"Quality Of Life, Or Quantity Of Lives?"

Source: archdaily.com

Anyone who's been in the urbanism game as long as I have (or longer) is probably familiar with the annual Places Rated Almanac, the annual metro area ranking reference produced by David Savageau. First published in 1981, I remember seeing each year's edition in bookstores while I was in high school and college, and it was the first attempt I could remember at evaluating the positives and negatives of place, and ranking them accordingly. It was the reference book I used to make the decision to choose the Bay Area for relocation after college in the mid-80s. (That never happened.)

One thing that always stuck out to me is how skewed the Place Rated rankings were toward new, smaller and suburban-oriented metros over older, larger and far more urban ones. In the early days New York and Boston ranked as lowly as Cleveland and Milwaukee; high crime rates and poor economies in each pulled their rankings down compared to Atlanta and Charlotte. It was then that I began thinking that big-city amenities would eventually count for something and turn the tide.

Over the years how we evaluate and measure metro area success has changed, as our metro areas have changed. As cities have rebounded, their cultural and social amenities play a more prominent role in how we evaluate them. As our economy morphed over the last 40 years from manufacturing-based to service and tech oriented, our measures of success changed with them. As gaps widen between the haves and have-nots in metro areas, we pay more attention to the breadth and depth of economic growth than we used to. But we're still prone to mischaracterizations based on incomplete data or old assumptions.

People like me, a Rust Belt native, have been looking for ways to compare our metros with others nationally, despite the demographic decline built into the system. Richey Piiparinen, director of urban theory and analytics at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, and principal and CEO at Rust Belt Analytica, wrote about this last January:

"In terms of population growth, the Sun Belt shines. Looking at the United States' largest 40 metros, the top seven fastest-growing from 2001 to 2017 are all in the Sun Belt: Austin (60.1%), Las Vegas (50.9%), Orlando (46.7%), Houston (43.1%), Charlotte (42.7%), San Antonio (41.5%) and Phoenix (40.8%). The bottom seven? They are all in the Rust Belt: Cleveland (-3.9%), Pittsburgh (-3.5%), Detroit (-3.3%), Providence (1.6%), Chicago (4.0%), St. Louis (4.4%) and Milwaukee (4.6%).

Peeling the onion back a bit reveals another narrative, however. In 2001, inflation-adjusted GDP per capita — a standard measure of labor productivity — was higher in the Sun Belt ($48,189) than the Rust Belt ($47,628). But that's no longer the case. The Rust Belt's GDP per capita is $54,435, compared to $52,419 in the Sun Belt. Looking at the growth rate since the Great Recession shows the Rust Belt pulling away, with gains of 13.1%, compared to 8.9% for the Sun Belt since 2009. Makes you wonder how much of the Sun Belt's labor productivity was contrived by the housing bubble.

A similar story unfolds when measuring real per capita income. The inflation-adjusted real per capita income is $52,939 in the Rust Belt, nearly $7,000 more than in the Sun Belt ($46,049). Again, the divergence has only gotten larger since the Great Recession.
We can keep going. The Rust Belt cities have more college-educated adults (5,956,549) than their Sun Belt counterparts (5,249,355), according to the 2018 Census. They also have higher college educational attainment rates (35.5% versus 33.0%). The Rust Belt has more workers with advanced degrees (2.03 million versus 1.39 million), as noted by the Current Population Survey. It also has a much greater concentration of skilled immigrants, with 34.2% of the Rust Belt's immigrants being college educated, compared to 27.9% in the Sun Belt. Oh, and when it comes to efficacy in land use, it's not even close. The Rust Belt's population density of 905 people per square mile is nearly double that of the Sun Belt (549).

So, on some of the most basic measures of development — productivity, prosperity, education, density — it's the Rust Belt that's on top. This reality echoes Richard Florida's analysis that population growth "bears little relation to economic growth, and it's a terribly misleading indicator of it.""

The Brookings Institute's Metro Monitor seeks to expand our notion of metro success. For several years Brookings has been measuring the economic performance of metros, yet also examining it in the context of the depth and breadth of its economy. Brookings started by evaluating the breadth and depth of global cities, but in the last few years they've focused exclusively on American metros. Now they gather and analyze data on the 192 largest metros in the U.S., or those with a population of 250,000 or more. Together, Brookings estimates the 192 largest metros hold 77% of the nation's population and generate 85% of the nation's gross domestic product.

Five factors are considered in their analysis. The first is growth, or measuring the change in size of the metro economy and its entrepreneurial activity. Second is prosperity, or monitoring changes in average wealth and income. The last three are all measures of inclusion. The general inclusion factor evaluates changes in employment and income are distributed among individuals, racial inclusion analyzes gaps in economic indicators among white non-Hispanic persons and people of color, and geographic inclusion, which explores gaps in economic indicators between the top 20% and bottom 20% of census tracts in a given metro area.

I took the liberty to delve into the Brookings data and come up with some findings and analysis. I started by looking at the 53 largest metros, or those with more than one million residents, over the ten-year period examined by Brookings, between 2008-2018. Unlike Brookings, however, I calculated an average of rankings for the five categories listed above and scored the metros, with lowest scores being best.

In addition I took things a step further; since the ways metros grow economically is as different as each metro, I examined how each metro's economic growth compared with its prosperity, inclusion, racial inclusion and geographic inclusion. To do so I established a ratio of growth rankings with the other four factors for each metro. What's more, I grouped each metro in one of four regional categories -- Northeast, Midwest, South and West -- to see if there are any regional variations in growth patterns. One note on the data: Nashville and Boston have no economic scores because Census data is lacking for those metros. Too bad.

My findings?

When you add it all together, Southern and Western metros at the smaller side of the large metro scale generally outperform others. Raleigh, NC leads the way with a score of 4.60, making it the only metro that ranks in the top ten in all five categories. Denver, Austin, Seattle, San Jose and Salt Lake City are also in the top ten. Beyond the top ten there's no discernible size or regional pattern. See the table below:

However, Midwest/Rust Belt metros rank well due to improved inclusion and prosperity scores.  In the spirit of doing more with less, metros surrounding the Great Lakes have made gains in productivity, prosperity and inclusion that belie their overall growth statistics. Buffalo (4th) and Pittsburgh (9th) both rank in the top ten of the 53 largest metros in prosperity. Other Rust Belt metros in the top half of the prosperity rankings include Rochester, Cincinnati, Columbus, Baltimore, Cleveland, Grand Rapids and Chicago. In the inclusion measure, ten of the 18 highest ranked metros are Midwest/Rust Belt, with Pittsburgh (6th), Chicago (7th) and Buffalo (8th) leading the way.

No surprise: America's superstar metros, tech hubs and tourism destinations lead the way in terms of pure economic growth. Nashville and Boston excluded, the highest ranking metros in economic growth are who many would expect to be there. Austin, San Jose, San Francisco, San Antonio and Denver are the top five. New York ranks 17th of the 51 ranked metros. As a rule, Southern/Sun Belt metros rank highly in economic growth. Eight of the top 12 metros are Southern, including San Antonio (4th), Raleigh (6th), Dallas (7th), Orlando (8th) and Houston (9th). Louisville and Charlotte round out the top economic growers. The bottom is a mix of Midwest/Rust Belt metros (Detroit, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis) and less wealthy Southern metros (New Orleans, Memphis, Virginia Beach, Birmingham).

Many Southern and Western metros may rank highly in terms of pure economic growth, but less highly in terms of prosperity and inclusion. By using a ratio comparison of growth and prosperity and growth and inclusion, it becomes clear that Sun Belt metros may lag behind others in translating growth into more productivity, greater worker skill gains, and improved quality of life. The bottom thirteen in the growth/prosperity ratio category are all Sun Belt metros, including New Orleans, Phoenix, Charlotte, Jacksonville and Orlando (again, Nashville and Boston are excluded from the analysis). In both cases, Southern and Western Sun Belt metros occupy much of the bottom half of the prosperity and inclusion categories. Many of the same metros are at the bottom of the growth/inclusion ratio category.

There aren't any discernible geographic trends when comparing growth to racial inclusion. Pairing growth with racial inclusion finds several Midwest/Rust Belt metros performing well. Six of the top eleven metros are at the leading edge of pairing racial inclusion with growth -- Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit and the Twin Cities. Sun Belt metros, particularly those in the South, dominate in the bottom half of the rankings.

However, the spatial segregation that defines many Midwest/Rust Belt metros is more evident when comparing growth to geographic inclusion. It could be said that spatial inequality in the Rust Belt is a proxy for racial inequality, and the data bears that out. Hartford, Denver, Providence, Washington, Raleigh and Richmond make the top six in being racially inclusive in their growth. Several Midwest/Rust Belt metros and Sun Belt metros occupy the middle and lower parts of this category, with San Jose and San Francisco at the bottom.

Richey Piiparinen made a strong concluding point in his call for a broader definition of metro success. "The future of growth," he says, "will be principled on the production of well-being, not its consumption. On quality of life, not the quantity of lives." I believe he's right, and I believe that so many of the cities we've traditionally written off are well-suited to providing the quality of life people want.

I'll follow this up soon with a similar analysis on the 56 metros with populations between 500,000 and one million.