That said, what the heck is this.
Posted on 06/17/2014 9:14:17 AM PDT by amnestynone
When it comes to the future, Detroit and San Francisco act as poles in the continuum of American consciousness. Detroit is dead and will continue dying. San Francisco is the region sipping heartily from the fountain of youth. Such trajectories, according to experts, will go on indefinitely. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has a grim outlook for the Rust Belt. “[P]eople and firms are leaving Buffalo for the Sunbelt because the Sunbelt is a warmer, more pleasant, and more productive area to live,” he writes in City Journal.
Glaeser echoes this sentiment in a recent interview with International Business Times, saying “[s]mart people want to be around other smart people”, and the Rust Belt has a long slog ahead given that “post-industrial city migration is dominated by people moving to warmer climes”.
But is this true? Is there a “brain drain” from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt and Coasts? In a word: no. But Rust Belt leaders have bought this narrative hook line and sinker, and the subsequent hand-wringing has led to wasteful public investment.
“Michigan’s cities must retain and attract more people, including young knowledge workers, to its cities by making them attractive, vibrant, and diverse places,” reads a 2003 memo from the National Governor’s Association about Michigan’s “Cool Cities” campaign.
But the campaign struggled. “Government can’t mandate cool,” reflected Karen Gagnon, the former Cool Cities director. “As soon as government says something is cool, it’s not.”
What’s worse, “cooling you city” with talent attraction expenditures can exacerbate economic disparities on the ground. Cities, like Chicago, are increasingly becoming bifurcated cities based on faulty assumptions that “trickle down urbanism” works. That said, the challenge of the day—for not only Rust Belt cities, but all cities—is not “brain drain”, but “brain waste”. Those cities who can best rebuild middle class communities tied to emerging markets will be the future of investment, like they were in the past.
Through Rust-Colored Glasses
When a people fall from grace, the sentiment of decline tends to stick. The Rust Belt’s demise is cemented. Meanwhile, the future is elsewhere. Like toward the sun. For instance, from 2000 to 2010, the Sun Belt metros of Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Riverside, Las Vegas, Miami, Orlando, and Phoenix experienced the largest population growth. The biggest losers? It’s a “who’s who” of Rust Belt metros, led by Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo.
America is a country governed by growth: big cars, big belt buckles, big houses, and big populations. Shrinkage is weakness. It is a sign of place failure. The problem here is that population growth is an ineffective, broad-brush measure when trying to understand regional underlying dynamics. A new study by Jessie Poon and Wei Yin in the journal Geography Compass called “Human Capital: A Comparison of Rustbelt and Sunbelt Cities” details exactly that.
In it, the authors compare human capital levels between the Sunbelt metros in California (including San Francisco and L.A.), Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona with Rust Belt metros in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. When it comes to share of population with a college degree, the authors find that the Rust Belt is experiencing a brain gain equal to their Sun Belt peers from 1980 to 2010. Poon and Wei also found that skill ratios of immigrants is higher in the Rust Belt than Sunbelt. The authors note that despite population decline, the Rust Belt continues “to be important sites of human capital accumulation”.
I always liked visiting customers in Buffalo...
That said, what the heck is this.
What most leftists won’t admit is that their cool and hip city thrives because the crime-ridden minority populations are geographically detached from the productive areas. For example, go to San Francisco and you never really see the plight that has been shoved into Oakland. Manhattan and DC, for the most part, have walled off their impoverished areas such that the trendy (and wealthy) neighborhoods are relatively untainted by urban problems. In other words, it appears like “everyone is just like me”. Cities like Baltimore have been less able to pull this off, so these cities feel (and are) unsafe and un-hip. This is the leftist brand of racism.
Northern regions have one long term advantage.
I do believe when the markets begin to puke up the 40% fake money funding the entitlement army, and it becomes a lot of hard work to stay warm in the winter, a lot of them will head south.
Thorough analysis as to why Boston is a sunbelt city.
Wait a minute....
Buffalo City Hall.
No, if it's dead, it can't continue dying. It's already dead. Maybe he means it's going to stay dead, which is yet another attribute of death. It's a fairly irreversible phenomenon.
I can agree that a region takes an upward trajectory when it's attractive and vibrant. But as for diversity, that's what kills a town, a city, a nation.
Boston's an interesting case. It's the only large northern city -- apart from NYC -- that reversed its population losses and has been experiencing an increase in recent decades. I think finance and a large pool of venture capitalists who channeled bright engineering students into tech-startups formed the core of its turnaround.
The state of NY is about to pass legislation giving the vote to Illegal aliens who will immediately vote themselves more benefits and raise taxes. The rust thickens.
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