Cleveland

More on Cities and Distressed Neighborhoods

Pete Saunders — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.

Here’s a quick summary. Fulton notes in his article that there are metro areas across the country anchored by core cities that have solid and successful downtowns surrounded by quickly rising close-to-downtown neighborhoods and growing suburban areas further out. However, many have struggling neighborhoods in between the downtown and suburbs, either awaiting the boom that revitalized downtown or becoming recognized as a great alternative to suburbia. Here’s how he put it, after being reminded of this while spending time in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:

“Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where I was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.

We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.

Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.”

It’s an astute observation, and one I’ve noted as well (without any cool name for it). I think it stands out as one of the most pressing issues of urban planning, policy and governance today, yet it’s almost never framed in this way. There are loud voices in cities advocating for new housing, so housing becomes more affordable. Meanwhile, the machinery that has supported the growth of suburbia continues to build more on the periphery of metro areas. Sun Belt metros, particularly in Texas and Florida, remain locked in on the suburban model. The middle neighborhoods, unfortunately, get left out of the discussion.

Why is this? Mostly because that’s where a significant chunk of urban distress is housed in American cities. These are the areas noted for high crime, poor quality schools, abandoned or obsolete housing, limited access, lacking in amenities, few job opportunities and other ills that plague cities. Residents of these neighborhoods are often looking for the kind of substantial public investment that turned downtowns around, or the private investment that boosted neighborhoods that were once very similar to them into attractive hip hotspots.

But these neighborhoods inhabit a different space than the revitalized downtown and the still-growing suburbs. Back when the term “donut cities” did make sense, cities realized the importance of strengthening the center. In came the new stadiums, mixed-use developments, institutional expansions, and a new commercial ecosystem to support them. And it worked. As I mentioned earlier, the suburban model keeps chugging along, even in weak metro economies. Without the appeal of being a metro area’s showroom to the world, or a metro area’s next shiny new thing, those in between continue to lag.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: A residential street view of a neighborhood in South Dallas. Few people associate neighborhoods like this with Dallas, choosing to focus on its revitalizing interior or booming outskirts. But neighborhoods like this exist there, and a big part of the Metroplex’s success is hiding this view from outsiders. Source: google maps.

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Envisioning Rust Belt Success

Pete Saunders — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:28:38 -0400

My Defining Rust Belt Urbanism piece three weeks ago, in which I discuss the themes of what would drive Midwest urban rebirth, prompted a great question. Bloomberg Opinion columnist, CSY subscriber and avowed Sun Belt enthusiast asked me on X (formerly Twitter) – what does Rust Belt success look like?

It’s a good question, because there are lots of people who don’t think there is much of a path to success for the urban centers of the nation’s heartland. Most of today’s urbanists seem to believe the templates have been set already. One is to get with the program forged by the coastal cities, leaning into a winning economic sector you’re uniquely suited for, or continue to fall behind. Another other option is to get with the program touted by Sun Belt cities. Market lifestyle, climate and affordability, and watch the people roll in.

In reality, urban rebound is much more complex than either of those examples would imply. Yet the fact remains that the path to success has to be tailored to the place. Before going into the ways that Rust Belt cities can turn around, let’s dig a little deeper into how coastal and Sun Belt metros reversed their fortunes and made economic leaps. (A parenthetic comment: I’m using the term “Rust Belt” here, but really writing about the largest metros within the twelve-state region most people generally call the Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. I often use the terms interchangeably.)

The Coastal Cities Template

There’s one key difference between coastal cities and Rust Belt cities that is rarely recognized. Through the middle of the 20^th century, coastal cities indeed had strong manufacturing economies cities like those in the Rust Belt. Yet they also grew and developed with stronger corporate and service economies. Using the three-sector model of economic activity, from their beginning coastal cities were able to develop a blend of primary (resource extraction), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (sales, transport and distribution) economic sectors. That allowed coastal cities to build on their assets from tertiary economic output (universities, hospitals, financial services, media and publishing) that formed the foundation of the knowledge or creative class economy that drives them today. With a weaker tertiary sector that didn’t produce quite the same output as that of the coastal cities (and probably an implicit acknowledgement made by people throughout the country that the coastal outputs were better than those in the middle of the country), Rust Belt cities lagged.

Coastal cities were then ready for a period in which the global economy leaned in their favor. That economic shift allowed them to stabilize local economies more quickly. It allowed them to focus more on quality-of-life improvements that led to reduced crime, improved schools and other public services. Coastal cities were ready to appeal to a demographic that was increasingly demanding what they offered.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Chart:courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Big Beats Small, New Beats Old

Pete Saunders — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

I came across a couple of interesting pieces in the last week that had me thinking about the past, present and future of American cities again. After reading them, I felt somewhat upbeat and validated, but also concerned.

The first piece was a research paper by the Brookings Institution's William H. Frey. Frey, a senior fellow for the Brookings Metro research program, conducted an analysis of U.S. Census American Community Survey population estimates for metro areas between 2020 and 2023. He found that large metro areas (those with more than one million residents) have seen a rebound since the peak Covid pandemic period in 2020-21.

According to Frey:

“(t)his includes reduced out-migration and smaller population losses in major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as shifts from sharp losses to gains in urban core areas such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C. While natural increase (the excess of births minus deaths) has improved almost everywhere, changing domestic migration patterns and especially a rise in international migration served to benefit population change in large metropolitan areas and their urban core counties.”

That’s great news for people who may have thought the so-called "urban doom loop" was an existential threat to American cities. I’d like to be on record as saying the urban doom loop phenomenon was overblown, because cities had adaptive and experiential advantages that would always make them attractive. Adaptive, in the sense that our largest and oldest cities have generally gone through multiple phases of development in their histories. Experiential, in the sense that cities increasingly have the economic and social infrastructure that appeals to today’s global movers and shakers. Good news for the nation’s biggest metro areas.

Unfortunately, the news is not so good as the places get smaller. Frey’s analysis includes a review of annual growth rates for small (with between 50,000 and one million residents) as well as non-metro areas (fewer than 50,000 residents) between 2010-11 and 2022-23. Smaller metro areas saw a boost in growth rates beginning in 2019-20, at the expense of the largest metros. That boost leveled off during the 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 periods, as larger metros rebounded. Non-metro areas, places with fewer than 50,000 residents, followed a similar trajectory as did smaller metros. However, overall they did not fare as well, because they were already witnessing population loss or minimal growth at the start of the analysis period.

Another trend was noted in the analysis as well. Generally, larger metros rely heavily on immigration and natural increase for population growth, and far less on domestic in-migration. Smaller metros and non-metro areas rely heavily on domestic in-migration for population growth, and far less on immigration or natural increase. That gap widens as places get smaller. The trend was accelerated during the peak pandemic years but appears to be returning to previous levels. But, in a nation with falling birth rates and a increasing reliance on international immigration to fuel economic as well as population growth, what does this means for smaller metros and even smaller non-metro places?

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard. (now at Substack)

Photo: Postcard depiction of Cairo, Illinois, circa 1940.

Comparing Canadian and U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Wendell Cox — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Canada and the United States are among a minority of national governments that formally designate metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas are labor and housing markets which include a core urban area (built up or developed area) as well as rural territory from which workers commute in large numbers to jobs in the urban area. The concept is illustrated in Figure 1, which uses Paris as an example. Other countries, such as Japan, Brazil, and France also formally designate metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan Areas: More Rural than Urban

Usually the land area of metropolitan areas is overwhelmingly rural, with only a small portion being in the core urban area. According to data from the 2021 census, 87% of the land area in Canada’s metropolitan areas was rural, with only 13% being urban development. Similarly, the data from the 2010 Census indicated that 81% of the land in US major metropolitan areas was rural, with only 19% being urban development. The Paris metropolitan area was 83% rural and 17% urban in the early 2010s.

This article compares Canadian and US major metropolitan areas (1,000,000 plus population) analyzing the last five years of available data (2017 to 2022). In 2022, 190 million people lived in the major metropolitan areas of the United States, while 18.5 million lived in Canada’s metropolitan areas (“census metropolitan areas”). Thus, about 10 times as many people live in major US metropolitan areas as in Canada. Moreover, there are 56 major metropolitan areas in the United States and six in Canada, a similar 10 to 1 ratio.

The Largest Metropolitan Areas

The largest metropolitan area in Canada or the United States is New York, with a population of 19.6 million in 2022. Los Angeles is second, at 12.8 million. Chicago is third at 9.4 million and has been losing population in recent years, raising questions about whether the metropolitan area will ever achieve megacity status (10 million). Dallas-Fort Worth ranks 5th, at 7.9 million, with nearby Houston at 7.3 million. Toronto is the only Canadian metropolitan area ranking in the top 10, with a population of 6.7 million (Figure 2).

Measured in population, Toronto is more significant in relation to Canada than New York is to the United States. The Toronto metropolitan area has 17.3 percent of Canada’s population. The New York metropolitan area has 5.8% of the US population, two-thirds less of the national population share than Toronto (Figure 3).

Population Gains and Losses

Dallas-Fort Worth is the fastest growing major metropolitan area in the two nations, adding 606,000 new residents in the last five years. Toronto was the second fastest growing metropolitan area, adding 468,000 residents. The Dallas-Fort Worth annualized growth rate was 1.60% from 2017 to 2022, slightly above the Toronto rate of 1.46%. Over the last year (2021-2022), Dallas-Fort Worth retained the lead, adding 170,000 residents compared to Toronto’s 138,000 and retaining its slim lead in percentage population gain of 2.19% to 2.11%.

Houston was close behind Toronto, at 441,000. Atlanta, Austin, New York, and Phoenix gained more than 250,000. Vancouver was the second Canadian metropolitan area in the top ten, ranking ninth, with an increase of 226,000 (Figure 4).

Four Canadian metropolitan areas ranked among the top ten in percentage growth. Austin had largest percentage population increase from 2017 to 2022 at an annual rate of 2.77%. Jacksonville and Raleigh followed Austin. Calgary was the highest ranking Canadian metropolitan area, ranked fourth, with a annual population growth rate of 1.98%. Orlando gained 1.87%. Edmonton ranked sixth with a 1.76% rate, followed by Nashville, at 1.75%. Vancouver ranked eighth at 1.67%, Dallas-Fort Worth, at 1.60% and Ottawa-Gatineau ranked 10th at 1.59% (Figure 5). Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolitan area, ranked 12th in percentage population growth, at 1.46% annually.

California accounted for four of the five largest population losses. Los Angeles lost 394,000 people between 2017 and 2022. This is a stunning result for metropolitan area that had grown quickly for decades. San Francisco lost the second largest population loss (132,000), while Chicago lost 72,000. San Jose and San Diego had the fourth and fifth largest population losses. No Canadian metropolitan areas were among the those with the smallest gains (Figure 6).

California similarly dominated the lowest percentage population changes. Los Angeles had an annual population loss rate of 0.60%. San Francisco’s loss rate was 0.57% and the San Jose loss rate was 0.57%, New Orleans lost 0.40% annually. San Diego lost 0.26%. No Canadian metropolitan areas were in the bottom 10 in percentage change (Figure 7).

Prospects

According to Statistics Canada, Canada was the fastest growing G-7 nation in 2022, and had a 2.7% annual growth rate in calendar 2023. This was the first year that Canada added more than one million residents in its history (1,050,000). Meanwhile, population growth was significantly muted in the United States in calendar year 2023, adding 1.571 million residents, with a growth rate of only 0.5%. One factor was Canada’s increased immigration targets.

But both countries are experiencing a significant movement of people out of the larger metropolitan areas to smaller areas and even rural areas. In the United States (Figure 8), domestic migration has shifted strongly away from the largest metropolitan areas (with some notable exceptions, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Phoenix). In Canada, the census metropolitan areas (over 100,000 population) lost a net 252,000 internal migrants from 2017 to 2022. while the census agglomerations (populations from 10,000 to 100,000) gained 125,000. The big surprise was that the largest gain was in the under 10,000 category, where the gain was 127,000 (Figure 9). Both national trends are in contrast to nearly opposite trends before the middle of the last decade.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Peace Arch, Blain, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia. By U.S. Embassy and Consulate, via Flickr, in public domain.

Ohio and the Battle for Populist America

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 20:28:58 -0400

This midterm year, in which many states have to choose between non-entities and the certifiably insane, Ohio is blessed by a real political dogfight. The Senate battle between representative Tim Ryan and Hillbilly Elegy author, JD Vance, is becoming one for the ages.

At issue is the very nature of populism. The 38-year-old Vance, a Republican who emerged from Appalachian poverty to serve in the Marines and attend Yale Law School, epitomises the grassroots radicalism of the Scots-Irish in America: anti-elitist, culturally conservative, sceptical toward draconian climate policies and hostile toward China. Ryan, after 20 years as the Democratic representative from the former industrial stronghold of Northeast Ohio, touts a more traditional, pro-union, but also firmly anti-globalist politics.

The state’s size, and its location in the politically volatile Midwest, render it a critical battleground. Ohio is home to 11 million people, making it the seventh largest state in the union. It has all the basic components of 21st-century America: challenged, largely minority cities such as Cleveland and Toledo, relatively prosperous Cincinnati, an emerging boom town in Columbus (the university town that also serves as state capital), and a vast array of rural towns and villages.

Ohio may no longer be the decisive “bellwether” of America — it has been trending Republican for over a decade — but it is still a competitive state. Veteran political scientist Herb Asher notes that despite its GOP leanings, Ohio remains open for Democratic challengers in a way that is hard to imagine in deep-red states such as Texas. In Ohio, successful Democrats are not gentry types like California Governor Gavin Newsom, but hard-bitten, pro-working class New Dealers like Senator Sherrod Brown. Ryan is cut from much the same cloth. At a time of heated polarisation, he has cast himself as a folksy, open-minded family man who puts country over party.

To his credit, Ryan has been willing, at least on the campaign trail, to declare his independence from Democratic orthodoxy. He has supported fracking and opposed Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness scheme. He has praised Trump’s protectionism and opposition to China. He does not much appeal to the tech-and-finance elites who now dominate the Democratic Party — one reason, suggests Midwest scholar John Russo, that he has been slow to attract big donor money.

Vance, by contrast, is not a great candidate. On stage, the hillbilly turned intellectual and venture capitalist is rigid and off-putting — you would rather sink a couple of bourbons with Ryan. Even Vance’s populism seems less people-friendly than Ryan’s. Vance’s biggest blessing, and greatest curse, is Donald Trump, who carried Ohio twice, and whose endorsement saved Vance in a hard-fought Republican primary. Like many conservative intellectuals, Vance opposed Trump at first but then quickly cosied up to him after he won. Ryan has not hesitated to make hay of this about-face, saying that Ohio needs “an ass-kicker not an ass-kisser”.

The outcome of the race will depend on two swing demographics: working-class whites and suburbanites. According to Russo, the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, combined with the increasingly rancid stench of Trumpism, could alienate affluent suburban voters, particularly in burgeoning cities such as Columbus. “The middle-class suburban moderate voter is the key for Ryan,” Russo notes.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Composite of photos by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr. Tim Ryan and J.D. Vance, under CC 2.0 License.

New Rankings Disrespect Management of Companies in Flyover Country

Dale Buss — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

It’s no surprise that the latest “authoritative” ranking of management acumen at U.S. companies relegates those headquartered in Flyover Country mostly to the bottom of the list. But this list sure is frustrating – and wrong-headed. And its bias matters.

The Wall Street Journal just published its annual “Management Top 250” ranking, developed by the Drucker Institute, which purported to measure “corporate effectiveness” by examining performance in five areas: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility, and financial strength.

In a display of tremendously disappointing predictability, the index found that fully nine of the top 10 best-managed American companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley, Seattle or on the East Coast, with only Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, ranked at No. 9, upsetting the coastal hegemony.

Even worse, Flyover Country companies didn’t fare much better in their fractional representation among the top 25. General Motors was ranked No. 16; 3M, No. 18; and Abbott Laboratories, No. 23. Ford Motor almost qualified, at No. 26.

Unlikely Conclusion

What is this telling us? That only four companies headquartered in the heartland have management teams good enough to rank them among the best 25 in the entire country? Does that seem … real? Is it telling us that the only clusters of the nation’s best-run companies really are in a handful of places including the San Francisco Bay Area, suburban D.C., and New York City?

Or are the poor results for heartland companies in these rankings telling us more about the rankers than about the ranked?

OK, the Journal is headquartered in Manhattan and run by Fox, and with a personal history with the newspaper, I understand why they would be comfortable with a coastal lens. But then combine the newspaper’s East Coast perspective with the West Coast view of the Drucker Institute. Founded by famed management guru Peter Drucker, it nonetheless is situated in suburban Los Angeles, where it may not occur to staffers that the potential geographic bias inherent in their rankings deserves a closer look.

The Journal shared relatively little about the 34 metrics the Drucker Institute used to determine the rankings, so it’s difficult to ascertain how the staff and computers made their decisions. But there were some curious clues.

For example, Microsoft, ranked No. 1, got kudos for the biggest increase of any company in its “innovation” score since Drucker researchers began their ranking in 2017. Why? The Journal cited the fact that CEO Satya Nadella “has pushed the company to develop its cloud-computing business since taking over in 2014.” That’s … innovation? Following Amazon to the cloud?

This is Innovation

While GM and Ford at least made the top 26, how about ranking them up with the digital-tech giants for truly stunning strategic innovation in embracing electric vehicles when the industry hadn’t already made it obvious that was the thing to do? Sure, Drucker gave each automaker five stars for innovation – but why not the five-stars-plus that it gave Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and IBM?

Clearly, “financial strength” can be measured in many ways, lending at least some objectivity to evaluation of that one of the five criteria. But interestingly, in the newspaper’s listing of how many stars each company gets in each area of evaluation, the category is called “financial responsibility.” When you use the term “responsibility,” that opens things up to all sorts of subjective interpretations of what’s “responsible” behavior and what’s not.

For example, under the sway of the today’s woke corporatists, the Business Roundtable has been changing what it regards as responsible corporate behavior to favor more “constituencies” than the shareholders who used to comprise the most important audience for company decisions -- but who now keep getting pushed down in importance. Is that what’s meant by “financial responsibility” and why the more politically progressive managers of coastal companies are rewarded in this category?

There’s also a troubling kind of halo around Silicon Valley denizens even after a year in which they’ve experienced unprecedented friction with the members of an American society with whom they’ve become so greatly intertwined. Vast issues around privacy, political affiliation and censorship, and antitrust concerns haven’t seemed to knock down many of these companies significantly in Drucker’s measure.

Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.

Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Photo: courtesy Flyover Coalition

The Battle for Cities

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 20:28:58 -0400

America’s cities face an existential crisis that threatens their future status as centers of culture, politics, and the economy. Many urban advocates continue to delude themselves that U.S. cities are about to experience a massive post-pandemic return to “normal.” But the disruptive technological, demographic, and social changes of recent times are more likely to upend the old geographic hierarchy than to revive it.

A representative New York Times article from July 12 denied that the pandemic has impacted dense urban areas in particular, and blamed negative attitudes toward cities instead on what it called “alluring” anti-urban attitudes. Perhaps urban advocates need to ditch their own attitudes and confront reality (and the statistical evidence): Many key problems facing our core cities—growing social instability, rising crime, out-migration, increasingly radicalized politics, high costs, and tight regulation—predate the pandemic, and are not likely to go away easily. Clever proselytizing by urban media likely won’t be enough to convince Americans liberated by the efficacy of remote work to eventually return.

To survive and thrive, American cities need to reinvent urbanity by returning to a more diverse economy concentrated not in the central districts but in neighborhoods stretched across the city. Such a shift can only take place if the trajectory of urban politics changes. Some cities, notes Seth Barron, author of the newly published The Last Days of New York, have been captured by “an equity oriented social ideology” paid for by real estate interests and public sector unions, and backed by mainstream media and nonprofits, that has proven profoundly self-destructive. Outside New York, political leadership in cities like Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; Seattle; and San Francisco continue to work assiduously to restrain law enforcement, even in the face of rising crime.

There appears to be a growing pushback against the progressive urban agenda, whose journalistic promoters often minimize social disorder. Defunding the police has not turned out to be a progressive success; the five cities that reduced their police budgets the most in 2020—Austin, Texas; New York; Minneapolis; Seattle; and Denver—have seen murders spike over the past year, well above the national average. Having partially gone down the path of defunding in 2020, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, California, have now taken steps to restore some police funding. In ultraliberal San Francisco, the vast majority of city residents want more police; almost half are considering leaving the city, citing social disorder as a key reason. Residents of the fashionable Capitol Hill area in Seattle are erecting barriers to keep out the homeless.

But if the urban gentry are upset, the real shift is further down the social pecking order. The surprising victory of ex-cop Eric Adams as New York’s next mayor took place amid a surge in violent crime, garnering support for his centrist, pro-police platform from the city’s minority voters. My colleague Charles Blain, president of the Urban Reform and Urban Reform Institute in Houston, noted that opposition to “defunding” has come primarily from African American and Latino politicos in his city, while support seems to stem mostly from affluent white liberals.

Political divides within cities increasingly defy traditional definitions of right and left. There’s a growing conflict between those largely dependent on public schools, spaces, and transit, and those free of the need for public services due to their ability to live close to work, send their kids to private schools, or choose not to have kids at all. Much of the base of urban radicalism has shifted from minority communities to the ultrawoke, largely white, educated left.

Yet progressives, due in part to small voter turnouts, still dominate representative bodies like the New York City Council; the newly elected Manhattan district attorney follows the left’s program of low-intensity crime enforcement. In Buffalo and Pittsburgh, recent elections have favored far-left candidates. In Philadelphia, a recent attempt to remove the George Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krassner failed miserably, despite rising crime.

The current urban trajectory is downwind of demographics. Despite the media hurrahs of a massive “back to the city” movement, Americans have been moving in the opposite direction for most of the past decade. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs have accounted for about 90% of all metropolitan growth. The rate of growth in America’s biggest and most expensive cities began to decline as early as 2015, and the population shift to suburbs, exurbs, and smaller cities has accelerated, something evident well before the pandemic.

Read the rest of this piece at Tablet Magazine.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: JJ, via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License.

What's Global Becomes Local

Richey Piiparinen — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 20:28:58 -0400

What’s global becomes local. What do I mean by that? Nothing that complicated. Check the graph below. It charts economic restructuring, or Cleveland’s evolution from a primarily manufacturing- to knowledge-based economy. Largely, that means healthcare. But not exclusively. Other knowledge-based service jobs that are prevalent locally include legal, finance, and management.

How people work is related to where people work. Inner-city factories, for instance, were the workhorses of the “old” Cleveland. But things changed. This was not only due to the automation of manufacturing jobs, but also to the decentralization of those jobs. This job sprawl initially went to the Cleveland suburbs, then the Sun Belt, and eventually overseas. Left in the wake are brick, big-box skeletons. Ruin porn. Places for “urban spelunking”. Take the image below. The vacant Warner and Swasey building sits near Downtown Cleveland. It was a high-end machine shop that was built in the late 1800’s. It made telescopes and machine lathes, and it supplied arms for world wars. Then deindustrialization happened. It did so globally. This was pockmarked as abandonment locally.

Source: Places that were

Not a few miles up the road, however, is the brand-new Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University medical school. It’s an architectural marvel that brims with relevance, talent, and cutting-edge, body-repair techniques. The rise of Cleveland’s healthcare industry from a local service to the global marketplace is conveyed visually: the intersection a portal to another time and place. To reiterate, what’s global becomes local.

But we can keep going, because what’s local becomes personal.

As detailed in Part 2 of this series, as regional economies, like Cleveland’s, evolve from labor- to knowledge-based, they do so at a cost. This cost has been termed the “bifurcation” of the labor market. MIT’s David Autor recently showed that much of the working class didn’t “graduate” into knowledge economy work, but instead became subsistent on lower-wage service work. A “barbelling” of the labor market thus ensued, with knowledge workers on one end and service workers on the other.

Read the rest of this piece at RicheyPiiparinen.Medium.com.

Richey Piiparinen studies the life of Rust Belt cities at Cleveland State. Co-Founder, Rust Belt Analytica. Director, “Life After Rust”. Husband, father, Clevelander.

Photo credit: Carlos Javeir via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.