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Clues from the Past: The Midwest as an Aspirational Region

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This piece is an except from a new report on the Great Lakes Region for the Sagamore Institue. Download the pdf version for the full report including charts and maps on the region.

The American Great Lakes region has long been a region defined by the forces of production, both agricultural and industrial. From the 1840s on, the region forged a legacy of productive power, easily surpassing the old northeast as the primary center of American industrial and agricultural might.

The Rise of the Great Lakes

Natural forces shaped the region, from its waterways and mineral resources, which made it ideal for industrial development. The lakes themselves are the largest sources of freshwater on the planet; the five lakes together are twice the size of England. This “fresh water Mediterranean” provided an essential pathway for transport between the various regions of the Great Lakes, as well as a connection to the northeast and, through the Saint Lawrence and the Erie Canal, to New York and the Atlantic.

But more than anything, it has been the people of the Great Lakes that proved its greatest resource. In the early 19th Century, the region’s development was paced by migrants from New England, who brought with them their values of thrift, hard work and a passion for education and self-improvement. Later others, notably Germans and Scandinavians, injected a similar culture of self-improvement to the area.

Like New England, the Great Lakes, noted author John Gunther, was possessed with a “gadget mind” that sparked the innovations that gave America command of the industrial revolution. Much of the brawn for this came from the poorer parts of Europe --- Russia, Italy, and most particularly Poland, which led one observer to call Chicago “a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw.” By 1920 one third of third of the population of Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit was foreign born.

Initially based largely on agricultural exports, by 1860 the region had blossomed into an urbanized industrial powerhouse. “All over the Middle West,” wrote historians Charles and Mary Beard, “crossroads hamlets grew into trading towns, villages spread into cities, cities became railway and industrial centers.” The area’s rapid growth sparked great optimism; in 1841 journalist and land speculator predicted that by 1940 Cincinnati would be the largest city in North America and by 2000 “the greatest city in the world.” Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Milwaukee and most of all Chicago stood at the center of a “web of steel” that marked the region as the world’s preeminent industrial center. It also sparked other innovations, from the auto assembly line and the high-rise building to the mail order catalog.

This growth cascaded in the early years of the last century. It became the nation’s primary growth engine. Between 1900 and 1920 Chicago added a million people while Cleveland doubled its population and Detroit, epicenter of the emerging “automobile revolution”, grew three fold. In everything from architecture and city planning to literature, the Great Lakes stood at the national, even global, cutting edge.

A Half Century of Decline

By the 1970s, the Great Lakes region, including Ontario, accounted for two-thirds of the North America’s automobile production, 70 percent of pig iron and three quarters of its steel. Yet by that time, this close tie to industry was seen not as an advantage but as a curse, driving the region towards precipitous decline.

By then America was widely seen as entering a “post-industrial era,” and the Great Lakes, the former bastion of the manufacturing economy, seemed the odd region out. Defined as the “foundry” in Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America, it was the only one he identified as in decline. He described the region’s inner cities as “North America’s Gulag Archipelago.”

Once a magnet for newcomers, the region now took a back seat as a place that attracted domestic or foreign migrants.10 With the exception of Chicago, the Lakes region have continues to lag both in domestic migration and foreign immigrants. Newcomers were reinventing places like Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and New York, but relatively few were coming to Cleveland, Detroit or Cincinnati.

The Great Lakes cities, also with the sometimes exception of Chicago, also found themselves increasingly regarded as cultural backwaters. Occasional stories of restoration and renaissance made the rounds in the media, but the trend was to greater obsolescence, to becoming permanently “a cultural colony” of the coasts. “To a Californian or a New Yorker,” noted Indiana-based historian Jon Teaford, “Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis and Saint Louis were down-at-the-heel, doughty matrons, sporting last year’s cultural fashions.”

Until recently there has been ample reason to believe this decline would continue. Only nine of the Midwest’s 40 largest metropolitan areas have a higher per capita GDP than the national average. This reflected a deep seated loss of jobs paced by industrial decline but not made up for by gains in other fields.

During this period the region not only lost many of its industrial jobs but, more pointedly, failed to replace them with the technology and service jobs that grew rapidly elsewhere. As a result, the region’s percentage of the national workforce dropped steadily over the past half century. In 1966, the Great Lakes region possessed one in four jobs in the country; by 2010 that percentage had fallen to less than one in five.

As a response to the perception of industry-led decline, some Great Lakes leaders sought out other sources of employment and growth. In Detroit, for example, much emphasis was placed on casino development. Michigan’s former Governor Jennifer Granholm, sought to reverse decline by targeting the so-called “creative class” by turning its hard-hit towns into “cool cities.” Across the region, others focused on convention centers, arts attractions such as museums and other entertainment venues as the way to improve their sagging fortunes.

Seeds of Resurgence
None of these efforts – although much heralded throughout the 1980s and 1990s – did much to reverse the region’s decline. Notes Jim Russell, author of the widely read Burgh Diaspora website:

Should Akron start putting more money in skateparks or global warming?

There are huge problems in spending money in order to attract the geographically fickle. Fads fade and the mobile – largely people under 30 – will move again...Tying up the urban budget with projects aimed at retaining the creative class has its own perils. There is little, if any, evidence indicating that this policy will decrease the geographic mobility of the well-educated. Many cities stuffed with cultural amenities also sport high rates of out-migration. Furthermore, tastes change. “Best places to live” lists change quite a bit from one year to the next.

Instead, the region’s current rebound is occurring in surprising fashion. The real lure of the Great Lakes lies in its own fundamental advantages: lower housing prices, business climate and perhaps, more importantly, a nascent industrial rebound.

This can be seen, most importantly, in employment numbers. Starting in the last few years, the area’s share of jobs has remained steady. The highest unemployment rates in the country are no longer concentrated in the Great Lakes region, but in states such as California and Nevada. In many Great Lakes states, unemployment rates have been dropping more rapidly than the national average.

Critically this resurgence has not resulted in a shift away from industrial growth. Instead, we are witnessing the early stages of what could be a profound increase in both the economic heft and job creation tied to the industrial sector. But the Great Lakes rebound is not merely a cyclical, one dimensional rise; it also includes growth in a host of other sectors, including in the information area and, perhaps even more remarkably, in energy, particularly shale gas.

At the same time the rise in non-industrial jobs also should testify to the growing attractiveness of the region, particularly for young families. After decades of mass outmigration, the region has begun to achieve a more favorable balance with the rest of country. Outmigration rates for states in the region are at or below national levels.

Migration in the Midwest, as Russell and others have pointed out, should be regarded more from the vantage point of recruitment, not retention. By promoting its affordability and improving economy, the region could improve its trailing inmigration rates. As people vote with their feet for the region, they are laying down the foundation for the area’s resurgence in the coming decades.

The Rise of New Growth Nodes

The Great Lakes demographic and economic turnaround does not mean that growth has occurred in the pattern of the early 20th Century. Instead we see the emergence of a new set of leadership cities. If Akron, Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago paced the region’s early 20th century ascendency, the new “winners” appear to include affordable, attractive cities, many of whom are home to major universities, state capitals and key research institutions.

These areas have done well in attracting many people from the less successful metropolitan areas of the region. Columbus, for example, evidenced strong growth from the rest of Ohio and other parts of the Midwest, notably Michigan and Illinois. But perhaps more importantly, the area enjoys strong in-migration from those parts of country -- notably the Northeast and California -- that have traditionally dominated knowledge-intensive industries.

A similar pattern can be seen in Indianapolis. In recent years, as urban analyst Aaron Renn notes, the Indiana capital has enjoyed “a profile closer to the Sun Belt than the Rust Belt.” It grew its population at a rate 50 percent greater than the national average, and also had strong net inmigration, with almost 65,000 net people deciding to pack up and move to the Indiana capital.

Already a center of regional culture and services, the area has succeeded as well in attracting new migrants not only from big Midwestern cities such as Chicago, but also from the two coasts.

By way of contrast, Chicago’s migration patterns look much different than those in Columbus and Indianapolis. Many other regions around the country benefited from people leaving the Windy City than Chicago gained from them. Chicago’s biggest gains have come from other, more troubled Great Lakes regions, while Indianapolis, for instance, has taken advantage of Chicagoans looking for more opportunity elsewhere.

Behind this shift in migration from the coasts lie many factors, such as taxes and regulations.
But perhaps most important may be the region’s greater affordability. Even after the bubble, for example, many key eastern and west coast regions suffer a ratio housing prices to annual incomes of five, six or even seven to one. For the most part, virtually all parts of the Great Lakes have ratios of three or less.

Over time, this could prove a critical advantage to the Great Lakes. As the current millennial generation – the largest generation in American history – enters their 30s, it is likely that they will seek out places where they can afford to buy a home and enjoy a middle class quality of life. The Great Lakes will be one place that can offer that opportunity.

Key to recovery: Both Brain and Brawn

The future of the Great Lakes region lies neither in simply the “information” economy nor in the brute force of manufacturing. Instead it is as a result of a combination both of the industrial sector and the high-value service sectors that feed into it.

Critically, the region boasts many areas where the information and service economies are particularly strong. Of the nine Midwestern metropolitan areas with per capita GDP growth above the national average, four are capital cities and six are home to major universities. Given governmental involvement in two of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, health care and education, it is no surprise that seats of government and large state-funded research universities – which also double as the hotbeds of medical services – are growing ahead of other regions with a more traditional, and perhaps outdated, economic base.

Indeed, some Midwestern areas are outperforming the coastal economies even in the realm of high-tech. In a recent ranking by Forbes magazine of best areas for tech growth among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, the region boasted three of the top fifteen areas, led by #3 Columbus, followed by Indianapolis and St. Louis.

However, it would be inaccurate to portray the Midwest as depending purely on a service or information economy. Producing things for sale and export is still alive and well, and the Midwestern regions that have blended their traditional capacity for manufacturing with newer fast-growing sectors of the economy.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa enjoyed the highest rate of GDP growth from 2001-2010 of any metropolitan area in the Midwest. Between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, a new high-tech corridor has grown up that takes advantage of the area’s historical manufacturing capacity and the new technology driven through the university.

Terre Haute, Indiana, fifth on the list of GDP leaders, reflects even more completely the blending of the “old” Midwest with the emerging one. Manufacturing has held steady as a share of the local economy at about 15.5 percent since 1991, but health and education have jumped from 14 to 17 percent, while wholesale services and agriculture have dropped. Terre Haute is home to Indiana State University and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a regional leader in engineering, science, and mathematics education.

Peoria, Illinois is second behind Cedar Rapids in GDP growth the past ten years. It is home to more than 200 manufacturing firms, two of the world’s largest earth-moving equipment makers, and coal fields. Peoria is also a leader in college degree attainment in the Great Lakes. While its absolute attainment levels are still low, its college educated population is growing faster than nearly every community in the Midwest. Peoria is one example of how brains + brawn, and not just brains, is the key to Midwestern growth going forward.

Consider what we might call the dynamic of the Badgers and the Wolverines. In Wisconsin, home of the Badgers, there exists an east-west corridor between Madison, home to the state university and state capital, and Milwaukee, the state’s historical center of industry and commerce. In Michigan, home of the Wolverines, an east-west corridor stretches between Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and Detroit, the state’s historical center of industry and commerce.

In Figure 14 we see that both Ann Arbor and Madison have high levels of bachelor degrees compared to the national average. But Madison is leading the Midwest in bachelor degree growth while Ann Arbor rate remains fairly static. Meanwhile, even though Detroit surprises with a fairly high rate of bachelor degree growth, Milwaukee stays in front of the national average in both growth and absolute numbers of college-educated workers.

Some might say that the Badgers are beating the Wolverines in the knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy, but that the lead manufacturing is up for grabs. But the truth is that the Wisconsin corridor also enjoys positive marks in manufacturing.

Milwaukee, for example, leads Detroit in the growth of manufacturing jobs. And Madison is emerging as a manufacturing center while Ann Arbor lags far behind. The knowledge economy and the old-time manufacturing economy can work happily together, in the case of Madison Milwaukee, or so far less so in the case of Ann Arbor-Detroit.

The New Industrial Paradigm

Despite the attempts to write it off as a spent force, manufacturing will remain a key driver of Midwestern and national growth. Despite the many job losses that impacted this sector over the past generation, American manufacturing remains remarkably resilient, with a global market share similar to that of the 1970s.

More recently, however, American industrial base has begun to expand and begin to gain on its competitors. This places the Great Lakes in an advantageous position. American manufacturing after a decade of decline has outpaced the overall recovery over the two years, in part due to soaring exports. In 2011 American manufacturing continued to expand even as Germany, Japan and Brazil all weakened in this vital sector.

Many factors are driving this change. One is a tie to the growing domestic energy industry, which has already sparked growth in the shale areas of eastern Ohio and other parts of the Great Lakes region. The United States together now boast the largest natural gas reserves in the world. In Ohio alone, new finds in the Utica shale could be worth as much as $500 billion; one energy executive called it “the biggest thing to hit Ohio since the plow.”

The boom in natural gas has already sparked a considerable industrial rebound including the building of a new $650 million steel plant for gas pipes in the Youngstown area.18 Karen Wright, whose Ariel Corporation sells compressors used in gas plants, has added more than 300 positions over the past two years. “There’s a huge amount of drilling throughout the Midwest,” Wright says. “This is a game changer.”

It also leads to the prospect that as coal-fired plants become more expensive to operate due to concerns over greenhouse gas emissions, the region will have a new, cleaner and potentially less expensive power source.

Another critical factor has been the rise of wage rates in both Europe and East Asia. Increasingly, American-based manufacturing is in a favored position as a lower cost producer. Concerns over “knock offs” and lack of patent protection in China may also be sparking a “back to USA” trend, something particularly favorable to the Great Lakes region.

Yet the new industrial base will not resemble old one. We are seeing both an industrial renaissance in the country and one that is heavily concentrated in the Great Lakes region. But it is a resurgence that is as much brain as brawn; an industry increasingly dependent not just on hard work, but skilled labor.

This pattern cuts across industry lines. Indeed even as the share of the workforce employed in manufacturing has dropped from 20 percent to roughly half that, high skilled jobs in industry have soared 37 percent. Even after years of declining employment, manufacturers in heavy industry, such as automobiles, are running short on skilled workers. Industry expert David Cole predicts there could be demand for 100,000 new workers by 2013. Overall, 83 percent of all manufacturers, according to Deloitte Touche, suffer a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers.

This remains a fundamental strength of the region. Much of the skilled labor base in the nation remains in the Midwest. The region is also home to four of the highest ranked, according to US News, industrial engineering schools in the nation: the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Northwestern, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Purdue.

Equally important for the region will be replacing the large cadre of skilled workers, many of whom are entering the late 50s and early 60s. “We have a very skilled workforce, but they are getting older,” says Ariel Wright, who employs 1,200 people at three Ohio factories. “I don’t know where we are going to find replacements.”

For now the very culture of production – often seen as a liability in the past – could prove a key to the Great Lakes’ future resurgence. These advantages are already redounding to the region. Indeed a recent Forbes survey of “heavy metal” industries – that is those involved heavy industry, metals, vehicles and complex machinery – found the region in surprisingly good shape.

The Milwaukee area, for example, ranked number 2 among the 50 metropolitan areas on the list, while Detroit clocked in with a respectable 6 placed finish. Cincinnati, Kansas City and Cleveland all ranked well within the top 20. In all, the 40 Great Lakes metropolitan areas added 50,000 heavy metal industry jobs since 2009.

Looking Forward

For the first time in a generation, the Great Lakes are experiencing demographic and economic trends in their favor. Yet in everything from migration to industrial growth, the region can expect to face strong competition from other areas, most notably Texas, the Southeast, the Great Plains and the Intermountain West for new jobs and production.

To meet this challenge, and truly take advantage of improved conditions, the region must develop a strategy that is suited to its particular advantages. There is no need to try to compete with Manhattan on urban chic, with Silicon Valley in high-tech startups or with Hollywood in entertainment – as some growth theorists would likely recommend.

The Great Lakes needs to focus primarily on those very values of production and community that sparked its original ascendance. Once these are identified and strengthened, the region can once again not only rebound, but define its own space in the national and global economy.

Perhaps the first priority has to do with education. The Great Lakes has an enormous edge in terms of first-class engineering schools, and needs to become more focused on these programs and those associated with them, including the information sciences. It needs to supplement this focus on the top echelon with a greater effort -- as we can now see in Ohio -- in training more of the skilled workforce desperately needed for the region’s resurgent manufacturers.

By 2018, 63 percent of the nation’s jobs will require some type of post-high school training credential. Increasingly successful education programs have to focus on aligning with jobs available within a state or region. This can only occur with explicit cooperation between education, government, and the business community.

Likewise, business collaboration with universities can boost the amount and the impact of industry R&D investments that fosters innovation. University-based research and technology development can yield fast-growing, high-technology firms that create higher-paying middle skill and professional, scientific and technical jobs.

The second priority lies in developing critical infrastructure to keep the region’s economy humming. This includes a greater emphasis on developing energy resources, rebuilding and modernizing the freight rail, waterways and ports, as well as highways that connect the Great Lakes to the rest of the country and the world.

In the modern economy, creating economic advantage also includes paying attention to specialized infrastructure such as university and lab facilities, technology and training centers, multi-modal shipping and logistics facilities, and research parks. These infrasystems – integrated fusions of facilities, technology and advanced socio-technical capabilities – can drive innovation, particularly for future higher-value industries and higher-paying jobs. The full range of today’s infrastructure assets is shown in the figure below.

Third, and perhaps most important, the region needs to maintain the housing affordability and other quality of life attributes critical to attracting both immigrants and domestic migrants. As Millennials enter their 30s in large numbers over the next decade, the region needs to improve its public schools, parks and other amenities to attract them.

Ultimately, this represents a distinctly common-sense means to overcome a legacy of failure and create a new paradigm of success for the region. The Great Lakes, rather than trying to arrest its decline by completely running away from its past, can now recover the great sense of potential so evident in its heroic history.

Download the full pdf version of the report, including charts and maps about the Great Lakes Region. The report was authored for the Sagamore Institute with support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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

Mark Schill is Vice President of Research at Praxis Strategy Group, an economic development and research firm working with communities and states to improve their economies.

Ryan Streeter is Distinguished Fellow for Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Sagamore Institute. You can follow his work at RyanStreeter.com and Sagamoreinstitute.org.

Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.


The Growth In Science & Research Occupations

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Local economic developers and policy pundits often point to scientific and research jobs as an important part of regional economies and a critical driver of innovation for the nation's economy. As we continue to filter through the data in our latest release (built on nearly 90 federal and state data sources), we notice that many occupations related to science and research are doing quite well.

The actual category of occupations is referred to as “life, physical, and social science occupations,” by Bureau of Labor's Standard Occupational Classification System (SOC 19). This group includes 44 occupations from the associate's degree to doctorate level, ranging from medical technicians to market research analysts. In this post, we will look at how states compare in this job category and highlight some of the jobs that are most notable since ’07.

OVERVIEW

First, here is a quick overview of the sector. There are currently 1.3 million jobs in this category, and since 2007 there has been 3.3% growth at the national level. In 2010, over 500,000 students completed education and training related to these jobs, according to the IPEDS database from the National Center for Education Statistics. (Note: These graduates would also be pursuing occupations that we are not measuring in this analysis, so this data doesn’t necessarily say that overtraining is occurring). We estimate that in 2011 there were nearly 70,000 openings for science and research occupations in this category.

The median hourly wage for this category is nearly $30 per hour and there is a pretty even split between males and females. Also, nearly 50% of the people who work in this sector are between the ages of 25 and 44.

STATE-BY-STATE LOOK

  • Not surprisingly, California has the highest number of these jobs (nearly 200,000). From 2007 to 2011, the state gained over 8,000 jobs. The state also has a jobs concentration (LQ) of 1.24, higher than than the national average (1.0).
  • North Dakota and South Dakota had the highest percent growth for these jobs (12% and 10%, respectively). However, because employment was relatively low to begin with, each state added less than 500 jobs.
  • The District of Columbia has the highest concentration of these jobs as well as the highest pay. From 2007 to 2011, about 1,500 new jobs were created. The concentration of these jobs in DC is more than three times greater than the national average.
  • Other states with relatively high concentrations of these jobs are Alaska (2.0), Delaware (1.9), Montana (1.89), Wyoming (1.73), Massachusetts (1.7), New Mexico (1.6), Idaho (1.58), Maryland (1.57), Washington (1.56), Colorado (1.28), Vermont (1.26), Oregon (1.24), New Jersey (1.24), New York (1.14), and Minnesota (1.12).
  • Perhaps surprisingly, New Jersey is one of only six states to have lost jobs in this occupation sector over the past five years. In New Jersey, the job loss was actually quite substantial––3,400 jobs, a 7.4% decline. Also of note, the states with the lowest concentration of these jobs tend to be in the South: Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Georgia, and Mississippi (among other states) are all well below the national average for these occupations.

Below is a table of all the states, sorted from the most to the least concentrated. The data comes from EMSI’s 2011.4 Covered dataset.

State Name 2007 Jobs 2011 Jobs Change % Change 2011 Median Hourly Wage 2007 National LQ
Total 1,279,078 1,321,345 42,267 3.3% $29.50
District of Columbia 20,395 21,920 1,525 7.5% $42.43 3.16
Alaska 6,344 6,836 492 7.8% $28.73 2.02
Delaware 7,659 7,144 (515) -6.7% $32.07 1.90
Montana 7,955 8,152 197 2.5% $21.25 1.89
Wyoming 4,659 4,922 263 5.6% $22.86 1.73
Massachusetts 51,381 54,568 3,187 6.2% $33.21 1.70
New Mexico 12,555 12,709 154 1.2% $29.68 1.60
Idaho 9,875 9,944 69 0.7% $21.86 1.58
Maryland 38,229 40,791 2,562 6.7% $35.27 1.57
Washington 43,250 46,353 3,103 7.2% $30.92 1.56
Colorado 27,947 29,304 1,357 4.9% $32.58 1.28
Vermont 3,587 3,688 101 2.8% $25.66 1.26
California 182,821 191,357 8,536 4.7% $32.81 1.24
Oregon 19,998 21,028 1,030 5.2% $25.42 1.24
New Jersey 45,876 42,485 (3,391) -7.4% $34.46 1.24
New York 91,307 92,552 1,245 1.4% $29.28 1.14
Minnesota 28,474 29,484 1,010 3.5% $29.89 1.12
Pennsylvania 57,545 58,368 823 1.4% $29.20 1.08
Utah 11,985 12,885 900 7.5% $23.17 1.04
Hawaii 6,541 6,713 172 2.6% $27.83 1.04
Virginia 36,864 40,063 3,199 8.7% $33.14 1.03
North Carolina 39,857 40,847 990 2.5% $27.17 1.02
South Dakota 3,787 4,171 384 10.1% $20.82 1.01
Connecticut 15,164 15,144 (20) -0.1% $31.49 0.96
Iowa 13,463 13,809 346 2.6% $24.37 0.96
Wisconsin 24,921 25,844 923 3.7% $26.36 0.95
Texas 89,518 96,626 7,108 7.9% $29.62 0.93
North Dakota 3,033 3,387 354 11.7% $22.66 0.90
West Virginia 5,935 6,186 251 4.2% $21.69 0.88
Michigan 33,820 33,310 (510) -1.5% $25.99 0.86
Nebraska 7,456 7,989 533 7.1% $24.64 0.85
Illinois 46,289 46,701 412 0.9% $30.86 0.84
Arizona 20,486 20,869 383 1.9% $25.29 0.82
Kansas 10,705 11,143 438 4.1% $25.06 0.82
Maine 4,643 4,729 86 1.9% $24.49 0.82
Rhode Island 3,669 3,636 (33) -0.9% $27.46 0.81
New Hampshire 4,467 4,610 143 3.2% $26.88 0.76
Missouri 19,013 19,145 132 0.7% $26.17 0.74
Ohio 36,798 37,410 612 1.7% $27.42 0.74
Indiana 19,744 19,771 27 0.1% $23.80 0.72
Arkansas 7,814 8,390 576 7.4% $23.49 0.70
Oklahoma 9,933 10,512 579 5.8% $25.93 0.68
Louisiana 11,944 12,416 472 4.0% $26.73 0.67
Nevada 7,844 7,674 (170) -2.2% $27.88 0.65
Mississippi 7,111 7,186 75 1.1% $23.65 0.65
Georgia 25,071 25,245 174 0.7% $27.72 0.65
Kentucky 10,746 11,347 601 5.6% $23.13 0.62
Florida 45,819 46,374 555 1.2% $25.72 0.61
South Carolina 10,881 11,277 396 3.6% $23.81 0.60
Alabama 10,405 10,461 56 0.5% $24.41 0.56
Tennessee 13,493 13,871 378 2.8% $24.72 0.52


TOP PERFORMERS

Altogether there are 44 distinct occupations captured in this category. We have selected the top 14 jobs based on total number of jobs, growth (% and total), and earnings. The data has been organized based on educational level. The 14 occupations we selected added over 42,000 jobs, which is 7% growth in five years. Average earnings are about $32 per hour. There is also an even distribution between associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral education levels.

SOC Code Description 2007 Jobs 2011 Jobs Change % Change 2011 Avg Hourly Wage Education Level
Source: EMSI Covered Employment - 2011.4
19-4041 Geological and petroleum technicians 13,805 15,258 1,453 11% $27.99 Associate's degree
19-4093 Forest and conservation technicians 29,306 31,577 2,271 8% $17.65 Associate's degree
19-4099 Life, physical, and social science technicians, all other 59,353 60,501 1,148 2% $21.60 Associate's degree
19-4021 Biological technicians 71,269 75,215 3,946 6% $19.90 Bachelor's degree
19-3022 Survey researchers 19,716 21,693 1,977 10% $20.39 Bachelor's degree
19-3021 Market research analysts 225,271 230,358 5,087 2% $32.47 Bachelor's degree
19-2099 Physical scientists, all other 24,343 25,382 1,039 4% $44.66 Bachelor's degree
19-2041 Environmental scientists and specialists, including health 81,070 83,675 2,605 3% $32.41 Master's degree
19-2042 Geoscientists, except hydrologists and geographers 30,504 32,602 2,098 7% $44.99 Master's degree
19-3099 Social scientists and related workers, all other 28,226 31,068 2,842 10% $35.12 Master's degree
19-1029 Biological scientists, all other 27,425 30,380 2,955 11% $33.30 Doctoral degree
19-1042 Medical scientists, except epidemiologists 95,226 105,224 9,998 10% $40.67 Doctoral degree
19-3031 Clinical, counseling, and school psychologists 94,123 97,347 3,224 3% $34.74 Doctoral degree
19-1021 Biochemists and biophysicists 21,762 23,504 1,742 8% $42.58 Doctoral degree
Total 821,399 863,784 42,385 7% $32.17


OBSERVATIONS

  • HIGHEST-PAYING – The highest-paying jobs on the list are geoscientists and physical scientists. Both average over $44 per hour. It is interesting to note that these are jobs associated with master’s and bachelor’s degree education rather than doctoral degrees. Most would just naturally assume that the doctoral degrees would have higher wages. Geoscientists gained 2,000 jobs (7% growth) and physical scientists gained 1,000 jobs (3% growth).
  • FASTEST-GROWING – The fastest-growing jobs on the list have been geological and petroleum technicians and biological scientists. They both grew by 11% over the past five years and added 1,500 and 3,000 jobs respectively. They each average about $30 per hour. The average ed level for geological and petroleum techs is an associate’s, and biological scientists typically have doctoral degrees. Again notice the similarity in wages; a higher average education level doesn’t necessarily result in higher wages. Other occupations that experienced higher levels of growth were survey researchers, social scientists, and medical scientists, which all had 10% growth.
  • MOST NEW JOBS – Medical scientists (doctoral degree level) added 10,000 jobs in five years, which is the largest number of new jobs. Medical scientists average about $40 per hour and there are over 100,000 working across the nation. The next occupation is market research analysts, which added 5,000 jobs (2% growth). Market research analysts make just over $30 an hour and typically have bachelor’s degrees.
  • MOST JOBS – Market research analysts also have the highest level of employment on this list: 230,000 jobs are classified under this title. The typical ed level for this job is a bachelor’s degree.

If you would like to take a closer look at each of the jobs, including what industries they work in, simply click the links below. The data and analysis comes straight from Analyst, EMSI’s web-based labor market analysis tool. With Analyst, users can look at over 800 occupations and 1,100 industries for any geography in the US. Data is also available for the UK.

Rob Sentz is the marketing director at EMSI, an Idaho-based economics firm that provides data and analysis to workforce boards, economic development agencies, higher education institutions and the private sector. He is the author of a series of green jobs white papers. For more, contact Rob Sentz (rob@economicmodeling.com). You can also reach us via Twitter @DesktopEcon.

Illustration by Mark Beauchamp.

The State of the Anglosphere

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The world financial crisis has provoked a stark feeling of decline among many in the West, particularly citizens of what some call the Anglosphere: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, for example, roughly 73 percent see the country as on the wrong track, according to an Ipsos MORI poll—a level of dissatisfaction unseen for a generation.

Commentators across the political spectrum have described the Anglosphere as decadent, especially compared with the rising power of China. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman praises the “reasonably enlightened group of people” who make up China’s one-party autocracy, which, he feels, provides more effective governance than the dysfunctional democracy of Washington, a point echoed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Service Employees International Union boss Andy Stern. On the conservative side, author Mark Steyn sees the U.S. and its cultural mother in England as “facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style ‘decline,’ but something more like sliding off a cliff.” Even Australia, arguably the strongest economy in the Anglosphere, is increasingly troubled, with local declinists decrying the country’s growing dependence on commodity exports to developing nations—above all, to China. “We are to be attendants to an emerging empire: providers of food, energy, resources, commodities and suppliers of services such as education, tourism, gambling/gaming, health (perhaps), and lifestyle property,” frets the Australian’s Bernard Salt.

It’s indisputable that the Anglosphere no longer enjoys the overwhelming global dominance that it once had. What was once a globe-spanning empire is now best understood as a union of language, culture, and shared values. Yet what declinists overlook is that despite its current economic problems, the Anglosphere’s fundamental assets—economic, political, demographic, and cultural—are likely to drive its continued global leadership. The Anglosphere future is brighter than commonly believed.

Start with economics. Like Germany in the 1930s or Japan in the 1970s, China has found that centrally directed economic systems can achieve rapid, short-term economic growth—and China’s has indeed been impressive. But over time, the growth record and economic power achieved by the free-market-oriented English-speaking nations remain peerless. A little-noted fact these days is that the Anglosphere is still far and away the world’s largest economic bloc. Overall, it accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s GDP—more than $18 trillion. In contrast, what we can refer to as the Sinosphere—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau—accounts for only 15.1 percent of global GDP, while India generates 5.4 percent (see Chart 1). The Anglosphere’s per-capita GDP of nearly $45,000 is more than five times that of the Sinosphere and 13 times that of India (see Chart 2). This condition is unlikely to change radically any time soon, since the Anglosphere retains important advantages in virtually every critical economic sector, along with abundant natural resources and a robust food supply.

Graph by Robert Pizzo

Graph by Robert Pizzo

Not surprisingly, Anglosphere countries retain close cultural and economic ties with one another. In making foreign direct investments, the United States shows a strong preference for Anglosphere countries, especially the United Kingdom and Canada (see Chart 3). The same is true for Australia, a nation whose economic future might seem to lie with Asia’s budding economic superpowers. Notwithstanding its worries about becoming a mere attendant to a rising China, Australia tilts its overseas investment heavily toward the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand.

Graph by Robert Pizzo

Anglosphere countries possess overwhelming military superiority to protect their economic interests. While the United States dominates military technology and hardware, Britain ranks fourth in military spending, with both Australia and Canada ranking in the top 15. The U.S. is headquarters to the world’s three largest defense companies: Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. America’s Anglosphere ally Australia has joined informally with Singapore and the Philippines (both are nations where English is spoken widely) to provide a potential regional military counterweight to China.

Anglosphere economic and military leadership is reflected in, and grows out of, the English-speaking world’s remarkable technological leadership. The vast majority of the world’s leading software, biotechnology, and aerospace firms are concentrated in English-speaking countries. Three-fifths of global pharmaceutical-research spending comes from Britain and America; more than 450 of the top 500 software companies in the world are based in the Anglosphere, mainly in the U.S., which hosts nine of the top ten. Out of the ten fastest-growing software firms, six are American and one is British. Internet giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have no foreign equivalents remotely close in size and influence.

Graph by Robert Pizzo

English is an ascendant language, the primary global language of business and science and the prevailing tongue in a host of key developing countries, including India, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Over 40 percent of Europeans speak English, while only 19 percent are Francophone. When German, Swedish, and Swiss businesspeople venture overseas, they speak not their home language but English.

Long-run trends in the developing world also point to the expansion of the English language. French schools have been closing even in former French colonies, such as Algeria, Rwanda, and Vietnam, where students have resisted learning the old colonial tongue. English is becoming widely adopted in America’s biggest competitor, China, and it dominates the Gulf economy, where it serves as the language of business in hubs such as Dubai. The Queen’s tongue is, of course, broadly spoken in that other emerging global economic superpower, India, where it has become a vehicle for members of the middle and upper classes to communicate across regional boundaries. In Malaysia, too, English is the language of business, technology, and politics.

With linguistic ascendancy comes cultural power, and the Anglosphere’s remains uncontested. In total global sales of media, movies, television, and music, it has no major competitor. Its exports of movies and TV programs dwarf those of established European powers like France and Germany and upstarts such as China, Brazil, and India (see Chart 5). Exports from Hollywood and the cultural capitals of other Anglosphere countries are growing enormously in developing countries: Hollywood box-office revenues grew 25 percent in Latin America and 21 percent in the Asia-Pacific region (with China accounting for 40 percent of that region’s box office). The hit movie Avatar made over $2 billion outside North America; in Russia, Hollywood films earn twice as much as their domestic counterparts. Anglophone preeminence extends to pop music, with Americans Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift, along with the U.K.’s Susan Boyle, ruling global charts. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese pop artists do have large followings in Asia, but the biggest global stars continue to originate in the Anglosphere. This is true of fashion trends, too: Los Angeles, New York, and London dominate fashion for everything from sportswear to lingerie in the increasingly global “mall world.”

Graph by Robert Pizzo

Much has been made of the aging of the West, but the English-speaking countries are not graying as rapidly as their historical European rivals are—notably, Germany and Italy—or as Russia and many East Asian countries are. Between 1980 and 2010, the U.S., Canada, and Australia saw big population surges: the U.S.’s expanded by 75 million, to more than 300 million; Canada’s nearly doubled, from 18 million to 34 million; and Australia’s increased from 13 million to 22 million. By contrast, in some European countries, such as Germany, population has remained stagnant, while Russia and Japan have watched their populations begin to shrink.

The U.S. now has 20 people aged 65 or older for every 100 of working age—only a slight change from 1985, when there were 18 for every 100. By 2030, the U.S. will have 33 seniors per 100 working Americans. But consider the numbers elsewhere. In the world’s fourth-largest economy, Germany already has 33 elderly people for every 100 of working age—up from only 21 in 1985. By 2030, this figure will rise to 48, meaning that there will be barely two working Germans per retiree. The numbers are even worse in Japan, which currently has 35 seniors per 100 working-age people, a dramatic change from 1985, when the country had just 15. By 2030, the ratio is expected to rise to 53 per 100.

Meanwhile, the nation that so many point to as the twenty-first-century superpower—China—now has a fertility rate of 1.6, even lower than that of Western Europe. Over the next two decades, its ratio of workers to retirees is projected to rise from 11 to 23. Other countries, such as Brazil and Iran, face similar scenarios. These countries, without social safety nets of the kinds developed in Europe or Japan, may get old before they can get rich.

These figures will have an impact on the growth of the global workforce. Between 2000 and 2050, for example, the U.S. workforce is projected to grow by 37 percent, while China’s shrinks by 10 percent, the EU’s decreases by 21 percent, and, most strikingly, Japan’s falls by as much as 40 percent.

In this respect, immigration presents the most important long-term advantage for the Anglosphere, which has excelled at incorporating citizens from other cultures. A remarkable 14 million people immigrated to Anglosphere countries over the last decade. The United States, in particular, remains a powerful magnet: in 2005, it swore in more new citizens—the vast majority from outside the Anglosphere—than the next nine countries put together. The U.K. last year also experienced the strongest immigration in its history.

In sum, post-financial-crisis reports of the Anglosphere’s imminent irrelevance have been exaggerated—wildly.

This piece originally appeared in The City Journal.

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

Shashi Parulekar is the director of global sales and marketing and chief technology officer for Zemarc Corporation.

Graphs by Robert Pizzo

Commuting in New York City, 2000-2010

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New York City is infamous for congestion and long commutes. At 34.6 minutes, it has the longest average commute time in the United State. The region is also America's top user of public transportation, with 30.7% of all metro area commutes made by transit. Nearly 40% of all transit commuters in the United States are in the metro New York. As transit commutes generally take longer than driving, one might be tempted to link these facts. But commute times also seem to correlate with city size, and bedevil big cities with limited public transit too.

New York's commutes improved a bit over the 2000s, however. The average commute time declined in every borough, in the city as a whole, and in the region. Overall US commute times fell as well, but less than New York's:


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

In addition to showing the decline, this chart also highlights disparity in commute times between the subareas of New York. Manhattanites have far shorter commutes than those who live in the outer boroughs. In fact, the outer boroughs actually have longer commutes than far-flung outer suburban areas. The areas just outside the urban core of New York are some of the most disadvantaged for regional commuting

The commute time decline is particularly noticeable when looking at ultra-long commutes, those that are 90 minutes are longer:


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

Here again we see both a decline in long commutes and a higher concentration in the outer boroughs.

New York also managed to finish out the decade with no increase in traffic congestion. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the region ended the decade with the same Travel Time Index it had when it started, 1.28:


Source: Texas Transportation Institute, Urban Mobility Report 2011

What has caused this?  Firstly, given that the data is collected in surveys with a margin of error, one shouldn't read too much into any given year's value. However, the decline was fairly consistently reflected in the later decade surveys and doesn't appear to be an anomaly of just 2010.

Assuming some legitimate improvement, one obvious potential explanation is the economy. Metro New York did lose 99,000 jobs in the 2000s. This was only a decline of 1.2% however, which actually bettered the US as a whole. But given the extreme congestion in the region, it clearly could have played a role. Also not to be dismissed are toll increases in the regions, and even potentially changes resulting from 9/11.

Given the focus of the Bloomberg administration on non-auto forms of transportation, it is also worth looking at changes there.  Public transit usage grew strongly in New York over the decade, with regional trips increasing by 23%.


Source: Texas Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report 2011

This increase is also reflected  an increase in public transportation commuting mode share over the past decade.


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

So should increased public transit ridership get the credit for commute time reductions? To some extent perhaps. But remember that New York has both the nation's longest commutes and highest public transit ridership. Also keep in mind that public transit commutes are longer than driving commutes. The average commute time in metro New York for those driving alone is 30 minutes. For those riding public transportation it is 51.2 minutes. But transit riders affect drivers too. Public transit saves drivers in the New York area nearly $8 billion per year in congestion costs.  So while public transit can't be necessarily given the credit for commute time improvements, it's certainly possible it contributed to them .

The same is not true, however, for other alternative transport modes. Here is the change in bicycle commuting over the decade:


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

Bicycling gets a lot of press in New York, and while the increases look impressive on a chart like the one above, the reality is that this is a trend that enjoys only a bit more than half a percentage point gain in mode share. Bicycling may be on an upswing, and may be of great help recreationally and for non-commute trips, but it is not yet a major force in commuting.

Walking is actually far more prevalent than bicycling for commuting in New York. But the mode share for walking actually declined over the decade:


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

While walking is generally seen as a good thing in urbanist circles, some people can end up walking to work simply because they have no other alternatives. People who obtain access to a car, or who are able to use transit to get a job outside of their neighborhood, may in fact be improving their economic prospects. Some people who previously walked may be riding transit or biking to work today. Also, some walkers may have switched to driving. Interestingly, the number of households without a vehicle declined in metro New York, though some boroughs saw increases. The changes are very small, however.


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

Lastly, as you might expect with transit going up, the percentage of commuters driving alone declined nearly across the board in New York, though it increased nationally:


Source: Census 2000, American Community Survey 2010 1-yr

In short, New York retains America's longest commutes and highest public transport usage. But in the last decade there have been increases in public transport commuting and declines in people driving alone, while overall commute times have improved, fewer people with ultra-long commutes, and road congestion has stayed flat. The 2000s were perhaps an unusual decade in America and New York. And the changes are fairly small so far.  The future will tell whether this is the start of a long term trend or merely a short term reversal.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile. Telestrian was used to analyze data and to create maps for this piece.

Housing Affordability: St. Louis’ Competitive Advantage

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Things are looking better in St. Louis. For decades, St. Louis has been slowest-growing metropolitan areas of the United States. Its historical core city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, a greater loss than any other major core municipality in the modern era.  Nonetheless, the metropolitan area, including the city, added nearly 50 percent to its population from 1950. The fate of St. Louis has been similar to that of Rush Belt metropolitan areas in the Midwest and East, as the nation has moved steadily West and South since World War II (Note).

Expensive Housing and Driving People Away: During the past decade, high house prices have driven residents away from areas with better amenities, especially California’s coastal metropolitan areas and metropolitan New York. Between 2000 and 2009, Los Angeles exported 1.4 million domestic migrants, the San Francisco Bay Area 600,000 (San Francisco and San Jose) and San Diego 125,000. New York lost nearly 2,000,000. St. Louis did much better, losing less than 45,000 domestic migrants. On a per capita basis, St. Louis also performed better, losing 1.6 domestic residents per capita to migration, compared to 4.5 in San Diego, 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area and 11 in New York.   This may not sound like an accomplishment, but the St. Louis area has probably not outperformed California in terms of migration since it entered the Union in 1850.

The big change between the 2000s and previous decades lies in housing price. It is in this period that America became effectively two nations in housing affordability. The major metropolitan areas that experienced that largest housing bubble lost 3.2 million domestic migrants, while those with lesser or no bubble gained 1.5 million. Demonstrating the preference of people for more dispersed surroundings, even more (1.7 million) moved to smaller metropolitan areas. Housing affordability has emerged as a principal competitive factor among metropolitan areas.

Superior Housing Affordability: This is where St. Louis excels. As of the third quarter of 2011, the median house price was 2.6 times the median household income in St. Louis, according to the 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which covered seven nations (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Hong Kong, in China). Dividing the median house price by the median household income gives St. Louis an affordability rating (Median Multiple) of 2.6. By comparison the Median Multiple was 4.2 in Portland (60 percent more expensive ), 4.5 in Seattle (75 percent more),  6.1 in San Diego (135 percent more) and 6.9 in San Jose (175 percent more. While other metropolitan areas were reeling from house price increases that still have not returned to normal, St. Louis (and other metropolitan areas, like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Indianapolis) have continued to experience affordable and far more steady house prices (Figure 1).

Lowest Cost of Living: Affordable house prices are associated with a lower cost of living. St. Louis does very well here. According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parity program, the cost of living in St. Louis is the lowest among major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1,000,000 population). In St. Louis, the cost of living is:

  • 29 percent less than in New York.
  • 31 percent less than in San Jose.
  • 23 percent less than in San Diego.
  • 19 percent less than in Seattle.
  • 12 percent less than in Portland.

Things Could Get Better for St. Louis: Moreover, the gap could become larger, especially as governments in California try to outlaw new detached housing, under Senate Bill 375. None of this is good for young households or less affluent households who will have to leave to find housing that meets their desires. Many will need to leave to fulfill their dreams.

Inevitably, the higher housing costs associated with these policies (called by various names, such as "livability," "smart growth" and "growth management") fall hardest on lower income households (often minorities), who have less to spend, are forced to move away or cannot afford to move in. The consequences were articulated by California's Hispanic oriented Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (Figure 2):

While there is little agreement on the magnitude of the effect of growth controls on home prices, an increase is always the result.

The Secret: Just what did the St. Louis leadership do to improve its competitiveness so much? Nothing. They just stayed out of the way. Unlike their counterparts where house prices exploded, St. Louis officials did not prohibit people from living where they wanted on the urban fringe and they did not force new houses to be built on postage stamp lots. Nor did they adopt land use regulations that drive up the price of land (Figure 3) and, in consequence housing), just as an OPEC embargo would raise the price of gasoline. When the easy money came and lenders were begging households with insufficient resources to take mortgages, the planning embargoes drove up house prices and invited undue participation by speculators who know the difference between a competitive and a rigged market.

There are positive signs as a result of this affordability advantage. St. Louis has been attracting more young residents. Recent data indicates that St. Louis ranked 15th in high tech job growth out of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 over the past decade. It would be expected that St. Louis would trail fast growing Seattle, Raleigh and Charlotte and perennial tax consumer Washington. However, St. Louis can be placed better than perennial leaders San Jose, Boston, Portland, Austin and New York. Budding local efforts are aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship, even as California and New York search for new ways to say "no."

Succeeding by Being St. Louis: The improving prospects of St. Louis are not the result of a taxpayer financed marketing campaign or a payoff from the usual "let's copy Portland" strategies (or even Cleveland, as one analyst put it a couple of decades ago). St. Louis cannot compete with the weather in the Bay Area, does not have San Diego's beaches, the mountains near Denver nor the natural beauty surrounding Seattle. But it does have an affordable life style.

St. Louis can succeed only by being St. Louis. It is a metropolitan area with a great past, and many fine civic institutions, including great parks, sports teams and a world class orchestra. This long laggard Midwestern metropolitan area may face its best competitive prospects since Chicago passed it in population in 1870. Local and state leaders need to stay away from the policies that would dilute St. Louis' principal competitive advantage, a low cost of living, due to a housing market left to operate without destructive distortion.

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

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Photo: Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (by author)

Note: This is adapted from a policy study by the author for the Show Me Institute: Housing Affordability The St. Louis Competitive Advantage

Don’t Bet Against The (Single-Family) House

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Nothing more characterizes the current conventional wisdom than the demise of the single-family house. From pundits like Richard Florida to Wall Street investors, the thinking is that the future of America will be characterized increasingly by renters huddling together in small apartments, living the lifestyle of the hip and cool — just like they do in New York, San Francisco and other enlightened places.

Many advising the housing industry now envisage a “radically different and high-rise” future, even though the volume of new multi-unit construction permits remains less than half the level of 2006. Yet with new permits at historically low levels as well for single-family houses, real estate investors, like the lemmings they so often resemble, are traipsing into the multi-family market with sometimes reckless abandon.

Today the argument about the future of housing reminds me of the immortal line from Groucho Marx:Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? Start with the strong preference of the vast majority of Americans to live in detached houses rather than crowd into apartments. “Many things — government policies, tax structures, financing methods, home-ownership patterns, and availability of land — account for how people choose to live, but the most important factor is culture,” notes urban historian Witold Rybczynski.

Homeownership and the single-family house, Rybczynski notes, rests on many fairly mundane things — desire for privacy, need to accommodate children and increasingly the needs of aging parents and underemployed adult children. Such considerations rarely enter the consciousness of urban planning professors, “smart growth” advocates and architectural aesthetes swooning over a high-density rental future.

Just look at the numbers. Over the last decade— even as urban density has been embraced breathlessly by a largely uncritical media — close to 80% of all new households, according to the American Community Survey, chose to settle in single-family houses.

Now, of course, we are told, it’s different . Yet over the past decade, vacancy rates rose the most in multi-unit housing, with an increase of 61%, rising from 10.7% in 2000 to 17.1% in 2010. The vacancy rate in detached housing also rose but at a slower rate, from 7.3% in 2000 to 10.7% in 2010, an increase of 48%. Attached housing  – such as townhouses –  posted the slightest increase in vacancies, from 8.4% in 2000 to 11.0% in 2010, an increase of 32%.

The attractiveness of rental apartments may soon be peaking just in time for late investors to take a nice haircut. Rising rents, a byproduct of speculative buying of apartments, already are making mortgage payments a more affordable option in such key markets as Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Urbanist pundits often insist the rush to rental apartments will be sustained by demographic trends. One tired cliché suggest that empty nesters are chafing to leave their suburban homes to move into urban apartments. Yet, notes longtime senior housing consultant Joe Verdoon, both market analysis and the Census tells us the opposite: most older folks are either staying put, or, if they relocate, are moving further out from the urban core.

The two other major drivers of demographic change — the millennial generation and immigrants — also seem to prefer suburban, single-family houses. Immigrants have been heading to the suburbs for a generation, so much so that the most diverse neighborhoods in the country now tend to be not in the urban core but the periphery. This is particularly true in Sunbelt cities, where immigrant enclaves tend to be in suburban areas away from the core.

Millennials, the generation born between 1983 and 2003, are often described by urban boosters as unwilling to live in their parent’s suburban “McMansions.” Yet according to a survey by Frank Magid and Associates, a large plurality define their “ideal place to live” when they get older to be in the suburbs, even more than their boomer parents.

Ninety-five million millennials will be entering the housing market in the next decade, and they will do much to shape the contours of the future housing market. Right now many millennials lack the wherewithal to either buy a house or pay the rent. But that doesn’t mean they will be anxious to stay tenants in small places as they gain some income, marry, start a family and simply begin to yearn for a somewhat more private, less harried life.

In the meantime, many across the demographic spectrum are moving not away from but back to the house. One driver here is the shifting nature of households, which, for the first time in a century are actually getting larger. This is reflected in part by the growth of multi-generational households.

This is widely believed to be a temporary blip caused by the recession, which clearly is contributing to the trend. But the move toward multigenerational housing has been going on for almost three decades. After having fallen from 24 percent in 1940 to barely 12 percent in 1980, the percentage topped over 16 percent before the 2008 recession took hold. In 2009, according to Pew Research Center, a record 51.4 million Americans live in this kind of household.

Instead of fading into irrelevance, the single-family house seems to be accommodating more people than before. It is becoming, if you will, the modern equivalent of the farm homestead for the extended family, particularly in expensive markets such as California. This may be one of the reasons why suburbs — where more than half of owner-occupied homes are locatedactually increased their share of growth in almost all American metropolitan areas through the last decade.

Some companies, such as Pulte Homes and Lennar, are betting that the multi-generational home — not the rental apartment — may well be the next big thing in housing. These firms report that demand for this kind of product is particularly strong among immigrants and their children.

Lennar  has already developed models — complete with separate entrances and kitchens for kids or grandparents — in Phoenix, Bakersfield, the Inland Empire area east of Los Angeles and San Diego, and is planning to extend the concept to other markets. “This kind of housing solves a lot of problems,” suggests Jeff Roos, Lennar’s regional president for the western U.S. “People are looking at ways to pool their resources, provide independent living for seniors and keeping the family together.”

But much of the growth for multigenerational homes will come from an already aging base of over 130 million existing homes. An increasing number of these appear to being expanded to accommodate additional family members as well as home offices. Home improvement companies like Lowe’s and Home Depot already report a surge of sales servicing this market.

A top Home Depot manager in California traced the rising sales in part to the decision of people to invest their money in an asset that at least they and their family members can live in. “We are having a great year ,” said the executive, who didn’t have permission to speak for attribution. “ I think people have decided that they cannot move so let’s fix up what we have.”

These trends suggest that the widely predicted demise of the American single family home may be widely overstated. Instead, particularly as the economy improves, we may be witnessing its resurgence, albeit in a somewhat different form. Rather than listen to the pundits, perhaps it would be better to follow what’s before your eyes. Don’t give up the house.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.com.

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

Photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

Will Millennials Still be Liberal When They’re Old and Gray?

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The Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) is the cohort most in favor of using the federal government to promote economic stability and equality since the GI Generation of the 1930s and 1940s. The attitudes of Millennials were heavily shaped by the protected and group-oriented way in which they were reared and their experience of feeling the full brunt of the Great Recession as they emerged into adulthood.  

As a result, the biggest political story of the first half of the 21st century may well be the extent to which the largest American generation ever retains its economic liberalism and thereby shapes the direction of public policy in coming decades. If history is any guide, much of that story’s plot will be written during the next four or five years.

Millennials deserve America’s sympathies for the disproportionate impact the Great Recession has had on their generation. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, a clear plurality (41%) of Americans think that young, rather than middle-aged (29%) or older  (24%) adults are having the toughest time in today’s economy. And they are right.  Last year, the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds (16.3%) and 25-29 year olds (10.3%) was well above that of those 35-64 (7%). Even among those 18-24 year olds fortunate enough to find full-time employment, real median weekly earnings were down by six percent over the previous four years. Not surprisingly, the weak economy has had a profound impact on the personal lives of Millennials. Nearly half (49%) say they have taken a job (often part time) just to pay the bills. A third (35%) have returned to school, something that may pay benefits in the long term, but is at the expense of current earnings. About a quarter have taken an unpaid job and/or moved back in with their parents (24% each). About one in five have postponed having a baby (22%) and/or getting married (20%). Less than a third (31%) say that they earn or have enough money to lead the kind of life they want.

Their experiences with the Great Recession have only reinforced Millennials’ support for economically activist government. Last November, when Pew asked whether Americans preferred a larger government that provided more services or a smaller government that provided fewer services, Millennials opted for a bigger government over a smaller one by a large 54% to 35% margin. By contrast, 54% of Boomers (born 1946-1964) and 59% of Silents (born 1925-1945) favor a smaller government. .

In addition, a majority of (55% to 41%) Millennials favored a greater level of federal spending to help the economy recover from the recession rather than reducing the federal budget deficit. Millennials also continue to support governmental efforts to lessen economic inequality; 63% agreed that government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep. Consistent with their overall attitudes toward the size of government, the two oldest generations—Boomers and Silents—favored reduced spending and a more limited government role in promoting economic equality.

The tendency of people to retain their political viewpoints and preferences throughout their lives suggests that once they are set, Millennial Generation attitudes toward government’s proper role in the economy will persist for decades. This conclusion was recently confirmed by   economists Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo. In a longitudinal analysis of survey data collected annually since 1972, they found that experiencing an economic recession during one’s “formative” years (18-25 years old) led Americans to favor “leftist” governmental policies that would “help poor people” and lessen “income inequality.” These attitudes were not influenced by experiencing a recession either before or after the formative years and remained in place even when controlled for demographic variables such as sex, race, and social class. However, the same data suggested that the deeper and more sustained the recession, the lower the level of confidence survey respondents had in governmental institutions such as Congress and the presidency.  

The success of governmental action in dealing with the Great Depression in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s put the GI or Greatest Generation on the path of lifelong support for governmental activism. After the nation’s victory over the Axis and the economic boom that followed, positive perceptions of government and political efficacy were virtually universal among Americans. Today, although America has begun to shake off the worst aspects of the Great Recession, unemployment remains stubbornly high and growth rates remain below the level needed to make dramatic dents in unemployment rates, especially among Millennials.

So far Millennial beliefs in activist, egalitarian government policies have not been shaken by the slow pace of the recovery or what  some may perceive as an inadequate federal response. The extent to which those attitudes persist in future decades, when Millennials will represent over one out of every three adult Americans, could depend on how well the government deals with the economic challenges the nation faces in the years just ahead.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, named by the New York Times as one of their ten favorite books of 2008.

Is Energy the Last Good Issue for Republicans?

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With gas prices beginning their summer spike to what could be record highs, President Obama in recent days has gone out of his way to sound reassuring on energy, seeming to approve an oil pipeline to Oklahoma this week after earlier approving leases for drilling in Alaska. Yet few in the energy industry trust the administration’s commitment to expanding the nation’s conventional energy supplies given his strong ties to the powerful green movement, which opposes the fossil-fuel industry in a split that’s increasingly dividing the country by region, class, and culture.

But Republicans, other than the increasingly irrelevant Newt Gingrich, have failed to capitalize on the potent issue, instead lending the president an unwitting assist by focusing the primary fight on vague economic plans and sex-related side issues like abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. The GOP may be winning over the College of Cardinals, but it is squandering its chance of gaining a majority in the Electoral College, holding the House, and taking the Senate.

No single sector affects more people and industries than energy, and none is more deeply affected by the disposition of government. Energy divides the nation into two camps. On one side there are the regions and industries dependent on the development and use of energy. They include the increasingly expansive energy-producing region stretching from the Gulf Coast and the Great Plains to parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian range.

The centers of energy growth, including areas stretching from the Gulf Coast through the Great Plains to the Canadian border, have generated the highest levels of job and income growth over the past decade (along with parasitic Washington, D.C.).

Nine of the 11 fastest-growing job categories are related to energy production, according to an analysis by Economic Modeling Systems Inc. Energy jobs pay an average of $100,000 annually, about the same as software engineers earn in Silicon Valley.

Perhaps more important politically, this bonanza is now spreading to historical battleground states Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Long-depressed areas like western Pennsylvania are reversing decades of decline as new finds and advances in natural-gas drilling have opened up vast new stores of domestic energy. The new energy wealth has created new jobs, enriched property owners, and provided states with potential huge new sources of revenue.

On the other side of the energy divide stand a handful of dense, mostly coastal metropolitan areas with either little in the way of energy resources or, in the case of California’s most affluent urban pockets, little interest in exploiting them. With a shrinking industrial base and less dependence on automobiles, these areas now constitute the political base for the both the Democratic Party and the growing green-industrial complex, which boasts strong ties to Silicon Valley’s well-heeled venture-capital “community” and their less celebrated, but even wealthier, Wall Street allies.

In these places, the current fossil-energy boom is regarded less as a boon than as an environmental disaster in the making, a view captured in the unrelenting attack on shale development in the news pages of The New York Times and other outlets in broad sympathy with the Obama administration. New production of low-cost, low-emission natural gas also threatens the viability of politically preferred renewables such as solar and wind. But unlike fossil fuels, such “green” initiatives have created very few jobs; overall, the promise of “green jobs,” as even The New York Times has noted, has failed to live up to its hype.

Given the success in the other energy states, California—with double-digit unemployment—might reconsider its policies, but this is unlikely. “I asked [Gov.] Jerry Brown about why California cannot come to grips with its huge hydrocarbon reserves,” John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell Oil’s American operations and a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technical Advisory Committee, told me recently. “After all, this could turn around the state."

Brown’s answer, according to Hofmeister: “This is not logic, it’s California. This is simply not going to happen here.’”

But elsewhere in the U.S., new technologies such as hydraulic fracking and vertical drilling have vastly increased estimates of North America’s energy resources, particularly natural gas. By 2020, the United States, according to the consultancy PFC Energy, will surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil and gas producer.

As President Obama has acknowledged, this surge of production boasts some great economic benefits. American imports of raw petroleum have fallen from a high of 60 percent of the total to less than 46 percent. Overall, according to Rice University’s Amy Myers Jaffe, U.S. oil reserves now stand at more than 2 trillion barrels; Canada has slightly more. She pegs North America’s combined reserves at more than three times the total estimated reserves of the Middle East and North Africa.

At the same time, energy exploration is sparking something of an industrial revival. The demand for new rigs, pipelines, and a series of new petrochemical facilities has created a burst of industrial production across much of the country. Steel mills, makers of earth-moving equipment, and construction suppliers all have benefited. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests shale gas could lead to the development of 1 million industrial jobs. Not surprisingly, some of the biggest backers of shale-gas exploration are prominent CEOs from industrial firms.

Energy policy may also be critical for the future of the Great Lakes–based American auto industry. Despite expensive PR ventures like the electric Chevy Volt, the Big Three depend for profits largely on SUVs and trucks. High oil prices will only help their competitors from Japan, South Korea, and Germany, all of which are ramping up in the emerging Southeastern auto corridor. Rising oil prices could also raise the costs of food production, which relies heavily on energy-intensive fertilizers and machinery.

Aware of the negative consequences for a still-weak recovery, President Obama has started to mount a defense for his energy policies. Last month he launched several preemptive strikes, claiming credit for rising U.S. production while ridiculing Republicans for their “drill, baby, drill” response to rising energy prices.

Obama is correct in asserting that increases in domestic production will not solve the energy price issue overnight, or even in the near future. But it was disingenuous for him to then take credit for the current energy boom, which resulted largely from policies adopted during the Bush years, while Obama’s policies have, if anything, slowed exploration and development.

It’s fairly clear that the president and his team—notably Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar—are at best ambivalent about greater fossil-fuel development. Obama, for example, recently proposed cutting tax breaks and subsidies for the oil industry, which he estimated at $4 billion annually—a new expense for the companies that would in large part be passed on to consumers at the pump.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but along with the effective tax hike, Obama proposed doubling down on the much larger and, to date, far less productive giveaways to the green-industrial complex, which received $80 billion in loans and subsidies in the 2009 stimulus. According to various studies, including the Energy Information Agency, solar firms enjoy rates of subsidization per kilowatt hour at least five times those gained by fossil-fuel firms.

If all energy subsidies were removed, the fossil-fuel industry likely could shrug off the hit, while the heavily subsidized green-industrial complex would markedly diminish. Yet even if Congress refuses to continue the green subsidies, it’s probable that administration regulators would find ways to slow fossil-fuel expansion in a second Obama term. Responding largely to the Democratic environmental lobby, they have already overruled the State Department to delay the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. Plans for new multibillion-dollar petrochemical plants on the Gulf will make easy pickings for federal regulators from agencies now controlled by environmental zealots.

“The energy states feel they are being persecuted for their good deeds,” says Eric Smith, director of the Tulane Energy Institute in New Orleans. “There is a sense there are people in the administration who would like this whole industry to go away.”

In the short run, Obama’s political exposure in the energy wars is somewhat limited. Most of the big-producing states—Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Alaska, and North Dakota—are unlikely to vote for him anyway. Nor does he have to worry about too much pressure from inside his party; Democratic ranks in Congress from energy-producing states have thinned considerably in recent years, removing contrary voices inside the party.

A more dicey issue relates to contestable states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where many see the energy boom as a source of economic recovery. To make their case in these and other swing states, Republicans first have to make energy the overall revival of the American economy—the key issue for this November’s election. If they insist on campaigning primarily as stolid defenders of rigid social values and election-year promises of painless tax cuts, they will have themselves to blame for their drubbing in November.

This piece originally appeared in TheDailyBeast.

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

Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.


Shale Revolution Challenges the Left and the Right

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama invoked the 30-year history of federal support for new shale gas drilling technologies to defend his present day investments in green energy. Obama stressed the value of shale gas—which will create thousands of jobs and billions in profits—as part of his "all of the above" approach to energy, and defended the critical role government investment has always played in developing new energy technologies, from nuclear to solar panels to wind turbines.

The president’s remarks unsurprisingly sparked a strong response from some conservatives (here, here, here, and here), who have downplayed and even attempted to deny the important role that federal investments in hydrofracking, geologic mapping, and horizontal drilling played in the shale gas revolution.

This is an over-reaction. In acknowledging the critical role government funding played in shale gas, conservatives need not write a blank check for all government energy subsidies. Indeed, a closer look at the shale gas story challenges liberal policy preferences as much as it challenges those of conservatives, and points to much-needed reforms for today's mash of state and federal clean energy subsidies and mandates.

The Government's Role

Some have pointed to the fact that fracking dates back to the 19th century and hydraulic fracking to the 1940s as evidence that federal funding for today's fracking technologies was unimportant. But dismissing the importance of federal support for new shale gas technologies in the ’70s and ‘80s because private firms had succeeded in fracking for oil in the ’40s and ’50s is like suggesting that postwar military investments in jet engines were unnecessary because the Wright Brothers invented the propeller plane in 1903.

Enhancing oil recovery from existing wells in limestone formations by injecting various combinations of water, sand, and lubricants, as was done by private firms starting in the 1940s, is a vastly different and less complicated technical challenge than recovering widely dispersed gas methane in rock formations like shale that are simultaneously porous but not highly permeable.

Recovering gas from shale formations at a commercial scale requires injecting vastly more water, sand, and lubricants at vastly higher pressures throughout vastly larger geological formations than anything that had been attempted in earlier oil recovery efforts. It requires having some idea of where the highly diffused pockets of gas are, and it requires both drilling long distances horizontally and being able to fracture rock under high pressure multiple times along the way.

The oil and gas industries had no idea how to do any of this at the time that federal research and demonstration efforts were first initiated in the late 1960s—indeed, throughout the 1970s the gas industry made regular practice of drilling past shale to get to limestone gas deposits.

This is not just our opinion, it was the opinion of the natural gas industry itself, which explicitly requested assistance from the federal government in figuring out how to economically recover gas from shale starting in the late 1970s. Indeed, shale gas pioneer George Mitchell was an avid and vocal supporter of federal investments in developing new oil and gas technologies, and regularly advocated on behalf of Department of Energy fossil research throughout the 1980s to prevent Congress from zeroing out research budgets in an era of low energy prices.

Early Efforts

The first federal efforts to demonstrate shale gas recovery at commercial scales did not immediately result in commercially viable technologies, and this too has been offered as evidence that federal research efforts were ineffective. In two gas stimulation experiments in 1967 and 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated atomic devices in New Mexico and Colorado in order to crack the shale and release large volumes of gas trapped in the rock. The project succeeded in recovering gas, but due to concerns about radioactive tritium elements in the gas, the project was abandoned.

These projects are easy to ridicule. They sound preposterous to both anti-nuclear and anti-government ears. But in fact, the experiment demonstrated that it was possible to recover diffused gas from shale formations—proof of a concept that had theretofore not been established.

A few years later, the just-established Department of Energy demonstrated that the same result could be achieved by pumping massive amounts of highly pressurized water into shale formations. This process, known as massive hydraulic fracturing (MHF), proved too expensive for broad commercialization. But oil and gas firms, with continuing federal support, tinkered with the amount of sand, water, and binding agents over the following two decades to achieve today's much cheaper formula, known as slickwater fracking.

Early federal fracking demonstrations can be fairly characterized as big, slow, dumb, and expensive. But when it comes to technological innovation, the big, slow, dumb, and expensive phase is almost always unavoidable. Innovation typically proceeds from big, slow, dumb, and expensive to small, fast, smart, and cheap. Think of building-sized computers from the 1950s that lacked the processing power to run a primitive, 1970s digital watch.

Private firms are really good at small, fast, smart, and cheap, but they mostly don’t do big, slow, dumb, and expensive, because the benefits are too remote, the risks too great, and the costs too high. But here’s the catch. You usually can’t do small, fast, smart, and cheap until you’ve done big, slow, dumb, and expensive first. Hence the reason that, again and again, the federal government has played that role for critical technologies that turned out to be important to our economic well-being.

Drilling Down into Innovative Methods

In fact, virtually all subsequent commercial fracturing technologies have been built upon the basic understanding of hydraulic fracturing first demonstrated by the Department of Energy in the 1970s. That included not just demonstrating that gas could be released from shale formations, but also the critical understanding of how shale cracks under pressure. Scientists learned from the large federal demonstration projects in the 1970s that most shale in the United States fractures in the same direction. This led government and industry researchers to focus their efforts on technologies that would allow them to drill long distances horizontally, in a direction that situated the well hole perpendicular to the directions that fractures would run, which allowed firms to capture much more gas from each well.

Government and industry researchers also focused on developing the ability to create multiple fracks from each horizontal well, and in 1986 a joint government-industry venture demonstrated the first multifrack horizontal well in Devonian Shale. During the same period, government researchers at Sandia Laboratory developed tools for micro-seismic mapping, a technique that would prove critical to the development of commercially viable fracking. Micro-seismic mapping allowed firms to see precisely where the cracks in the rock were, and to modulate pressure, fluid, and proppant in order to control the size and geometry of each frack.

George Mitchell, who is widely credited with having pioneered the shale gas revolution, leaned heavily upon these innovations throughout the 1990s, when he finally put all the pieces together and figured out how to extract gas from shale economically. Mitchell had spent over a decade consolidating his position in the Barnett Shale before he asked for technical assistance from the government. “By the early 1990s, we had a good position, acceptable but lacking knowledge base,” Mitchell Energy Vice President Dan Steward told us recently.

Mitchell turned to the Gas Research Institute and federal laboratories for help in 1991. GRI paid for Mitchell to attempt his first horizontal well. The Sandia National Laboratory provided Mitchell with the tools and a scientific team to micro-seismically map his wells. It was only after Mitchell turned to GRI and federal laboratories for help that he finally cracked the shale gas code.

A Counterfactual?

But so what? Federal investments in new gas technologies may have proved critical to the shale gas revolution, but could they have happened without those investments? Where is the counterfactual?

Constructing a counterfactual can be a useful analytical method, but it can be abused. In this case, the counterfactual has been asserted as a kind of faith-based defense against the inconvenient history of the shale gas revolution. Nobody has offered a real world example—for instance, a country where private firms developed economical shale gas technology without any public support.

Nor has anyone offered a detailed historical analysis to justify the claim that private entrepreneurs would have done the critical applied research, developed the fracking technologies, funded the explorations in new drill bits and horizontal wells, and created the micro-seismic mapping technologies that were all required to make the shale revolution possible. A close look at the development of those technologies reveals private sector entrepreneurs, like Mitchell, who were loudly and clearly asking for help because they knew they had neither the technical knowledge nor the ability to finance such risky innovations on their own.

The Implications for Renewable Energy Subsidies

In the end though, we are mostly having this debate now because historical federal investments in shale gas are being compared to current investments in renewables. There is much that is in fact comparable—the federal role in the shale gas revolution went well beyond basic research, as some have claimed, and matches up with current renewables programs virtually demonstration for demonstration, tax credit for tax credit, and dollar for dollar when comparing the scale and nature of present federal support for renewables with past support for unconventional gas. But that doesn’t mean that President Obama's subsidies for green energy are immune to criticism.

Indeed, once we acknowledge the shale gas case as a government success, not a failure, it offers a powerful basis for reforming present clean energy investments and subsidies. Federal subsidies for shale gas came to an end, and so should federal wind and solar subsidies, at least as blanket subsidies for all solar and wind technologies. In many prime locations, where there is good wind, proximity to transmission, state renewable energy purchase mandates, and multiple state and federal subsidies, wind development is now highly profitable.

If federal investments in wind and solar are really like those in unconventional gas, then we ought to set a date certain when blanket subsidies for wind and solar energy come to an end. Imposing a phase-out of production subsidies would encourage sustained innovations and absolute cost declines. We might want to extend continuing support for some newer classes of wind and solar technologies, those that are innovating new technological methods to generate energy, or those that are specifically designed to perform better in lower wind or marginal solar locations. But in the ’80s and ’90s we did not provide a tax credit to all gas wells, only those using new technologies to recover gas from new geologic formations—and we should not continue to provide subsidies to wind and solar technologies that are already proven and increasingly widely deployed with no end in sight.

Another key lesson is that many of the most important research and demonstration projects in new shale gas technologies were funded and overseen by the Gas Research Institute, a partnership between Department of Energy laboratories and the natural gas industry that was funded through a small Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-administered fee on gas prices. GRI had both independence from Congress and the federal bureaucracy, and strong representation from the natural gas industry, which allowed it to focus research and dollars on solving key technical problems that pioneers like George Mitchell were struggling with. Federal investments in applied research and demonstration of new green energy projects ought to be similarly insulated from political meddling and rent seeking.

These and other lessons from the shale gas revolution point to far-reaching reforms of federal energy innovation and subsidy programs. If the history of the shale gas revolution challenges the tale of a single lone entrepreneur persevering without help from the government, it also challenges the present federal approach to investing in renewables in important respects. The history of federal support for shale gas offers as much a case for reform of current federal clean energy investments as it does for their preservation.

This piece originally appeared at The American.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute, a leading environmental think tank in the United States. They are authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

The Return of the Monkish Virtues

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“[The author of Leviticus] posits the existence of one supreme God who contends neither with a higher realm nor with competing peers. The world of demons is abolished; there is no struggle with autonomous foes, because there are none. With the demise of the demons, only one creature remains with ‘demonic’ power – the human being. Endowed with free will, human power is greater than any attributed to humans by pagan society. Not only can one defy God but, in Priestly language, one can drive God out of his sanctuary. In this respect, humans have replaced demons…..[The author of Leviticus] also posits that the pollution of the sanctuary leads to YHWH’s abandonment of Israel and its ejection from the land….Israel pollutes the land; the land becomes infertile; Israel is forced to leave.” – Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus


“Pollution ideas are the product of an ongoing political debate about the ideal society. All mysterious pollutions are dangerous, but to focus on the physical danger and to deride the reasoning that attaches it to particular transgressions is to miss the lesson for ourselves…. Pollution beliefs trace causal chains from from actions to disasters…Pollution beliefs uphold conceptual categories dividing the moral from the immoral and so sustain the vision of the good society.” – Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture


“Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices.” – David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

The era of the 100 watt incandescent light bulb came to an end in America on January 1st. Lower wattages will soon join them in a phaseout over time. As I noted previously, this will mean factory shutdowns in the United States and the migration of the light bulb manufacturing industry to China. The most common replacement type bulbs, compact fluorescents, are not “instant on,” generally fail to provide a proper light spectrum, contain poisonous mercury, and burn out sooner than advertised. CFL boosters claim none of these are real problems and that CFLs are a slam dunk for benefit/cost reasons, but the cold reality is that despite significant promotion, they never received widespread consumer adoption voluntarily. Given how eagerly consumers slurp up even bona fide more expensive products like Apple computers when they are perceived to be superior, I’m inclined to think the consumers are on to something. I’ve tried out CFLs myself and thought they basically sucked.

The supposed rationale for imposing an inferior product that did not receive the desired traction in the the marketplace is to prevent climate change. I went searching to try to find exactly what the impact of light bulbs on greenhouse gas emissions was and have found it quite difficult to obtain. The various sites touting CFLs all note the high output of CO2 from electricity generation generally, how much CO2 changing this or that bulb will save, etc, but as for what a wholesale elimination of light bulbs would achieve, that’s harder to find.

According to the EPA, residential electricity accounted for 784.6 million metric tons of CO2 in 2009, or 11.8% of total US human greenhouse gas emissions. How much of that is from light bulbs? It’s not broken out in the EPA’s report (even the detailed version), but I’ll attempt an estimate of aggregate CO2 savings. (If someone has a direct link to this information, please let me know).

The Guardian reported that an Australian incandescent ban would save that country 800K tons of CO2 emitted per year and a UK ban would save 2-3 million tons. It also reported that China could save 48 million tons per year by banning incandescents.

The US is bigger than Australia and the UK, but similarly advanced developmentally. China is a bigger emitter than the US, has far more people, is less advanced developmentally, and is a bigger user of coal for electricity generation. However, all three countries project similar per capita emissions reductions from incandescent elimination. If the US savings were at the upper end of their range, it would have CO2 savings of around 15 million tons a year. That’s only 0.2% of total US greenhouse gas emissions. Even if the US saved the same 48 million tons as China, it’s only 0.7%. I’d be skeptical of anyone claiming the US would save a lot more CO2 per capita than these. Some maybe, a lot, no.

In short, swapping out incandescent light bulbs is not going to be a major contributor to solving the problem of climate change. I’m not aware of anyone claiming it is. So why pass a law that is unpopular in many quarters and cram CFLs and other type of bulbs consumers haven’t chosen to buy on their own down their throats? It seems to be a purely provocative move of a mostly symbolic nature with little real substance that is sure to only harden opposition to the real changes we need to make to actually make material reductions in GHG emissions. (One might say the same of other items like mandatory recycling or banning plastic grocery bags).

The answer is that the symbolism is the substance.

The sad reality is that rather than make policy cases based on benefit/cost or other technical considerations, for political or personal reasons sustainability advocates have decided to model their cause on the template of religion. In it we have an Edenic state of nature in a fallen state because of man’s sin (pollution) for which we will experience a coming apocalyptic judgement (damage from climate change). Thus avoiding the consequences becomes fundamentally a problem of sin management. The proposed sin management solution is again taken from traditional Christianity: confession and repentance, followed by penance, restoration to right standing with God (nature), and committing to a holier life.

There are two basic problems with this. The first is that while the religion template taps in to a deep psychological vein in the human spirit – some have suggested humanity may even carry a so-called “God gene” – most people already have a religion and aren’t likely to convert to a new one without a major outreach effort.

But more importantly, the notion of penance, and perhaps of asceticism more generally, has never sold with the public, even in more religious eras. David Hume (a vigorous religious skeptic it should be noted) referred to the values resulting from this lifestyle as the “monkish virtues” and noted that they have “everywhere rejected by men of sense.” Or as Carol Coletta put it more recently, people don’t want to be told to “eat their spinach.”

It strikes me that while perhaps environmentalists don’t really want to force a particular lifestyle on people, there is a fundamental desire to see people engage in some sort of public penance for our environmental sins. I believe this to be the root logic underlying a lot of feel-good (or perhaps more accurately, “feel-bad”) initiatives like getting rid of incandescent light bulbs. It is a form of penance and embrace of the monkish virtues.

I can’t help but notice that even Christianity itself has moved away from promoting the monkish virtues. While things humility are of course still preached and expected to be modeled, modern Christianity mostly rejects the notion of an ascetic life. Most Evangelical churches actually preach that God wants humans to be happy. The idea is of a God who wants us to be unselfish, but not unhappy. A not insignificant number of churches actually preach the so-called “prosperity gospel” in which God will provide earthly blessings to His followers. In the Catholic tradition, monasticism itself has been in decline for some time. (I liken the reports of upticks in interest in joining monasteries as similar to the perennial “return of the suit” articles in fashion magazines).

Whether these theological points are accurate or not is beside the point of this article. They appear to be attractional. For example, well-known prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen runs the largest church in the United States, with over 40,000 attending weekly.

What might the environmental movement have looked like based on a different template? I’ll refer again to the work of Bruce Mau. If you’ve ever seen him present on this topic, he likes to start by noting that if we brought the entire world up to US standards of living, it would take four Earth’s worth of resources given our current technologies and approaches to make it happen. He thinks that’s a good thing, because the patent impossibility of that “takes that option off the table.” He then goes on to talk about all the super-cool new stuff we are going to have to invent and scale up to address the challenges of the future. If you haven’t, I might suggest getting his book Massive Change, which I reviewed a while back. It’s difficult to come away from one of Mau’s books or lectures without being excited about the possibilities of the future.

I don’t think Mau has any different view of the fundamentals of climate change than your typical orthodox environmentalist. But his approaches to solutions (which are admittedly not always short term practical action plans) and the sales job on them is very different. As a designer, he knows he needs to create something that’s aspirational and attractional in order to get people to want it. It’s a shame too few people have followed that lead.

The monkish virtues are just never going to sell. Perhaps you can get a room full of the sustainability in-crowd to buy into it, or even focus on top level political success as with the bulb ban. But ultimately I think this is self-defeating.

In the short term I’d suggest ending any efforts to impose direct consumer mandates. I don’t think that’s where the money is, so to speak, in GHG reductions. Instead, let’s focus on the producer side of the equation in ways that are largely transparent to consumers and don’t involve significant costs. More fuel efficient vehicles might be one. Replacing coal with natural gas is another possibility. (The EPA report I linked earlier cited this as a big contributor the decline in GHG emissions in recent years). New technologies are clearly needed and should perhaps be invested in even though as we know this will lead to many failures along the way.

As the financial crisis in Greece and elsewhere shows, people rarely confront structural problems, no matter how serious, until the crisis actually comes. At least if “austerity” (a monkish virtue if ever there was one) is the major part of the proposed solution.

If an environmental equivalent of austerity is required to save the planet, then I’m afraid we should prepare for the deluge. I personally don’t think we’re at that point, given that we’ve had huge gains in energy efficiency for many decades now while our lifestyles have actually improved. More of that, not the promotion of monkish solutions like CFL lightbulbs, is what it will really take to drive further environmental improvements.

PS: If you don’t think people are really promoting or embracing monkish lifestyles in support of environmentalism, read this article from the Guardian about people giving up on daily showers. Or think about the people trying to completely go “off the grid.” Even if CFLs don’t fit for you, clearly there are plenty of examples. I pick CFLs because they are an institutionalization of monkish virtues, not just the passion of the small minority, which has always been the case.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile, where this essay originally appeared.

Photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

Is The United States Population Heading to Long-term Deceleration?

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It's been clear since the census 2011 estimates were released on December 21, 2011, that we are experiencing something of a demographic change, at least in the short run. Clearly growth is slowing down in part, many believe, due to economic reasons, as was the case during the 1930s as well as the 1970s.

But there may be a series of other of causes of recent population change which suggest it is quite possible the United States population is simply heading towards zero population growth far quicker than the Census had previously estimated. One key reason may be the slowdown in immigration. Whatever the cause, if these patterns are not reversed, we could start observing European like slow rates of population growth spreading in the next couple of decades.

The 2011 numbers estimated 4,008,000 total births in the United States, while a just released report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a provisional estimate of 3,978,000 births from June, 2010 to June, 2011—the first time this number has been under four million since 1999. This   certainly may be attributed to the effects of the economic recession, but may be part of much larger demographic trends --- such as falling fertility rates of Hispanic women --- that eclipse economic fluctuations.

Here is a series of maps that highlight recent population changes for the 50 states. The District of Columbia is too small to be seen at this scale, but DC did have the fastest population growth rate from 2010 to 2011, at 2.16%.  There are a variety of ways to present the same data, classifying and color coding, but it is always good to look at total numbers, and both absolute and relative change.

Map Figure One: Estimated Population by State as of July 1, 2011

The United States now has a population of about 311 million persons, and four states (California, Texas, New York and Florida) exceed fifteen million persons.  Combined, these top four states combined have 101.9 million people.

Map Figure Two: Estimated Absolute Change in Population from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The second map shows the absolute change in population from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011 in six categories. Only one state, Michigan, lost population, but fourteen states added less than ten thousand persons. A total of twenty seven states added fewer than 25,000 persons. Four states added over 100,000 persons; Florida added 218,929 persons, while Georgia added 103,053 persons.  California, although its population growth is slowing down, added 353,714 persons. Texas grew by the most people—421,215 persons—a rate that, if maintained, might result in the state surpassing 30 million people in the 2020 census.  It still has a long way to go to catch up with California, which in 2011 has an estimated population of 37,691,912.

Map Figure Three: Estimated Relative Change in Population from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The third map shows relative percentage change. Although Michigan remains the only state to shrink, thirteen states are now growing less than a third of a percent a year, similar to many European Countries with very slow population growth. Overall, the United States population increased by 0.73 percent—a noticeable difference from 1970 through the 2000s, when population was consistently growing at about one percent per year. The highest rate of growth was Texas at 1.67 percent. Texas in 2011 is similar to Arizona and Nevada a few years back—states with both high absolute and relative population growth, and both positive domestic migration from other states and international migration from around the world. Texas is, for now, the most dynamic place for demographic change.

Map Figure Four: Estimated Relative Births minus Deaths (Natural Rate of Absolute Population Change) from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The natural rate of population growth (births minus deaths), was estimated at 1,557,874 persons from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011. A third of this growth occurred in two states, California and Texas, and Texas had the highest natural rate of absolute growth at 274,024 persons compared with 230,798 for California.

West Virginia is the first state to record more deaths than births, but a number of states are only a few years away from attaining this status that occurs at the end of the demographic transition process. In Ohio   the natural rate of population growth is higher than the total rate, due to negative net migration, suggesting it is one of a number of states that could have modest population increase if it could cease losing people to other places.

Map Figure Five: Estimated Relative Births minus Deaths (Natural Rate of Relative Population Growth) from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The fifth map shows what appears to be an East-West split.  In the eastern thirty-one states, with the exception of Georgia, states have a natural rate of growth that is similar to other parts of the world with slowing or negative populations, including most of Europe, Russia, and East Asia. On the other hand, twelve out of nineteen western states have a natural rate of population growth exceeding 0.6 percent.

The highest rate of natural growth is in Utah, with an annual change of 1.36 percent, similar to the current population growth rate of India. Alaska also has a natural rate of increase above one percent, at 1.1 percent, and Texas, at 0.91 percent, has a similar rate of natural increase as the United States had for total population growth rate only a few years ago.  The overall natural rate of increase for the United State is 0.5 percent per year, similar to China and France.

Map Figure Six: Estimated International Migration from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The sixth map shows that every state had international migration during 2010-2011.  Most states number in the thousands, but five states, California, Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey, have over thirty thousand migrants arriving.

Map Figure Seven: Estimated Domestic Migration from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

In contrast to the map of international migration, the seventh map shows domestic migration; the net effect of millions of Americans moving to different states during the course of a year.  Twenty-four states show negative domestic migration, including all of the Midwest states except North and South Dakota.  Texas and Florida experience both strong international and domestic migration, while California, New York and New Jersey have negative domestic migration and positive international migration.

Map Figure Eight: Estimated Net Migration (Combined International and Domestic) from July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011

The eighth and final map shows the effects of net migration. States along the West Coast, the State of Texas, and the South Atlantic Region have all experienced net positive migration.  A band of states mostly in the Midwest and Northeast have negative net migration, as their residents leave for other places.  Migration patterns have been occurring for a long time, but what will be new is how migration occurs in the face of slowing overall natural rates of population change.

These numbers are, of course, just one year and it is entirely possible that growth will rise as the economy improves and as the current large millennial generation enters their prime child bearing years. But if the current one-year trend becomes a longer term phenomena, we could see a possible leveling off of population much sooner and at a lower rate than forecasted, say around 360 million by mid-century instead of 478 million by the year 2100 as forecast by the United Nations Population Division. These, will have implications for government fiscal policy, and will generate debate about government policy in encouraging births as we observe in Europe, Russia and Japan.  Population growth has been a relative advantage for the United States and remains so, but we may have to consider whether this trend is inexorable.

Ron McChesney is a Geographer with Three Scale Strategy and Research in Columbus, Ohio. Ron received a PhD in Geography at The Ohio State University in 2008.

Greg Overberg is a City and Regional Planner with Three Scale Strategy and Research in Columbus Ohio.  Greg received a MA in City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University in 2011.

Foreign Industrial Investment Is Reshaping America

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Declinism may be all the rage in intellectual salons from Beijing to Barcelona and Boston, but decisions being made in corporate boardrooms suggest that the United States is emerging the world’s biggest winner. Long the world leader as a destination for overseas investment, the U.S. is extending its lead as the favored land of overseas capital.

Since 2008, foreign direct investment to Germany, France, Japan and South Korea has stagnated; in 2009, overall investment in the E.U. dropped 36%. In contrast, in 2010 foreign investment in the U.S. rose 49%, mostly coming from Canada, Europe and Japan. The total was $194 billion, the fourth highest amount on record.

Foreign investment is already reshaping the American economic landscape, shifting wealth and income from differing regions. The transformative role is nothing new. After all, the country started as a colony of England, and for much of the 19th century remained dependent on European investors for everything from building canals to railroads. Without European capital, the settlement of the West and the rise of cities such as New York would have been far slower.

Today this pattern is re-asserting itself as foreign countries rediscover America’s intrinsic advantages: a huge landmass, vast natural resources, a large, expanding consumer market and a relatively predictable legal system. Our relatively vibrant demographics demographics — at least before the Great Recession depressed birthrates and immigration — marks a strong contrast with such key countries as Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of which are aging far more rapidly than the United States. China’s authoritarian political system leaves many investors reluctant to expose themselves too much to the regime’s often less than tender mercies.

The investment boom is concentrated not so much in the most celebrated sectors, such as tech or trophy real estate, but in the more basic industries that are best suited to our large, resource-rich country. Investment in the burgeoning energy sector more than tripled to $20 billion between 2009 and 2010. Some of this investment has come into the renewable industry, where Europe and China also have heavily subsidized companies, but the vast bulk has been devoted to the country’s expanding production of oil and gas.

The shale revolution in particular has attracted foreign interest. Energy firms from China, France and Spain have all placed major investments in the shale fields of Ohio, Colorado and Michigan. French giant Total recently paid $2.3 billion for minority stakes in the vast oil and gas holdings of Chesapeake Energy.

Perhaps even more important has been a surge in industrial investment, which rose $30 billion just between 2009 and 2010. Much of this growth is concentrated in the chemical industry as well as automobile, steel and other transportation sectors. It is also heavily focused on the southeastern states and Texas — the very places that most surveys reveal have the most hospitable business climates. According to a recent study by Site Selection magazine, the five states with the best business climates and 10 of the top 12 are from the old Confederacy.

Foreigners, particularly from large global corporations, are not stupid. They also are not burdened as much as domestic firms with legacy costs or romantic attachments to traditional industrial bailiwicks. “At the end of the day, a company looks at a whole nation and looks at the factors that matter most, like ease of doing business,” notes Bill Taylor, who for 17 years headed up Mercedes’ U.S. operations. “The Southeast has that and has a workforce willing to be engaged. They have found the area to be very fertile ground.”

This has certainly been true for companies such as Mercedes, whose largest U.S. plant is in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Last year the company invested $350 million in the facility.

Nor is Mercedes alone. Arch competitor Volkswagen last year announced it will build a new assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. Nissan, Toyota and Kia have all announced major new plant openings or expansions over the past three years throughout the region.

These are not inconsequential investments. With the average cost of building these facilities at over $1 billion, and the higher-paying manufacturing jobs they represent, such plants represent major employment generators. They also bring with them parts suppliers and other industries related to auto manufacturing. Alabama, for example, has seen major steel mill investments, including $4.6 billion from Germany’s Thyssen Krupp.

Over the next decade, these investments could transform the nation’s industrial structure. Alabama and Kentucky already produce almost as many cars as Michigan. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, Michigan still leads the country in auto employment with 181,000 jobs, followed by Indiana. But the next three states are Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.

Why is this happening? Managers in foreign firms, suggests Taylor, who previously worked for Ford and Toyota, believe Southern workers have not picked up the bad habits and work rules common among their unionized Midwestern brethren. Unions certainly are much less of an issue in the Southeast. Though Alabama has seen a huge jump in the number of its auto workers in recent years, according to its state department of labor, only 7,100 are unionized. Nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 12 percent of workers belong to unions, compared to just over 10 percent in Alabama. Less than 5 percent of workers in Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, Virginia and North Carolina belong to them.

Unions are not the only issue. The South also enjoys a strong network of rail and highway lines that make transport to key markets easy and affordable. Energy costs tend to be lower. Furthermore, many Southeastern port cities — notably Houston, Charleston, Mobile, Hampton Roads — have made big infrastructure investments in recent years.

The Southeast also plans to become a research hub for the auto industry. The Clemson University International Automotive Research Center is the nation’s only school to offer a Ph.D. in automotive engineering and has secured $200 million in commitments. Additionally, the South Carolina center has created partnerships beyond auto manufacturers with other universities in the area: Auburn, Mississippi State, Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The overall impact of the Southeast’s auto industry may not be fully felt for a few years. But long-term prospects are excellent. U.S. manufacturers, notably GM and Chrysler, make most of their money on fuel-guzzling trucks and SUVs. GM’s Volt, its much-hyped fuel-efficient car, has so far proved an expensive dud. In contrast, the major foreign manufacturers — particularly Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, and Kia — have long experience in building reliable, fuel-efficient cars. Demographically the high-end makers, notably BMW and Mercedes, increasingly dominate the luxury market, particularly among younger customers.

Battle tested in world markets, these firms — and their counterparts in steel and other metals-related industries — are successful competitors and reliable employers. Overall, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, foreign manufacturing firms, in autos and elsewhere, have proven far less susceptible to layoffs than their domestic competitors. They also tend to offer higher salaries on average than U.S.-based firms.

Some observers, such as the American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson, decry these investments. He believes foreign firms, particularly from Europe, come to “slum.” America, as he puts it, is where Europeans now go “to get the job done cheap.”

Meyerson points out, correctly, that these companies generally invest in mostly Southern “right to work” states in order to avoid entanglements with unions. They also avoid stricter environment controls in green-dominated juristictions such as California. Not surpsingly these plants are often seen as regressive at Berkeley salons or at AFL-CIO headquarters. But they may seem far more congenial in the historically poor backwaters of the Southeast , long lacking in steady, relatively well-paid and skilled work.

When Toyota recently announced plans to establish a plant for the Prius near Tupelo, Miss., (birthplace of Elvis), one imagines few locals were singing the blues. Instead the new plant received 35,000 applications for 1,300 available spots.

To be sure, these new jobs may not pay as well as top-grade UAW contracts, and a lack of unions could expose workers to undue management pressure. But in an economy where $8 hour jobs are king, an entry level job that involves learning technical skills and starts at $14 may appear akin to manna from heaven .

Of course, some will denounce this “foreign” influence as pernicious or even neo-colonialist. But the overseas investment surge might also be seen as confirming, once again, that at least some places in the country remain fields of opportunity for people other than geeks, corporate rent-seekers or investment bankers.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.com.

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

Photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

The Evolving Urban Form: Hong Kong

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Hong Kong has experienced its slowest decadal growth in at least 70 years, according to the results of the recently released 2011 census. Between 2001 and 2011, Hong Kong added only 5.4 percent to its population, a decline of more than two-thirds from its 1991-2001 rate. Hong Kong's slowest growth rate since 1921-1931 was between 1981 and 1991, when 13.8 percent was added to its population. In previous decades growth had been much greater (Figure 1).

Further, despite Hong Kong's much larger population base today, the numeric growth from 2001 to 2011 was also the smallest since the 1921-1931 decade. Hong Kong added 363,000 residents for a total of 7,072,000 in 2011. The increase is barely one-third of the 1,034,000 residents added between 1991 and 2001. Much of Hong Kong's population growth in the last 60 years had been driven by its better standard of living relative to mainland China. It seems likely that the growing prosperity of the past decade on the mainland has made Hong Kong less attractive for migrants.

High Income World's Most Dense Urban Area: Hong Kong continues to be the densest major urban area in the high-income world. The present density is estimated at 67,000 per square mile (26,000 per square kilometer). At least one small area of Hong Kong has a population density exceeding 1 million per square mile (400,000 per square kilometer), though the much more dense Kowloon Walled City (estimated at up to 5,000,000 per square mile or 2,000,000 per square kilometer) was demolished in the 1990s. Even so, there are now detached housing developments, as Hong Kongers who can afford it choose these much more expensive accommodations, as Witold Rybczynski relates in a recent commentary (detached housing photo).

Detached Housing

Subdivisions of Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is a unified government, with no local jurisdictions (such as cities or towns).  However, there are four broad regions and within each there are districts, are designated for statistical purposes.

Hong Kong's growth --- like that of most major metropolitan areas --- has been shifting to the periphery for decades (Table 1). Between 1981 and 2011, all of the population growth was in the New Territories, the new (greenfield and high density) suburban areas beyond the Hong Kong Island-Kowloon core. While all of Hong Kong was adding 2.1 million residents in total between 1981 and 2011, the New Territories added 2.4 million (Table 2). This suburban dominance continued in the last census period, with 96 percent of growth in the New Territories. Before that, the bulk of the growth was in the outer areas of Kowloon, which were then the suburbs (Figure 2).


Table 1
Hong Kong Population by District: 1911-2011
Year Total Hong Kong Kowloon New Territories Marine
1911 456,700 244,300 69,400 81,200 61,800
1921 625,200 347,400 123,400 83,200 71,200
1931 840,500 409,200 263,000 98,200 70,100
1941 1,600,000 Estimate: No complete census
1951 2,013,000 Estimate: Census cancelled
1961 3,129,600 1,004,900 1,578,000 409,900 136,800
1971 3,936,600 996,200 2,194,800 665,700 79,900
1981 4,986,600 1,183,600 2,449,100 1,304,100 49,700
1991 5,674,100 1,251,000 2,030,700 2,374,800 17,600
2001 6,708,400 1,335,500 2,024,000 3,343,000 5,900
2011 7,071,600 1,270,900 2,108,400 3,691,100 1,200
Sources:
Government of Hong Kong
www.cicred.org/Eng/Publications/pdf/c-c21.pdf



Table 2
Hong Kong Population by District: 1991-2011
Region & District Population: 1991 Population: 2001 Population: 2011 % 2001-2011 Land Area KM2 Land Area MI2 Density KM2 Density MI2
HONG KONG 5,674,114 6,708,389 7,071,576 5.4% 1,098 424 6,440 16,680
HONG KONG ISLAND 1,250,993 1,335,469 1,270,876 -4.8% 80 31 15,827 40,991
  Central and Western 253,383 261,884 251,519 -4.0% 13 5 20,089 52,031
  Wan Chai 180,309 167,146 152,608 -8.7% 10 4 15,230 39,447
  Eastern 560,200 616,199 588,094 -4.6% 19 7 31,265 80,976
  Southern 257,101 290,240 278,655 -4.0% 39 15 7,154 18,529
KOWLOON 2,030,683 2,023,979 2,108,419 4.2% 47 18 45,138 116,909
  Yau Tsim Mong 282,060 282,020 307,878 9.2% 7 3 44,946 116,409
  Sham Shui Po 380,615 353,550 380,855 7.7% 9 4 40,175 104,052
  Kowloon City 402,934 381,352 377,351 -1.0% 10 4 37,849 98,028
  Wong Tai Sin 386,572 444,630 420,183 -5.5% 9 4 44,891 116,268
  Kwun Tong 578,502 562,427 622,152 10.6% 11 4 56,303 145,826
NEW TERRITORIES 2,374,818 3,343,046 3,691,093 10.4% 971 375 3,801 9,845
  Kwai Tsing 440,807 477,092 511,167 7.1% 22 8 23,427 60,675
  Tsuen Wan 271,576 275,527 304,637 10.6% 61 23 5,019 12,999
  Tuen Mun 380,683 488,831 487,546 -0.3% 84 33 5,773 14,953
  Yuen Long 229,724 449,070 578,529 28.8% 138 53 4,179 10,824
  North 165,666 298,657 304,134 1.8% 137 53 2,215 5,737
  Tai Po 202,117 310,879 296,853 -4.5% 147 57 2,014 5,215
  Sha Tin 506,368 628,634 630,273 0.3% 69 27 9,074 23,501
  Sai Kung 130,418 327,689 436,627 33.2% 136 53 3,201 8,291
  Islands 47,459 86,667 141,327 63.1% 175 68 807 2,091
MARINE 17,620 5,895 1,188 -79.8% 0 0 0 0
Data from Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

 

The Core: Hong Kong Island: Hong Kong Island, home to one of the world's most dense central business districts (Central, Western and Wan Chai districts) lost 4.8 percent of its population. All five of the districts on Hong Kong Island lost population, with Wan Chi (of "The World of Suzy Wong" movie fame) suffering the greatest loss, at 8.7 percent).

The Core: Kowloon: Across Hong Kong harbor (see Star Ferry photograph, top), Kowloon, also a part of the core, gained 4.2 percent, adding nearly 75,000 residents (photo). Even so, Kowloon's population remains more than 10 percent below its 1981 population. Three of Kowloon's  five districts gained population, including Yau Sim Mong and Sham Shui Po, which along with the north shore districts of Hong Kong Island are the most intensely developed in the HKSAR.

Suburban: The New Territories: The New Territories added 10.4 percent to their population (348,000), with seven of the nine districts gaining. The largest gain (63 percent) was in the Islands district, which includes Hong Kong International Airport. Sia Kung, also grew strongly, at 33 percent (see photo). Sia Kung, like nearly built-out Sha-Tin, is conveniently located just over a narrow mountain range from Kowloon and contains considerable amounts of greenfield land for development.

Kowloon

Sia Kung

Yuen Long, home of the new Shenzhen Bridge had the third highest growth rate, at 29 percent. The Islands, Sia Kung and Yuen Long all have all experienced much improved access from extensions to the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) and the former Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR), which have now merged into the MTR.

Transportation in Hong Kong: Hong Kong is the most transit dependent major metropolitan area in the high-income world metropolitan area. Mass transit carries 72 percent of motorized trips. Even with the high residential and employment density, the average work trip is approximately five miles each way. Moreover, despite having one of the most effective mass transit systems in the world and extraordinarily high densities, the average one-way work trip travel time is 46 minutes, 18 minutes longer than Los Angeles or Houston. With the highest transit market share in the world and an automobile market share only 1/70th that of Houston, Hong Kong's density still  produces among the highest levels of traffic congestion in the world --- 1.5 times the traffic density of Los Angeles and three times that of Houston (photo).

Hong Kong Traffic Congestion

Economic Growth: Hong Kong has experienced strong economic growth for  the last three decades. In 1981, Hong Kong's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was one-third below that of the United Kingdom, its then colonial master. Even by this time, Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping had been so impressed by Hong Kong's market based economic advance, that he had designated adjacent Shenzhen as a special economic zone. That area has since grown from a fishing village to a population exceeding 10 million, according to the 2010 census. In the intervening years, the Pearl River Delta has emerged as the most populous extent of urbanization in the world, stretching from Hong Kong, through Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Zhuhai to Macao. However, because of border controls and the low level of commuting, these remain separate metropolitan areas and  urban areas.

Hong Kong's economic growth continued strongly in the middle 1990s, when its GDP per capita exceeded that of the United Kingdom. Hong Kong fell behind in the late 1990s Asian economic crisis, but soon recovered. By 2010, Hong Kong's GDP per capita had risen to 27 percent above that of the United Kingdom.

Hong Kong's economic performance relative to the United States may be even more impressive. In 1980, Hong Kong's GDP per capital trailed that of the United States by 45 percent. As of 2010, Hong Kong trailed the US by only three percent and according to International Monetary Fund data should pass the United States early in the present decade. Between 2000 and 2010, Hong Kong's per capita GDP (PPP-2010$) rose more than one-third --- only South Korea and Singapore did better among high-income areas, according to International Monetary Fund data. China's percentage growth rate was  nearly five times Hong Kong's but in actual dollars Hong Kong's GDP per capita rose at triple China's rate. However, should China's economy slow down, as some analysts suggest, it could be difficult for Hong Kong to sustain this strong growth rate (Figure 3).

The People's Republic of China has maintained Hong Kong's free market economic system, helping assure strong growth. It seems unlikely that either Deng Xiao Ping or Margaret Thatcher imagined that such economic progress would be made when they signed the historic agreement to restore Hong Kong to China in 1984. Nor is it likely they imagined China's meteoric rise.

Unique Hong Kong: Hong Kong is the living model of compact development and transit dependence toward which urban planning wisdom strives. However, Hong Kong itself is the outlier of outliers. Hong Kong's population density --- double that of any other high-income world urban area of similar size or larger --- would never have approached this level if it had not been separated from China itself by colonization and then the historical complexities of the post-World War II period. Even in its prosperity, the growing urban areas of mainland China are being built at densities averaging no more than one-quarter that of Hong Kong. Hong Kong may be more an accident of history than an exemplar.

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

----

Photo: Star Ferry, operating between Hong Kong Island (Central) and Kowloon (Yau Tsim Mong). All photos by author.

Hong Kong district map by Wikipedia user Moddlyg.

Time for Real Solutions to Vancouver's Housing Affordability Crisis

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Vancouver is in desperate need of new solutions to ease its worsening housing affordability crisis. The 8th annual Demographia housing affordability survey released by the Frontier Centre found that Vancouver has the second least affordable housing market next to Hong Kong. On average, and assuming zero interest, a house in Vancouver would cost the median family more than ten years income. Three years is the threshold after which a market is considered unaffordable.

Mayor Robertson recently announced the launch of a new task force to tackle the housing affordability crisis. The only way to tackle this problem is to focus on getting more housing units on to the market.

Much of the debate around housing affordability descends into discussions about manipulating housing prices by freezing out market mechanisms. Rent control used to be a popular remedy, until cities realized that the side effects of the cure were worse than the disease. Two common methods of attempting to tackle housing today are social housing and inclusionary zoning. Social housing has been responsible for creating some of the most crime ridden neighbourhoods in the Western world. There is a reason "the projects" have such a bad name. Yet politicians of all stripes tend to promise more "affordable housing" as they call it, knowing that it will at best benefit a narrow group of people who qualify. Inclusionary zoning—requiring developers to build a specific number of below market rate units in new developments—has been one of the methods that municipal governments have attempted to compensate for this shortcoming. It also misses the point. It fails to bring broad price levels down, since it increases prices substantially for market rate units in the same development. One study from San Jose State University economists found that inclusionary zoning increases the price of market of new homes by $22,000-$44,000 in the median city. That is simply how developers pass off the cost of losing money on affordable units.

The policies mentioned above ignore the fundamental issue: houses are priced by supply and demand. In a desirable city like Vancouver, prices are bound to be higher than in Omaha, Nebraska, or Saskatoon. But the dramatic price escalation that started in the 90s isn't beyond the city's control. There are many ways to get more supply on the market. One of the commendable policies undertaken by the city has been the introduction of laneway houses. These are small units that are hived off from existing houses. They are essentially small secondary suites that back in to laneways. But it won't be anywhere near enough on its own. Vancouver needs to develop more land. The land is there, but it is off limits to development because of the agricultural land reserve (ALR). That needs to change.

The ALR serves two purposes. The first is to preserve agricultural land. The benefit from it is contingent on whether the benefits from local agriculture outweigh the costs of taking land off of the market. From a nutritional and an economic perspective that simply isn't the case. Flash frozen foods are often more nutritious than "fresh" local food, and intensive farming is more economical and sustainable than small scale farming. We would not be able to accommodate anywhere near our current population without industrial agriculture. This justification simply fails.

The second justification for the ALR is to prevent urban sprawl. In a sense this works, since there is no sprawl development in the ALR. On the other hand, this approach is conducive to "leap frog" development which takes place beyond the growth boundary. It happens anywhere that a growth boundary exists. People commute further for cheaper housing. This is as true in the smart growth Mecca of Portland as it is in Toronto or Ottawa. From an economic perspective, there are reasons to worry about sprawl. People who move out into cheaper housing on the urban fringe typically pay less property taxes, and often cost municipalities more per capita. But the ALR hasn't solved this problem. Metro Vancouver outside of the city proper accounted for 87% of the metropolitan area's growth between 2006-2001. Simply put, the ALR simply hasn't prevented sprawl.

In order to balance the concerns of housing affordability and urban sprawl, the city of Vancouver should strike a compromise: open portions of the ALR, but only to high density development. This may not be the optimum solution for families that would prefer to purchase single dwelling homes, but a significant influx of new units would be a countervailing force against runaway home prices. This would also put downwards pressure on housing in the rest of Greater Vancouver. Though opening up broad swaths of the ALR may be the ideal, this seems like a reasonable compromise.

This type of solution would rile people on both sides of the political spectrum, but it would be a dramatic improvement over the status quo. High home prices can only be solved from the supply side. The choice between maintaining the ALR as constituted or opening up portions should be obvious. Infill development can only go so far towards solving Vancouver's housing crisis.

Steve Lafleur is a Policy Analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Downtown Vancouver photo by runningclouds

Mapping the College Culture Gap

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Although the television series “Mad Men” has yet to take up the subject of college applications, I could well imagine an episode in which ad man Don Draper spends his day consuming vast quantities of Scotch and cigarettes, only to come home and have his wife say (while ignoring the lipstick on his collar): “I spoke to Millie today, and she had some good things to say about Williams.”

When Britain still had an Empire, what mattered most was to get your daughters married and your sons into a good regiment. In Homeland America, all that matters to middle-class and affluent parents is getting their children into the best colleges that money can buy or that the Standardized Aptitude Test will allow.

Friends of mine who have college-bound children talk only about test schedules, AP credits, summer programs for gifted children, sports highlight reels, and the easiest routes to Duke or Pomona.

They search family trees for ancestral connections or minority status, and make charts of other friends who might know someone at Yale. Editors at the New Yorker are consulted about personal statements. During school downtime, kids are dispatched to examine China’s terra-cotta warriors or Seattle's soup kitchens, all with the goal of padding the college application.

I say all this as a parent who is about to launch his third child in the direction of the ivory towers, with no better idea than what guided us in sending off the first two. For years my wife and I have talked about colleges the way other couples play canasta. We use it to fill the lazy hours in the car or after dinner, as each of us is already familiar with each other’s reading lists and views about Rick Santorum.

What prolongs these familiar exchanges is that we are the parents of American children who have grown up in Switzerland, attending public schools in French. The college conversation has become a proxy for whether we are Europeans or Americans. Whatever decisions we make, they feel like the wrong ones.

When the children stay in Switzerland, I feel they have missed out on what I had in the American liberal arts, although when they leave for the States, it feels far away, expensive, and obsessed with the cult of Goldman’s Sachs-ism.

Swiss secondary education is roughly similar to U.S. high school, although collège, as it is called in French, has a thirteenth year and every year students are weeded out of the university track. Our daughter Helen was the only member of her sixth grade class to graduate from a Swiss university. Of the 350 students who started with her in the tenth grade at collège, only about 200 graduated; the rest were relegated to apprenticeships or trade schools.

For anyone in Switzerland who earns their high school diploma (known as a maturité gymnasiale), the entire university system is an open door, and tuition is $1000 a year. The country has little college testing and applications. To attend law or business school, a student merely adds his or her name to a list. The trick to staying at university is maintaining a B average, and only about two-thirds of each class does.

University in Switzerland is much closer to American graduate school than a U.S. liberal arts education. Students specialize in a branch of study, say, law, economics, literature, or engineering. Classes, at least in the first year, are large lectures, and the best grades are given to those students who write down what the professor has said and recall this wisdom on the final exam.

Readings only supplement the lectures. In later years, there are more seminars and papers, but the system recalls the hierarchy of a German universität more than a Berkeley teach-in. Facts count far more than expressing your feelings about Siddhartha.

In physical layout, Swiss universities look like inner-city high schools. Few offer social clubs, sports programs, psychological counseling, toga parties, or alumni gatherings. Their goal is to teach a specified curriculum. If the Ivy League is best understood as the first class ticket of higher education, a Swiss university is more like Southwest or easyJet—the seats are cramped and the champagne is extra.

With another daughter at an American college, I am struck—in comparison with the Swiss system—by the engagement that the U.S. professors have with their students, and at their goal of inspiring undergraduates to think for themselves. One professor said to my daughter, early on in her studies: “Laura, you’ve written a Swiss paper. I want an American paper. Tell me what you think.”

Of course, such independence of mind costs $200,000 over four years, so that your child can then spend another eighteen months as an unpaid intern at Sterling Cooper, gaining what the market, as well as Balzac, might call “experience.”

With our nineteen-year-old son, now in his last year of collège, we decided to split the geographical and financial differences between the U.S. and Switzerland, and encouraged him to apply to British universities, which are a cross between America's liberal arts and Europe’s narrow focus.

Three years’ tuition in England is about $50,000, and London is only an hour’s flight from where we live. We liked the idea that he would be studying in English and in small tutorials with eccentric professors. When I went with my son to his interview at Cambridge (he did not get in), I was struck by how detached Britain is from the rest of Europe. Not a single Swiss student has been admitted to the university in three years, and the translation of Swiss transcripts into English grades makes it clear that it might be another decade before any more are admitted.

Britain, like America, suffers from grade inflation, so everyone comes out of high school sounding terrific, with great marks and astonishing teacher recommendations. By contrast, the Swiss take great pleasure in grade deflation (the motto might be: “Every Child Left Behind”), and do a terrible job of promoting their students to the rest of the world.

An excellent average in a Swiss collège gets reported to Britain or the U.S. as someone with C+ grades. My daughter finished third in her Swiss class, and her recommendation letter from the school, in its entirety, read: “Laura Stevenson has fulfilled all the requirements of Collège de Saussure.” Little wonder that she was turned down at many American universities.

What do I want from a university for my children? I want them to be able to write clear, forceful English (or French) that is informed and, if they choose, amusing. I want them to have the intellectual ability to challenge accepted assumptions—for example, that the New Deal ended the Depression, George Washington had a great military mind, or Shakespeare wrote all his plays.

I would like them to learn to read critically, so that can they scoff at cant and pretense: for example, to see that Yale man Bob Woodward writes in language that looks as if it has been translated from Slovakian. I would also like them to view their education as a plant that needs watering on most days following graduation.

If my older son goes to college in England, we might be tempted to send our last child, also a son, to university in either France or Germany. That way, each of our children will have been educated in a different system. Then, in ten years, as we judge their successes or failures, we can rail about the rigidity of the Confederation of the Rhine, the British class system, Swiss banality, or U.S. careerism—or we can sing the praises of German rigor, the legacy of the English enlightenment, Swiss precision, or the iconoclastic American mind.

Photo: Prof Believeau's Yale University by Ina Centaur

Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical essays. He lives in one of the wine regions of Switzerland. His next book is Whistle-Stopping America.


The Ultimate Houston Strategy

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Last week was the 7th anniversary of my blog, Houston Strategies. After 947 posts (cream of the crop here), almost half a million visitors, and thousands of comments in an epic dialogue about Houston, I thought this would be a good time stand back, look at the big picture, and ask "What should be next for Houston?" while linking back to some of the gems from that archive.


First, let's look at where we are currently. Our foundation is in great shape. Houston has started the 21st-century with a set of rankings and amenities 99% of the planet’s cities would kill for: a vibrant core with several hundred thousand jobs; a profitable and growing set of major industry clusters (Energy, the Texas Medical Center, the Port); the second-most Fortune 500 headquarters in the country; top-notch museums, festivals, theater, arts and cultural organizations; major league sports and stadiums; a revitalized downtown; astonishing affordability (especially housing); a culture of openness, friendliness, opportunity, and charity (reinforced by Katrina); the most diverse major city in America; a young and growing population (fastest in the country); progressiveness; entrepreneurial energy and optimism; efficient and business-friendly local government; regional unity; a smorgasbord of tasty and inexpensive international restaurants; and tremendous mobility infrastructure (including the freeway and transit networks, railroads, the port, and a set of truly world-class hub airports). 

To those I'd add:

With all that, it's really easy to get complacent. In fact, in some ways I think we might be coasting a bit now. But coasting is definitely not how we got here. Big initiatives are a proud tradition here: dredging the original port, founding the Texas Medical Center, establishing the Johnson Space Center, and being the first in the world to build a gigantic, futuristic, multi-purpose domed stadium - just to name a few examples. But what should be next? Where should the world's Energy Capital put its energy, so to speak?

I was recently inspired by the Urbanophile's post on Indianapolis' 40-year economic development and tourism strategy built around sports. Starting with nothing but the Indy 500 they've built a string of wins all the way up to hosting one of the most successful Super Bowls ever last month. We need that same sort of sustained, long-term strategy that goes beyond specific projects to a theme we can weave into everything we do over the decades ahead. We need to take the energy boom we're currently enjoying and invest it to secure our long-term prosperity no matter how technology shifts in the future (most especially energy technology).

In an unpredictable world, the only safe bet is a talent base that can adapt. With the Texas Medical Center, we concentrated health care talent in a district that has grown and adapted into the largest medical concentration in the world with an array of world class facilities. We've done the same on an even larger scale with energy and engineering talent. The next step is to take that strategy and generalize it to focus on being the global capital of applied STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math) talent. We need to mobilize the city around a common purpose of building this human infrastructure. We need to embed it into our education, tourism, cultural and economic development strategies. It's just a perfect fit for Houston on so many levels:

In particular, I think we should focus on applied STEM - systems-based problem solving (engineering) over pure knowledge (where we are at a competitive disadvantage with many university clusters around the country). Facilitating man's progress through innovative problem solving.

Part of this strategy includes tourism, articulated in more detail here. We need the big tourism experience of other world class cities, and STEM is a unique niche we can build around, with a primary focus on families, schools, and STEM-related conferences. We already have some of the assets in place - JSC and Space Center Houston, the Natural Science Museum, the Health Museum, the Children's Museum, Moody Gardens - and others with more potential, like the Texas Medical Center. But we need that signature attraction: the world's largest institute/museum of technology. Not just a history-focused museum, but an institute actively involved in the community with a strong focus on the future. Local kids should spend frequent school days and summer camps there on fun and inspiring STEM activities. It could provide educational STEM experiences both online and on-site, helping to attract talented global youth to Houston for amazing experiences that draw them back later for college or after graduation. It should have the world's largest hackerspace. It should be an inspiring space that attracts global academic and professional STEM-related conferences (building on the OTC) - groups trying to solve big problems and contribute to humanity's progress (imagine a Davos or G8 of STEM...). Each conference could leave behind a new exhibit on its subject area, building the collections over time. And since it has the event space, we might as well open it up to festivals to expose more of our community to that same inspiration.

The natural place for such an institute is clearly the Astrodome, our historic icon looking for a second life. We should embrace the Astrodome as Houston's architectural icon like Paris does the Eiffel Tower, New York does the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building, Rome does the Vatican or Coliseum, and San Francisco does the Golden Gate bridge. It can find a second life as our inspiring cathedral to man's technological progress (along with some fun mixed in - Robot Rodeo anyone?). Most importantly, it has around a million square feet of space. Here's how it compares to other top museums:

But unlike every other museum in the world where exhibits are carved up into a series of halls, almost all of them could be visible in a giant 360-degree panorama while standing on the floor of the Astrodome.  How amazing would that space be?

The cost, you ask?  Easily in the hundreds of millions.  But if LA can come up with $1.2 billion to build the Getty Museum, I have no doubt that Houston can muster the needed resources.  It's a tiny fraction of the wealth of Houston's 14 philanthropic billionaires, much less the broader base of wealth in this booming city.  We can come together to make this happen before the Astrodome's 50th birthday in 2015, and it can put us on a path to greatness for our bicentennial in 2036 that Houston's and Texas' founding fathers could never have imagined.

We, the citizens of Houston, aren't the types to get complacent and rest on our laurels.  That's not the legacy previous generations left us.  It's time to step forward and tackle our next great challenge.  Are you in?

Tory Gattis is a Social Systems Architect, consultant and entrepreneur with a genuine love of his hometown Houston and its people. He covers a wide range of Houston topics at Houston Strategies - including transportation, transit, quality-of-life, city identity, and development and land-use regulations - and have published numerous Houston Chronicle op-eds on these topics.

Photo by telwink

Honolulu’s Money Train

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Honolulu is set to construct an ambitious urban rail project. It’s a $5.125 billion behemoth that this metropolitan area with less than a million residents may not be able to afford.

Honolulu's Beleaguered Residents

Critically, there is plenty of competition for the scarce dollars that Honolulu residents have to spare. The city’s basic infrastructure is in bad shape.

(Sewer) Water, Water Everywhere: A consent decree signed between local officials and the Environmental Protection Agency requires major upgrades to the sewer system. Sewer overflows are not unusual. Just a few days ago, 51,000 gallon raw sewage spilled into a local stream. The state issued a brown water alert for the entire island of Oahu (which is also the combined city and county of Honolulu), including Waikiki Beach and all other beaches. As of this writing, the brown water advisory has not been cancelled. Just in the last year, the state has reported 17 sewage spills and four brown water alerts. For this to happen in a highly tourist dependent economy is nothing short of astounding.

More than Leaky Pipes: The city's water system is in need of major upgrades. From 2004 to 2009, water main breaks were virtually a daily occurrence. In an effort to solve the problem, the city has raised water rates 60 percent in the last five years and plans another 70 percent increase over the next five years. How much more will be required after that is anyone's guess. "How are people going to make it? I just don't know" reacted City council Budget Chair Ann Kobayashi.

Unfunded Government Employee Liabilities: In just three years, unfunded city and county employee pension and retiree benefits have risen from $15,000 to $21,000 per Honolulu household. The state's actuarial consultant says things are going to get worse. The demographics are skewed against financial control, since people are living longer, and the number of retirees is rising relative to the workers who must pay (most of whom cannot even dream of such rich benefits).   All of this means higher tax bills for Honolulu households.

High Cost of Housing, High Cost of Living: Honolulu residents already endure the most unaffordable housing  in the nation, with median house prices 8.7 times median household incomes. That is three times Dallas-Fort Worth.  Honolulu's overall cost of living is also the highest in the nation, outside six metropolitan areas in the greater New York and San Francisco Bay Areas. Honolulu residents pay $1.41 to buy what $1.00 buys in St. Louis, 1.24 for each $1.00 in Austin and $1.21 for each $1.00 in Phoenix.

Choices: This is not about easy choices. The sewer remediation, water system maintenance, government employee pension and government employee retiree health care benefits are mandatory. The rail expenditures are not.

The Rickety Rail Project

Yet the city of Honolulu would tax its residents even more to pay for a 20 mile rail line to empty farmland well beyond the urban fringe. This is a project not unlike the early 1900s land speculation schemes of Henry Huntington in Los Angeles and the Sweringens of Shaker Heights (Cleveland). There is, however, one important difference. The Huntington and the Swearingens bet their own money. Honolulu is betting the money of its taxpayers.


End of the Honolulu Rail Line

The city hopes to receive $1.55 billion from the federal government, with local residents left to pay a hefty 70 percent of the cost. This $3.575 billion local share would create the highest tax burden for any urban rail line ever built in the nation, at more than $10,000 per household. But residents should "thank their lucky stars" if that's all they have to pay, given the history of cost overruns on such projects around the world.

Stacking the Deck: The Federal Court Challenge: The planning process is being challenged in federal court. The plaintiffs argue that the rail selection process eliminated more cost effective options with biased analysis. This would not be the first time.

Annie Weinstock, Walter Hook, Michael Replogle, and Ramon Cruz of the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy (with a foreword by Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenaur),  cited circuitous routing of a busway that biased ridership forecasts in favor of light rail for the suburban Washington Purple Line. Weinstock, Hook, Repogle and Cruz refer to a similar "deck stacking technique" that favored an expensive rail project over a busway in the suburban Washington Dulles corridor. They fault local officials more than federal:

While there is no outright pro-rail bias at the FTA, there is indeed FTA complicity in the rail bias of city and state level mass transit project sponsors. The FTA, when evaluating New Starts and Small Starts project applications, tends to bow to political pressure to favor locally preferred alternatives and ignore certain forms of rail bias by the project sponsors

Pulling the Plug on Rail? Former Governor Ben Cayatano has filed to run against Mayor Carlisle in the August 2012 election. In announcing his entry, Governor Cayatano said "I will pull the plug on rail." Polls show Mr. Cayetano ahead of both Mayor Carlisle and a third candidate.

Capital Cost Escalation: A state report indicated that construction costs could rise well above forecast. Every penny above the $5.125 billion capital cost will be the responsibility of local taxpayers. Based upon the international experience, this could easily raise the per household cost from $15,000 to $20,000.

Ridership Optimism Bias: Echoing general concerns raised by Weinstock, Hook, Repogle and Cruz (above), the state report indicated concern over an optimism bias in the ridership projections. For example, the city expects 60 percent of rail riders to use the bus to get to the train.  This is four times the rate of the largest new rail system built in the nation (Washington's Metro).  Using the bus to connect to the train makes travel much slower and this factor has often been over-estimated by rail planners. This unrealistic assumption alone could qualify the Honolulu ridership forecast as among the most inaccurate in history.  Fewer riders. more money out of residents pockets.

A Billion Here, A Billion There: As if all of this were not enough, a report for the Federal Transit Administration, obtained by the Star Advertiser through a freedom of information request, indicates that the operating costs of the transit system may be understated by as much as $1 billion over the next 20 years. That's $3,000 per Honolulu household (Note 1).

Federal Doubts: Federal Transit Administration Regional Administrator Leslie Rogers expressed concern about Honolulu's ability to afford the project in a letter to local officials, noting that the funding program is insufficient. Local taxpayers likely will need to pony up more.

How Would Rail Change Honolulu

With rail, Honolulu there are two ways that Honolulu will be changed:

What Will Change: Walling Off the Waterfront. The elevated design of the rail system is so intrusive that the local chapter of the American Association of Architects opposes the proposal. The elevated line would run directly in front of the waterfront. Its oppressive design would separate the rest of the historic Aloha Tower area from the rest of the city and could preclude future attractive "placemaking" development (see lead photo, courtesy of the Honolulu Chapter of the American Institute of Architects).

No Traffic Relief: Despite being only the 52nd largest metropolitan area in the nation, Honolulu has the second worst traffic congestion in the nation (see figure), according to INRIX, the leading international reporting source. Honolulu and Los Angeles are the only US metropolitan areas ranked in the worst 25 out of 200 in Western Europe and the United States. Even with the rail system, local plans call for traffic congestion to get worse.

Getting the Choices Right

Incumbent Mayor Peter Carlisle recently returned from a Potemkin Village tour of Manila, raving about that city's rail system. Governor Cayateno, whose familiarity with Manila extends well beyond a scripted tour, called Mayor Carlisle's comparison with Manila "comedic," noting that most residents cannot afford a car or that Manila has more than 10 times as many people.  


Manila Rail System: Part the Mayor Did not See

The mayor may not have been aware that more than 4,000,000 – more than one-third – of Manila's (National Capital Region) residents live in slums, shantytowns and informal settlements, where sewers are rare if not non-existent. Government projections indicate that the slum population will rise to 9,000,000 by 2050. More than one-half of Manila's population will be in slums.


Manila Slum

In his recent "state of the city'" address, Mayor Carlisle mused "Manila without rail transit would be unthinkable." That may be the view of an itinerate visitor, but not of the majority who never ride it. For millions, a Manila with sewers is unimaginable. First world urban areas all have sewers. But many do not have rail systems. Honolulu could use some genuine prioritization and less contempt for the hard earned income of its residents.

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

-----

Note 1: Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, who was minority leader of the United States Senate in the 1960s is reported to have said: "A million here, a million there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." The line has been often repeated, though the rise in government spending is indicated by the inflation from "millions" to "billions."

Note 2: Manila's rail system serves a very small market and represents a small share of transit ridership. The latest available data suggested that barely five percent of transit ridership was on rail.

Top Photo: Visual of rail system in downtown Honolulu (courtesy of American Institute of Architects, Honolulu Chapter) 

Photo credits: All others by author

Measuring the Impact of Apple and the App Economy

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We all know about the explosion of Apple tech products, the ever-expanding number of mobile applications in the App Store — and the near $100 billion in cash that Apple is hoarding. Yet one question that has gone mostly unanswered is how many jobs Apple has generated (and supported) with its mind-boggling growth.

Last week Apple released results of a study done by the Analysis Group of Boston — a firm commissioned by the tech giant — to measure its employment impact in the US. The results:

  • 47,000 current US jobs at Apple
  • 257,000 indirect (or support jobs) in manufacturing of components, transportation, professional services, etc.
  • 210,000 estimated iOS App Economy jobs, a figure derived using the same methodology as a study from Mike Mandel for TechNet.

The total estimate — 514,000 jobs created or supported by Apple — has already been criticized by at least notable one economist. But the methodology appears to be fairly conservative, if only because the authors did not include an estimated 187,000 additional jobs from induced effects (i.e., those that come increased spending at grocery stores, restaurants, etc.).

However, it’s the other component of Apple’s total job figure — the 210,000 for iOS developers — that warrants a further look.

The App Economy

Mandel’s in-depth study (PDF) on the App Economy was released in early February. Using want ads from The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine database, Mandel and his colleagues estimated that 466,000 jobs in the US can be attributed to app firms and app-related jobs at companies such as AT&T, Electronic Arts … and of course Apple. Pretty remarkable considering that, as Mandel wrote, there were zero app jobs in the US prior to 2007. Apple looked at the study and:

Using the same keyword search methodology employed by the study’s authors at the time of its release, we found that 45 percent of job postings in the app economy are specifically tied to iPhone and iOS, indicating that at least 210,000 jobs are driven by the iOS app economy.

There’s a good reason why Mandel relied on want ads instead of conventional labor market data — app jobs only started cropping up in the last five years, making them hard to track down through the BLS and other sources. Concluded Mandel, “… the App Economy is far too new to show up in the government statistics.”

Job posting (or real-time labor market) data is constantly updated and allows for full keyword searches. This is valuable to those who want a very recent look at the most in-demand skills needed by employers in a particular industry or field. But, as with all data, there are inherent shortcomings to analyzing want ads. And more to the point, using job postings to estimate employment in a sector can be problematic. Consider Mandel’s approach:

Our procedure for estimating the number of App Economy jobs has several steps (see Table 1).

1. We identified a set of keywords that characterize want ads for App Economy computer and mathematical occupations, which for convenience we will call ‘tech jobs’;

2. We used historical relationships to estimate the ratio between the number of want ads for tech occupations and the actual level of tech employment [emphasis ours];

3. We examined a sample of third-party app developers to estimate the ratio of tech jobs to non-tech jobs in the App Economy;

4. We drew from the literature to derive a conservative estimate of the spillover effects to the broader economy;

5. We used the location data in The Conference Board database to estimate App Economy jobs by metro area and by state.

Mandel looked at four years of postings data, which suggested “that tech jobs and tech want ads tend to move together, except for anomalous periods such as 2009, at the bottom of the downturn.” So he took the roughly 3.5 million tech jobs (defined as computer and mathematical occupations) in fourth quarter 2011 and the 952,000 tech want ads over the same time to come up with a ratio of roughly 3.5 tech jobs for each non-duplicated tech want ad over a 90-day period.

During the 90 days’ worth of want ads that Mandel examined, he and his colleagues identified 44,400 non-duplicated postings for tech workers that had at least one of the keywords they chose to look for — a list that included “Android,” “iOs,” “iPhone,” “Facebook API” and others. Using the 3.5 ratio, those 44,400 want ads result in 155,000 tech jobs in App Economy as of December 2011 (not including non-tech jobs in the App Economy).

Perhaps this is an accurate estimate, but a few things should be mentioned here. If Mandel had used a different 90-day period, he might have gotten a larger or smaller number of tech want ads. And a different — or longer — time period might also have shifted the employment-to-want ad ratio up or down.

Job posting data is volatile; it can change depending on the time of year, profession, hiring practices of employers, etc. Some employers post want ads to collect resumes for jobs they don’t intend to fill (or perhaps will fill internally). Also, the method of converting the text in want ads into generic job titles or standard occupation codes through keyword searches — a vital step for high-level analysis of real-time data — can cause discrepancies if not thoroughly vetted or fact-checked. A posting for a “team member” at a fast food joint can be misinterpreted as a “team assembler.” Things like this happen.

Pinning down existing app developer jobs is particularly tricky. A software developer might devote only 30% of the workday to apps or might spend a few months developing an app and move on.

More could be said here, but it’s clear that Mandel’s study provides insight into a burgeoning and heretofore unanalyzed part of the economy. Nonetheless, it’s helpful to have a lens with which to look through a study like this and real-time data in general.

See also: Making a Key Distinction: Real-Time LMI & Traditional Labor Market Data

Joshua Wright is an editor at EMSI, an Idaho-based economics firm that provides data and analysis to workforce boards, economic development agencies, higher education institutions, and the private sector. He manages the EMSI blog and is a freelance journalist. Contact him here.

The Republican Party's Fatal Attraction To Rural America

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Rick Santorum’s big wins in Alabama and Mississippi place the Republican Party in ever greater danger of becoming hostage to what has become its predominate geographic base: rural and small town America. This base, not so much conservatives per se, has kept Santorum’s unlikely campaign alive, from his early win in Iowa to triumphs in predominately rural and small-town dominated Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota and Oklahoma. The small towns and rural communities of states such as Michigan and Ohio also sheltered the former Pennsylvania senator from total wipeouts in races he would otherwise have lost in a blowout.

If America was an exclusively urban or metropolitan country, Mitt Romney would be already ensconced as the GOP nominee and perhaps on his way towards a real shot at the White House. In virtually every major urban region — which means predominately suburbs — Romney has generally won easily. Mike Barone, arguably America’s most knowledgeable political analyst, observes that the cool, collected, educated Mitt does very well in affluent suburbs, confronting President Obama with a serious challenge in one of his electoral sweet spots.

Outside the Mormon belt from Arizona to Wyoming, however, sophisticated Mitt has been a consistent loser in the countryside. This divergence between rural and suburban/metro America, poses a fundamental challenge to the modern Republican Party. Rural America constitutes barely 16 percent of the country, down from 72 percent a century ago, but still constitutes the party’s most reliable geographic base. It resembles the small-town America of the 19th century, particularly in the South and West, that propelled Democratic Party of Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan to three presidential nominations.

Yet like Bryan, who also lost all three times, what makes Santorum so appealing in the hinterlands may prove disastrous in the metropolitan regions which now dominate the country. Much of this is not so much particular positions beyond abortion, gay rights, women’s issues, now de rigueur in the GOP, but a kind of generalized sanctimoniousness that does not play well with the national electorate.

We can see this in the extraordinary difference in the religiosity between more rural states, particularly in the South, and the rest of country. Roughly half of all Protestants in Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma, according to the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, are evangelicals, not including historically black churches. In contrast, evangelicals make up a quarter or less of Protestants nationally and less still in key upcoming primary states such as Pennsylvania, New York, California and Connecticut, where the percentages average closer to 10 percent.

Let me be clear: Urbanity is not the key issue here. Cities have become so lock-step Democratic as to be essentially irrelevant to the Republican Party. Instead it’s the suburbs — home to a record 51 percent of the population and growing overall more than 10 times as fast as urban areas — that matter the most. Much of the recent suburban growth has taken place in exurbs, where many formerly rural counties have been swallowed, essentially metropolitanizing the countryside.

What accounts for the divergence between the suburban areas and rural areas? A lot may turn on culture. Small towns and villages may be far from the isolated “idiocy of rural life” that Marx referred to, but rural areas still remain someone more isolated and still somewhat less “wired” in terms of broadband use than the rest of the country.

Despite the popularity of country music, rural residents do not have much influence on mainstream culture. Most Hollywood executives and many in New York still commute from leafy ‘burbs. Few of our cultural shapers and pundits actually live predominately in the countryside, even if they spend time in bucolic retreats such as Napa, Aspen or Jackson Hole.

Until the recent commodity boom, much of rural America was suffering. And even today, poverty tends to be higher overall in rural areas than in urban and especially suburban countries. Some areas, notably in North Dakota and much of the Plains, are doing very well, but rural poverty remains entrenched in a belt from Appalachia and the deep South to parts of west Texas, New Mexico and California’s Central Valley.

Rural areas generally do not have strong ties to the high-tech economy now leading much of metro growth. This remains a largely suburban phenomenon, urban only if you allow core cities to include their hinterlands. All the nation’s strongest tech clusters — Silicon Valley, Route 128, Austin, north Dallas, Redmond/Bellevue in Washington, Raleigh-Durham — are primarily suburban in form. High tech tends to nurture a consciousness among conservatives more libertarian than socially conservative and populist. Not surprisingly, libertarian Ron Paul often does best in these areas and among younger Republican voters.

Another key difference: a lack of ethnic diversity. There are now many Hispanics living in rural areas, but they are largely not citizens and most are recent arrivals, attracted by jobs in the oil fields, slaughterhouses and farms. Many small towns, unlike suburbs, remain more homogeneous than suburbs, emerging as the most heterogeneous of all American geographies. Ethnic cultural cross-pollination occurs regularly in metropolitan suburbs; this is not so common in rural America.

Equally important, environmental issues spin differently in rural areas than in suburbs. Energy development and agriculture drive many rural economies. In some areas, like Ohio and western Pennsylvania, shale oil and gas is bringing long moribund regions back to life. In the Dakotas, parts of Louisiana, Texas and Wyoming, it is ushering in a potentially long-term boom. In contrast, there aren’t many oil and gas wells located next to malls and big housing tracks.

This does not mean that suburban voters share the anti-fossil fuel green faith of the urban core. But for them “drill baby drill” represents more a matter of price at the pump than a life and death issue for the local economy. Suburbanites feel the energy issue, but do not live it the way more rural communities do. One of the great ironies of American life is that those who live closest to nature are often less ideologically “green” than those, particularly urbanites, residing in an environment of concrete, glass and steel.

Rural America, of course, is changing, with many areas, particularly in the Plains, getting richer and better educated. These areas are growing faster than the national average and attracting immigrants from abroad and people from other U.S. regions. Yet the influence of newcomers, new wealth and new technology is still nascent. The political pace in rural America today still is being set by an aging, overwhelmingly white and modestly educated demographic.

Until the Republican nomination fight is settled, the party’s pandering to the sensibilities of such conservatives in rural areas could prove fatal to its long-term prospects. A Santorum nomination almost guarantees a replay of the Bryan phenomena; no matter how many times he runs, he will prove unlikely to win, even against a vulnerable opponent. Even in losing, his preachy, divisive tone — on contraception, prayer, the separation of church and state — has opened a gap among suburban voters that Obama will no doubt exploit.

The suburbs, with its preponderance of white, middle income independent voters, gave the 2008 election to Obama, and that’s where the next contest will be decided. The countryside will rally to a GOP standard bearer like Romney, albeit somewhat reluctantly, for both economic and social reasons. The battle will then shift to the suburbs, including those urban areas, common in the vast cities of the South and West, that are predominately suburban in form.

Most of the urban core, meanwhile, will vote lockstep for Obama. But the president, as thoroughly a creature of urban tastes and prejudice as to ever sit in the White House, could prove vulnerable in the suburbs, if the Republicans can deliver a message that is palatable to that geography’s denizens.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.com.

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

Rick Santorum Image by Bigstockphoto.com.

The Sorry State of American Transport

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We constantly read about the infrastructure crisis in America. I’ll have more to say on this at a future date, but it is pretty clear that we need to spend more money in a whole lot of areas: airports, roads and bridges, public transportation, and more.

Yet it’s very easy to see that so much of what ails transport has nothing to do with a lack of funds and everything to do with a lack of will. I took a train ride on the Northeast corridor last week that really drove it home to me.

Start with the sorry state of Penn Station in New York City, America’s busiest train station. (In fact, it’s the busiest transportation facility of any type in the United States, if Wikipedia can be believed). Yes, the place is a depressing underground dump. Yes, there used to be a glorious train station there that was demolished in the 1960s. Yes, we probably need to invest many billions in upgrades.

Yet is it a lack of funds that make the three agencies that call it home – Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the Long Island Railroad – act as though the others don’t exist? The three railroads have completely separate ticketing areas, signage systems, etc. This is hardly the only case in America. For some reason, Amtrak seems to despise sharing ticket agents with other carriers. There are separate windows for Amtrak and commuter lines everywhere I’ve been. Given that many journeys include both commuter and inter-city segments, this seems crazy. If you can’t have integrated ticketing (and actually, I don’t see why you can’t), at least you should be able to have a single agent help you.

The worst example of this I know is in Providence, where Amtrak monopolizes the four ticket windows. If you want to buy an MBTA T ticket, you have to go to a cafe next door. This tiny little coffee shop found a way to sell both pastries and train tickets (albeit from separate registers), so why can’t Amtrak figure out how to sell two kinds of tickets?

Also, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to actually get your Amtrak ticket online. You can book a reservation, but then you need to get a physical ticket printed at the station, either from a kiosk or an agent. (If there’s a way to avoid this, please let me know).

I decided to get my ticket at the window. The line was very short and I was early in any case. When I got there, some guy with his kids was at the window screaming at the agent about a problem with their tickets. I chalked this up to one of those cases where the frustrations of travel just cause somebody to snap. But then as I walked up to the window, the person next to me was also having a similar problem with their ticket and was having an animated discussion with an agent who didn’t seem to care. Fortunately, I had no such issues, but the agent I had to talk to was extremely surly and kept asking me to repeat myself over and over. Who would want to put themselves through such an experience? Customer service is clearly something that should also be within Amtrak’s control.

Amtrak markets themselves as having wi-fi. But on the train itself, as anyone who has ridden the NEC knows, the wi-fi is basically unusable. How much capital investment would it take to get working wi-fi?

In short, though the facilities can somewhat be excused as resulting from insufficient capital funding and bad decisions decades ago, there’s so much that could be done right now to upgrade the passenger experience it’s not even funny.

It’s the same with airports. While a few American cities like Indianapolis and Detroit have upgraded their terminals, too many key gateways remain depressingly dreary and non-functional. While some overseas places like Heathrow certainly would give any American airport a run for its money in the Hall of Shame, the general experience of flying to someplace like Madrid, Singapore, or Tokyo is like night and day versus the US.

Key among the worst offenders again is New York City, especially LaGuardia. Matt Chaban at the New York Observer recently wrote a piece that is a good overview of the depressing state: “Terminal Condition – How New York’s Airports Crashed and Burned.”

This is certainly not news to anyone who has flown to New York. But again, the vast billions it would take to replace these decrepit facilities is only part of the problem. Nobody forces America to put its passengers through the “TSA experience.” Last time I flew I was delayed at security while agents patted down some guy that looked like he was around 85 years old who apparently hadn’t stripped down quite far enough to go through the full body scanner. Somehow other advanced nations manage to run safe air travel systems without resorting to this.

While we are waiting around for funding issues to be resolved, wouldn’t it be nice if our governments and various travel companies actually focused on fixing some of these straightforward problems with coordination, ticketing, and customer service? It’s hard to take their capital requests seriously if they aren’t going to do what they can now.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile.

Photo By Kyle Gradinger, Amtrak Keystone Snowstorm I. Amtrak AEM-7 locomotive 904 leads a Keystone Corridor train through the snow in Rebel Hill, King of Prussia, PA.

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