Educated 20- and 30-somethings are flocking to live downtown in the USA’s largest cities ”” even urban centers that are losing population.

In more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities, the young, college-educated population in the past decade grew twice as fast within 3 miles of the urban center as in the rest of the metropolitan area ”” up an average 26% compared with 13% in other parts.

Even in Detroit, where the population shrank by 25% since 2000, downtown added 2,000 young and educated residents during that time, up 59% , according to analysis of Census data by Impresa Inc., an economic consulting firm.

Read it all.

The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.

The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.

Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.

Read it all.

The state budget squeeze is fast becoming a city budget squeeze, as struggling states around the nation plan deep cuts in aid to cities and local governments that will almost certainly result in more service cuts, layoffs and local tax increases.

The cuts are widespread. Ohio plans to slash aid to Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and other cities and local governments by more than a half-billion dollars over the next two years under the budget proposed last week by its new Republican governor, John R. Kasich. Nebraska passed a law this month eliminating direct state aid to Omaha and other municipalities. The governors of Wisconsin and Michigan have called for sending less money to Milwaukee, Detroit and other local governments.

And it is not only Republicans who are cutting aid to cities: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, decided not to restore $302 million in aid to New York City that was cut last year, while Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, another Democrat, has called for cutting local aid to Boston and other cities by some $65 million.

Read it all.

To solve a looming pension crisis and budget gap, city officials here said, they needed to take drastic action. And everyone agrees on one thing: they did.

Nearly half of this city’s workers were told late last week that, come September, they would probably be out of a job. Nearly every city department will be eliminated. More than a dozen tasks will be outsourced, including graffiti removal, firefighting, building maintenance and street cleaning.

Unlike the drama that played out over the last two months in Madison, Wis., the battle over public workers in this bustling suburb and upscale shopping mecca in the heart of Orange County is happening at lightning speed.

Read it all.

There is no child psychologist who will tell you that children thrive amid chaos and uncertainty. Children need stability, regularity, continuity. And yet every year, we shake up their lives at will. We fire the newest teachers, increase class sizes and play musical chairs with teachers all over the district. Schools struggle to plan, to build, and each school’s knowledge base is thrown to the wind.

Bita Nazarian, principal at James Lick Middle School in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, remembers what happened last year. In the middle of the year, she felt she had a crack team of educators, both veteran and rookie, at her school. James Lick was humming with possibility and esprit de corps. But then the March 15 pink slips came around. Fourteen of her best young teachers were given notice, and morale went through the floor. For the rest of the school year and through the summer, these teachers had to keep one eye on the classroom and one eye on job possibilities elsewhere. The entire school, especially students, felt this acute instability until August, when most were hired back. But by then the damage was done….

How can we hope to attract and keep talent in this profession when, at every step, we make it so difficult, so insecure, so unvalued?

Read it all.

Detroit’s population plunged 25% in the past decade to 713,777, the lowest count since 1910, four years before Henry Ford offered $5 a day to autoworkers, sparking a boom that quadrupled Detroit’s size in the first half of the 20th Century.

Census figures released to the Free Press by a government source who asked not to be identified because the data has not been released publicly yet, show the city lost, on average, one resident every 22 minutes between 2001 and 2010.

Read it all.

In some of Chicago’s troubled neighborhoods, it’s not unusual for boys to join gangs at a young age. For many, it’s a road fraught with violence.

But a group called Becoming a Man (BAM) is working on getting to those youngsters before they’re drawn into gang life or drop out of school.

Read or listen to it all.

By 2006, most of the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, had been gone for decades. The population was shrinking year after year. So the city launched a bold plan to redeem itself.

The plan: Quit trying to redeem itself….Youngstown walked away from the most fundamental assumption of economic development and city planning: The idea that a city needs to grow.

“We needed as a city to recognize that we’re a smaller city,” says Bill D’Avignon, head of Youngstown city planning. “We’re not going to grow; we’re never going to be the Youngstown we thought we were going to be.”

Read or listen to it all.

Hamstrung by shrinking budgets, the police say the volunteers are indispensable in dealing with low-level offenses and allow sworn officers to focus on more pressing crimes and more violent criminals.

“We had the option to either stop handling those calls or do it in a different manner,” said Fresno’s police chief, Jerry Dyer, whose department has lost more than 300 employees in recent years. “I’ve always operated under the premise of no risk, no success. And in this instance, I felt we really didn’t have very much to lose.”

Other chiefs facing budget problems are also using volunteers. In Mesa, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb, 10 of them have been trained to process crime scenes, dust for fingerprints and even swab for DNA. In Pasadena, Calif., a team of retirees is combating identity theft ”” and, apparently, their own ennui.

Read it all.

In a move rare in the United States and perhaps unprecedented in Idaho, Boise County is filing for federal protection against a multimillion dollar judgment.

“This was not our first option. This was our last option,” said Jamie Anderson, chairwoman of the three-member Boise County Board of Commissioners. “This protects us so we can continue to operate.”

Chapter 9 protection, from a section of federal code expressly for financially distressed municipalities, means that creditors can’t collect while the county is developing a plan for reorganizing its debts.

Read it all.

Have bankers gotten an unfair rap in the past few years?

Yes. They get a very unfair rap. Not that they didn’t speculate, but we had an expansion in this country that any rational person should have known was not sustainable. You can’t have everybody making money in the stock market every day. But we all wanted the party to continue. How [else] can you explain the Bernie Madoff phenomenon?

How do you explain it, then?

Nobody cared. Everybody just thought, Where did Madoff get the idea? A cynic would say Social Security, [though] I would never say that. But it’s exactly the same thing, isn’t it? I also think people should have asked why he could outperform like that. There’s no free lunch.

Read it all.

A first-of-its-kind federal survey of online access found that Americans in lower-income and rural areas often have slower Internet connections than users in wealthier communities.

he data, released Thursday by the Commerce Department, also found that 5 to 10 percent of the nation does not have access to connections that are fast enough to download Web pages, photos and videos.

Compiled in an online map that is searchable by consumers – assuming they have a fast enough broadband connection – the survey seems to confirm that there is a digital divide, something experts had suspected but lacked the data to prove.

Read it all.

John Wright could make more money doing something else, but he’s found his calling as a custodial worker at James Simons Elementary….

Co-workers can’t imagine the school without his uplifting presence. Cafeteria manager Karen Brown has known him for 10 years, and she’s watched him develop relationships with students to help keep them out of trouble. Wright does the jobs that no one else wants to do, but he never complains.

“It’s the little things you don’t even think about,” she said. “It would be a struggle without him.”

Read it all.

(Charleston, South Carolina) He was a 10-year veteran of the Charleston Police Department, specializing in patrolling this city’s palmetto-lined streets, improving community relations and keeping big crowds in check ”” until his unit was disbanded, a victim of budget cuts.

So this month he was put out to pasture, quite literally.

Napoleon lost his policing job, along with the other five police horses here, as Charleston joined the growing number of cities that have retired their horses and closed their stables to save money. The Great Recession is proving to be the greatest threat to police mounted units since departments embraced the horseless carriage.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s paper.

Few believed the housing market here [in Seattle] would ever collapse. Now they wonder if it will ever stop slumping.

The rolling real estate crash that ravaged Florida and the Southwest is delivering a new wave of distress to communities once thought to be immune ”” economically diversified cities where the boom was relatively restrained.

In the last year, home prices in Seattle had a bigger decline than in Las Vegas. Minneapolis dropped more than Miami, and Atlanta fared worse than Phoenix.

The bubble markets, where builders, buyers and banks ran wild, began falling first, economists say, so they are close to the end of the cycle and in some cases on their way back up. Nearly everyone else still has another season of pain.

Read it all.

During Palenville Pagan Pride Day in August, the agenda reflected the goddess-centered theology of the Divine Feminine, which members say has its roots 12,000 years ago in the Goddess Cybele in Central Anatolia, in Turkey.

So after the opening ritual at 9 a.m. and sandwiched around “Lunchtime with the Priestesses,” the schedule at the old Central House inn included “The Goddess in Antiquity,” “Pagans in the Mundane World” and sessions on sacred drumming patterns, dragon rituals and the Cybeline Revival.

Still, it was the least celestial item that perhaps mattered most. That would be “Discussion of Maetreum of Cybele v. Town of Catskill, N.Y.,” a legal case dating to 2007 after the town first approved and then denied tax-exempt status for the group, which has been certified by the federal government as a tax-exempt religious charity. The goddess may rule the universe, but the lawyers will help decide whether the pagans of Palenville have a future in this historic old town just down the snowy hills from Hunter Mountain.

Read it all.

California’s controller said on Wednesday he has received more than four dozen tips about suspect financial practices by local governments and will ask the state legislature for power to open up cities’ books.

A group of California lawmakers has unveiled a package of bills to help State Controller John Chiang uncover financial abuses by local governments, seizing upon a scandal involving a city official pulling in nearly $800,000 a year in pay, and he is calling for its prompt review.

“This will allow me to go in and check to see if the books are as they state,” Chiang told Reuters in a phone interview.

Read it all.

(Merced, California) Life has changed in ways big and small in this central California county, which is still trapped in the wreckage of a housing boom that went bust five years ago.

The median home price, $116,000, is down 68% from its peak in 2006. Three of five homeowners with a mortgage here owe more on their loans than their houses are worth, compared with about one in five nationally.

Socked by a sharp loss of property and sales tax revenue, Merced County and its cities have slashed budgets, workers and services. The grass is being mowed less often in city parks. A senior center is open fewer hours.

Read it all.

The proposed Park51 Islamic community center and mosque project near Ground Zero is again looking for a top imam after Sheik Abdallah Adhami resigned the post less than one month into the job.

Read it all.

Ohio public school teachers would pay a larger share of their retirement costs, work until they’re older and see pension benefits cut under changes approved Thursday that aim to keep their primary pension fund solvent by saving $10.9 billion.

The State Teachers Retirement System board approved a host of changes to the benefit program that serves the bulk of the pension fund’s 470,000 members. The changes must be approved by lawmakers and the governor.

Spokeswoman Laura Ecklar said the package marks the end of a two-year effort to find a way to keep the pension fund afloat for the long haul.

Read it all.

The Temecula center has owned the land for years but didn’t encounter resistance until planning work on the mosque coincided with debate over the New York site, putting 150 Muslim families at the center of a bitter fight, said Imam Mahmoud Harmoush.

Some residents worried the California mosque would be a center for radical Islam and add to traffic woes in the rapidly developing region. The mosque spent more than $17,000 in the past year, which included studies on the 4.3-acre site to address code concerns raised by its opponents, mosque leaders said.

“It’s amazing how people shift their positions and really don’t listen,” Harmoush said. “They say, ‘Maybe somewhere they are mutilating women, somewhere they are beating their wives.’ If somebody did something in Jordan or Pakistan or Iran, that doesn’t mean American Muslims will do it here.”

Read it all.

When a community needs to rebuild crumbling roads, should houses of worship pay fees for the number of times their congregants drive on them?

That’s the question behind a recent suit filed by churches in the small city of Mission, Kan., who argue the city’s new “transportation utility fee” is a tax they should not have to pay.

With cash-strapped states and cities facing a slew of tough choices, there’s a growing debate nationwide about whether religious congregations should help foot the bill.

Read it all.

Despite a shaky economy and the specter of higher gas prices, tourism is expected to continue its solid improvement this year in the Carolinas, where it means almost $39 billion to the two states’ economies.

“We’re in the midst of a slow-motion recovery, but tourism remains a bright spot,” said Brad Dean, president and CEO of the chamber of commerce in Myrtle Beach, the oceanfront town that attracts about 14 million visitors a year.

South Carolina’s former parks and tourism director agreed.

Read it all.

In a solemn display, laid-off firefighters and police officers lined up Tuesday to turn in their helmets and badges ”” symbols of deep budget cuts that were destined to further erode the quality of life in one of the nation’s most impoverished and crime-ridden cities.

Nearly half the Camden police force, including civilians, and about one-third of its firefighters lost their jobs as city leaders sought to balance the budget amid falling tax revenue and diminishing aid from the state.

In all, the city laid off 335 workers ”” about one-sixth of its employees.

Read it all.

Co-op and condo owners will pay sharply higher property taxes next year, under a preliminary assessment roll released Friday by the Bloomberg administration. The city attributed the rises, due to take effect in July, to higher market values placed on apartment buildings by tax assessors.

Taxes collections are expected to rise by 7.5% for co-op owners, and 9.6% for condo owners across the city, according to a summary report released by the Department of Finance….

Stuart M. Saft, a real-estate lawyer and chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, said he “absolutely” attributed the significant increases to city budget pressures, and said city finance officials were looking for ways to maximize city revenues.

Read it all.

Police agencies around the USA soon could have a new tool in their crime-fighting arsenal: unmanned aerial vehicles inspired by the success of such drones on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Local governments have been pressing the Federal Aviation Administration for wider use of unmanned aircraft ”” a demand driven largely by returning veterans who observed the crafts’ effectiveness in war, according to experts at New Mexico State University and Auburn University. Police could use the smaller planes to find lost children, hunt illegal marijuana crops and ease traffic jams in evacuations of cities before hurricanes or other natural disasters.

Read it all.

Panera Bread will open a nonprofit restaurant Monday in Portland where customers can pay what they wish for food
.
It’s the third “Panera Cares” community cafe for the company and its first West Coast location.

Panera (PNRA) opened community cafes last year in Clayton, Mo., and Dearborn, Mich. The restaurants are owned and operated by a nonprofit arm of the national restaurant chain, which receives no profit from the business.

Read it all.

Unemployment rates rose in more than two-thirds of the nation’s largest metro areas in November, a sharp reversal from the previous month and the most since June.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose in 258 of the 372 largest cities, fell in 88 and remained the same in 26. That’s worse than the previous month, when rates fell in 200 areas and rose in 108.

The economy is strengthening, but employers have been reluctant to create jobs. Hiring will pick up in 2011, but not enough to significantly lower the unemployment rate, economists forecast.

Read it all.

A study by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management calculates the combined underfunding of pensions in all municipalities at $574 billion. States have an estimated $3.3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Nunes says 10 states will exhaust their pension money by 2020, and all but eight states will by 2030.

States’ troubles are becoming bigger. Hitherto, local governments have acquired infusions of funds from federal budget earmarks, which are now forbidden. Furthermore, states are suffering “ARRA hangover” – withdrawal from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the 2009 stimulus.

There are legal provisions for municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Some have done so. As many as 200 are expected to default on debt next year. There are, however, no bankruptcy provisions for states.

Read it all.

Cities across the nation are raising property taxes, largely citing rising pension and health-care costs for their employees and retirees.

In Pennsylvania, the township of Upper Moreland is bumping up property taxes for residents by 13.6% in 2011. Next door the city of Philadelphia this year increased the tax 9.9%. In New York, Saratoga Springs will collect 4.4% more in property taxes in 2011; Troy will increase taxes by 1.9%.

Property-tax increases aren’t unusual, in part because the taxes are among the main sources of local revenue. But officials say more and larger increases are taking hold. “This year we have seen a dramatic increase in our cities and towns having to increase property taxes” for pensions and other expenses, said Jack Garner, executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities.

Read it all.