Q. Has the Golden Visa program been cancelled?

Actually no. But it has changed quite a bit.

We were lucky enough to get into the Golden Visa program when the required investment was lower AND one could invest in actual property. Today, I think your options are more limited and that you must invest in funds that invest in real estate.

Here is a resource that may help:

Get Golden Visa

Also check out Nomad gate and Reddit.

We chose the Golden Visa because we were not in a position to live in Portugal for 183 days which is required of the retirement visa which requires you show a certain amount of passive income AND that you stop working (I think.) You may be in a different position and the retirement visa and/or the digital nomad visa if you are still working are a much different process. Google D7 or D8 visa portugal for more information.

Q. Did we work with an investment advisor? Is this different than an immigration lawyer?

Yes and yes. We ended up hiring an investment advisor who helped us sort through the funds available for investment purposes that were aligned with the Golden Visa; he recommended the lawyer. (Resources are at the very end of this email.)

The investment advisor was more of a broker … his fee got paid by the investment funds.

The lawyers we worked with are Dixcart which is a medium-sized international firm. They were essential to getting us a) appointments with AIMA for our biometrics; without their help we would have been SOL; and b) eventually they told us we could sue to get the AIMA to get us our residency cards and it worked! Some of our friends still have not gotten their biometrics appointments which is a necessary step to getting your (first) temporary residency card.

Here is some information on suing AIMA that is not current - the law has changed making it more difficult to sue this agency. Why you might want to sue is a long story but suffice it to say there is a huge backlog of applicants for visas, including the golden visa, golden visa applicants don’t get any kind of preferential treatment (not that I’m complaining - this is good social policy!), and the process - until recently - was not automated in any meaningful way.

https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2024-05-06/over-50-complaints-per-day-against-aima/88565

The good news is that automation is coming and the backlog is being worked on, or so I’m told.

The lawyer we liked; the broker was good at explaining the tax benefits of investing in a VC Fund versus buying property, which was an issue for us and may not be an issue for you.

Q. Where did you look at to live and how did you make that decision?

We looked at 3 places to live ONLY.

• Lisbon

• Porto

• Cascais

We did 2 scouting trips which were very abbreviated and did not involve looking at real estate.

Our criteria was a cosmopolitan city, good air connections to Europe and the U.S., warm weather year round, some flat areas for walking, not a totally car-oriented culture implying good public transit, large concentration of expats/immigrants, many parks/walking routes, relatively calm streets (one of our dogs is reactive), lots of English spoken.

Of the three cities, we chose Cascais because it is close to Lisbon (40 minutes on the train to downtown, 20 minutes to the outskirts of Lisbon … a neighborhood called Belem … which is very rich in cultural sites (museums, statues, etc.)). Cascais is a town of around 250,000 people and turned out to be a little more car oriented than we would like as the city itself is spread out: the area is full of beautiful beaches and mountains to explore and that requires a car. We are told that one can buy a used car relatively inexpensively¹. It is prohibitively expensive to import a car from the U.S. Tourists come in every day via bus or train and in organized tours - but can be avoided by staying away from “centro” i.e. the downtown area.

We did not like Porto to live although it is a very fun city to visit due to its historic old town. Porto is farther North and because of this the weather is very similar to Portland, Oregon. (Too cold, too much rain!) Also it is very hilly. The first day there my Apple Watch showed that I had walked the equivalent of 47 flights of stairs! Be aware that the tiles they use on all the streets are very beautiful but slippery as hell. We are on the older side these days and worry about taking a fall.

Cascais has a large expat/immigrant community and is expensive as a result. It is a lovely town full of beaches with an extensive boardwalk called the “Marginal”. People liken it to La Jolla.

Here is a resource for finding neighborhoods that will work for you if you decide Lisbon is for you:

Hoodpicker

I also visited Madeira and Rich visited the Algarve. Both are farther South - we went there separately to get our biometrics done through the AIMA.

Appointments in the major cities are impossible to get. Madeira was very cute but it’s an Island and cut off from cultural activities as a result. The Algarve is reputed to be very crowded and hot - too hot for my taste but in truth I have yet to visit.

Q. Did we use a real estate agent?

Yes.

At first we thought we were going to AirBnb it and change neighborhoods/towns every 3 months for a year to test the waters. But an AirBnb didn’t fit the tax status we were going for: NHR 1.0. NHR 2.0 is out and may be of interest.

We started looking for a rental property and for this we used an agent who was recommended by a work colleague of Rich’s for a fee.

Three year leases are the norm there - but you can get out of your 3 year lease at 16 months. Be aware that landlords here DO NOT GENERALLY give you back your deposit at the end of the lease. Rent increases are limited by law to around 2-3% per year. We decided to rent and not to buy … at least for now. Mortgages are available at 2-3% there but may require a bigger down payment depending on your specific situation. Most banks here expect any mortgage to be repaid in full when you hit the age of 75 or 80.

I would highly recommend working with Filipa if you decide you want to look for real estate in Lisbon or Cascais and/or in between, either to rent or to buy².

There is no MLS (multiple listing service) in Portugal so an agent can access properties that may not be all that visible to the public.

Many but not all properties are listed on idealista.pt - you can search there and get English results back.

Properties are listed as T0 (studio), T1 (one bedroom), etc. Walk in closets are not the norm. In fact, most properties don’t have closets per se but built in wardrobes. I think air conditioning is a requirement, you may not. Be aware that mini splits also serve as heating units in the winter; it is highly unlikely you will find a place with central heat or air.

Properties here are generally smaller than in the U.S. (by 40-50%) and most are primed for indoor/outdoor living. Over 100 square meters with air conditioning signals that you are an immigrant/expat and is likely to be priced accordingly. Check if the unit you are renting has a lift. In smaller buildings, I am told that lifts can break down frequently and landlords are not all that quick to get them fixed.

Q. What else do I need to know?

The Portuguese people are very nice, Lisbon feels like an elegant and calm version of New York City. It resembles Barcelona a lot with a lot of beaux arts architecture; Barcelona is a city I love but has changed a lot due to being over touristed.

The lack of gun violence calms my soul. Lisbon has many parks and museums but they are not at the level of Paris or Madrid; that said, I like the fact that we can fly to Paris or Madrid when we want to …

Portugal is not very anti-immigrant (yet) but is becoming more so for … reasons. One root cause is the lack of affordable housing … as a result it is considering outlawing AirBnbs in Lisbon and perhaps country wide. AirBnbs are limited to 3 months.

If you do rent, be aware that your landlord must register your lease with the local authorities. An unregistered lease will not satisfy immigration requirements³.

If you are looking at real estate, be aware that if a deal seems too good to be true, it is likely to be a fraudulent listing. If you don’t work with an agent, you need to confirm that the landlord is the real owner of the property before giving them any money. Google how to do that. Expect the landlord to ask for proof of financial stability. Filipa (see below) knows what the law is and helped us push back on the landlord when she asked for something unreasonable (pay the rent every 6 months in advance which would tie up a lot of cash).

Dogs are considered part of the family in Portugal. One usually doesn’t disclose you have pets until AFTER you move in at which point the landlord cannot do anything.

It’s important to realize that if you don’t like Portugal but go through the process of getting a Golden Visa (GV) you can live anywhere in the Schengen Zone which is 31++ countries; the only places you cannot live with a temporary residence card are France and Germany. The only residency requirement for Portugal itself in conjunction with the GV is 7 days per year which means 7 days and nights. You will have to pass a language test.

That said, IMHO you should come to Portugal because you want to live here, not as a jumping off point to live elsewhere in Europe.

Rules for residency/citizenship are changing and it entirely possible that the process will take you longer than initially promised and will involve jumping over more barriers than you expect. Expect the unexpected, remain resilient and flexible in the face of the bureaucracy you encounter, and you will be fine.

Resources we recommend

Investment broker:
Werner Gruner
Get Golden Visa
Lisbon Office: Avenida da Liberdade, 1101269-046 Lisbon / Portugal
werner.gruner@getgoldenvisa.com
getgoldenvisa.com

Immigration lawyer:
Sara Freitas
sara.freitas@dixcart.com
Dixcart Portugal
Lda Rua Serpa Pinto 14A 1º andar, 1200-445 Lisboa, Portugal
+351 210 506320
www.dixcart.com

Real estate broker/agent:
Filipa Santos
+351 966 958 280
ftsantos@kwportugal.pt

It’s been two months since my husband and I and our two dogs moved permanently to Portugal and everyone is asking how it’s going. The answer is … very well indeed. We feel like this is “home” now and while we miss our friends from the old country¹ a lot, we are enjoying our new status as recent immigrants to this beautiful country.

It’s not perfect of course. No country is.

The thing I like the best is that I find my nervous system is no longer on high alert all the time. Which means I can finally relax enough to be truly ‘retired’, a status that has described me for 2 years but wasn’t (much) reflected in my day-to-day life. I spend a lot of time now doing things I enjoy which includes sitting out on my veranda with the dogs, reading, catching up on video. When I’m out and about, I find myself exploring art museums both here in Cascais² and in Belem³, a neighborhood which is considered Lisbon’s culture center and located only 30 minutes from us. I recently joined Democrats Abroad Portugal (more on that in a latter post) and find that between that, pilates, and language study that I am surprisingly busy.

The recent blackout affected us - of course. How could it not? We live in a large-ish condominium complex with a pool and since the kids were sent home from school, everyone congregated there. About an hour into the blackout all cell service ceased … which left me feeling profoundly untethered but didn’t seem to phase the Portuguese. At all.

The initial rumor was that all of Europe was “dark” and speculation was rampant at the pool and later at the dog park that this was Putin’s work and perhaps the beginning of WWIII.

While Lisbon was a mess (due to gridlock), here in Cascais people remained chill. Everyone clustered at the pool in our complex, enjoying the good weather and an unexpected day off from school and jobs. Which is very Portuguese I’m told. To make the most of the moment. (It turns out that the blackout did not effect all of Europe, just Portugal, Spain, and parts of France. The cause is still unknown at this point. My money remains on terrorism.)

The Portuguese people are lovely and everyone seems very welcoming. There are both language and cultural barriers, of course. Most people we meet speak some English; the younger people all learn English in school. I’m told that there are mixed feelings about all the immigrants coming here, particularly those who call themselves “expats” and make no effort to assimilate. We are committed to assimilating ourselves and are slowly progressing with our language study … not an easy thing. At times, the language feels like something made up by children to keep adults from understanding what they are saying Lots of extra vowels and syllables inserted every which way⁴.

We appreciate how privileged we are to be able to escape the harrowing mess that is the United States. Immigrating to a country where you don’t know the language and know next to no one is not an easy thing. If you too are looking for an escape plan, Portugal could be an option for you. The first thing you need to do is research visas and find one that fits your needs.

Many people are motivated to come to Portugal for a more affordable retirement. You should know that what you will spend on the ground here is heavily dependent on where you chose to live. We chose Cascais which is a breathtakingly beautiful beach town with great access to Lisbon (45 minutes by train). The down side of Cascais is that it is a costly place to live and certain areas - particularly Centro or the center of town - can get overrun by tourists who come in by train and by bus.

We live about 3 km from Centro which meant that we need a car to get around. In terms of housing, our condo in the U.S. was 2000 square feet or 185 square meters. We did not expect to live in 2000 square feet here; the average apartment in Europe is 1000 square feet or 100 square meters. So set your expectations accordingly. As it turned out, we landed in a rental apartment that is 1500 square feet or 139 square meters. When we look at properties to buy, we may have to look outside of Cascais to find something suitable. We have a bit of a team on the ground helping us with housekeeping, dog walking, paperwork and that makes a big difference in the quality of our lives. Between housing and this help, it means our retirement isn’t “cheap”; so much so that my husband Rich has decided to keep working until the end of the year.

Here's the artist statement

Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence. Even with smart phones and dash cams recording the actions, more lives get cut short due to unnecessary and excessive violence.

Who is next? Me? My brother? My friends? How do we protect these men?

Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child.

I set out to photograph mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. The mothers in the photographs have not lost their sons, but understand the reality, that this could happen to their family. The mother is also photographed in isolation, reflecting on the absence. When the trials are over, the protesters have gone home and the news cameras gone, it is the mother left. Left to mourn, to survive.

The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street.

To learn more, go to the artist's site: https://www.jonhenryphotography.com/#1

A little known fact is that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed which some people call putting the disease in remission.  Reversal implies that your diabetes is gone forever; remission is probably more accurate. So long as you keep working to change your lifestyle away from processed food and reduce your intake of carbs, it is likely that your diabetes will stay in remission.  Data suggests that this is particularly true if the lifestyle changes (outlined below) allow you to lose 5-10% of your body weight.

01// Join a Community

The first thing you should do after being diagnosed is to join a community.

Here are two good ones:

For ongoing information about the science of diabetes, diabetes drugs, and nutrition

These communities are FREE and can really help get your questions answered. There is also a good Facebook group on Reversing your Diabetes and similar groups on Reddit if you are into Reddit (I am).

02// Don't get stressed about Metformin

Many people stress about the drugs they are prescribed when first diagnosed. The standard of care is to prescribe metformin first. Insulin (something that is mostly taken via multiple shots per day) is generally only prescribed after metformin and at least one other drug you can take by mouth is found not sufficient to control your blood sugar.

Metformin is a good drug.

03// Go LCHF

LCHF stands for low-carb, healthy fat.  I first learned about it when I joined Diabetes Daily and found many people posting about the eating style they were using to reverse and/or control their Type 2 diabetes.

Avoid processed foods; eat meals centered around a protein that is NOT FRIED as much as possible. Some fried food is fine; too much can cause cardiovascular problems. The protein does not have to be particularly low fat.  I would limit your beef/pork consumption to 3x per week - because there is some data that eating beef/pork more often than that is related to cardiovascular disease and/or cancer (I forget which or if it is both!).

Replace carbs with healthy fats so you feel satisfied.

There are variants of LCHF eating.  Keto is one; the Mediterranean diet is another; a third is the Atkins plan.  One of the easiest versions of LCHF to follow is the Bullet Proof Diet

Pick a version of LCHF eating you think you can live with long-term.

Most diabetes educators focus on the fact that this is a ‘way of eating’ not a diet. A ‘way of eating’ is how you will eat from now on; a diet is temporary and most changes don’t tend to stick.

The ADA (American Diabetes Associates) recommended diet is junk and you should avoid it. A dietician will be forced - based on their code of ethics - to present the ADA diet to you.  If you feel like you could benefit from a dietician look for someone who will work with you to develop a LCHF plan.

04// Eat to your meter

The notion of eating to your meter is described here:

There are a lot of books that describe exactly how to eat to your meter. One I like the best is this one:

Note that this book is not specific to Type 2 (what you are) and has a lot of information on insulin dosing intended for Type 1.  Adam (the author) is a friend.

Skim the parts that are relevant to you.

05// Eliminate faux sugars

You know what I'm talking about.  Those pesky pink and yellow packets. Artificial sweeteners.

A list of ‘faux sugars’ is here.  Not all of them are necessarily bad, but all of them trick your body into thinking you just ate something sweet and rallying an insulin response. (Meaning your body will respond to them as if they were real sugar!!!) Try your damndest to eliminate these faux sugars when eating.

Some people find that a teaspoon of melted butter in their coffee makes coffee without sugar go down a lot better.   (This is a fundamental plank of the bulletproof diet linked in item #3).

Here’s a list of sugar masquerading as something else to avoid:

06// Avoid highly processed foods

The worst offenders here are foods processed to be "low fat".  Generally speaking, this means that the food manufacturer has taken out the fat and added sugar and/or carbs back in to make the food palatable.

For years the food industry has been blaming fat for what sugar did.  Don't fall into the trap!

Go for the highest fat version of the food you can.  For example full-fat yogurt versus regular yogurt. Heavy creme versus skimmed milk

It's a good idea to keep a ton of healthy fat snacks on tap for yourself: cheese, nuts (I find macadamia nuts to be expensive but incredibly satisfying), organic bacon, full-fat yogurt, pesto sauce, aioli but check for added sugar, etc.

Use butter, not margarine. Margarine is a frankenfood - meaning your body doesn’t know how to digest it - which is not good for your health overall.

07// Get a CGM

CMG stands for (continuous glucose meter). Sometimes your insurance will pay for this; sometimes it will not.  It is really really helpful to wear a CGM for at least 3 months even if you have to self-pay.

I recommend the Abbot Freestyle which is $75/month.  If you have a modern iPhone or Android phone you don’t have to buy the $100 reader; you can initiate the device and read your sugar on your phone.  The phone needs to support NFC.

Go here to learn more.  You may be able to sign up for FREE 14-day trial!

Note the list of compatible phones.

You’ll need to download a copy of the Librelink app onto your phone to make this work without a dedicated reader.

08// Avoid panic

Many people ask me what they should do if they 'cheat' and their blood sugar rises above what they consider an acceptable level.

What's acceptable for you may not be acceptable to me.  There is a saying in the diabetic community that 'your diabetes may vary'.  

Say you eat something with carbs and it temporarily brings your blood sugar up to 200. You know normal blood sugar is 80-120, so you find this a bit worrying.

To bring your blood sugar down do this ... much more useful than panicking!

• Drink 1-2 glasses of water.

• Take a walk.

The water dilutes your blood and as it does so it also lowers the amount of sugar in your blood by volume.

The walk (or any exercise for that matter) causes your muscles to take up sugar from your bloodstream.  Type 2 diabetes is essentially a disease where your body has difficulty getting the sugar in your body into the muscles due to something called insulin resistance. So these two things really do help.

09// Keep a food log

An integral part of the food log should be your blood glucose levels as measured by your meter - whether a traditional one (see below) or a CGM.

You don’t have to keep a food log forever but it really helps, in the beginning, to get to know your body and how it reacts to certain foods!

What you are looking to do is understand what foods make your sugar go high (take your blood sugar right before you eat, right after, and then 1 hour, and 2 hours after).  This is a drag to do with a traditional glucose meter (my fingers get sore from all that pricking!) but is trivially easy to do once you have a CGM on board.

What I found - for example - is that pasta is better than white rice - for me.  Pasta doesn’t raise my blood sugar as much as white rice does.

10// Have go-to meals at hand

My go-to meal for breakfast is avocado toast.  For the toast, use sprouted whole wheat bread that is chewy and dense. Yes, this has carbs, but because it is harder to digest it will not have as much immediate impact on your sugar.  Things with fiber are generally harder to digest!

Another go-to meal is eggs.

Salads with yummy dressing (no croutons) are another go-to meal for me.  A caesar salad with chicken for example.

When eating Thai - try chicken or pork larb.  Chicken satay is fine but the peanut sauce has sugar in it. (Peanuts are not low carb … sadly.  Use almond butter without added sugar instead. (You can eat the almond butter right out of the jar with a spoon.)

For dinners, we’ve been using the low-carb/KETO meals from Factor75:

Delivered 1x per week; 4 meals per week x 2 people will cost you $69 for a trial period; $99 a week after that. I eat these for lunch too!

11/ Read food labels religiously

I was shocked recently to discover that many, many brands of cold brew coffee have 30-50 grams of sugar in them!

I try to keep my carbs under 90 carbs per day.  This allows me to eat 1 piece of bread or another carb at 1-2 meals (for example) but not at all 3 meals.

Cauliflower makes a wonderful rice.  We buy it in bags that go into the microwave and then season with pesto sauce and butter. You can mash it once cooked to make the consistency more like mashed potatoes vs. rice.

Some people swear by spiral-ed zucchini as a substitute for pasta.

Eat more vegetables and vary the color of the veggies you do eat.  Not all veggies are created equal.  Look up the glycemic index of fruits and veggies so you can avoid vegetables like potatoes that are actually high in sugar.  Similarly, be careful about fruit. Some fruits are very high in sugar content and you need to eat them sparingly until you know exactly how they affect you and your blood sugar.

12// Don't try to change all of your behaviors at once

You might, for example, try out one of the above ideas per week over 12 weeks. Doing it this way helped me change my habits without feeling overwhelmed.

In the process of reversing my diabetes, I lost 45 lbs! And over the last 4 years, I've regained only 10 lbs of this for a net loss of 35 lbs.

Bonus! Products You May Benefit From

Book - The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fong - explains what diabetes is and how to deal with it.  A little bit technical.  If it's too much for you - start with The Obesity Code by the same author which explains why people who are insulin resistant (that means Type 2 diabetics and prediabetics) gain weight and/or find it so hard to lose weight.  

Painless lancet - https://www.accu-chek.com/lancing/fastclix-lancing-device

Also - try lancing the side of your finger and not just the top to reduce the pain. Other tips here:

Consider a sexy blood sugar meter like this one:

Note they sell this meter with coaching services which I found useful when I was first diagnosed. They also sell it with a free app for tracking your food/carbs/sugar.

Two other good food/carb/sugar trackers:

• My Fitness Tracker

• Lifesum

No affiliate links here.

The information presented is for your own use and represents my opinion. I'm not a doctor and there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to diabetes. Your diabetes can and will vary!

I worked briefly for diaTribe where I authored and/or contributed to the following articles. Note that I'm a Type 2 diabetic ... so these articles are (no doubt) slanted towards people with Type 2. The article on how to reverse your diabetes ... called "remission" below ... maybe particularly helpful.  I was able to reverse my diabetes within about 45 days using a combination of an LCHF (low-carb healthy fat) diet, exercise, and drugs (Metformin).  Your results will certainly vary.  

I've used 4 content management systems (CMS) since the inception of the web and blogging:

• Moveable Type (now more-or-less defunct)

• Expression Engine (now lightly maintained)

• WordPress (runs 67% of sites on the web)

• Ghost

All 4 of these systems are Open Source solutions to the problem of "how do I manage web content without having to code everything by hand."  

I'm running Ghost on the ghost.org platform versus hosting it myself.

Generally, I don't love other-people's hosted systems, because I have (modest) abilities to go into PHP files (for example) and make changes to my site themes. Ghost isn't authored in PHP ... the backend is in node.js which I don't know and don't want to learn.

That said, everything else about Ghost is a good fit ... simple to learn, extensible, secure, open-source, optimized for mobile and Google AMP, with a responsive support team.  

The motivation for the move was the "upgrade" of WordPress to the Gutenberg editor, which would have required me to relearn much of what I thought I knew about editing posts in WordPress.  This plus the general expense and complexity of WordPress left me feeling like a change was warranted.

I have always admired Anil Dash, formerly an executive/evangelist for Moveable Type when it was a for-profit endeavor. Anil runs his site (it's only one page) on Ghost.  

I like Ghost for its simplicity; the cost of hosting with ghost.org is reasonable especially now that WP Engine, my preferred managed WordPress host has raised its prices.

As I've learned more about how to set up my site in Ghost, I find it is the perfect balance of an easy lift with a modern text editor plus the ability to alter Ghost themes using my know-how in HTML and CSS.  

Themes are structured much like WordPress with partials etc.  

I'm not yet adept at altering the theme I picked ... but I'll get there.

In 2017, I wrote a book with Peter Hirshberg and Dale Dougherty available on Amazon. To our shock and amazement it became a best seller in the category City & Regional planning.  More exciting than this was learning that some city leaders were using the book as we intended - guiding their work as they revitalized their cities.  

Maker City: A practical guide to reinventing our cities

Maker City is designed to help cities understand the Maker movement and the impact it is having on economic opportunity: ecosystem development, education, advanced manufacturing, workforce development, and real estate.

The book is based on interviews completed with 50 thought leaders and practitioners who work at the forefront of the Maker movement in around 20+ cities.

Brooklyn, New York Los Angeles, California Chattanooga, Tennessee Louisville, Kentucky Chicago, Illinois Macon, Georgia Cleveland, Ohio New York, New York Detroit, Michigan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Elyria, Ohio Portland, Oregon Fremont, California Providence, Rhode Island Ithaca, New York Raleigh, North Carolina Kansas City, Missouri San Diego, California Lewisburg, Pennsylvania San Francisco, California  Wenatchee, Washington

Additional research was done on the Internet.

The target audiences for Maker City are leaders/activists in business, education, and nonprofits, as well as city leaders responsible for making policy.

Our goal is to provide practical examples and guidance people can use to strengthen and build their own Maker City.

The book was generously funded by a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

So proud of our daughter Sasha.  Love seeing all her hard work pay dividends.

Sasha owns a small studio in Manhattan (currently she is renting this out) and lives in Sleepy Hollow, NY with her partner Isaac.  Together they have 3 very well loved cats.

You can find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-mironov

Oh, yes. Sasha recently turned 30.  Rich and I had her when we were 6.  We are celebrating her birthday with 10 other folks in Santa Fe at a celebration we have dubbed Sashafest:

Some news.

We are moving to Portland June 1st, 2020.

Our reasons for this were many but included a wish to slow down (a bit), travel (well that’s not happening), and participate in new adventures (some of which can still happen!). There is a strong maker community there as well as a fledgling startup ecosystem for me; Rich has a number of colleagues in product management. I personally am looking forward to connecting with the arts/civic organizations in town and figuring out how my particular skill set (very eclectic I know!) might apply.

Like San Francisco, Portland is still in lockdown due to Covid 19.

If you know people in Portland that you think we’d be compatible with introductions are welcome. We are a bit worried about meeting new people in Portland due to Covid. That said, we do have a small base of friends and colleagues who have made the move and so far everyone we know there is making us feel very welcome.

If you are on our email list, we will be sending out an update with our new snail mail address shortly. Our (mine, Rich Mironov – my charming spouse – who is not on Facebook) email addresses and phone numbers have not changed.

You can find these on Linked In if we are connected to you that way.

Warmly,

Marcia

We went to York, PA to attend Blueprint York, a conference hosted be VentureBeat, intended to bring together Silicon Valley type investors with ecosystem builders intent on creating new forms of economic opportunity in York.

This was a follow on to the highly successful conference held in Reno in 2018.

The York, PA event had all the ingredients one might want in a conference. A welcoming local community which understood what it is good at, speakers that came from all over the country to share new models of economic development and workforce development, a low-cost of entry in the conference itself, and a strong point of view.

What the conference didn’t have, sadly, was very many investors or a huge number of people in attendance.

Heritage Rail Trail County Park York, Pennsylvania

It’s not that people don’t care about seeing a city like York, PA rise. They do. Every person who spoke at the conference took a caring, enlightened position. But the reality was … York, PA is not that easy to get to. There’s no rail stop in York, PA – for that you have to go to Lancaster, PA which is 26 miles away and – I’m told – is flourishing. Indeed, locals refer to the rivalry between York (which used to have a rail stop) and Lancaster (which does) as the “War of the Roses”.

Which would be funny except we know from our work with cities and towns that the smaller the city, the more likely it is that the solutions to create economic dynamism can only happen by linking up your small city with the greater region.

The nearest airport to York is Harrisburg, but there are no direct flights from San Francisco – say – to Harrisburg. Making Baltimore International the nearest airport and that is a 1.5-hour drive to York.

What York has in abundance is the will to succeed, the first ever ecosystem builder attached to a city in the country, a history of making things as well as industrial manufacturing, a committed industrialist at the helm of an advanced robotics and AI company, plus a downtown that is both charming and affordable.

York is very much a Maker City: I was told: “We make things here. And we make things better.”

That sums up York County, whose craftsmen and artisans have long created and finished things often seemingly out of nothing.

This idea of York County as the land of makers – and with it York Plan 2.0 – has caught on in recent years among a whole new generation. There is even a branding campaign.

YORK ASSETS

From York Plan 1.0 to York Plan 2.0
York has an interesting history. In 1938, in the run-up to World War II, community leaders got together to form the Manufacturers’ Association of York. Its singular mission was to prepare local manufacturers for the war that it knew was coming. This turned out to be both prescient and audacious.

Prescient because in 1938 most American leaders were isolationists who believed that America should stay out of the conflict in Europe. Audacious because effectively York was bringing together manufacturers in its city as a collective force, to make itself ready for the demands of war, at a time when virtually no other manufacturing city was doing so.

The York Plan 1.0 – with its slogan – “Do What you CAN with what you HAVE” – was endorsed by the Federal Government and became a national model for cities and towns and how they should prepare for World War II.

Today, York has a new plan it calls York Plan 2.0 and it is very much a plan to take York as a Maker City and evolve it to the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution.

A rendering of the third phase of the 240,000-square-foot innovation district planned for the city’s Northwest Triangle.

I spoke extensively with Correll French, a native son of the area, who is intent on bringing a makerspace to the area. The problem here is – of course- that there is no proven economic model for makerspaces, particularly in small cities and towns.

In larger cities – for example, Kansas City – there is an abundance of makerspaces, located in libraries, community centers, operating both as for-profit entities and as nonprofits. Kansas City (MO) has a population of 480,000; York (PA) is tiny in comparison with a population of only 48,000. We believe that York and Lancaster together could support a nonprofit makerspace but it would require overcoming transportation barriers between the two cities … to enable young people to get to the makerspace with ease, young people who cannot necessarily drive themselves.

In smaller cities and towns, makerspaces are often located inside schools or libraries. Freestanding makerspaces are also possible but may share their space and personnel with colocated businesses e.g. coworking, a startup incubator, or innovation hub.

Is a makerspace required to establish York as a Maker City … one intent on preparing its citizens for the future at a time or rapid technology change? No.

At the same time, a makerspace is an amenity many millennials seem to want, much like previous generations wanted access to a local gym. It’s also an amenity that “fits” with the spirit, history, and ambitions of York, PA.

First Ever Ecosystem Builder
Skyler Yost, Ecosystem Builder, served as one of the “Master of Ceremonies” at the conference. His role is paid for by industry and he believes that he is one of the first ecosystem builders to be hired by a city or town in the U.S.

What ecosystem builders do is serve as a kind of connective glue, to bring organizations together to work on initiatives. They also work with the economic development officers and civic leaders to grow capabilities that a city or town needs to thrive.

Skyler comes to this work from WeWork where he worked as a community builder at WeWork Chinatown (Washington, DC).

Bootstrapping Educational Resources
Amy Bridger, Senior Director, Corporate Strategy and External Engagement, Penn State Behrend (Erie, PA) spoke about the work of her research university, which is known as a leader in plastics, IoT, and robotics. This led to an interesting discussion of how cities and towns like York – that are located in areas relatively far away from a research university – can stand up their own educational infrastructure by creating their own coding academies (see below) bringing in major research universities to establish satellite campuses and the like.

What I didn’t hear – to my surprise – was any discussion of the role of community colleges in the York Plan 2.0. And – in fact – when we looked at the curriculum and degrees offered through the community colleges we found very little attention paid to engineering, electronics, coding, AI, or robotics. Thankfully, others in the community are stepping in to fill this gap.

John McElligott, CEO of York Exponential and of The Fortress Initiative
By his own admission, John started out “confusing imitation of Silicon Valley with innovation”. Only after his first venture in York did not realize the type of success he wanted did he realize that the way forward was to leverage the unique strengths of York in industrial manufacturing. He believes strongly that “small cities and rural areas deserve the same opportunities as big cities when it comes to technology and technology training and that the changes in technology around computer programming, robotics, manufacturing, and employment present a unique opportunity for these communities to leapfrog into the future.”

Today, John calls himself an “industrialist” not necessarily an entrepreneur (although he is that too); somewhat charmingly he refers to the York economy as “Mech” not “Tech”. As an industrialist, John is involved in two ventures based in York:

• York Exponential

• Fortress Initiative

York Exponential is an early-stage startup company that focuses on producing robots for industry; it does not sell the robots so much as rent them. The vision here of what John and others call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is not so much that robots will replace people but that robots will work side-by-side to augment people.

John was quick to realize that the growth of York Exponential was capped by the talent available in and around York. He created Fortress as a nonprofit coding academy – one of the first coding academy accredited and licensed by the state of PA – to create a trained workforce with skills in robotics, AI, and coding. Fortress provides a 12-week boot camp much like two other companies that presented at the conference: Flatiron Schools and Kenzei Academy.

MISSING ELEMENTS

So what is missing in York? Fast, reliable, inexpensive broadband is coming to York thanks to United Technologies which describes itself as a “carrier-neutral dark fiber provider”. In our work with cities, Gigabaud internet is a game changer for cities and towns, especially those interested in attracting and building out their advanced manufacturing sector as today so much of advanced manufacturing happens in the cloud. (We wrote about this extensively in the Advanced Manufacturing chapter of our book.)

Yes, there is industry and an advanced manufacturing sector poised to flourish. Yes, the downtown is pretty with many artisanal stores and a hipster-type food market that could be at home in Oakland or Brooklyn. But try to get a cup of coffee at 7:30 am on your way to your office. Nothing is open! Downtown York simply does not have the density of business required to support even one coffee shop.

Is this a failure of urban planning?

No, we don’t think so. What cities and towns like York need are more subtle than that. They need a way to create a talent base that will attract both established companies and entrepreneurs to come to York and stay.

Some of the innovative companies we learned about that are operating in this space include:

• Flatiron School– a coding academy much like Fortress that today operates in 10 cities and towns and remotely; recently purchased by WeWork. Flatiron guarantees its graduates jobs within 6 months of graduation. If they do not find jobs, graduates do not have to pay tuition. The school has a 95% placement rate and average salaries are $75K; less in some of its other locations. Right now, Flatiron is focused on expanding into (mostly) top tier cities: New York, Chicago, Miami. Secondary and tertiary cities are not its focus and – given the relationship with WeWork – we are going to guess that the only way Flatiron can work with students in York is via its online programs. This is unfortunate because only the in-classroom programs offer the tuition guarantee.

• Kenzai Academy – seems similar to Fortress or Flatiron at first blush – but there are important differences. Based in Indianapolis, it takes non-traditional workers and trains them up to take on jobs that pay $50-$70K in software engineering, UI/UX, and design. Most of these jobs would have been outsourced. Kenzai focuses not just on hard skills but also soft skills and provides mentoring to help people step up into the middle class. About 35% of the people who attend Kenzai Academy come from the service sector where they were <=$20/hour. All students get a part-time job through the Kelly Company, which enables them to apply what they are learning in work settings. Tuition is entirely free for the first year until you get a job that pays at least $40K. Graduates repay deferred tuition at the rate of 17.5% of their salary over 4 years. (There is also an option to pay tuition up front for students with means.)

• Arch Grants – based in St. Louis – an organization which gives out 50 grants of $50K to entrepreneurial teams with pro bono support services to entrepreneurs who agree to locate their early-stage businesses in St. Louis. This seems a highly replicable model and one that York, Lancaster, and Harrisburg may be able to come together and support. (No one of these communities has enough people to judge the competition required nor serve as pro bono mentors. But together they may.) Arch Grants is a nonprofit organization that is building a new economy by providing $50,000 equity-free grants and pro bono support services to entrepreneurs who locate their early-stage businesses in St. Louis.

OUR ADVICE FOR YORK

Forget about attracting VCs.
The transportation issues make York not a very attractive place for traditional VC-type investment.

Focus instead on entrepreneurship related to industrial-style manufacturing. We like the Arch Grants model and think something similar could work in York for startups focused on manufacturing. Also needed: more ways to quickly upskill and reskill nontraditional workers. We’d suggest working with the local community colleges to create a forward-looking curriculum in electronics, AI, and robotics. If not, work with the state to create a satellite campus of Penn State funded through a combination of state and federal grants. If you can get people to come to York to study, they will stay so long as there is an industrial economy they can participate in.

Originally posted on the Maker City blog

The following is an excerpt from the VentureBeat article “What’s the blueprint? Preparing the heartland for AI, automation, and the future of work” featuring Maker City’s Marcia Kadanoff.

An outline of the blueprint

But to take advantage of those resources, and all the others that are available in larger and smaller capacities around the country, there must be connective tissue. That, more than anything, seems to be the key. Marcia Kadanoff of Maker City explained what that really looks like in an email follow-up to a conversation we had at Blueprint. “York, PA has the first ever ecosystem builder in the U.S. In other areas of the country, this function can be accomplished through a native son or daughter who made good as a tech entrepreneur and now returns home to share what they have learned and invest both labor and money directly into the ecosystem,” she wrote. She pointed to people like the aforementioned Matt Dunne, and Nick Smoot of the Innovation Collective.. She noted that some locales rely on economic development boards and the like instead of one or two key people, but regardless: “The cities and towns that are thriving have relentless people who are providing leadership in a way that serves as an example others can follow.”

This is in addition to the need for broadband internet, proximity to and connections with institutions of higher learning, and what Kadanoff calls placemaking — “a coworking space, affordable living for professional-class workers […], a cafe, art center, or makerspace/innovation or startup accelerator.”

One key theme throughout Blueprint was that for these local leaders to build the tech-based work opportunities their towns need for the future, they have to know the unique strengths of their area and figure out how to evolve them to capitalize on key future technologies like AI and automation that will drive the future of work in the U.S.”

To read more, please go to VentureBeat.

Opportunity Zones

Background Information

Originally introduced in the Investing in Opportunity Act (IIOA), the Opportunity Zones Program was enacted as part of the 2017 tax reform package (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act). The program is designed to drive long-term capital to rural and low-income urban communities throughout the nation, and uses tax incentives to encourage private investment in impact funds.

Here is a set of links that provide valuable background and context to what an Opportunity Zone Fund is and why it matters to stakeholders in cities and towns interested in new forms of economic development and inclusive growth.

LISC – Local Initiatives Support Core
LISC’s mission is “With residents and partners, LISC forges resilient and inclusive communities of opportunity across America – great places to live, work, visit, do business and raise families.” Provides an Opportunity Zone 101 and FAQs:

• LISC FAQ

Bruce Katz, author of the New Localism
Formerly head of the Metropolitan Program at Brookings, Mr. Katz now heads up the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel and has written extensively about Opportunity Zones

• Guiding Principals for Opportunity Zones

• How Cities Maximize Opportunity Zones

• Seizing the Opportunity of Opportunity Zones

EIG (Economic Innovation Group)
The EIG covers opportunity zones extensively; this is a bipartisan group with a mission to “to advance solutions that empower entrepreneurs and investors to forge a more dynamic economy throughout America.”

• Opportunity Zones

Accelerator for America
Accelerator for America is a group set founded in 2017 by Rick Jacobs with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Accelerator which seeks to “scale and replicate local solutions to economic insecurity across the country.”

• There’s a short video on their role in the ecosystem available on this page:
  Short Video

• See also this page for a set of tools relevant to cities and their development of prospectus to drive investment capital: AfA Tools

Tax & Real Estate Implications Implications

• Opportunity Zones: Rules finally come out, and yup, they’re complex (but manageable)

• These Low-Income Communities Should Prepare for an Influx of Cash

• Property Prices Jump 20 Percent in U.S. Communities Named Opportunity Zones

• Cadre (Real Estate investment platform) 101 on Opportunity Zones

• Math for investment in Opportunity Zone Fund versus a REIT – note that we don’t agree with this math … one of the biggest issues is that fees on most OZ funds are at 1% not 2%

List of Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds

• Novoco Opportunity Zone Resource Center fund listing

Other
Other players in the data ecosystem around Opportunity Zones that we can introduce you to that may be pertinent:

• Citi Ventures

• MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth

We are happy to make the necessary introductions here.

Originally posted on the Maker City blog

It would be a pretty strange nation that concentrated all its economic goodness in one tiny place and left everywhere else future starved. Yet that’s precisely where we are as a nation.

One of the most hopeful economic stories in America is the investment in innovation in cities large and small in the USA. Some of this is being driven by the global trend back toward cities. When we were children, people were fleeing big cities due for the suburbs.

Remarkably the tech revolution has made cities more desirable. Because it’s easier and cheaper to start things than ever before (thanks to the cloud, easier ways to prototype products, lean methodology) it can be done most anywhere. But the formula only works because cities are places that can attract a concentration of talent and then build an ecosystem to support that talent. So today, we find cities competing on quality of life, attracting talent, supporting ecosystems.

What’s interesting is the most successful cities and towns away from the two coasts aren’t trying to be me-too copies of Silicon Valley, they are coming up with unique expressions of innovation based on their strengths. Witness Louisville building small batch manufacturing near its logistics hub, and GE co-creating appliances there with makers, artists and entrepreneurs at its First Build facility.

Pittsburg transformed from a steel town to software and now onto robotics and advanced manufacturing. In the process they are well into merging art, computing and making classes into integrated fab spaces for K-12 in the public-school system. They’ll have as diverse and sophisticated workforce as any city because of this. Mayor Peduto has been very intentionally planning invitation spaces, quality of life, and education as the future of his city. Chattanooga, Raleigh, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Miami and Burlington are all hip to this.

You could argue that one of Silicon Valley’s great exports is our approach to innovation. This is a particularly apt moment for all this because what needs to get invented nowadays is no longer pure software. In the world of IoT, wearables, new materials, additive manufacturing, more customized and smaller runs of products that take sophisticated authoring to create (everything from turbine blades to medical prosthetics), we need a wide range of making and manufacture cleverness. This calls on the full range of skills and capabilities seen across our cities –what Detroit is good at, the skills of the remade Brooklyn navy yard, the aerospace and making tradition of Los Angeles –coming together as probably the most exciting story and economic movement in America.

And we should give this movement it a name!

A couple years ago, Dale Dougherty, the Institute for the Future, Peter Hirshberg, and Marcia Kadanoff started calling this phenomenon “the Maker City.” The values of Silicon Valley and the Maker movement (experiment, fail fast, figure stuff out before you scale), the application of all this to makers, coding and project-based education, and its application to workforce development. We even wrote a book about this and the book itself became a modest best seller.

The book – entitled Maker City: A Practical Guide to Reinventing American Cities – was graciously funded by the Kauffman Foundation and is both a report on what works and a movement to further this progress. It’s been a privilege and exhilarating to work with so many cities which are at work on their future.

This is not some tired candidate complaining “who let the jobs out?” or more protectionist xenophobia. It’s America’s cities quietly figuring out what works, implementing 100 variations of the next economy, fueled by young people who are seeking out these affordable places and realizing they are great yet again. And to think Silicon Valley had something to do with this. That’s a hell of a thing to brag about.

Originally published on the Maker City blog

WeWork – which seems to be rebranding itself as the ever-so precious “We” – has expanded from its roots as a coworking space provider to an innovative presence in various market sectors, including housing, fitness, early childhood education, and — through its acquisitions of Meetup and Flatiron School — social gatherings and tech training. Now the global company, whose newly framed mission is “to elevate the world’s consciousness,” has launched a smart cities initiative, hiring former Waze and Google executive Di-Ann Eisnor to lead a team of data scientists, engineers, architects, economists, and biologists to work on issues related to urbanization, globalization, and climate change.

Di-Ann is a good friend of our Chairman, Peter Hirshberg, and serves with him on the board of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. She’s one of the sharpest people we know working at the intersection of cities, agent-based learning, and big data.

Her hiring hints at a strategy at WeWork to use the vast amount of information it has amassed on its users to partner with communities and city governments in developing data-driven solutions to problems such as mobility, infrastructure, and economic development. Quartz raises concerns about the problems with public-private partnerships such as those We Company envisions while recognizing the benefits of having more creativity and capital working on intractable global issues.

Relevant Link

Quartz – We Company’s first steps into the smart city space

Originally published on the Maker City blog

Recently, we were asked by Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP) on behalf of the Makers Valley Collective to partner with them on a unique proposal for Creative Placemaking. The proposal was solicited by the U.S. Consulate in Johannesburg and asked for local organizations on the ground to propose work supporting inclusive growth in South Africa:promote conscientious urban revitalization in low-income urban neighborhoods through “creative placemaking” that integrates community-based arts and culture programs into community development strategies for sustainable urban transformation.

The Makers Valley Collective is a group of Makers and civic innovators committed to experimentation, overcoming barriers, and working on practical and ‘glocal’ solutions towards urban renewal and greater community wellbeing.

There are three pillars to the work proposed:

• Clean and Safe Inner City
  Prototype public and public-private waste management systems (including bins, collection and street cleaning) that correspond with peoples’ current behavior and minimize the build-up of waste. Prototype ‘corner security hubs’ and other hard-infrastructure that support block-by-block safety using soft-infrastructure systems – local residents and volunteer ‘marshalls’, amongst other ideas that will arise from the community design thinking process.

• Productive Inner City
  Pair experienced ‘makers’ with local unemployed youth identifying themselves as future makers. Conduct skills development workshops in the form of short courses based around the designing and prototyping of solutions to commonly-experienced problems. Local makers generate an income in the process, gain experience and boost their entrepreneurial ability and employability.

• Inclusive Inner City
  Train and mentor Makers from diverse walks of life so they know how to bring their products to as broad a market as possible and also-depending on demand-scale up to manufacturing status when they are ready. This includes workshops on how to find financing through microgrants and other low-cost mechanisms.

Our role here was to serve as strategic advisor to the on the ground team at JICP. What makes this proposal particularly strong is that it includes ways to activate the city, turn young people into Makers, and work with makers to build pathways to more financial stability. Financial stability is impossible without housing stability and the JICP proposal recognizes this explicitly, calling it “the elephant in the room.”

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: USING MAKERS TO ADDRESS CRITICAL GAPS IN AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Part of the work proposed includes having local Makers work to build low-cost housing to address Johannesburg’s critical housing shortage.

Like the U.S., South Africa has re-urbanized at a rapid pitch which has led to rapid gentrification of its cities. But there is not sufficient housing for all of its citizens, particularly low-income people moving into Johannesburg from rural areas. Our partners in South Africa call this “the elephant in the room”, by which they mean that it is hard to build a clean, safe, productive, and inclusive inner city without proper housing, especially as rising property prices and gentrification are forcing the poor out of the inner city. The JICP and Makers Valley Collective hopes to work with 495 City project to prototype solutions to the housing crisis. This includes experimenting with new forms of housing suitable for inner-ring suburbs built to a footprint of 495 square meters in a modular fashion. A separate initiative empowers home ownership through the conversion of subdivided rental housing into shared ownership in a not-for-profit company, in the form of an innovative rent-to-buy scheme. At no additional financial cost to them, residents can become shareholders in the company that owns the property and expand their portfolio, benefiting from rising property prices in the area.

We saw a similar initiative in Santa Fe, NM where Zane Fischer, who was instrumental in the creation of Make Santa Fe, is at the forefront of the “tiny houses” movement through a company he started called Extraordinary Structures. Watch his TedX talk here:

As the project gets funded, we look forward to traveling to Johannesburg to work with the community and extant team there. This work builds on the writing and work we did in the Maker City book around tactical urbanism and also Peter Hirshberg’s involvement in Market St. Prototyping from the very beginning.

Likewise, it builds on Marcia Kadanoff’s work in low-income housing through TNDC.

To learn more about the housing crisis in Johannesburg:

• Affordable Housing Crisis in Johannesburg

• South Africa Urgently Needs to Rethink its Approach to Housing

We’ll keep you updated as this project gets the funding it needs to progress from strong concept to reality.

Originally published on the Maker City blog

Allegany County is located in upstate New York. This is a small county with a population of not quite 50,000, one with significant assets.

• A highly skilled population, especially as compared to other rural areas, with a concentration of tradespeople and advanced manufacturing competence

• The presence of both advanced manufacturing and science-based businesses as well as lower-tech “craft” businesses such as artists and small-scale agriculture

• Deeply affordable – both in terms of housing and overall business costs – as compared to other more urban areas in New York and Pennsylvania

• A region of natural beauty, rich in a variety of outdoor recreational offerings

• Strong anchor educational institutions (Alfred State, Alfred University, and Houghton)

• A strong sense of pride and the willingness to collaborate across the towns to advance the best interests of the county as a whole

Like so much of rural America, Allegany County has been struggling to figure out how to use the assets it has to build out its future self.

Threats to the future include: a declining and aging population, a lack of ethnic diversity, and economically, an overdependence on a small number of large employers in a narrow range of sectors. You can see how these threats are starting to play out by looking at this detailed profile in Data USA.

We worked with ~20 community leaders to craft a program to overcome these threats to the future and-at the same time-leverage the county’s many strengths. Our engagement happened over 3 days and included a 1/2 day of “economic tourism”, followed by a full-day co-creation session which we facilitated, and then a 2-hour debriefing session hosted at Otis Eastern Services LLC.

As we worked with the Allegany County community leaders, three things became apparent.

1. DON’T WRITE OFF RURAL AMERICA

In many ways, the best of America and American values can be found in small towns like Alfred (population: 5,200), Angelica (population: 1,400); Belmont (population: 1,000); Wellsville (population: 7,400). Allegany County is one of the few places in the country where young people can earn enough to buy their own homes. This is not a trivial matter.

Today’s young adults are slow to tie the knot, and a rising share may end up not getting married at all. According to Pew Research projections based on census data, when today’s young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a record high share (25%) are likely to have never been married.

Housing prices and job instability are two factors that are thought to explain these trends.

Yet rural areas like Allegany County can provide low-cost housing and relative job stability.

The figures bear this out. In Allegany County, the average salary is $44,085 – which may seem low. But, at the same time, the median home price in Allegany County is $72,100. These two numbers make for a housing affordability index of 1.6x where lower numbers are better. Compare this to the average salary and median home price in San Francisco where the average salary is $103,801 and the median home price $1,020,000, resulting in a ratio of affordability of 9.8x.

2. FOR ALLEGANY COUNTY, BUILDING OUT ITS FUTURE SELF MEANS GOING BEYOND ITS INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE

The future of the county is likely to be written in some combination of advanced manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and creative placemaking, the last to make Allegany County more attractive as a place to live but also to nurture the many tourists who travel to Allegany County to hunt and fish and enjoy the ATV trails at Tall Pines. We say this because due to changes in demand for oil and petroleum, the county has been struck by two plant closings. The number of actual jobs affected is small by big-city standards; one plant closing resulted in 100 jobs lost, one resulted in 350 jobs lost. Still, even 450 jobs lost has a ripple effect on the county, where the average town has a population of around 5,000.

3. INFRASTRUCTURE MATTERS

Time and time again we heard that the County was stymied by a lack of infrastructure. High bandwidth internet access exists but is not readily available to startup businesses. There’s an incubator but its short staffed, so you cannot just “drop in”, but must make an appointment to access its resources. There’s no coworking space in town. Also, the entire county is served by just one hotel although that will change later this year. Professional services are thin on the ground and in part, this is attributed to a lack of professional-style housing (apartments and condominiums versus standalone homes). Together, this lack of infrastructure is making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain newcomers to the area. Some cities and towns are starting to deal with this by paying people to move to the area. This is an expensive proposition and one that could backfire if the people who move there don’t end up staying for the long term.

THREE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR THE FUTURE OF ALLEGANY COUNTY

Advanced Manufacturing

Allegany County is home to many advanced manufacturing firms. This didn’t happen accidentally, it is part of the county’s heritage thanks to the presence of Alfred State College and Alfred University. While Alfred University is known across the world for its ceramics program, Alfred State College (part of the SUNY system) is also a key conduit of talent, attracting about 30% of its students from the five boroughs of New York City, who come there to attend its 2-year programs in the building trades and in mechanical engineering.

Some students end up working at Otis Eastern, Siemens|Dresser/Rand*, or the Arvos Group – ljungström division, three of the biggest employers in the county.

Otis Eastern serves many roles in the community. It is one of the largest local employers, a key source of local philanthropic investment through its founder Charles Joyce, and home to the Mayor of Wellsville – Randy Shayler – who works at Otis Eastern as Director of Resource Management. Multiple roles like this are part and parcel of working in the County, with many county legislators and economic development officials holding part-time appointments at the local universities. As we’ve written about elsewhere, due to the high cost of living, many rural areas are finding they can attract native sons (and daughters) like Charles Joyce to set up shop locally. Investing first in building a strong business that employs people locally, then investing in the development of the kind of civic institutions that can make a small town thrive as well as new forms of housing which are necessary to attract and retain professional workers.

Entrepreneurship

One of the many highlights of the trip was visiting Northern Lights, founded by Andy and Tina Glanzman, who moved to Allegany County from New York City, for lifestyle reasons. Andy Glanzman, CEO and Founder, gave us a tour of the facility, which is the largest employer not just in Wellsville, NY but also in Allegany County as a whole. Northern Light makes candles, the kind of candles that are then labeled by some of the biggest brands in the U.S. and then sold through major retailers, department stores (remember them?), and gift shops.

Northern Lights is the kind of artisanal business that we think could thrive in small, rural communities across America. Firms like this build up both process expertise and a skilled workforce. According to Northern Lights, the average employee has been with them for 18 years. In our tour, we met several employees who started out on the assembly line and are now running entire departments. Some come to Northern Lights with degrees in chemistry from one the three local universities (Alfred State, Alfred University, Houghton College).

Creative Placemaking

Andy is also the investor and founder of the Wellsville Creative Arts Center (WCAC), located in downtown Wellsville, which while not the county seat might as well be. (The actual county seat is Belmont which is located in the geographic middle of the county but is not nearly as vibrant a place as Wellsville). The WCAC is where to go to see music, hear local people speak about their passions at Open Mic night, and learn or improve your skills as a ceramicist. Ceramics is “baked in” to the DNA of the place thanks to Alfred University’s program and the county’s single incubator, Incubator Works which is funded – in part – by Corning – and started out with a focus on ceramics and has since expanded to include more types of businesses.)

What we loved seeing was the passion of a local entrepreneur who not only built a nationally-recognized business from scratch that employs people for the long term (Andy told us that the average tenure at his company is ~18 years) but also is investing in downtown Wellsville, having created not one but two civic institutions from scratch. In addition to Wellsville Creative Arts Center, Andy just purchased land on Main Street and is turning it into a labyrinth.

The labyrinth (still under constructed; the image above is what the labyrinth may look like when finished … although Andy plans one that uses bricks more so than grass, for ease of maintenance) resonated with us as a form of creative placemaking; also because we are familiar with the two labyrinths at Grace Cathedral here in San Francisco.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CITIES

The Maker City story is increasingly one of American reinvention, with similar themes and tactics resonant across the landscape. When we began this project we called it “The Maker City” because we thought that was where the action was. Not quite right. We should have called it “Maker Cities, Towns and Hamlets” because it’s increasingly clear that towns of all sizes are adopting the innovation playbook and the bottom-up spirit of the Maker movement in a myriad ways appropriate to their local context and heritage. This is the jubilant spirit of renewal that James Fallows chronicles in the book Our Towns, his recent epic 100,000 mile journey across America. America’s secondary cities are all-at-once showing renewed momentum, building on their affordability, their legacy downtown cores, and contemporary efforts to attract and retain talent. The great lingering question is: in this age of urbanization, what about rural areas, how do they spring back, what works in this time of enormous technological and economic change? It’s in places like Allegany County New York where questions like these are most restlessly alive, which is why we felt so privileged to help that region explore its future.

Originally published on the Maker City blog.

Throughout the United States cities, towns, and communities are suffering wherever industry has left town. Both economic and civic vitality are compromised. The symptoms are all too common: boarded up storefronts; corners populated by people—both young and old—neither in school nor able to find meaningful work; and declining kindergarten enrollments, indicative of young adults and their children fleeing smaller cities in favor of opportunity elsewhere. However, there is hope. The Maker City Project has identified a rich set of emerging tools and approaches available to help turn cities around. By applying new techniques to traditional economic development problems, “innovation partners” can serve as reinforcements to help a city or region that is stuck get unstuck. An innovation partner is a NGO*–generally a nonprofit–that comes from outside the community with a methodology that has been tried, tested, and shown to get measurable results in another area or region.

The purpose of this policy brief is to introduce three NGOs, describing both their methodologies and results; to inspire city leaders, economic development teams, and localists with the tools they need to move from hopelessness to tangible progress; to create a renewed sense of community; and to understand how and when to invite an innovation partner to come in and inject their methodology, thinking, and best practices. You and your organization still own the problem, but, by inviting an innovation partner to partner with you, you can help accelerate the solution with a methodology and processes that have been tested elsewhere.

You can download the policy brief, which profiles Rising Tide Capital, Innovation Collective, and Hope Street Group as well as some great work being done in Kokomo (Indiana) that leverages our book and Louisville (Kentucky) under the auspices of Interapt here:

Download

Don’t miss the end of the policy brief where we discuss two additional models for innovation of importance to localists.

Nan Braun, a Maker advocate in Kokomo, Indiana fielded a book club based upon the Maker City book we published last year. The purpose of the book club was to insert recommendations on economic revitalization into the city’s 15-year plan.

Angur Gopal is CEO of Interapt, a Louisville, Kentucky company that works to train former coal miners tech workers (coders, remote IT) through an unique collaboration with TEKY (Tech Hire Eastern Kentucky).

*Non-governmental agency.

Originally published on the Maker City blog

The Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA) is one of our key strategic partners. The way we think of them is as the modern incarnation of a trade association. Their membership consists of ~500 private and public sector players involved in urban manufacturing across about 150 cities and towns in the United States. Today, most trade associations spend most of their time, money, and energy lobbying at the federal or state level. What makes UMA unique is the fact that it eschews lobbying in favor of a membership-driven approach, where members take it on themselves to codify what is working, leverage their findings it policy recommendations, and then share best practices and policy implications with others in their communities of practice.

Founded by Kate Sofis (SF Made) and Adam Friedman (Pratt Center for Community Development) and headed up by Lee Wellington, the UMA is organized into four communities of practice:

• Workforce Development

• Land Use and Real Estate Development

• Local Branding

• Equity

It’s a holistic view of what it takes to drive the development and support of a robust manufacturing sector inside cities and towns.

Gathering
Each year, UMA hosts a Gathering to bring together its membership in one place for a 2-3 day event. The location of the Gathering is chosen with a great deal of care, so as to be able to make participants aware of what the local community is doing to support urban manufacturing. This year’s Gathering was hosted in Somerville, MA, a town that used to be almost exclusively a working-class enclave. When I attended college in Cambridge, Somerville was the city where graduate students lived due to its proximity to Cambridge and a large number of triple-decker homes that translated into cheap rents. Today, much of Somerville is on the “T” – Boston’s mass transit line – which has brought extreme gentrification to the city. Still, this is a place that remains proud of its roots as a working-class community.

Source: Bike trail near where we stayed in Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

Some 10% of the citizens who live in Somerville are Hispanic according to 2016 Census Data, many without the English-language skills required to work in an office setting. By 2018, the average house is expected to cost $616K in Somerville versus $742K in Cambridge, pricing out many working-class families. Note the acceleration in housing values in Somerville compared with Boston proper, effectively driving out Somerville natives into Boston as well as less transit-friendly suburbs and exurbs.

Source: Zillow data.

Why Attend?
Many of the people who attended the Somerville Gathering were explicit in the fact that they engage with the organization to learn what works in one geography so as to apply that learning to their own city and town. In other words, they were there to steal good ideas. (Stealings never felt so good – one proud participant told us!) You can read more about the UMA in this exclusive case study by Kim-Mai Cutler (formerly a reporter with TechCrunch), which was produced as part of our 2016 book – Maker City: A Practical Guide to Reinventing our Cities.

People came to the Somerville gathering from as far away as California (myself, my business partner Peter Hirshberg) and as close as Somerville itself (Artisan’s Asylum – a Makerspace; The Grommet – an ecommerce site selling goods produced by Makers; NuVu Studio – a school with a strong Maker orientation; Somerville Community Development – workforce development, ) were all in attendance.

For me there were 3 highlight of the meeting and one main take away:

1// Cocktail Party – Manufacturing as a Career Path
The night before the conference proper, Autodesk hosted a cocktail party and panel discussion at its new(ish) space on the Boston Waterfront called BUILD (Build, Innovate, Learn, Design). Housed in the Seaport Innovation District, Autodesk BUILD provides the space and equipment to support work with nearly any material used in the building and infrastructure construction processes—steel, wood, stone, concrete, ceramics, glass, and composites like carbon fiber, which are becoming increasingly important in the industry.

The Autodesk BUILD Space has more than 60 pieces of large-format equipment including six industrial robots, and 11 dedicated workshops for wood, metal fabrication, composites, 3D printing, laser cutting, and large format CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router and waterjet.

All the speakers were excellent, but what blew me away was the poise and coherent point of view put forth by Micah Reid the youngest member of the panel and a late addition (she was subbing in for one of the cofounders of the NuVu Studio, a school for middle schoolers and high schoolers). A senior in high school, Micah is graduating from the NuVu Studio, which you can read about here as part of our book. She will be attending Olin College next September, but intends to pursue manufacturing as a career, something which she would like to see more young people in high school identify as a career path and prepare for much as today they prepare for college. It is not hard to imagine her inventing teleportation and then open sourcing the technology, even if this strategy was to her personal financial detriment.

Another standout from the panel was Amon Millner, Assistant Professor of Computing and Innovation at Olin College. Amon spoke about the importance of making engineering, STEM, and manufacturing as a career path truly representative, which means a greater focus on communities of color for outreach. In particular, he noted that in Germany young people are guided towards two career paths that are equally valued: a vocational path and a professional path. He spoke eloquently about the need to destigmatize the vocational path, that it was the stigma attached to working with one hands that led so many people of color to decide not to pursue the vocational career path. That it was important – instead – to focus on the fact that both paths are equally valuable. Also, to help promote engineering as a career path for people of color.

2//Professor Greg Schrock – Research on Urban Manufacturing
We were familiar Prof. Greg Schrock due to his involvement with Portland Made, where he was part of a team that studied the economic impact of the Maker movement there. You can find the survey here – on the last two pages of the 2014 Report.

More recently, Greg worked with the UMA on a groundbreaking study of the Maker economy in Chicago (IL), New York (NY), Portland (OR).

You can find both an executive summary and the entire report on this site.

This is the first comprehensive report we’ve seen that classifies Makers by type of business, business size, and the like. Among the finding are these:

• Makers generally begin with a focus on products not markets

• A sizable minority of maker-entrepreneurs aspire to remain at small scale

• Maker-entrepreneurs who choose to become manufacturers face significant challenges in scaling up

• Some maker-entrepreneurs, typically those in the hardware and electronics sector, scale up by outsourcing production and finding a global market for their products

• Makers thrive in dense urban environments

• Makers need affordable industrial space but not necessarily Makerspaces

As Greg talked us through his research, he emphasized that there are different profiles of Makers and provided commentary to dimensionalize these findings. Makers tend to not self-identify as entrepreneurs (driven by money) but as more creative types (driven to create a product). Also of importance to Makers: being part of a community of like-minded people and helping their community to be more equitable and inclusive (i.e. social impact).

3// Factory Tour – Somerville
We toured 3 factories in 2 small groups, so I personally got to tour 2 factories. While I thought I would learn the most visiting Formlabs, a maker of 3D printers, in fact this was not the case. It was at the Taza Chocolate factory tour that I had my biggest “Aha” moment as discussed below.

Worker at Taza Chocolate factory preparing cocoa beans as the first step in the manufacturing process

ONE MAIN TAKE AWAY

There was a great deal of discussion of both inclusiveness and scaling at this conference – which makes sense given its theme: Making, Scaling, and Inclusion. That being said, one point of tension was whether the future of manufacturing work will require that workers gain exposure to the modern tools of production or will it be in more artisanal work, where knowledge must be acquired over time and can only be passed down through an extensive apprenticeship. The modern tools of production include computer science, electronics, robotics, CAD/CAM, and CNC tooling … all the things our young[est] panelist at the beginning of this post spoke so elegantly to. Artisanal skills range but can include “old school” vocational skills (e.g. welding) that takes a long time to master as well as instilling “old world” manufacturing techniques to production facilities in the U.S. (e.g. Taza Chocolates).

We are starting to think about this tension as a kind of 2 x 2 matrix that looks like this:

What’s important to take away from this matrix is the fact that because the U.S. is a higher priced labor market, it is critical for urban manufacturing firms to go “up the stack” so as to add more value. (U.S. firms cannot compete and win in the low-value quadrants … which is why we grayed them out.)

Going up the stack could happen by leveraging new forms of manufacturing production and/or creating a highly technical product. But of equal value – we think – is manufacturing that is based in artistry either around the production process or the product itself.

With an artisanal product, neither the products nor the production process are ones that can be easily replicated in China or other lower-priced labor markets. Artisanal products often are produced in small batches; to find scale, these kinds of firms need help securing national- and international- distribution as well as generating new forms of demand. That’s where a branded program – to create demand for products made in San Francisco or made in Portland – can come in. Companies like Etsy and The Grommet can also help to create a national market for products made in small batch or by hand.

The beauty of artisanal manufacturing is not just that the products themselves are beautiful; it’s also that the resulting jobs are less susceptible to being automated out of existence. When asked if chocolate making could ever be done by robots, the person leading our tour at the Taza Chocolate factory was emphatic: absolutely not. It takes all one’s senses – olfactory, taste, sight, hearing, touch – to make stone-ground chocolate.

Manufacturing based on technology inputs into the products themselves or process innovation may not be suitable for areas where there is a high density of technology companies. The technology companies tend to soak up all the talent in a way that starves the manufacturing firms of oxygen.

To me, this brings me to the final take away of the two-day UMA Gathering in Somerville. There were many discussions of inclusion at the Gathering. The definition that seemed to resonate with most people is that when establishing an urban manufacturing facility the workforce at the facility should resemble the demographics of the underlying community.

But I personally walked away feeling differently. So many communities in the U.S. – particularly those not located on the two coasts – have been hollowed out by the demise of entire industries. Steel. Coal. Suppliers to the automobile industry, many of which seem to have moved to China as part of globalization of this sector.

As a result of these factors, many cities or town do not necessarily have the right mix of talents to drive a manufacturing renewal. Thus, outsiders are needed to bring a sense of innovation, new skills and talents, new artisanry back into the community. This means that the workforce may not reflect today’s demographics so much as tomorrow’s. This may not be the most “politically correct” definition of inclusion, I grant you. But without an injection of new talent, many urban manufacturing firms will be set up to fail versus to scale. Also required: outside talent to help companies who start out making products at a small scale, to meet the needs of the local market, find national and even international distribution.

RELEVANT LINKS

• NuVu Studio was recently profiled on the U.S. News Maker City hub

• Autodesk BUILD is an example of an industrial Makerspace established in 2016

• Taza Chocolate can be found at your local Whole Foods

Originally published on the Maker City blog

We are excited to have worked with the Nation of Makers to pull together this program, which provides microgrants of $500-1000 to Maker advocates.

The objective of the program – which is supported by funding NOM received from Cognizant – is to encourage local Maker advocates to pull together the people and organizations that make up the local ecosystem around Making into a Town Hall. The overarching goal is to help communities focus on what they need to do to leverage the Maker movement to solve community problems, including and most importantly, getting people ready for the future of work which is digital and includes working side-by-side with robots and other forms of automation.

You can read more about the grant process here. Click the big orange button at the top of the page should you want to apply. Note that grants are only open to non-profit organizations that can field a Town Hall before March 16, 2018. Funding decisions will be announced during the National Week of Making which this year happens June 16-22, 2017.

As part of our work with the Nation of Makers, we put together a Short Guide to Creating a High Impact Town Hall, a microsite designed to be of use to Maker advocates in their community organizing work.

Originally published on the Maker City blog

Recently, we’ve noticed a trend. People who have found success in their chosen professions in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, have built businesses, and are now looking at pathways to create greater economic opportunity in the cities and towns where they grew up. The trend-and we think it is a trend-is seen in individuals as diverse as J.D. Vance, Walter Isaacson, Christopher Alan. The first two you probably know.

J.D. Vance is a venture capitalist and author of the best seller Hillbilly Elegy; he is relocating to Central Ohio. Walter Isaacson is President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, but is perhaps best known for his best selling biography: Steve Jobs; he’s relocating to New Orleans.

Christopher Alan, created a successful business in Los Angeles called AUTOParkit and recently relocated its advanced manufacturing plant to Warren, Ohio, where he grew up. What attracted him to Warren, Ohio was the availability of low-cost real estate for both commercial use and as an investment. Alan provides a bonus to those of his employees who chose to live in Warren, Ohio (population 41K), a city devastated by the demise of the steel industry.

Other entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are choosing to locate technology-based businesses outside of the major tech hubs, as a way to get sweat equity and/or capital to perform differently.

Ankur Gopal is an a serial technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Interapt, based in Louisville, Kentucky. In the Fall of 2016, Gopal started an Eastern Kentucky training program, which he said is intended to bring jobs to an area faced with a shortage of good-paying jobs. He said his program is a little bit different than some of the other coding bootcamps because he pays his soon-to-be employees as they learn. He believes that tech jobs have the potential to replace the rapidly fading industries of past generations in rural areas, such as coal and manufacturing. The training program also benefits Gopal, who hires the graduates to help his tech company grow. Interapt, No. 16 on a recent list of largest minority-owned businesses, helps its clients find the best-fitting, newest technology to help expand the client’s business or solve problems within their company.

Mark Kvamme is a respected venture investor who believes that “the Midwest is hands-down the best place in the world to create ambitious new ventures today.” He founded Drive Capital in 2013, choosing to locate the firm in Columbus, Ohio. This was seen as a curious move for someone who is not only a native Californian but also the second-generation in his family to go into VC; Floyd Kvamme, paterfamilias, is partner emeritus at KPMG.

WINNER TAKE ALL URBANISM

To us, these announcements seem to represent a common response to the growing notion that superstar cities have become too successful, soaking up energy, talent, and investment venture capital and talent from elsewhere in the country. This last is the thesis of a new book by Richard Florida entitled The New Urban Crisis: Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class (2017).

In his new book, Florida attempts to ask and answer the question, have superstar cities become too successful … not for their own good but for the good of the country as a whole? Certainly, over the last decade there has been a manifest movement of talent, capital, and wealth from elsewhere in the country to concentrate in a handful of superstar cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well. In his new book Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. Across nearly every metro area, middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing. Our cities and suburbs are being replaced by what Florida calls “a patchwork metropolis”, in which small areas of privilege are surrounded by vast swaths of poverty and disadvantage. The rise of a winner-take-all-urbanism, with a small group of winners and a much larger span of losers, signals a profound crisis of today’s urbanized knowledge economy that threatens our economic future and way of life.

Some data from Brookings Institution (2017) is very much on point here:

HOW TO REINVIGORATE CITIES LEFT BEHIND

Winner-take-all urbanism has left many smaller- and middle-sized cities and towns all but devastated, without access to the investment capital, talent, and energy that we here in San Francisco (for example) take for granted.

As a result, cities and towns at the bottom of this list find themselves unable to attract, retain, or create the kind of talent industry needs. Those cities and towns at the bottom of the list can be re-invigorated but it will take a concerted effort. It’s not so simple as looking to Amazon (say) to build a distribution center in a particular city or town, for two reasons. First, these jobs tend to pay minimum wage. Second, even if the jobs available paid more, they are a routine enough that they are likely to give way to robots in the near future. Thus, industrial revitalization must focus on what economists call “jobs in the middle” or “new-collar jobs”. These are jobs that pay well (typically $20/hour and above) and require considerable skills (not routine) but not necessarily a 4-year college degree.

Skills most in demand include: computer science, electronics, robotics, CAD/CAM, advanced manufacturing. Retraining is a dirty word for many workers coming out of legacy industries (think coal, steel, auto assembly). Instead of retraining, we prefer the term “upskilling”. Given the pace of technology change, a 4-year degree takes too long and often cost too much to impart the specific skills needed. Instead upskilling needs to focus on vocational training through community colleges, well-equipped Makerspaces, coding academies, and online academies like Udacity that offer nanodegrees in specific subjects like robotics.

THE ROLE OF NATIVE SONS AND DAUGHTERS RETURNING HOME

The novelist Thomas Wolfe (1940) famously published a novel entitled:

“You cannot go home again.”

We would counter that in today’s challenging times, when automation is expected to eliminate anywhere from 35-70% of routinized jobs, affecting workers on both ends of the income spectrum (high and low), there is a new call for social-impact investing in cities. Native sons and daughters are needed to return home, to apply our expertise, contacts, experience and will to cities and towns that need to reinvigorate themselves from the bottoms up. Social-impact investing can either mean volunteering money or time spent with one or more non-profit organization. Volunteering continues to be important. At the same time, we want to encourage people with entrepreneurial prowess to consider returning to the cities and towns they know best to help forge the future. Its an affirmation that change comes from the bottom up, from the diversity that is that is this nation, that the future strengths of our smaller cities will come from drawing on experience, talent and resources of our most successful geographies.

Native sons and daughters returning to their homes understand the culture of the city or town they are returning to and therefore are more likely to be accepted. These aren’t outsiders trying to impose their ideas on residents in a way that might seem at best paternalistic or at worst patronizing. Instead, those returning home know the culture, the heritage, and can quickly understand and access both the strengths and weaknesses of the cities or towns they grew up in.

Chris Arnade is a journalist, that like James Fallows of the Atlantic, has spent time criss crossing to better understand cities and towns not located on the two coasts and how they differ in culture and attitudes. Beyond the bubbles of the big cities and elite college campuses is an America that values community over careers, and has faced a downward trajectory for decades. We met Chris as part of our visit to our visit to Youngstown and Warren, Ohio.

We believe that successful people coming out of superstar cities would do well to consider an effort to go home again, particularly if “home” sits in the South, Appalachia, or the Midwest, all areas where income inequality is high, legacy industries are going away, and both young people and older workers need help reconnecting with opportunity.

DISPARITIES IN PRODUCTIVITY

If you are starting a new company or relocating an old one, you want to do so in an area with above average productivity. Productivity per worker drives firm profitability and wealth accumulation.

Productivity is not spread at all evenly throughout our country, with major urban centers on the two coasts dominating the current map in terms of productivity per worker:

(Source: Understanding U.S. Productivity Trends from the Bottom Up, Brookings Institution, 2017)

There are ~50 billionaires and 258,000 millionaires in the Bay Area alone. If 1% of them chose to go home, this would result in a cadre of 2,500 people who have the entrepreneurial skills, drive, and investment capital required to make a real difference. It would pay dividends in decreasing income inequality, increasing the resilience of the cities and towns in the face of the displacement that will only deepen as more jobs get automated out of existence, and turn despair into hope.

Of course, you don’t have to be a billionaire or millionaire to help.

Venture America is a nonprofit based in New York is dedicated to creating entrepreneurial opportunity in cities and towns that are under indexed for opportunity. Cities like Nashville (TN), Birmingham (AL), Cincinnati (OH).

(Source: Where Fellows Work, Venture America, 2017)

If you are just graduating from college with a degree in engineering or computer science, apply to become a Fellow. If you are in the middle of your career and having the backing of your company, think about becoming an EIR – Entrepreneur in Residence. Application for the 2017 EIR placements have closed so you’d be looking at their 2018 program. Which gives you plenty of time to line up corporate support for your work.

One of our colleagues-Gary Bolles of eParachute-has been thinking a lot of Maslow’s Hierarchy and the role of work in today’s society. Self actualization in this country and this era comes from the ability to do meaningful work. A lack of meaningful work is why some 32% of young people age 18-34 are still living at home with their parents.

(Source: For First Time In 130 Years, More Young Adults Live With Parents Than With Partners, NPR 2016)

Also, why opioid addiction has risen to epidemic proportions among our youth. Without major intervention, we are at risk of having an entire generation of young people being left behind from what makes life meaningful. Finding a life partner. Setting up your own home. Moving from renting a home to buying one. Starting a family.

What is the underlying driver here? It’s a kind of “Catch 22”. You cannot get a good paying job without a college degree. At the same time, pursuing a college degree can result in a crushing amount of debt, leading to a lifetime of regrets.

(Source: Student Loan Crisis: Degree of Debt and Regret, Consumer Reports, 2016)

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Get in touch with the Mayor’s office in your home city or town and/or the Office of Economic Development. Ask what help they need. Really listen to what they say. Reach out to the Congressional Representative or Senator in your home district. Involve them in the discussion on how to create jobs and economic opportunity.

As you embark on this listening tour, it is important that you put aside any preconceptions you might have. Replicating the success of Silicon Valley (say) in a town like Erie, Pennsylvania is not the answer. Every city and town has a legacy, something that is defining and a hallmark of greatness. Better to double- or triple-down on industries that are rooted locally and have some potential for growth than to turn your home city or town into something it is not. Also, be wary of thinking that coal miners and auto workers-say-don’t want to embrace technology. Our friend and colleague James Fallows of the Atlantic has written extensively on the two American futures: one full of hope, the future, new business models, and new methods of work; and one more nostalgic, populist, looking to past glories, and resentful.Video Player00:0000:47

There is every evidence that the workers left behind as legacy industries close down want to learn new skills and embrace the future. What they lack is not the will but the means. So focus on that … on reducing systematic barriers to aligning workers with the skills training for the exact skills in demand by local employers.

Here’s a checklist of specifics that you can consider based on what we have seen work in Ohio through two delegations: the one led by Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and the one lead by Rep. Rho Khanna (D-California). Also, the work of Gov. Gina Raimondo (D-RI) which provides a policy roadmap.

Go To Checklist

Good luck. And remember. You can go home again. And make a difference both locally and for the future of this country.

Relevant Links

• Meet the ‘New Urban Luddites’: We need a stronger word than ‘NIMBY’ to describe how destructive “winner-take-all” urbanism can be. (Source: City Lab April, 2017)

• Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer:
  They are not just the places where the most ambitious and talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be. (Source: Atlantic, April 2017)

Originally published on the Maker City blog