Subject: Economic Development
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The Spring 2009 issue of Shelterforce ran a brief about Van Jones’ being named White House special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality: the “Green Jobs Czar,” to use a more…
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Rick Cohen, a long-time Shelterforce contributor and editor of The Nonprofit Quarterly‘s “Cohen Report” wrote last week on the importance of nonprofits tracking their own industry’s job growth as a result of additional funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery…
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The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings announced today the launch of its MetroMonitor, a tool that measures the health of 100 of America’s largest metropolitan economies. The tools aims to look “beneath the hood of national economic statistics to portray…
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With city budgets shrinking rapidly, municipal governments are desperate to collect property tax revenue wherever they can find it. So they are moving to fast-track new, large development projects that can bring an infusion of new revenue, construction jobs and…
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From the City of Millville way down in South Jersey to Morristown up in the northern state suburbs, downtowns across New Jersey are approaching alarming levels of storefront vacancies. And why? Well, you can name any number of reasons, of…
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Monday brought the announcement of a record 70,000-plus jobs lost worldwide, from drug companies to automakers and everything in between. Meanwhile each year millions of Americans who still have jobs are having their wages stolen from them, an under-recognized epidemic…
The image in this post, which photographer Bill Lim has made available to us through the wonder of the Creative Commons, is of the beautiful Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial water sculpture in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. As we…
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Perhaps this is a pointer to where America’s recovery will come from. Some of the less fashionable parts of the country may quietly get on with the business of growing. Places like Chattanooga. And like Buffalo, New York, which did not experience a great boom, but may also largely miss out on the bust—while growing jobs in the public sector and health care. And like many other areas that don’t make the headlines.
— Chattanooga vrrrm vrrrm, The Economist blog
Basic economics asserts that capital flows from high-wealth areas to low-wealth areas to take advantage of the increased return on investment these areas offer. The economic miracles of southeast Asia have illustrated this principle on a global scale; as we emerge from the panic of 2008, could America’s beleaguered post-industrial cities illustrate this principle on a national scale? more
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So this is weird: December 5 is Walt Disney’s birthday and I get these two separate Disney things in the e-mail from different people but not entirely unconnected — both relate to our precarious economy. The first to arrive was…
Anyone who has wasted hours each day commuting to work, sat in traffic for an hour as a freight train inched by, waited endlessly for a bus only to have four arrive at once, or paid a week’s wages for a short plane flight can vouch for the inconveniences, inefficiencies, and travesties of our country’s transportation infrastructure.
At a November 17 conference sponsored by Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, elected officials, agency staffers and advocates from the U.S. and Canada described the daunting infrastructure challenges facing the heartland in terms of transportation and the related issues of water and housing.
The picture they painted was grim, but they emphasized the possibility of turning the dire situation into an opportunity for reshaping infrastructure priorities and investment. more
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With congressional leaders reaching an agreement Thursday afternoon on the president’s proposal to pump $700 billion into the country’s financial system, it’s not yet clear how corporations and foundations will change their policies in giving grants and gifts. However, if…
Even decades after de-industrialization and outsourcing decimated the once-solid, well-paid, empowered blue collar union workforce of the Midwest, jobs are still being lost by the hundreds or thousands as industries tighten their belts or close up shop altogether — from…
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With the Dems convening in Denver, the New York Times Magazine offered us David Leonhardt’s review of ‘Advanced Obamanomics’ on Sunday, August 24. In light of the Obama campaign re-launching his urban agenda today, it is timely to consider economics…
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Editor’s Note: The sixteenth and seventeenth paragraphs of this post have been revised to clarify the controversy over the two research studies mentioned. Johns Hopkins has a complex and mixed relationship with the mostly black residents of the east Baltimore…
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It’s tight here in New Jersey. And it’s because it’s crowded. With 8.7 million people, we are 11th in the country in population, but first in population density in the Union with over 1,100 people per square mile. We’re also…
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It wouldn’t be surprising to see non-Californians still do a double-take when the title “Governor” is applied to former on-screen cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was admittedly a lot weirder at the beginning here for us, but we’re mostly over it out here, done with the “I’ll be back” jokes and calling him the Terminator.
Plus, I think all the Terminator references only encourage his macho-dog antics, like when he called Democratic legislators “girly men” a few years back. Mature!
Anyway, Schwarzenegger seems to be reinventing himself enough so people even call him moderate. It’s true he has broken with Bush on some issues, positioned himself as an environmentalist, opposed offshore drilling and promoted and signed a measure to sharply reduce California’s greenhouse gases emission.
But Thursday he did something pretty retro. more
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This weekend, the New York Times suggested Pittsburgh as a destination (for at least 36 hours) alongside these locales, and as of my writing this post, the article remains the most popular in the paper’s travel section. This isn’t the…
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I am writing from India, where last week a small but significant convening took place. Some 250 experts (business leaders, academics, and other thinkers) from 25 countries came together for a two-day conference in Mumbai, India, titled The Responsibility to…
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that the Justice Department has indicted more than 400 defendants in 144 mortgage fraud cases. The indictments, part of a sting operation that began on March 1, was designed to “combat the threat mortgage fraud poses to the U.S. housing industry and worldwide credit markets,” according to an FBI statement.
“Operation Malicious Mortgage,” is “the culmination of substantial coordinated efforts during the last three and a half months to identify, arrest and prosecute mortgage fraud violators through the United States,” the FBI reports.
The Associated Press reports a suspected 53,000 mortgage fraud cases in 2007 alone, representing a 37,000-case increase from 2006, and a ten-fold increase from 2001-2002. AP cited statistics provided by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
In related news, the FBI statement said that it was “committed to” the prosecution of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tanin, two former Bear Stearns portfolio managers who were arrested Thursday for securities fraud. According to The New York Times, the indictments are the first to be “brought against senior Wall Street executives linked to a tight credit market that has rattled global markets, led to more than $350 billion in write-offs, cost numerous executives their jobs and culminated in the demise of Bear Stearns.”
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I was pleased to hear at a recent planning workshop that the definition of the creative economy has been expanded. As popularized by Richard Florida in his first book on the subject, the term seems to refer largely to professionals…
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National Housing Institute
