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. With “The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable”
What makes cities grow in the 21st century? This IHT article points to consumers:
In a discussion paper titled “Consumer City,” Edward Glaeser and co-authors Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz call this “the demand for density.” People now want to live in dense areas because dense areas offer what people want to consume — opera, sports teams, art museums, varied cuisine. In France, for example, he and his fellow researchers found a robust correlation between the number of restaurants and the growth of cities.
“The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable,” Glaese says.
The number of these “consumer immigrants” – those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life – is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.
But the “consumer immigrants” have a special significance because they are rich….
Glaeser et. al.’s paper, which is actually from 2000, can be downloaded as a PDF here. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to. I’m wondering about that restaurants comment — a “correlation” between city population growth and restaurant numbers doesn’t seem to prove much.
Via Creative Class.
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Reader Comments
That IHT article is an interesting companion to this — http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010045 — a recent Michael Barone piece from WSJ. Barone’s focus is obviously political but I thought it was interesting from a marketing/advertising perspective. Barone thinks “the economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.” Meanwhile, what he calls “interior boomtowns” — Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix and Charlotte — “are economic dynamos that are driving much of America’s growth. There’s much less economic polarization here than in the Coastal Megalopolises, and a higher percentage of traditional families….Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee.”
That’s a great tip, thanks. I can’t speak to L.A., but I think it’s not far off, what he’s saying about NY. This was interesting: “New York had a domestic outflow of 8% and an immigrant inflow of 6%.” That seems to run counter to the idea that NY growth has much to do with superconsumers. Although I guess all the restaurants that such people demand do need low-wage immigrant labor to wash the dishes and so on, so maybe it’s all connected. Anyway, thanks much for that link.
By the way, I did end up reading that guy’s academic working paper. I found it kind of underwhelming. The data is really only through 1990, and to me most of the paper was either not surprising, or not that convincing. It was interesting to read it, but all in all I think the points that Barone makes are a lot more relevant, and a lot more compelling.