Thinking about the “fastest growing small towns”

Posted on by

Forbes has put together a list of the “fastest growing small towns” in the United States. Here are the top five towns:

No. 1. Fairbanks, Alaska (Metro Area)

2009 Population: 98,660

2006 Population: 86,754

Growth: 13.8%

No. 2. The Villages, Fla. (Micro Area)

2009 Population: 77,681

2006 Population: 68,769

Growth: 13.0%

No. 3. Bozeman, Mont. (Micro Area)

2009 Population: 90,343

2006 Population: 81,763

Growth: 10.5%

No. 4. Palm Coast, Fla. (Metro Area)

2009 Population: 91,622

2006 Population: 83,084

Growth: 10.3%

No. 5. Ames, Iowa (Metro Area)

2009 Population: 87,214

2006 Population: 80,145

Growth: 8.8%

An interesting list based on data between 2006 and 2009. I have a few thoughts about this:

1. To be a “small town,” a community had to have less than 100,000 people. This does not sound like a small town to me. When I think of small town, I think less than 15,000 people. In my opinion, all of the top five fastest growing should really be labeled “small cities.”

1a. If the list were labeled the “fastest growing small cities,” would people still want to look at it? Using the term “small town” invokes certain images of a place where everybody knows everyone and a quaint downtown where people regularly gather. This image is something quite different from the actual population of the community; I’ve heard people in Naperville, a suburb with over 140,000 people, claim it is still like a small town.

2. Is this growth a good thing? I wonder if the people living in these communities would like to see this growth continue for a decade or so. Since they are already not small towns, they will really not be small towns if this sort of growth continues. The shift from smaller to larger community is often not easy as it involves more newcomers in the community who have a different understanding of the place, new businesses (such as big box stores and chains), and possibly a declining sense of community.

2a. Do a good number of people move to places that are the “hot places” because there is rapid population growth? The Yahoo! story on this has links that immediately go to real estate listing. How many people click on those?

3. It might be useful to know what is “average” growth for communities over this time period. While these communities might be the top 5, what is the distribution among places under 100,000? What is the average or median rate of growth?

Americans blame parents for bad education

Posted on by

A perpetual question in our country is who to blame for poor educational results. A recent poll shows a large number of Americans blame parents:

An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what’s wrong with the U.S. education system — more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.

Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame. Moms were more likely than dads — 72 percent versus 61 percent — to say parents are at fault. Conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to blame parents.

Those who said parents are to blame were more likely to cite a lack of student discipline and low expectations for students as serious problems in schools. They were also more likely to see fighting and low test scores as big problems.

Figuring out how to improve education is always a difficult issue to address. I’ve always thought the discussion is compounded by the fact that people feel more control or duty to check on how their property taxes are being used for education. People gripe about paying money to the federal government or the state but when it comes to the more local level and education, everyone has an opinion (and often a solution).

As the story goes on to day, it is not all about blaming: “55 percent believe their children are getting a better education than they did, and three-quarters rate the quality of education at their child’s school as excellent or good.”

A final thought: the next question on the survey should have been: if you are a parent of a child in school, do you blame yourself for your child’s performance? Or do the people who blame parents really blame other parents?

Looking to secure the suburban vote

Posted on by

Joel Kotkin argues that both major American political parties would do well to develop a strategy that would consistently appeal to the suburban vote. Here is how one journalist describes Kotkin’s view of American politics at the moment:

Demography in the US favors the Democrats. The fastest growing parts of the electorate don’t look good for Republicans.

Job creation will be the biggest public policy theme for some time to come, and Republicans haven’t quite gotten this issue right even as Democrats botch it.

Class, more than race, will determine America’s political future. The wide swath of largely suburban, skilled workers is up for grabs, and neither party has a vision for improving their quality of life – which is why they keep wreaking havoc on each Party’s plans.

Republicans have failed among Latinos and millennials and will pay for it for some time to come if they don’t reverse the trends they’ve helped start.

Kotkin has been talking about this for a while – he suggested right after this last election that the results went against the “creative class” and more middle-class suburbanites voted for Republicans.

So what would a successful suburban strategy look like? When I looked at all the campaign material that came to my house and listened to candidates talk leading up to the last election, many of them were going after the middle class vote: making homeownership a priority, talk about job creation, keeping the American Dream alive. But if Kotkin is right, the middle class swung one way in 2008 and then another way in 2010.

One way to approach this would be to think what suburbanites have historically sought in moving to suburbs: some space, getting away from the city (the noise, health issues, crime, “others”), owning a single-family home, good schools, good jobs, safety (particularly for kids), and a suburban lifestyle. It seems like both parties could approach these issues, though they might do so from different angles.

h/t Instapundit

Gallery of 2010 Smart Growth award winners

Posted on by

“Smart growth” is a popular term. It typically implies an antidote to sprawl and a quest to construct or design more people-oriented, mixed-use, and sustainable places. Here is a gallery of images that show the winners of the EPA’s 2010 Smart Growth Achievement award. Read more about the award winners (and see some more pictures) in the EPA’s explanation of the award and the winners.

These look like attractive places. One of the projects was described as “an outdoor public living room” while a number of the other projects reduced the barrier between people and streets.

It is interesting to note that these winners were all in large cities (New York City, Baltimore, Portland, San Francisco) or in small towns (a corridor of Maine communities). Were there any suburban places in the running for this award?

h/t The Infrastructurist

WikiLeak cables as historical documents

Posted on by

How should the WikiLeaks cables be viewed as historical documents? One historian suggests caution:

In the short term, this is a potential gold mine for foreign-affairs scholarship. In the long term, however, what WikiLeaks wants to call “Cablegate” will very likely make life far more difficult for my profession.

For now, things certainly look very sweet. Timothy Garton Ash characterized the documents as “the historian’s dream.” Jon Western, a visiting professor of international relations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, blogged that WikiLeaks may allow scholars to “leapfrog” the traditional process of declassification, which takes decades. While the first wave of news reports focused on the more titillating disclosures (see: Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Ukrainian nurse), the second wave has highlighted substantive and trenchant aspects of world politics and American foreign policy. The published memos reveal provocative Chinese perspectives on the future of the Korean peninsula, as well as American policy makers’ pessimistic perceptions of the Russian state.

Scholars will need to exercise care in putting the WikiLeaks documents in proper perspective. Some researchers suffer from “document fetishism,” the belief that if something appears in an official, classified document, then it must be true. Sophisticated observers are well aware, however, that these cables offer only a partial picture of foreign-policy decision-making. Remember, with Cablegate, WikiLeaks has published cables and memos only from the State Department. Last I checked, other bureaucracies—the National Security Council, the Defense Department—also shape U.S. foreign policy. The WikiLeaks cables are a source—they should not be the sole source for anything.

Seems like a reasonable argument to me. Much research, history included, includes collecting a variety of evidence from a variety of sources. Claiming that these cables represents THE view of the United States is naive. They do reveal something, particularly about how diplomatic cables and reports work, but not everything. How much one can generalize based on these cables is unclear.

As this article points out, how these cables have been portrayed in the media is interesting. Where are the historians and other scholars to put these cables in perspective?

Reduced American mobility

Posted on by

One of the hallmarks of American life in the last 60 years is the incredible mobility. Even a few years ago, the average American family moved every 5-6 years.

But this has changed with the recent economic downtown:

“We’re seeing one of the lowest mobility rates in a century,” says Nathaniel Karp, chief economist for banking firm BBVA Compass. Karp says the recession has forced many people to stay put because they are unable to sell their homes, cannot find jobs or are unwilling to relocate for work if it means sacrificing a partner’s stable position.

The slowdown makes the question of who’s moving and why even more significant than in years past.

If people can move frequently, it leads to people being able to move to where the jobs are available, it means that the housing market has more people who are selling and buying, and it influences the middle-class and above ethos that you can determine your own destiny.

This psychological feeling that movement is possible might have a profound effect if the mobility rate stays low. In recent decades, the decently educated and paid American could expect that they would come out of school, move to where a job was available, move up to a house, and then continue a cycle of better job leading to better house and then going to a better job and so on. But this has changed somewhat: college graduates are returning home more frequently and there are many who are stuck in houses where they owe too much money.

Overall, this would impact what it means to be middle class: it would still lead to having certain levels of education and consumption but it wouldn’t mean the greater “freedom” of being able to move where one wants to.

Considering the English character and how the government might push citizens into certain actions

Posted on by

How governments should push or encourage their citizens to perform certain actions is a tricky question. Governments can use financial incentives, cajoling, and brute force, among other options.

The Economist makes the suggestion that “Britain has good reasons to seek a fresh debate on poverty and social mobility.” But in having this debate, it is suggested that the government consider the “English character”:

In the early 1950s a sociologist called Geoffrey Gorer set out to solve the mystery of England’s “character”. To be precise, how had the English gone from being a thoroughly lawless bunch—famed for truculence and cruelty—to one of the most orderly societies in history? Just over a century before, he noted, the police entered some bits of Westminster only in squads of six or more “for fear of being cut to pieces”. Popular pastimes included public floggings, dog-fighting and hunting bullocks to death through east London streets. As late as 1914, well-dressed adults risked jeering mockery from ill-clad “rude boys”, and well-dressed children risked assault. Yet by 1951, when Gorer surveyed more than 10,000 men and women, he could describe an England famous worldwide for disciplined queuing, where “you hardly ever see a fight in a bar” and “football crowds are as orderly as church meetings”. In a book, “Exploring English Character”, Gorer decided that two keys unlocked the mystery: the mid-19th-century creation of a police force of citizen-constables, and the curbing of aggression by “guilt”…

The squabble [between liberals and conservatives] is a waste of breath. Material poverty and character both matter. What is more, they are often linked. Bad choices can worsen poverty; and it is harder to make good choices when life is grim. A more useful debate about character would involve pondering this. How far can the judgmental analyses of the past be applied in modern Britain?…

In most British communities (and more for good than ill) disgrace is a greatly weakened force these days. Mr Cameron’s supporters talk of “libertarian paternalism”, or nudging people to make better choices. Perhaps that will work, though the “tough love” of the past involved sharp prods, not nudges. As each new government discovers, the English are a stroppy lot, and hard to help. It’s not their fault: it is in their character.

A few thoughts about this:

1. I tend to like discussions of character, whether this involves a country or a community or a group. This transformation Gorer described from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s is remarkable – from public violence to public disgrace.

2. But discussions of character can be very difficult to have because it requires summarizing ideas about large and diverse groups. Governments try to apply regulations to broad swaths of people and this can run into trouble. Making claims about all of the people in poverty in England can lead to negative and unfair stereotyping.

3. How many people in England, or other countries, want to be nudged to “make better choices”? Perhaps the key is to do the nudging without letting anyone know that there is nudging taking place.

Last resident out of Cabrini-Green high rises

Posted on by

Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune chronicles the sage of the last family to move out of the 1230 N. Burling building, the last occupied high-rise at Cabrini-Green. Here is how Schmich sums up the legacy of the housing project:

Cabrini, with its history of murdered cops and slain children, was the housing development that came to symbolize the squandered hope of them all. It was a Chicago name known to the nation. It was also unique, sitting as it did on prime land near downtown and the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods…

In Cabrini’s heyday, 15,000 people lived in its white high-rises, red high-rises and brick row houses. Born as a hopeful haven for the poor, it devolved by the 1970s into an oasis of poverty in which guns-gangs-drugs melded into a single demon…

Whether life has changed for the better for the majority of people who have moved out remains a question, but the neighborhood is clearly better.

As the era of the public housing high-rise winds down, now we can turn and see if newer forms of public housing development or aid, such as mixed-income developments or Section 8 vouchers or other options, are better in helping people leave poverty.

Rationale for ban against future fast-food restaurants in South LA

Posted on by

Earlier this week, Los Angeles developed some new restrictions for new fast-food restaurants:

New fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles will be banned within a half mile of existing ones under an ordinance approved Wednesday by the City Council.

The law includes other restrictions on stand-alone eateries, the Los Angeles Times reported. They include guidelines on landscaping, trash storage and other aesthetic issues.

Similar limits are in place in other LA neighborhoods. The council imposed a moratorium two years ago in southern Los Angeles.

Is this an example of the government telling people what they can or cannot eat? Is this example of a government limiting business or jobs opportunities? The rationale for these new regulations is interesting:

The goal of the restrictions is to encourage the development of stand-alone restaurants and grocery stores.

“For a community to thrive, it is important to have balance, a full variety of food, retail and service providers,” said Councilman Bernard C. Parks, one of the sponsors of the ordinance.

The ordinance includes exemptions for fast-food restaurants in mixed-use developments and shopping malls and for existing restaurants planning to expand.

These sorts of rules are not unusual in communities. How does this differ from a suburban community that decides it won’t allow any more banks in its downtown? Or communities that have restrictions against tattoo parlors? Both banks and tattoo parlors create jobs and bring in some sort of tax dollars. If the City of LA wants to promote other kinds of development, this seems like a reasonable rule that doesn’t force out already existing stores but limits their future growth.

At the same time, the issue of fast food seems to bring out passionate arguments from people. Do we have a “right” to fast food restaurants? A lot of critics of sprawl argue that fast food restaurants represent the worst of sprawl: they are completely dependent on the automobile, the food is cheap, mass-produced, and not healthy, and the restaurants and their signs are garish advertisements for multi-national corporations who couldn’t care less about local communities. Others argue that we should be able to eat what we want when we want.

In Los Angeles, they seem to have made a decision about promoting other kinds of development. Communities make decisions like this all the time, depending on factors like tax revenue and what goals or values they wish to promote.

Conference on colleges and universities as critical part of regional development

Posted on by

A recent conference suggested that colleges and communities could cooperate more closely in order to foster economic development:

Colleges must play a greater, and more deliberate, role in helping regions innovate and thrive in an increasingly competitive and globalized economy, speakers urged this week at a conference on higher education and economic development.

Economic development is “no longer about attracting businesses,” said Sam M. Cordes, co-director of the Purdue Center for Regional Development. “It’s about attracting people, about attracting talent.”

Participants in the two-day conference, “Providing a Uniquely American Solution to Global Innovation Challenges: Unleashing Universities in Regions,” delved into the various ways colleges can help build stronger local economies, including acting as conveners for conversations about regional development, aligning their curricula with local elementary and secondary schools, and producing and retaining well-educated workers.

This is a popular topic these days, particularly in difficult economic times. People like Richard Florida have linked the presence of research universities and their graduates with cities that have a larger concentration of the “creative class,” which then leads to more development. There are a lot of cities and communities that hope they can tap the local college in order to boost the local economy. It looks easy: the local university has a bunch of PhDs and eager students.

But how exactly this is supposed to happen is less clear.  I remember the battle that took place in South Bend in the last five years. The University of Notre Dame wanted to expand and partner with the community to construct an “innovation center” that would blend the university and businesses. However, this became controversial as it involved bulldozing a number of houses, bringing up some of the old issues between the wealthy school and less wealthy city.

It sounds like this conference offered more specific ideas of how the university can partner with local communities and businesses in order to prompt growth. Since each school and community offers unique advantages (and disadvantages), such partnerships are likely to take a good amount of work. Both the school and community need to feel that they will benefit from the time and hard work that is necessary to put something together.