The Future of Cities

[ATL MU Warrior]

Which will die first, cities or the NFL?

Will those things die before or after everybody has a self-driving car and all auto dealers have been relegated to the dustbin of history? 

[MU82]

A little more than 9 years ago, I bet some guy $1,000 after he claimed that "All big box retailers will be gone in 10 years because they won't survive Amazon." Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Costco, Best Buy, all of them!

I hope the guy will pay up ... unless all of those retailers disappear in like 9 months, in which case I'll pay him.

[Jockey]

A little more than 9 years ago, I bet some guy $1,000 after he claimed that "All big box retailers will be gone in 10 years because they won't survive Amazon." Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Costco, Best Buy, all of them!

I hope the guy will pay up ... unless all of those retailers disappear in like 9 months, in which case I'll pay him.

A smart bet. I would even add 10 more years.

People simply like to shop. They want to get out of their houses. I seldom shop online - the exception being for baseball cards because they generally aren't otherwise available

[dgies9156]

And I'm telling you that if a corporation tried to open a steel plant anywhere near any even semi-populous part of the greater Charlotte metro area, you'd hear the NIMBYs if you opened your window in Florida.

Also, 1982 is a long time ago and Nashville has grown a lot since then. I'm guessing most decent neighborhoods would fight like crazy to keep any large industrial complex far away.

Glad to hear your dad fought to help keep water clean. Hearing about places where it's not drinkable due to industrial pollution is beyond sad.

Well, industry is still locating in Nashville.

To your bigger question, if we reject industry for our major cities because of stakeholder complaints, what do we do?

1) Leave a semi-skilled workforce, whose forbearers came to the Midwest and Northeast to work in the factories, idle? This requires a huge government investment in social welfare which, all things being equal, none of us want to make.

2) Have the government employ a majority of the semi-skilled workers? That seems to be the answer in Chicago and Illinois and we have seen what that's done to government budgets and pension deficiencies. We can't afford to keep creating "make work" jobs and then hire far more people than we need.

3) Do what Mississippi, Alabama and other then-rural southern states did back in the day -- buy the semi-skilled workers a train or bus ticket back to the south and send them to work there?

4) Do nothing and hope against hope that our urban public school systems somehow, someway get their act together and educate disadvantaged youth to be more than they have been.

None of these options have proven to work. That's why I'm a big believer in urban investment, streamlined permitting and state and federal tax incentives to invest in a very limited urban enterprise zone effort. It has to work because the alternative is a nightmare!

Now, in effect, we're doing 1,2 and 4.  The out-of-control crime, poor schools and heavy tax burden will continue to drive people south, even to the Evil Empire that is Florida!!

[MU82]

I'm a big believer in urban investment, too, dg.

And I hope you and yours get to enjoy Florida for many, many, many, MANY decades.

[Scoop Snoop]

That's why I'm a big believer in urban investment, streamlined permitting and state and federal tax incentives to invest in a very limited urban enterprise zone effort. It has to work because the alternative is a nightmare!

the Evil Empire that is Florida!!

I had only a small manufacturing company and when it was time to move to a larger facility, I was planning on moving the company to an industrial areas in the burbs. Richmond's Building Inspection Dept. had earned a rep for being complete a$$holes who nitpicked everything. There had been a years-long departure of businesses, especially manufacturers, fed up with the city BS. The media focused on the story and the head of the dept. was fired, along with his close cronies and replaced with a great, "can-do" guy.

Then the city then offered a some really sweet deals to retain businesses. 1) reasonable inspections that took into consideration the decades old buildings, some late 1800's-early 1900's- so that it was feasible to use the old buildings. 2) a very low interest loan to facilitate upgrading the old buildings and increase the number of employees, pay utility bills etc. 3) If certain easily attainable goals were met in a given time frame, the loan was forgiven. So...I took an eyesore of a building, had it painted and really cleaned up and repaired, and expanded my workforce. The rent of my 13,700 square foot building was about $2.70 per square foot the first year with modest increases in future years, so I was very happy with that. We were featured on the news as a success story and had some city officials at our grand opening, one of whom was our local councilman. Some guy named Tim Kaine. Future gov and senator. 

Oh...I agree. Florida is the Evil Empire. Always hated it. 

[Jay Bee]

A little more than 9 years ago, I bet some guy $1,000 after he claimed that "All big box retailers will be gone in 10 years because they won't survive Amazon." Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Costco, Best Buy, all of them!

I hope the guy will pay up ... unless all of those retailers disappear in like 9 months, in which case I'll pay him.

Will be a shock to your system to have reportable income, hey??

[MU82]

Will be a shock to your system to have reportable income, hey??

We Are Marquette!

[GOO]

The trend of people moving to cities and especially downtowns has picked right back up. Continues the long term trend.

Generally downtowns and surrounding areas, in particular,  are adding population, which helps to offset reduced office workers. Remote work hasn’t meant people going off to live in small towns, at least not post pandemic.

MKE doing well in downtown and the surrounding areas. Better than well, doing great, even booming.  Bodes well for MU.  MU is in a good spot lots of new building activity to the northeast, east, and southeast - southeast had been a dead area and Wisconsin Ave to the east is going great, hopefully that trend will continue and spread.  Kids want vibrant cities and MKE’s  downtown and surrounding area qualify.  MKE not doing so well in poorer areas, northwest of city center, where most of the crime occurs - I wonder if these are the areas people are leaving and heading south…?   

[dgies9156]

I'm a big believer in urban investment, too, dg.

And I hope you and yours get to enjoy Florida for many, many, many, MANY decades.

Thank you. I hope so too Brother MU! The sea is still where it's supposed to be -- 1,200 YARDS FROM MY FRONT DOOR!!!

[dgies9156]

I had only a small manufacturing company and when it was time to move to a larger facility, I was planning on moving the company to an industrial areas in the burbs. Richmond's Building Inspection Dept. had earned a rep for being complete a$$holes who nitpicked everything. There had been a years-long departure of businesses, especially manufacturers, fed up with the city BS. The media focused on the story and the head of the dept. was fired, along with his close cronies and replaced with a great, "can-do" guy.

Then the city then offered a some really sweet deals to retain businesses. 1) reasonable inspections that took into consideration the decades old buildings, some late 1800's-early 1900's- so that it was feasible to use the old buildings. 2) a very low interest loan to facilitate upgrading the old buildings and increase the number of employees, pay utility bills etc. 3) If certain easily attainable goals were met in a given time frame, the loan was forgiven. So...I took an eyesore of a building, had it painted and really cleaned up and repaired, and expanded my workforce. The rent of my 13,700 square foot building was about $2.70 per square foot the first year with modest increases in future years, so I was very happy with that. We were featured on the news as a success story and had some city officials at our grand opening, one of whom was our local councilman. Some guy named Tim Kaine. Future gov and senator. 

Oh...I agree. Florida is the Evil Empire. Always hated it.

Brother Snoop:

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. You want to make cities viable, you do what Richmond did with your business. It makes one heck of a difference. You pay taxes, people work and homes get upgraded. Cars get purchased and people have hope.

As for Florida, I call it the Evil Empire because I lived in Illinois and no one in Illinois government likes Florida! I live on the Treasure Coast and actually find the place generally works well, when our governor isn't off trying to trap mice!!!!

[Not A Serious Person]

The trend of people moving to cities and especially downtowns has picked right back up. Continues the long term trend.

Generally downtowns and surrounding areas, in particular,  are adding population, which helps to offset reduced office workers. Remote work hasn’t meant people going off to live in small towns, at least not post pandemic.

MKE doing well in downtown and the surrounding areas. Better than well, doing great, even booming.  Bodes well for MU.  MU is in a good spot lots of new building activity to the northeast, east, and southeast - southeast had been a dead area and Wisconsin Ave to the east is going great, hopefully that trend will continue and spread.  Kids want vibrant cities and MKE’s  downtown and surrounding area qualify.  MKE not doing so well in poorer areas, northwest of city center, where most of the crime occurs - I wonder if these are the areas people are leaving and heading south…?

Nick Bloom of Stanford University just put out a report today saying the opposite if this.

@I_Am_NickBloom 10h
Was Feb 2023 peak Return To Office?

The three best indicators of Return to Office (or its inverse, Working From Home) all show drops in office occupancy and rises in WFH in March 2023.

It looks increasingly like RTO has finally stalled out.

[JWags85]

I had only a small manufacturing company and when it was time to move to a larger facility, I was planning on moving the company to an industrial areas in the burbs. Richmond's Building Inspection Dept. had earned a rep for being complete a$$holes who nitpicked everything. There had been a years-long departure of businesses, especially manufacturers, fed up with the city BS. The media focused on the story and the head of the dept. was fired, along with his close cronies and replaced with a great, "can-do" guy.

Then the city then offered a some really sweet deals to retain businesses. 1) reasonable inspections that took into consideration the decades old buildings, some late 1800's-early 1900's- so that it was feasible to use the old buildings. 2) a very low interest loan to facilitate upgrading the old buildings and increase the number of employees, pay utility bills etc. 3) If certain easily attainable goals were met in a given time frame, the loan was forgiven. So...I took an eyesore of a building, had it painted and really cleaned up and repaired, and expanded my workforce. The rent of my 13,700 square foot building was about $2.70 per square foot the first year with modest increases in future years, so I was very happy with that. We were featured on the news as a success story and had some city officials at our grand opening, one of whom was our local councilman. Some guy named Tim Kaine. Future gov and senator. 

Oh...I agree. Florida is the Evil Empire. Always hated it.

Interesting stuff and smart business.

Meanwhile as someone who works for a small business in Wisconsin, that will be leaving in the next 12-24 months, I can testify that many places, especially in the North, are not like that.

Things have changed post-COVID, naturally, but circa 2019/early 2020, you’d have smaller companies fighting in the Midwest with local laws, ordinances, etc… while states, counties, and municipalities in the Sun Belt were literally throwing money at them.  At one point, the minimum we could have gotten for moving a company of 15-20 people to a variety of places in Texas, Florida, or Tennessee was close very to 7 figures, not even including tax savings and related incentives

[Not A Serious Person]

Regarding the state of Milwaukee, I suggest reading the story from last month's Journal Sentinel which the mayor of Milwaukee describes what is happening in the city.

Descriptions here are not remotely close to what the Mayor thinks.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/solutions/2023/03/08/whats-path-for-milwaukee-to-reverse-population-decline-grow-again/69959649007/

highlights

During his campaign for mayor, Johnson raised a few eyebrows when he talked about the city increasing its population to one million people, nearly twice its current size.

It is not just that Johnson wants Milwaukee to grow. He needs population and business growth to help relieve enormous pressure on the city’s long-term finances.

But you sense that Johnson’s moonshot for Milwaukee is about more than aspiring to grow; it is about inspiring a city to reimagine itself, to think differently about its future.

Milwaukee’s population reached its peak in 1960, when census data showed a city of more than 741,000 residents. That made it the 11th largest city in America. Today, it is 31st. Since 1970, except for a slight uptick in the early 2010s, the city’s population has been steadily declining.

According to the Census Bureau, the city’s population fell 17,600 since 2010 to just over 577,000 in 2020.

-----

Still, the optics of Milwaukee’s population decline can be deceiving. In some places, it looks and feels like the city is growing. The city saw an explosion of new apartment buildings and condominiums in the last two decades. The apartment building boom continues. Right now, construction is underway on a 44-story tower near the Milwaukee Art Museum. A 31-story apartment building is rising on the northwestern edge of the city’s Third Ward.

The number of occupied housing units in the city increased by 5,000 in the last decade. So, how can our population be declining?

The answer lies in shrinking household sizes in Milwaukee. Most of the new housing units in Milwaukee were smaller apartments with one or two people living in them. Citywide, the typical household size fell from 2.5 in 2010 to 2.39 in 2020.

That change is largely the result of declining birthrates in the last decade. Birth certificate records show that 117,000 babies were born to Milwaukee mothers in the 1990s, falling to 112,000 in the 2000s, and 98,000 in the 2010s.

----

Metro Milwaukee recovered from the last recession more slowly than some peer cities, with many of the new jobs created in lower-wage occupations. As part of “The American Growth Project,” a recent study from the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina ranked the 50 largest cities (metros) by speed of economic growth in 2022. Milwaukee finished last.

[Pakuni]

Nick Bloom of Stanford University just put out a report today saying the opposite if this.

@I_Am_NickBloom 10h
Was Feb 2023 peak Return To Office?

The three best indicators of Return to Office (or its inverse, Working From Home) all show drops in office occupancy and rises in WFH in March 2023.

It looks increasingly like RTO has finally stalled out.

GOO is speaking about people residing in downtowns.
Bloom's report is about people working in offices, downtown and elsewhere.
Not the same thing.

[MU82]

GOO is speaking about people residing in downtowns.
Bloom's report is about people working in offices, downtown and elsewhere.
Not the same thing.

Yep, in fact GOO specifically acknowledged a downturn in office workers in his 2nd paragraph:

Generally downtowns and surrounding areas, in particular,  are adding population, which helps to offset reduced office workers. Remote work hasn’t meant people going off to live in small towns, at least not post pandemic.

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Regarding the state of Milwaukee, I suggest reading the story from last month's Journal Sentinel which the mayor of Milwaukee describes what is happening in the city.

Descriptions here are not remotely close to what the Mayor thinks.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/solutions/2023/03/08/whats-path-for-milwaukee-to-reverse-population-decline-grow-again/69959649007/

highlights

During his campaign for mayor, Johnson raised a few eyebrows when he talked about the city increasing its population to one million people, nearly twice its current size.

It is not just that Johnson wants Milwaukee to grow. He needs population and business growth to help relieve enormous pressure on the city’s long-term finances.

But you sense that Johnson’s moonshot for Milwaukee is about more than aspiring to grow; it is about inspiring a city to reimagine itself, to think differently about its future.

Milwaukee’s population reached its peak in 1960, when census data showed a city of more than 741,000 residents. That made it the 11th largest city in America. Today, it is 31st. Since 1970, except for a slight uptick in the early 2010s, the city’s population has been steadily declining.

According to the Census Bureau, the city’s population fell 17,600 since 2010 to just over 577,000 in 2020.

-----

Still, the optics of Milwaukee’s population decline can be deceiving. In some places, it looks and feels like the city is growing. The city saw an explosion of new apartment buildings and condominiums in the last two decades. The apartment building boom continues. Right now, construction is underway on a 44-story tower near the Milwaukee Art Museum. A 31-story apartment building is rising on the northwestern edge of the city’s Third Ward.

The number of occupied housing units in the city increased by 5,000 in the last decade. So, how can our population be declining?

The answer lies in shrinking household sizes in Milwaukee. Most of the new housing units in Milwaukee were smaller apartments with one or two people living in them. Citywide, the typical household size fell from 2.5 in 2010 to 2.39 in 2020.

That change is largely the result of declining birthrates in the last decade. Birth certificate records show that 117,000 babies were born to Milwaukee mothers in the 1990s, falling to 112,000 in the 2000s, and 98,000 in the 2010s.

----

Metro Milwaukee recovered from the last recession more slowly than some peer cities, with many of the new jobs created in lower-wage occupations. As part of “The American Growth Project,” a recent study from the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina ranked the 50 largest cities (metros) by speed of economic growth in 2022. Milwaukee finished last.

You already linked to this article.

Milwaukee isn't growing to a million people. Milwaukee is doing largely fine - losing population mostly due to household size, not a decrease in living units. Its going through ebbs and flows like every other city has for time eternal. And Marquette isn't leaving the city.

Honestly I have no idea where you are going with this stuff. It's like you view yourself as some sort of futurist but you really don't have a point.

[Skatastrophy]

You already linked to this article.

Milwaukee isn't growing to a million people. Milwaukee is doing largely fine - losing population mostly due to household size, not a decrease in living units. Its going through ebbs and flows like every other city has for time eternal. And Marquette isn't leaving the city.

Honestly I have no idea where you are going with this stuff. It's like you view yourself as some sort of futurist but you really don't have a point.

I think he's just airing out his feelings? Really weird.

[Scoop Snoop]

Interesting stuff and smart business.

Meanwhile as someone who works for a small business in Wisconsin, that will be leaving in the next 12-24 months, I can testify that many places, especially in the North, are not like that.

Things have changed post-COVID, naturally, but circa 2019/early 2020, you’d have smaller companies fighting in the Midwest with local laws, ordinances, etc… while states, counties, and municipalities in the Sun Belt were literally throwing money at them.  At one point, the minimum we could have gotten for moving a company of 15-20 people to a variety of places in Texas, Florida, or Tennessee was close very to 7 figures, not even including tax savings and related incentives

Yep. The attitudes and ignorance of officials in too many metro areas toward business are simply awful. I was really pissed when Obama, during a campaign stop in Roanoke VA, said "If you own a business, you didn't build it. Someone else did that." Of course, that "someone else" is government. Business funds governments via taxes on income and half of FICA as well as hiring tax paying employees. I absolutely could not stand Obama from that day forward. I will quickly add that I do not like either party. After risking the equity in our home, investing almost all of our savings and having to sign personally on large loans, that comment got to me Big Time.

Fun story: An owner of a small commercial building in Richmond was making some simple repairs to his roof when a building inspector driving by noticed him, and scaled the ladder to the flat roof. He told the man that he needed a permit and to stop work immediately. The man pointed out that the cost of the repairs was under the amount requiring a permit, but the inspector was adamant.

"Okay, fine! I'll get a permit." The inspector began to write up the "violation" report while the man descended the ladder. Then the man took the ladder away. It was his, after all, and the inspector had not been given permission to use it. This was the pre cell phone era, so the inspector used his radio to summon help so that he could get off the roof. A news reporter was tipped off about the intercepted call for help, and the TV and radio stations and their listeners had a great time getting a laugh out of it. 

[Hards Alumni]

You already linked to this article.

Milwaukee isn't growing to a million people. Milwaukee is doing largely fine - losing population mostly due to household size, not a decrease in living units. Its going through ebbs and flows like every other city has for time eternal. And Marquette isn't leaving the city.

Honestly I have no idea where you are going with this stuff. It's like you view yourself as some sort of futurist but you really don't have a point.

I think he just wants to have a discussion. 

The trap is that there is often a conclusion made with political undertones added.

The reality is that cities will continue to grow and rural America will become smaller and smaller.  Trying to pin this trend on one thing or another is a fool's errand.

There are a myriad of reasons why populations grow in one place, and shrink in another, and then change back over time.

If you want my true opinion, Heise 2.0 has always presented himself as a conservative around here, and he is trying to correlate an uptick in crime with a decrease in urban populations.  That is his political undertone, and his argument is wafer thin.  But most people are simple.  They want logic or data to all fit nicely into one box or another.  It doesn't.  You can't describe why anything as complex as population variation over time in a single sentence. 

But "crime is bad in big scary cities and that's why people are fleeing in record numbers" is a great way to drive clicks to a website or draw eyes to a television.  ESPECIALLY, if the person who is reading or watching has recently moved away from a city or is considering moving away from an urban area.  It adds to their confirmation bias that they've made a smart decision.  A little dopamine is released, and they run and tell their friends.

[Pakuni]

Yep. The attitudes and ignorance of officials in too many metro areas toward business are simply awful. I was really pissed when Obama, during a campaign stop in Roanoke VA, said "If you own a business, you didn't build it. Someone else did that." Of course, that "someone else" is government. Business funds governments via taxes on income and half of FICA as well as hiring tax paying employees. I absolutely could not stand Obama from that day forward. I will quickly add that I do not like either party. After risking the equity in our home, investing almost all of our savings and having to sign personally on large loans, that comment got to me Big Time

Hoping to avoid a partisan debate here, but two points (the second more important than the first):
1. You're both misquoting Obama and leaving out the first part of the quote that puts the second part in context. And, in context, he was correct.

2. No, business does not fund government ... and it sure as heck doesn't fund government via income taxes. It's the labor of individuals that produces revenue for businesses. The business returns a portion of that revenue to the individual (i.e. wages), from which the individual then funds a share of government (i.e. income taxes). And it's also through revenue produced by those individuals that businesses pay corporate and other taxes.
The business in and of itself is merely an entity through which individuals collectively produce goods or services that generate revenue. It's not some benevolent being which bestows money upon employees and government out of the goodness of its heart.

[jesmu84]

Yep. The attitudes and ignorance of officials in too many metro areas toward business are simply awful. 

Don't cities compete frequently in an attempt to attract businesses (sometimes to the detriment of the local populace)? Foxconn, Amazon HQ2 are 2 that come to mind easily. Plus KC KS vs KC MO.

[Scoop Snoop]

Hoping to avoid a partisan debate here, but two points (the second more important than the first):
1. You're both misquoting Obama and leaving out the first part of the quote that puts the second part in context. And, in context, he was correct.

2. No, business does not fund government ... and it sure as heck doesn't fund government via income taxes. It's the labor of individuals that produces revenue for businesses. The business returns a portion of that revenue to the individual (i.e. wages), from which the individual then funds a share of government (i.e. income taxes). And it's also through revenue produced by those individuals that businesses pay corporate and other taxes.
The business in and of itself is merely an entity through which individuals collectively produce goods or services that generate revenue. It's not some benevolent being which bestows money upon employees and government out of the goodness of its heart.

Without the entrepreneur's financial risk and efforts to establish the business, there are no individuals producing goods and services.  The "mere entity" is the foundation. And I neither said nor implied that it was some sort of benevolent being. That's laughable.

 Look at the numerous small towns throughout the country that no longer have those "mere entities" and tell me about the residents' income and taxes generated. They are virtually ghost towns.

Regarding Obama's remarks, allegedly lifted from an Elizabeth Warren speech, he clearly was giving credit to government for providing roads, bridges etc. And exactly where did the government get the money to do things like that? His "you didn't build that" was an insult to anyone who worked extremely hard to get a business up and running. Shame on him for his cheap shot, political BS.

[Skatastrophy]

Without the entrepreneur's financial risk and efforts to establish the business, there are no individuals producing goods and services.  The "mere entity" is the foundation. And I neither said nor implied that it was some sort of benevolent being. That's laughable.

 Look at the numerous small towns throughout the country that no longer have those "mere entities" and tell me about the residents' income and taxes generated. They are virtually ghost towns.

You can't run modern businesses from small towns or rural areas (that I've been to, staying with family). Their Internet is terrible. Fastest thing available in many places is 5g Home Internet. It's wild how little we invest in the infrastructure in this country.

[Scoop Snoop]

You can't run modern businesses from small towns or rural areas (that I've been to, staying with family). Their Internet is terrible. Fastest thing available in many places is 5g Home Internet. It's wild how little we invest in the infrastructure in this country.

That's changing in many areas. Our electric co -op set up a subsidiary (Firefly) and, with some generous government grant money, established a fiber system in our rural county. We have better internet than my sister in the Chicago burbs! It's a good example of government working with businesses and individuals. Property values are estimated to have increased about 10% after the system was up and running.

But regarding your point about trying to run a business in an area with poor internet...very true, but the disastrous decline in business closures in small towns and cities mostly occurred decades ago. And 5G Home Internet makes it clear that things cannot change in that scenario.