Post No. 350: Back to school

A highlight from my summer trip to Seattle

Round-number posts mean time to reflect, coinciding with the start of another school year. Six and a half years into this blog project, what keeps me writing? After 32 years of full-time teaching, what--besides the need for money to convert into food and shelter--keeps me in the classroom?

When I was a student forty or so years ago, the changes we're dealing with were already underway, but it was difficult to see at the time. One day my political science professor announced, "Well, the world gained an empire last night!" (The tiny Central African Republic had rebranded itself, temporarily as it turned out.) None of us students knew this, until our professor told us. A few years later, in my own classroom, I found a note on my desk relating to our class discussions about American covert involvement in Nicaragua: "Could you please explain who or what are the contras?"

Today, anyone curious about the contras, or the latest news from the Central African Republic, could become more knowledgeable than me with a quick Internet search:

The academic model of discrete bodies of knowledge, possessed and dispensed by experts, and memorized by students to some degree or other, measured quantitatively and then rated on an ABCDF scale, has been overtaken by technology... if indeed it was ever very useful. There's some comfort on both sides in continuing to play the game, though, particularly for those of us who are (or were) very good at memorizing and articulating. Everyone knows their role (expert/grader, good student, poor student), the numbers give us an appearance of objectivity, and real life keeps going outside the classroom.

Did I really think, all those years ago, that all I had to do was make through college, then flash my diploma and my GPA, and lifetime employment would be mine? Did I really think, once I began teaching, that my role as objective explainer would be easy to define? Did we really think, all those years ago, that cars would always cheaply get us anywhere we needed to go?

"Who Made This City?" (1:00)

My hope this fall for my first-year students is that they set about owning their college education from day one, and they use this opportunity to cultivate the qualities that will enable them to live a good life: creativity, imagination, initiative, resourcefulness, and open-mindedness. I hope I can help them learn to perceive and reflect on, say, the places where they find themselves--the built environment, the political culture, the problems.

Source: Youtube

I hope I can help them learn these habits without having to be neutral about everything. The big questions of our time center on how to manage change: economic change, social change, environmental change. Without presuming to have all or any of the answers, does objectivity really require me to be neutral about presidential race-baiting? Then what about suburban sprawl? The preponderance of evidence on climate change?

Source: Pixabay via Journalists Resource

James Morone, in The Devils We Know (Kansas University Press, 2014), the fine collection of his essays from which I'm teaching this semester, portrays American political culture as an ongoing negotiation among individuals, institutions, and traditions. That seems a good way to approach anything as complex as a political culture, or a town, or an individual life. No one person or group can contain the entirety of a complex truth--which makes the "sage on the stage" model of academia even more obviously absurd.

Even so, there must be ways to distinguish among the claims for our support, and make some judgments, however tentative, about their validity. Empirical evidence will get you some ways down the road, but I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to moral arguments. Is it some life-cycle thing with me personally, or has some social consensus broken down that requires sides be taken?

(Good urban design, bad urban design)

One can't teach a seminar like mine on A Sense of Place without taking note of the impact of intracity highway construction on American life: the growth of the suburbs, the marginalization of the "inner city" and its nonwhite inhabitants, the types of businesses (mainly franchises) that were viable, the ways of getting around (any way but cars) that were not viable, the stress on government budgets once the maintenance bills started coming due. I grew up at a time when all this was taken for granted; it was "the way things are." If I thought about it at all, I assumed this is how supply, demand and available technology were naturally working things out. Of course suburban sprawl stemmed from policy decisions. And a lot of those policy decisions were motivated by racial segregation, highways drawn through black neighborhoods and to maintain "the boundary between the white and Negro communities," in the words of former Atlanta mayor Bill Hartsfield (Kruse 2019). Policies that work to the advantage of whites at the expense of nonwhites are not good, right?

To shape the future, the very future that my students will inhabit far longer than I will, we need to come to grips with what ails the present. And that means finding some other way to respond than  racism, greed or fear, while praising responses like that of Ottumwa Main Street that are both imaginative and incremental.

Ottumwa Better Block video (3:30)

I write, and I teach, as my way of contributing to a collective conversation-negotiation about our common future. Written and oral presentation helps me sort out the blizzard of information that is out there, not to mention my own responses to that information. Readers of this blog, known to me or not, like my students, help keep my sorting out accountable to something bigger than myself. If you've read this far, I am really grateful to you.

Downtown farmers' market, Butte MT:

Objectively preferable to a strip mall on a high-speed stroad?

Of the previous 349 posts, the most popular are from summer-fall 2016 (hereafter "Peak Holy Mountain" or perhaps "Holy Mountain Peak"):

1. A Silent But Needful Protest, 1 November 2016 [Coe College responds to the defacing of Multicultural Fusion posters]
2. Crime and Our Common Life, 1 August 2016 [The mysterious rise and fall and possibly now rise of violent crime rates in America]
3. Snout Houses? In Oakhill-Jackson??, 16 October 2016 [Suburban style development in a historic Cedar Rapids neighborhood]
4. Let's Hear It for Cedar Rapids, 5 September 2016 [The Mayors Bike Ride and everything else going on Labor Day weekend]
5. Gentrification: What Do We Know? 26 July 2016 [literature review analyzing a complex and controversial phenomenon]

The least popular list has some new entries, joining some long-time un-favorites from the early years:

1. Where are the Suburbs? 24 June 2019 [three definitions of the urban-suburban divide, applied to Cedar Rapids... a tangle of a post crying out for some graphic accompaniments]
2. Halloween 2013, 1 November 2013 [Halloween as civic holiday] 
3. Downtown Construction Continues, 23 September 2014 [early stages of the CRST building]
4. Nothing Says Community Like..., 13 January 2014 [Take your Christmas tree to this parking lot and it will be made into trails]
5. Book Review: Cities for People, 18 July 2018 [Danish planner Jan Gehl looks at city design from the perspective of human nature]

Fairfield: Iowa's minor miracle?

William Henry Coop, original settler of Fairfield, with a young friend

Iowa, in its small way, mirrors a lot of what's happening around the country: some cities growing and prosperous, some cities struggling, and much of the rural area also struggling. With some interesting exceptions, the vast majority of Iowa counties this decade have a shared experience of low incomes, declining working-age population, low job growth, low percentages of those with graduate and professional degrees, and Republican politics; many, though not all, have high levels of child poverty as well.

[Interesting exceptions: Poweshiek (Grinnell College) and Winneshiek (Luther College) Counties have higher-than-average educational attainment but are struggling in other ways. And there's a curious corner of prosperity in far northwestern Iowa, including Dickinson, Lyon and Sioux counties, though these are also losing population.]

And then there's Jefferson County, home of the town of Fairfield. Miles from the nearest urban center, its population is only 18,361, but that's up 9 percent since the 2010 census, making it one of only seven Iowa counties this decade that has grown faster than the nation as a whole. In 2020 it will surely break its census record; the previous mark of 17,839 was set in... 1870! Jefferson County's working-age population has increased only 3.1 percent this decade, but that still makes it one of only eight Iowa counties to gain. The other gaining counties are all in metropolitan areas.

Other fast facts:

• in job growth since 2010, in-migration (international only not domestic), and support for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred Hubbell in 2018, Jefferson County looks more like an urban Iowa county
• Jefferson County has the third-highest proportion of those with grad/prof degrees in the state, behind Johnson (University of Iowa) and Story (Iowa State University)
• compared to other counties of its size, Jefferson County has an unusually high working age/child ratio
• three of the counties which border Jefferson (Keokuk, Wapello and Van Buren) are among the state's most struggling

On the other hand:

• while unemployment has declined recently--most recent government numbers have it 2.4 percent--its 13-17 average of 6.7 percent was third highest in the state 
• child poverty is unusually high (24.8 percent, rank 8th among Iowa counties), particularly given its level of growth

With all this in mind, my Corridor Urbanism colleague Ben Kaplan and I--both former journalists, by the way--accompanied by my son Robbie, set out earlier this week to investigate the uniqueness that is Fairfield. Ben's report is forthcoming. Thanks to Mike for hosting us, and to Betsy for talking to us about her hometown.

Betsy is the co-owner of Revelations Coffee Shop...

...which has been doing business in downtown Fairfield since 1994...

...and also deals in books and art.

They also boast the "finest lunch in town," which we cannot validate because it was the only lunch we had in town, but it was mighty fine.

Once we pried ourselves away from the coffee--did I mention half-price refills?--we explored the downtown area. It was active and walkable, though streets are wider than they need to be.

Court Street

The commercial district was full of stores and restaurants... a hardware store across from Revelations, a bike shop down the street, several churches...

First United Methodist Church (1923), which our host Mike formerly served as pastor

...and Hy-Vee and Everybody's Whole Foods an easy walk away. The nearness of residential areas made it very walkable. (Walk Score rates downtown Fairfield 85 for walking and 69 for biking.) There are two Indian restaurants on the square, and the Istanbul Grill is a block away, which comprise more Asian food than you're likely to find in a town of similar size.

I was impressed by the plantings, which a lot of towns feature, but Fairfield's featured an unusual preponderance of wildflowers.

photo by Ben Kaplan

Central Park makes for an excellent public space at the core of the town.

photo by Ben Kaplan

Fairfield features the same mid-block crosswalks into Central Park as does Washington. Burlington Avenue (Business US 34), which runs along the south edge of the park was wider, and the traffic speed faster, than I'm comfortable with, but we made it. Unlike Washington, the central park does not have restrooms. All God's chilluns gotta... you know.

Fairfield is best known for the Maharishi Institute of Management, which occupies the campus of the former Parsons College. Their impact is everywhere: the county's unusual diversity, a lot of the local businesses, much of the wildflower plantings, and, alas, Maharishi Vedic City, a quirky but decidedly suburban subdivision about two miles out of town. Does the unusual religious influence affect outsiders' perception of the town? Negatively or positively?

Fairfield has a lot going for it: walkability, cheap rents, diverse culture, and for those with wheels proximity to Iowa City. And it has a shortage of workers: Betsy of Revelations was surprised by the unemployment numbers from earlier in the decade. "Where are they?" she asked. "I can't find them." She's faced with closing some days because of not enough staff. Young persons, take note! 

And other Iowa towns can note what a difference diversity and entrepreneurship can make.

Film review: "Paris to Pittsburgh"

Last year's National Geographic documentary, Paris to Pittsburgh, highlights local and grass-roots efforts to combat climate change, against the backdrop of the growing threat and the utter failure of the American national government (and most state governments) to take it seriously. The film's tone is positive--encouraging as well as optimistic--which is both a strength and a weakness.

The warning signs keep coming. Tuesday the World Resources Institute published a report showing declining groundwater supplies causing "extremely high water stress" in 33 large cities with a combined population of 255 million; climate change exacerbates the problem, due to droughts as well as faster evaporation on hotter days (Sengupta and Cai 2019). Today the United Nations reports that climate change is exacerbating stress on land and water resources caused by overpopulation and poor management (Flavelle 2019). Scientists have found evidence for the impact of climate change on a broad variety of fronts. (See these posts for a sampling of such research from 2014.) And there's the escalating pile of natural disasters that happen around America and compete for attention and federal governmental relief.

Attention, as the saying goes, must be paid. And yet year after year, American politics remains stuck on whether this phenomenon exists at all. The film takes its title from President Trump's 2017 statement announcing American withdrawal from the international agreement known as the Paris Accord: "I was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not Paris." The statement was apparently crafted for its alliterative charm rather than actual engagement with anyone in actual Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as one theme repeated throughout the film was the efforts of the mayor, city council, and citizens to do what they could in the absence of national action. Meanwhile, the administration props up coal mining corporations, staffs itself with climate change deniers, and tries to block states like California from mandating higher fuel efficiency standards.

This approach has been politically successful, which surely terrifies anyone who finds the climate change models even somewhat persuasive. President Trump was elected once, and may well be elected again, and anyhow Republicans at the state level have taken a similar approach: Florida (Florida, readers!) governor Rick Scott has banned the phrase "climate change" from state agency communications, and North Carolina in the administration of Pat McCrory barred any research at all into mitigation. The Atlantic Ocean is, I assume, duly impressed.

Getting ready to watch the film at St. Paul's United Methodist Church

I suppose no one can possibly take a position like "our activities are destroying life on the planet, but I refuse to do anything about it." So the only available way to justify refusal to act is to deny that there's anything to act against. Some may be motivated by economic interests: the film calls out Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell. But that's a tiny number of people. Why are their denials falling on such fertile soil? I think there are three reasons:

1. political/ideological resistance. Climate change evidence has been produced by scientists, who are elites; policies to address it have been pushed by environmentalists; and effective action will require government at the national and international levels. There are a lot of people who find some or all of those to be anathema.
2. complexity. Climate is complicated. A number of factors influence it, including but not restricted to human activities; it's easily confused with weather, which by the way is just gorgeous in Cedar Rapids today; scientific projections have a wide range of outcomes; and the impact so far includes a wide variety of sometimes-opposite phenomena (floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves). Climate change is at the same time both too erratic and too subtle.
3. despair. The international scope of climate change means anything we do, or the United States does, can be counteracted by someone else. Moreover, seven decades of the suburban development pattern that is decried by urbanists mean we're stuck in a particular kind of built environment that constrains efforts to live more sustainably. It can seem hopeless.

Wisely, Paris to Pittsburgh focuses its effort on the despair obstacle. Its callouts are few and brief, it spends a little but not much time on the science, and it doesn't spend much time arming you for Thanksgiving arguments with your Ann Coulter-fixated uncle. But if you are inclined to ignore the climate threat because you feel powerless to do anything, the filmmakers are ready to give you the halftime locker room peptalk of your life.

"A movement was galvanized around the country" when Trump took the national government backward on the issue; "a revolution is underway." The film visits Miami, where rising ocean levels are destroying beaches, larger "king tides" regularly cause widespread flooding, and "salt water intrusion" in the Everglades threatens the supply of fresh water; Kalona, Iowa, where farmers struggle with erratic weather during growing seasons, and the state has dealt with a succession of massive floods; Ventura, California, reeling from a catastrophic fire; and, of course, Pittsburgh. In each place, locals in and out of government are taking aggressive, positive action against the climate threat--even in "very conservative politically" rural Iowa. The State of New Jersey became the 16th state to join the interstate climate alliance when Republican governor Chris Christie was succeeded by Democrat Phil Murphy in 2018. Towards the end of the film, we see scenes from the Youth for Climate Action massing in Washington, D.C. [Locally, the Iowa City City Council last night declared a "climate crisis," and voted to accelerate the town's greenhouse gas emissions targets (Smith 2019).] The kids are all right, and so are a lot of other people in a lot of places.

Sandbags against the rising river, New Bohemia, June 2013

Of what does this revolution consist? Mostly switching from fossil fuels to renewables. The City of Orlando is not just wondering where they're going to put a potential 2.5 million climate refugees from south Florida, but has moved to an all-electric bus fleet, experimented with floating solar arrays on lakes, and has facilitated citizen "fleet farming" in private yards to increase the supply of local produce. Casa Pueblo, Puerto Rico, runs entirely on alternative energy, which protected it from the long-term effects of the 2017 hurricane. The rural electric cooperative in Kalona, Iowa, is switching to all solar and wind to save money; Iowa is the nation's leader in wind energy, and the film profiles two female students at Iowa Lakes Community College planning careers in the booming field of renewable energy. The State of California has passed ambitious renewable fuel (and emissions reduction) mandates, though a lot of their state wealth comes from fossil fuel extraction.

The makers of Paris to Pittsburgh are to be commended for avoiding the pitfall of much environmental rhetoric, which tends toward the doom-and-gloom. Solar energy is more accessible and less expensive than ever, and the same goes for hybrid or all-electric cars. These are steps that require some but not that much effort, and are within the reach of many families.

Another strong point is the emphasis on local cooperative effort. The opening montage segues from various dismissive statements by President Trump to more urgency from local officials. As any urbanist will tell you, good change starts when neighbors meet to work together. Localities can be parochial, and clannish, but the need to address direct real-world problems tends to cause both public officials and citizens to be less ideological in their response.

There's a danger in making response to climate change seem too easy. If throwing on some solar panels and switching to electric vehicles were all it took to solve it, climate change wouldn't be much of a crisis. I'm no scientist, but intuition tells me even mitigating the damage is going to require some heavy lifting. And not just of sandbags: Iowa state senator Rob Hogg (D-Cedar Rapids), author of America's Climate Century (CreateSpace, 2013), who is quoted extensively in the film, hopes the "spirit of the sandbag" seen in 2016 flood protection efforts could translate into preventative measures. Those are reactions to entirely different phenomena, however.

And the economic incentives seem so strong as to be irresistible, but they aren't rooted in any sort of moral or community concern. Sure, cheaper solar got the "very conservative politically" farmers of Kalona off the dime, but if someone came up with an even cheaper fuel made from, say, meadowlarks, those farmers would switch again in a minute. It's nice that economic incentives seem to dovetail with what needs to be done--Iowa's superannuated U.S. Senator Charles Grassley is shown marveling at the jobs created by wind energy--that can turn in a minute. It's a lot easier to be an urbanist when gas is $5 a gallon than when it's half that.

Jeff Speck

The happy talk verges on what urbanist Jeff Speck calls "Gizmo green" i.e. just buy this product and both you and the Earth will be happier. In Walkable City (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011) he quotes Witold Rybczynski:

Rather than trying to change behavior to reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. "Keep doing what you're doing," is the message, just add another solar panel, a wind turbine, a bamboo floor, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it--even in a Prius--it's hardly green. 

Speck cites a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study finding driveable vs. walkable location had a bigger effect on climate footprint than type of car, housing material, or single- versus multi-family housing. Then he notes the EPA moved its Kansas City headquarters to a LEED-certified building in the suburbs... to which employees had to drive instead of walk to work (Speck 2012).

Enough dyspepsia. Would I rather people act against climate change, however incompletely, or not? Put that way, the answer's obvious; if people are going to be in suburbs anyway, better that they drive hybrids and install solar panels. Paris to Pittsburgh gets points for nudging us, passionately and encouragingly, in the right direction. Still, it would be better for the climate if we slammed the brakes on the suburban model of development.

Trailer for the film:

SEE ALSO:

"The Artlessness of Climate Change Policy," 31 May 2017
"Policy Responses to Climate Change," 26 August 2013

Incremental changes to bus routes

The City of Cedar Rapids will be instituting some tweaks to its city bus routes later this month. The array will still be largely as it was after major changes were implemented two summers ago. Bigger changes may be in the offing.

Buses gather at the GTC before 5:15 departures

The bus system features eleven lines that run out of the downtown Ground Transportation Center, plus two circulator routes based that serve the northern suburbs out of Lindale Mall. Service begins at 5:15 a.m. Monday through Friday and 8:15 a.m. Saturday. (There is no service Sunday.) The last weekday buses leave the GTC at 6:15 p.m. and return at 7:05. Routes run hourly, with these additions:

• some routes run additional buses in the mornings (5:45-6:45-7:45) and the afternoons (12:45-1:45-2:45-3:45). Interestingly they don't do so during the typical evening work commute.
• the #5 runs along 1st Avenue between downtown and Lindale Mall every 15 minutes

Annual ridership in Cedar Rapids increased to 1.1 million early in the decade ("Cedar Rapids and Iowa City" 2011), and since have varied around that number, with ridership approaching 1.4 million in 2015 and (following the '17 route changes) 1.27 million in 2018 (Schmidt 2019). 

Hourly ridership has consistently stayed at 20 per vehicle-hour all decade as well. Cedar Rapids has avoided ridership drops in Iowa City and other towns (Schmidt 2019, "There's a Reason" 2019), but ridership proportional to population is still much smaller here. I think our ridership is less elastic i.e. those who ride have no alternative way to get around, but those who can drive (or walk, or bike) do. Hence the consistency. This makes sense for a system that has always valued coverage over ridership; as Ben Kaplan says, "It's designed to get a small number of people anywhere they need to go slowly, rather than a large number of people a few places quickly (Kaplan 2015; see also Walker 2018). (For a more intensive discussion of transit system goals, see Walker 2015).

The meeting place for the #5, #20 and #30 is moving

What's changing? Here is what catches my eye, admitting an eastside bias to that eye:

1. The Lindale Mall base of the #20 and #30 will be moved across Collins Road to the corner of Twixt Town Road and Southview Drive, near the Pet Smart. Originally (July 2017) located directly by the mall, it was moved to the edge of the parking lot. I think this will be a better location, because it will mean less deviation from the road, so it will be more convenient for people not going to the mall. This is particularly true for people transferring from the #20 to the #30 or vice versa. Only the inbound #5 will go to the mall; it will once again go all the way to the door.
2. The eastside routes will line up along the numerical avenues: #5 on 1st, #6 on 2nd (below 10th), #3 on 3rd, #4 on 4th, and #2 on 5th (above 10th; below 10th it runs on 12th Avenue).
3. The #2 will enter Oakhill-Jackson in a straighter fashion, on 10th Street and then 9th Street, rather than veering up to 15th Street. My friend Charles lives down there; I hope this doesn't make it harder for him!
4. Currently the #3 runs extra buses in the morning only, and the #11 only in the afternoon. Due to low ridership on the #3, there'll be extra buses on the #11 both times.
5. The current tangle of routes by Westdale will be somewhat eased by making the #1 and the #12 more direct. The #12 will no longer serve the Summit Village and Grand View Village mobile home parks, but they will still be served by the #10. All three lines will continue to serve Westdale, Wal-Mart and Target.

Current configuration of Routes 1, 10 and 12

Are bigger changes coming? Iowa City's transportation director stated a goal of doubling ridership in the next ten years, but Cedar Rapids has not. Even so, night service on some lines might begin in 2020, says transit director Brad DeBrower (Schmidt 2019). Other items on my wish list, like mobile ticketing and summer rides for kids, not to mention a downtown circulator, will have to wait.

SOURCES
"Bus Route and Schedule Changes"
Mitchell Schmidt, "Why Are Fewer People Riding Buses? Local Transit Officials Are Seeking Solutions," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 21 June 2019

EARLIER POSTS
"What's Next for Cedar Rapids Transit," 20 November 2018
"Cedar Rapids Rolls Out Bus Line Changes," 4 August 2017

Need workers? First, lighten up

Our organizations are more effective and less fragile when all the people involved don't look alike, don't think alike, aren't coming from the same place. Diversity has a real, positive effect across the board for how well organizations are able to execute and how well they're able to find their way forward.

--BEN DILLON, co-owner and chief strategy officer for Geonetric

(Source: Cedar Rapids Gazette)

It is not a sign of success that most places in Iowa are losing population, particularly among young people of working age. 92 of Iowa's 99 counties have either lost population in the 2010s, or gained more slowly than the nation as a whole; that's 93 percent of our counties, higher than the national average of 86 percent (Ozimek, Fikri and Lettieri 2019: 7). Exactly three counties--Johnson (Iowa City), Polk and Dallas (Des Moines and vicinity)--saw increases of 10+ percent in population aged 25-54, defined as prime working age, between 2007 and 2017. Five more saw marginal increases (0-10 percent): Linn (Cedar Rapids), Scott (Davenport), Story (Ames), Warren (south of Des Moines), and Jefferson (Fairfield). Though that short list of counties includes the state's largest, 59 percent of Iowans live in a county that lost prime-working-age population (pp. 9-10).

I have used population growth as a surrogate measure of a place's success, mostly because data are easy to obtain and work with; turns out it's significantly meaningful in its own right. A recent Economic Innovation Group report cites many deleterious effects of population loss (in most but not all cases, pp. 14-27):

• faster loss of prime working age population
• lower employment rate of those in prime working age population
• lower proportion of high-skill workers (because they're the ones able to move)
• loss of housing value, affecting family wealth, consumer spending and construction employment
• more vacant/abandoned properties
• loss of local government revenue
• loss of "dynamism" (fewer startups, lower worker productivity, less attractive workforce)

These situations are not unique to Iowa, of course. Only one county in Illinois, exurban Kendall County, has experienced strong prime-working-age growth in the last decade. Cook County (Chicago) has lost population among this age group, as have all of its "collar counties," especially Lake and McHenry. While Forsyth County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem) has gained prime-working-age population, but they've tended to be in lower-wage jobs (Porter 2019).

Time Warner Center, New York City (Getty Images, used without permission)

The story of the 21st century American economy has been spectacular, almost unbearable, growth in a few "superstar cities," with rest trying to catch up while still cleaning up from the 20th century industrial phase. As Eduardo Porter explains in The New York Times:

[A] limited set of successful cities... draw both highly-educated workers seeking well-paid jobs and high-tech companies that want to employ them... The new pattern of economic development amounts to a fundamental break from the decades after World War II, when poorer and generally smaller cities were catching up with richer, bigger places. In recent years, this convergence stopped. Many midsize cities and small towns that found manufacturing-based prosperity in the 20th century have lost their footing in the tech-heavy economy of the 21st (pp. B1, B6).

As a result, writes Richard Florida, We now have two distinct sets of metro areas based on skills: those with high concentrations of cognitive and people skills (which are closely correlated at 0.86), and others with high levels of motor skills. The unemployment rate for motor skills workers fluctuates over time but is trending higher, while the rate for the other two groups is flat and remains low even in recessions. Their geographic separation means that places, too, experience consistently positive or varying-but-trending-negative economies. Less-educated workers, in fact, do best in places that are dominated by cognitive and people skills (Florida 2019).

So, what is to be done? You could try resentment; President Trump and Governor Reynolds would be grateful for your support, thought once in office they've done more to feed resentment than actually doing anything about it. You could try luring a big employer with a tax-break, though there are plenty of sad experiences to advise you otherwise: Winston-Salem's incentives lured Dell in 2005 (it left town in 2009) and Caterpillar, which has created about a third of the jobs it said it would (Porter 2019). You could swing for the fences with a big project like a stadium or a casino; the track record for those is even worse than for economic incentives.

State Rte 175 through Grundy Center seems ripe for a road diet.
Remarkably, I-DOT is willing, but the residents are not.
(Google Maps screen capture)

So what is to be done is the un-flashy and un-quick process of improving local capacity. Vey and Love find support for enhancing the capacity of places through transformative and inclusive design that facilitate business development and individual creativity; enhancing the capacity of individuals with skill development and mentoring (see also Florida 2019); and inclusive community engagement.

The report from Economic Innovation Group concludes with an intriguing proposal for "heartland visas," where skilled immigrants would be admitted to "places confronting chronic population stagnation or loss as a means of boosting economic dynamism and fiscal stability" (p. 37). Unlike existing H-1B visas, immigrants would not be tied to a specific job or employer, though they would need to find a job or start a business "within a reasonable period of time." The program would be optional for local communities, so each place would decide for itself whether it wanted to play. Something like the heartland visas, combined with already-low cost of living compared with superstar cities, could facilitate an influx of skilled immigrants into struggling regions of the country, including most of Iowa.

The word "facilitate," however, does not mean "make it happen." I see three barriers, from the immigrants' perspectives, to making this happen. Are there employers with well-paying jobs and markets for entrepreneurship? Is the place otherwise attractive, with the urbanism that allows for density and vibe?

White supremacistwear at a Trump rally in Orlando (swiped from Twitter)

The third barrier is less tangible than the economic and physical ones, but it may be just as important: how welcoming is the community? Few people are willing to go where they're not welcome and, with the President of the United States leading by example, immigrants (and people of color, and so forth) are hearing loud and clear in many ways that they are not welcome. MAGA hats may make the wearer feel badass, but they send a clear message of hostility to people not like them. Des Moines, one of Iowa's most successful places, might get away for awhile with their anti-upzoning ordinance, but most places can't afford that luxury. [8/7/19: The intent and impact of this ordinance may be more complicated than it first seemed; see Sisson 2019 with hat tips to Phillip Platz and Seth Gunnerson.] The shooter this past weekend at the Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas, was clearly deranged, but nonetheless reflects a zeitgeist that is all too widespread. "How do you stop these people?" Trump asked a rally in May. "Shoot them!" came a response. Well, of course you do. "That's only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement," Trump chuckled amidst the cheers.

What does it mean to welcome immigrants? It surely means more than not shooting them, and even more than just allowing them to come. Welcome requires affirmation and outreach. In St. Louis, the Mosaic Project connects immigrants with peers in their industries, offer resources to entrepreneurs, and provides mentoring and support for spouses. Global Louisville is a public-private partnership that offers mentorship and business development assistance as well as coaching local businesses in cultural fluency. The Charleston (SC) Regional Development Alliance offers similar services to newcomers and long-time residents. Columbus (OH) offers global fluency training to local businesses. "You have to create a welcoming tonality of your local community at the same time you have to be attracting international people," says Mosaic Project executive director Betsy Cohen. "If you bring the seed, and the soil isn't receptive, it won't thrive" (Barker, Gootman and Bouchet 2019).

Struggling places could learn a lot from successful cities. That would start by ignoring the dystopian rhetoric conservatives are selling, and seeing cities as they really are. "Instead of bleeding residents, much of urban America is growing," writes Washington Post reporter Griff Witte (2019).

Rather than scaring away young, educated workers, cities have become a magnet for them. Once a turnoff for corporate investment and development, many urban neighborhoods have become the most coveted places to be.

Residents of the depopulating places of America need to recognize that our towns are not going to look like they used to. They may be more diverse, or they may be more desolate. They can either be different-and-thriving, or continue to die. Folks need to get over whatever fears and dislikes prejudice them against "the other." And then they need actively to reach out to welcome the people their places sorely need.

MAIN SOURCE: Adam Ozimek, Kenan Fikri, and John Lettieri, From Managing Decline to Building the Future: Could a Heartland Visa Help Struggling Regions? (Economic Innovation Group, April 2019)

OTHER SOURCES
Rachel Barker, Marek Gootman, and Max Bouchet, "Welcoming Communities Make for Globally-Competitive City-Regions," The Avenue, 5 August 2019
Richard Florida, "How 3 Skill Sets Explain U.S. Economic Geography," City Lab, 16 July 2019
Eduardo Porter, "A Bigger Gap for Not-So-Big Cities," New York Times, 17 July 2019, B1 & B6
Jennifer S. Vey and Hanna Love, "Demands for Place are Reshaping Our Communities, But How Can the Benefits Be More Widely Shared?" The Avenue, 24 June 2019
Graf Witte, "Trump Says Cities Are 'A Mess.' They're Actually Enjoying a Golden Age," Washington Post, 3 August 2019

EARLIER POSTS
"Small Towns, Rural Areas, and State Legislatures," 11 June 2019
"Iowa Losing Millennials, Needs Workers," 14 February 2019
"What is the Future of Iowa's Small Towns?" 3 July 2018