Charlotte

Do Blacks Deserve to Have Money Wasted on Them Too?

Randal OToole — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Critics of plans to build more light-rail lines in Charlotte, North Carolina say that proposed new lines will fail to serve the neighborhoods of blacks who “need it most.” Blacks are more likely than whites to ride transit, they say, so black neighborhoods need to have light rail too.

They are wrong about black’s use of transit. According to the 2023 American Community Survey, 1.5 percent of both black and white workers who lived in Charlotte took transit to work. In 2019, blacks had been more likely to ride transit — 4.5 percent vs. 2.5 percent — but since then the rise of remote working has allowed most former black Charlotte transit riders to work at home.

History also shows that Charlotte’s light rail has significantly harmed its transit system. In 2005, before Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened, 3.3 percent of workers living in Charlotte took transit to work. By 2019, when Charlotte had 19 miles of light rail plus a 4-mile streetcar line, transit share had fallen to 1.8 percent.

Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened in 2007. Between 2006 and 2019 total transit ridership in Charlotte grew by 15 percent and transit passenger-miles grew by 18 percent. While that sounds good, in the same time period the Charlotte urban area’s population grew by 70 percent and driving grew by 64 percent.

What’s most painful is that transit passenger-miles were gaining market share before Charlotte built light rail. Between 1996 and 2006, the region’s driving grew by 109 percent but transit passenger-miles grew by 138 percent. Transit ridership grew by only 80 percent, but the average transit trip was longer as people as average trip lengths increased from under 4 miles to more than 5 miles. Even 80 percent ridership growth in the 10 years before light rail is stunning when compared with the 15 percent growth in the 13 years after 2006.

Thus, Charlotte is just one more example of light-rail failure. Charlotte residents should support more rail transit only if they want to pay high taxes to make transit even more irrelevant than it is today.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

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

Photo: Charlotte rail, screenshot from WCNC video (embedded above).

The California Headquarters Exodus Continues

Wendell Cox — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:28:58 -0400

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and UCLA distinguished professor of economics Lee Ohanian and Joseph Vranich, President of Spectrum Location Solutions, show that “In 2021, California business headquarters left the state at twice their rate in both 2020 and 2019, and at three times their rate in 2018. In the last three years, California lost eleven Fortune 1000 companies, whose exits negatively affect California’s economy today. But California also is risking its economic future as much smaller but rapidly growing unique businesses are leaving, taking their innovative ideas with them.”

Including companies outside the Fortune 1,000, Ohanian and Vranich indicate that California lost 153 corporate headquarters between in 2021. This is more than double the totals for each of the three years from 2018 to 2020.

They note that “Our count is almost certainly biased downwards significantly, because relatively small business relocations are difficult to detect, since most business relocations are not reported by the media, and relatively few relocations require filing state compliance reports that would trigger documentation of the exit.”

And there is more than headquarters relocations. The report “does not take into account California businesses that are retaining their headquarters in California but who are making large facility investments in other states, such as Apple and Wells Fargo, who are building large campuses in Texas, and Disney, who is doing the same in Florida.”

The report indicates a broadly based corporate exodus, “occurring across virtually all industries—including manufacturing, aerospace, financial services, real estate, chemicals, and health care—but perhaps most disturbing is the large number of high-technology businesses that are leaving.” Noting that the “tech hubs of Silicon Valleyand San Francisco are among the most productive locations on the planet, they see the loss of firms like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, Oracle, and Tesla have relocated, all to Texas, as concerning.

The business exodus is, not surprisingly, concentrated in the most populous parts of the state. The table below (from the report) shows that more than one quarter of the corporate migrations were in Los Angeles, County, with 80 out of the 352 from 2018 to 2021. San Francisco County accounted for one-seventh of the state figure, at 52.Orange, Santa Clara, San Diego and Alameda all had at least 20 corporate headquarter relocations.

Table: Top Ten Losses by California County
Rank	County	Total	Rank	County	Total
1	Los Angeles	80	7	San Mateo	12
2	San Francisco	52	8	Sacramento	10
3	Orange	39	9	Riverside	8
4	Santa Clara	38	10	San Bernardino	7
5	San Diego	26	10	Placer	7
6	Alameda	23

Based on population, San Francisco County had by far the highest proportional loss, at nearly 60 corporate headquarters lost per million population, well above the 8 per million loss in Los Angeles County (Figure 1). Alameda, Santa Clara and Orange counties have higher headquarter exit rates than Los Angeles County, but are also well below that of San Francisco.

The exiting California headquarters have moved most to Texas, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona. Each of these states have consistently better rated business climates and lower costs of living than California.

The authors attribute the California’s headquarters exodus to multiple causes. Certainly one of the most significant is California’s business regulatory climate, routinely graded as worst or near worst among the 50 states.

“The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank focusing on state and national tax policies, ranks California 49thin its Business Tax Climate Index, far below Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and other states that are attracting California businesses. Annual surveys of business CEOs and small business owners invariably rank California 50th in terms of the quality of state business climates.”

They also cite California’s high tax rates, with the highest marginal income tax rates in the nation, now more than 20% above that of second highest Hawaii. This could be raised if voters approve another tax increase on the November ballot (Proposition 30).

Then there is California’s “remarkably high housing costs,” which Urban Reform Institute research identifies as the critical element in the cost of living crisis. It’s not just companies, but people that are moving. The Hoover report reminds us that since 2015, California has experienced a net outmigration of nearly 700,000 people.” A principal reason for these moves is the cost of living crisis, which makes it more difficult for firms to obtain sufficient talent.

The exodus continues even into 2022. “Lucas Oil, a large producer of specialty petroleum products that is moving to Indianapolis, and Aviatrix, a technology company specializing in cloud networking and security, whose valuation doubled recently to $2 billion” moved to Dallas-Fort Worth.

Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney stated that he plans on hiring many young people but noted that young people don’t want to live in Silicon Valley anymore, because they cannot afford to buy a home.

O’hanian and Vranich note that losing so many people to other states “would have seemed ludicrous not so long ago.”

However, the authors characterize the state’s political leadership of dismissing the business exodus as an issue. seriously enough. They conclude:

“While California has many natural advantages, its state and local economic policies have created a business climate that is no longer competitive with that of many other states. Policies have driven business and housing costs so high that companies and people are leaving the state for more affordable, less regulated, and less taxed locations. This process will continue until the state’s political leaders make very different policy choices that create a different future for California—one that honors its remarkable past.”

The report can be downloaded here: Why Company Headquarters Are Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Former corporate headquarters of Bank of America in San Francisco. Bank of America is now headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Source: Wikimedia under CC 2.0 License for both building images

High-Speed Rail: An Evaluation

Wendell Cox — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 20:29:01 -0500

Note: This article is adapted from the recently published Reason Foundation report Assessing the Results of the High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program, by Wendell Cox

It is expected that high-speed rail will be a priority for the new administration. Recent history with “faux” high speed rail in the United States and genuine high-speed rail internationally suggests an expensive price tag for taxpayers and little impact on travel.

But beyond the federal spending aspects is the question of how much value would be produced by such funding. Consequently, this report offers a detailed review of the most recent attempt to boost passenger rail by funding high-speed rail projects and improving service in Amtrak corridors.

In 2009, the Obama administration proposed, and Congress enacted, legislation that authorized the High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) program. The program offered grants to four states to develop and implement new HSR corridors, but only one (California) was accepted. It also offered many grants to improve the performance of individual Amtrak corridors.

This report draws on many sources to assess the results of projects in the HSIPR program. The results suggest caution in attempting a similar program during the new administration. For example:

California High-Speed Rail: HSIPR funding of $3.9 billion for the 520-mile planned Phase 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This project included the 119-mile initial construction segment (ICS) in the Central Valley and the high-speed rail infrastructure component of the new Transbay Transit Center. High-speed rail service was to cover the entire Phase 1 route (from Los Angeles to San Francisco) by 2020. Since the grant awards, however, both Phase 1 and the ICS have doubled in cost and decreased in scale, with portions now expected to operate in “blended” service with commuter trains. Service operation dates have been delayed by at least seven years on the ICS and at least 13 years for Phase 1. Cost projections for Phase 2 have not been updated. The overall federal commitment equaled nearly one half of the $8.1 billion spent on HSIPR corridor grants nationally.
Seattle-Portland Corridor: HSIPR funding of $0.75 billion for upgrading infrastructure. This project aimed to reduce travel time by 10 minutes on this trip that took between 3:20 and 3:30, and to add two daily round trips. The infrastructure was completed and the two new trains were scheduled to begin operating on December 17, 2017. Tragically, a safety related fatal derailment approximately 50 miles into the first trip of a new Seattle-to-Portland train halted the service expansion.
Chicago-St. Louis Corridor: HSIPR funding of $1.34 billion. This project upgrades infrastructure with new locomotives and passenger cars to reduce travel time less than one hour from the previous five-hour and 40-minute (5:40) trip. No additional service was to be added. Incomplete critical safety improvements (positive train control) have precluded achieving travel time reductions.
Chicago-Detroit Corridor: HSIPR funding of $0.6 billion for upgrading infrastructure. This project aims to reduce travel time by 30 minutes on this trip that took between 5:05 and 5:35 without adding additional service. With a top operating speed of 110 mph, this project has substantially achieved its intended travel time improvement.
Charlotte-Raleigh Corridor: HSIPR funding of $0.52 billion. This project aimed to improve safety (largely by upgrading infrastructure that eliminated grade crossings) and increase train frequencies. The infrastructure improvements were completed on schedule and one additional train was in operation in 2019.
Chicago-Iowa City Corridor: HSIPR funding of $0.23 billion. This project sought to upgrade infrastructure to re-establish service, which would operate at a maximum speed of 79 mph. After the grant award, Illinois and Iowa suspended the corridor improvements citing cost escalation and operating subsidies problems. Illinois recently announced that it would begin work, though in Iowa the suspension continues.

From the perspective of value for taxpayers’ money, this report finds inconsistencies between project objectives and the assumptions on which public policies have been adopted.

For example, none of the five major conventional corridor HSIPR projects had a significant share of rail travel in their respective corridors. As a result, none of the projects would materially reduce the market shares of the dominant modes in their respective corridors, even if all project objectives were met.

Another concern for taxpayers is cost overruns, which are endemic in high-speed rail projects around the world. Publicly funded high-speed rail systems have incurred large cost overruns relative to forecasts at the time of project approval, as documented in comprehensive research by European academics. Specifically, the California high-speed rail project and Great Britain’s HS2 project have incurred some of the most egregious cost overruns, a decade or more before there could be any prospect of complete service operation. This unfortunate experience seems likely to continue until there is effective and successful reform of high-speed rail planning and management approaches.

Even after construction is complete, financing operations have proved challenging. The international experience in countries with stronger intercity rail shares and more concentrated population, strongly suggests that the U.S. has little potential for financially successful high-speed rail projects. Out of the many high-speed rail lines that have been developed in the world, only three have covered their capital and operating costs from commercial sources, especially passenger fares. Each of these corridors had substantial pre-existing rail ridership, which is an advantage shared with only one corridor in the United States (the Washington to Boston Northeast Corridor).

With these challenges in mind, developing public policy that efficiently serves the taxpayers requires that decisions be made based on the best possible information. The data and analysis available at the time of project authorization should provide a reliable basis for informed decision making. This has not been the case in passenger rail, as substantial post-authorization cost escalation has been typical.

It is unfortunate enough when cost escalation occurs on a critical megaproject—one that is an important part of the existing transportation system. It is particularly unfortunate when the cost-escalation occurs in a non-critical project—those not required for the continued operation of the overall transportation system. Until megaprojects are built cost efficiently and perform well financially, taxpayers would be better served without them (including high-speed rail).

Some high-speed rail and other intercity rail niche markets may be commercially developed by the private sector and operated commercially (without subsidy). Such systems would have the advantage of switching unforeseen risk for cost overruns away from the taxpayers to private investors. Moreover, the private sector would likely choose projects with a high likelihood of financial sustainability over those without. But private businesses must also consider the relatively high cost of permitting and regulation involved in such projects.

The policy analysis concludes with the following recommendations:

Given the tendency for gross underestimation of costs that has occurred among government-sponsored high-speed rail projects, taxpayers should not be “on the hook” for the success of a project. The federal government should not provide funding or loans for new high-speed rail projects.
The federal government should support commercial passenger rail development with regulatory assistance in the form of simplified environmental reviews, expedited permitting, and expansion of tax-exempt private activity bonds, backed by revenues from the commercial company.

View or download Full Study: High-Speed Rail: Federal (HSIPR) Program and Policy Analysis

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo credit: Approaching the Hudson River Tunnel in New Jersey toward New York’s Penn Station (by author).

Of Niche Markets and Broad Markets: Commuting in the US

Wendell Cox — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 21:29:58 -0400

The six transit legacy cities - mostly urban cores that grew largely before the advent of the automobile - increased their concentration of transit work trips to 57.9% of the national transit commuting, according to the 2018 American Community Survey. At the same time, working at home strengthened its position as the nation’s third leading mode of work access, with transit falling to fourth. The transit commuting market share dropped from 5.0% in 2017 to 4.9% in 2018. Carpooling, after at least three decades of decline, has seen an increase in this decade.

Concentration of Transit Commuting Destinations in Legacy Cities

Based on transit work trip destinations (as opposed to residences of commuters) the cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington increased their share of commuting by 4.8% (2.6% points) in just eight years (from 2010 to 2018). The legacy cities are home to the six largest downtown areas (central business districts) in the United States, the destination for most of their transit commuting.

This increased concentration occurred even as transit commuting has begun to trend downward, from the 2015, the peak ridership post-1960 year (Figure 1). The transit legacy cities accounted for 6.1% of the nation’s employment in 2018. Their 57.9 share of transit commuting is nearly 10 times their equivalent share of jobs. The more favorable performance of the legacy cities in this decade resulted in their garnering 79.7%% of the increased commuting, more than 13 times their share of jobs.

The intensity of the concentration is illustrated in Figure 2, which compares employment, transit commuting and transit commuting increase (2010 to 2018) shares for legacy cities and the balance of the nation. The work trip market share to the legacy cities is 47%. By comparison, in the rest of the nation, transit’s work trip share is a miniscule 2.1%. Only 19 of the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas has a transit work trip share of 3.0% or more.

However, to get to jobs outside the legacy cities (in the same metropolitan areas), transit commuting is only 8.6% of the national total. Strikingly, in New York, nearly 51% percent of the jobs are outside the city of New York. Transit’s share to these jobs is only 4.4%, a fraction of the 58.0% who use transit to jobs in the city of New York (the urban core)(Figure 3). Large differences between transit commuting to downtown and the suburbs occurs in most major metropolitan areas, not just those with legacy cities.

New York continues to have by far the largest transit commute share, at 30.9% (Figure 4). The lowest transit commute shares are in Birmingham and Oklahoma City, at 0.6%. Transit work trip data is provided in the Table below by mode.

Working at Home: The Big Winner

The American Community Survey data reveals working at home continues to be the big winner among the most popular employment access modes. Between 2017 and 2018, working at home (which includes telecommuting) gained 258,000 workers nationally, rising from 8.00 to 8.25 million in total. This was a considerable accomplishment. Working at home increased disproportionately relative to driving alone. Having only 7% of the driving alone volume in 2017, working at home added more than 20% of the entire commuting increase over the last year.

Working at home strengthened its number three position, following driving alone and vehicle pools, and now exceeding transit by more than 600,000. In 44 of the 53 major metropolitan areas, working at home accounted for more employment access than transit. The nine exceptions, in which transit led working at home included the six metropolitan areas with “legacy cities” plus Seattle, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Overall, working at home has increased 2.3 million since 2010. It now has a market share of 5.3%, up from 4.3% in 2010.

Raleigh again had the highest work at home market share, at 9.1%, followed by Austin, Denver, Portland and San Francisco. The great advantage of working at home is that it reduces traffic, and does so without public subsidy (Figure 5). The work at home market shares exceeded that of transit in all but one of the ten top metropolitan areas (San Francisco, with its legacy city). Meanwhile, among the other nine strongest work at home metropolitan areas, seven have built expensive rail systems. Each of these has cost from hundreds of millions to billions of tax dollars. Yet, working at home, which is virtually unsubsidized has attracted substantially greater use.

Working at home exhibits little of the concentration observed in transit. All 53 of the major metropolitan areas have work at home shares of 2.5% or more. By contrast, 28 major metropolitan areas have transit commuting shares below 2.5%. Memphis had the lowest work at home share. Second lowest Buffalo, at 3.5% had a work at home market share larger than the transit market shares in 39 major metropolitan areas.

Carpool Resurgence

Carpools increased 300,000 between 2017 and 2018 and more than 600,000 since 2010. This follows decades of decline. This, however, was not enough to keep the mode from falling to 9.0% of the market in 2018 from 9.7% in 2017. There were 19.1 million carpools in 1980, the first year carpool data was collected and only 13.9 million now. The high market share was in Salt Lake City, at 12.0% (Figure 6), while the lowest was in New York, at 6.3%.

Ride Hailing

The data show a huge increase in taxicab use, which is probably due to recently initiated ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Taxicab commuting has increased more than 150%, from 150,000 to 360,000. The impact may be even greater. “Other” means of commuting increased almost 300,000, for a 25% increase. This was greater than that of all other modes of employment access, except for work and home and taxicab. It is not hard to imagine some respondents ticking “other” if they did not associate these new services with “taxicab.”

Work Access: Niche Markets and Mass Markets

While transit used to serve the largest share of motorized urban trips (probably about 90 years ago, but I have found no data), it has become a “niche” market among commuters who have a choice (have a car).Transit is about downtown and the urban core, with much of the share of transit commuting being destinations in these areas. Mind you, these are important markets, but they are small in the overall context of employment and transit’s access to metropolitan area jobs is miniscule.

The other three largest modes, cars, car pools and working at home serve broad markets. They can reach virtually any job in the metropolitan area, or in the case of working at home, many jobs around the world. That’s why those three modes hold a near monopoly on commuting, and represent most of its growth. With them, you can get from here to there.

EMPLOYMENT ACCESS BY MEANS OF ACCESS
US Major Metroopolitan Areas: 2018
	Drive Alone	Car Pool	Transit	Taxi	Motor-Cycle	Bicycle	Walk	Other	Home
Atlanta, GA	77.3%	8.9%	3.0%	0.5%	0.1%	0.2%	1.3%	1.2%	7.6%
Austin, TX	76.9%	8.7%	1.9%	0.1%	0.2%	0.8%	1.9%	0.7%	8.7%
Baltimore, MD	77.0%	8.0%	6.0%	0.3%	0.0%	0.3%	2.4%	0.8%	5.3%
Birmingham, AL	84.8%	8.8%	0.6%	0.0%	0.1%	0.0%	0.9%	0.6%	4.2%
Boston, MA-NH	66.1%	7.0%	13.2%	0.3%	0.0%	1.1%	5.6%	1.0%	5.5%
Buffalo, NY	82.1%	6.8%	3.1%	0.2%	0.1%	0.4%	3.0%	0.8%	3.5%
Charlotte, NC-SC	79.2%	9.4%	1.5%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.4%	0.9%	7.3%
Chicago, IL-IN-WI	69.8%	8.0%	12.1%	0.3%	0.1%	0.7%	2.8%	0.9%	5.4%
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	81.6%	8.2%	1.7%	0.1%	0.0%	0.2%	2.2%	0.8%	5.1%
Cleveland, OH	81.6%	7.9%	2.7%	0.1%	0.0%	0.4%	1.9%	0.8%	4.6%
Columbus, OH	81.3%	8.2%	1.7%	0.1%	0.1%	0.3%	2.2%	0.7%	5.5%
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	80.8%	9.5%	1.3%	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	1.3%	0.9%	5.8%
Denver, CO	75.0%	8.2%	3.8%	0.2%	0.1%	0.9%	2.4%	0.8%	8.7%
Detroit, MI	83.2%	8.6%	1.3%	0.2%	0.1%	0.2%	1.4%	0.7%	4.3%
Grand Rapids, MI	82.0%	9.1%	1.4%	0.1%	0.1%	0.4%	2.2%	0.5%	4.2%
Hartford, CT	81.2%	7.7%	2.6%	0.1%	0.0%	0.2%	1.8%	0.8%	5.7%
Houston, TX	81.0%	9.4%	2.0%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.9%	1.3%	4.9%
Indianapolis. IN	83.4%	8.0%	0.9%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.3%	1.0%	5.0%
Jacksonville, FL	80.3%	8.5%	0.9%	0.1%	0.2%	0.6%	1.6%	1.5%	6.4%
Kansas City, MO-KS	83.8%	7.8%	0.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.2%	1.2%	0.7%	5.2%
Las Vegas, NV	78.7%	9.8%	3.3%	0.2%	0.3%	0.2%	1.4%	2.1%	4.1%
Los Angeles, CA	75.0%	9.5%	4.8%	0.3%	0.3%	0.6%	2.5%	1.1%	5.9%
Louisville, KY-IN	82.2%	8.5%	1.7%	0.0%	0.0%	0.3%	1.3%	1.0%	4.9%
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	86.1%	9.0%	0.7%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.9%	0.6%	2.5%
Miami, FL	77.7%	9.2%	3.1%	0.5%	0.2%	0.7%	1.4%	1.4%	5.7%
Milwaukee,WI	81.5%	7.5%	2.6%	0.2%	0.1%	0.5%	2.3%	0.3%	5.0%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	77.4%	8.1%	4.5%	0.2%	0.1%	0.8%	2.4%	0.6%	5.9%
Nashville, TN	80.9%	9.2%	0.8%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.5%	1.0%	6.2%
New Orleans. LA	78.6%	9.3%	2.6%	0.3%	0.1%	1.2%	2.5%	0.9%	4.5%
New York, NY-NJ-PA	50.3%	6.3%	30.9%	0.8%	0.0%	0.7%	5.5%	0.8%	4.7%
Oklahoma City, OK	82.9%	8.8%	0.6%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	2.1%	1.0%	4.2%
Orlando, FL	80.3%	10.4%	1.3%	0.3%	0.3%	0.3%	1.1%	0.9%	5.0%
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	72.3%	7.2%	9.8%	0.3%	0.1%	0.6%	3.4%	0.8%	5.5%
Phoenix, AZ	75.8%	11.2%	1.8%	0.3%	0.3%	0.7%	1.3%	1.2%	7.4%
Pittsburgh, PA	76.6%	8.3%	5.6%	0.1%	0.1%	0.3%	3.4%	0.5%	5.1%
Portland, OR-WA	70.4%	8.8%	6.1%	0.2%	0.2%	2.0%	3.4%	0.7%	8.1%
Providence, RI-MA	81.3%	8.5%	2.4%	0.2%	0.0%	0.2%	3.0%	0.6%	3.8%
Raleigh, NC	79.0%	8.9%	0.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.3%	0.5%	9.1%
Richmond, VA	81.2%	8.7%	1.7%	0.3%	0.1%	0.7%	1.4%	0.9%	5.2%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	79.8%	10.9%	1.2%	0.1%	0.3%	0.2%	1.5%	1.0%	5.0%
Rochester, NY	80.9%	7.9%	2.2%	0.2%	0.2%	0.5%	3.0%	0.4%	4.8%
Sacramento, CA	76.6%	9.2%	2.2%	0.2%	0.3%	1.3%	1.7%	0.8%	7.9%
St. Louis,, MO-IL	83.6%	6.9%	2.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.8%	0.6%	4.6%
Salt Lake City, UT	74.5%	12.0%	3.2%	0.1%	0.2%	0.7%	2.2%	0.5%	6.7%
San Antonio, TX	79.2%	11.2%	1.8%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.8%	1.0%	4.6%
San Diego, CA	76.5%	8.8%	2.6%	0.2%	0.5%	0.4%	3.1%	1.2%	6.6%
San Francisco, CA	57.2%	9.6%	17.3%	0.7%	0.4%	1.9%	4.7%	1.2%	7.0%
San Jose, CA	75.3%	10.3%	4.0%	0.3%	0.3%	1.6%	2.2%	0.9%	5.0%
Seattle, WA	66.1%	10.0%	10.7%	0.3%	0.3%	1.1%	4.1%	0.7%	6.7%
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	78.9%	9.0%	1.3%	0.3%	0.2%	0.5%	1.4%	1.1%	7.3%
Tucson, AZ	76.8%	10.0%	2.1%	0.2%	0.4%	1.5%	2.1%	1.3%	5.5%
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	81.2%	8.5%	1.4%	0.1%	0.1%	0.4%	2.8%	1.0%	4.4%
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	65.8%	9.2%	13.0%	0.5%	0.1%	0.9%	3.3%	1.0%	6.1%
UNITED STATES	76.3%	9.0%	4.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.5%	2.6%	0.9%	5.3%
Derived from American Community Survey 2018.

Photograph: Interstate 5 in Orange County California, with elevated express lanes (by author)

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 by Mayor Tom Bradley 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. Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

A Blast from the Past in Charlotte and Columbus

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 01:30:38 -0400

I saw a couple of recent reposts containing very interesting material from several decades ago in Charlotte and Columbus.

The first is a 25 minute TV special from the 1960s looking at a proposal to issue bonds to fund urban renewal in downtown Charlotte. A few things struck me about this. The first is that despite the video being labeled “Uptown Do or Die” by the local organization that posted it, Charlotte’s central business district is consistently referred to in the video as “downtown” not “uptown” as people do today. It’s interesting to note that the Uptown nomenclature is ahistorical and it makes me wonder when the rebranding took place. Also, there’s an economist in there who makes some prescient remarks.

What’s also notable is the way that the condition of downtown Charlotte is framed and the logic of urban renewal (including street widening, demolitions, etc). Similar rhetoric is used today to justify most major downtown civic initiatives. Also, you can see the business owners who opposed urban renewal at the time, but also one who was initially positive after it happened and he was able to relocate his business into a new strip mall. (It appears perhaps some later footage was spliced in for this).

It’s definitely worth a watch. Click over to watch on YouTube if the video doesn’t display for you.

The second is an article from a 1978 issue of Columbus Monthly magazine called “Columbus’ Inferiority Complex.” The magazine just reposted it, and it’s a great window into the psychology of the city from that period of time. Similar psychologies have driven a lot of the views and decisions of people in some of the Midwest cities by those who remember or came of age in those eras. I’m pretty sure Columbus really was that boring back in the 1970s, but things have changed a lot since then.

"Oh, you will find little pockets of boosterism. You’ll find it in official places, of course, like the Chamber of Commerce and various business and civic organizations … and you’ll find it in private places, like a small but-comfortable living room in Wyandotte North Apartments on the far north side where a middle-aged man is saying, “Sure I like Columbus. It’s an easy city to live in. It’s easy to go out and eat, easy to go to a movie, easy to get to the airport. There’s no hassle here.” Or the younger man, sitting in a large, sunlit study in a Sessions Village home: “Columbus is a terrific place to be right now. Ten years from now, it’s going to be one of the really great cities in the country. People are doing things here. The economy is stable, the racial situation has always been good, politics and government are clean, there’s a tremendous amount of building going on Downtown.”

There is an old parody of an old saying, though, which a lot of Columbus people seem to believe fits this city unusually well: “It’s a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit here.”

Much is implied. That old wisecrack seems to acknowledge all the frequently-heard comments about Columbus being an easy place to live. It says, too, that the city is a safe place to live—physically and mentally. But the point of it is that Columbus is also a … well, a blah city. That nothing ever really happens here. That we have nothing to be famous for—no Superdome, no Guggenheim Museum, no Golden Gate Bridge, no Disney World, no White House, no San Andreas Fault … not even the Cincinnati Reds, Kings Island, Maisonette Restaurant, Cleveland Browns or Cleveland Orchestra. John Denver has never sung the praises of our terrain. We host a big tennis tournament and the stands sink into the mud, and the only way Columbus (that’s “Columbus, Ohio”) gets mentioned by David Brinkley is if the city gets hit by a foot and a half of snow… at the same time everybody else gets hit.

These are some of the things that prey heavily upon people’s minds as they gaze out the windows of their homes and offices and think to themselves, “God, what a hick town.” Some of them substitute “one-horse town” for “hick town.” Some of them substitute a one-word expletive for the whole thing.

The simple fact is that Columbusites have a whopping inferiority complex."

Click through to read the whole thing.

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.

Population Growth Slowing in Largest US Municipalities

Wendell Cox — Tue, 29 May 2018 01:33:38 -0400

The 2017 Census Bureau population estimates shows that population growth in the nation’s largest municipalities (incorporated cities and equivalent) has declined substantially relative to the healthier gains posted earlier in the decade. Among the 36 municipalities with more than 500,000 residents (including Honolulu, see below), the total population grew 0.63 percent between 2016 and 2017 (July 1), down more than one-third from the annual rate between the April 1, 2010 census and July 1, 2017. By comparison, the 2017 United States annual growth rate last year was 0.71 percent. The table below summarizes the results.

The United States has approximately 20,000 incorporated municipalities. These are distinguished from metropolitan areas, which are the labor and housing markets that have developed around the largest municipalities. Moreover, there are no national, or even state criteria that produce any sort of conformity in the size of municipalities, so that there can be huge differences in population. The largest municipalities in metropolitan areas can range from under 10 percent of the metropolitan population to more than 60 percent. In Atlanta, for example, the city of Atlanta has just 8.3 percent of the metropolitan area population, while in San Antonio, the city of San Antonio has 61.1 percent of the metropolitan area population.

Fastest Growing Municipalities

Seattle: The city of Seattle has emerged as the decade’s growth leader. Seattle has added 116,000 new residents since the 2010 Census and 17,000 since 2016. The resulting annual growth rates of 2.47 percent and 2.44 percent are the strongest among the municipalities with more than 500,000 population. Seattle accounted for 27 percent of the metropolitan area growth, more than its share of the population, which rose from 17.7 percent in 2010 to 18.7 percent in 2017.

Fort Worth: This second largest city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex placed second in population growth between 2016 and 2017, with an increase rate of 2.18 percent. This is slightly below the 2.23 annual rate achieved since the 2010 Census, which was the fourth largest.

Charlotte: The third fastest growing city was Charlotte, which added 1.84 percent to its population in 2017. However, reflecting the overall rate, Charlotte’s most recent year gain was below its rate since 2010, which was 2.16 percent.

Columbus: The capital of Ohio is emerging as one of the nation’s growth leaders, as was already indicated in the metropolitan area data. Last year, Columbus ranked fourth in growth, at 1.79 percent.

San Antonio: San Antonio was the fifth fastest growing large municipality, adding 1.63 percent in 2017. This was slightly below its 1.81 percent rate since 2010. Reflecting the slower growth among the largest municipalities, this higher growth rate earned a lower ranking, at 7th.

Austin: Austin had been the national growth leader through 2016, but fell behind Seattle in 2017, due to a much slower growth rate. In 2017, Austin’s growth rate was 1.33 percent (ranked 12th), well below its 2.33 percent rate since the Census.

Denver: Denver experienced a trend similar to that of Austin. From 2010 to 2017, Denver added new residents at a rate of 2.25 percent annually. That rate dropped to 1.42 percent in 2017, as Denver was the 9th fastest growing large municipality.

The Largest Municipalities

New York: The nation’s largest municipality has seen its strong growth fizzle away. Between 2010 and 2017, New York added residents at a 0.74 percent annual rate, slightly higher than the national rate of 0.69 percent. In 2017, however, New York’s growth plummeted to 0.08 percent, about one-ninth of the national growth rate (0.71 percent). New York’s growth this decade peaked in 2011, when 99,000 residents were added. By 2017, the gain had dipped to 7,000. The four intensely dense urban boroughs experienced huge losses, the greatest in Brooklyn (Kings County), which had a growth rate of 0.77 percent since 2010, but lost population at a rate of 0.08 percent in 2017. The drop in growth rate also exceeded 75 percent in Manhattan (New York County) and 80 percent in The Bronx and Queens. Only Staten Island (Richmond County), with a population density less than that of Los Angeles, grew faster in 2017 than earlier in the decade (Figure 1).

Los Angeles: The second largest municipality has also experienced a substantial loss in growth rate, though not so precipitous as in New York. From the 2010 census to 2017, Los Angeles gained an average of 0.74 percent annually. In 2017, the gain was only 0.47 percent, over one-third less the average post-2010 rate. Further, despite multiple announcements of having reached 4,000,000 residents (see: “Elusive Population Growth in the City of Los Angeles”), the city still remains short (though by only 241). Los Angeles had the fifth largest population growth among the nation’s municipalities (19,000), a strong showing in a slowly growing area. By contrast, the balance of Los Angeles County, with 60 percent of the county population lost 6,000 residents while the metropolitan area’s other county (Orange) grew 13,000, 11,000 of it in the city of Irvine.

Chicago: Chicago, the third largest municipality extended its recent declines, after modest increases earlier in the decade.

Houston: The fourth largest municipality, Houston, also experienced modest growth, after strong growth earlier in the decade. These data are before the impact of Hurricane Harvey, the immediate population effect of which will be evident in next year’s estimates (Figure 2).

The Special Case of Honolulu

One municipality is missing from the Census Bureau’s list, Honolulu, Hawaii’s capital. Honolulu is an incorporated combined city-county with a population in 2017 of 989,000, the only incorporated general purpose government unit in Hawaii. As a combined city-county, Honolulu is similar to San Francisco, Baltimore, St. Louis, Nashville, Indianapolis, Denver and others. This population should result in Honolulu being ranked as the 10th largest city in the nation, between San Jose and Austin.

Yet, Honolulu is listed in the Census estimates tabulation with a population of 350,000 under the title “Urban Honolulu.” This is due to an agreement between the Census Bureau and the State of Hawaii. In fact, however, Honolulu is the 10th largest city in the United States.

Estimates are Only Estimates

Estimating population (rather than counting it in a Census) is anything but an exact science. This was proven again in 2010, when there were huge over-estimates of population. The population estimate for New York was 200,000 higher in 2009 than counted in the 2010 census. In Detroit, the over-estimate was nearly 200,000. Atlanta, however takes the prize, with an over-estimate of more than 120,000, which was an error of nearly 30 percent. On the whole, however, the population estimates were fairly accurate overall. It will be interesting to see how accurate this decade’s population estimates are in relation to the 2020 Census counts, and what it reveals about the changing fortunes of our largest cities.

MUNICIPALITIES OVER 500,000 POPULATION IN 2017

		Population (Millions)			Change
Rank	Municipality	2010 Census	2016	2017	2010-17	2016-17	% 2010-17	%2016-27
1	New York, New York	8,175	8,615	8,623	448	7	0.74%	0.08%
2	Los Angeles, California	3,793	3,981	4,000	207	19	0.74%	0.47%
3	Chicago, Illinois	2,696	2,720	2,716	21	(4)	0.11%	-0.14%
4	Houston, Texas	2,094	2,304	2,313	218	8	1.38%	0.36%
5	Phoenix, Arizona	1,447	1,602	1,626	179	24	1.62%	1.50%
6	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania	1,526	1,575	1,581	55	6	0.49%	0.39%
7	San Antonio, Texas	1,327	1,488	1,512	185	24	1.81%	1.63%
8	San Diego, California	1,302	1,407	1,420	118	13	1.20%	0.91%
9	Dallas, Texas	1,198	1,322	1,341	143	19	1.57%	1.43%
(*10)	Honolulu, Hawaii	953	993	989	35	(4)	0.50%	-0.41%
10	San Jose, California	953	1,032	1,035	83	3	1.16%	0.33%
11	Austin, Texas	802	938	951	149	13	2.37%	1.33%
12	Jacksonville, Florida	822	881	892	70	11	1.14%	1.27%
13	San Francisco, California	805	876	884	79	8	1.30%	0.94%
14	Columbus, Ohio	789	864	879	90	15	1.51%	1.79%
15	Fort Worth, Texas	745	856	874	129	19	2.23%	2.18%
16	Indianapolis, Indiana	820	857	863	43	6	0.70%	0.65%
17	Charlotte, North Carolina	736	843	859	123	16	2.16%	1.84%
18	Seattle, Washington	609	707	725	116	17	2.44%	2.47%
19	Denver, Colorado	600	695	705	105	10	2.25%	1.42%
20	Washington, District of Columbia	602	684	694	92	10	1.99%	1.41%
21	Boston, Massachusetts	618	678	685	67	7	1.44%	0.98%
22	El Paso, Texas	648	681	684	35	3	0.73%	0.41%
23	Detroit, Michigan	714	675	673	(41)	(2)	-0.81%	-0.35%
24	Nashville, Tennessee	603	665	668	64	3	1.40%	0.42%
25	Memphis, Tennessee	652	653	652	0	(1)	0.01%	-0.17%
26	Portland, Oregon	584	641	648	64	6	1.45%	0.98%
27	Oklahoma City, Oklahoma	580	639	644	63	4	1.44%	0.70%
28	Las Vegas, Nevada	585	632	642	57	10	1.29%	1.58%
29	Louisville, Kentucky	596	618	621	25	3	0.57%	0.54%
30	Baltimore, Maryland	621	617	612	(9)	(5)	-0.21%	-0.86%
31	Milwaukee, Wisconsin	595	598	595	1	(2)	0.01%	-0.36%
32	Albuquerque, New Mexico	546	558	559	12	1	0.31%	0.19%
33	Tucson, Arizona	523	532	536	12	4	0.32%	0.78%
34	Fresno, California	497	523	527	30	5	0.82%	0.89%
35	Sacramento, California	466	495	502	36	7	1.02%	1.42%
	Total (Including Honolulu)	41,622	44,446	44,728	3,106	282	1.00%	0.63%

(*) See note in text on Honolulu

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: Honolulu: 10th largest city in the United States (by author)

2018 How We Pick the Best Cities for Job Growth

Mark Schill — Fri, 18 May 2018 11:40:34 -0400

The methodology for our 2018 ranking largely corresponds to that used in previous years. We seek to measure the robustness of metro areas’ growth both recently and over time, with some minor corrections to mitigate the volatility that the Great Recession has introduced into the earlier parts of the time series. The ranking is based on three-month rolling averages of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “state and area” unadjusted employment data reported from November 2006 to January 2018.

The data reflect the North American Industry Classification System categories, including total nonfarm employment, manufacturing, financial services, business and professional services, educational and health services, information, retail and wholesale trade, transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, and government.

We used five measures of growth to rank all 422 metropolitan statistical areas for which full data sets were available from the past 15 years, up from 421 last year. “Large” areas include those with a current nonfarm employment base of at least 450,000 jobs. “Midsize” areas range from 150,000 to 450,000 jobs. “Small” areas have as many as 150,000 jobs.

The Evolving Urban Form: Charlotte

Wendell Cox — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:38:11 -0500

There may be no better example of the post World War II urban form than Charlotte, North Carolina (a metropolitan area and urban area that stretches into South Carolina). Indeed, among the approximately 470 urban areas with more than 1 million population, Charlotte ranks last in urban population density in the United States (Figure 1) and last in the world. According to the United States Census Bureau, Charlotte's built-up urban area population density was 1685 per square mile (650 per square kilometer) in 2010. Charlotte is not only less dense than Atlanta, the world's least dense urban area with more than 4,000,000 residents, but it is only one-quarter the density of the supposed “sprawl capital” of Los Angeles (Figure 2).

Over the last seven decades, Charlotte also has been among the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. Charlotte is the county seat of Mecklenburg County, and as recently 1940 as was home to 101,000 residents while with its suburbs in Mecklenburgh County was barely 150,000.

Declining Densities in the Core City

Charlotte is also in example of the difficulty of using the core municipality data for comparisons to the suburban balance of metropolitan areas. With North Carolina's liberal annexation laws, Charlotte has pursued a program of nearly continuous annexation such that in every 10 years since 1940, the city has added substantial new territory.

In 1940, the city of Charlotte covered a land area of 19 square miles (50 square kilometers) and had a population density of 5200 per square mile (2,000 per square kilometer). For a prewar core municipality, this was not at all dense. For example, Evansville Indiana, which had approximately the same population at the time, had a population density nearly twice that of Charlotte. Other larger core municipalities approached triple or more Charlotte's population density, such as Trenton, Buffalo, Providence, and Milwaukee.

Over the last seven decades, the city's population has risen by 6.2 times, while its land area has increased by 14.4 times (Table $$$). The result is a 53% decline in the city of Charlotte's population density, to 2456 per square mile (948 per square kilometer). This is only slightly above average density of the US built-up urban area – which includes the smallest towns and suburbs of every size – of 2,343 per square mile (1,455 per square kilometer). Indeed, the average far flung suburbs (30 miles distant) of Los Angeles, such as Pomona and Tustin, are more than 2.5 times as dense.

City of Charlotte (Municipality)
Population & Land Area: 1940-2010
Census	Population	Area: Square Miles	Area: Square KM	Density (Sq. Mile)	Density (KM)
1940	100,899	19.3	50.0	5,228	2,019
1950	134,042	40.0	103.6	3,351	1,294
1960	201,564	64.8	167.8	3,111	1,201
1970	241,178	76.0	196.8	3,173	1,225
1980	314,447	139.7	361.8	2,251	869
1990	395,934	174.3	451.4	2,272	877
2000	567,943	242.3	627.6	2,344	905
2010	731,424	297.8	771.3	2,456	948
Change	625%	1443%	1443%	-53.0%	-53.0%

Growth by Geography

The core city of Charlotte's ever-fluctuating boundaries make it necessary to use smaller area measures to estimate the distribution of population growth. This can be accomplished using zip code data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses.

Inner Charlotte, for the purposes of this analysis (zip codes 28202 through 28208) covers approximately 28 square miles (73 square kilometers) and had a population of approximately 92,000 in 2010 . This is a larger area than the city of Charlotte in 1940, which covered only two thirds as much land area and had more people. Between 2000 and 2010, this inner area population rose by 6,200 residents. All the gain was in the central zip code that comprises the downtown area (central business district), which in Charlotte is called "Uptown." Outside this small 1.8 square mile area (4.7 square kilometers), the inner area actually lost 1,400 residents.

Overall, the inner area of Charlotte – which has somewhat an obsessive hold on many city leaders – accounted for 1.0% of the metropolitan area growth from 2000 to 2010. This is not unlike other major metropolitan areas, which have experienced slow growth, particularly in areas adjacent to the downtown cores. Among the 51 US metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population in 2010, net gain occurred within two miles of city hall, while this gain was erased by a loss of 272,000 between two and five miles of city hall.

Another 13% (64,000) of the 2000-2010 growth occurred in the middle Mecklenburg County zip codes (28209 to 28217), virtually all of which is in the city of Charlotte. This 185 square mile area, combined with the inner area, exceeds the land area of the city in 1990.

Mecklenburg County's outer zip codes, many of which are in the city, captured 37% of the metropolitan area's growth (184,000). The remaining 49% (247,000) of growth in the Charlotte metropolitan area was outside Mecklenburg County (Figure 3).

From 1990 to 2010, Charlotte was the seventh fastest growing metropolitan area out of the 51 with a population exceeding 1 million. Early data for the present decade shows Charlotte to have slipped to ninth fastest growing; however during this period, Charlotte has displaced Portland, Oregon as the nation's 23rd largest metropolitan area. Between 1990 and 2012, Charlotte added nearly 1,000,000 residents and now has 2.4 million residents.

Uptown: The Commercial Story

Unlike other post-World War II metropolitan areas (such as Phoenix, San Jose, and Riverside-San Bernardino), Charlotte has developed a concentrated, high rise downtown area." Part of this is due to the city's strong financial sector. Charlotte is the home to Bank of America, the nation's second largest bank and the successor to the San Francisco-based California bank of the same name that was the largest bank in the world for decades. Nation's Bank, the predecessor to Bank of America, erected a 60 story tower in 1992 that was among the tallest in the United States.

Charlotte was also home to Wachovia Bank, which built its 42 floor headquarters before, and nearby the Bank of America Tower. Wachovia had intended to move to a larger, 50 story building. However, the time it was completed, Wachovia had been sold to Wells Fargo Bank, a casualty of the US financial crisis. The new building was renamed the Duke Energy Center.

Thus, Charlotte consumed one San Francisco bank, and lost another to San Francisco. Now Uptown Charlotte has six buildings more than 500 feet in height (152 meters). With six buildings of this height, Charlotte has developed by far the concentrated central business district among the newer metropolitan areas.

However, the high employment density has not converted into a transit oriented business district, as some might have predicted. American Community Survey (CTPP) data indicates that approximately 87% of uptown employees use cars to get to work. Further, more than 90% of the jobs in the metropolitan area are outside Uptown.

Uptown: The High Rise Condominium Story

Uptown's commercial progress has not been replicated in the residential market, as overzealous high rise condominium developers apparently may have confused Charlotte for Manhattan or Hong Kong. One of the more recent 500 foot plus towers was The Vue, a 50 story condominium tower. Too few condominiums were sold, and a foreclosure auction followed. The new owner has converted the condominiums to rental units. A 40 story condominium project ("One Charlotte") was to feature units priced from $1.5 million to $10 million, but was cancelled. Another condominium building, the 32 story 300 South Tryon was also cancelled. A tower base was prepared for a 50 plus story condominium monolith, but this was never built, while depositors were claiming they could not find the developer to get their deposits back. It was also reported that legendary developer Donald Trump had plans for the tallest building in town, a 72 story condominium tower, which would have been joined by another tower. These have also been cancelled (for artists renderings, click here).

Charlotte's Continuing Dispersion

While Uptown condominium developers were unable to sell many units, Charlotte's labor market dispersed so much between 2000 and 2010 that the Office of Management and Budget expanded the metropolitan area by four counties. The net addition to the population of this revision was approximately 460,000. This is by far the largest percentage increase to a metropolitan area over the period, though much larger New York added counties with 660,000 residents.

Charlotte seems to say it all with respect to the ill-named "back to the city movement" (ill named, because most suburbanites did not come from the city to begin with). Yes, there is growth downtown and yes, it is important and yes, it is healthy. But, in the overall scheme of things, it is small, and relative to the rest of the thriving region, likely to remain less important in the years ahead.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

Photo: Uptown Charlotte courtesy of Wiki Commons user Bz3rk

As the North Rests on Its Laurels, the South Is Rising Fast

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:13:31 -0400

One hundred and fifty years after twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg destroyed the South’s quest for independence, the region is again on the rise. People and jobs are flowing there, and Northerners are perplexed by the resurgence of America’s home of the ignorant, the obese, the prejudiced and exploited, the religious and the undereducated. Responding to new census data showing the Lone Star State is now home to eight of America’s 15 fastest-growing cities, Gawker asked: “What is it that makes Texas so attractive? Is it the prisons? The racism? The deadly weather? The deadly animals? The deadly crime? The deadly political leadership? The costumed sex fetish conventions? The cannibal necromancers?”

The North and South have come to resemble a couple who, although married, dream very different dreams. The South, along with the Plains, is focused on growing its economy, getting rich, and catching up with the North’s cultural and financial hegemons. The Yankee nation, by contrast, is largely concerned with preserving its privileged economic and cultural position—with its elites pulling up the ladder behind themselves.

This schism between the old Confederacy and the Northeastern elites is far more relevant and historically grounded than the glib idea of “red” and “blue” Americas. The base of today’s Republican Party—once the party of the North—now lies in the former secessionist states, along with adjacent and culturally allied areas, such as Appalachia, the southern Great Plains, and parts of the Southwest, notably Arizona, largely settled by former Southerners.

“In almost every species of conceivable statistics having to do with wealth,” John Gunther wrote in 1946, “the South is at the bottom.” But even as Gunther was writing, the region had begun a gradual ascendancy, now in its seventh decade. That began with a belated post-WWII push to promote industrialization, much of it in relatively low-wage industries such as textiles. “Southerners don’t have any rich relatives. God was a Northerner,” the head of the pro-development Southern Regional Council told author Joel Garreau in 1980. “Without a heritage of anything except denial, Southerners, given a chance to improve their standard of living, are doing so.”

While the Northeast and Midwest have become increasingly expensive places for businesses to locate, and cool to most new businesses outside of high-tech, entertainment, and high-end financial services, the South tends to want it all—and is willing to sacrifice tax revenue and regulations to get it. A review of state business climates by CEO Magazine found that eight of the top 10 most business-friendly states, led by Texas, were from the former Confederacy; Unionist strongholds California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts sat at the bottom.

The South’s advantages come in no small part from decisions that many Northern liberals detest—lack of unions, lower wages, and less stringent environment laws. But for many Southerners, particularly in rural areas, a job at the Toyota plant with a $15-an-hour starting salary, and full medical benefits, is a vast improvement over a minimum-wage job at Wal-Mart, much less your father’s fate chopping cotton on a tenant farm.

And the business-friendly policies that keep costs down appeal to investors. Ten of the top 12 states for locating new plants are in the former confederacy, according to a recent study by Site Selection magazine. In 2011 the two largest capital investments in North America (PDF)—both tied to natural-gas production—were in Louisiana.

More recently, the region—led by Texas—has moved up the value-added chain, seizing a fast-growing share of the jobs in higher-wage fields such as auto and aircraft manufacturing, aerospace, technology, and energy. Southern economic growth has now outpaced the rest of the country for a generation and it now constitutes by far the largest economic region in the country. A recent analysis by Trulia projects the edge will widen over the rest of this decade, owing to factors including the region’s lower costs and warmer weather.

These developments are slowly reversing the increasingly outdated image of the South as hopelessly backward in high-value-added industries. Alabama and Kentucky are now among the top-five auto-producing states, while the Third Coast corridor between Louisiana and Florida ranks as the world’s fourth-largest aerospace hub, behind Toulouse, France; Seattle; and California.

Southern growth can also be seen in financial and other business services. The new owners of the New York Stock Exchange are based in Atlanta.

While the recession was tough on many Southern states, the area’s recovery generally has been stronger than that of Yankeedom: the unemployment rate in the region is now lower than in the West or the Northeast. The Confederacy no longer dominates the list of states with the highest share of people living in poverty; new census measurements (PDF), adjusted for regional cost of living, place the District of Columbia and California first and second. New York now has a higher real poverty rate than Mississippi.

Over the past five decades, the South has also gained in terms of population as Northern states, and more recently California, have lost momentum. Once a major exporter of people to the Union states, today the migration tide flows the other way. The hegira to the sunbelt continues, as last year the region accounted for six of the top eight states attracting domestic migrants—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia. Texas and Florida each gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and California.

These trends suggest that the South will expand its dominance as the nation’s most populous region. In the 1950s, the Confederacy, the Northeast, and the Midwest all had about the same populations. Today the South is nearly as populous as the Northeast and the Midwest combined, and the Census projects the region will grow far more rapidly (PDF) in the years to come than its costlier Northern counterparts.

Yankees tend to shrug off such numbers as largely the chaff drifting down. “The Feet are moving south and west,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote in 2010, “while the Brains are moving toward coastal cities.”

To be sure, some Yankee bastions, such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, enjoy much higher percentages of educated people than the South. Every state in the Southeast falls below the national average of percentage of residents 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree—but virtually every major Southern metropolitan region has been gaining educated workers faster than their Northeastern counterparts. Over the past decade, greater Atlanta added over 300,000 residents with B.A.s, more than the larger Philadelphia region and almost 70,000 more than Boston.

The region—as recently as the 1970s defined by its often ugly biracial politics—has become increasingly diverse, as newly arrived Hispanics and Asians have shifted the racial dynamics. While the vast majority of 19th-century immigrants to America settled in the Northeast and Midwest, today the fastest-growing immigration destinations—including Nashville, Atlanta, and Charlotte—are in the old Confederacy. Houston ranked second in gaining new foreign-born residents in the past decade, just behind New York City, with nearly three times its size. And Houston and Dallas both now attract a higher rate of immigration than Boston, Chicago, Seattle, or Philadelphia.

These immigrants are drawn to the South for the same reasons as other Americans—more jobs, a more affordable cost of living and better entrepreneurial opportunities. A 2011 Forbes ranking of best cities for immigrant entrepreneurs—measuring rates of migration, business ownership, and income—found several Southeastern cities at the top of the list, with Atlanta in the top slot, and Nashville coming in third.

Then there’s the most critical determinant of future power: family formation. The South easily outstrips the Yankee states in growth in its 10-and-under population. Texas and North Carolina expanded their kiddie population by over 15 percent; and every Southern state gained kids except for Katrina-ravaged Louisiana. In contrast New York, Rhode Island, and Michigan lost children by a double-digit margin while every state in the Northeast as well as California suffered net losses.

The differences are most striking when looking at child-population growth among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. Eight of the top ten cities for growth in children under 15 were located in the old Confederacy—Raleigh-Cary, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Atlanta, and Nashville. New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, along with several predictable rust-belt locals, ranked in the bottom 10.

Historically, regions with demographic and economic momentum tend to overwhelm those who lack it. Numbers mean more congressional seats and more electoral votes, and governors who command a large state budget and the national stage. Unless there is a major political change, the South’s demographic elevation will do little to help Democrats there, who, like Northern Republicans, appear to be an endangered species.

Pundits including the National Journal’s perceptive Ron Brownstein suggest that the GOP’s Southern dominance has “masked” the party’s decline in much of the rest of the country. Other, more partisan voices, like the New Yorker’s George Packer simply dismiss Southern conservatives as overmatched by the Obama coalition of minorities, the young, and the highly educated. The even more partisan Robert Shrum correctly points out that the Southern-dominated GOP is increasingly out of step with the rest of the country on a host of social and economic issues, from income inequality to support for gay marriage.

“A lot of sociologists have projected that the South will cease to exist because of things like the Internet and technology,” Jonathan Wells told Charlotte Magazine. An associate professor of history at UNCC and author of Entering the Fray: Gender, Culture, and Politics in the New South, Wells predicts the region “will lose its distinctive identity that it had in the past.”

It’s unlikely, though, that the South will emulate the North’s social model of an ever-expanding welfare state and ever more stringent “green” restrictions on business—which hardly constitutes a strong recipe for success for a developing economy. It’s difficult to argue, for example, that President Obama’s Chicago, broke and with 10 percent unemployment, represents the beacon of the economic future compared to faster-growing Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, or even Atlanta. People or businesses moving from Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago to these cities will no doubt carry their views on social issues with them, but it’s doubtful they will look north for economic role models.

Instead, you might see some political leaders, even Democrats, in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio (a Civil War hotspot for pro-Southern Copperheads), and Michigan come to realize that pro-development policies, such as fracking, offer broader benefits than the head-in-the-sand “green” energy policy that slow growth in places like New York and California. The surviving Southern Democrats (by definition, a tough breed) like Houston Mayor Anise Parker have shown that you can blend social liberalism with “good old boy” pro-business policies.

Politicians like Parker, along with Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush, represent the real future of the states that once made up the Confederacy. As they look to compete with the Northeast and California for the culture, and high-test and financial-service firms that are forced to endure the high cost of the coasts, Southerners are likely to at least begin shrugging off their regressive—and costly—social views on issues like gay marriage.

Bluntly put, if the South can finally shake off the worst parts of its cultural baggage, the region’s eventual ascendancy over the North seems more than likely. High-tech entrepreneurs, movie-makers, and bankers appreciate lower taxes and more sensible regulation, just like manufacturers and energy companies. And people generally prefer affordable homes and family-friendly cities. Throwing in a little Southern hospitality, friendliness, and courtesy can’t hurt either.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register . He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

This piece originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

Photo by Belle of Louisville.

Rust Belt Cities: Invest in Odysseus, Not Barney Fife

Richey Piiparinen — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:38:31 -0500

Given its legacy of shrinking, the Rust Belt has issues. The issues arose naturally, and relate to the fact things leave, or that so much has left. Particularly, when things leave, the mind—both the individual and the collective city mind—can get protective and restrictive. Neediness arises. The smell of desperation ensues like a pall that can tend to hang over cities, influencing decision making on all levels.

Enter “brain drain”, or that term coined to refer to the outmigration of an area’s educated citizens, particularly it’s young. You know the drill: Johnny goes to State college, comes back home for a spell, but then leaves Cleveland, Ohio for Chicago or New York. That is brain drain. And city leaders hate it, spending billions of dollars to stop it—often at the cost of coming off ridiculous, lame.

For instance, in Pittsburgh, there was a civic booster campaign thought up to keep educated folks from going. It was called “Boarder Guard Bob”. According to researcher Chris Briem, “Bob” was a Smokey-the-Bear-type of public service announcement made into a Barney Fife character, with the billboard-size messaging of “Bob” intended to “stop young people at Western Pennsylvania’s borders before they had a chance to leave for other cities”. And while this particular retention strategy (luckily) never went to print, various “plug the brain drain” strategies persist in one form or another at exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

But beyond the near-pitiful messaging, there are major problems with the brain drain approach, especially from an economic development perspective. For example, when, as a community, you are intentionally telling your citizen’s not to go, you are asking them to sacrifice personal development for the benefit of a place. To this point, my colleague, Jim Russell—a leading thinker in brain drain boondoggles and blogger at Burgh Diaspora—says it best, stating: “Discouraging geographic mobility is the same as restricting access to higher education”. In other words, it’s like telling Johnny to stick with his high school diploma so as to forego leaving the community for a 4-year degree.

What’s more, getting people to stay put does little to grow a local economy. In fact it hurts it. Because leaving home is often a rite of passage. It develops a person. I mean, can you imagine if there was no odyssey in the epic Odyssey? If so, Odysseus wouldn’t be the changed man with perspective and experience as he was when he returned back to his homeland, and so there’d be no “there” there. In this sense, the Rust Belt needs to engage their young to embark on their own “Hero Journey” if only to gain skills and broaden geographic connections. This is international economics 101 (see China, India, Brazil, etc.). It should be a domestic economic priority for the Rust Belt, and it would be if only the Cleveland’s of the world could let go of the protectionism that defines their longstanding existential fears of shrinking into one big pile of ruin porn.

Of course confidently encouraging outmigration is part and parcel with an understanding that many expats will “boomerang” back. But many are, and at a faster rate. To wit: as the alpha cities of the America like NYC get too expensive or creatively-class cute, many Rust Belt refugees are pivoting back from a certain left-wanting lifestyle if only for the opportunity, tradition, and honest-to-god reality that is “Rust Belt Chic”. And when they do, they often become “economic ass kickers”, which is term Russell uses to exemplify the fruits of the Hero Journey that is not only individually experienced, but felt in the local economy as well.

Take Sean Watterson, the co-proprietor of the wildly successful restaurant the Happy Dog on Cleveland’s Near West Side. He moved back from D.C. because, according to a recent Plain Dealer article, “Cleveland-ness is like Polish-ness or Irish-ness. It’s an ethnicity”. Here, Watterson not only runs a great hot dog business, but uses his establishment to advance a circulation of ideas by hosting a variety of events like “Life, the Universe, and Hot Dogs”, which is a series hosted by researchers from the Institute for the Society of Origins. Another big hit is the live performances by members of the Cleveland Orchestra called Classical Revolutions.

Cool sounding events, sure. But there is more to it than that, as such happenings spark cross-fertilization between parts of Cleveland—the blue collar West Side and the intelligentsia of the East Side—that have long been divided, often at the cost of Cleveland as a place of cultural and economic innovation. And how exactly does Watterson’s own “Hero Journey” come into play in his self-stated goal to break down barriers “between east and west and between high culture and low culture”? It likely relates to the fact he experienced experience outside of a legacy city bubble that enabled him to see and cross bridges that others have difficulty envisioning.

Now, does this mean that cities simply need to let people leave to prosper? Obviously not. If the place expats are boomeranging back to is stagnant and disparate, with openness and connection disabled by a collective insular mentality that: “that’s just the way things are done around here”, well, the boomeranging effect won’t hold. And the economic ass-kickers won’t ass-kick.

The goal, then, of cities should be on fostering return migrant connections, or to know who they are, why they are there, and to help get them together so that their collective unchained perspective can pop bubbles of inert status quo. This need is real. For instance, take this first-hand return migrant account published in Rust Belt Chic by Dana Marie Textoris:

Funny how your location-based identity, your physical and mental place in the world, can flip like a switch: Before I was a Clevelander managing to make it in San Francisco….right now I feel a lot like a San Franciscan stuck in Cleveland. In either place, I felt just a little bit Other. A bit of a novelty. Just a tad on the outside looking in. Where does that leave me? Where is home? As I type this, I realize, with sort of an internal groan, that the place I’m left in, the guide to what I’m searching for, is probably just right here, inside me, where my two lives — West Coast and Midwest — are now combined. I’m not really a true Clevelander anymore…I’ve picked up way too much San Francisco for that. The balance I’ve become, a little of this and that, is just what I’m hoping I’ll find, one day.

So, to all Rust Belt cities—this is where your attention must be turned: not on the ones who are leaving for good reason, but on those returning who have not left for good. They have brought the path of their self-discovery back to your doorstep.

Don’t close the door by screaming at the backs of others.

Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.