Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

Population Shifting in the Midwest

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My latest post is online at City Journal. I actually wrote it prior to the Indy op-ed I just put up, but for scheduling reasons they came out in the reverse order. This contains some of the background information against which that op-ed was written. It's about the resorting of population that's occurring within US states in the Midwest. Here's an excerpt: America’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy resulted in a spatial shift in population, from rural to urban. As the economy continues to adapt from industrial to … [Read more...]

High Performing Midwest Cities Need to Learn How to Attract National Talent

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My latest column is online in the Indianapolis Business Journal. Obviously it's about Indianapolis, but similar arguments apply to basically every other basically well-performing Midwest city. They are completely parochial talent sheds and need to attract from further afield.  Here's an excerpt: Nashville won 5,000 Amazon jobs despite being smaller and having fewer tech jobs than Indianapolis. One reason is that Nashville draws people from all over the country, while Indianapolis overwhelmingly draws from just Indiana. Metro Indy actually … [Read more...]

Indianapolis Bus Rapid Transit

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I was on vacation back in Indiana last week, so what else would I do but arrange to take a ride on Indy's under construction BRT system? I had a positive impression of it and am planning to write up a longer piece about the system and the role of BRT in low-density cities generally.  In the meantime, here's a podcast I recorded about the project with Jerome Horne from the city's transit agency. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]

St. Louis Blues

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My latest article is online in City Journal and is a look at the most recent failed attempt to merge St. Louis city and St. Louis county governments in light of the backdrop of civic challenges there. Here's an excerpt: Better Together, a drive to consolidate the governments of St. Louis County and its towns with the city of St. Louis, was over almost before it started. Following political blowback and the indictment of the St. Louis County executive who would have run the merged government, backers withdrew the proposal. But the problems that … [Read more...]

The Midwest’s Small Suburbs

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I've been examining data lately, revisiting a topic I'm mentioned in the past, namely the smaller sizes of suburbs in Midwest cities compared to other parts of the country. This applies to much of the US east of the Mississippi as well. West of that river, there are a number of states and regions where there are large suburbs, some of them ranking among the largest municipalities in the country. For example, here are the ten largest suburbs of Dallas-Ft.Worth: Suburb Population Arlington, TX 398,112 Plano … [Read more...]

Reinventing City Procurement

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Procurement in any context sounds dull and has the reputation of being a painful task you are forced to go through in order to buy something you need. Sascha Haselmayer of CityMart believes there's a different way. He joins me on the podcast to talk about cities using procurement as a problem solving process and engine of government transformation, including radically improving supplier diversity. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]

The Plight of the Midsized Midwest Industrial City

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Bloomberg's Justin Fox tweeted out a link to this piece from a professor in Peoria, Illinois who left a coveted tenure-track position because he couldn't bear the thought of living there.  Here's an excerpt: What this all boiled down to is that it was massively detrimental to my health and well-being to live in a dying Rust Belt city by myself. And my “solution” to that problem – moving to Chicago and driving seven hours round-trip to work – was never anything but a stopgap that negatively affected me in different ways. … People have … [Read more...]

The Quest for Human Flourishing

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I recently sat down with Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Harvard School of Public Health. He's also the director of the Human Flourishing Program, which was the subject of our recording. What is human flourishing? What is the state of it in society today? What can we do to improve our own personal flourishing? We discuss these and other questions in our podcast. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]

A New Mayor for Chicago and Congestion Pricing for New York

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My colleague Nicole Gelinas and I recorded a podcast for City Journal recently about recent developments in New York and Chicago. She talked about New York's approval of congestion pricing and I covered the Chicago mayoral election. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/aaronrenn/updates-on-chicago-new-mayor-and-new-york-congestion-pricing Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud. Cover image credit: Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 4.0 … [Read more...]

New Census Estimates Reveal Continuing American Divergence

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The Census Bureau today released new county and metro area level estimates for population. In my latest article for City Journal, I take a look at some of the trends. Here's an excerpt: Ninety-four metro areas, representing about a quarter of the nation’s total, lost population last year on a region-wide basis. This includes nine major metros of more than 1 million people. Among them were the three biggest: New York (down 19,474 people, or 0.10 percent), Los Angeles (down 7,223, or 0.05 percent), and Chicago (down 22,068, or 0.23 … [Read more...]