The growth of a given jurisdiction or region now depends increasingly on the decisions of specific groups of individual entrepreneurs or workers to locate there. These individuals,investors, engineers, systems analysts, scientists, creative workers,are what one analyst has called “very sophisticated consumers of place.” To them, the world is essentially a vast smorgasbord in which various locales compete for their affections and attention.
Surveys of high-technology firms find “quality of life” attractive to skilled workers far more important in deciding where to locate than any of the traditional factors such as taxes, regulation or land costs. The primacy of such factors helps make expensive, highly regulated San Francisco and its suburbs among the wealthiest places in the nation and also explains why inexpensive but aesthetically unpleasant Fresno ranks near the bottom in terms of economic health.
The most obvious winners have been the new peripheral communities, or “nerdistans,” that have grown up to service the needs both of the burgeoning high-technology industries and their workers. Their raw material is not ports, coal, iron or even highway locations, but concentrations of skilled labor. These high levels of educated workers characterize such areas as Austin, Chandler, Ariz., Irvine and Raleigh to a level far above the national norm.
Companies prefer these locations for a host of reasons, including the relative lack of distractions, crime and often lower taxes, but the most critical reason, according to numerous studies, lies with the availability and attractiveness to needed employees.
As knowledge workers and companies flee to the nerdistans, there are dramatic increases in the poverty and potential for further decay in scores of older suburbs, the “midopolis.”
Increasingly ethnically diverse and often saddled with significant traffic problems, declining schools and pollution, these areas generally lack the appeal of either the freshly minted nerdistans for families or the cultural allure of the better-preserved core cities for the young, single and childless.
This split between midopolis and nerdistan is most relevant to Orange County. Over the past two decades, Orange County has essentially developed into two kinds of places. One, made up of older suburbs largely in the north and east of the county, face many of the midopolitan challenges I have outlined above. The other, the nerdistan, can be said to have been practically invented here. The classic case, of course, is Irvine, but this also extends to the necklace of communities stretching down through the coastal,and particularly southern,ends of the county.
Although this will offend some of the more race-conscious professors, it is not race, as it was once was, but education and class that most clearly characterizes nerdistans. Nearly 30% of Irvine’s population, for example, is non-white but over 50% has at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 20% for the country in general and roughly 30% for all of Orange County.
Although these new areas often lack the social diversity and cultural richness associated with urban areas, there are things many engineers and scientists are more than willing to dispense with in order to escape the social and other pathologies common to urban areas and, increasingly, much of midopolis. In a sense, the nerdistans are attempts to recreate the suburban dream, but in a more conscious, and, in practice, less egalitarian way.
Over time, the biggest challenge of the new economy on the geography of Orange County will be to bridge this gap. This is in the interest of folks on both sides of the internal “Orange Curtain.”
On the one side, the people in the nerdistans feel the press of development and are reacting against it. They don’t want to become another Anaheim or Santa Ana. Yet as companies and skilled workers feel no alternatives, the pressures grow, prices rise and people sometimes feel that any development is bad.
On the other side, the people in many of the older communities are threatened with marginalization. What is the role of a Santa Ana or Anaheim in a new digitally driven geography?
I see two things that these areas can do. One, they can develop, as Westminster and Santa Ana have, to build off their base of ethnic business. They can become, in a sense, the new urban neighborhoods for Orange County. This could provide not only an economic engine for these areas, but a unique set of retail alternatives that are not easily duplicated on the ‘Net.
At the same time,and I think this may prove even more important,they can become centers for art and places where Orange County may yet develop the kind of urban infrastructure so attractive to the burgeoning “new media” and Internet parts of the economy. Most dot-com types, particularly the 20-to-30-year-old single and childless people who drive it,prefer more urban, even funky locations. That’s why this part of the digital economy is growing more quickly today in Santa Monica, Pasadena, San Francisco and Manhattan than in Orange County.
To fully enjoy a prominence in the new economy, Orange County needs to preserve and imaginatively upgrade its older areas, such as Santa Ana or downtown Orange to provide a kind of artistic, creative atmosphere conducive to the new wave of companies and the people who make it go. This starts usually in an area first populated by artists and clubs, and gradually emerges into a hot, youth-oriented district.
Fortunately, Orange County people are used to dealing with change, having gone from a rural backwater to a major industrial and technological center in just four decades. In the long run, the future depends on the will to rediscover within communities their unique sense of citizenship and civic purpose. Commitment still matters, and even in a virtualized world, our communities remain, as Jane Jacobs noted, “thoroughly physical places.” They must be nurtured, in real ways, with physical touch.
Kotkin is senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and author of a new book, “The New Geography, How the Digital Landscape is Reshaping the American Landscape” (available at www.newgeography.com).
