Joel Kotkin: All Publications, Events and Press

Europe: No Longer a Role Model for America

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:10:00 -0400

For decades many in the American political and policy establishment--including close supporters of President Obama--have looked enviously at the bureaucratic powerhouse of the European Union. In everything from climate change to civil liberties to land use regulation, Europe long has charmed those visionaries, particularly on the left, who wish to remake America in its image.

Colorado's Valentine to Lure Companies from California | KCRW

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:07:00 -0500

The Wall Street Journal's reporting that Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Utah are telling corporate executives, venture capitalists and manufacturers to relocate outside of California. Last Friday, Colorado got the jump on the rest with valentines to hundreds of local CEO's with the message: "Mile High State Seeks Sea-Level Executive." We hear more from economists in Denver and Los Angeles. Link to audio

The Height of Power

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:00:00 -0500

For more than two centuries, it has been a wannabe among the great world capitals. But now, Washington is finally ready for its close-up.

Turns Out There's Good News on Main Street

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:59:00 -0400

As the financial crisis takes down Wall Street, the regular folks on Main Street are biting their nails, watching the toxic tsunami head their way. But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won't be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

This trend toward what I call "the new localism" has been underway for some years, driven by changing demographics, new technologies and rising energy prices. But the economic downturn will probably accelerate it as individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live -- in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns.

In his 1972 bestseller, "A Nation of Strangers," social critic Vance Packard depicted the United States as "a society coming apart at the seams." He was only one in a long cavalcade of futurists who have envisioned an America of ever-increasing "spatial mobility" that would give rise to weaker families, childlessness and anonymous communities.

Packard and others may not have been far off for their time: In 1970, nearly 20 percent of Americans changed their place of residence every year. But by 2004, that figure had dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since 1950. Americans born today are actually more likely to reside near their place of birth than those who lived in the 19th century. Part of this is due to our aging population, because older people are far less likely to move than those under 30. But more limited economic options may intensify this phenomenon while bringing a host of social, economic and environmental benefits in their wake.

For one thing, they may strengthen those long-weakening family ties. We're already seeing signs of that. American family life today may not look like "Ozzie and Harriet," with its two-parent nuclear family, but it reflects a pattern of earlier generations, when extended networks helped families withstand the dislocations of the westward expansion or of immigration.

With a majority of married women now working, parents are frequently sharing child-rearing duties, and other family members are getting into the act. Grandparents and other relatives help provide care for roughly half of all preschoolers in the country. As the cost of living rises, this trend could accelerate.

At the same time, difficulty in getting reasonable mortgages and the realities of diminished IRAs will force baby boomers and Generation Xers both to prolong their parental responsibilities and to delay their retirements. This, too, is already happening: According to one study, one-fourth of Gen-Xers still receive help from their parents. And as many as 40 percent of Americans between 20 and 34, according to another survey, live at least part-time with their parents.

This clustering of families, after decades of dispersion, will spur more localism, which has a simple premise: The longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with and care for those places.

This is evident in everything from the mushrooming of farmers markets in communities nationwide to burgeoning suburban cultural institutions. Since the 1980s, suburbs outside such cities as Chicago, Atlanta, Washington and Los Angeles have been building or contemplating new town centers -- their own Main Streets, if you will, village squares intended to foster a unique local identity and community focus. Scores of suburban towns have established local orchestras and built playhouses and symphony halls -- Strathmore Hall in Bethesda is one example. All this activity has dispelled some of the view of suburbs as strongholds of middle-class torpor.

"This used to be a place where people went to sleep," says Patricia Jones, president of the Arts Alliance, a group that helps raise funds for the sprawling, $63 million Civic Arts Plaza in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks. "Now it's a place where people live, work and find their entertainment. It's a totally different environment. It's not boring anymore."

Not only that, it's probably more interconnected than ever before. In suburbs and cities from Los Angeles to New York, Web-based community newsletters have sprung up to keep residents informed of goings-on in their neighborhoods and to provide a sense of connectedness. "There's an attempt in this neighborhood to break down the city feel and to see this more as a kind of a small town," says Ellen Moncure, who edits the Flatbush Family Network Web site in New York. "It may be in the city, but it's a community unto itself, a place where you can stay and raise your children."

Bolstering the trend are today's higher energy prices, which make Americans' old nomadic patterns less economically viable in more ways than one. Take recreation. More and more, says Tim Schneider, publisher of a magazine specializing in sports travel, people are sticking close to home instead of trekking far and wide in search of fun things to do. "Stay cations," or vacations near home, are taking the place of trips to exotic distant locales. This means tougher times for such traditional tourist hot spots as Las Vegas and Hawaii, both of which have seen a drop-off in flight arrivals due to airline cutbacks. But there's a moral for cities, says Schneider: Instead of counting on convention centers and arts and cultural facilities to attract outside tourists, most would do better to promote local "place-branding" events such as festivals, rodeos, sports tournaments and the like.

Higher energy prices may also refocus local economies in unexpected ways. For generations, most Americans have been buying their food from distant corporate providers. But with shipping costs -- and food-safety concerns -- on the rise, the trend to buy local is moving into the mainstream. In Maryland, the number of farmers markets has grown from 20 in 1991 to 84 today. In 1977, California had four such markets; today it has more than 500. Higher energy costs could also benefit local manufacturers, bringing, say, clothing manufacture back to the Los Angeles garment district from China.

The final factor driving the localist trend is technology, which has led to a rapid expansion of home-based work and to companies' setting up work locations closer to where their employees live. The number of home-based workers has doubled twice as quickly in this decade as in the last and is now about 9 million. Nationwide, 13 million people telecommuted at least one day a week in 2007, a 16 percent leap from 2004. And more than 22 million people run home-based businesses.

A recent study suggests that more than one-quarter of the U.S. workforce could eventually participate full- or part-time in this new work pattern. And over time, it will accelerate localism. Commuting -- which became common only over the past century -- has cut workers off from the places where they live. Home-based work, by contrast, gives people more choice about where they work and more time to spend with their families and communities.

Telecommunication allows people who want privacy, low-density neighborhoods and good schools to live in small towns in a way never before possible. It also allows a firm such as Renaissance Learning, a leading educational software company, to set up headquarters in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., a city of 17,500 whose small-town feeling, broad river and wooded countryside appeal to many workers. "We don't have any trouble recruiting people here," says Mark Swanson, the firm's technical director.

Yet the desire to stay in the local community isn't limited to small towns or suburbs. I see it where I live, in California's San Fernando Valley, or in parts of my mother's native Brooklyn, where lots of people employed in fields such as the arts, consulting and design work at home or nearby and crowd the coffee shops, restaurants and stores of streets such as Ventura Boulevard in Studio City or once-decayed but now bustling Cortelyou Road in Flatbush.

In the end, localism is neither urban nor anti-urban. At its heart, it represents something larger: a historic American tradition that sees society's smaller units as vital and the proper focus of most people's lives. This made the United States different from Europe, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, has long tended toward centralization of power and decision-making.

The expansion of the European welfare state has further fostered this trend. But it's also true that Europeans tend to move less than Americans. And the powerful resistance to the most intrusive forms of European Union integration, such as a continent-wide constitution, suggest that strong localist elements remain imbedded in European communities.

But if Europe is joining the trend, the United States is likely to be the leader in pushing decentralization. What most impressed Tocqueville wasn't our large cities but the vitality of our many smaller towns and communities. "The intelligence and the power are dispersed abroad," he wrote, "and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction."

Today's localist revival reflects this tradition, but with the benefit of the great access to the larger world that technology provides. It offers the prospect of an America that, rather than being "a nation of strangers," can aspire again to be a nation of neighbors . . . in places that we choose for ourselves.

Joel Kotkin in Grand Forks Herald | 'Eide Motors Renovating its Showroom'

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:53:00 -0400

The Heartland Development Bank, which was conceived by Delore Zimmerman, president of the Grand Forks-based Praxis Strategy Group, and Joel Kotkin, a senior consultant with Praxis and an New America Foundation senior fellow, is designed to encourage investment in the Midwest and would use public and private funds to improve emerging population centers through investment in education, public infrastructure and research and development. LINK

Financing the Productive Economy: The Heartland Development Bank

Economic Growth — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:24:00 -0400

Infrastructure and Economic Opportunity
read more

Beyond Wall Street, Beyond Fannie and Freddie

Communications — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
09/12/2008 - 12:15pm

On September 12, the New America Foundation launched a new report, “The Heartland Development Bank,” by Delore Zimmerman, President of Praxis Strategy Group, and New America Foundation senior fellow Joel Kotkin. The proposed Development Bank is designed to address the United States’ growing population over the next fifty years by encouraging investment in infrastructure, energy, and innovative industries in the area commonly referred to as America’s Heartland. Joined by Mayor Dennis Donohue of Salinas, California and Sherle Schwenninger, Director… more

Joel Kotkin in Los Angeles Daily News | 'For Many Immigrants In the Valley, Life Continues As It Did In Their Native Countries'

Communications — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:19:00 -0400

..."Latinos," says Los Angeles author Joel Kotkin, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, "represent the city's grass-roots future - from its aspiring working class to a rapidly growing middle class.

"They are the city's emerging majority. Their ownership of small businesses has exploded, increasing nearly fivefold since the 1980s. They constitute the majority of new homebuyers in many Southland communities.

"Few can deny that, ultimately, Latinos - their music, their cultural values and political sensibilities - will reshape the essence of Los Angeles in the new century"... LINK

Whither the American Economy?

Communications — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:30:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/30/2007 - 8:30am

Responding to the damage caused by the slowdown in housing, the subprime mortgage crisis, and fears of a U.S. recession, the New America Foundation held a national policy forum on the need for a new era of public investment on Friday, November 30, 2007.

Despite the recent economic slowdown, New America Foundation board member Bernard L. Schwartz opened the conference with an optimistic message. The dynamism of the American economy, Schwartz argues, bolstered by robust public investment, can overcome… more

Back to Basics: A Pro-Growth Public Investment Strategy

Economic Growth — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:32:00 -0500

For more than a decade, rising asset prices have driven the economy, benefiting the wealthy but doing relatively little to improve either the economic status of the majority of Americans or the country’s overall competitiveness. Rising stock and housing prices created staggering short-term increases in wealth for some, but did little to bolster the nation’s preeminence in technology, industry, or agriculture.

In order to retool the economy and generate balanced, robust job growth, the government should focus on rebuilding and enhancing the nation’s energy, transportation, and communications infrastructure. Judicious investment in renewing and creating critical public goods will provide opportunities to all income classes and help ensure that employment keeps pace with population growth. We refer to this approach as “back to basics,” are turn to the sort of sensible public agenda that strengthened the economy and promoted societal well-being in the past.

In contrast, over the past 20 years, while returns to capital and the incomes of those in certain elite occupations grew rapidly, wages for lower-income and middle-class workers stagnated. To be sure, most families spend much less on food than they did in 1960, and the number of people earning over $100,000 a year has risen by over 13 percent since 1979. Yet, it has become increasingly difficult for families with two incomes to maintain a “middle-class lifestyle,” and single-earner households find it hard to keep pace with the rising costs of education, housing, and health insurance.

Almost all of the recent gains in wealth have been achieved by the relatively small number of Americans with incomes more than seven times the poverty level. In the meantime, middle-tier educated and skilled workers have been losing ground. This striking disparity is evident in income and wealth data, which show that the top 1 percent of U.S. house holds now accounts for as much of the nation’s total wealth as it did in 1913, when monopolistic business practices were the order of the day. The net worth of the top 1 percent is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s households combined.6 Nearly three-quarters of all income gains from 1979 to 2000 were realized by the top 20 percent of taxpayers.

In view of these trends, it is not surprising that Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for upward mobility. For the first time in our nation’s history, two thirds of all Americans think life will not be better for their children.

A large measure of this national unease is related to our failure to invest in and maintain critical infrastructure. In the past, the belief that it was possible to better one’s economic condition by working hard was reinforced by the public and private investment in transportation systems, scientific research, and technological development that fueled economic advancement. At present, however, Americans see government as being incapable of providing up-to-date transportation systems, reliable water supplies, or even basic education. The Katrina disaster, which led to the near-destruction of New Orleans and was largely caused by local, state, and federal failures to build and repair infrastructure, crystallized these concerns.

For the full report, please see the attached PDF file below.

Can't Stand the Heat

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:51:00 -0400

It’s all the suburbs’ fault. You know, everything -- traffic congestion, overweight kids, social alienation. Oh, and lest we forget, global warming and rising energy costs, too.

That latest knock against the burbs has caught on widely. With their multiplying McMansions and exploding Explorers, the burbs are the reason we’re paying so much for gas and heating oil and spewing all those emissions that are heating up the atmosphere --or so a host of urban proponents tells us. It’s time to ditch the burbs and go back to the city. New York, Boston, Chicago -- these densely packed metropolises are "models of environmentalism," declares John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who now heads the Congress for a New Urbanism.

But before you sell your ranch house and plunk down big bucks for that cozy condo in the city, take a closer look at the claims of big cities’ environmental superiority. Here’s one point that’s generally relegated to academic journals and scientific magazines: Highly concentrated urban areas can contribute to overall warming that extends beyond their physical boundaries.

Studies in cities around the world -- Beijing, Rome, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and more -- have found that packed concentrations of concrete, asphalt, steel and glass can contribute to a phenomenon known as "heat islands" far more than typically low-density, tree-shaded suburban landscapes. As an October 2006 article in the New Scientist highlighted, "cities can be a couple of degrees warmer during the day and up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer at night." This is critical as we deal with what may well be a period of prolonged warming. Urban heat islands may not explain global warming, but they do bear profound environmental, social, economic and health consequences that reach beyond city boundaries. A study of Athens that appeared this year in the journal Climatic Change suggested that the ecological footprint of the urban heat island is one-and-a-half to two times larger than the city’s political borders.

Further, urban heat islands increase the need for air conditioning, which has alarming consequences for energy consumption in our cities. Since air conditioning systems themselves generate heat, this produces a vicious cycle. Some estimate that the annual cost of the energy consumption caused by the urban heat island could exceed $1 billion.

This is not to say that big buildings can’t be made more energy efficient by using new techniques, such as high-tech skin designs, special construction materials to reduce energy consumption, green roofs and passive cooling. But one big problem is that making large buildings green also makes them much more expensive, so that they’re less and less affordable for middle-class and working-class families.

The Environment’s Friend

Low-density areas, on the other hand, lend themselves to much less expensive and more environmentally friendly ways of reducing heat. It often takes nothing more than double-paned windows to reduce the energy consumption of a two- or three-story house. Shade can bring it down even further: A nice maple can cool a two-story house, but it can’t quite do the same for a 10-story apartment building.

Focusing on the suburbs has the added virtue of bringing change to where the action is. Over the past 40 years, the percentage of people opting to live in cities has held steady at 10 percent to 15 percent. And since 2000, more than 90 percent of all metropolitan growth has taken place in the suburbs.

Here’s an Earth-to-greens message: Instead of demonizing the suburbs, why not build better, greener ones and green the ones we already have?

One approach might be to embrace what one writer, Wally Siembab, has dubbed "smart sprawl." Encouraging this sort of development will require a series of steps: reducing commuters’ gas consumption with more fuel-efficient cars, dispersing work to centers close to where workers live and promoting continued growth in home-based work. We’ll also have to protect open spaces by monitoring development and establishing land conservation based on public and private funding, the latter coming from developers who wish to work in suburbs. Building what we call "an archipelago of villages" seems far more reasonable than returning to industrial-age cities and mass transit systems.

Transportation Issues

This is not to say that transit of some kind -- perhaps more cost-efficient and flexible dedicated busways, or local shuttles -- can’t play a role in serving those who can’t or would rather not drive. But short of a crippling fuel shortage or some other catastrophic event, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever see the widespread success of heavily promoted strategies such as dense, transit-oriented developments, or the wholesale abandonment of the suburbs.

We can accommodate our need for space and still leave ample room for a flourishing natural environment, as well as for agriculture. By preserving open space and growing in an environmentally friendly manner, we can provide a break from the monotony of concrete and glass and create ideal landscapes for wildlife preservation.

Such notions -- developed before the term "green" existed -- go back to a host of visionaries such as Ebenezer Howard, James Rouse, Frederick Law Olmstead, Frank Lloyd Wright and Victor Gruen. And they have already been put into practice. Starting in the 1960s in his development of Valencia, north of Los Angeles, Gruen envisioned a "suburbia redeemed" that mixed elements of the urban and the rural.

Valencia’s elaborate network of 28 miles of car-free paseos -- paths designed for pedestrians and bicyclists -- helped make the natural environment accessible to residents. Similarly, The Woodlands, a sprawling development 27 miles from downtown Houston, is a model for a greener suburbia in a region not much celebrated for its environmental values.

Energy Efficiency

All these places evoke a more environment-friendly suburbanism, which also can be promoted in areas that did not benefit from the foresight of a Gruen or a Rouse. Town centers, revived older shopping districts, even re-engineered malls can all be part of a greener, more energy-efficient future in a large number of communities. Dragooning Americans into a dense urban lifestyle that’s attractive to only a relatively small minority isn’t the best way to address concerns about energy and resource depletion or global warming. Instead, we need to take gradual, sensible, realistic steps to improve the increasingly dispersed places where most of us choose to live and work.

San Fernando Valley Business Journal Quotes David Gray, Joel Kotkin

Communications — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:35:00 -0400

The value of a workplace diversity program may be best shown by the decisions made during economic downturns. Do the programs stay, continuing their goal of making the working environment reflective of society at large and promoting awareness of different cultures and lifestyles?Or do they get cut and possibly send a negative message to the employees – and the non-business world – that the company no longer considers diversity to be important.The larger a corporation, the more extras they may add to their diversity programs – mandatory training, feedback surveys, cultural events, and employee network or support groups; programs that cost in the millions... Hospitals and other healthcare providers in general are not as affected by bad economic times as some industries and so would not be as likely to cut back on diversity programs because of their close contact with the public...The reasons for starting diversity programs has less to do with the economy than with responding to an event or a trend the corporate culture sees or because the legal or human resources department wants to have one, said David Gray, director of workforce and family… more

Katie Couric Interviews Joel Kotkin on American Cities for 10 Questions

Communications — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:36:00 -0400

At a time when American cities are changing so rapidly--both as centers of our society, as a launch pads for escape to suburbs and exurbs--I thought I'd consult with the man who may be the country's leading expert on urban life, Joel Kotkin, author and Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He’s the subject of this week’s 10 Questions. We talked about the problem with trendiness in cities, what it takes to make a well-managed city, and why sustaining the middle class is so important.1. Mr. Kotkin, your book, "The City: A Global History," distills the essence of why cities were created-and what they are meant to accomplish-in about 200 pages. So here's the most basic question: how do you define a city-and what is it there for?Kotkin: A city is a place that is more than a village or town. It provides all the essential needs, and also tends to have a strong sense of identity and purpose. In our expanding urbanized world, more and more places -- even small towns and some suburbs -- are becoming more like cities, particularly with the internet.2. You've long criticized the middle… more

Suburban Idyll

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:51:00 -0400

No generation has lauded their revolutionary status more fervently than baby boomers. In documentaries, articles and books they are portrayed -- by themselves and others -- as agents of epochal change who, in the representative words of American University communications professor Leonard Steinhorn, have built "the inclusive, tolerant, free and equal America we have today."

Spoil sports may point out an older generation did the heavy lifting of surviving a depression, defeating the Nazis, overthrowing communism and launching the drive for civil rights. And some conservative boomers, outraged by the flood of self-congratulation, see their own breed as a scourge, undermining the nation’s morality, culture and even their own children.

Yet on a closer look, the roughly 80-million strong generation born between 1946 and 1964 could turn out to be a lot more like their parents than anyone expected -- in no arena more so than in their choices of where, and how, they live. At the time when the generation came of age, there was a media hype about a "back to the city" coolness (read San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury or New York’s East Village) or "back to nature" lifestyles (read Oregon or the Berkshires). In fact, relatively few boomers ultimately settled in edgy city neighborhoods or rural communes. Instead, they followed their parents into the suburbs -- often in bigger houses even further from the urban core.

The proclivity of boomers to buy and stay in single-family houses was one reason for the unexpected housing boom of the past decade. They not only moved to suburbia, but they hung out there much longer than anyone expected.

Now that the boomers are aging and their children vacating the premises there is enormous speculation about what their next moves might be. And once again, there has been widespread media and public relations hype about a pending mass migration of boomers back into the inner city. Outlets like CNN crow about the "reversal of the post-war flight to the suburbs," with boomer retirees and empty-nesters leading the charge.

Such reports, almost always based on anecdotal accounts, present the image of a generation ready to flee the boring burbs they hated as adolescents for hipper and cooler urban cores. No one has embraced this notion more than the developers of urban luxury condos. It is all about the chance to once again reinvent yourself: "What Is Your Dream? What Will You Create?" is the come-on used by one Boston condo developer targeting downshifting boomers.

Robert Toll, the man whose firm became famous for building suburban McMansions, has proudly announced that he is now targeting luxury downtown condos. He bases his move on the logic that downshifting boomers are heading downtown because they are "more hip hop and happening than our parents."

Yet with condo markets softening in many cities it appears that Mr. Toll’s well-heeled, with-it Viagra generation may not be as large as some predicted. True, some highly visible wealthy individuals have opted for pied-à-terres in world cities like New York, where even a small apartment can easily run a $1 million. And in almost any city, enterprising reporters and helpful developers can always produce individual boomers who fill the cherished back -to-the-city narrative.

The larger trends reveal the vast majority of boomers are actually going nowhere; according to the 2000 census, less than 2% cross state lines every year. Only a small number of those who move, according to a new study from the Research Institute for Housing America, choose to go back to the city. Many more, it appears, either head in to the suburbs, or move even further out.

A study for the Mortgage Bankers Association found that downshifting boomers were just about as suburb-oriented as their parents. Eighty percent of all moves by suburbanites over 50 were ... well ... to another suburban home, almost eight times the number that bought in the inner city. In contrast, more than half of city-dwellers who moved headed out to suburbia.

This reflects what may be seen as a basic lifestyle orientation. Asked for their preferences, many downshifting boomers express a predilection not for sex in the city, but for neighborhoods that are safe and close to outdoor recreation. Not surprisingly, according to one study of 2000 affluent boomer homeowners, two-thirds reported they wanted to stay in the suburbs; another 14% wanted to opt for a rural life.

"Everybody in this business wants to talk about the odd person who moves downtown, but it’s basically a ‘man bites dog’ story," says Sandy Rosenbloom, professor of urban planning and gerontology at the University of Arizona. "Most people retire in place. When they move, they don’t move downtown, they move to the fringes."

Ms. Rosenbloom’s observations are born out in an analysis of migration patterns of people 55-64 by my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group. Among the relatively few who move, the trend among this cohort has been to move away from highly urban regions like the San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Boston areas. Gainers have included sprawling, less-expensive places like Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix and Southern California’s Riverside. Some of the biggest draws, on a per capita basis, are in rural locales such as Idaho and Montana.

Such tendencies can also be seen within almost all major metropolitan areas, where more boomers, on a per capita basis, left the core city than the suburb. The differential was particularly striking in Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, all with inner cities that are being hyped as magnets for "back to the city" boomers.

There are diverse reasons for these trends. One factor, notes Ms. Rosenbloom, may be that most boomers plan to work beyond the traditional retirement age, and some even into their 70s. Many will do so at least part-time at home. A one- or two-bedroom condo in the city may be splendid for a vacation, but less practical for a home office. Lifestyle also matters. Since so many in this age cohort have spent most of their lives in suburban settings, they are if anything less acculturated than their parents to the density, congestion and noise of inner-city life.

These trends have important long-term implications for the real estate markets of both cities and suburbs. Urban planners and developers counting on free-spending boomers to fill luxury condominiums -- particularly outside of Manhattan and immediate environs -- might be well advised to redirect their efforts towards less affluent but more city-friendly populations. These include students and young childless professionals, as well as that relatively small but still significant cadre of families who would like to make a go of it in the inner city.

But that last group in particular poses a problem for most municipal politicians. Middle-class families can thrive only if cities tackle fundamentals like business costs, job creation, reforming education and fixing basic infrastructure. One appeal of the affluent "empty nester" boomers lies in their perceived lack of need for such expensive, and often politically difficult, fixes.

In contrast, aging boomers may constitute a huge opportunity for suburban developers, particularly those creating new communities or refurbishing small town central cores. Over time, such places may provide an ideal market for smaller homes, condos and townhouses located in areas close to amenities and with access to open space.

"They don’t want to move to Florida and they want to stay close to the kids," suggests Jeff Lee, a Washington, D.C., area developer. "What they are looking for is a funky suburban development -- funky but safe."

This can be seen in the unheralded, gradual graying of planned developments like the Woodlands outside Houston. Started in the 1970s largely for young families, the 85,000-resident community is increasingly home to three generations living in the same area. Almost one in four households is now headed by someone over 55, notes Roger Galatas, who for 13 years served as president of the development company which built and managed the Woodlands.

Mr. Galatas sees some hopeful social realities in such trends. Many aging boomers, he suggests, are more than suddenly "liberated" autonomous beings. They often consider themselves to be part of a web of relationships that spans generations. Having more time for hobbies or sports ranks high in surveys of boomers, but so too does spending time with family, whether an aging parent, a child or grandchild. "People don’t want to move away from their families, their churches, or their associations," he says.

There may even be an unexpected element of boomer social responsibility at work. In one survey of "empty nesters," as many as 40% said they expected one or more of their kids to come back and live with them at some point. According to a 2001 Zogby survey, most consider themselves as equally or more concerned than their parents with passing money on to their offspring. They also expect that their kids would welcome them into their homes if the need arose.

This picture may not fit the archetype of the hip, me-first, 50-something boomer as a superannuated rebellious adolescent so beloved by boomer memorializers, peddlers of Viagra and other sexual aids, as well as the ubiquitous luxury urban condo developers. Instead as family and community-centered seniors, they could provide a surprisingly stabilizing element for the generations coming to maturity behind them. That ultimately may prove their greatest legacy.

Why Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood Now Rule

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:07:00 -0400

Power in America is shifting from George W. Bush’s Sun Belt mafia -- with its roots in post-1950s aerospace, energy and development -- to a new political triad: a handover of control from one oligarchy to another.

This new triad draws its power from three key postindustrial power centers: technology, entertainment and finance. Its geographic orientation is different as well. Rather than having its primary bases in boomtowns like Houston, Dallas, Charlotte or Phoenix, the new elite clusters mostly in the more established, refined reaches of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Manhattan.

Nowhere is this shift more notable than in the extraordinary attention given to these power centers by the leading presidential candidates, particularly among the ascendant Democrats. A generation ago or even less, Democratic presidential hopefuls spent their time soliciting union bosses, African-American dignitaries, urban machine politicians and others who, for all their faults, had close personal ties to the party’s electoral base.

Republican hopefuls John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, of course, have also scoured the same turf for support, but it’s the Democrats who increasingly attract the bulk of triad money.

How much things have changed in the past few decades! Hollywood once split its loyalties carefully among the parties; its only president came from its right. Now, as much as 80 percent of its largesse flows to the Democrats. The schism between Obama supporter David Geffen and those hanging tough with Clinton is important, not only because of how it reflects Hollywood’s endemic pettiness, but because much of the party, instead of regarding these wealthy prima donnas as deluded minstrels, now treats them as enlightened policy gurus.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and Internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st-century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating. Not surprisingly, the battle to be Wall Street’s anointed that rages between Obama, who has support from No. 1 Wall Street political contributor George Soros, and Clinton, has emerged as perhaps the most crucial contest between them.

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Donors from this group of businesses propelled the careers of such substantial figures as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, and California’s Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arguably, their final triumph, helped by the demographic shift to the South and West, lay with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 congressional takeover by the GOP.

Back in the late 1970s, founding fathers of the Sun Belt power grab, such as oilman Henry Salvatori and Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, shared with me their conviction that the old Eastern establishment lacked the power and conviction to lead the country. They felt America needed to be guided by more vital, more clear-headed leaders. Economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as well as the perception of America’s weakness both against the Soviet Union and terrorist states such as Iran, lent credibility to these beliefs among a large part of the public.

Backers' Credibility Gone

Like most successful elites, these leaders possessed a relatively coherent agenda. It centered on gaining a free hand over the nation’s natural resources, a low-tax economic policy and support for a strong national defense. The divisive moral agenda, particularly helpful in wooing working-class and Southern voters, was grafted on later but was never widely embraced by the right’s corporate funders.

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low-tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

Indeed, even if Republicans hold on to the White House in 2008, the old Sun Belt agenda seems likely to wane. Republicans on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, however personally profligate, are making a great show of embracing green technologies. They would also be likely, particularly given both elite and popular attitudes on social issues, to eschew a candidate with too close an association with the religious right.

Once they recover from their post-Bush euphoria, however, traditional liberals should realize that the ongoing power shift does not necessarily signify the rise of a populist agenda. The wealthiest fifth of Americans are now equally likely to be Democrats or Republicans, a shocking shift from the nearly 70 percent Republican cast of this same quintile just two decades ago. The "party of the people" increasingly now must appeal as much to the affluent as the working-class voter.

This development parallels the emergence of the ultrarich of the triad, who increasingly serve as Democrats’ ideological, as well as financial, vanguard. The modern Wall Street grandees may be socially enlightened and environmentally concerned, but they are not necessarily advocates for the middle class. "When candidates suck up to Wall Street," former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggests, "watch your wallets."

More Fiscally Conservative

In fact, triad economic policy, which reflects the views of the new ultrarich and of figures such as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, would likely follow a more fiscally conservative course than Bush’s supply-side agenda. Don’t expect either significant tax cuts for the middle class or bold infrastructure spending programs that could create both employment and new opportunities for small entrepreneurs.

Some middle-class Americans even could find that the new crusade against global warming may be waged at their expense. They can expect higher energy costs and perhaps increasing movement of energy-reliant jobs to Third World countries that have more concern for making cash than of ridding themselves of carbon. Unlike Gore or Wall Street traders cruising to work in hybrid limousines, these middle Americans cannot salve their consciences by trading "carbon offsets," or make a killing by investing in environmentally acceptable technologies or fuels.

One upcoming focal point may be a rise in electricity prices, such as the one that is likely to occur from the proposed buyout of Texas utility TXU. This $32 billion deal may well be a harbinger of things to come: a combination of a Wall Street financier, in this case Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a deal widely celebrated by the media and backed by the political might of the environmental movement.

Internationalist Tilt

The bad news, some Texas regulators and legislators fear, is that the takeover, with its proposed cancellation of new coal-fired plants and its pile-up of new debt, could result in massive increases in energy costs. Financiers and the often well-to-do environmentalists might rejoice, but it’s not likely that the average residential user or the workers in Texas’ energy-dependent industrial firms will feel the same way. Other potential problems could evolve over trade and economic policy. The new triad tends toward internationalism and has few problems seeing jobs and opportunities move to China or elsewhere.

There is a sense among many in these elite industries that their generally well-educated employees are safe; at any rate, a Google or a Goldman Sachs has a smaller employee base to protect and draws from a much thinner sociological strata than a General Motors, a Honeywell or even an Intel.

By nature, such elite firms are less directly connected to everyday working Americans than even the most callous old bosses, and they don’t often have the same personal ties to the burgeoning cities to which the new middle class now is migrating. Due to their access to top talent from both here and abroad, they also do not have to cope with the most extreme consequences of America’s highly dysfunctional secondary-education system.

As a result, it may prove difficult for them to realize that policies that promote prosperity at the very top of the global food chain do not necessarily benefit middle America.

Over the next decade, the success of the new triad will rest largely on its ability to advance its agenda without grossly harming the rest of population. Now that Bush’s backers in the Sun Belt crowd have tried and failed, it will be fascinating to see whether their ostensibly more "enlightened" successors can blaze a more durable path to long-term political success.

A version of this article first appeared in The Arizona Republic.

Joel Kotkin in The Christian Science Monitor on Unionizing in L.A.

Communications — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:28:00 -0400

It's no secret that labor unions are struggling with declining membership and loss of negotiating clout, but don't tell that to the hundreds of activists who gathered Friday for a rally outside the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport...

Analysts note that the city is a major entry point for immigrants, legal and otherwise, who tend to work at low-wage jobs in numbers large enough to have some collective impact. It has active environmental and religious communities, which are increasingly taking up the causes of the poor. Moreover, they say, an exodus by much of the middle class leaves a city in which the contrast between Hollywood's megarich and South Central's slipping poor is acute and, to many, disturbing..."The big targets for unionization in L.A. are getting smaller," says economist Joel Kotkin, Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes on economic, political, and social trends. "Outside the big public projects, you don't see a lot of union labor, and you are not going to organize day laborers [standing] outside Costco. Since many of the workers don't vote, aren't citizens, and make low wages, the unions are going to have somewhat less money and clout… more

Hollywood, Wall Street and Silicon Valley

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:07:00 -0400

The collapse of the Bush administration may be seen by some on the left as a triumph of the popular will. But its main result may more accurately be read as a handover of control from one oligarchy to another. A new, more "enlightened" group may be rising to power, but it’s still unclear what this will mean to the vast majority of Americans.

Power in America is shifting from George Bush’s Sun Belt mafia -- with its roots in post-1950s aerospace, energy and development -- to a new political triad. This new triad draws its power from three key post-industrial power centers: technology, entertainment and finance. Its geographic orientation is different, as well. Rather than having its primary bases in boomtowns like Houston, Dallas, Charlotte or Phoenix, the new elite clusters mostly in the more established, refined reaches of the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Manhattan.

This shift has been accelerated because of the need for money to finance early primaries in large states. Today, aspirants Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spend much of their time parading in something that resembles a Renaissance pageant for aristocrats, courting fabulously wealthy grandees and their entourages. Media coverage has been favorable and, in the hip rags, even fawning. After all, these potential donors represent the "good" and "hip" rich, as opposed to the unfashionable fat cats of the past.

Republican hopefuls John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, of course, have also scoured the same turf for support in these communities, but it’s the Democrats who increasingly attract the bulk of triad money.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans like former Congressman Ed Zschau. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st Century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, whose power extends deeply into both Hollywood and Silicon Valley and which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating along with the implosion of the Republicans.

Not surprisingly, the battle to be Wall Street’s anointed that rages between Obama, who has support from No. 1 Wall Street political contributor George Soros, and Clinton, has emerged as perhaps the most crucial contest between them. No less a surprise the candidates, and the Democrats in Congress, express little of the populist objection to this year’s outrageous Wall Street bonuses that they did toward last year’s windfall for energy executives.

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of George W. Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

Indeed, even if Republicans hold on to the White House in 2008, the old Sun Belt agenda seems likely to wane. Republicans on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, however personally profligate, are making a great show embracing green technologies. Even the most hard-bitten energy executive would not feel comfortable with Vice President Dick Cheney’s notion that energy conservation reflects nothing more than a "personal virtue." They would also be likely, particularly given both elite and popular attitudes on social issues, to eschew a candidate with too close association with the Religious Right.

"When candidates suck up to Wall Street," former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggests, "watch your wallets."

Other potential problems could evolve on trade and economic policy. The new triad tends toward internationalism and has few problems seeing jobs and opportunities to move to China or elsewhere. There is a sense among many in these elite industries that their generally well-educated employees are safe; at any rate, a Google or a Goldman Sachs has a smaller employee base to protect and draws from a much thinner sociological strata than a General Motors, a Honeywell or even an Intel.

As a result, it may prove difficult for them to realize that policies that promote prosperity at the very top of the global food chain do not necessarily benefit middle America. This is one lesson their old nemesis George Bush, for different reasons, never learned, to his own detriment.

Joel Kotkin in The Business Press on Developing Riverside

Communications — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:40:00 -0500

Brein Clements, co-owner and head chef at Restaurant Omakase, has watched the same scene repeatedly since he opened the restaurant in downtown Riverside in July."People finish their meal, they go straight to their cars and drive off," said Clements, who operates the restaurant - a combination of Japanese and French cuisine - near The Mission Inn along with his wife Roryann. "They don't stay and walk around the city, because there really isn't that much to see. It gets frustrating."But that may change: the City Council Feb. 20 approved a $50 million residential-retail project called m solè, pronounced "em-so-lay," which will be built by Los Angeles developer Alan Mruvka...Developers like the concept because it appeals to a wide demographic, from young single professionals to young couples without children to empty nesters."If you have a lot of amenities in a downtown that people can walk to, then it has a chance of working," said Joel Kotkin, an author and lecturer who has written extensively on urban planning issues."But there isn't that much in downtown Riverside, except for the Mission Inn and a few stores, so I'm not sure. But there are… more

The Myth of ‘Superstar Cities’

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:43:00 -0500

"If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart -- it isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it."
-- Mayor Michael Bloomberg, January 2003

These seem the best of times for America’s elite cities. Wall Street’s 2006 megabonuses created thousands of instant millionaires, and, with their venture-fund soulmates in places like San Francisco, Boston and Greenwich, the best people are prowling for Ferraris, planes, multimillion-dollar condos, the newest $200 lunch place and the latest in high fashion. In some markets, office prices and rents are breaking all-time records.

The bluest of the blue cities can also celebrate their rise to the top of the congressional pole. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Finance Chairman Barney Frank of suburban Boston and Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel of Manhattan all represent something of an economic coup for the "good rich" such as dot-com billionaires, subsidized downtown real-estate developers and "enlightened" investment bankers. The new notables most likely won’t find fault with their constituents’ windfalls as they have with those of the oil companies, the pharmaceutical firms or Wal-Mart.

Yet these triumphs obscure the longer-term developments that continue to reshape metropolitan America. Economic and demographic trends suggest that the future of American urbanism lies not in the elite cities but in younger, more affordable and less self-regarding places.

Over the past 15 years, it has been opportunistic newcomers -- Houston, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Riverside -- that have created the most new jobs and gained the most net domestic migration. In contrast there has been virtually negligible long-term net growth in jobs or positive domestic migration to places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.

What as much as anything distinguishes elite places -- what Wharton real-estate professor Joe Gyourko calls "the superstar cities" -- are their absurdly high real-estate prices. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles have long been more expensive than, say, Dallas, Houston or Phoenix

-- but in recent years the difference in price, he calculates, has increased beyond all reason. San Francisco prices since 1950, for example, have grown at twice the national rate for the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

This is good news for those who hold property, but has been less than a blessing for those middle-class families who might want to enter these markets. In some superstar cities less than 10% of households can afford a median-priced home. Nationally the average is about 50%.

Mr. Gyourko traces these surging prices to two basic causes. First, there remains in superstar cities a remarkable concentration of very high-earning families who can bid up real estate. The second factor lies with the regulatory and tax regimes, which greatly limit the production of housing and job opportunities, particularly for middle-income families, not only in the city cores but in surrounding areas.

Of course high productivity from educated workers and companies resident in these cities also contributes to the superstar phenomena. But Mr. Gyourko asserts these earning are not nearly high enough to explain the massive real-estate price differential. "You don’t have to be productive to live in these places, you just have to have money," Mr. Gyourko suggests.

What drives the process is a simple combination of limited middle-class housing options combined with strong demand among the wealthy. Given the economic centrality and cultural vitality of a place like New York, there remains a sizeable top echelon, many in business, that can and do consume the Bloombergian "luxury product" as their primary or secondary residence.

The high-price trend is further exaggerated by the large concentrations of "trustafarians," or those with large amounts of inherited capital, in these areas. Many of these people have multiple residences -- in some Manhattan buildings as many of half of the owners are non-residents -- but can still drive up prices. Together with top-end business types, they can create what Mr. Gyourko describes as "the Vailization" effect: that is, turning part of the city into something akin to a high-amenity resort area, a "scarce luxury good" for a relative few and those who must remain behind to service them.

So what about the rest of the hoi polloi -- what is their urban future? For the most part, sadly, not in the "superstar" cities. Middle-class people have been fleeing the expensive cities for more affordable ones for a generation, and the migration has continued as the price differentials have grown.

Fortunately the jobs are headed in the same direction. After all, companies depend not only on elite MBAs but upon on the collective skills of middle managers, technicians and skilled laborers. Most companies also tend to be more mindful of basic costs, taxes and regulations than the average hedge-fund manager or trustafarian.

This perhaps explains why the largest companies -- with the notable exception of Silicon Valley -- have continued to move toward the more opportunistic cities. New York and its environs, for example, had 140 such firms in 1960; in 2006 the number had dropped to less than half that, some of those running with only skeleton top management. Houston, in contrast, had only one Fortune 500 company in 1960; today it is home to over 20.

Houston companies tend to staff heavily locally; this is one reason the city was able to replace New York and other high-cost locales as the nation’s unchallenged energy capital. Another example of this trend is Charlotte’s rise as the nation’s second-ranked banking center in terms of assets, surpassing San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles, indeed all superstar cities except New York.

The non-superstar cities have become the nation’s most prodigious centers for job creation. Between 1990 and 2006, job growth in Las Vegas averaged over 6% annually; Phoenix and Riverside well over 3%; Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte right around 2%. New York City, L.A., Boston, Chicago and San Francisco all remained well less than 1%.

Since 2000, these divergences have, if anything, actually widened. One reason is that superstar cities have continued to hemorrhage prodigious numbers of blue-collar jobs, including in fields such as manufacturing and warehousing that once sustained many urban working-class families.

To be sure, the superstar cities still likely boast far more high-six- and seven-figure incomes in finance and other business services. But in any industry this covers only a relatively small minority of workers. Overall, according to data collected by Pepperdine University’s Mike Shires, the average real income -- after factoring in taxes and the cost of living -- of workers in professional business services is actually higher in places like Phoenix, Denver, Houston and Dallas than in the pricey environs of San Francisco, New York, Boston or L.A.

Some urban boosters see these shifts to the high end as evidence of superiority. After all, they argue, only the "best" remain, while immigrants, the poor and ordinary middle-income slobs migrate out to the suburbs and other less elite regions.

Yet, even here, the demographic trends are not nearly so promising. Over the past decade college-educated workers -- who once disproportionately migrated to the superstar cities -- now appear to be tilting instead to more affordable, family-friendly places. Since 2000, Riverside, Phoenix, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Dallas all have been among the big net gainers with such migrants. In contrast New York, Boston, L.A. and even the Bay Area, a big winner in the 1990s, appear to have become among the highest net losers.

The big outlier here, as in many things, is Washington, D.C., where an ever expanding federal government and its satellites continue to draw in ever more educated workers.

Another intriguing shift is taking place among immigrants, the group who did much in the 1990s to help reverse demographic and economic decline in places like New York. Recent census data suggests they are increasingly likely to move to more affordable, business-friendly places such as Houston, Dallas, Charlotte and Phoenix.

These phenomena have led Andrew Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, to dismiss Mayor Bloomberg’s much ballyhooed projections of another million New Yorkers to roughly nine million by 2025. Mr. Beveridge’s numbers show that New York’s briefly impressive population growth is markedly slowing.

The growth in the immigrant population, he notes, appears to be dropping significantly since the late ‘90s.

New York has had high population expectations before -- 1940s census estimates of 8.5 million for 1970 proved a million off target. This may be the case again now, Mr. Beveridge suggests, unless the city finds ways to address the basic issues that affect the middle class -- high housing costs, taxes, regulation, schools and lack of support for diverse small businesses, particularly in the outer boroughs. How else can New York hope to create opportunities for a population already overwhelmingly minority and predominately working class?

To raise such issues amidst today’s giddiness tends to reap the scorn of many big city developers and other devotees of the superstar version of urbanism. Elite city boosters like academic Richard Florida consider any return to a traditional "back to basics" agenda as reflective of "neocon anti-urbanism."

This is something of an oddity, where the fashionable "left" defines successful urbanism by its ability to lure the superaffluent, the hypereducated and the avant garde -- or what Dr. Florida calls "the greatest number of the most skilled people." One wonders what true progressives like Harry Truman or Fiorella La Guardia would think of such an approach.

La Guardia or Truman understood that great cities become so, in large part, due to the strivings of the upwardly mobile middle class and families, not the elites of any stripe. It may well be true, as Mr. Gyourko argues, that as the nation grows to 400 million or more there could be a niche for 10 to 20 such "productive resorts" serving as "enclaves of the wealthy." But the urban future -- today as in past generations -- will belong mostly to places that continue to draw and nurture the middle class, which has driven the rise of most successful capitalist cities.

The game, however, is far from over. Some larger superstar cities, like New York or L.A., may still possess enough economic and social diversity as well as the physical space to shift direction. Despite their dysfunctional political systems, radical changes in tax, regulatory and education policies, including a new emphasis on practical skills training, could restore their historic attraction to those who wish to start a small business, or maintain a middle-class family.

Such a city might not pass always Mayor Bloomberg’s "luxury" calculus, but to its residents it might seem super indeed.

Joel Kotkin on Manufacturing a City in US News & World Report

Communications — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:44:00 -0500

Eli Broad never met a schedule he couldn't love...A newshound who built two Fortune 500 companies and a multibillion-dollar fortune, Broad (rhymes with road) whizzes through the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times each morning before most people can conquer a double cappuccino. He rarely slows down to finish a story, unless, as someone close to him puts it, "it's about him."But it's "about him" so often these days that just keeping up with himself threatens to throw Broad completely off schedule. One of the richest (net worth $5.8 billion), most powerful (as much clout as the mayor), and most philanthropic men in Los Angeles (and the nation), Broad is a blunt force in business, the arts, education reform, and politics. He is the city's leading cultural rainmaker, the major mover behind its $1.8 billion downtown redevelopment, and a powerful liberal Democrat who really can make things happen simply by picking up the phone...

Now, as chairman of the $1.8 billion Grand Avenue Project, Broad is out to manufacture the "downtown" he believes L.A. is missing. The Gehry-designed project, with its wide sidewalks, shops, theaters, restaurants, office towers, five-star hotel, and 16-acre… more