Chicago is a dramatic example of what's happening everywhere

You hear it in this clip  at 2:14-
"They can't get no jobs."

What's happening in Chicago is what's happening in cities, large and small, across the United States.  I just ran across this article in The Atlantic, that explains the underlying issues of why people in depressed areas of Chicago can't get the good jobs there, in great depth.

I started this post quite a while ago, but didn't have the time to read the whole article.  I took the time this morning.  This article focuses on the Black communities in the low income parts of Chicago, known mostly for the crazy high murder and crime rates these days.  Meanwhile, downtown and upscale areas of Chicago are booming.  Here's a little background on issues I'm keeping an eye on related to this:

-In the U.S. today, most of the high tech jobs with high incomes are clustered in large, tech hub cities.  The main ones are: Silicon Valley(The San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area), New York City, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Los Angeles/SoCal, Washington D.C., and at a somewhat lower level, some other areas like the the Raleigh Research Triangle here in North Carolina.  Richard Florida's "Creative Class" concept explains this.  In short, "Creative people like to be around other creative people," to quote one big theme of his research.

People here in NC may not like that I put the Raleigh Triangle "at a lower level."  But according to the stats in Florida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, an overwhelming proportion of the venture capital funding tech start-ups these days goes into downtown San Francisco (not "Silicon Valley" itself) and Manhattan in NYC.  Meanwhile, 1/2 of 1% of today's venture capital funds flows to the Raleigh Research Triangle.  Here's a good article/stats I just found on venture capital in The South.  A quick look for stats showed that roughly $148 billion in venture capital was invested in the U.S. in 2017, and the Raleigh area raised about $772 million in 2017 and 2018 ytd.

-When then professor Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, he hoped that his findings would help other large cities, and all the smaller cities, use the ideas to attract the Creative Class people, the highly creative and tech people, who, in turn, attract the major tech companies and start-ups.  In The New Urban Crisis, he writes that just the opposite happened, the high tech industry and other highly creative work has clustered even more.

-Because of this, the "best and brightest" people coming out of college, and the most creative people, have moved to the larger metros and concentrated there.  This has created a brain drain, with a huge chunk of the smartest and most creative people moving away from rural America, small towns, and small cities, to the big metros where most of the high paying jobs are.

-At the same time, in part because of Richard Florida's ideas and the "walkable city" concept popular with major architects and developers, downtowns all over have been redeveloped in the past 15-20 years.  By and large, that's a good thing.  It is attracting the better regional workers and businesses.  The downside is that if businesses and civic leaders focus most of their resources on just a downtown area, of any city, then other parts of the city may lack resources.

-But with that comes the continuing atrophy of rural America.  So we have tons of small towns and cities, and suburbs around many mid-sized cities, with huge heroin and opiate problems, more crime, and a lot of low paying and part time jobs, but relatively few high paying jobs.  Average people in rural and small town America are still struggling, already hit by the loss of good paying factory jobs 10-20-30-40 years ago.

-A lot of business people and civic leaders are well aware of this issue.  No one has figured out a good way to create HUGE numbers of solid, living wage paying jobs, in rural and small town America.  TENS of MILLIONS of living wage jobs are needed.  FAST.  Or, MILLIONS of new small businesses that can hire a few people each.

-What this article goes into, in great depth, is that the same thing is happening in the low income, largely black and minority areas of the large cities that are doing well.  We have tens of millions of young people, who grow up in rural America or in the hood, who are surrounded by few opportunities, and perhaps more importantly, few mentors on how to either find good paying work, or create small businesses of their own.

-At the same time, the vast majority of people (even homeless entrepreneurial goofballs, like me) have access to the internet, and with that, technologies, communications, and platforms that allow people nearly everywhere to interact, do work, and sell products to people across the U.S., and even around the world.  Yet there are no large scale programs teaching people to do this.

The more I watch all this unfolding, and learn new parts of the picture, like in this article, the more I think the only viable answer is turning Americans BACK into small business people and entrepreneurs.  150 years ago, most people were self-employed, we were a nation of farmers and shop keepers.  Our country was founded largely with that mentality.  I think we need to get back to that.  

Check out my art in person, or create a project of your own while here in Winston-Salem at Designs, Vines, and Wines.