Archive for March 30, 2009

Tax breaks, recession, and cluster development

March 30, 2009 / Wendy Waters / No comments

 An intriguing article ran in The Vancouver Sun on Friday about the video game programming industry.  As of the Fall of 2008, 44% of the 14,000 Canadian “Entertainment software” employees were in metro Vancouver, 37% in Montreal, and 14% in Ontario.

“Vancouver is unique in that the industry has grown up without a lot of tax incentives and government help, and largely because that’s where the talent is,” said Danielle LaBossiere Parr, executive director of the entertainment software association — or ESAC.

This is an example of the expected 21st century world in which demography means a talent shortage and companies will go where the skilled people are — tax breaks can’t program World of Warcraft.  I suspect that companies located in Silicon Valley also receive few if any tax breaks for being there — they are there because that’s where the cluster of talented people and complementary organizations are.

Will the recession mean a pause to this approach?

In the economic downturn, provincial and metro governments will seek ways to prevent more layoffs.  Meanwhile all variety of businesses facing reduced revenues will be looking for ways to save money.  Are some companies going to look to pull out of a region without (increased) tax concessions?  Or will they play poker and threaten to do so (but with no real intentions of leaving San Jose, Austin or Vancouver, for example, in favour of Fargo)?

My own concern is that some larger employers will in fact do the latter — use this downturn to gain a tax break.  Such a break could be short-sighted on the part of both the government / politiican who gives it and the company who takes it.   The scarce public money could instead have gone into making other broader improvements in the region that would help attract and retain talent generally.

Category: attracting talent, economic development /

City politics are where it’s at

March 29, 2009 / Wendy Waters / One comment

Recently, popular interest in city-based politics and municipal government activity has grown — whether in metro Vancouver (as Frances Bula ponders) or most areas of North America.  Meanwhile many city daily newspapers are failing.  I think there is a connection.

Cities are becoming the engines of economic growth as the knowledge economy and urban service sectors rise in importance, while natural resource extraction and manufacturing (that often took place in smaller towns or suburbs) are declining — at least in North America.

Thus, residents are becoming more concerned with metro issues — whether transit, roads, housing and crime or the latest from the arts and entertainment scene.    Policing, property and transportation issues as they affect day-to-day life in the city tend to be within the bailywick of municipal governments. Attracting and retaining both businesses and the employees they want to hire also tends to be a city issue.  In all these cases other levels of government are involved, but at the end of the day municipal politicians are increasingly held responsible for worsening or improvements to the little things that affect the quality of life of residents.

Those urban dailies that don’t provide enough information on municipal initiatives or sufficient unique and local perspectives — and instead rely on boring newswire stories — are struggling.  At least in Vancouver (and please tell me about your community papers) weekly or bi-weekly newspapers that cover nothing but local politics and community events seem to be holding on.

Category: communities, economic development, resident attitudes, urban technologies /

Cities Losing their Newspapers

March 16, 2009 / Wendy Waters / 13 comments

San Francisco, Seattle, Denver.  Three cities that have — or are about to — lose a daily newspaper.   The list may grow as large publishers of many city dailies world wide are in financial difficulty. One thing economic downturns are good at is exposing products, companies or industries that are no longer viable.

So why are newspapers dying? and what does the end mean for city life?

First, newspapers have lost some of their viability because they have generally failed to attract new readers to their print format.   People under age 40 tend to read their news online and watch cable news channels rather than read newspapers.  I would argue that because they have access to a wide variety of news sources, younger people are also more selective.  They do not choose a local daily because it is the local daily, or out of habit.  If they don’t connect with the content and the writers, they don’t buy it.  And, if you can read the few columnists or topics of interest for free online from the comfort of your laptop, why buy a newspaper.

Second, most newspapers haven’t managed to integrate themselves that well into the online and multi-media-stream world and potential new revenue streams within it.  This may be because they try to insert the same content, which only works some of the time in a different medium.  And it may be because standard newspapers too often run boring standard news feeds (AP, CP, etc.) or offer unchanged press-releases as news.  Yawn.  Give me some analysis, perspective, research — something!
What does this mean for cities, and connecting people?

In the past, the majority of residents read the local daily regularly.  It connected people to the world and everything about their city — business, sports, culture, arts.

Today, there are so many alternate sources for obtaining this information.  Standard news can be found on TV, on the radio, and from online news sources (with the best ones getting more traffic).   Blogs too — to know what’s going on at City Hall, I read Frances Bula.  Arts, culture, lifestyle information can be found on blogs, through Facebook networks, and specific websites, and now Twitter.

The city is interconnected in so many more ways than just through a newspaper.  For many under 40, the loss of newspapers will not be a hardship.  But some of the content and writers will be missed — by everyone.  In fact, in the vacuum from the final collapse of failing newspapers, I predict new publications will emerge.  They might be online arregators first — of content from blogs, twitter feeds, websites, and staff journalists — and a weekly or twice weekly print publication second.

Do you read your city’s daily newspaper (s)? Will you miss it if it disappears?  Where do you get your news?

Category: resident attitudes, urban history, urban technologies /

Building on Richard Florida’s light-based urban measurements

March 14, 2009 / Wendy Waters / 2 comments

 The majority of the world economy is increasingly the aggregate production of a limited number of mega-metro regions.   Meanwhile, with more than half the world’s population now living in urban areas, a large number of mega-metropolis are under-performing, whether measured economically or in the social well being of citizens.

Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander and Tim Gulden recently released a working paper: “Global Metropolis: The Role of Cities and Metropolitan Areas in the Global Economy.“  In it they present a methodology for first identifying interconnected cities (mega regions) via the contiguous light emitted as seen from space and second calculating the economic production from those regions.

From this approach they calculate that 2.6 percent of the world’s population, living in just 10 mega-metros, produce 21.2% of the world’s economic activity.   The top 20 cities produce 28% of global economic activity with 4.4% of global population.

The list of largest mega metros by light connectivity contains three from Japan in the top five (the other two are Los Angeles and New York).   Other world mega metros in the top 20 include London, Antwerp-Brussels, Bonn-to-Koln, Guangzhou-Hong Kong.

I’m wondering if by comparing other social and economic metrics between very different global mega-regions, we might learn more about the balance between economic prosperity, social well being, and continually fostering creativity and innovation.

Here are some questions that could be asked:

In Who’s Your City Florida noted that the world is spiky, and cities are spiky.  The American cities with the highest levels of innovative activity also had the highest poverty levels and largest extremes between rich and poor.   Is this also the case in Japan? Western Europe?

How do these mega regions compare in terms of education levels with each other? with cities further down the list?

What about demographics:

  • average age of the population?  How important is youth?  
  • place of birth? does immigration matter?
  • number of people educated abroad
  • languages widely spoken?

There are likely more intriguing questions.

Category: economic development /

Urban Chickens or Pigs Anyone?

March 11, 2009 / Wendy Waters / One comment

It looks like barnyard animals could be making an urban comeback in North America.

The Toronto Star summarized a Dutch  firm’s idea of farming pigs vertically, in multi-storey buildings.  Apparently it’s more ecologically responsible:

Proposed by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, the argument is that it’s more efficient to raise swine in highrise farms than on the ground, where they take up a lot of room. According to MVRDV, if pigs in Holland were raised organically – i.e. fed 100 per cent grain – three-quarters of the country would have to be set aside to meet their needs.

By giving these pigs wings and stacking them in the sties in the skies, the land below remains free and transportation and distribution costs can be cut. Each tower could feed 500,000 people annually. The pigs would also get to enjoy well-ventilated spaces with great views.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, chickens are scheduled to make a come back (while in New York, Seattle and Portland apparently they never left).

If barnyard animals can humanely be kept in dense urban spaces, and contribute to increasing urban sustainability, without creating new, more serious problems, then I’d welcome them.

But somehow in Vancouver, which sits right next to thousands of kilometers of wilderness, I can’t help but think that chickens would simply attract and feed more bears, cougars, foxes, coyotes and other animals that really don’t belong in the city.

Do you have your own chickens? would you welcome 40 storeys of pigs moving in down the street?

Category: development conflicts, ecological issues, planning policy, urban lifestyles /

Follow your nose

March 10, 2009 / Wendy Waters / One comment

Here’s a great map of the best Chinese food restaurants in the greater Vancouver area.   What’s not surprising is that they roughly mimic current and historical settlement places of Chinese immigrants.  From the original Chinatown just east of downtown in the 1890s, Asian (mostly Chinese) immigrants gradually spread their businesses south along Main Street, developing a key part of Vancouver along the way.

More recently, the suburb of Richmond has become home to thousands of people of Chinese origin — lots of great restaurants there.

What I’d like to figure out is why there are no restaurants in the North East part of Vancouver (Hastings-Sunrise) on the map.  Maybe Chinese immigrants there are from a different part of China?

Category: urban history /

Cities and states of nature

March 9, 2009 / Wendy Waters / One comment

Drug cartel wars in Mexico’s borderlands as well as Taliban and tribal Afghanistan heroin production can generate violence and lawlessness in individual cities thousands of kilometres away.  And city governments often lack the policing and even legal means to stop the chaos and control their streets.

There are as many examples as there are cities (Toronto had a spree of suspected gang violence last summer, in Los Angeles it can be endemic).  But the recent gang war in Vancouver, which has resulted in 32 shootings in 64 days got me thinking about the needs of metro areas in todays complex world.

From a recent Canadian Press article:

OTTAWA — The increase in gang violence on the streets of Vancouver and other Canadian cities has direct ties to the grisly drug-cartel wars that have terrorized Mexico and some American border towns, say Canadian and U.S. police.

Violence has reached a fever pitch in parts of Mexico where the government of President Felipe Calderon has sent in 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police to try to curb cartel activity. More than 7,000 have died in the last two years, with 1,000 deaths this January alone.

…

The Washington Times quoted senior U.S . military officials Tuesday who warned that if Mexico’s two main cartels joined forces, they would have the equivalent power of an army of 100,000.

When the drug cartels can mobilize the equivalent of 100,000 troops, the national government is not in control.

17th Century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that without government or — the State — humans would live in a state of nature, where life was “nasty, brutish and short.” Therefore, people willingly relinquished some of their freedoms and wealth in exchange for government-imposed order.

There are other theories about the state, including that to be effective, a state must have a monopoly on violence.  The Mexican borderlands appear to be failing on both counts — as are many other parts of the world.

The streets of many cities too are starting to become extensions of these states of nature — places where the government does not have the monopoly on violence.  The police in Metro Vancouver’s various municipalities have not solved any of the shootings (to the best of my knowledge). The courts have not successfully kept anyone charged with any related crime (such as selling armor-piercing bullets — not allowed in Canada) locked up.

The metro area is hampered by (at least) two things:

1. The metro region does not have one central government, nor one central policing force.  This makes it harder to maintain order when gangs move seamlessly from one municipality to the next.

2. Laws and jurisdictional procedures created for a more rural nation and/or for a different era don’t work.

There are serious concerns about more innocent people getting hurt.  Many shootings have been in crowded mall parking lots or on busy streets.  The police appear to have reasonably good knowledge about who is involved, but not enough evidence to charge them with sufficiently significant crimes that judges won’t grant them bail while they wait for trial in the backlogged court system, which could take months or years.  In the meantime, the shooting continues.

Maybe cities need a new deal.  Maybe cities’ needs will further push the idea of City States  — afterall, you can’t have a stable, prosperous economy or offer a good quality of life when gang wars make people fear going out.

Category: crime reduction, economic development, Uncategorized /

Condo units in the downturn: vertical sprawl

March 1, 2009 / Wendy Waters / 4 comments

Well located, condominium units in Vancouver’s uber-chic Yaletown have become as challenging to sell these days as a generic single family home in the suburbs.  As the residential real estate market has softened, it has hit some homes harder than others.

The economic principle of “scarcity” has been evident.  Where there is “geographic constraint” or a limited potential future supply, prices are holding up and sales velocity, while slower, is still measurable.  For example, quality homes (especially those with heritage qualities) on their own lots in vibrant neighbourhoods of Vancouver city have held their values reasonably well — and continue to sell.   They are not making any more single family lots in Vancouver.  By contrast with thousands of new condominium units scheduled for completion over the next 12 to 24 months, and tens of thousands already in existence, potential buyers see no reason to jump in now.

I suggested a while back that condominium towers in Vancouver were starting to look like vertical sprawl — the same exterior architecture of glass towers combined with similar cookie-cutter interiors.  In the suburbs, the homes might be detached, or low-rise townhomes, but otherwise typically share the characteristics of “sameness.”  Again, a potential buyer of a suburban home has no particular urgency at the moment.  There will always be something available.  US studies seem to show a similar phenomenon of sprawl homes declining and unique, urban core homes in vibrant cities retaining value.

This turn in the real estate market somewhat confirms my earlier thoughts that urban condominiums may have more in common with the suburban sprawl than many of their proponents would like to admit.

A lesson for condo-lovers: buy something unique.  Don’t by the generic 2 bedroom with a view of the adjacent tower.  Try to find a way to buy a unique unit, with a special feature (view, deck, whatever), and in the long run you’ll be better off as it will retain its value.

This past week MacLeans Magazine had a revealing article about the challenge of selling a generic condo unit (which inspired this post).

Category: downtowns, real estate, residential development /