Burgh Diaspora

Redefining Urbanization

2012-01-28T10:47:00.000-05:00

I've tended to think of cities in terms of hierarchy, the relationship of goods and services across space. That's how I was trained. Blogging about brain drain for almost six years, I now see cities as products of migration. Density takes a backseat to the gravity drawing in people from elsewhere. Nigel Thrift on redefining urbanization:

[C]ities are increasingly both networked and perforated by information technology in ways which are bringing them together as actual forceful entities rather than as simply conglomerations. In some places, that process is purposeful (think of the example of Living PlanIT’s kitting out of a new town in Portugal). But more generally it is the growth of GIS, locative services, and telematics which is producing a gradual but definite change in how we think about cities–cities in which place defined by movement becomes a defining characteristic.

Emphasis added. Until I read that, I hadn't realized how far I've strayed from conventional urban economic geography. I should mention that Thrift is a part of a collection of bloggers (e.g. Ben Wildavsky) who are tracking the globalization of higher education. I contend that the transnational flow of university students is the defining feature of the Talent Economy. I would describe a city in terms of its migration connectivity profile. We can understand how the world works through the lens of migration.

For you Pittsburgh-centric readers out there, I see your city as well-positioned to take advantage of the emerging economic epoch. Like China, Pittsburgh is connected the rest of the world via talent exports. Pittsburgh is people, not a place.

Cool City Cop Out

2012-01-27T16:06:00.000-05:00

Is your city in the dumps? Can't figure out how to fix it? Get cool, now:

You think building great managers is tough? It is. So tough that we grew up and looked at that opportunity and needed a nap after pondering the complexity of making it happen. So we write the check and build cool space instead. Ping-pong table anyone?

Sometimes, drawing parallels between regional talent management and corporate talent management is a fool's errand. This is not one of those times. Developing people is hard work and takes a long time. Moving the needle on primary and secondary education is painfully slow. Ask any politician. Better to build a new convention center or give in to the casino idea. That is to say, buy a ping-pong table for your shrinking city.

Portland, Oregon is the cool office space. The metro decided that economic development was too hard. Better to be an emerald city than a backwater with relatively good schools:

Interview partners agreed that even though the region has been practicing what Richard Florida is recommending (i.e. focusing on improving the living conditions), it did not implement these strategies deliberately. The success of the region in translating quality of life into economic competitiveness seems to be an accidental and unintended result of a much longer strategy aimed at environmental goals for their own sake rather than economic objectives.

Unintended consequences acknowledged, Portland now actively markets itself as a cool office space. So much the better to attract talent. That's what you do when you can't develop talent. Instead of innovating, you play ping-pong. When you want to get serious about being an entrepreneur, you move back to Indianapolis.

Cool is not an economic development strategy. For Portland, cool and all that came with it is a byproduct of being a more environmentally sustainable city. For my money, great place-making inspires people to do great things. Some college campuses made me feel like I wanted to be a famous scholar. I was smarter just by sitting in the cathedral-like library. Brilliant landscape design or architecture can help. They aren't necessary.

Brain Dead Indiana

2012-01-27T09:43:00.000-05:00

It’s almost as if they’re gonna get smarter by locating to an urban area. - David Audretsch, Indiana University professor of economic development

Indiana is dying. Desperate Rust Belt times require desperate Sun Belt measures. The state wants to give its residents the right to work. What's the rush? All the brains are leaving:

Q: What are some reasons why Indiana might have difficulty holding on to well-educated workers?

A: The real question is: Are we drawing people in? Do we have opportunities for highly skilled workers whether they graduated in Indiana or not? When you look at the data, the answer is some. More than we did in the past, but we are definitely net exporters of educational attainment. When you look at the so called great knowledge clusters in the country — Silicon Valley, research triangle in North Carolina; Austin, Texas. They’ve got a big inflow of people coming in, because of good match-ups between skills and industry.

Probably not the answer the journalist was expecting. Did Dr. Audretsch duck the question? The game of economic development is one of talent attraction, not retention. Indiana does not have a brain drain problem. Brain drain isn't a problem anywhere in the entire United States. But we throw billions of dollars every year at it, a colossal waste.

After residents graduate from college, Indiana does a lousy job of developing people. Again, Audretsch with some key insight:

We know that in larger cities, there’s going to be a lot more demand for highly educated workers. Indiana doesn’t have these kinds of mega-global cities like Chicago or New York or Dallas. The job opportunities in places like these are just greater for all levels of education. That’s something Indiana battles.

Emphasis added. Global cities do the best job of developing people. That's why so many people move to one. The upside for Indiana is that, at least domestically, even more talent leaves US global cities every year. Chicago poaches the best of Indiana's college graduates. Indiana poaches Chicago's best mid-career professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs. The focus on college graduate migration is a major gaffe.

Job Creation Geography: Top 10 Pittsburgh

2012-01-26T10:30:00.001-05:00

You move where the jobs are. Yes, geographic mobility is still in a long decline. But all US workers are not frozen in place. New hiring is sparse. The exceptions to the rule:

Since the Great Recession ended in June 2009, the United States has gained about 1.2 million jobs, mostly in the services sector. Of the top 100 metros, 59 have added jobs overall, while 41 have lost jobs.

The top 10 job-creating metros account for 38.5% of net U.S. job growth and include Houston (7.2%), Dallas (6.1%), Boston (6.0%), Phoenix (3.5%), Detroit (3.1%), Miami (3.0%), Nashville (2.7%), Pittsburgh (2.5%), Washington DC (2.2%), and San Jose (2.1%).

Emphasis added. Job growth is one thing. Recovery is quite another. Detroit has a long way to go back to peak employment. To attract migrants, demand for talent needs to outstrip local supply. That's Pittsburgh.

Relocation to Houston, Dallas, and even Boston isn't news. Some destinations don't change. However, the Great Recession did pick a few new winners in the vote-with-your-feet game. Pittsburgh is one of them.

Brain Drain Boondoggles: New Mexico Tax Credit

2012-01-26T10:08:00.000-05:00

New Mexico must be flush with cash. State revenue isn't a problem. In these booming economic times, lawmakers are itching to give companies a tax credit:

A bill to reverse brain drain in New Mexico advanced Wednesday, though in slimmed-down fashion.

The proposal would give tax breaks to state businesses that hire students who graduate from New Mexico universities with advanced degrees in select fields.

To qualify for the $5,000 tax credit, a company would have to employ somebody with a master's or doctorate in science, technology, engineering, math or health from one of the state's three research universities. ...

... A company would get the tax credit if it hired a graduate for a full-time job with benefits for at least seven months in the first year.

Hey, leave the brain drain out of this. Call a tax cut a tax cut. Heck, it's really a subsidy. The money will suppress wages. Companies love a hometown discount. New Mexico wants to add some gravy to that meal. The bill has bipartisan support.

Graduates who would have stayed regardless (likely a strong majority) also represent a tax credit opportunity. A few who might have left will stay. The per capita cost for that brain gain will be astronomical. In essence, Republicans duped Democrats into slashing state revenue, all in the name of brain drain.

Talent Migration Choke Points

2012-01-25T16:22:00.000-05:00

If talent is the new oil, where are the choke points? When I think about global flows of talent, the first place that comes to my mind is Silicon Valley. Set up shop there, letting the best and brightest come to you. But choke points cut both ways. The concentration of traffic represents opportunity and vulnerability. Ryan Avent with the latter story:

Based on the data points in these stories, then, we have a rise in tech salaries in 2011 of 5.2% versus a rise in Silicon Valley rents of north of 10%. To the extent that falling real wages are discouraging people from moving to Silicon Valley to take advantage of the boom, the country is losing out on employment opportunities, a potential increase in incomes, and new business formation. That's pretty disappointing. And one then has to ask why the area's housing market is so tight. Historically, the answer has been slow growth in housing supply, which is itself a reflection of the development priorities of the local residents. Through November of last year, the San Jose metropolitan area had approved just 2,400 new housing units for all of 2011, with an additional 5,400 approved in the San Francisco-Oakland metro area. To put that into context, Fargo, North Dakota approved over 1,400 units over that period; Detroit approved over 3,000 units; Las Vegas approved over 4,600 units, and Houston approved over 28,000 new housing units in that time.

A tight labor market discourages entrepreneurship (Avent's first point in the blog post). The higher prices for housing discourages talent migration. This negative feedback loop is hurting job creation. Talent is too spiky.

Like talent, venture capital is spiky. Richard Florida remarks that this money is not as spiky as some think:

Venture capital investment can and does flow widely across regions and is attracted to areas with the best deals and strongest ecosystems for innovation and entrepreneurship. It is largely a myth that a lack of venture capital funds in certain places holds back innovation there.

A tight labor market would seem to be a much bigger problem for regional innovation. Where is there an ample supply of free-flowing talent? Pittsburgh:

Google Pittsburgh's Bakery Square office was recognized as one of the coolest offices in the country last year, but wait and see the new floor, modeled after the Kennywood amusement park, says Jordan Newman, Google spokesperson. ...

... "The reason we're growing in Pittsburgh is there's a great pipeline of talent coming from CMU and other schools in the region," says Newsman. "There are so many great engineers coming out of the city. We're confident we'll be able to continue to find the talent here."

The boomerang effect has also brought many back to the region, he adds; residents who left Pittsburgh and chose to come back to work at Google. The region's strong economy has contributed as well.

Thinking of the US economic landscape in geopolitical terms, Pittsburgh is fertile ground for job creation. Better to be where the talent is produced than in a place waiting for talent to show up. So Portland fights for talent with placemaking strategies and Pittsburgh fights for entrepreneurship with the development of people.

Pittsburgh Jobs Boom Continues

2012-01-25T12:17:00.000-05:00

President Obama missed his chance to tout, once again, the Pittsburgh economic rebound. The United States is looking for a way forward. Pittsburgh has the answer:

Only May and June of 2001 showed a higher job count than the 1,164,000 raw number just out. So the middle of construction season then when I think there were a few big construction projects pushing up the numbers (and before USAirways employment imploded of course). Seasonally adjusted the first part of 2001 had some slightly higher numbers.

So we will call it the post-USAirways peak.

The post-USAirways employment peak? December 2011. Pittsburgh isn't just recovered from the Great Recession. The metro is posting job count records. More from Pittsburgh Today:

Pittsburgh is the pace setter in this benchmark cohort. The region had a relatively shallow recession. Conventional wisdom predicted a sluggish recovery that would lag behind the rest of the country. That's the historical precedent. Instead, Pittsburgh is accelerating.

Talent Migration Loser Texas

2012-01-25T10:20:00.001-05:00

If people vote with their feet, then Texas is a loser ... in the world of higher education. A journalist for the Washington Post crunched the numbers of the high school graduate college migration. The worst "brain drain" is in New Jersey. Texas is a distant second.

There are a bunch of tasty data morsels in this blog post. There's a link to an interactive map at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Every two years, a U.S. Education Department survey of colleges and universities collects information about the migration of new full-time students, based on their states of residence when they apply. Use this interactive tool to see these movements in detail during a 16-year period for nearly 1,600 institutions.

As someone trying to analyze talent migration patterns, I find state-level data extremely frustrating. The institutional variable helps me drill down into the numbers a bit.

More importantly, the Post blogger disaggregates the net migration. New Jersey doesn't attract a lot of college freshmen from other states. But it's the number who leave New Jersey that impresses. As for Texas, a good comparison is brain gain winner Pennsylvania. The two states have a similar number leaving. The difference is the big deluge moving to PA for school, which is New Jersey-impressive on the other side of the ledger. When it comes to talent production, Pennsylvania is a winner.

Last nugget, brain drain is all relative:

Nationally, about three-fourths of students stay in their home state for college.

I see states and regions freaking out about brain drain with college graduate retention rates hovering around 75-80%. What's all the fuss about? Population. Ugh.

Rust Belt Chic Sudbury

2012-01-23T11:01:00.001-05:00

Downtown needs rethought. It reads like Pittsburghese. Journalist Rob O'Flanagan is talking about the urban core of Sudbury, which reminds him of Pittsburgh:

I've lived in Guelph for nearly five years. Guelph, like so many southern Ontario towns, is quaint. It has limestone buildings -- there is no way to avoid quaint when you have limestone. Sudbury has granite and slag -- quaint is not Sudbury's reality. But the downtown, nestled as it is amidst those blackened hills, is actually quite beautiful in its own unique way. And from a certain height, it is really unlike anything I've seen anywhere -- except certain sections of breathtaking Pittsburgh, Pa.

Sudbury is dying. The city needs a makeover. What would Richard Florida do? O'Flanagan dismisses the usual angst about revitalization. Downtown has a "bad rap." Granite and slag is cool.

The Rust Belt Reset is mostly a matter of perception, a shift in urban aesthetic. Portland is out. Pittsburgh is in. Put a bird on it.

Leaving home helped me to appreciate the Rust Belt. I saw the wonders of other great cities, such as Seattle. I get the buzz about boomtown Denver. I prefer Pittsburgh. I see all Rust Belt cities through that lens.

I spent the better part of this morning trying to find an article that discussed the success of the Pure Michigan ad campaign. I failed and I might be misremembering. Supposedly, tourism to the state increased. But so did state pride, among current residents and expats. Pure Michigan is an effective pep talk. The fresh eyes of an outsider has a way of making the familiar exciting, "Hey, Michigan doesn't suck!"

In almost every shrinking community, there is the brain drain that isn't. The data don't matter. Locals are convinced there is an exodus. People are leaving because the city broken. Downtown needs fixed.

That's one way to sell a boondoggle. The much cheaper alternative is to look at the urban core with fresh eyes, re-imagining both space and place. See the metaphorical blank slate, a frontier opportunity. Ruin porn. That's where revitalization starts.

Kodak Is Dead

2012-01-22T12:51:00.000-05:00

Long live Rochester! Kodak's bankruptcy is clouding perceptions of Rochester. It's another Rust Belt gloom and doom story. For a more nuanced perspective, I turn to the Democrat and Chronicle:

Other company towns whose companies went through decline — steel-making Pittsburgh and auto-producing Detroit, for example — have suffered far more acutely than Rochester has. Displaced workers here founded smaller companies. They stayed and they worked. Local unemployment never went above 10 percent and has fallen to 6.9 percent compared with the nation's 8.5 percent.

Rochester just kept going, though the shadow of Kodak never vanished. Rochester Mayor Thomas Richards said recently that Kodak's gradual denouement, including its ongoing transformation of Eastman Business Park into an industrial area populated with growing companies, has eased the economic landing for the community.

Steel and Pittsburgh. Cars and Detroit. Cameras and Rochester. I add rubber and Akron. The companies that dominated Rochester and Akron left both communities with a wonderful legacy. See "Searching for Silicon Valley in the Rust Belt: The Evolution of Knowledge Networks in Akron and Rochester":

Until the 1980s, Akron, Ohio was the “tire capital of the world.” Today, not a single tire is today produced in the city. Yet, many of the companies—or at least parts of them—remain located there and have shifted emphasis to advanced polymers, the general class of materials which include synthetic rubber, fibers and engineered plastics. Economic development efforts in the city have been based around attempts to build a new community of innovation around these technologies. Rochester, New York was home to several internationally prominent companies in optical-electronics. In the 1980s, these companies moved significant parts of the production process elsewhere and shifted investments in an effort to diversify portfolios. Similarly, they have also made an attempt to transition from a dependence on mass produced consumer opto-electronics to higher technology areas including lasers, semi-conductors and photonics.

Neither Rochester nor Akron did the fail like Pittsburgh did. Detroit finally did the fail and the future looks dark. You dig beneath the oxidized surface and you see starkly different histories.

Kodak's demise reminds me of the US Airways hub in Pittsburgh. In 2004, the airport was downgraded from hub status. The moment of shock was many years (decades) in the making. It was (still is) more a matter of wounded civic pride. But the bad news reinforced the mesofact of Pittsburgh as a dying city.

I'll give the Rochester newspaper the last word:

But Kodak's story is no longer Rochester's story, at least in terms of how the economy performs. Rochester is moving on from the downsizings at Kodak — though, to be sure, some of the new growth is owed to the engineering and managerial talent nurtured at Kodak as well as at Xerox Corp. and Bausch + Lomb Inc., the others in the region's traditional Big Three.

Just last week, the Brookings Institution ranked 200 metro economies around the world based on their 2010-2011 growth rates for employment, income and output of goods and services. Rochester ranked 46th on a list headed by Shanghai, China — but was third-highest among the 57 U.S. metro areas evaluated, trailing only Houston and Dallas and outperforming metros such as New York City, Boston and Washington.

Brookings, a Washington-based public policy organization, said Rochester especially stood out because of its growth in output, 3.3 percent compared with the U.S. rate of 1.8 percent, and employment. The region is growing jobs at an annual rate of 2.5 percent compared with the nation's 1.3 percent.

Oakland Is Dying

2012-01-21T11:27:00.001-05:00

Is too much tolerance pushing out talent from Berkeley? The uneven economic geography of the Bay Area has to be explained. Here is one version:

"There's a brain drain running from the East Bay to San Francisco and the South Bay," said Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information.

Wadhwa said the famously liberal city of Berkeley has created an atmosphere so toxic to business that graduates move away after finishing school. The area's "economic survival is at stake," he said.

The new employment numbers show that while the tech sector added 13,000 jobs in the South Bay and 6,400 in the San Francisco metro area (which also includes Marin and San Mateo counties), the number of tech workers in the East Bay declined by 600.

Long-term jobs numbers in the Bay Area are even more striking. Over the past seven years, the East Bay has lost 11,100 tech jobs, the data show. During the same time, the South Bay added 26,700 jobs in tech and the San Francisco metro area added 13,000.

Emphasis added. The larger story is that San Francisco is recovering and Oakland is struggling. I'm not buying the Blame Berkeley narrative.

I lived in Boulder, CO longer than I lived in any other place. Boulder (a.k.a. People's Republic of Boulder) might not be as famously liberal as Berkeley. But the two communities have a lot in common. Think über-liberal college town or left of left-wing college town. That's Boulder, a place steeped in Beatnik lore. Boulder is also the cradle of a tech-boom. Why isn't wacky commie Boulder driving away graduates?

First, where else would you go? There isn't a Silicon Valley like alternative. South Bay, Marin, San Mateo, San Francisco, and San Jose are all pulling on the talent coming out of the university. Second, there isn't a Stanford in the region serving as a competing anchor for innovation. Lastly, Boulder is blessed with federal government laboratories and research facilities. You've got NASA, NOAA, NIST, and NCAR. That's why IBM located there many moons ago.

I doubt the policy landscape makes much of difference. Oakland has a Rust Belt quality, the draw of an urban frontier. East Bay should be looking for a different kind of talent, people who are interested in civic innovation. Other parts of the Bay Area are winning the war for tech talent. Berkeley produces graduates in other fields. I'm sure there's a niche in there somewhere.

Migration Versus Population Growth

2012-01-20T12:20:00.000-05:00

Better to boom with migrants than babies. Conventional wisdom associates population growth with economic growth. This perspective is unsustainable. I also think it is wrong. The simple act of moving to a new place is economic development. The United States is in trouble:

For the last 20 years — from the end of the cold war through two burst bubbles in a single decade — the U.S. has been casting about for its next economic narrative. And now it is experiencing another period of panic, which is bad news for much of the work force but particularly for its youngest members. The U.S. has always been a remarkably itinerant country, but new data from the Census Bureau indicate that mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history. Sure, some people are stuck in homes valued at less than their mortgages, but many young people — who don’t own homes and don’t yet have families — are staying put, too. This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to. Rather than dividing the country into the 1 percenters versus everyone else, the split in our economy is really between two other classes: the mobile and immobile.

Having lots of babies won't do an inert and isolated community much good. The growing numbers of people is more burden than boon. There is no density dividend for such a place. Welcome to North Korea:

Because North Korea shuts out people, it shuts out ideas. That's one big reason why it is a starving backwater. Its more open cousin, South Korea, which welcomes foreigners and sends hordes of students and businesspeople abroad each year, is 17 times richer.

South Koreans worry whether their children will make it to the right university; North Koreans worry whether their children will make it to the age of five.

The central message of my book, Borderless Economics, is that when people move around, they spread new ideas, mostly for the better.

I'm still in the middle of reading Robert Guest's book, "Borderless Economics". Guest is arguing that when you squash migration, you kill innovation. You get North Korea. The United States isn't transforming into North Korea. Immigration to this country is a tremendous economic asset. Guest makes this point in his book. He's advocating for more liberal immigration policies throughout the world. Migration fuels economic growth.

My point is that the same is true on the domestic front. Exporting talent like China does (again, read Guest's book and see this article that he recently wrote) is a great way to catalyze economic development. Rick Steves makes a similar case about more Americans studying abroad:

Educators are particularly concerned that the lack of opportunity for students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds will cause a "global divide" between students who've benefited from a global education … and those who haven't. And students for whom foreign travel is not easily affordable are the ones who benefit most from the experience. As a society, we can help enrich the education of our younger generation, and brighten their futures, by making this experience more accessible. The Paul Simon Study Abroad Act, currently being considered in Congress, would dedicate $80 million annually to incentivize study abroad, with the goal of encouraging a million American students from a wide range of backgrounds to study abroad each year.

I'd go further. I think we should incentivize Americans to live and work abroad. Allow college students to spend their last year abroad and graduate while in a foreign country. Help those students find work once they do finish school. Let them spend a year or two developing a network. Our country doesn't have enough emigration.

Place And Economic Development

2012-01-19T14:47:00.000-05:00

Is "cool" an economic development strategy? A few of my blog posts are syndicated at Sustainable Cities Collective. Sometimes the title gets tweaked in a way that highlights a controversy. Such is the value of a good editor. That was the case with my most recent work about Pittsburgh versus Portland. The larger issue of place-based planning and economic development provoked a comment that I want to address at Burgh Diaspora:

Nothing much has changed about Portland. It is a great city that succeeds, in part, by virtue of the constant infusion of talented, creative, young people willing (or able) to work part-time service jobs while they pursue "a real job" or figure out their next career steps. It was true in 1996-98 when I lived there and worked on NW 23rd, in a McMenamins and even in a natural foods store. It's all cliche and true. I stayed there until I got my first "real job" in Sacramento.

Because it has worked for Portland, many other cities mistakenly believe it is what will work for them. The "Portland Way" isn't an off-the-shelf remedy for what ails other cities. Having said that, what has worked for Portland it has never made the kickoff to the conversation be about economic development. It might have been an underlying theme, but not the focus. It has succeeded by focusing on creating a great place to live. It was a long-term approach that worked. Too many places, including my current location in the Southeastern US, focus on the short-term jolts of luring companies from other parts of the country to its turf, rather than committing itself to all of the things that make it a great place.

I know "place" is an unfocused term, but if you use that as the starting point of discussion, I think you would be surprised with the results. It requires a local commitment to a long-term process - often this struggles against political reality. Focusing on place-based techniques that improve streetscapes, parks, transportation, architecture, art and other public-space infrastructure would be a good start.

Emphasis added. I've included the entire comment because I don't want any confusion about the context. I'm ignoring the defense of Portland. To paraphrase the passage in bold, the focus on making a cool place instead of economic development is the root of Portland's success. I'd rather not get into the reduction of economic development as only smokestack chasing. That's a separate discussion. THE goal is to make a great place. Build it and they will come.

Portland built it and they did come. Portland's success is defined by the inmigration of talent. The most geographically mobile voted with their feet. Portland is a winner. Game over.

Instead of comparing Pittsburgh with Portland, I offer up Oklahoma City. You might remember OKC from yesterday's post. Like Pittsburgh and Rochester, it is a shithole. Today, CEOs for Cities gives Mayor Mick Cornett some love:

For his part, Oklahoma City is a success story, having famously raised taxes to pay for amenities designed to improve quality of life and attract young, college-educated people to the city. The Kauffman Foundation recently named it the most entrepreneurial city in the country with the most start-ups per capita.

I encourage you to click through on the link to the Kauffman Foundation ranking. I also suggest listening to the NPR interview with Mayor Cornett. I understand the connection between OKC's place-making investment and attracting talent. What is missing is how attracting talent translates into becoming "the most entrepreneurial city in the country." If you did click on the link to the Kauffman Foundation rankings, you would learn more about than just #1 OKC:

"Historically, fast-growing small companies have led the U.S. economy out of recession. And according to our latest [FSB/Zogby International] poll, nearly half of all small business owners would consider moving if doing so would help their companies.... Location matters more than ever before. The Great Recession redrew the map of America." Other cities topping each list include: big cities (1 million+), Pittsburgh, PA at no. 2 and Raleigh-Cary, NC at no. 3; medium cities (250K to 1 million), Lafayette, LA no. 2 and Omaha, NE no. 3; and small cities (fewer than 250K), Bismarck, North Dakota at no. 2 and Fargo, North Dakota at no. 3.

The top of the list isn't exactly a collection of talent migration winners. I offer that all these places do a great job of developing people. That's the common thread. Place-making has tremendous value if it helps to develop people. What, exactly, does your region plan to do with the talent it retains and attracts? Or, is the big bump in the IRS migration data in and of itself cause for celebration?

Rochester Is Dead

2012-01-18T14:23:00.001-05:00

Rochester, NY is dead. Then this dead city, like a relentless zombie, killed Kodak. The Wall Street Journal's version of Rust Belt history:

Kodak's other structural problem is geography. When you study the history of great American companies that stumbled and failed, or only partially recovered, you see how difficult it is to overcome the mindset of your immediate surroundings. Businesses located in places where success is the norm, and innovation is built into the ecology, have a better chance of fixing themselves.

That's an odd spin coming from a newspaper that recently ran an article claiming that Kodak made Rochester risk averse, thus stifling innovation. The city is damned to a Catch-22 Hell. Kodak suffocates any and all nascent entrepreneurial ambitions. The lack of entrepreneurial ambition destroys the regional economy, which leads to Kodak's bankruptcy.

That is quite a story. It isn't true. Rochester and Kodak have been heading in different directions for decades:

Rochester has been a job-growth leader in the state in recent years. In 1980, total employment in the Rochester metropolitan area was 414,400. In 2010, it was 503,200. New businesses have been seeded by Kodak’s skilled work force, a reminder that a corporation’s fall can leave behind not just scars but also things to build upon.

“The decline of Kodak is extremely painful,” said Joel Seligman, president of the University of Rochester, which, with its two hospitals, is the city’s largest employer with 20,000 jobs. “But if you step back and look at the last two or three decades, you see the emergence of a much more diversified, much more knowledge-based economy.”

Kodak demanded a college-educated workforce. Rochester delivered the talent. The result is one of the best-performing metro economies in the entire world:

The Las Vegas economy is inching out of last place.

That's according to a new study that ranks growth among 200 metropolitan economies worldwide.

The Brookings Institution's Global MetroMonitor placed Las Vegas at No. 179, an improvement over its 2010 rank, but a reminder that the city is still in recession, with recovery a long way off. ...

... Just three U.S. cities -- Houston, Dallas and Rochester, N.Y. -- were among the 50 best-performing economies. Most of the top 50 were in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. So it's essential to extend the market's reach into markets in those regions.

Somebody alert the editorial staff of The Wall Street Journal. Don't worry, the Rust Belt Curse will win the day. Even if the news is good, things are still very bad. Rochester, like Oklahoma City, is a shithole:

"Oklahoma City's strengths are things you have to be here to experience," Mayor Cornett said.

Cornett touts the city's low unemployment numbers, strong housing market, cost of living, and low traffic congestion and crime rate as strengths. The Mayor is not surprised Oklahoma City came in low when people were asked how they viewed the city.

"If you have not been exposed to Oklahoma City, it takes a long time for people to break down those stereotypes," Cornett said.

Mayor Cornett, journalists don't need to visit your city. Everyone knows Oklahoma City sucks. OKC is dead, where big companies go to die.

The Geography Of The Midwest

2012-01-17T13:34:00.001-05:00

Chicago is not part of the Midwest. However, I would define the "Midwest" as the part of the world caught up in Chicago's economic gravity. Chicago is the Capital of the Midwest. If Chicago is your gateway to the rest of the world, then you are a Midwesterner.

Richard Longworth describing the "Midwestern" geography problem:

I understand that the Midwest Governors Association is about to launch a project on "rebranding the Midwest," presumably to give it a sharper image. A noble effort, to be sure, but perhaps a vain one, given the general confusion on just where the place even is.

Part of the Midwest's branding issues is the mega-region defies a common understanding. I think there is a common understanding of the geography. I like Erin Ladd's definition:

As this theory illustrates, the problem is that the Midwest as a region has become shorthand for “uninteresting.” When polled about the connotations of the word “Midwest,” people came up with such dour adjectives as flat, boring, and honest. The Midwest is really defined by what it isn’t, not by what it is.

Here’s what it’s not: the Northeast, the South, the West Coast, the Southwest. Here’s what it is: everything that doesn’t fit into those categories.

But, North Dakota doesn’t necessarily have anything in common with Missouri. Pittsburgh and Minneapolis don’t have any relation to each other whatsoever. And every state between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenys does not have a shared history. Even so, because we can’t be known as fiery Southerners or brusque New Englanders or wholly enlightened West Coast-ites, we get to be everything they’re not: flat, boring and honest.

The Midwest is everywhere that is nowhere. But that isn't a functional economic geography. Both Ladd and Longworth make the same erroneous presumption: The other regions are well-defined. Just so happens that people from the "South" think they know exactly where the Midwest is. Those from the "West Coast" share a similar certainty, but a different delineation. Regional geography is, after all, subjective.

I contend that the "Midwest" is a region that needs to be disaggregated and deconstructed. A paradigm of political economy should be the framework for your regional conception. I choose global cities, the dominant economic geography of our times.

The "South" has ceased to be relevant. A place's relationship with Atlanta is more telling. Is Florida a Southern state? Miami is not a Southern city. Divide Florida up between Atlanta and Miami. There's your regional border.

Now imagine a collection of geographic entities (e.g. towns and cities) with strong ties to Chicago. This Chicago Cartel could be a political force that gets around the constitutional bargain that privileges states over metros. Longworth has tried to use a Midwestern identity to get Rust Belt states ravaged by globalization to stop the zero-sum nonsense: Collaborate and prosper.

The confusion about where the Midwest is stems from an antiquated notion of how to define a region. I remember being frustrated teaching World Regional Geography at the University of Colorado. Talking about economic globalization within that framework (developed during the age of imperialist Britain) was difficult. It's an urban world dominated by a network of global cities. Karachi isn't just another South Asian instant city. It's Pakistan's global city. The migration to Karachi tells a story that defines a functional region. Every global city in "South Asia" tells a different migration story. "South Asia" is meaningless and therefore difficult to define.

I suggest dropping the pretense of "Midwest" and pointing out the impressive reach of Chicagoland. How far does it stretch? Answer that question and then set about retooling geographic education in our schools.

Hep Cat Migration

2012-01-15T10:40:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh is cool, Creative Class chic. Does it matter? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff cultural anthropologist Bill Toland maps the magical migration:

Writer and actress Elena Passarello came to Pittsburgh from Georgia in the mid-1990s, then left for Iowa in 2005, to pursue a master's degree in non-fiction writing. (She's in town to act in barebones productions' "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train," at the New Hazlett.)

It's while she was at the University of Iowa, she said, that she first heard "a lot of Brooklynites throwing Pittsburgh's name around [as] a place where you could be your artistic self and finish your novel."

Pittsburgh has been on the hipster radar longer than I have been blogging about the region's brain drain. The city may be too cool to be cool, which makes it really cool. Those in the know have been buzzing about the Burgh for at least decade before the Washington Post put Portland in a corner.

Now that everyone knows all about anti-cool Pittsburgh, the scene is over. Get ready for Park Slope on the Allegheny. The urban pioneers have done their thing and the rest of the world moves to Pittsburgh to see what the fuss is about. The newcomers will wreck Pittsburgh.

Before all the hep cat Pittsburghers leave, someone should ask one of them about the next boomtown. I'm guessing Buffalo. I could see Pittsburgh and Buffalo mimicking the uneasy relationship between Seattle and Portland. Pittsburgh isn't the new Portland. Pittsburgh is the next Seattle. Buffalo is the new Portland. Let one depressing winter after another be your muse.

Buzz informs boutique migration, which won't show up in the numbers. These folks quietly pave the way for the coming deluge. Slacker slum begets techie Austin. The rub concerns whether or not techie Austin happens. If hipsters discover Asheville, will it bloom economically? Can your suddenly cool city handle the talent migration? Seattle answered the bell, so will Pittsburgh. I'm waiting to see if Portland can.

Mexican Consulate In Pittsburgh

2012-01-14T11:13:00.000-05:00

What's the process for landing a consulate? I'm reading a book titled, "Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration Since 1848." The map on page xiii details "Mexican Foreign-Born Population and Mexican Consulates by State." There is a noticeable lack of consulates in Appalachia, as in none between Philadelphia/DC and Detroit/Indianapolis in the North and Atlanta and Little Rock in the South. I'd like to see a Mexican consulate open in Pittsburgh to address this big geographic gap.

There are a few honorary consuls for other countries (e.g. Ireland) in Pittsburgh. Obviously there hasn't been a lot of Mexican immigration to Northern Appalachia, which might explain the dearth of consulates. That could change (I suspect it will sooner rather than later) and there are important links between Pittsburgh and Mexico:

The rise of Los Acereros de Pittsburgh in America's southern neighbor can be traced, like so many Steelers fandoms, to the team's dynastic success in the 1970s. At the time, the Televisa network began frequently broadcasting Steelers games because they were the most successful team. And Mexican fans responded, with the Steelers emerging as a rival to the Dallas Cowboys - a more geographically appealing success- as the most popular NFL team in Mexico.

I became a Steelers fan the same way and a connection to the City of Pittsburgh was forged. I think putting the cart before the horse would encourage more Mexican immigration to Pittsburgh. Mexicans living in the void of Northern Appalachia could come to Pittsburgh to take care of business at the consulate, instead of making the trek to Indianapolis or DC. Also, I would bet that there are more Mexicans travelling through Pittsburgh than anyone realizes.

Pistols At Dawn: Pittsburgh Versus Portland

2012-01-13T09:33:00.000-05:00

San Francisco is "Portland with jobs". That search generated some traffic at my blog. The quip is all about Portland's jobs problem. The first thing that comes to my mind is Aaron Renn's (The Urbanophile) "Nikki Sutton Story":

Eager to be in this great physical setting and around more people who shared her values, Nikki moved to Portland without a job in the early 2000’s. (She originally thought she had one, but it fell through right as she was moving). She spent 14 months looking for serious employment, but couldn’t find it. In the meantime, she worked at the Banana Republic flagship. According to her, the entire staff was in the same boat – people who wanted to live in Portland but hadn’t been able to find employment in their own field.

Since it gave benefits to part time workers, Nikki also applied for a retail job at Starbucks. She was told there was such a backlog of applications it would likely be some time before she even got a call back. Yes, there appears to be a long waiting list for jobs at Starbucks in Portland.

After more than a year of this, she was lured back to Indianapolis by an actual job offer from a local architecture firm. After working there for some time, she launched her own firm, Level Interior. She’s also active as a model and fashion stylist. I’m personally very impressed with her work.

Portland put the cart before the horse. Riffing off of one of my main themes ... local development for people, not places:

Policy should be assessed by impact on people, not places. In the recent past, policy has arguably been too heavily focused on public expenditure to turn around declining places, and paid too little attention to individuals, housing costs and amenity differences.

Move to Portland and be somewhere. Move to Indianapolis and do something. Portland is a wonderful example of great placemaking. Placemaking to what end? Portland is attractive. Portland is winning the war for talent. Portland is San Francisco without jobs.

Now about that Pittsburgh is better than Portland thing:

This ought not to be about Pittsburgh versus Portland. As it happens, Pittsburgh does have a lot going for it. The city, more than any other former industrial Mecca flourishing in generations past, has found a way to reinvent itself as a flourishing small metropolis connecting the East Coast and the Midwest. And admittedly, Portland has its problems: we need jobs and greater diversity. But Pittsburgh and Portland, rather than rivals or as combatatants in some kind of cool-cache duel, both represent the rise of the small city at the expense of megalopolises like New York, DC and Los Angeles.

Gone are the days before the Internet and ease of travel when small cities' most talented artists and entrepreneurs felt they had to migrate across the country forever in order to find attention, investment and advancement. Today Mark Rothko wouldn't have to go to New York to become Mark Rothko.

The great diaspora of the 21st century will not be immigrants foreign and domestic heading to two or three American cultura capitols. It will be one that favors the Copenhagens, Kyotos, Portlands and Pittsburghs of the world - not to the same centers of smog, hubris and spit of the past. There is no Ellis Island today but an archipelago.

No surprise, The Washington Post list sticking a fork in Portland-chic struck a nerve. Nobody puts Portland in a corner. Portland and Pittsburgh need to stick together and take on those big, bad alpha global cities. The "world is spiky" my ass.

Great people make great places, not the other way around. The hubris of architects and urban planners is astounding. Sorry Michigan, cool is not an economic development strategy. Attracting/retaining talent is a means to some end, not the end itself.

What's in and what is out is a "cool-cache duel", all in good fun. I'm more concerned about the Portland Way. Is it a good idea? Should Detroit try to emulate the success? Some snarky journalism struck me as a good way to broach the subject. Pittsburgh is suddenly Creative Class hip. That's funny, right?

Steubenville Cracker

2012-01-12T16:48:00.000-05:00

And I don't mean hilljack. The word out of Youngstown is that Southeastern Ohio will land the prized Shell oil cracker plant:

That’s why experts have pegged Southeast Ohio or Southwest Pennsylvania — locations with direct access to a prime water port, the Ohio River — for Shell’s expansion.

The lack of a port nixed the Mahoning Valley from consideration. As for SW PA, I doubt the loss matters much. I've seen some credible speculation that the plant will end up in Steubenville. The benefits of such a location will cross state borders. National Public Radio explains:

Scoring the cracker would be a coup for any governor, especially when jobs are such a hot political issue. Keith Burdette, commerce secretary for the state of West Virginia, says in the end the ethane cracker will provide jobs throughout Appalachia.

"There'll be a lot of hooping and hollering regardless of where it's picked, whether it's in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or Ohio. We want it built here," he says. "The truth of the matter is the sites [are] just so closely grouped together that the impact across state lines will be significant."

Ohio Governor John Kasich will get to crow about winning the plant. That should tell you a lot about state economic development. It's all about the ribbon cutting. I'm glad to have Ohio subsidizing Pennsylvania jobs. Kasich is still a Pittsburgh boy at heart.

Pittsburgh Hasn't Boomed, Yet

2012-01-12T14:13:00.000-05:00

Rochester or Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh or Rochester? Which Rust Belt city will boom first? Forbes wonders:

“For real estate to do well you want to see two things: that incomes are growing rapidly like they are in a market like San Jose … and that the growth in jobs attracts other people to that market,” says Ingo Winzer, founder and president of Local Market Monitor. However, job growth should be looked at as a bullish housing indicator only if the unemployment rate is already relatively low – that suggests local companies are creating new jobs rather than rehiring for positions they cut during the recession. ...

... Two surprising entrants on our list are Pittsburgh, Pa., and Rochester, N.Y., industrial-era boomtowns that went through several decades of economic decline. Pittsburgh has been one of the most stable housing markets over the past five years: Prices have been more or less flat since the market peak in 2007. Home prices in Rochester have dropped 15% since 2007, but its economy has managed to stabilize and hang onto jobs. “They [Pittsburgh and Rochester] are not high-growth markets yet, and they haven’t attracted new people yet,” says Winzer. “But they are both creating new kinds of jobs — high-tech and medical research-related jobs — and that’s why … they will do better than most markets this year.”

Emphasis added. In both places, there is job creation without population growth. The thinking goes that this will continue to eat up unemployment fast enough to attract migrants. Stay tuned ...

Rust Belt Clichés

2012-01-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

The Burgh is back and better than ever. You know the drill. Read all about it here and here. With that bit of civic boosterism out of the way, let's get real. Pittsburgh is dying:

The overall population dynamics of Rust Belt regions won’t change anytime soon. If the measure of success for an economic development program in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland were the addition of net new jobs in places that have seen steep drops in overall population and employment levels, then there would be no chance of success. That doesn’t mean, however, that longer-term growth is out of the question. And there are two countervailing trends underway: a tiny trickle of international immigration, and some post-recession retention of young people that can be attributed to the radical sorting underway in the overall economy. The decades-old Rust Belt phenomenon of losing young college graduates may be ending, or at least slowing, according to several studies of 2010 Census data, because there are simply not the employment opportunities in the Sun Belt that there used to be.

Emphasis added. I'll leave Buffalo and Cleveland out of this. Bruce Fisher means well. He is holding up Pittsburgh as a way forward for Buffalo. Enough with asterisk about population decline. It just isn't true.

I'm limiting the discussion to Pittsburgh's urban core and employment levels. Apples to apples, ladies and gentlemen. Today at Null Space:

Remember, I've pointed out in the past the incredible story that Downtown Pittsburgh is not only far from dead, but about as about as identically packed with jobs as it was 10, 20 and 50 years ago. About as densely packed with jobs as 4/10ths of a square mile can likely support here given challenging transportation, parking and transit issues Downtown Pittsburgh has (all of which clearly have costs that seem not to have deterred investment Downtown of late). There was an announcement last week of an entirely new PNC skyscraper, on top of the bigger one that was just built. Also, the North Shore Connector is about to open and can only help push down parking prices which will benefit Downtown occupancy.

Emphasis added. Read the passage in bold, again. Do you believe it? Granted, it's counter-intuitive, kind of like brain drain that is really brain gain. Go ahead and lament the sprawl. Mourn the expatriates. But please review the numbers before repeating the Rust Belt clichés.

The demographics are moribund. The population is (was) aging. Yes, that was an exodus in the 1980s. That's not to say Rust Belt cities are imploding. That's not to say they aren't, either. The assumption is that all communities in the Rust Belt share the same plight. That damning narrative is accepted uncritically.

I'm not moving the goalposts to make Pittsburgh look better. We are trying to solve a problem that we have failed to properly define. I think the Rust Belt should drop the population discussion. It's counterproductive. In his own way, Fisher is saying the same thing. Don't judge a city by its population numbers. I'm saying, in Pittsburgh's case, I don't mind if I do.

Geography Of Fear And Migration

2012-01-11T13:25:00.000-05:00

The film "Deliverance" is a classic piece of ruin porn. Since Appalachia is "off the map", the region serves as a geography of fear. Terra incognita is where monsters live. However, there is no such thing as bad publicity:

Some people would like to link the movie's anniversary with the inaugural Chattooga River Festival, set for June 22-24. The goal of the festival is to educate the public about the importance of protecting the river as a natural resource.

In addition to a screening of the movie, the festival would include guided hikes along the river's banks, rafting opportunities and an adventure race.

As intriguing as that may sound to some, others would like to let sleeping dogs lie and not reconnect the dots between Rabun County, "Deliverance" and its depiction of mountain folk as violent and primitive.

This debate reminds me of the term "Rust Belt". Some people hate it because of the pejorative connotation. For me, it is a point of pride and should be celebrated. Rust Belt is cool. I love Rust Belt cities.

I also love Appalachia. "Deliverance" didn't freak me out like "Easy Rider" did. I grew up familiar with mountain folk. I didn't take the negative stereotyping seriously. I did with "Easy Rider". I was terrified of travelling in the South. But looking behind the green curtain of one geographic myth dispels them all. I've enjoyed catching up on a part of America that I used to avoid. Really, no harm done.

I think the Chattooga River Festival should embrace the film, a bit like Cleveland embracing the Cuyahoga River catching fire. Ironic appreciation can work wonders for an overlooked place. Those locals still sporting open wounds are the ones doing more harm than good.

Take the lemons and make some lemonade. The movie is iconic and could help preserve a great river. Besides, Hillbilly Country is cool.

Rust Belt Population Loss Myths

2012-01-11T10:43:00.000-05:00

Is Indianapolis a Rust Belt city? I think it is, or was. Others might disagree. The sticking point is population. A true Rust Belt city has been bleeding people for half a century or more. The diverging fortunes of clever Indianapolis and parochial Milwaukee:

In 1950, Milwaukee was the 15th-largest American city, Indianapolis was 23rd and both were considered nondescript, second-tier localities. Into the 1960s, both cities were aging, with declining Rust Belt economies. Locals knowingly referred to Indianapolis as "India-no-place."

However, in the '60s, while open housing and school integration marches were taking place in Milwaukee, Indianapolis civic leaders were actively researching legislation that might revitalize their city. In 1967, Republicans won the governor's office, both houses of the legislature, the Indianapolis mayor's office, the Indianapolis City Council, the Marion County Council and promptly passed a very contentious piece of legislation that consolidated Indianapolis with its surrounding county.

Beyond the fiscal benefits, Indianapolis was instantly America's 11th-largest city. Suburbanites who had turned their backs on the city or sniped at it became supporters of what they then viewed as "their" notable metropolis. The enlarged community of political and civic leaders sublimated partisanship and leveraged this newfound pride to undertake a successful campaign to position Indianapolis as the national and international signature city for amateur sports. The city's image skyrocketed, and, man, so has its economy.

Emphasis added. An easy way for a city to get bigger is to expand the municipal boundaries. Pittsburgh should be so lucky. Speaking of Pittsburgh, The Urbanophile recently posted about Don Carter's TEDxPittsburgh talk. The arresting visual demonstrates the sprawl. Yes, Pittsburgh has a sprawl problem. Population problem? Not really. The metro population today is the same as it was in 1950. Pittsburgh isn't dying!

On the other hand, Braddock is dying. The reasons for Braddock's demise are commonly misunderstood. I've misunderstood the decline. I'll make you do the work and click through to one of Chris Briem's (Null Space) posts about Braddock. What's killing Braddock? Sprawl. People working at the still functioning steel mill now have a nice piece of suburbia. The bulk of the former residents didn't pick up and move to the Sun Belt. We need a better definition of Rust Belt city.

Xenophobia And Migration

2012-01-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

Show me a town fighting brain drain and I'll show you an intolerant community. Talent retention is local jobs for local graduates. Outsiders, foreign or domestic, need not apply. Matthew Yglesias with some bad intuition:

A related intuition I have that I'd be interested in reading relevant research on is that when you take the basic dynamic of population migration out of the "immigration" context, suddenly people understand it more clearly. When people hear about a town that's attracting many new residents, they say it's "booming" not that the newcomers are poaching a fixed supply of jobs. Nobody in Texas seems to have proposed trying to close the state to migrants from the Northeast and Midwest; rather, they see the state's attraction to migrants as one of its strengths. The "foreign-ness" of newcomers from other countries distracts people from fundamental dynamics that they understand in other contexts.

Emphasis added. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any research comparing attitudes about immigrants and domestic migrants. I don't think we need to bother with the question. California. Okies. Southern Blacks. Northern cities. Carpetbagger. "Gangs of New York".

Perhaps that last one deserves some explanation:

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.

American history is full of such labor tension, whether immigrant or domestic migrant. That continues today with such pejoratives as "Californication":

In the 80′s there was the great Yankee Migration that led to the foundation of the Great Wall of Texas Society (to be built along the Red River). The GWoTS didn’t build a wall but they did sell a few collectible bricks and hold some darn fine BBQ’s. At that time a couple of popular bumper stickers were “We Don’t Care How You Did It Up North!” and “Welcome to Texas – Now Go Back”.

Now we have another influx of folks coming to Texas for the jobs, low taxes, etc. only this time they are often from the People’s Republik of Kalifornia. Which again serves to illustrate that Liberals are like locusts. They lay waste to a land of plenty and then move on to the next place of bounty and do the same thing. Having thoroughly screwed up the West Coast, they come here seeking prosperity only to complain that here isn’t like where they came from. For the sake of clarity: If you come here because you like it here – Welcome! If you don’t like it here – Go Back!

I'm a Rust Belt refugee and I've lived in a bunch of different places. I'm intimate with the sentiment. The very act of migration is demonized. Those who leave are dead to us. Only those who stay deserve to have jobs. Buy local.

Temperature And Trust

2012-01-10T10:44:00.001-05:00

A Vermont rule of thumb is that locals won't speak to you for a year. They want to see if you are going to stick around. Growing up in the cold parts of the United States, I'm comfortable with taciturn culture. What I've learned is that trust travels better north of the 40th parallel. Don't confuse silence with insularity.

Environmental determinism, which made a comeback thanks to Jared Diamond, is still taboo. The theory is that human geography varies with climate. That's not all that controversial. However, the application of the theory is married to state building in the late 19th century and the age of imperial conquests. In Max Weber's famous book, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", Northern Europeans seem destined to succeed. Likewise, the feckless peoples of the tropics could never compete with the cold climate nations. Europe's global dominance was natural.

Weber makes a finer distinction, dividing Europe into North and South. This geographical convention lends itself to what Diamond terms "natural experiments". Robert Putnam's study of democracy in Italy ("Making Democracy Work") is a great example. Putnam falls back on environmental determinism that doesn't sit well with critics:

Italian northerners stereotype that Italy, from Rome south, is really part of Africa, and hence, still underdeveloped. Conceivably, "compared to the North, the southern regions are no better off today than they were in 1970." (Putnam 184) The explanations promoted by Putnam are, however, not without opposition.

Leonardo Morlino calls much of Putnam's methodology into question. Putnam's concept of civic virtue "seems very Tocquevillean and American-centric" to Morlino; he offers an alternative which could conceive of civicness as characterized by "full acceptance of the principle of legality and the rights and obligations of citizenship." (Morlino 177)

Morlino also has difficulty with some of the historical relationships which are made. Not only is there a problem with the civic traditions of the 1860-1920 and the Fascist period, but there is complaint that Putnam oversimplifies the complexities of Southern feudalism and the communal republicanism of the North.

Marco Maraffi has difficulty with the evidence used in Putnam's study since, "after all, Italy's regions are fairly weak institutions, not comparable with, say, the American states." (Maraffi 1349) Perhaps one could conclude that his American-centric viewpoint has equivocated the two.

The charge is one of cultural imperialism, a common salvo fired on environmental determinism. Regardless, Putnam and Weber make a similar argument. The North has more social capital, so this region is more successful. Does that mean democracy cannot flourish in hotter climates?

After reading Sean Safford's research, I contend that Putnam has it backwards. Southern Italy suffers from too much trust. My proof? The mapping of language density:

The scientists discovered this trend when analyzing the first comprehensive map of the world’s languages, Atlas of the World’s Languages, which was initially published in 1993. Focusing on languages spoken by native peoples when Europeans first arrived, they counted the number of tongues that a line of latitude crossed as it ran east-west across the continent. Their survey spanned 8 ˚N and ended at 70 ˚N, the furthest north an entire latitudinal span was inhabited by humans.

Upon tallying their results, a few things stood out. First, the number of languages peaked at 40 ˚N—the parallel that runs approximately through Philadelphia, Denver, and Reno. Perhaps coincidentally—or perhaps not—this northing is also where the number of mammal species peaks in North America. They also discovered the number of languages per square kilometer rises exponentially as you head south. Further, the number of parallels each language intersected increased as they moved north, a function of both language density and the non-overlapping nature of native peoples’ languages at the time. Finally, the number of languages increased with habitat diversity.

To be tropical is to be parochial because you needn't rely on your neighbor like you would in Nome, Alaska. To live in a northern climate community is a lot like residing in a big city. The social capital requirements are a lot less daunting. Richard Florida calls it "tolerance". I call it gambling with trust. To make it, you have to lean on someone you aren't sure you can trust. That's the magic of cities. You don't have to freeze to succeed. Just cram yourself into the nearest urban tropical ghetto.

Year Of The Rust Belt Reset

2012-01-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

Yep, Portland is out and Pittsburgh is in. There is something magical about Appalachian Rust Belt cities. The New York Times lists 45 places to go in 2012:

25. Chattanooga, Tenn.
A city stages a comeback fueled by artists and retailers.

In 1969, Walter Cronkite famously called Chattanooga the “dirtiest” city in America. In recent years, though, it has undergone a dramatic overhaul with a radical gentrification plan and an aggressive citywide push to lure artists. In addition to a $120 million clean-up-and-invest 21st Century Waterfront Plan, an incentive program called Arts Move brings artists of all mediums into town; a yearly Southern arts fair called Four Bridges draws thousands each April; and several arts districts have been cultivated and nurtured.

On the heels of this artistic transformation has come the inevitable, yet not unwelcome, boutique boom in places like the recently restored Warehouse Row, a Civil War-era factory turned shopping center filled with local, upscale and artisanal goods.

Like Pittsburgh, Chattanooga's transformation happened long before anyone noticed. Here is an article from 1998 celebrating the makeover:

Who knew that Chattanooga would soon become as green as Peter Pan’s tights? The city can boast of a leaf-lined river walk along its redeveloped downtown, a freshwater aquarium where conservation is the byword, a free electric bus shuttle, the world’s longest pedestrian bridge, and plans for a zero-emissions eco-industrial park and a grass-roofed convention center. Vice President Al Gore said in 1995 that Chattanooga “has undergone the kind of transformation that needs to happen in our country as a whole.”

I suppose I could write that the positive press in the Times is long overdue. But researching the city's image turns up more than a few good words such as this piece in a 2003 issue of Next American City. Better to say that some people did notice. No one believed what they were reading. Chattanooga may be cleaner. But it ain't cool. I'm moving to Portland.

I blame mesofacts. Our impression of place is slower to change than economic development. And that's saying something. In fact, Mr. Mesofacts himself (Samuel Arbesman) recently penned a post for Atlantic Cities about the relationship between rankings and our perception of large metros:

Every region rates coastal cities high, with Denver the only inland city making the top five according to any region. On the flip side, all regions rate inland cities near the bottom, with only the Midwest including two cities from the coast – Houston and Los Angeles – in its bottom five.

Further, if we search for cities that yield significantly divergent opinions depending on the region that's rating it, certain cities jump out. Just for example, San Francisco shows distinct sentiment differences depending on the region doing the rating. Respondents in the South and Midwest have less favorable views of the Bay Area city than it enjoys in the Northeast and West.

While certain cities are positively viewed by all regions, each region has a better view of its own cities than those cities of other regions. The South likes southern cities, the West western cities, and so forth. The Midwest appears to be the most self-hating (or at least the least positive toward itself) of the Census regions.

To some extent, Midwestern cities do have a branding problem. Domestic migrants are just discovering Pittsburgh and Chattanooga. I expect the favorable light to open up other Rust Belt cities for consideration. The mental maps, they are a-changin'.

Baltimore Wants More Immigrants

2012-01-09T18:03:00.000-05:00

The obsession with population numbers has to stop. Yes, a shrinking city presents a host of problems. More people living in the city is a good thing. But reversing decline should not be a policy goal. Picked up via Chris Briem's (Null Space) Twitter feed, Baltimore's mayor wants to attract immigrants in order to grow the population:

To reach the mayor's goal, courting such immigrants has "definitely got to be a significant component of the strategy," said Thomas Stosur, director of the city's Planning Department. He thinks the "aggressive" goal is feasible as long as the economy continues to improve. ...

... "One thing we know about immigrant settlement is that social networks are important to get the word out that a place has opportunities" such as jobs and easy access to housing, said Audrey Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied immigration's effects on metropolitan areas. "Job opportunities [are] probably the single most important thing for attracting immigrants."

Improving the regional economy and creating jobs will bring more immigrants to the region, boosting the population. Isn't that bizarre? I'd rather the mayor be more welcoming to immigrants in order to improve the regional economy and create jobs.

Population growth presents its own challenges. The numbers going up do not equal prosperity, far from it. I've discussed Reading, PA. Reading is attracting immigrants. Reading is growing. Reading is devastated by poverty. Baltimore would like to be more like Reading. Have at it.

Brooklyn Is Dying

2012-01-06T14:53:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn is passé. That's not news. The exodus of the creative vanguard has been in the paper for the last few years. This borough of NYC has been the center of many talent universes. The latest to leave is rap:

Last year, Sha Stimuli, a 33-year-old Brooklyn rapper, packed up and moved to Atlanta. He wanted to widen his audience, he says, and the South beckoned. He’s not the only one moving on.

In recent years, there is a growing sense among hip-hop heads that New York, and Brooklyn in particular, is passé. While there are still stars emerging from the borough, the action, the excitement is taking place elsewhere.

“In the last decade, New York has been left behind,” says Sha Stimuli. Although being a Brooklyn rapper may have helped his career ten years ago, today he sees it more as a disadvantage. “Me saying I’m from Brooklyn doesn’t actually help, because there is no novelty there,” he says. “People got bored of Brooklyn and New York.”

Brooklyn is proof that Spiky World is getting flatter. Talent can leave an alpha city such as Toronto and thrive in a small market such as Halifax. A city cannot thrive on hipsters alone. Portland should know.

The impact of globalization on urbanization is one of pricing people out of the most successful cities. "I have to be in New York" is replaced by "I can do this in Pittsburgh." You can DIY in Youngstown as well as Brooklyn. That's the magic sauce of the Youngstown Business Incubator. Better to freelance in the Rust Belt than Park Slope.

Why Portland Sucks And Pittsburgh Does Not

2012-01-05T10:13:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh is better than Portland. That will surprise a lot of people. It shouldn't. Portland imports talent. The region does a lousy job of producing it:

Portland poet Floyd Skloot says he’s stunned to learn that nobody in Portland has won a MacArthur. After looking at the roster of poetry and literature winners, Skloot understands why the city lacks a winner. Portland, he says, for all its belief in itself as a magnet for young creatives, lacks the infrastructure to support young literary geniuses.

Skloot’s daughter, Rebecca Skloot, wrote the nationally acclaimed book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” A few years ago, when Rebecca was looking to nurture her interest in creative nonfiction, she knew she had to leave Portland, Skloot says. Her journey took her to the University of Pittsburgh, Manhattan and now Chicago, places with respected masters of fine arts and writers workshop programs.

Floyd Skloot also says Portland lacks what he calls “a tastemaker.” That could be an influential literary arts magazine or press. The closest in recent years, he says, might have been Oregon poet laureate William Stafford, much revered but “the anti-MacArthur,” according to Skloot. The list of MacArthur winners for poetry is studded with writers exploring new styles, Skloot says, not traditional storytellers. Stafford, in line with local tradition, promoted making poetry more accessible even at the cost of innovation.

Quite simply, Pittsburgh is better at supporting creative and innovative endeavors. The Land of Three Rivers is a cauldron of talent. Portland is a lovely place to while away your twenties.

The article continues:

David Schiff, a nationally respected composer and Reed College professor, says he’s not surprised to learn no one in Portland has won one of the genius awards.

“We’re a small town that does not have a major university, that does not have a major arts school,” Schiff says. “We’re off the map in a number of ways.”

Succinctly put. That's the Rust Belt competitive advantage, the bright side to legacy costs. Without shrinking city talent, Portland isn't cool. The inability to produce talent organically will keep Portland poor.

More damnation:

The theory that the MacArthur board doesn’t respect the Pacific Northwest loses credence considering that at least 15 of the genius awards have been won by Seattle residents.

That’s the part that worries Schiff.

“The comparison between Seattle and Portland is quite horrifying, and it shows us that something needs to be done,” he says.

Schiff says it makes a difference that the University of Washington is in Seattle and the University of Oregon is based in Eugene. It also matters that Portland needs a new orchestra hall and opera house. Even more, Schiff says, local arts groups are torn between supporting local musicians and bringing in stars from the outside.
“That tension,” he says, “keeps us from nourishing our young.”

Outside of independent rock, there really isn’t much of a cutting-edge music scene in Portland, according to Schiff.

“What happens is that people interested in that may spend a couple years here because rent is cheap and then they realize they have to be in New York,” he says.

Portland is a Creative Class layover. Pittsburgh is a viable alternative to New York. Like Seattle, Pittsburgh has at least one major research university at its heart. The school in Ann Arbor doesn't really help Detroit. Boulder is a green belt too far for Denver. Portland is just an urban playground for Eugene.

The lesson? Better to be a producer of talent and suffer brain drain then to live off of imported talent. Eventually the flow turns around. Now Pittsburgh benefits from both. As for Portland, hipsters are a fickle lot. What's left after the scene dies?

Keep Portland Annoying

2012-01-04T12:42:00.001-05:00

Pittsburgh is on the hipster migration map. Portland is over, which is good news for the regional economy. The Washington Post throws dirt on Portland's self-important urbanity:

“Portland has overextended its welcome as the destination for hipsters who want to find themselves, while frolicking in beautiful scenery and reasonable rents,” says Hesse. “Pittsburgh is reasonable-rents, nice scenery, nice downtown, and the people are, in general, just far less insufferable.”

Pittsburgh is Portland with jobs and ambition. Monica Hesse didn't say that. I did. In fact, I've written that Portland could use a few more people from Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh:

That Rust Belt work ethic is a competitive edge in hip Portland. The best and brightest leaving states such as Ohio are rock stars wherever they go. They compete. They thrive. They propel the city forward. Not all members of the Creative Class are like this. If you want a dynamo, then recruit graduates from Big 10 universities.

There's a caveat to the magical demographic. It's the talent that leaves that is most desirable. Those who move the furtherest from home are the entrepreneurs that Portland needs. Ideally, they come from Pittsburgh or Cleveland. Shrinking cities don't produce many Peter Pans. That's particularly true in the hearth of Rust Belt Chic.

But everyone knows how great Portland is. Few, even the people who live there, appreciate Pittsburgh. As the commercial real estate market demonstrates, that's changed:

After years of often being uncharted territory for large out-of-town and institutional investors, Pittsburgh’s commercial real estate began seeing new interest from different kinds of buyers in 2011 as evidenced by the biggest sales for the year. ...

... PPG Place was snapped up by a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust, North Carolina-based Highwoods Properties Inc., which stretched beyond its geographic territory and out of its suburban strategy to acquire a trophy Downtown building. Perhaps more eyebrow-raising to some, the sale of 11 Stanwix, a former Westinghouse headquarters now occupied by First Niagara, was acquired by a German investment fund, Munich-based GLL Real Estate Partners for $66 million, a deal with some observers noted marked a rare foray for a European firm to buy an American office property outside first-tier metros such as New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Emphasis added. Pittsburgh is no longer "uncharted territory". That's key for migration. We go where we know, even if it is annoying.

Zero-Sum Regionalism

2012-01-03T13:10:00.000-05:00

Looming on Pittsburgh's horizon is a migration boom. The bulk of Southwestern Pennsylvania's gain will be Washington, DC's loss. More on that in a bit. Projecting migration is a lot like economic forecasting. Past is prologue:

Still, the application of economic theory should be able to help us avoid the commonplace error of simply assuming that the future will be like the past, that after 18 months of sluggish growth we’re due for sluggish growth to continue. The conventional wisdom is that the relatively strong growth in the fourth quarter was a false dawn, and the economy is destined to stall out. This is mistaken. Some tragic unforeseen disaster could hit us, but if it doesn’t we should be in for a string of increasingly strong quarters and accelerating growth that put us back on the path to full employment.

There is an economic theory of migration, as Chris Briem (Null Space) often reminds us. The pressure is to move from a region of high unemployment to one of low unemployment. With that in mind, we would expect people in Detroit to move to Pittsburgh. But there are other metros competing for the economically distressed. Why go to Pittsburgh instead of Dallas? A number of places are doing relatively better than Detroit. Given past patterns, somewhere in the Sun Belt would seem to be a more likely destination.

I think about how the dominant migration patterns might change and what that might mean for Rust Belt cities, typically domestic migration losers. If there is already a strong link between Detroit and Dallas, then Pittsburgh doesn't stand to gain much from its stronger job market. We go where we know.

When Pittsburgh natives leave home, you can be reasonably sure that DC is at or near the top of the list for preferred destinations. The two regions are strongly linked. For at least a few decades, Greater Washington has been doing much better than Southwestern PA. The end is nigh:

It’s been a wonderful ride, not just for the past 10 years but the past 20, and it has helped make ours one of the richest regions in the country. Which makes it all the more painful to have to inform you that it’s about to come to an end.

Any reasonable scenario for the future would surely project federal spending on salaries and procurement to grow very little, if at all. Given the region’s lopsided reliance on those types of federal spending, it’s a pretty good bet that the regional Washington economy will grow slower than the rest of the country for an extended period of time.

The reversal is unlikely to begin this year or even next — there’s a lot of built-in momentum to federal contracting and employment. Nor will we really know the extent of the federal pullback until several months after the coming election. Even the anticipation of a slowdown, however, is bound to have a self-fulfilling impact. It’s time — indeed, it’s past time — for the Washington region to begin thinking about its next act.

Emphasis added. The next act for the Washington region is Pittsburgh. While the regional Washington economy grows slower than the rest of the country, pressure will build up to leave. We go where we know and a large number of people living in Greater Washington know Pittsburgh. The trickle from Detroit is a tsunami from Northern Virginia.

I've learned from Texas that inmigration is a stimulus for economic growth. If the numbers are strong enough, a positive feedback loop is started and a temporary relocation becomes an established migration pattern. Pittsburgh will boom. That's my bet.

What's up with the title of this blog post? ("Zero-Sum Regionalism") I contend that Pittsburgh-DC is a functioning megapolitan region. The talent migration between the two metros is much more important for Pittsburgh than the churn with Cleveland. The "Steel Corridor" is merely the happenstance of sprawl. Look at this map published today at The Atlantic Cities. There's a significant gap between the Steel Corridor and the "Chesapeake" part of the East Coast megalopolis. Thar be mountains getting in the way of an urban corridor.

That Cumberland gap isn't as significant as it looks. I'll let Richard Florida explain:

Part of Washington DC’s resurgence is not just that it’s a government town and has AOL high-tech. DC in a very real way has become a suburb of New York. And a lot of the media and broadcast — NPR functions that are there, XM Radio, many of the documentary film producers, many of the writers for The New York Times — have actually relocated [to DC] because of the affordability and connectivity.

Emphasis added. As DC is to NYC, Pittsburgh is to Greater Washington. The distance is deceptive. The more important variable is connectivity. That's how I would define a megapolitan, metros linked by talent. And the balance of the talent trade doesn't matter. DC's resurgence is Pittsburgh's resurgence.

Regionalism is defined by its ability to solve a zero-sum thinking problem. Suburbs boom while the urban core busts. What if we merged the two into one region? But the issues holding back a city do not magically disappear. You might abate a fiscal crisis by reshuffling the burden. The fundamental weaknesses remain.

Don't fret about those parochial burbs, Pittsburgh. Focus on your connectivity with DC. Let the brain drain work its magic.

Migration Year In Review: Brain Drain Economic Development

2011-12-31T14:59:00.000-05:00

People develop, not places. That's my mantra heading into 2012. My plan for the new year is to work out the details of the theory and then figure out what that means for economic development projects. A corollary to that slogan is move to improve:

“The shifting balance of global economic growth is bring global migration flows with it,” says Madeleine Sumption, policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. “We're seeing lower migration to crisis nations, whereas most of the growth is towards developing nations.”

People are still seeking work in traditional markets, like Germany or Canada. But new, surprising flows are taking place in this post-recession, rocky recovery era -- Mexican Americans are returning home, for example, and Spanish graduates are emigrating to Chile and Chinese scientists in the U.K. are leaving to return home. The shift promises to create new types of diasporas, change remittance flows and alter labour markets.

We live in interesting times. The above Globe and Mail story about migration includes an interactive map detailing the most important flows of 2011. (The Brazil-Japan connection is news to me.) Immigrants to the United States are heading back to China, India, and Mexico. I'm seeing more evidence of native-born Americans heading off to boom economies such as Brazil's. The United States, like Pittsburgh, is becoming a major exporter of talent.

That brain drain is a great opportunity, which will benefit both places linked by relocation. Brain drain can and does fuel economic development:

A 2009 study of 127 developing countries found that overall, the loss of skills to migration is outweighed by the extra skills acquired by people contemplating it. That study's authors, however, found in an earlier study that you can have too much of a good thing: Once countries start to lose more than 20 percent of their college graduates, they reckon, brain drain starts to act as a drag on economic growth. In other words, China and India, which export only a small share of their skilled citizens, would benefit from exporting a lot more. By contrast, war-scorched disaster zones such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose most talented people have fled in droves, probably wouldn't.

Polemics aside, there is such a beast as too much brain drain. I argue that most US communities suffer from too little brain drain, a la China and India. Regardless, talent retention policies are horrid and destructive. Migration is economic development.

Pittsburgh Office Boom

2011-12-30T09:24:00.000-05:00

Tech and energy. Energy and tech. To have both is a metro embarrassment of riches. Welcome to Pittsburgh:

EMPLOYMENT HUBS

The markets that have a high concentration of technology and energy firms might see a different picture next year. Because technology and energy sectors have been experiencing strong growth lately, leasing demand in such cities should begin to fall in line with supply. The outperformers will likely include San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Oklahoma City and Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is an employment hub. People who are looking for work are moving to Pittsburgh. Young adults looking for somewhere cool to hang out are showing up in Pittsburgh.

2012 is shaping up to be a very good year for Southwestern Pennsylvania. Leave the "smart decline" to Phoenix and other Sun Belt bust towns. Come find out why so many other cities are studying Pittsburgh's success story.

Keep Pittsburgh Weird

2011-12-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

I can't ignore it. I didn't want to blog about it. I figure I've done enough Pittsburgh-boosting for one year. Out with the old and in with the new for The Washington Post:

OUT: Portland. IN: Pittsburgh. (Put a bird on it? Get lost.)

For those of you who don't understand the "put a bird on it" reference. Portland is so 2011, so ... over. All the cool kids are moving to Pittsburgh. Why? Jobs:

Portland came in at No. 60 in a ranking of metro area job growth over the past decade. ...

... Austin topped the list, which was based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, followed by Texas neighbors El Paso, Houston and McAllen-Edinburg. Pittsburgh rounded out the top five.

Emphasis added. Put a bird on it.

Value Knowledge Over Space

2011-12-28T13:31:00.000-05:00

Without migration, there are no cities. An urban landscape is more than a draw for talent. Metros thrive on churn, both the influx and egress of people. Edward Glaeser takes a different view with density at the heart of any vibrant downtown:

"They value knowledge over space—that's what the modern city is all about," he said. Successful cities "increase the returns to being smart" by enabling people to learn from one another. In cities with higher average education, even the uneducated earn higher wages; that's evidence of "human capital spillover."

The geography of knowledge exchange is one of intimacy. When I think of the urban experience, the word "intimate" doesn't spring to mind. City living is often lonely, an isolated existence. In fact, a city strength is anonymity. Everyone is from somewhere else. Reinventing yourself is easy.

The big issue with Glaeser's model of urban prosperity concerns density, residential or employment? I can imagine how employment density would catalyze human capital spillover. But residential density? I doubt it matters, at all. Residential density receives most of the attention because city boosters want everyone to love urban living like they do. It's a fetish, confusing correlation and causation. I don't buy the density dividend.

Migration, particularly immigration, is what the modern city is all about. The key word is "cosmopolitan", not "density". Give me suburban county where everyone is from somewhere else (e.g. Fairfax County, VA) and I'll show you an economic powerhouse. Migration is what makes Northern Virginia so special, so dynamic. You can see the world at one strip mall. Different cultures slosh together in unexpected ways.

The very act of moving, particularly to the top tier of global cities, is entrepreneurial. You are surrounded by risk-takers and innovation. The competition is fierce. The cream of the crop is seeking any edge, looking for any opening. Just so happens that this cauldron is usually located in a dense built environment. Migration is what matters.

Innovation Backwaters

2011-12-27T11:33:00.003-05:00

Edward Glaeser hearts Benjamin Chinitz. Why does one city fail (i.e. Pittsburgh) while another thrives (i.e. New York City)? Chinitz has a theory:

Mr. Chinitz argued that the abundance of small, independent companies in New York created a culture of entrepreneurship. Banks came to specialize in financing start-ups. There were lots of independent suppliers that catered to new companies. A poor kid, like the great Abraham E. Lefcourt, could start out shining shoes, then rise in a small clothing company, take it over, and then become Manhattan’s greatest skyscraper builder in the years before the Great Depression.

By contrast, Pittsburgh had large, fully integrated steel companies that sucked up the financing, labor and practically the air itself in the city. Who, in those days, would want to compete with U.S. Steel?

In the almost 50 years since Mr. Chinitz wrote his paper, his insights been regularly affirmed. Pittsburgh has continued to decline; New York has survived. Few now doubt that entrepreneurship is an important ingredient in local success. AnnaLee Saxenian’s now-classic comparison of the technology clusters in Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 took a page from Mr. Chinitz and argued that Silicon Valley’s success owed much to its abundance of smaller, non-integrated firms. Statistical work confirms that diversity and competition predict urban success; there is a strong connection between abundant, independent suppliers and the level of local entrepreneurship.

Emphasis added. AnnaLee Saxenian also wrote about brain circulation and how internationally mobile talent fueled growth in Silicon Valley. There is a strong link between migration and entrepreneurship. New York does better than Pittsburgh because not enough talent is moving to the latter city.

As I've chronicled, Rust Belt cities struggle with too little inmigration. The outmigration is an indicator of success. Better educated are more likely to leave the region. The Wall Street Journal (and Edward Glaeser) doesn't consider talent migration when writing about the ghost of Chinitz haunting Rochester, NY:

The city's boosters like to say Rochester is reclaiming its entrepreneurial past. The western New York city on the Erie Canal got on the map because of business-builders such as George Eastman, who founded Kodak in 1880. It was Rochester native Joe Wilson who transformed Haloid, a small paper company, into Xerox Corp.

As these businesses flourished, the spirit of small-scale entrepreneurship faded, local residents say. In the 1980s, more than half the Rochester-area work force was employed by the big corporations or their suppliers, says Mark Peterson, chief executive of Greater Rochester Enterprise, a nonprofit founded in 2002 to attract multinationals and start-ups to the area. As of 2010, the same corporations employed less than 10% of the local work force, Mr. Peterson says.

Alex Zapesochny, co-founder of Rochester-based medical start-up iCardiac Technologies Inc., says area residents ignored his booth at job fairs as recently as 2006. "They worked at large companies, and it made them risk averse," he says. Now, the company, which measures cardiac side effects of prescription drugs, has grown to 50 employees and receives a steady stream of resumes during these times of high unemployment nationwide, many from current and former Kodak employees.

Emphasis added. Large companies dominate regional workforce development. Talent is cultivated locally. There is a pipeline from colleges and universities to the firms at the core of the urban economy. Both Pittsburgh and Rochester did a great job of supplying graduates. There wasn't a need to import workers.

The risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, left Rochester as they would any hometown. Without immigrants, who would replace them? Rochester had to organically grow a startup culture. That takes time, a long time. The entire structure of workforce development needs to change.

Today, that change is apparent in Rust Belt cities such as Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Akron. As these small companies proliferate, the demand for talent will increase, drawing "outsiders" to the region. Expatriates, the risk-takers, will move back to take advantage of the opportunities. The urban alumni network is a deep pool of dynamic talent, people who are undaunted by a shrinking city's lousy reputation. Future prosperity will be a function of migration (talent churn) and fundamentally sound workforce development.

Local Talent

2011-12-26T09:44:00.000-05:00

People are leaving in droves. People aren't leaving in droves. Both are true in "stuck" states:

If you're home for the holidays, chances are you didn't have to go far to get there.

About 70 percent of Alabama's population was born in the state, according to figures recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau. ...

... "I'm not too surprised," University of Alabama geography professor Bobby Wilson said when he saw the numbers. Alabama in general and Birmingham in particular have trailed the economic and population growth rates of neighbors in the Sun Belt. New migrants follow jobs.

"It basically reflects mobility and migration," he said.

At the same time that economic factors aren't pulling non-natives in, natives may have a greater tendency to stay, more of a sense of roots,Wilson said.

Most of Stuck America can be found in the Brain Drain Belt. Turns out that places struggling with population decline tend to have the highest percentage of natives. But that doesn't mean there isn't exodus. Huh?

The native statistics say more about inmigration than outmigration. 90% of the population could leave and there would still be a high percentage of residents who were born there. No outsiders, no Nevada-like demographics. Leaving home doesn't matter. There may be no more stuck people in Stuck America than in the rest of the country. The issue is that no one is moving to Stuck America.

Secondary Immigration To Pittsburgh

2011-12-25T09:03:00.000-05:00

Better to be in Pittsburgh than anywhere in Texas. Bhutanese are bolting immigrant gateway Oakland for the Rust Belt. Word is getting around that there are jobs aplenty:

The rumors circulated for months: Pennsylvania is a better place to live than Oakland for newly arrived Bhutanese refugees.

"All the Bhutanese are migrating to Pennsylvania," Benu Mainali said. "They say it's better. It's easier to find a job." ...

... Family reunification may be the biggest tug. One extended family disperses around the country, then relatives share stories about which location offers the best opportunities. For the Mainalis, the spot was the Great Lakes corridor.

They were not alone: In recent months, Pennsylvania surpassed Texas as the top destination for Bhutanese refugees, and upstate New York is not far behind, according to data from the International Organization for Migration, the group tasked to resettle them.

Reading the first few paragraphs of the article, I figured "Pennsylvania" meant "Philadelphia". Pittsburgh is an unlikely home for any immigrant while Philadelphia's foreign born population has taken off in recent years. I am surprised as anyone that Pittsburgh is the more specific destination:

Leela Mainali was the first to broach the idea of leaving Oakland, whispering the names of eastern cities in nighttime conversations with her husband. She heard the stories of roomier, less expensive apartments, more plentiful work and less crime. She missed her relatives who were moving to the East Coast. Her older sister's family landed in northern Florida but could not find work there, so they moved to Pittsburgh this fall and found employment immediately despite their limited English.

"In Pennsylvania, it makes no difference," Benu Mainali said. "Even the people who don't speak a word, they're getting a job and making good money." ...

... The younger Mainalis stuffed their belongings -- clothes, a pressure cooker and some other kitchen equipment -- in the trunk of their Toyota and had the car towed to Pittsburgh for $850. They spent hundreds more on airfare and have about $5,000 left in savings.

They have car payments and are paying back the International Organization for Migration in monthly installments for the flight that brought them to the United States.

If jobs are hard to find, they could be in financial trouble. But the frugal, plucky family has been through much worse and remains optimistic.

Pittsburgh "may be better than here," Leela Mainali said hours before she left Oakland on Dec. 15.

How did Pittsburgh get on the Bhutanese radar? Buffalo, Akron, and even Erie (PA) have substantial populations. People in those cities would have a good idea about opportunities in Pittsburgh. The good news travels through the network to Oakland, spurring secondary migration from struggling California.

Your community may be more tolerant and welcoming. But migrants will deal with tremendous adversity if jobs are at stake. As more outsiders cluster in Pittsburgh, the more tolerant the city will seem. And yes, this change in attitude will attract more talent. Don't put the cart before the horse and think that tolerance in and of itself will attract immigrants.

Pittsburgh is emerging from the recession as a migration hot spot. The anecdotes are adding up. The numbers have been trending the right way for a few years. Time for boomtown.

Rust Belt Legacy Benefits

2011-12-24T12:23:00.000-05:00

Shrinking cities are withering under the weight of crushing legacy costs. The municipal debt from a more prosperous time is now split among a much smaller number of people. I don't mean to sweep this problem under the rug. I tend to see legacy costs as the Rust Belt's greatest asset:

Like theaters in Cleveland and Sacramento, Shea’s in Buffalo has become important because of its reliable subscribers — 13,100 for each of its six one-week Broadway tours this year. An impressive 85 percent renew annually; the subscriber base insures that 55 percent of seats are bought even before tickets go on general sale.

“The industry has noticed how good it is to play Buffalo,” said Stuart Oken, a lead producer of “The Addams Family,” who pointed out that the show made more money per performance here than in Toronto, Miami or any other city since the tour began in September. He predicted that the tour would make a profit because of moneymakers like Buffalo and return some of the money lost on Broadway to investors.

Jeffrey Seller, a Tony Award-winning producer whose musicals “Rent,” “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights” all played Shea’s, described the theater as a “miracle of the Rust Belt,” given that the Buffalo economy has struggled mightily through both good times and bad.

Theater would seem to be in Buffalo's blood. World class culture finds a welcome home in Rust Belt cities thanks to those bygone days. Once exposed, residents develop a taste. Going to Shea's is a tradition and a matter of civic pride. Buffalo does a better job of supporting the arts than Toronto, a vastly larger metro.

As far as urban experiences go, Buffalo offers a lot of bang for your buck. You don't need to have big time population to have big time culture. At least, that's true in the Rust Belt. That's the density dividend, quality over quantity.

A good metaphor for the Rise of the Rust Belt Class is manufacturing. Production remains constant or even grows despite the shrinking labor numbers. One brain replaces the brawn of ten. The minus nine finds service jobs in Charlotte and Joel Kotkin makes a big deal about migration to the Sun Belt.

The worm has turned and now people are moving to Pittsburgh because prospects are better than Chicago:

Times are tough in Michigan. He had spent his adult life bartending and managing restaurants, mostly in his home state and some in suburban Chicago, but hadn't worked in over a year.

He and Mattie have been together nine years and have two children, Brenden, 8, and Samantha, 1. They'd often talked of moving to Pittsburgh; Mr. Sunie has been an avid fan of the city's teams since he was 8, and the couple had visited for a Penguins game in 2005.

So he suggested to Mattie one day that he move to Pittsburgh and find a job, and that they reunite the family once he's settled. Mattie wasn't keen on the idea at first, but after talking with her parents and realizing they were spinning their wheels in Michigan, they went all in.

The move isn't quite a blind (i.e. pioneer) migration. It's still a big roll of the dice to go to Pittsburgh without a job in hand. Thanks to all the legacy benefits, Pittsburgh is booming. The city can absorb job seekers appearing on its doorstep.

Because Pittsburgh's economy is booming, don't expect the population to boom. In fact, all Rust Belt cities need to put such aspirations for a return of the 1950s aside. Focus on better educating the workforce already living there. Invest in the most troubled neighborhoods. Stop spending so much on arresting brain drain and the latest place branding campaign. It's a good time be in Buffalo.

Ironic Urbanity Of Iowa

2011-12-23T16:41:00.000-05:00

Iowa is urban, not rural. But the dominant geographic stereotype won't go away. The tale of the tape:

More than 70 per cent of Iowans live in urban areas, according to the most recent census, and farming represents less than 6 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product – small compared to the 17 per cent accounted for by manufacturing or the 14 per cent produced by the financial and insurance sectors.

In the book "Hollowing Out the Middle", the outmigration from small town Iowa is conflated with statewide brain drain. The most substantial threat to rural Iowa is urban Iowa, not Chicago. The most substantial threat to urban Pittsburgh is suburban Pittsburgh, not the Sun Belt. The book reinforces the dominant rural stereotype. It hurts Iowa, both rural and urban.

Iowa is undergoing noteworthy urban renewal. The small towns might be struggling. That's not the big story:

Davenport, the largest of the “Quad Cities” that straddle the Mississippi River marking the Illinois-Iowa border, about 175 miles west of Chicago, is a good vantage point from which to survey the state’s economy. Urban and industrial, it is representative of the reality behind the state’s cornfield image. ...

... Bill Gluba, Davenport’s Democratic mayor, says the city also learnt from the 1980s crisis the need to diversify its economy: other big local employers include Genesis, a healthcare provider, and Kraft, which has a meat-processing plant in the city.

These factors have helped Davenport escape the brunt of the recession. Its unemployment rate is 6.7 per cent. By contrast, the unemployment rate in nearby Rockford, Illinois – another former manufacturing hub – is 11.9 per cent.

Urban Iowa is thriving and it exerts a strong pull on the surrounding hinterlands. The state needs more talent and would like to draw from a deeper pool. But Iowa is rural and no one wants to live there.

More Pittsburgh Real Estate Boom

2011-12-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

South Florida be illing and young talent is leaving in droves. On the other hand, Pittsburgh is booming. The numbers from Zillow:

South Florida homes and condominiums are expected to lose an astonishing $6.5 billion in value this year, real estate website Zillow.com said Thursday. ...

... Just nine of 128 markets showed gains in home values during 2011, Zillow said. Metro New Orleans led the way with $3.5 billion in gains. Pittsburgh was second ($2.7 billion).

Let's review. Pittsburgh is one of five metros out of 100 sporting peak employment for the last decade. Urban Pittsburgh is one of the most vibrant commercial real estate markets in the entire country. Pittsburgh's 25-34 demographic is growing and is among the top metros for educational attainment. And now we see Pittsburgh as one of nine out of 128 residential real estate markets gaining value for 2011. But all that matters is decades of shrinking population. The recent run of good news must be a mirage.

Move To Improve

2011-12-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

Migrating to another country is akin to getting a college education. In fact, emigrating may be more valuable in terms of personal economic development. Increasing geographic mobility is one way to invest in human capital. That's missing from the following equation about why talent matters:

In 1928, the English economist Arthur Pigou coined the term “human capital” to describe investments in the acquisition and application of knowledge, asserting that these investments, just like traditional physical capital, were essential ingredients of economic production. Today, we might divide human capital into three major components. Education plays an important role in developing human capital, of course. Equally important is whether a society’s farms, factories, offices, and shops take advantage of its workers’ abilities through efficient management and the latest technology. And welcoming foreigners infuses a country’s stock of human capital with fresh energy and initiative.

One doesn't need to cross international boundaries to supply "fresh energy and initiative". Domestic migration provides a similar dividend. The tremendous talent churn in Chicago is a testament to that global city's vitality. Never mind the negative net migration numbers. Brain circulation, like increasing global trade, fuels tremendous growth:

I once asked the boss of Tata Consulting Services, a gigantic Indian IT firm, how many of his top executives had worked or studied abroad. He replied: "All of them."

The world's most talented people are exceptionally mobile. When they move to America, they make it smarter, and that's not just because they are smart. It is also because migration creates connections.

Those connections are transaction pathways, lines of trust. Trade follows migrants. Long distance knowledge transfer occurs more easily between nationals and expatriates. Exporting talent spurs innovation in the homeland. Talent migration isn't a zero-sum game.

Peak Employment Pittsburgh

2011-12-21T15:58:00.000-05:00

Update: You can look at the decade employment data for the top 100 major metropolitan areas here.

Via Chris Briem (Null Space) on Twitter, some news that deserves to be repeated:

The Pittsburgh region is in select company, one of only five of the top 100 major metropolitan areas in the United States to hit their highest employment levels in a decade in October 2011.

Pittsburgh and four metro regions in Texas -- Austin, El Paso, Houston and McAllen-Edinburg --were the only ones in October 2011 to do so, according to an On Numbers analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Pittsburgh didn't bust because the region didn't boom. Employment has long been in the toilet. What's the big deal about a peak in Pittsburgh? Well, you could say the same things about a host of other lousy cities. How come none of them are also listed?

Secondary Migration Of Foreign Born Talent

2011-12-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

Does your shrinking city want more immigrants? Good luck competing with established gateways. How Saskatoon hacks migration:

“My friends live here, they said it’s a good place – for living, for job opportunities. …That’s why I chose Saskatoon,” said Mr. Ahmed, who arrived three weeks ago. “So far, so good.” ...

... “All the Bengalis I meet here,” said Mr. Ahmed in Saskatoon, “they either come from Toronto or Montreal.”

You go where you know. Toronto or Montreal is on the map internationally. Saskatoon is now on the map domestically. The game changer is that Bengali pioneer migration from Toronto to Saskatoon. A network is born, a chain between the two immigrant communities forged. The result is immigration without any national policy reform.

The Saskatoon strategy can work for the likes of Pittsburgh and Cleveland if this urban tier below global cities leverages its connectivity profile. Let New York and DC do the heavy lifting and then poach those immigrants. Talent is leaving global cities in droves seeking geographic arbitrage opportunities. Pittsburgh offers DC networking at Rust Belt prices. Domestic migration from DC to Pittsburgh is well established. Foreign born talent can and will follow the same path.

Urban Economic Development

2011-12-20T16:21:00.002-05:00

The metro economy is the national economy. Whenever I see a map with state-level data, I think about the cities driving the numbers. I don't care how Georgia is doing. Tell me more about Atlanta. Thus, I find this story about "urban-development legends" disconcerting:

The [Richard] Florida approach has also led to a renewed emphasis on education, on the assumption that an educated population will probably have much in common with a creative one. But improving local schools, while important in its own right, isn’t a proven economic-development tool, at least for struggling cities. After all, an educated population is an asset that can be lost. A city with poor development prospects is doing the right thing in educating its young effectively, of course, but it is also increasing the chances that they will leave, which is good for the students but makes the city even poorer. Indeed, the fact that education in America is usually financed locally means that richer cities are essentially free riders, importers of labor educated elsewhere.

Mario Polèse is reminding us that there are no silver bullets, but only economic development fads that usually fail to deliver. Florida or Michael Porter (Mr. Clusters) are flavors of the month peddling the same hubris as Robert Moses did in New York City. Warning heeded.

People develop, not places. Education is seen as a problem because of place-centrism in economic development. We may blunder when trying to improve the development of cities, but we succeed at developing people. We are very good at the latter. We needn't write about people-development legends. Educate girls, improve a nation.

If concern about brain drain is helping to drive policy, then the suggested approach to urban economic development will surely fail. How can cities better align with what is "good for the students"? The problem is that no one is asking such a question. Instead, we have to grapple with our limited capacity to improve the metro economy.

The dominant paradigm of economic development lends itself to some bizarre proclamations:

In the short term, labour mobility is an important tool for a prosperous national economy. In the long term, it can lead to permanently weakened regional economies requiring billions of dollars in annual transfer payments from more prosperous regions.

We need to break down barriers to labour mobility across Canada but at the same time we need to foster policies that promote economic growth in all regions of the country.

Atlantic Canada is unable to figure out how to make increased labor mobility (positive for Canada and its citizens) work for the region. Talent is a zero-sum game. Meanwhile, there is a great deal of literature in the arena of international economic development about how the source country can benefit from the outmigration of talent. Like education, the very act of migration economically develops a person. Encouraging someone to stay is analogous to pulling a student out of school.

The Cities Of Rural Iowa

2011-12-16T13:41:00.003-05:00

Apparently, Iowa is part of Appalachia. I'm not referring to hillbilly migration. Iowa has no real cities. From New Geography:

Expectedly, Bloom’s portrayal of Iowans hasn’t exactly had a warm reception. On Tuesday, the Daily Iowan’s front page had perhaps the most outrageous quote that Bloom’s article included, labeling rural Iowans as nothing more than “the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated [sic]) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘The sun'll come out tomorrow.’”

Yesterday, Sally Mason, the president of the University of Iowa, sent out a campus-wide letter reminding the students that she “disagrees strongly with and was offended by Professor Bloom’s portrayal of Iowa and Iowans”. She reminds us of the generosity that Iowans famously possess and of our “pragmatic and balanced” lifestyles. She also goes on to speak about Dubuque’s recent revitalization, the kinds of companies Iowa has attracted (namely Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids and Google in Council Bluffs), and the fact that Iowa City, at times called the “Athens of the Midwest”, is designated as the only “City of Literature” in the United States. It seems like Bloom forgot to take any of this into account.

He even goes so far as to berate and categorize Iowa’s Mississippi River cities as “some of the skuzziest cities” that he’s ever visited. Cities such as Burlington, Keokuk, Muscatine, and Davenport all seem to be more degraded, violent, and worse-off than some of the cities he’s used to having seen growing up in New Jersey, a place with cities that are labeled time and time again for their overall “skuzziness.” Has he ever driven to Newark?

Emphasis added. I do love place smack. Pop geographic abstractions are caricatures. Iowa is "rural", which means not "cosmopolitan". Newark is urban and dangerous. Has the New Geography author been to Newark lately? The rebound:

Newark’s problems extend beyond people fleeing its borders, and it could be decades before it’s known if the 2010 Census was a turning point. But stanching the bleeding provides hope. The city is attracting immigrants, has seen new public and private investment in development and may be benefiting from renewed interest in city living.

"What you are seeing is a common pattern in certain metropolitan areas — those that host a diverse urban economy and are well-positioned in the global economy," said Douglas Massey, director of the office of population research at Princeton University. "Newark has the distinct advantage of being in the New York metropolitan area, and much of its comparative advantage stems from that fact, and from the fact that land and housing are relatively cheap and Newark is an easy commute into Manhattan."

Massey said similar growth is taking place in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh and Boston, while metro areas like Buffalo, Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, more concentrated on single industries, have languished.

Camden would have been a more biting rejoinder to Professor Bloom's sweeping dismal of rural and urban Iowa. Iowa is poor. Brain drain is acute. No one would want to live there.

All of the above is nothing more than sticks and stones until you consider the migration angle. Would you move to Professor Bloom's Iowa? I wouldn't. When it comes to relocation decisions, reputation matters more than metrics, mesofacts über alles. Keep that in mind if you are trying to engineer migration to your shrinking city or dying county.

Hillbilly Urbanism

2011-12-15T18:48:00.003-05:00

Despite Brian O'Neill's best efforts, Pittsburgh isn't part of Appalachia. However, Pittsburgh is located in Appalachia. Confused? Don't be:

Hardly any part of the U.S. typifies the concept of rural like Appalachia. Even the most outdated historical stereotypes persist: hillside shacks, impoverished children with no shoes, moonshine. While the region certainly had a rural past, its present is actually much more urban. To explore this side of the region, two Appalachians have just launched a news website, The Hillville, to cover an increasingly urbanized Appalachia.

“A lot of it has to do with media perceptions and what the media covers,” says co-founder Beth Newberry. She says the stereotypes mainly arise from high-profile news coverage of the area’s poverty problems in the 1960s, stemming from a visit by President John F. Kennedy. “That was the first time when we got a lot of those images on TV. And what we saw were hungry people in hollows and coal miners and people walking on the side of the road to get to town. And those images stick.”

Newberry and Hillville co-founder Niki King are quick to say that these images are undeniably a part of Appalachian heritage. But they feel the dominance of these images and stereotypes has skewed the idea of what Appalachia is.

When fans of the Cleveland Browns call Steeler fans "hilljacks", they mean that Pittsburgh isn't a city. There isn't anything urbane about Yinzers. (There isn't anything urbane about Browns fans, either.) Anyplace outside of cosmopolitan Cleveland is hillbilly country. To the extent that Pittsburgh is rural, it is part of Appalachia.

That's what I meant by the post "Redefining Rural". Rural landscapes can look urban. Pittsburgh can be part of Appalachia as a city. Appalachia has cities. More from The Hillville:

Maybe it’s because we’re all attached to our region’s rural past, so imprinted are we with our grandparents stories, we can’t stop thinking or writing about it. Or, the issues that dominate conversation happen to be in our rural quarters, like mining, mountain top removal and ameliorating poverty. Maybe it’s because there are few universities that offer urban studies. Virginia Tech’s Department of Urban Affairs and Planning is the only one I’m aware of.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fact Emily Satterwhite bemoans in her essay “Seeing Appalachian Cities” in the journal Southern Changes. “Appalachian Studies literature has seldom discussed what it means to be city and mountain, or what it feels to inherit or embrace contradictory sets of values. Only in the past few years have some Appalachianists begun to address the need to better understand the presence of cities in the region.”

Emphasis added. Hillbilly urbanism is the expression of a paradox, the rural city. North or South, I feel at home in any Appalachian city. Perhaps it's the cozy confines of the surrounding hills and the blue collar traditions that still dominate the culture. There's also that diaspora thing. It isn't universal:

In addition to the cities located within the region, the [Hillville] site is also going to focus on cities outside the region heavily influenced by migration of Appalachian residents. Cincinnati, for example, has a large Appalachian community. One in four residents is of Appalachian descent.

“It had such a large outmigration of Appalachians for jobs that they carried their culture with them, as happens with a lot of migrants,” says Newberry. “For the past 40 years there’s been an urban Appalachian center, there’s neighborhoods centers, there’s whole neighborhoods that family units basically picked up and moved to and recreated the connections they had in the hills.”

We hilljacks like to take over foreign cities (and opposing stadiums). Thus, Cincinnati is now a shining example of hillbilly urbanism. You can see the cultural diffusion in the landscape. In Detroit:

They showed up in droves, seeking work and settling together in older Detroit neighborhoods or in growing suburbs such as Taylor and Hazel Park, which sometimes still gets called “Hazeltucky” — a nickname that’s no compliment.

The new arrivals were looked down upon, often considered backward. Their homes were called eyesores. Landlords sometimes refused to rent to them, fearful that dozens more would follow into the neighborhood. A survey conducted by Wayne State University in 1951 asked Detroiters to identify “undesirable people” in the city. “Poor Southern whites” and “hillbillies” were in a near tie with “criminals and gangsters” at the top of the list, well ahead of “transients,” “Negroes” and “drifters.”

When people look down on you for how you look and talk, you stay with your own. So the new arrivals stuck together and formed tight-knit groups. Their neighborhoods were so insular that many of their children, born and raised in Detroit, still speak with accents nearly as thick as those of their parents.

Detroit is part of Appalachia, too. But it isn't located in Appalachia, hear?

Saint Louis Brain Gain

2011-12-15T12:35:00.002-05:00

Every US city is in the market for young adults aged 25-34. I'm not a fan of the focus. But good news is good news. Looking up in St. Louis:

From 2005 to 2007 — the peak of the housing bubble — the most popular destinations for footloose young adults were places such as Phoenix; Atlanta; and Riverside, Calif., where homes were cheap and construction and real estate drove a lot of job growth. When the housing market crashed, those jobs dried up, and places with more balanced economies, such as Denver and Seattle, now top the migration charts. While St. Louis has certainly suffered in the recession, it has fared better than many places and is one of a handful of cities — such as Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Boston — to flip from negative migration to positive.

Changing fortunes? Keep in mind that not every Rust Belt city is sporting a brighter side to the migration story. I know from firsthand experience that Saint Louis has a wealth of urban charm that appeals to the geographically fickle.

St. Louis is one of America's most culturally distinct cities:

The Midland would not hold much interest to a person searching out accents were it not for three enclaves that have retained unique speech: St. Louis, Cincinnati and, in particular, Pittsburgh, which seems to be the Galapagos Islands of American dialect.

I didn't realize just how quirky the cuisine is in St. Louis until I worked with someone from the region. You've likely heard of New York and Chicago-style pizzas. How about St. Louis-style? A good history of St. Louis food history can be found here. If you want to try some St. Louis pizza, Imo's will ship some to you. Nothing says diaspora demand quite like using Fed Ex to get some comfort food.

Miami Is Dying

2011-12-13T09:24:00.003-05:00

Nothing says "brain drain" quite like the exodus of the 25-34 demographic cohort. Take a look at this map. Surely the end is nigh for Miami. The dire situation:

When Christina Caldwell moved back to her native Miami after living out west for six years, she planned to remain. But after two years of dead-end jobs as a bartender and receptionist, she left for California — for good. She now makes more than $100,000 a year at a post-production company in Venice Beach.

“I would never, ever move back to Miami,” she says.

Christina is not alone: South Florida is losing young people in droves, according to recent national and local studies. The area’s high unemployment rate, lack of innovative jobs and huge income gaps have created a perfect storm that many young people are unwilling to wait out.

You know it's bad when someone leaves Florida for the economic apocalypse of California. Migration data don't lie. People vote with their feet. Something is horribly wrong with Miami. Richard Florida explains:

“Miami does very well on diversity, amenity and lifestyle, but it doesn’t have the tech economy or business base to create the kind of job activity that will draw or retain young people,” said Florida, who resides in Miami Beach half the year.

Miami is tolerant (hold your snark), but lacks tech and talent. Given the strong urban amenities and lifestyle, the missing two T's are mystifying. We all know that tolerance + cool = Austin tech boom. What gives? Shrinking cities want to know.

Pittsburgh Retains Young Talent

2011-12-12T21:40:00.003-05:00

Financial Times has video about the Pittsburgh turnaround:

In the narrative of the American rust belt, Pittsburgh offers the opening monologue. In less than a decade, the city and surrounding region lost more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs, including nearly 70,000 in steel alone. But now, more than 30 years after the collapse of this former manufacturing titan, the city has emerged as one of the country's most dynamic and robust economies.

Emphasis added. The almost 4-minute clip isn't quite as glowing as that last sentence. If you are interested in a plugging the brain drain success story, then give the video a whirl. I feel nauseated.

Pittsburgh Commercial Real Estate Boom

2011-12-12T18:48:00.003-05:00

You want a piece of Pittsburgh's revitalization? Invest in the Golden Triangle:

“The city of Pittsburgh has gone through a major renaissance and become a very attractive market for real estate investors worldwide,” says Alexander Joerg, director at ING Real Estate Finance (USA), in a statement.

~~ING secured a $43 million loan for Westinghouse Tower "capital expenditures".~~ I got the story backwards. ING is the lender. Munich-based GLL Real Estate Partners owns the building and secured the loan. According to the above article, the money comes on the heels of $25 million spent improvements to the building. That's a lot of money for a dying downtown bleeding population.

Pittsburgh Connectivity

2011-12-11T09:29:00.002-05:00

I draw your attention to a Chris Briem (Null Space) post about Cleveburgh airports. The issue is connectivity with Europe. Status symbol or economic necessity? I'll use Charlotte versus Cincinnati to make the latter case:

Chiquita’s move to the Southeast is not simply about better weather in the North Carolina. Other economic factors in Cincinnati played into the company’s decision. Delta Airlines has greatly scaled back its flights in and out of Cincinnati, as it was once a major hub for the company. Travel to international locations and the West Coast became harder without access to direct flights. Charlotte, however, is the busiest hub for U.S. Airways, making it a prime location for a major operation like Chiquita.

So, Cleveland and Pittsburgh should subsidize flights to Europe in order to retain and attract corporations. I appreciate the value of direct flight options. I'm not convinced that supporting nonstop to Paris is a good idea. Cleveburgh needs to update its understanding of economic geography.

Pittsburgh has some surprising connectivity strengths. Number one is the link with DC:

Current federal rules will force JetBlue to use the slots it won at auction "for destinations within 1,500 miles of LaGuardia and 1,250 miles of Reagan," according to the Wall Street Journal. That's silly. America should—as Matthew Yglesias, a blogger, has argued—"let airports be airports." You could—and, I think, should, if it actually existed—take high-speed rail between Washington and New York, Washington and Pittsburgh, or Washington and Boston. But building a high-speed rail link between Washington and Los Angeles wouldn't be a very good use of resources, and taking a train between those two cities would take far longer than flying.

Emphasis added. I was curious about the inclusion of Pittsburgh in the discussion. The Yglesias post provides the answer:

The DC metro area, for example, is served by three airports. One of them, DCA, is much more centrally located than the other two but it’s also smaller and because it’s centrally located it can’t really be expanded. That airport features six daily flights to Pittsburgh, 245 miles away. There are also four flights per day from Dulles, and three flights per day from BWI. Clearly, there’s a lot of demand for going to Pittsburgh. Were there a high-quality DC-Pittsburg rail connection, many of these air trips would instead be done by train.

Emphasis added. I'm well aware of the substantial churn between Pittsburgh and DC. But the demand is greater than I expected. Pittsburgh is well connected to Washington. That makes a direct flight to Paris or London or Frankfurt redundant. Pittsburgh should be selling its ties to DC, not a direct flight to Paris.

Given the excellent connectivity to DC, why is a direct flight to Paris redundant? Saskia Sassen in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy:

Our geopolitical future is not going to be determined by the G-2 combo of the United States and China. It will run through about 20 emerging strategic urban centers, working as networks rather than conventional hierarchies. Topping the list?

1. Washington/New York/Chicago. These cities are becoming more important geopolitically than the United States is as a country, partly due to war fatigue and the rise of the global economy. Chicago is rising fast as a geopolitical actor; think of the state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao in January, when he stopped not just in Washington but also in Chicago.

Both Sassen and Edward Glaesser were asked to list "16 global cities to watch." DC makes the cut. Cities that can't (won't) get on the A-list of global importance should be concerned about links to those that are. Indianapolis and Milwaukee don't need to become Chicago. They need to better leverage the proximity and connectivity to Chicago.

In a global urban hierarchy, the A-list cities are going to have strong connectivity with each other. You move to one of them, you get better access to all of them. If you want better access to Washington but can't/won't move to the DC region, then move to Pittsburgh.

As for Cleveland, I recommend leveraging the connectivity to New York City. Some may argue for Chicago. Fine, but choose one and make it a centerpiece of the regional economic development strategy. Forget the golden hub years. The world has changed a great deal from that time period. Don't try to out-Charlotte, Charlotte.

Moneyball And Community Redevelopment

2011-12-10T14:02:00.003-05:00

David versus Goliath. Backwater versus global city. Small market versus big market. Moneyball speaks to it all:

The Moneyball thesis is simple: Using statistical analysis, small-market teams can compete by buying assets that are undervalued by other teams and selling ones that are overvalued by other teams.

Like many Rust Belt cities, Pittsburgh has a treasure trove of urban assets that have been long undervalued. That's because statistical analysis didn't go much further than an account of population. All you need to know is that people vote with their feet.

Fair enough, but how do those migrants make their decisions? Just how rational is that choice? Moneyball exploits conventional wisdom, looking at the "places" off of the common mental map. While you are trying to cram onto the crowded bus to Portland, Oregon, good jobs go unfilled in Fargo, North Dakota.

We move to New York City because it is the Yankees of the urban hierarchy. But that doesn't mean small markets can't compete with the alpha global cities. New York will throw gobs of money at trying to out-Silicon-Valley, Silicon Valley. Heading Upstate, Albany is carving out a world renown cluster in nanotech. There is plenty of undervalued talent available not living in NYC.

An example of overvalued talent might be in the financial sector. Right now, Portland is the best example I can think of as an overvalued destination. More sophisticated migrants can crunch the numbers and find a diamond in the rough. Welcome to Pittsburgh.

Pennsylvania Boom

2011-12-10T12:34:00.002-05:00

I've written plenty about Pittsburgh's run of good fortune. And I don't pay much attention to state level data. But what about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania's East Coast? Goodbye, New Jersey:

“The commuting zones for New York, New Jersey, and Maryland are expanding into Pennsylvania,” said Gordon De Jong, professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University.

According to De Jong, the Pennsylvania counties most benefiting from state-to-state moves are: Pike and Monroe, within commuting distance of the New York metropolitan labor market; Northampton, Bucks, and Lehigh, with proximity to New Jersey’s labor market; and York, Adams, and Franklin, within the Baltimore/Hagerstown metropolitan market.

The migration pattern is geographic arbitrage, the proximity dividend. Talent is trying to maintain big city access at a fraction of the cost. Allentown is the next Brooklyn. Think gentrification on a much larger scale.

Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania are benefiting from being near New York City and Baltimore/DC. Which makes the Pittsburgh boom all the more remarkable. Pittsburgh is the proximity dividend. Cleveland and even Columbus benefit from being near Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is reinventing itself in the middle of nowhere. Philadelphia is functionally a cheaper New York City. Regardless, the twin engines of Pennsylvania are propelling the state to the forefront of regional prosperity.

Proximity And Migration: Pittsburgh Over Portland

2011-12-09T10:13:00.003-05:00

Most moves are over short distances. For Pittsburgh, one expects a lot of churn with nearby metros. Generally, the data back up that law of migration. I'm interested in relocation that defies expectation. More migration analysis from Pitt's University Center for Social & Urban Research:

Here are a few additional maps that did not make it into the report itself. Below is a comparison of the pattern of regions in the US that were generating net migration into the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) over the period 2009-2010 and a comparable period 5 years earlier.

Click on the above link if you want to see the maps. The proximity effect is evident in both maps, particularly the one detailing inmigration to Pittsburgh for 2004-2005 (a peak of net outmigration for the Pittsburgh MSA). For 2009-2010, the striking feature is the substantial long-distance migration to Pittsburgh.

As a result of the relatively low rate of unemployment, Pittsburgh is attracting migrants on a national scale. Portland doesn't seem cooler than Pittsburgh at 8.4% (not seasonally adjusted). Portland is more Rust Belt than Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh-DC Connectivity

2011-12-08T09:17:00.002-05:00

Let the noodling begin. You can read the latest Pittsburgh migration report here. The most common statistic cited is net migration. I prefer total migration and a poster at City-Data.com posts the Pittsburgh data for crowd-sourced analysis. The "churn" between Pittsburgh and NYC now exceeds that of Pittsburgh and DC. From where I sit, that makes NYC the most important city for the Burgh Diaspora. There is a tectonic shift in my world view.

I'll explain why I think total migration is more important than net migration. From Chris Briem via Twitter:

Biggest Pgh migration population loss is still to DC Metro. What about in the future? From Governing on DC economy: http://bit.ly/rBsOUf

There are some dark clouds on the DC metro area's horizon. By comparison, Pittsburgh looks great. People move from places of higher unemployment to places of lower unemployment. Massive job losses in NOVA could fuel an exodus to Pittsburgh.

The spread in unemployment rate is only part of the story. The employment picture is great in North Dakota, better than in Pennsylvania. Why won't the economically displaced go to Fargo instead of Pittsburgh? Chain migration. We go where we know.

Inmigration plus outmigration is a measure of the connectivity between two metros. If there is a reversal of fortune, you can predict where the new residents will come from by looking at the total migration picture. Net migration isn't predictive. It is a past performance metric. Furthermore, net migration is a lagging indicator (see mesofacts). I'd rather look at employment data.

Pittsburgh Reset

2011-12-07T15:42:00.003-05:00

The migration numbers are finally in. The people have voted with their feet and ch-choose Pittsburgh! The telling graphic:

I think the meager positive inmigration looks much more impressive against the largely negative trend of the last 15 years. Migration tends to slow down during a recession and that effect appears to benefit Pittsburgh. This bolsters the less-people-are-leaving theory. However, as the economy picks up steam (still holding my breath about Europe) I expect the move to Pittsburgh to increase.

Exodus Pittsburgh will pick up, as well. The balance should remain positive. The tell will be 2011-12. (Assuming the EU doesn't melt into a full blown depression) That will be 7-years out from the last net outmigration peak. At that point, I'll be ready to claim that Pittsburgh migration is no longer countercyclical.

Redefining Rural

2011-12-06T13:34:00.002-05:00

Rural means not metropolitan. Most of the migration data I look at puts counties into two categories, metro and nonmetro. Generally, rural means less people. That's a big perception problem. Consider the oxymoron of rural Taiwan:

That Taiwan is a mountainous island no doubt partially accounts for its teeming population. But so too does the humid, tropical climate of the lower elevations. Tropical ecosystems are the most productive in the world, in part due to their year-round growing season and generous precipitation. It’s why the majority of Taiwan’s population lives on the flat, western sliver, and why farmers there don’t need large land holdings. It’s also why the Taiwanese countryside is as populous as some American suburbs.

As we whizzed by parked cars, rice paddies, and murky fish farms, I had an epiphany. I was in the country. Sweeping aside my preconceptions, I realized that “countryside” is inherently interpretable term, one that depends more on how the land is used than it does on population density.

The link between population and rural informs bad economic development policy. A rural county could have a few towns and even cities with high density. It's still a rural county in terms of dominant land use.

Density along with education is way for a community to be more productive with less population. Just look at the agricultural industry. The same trend is apparent in manufacturing. Why aren't rural towns trying to become denser and more efficient? That's the best way to attract more people.

Rise Of The Rust Belt Class

2011-12-05T18:22:00.003-05:00

Economic development is a lot like improving public schools. Moving the needle a little bit in the right direction takes a lot of time. The rate of change is that of mesofacts. After decades of nice, comfortable water, suddenly the frog is boiled and ready to serve. Tastes like chicken. City Chicken.

Once scarce and exotic, chicken is ubiquitous and bland. Introducing America's most livable metros:

But for some some reason, these lists never seem to quite mesh with reality. Financial Times writer Edwin Heathcote pointed out recently that many of the places that top the “most livable cities” lists are places no one really wants to live — it’s always (no offense, guys) Provo, Utah, and Ann Arbor, Mich., and Manchester, N.H. “What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No L.A. or H.K.?” asked Heathcote. To reduce a city to metrics “is to strip out all the complexity, all the friction and buzz that make big cities what they are.”

I want to double down on that passage and link on through to other side. From the pen of Heathcote:

In fact, Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more.

The punch line about Pittsburgh could cut both ways. PGH is no HK. Neither is the Steel City an antiseptic Emerald City like Vancouver. Detroit is the anti-Portland. The Creative Class craves Rust Belt Chic. Now serving City Chicken. Why are you paying so much for the real stuff? The cheaper rip off tastes much better.

The Rust Belt is finally boiling. The rankings will eventually catch up. Jane Jacobs would choose Pittsburgh over Austin. Somewhere, outside boring Toronto, Richard Florida weeps.

Pittsburgh Of Canada

2011-12-05T16:29:00.002-05:00

Two of Hamilton's (Ontario) sister cities are Flint and Pittsburgh. In fact, Hamilton could be considered the Pittsburgh of the Great White North. After all, Hamilton is the “Steel Capital of Canada”. But Hamilton isn't the Pittsburgh of Canada. That distinction belongs to Waterloo:

Waterloo, like hundreds of other small North American cities, experienced a golden moment when its main street bustled, when its architecture was comforting brick, and its people were employed and churchgoing and filled with optimism. But this proved transitory; the city grew on the fringes, and the schools moved to the edges, followed by residential and commercial development. Big boxes stores sprouted on farmland, and the main street crumbled. Industry withered, jobs disappeared, and young people fled to the big city. ...

... One key to Waterloo’s success has been the integration — economic, geographic, and cultural — between the universities and the city. Like the engineering and computer faculties, the architecture school is integrated into the community. “We are involved in almost everything,” Rick Haldenby says, “every major committee in Cambridge, Kitchener, and Waterloo. We’ve advised on virtually every major development in the region.” Kuwabara suggests that the [University of Waterloo] architecture school is the best in the country.

Waterloo went from manufacturing center to talent production cluster. As a result, the urban core was dramatically revitalized. Waterloo is a Rust Belt exception.

The magic of failure is really a fluke of geography. A major research university is located in the heart of a city and becomes the engine of economic redevelopment. Put the University of Michigan at the center of Detroit, you get Pittsburgh.

Staten Island Is Dying

2011-12-04T08:55:00.004-05:00

There is plenty of urban frontier left in New York City. Patti Smith doesn't care. She suggests fleeing the Big Apple and heading to Poughkeepsie or Detroit. If twentysomethings heed her call, then Staten Island will turn to dust:

The truth is that people, or at least young people, have been leaving Staten Island over the past 20 or so years. A study released this year by the public policy organization the Center for an Urban Future showed that there were about 2,000 fewer people ages 20 to 34 living on Staten Island in 2009 than there were in 1990. In 1990, that demographic represented 25.3 percent of the population, while now it represents just less than 20 percent. At the same time, the number of people older than 65 has been rising. By 2030, Staten Island is expected to have the highest percentage of senior citizens of any of the five boroughs. ...

... That Staten Island is depleting itself of young people has been a source of concern to the city, Seth W. Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, told me. The hope is that Homeport will be appealing enough and reasonable enough to retain and attract men and women in their 20s and 30s who might otherwise be inclined to move, especially to New Jersey.

Could the surrounding neighborhoods, Stapleton and Tompkinsville among them, become the next Williamsburg, as some residents have speculated? In some sense this seems as unlikely as the welcoming of a Wal-Mart on Madison Avenue. Despite Homeport’s proximity to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, the neighborhood is still far away from well, Williamsburg, and the other neighborhoods in which the young and trend-setting congregate.

Perhaps even more relevant, Staten Island is not an incubator of preciousness; it seems allergic to preciousness. Before there were artisanal-cheese mongers in Williamsburg there were painters, performance artists, tattoos, eccentrics, an alternative-culture elite. Staten Island has a lower share of residents with bachelor’s degrees than any borough except the Bronx.

Emphasis added. Ah, to be an incubator of preciousness. Forget Williamsburg. Staten Island would kill to be the next Pittsburgh or Scranton. Those two cities are where suburban dreams find urban expression. As the life cycle turns, people are skipping Staten Island altogether and lighting out for the Rust Belt frontier.

More seriously, Staten Island is trying to capture market leakage. Regarding migration, this is a bad idea. Staten Island is competing with Cleveland for the economic refugees pushed out of Brooklyn. I doubt Staten Island stands a chance. You go where you know and Staten Island might as well be in Mongolia.

Put People Before Boundaries

2011-12-03T14:11:00.003-05:00

There are a variety of approaches to economic development. There are niche considerations, such as technology-based. When I encounter a story about economic development, I think about whether it is place-based or people-based. The more common and conventional thinking concerns territory. How do we improve Pittsburgh or the State of Pennsylvania? We can, in part, solve this problem by investing in people (e.g. education). A better workforce means a better Pittsburgh. That's still place-based.

For people-based approaches, a better Pittsburgh means a better workforce. Pittsburgh's raison d'etre is personal economic development. You would move to Pittsburgh in order to maximize your own potential. The attraction isn't the availability of jobs. Let me use the gentrification of Brooklyn to help me explain:

When I moved to Brooklyn, Fifth Avenue, only three blocks from my house, was a bleak expanse of brazen drug dealing, liquor bodegas with cashiers sitting inside Plexiglas cages, and Salvation Army outposts. By the mid-1990s, the dealers and robbers and worse had been moved along, either to upstate prisons or to less antisocial activities. The avenue is now the very image of gentrification, overflowing with hip boutiques and restaurants, many owned by young entrepreneurs. About a mile away from me is Myrtle Avenue, a long stretch that people once called “Murder Avenue.” These days, the street is safe enough to attract young businesses, much as Fifth Avenue did a decade ago. The same goes for parts of Red Hook, Bushwick, Gowanus, and beyond. Only 15 years ago, Bed-Stuy was about as inviting to white-collar home buyers as Islamabad. After the 81st Precinct, which encompasses the eastern half of the neighborhood, saw a 64 percent plunge in violent crime between 1993 and 2003, the lawyers, editors, artists, and nonprofit administrators started venturing in.

Emphasis added. Using the place-based paradigm, transform Murder Avenue to Myrtle Avenue and gentrification will follow. A cool place will attract talent. To some extent, that's true. But that's only part of the story, the most recent development. The Park Slope pioneers who moved to Murder Avenue saw personal potential in a tortured landscape:

This new workforce needed somewhere to live. A surprising number turned up their noses at New Rochelle and West Orange. Perhaps their college social-sciences courses had taught them to write off the suburbs as “alienating.” Perhaps the influence of Kennedy-era European sophistication led them to scorn the purportedly tacky conformity of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and to grimace at the sterile white-brick apartment buildings rising in Manhattan to house their kind. Unlike their immigrant parents, who associated city life with poverty, teeming tenements, and foul streets, they saw in the old urban areas the “authenticity” and “community” that the suburbs and the high-rise city lacked. They looked across the Brooklyn Bridge and found walkable, human-scale, leafy, and historic streets with houses displaying the craftsmanship of a seemingly more gracious age. (In reality, the elaborate woodwork in my neighborhood, at any rate, was prefabbed by Victorian developers.)

As their numbers increased, the professionals crossed Brooklyn Heights and trekked deeper into the blue-collar borough. Osman refers to the settlers as “romantic urbanists”; they—or should I say “we”?—were looking for an organic connection to history and an echo of rural life. With the help of a surging real-estate industry, we gave our new enclaves bucolic names—Heights, Hills, Gardens—and settled in happily, though uneasily, next to our less privileged neighbors.

The people come before the place. Or, the people make the place. Richard Florida has always had it backwards. The same goes for place-based economic developers. If you fail to go far enough back in a community's history, then you won't see the folly in your field of dreams. People develop, not places.

Libertarian advocates discover a new framework:

As will become evident later in this paper, whatever the stated purpose of industrial policies the effect has been to recompense individuals for staying where the jobs have disappeared—rather than helping them to relocate to where the new economic opportunities are emerging. That is precisely the opposite of the strategy that takes best advantage of nationhood. Being a sovereign country means that both labour and capital are able to move freely to where they can be best utilized. There are no border controls and no exchange rate considerations.

Current strategies subsidize inefficiencies; create labour shortages and bid-up wage rates in growth regions; and inflate public sector employment. Often the chief beneficiaries are the multiplicity of local and regional development bureaucracies. The fundamental question to be addressed is whether individual Nova Scotians believe that they are better served by accepting 90 percent of the national income to remain in stagnating industries or whether they would prefer relocation assistance to move to growth centers and experience substantial income enhancement.

To put it somewhat differently—current strategies run a risk of putting geographic regions ahead of individual fulfillment.

Emphasis added. In the United States, I've noticed libertarian think tanks putting "geographic regions ahead of individual fulfillment" as a rule. State policy is paramount. There are migration winners and losers. Outmigration is a problem that libertarian policies can address. The think tank sponsoring the above paper also has a history of talking out of both sides of its mouth:

It must be nice to work for AIMS. On one day you can complain about the government for trying to do things that restrict out-migration and on the other you can hammer them because of the results of out-migration. Cake and eat it too. Where do I sign up?

AIMS refers to Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. I'm convinced that AIMS is only interested in stopping government from picking winners and losers. I can see a possible thread of logical coherence. I don't see any evidence of AIMS making such a case. In fact, the author of the AIMS paper makes a strong argument for government intervention. Government should assist people, not attract industry. That's a heavy, visible hand guiding the labor market:

The most constructive people-oriented strategy of government should be to help create an inclusive labour force with appropriate skills and the flexibility to locate to where their personal economic and social wellbeing is maximized. If that proves to be outside the province, it may be a loss to Nova Scotia—but to those individual Nova Scotians it would be a personal gain.

Championing free trade and all that, I figure one is familiar with the concept of reciprocity. I guess not. Modelling the talent trade as a zero sum game is a mistake. Amusingly, AIMS is wide of the mark. The paper fails to move beyond criticism of the status quo and point the region in a more constructive direction. I doubt AIMS gets much traction.

Once again, Brooklyn gentrification to the rescue:

There are numerous reasons for the disappointing employment stats. For one thing, Brooklyn’s young companies often appeal only to niche markets, usually people like their owners. For another, they benefit from the technology-improved productivity of manufacturing throughout the United States; it takes fewer workers to produce beer or chocolate than it did in the past. And if the firms do grow and hire a lot more workers, chances are that they’ll relocate. It’s extremely expensive and endlessly aggravating to transport raw materials into, and finished products out of, a borough strangled by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Young businessfolks also face the familiar hurdles of all New York City firms: high taxes and burdensome regulations. It’s enough to bum out even the most idealistic hippie-entrepreneur.

This is a great example of legacy thinking, stubborn mesofacts obscuring a geography of opportunity. Brooklyn's most important product is talent. The borough is a factory and the widget is people. The raw material is the well-educated, the value add result is a successful freelancer. From the Free Exchange blog:

What Mr Katz describes is a world where a good job is not lifetime employment, where your employer takes care of you from age 20 until death (with a very generous pension). He describes people responsible for their own economic destiny. That may seem unsettling, because the old regime appeared to offer more stability, though that stability may have been an illusion. Actually the new way may offer more certainty because people look out for themselves, rather than being vulnerable to changes that impact their employer. The nature of work constantly evolves. The company man was a post-war construct. The self-sufficient artisan is actually more consistent with historical labour markets.

I think this bodes well for the younger generation. Having spent most of the 1990s hearing that my generation was made up of lazy, slackers doomed to failure (we showed them!), I hate it when uniform characteristics are foisted on an entire generation. But I did enjoy Noreen Malone’s recent New York Magazine article chronicling her generation’s economic woes. Millennials get a lot of grief for allegedly being hard-working, yet entitled and self-involved. But in order to build your human capital and be that modern, competitive worker it seems you must believe you’re a little special. The company man was content to be a cog in the machine, the modern worker must take pride in his talents.

Emphasis added. A better Brooklyn means a better workforce. In order to build your human capital, you move from Paducah, KY to Williamsburg. You become a successful freelancer and then return home to raise a family, bringing your Brooklyn network with you. Those Brooklyn-born firms that do grow have to relocate somewhere.

Ruin Porn

2011-12-02T16:52:00.002-05:00

Ruin porn, you know it when you see it. Using the term "Rust Belt" in the pejorative sense is ruin porn. To some extent, the idea of a Great Lakes megaregion is ruin porn. Broad brush strokes over Akron, Ohio:

Of course, the ad was not real. It was a lethal trap. At least three of the men who apparently answered it are now dead, their bodies buried in graves on the "farm" – which turned out to be land owned by a coal mine. Or hidden near the blighted city of Akron, deep in the heart of Ohio's Rust Belt – itself a grim icon of tough times and lost American glories.

Emphasis added. If I'm reaching for a grim icon of urban blight and faded glory, Akron doesn't spring to my mind. The above prose is artistic license, not journalism. It's a stock cliché, a conventional geographic stereotype. Sea serpents are swimming around in Flyover Country. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Ruin porn is powerful. Ann Arbor becomes a grim icon of tough times and lost American glories. Vibrant startups can't attract talent.

Politicians love ruin porn. If you want to get elected, then tell voters how you will plug the brain drain. Or, make wild claims about how fracking saved the Rust Belt and put the lid back on Hell.

Meanwhile, back in the land of eggheads, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) reports an unemployment rate of 6.3%. The region is outperforming the likes of Denver, Minneapolis, and Charlotte. It's on par in terms of job growth with Boston. No matter, deep in the heart of Pennsylvania's Rust Belt is a cauldron of serial killers. Times are so desperate that the unemployed are moving to Pittsburgh:

But, seriously, you might think, who would pack up all their bags to live in an isolated trailer for a few hundred dollars a week? The answer, in the America of 2011, is depressingly simple: lots of people. Desperate people, jobless people, poor people, people with little to lose, single people, people with struggling families to support, people willing to ignore the warning signs and take a gamble.

How else do you explain it?

Age Of Return Migration

2011-12-01T14:14:00.002-05:00

The Rural Rebound is a dusty story that sounds like news. That's especially true when the weaver of discourse is researcher Ben Winchester. Watch "Rewriting the Rural Narrative" on Lakeland Public Television. The interviewer is visibly surprised by Winchester's findings. Not much has changed over the last 40 years. Winchester offers only a shift in framework. Brain drain becomes brain gain. The interviewer can hardly believe his ears.

Very quietly, until now, return migrants have been transforming the economy in the rural hinterlands and around the world. In Korea:

Kim was one of more than a dozen American entrepreneurs I met in Seoul. They were the founders of media start-ups, video-game start-ups, financial-services start-ups, manufacturing start-ups, education start-ups, and even a start-up dedicated to producing more start-ups. "It's a big trend here," says Henry Chung, managing director of DFJ Athena, a venture capital firm with offices in Seoul and Silicon Valley. "There's a growing number of students studying overseas and coming back."

Korea is like a rural community. The culture is adamantly risk averse. There isn't a significant influx of outsiders. The most entrepreneurial leave. Return migrants are the lifeblood of transformation and prosperity.

Sticking with the above Korean brain circulation article:

In September, Kim raised $500,000 from investors in South Korea. His goal is to raise enough to qualify for an American investor visa.

He isn't the only entrepreneur who talks about coming to the United States. "I know for sure that I want one more stint in the States," says Shin. He is curious to find out if he can replicate his success in America's larger, more competitive market; and even though he now speaks passable Korean, he has never stopped thinking of himself as an American. "I don't know when, and it's too early to think about ideas, but I know I'll probably end up going back and forth," he says. "I think it's possible to do stuff in both places."

The migrant's connection to two places is the missing part of rural narrative rewrite. Relocation isn't a zero sum game. The two communities both benefit from the talent trade.

Rust Belt Development Paradigm

2011-11-30T14:26:00.002-05:00

Pejorative or emblem of pride? The term "Rust Belt" cuts both ways. Art as a medium for the debate:

Upon entering the Out of Fashion exhibit currently on display at the Southeastern Center for Contem- porary Art, the first set of objects that catches the viewer’s eye is Gabrielle Duggan’s “Spectrum,” a commentary on “the ideals and values embedded in one’s sense of fashion,” according to exhibit curator Steven Matijcio.

Duggan, a Buffalo native who now resides in Raleigh, pays homage to her experience growing up in the Rust Belt of upstate New York by arranging mannequins wearing garments comprised of various combinations of alpaca, wool, cotton, hemp, and Tussah silk.

The eight garments reflect degrees of protection and vulnerability and challenge the viewer to decide if Duggan’s arrangement reflects progress or regress.

“Playing upon our inherent tendency to rank the individual components of a line-up, Duggan creates a multi-dimensional spectrum of materials, techniques and utility that remains open to interpretation,” Matijcio states. “Which direction represents upgrade is left for the viewer to decide.”

Emphasis added. Blight or opportunity? Ruin porn or art? Shrinking or developing? The Rust Belt is a paradox.

We may cling to and valorize a blue collar ethos. In that sense, Rust Belt is a pejorative. The progressive Rust Belt mentality is one of seeing the benefits of brain drain. Brownfields are the new greenfields. Rank away, Newsweek.

Rust Belt Chic: Whiskey Rebellion

2011-11-30T09:26:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was in the Laurel Highlands of Southwestern Pennsylvania. The conversation around the fire turned to moonshine. Apparently, the up and coming country generation is rediscovering its distillery heritage. Rust Belt culture is cool.

If you were to drive America's Whiskey Trail, you would spend part of your trip in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Distilling spirits is one way to foster a deep connection with the region. The trend is taking root in Pittsburgh:

Wigle Whiskey celebrates a grand opening this Friday, offering the public a chance to taste the first Pittsburgh-distilled spirit since prohibition.

Eric Meyer, co-owner of Wigle Whiskey, says the celebration will include a three-in-one tour: a walk through the production space and the entire whiskey process, from grain to bottle; a history of the Whiskey Rebellion, as told through the distillery’s namesake Philip Wigle; and a tasting room primer on how to drink whiskey.

About Mr. Meyer:

The unshaven face of Wigle, Eric has hailed the micro-alcohol flag from all corners of the world--including working for a microbrewery in Kyrgyzstan and imbibing at many microdistilleries while working in the Pacific Northwest. In summer 2010, Eric heeded the call to start his own micro-operation and spent 6 weeks traveling back by train to his hometown Pittsburgh, visiting distilleries on his way. He arrived home in July 2010 and has had a bottle in his hand ever since.

One more quoted passage, from an interview with Meyer:

Why do you choose Pittsburgh as your home?
I grew up here, left, lived in a bunch of other cities, realized none of them were as unique as Pittsburgh, and moved back.

Part of what makes Pittsburgh unique is the whiskey tradition. It's an attractive quality that not only calls expatriates home, but brings in newcomers. The power of place is a great Rust Belt asset, one that has been ignored for too long. Outside the Rust Belt, there are just a bunch of other cities.

Trendy Un-Trendy Rust Belt

2011-11-29T09:42:00.002-05:00

Boston is dying. Residents are intolerant, despite what Richard Florida claims. But it's the high price of housing driving talent to the Rust Belt:

People aren't welcoming when you come here and they always say if you don't like it- then leave when you address the serious issues of the area.

And housing is one of them. All my friends and family think the prices for the subpar housing stock here are laughable.

If there's one thing I have learned in my travels- its that the un-trendy and "depressing" places are much more livable, affordable and welcoming than any of our better, more cool areas.

I know people who live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, Upstate New York and Wisconsin who are all infinitely happy and better off financially than those of us who live in the "better places" like Boston, NYC, DC or California. I want to cry when I go visit friends in Pittsburgh who earn much less than what we bring in but have a quality of life probably double that of ares because there housing is affordable, daycare is affordable, taxes are affordable, etc.

Emphasis added. Oh to be uncool Pittsburgh. The Creative Class is fleeing Boston in search of geographic arbitrage. All the hip urban amenities are failing to stop the brain drain.

Instead of investing in a contemporary opera house in order to attract talent, put your money down on people. The allure is personal opportunity, not a vibrant nightlife. Pittsburgh is better than Boston.

Sun Belt Zombie Sprawl

2011-11-28T12:20:00.002-05:00

Nowhere is American decline as evident as it is in the Sun Belt. Neo-Marxists keep trotting out Detroit to demonstrate the folly of global capitalism. Instead, they should look at Phoenix:

In the West, a comparison between Detroit and Phoenix is a hard sell.

"I tend to assume that we will grow again," said Jim Holway, from the Tucson-based Sonoran Institute, a group that promotes sustainable development in the Rocky Mountain region.

"Is it possible the forces that drove the growth in the West really have come to an end, and we’re going to face decline? I think it’s unlikely, but I can’t say it’s impossible," said Holway, a longtime planner in the region. "Certainly this is a time for creative thinking."

Emphasis added. The migration economy is dead. Richard Florida shoveling the dirt on the Sun Belt:

If mobility was once considered to be a quintessentially American attribute, it is now one that only an elite sliver of the population can lay claim to. It is both a significant shift and a sobering one.

All that is left is boutique migration. Population growth is almost meaningless in such a climate. But don't expect the Sun Belt boomtowns to embrace the paradigm shift. Steel will come back. American's need to make things again. Just buy local. The migrants will return.

The "creative thinking" is nothing more than wishful thinking. We've seen it all before in the Rust Belt. I'm having a hard time finding a Pittsburgh in all the greenfield mess. Which city might emerge in 40-years as successfully reinventing itself?

As for brownfield cities, even those located in the Sunburn Belt, the future looks bright. These regions have figured out how to grow the economy without robust inmigration. The revenge of the uncool city is coming to fruition.

Brain Drain Belt

2011-11-26T12:31:00.003-05:00

Talent is stuck in the Rust Belt. The headlines cry "brain drain" but the real problem is that too few people are leaving. Richard Florida on the crisis:

There is a distinctive “stuck belt” across the middle of the country running from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, down through West Virginia and into the Sunbelt states of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Mobility is largely a bi-coastal—plus Rocky Mountain state—phenomenon.

America can be divided into two distinct classes, the stuck and the mobile. The mobile possess the resources and the inclination to seek out and move to locations where they pursue economic opportunity. Too many Americans are stuck in places with limited resources and opportunities. This geography of the stuck and mobile is a key axis of cleavage in the United States.

Emphasis added. The mobile are able to move to places where one can best explore personal economic development. There is a glut of underutilized talent in the Rust Belt. That's good news for industry. Captive labor is cheap.

Being stuck highlights the problem with retention strategies. It's a poor use of valuable talent. Shrinking cities are struggling because of too little brain drain and not enough attraction of the mobile class.

US Talent Exports Growing

2011-11-23T10:07:00.003-05:00

The United States is very good at importing talent. Exporting talent? Not so good. That's changing:

I can't say I was surprised when I heard that Indian startup entrepreneur Kunal Bahl was touring U.S. colleges on a hunt for MBA talent for his New Delhi-based digital commerce company. ...

... Some might fret over a U.S. brain drain and see the trend of graduates leaving the U.S. as another black mark against globalization. But the fact is the U.S. economy could benefit from the global seasoning that future business leaders are gaining by working abroad. "These guys may come back and probably will come back," said Bahl, who visited Stanford, Wharton, Columbia University and Northwestern University. "They'll add value to companies here."

As this trend snowballs, I expect hysteria to follow. Instead, we should be helping native graduates find their way to India or other rapidly developing countries. Working abroad is a wonderful way to develop personally.

It stands to reason that talent isn't relocating to India because US cities aren't cool enough or tolerant enough. Please, no more sticky place boondoggles. We move to improve. International migrants make great entrepreneurs. Exporting talent will spur innovation in the United States.

Cleveland Return Migration

2011-11-22T08:56:00.002-05:00

You can go home again. This Thursday, over 35 million Americans will do exactly that. The crowded airports and jammed highways demonstrate the power of the link between two places. Co-location is normal and good for the economy.

Thanksgiving is an appropriate time to celebrate return migration. The long homecoming weekend is indicative of much more than US geographic mobility. Fittingly, Global Cleveland has seized the moment:

Potential "boomerangs'' are the target of a talent attraction effort under the aegis of the Cleveland Leadership Center. This Saturday, the group is sponsoring a networking event aimed at college students and recent graduates at the Corner Alley downtown -- intersection of East 4th Street and Euclid Avenue -- from 3 to 5 p.m. Those who attend can meet with corporate recruiters and civic leaders to learn more about opportunities in Cleveland -- and they'll be only a couple of blocks away from the Christmas lighting celebration on Public Square. If that sounds like something for you -- or for your children who'll be home for the holiday -- go to cleveleads.org for more information or to buy tickets.

Emphasis added. Networking return migrants (and encouraging more return migration) is the hot new trend in talent economics. If you are still pouring money into sticky places, then you have missed the boat. You are at least a decade behind the curve. I recommend selling your Richard Florida library at the next flea market and using the proceeds to buy "The Great Brain Race" by Ben Wildavsky. People develop, not places.

Take Two: Rust Belt Equals Brain Drain

2011-11-21T17:28:00.002-05:00

Whatever you want to call the current economic and financial mess we are in, the dramatic reshuffling has favored the Rust Belt. Such faint praise reads like a backhanded compliment. Making the rounds last week:

Reversing the Brain Drain
During the high-flying years of the 1990s and early-2000s, the highly educated were pouring into tech hubs (San Jose and Boston), quality-of-life capitals (Portland and Austin), and centers of rapid growth (Las Vegas and Phoenix). Rust Belt cities were bleeding brainpower.

Then the housing bubble burst. Suddenly, those with newly minted diplomas weren't so eager to fly the coop. A report released this year by William Frey of the Brookings Institution documents the change – Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Baltimore all saw gains in migration of college-educated adults between 2007 and 2009, while Buffalo and Cleveland stemmed the outward migration. The shift, Richard Florida observed in The Atlantic, “put older Rust Belt metros back on the talent map.”

Rust Belt cities weren't really bleeding brain power. For Pittsburgh, the shock came in the early 1980s. Long after the exodus ended, the demographic hole continued to echo. Population loss equals brain drain.

The recession comes around and talent is reluctant to leave. If there is no boom, there is no bust. The Rust Belt is saved by greater misery everywhere else. Eventually, order will be restored and the flight of the Creative Class will pick up where it left off. Let's sweep the following under the rug:

The country's metropolitan economies overall saw GDP growth of 2.5 percent last year, according to the Bureau of Economic Statistics. But Pittsburgh's GDP grew 4.1 percent, Buffalo's 3 percent, Baltimore's 3.3 percent, and Indianapolis' 3.6 percent. And while job growth has been dismal nationwide, it is better than average in many of the Rust Belt cities.

The sweeping geographic generalization is troubling. The relatively strong economic growth coupled with lower unemployment than the national average isn't ubiquitous throughout the Rust Belt. There are a few very bright spots. Rust Belt stereotypes give birth to poorly done stories.

On the whole, Rust Belt cities have struggled to attract the highly educated. Richard Florida had it wrong from the start. Instead, he perpetuated the brain drain myth and bolstered a lot of bad policy:

Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and my current hometown of Pittsburgh were at the forefront of the organizational age. The cultural and attitudinal norms of that age became so powerfully ingrained in these places that they did not allow the new norms and attitudes associated with the creative age to grow up, diffuse and become generally accepted. This process, in turn, stamped out much of the creative impulse, causing talented and creative people to seek out new places where they could more readily plug in and make a go of it.

Go right ahead and lump all of them into together. Rust Belt cities are pushing out talent, "bleeding brainpower". It was nonsense then and even less true now.

Rust Belt Equals Brain Drain

2011-11-19T09:31:00.002-05:00

Shale gas boosters are literally banking on the durability of Rust Belt mesofacts. The economy is chronically depressed and young adults are leaving in droves. If you want to score political points, then shout "brain drain!" Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley stoking those very fires:

"Pennsylvania has a challenge to continue to be good stewards of Penn's Woods, but we also have an obligation to the truth, and that we put terms like 'Rust Belt' and 'Brain Drain' onto the ash heap of history," said Cawley.

Concerning the truth, Cawley can't resist tall tales. What that says to me is that he is incapable of making a strong case for shale gas. Cawley must lie in order to convince PA residents that drilling is in their best interests. An obligation to the truth doesn't apply to Cawley. It only applies the anti-fracking crowd.

Cawley is implying that any delay in drilling will exacerbate the brain drain and prolong the Rust Belt misery gripping cities such as Pittsburgh:

State or municipal intervention needs to be smart as well as properly resourced. Prof Glaeser is scathing about the efforts to rehabilitate Detroit, for example, where money was thrown at construction but achieved negligible results.

By contrast, Pittsburgh has transformed itself from a city decimated by the decline of the steel industry on which it was built into a contemporary metropolis of tech clusters and vibrant neighbourhoods. Its success seems to result from a lucky combination of careful, consistent investment and seed money for start-ups from the Pittsburgh Technology Council (established perceptively early in 1983), while it is an ethnically mixed city of lively and distinctive neighbourhoods defined by good restaurants and cafés and, critically, cheap property prices.

Marcellus Shale drilling has pulled Pittsburgh off of the slag heap. It's a jobs bonanza that has people from all over the nation rushing to Southwestern Pennsylvania. The sooty skies and chronic sense of dread that defined Pittsburgh in 2007 is gone. The talent exodus is over. Pittsburgh is an Appalachia boom town.

The rest of Pennsylvania pay heed. You must support drilling as the City of Pittsburgh has or the brain drain will continue. Do not damn your children to a Rust Belt fate. Frack, baby frack.

Glorious Pittsburgh

2011-11-18T17:27:00.002-05:00

The following comment from the City-Data.com forum deserves a few more eyes:

This is Max from Scenic America. This thread came up in my Google Alerts so I thought I'd chime in.

We really enjoyed our time in Pittsburgh last weekend. The William Penn was one most spectacular hotels I've ever stayed in. The lobby is jaw-dropping and there is an astounding mural inside the Terrace Room restaurant depicting the battle of Fort Pitt.

We met at the Allegheny Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club down the block, which itself is a remarkable example of preserved tenement housing sandwiched in between a couple skyscrapers.

In regards to the comment from the article about the newspaper boxes: the reporter was pressing for "something we didn't like," and the boxes were an off-handed comment from one of the board members.

The proposal to digitize the Bayer sign atop Mt Washington is a real cause for concern. To look up at Mt Washington and see a glowing advertisement would be a real shame and would quite literally ruin the view.

For those interested in the billboard issue in Pittsburgh I urge you to join Scenic Pittsburgh. There is a proposal to ban digital billboards and reduce other billboard blight in the city that will be heard on Monday, Nov. 21: [url=http://www.facebook.com/ScenicPittsburgh.org?ref=pb]Scenic Pittsburgh - Community - Pittsburgh, PA | Facebook[/url]

Sorry I don't have more specifics on the legislation or hearing, but I'm sure if you contact Scenic Pittsburgh they can fill you in.

Normally, I would have cropped the comment. I like to emphasize the key part of the passage. I decided to leave it unmolested. I don't want to be accused of editorializing.

The bit about the William Penn Hotel is how I feel about Pittsburgh. I wasn't born in Pittsburgh. I didn't live in the region for any substantial amount of time, maybe 6-months. I've been a resident of Greater Denver and Greater DC for over the last 15-years. I'm attracted to the city because Pittsburgh is "jaw-dropping" beautiful.

How The Talent Economy Works

2011-11-17T13:09:00.002-05:00

Talent is the new oil. The latest issue of The Economist is out with immigrant networks gracing the cover. Digging deeper into the magazine reveals a useful abstraction of the emerging talent economy:

Such migrants do not merely benefit from all the new channels for communication that technology provides; they allow this technology to come into its own, fulfilling its potential to link the world together in a way that it never could if everyone stayed put behind the lines on maps. No other social networks offer the same global reach—or commercial opportunity.

This is because the diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the flow of information across borders: a Chinese businessman in South Africa who sees a demand for plastic vuvuzelas will quickly inform his cousin who runs a factory in China.

Second, they foster trust. That Chinese factory-owner will believe what his cousin tells him, and act on it fast, perhaps sealing a deal worth millions with a single conversation on Skype.

Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities.

The global economy is being rebuilt on this network infrastructure. Face-to-face yields the stage to distance trust. Dysfunctional supply chains give way to faster and larger capital flows. Geographic arbitrage is practical, logistically possible. Diaspora networks have a huge competitive advantage.

The Economist has a great graphic to hammer home the point:

China exports talent and, as a result, receives FDI from the destination country. That's a substantial return on investment in brain drain. Brain drain promotes economic development.

Rust Belt Chic Houston

2011-11-16T13:59:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of old school sportswriting. Frank Deford was the one who converted me. In 1985, Deford wrote a story about boxer Billy Conn:

Billy is a city guy, a Pittsburgh guy. Billy says, "Pittsburgh is the town you can't wait to leave, and the town you can't wait to get back to."

Deford captured the Pittsburgh I never knew. But Conn's quote gets at an eternal essence. In that Deford tradition, ESPN's Wright Thompson takes aim at the Burgh Diaspora:

Their kids grew up hearing about blast furnaces, about the way dockworkers and millworkers ate Primanti Brothers sandwiches and, of course, about the Steelers. Many claim the fans at away games are more raucous than fans at games in Pittsburgh. For three decades, largely through this team, they've kept something alive in themselves and their children. Says Heidi, "They know that even though they live here, home is Pittsburgh."

Bret Tirlia is looking at Penn State and Pitt for college. When he and his dad, Tim, roll into the Fort Pitt Tunnel, they crank "Renegade," the Styx song played in the fourth quarter of Steelers games, accompanied by a black-and-white montage of crushing hits. The song has a long, eerie buildup, just singing and a kick drum -- "Oh, Mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law" -- before it quickens and explodes with guitars.

Tim and Bret time their exit from the tunnel so the skyline appears as the full band takes off. The soundtrack allows them to see the city as it is today and as it once was.

Even in Houston, home is Pittsburgh.

Thompson interviewed me for the piece. I didn't let on that I love his work. I'm giddy that one statement I gave him made the final cut:

"The ethnic enclaves of Little Pittsburgh exist most poignantly in tailgate parking lots of away games," says Jim Russell, a Western Pennsylvania-born geographer who studies geopolitics and the relationship between migration and economic development. "That's where you see people doing the performances of culture. The blue-collar Pittsburgh that you see flashed on the screen during games exists only in Steeler bars and in the visitors' parking lot."

Really, my big contribution was helping with the copious amounts of information about the exodus from Pittsburgh. The ESPN fact checker who contacted me is from Pittsburgh and she, too, expressed her desire to move back home one day. She was also exasperated with all the details in the story that had to be triangulated. I hope I didn't steer her down any blind alleys.

I consider Wright Thompson to be a purveyor of Rust Belt Chic. I tried to talk to him about the trend. He didn't seem to cotton to the term. However, he understands the concept:

A recent story I wrote on Cleveland came out of a conversation at dinner with John Walsh about disappearing America, another subject that really fascinates me. I’ve come back to it again and again: Nazareth, Texas; Yankee Stadium; even Vince Lombardi’s house.

"Believeland" is the best articulation of Rust Belt Chic I've seen in print. Disappearing America lives on in shrinking cities. Hipsters such as Anthony Bourdain literally eat it up. Thompson on the expanding cult of the pierogi:

A woman and her son, both in Pittsburgh gear, stop to gawk. "We're making Primanti Brothers sandwiches," Lucas says proudly.

"What's that?" Joan Roach drawls.

Sara and Lucas think the same thing. "Are you from Pittsburgh?" she asks.

"My dad lived there all his life," Joan replies.

"You ever tried a pierogi?" Lucas asks. Joan shakes her head. She's from south Houston. She's never even heard of a pierogi. Lucas spears a potato-and-cheese. Joan studies it carefully before taking a bite. In the moaning revelation of a new taste, she wheels around to find her friends. Her drawl turns short words into long ones. "Oh my god," she screams, "Ka-ren. You got to taste these. Oh my god."

She returns a few minutes later. "Pirollis?"

"Pierogies," Lucas says.

Working class food as nouveau cuisine. You want authentic Pittsburgh? You will have to travel to an away game for the Pittsburgh Steelers to get it. For one Sunday, Rust Belt Chic Pittsburgh was centered in Houston, Texas.

Knowledge And Migration

2011-11-16T09:20:00.003-05:00

You go where you know. Money follows lines of trust. Proximity matters. All springs to my mind while reading the latest from Pop City:

Pitt Law Innovation Practice Institute's Justine Kasznica moved to Pittsburgh enticed by what she heard from BeatBots founder Marek Michalowski, a friend she had met during her undergrad years. He instilled in her an appreciation of the region's strong ties to innovation and commitment to economic development.

"I kept hearing how Pittsburgh was such an authentic city," says Kasznica, a former Philadelphia attorney who arrived in 2008 to work as a clerk in the federal court and later for CMU's Robotics Institute. Today she is the executive director of IPI, bringing fresh thinking about law and innovation to job.

Emphasis added. The mesofacts of Pittsburgh have evolved from Rust Belt to Rust Belt Chic. The pejorative is now a selling point. Of course, none of that matters if Pittsburgh can't get the word out.

Knowledge exchange is tricky business. You might hear that Pittsburgh is an authentic city. Do you believe everything you hear? Repetition helps. The clincher is usually a trusted confidant. In that case, outmigration is a shrinking city's best friend.

Failed Return Migration

2011-11-13T08:57:00.002-05:00

You miss Pittsburgh. You've talked about the greatness of your hometown, annoying neighbors and coworkers. People in your adopted community would get in line to shove that Terrible Towel down your throat just to shut you up. So why haven't you moved back? Like all those Buffalo expats, you are stuck in Oblomov's Dream:

The longer you're away from Buffalo, the more cherished (and distorted) your idea of it can become. It can become as romanticized as your past, with details and descriptions changing to suit whatever feeling you want to have about it. If you're from the Southtowns, you'll talk about Blasdell Pizza like it's a panacea for depression; if you're from the Northtowns, you'll talk the same way about La Nova. You'll remember Buffalo winters as ivory mosaics, and summers as yellow-hued embraces. You'll reminisce about the Bills dominance in AFC championship games, then find some optimistic angle to explain away their four crippling Super Bowl losses. And, the longer you're away from this city or region, the more likely it is that this idea you've created will become so comforting that you'll never dare shatter it by ambitiously merging the idea with the risk-filled reality of returning.

I've spent a good deal of my own time wondering why patrons of Steelers bars across the country remain so far from home. The above passage is from an essay designed to shake you out of your comfortable nostalgic apathy. Return to Buffalo and fix it now.

Before you make the leap, a cautionary tale from the R2I movement:

In any breakup, there is this moment when a person who was a part of you just an instant ago becomes a surrealistically familiar stranger. After that moment, inertia and denial can only delay the inevitable.

On my last night in Bangalore I drank an egregious amount of my favorite takeout Chinese hot-and-sour vegetable soup, and I cried; I knew this second goodbye was final. When I first left India in 1996, I left for the U.S. When I left India in 2009, I left India.

In the three focus groups I conducted in Cleveland, I heard similar frustration from a number of repats. Ironically, the Buffalo Siren does a good job of listing the common sources of the dissatisfaction that will inspire repats to leave again:

There are absolutely no jobs; the politicians are corrupt; downtown crime is rampant; the city schools are terrible; the winters are unbearable; economic development is lagging; there's just not enough exciting things to do in the dilapidated region.

Everything you fear about your Rust Belt hometown is true. For some of you, that will be your experience. You will be driven to greener pastures, this time for good. Others, however, will find a new city of great possibility. I also heard that from focus group participants. The return migration was a resounding success. Other people should try it, too.

I don't think Buffalo, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland needs more return migration. Rust Belt repats should network with each other and impact the regional landscape. I suspect most repats would be surprised how many returnees are already in town. There are enough numbers to fix Buffalo now or revitalize Garfield. Don't worry about engaging the diaspora. Expatriates will seek you out as news of your efforts spread.

Research Talent Stream Migration

2011-11-11T14:01:00.002-05:00

Sticking with yesterday's talent economy theme, there are a number of different streams that define the globalization of talent. Academic researchers comprise one important stream. UK brain circulation:

What’s especially intriguing in [the BIS report] is a new analysis of how researchers flow into and out of the country, done by tracking individual researchers’ publication records. Gone is the old concept of ‘brain drain’ – rather, the emphasis is on ‘brain circulation’. Though 37% of the UK’s 210,923 researchers tracked never seem to have published anything outside the country, a small group of researchers (2.6%) moved out of the UK between 1996-2010 and also returned. What’s more, this group were senior and highly productive, in terms of their research impact.

"Far from implying the UK ‘loses the best and brightest’ to the US and other countries, this analysis suggests that returnee inflow brings comparatively productive researchers back into the UK (presumably with an extended international network, diverse skills and knowledge) and that returnee outflow (representing the most productive group identified) is high, which may also serve to strengthen the position of the UK abroad through international network-building,” the report says. It also points to the importance of international collaborations: collaborative research is more highly cited, it shows; and in particular, research between the UK and another country always has more impact than the UK’s average.

Emphasis added. This study indicates that migration and greater productivity are positively correlated (holding education constant). In effect, brain drain catalyzes economic development. The UK exports talent and reaps a benefit. This is global talent trade. There is reciprocity for outmigration.

Communities fighting brain drain are chasing smokestacks, waiting for steel to return. Talent retention retards economic development. It undermines the investment in education. Instead of discouraging geographic mobility, the goal should be to increase outmigration and forge stronger links with the talent economy.

Talent Economy

2011-11-10T15:28:00.003-05:00

With the era of the knowledge economy winding down, what comes next? The talent economy. Using migration as a lens makes the emerging epoch easier to understand. More from the "stream migration" discussion:

There’s a stream motivated by the Canadian domination of speculative mining finance. There are three vortex cities that are fairly tightly connected: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto. The gyres involve all of Latin America but especially Santiago Chile, Lima Peru, and Mexico City.

Mining industry people (entrepreneurs, consultants, engineers, geologists, anthropologists) are bilingual and either live stints in various countries or split their lives between Canada and a Latin American country. Many have dual citizenships. Many think of their home turf as the Western Hemisphere excluding the USA.

The part of the stream that meets the relative poverty criterion consists of upstart geologists looking for mineral deposits and the consultants in peripheral areas like community relations/development. There is also a substream of rural development NGO types that often merges with this mainstream. A sub-stream of academics (esp. grad students) studying globalization, development, and resource industries is starting to emerge as well.

The stream size is probably around ten thousand. There are several mining and oil industry conventions that bring a substantial percentage of the members together annually. I believe the Australians have a similar stream in the mining industry with all the nations of the South Pacific (Indonesia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, etc).

This mining stream reminds me of patterns in shale gas investment. Countries outside of the United States are seeking access to the knowledge of hydrofracking, which is still developing. Drilling crews trained in Pennsylvania may find themselves working in Poland, establishing a new stream. Polish Hill in Pittsburgh is reconnected with its homeland in an unexpected way. But it isn't a story of immigration, emigration, or even the return of the prodigal sons and daughters. Instead, knowledge is exchanged along the lines of an ephemeral but repeating migration (i.e. brain circulation).

Knowledge isn't exchanged or traded. Talent is loaned or traded. In today's Wall Street Journal, a different way of thinking about the US export economy:

Of particular interest here are businesses that don’t need face-to-face contact, such as management consulting, engineering, law, and scientific research. Private business services are included in the “other private services” section of the monthly trade data, which accounts for half of the total U.S. surplus in services.

Jensen found jobs in these industries tend to pay more than positions in manufacturing and construction, which isn’t surprising since most require college educations and even advanced degrees.

“Precisely because they require a high degree of skill, they are jobs that the U.S. is likely to retain–and that can support exports,” Jensen argues in his book. The skill requirements also mean fewer of these high-wage jobs are likely to be lost to emerging markets.

Emphasis added. The bold part of the passage presents a conundrum. If the trade doesn't require face-to-face contact, then is only knowledge exchanged (as opposed to talent)? I think the answer is no. The knowledge is still locked in talent, hence the claim that "these high-wage jobs are likely to be lost to emerging markets." Talent, not knowledge, is the commodity traded. The business is selling expertise.

I'm more interested in businesses that do require face-to-face contact and thus the physical transfer of talent to another country. That migration is the map of the talent economy. Also, there is the migration of business to the location of the production of esoteric talent, such as found in Albany and that particular nanotech cluster.

Demography Exaggerated

2011-11-09T10:23:00.002-05:00

Imagine a train wreck in slow motion. Really slow motion, stretched out over half of a century. That is the best way to describe the plight of the Rust Belt. City-regions deny the inevitable. Steel will come back, some day. Blame NAFTA. Bust the unions. Scapegoats and silver bullets abound. People develop, not places:

Unlike an earthquake, a demographic disaster does not strike without warning. Japan’s population of 127m is predicted to fall to 90m by 2050. As recently as 1990, working-age Japanese outnumbered children and the elderly by seven to three. By 2050 the ratio will be one to one. As Japan grows old and feeble, where will its companies find dynamic, energetic workers?

For a company president pondering this question over a laboriously prepared breakfast of steamed rice, broiled salmon, miso soup and artistically presented pickles, the answer is literally staring him in the face. Half the talent in Japan is female. Outside the kitchen, those talents are woefully underemployed, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Laura Sherbin of the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American think-tank, show in a new study called “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Japan”.

The usual answer to the shrinking city or country brain drain is to seek more immigration and/or encourage more births. Meanwhile, structural unemployment is increasing and the people who do have jobs are becoming more efficient. Add to that robotics and other forms of automation. There's a dramatic policy disconnect.

As Hewlett and Sherbin suggest, we would do well to better develop the talent already in place. Yes, graduates leave and the result is brain drain. As "Hollowing Out the Middle" reminds us, what about the townies left behind?

Return Return Migration

2011-11-08T12:34:00.002-05:00

No, the post title is not a typo. The financial meltdown in Greece continues to generate fascinating migration patterns. Early last month, I looked at Greek outmigration. The emigrants followed old trails to familiar destinations. You go where you know:

Greek-Americans and their children began moving out of Astoria decades ago, abandoning the Queens neighborhood that once boasted the world's largest population of Hellenic immigrants for the suburbs or their homeland.

But amid the political and economic turmoil that has shaken Greece this year, that tide may again be shifting. The evidence—only anecdotal so far—can be seen in the clientele at Immigration Advocacy Services, an Astoria-based nonprofit where many "older clients are coming in with questions like, 'How can I get my nephew here from Greece?'" said director Debra Gilmore.

Chain migration rules. I think of relocation as a link between two communities, not a zero sum game. That's a defining feature of the globalization of talent era. The theoretical discussion of stream migration is a good example of avant-garde thinking on the subject. It puts brain drain in a different light.

Increasing geographic mobility enhances economic development. Migration is as important as education. We don't pay enough attention to the dividends of the former. Move to improve.

Keep Albany Weird

2011-11-08T10:51:00.002-05:00

Albany is the new Austin. That's remarkable insofar as we are talking about a tech boom in the Rust Belt. I spent the bulk of my childhood in southern Saratoga County. I'm familiar with the blight and economic struggles of Schenectady and Troy, to name a few of the depressed cities in the New York's Capital District. Reading about the rise of Albany's globally renown nanotech cluster is a strong challenge to my memories of the region:

“There aren't going to be, out of the blue, five factories going up in the next five years,” said an Intel spokesman, Chuck Malloy.

To glimpse Albany's future, look south—to Texas. “Albany is the new Austin,” Mr. Malloy said.

Two decades ago, that city transformed itself into a poster child of the semiconductor industry, luring Sematech there in 1987. Since then, Texas' investments in manufacturing decreased as other high-tech sectors, like software, took off. Sematech traded Texas' capital for New York's.

“Albany is at a tipping point,” Sematech's Mr. Armbrust said. “The desire to work across company boundaries created Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening here.”

Industry is moving where the talent is produced. That's great news for the Rust Belt, which is rich in legacy institutions such as SUNY Albany. Native talent, too, is moving back to reap the rewards:

Layoffs in the early 1990s changed all that. IBM's vulnerability startled employees and signaled a crisis in the state's high-tech economy. Mr. Montgomery jumped ship, embarking on a nearly two-decade odyssey that has mirrored the volatile growth of global computing and New York's struggle to reclaim its perch in the nation's high-tech economy.

As jobs and skilled workers left the state, so did Mr. Montgomery—for Europe, then for Silicon Valley and, as chip manufacturing moved north, to Oregon's Silicon Forest.

Now, after more than $2 billion in state commitments, New York's tech sector is back—as is Mr. Montgomery. Improbably, the epicenter is Albany, known more for bureaucracy than innovation.

I expect such return migration to pick up as the national economy improves. Albany is poised for a boom. This part of Upstate New York is uniquely positioned for strong growth because the cluster is so esoteric on the global scale:

Two economists, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT, have just released their 364-page “Atlas of Economic Complexity,” which claims to be the best model yet for predicting how much nations will grow in the future. So what’s the secret?

As it turns out, the authors argue, the best way to tell how rich a country will get isn’t by looking at things like political institutions, or the rule of law, or even education levels. Nope, it’s far better to look at what they call a country’s “collective knowledge.” That means looking, primarily, at how many different products a country creates — and particularly how many unique products a country makes, things that no other countries are making (say, medical-imaging devices). For example, the authors note that Pakistan and Singapore both export a similar number of types of products. But Singapore’s exports tend to be relatively rarer on the world stage than Pakistan’s, and the country’s much richer as a result.

Emphasis added. Albany is not just a nanotech cluster. It is the nanotech cluster. Try as other metros might, there is no Next Albany.

Globalization Of Talent

2011-11-07T20:59:00.002-05:00

There are a number of ways to define an economic epoch. I was trained to follow the hegemon. Which superpower controlled the age? A declining America and a rising China signal the world is at the end of an era and at the dawn of a new one. Another possible lens is globalization:

“This is the new wave, the new trend,” Wang Huiyao, founder and president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, told me. “We had the globalization of trade, we had the globalization of capital, and now we have the globalization of talent.”

The globalization of trade aligns with the industrial era and the second British hegemony. The globalization of capital fueled the knowledge economy under the stewardship of the American Century. The globalization of talent fittingly belongs to China:

“Increasingly, immigrants who live elsewhere are being viewed as assets,” Boyle said. “This is a paradigm shift; this is a seismic shift. The notion of brain drain is ridiculed — instead, it is ‘brain circulation.’ The notion is that people can return as tourists, that people can be ambassadors for their home countries, that people can serve as business agents.”

“It is no longer about brain drain, or even brain gain,” Wang agreed. “It is about global brain circulation.”

Emphasis added. India, as well as China, is lauded for its talent geopolitics. I think India has been slow to embrace its expatriate assets. China strategically exports talent to markets ripe for domestic exploitation. Brain drain is a tool for economic development.

Stuck In A Jobless Recovery

2011-11-07T10:34:00.002-05:00

How can your region solve the brain drain paradox? That's the question that drives my blog, Burgh Diaspora. In terms of developing talent, migration functions in the same way as education. Furthermore, the two are positively correlated. The higher the level of education, the more likely someone is to leave for greener (i.e. richer) pastures:

There’s a perennial paradox of youth migration. To thrive, hometowns need the best and brightest to stay put. But yet, in many ways, we also encourage them to leave. Network associate members Maria Kefalas and Patrick Carr, in their book “Hollowing Out the Middle,” discovered this paradox in the small Iowa town they studied. In numerous ways, the town, which suffered from chronic brain drain, rallied behind the “best and the brightest,” boosting their ambitions and dreams—essentially encouraging them to seek those dreams elsewhere. Demographer Jim Russell on his blog Burgh Diaspora gets to the heart of it, asking: “Since education makes a person more likely to leave your region, how do you justify your investment in human capital?”

The heart of it is that the best way to stop brain drain is to deny people education. As for retaining graduates, a successful initiative hinders economic development. The move to improve is the missing ingredient to the American recovery:

Another reason for decreasing mobility is the aging of the population; older Americans are less likely to move than young ones.

And then there’s the oft-noted rise of dual-income families. If a sole earner loses a job, it’s relatively easy for a family to pack up and move to a place with more employment opportunities. But it requires a grand leap of faith to do so when one member of a two-income family loses a job; more likely, the family stays put and holds onto the remaining job for dear life.

There are job openings going unfilled. Ideally, talent moves from a place with less opportunity to a place with more opportunity. This reshuffling of the workforce speeds recovery. It is also why the more geographically mobile earn better wages. Most people are unwilling (or unable) to take the relocation risk.

The dual-income drag on geographic mobility is familiar to me. Return migration to Rust Belt cities (and rural communities) is hindered by the trailing spouse problem. What is the solution? Again, Time magazine:

But McKinsey does see hope for this increasingly static workforce in the changing nature of work, and in particular in the technologically driven development of ”anywhere, anytime” work that doesn’t require the employee to be located at a company facility. “Their ability to work with colleagues and customers continents away in ‘real time’ and perform almost any function remotely provides a whole new level of flexibility,” the report explains, adding that 26% of the execs surveyed plan to employ more people working at home in the next five years, compared to only 15% who said they plan to offshore more jobs.

Decoupling work from the demands of geography is how the labor market is restructuring in the wake of the Great Reset. I've written about the 1099 economy. Freelancing, the one employee start up, is a surrogate for geographic mobility. Jobs, instead of talent, are migrating. A region could do much more to encourage such a career transition. Rust Belt cities could dangle the 1099 carrot to catalyze more return migration. Labor mobility doesn't necessarily entail geographic mobility. One can move without ever leaving.

Searching For Marcellus Shale Dividend

2011-11-06T09:30:00.002-05:00

To be sure, shale gas has been a boon to the Pennsylvania economy. The debate is about how much of a boon. As one would expect, industry is prone to gross exaggeration. The numbers simply are not as impressive as the pro-fracking camp would like them to be. Along those lines, two posts from the blog Carpe Diem help me explain.

The first one gets at the heart of the job creation story:

The latest numbers from Job Service North Dakota’s Labor Market Information Center report that Williams County has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, and perhaps the lowest in the entire United States September numbers, which are the most recent available, put Williams County at a staggeringly-low 0.9 percent.

Is there county anywhere in Pennsylvania that can boast similarly good news? Energy boosters are cherry picking the data. One county does not a national job recovery make.

The second post gets at the heart of the shale oil/gas revenue question:

"Resource-rich Alaska took in nearly $1.9 billion more than expected last fiscal year thanks largely to high oil prices and ended the fiscal year with an estimated $260 million surplus, an amount equal to nearly 4 percent of its general fund.

A handful of states — led by those that enjoy bountiful energy reserves such as West Virginia, Wyoming and North Dakota — have found themselves in similarly enviable positions, oases of optimism in an otherwise barren landscape of budget cuts and government layoffs. A few other states, including Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia, have combined slight increases in tax revenue with tight spending controls to produce modest surpluses.

In West Virginia, the surplus is going toward reserves, pension programs and debt. Wyoming put much of the extra money into savings after years of investing heavily in roads and schools.

Pennsylvania enjoys "bountiful energy reserves" such as shale gas. The state is noticeably absent from the story about the revenue boom. So much for the nonsense about public coffers overflowing from existing taxes on Marcellus Shale associated business.

A severance tax on drilling isn't even on the table for discussion in Pennsylvania. It should be. The jobs cup isn't overflowing. The state and its municipalities are still struggling with crushing public debt. The various proposed impact fees are a joke, an insult to PA residents. Industry is having a field day.

The debate is mostly about whether or not to frack shale. How much regulation will there be? How much financial remuneration for the drilling damage? Should local government make drilling regulation? I'm sure industry is happy the current lines in the sand. How can I be sure? Billions of dollars in investment keep streaming into the state.

Mesofacts: Pittsburgh Steelers

2011-11-05T14:58:00.002-04:00

More enduring than Pittsburgh's depressed, sooty image is the smashmouth persona of the professional football Steelers. The Marcellus Shale is helping Southwestern Pennsylvania shed the perception of chronic economic distress. What has to happen for fans to forget the reputation of a stone age team pounding the rock for chronic franchise success? The ironic facts:

The Steelers run the ball down your throat. The Patriots overwhelm you with defensive brilliance. Indianapolis is precise with the ball. Baltimore is impenetrable without it. ...

... For all its success and all its legacy as a pound-the-rock team, the Steelers have adapted as well as anyone to the NFL's current pass-first and pass-often mentality. Never was that more on display than in last Sunday's 25-17 victory over the Patriots, in which Ben Roethlisberger threw 50 times in 78 plays — as many passes as New England's total snaps.

The ideal way to beat the Patriots is to limit how often their prolific, clutch offence is on the field. That used to mean running the ball and eating the clock.

Pittsburgh found another way — a very effective way.

"I think it's great to have a team like this where we can run or pass," speedy wideout Mike Wallace said. "We adjust to the team we play against and hopefully some of these weeks we can come out and do what we want. We have guys around here like chameleons, just adapt to whatever the situation is."

More than ever, that situation is for Pittsburgh to pass. Roethlisberger has become so comfortable with Wallace and even younger receivers Antonio Brown and Emmanuel Sanders — not to mention standbys Hines Ward and tight end Heath Miller — that opening up the attack not only is an option, it's the best option.

Somewhere, Mike Madison (Pittsblog) is smiling. But mesofacts last long after the facts of the matters have changed. "Reputations die hard."

Once established, a brand is resilient. The brand matters more than the reality on the ground. The Pittsburgh Steelers are tough and blue collar, like the city. The team, like the region, is undergoing a mythological transformation. The world is waking up to a new set of mesofacts. Pittsburgh's team is finally catching up to its host city.

Marcellus Myths

2011-11-04T07:31:00.002-04:00

The jobs geography of shale gas continues to elude news coverage. Typically, numbers from industry boosters are cited. These tall tales simply don't match up with the anecdotes showing up in Marcellus Country media:

By 2010, the previously struggling Gosai family hotels were routinely near full, said Gosai, who spoke Thursday during The Greater Cumberland Committee’s monthly meeting. In fact, the entire southwestern Pennsylvania hotel business is “saturated with Marcellus shale drillers,” he said.

The bulk of the drilling jobs are still going to out of state workers. If Pennsylvania started producing more drillers, then that labor supply will ding the hotel business. Or, it might make more sense for the gas industry to ramp up operations elsewhere. Drilling is itinerant work. The result is the same. The hotel boom goes bust.

Nationally, the shale boom (both gas and oil) is going full throttle. Is energy leading this country out of its employment crisis? No. That should be obvious. Instead, David Brooks is passing along the industry hype:

Already shale gas has produced more than half a million new jobs, not only in traditional areas like Texas but also in economically wounded places like western Pennsylvania and, soon, Ohio. If current trends continue, there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs to come.

Sure, there are parts of Western Pennsylvania that are economically wounded (more about that in a subsequent post). Drilling in the Marcellus Shale has catalyzed some job creation. But the real lift for this region comes from Pittsburgh and its higher education industry. Once known for producing steel, Pittsburgh is now dominated by the production of talent.

As Brooks proves, a good mesofact is hard to kill. The promise of shale extraction jobs is full of such mesofacts. If we can only keep those wacko environmentalists from killing the goose laying the golden egg. The hyperbole on both sides of the debate is irritating. Brooks feeds this polarization with stock stereotypes and makes energy a much bigger election issue than it should be.

Rust Belt Chic Is Fatal

2011-11-02T12:44:00.002-04:00

Does civic pride matter? Does it affect economic development? Those two questions still linger in my mind after reading about the burgeoning Rust Belt rap scene:

Now the reasons rap is overlooked as a legitimate Rust Belt renaissance tool are numerous and cannot be fully digested here. Lets just say that images of rhyming young black (and increasingly white) men with tattoos and whatever have not been traditionally associated with the health of a city identity.

This is unfortunate. For what is a reality in the most real of American conditions is a generation less ashamed about the decline of their industrial society than they are proud that what has grown from the rust is a resilience-driven honesty captured in the raw beauty of the region’s emerging creations. And rap is becoming an increasingly important part of this output, and the nation is listening.

Richey Piiparinen sees a strong link between Rust Belt renaissance and a healthy city identity. Rust Belt cities do seem afflicted with low self esteem. Hence the inability to embrace Rust Belt Chic. We're aren't any near as great as emerald cities such as Portland.

At the other end of the pendulum swing is too much civic pride. Pittsburgh is fine. Nothing is wrong. Life here is good enough. No one aspires to greatness. Rust Belt cities do seem afflicted with hubris or, at least, complacency.

Rust Belt Chic is enduring its "so what?" moment. Existential crisis in Buffalo:

City’s have distinctive flavors and cultures, even our over-homogenized America, and I find watching Buffalo transform itself an endlessly fascinating exercise. It’s messy, it’s argumentative, and the process is without rules, standards or easily identifiable goal posts; perhaps a reason this conference, as a distinct measurable event, drew so much interest. How do you remake a city? Who gets to decide what a city becomes? Pittsburgh is regularly lauded for transforming from a steel town into the first Eds & Meds Rust Belt success. Who got to decide Pittsburgh was throwing in with its hospitals and universities, and not another industry? Who sets the agenda?

Buffalo certainly used to be a hard working manufacturing mecca, and we still do make a lot of stuff. But white collar jobs have out numbered blue collar ones around here for quite a while, and that self-image is hard to shake. As we wallow in past identities, former glories, and a wishy washy future, how did architecture stick all the way down to our cab drivers? There have been other efforts, other successes, that could have captured our imaginations. [Dabkowski wants Buffalo to be known as a Rust Belt-chic funky arts town]. We have our own constantly under-appreciated Eds & Meds effort, one that has generated far more economic development than architectural tourism, but is largely overlooked in plain sight. Newell Nussbaumer has tried to get the College Town label to stick on Buffalo, but some student housing ventures failed to take off, his estudentnetwork.com site morphed into Navigetter, and no matter how correct the statistics (70K+ total students), unfortunately the vibe never resonated.

Emphasis added. How can Buffalo cash in on its greatest Rust Belt Chic asset? People develop, not places. Apparently, no one has figured out how this wonderful architecture can develop people. Rust Belt Chic Buffalo is nostalgia. Can nostalgia fuel economic development?

The answer to that question is a resounding no. Via the editor-in-chief of The Cleveland Review, nostalgia as an anecdote for homesickness:

But the problem with homesickness isn’t just that it impedes ambition; it’s that the object of longing, home, is not as fixed as one might think. After the Civil War, for instance, “the transcontinental railroad and steam-powered ocean liners,” Matt writes, “made it easier to return to a physical home and thus, at least theoretically, easier to assuage homesickness. Upon traveling back, however, they found they had not arrived, and never could, for the same technologies that had brought them home had also disrupted traditional ways of life.” The schedules and even the clocks of hometowns had been recalibrated to train schedules and standard time; certain commodities, like ice, reshaped the diet. Traveling back revealed that “home” had been vanquished by time, and a word necessarily arose to define this longing for what was lost: nostalgia.

While homesickness was suppressed in America, nostalgia was allowed to flourish. In 1899 New Hampshire figured out a way to profit off of it, and began throwing annual “Old Home Weeks.” These festivals, wherein the town might display old photographs and antiquated town artifacts while concessionaires in old-timey clothes served up regional specialties, were conceived of as reunions, meant to draw former residents back to their birthplaces. By 1903, these weeks were attracting half a million people, and today quite a few New England towns still throw them—such as Freedom, New Hampshire, which hosts one every August. Neither early El Granada nor my El Granada of the 1980s and 1990s had enough of a community to justify an antiquarian street fair. But America’s comparative acceptance—embrace, even—of nostalgia makes sense to me. It’s safer than homesickness because it’s neutered; it can’t be realized and won’t get in the way of work; it asks you to long only for something that no longer exists.

While nostalgia may allow the wayward to remain productive, it can stifle development in the hometown. Buffalo's architectural treasures are holding the city back. Rust Belt Chic impedes ambition.

Brownfields are greener elsewhere in the Rust Belt. Nostalgia takes on a different hue when you adopt a city. I'm not from Pittsburgh. I chose the city. Pittsburgh is exotic, not stiflingly parochial. I am inspired by Rust Belt Chic Pittsburgh. Rust Belt Chic need not be fatal if you can stay away from your hometown.

Book Review: Instant City

2011-10-31T06:51:00.002-04:00

The Age of the "Instant City" is at an end. The subtitle of Steve Inskeep's new book is "Life and Death in Karachi". The Pakistani city serves as a case study for the urban boom in the wake of World War II. You'll learn as much about urban planning as you will Pakistan. The problem is migration, first political refugees (partition of India) and then economic refugees (rural to urban). The latter movement connects Karachi with the likes of Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix. All are, according to Inskeep, instant cities.

Inskeep defines instant cities in terms of population. The cities are growing at a much faster rate than the host nation state. I would define instant cities in terms of sprawl and the [seemingly] endless search for greenfields. Karachi's expansion in terms of area is as impressive as the spiraling population. There is more to manage than just religious differences.

Greenfields are "blank slates" best suited for the rationally planned community that was a hallmark of the era of logical positivism. Inskeep offers up Islamabad as a contrast to Karachi, which was anything but a blank slate. The planning paradigm found expression on the outskirts of Karachi. In American cities, the planning paradigm found expression in the urban core where neighborhoods were razed to make way for massive residential projects. A blank slate was imposed on the landscape.

The irony is that chaos ruled Karachi, particularly in the outskirts. I suspect Jane Jacobs would love Karachi. Clearly, Steve Inskeep embraces feral urbanization:

All this makes Karachi an especially vivid place to test some theories about the world's growing cities. The planet's urban population has increased by more than 2.7 billion since the end of World War II. Expanding urban zones are the engines of the global economy and also showcases for inequality.The gap between rich and poor, a focus of protests last weekend in the U.S. and other countries, is spectacularly on display in a swiftly expanding city in the developing world, as I could see without leaving my restaurant table at Port Grand. I noticed that the signage was not in Urdu, Pakistan's most common language, but in English, spoken by the globalized elite. Across the water to my right stood harbor cranes, the kind that unload billions of dollars' worth of supplies bound for U.S. forces in Afghanistan; to my left I saw a bridge with a new metal wall running its length. The wall keeps ordinary people on that bridge from gawking or taking potshots at the affluent at Port Grand. It costs 300 rupees to pass the armed guards at the gate of the jetty -- the equivalent of about $3.50, more than many Karachi residents earn in a day.

Yet two recent books argue that for all their flaws, growing cities offer unmatched opportunity for the poor. After all, cities grow in part because millions of people migrate from the countryside, note Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser, and Arrival City, by Doug Saunders. Whatever problems they encounter, these migrants more easily find jobs, schools, and hospitals in cities than in their poor home villages.

Could this optimistic view possibly hold true? Even in Karachi?

Having explored this troubled city for the book Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, I have to say yes -- on average. Pakistanis live better in Karachi than elsewhere, according to the U.N. Human Development Index, which measures cities and rural areas according to health, education levels, and income. When the UN used the index to rank different Pakistani districts, Karachi did better than almost anywhere else in the country. Not only do medical centers and universities exceed what's available outside the city: the potential employers range from tanneries to towel manufacturers and real estate developers, and from hypermarkets to the dozens of newspapers and TV channels that chronicle the city’s distress.

The Glaeser reference invokes, in my mind, the claim that the world is entering the Age of the Instant City and leaving behind the Age of the Suburb. Cities are cool. Jane Jacobs cool. Karachi is Jane Jacobs chic.

Karachi is no longer an instant city. It is stabilizing, like New York City. The story is one of infill and better managing the huge population. Karachi is a brownfield in need of revitalization, gentrification. Now would be a good time for urban planning best practices.

Eventually, even in Pakistan, the countryside will empty out enough to signal an end to that migration pattern. In the States, we are seeing the end of the Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration. Brownfields are the new greenfields. We see blank slates where there really isn't one, instead of imposing it. There is nothing instant about it. Change will be hard and slow.

Sun Belt Migration Bust

2011-10-30T11:12:00.004-04:00

I'll take one last swing at the latest domestic migration numbers. William Frey from Brookings is well quoted concerning the great slowdown in geographic mobility. You can find the more formal analysis here. The narrative rehashes what is showing up in the press. The only graphic associated with the Brookings article is worth discussing:

The migration spotlight is on the 25-34 cohort, the after college relocation and the war for talent. Riverside, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Charlotte drop off the map post-Great Reset. Their top gainers replacements are the usual suspects (i.e. DC, Denver, Seattle, and Austin). No surprise there. The migration boom towns are yielding to brain magnets.

The young and well educated were able to move during the economic downturn. They clustered in the cities already awash in the young and well educated. Talent attracts more talent. As the economy improves, other migrants should become hungrier for risk. I doubt Riverside, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Charlotte get back on the map.

I predict Pittsburgh will absorb a good chunk of that slack. We'll see more Buffalo-to-Steel City instead of Buffalo-to-Charlotte. Detroit-to-Pittsburgh is a flow to watch. As for return migration, Charlotte-to-Pittsburgh is already a trend (anecdotally speaking).

Thanks in part to the shale gas revolution, the stars have aligned for Pittsburgh. The positive press is now credible. Forget eds and meds. Pittsburgh is town and gown. Town and gown means plenty of tech and talent. There's no longer a black hole between NYC and Chicago.

Young, Educated Flock To The Steel City

2011-10-29T10:03:00.003-04:00

I'm still sorting out the wonderful migration news for Pittsburgh. I mentioned the William Frey numbers yesterday, which I found at The Washington Post:

Here's a list of large U.S. metro areas ranked by the estimated annual net migration of people age 25-34. The 2008-10 numbers were released Thursday.

Frey compared the new 2008-10 numbers with those from 2005-07. Pittsburgh stands out as doing much better over the later three-year period. How much better? Net migration is up 6,768, which is 7th best on the list. That number is how much migration has improved from the 2005-07 benchmark. On the balance, Pittsburgh lost young adults during 2005-07. It's a remarkable turnaround.

No matter how you look at the list, Pittsburgh is doing a lot better than Minneapolis. This morning, I read about how the young, educated are flocking to the Twin Cities:

"There is a growing divide between areas that are experiencing gains or losses in their younger populations," Brookings Institution demographer William Frey reported last summer. "Large stretches of the nation are sustaining only meager growth, or even declines, in their youth population." ...

... Partly because they are smallish cities in a major metro area but with a teeming university campus sprawling across both of them, demographer Frey found that Minneapolis and St. Paul are the nation's fifth-youngest when lined up against the primary cities in other metro areas. They're in the same league with college towns such as Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio.

The Twin Cities area as a whole, his analysis showed, stayed even in its share of under-45s during the past decade, even as many others fell: not just Rust Belt cities like Akron or Milwaukee but more happening cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.

Gainers, however -- those doing better than we are -- included key competitors such as Seattle (up 4 percent), Portland (up 7), Denver (up 9) and Atlanta (up 15).

Emphasis added. Ironically, Pittsburgh is now on the right side of that divide. The metro is getting younger and smarter. The recession has hurt young adult migration to Minneapolis. In some respects, the loss of the Twin Cities is the Steel City's gain.

A more useful contrast is with Cleveland. ~~a metro that gained migrants aged 25-34 over the 2005-07 period. The recession hit Cleveland hard and it shows up in the numbers.~~ (Note: An astute reader noticed I misread the chart and that Cleveland slightly improved its migration situation during the recession. Meaning, the metro lost more than less of the 25-34 age group.) Cleveland lost almost 2000 young adults during 2008-10. In terms of Frey's "divide", there is Pittsburgh and then you have the rest of Cleveburgh.

Great Reset Migration

2011-10-28T12:50:00.004-04:00

Update: Courtesy of The Washington Post, the William Frey numbers for the net migration of the 25-34 cohort. I'm trying to figure out what "Since2005-07" refers to. It looks like Pittsburgh is 7th overall in attracting young migrants and ahead of such metros such Chicago, San Francisco, and Denver. Am I reading the rankings correctly?

<------------End Update------------>

More articles continue to appear in the wake of the American Community Survey data dump yesterday. The heart of the matter concerns the impact of the recession on migration. The Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire with the analysis:

The institute’s study compared three years’ worth of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released early Thursday and covered 2008-10, with the data from 2005-7. Since the survey’s findings are released in three-year increments, this was the first time that researchers had a set of data that included only years since the financial collapse began, allowing them to make a direct comparison to a similar period before the collapse.

Using this and other data from the I.R.S. that many researchers consider even more comprehensive, they found that migration into formerly booming states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada began to slow as soon as the recession hit and continued to shrink even into 2010, when many demographers expected it to level off. At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years, and continued to do so in the three years before the financial collapse, suddenly saw the domestic migration loss shrink by as much as 90 percent.

Arizona, Florida, and Nevada are the new Rust Belt states. The dark times are just getting started. New destinations are reshaping America's economic geography. Analysis from Brookings William Frey:

“These places that were getting real new interest amid the bubble are not seeing that anymore, and in a way it is making people give another place a second look,” Mr. Frey said. “The dynamics of high housing costs on the coasts and relatively affordable inland is starting to change so, in effect, that shuts off the merry-go-round.”

“If nobody can buy or sell their homes, there’s going to be a stagnancy,” he added.

Atlanta, which ranked third as a destination for young people in that age group from 2005 through 2007, sank to No. 23 in the period from 2008 through 2010, according to Mr. Frey’s analysis. Phoenix dropped to No. 17 from second place, and Las Vegas plummeted to No. 35 from 10th place.

The winners were cities like Washington, which skyrocketed to sixth from 44th, Denver, which jumped to first from 12th, and Boston, which is now No. 26, up from No. 45.

Mr. Frey said that, in many ways, young people were staying in the more established cities with a kind of wait-and-see approach to the economy. He said he expected the relocation rates to pick up as soon as there were new housing and job opportunities for young adults.

“They are trying to bide their time in a hip place they know,” he said. “But there is going to be a pent-up demand for migration, because right now people are just putting their lives on hold.”

Plenty of meat in that passage. I now have a better idea why Frey is lumping in Pittsburgh with other established hipster destinations. The recession marks a dramatic improvement, even when compared to the rest of the United States, in Pittsburgh's migration ledger.

I also appreciate the tip of the hat to less risk appetite. Young adult migrants are riding it out in familiar confines. The gambling, going where you don't know, should pick up with the economy. For Pittsburgh, that might mean that those staying put now will pick up and go.

I'm betting the opposite will happen. More people from elsewhere will head to Pittsburgh as the risk aversion subsides. The mesofacts of the matter have changed that significantly.

Pittsburgh Hot Migration Destination

2011-10-27T09:12:00.003-04:00

Update: The Washington Post takes a deeper look at cool city way stations through the lens of DC:

“It’s the economy and hipness,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, who analyzed the census data comparing the 2005 to 2007 period with 2008 to 2010. “Young people are going to places that have a certain vibe. If there’s a recession, they want to ride it out in a place like that. And Washington has the extra advantage of being a government town that’s not as hard-hit by recessions as others.”

<---------------End Update--------------->

The lede is that American geographic mobility continues to decline. The trend would seem to benefit the Rust Belt. As usual, a finer grained analysis is warranted:

Other bright spots in the housing bust included urban, high-tech college meccas that are proving to be a draw for young, college-educated adults of all races and ethnicities. The data covering 2008-2010 show that Raleigh, N.C.; Austin, San Antonio and Houston, Texas; Denver; Pittsburgh; and Baltimore and Washington, D.C., all of which tend to promise specialized tech jobs and hip lifestyles, had some of the biggest gains in residents.

William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who reviewed the education and race data, said many of these cities will continue to attract new residents after the economy fully recovers. He said other cities must seek ways to diversify their industries, draw new investment and build partnerships with local universities to attract young talent, much like Pittsburgh has been striving to do after the collapse of its steel industry.

"Right now, the 'cool' cities are serving as way stations for the small number of adventurous young people who are willing to move in a down economy. But when the broader economy picks up, a much larger group of people will move to wherever the jobs spring up," Frey said, noting that people are staying put for now because they have to, not because they want to.

Emphasis added. Like Austin, Rust Belt Shittsburgh promises "specialized tech jobs and hip lifestyles". Who knew?

Pittsburgh is one of a handful of cool cities serving as a way station for young talent. I'm reminded of Seattle and Minneapolis during the Gen X recession of the early 1990s. Those two cities blossomed as a major national destination during the Dot Com boom. Similar growth doesn't seem likely in today's global economy and I think that will impact the recovery migration, effectively muting it.

Regardless, Pittsburgh stands out as a new winner in the war for young talent. The city is emblematic of the economic transformation catalyzed by the Great Reset. There are always emerging landscapes from such a calamity and Pittsburgh is it.

Burgh Diaspora Foodies

2011-10-26T19:30:00.003-04:00

Why is an Pittsburgh expatriate following China Millman's Twitter feed? While you ponder that mystery, behold the work of Lauren Bracey. Bracey is the brain drain behind the Burghilicious blog. However, the juice for this post comes from Bracey's own Twitter account:

DC transplant by way of Pittsburgh. At home: avid cook and baker with severe silliness. At work: I help NPR make its email program connect with readers.

Apparently, Pittsburgh food tastes much better in DC. Near as I can tell, Bracey moved to DC in 2011. But the Pittsburgh beat lives on.

The social media reality is seamless. Pittsburgh. DC. What's the difference? The migration destination is your day job. You moonlight as a native and resident.

Economic Geography Of Xenophobia

2011-10-26T13:26:00.002-04:00

Inert populations are more risk averse than the geographically mobile. Cosmopolites have a greater capacity to trust strangers and expand market. Then there is the tale of technological diffusion and global economic development:

[Jared] Diamond hypothesized that Eurasia's east-west orientation allowed freer movement of people and animals than did the Americas' north-south orientation because of the greater climate variability when moving north to south. This gave Eurasia an advantage in the spread and development of technology.

In a Sept. 13 article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Sohini Ramachandran, assistant professor of biology, and Noah Rosenberg, an associate professor of biology at Stanford University, report on data from 678 sites in the human genome exhibiting a high level of genetic variance. These sites provide information about genetic similarities and differences between populations in the Americas and in Eurasia. The researchers studied how geographical variables, such as latitude and longitude, affected these variations.

Their results show greater genetic differentiation of people in the Americas, indicating a lower rate of migration. "If two populations remain isolated, then they have an opportunity to diverge in their patterns of genetic variation over time," Rosenberg said.

Eurasia developed more quickly than the Americas thanks to greater geographic mobility. Migration means greater prosperity for the individual and the two communities at each end of the journey. Somehow, the latter gets lost in translation. Most communities would rather be like the Americas, more rooted in place.

Such thinking extracts a high cost. Autarky cannot compete with economic liberalism. In other words, talent retention policies retard growth and entrench intolerance. This negative feedback loop feeds risk aversion and patronage. The politics of brain drain is the economics of failure.

Lemonade Urban Redevelopment

2011-10-25T10:30:00.002-04:00

Your city's biggest liabilities are its greatest assets. That's the lemons-to-lemonade development paradigm, a Rust Belt philosophy. Out of the box thinking in Cleveland:

The [Hipp Deck] embodied a compelling vision for Cleveland’s parking infrastructure; a hybrid landscape, which recognizes the reality of parking demands, but also engages the desires of residents. Cars avoid the uncovered top level of parking decks, but people love the view! Sloped decks also work great for theater seating. We hope this exciting people-centered vision for the future of our ever-present parking infrastructure will help inspire the collective acts of our fellow artists, activists and designers.

I get hung up on the ideological stance that parking garages are a bad use of valuable urban space. That doesn't mean I'm a fan of car-centric development. On the contrary, I contend downtown retail is a relic of the industrial era. Pittsburgh is still struggling with this turn back the clock approach. The problem is that there is no sense in clicking your heels three times and wishing the parking lots away. A jihad against auto America will get you nowhere fast.

Cleveland is having a rails-to-trails moment. What to do with all the parking garages, particularly after the worker bees have gone home to the suburbs? Reimagining downtown like a skate punk, the Urban Design Collaborative sees spatial opportunity where most people see dormant land use. This is your father's Cleveland, culturally appropriated. You might say that someone has hacked the city's software.

Paying Graduates To Stay

2011-10-24T16:12:00.002-04:00

Joel Kotkin has a meaty piece about America's demographic advantage. In the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, and even China, only the States can expect a growing labor force over the next few decades. The reason for this demographic dividend? Immigration.

States get younger by attracting a more youthful demographic. Yet the common response is to double down on retention. Some funded schemes in New England:

Massachusetts is funding internships at private companies—$2.2 million this year, up from $1 million last year. In a pilot program started in July, Vermont is forking over cash to graduates who stay in the state.

New Hampshire, under the direction of a young-worker retention task force established by Democratic Gov. John Lynch, has launched a nonprofit called Stay Work Play to sell the state to college students. The state also is directing one-third of its entire marketing budget toward wooing and retaining younger people.

Thanks to Chris Briem (Null Space) for bring the above Wall Street Journal article to my attention. The Vermont initiative is troubling. The bulk of the money will go to graduates who would have stayed regardless. The effectiveness of attracting young talent is much easier to measure. No one can say with any certainty if the Vermont effort was worth it or even if it worked.

I'm in my sixth year of blogging about brain drain. I've looked at policy ideas that preceded Burgh Diaspora. The same approaches get tried over and over again. Each year, the same places complain about brain drain. Nothing seems to be working. Anyone out there other than Cleveland and Youngstown willing to try a new way to solve this problem?

Shale Oil Jobs And Migration

2011-10-24T13:40:00.002-04:00

While reading about the shale oil boom in North Dakota, I try to imagine what it would look like in Eastern Ohio. I have no idea if the Utica Shale is anything on the scale of the Bakken. But consider this migration tale:

School bus driver Barb Russell heard there was good money to be made here in the oil fields of North Dakota, so last month she packed a bag, locked her Farmington, Minn., home, and headed west. She tripled her income.

The 60-year-old grandmother rose every morning at 3 a.m. in September to drive a bus full of Halliburton workers to drilling rigs in a place where trucks roar non-stop and everybody who wants a job has one. ...

... New drilling technology has freed up vast reserves of oil in the Williston Basin of western North Dakota, fueling an economic bonanza that has become a flat-out gold rush. As the rest of the country desperately tries to skirt a double-dip recession, North Dakota boasts a $1 billion budget surplus and the nation’s lowest unemployment rate. Recruits from Minnesota, Texas and both coasts keep arriving, reversing a long population decline. Schools are rushing to hire more teachers. Towns are adding more cops.

Safe to say that the shale gas in the Marcellus hasn't fueled a similar migration boom. That's a bit of a mystery. Still, things might play out differently in Eastern Ohio. (See this story about Steubenville.)

Don't expect man-camps to pop up in feral Youngstown. Also consider the low unemployment in North Dakota that preceded the rush. The labor market has been tight there for the better part of two decades. School bus drivers won't be moving in from the next state over.

The energy industry talent migration to North Dakota isn't extraordinary and likely temporary. Hence the man-camps or even the booked motels in Williamsport, PA. The more opportunistic migration comes from a neighboring state. Proximity matters. Is someone in struggling Orlando, FL going to roll the dice in Williston, ND? I doubt it, at least not yet.

Beware of the hype that the oil and gas industry is pitching. The impact on unemployment will be subtle. Better for Ohio to figure out how to cash in on revenue from the drilling.

Buffalo Defining Rust Belt Chic

2011-10-23T09:55:00.002-04:00

We are born into the love affair of family. Marriage is the love affair we choose. That's the biggest image problem facing Rust Belt cities. Only natives love them. In Buffalo, that's changing:

"It's the most wonderful city I've been to in a long time," said Dieter Meyer, a Leesburg, Va., architect. "There's great architecture there, but there's really cool neighborhoods, like the Elmwood neighborhood and Allentown."

"The conference was one of the best, and I've been to a dozen of them," said Andrew Potts, a historic preservation attorney in Washington, D.C.

Then he added this: "The historic building resources in the Buffalo region are just incomparable in the United States."

"Incomparable." For years now, frontline publications across the country have been singing Buffalo's praises as a top-tier destination for architecture, history and art.

"Buffalo has a kind of power, the power of the authentic place," architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New Yorker has said.

Emphasis added. The National Preservation Conference was in Buffalo this year, thus the above glowing reviews. By now, the Rust Belt Chic connection should be obvious. The geographic aesthetic is authenticity, something sorely lacking in most Sun Belt boomtowns or hipster destinations such as Portland.

Growing up in Buffalo must be like having a stunningly beautiful sister. Familiarity breeds contempt, "What's so special about her?"

To outsiders, Buffalo is exotic. To most insiders, the city is the dull place you can't wait to escape. Buffalo is best seen with a rear-view mirror.

You go where you know. To almost all of America, the Rust Belt is either Flyover Country or a region to avoid. Hence the surprise that Pittsburgh is a top-20 destination in 2012 as ranked by National Geographic. Can a neighborhood be "cool" if no one has heard of it? As more outsiders discover these gems, Buffalo and other shrinking cities will get on the map. The Creative Class will flock to the Rust Belt.