You are hereEconomists Place Their Bests for 2012
"If you move from New York to Houston, you just gave yourself a gigantic raise," said Joel Kotkin. "As the country has become more stressed, people have to move to those places where they can achieve a middle-class lifestyle at a lower cost."
Joel's new book, THE NEXT HUNDRED MILLION: America in 2050 is now available at booksellers everywhere.
"In terms of big metros, Texas kicked ass as it has been doing for a number of years," said demographer Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Kotkin has been called America's uber-geographer by The N ew York Times, and his latest book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, predicts how the nation will evolve in the next four decades.
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/04/3937406/fort-worth-ranks-as-four...
The Central Valley communities were hit harder by the recession, but they’re seeing job growth in energy, agriculture, manufacturing and even construction, Kotkin said.
In contrast, Sonoma County has lost 43 percent of jobs in construction, 24 percent in finance, 20 percent in information and 10 percent in manufacturing over the past five years, he said.
“You lost jobs in most categories,” Kotkin said.
Demographer Joel Kotkin listed the Gulf Coast as one of the four growth areas, the others being in the mountain West and the southeastern states along the Atlantic seaboard. No surprise in those two, although Kotkin is also high on the prospects of the states of the Great Plains, where costs of living are low. We might also note that a worldwide rise in “primary commodities” such as grain and other foods could also fuel a surprising growth in the Plains states.
'California is God's best moment," says Joel Kotkin. "It's the best place in the world to live." Or at least it used to be.
Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious people "who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies." Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
“It’s just plain stupid," said demographer Joel Kotkin of the campaign's apparent neglect of black voters. “This is clearly a blind spot, perhaps because Romney’s generation of Mormons grew up in an all-white world,” he said, comparing it to "Obama’s preference for university professors over businessmen.”
"Greenurbia is the suburbs of the future. The suburbs of the 1950s were bedroom communities for people who commuted into the city. Today, there’s much more employment in the suburbs, and the big change is the number of people working full-time or part-time at home. Having people commute from one computer screen to another doesn’t make sense."
Kotkin has a striking ability to envision how global forces will shape daily family life, and his conclusions can be thought-provoking as well as counterintuitive. It's amazing there isn't more public discussion about the enormous changes ahead, and reassuring to have this talented thinker on the case. — Jennifer Ludden, NPR national desk correspondent
