News aggregator

On Tuesday, The Daily Beast ran my new Housing-Mortgage Stress Index. While the U.S. housing market saw a sharp drop in July and millions of homeowners remain underwater, housing market troubles vary significantly by metro region.

The Housing-Mortgage Stress Index shows the U.S. metros whose housing markets — and homeowners — face the highest levels of stress and danger of foreclosure and falling prices. The index, developed with my collaborator Charlotta Mellander, is based on three variables:

• Negative equity — percent of mortgages where owners owe more than their homes are worth.
• Loan-to-value ratio — total Mortgage Debt Outstanding divided by Total Property Value — both from Core Logic.
• Monthly mortgage cost-to-income ratio from the U.S. Census American Community Survey.

The index weights all three variables equally and covers 142 U.S. metros.

The first map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute based on data from Core Logic, shows the percentages of mortgages that are underwater across U.S. metros. Las Vegas tops the list with nearly three-quarters of all mortgages underwater. More than half of all mortgages are underwater in Stockton, Modesto, Vallejo-Fairfield, Bakersfield, and Riverside, California; Port St. Lucie, Orlando, Cape Coral, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Phoenix, and Reno. In Miami, Tampa, and Detroit, more than 45 percent of all mortgages are underwater.

The second map shows the performance of U.S. metros on the overall Housing-Mortgage Stress Index. The most troubled metros are located primarily in California, Florida, and Nevada. Nine of the top 20 troubled metros – including all five of the top five – are located in California (Stockton, Modesto, Vallejo-Fairfield, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Bakersfield-Delano, along with Fresno, Visalia-Porterville, Sacramento, and Salinas). The six Florida metros on the list are Miami, Orlando, Port St. Lucie, Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, Lakeland-Winter Haven, and Palm Bay-Melbourne. Rounding out the top 20 metros are Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada; Phoenix; Provo, Utah; and Greely, Colorado.

Among large metros — those with more than 1 million people — Tampa, Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego, Jacksonville, Washington, D.C., Virginia Beach, Chicago, and L.A. show high levels of housing-mortgage stress, along with the five noted above — Riverside, Las Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Miami.

There is still a great deal of localized stress in the U.S. housing market, and recovery is likely to take a lot longer than most people anticipate.

Most restaurants assume that their customers come from within an 8-minute drive time or less. By looking at customer data, you can identify who your customers are, and just as equally important, who they aren’t. Understanding who your customers are is an important first step and is a foundation for new locations, analyzing new markets, [...]

On Sunday, August 29, Richard Florida was interviewed on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. They discussed The Great Reset and how cities will change as Americans adapt to a world after the recession. Click the image below to watch the interview.

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Last Friday, my list of America’s Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others.

The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the performance of all U.S. metros on our Brainiest Metros Index developed with my colleague Charlotta Mellander. The index is based on three variables:

• The share of adults 25 years of age and older with a PhD, master’s, or professional degree (from the U.S. Census American Community Survey).
• Computer scientists and mathematicians as a share of all employment.
• Scientists (physical, biological, social) as a share of total metro employment (both from Bureau of Labor Statistics).

The Index weights all three variables equally and covers 339 U.S. metro regions.

Now let’s look quickly at how U.S. metros perform on these three key factors that make up the overall index.

The first chart above maps U.S. metros on the first variable – the share of adults with a PhD, master’s, or professional degree. The blue shaded areas show regions that score highly on this variable. Washington, D.C. is the clear leader among larger metros (those with more than one million people). Greater Boston and the San Francisco Bay area also have considerable concentrations. But the highest-scoring metros are all college towns that are home to large research-intensive universities – Ithaca (Cornell), Boulder (University of Colorado), Corvallis (Oregon State), Charlottesville (University of Virginia), State College (Penn State), Iowa State (University of Iowa), Lawrence (University of Kansas), and Gainesville (University of Florida).

The second map shows U.S. metros on the second variable – computer scientists and mathematicians as a share of total metro employment. California’s Silicon Valley-San Jose rates highly, along with Durham in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Washington, D.C., Boulder, Boston, Austin, Seattle, and several others.

The third map traces U.S. metros on the third variable – scientists as a share of all metro employment. The high-ranking metros here are almost all significant university towns.

But to what extent is metro “braininess” associated with better rates of economic performance? Human capital is a key driver of economic performance, according to a wide range of economic studies. And the Brainiest Metros Index reflects a small but high-powered subset of human capital. To get at this, we ran a series of correlation analyses and scattergraphs comparing the Brainiest Metro Index to measures of regional economic output, income, and wages; innovation and high-tech industry; housing prices; job and class structures; and even metropolitan happiness and well being. These are preliminary, exploratory analyses that simply point to associations between variables. We don’t make any claims here about the direction of causality, and we acknowledge that intervening variables may come into play.

Brainier metros have better economic outcomes, being closely associated with economic output measured as gross regional product per capita (with a correlation of. 556), regional income (.563), and regional wages (.646). Metro braininess also goes along with higher housing prices, whether measured by the Case-Shiller Index (.449 ) or by Census data on housing values (.358).

Brainier metros also have higher levels of innovation, measured as patents (.571), and have higher levels of high-tech industry (.698).

Brainier metros also reflect broader regional occupational and class structures. They are positively associated with the creative class (.77) and negatively associated with the working class (-.53).

And brainier metros tend to have happier populations. The correlation between the Brainiest Metros Index and Gallup’s measure of metropolitan happiness and well-being is.566.

This poses significant implications for economic development policy, which I pointed out at The Daily Beast:

Though luring new factories and building new stadiums lend themselves to outsize media attention and ostentatious ribbon-cutting ceremonies, the less glamorous work of building up local knowledge assets and leveraging existing university campuses yields far greater and lasting economic gains. Unlike incentive packages and new stadiums, which, despite their price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars, too often turn out to provide benefits that are scant or fleeting, knowledge assets like research universities can’t move; they are rooted in the local economy. These brainy metros not only demonstrate a better approach to stimulating state and local economic development, they are helping to rebuild the US economy as a whole.

Downtown Siloam Springs
Destination Downtown Conference – September 13-15

Main Street Arkansas Calendar August 30 – September 3, 2010
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MONDAY Nancy – off
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY Cary – Blytheville Rotary; Susan – off
FRIDAY Susan – off
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Brownfield Fund Opportunity
Grant Opportunity
Know a Do-Gooder?
Preservation Wiki
Advisory Boards: Should We Have One?
Grant Opportunity

Brownfields Fund Opportunity
This is to let you know that the proposal guidelines for the FY2011 Brownfields Assessment, Revolving Loan Fund, and Cleanup grant competition were released today.

Proposals are due October 15.

The guidelines are posted on the Brownfields website: http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/applicat.htm

HUD ANNOUNCES $189 MILLION AVAILABLE TO REVITALIZE COMMUNITIES
Obama Administration prioritizes early childhood education, community supports with $124 million in HOPE VI awards and $65 million in Choice Neighborhoods pilot grants

http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page/portal/HUD/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2010/HUDNo.10-185

Know a Do-Gooder?
We bet you do, and now you can recognize their efforts by telling us about them!
We are pleased to announce Foundation for the Mid South Do-Gooders—an innovative online program to highlight good deeds in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The program was established with $300,000 to give Mid-Southerners the voice to decide what to fund within their communities and states.
Visit our brand new, interactive website and nominate organizations and individuals, contributing to or supporting great deeds within their communities. No good deed is too big or too small to be considered. Nominations will be accepted until September 17, and, beginning October 3, the public will be invited to visit our website and vote to determine which finalists will receive grant awards. To nominate a Do-Gooder or review the rules and eligibility, go to www.fndmidsouth.org/do-gooders.

Preservation Wiki Seeks Contributors

Preservapedia, is a wiki-style (think Wikipedia) encyclopedia for preservation professionals sponsored by the National Center for Preservation Training and Technology. Their staff and interns have contributed over 300 articles on topics from linoleum to landscapes and they are seeking editors to help add, edit or expand articles. For more information see http://www.ncptt.nps.gov/preservation-wiki-seeks-contributors/ or contact Ed FitzGerald at admin@preservapedia.org.

Advisory Boards – What Is It? Should We Have One?
http://www.blueavocado.org/content/what-advisory-board-and-should-we-have-one

Grant Opportunity
Surface Transportation Environment and Planning Cooperative Research Program
The purpose of this e-mail is to make you aware of, and to ask you to share with your local partners, the most recent Federal Register Notice on the proposed FY2011 Surface Transportation Environment and Planning Cooperative Research Program (STEP). The notice announces revisions to the STEP implementation strategy for FY 2011 and to request suggested lines of research for the FY 2011 STEP via the STEP Web site at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/hep/step/index.htm in anticipation of future surface transportation legislation.
The full Notice is available at:
• Text version: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-07-02/html/2010-15949.htm
• PDF version: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-07-02/pdf/2010-15949.pdf
STEP is an FHWA-administered source of funding for research related to planning, environment and realty. The FHWA anticipates that the STEP or a similar program to provide resources for national research on issues related to planning, environment, and realty will be included in future surface transportation legislation.
Stakeholder input is required to identify the research topics that should receive priority consideration. Therefore, we are seeking input from all of our partners on the FY 2011 STEP.
FHWA will use STEP to fund research, field demonstrations, technology transfer, conferences, and workshops, as well as portions of various pooled fund research efforts. We anticipate that grants and cooperative agreements will continue to require a 50% match and that research contracts will not require a match.
The Office of Planning, Environment and Realty (HEP) has developed STEP research emphasis areas and has identified contacts for each (see below). The STEP contacts can answer questions that you may have regarding research planned or underway within a particular emphasis area.

A new report from our Martin Prosperity Institute team charts the geography of class in Toronto. The map below shows the deep underlying economic – class - divisions of the city and can also help us understand the current polarized mayor’s race.

The map shows the concentration of three broad classes of work across the city’s census tracts. The kind of work people do is the hallmark of social-economic class and the map shows a city where the dominant classes occupy, literally, two different social, economic, and geographic spaces. This segmented pattern mirrors the same trend identified by earlier research on the worsening residential segmentation of the city highlighted by my University of Toronto colleague David Hulchanski.

Higher-paying, higher-skill creative class jobs – in fields spanning science and technology; business and management; arts, culture, and entertainment; health care and education – are concentrated in a T-shape pattern radiating out of the downtown core of the city. Lower-skill, lower-wage jobs surround the creative class T and are concentrated in more outlying areas. Toronto’s geography reflects a city that has become almost completely post-industrial: There are very, very few districts left in the city where working class jobs are the dominant concentration. But where those jobs are can help us understand the mayor’s race and Toronto’s increasingly class-polarized politics.

The two leading candidates come from completely different economic and geographic worlds. The only working class concentrations in the upper left-hand quadrant of the map are in or very close to Rob Ford’s city council riding. Prior to running for mayor, George Smitherman represented the Toronto Centre Provincial riding, an area that is at the virtual apex of the creative class zone.

Toronto needs to come to grips with its growing class divide, and to develop strategies that can begin to address it if it wants to retain the tolerance, social cohesion, and commitments to social justice which have so long been its hallmarks.

In my last post, I mapped the projected growth in service jobs across America’s metro regions. Today, I look at a subset of those higher-paying, higher-skill jobs for knowledge, professional, and creative workers that make up the creative class. More than 35 million people are currently employed in creative class work in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law, health care, and education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment. The creative class makes up roughly a third of total employment and accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries in America. Creative class employment has seen relatively low rates of unemployment during the course of the economic crisis. Creative class jobs will make up roughly half of all projected U.S. employment growth – adding 6.8 million new jobs by 2018.

The map (above) plots the projected creative class job growth across U.S. metros. The biggest gainers are, by definition, the biggest regions. Greater New York tops the list with a projected gain of 250,000+ jobs, followed by Los Angeles (184,241), Greater Washington, D.C. (143,227), Chicago (139,577), Atlanta (106,148), Boston (103,120), Dallas (98,373), Philadelphia (92,187), Minneapolis-St. Paul (89,188), and Houston (88,024).

But job growth is a function of population size; it’s expected that large regions will dominate the list of the biggest job generators. So, the next map plots the projected percentage change in creative class jobs for U.S. metros. Gainesville, FL – home to the University of Florida – is the biggest projected gainer, with a projected 17.7 percent increase in creative class jobs, followed by Richmond, VA (17.5 percent), Greater Washington, D.C. (17.4 percent), Morgantown, WV (17.01 percent), Punta Gorda, FL (16.9 percent), Sioux Falls, SD (16.7 percent), Ocala, FL (16.5 percent), Columbia, MO (16.4 percent), and Durham, NC (16.4 percent). The only large metro to make the list is Greater Washington, D.C., and college towns stand out, as well as a couple of smaller Florida communities where jobs are growing off of a small existing base.

The good news is that creative class jobs will continue to grow and provide high-wage, high-skill employment for a large and significant share of the American workforce. It’s important to recognize that not all of these jobs require college degrees. Though nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of college graduates go on to do this kind of work, four in 10 creative class workers do not hold college degrees, according to analysis by my colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute. The bad news is that creative class jobs will be geographically concentrated. That, combined with the decline of blue-collar jobs and the bifurcation of the workforce into high-pay, creative class jobs and much lower-pay service class jobs, will contribute to mounting economic, social, and geographic inequality. As a nation, we have to increase the number of creative class jobs, but we also need to do much, much more to improve service work as I noted in my previous post.

At bottom, a jobs strategy needs to start from a fundamental principle: That each and every human being is  creative and that we can only grow, develop, and prosper by harnessing the full creativity of each of us. For the first time in history, future economic development requires further human development. This means develop a strategy to nurture creativity across the board – on the farm, in the factory, and in offices, shops, non-profits, and a full gamut of service class work, as well as within the creative class. Our future depends on it.

Our Aug edition of Community Matters – newsletter for the public sector – http://tinyurl.com/2caer5w # Buxton employees welcomed home the troops at DFW airport this morning. Thank you for your service! http://tweetphoto.com/41299941 # Healthcare Insights from Buxton http://www.buxtonco.com/healthcarenews/082510/index.html # Kroger partners with Shell for gas discounts in Texas http://sbne.ws/r/5sE3 # 0

Our Aug edition of Community Matters – newsletter for the public sector – http://tinyurl.com/2caer5w # Buxton employees welcomed home the troops at DFW airport this morning. Thank you for your service! http://tweetphoto.com/41299941 # Healthcare Insights from Buxton http://www.buxtonco.com/healthcarenews/082510/index.html # Kroger partners with Shell for gas discounts in Texas http://sbne.ws/r/5sE3 #

The Philips Livable Cities Award is now accepting entries!

This award is a global initiative designed to encourage individuals, businesses, and community and non-governmental groups to develop practical, achievable ideas for improving the health and well-being of people living in cities – ideas which can then be translated into reality.

The award is being overseen by a supervisory panel of independent experts in three award categories: Well-Being Outdoors; Independent Living; and Healthy Lifestyle at Work and Home. The overall winning idea from any of these three categories and an idea from each of the two remaining categories will receive grants.

Submission deadline is October 28, 2010. Further information on the award criteria and categories plus an entry form can be found here.

Philips have also established a new featured group on LinkedIn – called “Creating Healthy, Livable Cities” – to facilitate an issues-driven discussion among people interested in making cities more healthy and livable places. Join the discussion here.

Arnold Kling is all over it:

Old consensus: we need Freddie and Fannie in order to make housing “affordable.”

New consensus: we need them in order to “prevent further house price declines,” in other words, to make housing less affordable …

Government interference in housing markets, which helped produce the disorder known as the financial crisis, is still producing disorder…

The effort to prop up home prices does the following:

1. Diverts capital from other uses.

2. Uses up taxpayer money that could be spent on other things.

3. Increases the wealth of people who find suckers to buy their houses at too-high prices.

4. Decreases the wealth of the suckers who buy now.

5. Decreases the liquidity and mobility of people who cannot find rational buyers for their houses because rational buyers do not buy into a rigged market.

6. Decreases the investment opportunities for rational buyers, who are unable to buy homes in an un-rigged market.

The old government-backed system had a rationale of sorts in the old industrial order, providing a “geographic Keynesianism” which spurred consumption of durable goods coming off of U.S. assembly lines – everything from cars to refrigerators, washer-dryers, air-conditioners, and TVs. But little of that is produced in the U.S. anymore – it’s now a subsidy to offshore manufacturers. And the economy is far less manufacturing-intensive and far more knowledge-driven. These newer economic structures come along with much greater labor market flexibility and mobility, and conventional housing policy is thus at odds with Kling’s point #5. It’s time to put this bad policy to bed. But, we’re faced with an Olsonian political bind where there is not enough political clout to counter the housing and related lobby. And as Olson long ago pointed out, it’s just these kinds of political constraints that put nations and regions on the road to economic decline. Are counter-forces sufficient to overcome them? That seems to be the real question.

The past week or so, I’ve been tracking where new jobs will be created in America. Today, I look at the sector of the economy that accounts for the largest share of all jobs – the service class. More than 60 million American workers do this kind of low-skill, low-wage, routine service work, making up 45 percent of the work force. These service class jobs are projected to make up more than roughly half of all projected new jobs out to 2018 – 7.1 million new jobs, including 835,000 projected new home health and personal care aides, 400,000 new customer service positions, 400,000 new food preparation workers, and 375,000 new retail sales clerks.

The map above plots the growth in service class jobs across U.S. metros. The biggest gainers are the biggest regions. Greater New York again tops the list with more than 285,000 projected new service class jobs, followed by Los Angeles (192,364), Chicago (174,704), Houston (111,727), Atlanta (106,132), Greater Washington, D.C. (96,857), Philadelphia (96,133), Phoenix (94,189), Minneapolis (85,694), and Dallas (85,521).

But job growth is a function of population size; it’s expected that large regions will dominate the list of the biggest job generators. So, the next map plots the projected percentage change in service class jobs for U.S. metros. Two Texas metros – Brownsville (11.8 percent) and McAllen (11.6 percent) – top this list, followed by Rochester, MN (11.5 percent), Duluth, MN (11.4 percent), Alexandria, LA (11.3 percent), Vineland, NJ (11.1 percent), Greenville, NC (11 percent), Hickory, NC (11 percent), Waterbury, CT (11 percent), and Atlantic City, NJ (11 percent).

The next map shows the regions with the largest projected share of their work force doing service class work out to 2018. The largest share of service class work is, not surprisingly, in resort towns and tourist destinations where nearly two-thirds of the work force is projected to be employed in service class work: Ocean City, MD (63.9 percent), Atlantic City, NJ (63.4 percent), Myrtle Beach, SC (62.8 percent), West Palm Beach, FL (59.8 percent), Bradenton, FL (59.6 percent), and Punta Gorda, FL (59.4 percent).

Service class jobs compose the biggest share of all jobs, and are projected to grow considerably in the future. We can no longer be content to see service class jobs as low-skill, low-paid work. A serious job creation strategy must see service class jobs as a key to providing better, more engaging, higher-wage employment. Americans need to remember that manufacturing jobs were not always good jobs. A century ago, they were dirty, dangerous, low-wage jobs. Business strategies to improve productivity, the labor movement, public policies that enabled workers to form unions and to bargain collectively, and the post-Depression, post WWII social compact between capital and labor made them good jobs.

That is the key task of a jobs strategy today – we have to make service class jobs good jobs. The way to do that is to begin to improve the quality of those jobs and to see service class workers as sources of innovation, continuous improvement, and productivity gains. Service class jobs are the last frontier of real inefficiency in the economy. Already, companies like The Container Store, Whole Foods, Best Buy, The Four Seasons, and Starbucks are developing new and better strategies to engage their workers, improve pay, and promote from within. These efforts are in their infancy and much more can be done to extend them.

The Obama administration should convene a national service jobs summit, calling together industry executives, unions and workers’ organizations, and leading experts to define a strategy for upgrading service class jobs. It also means Americans will have to consider paying more for services. Henry Ford instituted his famous $5 day to enable his workers to buy cars. As a nation, we increased blue-collar pay and we – all of us – paid more for cars, appliances, and durable goods coming off the assembly line. In return, large parts of our work force were able to make enough to enjoy a decent middle-class life. What is more important to you, what would you really rather pay more for – a new car or the people who take care of your children or your ailing parents, or even the people who prepare the food you feed your family? Improving service jobs means spreading the costs of higher pay across our economy and all of us as consumers.

In my next post, I turn to the other big area of job growth in the U.S. economy – the projected growth of higher-skill, knowledge-based, creative class jobs.

My new paper on Canada’s creative class, done in collaboration with my MPI colleagues Kevin Stolarick and Charlotta Mellander, is out. It’s titled “Talent, Technology and Tolerance in Canadian Regional Development” and is published in the latest issue of the Canadian Geographer.

Here’s the abstract:

This article examines the factors that shape economic development in Canadian regions. It employs path analysis and structural equation models to isolate the effects of technology, human capital and/or the creative class, universities, the diversity of service industries and openness to immigrants, minorities and gay and lesbian populations on regional income. It also examines the effects of several broad occupations groups—business and finance, management, science, arts and culture, education and health care—on regional income. The findings indicate that both human capital and the creative class have a direct effect on regional income. Openness and tolerance also have a significant effect on regional development in Canada. Openness towards the gay and lesbian population has a direct effect on both human capital and the creative class, while tolerance towards immigrants and visible minorities is directly associated with higher regional incomes. The university has a relatively weak effect on regional incomes and on technology as well. Management, business and finance and science occupations have a sizeable effect on regional income; arts and culture occupations have a significant effect on technology; health and education occupations have no effect on regional income.

The full paper is here.

Historic Downtown Eureka Springs

Destination Downtown Conference – September 13-15

Main Street Arkansas Calendar August 23 - 27, 2010
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MONDAY
TUESDAY Cary & Mark – Arkansas Economic Developers Conference – Hot Springs; Greg & Susan – Siloam Springs (merchant & board visits)
WEDNESDAY Cary & Mark – Arkansas Economic Developers Conference – Hot Springs; Greg & Susan – Rogers (merchant & board visits)
THURSDAY Cary – Breakthrough Solutions – Federal Reserve Bank, Little Rock; Mark, Susan, Nancy – Osceola (museum site visit)
FRIDAY Cary, Greg, Mark – Arkansas City & Choctaw Island (market analysis visit)
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Vote for Main Street Helena
Age of the City
Park Sponsorships
Networking. Old School

Vote for Main Street Helena & Help Them Win $25k
http://my.preservationnation.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9353&security=2862&s_interest=2962

Beyond City Limits. The Age of Nations is Over. It’s the Age of the City
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/beyond_city_limits

This Park Sponsored By. . .
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=506217

Get Back to Business Networking
http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/taking-it-offline-getting-back-to-traditional-business-networking/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YoungentrepreneurcomBlog+%28YoungEntrepreneur.com+Blog%29

The United States has seen a steady erosion of blue-collar work over the past several decades. We define blue-collar, working class jobs as those which primarily make use of physical skill or manual labor. These occupations include not only factory work or production occupations, but jobs in construction, materials moving, transportation, installation, and repair. Blue-collar, working class jobs currently account for 23 percent of all U.S. employment. Blue-collar occupations and the regions that specialize in this kind of work have seen the highest levels of unemployment and the greatest vulnerability to the economic crisis. The decline of high-paying, blue-collar jobs for lower-skilled workers has caused considerable concern that the U.S. is losing an important source of good, family-supporting jobs, and that the American labor market is becoming more uneven and increasingly split between higher-paying knowledge work and lower-paying routine service work. But what will the geography of blue-collar work look like in the future?

The map above shows the metros with the biggest projected gains in blue-collar work. Not surprisingly, the biggest metros top this list. The biggest gainer is Greater New York which is projected to gain 41,084 working-class jobs followed by Houston (32,249), Chicago (30,482), Los Angeles (28,811), Phoenix (23,957), Atlanta (22,754), Washington, D.C. (21,387), Dallas (19,315), Riverside (16,755), and Las Vegas (14,781).

But job growth is a function of population size; it’s expected that large regions will dominate the list of the biggest job generators. So, the next map plots the projected percentage change in working-class jobs for U.S. metros. The regions with the largest projected working class increases are all in the Sun Belt: Pascagoula, MS (8.2 percent), Naples, FL (8.1 percent), Punta Gorda, FL (7.9 percent), Santa Fe, NM (7.4 percent), Cape Coral, FL (7.4 percent), Farmington, NM (7.4 percent), Jacksonville, NC (7.2 percent), Las Vegas ( 7.1 percent), Grand Junction, CO (7 percent), and St. George, UT (7 percent). The places with the slowest projected growth are mainly traditional manufacturing metros such as Elkhart (.2 percent) and Columbus, IN (1.06 percent), Muskegon, MI (1.16 percent), Oshkosh, WI (1.41 percent), Hickory, NC (.68 percent), and Dalton, GA (.46 percent), among others.

The next map shows the regions that are projected to have the highest share of their workforce doing blue-collar work out to 2018. Elkhart, IN, tops the list with nearly half (48.5 percent) of its workforce in blue-collar jobs – though that is down from 51.3 percent in 2008. It is followed by Dalton, GA (45.9 percent), Morristown, TN (40.9 percent), Houma, LA (40 percent), Decatur, AL (37.6 percent), Fort Smith, AR (36.5 percent), Hickory, NC (35.8 percent), Odessa, TX (35.4 percent), Gainesville, GA (35.3 percent), and Sheboygan, WI (34.3 percent).

The good news is that the U.S. will continue to create relatively high-paying working class jobs. These jobs will continue to provide good livelihoods for the workers fortunate enough to have them. The bad news is that their rate of growth will be sluggish and not nearly enough to provide the amount of good, family-supporting jobs required to undergird a middle class of lower-skilled workers. The harsh reality is that blue-collar, working class jobs in the U.S. are increasing slowly, and they will grow the slowest in traditional manufacturing and industrial regions and communities whose economic and social life has revolved around these jobs. There is little policy-makers can do – aside from declaring a trade war – to bring back large numbers of these high-paying jobs. But they can develop strategies to improve not just the wages but the content of blue-collar work, by engaging workers more fully and seeing them as a source of innovation. And they can help to infuse more creativity and design into manufacturing products, helping to broaden their market and counteract the trend toward declining prices. And policy-makers will have to develop strategies for improving wages and the content of work in other faster-growing segments of the economy, a point I will get to in my next post, which will cover the projected growth of service jobs.

Please check out a recent post on the blog, Blood and Milk, which I consider to be an excellent international development blog.  The author of the blog provides international development career search and guidance for just $2.  In this recent post, you can see feedback about the service.  If you are a young professional or thinking of a career change, this might be a useful service.  It is only $2!

Filed under: Community Development, Community Economic Development, Community Organizing, Disaster Relief, Faith, Favorite Personal Blogs, Favorite Personal Links, Globalization, Holistic Missions, International Development, Jobs, Microfinance, Nonprofit Management, Nonprofits, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Justice, Social Work Tagged: Foreign Service Careers, International Development, International Development Jobs, Micro credit, Microfinance, NGOs, Nonprofit Jobs, Nonprofits, Young Professionals

Comparing urban vs. Suburban locations – which is better for your healthcare practice? http://tinyurl.com/28jda3f # 0

Comparing urban vs. Suburban locations – which is better for your healthcare practice? http://tinyurl.com/28jda3f # 0

Comparing urban vs. Suburban locations – which is better for your healthcare practice? http://tinyurl.com/28jda3f #