit about Detroit's recent history, particularly the Motor City of the last ten years -- Kwame Kilpatrick and the aftermath of his corrupt administration, the subsequent bankruptcy and emergence from it, the binding of local government, business and nonprofit forces in creating a new template for leadership, and the very real rebound that Detroit is currently experiencing. Detroit is indeed booming, but it's not growth generated by external forces. The city is in the process of regaining favor by losing its stigma.

Detroit's not gaining in population; in fact, it's still losing people, albeit at some of the lowest year-to-year levels seen over the last 60 years or so. The Detroit metro area isn't gaining people either. In 1970 Metro Detroit had 4.5 million people. In 2016 it had 4.3 million. But the metro area is nearing the completion of a major economic transition as it moves from a manufacturing-dominant economy to a more mixed modern economy, and the transition is bearing fruit in gains in metro gross domestic product. Neighborhoods near downtown are showing improvements hardly imagined in my lifetime, as the Detroit Reclamation Project continues to gather momentum.

And that's exactly it: in a city and region that aren't gaining new residents, there's a transfer taking place. Suburban offices that left the city are returning downtown, and former suburban youth are pining for the Midtown/Corktown/Riverfront urban lifestyle. Yesterday's announcement that Ford Motor Company bought one of Detroit's most iconic ruins -- a building vacant for nearly 30 years -- so that it can move its mobility division from suburban Dearborn into a now-booming part of town is emblematic of what's happening. It's a great thing for the city.

But there's something else going on that rarely gets mentioned. Detroit's suburbs are unsettled right now. Unlike most other metro areas, Detroit's suburbs doubled down on suburbia in a major way, and never envisioned a future where the city would even begin to make a credible comeback.

Can Detroit's suburbs co-exist with a redeemed Detroit?

To understand the question, it must be put in the proper context. People don't understand the extent of the withdrawal from Detroit. Beginning in the 1970's the business elite and the white middle class didn't just leave Detroit, they divorced it. L. Brooks Patterson, the long-time county executive of suburban Oakland County, just north of Detroit and one of the most affluent counties in the nation, famously echoed the sentiment of many suburbanites in a New Yorker interview four years ago:

“I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. We’ve got restaurants out here.’ They don’t even have movie theatres in Detroit—not one.” He went on, “I can’t imagine finding something in Detroit that we don’t have in spades here. Except for live sports. We don’t have baseball, football. For that, fine—get in and get out. But park right next to the venue—spend the extra twenty or thirty bucks. And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, __under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.”

And this:

"When I asked him how Detroit might fix its financial problems, he said, “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.’”

The economic and social withdrawal from Detroit by the business community and the white middle class was about as complete as it could be. In many ways, Patterson's prediction did indeed come to pass.

Because the withdrawal was complete, there were things that developed in the Detroit suburbs that typically happened in comparable urban cores. Southeast Oakland County, which includes the suburbs of Ferndale, Royal Oak, Hazel Park, Oak Park, Madison Heights and others, became the default "gentrifying hipster" spots of metro Detroit. While the stigma placed on Detroit was alive and well, these communities developed much in the same way we see in other urban cores nationwide.

A tool I often use to get a sense of the economic and social demographic makeup of a neighborhood is ESRI's Tapestry Segmentation Model. ESRI has identified 67 distinct market segments across the economic and social spectrum, from high-income to low-income, from those living on sprawling estates to those in cramped apartments, from those who travel frequently to those who never leave the neighborhood. Enter a zip code, and it can summarize some of the dominant economic and social characteristics of that zip code. Here's what it says about the largest segment in Royal Oak's 48073 zip code, called the "In-Style" segment:

"We are professional couples or singles with no kids and strong work ethics. We support the arts, travel, and extensive reading. We focus on home maintenance and improvement. We use our phones to check for the best prices and redeem both print and mobile coupons."

Or the "Emerald City" segment in the same zip code:

"Young, mobile, well-educated, and well-employed, we are more likely to rent in low-density, urban neighborhoods throughout the country. We go online for professional networking, online dating, and blogging. We buy natural, organic, or environmentally-friendly products."

That definitely sounds like the demographic that's been behind the "back-to-the-city" movement in cities nationwide. It's just that, in the Detroit area, it happened beyond the city limits (by the way, if you haven't tried ESRI's Tapestry Segmentation Model, I really urge you to give it a test drive).

Also in Oakland County, two major office centers, one in Southfield and the other in Troy, developed as Detroit collapsed. Interestingly, both emerged close to the hip burbs of southeastern Oakland County -- Southfield is a 10-15 minute drive to the west, Troy is 10-15 minutes to the north. Businesses were able to tap into a young and educated talent pool rather easily.

Today, however, Detroit's young and educated have more options. The Seven Point Two -- the weird name (it's the area in square mile terms) given to the collection of neighborhoods that comprise Detroit's Greater Downtown -- is becoming attractive to the people who for years headed to Royal Oak or Ferndale. The conveyor belt pattern is familiar to many -- graduate from college and live in a cool neighborhood with tons of entertainment options, settle into a less-cool but just as entertaining neighborhood as you mature, and find a suburban area with nice schools as your kids reach school age. Same in metro Detroit as elsewhere -- it just started in the suburbs.

But because metro Detroit's population growth has been flat for more than a generation, there's very nearly a zero-sum cause and effect here. The city's loss decades ago was the suburb's gain. Today's city gain is coming at the expense of the suburbs.

It may be that Ferndale, Royal Oak and the rest of southeastern Oakland County inhabit that second step on the conveyor belt, becoming the less-cool but still entertaining spots, relative to the burgeoning hot spots in the downtown/Midtown/Corktown areas. I see that as having a ripple effect through other suburbs -- the Birminghams and Bloomfield Hills and beyond.

This could also force some real soul-searching for the office centers in Southfield and Troy. Much like the city did 60 years ago, it could be said that they took the growth for granted and expected it to last forever. If businesses choose to move downtown to be where the talent pool is choosing to go, what will that mean for them? Ford's move into the Michigan Central Station building will tell us a lot.

Lastly, I didn't even mention the middle-class and working-class suburbs of western Wayne County, the Downriver area, or Macomb County, the ones that have been extremely reliant on manufacturing workers living in small Cape Cods until they were able to upgrade to bigger homes even further from the city. They will have to do some soul-searching as well.

Again, I stress that this is, in a sense, Detroit simply reclaiming what it lost as it acquired its stigma over the last 60 years. It's settling into a position familiar to other cities nationwide. The economic and cultural divide between the two was too great. For better or worse, the city's rebound has the ability to equalize them. The suburbs just better be ready.

This piece originally appeared on The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years. He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

Photo: A scene from Main Street in downtown Royal Oak, MI. Suburbs like Royal Oak may have benefited from Detroit's troubles, but will they be able to compete with a resurrected Motor City? Source: patch.com

The New Demo-pessimism

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Normandy—cold, green, and charming—should be the scene of celebration for liberal democracy. The northern region of France produced seminal writings from its aristocratic native son, Alexis de Tocqueville, and was the setting for the landings on D-Day, which reestablished liberalism on a continent locked in the grip of fascism. Yet at the Tocqueville Foundation’s recent conference, “Democracy in the West: Towards a Vision for the 21st Century,” held in the sixteenth-century chateau that remains the property of Tocqueville descendants, the prevailing sentiment was pessimism about democracy’s future and even fear that the Tocquevillian model is headed toward extinction. New forces, notably from Russia and China, noted former French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, “are trying to undermine democracy and offer an alternative model.”

Read the entire piece at City Journal.

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Édouard Hue (User:EdouardHue) [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Backyard Rental House Zoning Threatens Trees, Breezes, Birds and Neighborhoods

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The Dallas city manager and housing director are proposing a devastating blanket zoning change: allowing ADUs (additional dwelling units), better known as backyard rental houses, in single-family zoned neighborhoods. This change would allow a 44-foot wide by 30-foot tall rental house to be built on the back of a standard 50‑foot wide by 150-foot deep lot. Backyard rental houses would deforest the older neighborhoods, undermine neighborhood stability, accelerate gentrification, reduce diversity of housing, and diminish attainably priced opportunities for homebuyers.

The Older Neighborhoods of Dallas Are Green While Other Cities Are Dense

The life force of Dallas is its original neighborhoods, which have layers of towering trees, lush landscape, gardens, and a natural habitat for wildlife and singing birds. This is in contrast to most cities where urban planners strive to make cities denser and grittier, with neighborhoods geared towards mass transportation. In Dallas life is more pleasant. One can still stroll through shaded neighborhoods and easily drive five or ten minutes to favorite destinations.

Dallas continues to rapidly evolve in a positive way. However, allowing backyard rental houses to be built would derail the distinguishing characteristics and lovely momentum of Dallas’ older neighborhoods. The city manager and housing director are soft-pedaling backyard rental houses as just adding “gentle density,” “granny flats,” “mother-in-law suites,” and “ADUs” to increase affordable housing in Dallas’ finest neighborhoods.

Backyard Rental Homes Will Replace 80′ Trees




















This 40-foot two-story structure replaced an 80-foot tall, 100 year old tree. It is a several bay garage with a large storage space above. It is not a rental house, but shows the mass on a 50-foot wide lot.

This option is not gentle. There are no proposed limits on the number of these backyard rental houses allowed in any neighborhood. They will replace 80-foot tall pecan trees and other mature trees in backyards and disrupt the positive direction of older neighborhoods.

Adding Density Erodes Prices of Homes

























5011 Junius Street sold for $10,500 in 1907 and after density was added to the neighborhood it resold 70 years later, in 1977, for $7,500.

Over the decades, economic studies have shown that adding multi-family zoning and density decrease the prices and stability of neighborhoods. While absentee owners find two houses on a lot more attractive, homeowners find this less attractive.

Density Was Added to Munger Place – Value Subtracted

An interesting case study is Munger Place. In 1905, it was the finest residence park in the South, at a time when Highland Park was struggling. “Gentle density” was added—rooming houses, apartments carved out of single-family homes, and ultimately apartment zoning. By 1974 the City of Dallas Housing Report identified Munger Place as the worst neighborhood in Dallas with the highest disease rate, the highest murder rate, the greatest number of homes being demolished, the most transient population, the highest crime rate, and no building permits issued for new homes for the past several years. The added density and resulting transience had a profound negative effect. A home at 5011 Junius in Munger Place that sold in 1907 for $10,500 resold in 1977 for $7,500—a 30% decline over 70 years.

City Planners Have Love Affair With Density for Density’s Sake

Despite the economic havoc that adding density and increasing multi-family zoning has had on older neighborhoods, the call to add density in the inner city neighborhoods is not new. For 75 years urban planners have been pushing for more residential density in cities. Rooming houses became common in the 1940s. In the 1970s, mixed use zoning became the zoning du jour. In the past several years, ADUs in backyards have been the latest academic, avant-garde, urban planner movement.

Backyard Rental Houses Accelerate Gentrification
























Craftsman cottages are small houses framed by large backyard trees. Neither will likely not survive with backyard rental house zoning in place.

Urban planners claim that by adding backyard rental houses gentrification will be slowed, there will be more affordable housing in improving neighborhoods, and seniors will be better able to afford to stay in their homes. An example of this national infatuation for increased neighborhood density is seen in the recent New York Times June 13th op-ed column by Diana Lind, Bring Back Rooming Houses. Lind writes, “We need to disrupt the model of single-family homes.” She also says, “A font of affordable housing exists.” She explains, “It is the wasted space of single-family homes … backyards … that could be zoned as shared space.” Lind mentions that some forward-thinking cities get it.

Backyard Rental Houses Encourage Landlords to Replace Homeowners

I, on the other hand, do not think her ideas are forward-thinking. While she thinks backyards are wasted spaces, I think they are an oasis of trees. Rental houses built in the “wasted spaces of backyards” will deforest the older neighborhoods and accelerate gentrification.

Backyard rental houses and increased density encourage landlords to replace homeowners and concrete to replace streets. This has a domino effect. Neighborhoods have either a positive or negative effect on each other. For instance, Highland Park has even benefited from the resurgence of the bordering Dallas tree-lined neighborhoods.

Attainably Priced Houses Are Reduced, Gentrification Increases

In addition to economically and aesthetically disrupting the neighborhoods, backyard rental houses accelerate gentrification and reduce the attainable priced options for homebuyers.

Rental House Loans Hurt Seniors, Not Investors

The city planners claim that seniors can offset the cost of their homes and remain in their homes longer by building backyard rental houses. This is not economically accurate. First, building a small rental house is very expensive per square foot. We have seen this on the cost of the 400 sf homeless cottages built in Dallas. Their construction cost was well over $200/sf. The 700 sf backyard rental house would cost approximately $200,000 or $300,000 if it was built over a three- or four-car garage.

Seniors Want Simpler Lives, Becoming Landlords Complicates Lives

Seniors, who probably want simpler lives, would become landlords with all the accompanying headaches that it entails, responsibilities, liabilities, and pressure of keeping it rented to pay off their $200,000 to $300,000 loans.

Backyard Rental House Removes A Senior Tax Freeze

But that’s not the worst of it. Once a new rent house is built, the tax freeze is taken off the house. The original house is reappraised for its full value and the value of the backyard rental house is added. A new senior tax freeze is reset but at a much higher amount. If seniors want to get into the rental business to offset their own home costs, they would be better off keeping the tax freeze in place on their homes and buying $200,000 rent houses nearby. If they had any cash flow beyond the cost of their loan, they could then apply that to the operating costs of their own home.

Backyard Rental Houses Lower Number of Affordable Rents

Also, the backyard rental house plan does not net more affordable apartments for renters. For instance, Mt. Auburn is a neighborhood just eight blocks away from the $2 million homes on Swiss Avenue. Here, one can purchase a 1,150 sf home for $175,000. These homes are 50% larger than a new 700 sf backyard rental house which would have a higher monthly rental rate because they are new. There will also be investor pressure to buy the $175,000 Mt. Auburn house because they can now build two houses on its lot.

Small Houses Will Be Torn Down for Investor Template of 2,800 sf Main House and 700 sf Rental

Investors would be given an incentive to tear down the existing home and build a 2,800 sf $700,000 house. This is the minimum square footage they would need in order to build a 700 sf rental house in the backyard. The result is a $700,000 home replaces an attainably priced $200,000 home, and the backyard rental house costs more to rent per month than did the original $175,000 home. In fact, there would be an incentive to make all the neighborhoods a template of 2,800 sf main houses and 700 sf backyard rental houses.

Junius Heights-Style Homes With 1,800 sf Also In Jeopardy


Junius Heights cottages will be candidates for expansion to 2,800 sf to allow 700 sf backyard rental houses, replacing trees as pictured.

In Junius Heights, adjacent to Swiss Avenue, the 1,800 sf houses cost $300,000 to $450,000—still attainable prices for many homeowners. By allowing backyard rental houses, these Junius Heights homes would also become targets for investors. Investors would add 1,000 sf to these 1,800 sf. homes to make them 2,800 sf, allowing them to build the maximum 700 sf rental house in the backyard.

City Planners’ Template of 2,800 sf Main House/700 sf Rental Destroys Diversity of Housing

The backyard rental house proposal, if enacted, would make all the older Dallas neighborhoods susceptible to the investor/builder template of 2,800 sf main houses and 700 s. backyard rental houses. Along with mature trees, the rich diversity of housing, sizes, prices, and architectural styles is lost forever.

Backyard Trees Soften Retail Streets

The backyard rental house proposal does more than just disrupt the economic stability and housing diversity in the older neighborhoods known for their tree-lined streets, such as Old East Dallas, North Oak Cliff, and South Dallas. They are also known for their even larger trees that are clearly visible behind the houses, and it is not just the residential neighborhoods that benefit from these tall trees, but the retail streets in these neighborhoods.


From Houndstooth coffee house one can see Louie’s Bar with 70 foot tree in neighbor’s backyard.

Henderson Avenue Benefits From Backyard Trees

Henderson Avenue is a vibrant street of retail, restaurants, and grocery stores that leads to Ross Avenue and Lower Greenville Avenue. Softening this neighborhood commercial street are 80-foot tall trees, like those one can see from Houndstooth Coffee, located on Henderson Avenue. These are found behind the 100-year-old residences beyond Henderson, like this one on Monarch Street behind Louie’s Bar and Restaurant. The mature trees in the backyards of the houses abutting the commercial uses are what give Henderson a neighborhood feel. Otherwise, we might as well be in the commercial districts of the West End, Deep Ellum, or Uptown.

Global Warming, Pestilence, Neighborhood Ecosystem Disrupted

The loss of trees is more than just an aesthetic loss. Backyard rental houses contribute to global warming, invite pestilence, and disrupt the environmental ecosystems of the neighborhood urban gardens.

Global Warming

A canopy of trees keeps homes cooler, requiring less air conditioning. Shaded backyards with unblocked breezes cool the yards and porches, encouraging homeowners to spend time outside, and reducing the amount of air conditioning needed inside. The rooftops and concrete that replace these backyard trees collect heat and radiate that heat outward to the neighboring homes, neighborhood and city.

Pestilence











West Nile Mosquitoes Do Not Like Density

The summer breezes that flow through the trees have more than just a cooling effect. Breezes are the best defense against the small West Nile Virus-carrying mosquito. The large field mosquito can fight through the wind. The West Nile mosquito likes still air in highly developed areas, breeding in bottle caps and other small amounts of water. The breezes and open areas make East Dallas much safer than neighborhoods like North Dallas, with larger footprints of homes and development. Backyard 40-foot wide rental houses on 50-foot wide lots block any breeze. These backyard rent houses invite the West Nile mosquito.

Environmental Impact




























Cooper’s Hawks in backyards cause an ebb and flow with a variety of songbirds that return when hawk leaves.

In the older neighborhoods of Dallas, with layers of flowering trees, one will see Cooper’s hawks, egrets, and owls. Also seen are songbirds of many varieties, pollinating hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, along with much wildlife. This natural environment and rich ecosystem is eradicated with backyard rental houses.

Density Creates Dire Consequences

Adding backyard rental houses might sound like a short-term solution, but it would have negative short-term and dire long-term consequences. As cities around the world become more prosperous, they become less dense. Both homeowners and apartment renters prefer to live in single-family home neighborhoods.

People Are Flocking to Cities Without Density

The people in denser cities like New York and Chicago are flocking to less dense cities like Dallas. Every city has a distinct personality that should be further developed. Dallas is an open, green city that is easy to move around. Also, it is full of potential.

Employment and Housing Now Have More Flexibility

One half of the geographic area is on the south side of the Trinity River which houses only 10% of the Dallas population. This geographically beautiful part of Dallas has unlimited possibilities for affordable homes, expensive homes, and new jobs. Autonomous transportation and delivery systems will be implemented in a few years, eliminating congestion and changing development patterns and removing the need to live near places of employment. Further, 50% of workers even now can work remotely. The future evolution of technology and development will eliminate any benefit of inserting rent houses in backyards of single family homes.

Dallas Should Celebrate Its Strength – Revel in Low Density

Rather than undermining the economic and aesthetic stability of Dallas’ finest neighborhoods, inviting disease, accelerating global warming, and eradicating the rich natural ecosystem, Dallas should celebrate its strengths and potential. The finest neighborhoods are like gardens that should be tended and nourished, so they can continue to flourish. The Dallas city manager, housing director, and planning director should concentrate even more energy on revitalization, conservation, and development of the distressed neighborhoods. Rather than diminish the neighborhoods north of the Trinity River, the southern half of the city should be cultivated, planted and nourished so it, too, can flourish.

South of the Trinity River Should Be City Planners’ Playground

It is in the southern half of Dallas where there is an abundance of vacant property, deteriorating neighborhoods, and development opportunities. Many of the current avant-garde housing ideas from the 1940s can be explored—shared housing, rooming houses, adding extra kitchens and apartments within single-family homes, and allowing rent houses in backyards—in the neighborhoods that are deteriorating, being abandoned and that are ripe for new development.

It is essential we protect the positively evolving neighborhoods from more density. We do not want to destabilize the good neighborhoods by adding more apartment zoning. We do not want to return to the Dallas housing policy of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that wreaked havoc on the single family neighborhoods. Has the city of Dallas conducted a study to see how many more rental units can be built under the current zoning? How many more can be built near single-family homes?

Dallas Had Largest Multi-Family Zoned Area Rezoned Single-Family in the Country

In 1976, the largest rezoning case in Dallas history consisted of rezoning 100 blocks of 2,000 mostly rental properties from multi-family zoning to single-family zoning. This single-family rezoning was in an era when urban planners, including the award-winning ones in Dallas, were calling for more density, not less. The property owners, with the support of the property rights mayor and developer Robert Folsom, prevailed. The largest single-family rezoning in the nation passed.

FNMA Selected Munger Place for Its First Inner City Loans

Because of this single-family rezoning, FNMA selected Munger Place and Old East Dallas for its first inner city lending demonstration project. Old East Dallas gradually became more single-family. Many years later, FNMA called this neighborhood their most successful inner city lending revitalization project. Rather than return to the bad housing policies of more density and rental zoning that devastated the finest old neighborhoods of Dallas, we should embrace the single-family zoning that revitalized them and made them stronger.

Dallas Neighborhoods Become Increasingly Attractive

Our single-family zoned neighborhoods, many of them now also historic and conservation districts, are increasingly attractive to residents in Dallas and residents in the denser cities across the country that are moving to Dallas to find a home that will make them happy and to enjoy a lovelier way of life.

This piece first appeared on Dallas Architecture Blog.

Douglas Newby is a real estate broker who initiated the largest the largest rezoning in Dallas - 2,000 properties primarily in use as multi family rental properties to single family zoning. In 1979, in Dallas he created the first Restoration House of the Year Award, and for the Dallas Chapter of the AIA organized a city wide survey of architect designed and Significant homes. His TEDx talk is Homes That Make Us Happy. His website is: ArchitecturallySignificantHomes.com. Blog is DallasArchitectureBlog.com

Perspectives on Defining the American Heartland

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The following excerpt is from a new report, Perspectives on Defining the American Heartland, written by Ross DeVol, a Walton Family Foundation Fellow. Read the full report (PDF) here.

George Strait sings about it. Kevin Costner built a baseball field in the middle of it. The Pioneer Woman cooks for it.

When one hears “American Heartland”–specific images and cultural values come to mind. With more emphasis on the economy between the coastal regions of the United States, there’s more interest in the American Heartland that goes beyond a country music song, a movie, or a popular cooking show on television.

And yet, a widely shared vision of what geographic region truly comprises the American Heartland has so far proved elusive.

A recent online poll from The New York Times provided nine different maps of the United States. They then asked their readers to choose the one map that most closely represents their perception of the American Heartland. Many of these maps represented subsections of states. Out of the provided choices, the map with the most responses only managed a meager 22 percent. Some people might see it merely as the middle of the country (Midwest). Others may use the pejorative term, Flyover Country. Most would not include parts of the South. Many would focus on the economic characteristics such as manufacturing (Rust Belt) or agricultural (Breadbasket) dependence. Despite all of the variables, we innately share degrees of ideology and geographic orientation of where the American Heartland is on a map.

There is little written analysis attempting to explain the geography of the American Heartland and the emerging term, New American Heartland, in a cohesive manner. This paper explores the origin of the term, Heartland and traces through a series of predecessor terms and how the use of the American Heartland term evolved over time. It concludes with my perspectives on the geographic dimensions of defining the American Heartland.

Today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a heartland as “a usually extensive central region of homogeneous (geographic, political, industrial, etc.) character.” Moving to the specific from the generic definition, Merriam-Webster adds a sociopolitical context to Heartland—“the central
geographic region of the United States in which mainstream values or traditional values predominate.” This context is essential as the geography is deemphasized and ideology becomes more central to the definition.ii The Merriam-Webster definition also implies that some Southern states are part of the Heartland.

Further, some writers attach almost a mystical quality to the Heartland, “The Heartland is considered a place we return to when we need to renew ourselves or recommit ourselves to the things that matter.” This quote from Frontiers to Heartland provides a clear perspective of those seeking to enhance the importance of Heartland in the national psyche. Additionally, it suggests that Heartland residents are more stable, cautious and traditional than other parts of the U.S. Many Coastal residents would envision that description as highlighting what traits are holding the Heartland back.

Read the full report (PDF) here.

RossDeVol is a Walton Fellow at the Walton Family Foundation and is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, focusing on research on policies related to economic vitality in Northwest Arkansas and the American heartland. Ross is the former chief research officer at the Milken Institute, where he was responsible for overseeing research on international, national and subnational growth performance; access to capital and its role in economic growth and job creation; and health-related topics. He was ranked among the “Superstars of Think Tank Scholars” by International Economy magazine.

Progressive California’s Growing Race Challenge

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No state in the union has been more adamant in opposing President Trump’s policy on immigration than California. The Golden State widely sees itself — and is widely seen in progressive circles — as the harbinger of America’s multi-cultural future, a “sanctuary state” that epitomizes ethnic ascendency.

Yet in reality, the picture is far less pleasing, most of all for racial minorities, particularly the poor and working class. The state policy agenda, dominated by concerns over climate change, has been something of a disaster for the very minorities that state progressives so fervently claim to serve.

This claim is at the center of a new report by David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez, released this week by Chapman University, which spells out the ways the California “boom” has hurt the prospect for historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Latinos.

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: TJH2018 [CC BY-SA 3.0 us], from Wikimedia Commons


Lessons from the Oakland/San Francisco Dismissal

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Federal District Court Judge William Alsup dismissed the "global warming" lawsuits of the cities of Oakland and San Francisco against large oil and gas companies, In so doing, the Judge provided important lessons in history, logic and public policy.

The cities had sought compensation for present and future sea level rise they attributed to the actions of defendants Chevron, Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips, all among the largest investor owned companies in the industry. The suit did not target the similarly large state-owned oil companies such as Saudi Arabia's Aramco, China's Sinopec and PetroChina, Kuwait Petroleum, and Mexico's Pemez which are among the most powerful in the industry.

The Costs and Benefits of Fossil Fuels

Judge Alsup ruled that cost-benefit analysis was necessary. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a New Geography piece on "cowboy greenhouse gas emission policies" that get in the way of policies that could work, but did not anticipate the piecemeal cowboy legal actions of individual jurisdictions.

He cited a precedent, in which the U. S. Supreme Court "cautioned that policy questions concerning global warming require an “informed assessment of competing interests” and that “[a]long with the environmental benefit potentially achievable, our Nation’s energy needs and the possibility of economic disruption must weigh in the balance.” These points have been made evident in the recent report on the impact of climate change recently released.

The Judge noted that:

The scope of plaintiffs’ theory is breathtaking. It would reach the sale of fossil fuels anywhere in the world, including all past and otherwise lawful sales, where the seller knew that the combustion of fossil fuels contributed to the phenomenon of global warming.

Jurisdictions around the world could follow suit, with the result being substantially higher costs of production. This could significantly reduce economic growth rates and would especially hurt low income residents who are by far the most sensitive to such price increases.

Based upon the historical record, Judge Alsup's view is that there have been important net benefits to society from fossil fuels:

"With respect to balancing the social utility against the gravity of the anticipated harm, it is true that carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels has caused (and will continue to cause) global warming. But against that negative, we must weigh this positive: our industrial revolution and the development of our modern world has literally been fueled by oil and coal. Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible. All of us have benefitted."

Despite all the sometimes overhyped talk about renewable substitutes for fossil fuels, it is clear that fossil fuels are still necessary to maintaining and growing the economy, Alsup says that:

In our industrialized and modern society, we needed (and still need) oil and gas to fuel power plants, vehicles, planes, trains, ships, equipment, homes and factories. Our industrial revolution and our modern nation, to repeat, have been fueled by fossil fuels.

Who is Responsible for the Externalities of Fossil Fuels?

Judge Alsup also raises the important logical question of responsibility. Who should shoulder the cost of any externalities? Judge Alsup places the responsibility for use of fossil fuels where it belongs, with those who use them. Perhaps it would have made more sense for Oakland and San Francisco to sue everyone, including their own citizens, since virtually everyone contributes to fossil fuel emissions.

The harm alleged by our plaintiffs remains a harm caused by fossil fuel emissions, not the mere extraction or even sale of fossil fuels.

Of course, the emissions are caused by the users of fossil fuels, none of whom is forced to use them. That may be an impractical course, but it is surely available to any who would apply monkish dedication to the subject.

Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded? Is it really fair, in light of those benefits, to say that the sale of fossil fuels was unreasonable?

Fossil Fuels Made the Modern World Possible

Indeed, if political leadership at the beginning of the industrial revolution had been similar to that of the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, there likely would never have been one. That would have been tragic. The billions of people lifted out of poverty would still be poor in all likelihood.

This is evident by the work of economists Diedre McCloskey at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Robert Gordon at Northwestern University. In 1800, most of the population of the world, including the currently most affluent nations of Western Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan was in poverty. Fossil fuels were critical in making possible the affluence that emerged on an unprecedented scale. It seems unlikely that there are many households prepared to accept the radically lower standards of living necessary by "swearing off" fossil fuels. Moreover, most would agree that throughout the affluent countries, poverty should be reduced.

China, which as late as 1980 was among the poorest per capita nations in the world, has made unprecedented economic progress since that time. This has included lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It was made possible by fossil fuels, and especially the use of coal, which fueled much of the economic growth. Similarly, there seems no rush on the part of the Chinese to restore that economic conditions of forty years ago. Despite the huge reduction of poverty in China, there is still a need for more reductions (see photograph above of a low-income area of Shanghai, with a nearby expensive apartment building in the background).

The world economy, including that of China could be substantially weakened by the precedents that Oakland and San Francisco sought to establish. Moreover, poverty would be increased and middle-income households would be left worse off.

The Self Evident Net Benefits of Fossil Fuels

Beyond the judge's opinion, the reality is that fossil fuels provide substantial enough net benefits to billions of people who might not be willing to accept the substantially lower quality of life. This is the ultimate and self-evident test. These users have not been duped by the oil and gas companies into using fossil fuels; they use them to improve their own lives.

And these billions include the city council members of both San Francisco and Oakland, as well as just about everyone else in the United States, Europe, Japan --- and every other countries as well.

Judge Alsup's opinion is refreshing and should be the basis for future discussions on looking for ways of mitigating environmental consequences without undermining prosperity, particularly for those who do not yet fully enjoy it.

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.

Photograph: Shanghai low-income neighborhood, with expensive apartment tower in background (By author, July 2018)

California’s Climate Extremism

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Environmental extremism increasingly dominates California. The state is making a concerted attack on energy companies in the courts; a bill is pending in the legislature to fine waiters $1,000—or jail them—if they offer people plastic straws; and UCLA issued a report describing pets as a climate threat. The state has taken upon itself the mission of limiting the flatulence of cows and other farm animals. As the self-described capital of the anti-Trump resistance, California presents itself as the herald of a green, more socially and racially just society. That view has been utterly devastated by a new report from Chapman University, in which coauthors David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez demonstrate that California’s draconian anti-climate-change regime has exacerbated economic, geographic, and racial inequality. And to make things worse, California’s efforts to save the planet have actually done little more than divert greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) to other states and countries.

Read the entire piece at City Journal.

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Berardo62 (Flickr: offshore oil rig) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Nashville Hot Chicken and the Pork Tenderloin: A Tale of Two Sandwiches

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One of the things you’re sure to hear about if you read up on Nashville is a local dish called “Nashville hot chicken,” a local culinary specialty.

To listen to people talk about it, you’d think eating Nashville hot chicken was some kind of ancient local religious rite. In fact, Nashville hot chicken appears to be a dish of fairly recent provenance. According to the Wikipedia entry for it:

Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville for generations. The current dish may have been introduced as early as the 1930s, however, the current style of spice paste may only date back to the mid-1970s. It is generally accepted that the originator of hot chicken is the family of Andre Prince Jeffries, owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. She has operated the restaurant since 1980; before that time, it was owned by her great-uncle, Thornton Prince. Although impossible to verify, Jeffries says the development of hot chicken was an accident. Her great-uncle Thornton was purportedly a womanizer, and after a particularly late night out his girlfriend at the time cooked him a fried chicken breakfast with extra pepper as revenge. Instead, Thornton decided he liked it so much that, by the mid-1930s, he and his brothers had created their own recipe and opened the BBQ Chicken Shack café.

In other words, it’s possible that this dish has been around a while in some form in the local black community, but what we know today as the Nashville hot chicken is from the 70s or 80s. A Midwestern reader with longstanding family ties to Nashville told me a while back that at least through the 1990s he never heard hot chicken mentioned there. I read that Nashville hot chicken is now supposedly popular around the south, but having spent extensive time in Alabama 10-15 years ago, I never once came across it there.

An enterprising journalist should write a true history of hot chicken, but it appears that this was a minor product, until fairly recently mostly limited to the black community and not even especially prevalent there.

Yet once again Nashville managed to take something about itself and create a mythos around it to build the brand. I just read this week that Pringles is now releasing a Nashville hot chicken flavor.

Being from Indiana I can’t help but contrast this with the pork tenderloin sandwich, which may be served regionally in various places (supposedly especially in Iowa) but is a particular speciality in Indiana.

I did not eat these growing up. The far Southern Indiana area I grew up in had a strong Kentucky influence and orientation, and tenderloins were not a thing there. I suspect there are other parts of the state where that’s also true. For example, I’ve never seen one on a menu in Northwest Indiana, nor have my many friends from there ever referenced it. But the pork tenderloin is fairly ubiquitous in Central Indiana, where it is on practically every bar and grill menu. I’m not sure of the actual origins and history of this product either, but it’s been around at least as long as Nashville hot chicken and in a much more extensive way.

Yet, as typical for Midwest food products, this never became a branding element outside Indianapolis or outside the state. (A better example might be Cincinnati style chili, which is better known, but never became “cool” in any sort of national way, though Skyline chili tried to expand regionally a while back).

Why was Indianapolis unable to do with the tenderloin what Nashville did with hot chicken?

For one thing, it never actually tried. The most telling thing in this regard is that I’ve never once seen or heard of a chef at any of the new hip restaurants in Indy do an interpretation the pork tenderloin. My wife lived her entire adult life in Indy until recently and she couldn’t think of one either, though it’s possible it happened recently.

Go to the restaurant page of the Indianapolis tourism agency and there’s no mention of a pork tenderloin sandwich, nor a picture of it. There’s nothing on the Indianapolis Monthly dining page either, though I know they occasionally do cover tenderloins. One place that I have seen do something with it is north suburban Hamilton County, which has an annual tenderloin trail event– conveniently happening this month – with discounts at 27 different places on “Tenderloin Tuesdays.”

I again and again see that Southern cities start with little to nothing, and yet what they do have they treat as the greatest things of all time. As illustrated by Nashville hot chicken, they’ve also looked at their often neglected black community as a source of local cultural identity.

The Midwestern cities not only fail at this consistently, they typically don’t even try. There are tons of regional food products in the Midwest – Chicago style dogs, St. Louis pizza, etc. – but other than Chicago’s deep dish pizza, they have been dramatically underexploited in the marketplace even as these cities say that they are very keen to raise their brand profiles.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

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: Prince’s hot chicken, CC SA-2.0

Can Lebron James Make Los Angeles Great Again?

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With his decision to move to Los Angeles, LeBron James has given our metropolis another reason to feel good about itself. When it comes to sports, and celebrity, Los Angeles’ lead is only growing, as evidenced by the recent movement of two football teams to the area, the proposed construction of a new basketball facility for the Clippers and the winning of the 2028 Olympics games.

Los Angeles is clearly winning the battle for sports screen time. In choosing Southern California, James effectively dissed Cleveland, no great rival, but also wannabe Houston, which he apparently has no fondness for, as well as Philadelphia and Boston, two attractive traditional basketball junkie centers. The fact that New York, America’s other megacity, was not even in the discussion might constitute the sweetest message of all.

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 is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class ConflictThe City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Keith Allison, via Flickr, using CC License.

American Migration: Exploring Where People Move Across America

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Just a few years ago, experts indicated Americans (especially young Americans) were more interested in a different lifestyle than previous generations. Instead of owning a house in the suburbs, the new American dream consisted of renting an apartment in the city.

Recently, though, Americans of all ages have begun to leave major metropolitan areas like New York City and Los Angeles. Over the last five years, population growth in big cities has shrunk, and people are packing up and moving again.

But where are they going now? We analyzed census data from the last five years to explore the counties and states where the most people are putting down roots. Let's take a look.




































Living just a train ride away from Manhattan or a few hours from the Santa Monica Pier or Golden Gate Bridge might sound like the life—and for some people, it is—but people may now be looking elsewhere to settle down.

This graphic helps illustrate which U.S. states have seen the highest net migration, both in and out, between 2011 and 2016. As you can see, states in the Northeast saw a larger negative net migration, while Southern states had a strong influx of newcomers.

Additionally, states with some of the most popular metropolitan areas, including New York, California, and Illinois, had substantial negative net migration as well.




































"There's no place like home" is meant to convey that even when you live somewhere else, you'll always have a certain fondness for your home. That is unless you can find someplace better.

From the data, we learned there was actually quite a lot of back and forth between state borders. While a majority of people moving to the West Coast (including Utah, Washington, and Oregon) came from California, people from these states typically relocated to California as well. Similarly, people living in states like New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana generally moved from Texas, but people from these same states were also more likely to relocate to Texas.

It's no wonder, though, states like Texas and California continue to be popular destinations considering their successful employment rates. Of course, some states also come with a fairly hefty price tag. California and New York may have great job markets, but they also have the highest costs of living in the U.S. Looking to buy a home in California? The median home price is over $537,000—compared to roughly $213,000 across the country.




































So if some states are losing residents in droves, where are they going?

For New Yorkers looking to leave behind the cold winters, high costs of living, and stagnant wages, there's only one place to go: Florida. With its world-famous beaches and low personal income tax rate, Florida was the most popular destination state for people leaving states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Even Californians are leaving the West Coast for Southern hospitality. In the past five years, an average of over 25,000 people left California for Texas. The tech industry has been relatively successful in certain parts of Texas, but unlike California, you won't have to give up the majority of your salary to afford rent.

Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon were other popular destinations for people looking to relocate from California. While Florida certainly sees its fair share of new residents, more than 9,400 people have left Florida to call Texas home since 2011.




































The sunshine and celebrity sightings might be nice, but it costs a lot of money to live in Los Angeles. Where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is over $2,000, buying a home can set you back an average of $740,000, and even frugal spenders should expect to spend $500 or more a month on groceries. The cost of living might also help to explain why nearly 6,900 people have left Los Angeles for Clark County, Nevada.

Every year, thousands of people give up their daily commutes on the 405 for the dry heat of Nevada, home to the University of Nevada, Mesquite, Boulder City, and Las Vegas. In Clark County, the median home price is less than $203,000, and a positive job growth means there's plenty of opportunity for those looking to escape the big city life.

In Cook County, Illinois (the second most populated county in the U.S. after Los Angeles and home to Chicago), almost 5,600 people have left for Lake County, Indiana.

Thousands of people have also decided to leave Washington, D.C. Whether it's the congested roadways, cost of living, or job opportunities, many have made their way to Prince George's or Montgomery counties in Maryland from D.C.




































In some cases, people have left areas like California, New York, and Washington, D.C., almost as fast as they've moved into them. Only a few states have seen a much faster exodus than growth.

Between 2011 and 2016, nearly 11 percent of Alaskan residents moved out of state, although there was less than 6 percent growth to replace their presence. This marks the first time in decades that Alaska's population has shrunk, further compounding the state's economic strife. Since 2012, over 29,000 more people have moved from than moved to Alaska, and nearby states like Washington and California have become much more attractive to residents.

However, many states are seeing the opposite effect. Despite the expense, more people moved to than from California between 2011 and 2016, New York saw hardly any change in its population, and a higher percentage of people moved to than from Washington, D.C., over the same period.




































Millennials are shaking things up. Whether it's the way they shop, eat, or approach money, young Americans aren't following in the footsteps of generations past—and that even includes their jobs.

Studies have shown millennials aren't afraid to do two things uncommon for older generations: jump from job to job and move from place to place. Considering relocating appeals to young employees, it's no wonder the highest percentages of people crossing state borders were millennials.

Seven percent of people aged 18 to 19 moved between states from 2011 to 2016. The next largest moving age groups were between 20 and 24 and 25 to 29. But where did they go? States like California and Florida were more likely to be the new homes of Americans aged 70 to 74, while young movers were more inclined to move to states like Utah, Wyoming, Alaska, and Illinois.

Coming or going?

When it comes to deciding where you want to live, there are many factors to consider aside from the location. As we found, the cost of living, job market, and industry trends likely play an important role in whether Americans pick up and move. Thousands of people do it every year though, including New Yorkers leaving the Northeast for Florida and Californians relocating to Nevada.

Whether you're coming or going, your house should feel like a home from the very beginning. At Porch, our goal is to help simplify the home improvement process from day one. Our free Porch Home Assistant is available 24/7 to connect you with professionals (or someone in our network) to manage everything from TV mounting to furniture assembly and lawn maintenance. Don't let your to-do list get out of hand. Visit us at Porch to find the right professional for your next home project.

Methodology

Using the U.S. Census Bureau County-to-County Migration Flows data, we analyzed where people moved to and from across the United States. We utilized the 2011-2015 Migration Flows data, which are the most up to date at the time of this writing. We looked at net migration unless otherwise stated, which shows the net gain or loss for a location-to-location flow. This is not indicative of the number of people who left the location, though. Since Census data relies solely on estimates, the figures presented above may not be inclusive of all migration.

This piece originally appeared on Porch.com.

Photo by yesid ferney patiño … [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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