The New Urban Crisis — Book Review & Quotes

Review

When I was 11 or 12, I visited a town called Nauvoo in Illinois. While most of the town is a recreation, the history of the town is tied to some of my ancestors. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were chased out of various towns and finally built a city from scratch in a swamp in Illinois that, at the time, was larger than Chicago.

Seeing the history of what it meant to literally build a city, I have ever since been fascinated by what it takes to organize such a fascinating and complicated tapestry of human lives that you see contained in every town and city. This book lays out not just the run of the mill complexity, but the real inherent problems that are exacerbated by the way our economy has begun to operate.

There was a moment early in the book where I was really struck with an outpouring of ideas, mostly in reaction to the specific case Florida was laying out and I wanted to really reflect on those ideas.

He outlines the ‘new urban crisis’ across ‘five key dimensions’:

1. “The rise of the winner-take-all urbanism creates a new kind of inequality between cities, with the economic gulf growing wider and wider between the winners and the much broader ranks of other cities that have lost their economic footing as a result of globalization, deindustrialization, and other factors.” — My reaction to this is the need, among other things that Florida talks about, to get resources to those other cities, whether in the form of real dollars or intangible ideas.
2. “It’s hard to sustain a functional urban economy when teachers, nurses, hospital workers, police officers, firefighters, and restaurant and service workers can no longer afford to live within reasonable commuting distance to their workplaces.” — Part of my thinking here is a need for accessible housing for everyone, making sure that there are places that folks like this can afford to live. The other thought is wanting to better understand landlords, rent, and general housing. What benefits would need to exist in order to justify lower rent prices? Lower demand? Assured tenants? How do you get landlords to be willing to charge less? Doesn’t this mean there is a massive underserved population? Who is serving the demand for affordable housing and services in cities?
3. “The New Urban Crisis is marked by the disappearing middle class — the fading of the once large middle class and of its once stable neighborhoods, which were the physical embodiment of the American Dream. As the middle has been hollowed out, neighborhoods across America are dividing into larger areas of concentrated disadvantage and much smaller areas of concentrated affluence.” — What if there was a purpose-driven community. ‘You have to live here deliberately. Rents and store prices will be cheaper, but only if you agree to take care of things and be loyal customers.’
4. “The burgeoning crisis of the suburbs where poverty, insecurity, and crime are mounting, and economic and racial segregation are growing deeper. The ranks of the suburban poor are growing much faster than they are in cities, by a staggering 66 percent between 2000 and 2013. Suburbia has long been home to the wealthiest communities in America, but now it’s inequalities increasingly rival those of cities.” — My reaction is why is it growing so much faster? These solutions have to take into account real people, not just reallocation of resources.
5. “Cities, after all, have historically driven the development of national economies. But this connection between urbanization and a rising standard of living has broken down in many of the most rapidly urbanizing areas of the world.” — Poor people are flooding into cities, but what is being done with them?

Florida lays out some specific ideas as well:

• Reform zoning and building codes, as well as tax policies, to ensure that the clustering force works to the benefit of all
• Invest in the infrastructure needed to spur density and clustering and limit costly and inefficient sprawl — In other words, don’t make it easier to spread out
• Built more affordable rental housing in central locations — Thought I had: Can you determine approval of rental applications by character over income? Why can’t a landlord interview applicants based on character and offer lower rent in exchange for more support and responsible living? How does WeWork select applicants to live and how do they ensure ‘community-minded’ living?
• Expand the middle class by turning low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work — Some thoughts I had: Think about ‘purpose-driven employment.’ What if we had shops and stores and restaurants where we select employees based on character, agree to pay them more in exchange for more commitment (e.g. like ESOPs)?
• Tackle concentrated poverty head-on by investing in people and places — better learning opportunities in places like libraries
• Engage in a global effort to build stronger, more prosperous cities in rapidly urbanizing parts of the emerging world
• Empower communities and enable local leaders to strengthen their own economies and cope with the challenges of the New Urban Crisis — e.g. sharing best practices

Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” (Jane Jacobs)

“These stark realities haunted me. What was causing people, companies, and stores to abandon Newark? Why had the city exploded into racial turmoil and entered into such a steep decline? Why had the factory where my father worked closed down? My early experience of that original urban crisis left a deep imprint on me.”

“The key to urban success, I argued in my 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was to attract and retain talent, not just to draw in 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; lots of other people to meet and date — what I called a thick mating market; and a vibrant quality of place, with great restaurants and cafes, a music scene, and lots of other things to do.”

“Enduring success in the new people-driven, place-based economy turned on doing the smaller things that made cities great places to live and work — things like making sure there were walkable, pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, parks, exciting art and music scenes, and vibrant areas where people could gather in cafes and restaurants. Cities needed more than a competitive business climate; they also needed a great people climate that appealed to individuals and families of all types — single, married, with children or without, straight or gay.”

“My research found that the metros with the highest levels of wage inequality were also those with the most dynamic and successful creative economies — San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York.”

“My research ultimately brought me face to face with the troubling reality of our new geography. Both the conventional wisdom and economic research tell us that people do better economically in large, dense, knowledge-based cities where they earn higher wages and salaries. But when a colleague and I looked into how the members of each of three different classes fared after paying for housing, we uncovered a startling and disturbing pattern: The advantaged knowledge workers, professionals, and media and cultural workers who made up the creative class were doing fine; their wages were not only higher in big, dense, high-tech metros, but they made more than enough to cover the costs of more expensive housing in these places. But the members of the two less advantaged classes — blue-collar workers and service workers — were sinking further behind; they actually ended up worse off in large, expensive cities and metro areas after paying for their housing.”

“Urbanism is every bit as powerful an economic force as the optimists say, and it is simultaneously as wrenching and divisive as the pessimists claim. Like capitalism itself, it is paradoxical and contradictory. Understanding today’s urban crisis requires taking both the urban pessimists and the urban optimists seriously.”

“On the one hand, the clustering of industry, economic activity, and talented and ambitious people in cities is now the basic engine of innovation and economic growth. It is no longer natural resources or even larger corporations that drive economic progress, but the ability of cities to cluster and concentrate talented people, enabling them to combine and recombine their ideas and efforts, which massively increases our innovation and productivity.” — People: the new coal, the new steel, the new oil.

“As the affluent and advantaged return to cities, they colonize the best locations. Everyone else is then crammed into the remaining disadvantaged areas of the city or pushed farther out into the suburbs. This competition in turn shapes a related economic paradox: the paradox of land. There are seemingly endless amounts of land across the world, but not nearly enough of it where it is needed most.” — How could we increase the value of living somewhere else and therefore the value of some of that less ‘needed’ land? Natural resources? University? Talent pools? Companies?

“The word crisis, after all, has two meanings. It can describe a time of extreme stress and danger when a whole array of threats are lined up against us; but it also refers to a critical inflection point, a time when, depending on the choices we make, things can still tip one way or the other.”

“With each doubling of population, the Santa Fe scientists concluded, a city’s residents become, on average, 15 percent more innovative, 15 percent more productive, and 15 percent wealthier.”

“Instead of numerous small companies each playing on its own turf, there are now a relative handful of giant multinational conglomerates in each industry; meanwhile, the smaller companies that survive scramble for smaller and smaller shares of the pie.”

“There is little evidence that high-tech industries are decentralizing away from superstar cities and tech hubs; if anything, they are becoming even more concentrated in the superstars.”

“Two key kinds of clustering take place in cities. First, and most obviously, is the clustering of certain firms and industries. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, skilled and ambitious people cluster in cities.”

“Superstar cities push together talented people from all corners of the world across lines of ethnicity, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. Anywhere from a third to half of the high-tech startups that have been launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past decade or so include at least one immigrant among their founders.”

“Although clustering drives growth, it also increases the competition for limited urban space; the more things cluster in space, the more expensive land gets; the more expensive land gets, the higher housing prices become, and the more certain things get pushed out.”

“Consider the premium paid for prime urban land and property. In broad terms, the total value of all land across the United States was $23 trillion in 2009, equivalent to some 160 percent of the nation’s economic output. But just the 6 percent of that land that is developed accounts for more than half of that value, $11.7 trillion. In metro areas with populations between 10,000 and 49,000, land value average out to $6,700 per acre compared to $64,800 per acre in large metro areas (with populations of 1 million or more.)” — Huge buying opportunity in those small metro areas if you have a formula / strategy for increasing the value of that land.

“If an investor had bought a plot of land in 1950 and sold it in 1993, it would have returned less than half of 1 percent of value per year in inflation-adjusted dollars. If that same investor purchased a plot of land in 1993 and sold it in 2014, its value would have risen by a factor of 28, returning 16.3 percent per year.”

“This is the nub of the urban land nexus: barring incredible feats of civil engineering, land in superstar neighborhoods is limited to what is already there.”

“It also stems from the efforts of urban landlords and homeowners — some of re-urbanization’s biggest winners — to restrict what is built, and in doing so to keep the prices of their own real estate holdings high.”

“Well-intended or not, when they reflexively block any and all development, they not only preserve their own housing values but also put a brake on the very clustering that drives innovation and economic growth.”

“If the housing and land use restrictions that constrain development were eliminated, so that everyone who wanted to work in San Francisco could afford to live there, the city would see a 500 percent increase in jobs, they calculated. New York’s increase would be 800 percent.”

“These estimates provide a stark reminder of the very real hit the US economy takes every year because of its inefficient and suboptimal use of land.”

“In many aspiring cities, New Urban Luddites effectively limit and block the investments that are required for such further scaling. Less scaling means less clustering; less clustering means lower levels of innovation and productivity. Thus, in turn, means lower economic output and smaller tax bases, which further constrains the ability of these cities to invest in urban development and to expand their redistributive policies and programs.”

“The clustering force is at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality. The concentration of talent and economic activity in fewer and fewer places not only divides the world’s cities into winners and losers, but ensures that the winner cities become unaffordable for all but the most advantaged. This unrelenting cycle is great news for wealthy landlords and homeowners, but bad news for almost everyone else.”

“The amount of venture capital invested in startups is more strongly correlated with population density than it is with either the concentration of highly educated people or the concentration of the creative class, and only slightly less strongly correlated with population density than it is with the concentration of high-tech industry — which is the very thing that attracts venture capital investment to begin with.”

“Other urban startups, such as Uber and Airbnb, hope to actually make some aspect of cities work more efficiently — transportation and short-term housing, respectively. Cities aren’t just locations for these companies, but the sites of the very problems their technologies aim to solve, and the platforms for innovation itself.”

“In fact, my research shows empirically that artistic and cultural creativity acts alongside the high-tech industry and business and finance to power economic growth.”

“In spring 2014, protests broke out in Oakland against the private buses that shuttled tech workers from their homes in the city’s gentrifying urban core to their jobs in the corporate campuses of Silicon Valley. ‘You are not innocent victims,’ a flyer that was handed out to bus passengers read. ‘You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, list in the big bucks and success.’”

“Paul Graham argued that startup cities and high-tech districts are ‘manufacturers of inequality,’ but nevertheless defended them as the price of progress: ‘You can’t prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups,’ he wrote.”

This chart shows the clustering of artistic jobs as a percentage of the population size. What struck me about this chart is little Santa Fe, New Mexico has about the same % of artistic people in its population as LA, but nowhere near the size of population.

But getting a creative culture going feels like the hard part, now they just have to grow the city while maintaining the same culture. Definitely something to learn from for other cities.

“There’s no denying that New York, London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have become more expensive places to live; that younger, struggling artists and musicians have been priced out of some parts of these cities; and that some of the neighborhoods that were once the leading artistic centers have lost their creative verve. Superstar cities and knowledge hubs are in great demand. Land in them is finite, and the competition for space is fierce.” — If these younger creatives are being priced out, why can’t they be convinced to become a part of a different hub? A small, up-and-coming one?

“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.”

“Several factors have driven affluent, educated whites back to the urban core. One is their access to the large concentration of the higher-paying knowledge, professional, tech, and creative jobs located there. Another is the growing tendency for the affluent to want to locate in closer proximity to work to avoid long commutes. But the most important factor driving the back-to-the-city movement of affluent, educated whites is access to amenities cities offer — from libraries and museums to restaurants and cafes. By moving back to the urban core, affluent whites are able to simultaneously reduce their commutes, locate near high-paying economic opportunities, and gain privileged access to the better amenities that come from urban living.”

“The fact that gentrification takes place mainly in superstar cities is a big part of the reason it attracts so much attention to begin with…. Gentrification is also limited to particular areas of even the most economically successful cities.”

“Lance Freeman, the leading student of gentrification and displacement, has found that gentrification actually displaces far fewer people than is commonly thought.”

“Such studies illustrate the extent to which the identities of gentrifying neighborhoods are socially constructed and reconstructed, as well as the extent to which race remains a factor in how gentrification is perceived. When it comes to how neighborhoods are defined, the gentrifiers ultimately win out.” — How do you change the perception of a community? Can solutions like Nextdoor address that?

“The great bulk of poor black neighborhoods remain virtually immune to gentrification, with their residents remaining largely trapped in chronic and persistent poverty.” — When we try and scale solutions, we often fail. Examples like Ben & Jerry’s, microfinance banks, etc.

“It makes little sense to discourage investment in cities and urban neighborhoods, especially in places that desperately need it. Indeed, the real task of urban policy is not to try to stop the market forces that are leading to the economic revitalization of certain urban areas, but to improve the housing options, economic opportunities, and neighborhood conditions of those who are being left behind.”

“Our study took a close look at the different factors that are shaping both wage and income inequality across US metros: (1) globalization and technological change; (2) the enduring legacy of race and concentrated poverty; and (3) the weakening of the post-World War II social compacts between business, government, and labor.”

“Our findings bear this out: income inequality across metro areas is statistically associated with both poverty and race as measured by the African American share of metro population, controlling for other factors. Furthermore, income inequality is lower where the unionized share of the workforce is higher, and higher in places with lower rates of taxation. Our analysis found statistical associations between urban income inequality, the weakening of unions, and the erosion of the systems of progressive taxation that underpin social insurance programs.” — Taxes, unions, helping black people.

“This, again, is the very nub of the New Urban Crisis — the same factors that drive economic growth also drive inequality.”

“My own analysis of all 350-plus US metros found wage inequality to be positively correlated with political liberalism and negatively associated with political conservatism.”

“It found that just nine of these cities had high levels of prosperity alongside low levels of inequality. And these were all smaller and more sprawling places, such as Scottsdale, Arizona, and Plano, Texas, or college towns, like Madison, Wisconsin, that are relatively affluent and homogenous to begin with.”

One chart showed that the places with the highest creativity and the lowest inequality are places like Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc.

“First, countries that redistribute more income have lower rates of inequality. Second, countries with greater levels of redistribution have higher levels of economic growth. And third, government policies that work to reduce inequality actually lead to higher rates of growth. All in all, lower levels of inequality, even when they come from government policies to redistribute income, are good for economic growth.”

“The separation of the advantaged and the disadvantaged into entirely separate and distinct areas of the city and suburbs. As we will see, this process of economic sorting is even more vexing than inequality per se, as it compounds the advantages available to those at the top while also compounding the adverse circumstances of the less advantaged.”

“At the center of the bigger sort is the decline of America’s once thriving middle class and the sturdy middle-class neighborhoods that literally defined the American Dream.” — How do you define and create a middle-class neighborhood?

“Distressingly, the middle class is smallest in economically vibrant places and largest in declines ones.” — The death of Ben Franklin’s legacy

“The working class, whose ranks of factory, construction, and transportation workers have been declining for decades.” — How could we bolster the working class? What new jobs or services?

“On the flip side, economic segregation is lower in metros that have more working-class jobs and higher rates of unionization, which tend to bolster blue-collar wages.”

“Indeed, 75 percent of the neighborhoods that were poor in 2000 were still poor a decade later; conversely, 80 percent of neighborhoods that were affluent in 1990 were still affluent a full two decades on. Increasingly, our ZIP codes are our destiny.” — The land of opportunity…

“‘Neighborhood inequality is multi-generational, something that is passed down from parents to children in the same way that genetic background and financial wealth are transmitted across generations,’ is the way sociologist Patrick Sharkey, the author of a major study on racially concentrated poverty, Stuck in Place, puts it.”

“My parents also hit the timing right, because the research finds that children whose families make such moves when they are toddlers see the biggest benefits.”

“The positive effects of moving decline substantially as kids grow older — and such moves have little impact on teenagers.”

“The places that are the most productive and offer the highest wages, that have the largest concentrations of high-tech industry and the most talented people, that are the densest and offer the most abundant mass transit options, that are the most diverse, and that are the most liberal in their political leanings nonetheless face the harshest levels of economic inequality and economic segregation.”

Rich people gravitate to: (1) proximity to the urban core, (2) proximity to transit, (3) proximity to major universities and other knowledge-based institutions, (4) proximity to natural amenities.

“Simply put, the rich live where they choose, and the poor live where they can.”

“Indeed, with their enormous physical footprints, shoddy construction, and hastily put up infrastructure, many of our suburbs are visibly crumbling. Across the nation, hundreds of suburban shopping malls are dead or dying; countless suburban factories, like their urban counterparts a couple of generations ago, have fallen silent.” — Can we seize on these as buying opportunities to reinvent?

“Incongruous as it might seem, the suburban dimension of the New Urban Crisis may well turn out to be bigger than the urban one, if for no other reason than the fact that more Americans live in suburbs than cities. Just one in five (21 percent) say they live in rural areas.”

“In the postwar years, suburbia’s seemingly bottomless demand for durable goods was the greatest driver of the boom economy. But in an era in which clustering is the key driver of innovation, suburban sprawl has come to be a fetter on economic growth. Suburban homeownership drains capital away from other, more productive investments in knowledge, technology, and talent. If the suburbs were once the geographic embodiment of capitalism’s deepest promise — the American Dream of upward mobility for all — today they, too, are caught up in the deep contradictions of the New Urban Crisis.”

“As well as being energy-inefficient and wasteful, suburban sprawl also limits the mobility of Americans and undermines productivity.”

“In total, sprawl costs the US economy roughly $600 billion a year in direct costs related to inefficient land usage and car dependency, and another $400 billion in indirect costs from traffic congestion, pollution, and the like, according to a 2015 study from the London School of Economics. The total bill: a whopping $1 trillion a year.”

“Too much of our precious national productive capacity and wealth is being squandered on building and maintaining suburban homes with three-car garages, and on the roads and sprawl that support them, rather than being invested in the knowledge, technology, and density that are required for sustainable, high-quality growth. The suburbs aren’t going away, but they are no longer the apotheosis of the American Dream and the engine of economic growth.”

“Overcoming the crisis of the suburbs and restoring their economic prosperity requires that suburbs become denser, greener, and more mixed-use, and more connected to urban centers via transit.” — Even small towns should have a bustling downtown / main street environment.

“Cities are at the very center of the many grand challenges we face — climate change, poverty, job creation, public health, sustainable energy, and inclusive development.”

“The coming century will see the greatest wave of urbanization in human history as another 7 or 8 billion people — more than are on the face of the earth today — move to cities, most of them in the poorest reaches of the developing world. More than 60 percent of the urban infrastructure that humans will need in the next half-century is yet to be built. Trillions upon trillions of dollars will be spent building new cities and retrofitting existing ones.”

“In many of the developing, and emerging countries that are urbanizing the fastest, there is no reliable economic data at all. This is a big issue, and as I told the UN Summit, it must be remedied before we can ever hope to understand the drivers of successful urbanization.”

“The productivity of cities and metro areas, even very poor ones, tends to be considerably greater than that of outlying areas.”

“Even in the poorest and least-developed places on earth, urban centers offer a better way of life than the countryside.”

“Poverty occurs in the absence of institutions that unleash the creative energy of people and neighborhoods, or, even more so, when there are dysfunctional structures that stymie and squelch it. Prosperity, in contrast, arises from institutions and structures that harness and leverage these clusters of human creative energy. When the residents of poor communities are able to apply their own energy and talent and develop their skills, their economic conditions and those of their communities are much more likely to improve.”

“John F.C. Turner contrasted the conventional model of top-down government projects that build housing for the poor (which he dubbed ‘housing as a noun’) to more bottom-up efforts in which poor residents essentially build their own housing (‘housing as a verb’). The first model sequesters the poor, isolating them from economic opportunity and further concentrating poverty, and has generated failure after failure. But in the second model, the poor cluster in the places where they want to be (or need to be) — near the sites of economic opportunity.” — Not sure if this was only for informal home building or organized home building efforts.

“Many of their business ideas were quite creative, but, the study found, they did not have the financial resources that would allow them to tweak and refine their plans to make them more effective, or the time to wait for markets to develop more fully. This is troubling, because entrepreneurship and self-employment are important alternatives to traditional forms of employment in parts of the world where conventional jobs are scarce and the poor face considerable discrimination in getting them.” — e.g. Fundacion Paraguaya

“It’s hard to believe, but in contrast to almost any other field, from medicine and law to engineering and business, there is very little systematic training to equip mayors and city-builders with the knowledge and tools they need to develop their communities and cities.”

“The breadth of the New Urban Crisis helps us understand why economic anxiety in America continues to mount. The middle class has been eviscerated amid the collapse of the suburban growth model that once fueled the American Dream. The poor and disadvantaged truly are falling further and further behind the rest of society. But even the affluent third of society who are thriving economically don’t feel as prosperous as they did in the past, because they live in expensive cities where securing their own, and their children’s, futures is growing more costly and increasingly difficult.”

“Now, for the first time in American history, outward expansion is no longer a reliable path to sustained economic growth. Restoring our economy today will turn on our ability to generate more clustered and dense growth in our cities and suburbs. Making this re-urbanization shift will be expensive, certainly when compared with the previous eras of cheap outward growth. Creating the density required for urban clustering, building the transit and other infrastructure that can undergird such urban development, rebuilding our suburbs in denser fashion, and providing affordable housing at the scale that is needed will cost a good deal more than laying down roads and highways and throwing up single-family homes in the suburbs.”

“The most effective approach to spurring denser and more clustered development is to switch from our current local reliance on the property tax to a land value tax. This system would provide greater incentives to put land in high-priced urban centers to its most efficient and productive use, increasing density and clustering.”

“Another intriguing idea involves using local tax policy to essentially co-opt NIMBY opposition to new development. The basic idea, referred to as tax increment local transfers, is to allow the residents of neighborhoods to share in the tax revenues that come from new development — for example, by rebating and reducing their own property taxes over time.”

“What we need are strategic investments in the kind of infrastructure that will push us closer together, as opposed to spreading us apart, and that will strengthen and reinforce urban density and clustering that power economic growth. That means shifting infrastructure investment away from roads and highways that spread us out and toward mass transit that helps cluster people and economic activity closer together.”

“When metro areas reach a threshold of 5 or 6 million people, cars and roads are no longer a very effective way to move people around.”

“Not everyone who works in a superstar city or leading knowledge hub has to live in one.”

“High-speed rail can better connect metros to one another by dramatically reducing the time it takes to move between them.”

“This could substantially expand the functional labor markets of these places, enlarge their economies, and bolster their overall economic competitiveness.”

“The most effective way to fund new transit and high-speed rail is to redirect a larger share of the gas tax towards such projects.”

“In our most expensive cities, housing has become unaffordable for all but the top one-third of society’s most advantaged people.”

“A big part of the problem is US housing policy itself. Designed to stimulate suburbanization, our current housing policy massively subsidizes homeowners. The federal government provides an estimated $200 billion in annual subsidies for homeownership via tax deductions for mortgage interest.”

“These policies badly distort the housing market, causing it to produce too much spread-out single-family housing and not enough clustered rental housing.”

“Renting is more closely aligned with the needs of the urbanized knowledge-based economy than homeownership. Renters are more likely to live close to work or use transit to get to their jobs, while suburban homeowners are more likely to commute long distances in their cars.”

“It’s time to redirect federal housing subsidies away from affluent homeowners to the less advantaged renters who really need them. Doing so will help create demand for rental units, stimulate more construction and apartment buildings, and generate more clustered development.”

“Right now, our economy simply does not have enough high-paying jobs to support a new middle class. We need large numbers of better jobs with higher wages to help lift people out of poverty and enable them to afford better housing.”

“The strategies that politicians typically offer up for rebuilding the middle class will not even come close to solving the problem. Many, most notably Trump himself, like to talk about bringing middle-class manufacturing jobs back to America, for instance. But only 20 percent of Americans do blue-collar work of any sort today, and that includes huge numbers of construction and transportation workers. Just 6 percent of workers actually make things in factories. Even if we were able to bring large numbers of manufacturing jobs back, and even if the much-publicized successes with advanced and so-called artisanal manufacturing continue apace, these new jobs will still amount to just a drop in the bucket. In today’s global, tech-driven economy, manufacturing will never be the economic force and the backbone of the middle class that it once was.”

“There are simply not enough knowledge jobs to go around. And only about a third of our workforce have high-paying knowledge, professional, and creative-class jobs.”

“We will still need a concerted effort to turn the large number of low-wage service jobs into family-supporting jobs. Higher pay is not just an increased cost — it can be a path to increased productivity and profit. Poorly paid, poorly treated workers are unmotivated, demoralized, and disengaged. Low-paying companies experience costly turnover. Workers who are paid better and treated better are more motivated and more engaged and can become a useful source of innovation and productivity improvement. The world’s leading manufacturing companies long ago realized that paying workers better and engaging them more fully in their work pays huge dividends in the form of the shop-floor innovations that make factories more productive.” — Makes me think of ESOPs and the old concept of ‘company families’

“Many of the most successful retail and hospitality companies of the past couple of decades — Trader Joe’s, Costco, Zara, Whole Foods, Four Seasons, and others — pay their workers substantially more than minimum wage and substantially more than their competitors as part of a broader ‘good jobs strategy.’”

“Higher paying service jobs can also promote creativity and innovation in less direct ways. Better-paying service jobs can boost the creative economy by helping its participants cover the rent.”

“Our current approaches to combating poverty can be divided into two basic categories: people-based approaches that provide resources to poor families or help them move to new and better neighborhoods, and place-based approaches that attempt to improve the conditions of disadvantaged neighborhoods by investing in schools, providing needed social services, and reducing crime and violence. We need to do both.”

“Fundamentally, poverty is the absence of money. Providing every person with a guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income is the most straightforward way to combat it; and the most efficacious way to do that is through a negative income tax, which essentially returns money to the poor so that they can cover their basic needs. Such an approach is a more cost-effective and less bureaucratically cumbersome way of mitigating poverty than providing myriad direct-assistance programs for housing, food, child support, and the like.”

“Not only do more stable cities lead to greater economic development and rising living standards, but they are the key to creating a safer, more tolerant, and less violent world.”

“The local level can best understand its own economic conditions and social needs and is best positioned to constructively address them.”