A city at its best, wrote the philosopher René Descartes, provides “an inventory of the possible.” The city Descartes had in mind was 17th-century Amsterdam, which for him epitomized those cities where people go to change their circumstances and improve their lives. But such aspirational cities have existed throughout American history as well, starting with Boston in the 17th century, Philadelphia in the 18th, New York in the 19th, Chicago in the early 20th, Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by midcentury Los Angeles, and San Jose in the 1980s.

Yes, the great rule of aspirational cities is that they change over time, becoming sometimes less entrepreneurial, more expensive, and demographically stagnant. In the meantime, other cities, often once obscure, suddenly become the new magnets of opportunity.

To determine America’s current aspirational hotspots, we focused in large part on economic indicators, such as employment growth, per capita income, and unemployment. But we also took into account demographic factors, such as the growth of domestic migration and the movement of college-educated people and the foreign born.

Finally, we considered quality-of-life factors such as traffic congestion, housing affordability, and crowding—which are keenly relevant to young families hunting for the places with the best “inventory of the possible.” In a sense, we believe aspirational cities reflect a kind of urban arbitrage, where people look for those places that provide not just economic and cultural opportunity but a cost structure that allows them to enjoy their success to the fullest extent.

Our top two cities reflect the importance of this arbitrage opportunity. Both No. 1, Austin, Texas, and No. 2, New Orleans, are places where people can enjoy the cultural amenities and attitudes of “progressive” blue states but in a distinctly red-state environment of low costs, less regulation, and lower taxes. These places have lured companies and people from more expensive regions, notably California and the Northeast, by being not only culturally rich but also amenable to building a career, buying a home and, ultimately, raising a family in relative comfort.

Like the Texas state capital and the legendary Crescent City, most of our top cities are located in the American South and lower Midwest, and they attract businesses and people not only from other sections of the country but also increasingly from abroad as well. These include No. 3, Houston, and the smaller but burgeoning oil town of No. 4, Oklahoma City. These are followed by three fast-growing, low-cost Southern cities: No. 5, Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina; No. 6, Nashville; and No. 7, Richmond, Virginia.

Not all our top aspirational cities are in Dixie. If there’s enough growth and opportunity, solidly blue-state regions can perform well enough to stay near the top of these rankings. Such cities include No. 8, Washington, D.C., and No. 10, Minneapolis–St. Paul, as well as No. 12, Seattle; No. 16, Denver; and even No. 22, Boston. In these cities, high-tech and professional-service growth has created enough wealth to offset higher costs while offering the next generation the chance to live in a culturally vibrant place where affording a home and raising a family are still possible.

Perhaps more surprising is the high aspirational ranking of some old Rust Belt and Great Lakes cities. The middle part of the country has been losing people and jobs for half a century, but more recently several urban areas within or bordering the Midwest have established enough of an aspirational culture to reverse the pattern of out-migration and begin luring people from the coasts. These include such diverse places as No. 15, Columbus, Ohio; No. 17 Louisville, Kentucky; No. 21 Pittsburgh; and No. 23, Indianapolis.

Of course, not everyone will find a perfect match in one of these cities. For those with extraordinary technical skills, for example, it still may make sense to move to the hotbed of the San Francisco Bay Area—notably No. 24, San Francisco, and No. 27, San Jose—where economic opportunity partially offsets extraordinarily high costs, at least for a certain portion of the population.

This applies as well even to cities toward the bottom of the list, including No. 46, New York, and, in last place, No. 51, Los Angeles. If you want to break into businesses such as finance, media, and entertainment, you have little choice but to concentrate on New York or Southern California. These areas may also prove more attractive to people who have inherited money (critical to affording houses or paying high rents), as well as those whose business is closely tied to these great cities’ ethnic economies.

People must also make tradeoffs when they decide where to locate. Some value a big house and yard, while others cannot abide a city without a decent opera or good Thai food. And those obsessed with, say, their children’s educations will clearly find a broader variety of schools and cultural institutions in San Francisco or New York than in Oklahoma City.

But for those who lack these specific demands, and for those whose priority is achieving a middle- or upper-middle-class quality of life, the less expensive, often smaller, and less congested cities seem to have the greatest appeal. This may offend the sensibilities of retro-urbanists, who tend to cluster in the great legacy cities, along with our tribes of cultural tastemakers, but the hard reality shows that, for the most part, people move to places that offer not merely the best lattes or artisanal pizzas but the great opportunity for advancement.

The Geography of Growth

We give economic growth roughly half of the weight in these rankings. This consists of three factors: employment growth, unemployment, and per capita income. This is where some of the coastal cities still do well, notably San Jose, whose recent job growth places it first, as well as No. 4, Washington, and No. 7, Seattle. The local economies in these areas have all been driven by the rapid expansion of high-tech and professional services, which explains their particularly high per capita GDP numbers.

Yet most of the big winners in the economic-aspiration sweepstakes are concentrated elsewhere, notably in Texas. Since the recession, the Lone Star State has created 1 million new jobs, five times as many as New York state. In contrast, Florida and California have lost a half million positions. Not surprising, Texas accounts for four of the top 11 regions for economic opportunity (No. 2, Austin; No. 3, Houston; No. 9, San Antonio; and No. 11, Dallas).

No big economic region outperforms Houston, a metropolitan area of more than 5 million people that boasts arguably the strongest big-city economy in the nation. Not only the global hub of the energy industry, it also boasts the nation’s largest medical center and has dethroned New York City as the nation’s leading export center. Other strong performers include No. 7, Salt Lake City; No. 8, Oklahoma City; and No. 11, New Orleans, all of which have enjoyed strong job growth over the past five years.

What Do You Get for the Money?

Strong economic growth—particularly high per capita incomes—represents half of our ranking, but this is balanced by considerations such as cost of living, housing, and traffic congestion. “Everyday life,” observed the great French historian Fernand Braudel, “consists of the little things one hardly notices in time and space.” This reality is particularly critical for young and prospective families, for whom a higher salary or glamorous environment may mean less than the prospect of owning a decent home, particularly without the necessity of a long, dispiriting commute.

These factors, we believe, will become more paramount as members of the large millennial or “echo boom” generation enter their late 20s, 30s, and even 40s over the next decade. This demographic—projected by the census to expand by roughly 8 million by 2025—is likely to prove intensely interested in owning their own homes. Indeed, research by generational analysts Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrates that not only do millennials aspire to homeownership, but among the oldest cohorts of this group, now just entering their 30s, interest in buying a house actually surpasses that of their boomer parents.

This difference in the affordability of housing relative to incomes plays a major role in boosting the rankings of some strong aspirational areas, notably Raleigh; Richmond; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City; and Indianapolis. Along with traffic congestion, it tends to bring down the rankings of most California metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego, as well as such hipster hotspots as New York and Miami. We also include “doubling up,” where more than one family lives in a household, as a surrogate for poverty (since metropolitan poverty rates are not adjusted for the cost of living).

Demographic Destiny

The last component of our rankings, accounting for roughly a quarter, lies in demographic trends. Like playing defense in basketball, the most important thing here is to watch the feet. The question is movement: where are people going, and where are they not? This tells us much about future trends and how people, as opposed to the media, actually view the best places for them to settle.

Our methodology concentrates on three metrics: domestic migration, growth of foreign-born population; and growth in the number of college-educated people. These groups reflect what may be thought of as “the canaries in the coal mine”—indicators of where people seeking a better life are choosing to settle. This factor seems to jibe with our overall rankings more than any other component.

The biggest beneficiaries tend, not surprisingly, to be places that are economically vibrant but not prohibitively expensive, such as Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Richmond, and Charlotte. Over the past decade these areas have enjoyed by far the fastest growth not only in migration, but in college-educated people and perhaps most surprisingly in number of foreign-born people. Today immigrants are flocking to such unlikely places as Nashville, Richmond, Louisville, and Charlotte. As for the college-educated, they, too, are also migrating to these same aspirational cities, as well as to new hipster hotspots such as New Orleans and Nashville. The increase in B.A.-degree holders in these cities averages in the double digits or higher over the past decade, in some cases more than twice the growth in such traditional “brain gain” cities as Seattle, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, and Boston.

The Urban Future

As the younger generation, as well as newly arrived immigrants, begins to look for places to settle, raise families, and start businesses, they will flock increasingly to these affordable and demographically, economically dynamic regions. Yet it is likely that other factors—global economics, shifts in immigration, and technological changes—could influence the aspirational landscape in the years to come.

In thinking about the future, then, it is important to recall that not long ago some of the cities near the top of today’s aspirational list were facing seemingly irreversible economic decline, demographic stagnation, and even loss and deterioration of basic infrastructure. You only have to recall the dismal ’70s in Seattle, where post-Vietnam budget cuts inspired some to ask that “whoever is last to leave turn out the lights,” or Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth after the oil bust in the ’80s, when those cities were widely known for their “see through” office buildings and abandoned housing complexes.

It’s always possible that unpredictable and major shifts could topple today’s aspirational cities from the top of the list. However, given current conditions and the most likely accrual of current trends, we can expect that most of the cities at the top of the aspirational rankings will remain there for some time to come.

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

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.

This piece originally appeared at the Daily Beast.

Creative Commons photo "Austin Skyline" by Flickr user StuSeeger

America has always been a nation of tinkerers. Our Founding Fathers, notes author Alec Foege, were innovators in areas ranging from agriculture (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) and electricity (Benjamin Franklin) to the swivel chair (Jefferson).

Engineering advances drove America’s quest for industrial supremacy in the 19th century, many of them borrowed (sometimes illegally) from the then very resourceful British Isles. By the early 19th century, the U.S. was producing its own major inventions, including the steamboat and cotton gin. By the end of that century, the U.S. was clearly on the way to industrial preeminence. The growth of engineering schools — MIT, the Case Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, as well as departments at the great land grant universities — generated a steady supply of engineers. For much of the last 70 years, America, has been the world’s leading center of engineering excellence, dominating markets from steel and cars to energy and aerospace.

Today, as well, where engineers concentrate, we can expect the greatest capacity for innovation. According to research from Houston Partnership economist Patrick Jankowski, there is a wide range of concentrations of engineering talent among the country’s 85 largest metropolitan areas. For the most part, regions with higher concentrations of engineers tend to do better, and seize the leadership of key industries.

Nowhere is this more true than in America’s top engineering hub, San Jose/Silicon Valley. The Valley’s ratio of 45 engineers per 1,000 employees is twice as high as any other big metro area. This deep reservoir of talent remains the Valley’s key asset, and has made it by most measurements the nation’s most affluent metro area.

This preeminence dates to the Valley’s early history, particularly in research sponsored by the Defense Department and NASA. This large high-tech workforce was then backed by venture capitalists, many of them also engineers by training, to form by far the most dominant high-tech region in the world. The presence of Stanford, now rated the nation’s second leading engineering school by U.S. News & World Report after MIT, Berkeley, ranked third and Santa Clara, at No. 14, gives the area an unmatched capacity to produce technologists.

More surprising, perhaps, is the second city on our list: Houston. The world energy capital is home to 59,000 engineers — second most in the U.S. after the much larger Los Angeles metro area — and has a concentration of 22.4 engineers per 1,000 employees. Although it does not match the Bay Area in elite engineering schools, Houston is home to Rice University and the University of Houston, both highly regarded, and, perhaps equally important, a strong sub-structure of trade and technical schools that feed into the engineering pool.

Key here is the energy industry, which is far more technology-dependent than many might believe. Houston is arguably now the country’s most important emerging city, with the largest job growth of any major metro area. Not only can engineers make money there, unlike in Silicon Valley, they can also afford to buy a house.

More surprising still is the metro area with the third-highest concentration of engineers: Wichita, Kan., with 21 engineers per thousand employees. In this case, the driver is manufacturing, particularly aerospace. But recent cuts by Boeing threaten the future of the self-proclaimed “air capital of the world.” As a result, Wichita has not done nearly as well economically of late as San Jose or Houston, but its reservoir of engineering talent suggests considerable potential if they stick around.

These top three engineering cities tell us much about the source of American innovation, and the remarkable diversity that makes this country an engineering powerhouse. It involves three essential industries — information technology, energy and manufacturing. Each has a distinct geographic makeup that reflects differing kinds of engineering talent.

The High-Tech Centers

No place comes close to Silicon Valley in terms of concentrations of engineers, but several other traditional tech centers make the top 10, led by San Diego in fifth place, a major center for biotech. Boston, home to No. 1 engineering school MIT, ranks eighth, and Denver, which boasts both a thriving tech and energy sector, is 10th. Other tech regions that rank in the top 20 include Seattle (13th), San Francisco (18th) and Austin (19th). None of these areas can claim even half of Silicon Valley’s per capita engineering base, but have thrived during the current high-tech boom.

The Energy Cities

When thinking of energy, we might think of wildcats covered with crude (like James Dean in Giant), but this is becoming an industry very dependent on highly trained geophysicists, petroleum engineers, chemical engineers and other specialists. This explains the ninth-place ranking for Bakersfield, “the oil capital of California,” a city better known for country music and cruising than technology. Over 15,000 people work in this generally high-wage industry in the onetime Okie capital. Energy jobs are also big in No. 14 Baton Rouge, La., home to Louisiana State University, which sends many of its engineering graduates into the Gulf of Mexico energy industry.

Manufacturing Hubs.

Detroit’s bankruptcy has shed a bad light on rustbelt centers, but in reality the industrial Midwest has been on something of a roll in recent years, with many states, from Wisconsin and Ohio to Iowa, boasting lower unemployment than the national average. One key element has been the increasingly innovative nature of U.S. manufacturing, notably in the auto industry. Little-recognized Dayton, which ranks fourth, has attracted major investment for advanced manufacturing in autos and aerospace.

Other manufacturing cities high on our list include No. 6 Greenville-Easley, S.C., home to many European auto-related firms. And despite the city bankruptcy we should not ignore No. 12 Detroit, where most of the metro area’s 30,000 engineers live in the economically healthy suburban regions.

These numbers, of course, focus on concentration as opposed to absolute numbers of engineers. In terms of raw numbers, by far the largest player is Los Angeles, with some 70,000 engineers. Yet it ranks only 33rd by concentration, a far cry from the region’s aerospace-oriented heyday. But L.A.’s legacy still makes an ideal setting for some tech ventures, notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

In terms of total engineers, L.A. is followed by Houston, with 59,000, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria with 49,000 (11th in terms of concentration), Boston with 43,000 and then San Jose and Dallas (29th), each with 40,000 or so engineers. Each has a critical mass that allows them to tackle big engineering projects, while also staffing potential spin-offs and start-ups. Some of these areas, notably the Valley, know how to make more money with their workforce than others.

The Have-not Regions

One surprisingly weak area is greater New York, which ranks 78th, with a miniscule 6.1 engineers per 1,000 workers, and some 20,000 fewer engineers than Los Angeles. The New York media and the city’s chattering classes may like to talk up the Big Apple as a high-tech center, but the relative lack of engineering talent should spark a tad of skepticism over whether the nation’s largest urban area is really up to the task of competing against engineer-rich places like Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Denver or Austin, much less stand up to Silicon Valley, with seven times the concentration of engineers.

The rest of the bottom of the list is depressingly familiar, in terms of economic also-rans. El Paso, Texas, ranks last among the 85 largest metropolitan areas, followed by Las Vegas, Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Pa., and Fresno. These cities are going to have a very tough time competing for high-tech jobs in the immediate future. To make something, whether digital or tangible, the first step lies in gathering in the talent that can make things happen, but as of yet, they have not made much headway.

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

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

Creative Commons photo "Engineers" by Flickr user ensign_beedrill

We recently explored the post-recession tsunami of online retail and discovered that e-shopping’s future is anything if not bright. According to a report by Forrest Research, by 2016, not only are 192 million U.S. consumers projected to be be clicking “checkout” (up 15% since 2012), but those 192 million will also be spending an average of 44% more.

But does this mean we should expect traditional retail to flatline? Well, no. As we showed here, the flourishing of specific retail subsectors (e.g., warehouses/supercenters) certainly cheers up total gloom-and-doom predictions.

Nevertheless, traditional retail and e-shopping scream for comparison. Whatever their destiny, they could hardly differ more in size, stability, and growth patterns so far, and so let’s take a look.

A Comparison

Here’s how the two industries break down:

Traditional retail: NAICS 44-45, except for electronic shopping and electronic auctions

E-shopping: electronic shopping (454111) and electronic auctions (454112)

A quick comparison between retail and e-shopping shows two very different stories. Traditional retail, of course, has been around forever with its ups and downs, while e-shopping is still technically a teenager — and like a teen, it’s growing wicked fast.

One thing we notice is the huge discrepancy in jobs between these two industries. Traditional retail, for all its loss, is still 90 times the size of e-shopping, whose growth is not quite as jaw-dropping, perhaps, as it might seem at first. Sure, it’s booming, but then, it’s always easier to top 160% growth when you start out so tiny.

No, the most interesting fact here is not how many jobs e-shopping is adding to the economy, but how many jobs it isn’t. It creates good consumer prices, serves more customers, makes more dough, and has completely changed the way we view products (literally and figuratively). And it does all these things with a smaller workforce.

This trend of online-based business and a smaller, more tech-based workforce is well illustrated by the Kodak vs. Instagram conversation (read more here and here). At its peak, Kodak employed 140,000 while Instagram, at the time that it was purchased by Facebook in April 2012, employed a mere baker’s dozen. In short, the American economy has always been obsessed with efficiency. If we can do more with less, we will, and the internet is apparently accelerating that process.

The Story in the States

Let’s take a closer look at the top states for job growth and decline for both these industries.

Retail jobs have flourished the most in North Dakota (21%), Nevada (15%), Utah (11%), and Arizona (10%). Each of those states, it should be noted, have fast-growing populations and/or economies. The worst decline has taken place in Michigan (15%), Ohio (14%), Rhode Island (13%), and Wisconsin (10%).

For e-shopping, it’s mostly just a question about where it has grown a lot and where it has grown a ton. Only two states have seen an actual decline in jobs. Idaho leads the way crazy 3,370% growth (from 40 to 1,400 jobs), followed by Utah (800%, from 700 to 6,200 jobs), and Indiana (780%, from 670 to 5,900 jobs). The states that have done the least well are Alaska (20%, from 80 down to 60 jobs), South Dakota (3%, from 92 to 89 jobs), Virginia (mere 5% growth, from 2,000 to 2,140 jobs), and New Mexico (11%, from 127 to 141 jobs).

Here’s a complete look at the growth/decline of each industry in all 50 states (plus Washington D.C.), as well as how they rank:

E-Shopping Hot Spots

E-shopping has also developed quite a few hot spots across the nation, and a handful of MSAs have very high job concentrations. Here are the MSAs where e-shopping’s concentration (measured in terms of location quotient, LQ) is highest:

Seattle, home to Amazon.com, stands out for its sheer number of jobs (14,500). So too does San Jose, eBay’s headquarters, with 4,600. These two MSAs are also where most of the earnings are pooled.

We should also note Indianapolis, where job growth since 2009 approaches 4,000 and tops 500%. In fact, e-shopping is Indianapolis’s fastest-growing industry of the past 10 years, climbing 4,500% since 2002. (Indiana, remember, is third in the nation for e-shopping growth: nearly 800%.)

The city with the highest concentration of online retail jobs is Fernley, Nev., home to an Amazon distribution center. Currently the town of 53,000 is 48 times the national average for e-shopping. Moreover, about 6% of the town’s workforce (710 out of 12,800 jobs) are in the e-shopping industry.

However, this isn’t as golden as Fernley was back in 2007, when e-shopping’s concentration was 107 times greater than the national average. During the recession, Fernley lost 30% of its e-shopping jobs, and has yet to recover them.

Galesburg, Ill., has a similar recession story but bounced back quickly. The town of 32,000, with a concentration 12 times that of the national average, has rapidly regained its jobs — and then some — over the past year.

For towns like Fernley and Galesburg, perhaps the lesson is that e-shopping is much less place-bound than traditional retail. All these small towns with high concentrations run a certain risk with e-shopping if the big companies were to move operations elsewhere.

The map and table below show the 2009-2013 job performance of online retail in the towns with the highest job concentrations (containing at least 100 e-shopping jobs). We see both huge gains and huge declines (in terms of % growth):

Conclusion

There’s no doubt we should keep an eye on the exciting growth in e-shopping. Yet we should also be aware that individual online companies do tend, by their very nature, to be smaller and less sturdy than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. They fluctuate rapidly and often drastically, which could be a little unsettling for towns where e-shopping is heavily concentrated.

Gwen Burrow 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. Contact her here.

Among urban planners, there is probably not a more revered urban area in the world than Portland (Oregon). The Portland metropolitan area and its core urban area , principally located in Oregon, stretches across the Columbia River into the state of Washington (Figure 1). Nearly four decades ago, the state of Oregon adopted strong urban planning requirements, including the requirement of an urban growth boundary. Two principal purposes of the resulting policies (referred to as “smart growth,” “urban containment, “compact cities,” etc.) were densification and transferring travel demand from cars to transit.

Portland’s progress toward these objectives has been modest, at best. Most growth has continued to be in the suburbs. There has been only modest densification, and employment has continued to disperse from the core. At the metropolitan area level, travel by car remains virtually as dominant as before and traffic congestion has intensified materially. Finally, house prices have been driven up relative to incomes (Note 1).

Portland: A Dispersing Metropolitan Area

Like virtually all major metropolitan areas in the world, Portland has experienced substantial dispersion. The core county of Multnomah peaked at more than two thirds of the metropolitan area population in 1930, as defined in 2000 (Note 2). By 2010, Multnomah County had dropped to one third of the metropolitan area population (Figure 2).

The dispersion has continued in recent years, though there has been core growth (as has been the case in many metropolitan areas). Between 2000 and 2010, the area within two miles (three kilometers) of Portland City Hall grew more than 20 percent. However, this was only five percent of the metropolitan area’s growth. In the inner ring extending to five miles (eight kilometers) from City Hall, the growth was only three percent, well below the metropolitan area’s overall 15 percent growth rate. More than 90 percent of the metropolitan area’s population growth was outside a five mile radius (Figure 3).

Portland: A Low Density Urban Area

Despite its international reputation as an exemplar of compactness , Portland is a low density urban area. Among the 875 urban areas in the world with more than 500,000 population, 797 are denser than Portland.

In the low density United States, Portland ranked 12th among major urban areas (over 1 million population), at approximately 3,500 residents per square mile (1,350 per square kilometer) in 2010. This is approximately 10% higher than the major urban area average density but barely half that of the densest, Los Angeles, with its undeserved reputation for low-density, “sprawling” development (Figures 4 and 5).

Portland is less dense than all major urban areas in the 13 western states, with the exception of Seattle. Notably, Riverside San Bernardino is denser, despite consisting almost exclusively of post-World War II automobile-oriented development. Even much smaller California urban areas, such as Stockton, Bakersfield, Lodi and Delano are denser than Portland.

Portland and Houston: Density Cousins

The Portland metropolitan area’s density profile nearly duplicates that of Houston, which is just as famous for its liberal land use and transportation policies nearly the opposite of Portland’s (Note 3). Both metropolitan areas have nearly the same percentage of their populations living at densities below 7,500 per square mile (2,865 per square kilometer). A 40 percent larger share lives at densities of from 7,500 to 10,000 per square mile (3,860 per square kilometer) in Portland, while Houston’s share of its population living at densities above 10,000 per square mile is three times that of Portland (Figure 6).

Among the nation's 51 major metropolitan areas, Portland ranks 25th in the share of population living in zip codes with more than 10,000 people per square mile in 2010 (Figure 7).

Portland’s Job Dispersion

As in other metropolitan areas, jobs have dispersed substantially around Portland. Today, fewer than 10% of the jobs are located in downtown Portland (the central business district). The city of Portland itself has approximately 1.41 jobs per resident worker. Suburban Hillsboro, with the third largest employment base in the metropolitan area, has slightly more jobs per resident workers (a higher “jobs-housing balance”) according to American Community Survey data.

Transit in Portland

Portland has developed an extensive rail system, intended to attract drivers from their cars. Today, six light rail lines (five light rail) radiate toward the urban periphery, focusing on downtown (the central business district, or CBD).

Yet the share of commuters using transit has fallen by a quarter since 1980, the last data available before the first light rail line opened. In short, rail has not changed the calculus of travel in Portland. Working at home, which is a less expensive and more environmentally friendly work access mode, has caught up with and now exceeds transit, as has occurred in most US major metropolitan areas. (Figure 8)

Worse, transit may have already experienced its “best of times.” The future could be grim. Opposition to rail expansion has grown, and longer term transit service cuts of up to 70 percent have been threatened. (See Portland’s Transit Halcyon Days?)

As elsewhere, transit in Portland is “about downtown.” The Portland Business Alliance estimates that 36% of downtown workers commute by transit. This is nearly one-half of all transit commuting in the Portland metropolitan area. Even in the job rich suburbs of Hillsboro and Beaverton, the share of people using transit for the work trip is less than the 5.0 percent national average.

Portland: Intensifying Traffic Congestion

Clinging to the fantasy transit can materially reduce automobile travel, Oregon officials have blocked substantial roadway expansions. Residents have been rewarded with much intensified traffic congestion.

The Texas A&M Texas Transportation Institute Annual Mobility Report (Note 4) reveals Portland to have the 6th worst traffic congestion in the nation among major metropolitan areas. This compares to a before-rail ranking of 39th in 1982. Now Houston, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix all have lower levels of traffic congestion than Portland (Figure 9). Without decades of urban containment and anti-mobility policies, these metropolitan areas have improved traffic congestion relative to Portland. This is despite far larger increases in travel demand. Since the early 1980s, each of these metropolitan areas has added more residents than live in the entire Portland metropolitan area. Portland also ranks among the worst (5th) in commuter stress (a measure of peak direction traffic congestion), according to the Annual Mobility Report

Portland: Congestion and Higher Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Reflecting the reality that greater traffic congestion increases greenhouse gas emissions, Portland’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per automobile commuter have increased substantially and transit has made only the scantest difference. Between 1982 and 2011, Portland’s increase in CO2 emissions was greater than Houston, Atlanta and Phoenix, though less than Dallas- Fort Worth (Figure 10).

Deteriorating Housing Affordability in Portland

In Portland, consistent with both economic principle and considerable research, urban containment policy drives house prices up relative to incomes higher by rationing the supply of land and housing. In 2010, values of comparable land on either side of the urban growth boundary varied by more than 10 times in value per acre (a phenomenon also identified in Auckland, New Zealand by Chairman of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Arthur Grimes).

The most recent Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey indicated that Portland's median multiple (median house price divided by median household income) was 4.3. In normally functioning housing markets, the median multiple is typically 3.0 or less, a ratio last achieved in Portland in 1995. This higher median house price means than approximately 125,000 fewer Portland households ---or 15% of households --- are able to afford the median priced house. (Note 5).

Higher housing costs retard the standard of living by reducing discretionary incomes (gross income minus taxes and necessities). This, in turn, leads to less demand for other goods and services (in the “discretionary economy”), less job creation and less economic growth.

Even so, Portland’s rising house prices have been moderated by the nearby availability of less expensive houses on larger lots in the Vancouver area (Clark County, Washington). There, more liberal land use regulation permits consumer-driven housing choice, rather forcing households to choose from the limited offerings planning authorities prefer.

In part due to rising prices, Portland is becoming less diverse . Indeed, Aaron Renn has called Portland the penultimate example in his searing critique, The White City. After the results of the 2010 census were announced. The Oregonian quoted then Mayor Sam Adams’ concern about the exodus of African-Americans from the city (municipality), saying that Portlanders should care about the fact that we offer ¬such limited access to equal opportunities. Local policymakers are largely oblivious to the role that urban containment policy may have played in diminishing those opportunities.

Misplaced Priorities

Despite all of this, Portland has its advantages.

As in Houston, Seattle, Atlanta and virtually all other major metropolitan areas regardless of land use regulations, a core renaissance is underway that is making a dense urban lifestyle more practical for the relatively few who both prefer it and can afford it. The suburban lifestyle, dominant virtually everywhere in the United States, remains alive and well in Portland (Note 6). Portland’s physical location remains the envy of most metropolitan areas. There is little better scenery than the nearby Columbia Gorge or majestic Mt. Hood, which crowns the area on clear days.

However, Portland has been sidetracked by a pre-occupation with urban design, at least partially driven by concerns about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that technological advances are poised to do far more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than could ever be achieved by urban containment policy.

But scenery aside, cities are primarily economic organisms. Cities have grown by serving the aspirations of people for a better standard of living. The very purpose of cities is to facilitate affluence and minimize poverty among residents (see Toward More Prosperous Cities). Yet policies, such as urban containment, that inherently reduce household discretionary incomes and impose greater congestion costs reduce discretionary incomes. Despite intentions to the contrary, the results show this to be the real Portland story.

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Note 1: Some other metropolitan areas that have embraced urban containment policy have produced even worse results. For example, traffic congestion is worse in Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne and far smaller Auckland, according to the “Tom Tom Congestion Index,” a real-time traffic reporting competitor to INRIX. Portland has seriously unaffordable housing, though has not retarded the standard of living nearly so much as in Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland, where housing is severely unaffordable. Attention is drawn to Portland’s negative outcomes because of the extent to which its policies are revered in the urban planning community around the world.

Note 2: Multnomah County is used in this analysis, instead of the historical core city of Portland, which has grown in large measure by annexation. Since 1950, the city added 108 percent to its land area and little more than half (56 percent) to its population.

Note 3: Houston is sometimes referred to as having deregulated land use. This is not strictly correct, though Houston is closer to a deregulated model than any other US metropolitan area. The city of Houston does not have zoning, though some municipalities in the suburbs are zoned. Many neighborhoods in the city of Houston have private land use covenants.

Note 4: The Annual Mobility Report has been the authoritative measure of traffic congestion in US urban areas for three decades. More recently, the report’s traffic congestion measures have been significantly strengthened by the use of actual global positioning data from INRIX, which also produces its own Traffic Scorecard both for US and international urban areas, using satellite based real-time traffic data.

Note 5: Estimated from income qualifying income requirements as reported by the National Association of Realtors for the third quarter of 2012 and the metropolitan income distribution modeled based on the 2011 American Community Survey.

Note 6: In 1999, new urbanist architect Andres Duany evaluated Portland in a commentary for The Oregonian:"To my surprise, as soon as I left the prewar urbanism (to which my previous visits had been confined), I found all the new areas on the way to the urban boundary were chock full of the usual sprawl one finds in any U.S. city, no better than in Miami. The outcome wasn't that different after all."

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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: Mount Hood (by author)

Perhaps nothing more illustrates the evolving inner class conflict within the progressive political movement than the recent embrace of California as a role model for the rest of the country. The Golden State, maintains John Judis of the New Republic, should provide the game plan for the Obama administration as it seeks a path back to relevance.

As an old-style, and increasingly marginal, Democrat, my response is "say what?" After all, even by the standards of the tepid national recovery, California, for all the celebration, still lags. The state has consistently suffered among the highest unemployment rates in the country – now ranking around sixth at 8.5 percent– and now, according to the U.S. Census, the highest rate of poverty in the country.

Nor is California, as is often alleged, recovering faster than nation overall. Since January 2007, California has ranked 42nd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Even today, it has roughly 3.5 percent – over a half-million – fewer jobs than it had five years ago. In contrast, arch-rival Texas, second after North Dakota in percentage jobs growth, has added close to 1 million positions. The recovery has been particularly slow in Southern California; in a recent analysis of U.S. metropolitan job-growth data since 2007, the Los Angeles-Orange County region ranked 39th, while the San Bernardino-Riverside area rated 37th.

Growing split

If anything, what's really emerging in California is a widening demographic and geographic divide between the hard-hit largely minority inner-city areas, such as Oakland and Los Angeles, as well as much of the entire inland part of the state (with the exception of oil-rich Bakersfield) and the wealthy coastal sliver that is home to the rich, famous, predominately white (and aging). One longtime conservative California observer, Victor Davis Hanson, wryly has dubbed this a form of "liberal apartheid."

Whatever one calls it, under the current progressive regime, California is accomplishing the exact opposite of the putative progressive egalitarian agenda. Rather than spread the wealth in the old social democratic model of Roosevelt and Truman, and even Clinton, this recovery, such as it is, has been largely centered among the asset-owning classes. They have benefited from, first, the stock market resurgence and a hypocritically pro-Wall Street regime in Washington and, now, an emerging housing bubble, largely promoted by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, vast portions of the middle and working classes have continued to languish.

This division, notes historian Fred Siegel in his upcoming history "Revolt Against the Masses," reflects a long-standing elitist tendency within progressivism that extends to at least the beginning of the 20th century. Starting with such luminaries as Herbert Croly and H.G. Wells, there has been a thread of progressive thought that rejects the essential notion of democracy and supports the notion of a guided economic system administered by a disinterested caste of highly educated "supermen."

In California, this progressive trend has been given full rein, as political power in the state has flowed increasingly to its most affluent corners – notably, San Francisco and Silicon Valley – where social-media hype and environmental management dominate the political agenda. To date, this agenda has been facilitated by an alliance among the minority political warlord class and the extremely well-organized public sector unions, along with rent-seeking crony capitalists, notably those who have benefited from "green" policies.

'Blue-on-blue conflict'

Yet, there are some tentative signs that this political alliance could be endangered, as representatives of more working- and middle-class areas begin to recognize the vast chasm between their interests – largely more and better-paying jobs, and more affordable housing – and those of the reigning gentry liberals. This "blue-on-blue conflict," as the ever-perceptive Walter Russell Mead has dubbed it, may become, given the declining relevance in California of the Republican Party, the most relevant political divide in the state today.

Caught in the middle is the ever-unpredictable but wily Gov. Jerry Brown. In many ways Brown has epitomized the ruling progressive alliance, particularly on issues such as green energy, which has essentially served to transfer money to rich investors, such as Google, from manufacturers, middle- and working-class consumers. At a time when European model countries, such as Germany and Spain, are rethinking their expensive green-energy programs as wasteful and economically damaging, Brown seems determined to stay his course.

Also not likely to be altered, at least for the time being, is Brown's dream of a state high-speed rail network. If ever built, given a funding shortfall of at least $45 billion, it will benefit primarily wealthy travelers and tourists, while the roads, bridges and buses depended on by the masses continue to deteriorate. Recently, a separate proposal for a Victorville-to-Las Vegas "bullet train" failed to win a federal loan, likely dooming it.

Brown may be basking in the temporary glow of the state's short-term budget surplus, but he must know that the long-term pension obligations, at both the state and local levels, and the costs of a vast welfare class are, to use the overused phrase, not sustainable. Without some new engine of economic growth beyond social media, capital gains and property bubbles, the state recovery will never spread to the vast majority of Californians and could nudge the interior parts of the state more toward either penury or even the Republican Party.

Oil and water

In this respect, Brown has made two tentative, but potentially critical, moves toward addressing the health of an increasingly Hispanic interior. First, he has embraced the possibility of oil production using hydraulic fracking, to the alarm of Bay Area gentry liberals, as a means of sparking desperately needed high-wage blue-collar employment. He has found some allies among largely Latino and African American Democrats from working-class districts who recently blocked coastal gentry efforts to prohibit the practice.

The second relates to the all-important issue of water. Western lore has it that, in this historically dry part of the world, whiskey may be for drinking but water is for fighting. By embracing the notion of a peripheral canal up north to assure water supplies to the central and southern parts of the state, Brown has taken on the core concerns of the Bay Area green constituencies. (The fact that San Francisco also relies almost entirely on water from the Sierras is not often acknowledged.)

In the water wars as well, Brown will be able to build a coalition between pro-business Republicans and Democrats who represent the generally more working- and middle-class areas dependent on affordable and reliable water supplies. The imperative to back Brown's efforts will be even greater in the Central Valley and other agricultural areas.

Changing attitudes

Another possible sign of change can be seen in a new effort, supported by business and labor, to begin providing some tax breaks and incentives to firms interested in expanding in the state. In the recent past, budget constraints and a largely anti-business Legislature has limited such incentives, which are used routinely by competitor states such as Texas, Utah and Louisiana. Whether such efforts will make a big difference is questionable, but they are signs of a slowly changing attitude toward enterprise in California.

Yet, such efforts may not be enough, particularly if the current asset bubble propping up state government begins to falter. At the same time, Brown's efforts to circumvent the green lobby on water and energy run the risk of endless lawsuits. Being an economic "Nixon in China" may hold great opportunities for Brown, but at the risk of discord with some of the very interests who have been his political bulwarks. It happened in Brown's original second term – 1979-83 – and could emerge again this time around.

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

This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

Photo by Randy Bayne; California Governor Jerry Brown

What is a city for? Ever since cities first emerged thousands of years ago, they have been places where families could congregate and flourish. The family hearth formed the core of the ancient Greek and Roman city, observed the nineteenth-century French historian Fustel de Coulanges. Family was likewise the foundation of the great ancient cities of China and the Middle East. As for modern European cities, the historian Philippe Ariès argued that the contemporary “concept of the family” itself originated in the urbanizing northern Europe shown in Rembrandt’s paintings of bourgeois life. Another historian, Simon Schama, described the seventeenth-century Dutch city as “the Republic of Children.” European immigrants carried the institution of the family-oriented city across the Atlantic to America. In the American city until the 1950s, urbanist Sam Bass Warner observed, the “basic custom” was “commitment to familialism.”

But more recently, we have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children. In the 1960s, sociologist Herbert Gans identified a growing chasm between family-oriented suburbanites and people who favored city life—“the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.” Families abandoned cities for the suburbs, driven away by policies that failed to keep streets safe, allowed decent schools to decline, and made living spaces unaffordable. Even the partial rebirth of American cities since then hasn’t been enough to lure families back. The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating “creative class”—a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students—occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich, traps for the poor, and way stations for the ambitious young en route eventually to less congested places. The middle-class family has been pushed to the margins, breaking dramatically with urban history. The development raises at least two important questions: Are cities without children sustainable? And are they desirable?

Best-selling urban booster Richard Florida, a pied piper for today’s city developers and planners, barely mentions families in his books, which focus instead on younger, primarily single populations. Eric Klinenberg, a New York University professor and author of the widely touted Going Solo, celebrates the fact that “cities create the conditions that make living alone a more social experience.” But perhaps the most cogent formulation of the post-family city comes from the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark, who see the city, and particularly the urban core, as an “entertainment machine.” In their view, city residents “can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns.” Schools, churches, and neighborhood associations no longer form the city’s foundation. Instead, the city revolves around recreation, arts, culture, and restaurants—a system built for the newly liberated individual.

Demographic trends seem to bear out this vision.Over the past two decades, the percentage of families that have children has fallen in most of the country, but nowhere more dramatically than in our largest, densest urban areas. In cities with populations greater than 500,000, the population of children aged 14 and younger actually declined between 2000 and 2010, according to U.S. Census data, with New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit experiencing the largest numerical drop. Many urban school districts—such as Chicago, which has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had a decade ago—have seen enrollments plummet and are busily closing schools. The 14-and-younger population increased in only about one-third of all census-designated places, with the greatest rate of growth occurring in smaller urban areas with fewer than 250,000 residents.

Consider, too, the generation of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 in 2000. By 2010, the core cities of the country’s 51 most populous metropolitan areas had lost, on average, 15 percent of that cohort, many of whom surely married and started having children during that period. While it’s not possible to determine where they went, note that suburbs saw an average 14 percent gain in that population during the same period.

Of course, not all sections of our largest cities are equally bereft of children. Of Los Angeles County census tracts where less than 10 percent of the population was 14 and younger in 2010, a significant number were located downtown and along the coast. These are mostly high-density areas where housing is expensive. You’ll find a considerably higher proportion of children under 14 in low-income parts of South and East Los Angeles, and also in middle-class neighborhoods in the heart of the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys.

Opinion polls confirm the impulse behind the child exodus. For example, in a recent survey for the Manhattan Institute by Zogby Analytics, 58 percent of people with children under 17 said that they would consider leaving New York City for better opportunities elsewhere; only 38 percent of those without children agreed. Part of the reason is surely the city’s density and cost, which make family life difficult. In Manhattan, where the average rent approaches $4,000 a month, it’s no surprise that families are waning.

A more family-friendly city remains possible. The Brooklyn community of Flatbush—like Staten Island, Queens, and eastern portions of Brooklyn—was built in the first half of the twentieth century to appeal to families fleeing the congestion of New York’s core. Just as the suburbs do now, these new settlements revolted many urbanists, such as Lewis Mumford, who complained in 1921 that the “dissolute landscape” was “a no-man’s land which was neither town nor country.” But Flatbush’s tree-lined neighborhoods, such as Kensington and Ditmas Park, may be the city’s best hope for retaining middle-class families. These areas still have many single-family homes and low-rise apartments. And Cortelyou Road, a main drag in Ditmas Park, brims with family-friendly restaurants and shops, though it was fairly desolate just a decade ago. Young families are enthusiastic about the neighborhood. “It’s an amazing place,” says Kari Browne, co-owner of the Lark café on nearby Church Avenue. “But the key concern is: Can you afford to stay?”

For many young families living in New York’s outer boroughs, the availability of space, particularly backyards, is deeply important. “The cost of space is the biggest issue in Brooklyn,” says resident Michael Milch, whose wife attends dental school at NYU. “The issue becomes: Can you get some personal green space?” Obviously, people who settle here are willing to make do with less space than those who, say, move to a far-flung exurb in Putnam County. But all are seeking space in communities more amenable to family life than are the contemporary city cores. Heightened family demand may be helping send housing prices steadily upward in New York’s boroughs, as young couples move from Manhattan to less dense neighborhoods. Jason Walker, a 45-year-old father of two, left Washington, D.C. (which may have the highest percentage of childless households in the nation), for Ditmas Park to escape “a culture dominated by childless people leery of the existence of kids.” The Walkers live in a two-bedroom apartment but are looking for a house in the area.

Such opportunities exist elsewhere in America, too, in places where detached single-family homes—the preferred housing of 80 percent of American adults, according to a National Association of Realtors survey in 2011—are often just a short walk or ride from the urban core. With its broad streets and massive shopping centers, the California city of Irvine may lack the inner-ring charms of Flatbush. But families are drawn to Irvine’s amenities—especially its schools. “You really have to worry about the schools in New York,” says Walker, whose children are six and eight. “If you have to go to private schools, this makes it a struggle to stay here.” In Irvine, by contrast, “everything stems from education,” says resident Eveleen Liu. “The city draws people who are impassioned about their kids and their school. Everyone volunteers. It’s the glue that holds this place together.” Schools are particularly crucial in attracting Asians, now the country’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Safety is another big draw: Irvine consistently rates among the safest American cities with more than 100,000 residents.

Families are also deeply attracted to open space. The great Frederick Law Olmsted–designed New York parks, including Prospect Park in Flatbush, are enormous assets for families without backyards. Irvine may lack stunning urban architecture and glorious cathedrals, but it has a magnificent park system that gives residents ideal settings for recreation, exercise, and family gatherings. “It’s an environment that is clean and nice and open to everyone,” says Veronika Kim, a mother of three and an apartment tenant in Woodbury, an Irvine neighborhood. “You can walk there with the kids and let them play. Even if you rent, you don’t feel like an outsider.” The parks are good not only for kids but for adults—for example, the members of the Woodbury Woodies, who play softball every week against teams from other neighborhoods. “There’s a deep sense of community here,” says Woody regular Julian Forniss. “Softball is part of that.” On the site of a former Marine Corps base, Irvine and Orange County are developing a “Great Park” that will be twice the size of New York’s 840-acre Central Park.

Other family-friendly cities have embarked on ambitious park and open-space projects as well. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the nearly completed $30 million Neuse River Greenway Trail cuts through 28 miles of forest. Houston’s $480 million Bayou Greenways project will eventually add some 4,000 acres of green space across the city, from the downtown to the outer suburbs, including 300 miles of continuous hiking and bike trails. Houston’s rival, Dallas, is planning a vast 6,000-acre park.

What families need is more affordable urban neighborhoods with decent schools, safe streets, adequate parks—and more housing space. As New York University’s Shlomo Angel points out, virtually all major cities worldwide are growing outward more than inward—and becoming less dense in the process—because density drives families away from urban cores and toward less dense peripheries. The lesson is clear: if cities want families, they should promote a mixture of density options.

The solution is not to wage war on suburbia, as urbanists have been doing for years. Following the notions that Jane Jacobs advanced a half-century ago, contemporary urbanists argue that high density creates a stronger sense of community. (Jacobs once opined that raising children in the suburbs had to be difficult, somehow overlooking how families were flocking to those suburbs.) But that contention isn’t self-evident. The University of California’s Jan Breuckner and Ann Largey conducted 15,000 interviews across the country and found that for every 10 percent drop in population density, the likelihood of someone’s talking to his neighbor once a week went up 10 percent, regardless of race, income, education, marital status, or age.

In California, particularly, state and local officials push policies that favor the development of apartments over single-family houses and town houses. But by trying to cram people into higher-density space, planners inadvertently help push up prices for the existing stock of family-friendly homes. Such policies have already been practiced for decades in the United Kingdom, making even provincial cities increasingly unaffordable, as British social commentator James Heartfield notes. London itself is among the least affordable cities in the world. Even middle-class residents have been known to live in garages, converted bathrooms, and garden sheds.

A city that continues to be high-density and high-cost hasn’t necessarily signed its own death warrant. Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn, and much of San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and other amenity-rich cities—what Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella calls “kiddie deserts”—continue to flourish. But other cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, can’t attract the same interest from young hipsters and the rich and are consequently less capable of withstanding the effects of family flight to the suburbs. Even in the most affluent cities, the dearth of families reinforces public policies incompatible with children, argues the Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz. For example, fewer middle-class families means less political pressure to reform education or support for tougher law enforcement.

Ultimately, everything boils down to what purpose a city should serve. History has shown that rapid declines in childbearing—whether in ancient Rome, seventeenth-century Venice, or modern-day Tokyo—correlate with an erosion of cultural and economic vitality. The post-family city appeals only to a certain segment of the population, one that, however affluent, cannot ensure a prosperous future on its own. If cities want to nurture the next generation of urbanites and keep more of their younger adults, they will have to find a way to welcome back families, which have sustained cities for millennia and given the urban experience much of its humanity.

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

This piece originally appeared at The City Journal.

Crossing the street photo by Bigstock.

A ground-breaking study of intergenerational income mobility has the enemies of suburbia falling all over themselves to distort the findings. The study, The Spatial Impacts of Tax Expenditures: Evidence from Spatial Variation Across the U.S. (by economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University and Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley). Chetty, et al. examined income mobility by comparing the income quintiles (20 percent) of households with children (between 1996 and 2000) compared to their own household income quintiles as adults in 2010/1. The children were all born in 1980 or 1981. The authors summarize their research as follows:

“We measure intergenerational mobility at the local (census commuting zone) level based on the correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings. We show that the level of local tax expenditures (as a percentage of AGI) is positively correlated with intergenerational mobility.”

The Over-Reach

One of their findings was that children born in the Atlanta area had less upward income mobility than in most other metropolitan areas (Note 1). This provided all that was needed for a spin by others that distorted the findings into a completely different story than supported by the data.

New York Times reporter David Leonhart started it, sprucing up the conclusions to produce anti-sprawl tome. He accomplishes this by unearthing anecdotes about the difficulty low income workers face getting to work in Atlanta, and blaming that urban area’s lower density suburbanization. However, the same anecdotes could have been woven from every metropolitan area in the nation (Note 2), regardless of their extent of suburbanization. More importantly, the research is not about sprawl.

Nonetheless, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman then piled on, writing in The New York Times that Leonhart’s article had shown “how sprawl seems to hurt social mobility.” Krugman continued the next day with his “sprawl-caused-Detroit’s bankruptcy” thesis, which relied on an apples-to-oranges comparison (See: Detroit Bankruptcy: Missing the Point). Then on July 28, Krugman wrote: “…in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying” (Note 3).  Krugman calls Atlanta the “Sultan of Sprawl.”

Professor Steven Conn of Ohio State University took it a bit further in the Huffington Post, saying that: “One of their findings is that mobility is more restricted in places defined by suburban sprawl -- like Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio -- than in denser, more urban places like San Francisco and Boston. Far from being good for the nation, our love affair with the car, and the sprawl it has produced, keeps people from moving up the economic ladder.”

The Research

The authors of the report reached their conclusions using regression analyses and controlling for demographic factors, with the objective of identifying associations between upward income mobility and tax expenditures, not suburbanization. In fact, the very issue of transportation and density was simply not a factor.

The authors provided additional information with 25 separate, simple correlation analyses between 25 individual variables and economic mobility (demographic factors were not controlled). Co-Author Raj Chetty described this supplemental research in a PBS interview, citing income segregation, school quality, two-parent families and measures, civic engagement, religiosity and community cohesiveness. The authors urged caution in interpreting these correlations: “For instance, areas with high rates of segregation may also have other differences that could be the root cause driving the differences in children’s outcomes.”

Rational Responses

The overreach was challenged by Columbia University urban planning professor David King, who pointed out that the best ranked cities in the upward mobility analysis were all “sprawling,” including Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara and Bakersfield, which he referred to as a “poster child for sprawl.” He further noted that: “…snapshot correlations really don't mean anything and will provide evidence for whatever point of view is desired.”

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute similarly questions the unfounded interpretations of the study and notes that Atlanta has invested billions in new transit systems over recent decades, but with no appreciable impact on how the poorest citizens did there.

University of Southern California economics professor Peter Gordon suggested that: “In the fast-and-loose manner that some have digested the Chetty et al. study, we could conclude that sprawl causes upward mobility.”

Pinnacles of Prosperity

Interestingly, if, as Krugman alleges, Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, then similarly sprawling Hartford is the “Pinnacle of Prosperity.” Hartford has the highest per capita gross domestic product of any metropolitan area in the world. Yet, the urban area density of Hartford is 1,791 per square mile (692 per square kilometer), little above Atlanta (1,707 and 659), but two-thirds less than less affluent New York (5,319 and 2,054) and three-quarters less than less affluent Los Angeles (6,999 and 2,702), according to the 2010 census (Note 4).

The reality is that the US has the world’s most sprawling cities, yet the 50 most affluent metropolitan areas per capita in the world include 38 in the United States. This includes the top eight, such as lower density Bridgeport (urban density 1,660 per square mile/641 per square kilometer), Boston (2,232/862) and Durham (1,913/739), as well as metropolitan areas with higher urban densities, San Francisco (6,266/2,419) and San Jose (5,820/2,247). Neither high-density New York nor Los Angeles makes the top 10. America’s greater dispersal is associated with the shortest commute times in the high income world, the least intense traffic congestion and some of the most affordable housing, if metropolitan areas subject to urban containment (smart growth) policies are excluded.

Moreover, the Chetty, et al data gives little comfort to any whose conception of good and evil depends on sprawl. The research aggregates upward mobility data for all counties within each commuting zone. Among major metropolitan areas, that includes counties from the most dense (New York County at 71,000 per square mile or 27,000 per square kilometer) to Skamania County in the Portland area, with a density of 7 per square mile or 3 per square kilometer. County level analysis could make a difference.

This is illustrated by the New York metropolitan area, which Chetty, et al divide into multiple commuting zones. The Tom’s River commuting zone, made up of outer suburban Monmouth and Ocean counties in New Jersey showed better upward income mobility (10.4 percent) than the New York commuting zone (9.7 percent) which included the city of New York, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties. It might be interesting, for example, to compare the data, say for highly urban The Bronx to suburban Suffolk County, but the data does not permit that. This is not to criticize the Chetty, et al work; it is rather to suggest caution in inventing conclusions.

Smaller May be Better

Further, commuting zones with smaller populations have generally better upward income mobility.  Rather than an ode to bigness, the study found that commuting zones with less than 100,000 population average have higher than average upward income mobility. Virtually all of the smaller areas are low density and have little or no transit. Indeed, the best performers were in the Great Plains, in a swath from West Texas, through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and reaching a zenith in South Dakota and North Dakota, which is about as far from dense urbanization as it is possible to get. Further, a large majority of the highest scoring commuting zones with larger populations, like Bakersfield and Des Moines, are highly dispersed (Table below). This could be an area for further research.

Additional Caveats

There is no question but that this is ground-breaking research. The authors deserve considerable credit for the unprecedented scale of their analysis, which included over 6.2 million observations. However, the available data had an important limitation. The IRS data set they used does not go back far enough to make similarly robust findings about peak adult earnings. Age 30 or 31 may premature for predicting longer run income mobility. At that age, many who will eventually earn much more are not far into their careers. This would include people who have spent longer in higher education, such as those who have earned professional degrees. Finally, the median income of households in the 30 to 31 age category is barely 1/2 of their parents in the same, which, again, is not likely to be representative of their eventual income and quintile ranking over their adult lives.

The findings would be appropriately characterized as relating to young adult income upward mobility. Conclusions about lifetime upward mobility or peak earnings upward mobility will need to wait a decade or more.

The Second Half of the Story: Where People Moved

The authors use the childhood residence in the study, both for the child and the adult. This means, for example, that if a child lived in the New York metropolitan area and moved to Atlanta by 2010 or 2011, he or she would be counted in the New York data. Where people lived as children is the first half of the story. The second half is where they moved.

This is important, because so many people moved away from places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Jose during the period the study covers. Approximately 10 percent of the residents of New York and Los Angeles moved elsewhere between 2000 and 2010. Approximately 8 percent left San Francisco, 13 percent left San Jose and 5 percent left Boston. These are not small numbers and indicate that more people left than moved in. A net 1.9 million left New York, 1.3 million left Los Angeles, 340,000 left San Francisco, while 230,000 left San Jose and Boston.

Some of the metropolitan areas that have gained the most domestic migrants scored below average on upward income mobility. For example, migration from other parts of the nation added 24 percent to Raleigh’s population in the 2000s, 17 percent to Charlotte, 11 percent to Tampa-St. Petersburg, and 10 percent to Atlanta (Note 5).

None of this contradicts the Chetty, et al findings, which did not address the question of why some many people have moved. It can be assumed that people who are doing well economically will probably stay where they are. On the other hand, most who leave might be thought of as seeking better opportunities that might elude them in the richer, slower growing, far more expensive metropolitan areas of their childhood. The idea that people left New York, Boston or Los Angeles for a less rewarding life in Atlanta, Charlotte, or Raleigh violates everything we know about human nature.

Seeking Prosperity

Throughout history, and especially over the last 200 years, cities have drawn people from elsewhere by facilitating opportunity. It is no different today. People move to satisfy their aspirations. This was the point of our recent "Aspirational Cities" report in The Daily Beast.

Chetty et al conclude: “What is clear from this research is that there is substantial variation in the United States in the prospects for escaping poverty.” True. It is also clear from actual behavior that, for many, the best prospect for escaping poverty may be the better opportunities that attract them to an aspirational city.

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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Note 1: Chetty, et al use “commuting zone” as their unit of geographical analysis. These areas are generally similar to metropolitan areas, but there are some important differences. For example, the New York metropolitan area is divided into three parts (New York Newark and Tom’s River). The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is divided into two. Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Oxnard are combined as are Rochester and Buffalo. All of Connecticut, which has four metropolitan areas, is a single commuting zone. Areas outside metropolitan areas are also divided into commuting zones.

Note 2: The overwhelming share of low income workers drive to work (see How Lower Income Citizens Commute). Even, in metropolitan Boston, with its better than average transit system, few of the city’s low income residents can reach suburban job locations in less than one hour (the average commute time for all residents is less than one-half that). Despite popular impressions to the contrary, most jobs cannot be reached in a reasonable period of time by transit in any metropolitan area, nor is there any practical (affordable) way to change that.  

Note 3: To the contrary, the American Dream is alive and well in Atlanta. Atlanta’s housing affordability is unrivaled by nearly all major metropolitan areas. Housing is four times as expensive relative to incomes in San Francisco and San Jose as in Atlanta (measured by the “median multiple”) three times as high in New York and Los Angeles and twice as costly in Portland. This makes housing more affordable for low income households. Not surprisingly, Atlanta households with less than $20,000 in annual income (approximately the lowest quintile) have a higher home ownership rate than in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston and Portland. Further, the gap with respect to African-American home-ownership is substantial. Atlanta’s African-American home ownership rate is approximately 40 percent above those of San Jose and Los Angeles, approximately 50 percent higher than Boston, San Francisco and Portland and nearly 60 percent higher than New York (American Community Survey, 2011).

Note 4: These are US Bureau of the Census urban area densityfigures, based upon continuous urban areas (“built-up” areas). Urban area densities are calculated using census blocks, and contain no rural land. As a result, their population densities are not distorted by jurisdictional borders. This is to be distinguished from any metropolitan area based measure. All metropolitan areas include urban areas as well as rural areas that are economically connected to the urban area. The extent of rural areas within a metropolitan area is driven by the geographical size of counties and thus varies widely. The largest major metropolitan area county, San Bernardino (California) is nearly 1,000 times as large as the smallest, New York County. If metropolitan area criteria were applied at the census block level, as is the case in urban areas, large swaths rural swaths would be removed from metropolitan areas, changing the density distribution. However, even if metropolitan areas were more appropriately defined, any measure of metropolitan density would remain a mixed urban-rural metric, not a measure of urban density. Here are the 2010 criteria for defining urban areas and metropolitan areas.

Note 5: There is less black-white racial segregation in Atlanta than in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and most other major metropolitan areas, according to 2010 data compiled by William Frey of the Brookings Institution.

It might stem from the dot-com crash, the increased popularity of certifications and onsite employer training, or various other reasons. Regardless, the key finding from EMSI and CareerBuilder’s analysis of higher education degree output over the last decade is still eye-opening: Computer and IT degrees completed in the U.S. have declined 11% since 2003.

The decrease in computer-related degrees comes at a time when the number of related computer and IT jobs grew 13% nationally, and while the number of degrees in other major fields — health, business, liberal arts and humanities, and engineering — has soared.

Our analysis looked at the output of associate’s degrees and above nationally and for the nation’s largest 150 metro areas. Education completion data comes from the National Center of Education Statistics, via EMSI’s Analyst tool, and we matched the degrees to our jobs data using a customized program-to-occupation mapping. You can find a summary of the analysis in CareerBuilder’s release, and we’ve included more findings by field and metro below.

Note: The NCES data comes from its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and accounts for all colleges and universities that participate or are applicants for any federal financial assistance program authorized by the Higher Education Act (HEA), which includes most of the well-known federal loans (e.g., Pell Grants, Stafford Loans). All public colleges and universities and a number of private postsecondary schools accept federal assistance loans and therefore are included in this analysis. We excluded Phoenix, Davenport, Iowa, and other cities whose higher ed output is dominated by large for-profit universities. 

Computer and IT

Computer-related degree output at U.S. universities and colleges flatlined from 2006 to 2009 and have steadily increased in the years since. But the fact remains: Total degree production (associate’s and above) was lower by almost 14,000 degrees in 2012 than in 2003. The biggest overall decreases came in three programs — computer science, computer and information sciences, general, and computer and information sciences and support services, other.

This might reflect the surge in certifications and employer training programs, or the fact that some programmers can get jobs (or work independently) without a degree or formal training because their skills are in-demand.

Of the 15 metros with the most computer and IT degrees in 2012, 10 saw decreases from their 2003 totals. That includes New York City (a 52% drop), San Francisco (55%), Atlanta (33%), Miami (32%), and Los Angeles (31%).

Here’s a look at the performance of 20 largest metros with the most computer and IT degrees in 2012:

Health Professions

Health degrees have increased by 112% since 2003 — an addition of 288,194 total degrees. Related jobs in the U.S. have increased 18.6% over that time.

Many metros have seen their output of health degrees at least double. This includes Los Angeles (109% growth), Miami (159%), and Minneapolis (193%).

Here’s a look at the 20 largest metros with the most health degrees in 2012:

The number of registered nursing degrees has gone from 88,482 in 2003 to 193,528 in 2012, a 119% increase. Registered nursing is the third-largest degree-awarding program in the U.S., behind business administration and liberal arts and humanities.

Engineering (and Engineering Technologies)

The are 37,138 more engineering and engineering technology degrees in 2012 than 2003, a 37% increase. Related jobs in the U.S. have increased 5.7% during that time. The biggest degree increases have come in biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering.

Tulsa has seen the largest percentage increase (222%) of engineering/engineering technology degrees among the 150 largest metros. What explains the huge jump? It mostly stems from a massive increase in output of engineering technology degrees in the area. For example, the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa produced 454 engineering tech degrees in 2003, up from 57 in 2003.

In San Jose, Ann Arbor, Raleigh, and Tulsa, at least 15% all associate’s-and-above degrees awarded are in engineering or engineering technologt. Raleigh has the highest concentration at 17%. The national share is 5%, so Raleigh’s concentration index is 3.36 — meaning it’s more than three times as concentrated as the national average (1.00).

The following table gives the metros with the highest concentration of engineering and engineering technology degrees:

Education

Education degrees have increased 18% since 2003. That’s an increase of 52,391 from 2003 to 2012. Related jobs in the U.S. have increased 6.3% from 2003-2012.

Education degrees make up 8.8% of all associate’s-and-above completions nationally, down from 10.6% in 2003. The highest concentration belongs to Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas, with 4.4 times the national average of education degrees.

Another Texas metro, El Paso, has seen a 346% increase in education degrees since 2003, while Denver (170%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (125%), Austin (114%), and Dallas (106%) have also seen major gains.

Business, Management and Marketing

There are 176,972 more degrees nationally in 2012 than 2003, a 33% increase. Related jobs in the U.S. have increased 1.2 percent from 2003-2012, an addition of 218,173 jobs.

Nearly 1 in 5 degrees awarded in the U.S. (18.1%) are in business, management and marketing, the highest share of any major field of study. For many large metros, business degrees make up a sizable percentage of total higher education output (25% of all degrees in Chicago and Milwaukee, 24% in Washington, D.C., and 23% in Atlanta).

Liberal Arts and Humanities

The U.S. produced 124,681 more degrees in 2012 than 2003, a 47% increase. This is the third fastest-growing degree category in the U.S. by total degrees added, behind health professions and business, management, and marketing.

Liberal arts and humanities degrees make up 10% of all associate’s-and-above completions, roughly the same share as in 2003. Of the 10 metros with the highest concentrations of these degrees, seven are in Florida — led by Ocala (66% of all degrees), Port St. Lucie (64%), and North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota (50%).

Despite growth in many metros, notable decreases in liberal arts and humanities degrees have occurred in Tulsa (51% decline), San Jose (38%), San Diego (30%), San Francisco (23%), and Ann Arbor (20%).

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.

Illustration by Mark Beauchamp.

Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering.

More recently density advocates span a much-discussed study of geographic variations in upward mobility as suggesting that living in a spread-out city hurts children’s prospects in life. “Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger,” quipped economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Yet the study actually found the highest rates of upward mobility not in dense cities, but in relatively spread-out places like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; and Pecos, Texas — all showed bottom to top mobility rates more than double New York City. And we shouldn’t forget the success story of Bakersfield, Calif., a city Columbia University urban planning professor David King wryly labeled “a poster child for sprawl.” Rather than an ode to bigness, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the study found that commuting zones (similar to metropolitan areas) with populations under 100,000 — smaller cities that tend to be sprawled by nature  —  have the highest average upward income mobility.

“Sprawl” did not kill Detroit, as Krugman suggests in his previously mentioned column, the city did that largely to itself. Another like-minded critic, historian Steven Conn,  blames the auto industry for the city’s problems, perhaps not recognizing Detroit would be little more than a more southerly Duluth without it.

There are at least three major problems with the thesis that density is an unabashed good. First, and foremost, Census and survey data reveal that most people do not want to live cheek to jowl if they can avoid it. Second, most of the attractive highest-density areas also have impossibly high home prices relative to incomes and low levels of homeownership. And third, and perhaps most important, dense places tend to be regarded as poor places for raising families. In simple terms, a dense future is likely to be a largely childless one.

Let’s start with something few density advocates consider: what people want and what they would choose if they could. Roughly four in five buyers, according to a 2011 study commissioned by the National Association of Realtors, prefer a single-family home. This preference can be seen in the vastly greater construction of single-family houses in the past decade: Between 2000 and 2011, detached houses accounted for 83% of the net additions to the occupied U.S. housing stock.  The percentage of single-family homes in the total housing mix last decade was more than one-fifth higher than in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the pattern is not likely to end, barring a longer-term recession or government edict. As the number of households once again begins to rise and birthrates tick up, single-family homes are once again leading housing growth.

Buyers of single-family homes are not necessarily embracing exurban lifestyles so much as reacting to basic economic factors. In many cases the nicest single-family districts closest to work and amenities are prohibitively expensive — think Beverly Hills or Studio City in the L.A. area, Bethesda near Washington, or Evanston outside Chicago. People move further out in order to afford something better than an apartment.

The last decennial Census shows us definitively that people tend to head toward the periphery. Barely 6% of Americans live in densities of over 10,000 per square mile, and the fastest-growing central cities between 2000 and 2010 — such as Raleigh, Charlotte and Austin — have average densities less than a third as intense as places like New York, Chicago, Or Los Angeles.

Overall, domestic migrants tend to be moving away from these denser metropolitan areas. Between 2000 and 2010, a net 1.9 million people left New York, 1.3 million left Los Angeles, 340,000 left San Francisco, while 230,000 left San Jose and Boston. In contrast, some of the largest in-migration has taken place over the past decade, as well as since 2010, in relatively sprawling cities, including Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Nashville.

Our perceptions of density are often distorted by media coverage, which tends to revolve around city centers. To be sure many downtown areas have experienced impressive growth, but this accounted for less than 1% of the 27 million expansion in the U.S. population between 2000 and 2010. In reality virtually all net population growth in the nation took place in counties with under 2,500 persons per square mile. The total population increase in counties with under 500 people per square mile was more than 30 times that of the growth in counties with densities of 10,000 and greater.

Some inner suburbs may be struggling adjacent to some hard-pressed cities, as is often highlighted by density advocates, but they are thriving in areas where prices are reasonable and the economy is strong. In Houston, arguably America’s most economically vibrant big metro area, over 80% of homes sales in 2012 were outside Beltway 8, the city’s second ring. The city’s inner ring, inside the 610 loop, has experienced an impressive revival, but still it only accounted for 6% of home sales last year.

There is clearly a growing chasm between affordable, family-friendly cities and those that, frankly, are not. Until the 1970s, in virtually all American metropolitan areas, a median-priced home cost roughly three years’ median income. This equilibrium was smashed by the imposition in some states of “smart” land-use policies that seek to limit or even prohibit suburban building, huge impact fees, as well as in some markets,  massive investment from speculators.

As a result, many of the metro areas beloved by density advocates, such as New York and San Francisco, now have median home price multiples well over 6 or 7; if current trends continue, they could, as occurred during the last housing boom, reach upward of 10. Not surprisingly, these areas all have low rates of homeownership compared to the national average.  For example, in New York and Los Angeles, the homeownership rate is half or less than the national figure of 65%. This is particularly true among working class and minority households. Atlanta’s African-American home ownership rate is approximately 40% above those of San Jose and Los Angeles, approximately 50% higher than Boston, San Francisco and Portland, and nearly 60%  higher than New York.

All these factors are particularly relevant to one group: families. Much of contemporary urban theory rests on the idea of weakening family connections: fewer marriages and lower birthrates will decrease the appetite for lower-density housing. Families do not make up the prime market for dense housing; married couples with children constitute barely 10% of apartment residents, less than half the percentage for the population overall.

Families also generally settle in less dense parts of cities, suburban or exurban areas;  the places with the lowest percentage of households with children include favored abodes of the  density lobby such as New York (particularly Manhattan), as well as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. In contrast the metropolitan areas with the strongest growth in their child populations — Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City — have much lower densities and far smaller urban cores.

This flight from density among families is not merely an American phenomena. There are far higher percentages of families with children in the suburbs of Tokyo, London and Toronto than within the inner rings. The ultra dense cities of East Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul — have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet. Tokyo and Seoul now have fertility rates around 1 while Shanghai’s has fallen to 0.7, among the lowest of any city ever recorded, well below China’s “one child” mandate and barely one-third the number required simply to replace the current population.

Some have suggested that the Obama administration is conspiring to turn American cities into high-rise forests. But the coalition favoring forced densification — greens, planners, architects, developers, land speculators — predates Obama. They have gained strength by selling densification, however dubiously, as what planner and architect Peter Calthorpe calls “a climate change antibiotic.” Not surprisingly, there’s less self interest in promoting more effective greenhouse gas reduction policies such as boosting  work at home and lower-emissions cars.

The density agenda need to be knocked off its perch as the summum bonum of planning policy. These policies may not hurt older Americans, like me, who bought their homes decades ago, but will weigh heavily on the already hard-pressed young adult population. Unless the drive for densification is relaxed in favor of a responsible but largely market-based approach open to diverse housing options, our children can look forward to a regime of ever-higher house prices, declining opportunities for ownership and, like young people in East Asia, an environment hostile to family formation. All for a policy that, for all its progressive allure, will make more Americans more unhappy, less familial, and likely poorer.

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

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

KAMAISHI, Japan - Two years after the disastrous 2011 earthquake and tsunami, most of the debris from the deluge has been cleared away in this small city on the northern edge of Japan’s tsunami coast. The cars and vans once piled on top of each other like some kind of apocalyptic traffic jam have been sorted out or sold for scrap. My guide, a local teacher who lost three of her aunts in the deluge, drives us up to a lookout. Spread out below us is the coastal village of Unosumai, or, more accurately, what once was the village of Unosumai. The view reminds me of pictures taken of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had flattened almost everything. The only exception there was one surviving building, the former Industrial Promotion Hall in Hiroshima’s Peace Garden.

In Unosumai, the village hall is still standing, broken windows and all, with the huge clock over the main entrance still fixed forever on 3:25 p.m., the time on March 11 of 2011 when an enormous wall of water washed into the building, drowning many of the village workers. A small shrine with flowers is set in front. While we stopped there, several people arrive to pray and give obeisance.

Kamaishi is a hilly city with little flat land. Rising directly behind the central business district are three steep hills, covered with a network of wooden ladders, stairways and pathways that have long provided a natural shelter against tsunami, a kind of local version of the storm shelters in Oklahoma. Tsunami is an historic threat here in the same way that deadly tornadoes are there.

These routes upward were critical in saving many lives. The town is extremely proud that not one of the approximately 3,000 elementary through high school children was killed in the surge, even though their schools, located along the shore, were inundated. It is often called the “Kamaishi Miracle.” By all accounts, the teachers and students performed admirably in the thirty minutes or so between the earthquake and the tsunami. Teachers had the presence of mind to tell their charges to literally 'take to the hills'. Don’t wait. Older students carried the younger elementary school children on their backs as they climbed to safety.

Kamaishi was famous for its network of seawalls, built at considerable expense before the tsunami. The seawalls utterly failed to hold back the surging tide. Plans to rebuild or strengthen them, using money from the national reconstruction fund, have become a source of controversy. Why spend so much money on a system that demonstrably failed its ultimate test?

Some argue that the sea walls gave the residents a false sense of security. “I do believe that, unconsciously, the breakwater’s presence did give people a false sense of security,” says Mayor Takenori Noda. Loud speakers all over the city had warned people to flee, with enough time to get to higher ground. Most of the town is within about two hundred yards of the nearest evacuation stairway.

Today, there isn’t much evidence of new construction going on. The national government has appropriated billions of yen to facilitate rebuilding in the tsunami-devastated zone, but not much is being spent in this town. When the slate is wiped totally clean, it is not surprising that it takes time to decide what to write as a replacement.

Kamaishi and other Japanese towns along the northeastern tsunami coast need something more basic than millions of yen in reconstruction aid sunk into greater seawalls, namely, a rationale for their existence. For more than a hundred years, the city's reason for being was grounded on its famous Steel Works.

The location of Japan’s first steel mill blast furnace, Kamaishi started to rise even before the Meiji Restoration began Japan’s transformation into a modern, industrial society. Built in 1857, the furnace was initially established to provide the steel needed for modern artillery to defend the country.

The city's heyday was probably in the 1950 and 1960s, when some 12,000 people were employed by the mill, and the town had a population or more than 90,000. Nippon Steel closed the works in 1988, putting thousands out of work. The town’s population has steadily declined, and is now around 40,000.

Kamaishi Steel Works never found a niche to justify itself, unlike Japan Steel Works a little further north on the island of Hokkaido. It, too, supplied the steel needed to build the large guns for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but it then evolved into a lucrative niche business to forge reactor pressure vessels for nuclear power plants, which it developed into virtually a global monopoly.

Kamaishi struggled to find a substitute for defense production. It recruited various metal-working enterprises. Some stayed, but others left because the location was too far from regular supply networks. The small harbor was thought to have container-ship potential, but it never developed into the kind of terminal that some of the city fathers had envisioned. The day I visited it was quiet and empty of ships.

In 2010, Foreign Policy Magazine used Kamaishi as an exemplar of what it thought ailed Japan’s economy, especially the propensity to spend billions of yen on unneeded and ultimately useless public works projects, including Kamaishi’s famous city breakwater.

Has Kamaishi's story changed since then? One element of the town’s new reconstruction plan involves a request for funds to build a rugby stadium. With the once formidable Kamaishi Nippon Steel Rugby team long gone, one has to wonder who would play there.

Todd Crowell is a Tokyo-based journalist.

Flickr photo by Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock, 1st Combat Camera Squadron 1. Posted by DVIDSHUB: "Petzel, a search and rescue dog with the Fairfax County, Va., Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue team waits for his master before heading out to search structures and debris on March 17, 2011, in Unosumai, Japan. A 9.0 earthquake hit Japan on March 11 that caused a tsunami that destroyed anything in its path." Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/sojri7.

For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush's “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.

Once, we saw the potential unsurpassed human liberation available through information technology. However, Silicon Valley, as shown in the NSA scandal, increasingly has become intimately tied to the surveillance state. Technology has enabled powerful firms – including Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google – to channel everyone's email and cellphone calls to the national security apparatus.

“It's as bad as reading your diary,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, recently told the Associated Press, adding, “It's far worse than reading your diary. Because you don't write everything in your diary.”

Nor does the snooping relate only to national security. If my emails to friends and family arguably constitute a potential threat to national security, that's one thing. The massive monitoring and largely unapproved tapping into our data for profit is quite another.

Google, which, in the first half of 2012, took in more advertising dollars than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined, has amassed an impressive list of privacy violations, notes the Huffington Post. Even the innocent-seeming Gmail service is used to collect and sell information; Google's crew in Palo Alto may know more about the casual user than most of us suspect.

Even Apple, arguably the most iconic Silicon Valley firm, has been hauled in front of courts for alleged privacy violations. For its part, Consumer Reports recently detailed Facebook's pervasive privacy breaches, including misuse of information as detailed as health conditions, details an insurer could use against you, when someone is going out of town (convenient for burglars), as well as information pertaining to everything from sexual orientation to religious and ethnic affiliation.

Despite ritual denials about such invasions of privacy, the new communications moguls have little reason to stop, and lots of financial reasons to continue. As for concerns over privacy, the new oligarchs take something of a blasé attitude. Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, in 2009 responded to concerns over privacy with this gem: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”

First came the engineers

These autocratic sentiments have evolved over time. Initially, Silicon Valley was dominated by engineers whose primary obsession was using information technology to make the physical world work better. Many of them from Midwestern schools, that early workforce came to the Santa Clara Valley for the same suburban, middle-class lifestyle that earlier brought millions to the aerospace hubs of the Los Angeles Basin and Long Island. They may have been nerds, but not a class apart.

The early Valley deserved our admiration for taking new technologies – semiconductors, in particular – and applying them to practical concerns ranging from machine tools to spacecraft and defense. The Internet itself was not invented by swashbuckling entrepreneurs but evolved from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA. Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg did not pay to build the Internet; the taxpayers did.

The new Valley elite are simply the latest to refine and exploit information technology for their own, often enormous, personal benefit. Nothing wrong with making money, to be sure, but this ambition is no different than those of Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson. Each innovated in a key industry, established oligarchic control and became fantastically rich.

But even by the standards of bygone moguls, the new oligarchs' wealth has not been widely shared. Big Oil and the Big Three automakers created hundreds of thousands of jobs for a wide range of workers. In contrast, the tech oligarchs' contributions to American employment are relatively negligible.

Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000. Even in the current boom, new job creation has been relatively insipid. From 1959-71, Silicon Valley produced 100,000 tech jobs; by 1990 it generated an additional 150,000 and, in the 1990s boom, another 170,000. After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.

The geographical area enriched by the oligarchs has also narrowed. In previous Silicon Valley booms, outlying areas such as Sacramento and Oakland also benefited; not so much this time. Nor is the population expanding much, as one would expect from an economic boom. Although the massive outflow of domestic migrants over past decade – more than 20,000 annually – has slowed, still, more domestic migrants are leaving than coming. Part of this has to do with having the nation's highest housing prices relative to income, more than twice that of competitor regions like Austin, Texas, Raleigh, N.C., or Salt Lake City.

Rather than a place of aspiration, the Valley increasingly resembles an extremely expensive gated community, with prices set impossibly high particularly for all but the most affluent new entrants.

What Needs to Be Done?

Americans need to wake up to the reality of this new, and increasingly ambitious, ruling class. “The sovereigns of cyberspace,” like the all-powerful Skynet computer system in the “Terminator” series, are only recently focused on politics, and have concentrated largely in the Democratic Party (where the price of admission tends to be cheaper than in the old-money-dominated GOP). And it's not just money they are throwing at the game, but also the skillful political use of technology, as amply demonstrated in President Obama's re-election.

Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world's dominant social media site. In contrast, the world's top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world's oil production.

Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country's third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg's 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.

This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed. Taking a page from the Progressive Era, author and historian Michael Lind suggests that companies like Google, given their enormous market share, should be regulated like utilities. Others, within the European Union and elsewhere, look to apply antitrust legislation, once used to break up Standard Oil. One innovative approach, as Jaron Lanier suggests in his new book, “Who Owns the Future,” includes forcing companies to pay for the privilege of using your data, thereby “spreading the wealth” from a few hegemons to the wider populace.

Threat is bipartisan

These changes will require both Left and Right to change their attitudes. Progressives, for example, have tended to embrace the Valley's population for its generally “liberal” views on social issues and the environment. They have largely ignored the industry's poor record on hiring non-Asian minorities and the lavish, energy-consuming lifestyles of the oligarchs themselves.

Some on the left are seeing the light. Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper has been in the forefront unveiling the NSA scandals and the complicity in them of the tech giants. Credit belongs to the EU, which, particularly in contrast with our government, has been asking the toughest questions about loss of privacy and the dangers of oligopolistic control. With Barack Obama secure in the White House, some American leftists have also begun to recognize the extreme inequality that has accompanied, and likely been worsened by, the ascendency of the digital aristocracy.

Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.

What needs to be accepted, by both conservatives and liberals, is that privacy matters, as does the threat posed to democracy by oligarchy. Until people focus on the potential for evil before us and discuss ways to curb abuses, this small and largely irresponsible class, likely in league with government, will usher in not the promised cornucopia but a gilded-age reign of Big Brother.

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

This piece originally appeared in The Orange County Register.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

When the 2010 Census results were released, a number of big cities had populations that were very off from what would have been expected based on the Census Bureau’s previous annual estimates of the population – sometimes grossly so.  Some of these were related to cities that had challenged the estimates and had adjustments made in their favor, such as Cincinnati and St. Louis. Given that the Census Bureau seems to have approved every challenge, bogus challenges were all but encouraged.  Still, there were significant variances in cities that didn’t challenge the Census, such as Chicago and Phoenix. 

Had the estimates been correct, Atlanta would have gained over 125,000 people in the last decade – a stunning gain of 30%. But Atlanta’s actual population was nearly flat, growing less than 1%. Other cities experiencing huge swings due to misestimates were places like New York City (projected to gain 417,000, actually gained less than half that at 167,000) and Chicago (projected to lose 29,000 people, actually lost over 200,000).  I myself ended up with some egg on my face for drawing unwarranted inferences from what appear to be badly botched estimates.

Urban advocates were quick to cry foul, alleging undercounts (though taking the strong growth counted for downtowns as gospel).  Given the much more rigorous Census standards for challenges to decennial counts, it was virtually impossible for these to succeed, but some have continued to maintain systematic undercounting in the decennial census as a matter of course.

When the first round of new post-2010 Census estimates were released for cities, the media started crowing again about a supposed resurgence in city populations. However, this wasn’t real growth. Instead, the Census Bureau had created a new, temporary methodology to get the estimates out the door. Rather than producing real numbers, they simply took the estimates for growth at the county level and assumed every municipality in the country grew at the exact same percentage as the county as a whole.  The media missed the story because they relied on the headline data, and were attracted to the “back to the city” meme. They would have had to dig into the methodology document – something ordinarily no one would need to do for this sort of routine release – to figure this out.  This release was embarrassment number two for the municipal estimates program.

You would think that after these two fiascos, the Census Bureau would be highly attuned to getting the municipal estimates right. Indeed, for the recently released 2012 vintage municipal estimates, they went back to using a real estimating methodology instead of the simple allocation approach from 2011. However, as with the 2000s, these are showing strong municipal population growth in places where that would represent a major discontinuity with the actual decennial Census results from the 2000-2010, and from economic conditions.

How is it that cities, after a disappointing 2000s where some places actually underperformed versus the 1990s, in an economy that has been recessionary to sluggish the entire post-2010 person and in which the housing market that triggered the crash has also yet to recover, that these growth rates are possible? It’s certainly eyebrow-raising at a minimum.

Consider Chicago. After losing over 200,000 people in the 2000s, Chicago supposedly gained 17,000 people between 2010 and 2012. With a highly publicized murder problem in many of the neighborhoods that saw the severest depopulation in the previous decade, where housing was whacked leaving any number of uncompleted building shells, and with a budget crunch that is squeezing service provision, this would certainly represent a remarkable accomplishment.

Or look at Indianapolis. In its urban core area, Center Township (township data is reported in a similar manner to municipal estimates in some areas), the population declined by almost 25,000 people during the 2000s, a steep 14.5% loss that was worse than Buffalo and St. Louis and nearly as bad as Cleveland.  Center Township has lost population every decade since 1950. Yet the Census Bureau has estimated that it gained 2,300 people since the census. Though a lower total percentage due to the base, this is more physical people than was estimated to be added by all but three of Indy’s suburbs, many of which posted huge gains in the 2000s (such as Westfield, which added 20,800 during the 2000s but was only estimated to have added 1,800 since the census despite building permit issuances at all time record highs).  This sort of radical turnaround in fortunes would certainly be nearly miraculous if true.

Amazingly, the Census Bureau actually even went back to the estimating status quo ante in Atlanta by claiming very high population growth, despite missing by a country mile last time around. Atlanta is projected to have gained almost 24,000 people since the census, even though it was nearly flat the previous decade. This is a rate very close to what the Census Bureau estimated it had in the last decade.

You can go right down the line and find similar effects at work in other places. It raises serious questions about these estimates. Places like San Francisco, DC, and even Pittsburgh have had economic growth that might seem to underpin more robust core population growth, it’s hard to credit many of these other places with such turnaround.  Some of the analysts focused on an inability of people to move outwards because of the economy, but it’s hard to believe this alone grew the population of Atlanta by 24,000 people.

There are red flags all over these numbers. Perhaps the urban advocates claiming dramatic undercounting in the census were right – or maybe not. Regardless, something very odd appears to have been going on with the Census Bureau’s municipal estimates and counts over the last decade or so. Until there’s reason to believe they’ve finally started getting it right, I would treat any number that comes out before the decennial census with extreme skepticism. After having fooled us not once, but twice before, smart money should apply a steep discount to any annual municipal estimates coming out of the Census Bureau.

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

Photo: Travelin' Librarian

There are two deep-blue regions that are critical to the Obama administration: the Northeast and the coastal region between San Jose and Seattle that truly deserves the moniker of the Left Coast. They dominate the Democratic donor list, and provide the administration with most of its appointees and much of its ideological moorings.

Yet this common ground conceals a shift in the balance of power between these two blue strongholds. The power of the high-tech heavy Left Coast is waxing while the old Boston-to-Washington corridor is waning. Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post simply confirms this movement of the political tectonic plates.

The Rise of the Tech Oligarchs

Wall Street was the star of the 1980s, but today, it’s the tech industry that offers “the same heady mix of mystery, power and money,” as Om Malik puts it. The Left Coast’s ascendency is based largely on its increased domination of this critical sector. Thirty years ago, East Coast giants such as ITT and Eastman Kodak ranked among the largest tech firms, with little representation from the Left Coast. Today the region accounts for seven of the top 10 tech companies.

The Left Coast is also home to four of the world’s top seven software companies. The software for most of the world’s computers comes from either Microsoft in Seattle or Google and Apple in the Bay Area. Search is almost completely dominated by Google, social media by Facebook. Bezos’ Amazon overwhelms its e-tailing competitors.

This has generated an enormous shift in the geography of American wealth. In 1990 most of the richest Americans lived in the Northeast or were part of the old energy/agriculture economy in the middle of the country. Today five of the nation’s 15 wealthiest people reside in the Bay Area or the Puget Sound; only two, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, come from Wall Street. More importantly, the Left Coast oligarchs tend to be much younger than their East Coast counterparts; six of the world’s 29 billionaires under 40 hail from the Left Coast, three from Wall Street.

Seizing the Means of Communications

The best historical analogy can be found at the turn of the 20th century as entrepreneurs from America’s industrial expansion — John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman and JP Morgan — moved to influence government and politics, first by buying political influence and later through foundations. Many of the great newspaper tycoons of the time, for example William Randolph Hearst, heir of a great Colorado mining fortune, also used their money in influence mass opinion, a pattern repeated, ironically in 1933, when Wall Street financier Eugene Meyer bought the moribund Washington Post, greatly enhancing his family’s influence for decades.

But these newbies come with an extra media advantage: they dominate virtually all the emerging transmission systems for information. Google, Apple and Facebook all are emerging as major disseminators of entertainment as well. This shift promises to inflict collateral damage on both Hollywood and the Manhattan-centered advertising industry. The recent shotgun merger of Omnicom and Plublicis reflects the weakened position of traditional ad firms at a time that Google alone has more ad revenues than the entire print publishing industry combined.

Reshaping the Political Landscape

Once largely divorced or distant from politics, the Left Coasters such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have all greatly expanded their lobbying operations. Many tech firms, notably Facebook and Apple, pay minimal taxes, meaning they have a strong stake in defending their current privileges . They also have reason to work to make it difficult to protect the privacy of netizens since so much of their profit depends on selling personal information to corporations.

This fluency with data has also made the Left Coasters critical contributors of campaign expertise for President Obama and other Democrats. Now they are starting to fund the next generation of pliable favorites, most recently Newark Mayor and senatorial aspirant Corey Booker.

The rise of the Left Coast oligarchs will likely accelerate the extinction of the traditional working-class Democratic Party. Bezos and other Left Coasters tend to be progressive on social issues, but vehemently opposed to unions, here and abroad.

Bezos and other online retailers will need to defend themselves against attacks on the job-destroying aspects of their shops; since 2003 there has been a loss of roughly 800,000 retail jobs while the electronic side of the industry has generated less than 180,000.

Mark Zuckerberg and others leading the charge for immigration reform also have an interest in assuring a steady supply of lower cost, lower hassle “techno-coolies” for their software shops.

This may not endear the oligarchs to a large part of American middle class who would prefer those jobs go to themselves, or their children. Left Coasters also embrace green policies that entail high energy prices, arguably more acceptable in the mild, if a bit, wet climate of the Left Coast but economically disadvantageous to far less temperate middle America.

Conservatives, for their part, hope that the Left Coast moguls prove more libertarian than statist. But they may miss the fundamental law of oligarchy: when a company dominates a sector, they usually seek to use the government to consolidate their position. Google and other tech firms, for example, have been more than happy to feed off the crony capitalist trough — for example in backing renewable energy schemes— when opportunity strikes.

What’s the Future?

Demography is working against the East Coast, now the oldest part of the country, with the smallest population under 20. The region’s aging population will likely blunt innovation there. In contrast, despite high housing prices, the Left Coast’s population grew 10%  in the last decade compared to 6% for the Northeast; Census projections to 2023 suggest the Northeast will continue to lag as well over the next ten years.

As urban analyst Aaron Renn has noted, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco also boast a very politically incorrect advantage. Despite their worship at the altar of diversity, these cities have smaller populations of African-Americans and Latinos, who tend to be more economically disadvantaged. The Northeast is three times as black as the Left Coast. In contrast, the Left Coast’s largely upwardly mobile Asians account for 15% of the local population, three times their proportion on the East Coast.

The Left Coast also enjoys by far the highest concentration of people engaged in STEM jobs — roughly 50% higher the national average. Since 2005 STEM employment has expanded by double-digit percentages in Seattle, San Jose and San Francisco, compared to much more modest gains in New York and Boston. In some fields like e-tailing, the Left Coast, not surprisingly, dominates, with Seattle and San Jose leading the way.

Given the current economic trajectory, more traditional East Coast dominated-industries — from brick and mortar retail to publishing and media — can be expected to crumble before the onslaught of the Bay Area and Seattle. The old cities of the East may hold their social prestige and legacy well into the current century, but the blue balance of power seems destined to keep tilting toward the Left Coast.

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

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

Facebook photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Commission (European Union) now designates metropolitan areas (Note) for the European Union (EU) and the European Three Trade Association (EFTA). The EU has 28 members, having just added Croatia, while the EFTA has 4 members. According to the latest data, there are 99 major metropolitan areas in Europe (those more than 1,000,000 residents).  Overall, Eurostat designates 305 metropolitan areas with more than 200,000 population.

Europe’s Largest Metropolitan Areas

London and Paris are by far the largest metropolitan areas in Europe. London's population is approximately 13.6 million, of which approximately 24 percent live in the historical core of Inner London (the pre-1965 London County Council area). Paris has approximately 11.9 million residents, with 19 percent living in the historical core of the ville de Paris.

The third and fourth largest major metropolitan areas are both in Spain. Madrid has a population of 6.4 million, more than half of which is in the historic core municipality. Barcelona ranks fourth largest, with a population of 5.4 million, with 30 percent living in the historical urban core municipality. In recent decades there has been substantial suburbanization in the valleys to the north of the city of Barcelona. Moreover, the Eurostat Milan metropolitan area definition could be too tight. The urbanization stretches into Como, Lecco and Varese and an argument could be made for inclusion of exurban Lodi and Pavia. These would raise Milan’s population to nearly that of Madrid.

Germany has the other two metropolitan areas with more than 5 million residents, Essen (Ruhrgebiet or Rhine area) and Berlin. Both metropolitan areas have a population of 5.1 million. By some definitions, a Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area would include Dusseldorf and even Cologne (Köln) and Bonn to the south. This wider area has a population of more than 11 million and would rank among the top three in Europe. Eurostat breaks this area into four metropolitan areas.

Overall, approximately 1/3 of the metropolitan population lives in the historical urban cores of Europe’s 99 major metropolitan areas, with approximately 2/3 of living in the suburbs and exurbs (Figure 1). This percentage is somewhat smaller among the metropolitan areas with more than 5,000,000 population (30 percent). The 25 largest metropolitan areas are shown in the table, and all 99 metropolitan areas are listed in Europe: Major Metropolitan Areas & Historic Core Populations: 2010 to 2012.

Enlargement Nations Compared to the EU-15 and EFTA

The share of the population living in the historical urban cores is much higher in the generally less affluent nations that have been added to the European Union over the last decade. In the 13 enlargement nations, approximately 52 percent of the metropolitan area population lives in the historical urban core. By contrast, in the more affluent nations of the EU – 15 and the EFTA only 29 percent of the major metropolitan area population lives in the historical urban cores (Figure 2).

To some degree, this difference is explained by the stronger central planning in metropolitan areas that developed in the more controlled economies in the enlargement nations before the fall of the Soviet Union. Planners were usually given larger geographical areas to control than has typically been the case in Western Europe, North America and Japan. The metropolitan areas of the enlargement nations also have substantially more dense principal urban areas, averaging 11,300 per square mile (4,300 per square kilometer), compared to 8,400 per square mile (3,200 per square kilometer) in the EU-15 and the EFTA.   

Resurgence of the Historical Cores

Western Europe’s historical cores experienced substantial population losses in the decades leading to 2000. This trend, similar to that in the United States, saw the population of Inner London drop 55 percent from its 1911 peak to its 1991 low. The ville de Paris lost more than one quarter of its population from 1921, a rate slightly greater than in the city of Chicago over the same years. Copenhagen lost 35 percent of its population. In the decades from the mid 20th century to 2000, virtually every major urban core municipality in Western Europe declined from its peak population, except for those that expanded their boundaries, combined with another municipality or had substantial greenfield space for suburban development within their city limits (such as Rome).

Since 2000, as we see in the United States, many of the historical cores have begun adding population. Much of the increase has resulted from the international migration that has been spurred by the open borders of the EU's enlargement (See: Examining Sprawl in Europe and America: Europeans are Moving to the Suburbs Too). Inner London has been a particular beneficiary of this trend, adding nearly 900,000 residents over the last two decades. Much of this gain is from international migration, as Inner London suffered a minus 1.5 percent annual domestic migration rate in the 2000s, less than that of New York City (1.8 percent), but more than that of Los Angeles County (1.4 percent). Inner London’s population remains 36 percent below its peak level of more than a century ago.

Comparisons to the United States

Europe has nearly twice as many major metropolitan areas as the United States. The total major metropolitan area population is also higher, at 207 million compared to 173 million in the United States. Yet the major metropolitan areas of the United States constitute a larger share of the urban population. Approximately 55 percent of the US population lives in a major metropolitan area, compared to only 40 percent in Europe. The share of major metropolitan areas in the historical urban cores is slightly higher in Europe, at 33 percent, compared to 27 percent in the United States.

Growing Metropolitan Areas

International migration, particularly from the enlarged EU, as well as the continuing shift from rural to urban areas has driven stronger growth throughout some metropolitan areas. Eurostat metropolitan area data is available from as early as 2003 and shows Madrid to be the fastest growing, at a 1.5 percent annual rate. Rome is not far behind, with a 1.4 percent annual rate. Brussels is growing at a 1.1 percent rate, while London, Prague and Valencia are adding 1.0 percent to their populations each year. While detailed Eurostat data is not available for earlier years in Milan, strong growth has been indicated. Even formerly moribund Vienna, which reached its population peak early in the 20th century, is growing at an unprecedented 0.8 percent annual rate.

Other major metropolitan areas continue with slow growth or are even declining. Europe's two largest conurbations, Essen and Katowice (the Upper Silesian metropolitan area of Poland) are losing population. Naples is simply not growing.

Note: Metropolitan areas are labor markets and always include both a principal urban area (contiguously built up area) and connected rural territory. Smaller urban areas may also be included. See: Definition of Terms used in The Evolving Urban Formseries.

Photo: Belgravia, London (by author)

In the housing industry, land planners are the first to be dropped during a downturn… and the first needed in an upturn. A good way to monitor the optimism of the housing development market is to monitor the volume of land planning.

The land plan is the beginning of a long and arduous process. Unlike architecture, which is relatively quick from design to construction, land planning takes patience. It can easily consume a year or two (or more) for a US neighborhood to go from the initial design stages to the beginning of construction.

Typically, but not always, national recessions coincide with downturns in the construction industry. For example, housing growth in the Minneapolis region leaped to the far outer suburban regions because we had an urban boundary that raised raw land prices and made unsubsidized affordable housing within the core unattainable. To get a financially attainable home for a middle-class family meant a 30 mile trek to the suburbs, typically in that shiny new gas guzzler SUV.

About a year before the national recession, when local gas prices exceeded three dollars a gallon, homes sales in the outer reaches of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) came to a standstill. This halt impacted the low-value suburban cookie cutter bland developments. Planning consultants that simply followed the regulatory minimums saw their workload come to a screeching halt.

Around that same time, our unique land planning business grew 30%. Our clients were savvy developers and builders who knew that they needed an edge to entice buyers back into new purchases. Unfortunately, development redesign takes time to go through the approval processes. When the banking collapse triggered the national recession and the housing collapse, we had 105 neighborhoods going through the approval process. Within a 48 hour period, all 105 neighborhoods either went dead or dormant. The building industry Armageddon had begun.

Most design professionals we knew reduced overhead to survive or went out of business. We weren't aware of any that took the time or money to re-educate or re-tool. On the other hand, during the five year downturn we invested more time, money, and energy than we had in the past into improving design models, software technology (and related patents). This depleted our personal and corporate resources, because no bank or investor was interested in a company that served the home building industry. Our work outside the US kept us (barely) afloat.

During the recession years we had only two jobs within the US: A single master planned community of 1,900 units, and a 20 lot subdivision. That was it. When 2012 began, the phone started ringing with requests for the planning of new domestic developments. The preparations to invest in the recovery were underway.

In the years before the recession it had become increasingly more time consuming and difficult to gain approvals. The US is the only country in which we work where neighbors have input into development decisions, even when a project clearly meets all required regulations. But now, we are witnessing quicker approvals than before, as citizens (I think) recognize that their net worth, income potential, and perhaps their job (or that of a family member) is tied to getting the housing industry healthy again.

When suburbia imploded, urban planners and architects rejoiced and announced a resurgence of urban growth that promised an era of utopian living. People were going to walk, bike, or be bused to nearby jobs in gentrified (i.e. expensive and exclusive) neighborhoods. Instead of decaying urban blight, we were going to see suburban blight. To be sure, urban economic growth areas such as Washington DC saw reinvestment and positive redevelopment, but for the most part, the promising urban rebirth miscarried.

In the 45 years that I’ve been in the planning, engineering, and software side of land development, I’ve continually read about the death of the suburbs and the major change in the housing market. Most of the predictions have proven to be false. Terms like 'cocooning' and 'clustering' failed to catch on, and are no longer commonly used.

More recently, I’ve seen a projection that 50% of all households will be single person entities in the not too distant future. I’m from the hippie generation. If, in 1969, forecasters judged that we represented future housing needs, everyone would surely have foreseen an upcoming growth in communal neighborhoods, marriages with multiple sex partners, and children raised in flower gardens. Yet most of our generation grew to be conservative, short haired, well behaved, religious suburbanites and business leaders.

I’m certainly not an economist, a demographer, or a professor, but my projection is that the idealistic young people of any generation will eventually marry and desire (for the most part) a home with a yard in which to raise their children. A home they are proud to pull up to in a neighborhood that is beautiful, safe, connective, and functional. In addition, I believe that they will want a lower-maintenance home that consumes little energy for heating and cooling. That home could very well be in a redeveloped urban environment, or in a suburban setting.

Those that qualify for a mortgage today want to arrive at an individual home that elevates their sense of self-worth, especially after experiencing the recession. Instead of a 10mpg SUV, they are likely to drive home in a vehicle that gets three to five times that efficiency, making the cost per gallon not so critical, even if we go beyond five dollars a gallon.

The resurgence in development is sprouting in many regions. North Dakota, for example, desperately needs to house its workers in cities that offer enough of a living standard to entice families. Before the boom, the minimalistic regulations worked well. But that approach is far behind the curve to create competitive, sustainable towns during the current population explosion. The number of new development submittals and the demand for housing is overwhelming both the city staff and the local engineering firms.

To make matters worse, developers and builders flooding into the area to make a quick buck have built some truly terrible dwelling places. The result has been a sense of caution that is preventing quick approvals. Many consulting firms that used to prepare farm property splits or new utility easements are now planning large scale developments. They are either unqualified or ill-prepared for designing new cities.

Regulations such as streets with 66-foot wide right-of-ways and absurdly wide local paving widths (often over 40 feet) go unchallenged because consultants do not want to deviate from obsolete regulations in fear of further delaying approvals.

Moving forward as the housing market recovers, if we simply repeat the same solutions that we used prior to the recession, growth will be slow but steady. If we add significantly more value by advancing both home and neighborhood design, efficiency, and value we can accelerate economic recovery and leave a better legacy for future generations. At the same time, we would increase developers' profitability, and decrease municipal maintenance burdens. As with any product, demand is created or re-energized when the product is significantly improved.

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

Flickr photo by outtacontext, 'A few acres of suburban land, previously a high school… becoming a housing development.'

August 9th is National Day in Singapore, and it is accompanied by both public and private celebrations. From my family’s flat in the public housing estate of Hougang, we can hear the roar of jet planes over our heads as they make their way to the National Day Parade grounds for a fly-past and appear shortly before our eyes on the television screen. Over the years, National Day has become a festive affair for an extended family gathering that includes cousins, nieces and aunties, and an excuse to cook-up a feast - a hearty steamboat or hotpot dinner (see picture inset) usually reserved for the Chinese New Year.   

Dinner is punctuated with reminiscences as well as animated conversations with my primary-school-going niece about the National Day revelry at her school, and we all wait in anticipation to catch the venerable former Prime Minister Mr. Lee Kuan Yew make his appearance amongst the VIP spectators. We take note of his state of health and the uniformity o f outfits worn by the entourage of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) Ministers and Members of Parliament. When the national anthem is being sung, I watch from the corner of my eyes at my father silently mouthing the words to “Majulah Singapura” and become acutely conscious of our affinity or bonds not just as family but also as Singaporeans.

Yet proud of what we have built, many Singaporeans are also concerned with what we may be losing. On the same day of August 9th elsewhere in this island-state of Singapore, a tireless group of activists1 are conducting an evening tour of the old Bukit Brown cemetery in an effort to raise awareness of the “forgotten histories” of those pioneers – coolies, poets, philanthropists, businessmen, bankers, educationists, doctors, diplomats, musicians, builders, architects and war heroes who now lay there but whose stories and contributions to society have not (yet) been told. Their tombs were to be exhumed and the cemetery leveled for the construction of a 6-lane expressway. Working with urgency and energetic vigor, the activists advocate for the preservation of Bukit Brown cemetery as a “living heritage site”.  Put together with other groups such as Nature Society, Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), Association for Women’s Action and Research (AWARE) etc., the Bukit Brown activists form part of an emerging social and cultural movement in Singapore that reflects the changing character and ethos of its society.

The sense of loss is one of the themes that “Cook a Pot of Curry” - a witty, humorous and poignant theatrical production by local playwright Alfian Sa’at, tackles with great nuance.  Staged by theatre group “Wild Rice” in July, 2013, it was sold-out on almost every performance night. The play reflects critically on what it means to be Singaporean. It confronts the recent influx of immigrants, foreign talents and workers that has given rise to a tide of anti-foreigner sentiments blamed for everything from “overcrowding on public transport, escalating property prices and wage depression” (Wild Rice: Alfian in the spot-light). Using a high-profile dispute between a recently arrived immigrant couple from China who had complained to the authorities about their Singaporean Indian neighbors because they could not stand the smell of curry being cooked next door, the play draws attention to the ridiculous “solution” proffered by the mediating authority to the Indian family to cook curry only at stipulated times.  This ruling threw Singaporean society into a frenzied fit of private curry parties as a protest against the government, fuelled the toxic seething anti-foreigner sentiments and inspired a popular Singaporean blogger Mr. Brown to spoof the song “Curry Curry Night”, karaoke style.  The play itself grapples with issues of population, immigration and identity that converge on the question of home. But "Is this home?", asks a character in the play as he sings wistfully to a Youtube parodied national day song.

In spite of the tension between locals and foreigners, the play manages to convey their shared sense of marginalization and loss, confusion and anxiety.  Through testimonies gathered from a series of interviews with people from all walks of life in Singapore, “Cook a Pot of Curry” showcases these individual voices that include excerpts from “Remalyn”, a 30-year-old Filipina domestic helper; “Ravi”, a 40-year-old Singaporean social worker; “Evelyn”, a 28-year-old Singaporean Yoga instructor; “Xiaoqing”, a 23-year-old post-graduate student from China, and “Syamsul”, a 33-year-old Singaporean civil servant into the script.  These voices represent the diversity of views that range from “new citizens who support the ruling party, foreigners who don’t really like Singapore, citizens who hate foreigners”, says Nelson Chia who plays the role of the post-graduate student from China as well as a Singaporean labor activist (See “Art imitates Life” 15-July-2013: Interview with Nelson Chia).

The play is   not afraid to confront “sensitive issues of race and nationality” – issues rendered taboo by the government of former Prime Minister Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, which sought to defuse the country’s turbulent race relations and religious tensions in the past. The PAP-government’s tight grip on those “out-of-bound” markers have for a long period of time defined for Singaporeans their identity and its meanings that are affixed in a specific time, space and purpose. But these are being unloosened by groups like the Bukit Brown activists who work tirelessly – tombstone by tombstone – to unravel nuggets of stories and memories that may one day present an alternative narrative of, and a trajectory for Singapore.

Although maybe not as quickly as some might hope, things are changing gradually: in the National Day message of 2013, the Prime Minister of Singapore Mr. Lee Hsien Loong centered his 10-minute speech on the notion of “home”. Speaking from a National Servicemen clubhouse in the public housing estate of Toa Payoh, Mr. Lee took stock of the progress made during the past year: more public housing and stabilized prices in the red-hot housing market; more buses, bus routes and new MRT train lines. Addressing national issues such as the population, economy and the changing global conditions, he spoke to ordinary Singaporeans about our concerns: crowding and congestion, job security, cost of living, the Singaporean identity and whether our children will do better than ourselves.

However, the work of making a home out of Singapore goes beyond building brick-and-mortar houses. In its own way, “Cook a Pot of Curry” attests to the complexity of making a home out of Singapore: it presents the diversity of views and complicated emotions that do not suggest any clear-cut or straightforward “solution” towards resolving the tensions and conundrums which have arisen, and engenders questions not easily nor readily answered as Nelson Chia puts it:

“It is quite poignant for me. I am a Singaporean but I have relatives that are Permanent Residents (PR) and friends who are foreigners. Rationally, I can understand the policies… but complexities come because a lot of us are not prepared for the changes. For example, rationally, you know if you lose a job to a foreigner, it is not their fault. But somehow, people take it personally…This play raises a number of questions for me as well.” (“Art imitates Life” 15-July-2013: Interview with Nelson Chia).

“Joanne” – a dour-faced teacher from the play who derides the effort to create a national costume for Miss Singapore Universe showcasing “Singaporean-ness” in all its farcical superficiality, reflects the futility of such socio-cultural projects. Likewise, we may rationalize how social, political and cultural forces have come to shape the meanings of “home” but through “Cook a Pot of Curry”, we realize that it is our longing for inclusiveness, recognition, acceptance and affinity which makes home a possibility. However, when people like Alfian Sa’at continues to be derided and his discourse policed by Singapore’s mainstream media, it is no wonder that many of us – locals and foreigners alike, struggle to call Singapore – home.

Arthur Chia is a Singaporean Post-doctoral Fellow in the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) - MIT joint program. He is a student of Southeast Asian studies; anthropology and Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies.

1 Inset picture shows activists and participants singing “Majulah Singapura” at Bukit Brown on National Day August 9th 2013: Bukit Brownies singing "Majulah Singapura".

In the 1950s and 1960s, Southern California was ground zero for the "American Dream" of owning a house. From tony Newport Beach and Bel-Air to the more middle-class suburbs of the San Fernando Valley and Garden Grove to working-class Lakewood, our region created a vast geography of opportunity for prospective homeowners.

Today, with house prices again skyrocketing, Southern California is morphing into something that more resembles a geography of inequality. Now, even the middle class is forced into either being "house poor" or completely shut out of homeownership, or may simply be obliged to leave the area. Even more troubling is that the working class and the poor suffer from the kind of crowded, overpriced housing conditions sadly reminiscent of those experienced during the Depression and the Second World War.

Judged by the "median multiple" – the median income divided by the median house price – California's prices for a generation have soared well above the national averages. Demographer Wendell Cox notes that, until the early 1970s, California's house prices were similar to those in the rest of the United States. National Association of Realtors data indicate that the median house price in California at that time was 7 percent above the national average. By 2013, the price differential had risen to 109 percent.

This has little to do with such things as construction costs, which have not risen as quickly in most of California as elsewhere, but are largely the result of soaring land costs and stiff fees imposed on housing. Attributable largely to regulatory factors that restrict building in many areas, the cost of finished land for comparably priced houses has increased nine times as much in California as in the rest of the nation since 1970. Portland State University economist Gerald Mildner refers to this as "Economics 101," indicating that "as the demand for property in a region grows, the increase in demand translates into some combination of more space and high prices, depending upon the elasticity of supply."

Beside regulatory restraints, California housing prices are driven up by the highest impact fees in the nation. An annual survey by Duncan and Associates shows that the average impact fee in California for single-family residence in 2012 was $31,100 per unit, nearly 90 percent higher than the next most expensive state and 265 percent higher than the norm among jurisdictions that levy such fees, which typically pay for capital improvements, like water and wastewater facilities, required by a new development. Many states and localities on the other side of the Sierras do not.

These fees also impact multifamily housing; the state's fees on multifamily units averaged $18,800, 290 percent above the average outside the state.

Construction penalized

California's emerging housing crisis, then, is not, as some suggest, a reflection of the state's constrained geography or economic superiority. The two most-recent spikes in housing costs have occurred as the state's median income has dropped from well above to just about the national average. Neither can we blame a huge surge of new residents, since California's once-buoyant population growth has slowed to levels similar to those of the rest of the country.

Instead, the roots of our state's massive social regression lie in political choices made by the state, counties and cities. This trend likely will intensify, as regulators interpret the state's climate-change legislation to further penalize construction of single-family houses preferred by most California families. Particularly vulnerable will be the starter-home market, once the engine of California's egalitarian middle-class culture.

Some "new urbanists" and greens argue that such restrictions will eliminate wasteful "McMansions" and spur construction of more "sustainable" dense housing for the working masses. Yet, in reality, the impact of highly restrictive housing polices tend to be felt most by both middle-class families and the least-affluent, who find themselves unable to buy housing or, in some cases, are forced to spend huge percentages of their income on rent.

The growing affordability crisis seems likely to worsen as the housing market recovers. Given the paucity of new home construction, and ever-tightening regulation, California's housing market is particularly vulnerable to wild swings in prices; the year-on-year median house price increase as of May 2013 was the greatest since 1980, even greater than in any of the past decade's "bubble" years. Overall, price gains in the state were two to three times stronger than that in the rest of the nation.

This process has been further accelerated by the presence of investors in the local market. Investors, many from Asia, now account for upward of one in four home purchasers in the state.

Among the biggest losers here is California's middle class, particularly young families without large family endowments. Some 60 percent of U.S. households can now afford to buy a house, according to the National Association of Home Builders / Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index, but that percentage has dropped even in the Riverside-San Bernardino (40 percent) and Sacramento (50 percent) metropolitan areas, while San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego had affordability levels of 20 percent to 30 percent. The lowest level, 17 percent, was found in the San Francisco metropolitan area. We can expect these numbers to worsen in the immediate future.

These numbers will impact a wide range of people, including many with skills desired by employers. According to an analysis of Orange County average salaries for National Core, a nonprofit housing developer based in Rancho Cucamonga, even a biomedical engineer or a nurse in O.C. does not earn enough to buy a house there. As economist and author Claude Gruen has suggested, more restrictive land-use regulation "is to the middle class what the economic disaster of slum clearance was to the poor."

Renters don't escape

Nor will the poor, or renters, benefit from these policies. The nation, and the state, have had programs to help lower-income residents, but these programs meet only a fraction of the need. Los Angeles County had a waiting list 17 times its potential supply of housing, according to a 2004 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. With relatively little new product being produced, it's unlikely this situation can improve, as potential homeowners are shoved into the rental market, boosting rents higher.

The net result is that more Californians are becoming house poor or "rent" poor. According to American Community Survey data analysis done for National Core by this author and demographer Wendell Cox, this state has four of the six major metropolitan areas with the largest share of renters spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent – led by Riverside-San Bernardino, Los Angeles-Orange County, Sacramento and San Diego – are located in the Golden State. This includes a majority of renter household in the cities of Los Angeles, Glendale, Anaheim and Santa Ana.

Even more troubling is a growing percentage of working households suffering housing-expense burdens of 50 percent or more of income. California again leads the way, according the National Housing Conference, with Los Angeles and San Diego among the top five major metro areas.

This emerging social disaster has received little attention from the so-called progressives, whose policies in part are responsible for the state's growing housing crisis. In large part due to housing, and lack of good middle-class jobs, California now has the highest poverty rate (when adjusted for the cost of housing) of any state.

Not only are working-class Californians poorer, they also are subject to ever-higher levels of overcrowding. On a percentage basis, four California major metropolitan areas are in the 10 regions in the country with the most families doubling up. The top two are Riverside-San Bernardino and Los Angeles, followed by San Jose and San Diego.

Overcrowding is particularly tough on children, who suffer greater problems with health and academic performance. Another study associated psychological problems with children from overcrowded housing.

Long drives to work

Finally, the housing crisis also creates significant environmental problems. The unaffordability of housing has forced many Californians to seek shelter far from work. Among commuters traveling 60 minutes or more to work, Riverside-San Bernardino is third-highest, followed by Los Angeles, eighth, and San Francisco, ninth. Among major metropolitan areas with the highest share of commuters traveling 90 or more minutes one way, Riverside-San Bernardino ranks second, in a virtual tie with New York, followed by Sacramento, seventh, and Los Angeles, eighth.

For both California's middle- and working-class, our housing regulatory regime serves as a kind of tax – a nearly confiscatory one – that works particularly against families, the poor and those who do not possess considerable family wealth. The result is a California that is increasingly out of sync with the very dream that has brought millions from all over the country.

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

This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

Photo of Los Angeles housing by Wendell Cox.

Members of the millennial generation – born between 1982 and 2003 – carry a student debt burden of close to one trillion dollars. This is the group that includes many just entering the stage in life when people tend to settle down and start families. Even though Millennials are marrying later than previous generations, they would still be the prime market for sales of single family starter homes, if only they could afford them. As interest rates rise along with home  prices, the only way this key consumer segment will be able to afford to buy a house is if the nation, out of its own self-interest, finds a way to relieve Millennials of their crushing student loan obligations.

Millennials are the first generation in American history that has been asked to self-finance the cost of the education needed for America to be economically successful. Shortly after the ratification of the Constitution, Congress passed legislation setting aside land in the new territories for the establishment of the iconic one room school houses to assure its newest citizens had the skills required to be good farmers and domestic servants. Even as the country was engaged in a devastating Civil War, a state-by-state movement to mandate universal and free primary education for every child swept the nation and became a permanent part of American society. Then, when the Industrial Revolution generated a demand for factory and office workers with a high school education, the nation expanded the concept to make such an education available equally to young men and women without any requirement to pay tuition.      

The situation has changed, but the need for an educated young generation has not. The difference is that at least two years of post-secondary education has become a must-have ticket for a young generation seeking to make its way in the world. Yet we have suddenly yanked the universal, free education rug out from under them and asked them to pay for it by not only going into debt, but assuming a debt that is not even dischargeable in bankruptcy court.

The result is a rising tide of student debt that threatens to undermine the economic vitality of the nation. According to the Federal Reserve, student debt rose by a factor of more than eight between 2001 and 2012, twice as fast as home loans and far in excess of the modest increases in other forms of indebtedness during the same time period. A recently released report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicates that about one in four student loans is now either in default or in programs designed to help borrowers in distress. This analysis looked only at loans made through the direct student loan program totaling about $570 million, not older ones that may have been offered by banks and other private sector lenders. If borrowers are unable to repay their loans in the long run, the federal government and taxpayers will have to absorb the losses. Why, then, not recognize the problem now and bail out the borrowers so that they can put the windfall to good use in an economy desperately needing a new boost in consumer spending?

The Great Recession seriously disrupted household formation and consumer spending.  According to an analysis by Merrill Lynch, in the decade before the financial markets’ collapse in 2008, one-third of all housing turnovers came from homeowners older than  55, and about one-third of those sales were to buyers under 34. Since then sales of homes have fallen by about two million units, leaving the economy 2.5 million households below normal levels. Millennials represent about 22% of the US population and control $200 billion of direct purchasing power, not counting their influence on their parent’s spending decisions. Over the next five years, a quarter of Millennials will enter their peak spending years, making them the best hope for reviving the housing market.

Millennials have expressed a strong preference for living in the type of suburban communities in which they grew up, especially when it’s time, as it is for many of them now, to raise a family. Their first home needn’t be “move in ready;” about a third of them say they would prefer a “fixer upper.” And more than 80% of the generation believe they would find a way to pay for the cost of any repairs themselves rather than borrow the money from their parents. A wave of new home buying would not only give a sharp boost to the durable goods industry that depends on new household formation for its growth, but would also provide a ready-made army to fix up some of the country’s declining, inner ring suburban housing stock.

There are legitimate public policy issues about how to fix the problem of financing American higher education. Some might argue that we should tackle that problem before dealing with student loan debtors. But with the economic recovery still proceeding at too slow a pace for most middle class Americans, an equally good case can be made that the country should deal with student loan debt either first or as part of a comprehensive reform of  financing higher education. The economy could use the boost, as could the morale of America’s largest and most diverse generation.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais areco-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 and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

New home photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

Nothing. Seriously. Not a damn thing.

Oh, the occasion is being used to opine on our state of affairs, but nothing is structurally taking shape in America to prevent the next Detroit from occurring. In fact, Detroit is occurring every day inside most of us. We are all getting bankrupt in so many little ways.

America is in a precarious position. Our economy is based on consumption. Our consumption is based on our livelihood. Our livelihood is based on our employment, and in our jobless “recovery”, there just aren’t many decent jobs. With technological advances, it is likely to get worse. Writes columnist Bill McClellan in the St. Louis Dispatch:

[T]he day is coming when trucks will drive themselves. People in the trucking industry say it is inevitable. Within a decade or so, truck drivers will be obsolete. There are currently 5.7 million truck drivers.

McLellan continues, discussing an email he received from a reader:

Pat B. is a conservative businessman. He wrote, “Regarding the truck drivers, I think the bigger issue is how society is going to deal with nonproductive people vs. productive people. Automation will allow ‘productive’ people to be much, much more productive than the ‘nonproductive’ people. Theoretically, a very small segment of the population could produce almost everything. How will we deal with this?”

Good question. Currently, Detroit is ground zero of it. So much busted there, so many poor, so many with blue- and white-collar skills in the new no-collar economy. Do we let the city die on the vine? Au revoir Rust Belt?

Well, a consensus is becoming clear. We need to “First World” Detroit. Get it and other post-industrial cities on the right path.

Enter New York.

Courtesy of Smithsonian

In the late 1970′s, New York City was in trouble: the threat of bankruptcy, and the Bronx was on fire, literally, with broadcaster Howard Cosell famously being attributed to saying “There it is ladies and gentleman, The Bronx is burning” as cameras panned to a fire in an abandoned elementary school during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. Put simply, the 1970’s NYC was not unlike the modern day Detroit—insolvent fiscally, aesthetically, and, in many respects, sociologically. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose in the Village Voice.

But with crisis comes opportunity, particularly for those who can afford to be opportunistic. Specifically, in the book by Paul Harvey entitled The Brief History of Neoliberalism, the crossroads of NYC’s late-70’s fiscal crisis gets center stage. Here, the groundwork for the city’s co-optation had been laid for some time, with the 1960’s urban crisis increasing municipal desperation. Financial institutions smelled blood, and they saw occasion. What happened dictates urban redevelopment to this day. Writes Harvey (h/t Cleveland Frowns):

At first financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but in 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget.

Harvey states that the new budget strategy amounted to “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government”, one that would subsequently de-emphasize social and physical infrastructure for the priority of a “good business climate”. Harvey continues:

But the New York investment bankers did not walk away from the city. They seized the opportunity to restructure it in ways that suited their agenda…This meant using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business…coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises…[T]he investment bankers reconstructed the city economy around financial activities, ancillary services such as legal services and the media…and diversified consumerism (with gentrification and neighborhood ‘restoration’ playing a prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more construed as entrepreneurial rather than a social democratic or even managerial entity.

Fast forward to now and you can see how this framework has made modern day New York. A billionaire mayor. Impressive wealth accumulation. Lower crime. Gentrifying areas that are spreading into many parts of the city. The scene in the Bronx:

The South Bronx is on the upswing and this new project proves it,” said Kathy Zamechansky, President of KZA Realty Group. “A gleaming new building is just what this area needs to add life and vitality to a neighborhood…

All good, right?

Not exactly. Commoditizing public welfare has come with very personal costs. Particularly, New York City’s economic sphere epitomizes the worsening two-tier system in America, with one study finding that “three of the four most [income] segregated metropolitan areas [in the country] are in the New York City region”. In the city itself, the income disparity rates from subway stop to subway stop are at Namibian levels. “Get off at Chambers St., and you’re averaging $205,192,” writesFishbowl NY. “Hop off at Kingsbridge Rd., and you’re at $18,610”.

There is cost to personal freedom as well, with Mayor Bloomberg’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics ruled as a violation to the constitutional rights of minorities. The increase in police stops have been significant since Bloomberg took office, going from 160,851 in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011. In a 195-page response just released, the federal judge wrote: “No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life”.

Heck, there’s even consternation from the city’s creative types. Specifically, New York’s legacy of nurturing the next generation of thought is being homogenized by the fact that elites talking to elites creates for shitty cultural capital. WritesGawker’s Hamiliton Nolan on how the influx of money is turning the city into “a game of urban Candy Crush”, “Everything is an orgy of destruction! Who’s hip now? Nobody!” Echoes creative class troubadour Lena Dunham:

It’s news to no one that the middle class and up-and-coming talent struggle in this city. As a result, New York is seeing an exodus of its creative population. As Dunham says, “If they struggle for too long, they’re leaving New York for Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and in some cases, even Tampa. We can’t have our generation’s Patti Smith moving to Tampa. That’s going to seriously f*ck our shit up.

But the bridge had been crossed. Not simply for the reasons Dunham fingers, but because New York City is the head of a teetering set of bones. Writes eminent economic scholar Joseph Stiglitz in a recent essay entitled “The Wrong Lesson from Detroit’s Bankruptcy”:

Rather than deal purposefully with this changing economic landscape with useful policies encouraging the growth of other industries, our government spent decades papering over the growing weaknesses by allowing the financial sector to run amok, creating “growth” based on bubbles. We didn’t just let the market run its course. We made an active choice to embrace short-term profits and large-scale inefficiency.

America does have an urban renewal program, but it is aimed more at restoring buildings and gentrification than at maintaining and restoring communities, and even at that, it is languishing.

Which brings us back to Detroit. Consider it America’s “Back to the Future” moment. There is municipal bankruptcy. There is fiscal management being taken away from an elected government. There are financial institutions wreaking havoc on the middle class via a collective Alfred E. Neuman-like exasperation. There is the subsidy environment going full bore in the midst of economic trauma, with the Governor of Michigan giving the okay to Detroit billionaire Mitch Ilitch on his $650 million dollar publicly-subsidized hockey arena one day after signing off on the country’s largest city bankruptcy filing. And then there’s the gentrification-as-economic-development silver bullet, with real estate developer Dan Gilbert buying up downtown properties for the price of a song and then using the spatial grease of placemaking to fill his square feet with the rise of the creative class. “Stand up and gentrify: 7 days in Detroit” reads a series running in the The Windsor Star.

“It was a face that didn’t have a care in the world, except mischief.” Quote from Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman.

Taken together, the framework of Detroit’s progression is to simply go forth into who we are as a country—a group of people on a collision course with the inevitable failings of economic disparity, or more generally: a nation without good jobs.

Should Detroiters be worried?

Maybe. Reads the New York Observer: “Bloomberg Warns the Next Mayor Could Follow Detroit Into Bankruptcy”.

Back to the future indeed.

Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

Lead photo courtesy of Vice.

Public transit systems intend to enhance local economies by linking people to their occupations. This presents problems for many  low-income families  dependent on transit for commuting. With rising prices at the gas pump, much hope has been placed on an influx of investment into public transit to help low-income households. But does public transit really help the poor? While the effect of transit access on job attainment is murky, several alternatives such as car loans and car-sharing programs have seen real results in closing the income gap. For Christina Hubbert, emancipation from public transit has been a change for the better. NBC News reports:

A car means Hubbert no longer spends two hours each way to and from work in suburban Atlanta. It means spending more time with her 3-year-old daughter — and no longer having to wake her up at 5 every morning so she can be in the office by 8. It also means saving hundreds of dollars each week in day care late fees she incurred when she couldn’t get to the center before its 6:30 p.m. closing time.

Research finds that car-ownership is positively correlated with job opportunities while no such relationship exists with access to transit stations. Furthermore, increased transit mobility has been proven to have no effect on employment outcomes for welfare recipients. The notion that newer and nearer public transit creates benefits for all is inaccurate; it only creates opportunities for those who live near the transit stations, and those opportunities are limited. A study by the Brookings Institute finds that, among the ten leading metropolitan areas in the US, less than 10% of jobs in a metropolitan area are within 45 minutes of travel by transit modes. Moreover, 36% of the entry-level jobs are completely inaccessible by public transit. This is not surprising given the fact that suburbia houses two-thirds of all new jobs.

The mismatch between people and jobs can be reconciled in two ways: car loans and car-sharing services. Basic car-sharing involves several people using the same car or a fleet of cars, as with the ZipCar. The concept has branched out to on-demand car sharing services, such as Lyft, mobile apps which link riders with drivers.

Car loans on the other hand have been around for a while and offer affordable financing for a car without a required down payment. Ways to Work, one of the largest loan providers in the U.S., includes courses on personal finance and credit counseling. By making vehicle travel more attractive, these two disruptive innovations threaten the expansion of public transit – and its powerful associated lobbies – in three ways:

1. It’s more cost-efficient and time-efficient.

To improve the way we move people, transit developments must save both time and money. Sadly, transit lines are notorious for their extraordinary costs and long delays. Data from the 2010 Census reveals that people living in central cities with a higher proportion of transit riders experience longer commutes. And since transit riders have more cumbersome commutes, they are much more likely to be tardy or absent from work.

The hefty price tag of transit projects also triggers concern. For example, the cost per new passenger of the Washington Metro line to Dulles Airport was estimated at $15,000 annually. That’s about the same as the current poverty threshold for a household of two.

Car-loan programs on the other hand are largely cost-efficient, producing real fiscal benefits to borrowers, employers, and taxpayers. A survey of 4,771 borrowers and their employers finds that borrowers have greater job security as a result of access to vehicles. With access to credit, borrowers increase their purchasing power by an average of $2,900 each year and save about $250 by avoiding payday loans and checks-for-cash outlets. Employers gain as well through cost savings due to increase retention and reduced absenteeism and tardiness, which amount to $817 and $1130 per borrower respectively. In large part, providing vehicle financing is a smart investment since it reduces the number of low-income families on social welfare – an annual cost savings of $2,900 for each borrower coming off public assistance.

Given its clear advantages, car sharing is increasing. Recent reports find that shared-use vehicle organizations have been lucrative. Between August 2012 and July 2013, car-sharing ridership grew by 112 percent and the number of vehicles increased by 52 percent. And although car-sharing is not typically used to transport the poor, having on-demand car service makes it so that door-to-door access is more available and affordable. If car-sharing continues to grow at its current rate, it’s reasonable then to assume that these pseudo-taxi services will be eventually be affordable enough so that people would choose to be chauffeured rather than drive their own vehicles.

2. Vehicle ownership provides greater access to jobs and economic opportunities.

Instead of being limited to a few areas that are transit-oriented, families with cars have access to more jobs and economic opportunities. Public transit lines are limited in their geographical coverage and take time to make often numerous stops.  Transfers are inefficient and time-consuming, making much of that coverage impractical. Also regular transit riders have limited employment options since they’re only able to consider jobs in the vicinity of transit stops and stations.

3. Travel by car  is responsive to current travel patterns

A common misperception is that low-income people do not have cars. In reality, 86% of the poor have cars, compared to 95% of the entire population. The high percentage of poor families with cars reveals how automobile culture has become fixed into American ideals of economic well-being and prosperity. And contrary to stereotypes, the poor and the rich similarly spend about 94% of their transportation costs on vehicle travel versus public transit, challenging the notion that low-income travel behavior is unlike that of the rest of the population. As such, providing the poor with cars dramatically levels the playing field as they are the ones who would gain the most from increased access to employment destinations and education facilities.

A strong argument posited by public transit advocates is that as more cars use the road, congestion and pollution will intensify. And to be sure, public transit is more environmentally friendly than motor vehicles. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), the largest union representing transit workers in North America, reports that one full bus eases the road of thirty-five cars, and that existing transit usage cuts national gasoline consumption by 1.4 billion gallons annually. Yet, on average, this result can only   be achieved if buses were always full, which they are not – authorities from the Los Angeles Metro estimate that their buses run at an average of 42% capacity.

But is it equitable to ask the poor to forgo mobility and economic gain for the environment? Considering that most Americans experience some degree of social mobility via vehicle ownership, it’s far more reasonable to allow  low-income families greater access to opportunity, new fuel efficiency standards for cars set by the Obama administration will decrease overall GHG emissions substantially; according to forecasts by the Department of Energy, carbon emissions from light-duty vehicles will drop 21% between 2010 and 2040 in spite of a 40% increase in driving. This shows that, even with more cars on the road, environmental goals can be accomplished.

Although the eligibility requirements are stricter in some areas than others, every state in the U.S. has a program for low-income residents to have access to car loans. Car-sharing is also rapidly expanding, but  marketing now is geared towards millennials on a budget rather than low-income families. Both innovations, however, respond to new demands faced by future workers, who are likely to find employment in dispersed locations and may make more trips per workday since many may have multiple part-time jobs. With more efficient ways of getting people to work, it’s time to challenge the assumption that the expansion of public transit is the best way to meet the needs of America’s hard-pressed working class.

Jeff Khau graduated from Chapman University with a degree in business entrepreneurship. Currently, he resides in Los Angeles where he is pursuing his dual-masters in urban planning and public policy at the University of Southern California.

Photo by Romana Klee, #113 zipcar.