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Hmm..I was just thinking about moving from Houston to Chicago. Now reading that article makes me feel quite confused. Should I just stay where I am, go somewhere else or continue on with my move....
Nope things are horrible here. Death everywhere. Gangs, violence, guns, corruptions, baby snatching.
Did he buy a condo in NY, too? I hope he doesn't have to move anytime soon, or he's going to find out that they're hard to sell there, too. Maybe then he'll write about NY's downfall.
NY's problems are all invisible these days. Journalists made a secret pact not to talk about them. I don't think I've seen a movie about NYC - any borough - with poor people in it since the 1980s. (There was still some sort of 'gritty New Yorker' pride back then.. now they - or at least the journalists, filmmakers, etc. living there - want people to think they've all (yes, all eight million of them) been ridiculously posh, without trash piled up in front of storefronts or graffiti on the buildings or anything like that, since the founding of the city.)
Last edited by Alicia Bradley; 06-11-2012 at 03:56 PM..
NY's problems are all invisible these days. Journalists made a secret pact not to talk about them. I don't think I've seen a movie about NYC - any borough - with poor people in it since the 1980s.
Well, they pushed poverty to the outer edges of the city and into the suburbs, exactly as Chicago is now doing. There isn't a lot of poverty left in Manhattan for them to show, and I guess Bronx and Newark don't make as good of movie settings.
Well, they pushed poverty to the outer edges of the city and into the suburbs, exactly as Chicago is now doing. There isn't a lot of poverty left in Manhattan for them to show, and I guess Bronx and Newark don't make as good of movie settings.
I think it's that they actually don't want people to know about them. Or maybe that movies that don't trade in stereotypes ('NYC and the surronding areas are 100% wealthy now, pass it on') don't do well at the box office. Or it could be both. Stereotypes are a sort of chicken and egg situation, IMO - I think creators of popular art enjoy propagating stereotypes, but I also think consumers demand them.
Just thought I'd throw it out there for discussion.
Personally, I find Aaron M. Renn's analysis to be something I nearly always find to be lacking - so much so, that I no longer read his Urbanophile blog. I like to read things I disagree with, but only when they're well-supported and well-reasoned. Urbanophile blog is often written in a way such that even when I agree with it, I get annoyed at the lack of support.
First, I don't want to say that there aren't problems in Chicago or, in a larger scope, Illinois. However his headline is "Second-Rate City", not "Bankrupt State," and while Chicago is the largest city in Illinois, its population accounts for less than 1/4 of the state's total population. This isn't the elder Daley's Illinois, and burdening Chicago with Illinois's problems is neither fair nor honest.
It hits the low-hanging fruit at the heart of the conjecture without any analysis. It quotes Maria Pappas infamous numbers as though they make sense on their face. They don't. Maria repeatedly fails to define the timeline for her numbers. She admits that she has repeatedly failed to even include the assets that assign to the debt already. That's like saying you have a $250,000 debt but not mentioning that it's a mortgage on a $300,000 (or even $200,000) house. It's misleading and obscenely so. Yet the article can't be bothered to look into that or question it.
The article then claims that to be a "global city" you have to have a dominant industry you can tax like a milk cow, citing finance for New York, government for Washington, and entertainment for L.A. (yet how much of L.A.'s GMP is really from entertainment? less than you might think.). And what's the dominant industry in Paris or Tokyo or Sydney? The article then claims that that's why our GMP per capita is low - failing - again - to point out that the GMP per capita in LA is actually lower than that of Chicago. So it claims from one side of the mouth you can't be global without a dominant industry like L.A. and because we don't that's why we have a higher GMP per capita than L.A. Right. Totally rational ...
The article's claim that financiers must move to New York (what's that about the growing banking in Charlotte? What's that about San Francisco's venture capitalists? London? Tokyo? Hong Kong? Singapore? Who ever heard of those places?) or that software engineers are "forced" to move to the Silicon Valley - another falsehood that misunderstands the ecosystem of software and technology. Only one type of software engineer is "forced" to move to Silicon Valley - one with an idea that requires enormous startup capital at the angel stage. Very, very few software engineers need that. Very few tech companies need that. Most wouldn't even benefit from it. Again - a stark misunderstanding of an industry.
The article then quotes Bill Testa as saying that "Chicago companies' prospects for growth are somewhat limited." Of course, again, the article has mislead the reader. In the quoted article, Testa writes,
Quote:
However, globalization of the economy has also brought new opportunities to populous information-based cities like Chicago. Large cities often have wonderful amenities that are not dependent on climate, such as sports, restaurants, museums, and cultural diversity. But more fundamentally, it is because expanding global trade in goods, services, and capital requires the complex and specialized functions and industry sectors that are concentrated in large cities, including legal services, logistics, distribution, finance, insurance, business meetings, R&D, and professional business services.
Chicago has been developing such sectors almost since its inception. Today, Chicago features world-leading risk exchanges, universities, business meeting and personal air travel firms, legal services, headquarters facilities, and management consultancies.
Does that sound like Bill Testa is saying what Aaron is trying to suggest? I don't think so. I think it sounds like Testa thinks Chicago is challenged but doing well.
Aaron then goes on to call the tax changes made to accomodate the financial exchanges in Chicago "special tax breaks." A more honest evaluation of that would be that they really were what the exchanges called them - a correction. Before the fix, the exchanges were being taxed on business not done in Illinois. They were being taxed on things other juridictions had rights to tax. As individuals, if we pay income tax on income in Texas, Illinois doesn't also tax that. The exchanges were merely asking for that same, logical treatment. But does the article acknowledge that? No, because either it doesn't fit with the anti-Chicago hypothesis, or because the author is lazy or even maybe incompetent. Take your pick, it ultimately doesn't matter *why* the analysis is wrong so often, it just matters that it really is wrong, so very, very often.
I actually agree with the article's criticism of Chicago's complex licensing rules, as well as his criticism of aldermanic privilege. However if you're going to point out the flaws that exist, it only seems fair to at least have an aside about the city working to correct some of the more egregious problems - just a few months ago, Rahm cut the number of different licenses pretty much in half to reduce red tape. That doesn't' solve everything, but at least it shows he knows things are bad and need change.
Finally he rounds things out with generic discussions of corruption and clout, and equally generic suggestions of fixing pension reform, something that Chicago can't legally do by itself. Only in passing does the article acknowledge that it has to be a state project because it's written into the state constitution.
There is nothing in the linked article that is factually out of step with the realities facing Chicago -- lack of middle income jobs / neighborhoods, too much "insider deal making" and too little transparency in what the City does to foster certain industries / developments, a bizare fixation on "one leader" driven governent when there is ample evidence that leads to massive corruption, capitulation to corrupt organizer labor instead of rational balance of wages / benefits...
The population shifts that Chi-Town Native cites as being driven by the closing of public housing and a transferance of such residential needs to aging suburbs is probably more accurate than gentrification in the most recent decade, though I do believe that there has been MASSIVE gentrification over the past 3-4 decades in north / west side areas that has greatly favored office and medical employment over manufacturing / distribuation which were once awesome avenues of economic mobility...
The lack of Chicago being "the place to be" for anything other than the financial derivatives / commodities realistically DOES hurt the City and the region in several important ways BUT it also leads to a much more resilient core employment base. In decade past when the dominance of Sears and Wards made Chicago the epicenter of department stores while more catalog forcused firms like Speigel and others all had important implications for commerical real estate the influence that those firms had over the landscape of malls gave the leaders a special "seat at the table" when it came to plans for how Chicago would tailor is rail networks and such to the needs of its major employers.
The sort of "office de-population" that has occured since the peak of the residential real estate bubble is not really driven by any missteps of Chicago or Illinois politicians as much as the shifts away from low level workers toward automated systems has effected the "non professional but still office oriented" employment that once was a staple of the under skilled. Firms in the broad field of financial services have largely eliminated clerical and support staff and likely will never go back -- paper in all its forms has largely been eliminated from the workflows of firms that process any kind of financial information and that elimination means that the massive "bridge" of workers that once did a wide range of semi-clerical tasks has been "blown up" with client electronic communications now flowing directly to/from more professional level employees... The effect this has on futher increasing the gap between those that work in office towers and have college / post bachelors degrees and those that may not have even finished high school ought to be obvious -- no longer can a well intentioned but late to the party single mom work her way up from the "paper pusher" level of some firm, take some night classes, get some promotions and help her whole family see the value of persistence in the face of early set-backs...
In some ways Chicago may have been uniquely well suited to this sort of journey -- when more of the banks, retailers, manufacturers and commercial real estate firms were not just "outposts" of some global enterprise but actually headquartered here the efforts of those firms' top eexecutives to really look inside their own firms for ways to help "put out a ladder" to help employees with ambition and the wisdom to climb higher was a lot more likely to happen than when the "edict" to make things as lean as possible came from a "home office"in Dallas, Antwerp, Manhattan, Chapel Hill or Chirst Church...
I have been involved off and on with the various civic / business assocations in the region and anyone who has seen what sorts of things happen both at the public events they sponsor and the more one-to-one communications that happen between higher level executives soon realizes it is NEVER about "cutting taxes" or giving special interests more power and instead about BALANCE between the out-of-touch governmental/academic types and the real world of maintaining/growing a workforce/business in the face of ever faster global pressures to deal with emerging economic / demographic trends. No one who enjoy the parks, museums, cultural institutions of Chicago would trade that for the turmoil of Mumbai/Bangalore/Kuala Lumpur/Guangzhou/Shenzen -- it would be like turning back the progress of development 100 years in some ways. Further the disdain with which most of the local Universities have for getting involved in any business interests stands in sharp contrast to the more productive relationships that exist in urban locals like NYC, Boston or LA where many of the leaders of those cities top Universities more closely understand the value of synergistic advancement.
Rahm's "bull in a china shop" style together with the single minded madness of Mike Madigan and the utter capitulation of Pat Quinn don't bode well for Illinois or Chicago. Taken together with the lack of any apparent interest from business leaders inside Chicago on the Republican side the odds of any dramatic shifts seem remote. And make no mistake, short of some kind of economic miracle / Star Trek like discovery politicians with at least as much backbone as Wisconsin's Walker will be needed to put the state / region on a path that does not end in bankruptcy...
I've followed the Urbanophile for quite some time now. I found this article particularly disturbing in light of the fact that he was still pretty bullish on Chicago just a few short years ago. Apparently he's observed some things that made him change his mind.
I don't like to publicly criticize people personally, but I think Aaron M. Renn has put himself out there enough to be treated as a public figure.
He became known as the Urbanophile after winning a competition to propose ways transit in Chicago could hit a billion riders per year. His "solution", if what he proposed could even be called a solution, was to basically make driving so distasteful that the only real option left for people would be to use transit.
Which, even though I don't own a car and I'm a huge proponent of transit, I hope I don't need to point out that being massively punitive of drivers is a fundamentally flawed and irrational way to go about trying to increase transit. I support ending carrots for drivers. I do not support beating them with sticks, which is what Aaron basically proposed.
So, even though I've followed him from that point, I've never really respected his analysis because it's often short-handed, one-sided, poorly considered, or logically inconsistent.
I sincerely feel bad for anyone who wants to move and change their life and becomes trapped by a bad real estate investment. However I'm not surprised that his reaction to that personal problem seems to have so seriously colored his view of the city he now feels trapped in.
Thanks for posting that link. It reflects the same type of transition which is currently happening to my family. My family relocated from Chicago to Mississippi after my husband and I lost our jobs. Our children who are now out of college are leaving Chicago because no one is hiring them either. I have retired family members and those who have been seeking employment in the last two years, relocating here as well. Multiple fortune 500 companies have now left Chicago and have established their new headquarters here to my surprise as well. We are prospering like we never have before. I speak from the experiences of myself and my family. We are in agreement with that article because it is 100% reflective of our exact same experience.
Multiple fortune 500 companies have now left Chicago and have established their new headquarters here to my surprise as well.
Please name those Fortune 500 companies that have left Chicago and moved their headquarters to Mississippi.
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