Brookings: Topics - Colorado

Launch! Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level

Mark Muro, Devashree Saha, Kenan Fikri, Jessica Lee and Nick Marchio — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Part of Brookings's new Advanced Industries Series, this report finds that the Colorado space economy is a critical driver of economic growth and explores how Colorado can defend and extend its current position as one of the most multidimensional space economies in the nation. Directly employing over 66,000 workers across the military, civil, and private domains, the full space enterprise in Colorado contributed some $8.7 billion in value-added output in 2011, in a performance that generated some 3.8 percent of Colorado’s private-sector gross domestic product.

Note: This report was released at an event on Tuesday, February 5, at the History Colorado Center. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings presented a dynamic public forum focused on the significance and future of the Colorado space economy as an exemplary advanced industry. The forum explores ways the Colorado space cluster can build and sustain regional and national economic competitiveness. See event details.

With the Great Recession receding but disruptive change in the air, Colorado has been moving to reassess its economic positioning and identify the most promising sources of long-term growth and competitiveness.

Most notably, the administration of Gov. John Hickenlooper—alert to calls that the United States must reorient its drifting economy away from consumption activities and imports and more toward high-value innovation, production, and exports—has been carrying out a major economic planning initiative aimed at engaging the state’s key industries and regions in a “bottom-up” effort to explore and seize on the best opportunities for economic expansion. Through this Colorado Blueprint process, the state has come to focus—with support from the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program—on its extraordinary space/aerospace cluster, which it quickly recognized stands as a classic “advanced industry.”

Three major findings about the Colorado space economy:

Colorado possesses one of the most diversified, multidimensional, and high-potential space economies in the nation.
However, while significant opportunities are emerging, a set of disruptive forces at work in the global space market have exposed a number of competitive challenges for the Colorado industry.
Given these challenges as well as its many strengths, Colorado should commit itself to preeminence in the space through a collaborative partnership of industry and government along six dimensions.

Read the report » (PDF)

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Launch! Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 5, 2013
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST

Auditorium
History Colorado Center
1200 Broadway
Denver, CO 80203

Time: 9:00 - 11:30am MST
Venue: History Colorado Center, Auditorium
1200 Broadway, Denver, Colorado

U.S. “advanced industries”—high-value engineering and R&D-intensive industrial concerns—make signal contributions to national and regional economic prosperity. Iconic American companies such as United Technologies, GE, Intel, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ford, Caterpillar, and Medtronic comprise 10 percent of the overall economy but generate 45 percent of U.S. goods exports and support over 4 million high-skill jobs and several million more ancillary ones.

The space and aerospace industry is quintessentially emblematic of the advanced industry sector. And one of the deepest and broadest concentrations of space-related activity in the country lies in Colorado. There, the space cluster pervades the state’s industrial base; cuts across the public and private sectors; and enables a fast-growing telecommunications industry, dynamic GIS and earth observation enterprises, as well as more emergent energy, cybersecurity, and advanced materials segments of the economy.

On Tuesday, February 5, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings presented a dynamic public forum focused on the significance and future of the Colorado space economy as an exemplary advanced industry. Part of Brookings's new Advanced Industries Series, and anchored by the release of a new Brookings strategy report by Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, the morning forum explored the best ways to advance the competitiveness of the Colorado space cluster at a time of uncertainty and disruptive change.

Hosted in collaboration with the Colorado Space Coalition and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the event also featured comments from leading business, civic, and government leaders as well as a panel discussion and audience Q & A. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper concluded the event with keynote remarks.

Read the report, which was released at this event.
See also Mark Muro's presentation » (PDF)

Panel Discussion (L to R): Tom Clark, Chief Executive Officer, Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation; Frederick Doyle, Vice President and Corporate Executive, Defense and Intelligence Community, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation; Walter Scott, Founder, Executive Vice President, and Chief Technical Officer, DigitalGlobe, Inc.; Stein Sture, Vice Chancellor for Research, Huber and Helen Croft Endowed Professor, College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado at Boulder; Dan Schmitt, Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer, The Incubation Factory

Mark Muro, Senior Fellow and Policy Director, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings

Governor John Hickenlooper, State of Colorado

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Full Event - Launch! Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level

Launch! Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 5, 2013
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST

Auditorium
History Colorado Center
1200 Broadway
Denver, CO 80203

Time: 9:00 - 11:30am MST
Venue: History Colorado Center, Auditorium
1200 Broadway, Denver, Colorado

U.S. “advanced industries”—high-value engineering and R&D-intensive industrial concerns—make signal contributions to national and regional economic prosperity. Iconic American companies such as United Technologies, GE, Intel, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ford, Caterpillar, and Medtronic comprise 10 percent of the overall economy but generate 45 percent of U.S. goods exports and support over 4 million high-skill jobs and several million more ancillary ones.

The space and aerospace industry is quintessentially emblematic of the advanced industry sector. And one of the deepest and broadest concentrations of space-related activity in the country lies in Colorado. There, the space cluster pervades the state’s industrial base; cuts across the public and private sectors; and enables a fast-growing telecommunications industry, dynamic GIS and earth observation enterprises, as well as more emergent energy, cybersecurity, and advanced materials segments of the economy.

On Tuesday, February 5, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings presented a dynamic public forum focused on the significance and future of the Colorado space economy as an exemplary advanced industry. Anchored by the release of a new Brookings strategy report by Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, the morning forum explored the best ways to advance the competitiveness of the Colorado space cluster at a time of uncertainty and disruptive change.

Hosted in collaboration with the Colorado Space Coalition and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the event also featured comments from leading business, civic, and government leaders as well as a panel discussion and audience Q & A. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper concluded the event with keynote remarks.

A report was released at this event.

Video

Full Event - Launch! Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level

Advancing Advanced Industries

Mark Muro — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Pristine clean rooms, gleaming components, jaw-dropping technical exploits: America’s advanced industries (AI) sector is the focus in Denver today as the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program delivers a new competitiveness strategy for the Colorado space industry at a dynamic forum with Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Our key point: Engineering- and R&D-intensive advanced industries like the Colorado space cluster are prime movers of U.S. prosperity and merit special attention as regions, states, and the nation seek to reignite growth through innovation after the Great Recession.

Building on insights provided by colleagues at the McKinsey & Company Advanced Industries Practice, we at Brookings see a critical need for states and regions to focus on their advanced industries, which have enabled a steady stream of life-transforming innovations ranging from spaceflight to LASIK, MRIs to clean energy. These high-value industries are crucial drivers of local and national innovation, productivity, and exports—generating 10 percent of the nation’s output, 46 percent of U.S. goods exported, and over 8 million skilled jobs.

In Colorado today we’ll unveil work we undertook in conjunction with Hickenlooper’s Colorado Blueprint process. Our report drills down on one particularly significant AI and the decisive moves that will be needed to maintain and extend it.

Brookings’ fine-grained, establishment-level analysis brings Colorado’s space cluster into focus as a true “crown jewel” advanced industry that pervades and enables the state’s broader economy. When it comes to innovation, the state’s space economy is literally extending the envelope of human capacity and making life better. Take satellites: Colorado companies are building and operating the satellites that deliver real-time GPS signals, weather data, television broadcasts, and mobile communications to billions across the globe. Colorado’s DigitalGlobe, for example, provides millions of square kilometers of the high-resolution satellite imagery that make Google Earth and Google Maps possible.

How does all this translate into economic value? Hugely: As depicted in our analysis, the Colorado space industry contributes inordinately to Colorado’s, and the nation’s, economic well-being. Just in terms of its top-line numbers, the cluster now encompasses more than 500 private establishments that directly employ over 66,000 workers across the military, civil, and private sectors. This $16 billion economy has been a steady contributor to high-pay job growth in Colorado, even through the Great Recession. In short, Colorado’s space economy exemplifies the kind of high-value AIs that the nation and its regions must defend and expand as they seek to refocus the nation’s drifting economy on higher-value traded-sector growth.

However, maintaining the nation’s AI prowess will require increased focus and collaborative action in the years ahead. Disruptive forces at work in the global marketplace now require industry and government to work together to master change and innovate.

In view of that, our report challenges the state of Colorado to “become the center of innovation for the global space economy.” By consolidating the state’s current position in the space economy, seizing new opportunities as they emerge, committing to innovation, improving access to risk capital, bolstering the workforce pipeline, and intensifying cluster dynamics, industry and state government will need to work together to make Colorado’s space economy one of the foremost AI clusters in the nation—and the world.

AIs matter vitally, and to defend and expand them, regions and states need to act in concert—and Washington needs to help them.

Authors

Mark Muro

Image Source: © Rick Wilking / Reuters

Advancing the Clean Economy: The View from Colorado

Mark Muro and Devashree Saha — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:51:00 -0400

As the governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, Bill Ritter led the nation in arguing for the economic development value of “decarbonizing” the U.S. energy system. Moreover, he showed how to advance such development through catalytic, market-smart public policies.

At our clean economy event this week, we'll get to hear him expound his strategies and goals.

During his tenure as governor, Ritter issued Colorado’s first Climate Action Plan in 2007, calling for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050. In 2010, he successfully pushed for a 30 percent renewable portfolio standard in Colorado, the second highest in the nation.

More broadly, Ritter, a Democrat, signed dozens of pieces of clean energy legislation that turned Colorado into a national model for generating new clean energy technologies and start-ups, attracting firms, and creating jobs by providing a supportive policy framework to boost demand, ensure the availability of finance and drive innovation.

Ritter also tirelessly marketed Colorado as a place where clean energy businesses can grow. Denmark-based Vestas Wind has made Colorado its North American manufacturing hub. SMA Solar is opening its first manufacturing plant outside of Germany in Colorado. Others, including Siemens, SMA Technologies, Abound Solar, Ascent Solar, and Solix Biofuels, are also growing and adding jobs in Colorado.

This combination of economic development fervor and steady policy has contributed to Colorado’s high ranking among states for the share of its total employment comprised by “cleantech” workers as measured by our forthcoming “Sizing the Clean Economy” report and database, debuting Wednesday.

Today Ritter is bringing the same commitment to growing the national and Colorado clean economy that he showed as governor to his activities as the director of a newly established Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University. The center has the mandate to shape national energy policy and advance economic initiatives related to clean and renewable energy. With the present stalemate at the federal level on moving a clean energy agenda, Ritter in his new role will be working with a small group of states as well as municipalities to build the clean economy in America region by region and state by state. We’ll be looking forward to hearing his reflections on the way forward in a closing dialogue at our Wednesday event, to be webcast here.

Authors

Mark Muro
Devashree Saha

Publication: The Avenue, The New Republic

State Budgets' Unsound Structures

Mark Muro — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:42:00 -0500

There’s been a lot of talk about state budget woes across the country as impacted by the Great Recession. However, beneath these cyclical declines in revenues are some far more daunting issues that states must confront to get themselves on a sustainable fiscal path.

Today in Phoenix, Brookings Mountain West and its Arizona partners are formally releasing an important new report we've done on the troubling state budget messes on display in California and three Mountain region states—Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.

Produced by my group here at Brookings with University of Tennessee economist Matt Murray and the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, the new study (entitled "Structurally Unbalanced") is meant to welcome Western legislators back to work with a clear comparative primer intended to motivate and inform the hard work of closing this year's daunting budget gaps and moving to reduce more entrenched longer-term problems. (Hey, welcome back lawmakers!)

Along these lines, the report—though focused on California and the three Intermountain states—serves as a kind guide to the varied ways almost all states have gotten into serious fiscal trouble in recent years.

At the center of our work is a key distinction between two types of budgetary trouble.

On the one hand, the large "cyclical" or deficits we flag in all of the Western states represent the temporary fallout of the Great Recession and its aftermath given the sharp and presently continuing decline of taxable economic activity in states. Ranging from 9 percent of stable general fund spending in Colorado to a whopping 17 percent of general fund spending in Nevada, these shortfalls are truly scary but at least will pass once the still-troubled Western economy picks up. In that sense, these gaps of hundreds of billions of dollars are the easier part the problem.

Harder because more entrenched, on the other hand, are what we call the states' "structural" deficits—the more or less permanent imbalances of revenues and expenditures that can arise from flaws in a state's fiscal structure, fundamental changes in the regional economy or the state's demographics, or, especially, imprudent or shortsighted policy choices. In Arizona, this sort of structural shortfall now adds up to a cool $2.1 billion—a chilling 21 percent of stable general fund expenditures. That structural gap is more than twice as mammoth on a percentage point basis as that of California, the leading poster-child for fiscal mismanagement.

But as I said the states in our report represent a catalogue of the varied ways states get in trouble. And that's true. Basically, the four Western states put on display four different styles of trainwreck that should be duly noted as cautionary tales elsewhere:

California basically enacted too many permanent spending increases (notably on education) during the dot.com boom and more recent good times even as it left in place a series of rigid voter mandates and tax limitations
Arizona, by contrast, basically gave away the store in better times by handing out a series of ill-advised tax cuts (total value, adjusting for inflation and growth: $2.9 billion since 1993) unaccompanied by spending cuts. Also a problem: Voter and court mandated spending on schools and Medicaid is combined with super-majority requirements for any revenue increase
Nevada, for its part, doesn't yet have a structural deficit (it just has a gargantuan 18 percent cyclical problem for FY 2011!) but it will soon. Here the problem is that the state's narrow, consumption and real estate-oriented revenue system may well now be ill-attuned to a post-Recession "new normal" in which migration, homebuilding, and gaming are permanently depressed
And finally there's Colorado. Colorado doesn't have a structural deficit, or even quite as large a temporary problem—it’s just damaging itself the slow way though adherence to its Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). Thanks to TABOR's spending and revenue raising limits, that is to say, expenditures and revenues track with each other but both are being inexorably ratcheted down. One indication of trouble: State funding for both K-12 and higher education as a percentage of personal income has declined precipitously under TABOR: from 35^th in the nation in 1992 to 48^th in 2006 and 2008, respectively, on both accounts.

In sum, there are few ways to completely avoid fiscal problems in bad times (well, a well financed rainy day fund can help) but there are many ways to create a deeper mess and they frequently begin in good times.

With that said, narrowness and rigidity and voter mandates sure turn up often as sources of trouble, which is why our report suggests that states wanting to improve their fiscal stability commit to a balanced approach (including of revenue- and spending-side responses), a broadening of the tax base, and the preservation of lawmakers' flexibility. Creatively restructuring government is also essential. Such adjustments—along with improved information sharing and budget processes—represent the only way states will be able to ease the present crisis while using it to get onto a more stable course into the future.

With many of them facing similar problems as legislatures reconvene this month, lawmakers in lots of places should study carefully the past mistakes and current predicament of the Western states.

Authors

Mark Muro

Publication: The Avenue, The New Republic

Image Source: © Joshua Lott / Reuters

Leveraging the Mountain West Innovation Complex for Energy System Transformation

Mark Muro and Sarah Rahman — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Over and over America has looked to the West to work out the future. In this thinly populated terrain, experiments could still be attempted and national agendas advanced more swiftly than in the congested East, so the federal government has sought breakthroughs of every kind in the Mountain region.

In the West, giant dams now generate electricity in new ways. Major science research laboratories lead our nation’s alternative energy program. And for that matter, military test sites, engineering programs, and research and development contracts with universities have contributed to a constant dynamic of radical invention in the Intermountain states. For a century and more, in short, the West has provided an inviting frontier for technological innovation and experimentation, and a powerful symbiosis between federal and Western resources has emerged there.

Now, as the nation works out another future—a clean energy future—in order to create a more competitive “next economy,” it should look once again to the Intermountain West.

As in the past, a mutually beneficial synergy supportive of the nation’s and region’s interests appears not just possible but necessary.

America needs to transform its energy system to reduce its carbon intensity and make clean energy cheap. At the same time, the Intermountain West region (including Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah) possesses a unique confluence of world-class innovation assets (research universities, national and corporate research labs, and top-fl ight science and engineering talent); varied energy resources ranging from lowsulfur coal to solar, wind, and geothermal energy potential; and unparalleled opportunities to build out next-generation energy systems, whether smart energy grids or energy efficient buildings, as future population growth demands the building of new infrastructure from the ground-up.

In view of that, this brief contends that a new partnership should be forged between the federal government and the Intermountain states metropolitan areas to leverage the region’s unique strengths in support of the national interest.

To begin that partnership the federal government should construct in the Mountain region a distributed network of federally funded, commercialization-oriented sustainable energy research centers. These regional centers would combine aspects of the “discovery-innovation institutes” concept proposed by the National Academy of Engineering and the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings (as articulated in the Brookings paper “Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes: A Step toward America’s Energy Sustainability”); the “energy innovation hubs” being created by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE); and the agricultural experiment station/cooperative extension model of the land-grant universities that has played such an important role in the growth of the West.

In the spirit of the earlier land-grant university paradigm, the new network would involve the region’s research universities and national labs and invoke strong participation from industry, entrepreneurs, and investors as well as state and local government. Each individual breakthrough center would have a different theme, though all would conduct focused translational research necessary to move fundamental scientific discoveries from the laboratory to commercialization to system-wide deployment.

Done correctly, these centers could be just as transformational as the construction of the major science-engineering-technology-military complex that the nation brought into being in the West during World War II and the Cold War. If created at the scale envisioned here, a new generation of high-powered university-industry-government clean energy innovation partnerships would have the power to catalyze the growth of a major new clean-energy economy in the region perhaps even more signifi cant than the microchip and aerospace industries created by mid-century defense investments. At a minimum, seeding the aridlands with an array of high-intensity research centers would introduce a powerful model for linking national leadership and local capabilities in service of national and regional prosperity.

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Mark Muro
Sarah Rahman

Pikes Peak as “Megapolitan” Space: A Federal Agenda for Prosperity in the Colorado Springs Metro Area

Robert E. Lang, Amy Liu and Mark Muro — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Each year Colorado College holds the State of the Rockies Symposium to release an impressive report card grading the Intermountain West region on a variety of attributes. This year the event focused on megapolitan areas—combinations of two or more regions into a single economic, social, and urban system. Headlining the event was the Brookings Blueprint for American Prosperity paper, “Mountain Megas: America’s Newest Metropolitan Places and Federal Partnership to Help them Prosper.” Amy Liu and Mark Muro of the Metro Program, and Robert Lang of Virginia Tech delivered keynote addresses on how Colorado’s Pike’s Peak region relates to the Front Range “mega”.

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Publication: Colorado College State of the Rockies Symposium

Arizona Needs to get in the Federal Game

Robert E. Lang and Mark Muro — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:00:00 -0500

For several years, we and others at Arizona State University have been describing the rise of the Sun Corridor - the vast swath of urban space that sweeps from Prescott through Phoenix and Pinal County and down through Tucson to Nogales.

Now, it's time to take the next step.

With a new president and Congress set to take office, it's time for Sun Corridor leaders to talk federal policy. In short, it's time to get in the game.

Which is why the Brookings Institution and Morrison Institute of Public Policy are bringing together some of the state's top leaders Friday at ASU's downtown Phoenix campus to consider how to amplify the Sun Corridor's voice in national affairs.

Grounding the discussion will be a review of the big report we released last summer "Mountain Megas," which notes that each of the five southern intermountain states is dominated by a megalopolis - Arizona's Sun Corridor, the Front Range along Colorado's Interstate 25, Wasatch Front along Utah's Interstate 15, Greater Las Vegas and northern New Mexico.

Our work confirms that for all of its dynamism, the Sun Corridor is grappling with huge infrastructure, economic-development, education and sustainability challenges.

These challenges involve the very fundamentals of metro- and megapolitan health, as we at Brookings argue in our national Blueprint for American Prosperity initiative of which "Mountain Megas" is a part. Moreover, the sheer scale of the challenges in many cases transcends local and state problem-solving capacity and will require federal engagement, whether to help fill intercity rail gaps, maintain basic science research, repair the nation's broken immigration system or develop a framework for climate-change responses.

And yet the Sun Corridor is by no means alone or without options. Even if securing the right kind of federal engagement remains a tall order, our work shows that each state in the intermountain "flyover zone" is now anchored by a major "megapolitan" area like the Sun Corridor that is contending with similar plus-sized urban challenges.

What's more, the Southwestern states' prominence in the recent election boosted their clout, as has the deep involvement in national politics of strong leaders like Gov. Janet Napolitano, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

In short, neither the Sun Corridor nor Arizona need to "go it alone" as they seek the limited but substantive federal engagements to craft the future.

Hence the question of the moment: Shouldn't the five Mountain Megas - and their states - seek common cause as they insist on a new, more productive arrangement with Washington?

Sun Corridor leaders have only to note the extraordinary push of Midwestern lawmakers to secure a $25 billion federal bailout of the auto industry to recognize that multistate teamwork is crucial in federal relations.

In sum, Sun Corridor leaders should consider whether they can afford to watch the massive change of governance going on in Washington without forging ties with their colleagues in the other Mountain Megas to place a full mega-oriented team on the field.

We would suggest they dare not.

Authors

Publication: The Arizona Republic

Western Perspective: Mountain Megas

Robert E. Lang and Mark Muro — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0400

The Intermountain West—once the Great Empty—is where it's at this fall. The states, especially in the region's southern half —Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah—suddenly lie smack in the middle of the nation's most radical and consequential demographic, land-use and economic transformations. The region is growing up, flexing its muscles and distancing itself from California, which has historically had an outsized impact on the West's development.

In fact, thanks to such maturation, the southern Intermountain West is well on its way to emerging as what might be called the New American Heartland as its economy, people and politics become more central to the nation.

Politically, the region—blessed already by nationally significant senators and governors—could be home to several swing states in the 2008 election and in time play the storied "kingmaking” role the Midwest does now.

Policywise, the Mountain region's signature issues are more and more the nation's, whether it be road and rail infrastructure, job quality, immigration or energy. And for that matter, the southern Intermountain West is also on the cutting edge of pioneering the astonishing new urban forms that are evolving all across America and even abroad.

Most notably, the region is home to five emerging "megapolitan” areas—vast, newly recognized "super regions” that often combine two or more metropolitan areas into a single huge economic, social and urban system.

In the 1960s, Dallas and Fort Worth were clearly colliding, as were Washington, D.C. and Baltimore by the 1980s. Now regions with more far-flung urban cores such as Phoenix and Tucson are exhibiting the same pattern, as are the urban spaces extending around Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Albuquerque. In short, a region that was once a peripheral rural "flyover” zone and "empty quarter” has moved in a very real sense to the center of American urban invention.

Which is why our group at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program in Washington, D.C.—one of the nation's leading urban research organizations—undertook two years ago to probe the nature of the Intermountain region's new urban reality and assess, in a presidential election year, its federal policy needs.

Going in we thought (and still do) that on balance the campaigners, power brokers, congressmen, commentators, think tankers and feature writers of the nation's Capitol have failed to understand the Rocky Mountain West's dynamic new urban reality.

What is more, we felt that even within the region there was a need for greater awareness of the new reality and an added sense of common cause among the different states' leaders to ensure the region asserts its common interests cohesively in Washington.

And so in July, just in time for the major political parties' August conventions, we published a major report on the southern intermountain region entitled "Mountain Megas: America 's Newest Metropolitan Places and a Federal Partnership to Help Them Prosper.”

Prepared as part of our metro-oriented Blueprint for American Prosperity initiative, "Mountain Megas” describes and assesses the new super-sized reality of the Intermountain West and proposes a multi-dimensional policy agenda for securing a more helpful partnership with Washington to empower regional leaders' efforts to build a brand of Western prosperity that is at once more sustainable, productive and inclusive than past paroxysms of boom and bust.

Along these lines, we assumed that true prosperity is actually based on achieving those three interrelated dimensions of prosperity—sustainable, productive and inclusive growth—all at once. In addition, we assumed that such balanced growth depends on the region assembling in its megapolitan areas sufficient stocks of the crucial assets that contribute to such prosperity: top-notch infrastructure, world-class innovation inputs, vital human capital, strong quality-of-place, as well as the effective regional governance to put it all together.

And so with that in mind, we probed and sorted the region's crucial economic, demographic and developmental trends and challenges as they currently engulf the southern Rockies' five "megapolitan areas:

The Sun Corridor that incorporates Prescott, Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona;
The Front Range area that links up metropolitan Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs along I-25 in Colorado;
The Wasatch Front along Utah 's I-15 corridor linking up metro Logan, Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake City;
Greater Las Vegas; and
Northern New Mexico, where metro Albuquerque and Santa Fe are converging.

For the analysis, we used a new large-scale geographical unit—the "megapolitan" area, developed by Virginia Tech—and with it we took stock of the region with reference to the new super-metro scale across which development is now spilling.

What did we find?

We found a region in the midst of massive, convulsive change and sorely in need of a new relationship with Washington to help it surmount its challenges and assert its leadership in the nation and the world.

In our account, super-fast, hyper-urban population growth is creating gargantuan infrastructure, economic development, education and placemaking challenges, not to mention a crying need for new governance solutions capable of mastering mega-scaled problems:

Careening development across vast expanses of territory has left the region struggling with titanic infrastructure challenges.

A critical interstate linkage is missing between Phoenix and Las Vegas. Intercity passenger rail remains underdeveloped throughout the region. And transportation choices(such as parallel highways, commuter rail and transit options) are still uncommon in the New American Heartland.
Likewise, the region's air network is second-tier, and serves mainly to support regional flights and few direct, international connections. In addition, the threat of global climate change raises vexing questions about water and energy systems and grids.

Economic transformation continues but innovation and productivity rates in the region remain mediocre as the region shifts away from "traditional" resource-based employment and into service industries (hospitality, business and professional work) and high-tech enterprises (aerospace, biotech, IT). Progress aside, the region still possesses a somewhat underperforming portfolio of industry clusters in critical "traded” sectors. And despite undeniable strong points the Mountain West research complex remains spotty as indicated by measures of research and development expenditures, the translation of inventions to job-creation and the presence of highly educated workers.

Large-scale domestic and international migration has brought massive social and educational challenges. Rapid legal and illegal immigration in the context of the nation's unsettled, unworkable immigration policies has generated uncertainty and controversy among employers and communities alike, and is creating dislocations for firms and strains for local governments.

At the same time, this new reality finds the training and education needs of an increasingly diverse population largely unmet. Huge needs exist for more and better English language classes, new ideas for educating the children of new Americans, and new strategies for securing the educational pipeline from pre-K through high school and beyond.
Similarly, widening income disparities and growing poverty rates give rise to concerns that the Mountain West—once a middle-class society—is developing into a society of haves and have-nots.

And then, 50 years of mass-produced, auto-centric development have bequeathed to the region a largely monotonous, inefficient urban fabric that must be overhauled for an era of high gas prices and evolving tastes. In this sense, placemaking and the design of truly distinctive, well-designed urban places stands as a key challenge all across the megapolitan West. To truly flourish, the region must find new ways to carve vibrant, transit-linked urban centers out of the autoscape.

And we noted one other challenge: The Intermountain megas are facing a plus-sized governance riddle. In this regard, while megapolitan-area leaders are innovating, the fact remains that they are frequently hobbled because they lack the super-scaled governance networks or institutions needed to manage events at the super-regional scale on which problems manifest themselves.

In short, as the problems get bigger and sprawl across more metros and counties and municipalities, the governance challenges of response get bigger, too.

As to what we think needs to happen now, it's this: Acting together, as an ascendant and increasingly consequential coalition, the Mountain Megas—and the states that contain them—must insist upon the shaping of a new and more supportive and empowering relationship with the federal government in Washington that will allow the region's pivotal urban regions to surmount their common challenges and assert their leadership in the nation and the world.

To be sure, self-help will always remain the primary source of progress in the Intermountain West. After all, America's most vibrant new urban region has long relied on its do-it-yourself spirit to begin the work of building a "civilization to match the scenery," to paraphrase Utah-born writer Wallace Stegner.

Moreover, the Mountain West's megapolitan areas have made impressive progress lately in beginning to address the super-sized challenges that stand between them and true prosperity.

On infrastructure, they have thrown themselves into building the nation's most impressive new light rail systems, whether in metro Denver, Phoenix or Salt Lake City.
On innovation, they have collaborated across local and metro lines to make serious investments in the region's scientific, engineering, alternative energy and medical capabilities, as exhibited most dramatically by the three-metro Science Foundation Arizona initiative.
And on placemaking and governance, leaders of the megapolitan West have led the nation by immersing themselves in regional visioning processes like Envision Utah or experimenting with new regional governance networks such as the Metro Mayor's Caucus in greater Denver.

And yet, the fact remains that while the West's megapolitan leaders and institutions can achieve a lot by themselves, they can't "go it alone" given the sheer size and boundary-crossing nature of the challenges they face.

Instead, at least at times, and on certain crucial, mega-scaled issues, Western leaders require a steady, supportive partner in the federal government to offer leadership on uniquely federal, border-transcending issues like inter-mega transportation, basic science research, immigration and climate change responses even as they also need greater empowerment and freedom.

Our report calls out a substantial list of policy changes needed for a revitalized Mountain West /Washington partnership.

But to pull out a few errands, Washington needs to at once lead on key infrastructure, innovation and sustainability issues even as it "gets out of the way” on others and moves to empower these increasingly capable, innovative urban areas.

On infrastructure, Washington needs to help state and local governments and the private sector build out their underdeveloped transportation network in a next-generation fashion.

That means strengthening nationally significant passenger and freight corridors in the region, making a long-term commitment to high-speed rail connections, and moving to address the region's long-term air needs. At the same time, Washington needs to quit favoring particular transportation solutions and become what we call "modally agnostic” even as it provides substantially more autonomy to metros and megas to shape their transport networks.
On innovation, Congress should fully fund the America Competes Act to bolster U.S. science research (which would have disproportionate benefits for the Intermountain West) and extend the life of recently passed renewable energy tax credits to reduce the uncertainty around alternative energy investments. But new initiatives are also needed.

The establishment of a national innovation policy with an explicit charge to help foster diverse, locally led regional industry clusters would be a good start. So too would a major national push to develop a high-powered, interlinked network of "discovery innovation institutes” tied to the region's universities to pursue new methods of accelerating the commercialization of pathbreaking new alternative energy breakthroughs.
And on sustainability issues, no region stands better poised to remake its economy and built environment on a more supportable footing. Therefore, it is of special urgency to the Intermountain West that Washington provide the basic framework for change:
Better data and models for monitoring and predicting climate, water, and energy trends;
and a national carbon pricing system—in the form of a tax or "cap-and-trade" program—that would further catalyze markets for the alternative energy innovations that the region is poised to deliver.

To help remake the built environment, moreover, the federal government should issue a "sustainability challenge" to catalyze bold Western problem-solving among state, mega-regional, metropolitan, local and tribal actors.

This challenge, delivered in the form of a competitive grant offer, would challenge all regions to figure out the boldest, most creative and effective new ways to better link up disparate housing, transportation, environmental, energy and land-use policies to achieve broad sustainability goals, such as the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

The grant would be performance-based, and substantially reward the most ingenious and creative solutions to core sustainability challenges with a substantial financial carrot and flexibility in implementing federal program requirements.

In that way, Washington would appropriately reward Mountain State innovation without pre-judging the possible solutions or micromanaging the details.

And the same approach might work as a way of supporting the emergence of new, wider-reaching and more interconnected governance networks to match the geographic scale and dynamism of the new reality.

One idea: Washington could announce a "governance challenge" to prompt megapolitan-area leaders' to experiment with new ways of organizing themselves. Once again, the challenge would mandate no particular approach but instead simply reward the most path-breaking proposals available for connecting regional and super-regional governance in such key domains as transportation planning or land use or housing with substantial grant money.

In sum, the time has come to make America's emerging New Heartland in the West a prime test-bed for the nation's next generation of pragmatic, far-sighted metropolitan policies. With the Intermountain States increasingly central to national affairs, Washington should look West and seek to craft with Mountain Mega leaders a supportive new partnership that matches the size and promise of the nation's newest urban areas.

Authors

Publication: Headwaters News

What the Delegates Can Learn From Denver

Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0400

What will delegates take away from the Denver conventions? T-shirts, buttons, business cards, policy papers, and the memory of Barack Obama’s history-making acceptance speech, of course. But the delegates should also absorb some lessons from Denver itself. The Denver region is the shape of things to come.

The Denver metropolitan area has transcended the old, destructive city versus suburb dichotomy. Our obsession with the differences, disconnections, and competition between cities and suburbs is irrelevant now, because the key social and economic units in American life are metropolitan areas, combining cities, suburbs, and rural swaths in an integrated whole.

The new Blueprint for American Prosperity project from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program shows that metropolitan areas, not individual cities or suburbs, are the engines of our national economy. Metro areas are home to the workers and firms that drive prosperity, and important assets like innovation and infrastructure.

The nation’s 363 metropolitan areas are home to 83 percent of the population, yet generate 86 percent of U.S. jobs and 90 percent of the nation’s output. The Denver metro contains about half of Colorado’s population, yet accounts for more than 60 percent of its state gross domestic product. Metro areas are the real geography of American life.

Denver gets this. The region’s Metro Mayor’s Caucus brings 32 area mayors together regularly to address common issues like water resources, transportation, and development. In his recent state of the city speech, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper acknowledged the power of the metro, saying, “The most powerful changes in America today are taking place NOT in cities or states, but in metropolitan regions. As I’ve crossed the country these past 18 months raising money for our convention, I am most frequently asked how Denver has achieved such success on a regional basis.”

Denver area leaders not only connect across municipal borders, they connect different issues. In 2004, the region voted for a $5 billion plan, FasTracks, to build more than 100 miles of new light rail, commuter rail, and bus rapid transit lanes serving 57 new transit stations. Communities around the new transit stations changed zoning laws to allow tighter, taller development near the rail stops, providing the density that enables more residents to reap the rewards of this great public investment.

As the Denver Post noted in a recent editorial, FasTracks “would be no more than a jumble of rail and concrete without careful zoning and transportation planning by the cities and counties served by the project.” Everyone can see the connection between where we live and how we get around now, thanks to high gas prices, but metro Denver made the link back when gas was $2.00 a gallon.

There’s nothing inherently unique about this metro that brings the mayors together or enables them to link housing and transportation. It takes leadership, patience, and imagination — and the Democratic delegates should bring these lessons home from Denver.

However, such efforts would go a lot farther if federal leaders also learned in Denver the need to encourage metro-wide collaboration and connect federal policies. Right now, federal housing, workforce, transportation and even homeland security programs, just to name a few, allocate resources to either parochial city or county bureaucracies or distant state agencies, which rarely see the metropolitan area as an economic or environmental whole. Different federal rules and resources could be powerful incentives for more city/suburban collaboration.

The federal government could also make it easier for cooperation-minded local governments to combine different federal spending programs in single, bigger-bang-for-the-buck projects. Currently, local efforts to use federal funds for combined projects, like denser development around transit stops, are stymied by headache-inducing differences in grant requirements and restrictions.

Better yet, the feds could combine both goals – more collaboration across borders and program areas – into a sustainability challenge grant. This grant would reward metropolitan partnerships that combine land use, housing, economic development and transportation programs to develop more sustainable communities, thereby rewarding innovation, integration, and collaboration all at once.

Denver points toward a model for the 21st century US, which will be – is in fact already-- a full-fledged metro nation that is functionally and economically a network of metropolitan areas. Delegates, just look around.

Authors

Jennifer Bradley
Bruce Katz

Painting the Mountain States Blue

William H. Frey and Mark Muro — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Hopeful Democrats will not just be showcasing their candidates and purveying a spectacle of unity as they gather in Denver today for their convention. Equally important, they will be planting their blue flag in America's newest, most geographically expansive "swing" region - the fast-growing, increasingly diverse, no-longer-reliably-Republican Intermountain West.

To be sure, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and, to a lesser degree, Arizona remain distinctly red in the eyes of most coastal Americans.

A land of sagebrush and Sagebrush Rebellions, these states have been known even in recent years more for Republican politics and Endangered Species Act blow-back than nationally significant political jujitsu.

But thanks to sweeping economic changes and a massive influx of blue-leaning voters, the southern Intermountain region has now become central to the Democrats' new strategy for assembling a winning coalition.

Concentrating and speeding this transformation has been the emergence of what the Virginia Tech urban scholar Robert Lang calls its "megapolitan" areas - vast, newly recognized "super-metros" that often combine two or more metropolitan areas into a single economic, social, and urban zone, such as revolves now around Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Tucson.

Now home to huge pluralities of their states' employment and social and cultural life, these "mountain megas" are capturing the lion's share of each state's population growth. Spurred by this growth, the nature of the West's economy has transitioned sharply away from traditional resource-extraction and agriculture toward such "New West" activities as information technology, knowledge creation, and aerospace as well as tourism and hospitality. Along the way urban development, infrastructure, and education issues have joined energy development and water resources as hot-button issues - just like elsewhere.

Yet what's most important for the political class is the changing demography that has accompanied the region's growth. In each of the southern Intermountain states, the greatest population growth has occurred among minority populations, especially Hispanics, and among whites with bachelor's degrees and higher education. Polls show these groups leaning more toward the Democrats than white, working-class populations, whose growth is either modest or negative. Such decline is the key toward the states' possible "tip" to the Democrats, according to political scholar Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of "Why the White Working-Class Still Matters." Nor does it hurt that the plurality of new migrants are arriving from blue California origins.

Colorado would clearly be the prize for Democrats as the informal capital of the New West. Here it depends on how much the new blue-leaning migrants to Denver's exurbs and Colorado Springs will trim Republican advantages of the past, which trumped the strongly Democratic Denver, its inner suburbs, and Boulder. The trend looks promising for Democrats given the party's recent success in senatorial, gubernatorial, and state legislative contests.

Nevada, for its part, is not far from a Democratic takeover simply because of the huge influx of former Californians and Hispanics to Las Vegas, a Democratic stronghold. It is also quite possible but not a shoo-in that New Mexico is also likely to tip Democratic in light of its razor-thin Bush victory in 2004 and new, blue-leaning growth in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Arizona remains the biggest long shot of the four, if only because the GOP standard bearer is its native son.

The Democrats are planting their flag in shifting sands. Just as the Democrats may be "rolling the dice" in nominating a young, multiethnic, youth-oriented candidate, after years of relying on tried and true party stalwarts, they are also taking a gamble in counting on the New West as a crucial part of their future-oriented strategy. However, one thing is sure: In betting on this fast-growing, increasingly urban dynamo of a region, they are making both the convention and the race through November even more compelling than it might have been.

Authors

Publication: The Boston Globe

Charting a Course for Downtown Living: Denver

Alan Berube — Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

In this presentation to the Downtown Denver Partnership, Alan Berube examines demographic trends in downtowns, compares Downtown Denver to its West Coast peers, and explores future opportunities for downtown residential growth in Denver and elsewhere.

The metro program hosts and participates in a variety of public forums. To view a complete list of these events, please visit the metro program's Speeches and Events page which provides copies of major speeches, PowerPoint presentations, event transcripts, and event summaries.

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Authors

Alan Berube

Publication: Downtown Denver Partnership

Denver in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Executive Summary

After losing population in the 1980s, Denver grew rapidly in the 1990s thanks to its continuing emergence as a gateway for immigrants and a destination for young, mobile workers.

Denver's population grew by nearly 19 percent in the 1990s, more than reversing its 5 percent population decline in the 1980s. This growth was almost entirely attributable to an increase in the city's Hispanic population, the majority of whom are immigrants from Mexico. The foreign-born now represent over one-sixth of Denver's population, and help account for the city's youthful profile. Denver's population turnaround, however, occurred in the midst of continued decentralization. The Denver suburbs grew nearly twice as fast as the central city in the 1990s, and half of the region's workers now commute between homes and jobs in the suburbs.

The economic profile of the Denver region is healthy, underpinned by high levels of education and labor force participation. Among the 23 Living Cities, Denver had the second-fastest growth in household incomes, the sixth-highest share of college graduates in 2000, and the lowest poverty rate among African Americans. Yet gaps between whites and minorities—particularly Hispanics—on educational attainment leave many of the city's families with only modest incomes. Those families may be facing increasing difficulties obtaining affordable housing, as rents increased faster in Denver than in any other Living City in the 1990s.

Along these lines and others, then, Denver in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 concludes that:

Denver's population rebounded in the 1990s, but the region continues to decentralize. After losing 5 percent of its population during the oil bust of the 1980s, Denver rebounded in the 1990s by gaining 87,000 new residents. Most of the city's neighborhoods added residents as population citywide increased by 19 percent. At the same time, the growth of Denver's suburbs accelerated. Areas outside the central city grew by over one-third in the 1990s, the fourth-fastest rate of suburban growth among the 23 Living Cities. Meanwhile, as people moved farther out in the region, so did jobs. About half of all commutes in the region begin and end in the suburbs, and a below-average proportion of Denver residents work within the central city.

Racial and ethnic diversity is on the rise in Denver due to increasing immigration. The share of Denver residents who are of Hispanic origin increased from 23 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2000. Driving this trend was a near-tripling of Denver's foreign-born population during the decade—the second-largest such rise among the 23 Living Cities. Nearly two-thirds of Denver's foreign-born come from Mexico, and smaller numbers hail from Southeast Asian and European countries. Because 62 percent of the city's foreign-born residents arrived in the country in the last ten years, Denver may face unique challenges in connecting these newcomers to the economic, political, and educational mainstream.

Residents of Denver are young and mobile. Baby Boomers aged 35 to 54 are by far the nation's largest age cohorts, but people in their late 20s and early 30s make up Denver's largest age groups. Thanks to this age tilt, few of the city's households contain married couples; most consist of people living alone or with other nonrelatives. In addition to attracting young people from abroad, Denver was a magnet for domestic migrants in the U.S. during the 1990s. One-third of all residents lived in a different city five years ago, the highest proportion among the 23 Living Cities, and the city gained a significant number of 25- to 34-year-olds even as their numbers declined nationwide.

Denver's workforce is highly educated, although wide educational attainment gaps between whites and minority groups persist. Among the 23 Living Cities, Denver ranks sixth in the share of its adults who hold at least a bachelor's degree. Still, racial and ethnic minorities lag far behind their white counterparts in educational attainment. Eighteen percent of blacks and only 8 percent of Hispanics hold bachelor's degrees, compared to 48 percent of whites. Meanwhile, the share of Denver adults who have graduated from high school fell slightly between 1990 and 2000—one of only a few cities in which this occurred. This trend reflects not only the recency of Latin American immigration to the city of Denver, but also location shifts of more educated workers around the region.

High levels of work contribute to the economic success of most Denver residents. Households in each part of the income distribution increased in number in Denver during the 1990s. Because higher-income households grew fastest, the city's median household income increased by 17 percent—the second-fastest rise among the 23 Living Cities. Denver's poverty rate declined significantly, and the city has the lowest poverty rate among African Americans of any Living City. Yet many families still struggle to make ends meet—moderate-income households earning $18,000 to $34,000 make up more than a fifth of all Denver households.

Homeownership rose in Denver during the 1990s for nearly all racial groups, but costs are rising for renters. Denver experienced a considerable rise in its homeownership rate during the 1990s, and 53 percent of its residents owned their own homes in 2000. Significantly, homeownership increased most rapidly for the city's Hispanic households. At the same time, in-migration to Denver and rising household incomes in the 1990s produced a rapid run-up in rents. Median rental costs increased 24 percent between 1990 and 2000, the highest such rise among the 23 Living Cities. These costs highlight what may be a growing need for affordable housing among the city's moderate-income families, 42 percent of whom paid at least 30 percent of their income on rent in 2000.

By presenting the indicators on the following pages, Denver in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 seeks to give readers a better sense of where Denver and its residents stand in relation to their peers, and how the 1990s shaped the city, its neighborhoods, and the entire Denver region. Living Cities and the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy hope that this information will prompt a fruitful dialogue among city and community leaders about the direction Denver should take in the coming decade.

Denver Data Book Series 1
Denver Data Book Series 2

What Cities Can Do: Revitalizing Denver's Downtown

Wellington E. Webb — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400

At the heart of every city is a downtown, a hub that determines the city's success or failure. Much of the momentum for our economic turnaround in Denver originated in our strategy for downtown.

One of the first things I did after taking office in 1991 was to convene a downtown summit focused on housing. Up to that point, the emphasis downtown had been on retail, not on housing. I was convinced that if a residential population could be established downtown, retail would follow. Out of the summit came several housing-oriented initiatives.

We created a downtown housing office to market our inventory of vacant buildings to housing developers and to provide developers and investors with accurate information on properties and market conditions. We also made sweeping changes in downtown zoning to encourage housing and transit-oriented development and to protect historic buildings. The land use regulations in place inhibited housing. We used higher density to encourage housing and created design standards and review. As a result, we were able to save a critical mass of our older buildings downtown. They may not have been functional for office space, but they worked as housing.

In addition, we eliminated parking as a "use by right." Once a downtown is more than one-third parking lots, it loses its character and sense of place. We provided housing financing on unconventional projects. Once these projects were successful, they were supported by conventional lenders. We directed all our private activity bond allocations toward downtown housing projects for three years. And we created a multimillion-dollar revolving loan fund for housing, which we continue to increase.

In 1995, I convened another summit to take our success one step further. Our lower downtown was booming, and our midtown was under renovation. The time had come to expand our focus to the inner-ring neighborhoods right around downtown. They were not benefiting from the economic resurgence, but they offered lower property and building costs and a strong downtown as an anchor.

We continued several other important elements of Denver's long-term strategy, including placing sports arenas and major cultural facilities downtown and maintaining downtown as the hub of the regional transportation system, including the initial phases of the light rail system.

One final key to our downtown revitalization has been a constructive partnership between the public and private sectors. In 1998, the International Downtown Association awarded Denver its Outstanding Achievement Award, and said that "the collaboration of the City and County of Denver, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority, and the Downtown Denver Partnership provide a model for cities all over the world."

Authors

Wellington E. Webb