PCRD

Green Jobs and the Inner City

Last week, in Milwaukee, I learned of a new initiative to develop skills in green building evaluation (including energy audits) among inner city residents. A new business that is forming will train inner city residents in conducting energy audits with new hand-held technologies.

Tying green building to inner city employment opportunities opens the door to "green collar jobs". Here's an example of what is happening in Philadelphia. If you would like to learn more, download this report.

Creating Your Own Regional Talent Advantage

PCRD staff member Christine Nolan recently attended the C2ER (Council for Community and Economic Research - formerly ACCRA) conference in Atlanta, GA, giving a presentation on one of PCRD’s newest grants – Rural Economic Development Policy:  Crossing the Next Rural Frontier – as part of a panel on cluster models and their use. 

The overall theme of the conference was Creating Your Own Regional Talent Advantage, and the conference organizers at C2ER took full advantage of the recent upsurge of interest in research into human capital and its role in creating economic development and advantage in a global knowledge economy. The program ranged from the workforce in 2020 to the impact of young professionals programs, migrating graduates, measuring K-12  school success, and the utility of occupational cluster models in conjunction with industry cluster models. 

Ms. Nolan’s discussion covered the topic of identifying and analyzing occupational clusters, as well as industry clusters, with an eye to discovering linkages that lead to “hot spots” of innovation and knowledge across the United States.  Other panel members included Rich Bryden of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School, and Ed Feser of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

C2ER has now posted all available presentations from the conference to its website. To see the Nolan and Bryden presentations click on “Cluster Models”  in the presentations listed for Thursday, May 15th. 

The PCRD grant’s principal funder is the US Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, and the research team includes experts from Indiana University’s Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC); Strategic Development Group Inc. (SDG) located in Bloomington, Indiana; the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) at the University of Missouri and Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI) of Moscow, Idaho.

Incentives to Encourage Collaboration

A small group of cities and towns in Northeast Ohio is trying to figure out strategies to share revenues. In this way, they hope to curb the destructive competition among cities and towns within the region. You can learn more about this initiative from its web site.

Now, the State of Ohio is exploring ways to encourage this type of collaboration. Read more.
Indiana should be interested interested in following this approach.

We can start by looking at the WIRED initiative (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development) and the Regional Innovation Grants (pre-WIRED grants) that the Department of Labor has been making. The Department of Labor has been stimulating regional collaboration by placing positive incentives in front of regions.

You can learn more about what is going on in the WIRED regions from the WIRED Nation web site.
In the years ahead, state policy-makers will be redesigning economic development incentives to encourage these collaborations. But we can expect local incentives to come under more scrutiny, as well. We will see new types of local economic development incentives.

Here's an example. Recently, I worked with Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) to develop a local innovation zone incentive initiative. The initiative is designed to encourage local collaborations. It begins with a concept of "anchor partners", which must include at least one college or university. You can learn more from the project web site.

As Deaths Outpace Births, Will Regions Adjust?

Posted by Indraneel Kumar

The story of Pittsburgh is similar to what many cities, suburbs, and rural areas are experiencing in the Midwest. The resident population is aging. Earlier, it was due to out-migrants outpacing the in-migrants as people moved out for jobs, opportunities, and warmer climate. Now, as revealed in a recent New York Times article (see here), it is due to higher numbers of deaths as compared to births.

Demographers call this “natural decrease” and think it will have lasting effects on communities. The public schools are closing in Pittsburgh because there are not enough children and hospitals are converting wards for children into facilities serving the older population. The population in the older-age cohorts has specific needs - healthcare and assistance.

In Pittsburgh, the healthcare sector now has the largest employment base, replacing manufacturing which previously held the number one spot. Until now this phenomenon of an aging population due to natural decrease was observed in only a few cities and towns within a metropolitan area. For the first time, a decrease in population due to more deaths and fewer births is being observed at a metropolitan scale.

In addition to this decrease, another challenge will be the “older population stock” caused by the retiring baby boomers (generation born between 1946 and 1964). There might not be enough workers from the younger generations to replace the retiring workforce. This will have huge impacts on the housing market according to a study by Dowell Myers, a demographer and planning professor from California.

As the older generation retires, downsizes, moves to older homes, and eventually moves out from the housing market, it will create a substantial supply of housing units. There might not be enough younger buyers with adequate purchasing power to buy these houses. The cities, counties, and regions will be reaching a tipping point where housing supply may far exceed the demand. Read more here.

RUrbanism: Sustainable Integration of Rural and Urban Communities

Posted by Indraneel Kumar

Climate change, green house gas emissions, and energy and food securities are highly debated and recognized issues globally. What will cities of the year 2100 will look like? How shall we plan and design for sustainable communities 100 years from now? The International Gas Union held a worldwide competition in 2003 and one of the three award winning projects was Goa 2100 planning based on RUrbanism or rural-urban sustainability framework .

The Goa 2100 was recognized for using sustainability concepts such as ecological footprint, material life-cycle analysis, optimal densities and built-form analysis, and time-budget analysis into planning and designing a city. The planners found that based on availability of renewable, recycling capacity and other resources within the region, Goa should have densities between 150 and 300 persons per hectare and buildings should be six-stories high. By the way, our neighbor, Vancouver, British Columbia won the 1st Place in this competition. The cities (PLUS) award winning entry involved 500 experts and 30 cities across Canada in a 2-year long planning and design effort. Read more here. Planning for sustainability requires innovative approaches and these projects reflect those ideas. 

Government & Web 2.0

This month's Governing Magazine has an interesting article about how Web 2.0 tools - wikis, blogs, etc. can and should change the way in which state and local government functions. Here's a quote from Mark Forman, a partner at KPMG - People who learn how to harness wikis and other new tools to the benefit of government will be hailed as the next great visionaries. You can read the entire article here.

Meeting the Challenge of Failing High Schools

Across the country, our high schools are failing. The Alliance for Excellent Education has outlined some of the costs of this failure. So, for example:

• 70 percent of eighth graders can’t read at grade level, and a mere 3 percent of all eighth graders read at an advanced level.
• Though fourth grade reading scores have risen in the past few years, America's eighth and twelfth grade scores have remained essentially flat since the 1970s.

Download a fact sheet here.

According to the Alliance, In Indiana:

• If the nearly 25,000 high school dropouts from the Class of 2007 had earned their diplomas instead of dropping out, Indiana’s economy would have seen an additional $6.4 billion in wages over these students’ lifetimes.
• If the high school dropouts who currently head households in Indiana had earned their diplomas, the state’s economy would have benefited from an additional $1.6 billion in wealth accumulated by families.
• If all of the students in Indiana who are estimated to drop out of school this year earn diplomas instead, the state could save more than $284 million in health care costs over the course of those young people’s lifetimes.

Indiana spends over $40 million each year to provide community college remediation education for recent high school graduates who did not acquire the basic skills necessary to succeed in college or at work. Learn more.

In rural America, we have a wonderful opportunity to re-invent our high schools. Read the inspiring story of one rural school district in Indiana.

At Purdue, we worked with Deb Howe, the superintendent, to help her realize her dream of a more dynamic rural community energized by a new approach to high school. You can read more about her initiative to re-invent high school in Rochester, IN here.

Only 64% of the ninth graders graduate in Mississippi. Mississippi has set a target to reduce the dropout rate by 50% in five years. Read more.

The dropout problem is gaining more attention recently. For example, Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star launched a series on the issue yesterday exploring social promotion. Read more.

Last week, the Detroit Free Press outlined some solutions. Read more.

At the same time, hearings are taking place across the state to address the issue. Read more.

South Carolina is addressing the issue by connecting businesses more closely to high schools. Read more.

Last month, AT&T announced a $100 million effort to reduce dropouts. Read more.

What would Indiana look like in five years if we set the same target as Mississippi: Cut dropouts by 50%?

Here are some basic resources to learn more about reducing dropouts:

Alliance for Excellent Education
America's Promise Alliance
The Silent Epidemic report from the Gates Foundation
National Dropout Prevention Center

New Podcast Available: Indiana Circuit Breakers

Our friends at Purdue Extension ECD have produced their very first On Local Government podcast featuring Purdue Economist Larry DeBoer. In this month's podcast Larry explains the Indiana circuit breaker. You can download this and load it to an iPod or listen online with QuickTime or Windows Media Player. The two formats are listed below:

• April 2008 Capital Comments Podcast (wmv format)
• April 2008 Capital Comments Podcast (mp3 format)

The Cognitive Age

Last week in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks wrote about The Cognitive Age, which he says is the a accurate paradigm for our economy, more so than globalization. Here's a quote:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

Here is a link to the entire article.