“You go to some of these places [Midwestern cities], the question they ask when they meet you is ‘where did you go to high school’?… The fact that where you went to high school is a social marker places you in a community. You go to Washington DC and nobody cares where you went to high school… In New York, they ask ‘where are you from?’ because it is assumed that you are not from here. Some of these places in the Midwest… need more outsiders to come in because outsiders are the natural constituency of the new.” _____Aaron Renn
Among the cities discussed, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Charlotte, Minneapolis-St Paul, Nashville, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Madison, Iowa City, Rochester (MN), Singapore, Paris.
Topics include:
- 0:00 Introduction of Aaron Renn
- 1:15 What makes the large coastal cities so successful at creating wealth?
- 8:30 Can a large city become dominant in a new sector? (e.g., New York in tech)
- 13:00 How would you categorize non-coastal cities in terms of their prospects?
- 16:30 Why some cities are struggling while others are restructuring successfully
- 20:55 Will some smaller cities turn into ghost towns within twenty years?
- 26:35 What is going on with Detroit’s recovery?
- 30:40 The role of new immigrants in the development of a city
- 36:50 Immigration policy in Canada and Australia compared to the US and UK
- 43:50 What is the future for mass transit?
- 48:00 The lack of city to city benchmarking in infrastructure costing and execution
- 53:40 Is there anything going on in high-speed rail, other than in California?
- 59:40 The decline of trust in institutions and the problem of cronyism.
TO HEAR THE PODCAST, CLICK HERE OR ON THE TIMELINE BELOW: