Using the steel- and auto- related job losses in the early 1980s as an example, a paper discusses the long-run effects of massive job losses. The authors found that after an initial spike in the unemployment rate in the impacted local economies, the rate converged back to the national average after five or six years. However, high out-migration (and low in-migration) led to this reduction in unemployment, rather than an increase in new jobs. Similarly, a landmark study found that those U.S. multi-state regions that experienced downward employment shocks returned to a more normal path of employment growth within five to ten years. However, the lost jobs were never recovered.[1]
In 1925, urban planner & historian Lewis Mumford described four “great tides” of migration that reflected the economic transformation of the US. Eight decades later, Robert Fishman (professor of architecture & urban planning at the University of Michigan) noted the large-scale return of people to global cities, labeling it the Fifth Migration. Today’s great tide, the Sixth Migration, is ebbing from global cities & towards a better quality of life.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Recovery And Outmigration
Friday, April 29, 2011
Pittsburgh Population Map
[Above] is the contiguous United States, color-coded by the change in population density from 2000 to 2010. In urban areas, deep blue indicates that the population doubled (or more), pure red means that everyone left, grey denotes no change, and the intermediate tones represent the spectrum of increases and decreases in-between. Below 5000 residents per square mile, these colors fade with the square root of density towards white, where no people lived in either year. We created these maps from the official U.S. Census 2000 and 2010 block-level population data and boundaries using custom-built cartographic software.
Rust Belt Leading Recovery
Around the Great Lakes, a recovering auto industry and rising global demand have helped stabilize labor markets. Moody’s estimates that new manufacturing jobs accounted for a fifth of the nation’s total job growth during the past year. And the large metros of the Great Lakes reaped an outsized portion of the benefits, having generated 20 percent of those new manufacturing jobs. These expanding job opportunities in manufacturing and in other parts of the economy are moving workers out of unemployment lines and onto production lines. Job growth in the region accounted for three quarters of its declining unemployment rate.
Root Causes Of Outmigration
But just because there are people moving out of New York and California and New Jersey, you can't automatically blame taxes. A lot of those low-tax states have sunny weather, cheap land and relatively healthier economies. It's a complex equation.What researchers needed was a natural experiment to tease out the influence of taxes. And they found just such an experiment, in Chris Christie's home state of New Jersey.In 1994, New Jersey increased taxes on income over $500,000 by 2.6 percent. And what happened?"The vast, vast majority just don't respond to the tax. They stay put," says sociologist Charles Varner of Princeton University.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Benchmarking Urbanism
Portland does a great job encouraging growth along transit lines in developed areas, but it also has a dirty secret: The greenfield area around Powell Butte was a significant contributor to the city’s growth. As Portland’s annexation map makes clear, it has annexed land as recently as the early 90s, and plans to eventually annex the entirety of its urban growth boundary. That means that Portland has as much in common with Forest Lake as it does with Minneapolis.The population growth in the Powell Butte area accounted for a greater share of the city’s growth than the downtown area – although downtown had a higher growth rate and is a smaller area. Still, it’s not really fair to ask a city that has been built out for decades to grow as fast as a city that still has a greenfield advantage.
Milwaukee, St Louis and Cleveland are of similar size, age and metropolitan structure, and at first glance Minneapolis and St Paul look good in comparison. St Louis and Cleveland each lost tens of thousands of residents in the last decade, and Milwaukee lost about two thousand – eerily similar to the Twin Cities’ combined losses. But the three rust belt cities also had population booms in their downtowns – all three had growth rates that surpassed Minneapolis and St Paul, and St Louis beat Minneapolis in absolute increase as well.
The problem, from places ranging from Chicago to Cleveland, is that the gains in the “core of the core” have been more than offset by losses elsewhere, especially the flight of blacks and other minorities – many of them immigrants – to the increasingly diverse suburbs.
Tree Climbing Competition
Saturday, May 7th, 2011 :: Contestant Sign-in 7:00 AM :: 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM :: Allegheny Cemetery, Butler Street Entrance, Pittsburgh, PA 15201Watch as International Society of Arboriculture Certified Professionals take to the treetops to prune high up branches and keep mature trees healthy in this exciting family-friendly competition in Allegheny Commons.
Pittsburgh Continues Robust Recession Recovery
The Pittsburgh metropolitan area added 18,200 jobs, ranking it 14th among the 100 metros. It grew from 1,102,700 jobs in March 2010 to 1,120,900 jobs in March 2011.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Pittsburgh As Punchline
31. Pittsburgh – MIKE POUNCEY, G, FloridaRich Eisen: “This is a nice feel-good story for yet another completely fucked rust-belt city where all the jobs have vanished and all that’s left is hollowed-out factories, mortgage fraud, and teen prostitution.” Deion Sanders: “I really think Pittsburgh should have taken a cornerback. How’re you gonna do Mike Tomlin like that, Dan Rooney? C’mon, man!”
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Smarter Talent Investment
How to cut Bright Futures is one of many issues House and Senate negotiators are expected to wrangle over in the coming days as they begin trying to resolve budgetary differences. Both chambers have proposed spending cuts in nearly every part of the budget to avoid a potential $3.75 billion revenue shortfall.The Bright Futures scholarship program, funded by Lottery proceeds, was launched in 1997 to stem a "brain drain" of top Florida students to out-of-state colleges. Students could qualify for grants paying 100 percent or 75 percent of tuition and fees at in-state public and private schools depending largely on how well they scored on entrance exams.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Return Migration Buzz
Ron Elkins was reading The Economist at work in Budapest, Hungary, when he ran across an article, “Youngstown, Ohio: A Youngstown town again.”He said that was the final sign that he should return to the Valley, “where there’s so much going on now.”
Sunday, April 24, 2011
You Go Where You Know
"We moved here mostly because we hated the weather up there. It rains all the time," said Christina, 21, who will begin studying equine sciences and zoology as a freshman at Colorado State University in August. "Colorado looked beautiful. I applied to CSU and got in."
After losing his job as an engineer for a commercial contractor in Texas last fall, Armstrong began looking for work in Colorado, where he had gone to college. ...... Then, in mid-2008, she rented a U-Haul and drove to Colorado, where she has friends. The mountain beauty, clean air and relative lack of people were deciding factors.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Rust Belt Chic Migration
“A lot of these places are attracting young people, who have a dream but not a lot of money,” [Bert] Sperling said. In these cities, “they can buy a foreclosed home for not a lot of money — It’s like homesteading in the Old West!”
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Hot Job Growth In Pittsburgh
This post details net job growth in the 100 most populous metro areas from a) 2001 to 2010 and from b) 2009 to 2010. This allowed us to isolate how cities fared in a key post-recession year and for a much longer period.
After running the numbers using EMSI’s first quarter 2011 dataset, we’ve put the largest 100 metros into four categories:
- Hot — These select cities performed well from 2001 to 2010 overall, and they saw net job growth from 2009 to 2010.
- Heating Up — This is an even more select group that struggled as a whole through the decade but are now on the uptick and adding jobs.
- Cooling Down — This group saw job growth in the early part of the decade but lost jobs in the last year (2009 to 2010).
- Cold — These cities, many of which sit in the Rust Belt, have shown net job loss in the decade — and from 2009 to 2010.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Houston Has A Problem
“I would imagine 50 years ago if you had gone to the Automobile Maker’s Club of Detroit and asked them if they would be the car capital in the future you would have heard a similar list. But nothing is inscribed in stone,” he said. “There are a lot of places where they’re hungrier than us for this business, and we need to be very cognizant that these things [such as NASA, the Texas Medical Center and the Ship Channel] aren’t here just because they happened, but because we chose to put them here.”Kumar concurred.“We’re at a cusp where the technology and the business models are destructive enough that we can’t fall asleep at the switch,” Kumar said. “The long-term equilibrium is about to shift.”
Houston isn’t usually thought of as a place that creates new innovations, panelists said, although there have been plenty of ground-breaking developments here, including the birth of the nanotech industry.Rather, Houston has excelled at taking innovations and economically transforming them, adapting niche products and new technologies to mass-market business applications, said Praveen Kumar, a finance professor at the University of Houston and director of the Global Energy Management Institute.“Here is where we can differentiate ourselves, as the place that has developed the specialized workforce to take those ideas to the next level,” Kumar said.Given their histories, Rice University and UH likely won’t be able to catch up to major research universities like Stanford or others by way of the federal research grant model, Kumar said.
Friday, April 15, 2011
San Francisco Is Dying: Kidless Cool Cities
Families that remain in The City are bucking the trend that has plagued San Francisco for years as the number of children — defined as people up to 17 years old — has dropped from 181,532 in 1960 to 107,524 today, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures. The 2000 census counted 112,802 youths.
While Portland, Oregon has a child population slightly higher in proportion to the national average, Portland has struggled to retain families, despite affirmative efforts to do so. From 1990 to 2003, the city added more than 90,000 people, growing to an estimated 529,121 residents. According to demographers at Portland State University, the number of school-age children grew by only three between the census counts in 1990 and 2000.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Talent Retention Incubator
That type of resource is available to some extent in the Ithaca area, says Greg Galvin of Kionix, through the Cayuga Venture Firm. But overall, he says the slowness of the area’s growth has been “depressing.”“The whole thing is a kind of [a] chicken and egg problem ... the investment capital doesn’t come,” says Galvin.Why doesn’t enough capital come? Because there aren’t enough startups to attract investors. There aren’t enough startups, because there isn’t enough capital.Solving that dilemma requires a certain degree of critical mass in the region. In the final part of our series we’ll look at strategies the university and the community can employ to ramp up the pace of growth in Ithaca.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Portland Predicament
“Like the guy who’s almost got a PhD who’s working as a bookstore clerk,” notes Joe Wetmore, who owns what may just be the quintessential college town business, a used bookstore called Autumn Leaves, on Ithaca’s downtown shopping drag.Wetmore sees people stop by his store all the time, with a lot of degrees, but no work.“People who come here go to Cornell, get a degree or two, but don’t want to leave,” says Wetmore. “They end up being underemployed just because they want to stay in the region.”
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Rust Belt Chic Batman
Nolan's choice of locations also returns him to the very region of America where the movies began, just at the moment when many critics believe that studio cinema has reached a dead end. Mark Harris, in his GQ article The Day the Movies Died, portrays Nolan as a last great hope for studio film-making, which for Harris has reached "an all-time low". The Nation's Stuart Klawans, meanwhile, writes that "movies have lapsed into a semi-historical, niche-market status, like … easel paintings." If Nolan's career is meant to save studio pictures, it's an irony of movie history that he'd continue doing it in this area. Among the first permanent structures established as a moving picture house was Harry Davis's 1905 Nickelodeon theatre in Pittsburgh.The Warner brothers themselves, who founded the conglomerate now producing Nolan's film, grew up just across the state line in nearby Youngstown, Ohio (its "beautiful sky of soot" immortalised by Bruce Springsteen). They opened their first cinema in 1906, the Cascade Movie Palace, in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The Cascade – the cinema was located in the Knox building on South Mill Street – seated 99 and offered three movies for a nickel. Among the more legendary stories about the place presented by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is that the Warner brothers apparently borrowed chairs from a local funeral home, which meant that they couldn't run their pictures when someone in town died. The Warners moved on to found their first film distribution company, the Duquesne Amusement and Supply Company, in Pittsburgh, in 1907.
Underneath the gritty charm depicted in productions such as Wonder Boys, Flashdance, and the American version of Queer as Folk, there's also the lurking fear contained in the work of the city's best-known director, George A Romero, whose locally shot films include Night of the Living Dead and Martin, about a Pittsburgh-area grocery bag boy convinced that he is a vampire.
Photographer Garrett MacLean relocated here from San Francisco in 2007 and cofounded the Yes Farm with two fellow transplants -- a cooperative helping stabilize a tattered east side neighborhood."When I moved here, nine out of 10 people who live here looked at me as if I was crazy," said MacLean, 33. "That's changed completely. When people move here now there's no longer any stigma."Photographer PD Rearick, 32, a recent graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, started a local business serving the photo needs of artists."I can be an entrepreneur and take a risk without having to bear the consequences of a bigger city," said Rearick.
Small-Business Pittsburgh
The Pittsburgh area is No. 23 in the standings of 100 major metropolitan areas, as rated by The Business Journals, the online arm of Business First’s parent company, American City Business Journals Inc.That’s a sharp upswing from a year ago, when Pittsburgh was 71st. (Click here to see the full national standings.)The rankings are based on a six-part formula that rewards markets that have prosperous economies, are expanding rapidly, and are densely packed with small businesses. (It defines a small business as any private-sector employer with 99 or fewer employees.)
Monday, April 11, 2011
Pittsburgh Number One Large American City Of The Future
Pittsburgh – Top Large CityPittsburgh in Pennsylvania climbed from ninth position in the 2009/10 ranking to be crowned as the number one Large American City of the Future 2011/12. The Canadian city of Halifax ranked second, followed closely by Charlotte, North Carolina.Seattle ranked as the top large city in both the economic potential and infrastructure categories. fDi ’s independent judging panel was impressed by the FDI strategy information submitted by Victoria, Canada, which resulted in the city claiming the top position in this category, followed by Charlotte and Pittsburgh.
- Pittsburgh
- Halifax
- Charlotte
- Mississauga
- Las Vegas
- Victoria
- Windsor
- St. Louis
- Hamilton
- Quebec
Friday, April 08, 2011
Energy Industry And Regional Job Creation
Which brings me to my broader point: there are plenty of similar success stories. Look no further than Pittsburgh, once the poster child for rust-belt decay and population flight. The city evolved into an educational, medical and technology hub and is now attracting energy companies seeking to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale that underlies a vast four-state region. Energy is also the story in Oklahoma City, largely stagnant for two decades following the energy bust of the mid-1980s.
"Our study demonstrated that new coal-powered plants simply don't deliver on their promise of new jobs for host communities, in fact, they don't even come close," said David Eichenthal, President and CEO of The Ochs Center. "The fact that only one of the large plants built in the past five years appears to have provided the number of jobs it promised shows that communities being asked to take on the burden of hosting new coal plants need to take promises of new jobs with more than a grain of salt." The report, which reviewed figures publicly promised by companies constructing coal plants and compared them to actual construction job creation in the county, is the first effort to measure one of the most important figures that communities rely on when deciding whether to approve new plants.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Cleveland Return Migration
More Pittsburgh Jobs Numbers
In the Cincinnati MSA total employment in February compared to February 2010 was up 1 percent, an increase of 10,200 jobs, according to data released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compared to selected regional competitors Cincinnati’s employment growth ranked 7 out of 12 (see Table 1). Raleigh and Pittsburgh ranked 1 and 2 with growth rates of 2.5 and 2.1 percent respectively. Each of the 12 metro areas saw job growth between February 2010 and February 2011.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Peak Employment Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is undoubtedly the biggest surprise at the top of the standings, but its high position is merited. The Pittsburgh area has added 23,600 private-sector jobs in the past year. And its unemployment rate of 7.9 percent is a full point below the corresponding national rate for February, 8.9 percent.
Boutique Migration
A decade ago, urban economist Paul Gottlieb coined a term for this disconnect between population and economic growth. He called it "growth without growth," a construct former Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton has picked up on in recent writings. When Gottlieb compared population growth to growth in real per-capita income in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, he found a pattern similar to what we discovered for states. Like states, U.S. metros divided into four categories. Some -- like Atlanta, Austin, and Dallas -- were above the national average in both categories. Others, including many older Rustbelt metros, were below average in both. But it's the last two categories that were more interesting. Much as we found with states, half of the 100 largest metros divided into "population magnets" -- places where population grew but not income, and "wealth builders," where incomes rose much faster than population.
When Marja M. Winters was studying urban planning in graduate school, she learned the art and science of helping cities grow.Now Ms. Winters, a native of Detroit and the deputy director of the city’s planning and development department, finds herself in an utterly unexpected role, one that no school would have thought to prepare her for: she is sorting out how to help her hometown shrink, by working through difficult decisions that will determine which neighborhoods can be saved and which cannot.“It was always this notion that the population of the world continues to grow, and more and more people want to live in cities,” Ms. Winters, 33, said about her courses at the University of Michigan. “The reality is very different. Who knew?”
Even in Detroit, where the population shrank by 25% since 2000, downtown added 2,000 young and educated residents during that time, up 59% , according to analysis of Census data by Impresa Inc., an economic consulting firm.
The single largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birthrates are far above those of non-Hispanic whites, largely because the white population is aging and proportionally has fewer women in their child-bearing years. The median age of whites is 41, compared with 27 for Hispanics, the report said.
A closer look below reveals that the Chicago metropolitan area has attracted both the highly educated and the less educated. The share of Chicago’s foreign born who hold a college degree is below the U.S. average. In contrast, in the remaining metropolitan areas of the Midwest, the foreign born population includes a greater share holding at least a bachelor’s degree in 2007. According to sample data from the U.S. Census Bureau, an incredible 50 percent of Pittsburgh’s working age population who were foreign born hold at least bachelor’s degree. Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Columbus are not far behind.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Batman In The Burgh
Both 2005's "Batman Begins" and 2008's "The Dark Knight" shot on location in downtown Chicago (standing in for Gotham), and Moskal estimates that the films spent in excess of $50 million combined when they were here — on crews, vendors and hotels, among other expenses.
Pittsburgh 2025
New York and Pittsburgh had the highest effective rent increases from a year earlier, at 2.8 percent, followed by San Francisco at 2.7 percent, Reis said.Pittsburgh “has held up really well,” said Jones of CBRE. The city’s concentration of employment in the energy industry has helped bolster rents, he said.“They’ve managed to skirt the recession,” Jones said. “The market’s tight enough to support further rent growth. It’s a small market but one that’s performed really well.”
Monday, April 04, 2011
Ironic Economic Growth
Noteworthy: Rebounding manufacturing job growth is tied to above-average rent growth in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.And, yah … Vegas was the only place for declining rent (down 3 percent.)
Emerging Talent Migration Patterns
What was most surprising about the recently released census figures was the city as a whole lost only four people, going from 47,380 to 47,376 people in 10 years, said Tarik Abdelazim, Binghamton's planner. ...... The greatest changes are in the city's First Ward and North Side, where the number of whites fell nearly 10 percent in the past 10 years, census data shows."We've seen the same migration patterns other cities across the nation have shown," Abdelazim said.That's because people migrate to an area where they can afford to live, said Binghamton Mayor Matthew T. Ryan.Rents in Binghamton are far cheaper than in New York City. Economically, minorities are also less likely to have the opportunities that other people have in bigger cities, the mayor said."When you have cities not providing affordable housing that is needed, there will be migration," Ryan said. "Upstate cities have this."
But is an emphasis on vocational training the right direction for Texas? Scott McCown, executive director of the progressive, nonpartisan Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, says that “community colleges are a bright spot” on an otherwise bleak educational landscape in Texas, where keeping business taxes low takes priority over an educational pathway toward advanced science, math and engineering.Low taxes and limited regulation have become articles of faith among state policymakers who fail to distinguish between “what God did for us and what public policy did,” McCown adds. He is discouraged by the state’s unwillingness to invest in research and education at levels needed to reverse what he sees as a state “caught in a downward spiral.”
Friday, April 01, 2011
Brain Gain Detroit
Urban cores attracted increased numbers of young adults even in metropolitan areas that were losing population and hemorrhaging talented young workers. Cleveland and Detroit, both of which experienced an exodus of 25 to 34 year-olds over the past decade, saw an increase in the number of young adults with a college degree in their close-in neighborhoods.