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Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region

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Greater New Orleans, Inc.

This is the executive summary from a new report Sustaining Prosperity: A Long Term Vision for the New Orleans Region, authored by Joel Kotkin for Greater New Orleans, Inc. Download the full report from GNO, Inc. here: gnoinc.org/sustainingprosperity

The recovery of greater New Orleans represents one of the great urban achievements of our era. After decades of slow economic, political and social decline, hurricane Katrina seemed a kind of coup de grâce, smothering the last embers of the region’s vitality.
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The U.S. Middle Class Is Turning Proletarian

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Forbes

The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility.

The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it has widened significantly under his watch. Not only did the income of the middle 60% of households drop between 2010 and 2012 while that of the top 20% rose, the income of the middle 60% declined by a greater percentage than the poorest quintile. The middle 60% of earners’ share of the national pie has fallen from 53% in 1970 to 45% in 2012.
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Possible Sign of Trouble for Los Angeles

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Orange County Register

A quarter century ago, the Los Angeles-Orange County area seemed on the verge of joining the first tier of global cities. As late as 2009, the veteran journalist James Flanigan could pen a quasiserious book, “Smile Southern California: You’re the Center of the Universe,” which maintained that L.A.’s port, diversity and creativity made it the natural center of the 21st century.

A very different impression comes from a newer report, The Los Angeles 2020 Commission, which points out that, in reality, the region “is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward.” The report, which focuses on the city of Los Angeles, points to many of the problems – growing poverty, a shrinking middle class, an unbalanced city budget, an underachieving economic and educational system – that have been building for decades.
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America’s Glass Half-empty, or Half-full?

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Orange County Register

The stock market is high, real estate prices have resurged, even the unemployment rate is dropping, yet Americans still feel pretty down about the future. A survey released in January by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research had 54 percent of respondents expecting American life to go downhill over the coming decades. In a December survey, 23 percent of respondents said things will improve over time.

Yet, in reality, there are several huge trends – economic, environmental, demographic – working in favor of the United States. Despite 13 straight years of underwhelming leadership, the U.S. can emerge extraordinarily blessed from the Great Recession and lackluster recovery, if Americans take advantage of our current situation. Read more

Blue-Collar Hot Spots: The Cities Creating The Most High-Paying Working-Class Jobs

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Forbes

It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred and even an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.” Read more

Selfies Replace Focus on Big Picture

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Orange County Register

California’s economy may be on the mend, but prospects for continued growth are severely constrained by the increasing obsolescence of the state’s basic infrastructure. Once an unquestioned leader in constructing new roads, water systems, power generation and building our human capital, California is relentlessly slipping behind other states, including some with much lower tax and regulatory burdens.

The indications of California’s incipient senility can be found in a host of reports, including a recent one from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state a “C” grade. Read more

California’s Potholed Road to Recovery

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Orange County Register

California’s economy may be on the mend, but prospects for continued growth are severely constrained by the increasing obsolescence of the state’s basic infrastructure. Once an unquestioned leader in constructing new roads, water systems, power generation and building our human capital, California is relentlessly slipping behind other states, including some with much lower tax and regulatory burdens.

The indications of California’s incipient senility can be found in a host of reports, including a recent one from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state a “C” grade. Read more

The Metro Areas With The Most Economic Momentum Going Into 2014

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Forbes

America’s economy may be picking up steam, but it remains a story of parts, with the various regions of the country performing in often radically divergent ways.

To identify the regions with the most momentum coming out of the recession, we turned to Mark Schill, research director for the Praxis Strategy Group, who crunched a range of indicative data from 2007 to today for the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas. To gauge economic vitality, we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength we looked at population growth, birth rate, domestic migration and the change in educational attainment. All factors were weighted equally. Read more

The Blue-Collar Heroes of the Inland Empire

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Orange County Register

The late comedian Rodney Dangerfield (nee Jacob Cohen), whose signature complaint was that he “can’t get no respect,” would have fit right in, in the Inland Empire. The vast expanse east of greater Los Angeles has long been castigated as a sprawling, environmental trash heap by planners and pundits, and its largely blue-collar denizens denigrated by some coast-dwellers, including in Orange County, who fret about “909s” – a reference to the IE’s area code – crowding their beaches. Read more

Silicon Valley is No Model for America

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Orange County Register

Its image further enhanced by the recent IPO of Twitter, Silicon Valley now stands in many minds as the cutting edge of the American future. Some, on both right and left, believe that the Valley’s geeks should reform the nation, and the government, in their image.

Increasingly, the basic meme out of the Valley, and its boosters, is that, as one venture capitalist put it: “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like.” The rest of the country, that venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently argued, needs to recognize that “it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else, that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area.” Read more