NewGeography.com blogs

Almost three years ago, shortly after graduating from college, Jeffrey Rogers found himself with a degree and no job. The economy had just taken a dramatic turn for the worse and he was struggling to get by.

“He was literally living off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” said Kathryn Rogers, his younger sister and a first-year graduate student at Chapman University in Southern California.

Jeffrey went to their father for help in a last-ditch effort to meet his monthly living expenses, but his Dad refused. “He definitely is into tough love," said Kathryn. “He said, ‘He’ll make ends meet in one way or another...' [his] attitude is, ‘Once you graduate, you’re cut off’.”

Jeffrey ended up borrowing money from friends to pay rent for the next six months. But Kathryn is grateful for her father’s “tough love”. She believes it has strongly contributed to her own sense of financial responsibility. While her parents paid her rent and tuition, with the help of an academic scholarship during her four years of undergraduate studies, she was in charge of everything else. “I paid for food, I paid for gas, I paid for activities, I paid for my sorority,” she said.

Kathryn has always had a job since the age of 16. Being aware of how much things actually cost has helped her keep her budget balanced now that she is on her own. But not having that awareness is a huge problem for many college students. “If you’ve always had everything given to you, you wouldn’t think about [cost of things] because it wouldn’t be an issue,” she said.

A majority of Kathryn’s student acquaintances don’t know the basics of personal finances. “You talk to people our age, they’re 18 and they have $12,000 in credit card debt or they don’t know how to pay bills or how to do their taxes,” she said.

Kathryn believes a financial management class in high school should be mandatory. “If your parents don’t teach you, where are you supposed to learn?” she asks.

Catie Robbins, a senior screenwriting major at Chapman, agrees. “Your parents figure you’re going to learn along the way. But then you always feel so much guilt and disappointment when you’re not being responsible with your money. It’d be nice if there was more guidance available.”

Robbins has taken out student loans and receives financial aid, which helps her parents pay for her tuition. But they also take care of her rent, food, and other necessities.

“Basically I don’t have to pay for anything. But it’s scary because they only send me enough money for my food and lodging, so I can’t buy anything else,” she said. “If you want to do fun, random stuff or if you go overboard on your food expenditures, you can be very poor. It’s fine – it’s just kind of sad to be dependent on my parents.”

Robbins looks forward to graduating and getting a job. But right now her financial aid package limits the amount of money she can make from employment to $2,000 a year, which she said she can easily earn during the summer. “As soon as I make that much, I have to quit,” she said. She points out that, counter-intuitive as it is, students are given financial aid because they don’t have enough money, but then are stopped from earning more because of the aid they receive.

There is also a certain irony in being given dreams and goals during college, and then being unable to fulfill them because of the financial burden of college.

“Originally, I had all these ideas for traveling,” said Robbins, who has studied abroad. “But you definitely can’t just take off after school and be youthful and pursue all these silly things. You have to be responsible. I am kind of excited to finally be free and living on my own, and not having to ask my parents for money,” she added.

While financial aid is limiting for some students, and asking your parents for money is never easy, it is definitely a preferable alternative to being entirely dependent on student loans. That’s the situation in which junior Dave Casey finds himself.

Without the minimum required 2.0 GPA, Casey was not eligible for federal student aid this semester. Taking out loans was his only option for staying in college. Currently, he owes about $60,000 with two more years of school to go. He is paying a monthly $187 in interest alone.

“I could have gone to the University of Rhode Island for $6,000 a year,” said Casey, a native of Warwick, R.I. “But I didn’t want to. I was willing to pay because I wanted to go off, I wanted to experience something else, I wanted to be surrounded by a different environment, different people. And I think that’s how you really learn.”

Casey’s father helps him out with rent, and he works over 20 hours a week at a local restaurant. “What stresses me out is that my mother is on food stamps, and I have no money to give her,” said Casey, whose parents are divorced. “I can’t [help], because I’m in a hole myself. Do I send hundreds of dollars a month back to my mom, or do I pay off these loans and then turn to help her? Either way there’s not enough money to go around.” Like Kathryn Rogers and Robbins, Casey’s only hope is to get a steady job after he’s graduated and start paying off his mountainous debt.

“The only reason why I’m not freaking out hardcore about this is because I can’t comprehend it. Set $60,000 in front of me; I’d like to see it. It’s so abstract to me,” he said. “These loan agencies definitely benefit from our naiveté.”

Donald Booth, a professor of economics at Chapman and board member of Consumer Credit Counseling Service, thinks that technology is a major contributor to the lack of financial knowledge.

“The traditional way was the bill came to your house, you wrote a check, licked a stamp and mailed it back. Now you have automatic pay, it withdraws it from your account,” he said. “[People] don’t even know what they have in their checking account.”

The transition to so much financial activity online has been difficult for generations both young and old. “Don’t think it’s just students who don’t know how to manage money – it’s almost everybody,” he said.

Older people are naturally resistant to new technology because they like doing things the way they’re used to, according to Booth. On the other hand, there was no one to teach students to use the Internet as a financial tool.

So we’re basically in the banks’ pockets now, because people aren’t keeping track of the money they’re spending, how much they have, how much they owe. "And everything seems free. You almost never get turned down anytime you want to buy something. Until it catches up with you.”

Rachel Yeung is a senior at Chapman University in Orange County, California.

The Wall Street Journal recently carried an article entitled “E-Yikes: Electric Bikes Terrorize the Streets of China.” The article describes difficulties arising from the fact that nearly 120 million electric (battery) bicycles (E-Bikes) are now in operation in China, as people have abandoned mechanical bicycles and highly-polluting petrol motorbikes.

However, to the millions of owners, China’s E-Bikes are a boon, not a bane. E-Bikes are best understood in terms of human aspiration (just like cars in America or Western Europe). People generally seek to improve their lifestyles. Research at the University of Paris, the University of California, the University of North Carolina and elsewhere has clearly demonstrated a strong relationship between higher incomes and higher rates of economic growth where people have greater personal mobility. This is what the E-Bike provides.

In the large urban areas of the 21st century, even the dense Chinese urban areas, travel is highly dispersed. The efficient operation of the urban area requires an ability to travel from any point in the urban area to any other point in a short amount of time. As effective as public transport can be for trips within the dense (but generally small) urban core or to the urban core from suburban areas, a large share of trips simply cannot be feasibly made any other way than by personal mobility. This includes walking, for very short trips and bicycles for somewhat longer trips. But, it also includes substantial and increasing travel by faster modes of transport, particularly cars and two-wheeled vehicles. E-Bikes have greatly improved mobility. At the same time, the E-Bike has enormously reduced both the air pollution and carbon footprint of two-wheeled personal mobility.

This is not to discount the traffic and other difficulties. However, the Chinese, like their western counterparts, will continue to seek better lives and that means greater personal mobility. It means that E-Bike usage will continue to grow and that car usage will also continue to grow, as incomes rise. While that will make traffic congestion even worse, the spectacular automobile fuel efficiency improvements ahead will allow massive expansion of personal mobility, while moving in the right direction with respect to the carbon footprint. In the final analysis, the Chinese (and the Indians, Indonesians, etc.) would like to live as well as we do in the United States and Western Europe. And why not?

Photograph: E-Bike display at a Suzhou (Jiangsu) hypermarket.

While California's much publicized budget battles have made the dire financial straights faced in Sacramento a topic of regular media conversation, other states are also experiencing major fiscal woes. According to experts interviewed by Crain's Chicago Business, Illinois currently finds itself in a state of de facto bankruptcy, with the state's ledgers appearing "to meet classic definitions of insolvency: Its liabilities far exceed its assets, and it's not generating enough cash to pay its bills."

According to Crain's, "While California has an even bigger budget hole to fill, Illinois ranks dead last among the states in terms of negative net worth compared with total expenditures." The state had a record $5.1 Billion in bills past due at year's end, has failed to pay some vendors for months, and has seen the average time to pay a bill double to nearly 92 days. The state also faces rapidly mounting pension obligations, and has seen it's ability to borrow restricted by its worsening credit rating. Facing piles of liabilities, and recession reduced receipts, the state is currently "living hand to mouth, paying bills as revenues come in each day, building up cash when special payments are coming due. Cash on hand varies from day to day, sometimes dipping below $1 million".

A business or municipality facing such financial challenges might be tempted (or forced) to seek the shelter of bankruptcy protection in order to place it's books in order. States, however, do not have recourse to that option under existing federal law. As a result "rather than having a court restructure its finances as in a bankruptcy filing, a state [has]to reorganize its spending and debt on its own." Lawmakers in Springfield, faced with a situation that is bankruptcy in all but name, will have to make difficult decisions regarding future taxes and services.

I was pleased to have the opportunity to have an op-ed produced on transportation in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on January 17. The op-ed, entitled “Arterial system needed” argued that the most important thing the Atlanta metropolitan area could do to reduce traffic congestion would be to develop a decent arterial street system, something that, unbelievably, does not exist today. Regrettably, the permitted length of the op-ed did not permit much elaboration of the point, or mention of other important issues.

In metropolitan areas with effective arterial street systems (such as Los Angeles), there is usually a surface alternative to a grid-locked freeway. A skilled driver can use these alternate routes and avoid much of the frustration of congestion. This may or may not improve travel times, but it is certainly better for the psyche. In Atlanta, there are few alternatives to the freeways and even the freeway system itself is very sparse.

The principal elaboration for which I wish additional space had been available had to do with the role of transit. Many Atlanta officials are of the view that transit is the solution to traffic congestion. Many of them join pilgrimages to Portland (Oregon), where planners are only too happy to reinforce this view, with their doctrine to the effect that transit has transformed their urban area. The reality is that, after nearly 25 years of major transit improvements, transit’s market share in the Portland area is about the same as it was before.

There are proposals to expand the MARTA transit system and tax from the core counties of Fulton and DeKalb to suburban counties. It is hard to imagine a more counterproductive policy approach. This would shower the overly-costly MARTA system with a stream of revenue with which its out of control costs per mile could escalate. The additional cost to taxpayers and riders would be far in excess of any potential benefits. MARTA’s principal problem is not lack of funding; it is rather insufficient cost control.

The reality is that to reduce traffic congestion, transit would need to attract a large share of urban trips. In fact, however, whether in Paris, Portland or Atlanta, the transit system that could compete for most metropolitan trips has not yet been conceived of, much less developed or even proposed. Because of the necessity to travel from every point in an urban area to every other point, this is simply impossible. The vast majority of travel demand in all major urban areas of the United States and Western Europe is for personal mobility – automobiles – simply because there is no choice in their modern, affluent economies.

Taking on the Portland mystique is not easy – and likely I'll find out again with my most recent piece: Picture-perfect Portland?

But I'd also like to take a Midwest perspective that shows some surprising things. Let's compare Portland to a similarly sized and less acclaimed Midwest city, Indianapolis. You can think of Portland as being in “first place” from a policy perspective by popular acclaim. It has an urban growth boundary, extensive transit, excellent urban density, a strong biking culture, a strong culture of civic engagement, the most microbreweries per capita, and on down the line. It is a place people want to live in so badly that they will move there with no job in hand and would be one of the cities that comes to mind among similar sized metros as a talent hub.

If Portland is first, then you’d have to characterize Indianapolis as “worst”. Indianapolis is surrounded by expanding suburbia with very pro-sprawl policies on all four sides. It is one of the least dense cities in America. It has no rail transit and only the 99th largest bus system, along with one of the lowest transit market shares in the country. It is currently in the middle of a multi-billion program to widen about 60 miles of freeway. It just recently put in its very first bike lanes and scores near the bottom in green measures of sustainability. Its brand image also is hardly the best. You don’t hear too many people around the country going, “Man, I’ve gotta get me to Indianapolis.”

But let’s look at how these cities compare on various quantitative measures of urban performance.

Now in most of these Portland does beat Indy, but not by a lot. In job growth and unemployment – two big factors in today's economy – Indy actually does better. Portland's higher incomes are offset by higher housing costs. There are only two stats – international migration and GMP per capita growth – where Portland has a big lead.

Given the wide difference in their policies, it is striking to see these cities so close. By rights, it should be total world domination by Portland – but it isn’t.

Now obviously these aren’t the only statistics to measure a city by. Portland residents would no doubt tout their many livability advantages. Yet at some point isn’t livability supposed to translate into superior demographic and economic performance? Isn’t it supposed to make a city attractive to the talent pool needed to thrive in the 21st century? And isn’t that talent supposed to power the economy? I was particularly struck by how close the cities were on college degree attainment. While I called Portland a talent hub, perhaps I spoke too soon. Contrast with Boston, which has 41.9% of its over 25 population with a bachelors degree or better.

It may be that policy changes act with a lag. But Portland has been at this a long time. The UGB dates to 1973 and the light rail system started construction in the early 80s, for example. Perhaps other factors play a bigger role than many imagine. Land use and transportation policies might provide benefits to cities, but they do not, by themselves, create an economic dynamo.