Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Should be a pretty good lecture at Maxwell on Thursday night. Not the same name appeal as the Hillary Clinton (who spoke yesterday morning as part of the school's lecture series), but Glaeser's an interesting guy. He's worth a read; we're fortunate that he'll be giving a free talk in Syracuse.
4:00 p.m. on Thursday the 26th, Eggers Hall, University Hill.
Ed Glaeser's talk was terrific; not nearly as econ-heavy as it could have been, which at least one of us appreciated. Decent turnout - mostly Maxwell faculty and students; given the ghastly weather and the inconvenient time, not a big surprise.
He talked about most of the usual things that he's written about (triumph of the cities; creative people in close proximity to one another) and gotten into on his Bloomberg program, but went in-depth a little further with a couple of them.
Glaeser made a pretty big deal about the folly of governments (especially municipal governments) as successful stewards of industrial policy. Governments, as he said, are not successful venture capitalists. Their efforts should instead focus on human capital policy: providing an atmosphere for creative and entrepreneurial citizens is more likely to pay off than luring some employer to help underemployed citizens.
I think this has particular resonance in Syracuse and Onondaga County, where generations of governments have tried to find and select the Next Best Thing as a means of job-creation instead of zeroing in on the quality of life enhancements that will allow us to remain competitive with the Portlands and Austins for human capital. (It also called to mind the mind-numbing degeneration of that Destiny chat on here the other day. National retail jobs as a boon? Not so much.)
Glaeser went through the usual bit about the inefficiency of our transportation network and the waste of our nationalal infrastructure spending. 1:1 correlation between new road miles contructed and increase in vehicle miles travelled; that kind of thing. Old hat. What I thought was especially apt, though, was his reference to our highway system as a "Soviet-style" network. Without market pricing of roadways, there's little disincentive to drive. Users pay a flat fee, of course, whether or not they use the highways; the use of that "S" word, though, so often used by conservatives and wanna-be conservatives to describe things like pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure and mass transit, was interesting.
Finally, he talked at length about the misconceptions about urban poverty. Though near-universally viewed as a negative, cities should be proud of their poverty. Cities don't breed the poor; far from it, the poor select cities for its positive attributes: walkability, social services, free amenities. Exurban areas, on the other hand, often pride themselves on their homogeneity. This, Glaeser says, is a misplaced pride: those areas only attract a small slice of society because they offer no attraction to the broadest swath of the population. And change in incomes and home values over the past fifty years seem to bear this out.
I do disagree with Glaeser on one of his last points. He's often criticized as hypocritical for moving to a bedroom community outside Boston, despite his enthusiastic championing of urbanity (I'm not on that list of critics - one can recognize the superiority of a certain thing while eschewing it based on personal preference; I, for instance, am well aware that broccoli is a super-food that I should eat, but I don't like it and seek to avoid it).
The largest barrier for the resurrection of American cities, he posits, is the urban public education system. It's one thing to pay an enormous sum to raise a family in Manhattan (or Boston), but it's too much to ask to fork over $50,000 a year in tuition to Trinity because your kid got rejected from Stuy and isn't willing to go to one of the bad public high schools. Because there are so many bad public schools, he says, we've failed our kids.
I think he's a little out of touch on this point, and ignoring his own work in reach this conclusion. Our public schools are a reflection of the population at large. The poor come to the cities for the great services they offer. Well, gosh, they offer (in the Northeast, at least) a free, high-quality education to all comers. That their graduation and retention rates are deplorable does not speak to the education offered. If it did, kids wouldn't be graduating with solid educations and admission to well-regarded universities. Yet that's exactly what they're doing.
The school is a microcosm of the larger city; it fails its students exactly as much as the ER doctor who fails to get the obese diabetic to take his insulin fails his patients. There's a failure, for sure, but it doesn't rest with the institution itself.
All in all, a very engaging and informative talk. Should be required viewing for, say, the Onondaga County Legislature and the Syracuse Common Council.
Last edited by Cleveland Park; 04-27-2012 at 10:12 AM..
While the car and the highway ain't to pretty and may even suck it is the preferred way people in suburbs travel. Most people live in suburbs and have since the 50's so wouldn't it make sense that the bulk of money spent for the "common good" would be spent where the taxpayers themselves live?? What would the point of representative government be if the taxpayers didn't have any say in where the money was spent??
Do urban areas really "draw" the poor in?? I've always thought the urban poor to be a class grown in place and expanded by wasteful government programs meant to keep them poor so they wouldn't prosper and vote against the slum bosses. Is any proof available to show that poor people are in fact moving into cities as opposed to having been born there??
While the car and the highway ain't to pretty and may even suck it is the preferred way people in suburbs travel. Most people live in suburbs and have since the 50's so wouldn't it make sense that the bulk of money spent for the "common good" would be spent where the taxpayers themselves live?? What would the point of representative government be if the taxpayers didn't have any say in where the money was spent??
Do urban areas really "draw" the poor in?? I've always thought the urban poor to be a class grown in place and expanded by wasteful government programs meant to keep them poor so they wouldn't prosper and vote against the slum bosses. Is any proof available to show that poor people are in fact moving into cities as opposed to having been born there??
Would've been a quick two answers, since it's not the case that most Americans live in the suburbs. And since urban areas are the cultural and economic drivers of our society (indeed, the lecture was about the enormous advantages the cities enjoy over outlying areas), it makes sense that that's where we invest.
Regarding the second one (I'll only tackle the last line); he cited to this, but I didn't scribble fast enough to catch the name.
If you have the chance, though, come along next time. He took questions for some time, then stuck around to chat at the reception. With a pretty diverse crowd, there were some very interesting questions.
Everything Goggle turns up shows suburbs to out number urban and rural people combined.
Its been fun for "intellectuals" to slam suburbs for decades. I think the push back is gonna start soon, prolly not this Fall but in 4 more years for sure.
Here's a pretty good story on the starts of the push back.
Even just reading this board, in an area not really known as suburbia, the regular posters tend to take an anti-suburb stance. 78% of the people who live in "Syracuse" don't actually live in Syracuse.
That article I linked to has some theories that may apply even in this small area. One big one is tele-commuting. My job will never have that option but many do. So I have to go in to work, my commute is a tiny fraction of I'll bet anyone's here and I live in the sticks. Soon many people will have jobs they don't have to be anyplace at all so they can live anywhere. Cities aren't becoming more relavent they are becoming less.
At a time we should be fixing our roads and bridges to the suburbs many are talking about light rail into Syracuse. Its very strange.
I think a lot of interest in urban areas is due to the results of things such as gas prices and sprawl. There is a movement it based more on sustainability and restoration more than necessarily putting suburbia down. Suburbia can vary as well.
I see Glaeser's point about the urban educational system, but I agree Cleveland Park that there are other factors that have to be kept in mind. One that I think gets overlooked is the aspect of assimilation of immigrants in terms of the urban public school setting. Urban districts carry the bulk of immigrants students in an area. In turn, that present another challenge that the bulk of suburban school districts do not have to face. You still get students that perform academically at a high level and go on to college in spite of the statistics. So, it is just a matter of handling one's business in the clasroom, regardless of setting, by and large.
As for the poor, I think that cities due to attributes have always attracted a diverse collection of people around the world. So, I think what an urban setting provides for those that are poor is an infrastructure that is sustainable and allow for them to function in a way that minimizes their alienation or seclusion.
Even just reading this board, in an area not really known as suburbia, the regular posters tend to take an anti-suburb stance. 78% of the people who live in "Syracuse" don't actually live in Syracuse.
That article I linked to has some theories that may apply even in this small area. One big one is tele-commuting. My job will never have that option but many do. So I have to go in to work, my commute is a tiny fraction of I'll bet anyone's here and I live in the sticks. Soon many people will have jobs they don't have to be anyplace at all so they can live anywhere. Cities aren't becoming more relavent they are becoming less.
At a time we should be fixing our roads and bridges to the suburbs many are talking about light rail into Syracuse. Its very strange.
I don't think it is necessarily anti-suburb, but it is more about less sprawl, more sustainability and dare I say more core restoration. There is a reason why metro areas have an urban core/city. Without it, there aren't any suburbs. With that said, there can be a nice balance, if properly done.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
