St. Louis

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.

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

A Polycentric Plan for St. Louis

Randal OToole — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 20:28:38 -0400

St. Louis has more miles of light rail than any other Midwestern urban area, yet fewer people rode St. Louis transit in 2019 than in 1991, before the region opened its first mile of light rail. According to a new report from the Show-Me Institute, this is because Metro, the region’s transit agency, has planned its transit system for the 1910s, not the 2020s.

That means that Metro has built a system that assumes that most people work downtown, live in dense residential neighborhoods close to light-rail stops, and don’t have access to automobiles. None of those conditions have been true for at least 50 years, and Metro’s system is especially unsuited to the post-pandemic world.

Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this report.

Metro doesn’t even serve downtown all that well. Before the pandemic, only about 10 percent of downtown St. Louis workers commuted by transit. But this was much better than in the rest of the region, where less than 3 percent of workers commuted by transit.

Now Metro wants to make the system even worse by building a new, street-running north-south light-rail line. The existing east-west light-rail lines all operate in their own exclusive rights of way, which has the virtue of making them somewhat safer and faster than most other light-rail systems in the country (but still not fast enough to attract more new riders than the system’s loss of bus riders). The proposed street-running light rail would be no faster than buses and would be prone to accidents that will kill and injure far more people.

As an alternative, the Show-Me Institute report, which I wrote, proposes a network of non-stop buses to major economic centers in the St. Louis region. This is an improved version of the polycentric proposal I made for Portland, which was published recently by the Cascade Policy Institute. The Portland plan designated nine transit centers, each of which would have non-stop buses to every other transit center plus local buses radiating away from each of the hubs.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Brian Holsclaw via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Urban Doom Loop and Experiential Advantage

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 20:28:38 -0400

Let’s talk about the “urban doom loop”.

There were quite a few pundits who believed that the Covid pandemic would be the catalyst for a profound transformation of cities. Work-from-home opportunities will diminish the demand for office space in downtowns, they said. The loss of downtown office workers would cripple the commercial activity designed to serve them, creating even more building vacancies, they said. The low demand for office space will drive commercial property values down, result in declining property taxes, falling tax revenues for cities, worsening public services, rising crime and the outflow of residents – a downward spiral that would doom cities and favor suburbia, or small and midsize cities.

When I wrote on this topic three years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I quoted an article from curbed.com written by someone who viewed the pandemic as the last straw:

“My reasons were less dramatic: Mostly, I fulfilled a deep desire for outdoor space. My longing to leave preceded the pandemic. I’ve spent the past eight years — since my second child was born — trying to free myself from our below-market-rate, duct-taped-together-but-beautiful fourth floor walk-up in Brooklyn.”

Yet I see cities that are bouncing back. Even with remote work becoming engrained in our economy now, people are returning to cities. Cities are exploring ways to adapt vacant downtown commercial space into new housing, transitioning downtowns from job centers to actual complete neighborhoods.

The urban doom loop phenomenon always seemed more like a wish by anti-urban types than an accurate take on the future of cities. There have been short-term impacts on cities related to the pandemic, but I believe cities have leaned in on their assets to weather the change.

In other words, the adaptability and experiential advantage of cities is preventing any doom loop from spiraling out of control.

Recently a piece in the Washington Post indicates the narrative might be changing somewhat. Stijn Van Neiuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and business at New York’s Columbia University, was one of the early proponents of the urban doom loop narrative at the start of the pandemic. But he’s since amended his views to focus more on midsize cities, rather than large ones:

“Midsize cities have a much bigger chasm to cross than what New York City has to go through. The situation is worse in those places with so little else in place.” He added, “It is a train wreck in slow motion.”

I think there’s a tacit acknowledgment by Neiuwerburgh that New York is returning to normal, despite its challenges. But in his mind, cities like Indianapolis and St. Louis, or Memphis and Minneapolis, don’t have the amenities and resources to recover in the same way New York does.

Neiuwerburgh, however, misses an important point. Relative to the hinterlands they serve, these midsize cities actually do have more amenities and resources. They’ve learned to capitalize on them.

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

Photo: Chicago is becoming a recognized leader in the adaptive reuse of office buildings for residential use. This image is of the 30 N. LaSalle Street building in Chicago, where a proposal to add 432 apartment units to replace vacant offices is being considered. This is one of several projects on LaSalle Street, the heart of Chicago's financial district, that could add more than 1,600 dwelling units to the Loop. Source: archpaper.com

Collapse or Evolution?

Randal OToole — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 20:28:58 -0400

An article in Salon by anti-capitalist Chris Hedges argues that our civilization is on the verge of collapse. As evidence, he points to the 65 percent decline of the population of St. Louis since 1950.

This decline, however, only applies to the city of St. Louis, which is a political entity. The St. Louis metropolitan area, which is an economic unit, has grown by 68 percent in the same time period.

This change took place in response to changing technologies that will be familiar to Antiplanner readers. Before World War I, most downtown jobs were in factories that didn’t pay workers enough for them to afford to take mass transit to work. As a result, they crowded into dense housing within walking distance of jobs. Between 1920 and 1970, factories moved to the suburbs, worker pay increased, those workers bought cars and moved to the suburbs themselves. This was an evolutionary process, not a sign of collapse.

Downtown property owners didn’t appreciate the dispersion of jobs to the suburbs and pressured city governments to write numerous and usually futile downtown recovery plans. These plans failed to turn back the clock as downtowns instead evolved from factory and retail centers to financial service centers to entertainment centers.

Now cities and downtowns are evolving again in response to the recent pandemic. A recent report from the University of California, Berkeley, finds that only four downtowns out of the 62 largest cities in the United States and Canada have recovered 100 percent or more of their pre-COVID economic activities. The report uses cell phone tracking data to estimate the economic activity in downtowns and cities before and after the pandemic.

Three of the four downtowns that have fully recovered — Bakersfield, Fresno, and Salt Lake City — are smaller urban areas whose downtowns weren’t very large in the first place, and the fourth — Columbus — is on the border between big and large with just over a million people. The study also found that economic activity had fully recovered in just ten of the 62 central cities in the sample. With the exception of San Diego, these were also mostly smaller urban areas.

A comparison of downtown recovery with the percentage of people who commute by car. See explanatory variables to make similar charts based on other factors.

Downtown and city recovery, the paper found, were positively correlated with the percentage of people in the urban area who commuted to work by car and negative correlated with the percentage who commuted by transit. Recovery was also negatively correlated with the city’s housing density and positively correlated with the share of the city’s households who live in single-family homes.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary changes resulting from the pandemic are likely to lead to another batch of futile but expensive downtown plans. The authors of this study say “it may be time to reinvent downtown,” but the reinvention ideas they suggest may do more harm than good.

In particular, they point to a “recent policy hackathon held by Politico” that proposed “rethinking streets for transit, bikes and pedestrians; moving parking to the outskirts of downtown; and attracting diverse segments of the population to visit (both in terms of age and race/ethnicity).” These proposals, like so many previous downtown plans, would attempt to turn back the clock to a time before the automobile became ubiquitous. That would limit downtown’s market to the small share of households who are willing to do without an automobile. As the paper notes, accomplishing this would “take significant public-private collaboration,” meaning large subsidies.

Instead of subsidies and grandiose plans that aren’t going to work anyway, it would be better for cities to let downtowns evolve on their own. The best thing cities can do to promote a positive future for downtowns is to tackle the problems of crime and homelessness that are keeping many people away from downtown areas. But that’s an issue for another day.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: David Schwen, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

St. Louis Plans More Transit Spending

Randal OToole — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:28:58 -0500

The Shiloh-Scott extension added 3.5 miles to St. Louis’ light-rail system in 2003, yet St. Louis transit carried 4.5 percent fewer bus and rail riders in 2004 than it had carried in 2002.

As an op-ed article in the St. Louis Business Journal points out, buses carried 40.3 million riders in 1993, before the region’s first light-rail line opened. In 2019, buses and light rail together carried just 36.1 million riders. Spending money on transit capital improvements in St. Louis is a lost cause.

The op-ed also points out that just 4.4 percent of low-income workers in the St. Louis area take transit to work while the other 95.6 percent pay regressive sales taxes to support transit rides they rarely if ever take. The real problem St. Louis transit faces is that it can’t find enough bus drivers to operate the system it has. Instead of spending hundreds of millions or billions on new transit lines, the city should spend a small fraction of that attracting more drivers.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Matthew Black, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Meet me in St. Louis: When One Golden Gate Closes, Another May Open

John Mirisch — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Sacramento politicians and the urban growth lobby they so diligently serve have created a narrative that there is something very wrong with living in (or wanting to live in) a single-family neighborhood. Single-family neighborhoods are -- so the narrative goes -- “racist,” “immoral,” and “evil.”

Three sub-narratives disseminated by density fetishists dominate discussions aimed at demonizing what for a vast majority of Americans, represents a lifestyle preference.

Single-family neighborhoods are racist (OK, ignore the role of banks and the real-estate industry in suppressing Black homeownership, and reward them by effectively putting them in charge of urban planning).

Single-family neighborhoods preclude housing affordability because urban density is required for affordability (well, not exactly, according to demographer Wendell Cox).

Single-family neighborhoods accelerate climate change (except it isn’t the lack of density that causes climate change, but increased consumption).

The reasons Sacramento politicians cling to these narratives when carrying the water for the density lobby is fairly self-evident: money and power. For them, the commodification of housing serves numerous constituencies --- developers, Big Tech, the construction unions, and Sacramento politicians. These are aided and abetted by a vocal Twitter mob of WIMBY (Wall St.in my back-yard) true-believers.

Of course, these policies are at odds with what most Californians and Americans prefer. The move to force ever more urban density down the throats of Californians has left many of the state’s residents feeling helpless and frustrated. In effect, their preferences (are being derided by efforts to discourage homeownership and turn us into a state of renters ( a nifty and reliable source of recurring revenue for corporate landlords and private equity investors.

Now that Sacramento politicians have taken measures to eradicate single-family neighborhoods, reduce homeownership, and to force density upon communities, other states should take notice and react accordingly. The same vested interests have power in many communities and would like to impose this approach on them.

But those states throughout the nation that are willing to accept a diversity of lifestyle choices and to embrace housing pluralism, should promote this as a virtue and use it to their advantage. . States that are willing to embrace tolerance, including when it comes to people’s housing preferences should let people in states with fewer housing options know that they exist and would welcome new community members.

California’s historical tolerance of people of all stripes has been a strength and a way for the state to attract new residents. But as the “progressive” (well, really corporatist) clerisy tightens its grip here, there is an opportunity for other states to attract people of all stripes. This could turn the tables on California --- usually brashly seeing itself as harbinger of the future --- for a change. Other states have the opportunity to turn California’s lack of tolerance into a strength, into an asset, into a way to make people feel accepted, welcome, and at home within their states and within the communities in their states.

The notion that California is simply somehow “better” than other places is increasingly outdated --- except of course for our weather.

If Sacramento politicians take the state’s residents for granted and are comfortable telling them that they are not allowed to look for and live in the housing they prefer, then other states can offer a that opportunity to attract the talented and dynamic current residents of the Golden State, many of whom like living in a home with a garden in a neighborhood of homes with gardens.

We can already see an advertising campaign in California touting the virtues of Ohio as a place to relocate to. Why not consider Ohio as a place to lay down roots? And while Ohioans might not give a damn for the whole state of Michigan, why not Michigan, for that matter? Californians have headed to Texas, Arizona and Nevada, states not more attractive in physical terms those in the Midwest.

Last month I was in St. Louis for a few days. It’s a city I had never spent an appreciable amount of time in.

If we’re going to “build back better,” then there aren’t many better places than St. Louis to do so.

The population of St. Louis is currently just above 300,000 residents. This is less than in 1870. It’s a mere 35% of the St. Louis population in 1950. In the 50 years from 1970, St. Louis has lost more than half its population, even as its suburban population rose dramatically.

Like any city, St. Louis may have its share of problems. But it is quite simply a great city. Wholesome Midwestern values (on a human, person-to-person level; I am not making any political commentary here). Extensive infrastructure. Good food. Nice people. Great beer. For all the talk of Austin, Boise, Bozeman, and Nashville, St. Louis seems like a great place to live, laugh, love, and work. And it definitely deserves to be a success.

St. Louis has a beautiful, historic downtown. It has world-class universities, major museums, impressive cultural institutions, huge, well-maintained parks, and great professional sports teams. It has one of the most incredible man-made landmarks anywhere in the world.

Maybe it’s time we started to focus more on encouraging people to move back to the Midwest. There we can create greater geographic equity and regional equality, and allow people to pursue their dreams of homeownership and independence.

Maybe it’s time for us to really look to build back better, rather than just building back bigger.

St. Louis, Ohio, Michigan, and other parts of what has become known as “flyover country,” are all prime candidates for building back better, especially in the wake of the Great Resignation and with all the potential of remote work to offer Americans of all stripes more choices.

While urban supremacists who shun urban humanism in favor of concentrating more people (and opportunity) into “superstar” cities,” most Americans have no desire to live in the kind of dorm-like apartments that are the dream of these new urbanists.

Cities like St. Louis and states like Ohio should focus on promoting the quality of life they can offer Americans who, in the wake of the ongoing Great Resignation and the success of remote work now have choices they didn’t have before.

You like living in an historic, dense downtown? We have that. Do you prefer living in a medium-dense triplex or fourplex with easy access to the urban center? We have that, too. Do you want somewhat more spacious accommodations, maybe even a home with a garden in a neighborhood of homes with gardens? We have that, too.

And they’re all affordable compared to coastal “superstar” cities.

As a native Californian, I love my state and my community. But I also understand that California is not Jerusalem. Everywhere is Jerusalem. Jerusalem is wherever we choose to make it.

When California ceases to be a place of opportunity for all, and when it constrains choice and tries to force a housing Gleichschaltung upon its residents, then the Golden State has lost some of its luster as increasingly the state’s gold is reserved for the corporate oligarchs rather than the residents.

I recognize that those who have profited from the overconcentration of opportunity might vigorously resist decentralization and a deconcentration of opportunity. But when something is overconcentrated, the proper remedy is, of course, to deconcentrate it. We all suffer when a few places attempt to monopolize opportunity.

Remote work opens up new horizons. For regions. For states. For cities. And, perhaps most importantly, for people. We should embrace its potential, not try to stifle it like the Luddite Californian urban supremacists.

We now have an opportunity to restore the kind of balance restored to the country through policies that embrace urban humanism rather than the dehumanizing scale prescribed by the density fetishists and urban supremacists.

I’m rooting hard for places like St. Louis and Ohio and Michigan. And I understand that if they can offer tolerance for people’s preferences and can welcome a diversity of housing and lifestyle choices (and, yes, some of these places undoubtedly have room for improvement here), they may, in the long run, force California to become more hospitable to its own residents, whom the state’s powerbrokers and Sacramento politicians all-too-often seem to take for granted.

California has effectively told its residents who live in – or want to live in -- single-family neighborhoods: you are not welcome. Not opening that golden gate for you if you’re dreaming of your Blue Heaven.

But golden gates don’t only exist in the Golden state. They can be anywhere we want. They should be anywhere tolerance, choices, and respect for people from all walks of life can co-exist.

Californians now being told they aren’t welcome in their own state because they prefer living in a home with a garden -- or perhaps simply want a bit more space -- may be receptive to other places. A message along the lines of the following would likely resonate among many Californians:

“Your home is your castle. Your home is your home, and it’s for you to have a garden. It’s OK for you to live in a neighborhood of homes with gardens. Or in a denser urban center. Whatever you prefer. Welcome home. Welcome to St. Louis (or Dayton or Des Moines or Detroit or Toledo or Kansas City or…).”

John Mirisch was elected in 2009 to the Beverly Hills City Council, where he has served three terms as mayor. He is currently a garden-variety council member.

Photo: Sam Valadi via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Clang! Clang!: We Need More Bell-Ringers Like Benson Hill

Dale Buss — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 20:28:58 -0400

When Matt Crisp rang the bell a couple of weeks ago opening trading on the New York Stock Exchange because his St. Louis-based company, Benson Hill, had just completed an initial public offering, it ranked as a happy but unfortunately uncommon occurrence.

When was the last time an ag-tech startup nurtured – and still operating – in Flyover Country commenced an initial public offering at that icon of American capitalism?

Not sure about the answer to that question, but whenever it was, it wasn’t recently enough. And this kind of debut, by dynamic innovators in the food and ag-tech industries in the heartland, doesn’t happen nearly enough.

“It was a little bit surreal, but invigorating,” Crisp told me not long after that memorable day which saw Benson Hill begin trading under the symbol BHIL, after shares of the Special Purpose Acquisition Company that preceded it already were trading on the NYSE.

“We had a lot of trusted colleagues [at the IPO] who helped us to advance the company through rough times. And it was even more special to have literally dozens of people come to New York who were long-time supporters, advisors, board members and investors.”

Starting Point

The first couple of weeks have seen Benson Hill trading below its $10-a-share offering price, but Crisp is taking the long view. “Becoming a publicly traded company has the feeling of being just a stop on the journey, for those of us who believe in our plan to advance the food system,” he told me. “We think about this not as crossing a finish line but crossing a starting line.”

And it’s an ambitious race. Benson Hill, founded in 2012, aims to revolutionize agriculture by using data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to help improve crop varieties with better accuracy, nutritional value and sustainability than traditional breeding methods.

Benson Hill already has improved soybeans in the field and has launched a breeding and commercialization program for advanced yellow peas, which have come front-and-center as a preferred ingredient for the plant-based incursion in the food industry that seeks to unseat traditional animal protein in everything from jerky to yogurt.

A number of other companies are working assiduously with yellow-pea protein. But the encouraging thing is that Benson Hill and other leaders in this derby are firmly ensconced in Flyover Country. That’s by contrast with some of the earlier pioneers, such as Hampton Creek, founded in California by Josh Tetrick, a company that hasn’t necessarily set the world on fire even after changing its name to Just.

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

International Traffic Congestion Extinguished by Pandemic and Remote Work

Wendell Cox — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The 2020 TomTom Traffic Index reflects a huge drop in worldwide urban traffic congestion levels. Congestion levels (rated by the percentage of additional time required for auto travel during “rush hour”) dropped in 387 urban areas while increasing in only 13. Overall, TomTom rates 416 urban areas in 57 international geographies. The TomTom Traffic Index is produced by TomTom International BV. TomTom is known for its satellite navigation services for drivers and maps.

According to TomTom, “The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way we live, work and move. Lockdowns, remote working and other restrictions on movement have transformed patterns of movement and reduced traffic congestion in most cities.” Similar results were just reported for many more US urban areas in Record Low Congestion Levels in Seattle, LA & San Francisco: The 2020 Urban Mobility Report, with congestion down by about 50% and greenhouse gas emissions from commuting also down 50%.

TomTom reports that: “This year we witnessed a mass exodus of people from capital cities across Europe. The day before new lockdowns went into force was the most congested day in Athens and London in 2020. Meanwhile in Paris, traffic jams reached record lengths,” where a congestion level of 142% was recorded. This an incredibly high traffic congestion index --- 2.6 times the highest annual congestion level recorded in the most congested urban area (Moscow, at 54%, below) and 4.4 times the Paris 2020 congestion level (Paris had the 42nd highest congestion index out of the 416 urban areas).

Congestion Levels by Nation

The TomTom Traffic Index provides congestion levels for 10 or more urban areas in eight nations (including the European Union).

The United States has the lowest congestion level, at an average of 13.8% (Figure 1). This is not surprising, given the comparatively low densities of US urban areas (Demographia World Urban Areas, Schedule 1, Page 19) and the unparalleled dispersion of employment and the fairly comprehensive limited access expressway system. Canada ranks second, at 17.3%, despite having urban population densities double that of the US, and more limited expressways. Australia has the third best congestion level at 20.2%. The United Kingdom, the European Union and China are bunched from fourth to sixth, within 0.7% of one another. Turkey’s congestion level is at 26.7% while Russia has by far the highest congestion level, at 36.6%.

Congestion Levels by Urban Area Population

As would be expected, the worst congestion levels are in the largest urban areas (over 5,000,000), at 28.9% (Figure 2). The 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 category has a congestion level of 22.5%, The smallest category (under 1,000,000) has a congestion level of 18.5%. Overall, the average congestion level is 21.2% (urban area population categories are based on data from Demographia World Urban Areas).

The highest and lowest congestion levels are reviewed below, by population category.

Urban Areas Over 5,000,000 Population

Because of ties (urban areas with the same congestion level), 13 urban areas have top ten congestion levels in the largest population category (5,000,000+ population), seven of which are in the United States and four are in China.

The lowest congestion levels were in Dallas-Fort Worth (USA) and Dongguan, China, both at 13% (Figure 3). Dallas-Fort Worth had the lowest congestion level in this population category at least twice before (2017 and 2015). Dongguan is a Pearl River Delta urban area of about 8 million residents, located between two much larger urban areas, Guangzhou-Foshan and Shenzhen.

Rio de Janeiro had the third least congestion, while Madrid and Boston tied for the fourth position. There was a three way tie for 6th place between Suzhou (Jiangsu, China), Houston and Wuhan. Quanzhou (Fuzhou, China), Atlanta, Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia made a five way tie for 10th best congestion level. Quanzhou may be China’s most decentralized urban area, with its “in situ” urbanization (urbanization in place, rather than by expansion from a core) that involves conversion of rural areas in place to urban areas, with agricultural employment being replaced by non-agricultural employment).

The highest congestion levels in the 5,000,000+ population category included six of the highest density urban areas in the world: Bogota, Manila, Bangalore, Delhi, Lima and Pune (all with more than 25,000 per square mile or 10,000 per square kilometer). By comparison, the average world urban area with more than 500,000 population is 10,800 per square mile or 4,200 per square kilometer.

The highest congestion level was in Moscow, at 54% (Figure 4). The next three, Mumbai, Bogota and Manila were in a three way tie for third worst congestion. Each of these three urban areas is very high density, at over 30,000 per square mile (over 12,000 per square kilometer). Istanbul and Bengaluru (Bangalore), India shared the 6th highest congestion levels. Delhi, the world’s third largest urban area had the seventh highest congestion level. Bangkok and St. Petersburg shared 8th position. There was a three way tie for 9th, which included Lima, Pune (India) and Chongqing (China).

Urban Areas 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 Population

There are 12 urban areas with top ten congestion levels in the 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 population category), 11 of which are in the United States and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

There was a seven way tie between US urban areas for the lowest traffic congestion level (9%) — St. Louis, Cleveland, Richmond, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Kansas City. Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) took 8th place. There was a four way tie at 9th place between Louisville, Memphis, Columbus and Detroit (Figure 5).

There are 11 urban areas with the highest congestion levels in the 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 population category. Four are in Ukraine and two are in Russia.

The worst congestion was in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, at 51%, a higher congestion level than all but six other urban areas of any size (Figure 6), despite a population of less than 3,000,000. Number two Novosibersk (Russia) has an even smaller population, below 2,000,000, but has a congestion level that ranks 9th highest out of the 416 urban areas. Ukraine’s Odessa and Kharkiv rank third and fourth, while Bucharest (Romania) ranks fifth, just ahead of Samara, Russia. Dublin and Dnipro (Ukraine) tied for seventh, followed by a three-way tie for 9th, consisting of Recife (Brazil), Tel Aviv and Changchun (Jilin, China).

Urban Areas Under 1,000,000 Population

There are 14 urban areas with top ten congestion levels in the under 1,000,000 population category, 12 of which are in the United States, along with Cadiz, Spain and Amere in the Netherlands.

Greensboro-High Point (US) had the lowest congestion level, at 7%. A six way tie for second place included Cadiz, Dayton, Little Rock, Akron, Syracuse and Winston-Salem. Worcester (MA) took 8thplace. There was an 8 way tie for 9th place including Buffalo, Albany, Columbia (SC), Omaha, Knoxville, Grand Rapids and Rochester, and Amere (Figure 7).

Among the 13 urban areas with the highest congestion levels in the under 1,000,000 category, five are in Poland. All of the others are in European nations.

The highest congestion level was in Lodz, Poland, at 42%, which was followed by two other Polish urban areas, Krakow and Wroclaw. Edinburgh was fourth, followed by another Polish urban area, Poznan. Sofia, Bulgaria had the sixth worst congestion level, while Palermo (Italy), Gdansk (Poland) and Geneva shared 7th place. Tomsk (Russia), Brighton and Hove, and Hull (United Kingdom) and Limerick (Ireland) were in a four way tie for 9th place (Figure 8).

Changing Traffic Forever?

As has been evident in international traffic congestion indexes before, the United States has dominated low congestion levels. Thirty of the 39 urban areas with top 10 congestion levels were in the United States. China had six of the top 39 urban areas with the lowest congestion levels.

TomTom suggests that “COVID-19 could change traffic forever” and imagines a future more based on remote work, in which “We'll no longer waste hours stuck in traffic as working from home will became the norm for most jobs. Rush hour traffic will all but disappear, making journeys faster and less stressful.” This more environmentally friendly future, with its more enriching lives could well be achievable.

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.

Photograph: Downtown Dallas, Dallas-Fort Worth urban area: Tied with Dongguan (China) for lowest congestion level in 2020 TomTom Traffic Index (by author).

Reshoring America: Can the Heartland Lead the Way?

Joel Kotkin - Michael Lind - Dave Shideler — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The COVID-19 pandemic has had overwhelming impacts on our economy, not to mention the impact on lives and personal wellness.

The critical lack of medical equipment to treat and protect those affected highlights the over-reliance of United States manufacturing sector on overseas production. The offshoring issue extends beyond current pandemic concerns, however, reaching far larger and more permanent concerns over industrial supply chains, worker training and even national security.

Reshoring is the relocation of production facilities to, or the creation of new ones in, the United States. Many domestic and foreign companies are recognizing the strategic advantages of locating in the United States, such as protecting intellectual property, shortening supply chains and shrinking wage differentials1 between the United States, China and other overseas locations. Some estimates suggest that firms fail to accurately estimate the costs of production in other countries by as much as 20 percent. Considering these additional costs, experts suggest that 10-30 percent of projects considering locating production outside of the U.S. would find that it would be cheaper to remain or expand within the country. As a result, jobs stemming from reshoring activity are estimated to have reached over 400,000 in 2019, and that number is expected to grow.

The U.S. Heartland stands to benefit the most from reshoring activity. Because of its historic dependence on manufacturing, there remains a culture, skilled labor pool and training programs, as well as infrastructure to support production facilities. The presence and diversity of existing manufacturing throughout the region also supports reshoring activity, since domestic suppliers are available and proximate. The growth of financial and professional services in the Heartland also make it a desirable place for manufacturers, given the shift within the industry toward out-sourcing these aspects of the business.

Bipartisan support for reshoring has never been stronger in Washington. We have seen that reshoring activity will require more than tariffs and renegotiation of trade agreements. Instead, policies encouraging the behavior will also be needed, so that carrots and sticks are an integral part of the policy framework. To truly be successful, priority should be given to sectors and companies with growth potential, such as critical supply chain gaps that impact national security. Furthermore, infrastructure improvements and enhancements are needed to ensure that the U.S. remains competitive in the broader global economy.

Read the full report at heartlandforward.org.

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.

Michael Lind is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of book, beginning with The New Class War (2020). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dave Shideler is the Chief Research Officer at Heartland Forward, oversees research focused on identifying practical tool and policies Heartland communities can use to enhance economic performance and prosperity. Before Heartland Forward, Dave was Professor of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University and Community and Economic Development Specialist with the OSU Extension Service. Those roles focused on entrepreneurship and assisted rural communities with economic development planning and implementation. Dave holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from The Ohio State University.

Image credit: Heartland Forward, from the report

The Heartland's Revival

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:29:01 -0400

For roughly the past half century, the middle swath of America has been widely written off as reactionary, backward, and destined for unceasing decline. CNBC recently ranked the “worst states” to live in, and almost all were in what is typically defined as the Heartland.¹ Paul Krugman of the New York Times sees the region populated by “jobless men in their prime working years, with many suffering ‘deaths of despair’ by drugs, alcohol or suicide.”

Another Times article describes much of the small-town and rural areas as home to “the left behind”—Trumpian knuckle-draggers at war with modernity. This coastal contempt for the interior is nothing new, going back to celebrated figures such as Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, who dismissed it as hopelessly “backward if not reactionary.”² Two New Jersey academics have even proposed, with the approval of much of the national media, that large parts of the Great Plains be evacuated to make way for an expansive “Buffalo Commons.”³ One progressive publication suggested that the country should send “reparations” to the region, as if it were incapable of devising its own recovery.

Yet in reality, the Heartland—a region of twenty states between the Appalachians and the Rockies—has remained a critical part of our country. In 2016, this area generated nearly $5 trillion in goods and services.⁴ As of 2015, it was also home to nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population,⁵ a percentage that is likely to increase as both the Northeast and coastal California are projected to grow less than the national average between 2010 and 2030.⁶

To be sure, the Midwest and the less urbanized South have lagged behind, but the Heartland now also boasts some of the fastest-growing large metros. This revival reprises the critical role of the vast interior in providing what Japanese political scientist Fuji Kamiya described as sokojikara, or “reserve power,” the unique combination of America’s vast fertility, its openness to change, and innovative spirit.⁷ Throughout its history, America’s continental mass has been a key element of our economic, social, and demographic strength. Abraham Lincoln described it as constituting “the great body of the Republic.”⁸

The New Demography

Those pontificating about Heartland decline from Manhattan, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco might consider looking more closely at demographic trends, which even before the pandemic were working in favor of much of the Heartland. In contrast, the great “urban renaissance” of the first decade of this century had a shorter run time than many anticipated.

New York epitomizes these trends. In the years right after the Great Recession, New York was gaining as much as fifty to eighty thousand people per year. By 2018, it was losing some forty thousand annually. Over the last several years, Chicago and the Los Angeles area have also lost population, both to surrounding suburbs and from people leaving the region entirely, notes Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution.

As both Frey’s research and a recent study from Heartland Forward demonstrate, outside of Florida and the southeast coast, the cities growing fastest have been in the Heartland—Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Nashville, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Des Moines. More remarkable—or unexpected—has been the demographic resurgence of some even smaller regions, such as the Fayetteville-Bentonville-Rogers-Springdale area in northwestern Arkansas; Fargo, North Dakota; Madison, Wisconsin; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

These are not entirely new trends. Dispersion of both jobs and people started taking place as early as the 1970s, well before the current upsurge.⁹ Looking back, Frey suggests that the big city growth enjoyed in the period after the Great Recession represented something of “an aberration of historical patterns.” The old demographic normal has simply become the new normal again.

The shift to Heartland cities is driven by the migration of both immigrants and millennials. Today the South and increasingly the Midwest have emerged as primary destinations for immigrants, both directly and from the coasts. Similarly, much of the recent migration from Puerto Rico has been concentrated in the Midwest. Immigrants are particularly prominent as Main Street entrepreneurs; in Ohio, they now constitute one in five small business owners.

Equally critical have been the shifts in millennial migration. It has been widely asserted by urban cheerleaders, such as Neil Irwin of the New York Times, that places like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle would prevail since they have “the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.” The Times described Iowa as a place millennials are leaving, but nearly 15 percent of the population around Des Moines, the state’s capital and largest city, is between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, ranking it seventh among the fifty-four U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with between five hundred thousand and one million people. Perhaps more impressive, nearly 53 percent of local millennials have at least a two-year degree, the fourth highest rate among all MSAs in Des Moines’s population category.

Increasingly, as urban pundit Richard Florida has noted, the new growth of the “creative class”—the well-educated millennials critical to the urban renaissance—is “shifting away from superstar cities.” Large Heartland metropolitan areas like Nashville, Austin, Detroit, San Antonio, Grand Rapids, and Dallas–Fort Worth are all gaining educated millennials far more rapidly than coastal “magnets” like New York, Los Angeles, or even the Bay Area.

Read the rest of this piece at American Affairs Journal.

Notes

¹Scott Cohn, “These Are the Worst Places to Live in America in 2019,” CNBC, July 10, 2019.

² Jon K. Lauck, From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Realism: 1920-1965 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 51–57.

³ Richard Rubin, “Not Far from Forsaken,” New York Times, April 9, 2006; Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” Planning Magazine (December 1987).

⁴ Michael Lind and Joel Kotkin, The New American Heartland (Center for Opportunity Urbanism, 2017).

⁵ United States Census Bureau, “United States Population Growth by Region,” 2015.

⁶ Rolf Pendall et al., “Scenarios for Regional Growth from 2010 to 2030,” Mapping America’s Futures, Brief 1, Urban Institute, January 2015, 9. California analysis based on population projections from: State of California Department of Finance, “Projections,” January 10, 2020.

⁷ “2005 Nen Wa Nihon No Tagagore,” Shokun, February 2007.

⁸ Lauck, From Warm Center to Ragged Edge, 1.

⁹John Herbers, The New Heartland: America’s Flight Beyond the Suburbs and How It Is Changing Our Future (New York: Crown, 1986), 3–9.

¹⁰ Derek Thompson, “The Feedback Loop That Will Makes America’s Richest Cities Even Richer,” Atlantic, March 26, 2015; Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 2–4, 15, 61.