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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Can Liverpool Win a Place Back on the Global Stage? by Tim Clark

[ I write a lot about Rust Belt type cities in the US, but America is hardly alone in being home to former industrial towns that are struggling to reinvent themselves. Tim Clark takes a brief look at Liverpool and what it is up to - Aaron. ]

Mayors, city planners, and business leaders from around the world were joined by a surprise last-minute delegate at the New Cities Summit in Paris last week. The delegates, who had gathered to tackle some of the greatest challenges of modern times, were joined by the UK’s newest city mayor – Liverpool’s Joe Anderson.

With the election papers barely counted Labour Mayor Anderson was whisked to France to join Conservative Cities Minister Greg Clark at the summit. Key to Anderson’s trip has been to learn how to help regenerate Liverpool into the thriving city which it was once known.

For this reason Anderson cuts a strange figure at a summit which focuses on global mega-cities of China or the gleaming science parks being built in Russia or India. He has however attracted the attention of the world’s media in Paris, all keen to ask Anderson about his new role as a regional city mayor, and met with fellow world leaders including the Deputy Mayor of Paris.

“It has been interesting to compare what they [Paris] are doing and what we are doing, and how to get through austere times.” Anderson said. “In a way we are very similar, though Paris is on a different scale to what we are doing in Liverpool.”

Paris, like Liverpool, has areas which have suffered from neglect, however the problem in Paris is particularly acute. The French capital’s famous ‘red belt’ of suburbs has been confined to the edges of popular French culture and imagination since the impressionists scorned it in the 1900s. Yet however much maligned the suburbs are, they are now home to over one in every nine of the French population.

Paris is now looking to turn these forgotten districts into clusters for industries and attract global businesses. Though Liverpool may not have the same global clout as Paris, the ideas have had an impact on Anderson.

“Being here [at the World Cities Summit] is two fold, one is to raise Liverpool’s profile as a major city in the UK, and the other is to pick up and share some good practices.

“We’re looking to learn from Paris what we can do to build on what Liverpool naturally has,” Anderson says. “Paris setting up areas of specific opportunities for growth, such as the creative industries and bio-sciences.

“We’ve negotiated with the government to have an enterprise zone and five mayoral development zones. Liverpool is currently the only city outside London to have these powers. It looks like we will develop a relationship with Paris which is mutually beneficial about sharing good practice, so we can learn from what they’ve done and what we’ve done.”

The devolution of power from central government has been key to Cities Minister Greg Clark’s policy of allowing cities to both borrow to build infrastructure to attract businesses and also keep the extra income they generate.

It has been muted that Liverpool will gain extra powers including running key transport services if the city can make the economic case.

“We want to grow the city again, Liverpool has just under 450,000 people, but at one time it was over 800,000 and the infrastructure to cope with that size population is still there. That is a challenge alone, how to maintain infrastructure built for a large metropolis in the face of dwindling income from taxes and a smaller population.

“It’s not just a case of growing and strengthening the city economically, but growing the population as well and sustaining it, and that is why we’ve got to create opportunities to convince people to stay.

Among the gleaming visions on the future on offer at the New Cities Summit it is difficult to imagine Liverpool’s place among them. Liverpool is a city which lives on the glories of it’s past. As Second city of the Empire the port grew to become one of the world’s biggest trade centres, handling over 40 per cent of world trade. It was the Shanghai of Victorian Britain, but it has long since been left bereft of civic pride and the steep decline in fortunes since the Second World War has meant it’s place on the world stage has similarly suffered.

“We have 18,000 people on the housing waiting list and that is a problem. I’ve pledged to build 5,000 houses a year. We need quality affordable homes for sale and in the rental sector, and we have to do that if we want to halt the fact that people are leaving to places where they can find accommodation and jobs.”

One of the plans which is central to job creation is the Peel Holdings Liverpool Waters Development. With an estimated £5.5 billion in investment it is according to Anderson key to bringing Liverpool back to the level of it’s industrial past.

The project has been controversial, with Unesco delegation report stating that the scheme could cause ‘irreversible damage’ to the city’s heritage-listed waterfront. This is something

“It can be as good as Canary Wharf in my view,” Anderson says. “It will bring in businesses, especially in the financial sector. What we want to offer is a brand which is world renowned and that comes down to leadership, so I am ready for that.”

Tim Clark is a freelance journalist based in the U.K. He splits his time between writing about comedy for his website Such Small Portions and writing about travel, architecture and education.

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

The OECD Reviews Chicago

Update 5/20/12: This post has been edited to reflect a correction. Please see here for details.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an international organization that has its roots in the administration of Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe after World War II. The OECD was invited by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce* to perform a “territorial review” of Chicago’s regional economy. I believe this is the first such review the OECD has ever undertaken in the United States. The results were released a couple months ago. The Chicagoland Chamber graciously sent me a copy. (The report is available online here – thx Jim Russell for the link). I did a read through of this inch-thick, 332-page report and wanted to share a few observations about it. As the quote at the top might indicate, this report, like Rahm Emanuel’s economic strategy, was fairly gloomy. My points will be topical and not an integrated narrative as I did not get to undertake as thorough a review as I might like.

Interesting Statistics

The OECD review amassed quite a bit of interesting statistical data on Chicago and puts them in the context of other major cities in the 34 countries that comprise in the OECD. I think that by itself made the review worth doing. I might suggest other cities take a look at this to determine if such a study would be relevant to them, particularly as international comparisons can be difficult to pull off.

This report is a goldmine of stats and there’s way too much to list here, but a few things that jumped out at me:

• The OECD report benchmarked labor productivity, which is less commonly looked at in economic studies. Chicago’s is above average but growing more slowly than average.
• Chicago has trailed the nation in job growth. Had Chicago simply matched the national average in job growth since 1990, the region would have 600,000 more jobs than it does today.
• There was quite a bit of sectoral analysis of Chicago’s economy. In fact, they actually normalize the sectoral composition of Chicago’s economy when looking at job growth to see if its under performance in job growth was due to concentration in slow growing sectors – but it was not.
• Chicago is known for having America’s second largest business district, but it ranks only fifth out of the top ten regions in America for the percentage of its jobs in the core city. Between 1960 and 1990, over 96% of new regional jobs were created outside downtown.
• There were many other interesting statistics around labor force participation, mobility of educated labor, elderly dependency ratios, educational attainment, poverty, patents, the structure of governments, taxation, etc.

Excess High End Talent

According to the OECD, Chicago suffers from a skills mismatch in its workforce. This is not just true at the bottom end of the economy as might be expected, but also at the top end, where there is a surplus of highly skilled labor:

At the high end, there is a large pool of high-skilled, highly educated workers, in principle more than sufficient to fill the jobs available at that level … at the high-skill end, data for the tri-state region points to an apparent oversupply.

To some extent this shouldn’t be a surprise. Chicago is a desirable city for people to live in, particularly for educated workers inside its heartland catchment area. As with other big city talent magnets, the economy doesn’t always supply the right employment for all the people who want to live there. The many articles about unemployment in Portland, for example, illustrates this, and Chicago is similar. In that regard, you might see the skills surplus as a sign of local strength.

However, the skill concentration in Chicago isn’t producing the type of high end innovation economy seen elsewhere. As the OECD notes, “Indicators suggest that the Chicago Tri-State metro-region does not rank as highly among the US knowledge hubs as one might expect, given the size of its economy and population and its concentration of world-class research universities.”

Also, Chicago may not be as attractive a talent hub as its aggregate numbers indicate. Again per the OECD:

To be sure, the Chicago Tri-State metro-region remains an attractive place for many migrants, but it is less attractive than many of its US metro-region peers. Moreover, if the analysis is confined to highly educated people of prime working age (25+, with at least a bachelor’s degree), then the picture is even more problematic. During 2005-09, more such people moved into the area than left it, but the net gain was relatively small compared with other large US metro-regions. Los Angeles, for example, benefited from a net gain of nearly 80,000 highly educated people in 2009, compared with 3,500 for the Chicago Tri-State metro-region.

When you under-perform as a talent magnet and still can’t put high skilled labor to good use, that’s a definite sign of trouble. This was one thing that was eye opening for me in the study as I’d previously assumed the high end of the market was in pretty good shape and that skill mismatch problems were the result of a large under-educated population vs. open jobs requiring mid-tier skills.

Policy Prescriptions

The OECD’s recommendations were not nearly as strong as its assessment of the region’s conditions. This shouldn’t be surprising as it is easy to look at data and see what may be wrong, but it is not always obvious what to do about it. The recommendations fall into five broad categories:

• Better Skills Matching
• Improving Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Investments in Transportation and Logistics
• More Green Industry Growth
• More Effective Institutional Arrangements

First off, including “green growth” as one of only five major chapter headings is a joke. The aggregate number of jobs identified as specifically green is small. And as I’ve noted many times, there’s no such thing as green industry. Pretty soon there will just be industry again – it will all be green. So if Chicago and the US aren’t doing well at today’s industries, why would we think they would do any better at tomorrow’s? “Green” isn’t some sort of fairy dust you can sprinkle on and work wonders with. If anything, the acceleration of transition to more green practices will only drive more manufacturing offshore, exactly as it did with light bulbs. The track record of trying to create “green jobs” almost everywhere has been poor and has failed to live up to the hype, so I can’t believe the OECD is doubling down on this snake oil.

For the other areas, the OECD doesn’t break much new ground, though does highlight some interesting international case studies of regions getting it right. The sections more or less regurgitate the laundry list of organizations and initiatives already in place, then tag on “do more and coordinate better.” Examples include, “create region-wide capacity to match skills supply with demand” and “broaden the innovation focus [to include] non-science-and-technology-based innovation.”

By contrast, there was little focus on what counterproductive initiatives might be trimmed. While, for example, the report notes that many of the excessive numbers of local governmental units probably should be eliminated or merged, it doesn’t really look at how many of the alphabet soup of various non-governmental civic development groups might likewise be better off euthanized. Given the unified civic leadership nexus of Chicago, this should in theory be much easier than killing off governments, which are famously resistant to elimination. It’s hard for civic sector leadership to scold state legislatures about the need to consolidate when they can’t even do it themselves. This shows that the OECD had to deal with local political reality, so it probably pulled a lot punches in the recommendations. Statements of raw flattery such as “All key public and private stakeholders are keenly aware of what needs to be done to address these issues effectively” show the extent to which the OECD wanted to avoid ruffling feathers and challenging the Chicagoland status quo, which is disappointing.

I might also take issue with the way the problems were attributed to these structural factors without addressing at any great length many of the clear drivers of Chicago’s under-performance. For example, Chicago is the regional capital of a greater Midwest that has been struggling as a whole. It’s tough to swim upstream against that. (I’ll have more to say on other underlying factors in a subsequent analysis of my own).

In short, this report got it half right in giving us a very good look at the current conditions, strengths, challenges, and international comparisons. Where it lagged was in fully articulating the structural landscape driving the under-performance and developing compelling strategies for turning the ship around. Still, if I were a region out there looking for a good snapshot of where I stood in the marketplace, the OECD would be on my list of people to call.

* Disclosure: I won a competition sponsored by the Chicagoland Chamber in 2009.

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Providence: The Quiet Revival by Alon Levy

[ Here is the second in the two part guest author series on Providence. Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations brings his typical keen insight to the city - Aaron. ]

Rustwire’s recent article about Providence, and a less recent article on the Urbanophile, have made me think about Providence’s growth. The Urbanophile comes strongly on the side of the power of its coziness; Rustwire takes the opposite track, talking about redevelopment and about the problems of the current recession, which has hit Rhode Island particularly hard.

With the caveat that I’m familiar mainly with the East Side, let me say that the redevelopment is unimpressive. Providence doesn’t look like it’s booming (in reality, its metro area income growth is high), and the city itself is very poor. That said, it doesn’t look very poor – not just on the East Side, which is solidly upper middle-class, but also near downtown. Downcity has a lot of urban renewal hell, but it doesn’t look especially bad.

To me the contrast is with New Haven, a city I’ve visited many times over the last few years, and there’s simply no competition. Although New Haven’s Chapel Street is busier and livelier during than anything I’ve seen in Providence, away from it the city looks post-apocalyptic (and even then, Thayer Street generally stays open later than Chapel). Yale student housing is in glorified project towers surrounded by too much parking, and a never-completed freeway stub and elevated parking structures cut off the main campus from the medical center. Providence has its share of freeways slicing neighborhoods apart, but the East Side managed to avoid them, and its housing stock is normal buildings, developed by different individuals over hundreds of years. Perhaps this better urban integration is why despite being poorer than New Haven, Providence maintains lower crime rates, echoing Jane Jacobs’ points about safety.

In other words, Providence is starting from a much better base than peer cities, though, going purely by income, nearly all secondary Northeastern cities are growing fast. The issue is not that Providence is rebranding itself as the Renaissance City, or Creative Capital. It’s that it was messed up less than other cities. Worcester has almost nothing next to the train station. New Haven has housing projects that I know people who are afraid to walk through. Providence has sterile condos and a mall, but next to them are some nice secondary shopping streets, and beyond them, in the right directions, lies intact urbanism, on the East Side and in Federal Hill.

If anything, most relevant government policy even in recent decades has hurt city walkability. In the 1980s, the city moved the railroad tracks north of the river, severing them from the East Side Railroad Tunnel. Simultaneously, it built Providence Place Mall and today’s train station, covering what used to be elevated track. The project was meant to remove an eyesore from downtown, but instead just moved the station to a more inconvenient location, and the mall sucked retail out of Downcity streets. Even what Rustwire calls highway removal was really a realignment: the I-195 river crossing was moved to a more southerly location since the old route was not up to the latest design standards, and this also happened to move the freeway farther away from Downcity and reunite it with the previously-isolated Jewelry District. There’s nothing wrong with that realignment, but it’s the kind of project Robert Moses would’ve supported.

On top of this, the attitude toward economic development is just embarrassing. Last year, I went to a meeting featuring smartphone app writers who claimed that “Providence is like a startup,” without a shred of irony about using this word to refer to a 17th-century city. A representative from the city government talked about the subsidies the city is paying to young entrepreneurs to just come live here.

And still the revival continues. Rhode Island may have one of the highest unemployment rates in the US today, but income growth is high; things are slowly getting better. The most visible growth in the US is in population rather than income, and so the usual markers are new housing starts, new infrastructure, and a lot of “coming soon” signs. Providence of course doesn’t have much of this. Instead, people are getting richer, slowly. RISD students occasionally go down the hill to Downcity (though Brown students don’t, since Brown’s campus is much higher uphill).

Economic growth in the richest countries is slow enough that people don’t perceive it. Instead, they think it’s the domain of countries that are catching up, such as China, where it’s so fast it includes new construction and the other markers that signify population growth in the first world. In the long run, it matters that a city’s income grows 1.8% a year rather than 1.1%, but it’s not visible enough to be captured by trend articles until long after the spurt of growth has started.

This article originally appeared in Pedestrian Observations on March 7, 2012.

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

Nashville Rolls On

I have a friend in Nashville and try to get there about once a year for a visit. He knows my insatiable desire for urban exploration, so tries to take me around to new places each time, which is awesome. A couple of my previous trips were documented in the posts “Impressions of Nashville” (from 2007) and “Nashville: Next Boomtown of the New South” (from 2008). As with previous visits, I want to highlight a few observations I had.

The first is, “What Great Recession?” Yes, Nashville surely suffered from this, and there’s a notable absence of private sector construction visible that testifies to that, especially in marked contrast to my first visit in 2007. Yet what you feel in Nashville is a sense of vitality and a sense of optimism. This is a place that hasn’t lost faith in its destiny.

I think that can’t be overstated in a city. It feels good to have the wind at your back. It feels good to be in a place where the people believe they are headed towards better days and towards a better future. Just like bandwagon sports fans, people want to sign up to be with the winning team and while the future can’t be predicted, Nashville looks like a winner and its people believe they are winners. I can feel the difference in the air versus say even the best performing Midwest metros like Columbus or Indianapolis.

Nashville was the 12th fastest growth large metro in America in the 2000s, growing at 21.2% and adding 278,000 people during the course of the decade. Last year, like most regions, growth slowed, but remained healthy at 1.4%. During America’s “lost decade” of job creation, Nashville added 36,000 jobs. Nashville’s job growth last year ranked 5th among large cities at 2.4% or 17,400 new jobs. The sense of optimism is fully backed up by the numbers. Lots of places would kill to be performing like this.

Beyond simple internal growth, Nashville is an attractor city. People from outside want to move there and I’ve met many people originally from someplace else. While this is changing or diluting the culture – southern accents are in decline in various precincts, for example – in ways some might not like, as I’ve noted before, having a critical mass of outsiders is very important to urban success.

The driver of this seems to be the music industry. I’ve gotten in the habit of asking people why they moved to Nashville. Music is by far the most common answer. (In fairness, perhaps this is something that’s de rigueur to say, and people don’t want to admit to having moved for more prosaic reasons). That industry is clearly key to the city. Not only is it economically important in its own right, but it draws media attention and even draws celebrities (not all of them country stars) to live there. Music is like a lot of other industries. It’s easier than ever to get into the game and I suspect most cities have a vastly better music scene than they did a decade or two ago, yet the peaks of the industry are also higher than ever, and Nashville is one of the peakiest of all.

The other thing music drives is tourism. Nashville is a big (but thankfully not too big) tourist draw. Again, this creates brand awareness and drives economic growth, but also exposes people to the city. I’d say that increases the likelihood of attracting people. My point of view on Nashville before visiting it would have been to assume it was a sort of hillbilly heaven, but I learned it was more cosmopolitan by visiting it. It’s a city I could actually live in. Drawing visitors gives Nashville the opportunity to tell its story and make a pitch for the place.

Nashville also is implementing some very forward looking urbanist policies. I noted before their form based code, high quality basic urbanism of the new development in the central city, and legitimate infill densification. They continue to up their game here, with a major rezoning that effectively eliminates traditional zoning in the downtown apart from banning heavy industrial use, and eliminates minimum parking requirements. That’s huge and we’ll see what dividends it pays over time.

Everything isn’t perfect in Nashville. My friend worries that if he ever lost his job, there would be few corporate opportunities available to someone with this skill profile. Nashville doesn’t yet have the large and diverse employer set of major cities, making planting your flag there somewhat risky outside of industries like music and health care. Assuming the city continues its growth, this will be addressed over time. But it’s something that should inform the city’s recruitment efforts. The city is very focused on trying to lure corporate HQ relocations. But trying to lure an HQ where there’s little overlap with the existing industry base might not be the best idea.

Also, Nashville suffers from a notable lack of quality in some areas. I previously mentioned their second class infrastructure standards. This place too often suffers from a southern “bare bones” feel, even in new development. Also, the architecture is extremely conservative. This seems not to have harmed their growth and perhaps really isn’t that important in the short term, no matter how much I might want it to be. Where I believe it makes a difference is over time as things age. If things are super-cheaply done and notablw mostly for being new and to contemporary style, they may lose their appeal over time and end up as struggling redevelopment zones 20-30 years down the road as so many other places have.

But that’s a problem for another day. For now Nashville continues to rock and roll, as it were.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

Providence: The Rust Belt’s Most Northeasterly Point? by Nicholas Cataldo

[ Today I'm kicking off a two part mini-series of guests posts on Providence, Rhode Island. As a warm up to this, you might want to read my earlier blog post on the city if you haven't already - Aaron. ]

Whether it is the Beehive of Industry, the Renaissance City, or the Creative Capital, this city has been changing hats for centuries. That isn’t a typo, this place is old. Not unlike other rust belt cities, Providence has been struggling to shake off the ashes of the golden age of manufacturing in favor of greener pastures. In each pursuit to reinvent itself every decade or so, this town certainly goes all in. Economic crises seem to hit here harder than most places. So, who or what is Providence and where does it plan on going from here?

Historical Perspective

In 1636, a man named Roger Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and founded Providence after being exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was lambasted for heresy because of his criticisms of the church and is credited with being the first person to refer to a wall of separation between religion and government. He welcomed people from all over the colonies who were escaping persecution including Jews, Quakers, Baptists, brigands, and other misfits. Providence had, early on, marketed itself as a safe haven for free thought and independence to the other colonies’ disdain. If you want, you can think of it as a pirate fortress, and you’d be partially right. This independent nature remains today as a backdrop to both the city and the rest of the State of Rhode Island.

Fast forward to the great depression, and most factories had packed up and left, and with white flight following World War II you have a situation where there are relatively few jobs, a dismal tax base, an interstate highway dividing the city, and the New England mafia is running things. If this last sentence sounds familiar it is because you could substitute Providence, minus the mob, for much of the urban north east and to a certain extent, any post-war American city. Economic fluctuations just seem to hit this part of America harder; and so ended Providence as the Beehive of Industry.

Resurgence and Rebranding

Buddy Cianci, ‘the’ mayor of Providence, wanted nothing more than to lift this phoenix from the ashes of deindustrialization. This rebirth branded Providence as the Renaissance City and over half a billion dollars were invested over the course of the 70’s and 80’s. A river running through the city was uncovered, a park built, a downtown ice skating rink, and the movement of a railroad line to a less intrusive location. This gave beautification to a crumbling city. Bouts of intense building happened periodically right up until the current financial crisis and everything went downhill again. Construction halted or was cancelled for countless projects and investors hunkered down for the bleak economic forecast. Several proposed skyscrapers were put on indefinite hold. Foreclosures became part of daily routine. The very people who were once optimistic about the path the city was taking as a center of education, art, business, and sciences now faced the reality of a city threatened by bankruptcy. I’m going to be honest here, if frogs started falling from the sky, people would shrug it off. How, you ask, will Providence try to pull itself out of a mess like this?

How Providence Will Try to Pull Itself Out of a Mess like This

Situated nicely between Boston and New York City, it is pretty hard for Providence to get positive attention. Any reference of Providence as part of a top ten list, will more than likely lead to bad publicity. So, in lieu of innovation, the city has taken principles that have worked for other places in similar predicaments and is attempting to implement them here.

The street car lines that were abandoned in favor of automobiles and busses are being reassessed. This flirtation with mass transit will be lurking behind the scenes for years to come until the budget will allow for it or at least until people believe that it’s worth it. Being a dense city built before the advent of the automobile, the compactness and ease of travel makes Providence attractive for New Urbanist concepts that shun cars.

With a large higher education base, it is not too much of a stretch to reach for a sleek and sexy biotech industry. This worked very well for Boston. And, with a commuter line running between these two cities, why not hitch a ride on their success? In 2011, with the removal of a section of highway from downtown, 35 of prime real estate have been freed up. I can imagine that many people, myself included, are biting their nails in anticipation with what will eventually fill this space. A worst case scenario will be 15 Wal-Marts side-by-side with the zoning approval of a desperately cash strapped city council. On the other, much more plausible, side of the spectrum the branding of this new section as the Knowledge District will invite new high technology business firms in and save this place from floundering. This is the kind of long term planning that will make or break this city.

With good press, solid subsidies, and firms willing to take a certain level of risk in this current market, Providence is due for another makeover sometime soon.

This post originally appeared in Rust Wire on March 5, 2012.

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Louisville and Lexington Point the Way to Greater Inter-Regional Cooperation

I’ve written before about how Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer saw cooperation with Lexington as a vehicle for making his smallish region more competitive. This has gone beyond talk. As Louisville and Kentucky fought it out on the basketball court, the New York Times was reporting on how the two cities are planning to become economic teammates. Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution also wrote about this initiative.

The first concrete step in this is something called the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement. It’s a partnership around advanced manufacturing between the two cities developed in conjunction with Brookings. Here’s a video about it. It’s a big goofy, and the production values clearly need improvement (such as the two minutes of basically dead air at the end of it), but it should illustrate what they are trying to get at. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

I’ve historically been a bit skeptical of the mega-region concept. I could never figure out exactly what it is mega-regions were supposed to accomplish that would provide step change improvements in metro area performance. It’s not exactly clear here either what is going to ultimately happen. However, if you are going to make mega-region type development happen, Louisville and Lexington are pretty well placed to prove out the concept. They are in the same state, they are both too small to plausibly go it alone in the global marketplace, and they are close – only about 80 miles apart. They are just far apart to be separate media markets and spheres of influence, but close enough to make going back and forth a breeze. They also decided to pick just one area to start with, which I think was smart. I’ll be very interested to see what comes out of this. Anyone interested in cross-regional collaboration should keep an eye on what’s happening here.

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Density, Vibrancy, and Opportunity Zones by Tory Gattis

[ Here's the second part of Tory Gattis' take on vibrancy and car based urbanism. - Aaron. ]

Last week I tried taking Jane Jacobs’ four tenants of vibrancy and applying them to the car-based city, describing the concept of the mobility/draw zone. It can be roughly summarized in this excerpt:

So the four tenets of vibrancy transformed for the car-based city get reduced to two:

1. Loose zoning/permitting constraints to enable both a wide diversity of businesses as well as population density where there is consumer demand (apartments, condos, townhomes)
2. Maximized mobility with a well-designed, high-capacity arterial and freeway network

These two principles maximize the population within the largest possible mobility/draw zone, which gives vibrancy its best chance of reaching critical mass and flourishing.

The next day, I promised these two topics (among others) in a future post. This is that post.

• Rename “mobility/draw-zones” to “opportunity zones”, since they represent the opportunity region for a consumer, explorer, job seeker, or business owner – and the larger it is and the more people it has, the larger the opportunity and the resulting vibrancy.
• How Manhattan and Houston have very similar opportunity zones despite dramatic differences in urban form, and have the potential for similar levels of vibrancy in some respects.

Density is a big focus of debate in today’s urban planning. Again, if your assumed mobility mode is 3mph walking, or walking plus mass transit, you need a lot of people in a small area to create vibrancy within the mobility zone. In Jacob’s world, mobility is basically fixed and density is variable. In the car-based world, density is relatively fixed (well below Jacob’s standard of >100 dwellings/acre because of the need to accommodate cars and parking plus the majority desire for single-family residential living or mid-density apartments), but mobility is variable depending on the road network and traffic congestion – which can substantially affect the size of the mobility zone. Since what really counts is the population within the 10-20 minute mobility zone – as a proxy for easily accessible diversity and vibrancy – lets take a look at some estimated mobility zones in Manhattan and Houston:

* Average Manhattan taxi covers 1.9 miles in 10 minutes, ~12 mph (source)
(note that some Manhattan scenarios actually show a mobility zone population larger than the actual population of Manhattan, due to the circular nature of the model vs. Manhattan’s actual long, thin-island geography – but it still serves its illustrative purpose)

Several interesting observations come out of this table:

• A car-based city with a strong freeway network has the potential to match the vibrancy and diversity of a high-density city like Manhattan. This is not to say that Houston and New York are equivalent. This is an analysis of the diversity available in a typical, everyday 15-minute trip. Special occasion trips (museums, sporting events, concerts, theater, etc.) have a much higher acceptable commute time, and therefore draw on a larger area. New York is a much older and larger city that can draw on a regional metro population of 21 million, substantially more than Houston’s 5 million.
• The classic “monotony of the suburban edge cities” phenomenon is explained by looking at the all-arterial drive scenario, which is common on the fringes. The fringes also drop population density rapidly as they get farther out, further reducing the mobility zone population and therefore diversity/vibrancy (ex: the mobility zone of interest for suburban Sugar Land in southwest Houston is to the north and east, not south or west).
• Los Angeles was the first large-scale car-based city, and it is often not held in high regard. Why? LA has many arterials with overloaded, slow freeways and no frontage roads (although they do have higher density to somewhat make up for it). That drives LA towards the “all-arterial” scenario, or the middle scenario at best. Houston has a strong frontage-road network with substantial retail, office, and other commercial services – the car-based city equivalent of “vibrant street retail.” Even commercial/retail space not on the frontage roads is often within a couple minutes of a frontage road. This allows Houston to make the third scenario a relatively common one, with it’s attendant high access to diversity within the mobility zone.
• Jacobs describes a “density dead zone” of greater than 12 dwellings per acre but less than 100 dwellings per acre – too dense to be suburban but too sparse to be really urban. These areas almost never achieve vibrancy or diversity. Arterial-driven car-based cities with weak freeway networks seem to be the car-based equivalent of this “dead zone” with low density and relatively low-to-moderate mobility.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

This post originally appeared in Houston Strategies on May 11, 2006.

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

More Thoughts on the Urban Hierarchy

Few topics get the urbanist blood stirring like the perennial debate over ranking cities. My latest piece on the reordering of the urban hierarchy spawned yet another rekindling of that debate. Among those weighting in were Richard Florida at the Atlantic Cities (whose ideas shaped my original post), Kenan Fikri of the Brookings Institution over at the New Republic and Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora. There is also a lively comment thread here at the Urbanophile. I wanted to respond to some of the points raised.

The first is the idea that globalization is not a zero sum game and that one city’s gain doesn’t have to come at another city’s expense. This is true. A rising tide can lift all boats. Also, as people like Saskia Sassen have noted, global cities typically don’t compete because they specialize in different things.

However, global cities themselves are a relatively recent phenomenon. Not every city of prominence in the past has yet successfully made the transition to the global age. Early in the industrial age there were cities like Cincinnati that emerged as titans only to fall back as new upstarts arose. It seems axomatic that creative destruction is not going to leave the current system of global cities locked in the current network positions and relative hierarchies that they are in today. And just because cities can in effect “win” in an absolute sense from globalization, they can clearly end up falling back on a relative basis.

I again particularly believe this is a risk for cities that are not the premier city in their country and which are located in the already developed world. As Florida noted, the top of the pecking order is incredibly stable over time. How many times has a #2 or lower city passed up a #1 city in the modern age? Not many. Only two cases come to mind right now, both from extraordinary events. Toronto supplanted Montreal after the latter decided to re-embrace its Francophone heritage at the expense of English speakers, and I believe Rio was once the first city of Brazil and lost out to Sao Paulo after the capital was moved to Brasilia. (Other examples? India perhaps? How many that don’t involve the capital moving?) But there’s much more churn the further down you go.

There is also the question of whether or not I’ve changed my mind about Chicago, particularly in relation to previous posts like this one. I don’t think so. In fact, I think that 2009 piece holds up rather well. Probably to some extent I have come to realize the weaknesses of Chicago’s story though as I dig into the numbers and see what’s going on elsewhere. Also, I think it’s a city that has been (at least until Rahm took over) singularly oblivious to the challenges it faces (though in fairness I guess LA gives it a run for the money), so I work to highlight those rather than the good news which already gets plenty of press. For example, the major national media fawned all over Chicago when Rahm announced his infrastructure plan. I could run ten negative stories and not counter that press, but I feel it’s my job here in this blog to tell the story that’s not being told.

I still clearly believe Chicago has experienced a huge and remarkable transformation. I witnessed most of it personally. I’ve seen a hundred buildings added to the skyline, vast tracts of the central city rejuvenated, a major transformation of the physical face of the city, and more. It would not surprise me at all to discover that it is Chicago that leads the nation in repatriation of jobs from the suburbs to downtown. It has a food scene that holds its own with anybody. And it continues to grow and improve in many ways despite obvious challenges like pensions. I continue to believe the Chicago story is real.

Yet in a sense it was the 90s that was really Chicago’s decade. I’ve got some forthcoming writings on this topic that will explore this in more detail, but just as one teaser, I can tell you that on a metro area basis, Chicago actually added more jobs than Houston in the 90s. But the 2000s were a tough decade for Chicago. What’s more, I don’t think Chicago fully grasps the extent to which other cities have moved even further forward, though you’ll occasionally see someone who gets it, such as in a recent Reader article on competitive cocktailing. So I think Chicago has done well and continues to only get better in many ways, though it has hit a rough patch and I think clearly has suffered a relative decline in standing and importance.

Also, while I pivoted off a Chicago article, I don’t think Chicago is alone. Los Angeles is clearly a “sick man” city in many ways, though a lot of its problems are self-inflicted. I also think Boston is suffering on a relative basis as NYC-DC becomes the premier northeast axis instead of NYC-BOS. This is perhaps why Philadelphia is showing signs of revival.

As for Fikri saying that Washington’s media exports were puny in comparison to NYC and LA, this is true if you look at things like movies and TV shows. But what I had in mind was the huge base DC is becoming for political and other media and reportage. Washington has a huge number of foreign correspondents. Fully 56% of full-time foreign journalists live in DC. Another 34% are in New York. 8% are in California, presumably mostly to cover Hollywood, with perhaps the odd Silicon Valley correspondent. Only 2% are based elsewhere in America. (If you look at part time foreign journalists as well, NYC is the #1 market). I don’t have much at my fingertips right now, but I’ve also read many stories about more media, particularly the politically oriented variety, relocating from NYC to DC. This gives a place like Washington a huge media footprint and platform for which to get its word out to the world in addition to its status as the most important political capital in the world. There’s a reason that those foreigners Phil Rosenthal wrote about in the Chicago Tribune think there are only three US cities: New York, LA, and DC. Combine that with the wonkish atmosphere and the highly educated population, and it’s also no surprise that something like Greater Greater Washington is the most successful city blog in America.

Someone commented that Washington had nothing on Chicago in his estimation. As far as the central city goes, I’d probably agree with that. But it’s not just what you have, it’s where you are headed, and Washington is clearly headed up, in terms of its global and national importance, its economy, its population, its education levels, and its urban environment. When the Burnham Plan came out, Chicago was arguably not a very attractive place either. It was the Houston of its day in a way. But it was a city on the rise. So too with Washington today. It is America’s next great metropolis, at least as long as the federal government’s money and ever increasing control over American life hold up.

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy

My latest blog post is online over at New Geography. It is called “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” In it, I look at how the relentless expansion of the US federal government and the “spiky world” forces of globalizations are revamping the urban hierarchy of the top tier cities in the United States. While not a definitive view, it seems that New York is going from strength to strength, while Washington, DC emerges as America’s new “Second City.” This has been to the detriment of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. It’s controversial to be sure, but I hope you’ll enjoy it. Comments definitely encouraged on this one.

Update: Richard Florida has more to say on this topic over at The Atlantic Cities..

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

The Chicago Tribune Doesn’t Get It On Regional Economic Development

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently released a 332-page economic report on greater Chicago. This one, like Rahm Emanuel’s own economic plan, is very candid about the economic and demographic problems facing Chicago. I will be saying much, much more on this subject in the near future.

In the meantime, I want to focus in on the Chicago Tribune’s reaction to the OECD study. They published an editorial about it concentrating on one finding, one that’s absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever given Chicago even a cursory review, namely that there are way too many units of government in Chicagoland – over 1,700 to be precise.

The Tribune correctly notes that jurisdictional boundaries are often irrelevant to economic geography. But this particular piece caught my eye:

State borders should not matter, the OECD concludes, because the entire Midwest depends on the economic engine of its largest city. What’s good for Chicago is good for Indianapolis. Did you hear that, Mitch Daniels? Or is the Indiana governor too busy recruiting Illinois companies to move across the state line?

While I can’t read the Tribune editorial board’s minds, it isn’t difficult to see why they pick on Mitch Daniels. He has launched a campaign to try to lure businesses from Illinois (and other surrounding states) to Indiana. Indiana also pointedly declined to be part of the OECD study when they were invited, even though Northwest Indiana is clearly part of Chicagoland. In explaining the state’s rationale, economic development director Mitch Roob said, “We don’t do studies, we do deals.”

Far be it from me to defend Indiana’s decision not to participate in the study. It clearly shows a lack of understanding of modern economic geography. The approach of focusing on poaching businesses from surrounding states reveals Indiana’s strategy of trying to be “the best house on a bad block” and is a tacit admission it really can’t compete at the national much less the global level. What’s more, it’s another example of how Indiana hasn’t gotten it on the centrality of metro regions to the modern economic. (See “A New Approach to Regional Economic Development in Indiana for further thoughts on this). Incidentally, Indiana’s strategy isn’t working very well. Since 2004, the year Daniels was elected governor, Indiana actually lost a greater percentage of its jobs than Illinois, and the flow of people moving from Illinois to Indiana has dropped as well.* Underperforming dysfunctional Illinois is quite a feat.

But while there’s plenty of room for Indiana to change its thinking, the Tribune’s editorial isn’t likely to inspire anyone in Indiana or elsewhere to do it. Quite the opposite in fact.

Consider their statement “What’s good for Chicago is good for Indianapolis.” This sounds nearly identical with the oft-mangled misquoting of Charlie Wilson as telling Congress “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” I wonder if Tribune ever considered the converse of their statement, namely that what’s good for Indianapolis is good for Chicago. Do you think they believe that? Do you think they or any other member of the Chicagoland’s leadership ever spent any time time thinking about what was good for Indianapolis or Milwaukee or Madison or Des Moines or Grand Rapids? I haven’t heard anything to suggest that they have.

If you are the big dog, which in this case Chicago clearly is, and you want other people to work with you, then you need to make the first move to prove your good intentions.

This is perhaps best illustrated by former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. In Indiana, east-west roads that form a county boundary are the maintenance responsibility of the county to the north. 96th St. is the boundary between Marion County (Indianapolis) and Hamilton County, home to the most rapidly growing and affluent suburbs in the region. (Chicago residents can think “Lake-Cook Rd.” though the analogy is imperfect). There was a critical need to upgrade the corridor and build a new bridge across the White River at 96th St. Under Indiana law, this was Hamilton County’s responsibility, but because the cost of the project was so steep, it went nowhere for a long time. What’s more, plenty of folks in Indy weren’t too keen for it to happen, because they saw it as benefiting primarily the suburbs and enabling them to suck more life out of Indianapolis.

Goldsmith saw it differently. He saw how it would open up land in his own city to development as well. And he didn’t see the suburbs as the enemy. So although he was under no obligation to do so, he stepped up and told Hamilton County he’d pay for 50% of the road project even though legally it was 0% his responsibility. The project got done.

Later, on the other side of the county, it came time to widen South County Line Road. This time it was Indianapolis responsible for the cost. But because he had first paid for 96th St. when he didn’t have to, Goldsmith had the moral authority to go the county south of him and ask them to pay half of the County Line expansion, which they did.

This is how regional cooperation works. The big dog has to step up first. Getting it right on regional questions like this – it also has a regional non-compete where various cities and towns won’t offer subsidies to induce a business to relocate within the region – is one of the reasons Indianapolis has led the way in the Midwest on population and job growth in the last decade.

I absolutely agree that it is in the interest of the Midwest for Chicago to be strong and prosperous. And vice versa. So cooperation is in everyone’s interest. But to make it happen, it is Chicago that is going to have to step up and first and prove to the rest of the region that it is as invested in their success as it expects them to be invested in Chicago’s. Without that, maybe places like Milwaukee and Grand Rapids will continue to pursue closeness to Chicago on their own because they have few other good options, but any broader cooperation of the type the Tribune apparently wants to see happen is likely doomed.

As I’ve argued before, Chicago and Indianapolis are very complementary. (The same is true of various other Midwest cities with Chicago). They are very different and are not good substitutes for each other. Hence they can benefit from specialization and cooperation. What we see instead is opportunistic swipes at each other, such as Indy trying to lure the CME away and Chicago saying it wants to poach sports events that are hosted in Indy. While I actually don’t think these sorts of things are necessarily unhealthy in and of themselves – I don’t want to stamp out inter-geographic competition – they are unfortunately all there is. There should also be more cooperation to create the sort of “coopetition” situation we’ve seen touted as one of the keys to Silicon Valley’s success.

As I said, Chicago will have to make the first move. The first one to make is to get the rhetoric right, which the Tribune clearly didn’t do. Chicago’s media and civic leadership need to show first through their statements that the success of the broader Midwest is important to them personally, and that they see it as critical to the future of success of Chicago. Then they need to figure out how to show they mean it through their actions.

* Total Non-Farm Employment, annual average, 2004-2011. Illinois lost 2.6% of its jobs. Indiana lost 3.4%.

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