Blue state blues

As San Jose City Council starts to absorb its progressive majority, Joel Kotkin at National Review reminds us what happens when liberal activists have free reign in municipal government: the working class and minorities suffer.

Progressives have demonstrated monumental incompetence in addressing everything from social equity to education, culture, and energy policy. ' even in postmodern American, failure cannot forever be sold as success.

In analyzing the nation's 107 largest metropolitan regions (populations over 500,000) Wendell Cox, a demographer at the Urban Reform Institute, found that the *worst* places for minorities--judged by where ethnic populations are growing and how minorities do compared with whites in such areas as educational attainment and homeownership--are generally those metros that re blues. The best, Cox found, are generally reddish or purple metros mainly in the South, Midwest, Gerat Plans, and desert Southwest.

African Americans, for example, generally do best, as compared with whites, in southern metro areas, led by Atlanta, McAllen (Texas),Raleigh, El Paso, Nashville, and Virginia Beach. The other best places are Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix and heartland areas such as Des Moines and Kansas City. Among the large metros, only Washington, D.C. metro, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland,and West Virginia, and the Baltimore metro, with their large numbers of federal employees, make the top 20 for Black progress. At the bottom are most deeply-blue metropolitan areas such as News York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Chicago, and San Diego.

Much the same pattern is seen with Latinos, for whom midwestern cities such as St. Louis, Columbus, Omaha, Kansas City, and Grand Rapids, and southern ones such as Atlanta, Virginia Beach, and Fayetteville (Ark.) all rate in the top 20. In contrast, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, and Boston fallway to the bottom. Asians, although doing better generally, follow a very similar pattern,with Atlantia, Fayetteville (Ark.) Kansas City, St. Louis and Cinnati in the top five. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco--long the Asian American population centers--all cling to the bottom.

Read the whole thing here.

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Photo taken by Nino.