If you are in DC tomorrow morning, January 20, please join us (or watch online) for the 2015 City Makers Summit at the Newseum. The premise is that cities are the arenas for the fastest-adapting, most practical-minded, least politically-paralyzed decision-making in America today. The panels will explore what that means for cities that try to foster a Jane Jacobs-like cycle of economic innovation and rising wages.
I mention this for three reasons. First, to encourage you to come or watch. I will be interviewing the mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, on what his city has done to create higher-skill, higher-wage jobs and develop the right local talent to fill them. Also I will interview a "maker's" panel of Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, plus Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez, the co-founders of Maker's Row. You can see the full lineup, with interviews by the Atlantic's Steve Clemons and CityLab's Sommer Mathis of an interesting range of civic figures, here.
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Second is to set up the next subject of our American Futures reports, which is the big, sprawling, now-troubled metropolis of San Bernardino, in the Inland Empire of Southern California, my original homeland.
As I mentioned last month, San Bernardino has endured a combination of blows that actually make it a purer symbol of the post-2008 collapse than Rustbelt sites like Gary or Detroit. Its population was relatively poor to begin with; the main components of its blue-collar job base—a big railroad yard, a steel mill, an Air Force base—were each shattered within a few years' span; its real-estate values shot up suddenly during the sub-prime bubble of the mid-2000s and then fell extra hard, making it one of the foreclosure centers of the country. Its unemployment rate neared 20 percent at the worst and is still twice the national level. San Bernardino is one of the poorest cities of its size (200,000+) in the entire country, and with Detroit and Stockton it is one of the three largest cities to declare municipal bankruptcy. A WalletHub ranking this week put it dead last on a ranking of job prospects in 150 metro areas.
The challenges, and the responses of people in San Bernardino who are trying very hard to make the best of the city's circumstances, are for the next round of dispatches. For the moment, let's make a connection to the theme of the City Makers conference. To wit, the functionality of American government at the national, state, and local levels: