Maybe it's my age, but, somehow, the future does not seem to be turning out the way I once imagined. It's not just the absence of flying cars, but also the lack of significant progress in big things, like toward space colonization, or smaller ones, like the speed for most air travel or the persistence of poverty.

Indeed, despite the incessant media obsession with technology as the driver of society, it seems we are a long way from the kind of dramatic change that, say, my parents' generation experienced. Born at the end of the horse-and-buggy age, they witnessed amazing changes – from the development of nuclear power and the jet engine to the first moon landing.

In contrast, my children's experience with technological change is largely incremental – a shifting of digital platforms, from desktops to laptops to tablets and iPhones. The new raft of minidevices are ingenious and much more powerful than even the high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. But this wave of technology is not doing much except, perhaps, to make us ever more distracted, disconnected and obsessed with trivia.

As one former Facebook employee put it succinctly: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

One clear sign of our technological fail: the stagnant, or even declining, living standards for most Americans. New technology is not creating much-cheaper and better housing, nor is it reducing poverty or creating a new wave of opportunity for grass-roots businesses. In fact, the current “tech boom” has done little to improve incomes much outside a few stretches of the Bay Area, a handful of college towns, and overhyped city media districts.

Even Silicon Valley's proud tradition of truly ground-breaking innovation in engineering has slowed as the tech hub has become dominated by media and advertising-driven software companies. The prospect of the easy score in social media, notes longtime entrepreneur Steven Blank, “marks the beginning of the end of the era of venture capital-backed big ideas in science and technology.”

Worse of all, the stagnating tech world is steadily reducing our own dreamscape. Zohar Liebermensch, a student from my “history of the future” class at Chapman University, compared the initial visions of Disneyland's Tomorrowland with later concepts. Over each generation since the park opened in 1955, she found, designers had to ratchet down the more ambitious projections – such as a manned mission to Mars – as the prospects dropped for their actually occurring.

Disneyland, she noted, also cut back on refurbishment in the “Carousel of Progress” exhibit, focused on the future “typical” American family. In the early years of the park, updates were needed every three years. That became six years, then nine. The attraction now hasn't been significantly modified in 18 years. “This increased changeless period,” she notes, “waves another flag of concern, as it demonstrates Disney's view that there has been no noteworthy progress in almost two decades.”

Science fiction testifies most strongly about our technological underachievement. Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” notes author David Graeber, assumed that a 1968 movie audience would find it “perfectly natural” that, by 2001 – now, more than a decade ago – there would be regular commercial flights to the moon, advanced space stations and hyperadvanced computers with human personalities.

Essentially, our new tech doesn't offer anything like the revolutionary and broadly felt changes brought about by electricity, jet travel or, for that matter, indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, the major productivity enhancements spawned by the computer and Internet revolutions, notes Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon, have already taken place, while the new social-media technology has done very little for productivity.

This trend has long-term implications for our society and economy. Increasingly, economists, such as Tyler Cowen, suggest that are we seeing a slowing of breakthroughs, with benefits increasingly accruing to a relative handful. We may hope to create a terrestrial “Star Trek” reality, but the society we are creating looks increasingly more like something out of the Middle Ages.

Can this decline in our dreamscape somehow be reversed? First, we need to look at the basic causes for our current narrow-casted view of technology. One is a relative lack of competition. In the 1980s personal computer boom, there were scores of companies competing across a broad array of tech sectors, resulting in a few winners, but a rapid evolution of technology.

Today most of the large new niches – mobile software, Web search, social media – are dominated by a handful of companies. The model has shifted from fierce competition to what might be seen as a series of oligopolies dominated by a handful of sometimes shifting companies, largely controlled by a small but powerful group of investors and entrepreneurs. Job creation, even in the boom, has been much slower than in previous booms as tens of thousands of the people engaged in building the backbone of the information age – telecom, semiconductor and computer product firms– are being replaced by numbers of younger, cheaper and often foreign workers.

At the top of this system stands a remarkably small group whose fortunes depend largely on using the Internet as a vehicle for advertising, often based on gross invasion of privacy. “Tech is something like the new Wall Street,” notes economist Umair Haque, “Mostly white, mostly dudes, getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact.”

Perhaps the biggest loss here may be psychological, the decline of what historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the expansive character of American life.” Instead of exploring new frontiers, we now obsess over mobile apps, and our Big Picture has devolved into a procession of “selfies.” If anything, in most critical areas, such as housing and transport, we seem to be looking backward, to the days of small apartments, trolley cars or trains. A crowded, poorer future, not a tech nirvana, beckons.

If it's not prosperity for more people, what is the end game of the new tech model? Much of it is profoundly narcissistic, seeking to replace the physical world with a digital one and making most of humanity superfluous. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, now director of engineering at Google, advocates a path to “transhumanism,” with the ultimate aim of creating a kind of immortality by imprinting our brain patterns as software. This “transhumanist” vision also reflects an almost obsessive concern of the 65-year-old inventor, who takes about 150 vitamin supplements a day in hopes of delaying his own demise.

The potential class implications of Kurzweil's transhumanist agenda are particularly troubling. It is likely that much of the new biological technology for many years, perhaps for decades, will not be easily accessed except by the very rich. Those left behind, Kurzweil believes, will end up as what he dubbed MOSHs – Mostly Original Substrate Humans. “Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do,” he writes.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy suggests that the focus on human-machine interface will end up with “the elite” having greater control over the masses. And, because human work no longer will be necessary, most of us will become superfluous, a useless burden on the system. “If the elite consists of softhearted liberals,” he suggests, they may play the role of “good shepherds to the rest of the human race.” But, under any circumstances, he predicts, the mass of humanity “will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

Clearly, as a society, we need to start thinking about how technology can serve broader human purposes. This is not an impingement on private enterprise: The Internet, and the microprocessor, were developed largely at taxpayer expense, notably through the Defense Department and NASA. Digital technology should be spurring the creation of new competitive companies, not, as we see now, fostering an American version of the Japanese cartels called keiretsu, where firms like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft use their unfathomable riches to dominate a host of fields, from robotics and space travel to health care, even publishing.

Instead of allowing technology to promote oligopoly, we need to spark competition to speed up innovation that could benefit the majority of people, as opposed to creating a class of fabulously rich superhumans. We also need again to expand our physical frontiers – both in space and, with intelligence, on Earth – so more people can live comfortably, with privacy and maximum freedom of action. Let's make Tomorrowland again a place we would like to have our children inhabit.

This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

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.

Creative Commons photo "Engineers" by Flickr user ensign_beedrill

A three installment start at a potential Discovery Channel “reality” program called Salvage City has created a minor kerfuffle in some local quarters. I haven’t seen the show, but it appears to feature a group of the Beautiful and the Bearded who break into buildings, ostensibly illegally, on architectural salvage missions one step ahead of the wrecking ball, all for fun and profit. Here’s the trailer. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

Not everybody is happy with the “Rust Belt boneyard” take on the city. Michael Allen at Next City says this is an example of the Rust Belt frontier myth:

The term “Rust Belt” itself exaggerates the physical decay and isolates the identity of many cities in static matter. Advocates, journalists and scholars have popularized the term, often endearingly, while perpetuating the emphasis on what makes these places frontiers of decline. Narratives of the Rust Belt are still focused on loss, rife with a cynical nostalgia and a nagging refusal to cast in with wealthier and less damaged cities. The singularity of the conditions of places like St. Louis and Detroit remains mythic fodder for would-be heroes of public policy, architectural design and public art. There are many Daniel Boones of the legacy cities.

Allen, however, isn’t writing just to cast stones at the show. Chris Haxel at the Riverfront Times is more emphatic, saying St. Louis deserves better:

Where the producers really stumble is their characterization of St. Louis as a foe on the level of alligators or hurricanes. Salvage City is rife with images of decay or ruin porn, a style that fails to tiptoe the line between appreciation and exploitation. The salvage scenes are ostensibly about rescuing doomed valuables, but in reality glorify theft, plunder and trespassing.

…

What he and the show’s producers have done — exploit the city in exchange for personal gain — is the definition of selling out. Not the artistic selling out that is inevitable when a band or artist enjoys mainstream success, but the kind that constitutes betrayal….Here they are on national television, selling the city as an “urban wasteland…ripe for plunder.” Ultimately, Salvage City disappoints because St. Louis deserves better.

I post this because I always find it interesting to see the reactions people have when their city is supposedly mischaracterized for the worst in contrast to the crickets when locals use whitewash and marketroid materials to promote their city to the world. Want to see a real myth? Check out “Here Is St. Louis” (if the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

There’s nothing per se wrong with this. It’s a classic city video that portrays St. Louis as an amalgam of family friendly fun and Portland-style hipness, with a dollop of local flavor a multi-culti thrown in. But is it a full and inclusive portrayal of the reality of St. Louis? I don’t think so. In effect, videos like this are the flip side of Salvage City, but few people ever think to critique them.

I don’t want to suggest too much collective outrage, however. The response to Salvage City is a bit muted from what I can tell. And Alderman Olgilvie strikes a better tone in telling folks totake a chill pill:

Our mini freak-out over Salvage City comes on the heels of several media panic attacks in 2013. Other examples include reactions to a New York Times look at crime and murder in St. Louis, and a humorous Art Forum takedown of an overwrought guided bus tour of St. Louis art venues that culminated with a violet-hour visit to SLAM’s expansion grand opening. The story, and the predictable freak-out. (See RFT‘s “Snobby New York Art Critic Scowls on St. Louis.”) Writers snapped our photo when the light wasn’t flattering, and we didn’t like it one bit.

…

What it boils down to is a little hypersensitivity about how St. Louis is portrayed in national media, positive or negative. It is this nagging worry that folks on one coast or the other will write us off the same way one of Kendzior’s article headlines refers to us, as flyover country.

…

Perhaps our New Year’s resolution should be a little bit thicker skin, and a renewed confidence in telling, and hearing, all the stories about our city: good, bad and indifferent. Rather than make one story carry the burden of representing all the facets of our city, let a thousand voices rise in song or storytelling, each with its own particular perspective.

The challenge for St. Louis and other such place is to develop a maturing sense of confidence about who they are. One that accepts the vicissitudes of the media, isn’t afraid to acknowledge legitimate faults, isn’t dependent on the approval of others for a sense of self-worth, and is willing to go its own way into the future.

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, where this piece originally appeared.

St. Louis Skyline photo by Wendell Cox.

The United States could have three more megacities (metropolitan areas over 10 million) by 2042, according to population projections released by the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston  are projected to join megacities New York and Los Angeles as their metropolitan area populations rise above 10 million. At the projected growth rates, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino could pass the threshold by 2060. The population projections were prepared for USCM by Global Insight IHS.

USCM anticipates that the number of major metropolitan areas – those over 1,000,000 population –- will rise from 51 in 2012 to 70 in 2042 (Note). The additional 19 major metropolitan areas range from Honolulu, which should exceed the million threshold next year, to Colorado Springs. California would add four new major metropolitan areas, including Fresno, Bakersfield, and Stockton from the San Joaquin Valley and Oxnard, which is adjacent to Los Angeles. Texas would add two, McAllen and El Paso, as would Florida (Cape Coral and Sarasota) and South Carolina (Columbia and Charleston).

The Top 10 in 2042

The top ten rankings would change relatively little. The top five would continue to be (in order), New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston. But the relationships would change materially. Dallas-Fort Worth would trail Chicago by only 30,000, much reduced from the 2012 gap of 2.9 million. If the annual projected growth rate were to continue another year (to 2043), Dallas-Fort Worth would take third position from Chicago, ending more than eight decades in that position. Houston also is forecast to gain substantially on Chicago, from a deficit of 3.3 million in 2012 to only 900,000 in 2042. If the respective annual growth rates were to continue, Houston would bump Chicago to fifth place by 2050.

Atlanta would move up three positions to number 6, and could be the nation's 6th megacity before 2050. Miami would move from 8th to 7th. There would be two new entrants to the top ten: Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino, ranked 8th and 9th. These two, along with Miami could become megacities before 2060. The tenth position would be held by fast growing Washington, which would remain the only non megacity in the top ten.

Seven of the top ten metropolitan areas in 2042 are forecast to grow very rapidly. Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino are projected to grow at annual rates of 2.1 percent and 2.0 percent respectively, approximately three times the 2012-2042 national growth rate projected by the US Census Bureau (0.7 percent). Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston would grow at 2.5 times the national rate (1.7 percent), Miami nearly double (1.3 percent) and Washington at 1.5 times the national rate (1.0 percent).

Washington is technically in the South, which according to the US Census Bureau begins at the Mason-Dixon line, or the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. This means that all of the fast growing top 10 metropolitan areas are in the South or West, a pervasive trend discussed later in this article.

Meanwhile, the three largest metropolitan areas would have well below average growth. New York would grow the slowest, at 0.3 percent. Chicago would grow at 0.5 percent annually, faster than Los Angeles, a national growth leader for a century, which would grow at only a 0.4 percent annual rate (Figure 1).

Fastest Growth Major Metropolitan Areas

Among the 70 major metropolitan areas, the fastest growing would be Cape Coral, Florida, with an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent. Provo, Utah and McAllen, Texas would grow at 2.3 percent. Six of the ten fastest growing metropolitan areas already have more than 1,000,000 population, including Austin, Phoenix, Raleigh, Riverside-San Bernardino, and Atlanta (10th). Boise would be the 9th fastest growing (Figure 2)

Slowest Growth Major Metropolitan Areas

Four of 2042's major metropolitan areas would lose population from 2012, including Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Hartford, Rochester, Milwaukee, and Providence would grow at less than one-third the national population growth rate. New Orleans and New York would round out the bottom ten, growing at an annual rate of approximately 0.25 percent (Figure 3).

Though Los Angeles is not among the bottom ten (it would #13), it is notable that its growth rate is projected to be slightly less than St. Louis, long a laggard, and only slightly better than Philadelphia. Philadelphia has been losing position regularly since it was the nation's largest city, before the first US census (1790).

Regional Distribution of Growth

According to the USCM projections, the overwhelming majority of major metropolitan area population growth (70 areas) will occur in the South and West. Approximately 51 percent of the major metropolitan growth is expected in the South, which would add 33 million residents. The West would capture 36 percent of the growth, while adding 22 million residents. The Midwest would capture only 9 percent of the growth, adding 8 million residents, while the Northeast would take 4 percent of the growth, while adding only 2 million residents (Figure 4).

The South would grow at an annual rate double that of the national 0.7 percent rate (1.4 percent). The West would be close behind (1.2 percent). However, if the major metropolitan areas of coastal California were excluded from the West (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose), the West would grow even faster than the South (1.6 percent). Coastal California's annual growth rate is projected at 0.6 percent, below the national average of 0.7 percent.

The Northeast and the Midwest would both grow at less than the national growth rate (0.2 percent and 0.5 percent respectively). The fastest growing metropolitan area in the Midwest is projected to be Indianapolis, at a respectable 1.2 percent growth rate (ranking 32 out of 70). Midwestern Omaha, Kansas City, and Columbus would also grow faster than the nation.

The fastest growing major metropolitan area in the Northeast would be Philadelphia, which would add only 0.3 percent to its population annually (ranking 59th). Philadelphia would add only slightly more residents than Provo, Utah, despite being more than 10 times as large in 2012.

Projections are Projections

Projecting anything can be risky. Unforeseen circumstances could result in a materially different future than forecasts suggest. No reputable forecaster, for example would have predicted during the 20th century that North Dakota would become the nation's fastest growing state in the early 2010s. Upstate New York, for example, could experience an economic turnaround if state allows them to take advantage of hydraulic fracking. The long-suffering Buffalo and Rochester metropolitan areas could rise well above current expectations. It is probably far too much to expect any major material progress in California, with a business climate so colorfully dismissed by The Economist in its current edition (see The Not So Golden State).

The USCM projections to 2042 indicate a continuation of geographical trends that have been strengthening virtually every decade since the middle of the last century. Barring any sea-changes, they are more likely to be more right than wrong.



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Note: The USCM projections were prepared before the revision of metropolitan area boundaries in 2013. This revision added Grand Rapids as the 52nd major metropolitan area. Had the new definitions been available, Grand Rapids would have been the 71st major metropolitan area. Generally, there were only minor changes in the major metropolitan area definitions, the most significant being New York, Charlotte, Grand Rapids, and Indianapolis.

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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: Cape Coral, Florida: Projected Fastest Growing Major Metropolitan Area: 2012-2042 (by author)

Income inequality is an increasingly dominant theme in American culture and politics. Data from the IRS covering mean and median income of filing households for 2012 by zipcode allow us to map and interpret the fascinating geography of income differences. Where are the richest areas, the poorest and the most unequal?

The IRS data do not give us the distributions of incomes, so this report does not tell us where the largest numbers of rich or poor populations will be found; this can be done from the American Community Survey for large enough units of geography. With the IRS data, the median is the income of the household halfway between poorest to richest after all are ranked by income. The mean, or average income, is the aggregate income of all households divided by the number of households filing a return. 

Most of the over 44,000 US zip codes have a sufficient mix of lower to higher income households that they do not stand out as extremely rich or poor. Even many zips with very low mean or median incomes are not so extreme since most of the poor population actually lives in more mixed income areas. Very unequal areas are defined here as having a far higher mean than median income, indicating an imbalance of incomes, e.g. a few very high income households inflate the average over the more typical, median income.

The Richest Zip Codes

Figure 1 maps the 170 zip codes with more than 1000 people and median incomes over $150,000 or mean incomes over $200,000. The most astounding thing about the map (which shows the number of rich zip codes by the county they are part of) is their  concentration  in a few areas, led by the country’s premier global city, greater New York city, with 75 of the 170. New York is followed by Washington DC with 23, another sign of the growing wealth of the national capital.  Boston follows with 10, Los Angeles, 18, San Francisco (14), and Chicago (6) and then a scattering in other leading metropolitan areas. There is no such concentration of the super-rich in any rural or small town area. But many are quasi-rural suburban and exurban.

But, the reader will protest, there are huge numbers of rich folk in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states. The reason is that these many rich households are “diluted” in impact because the zip codes are more variable in income. There really is something remarkable about the overwhelming affluence of the key suburban areas of Westchester and Nassau, New York; Fairfield, CT; Fairfax, VA; and Howard and Montgomery, MD. But I believe the map is telling and accurate at highlighting the utter dominance of the economic power of New York and then Washington. Boston retains power beyond its size, while Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and upstarts in the South scramble for a place.

The Richest Areas

The zip code with the highest and the 4th highest incomes are in Westchester County, close to the Connecticut border. The second richest, Westbury, is in Nassau county, New York, which also has the 9th richest. Also in the NYC suburbs are the 8th, in New Jersey just 20 miles west of New York, while 10th and 11th richest are both located  in Fairfield County, CT.

Chicago’s north Cook county has the 3rd (Kenilworth) and 12th (Glencoe) richest areas.  Los Angeles is home to the 7th richest, Bel Air (northwest of Beverly Hills), Atherton, in San Mateo county, is the 5th richest, and Gladwyne in Montgomery County, PA is the 6th richest.  Greater New York then is home to 7 of the 12 richest, followed by Chicago with 2.  Quite a concentration. 

The Poorest Zip Codes

The list and map (Figure 2) of counties with poor zip codes may surprise the reader more. I divide the 94 poorest areas into five types:

The poor college areas are zip codes for student dormitory housing, people who are temporarily poor; some military base areas are similarly poor because of barrack housing of single people.

The poorest minority dominated areas are mainly Black and in the rural to small city South, except for a few Hispanic dominated areas in the west. The college poor areas are scattered across the country, especially in the East, the military base communities in Texas and Oklahoma. The rural set is surprisingly concentrated mainly in the north, especially in Michigan. The few inner city poor areas are in Los Angeles, Waterbury, CT: Portland, OR; Youngstown and Canton, OH; an odd set. A few of the rural areas also have correctional institutions.

If I had relaxed limit by including more smaller population areas, or not quite such low incomes, many more college, military base, minority majority counties would appear on the map. But as noted up front, virtually none of these poorest zip codes are in big cities or their metropolitan areas, where millions of poor households live, simply because these metro zip codes tend to be large and more heterogeneous. This also does not factor in the cost of living, which can be high in some regions, particularly on the east and west coasts.

The Poorest Areas

The 12 poorest zip codes are different and quite varied in character. Five of the zip codes are essentially college or university student housing, and thus not indicative of an adult working population. Three areas are in part poor because of the presence of correctional institutions or adult care institutions. Two of these also have a significant minority (Black) population. Two rural areas, in GA and VA have high Black shares. This leaves two northern rural areas in Michigan (high seasonal dependency) and in New York, Salamanca, also a seasonal resort, as well as an Indian reservation.

Unequal Zip Code

The unequal zip codes (67) are mainly areas where the mean is at least twice the median, showing the disproportionate effect of a few very wealthy households. One critical area for high inequality are primarily beach or mountain communities with richer retirees serviced by lower-paid workers; these include 13 areas in California, South Carolina, Florida, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, and Colorado. Downtowns (8 areas) include a few actual downtown CBD zip codes with an older poor population and newer rich folk. Rural here identifies mainly small Kentucky zip codes with a very imbalanced income pattern (7 areas). Finally I note a few zip codes in exurban areas where there appears to be a juxtaposition of an older resident population, and newer wealthier households (3 areas). This pattern may become more common in both exurban and rural small-town environmental amenity areas.

The Most Unequal Areas

Of the 13 most unequal areas, 6 are college or university zip codes, areas with poor students and much higher income professionals. Two are downtown zip codes, Boston and San Antonio, two are minority population areas, Louisiana and Texas. Two are resort areas, in Nevada and North Carolina, but several similar areas are not far down on the list. One Kentucky area is classed as just rural, but again other similar counties are on the fuller list.

Several zip codes are on both the poorest and the unequal zip code lists, most commonly the college and the minority-dominated areas. Rich suburban and exurban areas tend to be fairly consistently rich, resort areas tend to be more unequal.

Conclusion

The zip code data provide a partial, highly localized look at the geography of inequality. If American society continues to accept extreme income, the geography of inequality will only become not only more extreme, but more pronounced in a diverse set of locations.

Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist).

It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred and even an “endangered species.”  Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.”

Yet in recent years, according to research by Mark Schill of the Praxis Strategy Group, there’s been a strong revival in higher-paid blue-collar industries in many of our largest metropolitan areas, and the momentum is, if anything, building. Schill analyzed employment changes from 2007 to 2013  among a group of higher-paying blue-collar industries: oil and gas and mining; construction; manufacturing; and wholesale trade, transportation, warehousing and waste handling. Compensation in these sectors average $58,000 a year; in oil and gas, pay tops $100,000. In any case, these fields pay far better than alternative sources of employment for people without college degrees, such as retailing ($27,500), food service ($16,000), hospitality, or the arts ($31,000). Nationally, this cross section of higher-value blue-collar industries employs 31.3 million people, just more than a fifth of the nation’s workforce, up 1.3 million jobs since 2010.

This blue-collar resurgence seems likely to be  more than a merely cyclical phenomenon. The U.S. edge in energy and manufacturing, increasingly linked, has sparked major new investments by both domestic and foreign producers. The new energy finds have created employment in the construction and operation of such things as pipelines and refineries, and have also led manufacturers to plan new factories here due to electricity and feedstock costs that are now well below those in Europe or East Asia.

The Boston Consulting Group suggests other factors sparking this revival. This includes  rising wages in China as well as sometimes unpredictable business conditions that are leading some large U.S. companies to move some production to America from China.

Overall, since 2010 the number of high-value manufacturing jobs is up 167,000 in the 52 largest metropolitan areas while energy extraction added 50,000 positions. (Heavily subsidized renewables enjoyed a much smaller increase.) The wholesale trade and material handling sectors have added almost 300,000 jobs in  that time. And as the economy has recovered somewhat, demand for housing, including in some once distressed exurban areas, has sparked a nascent revival in higher-paying construction employment. This key blue-collar sector, devastated by the recession, has gained roughly 200,000 jobs since 2010.

This revival is not evenly spread. The big winner is the Houston metro area, in large part due to the energy industry, which has added 23,000 jobs since 2010. It also reflects local growth in the high-wage manufacturing (up 30,000 jobs) and trade and transport sectors (up 26,000), while construction employment has surged nearly 20,000, a number matched only by the much larger New York metro area. Houston tops our list of the cities creating the most good blue-collar jobs. (Our ranking is based 50-50 on growth from 2007-13 and 2010-13.) Not far behind in second place is Oklahoma City, which has clocked a similarly broad increase, led by 28% growth in energy employment, 6% in construction and 15% in manufacturing.

Many of the other metro areas in our top 10 fit the same mold — traditionally business-friendly Sun Belt locales with strong energy sectors, and expanding manufacturing.

A Surge In The West

The Intermountain West also continues to create manufacturing and trade jobs at a rapid rate. This region’s blue-collar star is Salt Lake City, which places seventh on our list, led by a strong expansion in energy sector employment and trade and transport, with decent growth in manufacturing.

It’s not merely a “red state” phenomena. Progressive-dominated Denver places 11th on our list, with 32% growth in energy jobs as well as a 10% increase in construction employment. Similarly Portland (9th) and Seattle (10th) have produced more opportunities for blue-collar workers. This has been paced largely by strong growth in manufacturing, aided by low energy costs from hydro. IntelINTC +0.2% is building a large new factory near Portland, while BoeingBA -2.5% has continued to add jobs in the Seattle area – its headcount in Washington State is up 17% since 2010. Construction has also been healthy, in part due to migration from more expensive California, as well as trade, which ties into the region’s close ties to the Pacific Rim.

In contrast the “big enchilada” economies of California have lagged, and overall employment in high-paying blue collar sectors remains well below 2007 levels. But since 2010, there has been a modest uptick in manufacturing and construction in San Jose/Silicon Valley, which ranks 13th on our list, while San Francisco (16th) has seen some recovery in the transportation and trade sectors.

The Revival Of The Rust Belt

No part of the country is more associated with high-paid blue-collar work, and its decline, than the Rust Belt. Employment in most Rust Belt cities is well below 2007 levels, but since 2010 there has been a resurgence in high-paying manufacturing industries, led by the third-ranked Detroit area, which added 37,000 jobs.

This is clearly tied to the recovery of the U.S. auto industry. The East and West Coast media love to yammer about the demise of the car, but the industry’s production has returned to 2007 levels and automakers are investing in the region. GM has committed to spend over $1.3 billion to upgrade five factories in Ohio, Indiana, Detroit and the nearby Michigan cities of Flint and Romulus.

It’s more than an autos story in the region. Grand Rapids, which has a highly diverse manufacturing sector, including many furniture companies,  has increased industrial employment 16% since 2010, putting it fourth on our list. Other Rust Belt metro areas making a blue-collar comeback  are Louisville, Ky. (12th), Minneapolis (15th), Columbus, Ohio (18th), and Pittsburgh (19th).

The Laggards

Some metro areas have continued to lose high-wage blue-collar jobs, led by Las Vegas (down 4.2% since 2010), Orlando (-13.6% since 2007), Providence, Rochester and Philadelphia. Our two largest industrial metro areas, Chicago and Los Angeles, have seen slow growth, ranking 25th and 28th, respectively. Rapidly de-industrializing New York ranks 35th, despite the metro area’s surge in construction employment.

Yet overall, demand is rising for highly skilled workers at U.S. industrial and energy companies.

At a time when the wages of college graduates have been falling, it might behoove more young people to realize that, in many cases, a degree in art is not worth as much as a certificate for machining, welding, plant management or plumbing. Some metro areas are bolstering their efforts in this area, notably New Orleans, Columbus, Nashville and even creative class-oriented Portland.

To be sure, the golden days for working-class employment are over, but the future may prove to be a lot less dismal, particularly in some regions, than generally proclaimed by those who have rarely seen in the inside of factory or a refinery.

Data source: QCEW Employees, Non-QCEW Employees & Self-Employed - EMSI 2013.4 Class of Worker. Analysis by Mark Schill, Praxis Strategy Group, mark@praxissg.com. The analysis covers 37 "blue collar" industry sectors at the 3-digit NAICS classification level, each averaging at least $40,000 in average annual pay (including benefits). Industries include oil and gas extraction, utilities, heavy and specialty construction, most manufacturing, merchant wholesale industries, most transportation sectors, warehousing and storage, and waste management.

This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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.

Auto manufacturing photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

The stock market is high, real estate prices have resurged, even the unemployment rate is dropping, yet Americans still feel pretty down about the future. A survey released in January by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research had 54 percent of respondents expecting American life to go downhill over the coming decades. In a December survey, 23 percent of respondents said things will improve over time.

Yet, in reality, there are several huge trends – economic, environmental, demographic – working in favor of the United States. Despite 13 straight years of underwhelming leadership, the U.S. can emerge extraordinarily blessed from the Great Recession and lackluster recovery, if Americans take advantage of our current situation.

Why, then, so glum? One explanation clearly is the shape of the economic recovery, which, due in part to Federal Reserve monetary policy, has favored the rich by primarily promoting stock market and other asset growth. “Qualitative easing,” notes one former high-level Fed official, essentially constituted a “too big to fail” windfall for the largest Wall Street firms. Executives at these same firms set new compensation records in 2011, just three years after the financial “wizards” left the world economy on the brink of economic catastrophe.

As people on Wall Street, and their hipper counterparts in Silicon Valley, celebrate their good fortune, most people are not doing well, and they know it. Unemployment may have dropped officially, but the percentage of Americans in the workforce is now at the lowest level since December 1977. Huge parts of our society now face long-term unemployment or, at best, a marginal existence at the low end of the job market.

This trend is most disturbing because it has been going on for a long time and, generally, has been getting worse. Since 1973, for example, the rate of growth of the “typical family's income” in the United States has slowed dramatically; for males, it has actually gone backward when adjusted for inflation, at least until the early 1980s. In contrast, in 2012, the top 1 percent of earners accounted for one-quarter of all American income, the highest percentage in the past century.

So, given these problems, why should anyone be optimistic? After all, by 2020, the CIA suggested in 2005, the U.S. world position will have eroded because of the rise, most notably, of India and China; many business leaders share this assessment.

Nevertheless, here are five reasons for optimism.

Everyone else is in worse shape

Looking for a global hot spot that's doing better? Look again. Virtually all America's much-vaunted competitors of yesterday – notably, Japan and the European Union – have suffered slow economic and demographic growth. The much-ballyhooed winner of tomorrow, China, also appears to be slowing. Political corruption, soaring local debt and massive levels of pollution are creating a crisis of confidence, reflected by the growing exodus of the educated and affluent from China and Hong Kong , with many ending up in the United States.

The other members of the so-called BRIC countries – a term coined by one of the geniuses at Goldman Sachs– also are stagnating. Brazil's successful bids to host the 2016 Summer Olympics and this summer's soccer World Cup have made ever more obvious the country's massive poverty and political incompetence, made all the worse by a slowing economy. India, too, is experiencing weak growth and increased political instability. Russia's uncrowned czar, Vladimir Putin, may be outmaneuvering our gullible, indecisive president but the country Putin controls is going nowhere, with the population stagnating and its weakening economy utterly dependent on extractive resources. Turkey, another favorite of the investment banks, is also showing signs of distress and instability.

Energy revolution

Barack Obama has tried to take credit for America's huge shift toward self-sufficiency in oil and gas, a movement driven largely by wildcatters and independents. Of course, it would have never happened if he had his druthers; under his administration, energy production on federal lands has dropped steadily. Nevertheless, the president seems smart enough not to shut off this amazing development on private and state lands, despite incessant pressure from his environmentalist supporters.

The energy revolution, notably in natural gas, changes everything. It allows us to tell many of the world's leading malefactors – Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia – to keep their oil. It also is driving continued improvement in air quality and reduced levels of greenhouse gases. American natural gas, rapidly replacing coal as an energy source, has turned this country into what one green think tank, the Breakthrough Institute, called “the global climate leader.” We are lowering our emissions far more rapidly than are the Europeans, people widely praised by some U.S. greens for having superior policies.

Manufacturing resurgence

For all the concern expressed about the “end of the car era,” the U.S. auto industry is doing pretty well, in fact, selling vehicles at about the levels experienced before the Great Recession. General Motors, nearly dead five years ago, is now investing $1.3 billion to upgrade five Midwest factories. New auto plants, particularly those of European and Asian carmakers, are being erected across the South. But the resurgence of U.S. manufacturing is about more than cars; there also is huge investment in other industries, notably in pharmaceuticals and refining, notably tied to the energy revolution.

Critically, the vast supplies of oil and, most importantly, natural gas, are pushing down manufacturing costs well below those imposed on Asian and European firms. This is where industrial jobs have been growing the fastest, and are likely to expand in years ahead. In fact, U.S. industrial and energy production has driven U.S. exports to a record level, one clear sign that the nation's competitiveness is beginning to move beyond our traditional strengths in entertainment, services and agriculture.

Demographic advantages

As in other countries, The U.S. birth rate fell during the recession, but this decline has now stopped as the economy has crawled back. Over the past decade, the U.S., through somewhat high birth rates and immigration, has avoided the kind of demographic implosions that afflict most of our key competitors. In the next few decades, the working population of Americans is expected to grow substantially, while those in Japan, Korea, Europe and China all taper off.

America's relative youth helps not only fiscally – with more young people to carry the burden of a swelling retiree population – but also culturally. Despite the rise of entertainment and media in other countries (for example, Bollywood films or Korean pop music), the domination of new culture remains overwhelmingly American. Critically, this applies not only to Hollywood but even more so to digital media, where U.S. domination is both overwhelming and terrifying our competitors, particularly the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing.

Blessings of federalism

Perhaps America's greatest strength lies in its constitutional order. Unlike other countries, the U.S. was defined by a separation of powers that accommodates regional differences. The calls from Washington by both Left and Right for more national solutions is misplaced; whether used to promote conservative or liberal policies, one size does not fit nearly all in a country as diverse and differentiated as the United States.

Instead, we need to let our states and regions seek out the approaches that work best for them. If Ohio and Pennsylvania allow fracking, and it creates significantly better results than those in anti-fossil-fuel states like New York and California, that would send a message to other states, but does not have to reflect a national policy.

America's regions have enormous assets and advantages in the global economy. If we allow them to exploit what they have, there may be more hope for the future than many now believe.

This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

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.

USA map image by BigStockPhoto.

An idea that’s been kicked around by many is to help turn around struggling cities like Detroit by offering geographically limited immigrations visas. That is, to allow foreigners get their green card if they agree to live in a particular city for a certain number of years.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has now officially endorsed the concept, calling for Detroit to be awarded 50,000 city-specific immigration visas for skilled workers over five years. As the NYT put it:

Under the plan, which is expected to be formally submitted to federal authorities soon, immigrants would be required to live and work in Detroit, a city that has fallen to 700,000 residents from 1.8 million in the 1950s.

“Isn’t that how we made our country great, through immigrants?” said Mr. Snyder, a Republican, who last year authorized the state’s largest city to seek bankruptcy protection and recently announced plans to open a state office focused on new Americans.

Later, he added, “Think about the power and the size of this program, what it could do to bring back Detroit, even faster and better.”

The appeal of the idea is obvious. I’ve probably said positive things about it myself in the past. But examine it more closely and it’s clear this is an idea that’s fatally flawed. By requiring immigrants to live and work in the city of Detroit for a period of time, this program would effectively bring back indentured servitude, only instead of having to work for the people who paid for their trip to America, these immigrants would have to work for Detroit.

I’ve got to believe that the courts would look skeptically at such a scheme that so radically restricts geographic mobility and opportunity. What’s more, I think it’s plain wrong to invite people into our country with the idea that they are de facto restricted to one municipality.

L. Brooks Patterson, county executive of wealthy Oakland County in suburban Detroit, took huge heat again this week when he was quoted in the New Yorker saying “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn.’” Yet isn’t this idea of city specific visas almost literally treating Detroit like a reservation, only for immigrants instead of Indians?

Some have likened this to programs to entice doctors to rural areas by paying for medical school. I’m not sure how all of those are structured, but they may have questionable elements as well. But more importantly, my understanding is that they are purely financial, where medical school loans are paid off in return for a certain number of years of service. If a doctor elects to leave the program, they are in no worse shape than someone who didn’t sign up would be. They are still licensed to practice medicine and have to repay their loans just like every other doctor.

I don’t think Gov. Snyder is motivated by any ill will in this. I think he’s genuinely looking for creative solutions to the formidable problems Detroit faces. He’s taken huge heat for finally facing up to the legacy of problems there, and hasn’t shied way from making tough calls. He’s even willing to call for some bailout money, which many in his own party don’t like. But this idea is a bad one. He should withdraw it, and the federal government should by no means open to the door to these types of arrangements.

Immigrants remain a great way to pursue a civic turnaround, however. Detroit just needs to lure them on the open market the same way Dayton, Ohio and others are trying to do.

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, where this piece originally appeared.

Photo by telwink

Despite planning efforts to restrict it, the Bay Area  continues to disperse. For decades, nearly all population and employment growth in the San Jose-San Francisco Combined Statistical Area has been in the suburbs, rather than in the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland. The CSA (Note) is composed of seven adjacent metropolitan areas (San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Napa, and Stockton). A similar expansion also occurred in the New York CSA.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to two of the three most dense built-up urban areas in the United States, the San Francisco urban area, (6,266 residents per square mile or 2,419 per square kilometer) with the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland and the all-suburban San Jose urban area (5,820 residents per square mile or 2,247 per square kilometer), according to US Census 2010 data. Only the Los Angeles urban area is denser (6,999 per square mile or 2.702 per square kilometer). The more spread out New York urban area trails at 5,319 per square mile (2,054 per square kilometer).

The San Francisco Bay & Central Valley Area

The continuing dispersion was reflected in commuting patterns that developed between 2000 and 2010, with the addition of the Stockton metropolitan area, which is composed of San Joaquin County, with more than 700,000 residents. San Joaquin County is located in the Central Valley and is so far removed from San Francisco Bay that it may be appropriate in the long run to think of the area as the "San Francisco Bay & Central Valley Area." The distance from Stockton to the closest point shore of San Francisco Bay is 60 miles, and it is nearly another 25 miles to the city of San Francisco.

Ironically, this continued dispersion of jobs and residences is, at least in part, driven by the San Francisco Bay Area's urban containment land use policies designed to prevent it. What the planners have ignored is the impact on house prices associated with highly restrictive land use planning. The San Francisco metropolitan area and the San Jose metropolitan area are the third and fourth most unaffordable major housing markets out of 85 rated in the recent 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, trailing only Hong Kong and Vancouver.

Historical Core Cities: San Francisco and Oakland

The historical core municipalities (cities) of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco and Oakland have held their population very well. Each essentially retains it 1950 borders. Among the 40 US cities with more than 250,000 residents in 1950, only San Francisco and Oakland managed population increases by 2000 without substantial annexations and substantial non-urban (rural) territory within their city limits. For example, New York and Los Angeles, both of which have grown, have nearly the same city limits as in 1950 and 2000, yet much of New York's Staten Island was rural in 1950 as was much of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.

Yet both San Francisco and Oakland have had difficult times. Between 1950 and 1980, both San Francisco and Oakland suffered 12 percent population losses, which were followed by recoveries. The losses were modest compared to the emptying out of municipalities like St. Louis. Detroit, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Paris, which remain one quarter to nearly two-thirds below their 1950s figures. Further, population gains from annexations masked losses within the 1950 boundaries of many cities, such as Portland, Seattle, and Indianapolis, etc.

San Jose: Now the Largest City

San Jose is now the Bay Area's largest city. San Jose has grown spectacularly, from a population of 95,000 in 1950 to nearly 1,000,000 today. San Jose passed San Francisco by the 1990 census and Oakland by the 1970 census (Figure 1). Virtually all of San Jose's population growth has occurred during the postwar period of automobile suburbanization. The pre-automobile urban form familiar in San Francisco and central Oakland simply does not exist in San Jose. Even attempts to pretend the pre-war urban form has returned have been famously unsuccessful. Even after building an extensive light rail system, San Jose's transit work trip market share is barely one quarter that of the adjacent San Francisco metropolitan area.

Nonetheless, suburban San Jose has become a dominant force in the "Silicon Valley", which stretches through San Mateo County in the San Francisco metropolitan area and into Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose. The Silicon Valley has been the capital of the international information technology business for at least a half century. The highly suburbanized region has done more than its share to elevate the San Francisco Bay Area to its high standard of living (According to Brookings Institution data), a phenomenon that has spread also the urban core of San Francisco. At the same time, San Jose is the second most affluent major metropolitan in the world and San Francisco ranks seventh. The Silicon Valley, which includes much of San Mateo County (adjacent to Santa Clara County in the San Francisco metropolitan area), is clearly the economic engine of the region with twice as many jobs as San Francisco (which is both a city and a county).

Metropolitan Growth

Overall, the San Francisco Bay Area has grown approximately 180 percent since 1950, considerably more than the national average from 1950 to 2012 of 107 percent. The Bay Area's growth was strong, but well behind the 280 percent growth achieved in the Los Angeles CSA (Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, and Oxnard MSAs).

However, growth has since moderated substantially. Between 1950 and 2000, the Bay Area grew at an annual rate of 1.9 percent but since 2000, the annual growth rate has dropped to 0.7 percent annually. Even so, in recent years, the Bay Area has nearly equaled the much slowed growth of the Los Angeles CSA, adding 23.6 percent to its population since 1990, compared to 25.5 percent in Los Angeles. Both areas, however, grew at less than the national population increase rate (25.8 percent), and slowing, in the 2000s to the slowest growth rates since California became a state in 1850.

Suburban Growth

Despite the decent demographic performance of the cities of San Francisco and Oakland since 1950, nearly all Bay Area growth occurred in the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2012, only one percent of population growth in the CSA occurred in the two historical core municipalities and 99 percent in suburban areas. Things have been somewhat better for the two cities since 2000, with seven percent of the growth in the historical core municipalities and 93 percent of the growth in suburban areas (Figure 2).

Since 1950, the San Jose metropolitan area has grown by far the fastest in the CSA, with the more than 500 percent increase in population. The outer metropolitan areas (Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Napa, and Stockton) have grown nearly 300 percent, while the parts of the San Francisco metropolitan area outside the two core cities grew more than 200 percent. San Francisco and Oakland grew approximately 5 percent (Figure 3).

Domestic Migration

As house prices increased before the subprime crisis, the Bay Area lost more than 600,000 domestic migrants, a rate of more than 85,000 per year. Since 2008, however, with substantially lower house prices, and a renewed tech boom, there has been an annual gain of approximately 4,000 to the Bay Area in domestic migration. However, if the substantial house price increases since 2012 continue, the area could again become a net exporter of people.

Future Urban Evolution

Like much of California, San Francisco Bay CSA exhibits much slower population growth than before. How much of this is tied to the regional and state policies constricting suburban housing remains an open question, but it seems much growth that might have occurred in the original San Francisco metropolitan area or the later developing San Jose metropolitan area will instead occur in the Vallejo or Stockton metropolitan areas, where housing prices  tend to be much lower, particularly for larger homes that are increasingly unaffordable closer to the urban core. Indeed, it is not impossible that Modesto (Stanislaus County) could be added  to the San Francisco Bay CSA by 2020, which is even farther away from the historical core than the Stockton metropolitan area.

At the same time, many potential new residents may find either the high prices near the core nor the long commutes associated with Central Valley residence unappealing. Many households may instead seek their aspirations in Utah, Colorado, Texas, and even Oklahoma, not least because the "California Dream" has been made affordable.

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: Metropolitan areas are labor markets. Their building blocks in the United States are complete counties. Metropolitan statistical areas are organized around built up urban areas with counties reaching a threshold of the urban area population being considered central counties and included in the metropolitan area. In addition, any county with an employment interchange of 25 percent or more with the core counties is also included in the metropolitan area. Adjacent metropolitan areas are added together to form Combined Statistical Areas if there is a 15 percent or more employment interchange. This is a simplified definition. Complete details are available from the US Office of Management and the Budget.

Photo: Market Street, San Francisco (by author)

This is the second of a two-part series discussing Charles Mongomery's Happy City. Read part one here.

‘The system that built sprawl’

Montgomery faces the hurdle of explaining why, if low-density suburbs cause unhappiness, so many millions of people, over so many decades, across several countries, flocked to that way of life. As he writes, ‘since 1940, almost all urban growth has actually been suburban.’ He must account for this fact, even though it means little to him personally. For the green-tinged intelligentsia, working and middle-class people are pawns who rarely think for themselves.      

Still, in Montgomery’s case the hurdle is high, since his objections to dispersion go much further than conventional gripes about fragile economic foundations. Happy City does peddle the myth, in passing, that the financial crisis brought suburbanisation to a crashing halt. There’s an assertion that ‘census data in 2010/2011 showed that major American cities showed more growth than their suburbs’, and a hope this points to forces ‘systemic and powerful enough to permanently alter the course of urban history’. Montgomery even compares buying a detached home on the urban edge to ‘gambling on oil futures and global geopolitics’. As it turns out, he misconstrues the available data. Suburbanisation barely missed a beat in the United States and continues in earnest. 

Montgomery’s essential point, though, is that suburban life is contrary to deep-seated human yearnings. This endows him with an even more patronising attitude to working people than his forerunners Richard Florida – who endorses the book – and Edward Glaeser. One line of argument in Happy City, which also features in Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, claims dispersion was forced on people by greedy land owners and property developers in cahoots with weak-kneed or compromised politicians and officials.

He puts it his way: ‘sprawl, as an urban form, was laid-out, massively subsidized and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there … it is as much the result of zoning, legislation and lobbying as a crowded city block.’ In another chapter, Montgomery warns of the challenge for pro-density New Urbanism: ‘the system that built sprawl – huge state subsidies, financial incentives and powerful laws – is still in place.’ Popular preferences don’t even rate a mention. Similar comments appear throughout the book, adding up to an audacious feat of historical revisionism.

The standard interpretation of urban evolution, from the walking city to the monocentric and then polycentric metropolis, places breakthroughs in transport technologies first, most notably railways, streetcars (trams) and affordable motor vehicles, followed by mass shifts in transportation modes and population movements second, with land owners and politicians ready to exploit the new conditions. Of course, transportation technologies have such a powerful impact because of pent up demand for space and lower densities.

Essentially, Montgomery reverses the causative sequence, claiming government and business interests dragged people to the fringes and this induced a transformation of transportation modes, which may or may not have been viable under prevailing technologies. This anomalous theory puts him at odds with some of the most recognised urban thinkers:  

• Lewis Mumford in The City in History: ‘what has happened to the suburb is now a matter of historic record … as soon as the motor car became common, the pedestrian scale of the suburb disappeared …’
• Peter Hall in Cities in Civilization, discussing Los Angeles: ‘the car was doing more than decentralize; it was decentralizing in a new way’.
• Robert Bruegmann in Sprawl: ACompact History: ‘families wishing to live at lower densities could be seen as the primary cause of the growth in … the railroad, public transportation and finally the automobile industry … each of these means of transportation did, in fact, give families increased mobility.’
• Joel Kotkin in The City: A Global History: ‘as automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of [the United States] also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities.’
• Shlomo Angel in Planet of Cities: ‘a third and more radical transformation, from the monocentric to the polycentric city, began in the middle decades of the twentieth century with the rapid increase in the use of cars, buses, and trucks.’

Such quotes can be piled up all day long.    

Happy City is open to the same criticism as Glaeser’s book, namely that as a matter of chronology, urban dispersion took off before the interstate highway system, tax deductibility of home mortgage interest, the relative decline of inner-city schools, many development controls, and other factors cited by both as having pushed Americans to the periphery. In Downtown: Its Rise and Fall 1880-1950, Robert Fogelson explains that ‘by the mid and late 1920s, however, some Americans had come to the conclusion that the centrifugal forces were beginning to overpower the centripetal forces – or, in other words, that the dispersal of residences might well lead in time to the decentralization of business.’ And suburbs have been popular in countries other than the US, like Australia, where these sorts of factors are absent.

Blinded by science

For his part, Montgomery envisages an alternative past, in which demands for space and mobility hardly figure. ‘Well, the path that led … to today’s sprawl was not straight’, he writes, ‘it meandered back and forth between pragmatism, greed, racism and fear.’ Rewriting history may be audacious, but that’s just the beginning. The book doesn’t stop at denouncing suburbanisation as a form of organised compulsion. Montgomery’s ultimate purpose, drawing on ‘happiness science’, is to expose suburban life as a mass delusion. ‘We need to identify the unseen systems that influence our health and control our behaviour’, he writes.     

Much of Happy City is devoted to a succession of studies and experiments by a range of neuroscientists, psychologists and behavioural economists on the conditions that stimulate feelings of well-being and contentment. Montgomery focuses on research into different spatial environments: densely or sparsely populated, high-rise or street-level, crowded or uncrowded, mixed-use or homogenous, auto-dependent or walkable, near or far from nature, and so on.

Many people have no clue that their deeper inclinations are out of synch with their surroundings, he maintains, painting a less than flattering portrait of human nature. ‘The more psychologists and [behavioural] economists examine the relationship between decision-making and happiness,’ he repeats in various ways, ‘the more they realize … we make bad choices all the time … in fact we screw up so systematically …’

Building a case that most of us are hobbled by delusions, Montgomery delights in claiming ‘we are far less rational in our decisions than we sometimes like to believe …’, and ‘we regularly respond to our environment in ways that seem to bear little relation to conscious thought or logic.’ Personal motives can be reduced to a stew of physiological and chemical stimuli, all summed up in a single paragraph:  

Neuroscientists have found that environmental cues trigger immediate responses in the human brain even before we are aware of them. As you move into a space, the hippocampus, the brain’s memory librarian, is put to work immediately … it also sends messages to the brain’s fear and reward centres … it’s neighbour, the hypothalamus, pumps out a hormonal response … before most of us have decided if a place is safe or dangerous … places that seem too sterile or too confusing can trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety … places that seem familiar … are more likely to activate hits of feel-good serotonin, as well as the hormone that … promotes feelings of interpersonal trust: oxytocin.

Nowhere is it acknowledged that if rational choice is devalued, people might end up being treated less like autonomous citizens and more like laboratory rats. Happiness ‘can’t be summed up by the number of things we produce or buy’, the book insists, ‘but the firing synapses of our brains, the chemistry of our blood …’

Montgomery proceeds to grab hold of anything that discredits the real-life choices of suburbia’s teeming millions. One of many concepts he takes from neuroscience is ‘information propagation’. By operation of the hippocampus and other parts of the brain, we are told, our ‘concept of the right house, car or neighbourhood might be as much a result of happy moments from our past or images that flood us in popular media as of any rational analysis.’ From psychology he borrows the concept of ‘adaptation’, described as a ‘characteristic that exacerbates such bad decision-making [namely] the uneven process by which we get used to things.’

He considers these important explanations for the appeal of suburban lifestyles when denser neighbourhoods are better for physical and mental health, at least according to his interpretation of studies and experiments on walking, cycling, social encounters, community activities, public space, streetscapes, grid planning, on-street parking and traffic velocity.  

But his method of selecting a body of research, cobbling the results together, and equating this to the preconditions for a happy life, suffers from a fallacy of composition ─ the error of inferring that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Although Montgomery claims ‘most people, in most places, have the same basic needs and most of the same desires’, it doesn’t follow that research findings on parts of life should add up to a real whole life.

Kirk Schneider, a prominent American psychologist, writes in Psychology Today that ‘prevailing studies of happiness … represent but a circumscribed range of how such phenomena are actually experienced on the ground, so to speak, in people’s everyday worlds.’ Schneider cautions that ‘those things represent only slices of life, not life itself.’

There’s no reason why urban planning should start from abstract assumptions drawn from a bunch of controlled experiments, rather than from masses of people weighing up their full, lived experience.   

In this and other ways, the book succumbs to a disturbing strain of authoritarianism. History teaches us to beware a state that deals with people through the prism of theories which second-guess their inner thoughts and feelings, rather than according to their outward conduct. Freedoms are at risk whenever powerful functionaries claim to know what people are thinking, because of ‘false consciousness,’ ethnic stereotypes, biological determinism, or whatever. And Montgomery is no freedom-fighter: ‘we are pushed and pulled according to the systems in which we find ourselves, and certain geometries ensure that none of us are as free as we might think.’  

‘Make them feel rich’

In the end, Happy City fails to prove the assertions trumpeted in its opening pages. It fails to produce any direct evidence connecting flatlining assessments of well-being or rising rates of depressive illness to ‘sprawl’. Nor is there any indirect evidence from which a connection can be inferred. Just as research on parts of life don’t add up to a whole real life, neither can studies and experiments finding discontent in particular conditions translate to generalised disenchantment with a whole way of life.

Montgomery’s style is to fill the gaps with a series of conveniently chosen anecdotes and vignettes, some designed to trash suburbia and others to wrap a glowing aura around transit-oriented density. Randy Straussner’s super-commuting horror story, which never goes away, is an example of the former. But the star of the book, and prominent case of the latter, is ‘The Mayor of Happy’.

At the helm of impoverished Bogota between 1998 and 2001, Enrique Penalosa cancelled a highway expansion plan, used the funds for hundreds of miles of cycle paths, hiked fuel taxes by 40 per cent, banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week, introduced car-free days, dedicated a new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas, and built the city’s first rapid transit system. This made him a guru to green urbanists like Montgomery, who was inspired to write HappyCity.

‘We might not be able to fix the economy’, Penalosa is quoted as saying in the book, ‘we might not be able to make everyone as rich as Americans … but we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich.’ Confronting an unemployment rate of 18 per cent when Penalosa left office, however, many Bogotans would have longed for the real thing. 

John Muscat is a co-editor of The New City, where this piece first appeared.

To identify economic hot spots in the making, we often look for where immigrants, young people or entrepreneurs are clustering. But perhaps nothing is a better indicator than those who truly make up generation next — America’s children.

Several major factors determine where the most children are being born, and more importantly, raised, says demographer Wendell Cox. Three key ones are economic growth, affordability and lower population densities.

Using the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey, Cox looked at the under 14 populations of the nation’s 51 metropolitan statistical areas with over a million residents, and also traced the changing numbers in this age group since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Finally he broke down each of these metro areas between their core cities and suburbs to determine where within the region children are the most predominant.

Thesuburbs have sometimes been described as the nurseries of the nation, but surprisingly the outer rings generally did not outperform core cities in terms of births over the period we examined. In the core cities of our 51 largest MSAs, newborns to 4-year-olds made up 6.9% of the population in 2012, compared to 6.3% in the suburbs. But even here, it’s not the “hip and cool” cities leading the way – San Francisco, Seattle and Boston were all well below the average. Generally the highest proportions of young children were in lower-density cores of such cities as Oklahoma City, Dallas, Charlotte, N.C., and Houston. (Two metro areas with denser urban cores, Milwaukee and Hartford, also made the top  10.)

But something dramatic happens as children age: They and their parents start moving to the suburbs in massive numbers. In both the 5-to-9 and 10-to-14 cohorts, suburbs easily surpass core cities in virtually every major metropolitan area. So while the popular perception that many downtowns are now overrun by baby strollers is not necessarily an urban myth, it ignores what happens to families as children get older and ambulatory, requiring more space, needing to go to school and more susceptible to getting into trouble.

In addition, Cox notes, not only are there higher concentrations of children in suburbs in the vast majority of metro areas, the overall greater population on the periphery makes the suburbs home to the preponderance of families. This is one reason that most of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. are either suburbs or exurbs. Roughly 23.9 million children below the age of 14 live in the suburbs of our 51 largest metro areas compared to 8.6 million in the core cities.

Families and Opportunity

Perhaps nothing attracts families on the move more than economic opportunity. The old adage “the rich get richer and the poor have babies” may no longer fit in the United States. In fact, in most high-income societies, the birth rate is shaped increasingly by economic conditions. The Great Recession, for example, reduced fertility in most major countries, including the United States, which traditionally has enjoyed somewhat higher birth rates than its high-income competitors in East Asia and Europe.

But with the gradual economic recovery in the United States, the decline in birthrates has endedand could return to the levels of the more prosperous 1990s and early 2000s.  This dynamic plays out as well on the local level. Birthrates tend to have remained stable in metro areas with stronger economies during the recession. In booming North Dakota, births actually increased.

Not surprisingly, metropolitan areas with the consistently strongest economies in terms of job creation and income growth dominate our list of the cities with the highest share of children under 14 in their populations. In our top-ranked metro area, Salt Lake City, children make up 24.7% of the population, and in second place Houston, they account for 23.0%.

Affordability

The second major factor driving child demography is the cost of housing, which is the principal driver of the cost of living. Virtually all the areas with high proportions of children have median home price to annual income ratios of three to four. In some cases, low home prices seem to trump economic malaise. This may help explain the relatively high under 14 population in No. 4 Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

Conversely high housing prices can also limit the ability of even prospering areas to grow families. This is most obvious in the relatively low ranking of the New York metro area (41st), with a median home price to income multiple of 6.2.  San Francisco-Oakland, home to the highest housing prices in the nation with a median multiple rapidly approaching 9, ranks 45th place. Pricey Boston ranks 46th. Policies designed to prevent the construction of single-family homes, particularly in the Bay Area, all but guarantee that housing prices will remain high, and toxic for all but wealthy households.

Density

Despite the hopes of some urbanists, most families prefer lower-density living, particularly single-family houses. Between 2000 and 2011, detached house accounted for 83% of the net additions to the occupied housing stock in the United States. A survey sponsored by the National Association of Realtors suggests that roughly 80% of Americans prefer a single-family house to either an apartment or townhouse.

Correspondingly, expansion in the number of families and children has been occurring overwhelmingly in less dense areas. The fastest growth in the under 14 population since 2007 has been almost entirely in what can be described as heavily suburbanized low-density areas, led by greater New Orleans, Raleigh, San Antonio, Charlotte, Nashville, and Houston. In contrast, the biggest drop off in the number of children has been in metropolitan areas with higher urban densities, with the most dense, Los Angeles, also suffering the largest decline. The 10 metropolitan areas with the largest declines in their youth populations had urban densities averaging 45 percent more than the 10 with the greatest gains.

The Urban Future and Fertility

What does this tell us about the future of our urban regions? Since families are a critical component of growth in any metropolitan areas, those with higher percentages of children are likely to grow far faster than those that are made up increasingly of childless households. This trend should accelerate as the millennials, now entering their 30s, begin to form families. Children boost the demand for certain goods, notably houses and certain kinds of retail, and also increase demand for many services, notably schools.

Given the current economy, most of our top metropolitan areas can be expected to continue growing, particularly those, like Houston and Dallas, that have become increasingly hospitable to immigrants; the foreign-born account for one out of every four women giving birth in the country. Minorities overall are the ones driving population growth; last year  there weremore white deaths than births.

But some traditionally fertile metropolitan areas might see a real slowdown, notably Riverside-San Bernardino, where income and job growth is lagging well behind housing costs.  At the same time, we can expect continued slow growth in the populations in those areas towards the bottom of the list. To be sure, migration of older people from cold climates will keep Miami (47th on our list) and Tampa-St. Petersburg (second from last) growing, particularly as the boomers age. Such a movement can not anticipated in many other low-ranked cities ranging from relatively prosperous Pittsburgh (last place) to less affluent Buffalo, Providence and Cleveland.

We can also anticipate the evolution of some metropolitan areas with low percentages of children — such as Boston, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles — will slow not just demographically, but also economically as younger workers look to establish families elsewhere.  This may be somewhat counterbalanced by foreign immigration, but these newcomers, particularly those without huge financial resources, are also increasingly migrating to lower-density cities.

Having children in your region certainly does not guarantee success, but without them, metro areas will face a more rapid aging of their populations and workforces, something that historically does not produce robust economies but gradual decline.

This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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.

Crossing the street photo by Bigstock.

This is my old apartment in SF’s Mission District from way back when Mrs. UpintheValley and I were just dating.  My waystation before cohabitation and matrimony. I notice the curtains haven’t changed.  Flea market bedspreads and pillowcases were the order of the day then, and apparently still are.  Which means P. has kept the lease on the place and presumably lived in uninterrupted squalor with a revolving cast of characters from Roommate Finders all these years.  At the prices we were paying then, why would you ever leave?  The rest of the neighborhood has…evolved, beginning with the ground floor. Man, has it ever.

For example, the launderia, where I once had a load of jeans stolen, is now a yoga studio…

…and is buttressed by a vegan restaurant.  The corner liquor store beneath my old bedroom is now a supper club with gilt lettering in the window.  The dive bar at the other corner, where day laborers used to drink their wages beneath the deathly pallor of fluorescent tube lighting and stagger out to the alley to relieve themselves against the wall, is now a pretentious cocktail lounge with velvet curtains.

The New Mission:  High end condos where the old $1 dollar movie palace used to be, but the marquee remains to satisfy the historic preservationists.

Dogs and bikes are ubiquitous in the new SF.

Unlike LA, the bike is king in the new social arrangement.  Bike lanes are everywhere.  Bicyclists are entitled to use the full lane if they choose, and they do so. You may not squeeze them to the side as you pass.   There are reasons for this. One of them is: people who write programming code like to ride bikes, and the people who write code are making it rain in San Francisco.

Construction is everywhere….

They’ve just built the two tallest apartment buildings on the West Coast.

Way out in the Avenues, 3BR starter homes sell for $1 million+ sight unseen, all cash, to Chinese investors, the other group making it rain. No one in the neighborhood seems to know who the buyers are, but everything goes in multiple offers.  You see a guy like this at a cake shop on Taraval, yakking away in Mandarin, and you find yourself inordinately interested in someone else’s mundane conversation.   I’ll say this for the Asians: not a spec of trash or tagging to be found West of Twin Peaks and I only saw one house in disrepair in three days of strenuous walking.

Trails, trails, trails, everywhere…with plenty of parking.   For a city drowning in New Money, San Francisco, unlike LA, has managed to retain at least one bedrock principle of the social contract.

But back to the Mission.  One still encounters the old army of derelicts and panhandlers, but you just don’t find as many Latinos there anymore. Its identity as a landing place for working class immigrants to get a toehold in the economy is rapidly being eclipsed by the brute facts of New Money.  If people of the Twitterverse are willing to spend a million dollars to share a block with schizophrenic crack addicts then there is a diminished geography remaining for line cooks and seamstresses to occupy.   Or drywall installers. Or yoga instructors.   Or maintenance men.  The Latino working class is abundant in Van Nuys.  In San Francisco, it is memorialized in murals.

Last image on the way out of town….a concise acknowledgement of the obvious:  the laptop has replaced the pickaxe in the digital Gold Rush.  Unlike their 19th century counterparts, the gold miners are actually making the money.  The dry goods dealers and shopkeepers work for them.  How long can this last? What happens when Apple stops selling 400, 000 iPhones a day?  Social media and gaming and on-line retail are built on code.  Code can be written anywhere. Angry Birds was designed in Finland.  Tell me how this movie ends.

Andreas Samson lives and works in Van Nuys and blogs about the San Fernando Valley at upinthevalley.org.

The iconic view of tech companies almost invariably stress their roots in people’s garages, plucky individual entrepreneurs ready to challenge all comers. Yet increasingly the leading tech firms – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and especially Google – have morphed into vast tech conglomerates, with hands in ever more numerous, and sometimes not obvious, fields of endeavor.

Ironically, the very entrepreneurial form that defeated Japan’s bid for global technological dominance is morphing into an American version of the famed keiretsu that have long dominated the Japanese economy. The keiretsu,epitomized by such sprawling groups as Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and even Toyota, spread across a vast field of activities, leveraging their access to finance as a means to expand into an ever-increasing number of fields. The can best be understood, notes veteran Japan-based journalist Karel van Wolferen, as a series of “intertwined hierarchies.”

Increasingly, American technology is dominated by a handful of companies allied to a small but powerful group of investors and serial entrepreneurs. These firms and individuals certainly compete but largely only with other members of their elite club. And while top executives and investors move from one firm to another, the big companies have constrained competition for those below the executive tier with gentleman’s agreements not to recruit each other’s top employees.

At the top of the American keiretsu system stands a remarkably small group whose fortunes depend in part on monetizing invasions of privacy to use the Internet as a vehicle for advertising. These are not warm and cuddly competitors. Both Google and Microsoft have been accused of using anti-competitive practices to keep out rivals, in part by refusing to license technology acquiring of potential competitors.

“Tech is something like the new Wall Street," notes economist Umair Haque,“Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact.”  

Like their soul brothers on Wall Street , America’s elite tech firms – and their owners – have become fantastically cash rich.  Besides GE, a classic conglomerate, the largest cash hordes now belong to Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Google, all of whom sometimes have more dollars on hand than the US government.  Seven of the eight biggest individual winners from stock gains in 2013 were tech entrepreneurs, led by Jeff Bezos who added $12 billion to his paper wealth, Mark Zuckerberg who ranked in an additional $11.9 billion while Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had their wallets expanded by roughly $9 billion.

This wealth reflects in large part the oligopolistic nature of many key tech sectors, for example, the Apple-Google duopoly on mobile phone software, Microsoft’s dominant position in operating systems for PCs, Google’s utter control of search, and Facebook’s domination of social media. In most cases, these fields are controlled at levels of eighty percent or more.    

America’s new gilded age giants are similar to Japan’s keiretsu but they also share a lineage with the early 20th Century trusts that controlled railroads, cotton, silver and other commodities. Those early fortunes helped provide the foundation for such banking firms as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Oppenheimer, and Lehman Brothers, as well as the basis for the Rockefeller and Hearst empires. Their wealth, in the era before income taxes, was immense; by the 1880s the revenues of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad empire were greater than those of the federal government.

The control of immense resources by a small group of tech firms, like the oligopolies of the earlier industrial magnates, produces a steady cash-flow them to look further afield for new opportunities and expand into potentially huge new markets. But even more importantly, it gives them the opportunity to fail and still live to acquire another day.

Google’s recent sale of Motorola’s mobile division, at a paper loss of nearly $10 billion, would have led to bankruptcy head-rolling at many firms but for Google it hardly left a scratch. A $10 billion failure barely threaten a company whose last quarterly revenues neared $17 billion, has cash on hand of over $56.5 billion and whose market cap is now nearly $380 billion.

Indeed, if any of the tech powers on track to become a full-fledged keiretsu, it’s likely to be Google. Over the past year the company has ventured into a host of fields, such as robotics, energy, mapping, and driverless cars – fields that have great potential but are only tangentially related to their core business. The recentacquisition of Nest, a company founded by Apple alum Tony Fadell , brings Google into the “smart home” marketplace, part of the so-called “internet of things”. This gives these firms a new capacity to harvest ever greater information hauls from your once “dumb,” but at least private, household appliances.

These investments and cross-industry ties are changing firms like Google in fundamental ways.  As industry veteran Michael Mace observes, Google has stopped being a “unified product company” and is turning instead into what he calls “a post-modern conglomerate.” Its goal, he notes, is no longer to dominate search, or even the internet, but to invest, and hopefully, control anything that uses information technology, including everything from logistics and medical devices to the most mundane household devices.

By investing widely and eating up developing markets, the “the Gang of Four” internet companies—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google—have two key advantages: almost unlimited capital resources, and tech expertise and credibility. Allied with venture firms, and a vast reservoir of technical experts, the tech oligarchies, for example, already  dominate such promising fields robotics, with Silicon Valley home to half of all venture invested in the field, over 70 percent of employees, and a whopping 90 percent of market cap.  

Others are turning to space, a field once dominated by NASA, once a key contractor for the Valley. Headquartered in the old aerospace center of Los Angeles, Space X, the largest of the space startups, was founded by billionaire Elon Musk, who previously founded PayPal and Tesla. By 2013, Space’s X’s total employment, including contractors, topped 3800.

Musk is not alone in the space game. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos founded his own private space exploration company, Blue Origin, which has launched two vehicles into space, Charon and Goddard. It intends to build orbital space stations, and serves as a contractor for NASA. Like the nascent space industry’s third new player, Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin Galactic,’ these firms are all the pet projects of billionaires fascinated by space. If NASA continues to retreat from many areas of space exploration, it is likely that in the future the heavens too may end up belonging to the oligarchs.

The Media power-shift

A Google or Amazon space-ship may still be in the distant future, but we can already see the impact of the new keiretsu on information and culture. In the past, more hardware-oriented companies provided the “pipelines” through which traditional media disseminated their product. But increasingly, it’s the tech oligarchs who control the news and information industry.

Google, by some estimates, already enjoys more advertising revenues than either the newspaper or magazine industry. And they’re positioned to take over the the hardware side by supplanting the traditional telecommunications companies with their own series of global pipelines.

This big tech takeover also previews a geographic shift from traditional centers of power like New York and Los Angeles to the new seats of influence, most notably Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the Puget Sound area.

The transitions of power and influence have come at heavy costs. 

As the new software-based media expanded over the last decade, massive losses have pummeled newspapers, music, book and magazine publishing Since 200. The paper publishing industry, traditionally concentrated in the New York area, has lost some 250,000 jobs, while internet publishing and portals generated some 70,000 new positions, many in the Bay Area or Seattle.

To the new oligarchs, the old media are just part of what one venture capitalist derisively called “the paper economy” destined to be swept away by the new digital aristocracy. As relatively young people who have already amassed fortunes, the tech giants have the time to disseminate their views to the public, both the mass and the influential higher echelons. Another $200 million new venture with a mission to support largely left of center investigative reporting, is being backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Buying up prestigious media outlets, an old tactic for consolidating influence that was previously used by gilded age moguls like William Randolph Hearst, has surfaced among the new tech giants, exemplified in the recent purchase of the venerable New Republic by Facebook co-founder, and Obama tech guru, Chris Hughes, who is reportedly worth $850 million.

But perhaps more critical than buying old outlets will be the growth of their own oligarch controlled news media. Yahoo is now the #1 news sites in the U.S. with 110,000,000 monthly viewers, and Google News isn’t far behind at #4 with 65,000,000 users. The Valleyites are also moving into the culture business with both YouTube (owned by Google) and Netflix now creating original entertainment content.

The tech firms control over media is likely to become even more pervasive as the millennial generation grows and the older cohorts begin to die off. Among those over 50 only 15 percent, according to a Pew report get their news over the internet; among those under 30, the number rises to 65 percent.   

Impact on Innovation

Is this concentration of tech power a good thing? To some extent, the country benefits from having a Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Apple at the forefront of such fields as healthcare, robotics and space. They possess the resources and the technical know-how to develop and market new product lines that smaller, more specialized start-ups might lack.

Indeed the shift of resources from social media and advertising to robotics or space travel has to be considered a basically positive development. Unlike the social media revolution, which appears to have done relatively little to benefit the overall economy, the developments in space travel or driverless cars, may provide advantages that are more widely shared.

Yet, there is also a major problem with over-rich and over-confident oligopolies. It’s a lesson demonstrated by Japan’s arc over the past two decades and in the story of the big three US automakers and their era of domination – both examples show how concentration of power can stifle innovation and positive growth. Already some economists see a slowing in the pace of technical breakthroughs. In the 1980s personal computer boom, scores of companies competing across a broad array of tech sectors resulted in few long-term winners but a rapid evolution of technology. In contrast, it is not easy to argue that Google’s search function or Microsoft’s code are any better today than they were three or even five years ago.

As the tech firms move further from their entrepreneurial roots, one critic notes,many take on “a timid, bureaucratic spirit” that responds to the needs of investors and focuses on preserving already established business lines.

Would we be better off with say, a garage-bound Steve Jobs developing the software for robotics, rather than having development managed in a corporate structure that answers the demands of Wall Street analysts? Trusting a small, often closely knit group of investors, to oversee critical industries of the future, does not seem to be the best strategy to maintain and deepen our technological lead.

Digital innovation should be spurring the creation of new competitive companies. Yet,  instead it is fostering an American version of the Japanese keiretsu, where firms like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft try to use their unfathomable riches to dominate the entire technological future. This is not a step forward but one that can limit Americans’ ability to renew the entrepreneurial genius at the heart of our national character.

This story originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

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.

Facebook photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

A quarter century ago, the Los Angeles-Orange County area seemed on the verge of joining the first tier of global cities. As late as 2009, the veteran journalist James Flanigan could pen a quasiserious book, “Smile Southern California: You're the Center of the Universe,” which maintained that L.A.'s port, diversity and creativity made it the natural center of the 21st century.

A very different impression comes from a newer report, The Los Angeles 2020 Commission, which points out that, in reality, the region “is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward.” The report, which focuses on the city of Los Angeles, points to many of the problems – growing poverty, a shrinking middle class, an unbalanced city budget, an underachieving economic and educational system – that have been building for decades.

Sadly, “the 2020” report more accurately reflects L.A.'s current situation than Flanigan's more optimistic view. All the more remarkable – and, perhaps, ironic – is that the signatures on the report come from many of the same political figures, union leaders and political advocates who have done so much to create this very sad situation. Disappointingly, the L.A. City Council already has started making its excuses, while the report's authors, as the Daily News' Rick Orlov notes, have already started “softening” their sometimes-harsh assessment.

It is difficult, for example, to take seriously a report that, on the one hand, worries over pension costs but is signed, and supported, by the likes of County Labor Federation boss Maria Elena Durazo and L.A. Department of Water and Power union head Brian D'Arcy. For the most part, the commission was made up of lawyers and others who feed off the very pattern of insider deals and misdirected investment strategies that have so humbled a great city, and region. No surprise, then, that their biggest concrete recommendations were to speed up the pouring of concrete for their various pet projects, some of which make sense, while other don't.

Nevertheless, the report suggests that, perhaps, at last, even the most comfortably entrenched leaders are finally waking up to the predicament they and their colleagues have helped create. What they need now is a strategy that restores to Los Angeles the global status that is a prerequisite for progress.

Why does being a global city matter so much? In large part, it is the best way to compete in a globalizing economy where the successful cities are defined not by size or population, but by the unique services they offer the world. In an ongoing study I am directing for the Chapman University Center for Demographics and Policy, with the assistance of the Singapore Civil Service College, we identified the leading world cities. We focused on such things as financial services, industrial specialization, media and culture.

Size doesn't always matter

In the business of global cities, many of the biggest urban areas – in fact, all the largest ones, excluding Tokyo – failed to make the top 30. Instead, New York and London did best, along with such Asian cities as Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. Perhaps our most surprising finding was that California's two great metropolitan areas, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, ranked sixth and seventh, respectively.

Why, despite all its problems, is Southern California ranked so high? This is largely a reflection of several factors – notably, a still-sizeable tech sector, a huge port and strong cultural diversity – but, most importantly, because of Hollywood. Great global cities, by our calculations, are often what can be seen as “necessary cities.” They dominate economic niches to an extent that someone from outside the region is compelled to do business there.

Hooray for Hollywood

This is true, for example, for finance and media in New York and London, while the Bay Area dominates tech. Similarly, Hollywood is nearly synonymous with the American entertainment industry, which is by far the largest in terms of revenue and influence in the world. Last year, the industry enjoyed a trade surplus of roughly $12 billion; film and television industry exports totaled nearly $15 billion. Every major global movie studio in the world is located in Los Angeles, which is also a key hub of the music industry.

So dominant is Los Angeles' entertainment industry that many countries, trying to preserve their own cultural industries, have placed strict quotas on the number of English-language films that can be shown and songs that can be played on the radio. Los Angeles-Orange County once also enjoyed a dominant position in aerospace, but this industry has dramatically faltered, as the sector shrank by some 240,000 jobs as companies moved elsewhere, taking with them much of the region's technical talent.

The port of Los Angeles, another economic linchpin, remains somewhat dominant but the trade sector faces growing competition and suffers from the kind of institutional malaise that affects so much of business here. The region retains a foothold in the auto sector as the U.S. base for some Asian makers. Even here, however, there are clouds, as Nissan relocated to Nashville, Tenn., and Honda moved top executives to Ohio in order to be nearer to its manufacturing. More promising, the new Hyundai U.S. headquarters in Fountain Valley signals that global carmakers still see L.A.-Orange County as a “necessary” place.

The region has held on to a leading, if somewhat smaller, share of entertainment, but L.A.'s other traditional industrial strengths, such as aerospace and defense, have badly eroded. One bright spot is technology. Somewhat surprisingly, the Startup Genome project ranked Los Angeles as having the second-strongest startup ecosystem in the United States. Yet, overall, L.A. has been losing ground in terms of employment, technology employment and net migration to other ascendant regions.

Tech titans

Perhaps the most critical factor affecting L.A.'s global status revolves around technology. It was shocking to me, at least, with L.A.'s focus on global ties, that the Bay Area has now slightly nosed out Southern California in our study's rankings, largely due to that region's technological preeminence. The region hosts the largest concentration of cutting-edge tech firms in the world. This fact alone allows the Bay Area to play a profound role in how globalization works, notes analyst Aaron Renn (www.urbanophile.com), particularly since innovations coming from that region arguably are a more primal enabler than advanced producer services. Indeed, according to one study, three Bay Area counties – San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara – rank as the top three for concentration of tech jobs, and are among the leaders in growth.

More serious still, Silicon Valley's technological push is threatening to upend the structure of Hollywood and media. Over the past decade, Internet and software publishing, which are heavily centered in the Bay Area, have added close to 100,000 new jobs, while traditional media – based largely in New York and Los Angeles – have lost almost three times as many jobs.

Google and Yahoo already are ranked among the largest media companies in the world. (Yahoo refers to itself as a digital media, rather than a technology, company.) Apple now has a great deal of control over consumer distribution of entertainment products like music and video. The entrance of Netflix, and other tech firms, into the television production business could further undermine L.A.'s entertainment dominance. To the new-tech oligarchs, older industries are prisoners to what one venture capitalist derisively called “the paper economy,” soon to be swept aside by the rising digital aristocracy.

These issues, and challenges, are what the 2020 Commission people should be addressing in their search for solutions to the L.A. region's relative decline. As our research indicates, Los Angeles-Orange County remains a major world city, but its upward trajectory is threatened by changes in technology and the rise of other regions in the U.S. and abroad. Now that members of the L.A. establishment have acknowledged “the truth,” perhaps it's time for them to come up with ideas that can make the truth more pleasant.

This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

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.

Photograph: Downtown Los Angeles from Echo Park (by Wendell Cox)

Imagine someone writes a newspaper story about you and prints the picture of your older, well-known sibling next to the column. It is clear to you why this was done: your sibling is more famous and recognizable. But how does that make you feel?

Following the January 28th State of the Union address, PBS interviewed a number of civic leaders. One of those interviewed was the mayor of Tacoma, a city with many of the challenges and attributes of a second child.

The older sibling (that is, Seattle) has a nationally recognizable architectural landmark and a larger economy, and there is a higher likelihood that people around the country have heard its name rather than Tacoma’s.  Should we be surprised, therefore, that when Mayor Marilyn Strickland was being interviewed, “(D) Tacoma Washington,” was written at the bottom of the screen, but behind her was an image of Seattle’s skyline? The Tacoma Dome, Downtown Tacoma, the Museum of Glass, and other Tacoma landmarks were notably absent on the screen. Instead of using the Seattle image and perhaps to suggest where the program was being taped, PBS had an opportunity to educate the public (and to be factually correct) by showing a picture of Ms. Strickland’s town, Tacoma. Instead, PBS reinforced Tacoma’s “second city” image by visually identifying it with a picture of its more famous sibling. You cannot imagine how bothersome this is to people who live in Tacoma. A local columnist lamented that with Seattle’s picture as the backdrop, it was hard to focus on what the mayor was saying.

The “second city” phenomenon is not exclusively a Tacoma issue. Glasgow, Melbourne, Milan, Montreal, St. Paul, Long Beach, California and many other cities around the globe face a similar challenge. Either their identity has not been well-articulated, or it has not been understood by external observers. This is not a logo problem. It is not about a catchy phrase, and it is not about another cultural event. Unique architectural landmarks can create memorable identities, but these phallic symbols already dot cities the world over. Whether in Dubai, Barcelona, or Beijing, starchitects would be happy to add the next jaw-dropper to any city willing to deposit a large sum of public funds at their altars.

But for smaller cities, this level of economic competition is not affordable. This is where the notion of “urban branding” comes in. Cities need an internally generated and well-articulated narrative of identity before they can be recognized externally. At the beginning of the twenty first century, many cities, including Tacoma, are finding themselves struggling with this notion at local, regional, and international scales. How does a city get out of the shadow of another city? How do you broadcast who you are? Creating hipster colonies or 24 hour entertainment districts does not always work. Cities like Tacoma already house museums, artist colonies, hip hangouts, and, yes, waterfront condos with killer views. Nevertheless, the glitzy brother 20 miles north casts a long shadow that may stunt growth and contribute to a feeling of self-doubt.

To get out of this position, cities like Tacoma need more than cultural fairs and gimmicky tourist attractions. They need an inclusively created branding strategy. It is important that they know what works and what doesn’t, but strategies need to be based on a vision that gives the city the self-confidence it needs to move forward. Tacoma cannot be and should not be Seattle, in the same way that Long Beach is not and should not be Los Angeles. The identity of a city does not arise out of a formula calculated by the latest intellectual fashion, but from an inclusively-created vision that seeks input from the public, and asks help from experts, not the other way around. Perhaps one the worst ideas of the last twenty years has been an excessive reliance on “best practices” and “experts.” We need to learn about each other, but we need to do it our way and articulate a clear vision of who we are. The second child can also succeed.

Table: Tacoma is about a third of Seattle in population. With a lower density, less expensive housing and a more affordable cost of living, its households are on average slightly larger than those living in Seattle. Its small city charm, stunning views and history rival any urban area in the nation.

None of this, however, diminishes the responsibility of media outlets. Tacoma is not Seattle. A major news outlet should educate itself and the public by using accurate images. The next time a TV station invites the mayor of Tacoma to participate in a program, here’s hoping they don’t show the Space Needle in the background. 

For now, people will be sleepless in Tacoma until they figure out their way out of being the second city.

Ali Modarres is the Director of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma.  He is a geographer and landscape architect, specializing in urban planning and policy. He has written extensively about social geography, transportation planning, and urban development issues in American cities.

Tacoma photo by Flickr user Michael D. Martin.

I’ve seen a few pieces in the conservative press lately boasting about Scott Walker’s performance as governor of Wisconsin. For example, the American Spectator ran an article called “Wisconsin Thrives Under Scott Walker“:

In 2011, Wisconsin had a whopping deficit of $3.6 billion dollars. But a cooperate tax cut and collective bargaining reforms invigorated the state economy. Now, the state is boasting a $911 million surplus, credited to “good stewardship of the taxpayers’ money.”

And what will Walker do? Buy his wife a $19,000 dress? Increase his paycheck? Go on vacation? Nope. He’s proposing $800 million in tax cuts. “What do you do with a surplus? Give it back to the people who earned it. It’s your money,” Walker said.

I find these articles revealing because they show how the Tea Party mindset has affected the definition of success in Republican circles generally. Why has Scott Walker been a success in their view? Because Wisconsin’s state government is financially healthy. The actual people of Wisconsin take a back seat to that. A friend of mine in Indiana summed up the mindset when she noted that many people today equate the financial health of government with the well-being of the people in the state.

This I think is the Tea Party mindset writ large. As I’ve noted before, under Tea Party influence, Republicans have come to see government as purely a fiscal machine in which nearly the entirety of good policy consists in reducing the amount of money flowing through it. This is rooted in a single factor determinism view of economics. Much like Marxism, it has a base and a superstructure. The base in Tea Party thinking is government. If you shrink it, the theory goes, prosperity must inevitably follow.

The fiscal health of government is no doubt important. But to determine if Wisconsin is actually “thriving” you need to look at statistics that actually affect people. So let’s do that. Scott Walker took office in January 2011. So here is the percentage change in jobs in Midwest states between December 2010 and December 2013 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Wisconsin actually doesn’t rank that well in job growth during Scott Walker’s administration, barely beating fiscal basket case Illinois. The state looks better in its unemployment rate:

However, in part that’s because Wisconsin’s unemployment rate was already low on a relative basis when Walker took over. It ranks near the bottom in reducing its unemployment rate, though obviously reductions are harder to come by when you’re already lower. Michigan had nowhere to go but down.

I actually support many of Scott Walker’s reforms. Public sector unions clearly need to be reigned in or even eliminated as they are a huge barrier to rational fiscal management and effective service delivery in addition to being an inherently corrupting political force. Items like allowing unions to force localities to buy health insurance through union affiliated firms at inflated rate were clearly abusive.

It’s also early to judge, and this is monthly data that is fairly volatile, even though it’s seasonably adjusted and with a same month comparison. There just isn’t that much other data available.

What I object to is declaring victory when the budget is balanced. The attitude exposed by this is profoundly revealing and shows everything that’s wrong with Tea Party type thinking. It’s obvious that people claiming Wisconsin has thrived under Walker didn’t even take a cursory look at the actual economic performance of the state.

Wisconsin balanced its budget? Big deal. You’re supposed to balance the budget. That’s just doing your job. It shows how far we’ve come that you can receive plaudits simply for meeting what should have been the baseline expectation.

The charts above should also cause a reconsideration of the notion that government finances are the primary determinant of business climate and economic growth. There are states on both the left and right of that issue that are both thriving and struggling. Part of it is that states have limited power in the modern economy. There’s only a limited amount they can do to make things better, whereas they can definitely screw it up.

Also, the natural condition of a participant in a marketplace is failure. The vast majority of new businesses fail. Similarly, places can fail too, and having a budget surplus can’t necessarily stave that off.

My view is that while state governments are weak actors and there’s a risk of screwing it up, the likelihood of failure in the marketplace is high enough that government does actually have to try to do things. By all means prudent finances and a good regulatory climate need to be maintained, but if you think that’s enough to save you, you’ve got another thing coming. Now that Scott Walker has repaired the budget, what’s his actual plan moving forward to try to build actual personal and marketplace success for Wisconsin residents and businesses? That’s what will determine his actual legacy. It’s in whether he boosts the fortunes of the state’s residents over the longer term, and manages to bend the curve of progress in a positive direction over time.

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, where this piece originally appeared.

Scott Walker photo by AndyLindgren.

There is a shiny, brittle skin to the economic recovery that conceals an unhealthy flesh underneath. It is tempting to call this condition a glass half empty. But seeking the healthy and the fit in nontraditional places has become a quest for more and more Americans who are leading us down a pathway that diverges, from the mainstream towards a new future. Out of earshot of the mainstream media and off of Main Street, there is a glass half full.

The official storyline of the economic recovery began in 2009 almost as soon as the stock market lost half its value, and masses of unemployed people listened to cheery reports that the recession was over, even as unemployment surged to 10%. With waning confidence in our institutions and leaders to guide us, people seemed genuinely at a loss to define a shared future of abundance and beauty. Since then, insidious corrosion has eaten away our traditional sources of optimism. In a sea change, the focus of many people is slowly shifting away from that glossy promotional veneer back towards person-to-person relationships and rebuilding moral capital one transaction at a time.

For many employees, a fulfilling career is a lost dream, traded instead for salary and benefits. In this phase of the curve it is still an employer’s market, and most employers manipulate the terror over loss of job to their advantage. Working hours are now pretty much 24/7 for many people, taking work home on weekends; answering business emails and phone calls at all hours of the day and night.

Today’s workers are jumpy and work far harder, for less than they had made in the before-times.
Many employers, starved for profit in recent years, finally took what little profit they had in 2013, sharing little or none with the hardworking employees who had helped them to regain their economic footing. Those workers at the top who sweated the worst of it divided meager earnings among themselves, leaving little for the rest of the workforce.

Mainstream America bravely soldiers on, making 2004 wages, but with 2014 expenses. We are presented with more stuff to buy, more media to consume, and more gadgets to worship. Experiences that were once fundamentally outside of the mainstream economy – one’s college years, for example – are now a big business. There seems to be no refuge from the insistent, shrill attempts to monetize everything. It is easy to feel pessimistic and just a little debased, and to begin feeling dissident urges. Under our noses, however, another America lurks.

This is an America which hasn’t bought into the “too big to fail” system, and it has at least two demographic bases. The first is the portion of the millennial generation that has seen the damage done to their elders, and is now waiting it out, sneering at “suits” and instead creating its own economy out of localized, small moves. It operates with a healthy disregard for the establishment system. This group is in its first historical phase of creating its own food and shelter, carefully selecting strains of sustenance from local sources and operating a kind of “starting over” effort at the basic need level of the Maslow hierarchy. Food and shelter first, they reason; rebuilding a new system will come later.

It's a generation that has suffered from what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called the reproduction of the space of production in their youth. This somewhat laborious phrase cites the space of production – the factory floor – as the model upon which all the rest of our space has been molded. School, said Lefebvre, is molded upon the factory floor, where students are taught to memorize and obediently regurgitate facts to their teacher/boss. Business leaders, anxious to produce workers, insist upon teaching to standardized tests, to reproduce the results they expect upon graduation. Education is replaced with being taught the business culture.

What Millennials reject is not so much the establishment itself, but rather the manager-worker relationship that has seeped into every corner of daily life, driven by the pressure for higher profits and faster throughput. What looks to boomers as sloth (because we are conditioned to respect this pace of production) is to them a form of dissent.

It's too soon to tell whether the millennial generation, like the boomers before it, will eventually succumb to the corporate world. Allied with them, however, are the new, immigrant Americans; people who have come to our shores to seek a new place to live and work. To the rest of the world, America is still the land of the free. People are escaping terrible conditions in cities like Cairo, Rio and Istanbul, and even more frustrating powerlessness in cities all around the world. To these new arrivals, many from non-OECD countries, America still represents opportunity.

New arrivals are treated with suspicion by a xenophobic, fear mongering media precisely because they are correctly viewed as not-yet properly conditioned. Those immigrants who buy into the promise of wealth may perpetuate a realm that is corporate-dominated, but many others may not. Our genius is our open borders, and as a nation of immigrants America has always renewed itself with their diversity.

A future of abundance and beauty must begin with small moves: a foundation upon which moral capital can be rebuilt. If integrity and trust can be found in simple transactions between individuals, then progress can indeed be made. It is here that a glass half full can be found, and it is here that the social space of America is being re-made. Dying strip malls are being replaced by farmer’s markets; vacant glass towers are being replaced by warehouse-based laboratory startups and home offices, just to name a few examples. This new generation, and these new immigrants, are proving that America is all right after all, and can rebuild itself without the worst trappings of the 20th century corporate world.

These are small, unglamorous trends. If they occur without “help” from Wall Street or without government regulation, are they dissent? Then so be it. Good people can bring to society a sense of uncorrupted – dare one say humanistic? – values. Our half-full glass should include a re-creation of space on a new model: space modeled not on production, but rather upon a shared and positive vision of the future.

Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

Flickr photo by khersee: Warehouse— waiting to be repurposed?

There is an increasing recognition – at least outside the academy, planning organization and urban core developer groups – that the spatial expansion of cities or suburbanization represents the evolving urban form of not only the United States and virtually all of the high income world but also across the developing world, whether middle income or third world.

In recent years, Mexico has made substantial economic progress. Per capita income (purchasing power parity) in Mexico exceeds that of all the "BRIC" nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) except resource-rich Russia.

In Mexico, as almost everywhere, cities continue to expand to provide more living space for an emerging suburban middle-class. This is obvious in the new townhouse (attached house) and detached house developments that ring the urban areas (photograph above). Some of the best evidence of this can be observed on and beyond the southern edge of the nation's second-largest urban area, Guadalajara (for example on Google Earth).

The Valley of Mexico

Nearly 3 years ago, one of the first Evolving Urban Form articles highlighted the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area, which is Mexico City in its functional (economic) manifestation. That article noted that the core municipality of Mexico City in 1950 had 2.23 million residents out of the urban area's fewer than 3 million and comprised only 54 square miles (139 square kilometers). By 1970, the city's population had risen to 2.85 million. However, as has happened in Paris, Copenhagen, Milan, Osaka, Glasgow, Detroit, and many others, the urban core population plummeted. By 2000, the former city had a population of only 1.69 million, a 40 percent loss from 1970. There was a modest population increase between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, but its population seems unlikely to ever be restored to near their previous peak, which mirrors the experience of Paris and Copenhagen.

Instead all population growth in the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area has been outside the 1950 area of Mexico City and in the post-World War II suburbs. While comparable metropolitan area data is not available, the Mexico City urban area added more than 10 million residents between 1970 and 2010. The same period, the suburban areas added more than 11 million residents (Figure 1). The Valley of Mexico metropolitan area is located not only in the Distrito Federal, but also in the states of Mexico and Hidalgo.

The Other Major Metropolitan Areas

While the scale of urbanization in the Valley of Mexico dwarfs that of the rest of the nation, similar dispersion is evident in the nation's other 11 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population (Figures 2 and 3).

Guadalajara

Guadalajara, capital of state of Jalisco, is Mexico's second largest metropolitan area. Between 2000 and 2010, the metropolitan area grew nearly 20 per cent, from 3.7 million residents to 4.4 million. The core city (locality) of Guadalajara lost 150,000 residents, registering a population of just under 1.5 million in 2010. Suburbs accounted for approximately all the metropolitan area's population growth.

Monterey

Monterey, capital of the state of Nuevo Leon, is currently the third largest metropolitan area in Mexico and is growing slightly more rapidly than Guadalajara. Between 2000 and 2010, Monterey added 22 per cent to its population, which increased from 3.4 million residents to 4.1 million. The central locality grew modestly, but 97 per cent of the metropolitan area growth was in the suburbs.

Central Mexico

The Valley of Mexico metropolitan area is encircled by smaller, but major metropolitan areas that are among the fastest-growing in the nation.

Queretaro, the capital of the state of Queretaro, is located 130 miles (220 kilometers) north of Mexico City by freeway. Queretaro is the fastest-growing major metropolitan area in Mexico, having added 34 per cent to its population over the last census period, to reach 1.1 million. More than two thirds of the growth was in the suburbs.

Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico (Note), is located across a mountain range only 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Mexico City. Toluca grew 33 percent to 1.9 million residents in 2010. Nearly 90 per cent of Toluca's population growth was in the suburbs between 2000 and 2010.

Pueblo, capital of the state of Puebla, is located across mountain range 130 miles (80 kilometers) to the east of Mexico City. Puebla is located in a valley surrounded by some of the most spectacular volcanoes in the world, including Popocateptl and Iztaccihuatl (both more than 17,000 feet, or 5,100 meters), toward Mexico City, La Malinche (14,600 feet or 4,500 meters), only 17 miles from the city center and Orizaba (18,500 feet or 5,600 meters). The three tallest of these reach elevations higher than any in North America outside of the Yukon and Alaska. Puebla was the slowest growing of the Central Mexico metropolitan areas, adding 23 percent to its population, and reaching 2.9 million residents in 2010. Three quarters of Puebla's growth was in the suburbs. The Puebla metropolitan area extends into the state of Tlaxcala.

Border Metropolitan Areas

In comparison,   the large metropolitan areas on the United States border expanded outwards but not as rapidly. Tijuana, which is adjacent to the San Diego metropolitan area now has 1.75 million residents. More than 60 percent of its growth over the preceding 10 years was suburban. Juarez (located in the state of Chihuahua), is across the border from the El Paso metropolitan area and reached a population of 1.5 million, with slightly more than one half of its growth being in the suburbs. Neither San Diego-Tijuana area nor Juarez -El Paso qualify as metropolitan areas because they are not labor markets – there are significant limitations on the movement of labor (employees).

Other Interior Metropolitan Areas

Three other major metropolitan areas are located in the interior. In Torreon (states of Coahuila and Durango), more than 60 percent of the population growth was in the suburbs. A smaller 51 percent of the growth in San Luis Potosi (state of San Luis Potosi) was in the suburbs. The significant exception was Leon (state of Guanajuato), where only 36 percent of the growth was outside the core urban core.

Continuing Dispersion

Overall, 5.1 million of the 6.0 residents added to Mexico's major metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2010 were outside the urban cores (Figure 4). Most of the growth was in the three largest metropolitan areas (Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey), which added 3.2 million residents. The urban cores of these three metropolitan areas together declined approximately 100,000, while the suburbs attracted more than all of the metropolitan area growth. Mexico seems well positioned for continued economic growth and a populace that seeks better standards of living, more often than not in dispersed settings.

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: The state of Mexico has the largest population in the nation, at 15.2 million (2010). This is 70 percent more than the second largest federal division, the Distrito Federal. This state of Mexico borders the Distrito Federal (Mexico City) on three sides and it outer suburban areas constitute more than one-half of the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area population (11 million of 21 million). Another 2 million are located in the even more distant state of Hidalgo. This state of Mexico also includes Toluca, another major metropolitan area (see above).

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Photograph: Southern suburbs of Guadalajara (by author)

Correction: This version removes reference to Tijuana as the capital of Baja California. Mexicali is the state capital.

The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility.

The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it has widened significantly under his watch. Not only did the income of the middle 60% of households drop between 2010 and 2012 while that of the top 20% rose, the income of the middle 60% declined by a greater percentage than the poorest quintile. The middle 60% of earners’ share of the national pie has fallen from 53% in 1970 to 45% in 2012.

This group, what I call the yeoman class — the small business owners, the suburban homeowners , the family farmers or skilled construction tradespeople– is increasingly endangered. Once the dominant class in America, it is clearly shrinking: In the four decades since 1971 the percentage of Americans earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has dropped from 61% to 51% of the population, according to Pew.

Roughly one in three people born into middle class-households , those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of income, now fall out of that status as adults.

Neither party has a reasonable program to halt the decline of the middle class. Previous generations of liberals — say Walter Reuther, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, Pat Brown — recognized broad-based economic growth was a necessary precursor to upward mobility and social justice. However, many in the new wave of progressives engage in fantastical economics built around such things as “urban density” and “green jobs,”  while adopting policies that restrict growth in manufacturing, energy and housing. When all else fails, some, like Oregon’s John Kitzhaber, try to change the topic by advocating shifting emphasis from measures of economic growth to “happiness.”

Other more ideologically robust liberals, like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, call for a strong policy of redistribution, something with particular appeal in a city with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the country. Over time a primarily redistributionist approach may improve some material conditions, but is likely to help create a permanent underclass of dependents, including part-time workers, perpetual students, and service employees living hand to mouth, who can make ends meet only if taxpayers subsidize their housing, transportation and other necessities.

Given the challenge being mounted by de Blasio and hard left Democrats, one would imagine that business and conservative leaders would try to concoct a response. But for the most part, particularly at the national level, they offer little more than bromides about low taxes, particularly for the well-heeled investor and rentier classes, while some still bank on largely irrelevant positions on key social issues to divert the middle class from their worsening economic plight.

The country’s rise to world preeminence and admiration stemmed from the fact that its prosperity was widely shared. In the first decades after the Second World War, when the percentage of households earning middle incomes doubled to 60%, it was no mirage, but a fundamental accomplishment of enlightened capitalism.

In contrast, the current downgrading of the middle class undermines the appeal of the “democratic capitalism” that so many conservative intellectuals espouse. In reality, capitalism is becoming less democratic: stock ownership has become more concentrated, with the percentage of adult Americans owning stock the lowest since 1999 and a full 13 points less than 2007. The fact that poverty — reflected in such things as an expansion of food stamp use— has now spread beyond the cities to the suburbs, something much celebrated among urban-centric pundits, is further confirmation of the yeomanry’s stark decline.

How our political leaders respond to this challenge of downward mobility will define the future of our Republic. Some see a future shaped by automation that would “permanently end” what one author calls “the age of mass human labor,” allowing productivity to rise without significant increases in wages. In this world, the current American middle and working class would be economically passé.

One would hope business would have a better option that would restart upward mobility. Lower taxes on the investor class, less regulation of Wall Street, and the mass immigration of cheap workers — all the rage among investment bankers, tech oligarchs and those with inherited wealth — does not constitute a compelling program of middle-class uplift. Nor does resistance, particularly among the Tea Party, to make the human and physical infrastructure investment that could help restore strong economic growth.

Fortunately history gives us hope that this decline can be turned around. The early decades of the Industrial Revolution saw a similar societal decline, as once independent artisans and farmers became fodder for the factory lines. Divorce and drunkenness grew as religious attendance failed. But a pattern of reform, in Britain, America and even Germany, helped restore labor’s place in the economy, and rapid growth provided the basis not only for the expansion of the middle class, but remarkably improvements in its well-being.

A pro-growth program today could take several forms that defy the narrow logic of both left and right.  We can encourage the growth of high-wage, blue-collar industries such as construction, energy and manufacturing. We can also reform taxes so that the burdens fall less on employers and employees, as opposed to those who simply profit from asset inflation. And rather than impose huge tuitions on students who might not  finish with a degree that offers employment opportunities, let’s place new emphasis on practical skills training for both the new generation and those being left behind in this “recovery.” Most importantly, the benefits of capitalism need be more widely shared if business hopes to gain support from the middle class for their agenda.

This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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.

Back in the 1960s, and for well into the 1980s, California stood at the cutting edge of youth culture, the place where trends started and young people clustered. “The California teen, a white, middle-class version of the American dream” raised in a world of “suburbs, cars, and beaches,” notes historian Kirse Granat May, literally shaped the national image of youth, from the Beach Boys and Barbie to Gidget.

In those times, California, particularly the Southland, was literally becoming ever younger, as more families and migrating 20-somethings moved in. The beaches of Southern California, so attractive to youth, evoked a care-free, athletic, somewhat hedonistic culture; California also was the place where young people, free from the traditional constraints of places East, felt free to innovate, in everything from music and board shorts to the earliest PCs.

Yet today, you increasingly have to color California, particularly Orange and Los Angeles counties, a pale grey. Once evocative of youth, almost mythically so, these counties are aging far faster than the national average. From 2000-12, notes demographer Wendell Cox (www.demographia.com), the average median age of Los Angeles and Orange County residents rose by 10 percent, almost twice the national rate and well above the 6.6 percent rise for the state overall.

This aging trend will continue, if current conditions remain in place. One recent USC study predicts that the Los Angeles area, due in large part to declining immigration, will continue aging rapidly. In the next two decades, the study projects, Los Angeles County will gain 867,000 senior citizens and have 630,000 fewer residents younger than 25.

In contrast, the Bay Area – even rapidly aging Marin County – has been graying more gradually. In part, the Bay Area's slower aging is less a reflection of rising birth rates, as was the case in California's youthful heyday, than the movement of 20-somethings, particularly since 2007. Since then, the San Francisco area has led the nation in migration by the 20-34 age group. It does far worse as people get into prime child-bearing years, ranking 30th in migration among the 52 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

Not surprisingly, San Francisco – with 80,000 more dogs than kids – has the lowestpercentage of youngsters of any major American city. Even when more-suburban San Mateo County is added, the Bay Area ranks 40th in growth among people under age 4. San Jose-Santa Clara shows a very similar pattern, with people arriving in their 20s and leaving in their child-bearing years.

Southern California right now is not experiencing much youth migration. Hollywood, great weather and the beaches are still all here – in a climate enhanced by a greater cultural diversity – but young people still are not moving here in droves. From 2007-12, this region ranked a mediocre 31st in migration by 20-somethings. Overall, we are losing millennials, while other regions, such as Washington, D.C., Houston, Denver and Austin, Texas, are luring them.

Perhaps even more troubling, the region also ranks 47th for migrants in their prime child-bearing years and 32nd in terms of newborns. If not for the Inland Empire, which does markedly better with the 30- and 40-something groups, Southern California would be starting to look like a multicultural version of supergrey Japan. A recent report for theU.S. Conference of Mayors projected that, by 2042, Los Angeles will rank 58th of 70 U.S. regions for population growth, with the slowest growth of any major city in the South or West.

This low youth migration combined with a steady erosion of the key parental cohorts, suggests that rapid aging could soon replace rambunctious youth as the region's greatest demographic challenge. An ever-shrinking percentage of families and young workers is not good for the local economy. It deprives local companies of both new employees and an expanding customer base. Older people may be great for lower crime rates and filling hospitals, but not so much for the overall economy, as they often do not work and tend to consume less than younger people.

Why is this occurring, and can anything be done to address this descent into regional senility? One answer lies in the region's high housing prices. The L.A. area's median multiple – the ratio of home price to a homeowner's annual income – is now more thantwice that of more economically dynamic regions like Houston, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Phoenix.

This price pressure has sharply reduced opportunities for young couples to buy houses, while older residents, often working into their sixties, seventies or even eighties, stay in their homes, further reducing opportunities for the next generation. Mortgage applications have fallen dramatically in recent months, after some signs of resurgence. It's now largely investors who are holding the market up.

In Southern California, the combination of inflated house prices and weak job growth means not only that fewer young people are coming but, once here, they are having fewer babies, or will move once they take that plunge. This trend is spreading to the Inland Empire, the region's primary nursery, where declining incomes and higher rents are making family formation an ever-more dicey proposition.

Once a major lure for the parental age groups, the Inland area has dropped to 26th in attracting people in their 30s. This is not surprising given the toxic combination of a weak economy and rising costs; the percentage of Inland Empire households paying at least half their incomes in rent has risen from 20 percent to 30 percent since 2007, a reflection of rising rents amidst shrinking salaries. In Los Angeles, roughly a third of households see half their earnings go to rent.

How can we address this decline? The response of many homebuilders, spurred by the planning agencies, is to reduce the size of houses, even in far-flung suburban areas. This may solve some problems in the eyes of density-obsessed planners but, is not likely to be attractive to families at a time when American house sizes, after a short period of contraction, are expanding again. Less space at higher prices in Southern California may not be so appealing to families who can get more, at lower cost, in a host of markets across the country.

This leaves the Southland with the alternative, seen in the Bay Area, of attracting younger professionals who eventually may leave. But a torpid economy does not help in luring ambitious millennials, and building high-density housing in the absence of expanding incomes and opportunities seems something of a fool's errand. If they can't afford the urban-hipster enclaves of New York or San Francisco, the coveted member of the “creative class” may find themselves better off settling first in the burgeoning urban districts of less-expensive cities like Houston, Dallas or Nashville, places where they also can eventually hope to get a decent job and buy a home.

Clearly, this region, with its still-impressive assets, should be attracting both new families as well as younger singles. But this cannot reliably be done unless we begin looking at ways to encourage older people to move out of their homes, perhaps by reforming Proposition 13 and providing other incentives. We could also start allowing builders again to construct the kind of housing families need and clearly want – detached homes where land is affordable. As for the 20-somethings, what they need most is not forced density or transit-oriented development but the whiff of opportunity, something a “smart” policy agenda seems best-suited to stifle.

The premature aging of this region represents an existential challenge, a harbinger of further, long-term decline. Unless addressed by policies that reignite economic growth and expand opportunities, the youthfulness of this region will exist merely a cherished myth, seen in old sitcoms on Nickelodeon but increasingly not in our neighborhoods.

This story originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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 is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from GNO, Inc. here: gnoinc.org/sustainingprosperity

The recovery of greater New Orleans represents one of the great urban achievements of our era. After decades of slow economic, political and social decline, hurricane Katrina seemed a kind of coup de grâce, smothering the last embers of the region’s vitality. In the fall of 2005 it was entirely logical to see New Orleans as just a potential exemplar of failed urbanization, much as we might see in Detroit¹, Cleveland, and a host of other once great cities – for example Naples, Lisbon, Antwerp and Osaka – that have tumbled from their once great importance.²

Yet in New Orleans’ case, disaster engendered not continued decline, but the revival of the en­tire region, its economy, and social and political institutions. Like Chicago after the great fire of 1871, San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire, or New York following 9-ll, New Orleans has rebounded in ways that have defied expectations.

Critical to making New Orleans a resilient city has been the transformation of the civic culture. This has much to do with the commitment of New Orleanians to their city – like Chicagoans, New Yorkers and San Franciscans in the past. “A city,” notes urban historian Kevin Lynch,” is hard to kill if it possesses unique cultural appeal, geographic assets and people who are determined to save the city they love.”³

New Orleans resiliency since Katrina constitutes much more than improved levees or better evacuation procedures; more than new brick and mortar applied to what had been an aging, deterio­rating region. New Orleans has made enormous progress in cleaning up its famously corrupt political system, and also made huge strides in improving its educational infrastructure. Once considered one of the worst places to do business, the region, and the state of Louisiana, has undergone a marked improvement to its reputation. It has emerged as a good place for commerce – something of a “Cin­derella” in economic development terms.⁴ Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center put it, “Greater New Orleans is in some ways rebuilding better than before”.⁵

Our analysis shows this progress in a host of indicators. Once a below-average job producer, the region has expanded its employment since the 2007 recession far faster than the national average. It recovered all the jobs lost in the recession by 2012 – and then some – while the nation remained three percent below its pre-recession level. Entrepreneurial activity also has grown faster than the national average by a wide margin.⁶

More important still, the region finally began to reverse a demographic decline that, for a gen­eration or more, saw young, educated people and families depart for other locales to seek out a better life. The concentration of 25 to 35 year olds has increased far more quickly in the region than it has in the nation as a whole. Indeed since 2007, New Orleans region has experienced the fastest growth in educated population in the nation.⁷

Many economic trends favor the region’s continued ascendency. These include the still nascent US energy boom, which represents arguably the greatest shift in global economic power since the end of the Cold War and the rise of China; the massive flow of investment, domestic and foreign, into lower-cost locales and most particularly into the Third Coast, the burgeoning region around the Gulf of Mexico; and finally the expansion of US trade with Latin America and the Caribbean basin.

To these powerful forces we can also add demographic and social factors that work to the region’s advantage. One key is a relatively low cost of living, which, in effect, gives area residents and businesses a leg up on their East and West coast rivals. This is critical in attracting net migration from those regions, with their storehouse of educated residents and skilled workers.⁸ Another force is the breadth of skills that can be easily found in the region, including higher paid skilled professionals ex­perienced in transportation and material moving, installation, maintenance and repair, construction, manufacturing and energy.

A future scenario can be constructed where greater New Orleans emerges as one of the bright­est spots in the North American economy. Not only does the region have natural advantages in terms of energy resources and transportation, it can claim primary sources of higher-wage employment. It also possesses a cultural cachet that attracts educated workers, but in a cost and regulatory environ­ment that appeals to business investors.

This is most notable in the growth of the region’s rapidly evolving information industry, in­cluding software, videogames and an expanding film/television industry. Over the past five years, New Orleans has come to enjoy a locational concentration equal to that of New York, and has emerged as a major player in this sector.

Challenges Ahead: Economic, Social and Environmental

As the region moves further from the immediate post-Katrina crisis, the great momentum of the last five years is clearly slowing down. Job creation remains positive, but has gradually fallen towards national norms. Indeed, since 2010, after years of running ahead, the region’s job growth rate actually trailed the national average. This could be simply a sign that, after recovering more slowly, the rest of the country is now catching up. But the slowdown relative to other cities should be taken seriously, as it could represent a loss of critical momentum.

“Concert Of Economic Forces” That Can Make Recovery Permanent

To overcome its legacy of poverty and inequality, the New Orleans region needs to focus not on just one sector but on five critical ones. In a highly competitive national and global economy, re­gions need to work on their unique strengths, establishing advantages that can lead to more, and bet­ter, job creation. Most particularly, the region needs to develop a broad, but still highly selective, base of industries that can create the higher-wage jobs necessary for the uplift not of a few New Orleani­ans, but for the many.

1. The first, and most evident, is the region’s cultural legacy, which serves as a major source of jobs for local people as well as a lure for talented people from elsewhere. This, of course, includes the still very important tourism industry, but also encompasses generally higher-wage professions in film, television, video game software and even medical research.

The growth in information sector employment, something relatively new to the region, rep­resents a clear breakthrough. It allows the region to take advantage of its essential cultural assets, by attracting companies and highly skilled workers. Although it is unlikely that the New Orleans region will ever become as tech-dependent as, say, Silicon Valley --- which may prove a good thing, given that industry’s volatility --- New Orleans can look forward to a sustained increase in high-paying, and high-visibility, employment. Perhaps most critically, it has an excellent opportunity to make itself the cultural capital of the Third Coast, the burgeoning region around the Gulf, something the region desperately needs and a role that New Orleans is uniquely positioned to fulfill.

Yet although these industries are important, they alone cannot sustain a long-term, broad recovery. Wages in the tourism industry and the arts tend to be low – one reason for the city’s per­sistently poor income distribution in the past – and higher-wage jobs, except in engineering services and entertainment, remain below national norms in total jobs and will take many years to reach true critical mass. Perhaps most critically, these industries alone cannot produce enough high-wage skilled jobs for the region’s working class population.⁹

2. The river system. Its location at the shipping terminus of the Mississippi River, across the regions the region’s ports – New Orleans, South Louisiana, St. Bernard, Manchac, Plaquemines and Grand Isle Port – is the historic reason for the region’s existence and one of the key factors in its future success. The region needs to work to compete successfully with its Third Coast rivals, notably Houston, as well as Mobile and Tampa. Growing trade with the Caribbean and the completion of the Panama Canal expansion project increase the opportunities for expanded logistics and cargo han­dling. In addition, the river provides an ideal spur to new industrial production, such as the Nucor Steel plant in St. James Parish, which some see as the precursor of a new zone, akin to Germany’s Ruhr Valley, that could emerge between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Given the devastation of the region’s unique ecological environment, the river presents unique challenges to be addressed. At the same time, the river offers the region new opportunities to develop yet another nascent sector: environmental remediation. The RESTORE Act funds will bring billions to the Gulf help alleviate the region’s own environmental issues, but could also support the unique expertise and skills related to the profound challenges of maintaining coastal regions. This can be seen already in the over $210 million that has flowed to expert Louisiana companies as a result of Hurricane Sandy.¹⁰

3. The energy revolution. Perhaps no sector has more potential to generate higher wage jobs across the region, particularly for working class residents, than the current energy revolution. This is rapidly shifting economic power to North America, and it’s a shift for which the region has a front row seat. Louisiana and the greater New Orleans area boast enormous oil and gas reserves, but the region has not kept up with Houston or even smaller cities in terms of energy-related jobs. Yet there has been continued growth in many upstream services, such as petro-industrial development and exploration, even if headquarters employment has dropped. With the resolution of the BP disaster, it is hoped that the region will recover more employment in this high-wage sector.

4. Environmental remediation. This is both a major challenge and an opportunity for economic development. Simply put, there is no long-term future for the region if the environment that sup­ports it collapses. Katrina, after all, was not the first ecological disaster to hit the region, and it won’t be the last. Finding ways to restore coastal wetlands and manage the river and other water resources in a sustainable manner not only preserves the environment that New Orleanians cherish, but could also create significant business opportunities down the road; More than 4% of Dutch GDP is related to water management, and more than 50% of that is related to international projects and the export of water expertise and services.¹¹

The region has already received $1.3 billion from various BP criminal settlements that will be applied to river diversion and barrier island restoration projects. Over $600 million is already budget­ed for projects being let in 2014 alone, signifying great potential to expand the region’s expertise and capacity in this sector.¹²

5. The construction of infrastructure. New industries require new or improved roads, better freight and harbor access, reliable, inexpensive electricity, and improved air service. The region is moving ahead on many of these fronts, from the expansion of the airport to major port improvements and the development of a new biomedical district along the Canal Street corridor. A region that has historically lagged in forward-looking improvements is showing clear signs of determination to catch up with competitors in the country and around the world.¹³

Yet all these efforts must be done in conjunction with a long-term commitment to preserve the very environment that New Orleanians treasure. This is the ultimate challenge to sustaining and expanding regional prosperity in the era ahead.

This concert of economic forces is critical to driving down poverty rates and raising incomes across class and racial lines. This can only be realized if there is a conscious effort to promote broad-based, sustainable growth in a diversity of industries. This requires placing a greater emphasis, among other things, on higher education, particularly on engineering and the biosciences, and, per­haps even more, on community colleges, technical schools and certificate training. The area may now be attracting more college-educated workers, but it still lags behind the national average, reflecting a legacy of out-migration of skilled workers over the past few decades.¹⁴

This is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from GNO, Inc. here: gnoinc.org/sustainingprosperity

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.

Endnotes

1 http://www.newgeography.com/content/003897-root-causes-detroit-s-decline...

2 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/the-10-fastest-growi...

3 Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, “Conclusion: Axioms of Resilience”, in The Resilient City, editors, Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Oxford University Press, (New York: 2005), pp.335-353

4 http://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-for-business-2012

5 The New Orleans Index, by Allison Player, 2013

6 Allison Plyer, Elaine Ortiz, Ben Horwitz and George Hobor, The New Orleans Index at Eight: Measuring Greater New Orleans Progress Towards Prosperity, Greater New Orleans Community Data Center August 13, 2013, p.6-7

7 newgeography.com/content/002044-americas-biggest-brain-magnets

8 http://www.newgeography.com/content/002950-the-cities-where-a-paycheck-s...

9 Author’s analysis of data from EMSI, Inc.

10 http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environment/managing-our-impact-on-the-environ­ment/complying-with-regulations/clean-water-act-provision.html; http://www.restorethegulf.gov/council/about-gulf-coast-ecosystem-restora...

11 Dale Morris, Senior Economist, Royal Netherlands Embassy

12 http://www.nfwf.org/gulf/Pages/home.aspx;

13 http://biodistrictneworleans.org/

14 Plyer, etal, op. cit., p.12