Major American cities can be divided into two types--aspirational cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City--and Euro-American cities such as Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The former have a bright future; the latter, well, not so much.
Reduced to its essentials, this is the thesis of Joel Kotkin, an author, scholar and consultant whose work focuses on cities and the role they play in our economy and culture. Kotkin's The City: A Global History will hit bookstore shelves in a few weeks, and although, as the title suggests, the book appears to cover a very broad span, he's recently been promoting a few specific ideas in magazine articles and op-ed pages. The concept cited above was the theme of American Cities of Aspiration...and the Decline of Euro-America in yesterday's Weekly Standard.
Kotkin sees the two types of cities as representing, "a chasm in America, separating two competing economic regimes, one that embraces growth and new opportunity and another that increasingly seeks to preserve its privileges and coveted lifestyle." He continues,
What differentiates these two Americas is not so much politics, but perspective on the future. Cities of aspiration like Reno accommodate job growth and attract young families who hope that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. They offer an environment that most of our forebears--wherever they might be from--would recognize as distinctly American. In the places people are leaving, what might be called Euro-America, the focus is on preserving older urban forms, cultivating refinement, and following continental norms in attitude, politics, and lifestyle.
A map of Kotkin's "two competing economic regimes" would dovetail nicely with the current Red-Blue divide, and so I suspect this concept will be rejected out of hand by Democrats and others on the left who are concentrated in "Euro-American" cities. This would be a mistake. Kotkin's ideas are being promoted by the Standard and George Will, and he has sharp disagreements with such left thinkers as James Howard Kunstler and Jeremy Rifkin, but he's a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank, and he's cited frequently in the mainstream media. Whatever you may think of Kotkin's ideas, he can't be dismissed as merely a partisan tool.
And as someone who's lived in San Francisco (and loved it) for the past 15 years, I think Kotkin's thesis holds water. In his Weekly Standard piece, Kotkin notes that, "The in-migration of educated people may prove the most important sign of the future vitality of aspirational cities. Boston may still be 'the Athens' of America, but since the mid-1990s it and other Euro-American centers have been losing educated workers, particularly those over 30."
My wife and I have two Ivy League degrees and three graduate degrees between us, but we can't afford a home in San Francisco, and we doubt we ever will. Granted, we've chosen careers that are more fulfilling than renumerative, but we see our friends and colleagues in "aspirational cities" buying homes, and we wonder what we're doing here. This was one of the factors that led us to recently contemplate a move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my wife was considering a potential job opportunity. We've decided to stay put, now that my wife's landed her dream job here in the Bay Area, but it wasn't an easy decision. (And if you just said to yourself, "Why would anyone leave San Francisco for Lousiana?" I wonder how much time you've spent in either place.)
If you care about America's cities--all of them--and the people who make them such wonderful places, you need to take Kotkin seriously. As he notes in the Standard, "San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and many other American cities have been losing jobs since 2000; New York has fewer private-sector positions today than it did in 1969." They remain generally wealthy places because of a "near monopoly" in "major media...top universities...[and] financial and professional services...even as they fail to create opportunities for their working and middle classes."
This is a recipe for economic stagnation and class resentment, and simply closing our eyes and wishing Kotkin would go away and take his unpleasant ideas with him is to be complicit in the abandonment of some of our greatest cities.