Lecy ∙ Urban Policy

LECTURE 07The Five Migrations

The US Population

486 urbanized areas (>50,000 people), accounting for 71.2 percent of the U.S. population.

The 3,087 urban clusters (2,500-50,000 people) account for 9.5 percent of the U.S. population.

The other 19.3 percent live in rural areas.

10% of households move each year

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/09/why-people-stay-where-they-are/380583/http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/

THE FIVE MIGRATIONS

1. The rise of the creative class / the great divergence

2. Middle class leaving expensive cities

3. Poor to inner city

4. Jobs to the suburbs

5. Political sorting (cities versus suburbs)

Rise of the Creative Class

ARE PEOPLE MOVING TO JOBS, OR ARE JOBS MOVING TO PEOPLE?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLstkIZ5t8g

A TAXONOMY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Attract Companies (classic economic development policy)

• Tax incentives / subsidies

• Michael Porter – build competitive clusters

Attract People (the creative class)

• Amenities, tolerance, schools, housing

• Build amenities through incentives for developers (downtown revitalization)

Build Companies (entrepreneurship)

• Ecosystems of universities, venture capital, incubators

Most regions’ presence of advanced industries is relatively small, however.

One cause for concern is that the number of metro areas benefiting from these skilled occupations is shrinking. In 1980, advanced industries made up at least 10 percent of the workforce in 59 of the 100 largest metro areas. Brookings found that, by 2013, this figure had dropped to just 23 metro areas.

“There’s a sense that a group of places is pulling away somewhat from the others,” Muro said.

http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-advanced-industry-jobs-in-metro-areas-report.html

CONCENTRATION OF CREATIVE INDUSTRIES IN A HANDFUL OF METRO AREAS

Moretti, E. (2012). The new geography of jobs. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. CH3: The Great Divergence.

What even changed the economic fate of Seattle (pp 74-78)? What factors convinced Jeff Bezos to locate Amazon in Seattle (pp 79-

80)? How has Microsoft influenced entrepreneurship in Seattle (p 80)? What characteristic do all high tech cities have in common (p 88)? What is the biggest determinant of what low-skilled workers will make in

a city (pp 88-97)? Are cities highly educated because they produce a lot of college

graduates or because people move there (not specifically stated in the text, but make an educated guess)?

What are the four reasons that working in a city that has more college graduates make you more productive (pp 97-101)?

Explain what is meant by the great divergence? What are some non-financial implications of the great divergence (pp

107-120)?

http://www.100resilientcities.org/blog/entry/what-your-personality-has-to-do-with-your-neighborhood#/-_/

Openness to Experience is the personality characteristic that most strongly predicts

where you will live.

America’s economic and social fabric has been remade over time through a series of great migrations: settlers heading west; farmers and new immigrants to great industrial centers; blacks from the rural South to the urban North; the middle class from the urban centers to the suburbs; and more recently, from an ongoing dual migration of the skilled and less skilled I dubbed “the means migration.”

But which metros have proven best at attracting the creative class, the roughly 40 million workers (a third of the U.S. workforce) whose occupations span science and technology; arts, design, media and entertainment; and the knowledge-based professions, like medicine and law?

2009-2011

Metro Number of Movers

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria* 8,227

Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown 5,385Boston-Cambridge-Quincy 3,712

San Jose- Sunnyvale-Santa Clara 3,739

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana 2,811

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington 4,021San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont 2,614

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue* 2,709Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro 1,829

New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island 3,978

Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta* 1,181

Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos 1,964Denver-Aurora-Broomfield 1,977

Las Vegas-Paradise* 386Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale 1,418

LEADING METROS FOR CREATIVE CLASS IN-MIGRATION

http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/10/where-does-the-creative-class-move/382157/

MILLENNIALS PREFER CITIES TO SUBURBS, SUBWAYS TO DRIVEWAYS

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/millennials-prefer-cities-to-suburbs-subways-to-driveways.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/working-class-neighborhoods-are-disappearing-from-american-cities-2014-9

Middle Class Leaving Expensive Cities

Domestic International

Net

In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year. From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50 percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey.

Pieds-à-Terre Owners Dominate Some New York Buildings

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-owners-dominate-some-new-york-buildings.html

If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of hereDavid Byrne (of the Talking Heads)

This real estate situation – a topic New Yorkers love to complain about over dinner – doesn't help the future health of the city. If young, emerging talent of all types can't find a foothold in this city, then it will be a city closer to Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi than to the rich fertile place it has historically been. Those places might have museums, but they don't have culture. Ugh. If New York goes there – more than it already has – I'm leaving.

Urban Migration: Fleeing Greater Density for Lower Taxes

Not only is the rent too damn high, so are the taxes. Using IRS data, one can track the adjusted gross income of domestic migrants. Analysis from the Tax Foundation proves that wealth is fleeing high tax states in search of fiscal relief:

Florida benefited the most—interstate migrants brought a net $67.3 billion dollars in annual income into the state between 2000 and 2010. The next two highest gainers were Arizona ($17.7 billion) and Texas ($17.6 billion). New York, on the other hand, lost the most income ($-45.6 billion), and is followed by California ($-29.4 billion) and Illinois ($-20.4 billion).http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/jim-russell/171626/fleeing-greater-density-lower-taxes

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/new-york-1percent-stifles-creative-talent

Poor to the Inner Cities

Jobs to the Suburbs

Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press. CH12: The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ghettoization of Public Housing in the US.

What was the most important implication of the 1935 Judge Dawson ruling on the use of eminent domain to secure land for public housing projects (p 222) and the 1949 Housing Act stipulation that a local housing authority had to be established to receive federal funds for housing projects (p 225)?

What were the four features of the Housing Act legislation that lead to concentration of public housing in the urban core (pp 225-226)?

1. Use of eminent domain was ruled unconstitutional for securing land for housing.

2. Voluntary action (community had to create a housing authority).3. Composition of housing authority boards and their goals (clear the

slums).4. One slum unit had to be eliminated for every unit erected (only places

that had enough concentration of slum units were inner cities).

What was one way that concentrating public housing effected existing neighborhoods (p 227)?

Federal housing was designed as a temporary solution for vulnerable families. Did the policy work this way (pp 229-230)?

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) is a book by William Julius Wilson, Professor of Social Policy at Harvard.

Wilson's argument is that the disappearance of work and the consequences of that disappearance for both social and cultural life are the central problems in the inner-city ghetto. He sought to discuss social disorganization without stigmatizing the poor. Wilson writes that chronic joblessness has deprived those in the inner city of skills necessary to obtain and keep jobs. Wilson's book uses evidence from large-scale scientific surveys in the ghetto and information culled from ethnographic interviews of ghetto residents in order to create a complete picture of the problems that face the residents.

Wilson writes that people who inhabit the disorganized, jobless ghettos face dim prospects. Poor public transportation often fails to provide access to job locations, stereotypes about poor blacks, especially black men also make jobs harder to find. Wilson rejects the idea that inner-city residents have a "culture of poverty" or damaged personalities. He holds that addressing the problem of joblessness is the solution to urban inner-city problems. Wilson supports work programs modeled after Depression-era projects.

Wilson ties the disappearance of inner-city jobs to industrial restructuring, suburbanization, foreign competition, and racism.

The spatial mismatch between jobs and housing is as much an issue of transportation as of segregation or economic development.

Parks proposes that blacks – and black women in particular – face (at least) threeobstacles. Economists reason that women and minorities often have (1) to travel further tofind the same job opportunities as whites, assuming that non-discriminatoryemployers are fewer and harder to find than those who'd hire a white man. The othertwo challenges speak directly to the communities in Chicago where minorities oftenlive: Not only do (2) they lack jobs close to home, but (3) they also lack good access to transitto connect them to work elsewhere.

Parks is agnostic on the policy solution implied by that: The city could work to create more jobs in black communities. But it could also improve transportation out of those communities to job centers that already exist.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/02/commuting-penality-being-poor-and-black-chicago/8457/

THE COMMUTING PENALTY OF BEING POOR AND BLACK IN CHICAGO

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PULLING JOBS BACK TO CITY CENTERS

A new analysis suggests that jobs previously lost to the suburbs are returning to the core.

http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/02/young-people-are-pulling-jobs-back-to-city-centers/385934/

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PULLING JOBS BACK TO CITY CENTERS

A new analysis suggests that jobs previously lost to the suburbs are returning to the core.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/upshot/more-new-jobs-are-in-city-centers-while-employment-growth-shrinks-in-the-suburbs.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

The Big Sort (political homophili)

Republican Landslide

Democratic Landslidehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvzAUSVnIbo

THE BIG SORT

MinneapolisChicago

IndianapolisMilwaukee

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/democratic-republican-voters-worlds-apart-in-divided-wisconsin-b99249564z1-255883361.html

https://dsparks.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/isarithmic-history-of-the-two-party-vote/

SUMMARYIn

SUMMARY OF MAIN POINTS

• Demographic sorting is re-shaping America, especially cities.

• Creatives are moving to creative cities.• Primarily when they are young.

• Creative cities are experiencing out-migration of the middle class because of their success.

• The poor have been forced into inner cities, job have moved to suburbs (spatial mismatch).

• People seek self-similar communities (political homophili), and as a result politics are becoming more polarized.

• Economic development policy must take account of these trends.