We should relocate a bunch of government agencies to Midwestern cities. Actually, we ought to move these government agencies out of the Washington, DC, area. We have this mismatch. We have a number of Midwestern cities that are smaller than they used to be.
“The city of Detroit has lost nearly two thirds of its population since its post-war peak.” “Cincinnati has lost 40% of its population since 1950.” “In 1950, nearly a million people lived in the city of Cleveland. Now, under 400,000.” A lot of the industries that have been based there have gone away. “The plant where they once pumped out 12 million four-speed transmissions is shutting down.” “A southern Indiana pillow factory prepares to close.” “Hostess Brands says it will shut down its Akron plant.” “Heads of American Axle Manufacturing in Hamtramck say the plant is closing its doors.” So those are cities that are overbuilt. They have airport and housing stock and cultural amenities for biggest cities than they are today. And then we have coastal cities that have not enough infrastructure to support their current populations. A lot of that, there isn’t that much we can do about. Google, Apple, JP Morgan, these are private companies that have chosen to cluster in expensive coastal cities. But the government is something that’s under our control.
“The Washington area now commands the highest housing prices compared to income in the country.” If a certain amount of well-paid government jobs left the Washington area, we could not having a crippling hole. This is a very expensive office space market. Companies would lease that space. It’s an expensive housing market. If it was a little bit less demand to live here, people who live here would see rents fall down, and it could give places like Cleveland, Detroit, that have a lot to offer, they have art ,museums, they have professional sports teams, they have theaters, but have a lack of jobs engines, some more opportunities there.
There’s a lot of government agencies that don’t have a great deal to do with politics, per se. The centers for Disease Control, which is headquartered in Atlanta, is a really good model for that. It’s a government agency, it’s very important, but it’s not really part of national politics. The sort of technical and scientific agencies, you often find, have already decided to sort of move out to the suburbs in search of cheaper and more plentiful office space, and those are the kind of agencies where we should think about… if we could get an even higher standard of living by moving to lower cost cities, but also to places that, frankly, just have more need of the jobs. There’s no need for everything to be so incredibly centralized. It makes people feel like politics and government is happening in a far-off, very distant kind of place. The average income in the DC metro area is the highest in the nation, and the people rightly find that to be a little bit troubling to the American spirit. And so trying to spread some of that opportunity around, after all, the tax dollars that support these jobs come from everywhere, and it makes sense to, make sure that the benefits also flow everywhere.
