Yes, Houston is a great city. But not entirely for the reasons Kotkin suggests.
by James A. Bacon
Joel Kotkin is at it again. The urban geographer whose life mission seems to be debunking smart growth and creative-class worship, makes many well-founded observations… and manages to totally miss the point.
In a column just published in The Daily Beast, Kotkin argues that the economic trend-setters of the United States are still located, for the most part, in the Sun Belt:
While Gotham and the Windy City have experienced modest growth and significant net domestic out-migration, burgeoning if often disdained urban regions such as Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City have expanded rapidly. These low-density, car-dominated, heavily suburbanized areas with small central cores likely represent the next wave of great American cities.
One big advantage of these “aspirational cities” is that they have a lower cost of living, particularly of housing, which makes them attractive to creative-class professionals who might have higher priorities than finding hip, cool places to live.
Many of these metropolitan areas are also leading the nation in growing their number of well-educated arrivals. Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Las Vegas, Nashville, and San Antonio, for example, experienced increases in the number of college-educated residents of nearly 40 percent or more over the decade, roughly twice the level of growth as in “brain centers” such as Boston, San Francisco, San Jose (Silicon Valley), or Chicago. Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas each have added about 300,000 college grads in the past decade, more than greater Boston’s pickup of 240,000 or San Francisco’s 211,000.
All very good. What Kotkin fails to consider is that there are better explanations for the growth disparities he sees than smart growth. The bigger question is whether regions are located in states that hew to a “blue state” or “red state” governance model. (I recommend that he read the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “2013: Jobs, Innovation, and Opportunity in the States,” for a discussion of the key economic variables.)
New York, Boston and San Francisco are hampered economically not by their compact, cost-efficient human settlement patterns, but by their proclivity for big, activist government, high taxes, public employee unions, draconian environmental policies and a welter of other anti-business policies. The regions that Kotkin touts as paragons of growth tend to have less activist government, lower taxes and a lighter hand of regulation. Those are the factors that have contributed to their economic dynamism, not sprawl.
I will venture a prediction: Sun Belt cities will pay for their profligate growth. The average age of their building stock and infrastructure is much younger than that of the older, legacy cities. They have not had to grapple with depreciation and replacement costs of the sprawling roads, utilities and other systems they have built heedless of maintenance and replacement costs. When those costs come due, it will be interesting to see how well they hold the line on taxes. Let’s see how fast they grow then.
Smart growth is not the problem. Smart growth in the hands of political progressives working under blue-state governance models is the problem. Forward-looking conservatives need to work on applying smart growth according to small-government, free-market principles. Then they will enjoy the best of both worlds.
