Dream City?

I recently read this article:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/cities-americans-moving-escaping-154840318.html?l=1

Quoted text follows:

For much of the nation’s history, Americans moved around mostly to find decent work. But these days, people may be more inclined to move in search of low taxes, cheap housing and like-minded citizens they’re comfortable being around. Such shifts in internal migration patterns could transform the U.S. economy and the political establishment in sweeping and unforeseen ways.

That’s the contention in Shaping Our Nation, the latest book from political historian Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, who also-co-authors the biennial Almanac of American Politics. In Shaping Our Nation, Barone explains a new way Americans define an enduring urge: “to pursue dreams and escape nightmares.” Today's nightmare cities, Barone says, are mostly familiar ones: Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and other former factory towns that no longer have enough jobs to support a shrinking population. The new dream cities tend to be ones in which low taxes and low housing costs are fostering population growth and prosperity: Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Nashville, Atlanta and several “mini Atlantas” including Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Jacksonville.

Barone detects another pivotral trend, as he explains in the video above: the movement of Americans to “culturally congenial” places where they feel they fit in. This has a lot to do with a kind of self-segregation that's occuring along a blue-red political fault line. Older, conservative Americans, for instance, are migrating to “well-churched” cities in Texas, where the population has grown 53% since 1990—twice the national rate. “Texas has been a huge growth magnet over the last 20 years,” Barone says, “and not because it has pleasant weather.”

Liberals, meanwhile, seem to be increasingly inclined to head for their own cultural redoubts. "You'll see liberal professionals go to the San Francisco Bay Area," Barone points out. "They wouldn't leave for the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex if you tripled their salary."

Barone's survey of U.S. migration patterns in Shaping Our Nation goes all the way back to colonial days. Connecting the dots across generations provides a richer view of trends today than pundits scanning the latest poll ratings or batch of economic figures are likely to get.

From 1970 to 2010, for instance, there was a “mass internal migration” of Americans from northern industrial cities to newer, more welcoming Sun Belt locales. This north-to-south migration is typically attributed to shifting job trends (and better weather), but Barone points out that two of the states to gain the most population during that time—Texas and Florida—also lured people because there is no state income tax.

California, meanwhile, enjoyed a huge influx of people from 1930 until 1990, but has since begun to lose people and businesses fleeing high taxes, regulatory overkill and everyday hassles such as congestion. Many of those people have moved to lower-tax mountain states such as Utah, Colorado and Idaho, while most of the newcomers to California during the last two decades have been Latino immigrants.

Cities and states that gain population always enjoy greater political power, of course, as their representation in Washington increases. And economic momentum can be self-perpetuating, since more companies are likely to relocate to a particular region once other businesses have gotten the ball rolling. So there may continue to be a national power shift that favors the south and the mountain states, at the expense of the trendy right and left coasts and unionized cities of the upper Midwest.

Some of the high-tax, high-cost cities can fight back, of course, by lowering taxes and doing more to create a business-friendly environment that lures employers. They may even develop an advantage as their economies stagnate and wage rates fall, lowering labor costs for companies that might resettle there. Still, many nightmare cities remain saddled with pension costs for former employees and other liabilities that aren’t easy to escape. No wonder people move.

End of quoted text.

What I find interesting about this article is how heavily slanted it appears to be towards lower taxes. It is true that personal income tax is lower in Texas (there isn't any), but property taxes are still very high. In my mind, it's a wash. Taxation is really fairly equitable across most of the nation. Oregon has no sales tax, but income and property taxes are relatively high. Utah has moderate property, sales, and income tax. It all evens out - people demand a certain level of service from their government, and that service has to be paid for. Where demands are higher, taxes are also relatively higher. But it's also not a drastic increase.

The remark is made, somewhat tongue in cheek, regarding the weather in Texas not being an attractive feature. I'm not sure that the sarcasm is warranted. Weather very well could be a factor, along with the other intangibles that the article mentions, including political ideology, perceived religiosity, low housing costs (which are market-driven), and historical ties to a region or community. The South is a place that many left following the jobs north during/after the great depression. Now the trend has reversed, and folks (and jobs) are finding their way back to the South. It's a complex thing. We haven't seen enough history to know for sure if this is a cyclical thing, or if this is just a system seeking equilibrium. For that, we'll just have to wait and see.

I am a city planner, and as such, I want to believe that there are systems for affecting this sort of thing. That one could adjust the dials of taxes and business opportunity and X, Y, and Z variables in order to produce a healthy, growing community. But the logic defies me, and I laugh both at my hubris and the fickle nature of the human social machine.

It's a very delighted, enthralled laugh from my very soul.

Voting

When the colonists in the Americas started getting frustrated with the motherland, one of the main gripes was with regard to the parliamentary process in Britain not allowing for representation from America. Under the old system, which really was based on feudal laws dating back to William the Conqueror and earlier, only land holders could vote. And really, only those of the upper class of land owners (the house of lords) could affect policy and change in the country. The colonies were literally owned and governed by these lords in Britain, and they decided what would be best for them, not the colonies. And since their loyalty was to themselves and their own coffers, they enacted legislation that would prove to be incredibly onerous, if not completely disastrous. So the Americans decided they didn't want to be taxed (or governed) without having a say in how things went. We all know what happened.

It is interesting, then, when I see how little that effort has continued to mean to us. I don't know why it is, but it seems we've become more complacent. While presidential election turn out tends to be relatively high, off year elections remain incredibly poorly attended. We just don't go. In Mont Belvieu, the city where I still officially live, there was a very significant ballot initiative - that of a home rule charter for the city. And yet, people stayed away from the polls in droves. I think attendance was in the single digits - roughly 300 people voted. The same thing is true out here in Grants Pass, where an important tax levy was on the ballot. The turnout was around 53% in the county, which is actually pretty good, all things considered. In town the numbers were about the same.

It never ceases to impress me how little value we ascribe to this right. We live in a modern world of convenience, distraction, and relative comfort. Perhaps we have been lulled by the siren call of security. Perhaps we can't be bothered to give up a little time to mail in the ballot. Or stop by a polling place. Whatever the reason, the effect is clear - we become disassociated with our government, and then we complain when it doesn't appear to be working for us. Approval of congress is incredibly low, yet people don't get out to vote for anything different.

It's a bit discouraging, at times.

Yet, it doesn't have to be that way. We can (and should) get back to the polls early and often. We can (and should) become interested and informed in what's going on. We can (and should) engage in civil civic dialogue with friends and neighbors, sharing views and helping to foster interest in what's going on. And we can (and should) even run for office ourselves. It's our right. We are Americans. And we are amazing.