Urban competitive advantage, economic development, and urban economics

The big debate in urban economics is do you put money into education and building the knowledge capacity of your citizens and region, or do you spend your money attracting businesses. This is a bit less of an issue for the DC _region_ because it is blessed with the relatively steady financial teat of the federal government.

Even so, other business has spun off and leveraged the federal government presence, telecommunications, computing and defense businesses, which tend to locate in Northern Virginia, and biotechnology, which has developed out of the intellectual milieu of the National Institutes of Health, and therefore tends to locate in the Maryland suburbs of DC.

This debate does matter at the micro level of the city and county.

The various jurisdictions do poach businesses, and often the District of Columbia ends up on the short end of the stick in such competitions. (But I won't talk about the height restriction driving up costs to rent, or the high time and other costs of the regulatory regime in the city.)

The issue is really one of time. If you look at this in the long term, it makes sense to invest in people and knowledge. In the short run, poach businesses. However, DC is advantaged in some respects compared to the neighboring jurisdictions because unlike them, it also collects income taxes from residents, providing a broader revenue stream to support local government, a revenue stream that can in turn generate additional investment, or be wasted.

I think about this a lot in terms of what I call value destroying or value producing actions (not just for government but for business too.)

One of the areas where I see a lot of value destroying is in the "reform" effort for the DC Public Schools.

I don't see a vision put forward, just a bunch of activity--closing schools, buying out teachers, firing Central Administration personnel, contracting out services.

This comes to mind because when I was involved in H Street Main Street, one of my committee members made the point that an "arts district" on H Street shouldn't be limited to the business district, it should be extended into the community beyond the commercial corridor.

This led to an idea that I pushed for a few years with almost no take up: creation of an "Arts Cluster" of public schools around H Street, comparable to how the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools function--a beacon of excellence within a school system that for the most part hasn't been achieving.

The Cluster could have included schools such as Miner, Ludlow-Taylor, Wilson, Wheatley, Maury, Gibbs and others.

The arts studied would be visual, performing, language (including foreign language), and media.

Each school would have a specific "foreign" language of which all the students would be taught, daily. Ideally these international schools could develop relationships with Embassies and other organizations, and serve as places of attraction for people from other countries who speak that language, and expand beyond strictly language learning to include culture.

Each school could have resident artists.

And instead of selling off unused assets such as the Old Engine 10 Firehouse on Maryland Avenue NE, the unused "historic" school building on the Miner Campus, and the police department's Old Precinct 9 Station, these buildings could have been converted into artist workspaces and facilities developed in part to support the school function/arts district beyond the H Street corridor idea. E.g., instead of losing the Washington Glass School to Maryland, it could have moved into one of these buildings, developing attractions for the business district, but also supporting the K-12 learning environment in the city, and supporting creativity.

With some of those buildings resident artists for the schools, could actually live there...

Anyway, this comes up because of this essay, "‘But Where Does That Leave French?’" from Inside Higher Education. From the article:

Whatever our language choices and their respective global “ranking”, we can hope that a large number of languages find their way into our K-21 curricula (and lifelong-learning options) in response to the twin forces of economic globalization and cultural internationalization. ...

Encouraging widespread two-way bilingual K-12 education, in which native speakers of English and other languages learn to use each other’s languages, and vastly expanding the range of languages taught in U.S. schools and colleges may sound preposterous in the face of popular negativism about increased immigration and the alleged (and largely imaginary) refusal of immigrants to learn English (when they are in fact giving up their native languages at least as quickly as previous generations of immigrants). However, surveys of college-bound high school students and their parents have increasingly revealed their desire that a college education include language study and time abroad in order for graduates to compete effectively in the global economy. ...

Call it public diplomacy or global competency or inclusive humanism; our goal should be to make everyone in the world safer, healthier, and better educated about each other’s shared values, diverse lifeways, and unique cultural achievements. We have had enough of xenophobic fear-mongering, hypocritical ethnocentrism, and Doomsday rhetoric. If the worst scenarios do indeed come to pass, it will not be because they are unavoidable but because we have diverted too many of our resources into preparing for those pessimistic scenarios and too few into warding them off.

One of DC's competitive advantages potentially is the fact that as an international capital people come here from other countries and they speak other languages. But this is mostly a federal phenomenon--sure some DC schools like Oyster Bilingual Elementary School show excellence in this arena, but mostly it is an exception to the rule.

Why isn't there an initiative in place _at the local level_ to respond to this opportunity in ways that strengthen our local schools and the local economy?

It's not French that matters so much anymore, but Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. And the importance of understanding Spanish isn't just because of immigration to the United States, but because of the proximity and importance of Central and South America. And Portuguese... Brazil is one of the most populous countries in the world. And Russia...

(This kind of initiative would also go a long way towards the kind of people-to-people diplomacy that is being suggested to counter the disasters of image destruction at the National Government level.)

It's also a way to reposition the University of the District of Columbia.

There are forces to make UDC into a community college, and I agree that the city needs a community college*. But maybe the city needs an international university too, and maybe UDC would be a way to link the local to the international in a competitively differentiated fashion. (Also see "UDC Is a School to Retool," a column by Steven Pearlstein from the Washington Post.)

(* This would be unprecedented, but I think that DC should consider approaching Montgomery County and/or Prince George's County and propose a cross-border community college, leveraging their extant systems, rather than building a half-a**ed institution from scratch.)