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| Downtown Cedar Rapids, spring 2017 |
There's this high-level desire to see [startup growth] happen here, and if you don't have people trying to make that happen here, it just won't.... I just had this idea that why would I run off to Chicago or Silicon Valley to be part of startup activity when people were trying to do that here (Patane 2017).Cedar Rapids seems to be out-performing its peer cities in the 2010s. We're three weeks away from a city council election, including eight candidates vying for an open mayoral slot. It's been a rather bloodless campaign so far, with no burning issue or group conflict to polarize the electorate. There's been a lot of talk about fixing streets and filling potholes, which speaks to a certain confidence in our future. Or maybe it's a lack of concern? We are so sure we're not Steubenville, Ohio, and are never going to be, that our concerns can be potholes vs. bike lanes or which neighborhoods are getting shorted on city spending.
Do we know why we're in the position we're in? To be sure, we were early on the tech train (Rockwell Collins, McLeod USA) at least for this part of the country, our economy has diversified from the agricultural days, and we're reasonably close to the University of Iowa--though that's in Iowa City, a separate metro with a remarkably similar income pattern. We've been blessed with some visionary leaders--a group Horn seems fixing to join--and a moderate, tolerant political culture. We're doing a lot of the right things: re-examining our zoning code, re-developing downtown, flood protection, building sidewalks and trails, re-converting our one-way streets. It would be interesting to re-run the last decade without the flood, and see whether we'd be better or worse off today, but alas, this is not experimental science we're doing.
Nationally, it is widely known that generally favorable economic data since 2010 mask a wide variety of experiences. In an early crack at the data, I showed in June 2016 just with population data that the back-to-the-city movement affected the central cities in the largest metropolitan areas differently, from dramatic growth (Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh) to steep declines (Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans).
More studies have dug deeper into the data. A Brookings Institution study, based on analysis of Census Bureau data, analyzes changes in inflation-adjusted median household incomes in 300 metropolitan areas (Berube 2017). They divide the metros into five groups:
- booming (25), including large tech hubs and small cities around oil and gas finds;
- stabilized (37), tech and other large cities that have been able to sustain gains through tough times;
- recovering (73) i.e. from de-industrialization or the housing crash;
- struggling (86), mostly middle-sized cities which had relied on manufacturing;
- hardest-hit (76), mostly older manufacturing cities.
Spread out that way, the urban renaissance appears so far to be concentrated in relatively few places, with more trying to keep up and still more genuinely floundering. (That's sort of my impression of today's economy at the individual level as well.)
A New York Times business column (Porter 2017) highlights a study by Mark Muro, also of the Brookings Institution, noting that cities the size of Cedar Rapids are on the whole doing less well than large cities. The key graphic from the article:
Where Disruption Has Hit U.S. Workers Hardest
Automation and foreign trade have buffeted the nation’s labor force, especially across the Midwest and Southeast. But big metropolitan areas have been more successful than smaller places at recovering from economic shocks.
Rates of recovery from recession
in the 10 states of greatest disruption
How states rank in being disrupted
by foreign trade and automation*
Large
metro
areas
Small
metro
areas
CHANGE FROM
2009 TO 2015, BY
SIZE OF METRO AREA
LEAST
MOST
Top 10
cities
MOST
Michigan
PRIVATE
EMPLOYMENT
+2.1%
+1.9
+1.0
Compound annual
growth rate
REAL PERSONAL
INCOME
+1.9%
+1.9
+1.3
Compound annual
growth rate
LABOR FORCE
PARTICIPATION RATE
–0.6
–0.8
–1.5
LEAST
Percentage-point
change
Hawaii
The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are the drivers of economic success today. This applies to the biotech engineer but not to the welder, who has more replaceable skills.According to one estimate, 80 percent of new jobs in 2016 were created in metropolitan areas of 1,000,000 or more. Counties with populations below 250,000 actually had a net loss of jobs (Bishop 2017). Small metro residents are feeling it, too: Voters in small metros showed their frustrations by favoring Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election by nearly 20 percentage points, almost the same as rural voters (Florida 2017). Struggling World is close by, too. A New York Times magazine story out of Clinton, 90 miles to our northeast, argues that the sharp statewide swing towards the Republican Party in the 2010s has its roots in the loss of college-educated young people (Tackett). In Iowa, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the educated young move elsewhere to get work, while the economically-insecure folk who remain take out their anxieties at the polls, leading to policy outcomes with mostly symbolic payoffs that if anything just create frustrations for the cities that are the engines of the states' economies.
There aren't enough data in the study from Cedar Rapids, but what there are would put us in the "stabilized" group: 2016 median family income ($63385) is up 6.4 percent since 2009. That makes sense when you consider that our catastrophic flood occurred in 2008, and much federal aid and private investment has followed. Compared to 1999, though, we're down 2.7 percent.
If we don't know how we got stabilized--or worse, are naive about how we got here--how do we avoid regressing to the mean? Does Cedar Rapids, despite its being a small city, have a thick enough labor market to retain college-educated young people through lean times as well as fat? (The current national bull market, seven years on, won't last forever.) One way to enlarge the labor market could be to enlarge the scope of the city by strengthening connections with Iowa City, including better intracity transportation by which I do not mean adding another lane to I-380. Further strengthen those connections with a regional revenue-sharing agreement with a non-compete provision so area municipalities work together to make an appealing, resilient region.
More questions: can we do better at retaining young, educated people, while building an economy (and a community) that includes everyone? Is the city's financial conditions strong enough to sustain us through whatever history and the economy bring next?
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| Aaron Horn, from his Twitter page |
Aaron Horn clearly thinks Cedar Rapids has the potential to remain strong, so we'll give him the last word.
I think we [in the State of Iowa] have a lot of work to do. Generally, especially here at NewBoCo, we just feel like it's not enough. We feel like we're doing a lot here at NewBoCo and it's not enough.... We just take that on personally as we're not just going to sit around and say, "The State of Iowa is not doing enough." We're just going to dig in our heels and say, "Where are the gaps, and what do we need to do to fill that?"MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Justin Golbabai, "What Happens if the Delivery Trucks Don't Come," Strong Towns, 18 October 2017
"The Right Way to Help Declining Places," Economist, 21 October 2017
Ellen Shepard, "Chicagoans Had Better Take a Hard and Wary Look at Any Deal to Woo Amazon," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 September 2017
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