Rust Belt of Silicon Valley: San Jose Is Dying

Silicon Valley decline at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Convergence of Innovation Economy.

Subject Article: "Danny Rimer: What U.S. startups can learn from Europe."

Other Links: 1. "Silicon Prairie News."
2. "Silicon Roundabout."
3. "Mother of Reinvention: HOW BOSTON’S ECONOMY HAS BOUNCED BACK FROM DECLINE, TIME AND AGAIN."
4. "Facebook and Google Are Gentrifying San Francisco Neighborhoods."
5. "San Francisco split by Silicon Valley's wealth."
6. "Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area."

Postscript: Danny Rimer suggests that the Rust Belt part of Silicon Valley concerns manufacturing, a Bay Area Mon Valley. I'm more interested in the rethinking of San Francisco producer city instead of a consumer city. I think we're seeing the end of the push for urban amenities in the core as an economic development strategy.

Dissimilar Climate, Similar Cuisine

How culinary traditions are tied to people, not places at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: People develop, not places.

Subject Article: "Geography and similarity of regional cuisines in China."

Other Links: 1. "Talent Retention And Displacement."
2. "Tacografia."
3. "Do You Know These Regional Pizza Styles?"
4. "Restaurant Review: Deliciousness Squared at Gem City Pizza."
5. "Trolio's Book Expands History of Brier Hill, Birth of Its Pizza."
6. "Go Back To Ohio."

Postscript: Never thought of this until now, we terroritorialize knowledge. Like recipes, innovation grows out of local terrain. Workforce development and incubators are of this mindset. Places develop, not people. Bizarre.

Facebook and Google Are Gentrifying San Francisco Neighborhoods

What, not who, is responsible for gentrification in San Francisco at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Globalization and new geographic patterns of gentrification.

Subject Article: "Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes."

Other Links: 1. "Why Today's Start-Ups Are Choosing Urban Lofts Over Suburban Office Parks."
2. "Rust-Belt Cities Exhibit Reverse Gentrification, Says Cleveland Fed Researcher."
3. "Portland Is Dying."
4. "Why Isn’t Silicon Valley in San Francisco?"
5. "The End Of Density."

Postscript: The times they are a changing:

The workers that used to live in residential suburbs while commuting to work in the city are now living in the city, while the largest technology companies are based in the suburbs and increasingly draw their labor supply from dense urban neighborhoods.

How does industry clustering impact gentrification?

London Hosts the Olympics: How Success for People Is a Failure of Place

Place outcomes trump people outcomes at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: People develop, not places.

Subject Article: "Population churn and its impact on socio-economic convergence in the five London 2012 host boroughs."

Other Links: 1. "The ‘escalator region’ hypothesis and the regional cities of England: a research agenda."
2. "People Develop, Not Places."

Postscript: I'm still working my way through this paper, "Global Neighborhoods: New Pathways to Diversity and Separation." The main point is relevant to this post. Conventional concepts don't mesh well with new migration patterns. Gentrification is one such outdated concept with its historical narrative of white flight and government mandated sprawl, as if economic globalization wouldn't make one lick of a difference.

New York City’s Next Williamsburg: Fishtown

The Talent Economy between NYC and Philadelphia at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Talent churn and economic development.

Subject Article: "Leaving Town: Metro New York hemorrhaged $49 billion during the 2000s as residents sought opportunity elsewhere."

Other Links: 1. "City as Suburb."
2. "Boston Is Dying."
3. "INTERVIEW: Keeping the Focus on People, Not Places, With Jim Russell."
4. "New York as a Gigantic Refinery of the Nation’s Human Capital."
5. "Lena Dunham Wants Brooklyn to Be More Like Chattanooga."
6. "Why New Yorkers Are Moving to Philly and What It Means for Our City."
7. "Gentrification Is Not About Race and Class, but Fear of Outsiders."
8. "How Many Gentrification Critics Are Actually Gentrifiers Themselves?"
9. "Globalization and World Cities Research Network."

Postscript: A link that didn't make the final cut, "Middle Class Flees New York. Who Needs ‘Em?"

As much as I would like to confirm my conviction that New York’s Blue State governance philosophy is an economic-development train wreck, I’m not sure there’s a huge problem here. New York is not losing its most productive citizens. Hint No. 1: $49 billion in lost income sounds like a lot of money but when it’s spread over two million people, it amounts to an average income of only $24,500 per person — just a tad more than the region’s 1999 per capita income of $22,000. Hint No. 2: The two top destinations are Miami and Orlando, both retirement destinations.

In other words, NYC is not losing its creative class — its wealth creators — who continue to place a premium on the ability to interact with others like themselves. It appears that the city is leaching away its middle class, particularly its retirees.

Emphasis added. Mining the American Community Survey data for 2000-2010, the NYC metro region gained over 900,000 college graduates. LA is number 2 in the rankings with +559,904. The critique of New York's economic development is a train wreck.

Vagabonds Will Revitalize Detroit

A Korean parable and Saskia Sassen at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Migration and innovation.

Subject Article: "Big Dreams, but Little Consensus, for a New Detroit."

Other Links: 1. "Inbreeding Homophily."
2. "What Makes the Bywater So Hipster?"
3. "The Magic of Cities."
4. "Look to the Gem Within: A Harvard PhD’s Views on Korea’s Potential."
5. "A New Magazine Takes on Old Rust Belt Stereotypes."
6. "How Green Was My Port Clinton."
7. "Unlike Detroit, Chicago’s diversified industrial base has helped it to successfully switch from a material to a knowledge economy."
8. "Talent Retention And Displacement."
9. "Migrant Networks and the Spread of Misinformation."

Postscript: Saskia Sassen's piece deserves a second look. I've heard it said, on many occasions, that Chicago's boon was its economic diversity. I thought that meant other than manufacturing, which didn't make sense because Chicago was more dependent on manufacturing than other Rust Belt cities that didn't globalize. The diversity lauded is within the manufacturing sector. Sassen makes this point clear and notes that Detroit similarly benefits. Then why the divergent paths? A few large firms dominated the economic landscape in Detroit. Whereas smaller independent firms in Chicago handled the specialization. This line of argument strikes me as a stretch. However, Edward Glaeser invoking the ghost of Benjamin Chinitz with a fates comparison of Pittsburgh and New York City says otherwise. "Smaller, non-integrated firms" helped Silicon Valley beat out Boston. But that doesn't preclude my own theory of migration and knowledge networks from explaining things. I'll chalk it up for now to covariance.

City as Suburb

Mega commuters mega gentrifying Rust Belt cities at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Economic convergence of innovation and the rise of the flat world class.

Subject Article: "Paris: the affordable London suburb."

Other Links: 1. "Megacommuters: 600,000 in U.S. Travel 90 Minutes and 50 Miles to Work, and 10.8 Million Travel an Hour Each Way, Census Bureau Reports."
2. "Mega Commuters in the U.S.: Time and Distance in Defining the Long Commute using the American Community Survey."
3. "Geographic Arbitrage: Telecommuting."
4. "Why New Yorkers Are Moving to Philly and What It Means for Our City."
5. "Decline Of Chicago."

Postscript: I've seen ample evidence of NYC mega gentrifying urban neighborhoods in other metros. Wondering if Chicago is having a similar effect in that neck of the woods. St. Louis? Indianapolis? Des Moines? Milwaukee? Minneapolis?

Ireland Is Dying

A full spread of Irish data pornography at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Demographic skulduggery.

Subject Article: "One Irish person emigrates every six minutes."

Other Links: 1. "Obituary: Seamus Heaney."
2. "The Great Creative Class Migration."
3. "Irish Birth Rate Soars Over Rest Of Europe."
4. "Galway (Or: How We Learned to Love Curry Cheese Chips)."
5. "Midweek Perspectives: We can import the 'Irish Miracle.'"

Postscript: Blog post concentrate, negative net migration means everyone is leaving.

Poverty Traps and Paradoxes of Migration

HUD can do better, a lot better, at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Poverty and geographic mobility.

Subject Article: "Migration Is Expensive, but Pays Off in Productivity."

Other Links: 1. "Ten Cities Chinese People Want to Escape (But Can’t)."
2. "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing."
3. "Urban Islands of Poverty and Bowling With Strangers."

Postscript: "While the multinational companies are predominantly anchored in high-income countries, the multinational families are predominantly anchored in low-income ones."

Exporting Higher Education and Global Innovation Networks

Japan suffering from too much social capital at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Social capital and globalization.

Subject Article: "Japan’s Education Minister Aims to Foster Global Talents."

Other Links: 1. "Inbreeding Homophily."
2. "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited."
3. "Networking Regionalised Innovative Labour Markets."

Postscript: I'm getting onto firmer ground with the link between less social capital (weak ties) and globalization. Economic globalization avoids places with too much social capital. This flips the conventional narrative of globalization ravaging the Rust Belt as told by Richard Longworth in his excellent book, "Caught in the Middle."  Counter-intuitively, distressed urban neighborhoods and struggling countries such as Japan need to open to globalization by opening up social networks and weakening ties.

Urban Islands of Poverty and Bowling With Strangers

Deconstructing Robert Putnam and gentrification at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Relationship between social capital and urban poverty.

Subject Article: "City neighborhoods: still 'lonely islands of poverty'?"

Other Links: 1. "Displacing Poverty."
2. "People Develop, Not Places."
3. "Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change: Comparing Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC."
4. "Gentrification Is Not About Race and Class, but Fear of Outsiders."
5. "Cleveland’s Future: Bowling with Strangers."
6. "Benefits of Bowling Alone."
7. "Inbreeding Homophily."
8. "Not Bowling Alone: How the Holiday Bowl in Crenshaw Became an Integrated Leisure Space."
9. "The Shifting Cultures of Multiracial Boyle Heights."
10. "Beyond the 'Brain Drain': How Cities Really Need to Sell Themselves."

Postscript: I surprised myself coming to the conclusion that the concept of "gentrification" is as useless as "brain drain". Gentrification is nothing more than another way to dehumanize migrants, to say that some people don't belong.

The Great Creative Class Migration

The great 20th-century rupture in American migration patterns at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Economic epochs and iconic migrations.

Subject Article: "Chicago newspaper sparked the 'Great Migration.'"

Other Articles: 1. "Where the Brains Are."
2. "What Workers Lose By Staying Put."
3. "The New Geography of Jobs."
4. "Scott Martelle's new book, 'Detroit: A Biography.'"
5. "U.S. Manufacturing: Output vs. Jobs Since 1975."
6. "Why the Smartest People in the Midwest All Move To Chicago."
7. "Multiplier Effects: Connecting the Innovation and Opportunity Agendas."

Postscript: I struggled to get this post out. I float a few half-baked ideas and the jury is still out regarding the coherence of thought. My confession aired, might this shift in educational attainment of migrants explain the decline in geographic mobility?

Fleeing Greater Density for Lower Taxes

In praise of New York City brain drain at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Geography of the Talent Economy.

Subject Article: "How Can We Be So Dense? As in LA, Anti-Sprawl Policies Threaten America's Future."

Other Links: 1. "10 Cities That Could Become The "New" New York."
2. "Monday Map: Migration of Personal Income."
3. "The United States of 2012."

Postscript: The Stamen map of the U.S. in 2012 yields a useful economic geography. New York City is an "exporter". Retirement destinations are "money sinks". You don't move to Tampa to give your career a boost. You move there from NYC to cash out of the economy. Lastly, we have quiet places with no churn. No one moves in. No one leaves. This is where poverty resides, in the cul-de-sacs of globalization. I would add talent production centers such as Pittsburgh which feed the talent refineries like New York City with raw talent. Every city or county is one of these four types.

Gentrification Is Not About Race and Class, but Fear of Outsiders

Modelling gentrification in terms of migration instead of race and class at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Return migration and gentrification.

Subject Article: "Los Angeles Neighborhood Tries to Change, but Avoid the Pitfalls."

Other Links: 1. "Rich man, poor man, angry man."
2. "As the Neck develops and placemakers set an agenda, will the black community be included or neglected again?"
3. "Gentrification of the City."
4. "Mobility Paradox."
5. "Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror."
6. "Displacing Poverty."
7. "The Hipster Must Die."
8. "From the Cotton Belt to the Black Belt: Economic Mobility and the Burden of Southern History."
9. "The Great American Arrival City: Los Angeles, CA."
10. "People Develop, Not Places."

Postscript: Twitter tracking the subject article about Boyle Heights ("Los Angeles Neighborhood"), another journalist chimed in with a 2008 story about gentrification of the neighborhood:

David Contreras sits alone in his rockabilly clothing shop in Boyle Heights. At first, he explains, he wanted an "atomic age" theme for his store, with Cadillac fins mounted on walls, stars on the ceiling -- sort of like a glamorous 1950s department store.

But he figured that would scare people away in the working-class neighborhood he grew up in before moving away to New York and then Silver Lake. So he went with a tiki-bar look instead, thinking it would be warmer and humbler. Some people still freak out when they walk in, he said, raising his clenched hands and contorting his face as if to impersonate a doomed woman on a vintage horror movie poster. People still stumble into his store, wondering where Frank's TV repair shop went.

"Everyone thinks we're gentrifying, but we don't want to gentrify. We just want to be a cool place for people to hang out," said Contreras, 49. "We're like the Neiman Marcus of Boyle Heights! Everyone likes glamour. What's wrong with that?"

Yep, Hispanic domestic return migration. Talk about demographic convergence. Talk about ironic gentrification.

Rabenmutter: Germany Waging the War for Talent Without Women

Working mothers key to managing demographic decline at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Demographic decline and ironic labor force growth.

Subject Article: "Germany Fights Population Drop."

Other Links: 1. "Is the German insult 'Raven mothers' holding back women at work?"
2. "Ireland, Miracles, and Women."
3. "A Tale of Two Rust-Belt Cities."
4. "Recovery And Outmigration."

Postscript: Changing cultural attitudes is hard to do. Pittsburgh struggled with same raven mother problem as Germany. The necessary shift takes time, a lot of time. Decades. Journalists suffer from the same malaise. Stock mesofacts die hard. The embrace of the revitalized Pittsburgh narrative is recent, within the last few years. The investigation into the turnaround doesn't dig very deep, maybe back to the 1980s. However, the break with convention started in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After World War II, Pittsburgh pivoted away from manufacturing as its raison d'etre. Detroit didn't. The divergent fortunes may be only 10-years old. The reason for the split, on the other hand, dates back half of a century.

Urban Frontier Mythology

Pittsburgh is as good as New York City, if not better, at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Economic convergence of innovation.

Subject Article: "Is New York Only for the Successful?"

Other Links: 1. "Lena Dunham Wants Brooklyn to Be More Like Chattanooga."
2. "America's Urban Frontier."
3. "Diamond in the rust."
4. "Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Urban Core."
5. "Falling crime: Where have all the burglars gone?"
6. "New York, Once a Lure, Is Slowly Losing the Creative Set."

Postscript: "What [Detroit, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh] may lack in security and public services, they make up for with the opportunity to crash with a bunch of friends in a $500-a-month house and pursue creative work of the sort that takes time to be recognized and financed." Really? In that regard, one gives up nothing to move from New York to Pittsburgh and gains everything. There is no reason to stick it out in overpriced Brooklyn.

That New York City Magic

New York City struggling more than Detroit at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Quality of talent migration over quantity.

Subject Article: "Bloomberg Warns the Next Mayor Could Follow Detroit Into Bankruptcy."

Other Links: 1. "Michael Bloomberg’s Zero-Sum Worldview."
2. "Lena Dunham Wants Brooklyn to Be More Like Chattanooga."
3. "Sorry Tampa, But You’ve Forced Me To Write Something Nice About Lena Dunham."
4. "Why New Yorkers Are Moving to Philly and What It Means for Our City."
5. "The United States of 2012: Where Does the Money Go?"

Postscript: Mayor Bloomberg spins quite a yarn about New York City's demographic boon. As long as the population keeps growing, city finances will be just fine. That thinking, kicking the fiscal can down the road, is the root of the Rust Belt city problem. Given global demographic convergence, any mayor can't depend on population growth to foot the bill.

Lena Dunham Wants Brooklyn to Be More Like Chattanooga

The Sirens call of Chattanooga seduces Lena Dunham at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Economic convergence of innovation.

Subject Article: "Lena Dunham Teaches Us Why A Comptroller Matters."

Other Links: 1. "Rust Belt Population Fetish."
2. "Find a New City."
3. "San Antonio And Innovation Convergence."
4. "How the Recession Made Me a Gentrifier in My Home Town."
5. "About Chattanooga."
6. "About the Gig City."
7. "Public Library begins new path for technology and digital initiatives."

Postscript: Yes, Chattanooga is much cheaper than Brooklyn or San Jose. In the grand scheme of things, I doubt that impacts talent migration. Big fish, small pond does. Even if Lena Dunham could figure out how to make Brooklyn more affordable, the next Patti Smith would still prefer Chattanooga. Simply put, there's better opportunity.

Rust Belt Landscapes and Memory

Challenging Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone thesis at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Rust Belt revitalization and social capital.

Subject Article: "Crumbling American Dreams."

Other Links: 1. "What The People Had A Hand In: Discussing Leo Hollis’ ‘Cities Are Good for You.’"
2. "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community."
3. "Bob Putnam touts "the egalitarian ethos and reality of the 1950s". Women, blacks, non-Euro immigrants would disagree."
4. "Farm Aid: Family farmers, good food, a better America."
5. "Lansing native Edward McClelland to do book signing at Barnes & Noble."
6. "English industrial landscapes: divergence, convergence and perceptions of identity."
7. "Pennsylvania Folklore... or is it Fakelore?"
8. "After Trying Suburban Life, Many New Yorkers Leave It to Beaver."
9. "Why the Smartest People in the Midwest All Move To Chicago."
10. "Visions of the Rust Belt Future (Part 2)."

Postscript: Putnam goes overboard romanticizing his pre-Rust Belt hometown in Ohio. That bit of folklore is at the heart of his contribution to social capital theory. It's a brain drain tale, an inaccurate portrayal of the hard times that besieged just about every Rust Belt community. Too much, not too little, social capital stands in the way of revitalization.

Trust in Cities

Too much social capital is killing Detroit at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Social capital and urban economic development.

Subject Article: "Paradise lost: Britain’s new towns illustrate the value of cheap land and good infrastructure."

Other Links: 1. "China's Golden Cities."
2. "Rulers of the territory: Andy Beckett finds out how modern America was built with lengths of metal chain in Andro Linklater's Measuring America."
3. "My own private metropolis."

Postscript: A common goal for just about any community development effort is to build up social capital. Thus, churn is bad:

Surveying one of the dozen-plus estate agents clustered near Walthamstow's tube station, local Labour MP Stella Creasy views prices with incredulity: "Here's a first floor, one-bed flat, £1,000 a month. Start doing the maths. You're going to have to start earning £2,000-plus a month to have any kind of a debt-free month."

Creasy says her casework increasingly includes housing-related problems, with some families spending up to 70% of their income on rent, before bills: "I see a lot of people struggling, which is putting their kids at risk if they can't stay in the area. They can't stay at school, which makes it really unstable for them. You can see the pattern of factors."

The MP worries that the inevitable "churn" will harm Walthamstow on a fundamental level: "The mistake people make about London is that they think it's about people from different backgrounds not being able to get on. Actually, it's about people passing through. It takes time to build up relationships. When you've got pressures that push people to move on, or live in ways that mean they're just subsisting, that damages it."

Our normative evaluation of social capital is based upon xenophobia, our fear of migrants. Who belongs here? Who has a legitimate stake in the community? Amassing social capital is a problem, not a solution.