I'll Take ... Houston?

Urban economist, Ed Glaeser says NYC has a Houston problem. Houston has more affordable housing, less congestion, and easier commutes -all because of its "deregulated market", lack of rent control, and ease of construction.  Ryan Avent says not only is Glaeser wrong, he's contradicting his own research.

Young Americans

Mark Thoma points us to new research by Elizabeth Casico and her collaborators on how young Americans stack up in the global competition for skills:

Young Americans entering the labor market today face substantial competition. Employers can look all over the world for workers with the skills to meet their firms' needs. Are young Americans ready for these challenges? ...This Economic Letter summarizes new research by Cascio, Clark, and Gordon (2008) (hereafter CCG) that uses data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), fielded in the 1990s, to address this issue. The authors estimate the skill levels of 16- and 17-year-olds and 26- to 30-year-olds for the United States and other high-income countries. Consistent with other assessments of the school-age population, the IALS data show that U.S. 16- and 17-year-olds perform poorly relative to their counterparts in other nations. By their late 20s, however, those in the U.S. group in the IALS data compare much more favorably to their counterparts abroad, suggesting that they are able to "catch up" in college or beyond.

I find this research fascinating: It lines up completely with my personal experience. As a working class kid who had to hide the fact that I was "smart," my "skill level" and test scores at 16 or 17 would surely have lagged against many international competitors and middle-class Americans. But a Garden State scholarship and admission to Rutgers fundamentally changed my trajectory.  I made up ground very quickly and then continued along into and through graduate school.  I wish I still had my scores: But if I recall correctly, my GRE's were in the neighborhood of 400 or 500 points higher than my SATs.

I can't wait to see if they have subnational data for the US, and - hey wait a minute - any data at all for Canada. 

Big Apple Bounce

It's been widely reported that US housing starts "surged" - rising 9.1 percent in June - after many months of decline and turmoil.  The seasonally adjusted rate of more than 1 million homes was seen to be a significant turnaround over a 2.7 percent decline in May.  Behind this shift was one anomaly - an extraordinary run-up in building permits in New York City before July 1st, when the city will enact new building codes as both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal report.  The Journal summarized it this way: "The gain was driven by soaring apartment construction, which was related to the New York building-rules change. Aside from the boost given by the building-regulation change, U.S. housing starts fell 4% in June." More evidence of the very differeent housing markets separating global real estate superstars from rustbelt regions, ex-urbs and overbuilt resort markets.

Walkability Index

Walkscore.com has rated and ranked the "walkability" of more than 2500 US neighborhoods.  Here's the top 10. The site allows you to click on the city to get list of walkable neighborhoods. Nice maps too.

• San Francisco
• New York
• Boston
• Chicago
• Philadelphia
• Seattle
• Washington D.C.
• Long Beach
• Los Angeles
• Portland, OR

Some obvious ones: NYC's Tribeca, Little Italy and Soho; DC's Dupont and Logan Circles; Boston's Back Bay, Beacon Hill and South End.  But it's a terrific to see LA and Long Beach on the top 10 list.

Sorted Nation

Part Three of our "sorted nation" conversation, that is Bill Bishop and me, with Planetizen's Nate Berg is up over at the Planetizen site. Click here.

Not Good

Image from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas via Mark Thoma.

More here.

Creative New Zealand

Writing in the New Zealand Herald, Richard Wagstaff skewers a ANZ Bank report which divides government spending into productive and non-productive categories, placing culture along with other functions in the former category.

To make its point, the report divided government spending into "productive" and "non-productive" categories. Among productive spending were education, law and order and transport ...

Similarly, spending on culture is deemed "non-productive". Business professor Richard Florida would disagree. His book Rise of the Creative Class found that to succeed in a modern economy, cities have to attract creative thinkers. Auckland City Council has embraced this concept. Last year, it released a blueprint for growing its creative industries. The council says these employ more than 13,000 workers in Auckland alone and contribute $1.7 billion to the city's Gross Domestic Product. But even as New Zealand cities strive to compete with others world-wide, ANZ says helping cities to be more liveable through culture is "non-productive".

The full story is here.

Suburbia at the Tipping Point?

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(Image from Business Week; data from Zillow.com).

Check out this image and more tracking the variation in housing prices within regions from Business Week based on data from Zillow.com.  Business Week's Prashant Gopal discusses them and more in this story on the "unravelling of the suburban fringe:"

BusinessWeek.com asked Zillow.com, which provides online home valuations, to analyze how home values have been holding up in large cities across the county compared to both inner and outer suburbs. The results are fascinating. Annual price changes in most of the largest metro areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, followed a similar pattern: Values were most stable within a 10-mile radius of the center of the city, but generally worsened with each successive radius ring as far as 50 miles from the center of the city.

Not all cities kept precisely to the pattern, in part because of the complications of geography. In Washington D.C., for example, prices started improving in the 40-mile and 50-mile rings, most likely because the area intersects with Baltimore and its immediate suburbs. Some cities, such as Boston, Cincinnati, Denver, San Diego, St. Louis, and Phoenix, did not seem to have any discernible pattern. And in other areas—Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, and Reno, Nev.—the opposite phenomenon seems to be in play, with real estate values actually improving away from the city.

This seems to suggest a new spatial fix in the making, with consolidation and concentration and higher real estate values in the core areas of mega-regions and especially their hub cities, and  less reconcentration and a more general decline in real estate values in second and their tier cities, alongside more general real estate stagnation or decline in both urban and suburban locations. The pattern in Boston is intriguing: Why is it different than that for other metros in the Bos-Wash mega?  These pattern is complicated, a bit unclear, and emergent - it's still early in the game - but these data suggest it's worth further examination.

Any other thoughts?

MPI Live

The new website for our Institute, the Martin Propserity Institute is live today. Thanks to Ian Swain MPI researcher, DJ and internet impressario, to the MPI team and the Mark G and the crew at Naked Creative for all their terrific effort.  We'll be updating and adding content over time, but the site is up and running. Send us any comments or suggestions

Bubba on Bishop

Former President Bill Clinton warned Saturday that the country is becoming increasingly polarized despite the historic nature of the Democratic primary. Speaking at the National Governors Association's semiannual meeting, Clinton noted that on the one hand, following the early stages of the Democratic primary, "the surviving candidates were an African-American man and a woman." ...  But this achievement was overshadowed by a growing distance between Americans, said Clinton.  "Underneath this apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to manage difference," Clinton said.

Clinton developed his 44-minute speech from themes he said he drew from a new book, "The Big Sort," by Bill Bishop. He cited statistics compiled by Bishop that found that in the 1976 presidential election, only 20 percent of the nation's counties voted for Jimmy Carter or President Ford by more than a 20 percent margin. By contrast, 48 percent of the nation's counties in 2004 voted for John Kerry or President Bush by more than 20 points, Clinton said.
"We were sorting ourselves out by choosing to live with people that we agree with," Clinton said.

The rest is here (h/t: Patrick Adler). Way to go Bill  - Bishop that is.

The Russians are Coming

The great fire-sale of US assets continues. In the 1980s, it was Japanese and European companies buying up US factories, who incidentally helped restore their competitiveness. Then, there was the buy-up of great buildings and commercial real estate. Now, the the dollar down and weakened real estate markets comes the buying up of prestige properties in super-star markets from NY to Palm Beach.   The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent buying binge by the Russian super-rich:

As many of America's wealthy are roiled by the credit crisis and general financial gloom, a growing number of rich Russians are house-shopping -- and buying -- in costly U.S. enclaves.

Fertilizer mogul Dmitry Rybolovlev is set to pay nearly $100 million to Donald Trump for an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., say people familiar with the deal reached in May. Last year, Oleg Baibakov, president of GSC City, a Moscow construction-management and consulting firm, bought a condo at Manhattan's Time Warner Center for $13.5 million, according to public records.

And in Snowmass, Colo., perhaps the most famous Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, paid $36.4 million in April for a 200-acre ranch. The property's massive, split-level house is five minutes away from an $11.8 million ski-in, ski-out house that Mr. Abramovich, owner of England's Chelsea soccer team, purchased two months earlier, records show ...

In New York City, foreign buyers now make up about 15% of the market, with Russians the largest contingent, says Hall Willkie, president of real-estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. "A few years ago we didn't see any Russians," Mr. Willkie says. "But now, especially at the high end of the market they are buying big apartments...so they are a significant factor." ...

Sergey Skaterschikov, a Moscow-based private-equity investor, is shopping for a house in Palo Alto, Calif., because his son will attend school in the area ... At a recent Sotheby's International Realty conference, agents discussed Russian as well as Chinese nationals as new markets for eight-figure homes, according to Washington, D.C.-based broker Daryl Judy ... In January, San Francisco-based brokers Misha Kurgatnikov and Victor Borelli met with a delegation of more than 100 Russia-based brokers representing wealthy Moscow clients interested in buying distressed luxury properties in California and Las Vegas ...

Russian developers also are getting involved. Mirax Group Corp. of Moscow has invested in 13 partially completed houses at the Aqua, a New Urbanist-style development near Miami's South Beach. The $75 million project will offer fully equipped homes, including linens, flatware and towels, aimed at Moscow-based buyers ... It hopes eventually to be involved in developments in cities including New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas and Aspen, Colo., says Dimitry Lutsenko, a Mirax board member, via email. Security-related requests by Russian buyers are common, including underground parking, gated entrances and video cameras.

Flight of the Creative Class

Vivek Wadhwa reports on his research which shows how much foreign-born talent mean to the US economy and why US immigration policy is causing many to leave. Money quote: 'We need to do all we can to attract and keep skilled immigrants rather than bring them here temporarily, train them, and send them home."

In over 25 percent of tech companies founded in the United States from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born. In 2005, these companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers. In some industries, such as semiconductors, the numbers were much higher—immigrants founded 35 percent of start-ups. In Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrant-founded start-ups had increased to 52 percent.

When we looked into the backgrounds of these immigrant founders, we found that they tended to be highly educated—96 percent held bachelor’s degrees and 74 percent held a graduate or postgraduate degree. And 75 percent of these degrees were in fields related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The vast majority of these company founders didn’t come to the United States as entrepreneurs—52 percent came to study, 40 percent came to work, and 6 percent came for family reasons. Only 1.6 percent came to start companies in America. They found that the United States provided a fertile environment for entrepreneurship. Even though these founders didn’t come to the United States with the intent, they typically started their companies around 13 years after arriving in the country.

Most students and skilled temporary workers who come to the United States want to stay, as is evident from the backlog for permanent resident visas. Yet we’re leaving these potential immigrants little choice but to return home. “The New Immigrant Survey,” by Guillermina Jasso of New York University and other leading academics, found that approximately one in five new legal immigrants and about one in three employment principals either plan to leave the United States or are uncertain about remaining. These surveys were done in 2003, before the backlog increased so dramatically.

More here.

The New Spatial Fix

My new Globe and Mail column is out:

The days of urban sprawl are over ...

... but not for the reasons you think

RICHARD FLORIDA

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

July 11, 2008 at 6:11 PM EDT

One of the few things increasing as fast as the price of oil lately has been the amount of commentary linking higher energy costs to the death of suburbia. Clearly, higher gas prices have affected where people want – or can afford – to live. Just as the demand for SUVs plummets and consumers have finally begun to see the point of hybrids, people are turning away from sprawling exurbs toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs.

A recent report from CEOs for Cities, a group of U.S. business leaders, mayors and university presidents, declares: “Now that the era of cheap gas is over, demand for development on the fringe is down, and consumer interest and market potential lie in developing and redeveloping neighbourhoods closer to the urban core.”

“Could it happen in Canada?” this newspaper asked recently. While Canada is not suffering from the one-two punch of rising gas prices and subprime mortgages, it's abundantly clear that the same kind of shift away from sprawling suburbs and toward the urban core is under way from Toronto and Montreal to Vancouver and Calgary.

But what's happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order – what geographers call “the spatial fix” – of which the move back toward the city is just one part.

Lights Out

Writing in the New Statesman, Andrew Stephen compares the US crumbling infrastructure to conditions he observed during the collapse of the Soviet Union (via Planetizen).

The fact that I sat in my top-floor office in a puddle of sweat for most of the second week of this month because the air-conditioning had failed, for example, is hardly something I would expect the candidates to lose too much sleep over - even when the temperature inside crept past 110 degrees. For me, it all culminated in a visit from Bill, my friendly air-conditioning technician, on the morning of Friday the 13th.

What he told me symbolised much more than the strangely confused and angry mood that consumes America when the mere subject of "energy conservation" comes up. The ramifications went far beyond my usually nicely cooled, breezy office. Even America's outrageous hogging of the world's energy supplies - it comprises just 5 per cent of the world's population but uses 23 per cent of its energy resources - no longer seemed that surprising, let alone outrageous. It was what was going on around me and Bill as we spoke early that morning that brought home something I have been noticing with increasing alarm over the past two decades: the sheer fragility of America's crumbling infrastructures.

To my American readers: please do not get too angry with me when I say this, but the rapidity of the deterioration of your country's infra structures often reminds me of an extensive tour of the Soviet Union I undertook in 1986 - when I saw for myself, in places such as industrial Ukraine and Siberia and St Petersburg, that the Soviet Union had already had its day. For just as Bill and I were having our grim conversation early that Friday morning - and unknown to either of us at the time - the heart of the capital of the most powerful nation on earth, less than a mile from where we stood, had been plunged into the kind of chaos one might envisage in, say, New Delhi on a very, very bad day.

Having only been to Russia recently, I can't speak directly to his comparison. But, having lived in Washington DC I suffered through many, many power outages. Rana and I often remarked  that it felt like we were living not in an advanced country but the third world. We've yet to experience a single outage in Toronto, while her family's power was out for days upon days in suburban Detroit.

Density and Politics

(Image from the Boston Globe )

Density makes places more Democratic. That's the conclusion from this map and the accompanying Boston Globe article (via Planetizen) by Robert David Sullivan:

The accompanying map shows where the electorate has grown the most over the past half-century - counties that in 2004 cast at least 10,000 votes and at least double the votes cast in the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. In just about every major metropolitan area, Democrats are strongest in the center and Republicans fare best farther out, but the patterns depend on how long ago the suburbs began to grow.

In the oldest metropolitan areas, there are outlying counties that were solidly Republican in the 1960s and 1970s, but have trended Democratic as development has cooled down. (They include Barnstable County in Massachusetts. Southern New Hampshire, past its peak rate of growth, is heading in the same direction.) This phenomenon has had a significant impact on presidential elections. When California was one of the fastest-growing states, it was reliably Republican, but it became safely Democratic in the 1990s, when its population growth rate fell sharply ...

Sprawl has kept Republicans competitive at the national level, but the "frontier vote" may be reaching its limit. The rising price of gasoline and a soft housing market (made worse by the foreclosure crisis) have had more people questioning the value of long commutes and mansion-sized houses.

Hmmm ...

Bill Fulton takes on Joel Kotkin's criticisms of Chris Leinberger's intriguing arguments about sprawl, declining suburbs and walkable urbanism:

Joel Kotkin is at it again. In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section, the enfant terrible of L.A. urbanism dissed the “suburbs as slums” thesis of Brookings’ Christopher Leinberger. But in once again coming to the defense of “suburbs”, he has revealed that he can’t tell the difference between Glendale and Palmdale ...

In a similar fashion to last summer’s debacle – when he decried Pasadena-sized densities as “Manhattanization” – Kotkin has now confused Glendale with Palmdale. He argued that Leinberger is wrong because people and jobs are not flowing to Downtown Los Angeles in huge numbers. He claimed that Leinberger and his sympathizers base their research mostly on anecdotes, rather than facts. And he concluded that “rather than cramming more people and families into cities,” high energy prices and similar trends “may instead foster a more dispersed, diversified archipelago of self-sufficient communities.” As examples he lists Burbank, Ontario, and West L.A. – all job-rich “suburbs” where commutes are shorter than they are in inner-city L.A ...

The inescapable conclusion is that Kotkin is about 30 years out of date. His mind lives in a ring of older suburbs that circle downtown L.A. – Burbank, the San Gabriel Valley, the Westside, Irvine, all built between the 1920s and the 1960s as residential suburbs. Kotkin always casts the “urban v. suburban” battle as a battle between Downtown Los Angeles and these “suburbs”.

The rest is here (via Planetizen).

Florida, Florida

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrock asks:

What is the probability of a family having two girls if one of the children is a girl named Florida?

Alex notes it's a rare first name. Florida Florida - has a certain "ring" to it:-)

Mapping North America

Ok, now I'm really excited.  One of our central goals here at MPI is to create integrated North American (that is Canada and the US) data-sets. And in our ongoing work, especially in developing the new Canadian edition of Who's Your City? we've been developing maps of North American data on various regional economic and demographic measures. So was I more than delighted to see the map above developed by David Eaves based on an original map I posted from calorielab (via strange maps and Andrew Sullivan). Eaves comments:

If Canadian provinces were ranked along side US States, they would rank 1st (BC), 2nd (QC), 3rd (ON), 4th (AL) and tied for 5th (MB) (YK) as the least obese provinces/states. Colorado would be the first American state placing 7th, with the provinces of NS in 8th and SK in 9th. PEI and NB would appear 15th and 16th and NL would appear 19th. NWT and NU would close out in 30th and 31st position. You can see the original chart at the bottom of this page. Actually even some of the grimmer looking patches of Canada’s map have a silver lining. The Arctic Territories, specifically Nunavut (NU) and the North-West Territories (NWT), appear obese and thus unhealthy. However, Statistics Canada notes that obesity criterion for Inuit populations should be more relaxed since a high BMI does not appear to have the same health risk for Inuit as for non-Inuit.

Cleveland's Talent Blueprint

A group of Cleveland business, civic and policy leaders has launched a new initiative to attract foreign talent. The Plain Dealer reports:

The group of civic leaders and pro-immigration stalwarts seeks cash and support for its "Talent Blueprint Project," a strategy to attract foreign students, workers and entrepreneurs ...

Rust belt competitors are already moving to attract immigrant investment, under a unique visa program. Milwaukee and Pittsburgh are drawing tens of millions of dollars through immigrant investment centers. The program, run by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, holds the promise of permanent-resident visas - green cards - to foreigners who invest in businesses that create at least 10 jobs.

The Cleveland Council on World Affairs, led by Mark Santo, is pushing for an investment center here. For distressed areas like Cleveland, immigrant investment could start at $500,000 ... He envisions an "H1B City" to lure workers from tech hot spots like Silicon Valley in California, the Research Triangle in North Carolina and Austin, Texas ... The region could offer free business space and play up its array of universities and low cost of living ...

Blueprint advocates, led by immigration lawyer Richard Herman, have joined critics nationwide of a program that caps visas for skilled, foreign workers at 65,000 a year. Congress lowered the cap from 195,000 in 2003 due in part to concerns that foreign workers were displacing Americans ...  "High Skill Immigration Zones" would attract skilled foreigners to fill job shortages, such as those in technology sectors. With the gathering of more foreign talent, high-tech companies.

Urbanization and Democracy

Ed Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, notes their strong connection (via Mark Thoma):

Across countries today, there is a robust correlation between urbanization and democracy. This correlation reflects many things, such as the tendency of more urban places to be richer and better educated, but it also surely reflects the role that cities play in supporting the coordinated action that creates and defends democracies

Celebrating Pittsburgh

This New York Times Sunday Travel piece celebrates the Pittsburgh I know and love.  Writer, Jeff Schlegel hones in some of the city's true gems.

Pittsburgh has undergone a striking renaissance from a down-and-out smokestack to a gleaming cultural oasis. But old stereotypes die hard, and Pittsburgh probably doesn’t make many people’s short list for a cosmopolitan getaway. Too bad, because this city of 89 distinct neighborhoods is a cool and — dare I say, hip—city. There are great restaurants, excellent shopping, breakthrough galleries and prestigious museums. The convergence of three rivers and surrounding green hills also make it a surprisingly pretty urban setting. And if the Pirates are in town, head over to PNC Park. Besides the game, the ballpark offers a great excuse to explore downtown Pittsburgh and the river views.

The slide show is terrific. (Image of the Mattress Factory from the NY Times).

America's Got Talent ... Troubles

Clive Crook in the Financial Times:

A startling and profoundly important fact about the US economy has received surprisingly little attention. The educational quality of the country’s workers is starting to decline – not just relatively (because other countries are catching up and moving ahead) but also, for the first time, in absolute terms. Over the coming years, baby-boomers departing from the labour force will have better educational qualifications than the younger workers replacing them. If the ultimate source of an economy’s ability to grow and prosper is its human capital, the US is in trouble.

For decades the educational quality of the US labour force surged. In 1940, less than 5 per cent of the population aged 25-64 had at least a four-year college education. By 2000, the proportion had increased to nearly 30 per cent. Successive generations of workers improved on the educational attainments of their predecessors. Retiring workers were replaced by better-educated youngsters. This remorseless accumulation of human capital helped fuel the country’s postwar growth. According to at least one authoritative study, it was the principal driver.

This trend came to a halt with workers now aged 55-59. Younger cohorts are no better educated than these soon-to-retire boomers. Broadly speaking, educational quality has topped out – and on at least one measure, it is actually deteriorating. In 2006, Americans aged 55-59 collectively possessed more masters degrees, professional degrees and doctorates than Americans aged 30-34. This impending loss of educational capital is entirely outside the country’s experience.

The numbers come from a recent study by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics: The Accelerating Decline in America’s High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy. As the title suggests, Mr Kirkegaard is chiefly concerned with the US visa system, which discriminates in a variety of ways against high-skilled immigrants. Easier entry of immigrants with scarce skills – for which high-tech employers such as Intel, Microsoft and others tirelessly plead – is the quickest and easiest fix and Mr Kirkegaard makes an unanswerable case for it. But the deeper problem, as he notes, lies with the education system. What is going on?

The US has always depended on "imported" talent at both the high and low end.  Superb universities, strong research institutions and vibrant high-tech industries primed the pump of this system.  But the problem runs far deeper through the education and development pipeline and as James Coleman and collaborators have pointed out right down to the early-childhood development system.  What's going on, indeed?

Humanities and Social Sciences Talk

Phillip Jeffrey has posted pictures and notes from my June 5th talk for Research in Society Lectures at the 77th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2008) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Fatness Index

Source: Strange Maps (via Andrew Sullivan).

Denser

Sacramento has developed a new blueprint for density. The Wall Street Journal reports:

For decades, backers of "smart-growth" planning principles have preached the benefit of clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop. Less travel would mean less fuel consumption and less air pollution. Several communities built from scratch upon those principles, such as Celebration in Florida, sprouted across the country. But they were often isolated experiments, connected to their surroundings mainly by car. So, as gasoline remained cheap, the rest of the country continued its inexorable march toward bigger houses and longer commutes.

Now, smart-growth fans see a chance to reverse that ... Over the past 50 years, cheap gasoline has encouraged developers to build communities further and further away from city cores. Now, city planners are experimenting with "smart growth" that keeps work and shopping close to home.

Sacramento -- yoked to the car and mired in one of the lousiest housing markets in the country -- offers an intriguing laboratory for that idea. Four years ago, just as oil was gaining momentum in its torrid climb to $140 a barrel and beyond, the six-county region adopted a plan for growth through 2050 that roped off some areas from development while concentrating growth more densely in others, emphasizing keeping jobs near homes. The local governments in the area aren't compelled to follow the so-called Blueprint, but the plan -- backed by a strange-bedfellows coalition of ordinary citizens, politicians, developers and environmentalists -- shows signs of working, nonetheless.

Sacramento benefits immensely not just from being the state capitol but from its location in the Nor-Cal mega - an affordable one at that. Oh ... and time costs, not just oil ...

Soul of the Forbidden City

Michael Meyer's new book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, argues that the city's history, authenticity and soul are being erased. As Kate Sekules points out in this New York Times book review:

This summer, widespread Beijing fatigue is an inevitability. But it’s high-flying Olympic Beijing that may become overfamiliar, a city that’s appeared before our very eyes as in a scene from “The Matrix.” This is not Michael Meyer’s town. The Beijing he has called home is being systematically eradicated, and this book is his testament.

But New Yorker architecture critic, Paul Goldberger demurs at least to a point:

But now Mao’s Beijing is nearly as much a part of the past as the Forbidden City. The factories are being pushed to the outskirts, and in their place the city has developed a skyline. It isn’t like the height-obsessed skyline of Shanghai, or the tight, congested skyline of Hong Kong. In Beijing, the towers are sprinkled all over the place. Most of them are mediocre, and some are ridiculous—a few have pagodalike crowns, to satisfy a former mayor who insisted that new buildings appear Chinese—but a handful are among the most compelling buildings going up anywhere in the world. In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city, combining explosive, relentless development with a fondness for the avant-garde. Beijing is as ruthlessly unsentimental today as it was in Mao’s time, with little patience for history if it gets in the way of development, and yet the city doesn’t feel as if it were defined solely by growth, like Shanghai, or like the kind of entirely manufactured environment that you see in Dubai. When I visited Beijing recently, the architect Ole Scheeren said to me, “I think Beijing is incredibly strong in its ability to completely override its own history and yet not surrender its identity.”

Goldberger has more to say, specifically on Beijing's Olympic architecture, here.

(Image from the New Yorker).

The Long Tail in Question

A new study by Harvard Business School's Anita Elberse marshals substantial empirical evidence that "hits" still matter quite a bit, a seeming refutation of Chris Anderson's popular long tail thesis.  According to Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal:

Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school who takes the same statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and cultural industries that sabermetricians do to baseball, ... looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.

Anderson responds here. Here's Elberse's reaction, Tyler Cowen weighs in here.

Here's Elberse's site: Her research looks very interesting.

Safest Places to Drive

Detroit does well, so do lots of Michigan communities.  Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Cedar Rapids and Lexington also do very well. The report is here. There's also a New York Times story (via Tyler Cowen).

Poor, Sexy and Smart

Science Magazine reports (h/t: Kevin Stolarick):

Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, likes to joke that the city is "poor but sexy." He may now want to add "and smart." Despite chronic budget shortfalls, Berlin's city government has pledged €160 million ($250 million) over the next 4 years to attract top researchers to the city's four main universities as well as its research institutes.

The impetus for the "Berlin International Forum for Excellence" came from Jürgen Zöllner, the city's senator for science and education. He initially proposed a new "superuniversity," but the city's existing universities feared that the new institution would lure away their best talent. Instead, the city will set up a foundation that will identify existing "areas of excellence" and distribute funds to top up salaries of world-class researchers, set up graduate schools, and attract visiting scholars to the city.

Berlin's universities and scientific institutes will work together in governing the new foundation, Zöllner said in announcing the plan yesterday. It's a chance to make Berlin "one of the most important locations for research in the world," he crowed. That level of collaboration is unusual, says former federal undersecretary for research Wolf-Michael Catenhusen, whom Zöllner charged with negotiating an alternative to the superuniversity. "It is as if MIT, Harvard, and Boston University were all to cooperate on a project." Catenhusen says the foundation's planners hope to attract additional private donations to boost the pot of funds.

My colleague, Stolarick notes that: ""To help put the size of the investment into perspective, Berlin had a population of 3.4 million in 2006." The competition for talent is heating up. 

"Is Toronto in Decline?"

That's the question asked by this recent Fraser Institute report.  Key findings:

• Torontonians are worried their city is losing its edge compared to other major Canadian business centers.
• The city of Toronto’s median income has sunk below the national average. In the 2001 census, median income in Toronto was 106 percent of the national average; in the 2006 census, it was below the national average at 96 percent.
• Management occupations in Toronto, which may be viewed as a proxy for the city’s health as a business centre, have been on the decline.
• The negative trend is visible not only in Toronto, but also across the province as a whole. Median income in Ontario grew by 10 percent over the period compared to 16 percent nationally. Moreover, Ontario saw a decline in the number of management occupations over the most recent census period.

Jim Stanford responds here.

The Prosperity Institute is knee-deep in a major study of Ontario's talent, skills, innovation and prosperity, so I will reserve detailed comment until all the data and analysis is in. 

But let me just say that while Toronto, like any city, faces challenges, it is in better shape tan just abut any city in North America and most worldwide.  It is the only Great Lakes or "rustbelt" city to register significant population and employment growth; has a vital creative sector and a reasonably balanced economy; and is a global model for attracting and integrating new immigrants and for achieving wide ranging social cohesion. 

The core issues, to my mind, revolve around: bolstering innovation and entrepreneurship; better leveraging the creative industries especially music; upgrading the creativity, pay and working conditions of service jobs; adding more design content to manufacturing; nipping growing social and economic fragmentation in the bud;  dealing effectively with sprawl, investing in more extensive mass transit, and overcoming mounting traffic congestion; embracing sustainable development, deepening the greening of the city, and achieving a model of development which simultaneously enhances and leverages the built and natural environments.   

Most of all Toronto can no longer just look inward.  It is attracting talent and investment from the region, province, nation and world. It needs to achieve a development model which  recognizes and contributes to broader regional, national, and global development.  And it should now seek to define for global best-practices across the board. It occupies a unique space where it can begin to form a model of sorts for sustainable development of its natural assets, the built environment and human capabilities for the world.

I'd very much appreciate your thoughts? 

Everybody's Buddy

I have a picture of myself with former Providence mayor, Buddy Cianci, perched atop the shelves in my office.  Cianci understood better than most mayors of his generation what it takes to build a great city. He reached out to young people, immigrants, gays and lesbians and artists long before it was "fashionable" to do so. And he also pursued a bottom-up approach to energizing his city. He developed his own informal version of a "seed grant" program providing small scale funding ( a couple thousand bucks) and the mayor's blessing to a wide range of urban initiatives. We won't talk about where the revenues to finance that came from:-) Now, after some "time off", he's back as Governing Magazine reports (h/t: David Schleicher):

No matter what he does, it's still Buddy's town. Buddy Cianci is proving that you can go home again. And again. Cianci has been the dominant figure in Providence politics for nearly 35 years, since he won his first term as mayor at age 33. He served a decade before leaving in disgrace in 1984, having pled no contest to attacking a man with a log and a lit cigarette. He made a triumphant return to the mayor's office in 1990 and gained national acclaim for bringing about a renaissance in the downtrodden Rhode Island capital. But the comeback tale turned sour when federal investigators rooted out widespread corruption in his administration and convicted the mayor of racketeering in 2002. Now, after five years behind bars, Cianci is in town again, and to the surprise of no one, he's making himself the center of attention. He's not only showing up at public events and making regular TV appearances but he's on radio hosting a talk program four hours a day.

That's great. And Providence: It has a new, much younger, brilliant and openly gay mayor, David Cicciline, who I'm an even bigger fan of!

Flight of the Modelling Class

I knew US immigration policy was troubled, but this takes the cake: The Economist reports:

It's not often that fashion models are paired with IT workers, except in the lurid fantasies of computer geeks ... Anthony Weiner, a New York congressman, ... has proposed a bill amending the rules so that the models will be reclassified into their own special immigration category. This would free up more visas for the nerds; and it would allow 1,000 models to strut their stuff in America each year, compared with just 349 in 2007 ...

Steve King, an Iowa congressman, thinks the bill should be called the “Ugly American Act” because it implies there are not enough beautiful people in the United States. But Mr Weiner, a bachelor accused by the tabloids and his fellow politicians of using the visa issue to get himself a glamorous date, says he's only thinking of New York's economy, which is heavily involved in the fashion industry.

The business generates thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue: the average photo-shoot costs about $100,000. If a foreign model is denied entry, he says, the production is likely to be lost to other countries. New York's skyline or California's hills can be easily photoshopped in later. This “beauty drain”, as the newspaper Politico calls it, affects make-up artists, stylists and photographers as well as media companies and advertising agencies.

The visas for models bill is still far from becoming reality, and comprehensive immigration reform is a distant dream. Luckily though, supermodels like Gisele Bündchen are in the clear. They are eligible for O-1 visas, given to those with “extraordinary ability,” like Nobel laureates.

Convocation Address

Here's a link to my recent convocation address to the University of Toronto's Rotman School Class of 2008.  I was truly honored to do it.  Plus, it was the first time I donned my gown - powder blue, the color of which university?

The Geography of Happiness

Happiness is as hot a topic as it gets.  But Ronald Inglehart and a global team of researchers associated with the World Values Survey have been developing detailed data on the subject for more that four decades.  The July issue of