geography

Cities and Opportunity in 21st Century America

Cullum Clark — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:04:44 -0500

I’m happy to share our new George W. Bush Institute report, “Cities and Opportunity in 21st Century America.” This report is the first in our new Blueprint for Opportunity series, which aims to explore the challenge of expanding opportunity and economic mobility in America, particularly in U.S. cities, and to lay out a market-oriented opportunity agenda. We plan on publishing additional reports in the series approximately once a quarter over the next couple years.

This report examines how America is doing in promoting economic mobility, why cities and neighborhoods so strongly influence economic mobility for people who live there, and which metropolitan areas are outperforming as engines of opportunity. Our second report will consider lessons from history on cities and opportunity and recent trends remaking the geography of opportunity in the U.S. cities, and subsequent reports will focus on particular policy areas like metropolitan economic development, new business creation, the future of work, the role of anchor institutions, housing attainability, and more.

Click here to download Cities & Opportunities paper

J.H. Cullum Clark is a Director in the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative and an Adjunct Professor of Economics at SMU in Dallas. His work focuses on policies to expand opportunity and economic mobility in America’s cities. He worked for 25 years in the investment industry, at two Wall Street firms in New York then as CEO of his own small investment company for 18 years. He is co-author of a forthcoming book on the metropolitan areas of the “Texas Triangle” region that Texas A&M Press will publish in 2021. He serves on the boards of the leading charter school network in North Texas and several arts and civic organizations in Dallas.

Does Geography Determine Destiny?

Rhonda Howard — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 11:28:20 -0400

A new Heartland Forward report, Does Geography Determine Destiny has been released today.

There will be a press briefing at 11:30 a.m. EST/10:30 a.m. CST., with Ross and John Friedman. They will each be making comments and then opening up the virtual roundtable to answers questions.

An excerpt from the report follows:

Upward mobility in the United States, often affectionately referred to as the “American Dream,” is at the center of some of today’s most important and timely debates. We are all invested in the idea of upward economic mobility, grounded in the notion that with hard work, we can build a better life for ourselves, our communities and our children. Unfortunately, the analysis in this report makes it clear that the distribution of opportunity has been and continues to be uneven.

Read the rest and download the full report at: Heartland Forward

Which Countries Would Fit Inside of Texas?

Brian Shreckengast — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 17:55:21 -0400

Everyone knows that Texas is big. In the self-storage world, Texas would be a 10x30 storage unit, the biggest of the bunch. But many people (namely, Yankees and Europeans) may not realize just how massive the Lone Star State really is. How that at 261,231 square miles of land, Texas would be the 39th-largest country by land area in the world, coming in just behind Zambia and ahead of Myanmar. Since there are, give-or-take, roughly 200 countries in the world, that means that most of them are in fact smaller than Texas. In order to truly convey Texas's size, we came up with a zany hypothetical scenario: if Texas were a storage unit, what countries could fit inside?

Of course, using maps to illustrate size is a tricky matter, since most 2D map projections distort size in favor of shape. This includes the Mercator Projection used by Google Maps. Fortunately, we found thetruesize.com, a tool which runs on top of Google Maps and accounts for these distortions, allowing for accurate size comparisons. Now you can see exactly how these countries would fit inside of your Texas storage unit.

What's in a (Metropolitan Area) Name?

Wendell Cox — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:32:17 -0500

Only two of the world's megacities (metropolitan areas or urban areas with more than 10 million people) have adopted names that are more reflective of their geographical reality than their former core-based names. It is likely that this will spread to other megacities and urban areas as the core jurisdictions that supplied the names for most become even less significant in the dispersing urban area.

The first metropolitan area to make a change was Jakarta which became "Jabotabek," a title derived from the names of four major municipalities in the metropolitan area, Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang and Bekasi. However, since that name did not include letters from the fifth largest municipality, Depok, the metropolitan area is sometimes called Jabodetabek. But adding a couple of letters for municipalities could lead to an exceedingly long name. For example, a new municipality of South Tangerang was recently created, representing the sixth municipality with nearly 1,000,000 people or more in Jabotabek. Presumably there will be those who will insist on calling the metropolitan area Jabodetabekst, a more Russian than Indonesian sounding name.

Further, a large part of the metropolitan area is not in one of the six larger municipalities and instead is in one of the many smaller jurisdictions. There is thus the potential of the name even longer than the present world record holder, "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateahaumaitawhitiurehaeaturipuk-
akapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu," which is the 105 letter name of a hill in the Hawks Bay area of New Zealand.

The second mega-city with a new name is the Mexico City area. Mexico's national statistics bureau, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) has designated the Mexico City metropolitan area as the "Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México," which translates to the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area.

Alternate names for metropolitan areas or urban areas are not unusual. One of the earliest may have been the "Southland," a name apparently given to the Los Angeles area or Southern California many decades ago by the Los Angeles Times. There are Tri-State areas, such as New York and Cincinnati and Seattleites refer to the Puget Sound area. However all of these names have varying definitions depending upon who is using them and none directly corresponds to the boundaries of either an urban area or a metropolitan area.

Perhaps better defined is the Randstad area of the Netherlands, which includes at least the urban areas of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. However this area is too large to be considered a single metropolitan area or a single urban area.

Similarly, there is the Pearl River Delta, made up of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Macau. This area of virtually continuous urbanization is by far the largest in the world, but does not qualify as a metropolitan area or an urban area because each one of the jurisdictions is essentially a separate labor market. Further, despite the fact that Hong Kong and Macau are a part of China, the border controls between Shenzhen and Hong Kong and Zhuhai and Macau make it structurally impossible for those areas to merge into single labor markets.

The Yangtze River Delta is another accurate title for a large area of urbanization. This includes the city/province of Shanghai, and up to 14 city/prefectures, such as Nanjing, Suzhou, Ningbo, Yangzhou and Hangzhou. However, as in the case of the Pearl River Delta each of these represents a separate labor market and urban area.

Top Secret Edge Cities

Joel Garreau — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:05:22 -0400

Here's three items from the Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series:

The Series: We've long known that high-security businesses warp the statistics describing Edge Cities. No matter how sophisticated the data source you go to, you find anomalies in which the numbers just wildly do not match the office buildings, retail locations and expensive homes you can plainly see. You know you're in this territory when the GPS in your car starts giving you screwy results -- because it's being jammed. Now my former Washington Post colleagues Dana Priest and William H. Arkin and a platoon of their associates have done an astounding job of lifting the veil. In their two-year investigation, "Top Secret America" -- sure to win a Pulitzer -- they've put together an authoritative data base of government and private job locations where 854,000 people with high-level clearances work. (That's one and a half times the population of the District of Columbia.) They call it "an alternative geography" of the United States, and they're right. Here's the home page for the sprawling report.

Some Numbers: Howard County, Md., has the largest secret Edge City in the United States and the numbers are eye-popping. The headquarters of the National Security Agency -- the communications intercept spooks -- is 6.3 million square feet - about the size of the Pentagon - and is surrounded by 112 acres of parking. It's on its way to 14 million square feet. (Downtown Memphis is 5 million square feet.) And that doesn't count the miles and miles of super-secure commercial office buildings housing the corporations in the NSA orbit. Finally we get more than rumors about why this is one of the richest counties in the U.S. We're talking a $20 billion payroll much of which doesn't show up in other data. In fact, most of the wealthiest counties in America turn out to have Top Secret Edge Cities.

The Map: Check out the interactive U.S. map of where the Top Secret Edge Cities are. Zoom around. These are the Edge Cities where "the extrovert is the one looking at somebody else's shoes."

World Small Area Map of GHG Emissions

Wendell Cox — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:02:02 -0500

The European Commission has just made a Google Earth overlay available showing annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10 square kilometer quadrants. The overlay can be manipulated to show estimates from every year beginning in 1970. One of the most fascinating features is the GHG emissions on the oceans, from shipping lanes. All are green (fewer GHG tons), but one route stands out as by far the busiest, from Hong Kong and Japan through the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal to northern Europe.

The application is useful for broad reviews of GHG emissions by same-sized areas, though the zoom feature does not provide high resolution enough photography to discern differences at the smallest area level.

The new political donor class

Mark Schill — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:35:43 -0400

Do you know who is funding your local candidate? Most of them are probably not from your district, as Lee Drutman at Miller-McCune points out after looking at the results of new report by two University of Maryland professors. Lee writes:

Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. - the "political ATM's" of the campaign trial.

Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.

The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”

If you're interested in where the small donors are coming from in the presidential race, check out the interactive map at Huffington Post's Fundrace. It's a great tool to use as a proxy to visualize which way your state or metro area might lean, or maybe you just want to spy on your neighbors.

For instance, it's pretty easy to see instantly which parts of the Los Angeles may be pockets of Republican influence, or to see Obama's fund raising success in the Chicago region.

Perhaps the Republicans should move this week's convention out to the western Minneapolis suburbs for a warmer reception?

Miller-McCune link via NewsAlert.