NewGeography.com blogs

There was terrible news for Dayton this week as the city's last Fortune 500 company, NCR, founded locally in 1884, announced it was moving its headquarters to Atlanta. The Dayton Daily News is the place for complete coverage.

This is bad news not just for Dayton, but for the state of Ohio and the entire Midwest. Firstly, it illustrates the plight of the smaller cities of the Midwest, the ones below one million in metro area population that I usually don't write much about. These cities, including places like Dayton, Youngstown, and Toledo, are often struggling. Unless they are a state capital and/or home to a major state university, they just don't seem to have quite the scale necessary to operate in the globalized economy. These cities have special challenges and I won't profess to have answers for them.

Secondly, this is further damage to the economic reputation of the Midwest as a whole. Loyal readers know that I've been skeptical of cross-regional collaboration as a panacea (though I've also written some positive things about it). However, there are clearly issues that affect the Midwest as a whole. It has, for example, a collective reputation as the Rust Belt that probably only Chicago is able to overcome.

This reputation creates formidable brand headwinds in trying to attract the talent needed to compete in the 21st century. The Atlanta Business Chronicle had an interesting take on the NCR move, with one anonymous source attributing it to talent issues with Dayton. "They [NCR] can’t recruit talent to move to Dayton, Ohio."

So what, you might say. It's Dayton. But my town is way cooler than Dayton. Well, the problem extends well beyond Dayton. Consider Ann Arbor. If any city in the Midwest can claim to be a winner in a the knowledge economy, it has to be the home of U of M, the best public university in the Midwest. But according to an article in the Journal, "Despite Ann Arbor's educated work force, employers here find Michigan's reputation as a failing manufacturing economy can deter potential hires from moving to the state."

In short, this thing affects everybody. Even the best regional performers will be fighting horrible brand headwinds as long as the region in which they are embedded continues to fail. It's like a larger version of what I've long said about the Hoosier State, that there can't be a long term prosperous Indianapolis without a prosperous Indiana.

The lessons of Dayton and NCR are not being lost on people locally and around the state at least. Local blog Dayton Most Metro asks, "Are we ready to wake up yet?"

And a columnist in the Cleveland Plain Dealer chimes in with a call to arms for his city.

When Ohio cities lose storied corporate birthrights to the likes of Beijing, Calcutta, or even the green fields of Ohio suburbia, I understand potentially insurmountable market forces at work.

But when we continue to lose to the likes of Georgia, I only recognize underperforming leadership and a criminal failure to anticipate market realities.

In trying to understand the meaning of it all, we should reflect on the somber and lonely sentiments of a Dayton Daily News editorial that noted Wednesday that the city is now on its own.

Closer to home, Cuyahoga County continues to inch closer to its civic funeral. Not only do we continue to bleed off population and shutter what is left of our industrial base, we continue to act in a predictable political fashion that hastens our day of reckoning.

The inability of Cuyahoga County officials to agree on government reform tells the world that Northeast Ohio continues to be no place to do business. Like Dayton, our region remains a corporate cherry-picker's fantasy.

Soon there will be nothing left to govern in Cuyahoga County.

This post originally appeared at The Urbanophile.

Would you like to avoid recessions altogether?

You can come close if you live in the right place.

This report looks at the period January 1991 through April 2009 – a period of 220 months that includes three recessions. Since employment rises and falls monthly because of seasonal trends (school year, holiday retail and more), this report uses 12-month employment growth rates as the measurement criteria – the employment in a given month compared to the employment 12 months earlier. This eliminates seasonality and allows us to compare, if you will, apples with apples.

The metric in this analysis is the percent of months where the 12-month employment growth rate is positive.

Using employment growth rates as the measurement criteria:

Alaska is 99.1% recession-proof since employment was growing for 218 months out of 220.

Michigan is 51.8% recession-proof since employment was growing for 114 months out of 220.

Some metropolitan areas are also relatively recession-proof:

And, unfortunately, some metropolitan areas are not very recession proof:

You can’t necessarily judge a metropolitan area by its State’s employment growth rates. For example, Georgia is only 73.6% recession-proof yet Valdosta is 94.5%. Indiana is 74.5% yet Indianapolis is 90.0%. Missouri is 72.3% yet Columbia is 95.9%.

A complete list of states and metropolitan areas is available at http://jobbait.com/a/rpa.htm.

The data in this report present only part of a recession-proof picture of states and metropolitan areas. Think of them as a long-term picture from 1990 through April 2009. They do not necessarily represent what’s happening today. For example, Olympia WA which is the second-most recession-proof metropolitan area long term has declines in the last two months, March and April 2009. And, this will change next month and the month after.

This report was written by Mark Hovind, President of JobBait. Mark helps six and seven figure executives find jobs by going directly to the decision-makers most likely to hire them. Mark can be reached through www.JobBait.com or by email at Mark@JobBait.com.

Between economic development strategies targeting software firms, the deflation of the tech bubble, talk of "broadband," and recent consternation about failing publishing business models, we seem to hear a lot about the information sector. Recognizing that, it's interesting that the information sector only comprises about 2.2% of total employment in the US.

On top of that, after a big decline since the tech bubble peak in 2001, in February the sector has receded to just more than 2.9 million jobs, a level not seen since April 1996.

The telecommunications subsector accounts for just more than 1/3 of information employment, and saw the biggest boom and bust. Publishing has declined since 2000, and motion picture and sound recording industries are larger than either software publishing or data processing.

Looking at percent change, software has recovered from the tech bust, while the movie business has remained steady since topping off in 2000. Worse off are telecom and data processing, which continue the post bust slide.

One fifth of the jobs in the publishing industry have vanished since 2001.

This is not to say technology occupations are not a key part of the nation's economy and productivity gains over the past decade, but the importance of the information sector itself is overstated. High-tech industries that produce products generally fall into manufacturing sectors while things like systems design, web design, or even custom programming are business services.

The next post will look at regional shifts in information employment, but until then check out Ross Devol's more comprehensive study on regional tech poles.

Other Information services includes: news syndicates, libraries, archives, exclusive Internet publishing and/or broadcasting, and Web Search Portals.

Shortly after I told you that Bloomberg.com is reporting a running total of the money the U.S. government has pledged and spent for bailouts and economic stimulus, reporters Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry updated the totals: So far, $12.8 trillion has been pledged – an additional $1.2 trillion over the earlier report. The total disbursed through March 31, 2009 stands at $4.2 trillion. The Federal Reserve is still committed to providing the largest share at $7.8 trillion, followed by the U.S. Treasury $2.7 trillion and FDIC $2.0 trillion.

The national debt currently stands at $11.3 trillion — versus an authorized limit of $12.1 trillion. Spending, lending and bailouts by the Federal Reserve are not counted toward the limit.

This week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in China. Mainland China holds $767.9 billion of Treasury securities at the end of March 2009 or about 7 percent of the total national debt. Japan, the second largest major foreign holder, has $686.7 billion.

Notes: Data from Department of the Treasury. Caribbean Banking Centers (Carib Bnkng Ctrs) include Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, and British Virgin Islands. Oil exporters include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.

The U.S. bailout commitment of $11.6 trillion equals 89 percent of U.S. 2008 gross domestic product (GDP).

Jonathan Weber writes that "Most demographic and market indicators suggest that growth and development across the country are moving away from the suburban and exurban fringe and toward center-cities and close-in suburbs," in an article for MSNBC entitled Demographic trends now favor downtown: Growth across the country moves away from suburban and exurban fringe.

One might wonder what country Weber is writing about. In the United States, growth and development continues to be concentrated in suburban and exurban areas. Moreover, strong domestic migration continues away from the center cities and close-in suburbs, as evidenced by the fact that between 2000 and 2008, 4.6 million domestic migrants left the core counties of the metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population, while 2.0 million moved into the suburban counties.

The case is apparently furthered by the obligatory reference and photograph of The Model, Portland, Oregon. However, even in Portland, the suburbs are doing far better than the core. Since 2000, the suburbs have gained 106,000 domestic migrants, while the core county (Multnomah) has lost 4,000 domestic migrants. The IRS micro-data further indicates that the core continues to lose net domestic migration to the suburban counties.

It appears that the only trend indicating that the suburbs are losing out to central cities is the exponential increase in articles blindly parroting “death of the suburbs” dogma.