Cities and Suburbs

Felix Salmon reports on the real estate panel at the Milken Institute's Global Conference, highlighting this interchange between Sam Zell Chairman and CEO of the Tribune Company and Bobby Turner of Canyon Capital Advisors.

Turner, channeling the likes of Ryan Avent and Richard Florida, said that consumer prefences are going to move away from the suburban lifestyle as transportation costs soar. Zell agreed, pointing to enormous growth of housing in what he called "24/7 cities", putting a lot of that growth down to the societal deferral of marriage. But as cities become ever more expensive and the suburbs become ever cheaper, he was asked, won't corporations move out to the suburbs? No. Motorola rented 200,000 square feet of office space in downtown Chicago last year, he said, even as they have over half a million vacant square feet not far away in McHenry county. If the employees are moving to the cities, then the companies are going to have to follow suit.

Yep, they sure are.

Mega-Regions of the Future-Past

This edition of Arthur Radebaugh's Closer Than We Think on mega-regions of 1975 was published in 1961 - the same year Jean Gottman published his classic, Megalopolis. The text reads:

Tomorrow's map will be vastly different from today's. Great patches over much of it will indicate the super-metropolis cities which are already evolving out of our once-separated urban centers.

The "regional cities" of tomorrow will be nearly continuous complexes of homes, business centers, factories, shops and service places. Some will be strip or rim cities; some will be star-shaped or finger-shaped; others will be in concentric arcs or parallels; still others will be "satellite towns" around a nucleus core. They will be saved from traffic self-suffocation by high-speed transportation - perhaps monorails that provide luxurious nonstop service between the inner centers of the supercities, as well as links between the super-metropolises themselves.

Via Paleo-Future, pointer from Chris Briem.

Rethinking Urban Politics

David Schleicher, Climenko Fellow at Law Harvard Law School, has an intriguing new paper "Why is There No Partisan Competition in City Council Elections? The Role of Election Law," coming in the Journal of Law and Politics. His basic argument is that there is "nothing natural about the lack of partisan competition in elections in American cities. Instead, the lack of competition is likely the result of a system of anticompetitive election laws that make it difficult for the local major party that is the minority to differentiate itself from its national parent. When combined with substantial residential segregation by political party and a first-past-the-post system that creates serious barriers to entry for third-party entrants, the result is uncompetitive and unrepresentative local elections."

The complete paper is here.

Rising from the Sands

From next week's Economist:

A great piece on the rise of the Middle East economies including an interesting story with some background on the City of Dubai.

Having been to Dubai a few times, I can tell you that the story out there is compelling.  This one city is home to a quarter of our planet's construction cranes, they are spending massively to diversify their economy into industries such as IT, bio, media and manufacturing as oil reserves shrink.  Separately, Dubai has allocated a massive $15 billion dollars for public infrastructure alone over the next five years.

But is this sustainable?  Even though many Middle East cities are flourishing attracting talent and harnessing technological assets, can these places be models for the other big "T" that being, tolerance?   What do you think?

Aleem Kanji

CO2 Map

Source: Purdue University's Vulcan Project.

A list of the top emitting counties after the jump.

Political Geography

This superb graphic by Amanda Cox of the NY Times (via Andrew Sullivan).

More interesting primary maps and graphics here and here.

This Picture Is Worth a Whole Lot More ...

than the thousands upon thousands of words I've read today about Pennsylvania and the Democratic primary.

The graphic is from the Iowa Electronic Markets, and reflect "real-money futures markets where contract payoffs will be determined by the outcomes of the 2008 U. S. National Conventions."

Global Marshall Plan

Gordon Brown calls for one:

And when today cynics dismiss as and impossible dream or naïve idealism proposals to create the institutions of a truly global society let us remind them that people used to think black civil rights a distant dream, the end of the cold war an impossible hope, the ending of apartheid in our generation the work of dreamers, debt relief for the poorest countries an unrealisable idea ... And so let us have confidence we can discover anew in ourselves the values we share in common,  ... and let us have confidence we can create a global covenant across nations to make peace and prosperity real in our generation.

The rest is here.

Location, Location, Location

An innovative analysis by Eric Cadora highlights "million-dollar blocks" -- individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block per year are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block.  Some blocks cost over five million dollars per year...A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.

Via Tyler Cowen, here. Does it even surprise you?

The Consigliere

The Financial Times profiles Geoff Beattie, the force behind the Thompson-Reuters merger.

As president of Woodbridge, the family investment company, Mr Beattie, 48, is often described as the consigliere or éminence grise of the family. It is a sign of the rarity of such roles in Anglo-Saxon capitalism that there seems to be no English equivalent.

Other family conglomerates accrue advisers who “slowly but surely emasculate the family”, Mr Beattie says. But Woodbridge acts as the sole conduit between the family, its assets and a tight circle of loyal lawyers and bankers. In 50 years only two people have held the role. Mr Beattie took over in 1998 from John Tory, a lawyer who spent 20 years advising Roy Thomson and another 20 counselling his son, Kenneth. According to Mr Beattie, who began his career in Torys law firm, continuity has shaped a long-term approach that has become a family hallmark. Without the responsibilities of operating executives, “it allows us the time, and gives us the responsibility, to be far-sighted”.

It is a model other businesses should study, Prof [Roger] Martin says. “There is a view, especially in the US, that the widely held, publicly traded corporation with no major shareholder is the natural order in the world. It isn’t. It is a recent phenomenon.”

Beattie is also a key force, along with Roger Martin, behind the Martin Prosperity Institute.

The Big Sort

Governing Magazine's Allan Ehrenhalt reviews Bill Bishop's new book in today's Wall Street Journal.

The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes. No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics."

I read the book in galleys and have collaborated with Bill and Bob Cushing, his statistician counterpart over the years. This is a remarkable book detailing the multidimensional sorting of the American population and the increasing importance of geography and location for every facet of our lives.  Go out and grab yourself a copy of this book, read it from cover to cover - if you want to understand the forces that have shaped and will continue to shape American politics and the culture of everyday life.

The First 21st Century Campaign

Obama-Clinton signals a massive change in political campaigns, writes Ron Brownstein:

"But now the ability to inspire large numbers of supporters to work on your behalf—by contributing financially, participating in outreach programs organized by the campaign, or informally talking to friends and family—is joining and, perhaps, eclipsing those television-inspired skills in importance. The change is still incipient, but the unprecedented scale of the Clinton-Obama race suggests that presidential politics may be moving from the television-based network era to an Internet-based networked era in which candidates who can attract and inspire vast networks of supporters will enjoy potentially decisive advantages over those who cannot."

UPDATE:  I wanted to say something like this yesterday but was too rushed.  Matt Yglesias is absolutely right about this: "Clinton and (even more so) Obama are improving on many models and ideas that Howard Dean used in 2004 and were even to some extent present in the McCain 2000 campaign."  Obama has taken it much further, but is not the first.

Ed Glaeser on Buffalo

The video of Ed's recent talk is here. Well worth a watch.  Here's one take by Charity Vogel of the Buffalo News.  Your thoughts?

Where Does Inequality Come From?

Harvard macro-economist, Greg Mankiw growing economic inequality and its causes in the NY Times (pointed from Mark Thoma):

The best data on the superrich comes from Thomas Piketty ... and Emmanuel Saez... They report that ... the superrich have been getting an increasing slice of the economic pie. In 1980, the top 0.01 percent of the population had 0.87 percent of total income. By 2006, their share had more than quadrupled to 3.89 percent, a level not seen since 1916 ...

Also, the trend toward increasing inequality has been fairly steady, despite changing political winds. The income share of the richest families increased substantially both during Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office and during Bill Clinton’s.

The best diagnosis so far comes from ... Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz... Their bottom line: “the sharp rise in inequality was largely due to an educational slowdown.” According to Professors Goldin and Katz, for the past century technological progress has been a steady force not only increasing average living standards, but also increasing the demand for skilled workers relative to unskilled workers. ...

But recently things have changed. Over the last several decades, technology has kept up its pace, while educational advancement has slowed down. ...

While education is the key to understanding broad inequality trends, it is less obvious whether it can explain the incomes of the superrich. Simply going to college and graduate school is hardly enough to join the top echelons...

Education can explain part of growing inequality: the fact that a household of two college-educated earners has gained considerably on a family of one blue-collar breadwinner or two service-economy workers. It explains the growing economic distance between the Northern Virgina suburbs and say western Pennsylvania. But it does not explain the difference between Central Park West or the Upper West Side in Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Malibu in greater LA, and Palo Alto and the upscale suburbs of Silicon Valley and everywhere else. The fact of the matter remains that a significant percentage of the self-made richest people in America and around the world do not have college degrees, Bill Gates being the most obvious case in point. So what accounts for the incredibly rising tail of the income distribution - the fact that Bill Gates and company are so much richer than a family with two college-degree wage earners? Education fails to explain this.

Periods of economic transformation, like the one we are going through from the industrial to the creative economy, or from agriculture to industry a century or two ago, are marked by rising economic inequality.  The reason is that the mechanisms for generating wealth change dramatically during such periods. MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin make the important point that a key reason for rising economic inequality is the breakdown of old institutions (the New Deal broadly construed) that mitigated economic inequality.

But what most ignore is that the basis for economic wealth-creation and thus inequality have shifted massively today. That's Mankiw's main point, really - the massive growth not in the upper-middle class or even the growing numbers of "millionaires" but the incredible growth in the distance between the super-rich and everybody else.

In today's idea-driven, creative economy super-wealth comes increasingly from control over royalties derived from specialized intellectual property in one from or another (new technology, new forms of entertainment, new investment vehicles and so on). And it is the growing distance between those at the commanding heights of the royalty economy and the rest of us who derive income from wages that is a key dimension of growing economic inequality.

In my view, the key to mitigating economic inequality rests on a two part strategy. On the one hand, new institutions are needed that can generate less skewed distribution of the proceeds from royalties. On the other new mechanisms will have to be found to increase the earnings of those at the very bottom by improving the productivity and in turn the wages, benefits and working conditions of those who work in the low-wage service economy (as was done in the previous era for blue-collar work).

Your thoughts.

The Backpack Apartment - Coming soon to your city?

With real estate running scarce and increasingly expensive in cities around the world, here's a way to still live in an urban environment - albeit in a very, very small space!  Its all about the backpack apartment which consists of a cube-made element.  The backpack apartment is constructed with a welded steel cage and a light birch veneered plywood interior cladding. The height of the top floor of the cube element is approximately eleven feet and the total weight of the sculpture is about two tons.

What do you think - is this something you would like to see in your city and would you consider living in a backpack apartment?  Note to City Zoning-by-law inspectors: Beware!

Aleem Kanji

Surburban Spread

Are American suburbs a model for the world - especially it's emerging nations? USA Today says maybe so.  I find it highly doubtful particularly given traffic congestion and rising oil prices.  Some talk of peak oil. To my mind, it's the suburban model that's "peaked."

UPDATE:  NPR's Morning Edition (H/T: Alison Kemper) reports that in some markets suburban real estate prices are in free fal, while urban, in-city or close-in markets are stable or even increasing.

Economists say home prices are nowhere near hitting bottom. But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.
The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl ...

At a recent auction of foreclosed homes north of Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, there weren't many takers. All of the addresses are far from downtown, and average commute times are among the highest in the nation. It's a different story for properties that are closer to the city's center — in areas of Montgomery County that are on the edge of Washington ... Inside the city, median home prices are actually up 3.5 percent from a year ago ...

David Stiff, chief economist for the company that produces the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, saw the trend in other cities, as well — including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Miami and Boston. Stiff recently matched home resale values against commute times and found that in most of these major metropolitan areas, the trend is the same. The longer the commute, the steeper the drop in prices ...

"We don't live in the Ozzie and Harriet era anymore," Goldberg said. "We live more in the Seinfeld, Sex in the City era, in which young people find cities to be compelling."

You can listen here. The key factor here is time, more than cost of gas or lifestyle preferences.

Global City

Foreigners are propping up NYC's economy according to the New York Times, filling up top restaurants and buying up real estate. But the Times adds, "the number of customers dining in chain restaurants like Applebee’s and Outback Steakhouse in the metropolitan area dropped by 3.4 percent in February."

Being Pennsylvania

It's 2:20am EST in the Lufthansa Frankfurt lounge. I am rolling on the floor having just read Rana's post.  On the slightly more serious side of things, here's a new paper by Bill Frey and Ruy Teixeira on the political economy of Pennsylvania and its upcoming primary.

It's the Simple Things...

I had the rare pleasure of flying Lufthansa, classe primo.  What an amazing experience.  Not only was the food delicious and the cabin spacious but the flight attendants were not surly!  And the best part of all..every seat had a ROSE!

So typically after I fly, I rename the airlines.  For example.

United is U-FRIGHTED

Northwest= NorthWORST

Southwest = SouthWORSTEST

US Air = US SCARE

Air Canada- SCARE Canada

Continental - Conti-HELL-tal

Delta - Schmelta

Aeroflot - AeroFLOP

American - Ameri-CANT

So for now, Lufthansa gets to keep its name.  Please share your monikers for the airline carriers.

Solar Powered Medical Equipment from Dayton's Creative Class

In early March, under the leadership of SOCHE, Richard, Steven, Lou, Rana, and I worked with 32 catalysts in Dayton, Ohio. The energy of the people, the strength of the art community, the leading universities, and the culture of innovation (from the Wright Brothers to Wright-Patterson) made for an exciting couple of days.

I recently came across a great example of the Dayton's creative assets in action. This article from the University of Dayton highlights the winner of their recent business plan competition.

From the piece:

Salud del Sol, an innovative new business from a team of University of Dayton students aimed at bringing the 'health of the sun' to medical treatment in developing countries, took home the $10,000 first prize to help get the venture off the ground.

Winning the 2008 University of Dayton Business Plan Competition, the team of Lauren Dokes, Lori Hanna, Daniel Hensel and Anna Young created a business plan to develop and market solar cookers and solar-powered sterilizers.

Salud del Sol tapped other expertise at the University including engineering, international development and social entrepreneurship, according to project member Lori Hanna, a mechanical engineering major. The project – the basis of her senior honors thesis – grew from an internship in rural Nicaragua through UD 's Engineers in Technical Humanitarian Opportunities of Service-learning (ETHOS) program.

"Nurses have to travel to bigger health centers or hospitals to use sterilizers, sometimes traveling long distances by bus and spending precious time and money to have access to the equipment," she said.

This type of social entrepreneurship is becoming more and more of a calling card/career choice of members of the creative class and places that offer combinable creative assets -- including universities, mega region/international linkages, entrepreneurial institutions, and scientific talent -- will see sustainable growth and improvements in quality of place.

When Megas Clash

Matt Yglesias, blogger-extraordinarire and author of the this immensely thoughtful new book on US foreign policy, jumps into the  fray (while paying one of the nicest complements of my life - opening clause):

When titans clash, I think of a more trivial point to raise (non-trivial point -- environmental sustainability should be considered here), namely that I don't understand why Florida calls these things mega-regions.

The so-called "mega-region" in which I live -- Florida calls it BosNyWash, I think, while Krugman uses the more felicitous term Acelaland -- is geographically smaller than a traditional "region" like New England or the Pacific Northwest. The true mega-regions of the United States are longstanding geographic and cultural concepts like "the South" that are composed of distinct sub-regions and are much, much larger than Florida's multi-focal urban clusters.

Yglesias has a good point here: What to call regions of various scales. To clarify, I am not the inventor of the term which has entered into the lexicon of economic geographers and urban economists.  Mega-region, as I understand it, evolved from the  Jean Gottman's classic Megalopolis, referring to a combination or amalgamation of metropolitan, or metro, regions. Various studies by Glaeser, Lang, and the RPA all use the term, mega-region, though not everyone agrees on whether to hyphenate or not.

Mega, Mega

Ryan Avent weighs in over at The Economist:

I find Mr Krugman's conclusion here rather surprising given his previous work on the subject. As a principle figure in the development of the new economic geography, Mr Krugman has written--often--that the forces pulling people together into economic agglomerations are threefold: there are the benefits of labour pooling and information spillovers, as he mentions. But he fails to discuss the importance of forward and backward linkages--that is, the importance of being near to suppliers and customers in a world where transportation costs are non-negligible.

This is a key consideration, giving rise to a measure called market potential. One of Mr Krugman's co-authors on the groundbreaking book The Spatial Economy, Anthony Venables, co-wrote a similarly seminal paper (PDF) with Stephen Redding which noted that market potential--the nearness of a place to other economically vibrant places--can explain quite a bit of differences in global wealth.

This seems very relevant to the mega-region discussion. Why, for instance, have places like Baltimore and Philadelphia performed much better in recent years than similar cities in America's distressed Rust Belt? Obviously, many factors are at work, but it seems odd to suggest that the nearness of those places to the dynamic economies of New York and Washington are unimportant. Distance still matters for the movement of both goods and people. Being in Philadelphia confers an advantage on firms, who then have fairly good access to nearby economic centres, and also to the tens of millions of people surrounding them.

The density and connectedness of economic activity in America's northeastern corridor increases the returns to operations all throughout the region. The Rust Belt cannot duplicate this market potential, being poorer and more dispersed. I think Mr Florida is right to call this a factor worthy of policy consideration.

Mega Debate

Paul Krugman has more to say on megas:

My basic view is that at a point in time the economic geography we see is more or less an equilibrium — that is, the individual costs and benefits of moving from one place to another are roughly balanced. Suppose that we see two regions, M (the mega) and N (a not so mega). M will have higher productivity and wages, offset by higher commuting costs and/or higher housing prices. An individual considering a move from N to M will take these into account, so that roughly speaking the two locations will be equally attractive.

Now we know that’s not the whole story. Adding to M’s work force will reinforce the positive spillovers from a large concentration of talent etc.. That’s the argument for encouraging more people to move to M.

But there are other considerations. For one thing, there are negative spillovers too, such as traffic congestion. For another, there are spillovers in N as well. For example, reducing the smaller city’s work force may deprive it of the critical mass needed to support some amenities, or maintain a cost-competitive position in some industries.

Do we know enough about these cross-cutting effects to be sure that moving people from Des Moines to Acelaland makes America better off? I don’t think we do. And as anyone who’s tried to study positive externalities knows, it’s very hard to pin them down.

Hmmmmm. Seems to me a good deal of recent research in economic geography suggests that regions are diverging. Berry and Glaeser find powerful evidence of human capital divergence over time. It is also increasingly clear that urbanization, in general, is an important component of productivity.  Careful studies of US-Canadian regional productivity and competitiveness by my colleague Roger Martin and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity show that urbanization is a key component of the difference. Anyway you slice it urbanization is important to economic growth. (BTW, no one is suggesting "moving people from Des Moines to Aceleland," that's the way China and Russia did it: just that existing conditions are moving people worldwide to mega-regions and we need a public policy regime that takes that into account in various ways and across various dimensions).

Furthermore, the Jacobs-Lucas theory of human capital externalities provides the basic microfoundations as to why.  In his book with Fujita and Venables, The Spatial Economy the authors essentially admit that conventional economic models are unable generate the Zipf rank-size distribution of cities and regions. This is exactly the problem that Axtell and Florida, Emergent Cities takes on and generates using a basic Jacobs-Lucas framework to undergird agent-based models which show how clusters, then cities, then metros and then mega-regions form based on these human capital externalities. The Santa Fe Institute PNAS paper on urban scaling also shows how urban metabolic rates essentially speed up to offset "negative spillovers" like traffic congestion which Krugman mentions.

But let me get to the nub of the matter. Nations are political jurisdictions. Metros are constructed from data on commuting patterns and the like.  Mega-regions, as we define them, reflect an observable physical reality.  If an alien were to descend from space into the earth's atmosphere what would he see?  He would not be able to discern the world's 191 or so nation-states, nor would he be able to easily pick up metros (which blur into megas). He would see mountains and oceans in the daytime, and mega-regions at night. Mega-regions of all man-made geographic phenomena are a readily observable unit.

Furthermore, there is no logical reason to believe that the basic Jacobs-Lucas microfoundations for city formation and economic growth stop at the (arbitrary borders) of a cluster or metro, especially when we observe mega units in real space.  In fact, there is good evidence that suggests that those micro-foundational processes can and do scale from Axtell-Florida and the Santa Fe Institute research.

I'm the first to admit that there is a lot more to do on this issue. But the fact remains that mega regions produce the lion's share of the world's economic output and innovation.  Developing policy for a spiky world seems like a pretty big issue, and not just from a competitiveness point of view. Krugman is very concerned about inequality. As Who's Your City points out, the divergence between mega-regions and other places makes geography an increasingly important component of economic and social inequality.

Mega Krugman

Paul Krugman is a mega skeptic.

It’s not at all clear to me that world competition is between mega-regions.

I’d say that there are two things that arguably define an economic unit for the purposes of economic geography. One is labor mobility: a region over which there’s high mobility of labor will be a region in which everyone with the same set of skills is paid more or less the same real wage (which may differ in money terms because of differences in the cost of living etc.). By that definition, the United States as a whole is the relevant unit: workers are as mobile between Chicago and Boston as they are between Baltimore and Boston.

The other definition is the reach of spillovers — positive externalities, for the econowonks. That’s probably much more localized: there’s a reason investment bankers cluster in expensive Wall Street or City of London locations. But again, it’s hard to see that this makes the Northeast Corridor, as opposed to individual metro areas within the corridor, a relevant unit.

I'll have more to say later (it's a busy weekend), but this paper  has more on why the mega-region, alongside the cluster and the nation-state, is an increasingly relevant and important economic unit and why it needs to be considered as such from a policy-making perspective.  But let me just say that when 40 of these megas which account for less than a fifth of world population account for roughly two-thirds of economic activity and 85 percent of global innovation, something is going on.  Another piece of the explanation (micro-foundations if you will) is outlined in this paper with George Mason's Rob Axtell, which uses adaptive agent models to suggest that mega-regions are in fact emergent economic units, emerging that is from the evolution of localized clusters and city-regions. At the end of the day, mega-regions have large geographically defined markets, and people are more mobile across mega-regions than across nations (Krugman even calls his own mega, Acelaland, after the fast train).  My hunch is that people are also much more likely to relocate within megas than across them, say from NY to Boston or to DC, and in fact recent conversations with many journalists, non-fiction writers and editors suggest a shift from NY to DC, Krugman's Times colleague, David Leonhardt being a case in point, though more research needs to be done on this issue of mega-mobility.

II'm in good company: Krugman's also also skeptical of the new paper on place-making policy by Ed Glaeser and Joshua Gotltlieb (unfortunately gated by Brookings).  It's always great to have Krugman applying his ever facile intellect to these issues.

Your thoughts?

Mega-Regions and Urban Policy

My piece in today's Wall Street Journal is here.

The problem is that much of our public policy not only ignores the rise of the mega-regions, it actually works against them. If we want to bolster economic competitiveness and ensure long-run prosperity, we must pursue policies that take mega-regions into account.

Above all, this means remaining committed to open global trade. Mega-regions thrive on trade, which is why their leaders – from business officials to mayors – strongly support it. While political candidates may find it attractive to bash trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, this will only weaken mega-regions in both the advanced and developing world.

Second, it's time to stop transferring wealth from our most productive mega-regions to lagging places. In the U.S., the past 50 years have seen a massive transfer of tax money from innovative and prosperous mega-regions on the East and West coasts to the South. While this transfer may be a boon to local politicians and developers, such misguided policy has diverted economic resources away from the core mega-regions where they can be used most productively.

Third, our public policy must work toward, not against, density. Nearly every expert on the subject agrees that innovation and productivity are driven by density. For the better part of a century, we've subsidized suburbanization. That stimulated consumption of cars and appliances, which drove the industrial economy and allowed families to buy affordable homes. But it also diffused the density that is increasingly required for innovation and growth. Of course, every place does not have to be like Tokyo or Manhattan. Silicon Valley-style density would probably be sufficient. We can still have suburbs, but our economic policy has to start to encourage density, not sprawl.

Fourth, our urban policy should not be aimed only at improving schools, creating affordable housing and redistributing income. Urban policy must also start to address economic competitiveness. It must strengthen mega-regions by improving fast-rail transit between their nodes, modernizing airports, and achieving greater cross-border flows of goods and people.

Is There Really a Shortage of "Good" Men?

Mark Gimein in Slate on the "eligible-bachelor paradox":

This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders." Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Tyler Cowen doesn't quite buy it.

So the "strong bidding women" can always cave and settle for a "lesser man" after an optimal amount of waiting, yet many don't.  The distinction between period-by-period happiness and overall lifetime happiness also shapes the market.  As smart single women mature, their lives get better and better.  "Settling" becomes psychologically harder, even if it would make some of the "settlers" happy in the longer run.  So settling doesn't happen; decisiveness become harder to conjure up at the same time that its long-run value is increasing, or in other words behavioral economics is very much at work here.

Your thoughts?

Beyond Creative Industries

An important new study by Statscan finds that:

Culture workers and their knowledge, skills and creativity are relevant for producing goods and services outside the culture sector, according to a new study on the role of culture occupations in the economy.  ... [It] used employment data from the 1991, 1996 and 2001 censuses, examined the extent to which employers in non-culture industries, such as manufacturing, relied on culture workers and their skills as inputs into productive processes during the 1990s. It found that almost half of all culture workers were employed in non-culture industries, particularly in four sectors: manufacturing, business services, educational services and retail trade ... This suggests that forms of creativity other than purely scientific and technical expertise were also relevant for producing goods and services.

Moreover, core culture employment in manufacturing increased by 55%, a rate far higher than overall employment growth in manufacturing during the 1990s. For business services, core culture employment almost doubled over the decade, an increase that was also larger than overall employment growth in business services. This suggests that producing manufactured goods and business services relied to a greater degree on creative design work at the end of the decade than at the beginning.

The study also examined where core culture workers tend to be employed. Firms located in large cities hired culture workers to a much greater extent than those located in small cities and rural areas.

Click here for the full report; here is a related study charting trends in Canada and the US.

Sunshine State

Eye Weekly's ever witty Marc Weisblott really made me smile tonight. We're in NYC to do a segment on the CBS Early Show tomorrow AM, and I came across his new piece (with requisite, though mainly recycled, "zingers") titled "Sunshine Statesman." 

When my brother Rob and I formed our first band in the mid-1960s, trying our hand at Jimi Hendrix, Cream and other power rock staples, we practiced hard for our first gig - the annual Cub Scout shindig. We thought we'd found a great name - Flagg - with those so strategically place double gs.

But our Dad, who headed our local troupe, told the organizers to call us "The Sunshines."

I hadn't thought about that for nearly 40 years, but Weisblott and Eye brought it all back - the image of our youthfully mortified red faces on the stage of Queen of Peace Elementary School's cafeteria cum Cub Scout meeting hall/ performance venue. And for that I am ever so grateful.

The Fisher-Florida Debate

WaPo's Marc Fisher responds to my response:

That's all quite reasonable, but it doesn't entirely respond to my point about Florida's ranking of the District as a relatively lousy place for families with children, or his comments about how Washington flunks his "Trick or Treater Index," a shorthand measure of a city's suitability for families with kids based on how many or few kids come around on Halloween.

He and I certainly agree that each family has to make its own choices based on its own values and ideals--and what it can realistically manage. But I don't think Florida has really answered the point about what he found lacking in the District. Rather, he simply states how much he loves the District, which I know is true, but which doesn't seem to cover all of his feelings and thoughts about the city.

He also goes on to say some nice things about me and my work's influence on his own. Like I said, I very much admire Marc's writing.

But I have to wonder if he stopped reading Who's Your City? after the "trick-or-treater index" passage that got him so worked up. On p. 262 I rank greater Washington DC as the No. 1 place for families with children in the USA. I also rank it is No.2 for young singles (only San Fran does better).  And in the new edition of the Advocate I say in my estimation it's also the best place for gays and lesbian (especially single gay men in the country.). The trick or treater index was not meant to say that DC is a bad place for children - Rana and I were planning to have kids and raise them there that's why we bought the house in the neighborhood we did - but simply to show that parents in cities outside the US do not fear as much for their kids safety. That section of the book quotes several parents saying as much.  It is very clear to me parents worry more about their kids safety in DC and virtually any US city and most suburbs than they do in Toronto.  But as the book says, greater DC remains the best place for familes with children in the US according to our rankings.

I'll say it again: Rana and I love Washington DC. Like I said, we moved for the one reason that Marc identifies - the opportunity to run a well-funded think tank. Furthermore, I believe Greater DC has just about the biggest upside of any US region. Not only because of federal spending but because it is attracting talent and business as the most livable and relatively affordable node in the great Bos-Wash mega-region.  The region does face some issues and threats - among them traffic congestion, sprawl, income inequality, and housing affordability. But it has the resources and trajectory to cope with all of them, and our Gallup survey shows that people are very positively attached to the region and find it to be incredibly open-minded, tolerant, diverse, and to offer a high quality of life - and that includes all races, ethnicities, income and education levels across the board.  I actually have an oped sitting with the WaPo which expresses my thoughts on greater Washington's very positive future in a little bit deeper fashion. Hope they decide to run  in, and I'd very much appreciate Marc's comments on it.

Place and Health

Two new studies document considerable variance in health outcomes by location (h/t: Jason Rentfrow).

The first study investigated over 7,000 individuals aged 52 and older who lived in urban areas across England. The study found that even when individual differences in education and income were taken into account, people who lived in the most deprived areas were significantly more likely to have poorer cognitive function than those living in the least deprived areas. These findings represent a cause for concern because poor cognitive function in older people is closely linked to the risk of developing dementia.

Meanwhile, the second study, which involved 4,148 individuals aged 60 and over, assessed whether mobility disability and neighbourhood deprivation are linked. Over a two-year period, 13.6% of those in the most deprived areas developed problems with mobility compared to 4.0% of those in the least deprived areas. As with the first studies, these figures took into account individual differences in income, education, and health.

The full press release with a link to more information is here.

Geographic Inequality

This new study by the Economic Policy Institute looks at trends in state level inequality over the past couple decades (h/t: Alison Kemper). 

Quote of the Week

Brad DeLong on housing:

We aren't buiding more superhighways, there are no major transportation improvements on the horizon, America is filling up, andlso land-value gradients are on the rise. If the income distribution continues to erode, we will wind up with higher prices for scarce positional goods--chief among which is location, location, location.

Especially if you live in the Bay Areas like DeLong.

Class/Politics

A new, very thoughtful and provocative Brookings paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz on the "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class," here.

Historic Cities Programme

A quick plug for a project I am involved with - the Historic Cities Programme (or HCP) coming to Toronto (free to attend for all) from April 16 to 25.  HCP is an international exhibition which is an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.  The exhibition debuted in the United States and is currently making its way across Canada. 

HCP showcases the conservation and re-use of buildings and public spaces in historic cities in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Mali, India and Afghanistan.  The HCP exhibition offers a perspective that looks at culture as an asset that can transform communities.

   

Here are some pictures from the exhibition's debut in Montreal last week

Aleem Kanji