Urban Issues

Columbus, Ohio’s Structural Advantages

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 01:33:38 -0400

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is hiring a research associate for their global cities program. If interested, check out the listing.

In 2009 I posted an article that proclaimed Columbus, Ohio “the new Midwestern star,” a prediction which proved prescient. I won’t go too much into performance right now as I’m planning an article on the subject, but just as one quick stat, Columbus has been the fastest growing major Midwest metro in population since 2010 at 9.0%, with a bit of a gap to the #2 performer Minneapolis at 7.3%.

Columbus is doing very well by Midwest standards but continues to lag the biggest Sunbelt boomtowns like Nashville and Austin. Many other Midwest cities have done pretty well – Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Minneapolis come to mind – but none of broken away to join the nation’s major growth champions in either Sunbelt style growth or coastal style high end growth.

Can Columbus do it? I was there Friday and thought about the structural position of the city vs. some others, particularly Indianapolis which I know well. I believe I may have written about these before, but it’s worth a refresh. Here are some of the structural factors – not performance indicators – that give Columbus a potential leg up in attempting to break out.

The first is the presence of Ohio State University, the state’s flagship school and traditionally the largest college campus by enrollment in the country (though Texas A&M and the University of Central Florida have now passed it). Indiana’s major schools are separated into liberal arts and engineering/ag and are located in college towns an hour or so from Indianapolis. Imagine if Indiana University and Purdue University merged and had their flagship campus near where the Children’s Museum is on the Indianapolis mid-north side. That’s a massive plus for Columbus.

The second is that the affluent streetcar-era suburbs of Columbus are separately incorporated actual or de facto enclaves with their own school districts, notably Bexley, Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights, and Worthington (and maybe others). These are equivalent to say the North Shore suburbs of Chicago in feel. They look pristine, with excellent infrastructure, etc. Indy’s equivalent neighborhoods are all in the city proper and part of either the Indianapolis Public Schools or a township-wide system. Resultantly, they show disinvestment, much poorer infrastructure, and diminished property values relative to their architectural quality. The Columbus system can be critiqued on equity grounds, but there’s little doubt it has boosted the fortunes of these white collar havens relative to Indianapolis, giving it an edge on recruitment.

The third is that Columbus was less industrial than Indianapolis and more white collar historically. Economic history matters, and this greater white collar orientation vs. the working class dominated Indianapolis is a big asset in the knowledge economy.

The fourth is that while both Indianapolis and Columbus have been thriving by sucking in people from the rest of their states, having comparatively little national draw, Columbus has a much bigger state to drain. This gives it a high potential flow level and longer runway than Indianapolis, which has already seen its demographic performance start to erode, I believe in part because the small towns of Indiana it traditionally drew from are starting to dry up.

The fifth is that Columbus has a better legacy built environment, notably the true urban commercial corridor along High St. I also get the impression that the city’s older frame housing is bigger. There are more multi-story farmhouse type buildings and fewer worker cottages. Quality of in-town housing stock that can potentially be renovated is in some respects a limiter on growth. (Having said that, Columbus has plenty of dilapidated in city areas).

Columbus also has a couple of structural disadvantages.

The first is competition from other big cities in the state. Cleveland and Cincinnati were traditionally bigger, and there are many sizable others too.

The second is a related point that Columbus has a fairly small share of the state’s population, and thus less heft in state level affairs. Combined with the above it means that the Ohio legislature can take a portfolio view of the world, whereas in Indiana the legislature knows that if Indianapolis fails the state is sunk.

The third is a weak brand stemming from the less distinctive name Columbus. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, Boston just have more distinctive names. Indianapolis is a mouthful, but you know what someone is talking about when they say it. This branding problem even extends to some suburbs like Dublin, an affluent analog to Carmel, Indiana. But whereas Carmel benefits from brand association with Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, Dublin’s brand association with Ireland is positive, but working class.

Fortunately for Columbus, the structural disadvantages haven’t come to the fore in reality because Cincinnati is essentially an isolate region, and the rest of the state has been in decline. It’s not like Ohio has two boomtowns that a farm boy has to chose between.

On the other hand, Minneapolis-St. Paul has most of the same structural advantages of Columbus and they’ve failed to convert it though obviously have done well. They have the state’s flagship school, actually dominate the state demographically, were even more white collar and probably have even better legacy urban building stock. Structural advantages aren’t everything but they at least give a city a platform on which to take its shot.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: Construction in the Short North, Columbus, Ohio

The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 01:33:38 -0400

Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.

Read the entire piece at City Journal.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Office of the Attorney General of California [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Buffalo Billion Reconsidered

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 01:33:38 -0400

You may recall my City Journal feature on Buffalo from 2015. This was written about the time New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion program – a pledge to spend $1 billion in state funds to bring back the city economically – was in the earlier stages of development.

Fast forward, and Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion chief Alain Kaloyeros and Buffalo construction magnate Louis Ciminelli were recently convicted on corruption charges. A lot of the heavy lifting journalistically that raised questions about the Buffalo Billion was done by Jim Heaney and his team at the Investigative Post.

As this was ongoing, the New York Times did an analysis of whether the Buffalo Billion was living up to the hype. They found mixed results and an overall underwhelming program to date:

But an examination of the plans and progress of projects included in the Buffalo Billion reveals a far more uneven return on investment to date: a mix of street-level successes, expensive brick-and-mortar gambles and ill-conceived misfires.

While some projects have bloomed, others have been delayed by years or show no sign of progress, beyond their initial news release. And Mr. Cuomo’s promises of well-paying, permanent jobs at the most costly projects have repeatedly fallen well short….“I think the Buffalo Billion sounds better than it probably turned out to be,” said Isaac Ehrlich, a SUNY distinguished professor of economics at the University at Buffalo.
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“The last seven years have undoubtedly been the best in Buffalo for a very long time,” said Howard Zemsky, the president of Empire State Development, the state’s primary economic development agency. “And I don’t think it’s coincidental that the way the governor transformed economic development has had a very positive impact.”

Mr. Zemsky noted some 25,000 new private sector jobs have come to the city during the Cuomo administration, and added that many of the Buffalo Billion projects — both past and future — were not exclusively about jobs, per se, but support for long-term solutions like downtown revitalization, smart growth, opening up the waterfront and keeping younger generations from fleeing.
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Still, the governor’s rhetoric has often proved overblown: At Riverbend, a state-funded $750 million solar plant, Mr. Cuomo promised at least 3,000 jobs. Tesla, which runs the plant, now employs about a fifth of that number — between 600 and 700 employees — working with Panasonic, which is a subtenant. And last month, amid concerns about its solar operations, Tesla said that it would trim its work force by nearly 10 percent, though it is not clear if Riverbend’s work force will suffer.

At an I.B.M. “innovation hub” where the governor said 500 people would be employed in information technology jobs, the actual number is about half that, according to company officials, with many working for subcontracted agencies and earning between $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

In Niagara Falls, the Wonder Falls resort, a planned $150 million project that includes an indoor water park and 300-room hotel, was to create “1,500 direct and indirect jobs” during construction, and 300 more permanent positions, the governor said in 2013.

The project, however, hasn’t even broken ground; an empty former mall and a parking garage remain on the site, though state and company officials said it is still in the works.

When I looked at Buffalo for my article, the impression I got – which I should point out no one said explicitly – was that Cuomo, looking for a signature upstate economic development initiative, found the recently completed Western New York Regional Economic Development Strategic Plan from 2011 and seized on it, redirecting it for his own purposes. I though the original plan created by regional leaders was good, but you’ll note it doesn’t directly map to some of the Buffalo Billion key initiatives. The original plan doesn’t include anything about subsidizing major manufacturing plants, for example. To the extent that things went sideways with some of this, I would look to the Cuomo people, not local Buffalo leaders who put together a pretty strong plan of their own.

I noted in my piece that the size of the Solar City plant created reputational risk to the city if anything went wrong. The headlines about corruption and underwhelming performance at Solar City are an example of this coming to light.

That’s a shame because a lot of good things have been happening in Buffalo. Howard Zemsky is always in the press because he heads the state’s economic development agency. Properly so, he’s repping their work. But you don’t hear much about the Larkinville development that he spearheaded, which includes a really fantastic renovation of a large former industrial complex. That’s much more significant than sound bites about Empire State Development.

Similarly there are great activities in the neighborhoods, and some of the demographic and economic stats I’ve seen have been somewhat positive, particularly relative to upstate.

It’s unfortunate that this corruption scheme and some ill-advised crony capitalism are detracting from on the ground reinvention happening in a city that does have strategic reason for long term optimism about its prospects.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

Photo: Buffalo Light Rail at Fountain Plaza by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, CC BY 2.0

The Once and Future Lagos

Aaron M. Renn — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 01:33:38 -0400

City Journal just ran a very interesting piece on Lagos by Armin Rosen. Lagos is by some estimates Africa’s largest city and is well known as a creative capital. I don’t know anything personally about the city, but found Rosen’s description balanced and fascinating. Here are some excerpts:

Poverty, confusion, and moral fluidity haven’t stopped Lagos from achieving global prominence. Maybe an all-pervading looseness has even been a source of the city’s growth, since it has expanded with a velocity that prudent planning would avoid. Lagos is now West Africa’s economic and cultural hub, as well as perhaps the continent’s largest city, depending on which population figures one accepts. By most accounts, Lagos has twice as many people as London, along with a GDP greater than all but six African states. In its successes and failures, the city offers a cautionary preview of where an urbanizing developing world is hurtling.
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The project seeks to expand the congested Victoria Island area, while creating a glittering showcase of world-class high-end real estate, thus helping to reverse Lagos’s reputation for disorder. But the initiative reflects a certain myopia: the landfill destroyed Bar Beach, once a popular public space in a city with no large parks and few major squares or monumental avenues. It’s not obvious whether the existing infrastructure can support such a large development so far off the mainland; as it is, Victoria and Lagos Islands are accessible only through a gauntlet of traffic choke points. The development is also aimed at a tiny upper sliver of an overwhelmingly poor city. “The plan is to create a Dubai and just ignore people who can’t afford to live in the proverbial Dubai, which describes most of the population,” says Olaolu Ogunmodede, a researcher at the Lagos-based Center for Public Policy Alternatives and an editor at The Republic, of the Lagos state government’s approach. (The city is organized as a state within the Nigerian federal system.)
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In nearby Ikoyi and Victoria Island, affluent Lagosians have little reason to venture too far, either—they live in gated estates, with their own security, garbage collection, electricity, and private bus services. One gets frequent reminders of how segmented Lagos is, how cordoned off its parts are from one another. Cut down a side street in Ikeja, and you’re suddenly in a squalid parallel world, where generators scream beside narrow mud streets, lined with freelancing numbers-runners and peddlers hawking broken clocks. The alley ends, and the modern downtown resumes again. From the Third Mainland Bridge, travelers can see the plush villas of Banana Island and Lekki glimmer in the distance at night, while the vast lagoon-side Makoko slum, less than 500 yards west of the six-mile-long causeway and home to an estimated 250,000 people, is invisible in the darkness. Makoko has become a transit point for timber from farther down the coast, creating yet another vibrant hyper-local poverty economy. You can smell the tang of burning garbage and wood from the bridge whenever traffic slows.

Cheta Nwaze, a researcher at SBM intelligence, offers more insight into the city’s divisions. Nwaze and another SBM analyst, Ikemesit Effiong, meet me at Seven Eagles Spur, a diner-style restaurant inside Ikeja’s City Mall, decorated in images of southwestern American desert highways and chiefs in feather headdresses. Nwaze informs me that, a decade ago, the land that the mall now occupies was a slum. Residents were removed with a minimum of due process or public deliberation—still the standard procedure for any big-ticket Lagos development project. The mall has a KFC and a Nike store, and our lunch bill comes out to 9,100 naira, or $25. The people who had lived on the site of the future mall probably never imagined such a thing. “You give someone 9,100 naira and tell them to kill someone, and they will do it,” Nwaze says, only half-joking.
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Lagos is booming. Credible estimates put the population at 17 million or 18 million, but the city defies understanding of its true scope. “Most Nigerians can’t be accessed even by the government,” Effiong notes. This relative lack of data could turn out to have broader significance, since the world is sure to look more like Lagos in the coming decades. An estimated 54.5 percent of the global population now lives in cities, but urbanization is less complete in the developing world. Slightly more than half of Asia’s population, and nearly 60 percent of Africa’s, still lives in rural areas. The number of cities with 500,000 inhabitants or more is expected to grow by 80 percent in Africa alone between now and 2030, and the ten cities that the UN projects to cross the 10 million–inhabitant “megacity” threshold by 2030 are all in developing countries. By 2030, some 730 million people, or 8.9 percent of the people on earth, will live in these megacities, up from the current total of 500 million, or 6.8 percent. Success has made Lagos an unnerving glimpse into the near future.
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This constant flux can make for a verdant creative environment. Jumia and iRoko, West Africa’s leading e-commerce and entertainment streaming services, respectively, are regionally important companies founded in Lagos during the past decade. Music and movies produced in the city dominate West Africa and beyond—it was a Lagosian, Wizkid, who appeared alongside the Canadian pop star Drake in his 2016 megahit “One Dance.” As Edet Okun, an assistant curator at Lagos’s Nimbus gallery explains, the city has also fueled a burgeoning art market. “The money is here, and you have a high concentration of people,” Okun says, guiding me through a collection that includes traditional Ife bronzes, as well as striking monochromatic abstract works from Nigerian artist Olu Okekeanye.

Attracting Nigerians of every description, Lagos offers hope for a country often defined by its religious, regional, and ethnic cleavages. It is the exception to Nigeria’s fault lines, “probably the one place in the country where, regardless of where you came from, you can feel like you belong,” one Nigerian told me. For some Lagosians, the rationalized marketplace of the city is also the only way of escaping a dead-end village economy, in which labor is a social or familial obligation, rather than a source of money and freedom. “A lot of these many odd jobs that people do for free in rural areas, people pay for in Lagos,” says Ray Ekpu, cofounder of the magazine Newswatch. Ekpu moved to Lagos from Nigeria’s southeast in 1980 and has seen the worst of the city: he was imprisoned six times during military rule, and a close colleague at Newswatch died in a mail-bomb attack in 1986 that many suspected was linked with the magazine’s work. “People come searching for the bright lights,” Ekpu observes. “They think they can find a good life here. Some of it is true. Some of it is a myth. They think if they can get here, they can find something to do.” That Lagosian myth—of opportunity and an escape from Nigeria’s various social and political ills—has an intense hold over the country.
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Infrastructural lapses aside, Lagos uneasily embodies one of civilization’s fundamental divides: the split between the city and the provinces, between a flagging periphery and the center toward which that periphery gravitates. The numbers reflect an astounding imbalance. Lagos contributes more to Nigeria’s GDP than any other state, and twice as much as the second highest-ranked state. Only 214 Nigerians pay 20 million naira ($56,000) or more in taxes each year; all live in Lagos, which collects some 39 percent of Nigeria’s internally generated revenue. Lagos state governor Akinwunmi Ambode has claimed that 60 percent of the country’s industrial and commercial business takes place in his city.

Click through to read the whole thing.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

Photo: Lagos, Nigeria. Image via City Journal

Backyard Rental House Zoning Threatens Trees, Breezes, Birds and Neighborhoods

Douglas Newby — Sat, 30 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

The Dallas city manager and housing director are proposing a devastating blanket zoning change: allowing ADUs (additional dwelling units), better known as backyard rental houses, in single-family zoned neighborhoods. This change would allow a 44-foot wide by 30-foot tall rental house to be built on the back of a standard 50‑foot wide by 150-foot deep lot. Backyard rental houses would deforest the older neighborhoods, undermine neighborhood stability, accelerate gentrification, reduce diversity of housing, and diminish attainably priced opportunities for homebuyers.

The Older Neighborhoods of Dallas Are Green While Other Cities Are Dense

The life force of Dallas is its original neighborhoods, which have layers of towering trees, lush landscape, gardens, and a natural habitat for wildlife and singing birds. This is in contrast to most cities where urban planners strive to make cities denser and grittier, with neighborhoods geared towards mass transportation. In Dallas life is more pleasant. One can still stroll through shaded neighborhoods and easily drive five or ten minutes to favorite destinations.

Dallas continues to rapidly evolve in a positive way. However, allowing backyard rental houses to be built would derail the distinguishing characteristics and lovely momentum of Dallas’ older neighborhoods. The city manager and housing director are soft-pedaling backyard rental houses as just adding “gentle density,” “granny flats,” “mother-in-law suites,” and “ADUs” to increase affordable housing in Dallas’ finest neighborhoods.

Backyard Rental Homes Will Replace 80′ Trees

This 40-foot two-story structure replaced an 80-foot tall, 100 year old tree. It is a several bay garage with a large storage space above. It is not a rental house, but shows the mass on a 50-foot wide lot.

This option is not gentle. There are no proposed limits on the number of these backyard rental houses allowed in any neighborhood. They will replace 80-foot tall pecan trees and other mature trees in backyards and disrupt the positive direction of older neighborhoods.

Adding Density Erodes Prices of Homes

5011 Junius Street sold for $10,500 in 1907 and after density was added to the neighborhood it resold 70 years later, in 1977, for $7,500.

Over the decades, economic studies have shown that adding multi-family zoning and density decrease the prices and stability of neighborhoods. While absentee owners find two houses on a lot more attractive, homeowners find this less attractive.

Density Was Added to Munger Place – Value Subtracted

An interesting case study is Munger Place. In 1905, it was the finest residence park in the South, at a time when Highland Park was struggling. “Gentle density” was added—rooming houses, apartments carved out of single-family homes, and ultimately apartment zoning. By 1974 the City of Dallas Housing Report identified Munger Place as the worst neighborhood in Dallas with the highest disease rate, the highest murder rate, the greatest number of homes being demolished, the most transient population, the highest crime rate, and no building permits issued for new homes for the past several years. The added density and resulting transience had a profound negative effect. A home at 5011 Junius in Munger Place that sold in 1907 for $10,500 resold in 1977 for $7,500—a 30% decline over 70 years.

City Planners Have Love Affair With Density for Density’s Sake

Despite the economic havoc that adding density and increasing multi-family zoning has had on older neighborhoods, the call to add density in the inner city neighborhoods is not new. For 75 years urban planners have been pushing for more residential density in cities. Rooming houses became common in the 1940s. In the 1970s, mixed use zoning became the zoning du jour. In the past several years, ADUs in backyards have been the latest academic, avant-garde, urban planner movement.

Backyard Rental Houses Accelerate Gentrification

Craftsman cottages are small houses framed by large backyard trees. Neither will likely not survive with backyard rental house zoning in place.

Urban planners claim that by adding backyard rental houses gentrification will be slowed, there will be more affordable housing in improving neighborhoods, and seniors will be better able to afford to stay in their homes. An example of this national infatuation for increased neighborhood density is seen in the recent New York Times June 13th op-ed column by Diana Lind, Bring Back Rooming Houses. Lind writes, “We need to disrupt the model of single-family homes.” She also says, “A font of affordable housing exists.” She explains, “It is the wasted space of single-family homes … backyards … that could be zoned as shared space.” Lind mentions that some forward-thinking cities get it.

Backyard Rental Houses Encourage Landlords to Replace Homeowners

I, on the other hand, do not think her ideas are forward-thinking. While she thinks backyards are wasted spaces, I think they are an oasis of trees. Rental houses built in the “wasted spaces of backyards” will deforest the older neighborhoods and accelerate gentrification.

Backyard rental houses and increased density encourage landlords to replace homeowners and concrete to replace streets. This has a domino effect. Neighborhoods have either a positive or negative effect on each other. For instance, Highland Park has even benefited from the resurgence of the bordering Dallas tree-lined neighborhoods.

Attainably Priced Houses Are Reduced, Gentrification Increases

In addition to economically and aesthetically disrupting the neighborhoods, backyard rental houses accelerate gentrification and reduce the attainable priced options for homebuyers.

Rental House Loans Hurt Seniors, Not Investors

The city planners claim that seniors can offset the cost of their homes and remain in their homes longer by building backyard rental houses. This is not economically accurate. First, building a small rental house is very expensive per square foot. We have seen this on the cost of the 400 sf homeless cottages built in Dallas. Their construction cost was well over $200/sf. The 700 sf backyard rental house would cost approximately $200,000 or $300,000 if it was built over a three- or four-car garage.

Seniors Want Simpler Lives, Becoming Landlords Complicates Lives

Seniors, who probably want simpler lives, would become landlords with all the accompanying headaches that it entails, responsibilities, liabilities, and pressure of keeping it rented to pay off their $200,000 to $300,000 loans.

Backyard Rental House Removes A Senior Tax Freeze

But that’s not the worst of it. Once a new rent house is built, the tax freeze is taken off the house. The original house is reappraised for its full value and the value of the backyard rental house is added. A new senior tax freeze is reset but at a much higher amount. If seniors want to get into the rental business to offset their own home costs, they would be better off keeping the tax freeze in place on their homes and buying $200,000 rent houses nearby. If they had any cash flow beyond the cost of their loan, they could then apply that to the operating costs of their own home.

Backyard Rental Houses Lower Number of Affordable Rents

Also, the backyard rental house plan does not net more affordable apartments for renters. For instance, Mt. Auburn is a neighborhood just eight blocks away from the $2 million homes on Swiss Avenue. Here, one can purchase a 1,150 sf home for $175,000. These homes are 50% larger than a new 700 sf backyard rental house which would have a higher monthly rental rate because they are new. There will also be investor pressure to buy the $175,000 Mt. Auburn house because they can now build two houses on its lot.

Small Houses Will Be Torn Down for Investor Template of 2,800 sf Main House and 700 sf Rental

Investors would be given an incentive to tear down the existing home and build a 2,800 sf $700,000 house. This is the minimum square footage they would need in order to build a 700 sf rental house in the backyard. The result is a $700,000 home replaces an attainably priced $200,000 home, and the backyard rental house costs more to rent per month than did the original $175,000 home. In fact, there would be an incentive to make all the neighborhoods a template of 2,800 sf main houses and 700 sf backyard rental houses.

Junius Heights-Style Homes With 1,800 sf Also In Jeopardy

Junius Heights cottages will be candidates for expansion to 2,800 sf to allow 700 sf backyard rental houses, replacing trees as pictured.

In Junius Heights, adjacent to Swiss Avenue, the 1,800 sf houses cost $300,000 to $450,000—still attainable prices for many homeowners. By allowing backyard rental houses, these Junius Heights homes would also become targets for investors. Investors would add 1,000 sf to these 1,800 sf. homes to make them 2,800 sf, allowing them to build the maximum 700 sf rental house in the backyard.

City Planners’ Template of 2,800 sf Main House/700 sf Rental Destroys Diversity of Housing

The backyard rental house proposal, if enacted, would make all the older Dallas neighborhoods susceptible to the investor/builder template of 2,800 sf main houses and 700 s. backyard rental houses. Along with mature trees, the rich diversity of housing, sizes, prices, and architectural styles is lost forever.

Backyard Trees Soften Retail Streets

The backyard rental house proposal does more than just disrupt the economic stability and housing diversity in the older neighborhoods known for their tree-lined streets, such as Old East Dallas, North Oak Cliff, and South Dallas. They are also known for their even larger trees that are clearly visible behind the houses, and it is not just the residential neighborhoods that benefit from these tall trees, but the retail streets in these neighborhoods.

From Houndstooth coffee house one can see Louie’s Bar with 70 foot tree in neighbor’s backyard.

Henderson Avenue Benefits From Backyard Trees

Henderson Avenue is a vibrant street of retail, restaurants, and grocery stores that leads to Ross Avenue and Lower Greenville Avenue. Softening this neighborhood commercial street are 80-foot tall trees, like those one can see from Houndstooth Coffee, located on Henderson Avenue. These are found behind the 100-year-old residences beyond Henderson, like this one on Monarch Street behind Louie’s Bar and Restaurant. The mature trees in the backyards of the houses abutting the commercial uses are what give Henderson a neighborhood feel. Otherwise, we might as well be in the commercial districts of the West End, Deep Ellum, or Uptown.

Global Warming, Pestilence, Neighborhood Ecosystem Disrupted

The loss of trees is more than just an aesthetic loss. Backyard rental houses contribute to global warming, invite pestilence, and disrupt the environmental ecosystems of the neighborhood urban gardens.

Global Warming

A canopy of trees keeps homes cooler, requiring less air conditioning. Shaded backyards with unblocked breezes cool the yards and porches, encouraging homeowners to spend time outside, and reducing the amount of air conditioning needed inside. The rooftops and concrete that replace these backyard trees collect heat and radiate that heat outward to the neighboring homes, neighborhood and city.

Pestilence

West Nile Mosquitoes Do Not Like Density

The summer breezes that flow through the trees have more than just a cooling effect. Breezes are the best defense against the small West Nile Virus-carrying mosquito. The large field mosquito can fight through the wind. The West Nile mosquito likes still air in highly developed areas, breeding in bottle caps and other small amounts of water. The breezes and open areas make East Dallas much safer than neighborhoods like North Dallas, with larger footprints of homes and development. Backyard 40-foot wide rental houses on 50-foot wide lots block any breeze. These backyard rent houses invite the West Nile mosquito.

Environmental Impact

Cooper’s Hawks in backyards cause an ebb and flow with a variety of songbirds that return when hawk leaves.

In the older neighborhoods of Dallas, with layers of flowering trees, one will see Cooper’s hawks, egrets, and owls. Also seen are songbirds of many varieties, pollinating hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, along with much wildlife. This natural environment and rich ecosystem is eradicated with backyard rental houses.

Density Creates Dire Consequences

Adding backyard rental houses might sound like a short-term solution, but it would have negative short-term and dire long-term consequences. As cities around the world become more prosperous, they become less dense. Both homeowners and apartment renters prefer to live in single-family home neighborhoods.

People Are Flocking to Cities Without Density

The people in denser cities like New York and Chicago are flocking to less dense cities like Dallas. Every city has a distinct personality that should be further developed. Dallas is an open, green city that is easy to move around. Also, it is full of potential.

Employment and Housing Now Have More Flexibility

One half of the geographic area is on the south side of the Trinity River which houses only 10% of the Dallas population. This geographically beautiful part of Dallas has unlimited possibilities for affordable homes, expensive homes, and new jobs. Autonomous transportation and delivery systems will be implemented in a few years, eliminating congestion and changing development patterns and removing the need to live near places of employment. Further, 50% of workers even now can work remotely. The future evolution of technology and development will eliminate any benefit of inserting rent houses in backyards of single family homes.

Dallas Should Celebrate Its Strength – Revel in Low Density

Rather than undermining the economic and aesthetic stability of Dallas’ finest neighborhoods, inviting disease, accelerating global warming, and eradicating the rich natural ecosystem, Dallas should celebrate its strengths and potential. The finest neighborhoods are like gardens that should be tended and nourished, so they can continue to flourish. The Dallas city manager, housing director, and planning director should concentrate even more energy on revitalization, conservation, and development of the distressed neighborhoods. Rather than diminish the neighborhoods north of the Trinity River, the southern half of the city should be cultivated, planted and nourished so it, too, can flourish.

South of the Trinity River Should Be City Planners’ Playground

It is in the southern half of Dallas where there is an abundance of vacant property, deteriorating neighborhoods, and development opportunities. Many of the current avant-garde housing ideas from the 1940s can be explored—shared housing, rooming houses, adding extra kitchens and apartments within single-family homes, and allowing rent houses in backyards—in the neighborhoods that are deteriorating, being abandoned and that are ripe for new development.

It is essential we protect the positively evolving neighborhoods from more density. We do not want to destabilize the good neighborhoods by adding more apartment zoning. We do not want to return to the Dallas housing policy of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that wreaked havoc on the single family neighborhoods. Has the city of Dallas conducted a study to see how many more rental units can be built under the current zoning? How many more can be built near single-family homes?

Dallas Had Largest Multi-Family Zoned Area Rezoned Single-Family in the Country

In 1976, the largest rezoning case in Dallas history consisted of rezoning 100 blocks of 2,000 mostly rental properties from multi-family zoning to single-family zoning. This single-family rezoning was in an era when urban planners, including the award-winning ones in Dallas, were calling for more density, not less. The property owners, with the support of the property rights mayor and developer Robert Folsom, prevailed. The largest single-family rezoning in the nation passed.

FNMA Selected Munger Place for Its First Inner City Loans

Because of this single-family rezoning, FNMA selected Munger Place and Old East Dallas for its first inner city lending demonstration project. Old East Dallas gradually became more single-family. Many years later, FNMA called this neighborhood their most successful inner city lending revitalization project. Rather than return to the bad housing policies of more density and rental zoning that devastated the finest old neighborhoods of Dallas, we should embrace the single-family zoning that revitalized them and made them stronger.

Dallas Neighborhoods Become Increasingly Attractive

Our single-family zoned neighborhoods, many of them now also historic and conservation districts, are increasingly attractive to residents in Dallas and residents in the denser cities across the country that are moving to Dallas to find a home that will make them happy and to enjoy a lovelier way of life.

This piece first appeared on Dallas Architecture Blog.

Douglas Newby is a real estate broker who initiated the largest the largest rezoning in Dallas - 2,000 properties primarily in use as multi family rental properties to single family zoning. In 1979, in Dallas he created the first Restoration House of the Year Award, and for the Dallas Chapter of the AIA organized a city wide survey of architect designed and Significant homes. His TEDx talk is Homes That Make Us Happy. His website is: ArchitecturallySignificantHomes.com. Blog is DallasArchitectureBlog.com

The New Demo-pessimism

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

Normandy—cold, green, and charming—should be the scene of celebration for liberal democracy. The northern region of France produced seminal writings from its aristocratic native son, Alexis de Tocqueville, and was the setting for the landings on D-Day, which reestablished liberalism on a continent locked in the grip of fascism. Yet at the Tocqueville Foundation’s recent conference, “Democracy in the West: Towards a Vision for the 21st Century,” held in the sixteenth-century chateau that remains the property of Tocqueville descendants, the prevailing sentiment was pessimism about democracy’s future and even fear that the Tocquevillian model is headed toward extinction. New forces, notably from Russia and China, noted former French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, “are trying to undermine democracy and offer an alternative model.”

Read the entire piece at City Journal.

Photo: Édouard Hue (User:EdouardHue) [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Can Detroit's Suburbs Survive The City's Rebirth?

Pete Saunders — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

I've written quite a bit about Detroit's recent history, particularly the Motor City of the last ten years -- Kwame Kilpatrick and the aftermath of his corrupt administration, the subsequent bankruptcy and emergence from it, the binding of local government, business and nonprofit forces in creating a new template for leadership, and the very real rebound that Detroit is currently experiencing. Detroit is indeed booming, but it's not growth generated by external forces. The city is in the process of regaining favor by losing its stigma.

Detroit's not gaining in population; in fact, it's still losing people, albeit at some of the lowest year-to-year levels seen over the last 60 years or so. The Detroit metro area isn't gaining people either. In 1970 Metro Detroit had 4.5 million people. In 2016 it had 4.3 million. But the metro area is nearing the completion of a major economic transition as it moves from a manufacturing-dominant economy to a more mixed modern economy, and the transition is bearing fruit in gains in metro gross domestic product. Neighborhoods near downtown are showing improvements hardly imagined in my lifetime, as the Detroit Reclamation Project continues to gather momentum.

And that's exactly it: in a city and region that aren't gaining new residents, there's a transfer taking place. Suburban offices that left the city are returning downtown, and former suburban youth are pining for the Midtown/Corktown/Riverfront urban lifestyle. Yesterday's announcement that Ford Motor Company bought one of Detroit's most iconic ruins -- a building vacant for nearly 30 years -- so that it can move its mobility division from suburban Dearborn into a now-booming part of town is emblematic of what's happening. It's a great thing for the city.

But there's something else going on that rarely gets mentioned. Detroit's suburbs are unsettled right now. Unlike most other metro areas, Detroit's suburbs doubled down on suburbia in a major way, and never envisioned a future where the city would even begin to make a credible comeback.

Can Detroit's suburbs co-exist with a redeemed Detroit?

To understand the question, it must be put in the proper context. People don't understand the extent of the withdrawal from Detroit. Beginning in the 1970's the business elite and the white middle class didn't just leave Detroit, they divorced it. L. Brooks Patterson, the long-time county executive of suburban Oakland County, just north of Detroit and one of the most affluent counties in the nation, famously echoed the sentiment of many suburbanites in a New Yorker interview four years ago:

“I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. We’ve got restaurants out here.’ They don’t even have movie theatres in Detroit—not one.” He went on, “I can’t imagine finding something in Detroit that we don’t have in spades here. Except for live sports. We don’t have baseball, football. For that, fine—get in and get out. But park right next to the venue—spend the extra twenty or thirty bucks. And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, __under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.”

And this:

"When I asked him how Detroit might fix its financial problems, he said, “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.’”

The economic and social withdrawal from Detroit by the business community and the white middle class was about as complete as it could be. In many ways, Patterson's prediction did indeed come to pass.

Because the withdrawal was complete, there were things that developed in the Detroit suburbs that typically happened in comparable urban cores. Southeast Oakland County, which includes the suburbs of Ferndale, Royal Oak, Hazel Park, Oak Park, Madison Heights and others, became the default "gentrifying hipster" spots of metro Detroit. While the stigma placed on Detroit was alive and well, these communities developed much in the same way we see in other urban cores nationwide.

A tool I often use to get a sense of the economic and social demographic makeup of a neighborhood is ESRI's Tapestry Segmentation Model. ESRI has identified 67 distinct market segments across the economic and social spectrum, from high-income to low-income, from those living on sprawling estates to those in cramped apartments, from those who travel frequently to those who never leave the neighborhood. Enter a zip code, and it can summarize some of the dominant economic and social characteristics of that zip code. Here's what it says about the largest segment in Royal Oak's 48073 zip code, called the "In-Style" segment:

"We are professional couples or singles with no kids and strong work ethics. We support the arts, travel, and extensive reading. We focus on home maintenance and improvement. We use our phones to check for the best prices and redeem both print and mobile coupons."

Or the "Emerald City" segment in the same zip code:

"Young, mobile, well-educated, and well-employed, we are more likely to rent in low-density, urban neighborhoods throughout the country. We go online for professional networking, online dating, and blogging. We buy natural, organic, or environmentally-friendly products."

That definitely sounds like the demographic that's been behind the "back-to-the-city" movement in cities nationwide. It's just that, in the Detroit area, it happened beyond the city limits (by the way, if you haven't tried ESRI's Tapestry Segmentation Model, I really urge you to give it a test drive).

Also in Oakland County, two major office centers, one in Southfield and the other in Troy, developed as Detroit collapsed. Interestingly, both emerged close to the hip burbs of southeastern Oakland County -- Southfield is a 10-15 minute drive to the west, Troy is 10-15 minutes to the north. Businesses were able to tap into a young and educated talent pool rather easily.

Today, however, Detroit's young and educated have more options. The Seven Point Two -- the weird name (it's the area in square mile terms) given to the collection of neighborhoods that comprise Detroit's Greater Downtown -- is becoming attractive to the people who for years headed to Royal Oak or Ferndale. The conveyor belt pattern is familiar to many -- graduate from college and live in a cool neighborhood with tons of entertainment options, settle into a less-cool but just as entertaining neighborhood as you mature, and find a suburban area with nice schools as your kids reach school age. Same in metro Detroit as elsewhere -- it just started in the suburbs.

But because metro Detroit's population growth has been flat for more than a generation, there's very nearly a zero-sum cause and effect here. The city's loss decades ago was the suburb's gain. Today's city gain is coming at the expense of the suburbs.

It may be that Ferndale, Royal Oak and the rest of southeastern Oakland County inhabit that second step on the conveyor belt, becoming the less-cool but still entertaining spots, relative to the burgeoning hot spots in the downtown/Midtown/Corktown areas. I see that as having a ripple effect through other suburbs -- the Birminghams and Bloomfield Hills and beyond.

This could also force some real soul-searching for the office centers in Southfield and Troy. Much like the city did 60 years ago, it could be said that they took the growth for granted and expected it to last forever. If businesses choose to move downtown to be where the talent pool is choosing to go, what will that mean for them? Ford's move into the Michigan Central Station building will tell us a lot.

Lastly, I didn't even mention the middle-class and working-class suburbs of western Wayne County, the Downriver area, or Macomb County, the ones that have been extremely reliant on manufacturing workers living in small Cape Cods until they were able to upgrade to bigger homes even further from the city. They will have to do some soul-searching as well.

Again, I stress that this is, in a sense, Detroit simply reclaiming what it lost as it acquired its stigma over the last 60 years. It's settling into a position familiar to other cities nationwide. The economic and cultural divide between the two was too great. For better or worse, the city's rebound has the ability to equalize them. The suburbs just better be ready.

This piece originally appeared on The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years. He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

Photo: A scene from Main Street in downtown Royal Oak, MI. Suburbs like Royal Oak may have benefited from Detroit's troubles, but will they be able to compete with a resurrected Motor City? Source: patch.com

Cautionary Tales from the Cities of Seattle and Philadelphia

Wendell Cox — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

For some time now urban core proponents have boasted about a "return to the cities" from the suburbs. And while the urban core cities (historical core municipalities) have done better in recent years than before, the claim has been significantly overblown. Suburbs have continued to capture the "lion's share" of metropolitan growth in the United States. Moreover, suburban growth since the beginning of the overwhelming automobile oriented suburban expansion since World War II has been far greater than could ever have been explained by central city population losses (Note).

The Cities Have Done Better Lately, But Threats Loom

Nonetheless, the catastrophic population losses in the urban core cities, especially 1970 through 1990 have slowed down or stopped completely in many areas. Sadly, some of the cities that have experienced the most significant turnarounds appear not to have learned important lessons of their previous declines. Take, for example, the cities of Seattle and Philadelphia (a combined city-county), whose city councils have revealed inclinations likely to raise concern among corporations seeking expand or locate under their jurisdictions.

City of Seattle

Seattle is thought by many to be the logical successor to the San Francisco Bay area, with its information technology industry and the new wealth it has produced.

Metropolitan Seattle has become one of the world's premier information technology hubs, with Amazon in the central business district of the city and Microsoft headquartered in the suburbs. The city of Seattle's progress is of rather recent vintage. Like other urban core cities, Seattle had lost population from mid-century to 1990. In 1960, following a decade of major annexation, the city had 558,000 residents. By 1990, the population had dropped to 516,000. All the metropolitan area's growth for the last 30 years had been suburban. By the 2000 census, the city had reached 563,000, little above its population 40 years before. But the last two decades have seen much stronger growth. Since the 2010 census, the city has grown at a faster rate than any municipality with more than 500,000 population in 2017. Yet, even so, the city of Seattle accounted for only 12 percent of the metropolitan area's rapid growth between 1990 and 2017. Since 2010, the city's share of growth has risen to 27 percent.

Emboldened by the growth, support developed on Seattle's city council to deal with its mounting homelessness problem and a head tax was proposed on companies with more than $20 million in annual Seattle earned revenue. After Amazon placed a hold on an under-construction downtown tower, and business interests objected, at least in part because "Past Council action on homelessness does not inspire confidence that they would use new revenue wisely and with accountability measures that track outcomes," the council halved the proposal and adopted it. Then a campaign for repeal by voters obtained enough signatures and money to frighten the city council into repealing the tax.

The business concern about use of funds and accountability suggests that priorities and execution need improvement. That could lead to better results on the important issue of homelessness.

Despite the temporary setback some proponents continue to believe that Seattle can just about do anything it wants, since it is perceived to be so desirable. For example, an Associated Press article quoted a proponent of the Seattle tax who said "It's frustrating to see the council be so spineless when the city has so much leverage for businesses to come here despite the tax." That is precisely the kind of thinking that could kill the "golden goose" not only of the city, but also the metropolitan area. The Seattle area lost its world headquarters of Boeing some years ago. Then Boeing started building passenger jets in the Charleston area of South Carolina. The extent to which local (and state) tax policies contributed to Boeing's significant reduction of its Seattle presence is known only to the Boeing officials who weighed the factors and made the decision.

Moreover, there may be storm clouds on the horizon. Seattle has become one of the nation's most severely unaffordable metropolitan areas. The culprit is its urban containment policy, with its urban growth boundary. Seattle's house prices are now double their level relative to incomes compared to before imposition of the urban growth boundary, a pattern repeated in a number of metropolitan areas around the world.

As the cost of living rises, metropolitan areas begin to lose businesses people to elsewhere. Already, King County (where the city of Seattle is located), has seen its domestic migration drop in recent years. In 2011 through 2013, King County accounted for between 60 percent and 86 percent of the metropolitan area's net domestic migration. That has dropped to 13 percent in 2017. Seattle's high rising costs, driven by its worsening housing affordability, could soon turn the metropolitan area's net domestic migration negative, just as it has in previous growth leaders Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area. No city or metropolitan area can, in the long run, continue to attract businesses and residents if it allows its costs of living to get out of control.

City of Philadelphia

The city of Philadelphia is much different than the city of Seattle. From its peak population of 2,072,000 in 1950, Philadelphia lost about as many residents as lived in the city of Seattle at the beginning of the century, falling to 1,510,000 in 2003. But with its attractive urban core, and with improved crime rates, Philadelphia began growing again. By 2017, the city had 1,581,000 residents.

But unlike Seattle, Philadelphia does not have a huge information technology presence. Its growth is more fragile, having added 55,000 new residents since 2010, less than one-half the 126,000 gained by much smaller Seattle. After having obtained none of the metropolitan area's growth from 1960 to 2000, the city accounted for 16 percent of the growth since 2000 and an impressive 42 percent since 2010. A factor, however, in that performance is the Philadelphia area's very slow growth. Among the nation's 10 largest urban core cities, only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have grown more slowly since 2010.

Philadelphia's city council seems to be at least as emboldened as Seattle's, despite the city's far more fragile economic fundamentals. A proposal to implement a one percent tax on new construction has gained considerable support. The money would be used for affordable housing programs. To their credit, Mayor Jim Kenney, the building trades unions (whose business manager calls the proposal "dumb"), and business interests are opposed. They, at least have learned an important lesson about how to snuff out the essentials of competitiveness.

Urban Core Cities: Shaky Competitive Positions

Urban core cities continue to battle structural challenges. Our own reports have documented the higher taxes, higher spending and higher debt levels per capita of larger municipalities in Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and Ohio. Further expenditures per capita in the United States as a whole were found to be higher in larger municipalities. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, state programs to identify and assist municipalities that have fallen into fiscal distress have much higher per capita tax rates of such designation among larger municipalities. Some urban core cities may perform a greater array of functions than suburban jurisdictions, whose citizens often a slimmer package of government services.

The urban core cities need to avoid policies that weaken their competitive situations and could lead to exporting people, jobs and businesses. The recent developments in Seattle and Philadelphia suggest that, with their special interest pressures, they may face unique challenges to maintaining their competitiveness in the years ahead.

Note: There is considerable confusion about the origins of suburban growth. Much more of the gains came from outside urban areas, which attracted millions of new migrants. Indeed, since 1950, US urban areas have added more than 150 million residents, while rural areas added only 5 million. Overall, urban areas, ranging from populations of 2,500 to 20 million, had only 64 percent of the population in 1950. Yet through the next 6 censuses attracted 97 percent of the US population gain. The rest of the growth, only 3 percent was in rural areas. This was a significant turnaround, since in 1950, only 64 percent of the population was in urban areas and 36 percent in rural areas.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Downtown Seattle by Jamies [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

The Big Move

John Sanphillippo — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

I spent the afternoon yesterday helping my neighbors pack, clean, and complete a series of fix-it projects around their apartment. They’re moving from San Francisco to a semi-rural town of 28,000 in western Massachusetts.

My neighbor bought her one bedroom apartment a decade ago for what seemed like the outrageously high price of $400,000. Today the place is worth $900,000. Now that her and her husband have a child they need more space and were confronted with the reality of what it would cost to upgrade to a slightly bigger place with a patch of garden. The numbers didn’t add up. Moving to a suburb anywhere in a two hour drive of San Francisco didn’t help since the price of anything approximating what they want is insane, and the vaguely “affordable” options were horrifying for a long list of reasons. Hence the 3,000 mile move to Massachusetts. The median home value in their new place is $280,000 – and they’re getting a big fully renovated Victorian era home on a third of an acre.

The question now is whether to rent the old apartment or sell it outright. Holding it will provide a steady rental income that will cover all their expenses in Massachusetts. Selling it will provide a lump sum of cash that will allow them to live mortgage free in their new home and have plenty of money left in savings. They still haven’t decided.

At the moment they’re leaning toward the rental option. One bedroom apartments in this location routinely fetch north of $4,700 a month. The space is relatively low maintenance. With proper screening of tenants for credit worthiness and references it should theoretically be a pretty straightforward arrangement. But being a landlord in San Francisco’s regulatory environment is not for the faint of heart. Any number of things can (and often do) go terribly wrong in a place where landlord/tenant relations are notoriously fraught with legal action. We’ll see how that goes.

For the moment my neighbors are absorbed with the quotidian concerns of moving house and settling in to their new place. I’ll note that while they definitely wanted more space and a garden, they also wanted to be in a town with a Main Street and other “urban” amenities close at hand. I see this repeatedly with my millennial friends as they have children and migrate away from the city. They want an older neighborhood close to a smaller version of what a city offers. It doesn’t need to be San Francisco. But it isn’t all Burger Kings and Jiffy Lubes either.

This piece first appeared on Granola Shotgun.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Hooked on a Feeling: Unique Experiences Help Fill Wisconsin’s Talent Pipeline

Angela Damiani — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 01:33:38 -0400

By all measures economists use to assess the quality of life a place offers—job availability, cost of living, commute times, recreation, etc.—Wisconsin stacks up pretty well. Very well, in fact. Problem is, people don’t consult economists when choosing the best place to pursue their passions. As CEO of NEWaukee, I devote my professional life and much of my personal life to promoting Milwaukee and Wisconsin as a career and lifestyle destination. My pitch has very little to do with the metrics you find in national rankings of “best places to live” and everything to do with what it feels like to call a place home. Instead, the marketing we do is much more experiential. And it works.

Well-kept secret?

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard of a place referred to as a “well-kept secret.” Really?

If a place is truly awesome, word will spread, especially in today’s social media age. Granted, achieving national awareness of your city, region or state is challenging, but you need to ask yourself if such attention is actually warranted.

In Wisconsin, we too tell ourselves that life is good here. And we have data to back it up. For example, 85 percent of all UW System graduates remain in Wisconsin after they leave school and 60 percent of all college graduates now living in Wisconsin were also born here, the eighth highest percentage in the nation. So, clearly, there’s something that keeps people here. It is, after all, a beautiful state with plenty to do. Nonetheless, there are so many ways in which our state could be even better, and I can’t help but worry that we suffer from a feedback loop in which we talk ourselves in circles about how great we’ve got it while the rest of the world moves on about their business, leaving Wisconsin behind.

I’ve made it my life’s mission to change this place for the better, leveraging national and international placemaking’s best practices.

How I got hooked

I am not from here, and candidly, I didn’t pick Wisconsin. It picked me.

I grew up with a set of parents who were from the southside of Milwaukee. Salt of the earth type folks who often found the coldness of the Californian culture disconcerting. Wisconsin was referred to as “home” in our house throughout my childhood, but it looked nothing like the home I knew in the Bay Area. We visited Milwaukee during hot, sticky summers and attended the Wisconsin State Fair, where I have distinct memories of eating cream puffs and watching a calf being born.

Cut to a visit with my empty-nester parents in Milwaukee nine years ago. I was working in Athens, Greece, reveling in the freedom of a life as a young expat in a mega metropolitan area and the ability to order takeout at all hours of the night. Milwaukee was comparatively small and quaint, and never a real option for me, given my restlessness. Or, so I thought.

During that visit, I attended a party hosted by my future business partner and was totally swept away by the energy of the young people in Milwaukee.

The inklings of a new kind of networking organization was being explored by a group of friends that were eager to meet others their age interested in both exploring and shaping the city. I was impressed and humbled by the group’s combination of altruism and creativity and ended up dropping everything—my life in Athens and my fledgling career as an international journalist—to figure out what this “thing” could actually be.

Even before we knew where we were going, we knew what we were doing would change things. We envisioned a future in which people connected in new ways—with one another, with the city, with a future job or a future spouse. The momentum was intoxicating, and it seemed like nothing could stop us.

This “thing” became NEWaukee, a social architecture firm whose mission is to realize Milwaukee’s full potential and to empower its citizens to shape the city’s future in fulfillment of their inclusive vision.

Settling in, but not settling down

Mine is not an overnight success story (is there such a thing?). In the last decade, I have founded three businesses, all before the age of 30. Two have failed, but added to my confidence and resilience in taking the path less traveled.

Living here allowed me to get to the point. To get to the good stuff—a phase of my life that others spend years working for and often never achieve: the freedom to pursue my true passion. Unlike my peers who opted for big, coastal cities, I could afford to start a business at age 23, and do so again, and then again. I could afford to buy a house at age 26. I could afford to continue my travels—one of the best parts about being in the middle of the country is that you can go to either coast with relative ease and no long-haul flights.

While Wisconsin offers countless individual perks to its residents, the state is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Because I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck, I was able to devote all of that spare energy and time into making this a better place.

And that is why Wisconsin is an incredible place for millennials. Of all the stereotypes about my generation, the one I can attest to is our deep desire to contribute to the greater good. In Wisconsin, you have the time, space and support system to discover your passion, and to make it happen.

Yes, but is it scalable?

I have seen my experience in Wisconsin replicated over and over again across the state. And that same fervor that fueled the formation of NEWaukee has sparked similar social engagement throughout Wisconsin, most visibly in YPWeek.

YPWeek is a week-long conference of discovery, adventure and conversations about the issues that matter among young professionals in Wisconsin. YPWeek brings together community leaders in purposefully chosen locations representing unique cultural assets for meaningful learning and social interaction.

YPWeek began in 2012 as a simple showcase of Milwaukee’s offerings for young professionals eager to establish their lives in the city. Based upon the event’s early successes, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation asked NEWaukee whether the initiative could be expanded statewide. To which, we responded, “Why not?”

This year, YPWeek included nearly 30 communities throughout Wisconsin. Hundreds of events were designed to leverage the perspectives young professionals bring to their communities and workplaces as Wisconsin seeks to maintain and grow its talented workforce and foster its exceptional quality of life. Through collaboration with dozens of partners from across the state, we have created the nation’s largest and strongest statewide network of young professionals.

Young people in small and large towns across Wisconsin have united in a way that no other state can claim. Brandi Cummings, president of Y-Link in Kenosha, Wisconsin, reflects, “The network we have built together showcases what is fantastic about being young in Wisconsin while also providing the momentum for moving in the direction we need to make our communities even more desirable for the next generation to live and work. Having the opportunity to work with a statewide network of leaders with similar passions, experiences, and goals not only inspires me to do greater things in my community, but encourages me to rethink how I look at our state as a whole.”

NEWaukee is a small and nimble team fortunate to have found soulmates across Wisconsin who share our dedication to the state’s future. Together, we have moved mountains, devoting time, sweat, and in some cases our own personal resources to bring YPWeek to life in Wisconsin. In the process, we have set Wisconsin apart from any other location in terms of fulfilling millennials’ desire to shape their communities.

In the process, we have proven that place-based engagement strategies are the solution to the talent shortage that plagues every industry in Wisconsin. As Nick O’Brien from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, put it, “As a transplant to the state, the network of peers that YPWeek introduced me to is without a doubt the primary reason I’ve fallen in love with Wisconsin. Not only has the YPWeek experience been the biggest factor in my decision to stay in Wisconsin, but more importantly, it’s been the sole driver of my motivation to contribute to my community and to many other statewide efforts.”

There’s still plenty to do here in Wisconsin, and we welcome everyone eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and make a difference.

Angela Damiani is a serial entrepreneur and currently the co-founder and CEO of NEWaukee, her third venture. NEWaukee is a social architecture firm that specializes in community-based signature experiences centered on high-profile issues of importance for the state of Wisconsin. NEWaukee also provides consumer, employer brand and talent engagement services to employers looking to attract and retain talent necessary to grow their businesses. For more information about NEWaukee, please visit: www.newaukee.com.

Photo: NEWaukee, via Flickr.