Authors

J

Jason Hachadorian

Research Assistant

Jennifer S. Vey

Fellow and Co-Director - Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking

jvey1

Most efforts to address these gaps focus on improving our K-12 educational systems. Yet, children spend an average of 80 percent of their waking time outside of a classroom—a simple, yet startling statistic that highlights the need to explore a broader range of solutions.

As we learned at a recent Brookings event, Urban Thinkscape, an ongoing project from developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, might be one of those solutions. Drawing on findings from their research on guided play—particularly from interventions like the Ultimate Block Party and The Supermarket Study—the project embeds playful learning activities, such as games and puzzles, into public places where children routinely spend time during non-school hours. Designed by architect Itai Palti, each installation is created with specific learning goals in mind and reflects best practices in psychological research.

With a pilot led by researcher Brenna Hassinger-Das in progress in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone, the project is already revealing important lessons—not only for educators, but for urban planners and policymakers as well.

The first involves the (often under-appreciated) need to work with local residents. Through meetings and focus groups with leaders of community organizations, neighbors, and Promise Zone stakeholders, the team gained a clearer understanding of resident needs, spurred interest in the project, identified potential sites, and improved designs. Residents were brought into the process early, empowered to offer suggestions at several stages, and will continue to be engaged as the project is implemented and assessed.

The upshot? When community members are meaningfully involved—and local wisdom valued—from the onset, residents become invested in the project and feel a sense of ownership of it over the long haul. This not only improves the likelihood that the project will succeed, but also helps foster neighborhood trust and cohesion, and builds social capital that can be applied to future efforts.

Many high poverty urban areas are challenged with large numbers of vacant or underutilized properties, as well as dull spaces (like bus stops) that serve only utilitarian functions. The Urban Thinkscape project aims to take such spaces and remake them into opportunities for interaction and learning—and by doing so create tangible improvements to the neighborhood’s physical fabric. While the West Philadelphia pilot has substantial long-term planning behind it, ideally the “playful” installments will be refined over time so they can be more easily and cheaply implemented in other urban neighborhoods.

Finally, the Urban Thinkscape interventions have the potential to advance academic and spatial skills in children, reducing the gap in school readiness, and ultimately fostering better educational and life outcomes.

Many families in high poverty neighborhoods can’t afford extracurricular enrichment activities, particularly during the summer. And even where they might be offered—via community centers, or through other nonprofit initiatives focused on the arts, STEM activities, or sports—children may only experience them at certain times of the week. Urban Thinkscape aims to supplement these activities by embedding learning opportunities into the everyday landscape through interventions that develop numeracy, literacy, and other skills necessary to succeed in school and eventually the workforce. From an urban planning and policy perspective, this individual development is critical to helping build family wealth and vibrant, healthy city neighborhoods.

Though still nascent in its development, the Urban Thinkscape model appears to be a fun, innovative way to give children—and their caregivers—learning opportunities outside the classroom, while creating new gathering spaces and improved public places. In this way, the project is creatively employing the city itself as an agent of change. If the full vision of this work is realized, perhaps we can finally put the brakes on the “summer-slide” such that all kids can start the school year at the top of their game.

      

 

 

The health care industry’s impact on cities and regions—through job creation, purchasing, and real estate development—has gained increasing attention in recent years, and for good reason: The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2022 one in six new jobs will be in health care occupations, found in settings ranging from hospitals to residential care facilities. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, by 2023 over 19 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product will be in health care expenditures.

At the same time, disparities in disease and mortality rates have called into focus the responsibility of urban health care centers—including academic medical centers at urban universities—to use their economic influence to improve the well-being of the often poor and minority neighborhoods surrounding them. A recent report by the Democracy Collaborative, titled “Can Hospitals Heal America’s Communities?” argues that health organizations must be accountable for “all of their impacts on community health”—not just those related to direct health services—by using their procurement, hiring, and investment policies to tackle the “social, economic, and environmental issues that…determine our health status, our outlook, and our life expectancy.”

At a time when the nation’s health care system is being upended by new policies, technologies, and demographic dynamics, these issues are more relevant than ever. Yet largely absent from the discussion is consideration of how the physical character of urban health centers, and the relationship they in turn have with their surrounding neighborhoods, could be more supportive of expanded and evolving ideas for what it takes to build a healthier society.

Look around the large urban academic medical campuses where much of our nation’s care is provided and studied, and you see a starkly similar, and fairly depressing, spatial form: large-scale, inwardly focused buildings, ample parking, and scarcely any people in site. While these centers may be embedded in the urban landscape—and are often only a stone’s throw from busy downtowns or commercial corridors—they are rarely enmeshed in it. Though their economic connection to their city and region may be important, it’s fair to say that their corporeal relationship is barely tangible.

The ramifications of this disconnection are pretty apparent, if not yet precisely measurable.

First, the physicality of these complexes doesn’t make for a healthful experience for either patients or workers, who have limited access to local food, retail establishments, greenery, or lively public spaces, and thus limited incentive to engage with the world outside. (This is precisely why my dad never knew the daily weather.)

At the same time, their fortress-like settings make them unwelcoming to those living or working around them. The huge number of employees, outpatients, and visitors, combined with other local residents and workers, should provide a substantial market for commercial activity, health- and wellness-related programming, and other cultural amenities that would help integrate hospitals into their communities in ways that directly promote a more holistic social mission. But in most medical centers, this potential remains hidden behind tinted glass doors.

Finally, the self-contained nature of medical campuses inhibits interaction among and between clinicians and researchers, potentially curtailing the exchange of ideas and collaborations that spur and nurture innovations in preventing, diagnosing, and treating injuries and illness. A recent Project for Public Spaces (PPS) survey of health workers in the Oklahoma City health sciences center—a classic example of the model described here—found that there were far fewer spontaneous interactions there than in dense Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Mass. Yet when they did happen (albeit most often in internal cafeterias) they were highly valued just the same.

In recognizing this challenge, stakeholders in Oklahoma City are embracing the opportunity these findings present as they think about how to evolve their health care and research campus into an 843-acre innovation hub. The emerging district encompasses the campus as well as Automobile Alley, a lively commercial corridor that’s grown up across the highway. Through work with Brookings and PPS, district leaders hope to develop a unified vision and specific strategies for integrating innovation, placemaking, and inclusion in ways that make the area more vibrant and bolster it as a driver of regional economic growth and opportunity. Similar efforts in Buffalo, N.Y. and Austin, Texas are also focused on remaking medical campuses in ways that benefit adjacent communities while facilitating innovation and firm growth.

The Wake Forest Innovation Quarter in Winston-Salem, N.C. looks to be there already. A growing campus for research, business, and education in biomedical science, information technology, clinical services, and advanced materials, the Quarter is home to more than 60 companies and four leading academic institutions—including the Wake Forest School of Medicine—with more than 3,000 workers and 5,000 students. Health and wellness is also a major focus of the Quarter, motivating the creation of the 1.5-acre Bailey Park, a public space actively programmed to serve the Quarter’s tenants as well as the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Along with outdoor movies and concerts, Bailey Park offers yoga and fitness classes, in partnership with the YMCA, and a number of walking, running, and bike events that are all free and open to the public. In addition, vendors and retailers offer healthy foods in a number of venues, including a new public market hall that is intended to provide business opportunities for food entrepreneurs. On any given day, an array of other community activities, lectures, and classes are happening throughout the Quarter.

The opportunity for other medical centers to follow suit is enormous: a recent report released by Revista estimates that $97.1 billion in large health care real estate construction projects were either under construction or in late planning stages at the end of 2015. As these campuses expand into urban space, they, too, ought to be thinking about the physical form that growth takes, and how it can be shaped in ways that embrace and promote a more expansive, inclusive notion of health and well-being.

Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore combines the therapeutic properties of nature with innovative, patient-friendly design that includes lush green grounds, eight rooftop gardens, and an open environment that engages the surrounding neighborhood.

Editor’s Note: Wexford Science and Technology LLC, the developer of the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, is a donor to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the authors and not determined by any donation.

      

 

 

On Tuesday, April 26, the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution hosted an event about Detroit’s rebound. Brookings Vice President of Metropolitan Policy Amy Liu opened the program and introduced Kresge Foundation President Rip Rapson, who presented findings from The Detroit Reinvestment Index, forthcoming research on what national business leaders think about the city. Rapson then moderated a panel of experts who discussed accomplishments to date and the work yet to come in furthering Detroit’s revitalization.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #DetroitResurgence

Photos

Amy Liu opens the program

Rip Rapson gives remarks

Sandy Baruah, President and Chief Executive Officer, Detroit Regional Chamber; Stephen Henderson, Editorial Page Editor, The Detroit Free Press; Quintin E. Primo III, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Capri Investment Group, LLC ; Jennifer Vey, Fellow & Co-Director, Robert and Anne Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking, The Brookings Institution

      

 

 

“1/5 people in Baltimore lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, and yet these communities are located in a relatively affluent metro area, in a city with many vibrant and growing neighborhoods,” Vey says. In this podcast, Vey describes the current state of Baltimore and urges the start of discussions about the abject poverty facing many cities in the United States.

Also in this episode: stay tuned for our presidential election update with John Hudak. Also, Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses global drug policy and the upcoming United Nations General Assembly special session on drug policy.

Show Notes

“The Third Rail”

One year after: Observations on the rise of innovation districts

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen in all the usual places, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

      

 

 

In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the unrest that followed, Baltimore—like many cities—continues to grapple with how to ensure that more of its residents have a chance to participate in the growth and revitalization taking place in the city and region. The current racial divide in Baltimore is striking:

Economic and community development leaders across the country have learned a great deal, over many decades, of what has worked and what hasn’t—and those lessons need to be understood and integrated into both new and existing efforts to grow more inclusive communities. But poverty and economic isolation, and the racial dynamic that underpins them in many urban areas, are extraordinarily complex challenges that require deep and varied solutions working at multiple levels of intervention. In our collective efforts, we’d all be wise to listen closely to the concerns and ideas of youth like those here, because they are the ones who will be most impacted tomorrow by the choices we make and actions we take today.

Click here for all of Brookings content on Baltimore. And stay tuned for more from Brookings on the issues of race and opportunity in the months to come.

      

 

 

Innovation districts capture the remarkable spatial pattern underway in the innovation economy—the heightened clustering of anchor institutions, companies, and start-ups in small geographic areas of central cities across the United States, Europe, and other global-trading regions.

The rise of innovation districts has been situated against the familiar backdrop of suburban corporate campuses and science parks. Accessible only by car, these spatially isolated corridors place little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation.

By contrast, in our report we found the rise of urban innovation hubs to be the organic result of profound economic and demographic forces that are altering how we live and work. The growing application of “open innovation”—where companies work with other firms, inventors, and researchers to generate new ideas and bring them to market—has revalued proximity, density, and other attributes of cities. At the same time, the growing preference of young talented workers to congregate in vibrant neighborhoods that offer choices in housing, transportation, and amenities has made urban and urbanizing areas increasingly attractive.

We also found that innovation districts uniformly contain a mix of economic, physical, and networking assets. Economic assets are the firms, institutions, and organizations that drive, cultivate, or support an innovation-rich environment. Physical assets are the public and privately owned spaces—buildings, open spaces, streets, and other infrastructure—designed and organized to stimulate new and higher levels of connectivity, collaboration, and innovation. Lastly, networking assets are the relationships between actors—such as between individuals, firms, and institutions—that have the potential to generate, sharpen, and/or accelerate the advancement of ideas. These assets, taken together, create an innovation ecosystem—the synergistic relationship between people, firms, and place that facilitates idea generation and advances commercialization.

One year later, innovation districts continue to rise. What have we learned about how they are evolving?

First, the model of innovation districts has been embraced, co-opted, and (in some cases) misappropriated, further reinforcing the need for grounding this work in empirically based evidence.

A simple Google search will reveal the extent to which the language of “innovation districts” (or “innovation quarters,“ “innovation neighborhoods,” or “innovation corridors”) has rapidly permeated the field of urban and metropolitan economic development and place-making.

In some places, this labeling is being accurately used by globally recognized research institutions (e.g., Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Drexel University in Philadelphia) that are both experiencing extraordinary growth near their campuses as well as designing intentional efforts to build on their distinctive assets. In communities as diverse as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis in the United States and Manchester and Sheffield in England, local leaders are conducting deep empirical analysis to understand their competitive advantages and existing weaknesses within their innovation ecosystem. They are exploring what it means to encourage greater collaboration and cooperation across their institutions, firms, and entrepreneurs. And they are exploring ways to better create “place” so as to increase overall vitality, facilitate innovation, and spur the growth of new businesses and jobs.

In other places, the nomenclature reflects an aspiration—and is spurring more deliberate efforts by local stakeholders to grow distinctive innovation ecosystems. In cities like Albuquerque, N.M., Chattanooga, Tenn., Chicago, Ill., Durham, N.C., and San Diego, Calif., local leaders are using the innovation district paradigm as a platform to measure their current conditions, develop strategies for addressing gaps and challenges, and build coalitions of stakeholders that can together help realize a unified vision for innovative growth. Some of these budding districts represent typologies not outlined in our report but that are ripe for future research, including “start-up” enclaves in or near downtowns of cities that lack a major anchor as well as “public markets” that blend locally produced food products and crafts with maker spaces, digital design, and other innovations in the creative arts.

There is one unfortunate trend in the rising use of the “innovation district” lexicon. In a number of cities, local stakeholders have applied the label to a project or area that lacks the minimum threshold of innovation-oriented firms, start-ups, institutions, or clusters needed to create an innovation ecosystem. This appears to result either from the chase to jump on the latest economic development bandwagon, the desire to drive up demand and real estate prices, or sometimes a true lack of understanding of what an innovation district actually is. The motivation for real estate developers to adopt the moniker seems clear: to achieve a price premium for their commercial, residential, and retail rents. Yet these sites are typically a collection of service-sector activities with little focus on the innovation economy. The lesson: labeling something innovative does not make it so.

From all these observations, it is clear that the field needs a routinized way to measure the starting assets of innovation districts—both to separate true districts from “in name only” ones as well as to give individual communities a platform for developing targeted strategies going forward. This means both running the numbers—conducting a quantitative audit—and undertaking a more qualitative assessment of strengths and weaknesses. Irrespective of their phase of development, innovation districts must evaluate the extent to which they have a critical mass of economic, physical, and networking assets to collectively generate the vitality that these districts demand. They need to evaluate the competitive advantages they have in certain economic sectors and learn how to cultivate them. And they need to ensure that they have the connectivity, diversity, and quality of place necessary to create a unique and vibrant environment in which innovation can thrive.

To facilitate this process, we are working in close collaboration with Mass Economics and the Project for Public Spaces to develop an audit template and tool. Over the next year, we intend to sharpen this tool in a subset of innovation districts across the country and then encourage others to employ it in their own established or burgeoning districts.

Second, the core economic assets of innovation districts are not fixed; in fact,
many innovation districts are being created or enhanced by the relocation of major anchor facilities as institutions strive to achieve the highest return on investment.

The conventional notion of an “anchor” institution is that it is solidly weighted in a particular place. Yet over the past decade a substantial number of innovative companies and advanced educational and research institutions have moved key facilities and units as a means of generating greater innovation output. Examples of new locations include the University of California-San Francisco’s biotechnology campus in Mission Bay (2003); the University of Washington’s medical research hub in Seattle’s South Lake Union (2005); Brown University’s medical school in downtown Providence, R.I. (2011); Duke’s Clinical Research Institute in downtown Durham (2013); Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrative Media Program in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (2013); and, most famously, the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City (2015).

These “first mover” relocations show how corporate and university leaders are departing from the tradition of building new facilities within their existing footprint and are willing to seek out new areas (and even new cities) to retain, or achieve, competitive advantage in their respective clusters and fields. As Cornell Professor Ronald Ehrenberg said about his school’s isolated Ithaca, N.Y. campus, “It is very, very difficult for us to do the kind of development through tech transfer that a place like Stanford or Berkeley can do in San Francisco or Harvard or MIT can do in Boston.” Our strong sense in talking with leaders around the country is that we are still at the early stage of corporate and university relocations given the extent to which urban areas have been revalued. The physical relocation of key innovation assets has now become a critical competitiveness strategy for companies, universities, and even states.

In some cases, the “unanchoring of anchors” is also compelling local leaders to rethink the traditional borders and boundaries of the innovation economy. In Philadelphia, for example, University City has always been recognized as a settled innovation hub, given the co-location of such anchor institutions as Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University City Science Center, and others. The recent decision of Comcast to consolidate its corporate presence in the downtown area and build its major new Innovation and Technology Center less than 10 blocks from 30th Street Station and the Drexel Campus is convincing some leaders to “stretch” Philadelphia’s University City district to incorporate this new corporate giant.

Third, almost all innovation districts have significant work ahead to understand the rising value of “place” in the innovation ecosystem and leverage or reconfigure their physical assets to create dense and dynamic communities.

While our paper dissected various types of physical assets to help practitioners understand their individual roles and value, the more important message to convey now is the imperative to combine and activate physical assets in ways that create vibrant “places.” The Project for Public Spaces aptly describes place as “…environments in which people have invested meaning over time. A place has its own history—a unique cultural and social identity that is defined by the way it is used and the people who use it.”¹

Our review of innovation districts, including those cited in our paper, reveals that many have not yet maximized the potential for creating lively communities in which their residents and workers feel invested, reducing the potential innovation output of these communities. When designed and programmed well, a district’s public spaces—whether within buildings or outside of them—facilitate open innovation by offering numerous opportunities to meet, network, and brainstorm. Strong places entice residents and workers to remain in the area off hours, extending the opportunities for collaboration. Strong places create a culturally and educationally enriched environment that strengthens human interaction, knowledge, and motivation.

While some university-led districts have made some improvements over the years, districts anchored by medical campuses have significant work ahead. These spaces were designed as isolated fortresses that valued parking over walking (ironic given their health mission), with little or no attention paid to amenities, cultural activities, retail, or housing. Significantly, some medical campuses are often located in close proximity to downtowns, as part of universities, or near organic entrepreneurial communities (e.g., the proximity of Oklahoma City’s Health District to Automobile Alley). This raises the potential for smart (and related) place-making activities in a nearby area and reinforces the need to rethink traditional geographies and artificial boundaries when considering interventions.

Fourth, the rapid growth and impact of national intermediaries (what we call innovation cultivators) shows real promise in helping innovation districts grow and steward their networking assets and stimulating new innovation opportunities.

The past year has seen substantial growth in multicity intermediaries along with scores of locally grown accelerators and incubators. It appears more than ever that intermediaries are increasingly the catalyst to growing innovation and entrepreneurial energy within local districts and across start-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, and, even to some extent, large companies and research institutions. They are designed to think and act horizontally, encouraging people and firms to interact and work together in ways and at a scale previously unseen.

A growing and increasingly important role for intermediaries is helping innovation districts evolve from the traditional “research and development” model to a “search and development” one, where crucial answers to their innovation questions and technological challenges are discovered by finding and collaborating with other firms. Some districts immediately recognized this potential and have gone to great lengths to grow, lure, and fund the development of multiple intermediaries across their districts.

The Cortex Innovation Community in St. Louis has, in a short period, clustered new buildings owned and/or supported by a number of well-respected intermediaries. These development and programmatic moves are effectively creating a new focal point for Cortex innovation activities. The new Cambridge Innovation Center, which offers space for start-ups combined with access to venture capital firms, professional services, and a plug-and-play physical environment, is already at 85 percent occupancy. A newly constructed Tech Shop—a do-it-yourself “maker space” equipped with industrial tools, machinery, and technology to support entrepreneurs—is under construction nearby. The near complete renovation of the Center for Emerging Technologies, which provides training, specialized facilities, and technical support, adds yet another layer of support for entrepreneurs and start-ups. Adding more to this mix is a soon-to-be-constructed space for tech-commercial activities combined with new housing, which will exponentially increase the number of people in a very small radius.²

As one can imagine, this clustering was deeply intentional and viewed as a way to stimulate new relationships, new networks, and the cross-fertilization of ideas; Cortex refers to this deliberate process as “innovation engineering.” We anticipate more innovation districts to follow suit, pursuing, if not cultivating, such intermediaries in their own innovation ecosystems.

Finally, the rise of innovation districts takes place in a national and urban political environment that demands inclusive growth and equitable outcomes.

The past year has seen the elevation of income inequality and social mobility as issues of national and urban significance. With the federal government mired in partisan gridlock, cities have become the vanguard of efforts to raise the minimum wage, expand affordable housing, and extend pre-K education, among other initiatives. These efforts come at a time when the civil unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson has refocused national attention on neighborhoods of high poverty.

Because of their location in the cores of central cities, many established and emerging innovation districts are located several blocks away from distressed communities. This proximity creates an enormous opportunity to show the positive impact that innovative growth can have on inclusive outcomes. Innovation districts create employment opportunities that can be filled by local residents and procurement and construction opportunities that can be fulfilled by local vendors and contractors. The districts generate tax revenues that can be used to fund neighborhood services and neighborhood regeneration. And they offer the potential to link the ample expertise and talent in anchor educational institutions with the needs of neighborhood schools and children.

Recognizing these benefits, local leaders are demonstrating a genuine commitment to growing more inclusive districts. In our work, we’ve seen several early models that could be built on and replicated. In the Barcelona 22@ district, for example, leaders are trying to quantify the growth in service jobs accessible to local and regional residents while, at the same time, connecting those residents to training that increases their skills in more innovation-oriented sectors. Last year, Drexel University opened a new “urban extension center” that offers career-building workshops, legal clinics, and other services to residents of the adjacent Mantua Promise Zone. The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland’s University Circle district has been working for several years to leverage local purchasing power to create business ownership and employment opportunities for low-income residents. And in Baltimore, the University of Maryland partnered with surrounding neighborhood organizations, residents, and institutions to develop a detailed new plan for building what the Baltimore Southwest Partnership envisions as a “diverse, cohesive community of choice built on mutual respect and shared responsibility.”

These examples represent concrete initiatives to ensure that nearby neighborhoods and their residents connect to and benefit from new growth opportunities in innovation districts and beyond. Scaling such efforts will be critical in the years to come, as the success of these districts will be defined in large part by their broader city and regional impacts.

As Brookings works this year to help unleash more innovation districts across the U.S. and Europe, we will continue to hone our observations and knowledge about trends, challenges, and strategies. We will compile and publish what we have learned for anchor leaders, policymakers, scholars, and practitioners, focusing on many of the issues—accelerating commercialization to improving inclusion—noted above. We will do this work in close collaboration with proven organizations like Mass Economics and Project for Public Spaces. We look forward to contributing to this rapidly changing space via empirical and on-the-ground research, strategy and policy development, convenings, and network building. Stay tuned.

Read The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

      

 

 

Baltimore was an early pioneer in applying new comprehensive approaches to neighborhood revitalization. Since then, the practice of joining people- and place-based strategies has evolved, driven by both public and private sector leaders. The Great Recession has reversed progress in some ways as unemployment, foreclosures, and stagnant wages increased poverty.

As the nation now focuses on its struggling urban areas, it is critical to broadly examine what cities, counties, and the nation have learned since the redevelopment of Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.

On May 21, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program hosted a forum, featuring hands-on experts to reflect on promising practices to help young people and families in distressed communities participate in an advanced economy that works for all.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #BeyondBaltimore.

Download biographies for the panelists (PDF) »

Pictures from the event

Jennifer Vey, Fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program

Amy Liu, Senior Fellow and Co-Director moderates the panel discussion

Amy Liu, Frederick (Bart) Harvey, Joel Miranda, Donald Hinkle-Brown, Derek Douglas, and Michael Smith

Donald Hinkle-Brown, Derek Douglas, and Michael Smith

      

 

 

The article’s thesis is that Baltimore does not suffer as much from inequality—stark differences between the haves and have-nots—as it does from deep poverty. Indeed, several measures support that view. Baltimore’s poverty rate of 23 percent ranks it in the top quarter of large American cities. As one of us pointed out in the article, Baltimore’s relatively high income inequality owes more to the low incomes of its poor households than to the high incomes of its rich households. Linskey is correct, too, that Baltimore suffers from very high rates of violent crime; its homicide rate was fifth-highest among U.S. cities in 2013.

And yet to assert that there is no “rich Baltimore” misrepresents the facts. Baltimore has lots of wealth. You can find much of it in the thriving downtown area only a couple of miles from Freddie Gray’s Sandtown-Winchester, in vibrant neighborhoods along the waterfront, and in leafy communities throughout the northern part of the city. In 2013, 40,000 Baltimore households earned at least $100,000. Compare that to Milwaukee, a similar-sized city where only half as many households have such high incomes. As our analysis uncovered, jobs in Baltimore pay about $7,000 more on average than those nationally. The increasing presence of high-earning households and good jobs in Baltimore City helps explain why, as the piece itself notes, the city’s bond rating has improved and property values are rising at a healthy clip.

Much of the article’s case rests on a comparison of Baltimore to Boston, where most Globe readers live. Relative to Baltimore, Boston’s poverty rate is lower, its local finances are healthier, and it suffers far fewer homicides. But Boston is more the exception in urban America than the rule. The juxtaposition of assets and affluence on the one hand and deep distress on the other characterizes not only Baltimore but Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and indeed most major cities and regions in the United States today. Our research and that of others demonstrates this uncomfortable truth.

The most inexplicable aspect of the article is the reference to “Murder Mall” as a “widely used shorthand” for the Mondawmin Mall where the riots originated.  Frequent shoppers there (which includes one of us) have never heard that moniker.

To be sure, Baltimore has deep problems, but it also has diversity, culture, and the untapped potential of people who need more and better opportunities to participate in the prosperity many of us—in Baltimore and beyond—take for granted. That story needs to be told, as it is critical to the ability of the city’s residents to find and keep quality employment, of local businesses to grow, and of all neighborhoods to flourish.

      

 

 

While violence is never justifiable, knowing such context is critical to understanding what happened in Baltimore, and why. 

The Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived is plagued by joblessness, entrenched poverty, and the full range of social challenges that accompany economic disparity and distress. According to data from the Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the University of Baltimore over half of the working age population in the Sandtown-Winchester is either unemployed and looking for work or out of the labor force all together. Over a third of its homes are vacant or abandoned. And almost half of its children are growing up poor.

Yet this community exists in a wider metropolitan area that by many measures—income levels, educational attainment, the concentration of high wage industries—is doing quite well. Indeed, though they may feel worlds away, Baltimore’s growing downtown and thriving waterfront communities are just a short distance away from Sandtown and other troubled neighborhoods that have remained untouched by the affluence and revitalization that characterizes much of the region.

But while the economic challenges in parts of Baltimore are steep, they are, sadly, not unique to this city.  More than that, we haven’t made much progress in overcoming them.

In the decades since President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, concentrated poverty has actually become deeper and more widespread in cities, and increasingly in suburbs, across the country. According to Joe Cortright and his colleagues at City Observatory, since 1970, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States has tripled, and the number of poor people living in them has doubled. As they point out, for all the fretting over gentrification—legitimate cause for concern though it may be in some regions—we should be far more dismayed by the fact that the vast majority of communities that were poor in 1970 have remained so 45 years later.

The intractability of concentrated poverty shows just how difficult an issue it is to solve. We can point to a long list of reasons behind it, but what do we actually do about it? How do we not just help alleviate the worst symptoms of economic stress for families and neighborhoods, but actually raise incomes so that people can move up and out of poverty?

The answer lies in part in cities and regions’ ability to leverage their existing economic strengths in order to grow the kinds of industries where more and better jobs are created—and in ensuring that all residents have an opportunity to participate in that growth by investing in education, skills, infrastructure, and the revitalization of downtown and other employment centers in the urban core.

In Baltimore, sectors like information technology, advanced health care, bioscience, and logistics—anchored by the port and airport—offer some of the best opportunities for people to make a good living without a college degree. And the region has a powerful set of assets and advantages that should help these sectors grow, including a robust network of colleges and universities, several world-class hospital systems, close proximity to the nation’s capital, and unique, vibrant communities where people and firms want to locate.

For the region to help raise more residents out of poverty and into the middle class, it has to build from these strengths. The fact is, we want—we need—people, firms, and anchor institutions to continue to invest in Baltimore’s job centers, including, yes, strong market areas in downtown, the waterfront, and Harbor East. Only by doing so can the city continue to grow the number of businesses and quality jobs, as well as a robust tax base.

Equally critical, though, is that existing city residents have an opportunity to participate in that growth, by being able to access new jobs or open a new business, and by seeing the kinds of improvements in their schools and neighborhoods that new revenues can help finance.

As the spotlight on Baltimore dims, the city will begin to heal, and hopefully start to undertake a hard, unvarnished look at all that transpired here, and the reasons behind it. At the same time, we as a nation need to examine the broader economic backdrop against which these events occurred, and the kinds of changes we need to undertake if we don’t want them to see them happen—in this city, or any city—again.

      

 

 

The popularity of the Discovery Channel’s “How It’s Made” reflects America’s longstanding fascination with cutting-edge processes, state-of-the-art machines, and the shiny, new objects they together produce. It’s not for nothing that, despite years of off-shoring and outsourcing, the United States remains the world’s largest maker and biggest consumer of manufactured goods.

What’s more, global conditions are becoming increasingly favorable for domestic production: Shorter lead times, more predictable delivery conditions, more integrated technologies and consistent product quality are conferring ever-important advantages for U.S. firms.

Nevertheless, for decades Americans have held an incongruous belief that U.S. manufacturing is dying or dead, and that the nation’s manufacturing jobs largely involve rote assembly-line work in dirty, unsafe factories.

This problematic disconnect between perception and reality is readily apparent in Newark.

From its position as an early innovator in iron fabrication to its famed association with Thomas Edison, Newark lays claim to a strong industrial legacy. But in recent years, trends regarding the structure, scale and value of manufacturing in the area have been neither well-documented nor well-understood. As a result, misconceptions about the Newark’s manufacturing sector persist, resulting in lost opportunities for firms as well as potential workers.

To be sure, Newark’s manufacturing sector — like the nation’s — has changed dramatically in recent decades. Today, most of Newark’s 400 manufacturers are small businesses that compete under very different constraints than they and their predecessors did just a generation ago. Some have retooled to meet new and evolving market opportunities, while others struggle to adopt innovative processes, optimize their supply chains or overcome workforce and land-use challenges.

From bakeries to apparel makers, printers to custom-part fabricators, Newark manufacturers employ 10,000 workers, or about 8 percent of all local jobs. Together, these firms compose a small but promising sector that stands at an important crossroads.

A recent report by the Brookings Institution sheds new light on the issue and provides a set of guideposts for improving firms’ long-term success.

The report argues that Newark has a chance to seize upon the national “manufacturing moment” by taking better advantage of the great density and diversity of people, firms, infrastructure assets and resources in the city and broader region. To do so, however, local and regional stakeholders — including government, educational institutions, nonprofits and networks of manufacturing firms — must focus collectively on reaching a few realistic goals.

First, they need to identify high-impact resources that will help small and midsize manufacturers improve productivity, broaden market reach, up-skill local talent and deepen innovative capacity. Local and regional partners across sectors must collaborate to promote resource efficiency and sustainable supply chains, while linking firms to resources that can help them better understand, and connect to, new market opportunities.

They must coordinate efforts to grow — through education, credentialing and internships — a reliable pipeline of skilled production workers that can successfully replace the sector’s aging workforce. And they must align and set agendas that will ensure Newark’s land and infrastructure are of the scale and quality needed to attract new firms and expand existing ones.

These steps will ultimately boost Newark’s industrial performance and value — something that cannot be accomplished through “race to the bottom” tactics or strategies that rely on short-term gains.

Newark manufacturing can play a key role in supporting a regional transition to a more resilient “next economy” — one driven by the creation of quality jobs in innovative, clean and globally connected industries.

To this end, the framework and recommendations presented by Brookings will hopefully serve to advance dialogue about the sector — why it matters, who will lead key efforts, what resources can be allocated and, ultimately, how the health of Newark’s manufacturing sector will be defined and measured in the years to come.