"Boomerang migration" is a hot topic in talent circles. In places where brain drain looms large, the belief that people who've left will come back later in life after they have children and are ready to settle down close to family back home is a powerful hope for cities looking to boost their pool of educated workers. Often too, people who left for the big city after school find themselves looking for a more purposeful existence in life, and decide to move back to make a difference. Yet, boomerang migration is fraught with peril as well. As … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2011
The Power of Greenfield Economics
I've touched on this before in other posts, but it is worth highlighting again. The great move from the city to the suburbs has been attributed to various factors: changing lifestyle preferences, the automobile, subsidies to sprawl, urban industrial pollution, etc. While there is probably truth in all of these, possibly the most powerful of them all is greenfield economics. What is greenfield economics? This is simply the set of conditions that flow from building on new territory or exploiting new markets vs. redevelopment of old places, … [Read more...]
The Sprawl Bubble
[ Buffalo's Chuck Banas is a great thinker, doer, and writer on urban matters. He graciously allowed me to repost some of his articles, and this is sadly the last one I have on file. It was written in 2009 and so some of it addresses what was going on at that time, but the perspective remains relevant, even if sprawl is not your issue. - Aaron. ] I’m certainly not the first pundit to comment on the recent economic meltdown, and I sure won’t be the last. But there is a side to this crisis that almost no one is talking about, perhaps because … [Read more...]
Does Privatization Actually Transfer Risk Away from Government?
One of the reasons I've always liked privatization is that done right it can transfer a lot of risk from the government to the private sector. When I consider the Chicago Skyway or Indiana Toll Road leases, one of the things I liked about them is that there seemed to be an embedded hedge that more or less provided certainty over future financial performance. Travel volumes fall because gas goes through the roof? Not the government's problem. Construction costs increase faster than inflation? Not the government's problem. We really do stop … [Read more...]
The 31-Flavors of Urban Redevelopment
Aaron Renn’s March 24 posting on “The Logic of Failure” and his reference to “silver bullet” solutions for redevelopment and revitalization reminded me of my visit to the “Creative Cities Summit”, about revitalizing cities, three years ago this fall. The setting, timing and venue could not have been better, at least in terms of provoking thought about how to do things better. The setting was Detroit, the time was October, 2008, when the financial markets were crumbling, and the venue was Renaissance Center (“RenCen”), the Robocop-like mixed … [Read more...]