Chris [00:00:09]: Tolerance, diversity is going to be increasingly important for populations and people of many different backgrounds. So those cities that are culturally able to integrate or make people feel welcome from first backgrounds are going to be the cities that grow and succeed.

 

Amanda [00:00:31]: That’s the voice of Chris Fair joining us from Resonance Consulting. Chris is a trained futurist focused on helping communities craft a better tomorrow. He talks with us about what will make the cities of the future great places to live. We also examine US migration trends and what US cities can learn from places abroad. I’m Amanda Ellis, and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for chamber economic development and talent attraction professionals. Learn more about this podcast at livabilitymedia.com, and with that, let’s jump in. Chris, welcome to inside America’s best cities. Thanks so much for taking some time to join us today.

 

Chris [00:01:13]: Thanks for having me.

 

Amanda [00:01:14]: So can you talk a little bit to kick us off, Chris, tell us about Resonance and just a little bit about you, a nice overview to get us going.

 

Chris [00:01:22]: Sure. So my background was really in real estate, branding, marketing. I eventually went on to do a master’s degree in studies of the future at the University of Houston. And when I finished that, I started Resonance 16 years ago, really taking my experience in marketing places and futures thinking and methodologies to create a company that would help countries, cities, communities think about the future of places. So all the work we do at Resonance is really around research strategy in terms of economic development, destination development, urban development, then branding and marketing to attract talent, tourists or investors, companies to cities and communities.

 

Amanda [00:02:07]: So you said future studies. What types of things do you study as part of a program like that?

 

Chris [00:02:12]: Well, I kind of characterize it simply as everything from statistics to Star Trek. So being able to look at and model data to extrapolate trends from a quantitative analysis perspective to really letting go of the data and being able to think about and help shape visions, scenarios for alternative futures and most importantly, from my perspective, helping people shape and identify what future do they want to see happen? And then creating the plan to help them get there.

 

Amanda [00:02:41]: That sounds fascinating. It also sounds like something in your brain that you probably sometimes wish you could turn off.

 

Chris [00:02:47]: Yes, that’s one thing. The future is always coming, so you can think about it nonstop.

 

Amanda [00:02:53]: That’s true. That’s very true. So you recently wrote a column for us at Livability, Chris, talking about a city’s Lovability versus its Livability. Can you tell us a little more about that idea?

 

Chris [00:03:04]: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think we all really understand what is Livability. If I asked you or any one of a thousand different people, what do you want in choosing a city to live in? And we would talk about, we want affordable housing, we want good schools for our kids. We want access to health care. We want to live in a clean environment. And all of these things are critically important to our quality of life. But through our work and over the past decade, really studying and analyzing the factors that shape the performance of cities when it comes to attracting visitors or attracting residents or attracting companies, it’s much more what I characterize as the lovability of the city that determines where talent, tourism, and investment is flowing. And that lovability could be everything from nightlife to the Instagram-ability of different neighborhoods and streets to the quality of restaurants to culture to outdoor activities. I mean, these are the things that really attach us to place. So, while livability is critically important in terms of making sure we have all of our basic needs met, it’s the lovability that’s determining where we move to and where we want to travel to.

 

Amanda [00:04:16]: More like the character and personality of a place, because places definitely have their own personalities, and some we connect to more than others. And I think that’s true for everyone. So that makes a lot of sense. At Resonance I know you all work with cities all over the world, so at Livability, we work with places in the US. So, I was curious to get your perspective. What do you feel like US places can learn from cities abroad in terms of talent, attraction, some of the livability lovability concepts we talked about, or even vice versa?

 

Chris [00:04:47]: Well, I think one of our biggest challenges for US cities is really around housing. In terms of housing, affordability, availability, there’s lots of different estimates. Are we short whether it’s 3 million, 4 million, 5 million houses, depending on which methodology and theory you might use. The reality what we can all agree on is that we don’t have enough homes for the population that we have. I think European cities have done a much better job of managing and thinking about housing as a public amenity or a public infrastructure. Vienna would be the best example. I mean, for over 100 years, they’ve invested in and built housing where 60% of the people that live in Vienna now live in some form of public housing. So, I think that is a big step that we need to take, and it won’t be necessarily we don’t have 100 years to do what Vienna has done, so we’ll have to be more innovative. But I think it does require a new perspective on housing that we can’t just leave it up to the market to solve the problem, can’t just leave it up to government policy to solve the problem, either. That really, we need to find some solutions in between where the public sector and government is investing in and helping facilitate the actual development and management of housing in some new ways that maybe we haven’t done in the past. One of the other things that we’re sort of handicapped with in North American cities is that we grew up and designed our cities around cars, which means we’re very low density for the most part. So that means we’re not very walkable, we’re not very bikeable. And that’s something that our research has shown just even in the last few years, that the walkability and bike-ability of a city is now showing higher correlations with the cities people are moving to. So, we have a lot of work to do and it’ll take really decades to transform and ensure that our cities are more walkable, more bikeable. And a lot of that is going to come by what I call urbanizing, the suburbs. How do we take and create more density, more nodes around transit that provide the amenities that people are looking for, whether they live in the city center or in suburban areas and thereby will help make those areas more walkable, more bikeable? This is very much essentially the idea of the 15 minutes city that became so popularized during the Pandemic.

 

Amanda [00:07:11]: Yes, you all at residents do several Best Cities lists and I know you recently released your best cities in the US. And we also do a list like that and recently released ours too. So I’d love to chat about that. Can you give a high-level overview of some of your methodology and those different lists that you do which are broader than just the US cities?

 

Chris [00:07:31]: Yes. Every year we do world’s best cities rankings and America’s best cities and Europe’s best cities rankings. And of course, at Livability you guys look at cities under 500,000 people versus our rankings are all looking at larger cities of metropolitan areas of over 500,000 people. And what really makes our rankings unique is that we have analyzed over 1000 different metrics and what we’re looking for are those measures that have statistical moderate to high correlations with either attracting visitors, attracting young professionals, or attracting or helping form companies within the city. So, our rankings are very performance based rather than perception based or aspirationally based, really as a leading indicator of saying which cities are performing the best when it comes to creating the underlying conditions to attract talent, attract tourism and attract investment.

 

Amanda [00:08:32]: Even though we’re looking at really different population sizes, there’s definitely some overlap of some places in our list like Salt Lake, Madison, Charleston Sensei, some of those places that are in a sweet spot population wise, I guess to make both of them, but that we’re both seeing some of those things. So that is really neat. Do you have a favorite city?

 

Chris [00:08:53]: We all have favorite cities, and I would say one of my favorite cities is Montreal was a place I moved to go to for university. And it was, you know, moving from where I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and Canada, which know very suburban. Actually, one of the lowest density cities in the world in terms of the size of the city to moving to. A city where you could walk, you could bike, that had a bit of that European character in terms of walkability, bike ability, cafe culture, et cetera. When I was 18 years old, that was really revolutionary for somebody that grew up in a very suburban, auto-oriented city. So that was my kind of first love of a city and one of my favorite cities still.

 

Amanda [00:09:40]: Where are you now?

 

Chris [00:09:41]: I’m based in Vancouver.

 

Amanda [00:09:43]: So, you’re our first guest who is technically international.

 

Chris [00:09:47]: There you go.

 

Amanda [00:09:49]: Talk about Chris, what’s a favorite project you’ve worked on for a US city?

 

Chris [00:09:54]: Yeah, I think one of the recent projects, I lived for about five years in Greenville, South Carolina, in the late 90s, early Aughts really, which was the point the city had kind of reached a tipping point and where it had gone from being completely abandoned and boarded up in its downtown to becoming a more vibrant, attractive place and was starting to get a little bit of a buzz in the late ninety s. And we recently just did an economic development strategy for the city last year and it was interesting to look at. Some of the issues that we were trying to solve for were really symptoms of Greenville’s success as a city, and that Greenville has been so successful in creating a vibrant downtown that it’s a very desirable place to live. It’s attracting visitors and residents from all over the East Coast and the Midwest that enjoy the downtown, the quality of life. But what the city didn’t really plan for was how do we create housing and transportation for all the people that work in this destination city that relies on so many service jobs that really basically had kind of starved out the housing of the people that worked in that service economy. So, a lot of the work there was looking at, well, how do we kind of correct for some of the mistakes in the past in terms of not providing the transit, not providing the housing and the connectivity that the downtown needs in order for it to continue to be a success? And how do we make that prosperity also more inclusive across different segments of the population? So, for me, coming back 20 years later and seeing some of the unanticipated consequences of that success and trying to solve for that was a really interesting, fulfilling project.

 

Amanda [00:11:39]: Yeah, I would say so, especially if you lived there for a bit and kind of got to see it from all sides. That’s pretty neat. So, you’re a futurist. We talked about that some at the beginning. What are some community characteristics that you think will become more important? Or maybe things that we’re already hearing a lot about that you think will maintain their importance for attracting talent and investment in the coming few decades, particularly for US communities?

 

Chris [00:12:06]: Yeah, we already talked about the walkability and bike ability, so those are two new factors that we added to the America’s Best Cities rankings this year because we could see that they had moved up in terms of importance, in terms of the correlation of where young professionals were choosing to live. So, I think those will become increasingly important. We often hear about how millennials don’t want to own a car, or they don’t want to drive or get a driver’s license and Gen Z even more so. So, if you don’t want to own a car or you don’t want to drive, then obviously you’re choosing to live in places that are not auto dependent. So, I think that’s probably one of the biggest shifts and changes. On the flip side, we don’t factor this into our rankings, but we do see that a lot of migration in the US. To US. Cities has been towards the sun belt, whether that’s Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, et cetera. But those areas also, as we’re seeing right now this summer, are also the most sensitive to the effects of climate change. So, in effect, we’re moving the wrong way. So, I think that that will be one of the longer-term trends that’s going to start to emerge over the next decade, will be do we return to some of the cities more towards the north that have access to water, that have access to some of the resources that we’ll need? So, this is, I think, hard to predict, but for me is one of the things as a futurist that I’m really looking at as it relates to thinking about long term implications and what that might mean for cities across the US.

 

Amanda [00:13:41]: Something that has been in the news a lot in the last couple of years, Chris, that has been talked about a lot, like during the Pandemic. And as we’re coming out of that, is this migration from bigger cities to smaller and mid-sized cities. Do you feel like that’s still happening? What does that trend look like in your opinion?

 

Chris [00:13:58]: Yeah, it’s literally a bit of an urban myth. I think that we’re seeing this urban exodus. Certainly, over the course of the Pandemic, we did see a migration out of some of our superstar cities like New York or Chicago or LA or San Francisco to cities like Austin or Tampa or Orlando, and Raleigh for example. But that has always been the case you know. What changed during the Pandemic was the lack of inflow of international migrants who typically move into the gateway cities like a New York or a Chicago or LA, or you know San Francisco. So, one tap, we kind of opened up even more in terms of the outflow of people who were able to remote work and move to maybe more affordable or more lifestyle-oriented centers. But we turned off the tap for a couple of years in terms of migration into the country. So, I think this is going to balance itself out over time and we will see the gateway cities recover and things will kind of get back into balance, and then, in fact, we may see that, well, guess what? Affordability has kind of been lost in Austin and some of these other cities, et cetera. So, they’ve a bit lost, one of their competitive advantages that attracted people in the first place. So, we’ll see how this all balances out in the next few years.

 

Amanda [00:15:16]: It’s interesting, we do some research at Livability on relocation habits in general, and we’ve shown lately that people moving tend to be targeting cities of similar size to where they’re coming from.

 

Chris [00:15:28]: Yeah, definitely. I think the patterns of where people can choose to live and work have changed with the flexibility of remote work. But we need to keep in mind that only 40% of the population of US workers were working in offices to begin with. If a quarter of them work remotely, we’re still only talking about 10% of the population, and I think it’ll be much lower than that. And we’ll end up finding that it’s 4 or 5%, which might have been double what it was before the Pandemic. But this isn’t wholesale systemic change where everybody leaves New York and moves to Miami. We’ll start to see this kind of balance out here as immigration comes back online, which it has, and hopefully grows, because we’re going to need that labor in the future.

 

Amanda [00:16:13]: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think a lot of us tend to forget that’s actually kind of a relatively small number of A. office workers, B. those that are office workers but have remote flexibility. That makes a lot of sense. That overall percentage is actually not as high as we sometimes think it is.

 

Chris [00:16:29]: And if you look at the number of people that live in the hundred largest cities in the US. It’s almost exactly the same. It’s actually a million more than it was prior to the Pandemic. So, people changed locations a little bit, but we didn’t leave cities and move to the country. We maybe changed some of the cities we moved to. As I said, immigration coming into those gateway cities is a big part of why those population declines show up in the statistics right now. But those will get wiped out, I suspect, in the next few years.

 

Amanda [00:17:01]: Yes. What are your thoughts on implications of that for communities wanting to have staying power with people, especially with this trend of trying to get to recruit talent by having them move to your community, but then also trying to get them to stay? Any thoughts on that?

 

Chris [00:17:17]: Yeah, I think that the future of the country is going to be driven by immigration. So tolerance, diversity is going to be increasingly important for populations and people of many different backgrounds. So those cities that are culturally able to integrate or make people feel welcome from diverse backgrounds are going to be the cities that grow and succeed.

 

Amanda [00:17:43]: Thinking about communities and talent attraction campaigns. I feel like a lot of times it’s targeted at other people in the US. Do you think that that should have a broader perspective than it has so far?

 

Chris [00:17:53]: Yeah, I think that that’s probably one of the areas that a lot of US. Cities need to improve on. We talked a little bit about looking at examples in Europe or even Canada. Toronto is the most diverse city in the world. 53% of the people that live in the Toronto metropolitan area were born in another country. As we think about the future and economic growth and prosperity is going to be driven by the next hundred million people that immigrate to the United States and that tolerance, diversity, inclusion for multicultural communities and creating the social fabric that allows for that to happen and encourages it will be a key differentiating factor in terms of determining whether a city is successful and prosperous or not.

 

Amanda [00:18:40]: So as we head toward wrapping up, Chris, I always like to close with a fun question. So you mentioned you live in Vancouver. What is a bucket list item that someone visiting should be sure to do?

 

Chris [00:18:52]: I think the bucket list here is actually walking or biking around the seawall around Stanley Park. So Vancouver has an over 1000 acre park surrounded by the ocean, and they were very innovative over 100 years ago, building a sea wall and a trail that goes around that. So it really gives you a perspective on the city that makes Vancouver unique, where you’re looking at very high density urban glass towers on one side, and then you’re looking into nature on the other, and out to the ocean and the mountains beyond. So it’s a pretty unique experience. That’s something everyone should do, and it’s something that, as locals, we enjoy and do regularly as well.

 

Amanda [00:19:32]: Yeah, that sounds really cool. I’m not much of a biker, so I’d have to take the walking path. Well, thank you so much, Chris, and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to join us.

 

Chris [00:19:41]: Great. Thanks again for having me. It’s my pleasure.

 

Amanda [00:19:48]: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast, where we take you inside America’s best cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate and review this show. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.