The first time I presented a paper at an academic conference, I was accused of being nostalgic. My mistake, as my fellow academic pointed out, was that in my bid to find some value in working-class occupational cultures I was guilty of backward looking romanticism. It wasn’t meant to be constructive criticism, but over the years I’ve developed a longstanding interest in the idea of nostalgia which is often attached to working-class life.

So I’ve been especially interested in the ways that political developments on both sides of the Atlantic have involved nostalgia as the backward-looking voters supported Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US.  We may see more of this in France, with support for Le Pen later this year. Charges of nostalgia in these situations refer to a whole range of stances and attitudes, from the more benign sentiments of those who want a return to full industrial employment or desire a greater sense of community to those who more darkly ‘want their country back’, which too often is code for freedom to discriminate. Looking beyond recent elections, we can to detect a backward-looking trend in television, in programmes such as Call the Midwife, Downton Abbey, Mad Men, Endeavour, or the new Netflix series, The Crown.  In politics and popular culture, many seem to be happiest when living in the past.

However, by using the term nostalgia as a catchall criticism we often miss the complexity and nuance involved, and class often has a big part to play here. Those who study nostalgia note that it almost always tells us more about attitudes toward the present than views of the past. It is precisely because people feel unsettled about their current unstable situation and unknowable future that they seek solace in the comfort of the past. Scholars also point out that nostalgia is very rarely ‘simple’ in the sense that people want to live in the past. They are almost always critical, even reflective, about both the present and the past, and they find something of value in that past that may have been lost.

Finally, while it is true that nostalgia is often portrayed as an anti-progressive, anti-modern conservative emotion, it can also have a more creative, progressive, even radical side. I think it is this aspect of nostalgia that can help us think more critically about working-class culture. Reporters and commentators explain voting behaviour using the familiar tropes of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ and ‘rustbelt romanticism’. But dig a little deeper, listen a little more carefully, and it’s easy to see why people might want to return to the past when industrial workers earned $28 per hour and enjoyed good pensions, health care, and perhaps above all, long-term job security. To be nostalgic for those aspects of the past is not only understandable, it’s completely rational. While these positive aspects of the past may sometimes erase less desirable aspects of history, many workers who mourn the loss of earlier jobs are at the same time critical of the past or the work they may have done. As part of my research, I often interview workers who did routine and mundane jobs. Quite a few have said that they hated their jobs but loved the people they worked with. I remember vividly a former coal miner from the North East of England telling me that he despised the physical labour of the mine but would return tomorrow if he could because he missed the comradeship of those he had worked with.

Here then is the point about nostalgia. It seems to me that we need to listen carefully when people talk about their pasts. Dismissing a desire for positive aspects of a remembered past as romantic, conservative, and anti-progressive is wrong-headed, and it also misses a real opportunity. Surely, we want working-class people to remember what collective action and union shops achieved.  We want people to be ambitious for themselves and their kids.

But above all we need to harness the more radical and progressive aspects of a nostalgia that leads people to ask why. Why is it that industrial working-class jobs paid more in the past than they do now? Why were terms and conditions better in the thirty years of the long boom after World War Two? And why did working-class people in that period enjoy rising standards of living year after year, while today similar groups know only precarity? Once we ask these questions, we can start to argue for a more positive, open, and progressive future. We cannot just leave the past to more reactionary voices who want to capture the negative aspects of nostalgia for their own ends.

This piece first appeared at Working Class Perspectives.

Tim Strangleman, University of Kent

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

This statement by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and venture capitalist, unsurprisingly caused a stir, given that he made it in Chicago. Simon Kuper had made a similar observation in the Financial Times when he described how young Dutch up-and-comers had their sights set on London, not Amsterdam. “Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite,” Kuper wrote. “They want to join the global elite.”

Populist movements in Europe and the United States have fueled talk of social and economic division, of a small class of winners at the top and a far larger group of increasingly disaffected lower-skilled workers at the bottom. This attitude seems to flow through to places as well, with global city winners like London and post-industrial losers like Flint, Mich.

Because these divides cleave along social class, educational and cultural lines, they are clear and easy to see. But there’s another -- less visible -- divide cutting across the seemingly monolithic group of the successful. This one separates those who are indisputably winners from those whose success is ambiguous, more qualified and more contingent. This difference is the one between the hedge fund principal, raking in wealth seemingly effortlessly, and the young adult struggling to pay urban rent despite possessing an excellent degree and professional employment. It’s the difference between New York and Cincinnati -- or even Chicago.

The same forces of globalization that  have pulled top Midwest talent into Chicago from below are also acting on the city from above, drawing its talent further up the global city hierarchy. The knowledge economy favors the college degreed over the less educated, but those with the highest and most differentiated skills are most favored, while those whose skills are second tier -- less perfectly in tune with the emerging economy -- are more vulnerable to competitive pressures.

It’s easy to see that the Flints of this world have struggled. Less visible are the stresses put on second-tier cities -- the Chicagos and Cincinnatis -- from a system that is disproportionately giving the greatest rewards to those at the very top of the hierarchy while threatening even the seemingly successful cities with being left behind.

Economist Richard Florida calls this phenomenon “winner-take-all urbanism.” It’s the superstar athlete or celebrity effect transposed into the urban world. Just as A-list stars earn far more than the merely famous, the top business talent and the top cities are reaping disproportionate riches over the merely prosperous.

This divide is harder to spot because the people and places involved are often superficially similar. The people in both possess university degrees. They share similar cultural norms, aspirations and politics. The places they live in all have their farm-to-table restaurants, tech startups, artisanal coffee roasters and bicycle commuter infrastructure. As with a sports team, they all wear the same uniform. But some are all-stars while others are role players who are more easily replaced.

When young workers or artists struggle to find an affordable apartment in a global capital, this isn’t just proof of a failure to deregulate housing development. It’s also a marketplace sending a powerful signal that their position among the winners of society is much more precarious than they might imagine. Most would agree that there are some businesses and people who shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco. We shouldn’t expect a peanut butter spread of talent and economic activity across the country. The nature of the industries concentrated in these places produces a higher-end specialization. So there will be some economic value line below which it isn’t viable to be there.

There’s an argument to be made that building more housing to reduce rents can draw the line lower. But that still presumes a line. When aspirational millennials -- or even older people like me -- can’t afford the current rent, that’s a signal that they are near or below that line. In a time in which rewards seem to be skewed to the top, that should be worrisome to them personally, not just to the poor or working classes.

Similarly, cities that remain a notch below the top tier should be worried. Chicago’s financial crisis, population loss, violent crime spike and other problems suggest fundamental structural challenges facing the city. And if even Chicago is not fully achieving the global-city status it craves, shouldn’t other cities be worried?

Yet the leaders of these cities, and the ambiguously successful people who live in them, have tended to identify themselves as among the winners. They haven’t really grappled with the fact that the global economy puts them at risk. It’s not just people in Flint or Youngstown, Ohio, who are being buffeted by globalization. If these people and cities ever came to view themselves as at risk, they could become a powerful voice for reforming the system to be more equitable while retaining its fundamentally open character. They are the exact potential champions for change in a system that badly needs it so that we can broaden the pool of success.

Unfortunately, those among the ranks of the second-tier successful have instead sided with the global capitals and the global elite to defend the economic status quo, leaving the reform fight to the populists who prefer an overly closed system. They may yet discover to their chagrin that the very system they so vigorously supported will ultimately become their own undoing.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: Kevin D. Hartnell (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

The world has come a long way since 1929, when 80 percent of the world’s car registrations were in the United States, which also manufactured 90 percent of the vehicles. Now China produces the most cars and its annual sales rank top in the world. China overtook the United States in vehicle sales during the Great Recession. But it’s not like Americans are no longer buying cars; the US broke its own record last year. In 2016, sales records were also set in nations as diverse as China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Mexico.  

China

China has emerged as the world’s largest automotive market. In 2016, China’s sales of passenger cars, light trucks (including sport utility vehicles, or SUVs) and commercial vehicles reached 23.9 million. This is 6.5 million more cars than were sold in the United States. This gap is likely to grow, because China's large population offers greater opportunity for growth. The United States has about eight times as many vehicles per 1,000 population as China. The US leads in total vehicles with 260 million compared to China's 140 million, according to OICA, the international vehicle manufacturers organization (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles), 

From virtually the beginning of motorization more than a century ago, the United States dominated world automotive production but during  the Great Recession   China assumed sales leadership. As sales dropped precipitously in the US, Chinese sales rose 47 percent in 2009.

Sales in 2016 were aided by temporarily lower taxes on small engine vehicles, which ended on December 31. Still, analysts expect another four to five percent growth in vehicle sales in 2017.

As in a number of other nations with rising volumes, SUVs took an increasing share of total sales figures. SUV sales were up 44 percent, eight times the increase in passenger car sales. Now, nearly three-quarters as many SUVs as passenger cars are sold in China (Note).

Buick was one of the international pioneers in China’s automobile market, from agreements after US President Richard Nixon’s early 1970s visit. Buicks had been favored by some government officials. and were the first American cars built in China (in a joint venture with local SAIC ). China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, who served from 1949 to 1976, owned one before World War II (Photo: Premier Zhou En Lai’s Buick, Museum in Nanjing). Today, 80 percent of the world’s Buicks are sold in China.

In recent years the Chinese  market has become more diverse. Virtually all of the international players sell in China and there are a number of local manufacturers. Sweden’s flagship brand, Volvo, now owned by Chinese interests, who now ship a “made in China”  model to the United States (the only Chinese import).

China’s infrastructure is well prepared for its record breaking sales. China leads the world in its length of motorways (freeways or controlled access expressways), with 123,500 kilometers (76,700 miles) as of the end of 2015 (Photo: G4 Expressway between Zhengzhou, Henan and Wuhan, Hubei). This compares to the latest available US total of 104,500 (64,900 miles) in 2014.

China’s cities are served by extensive freeway systems. In Beijing  there are five freeway ring roads and a sixth partially opened. But cars have become so popular that the high city densities have predictably created both horrific traffic. Further, despite effective emission controls, the high density of traffic contributes to the country’s severe air pollution problems . The plan for a more decentralized Beijing and environs (Jin-Jing-Ji) is aimed at least partially at reducing traffic congestion.

Photo: Zhou En Lai’s Buick, Zhou En Lai Museum, Nanjing

Photo: G4 Expressway between Zhengzhou, Henan and Wuhan, Hubei

United States

A record 17.6 million light vehicles were sold in the second largest market, the United States, which broke last year’s record of record of 17.4 million. Light duty truck sales captured nearly 60 percent of the market, with an annual increase of 7.2 percent. This included SUV’s, (and “crossovers”) with 38 percent of the market and a 7.4 percent increase. Passenger cars continued their decline by 8.1 percent, to 40 percent of the market.

Western Europe

The core European Union 15 nations, along with Norway and Switzerland taken together account for the third largest car market.  . There was no new record there last year but the strongest volume since 2007. Nearly 14 million light vehicles were sold, approximately six percent below the record set in 1999.

The United Kingdom set a record, with sales of 2.6 million vehicles, up two percent from 2015. Fifteen of the seventeen nations had sales increases. Italy, Portugal and Ireland had the greatest gains, at 17.5 percent, 16.2 percent and 15.8 percent respectively. Spain also exceeded a ten percent gain (10.9 percent), while Finland gained 9.3.

Strong gains were also posted in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Belgium, with increases of from seven to eight percent. However, neighboring Netherlands had by far the largest drop, 14.7 percent. Large markets France (up 5.1 percent) and Germany (4.5 percent) contributed importantly to the higher Western Europe sales number. Sales were down 2 percent in Switzerland.

A More Mobile World

In 2014, world vehicle sales reached 89 million (Figure 1). Between 2004 and 2014, world car sales rose at a rate of 3.3 percent annually. Even with the reverses of the Great Recession, this was a more than one-quarter increase from the 2.6 percent rate of the previous decade. If the trend of recent years continues, production will exceed 100 million by 2020.

According to OICA, international vehicle manufacturers organization (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles), there were 1.2 billion vehicles in the world in 2014, 180 per 1,000 population.

It might be expected that the greatest motorization would have been reached in the United States, the most affluent of the larger nations. That would be partly right, but not the 50 states, rather Puerto Rico is the most intensively motorized geography in the world, with 892 vehicles per 1,000 residents, according to OICA (Puerto Rico is routinely reported separately, for cars and other data .  This is surprising, given that Puerto Rico’s median household income was only one-third of the 50 states in 2015, and less than one-half that of 50th ranked Mississippi (Figure 2).

The United States has to settle for fourth position, following Iceland and Luxembourg. Even that may seem high, especially in view of data in The Economist's The World in Figures, which says that the US  ranks 36th in cars per 1,000 population. But in the United States, cars aren’t even half the story. In the US, peak sales of traditional passenger cars  was reached in 1974 and sales have dropped nearly 40 percent. Consumers have been buying SUVs and pickups instead. Motorization is measured by personal vehicles, not cars. According to OICA, in 2014 86 percent of Western European vehicles were cars, compared to 47 percent in the United States, In fact, in 2016, the top three selling vehicles in the United States were pickups, led by the Ford F Series, which is also the top seller in Canada (photo: Ford F-150 Pickup), where nearly two-thirds of 2016 sales were pickups and SUVs.

Photo: Ford F-150 (2017 model)

World motorization continues to grow strongly. The cars are cleaner , safer and will continue to get more environmentally friendly. The mobility they have facilitated has made an important contribution to the continuing improvements in the quality of life and will continue to do so, despite efforts of governments and planners to discourage their use.

Note: Vehicle types may not be standardized in national reporting and thus caution is required in interpreting this data.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: Chang’an Avenue, Beijing by Australian cowboy at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps no president in recent history has more pressure on him to perform economic miracles than Donald Trump. As someone who ran on the promise that he could fix the economy -- and largely won because of it -- Trump faces two severe challenges, one that is largely perceptual and another more critical one that is very real.

To start, Trump must cope with the widespread idea, accepted by much of the media, that we are experiencing something of an “Obama boom.”

He is widely portrayed as inheriting a very strong economy, notes MSNBC, in which the U.S. is “the envy of the world.” Fortune sees Trump inheriting “the best economy in a generation.”

Yet this is more a matter of perception than reality, a kind of “fake news.” To be sure, President Barack Obama inherited a disastrous economy from George W. Bush and can claim, with some justification, that on his watch millions of jobs were restored and the economy achieved steady, if unspectacular, growth. Under Obama average GDP growth has been almost twice as high as under his predecessor, but roughly half that of either President Reagan or Clinton.

Less appreciated, however, are the fundamental long-term weaknesses in the U.S. economy that Obama and Bush have left for Trump. A recent report from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness details a litany of profound, lingering flaws -- historically slow growth, rising inequality, stagnant incomes, slumping productivity and declining lifespans. As the report concludes: “The Great Recession may be over, but America is dangerously running on empty.”

These make for challenging conditions for Trump to make good on his promise to “make America great again.”

Since 2005 the vast majority of new jobs created have been part-time, and most have been in low-end service professions. Full-time middle-class employment, particularly in fields like manufacturing, construction and energy, has recovered some, but not enough to rekindle a broad sense of economic opportunity. Both the numbers of the rich, and those of the poor, grew markedly under our now departing President. There are now 16 million more people on food stamps than in 2008, and homeownership is down to the lowest level in nearly 50 years.

Trump may have lost the popular vote but given his awful approval numbers, it’s a testament to how deep the distress is for millions amid this economic malaise that he managed to come even close. Perhaps more importantly House Republicans, also running against the economy, outpolled their rivals by 3.5 million votes. Their constituents differ from that of the blue states won by Hillary Clinton. These states, whose economies depend more on financial engineers, real estate speculation, media and technology development, did well – or at least those who worked in these industries did.

Trump’s Biggest Challenge

Trump won because of Middle America -- largely white, suburban and small town, mainly in the vast region between the Appalachians and the Rockies. To consolidate his grip on power, and that of his unruly party, he needs to extend the weak, but long-lasting Obama recovery into something that drives up higher wage employment in manufacturing, energy and services.

This is where Trump’s emerging nationalist policies could come into play. Conservatives and liberals alike sneer at his needling of big corporations, foreign and domestic, over jobs, but what is the job of a President? Shouldn’t he be on the side of average citizen in Podunk, USA? If Trump can bring good jobs back to Middle America, notes analyst Aaron Renn , a native of southern Indiana, they’ll appreciate it. Trump, he notes, is “sending a powerful message to workers that they matter and he will fight for their interests. “

His jawboning of Carrier, Ford, GM and Sprint, and even the mighty Apple, could all be dissected as dependent on subsidies, incentives and intimidation. But people in Indianapolis, southeast Michigan and Kansas City are not theoretical beings waiting for the welfare leavings of the coastal super-rich. Their desires matter as much as those of sensitive souls in San Francisco or Brooklyn.

There are certainly ways -- tax policies, regulatory reform, infrastructure investment -- that might spark growth and get companies to create more jobs here.

Is Trump Up To The Job?

There is nothing better for an economy than mass prosperity, which is something now sorely missing. That means people buying houses, getting married, having babies, the essentials of a strong middle class economy. Anyone who delivers those goods -- last accomplished by Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan -- seems certain of re-election. This is particularly critical for the roughly seven in 10 Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings.

Of course, Trump seeks to achieve this goal is using a very different approach than either Clinton or Reagan. He has chosen to follow an economic nationalist course that, in some ways, seek to reverse the approach embraced by both of these successful Presidents and much of the nation’s establishment. In contrast to virtually everyone who has held the White House since the 1940s, Trump did not run for leader of the world; he ran, very purposely, as the candidate of Americans. Clinton, like the European Union have offered more complexity, notes the Guardian; Trump, like many effective leaders, boiled everything down to simple memes.

Whether this populist course will work is not clear. Critics in the Democratic Party have pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s cabinet hardly fits a populist mold. It’s full of Wall Street financiers and high level corporate executives. He also will face opposition within his own party, which remains largely chained to big business interests and includes many advocates for ever expanding globalization. Similarly many “routine” jobs that paid well have fallen not simply to foreigners, but to automation and technology.

Yet ultimately Trump has proven himself something of savvy politician -- far more than anyone suspected -- and seems, at least for now, to be keeping his eye on the ball. The specter of tax, regulatory reform and more infrastructure spending is already ramping up projections of long lagging investment from businesses. And the general population, however deeply divided, seems more optimistic than in previous years, which could further stimulate the economy.

This could reinforce the notion that Trump’s hectoring of executives, and pushing economic nationalism, could prove effective in creating broad based economic growth for the emerging post-globalization era. Now it’s a matter of whether he can pull this off without sparking a trade war, an international meltdown or another recession that could turn him not into the new Reagan, but the latest version of Herbert Hoover.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

My family lived in this building when I was a kid in the 1970’s. This was the door to our old apartment. It’s in a nondescript part of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. There are a million places just like this all over the Southland. These beige stucco boxes are the workhorses of semi-affordable market rate housing in California. The place hasn’t changed in forty years other than the on-going deferred maintenance.

I walked around the block to see the buildings where my friends used to live and the shops where we bought groceries and such. I can’t say I felt nostalgia. These weren’t happy times. But I was aware of the fact that the people who live here now are the same as my family was then – basically good people who are scraping by with almost no money doing the best they can with what they have. These are the minimum wage workers who do all the invisible dirty work of the city. Real incomes for these folks haven’t changed since I was a kid. But the cost of everything important from owning a home to health care to a proper education has skyrocketed.

I want to go back to my last post about the exclusive homes in the fringe suburbs. The people who can afford to live here do so in large part so they can distance themselves from the people in my old neighborhood. Fair enough. I completely understand. I don’t want to live in my old neighborhood again either.

But there’s that lingering problem of public infrastructure vs. the tax base of various forms of development. The city has spent almost nothing on my old block for decades. Yet those sad buildings keep spinning off revenue year after year. And there are a lot of them. Collectively they generate enough excess cash that the authorities can siphon it off to fund other activities. When it comes time to allocate resources who do you think has the most likely chance of getting what they need? The people who live in my old apartment, or the folks who live in the $700,000 homes up on the hill?

As a society we want to believe that the poor are draining the public coffers dry. We need to blame the lower end of the working class for whatever we don’t like about the country. We want it to be true that they are undeserving compared to the better people who begrudgingly support them from a distance. Welfare. Food stamps. Section 8. But the reality – if you look at the budget and the actual numbers – is that without the poor packed tightly in their crappy apartments all working for crumbs in underfunded sections of town there could be no exclusive enclaves.

Billie Holiday said it best. Them that’s got shall have. Them that’s not shall lose.

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

All photos by Johnny Sanphillippo

I’ve been arguing that one thing struggling post-industrial cities need to do is take care of their own business, doing things like addressing legacy liabilities and rebuilding of core public services.

Last week I write about Buffalo doing just this by completely re-writing its zoning code and creating a new land use map of the city to bring its planning ordinances up to date for the 21st century.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, recently wrote a feature on another good example: the replacement of Detroit’s entire street light inventory.

Detroit had 88,000 street lights, but only about half of them worked. Many of them were ridiculously old, some dating to the early 20th century I believe. Many of these were historic and charming as a result, but alas they didn’t work and couldn’t be maintained either. What’s more, thieves kept stealing the wire out of them for the copper.

The new system consists of 65,000 new LED lamps. As the Times puts it:

Let’s hope that if anyone writes a history of Detroit’s rejuvenation, a chapter is devoted to the lights returning. Like picking up the trash, fixing potholes and responding to emergencies, these efforts signal that no matter where you live in Detroit, you are no longer forgotten — that government here can finally keep its basic promises.

…

This is where the new lights come in. They’re spread all across town. The project cost $185 million, paid by the city and the state. The Public Lighting Authority of Detroit, backed by the mayor, received a critical assist from the Obama administration: Energy Department experts advised local officials to swap out the old, costly, broken-down sodium lamps, which vandals had been stripping bare for copper wire.

They recommended LED technology. Investments by the Obama administration in energy-efficient lighting have reduced costs, making LEDs feasible for a city like Detroit. Three years ago, nearly half the 88,000 streetlights in the city were out of commission. The more potent LED lights allow the authority to replace those 88,000 old fixtures with 65,000 new ones, strong enough for you to read one of those glossy magazines after dark.

Detroit said that it needed to actually deliver high quality services to its residents. Streetlighting is literally a high visibility service. And unlike some human services areas or economic development, it’s a straightforward piece of physical infrastructure that should be well within the ability of the city to actually deliver. And the new lighting authority did deliver:

The whole thing came in under budget and on time. When was the last time anyone could say that about a major infrastructure project in Detroit? “An example of how good government should work,” as Lorna L. Thomas, chairwoman of the lighting authority, put it at the switch-flipping ceremony.

It’s also an example of how one smart urban-design decision can have ripple effects. Some residents here grumbled about fewer lights. That said, the stronger new ones turn out to save Detroit nearly $3 million in electric bills. They use aluminum wiring, which nobody wants to strip, discouraging crime. The technology even cuts carbon emissions by more than 40,000 tons a year — equivalent to “taking 11,000 cars off of your streets,” [said Shaun Donovan].

Part of creating a willingness to spend more money on government is recreating a sense that government is actually competent. Delivering a project on time, under budget, that will save millions in operating costs, reduce theft, and be more environmentally friendly is a step in the right direction.

I’m not the biggest fan of LEDs and might be with the grumblers on wanting a higher density solution. But my preferences for gold level services aren’t always realistic. This appears to be a high quality, cost effective solution the city should feel good about. Other post-industrial cities should take note.

Click over to read the rest of the Times piece.

Image via Laura McDermott/The New York Times

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Perhaps nothing has made modern progressivism look sillier than the often hysterical reaction to the election of Donald Trump. This has spanned everything from street protests, claims of Russian electoral manipulation and even reports of sudden weight gain and loss of sexual interest. Rather than become more introspective in the face of defeat, the bulk of left-leaning media and their intellectual allies have embraced the notion — even before the new president proposes anything — of following what UC Berkeley public policy professor and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich calls “the resistance agenda.”

The notion of modern progressives donning berets and fighting the modern-day version of Nazis is absurd. Donald Trump may be wrongheaded, and personally venal, but he is not Adolph Hitler, or even Benito Mussolini. Critically, he is not particularly popular, as were those demagogues. Trump’s election certainly was not a mandate, as many liberals correctly point out.

The election showed a still deeply divided nation. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but the GOP triumphed everywhere else, notably at the congressional level, where they won by 3.5 million votes, and it did even better at the state and local levels. Certainly, the progressives can get back into the game, but first they need to toss out the berets, stop talking civil disobedience and instead embrace the role of loyal opposition, using counter-arguments rather than histrionics.

Progressives still have wind at their backs

Democrats, time is still largely on your side. All the constituencies that backed Hillary Clinton — minorities, millennials, college-educated professionals — are demographically ascendant. Those that backed Trump, such as boomers, seniors and members of the white working class, are destined to fade.

To return to power in the short run, however, the Democrats need to appeal to parts of the largely white, older Trump base, many of them former Democrats. The meme, as seen in Slate’s assertion that the election proved “how racist, sexist and unjust America is,” does not seem the best way to win over these wavering voters. There are opportunities galore to do this.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Trump protest photo by i threw a guitar at him. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/becc/26879649373/) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

I’m a fan of Strong Towns and share their thesis that the biggest sustainability problem with much of suburbia is its financial sustainability.

A recent article there about Lafayette, Louisiana has been making the rounds. That city’s public works director made some estimates of infrastructure maintenance costs and which parts of the city turned a “profit” from taxes and which were losses. Here’s their profit and loss map.

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The obvious conclusion that we are supposed to draw is that dense, compact, traditional urban development is profitable and good, but low density sprawl is a money loser and bad.

There’s some truth in this, but taking that simplistic view can give a misleading impression. For example, let’s consider why high density central business districts tend to have such density of development and high property values per acre (and thus taxes). It’s obvious that these districts derive a great part of their value from the overall scale of the community, i.e., sprawl.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Lower Manhattan below 59th St. is certainly incredible valuable property. However, if the rest of the metro area were some how chopped away leaving only this super-valuable part, how much value would that land retain? In part, Manhattan is valuable because it’s the center of a vast megacity region where tremendous amounts of human capital that lives in dispersed communities can be concentrated in a small area for commercial purposes.

This article says that only about five cities in America don’t suffer from a fatally flawed financial model. I seem to recall that elsewhere they said NYC and SF are the only two cities that can survive in the long run financially.

But it wasn’t that long ago that NYC nearly went bankrupt and had to be rescued. A recent study just said that its structural finances are the second worst of any major city in the country, primarily because of its gigantic liability for retiree health care. NYC looks good now because its economy has been booming. Let’s see how it does it a major downturn, particularly without a strong fiscal hand like Bloomberg at the tiller.

San Francisco is unaffordable to all but very high income residents. It’s a de facto gated community. It may well be that pricing everybody but the rich out is a viable strategy for financial sustainability, but that’s obviously a path foreclosed to most places, even if they wanted to try it.

We also need to consider that there’s infrastructure we have maintained. By and large our telecommunications infrastructure and electricity infrastructure are in very good shape, for example.  For telecom especially we’ve made vast investments to not only maintain, but dramatically upgrade our infrastructure. How did we manage to pull that off if it’s financially impossible to maintain and upgrade infrastructure? What lessons could we learn from that?

In short, I agree with the general Strong Towns thesis that we need to look at the long run “total cost of ownership” of sprawl. In many cases, the math just doesn’t add up and some cities are in an infrastructure hole so deep they’re unlikely ever to get out. But they are overstating their case here.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo "Downtown Lafayette, Louisiana" by Patriarca12 (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Last year I engaged in a failed attempt to renovate and expand an old house in an 1890’s era neighborhood in Ohio. It ended badly. So I thought I’d do a follow up on what actually does work given the legal parameters and cultural context.

I sold the house to a smart young local guy who bought eight similarly run down properties on the same block within a short period of time. He gathered private funds from a group of personal investors to finance the venture. Then he hired a family owned contracting company from across the river in Kentucky to renovate all the homes. He’s selling the properties as they become ready for market and distributing the profits to his investors, keeping a percentage for himself. It’s a really good economic model with a fast lucrative turn around.

The new owner and his contractor never dreamed of changing any of these buildings in a way that would have required any kind of special permission or variances from the city authorities. That way lies ruin. This smart team of savvy professionals brought these abused and neglected husks up to respectable middle class standards quickly and efficiently in a way that only marginally involved municipal officials with plain vanilla over-the-counter permits and ho-hum inspections. Once the new kitchen cabinets and fancy appliances go in along with the new windows and flooring these homes have instant market appeal. They’ve been selling very well, particularly because the collective renovations of multiple buildings at the same time in the same concentrated area feeds a palpable sense that the neighborhood is rapidly gaining value.

It helps that the new owner went to high school in the area. In a provincial town like Cincinnati these things really matter to the locals. And he’s selling single family homes, presumably to future owner/occupants. In contrast, I was reviled in social media as both a carpetbagging gentrifier who was driving out long time working class residents and an absentee slumlord who would dump “the wrong element” on to the neighborhood and degrade property values and the quality of life for nearby homeowners.

The end result is that the house I paid $15,000 for will ultimate sell for six figures even though it’s still exactly the same size and shape – give or take a nice cosmetic skin job – after it’s flipped at a generous profit. So the folks who worry about gentrification will experience the same resultant condition relative to what I had in mind for the place. And there’s no guarantee that it won’t eventually be purchased by someone who will choose to rent the property rather than live in it themselves. But all that is beside the point. The regulatory environment and cultural perceptions are the defining constraints. The new owner is just a whole lot better at effectively piloting his way around those shoals. I have to respect his business acumen.

Over the past five years I’ve followed a variety of young talented industrious people in the neighborhood. One couple has been engaged in another business model that works beautifully. They buy a distressed property at a reasonable price point. They move in and occupy the space themselves for about a year while they renovate it. Then they buy their next property, move in, and rent the one they just completed. Instead of flipping properties they’re steadily building a long term portfolio with positive cash flow and equity. They’re currently managing a dozen units and filling them with good quality people from the community.

The crucial point is that they never buy a property that requires special permission to upgrade or needs extraordinary amounts of structural work to bring it up to code. They buy a solid shell and clean it up. Full stop. If they encounter an otherwise great building that happens to need fire sprinklers, or an elevator, or a zoning variance they steer well clear of it. Let some other poor bastard kill themselves in the meat grinder of endless bureaucracy and public outrage. (That was me…)

To do absolutely anything else is technically possible, but hideously time consuming, difficult, and untenably expensive – and your neighbors will call you all sorts of terrible names and project all their fears on to you. For folks who believe in building great new places that mirror the charming old compact mixed use walkable neighborhoods of a century ago… Let it go. We have the dregs we inherited from previous generations and they can be shined up. But that’s it.

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

All photos by Johnny Sanphillippo

The 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey measures middle-income housing affordability in 92 major housing markets (metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population) in Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong ), Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. These include five of the largest metropolitan areas in the high income world, the megacities of Tokyo-Yokohama, New York, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto, Los Angeles, and London, all with more than 10 million population.

Rating Middle-Income Housing Affordability

The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey rates middle-income housing affordability using the “Median Multiple,” which is the median house price divided by the median household income. Historically, liberally regulated markets have exhibited median house prices that are three times or less that of median household incomes, for a Median Multiple of 3.0 or less. The ratings are in Table 1.

This year, the least affordable major housing market is Hong Kong (with an 18.1 median multiple --- the median house price divided by the median household income). Sydney is second least affordable, at 12.2 and Vancouver is 11.8 is third, suffering a huge deterioration from last year’s 10.8. Auckland is fourth, at 10.0, San Jose at 9.6, Honolulu at 9.4, Los Angeles at 9.3 and San Francisco at 9.2 (Figure 1).

Overall, there are 29 severely unaffordable major housing markets, including all in Australia (5), New Zealand (1) and China (1). There are 13 severely unaffordable major markets in the United States, out of 54. Seven of the United Kingdom’s 21 major markets are severely unaffordable and two in Canada. Toronto, Canada’s second most costly market experienced a deterioration in housing affordability equal to that of Vancouver, rising to a median multiple of 7.7 from 6.7 (a house price increase equal to a year’s annual household income).

This year, the least affordable major housing markets Hong Kong (with an 18.1 median multiple --- the median house price divided by the median household income). Sydney is second least affordable, at 12.2 and Vancouver is 11.8 is third, suffering a huge deterioration from last year’s 10.8. Auckland is fourth, at 10.0, San Jose at 9.6, Honolulu at 9.4, Los Angeles at 9.3 and San Francisco at 9.2 (Figure 1).

Overall, there are 29 severely unaffordable major housing markets, including all in Australia (5), New Zealand (1) and China (1). There are 13 severely unaffordable major markets in the United States, out of 54. Seven of the United Kingdom’s 21 major markets are severely unaffordable and two in Canada. Toronto, Canada’s second most costly market experienced a deterioration in housing affordability equal to that of Vancouver, rising to a median multiple of 7.7 from 6.7.

There are 11 affordable major housing markets in 2016, all in the United States. Rochester is the most affordable, with a Median Multiple of 2.5, followed by Buffalo (2.6), Cincinnati (2.7), Cleveland (2.7), Pittsburgh (2.7), Oklahoma City (2.9), St. Louis (2.9) and four at 3.0, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis and Kansas City.

Among the megacities, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto is the most affordable, with a median multiple of 3.4, while Tokyo, the world’s largest urban area, has a seriously unaffordable median multiple of 4.7.

 “Best Cities” for Middle-Income Households

Every year, “best cities” and “most livable cities” lists are produced by various organizations. Aimed at the high end of the housing market, these surveys evaluate housing affordability. Yet, the media often mischaracterizes the findings as relevant to the majority of households.

In fact, a city cannot be livable, nor can it be a “best city” to middle-income households that cannot afford to live there. Households need adequate housing.

The “best cities” for housing affordability are often better on middle-income outcomes that the high-end best cities that attract media attention for their luxury lifestyles. This is illustrated by a comparison between Dallas-Fort Worth, where housing affordability is far better and Toronto, which was rated as the “best city” by The Economist. In addition to better housing affordability, traffic congestion is better. Dallas-Fort Worth has the least traffic congestion of any city over 5,000,000 in the world. This is despite the fact that Toronto employs the most favored urban strategies, which Dallas-Fort Worth does not (such as densification and discouragement of auto use). This is not to dispute Toronto’s luxury rating, but it is of little use to the much larger number of middle-income households being priced out of home ownership (Figure 2).

Another comparison shows that Kansas City has substantially better housing affordability than all of The Economist’s top 10 cities. In addition, Kansas City has the least traffic congestion of any city with more than 1,000,000 population (Figure 3) in the world (tied with Richmond).

Urban Containment and Severely Unaffordable Housing

Excessive land use regulation (housing regulation), principally urban containment policy, has been implemented in the major housing markets with severely unaffordable housing. Urban containment has been associated with much higher house prices, which is to be expected, because severe limitations on supply drive prices higher (as the experience with oil and OPEC shows). The process is illustrated in Figure 4.

Prime Minister Bill English of New Zealand (then Deputy Prime Minister) noted in his introduction to the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey that “Land has been made artificially scarce by regulation” locking up land for development. “This regulation has made land supply unresponsive to demand” and “translates to higher prices rather than more houses ...”

Excessive housing regulation has also been identified as having significantly reduced economic growth in the United States (nearly $2 trillion annually) and inequality internationally. It has made the job of central reserve banks more difficult by fueling inflation.

Economic uncertainty is a substantial concern for households. It is important to keep housing affordable, so that households can have a better standard of living and poverty rates can be lower. This requires avoiding urban planning policies associated with artificially raising house prices, specifically the “killer app” of urban containment. Failing that, housing affordability is likely to worsen further.

Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry Overman of the London School of Economics recently suggested that “… that the ultimate objective of urban policy is to improve outcomes for people rather than places” and that “… improving places is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.”

Following that policy prescription, a number of cities (such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City and others) have achieved the objective of putting people over place. For most of society, middle-income households as well as lower income households, the best cities are where governments have overseen local housing markets competently, evidenced by housing that is affordable, all else equal. In such cities, the cost of living tends to be lower, as households are able to afford a more affluent life.

Oliver Hartwich, of the New Zealand Initiative notes in his introduction, “We should not accept extreme price levels in our housing markets. High house prices are not a sign of city’s success but a sign of failure to deliver the housing that its citizens need.”

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Rochester, New York: Most Affordable Major Housing Market in 2016 by Theresa Marconi (Personal Communication) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915” (1973)

In a way, now rare and almost archaic, Kevin Starr, who died last week at age 76, believed in the possibilities of California, not just as an economy or a center for innovation, but also as precursor of a new way of life. His life’s work focused on the broadest view of our state — not just the literary lions and industrial moguls but also the farmworkers, the plain “folks” from the Midwest, the grasping suburbanites who did so much to shape and define the state.

His California was not just movie stars, tech moguls, radical academics, talentless celebrities and equally woeful party hacks who dominate the upper echelons. A native San Franciscan, who grew up in a contentious working-class Irish family and never forgot his roots, Kevin’s California was centered on providing, as he said in a recent interview with Boom California magazine, “a better life for ordinary people.” The diverging fortunes of our people — with many in semi-permanent poverty while others enjoy unprecedented bounty — disturbed him profoundly, and, in his last years, darkened his perspective on the state.

Over recent years, Kevin was increasingly distraught by what he saw as “the growing divide between the very wealthy and the very poor, as well as the waning of the middle class” that now so characterizes the state. He saw San Francisco changing from the diverse city of his youth, made up of largely ethnic neighborhoods, to a hipster monoculture. With typical humor, he labeled his hometown as essentially “a Disneyland for restaurants,” a playground with little place for raising middle-class families. California has, indeed, changed over the decades, but not always in a good way.

Kevin Starr’s California

Kevin Starr represented another, more congenial California, one where people could still disagree on issues, but work for common goods. He was, as his wife Sheila told the New York Times, largely a man of the 1950s, a creature of consensus seekers. He served as state librarian under governors Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A conservative-leaning centrist Democrat, he did not fit comfortably in a state that has drifted from a vibrant two-party culture to a dominant progressive monoculture with little more than a Republican rump.

In today’s hyperpartisan environment, the Golden State must either be a dystopia (the conservative view) or an emerging paradise on earth (the common progressive mantra). Starr, as a fair-minded historian, saw both realities — not only today but through time. In his multipart “California Dream” series, Starr both confronted reaction against ethnic change and celebrated the process of integration, whether for Latinos, Asians or Anglo Okies, whose unique presence, outside of their descendants, is all but lost in contemporary California.

But what most separated Kevin’s view of California from many others were his humanity and empathy with the aspirations of the state’s middle- and working-class families. Many intellectuals denounce suburbs as racist and exclusionary, as well as environmentally and culturally damaging. Starr saw in them something else — what author D.J. Waldie has described as “Holy Land” — in places like Lakewood, the Bay Area suburbs and Orange County. To him, these were not only places of opportunity, but also landscapes of a reborn “more intimate America,” home to an expanding middle class.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Institute of Museum and Libraries Service (IMLS website) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

President Nixon, though possessing the instincts and speaking the increasingly conservative language of the mainstream Republican Party all his life (his writings on domestic policy attest to this,) governed within the boundaries set by the New Deal. Where other conservatives like Barry Goldwater had no interest in “streamlining government,” “making it more efficient,” and “promoting welfare,” Nixon sought to do exactly these things. He might be considered a “good-government conservative,” seeking, as did his mentor Eisenhower, to make the institutions of the New Deal state work more effectively and efficiently for the American people. At the time, liberal Democrats had no interest in reforming governance in this way, while more conservative Republicans offered no solutions but “starve-the-beast.” Nixon was pioneering a pragmatic middle ground.

If there was a single animating principle behind Nixon’s good-government reform efforts, it was this: lessen the power of the federal bureaucracy. There were various ways Nixon went about this, but this article will examine three. Nixon would empower the poor and those dependent on federal aid by replacing strings-attached welfare and social programs with no-strings-attached payments, believing poor people would be better at deciding how to spend their money than bureaucrats. Nixon would empower officials (and bureaucrats) at the state, city, and county levels by passing revenue sharing aid along to them. Finally, Nixon would oversee the smoother management of the federal government, by reorganizing the federal departments into departments based on broad purpose and function rather than on sector or constituency.

These initiatives-the Family Assistance Plan, General Revenue Sharing, and Executive Reorganization- made up a significant chunk of Nixon’s domestic policy, also known as the “New Federalism.” There were other aspects, including Keynesian full-employment spending, creation of new federal regulatory departments, and a push for universal healthcare. But the Family Assistance Plan, Revenue Sharing, and Executive Reorganization were the boldest in terms of reforming the New Deal and Great Society institutions for a new era, and incidentally, they all failed to gather sufficient popular support to be institutionalized in the long term. The Reagan Administration ended most Revenue Sharing plans in 1986, while the Family Assistance Plan and Executive Reorganization never passed in Congress (in the latter case, largely due to the distracting factor of Watergate.)

But these bold good-government reforms are worth revisiting today, if only to gain insight into the unique governing philosophy of President Nixon.

The Family Assistance Plan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, head of Nixon’s Urban Affairs Council, strongly advocated for what he called the “income strategy-“ a resolution to fight poverty by boosting incomes and putting money in poor people’s pockets, rather than providing social services staffed by career bureaucrats. After much internal jockeying over such issues as the enforcement of work requirements and rates of support payments, the “Family Assistance Plan” became the administration’s keystone domestic policy initiative, the vital core of its New Federalism.

The Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was designed to largely replace the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) put in place by the New Deal and expanded under the Great Society. FAP’s logic was simple: poor families would have a better knowledge and understanding of how to help themselves if given welfare payments than would the social workers and bureaucrats whose programs those dollars might otherwise fund. There was also a strong work requirement and work incentive, distinguishing the plan from previous versions of welfare programs. As President Nixon said in his August 8, 1969 Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,

… I, therefore, propose that we will abolish the present welfare system and that we adopt in its place a new family assistance system. Initially, this new system will cost more than welfare. But, unlike welfare, it is designed to correct the condition it deals with and, thus, to lessen the long-range burden and cost.…The new family assistance system I propose in its place rests essentially on these three principles: equality of treatment across the Nation, a work requirement, and a work incentive.

The FAP would have been the most significant reform in American social welfare policy since the 1930s and one of the most transformative domestic policies of the latter half of the 20th Century. It would have served the administration’s goal of weakening the bureaucracy by reducing the responsibilities of federal service agencies, opting instead for a cash handouts approach that incentivized job attainment.

Ultimately, due to lengthy conflicts over the substance of welfare reform between the Moynihan and Burns camps, the administration never put forth a bulletproof proposal to Congress, and Congressional conservatives and liberals united to defeat what they respectively regarded as too generous and too stingy a proposal.

Revenue Sharing

If the purpose of the Family Assistance Plan was to remove the bureaucratic middleman from welfare policy, then the point of Revenue Sharing was to remove the bureaucratic middleman from many other aspects of federal policy, particularly social services. Revenue Sharing in its various forms- General Revenue Sharing, which did not have any strings attached, and Special Revenue Sharing, which was directed at specific sectors but still had few strings attached- was conceived in the spirit of decentralizing policymaking power to states, counties, and municipalities. As President Nixon said in his February 4, 1971 Special Message to Congress proposing General Revenue Sharing,

There is too much to be done in America today for the Federal Government to try to do it all. When we divide up decision-making, then each decision can be made at the place where it has the best chance of being decided in the best way. When we give more people the power to decide, then each decision will receive greater time and attention. This also means that Federal officials will have a greater opportunity to focus on those matters which ought to be handled at the Federal level.

Strengthening the States and localities will make our system more diversified and more flexible. Once again these units will be able to serve–as they so often did in the 19th century and during the Progressive Era–as laboratories for modern government. Here ideas can be tested more easily than they can on a national scale. Here the results can be assessed, the failures repaired, the successes proven and publicized. Revitalized State and local governments will be able to tap a variety of energies and express a variety of values. Learning from one another and even competing with one another, they will help us develop better ways of governing.

The ability of every individual to feel a sense of participation in government will also increase as State and local power increases. As more decisions are made at the scene of the action, more of our citizens can have a piece of the action. As we multiply the centers of effective power in this country, we will also multiply the opportunity for every individual to make his own mark on the events of his time.

Finally, let us remember this central point: the purpose of revenue sharing is not to prevent action but rather to promote action. It is not a means of fighting power but a means of focusing power. Our ultimate goal must always be to locate power at that place–public or private-Federal or local–where it can be used most responsibly and most responsively, with the greatest efficiency and with the greatest effectiveness.

Integral to the Revenue Sharing programs, and indeed to the New Federalism as a whole, was the urge to, as Richard P. Nathan put it, “sort out and rearrange responsibilities among the various types and levels of government in American federalism.” With the complex ecosystem of American federalism approaching incomprehensibility, Nixon’s administration sought to rationalize it somewhat by decentralizing some functions and centralizing others. Nathan argues that inherently trans-regional issues, such as air and water quality or basic minimum welfare standards, were best managed at the federal level, as were basic income transfer payments. Meanwhile, more complex and regionally variant issues, such as social services and healthcare and education, might be better dealt with locally.

Many of the functions of powerful federal departments would thereby increasingly be taken up by states and cities, which would now have the federal funding to manage things they once could not. In this way, Nixon weakened the federal bureaucracy by empowering political entities far away from the national bureaucracy’s central core in Washington.

Revenue Sharing of all sorts was broadly popular across party lines, but was terminated by the middle of the Reagan Administration.

Executive Reorganization

The third significant aspect of President Nixon’s domestic agenda was the wholesale reorganization of the Executive Branch’s departments. The twelve departments existing at the time of Nixon’s presidency had all been born out of necessity over the first two centuries of American history, and typically corresponded to particular economic or infrastructural sectors (for example, the Department of Agriculture.) New agencies proliferated within the departments, and often times different departments would pass conflicting regulations on the same subjects, making a tangled environment for citizens navigating through the mess.

The solution developed by the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization (PACEO) was to completely reorganize the Executive Branch based on function rather than constituency. The Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, and Justice would remain largely as they were; the remaining departments would be reorganized into a Department of Human Resources, a Department of Natural Resources, a Department of Community Development, and a Department of Economic Development. As President Nixon said in his March 21, 1971 Special Message to Congress on Executive Reorganization,

We must rebuild the executive branch according to a new understanding of how government can best be organized to perform effectively.

The key to that new understanding is the concept that the executive branch of the government should be organized around basic goals. Instead of grouping activities by narrow subjects or by limited constituencies, we should organize them around the great purposes of government in modern society. For only when a department is set up to achieve a given set of purposes, can we effectively hold that department accountable for achieving them. Only when the responsibility for realizing basic objectives is clearly focused in a specific governmental unit, can we reasonably hope that those objectives will be realized.

When government is organized by goals, then we can fairly expect that it will pay more attention to results and less attention to procedures. Then the success of government will at last be clearly linked to the things that happen in society rather than the things that happen in government.

Rather than being a conscious component of the New Federalism, the Executive Reorganization is more rightly thought of as a part of what Richard P. Nathan calls the “Administrative Presidency-“ Nixon’s attempts after 1972 to bring the federal bureaucracy much more directly under his personal control, through reorganizing the Executive Branch and through appointing personal loyalists to Cabinet positions and other spots. This, of course, would have lessened the influence of career bureaucrats and directly increased the President’s power over policy implementation.

The Executive Reorganization failed largely due to the Watergate scandal.

Conclusion

It’s very likely that much of Nixon’s plan to weaken the federal bureaucracy and fundamentally reform the federal government was driven by his own distrust of the “Establishment.” That does not, however, detract from the very real fact that the U.S. federal government of 1968, after almost three-and-a-half decades of near-continuous expansion, was cumbersome, overbearing, and inefficient at fulfilling the tasks assigned it by the American people. Much of this dysfunction, it could be argued, lay in the fact that the federal bureaucracy was becoming an interest group committed to its own perpetuation and loathe to undergo reforms imposed from the outside.

Nixon’s plans to lessen the federal bureaucracy’s authority, responsibility, and power, whatever their fundamental motive, bore much potential to transform the federal government from a hulking behemoth into a sleeker, more responsive, and fundamentally more effective machine attuned to the needs of the last few decades of the 20th Century. Had the Family Assistance Plan, Revenue Sharing and policy decentralization, and the Executive Reorganization passed, the apparatus of the federal government might well look different today. Agencies and departments would be more goal-oriented than constituency-oriented; many federal services would be outsourced to newly-vibrant state and local governing entities; the welfare system would be entirely transformed into a payments system rather than a services system.

President Nixon’s legacy as a good-government reformer ought to be examined more closely, both for its own sake, and for the sake of better informing government reform efforts in the 21st Century. There is potentially much we could learn from many of Nixon’s initiatives.

Luke Phillips is a political activist and writer in California state politics. His work has been published in a variety of publications, including Fox&Hounds, NewGeography, and The American Interest. He is a Research Assistant to Joel Kotkin at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.

Photo: Oliver F. Atkins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sources

“The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency,” Richard P. Nathan, 1975

“Richard M. Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator,” Leon Friedman and William F. Levantrosser, 1991

“Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” Richard Nixon, August 8th 1969

“Special Message to Congress Proposing General Revenue Sharing,” Richard Nixon, February 4th 1971

“Special Message to Congress on Executive Reorganization,” Richard Nixon, March 21st, 1971

The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back
by Kay Hymowitz

My City Journal colleague Kay Hymowitz has written a number of great articles on Brooklyn, the borough that is her home. This inspired her to write a great book on the topic of the transformation of Brooklyn called The New Brooklyn.

It starts with a two-chapter history of the borough from its earliest settlement to the present day, followed by a series of chapters looking at Brooklyn today. This includes the transformation of Park Slope (where she and her husband moved in the early 1980s), Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and the Navy Yard.

But she recognizes that Brooklyn is not all hipster gentrifiers. It is still a borough of immigrants and still too often poverty. A quarter of Brooklyn’s residents are below the poverty line. So she also presents case studies of this other face of the new Brooklyn, including the looking at the Chinese of Sunset Park, the West Indians of Canarsie and the African-Americans of Brownsville.

There’s a lot of great details in here. For example, that there were once slaves in Brooklyn:

It’s worth lingering over this jarring fact: when you walk past the fine townhomes and churches of Brooklyn Heights, eat at a pizza joint in Bensonhurst, or wander through the art galleries of Bushwick, you are traversing land once tilled by African slaves – and a substantial number of them, given the small size of the white population.

Also how NYCHA income limit rules helped segregate public housing that had formerly been at least partially integrated.

NYCHA residents were required to move out once their income surpassed a certain ceiling. That made sense; public housing was supposed to be for those who couldn’t afford to live in private developments. The problem was that most of those who reached the income ceiling were white. Antipoverty advocates argued that it was only fair to give preference to the most disadvantaged on waiting lists. Perhaps; but as a result, upwardly mobile whites were replaced by poor black refugees both from the South and the cleared slums of other parts of New York.

There are also some passages that would give Richard Florida the tingles:

The postindustrial crowd settling in Park Slop had a somewhat different profile from their educated suburban cousins, a profile that continues to dominate gentrified neighborhoods everywhere. They were an artsy-literary bunch; today, we would call them the “creative class”…Whatever the reasons, the original gentrifiers were in conscious retreat from suburban conformity. Though gentrifier tastes have veered back towards mid-century modern, the Tiffany lamps, stained glass and Victorian antiques that the pioneers collected were a far cry from the harvest-gold kitchen appliances and plastic chairs and dishes favored by suburbanites.

A few of the essays were previously published in City Journal, but the majority of the book is new. The writing is very accessible and not academic. The New Brooklyn provides not just a highly readable look at the current conditions in Brooklyn, but a sense of how we got to where we are. As someone who lacks in-depth knowledge of Brooklyn, I found it very informative.

You can also listen to Kay talk about her book in a recent episode of the City Journal podcast.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Access for residents to employment is critical to boosting city productivity. This has been demonstrated by researchers such as Remy Prud’homme and Chang-Woon Lee of the University of Paris, David Hartgen and M. Gregory Fields of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Generally, city productivity (economic growth and job creation) can be expected to improve more where employment access is better . Access is measured in the number of jobs that can be reached by the average employee in a certain period of time, like 30 minutes.

Generally, US cities have seen strong productivity gains as they have become more accessible. In 1900, before the broad adoption of the automobile, US gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $6,900 (2015 dollars). By 1930, when there were 90 percent as many motor vehicles as households in the nation, GDP per capita rose to $10,600. Now, even factoring in the economic reverses of the last decade, GDP per capita is more than five times that amount (Figure 1).

Further, American metropolitan areas tend to have shorter work trip travel times and less traffic congestion than their counterparts elsewhere. Much of this is due to their more decentralized employment bases than elsewhere in the world, where decentralization has increased at a slower rate.

Public officials and planners now have been given an important new tool for assessing access and improving metropolitan transportation. Researchers at the University of Minnesota Accessibility Laboratory have been studying accessibility in US employment markets (metropolitan areas) in the most detailed terms yet. The first report, in 2013, was authored by Professor David Levinson (on autos) and since that time Andrew Owen and Brendan Murphy have collaborated with Levinson in reports on autos, transit and walking. These modal reports measures access by the number of jobs that can be reached in a metropolitan area by the average employee in 10 minute intervals (from 10 to 60 minutes).

This article summarizes access in the 30 and 60 minute travel times in 49 metropolitan areas (Note 1). The 30 minute trip is used because it is close to the average one-way work trip travel time in the United States (26.4 minutes in 2015). The 60 minute trip is used is the longest commute considered.  This “one hour economic circle” has also been adopted in Chinese cities, such as Chongqing for urban area planning, as recommended by former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud.

Access by Automobile

As one would expect, more jobs can be accessed in the larger metropolitan areas. New York leads, with 2.6 million jobs accessible to the average employee within 30 minutes by auto. New York is closely followed by Los Angeles, only 12 percent lower at 2.3 million. With a population 35 percent below that of New York, and with the worst traffic congestion in the United States, this is a surprising result. The greater dispersion of jobs in Los Angeles certainly helps. In third position, Dallas-Fort Worth surprisingly edges out much larger Chicago, in fourth position. This undoubtedly is the result of DFW’s superior freeway system, which along with its arterial system has resulted in the best traffic congestion in the world for any metropolitan area over 5 million population. Washington (Note 2) and Houston rank fifth and sixth.

Employment access by autos in 60 minutes is the highest in New York, and Los Angeles, with Chicago third (ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth), probably due to its larger overall labor market (42 percent more jobs than Dallas-Fort Worth). Washington, San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth have around 3,000,000 auto accessible jobs (Figure 2).

Access by Transit

Transit access is dominated by New York’s 200,000 jobs within 30 minutes access by transit. This is nearly three times that of second place San Francisco. The top five include three of the other metropolitan areas with the largest central business district (CBD or downtown) areas, Chicago, Washington and Boston, while Philadelphia, with the sixth largest CBD ranks seventh. Los Angeles ranks sixth. Seattle, Portland and Denver round out the top ten, well above their 15th, 24th and 21st population ranks. These high rankings may be a measure of their transit system quality, though access by transit is a mere fraction of their auto access.

New York leads in 60 minute transit access, at more than 1.2 million, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago (Figure 3).

Access by Walking

New York also leads in 30 minute walk access, more than doubling that of second place San Francisco, at 47,300, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. New York also leads in 60 minute walking access, at 157,100, followed, again, by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington (Figure 4).

Modal Comparisons

The job accessibility differences between autos and transit are significant. On average among the 49 metropolitan areas, 30 minute access by car is 783,000 jobs, compared to only 18,000 for transit and 7,000 by walking. At 60 minutes, autos reach nearly 1.7 million jobs, compared to fewer than 130,000 for transit and 28,000 by walking. Thus, at 30 minutes, the accessible auto market is 43 times that of transit and 115 times that of walking (Figure 5).

The ultimate transit city in the United States is New York. There, the average employee can reach 2.6 million jobs by auto in 30 minutes, compared to 205,000 for transit and 157,000 by walking. Auto access in 30 minutes is 13 times that of transit and 56 times that of walking (Figure 6).

Portland is a metropolitan area often cited for its urban transport policies, especially its extensive light rail system. Further Portland has a comparatively strong, traditional central business district (downtown) and has implemented policies intended to reduce car use and encourage transit and walking as well as increase urban densities. The average Portlander can reach 687,000 jobs in 30 minutes by car, 19,000 by transit and only 7,000 by walking. That’s only slightly better than the national average, with autos providing 37 times the access of transit and 97 times that of walking (Figure 7).

Raleigh (Note 2) is certainly not a new city, but its explosive growth has given the metropolitan area a post-World War II urban form, with comparatively low density (one-half that of Portland) and very low transit ridership. The average employee in Raleigh can reach 567,000 jobs by car in 30 minutes, compared to 4,500 by transit and 4,300 by walking. Raleigh’s auto access is 125 times that of transit and 132 times that of walking, both higher than the national average (Figure 8).

Extending Auto Mobility to All

It is clear from the data that access to an auto provides unique advantages in comparison to transit or walking. Professor Robert Gordon, in his seminal The Rise and Fall of American Growth says that" "Much of the enthusiastic transition away from urban mass transit to automobiles reflected the inherent flexibility of the internal combustion engine—it could take you directly from your origin point to your destination with no need to walk to a streetcar stop, board a streetcar, often change to another streetcar line (which required more waiting), and then walk to your final destination."

It might be asked, “how can it be that this is so in view of the many billions spent on new urban rail lines?” The answer is that transit cannot be competitive with the automobile in the modern urban area. Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I concluded that it could take all of an urban area’s gross domestic product each year to build and operate such a system.

At the same time, transit moves a large share commuters to the largest central business districts in the transit legacy cities. This is an important niche market, but not a large percentage overall.



With the practical impossibility of replicating auto mobility for people who cannot afford cars, new thinking is needed. One approach could be auto ownership programs, according to Evelyn Bloomenberg and Margy Waller in a 2003 Brookings Institution paper. This could require shifting transit funding priorities toward employment access and the longer term economic growth that would produce.

Note 1: The latest reports cover 50 metropolitan areas. This article deals with 49, because no transit data was provided for Memphis.

Note 2: Some metropolitan areas are virtually adjacent to others. This can increase the jobs accessible because there is significant employment outside the metropolitan area, in an adjacent metropolitan area. Examples are San Francisco and San Jose, Washington and Baltimore, and Raleigh and Durham.

Photo: Suburban Employment Center: Chicago (by author)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels. The planet was significantly cooler and dryer back then. Sea level was lower since glaciers in the north pulled water out of the oceans. The bay isn’t that deep so a relatively small change in sea level pushed the coastline out by twelve miles from its present location. Further back in pre-history when the earth was warmer than today sea level was higher. The hills of San Francisco were small islands off the coast of ancient California.

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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels. The planet was significantly cooler and dryer back then. Sea level was lower since glaciers in the north pulled water out of the oceans. The bay isn’t that deep so a relatively small change in sea level pushed the coastline out by twelve miles from its present location. Further back in pre-history when the earth was warmer than today sea level was higher. The hills of San Francisco were small islands off the coast of ancient California. These cycles play out on a scale we humans can’t perceive in our daily lives. You can think of this process as a larger version of the tides that play out over thousands of years instead of twice a day. There’s absolutely no need to debate human induced climate change. The climate changes all the time with or without us. The real question is how we will adapt over time.

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In the last century the majority of what was once low lying wetlands around the bay were filled and built upon. Airports, shipping terminals, oil refineries, housing developments, and industrial parks are sitting on landfill just slightly above water.

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We just experienced a king tide. This is a naturally occurring cyclical event that happens whenever the earth, moon, and sun line up in a particular way to create a tide that’s about seven feet higher than usual. In this part of the world king tides tend to arrive a few times a year alongside heavy winter rains. The result is a submerged landscape that at a normal high tide in summer is actually dry land.

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A significant amount of territory would be underwater in a king tide if it weren’t for extensive levees, drainage ditches, canals, and pumping stations that actively manage the hydrology of the built environment.

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So far the engineered solutions are working to plan. But this stuff is expensive to build and maintain. If we skimp or take our eyes off the ball there’s a risk of a breach that would do serious damage to the affected areas. This is California’s version of New Orleans with the added feature of seismic activity to complicate matters.

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Last summer I was exploring the semi industrial neighborhoods around the airport just south of the city and found myself having a conversation with a hotel manager.

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Even during ordinary high tides the water level of the canal is about the same as the parking lot. So whenever it rains the drainage system that normally pulls water away from the land works in reverse and canal water is pushed up onto the surface.

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What’s the difference between a hotel room that remains completely dry vs. a hotel room that has just one inch of standing water on the floor? That’s the difference between $100 a night and $0 per night.

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The management has long responded to the situation by not renting ground floor rooms during the rainy season. That constitutes a seasonal operating loss since any hotel that falls below a 60% occupancy rate loses money. But there isn’t much that can be done. The rooms on the lower level are being renovated so that once the weather clears up the hard surfaces can be thoroughly cleaned and aired out and put back on the market without incident.

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Warehouses and industrial sheds in the area have a similar set of challenges. Who exactly wants to store or manufacture things in a facility that gets wet whenever it rains at high tide?

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I was curious why such valuable waterfront land wasn’t redeveloped with new construction that was built with rising tides and earthquakes in mind. Wasn’t the canal a natural feature that could be capitalized upon as a major amenity? Wouldn’t people pay extra to stay at a fancy hotel or live along a landscaped promenade with cafes and shops? It could be really nice, and the real estate market would certainly be able to absorb the required price point. I was told the hotel owner had asked for permission to redevelop the site as a retirement village. Local regulators denied the applications. The city insists that the property remain as it is.

Over the years I’ve had more than one mayor or city official in different parts of the country explain that each new resident costs the city money in services and infrastructure. What cities desperately need is tax revenue. That’s why we see a proliferation of casinos, premium outlet malls, entertainment complexes, and technology parks. A half assed soggy hotel is better for the city’s bottom line than anything that will burden the municipality with needy residents.

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In the short term there are all manner of temporary quick fixes that can keep this system going. But over the long haul there are only two possible trajectories for these places. One is for huge sums of public money to be spent defending private property. The other is that the structures that currently occupy vulnerable positions will lose value, be abandoned, and gradually slip under the tide. Downtown San Francisco is likely to find the funds to keep back the waves. Will taxpayers really be willing to fortify the old Taco Bell and aging suburban big box store? Toss in an earthquake or two and things could get really interesting very fast. Happenstance is the polite politically neutral term for this kind of triage.

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

All photos by Johnny Sanphillippo

In often needlessly harsh ways, President Donald Trump is forcing Americans to face issues that have been festering for decades, but effectively swept under the rug by the ruling party duopoly. Nowhere is this more evident than with immigration, an issue that helped to spark Trump’s quixotic, but ultimately successful, campaign.

Many Americans are clearly upset about an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and many also fear the arrival of more refugees from Islamic countries. Perhaps no issue identified by Trump has been more divisive.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s rhetoric has stirred bitter anger among the country’s polite establishment, right and left, as well as the progressive grievance industry. His call for a massive border wall has not only offended our neighbor, Mexico, but also created legitimate concern in Latino communities of massive raids. According to a 2012 study for the National Institutes for Health, the undocumented account for roughly one in five Mexicans and up to half of those from Central American countries.

The weakness of the open borders position

Anti-immigrant sentiment has a long, if somewhat nasty, history in America. It usually follows periods of great immigration, and ethnic change, as occurred in the mid-19th century and early 20th century, when immigration policies were dramatically tightened.

Today, economics dictates some change of direction. In a country where wages for the poorest have been dropping for decades, the notion of allowing large numbers of similarly situated people into the country seems to be more a burden than a balm. In California, among noncitizens, three in five are barely able to make ends meet, according to a recent United Way study.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown has famously laid out a “Welcome” sign to both Mexican illegal and legal immigrants coming to the state. Many progressives consider concerns with nationality and cultural integration as vile attempts to have them “Anglo-Saxonized.” The open borders ideology has reached its apotheosis in “sanctuary” cities which extend legal protection from deportation even to criminal aliens who have committed felonies.

Trump’s over-the-top response

Politically, the open borders rhetoric helps Trump. Even in California, three-quarters of the population, according to a recent UC Berkeley survey, oppose sanctuary cities. Overall, more Americans favor less immigration than more. Most, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, also want tougher border controls and increased deportations. They also want newcomers to come legally and adopt the prevailing cultural norms, including English.

But in his rants on immigration, Trump may be going too far. Only a minority favor Trump’s famous wall, and the vast majority, including Republicans, oppose massive deportations of undocumented individuals with no criminal record. Limiting Muslim immigration does better, but appeals to only roughly half of Americans.

Trump’s restrictionist choice for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is also on record opposing more legal immigration. This could prove ruinous to the country’s long-term future. Like most high-income countries, the United States’ fertility rate is below that needed to replace the current generation. If the U.S. cuts off its flow of immigrants too dramatically, we will soon face the labor shortages, collapse of consumer demand and drops in innovation already seen in the European Union and much of East Asia.

An overly broad cutback in immigration would also deprive the country of the labor of millions of hard-working people, many of whom do difficult jobs few native-born Americans would do. The foreign-born, notes the Kaufmann Foundation, are also twice as likely to start a business as the native-born.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: JamesReyes [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In his 1950s satire Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut describes a dark dystopia where automation has led to a world of meager consumption and desperate idleness. The vision of workers displaced by machines predates this though, and is perhaps most associated with the 19^th century Luddite movement where workers sabotaged machinery for fear of losing jobs. In economic thought, the prospect of labor-replacing technology has a still much longer history.

The opinion of most economists has been that “Luddite fears” are misplaced. New technology is economically synonymous with increased efficiency, new and cheaper products, expanded national income and demand for goods, and ultimately an expanded demand for labor and higher wages. With recent technology, however, most notably robots and artificial intelligence, a growing number of economists are sounding alarm.

Will the future be one where capital in the form of robots and other machines make remunerative work increasingly obsolete? Will it be one where smart policy aims at the maintenance and fostering of labor-intensive processes, while shunning automation and capital intensity? These two questions increasingly dominate the economic debate. In this brief exploratory paper we highlight an important element in that debate.

Don’t Forget Multiplier Effects

The jobs supported by a given industry extend beyond those specifically employed in that industry. A more or less wide variety of produced inputs are needed, and jobs are created as well in the industries supplying these inputs. And the suppliers themselves need inputs, as do their suppliers, and so on, creating an often long and complex chain of input supply and job creation. Importantly, some industries have deeper supply chains than others, and a deep supply chain means higher off-site job effects.

Turning to economic models, the off-site job effects of a given industry are captured by the employment multiplier of an input-output model. Employment multipliers measure total jobs divided by on-site jobs—a multiplier of 3 means for every job on-site two more are created off-site through supply chain multiplier effects. Now it may be that industry A offers fewer jobs on-site than industry B yet offers more jobs in total when multiplier effects are included. In framing a jobs policy, failure to include multiplier effects could lead to the erroneous choice of B over A.

Off-site job creation extends beyond the chain of industrial inputs. An industry with a given number of workers and high wages will create more jobs through the effects of personal consumption spending than one paying low wages. Likewise an industry with much capital (buildings, machines, etc.) creates more property income than one with little capital, and this means greater personal consumption spending. More importantly, though, in the case of high-capital industries, considerable annual expenditures will be required to maintain, repair, and periodically replace the capital stock, and this creates jobs in the broad collection of industries that provide these essential capital goods and services.

Multipliers and Automation

So we ask the question: Do industries characterized by automation have greater off-site employment effects, i.e., multiplier effects, than other industries? If we had some definitive index of automation by industry we could simply compare industry I-O employment multipliers to this index and determine the answer. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, no such index exists. Is there a suitable surrogate?

To begin with note that any tool or machine, even simple and inexpensive ones, contribute to the abridgement of labor and thus to some degree of automation. At the same time, a thoroughly automated factory, with its robots and advanced technology, is a very expensive factory, and thus a factory with a high ratio of capital stock to labor. So as a tentative exploration of the relation between automation and employment multipliers, let us compare industry capital-labor ratios and multipliers (see italicized footnote for how we estimate the value of an industry’s stock of capital).

The multiplier effect we wish to examine includes particularly the action of personal income and induced investment spending. These are derived from our input-output model “closed” with respect to household spending and investment. Such models are strictly intended to portray the economic base of regional economies. When constructed at the national level, they tend to overstate multipliers, the result of assuming, in effect, that all economic activity is explained by national exports. However, absolute size notwithstanding, industry-by-industry comparisons provide an entirely reliable indication of relative multiplier magnitudes.

Drawing an overall comparison of multipliers and capital-labor ratios, across all of the approximately 1,000 North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) industries, provides a less than perfect yet solidly positive correlation. Figure 1 shows indicative findings.

Leading the collection is petroleum refineries (NAICS 324110), with nearly $21 million in plant and machinery per employee and an employment multiplier of nearly 100. Think of the great investment in building a refinery, all the moving parts, the ongoing investment needed to maintain it, all the many inputs per worker and an employment multiplier near 100 is perhaps not surprising, especially as it is derived from a national-level model. Other industries with large capital investments (per worker) and employment multipliers include light truck and utility vehicle manufacturing (336112), petrochemical manufacturing (325110), and tobacco manufacturing (312230).

At the other extreme, low multiplier-low capital investment, we find fine arts schools (611610). With a modest building, capital, and equipment investment of less than $9,000 per employee, art schools appear with an employment multiplier of barely 1.5. Other sectors at the low end, mainly service sectors, include child day care services (624410), mobile food services (722330), and nail salons (812113). It is easy to see how modest wages and minimal capital investment results in shallow multiplier effects.

Implications for Policy

While more research on the particulars of consumer spending and investment effects is warranted, and a more explicit measure of automation than simply the ratio of capital-to-labor would be helpful, our findings are nonetheless indicative of a need to consider multiplier effects in framing policy. As automation proceeds, employment multipliers will, of mathematical necessity, increase: A theoretical factory, fully automated, with no jobs at all, would have an employment multiplier approaching infinity. So in judging which industries fit better with a jobs and industry policy, consider where the inputs come from, including especially the investment goods and services needed to maintain plant and equipment. A factory full of domestically made and serviced robots may employ more workers than it appears.

* Measuring the value of an industry’s capital stock:

Among the annual data included in Emsi’s I-O model are figures on the flow of property income by industry. Property income is the return on invested capital. Assuming a uniform rate of return across all industries (we assume 4%, a rough but for our purposes acceptable assumption), the total value of capital in a given industry is computed as the industry’s flow of property income divided by the assumed uniform rate of return. Finally, dividing the value of an industry’s capital stock by the number of its employees provides that industry’s capital-labor ratio: the economist’s standard measure of industry capital-intensity.

Dr. Robison is EMSI’s co-founder and senior economist with 30 years of international and domestic experience. He is recognized for theoretical work blending regional input-output and spatial trade theory and for development of community-level input-output modeling. Dr. Robison specializes in economic impact analysis, regional data development, and custom crafted community and broader area input-output models. Contact Josh Wright with questions about this analysis.

Photo credit: Flickr/Steve Jurvetson

For most of recent history, the world has worried about the curse of overpopulation. But in many countries, the problem may soon be too few people, and of those, too many old ones. In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35. Demographers estimate that global population growth will end this century.

Rapid aging is already reshaping the politics and economies of many of the most important high-income countries. The demands of older voters are shifting the political paradigm in many places, including the United States, at least temporarily to the right. More importantly, aging populations, with fewer young workers and families, threaten weaker economic growth, as both labor and consumption begin to decline.

We took a look at the 56 countries with populations over 20 million people, nine of which are already in demographic decline. The impact of population decline will worsen over time, particularly as the present generation now in their 50s and 60s retires, begins drawing pensions and other government support.

Europe: Homeland of Demographic Decline

Heading up our list of slowly dissipating large countries is the Ukraine, a country chewed at its edges by its aggressive Russian neighbor. According to U.N. projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 22% by 2050. Eastern and Southern Europe are home to several important downsizing countries including Poland (off 14% by 2050), the Russian Federation (-10.4%), Italy (-5.5%) and Spain (-2.8%). The population of the EU is expected to peak by 2050 and then gradually decline, suggesting a dim future for that body even if it holds together.

The most important EU country, Germany, has endured demographic decline for over a generation. Germany’s population is forecast to drop 7.7% by 2050, though this projection has not been adjusted to account for the recent immigration surge. The main problem is the very low fertility rate of the EU’s superpower, which according to United Nations data was 1.4 between 2010 and 2015. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1% to replace your own population so we can expect Germany to shrink as well as get very old.

Nor can Europe expect much help from its smaller countries. Although too small to reach our 20 million person threshold, many of Europe’s tinier “frontier” countries have abysmal fertility rates. Among the 10 smaller countries with the greatest population declines, all are in Europe, and outside Western Europe, with Bulgaria’s population expected to shrink 27% by 2050 and Romania’s 22%. Each of these have below replacement rate fertility. Things are not that much better in Western Europe, where fertility rates are also below replacement rates, but not quite so low. Long-term, the only option for Europe may be to allow more immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, although this may be impossible due to growing political resistance to immigration.

Demographic Decline: The Asian Edition

If this were just a European disease, it would not prove such a challenge to the economic future. Europe is gradually diminishing in global importance. The big story in demographic trends is in Asia, which has driven global economic growth for the past generation. The decline of Japan’s population is perhaps best known; the great island nation, still the world’s third largest economy, is expected to see its population fall 15% by 2050, the second steepest decline after Ukraine, and get much older. By 2030, according to the United Nations, Japan will have more people over 80 than under 15.

But the biggest hit on the world economy from the new demographics will come from China, the planet’s second largest economy, and the most dynamic.

Until a generation ago, overpopulation threatened China’s future, as it still does some developing countries. Today the estimates of the country’s fertility rate run from 1.2 to 1.6, both well below the 2.1 replacement rate. By 2050 China’s population will shrink 2.5%, a loss of 28 million people. By then China’s population will have a demographic look similar to ultra-old Japan’s today — but without the affluence of its Asian neighbor.

Other Asian countries have similar problems. Thailand ranks as the fifth most demographically challenged, with a projected population loss of 8%. The population of Sri Lanka, just across Adam’s Bridge from still fast-growing India, is projected to increase only 0.6%.

Also going into a demographic stall is South Korea, another country which a generation ago worried about its expanding population. With its fertility rate well below replacement (1.3), the country will essentially stagnate over the next 35 years, and will becoming one of the most elderly nations on earth.

Full List: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

Smaller Singapore is an anomaly. The city-state has a rock-bottom fertility rate of 1.2, but projects a population increase of 20% by 2050 due to its liberal and vigorously debated immigration policies.

Economic Consequences

Most world leaders are fixated on the unpredictable new administration in Washington in the short term, but they might do better to look at the more certain long-term impacts of diminishing populations on the world’s most important economies. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have connected low birth rates to economic declines. On the “devil” of overpopulation, Keynes wrote, “I only wish to warn you that the chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

It is already fairly clear that lower birthrates and increased percentages of aged people have begun to slow economic growth in much of the high-income world, and can be expected to do the same in long ascendant countries such as China and South Korea. Economists estimate that China’s elderly population will increase 60% by 2020, even as the working-age population decreases by nearly 35%. This demographic decline, stems from the one-child policy as well as the higher costs and smaller homes that accompany urbanization, notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. China’s annual projected GDP growth rate will likely decline from an official 7.2% in 2013 to a maximum of 6% by 2020.

There are several reasons these demographic shifts portend economic decline. First, a lack of young labor tends to drive up wages, sparking the movement of jobs to other places. This first happened in northern Europe and Japan will increasingly occur now in Korea, Taiwan, and even China. It also lowers the rate of innovation, notes economist Gary Becker, since change tends to come from younger workers and entrepreneurs. Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects, in part, the fact that its labor force has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035.

The second problem has to do with the percentage of retirees compared to active working people. In the past growing societies had many more people in the workforce than retirees. But now in societies such as Japan and Germany that ratio has declined. In 1990, there were 4.7 working age Germans per over 65 person. By 2050, this number is projected to decline to 1.7. In Japan the ratios are worse, dropping more than one-half, from 5.8 in 1990 to 2.3 today and 1.4 in 2050. China, Korea and other East Asian countries, many without well-developed retirement systems, face similar challenges.

Finally, there is the issue of consumer markets. Aging populations tend to buy less than younger ones, particularly families. One reason countries like Japan and Germany can’t reignite economic growth is their slowing consumption of goods. This challenge will become all the more greater as China, the emerging economic superpower, also slows its consumption. The future of demand, critical to developing countries, could be deeply constrained.

What about the USA?

To a remarkable extent, the United States has avoided these pressing demographic issues. The U.N. has the U.S. tied with Canada for the fastest projected population growth rate of any developed country: a 21% expansion by 2050. Yet this forecast could prove inaccurate.

One threat stems from millennials who, even with an improved economy, have not started families and had children at anything close to historical rates. Today the U.S. fertility rate has dropped to 1.9 from 2.0 before the Great Recession; population growth is now lower than at any time since the Depression. This places us below replacement level for the next generation. Projections for the next decade show a stagnant, and then falling number of high school graduates, something that should concern both employers and colleges. The United States’ high projected population growth rate, like that of Singapore, is entirely dependent upon maintaining high rates of immigration.

But even before the election of Donald Trump, who is hell-bent on cracking down on at least undocumented immigration, total immigration to the United States has been slowing. At the same time the fertility rates of some immigrant groups, notably Latinos, have been dropping rapidly and approaching those of other Americans. This is despite the fact that as many as 40% of women would like to have more children; they simply lack the adequate housing, economic wherewithal and spousal support to make it happen.

In the coming decades, the countries that can maintain an at least somewhat reasonable population growth rate, and enough younger people, will likely do best. To a large extent, it’s too late for that in much of Europe and East Asia. For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, with among the most liberal immigration policies and large landmasses, the prospects may be far better. However, we also need native-born youngsters to launch, get married and start creating the next generation of Americans.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Ahmet Demirel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times ran a piece in today’s paper about the state of America’s inner cities – and of course Donald Trump. Their conclusion is that the landscape of America’s cities, and of American blacks – the “inner city” is clearly a racially loaded term – is complex.

I agree with that. I’ve classified America’s cities into three major buckets: elite/vertical success cities like New York, workday/horizontal success cities like Dallas-Ft. Worth, and struggling cities like Youngstown or Flint.

There’s no one size fits all model of cities. Some cities like New York indeed have become amazingly successful. But it’s also true that many post-industrial cities remain in terrible shape.

Even within the successful cities, there are immense divisions. Chicago is booming in its downtown and North Side. But the South and West Sides are seriously struggling.

Black America also has a complex landscape. Highly educated blacks are doing very well. It’s an under-reported story that upscale suburbs like Carmel, Indiana and Overland Park, Kansas are seeing strong black population growth and population share growth, although the totals in both cases remain modest. Cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Charlotte are becoming magnets of black middle class. The black population is also strongly suburbanizing, part of the general trend of the diversification of the suburbs. The South retains a significant rural black population.

But undoubtedly black poverty remains a big issue, both in cities and in suburbs. Black America as a whole remains far behind white America in economic success. Last I checked, black median household income was around $35,000, compared with $57,000 for whites. The wealth gap was even more stark, with the black household median at only $7,000 compared with $111,000 for whites.

So the idea that America’s cities are uniformly decayed or that black America is uniformly failing isn’t accurate, but it certainly is true that significant portions are dealing with bigtime problems.

Where did Trump get his ideas about America’s cities? The media have seemed to suggest he’s simply holding on to outdated 1970s stereotypes. But that seems unlikely. He lives in Manhattan and started building there in the 70s. He knows the difference.

It’s pretty obvious where Trump got the idea that inner cities and black America are in bad shape. He got it from urban progressives themselves.

In the last two years the urbanist discourse has been increasingly dominated by racial issues: Black Lives Matter, housing discrimination and segregation, income inequality, and a general arguing that American society is saturated with racism that is the cause of many and pervasive ills in the black community.

It’s only now, after Trump said basically, “I agree”, that all of a sudden people start talking about this complex, nuanced landscape. Urban progressives need to take an accounting of how they have been talking about things too.

The idea that Trump is intending to denigrate the inner city is obviously false. He uses the same type of rhetoric about “disasters” and such when talking about white working class industrial and mining towns. His whole point is  that the people in these places are victims of a venal and incompetent elite. He surely means the same thing in describing inner cities.

The difference is that he found a rhetoric that resonated with working class whites. That same rhetoric is not resonating with working class blacks. What poor whites interpreted as a validation of their worth, many blacks have interpreted as a denigration of their accomplishments in the face of adversity.  Trump will never win the leadership class in cities. But if he’s serious about wanting to help these communities, clearly on his to do list is finding new rhetoric that speaks to the rank and file urban black community in a way that resonates.

As for the word “carnage,” I don’t know how else to describe what’s happening in Chicago. The global media have been full of front page type stories over the last two years about the horrific violence there, and justifiably so. I agree completely with critics that Chicago’s police department is in dire need of reform. The lack of internal reforms there may explain a lot of the difference in the crime trajectory of Chicago vs. NYC and LA. But the attempts to explain away what’s going on in Chicago – nowhere near historic highs! St. Louis has a higher murder rate! – is unbecoming. It is a legitimate disaster.

There also does remain an immense amount of work to do on integrating blacks into mainstream American success. One mind-boggling factoid that I saw recently came from Mitch Daniels’ open letter to the Purdue University community.  It says that only about 100 black high school grads a year in the entire state of Indiana have GPAs and test scores at the average level of Purdue freshmen. Last year Purdue only admitted 26 total students of all races from Indianapolis Public Schools.

Mitch is making it his business to do something about it. Purdue is planning to open its own high school in Indianapolis to try to better prepare black students for college.

America as a whole needs to do the same. Regardless of who or what is to blame, black Americans, and others left behind in our highly unequal cities, are our fellow citizens whom we should care about as neighbors. Integrating them fully into mainstream success is an imperative.

Trump isn’t wrong that there are big problems that need to be faced. The challenge I’d put to him is to engage seriously on the many complex structural challenges involved. Some problems – rebuilding water and sewer infrastructure, which is a dire need – really are “simple” problems of engineering and money. Many others like policing are not.

In the near term, he needs to put his branding, A/B testing, etc. skills to work, and rebuild the way he talks about cities and the black community. That will be one test of how serious he is about rebuilding America’s inner cities.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: Flint River in Flint Michigan

Earlier today Caterpillar announced that it was moving its corporate headquarters from Peoria to Chicago. The move affects about 300 top-level executives. The company will retain a large presence in Peoria.

This is in line with what I’ve written about before: the rise of the executive headquarters, where a company moves its executive suite (anywhere from 50-500 people) to a major city like Chicago while leaving the back office elsewhere.

Chicago has benefitted from this more than any other city I know. In addition to many corporate HQ relocations from the suburbs, it lured ADM from downstate Decatur, ConAgra from Omaha, and even MillerCoors from Milwaukee.

These are all food/agriculture or industrial concerns. That’s right in line with Chicago’s industrial heritage.

I would assume there’s a real possibility every major agricultural or industrial company in the US interior that’s not already headquartered in a major city like Minneapolis may make a similar move to Chicago. I’m sure World Business Chicago already has its target list compiled and is making calls.

This exposes two major divides in the American economy.

The first is between cities positioned advantageously vs. disadvantageously. Chicago is the former (along with Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, etc). Peoria, along with most sub-million metro areas with an industrial heritage, is the latter. It’s simply difficult to keep higher end jobs in these cities. This robs of them of not just some high wage positions, but also significant talent firepower that could be invested in civic betterment.

The second is between those who are prospering with high skills, and those who are not. Chicago has a serious murder problem that’s been making global headlines for two years. It also has a huge financial problem on its hands, especially in the school district.

This doesn’t seem to be affecting business recruitment. CAT and others have not been scared off. This shows that, so far at least, Chicago and its successful segments can succeed even while the impoverished black and Latino areas of the city fail, and as many other industrial cities fall into decline.

In other words, this is another example of the decoupling of success in America. Those who are succeeding in America no longer need the overall prosperity of the country in order to personally do well. They can become enriched as a small, albeit sizable, minority.

Trump’s election was an intrusion into that success caused by those resentful from being left behind. The election of leftist mayors in the style of Bill de Blasio is another such reaction.  It’s very clear from what I see and hear in global cities that those who are succeeding wish those who are not would hurry up and die or just go away. They pretty much say it explicitly when it come to the white working class, and you can believe they are thinking it when it comes poor blacks.

There are cumulatively a lot of angry people out there, who are not blind to what items like CAT’s relocation imply. This inequality is only a recipe for further political upheaval and unrest.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Picture by Bidgee (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons