Multi-jurisdictional
intentional regional communities are, in all cases, “Greater Communities” where
“community motive” is at work at a more than a local scale. This newsletter
provides a scan of regional community, cooperation and collaboration activity
as reported in news media and blogs.
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Top 10 Stories
How to build regional entrepreneurial communities has
just gotten it’s first “here’s how to do it” book. Brad Feld’s … Startup
Communities …
Leaders and Feeders
Feld’s thesis is that unlike the common wisdom, it is
entrepreneurs that lead a startup community while everyone else feeds the
community. Feld describes the characteristics of those who want to be regional
Entrepreneurial Leaders; they need to be committed to their region for the long
term (20+ years), the community and its leaders must be inclusive, play a non-zero
sum game, be mentorship-driven and be comfortable experimenting and failing
fast. Feeders include the government, universities, investors, mentors, service
providers and large companies. He points out that some of these, government,
universities and investors think of themselves as the leaders and Feld’s thesis
is that we’ve gotten it wrong for decades. This is a huge insight, a big idea
and a fresh way to view and build a regional ecosystem in the 21st century. It
may even be right.
Activities and Events
One of the most surprising (to me) was the observation
that a regional community must have continual activities and events to engage
all participants. Using Boulder Colorado as an example, (Feld’s home town) this
small entrepreneurial community …
... Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has focused much of his
administration’s energy on job creation. He has chosen to distribute funds via
competitive “regional councils” — panels of local officials and academic and
business leaders that vie with their counterparts in other regions to receive
grant money from the state.
“Why? Because people like to win,” Mr. Cuomo said
Tuesday. “Why else? Because people don’t like to lose.”
The regional council system is modeled after the
Empowerment Zones created during the Clinton administration, in which Mr. Cuomo
served as housing secretary. There are 10 councils around the state, and
central New York won the largest package of grants and tax credits last year —
$103.7 million for 74 projects.
“If you want to grow the economy, you can’t do it from
Albany,” Mr. Cuomo said. “You have to recognize the variations in the state’s
economy from region to region, and you have to develop that economy from that
region.”
Local officials are buying into the concept.
...
“Are we great yet? Are we great yet?” Sort of like the
kids yelling from the backseat, “Are we there yet?” That’s often a question we
get about the efforts of the Navigating from Good to Foundation as we reach the
end of the initiative’s first five years.
The foundation was birthed out a Greater Columbia
Chamber of Commerce Intracity Visit in 2006 as a mechanism to move the region
from being a pretty good place to work, live and play to being a great place. A
campaign was launched to fund a five-year program and some $3.2 million was
raised.
The primary tools of the foundation are coordination,
collaboration and education to align and focus diverse efforts into a unity of
purpose. The realization of what our community can become by all people working
toward a shared vision is the cornerstone of Navigating from Good to Great.
While much of the work is carried out by the chamber,
the foundation is a separate 501(c)3 and the program and funds are overseen by
a separate board. …
It's no secret that the Washington area housing market
is one of the most expensive in the country. With median home prices well above
the national average and rents continuing to rise, finding affordable housing
can be a challenge for area residents. It's particularly hard when looking for
housing close to jobs.
Over the past 40 years, median home values and rents in
the Washington region have increased much faster than household incomes. While
the median household income increased by only 46% since 1970, rents rose by 69%
and home values increased by 144%.
When a household spends 30% or more of its income on
housing costs, housing researchers typically identify it as "housing cost
burdened." In 2010, about half of all renters in the DC region fell in
this category, and 83% of renters with household incomes below $50,000 were
burdened. Nearly one-third of the region's homeowners spend more than 30% of
their incomes on their mortgages.
On top of that, many so-called "drive to
qualify" households, or those households that were only able to find
affordable housing far away from where they were looking, have very high
transportation costs. According to the National Association of Realtors
Affordability Index, the Washington region ranks as the 5th least affordable
major metro area overall, with only San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and
Boston less affordable than our region.
…
When it comes to ranking quality of life, Greater Lafayette falls in the
middle of the pack when compared with peer cities in areas important to young
professionals, according to findings from a report released last month by a
Madison, Wis., consulting firm.
The findings surprised top city officials on both sides of the river.
Young professionals? Not so much.
The city ranks fifth among its peers in Next Generation Consulting’s
report “From Good to Great: Making Greater Lafayette a Community of Choice.”
Madison, Wis., scored the highest overall and Asheville, N.C., ranked lowest in
the eight-city peer group selected by a team of Greater Lafayette leaders.
The Lafayette metropolitan area ranked highest in categories that judged
cost of lifestyle, social diversity and employment opportunity diversity. Its
lowest scores were in categories that measured the degree of after-hours or
weekend activities available to residents and the area’s level of healthy
living assets and greenness.
…
…map by Stamen Design shows the paths of the various
Silicon Valley bus services that flood San Francisco each morning and evening
peak. (Linewidth is proportional to
frequency.) All these lines running
around San Francisco extend south off the map, duplicating each other for more
than 30 miles until they diverge to serve different employers in Silicon
Valley. The colors indicate which employer.
In general, these private buses are open only to the employees of the
company in question.
These buses carry some of world's smartest geeks between
the manicured suburban headquarters of Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, EBay and
Electronic Arts and the diverse, interesting, crowded, messy city that these
geeks insist on living in -- a distance of 30-40 miles.
…
But why should people have to commute such distances at
all? In this case, it happened because a
whole mass of companies decided that they all had to have vast corporate
campuses that are too big to be in walking distance to anything. The critical mass of Silicon Valley congealed
in the high-car age, as early icons like Hewlett and Packard outgrew their
garage. Stanford University has always
sat in Silicon Valley's midst like a queen bee, happy to seem the indispensable
center of the burbling mass of innovation.
Since then every new breakthrough firm, from Google to Facebook, has
felt they had to be there.
But now, that critical mass is in the wrong place for
the needs of the next generation. …
Turns out the United States economy grew substantially
more slowly than initially estimated between April and June of this year, a torpid
1.3 percent. Lagging growth is not just a short-term problem.
America's economic growth has been sluggish since the onset of the Great
Recession and even before, so much so that leading economists and commentators
like Paul Krugman and PIMCO’s Mohamed
El-Erian suggest that America is facing a "lost
decade" of economic growth.
But America's overall economic growth rate is
essentially a composite of its many different cities and regions. Last
week, TIME's Rana Foroohar noted
as much:
I think that post election, the economics and job
creation focus is going to move to cities and what’s happening at the local
level. ... We’ll move from a simplistic conversation about tax cuts versus
spending, and we’ll start admitting that we really have no idea why US GDP
growth is as slow as it is, and there’s no one way to explain the 2 percent
economy (which is really a 5 percent or 0.5 percent economy depending on where
you live). And, we’ll have to start experimenting with lots of different
paradigms. That will happen at the city level.
It's important and useful to look under the hood of
national economic growth, and identify the variation in growth occurring across
America's more than 350 metros. Which metros have grown and which have faltered
over the past decade? How has the geography of growth changed since the onset
of the Great Recession?
…
- Introduction
In the wake of the recent economic crisis, many
statehouses and city halls face worrying fiscal stress that could have national
ramifications. Federal stimulus funding—a multi-year lifeline for state and
city coffers—is petering out before tax revenues fully recover and forcing
many sub-national governments to consider tax hikes and/or spending cuts that
could slow recovery and, in some cases, undermine long-term growth. In
particular, funding for infrastructure and education—of which states and cities
are by far the primary sources—are under the budget knife.
A particular concern for many sub-national governments
is ballooning personnel costs, including public employee/retiree pensions and
health care. In some acute cases, this financial burden has swept governments
into bankruptcy protection; in others, broad changes in policy will be required
in order maintain long-term solvency. And at the state level, the soaring costs
of Medicaid threaten to crowd out other spending in the long term. A potential
spillover of the eurozone debt crisis or further cuts in federal assistance in
the near-term could exacerbate these fiscal woes.
·
How do state and local governments
budget?
·
Why are state and local budgets
relevant?
·
What's the scope of state and local
budget stress?
·
What's the fiscal outlook for
states?
·
What's the fiscal outlook for
municipalities?
·
What are some troublesome cuts
states and cities are making?
·
What are some innovative
initiatives states and cities are taking?
Canada is the leading former British colony – that leads
even its former British ruler – in the introduction and use of integrated
regional systems. As such it has realized benefits that have eluded others.
This article will discuss its system in the context of the United States which
has lagged Canada since the 1950s. The reason is very simple. In the United
States its vast municipal bond market has enabled local governments to maintain
the status quo of a fragmented system with little, if any, integration.
It has been realized in the United States that
collaborating is not easy as it does not come naturally to municipalities and
it is very hard to sustain over the long term in spite of its many benefits.
Decades of experience in Canada demonstrate how systems can prosper and be
maintained and how different governments have devised their own solutions. As a
result, Canada is one of the leading countries where regional governance is
practiced. …
Lacking financial capability to build necessary
infrastructure in a suburbanizing environment, Canadian provinces have guided
their local government to embrace municipal reforms in their metropolitan
regions. Consolidation or regionalization or a combination thereof have been
the most potent instruments employed to recalibrate emerging metropolitan
dynamics to curb the downsides of fast growth. As a result, regional governance
has generally taken a deeper root in Canada since the 1950s. The result is that
there is less suburbanization, less polarization and less inequity, while
cities have been less hollowed out than those in the United States. In the US,
this bodes ill for the country since its stands at the precipice of the
minority majority era, in which the two dominant segments of the new majority
have been disadvantaged both within cities and in the suburbs.
In Canada, local restructuring has been facilitated by…
France’s most populous administrative zone, encompassing
the capital Paris, has signed a cooperation agreement with the Palestinian
district of Jerusalem, a move organizers say is designed to send a “political
message” of solidarity with the Palestinians and their aspirations for a future
capital in the city.
The French region described the agreement as the “first
of its kind.”
The decision is a blow to Israel’s claim that the
eastern sector is part of its united capital. A spokesman for Israel’s Foreign
Ministry said east Jerusalem “does not exist” as a separate entity and that the
French council was “living in a make-believe world.”
The Regional Council of Île-de-France voted September 28
in favor of a “decentralized cooperation agreement” with the Palestinian
Authority (PA) district of Jerusalem, making it “the first French community to
sign an agreement of cooperation with the Arab part of the holy city,” a
statement on the council’s website read. The agreement is to be officially
signed during the month of October.
Israel extended its sovereignty to the entire city of
Jerusalem following the Six-Day War of 1967, and does not recognize the PA’s
Jerusalem district, which incorporates some 400,000 Palestinian residents in
Jerusalem and its outskirts.
Île-de-France has earmarked 300,000 euros for the
cooperation agreement,…
Extra –
THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND describes how the expansive forces
of industrial capitalism have been subverted by today's predatory finance
capitalism. How did it all happen and how will it affect us? The answer is a
laundry list of issues: What is inflated debt? Debt deflation? Globalization?
Privatization of public assets? The mortgage crisis? Bailouts? Fraud? Casino
Capitalism? Junk economics and voodoo mathematics? Monopoly power? Austerity?
Unemployment? What is the rentier class? Balance of payments? De-Dollarization?
Political ideologies? Partisanship? Two separate economies? Is government
regulation always wrong? What is the best tax policy? Why the 1% versus the
99%?
Economics has become very confusing and difficult to
understand (and out of reach for most of us) because about 20 different
geo-political issues impact economic health and growth worldwide, and few are
studied in the classroom or given space in the press. There is a way out of the
labyrinth, however, as Professor Hudson demonstrates across 20 readable
chapters.
THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND is a compendium and brief history
of economic thought and why it matters not only to Americans, but to people
everywhere. You will find yourself referring to it again and again as a fount of
information, much of which has been out of favor for decades and/or suppressed
by financial interests. …
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Basic Geocodes -
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Geocode
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Geography
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Wikipedia
page link
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0000
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Earth
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0900
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Arctic Ocean
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1000
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Europe
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2000
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Africa
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3000
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Atlantic Ocean
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4000
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Antarctica
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5000
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Americas
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6000
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Pacific Ocean
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7000
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Oceania
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8000
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Asia
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9000
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Indian Ocean
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"Global Region-builder Geo-Code
Prototype" ©
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