Geographic Mobility Neighborhoods

I was planning to do a review of the brain drain policy literature today, but got sidetracked researching a staff pick from the most recent State Science & Technology Institute Weekly Digest. From Northwestern University:

Thiemann and Grady produced their “Follow the Money” video to explain their project and animate the results. Tiny bills stretch out from county to county on a map of the contiguous United States. Some places, such as Los Angeles have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee -- Grady’s home -- have bills circulating mainly within a more local neighborhood.

From this travel data, the team ran computer algorithms to find what they call effective communities within the United States. People tend to travel more within these invisible boundaries than outside them. In the video, counties flash and wiggle as the computer algorithm tries to decide which counties belong in the right community.

“Normally, you just push a button and wait for two hours and then all you get are numbers, which is really boring,” Thiemann said. “But [the animation] makes the process visible and shows you how interesting it can be.”

Grady hopes the video will stimulate other people to think up new ideas about what to do with these data. They’ve already started using it to study how diseases, such as H1N1, spread, and linguistics professors want to compare these travel boundaries to dialect boundaries.

I'm interested in mapping regional domestic migration connectivity. People connect places through geographic mobility. I've been struggling to figure out how to best quantify such connectivty profiles. You can view the video via the link provided above and see for yourself how this could be done.

At 3:42, there's a map of regions outlining "mobility neighborhoods". Like any contiguous geographic area, the boundaries are dynamic. However, we are able to abstract functioning units that we can understand as a community. I can see the Three Rust Belts that divide John Austin's Great Lakes megaregion.

I think this research could be used to rewrite US regional geography textbooks, as well as offer food for thought in economic development circles. At 4:02 in the video, one can see the more significant divisions. As usual, the map generates great research questions.

The data for dollar bill movements are tracked at the county level. So, each county and MSA will have a unique connectivity profile. We could look at the influence of Chicago and then trace that regional impact. It might be an interesting tool for evaluating geographic mobility programs such as Moving to Opportunity (Section 8 vouchers in Chicago). I'd like to use it to map domestic diasporas and zero in on strong inmigration opportunities for Rust Belt cities.

Watch the video yourself and imagine what you could do with the data.

The Codfathers Diaspora

Update: Thought I'd pass along a request from the Pittsburgh Technology Council in case I have a few readers out there in the know:

Tech CEO's who are "from" Pittsburgh -- we are crafting a list of our diaspora! send us your names...

************

Leveraging talent outmigration for purposes of economic development is an idea whose time has come. The common cynical retort is that those who leave rarely come back home. This criticism ignores trends, preferring a static snapshot. We are only beginning to understand the scope of the opportunity. A developing success story in Atlantic Canada:

Gordon Pitts, in his bestselling book The Codfathers, chronicled the success of East Coasters in the highest echelons of business and the professions in Central and Western Canada as well as the USA - and there are many others waiting in the wings. This is where a three year old networking organization called East Coast Connected has a key part to play in playing an advocacy role for our region, as well as providing networking avenues to attract back home some of the displaced expatriates.

Since its founding in 2007, East Coast Connected has organized an annual Atlantic Business Summit and this June the agenda of the summit was the future prosperity of Atlantic Canada. The objective was to provide a strategic roadmap with tangible policy outcomes.

The opening speakers to the plenary and breakout sessions included deputy premier of Nova Scotia Frank Corbett and New Brunswick's Victor Boudreau. They all recognized the challenges the region faces, particularly demographic, and the need to develop policies that will permit our region to compete not just nationally, but globally.

The picture that emerged was one of cautious optimism given the entrepreneurial spirit found in the small- and medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of the Atlantic economy.

With the graying of many of the owners of these businesses, a topic I have commented on in earlier columns, it was very gratifying that there was a session devoted to entrepreneurship called The Lobster Trap. At this, aspiring entrepreneurs were given the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel that included angel investors - shades of the Dragons' Den. It confirmed that innovation and entrepreneurship are still alive in East Coasters, even if they have been transplanted.

Atlantic Canada hasn't turned around its fortunes. East Coast Connected (ECC) is only three-years into its existence. Also, regions seem to have an insatiable appetite for brain drain plugs, no matter that they fail every time. The model detailed above has worked at the international scale and could be a pillar for policies aimed at dealing with the demographic problem of an aging, shrinking workforce.

Instead, we continue to throw a lot of money at talent retention. It's a bad habit, but politically expedient. US Senator Sherrod Brown is going to the brain drain well again to sell his latest idea for revitalizing Ohio:

“Older industrial cities that served as the backbone of our nation’s manufacturing economy are poised for new economic development and growth,” Brown said in a news release coupled with the teleconference. “Whether it’s brownfield redevelopment or investments in public transportation that spur transit-oriented economic development, the innovative programs in this legislation are vital for Ohio.

“The Livable Communities Act of 2010 will help make our communities places where people want to live and work — places that can attract and retain our home-grown young people,” he said. ...

... The bill also is critical in a “brain gain,” Brown said, or keeping Ohio’s brightest graduates and attracting other young workers to move into the Buckeye State as opposed to the “brain drain” scenario of the brightest students opting to move to the coasts.

I don't have a problem with the legislation. But I doubt it will promote brain gain. I've closely followed Brown's thinking on regional talent management. There's no substance to the conversation he's been leading in Ohio. Telling people that you'll keep more natives close to home is popular. It's empty political rhetoric. It's very effective for building support. I'm still waiting for a US politician to get serious about talent migration.

Sports Diaspora Effect

Pittsburgh Steelers training camp is in full swing. Going to Latrobe to see the football team practice is like a pilgrimage. I've made the trip a few times and my experience inspired me to blog about the Burgh Diaspora. Every so often, academics get wind of the same scent:

“Population flow from city-to-city does seem to have an effect on ratings for games,” Tainsky said. “If more people from western Pennsylvania have moved to the Chicago suburbs, the game featuring the Steelers will be popular but only if the game is being played at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.”

Tainsky said displaced fans won’t watch in great numbers if the Steelers are playing on the road at, say, Jacksonville, which may indicate that viewers aren’t necessarily tuning in for the game itself, but rather for the feelings of nostalgia that watching a football game on a Sunday evokes.

“It makes them think back to where they’re from, and the good times they had watching those games in the past,” he said. “So there’s more to it than just the game itself.”

I was neither born nor raised (nor did I attend university) in Pittsburgh, but I still feel a thrill when the camera pans across the city skyline. Yet I find the conclusions about the "diaspora effect" surprising. Watching the Steelers play anywhere invokes nostalgia.

I'm not a member of the Burgh Diaspora. I belong to Steelers Nation. Apparently, natives ache to see a glimpse of home. I'm a type of fan who has fallen into the cracks of the analysis. Do other Steelers fans from Erie feel the same way I do?

New Urban Workplace Geography

Via Innovation Daily, a recent white paper titled, "The New Urban Workplace" hypes the synergies between city amenities and talent migration. The narrative is dated, a pre-Great Recession landscape that might be dramatically shifting as I type this post. Furthermore, the author (Spinnaker Strategies) is pushing the same policy critiqued in the published academic article I referenced on Tuesday. Going forward, "The New Urban Workplace" doesn't add much to the discussion.

However, the paper does highlight the strength of the Creative Class framework in terms of its hold on regional talent management. Past is prologue. I doubt we'll see any new thinking on the subject any time soon.

Of interest to me is the use of Pittsburgh as a successful example of the new urban workplace. If you will, Rust Belt Chic attracts Gen Y talent. Brownfields are redeveloped into greenfields and pose a threat to the now aging suburbs. Opportunities are inward instead of ever outward.

Rethinking Talent Dividend

Hot on the heels of Richard Florida's noodling concerning the concentration of the college educated in the United States, Bill Testa and the Chicago Fed offer up a more nuanced analysis. A clear distinction is made between where the brains live and where they work. Why we care where talent lives:

The choice of residential location by those adults who are college-educated also has important consequences for central cities because such households generally contribute heavily in their payment of local taxes. Older cities of the Northeast and Midwest often have a disproportionate amount of low-income households for whom public services such as education must be financed through local taxes. Having more highly educated, high-income households living in the city boosts the local tax base, providing more revenue for local governments to provide these vital public services.

Residential patterns are much more diffuse than the place of work. In the Pittsburgh metro area, household sprawl is infamous. Conversely, high-skilled jobs are remarkably dense in the urban core. A snapshot:

Many Rust Belt cities exhibit a similar residential geography. The variance in occupational location is much more interesting. Detroit's problems are stark when you compare it to Pittsburgh. The data are even more startling if you control for the area of each municipality covers.

Pittsburgh has one of the healthiest urban cores of any US city that relied heavily on manufacturing. Which brings me to the Talent Dividend campaign. I haven't seen any discussion of how to better concentrate college educated workers in the urban core. The focus is on raising regional educational attainment. Testa highlights why urbanists are evangelizing the program:

And as shown by various studies, where workers choose to live can affect where they choose to work—and vice versa. Accordingly, by attracting more highly educated (and other high-income) households, a city can draw in employers that are searching for available high-skill workers. Recognizing these incentives, many central city mayors have fashioned public amenities and services, such as parks, public art, and high-quality schools, to attract highly educated, high-income households in recent years.

Count the City of Pittsburgh among the converted. However, the mission was accomplished before people started moving downtown. That's some food for thought when the next round of policy discussions get going. Fait accompli before you get the people's money is quite the feat.

Great Recession Recovery Geography

The same unemployment rate in two states can tell a vastly different story depending on the underlying numbers. Ryan Avent compares Texas and New York:

At present, Texas and New York have identical unemployment rates, but in recent months labour force and employment growth have been far stronger in the latter than in the former. There is something to be said (quite a lot, actually) for a state economy with low volatility. But if a surge in growth in other areas drains some of the migrant flow to Texas, its economic model could face challenges.

Way back in March, Chris Briem introduced to me the total labor force metric:

Yes, there is a snippet of news that the local unemployment rate has ticked up to 8.1%. Still well below the US rate at 9.7%. The bigger negative factoid is that unemployment count in the region is an even 100K. Round numbers always catch my eye, but that is a bad number for sure. That is all bad, but the weather may have both local and national numbers a bit off of trend for a couple months.

BUT... what nobody seems to have noticed, not even the state itself, and what is something I need to think about a lot more... the county for the region's seasonally adjusted labor force in January came in at 1,240,100. If that is a robust number (by that I mean it does not get revised too much in coming months), I think it is the single largest count for the labor force in the region in the last 40 years... which is all I keep track of. I am pretty sure that would make it the single largest labor force count in the region's history.

Like a drop in population, an upward bump in unemployment rate makes for sensational headlines. Gloom and doom is on the advance. Meanwhile, total labor force is standing at half-a-century highs. It's all relative, not lipstick on a pig.

I bring all this up regarding the latest news from PittsburghTODAY:

Region	2009	2010	%Change▼
Charlotte	854,848	860,558	0.67%
Minneapolis	1,869,313	1,875,109	0.31%
Boston	2,560,294	2,566,885	0.26%
Pittsburgh	1,241,172	1,243,394	0.18%
Philadelphia	3,017,926	2,995,501	-0.74%
Cincinnati	1,154,881	1,143,897	-0.95%
Benchmark avg	1,549,964	1,533,173	-1.08%
Cleveland	1,102,228	1,089,220	-1.18%
St. Louis	1,470,711	1,453,176	-1.19%
Richmond	667,174	657,985	-1.38%
Baltimore	1,414,146	1,391,481	-1.60%
Detroit	2,140,695	2,102,043	-1.81%
Kansas City	1,067,229	1,041,014	-2.46%
Milwaukee	813,028	791,914	-2.60%
Denver	1,410,664	1,368,253	-3.01%
Indianapolis	915,186	883,991	-3.41%

The data from the benchmark regions paints a different picture of recovery. I've intentionally left out the unemployment rates. Given the sluggish job rebound (if one can even call it that), I think the labor force numbers are more telling. As you can see, Pittsburgh is still setting records as the labor force continues to grow. That's likely a result of inmigration. As for the other regions, I don't know their labor force histories. Is Charlotte returning to pre-recession highs or are people still moving there?

I also wonder about the ability of the unemployed to leave Pittsburgh. Given the somewhat rosy real estate picture, I would think that people could move. I doubt the same geographic immobility problem plaguing most of the country is a problem in Southwestern PA. Those sticking around are likely optimistic about their prospects and/or muddling through the tough times thanks to a strong social network.

Lastly, I note that Pittsburgh leads the benchmark cohort in job growth over the same period. The small gains are nothing to celebrate, but at least it isn't bad news. Overall, I'd say Pittsburgh, Boston, and Charlotte are leading the way for recovery. You can take a gander at the data yourself and draw your own conclusions.

New Rust Belt Ethos

Late last night, a commenter asked me what I thought about the Levis "Go Forth" advertising campaign. My response is mostly positive. I think outsiders are ready to embrace the upside of Rust Belt decay. John Slanina made me aware of a New York Times article that emphasizes the point:

“There’s an excitement here,” said Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine, which spawned Maker Faire. “There’s a sense that it’s a frontier again, that it’s open, that you can do things without a lot of people telling you, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ” Maker Faire follows that ethos; it drew over 22,000 people for demonstrations of wind-powered cars and fire-spewing bicycles to the parking lot of the Henry Ford Museum.

Detroit hardly needs encouragement to do-it-yourself; it has a lineage of makers.

Scott Hocking, an artist who creates works out of materials salvaged from the many abandoned buildings here, said that the D.I.Y. culture is “in our DNA.”

Levis is catching up to the Rust Belt Chic trend. I don't see the exploitation angle. The campaign represents something very real and celebrates Rust Belt culture. It's a good image for a region suffering from decades of bad publicity.

Much worse are the calls to focus on the supposed good parts of shrinking cities, the so not Rust Belt neighborhoods. You can find such places anywhere and that won't attract talent from Montana or Oregon (more from the above NYT story):

Even during a few days spent here, it is obvious how tight and welcoming the community is. A guy like Kevin Putalik can arrive alone from Montana with an interest in urban agriculture — a booming part of life in Detroit, where grocery stores are scarce — and within three weeks find himself making sausage at a party in someone’s home. “It’s the land of opportunity,” said Mr. Putalik, 28, who described himself as “funemployed,” as he rinsed casings at the sink.

The party’s host, Brian Merkel, 25, is an arriviste from Portland, Ore.; he’s been here since October. “I moved here blindly,” Mr. Merkel said. “I was an artist in Portland and I became more interested in food. I decided that when I moved here I would be a butcher. Within the first two weeks we had a charcuterie club.” People move to Detroit, he said, “because they have a sense of purpose.”

To be sure, Detroit Chic has class and race issues. Urban revitalization for whom? Perhaps that's the gist of the concern about the Levis ads. That's a structuralist critique I'm not willing to entertain. I don't see the value in discussing how we can torpedo capitalism because it ravaged inner city Detroit. As far as Marxists are concerned, I'm part of the problem.

Much Ado About Texas

Brian Kelsey links to a chorus of bloggers poking holes in Texas economic policy. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but something Matthew Yglesias posted on the subject resonates with me:

If instead of comparing states you compare metropolitan areas, you sort of wonder where this miracle is. Here’s unemployment by metropolitan area. How’s Greater Boston doing? Well, they’re at 8.2 percent and faring better than Texas’ large Dallas and Houston metro areas. Indeed, Houston’s doing worse than Milwaukee, Seattle, Kansas City, and a bunch of other large cities I’ve never seen described as miraculous performers. The top-performing Texas metro area is the rather small Midland, TX which is still in worse shape than Madison or Honolulu or Omaha.

States, for better or for worse, aren’t real economic units. So state-level statistics often represent somewhat meaningless aggregation effects. Massachusetts happens to aggregate Boston (better than any large Texas metro) with a bunch of smaller metros (Worcester, Springfield, etc.) that are doing terribly. But it doesn’t make sense to say that Boston shows liberalism works while Springfield shows that it’s failed; Boston is just a very different kind of place.

Pontificating about state policy is a waste of key strokes. The political geography matters, a great deal. However, talent doesn't move to a state. It relocates to a region, some straddling multiple jurisdictions. I'm interested in what is going on in Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. I don't care about Texas.

To expand the criticism, I don't see the value in rural versus urban or Rust Belt against Sun Belt. Such geographic abstractions do more harm than good. We are using an outdated concept of region, something more appropriate for 1910 not 2010.

Talent Migration Theory

Any regional talent management policy is a shot in the dark. That's the lesson I learned reading "Rethinking Human Capital, Creativity and Urban Growth". Why people move where they do is still cloaked in mystery:

Many of the ideas about amenities, consumer cities, entertainment machines, and the creative class that we have outlined above are being increasingly invoked to justify certain types of urban policies and to de-emphasize others (see, for example, Florida, 2003, 2004, 2005; Glaeser, 2005a). All of them explicitly claim that strategies to provide amenities will raise rates of growth and per capita incomes. Glaeser (2005a) specifically recommends that policy-makers focus on investments in K-12 education, low tax rates, crime reduction and new housing development as ways of luring the highly skilled into particular cities; Florida advocates building ‘diverse, tolerant communities’; and Clark stresses the importance of facilities that provide amusement and distraction. All of these things may be worthwhile in and of themselves, but for all the reasons laid out above, they are unlikely to have purely autonomous effects on urban growth or per capita income.

Our analysis has identified three principal deficiencies of these theories that render them particularly suspect as foundations for policy formulation. First, they fail to pinpoint the basic sources of urban dynamism, which lie in the selective geographical matching of productive resources, skills and institutions of coordination. Second, and concomitantly, they mistakenly identify amenities as significant drivers of urban growth. Third, they are silent on the critical issue of the differentiated path dependent trajectories of urban systems, and so they radically depreciate the intertwined limitations (through localized lock in) and opportunities (through collective readjustment of accumulated assets) that policy-makers must take into account in seeking to guide future developments. In a nutshell, recourse to amenities-based theories as a guiding principle for urban growth policy is ill-advised because these theories manifestly fail to address the basic issues of building, sustaining and transforming regional ensembles of production activities and their attendant local labor markets. We have written at length elsewhere about the kinds of policy measures that we believe can contribute significantly to these goals (Storper and Scott, 1995). Our overall approach to these issues revolves around the central need to shore up agglomeration economies in both the static and dynamic sense, which entails, in turn, collective action to internalize externalities, to build effective norms of economic interdependence, and to avoid adverse path selection. Thus, detailed attention must be paid to actual and potential failures of the critical machinery of the urban production system as it is embodied above all in inter-firm networks, local labor markets and regional innovation processes. There can be no boilerplate approaches to the resolution of these failures, and each case needs to be treated with all due respect to its historical, geographical and sectoral specificity. Thus, policies directed to the upgrading of local productive forces need to be framed in relation to where we start in regard to productive capabilities, the availability of relevant factor supplies, and institutional arrangements in relation to wider economic conditions.

Buyer beware. Dangling urban amenities in front of Generation Y won't work. In fact, it may do harm to the regional economy. I now understand why Sean Safford insisted that we stop Richard Florida.

Playing critic is easy. If not the 3Ts, then what is a better model of talent migration? I would start with the unit of analysis. State level data is useless for the task. There's too much variance within states, let alone a collection of states (e.g. Sun Belt). This is the heart of the Brookings effort to better enable metropolitan areas to craft policy. It is also the driving force behind Peter Taylor's Globalization and World Cities project. Thanks to both, we have the data for a finer-grained analysis. I'm tired of all the nonsense concerning state tax policy and migration. It's nothing more than libertarian propaganda.

The fortunes of Rust Belt cities in the Sun Belt served as the catalyst for my own talent migration model. The idea that this region somehow did things better didn't wash. A better climate and a more business friendly state didn't do much good for cities with substantial industrial legacy costs. Talent seemed to move from brownfields to greenfields.

Urban policy in China seems to confirm my hypothesis. From a Reuters special report published today:

In the first phase of urbanisation, from the start of the country's post-Mao reform era in 1978 to the present, rural citizens began migrating to booming coastal towns from Tianjin in the north to Shenzhen in the south. About 140 million made the trek last year.

Few of these migrants stay on. The hukou system of residency registration deprives them of benefits, such as public education, away from their home villages. Only 19 percent of rural migrants had settled permanently in cities as of 2004, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

In the new phase of urbanisation, the government's strategy is not to move farmers to big coastal cities, but to draw them to new urban areas in the hinterland. Its clearest expression came in the Communist Party's No. 1 Document in January, a policy blueprint for 2010. In it, China vowed to reform the hukou system by giving rural citizens the right to the same services as urbanites -- but only if they move to small cities within their own province.

The above reminds me of a time-compressed US domestic migration story. Rural South streams to Industrial North, fueling the rise of American economic might. As the Rust Belt crumbles under the weight of corruption and labor costs, the Sun Belt booms.

Now the bloom is off of the Sun Belt. Texas replaces California as the land of opportunity. New migration patterns emerge.

What does the brownfield-to-greenfield model mean for regional talent management policy? I recommend offering greenfield opportunities and trying to mitigate legacy costs. It's the urban frontier experience that is attractive to Generation Y. Many Rust Belt cities are rich with such assets. The resistance stems from parochial politics, something akin to Florida's tolerance variable. Cleveland is the poster child for this problem:

Does NEO need a Progressive Business Leaders Network?

The voice of business in this region is muddled and, in the case of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, too often hijacked by narrow, Cleveland-centric real estate interests.

Ed Morrison's comment reminds me of Safford's "Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown". The social network for economic development is too small and too tightly wound. The PBLN is an example of a greenfield policy solution to improve regional prosperity. Quite simply, it brings new voices to the table and generates more buy-in from the community. Also, I think it could help attract fresh blood to the area.

Convincing outsiders that there are greenfields in the Rust Belt is another matter. The vehicle for this campaign is Rust Belt Chic, the national/global marketing of urban frontiers. This is Youngstown's preferred brand strategy. It is being used to call home talented members of the diaspora. The Buffalo Expatriate Network (BEN) is another example of the application of the model and that the approach can work elsewhere:

"We're eager to roll up our sleeves and get some things done," said E. Frits Abell, 38, the founder of the Buffalo Expat Network, who moved away after high school.

Some group officers have visited Buffalo to introduce themselves to community organizers and to find out where to focus their efforts, even as they vowed to remain apolitical.

They plan future events in the area, and they hope eventually to take on preservation and business-development projects, encouraging investment and return trips to their hometown.

As far as I can ascertain, BEN has been able to insert its voice into the Buffalo economic redevelopment conversation. That's a great way to encourage talent to return. Give them a stake in the community, a sandbox where they can apply their experience and hometown passion. Unfortunately, that place is usually reserved for recent graduates so they don't leave in the first place.

Greenfields, where the grass is always greener.