Caterpillar’s HQ Move to Chicago Shows America’s Double Divide

Picture Credit: Bidgee/Wikipedia – CC BY 3.0

Earlier today Caterpillar announced that it was moving its corporate headquarters from Peoria to Chicago. The move affects about 300 top-level executives. The company will retain a large presence in Peoria.

This is in line with what I’ve written about before: the rise of the executive headquarters, where a company moves its executive suite (anywhere from 50-500 people) to a major city like Chicago while leaving the back office elsewhere.

Chicago has benefitted from this more than any other city I know. In addition to many corporate HQ relocations from the suburbs, it lured ADM from downstate Decatur, ConAgra from Omaha, and even MillerCoors from Milwaukee.

These are all food/agriculture or industrial concerns. That’s right in line with Chicago’s industrial heritage.

I would assume there’s a real possibility every major agricultural or industrial company in the US interior that’s not already headquartered in a major city like Minneapolis may make a similar move to Chicago. I’m sure World Business Chicago already has its target list compiled and is making calls.

This exposes two major divides in the American economy.

The first is between cities positioned advantageously vs. disadvantageously. Chicago is the former (along with Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, etc). Peoria, along with most sub-million metro areas with an industrial heritage, is the latter. It’s simply difficult to keep higher end jobs in these cities. This robs of them of not just some high wage positions, but also significant talent firepower that could be invested in civic betterment.

The second is between those who are prospering with high skills, and those who are not. Chicago has a serious murder problem that’s been making global headlines for two years. It also has a huge financial problem on its hands, especially in the school district.

This doesn’t seem to be affecting business recruitment. CAT and others have not been scared off. This shows that, so far at least, Chicago and its successful segments can succeed even while the impoverished black and Latino areas of the city fail, and as many other industrial cities fall into decline.

In other words, this is another example of the decoupling of success in America. Those who are succeeding in America no longer need the overall prosperity of the country in order to personally do well. They can become enriched as a small, albeit sizable, minority.

Trump’s election was an intrusion into that success caused by those resentful from being left behind. The election of leftist mayors in the style of Bill de Blasio is another such reaction.  It’s very clear from what I see and hear in global cities that those who are succeeding wish those who are not would hurry up and die or just go away. They pretty much say it explicitly when it come to the white working class, and you can believe they are thinking it when it comes poor blacks.

There are cumulatively a lot of angry people out there, who are not blind to what items like CAT’s relocation imply. This inequality is only a recipe for further political upheaval and unrest.

 

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/31/caterpillars-hq-move-to-chicago-shows-americas-double-divide/

The Real State of America’s Inner Cities

Flint, Michigan

The New York Times ran a piece in today’s paper about the state of America’s inner cities – and of course Donald Trump. Their conclusion is that the landscape of America’s cities, and of American blacks – the “inner city” is clearly a racially loaded term – is complex.

I agree with that. I’ve classified America’s cities into three major buckets: elite/vertical success cities like New York, workday/horizontal success cities like Dallas-Ft. Worth, and struggling cities like Youngstown or Flint.

There’s no one size fits all model of cities. Some cities like New York indeed have become amazingly successful. But it’s also true that many post-industrial cities remain in terrible shape.

Even within the successful cities, there are immense divisions. Chicago is booming in its downtown and North Side. But the South and West Sides are seriously struggling.

Black America also has a complex landscape. Highly educated blacks are doing very well. It’s an under-reported story that upscale suburbs like Carmel, Indiana and Overland Park, Kansas are seeing strong black population growth and population share growth, although the totals in both cases remain modest. Cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Charlotte are becoming magnets of black middle class. The black population is also strongly suburbanizing, part of the general trend of the diversification of the suburbs. The South retains a significant rural black population.

But undoubtedly black poverty remains a big issue, both in cities and in suburbs. Black America as a whole remains far behind white America in economic success. Last I checked, black median household income was around $35,000, compared with $57,000 for whites. The wealth gap was event more stark, with the black household median at only $7,000 compared with $111,000 for whites.

So the idea that America’s cities are uniformly decayed or that black America is uniformly failing isn’t accurate, but it certainly is true that significant portions are dealing with bigtime problems.

Where did Trump get his ideas about America’s cities? The media have seemed to suggest he’s simply holding on to outdated 1970s stereotypes. But that seems unlikely. He lives in Manhattan and started building there in the 70s. He knows the difference.

It’s pretty obvious where Trump got the idea that inner cities and black America are in bad shape. He got it from urban progressives themselves.

In the last two years the urbanist discourse has been increasingly dominated by racial issues: Black Lives Matter, housing discrimination and segregation, income inequality, and a general arguing that American society is saturated with racism that is the cause of many and pervasive ills in the black community.

It’s only now, after Trump said basically, “I agree”, that all of a sudden people start talking about this complex, nuanced landscape. Urban progressives need to take an accounting of how they have been talking about things too.

The idea that Trump is intending to denigrate the inner city is obviously false. He uses the same type of rhetoric about “disasters” and such when talking about white working class industrial and mining towns. His whole point is  that the people in these places are victims of a venal and incompetent elite. He surely means the same thing in describing inner cities.

The difference is that he found a rhetoric that resonated with working class whites. That same rhetoric is not resonating with working class blacks. What poor whites interpreted as a validation of their worth, many blacks have interpreted as a denigration of their accomplishments in the face of adversity.  Trump will never win the leadership class in cities. But if he’s serious about wanting to help these communities, clearly on his to do list is finding new rhetoric that speaks to the rank and file urban black community in a way that resonates.

As for the word “carnage,” I don’t know how else to describe what’s happening in Chicago. The global media have been full of front page type stories over the last two years about the horrific violence there, and justifiably so. I agree completely with critics that Chicago’s police department is in dire need of reform. The lack of internal reforms there may explain a lot of the difference in the crime trajectory of Chicago vs. NYC and LA. But the attempts to explain away what’s going on in Chicago – nowhere near historic highs! St. Louis has a higher murder rate! – is unbecoming. It is a legitimate disaster.

There also does remain an immense amount of work to do on integrating blacks into mainstream American success. One mind-boggling factoid that I saw recently came from Mitch Daniels’ open letter to the Purdue University community.  It says that only about 100 black high school grads a year in the entire state of Indiana have GPAs and test scores at the average level of Purdue freshmen. Last year Purdue only admitted 26 total students of all races from Indianapolis Public Schools.

Mitch is making it his business to do something about it. Purdue is planning to open its own high school in Indianapolis to try to better prepare black students for college.

America as a whole needs to do the same. Regardless of who or what is to blame, black Americans, and others left behind in our highly unequal cities, are our fellow citizens whom we should care about as neighbors. Integrating them fully into mainstream success is an imperative.

Trump isn’t wrong that there are big problems that need to be faced. The challenge I’d put to him is to engage seriously on the many complex structural challenges involved. Some problems – rebuilding water and sewer infrastructure, which is a dire need – really are “simple” problems of engineering and money. Many others like policing are not.

In the near term, he needs to put his branding, A/B testing, etc. skills to work, and rebuild the way he talks about cities and the black community. That will be one test of how serious is about rebuilding America’s inner cities.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/29/the-real-state-of-americas-inner-cities/

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s City of Spectacle

Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago
by Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd

Richard M. Daley took office as mayor of Chicago in 1989. The city was at a low ebb following the bitter racial conflicts of the so-called Council Wars period, when a largely white city council fought to stymie Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. During Daley’s 22 years in office, many of the Windy City’s neighborhoods gentrified, in part because of a blizzard of municipal-improvement projects originating with or approved by city hall. When Daley departed in 2011 after six terms, the city remained deeply racially divided and was teetering on the edge of a fiscal crisis. Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd’s Building the City of Spectacle traces the remarkable two-decade transformation of Chicago under Mayor Daley.

As part of his strategy to revitalize the struggling city, Daley embarked on a series of lakefront megaprojects: rerouting roads and eliminating highway crossings; authorizing multiple expansions of the McCormick Place convention center; and championing the renovation of Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. Reconstructing Navy Pier turned the neglected Near North Side landmark into a tourist-oriented entertainment venue, similar to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Navy Pier is now Illinois’s most popular tourist attraction, with about 9 million annual visitors. Daley tore up the runway at Meigs Field Airport in 2003 and created a 91-acre waterfront park out of Northerly Island. In 2004, he opened the 25-acre Millennium Park in the heart of downtown, featuring highly regarded attractions from internationally renowned architects and artists such as Frank Gehry and Anish Kapoor.

Building the City of Spectacle largely ignores Daley’s non-lakefront projects, such as investments at Midway and O’Hare airports and the Block 37 boondoggle, in which the mayor spent $200 million on an abandoned shell of an underground high-speed rail terminal on State Street. The book paints Daley as the heir to urban master planner Daniel Burnham, who was famous for saying, “Make no small plans.” Like Daley, Burnham focused heavily on revamping Chicago’s shoreline and envisioned an ambitious lakefront park system. But the authors say that Daley’s legacy is perhaps better compared with that of Robert Moses, who, before he could become a master builder, first had to become a power broker.

Initially, many Chicagoans wrote Daley off as a lightweight. His father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, died in 1976 after 21 years in office and was credited with sparing Chicago from the midcentury decline that befell most Rust Belt cities. The younger Daley’s critics vastly underestimated his political skills until it was too late to stop him from dominating city politics.

Daley steadily acquired power, working hard to win over Chicago’s African-American population, defusing the open animosity that had characterized the Council Wars years, and bringing the city’s emerging Latino population into his coalition. By appointing loyalists to vacant positions, Daley gradually reshaped the city council into a veritable rubber stamp for his agenda. He also managed to secure the absolute backing of Chicago’s corporate community and civic elite, who provided him enough cash to ensure “shock and awe” victories over successive opponents. He ultimately accumulated enough political power to push through whatever he wanted, good or bad.

Toward the end of his administration, Daley’s leadership became increasingly autocratic. His final term was marred by two terrible decisions. A $1.2 billion deal to lease operation of the city’s parking meters for 75 years drew the ire of Chicagoans, and a failed bid for the 2016 Olympics consumed civic attention while the city’s finances deteriorated. When Daley left office in 2011, his approval ratings had bottomed out, and the deeply segregated and economically divided city was broke. Still, downtown was poised for a major boom.

Spirou and Judd declare Daley’s legacy mixed, but some of their conclusions are questionable. They overstate, for instance, how much power Daley needed to consolidate in order to pull off his lakefront projects. Most major cities, including those without domineering mayors, have also constructed expensive capital projects like stadiums and convention centers. Daley’s vaunted power was more consequential when it came to pushing through bad policy moves like the botched parking-meter privatization and the Olympic bid, or in his unwillingness to use his power to make painful fiscal decisions.

The book also largely ignores the improvements Daley made to Chicago’s less flashy neighborhoods. He returned from a trip to Paris demanding that the city install wrought-iron fencing around parks and other spaces. He rolled out bike lanes and implemented streetscape improvements with new trees, median planters, and decorative street lights. And he started the process of rehabilitating the Chicago Transit Authority’s aging elevated lines and stations. These initiatives changed Chicago for the better and arguably contributed more to the city’s revival than the major lakefront projects.

Millennium Park, which many regard as a world-class urban treasure, is the one megaproject that clearly defines Daley’s legacy in a positive way. Construction ran vastly over budget and took years longer than projected, but Chicagoans rightly see the park as worth the wait and the price. Filled with highly regarded art and architecture, the park instantly became a popular gathering place for a diverse collection of locals and tourists. Unfortunately, Millennium Park wasn’t enough to cancel out Daley’s bad moves; current mayor Rahm Emanuel has spent much of his time in office grappling with their consequences.

Daley is rarely seen or heard from anymore, but Chicago can’t afford to ignore the hard lessons of his long tenure at the pinnacle of Windy City politics. Building the City of Spectacle is a good first step in exploring his complicated legacy.

The review originally appeared in City Journal on January 27, 2017. Cover image via City Journal.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/27/chicago-mayor-richard-m-daleys-city-of-spectacle/

The Brooklynization of Brooklyn

The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back
by Kay Hymowitz

My City Journal colleague Kay Hymowitz has written a number of great articles on Brooklyn, the borough that is her home. This inspired her to write a great book on the topic of the transformation of Brooklyn called The New Brooklyn.

It starts with a two-chapter history of the borough from its earliest settlement to the present day, followed by a series of chapters looking at Brooklyn today. This includes the transformation of Park Slope (where she and her husband moved in the early 1980s), Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and the Navy Yard.

But she recognizes that Brooklyn is not all hipster gentrifiers. It is still a borough of immigrants and still too often poverty. A quarter of Brooklyn’s residents are below the poverty line. So she also presents case studies of this other face of the new Brooklyn, including the looking at the Chinese of Sunset Park, the West Indians of Canarsie and the African-Americans of Brownsville.

There’s a lot of great details in here. For example, that there were once slaves in Brooklyn:

It’s worth lingering over this jarring fact: when you walk past the fine townhomes and churches of Brooklyn Heights, eat at a pizza joint in Bensonhurst, or wander through the art galleries of Bushwick, you are traversing land once tilled by African slaves – and a substantial number of them, given the small size of the white population.

Also how NYCHA income limit rules helped segregate public housing that had formerly been at least partially integrated.

NYCHA residents were required to move out once their income surpassed a certain ceiling. That made sense; public housing was supposed to be for those who couldn’t afford to live in private developments. The problem was that most of those who reached the income ceiling were white. Antipoverty advocates argued that it was only fair to give preference to the most disadvantaged on waiting lists. Perhaps; but as a result, upwardly mobile whites were replaced by poor black refugees both from the South and the cleared slums of other parts of New York.

There are also some passages that would give Richard Florida the tingles:

The postindustrial crowd settling in Park Slop had a somewhat different profile from their educated suburban cousins, a profile that continues to dominate gentrified neighborhoods everywhere. They were an artsy-literary bunch; today, we would call them the “creative class”…Whatever the reasons, the original gentrifiers were in conscious retreat from suburban conformity. Though gentrifier tastes have veered back towards mid-century modern, the Tiffany lamps, stained glass and Victorian antiques that the pioneers collected were a far cry from the harvest-gold kitchen appliances and plastic chairs and dishes favored by suburbanites.

A few of the essays were previously published in City Journal, but the majority of the book is new. The writing is very accessible and not academic. The New Brooklyn provides not just a highly readable look at the current conditions in Brooklyn, but a sense of how we got to where we are.  As someone who lacks in-depth knowledge of Brooklyn, I found it very informative.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/24/the-brooklynization-of-brooklyn/

Silence and Suffering

Scene from Martin Scorcese’s “Silence”

Every last one of us is going to exit this world in a pine box. On the way out the door, we’re very likely to suffer debilitation and pain, often extreme and of long duration. Every single person we love and care about in this world will likewise die.

The existence of death and suffering in a religious context has been called the “Problem of Evil.”  From what I understand Buddhism teaches that suffering is ultimately an illusion. In Hinduism suffering is deserved because it is the paying off of a karmic debt from bad deeds in a previous life. In Christianity, the dilemma is that if God is all powerful and all good, why hasn’t he put an end to suffering?

But as Charles Taylor points out in A Secular Age, unbelieving modernity also faces the same problem:

When we break down the hunger for meaning into more concrete needs, one is for an answer to the problem of suffering and evil. I don’t mean a theodicy; by definition, unbelievers have no place for this. I mean how to live with it. We can be overwhelmed when we are made aware of all the suffering there is in the world; and more than this, the loss, dispersal, evil, blindness; or the distorted and thwarted and self-mutilating humanity; or the dullness, emptiness, flatness.

This is, as it were, a condition which arises even in the disenchanted world: we are unprotected; not now from demons and spirits, but from suffering and evil as we sense it raging in the world. There are unguarded moments when we can feel the immense weight of suffering, when we are dragged down by it, or pulled down into despair. Being in contact with war, or famine, or massacre, or pestilence, will press this in on us.

But beyond suffering there is evil; for instance, the infliction of suffering, the cruelty, fanaticism, joy, or laughter at the suffering of the victims. And then what is almost worse, the sinking into brutality, the insensible brute violence of the criminal. It’s almost like a nightmare.

Modernity has two strands of responses to this. The first is the response to evil and suffering generally, and usually takes the form of the quest to eliminate it. This can produce much good effect when those efforts recognize the inevitability of the human condition. Too often, however, it crosses over into a utopian seeking of the complete elimination of evil and suffering, and by doing so becomes that very evil itself. The 20th century record of movements like Communism attest to this, though this belief that we are on the side of righteousness and thus are justified in anything in our pursuit of what we believe of be justice is something to which we are all susceptible.

The second strand is the response to personal suffering. One approach is what I’ll label “mindset.” The idea is that we engage in a thought control process to attempt to reframe suffering into a positive context. We might, for example, think of all the people who have it worse than us so as to make our own suffering seem less. Or we try to recontextualize suffering as a growth experience – “no pain, no gain” or “that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Pretty much every self-help or self-improvement book I’ve read involves some type of mindset advice. Another attempt to deal with suffering is medication, which can take various forms.  This often ends badly when not subject to rigorous external constraint.

We are in fact often able to use these techniques to successfully overcome personal suffering. The problem we face is that we can, and often do encounter suffering and events that overwhelm our coping mechanisms.

Consider the Biblical example of Job. We’re told Job was the most righteous man on planet Earth. When his children are killed and all of his property is destroyed, he engaged in a classic mindset type reframe, saying, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21). Pretty impressive of Job. Then he get hit a second time, this time with painful boils that covered his body from head to toe. This is too much for Job. It overwhelms his ability to reframe the problem away and he goes on a rampage lasting an entire chapter, saying things like, “Let the day perish on which I was to be born…Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me and the breast give me suck?…Why is light given to him who suffers, and life to the bitter of soul who long for death but there is none?” (Job 3)

Everyone of us has a breaking point at which our resources for coping with suffering will fail. If it has not happened to you yet, rest assured, it very much could. Some people do survive extreme suffering like the Holocaust, post-nuclear Nagasaki, 9/11, or the horrors of war, but very often they are permanently damaged or scarred by the experience, not made stronger. Don’t believe you’re guaranteed to be different.

Being confronted with the limits of your own ability to cope with suffering is one of the themes of Shusako Endo’s novel Silence, which was just released in a film adaptation of the same name by Martin Scorcese.

Silence tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel to Japan during a time of persecution in search of their former mentor, who rumor has it apostatized from this faith (i.e, repudiated Christianity). They are fully trained in the Christian theology of persecution, martyrdom, etc., but find they are unprepared for the reality of what they experience.

Makoto Fujimura, an American-born, ethnically Japanese artist, wrote an excellent commentary on the book called Silence and Beauty that provides a lot of insight into not just the book and film, but also Japanese culture.  (He also put up a Silence and Beauty web site with more info on his commentary on Endo). Fujimura writes:

What Endo gets at, and repeatedly obsesses over in all of his writings, is the fate of those who are pushed beyond the normative categories of experience. Martin Scorsese’s script, very faithful to the book, reveals the deeper, artful way of pushing us out of normative categories of experience as well. Endo seems to argue that none of us are exempt from the possibility of complete failure if we face extraordinary torture and dehumanization. Scorsese translates this trauma to a hidden, and therefore more powerful, view of fear. Neither of them discounts the possibility that even in such circumstances one may rise above all the darkness and achieve heroic heights—or true martyrdom. But Endo’s focus is on the weak, those who cannot rise above their fears and whose circumstances expose their inner demise. Given the worst scenario, the most nightmare-filled turn of events, what virtue and faith remain?

Endo’s Silence thus explores the essence of the human condition, our weakness and incapacity in the face of the inevitability of the evil and suffering in this world. By exploring this through the lens of the extreme, it allows us to understand the more mundane as well. Not everyone fails only under torture, but often under much more ordinary events: sickness, job loss, divorce, loneliness. It may well be that we have the ability to develop additional capacity to overcome these kinds of experiences, but all of us at any moment are at risk of being hit by the right event that will overwhelm us.

Silence takes place around 1640. It’s a fictional story, but takes place in a genuine historical setting and is based on real historical figures. Japan had been globalizing and had opened its ports, particularly Nagasaki, to European traders. Christian missionaries came to the country and converted a large number of people, as many as 300,000.

After the Shimabara Rebellion in in 1637, Japan decided that Christianity and Europeans were a threat to their culture and society. Christianity was banned and Japanese converts forced to recant under threat of torture. As Fujimura puts it:

What ensued after Ieyasu’s edict to ban Christianity is one of the darkest periods in the history of the Japanese Christian church. The depth of cruelty, the “refined” design of torture techniques and the prolonged suffering of the faithful rival any time in history, including the early church. The depth of evil—what can only be described as a genius for innovative torture techniques that equaled or even surpassed any modern torture methods—led many Japanese Christians, even the greatest of priests, to recant their faith.

Beyond banning Christianity, European contact was greatly restricted for an extended period of time and the Japanese became a closed off society until the famous arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships in 1853.

The novel is set after the persecutions have already largely succeeded. The foreign priests in Japan are either dead, or in the case of Father Ferreira, potentially recanted their faith. The ordinary Japanese Christians have been driven underground.

Jesuits priests Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe can’t believe that Ferreira, their mentor in the faith, could ever apostatize. They beg for permission go to Japan, finally finding a way in on a Chinese ship with a strange Japanese guide named Kichijiro, who may or may not be a Christian himself but who is an obviously wounded and haunted person.

Kichijiro takes them to a dirt poor village with underground Christians ecstatic to see the priests. They minister to the community and search after news of Ferreira, while being appalled by the conditions in which the Japanese villagers live.

I won’t go into many more details on the plot – no major spoilers. You can find the plot summary online for yourself, but ultimately the priests find themselves betrayed and Rodrigues comes into the power of Inoue, the magistrate known for his horrific tortures of Christians. Fearful yet confident in his ability to resist torture, Rodrigues comes face to face with a situation unlike anything he was remotely prepared to deal with.

Both Endo’s book and Scorcese’s film are excellent. If I have one criticism of Scorcese’s film, it’s that he plays up the arrogance of Rodrigues to a greater extent than the book. This turns the story into something of a morality play on pride rather than the human condition. That’s unfortunate, especially since Scorcese sees the supreme relevance of Silence in helping us confront the human condition in our own daily lives. As he recently told Film Comment:

You are put to the test: how much can you take before you crack? How could you judge another person for falling out of grace if, when you haven’t been put to the test? And even if you’ve been put to the test and make it, in a true Christian sense, the Kichijiros have to be accepted to – they have to be “forgiven” by the priests and the people around him. If you’ve ever had a family member or loved one who’s got an addiction of some kind…They clean up and they go back on. What do you do with them? They come back, they’ve cleaned up for a while. Next thing you know they rob the house. They’re back on the stuff. Bail ’em out, you get ’em out again, they bring friends over to rob the house. Then what do you do?

It reminds me of when I was about eight years old during the Cold War. The most frightening thing was the image of the POWs who had been brainwashed. Like, their souls were taken away. They came back and they were shunned by society. And was that the right thing to do to them? Where was the compassion? What about their suffering? This, for me, is something that is troubling, and I guess that’s why the material has always been so important to me.

Both Endo’s and Scorcese’s versions of Silence are fantastic meditations on the cold reality of the human condition that makes a mockery of our modern assumptions that we can live largely free of suffering and evil in this world. Highly recommended.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/21/silence-and-suffering/

President Trump, Cities, and Immigration

Image via City Journal

As Donald Trump prepares to assume the Presidency tomorrow, his potential impact on cities looms large. That’s the subject of my recent City Journal piece “What Does President Trump Mean For Cities?” It’s in the print edition, so keep in mind this was originally written in early December.

Any take on this is by its very nature speculative, but cities and Trump would be appear to be heading for a very high conflict relationship.

One of the key battles will likely be immigration. I’m participating in a forum focused on this very issue at NYU next Thursday the 26th called “Cities and Immigration in the Age of Trump.” Also joining me will be NYC City Council President Melissa Mark-Viverito, Vox writer Dara Lind, and a few others. If you’re in NYC, should come out if you can make it.

I note in my piece that immigration is where there could be some early fireworks. Here’s an excerpt:

Immigration will almost certainly be a major flashpoint. Big cities have become home to increasingly large numbers of immigrants. Miami is 75 percent foreign-born, San Jose 40 percent, and Houston 29 percent. These numbers don’t include U.S.-born children of immigrants. Many shrinking cities like Detroit and Dayton see immigrants as their best hope for repopulation. Moreover, Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal immigration, and most big-city mayors are de facto open-borders ideologues. Many preside over so-called sanctuary cities, where local governments, including law enforcement, refuse to cooperate with federal immigration laws. Trump says that he will revoke federal funding to sanctuary cities, and many mayors have already vowed to defy him. Whether he remains resolute in this standoff will offer an early test of Trump’s commitment to his agenda.

Click through to read the whole thing.

One thing I expect to see from cities is a reversal of field on federal involvement. Urbanists have tended to applaud Obama’s diving into local affairs like policing and land use. It seems unlikely they will welcome Trump’s Justice Department of HUD taking a similarly aggressive approach.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/19/president-trump-cities-and-immigration/

What Do We Do About Fiscally Distressed Cities?

Hartford, Connecticut. Photo Credit: Sage Ross – CC BY-SA 3.0

For my first podcast of the year I sat down with my colleague Steve Eide to talk about fiscally distressed cities. Steve has been of the view that states should be more interventionist in distressed city finances. He recently co-authored a paper making that argument, especially that city officials shouldn’t manage the any bankruptcy process. He also recently put out an examination of Connecticut’s distressed cities.  If the audio player doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.

Subscribe to podcast via via iTunes | Soundcloud.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/18/what-do-we-do-about-fiscally-distressed-cities/

Are America’s Cities Doomed to Go Bankrupt?

I’m a fan of Strong Towns and share their thesis that the biggest sustainability problem with much of suburbia is its financial sustainability.

A recent article there about Lafayette, Louisiana has been making the rounds. That city’s public works director made some estimates of infrastructure maintenance costs and which parts of the city turned a “profit” from taxes and which were losses. Here’s their profit and loss map.

The obvious conclusion that we are supposed to draw is that dense, compact, traditional urban development is profitable and good, but low density sprawl is a money loser and bad.

There’s some truth in this, but taking that simplistic view can give a misleading impression. For example, let’s consider why high density central business districts tend to have such density of development and high property values per acre (and thus taxes). It’s obvious that these districts derive a great part of their value from the overall scale of the community, i.e., sprawl.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Lower Manhattan below 59th St. is certainly incredible valuable property. However, if the rest of the metro area were some how chopped away leaving only this super-valuable part, how much value would that land retain? In part, Manhattan is valuable because it’s the center of a vast megacity region where tremendous amounts of human capital that lives in dispersed communities can be concentrated in a small area for commercial purposes.

This article says that only about five cities in America don’t suffer from a fatally flawed financial model. I seem to recall that elsewhere they said NYC and SF are the only two cities that can survive in the long run financially.

But it wasn’t that long ago that NYC nearly went bankrupt and had to be rescued. A recent study just said that its structural finances are the second worst of any major city in the country, primarily because of its gigantic liability for retiree health care. NYC looks good now because it’s economy has been booming. Let’s see how it does it a major downturn, particularly without a strong fiscal hand like Bloomberg at the tiller.

San Francisco is unaffordable to all but very high income residents. It’s a de facto gated community. It may well be that pricing everybody but the rich out is a viable strategy for financial sustainability, but that’s obviously a path foreclosed to most places, even if they wanted to try it.

We also need to consider that there’s infrastructure we have maintained. By and large our telecommunications infrastructure and electricity infrastructure are in very good shape, for example.  For telecom especially we’ve made vast investments to not only maintain, but dramatically upgrade our infrastructure. How did we manage to pull that off if it’s financially impossible to maintain and upgrade infrastructure? What lessons could we learn from that?

In short, I agree with the general Strong Towns thesis that we need to look at the long run “total cost of ownership” of sprawl. In many cases, the math just doesn’t add up and some cities are in an infrastructure hole so deep they’re unlikely ever to get out. But they are overstating their case here.

 

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/17/are-americas-cities-doomed-to-go-bankrupt/

Detroit’s New Streetlights Show Service Rebuilding in Action

Image via Laura McDermott/The New York Times

I’ve been arguing that one thing struggling post-industrial cities need to do is take care of their own business, doing things like addressing legacy liabilities and rebuilding of core public services.

Last week I write about Buffalo doing just this by completely re-writing its zoning code and creating a new land use map of the city to bring its planning ordinances up to date for the 21st century.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, recently wrote a feature on another good example: the replacement of Detroit’s entire street light inventory.

Detroit had 88,000 street lights, but only about half of them worked. Many of them were ridiculously old, some dating to the early 20th century I believe. Many of these were historic and charming as a result, but alas they didn’t work and couldn’t be maintained either. What’s more, thieves kept stealing the wire out of them for the copper.

The new system consists of 65,000 new LED lamps. As the Times puts it:

Let’s hope that if anyone writes a history of Detroit’s rejuvenation, a chapter is devoted to the lights returning. Like picking up the trash, fixing potholes and responding to emergencies, these efforts signal that no matter where you live in Detroit, you are no longer forgotten — that government here can finally keep its basic promises.

…

This is where the new lights come in. They’re spread all across town. The project cost $185 million, paid by the city and the state. The Public Lighting Authority of Detroit, backed by the mayor, received a critical assist from the Obama administration: Energy Department experts advised local officials to swap out the old, costly, broken-down sodium lamps, which vandals had been stripping bare for copper wire.

They recommended LED technology. Investments by the Obama administration in energy-efficient lighting have reduced costs, making LEDs feasible for a city like Detroit. Three years ago, nearly half the 88,000 streetlights in the city were out of commission. The more potent LED lights allow the authority to replace those 88,000 old fixtures with 65,000 new ones, strong enough for you to read one of those glossy magazines after dark.

Detroit said that it needed to actually deliver high quality services to its residents. Streetlighting is literally a high visibility service. And unlike some human services areas or economic development, it’s a straightforward piece of physical infrastructure that should be well within the ability of the city to actually deliver. And the new lighting authority did deliver:

The whole thing came in under budget and on time. When was the last time anyone could say that about a major infrastructure project in Detroit? “An example of how good government should work,” as Lorna L. Thomas, chairwoman of the lighting authority, put it at the switch-flipping ceremony.

It’s also an example of how one smart urban-design decision can have ripple effects. Some residents here grumbled about fewer lights. That said, the stronger new ones turn out to save Detroit nearly $3 million in electric bills. They use aluminum wiring, which nobody wants to strip, discouraging crime. The technology even cuts carbon emissions by more than 40,000 tons a year — equivalent to “taking 11,000 cars off of your streets,” [said Shaun Donovan].

Part of creating a willingness to spend more money on government is recreating a sense that government is actually competent. Delivering a project on time, under budget, that will save millions in operating costs, reduce theft, and be more environmentally friendly is a step in the right direction.

I’m not the biggest fan of LEDs and might be with the grumblers on wanting a higher density solution. But my preferences for gold level services aren’t always realistic. This appears to be a high quality, cost effective solution the city should feel good about. Other post-industrial cities should take note.

Click over to read the rest of the Times piece.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/12/detroits-new-streetlights-show-service-rebuilding-in-action/

Globalization’s Winner Take All Economy

Cincinnati image via Shutterstock

Globalization and technology aren’t just producing divergence in outcomes between the highly educated and the lesser educated, but within the higher skill, higher value portion of the economy it is also disproportionately rewarding superstar performers. This secondary divide is one less talked about, but it’s the subject of my column in the January issue of Governing magazine.

Economist Richard Florida calls this phenomenon “winner-take-all urbanism.” It’s the superstar athlete or celebrity effect transposed into the urban world. Just as A-list stars earn far more than the merely famous, the top business talent and the top cities are reaping disproportionate riches over the merely prosperous.

This divide is harder to spot because the people and places involved are often superficially similar. The people in both possess university degrees. They share similar cultural norms, aspirations and politics. The places they live in all have their farm-to-table restaurants, tech startups, artisanal coffee roasters and bicycle commuter infrastructure. As with a sports team, they all wear the same uniform. But some are all-stars while others are role players who are more easily replaced.

When young workers or artists struggle to find an affordable apartment in a global capital, this isn’t just proof of a failure to deregulate housing development. It’s also a marketplace sending a powerful signal that their position among the winners of society is much more precarious than they might imagine. Most would agree that there are some businesses and people who shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco. We shouldn’t expect a peanut butter spread of talent and economic activity across the country. The nature of the industries concentrated in these places produces a higher-end specialization. So there will be some economic value line below which it isn’t viable to be there.

Click through to read the whole thing.

My argument is that there are people who have labeled themselves “winners” in the new economy who may successful in a sense, but are much more at risk from the current system than they might want to think.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/10/globalizations-winner-take-all-economy/