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New Census Estimates Reveal Continuing American Divergence

Photo Credit: Nserrano, CC BY-SA 3.0

The Census Bureau today released new county and metro area level estimates for population. In my latest article for City Journal, I take a look at some of the trends. Here’s an excerpt:

Ninety-four metro areas, representing about a quarter of the nation’s total, lost population last year on a region-wide basis. This includes nine major metros of more than 1 million people. Among them were the three biggest: New York (down 19,474 people, or 0.10 percent), Los Angeles (down 7,223, or 0.05 percent), and Chicago (down 22,068, or 0.23 percent). … Among smaller metros, Boise, Idaho continues its streak as a red-hot market. It was the eighth-fastest-growing metro in the country last year and has added 113,860 people (up 18.47 percent) since the 2010 Census. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was the 11th-fasting-growing metro; Idaho Falls, the 20th. This strong growth, which includes a significant influx of coastal residents, will likely shift that state’s politics in the future. One resident said recently said that Idaho is becoming “the new Colorado.”

America is experiencing economic and demographic divergence, with some cities booming while a significant share of the nation’s metro areas shrink. Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, 42 metro areas in the country lost population. Based on the midyear population estimates, 85 metro areas have shrunk since 2010. Not just cities, but entire regions are getting smaller. While population growth is not the sole, or perhaps even the best, measure of urban health, population loss can cause serious problems. It can, for example, lead to sprawl without growth, which depresses housing prices and causes home abandonment. And it causes fiscal stress for local governments because so many of their costs are fixed or semi-fixed, such as bond payments and the need to maintain infrastructure.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/04/18/new-census-estimates-reveal-continuing-american-divergence/

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The Future of the Urbanophile

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The Philadelphia Revival Story

My latest piece will be in this Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer but is already available online now. It’s about the nascent revival in Philadelphia over the past decade, and its relevance, or rather lack of relevance, to many other struggling cities in Pennsylvania. Here’s an excerpt:

In many ways the city has been ideally positioned for new economy success. The Philadelphia metro area is a very large region of 6.1 million people in an era in which larger cities have been growing faster.

Philadelphia has a highly educated population, with nearly 38 percent of people over the age of 25 in the region having a college degree. This is critical in a knowledge economy era, when biomedical research, high-tech and digital business, creative service and health care are in high demand. While not quite at the most elite levels, Philadelphia’s share of adults with a college degree is significantly above the national average.

Philadelphia is also one of only a handful of cities with a major urban transit system and extensive commuter rail network. It has geographic proximity to much more expensive New York and Washington, and is well connected to them via rail. It has a strong local vernacular culture, and also stellar high culture institutions.

For people looking for a high quality, authentic urban experience at a reasonable price, Philadelphia is one of only a tiny number of places that qualify.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/04/12/the-philadelphia-revival-story/

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Chicago: Past, Present, Future

I gave a talk recently at the Chicago Booth School of Business about Chicago and while I was not able to record it, I decided to reprise my talk as a podcast. I give a very brief narrative overview of the city’s history, it’s present day strengths, the challenges it faces, and ideas for the future. If the podcast doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.

Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud.

Featured image credit: Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 4.0

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/04/10/chicago-past-present-future/

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Changing the Chicago Way?

“Chicago sunrise 1” by Daniel Schwen – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

My latest piece is online at City Journal, and is about the election yesterday of Lori Lightfoot as Chicago’s next mayor:

Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor of Chicago on Tuesday, defeating Cook County Board of Commissioners president Toni Preckwinkle. Lightfoot, who swept all 50 city wards, won by a 74-to-26 margin that rivals the biggest election routs of Richard M. Daley. She becomes the city’s first black female mayor, making Chicago the largest city ever to elevate a black woman (who is also gay) to executive power. In choosing Lightfoot, Chicago has clearly voted for change. Though she’s worked in government for years, Lightfoot is a political outsider by Chicago standards. … Lightfoot now faces the challenge of governing Chicago. Unlike outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel, who took office after a decade of economic malaise, Lightfoot inherits a booming downtown economy that has reached record-high employment. Under Emanuel and Daley, the mayor governed in an alliance with the business community. Given Lightfoot’s professional background, there’s no reason to believe that she will disrupt that cozy relationship.

Lightfoot also benefits from a downward trend in the city’s violent-crime problem. The murder rate, though still elevated, was lower last year and has fallen by 30 percent so far in 2019—welcome news for the city. Other crimes are down, too. If the economy keeps humming and the positive crime trend persists, Lightfoot will have some breathing room to establish herself.

Not that there’s any shortage of other challenges. Chicago has enormous financial problems, headlined by unfunded pensions and high levels of debt. She faces a deficit of as much as $800 million in next year’s budget. She’ll have to negotiate contracts with the police, firefighters, and teachers. The teachers have been in a confrontational mood for years and went out on strike during the Emanuel years. Lightfoot gave little indication of how she’d solve the city’s financial problems during the campaign, but she has floated various ideas for tax increases, include a value-added tax on professional services—a surprising suggestion, considering her background in Big Law. Then there’s the challenge of spreading prosperity beyond the city’s downtown and North Side to other, left-behind areas—a task with no easy answers.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/04/03/changing-the-chicago-way/

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What Can We Do For America’s Most Challenged Cities?

My latest Manhattan Institute study was just released, discussing the particular difficulties facing America’s most distressed cities. Post-industrial metro areas with less than one million people that have experience significant decline are in a different category than other places. In addition to demographic and employment challenges, they tend to have low end economies, low levels of educational attainment, and very few elite caliber assets such as an R1 research university around which to rebuild.

I suggest that speculative economic development projects and subsidies are unlikely to work at reviving these places because the market is fundamentally against them. Rather, they should focus on building the preconditions of success by fixing their finances, reforming their governance, and rebuilding public services. This will require significant state, and perhaps some federal, assistance for them to achieve.

Click over to read the report.

I also have an article online at CityLab discussing my report. Here’s an excerpt:

What cities are we talking about here? If you ask someone to name a left behind industrial city, you’re likely to hear places like Detroit or Cleveland. They have challenges to be sure, but also much that is positive going on and, more importantly, they have high value assets around which to build a 21st century economy. Detroit, for example, has nine Fortune 500 headquarters, a major concentration of engineering talent, and is a hub for Delta Airlines with non-stop flights to Europe and Asia, among many other things.

The truly left behind and most forgotten cities are smaller places, many of which are little-known: Danville, Illinois; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Michigan City, Indiana; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Youngstown, Ohio.

These metropolitan areas often have several strikes against them, including population loss, weak job markets, low value economies, a low share of adults with college degrees, and a central municipality that is financially distressed. They also have very few if any high value assets to rebuild their economies around. They usually aren’t state capitals and lack elite universities, Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, a major airport (or any airport), and name recognition. … Instead, deeply challenged smaller post-industrial cities should do the basics: Local governments must address their often huge unfunded liabilities and get to structurally balanced budgets. They should reform their governance where necessary, especially by eliminating corruption. And, they need to start rebuilding core public services, especially public safety but also parks, etc. Make no mistake, this will require help from federal and state governments, and may involve painful steps like bankruptcy and prosecutions.

This is not giving up. It’s exactly what New York City did before its comeback. When a financial control board helped it recover from its 1970s brush with bankruptcy, the city put in place a new charter, fought corruption, and started investing in its subways and rebuilding Central Park. It’s also what Detroit did more recently in addressing its financial plight through bankruptcy; creating regional authorities or taxing districts for its water system, convention center, and art museum; and replacing all of its streetlights. It’s what former Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner said she would do if Governor Cuomo gave her city the same billion dollars he gave Buffalo, proposing to spend three-quarters of the money to repair the city’s water system.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/03/28/what-can-we-do-for-americas-most-challenged-cities/

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The Tech Campus Moves Downtown

Cornell Tech. Photo Credit: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0

My latest City Journal article from the Winter issue is now online. It’s called “The Tech Campus Moves Downtown” and is about states and universities making geographic moves to better position themselves for the 21st century. It talks a lot about the University of Illinois and its Discovery Partners Institute plan, as well as Cornell Tech.  Some excerpts:

Much of today’s technology economy is located where a critical mass of talent and capital converge: on the campuses of elite research universities, in settings with strong entrepreneurial cultures. The key role that universities play in this equation is prompting some states to rethink the geography of their key academic institutions, looking to position them more effectively as engines of the local economy.

A case study for the challenges that states face in strengthening their knowledge-economy prowess can be found in Illinois. The University of Illinois’ renowned computer science and engineering programs have produced a Who’s Who of tech startup founders, including Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (YouTube), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Tom Siebel (Siebel Systems), Jerry Sanders (AMD), and Max Levchin (PayPal). It’s a track record to be proud of. From the state’s perspective, though, there’s one big problem: none of these accomplished people built his business in Illinois. … Why do Illinois’ tech brains often escape to the West Coast? A commonly given answer: geography. The University of Illinois’ flagship campus is located in downstate Urbana-Champaign, a small region of only 240,000 people about two hours’ drive on I-57 from the state’s economic capital in Chicago. This disconnect between the location of a state’s flagship school and its economic capital is not unique to Illinois: other states should be rethinking their geographic strategy for the twenty-first century as well.

The location of most American universities is an accident of history…Most of their sites were chosen more than 100 years ago, for reasons no longer relevant…As states’ populations swelled and their economies expanded, cities with colleges began to diverge. Some states had established their flagship public institutions in the state capital or in another city that grew to be the state’s economic center. These included Ohio State in Columbus, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Texas in Austin. But others—like Purdue, Penn State, and Missouri—were located in cities that grew with the college but remained small urban areas, “college towns” to this day. … Cornell, a private Ivy League university that is also New York’s land-grant college, has made just such a geographic realignment. As a private school, it’s free from the political complications besetting state universities, and thus is able to make moves more rapidly than these public institutions. Cornell’s main campus is located in the upstate college town of Ithaca. Its medical school has long been based in New York City, and it recently opened a second major New York City operation: Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, a partnership with Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. … New York City’s motivation to get a technology-focused university is clear. Less attention has been paid to Cornell’s motivation. According to Dan Huttenlocher, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, one motivator was that the city was a complementary venue to Ithaca for realizing the university’s research ambitions. “We are focused on the digital transformation of the economy and society,” he says. “So many issues of the world are urban issues.” The critical mass of industry and the density of people make New York City a good place for those looking to be on the leading edge of digital transformation. It didn’t hurt that Cornell could tap into huge pools of donor money to win the competition and launch the campus. The school has raised $770 million in private funding so far. … Cornell may be the best-known case of a top college making a big geographic move, but it’s happening elsewhere, too, as the case of Michigan State’s medical school demonstrates. University medical schools have long been located in a state’s big city, geographically separate from the university’s main campus. These schools require a critical mass of patients to operate at a scale more easily attained in a large metro.

That’s part of the rationale for Michigan State College of Human Medicine (MSU-CHM) relocating its medical school headquarters to Grand Rapids and building a major medical school campus there. … Illinois is arguably the state with the most to gain from some type of geographic realignment. It’s been a topic of conversation and debate for years. Former governor Bruce Rauner put forth the most aggressive solution to date, one that draws heavily on the Cornell Tech approach. The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), to be located in Chicago’s South Loop, is envisioned not as a degree-granting institution but rather, in partnership with other universities and corporations, as a center for cutting-edge research in areas like big data and food and agriculture. DPI anticipates rotating faculty and students from the University of Illinois and other schools, as well as hiring its own faculty. The state has already appropriated $500 million for the project and is exploring partnerships with Israeli universities. … Leaders in Urbana-Champaign are alarmed at the prospect that university assets might move to the Loop. Laura Frerichs, director of the University of Illinois’ Research Park and economic-development director for its Urbana-Champaign campus, emerged as a major DPI opponent. She believes that there’s no inherent limitation in her community’s ability to retain talent and build a technology economy. She points to local examples of technology success, such as Wolfram Research, the global software company behind the well-known Mathematica platform, which is headquartered locally and employs 350 people. The research park that Frerichs runs has attracted numerous major firms, including ABInBev (formerly Anheuser-Busch), Caterpillar, and AbbVie. … The biggest political risk to DPI is the state’s transition to a new gubernatorial administration. Rauner lost his reelection bid to Democrat J. B. Pritzker, who criticized the DPI plan. Yet Pritzker has championed Chicago’s technology sector. He has invested in Chicago technology firms and was the driving force behind the creation of a facility known as 1871 (named after the year of the Great Chicago Fire) as a sort of headquarters institution of Chicago tech. He clearly understands the logic of DPI. As governor, he’ll likely want to put his own stamp on it and perhaps rebrand it, not cancel it. Then again, relying on rational behavior in Illinois politics has never been a winning bet.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s not just STEM focused moves either. The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has been making a push into Arlington.

A related point occurred to me last week when I gave a talk to some MBA students at Chicago-Booth. I was told that most MBA students there actually live downtown now and take the train to Hyde Park every day. In fact, every person who attended my talk lived downtown (I did a survey). It makes me wonder if the school made a mistake when it built its new business school building, the Harper Center, in Hyde Park instead of downtown.  MBA students already don’t engage much with the rest of the school, so this would have been a feasible move.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/03/22/the-tech-campus-moves-downtown/

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Smarter Cities and Community Engagement

As a follow-up to Monday’s post, the two top finishers in the Chicago mayoral election were Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle. They will meet in an April runoff.

During the election I was down in Miami speaking at the Knight Foundation’s annual Media Forum. I was honored to be invited to participate and was on a panel devoted to smarter cities. Here’s the video of our session. If the video player doesn’t display for you, click over to watch on You Tube.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/02/28/smarter-cities-and-community-engagement/

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A Mad Dash for City Hall in the Windy City

If you didn’t see it in the weekend paper, my latest piece is now online in the Wall Street Journal. It’s about the Chicago mayoral election and the state of the city. Here’s an excerpt:

Visitors to Chicago’s gleaming downtown might never know that the Windy City faces a fiscal crisis driven by unfunded pension liabilities as well as major challenges with crime and corruption. But local voters should know the full story as they head to the polls Tuesday to pick a new mayor.

Thirteen candidates—mostly Democrats—are vying to replace Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose eight years in office have been dogged by controversies including a major teachers strike and allegations of police brutality. His unexpected decision not to run for re-election created a wide-open field to replace him. … The backdrop of Tuesday’s election is a strange mixture of urban glitter, violent crime and woeful governance. Chicago has proved itself different from other postindustrial American cities. It has a strong economic base and continues to draw talent and investment. The Windy City’s potential is unlimited if it gets its act together. But doing so will require fresh thinking and a real commitment to reform—qualities noticeably missing among the city’s permanent political class and the baker’s dozen of candidates vying to be the next mayor.

Click through to read the whole thing.

Cover image credit: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/02/25/a-mad-dash-for-city-hall-in-the-windy-city/

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Don’t Fall in the Branding Trap

My latest piece is online in City Lab. It’s another look at urban branding. Here’s an excerpt.

The problem with the typical approach extends beyond just marketing. It has tangible consequences. A brand is really a city’s conception of itself. By selling itself as a facsimile of something its not, a city ends up turning that into reality. Thus, so many urban places today seem vaguely the same—a blur of Edison-bulbed eateries and mid-rise “one plus five” apartment buildings (in which up to five stories of wood frame construction are built atop a concrete first floor). These buildings, which all look vaguely the same with their multi-shaded exterior panels that seem destined to date quickly, are now obligatory elements in densifying urban neighborhoods, as critics have observed,

In a much-discussed New York magazine essay, Oriana Schwindt dubbed this “the unbearable sameness of cities.” Traveling to the city nearest the geographic center of each state, she described how she constantly kept seeing the same Ikea lights in coffee shops she’d visit. “And it wasn’t just the coffee shops—bars, restaurants, even the architecture of all the new housing going up in these cities looked and felt eerily familiar. Every time I walked into one of these places, my body would give an involuntary shudder. I would read over my notes for a city I’d visited months prior and find that several of my observations could apply easily to the one I was currently in.”

She’s not the only one who’s noticed that urban neighborhoods seem to be built from the same box of standard components: Vox recently explored the ubiquity of “the metal chair that’s in every restaurant.”

There are always fads and trends, of course. We all take part in at least some of them, and having fun doing so is part of what it means to be human. (I, for one, am happy that so many American cities now have a “barbecue place with lacquered-wooden tables” that Schwindt noted.) But there’s a thin line between fashionable and fashion victim. Cities need to sell something more than just the trends.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/02/14/dont-fall-in-the-branding-trap/

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President Pete?

Photo Credit: Edward Kimmel, CC BY-SA 2.0

My latest piece is online at City Journal. It’s a look at the improbable presidential candidacy of South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. Some excerpts:

Buttigieg has the impressive résumé one would expect from an aspiring presidential candidate. Born in South Bend, he was valedictorian of his high school, then went to Harvard and received a Rhodes Scholarship. He became a Naval Reserve officer and served in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer. He’s worked in elite business and Democratic political circles, doing a stint at McKinsey and Company and on John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Mayor of South Bend is an odd platform from which to pursue the presidency. Being a mayor of any sort is typically a dead-end job. Only three presidents have ever served as mayor, the last being Calvin Coolidge. Perhaps because of resentment against big cities, mayors aren’t often elected governor of their states, either. The Washington Post observed that making that leap is “rare.” Cory Booker’s rise from celebrity mayor of Newark to the U.S. Senate perhaps inspired others to see City Hall as a stepping stone to greater things, but it remains an atypical trajectory.

For Democrat Buttigieg, running for mayor may have reflected limited political options. Indiana is solid red, with Republicans dominating the state since the election of Mitch Daniels as governor in 2004. Buttigieg tried running for state treasurer in 2010 but was crushed by Republican Richard Mourdock, getting only 37.5 percent of the vote. Though being gay may seem like a negative in socially conservative Indiana, the real scarlet letter for Buttigieg is the “D” after his name.

Click through to read the whole thing.

  from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/02/07/president-pete/

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New York City’s Infrastructure Future

My latest podcast features Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York. We talk about his very unique organization, the threat to the region posed by the Amtrak and commuter rail tunnels under the Hudson River, resolving the New York region’s governance dysfunction, the highest priority infrastructure needs in the region, and a bit about megaregions. It was a great conversation. If the audio player doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.

Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/01/15/new-york-citys-infrastructure-future/

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The Overlooked Opportunity in the High-Tech Industrial Economy

Long time commenter and guest post contributor Rod Stevens, a real estate and economic development consultant at Business Street, joins me for the inaugural podcast of 2019 to talk about the overlooked opportunities in high tech industrial economic development.

People tend to think of high tech as software or biotech, but there’s often an under-the-radar high tech economy already in place in the overlooked industrial businesses of many communities. We talk about what these businesses are, where they are located, what they need, and why you’ve never heard of them. If the audio player doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.

Subscribe to podcast via iTunes | Soundcloud.

Featured image credit: Portland Bolt CC BY 2.0

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.aaronrenn.com/2019/01/10/the-overlooked-opportunity-in-the-high-tech-industrial-economy/

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Dwindling Legacy Income in Rust Belt Cities

Buffalo Light Rail at Fountain Plaza by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, CC BY 2.0

Bruce Fisher is a great analyst on Rust Belt cities. Because he focused on Buffalo specifically, his work isn’t known as well as it should be because some of the observations are very relevant to many places.

For example, he has a new column out in the Daily Public looking at the impact of “legacy income” on Rust Belt cities and how that will dwindle over time.

Over the past 20 years, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the norm had been that 18 percent of all personal income here comes from federal and state government programs—including the Social Security that working people pay into all their working lives. But as of the latest available figures, that share has grown—to 22.6 percent. Here’s what that signals: New jobs don’t pay like pre-Great Recession jobs used to, and retirement income is more important than ever to the regional economy.

Pensions, disability, and Social Security comprise a fifth of personal income here. Another fifth comes from government jobs—mainly teachers, public safety personnel, and college professors, but also the broad range of civil servants, everybody from snowplow drivers to weather forecasters to road crews and school nurses.

This is what economists mean when they say we have a “mixed” economy. Private employment in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro accounts for at least 480,000 of the 580,000 or so jobs here. The private sector still accounts for an overwhelming share of the personal income of working people.

But as we’ve tracked for a bunch of years now (today’s analysis looks at numbers just released last month, current through the end of 2017), this region is living off its legacy as a manufacturing center. That legacy includes high-wage employment that no longer exists except in the form of private pensions. … The Buffalo economy of the industrial age is gone, except that its legacy continues to pay our collective bills. How? Through transfer payments, through private and also public pensions, and through the marvel of high ratios of discretionary, disposable income thanks to the low cost of housing here.

That’s why Buffalo and other Rust Belt cities enjoy such a robust entertainment sector, as various national and major-market media seem to have discovered. Restaurateurs, cultural venues, and other market-conscious business types are wise to track the supply of elderly and near-elderly people here and in other places where big factories once pumped out retirees with nice pensions, and where public employment guarantees 20 percent of the workforce a very secure retirement. To widespread pension security add the phenomenon of the paid-off house, and voila: Even without an uptick of child-free, urban-trending millennials, the coffee shops, saloons, boutique eateries, fromageries, artisanal olive-oil shops, farmers’ markets, and middle-ticket restaurants continue to do good business.

Retiree money is critical to several sectors here, because for current workers, for the not-yet retired, there are tectonic shifts underway. … The gist: So long as there is a decent supply of elderly people bringing Social Security and Medicare benefits in to pay for healthcare workers (Medicare doesn’t go to the patient, but to the healthcare establishment), and so long as there is some steady pay for civil servants, the Western New York economy has a baseline of income stability.

Let’s hope that the next round of General Motors plant closures bypasses Buffalo. And that Tesla’s 600 employees grow to the 3,000 Elon Musk promised. And that millennials and climate refugees begin the remigration to our shrinking (our population dropped by 30,000 since 2001) but cheerful and well-promoted region. They’ll find housing in oversupply, dysfunctional public transit, and politicians flush with Christmas cheer from real-estate developers both free and, like one of our congressmen, out on bail.

They’d best arrive soon, before our retirees die off and leave a huge hole in our regional economy.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.urbanophile.com/2018/12/21/dwindling-legacy-income-in-rust-belt-cities/

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A New Address For the Urbanophile

I am now officially on Christmas break here, but I want to leave you with this very important post about big technical changes happening over the holiday.

A while back I rebranded the site from Urbanophile to Aaron Renn. But I continued to use the urbanophile.com domain name for the web site and my email and Twitter handle. I am now in the process of converting those remaining items.

I have already changed my preferred email address to aaron@aaronrenn.com. Please update your address book with the new address. My old one will continue to work, but please do make the update when you can.

My Twitter handle has been changed to @aaron_renn.  If you are a twitter follower there is no need to take any action. You are still following me under the new handle.

Over the break I’m going to be converting the web site to the aaronrenn.com domain. I waited on this one because it’s an invasive change. I’m going to try to update all internal links to link to the new site, and to redirect any old links so that they still work. You should expect intermittent outages over the next week or two. And also I anticipate that I’ll be finding and fixing various problems of some sort for a while after the cutover.

So after the break, you should update all your bookmarks to the new address www.aaronrenn.com. If you read me via an RSS reader like Feedly, my plan to make sure everything continues working correctly without you needing to update anything.

See you all in 2019!

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.urbanophile.com/2018/12/21/a-new-address-for-the-urbanophile/

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Coastal Branding Tactics for Heartland Cities

Indianapolis Monthly magazine just ran an interesting feature article on Gwendolyn Rogers, proprietor of a local store called the Cake Bake Shop. I have never been to it and am not the target market. But I thought there were a few interesting elements to it that are relevant not just to marketing businesses but cities.

Rogers is not an Indianapolis native. She spent time living in Los Angeles and Idaho before arriving there. She had worked for a modeling agency in LA and her husband worked in the film industry. Perhaps because they both worked in the entertainment sector, Rogers understands the power of celebrity for marketing, and how to go about getting celebrities to help promote your product. This appears to have been a big part of how she built her business up.

In 2014, she opened her bakery from scratch. She created the recipes, seeking the finest ingredients, no matter the cost. She designed the restaurant, the decor, the packaging. Four years later, customers line up to purchase cakes that top out at $210. Her gift cards hang at Costco. Williams-Sonoma sells her cakes online. She has won awards and has a celebrity following, from Steve Martin to Paula Deen. This spring, the baker debuts her biggest challenge to date—a 3,600-square-foot Cake Bake restaurant in the heart of Carmel.

Rogers smiles. Her mouth quivers. Even she can’t believe how big everything has gotten, how big she is dreaming. In the beginning, she just wanted to take financial pressure off her husband and put her three boys through college. She did not expect to sell 1,200 slices of cake a day, as she did one recent Friday. She did not expect to land on Oprah’s “O” list. … There’s another essential ingredient to Rogers’s success, one that plays out in real time as the owner greets a woman at one of Cake Bake’s little round tables. She returns to the bar brimming with excitement. “Her husband just happens to be Darius Rucker’s agent,” Rogers says. “I am going to see Darius Rucker tonight and I love him, and she’s like, ‘I’m going to get you in there.’ So I was like, ‘I want to bring him a cake,’ and she was like, ‘Let me call my husband right now.’”

This is Rogers’s signature move. She slips a pretty foot in the back door. Brings celebrities a free cake. Someone snaps a picture. Rogers posts it on social media. Orders flood in. If you can’t be Matt Damon, you can at least eat the same cake.

Of course, it doesn’t always work. John Mellencamp never responded, though six months later one of his people bought a bunch of cakes to take back to Bloomington. The Darius Rucker gambit may not pan out.

“We’ll see what happens,” Rogers says. “We’ll have to follow up with this story. I’ll let you know if I made it.”

I find this interesting because very few independent retail shop owners in cities like Indianapolis would ever even think about trying to leverage celebrity endorsements for brand building. Rogers, with her LA experience, thinks about it all the time.

I was reminded of the micro-distiller Cardinal Spirits that I profiled for CityLab. Their co-founder had lived in Brooklyn for many years, and so understood the value of going after the NYC market and the high end press there, resulting in getting featured by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times – and CityLab. He was also not intimidated by the prospect of doing so.

It seems to me that interior cities could do a much better job of leveraging these types of marketing approaches to sell themselves as places. But few seem to do so, possibly because it’s just not on their mental map, and also because they don’t know how it works and/or feel intimidated. That might help explain Nashville’s superior marketing skill. The music industry there always had to manufacture buzz to sell its product, so that same mindset and skill set translated to selling the city. What’s more, the same companies that do business in Nashville are also in New York and LA and London, so there are connections to leverage.

Brooks appears to be a natural marketer. She also created a sort of fairy land aesthetic for her shop, with tremendous attention to detail, and plastered her logo all over everything.  Here’s a pic from their Instagram.

It’s a bit rococo for my taste, but apparently the customers love it. From the article:

The tiny restaurant is heavily decorated, a cross between a French bistro and the inside of a coconut snowball. Lavish garlands festoon the windows. Towering cakes resemble the hats Southern women wear to church. Cookies and brownies sparkle. Literally. They’re topped with Pixie Glitter, edible dust Rogers trademarked and sells online. Men in pink vests and silver neckties and women in matching aprons greet customers. Mozart plays. … She had her eye on a Broad Ripple cottage she thought would make a good bakery, but she had to secure a bank loan and renovate it. She built fake cherry trees and hunted down twinkling lights from the Netherlands. She shopped all over for uniforms, then had the idea to embroider her logo over the back pockets of the khakis so staffers couldn’t carry their cell phones. … “It’s not enough for it to taste good,” she says. “It has to look good, too.” … Other keys to her success: A masterful marketer, she puts her logos and patterns on everything, from rubber spatulas to pens to take-out napkin rings. It also helps to have a husband with Hollywood connections. And her timing was good. She rode the heels of the cupcake explosion ignited by Magnolia Bakery in New York City and Candace Nelson, who opened her first Sprinkles shop in Beverly Hills in 2005. But don’t call Cake Bake a cupcake shop.

I don’t tend to frequent cake shops, but I’m not aware of any stereotypes about gentrified cake shops to match that for coffee shops, barbecue joints, etc. So far as I know her aesthetic isn’t just from the urban extruder, though someone may correct me on this. This helps it stand out.

Who knows whether she will succeed or fail in the future, but to have survived as long as she has selling a product at a price point far above what the extremely price conscious Hoosier market is used to paying says something.

If you read the piece you’ll also notice that she’s honed her origin story to create a mythos around her path. Like a number of these origin stories, it includes taking a crazy leap of faith, in her case buying plane tickets to London for a contest that she hadn’t even been selected to participate in yet but ended up winning. De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace! You an get a sense of these origin stories and how they are constructed simply by reading magazine profiles of people.

By saying that she honed her origin story, that’s not to suggest that she made it up but rather that she took the facts of her life and created a compelling narrative out of the right parts of it with elements of the mythic, the heroic, vulnerability, etc. Frankly, it’s a to-do item for me. It’s also a to-do item for cities. How can they create that authentic backstory and mythos that points forward to something aspirational people want to be a part of?

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.urbanophile.com/2018/12/20/coastal-branding-tactics-for-heartland-cities/

[kim26chiu]

Superstar Effect: Billboard Charts

There’s been a lot of press related to the superstar effect recently. First, the Wall Street Journal notes that fewer names are now dominant in the Billboard Hot 100 than in previous years.

The music chart, published weekly by Billboard magazine since 1958, ranks songs based on sales, radio play and, these days, online streaming.

But it’s now dominated by big names in a way that it wasn’t in years past. Today, it’s not uncommon for the most popular performers to have 10 or more songs listed on the Hot 100 at one time.

Supernovas like Drake, Post Malone and The Weeknd are burning brighter than ever. But as a consequence, fewer leading artists get to see their names on the chart.

Today, the Hot 100 typically features around 75 different lead artists—the performers whose names appear first on a song. In the 1970s, the number was closer to 100.

At the same time, the hits now include far more cameos by featured performers. Until the mid-1990s, the number hovered around 10. Today, it’s closer to 45.

The Journal also says that the place you should go to make the most money is America’s superstar cities.

Brookings says that tech is still concentrating in the Bay Area.

And the New York Times talks about the divergent fortunes of mid-sized cities, as they separate into winners and losers. They specifically focus on Nashville and Birmingham.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.urbanophile.com/2018/12/19/superstar-effect-billboard-charts/