Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

Chicago’s Secondary Stations: Little Engines That Could…And Should

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This is part of the series North America's Train Stations: What Makes Them Sustainable or Not? To describe how central stations can help us evolve toward sustainable transportation, this series uses a middle category called “Economic Engines.” This category stimulates its surrounds. These three Chicago stations do that job well. Category: Economic Engines (click for all currently reviewed stations) Consolidated Scorecard: Click to view full scorecard Scorecard Summary: max pnts = 100 80 Ogilvie Transportation Center         … [Read more...]

The Magic of Microclusters

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This post originally appeared on October 27, 2013. If you look at the list of target industries for any given city or state, you usually find several from the same list of five common items: high technology, life sciences (under various names), green tech, advanced manufacturing, logistics. Take a few from this list, and add a legacy industry if there’s one or two where you are already particularly strong, and there you have it. The problem is that everybody and their brother is now claiming to be a tech or startup “hub”, etc. And there’s … [Read more...]

More On the Midwest vs. the South

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My post on Sunday about SEC vs. Big 10 football produced quite a stir. There are 165 comments and counting, and it even prompted posts by Richard Longworth and Crain's Cleveland Business. Not everyone was critical but the ones that were basically say that it's ludicrous to say that football proves anything. I don't think that it does. But I will make three points: 1. The differing fortunes of the two conference is yet another in an extremely long series of data points and episodes that demonstrate a shift in demographic, economic, and … [Read more...]

How Segregated Is New York City?

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[ I don't know how he comes up with this stuff, but Daniel Hertz has continued to turn out tons of interesting maps and findings on segregation and inequality. In this piece from last April, he looked at the matter of segregation in New York City. For more, check out his web site - Aaron. ] Update to Original Post: I wrote this in the comments, but several people have asked about it and not everyone makes it down there: this post focuses on white-black segregation because that, for various social and historical reasons, has been by far the … [Read more...]

Thoughts On My Neighborhood Post-Ferguson

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Some folks asked me to comment on Ferguson, MO. I don't have anything to add to the massive amount that has already been written, but it did get me thinking about my own neighborhood and the racial dynamics that exist in America. I live in a mixed race neighborhood on the North Side of Indianapolis called various names, including South of Broad Ripple (SoBro) and Keystone-Monon. It's a racially diverse area, mostly featuring wood frame 2-3br/1-ba worker cottages built around wartime. It's likely always been working class or starter home … [Read more...]

The New Donut

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Former Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut used to like to say that "you can't be a suburb of nowhere." This is the oft-repeated notion has been a rallying cry for investments to revitalize downtowns in America for three decades or so now. The idea being that you can't have a smoking hole in your region where your downtown is supposed to be. This created a mental based on a donut. You can't let downtown become an empty hole. For reason that will become apparent soon, I call this model "the old donut": Filling in the hole became every city's … [Read more...]

Reinventing Higher Education

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It's no secret that the status quo in higher education is facing a lot of pressure from things like skyrocketing tuition, ballooning student loan debt, people questioning the need for higher education, difficulties graduates are getting established in careers, etc. One organization focused on helping universities navigate the transition to a new future and boost higher educational attainment rates in the US is the Lumina Foundation. Lumina is a $1 billion foundation in Indianapolis - no, they don't give out scholarships! - focused on … [Read more...]

Cutting To Invest In Kokomo, Indiana

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A whimsical fairy tale convenience store in Kokomo, IndianaBruce Katz at the Brookings Institution likes to talk about a paradigm called "cut to invest." The idea is to cut spending on operations and lower priority items in order finance investments in higher priority infrastructure or other projects. Nice theory, but who is actually doing it? One example is Kokomo, Indiana. It's not the mythical tropical island paradise you may have heard about from the Beach Boys. Instead it's a small industrial city of around 57,000 people about 45 miles … [Read more...]

Fixing Corrupt Cities

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This is the second installment in my series on corruption. This week I'm taking a look at a book Richard Layman turned me onto. It's called "Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention." Written by Robert Klitgaard with assistance from former La Paz Mayor Rondal Maclean-Abaroa and H. Lindsey Parris, and published under the auspices of the World Bank, this book is a must-read on the topic of corruption even if, sadly, many of the recommendations are not directly applicable to the type of corruption many US cities experience … [Read more...]

Suburbs and Sacred Space

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This post originally appeared in New Geography on June 7, 2013. Suburbs are often unfairly maligned as lacking the qualities that make cities great. But one place that criticism can be fair is in the area of sacred space. There most certainly is sacred space in the suburbs, but usually less of it than in the city both quantitatively and qualitatively. In fact, the comparative lack of sacred space is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the suburb that makes it “sub” urban, that is, in a sense lesser than the city. Lewis Mumford … [Read more...]