Lots of people who care about cities have focused their energy on helping cities attract college graduates, as the college degree share of a region is highly correlated with how successful it is economically.
This report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland cautions that  ”too narrow a focus on the graduates can lead to misguided policies”
It continues:
“It is a summary statistic that can change for many reasons. One metro area could have a fast-rising share because it has a lot of universities graduating local students or attracting high-skilled immigrants. Another area …

Look out, Silicon Valley.
Read the report from Brookings here, which notes the success Rust Belt cities have had in attracting skilled immigrants.
The report notes:
“Perhaps most notable is the very high concentration of high-skilled immigrants in older industrial metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast such as Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Syracuse. Detroit, for instance, has 144 high-skilled immigrants for every 100 low-skilled immigrants. Immigrants in these metropolitan areas tilt toward high-skill because they blend earlier arriving cohorts who have had time to complete higher education with newcomers …

More than 50 US cities are competing to win a $1 million prize if they increase their number of college-educated residents.
The Talent Dividend Prize will be awarded by CEOs for Cities to the metropolitan area that exhibits the greatest increase in the number of post-secondary degrees granted per capita over a three-year period, the organization announced recently.
Competing cities include: Akron, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago; Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Rochester, St. Louis and Youngstown.
Read the complete list of competing cities and more details here. Is your city on the …

Stephan Whitaker, a research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has noticed two salubrious trends in RustBelt demographics:

1) between 2000 and 2008, college graduates rose sharply as a share of the work-force in several urban areas

2) in the future, the graduate share will keep rising as older, less-educated workers retire

This news is good taken at face value, because research by Ed Glaeser and other urban economists suggests cities thrive as idea-generating centers. When educated people interact face-to-face, they breed businesses and insights.

Andrew Basile, writer of the infamous Detroit sprawl letter, shared this video he has been working on with us. It outlines how car culture destroyed Detroit and how the Woodward Corridor presents an opportunity for revitalization.

What an inspiring guy. Kudos to Mr. Basile for fighting the good fight and not “silently surrendering,” like so many other businesses.
Detroit’s Woodward Avenue:
Before:                                                                                    After:

-AS
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Duluth, Minnesota, is aiming to grow its population and reach 90,000 residents by 2020, according to this article in The Duluth News Tribune.
The city plans to build on its historic strengths such as shipping, and grow other areas like medicine and IT, according to the story.
It currently has about 84,000 residents, per the US Census via Wikipedia.
Do we have any readers in Duluth? What do you think?
Also, a personal observation – I was in Duluth for the first time last summer and was frankly blown away by how beautiful it …

Pittsburgh’s population has shrunk over the last decade, falling by 24,000 persons between 2000 and 2008. In the 2009 Democratic primary race for mayor, Councilman Patrick Dowd even made reversing population decline a signature issue of his campaign, (as you can see in this video).

We can get by without steel mills, but new residents are sorely needed to support the legacy costs of public servants employed when Pittsburgh had double the public to serve.

While Pittsburgh’s population dips, the U.S. Hispanic demographic drives American population growth and is projected to triple by 2050. Immigration accounts for recent trends, but projections also depend on higher Hispanic birth rates.

When Lebron James played his first game as an ex-Cav in Cleveland earlier this month, he was booed by 20,000 aspiring brain-drain border guards still upset about his decision to take his talents to South Beach… and out of Ohio. Ironically, the native Clevelanders I heard complain about this most were actually ex-pats who had taken their talents to Chicago years before. In doing so, they’d followed a well-worn path out of northeast Ohio – one so commonly understood that it could be invoked last year without any real explanation in those viral “Cleveland Tourism” videos.

As blogs like Burgh Diaspora rightly and routinely point out, “brain drain” is a canard when framed simply as a fear about talented native young people …

When I was an undergraduate headed to Canada for my freshman year, I remember trying to get a money order to pay for my visa application in advance of crossing the border. Standing at the counter in my credit union in Erie, PA, trying to persuade the clerk to make a money order out in Canadian dollars? I might as well have asked for Mauritian rupees. Before I left the credit union, half the staff had been called on deck to figure out how to perform such an exotic transaction. I shook my head at the apparent difficulty of using the currency of a country which, on a clear day, I could see from my bedroom window. Eventually getting what I’d come for, I left the credit union in disbelief of my hometown’s provincial ways, and made for the border.

Where, you ask?
Hamilton, Ontario, that is. At least, according to this story in the National Post that says the affordable and beautiful real estate appeals to those who are sick of Toronto prices.
I like to think this blog does a decent job of covering developments in the Rust Belt, from Buffalo to Milwaukee and beyond. But we haven’t spent much time studying our Canadian counterpart. It sounds like Hamilton has some interesting neighborhoods to explore.
And I gotta give credit where credit is due. I was alerted to this by a …