Economic development

You are where you eat.

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live?

8463293463_559cacf5bd_m

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production.

We’ve assembled data on the number of full service restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that the “full service” definition basically applies only to sit down, table service restaurants, not the broader category that includes fast food and self-service. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans and Denver score high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about seven full-service restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 11 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside has only five and seven other metropolitan areas have fewer than six.

The top five metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, Providence, Portland, New York, and Seattle. Each of these cities has nine or more full service restaurants per capita. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, almost eight percent of Las Vegas restaurants employed more than 100 workers; nationally the average is only two percent.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity– but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences). It is also highly correlated with per capita income, which makes sense: the more people that are able to afford frequent restaurant outings, the more restaurants there will be.

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options. If you’re going to travel 2,000 miles for dinner, it might be wise to make a reservation. Or if you’re going to Portland, at least be ready to wait in line.

 

Photo courtesy of Janet at Flickr Creative Commons

How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 2: Small Business)

Posted on by Joe Cortright

We recently featured a post regarding how venture capital is associated with economic mobility. We know that these are strongly correlated—and that, if we are concerned with the ability of children today to obtain ‘The American Dream,’ we should be concerned with how to increase economic mobility.

To understand more about how cities can increase intergenerational economic mobility, we wanted to take a look at another measure of entrepreneurship: small businesses per capita.

We follow Glaeser, et al, and measure the number of businesses with 20 or fewer employees per 1,000 population in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. As in the previous post, we measure economic mobility as the probability that children born in the bottom quintile rise to the top quintile as adults.

The chart below shows the results: cities with a larger number of small businesses per capita have higher rates of economic mobility. This relationship is positive, but statistically less strong a fit (R-squared: .16) than venture capital.

The data from this post and the previous one suggest that there a positive relationship between entrepreneurship and higher levels of economic mobility, particularly that economic mobility is somewhat correlated with higher numbers of small businesses and more strongly correlated with venture capital.

This analysis is both partial and preliminary. We know from Chetty, et al, that there are other factors (segregation, schools, family structure) that influence economic mobility. A more comprehensive analysis would consider whether or not after controlling for the variation explained by these other factors there was any remaining variation explained by entrepreneurship. Moreover, these relationships are simple correlations, and do not necessarily indicate cause and effect. For example, it could be that economic mobility causes entrepreneurship. Furthermore, our data on small businesses and venture capital are taken from recent years; a more rigorous analysis would look to see whether small business and venture capital levels of two or more decades ago were correlated with economic mobility over the succeeding time period.

Still, taken as a whole, the data suggest that more entrepreneurial places have higher levels of economic mobility. Why this relationship exists and what implications it may have for policy are questions worthy of further research.

To learn more about innovation and entrepreneurship from a metro perspective, go to our cards here. (We also feature information on economic mobility and opportunity, economic segregation, and more here.)

Less in Common

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place.  Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and interests is part of the secret sauce that enables progress and creates opportunity.  This ease of exchange underpins important aspects of our personal lives, civic effectiveness and economic development.

But over the past several decades, a number of trends–some social, some economic, some political, and others technological–have interacted to dramatically change the ways, the places, and the amounts of interaction between different groups in our society.  By many measures, we now spend less time in social settings, and are less likely to regularly interact with people whose experiences are different from our own.  In our schools, communities, work, shopping and personal activities, we’re increasingly separated from one another.

Our new report, Less in Common, surveys a wide range of measures of how Americans have grown apart from one another over the past several decades.  We’ve intentionally drawn promiscuously from a variety of fields to illustrate the breadth and variety of ways in which this trend seems to be unfolding.

Many of these changes are reflected in the physical landscape of our cities.  In North America, development patterns, particularly the growth of suburbs after World War II, diminished access to an easily shared urban life.  Space and experiences became more private, fueled by suburban expansion, large lots, and the predominance of single-family homes. These development patterns have resulted in Americans having “less in common.”  This phenomenon appears to play out in many different ways:

Distrust among Americans is increasing.  A key marker of social capital that is regularly used in comparing nations and tracking trends over time is the generalized feeling of trust.  The General Social Survey reports that the share of the population that says “most people can be trusted” has fallen from a majority in the 1970s, to about one-third today.

Americans spend significantly less time with their neighbors.  In the 1970s, nearly 30 percent of Americans frequently spent time with neighbors, and only 20 percent had no interactions with them.  Today, those proportions are reversed.

The biggest portion of our leisure time is spent watching television.  TV watching is up to 19 hours per week today compared to about 10 hours in the 1960s.  We spend less time socializing and communicating.

Our recreation is increasingly privatized.  Since 1980, the number of members of private health clubs have quadrupled to more than 50 million.  We used to swim together—prior to World War II, almost all pools were public.  Today, we swim alone in the 5 million or so private swimming pools compared to just a few thousand public ones.

Driving alone has become the norm, with transit reserved for the poor. Today, 85 percent of American commuters travel to work in private automobiles, up from 63 percent in 1960.  Carpooling has fallen by half since 1980, and the share who commute via transit has declined from 12 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent today.

Economic segregation trends upward as middle-income neighborhoods decline. High-income and low-income Americans have become more geographically separated within metropolitan areas. Between 1970 and 2009 the proportion of families living either in predominantly poor or predominantly affluent neighborhoods doubled from 15 percent to 33 percent.

Many of us live in gated communities. By 1997 it was estimated that there were more than 20,000 gated community developments of 3,000 or more residents. By design, gated communities restrict access and carefully control who is allowed into a community to separate residents from outsiders.

Politically, America sorts itself into like-minded geographies.  Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of consistent conservatives and about half (49 percent) of consistent liberals say most of their close friends share their political views.

There are some counter-trends to the general pattern of isolation and separation.  Racial segregation, though still high, has declined steadily for decades. New community spaces—like farmer’s markets—have grown rapidly.  Widespread availability of the Internet combined with social media has made it easier and more democratic to connect with others and with all forms of information.

A broadly shared sense of common interest, anchored in a society that promotes social mobility and easy interaction, is a vital underpinning of effective political institutions and the economy.  If we’re going to make progress in tackling a range of our nation’s challenges, and live up to our full potential, we need to reinvigorate the civic commons.

You can also see the findings in the form of an easy-to-share infographic:

Click to see the full infographic.
Click to see the full infographic.

How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve higher economic status when they are adults. Their work shows a remarkable degree of geographic variation in intergenerational economic mobility. In many communities, the chances of measurably improving one’s economic prospects are dramatically lower than in others. The variations aren’t random: their analysis finds that intergenerational economic mobility is correlated with a number of community characteristics, such as residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure.

In theory, we believe that entrepreneurship is a key mechanism for promoting economic mobility. Entrepreneurs can create new businesses that give themselves—and their employees—the chance to improve their economic position. We already know that entrepreneurship is one of the critically important factors in stimulating metropolitan economic growth. Job growth is strongly correlated with an abundance of small firms. Across metropolitan areas, metro areas with more small firms relative to the size of their population see faster employment growth (Glaeser, Kerr, & Ponzetto, 2010).

Fast growing, entrepreneurial firms may be particularly important for providing opportunities for upward mobility because they tend to hire more younger workers than other bigger firms (Ouimet & Zarutskie, 2013). Having a large number of young, small, entrepreneurial firms may create more opportunities for young workers from all economic strata to progress through the economic spectrum.

So, what is the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic mobility? One way we look at this is to examine venture capital per capita. (For this analysis, like most others we produce, we focus on the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas—those with populations larger than 1 million in 2012.)

Venture capital investments are a key indicator of entrepreneurial activity. We tabulate data from the National Venture Capital Association on the dollar value of venture capital in 2011 divided by the population of the metropolitan area. Because of the very large disparities in venture capital per capita among metropolitan, we took the log of this variable.

We compare the venture capital per capita in each metropolitan area with the level of intergenerational mobility by metropolitan area. We use Chetty, et al’s measure of intergenerational economic mobility: the probability that children born to families in the lowest income quintile had incomes as adults that put them in the highest income quintile. Among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas the probability of moving from the lowest quintile to the highest varied by a factor of about three: a four percent chance in the least economically mobile areas to a nearly 12 percent chance in the most economically mobile areas.

The chart below shows the relationship between venture capital and economic mobility for these large metropolitan areas. The data show a positive relationship between venture capital and economic mobility: cities with higher levels of venture capital have higher levels of economic mobility. (The R2 of .31 suggests that this is a statistically significant relationship.)

This strong positive relationship is not something we can immediately claim as a causal link—however, it has implications for further study. It also raises interesting questions: if cities attract more venture capital, will they be able to attract more young talent? And how will that impact economic mobility and inequality within the city?

In a future post we will examine the link between the number of small businesses in a metro and economic mobility, and conclude this segment. (To read more on economic opportunity, go here, and to read more about innovation and entrepreneurship, see our work here.)

Best Bar Cities

Posted on by CityObservatory Guest

Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about how restaurants add value to a city– but thought we’d look at bars in the same way.

Now, what makes a great bar depends on who you talk to- but regardless of if you prefer a wine bar with small plates, a gastropub, or a dive bar with ski ball (or without ski ball)—bars contribute to a city’s livability and an individual’s experience within a city. Trying to argue that one is better than another is, well, a way to start a barroom brawl. So while we can’t resolve which cities have the best bars, we can at least count which cities have the most bars.

We used County Business Patterns data to analyze the number of bars per 10,000 workers each the top 51 most populous metro areas. (The latest data is from 2012, reflected below):

It’s no surprise that New Orleans comes up first—it is renowned for its bars. (In case it wasn’t on your calendar, Mardis Gras is right around the corner..) There’s no particular rhyme or reason for the rest of the ranking; a variety of things can influence bar culture, such as policy and availability of licenses, availability and strength of public transit, age of residents (younger residents will desire more bars than older ones), and weather (colder places have seen higher consumption rates of alcohol).

Of course, the number of bars per capita isn’t a measure of quality (much like it isn’t for restaurants, either). More bars may reflect loose regulations, a higher city-wide per capita income, and of course, a desire for variety. For example, Pittsburgh’s historical blue-collar workforce may desire its older dive bars, but its new population of young engineers and medical workers allow for hip and more expensive wine, whiskey, and champagne bars to flourish.

Bars are just one way in which a city can make itself more livable for its residents. Livability is important—it attracts residents, and therefore tax payers, and helps to retain younger, talented workers. Ed Glaeser, Harvard economist and author, has encouraged the city of Boston in its efforts to allow bars to stay open later. He sees it as a matter of making Boston “livelier.” A city’s liveliness, to which bars certainly contribute, may not be of the utmost importance to all residents—but it’s clear it’s important to some, and can be a strategic advantage to cities. (To read more about how city distinctiveness and its placemaking efforts can benefit cities, go here and here.)

One tip for a prosperous city economy

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Local media over the course of the last several months have asked us variations on one question repeatedly: if our city wants to do better – be more productive, retain more young people, reduce poverty—how can it do that?

That’s a very complicated question of course, and each metro area and urban core has its own problems based on current policies and laws, history, and geography, among other factors. However, there is one indicator that above all else predicts success of city residents: college attainment rates. Even for those without a 4-year degree, this predicts success; essentially, if your neighbors are better educated, you are more likely to have a better income. With that, all of the correlates of a higher income such as health, educational opportunities for children, and even happiness—are higher.

It’s striking how strong and consistent the correlation between education and higher personal incomes is.  Economists attribute this to a number of factors.  Better educated workers command a high skill premium, because they’re more adaptable and productive, and are critical to growing knowledge based firms.  Education has important spillover benefits:  on average, workers of all education levels are more productive (and higher paid) if they live in cities that are better educated.  A well-educated population makes a city more resilient in the face of economic and technological change, and better able to quickly adapt to new circumstances and opportunities.

Cities around the nation pursue a range of different economic strategies–pursuing new industries, promoting innovation, encouraging entrepreneurship, expanding infrastructure, and building civic amenities.  While there are merits to all of these approaches, every one of them takes a back seat to improving educational attainment as a way to raise incomes.  Put another way, all of these strategies will work better in a place with strong educational attainment, and communities with weak educational attainment will find only meager returns.

Improving educational attainment isn’t the only economic strategy, but it’s a fundamental one, and if your city fails to move forward in this important area, it will find it more difficult to successfully implement all of its other tactics.

At CityObservatory, we track attainment rates closely, as we believe talent is the biggest driver of positive (or negative) change in a city. The figure above shows the most updated figures on educational attainment and per capita income, from the 2013 American Community Survey data. To learn more about how talent drives city success, go here, and be sure to check back often, as we will continue to discuss how talent and success are tied to complex urban problems (and solutions to those problems).

Consuming the city: Ranking restaurants per capita

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The number of eating places per capita is a key measure of a city’s livability

Cities are great places for consumers.  They provide an abundance and variety of choices, especially in the form of experiences. While our conventional economic indicators don’t fully capture the nature and depth of choices in cities, there are some measures that shed light on which places offer the most.  Today we offer our index of restaurants per capita as one such indicator of where choice is greatest.

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production. We’ve assembled data on the number of restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that this category, technically NAICS 72251, includes both sit down, table service restaurants and simpler fast food and self-service self-service establishments. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans scores high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about 17 restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 23 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside and Grand Rapids have only about 14 per 10,000. (On this map areas shaded green have the highest number of restaurants per capita; areas shaded red have the fewest. Detailed data on individual metropolitan areas is shown in the table below).

The top six metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, New York, Providence, Boston, Seattle and Portland. Each of these cities has twenty or more  restaurants per 10,000 population. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

In an important sense, the number of different restaurants in an area correlates to the range choices available to consumers. Cities that have more restaurants per capita tend to have larger restaurants (measured by the average number of employees per restaurant).  Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity–but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences).

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options.

 

You are where you eat.

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live?

8463293463_559cacf5bd_m

There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists for cities with the most restaurants, the best restaurants, the most distinctive local restaurants… and of course none of these seem to agree (although the “winners” tend to be similar among these lists).

But what about the cities that provide the most dining options per person? And what does restaurant variety have to do with a city’s livability?

One of the hallmarks of a great city is a smorgasbord of great places to eat. Cities offer a wide variety of choices of what, where, and how to eat, everything from grabbing a dollar taco to seven courses of artisanally curated locally raised products (not to mention pedigreed chickens). The “food scene” is an important component of the urban experience.

Restaurants are an important marker of the amenities that characterize attractive urban environments. Ed Glaeser and his colleagues found that “Cities with more restaurant and live performance theaters per capita have grown more quickly over the past 20 years both in the U.S. and in France.”

Matthew Holian and Matthew Kahn have seen that an increase in the number of restaurants per capita in a downtown area has a statistically significant effect in reducing driving and lowering greenhouse gas production.

We’ve assembled data on the number of full service restaurants per capita in each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. These data are from the County Business Patterns data compiled by the US Census Bureau for 2012. Note that the “full service” definition basically applies only to sit down, table service restaurants, not the broader category that includes fast food and self-service. We’re also looking at metro-wide data to assure that the geographical units we’re comparing are defined in a similar fashion—political boundaries like city limits and county lines are arbitrary and vary widely from place to place, making them a poor basis for constructing this kind of comparison.

As you might guess, the metro areas with the most restaurants per capita are found predominantly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Elsewhere, New Orleans and Denver score high as well. While the average metropolitan area has about seven full-service restaurants per 10,000 residents, the range is considerable. The San Francisco metropolitan area has more than 11 restaurants per 10,000, while Riverside has only five and seven other metropolitan areas have fewer than six.

The top five metropolitan areas on this indicator are San Francisco, Providence, Portland, New York, and Seattle. Each of these cities has nine or more full service restaurants per capita. With the possible exception of Providence, all of these are recognized as major food cities in the US. (And Portland achieves its high ranking without counting the city’s more than 500 licensed food carts.)

Interestingly, Las Vegas, which we think of as a tourism mecca, has fewer restaurants per capita than the average metropolitan area. A lot of this has to do with scale—the average restaurant in Las Vegas tends to be much larger than in other metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, almost eight percent of Las Vegas restaurants employed more than 100 workers; nationally the average is only two percent.

This ranking doesn’t include anything about quality–simply quantity– but the higher restaurants per capita can indicate higher competition (and therefore better quality options), or higher demand (a signal that more diversity of options is valued, allowing for more valuable experiences). It is also highly correlated with per capita income, which makes sense: the more people that are able to afford frequent restaurant outings, the more restaurants there will be.

While this isn’t a perfect listing of best food culture — each person’s measure of the ‘best food town’ is subjective — it does settle the debate of where you should go to have the largest selection of eatery options. If you’re going to travel 2,000 miles for dinner, it might be wise to make a reservation. Or if you’re going to Portland, at least be ready to wait in line.

 

Photo courtesy of Janet at Flickr Creative Commons

How productive is your city?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Which metropolitan economies are the most productive?  Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product — the total value of goods and services produced by our economy.  Economists usually compare the productivity of national economies by looking at GDP per worker or per employee.  At the sub-national level, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates an analogous concept “Gross Metropolitan Product” –the total value of goods and services produced in a metropolitan area.

If we divide metropolitan GDP by population, we get a rough idea of which metropolitan economies are the most productive on a per person basis.  Nationally, gross metropolitan product averages about $55,000 per person in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

The distribution is characterized by two distinct outliers: Riverside, CA on the low end, and San Jose on the high end. The two cities are 400 miles apart, but San Jose has a GDP per capita almost $75,000 more than Riverside (that’s more than most cities produce in a year per person).

In general, it’s clear that the productivity of a few big cities in the northeast and west coast is much higher than those in the middle of the country. Nine metros have gross domestic product over $65,000 per capita, and the only one of these not on the east or west coast is Houston.

It should be noted that this looks quite similar to the map of educational attainment: GDP per capita and educational attainment are highly correlated, and an increase in the level of talent in one’s city is associated with an increase in GDP:

We should keep in mind that gross product is a broad measure of economic activity:  it picks up the value of goods and services produced in an area, including the rental value of owner-occupied homes and returns to physical capital.  While most labor income in a metropolitan area goes to residents of that area, capital income often goes to owners who live elsewhere.  Since GMP measures the value of services where businesses are located, rather than where shareholders live, it apportions the capital returns for banks in New York, to New York, and for software firms in Seattle, to Seattle, rather than to the location of the shareholders of these firms.

Some technical notes:  The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures gross domestic product of metropolitan areas in chained 2009 dollars.  These data are for calendar year 2013; annual data for 2014 should be released in the third quarter of this year.  You can explore GDP by industry sector to see which industries make the biggest contribution to regional output in each metropolitan area.  Detailed data are available on the BEA website:  http://www.bea.gov/regional/index.htm

Keeping it Weird:  The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references.

These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially over, a double-digit unemployment rate tells us something different. The bruising battle over the economic consequences of tax Measures 66 and 67 underscored deep disagreement — and uncertainty — about Oregon’s economic future.

What will we do for a strategy? I think you can find the answer hidden in plain sight. Keep Portland Weird. You’ve seen the bumper sticker around town. It’s funny and controversial. It’s spawned imitators (Keep Portland Beered, Keep Portland Wired) and competitors (Keep Vancouver Normal). But it’s not just a bumper sticker — it’s an economic strategy.

In a turbulent economy, being different and being open to new ideas about how to do things are remarkably important competitive advantages.

The bumper sticker may not be original — apparently the idea was imported from a buy-local campaign in Austin, Texas — but it is popular, with more than 18,000 of the stickers sold. And make no mistake, Portland is weird, at least compared with other major U.S. metropolitan areas.

We developed a weirdness index for the national organization CEOs for Cities that measures the differences in behavior based on 60 different indicators of what people do, watch, read and consume.

We used this data to rank the 50 largest metro areas, based on how closely their patterns tracked the overall national average. Portland ranks 11th of the 50.

The most normal places in the country are in the Midwest. Consumption patterns, attitudes and behaviors in St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincinnati and Columbus almost exactly match national norms.

Trying to summarize weirdness in a single index is, of course, a contradiction in terms. Every weird city is weird in its own unique way. San Francisco and Salt Lake City rank among the weirdest — most different from the U.S. average in attitudes, activities and behaviors –but are nothing alike. So it makes sense to drill down to find out what makes each place distinctive.

In what ways is Portland weird? As you might expect, recreation, environmentalism, and great food and drink figure prominently. Compared with the U.S. average, Portlanders are twice as likely to go camping, 60 percent more likely to go hiking or backpacking and 40 percent more likely to golf or hunt. Portland has the highest per-capita ownership of hybrid vehicles of any city, and more people belong to environmental groups. We also rank above average in consumption of alcohol, coffee and tea.

Another way to track local weirdness is to look at what terms people are searching for on the Internet. According to Google over the past year, Portland ranks first among U.S. metro areas for the search terms “sustainability,” “vegan,” “farmers market,” “cyclocross,” “microbrew” and “dragonboat,” and second — after Seattle — for “espresso.”

But aside from winning bar bets or playing Trivial Pursuit, what’s the economic importance of being weird?

As it turns out, a lot.

When it comes to economic success in today’s economy, the key is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter counsels businesses that “competitive strategy is about being different.” And the late, great urbanist Jane Jacobs told us, “The greatest asset that a city can have is something that’s different from every other place.”

Practical examples of how distinctive local behaviors translate into economic activity are right in our own backyard.

Back in the ’60s, at a time when most adults didn’t sweat in public if they could avoid it, people in Oregon started the trend of jogging and running for health. One guy started selling these people Japanese sneakers out of the back of his station wagon: Phil Knight. The company he founded is a global powerhouse.

A similar story could be told about two avowed ex-hippie home brewers, who as soon as it was legal to do so, started selling kegs of their beer to local restaurants out of the back of their Datsun pickup. Kurt and Rob Widmer, and a host of other amateurs turned entrepreneurs, ignited a trend that is even today reshaping the brewing industry.

The conventional business wisdom of the 1960s or 1970s would never have forecast that Portland would become a hotbed for two industries that were either in steep decline (shoes) or increasingly monopolized by giant corporations (beer). But with local consumers who were willing to take a flier on something new — and whose tastes anticipated a much larger shift in global attitudes — athletic apparel and microbrewing both became signature industry clusters in metropolitan Portland.

True entrepreneurship is about deviant behavior: starting a business that makes a product that no one else has thought of or thinks there’s a market for. Entrepreneurs and open-minded, experimental customers go hand-in-hand.

Openness to change isn’t just about new products or services; it’s about community and government as well. Oregonians’ willingness to test novel or untried ideas of all kinds — urban growth boundaries, modern streetcars, vote-by-mail, death-with-dignity — is both representative of a widely held attitude towards change and a powerful advantage in a fast-moving world.

And in many cases, innovative public policies are essential to growing new industries. Microbrewers owe their early start, in part, to Oregon’s decision to be one of the first states to legalize craft brewing. Many Portland businesses are exporting the knowledge gained from the region’s pioneering work in urban planning, streetcars, green buildings and cycling.

Openness to new ideas also is critical to attracting and retaining mobile, talented young people — the college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds I call the “young and restless.” Our in-depth national study of migration trends showed that over the past decade, Portland has seen a 50 percent increase in this group, the fifth-fastest growth of any large metro area.

Portland’s special character, and the sense that one can live their values and make a mark, are key to this migration. As one interviewee put it: “This place communicates to newcomers that it ‘isn’t done yet’ and that there’s an opportunity for me to contribute to what it will become.”

To be sure, the Keep Portland Weird mantra has spawned detractors and wags: Keep Vancouver Normal. Keep Portland Sanctimonious. We shouldn’t do things just to be different, but we should never be dissuaded from trying something simply because it is different or would make us different from other places.

Decades ago, Gov. Tom McCall understood and gave voice to this sense of Oregon exceptionalism, when he famously said, “Come visit, but don’t stay.” Our pioneering spirit runs deep. Remember, the state’s motto is “She flies with her own wings,” which in today’s parlance would be translated as marching to the beat of a different drum.

Keeping Portland Weird ought to be the theme of our economic strategy. Especially today. As Hunter S. Thompson advised, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We can be reasonably certain that the U.S. and world economies will need to change dramatically to meet the challenges we face in coping with climate change, providing health care and building livable communities. In the days ahead, being weird can be a competitive advantage.

Making weirdness your marketing slogan turns the usual logic of boosterism on its head. The conventional wisdom prescribes emphasizing a “good business climate” — usually consisting of the same things you find everywhere else, just cheaper. Traditional strategies chiefly involve clinging to the past or shamelessly clumsily copying what everyone else is doing.

If one buys into the view that the “world is flat” — the metaphorical reference to a level playing field in a global market — the temptation is to focus on making yourself “flatter.” In reality, the world though smaller and more tightly linked, isn’t flat. There are giant spikes of industry, creativity and inventiveness in particular places. So the key is to understand what your “spikes” are and capitalize on them. The alternative strategy — make Portland flatter — is a recipe for mediocrity and failure in a global knowledge-based economy where the ability to generate new ideas and turn them into businesses and better communities is the only source of sustainable competitive advantage.

No one can predict what will be the industries of the future. They have to be invented and created through trial and error — lots of trials, and almost as many errors. A place that is open to new ideas — especially weird ones — is by its nature better positioned to generate the kinds of trials that lead to these new industries.

Where are the food deserts?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

One of the nation’s biggest health problems is the challenge of obesity:  since the early 1960s the number of American’s who are obese has increased from about 13 percent to 35 percent.

The problem is a complex, deep-seated one, and everything from our diet, to our inactive life-styles, to the built environment have been implicated as contributing factors.

Over the past five years, a new term has crept into our common lexicon of cities:  food desert.  (Google Trends reports almost no use of the term prior to 2009, and mentions have grown steadily since then).

The image of a food desert conveys a strong, specific image:  people who live so far from a grocery store with healthy food that they have little alternative but to subsist on the unhealthy alternatives close at hand.  But what exactly is a food desert?  And how many Americans have poor diets because of the distance they have to travel to reach a grocery store?

Judged by proximity to grocery stores nearly all of rural America is a food desert.  Nathan Yau at FlowingData uses Google maps data to construct a compelling map of how far it is to the nearest grocery store across the entire nation. The bleakest food deserts are the actual deserts of the American West, in Nevada and Wyoming.

City dwellers, particularly those in the biggest, most dense cities tend to live closest to supermarkets and have the best food access.  At City Observatory, we’re big fans of WalkScore, the app that computes a walkability index for any residential address in the U.S. based on its proximity to common destinations like stores, parks and schools.  Earlier this year, WalkScore used their data and modeling prowess to develop some clear, objective images of who does (and doesn’t) have a good grocery store nearby.  They estimate that 72 percent of New York City residents live within a five-minute walk of a grocery store.  At the other end of the spectrum, only about five percent of residents of Indianapolis and Oklahoma City are so close.  If you want to walk to the store, this data shows the real food deserts are in the suburbs.

There are other ways of measuring food access and mapping food deserts.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture and PolicyMap have both worked to generate their own maps of the nation’s food deserts.  They use a combination of physical proximity (how far it is to the nearest grocery store) and measurements of neighborhood income levels.

While it’s clear that income plays a big role in food access, it’s far from clear how to combine income and proximity to define food deserts.  The USDA uses an overlay which identifies low-income neighborhoods with limited food access.  PolicyMap has a complicated multi-step process that compares how far low-income residents have to travel to stores compared to higher income residents living in similarly dense neighborhoods.

In practice, combining neighborhood income and physical proximity actually muddles the definition of food access.  First, and most important, it acknowledges that income, not physical distance is the big factor in nutrition.  Both of these methods imply that having wealthy neighbors or living in the country-side means than physical access to food is not a barrier.  Second, it is your household’s income, not your neighbor’s income, that determines whether you can buy food.  Third, these methods implicitly treat low income families differently depending on where they live.  For example, PolicyMap excludes middle income and higher income neighborhoods from its definition of “limited supermarket access” areas—and therefore doesn’t count lower income families living in these areas as having poor food access.

The fact that both of these systems use a different yardstick for measuring accessibility in rural areas suggests that proximity isn’t really the issue. Rural residents are considered by USDA to have adequate food access if they live within ten miles of a grocery story whereas otherwise identical urban residents are considered to have adequate access only if they live within a mile or half-mile of a store.

If we’re concerned about food access, we probably ought to focus our attention on poverty and a lack of income, not grocery store location.  The argument here parallels that of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who pointed out that the cause starvation and death in famines is seldom the physical lack of sufficient food, but is instead the collapse of the incomes of the poor.  Sen’s conclusion was that governments should focus on raising incomes if they wanted to stave off hunger, rather than stockpiling or distributing foodstuffs

It’s tempting to blame poor nutrition and obesity on a lack of convenient access to healthier choices, but the problem is more difficult and complex than that.  Poverty and poor education are strong correlates of poor nutrition and obesity.

Finally, it’s reasonable to question whether the physical proximity to healthier eating choices is the big driver of our hunger and nutrition problems.

Millions of Americans, rich and poor, walk right past the fresh vegetables and buy chips, soda, and other calorie-rich processed foods.  The “food desert” narrative is a convenient way of making it sound like personal choice doesn’t enter into the problem.  But studies show that there is no apparent relationship between a store’s mix of products and its customer’s body/mass index (BMI) (Lear, Gasevic, and Schuurman, 2013). Limited experimental evidence suggest that improving the supply of fresh foods seems to have limited impacts on food consumption patterns.  Preliminary results of a study of consumers in a Philadelphia neighborhood that got better supermarket access showed no improvement in fruit and vegetable consumption or body mass index even for those who patronized the new store.

Of course, we have good reasons to believe that the built environment does play an important role in obesity—but that may have more to do with how easy it is to walk to all our daily destinations, and not just the distance to the fresh food aisle.

Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data

Posted on by Joe Cortright

At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities.  These distinctive traits don’t always shine through in conventional economic data, which leads us to look for the rare statistics that convey more nuance about every place.

One such data source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics (OES).  The OES includes metropolitan-level estimates of the number of workers in occupational categories, as well as estimates of the range of pay levels.  It’s possible to use the occupational employment estimates to calculate a location quotient–a measure of specialization, which shows how much larger or smaller a share of a region’s employment base is made up of a particular occupation.  We used the OES data to identify the occupation in each metropolitan area with the highest location quotient–indicating the occupation in each metropolitan area that is the most disproportionately likely to be found in that region compared to all others.  Note that the occupation with the highest location quotient is not necessarily the most common occupation in the region, just the one that is more concentrated in that region than any other occupation, relative to the typical metropolitan area.

Occupations with high location quotients are indicators of a city’s knowledge specializations.   While it’s hard to measure knowledge directly, occupational data give us a window into where the most highly developed knowledge is located. These knowledge specializations have important economic development implications.  If you’re looking to grow a business and be successful, you want a pool of talented people who understand your industry, its technology, and its markets.  The occupational data shed light on the concentrations of specially talented workers.  The leading specializations for each of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are shown here.



 

These data confirm many of our intuitive notions about the clustering of industries, knowledge, and occupations.  New York’s leading occupation is fashion designers, Los Angeles’s is media and communication workers.  Las Vegas is the leader for gaming workers, Washington for political scientists, and blue collar Milwaukee for foundry mold and coremakers.

It’s interesting to compare metro specializations to those for entire states.  We compared our results to those generated for states by the website Mental Floss who prepared “Which job is most unique to your state?” — a similar analysis of state occupational distinctiveness a couple of months ago.

Many cities share their principal occupational specialization with the state they are located in, but in other cases, there’s evidence of an urban-rural divide.  In Louisiana the most distinctive occupation is captains, mates and pilots of water vessels, while in New Orleans, its entertainers, performers, and sports workers. Oregon’s leading occupation is logging workers, but in metro Portland, the most specialized occupation is semiconductor processors.

Occupational data provide a rich source of insight into the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a region’s workers.  Those who want to explore the occupational approach to understanding city distinctiveness should read this paper by Ann Markusen and Greg Schrock.