By: Zak Stone
Via: Co.EXIST

The co-working network The Hub’s L.A. outpost just opened, but it’s already taking off. The model: Less leased office space than collaborative space for people with shared values.

If you find yourself at the Hub L.A. on a post-industrial block of downtown Los Angeles, you’ll encounter all the features you might expect from a co-working space: Raw-wood planters and ample natural lighting. Zig-zagging communal tables, ready to host a row of MacBooks. Wall-sized white boards marked up with words like “inspire” or “collaboration.”


But click “Apple + F” on the Hub’s website, and you won’t find the word “co-working” written a single time. Rather, co-founder Nick Kislinger calls the Hub a “members’ space for people who give a shit.” While the 4,000-square-foot former warehouse may be ideal for cranking on a laptop all day, those in charge of Hub L.A. insist that the physical space is just the beginning of an exclusive social experience and community–portending a model of co-working spaces that’s more like a Soho House for social impact professionals.

While many co-working spaces feature business accelerator workshops and social events, CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stewart says that the Hub will go beyond that to serve the “whole person” with programming for “personal development or professional development.” And they’ll attempt to create a new community of urban entrepreneurs united around sustainability and digital media.

That means putting a cafe on-site, and organizing events like a release party for a book about “changes in consciousness,” a lecture on permaculture, a workshop on sustainable infrastructure, or a short-film festival.


And it also means letting the right kind of person in. On the application, members must demonstrate a commitment to social impact through their professional aspirations. Individual memberships range from $25, which gets an open invitation to the events, to $510, for unlimited access to the space (about twice as much as full-time access to more typical co-working spaces downtown). According to Kislinger, a “dedicated impact media lab” geared at “Inconvenient Truth-style” media-makers will soon open.

So far, the concept seems to be working. Despite only being officially open for little more than one week, nearly 100 of 600 slots for members have already been filled, according to Stewart. Two four-person mini-offices, called “hub-lets”–which require at least a six-month lease–are already occupied by OkCupid Labs and Verynice, a consultancy for social design.

And it also means letting the right kind of person in. On the application, members must demonstrate a commitment to social impact through their professional aspirations. Individual memberships range from $25, which gets an open invitation to the events, to $510, for unlimited access to the space (about twice as much as full-time access to more typical co-working spaces downtown). According to Kislinger, a “dedicated impact media lab” geared at “Inconvenient Truth-style” media-makers will soon open.

So far, the concept seems to be working. Despite only being officially open for little more than one week, nearly 100 of 600 slots for members have already been filled, according to Stewart. Two four-person mini-offices, called “hub-lets”–which require at least a six-month lease–are already occupied by OkCupid Labs and Verynice, a consultancy for social design.

By: Jeff Tyler
Via: NPR Marketplace


Jeff Horwich: Today, the apparel industry’s largest trade show kicks off in Vegas. And this year, the mayor of Los Angeles will be there, promoting a “Made in LA” campaign.

Here’s Marketplace’s Jeff Tyler on the surprising rise of a new American clothes-making hub.

Jeff Tyler: At this factory in downtown Los Angeles, large knitting machines transform yarn into fabric. What distinguishes this city from fashion hotspots like New York or Paris?

Pat Tabassi: We’re a great hub for the casual ‘L.A. chic’ look.

Pat Tabassi is marketing manager for Design Knit, a textile manufacturer. She says the company considered relocating to Shanghai, but decided the move would add time to their production process.

Tabassi: It’s really about efficiency. Because everyone wants to get their goods out as quickly as possible.

Los Angeles specializes in what’s known as ‘fast fashion’ — style as set by celebrities. Ilse Metchek is president of the California Fashion Association. She says L.A. designers have a moving target.

Ilse Metchek: You have 10 weeks to define what’s hot. And in 10 weeks, it’s not.

Companies based here can jump on a trend before it goes out of style.

Metchek: That’s what we’re all about. Built-in obsolescence.

From the home of built-in obsolescence, I’m Jeff Tyler for Marketplace.

By: John Schwartz
Via: The New York Times


BALTIMORE — The four cranes rise grandly over the port here, 14 stories high. Just off the boat from China and now being prepared for operations, the $40 million machines are part of this city’s gamble that when supersize container ships start coming through the expanded Panama Canal in 2015, Baltimore will be one of the few ports on the East Coast ready for their business.

“We think it’s going to be a major win for us,” said James J. White, the executive director of the Maryland Port Administration.

This sense that the new set of locks now being built to allow giant ships through the canal will bring riches 1,000 miles or more to the north is shared by industry and government officials along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, who have been promoting multimillion- — and in some cases multibillion- — dollar port projects for years. The Obama administration has now moved to speed up the review process for developing and deepening the harbors for several of these ports, including those of New York and New Jersey; Charleston, S.C.; Savannah, Ga.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Miami. The initiative “will help drive job growth and strengthen the economy,” President Obama said in announcing it last month.

But some who are following the efforts have begun to express skepticism about the hope and money going into dredging mud and raising steel. With so many ports competing for a share of the bounty, experts are questioning how big that bounty will be. “Everybody is trying to go after it — there are going to be few beneficiaries, in my judgment,” said William D. Ankner, a former official of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and a former secretary of transportation for Louisiana.

The big ships — known as “Post-Panamax” and even “Super-Post-Panamax” — are already in heavy use worldwide, making up 16 percent of the container fleet but accounting for 45 percent of its capacity, according to a July report by the Army Corps of Engineers. And “those numbers are projected to grow significantly over the next 20 years,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations for the corps, in announcing the report.

In the race that began when plans for the expansion were first announced in 2006, some winners have already emerged. The Port of Virginia, in Norfolk, is ready to receive the big ships today. And New York is also prepared, thanks to a massive dredging project that began 13 years ago.

But nearly every port in the game still faces major challenges and expenses — including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which plans to spend $1 billion to raise the Bayonne Bridge roadway by 64 feet to allow the giant ships through on their way to to Newark and Elizabeth, N.J.

Baltimore, which already has a 50-foot channel, has a bottleneck on the land side: the Howard Street tunnel, through which trains have to pass to reach the port, and which is too small to accommodate the double-stacked container cars that are increasingly the standard for rail shipping. The rail line CSX has announced a workaround that could cost hundreds of millions, involving a new yard beyond the tunnel filled with containers brought by truck; the port will load the trains with a single container to get through the tunnel, and the trains can be completed at the yard.

Matt Roth for The New York Times

Miami is putting $2 billion into improvements to its port; its dredging project was approved by the Army Corps of Engineers in April, and the city is building a tunnel costing an estimated $1 billion to create a crucial link between the port and the Interstate System of highways.

Savannah is preparing to move forward with a $652 million deepening project, while the South Carolina Legislature has committed $300 million to dredging for Charleston. A plan for the two cities to team up on a common port has all but stalled.

The big ships will also come via places beyond Panama: many are expected to come from Southeast Asia through the Suez Canal, and from South America’s eastern ports.

But more fundamental questions have been raised about the real benefits of the coming trade, and especially the effects of the new canal traffic.

Moving goods by water is generally cheaper than moving them by land because of the economies of scale of moving so many containers on those big ships, said John Martin, a ports consultant in Lancaster, Pa. So that would suggest canal routes will offer lower-cost shipping to the East Coast and Midwest through the canal.
But, he said, containers loaded on the West Coast, which has built up its container yards and highway and rail infrastructure, can outrun those that travel to the East Coast by water, and that can make the difference when speed and dependability are more important than cost alone. Besides, he added, costs and fees can shift; Panama can be expected to raise rates for canal passage, and “the railroads are not going to sit idly by” and let the water route undercut their business.

Scudder Smith, a consultant with the engineering consulting firm Parsons Brinkerhoff, said that a water passage, “all things being equal, will cause cost reductions — but all things are not equal,” he added, and so “I’m not at all confident in any numbers.”

That could be why J. Christopher Lytle, executive director of the Port of Long Beach, does not sound a bit worried. “There’s just not going to be a huge movement of cargo from the West Coast to the East Coast,” he said.

His port, and its counterpart in Los Angeles, are already dealing with some of the biggest vessels on the water, capable of carrying the equivalent of 13,000 container units — vessels too big to pass through the new Panama Canal locks.

After talking up port projects in ways that sound a bit like the overblown economic predictions about new stadiums and convention centers in recent years, some officials are now scaling back their claims. After Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi trumpeted plans for a “port of the future” at Gulfport with a 50-foot-deep channel, redirecting some $600 million in federal housing disaster funds on a project he pledged would spur the economy and create bountiful jobs. A state official at the time called it “the single largest economic-development project in the state’s history,” and officials predicted that it would surpass the Port of Los Angeles.

Today, Mississippi and the port are being more modest. The port recently noted that it is not pursuing the announced plans to dredge the channel to 50 feet, and because of lapsed maintenance, the channel does not even reach the depth of 36 feet authorized by law. The port is now focused on improving what it has instead of expanding greatly, and plans focus more on the cascade effect as smaller ships are crowded out of the major ports by the new superships.

Local critics of the original plan like Reilly Morse, policy director of Mississippi Center for Justice, said the state had been swept up in a national fad “that promised far more economic benefits than it could deliver and risked far greater burdens on the host community than it could support.”

Other ports try not to overstate their goals. Mark Montgomery, the chief executive of Ports America Chesapeake, the private partner with the state of Maryland in Baltimore’s project, said that his port and supporters understand that they are not likely to defeat the megaports of the West Coast, or even New York and Norfolk. Instead, he said, his port will serve Baltimore, Washington and Northern Virginia — though he also sees it as a potential gateway to the Midwest. “Our expectations are right-sized,” he said.

To Robert Puentes, a transportation expert at the Brookings Institution, the problem of whether the ports are overbuilding for a Panama payoff is one of planning. “We are the only industrialized country on the planet that doesn’t have a comprehensive freight policy,” he said. As for port development, he said, “I can’t see the federal government picking winners and losers” in such a politically charged environment, but “they could provide a little more guidance — where right now they are providing none.”

By: Emily Badger
Via: Fast Company

It worked for St. Paul, Minnesota, where artists revived an old warehouse district–and got to stick around to reap the benefits of what they helped create.


The process whereby artists cycle through the rundown neighborhoods of American cities has become so entrenched it even has a dirty name: the SoHo effect. Artists venture into an area where no else will. They help make it desirable, chic even. Then, as rents go up, they’re forced to move out. Neighborhoods appreciate over time. But artist income seldom does.

“I remember that very deeply in my soul back in 1986, we felt that was unfair,” says Kelley Lindquist, who became the president of a nonprofit called Artspace in 1987. “It was insulting for people to sometimes say, ‘Oh, artists like to move, they’re bohemians!’ Who likes to be on the street and renegotiate a lease and carry all their equipment and try to create a new community and basically start all over?”

This is the lopsided social contract cities often have with artists: We count on them remake abandoned neighborhoods, but we offer no provisions for them to remain a part of what they helped create. Enter Artspace. The Twin Cities-based organization has pioneered what sounds like the ultimate niche idea: It’s a nonprofit real estate developer for artists. Its flagship project, the Northern Warehouse in the Lowertown district of St. Paul, Minnesota, has been housing artists for more than 20 years in the heart of a neighborhood that’s undergone vast transformation. Today, as widespread civic enthusiasm for “creative” projects has begun to spawn skepticism, the Northern Warehouse may be one of the clearest case studies of the role of artists in rejuvenating decayed neighborhoods—and sticking around afterward.

Click image to view Fast Company's slideshow of Artspace's developments

The city of Minneapolis’ arts commission founded Artspace in 1979 to help connect local artists to affordable space in the city’s warehouse district. But the same artists kept coming back, priced out of their homes and studios, in need of yet another space. When Lindquist took over a decade later, the local arts community began to focus instead on the only permanent solution: They needed to control the buildings. Since then, Artspace has completed 30 live/work developments in 21 U.S. cities, with two more opening this fall, two more under construction, and another dozen in the pipeline.

Lindquist recalls that in the ‘80s, four other organizations–in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington and New York–were toying with a concept similar to Artspace’s (at the time, the five had been given a grant by the Apple Foundation to network with each other). Artspace is the only one of those original five that has survived to this day.

“I do honestly think that there is a prairie spirit here,” Lindquist says, laughing. He sometimes thinks about why this idea got off the ground in Minnesota when it didn’t elsewhere. “Living in Minnesota is pretty rough,” he says. “There can be easily six months of the year that would seem pretty hard to live in and intolerable to a lot of people. But I think it forced those of us here to try harder, and to be a little more experimental, a little more risk-taking on how do we keep our culture vibrant?”

Artspace has intertwined missions serving artists and small arts organizations and leveraging the properties that house them for “creative placemaking.” In its most literal sense, the term refers to building communities around arts and cultural activities. But “creative placemaking” has also become shorthand for the more ambitious–and harder to measure–idea that the arts can also lead to economic development. Over the last decade, many cities have fallen in love with the idea that if they can just lure artists and other creative types, economic vitality will follow. The tricky part is proving that an influx of artists actually causes everything that comes afterward: the higher property values, the new restaurants, the middle-class families.

“In a lot of ways, I think Lowertown is perhaps the most cut-and-dried example you’ll ever get of artists who really created a tipping point,” says Laura Zabel, the executive director of Springboard for the Arts, a long-running tenant of the Northern Warehouse. “Because there was such a vacuum here before.”



On the edge of downtown St. Paul, Lowertown was long a hub for railroad warehouses. If you wandered into the area 20 years ago, Zabel says, “there was sort of a feeling that you fell off a cliff.” Few people lived there and most of the buildings were empty. The Northern Warehouse had been built for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the ‘80s, the bottom two floors were still occasionally used by arts organizations. But the top four floors were uninhabitable after the roof caved in. When Artspace eyed the property in the late ‘80s, those top floors had been vacant for 20 years.

Artspace converted the building into 52 live/work loft spaces for artists, with complimentary commercial space on the first two floors. The project was financed with a mix of historic and low-income housing credits, private investment and philanthropy grants. As a result, the building’s mortgage is so low that Artspace can charge tenants well below market rate. To qualify to live and work here, artists must make less than 60% of the area median income. Rents range from about $500 to $1,000, depending on income, for spaces as large as 1,600 square feet. When Artspace recently commissioned a study of the area, market rate for a two-bedroom in now-booming Lowertown was $1,300 a month.

“I’m not sure [Springboard] would still be around if we didn’t have this space,” Zabel says. Her organization, which is about to expand, pays $1,100 a month for 2,200 square feet. This is a common refrain throughout the building. “I’d probably be nowhere,” says painter Matthew Rucker, who estimates that he makes 90% of his annual income during the two weekends a year when the Northern Warehouse hosts an art crawl. “I can honestly say that I owe almost all of my current success to living in this building.”

The Northern Warehouse has also created for its tenants something like the creative cacophony of a coffee shop on a much larger scale. The people who live and work here are sculptors, singers, graphic designers, composers, writers, painters, even magicians. And they constantly interact through the building’s co-op, at art crawl events, in Springboard’s artist resource center. Justin E.A. Busch, a writer and composer, says his six years in the Northern Warehouse have been the most productive of his life because of both the private working space he has here and the people who share the building with him. He produced one CD, for example, with a neighbor who’s a singer.

In a traditional apartment, that might never happen. “Even if your next-door neighbor in an apartment building is a singer,” he says, “it’s a different atmosphere knocking on a stranger’s door and saying ‘I can’t help notice you’re a singer!’ Here, you know everybody is an artist.”

Outside the Northern Warehouse, galleries and restaurants have sprung up throughout the neighborhood. The best farmer’s market in the city now runs year-round across the street. Artspace has developed a second, 66-unit property next door, the Tilsner. Today Lowertown is one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the city, and there is even talk of a new minor-league baseball stadium there.

This, of course, has the artists on edge, being attuned as they are to the fear that artists will always fall victim to their own success in a redeveloping neighborhood. The artists who live in Artspace’s properties will at least be safe in perpetuity. Artspace recently refinanced the Northern Warehouse, and it remains on stable financial footing as a permanent space for artists for decades to come. One might hope that its permanent presence might keep some of the neighborhood’s character intact, regardless of whatever else happens.

If that’s the case, the Northern Warehouse model suggests that it’s possible to break the SoHo effect but still leverage the urban pioneering instinct of artists. Artspace doesn’t prove that artists can power the economy of whole cities. Its success–born out of an intricate model that emphasizes the long-term stability of an arts community–hardly translates to a blanket endorsement of the equation that artists = urban prosperity. But it seems to be doing something pretty effective in the Twin Cities.

By: Emily McMackin
Via: BusinessClimate.com

Just like people, cities have their own distinct personalities. They come with their own set of strengths, weaknesses, quirks and attraction. Some are good at logistics and structure; others are creative and free-thinking. Bottom line: It takes all kinds to make the economy go round.

Rather than publish a dry inventory of the top 50 metros by export volume, Global Trade magazine has put together a “Who’s Who” list of sorts based on these top cities and the traits that set them apart in the global market.

Cities for Entrepreneurs, Techies
The award for Most Entrepreneurial went to Charlotte, NC, which ranks No. 43 in its export volume. Not only has Charlotte attracted nearly 7,000 new firms over the past decade (translating into 57,000 new jobs), it’s also known for its incentives, including electric and gas utility discounts, fast-track permitting and available grants.

But lately it is becoming even better known for creating an inviting environment for entrepreneurs. Start-ups and early-stage companies can find plenty of support through entrepreneurship programs, small business centers and incubators as well as assistance opening business in foreign markets.

Ranking No. 31 in its export volume, Austin, TX landed the coveted Most Likely to Succeed Award for its business-friendliness, record job growth and up-and-coming reputation as a tech hotbed.

A major ace in its corner? Lone Star State’s low-tax structure, which has zero corporate or individual income tax, tax breaks for businesses hiring and providing health care, and many more incentives. Austin’s tech boom is rivaling that of Silicon Valley, with Apple recently expanding its campus and eBay also growing there, together creating nearly 5,000 high-paying new jobs. Thanks to Austin’s eclectic arts and cultural scene and its “Live Music Capital of the World” designation, the city has no trouble attracting young intellects to fill those jobs.

Surprising City
Coming in at No. 32 for its export strength, Greenville, SC snagged the trophy for Best-Kept Secret, partly because of its proximity to universities like Clemson and the University of South Carolina, but also because of its sophisticated transportation system. Companies shipping products and goods have access to three interstates and freight lines and five ports, including the Port of Charleston.

Innovation is part of the landscape in Greenville, which is home to GE Energy as well as other cool companies and high-tech manufacturers.

Other winners were …
Best Logistics Infrastructure: Memphis, TN
Most Improved: Detroit, MI
Best Quality of Life: San Diego, CA
Best Proximity to Universities: Los Angeles, CA
Best Cost Structure: Cincinnati, OH
Best Incentives: Milwaukee, WI
King of the Hill (aka, Best All Around): Indianapolis, IN

submitted by: Derek Singleton, the Software Advice blog

Recent news coverage has highlighted several companies that decided to locate their production facilities within the United States. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that European aerospace manufacturer Airbus plans to open a massive plant in Alabama. The Detroit Free Press reported also reported that the high-end watchmaker Shinola would be setting up shop in Detroit.

These are encouraging signs for proponents of American manufacturing. What’s more, there have been reports of a number of companies “reshoring” their production from China or another overseas location. Companies are coming back for a variety of reasons, many of which are driven by conditions in China. Some of the most popularly cited reasons include:

—Chinese labor costs are expected to rise at a rate of 13 percent per year through 2015;
—The cost of shipping products around the world is dramatically increasing;
—Distance is making it difficult to design and collaborate on products; and,
—It is increasingly difficult (and expensive) to protect intellectual property in China.

Three Companies that Brought Production Back
While there are numerous reports of companies reshoring, these three represent a sampling of motives for a move back to U.S. soil:

Hurst
Hurst is best known as the manufacturer of the Jaws of Life, and they recently made news for bringing their production back from China due to quality issues and unreliable suppliers. After Hurst started receiving returns of defective products, they started sourcing their production domestically. As a result, they have realized significant quality improvements and have more control over their supply chain.

General Electric
In February of this year, General Electric decided to reshore the production of their water heaters from China to Kentucky. In addition to supply chain issues, GE had difficulty coordinating short delivery times. Even though GE had 30 percent lower labor costs in China, once supply chain and delivery issues were factored in, they saw their costs were actually six percent higher than producing in the US. The move back to U.S. soil has resulted in stronger control over their supply chain.

Peerless Industries
Peerless-AV moved back to the U.S. after an extended an expensive (seven figures in legal fees) battle surrounding intellectual property theft and knock-off products. Moving back afforded Peerless better intellectual property protection and provided them the ability to bring products to market more rapidly.

Let’s Turn the Trickle Into a Trend
Reshoring is not the dominant trend in the industry. The number of companies that have left the U.S. still dwarfs the number of companies that have come back to the U.S. The question then becomes: how do we turn this trickle into a trend? Here are a few ways we can make it happen:

—Create a more educated workforce that can fill skilled labor gaps and get Americans interested in manufacturing careers at all levels (e.g., assembly, engineering, management, etc.).
—Use automated assembly processes to limit the labor input of production more extensively.
—Help companies evaluate their true total cost of ownership (TCO) to help model the risks and costs of offshoring production.

If you have any thoughts on the reshoring trend, I want to hear from. You can contact me via the Software Advice blog at: What Can be ‘Made in the USA’? Or you can reach me directly by emailing derek@softwareadvice.com.