Who's Going To Win In November?

Meet Democraps Jon Ossoff, Conor Lamb and Andrew Janz

170 members of the American Political Science Association who specialize in presidential history participated in an annual poll that ranked every U.S. president. Trump displaced one-termer James Buchanan-- a pro-slavery Democrat from Pennsylvania-- as the nation's worst president. It was obvious from the second Putin installed him in the White House that he would wind up as the worst president ever... but this fast? In an interview yesterday on C-SPAN, historian Douglas Brinkley said "Trump represents kind of a dark underbelly of America." Richard Florida was less specific but tweeted yesterday that "In many ways, the US no longer qualifies as an advanced nation." The point he's been making since Trump took over is that this will ultimately limit ability America's "ability to attract global talent & improve its economic competitiveness."

The new Quinnipiac poll was released yesterday-- a birthday present for me. "American voters say 53 - 38 percent, including 47 - 36 percent among independent voters, they want the Democratic Party to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives this year. Voters say 54 - 39 percent, including 51 - 38 percent among independent voters, they want the Democrats to win control of the U.S. Senate this year." (That's the generic balloting people have been foolishly fretting about over the last month. That Democratic lead is 15 points. Is that why Florida Republican Tom Rooney announced he's retiring yesterday? Or wa sit because Vern Buchanan's lost a state legislative race last Tuesday to an unknown Democratic women in a district not all that far from Rooney's district? Or is because Rooney is still nauseated by Trump?

Not everybody is (nauseated by Trump). [Before we get back to Richard Florida, let me mention that last night Linda Belcher flipped the reddest district a Democrat has won since Trump got to the White House. Kentucky's state House District 49 (Bullitt County) gave Trump a colossal 72% of the vote in 2016. But yesterday voters helped Linda jturn it blue, winning the support of more than 68% of voters. How's that for a swing-- 86 points?] Now, back to Richard Florida. Last week he wrote a post on his blog, The Geography of Trump's First-Year Job Approval. "Trump’s average first-year approval rating," he noted "sits at a lowly 38 percent-- the worst of any president since Gallup started measuring presidential job approval in 1945. But this overall average belies huge variation in that approval rating across the 50 states, according to a recent Gallup poll based on surveys conducted throughout 2017. Indeed, Trump’s approval rating reaches above 60 percent in West Virginia and above 50 percent in 11 other states, including the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Alabama, and Oklahoma... [T]here is a broad Trump approval belt across the Plains, Appalachia, the Deep South, and parts of the Midwest, and a broad disapproval belt on the coasts and in New England, as well as in states like Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, and Minnesota... [T]his jagged geography of Trump’s approval rate mirrors the fundamental contours of America’s long-standing political, economic, and cultural divides."

Opinions of the president reflect the fundamental cleavage of class, which has long divided Americans along political as well as economic lines. Trump’s approval is overwhelmingly concentrated in less affluent, less educated, more working-class states. It is positively associated with the share of workers in blue-collar working-class jobs (0.76), and negatively associated with income (-0.72), wages (-0.79), education (measured as the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree and above, -0.86), and the share of workers doing knowledge, professional, or creative work (-0.72).

Contrary to the idea that support for Trump is a function of rising unemployment, there is no statistical association between Trump’s approval rate and a state’s unemployment rate. The conventional wisdom suggests that Trump’s rise was bolstered by those losing out from America’s gaping inequality. However, the data complicates that story. Approval of Trump is actually higher in states with lower levels of income inequality, approval being negatively correlated with the Gini coefficient measure of income inequality (-0.40). On the other hand, states with higher levels of inequality are much more likely to disapprove of Trump, with a positive correlation between income inequality and the share of people who disapprove of Trump (0.38).

Approval and disapproval of the president powerfully track America’s widening spatial divide. Approval is concentrated in less urbanized states, while disapproval is concentrated in denser, more urbanized ones. Trump’s approval rate is negatively correlated with two measures of urbanity: the urban share of population (-0.52), and to an even greater extent, the urban share of a state’s total land area (-0.62). (Interestingly, neither Trump’s approval nor his disapproval has any statistical connection to the overall population size of states.) Another dividing line is the car. Approval of the president is positively associated with the share of commuters who drive to work alone (0.45).

...Despite his record low level of overall approval, President Trump retains considerable support in traditionally conservative states in the Plains and Deep South and in parts of the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating is not a break with the past; its geography both reflects and reinforces the basic fault lines of class, geography, race, and culture that have long divided this country. If anything, Trump’s support has deepened America’s persistent red-blue divide.

All of this fits the pattern of Trump’s support as being premised on what Ron Brownstein, my colleague at The Atlantic, has aptly dubbed the “coalition of restoration”-- a geographically concentrated band of working class, white, suburban, and rural support that is bent upon restoring a bygone America.

This political backlash not only signals a more reactionary political agenda, it is also an agenda for economic retreat, undermining key pillars of America’s economic growth and rising living standards. “The much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political,” I wrote of the rising tide of conservatism in less prosperous states back in 2011. “American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.”

This is far more the case today.

Not unrelated, the aforementioned Ron Brownstein wrote for CNN yesterday about the places that will decide the 2018 election. He wrote that control of the House will depend on what he calls "red pockets, Romneyland, and blue-collar blues."

Red Pockets

The clearest opportunity for Democrats is the relatively few remaining Republican-held districts in blue metro areas with large populations of college-educated whites, and in many cases substantial minority and youth populations as well. These are places crowded with voters who tilt toward liberal positions on social issues and recoil from Trump's volatile persona, particularly the way he talks about race.

The renewed visibility of gun control issues after the horrific Parkland, Florida, massacre could provide Democrats another lever in these districts, since the Republicans in them have almost universally voted with the National Rifle Association to loosen gun regulations in recent years.

These "red pockets" include the four seats Republicans control in Orange County -- the districts held by Mimi Walters and Dana Rohrabacher and the open seats that will be vacated by Darrell Issa and Ed Royce -- as well as their sole remaining seat in Los Angeles County, held by Steve Knight.

Others that fit this description include the seats in the western Chicago suburbs held by Republican Peter Roskam and in the eastern Denver suburbs held by Mike Coffman; the three suburban Philadelphia seats held by Ryan Costello, Mike Fitzpatrick and Pat Meehan (who has announced he will not seek re-election amid a sex scandal); the northern Virginia seat held by Barbara Comstock; two open seats in New Jersey as well as the one defended by Rep. Leonard Lance; Lee Zeldin's seat in eastern Long Island; the suburban Minneapolis seats now held by Jason Lewis and Erik Paulsen; the Seattle-area seat that Dave Reichert is leaving; as well as the Miami-area seat being vacated by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the nearby seat held by Rep. Carlos Curbelo.

Though Romney carried many of these seats-- often narrowly-- in 2012, Hillary Clinton won all of those listed above in 2016 except for the seats held by Lewis and Fitzpatrick, which Trump won by eyelash margins. These resemble the places where Democrats showed the most dramatic gains in 2017, for instance in their sweep of legislative seats and the huge margins they generated in the governor's race in northern Virginia.

Compounding the GOP's vulnerability, the new congressional map the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued Monday, after earlier ruling that the current district lines represented an impermissible gerrymander, strengthened the Democrats' hand in all three suburban Philadelphia seats.

For Republicans, the key in these booming districts will be whether the good economy helps them recapture voters recoiling from Trump's personal behavior. One complication is these blue-state upper-middle-class suburbs are among the most likely losers from the GOP tax plan, which limits the deductibility of mortgage interest and state and local taxes. Democrats are highly unlikely to win back the House without maximizing their gains in the red pockets.

Romneyland

The next bucket of seats is demographically similar to the red pockets but politically distinct because they are in metro areas that lean much more reliably toward the GOP.

I call this group of seats Romneyland because they are filled with voters who resemble Romney demographically and ideologically: professionals and corporate middle managers who want a president who will shrink government and even pursue a center-right social agenda, but also exude professionalism and decorum.

Romney won virtually every seat in this category in 2012. In 2016, Trump lost ground relative to Romney in almost all of them, though the residual Republican strength was great enough that he still carried many, albeit often narrowly.

The districts in this bucket include the Omaha-area seat held by Don Bacon; the seats in suburban Houston and outside Dallas held by John Culberson and Pete Sessions, respectively; the two suburban Atlanta seats held by Karen Handel and Rob Woodall; David Young's seat outside Des Moines; the Tucson-area seat Martha McSally is vacating to run for the Senate from Arizona; the Lexington, Kentucky-area seat held by Andy Barr; the seats outside Detroit that Dave Trott is vacating and Mike Bishop is defending; and Kevin Yoder's seat in suburban Kansas City, Kansas.

These seats are not immune from the forces threatening the Republicans in the red pockets: Handel, for instance, only narrowly survived last June's special election in Georgia, though her predecessor Tom Price had carried over 60% of the vote there as recently as 2016.

But as Handel's slim victory over Democrat Jon Ossoff showed, Republicans have more of a cushion in these places than in the red pockets. That's partly because more of the white-collar whites in them are social conservatives than their counterparts in the Democratic-leaning metro areas.

Blue-collar blues

The third key test for Democrats is the districts I call "blue-collar blues." These are the blue-collar, exurban, small town and rural seats in states that generally lean Democratic.

These include Republican seats held by John Faso, John Katko and Claudia Tenney in upstate New York; Mike Bost, Rodney Davis and Randy Hultgren in downstate Illinois; the northeast Iowa seat of Rod Blum; Bruce Poliquin's northern Maine district; and the Central Valley, California, seats of Jeff Denham and David Valadao.

These seats present an especially revealing test for Democrats. Former President Barack Obama carried almost all of them at least once and many of them have elected Democratic House members in the recent past. But House Democrats were routed in these places in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections under Obama, and almost all of these districts turned further toward Trump in 2016.

The 2017 results in Virginia and Alabama showed Democrats almost completely failing to crack the GOP's hold on blue-collar and rural voters. But some Democrats argue that terrain is much tougher for the party in the South than in the Northeastern and Midwestern states where these competitive House seats are concentrated.

Democrats see an opening in polling, such as the 2017 average of Gallup's daily approval ratings for Trump, that shows a significant erosion in his support across the Rust Belt among working-class white women, even as he remains very strong among blue-collar white men. Converting that female disillusionment with Trump into votes for Democratic congressional candidates is likely the key to seriously contesting the "blue-collar blue" seats.

One early test will be March's special election in the heavily blue-collar southwestern Pennsylvania district that Republican Rep. Tim Murphy has vacated: Democrat Conor Lamb, a former Marine, is running competitively against Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone in a district Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points.

The Democrats' advantage: in like a lion, out like a Lamb

There he's wrong. Conor Lamb, as we mentioned yesterday, is a truly shit candidate, wrong for the district, wrong for the energy of the day, perfect for the Beltway Democratic establishment and nothing more. Trump-hatred may swing the district towards the Democrats somewhat but Lamb and his campaign are fighting that swing with every move they make. Candidates and campaigns matter. The more garbage candidates like Jon Ossoff and Conor Lamb the DC Democrats nominate, the safer the Republican majority will be. Yesterday, Lamb shot himself in the foot again. This from him... in a district he might have had a chance to win if he had won back the union vote: "I think [$15 an hour] sounds high based on what I’ve been told by many small business owners in our area. I would rather see something that was agreed on by both sides." Republicans already have their candidate. The Democrats desperately need one.

More candidates, for example, like Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA), who happened to mention this to me today: "The Democrats must deserve victory. We should contrast a politics of restoration with a politics of preparing the nation for the future. And we should have candidates run on a bold platform of a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulating magazine clips and an assault weapons ban, supporting net neutrality, making college debt free as Robert Reich has proposed, and strong antitrust enforcement. These policies have broad support among people and particularly younger voters. We need a clear contrast and to stand for a substantive agenda to win."

I'm not 100% sure what category Austin Frerick's Iowa district would be in, but I asked him to take a look and he sent me a note saying that "Folks in Romneyland to those in the blue-collar blue areas loves our economic concentration message. Who doesn't want fair, free, and competitive markets? Only the robber barons of this era don't like this message. It just takes courage to stand up and say enough is enough and refuse that dirty money." As you can probably guess, he's more like a Ro Khanna candidate than from the confused Ossoff GOP-lite school.


UPDATE: How To Win In A Trump District

David Gill has a prescription: "Even in my district (IL-13), which Trump carried by 5 points, voters will respond to a message from a Democrat that actually addresses their concerns-- that's why I came within 0.3% of victory here in 2012, while all other Democrats have lost here by 50 to 60 times that margin. My message of single-payer healthcare, a $15/hour minimum wage, and tuition-free access to public higher education & trade schools resonates with voters here, whether they consider themselves left, right, or somewhere in between. If I can once again get by the corporate-funded establishment Democrats in the primary, as in 2012, I have little doubt that I can succeed in November."

The Plundering Of America

I didn't realize that urbanologist Richard Florida was overtly political. I guess Trump is pissing him off as much as he's pissing off the rest of the country-- and the world.. Yesterday Florida tweeted that "It is the sole motivation of our plutocratic president & leadership. They look at Putin & say: "I can do a lot better plundering the US ..." He was commenting on this David Sirota report at International Business Times. The just of Sirota's article was that on Friday night Trump added a little clause into the Tax Scam bill to further enrich himself. Has any other president ever done anything like that? "Republican congressional leaders and real estate moguls," wrote Sirota, "could be personally enriched by a  real-estate-related provision GOP lawmakers slipped into the final tax bill released Friday evening, according to experts interviewed by International Business Times. The legislative language was not part of previous versions of the bill and was added despite ongoing conflict-of-interest questions about the intertwining real estate interests and governmental responsibilities of President Donald Trump-- the bill’s chief proponent."

The Trump organization and the Kushners (the family of Ivanka's husband, Jared) have overseen vast real estate empires, and top GOP lawmakers writing the tax bill collectively have tens of millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate-related LLCs. The new tax provision would specifically allow owners of large real estate holdings through LLCs to deduct a percentage of their “pass through” income from their taxes, according to experts. Although Trump, who became famous for his real estate holdings, has transitioned into branding in recent years, federal records show Trump has ownership stakes in myriad LLCs.

The new provision was not in the bill passed by the House or the Senate. Instead, it was inserted into the final bill during reconciliation negotiations between Republicans from both chambers. The provision, said experts, would offer a special tax cut to LLCs with few employees and large amounts of depreciable property assets, namely buildings: rent generating apartment and office buildings.

“This helps people who have held property for awhile, like Donald Trump,” David Kamin, an New York University law professor who served as a special assistant to the president for economic policy  in the Obama administration, told IBT. “If you’ve got an LLC that’s a trade or business with a bunch of real estate holdings and few employees, [I] think you’re now golden. You get the deduction.”

Similarly, Urban Institute tax expert Steve Rosenthal told IBT the provision would specifically benefit real estate investors.

“It would benefit real estate businesses especially, which typically operate as pass-through businesses, most often LLCs,” said Rosenthal, a former tax attorney at Ropes & Gray. “An LLC's building, and other depreciable property, would be ‘qualified property’ for purposes of the new test, as long as the LLC had not fully depreciated the property. That would be unlikely, as commercial real property is currently depreciated over 39 years.”

IBT previously reported that 13 GOP lawmakers directly sculpting the bill-- including U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan-- have between $36 million and $163 million worth of ownership stakes in real estate-related LLCs. Those entities generated between $2.6 million and $16 million in “pass through” income and could benefit from the new provision.

Sen. Bob Corker, who was considered a potential “no” vote on the bill, abruptly switched his position upon the release of the final legislation. Federal records reviewed by IBT show that Corker has millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate related LLCs that could also benefit.

“Pass throughs” are business entities that don’t pay corporate income taxes, like partnerships, LLCs and S-Corporations. Instead, they “pass through” income to partners, who then pay personal income taxes on the money they receive. The Senate version of the tax bill would have added a 23 percent deduction for income from pass-throughs to the tax code. The new reconciled tax bill shrinks that deduction to 20 percent but, in a last minute change, added a new way around restrictions that would have kept pass-throughs with large income but few employees from benefiting.

The new bill still has the same income provision but adds a loophole: depreciable property. So instead of being being able to get a large tax cut only if you pay a lot of wages, now you can get the tax cut if you own a lot of property.

“If they were saying before Trump wouldn’t get this because his pass-through firms don’t have employees, that’s clearly no longer the case,” Kamin said.

The Republican congressional zombies-- did you watch Z-Nation Friday night?-- seem to be on autopilot over this massively unpopular Tax Scam. It's almost as if they've become downright fatalistic about the massive electoral losses they know they're about to suffer at the hands of angry voters. And just can't stop themselves. Perhaps they're looking forward to life after Congress... on K Street. As McKay Coppins reported Thursday for The Atlantic, The Republican Nightmare Is Just Beginning-- and they know it. "Even as Moore’s political obituaries were being written, party strategists were bracing for the army of Moore-like insurgents they expect to flood next year’s Republican primaries... [T]he dynamics that made it possible for Moore to win the Republican primary in Alabama are unlikely to change by 2018-- and the consequences of the GOP nominating a slate of toxic standard-bearers could reverberate well beyond the midterms." It's almost as if dozens of mainstream Republican electeds are just giving up and ceding the party to the fringe psychopaths that have been enabled by Fox, Hate Talk Radio, an increasingly turgid education system, and the widespread opioid addiction that now defines "red state America," or at least the Trump base.

The "enhanced" Tax Scam shocked even Nancy Pelosi in its audacity to steal from America and enrich its authors. "With each version," she said yesterday, "the GOP tax scam becomes an even more cowardly, outrageous, and brazen theft from middle class families to corporations and the wealthiest one percent. Slashing the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans even deeper is Republicans’ final insult to hard-working Americans in this deficit-exploding scam of a bill. Republicans went into conference with two bills that raise taxes on tens of millions of middle class families. But instead of actually helping middle class Americans, the GOP throws them a few meager crumbs while slashing taxes for millionaires even deeper. The GOP tax scam’s theft from middle class families to give to the wealthiest is a moral obscenity. The American people see it for exactly the con job it is. And the American people will hold Republicans accountable for the votes they cast next week."

Forget Gentrification-- Our Great Cities Are Being Afflicted With Full-On Plutocratization

The new issue of the Harvard Business Review carried an adaptation by urbanologist Richard Florida from his new book, The New Urban Crisis, warning about "a sterile sameness" that's been hard to miss taking over cities we all used to love and feel inspired by. I don't think Florida is as worried about it as I am... but he's worried too.

Every time I have visited London over the past several years, I invariably hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he will say, “You see that building?” nodding towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel. “Some of the apartments cost £50 million or more. And no one lives there—it’s always dark.”

London, New York, and Paris are being overtaken over by an invasion of the global super-rich, which one writer described as a shift from mere gentrification to full-on “plutocratization.” According to some, this influx is driving artists from cities, turning them into what musician David Byrne called “pleasure domes for the rich.” For a growing number of musicians and artists, the transformation of our cities is personal and palpable. Yes, there’s a certain irony in the spectacle of highly successful rock stars pining after the good old days of cheap rent, cheap drinks, and creative nirvana, even if we can empathize with their frustration at CBGB’s being turned into an upscale clothing store. But artists’ complaints reflect the increasingly intense competition for urban space. Artists, musicians, and other creatives who helped transform old, neglected urban spaces into studios and workspaces in the 1970s and 1980s are being elbowed out of those same places by investment bankers, business professionals, techies, and even the global super-rich.



There’s little doubt that creative urban ecosystems exist in a precarious balance. Take away the ferment that comes from urban mixing, and the result is a sterile sameness. In SoHo today, luxury shops seem to outnumber performance spaces and studios. But even if rising housing prices are making it harder for a new generation of artists and creatives to get a toehold in SoHo and neighborhoods like it, that doesn’t mean that entire cities have become creative dead zones.

So does this change really threaten the creativity of our most vibrant cities? Despite the influx of wealthy people into the urban core and the transformation of some leading creative neighborhoods, there is little evidence of any substantial diminution of these cities’ overall creative capacities. Cities are big places, after all; creativity can and does move from neighborhood to neighborhood. In time, the ongoing transformation of these cities may truly jeopardize their creative impetus, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The global super-rich who are snapping up real estate in superstar cities aren’t really buying “homes,” in the conventional sense of that term, to live in and use. They aren’t looking for places to raise their families or to do productive work. Instead, they’re looking for safe places to park their money. If luxury real estate was once the most obvious way to measure and display wealth as “conspicuous consumption,” it has become something more mundane today-- a new class of economic asset used to store and grow wealth.

New York and London do in fact have considerable shares of the world’s wealthiest people. New York tops the list with more than 100 billionaires and London is sixth with 50. London leads in “ultra-high net worth” individuals with $30 million or more in assets, with New York in fourth place.

But, do the super-rich really damage great cities? While rarely occupied trophy apartments and lights-out buildings certainly make neighborhoods less vibrant, there are simply not enough super-rich people to deaden an entire city or even significant parts of it. New York City, after all, has more than eight million inhabitants and some three million housing units; its 100-plus billionaires and 3,000 or so ultra-high net worth multi-millionaires wouldn’t fill half the seats in Radio City Music Hall.

Ultimately, it’s not so much a plutocratic incursion of billionaires that is transforming many of the world’s great cities, but the much greater numbers of relatively well-off people who are flocking back to them, including the growing ranks of startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and well-paid techies who are trading in their houses in the suburbs for condos, apartments, and townhouses in the city.

The movement of urban high-tech startup companies and talent into urban centers is a real sea change. The leading high tech companies of the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s and even the early 2000s-- like Intel, Apple, and Google-- were all housed in corporate campuses in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s headquarters was in suburban Redmond, Washington. Other high-tech companies clustered along the Route 128 suburbs outside Boston, in the suburbs of Austin, or the office parks of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

That geography has changed dramatically as venture capital investment and startup companies have become much more urban.  Today, dense, urban San Francisco tops suburban Silicon Valley’s as the world’s number one location for venture capital-backed startups. New York City-- and in particular a small area of Lower Manhattan-- is second. Across the U.S., more than half of venture capital investment and nearly six in ten of U.S. startups are in urban zip codes.

Startups and cities are a natural match. Urban areas provide the diversity, creative energy, cultural richness, vibrant street-life, and openness to new ideas that the talent who launch and work for startups is looking for. Their industrial and warehouse buildings provide flexible and reconfigurable work spaces. While many large, well-established tech companies which require large headquarter sites-- like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook to name a few-- remain in the suburbs, the startups that power innovation and growth draw their strength and inspiration from cities.

Cities also help new companies attract talent. Today’s hottest startups concentrate on digital and social media, games, and creative applications, which draw on the deep pools of designers, composers, scenarists, musicians, marketers, and copywriters that can be found in cities.

Still, as technology companies and techies who work for them head back to cities, they are increasingly being blamed for their deepening problems of housing affordability and urban inequality. In spring 2014, protests broke out in Oakland against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from their homes in the city’s gentrifying urban core to their jobs in the corporate campuses of Silicon Valley. In San Francisco’s Mission District, protestors dressed as clowns formed human pyramids, bounced giant exercise balls, and performed the can-can in front of a Google bus.

To what extent are urban startups and the techies who are increasingly settling in cities responsible for rising urban housing prices, inequality, and gentrification? On this, the evidence is actually mixed. There’s no question that the urban tech incursion has put pressure on housing costs, especially in cities like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Seattle. The connections between economic inequality and urban tech are less clear-cut, however. For instance, the presence of startups and venture capital correlate with some measures of inequality but not others. Moreover, tech companies are huge drivers of innovation, economic growth, jobs, and much-needed tax revenues that cities can use to address and mitigate the problems that come with them.

There can be no doubt that the recent influx of the very rich, of tech startups and their employees, and of financial and other professionals into cities is generating real challenges and prompting highly charged conflicts. But has it blunted those cities’ cultural creativity, as some have charged? In a word, no: The creative strengths of superstar cities have actually increased.

The concentration of creative industries and creative jobs in superstar cities like New York and LA remains strong. LA’s concentration of artistic and creative fields across the board is nearly three times the national average, while New York’s is more than double. LA’s concentration of fine artists, painters and sculptors is nearly four times as high as the national average; New York’s is one-and-a-half times as high. New York has nearly three times and LA more than twice the national average for musicians and singers. Both metros have more than three times the national average for writers and authors. And New York’s concentration of fashion designers is ten times higher than the national average, while LA’s is nearly eight times higher.

But, for all of the dire warnings coming from established musicians and artists, these cities are at least as artistically creative as they ever were, and even more technologically innovative. On the whole, their creative economies are considerably stronger than they were back in the 1970s and 1980s. Would anyone really want to trade New York’s or LA’s economies today for their economic situation back in the 1970s or 80s? The answer is obvious. The addition of high tech to these cities’ traditional strengths in artistic creativity, has made their economies stronger.

Put bluntly, some of the noisiest controversies regarding our changing cities spring from the competing factions of a new urban elite. The much bigger problem is the widening gap between this relatively advantaged class and everyone else. It’s the poor and the working classes who are truly being displaced and shunted aside in our thriving cities, and the way to help them is not to turn off the spigot of wealth creation, but to make their flourishing economies more encompassing and inclusive.

We spoke with San Francisco author and anti-gentrification activist Denise Sullivan about Florida's assertions. "All these great new conveniences and services that the newly rich and super-rich insist upon," she reminded us, "don't actually enhance the quality of life; rather, they detract from the joys of city living, the reasons people traditionally creative people gravitated to city centers." She explained:

Take the ride share apps: You never have to interact with a person on the street or a person on the bus or a parking lot attendant. How is this different from mom or dad picking you up from soccer practice?

Artists, service workers, the middle class, can no longer function in a town that strives to serve and cater to the whims of the newly rich, the super-rich, and worst of all, the wannabe rich: I mean, who gets driven around except people who want to perceive themselves as being the driven? Frankly, I'd rather be the driver. Or maybe I should say, I relate more to the drivers. Of course most of them live in Fremont (a once undesirable suburb about 40 miles South of Oakland which now you're lucky if you can find a place to rent or own there).

The homogenous culture of San Francisco is heartbreaking:The disappearance of African American and Latino families, the middle or creative (and I don't mean tech creative) class, the small businesses that can no longer survive… but the real human tragedy is the housing crisis and its become a matter of human rights. The homelessness, the police violence/racial profiling, and even the mental health issues wrought by gentrification and all that goes with it are very real here. Talk to anyone who lives in a tent city, which according to some studies will tell you the occupants are over 70% San Franciscan. This is the real, live, in-progress, demonstration of how the super rich have destroyed us and how poor in spirit we've become as a city, as a society. We need to feed, cloth, and house our poor. We aren't doing it. I see that as a complete failure and collapse of civil society.

The other person we asked about this is progressive Democratic candidate Katie Hill, who's running for a swing district seat the encompasses Simi Valley, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley just north of L.A. She runs a non-profit that's dedicated to helping homeless veterans find housing and get their lives back on track. After reading Florida's piece, she pointed out that "The housing crisis in L.A. and other thriving cities is a manifestation of income inequality and the ever-shrinking middle class. It could not be clearer than the high-end lofts we see now right next to Skid Row-- where the masses of homeless encampments make it look like we're stepping into a third world country." She elucidated:

The reality is that we have a lot of well-paying jobs-- in fact, many employers, including PATH, have a hard time finding and retaining qualified people for their most needed positions. But people coming from disadvantaged economic positions have so many factors working against them from birth that getting to the point of a master's degree or whatever other qualification is required for those high paying jobs is nearly impossible. They get stuck, lacking education and opportunity, in a cycle of low wage jobs (or worse, addiction, crime, and incarceration).

In L.A. county, studies show that someone needs to make more than $18 an hour to afford a studio apartment. Sadly, most of the jobs people without a degree qualify for come nowhere near that.

  It's no wonder we have have so much homelessness. Until we deal with the underlying issues-- income inequality, housing affordability, the class division that has happened and everything that goes with that-- we always will.

Severe Wealth Inequality Is Destroying The World's Great Cities

Last weekend we noted in, post about the galloping inequality inherent in urbanization that Richard Florida was warning that "Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed. But this dramatic back-to-the-city movement also has its dark side, giving rise to what I call the new urban crisis, which registers itself in increasingly unaffordable housing and a growing divide between rich and poor." Since then, Florida was on NPR with Steve Innskeep (above), discussing his new book, The New Urban Crisis. He explained to the NPR listeners that "the middle-class neighborhoods, those platforms for the American dream, have been decimated" and that blue-collar service workers "are being pushed out of these metropolitan areas entirely." He blames Democratic politicians in the big cities and says flatly that they have "abandoned progressive policies" and he blames how power (and taxes) have flowed to the federal government and away from local governments.

We have to make a commitment to building affordable housing because what's getting built in New York and in Los Angeles and San Francisco and what is causing the backlash is luxury towers and luxury lofts for the wealthy. Number two, we've got to build more transit. We've got to build transit that connects parts of our cities and parts of our communities-- and actually those lagging areas-- that connects them to employment centers near the urban core, which is where the best jobs are being created. But the third thing we have to do that's absolutely critical and that very few people are talking about-- we have nearly 70 million jobs now in the blue-collar service economy-- food preparation, food service, office work, personal care services-- the fastest growing jobs in our country.

So I talk in the book about the need to massively increase the minimum wage to take into account the cost of living. So that minimum wage would be higher in New York and San Francisco than it would be in Buffalo or Pittsburgh, of course. As a country, we really spend time and money making manufacturing jobs good jobs. We increase the wages so that people who work in factories could buy the cars and consumer durables coming off the assembly lines. The only way we're going to build a middle class today is to make sure the service workers-- 70 million strong, more than roughly half of our workforce-- that they have jobs that are middle class jobs. And right now, they're sinking further and further behind.

...I had hoped that our federal government would lead here. But now with the Trump election and Republicans in control of both houses, that's impossible. So I think the default for the United States is this progressive group of cities and mayors and urban leaders and philanthropy. And let's hope progressive businesses-- the tech companies, the knowledge companies, progressive real estate developers-- will get on board with this because we are in such deep trouble with this overblown nation-state and really out of sync with the times. Dysfunctional, imperial presidency-- we see that with Trump in office, but it's been there all along. I really do see cities and local empowerment as probably the only way out of this new urban crisis.

There's an excerpt from his book in the new issue of The Atlantic, The Roots of the New Uran Crisis. In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, he laid out the basis for urban success-- attracting and retaining talent, not just companies. "The knowledge workers, techies, and artists and other cultural creatives who made up the creative class were locating in places that had lots of high-paying jobs-- or a thick labor market. They also had what I called a thick mating market-- other people to meet and date-- and a vibrant quality of place, with great restaurants and cafés, a music scene, and an abundance of things to do."

In time, my work generated a considerable following among mayors, arts and cultural leaders, urbanists, and even some enlightened real estate developers who were looking for a better way to spur urban development in their communities. But my message also generated a backlash on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Some conservatives questioned the connection I drew between diversity and urban economic growth, countering that it was companies and jobs, not the creative class, that moved the economy forward. Others, mainly on the left, blamed the creative class and me personally for everything from rising rents and gentrification to the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Although some of the more personal attacks stung, this criticism provoked my thinking in ways I could never have anticipated, causing me to reframe my ideas about cities and the forces that act on them.

Slowly but surely, my understanding of cities started to evolve. I realized I had been overly optimistic to believe that cities and the creative class could, by themselves, bring forth a better and more inclusive kind of urbanism. Even before the economic crisis of 2008, the gap between rich and poor was surging in the cities that were experiencing the greatest revivals. As techies, professionals, and the rich flowed back into urban cores, the less advantaged members of the working and service classes, as well as some artists and musicians, were being priced out. In New York’s SoHo, the artistic and creative ferment I had observed as a student was giving way to a new kind of homogeneity of wealthy people, high-end restaurants, and luxury shops.

I entered into a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation. I began to see the back-to-the-city movement as something that conferred a disproportionate share of its benefits on a small group of places and people. I found myself confronting the dark side of the urban revival I had once championed and celebrated.

As I pored over the data, I could see that only a limited number of cities and metro areas, maybe a couple of dozen, were really making it in the knowledge economy; many more were failing to keep pace or falling further behind. Tens of millions of Americans remain locked in persistent poverty. And virtually all our cities suffer from growing economic divides. As the middle class and its neighborhoods fade, our geography is splintering into small areas of affluence and concentrated advantage, and much larger areas of poverty and concentrated disadvantage.

It became increasingly clear to me that the same clustering of talent and economic assets generates a lopsided, unequal urbanism in which a relative handful of superstar cities, and a few elite neighborhoods within them, benefit while many other places stagnate or fall behind. Ultimately, the very same force that drives the growth of our cities and economy broadly also generates the divides that separate us and the contradictions that hold us back.

My perspective on cities and urbanism was also deeply affected by what I saw happening in my adopted hometown of Toronto. I had moved there in 2007 to head up a new institute on urban prosperity at the University of Toronto. For me, the city was a bastion of the very best of progressive urbanism. Toronto had as diverse a population as can be found anywhere in North America; a thriving economy that was barely dented by the economic crisis of 2008; safe streets, great public schools, and a cohesive social fabric. Yet, somehow, this progressive, diverse city chose Rob Ford as its mayor.

While his personal foibles and dysfunctions may have endeared him to his Ford Nation of supporters, he was, to me, perhaps the most anti-urban mayor ever to preside over a major city. Once elected, Ford went about tearing down just about everything that urbanists believe make for great cities. He ripped out bike lanes, and developed plans to turn a prime stretch of the city’s downtown lakefront into a garish mall, complete with a giant Ferris wheel.

Ford’s rise was the product of the city’s burgeoning class divide. As Toronto’s once sizable middle class declined and its old middle-class neighborhoods faded, the city was splitting into a small set of affluent, educated areas packed in and around the urban core and along the major subway and transit lines and a much larger expanse of disadvantaged neighborhoods located far from the city center and transit. Ford’s message resonated powerfully with his constituency of working people and new immigrants, who felt that the benefits of the city’s revitalization were being captured by a downtown elite and passing them by.

I came to see this mounting class divide as a ticking time bomb. If a city as progressive, diverse, and prosperous as Toronto could fall prey to such a populist backlash, then it could happen anywhere.

At the time, I said Ford was just the first signal of this brewing backlash: more and worse would follow. It did. In short order came England’s stunning and wholly unexpected decision to leave the European Union with the Brexit. Vehemently opposed by affluent, cosmopolitan London, it was backed by the struggling residents of working-class cities, suburbs, and rural areas who were being left behind by the twin forces of globalization and re-urbanization.

But what came next was even more unanticipated-- and even more frightening: the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the most powerful country on the planet. Trump rose to power by mobilizing anxious, angry voters in the left-behind places of America. Hillary Clinton took the dense, affluent, knowledge- based cities and close-in suburbs that are the epicenters of the new economy, winning the popular vote by a substantial margin. But Trump took everywhere else-- the farther-out exurbs and rural areas-- which provided his decisive victory in the Electoral College. All three-- Trump, Ford, and Brexit—reflect the deepening fault lines of class and location that define and divide us today.

These political cleavages ultimately stem from the far deeper economic and geographic structures of the New Urban Crisis. They are the product of our new age of winner-take-all urbanism, in which the talented and the advantaged cluster and colonize a small, select group of superstar cities, leaving everybody and everywhere else behind. Much more than a crisis of cities, the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time.

The stakes could not be higher. How we come to grips with the New Urban Crisis will determine whether we become more divided and slide backward into economic stagnation, or forge ahead to a new era of more sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

Trump Didn't Cause The Urban Housing Bubble, But His Policies Are Likely To Make It Worse

Last week, urbanologist Richard Florida did a post ostensibly about Vancouver, but completely relevant to all the great cities of the West. As he said, "Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed. But this dramatic back-to-the-city movement also has its dark side, giving rise to what I call the new urban crisis, which registers itself in increasingly unaffordable housing and a growing divide between rich and poor.

Rising inequality in Vancouver is driven by the decline in stable, blue-collar, middle-class jobs, which make up just 15 per cent of the region’s jobs. Highly paid professional, knowledge and creative jobs make up 36.5 per cent of jobs, while lower-paid service jobs account for 47 per cent of jobs.

Vancouver is seeing not just the decline of its middle class, but of the neighbourhoods such families called home. Middle-class areas, which made up more than 70 per cent of Vancouver neighbourhoods in 1970, have fallen to less than half by 2005, the last year for which data is available. There are likely far fewer today.

As the educated and affluent flock back to urban cores, a great deal of poverty in cities like Vancouver has shifted to the suburbs. Indeed, these places are morphing into a new kind of “patchwork metropolis,” with small areas of the advantaged concentrated downtown near subway and transit stations or in affluent suburban areas, surrounded by much larger spans of concentrated disadvantaged.

The new urban crisis has engendered a backlash that resulted in the rise of the late mayor Rob Ford in Toronto, the Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in America.

Friday an OpEd in the NY Times by Oliver Bullough, Offshore Money, Bane of Democracy, looked at the problem from a different perspective. This is something I'm particularly tuned into right now because my best friend, an inner-city public school teacher, is trying to buy a house and keeps finding himself out-bid even in neighborhoods considered "sketchy." Here in L.A. the money buying up local real estate-- and now at every level-- in coming from China. As Bullough points out, "China was the leading investor in real estate in the United States by the end of 2015, with $350 billion in related investments and holdings."

Almost one-third of top-end property purchases in America’s biggest cities are suspect, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the body at the Treasury Department whose task it is to protect the United States from money laundering. The government recently granted FinCEN authority to peek behind the veil of secrecy provided by offshore shell companies, and what the bureau has seen is disturbing: There is a flood of dirty capital pouring into United States real estate, and it isn’t clear who owns it.

...Greedy rulers around the world steal billions from their people, then disguise the money and stash it offshore, usually in the West. The extraction of this much capital cripples the economies of source countries like Afghanistan, Nigeria or Ukraine, and breeds insecurity and violence there. Offshoring is also a problem for host states. If a government doesn’t know who owns the country it runs, how can it know how those owners will behave in a crisis?

...Law enforcement in the United States leads the world in investigating and prosecuting corruption, but the country still lags badly in terms of transparency, despite FinCEN’s new powers. Britain has a freely accessible, central online register of all companies, and anyone who creates a new company has to declare its actual owners. The system is flawed, not least because the information provided is not checked. But it’s a good first step toward ending the abuses enabled by anonymous companies. America should adopt something similar.

The British Parliament is also considering implementing “unexplained wealth orders,” which would force criminals or foreign officials to justify how they came to own luxury goods or expensive real estate. Those who cannot prove they secured the financing legally would see their property confiscated.

These two measures alone can’t be enough to reveal the true owners of the anonymous money that is buying up so much of the West. But they can go a long way toward depriving dictators and thieves of a haven for their dirty cash, while helping officials in democracies regain control over who is buying the countries they were elected to run.

How attractive will the glittering big cities remain if service workers and even middle class blue and white collar workers-- think school teachers, for example-- can't afford to live in them or even in their close-in inner suburbs? What Florida refers to as the "creative class" in his writing-- that helped spark the urban renewal-- are already being squeezed out of affordable housing in many cities en masse. 

President Bannon Vs IQ Clusters... And, Yes, He Does Need Senate Confirmation

A NY Times editorial last night was entitled President Bannon and just blasted Trump's top advisor, neo-Nazi Steve Bannon. "[W]e’ve never witnessed a political aide move as brazenly to consolidate power as Stephen Bannon," they wrote-- "nor have we seen one do quite so much damage so quickly to his putative boss’s popular standing or pretenses of competence." And it's probably going to get much, much worse. Unless... well, according to section (a)(6) of federal statute 50 U.S. Code 3021, a civilian like Bannon actually does need to go through Senate confirmation in order to serve on the National Security Council because he doesn't fit into any of the five listed pre-approved categories for membership. That obscure law, which has remained obscure because no president has ever tried to put a political hack on the NSC until now, was dug up by Jonathan Alter late night. A well-placed Senate staffer on the Republican side of the aisle I talk to regularly told me this morning that the chances of Bannon being confirmed by the Senate are zero. "Everyone hates him; it wouldn't even be close."

But a new executive order, politicizing the process for national security decisions, suggests Mr. Bannon is positioning himself not merely as a Svengali but as the de facto president.

In that new order, issued on Saturday, Mr. Trump took the unprecedented step of naming Mr. Bannon to the National Security Council, along with the secretaries of state and defense and certain other top officials. President George W. Bush’s last chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, was so concerned about separating politics from national security that he barred Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush’s political adviser, from N.S.C. meetings. To the annoyance of experienced foreign policy aides, David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s political adviser, sat in on some N.S.C. meetings, but he was not a permanent member of the council.

More telling still, Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Bannon to the N.S.C. “principals’ committee,” which includes most of those same top officials and meets far more frequently. At the same time, President Trump downgraded two senior national security officials — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a role now held by Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., and the director of national intelligence, the job that Dan Coats, a former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former ambassador to Germany, has been nominated to fill... In giving Mr. Bannon an official role in national security policy making, Mr. Trump has not simply broken with tradition but has embraced the risk of politicizing national security, or giving the impression of doing so.

...As his first week in office amply demonstrated, Mr. Trump has no grounding in national security decision making, no sophistication in governance and little apparent grasp of what it takes to lead a great diverse nation. He needs to hear from experienced officials, like General Dunford. But Mr. Bannon has positioned himself, along with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the president’s most trusted aide, shutting out other voices that might offer alternative views. He is now reportedly eclipsing the national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

While Mr. Trump long ago embraced Mr. Bannon’s politics, he would be wise to reconsider allowing him to run his White House, particularly after the fiasco over the weekend of the risible Muslim ban. Mr. Bannon helped push that order through without consulting Mr. Trump’s own experts at the Department of Homeland Security or even seeking deliberation by the N.S.C. itself. The administration’s subsequent modifications, the courtroom reversals and the international furor have made the president look not bold and decisive but simply incompetent.

Bannon is widely seen as the hand behind Trump's hated and unconstitutional executive order to ban Muslim refugees, an order that stirred up exactly the kind of anxiety and strife Bannon was aiming for. Bannon isn't interested in "IQ magnets." (Watch the short video below.) Republicans want more Betsy DeVos policies to dumb-down the country, making people susceptible to demagogues like Trump. A few days ago we mentioned that when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty and delineated urbanologist Richard Florida's views about how Trump's anti-refugee and anti-immigrant stances will be catastrophic for the economic well-being of the nation. Yesterday, writing for The Atlantic, Florida's piece, How Trump Threatens America's Talent Edge went into far greater detail and is worth considering. Right from the twitter storm we considered a few days ago, Florida starts out reminding his readers that "Trump's executive order on immigration threatens what goes to the very core of America's innovative edge: the ability to attract global talent. Even if the ban is lifted, the damage has been done. Global talent has been put on alert."

America’s science and tech edge has long been fueled by the talented immigrants it attracts from across the world. Immigrants have played an incredibly important role in America’s high-technology competitiveness. Foreign talent makes up a huge share of America’s science and technology workforce, and from a third to half of the founding teams of significant U.S. technology startups.

The reality is that high-skilled immigrants can choose where to go. For decades, they’ve picked the United States and those choices have benefitted us. But they can just as easily pick other places. More than a decade ago, in my book The Flight of the Creative Class, I pointed out that efforts to restrict the flow of immigrants to the United States would have serious economic consequences. This was a smaller threat a decade or two ago, when global competitors were less established. The U.S. could rest on its “talent laurels."

But today, there are a handful of countries and dozens of global cities with great universities that can effectively compete for high-skill immigrants. Countries like Canada and Australia have come to understand the economic advantages of attracting immigrants and have upped their efforts to attract top talent from around the globe.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, Çaǧlar Özden, and Christopher Parsons drives this point home. They outline how the U.S. has fallen behind in attracting immigrants and how much it benefits from their dense clustering in knowledge-based cities and metros like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Boston-New York-Washington Corridor.

An especially worrying trend the study points out: Even before Trump, the U.S. has been losing the competition for talent. The chart below is a bit wonky but it tells the tale. It compares the share of immigrants with high school educations in 1990 to the share in 2010 across a whole bunch of countries.

The countries that are above the line—like Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Norway and yes, even Mexico, have grown their share of more highly educated immigrants. The U.S. is the big dot that sits below the line; its share of more educated immigrants has fallen relative to other nations. Trump’s immigration crackdown comes at the worst possible time for America’s ability to attract global talent.

The map below shows the extreme clustering across the Bos-Wash Corridor, along the West Coast from Los Angeles and Southern California to the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest as well as Chicago, Miami, and the border areas of Texas and Arizona. The darkly shaded places in the interior of the country are largely college towns, which have long functioned as key immigrant gateways, in effect comprising the Ellis Islands of our time. Immigrants not only cluster geographically, but by occupation and industry-- for example computer scientists and software engineers in the Bay Area or mathematical finance whizzes in Manhattan, magnifying their positive impacts, as the study notes.

As the authors point out, immigrants to the United States haven take home larger shares of Nobel Prizes; they’ve won half of the nation’s Fields Medals for outstanding achievements in mathematics and a third of its Man Booker prizes for literature. And of course, America’s science and tech workforce broadly depends on the considerable numbers of highly educated foreign students it attracts in fields computer science, software engineering, math, and other science and engineering fields.

Indeed, by declaring war on sanctuary cities, Donald Trump has effectively declared war on half the U.S. economy. Cutting of federal funding would hurt these cities drastically. But harming their economic output could even more disastrous for the U.S. economy writ large.

The metro areas encompassed by the fifteen sanctuary cities below make up 45 percent of the entire U.S. economy, according to data put together by my colleague Steven Pedigo, who heads up the Urban Lab at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

Immigrants benefit the U.S. enormously-- but they no longer need to come here. Global talent is already heading to cities and nations outside the United States. The Trump administration’s moves to limit immigration pose a deep threat to America’s ability to attract global talent, to its innovative prowess, and ultimately, to the living standards of its people.