On Sunday, August 29, Richard Florida was interviewed on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. They discussed The Great Reset and how cities will change as Americans adapt to a world after the recession. Click the image below to watch the interview.

A new report from our Martin Prosperity Institute team charts the geography of class in Toronto. The map below shows the deep underlying economic – class - divisions of the city and can also help us understand the current polarized mayor’s race.

The Philips Livable Cities Award is now accepting entries!

This award is a global initiative designed to encourage individuals, businesses, and community and non-governmental groups to develop practical, achievable ideas for improving the health and well-being of people living in cities – ideas which can then be translated into reality.

The award is being overseen by a supervisory panel of independent experts in three award categories: Well-Being Outdoors; Independent Living; and Healthy Lifestyle at Work and Home. The overall winning idea from any of these three categories and an idea from each of the two remaining categories will receive grants.

Submission deadline is October 28, 2010. Further information on the award criteria and categories plus an entry form can be found here.

Philips have also established a new featured group on LinkedIn – called “Creating Healthy, Livable Cities” – to facilitate an issues-driven discussion among people interested in making cities more healthy and livable places. Join the discussion here.

Arnold Kling is all over it:

Old consensus: we need Freddie and Fannie in order to make housing “affordable.”

New consensus: we need them in order to “prevent further house price declines,” in other words, to make housing less affordable …

Government interference in housing markets, which helped produce the disorder known as the financial crisis, is still producing disorder…

The effort to prop up home prices does the following:

1. Diverts capital from other uses.

2. Uses up taxpayer money that could be spent on other things.

3. Increases the wealth of people who find suckers to buy their houses at too-high prices.

4. Decreases the wealth of the suckers who buy now.

5. Decreases the liquidity and mobility of people who cannot find rational buyers for their houses because rational buyers do not buy into a rigged market.

6. Decreases the investment opportunities for rational buyers, who are unable to buy homes in an un-rigged market.

Last Friday, my list of America’s Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others.

The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the performance of all U.S. metros on our Brainiest Metros Index developed with my colleague Charlotta Mellander. The index is based on three variables:

In my last post, I mapped the projected growth in service jobs across America’s metro regions. Today, I look at a subset of those higher-paying, higher-skill jobs for knowledge, professional, and creative workers that make up the creative class. More than 35 million people are currently employed in creative class work in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law, health care, and education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment. The creative class makes up roughly a third of total employment and accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries in America. Creative class employment has seen relatively low rates of unemployment during the course of the economic crisis. Creative class jobs will make up roughly half of all projected U.S. employment growth – adding 6.8 million new jobs by 2018.

The past week or so, I’ve been tracking where new jobs will be created in America. Today, I look at the sector of the economy that accounts for the largest share of all jobs – the service class. More than 60 million American workers do this kind of low-skill, low-wage, routine service work, making up 45 percent of the work force. These service class jobs are projected to make up more than roughly half of all projected new jobs out to 2018 – 7.1 million new jobs, including 835,000 projected new home health and personal care aides, 400,000 new customer service positions, 400,000 new food preparation workers, and 375,000 new retail sales clerks.

The United States has seen a steady erosion of blue-collar work over the past several decades. We define blue-collar, working class jobs as those which primarily make use of physical skill or manual labor. These occupations include not only factory work or production occupations, but jobs in construction, materials moving, transportation, installation, and repair. Blue-collar, working class jobs currently account for 23 percent of all U.S. employment. Blue-collar occupations and the regions that specialize in this kind of work have seen the highest levels of unemployment and the greatest vulnerability to the economic crisis. The decline of high-paying, blue-collar jobs for lower-skilled workers has caused considerable concern that the U.S. is losing an important source of good, family-supporting jobs, and that the American labor market is becoming more uneven and increasingly split between higher-paying knowledge work and lower-paying routine service work. But what will the geography of blue-collar work look like in the future?

So, what are America’s busiest airports? Depends on what you measure, it turns out. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics compiles detailed statistics on America’s airports (via the NYT’s Catherine Rampell).

For domestic flights, Atlanta is the busiest airport, followed by Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, and LAX.

That’s the overwhelming conclusion of a new Gallup-Healthways survey based on telephone interviews with 173,581 employed Americans over the past year.

The first chart shows the toll that commuting takes on physical health. Americans with longer commutes suffer higher levels of back pain, higher cholesterol, and higher levels of obesity.

This chart from Gallup shows the dramatic growth in the percentage of Americans who want to see smoking banned in public venues.

Over at The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark accuses me of making too much of a case for high-speed rail:

Setting aside the positives and negatives of fast trains for now, my biggest qualm with Florida’s argument is his sense that the megaregion will produce the “Concentration and clustering [that] are the underlying motor forces of real economic development.” He cites the Boston-Washington and Char-lanta regions as examples of these megaregions, which he says “Will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars…”

Though there was been an increase in the number of residents living in the dense cities along the corridor (those that Florida implies need to be reinforced to meet the demands of the next century), that expansion is minor compared to the increase in the number of residents living in not-so-dense areas. It is true that the interconnections between cities in the Northeast have led to strong intercity rail ridership compared to the rest of the country, but the true success, especially of the New York metropolitan area, has been in maintaining urban and commuter rail ridership, which represents a far larger quantity of users and which has nothing at all to do with the presence of the greater Boston-Washington megaregion. The megaregion in itself, in other words, cannot be directly correlated with the notions of higher density…

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