Creative Class

This new study by the Economic Policy Institute looks at trends in state level inequality over the past couple decades (h/t: Alison Kemper).

Brad DeLong on housing:

We aren’t building more superhighways,
there are no major transportation improvements on the horizon, America
is filling up, and also land-value gradients are on the rise. If the
income distribution continues to erode, we will wind up with higher
prices for scarce positional goods–chief among which is location,
location, location.

Especially if you live in the Bay Areas like DeLong.

A new, very thoughtful and provocative Brookings paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz on the “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class,” here.

A quick plug for a project I am involved with – the Historic Cities Programme (or HCP) is coming to Toronto (free to attend for all) from April 16 to 25.  HCP is an international exhibition which is an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.  The exhibition debuted in the United States and is currently making its way across Canada.

HCP showcases the conservation and re-use of buildings and public spaces in historic cities in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Mali, India, and Afghanistan.  The HCP exhibition offers a perspective that looks at culture as an asset that can transform communities.

Here are some pictures from the exhibition’s debut in Montreal last week

Aleem Kanji

Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a revised and updated version of my original Globe and Mail column on the subject.

Pennsylvanians are going to have a much bigger-than-usual role in
determining the Democratic nominee this time around. Pundits say the
key to the race lies in the traditional fault lines of race, gender and
generation. A recent story in The Wall Street Journal featured a map of
the so-called “three Pennsylvanias” — with the “older lower west” and
the conservative central regions inclined toward Hillary Rodham
Clinton, and the “more affluent, diverse east” breaking for Barack
Obama.

Mr. Obama now appears to be closing what looked to be a huge gap in
the public opinion polls just a couple of weeks ago. He continues to
pull overwhelming support from greater Philadelphia’s black community.
But he also is drawing in new voters from the tens of thousands of
college students in Philly, Pittsburgh, State College, the Lehigh
Valley and other pockets across the state. He’s also likely to do well
in the affluent suburbs around several of the state’s largest cities.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, resonates with baby-boomers,
seniors and especially with women. The Clinton campaign also gains
support among union members in the state’s historically blue-collar
industrial districts, which have been hard-hit by deindustrialization
and economic anxiety for years.

The rest is here.

Over at Toronto Eye Weekly, Marc Weisblott had us rolling on the floor again with this zinger of a column on my UofT/Rotman book launch.  Marc finds me too business-y, not-bohemian-enough, and ever cloying. Then with as sideways-a-compliment as there ever was calls me “an ever-strapping, 50-year old guru” and “a case study in how beefcake genetics might be a factor in helping to get their opinions published.” (YOUCH). OK, so now I really know why Rana can’t stop laughing. I’ll take the compliment, but what Marc should know is that I was the very picture of geekdom growing up – all 135 lbs., gangly, coke-bottle-eyeglasses, and full-mouth braces of me.  I’ll try to dig up an old photo and scan in the real “genetic” evidence sometime.

The video of my talk at Googleplex NYC is here.

Mobile, Alabama is making strides to advance its local economy, in recent weeks it has attracted Airbus’ European parent company to its city in an effort to build an aerospace cluster.  New commercial airplanes and big military tanks are on the way for production right out of this tiny centre in the Southern U.S.  Other industries (steel, auto makers) are also looking at Mobile as a place to set up shop.

Why is it that manufacturers, many of them foreign based find Mobile hard to resist?  What’s keeping Mobile Alabama’s economy on fast forward?

Aleem Kanji

WaPo columnist Marc Fisher – who I know and have spoken to on many occasions and whose views and writing I very much admire – questions my own priorities for choosing where my family and I live.

In the end, however, it seems Richard Florida chooses where to live more the way many of us do rather than the way he advises in his books: He doesn’t necessarily go where the most creative
and exciting people are; rather, he goes where he gets the best job. There’s not the least bit of shame in that, but Florida’s answer to “Who’s Your City?” may well be “whoever’s making it worth my while.”

He’s right. I’ve said on many occasions our decision to leave Washington, D.C. was bittersweet. We loved our house, our neighborhood, our friends, and the community. On many levels, D.C. was a great “fit” for us. The main reason I moved to Toronto, as I’ve said many times, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a major think tank around place, creativity, and prosperity issues. I had to struggle to raise research funds in the States, so the prospect of heading a well-funded research institute at a major university was, for me, or just about anybody, a no-brainer.

In fact, Fisher identifies the very reason I wrote Who’s Your City? Finding a community that fits you best involves a series of trade-offs among job and career; relationships and family; community, climate, and lifestyle; amenities and interests; life-stage and personality. Yes, I moved for career. But who argues that Toronto is not a great city? In many ways – though not in all ways, and certainly not as a getting-flabby cyclist enduring a cold and snowy winter – it fits us as well or better than D.C. It’s not a far-off remote out-of-the-way destination.

When Rana and I looked at all the dimensions of the move, and weighed the trade-offs against one another, Toronto won out. But we have nothing but fond memories of D.C. and I find it one of the greatest places in the world. I am constantly recommending it to our family and friends as a great place for them to live.

In fact, when I decided to move from Pittsburgh several years ago I made a rudimentary spreadsheet (sort of an early template for some of the ideas in Who’s Your City?) and guess which two cities came out on top – D.C. and Toronto, virtually tied. I almost moved to Toronto, actually, at the time.

Fisher also chastises me for our choice of a particular neighborhood.

For reasons that always baffled me, this great bard of urban vibrancy, a latter-day Jane Jacobs (the spiritual grandmother of the smart-growth movement), chose to live in about as anti-urban a city setting as could be had: far from a Metro station, way up on a hill, in a beautiful spot
right near Rock Creek Park, well away from any of the amenities he preaches about in his books.

He and I actually talked about this a great deal. My book says a person’s choice of neighborhood is critical and, well, very personal. It has to fit your life-stage, lifestyle, family, and personality. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. Actually, our neighborhood in Toronto – Rosedale – is very similar to the one we lived in in D.C. It’s an older, green neighborhood, a bit closer to the city center, on the ravine – Toronto’s answer to Rock Creek Park. Rana and I got married when we lived in D.C. I’m 50. We want to have a family. So we wanted to live in a house in a community that’s not too congested but near urban amenities, that is near parks and open space where our (future) kids and (current and future) nieces and nephews can play, and where we can walk and cycle. That’s our choice and the kind of neighborhood that best fits us. Others like things funkier and more urban. Others prefer more suburban and even more rural.

And that’s the real point of Who’s Your City? – that each of us has to make that choice, weighing all the possible criteria and considerations, in a way that fits us and our families best. We could not be happier in our new neighborhood, just like we loved our old one as well.

The Internet is truly amazing. Lots of great work going on – developing new versions and data for the singles map, or should I say more appropriately the singles maps.

Julio Gonzalez Altamirano uses 2006 American Community Survey data to examine the top 50 metros based on men and women with a bachelor’s degree or higher. He finds less divergence.

Half Sigma parses the data by education level, race and ethnicity, and age range. The data is in tabular form, what an opportunity for mapping.

Lots of comments on the need to take gay and lesbian singles into account. Gary Gates and Jason Ost have done some of this in their Gay and Lesbian Atlas.

Chris Dunham takes an historical view, overlaying a map of men and women in America in 1890 and showing how little things have changed.

Elmer asks: “How is this map different from the one published in the February 2007 issue of National Geographic?” Great question. I cover this in detail in Who’s Your City? where I cite that map as an inspiration and talk about how I blogged about it at the time. We then updated the map with new data, created our own definition of singles and our own age range. As the book mentions our findings are different – we tend to find even bigger differences – than the original National Geographic map.

We never realized how much interest this issue would attract, but we’re excited and encouraged by it and our team is busily crunching numbers on various different types of singles and hope to have more maps in the
future.

Please send us your versions of the singles map!