A lot of so-called "movement" conservatives dislike Donald Trump because he isn't conservative in their view. Some of them have sadly concluded that much of their own base is not as well, being much more open to things like protectionist trade policy than in years gone by. Their focus has been on working class voter, but another chunk of the Republican electorate, namely upscale metropolitan Republicans, is also moving away from some traditional conservative positions. These middle to upper middle class Republicans have little interest … [Read more...]
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Chicago Is Winning the Battle for the Executive Headquarters
The corporate headquarters used to be the primary measure of a city's economic clout. Saskia Sassen, while not ignoring headquarters, documented how in the age of globalization, the resurgence of the global city was driven by demand for financial and producer services, not more and bigger HQs. As she pointed out in her seminal book The Global City, "Major cities such as London, New York, and Chicago have been losing top ranked headquarters for at least three decades." Yet despite this they were coming back strong. Back in 2008, I started … [Read more...]
Making the Link Between Quality of Life and Economic Development
A rather prosaic economic development announcement in Indianapolis provides an opportunity to hammer home in a concrete way the connection between quality of life investments and economic development. This is something I've long argued we urbanists do a poor job of. We tend to adopt a "build it and they will come" marketing approach to quality of life initiatives where the connection between cause and effect is tenuous. Additionally, these tend to focus almost entirely on and tell stories about "the best and brightest" which in a country dying … [Read more...]
Milwaukee’s Relationship with the Chicago Mega-City Revisited
[ I am going to take a break until early 2013. See you folks in the New Year. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this piece by David Holmes that follows up on my "Don't Fly Too Close to the Sun" piece. He makes some of the same points I did at the conference, as well as some new ones I found interesting. Bye for now! - Aaron. ] I was intrigued by Aaron’s recent post "Don't Fly Too Close to the Sun Piece" which focused on the relationship between Milwaukee and Chicago and the notion of whether “proximity to Chicago or another mega-city … [Read more...]
Don’t Fly Too Close to the Sun
I was honored to speak at a conference in Milwaukee over the summer called Milwaukee's Future in the Chicago Mega-City. Chicago and Milwaukee are about 90 miles apart on I-94. There's an Amtrak link that makes the journey in about 90 minutes. The two cities have been sprawling such that there's now more or less continuous development along the lakefront between the two cities. Milwaukee has been a challenged city economically and demographically. Chicago has had its own serious problems, but has seen its already muscular core boom in terms of … [Read more...]
Thoughts on Chicago’s Tech Scene
This article is part of the State of Chicago. I wasn't planning to write a piece on Chicago tech, but I did a radio interview about it this week and since I never know how much might be used from me in a space constrained medium, I thought I'd lay out something here too. I've said before that I don't think Chicago is well positioned to become some type of dominant tech hub, but should only seek to get its "fair share" of tech. However, as the third largest city in America, Chicago's fair share on tech is still pretty darn big. If you look … [Read more...]
The Brief Wondrous Life of the One Dollar Bus
[ People think New York and they think Manhattan first, or maybe the finer precincts of Brooklyn. But it's an amazingly diverse city. Jefferson Mao grew up in Flushing, Queens, and writes a blog dedicated to that extremely diverse and interesting neighborhood. It's called Flushing Exceptionalism and you ought to give it a look. In this piece reprinted from that blog, he talks about entrepreneurship and the life conditions of the immigrant - Aaron. ] I was there for the entirety of the One Dollar Bus Era in Flushing. It was on a Sunday when … [Read more...]
State of Chicago: Lacking a Calling Card Industry
This article is part of The State of Chicago. I now want to transition from a look at historical and current conditions in Chicago to a defense of a couple of my more controversial diagnoses that attepted to explain the problems behind Chicago's weakness in recent years. These were my observation that Chicago lacks a "calling card" industry, and my claim that Chicago, while a global city, is weak enough in this dimension that it cannot rely on that alone to sustain it. Today I'll look at the former. In some rankings I've seen, Chicago has … [Read more...]
State of Chicago: Explaining the 1990s Versus the 2000s
In my article "The Second-Rate City?" I noted Chicago's very strong economic and demographic performance in the 1990s and contrasted it with the very poor performance in the 2000s. Then I outlined several problems with Chicago I thought helped drive the struggles. A few people asked a very fair question, saying, "All the negative factors you cite about Chicago (e.g., clout, business climate) were equally as true in the 1990s as in the 2000s, so what really made the difference?" I want to try to respond to that today. First, let's ask … [Read more...]
The Gated City
Update: Ryan posted a reply to some of the points I raise here. It's definitely worth reading. The Gated City is a mini-ebook by Ryan Avent that makes the case for removing restrictions on densification in cities. In addition to being a left-leaning economist, Avent is also a journalist who is an editor at the Economist magazine and a principal contributor to its Free Exchange blog. Avent's journalism skills make him one of the more articulate and easy to read economists out there. This book brings Avent's signature readability to the … [Read more...]