Indianapolis Monthly magazine just ran an interesting feature article on Gwendolyn Rogers, proprietor of a local store called the Cake Bake Shop. I have never been to it and am not the target market. But I thought there were a few interesting elements to it that are relevant not just to marketing businesses but cities. Rogers is not an Indianapolis native. She spent time living in Los Angeles and Idaho before arriving there. She had worked for a modeling agency in LA and her husband worked in the film industry. Perhaps because they both … [Read more...]
Archives for 2018
Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century
I have been a steadfast critic of the project to build two new bridges across the Ohio River in Louisville for over a decade. In fact, my first critical post on the bridges proposal was put up in 2007 less than six months after starting my original Urbanophile blog. The end result was even worse than I anticipated. The project has proven to be a money waster of the highest order, and in fact by far the biggest American transportation boondoggle I can identify in the 21st century so far. Part of the agreement between Indiana and Kentucky … [Read more...]
The Other Side of the Superstar Effect
A couple of folks had interesting counterpoints to the superstar effect. Neil Strickland gave me permission to post the following email he sent: I wonder if you've read, or if I've referred to, the Santa Fe Institute's highly cited 2007 paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) called "Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the pace of life in cities." Its work was in "deriving growth equations which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference … [Read more...]
Superstar Effect Wins Again as Amazon Chooses New York, Washington for HQ2/3
Amazon, obviously embarrassed at the way their HQ2 process has been received, leaked the results of the competition the night before Election Day, ensuring coverage will be largely muted. Amazon has reportedly decided to split HQ2 between two locations, New York City (Long Island City, Queens) and Washington (Crystal City, VA). I will have more analysis over the next several days, but this shows that the superstar effect is alive and well. Amazon chose note one but two elite coastal cities for its new headquarters. There's no other way … [Read more...]
Why Are State Boundaries So Significant?
There was some debate about why state boundaries, which seem irrelevant in many ways as they don't reflect real economic geographies (or often even cohesive communities) and are only sometimes on natural boundaries. Here again is are the 50 "Facebook States of America" from the NYT piece I posted last week. A lot of people went straight to the state university system as a reason for this. The argument is that people go in-state because it's cheaper, and this creates Facebook networks. That's probably some of it but the state … [Read more...]
What Happened After the Last HQ2 Competition
When I traveled to Oklahoma City for the first time a few years ago I was shocked to discover that in the civic narrative of the city's transformation - it's origin story if you will - the triggering event for change was losing a competition for a United Airlines maintenance facility in 1991 to Indianapolis. This United Airlines maintenance base was like a Foxconn or HQ2 of its era. It was a big deal because the thousands of jobs would be very high paying union mechanics and there were going to be a lot of them. It was anticipated that many … [Read more...]
Nashville Hot Chicken and the Pork Tenderloin: A Tale of Two Sandwiches
One of the things you're sure to hear about if you read up on Nashville is a local dish called "Nashville hot chicken," a local culinary specialty. To listen to people talk about it, you'd think eating Nashville hot chicken was some kind of ancient local religious rite. In fact, Nashville hot chicken appears to be a dish of fairly recent provenance. According to the Wikipedia entry for it: Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville for generations. The current dish may have been introduced as early … [Read more...]
6 Forces Disrupting Higher Education
Universities and health care, "eds and meds", have been in a huge growth cycle over the last few decades. Many communities have been pinning their hopes on anchor institutions like a university or research hospital to retool their economies for the 21st century. Yet the higher education industry is facing a convergence of several trends and forces that are threaten their future. At a minimum, schools need to be figuring out how to navigate these choppy waters ahead. Here are six forces converging on colleges today and in the near … [Read more...]
Northern Ambition: Young and Foreign in the Twin Cities Circa 1987
[ When I wrote about there being social factors other than the cold keeping people from moving to Minneapolis, Sami Karam, a Lebanese immigrant who now lives in New York City and posts insightful demographic analysis as his site Populyst, mentioned that he'd had similar experiences trying to fit in there when he lived in Minneapolis in the 1980s. I asked him if he'd write up his experience, and he graciously agreed. While this story is about 30 years old, I believe it still holds relevance today. You can also follow Sami on twitter at … [Read more...]
Ranking Smaller College Towns
I recently revisited Bloomington, Indiana (home of Indiana University, my alma mater) and Charlottesville, VA (home of the University of Virginia). They got me thinking about college towns, so I pulled some data for various of them in this size class. These are communities roughly in the 125,000-250,000 population range that are home to major flagship (or similar) universities. I have 11 on my list. For this size class of community, I believe the best unit of analysis is the county. These are metro areas and can have outlying counties. But … [Read more...]