Red and Blue Real Estate

Check out this chart over at Zillow.

Stan Humphries, Zillow's vice-president of data and analytics, explains:

According to Zillow’s Zindex (median Zestimate or the middle estimated home value), the Red states (pro-Bush) have substantially lower home values than do Blue states (pro-Kerry). Red states had a Zindex of $190,323 vs. a Zindex of $323,952 for the Blue states as of the first quarter of 2007. ...  In other words, while Red states were on the winning side of the election, the Blue states are on the winning side in terms of real estate values, and by a substantial amount. ... The correlation between the Zindex and Bush’s share of the popular vote is -58%, indicating that the two measures are fairly inversely related.

Risky Real Estate

Interesting report over at Forbes (hat tip: Dean Alexander) on riskiest housing markets. Topping the list, not surprisingly, is Miami.

"Many of the cities on our list --like San Francisco and San Diego--are traditional high fliers where speculators can still make a lot of money if they pick the right neighborhood or hit the price trough. Of course, they might also take a serious bath. Others, like Chicago or Phoenix, are generally stable markets that are currently under significant strains. Finally, some, like Cincinnati or Kansas City, are precariously teetering and are not well equipped to handle further downturn. ... The metros with the highest shares of ARMs, according to the National Association of Realtors, are in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, respectively. These three cities are also the most overpriced, according to our price-to-earnings measure. And these areas are three of the four least affordable to the local population, according to the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo's affordability index. If rates go up or lending tightens, fewer will be able to buy in, bringing the markets to a screeching halt. ...Two larger cities that performed very well by this measure were Los Angeles and New York, which ranked fourth and eighth for lowest vacancy rate. While both cities had high ARM shares and high P/Es, their low vacancy rates bode well for those markets.

Interesting stuff: and I agree with much of it (still waiting for that steal on a place in Miami Beach).But what what if much of the demand in places like San Francisco, San Diego and LA is not coming from local sources - what if it is increasingly global? Could that be what is showing up in the low vacancy rates in NY and LA, and continuously rising prices in Manhattan?  Is the super-star city phenomenon now shifting outward to the global level, as globalization brings  us a  small set of global super-stars where demand has gone truly global?

Big Corporation on Campus

Richard has written extensively on the role of the University in the Creative Economy... (check out the library for pieces by Richard including The University and The Creative Economy by Richard, Gary, Kevin, and Brian). His work has informed my work on the benefits of starting new ventures on campuses.

A recent story in the WSJ by Thaddeus Herrick (available w/out a sub via AOL) shows that corporations are beginning to try new strategies in leveraging the benefits of the university in the creative economy. Express Scripts, Inc., a company that does $18 billion in pharmacy benefits management, is relocating its HQ to the University of Missouri's St. Louis Campus. From the piece,

Getting Ahead

Kevin Stolarick of the Creative Class Group and Lisa Taber of FortiusOne have paired up to develop a series of 'heat maps' that show the hottest places in the country based on your lifestage and some preselected criteria.  The maps allow you to zoom in on specific parts of the country or see how your current city compares to others.

Each map shows the best regions based on a variety of criteria all evenly weighted.  In this case, "Getting Ahead" shows the combination of cities that rate the best based on:

    Tolerance (higher is better)

    Growth

    Number of Creative Class young & single in the region

 

The criteria used for each map are listed & described in the region to the left of the map. 

Only data for major US cities (populations above 250,000) has been included.

The map itself is a heat map overlay on a standard Google Map.  So, all of the usual Google map features are available: pan, zoom in , zoom out, change the background, etc...

The "hotter" -- yellow areas are those places that do the best on the combined criteria.

Getting Ahead Map

Come back Monday to see next week's map: Starting a Family

Our Infrastructure is Old ...

And will cost a lot of money to up-grade.

Plus long commutes are not good for people and make for unhealthy cities. Riverside,Atlanta, LA, Houston and DC top Forbes' list.

Breaking News....

From Toronto's National Post...

[M]aybe it’s time to start printing brochures, buttons and lawn signs for Richard Florida — a new mayor for a better Toronto. ... On the cosmetic front, Florida is as tall as Mayor Miller, has excellent hair and is a great public speaker — and so far hasn’t screwed anything up. ... In the big casino of running cities, Mayor Miller is down to his last few chips. He has to change his bets soon. Or Mayor Florida looms.

When Rana read me this comment from her blackberry by the smart and witty Bill Marshall who runs the Toronto Film Festival, I nearly busted a gut. We're in Positano (one of my favorite places in the world) after an event in Rome, so it took me a little while to get to the computer.  And, no, seriously, I'm not running for anything. But I do appreciate the props on the hair.

Jurisdictional Advantage

Over at The Intangible Economy, Ken Jarboe elaborates on the concept which undergirds our new research center at the Rotman School.

Creative Class Fashion

According to Women's Wear Daily, Banana Republic dubs its fall campaign "urban style for the creative class."  

Science and the Creative Class

[S]cience is moving away from the stereotype of men in lab coats. ... [T]he new generation of scientists is an imaginative and creative class of people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Jonathan McDowell a leading researcher of black holes, dark matter and extreme astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says in an interview with Earth and Sky, here.

Money to Party

Kevin Stolarick of the Creative Class Group and Lisa Taber of FortiusOne have paired up to develop a series of 'heat maps' that show the hottest places in the country based on your lifestage and some preselected criteria.  The maps allow you to zoom in on specific parts of the country or see how your current city compares to others.

Each map shows the best regions based on a variety of criteria all evenly weighted.  In this case, "Money to Party" shows the combination of cities that rate the best based on:

    Overall Cost of Living (lower is better)

    Nightlife

    Rental Affordability (lower is better)

    Number of Creative Class young & single in the region

 

The criteria used for each map are listed & described in the region to the left of the map. 

Only data for major US cities (populations above 250,000) has been included.

 

The map itself is a heat map overlay on a standard Google Map.  So, all of the usual Google map features are available: pan, zoom in , zoom out, change the background, etc...

 

The "hotter" -- yellow areas are those places that do the best on the combined criteria.

Money to Party Map

Come back Monday to see next week's map: Getting Ahead

The Car of the Creative Class

The Creative Class clearly brings its own ethos to work, leisure, cities, and consumption. From the San Jose Mercury News (hat tip: ValleyWag), The Prius is the number #1 selling car in Silicon Valley. Thats right, the large US metro with the greatest % of CC in its workforce has made the Prius its car of choice by buying more Prii in June than any other model. "That puts the Prius ahead of Toyota's Camry and Corolla and Honda's Accord and Civic, all cars that outsell the high-mileage, gas-electric sedan nationwide."

"Are we ahead of the curve, or what?" asked Rod Diridon, executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, and a Prius owner.

The Prius' newfound status reflects the continued greening of Silicon Valley. Diridon listed sustained higher gas prices, the availability of carpool-lane stickers for solo Prius drivers - no more are being issued - and the intelligence of local residents as factors in the Prius' popularity."

posted by David

 

Whole Place Development

My old friend and true urban innovator, Kip Bergstrom of the Rhode Island Policy Council on metros, megas, place, and design (pointer via CEOs for Cities).  Click here to download.

New Report from NSF

In a recently released report, the National Science Foundation notes that

[T]he number of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) articles in major peer-reviewed journals flattened in the 1990s, after more than two decades of growth, but U.S. influence in world science and technology remains strong.  The report, Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988 - 2003, finds changes occurred despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. Flattening occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions.  In contrast, emerging Asian nations had large increases in publication numbers, reflecting their growing expertise in science and technology. European Union totals also went up.

So, the U.S. is basically spending more to achieve exactly the same thing?

Related Websites
Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf07320/
The Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srs07204/

posted by Kevin Stolarick

By the Numbers: Creative Density

For this week's By the Numbers, we examined the regions with the highest density of creative talent. Pulling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census, we calculated the number of creative class members per sq. mile.

We ranked the top ten metros for each classification: large, medium, mid-sized and small.

The results were surprising!

Here's a quick look at the top three for each metro size:

Large Metro: Million-Plus

1. Los Angeles, CA (281 Creative class per sq. mile)
2. New York, NY (269)
3. Washington, DC (226)

Medium Metro: 500K- Million

1. Bridgeport, CT (162)
2. New Haven, CT (92)
3. Akron, OH (89)

Mid-sized Metros 250K- 500K

1. Trenton, NJ (358)
2. Ann Arbor, MI (93)
3. Boulder, CO (74)

Small Metros: 250K- Smaller

1. Carson City, NV (50)
2. Santa Cruz, CA (42)
3. Elkhart, IN  (42)

For a list of the top 10 for each classification, download the full-report. Download CCGCreativeDensity.pdf

For more information, about CCG services & research, contact David Miller.

Posted by: Steven Pedigo

Report on the Report

Here's the back story of last night's appearance on The Colbert Report. It's funny because about two months ago I said to my wife, there's one show I would be really, really nervous to be on, The Colbert Report. Not only is he quick and funny, he stays in character and really grills people - it can be embarrassing. So when the call came right before their 4th of July break, I was nervous. But Rana and our entire team prevailed on me, so I said, what the heck, give it a go.

Here's a picture of me, Rana, and David behind Stephen's desk.

Singles Map... It's BACKKK!

You've asked to see it again. So...... it's back! 

Check out the Singles Map....

The Midwest almost serves as the dividing line.... a great number of single women to the east and a surplus of single men to the west.

New York, DC, Chicago and Miami with the greatest surplus of women, and LA,  San Fran, Seattle, Phoenix, and Vegas.   

Why is this? Any ideas?   

Check our discussion last time around. 

posted by: Steven

Stop the Insanity

This story in Business Week "The High Costs of Wooing Google" shows (yet again) the inanity of incentives.

Business-development incentives, while hardly new, are proliferating as never before, and the dollar values are soaring. Lenoir's courting of Google offers a case study of how elaborate the inducement ritual can get. Today it's not just carmakers promising thousands of jobs apiece that are getting rich deals. From New York to Washington State, IT, biotech, and financial-services companies have incited frenzied bidding for their business and the spirit-elevating buzz they bring. States and localities bruised by globalization view these knowledge-based fields as the foundation for economic rebuilding. Reliable current estimates of the number of deals don't exist, but those who study the field all agree that the total is rising. Peter S. Fisher, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Iowa, pegs the aggregate value of incentives at about $50 billion a year.

A total waste of money. Just think what the town could have used it's $200 million for (that's the endowment of a good small university) or what that $50 billion total might be used for?

San Francisco's Growth Paradox

The Economist writes:

To judge by the interminable queue outside Boogaloos restaurant in the Mission District, San Francisco is thriving again. ...Yet this boom is unlike the one that began ten years ago. For one thing, it has produced many fewer jobs. Although slowly rising, the number of workers in San Francisco is still 12% lower than during the dotcom era. Since 2000, indeed, the city has shed more jobs than Detroit. ...

More than biotechnology or Web 2.0, San Francisco's economy these days is built on leisure. That industry is in fine fettle: bucking the trend, hotels and restaurants employ more people now than they did seven years ago. ... [M]any expensive flats have been bought by people in their late fifties who have grown tired of the suburbs and no longer need worry about schools. Although lured by the city's bright lights, they may not see much of them. [A]another trend is towards pieds-à-terre that are empty most of the time. ...

Younger workers often have a similarly detached relationship with the city. Google shuttles 1,200 people a day, many of them from the Mission and other trendy parts of San Francisco, to its headquarters in suburban Mountain View. Such reverse commuting helps to explain why property prices in the city barely wobbled during the dotcom crash. ...Those prices pose the greatest threat to the city's future as a crucible of new ideas.

Your thoughts?

Colbert Report

Update: Click here to watch. Looking forward to your reactions.

Don't forget to tune-in (or set your Tivo) to the Colbert Report tomorrow night at 11:30PM on Comedy Central.

So, trusted readers and advisors, what in the world do you think he'll ask me about - cities, the gay effect, flight of the creative class....?

Lets see who out there can get it right.

By the Numbers: Movers from Abroad

For this week's "By the Numbers," we examine regions with the highest percentage of movers (from last year) who spent the previous year abroad.   

Pulling the data from the U.S. American Community Survey, 2005, we rank the top 10 metros for each metro classification: large, medium, mid-size, and small.

Here's the top three for each:

Total Movers who spent the last year Abroad & % of Total Movers who were from Abroad.

Large Metros (Over a Million)

1. New York - 150,913 movers from Abroad (7.8% of all total movers to the region)
2. Washington, DC - 58,900  (7.1%)
3. Miami, FL - 62,813 (7.0%)

Medium Metros (500K- Million)

1. El Paso, TX - 8,154 (8.4%)
2. Honolulu, HI - 10,229 (8.1%)
3. Bridgeport, CT - 7,616 (7.5%)

Mid-sized Metros (250K- 500K)

1. Killeen, TX - 15,727 (17.6%)
2. Salinas, CA - 5,865 (8.5%)
3. Norwhich, CT - 2,677 (7.9%)

Small Metros (250K- Smaller)

1. El Centro, CA - 4,035 (17.4%)
2. Gallup, NM - 935 (15.6%)
3. Mount Veron, WA  - 2,681 (10.3%)

Download the full-pdf with the top 10 for each here: Download CCG_MoversfromAbroad.pdf

For more information about CCG's services, contact David Miller.

posted by: steven

Toronto and Me

Lots of media on Toronto and me, here, here, here and here.  We had been trying to wait on the announcement until I visit the city again in late August but the cat's now very far out of the bag as they say. So here's the skinny.

First off let me say that our time in Washington DC and at George Mason's School of Public Policy has been terrific.  The leadership of the school, Kingsley Haynes and Roger Stough are dear old friends and colleagues. What they and their team have done to build a new school of public policy in less than a decade is phenomenal.  My GMU colleagues have been great. Washington is a wonderful city that has been a great place to work.  Also, our remarkable CCG team is mainly here - David, Steven, Amanda, and our interns (with other key folks in Pittsburgh). CCG will stay a DC and Pittsburgh based company. We'll miss our colleagues, and our friends, our house, neighborhood and neighbors and especially our neighborhood pool. There is no push here, only pull, which brings me to ...

Toronto - It's a city I've long admired. My own calculations put the broad Tor-Buff-Chester mega-region as one of the world's ten largest.  Toronto is at the cutting edge of innovative, dare I say creative, urbanism and economic development. Some of the media say it reflects my principles.  The truth is more the reverse: What Toronto has done has informed my work.

The main reason for the move is Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Its Roger's vision that has created the major new Centre for Jurisdictional Advantage and Prosperity funded, as has been reported in the press, by some $100 million in funds from the Province of Ontario and private sector sources.  Ontario's Premier, Dalton McGuinty and his team could not have been more generous.  Joseph Rotman provided part of that funding to get the initial research agenda of the Centre up and running.  The Centre will have amazing quarters in the MaRs Centre, essentially the old Toronto General Hospital, near campus and almost directly across from the Ontario Parliament. The space, which we are working on now, is phenomenal.  For the first time in my career I will have a stable source of research funding to build a team, develop data, support other researchers, and really build capability and knowledge in this area. My title will be Director of the Centre and Professor of Business and Creativity.

My wife Rana and I have found a wonderful house in Toronto's Rosedale neighborhood overlooking the ravine.  We hope to move in early September.

If there's more you'd like to know, just give a shout.

Creative Class Queen Bucks Housing Market Trends

While many think that tattoos and piercings are typical of all creative class members, Martha Stewart and her empire embody many elements of the creative class theory -- from a focus on design and supporting the creativity of customers to building a career  that allows for one's passion to play a central role. According to a new WSJ article (sub required) by Michael Corkery, creative class Queen, Martha Stewart has been very effective in using her creativity to sell homes in a weakening housing market. From the piece...

"All across the country, home builders are gasping for air as sales plunge, inventories rise and profits disappear. But in one small corner of the housing market, the sales picture is a little brighter: There is steady demand for houses designed in part by Martha Stewart and built by Los Angeles-based KB Home.

Here in the Atlanta area, where new-home sales dropped 20% in the first quarter of 2007, traffic at Martha-KB new-home developments has been steady. The largest Martha-KB Home development has been outselling the average Atlanta subdivision 2 to 1, according to SmartNumbers, a real-estate information and analysis firm, based in Marietta, Ga."

While some core creatives may never be interested in a Martha Stewart home, there are other members of the group who are clearly interested in letting her design a warm, welcoming home for them. (A longer segment of the article is available after the jump).

Posted by David

Global Superstar Cities

David Leonhadt has a fascinating piece in today's NYT on the "split" housing market:

[T]he high end of the market is surviving the slump much better than any other segment. Even as foreclosures keep rising and overall sales continue to plummet, more expensive homes have staged a bit of a comeback in recent months. They’re spending less time languishing on the market than others, and their prices appear to be holding up better. ... The upper end of the market has also been helped by an influx of well-off foreign investors whose buying power has grown with the recent decline of the dollar. Hard as this may be for an American to imagine, New York, San Francisco or Miami can now seem like a bargain, compared with London, Moscow or Sydney.

It's clear that the housing market in key cities and mega-regions has become globalized.  In this sense it bears some parallels with what has happened to elite universities, where foreign students vie for top slots.  The housing market in cities that are atop the world city system -  like London, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver, LA, and others in the US and around the world - has been globalized.  This not only drives prices up at the top end, it puts tremendous pressure on the entire market in those areas, making them even more unaffordable for average people and even for the upper-middle class.  My hunch is this problem - and the split nature of the housing market - will continue to worsen for some time.

Money Can't Buy Happiness

Or so writes Robert Samuelson: 

The psychology of prosperity -- striving, taking risks -- feeds on ambition and insecurity. Our system often seems an insane rat race. But over time, it has created huge gains in material well-being. Air conditioning may not have made people in the South and elsewhere happier. But it surely has made them more comfortable.

Gentrification of Coney Island

The Washington Post writes:

The birthplace of the roller coaster and the American hot dog is set to fall into the same powerful grip of New York City gentrification that cleaned up Times Square and brought luxury lofts to Hell's Kitchen. Thor Equities, a mall and commercial real estate developer, has amassed much of Coney Island's six-block-long amusement area, with public hearings expected later this summer on a $1.5 billion redesign of the area into an upscale techno theme park with retail space, high-rise timeshare towers and hotels. Click here for the full story.

Why (and How) I Do What I Do

This picture and accompanying story in the New York Times struck a deep chord.

I vividly recall the day the Newark riots erupted. I was with my parents and brother at the beach in Long Branch, New Jersey. It was a classic working class beach resort, something you might see on a flashback scene in the Soprano's. I was 9 or 10 at the time. People kept rushing up to the adults saying: "Newark is on fire."

We returned home later that week and my father took me to my Saturday guitar lesson in Bloomfield, right outside of Newark. On the drive through, we saw the National Guard troops and their heavy equipment essentially occupying the city.  Police pulled our car over and told my father to take an alternate route: "There are snipers on top of those buildings."  Later it was found that many of the so-called snipers were actually police.

The "riots" left a deep impression on me. From then on, I found myself wandering through the stacks of the Newark Library, trading in my "Hardy Boys" novels for books on urban affairs. I needed to understand what was happening in the city of my birth - its once vibrant downtown and neighborhoods reduced to empty store-fronts, burned-out shells, and rubble. I continued to revisit those streets for some time after. Not just on car rides with my father. In our early teens, my brother and I would ride our bicycles - conducting our own version of amateur two-wheeled urban ethnography - on those same streets. More than anything else, I recall how even at that very young age how repulsed I was by the blatant racism lurking behind all of it.

There's a marvelous essay in the Book Review by the novelist Haruki Murakami on the impact of music on his writing.  Music was an enormous part of my youth, but I'd never before so clearly seen the connection between it and what I do now. My guitar playing in bands with my brother Rob were much more important to me than just about anything else. We quickly got bored with playing cover hits, so we we would spend endless hours of riffing and improvising around songs. For years, I've thought I traded in my guitar for a career as a thinker, writer and speaker.  Not really, Murakami helped me understand.  Sure, I've always liked to read, but I've never been a studied writer. Other than first semester composition, I never took a writing class. And I've never had any coaching with public speaking, nor even watched a tape of myself.  People recommend books to me on writing and speaking all the time: I never, ever look at them.

Music, Murkami helped me understand, was a critical component of my training. Music, he explains, helps impart an indelible sense of rhythm, melody, and harmony on writing which he likens to "performance." I essentially "listen" to what I write, trying to feel the rhythm and melody in the combinations of words. The best part, he adds: "Free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow." I improvise a lot in my writing, drawing out riffs of examples, or stories or even trying to bring together new connections between subjects. And improvisation is the core of my speaking.  I don't use any notes at all. I remember the day I put them down: It was the day I realized they were impeding the flow of thoughts and the process of story-telling and communicating which is critical in making a connection to your audience.   

There's Something Happening Here...

There's an excerpt from Brink Lindsey's terrific new book, The Age of Affluence, over at Reason Magazine. I read the book in galleys and must say I strongly recommend it. The piece, titled "The Aquarians and the Evangelicals," deals with the breakdown of post-war culture in the late 1950s and simultaneous rise of the counterculture and the religious right in response. On balance, I think he is right.  This explains the dualistic pattern found by Ron Ingelhart in his work and our own cultural divide and political polarization. The US is really two separate nations - one shaped by the values of the counterculture, the other by the socially conservative response to it.

Positioning Canada for the Spiky World

Roger Martin. Dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management,and Gord Nixon, President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, outline a detailed strategy for Canadian competitiveness in our era of "transformational globalization."

In a 2005 Atlantic Monthly article titled ‘The World is Spiky', Richard Florida countered Mr. Friedman's flat world hypothesis by showing that economic activity in the world is incredibly spiky as is innovation activity, measured by patents. Mr. Florida showed convincingly that talented people agglomerate in a limited number of regions in the world where they work for innovative organizations that dominate their industries. ...As these industries get intensely spiky, a country is either a player or not; there is not an in-between. ... We think that Canadian policy is largely indifferent to, if not ignores, the transformation that is going on today. While things may turn out fine with a policy of indifference, we think that the likelihood of that is sufficiently low and the downsides so devastating for Canada that we will argue that Canada needs to take positive action now.

The full story in the Globe and Mail is here.

While this debate is taking place in Canada and elsewhere around the world, America's attention is drained away by Iraq and the so-called "war on terror". Major global transformations come together in rapid tipping points. The opportunity costs of lapsed attention can be great.  We're not there yet, but the clock of history continues to tick away. Or as Paul Romer likes to say, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

Florida-ville Invades Colbert Nation