The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Where Are the Happy Places?

You can't buy happiness, we're told. The same, I suspect, holds true for optimism and satisfaction.

But you can find it, according to a new survey by Gallup and summarized in an article by the "creative cities" guru, urbanologist Richard Florida.

The article lists the cities where residents are most and least satisfied with their communities, and most or least optimistic that their towns are getting better. The standings won't make Midwesterners feel either satisfied or optimistic.

A New Map for the Chicago Region

Any astronaut looking down from space at night would spot a solid band of bright light wrapped around the southern end of Lake Michigan. The lights go on somewhere north of Milwaukee, stay on as the band moves south through Kenosha and Racine and turn into the glare of Chicago before sweeping east across northern Indiana, finally fading into the blueberry belt of southwestern Michigan.

What our astronaut is seeing is a megalopolis, a super-city, a midcontinental metro -- a region. From orbit, it looks like one big urban area. He can't see any state lines or town lines, which makes sense, because it's hard to see them even from ground level.

But they're there. Oh boy, are they there, and they keep this Chicago region from acting like the one big city it really is. Down here on the ground, it's not one big region but three states, 21 counties, dozens of towns and a couple thousand townships, school districts and other jurisdictions and taxing bodies, all out for themselves, with little regard for the other state, town or jurisdiction next door.

Obviously, this Chicago region is much less than the sum of its parts. This is the conclusion of anyone who's tried to get these many parts to work together and, more immediately, of a major new study by the very authoritative Paris-based economic body, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Old Industrial Cities: What Works and What Doesn't

The Midwestern landscape is pocked with old industrial cities whose industries have mostly gone away. Some have turned the corner from their industrial past and are beginning to thrive in the global age. Others remain poor, rusted, shrinking, locked in the past.

Which raises the question: why are some of these cities succeeding, others failing? Is there a key, a magic bullet, a successful policy that all should adopt?

An obvious question, you'd think, except that no one has thought to answer it by comparing these cities in a systematic, in-depth way. Until now.

The Community Development and Policy Studies division of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank works with Midwestern banks and towns to help distressed communities, so the transformation of these cities is vital to its goal. Recently, it dispatched ten staff members to ten cities -- two in each of the five states in the Chicago Fed's region -- to probe what these cities are and are not doing, to see if any patterns emerged.

So Long G8, Welcome NATO

Tuesday, March 6

Some preliminary and random thoughts on the summit that got away:

Chicago is just now digesting the news, announced barely twelve hours before this is being written, that one of the two global summit meetings scheduled to be held here in May has been moved. The NATO summit May 20-21 will still be held in Chicago, but the G8 summit of leading economic nations, which was to have been here May 19-20, has been moved to Camp David.

Reporters are still scrambling to find the specific reasons for the move. Pundits will parse the long-term impact, to Chicago and the G8. But some immediate conclusions arise.

Good Jobs -- But Where Are the Workers?

The number of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest is going down, but factories say they can't find workers to fill manufacturing jobs. As they say, it's a puzzlement.

A Chicago Tribune article laid out the problem, without pinpointing the reason or saying what to do about it. In his invaluable blog, Bill Testa, the vice president and director of regional research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has charted the trends -- Midwestern manufacturing jobs down sharply (from 4.2 million jobs in 1998 to only 2.7 million in 2010), with any improvement likely to be "modest."

This is the heartland of manufacturing, right? We know the Midwest has always lived on factory jobs. Even if the number of those jobs have declined, many factories are still there. Many factory jobs these days pay well. Most workers in factory towns don't go to college, so would be attracted to industrial jobs -- or so you'd think.

All this makes sense. And yet the workers don't seem to be there.