The Truth of Superstar Cities

Reading today's news on New York's hot housing market, I had to reflect again on the puzzling op-ed piece on "The Myth of Superstar Cities" last week in The Wall Street Journal.

To our knowledge, no source of data would tell you with any accuracy the number of college-educated 25 to 34 year-olds in any city since 2000, but the piece insists that "over the past decade college-educated workers...now appear to be tilting to more affordable, family-friendly places." It goes on to assert the following: "Since 2000, Riverside, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas all have been among the big net gainers. In contrast New York, Boston, L.A. and even the Bay Area, a big winner in the 1990s, appear to have become among the highest net losers."

If the author has any facts to support these claims, we wish he would share them with us. In fact, we wish his editors would have insisted on including them in the article so we could all be enlightened.

(Our trusted economist, Joe Cortright at Impresa Consulting, tells us that the Census does publish its estimates of college attainment for the adult population, although even these estimates, based on the American Community Survey, have a relatively wide margin of error, making it difficult to accurately state how much change there has been in one city relative to others since 2000.)

What is most puzzling of all is that Las Vegas actually ranks last among the top 50 metro areas in the percentage of college grads, and Riverside and Phoenix are not far behind. Attracting additional college grads is always a good thing for an economy, but you have to look at the base off which you calculate that growth to see the complete picture.

The notion that big cities in so-called blue states are filled with evil chablis and brie elites sure feels like trumped up class warfare.

What really matters is that cities and the metro regions they anchor are the engines of the U.S. economy. If cities don't succeed, neither does America. It's counterproductive to our national success to try to pit one city against another.

  

Heather B, February 20, 2007

Is it possible that the authors used IRS data?

Link: http://myvalleyadvocate.com/blogs/urbancompass

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