Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1426

I’m always on the lookout for great websites and communities dedicated to cities. And today, thanks to a friend of mine, I found a new one called City Observatory . It’s my new favorite site for city geeks.

They describe themselves as a “ data-driven platform for sharing, analyzing and discussing the success of cities .” As soon as I read that, I immediately subscribed. I’m a big believer in using data to elevate the discussions happening around our cities and to cut through the bullshit.

I’m looking forward to digging into more of their articles, but I did already take a look at the first report they published, which is called: “The Young and Restless and the Nation’s Cities”. Click here to download the PDF .

What the report talks about is a demographic group that they refer to as “Young and Restless”, and which they define as being 25-34 years old and having a 4-year degree. And they focus on this group because they see it as critical to driving local economic development.

They’re the next generation who are going to start those companies and drive growth and innovation. And since the data shows that as people age, they become less willing to relocate (which intuitively makes sense), cities today are quickly realizing that they need to capture this group of smart people while they’re still restless (i.e. mobile).

So if this is important, which cities (in the US) are winning right now? Here are the top 10 cities via City Observatory :

1. Washington D.C. 8.1%

2. San Francisco 7.6%

3. Boston/Cambridge 7.6%

4. San Jose 7.5%

5. Denver 7.5%

6. Austin 7.0%

7. New York 6.6%

8. Minneapolis 6.6%

9. Raleigh 6.5%

10. Seattle 6.1%

The percentage represents the portion of the population that’s 25-34 years old and has a 4-year degree. I’ve just listed the cities here, but in reality they reference the entire metro areas.

Do any of the cities on this list surprise you? None are surprises for me. It’s more or less what I would have expected to see, except maybe for the absence of Chicago (it’s 12th according to this ranking).

Is your city doing enough to capture this group?

Image: Flickr

New York Magazine recently published a really great conversation between Marc Andreessen and Kevin Rose . Marc cofounded Netscape way back when, and now runs a venture capital firm .

In addition to technology, the conversation touches on a bunch of different topics such as why it’s beneficial to be an optimist and why change can be difficult for people to accept.

But they also hit on a number of broader economic shifts, such as the replacement of labor by machines, and the rise and decline of industrial production in the US. Here’s a snippet on that latter point:

You’ve described the middle class of the 20th century as a myth.

There are two middle classes. There’s the historical middle class—which is the bourgeoisie—starting in the, like, 1600s. This was the businesspeople and the traders, the merchants, the butcher, the baker, the general-store manager, the guy who was going off to China to go get silk and bring it back. Businesspeople.

But in the 1940s something really significant happened, which is we bombed the rest of the industrialized world. And so the industrial base of Germany was obliterated. Japan was reduced to rubble. The rest of Continental Europe was bombed. England was bombed. The industrial base of the world was bombed. The one major industrial country that wasn’t bombed was the United States. So the United States became the monopoly producer of industrial goods.

The army bombed the American middle class into existence?

It was an accident of history. We had a window of opportunity which we took full advantage of. We had this window from basically 1945 to 1966, 1968, in which we were basically running unopposed. In that window, all kinds of wonderful things happened. One of the things that happened was the rise of this new idea of the middle class, which there was no historical precedent for, which was college-level wages for high-school-level education. As long as there’s no competition, it’s all well and good. The minute the Japanese show up, the minute the Germans show up, it just all falls apart.

Click here  for the full conversation. It’s an interesting read.

Josh Lehner of the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis published a study earlier this summer where he looked at employment growth according to city size across the US.

What he found since the Great Recession of 2008-2010 is that larger metros – with populations greater than 1 million people – have rebounded the fastest. They are shown in the light blue line below:

According to Josh:

This is at least partially due to the fact that all those good economic things — agglomeration effects, knowledge spillovers, clustering, etc — happen in certain locations, which are usually bigger cities.

However, if you go back to the 1980s, you find that this trend isn’t consistent. Large metros outperformed in the late 90s. But they were more or less on par with smaller metros during the housing boom of the early 2000s and actually under performed in the early 90s recession.

One possible explanation for this – which Josh proposes – is that the recent housing boom acted as a sort of equalizer for smaller metros. It created stronger population growth outside of the bigger cities.

I buy that.

But then does that mean that going forward big cities will continue to outperform? Is this going to be more or less the new norm? Intuitively, I would think yes.

You can find Josh’s blog post, here . Richard Florida also wrote one for CityLab, here .