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...]
Midwest Cities Are Not on the Radar for Migrants
The Midwest is simply not in the picture when it comes to migration nationally. Even its best performing regions are often migration losers with the rest of the country. Columbus, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis-St. Paul all have growing populations, and basically healthy economies. Yet all of them are have net migration losses with the country when you look only at migration from out of state. The chart above is metro area migration as reported by the IRS county to county data, aggregated to the appropriate levels. All of these … [Read more...]
The Buffalo Billion Reconsidered
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...]
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