The Daily Beast
One hundred and fifty years after twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg destroyed the South’s quest for independence, the region is again on the rise. People and jobs are flowing there, and Northerners are perplexed by the resurgence of America’s home of the ignorant, the obese, the prejudiced and exploited, the religious and the undereducated.
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Forbes.com
Our tepid economic recovery has been profoundly undemocratic in nature. Between the “too big to fail” banks and Ben Bernanke’s policy of dropping free money from helicopters on the investor class, there have been two recoveries, one for the rich, and another less rewarding one for the middle class.
Viewed in this light, the recent run-up in home prices, the biggest in seven years, offers some relief from this dreary picture. Home equity accounts for almost two-thirds of a “typical” family’s wealth (those in the middle fifth of U.S. wealth distribution); there is no other investment by which middle-class families can so easily grow their nest eggs.
Forbes.com
Over the past 60 years, financial services’ share of the economy has exploded from 2.5% to 8.5% of GDP. Even if you believe, as we do, that financialization is not a healthy trend, the sector boasts a high number of relatively well-paid jobs that most cities would welcome.
Yet our list of the fastest-growing finance economies is a surprising one that includes many “second-tier” cities that most would not associate with banking. To identify the cities making the biggest gains, we ranked metropolitan statistical areas’ employment growth in the sector over the long-term (2001-12), mid-term (2007-12) and the last two years, as well as momentum.
The Daily Beast
In the wake of the post-2008 housing bust, suburbia has become associated with many of the same ills long associated with cities, as our urban-based press corps and cultural elite cheerfully sneer at each new sign of decline. This conceit was revealed most recently in a a study released Monday by the Brookings Institution–which has become something of a Vatican for anti-suburban theology–trumpeting the news that there are now 1 million more poor people in America’s suburbs than in its cities.
Reason TV
Joel was recently featured in this short video piece about central planning in Los Angeles and its impact on local neighborhoods. Watch the video below.
Forbes.com
Perhaps no idea is more widely accepted among urban core theorists than the notion that higher population densities lead to more productivity and sustainable economic growth. Yet upon examination, there are less than compelling moorings for the beliefs of what Pittsburgh blogger Jim Russell calls “the density cult,” whose adherents include many planners and urban land speculators.
Let’s start at the top of the urban food chain, the world’s 28 megacities of over 10 million people (which we are defining as areas of continuous urban development, incorporating suburbs and satellite communities). Is greater density the key to great prosperity? Read more
Forbes.com
The modern megacity may have been largely an invention of the West, but it’s increasingly to be found largely in the East. The seven largest megacities (defined as areas of continuous urban development of over 10 million people) are located in Asia, based on a roundup of the latest population data released last month by Wendell Cox’s Demographia. The largest megacity remains the Tokyo-Yokohama area, home to 37 million, followed by the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, Seoul-Incheon, Delhi, Shanghai and Manila.
The Daily Beast
Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.
Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.
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Wall Street Journal
In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, some political commentators have written political obituaries of the “red” or conservative-leaning states, envisioning a brave new world dominated by fashionably blue bastions in the Northeast or California. But political fortunes are notoriously fickle, while economic trends tend to be more enduring. Read more
Forbes.com
In an era in which many businesses that pay high wages have been shedding jobs, the wide-ranging employment category of professional, scientific and technical services has been a relatively stellar performer, expanding some 15% since 2001. In contrast, employment dropped over 20% in such lucrative fields as manufacturing and information-related businesses (media, telecom providers, software publishing) over the same period, and finance and wholesale trade experienced small declines.
With an average annual wage nearing $90,000, this category — which includes computer consulting and technical services, accounting, engineering and scientific research, as well as legal, management and marketing services — increasingly shapes the ability of regions to generate higher-wage jobs. In order to determine which metropolitan areas are doing best, Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group compiled rankings based on both long and short-term growth, as well as the extent and growth of each region’s business service economy compared to the national average.
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