You may recall my City Journal feature on Buffalo from 2015. This was written about the time New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Buffalo Billion program - a pledge to spend $1 billion in state funds to bring back the city economically - was in the earlier stages of development. Fast forward, and Cuomo's Buffalo Billion chief Alain Kaloyeros and Buffalo construction magnate Louis Ciminelli were recently convicted on corruption charges. A lot of the heavy lifting journalistically that raised questions about the Buffalo Billion was done by Jim Heaney … [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...]
Lone Star Carpetbagger
I subscribe to Jeff Wood's must read Overhead Wire daily newsletter. Today I clicked on a link that looked interesting called "Making Dallas a Desirable Place to Live." Looking at the byline, I was not surprised to see that it was written by Patrick Kennedy, who seems to write every other piece I come across on Dallas. Kennedy is a fascinating fellow whom I met once a few years back. This blog post isn't really a profile of him but rather a sketch of why I think he's someone who ought to have a proper analysis done. Kennedy is a classic … [Read more...]
The New Basis of City Diplomacy
I was in Chicago last week for the Chicago Forum on Global Cities. One of the panels I was looking forward to seeing was about city diplomacy. People have been talking for a while about cities conducting their own foreign policy. But it was very clear at this forum that in the United States at least, the entire basis of that idea has shifted radically in a very short period of time. Here, for example, is an article in the Chicago Tribune about the topic in advance of the 2015 edition of the Chicago Forum: It's one example of an … [Read more...]
Kwame Kilpatrick’s 28 Year Prison Sentence Is Unfairly Long
A recent article noting that former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had been transferred between prisons, combined with rumors that President Trump might commute the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich made me think about the fairness of Kilpatrick's 28 year prison sentence. According to a 2016 article from the Washington Post, only one other person has ever been sentenced to more than 20 years for political corruption. In fact, they only list four that got more then 15 years and they seem to involve extreme cases, like Rita … [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...]
Double Decking Interstates Is Not the Answer for Nashville Traffic Woes
Fresh off the defeat of Nashville's transit referendum, a Republican gubernatorial candidate is proposing a major highway expansion that would complete the I-480 loop around the city to the north and double-deck I-65, I-40, and I-24 through downtown. Nashville's traffic is getting worse. But it's first worth asking whether it has too few freeways. I have a database from the Texas Transportation Institute that can help shed light on this. It's five or so years old, so updated data would need to be pulled, but as of 2011, Nashville did not … [Read more...]
Slouching Towards Luxury
An article about the resurgence of independent bookstores has been making the rounds. Between 2009 and 2015, more than 570 independent bookstores opened in the U.S., bringing the total to more than 2,200; that's about a 35 percent jump after more than a decade of decline. The surprise recovery may hold lessons for other small retailers. Stores like Anderson's are helping Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli solve an economic mystery. "I often say, these are stories of hope," Raffaelli laughed. Bookstores may be following the same … [Read more...]
New Localism and Old Institutions
Last week I posted an article talking about the maturity curve, or the lifecycle arc from incubation to growth to maturity to decline that applies to so many things. And this weekend my review of Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak's book The New Localism was published in the New York Times Book Review. These two items are related. It's been widely noted that trust in institutions has been declining across the board in America. Government, religion, media, and business have all seen declining trust. To be quite honest, that decline in trust is … [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...]
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