- [Host] Welcome to a special episode of "One Detroit."

As part of our ongoing Future of Work series, we're delving into one of the most important challenges for the state of Michigan, growing our population.

Earlier this year, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the creation of the Growing Michigan Together Council and the appointment of the first ever Chief Growth Officer to tackle Michigan's sluggish population growth.

One of the major issues is how to attract people from outside the region to fill jobs and retaining those who are already here.

Michigan Radio Political Director and One Detroit Contributor Zoe Clark spoke with leading urbanist, author and professor Richard Florida about the problems and possible solutions as we imagine Michigan's future.

(gentle upbeat music) (logo whooshing) (gentle upbeat music) - So Richard, I love to pick your brain.

And I wanna start with just this eye-opening fact.

This report that came out this spring that really sort of had the buzz of Mackinaw that showed the dire state of Michigan's population growth or lack thereof, really.

When you hear of a state, any state, right?

Incapable of growing its population first, just what's the first thing that comes to mind for you?

Like, what is the problem?

- Well, it's important news, but it's not new news.

I mean, I've been doing this for a while, and if you've been doing, studying demographics and economic change, population growth or decline, one thing you know, if there's one fact you know, it's that the Sunbelt has been growing and the Frostbelt has been declining for a while.

I don't know if this is true anymore, but for most of the past four decades, housing has been a lot more affordable in the Sunbelt.

There's been more economic growth.

Now, jobs weren't those good paying union factory jobs like you had in Michigan or Ohio or Indiana.

But jobs were growing, population was growing.

I think maybe until very recently, until we ended up with like the hottest days on record, people thought the warm, sunny climate was better.

So yeah, I think Michigan has been caught up in an ongoing long run shift in population away from the Frostbelt, the Great Lake states, the Midwest, whatever word you wanna use for that to the Sunbelt.

In fact, a very famous urban economist Ed Glaeser at Harvard actually wrote a whole economics paper showing that like Sundays and temperature were a big predictor of where population was going.

That said, I think if we're lucky, I don't wanna make a prognostication, I don't have my crystal ball handy.

I think we may have been reaching a tipping point, you know?

And the report captured hopefully what is the end of this, the beginning of the end of this.

And maybe we're beginning to see yet another shift after COVID, maybe, maybe, hopefully that we can abate this tremendous loss of population in Michigan and other Great Lake states.

- And you yourself have a paper with some recommendations and we're gonna get all into that about how we could possibly go about fixing this.

But let's do some level setting first.

Like, why does it matter, right?

There might be some folks who are like, "Okay, so like population has slowed.

It means more space in Michigan."

Like, help us understand why this is an important issue when we talk about population loss?

- Well, first we have to say why it matters for me and why a guy from the University of Toronto who grew up in New Jersey is so concerned with Michigan.

It's because my wife is from Michigan.

And my kids, although we live in Toronto, all of their, I shouldn't say all, my brother has three kids.

They live in New Jersey.

But most of their cousins live in Michigan.

In fact, Zoe, my brother's daughter who's from New Jersey is going to the University of Michigan to join five cousins on my wife's side.

So, we're gonna have six...

I mean, it's sort of amazing to me.

I think we have eight or nine or 10 nieces and nephews in college.

More than half of them are at one university.

So, it matters to me.

- [Zoe] Yeah.

- And why does it matter?

Your question is so interesting and so perceptive.

I lived in Pittsburgh for nearly 20 years, and an argument was made when I was in Pittsburgh, not by me, but that actually shrinking population would be good for Pittsburgh.

And folks, hold onto your seats.

The argument was that Pittsburgh could be like Switzerland without mountain slopes.

That what Switzerland did was become richer with fewer people.

Now, for most economists, most demographers, there's a little sliver of truth in that.

But for most people, they believe, and I think the truth is, when your population grows, you have people, economic assets, consumption, demand, I could go on.

You are gonna generally grow your economy.

And I think what's important for Michigan now, like this sounds so weird, right?

Like, we have a labor shortage.

Like, who would've thought that?

And I don't wanna say, there's still many better good jobs we could create, but in general, when you take all the jobs and what's coming now with reinvestment in manufacturing and electric vehicles and semiconductors, we're gonna have a real shortage of workforce.

And so, I think the idea would be that we need to add people so that we can get our economy jump-started and we can have the labor force that we need to meet this new demand.

- Well, I think that is a great way of taking us to this line, of this sentence from your report.

Michigan is at a historic inflection point, right?

Like, that's where we find ourselves right now.

And you sort of hear when you're talking about politics, "This is the most historic election yet."

Or you hear about decades, "This is the most important decade yet."

But you're really saying it here that right now, specifically for a state like Michigan, this is kind of make or break.

- It was really surprising to me.

You know, I began my, well, my dad worked in a factory in Newark, New Jersey.

My dad only had a seventh grade education.

Got a job in making eyeglasses like yours and mine.

I'm not kidding.

I mean they looked like this.

And I watched the industrialization happen.

I watched, that was a huge eyeglass factory and the manufacturer, I watched the factory decline.

I watched my dad get put out of work.

I watched, I lived in Pittsburgh, I watched the closing of the steel mills.

I watched the catastrophe of the auto industry and heavy industry in Michigan.

So, I have a long history on this.

If you would've asked me five years ago, could this come back?

I would've been maybe, hopefully, let's pray.

But what happened, I think without, with sort of behind the scenes if you will, or certainly when I didn't have my eyes on it, is the nature of the auto industry, right?

This internal combustion engine, analog thing driven by a driver with a shifter, it changed.

And it used to be that the trendy industries were computers and cell phones and digital devices in Silicon Valley and in Boston.

All of a sudden this thing we call the car is becoming something different.

It's driven by software.

It's assisted by artificial intelligence.

It's built by humans and by Robotics.

And it's powered not by necessarily in the future, an internal combustion engine, by an electric engine and a battery.

Talk about a turning point.

And what I tried to grapple with in this report, I'll sort of say it in shorthand for everyone listening in.

In the past when we made these big technological shifts in our country or in the world or in regions, metropolitan or city regions.

What happened with, when this happened, when Boston lost its textile industry in the 1940s and '50s, they said, "Oh, we're gonna grow high tech industries.

We're gonna build mini computers."

When Pittsburgh lost its steel industry, and I lived there and I taught at Carnegie Mellon, we said, "We're gonna make software and robots."

In the US, when we saw the industrialization, we said, "Oh, we don't have to worry about steel and chemicals and all these old industries.

We're gonna make semiconductors and chips and we're gonna make computers and we're gonna make software and we're gonna make social media and biotech and we're gonna win."

This is the first time in my life that I've seen the ability to take new technologies.

'Cause you couldn't do that with textiles in Boston.

You couldn't do that with steel in Pittsburgh.

But with autos in Michigan, you can take semiconductors and computers and artificial intelligence and batteries, and literally use that new, so I said it's the first place that we would see new technology be used to transform and now that's big for Michigan, but that's big, that's what we need to do as a country like- - [Zoe] Right.

- Michigan needs to do this to show our country it can be done.

If we can do this, if we can use these new technologies to transform an old, deep rooted incumbent industry, well one, we'll make Michigan a much better place with much better jobs and more opportunity for young people.

But two, we'll show the country, and here's what I think.

In the US we went on this two decade long experiment that we thought we could have high tech industries and finance and real estate in New York and Boston and Washington and San Francisco and LA.

We didn't need to worry about the middle.

The big opportunity here is the place you're gonna make these things from semiconductors to automobiles to electric batteries is in the heartland.

That's not just Michigan.

That's Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee.

But Lord God, if we could do that, we can now rebuild our country.

And that's what's so exciting to me.

And that's what I think the inflection point is.

Can we take these new technologies and use them to rebuild our industries and create good jobs and rising living standards for people?

- Oh, there's so much there.

And you know that there's really these sort of three pillars, right?

So, let's dig into them.

It's transformative technology, right?

It's talent and it's placemaking.

I mean you sort of just lay it out in this paper, like you kinda just gotta grab it and do it.

So, let's start with transformative technology.

What does Michigan need to do to get in the game?

- [Richard] Well.

- And are people capable?

- It has it all.

I mean, what's so interesting about Michigan.

- [Zoe] Yeah.

- Is that you have the leading edge center of automotive research in the world with your companies, with the big companies, Ford and GM, Stellantis, and with the supply infrastructure.

The numbers are in the report, but it's like more than half of all R&D in this field of automotive is done in Michigan.

Then you think, okay, well you know, the electric technology, that's done, that's Tesla.

That's done in in California.

Rivian, it picked up and it moved from Michigan to California.

Or maybe that's done in China or Korea.

The robots, the software, well that's not done in, but then you have your universities.

The University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State and more.

And there's a great group of researchers in Michigan who actually called this the University Research Corridor.

They just looked at the research at Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State, and you know what they found?

That's at least as big as like Boston with Harvard and MIT or San Francisco with Berkeley and Stanford or LA with UCLA and USC.

I mean, so you have the research and particularly at the University of Michigan in these key fields.

So, the idea is all you have to do is really align it.

Can you align that research going on in the universities particularly with the companies?

It's easier said than done, but my hunch, when you look at what's happening at the universities, the investment in these new technologies.

You look at Michigan Central in Downtown Detroit and you begin to think it's not foreclosed that it will happen, but with a little effort and a little alignment, it can happen.

So yeah, I think more than any place else, even if you asked me to stack it up against California or Korea or China, I'd say Michigan.

Look, Michigan faces tremendous competition from those places, but it's probably in the single best shape of any place to make that happen.

There's a giant misconception out there.

- [Zoe] Okay.

- And the giant misconception that the report tries to drill down on is that Michigan and Detroit in particular don't retain talent.

The fact of the matter is Michigan does spectacularly well at retaining talent.

The state ranks seventh in the nation.

And get this, hold onto your seats, hold onto your hats.

Of all the metropolitan areas in the United States when it comes to retaining talent based on certain surveys with data limitations, Detroit ranks between number one and number three.

The problem is Michigan and Detroit and its cities don't attract talent, they retain people who grow up there stay there with the proviso.

You do lose super, super, super teched up like software engineers, and the report says this.

You've gotta make a real effort to keep the super teched up software engineers and computer scientists and chemical engineers 'cause they're going anywhere in the world, they can write their ticket, but you don't, the thing is you have to attract talent.

And that's really the key.

And I think the big advantage there right now is cost of living, and believe it or not, quality of life.

Now, every time I say this, people say, "Not all of our schools."

But Michigan has very, very good public and private schools.

The urban centers are challenged.

Detroit is challenged, Flint is challenged.

But if you look at the public schools throughout the state, particularly in the suburbs, they're very good.

Private schools are superb.

They're a legacy of this wealthy past.

You look at universities.

University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, Michigan Tech, Central, you can go down the list.

So, you have a good base to build from and you have affordable housing.

You know, one of the things that happened post COVID, that used to be that New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles were expensive.

Miami and Austin and Nashville, and all the rest of those Sunbelt towns got expensive.

So Michigan has affordable housing and great places to live, not just, you know, all throughout the state there are spectacular places to live.

And then the third one I talked about was place.

That one of the things that Michigan has done pretty well is learn how to revive its urban centers.

Not only it's urban centers.

Michigan has actually done really well at making, it's more lakefront.

Like Traverse City and that part of up north Michigan.

The Brookings Institution in Washington DC did a whole study which said they have used quality of place and place-based assets to attract talent.

The one part in the report we talk about that might be seen as controversial but we think it's not, is that the one place you haven't done this in the state is around your college towns.

And I want people to really think about this.

If you think about where technology-based development occurs, it didn't occur in San Francisco to start with.

It happened in Palo Alto around Stanford, and then that catalyzed the Bay Area.

You think about Boston with its high tech complex.

It didn't occur in Boston, it occurred in Cambridge around MIT and Harvard.

If you think about Texas, it didn't occur in Dallas and Houston, did it?

It happened in Austin.

And one of the things we do in the report is simply compare the growth of Austin to the growth of Ann Arbor.

You know, Austin goes like this, Ann Arbor goes like this.

And one of the points we say is with everything we know about placemaking, wouldn't it be interesting to try to grow and scale the college towns?

Ann Arbor, Lansing and all the rest of them, all the other spectacular college towns throughout the state so that those young people, particularly those software engineers and artificial intelligence computer scientists, when they graduate, they can say, "I can take a job in my college town."

And one thing we know like, you probably know, everybody probably knows of Bell's Brewery, the award-winning brewery from Michigan.

I mean when he graduated from school, he's like, "Mo, no, no, no, no.

I don't wanna move my brewery anywhere else.

I wanna make beer and I wanna keep it in my college town.'

I mean, you see that from Michael Dell in Austin to Steve Jobs in California.

Many of these people want to build their companies where they went to school.

So, I think that's the one thing with place we talk about.

Maybe it's time to apply the lessons of placemaking to the college towns, and as we grow population, grow those places too.

- Well, and that's this fascinating idea.

And I wanna get back to that 'cause I did have to hold onto my seat when you were telling, 'cause when I read the report the first time, and I think it did turn a lot of heads on the island because it was like, "Wait, say this again."

So you know, the idea is if you can get people, right?

If you can build it, and they come, it's sticky here.

- Yeah.

- Like, people stay.

And again- - And they're already here.

I mean, the thing is they're at the University of Michigan and Michigan State.

These, I mean, I know this, I taught at Carnegie Mellon.

I'm a professor at the University of Toronto.

These are two and I went to graduate school for a while at MIT.

These are spectacular computer science departments.

A fellow at the University of Toronto developed machine learning and deep learning technology, right?

The thing that's all the rage in AI.

The University of Michigan is at least that good and bigger.

So, you have the best and the brightest computer engineers, software engineers, artificial intelligence people going to school in Michigan, they're not staying.

You need to give them a reason to stay.

Now, folks like Dug Song and others in Ann Arbor are doing a really good job of building a startup community, but it's just not big enough.

And those kids, and the other thing, you know?

I hate to say this because I love the university and I have six nieces and nephews there.

The universities have a lot of incentive to tell young kids coming out of business or computer science or engineering.

'Go take a job in Silicon Valley or New York because it pays more."

And rightly or wrongly, their rankings depend on that, right?

Pay levels are part of the way they're rated and ranked by the Financial Times or Business Week, or Bloomberg or whatever.

So, you've gotta get better paying jobs, but you've gotta get more excitement.

And when I was at Carnegie Mellon, this was a big eye-opener for me.

Before I wrote this book you mentioned, "The Rise of the Creative Class", I was trying to study why we were losing our software engineers and computer engineers and why it wasn't sticking in Pittsburgh, a city I love.

And by the way, I thought was cooler than Austin or Silicon Valley.

And the reason the young people told me is they wanted to live in Austin, not New York.

These were not hedge fund people.

These were computer scientists.

Kind of nerdy, quiet, technical.

They liked Austin because it was a navigable college town.

They didn't wanna go to the big city to start.

So, what I'm suggesting is if Ann Arbor was a little bit bigger and had a little bit more opportunity, that could be the way station where these young kids in their 20s, 24, 25, and Lansing and the others would take their first job and build their startup.

And maybe as they got older, you know, one of the things we talk about in the report, it's not Palo Alto versus San Francisco, it's not Cambridge versus Boston.

When that starts to happen, the college town then fuels the growth of the big city because then the people when they get older say, "Well, I wanna move my family and be part of the big city."

So, Ann Arbor and Lansing and the rest can all fuel the other cities in Michigan the way the college towns and other states do.

And I think that's the way to think about it.

And one of the things we talked about is maybe you need some transit connections between Lansing and Ann Arbor and Detroit and other places to make that physical and mental distance to shrink it.

But yeah, I think the assets are there and to me, to my mind, the college towns are now the missing ingredient.

- Richard Florida, we're gonna leave it there.

But on that hopeful note about what Michigan's future could look like, we're really grateful for the time.

- And I hope to be part of it.

I mean, I really think this is important for you, but it's important for our country.

If you don't do it, I'm worried about the...

If with all of these assets, if you can't do it, I'm worried about the future of our country.

And you know, I'll tell you one thing.

My dad, that seventh grade wisdom, working class wisdom.

He's like, "Richard, I grew up during The Depression.

I saw this country on our knees.

I remember the day Pearl Harbor was attacked."

He said, "I walked down to the enlistment office and I enlisted in the army."

He said, "They gave me an old World War I helmet and a broomstick."

Not a gun, a broomstick.

He said, "You've never seen a country turn on a dime like America."

You know America, and he said, "We were lazy.

We didn't want to get involved.

There was the depression.

People weren't working."

And as soon as that spark ignited, I can't believe he was wrong.

There's something in our DNA that allows us to rise, you know, we get lazy, we get, it's like we're living in the 1920s again, you know?

With the Gatsby and the rich people and the robber barons.

And then all of a sudden a switch goes off and I think we're at that switch.

That's why I called it an inflection point.

So, I'm hopeful we can get our act together.