Neal Peirce’s weekly column dated November 23 points to emerging research that should pull the props from under the assumptions still made by most city officials — that the path to progress lies in population growth.
Setting aside this shopworn proxy for prosperity, economists Robert Weissbourd of RW Ventures and Christopher Berry of Harvard University claim that cities should look to a very different source for future success. Their research findings, unveiled at the annual meeting of CEOs for Cities in Chicago, showed that population growth is not the predictor of prosperity people assume it to be. A better marker: the more college graduates you attract the better chance you have to be a successful region.
Peirce points out that places like Cincinnati showed gains in prosperity without getting bigger in population. Only Austin, Colorado Springs, and Charlotte got both bigger and more prosperous. And, in general, gains in wealth in places considered cold and rainy outshined income gains in warm, sunny spots.
Peirce’s column, sure to stir up reaction in city management circles, is already drawing comments from the Citistates network.
New York City-based author Alex Marshall notes that “there are jobs in the sunbelt cities, even if they aren’t well paying�.We can’t all be high-income.” Marshall raises an eyebrow over Cincinnati’s new standing. “Cincinnati is certainly not hip,” he says, at least not in the way Austin is. “Maybe Cincinnati’s found a way to be on the positive flip side of Richard Florida’s thesis that hipness matters.”
That comment arouses Scott Polikov in Austin: “We are struggling with the costs of Florida’s thesis down here in the hippest of hip cities, Austin, where the bohemian class (to which the creative class is supposedly attracted) cannot afford to live anymore now that the creative class has made it. ”
If the Weissbourd-Berry premise holds up against the scrutiny it’s bound to attract, watch for cities to start shifting the rules of engagement. They’ll find out whether their pool of college graduates is rising, and if it isn’t, what it would take be a “destination” city for the college-educated crowd.
Leaders in some places are already alert to this. Boston has the highest concentration of college and university students of any region in America. At any one time, there are about 300,000 active students. And often cold-and-wet Boston is one of those regions that, had it not been for foreign immigration, would have lost population over the past decade. The Boston Foundation and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce are way ahead on this front. Their own research, released in late October, showed the region losing half of those graduates, and that 80 percent of the reasons were “avoidable.” Even though higher education is essentially an export industry in Boston, losing half the graduates strikes leaders there as alarming.
St. Louis has already heard enough alarm bells about its future. Its leaders are hot on this talent trail, having commissioned a combination of Joel Kotkin and William Frey to do a special study on talent retention. By interviewing “ex-pats” who went to other places, they’re already seeing some of the Weissbourd-Berry trend, says Dick Fleming, head of the Regional Commerce and Growth Association.
Maybe this is just another competitive scramble for assets. But doesn’t this feel more like a logical 21st century competition than the race for big boxes and businesses borrowed from neighboring states?