Creative Class

The new administration’s urban policy is here (h/t Aleem Kanji).

My first reaction is to be nice and say we should all give them time to get their act together.

But right now, there’s very little new thinking or strategy here, and even less evidence that anyone has a grasp of role location plays in the economy and of the powerful geographic forces that are reshaping the global and U.S. economies. It’s essentially a retread of Clinton-era urban policy, with the Bush-era homeland security add-on, plus some more emphasis on green and neighborhoods.

I sure hope they don’t start pouring stimulus money into this smorgasbord approach…

Your thoughts…

Barack Obama won the election by winning cities, according to this analysis by Nate Silver. (h/t: Alison Kemper). While others have pointed to this trend, Silver does a nice job of putting it all together. Plus the graphics are great.

If Bill Clinton was the first black president, then Barack Obama might be the first urban one. He is the only American president in recent history to seem unembarrassed about claiming a personal residence in a major American city. Instead, presidents have tended to hail from homes called ranches or groves or manors or plantations, in places called Kennebunkport or Santa Barbara or Oyster Bay or Northampton …

In 1992, when Bill Clinton won his first term, 35 percent of American voters were identified as rural according to that year’s national exit polls, and 24 percent as urban. This year, however, the percentage of rural voters has dropped to 21 percent, while that of urban voters has climbed to 30. The suburbs, meanwhile, have been booming: 41 percent of America’s electorate in 1992, they represent 49 percent now).

In other words, if you are going to pit big cities against small towns, it is probably a mistake to end up on the rural side of the ledger. Last year, Obama accumulated a margin of victory of approximately 10.5 million votes in urban areas, far bettering John Kerry’s 3.6 million. Obama improved his performance not only among black and Latino voters but also among urban whites, with whom he performed 9 points better than Kerry. Obama also won each of the seventeen most densely populated states, a list that includes such nontraditional battlegrounds as Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. (One hidden advantage of urban areas: They’re easier to canvass to get the vote out.)  …

With the votes that he banked in the cities, Obama did not really need to prevail in the suburbs. But he did anyway — as every winning presidential candidate has done since 1980 — bettering McCain by 2 points there …  It may also be that suburban voters are starting to look — and behave — more like their urban brethren. According to a poll by the National Center for Suburban Studies, 20 percent of suburban voters are nonwhite — not much behind the national average of 27 percent — and 44 percent live in a racially mixed neighborhood (versus a national average of 46 percent). Suburban voters are just as likely to be concerned about the economy as other voters are and just as likely to know someone who has lost a job. Moreover, many suburbanites who do not live in cities may nevertheless be thoroughly familiar with them; according to the Census Bureau, at least eight to nine million persons commute into urban areas each day  …

Republicans trail Democrats among essentially every fast-growing demographic except the elderly — the youth vote, the Latino vote; they never had the black vote. It is long past time that they hone their pitch to urban voters, and find their shining city upon a hill.

Ryan Avent, one of my favorite and one of the very best urban bloggers around, digs into Obama’s urban policy team. As a preface to his longer article which appears in Grist, Avent writes on his blog: “My thinking on the selections has evolved somewhat. Initially, I was fairly disappointed, but I’m more sanguine now.” Money quote: “The urban picks are probably just a bit more explicitly pragmatic and shouldn’t be read as a betrayal by the president.”

The best member of team city, as judged by urbanists and other progressives, is likely to be Shaun Donovan, tapped by Obama as secretary of Housing and Urban Development …A Clinton-era veteran of the agency, he’s familiar with the federal bureaucracy and managed to be effective despite institutional hurdles. More recently, he has demonstrated his knowledge of best practices in affordable housing as a capable head of New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development  … Yet it’s unclear whether Donovan appreciates the scope of the housing challenge facing the nation.

From a visionary perspective, Obama’s Transportation pick is widely seen as the most baffling … Obama used the pick to name his promised Republican cabinet member (Defense secretary holdover Robert Gates excepted). Ray LaHood, a retiring downstate Illinois representative, will be handed the reins of the department at perhaps the most crucial juncture for transportation investment since the Eisenhower years …

Less remarked upon by urbanists but perhaps more disappointing, on the face of things, is Obama’s choice for head of the new Office of Urban Policy… And so the choice of Bronx Borough president Adolfo Carrion was also somewhat underwhelming. Carrion is at least nominally qualified. He’s a trained urban planner and a veteran of the New York political scene. He helped engineer redevelopment of underused portions of the Bronx … Carrion did take a courageous stand in favor of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan … There is little in Carrion’s resume to indicate that the Bronx lifer can explain the necessity of a difficult transition to increased density to residents and leaders of the nation’s great suburban expanses.

The whole piece, here, is required reading for anyone interested in American urbanism and the future of urban and regional policy.

Two conservative intellectuals have recently raised questions about the value of college for most students. While they come from different starting points, they make the same basic point. I find the sources mildly interesting but I think the basic concept is long overdue. Just as high school needs to be reinvented, so does the undergraduate college model.

Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute had a piece in the New York Times about a week ago, which is summarized in these first paragraphs.

Barack Obama has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education - expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits - but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.

Then yesterday George F. Will had a rambling column in the Washington Post about civil rights court cases that included this nugget:

…many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.

This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:

“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”

Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.

Maybe this rings true to me because it matches my own experience. I never liked school with its emphasis on memorization, and was bored to tears as a college freshman when I dropped out. By the time I went back years later and got a BA, I was able to test out of about two years worth of courses. By then I had started a couple of small businesses, edited and published two newspapers, been a broadcast engineer, managed a radio station, done a lot of political activism, and had many other jobs. None of these required me to have a college degree at the time.

However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility - everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk. Instead it should be the basis of a public conversation involving universities, think tanks, unions, and other interested parties.

What do others think?

Rich has already written about how 1930s New Deal stimuli projects will not help this country prepare for the 21^st century global economy. Bloomberg has an incredibly insightful article on the Obama stimulus package. In effect, all the funds that will be appropriated for infrastructure will go for fixing old roads and building new ones to open new open spaces to crackpot development. Whatever one believes about global warming, this is certainly environmentally irresponsible and a step in the wrong direction. Moreover, it will cost cities, which, as Rich, Ed Glaeser, and many others have shown, have subsidized suburban development in the past. Now, U.S. “leaders” want to give us another dollop of past solutions. Optimistically applying old solutions (like ever greater indebtedness) for a debt and insolvency crisis is definitionally “crackpot.”

Can Obama translate his vague promises of change into a real change of direction for this country? To those that responded to my posting about taxation decisions, thanks.

I hope you all have great holidays. Rest, have fun, and prepare to put your thinking caps on because next year will be the most important for the global economy since 1933. We need to be there with alternative solutions and open the space for debate. Otherwise, the economists with old failed theories, some of whom claim to understand the Great Depression, will continue to provide crackpot solutions… to be discussed in the next posting.

How many of you are startled and even a bit frightened at the lack of attention the rapidly worsening global warming crisis is receiving in the U.S. in particular? Yes, there is vague talk from the incoming U.S. President about global warming, but, in fact, the U.S. government is trying everything in its power to boost consumption and raise housing prices in an effort to reignite the housing bubble. Obama is talking about massive infrastructure programs and yet, when you examine the plans, it is largely about building highways with some money for energy conservation in government building retrofits. All of this will be done on a wave of deficit spending that is likely to pauperize the remaining U.S. middle class.

Highway building and energy conservation measures will fail to rein in global warming because hydrocarbon energy is too inexpensive in the U.S. Odd isn’t it, only six months ago, because of the price increases, the U.S. was treating energy conservation as a serious topic. Miles driven were dropping, people were demanding better mass transit, and the move back to the city was being celebrated. The price mechanism was addressing the global warming problem, though it did affect the poor disproportionately. Today, with gasoline prices down, miles driven are increasing, and once again traffic jams and the behemoth SUVs are back.

There is an obvious measure that can address our fiscal deficit and global warming - raise gas taxes, say $0.50 immediately, then after three months another $0.25, and again another $0.25 in another three months (the more one increases, the stronger the signal to consumers is). The phasing in of the increases would provide warnings to auto buyers to choose more fuel-efficient vehicles. This would be a serious response to global warming and the fiscal deficit, but there are no voices demanding such an obvious policy.

You don’t need to be a member of the Creative Class to see how disconnected from reality the policy discussions in Washington, D.C. are. No discussions of raising taxes to address an enormous and spiraling deficit. No discussions of serious policies to discourage the consumption of fossil fuels. The U.S. is today operating on what I term “crackpot optimism,” which I will discuss further in future posts.

So says New York Times’ David Brooks:

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe … If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers. People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact…

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now.

To take advantage of the growing desire for community, the Obama plan would have to do two things. First, it would have to create new transportation patterns. The old metro design was based on a hub-and-spoke system — a series of highways that converged on an urban core. But in an age of multiple downtown nodes and complicated travel routes, it’s better to have a complex web of roads and rail systems.

Second, the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs… A stimulus package may be necessary, but unless designed with care, its main effect will be to prop up the drying husks of the fall.

More here.

With all the talk about Obama’s governing from Left, Right, or Center, I haven’t seen much talk about specifics. The leftish website “Politics Done Right” has an interesting chart and discussion of the policies on the President-elect’s website.

Most of this discussion, moreover, has dwelt in the realm of tactics, presentation and salesmanship rather than grand strategy…

In the case of Barack Obama, however, I would argue that there is not as much need to worry about tactics. If his campaign was any indication, Obama is not much of an outsourcer — he will dictate the tone of his administration. Moreover, we actually have quite a bit of information about what his longer-term goals are.

Lots of Creative Class economy stuff here - education, urban policy, research, infrastructure. While I’m pleased with the range and content of the proposals, I worry about the sheer numbers. What do you think?

Technology has enabled the newer mobile, flexible workplace that allows for better collaboration, faster decisions, and higher productivity.

The White House, as well as the U.S. government generally, over the past 8+ years has demonstrated an increasing performance deficit in these areas of collaboration, decision speed, and productivity, particularly when compared to private corporations, who have embraced new technologies and new workplaces.

Consider these three examples: FEMA’s inability to manage the crisis in New Orleans; the CIA and FBI and other agencies not being ready on September 11, 2001; and the clumsy response to the current economic challenges. Inquiries and reports related to these examples have revealed that various key people and agencies have lacked access to timely information or have been unable to collaborate quickly.

Then consider comparable private sector capacity: Wal-Mart is a world leader in logistics, infinitely superior to either FEMA or the military and indeed did end up helping out with post-Katrina needs. Within the Google servers is probably more information about what potential terrorists are up to than at the FBI or CIA.

For U.S. government agencies to catch up even modestly to the productivity and innovation capacity, a new approach to workplaces is likely needed.

It could start at the top. I would suspect that few Presidents of major, successful corporations don’t have a Blackberry or the equivalent.  Anyone who wants to have a laptop with high speed Internet access on their desk can have it. Denying this to Obama seems ridiculous –and if the President cannot decide this for himself, exactly who is in charge of the USA?

Security is a huge issue at every big company; this therefore does not seem like a good reason to tell Barack Obama he can’t have a Blackberry.  The White House should be able to employ top IT people to put in appropriate security measures.

One argument I’ve heard as to why he shouldn’t have one is that all of his correspondence becomes public record. But what does that have to do with the Blackberry?  In 2008, considerable official correspondence between all types of companies and organizations happens in e-mails. This is just 21st century workplace reality - the Office of the President needs to catch up. (I’m sure Obama knows what should and should not be said in e-mail messages!)  And, he could always decide to read only.

Electronic communication is a key part of dynamic workplaces today that enable better collaboration and higher productivity. It was key to how Obama mobilized a nation to become President-elect.  I would think that it will be key in the new White House — but it will be interesting to see what the Obama team decides to do.