For anyone who wonders why Portland is such a lure to young creative types, D.K. Row of the Oregonian attempts to explain.

"Portland's a paradise for creative types, who can live cheaply, surrounded by garlands of lush greenery, life-enhancing amenities such as light rail and too many artisanal indulgences to name. This is also a Valhalla where culinary, environmental and sustainable ideas aren't guiding principles within a Moonie-like cult. Rather, they're embedded values. Portlanders eat, cycle and recycle seriously.

"Artists, architects, designers, gourmands, writers, musicians, soul-seeking professionals and empty nesters alike have thus migrated to our once-isolated hamlet and dramatically changed its census profile socially, politically and economically."

Quoting Meg O'Rourke, Row explains that "today's utopian downtown cultural movements" are happening in cities like Portland vs. New York because New York's identity and reality "is now too expensive to allow layers of cultural idiosyncrasy to flourish, indie sub-scenes that pointedly, even fussily, reject mainstream convention."

Row warns, however, that Portland's economy may not be an enduringly friendly place for artists.  It is, he wrote, "a miserly economy based largely on service industries, an increasing number of empty downtown storefronts, lukewarm funding for philanthropic institutions and so on."

"Is the Portland Way of Life more artful interpretation than reality?," Row asks. 

This is the subject of a recent policy brief by Ed Glaeser and William Kerr.  Published by the Rappaport Institute/Taubman Center, the brief links entrepreneurship and regional economic growth.  And to encourage entrepreneurship, the authors have four pieces of advice for urban leaders:

(1) Investing too much in attracting large, mature firms may not be good policy.

(2) There is little reason to have much faith in the ability of local governments to play venture capitalist. The best role for government is simply to encourage competition among local banks and financiers.

(3) There is much to be said for the strategy of focusing on the quality of life policies that can attract smart, entrepreneurial people.  The best economic development strategy may be to attract smart people and get out of their way.

(4) Good universities have faculty members who are involved in local start-ups and train students who may become entrepreneurs and the employees of entrepreneurs.  Imposing costs that restrict the growth of such institutions can be costly.

The prize quote from the brief:  "What community ever screwed up by providing too much quality of life?"  That ought to become the guiding principle of every city.

Our President and CEO Carol Coletta was in Dallas this week where she spoke of the shift in housing demands away from suburbia at the 11^th annual meeting of the North Texas Housing Coalition. The leaders of the new economy – the young, college-educated and highly mobile members of the 21^st century workforce – are increasingly urban dwellers. They seek high-density, inner-city living that fosters connectivity and diversity.

They are also far less interested in single-family homeownership, instead favoring multifamily housing in the form of condominium ownership or renting. 

We think cities that ensure residents can meet their daily needs without a car stand to win big. Dense, transit-oriented development promotes less traffic and frees up disposable income otherwise spent on gas and commuting.

This is just one of the issues we intend to explore as part of the US campaign – a campaign to build and sustain the next generation of great American cities that are of, by and for US.

Once again, Harvard professor Ed Glaeser makes a persuasive case that the anti-urban bias of federal spending and policy continues.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Ed asserts that "the billions of dollars being spent on infrastructure across the nation
provide an opportunity to plan for a better America, but politics-as-usual favors sprawl over city. This anti-urban bias of national policies must end."

He calls "subsidization of highways, subsidization of homeownership, and a school system that creates strong incentives for many parents to leave city borders" a "painful policy trifecta" we've endured for the past 60 years.

Read the rest of his opinion piece here.

All eyes are on Detroit, and so are ours. This week CEOs for Cities traveled to the Motor City to co-host the national Opportunity Dividend Summit with United Way for Southeastern Michigan, which serves a six-county area in what CEO Mike Brennan referred to as “the epicenter of the contraction.”

Last year, Brennan and his 100-person staff experienced a contraction of their own when they moved from a 12-story office building to an edgy new space in downtown Detroit. In the process two-thirds of them gave up their desks. Now, instead of having cubes to call their own, United Way employees plug their laptops into cozy community workstations situated throughout their open floor plan office, which is indeed open and available for community use.  Brennan says this not only reflects the way they do business but also frees his staff up to work “where the work is.” He should know, as he is among those who made the change.

The Detroit Free Press profiled the space earlier this year, giving the concept a name (hotelling) and denoting it “the office of the future.”  For Brennan and his staff, it means saving $300,000 annually and still serving 400,000 callers a year through their vast 211 call center network.

Next time you are in Detroit, ask for a tour.  You’ll want to move in or duplicate it in your own city, just like we did.

Complete College America, an organization focused on increasing college completion by focusing on state policy change, has just launched a 17-state alliance dedicated to achieving President Obama's 2020 goal of having the world's best-educated adult population.  It is exciting to have states tackling this ambitious goal alongside the 17 cities in our National Talent Dividend Network committed to increasing their college attainment rates by one percentage point in the next 24-48 months.  With the majority of the US population residing in metropolitan regions, we're eager to have these states partner with cities on strategies to achieve their goals and the associated economic dividends.

What is the recipe for success in this great diet?

Getting the whole city involved to collectively lose weight.  And it looks like it’s achieving some great results.

In response to the obesity epidemic in America, Mayor Mick Cornett put Oklahoma City ‘on a diet’ in December 2007, launching this website to help people with motivation, information and resources, events and build community interest in choosing healthier lifestyles. 

The Mayor set the community goal of losing 1 million pounds as a city.  Now the 'This City is Going on a Diet' site has almost 41,000 participants who have already contributed to an overall weight loss of 531,122 pounds (an average of almost 13 pounds per person).

With this initiative, The Mayor hopes to bring awareness to the problem of obesity, “introduce programs to help cure it, and inspire all citizens to become healthier and lose weight”.

What happens when you pair two designers over a slice of pizza with the back of a pizza box as their blank slate?

The Boston design community gets a new museum to promote local design.

But it won’t look like any other museum.

The nomadic Design Museum Boston will occupy empty storefronts around Boston, bringing design to retail areas and a whole new experience of design to the city.

Designers Sam Aquillano and Derek Cascio have paired the difficulty of raising capital to fund a large scale museum construction with the opportunity presented by empty spaces increasingly popping up in a difficult economic environment to reinvent the traditional, single-space institution to one that is scattered across locations.

See The Boston Globe article here.

While public officials at all levels of government continue to consider a myriad of short-term economic recovery solutions, our President and CEO Carol Coletta, together with regional PNC Financial Services president Beth Wnuck, proposes a more patient and lasting response this week on Forbes.com. 

Bolstered by our Talent Dividend research, they call for public investment in developing an educated workforce as an essential economic policy strategy. Nearly 60% of a city's success, as measured by per capita income, is explained by the percentage of college graduates in a city's population. An increase in college attainment rates by one percentage point in the largest 51 metro areas yields $124 billion in additional personal income each year for the nation. 

They start by pointing out the obvious: there is nothing "traditional" about the traditional college student. Employers, public education institutions and government leaders lag far behind in adapting to the nearly 75% of college students today who are adults balancing work and school. A distinct shift in perception is required to consider the long-term public value of a college degree, which in the U.S. is still considered to be a private good. 

CEOs for Cities recently traveled to Phoenix to introduce city leaders there to the Talent Dividend. A one percentage point gain in college attainment would yield a $3.1 billion increase in per capita income in the Phoenix Metro Area.