Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

New York City’s Infrastructure Future

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My latest podcast features Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York. We talk about his very unique organization, the threat to the region posed by the Amtrak and commuter rail tunnels under the Hudson River, resolving the New York region's governance dysfunction, the highest priority infrastructure needs in the region, and a bit about megaregions. It was a great conversation. If the audio player doesn't display for you, click over to listen on … [Read more...]

The Overlooked Opportunity in the High-Tech Industrial Economy

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Long time commenter and guest post contributor Rod Stevens, a real estate and economic development consultant at Business Street, joins me for the inaugural podcast of 2019 to talk about the overlooked opportunities in high tech industrial economic development. People tend to think of high tech as software or biotech, but there's often an under-the-radar high tech economy already in place in the overlooked industrial businesses of many communities. We talk about what these businesses are, where they are located, what they need, and why … [Read more...]

Coastal Branding Tactics for Heartland Cities

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Indianapolis Monthly magazine just ran an interesting feature article on Gwendolyn Rogers, proprietor of a local store called the Cake Bake Shop. I have never been to it and am not the target market. But I thought there were a few interesting elements to it that are relevant not just to marketing businesses but cities. Rogers is not an Indianapolis native. She spent time living in Los Angeles and Idaho before arriving there. She had worked for a modeling agency in LA and her husband worked in the film industry. Perhaps because they both … [Read more...]

Louisville Bridges Project Is the Biggest Transportation Boondoggle of the 21st Century

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I have been a steadfast critic of the project to build two new bridges across the Ohio River in Louisville for over a decade. In fact, my first critical post on the bridges proposal was put up in 2007 less than six months after starting my original Urbanophile blog. The end result was even worse than I anticipated. The project has proven to be a money waster of the highest order, and in fact by far the biggest American transportation boondoggle I can identify in the 21st century so far. Part of the agreement between Indiana and Kentucky … [Read more...]

The Other Side of the Superstar Effect

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A couple of folks had interesting counterpoints to the superstar effect. Neil Strickland gave me permission to post the following email he sent: I wonder if you've read, or if I've referred to, the Santa Fe Institute's highly cited 2007 paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) called "Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the pace of life in cities." Its work was in "deriving growth equations which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference … [Read more...]

Superstar Effect Wins Again as Amazon Chooses New York, Washington for HQ2/3

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Amazon, obviously embarrassed at the way their HQ2 process has been received, leaked the results of the competition the night before Election Day, ensuring coverage will be largely muted. Amazon has reportedly decided to split HQ2 between two locations, New York City (Long Island City, Queens) and Washington (Crystal City, VA). I will have more analysis over the next several days, but this shows that the superstar effect is alive and well. Amazon chose note one but two elite coastal cities for its new headquarters. There's no other way … [Read more...]

Governor Mitch Daniels vs. Purdue University President Mitch Daniels

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Mitch Daniels has been fairly highly regarded both for his tenure as governor of Indiana and as president of Purdue University. Obviously he has critics, especially those who differ with his politics. But it's clear Mitch is a man of ideas and has done a pretty good job at implementing them. Many Republicans still lament that he decided against running for president in 2012. What he gets most noted for in both roles is financial conservatism. As incoming governor he faced a billion dollar budget deficit that he was able to close, then he … [Read more...]

Why Are State Boundaries So Significant?

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There was some debate about why state boundaries, which seem irrelevant in many ways as they don't reflect real economic geographies (or often even cohesive communities) and are only sometimes on natural boundaries. Here again is are the 50 "Facebook States of America" from the NYT piece I posted last week. A lot of people went straight to the state university system as a reason for this. The argument is that people go in-state because it's cheaper, and this creates Facebook networks. That's probably some of it but the state … [Read more...]

What Happened After the Last HQ2 Competition

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When I traveled to Oklahoma City for the first time a few years ago I was shocked to discover that in the civic narrative of the city's transformation - it's origin story if you will - the triggering event for change was losing a competition for a United Airlines maintenance facility in 1991 to Indianapolis. This United Airlines maintenance base was like a Foxconn or HQ2 of its era. It was a big deal because the thousands of jobs would be very high paying union mechanics and there were going to be a lot of them. It was anticipated that many … [Read more...]

Nashville Hot Chicken and the Pork Tenderloin: A Tale of Two Sandwiches

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One of the things you're sure to hear about if you read up on Nashville is a local dish called "Nashville hot chicken," a local culinary specialty. To listen to people talk about it, you'd think eating Nashville hot chicken was some kind of ancient local religious rite. In fact, Nashville hot chicken appears to be a dish of fairly recent provenance. According to the Wikipedia entry for it: Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville for generations. The current dish may have been introduced as early … [Read more...]