Who Gets The Credit?

By Mike Gaymon,GACCE, Senior Advisor

Assessments are essential for sustainability whether it is for a company in the private sector, a not for profit organization, or a public entity.  Having conducted nearly 200 assessments for states, communities and regions these are in " the wheel house" of Market Street Services.

These assessments drill down pretty deep into the strengths and weaknesses of a community. Every community has both. The more forward thinking communities realize that without a thorough assessment, change will come, but it may be by default and not by design. Often, when strengths are identified there are plenty of folks standing by to take the credit.  But when weaknesses (liabilities) are identified, sometimes we hear the word "they" instead of "we".  Maybe it is just human nature but most people identify with winners and want to be around success. 

It's not so much about where the community actually is currently, but about where are they going be in the future. How can they take advantage of the strengths and strategically minimize weaknesses in order to make changes that result in positive outcomes?

Community and economic development is a team sport: it takes many players on the field to properly execute a strategy. Working together is a necessity.

Regardless of the size of the community or the amount of weaknesses or strengths, it's amazing what happens if you don't care who gets the credit!

The Road Ahead

By J. Mac Holladay, Founder and CEO

Years ago I wrote many “chamber commentaries” for the Charleston News and Courier. I covered many issues particularly education reform, governance, and economic development. As I prepared to leave Charleston to begin work as the Director of the State Development Board, I wrote this final column. Please note that the date I wrote this was July 29^th, 1985.

“The Lowcountry has endured a great deal. 

It has a rich history of success and failure, prosperity and poverty. 

In some ways our community faces another important crossroad. 

The past twenty years have been tremendous in terms of growth and development. 

The economy across this nation is changing…we are part of a world economy. 

We must understand our opportunities and assets in terms of reality, not fantasy. 

Education is the only thing that unlocks the future for individuals and communities.

Our work has only just begun…

There is one element that is the key to these issues and countless others unnamed.

That one necessity is leadership…leadership knows no color, no age, no sex; it only understands results.

 It relates only to people, for it’s through people that this happens.  

Nothing happens by accident; people make things happen. 

The road ahead is exciting and frightening. It can lead one way or another. 

The Trident must choose its course.”

J. Mac Holladay
Chamber Commentary
The News and Courier/The Evening Post
July 29, 1985

It is amazing to realize how many things have changed over the years, but the things that make great communities remain constant. Understanding the core issues is as vital in 2015 as it were 30 years ago.

ACCE in Montreal

By Kathy Young, Principal, COO

This week, the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE) is gathered in Montreal, Quebec for the 101^st annual meeting of the organization. For four days, ACCE members from around the U.S., Canada, and with guests from other countries, will discuss the most pressing trends and issues facing chambers and communities today. As the national economic development sponsor, our team is here to participate and present alongside our clients during the workshops and special sessions.

Now two days in to the conference, we’ve had the opportunity to reconnect with clients, meet chamber professionals new to their communities, and share our perspective about the value of holistic community and economic development strategies. Yesterday, our CEO, J. Mac Holladay was joined by Michael Huber (President and CEO, Indy Chamber) and John Seymour (President and CEO, Decatur-Morgan County Chamber) to discuss how important quality of place continues to be, every day, and during times of crisis. Decatur has steadily transformed over the past few years, working within a consensus One Vision. One Voice. Strategy. The Indy Chamber turned a difficult situation into a positive spotlight this past year with their #IndyWelcomesAll campaign.

Having the beautiful city of Montreal as the backdrop for a quality of place conversation provided great context for the discussion. Predominantly French-speaking and centered by a downtown that blends a thriving arts district, the narrow lanes of Old Montreal, and contemporary architecture, the friendly city wears its host status well. Nationally, Canada has the highest per-capita rate of immigration in the world, and Montreal’s culture reflects this diversity and welcoming spirit.

The many intriguing sessions provide insight into workforce issues, young professional programming, and regional branding, among many others. Our Vice President, Matt Tarleton, alongside Dr. Garrett Harper (V.P., Research, The Research Center, Nashville Area Chamber), and Christy Bertolo (Member Resource Specialist, Columbus Chamber of Commerce), will explore methods of increasing revenue and developing new partnership using research and data analysis. David Brown, President of Greater Omaha Chamber (awarded ACCE Chamber of the Year last night) was one of several speakers that shared lessons about creating a regional collaborative brand (if you haven’t seen the award-winning We Don’t Coast campaign, check it out).

Suffice it to say, there are dozens and dozens of great learning opportunities packed into these four days, and the social gatherings provide the reminder that the chamber of commerce world is a close-knit community of people who respect and value each other and the peer-to-peer opportunities that this conference and organization provide. I’m always impressed by the mentoring and encouragement that trumps the competitive environment that you would naturally expect to find at such a gathering.

One Path Among Others Not Taken

By Jim Vaughn, Senior Advisor

After reading the good news from Washington that the Senate approved a highway bill on a vote of 91-4 (the bad news is the stopgap measure will finance federal highway and transportation projects only for three months!), I came across these interesting approaches from the states— 

Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads

Iowa DOT chief Paul Trombino said nobody is going to pay to rebuild the state’s roads. It’s not affordable. Iowans will have to figure out which roads “we really want to keep” and let the others “deteriorate and go away.” 

Texas to Convert Some Roads to Gravel

Converting 83 miles of roads from paved to unpaved is an unintended consequence of prosperity in Texas. The affected roads have been so heavily damaged by truck activity related to oil and natural gas exploration that they have become safety hazards, said TxDOT Deputy Executive Director John Barton. 

So what if Iowa and Texas are on to something? What if we can’t afford a lot of the roads we’ve got? What if the best solution is to plow them under? And what if we change our priorities on building and rebuilding our roads and highways? 

Of course we have to repair and build roads because we chose to build car-dependent cities back in the 1960s. But did we? University of Virginia historian Peter Norton says “the car-dominated city wasn’t the inevitable path of progress, but one path among others not taken.” 

In her excellent Washington Post Wonkblog post, The Myth of the American Love Affair With Cars, Emily Badger quotes Norton to tell the history that has been lost about how automobiles came to own the road: 

Americans’ love affair with the car “is one of the biggest public relations coups of all time,” Norton said. “It’s always treated as folk wisdom, as an organic growth from society. [But] everyone forgets it was invented as a public relations campaign.” 

This “love affair” was coined, in fact, during a 1961 episode of a weekly hour-long television program called the DuPont Show of the Week (sponsored, incidentally, by DuPont, which owned a 23 percent stake in General Motors at the time). The program, titled “Merrily We Roll Along,” was promoted by DuPont as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.” 

The show aired at a time when cars were facing steep criticism, as plans for the new interstate system threatened to destroy or disrupt neighborhoods in many U.S. cities. Highways were on their way to remaking Detroit, Cincinnati and St. Louis. Interstate 95 would ultimately raze entire black neighborhoods in Miami. In Washington, a grassroots group called the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis was protesting “white men’s roads thru black men’s homes.”

In New York, urbanist hero Jane Jacobs had gone to battle against a proposed road through Washington Square in Greenwich Village that would have replaced a public park with a thoroughfare for speeding cars. 

The “love affair” story, Norton says, was a response to all this protest, and it successfully helped seed two ideas that have been entrenched ever since: that we’re bound to cars by something stronger than need, and that people who challenge that bond are just turning up their noses at their fellow Americans. 

In the half century since then, we have largely rebuilt American communities to accommodate this love, retrofitting cities to make space for cars, bulldozing old buildings so that we can park them, constructing new communities where it’s not possible to get around without them. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who love their cars. The phenomenon of sports cars, weekend cars and collector cars is real. So, too, is the allure for many people of road trips, scenic highways or weekend drives through the country. Rather, the story Norton disputes, which he has written about in the book “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City,” is the history that says that we’ve built car-dependent cities and suburbs because that’s what Americans wanted, the story that says all our surface parking lots and spaghetti interchanges are a pure product of American preferences. 

Now, about 86 percent of Americans get to work every day in a private car – a statistic that’s often interpreted to mean that the vast majority of us chose to travel that way. 

This conclusion conflates preferences with constrained options. “I actually drive most of the way to work,” Norton admits. “I do it because the choices stink.” To extract from today’s ubiquitous parking garages, drive-through restaurants and busy roads a preference for cars ignores all the ways that public policy, industry influence and economic incentives have shaped our travel behavior. 

“If you locked me in a 7-Eleven for a week, and then after the end of the week unlocked the door and you studied my diet over the previous seven days, then concluded that I prefer highly processed, packaged foods to fresh fruits and vegetables, I would say your study is flawed,” Norton says. 

We make the same mistake, he says, with the history we tell of the car. And this popular story of that past makes it hard for us to envision alternative futures before us. 

So in three months, when the stopgap highway bill expires, what are we going to do about our transportation infrastructure? 

If Norton was right—that the car-dominated city wasn’t the inevitable path of progress, but one path among others not taken—it stands to reason that continuing to build and rebuild freeways and highways is but one path today. 

Imagine passing a long-term, balanced and sustainable transportation bill that leads to significant public and private investment in cities designed for people and not just for cars. That’s a bill that could result in a real love affair: an American love affair with cities.

Some College, No Degree

By Katie Thomas, Project Associate

In today’s economy, postsecondary education is now more important than ever before, while at the same time being more expensive than ever before. However, today’s blog is not about highlighting the importance of higher educational attainment or about how it is a key contributor to an individual’s lifetime earnings and wellbeing, among various other factors. It’s also not about the increase in tuition expenses and college costs – I’ll save that for another day. It’s about the most expensive education – the one that doesn’t lead to a degree.

Of all the data that we analyze when examining a community’s workforce, the one indicator that always concerns me is the educational attainment of the population with some college, no degree. It’s a vague indicator about that portion of the population’s educational level, which leaves me frustrated and yearning for more information. Are those individuals still currently pursuing higher education? Did they attend a postsecondary institution to get training in an occupation that requires a certificate, and therefore they don’t need a degree for their career field? Or, is it that they dropped out of college? 

The last question is the one that worries me the most. Not only do I fear that they may have enrolled in higher education and dropped out, I worry about what that cost them. While it’s true that individuals drop out for a variety of reasons, whether it’s a personal reason, a financial constraint, or another reason, I worry about the student loans that they may have accrued during their time attending postsecondary institutions and about those individuals possibly defaulting on them because their education did not lead to that higher paying, higher quality job that they had imagined when they first enrolled. As the costs to attend college continue to increase, the importance of ensuring that individuals are adequately prepared to succeed at the university-level and that they receive a quality education continues to grow.

This week the U.S. Department of Education released “Fact Sheet: Focusing Higher Education on Student Success.” It reported the graduation rates (percentage of students that earn a four-year degree within six years or less) and the student loan default rate by state, and also separated the data based on public; private, non-profit; and private, for-profit colleges. Among many things, the report highlighted the growing importance of ensuring that schools are providing meaningful, high-quality degrees and education. 

Nationally, the graduation rate for students attending a four-year institution in 2013 was 55 percent, while the default rate was 12 percent. However, the graduation rates and default rates varied by state and by the type of institution. Here in Georgia, at private, for-profit colleges, the graduation rate was a mere 16 percent, while the default rate was nearly one-quarter of the cohort analyzed. That means that of the individuals in Georgia that attended a private, for-profit college and who entered repayment on their federal student loans in the 2010 fiscal year, 23 percent had defaulted by 2013. In Georgia overall, the graduation rate was 45 percent for public, private, and for-profit colleges combined, and they had a cohort default rate of 13 percent. 

When an individual takes that step and commits to increasing their education, they should be properly prepared, as well as assured that they will be receiving a valuable education that will afford them quality, future employment opportunities. Individuals working in education and career advisement need to be aware of these issues and to properly educate and prepare individuals for their career paths and future educational endeavors. Individuals that are the first person in their family to attend college, especially, are often those that least understand the whole process of attending a postsecondary institution – loan applications, interest rates, employment opportunities for specific majors, future earning potentials, etc. 

Not all degrees are equal and not all colleges provide the same quality education. Looking at the educational attainment of a community alone does not show the whole picture. Individuals on the ground in the community must try to figure out who the people are that have some college, no degree and if there is a disconnect in the information, quality, or affordability of higher education in their region. Not only will this aid those individuals in improving their prosperity and wellbeing, it will also improve the wealth of the region by having a higher quality workforce that can support future economic opportunities.

Mapping State Workforce Trends

By Ranada Robinson, Research Manager

I love maps because they are an easy way to illustrate data points. Lately, I’ve been very interested in various data indicators we use at Market Street to evaluate workforce strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few state data maps using 2013 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data that reveal some interesting findings. 

Because workforce sustainability is an emerging issue in the United States because of the impending retirements of Baby Boomers, in many communities, we take a look at the ratio of young professionals (25-44) to experienced professionals and those nearing retirement (45-64) to determine if there are currently enough young professionals to eventually replace those who retire. In some instances, we also take a look at these dynamics by occupation and/or business sector. In the following map, the states most at risk of not having a sustainable workforce are shown in yellow: Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In these states, there are roughly only three young professionals for every four experienced professionals. The three states with the most sustainable workforces (highest levels of workers in the young professionals age range compared to those in experienced professionals) are Washington, D.C., Utah, and Texas. In D.C., the ratio is 1.62, meaning that there are nearly ten young professionals for every six experienced professional. 

Workforce Age Ratio, 2013 

In terms of migration, the population of communities is dependent on two factors: natural change (birth minus deaths) and net migration (in-migration minus out-migration). The demographics of residents moving in and out of states can significantly affect the workforce, particularly when net migration outpaces natural change. The next two maps illustrate the levels of educational attainment of residents moving into respective states. States (and communities) that can attract talent with higher educational attainment while also retaining educated talent are likely to be more competitive for knowledge-driven, higher-wage business sectors. The states with the largest percentages of in-migrants with bachelor’s degrees or higher are: Washington, D.C. (79.5 percent), Massachusetts (59.7 percent), New Jersey (55.5 percent), and New York (54 percent). The states with the lowest percentages of in-migrants with four-year college degrees are Mississippi (23.1 percent), West Virginia (23.2 percent), Arkansas (28.2 percent), and Idaho (28.4 percent). 

Percentage of In-Migrants with a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher, 2013 

The states that attract high levels of in-migrants without a high school diploma are primarily in the South. The states with the largest percentages of in-migrants who likely need additional training are Mississippi (16.5 percent), Oklahoma (15.3 percent), New Mexico, Arkansas, Delaware, and Georgia (all 14.7 percent). The states with the lowest percentages are Vermont (2.8 percent), Hawaii (3.5 percent), Montana (3.6 percent), and Washington, D.C. (3.8 percent). 

Percentage of In-Migrants with No High School Diploma, 2013 

I also took a look at adult educational attainment for all residents by gender. Interestingly, the bachelor’s degree-plus maps for women and men look very similar with the exception of just Vermont. 

Percentage of Women aged 25+ with a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher 

Percentage of Men aged 25+ with a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher 

There are actually 32 states where there are a larger percentage of adult women with a bachelor’s degree or higher than their male counterparts. In the following map, states where women have higher percentages of higher educational attainment are shaded yellow, and states where men have higher percentages of higher educational attainment are shaded blue. In Vermont, women lead in the percentage of attainment of bachelor’s-plus by 8.3 percentage points, and in Alaska, by 6.5 percentage points. In Utah, men lead by 4.6 percentage points, and in D.C., 2.8 percentage points. 

Percentage Point Difference of Bachelor’s Degree or Higher Attainment between Women and Men 

On the other end of the spectrum, the story is very different. In all states except Hawaii, women have lower percentages of not having a high school diploma than men. This is an important observation in understanding workforce and occupational dynamics and educational trends. Communities can match this set of indicators to occupational data that reveals male-heavy (or woman-heavy) occupations that may require certifications or experience rather than educational attainment. It can also be paired with school system dropout data to help steer students into trades that may help them overcome the odds that come with not having a high school diploma. 

Percentage of Women aged 25+ with no high school diploma, 2013 

Percentage of Men aged 25+ with no high school diploma, 2013 

As you can see, there are many publicly available data indicators that can be helpful in understanding workforce dynamics. Additional indicators include wage data, educational attainment by race and ethnicity data, and graduation rates by gender or race and ethnicity. Because talent is so important in today’s economic development environment, analyzing a community’s workforce strengths and weaknesses can be the key to gaining competitive advantage.

Growing Quickly into Decline

By Alex Pearlstein, Vice President

I was in a community this week that is experiencing an interesting phenomenon: too much success. More specifically, too many small-lot, low-to-mid price point single-family homes being constructed than are fiscally sustainable. As can be imagined, this community is a fast-growing suburb of a fast-growing metro area. Schools are good, crime is low, retail is plentiful, so the steady march of new residents heading for this community shows no sign of abating. 

Unfortunately, government staff now estimates that for every newly constructed housing unit the community runs an $80,000 deficit for provision and maintenance of infrastructure and services. On top of that, some of the area’s older subdivisions (circa the 1960s and 70s) are starting to see their infrastructure fail. Strong Towns has written extensively and convincingly about this phenomenon, but it is striking to see it play out so clearly in reality. As could also be predicted – and is far from unique in commuter suburbs – the general public and elected officials are vehemently opposed to new multi-family development; in fact, there’s a moratorium on this type of product. Transit is also a dirty word here. Moreover, investing public dollars for talent-attracting/retaining amenities such as parks, paths, arts, beautification, event spaces, festivals, etc., gets short shrift when needs are so great for new roads, schools, water and wastewater infrastructure, police and fire personnel, etc. 

Despite increasingly dire fiscal projections, elected officials continue to show distaste for raising taxes; meanwhile, local government has been cut almost to the bone to remain solvent. Unsurprisingly, the community is thinking about strategies to become more fiscally sustainable. One way to accomplish this is to attract and create better jobs. Another is to engineer the development of higher-value housing. Backroom discussions on increasing minimum lot sizes for new development are starting to creep into the open. 

Some in the community are dubious that even downzoning properties reserved for residential will have the desired effect of luring investment in higher-priced housing. “We’ve already gone too far down that path and established a reputation as an entry-level community,” some argue. If developers thought there was a market for higher-cost homes they would have built them already. Others note that lot and/or home size is no guarantee that a desired price point will be realized. Value is largely determined by (wait for it…) location, location, location. In fact, one local developer of a higher-end subdivision was reportedly disappointed in the average sales price he received for his larger units. 

The situation in this community is being played out in hundreds if not thousands of similar suburbs in fast-growing metro areas. There is no guarantee that they’ll one day go the way of Ferguson, Missouri, but the likelihood of this scenario is greater if unsustainable development trends are not reversed. Unfortunately, the longer a community grows unsustainably, the harder it is to change minds and policies to pivot in new directions. Especially if we’re talking about increased density, mixed-use development, transit, road diets, and other bugaboos foisted on populations that self-selected suburban environments. 

Above all, making smart and sustainable choices comes down to leadership and vision; often, they go hand in hand. Realistically, however, leaders represent the values and viewpoints of the population that elects them, so you get situations where the blind are leading the blind. In other words, we’ve got some trainwrecks coming – and fast. Strong Towns is battling hard, but growth patterns are so established and mentalities so steadfast in their certitude, that it might not be a fair fight.