The 3rd T

There's been an ongoing debate over openness and tolerance in Baton Rouge led by local business leader and former Chamber of Commerce Chair Joe Traigle.  This story provides a candid report on a community struggling with a critical issue (hat tip: Rod Frantz). I know  Joe and other concerned folks in Louisiana are searching for levers and solutions.  Care to join in the dialog and suggest some ways Baton Rogue and other communities can begin to make headway here.

Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle

According to this story in Business Week:

"Over the past few years, co-working facilities—both grassroots, co-op-like versions and for-profit models—have started popping up across the country and the world, from Seattle to Copenhagen. A co-working wiki hosts pages for dozens of other cities with co-working initiatives in progress. And while the concept of shared office space is nothing new to entrepreneurs, an increasing number of them are signing on and finding that the community-building and networking benefits outweigh even the virtues of a shared fax machine."

Be sure to check out the slide show. For a long time, I have said that we need new kinds of "third places" geared to the realities of flexible virtual work.  Part coffee shop, part hotel lobby?  The right space is hard to describe.  Love to hear what you think.

State New Economy Index

I'm not a big fan of the term "new economy" - it's a bit of an "empty" term.  Still a new Kauffman Foundation report provides some interesting data on America's states. Ranking first on Kauffman's State New Economy Index is Massachusetts, followed by New Jersey, Maryland, Washington and California.Virgina ranked 8th.  Our own State Creativity Index has Massachusetts first followed by New York, California, Connecticut and Washington. 

The Kauffman report is here. A Business Week story here.

Update:  This is a nicely done study. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the state is simply the wrong unit of analysis.  The natural economic unit ala Lucas or Jacobs is the region - the metro and the mega.

Anyone else out there been thinking about this?

The Bohemian Factor

Yesterday, I linked to this Business Week story which identified some leading cities for artists and talked about the effects of artists on housing values and economic development.  So I worked with Charlotta Mellander to look at the data and get a better sense of  what's going on. Highlights after the jump.

Our  findings are preliminary. There's lots to control for and lots more to do. But they certainly suggest that Business Week is on the money.  Arts and culture - the so-called bohemian factor - matter a great deal to housing values and regional income.  As much or more than some other key economic clusters - and a whole lot more than sports.  Still high-tech and bioscience are what regions seem to want. And  sports teams and stadiums continue  to command special treatment and big subsidies.  But the more we look into it, the more it becomes evident that arts and culture may well be the smarter bet.

Talent and Creativity in India

In a fascinating discussion of the Indian IT industry, John Hagel writes:

"Rather than continuing to focus on attracting and retaining talent within their own companies, these firms could create enormous value by developing the management techniques required to mobilize and leverage specialized talent wherever it resides. ... This would require mastering open innovation management techniques to attract and mobilize talent, focus the innovation initiatives across multiple participants and accelerate commercialization and learning from these initiatives."

Amen! The whole thing is here.

Chinese Creative Class

Last night in  my seminar on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, we were discussing Jane Jacobs and Robert Park who invented the field of urban sociology a century or so ago at the University of Chicago.  One of my students who happens to be Chinese mentioned Park's construct of the city as a place for the gifted and the "marginal."  That led us to a discussion of China's Creative Class and its major creative urban centers.  So I was pleased to come across this post by Alain Truong:

"Working over the last several years from the ‘‘Alternative Archive,’’ a townhouse in their native Guangzhou, Ou Ning emerged as the éminence grise of China’s burgeoning graphic-design and alternative-media scene and Cao Fei became a globe-trotting young artist (she is 28) on the biennial circuit. ... Together they have documented China’s rapidly regenerating cities in strangely lyrical urban research projects about Sanyuanli (a migrant neighborhood in Guangzhou) and Dazhalan (a poor enclave in Beijing’s old city). Last summer, this one true power couple of the Chinese art world made a surprise move from Guangzhou to Beijing, trading local prominence for a perch in the capital."

Bohemian Today, High Rent Tommorrow

That's the title of a new Business Week story which writes:

"Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be five or 10 years from now? Look at where artists are living now."

The story is here along with rankings of  the top 10 locations for artists. Now where I have heard that before (wink, wink).

Google Goes New York

So why would Google the quintessential Stanford spin-off and Silicon Valley company, make the Big Apple its second home?  It's not cheap real estate and low taxes, that's for sure. Access to talent, lead-users and customers - says this report from Information Week (hat tip: Kevin Stolarick).

"Proximity to Madison Avenue and the media companies -- the four major TV networks, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., Hearst, New York Times Co., Bloomberg -- is only part of the answer. The New York metro area is emerging -- or re-emerging -- as one of the hottest technology centers in the world. Silicon Valley and Redmond, Wash., may spring to mind as the software havens of the United States, and new hubs like Bangalore, India, are flourishing overseas, but the New York area employs more technology people than any place in North America. "

Deconstructing the Research Triangle

Brian Holmes who describes himself as interested in "geopolitics and geopoetics"  has an interesting essay on the Research Triangle and its  general model of high-tech development.

"We’ve heard a lot in recent years from urbanists and economic planners about the ‘creative city’, the ‘creative class’ and the ‘creative industries’. To compare facts with fictions, I decided to take a little tour of one of the urban areas that have been specially designed to put the creativity into industry."

The concepts and writing are at times dense. And while there are things I might want to debate, there's no doubt that he's providing a different and useful window into the cutting-edge of global capitalism. The full essay is here.

Understanding the Creative Community

Mark Kuznicki writes:

I dream of a future where every individual has the power and ability to discover his or her creative passions, and to resolve their multi-dimensional identities into a coherent whole through their interaction in open community with others. The holy grail is the unification of one’s practical needs with one’s hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is a universal desire, and it is the most powerful force in human civilization.

The entire essay is a MUST READ.

Spasibo, Russia

I've been meaning to post about our recent trip to Russia for a week or so now. But then again it's been a busy week. Where to start?  Well, the picture to the left may be the best place. That's me, last Friday in Krasnoyarsk at the big regional economic summit.  Krasnoyarsk, if you're not by a map,  is in Siberia.  Far eastern Siberia, north and just a little west of Beijing. 

Lots more pictures after the break.

Evolution of Popular Music...

Exhibit A: Rebirth of Iggy Pop's Stooges - Ben Ratcliff writes: "It’s almost all fast and rough — almost a punk album, with the hard riffs and commitment to bashing that one wishes the Rolling Stones still had."

Exhibit B: TV's Nashville Star. More here.

Pop quiz:  One city gets a lot of bang for its music "brand;" the other doesn't. Explain?

We Know What's Wrong ...

So why won't anyone in national political leadership do anything about it?  Bill Gates enumerates many of America's key competitiveness issues in this Washington Post piece. (The whole thing after the jump). How many times have we heard this before?  Why is America's  political class so utterly out of touch? And why does business tolerate this state of affairs? Your thoughts?

David Brooks Comes Clean

The Times' celebre-pundit put his values on the table. We know he's enamored of patio men and soccer moms, but would anyone have thought he was this angry, or troubled.  I  guess you'd  have to be a psychologist to sort out what in the world could provoke him to write this. Or perhaps a picture really is worth many thousand words after all.

Update: Steven Johnson weighs in: "Brooks' obsession with the surfaces of hipster parenting ends up blinding him to the real trend here, which is central to almost all the examples he cites: young parents choosing to raise their children in the city, not the suburbs."  It's must read.

Your thoughts? The whole incredibly ludicrous screed after the jump.

The View(point) from Florida-ville

This month's issue of Fast Company has a short article on how communities are working to implement new creative economic development strategies. It's a topic we frequently discuss here on the blog, and it's one of the things I personally care most about. I guess I had high hopes for the article. Its author, Andrew Park, seemed quite diligent. I spoke with him personally for more than 4 hours. He talked with members of our team, and interviewed people in communities around the country. I was hoping for a real feature on what communities are doing, what's working and what isn't, and what we've learned so far. I like the magazine, and there are some top-flight reporters there who I've worked with in the past.  I hesitate to blame the author, either -- knowing the publishing business, his article was likely hacked up due to a lack of space.

At any rate, the article tries to make five points. Even though I've responded to this kind of thinking elsewhere, because Park is talking about communities we admire and work with, I'd like to share my thoughts here...

Rudy versus Mike

Slate's Jacob Weisberg on  GOP front-runner,  Rudy Guiliani's record as NYC mayor:

"President Rudy would give powerful speeches denouncing terrorism while assuming extraordinary wartime powers. He'd reject compromise with his antagonists and ignore the nuts and bolts of running a government. After a few years, he'd be on nonspeaking terms with much of his Cabinet, never mind his fellow world leaders. By the time he got done, he might make us appreciate George W. Bush." 

Weisberg goes on to say Bloomberg was left to clean up one after another of Giuliani's many messes. For my money, there's no comparison. Despite his Olympics and stadium fixation, Bloomberg has proven to be a superb mayor, getting the city's fiscal house in order, improving its quality of life, taking on it's schools, and addressing key issues in its economy. Giuliani was one of the most over-rated mayors of recent history - who did little to improve local government instead using the mayor's office as platform to promote himself.  If you don't believe Weisberg, next time you take a taxi, just ask the cabbie.

The whole thing is here.

Primed for Disaster

Rob Horning speculates on the sociological underpinnings of the  financial collapse of  sub-prime mortgages:

"I wonder if the bias toward home ownership (as a symbol of arriving in the middle class and becoming a stakeholder in society’s stability) makes us collectively tolerant of bad loans—in the grand scheme of things in America, bankruptcy seems more dignified than being a renter, even though spending more than you’ve earned seems to me a way of stealing from posterity.  We’re willing to underwrite this fantasy that everyone’s middle class with more and more exotic financial instruments... What happens when we can fantasize no longer? "

Rob's onto to something here.  Easy credit has been the way to keep consumption up and the illusion of middle-class life intact.  It's  also fueled much of the recent economic expansion with construction jobs being the difference between growth and decline in countless US cities and regions.   

But its impacts are very  concentrated, hitting hardest in Midwest industrial centers, where hard-working, American-dreaming families have seen their real estate piggy-bank turned upside down and shaken until it's more than empty  - with a house that's under water,  won't sell, and  has them on the edge of bankruptcy if not already over it.

The threat of  losing your home creates a kind of fear and anxiety that is much more palpable than that of  terrorists in far away lands, immigrants, gay lifestyles, and city-people.   And guess who's bugging them everyday to pay up and threatening to take away their  home. You got it:  a very big and very faceless financial institution.

This is likely to have a significant effect on politics - and particularly on the political landscape in  Midwestern battleground states.  If you thought populism was a powerful political tendency in '06, just wait for '08.  I hear lots of pundits saying that the election will turn on the Iraq war and "security," but I wouldn't bet the proverbial  farm on that.

Map of the Week

Aleks Jakulin writes: "When one allows people to settle where similar people live, the geography is going to mirror these clusters, and political opinions will be increasingly geographically clustered. In particular, observe how blue are the urban centers. While this picture might be of the USA, the same pattern also appears in Europe."

Who's Your City - Startups

Ben Casnocha asks: "by locating your start-up in Silicon Valley, are you more likely to succeed?"

"New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson, in a blog post and in a private email, asked the question: Does starting a company in Silicon Valley increase your chances of success? Here's what I would ask Fred: Are you more likely to succeed in the finance world if you're located in New York City? I would strongly argue yes. You can be equally or more successful than a New York finance person if you're based in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles or anywhere else. However, due to the congregation of finance-resources in New York City, your chances of success improve there."

Hobsbawm on America

This essay by the distinguished British historian Eric Hobsbawm is a few years old, but well worth reading (pointer from Brian Knudsen).

Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success story among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world's largest, both pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement was unique; its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, as I have written elsewhere, "in some ways the United States represents the best of the 20th century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own... Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common. ...  The U.S.A. promises greater openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds.

Creativity and Schools

Over at his always interesting, Notes from the Lounge, Julian Sanchez, notes Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and futurist Alvin Toffler concern that the current "factory model" of education is broke beyond repair. Here's Toffler:

You've been writing about our educational system for decades. What's the most pressing need in public education right now?  "Shut down the public education system."

That's pretty radical. "I'm roughly quoting (Microsoft chairman) Bill Gates, who said, "We don't need to reform the system; we need to replace the system."

Read the whole Toffler interview here or download here.  And read the comments by high-school students here (pointer: Angela Stevens). Trust me it's worth it.

Ignore the stuff in Julian's post about Steve Jobs bashing teachers.  Unionization and tenure are symptoms not the cause.  Gallup's latest studies show that teachers perform extraordinarily well when they are engaged. The problem lies deep in this structure.

The More Things Change...

This detailed report on the location of artists, musicians, dancers, designers and the like in 1970 shows the dominance of NYC, LA, San Francisco among other city-regions and points to the role growing role of  Nashville as a musical center.  These locations have been pretty "sticky" since 1970. Talk about "path dependence."  Especially interesting since the real spark for for the creative economy dates from around 1980. Between 1980 and 2005, some 25 million new jobs in creative occupations are created, and the share of creative occupations jumps from less than 20 to more than 30 percent. The artistic centers of 1970  read like a who's who of today's creative city-regions.  What might be going on here? Perhaps these artistically creative locations sparked earlier seedbed and incubation conditions (openness to new ideas, low barriers to entry, high tolerance for self-expression) which helped shape ecosystems that could attract and harness creative economic energy in the form of commercial innovation and the formation of new entrepreneurial firms. Or, perhaps there is something deeper, more structural going on in these locations which produced both.

 Click here for the report (hat tip: Scott Jackson).  Any thoughts?

Trustafarians and Superstar Cities

Rob Horning over at Pop Matters weighs in.

"A week ago Joel Kotkin wrote an article for the WSJ about fading American “supercities” (New York, San Francisco) and the B-list cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Charlotte) that are gaining population at their expense by providing better value (mainly via cheaper real estate) and catering to a more family-oriented middle-class lifestyle. ... What makes them most suburban-like is how one’s insulation from the lives of others is upheld pretty well—traveling in cars assures that ...What drives Kotkin’s piece is instead a chance to heap scorn on “trustafarians”... This has obvious middle-class populist appeal ... Kotkin’s article brandishes its antielitism...stopping just short of championing mediocrity. Middle-class existence is not incompatible with intellectual pursuit; I wonder why commentators like Kotkin imply that it is."

Ryan Avant does too:

"Kotkin ... is apparently under the extremely misguided impression that the growth of cities like Charlotte and Raleigh, Houston and Phoenix has come at the hands of some mass of middle class blue-collar heroes (although he presents evidence to the contrary in the very same article). It’s difficult to describe this belief as anything other than unbridled ignorance. The success of the cities mentioned above is directly traceable to their ability to attract educated, skilled professionals. These new banking and research centers are brimming with post-graduate degrees; you simply cannot find a booming city without a well-educated workforce."

And CEOs for Cities:

"I had to reflect again on the puzzling op-ed piece on "The Myth of Superstar Cities"...To our knowledge, no source of data that would tell you with any accuracy the number of college-educated 25 to 34 year-olds in any city since 2000, even though the piece insists that "over the past decade college-educated workers...now appear to be tilting to more affordable, family-friendly places." It goes on to assert the following: "Since 2000, Riverside, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas all have been among the big net gainers. In contrast New York, Boston, L.A. and even the Bay Area, a big winner in the 1990s, appear to have become among the highest net losers." If the author has any facts to support these claims, we wish he would share it with us. In fact, we wish his editors would have insisted on including them in the article so we could all be enlightened ... What is most puzzling of all is that Las Vegas actually ranks last among the top 50 metro areas in the percentage of college grads, and Riverside and Phoenix are not far behind. The notion that big cities in so-called blue states are filled with evil chablis and brie elites sure feels like trumped up class warfare."

Bigger Houses, Smaller Families

I've argued for a long time now that part of what's going on in cities is smaller families - 1 or 2 people - taking over spaces that once housed much larger families or even groups of families. You can see this everywhere from Brooklyn's Park Slope to Chicago's Lincoln Park, Boston's South End, and lot's of other places.  So I was  delighted to see the folks over at  Zillow have  crunched the requisite numbers. 

American families have shrunk dramatically and consistently over the past century. In 1900, the average American family was 4.6 people. By 1940 it declined to less than 4. In 1980 it slipped below 3, and  hovers around 2.5 people today. Over the same time, our houses have gotten much, much bigger.  In 1900, the average new home was about 700 square feet and most families lived in much smaller quarters than than. By 1940, the average new home was 1500 square feet where it hovered through the 60s and 70s. Before climbing to more than 2000 square feet in 1990 and around 2500 square feet today.

Superstar Cities, Spiky World

It must have caught more than just my eye because this story which ran in yesterday continues to be the most e-mailed over at the New York Times. With all the talk of an impending real estate collapse and with the  housing market imploding in Sunbelt boomtowns like Las Vegas and Phoenix, housing prices are spiking up again in New York City.

"Across the board, the prices of Manhattan apartments are rising. Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm, said the number of contracts signed this January was 19.4 percent higher than in January 2006. Prices were up 14.4 percent in the same time period. Inventory, which was mounting last summer, is shrinking fast. Now, according to Mr. Miller, statistics showed that sales of studio and one-bedroom units, stagnant over the past year, were up 13.7 percent in January. “It’s not like a lot of huge sales at the high end skewed the average up.” 

The Dynamist's V'irgina Postrel weighs in  over at  Cities on the Hill:

"If Joel is so concerned about the high price of real estate in L.A., why doesn't he take Ed Glaeser's research to heart and, say, advocate a zoning change to allow the single-family zoning on the westside or in the San Fernando Valley to become multifamily? Even at townhouse densities, that could significantly increase supply and lower prices. L.A. prices aren't high because bad attitudes will them to be high. Supply and demand operate even in California."

Amen!  Same is true for New York (which added 250,000 new college graduates between 2000 and 2005) and other superstar cities as well.  And, no,  I'm not saying I "like" the growing real estate gap between superstar cities and other places.  I'm not making a normative argument, just reporting the facts.  But today, way too many many people want to  confuse - and in some cases say purposefully contaminate - facts with values.  This kind of thing only  makes it harder to get to the bottom of what is really going on.  But maybe that's their point.

Who's Your City - Schools Edition

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"Across the country, a small but growing number of parents ... are dramatically altering their families' lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children. ...  The phenomenon is driven by rapid changes in technology, which give many parents geographic latitude with their jobs. The Internet has created a national marketplace for schools, with troves of information on most any school in the country, and even particular administrators, available within a few clicks."

Click here to read the whole thing (hat tip and shout out: Rob)

Makes sense to me: Families moving to schools to give their kids the best opportunities. But we've always done that, really -  choosing this suburb or that to be near better schools or in districts close to private schools. You should see how the housing prices escalate in Northwest DC  where we live, as you to get to the blocks which are closest to the  premier schools.

But there is another response as well. The simultaneous rise in home schooling among these same types of  families.  My own take on this is that the very same technology that enables the parents-move-to- schools trend is also beginning to transform education as we know it. 

Poetry of Cities

Pier Giorgiho Di Cicco, the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto, on the future of cities (hat tip: Amanda Styron.  It captures the essence of  the creative community, its great potential, its contradictions, and the challenges we all face. Read it and share your thoughts.

The creative city is more than just innovative. It manufactures an appetite for life. It respects the random, not just as new information for design, but as the currency of civic allowance. People will not volunteer their ideas if they live in the regulated environment of gentrified enclaves, free only to exercise imagination in front of computer screens. All this to say, that a knowledge economy depends on knowing the roots of creativity.

Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness

The Council on Competitiveness has just released a new report on entrepreneurship in the United States. The study finds that while U.S. entrepreneurial performance continues to lead the world by almost any measure, other nations are starting to catch up. Click here for the report (hat tip: Sandy Maxey).

Best and Worst Regions for Children

Lot's of people talk about how important it is for regions to be good places for families and children. But few, if any, studies have provided detailed empirical evidence to compare cities and regions.  A new study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Center for Health Advancement has developed detailed rankings for the largest 100 metropolitan regions based upon measures of housing, neighborhood conditions, residential integration, education and health.

The best and worst lists after the jump. The full report is here (hat tip: Shari Young Kuchenbecker).

Risk, Reward and the New Class

This figure via 2Blowhards: "After I sketched this out, it dawned on me that there were a number of professions that were way off the general curve. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants, for example, made a lot of money but did not have to put much money at risk to earn it ... Yep, those risk-averse New Classers definitely know something the rest of us do not. But what is it? How do they so successfully defy the risk-reward curve? How do they float above the rest of us earth-bound types?" Read the whole, insightful thing here.

Creative Production

I've long said that the inspiration for my creativity theory of economic development comes from my father's factory and my early studies of Japanese factories with Martin Kenney.   If you want to understand the truly creative corporation of the future, Jon Gertner's insightful piece on Toyota, a company which epitomizes the creative mode of production,  in today's New York Times Magazine is a must read. It's Toyota - more so that Google - that understands that the key source of innovation - or kaizen, continuous process improvement - comes from tapping the full knowledge and intelligence of every worker.  "Creating a new product like an i-Pod or even the Prius is a far more modest achievement than developing a new process.  The former are what we usually think of as inventions, of course. But the latter ... presents a novel way of thinking about work and the capabilities of human organizations."  Amen!  My creativity theory argues that just this kind of creativity is the key to economic growth.  Right now we tap at most the creative talents of 30 percent of the workforce. The key is to harness human creative capabilities across the entire economy - from invention and design to production and the provision of services. Imagine the kind of productivity that can be achieved if we were to fully stoke the creative furnace that lies deep within every human being.

Childcare and the City

Wendy Waters nails it.

When parents cannot find adequate child care, one parent or both will often reduce their work hours, or leave the paid workforce completely, ... which drags down economic performance and the region's ability to attract investment including hip "creative economy" companies.

 

To a surprising degree in recent years women with graduate degrees are leaving the paid work force or at least of being employees ... If good child care -- or better put, early childhood education -- programs were available, and if employers were more flexible than most are, many of these women would stay thereby contributing more to the tax base and the overall economy.

3.  If young couples and nascent families could choose between settling in a city with excellent early childhood education programs and support, and a city without it, guess which city they would choose, if the job options in each were reasonable?

Read the whole thing over at All About Cities. I'll have lots more to say about this in my next book, Who's Your City?  In the meantime, what are your thoughts on this critical issue?

Offshoring and Regions

Brookings has just released this report on the impacts of "service outsourcing" on US regions.

Twenty-eight metropolitan areas, with 13.5 percent of the nation's population, are likely to lose between 2.6 and 4.3 percent of their jobs to service offshoring, higher than the average loss among the metropolitan areas studied. Five metropolitan areas—Boulder, CO; Lowell, MA; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; and Stamford, CT—are likely to lose between 3.1 and 4.3 percent of their jobs to service offshoring between 2004 and 2015, while 23 others are likely to lose between 2.6 and 3 percent of their jobs. However, 158 metropolitan areas are likely to lose no more than 2 percent of their jobs as a result of service offshoring.

Jane Jacobs Medal

The Rockefeller Foundation has launched the Jane Jacobs Medals, which together with cash awards of $200,000, will be given two people annually whose accomplishments reflect Jacob's " principles and practices in action in New York City."

Lonely @ the Top of A Spike

Great piece a few days ago by Troy McMullen in the Wall Street Journal about the number of high value condo's in NY City that are second or third homes for the super-wealthy. 

"Wealthy jet-setters have long maintained cozy Manhattan pieds-à-terre, but the city's choicest properties are increasingly being scooped up by out-of-towners. More than 10% of Manhattan apartment sales are second-home purchases, up from about 5% eight years ago, estimates Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, one of Manhattan's largest real-estate appraisal firms.

Donald Trump says that more than half the condo owners at his buildings on Central Park West and Park Avenue are part-timers. These people "may not even know the address" of their New York holdings, says Mr. Trump, but "they'd still rather own a place in New York than schlep to a hotel."

The lavish part-time spreads underscore a shift among the wealthy, who increasingly split their time among three or four homes. The investment potential of the city's blue-chip real estate also appeals to rich people looking to diversify their portfolios."

Then,

"But the occasional occupants are troubling to some full-time residents, who say their buildings are left depressingly hollow. And the popularity of the costly apartments helps boost Manhattan prices for everyone, draining away developers' interest in erecting middle-class buildings on the city's few available parcels and making one of the world's most expensive real-estate markets even more forbidding to average buyers."

Is this the decay, that Jacobs wrote about, caused by too much success that leads to lack of diversity as all target this 'successful' high return use of real estate? Could these 'part-time' residents zap the vibrancy of districts, not just buildings?

posted by David

"Kotkin, Smotkin"

That's the word over at Crescat (hat tip: Brian Knudsen). Click here to read the whole thing.

America's Architectural Assets

Last week, the American Institute of Architects, released the results of a poll of the American public to determine America's favorite architecture.  The final list of 150 sites includes bridges, cathedrals, retail outlets, memorials, offices, transportation hubs,  homes, and other structures.

Interestingly, it appears that America's architecture is spiky, with 3 cities (New York, Chicago, and Washington DC) accounting for nearly 1/2 of the list.

View the 150 and comment at the AIA Blog.   The full list after the jump.

posted by David

Siberia Beckons

We're off to Siberia - Krasnoyarsk to be exact, for the big Economic Forum. Flying from DC to London then onto Moscow where we' lll spend the night, then to Krasnoyarsk. It's our first time to Russia. Have the trusty laptop so will try to post from the road, time allowing.  Back Saturday.   And if we somehow miss a connection on the way home, there are worse places to be laid over than Moscow and London.