Economic Impacts of GO TO 2040

The economy of the Chicago metropolitan region has reached a critical juncture. On the one hand, Chicagoland is currently a highly successful global region with extraordinary assets and outputs. The region successfully made the transition in the 1980s and 1990s from a primarily industrial to a knowledge and service-based economy. It has high levels of human capital, with strong concentrations in information-sector industries and knowledge-based functional clusters -- a headquarters region with thriving finance, business services, law, IT and emerging bioscience, advanced manufacturing and similar high-growth sectors. It combines multiple deep areas of specialization, providing the resilience that comes from economic diversity. It is home to the abundant quality-of-life amenities that flow from business and household prosperity.On the other hand, beneath this static portrait of our strengths lie disturbing signs of a potential loss of momentum. Trends in the last decade reveal slowing rates, compared to other regions, of growth in productivity and gross metropolitan product. Trends in innovation, new firm creation and employment are comparably lagging. The region also faces emerging challenges with respect to both spatial efficiency and governance.In this context, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) has just released GO TO 2040, its comprehensive, long-term plan for the Chicago metropolitan area. The plan contains recommendations aimed at shaping a wide range of regional characteristics over the next 30 years, during which time more than 2 million new residents are anticipated. Among the chief goals of GO TO 2040 are increasing the region's long-term economic prosperity, sustaining a high quality of life for the region's current and future residents and making the most effective use of public investments. To this end, the plan addresses a broad scope of interrelated issues which, in aggregate, will shape the long-term physical, economic, institutional and social character of the region.This report by RW Ventures, LLC is an independent assessment of the plan from a purely economic perspective, addressing the impacts that GO TO 2040's recommendations can be expected to have on the future of the regional economy. The assessment begins by describing how implementation of GO TO 2040's recommendations would affect the economic landscape of the region; reviews economic research and practice about the factors that influence regional economic growth; and, given both of these, articulates and illustrates the likely economic impacts that will flow from implementation of the plan. In the course of reviewing the economic implications of the plan, the assessment also provides recommendations of further steps, as the plan is implemented, for increasing its positive impact on economic growth

The Geography Of Opportunity And Programmatic Approaches For Enhancement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The majority of social scientists--including anthropologists, economists and sociologists--agree that the environment in which individuals live, work and socialize plays a central role in their range of opportunities and quality of life.1 A substantial body of research specifically highlights the deleterious effects that socially isolated and economically deprived neighborhoods can have on individuals. This type of segregation from mainstream society is too often the fate of poor, urban African Americans. Residents of these neighborhoods experience not only physical isolation from jobs, quality housing and amenities, but also social isolation from individuals and institutions that inhibits formation of diverse social networks and participation in civic life.2 The results of this isolation are believed to be more detrimental to children,3 but are manifested throughout the community in the form of poor educational institutions and outcomes, incarceration of youth and high levels of adult unemployment and underemployment.4 While social science researchers agree that neighborhood conditions influence opportunity, public policy developers and analysts are less consistent in their beliefs regarding the interaction of place and individual outcomes.5 Despite this disagreement on causality, both "place-based" and "people-based" strategies have been proposed and implemented as a means of increasing opportunity for residents of poor neighborhoods. Though no consensus exists regarding which is more effective or efficient, Avis Vidal (1995) contends that being able to declare the universal superiority of one approach or the other is not the issue: The relevant policy issue is not people versus place or strengthening poor neighborhoods versus dispersing their residents and somehow starting over; rather the issue is whether and under what circumstances specific interventions targeted to, and tailored to the needs of, disadvantaged neighborhoods have a constructive role in the policy portfolio.6 Given the growing disparity in income levels and continued concentration of poverty in the United States today, determining the most appropriate strategic direction in a given context is a key policy issue. In this paper, I explore what types and combinations of programs appear most promising for increasing the opportunity of residents of the distressed neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I begin with a review of Galster and Killen's conceptual framework of the "geography of opportunity." In the following section, I examine the results of exemplar programs of each type and offer broad suggestions of the contexts in which each type may be most appropriately used. I offer a brief description of the geography of opportunity in Milwaukee as well as past and current efforts to enhance this geography. I conclude with an assessment of how both types of development strategies (place- and people-based) might be most effectively implemented in Milwaukee in the future.Master of City and Regional Plannin