In my initial post on this blog, “Why Honeycomb Commons,” I mentioned that “I… advocate for social systems which affirm people rather than control them and economies and technologies which are built with a human and local scale in mind.” I want to provide some evidence for this advocacy today, which will also serve as a nice follow-up to the most recent post on brownfields. As mentioned in that post, many Midwestern cities have seen a massive population decay in their central-city areas in the last half-century. This decay has taken a toll on both their economies and their tax bases, as many employment dollars get paid to those commuting in from the suburbs, where they are taxed in different towns or counties. To remedy these issues, many economic development departments adopt the “chasing smokestacks” strategy, attempting to woo large firms to locate in prime locations they lay out for them. As I will make clear over the course of this blog, I believe “chasing smokestacks” is one of the worst strategies a city can take. Instead of seeking companies, I’d like to assert, cities desiring economic development should prioritize people: both their current residents and those they wish to attract.
The first lens through which I’ll analyze this question is that of migration. What follows is an attempt to explain why people might come to a city and where they might locate within it.
There are two perspectives from which to approach this issue: firstly, the question of whether “retail follows rooftops,” or more broadly, whether “people follow jobs” in migration patterns, and secondly, the question of how far folks are willing to commute from home to work. While academic literature and public opinion on these topics seldom yield consensus, a picture of location patterns can nevertheless be painted: It seems that while on an inter-state or inter-regional level people do migrate to follow jobs, at smaller spatial levels, residential location decisions are made based more on amenities than proximity to work, with people willing to commute on average approximately half an hour to and from work. Continue reading →
