By Aaron Renn Amazon is seeking bids for a second headquarters location that will be equal in size to its current Seattle base. (You can read their RFP here). It would ultimately employ 50,000 people in eight million square feet of office space at an average salary of over $100,000. This is going to be the feeding frenzy of the century. This seems to suggest that Amazon thinks they are about capped out in Seattle. To give a sense of Amazon’s place in Seattle, the Seattle Times recently labeled it “America’s biggest company town.” The company has over eight million…
Author: arenn
The UK has voted to leave the European Union. The Brexit campaign was revealing because it was based on the exact opposite of the urban triumphalist vision that so often dominates the discourse. Globalization doesn’t respect borders we’re told. Cities, not provinces or nation-states, are the real actors in the global economy. Some have fantasized about the Singapore model of the city-state as ideal. Virtually all mayors express great dissatisfaction about their national governance arrangements. Benjamin Barber even wrote that mayors should rule the world. The ultimate vision of this would be an independent, polyglot London, arguably the world’s most…
The following appeared in the Autumn 2015 edition of City Journal. Reinventing Buffalo The western New York city should focus on getting better—not bigger. Governor Cuomo says that the sight of cranes in the sky means that Buffalo is back—but is that really true? In November 2014, newspapers in the Northeast filled their pages with astonishing images of a blizzard that buried Buffalo under seven feet of snow. This record-breaking storm was caused by a band of lake-effect snow a mere 20–25 miles wide. It seemed almost as if fate had decided, once again, to punish this long-suffering post-industrial city…
If there’s one thing that’s a nearly universal anxiety among cities, it’s brain drain, or the loss of educated residents to other places. I’ve written about this many times over the years, critiquing the way it is normally conceived. Since brain drain seems to be a major concern in shrinking cities, I decided to take a look at the facts around brains in those places. Looking at the 28 metro areas among the 100 largest that had objective measures of shrinkage – in population and/or jobs – between 2000 and 2013, I looked what what happened to their educational attainment…
Last month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put out the first official release of annual job data for metropolitan areas, so I wanted to take a brief look at this for large metro areas (more than one million in population, based on old metro area definitions that the BLS still uses). Here are the top 10 cities for percentage job growth. Nashville takes the crown.
[ Here’s a rarity. It’s one from the archives that I wrote way back in 1997. There are a lot of anachronisms in it, but it is still very relevant. Also, this should not be considered overly specific to Indianapolis, because the thinking is pervasive, though thankfully improving in a lot of places – Aaron. ]It is almost considered a truism in Indianapolis that one of the biggest obstacles to getting people to come downtown to shop, see the sights, etc. is a lack of free, convenient parking. People driving in from the suburbs are forced to either park on…
THE BASICS: This domestic drama from 1950 is the play that brought William Inge to the attention of the literary world. The production at the New Phoenix Theatre, directed by Joseph Natale, plays Thursdays – Saturdays at 8pm, through April 21st. Thursday evenings are Pay What You Can. The show runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes with its single intermission.THUMBNAIL SKETCH: The action takes place in an old house in a run-down neighborhood of a Midwestern city–circa 1950. Doc Delaney and his wife Lola are a middle aged couple leading lives of (usually) quiet desperation. Doc is a chiropractor,…
By Aaron M. RennWe constantly read about the infrastructure crisis in America. I’ll have more to say on this at a future date, but it is pretty clear that we need to spend more money in a whole lot of areas: airports, roads and bridges, public transportation, and more. Yet it’s very easy to see that so much of what ails transport has nothing to do with a lack of funds and everything to do with a lack of will. I took a train ride on the Northeast corridor last week that really drove it home to me. Start with…
To anyplace that considers itself a “global city” – New York, Chicago, etc – globalization and global competitive reality are the defining lens through which they see their present and future. I happen to think that with the exception of a handful of the most exceptional cities, this is to some extent unhealthy. These cities take too narrow a view. Yet clearly there is an aspect of this global city thing that’s very relevant to them. But to those smaller places that aren’t global cities, globalization seems curiously absent from the radar. I would define a global city as a…
By Dyane Nunez:On December 9, the Pandamonium runway show hits the Buffalo Museum of Science. The event is the brainchild of local fashion designer Steven Bales.Up to this point, Bales Clothing has been featured in over 40 fashion shows between Western NY and NYC. The designer has participated in over a dozen different college fashion shows, fashion show events and even the High School of Fashion Industries Reunion Fashion Show 2011. The mission at Bales Clothing is to provide opportunity to and for those seeking personal growth and prosperity, while inspiring others to follow their dreams. They aim to be more…