urbanSTL

Ask yourself this: The last few times you visited a place, did anyone try to sell you on it as a community you might want to live in or build a career or business? In my experience, the answer is almost always no. While practically everyone says they obsess over talent, the sad fact is few places actually try seriously to recruit anybody.

Every single person who lives in a place should consider himself a licensed privateer, armed with a letter of marque, scouring the high seas of talent to bring more people to their town. Consider the flip side of my earlier question: Have you yourself been recruiting and making the sale on your community to visitors or outsiders you meet?

You know the story: Kids move to where they want to live and then look for a job, not the other way around. They’re drawn to a small number of hip metro areas (D.C., San Francisco, Seattle) and smaller cities (Boulder, Colo.; Missoula, Mont.; Palo Alto, Calif.) around the country and hip employers follow them. The result is an upward cycle of talent and jobs and business growth in the fashionable places, and a downward cycle everywhere else.

Is there any hope for the rest of us? Yes, but it requires a concentrated effort to create compelling places to live and work -- and fast. Because of the demographics of young talent, the cities and suburbs on the downward cycle have a limited window to turn things around: ten years at most, and maybe no more than five.

"Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity," Chabon wrote in The New York Review of Books, but adults have contrived to provide "a door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service ... We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between."

Beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at [kids'] freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework.

Gray goes on to document that, over that same period of time, mental health in children has declined sharply, as measured by standardized tests that have been essentially unchanged for 50 years. The presence of anxiety disorder and major depression are now five to eight times what they were in the 1950s, and the suicide rate for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

Portland is overly dependent upon talent attraction, a strength. Out of necessity, Pittsburgh is overly dependent upon talent production. Better to be overly dependent on talent production than talent attraction.

Resentment simmers, at the fleets of Google buses that ferry workers to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View and back; the code jockeys who crowd elite coffeehouses, heads buried in their laptops; and the sleek black Uber cars that whisk hipsters from bar to bar. Late last month, two tech millionaires opened the Battery, an invitation-only, $2,400-a-year club in an old factory in the financial district, cars lining up for valet parking.

For critics, such sights are symbols of a city in danger of losing its diversity — one that artists, families and middle-class workers can no longer afford.

Nick DiMaio has been documenting America's aging shopping centers since 2005. Author of The Caldor Rainbow, a blog named after the logo of his favorite local chain growing up in Connecticut, he's amassed an impressive collection of images and recollections of the decaying suburban malls and plazas that we loved and built decades ago.

As shoppers and developers continue to move away from such places, aging or defunct strip malls and big box stores have become easier and easier for DiMaio to find.

Though the city has fewer people than it did before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, it has 70 percent more restaurants, according to a count by Tom Fitzmorris, a local expert who does not include fast-food or chain restaurants in his tally.

Economically speaking, the restaurant boom is a barometer of a city that is more affluent and more educated than it used to be. “Richer cities have more restaurants per capita,” said Jed Kolko, the chief economist of Trulia, the real estate website, who said New Orleans already ranked 14th in the nation on restaurants per person in 2010, just a few years into the recent boom (San Francisco was No. 1).

At the same time, the high concentration of restaurants here has built on itself, as chefs are attracted to a city where eating out is so popular and the most successful ones expand. In that sense, it represents an industry cluster along the lines of the financial industry on Wall Street or high technology in Silicon Valley. More than 10 percent of the jobs in the metropolitan area are in the restaurant business, compared with an average of 8.2 percent nationwide.

As the state’s hand recedes from the hinterlands, people are struggling with choices that belong to past centuries: to heat their homes with a wood stove, which must be fed by hand every three hours, or burn diesel fuel, which costs half a month’s salary? When the road has so deteriorated that ambulances cannot reach their home, is it safe to stay? When their home can’t be sold, can they leave?

“An unfit residence for any but a nomad population,” concluded one member of a U.S. government expedition dispatched around 1820 to determine whether the lands that fell roughly to the west of the 100th meridian were places where a person could reasonably expect to make a life. Nearly two centuries later, the territory formerly known as the Great American Desert remains one of the most sparsely populated regions in the country, with the counties of its collective states frequently holding more square miles within their boundaries than residents. And each year, these empty counties — radiating west from the 100th meridian across the Great Plains to the base of the Rocky Mountains — grow emptier still, as the land steadily sheds its few scattered inhabitants.

Over a hundred years before sections of news sites and Flickr pages devoted to “ruin porn” sprang up, Charles Marville set out to document a Paris that had been subjected to an incredible amount of destruction, and would undergo its most dramatic changes yet under city-planner Baron Haussmann.

The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That’s 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people’s environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city.

After Christie announced his budget plans, panicked city leaders got together, pored over their books and collective-bargaining agreements, and realized the unthinkable was about to happen. Camden, a city that even before any potential curtailing of state subsidies made Detroit or East St. Louis seem like Martha's Vineyard, was about to see its police force, one of its biggest expenditures, chopped nearly in half.

On January 18th, 2011, the city laid off 168 of its 368 police officers, kicking off a dramatic, years-long, cops-versus-locals, house-to-house battle over a few square miles of North American territory that should have been national news, but has not been, likely because it took place in an isolated black and Hispanic ghost town.

Many major cities are experiencing a housing shortage which is pricing out large swaths of their populations—the workers, the creators, the young'uns. We need to start thinking big—or, rather, tall.

In theory, most of us know density is good for us—it allows us to live closer together, share resources, save energy, and stay safe. But we like the idea of skyscrapers right up until the point where one is constructed next door. Suddenly, we lament that a tall building might obscure our view, or darken our perfect afternoon sunlight. There is an ongoing sentiment that density should be for someone else. I should be able to keep my car and my yard, while my neighbors get a subway and a public park.

Hong Kong, which has more buildings over five hundred feet tall than any other city in the world, has been the muse of photographer Michael Wolf, who captures the towers as well as the people living inside them. These photos are shocking at first in their overwhelming scale. But 80 percent of the residents Wolf interviewed said they were happy, thanks to the sense of community. "The important lesson to be learned is that it's not space which is important for humans," Wolf told Atlantic Cities. "It's your neighbors."

Mr. Bloomberg has sought to remake the city’s landscape for the 21st century, pushing for higher-density development and higher-quality design and opening up the city’s vast waterfront to new residential, recreational and commercial uses. Nearly 40 percent of the city has been rezoned during the mayor’s 12 years in office.

The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists?

In 2011, after decades in which Silicon Valley had seemed to care no more about its surroundings than about its clothes, Steve Jobs announced he had hired Sir Norman Foster to design a vast new Apple headquarters. Facebook soon commissioned an equally massive building from Frank Gehry. Google followed suit, along with Amazon, up north. As the tech industry finally turns its attention to architecture, Paul Goldberger explores what companies’ choices reveal about their cultures, their workforces, and the shifting relationship between city and suburbs.

U.S. teenagers just aren't as into driving as they used to be, U.S. government forecasters acknowledged Monday in dramatically altered projections for transportation energy use over the next 25 years.

Growth in "vehicle-miles traveled" (VMT)-that key gauge of America's love affair with the automobile that once reliably ratcheted up year after year-will slow dramatically, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says in its new Annual Energy Outlook. The EIA slashed its projected annual VMT growth rate to 0.9 percent, a drop of 25 percent compared to its forecast only a year ago.

The change is partly due to slower population growth, but also because of a generational shift confirmed by at least four studies in the past year. In the United States, young people are not only driving less than teens did a generation ago, they aren't even getting licenses.

Locals call it the " Dan Gilbert effect," the recent buying spree of commercial buildings in downtown Detroit by the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans.

Now the phenomenon appears to be spreading.

Despite a fiscal plight that forced the city to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection five months ago, the real-estate market has been picking up in Detroit's downtown core. Mr. Gilbert has led the charge by buying dozens of properties and moving in 3,800 of his employees from suburban offices and creating another 6,500 jobs downtown since 2010, according to the company.

The math is clear, though. An apartment with parking costs more to build than one without. And that difference isn't covered by the typical fees to use this resource. The price of parking is much more closely related to what people think it's worth – and what they're willing to pay for it – than what it costs to build.

"The fact that the market value of parking is so radically out of proportion to what it costs to build the parking is a sign that there is an imbalance in the market, and that people are not building the parking spaces in order to rent them out," says Williams-Derry, Sightline's director of programs "They're building them for some other reason."