Skyrocketing home prices and their impact on affordability are often cited as reasons for net domestic migration out of California. In the early 1960s around 250,000 Americans moved to California each year. In 2020 close to the same number left. Is this the beginning of a mass exodus from the Golden State or a more temporary phenomenon?

The answer lies in the relative price of housing.

To understand the economic forces at work, let’s consider an example far less emotionally fraught than housing. With Hawai‘i open again, I am thinking about heading to Maui to consume, among other delicacies, iconic shave ice. Should I choose the rainbow or the coconut flavor?

If the price is the same for each, I choose the one I like best (coconut). I’ll even pay a little more for it. But at some price the difference between the cost of the two will tip the scales to rainbow. If too many people prefer coconut, the vendor will make it more expensive, relative to rainbow, to prevent running out of syrup.

Shave ice is much cheaper than housing. But the same economic forces—involving relative prices—are at work in the shave ice and housing markets. We must better understand relative prices if we want to understand California’s housing challenges and for how long they might contribute to the reduction in California’s population due to out-migration.

There are two kinds of prices we consider when making a home purchase: absolute and relative. The absolute price is the out-of-pocket cost, and it limits the set of homes a buyer can consider. For example, your budget might make a $70 million Malibu beach house out of reach, but would not exclude all potential homes.

Among the homes whose absolute prices you can afford, you will then have a choice, and this is where the relative price of homes becomes important. You might consider a number of factors beyond price, including location, schools, and other amenities. In the end, you will weigh those factors against their relative cost: the price of one home on your list versus another. (The New York Times runs an occasional feature that deftly illustrates this process, following a home purchaser considering three different homes within their budget.) This kind of comparison takes place whether you’re choosing between two homes within one city—say, Los Angeles—or whether you’re choosing between two homes in different cities—say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Relative prices tell some of the story of California migration. Starting in the 1880s, developers here lured buyers from the East with advertisements offering affordable land with a healthy climate and, according to one brochure, the absence of “cyclones and blizzards”—sparking a land boom and, in 1886, the first of a series of speculative bubbles. It was the beginning of the more than 120 years of California land and homes commanding a premium over similar homes in the East. Of course, it was not only California’s salubrious weather that brought immigrants from other states. Employment in Hollywood, in aerospace, in tech, and in agriculture and the like were, and remain today, powerful attractors.

Migration of large numbers of people into and out of the state, of course, impacted housing demand. Over time this migration has been more heavily into the state and in the absence of more rapid home building, has pushed prices up. And as the relative price of housing soared, the less attractive California became for those contemplating a move. From World War II to the late 1980s, when California homes were priced not too much higher relative to homes elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved to the Golden State each year. In 2020, 240,000 Californians went the other direction.

Some who left cited job opportunities or the pace of life in growing cities such as Phoenix and Austin. But the cost of housing was also given as a reason. Often leavers would say, “I can purchase a home there and not in L.A. or San Francisco,” or “I get so much more for my housing dollar outside of the state.” In other words, relative prices pushed people away. If the price of homes in Phoenix compared to Los Angeles is low enough, it will drive migration to Phoenix. And then, over time, that shift in demand ought to increase Phoenix home prices relative to Los Angeles home prices just as the migration to California pushed relative home prices up here. When the California premium becomes small enough, home price migration should cease.

To examine the impact of migration on relative home prices, let’s consider Austin, Dallas, Las Vegas, Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and Boise—all cities where Californians are moving.

The standard measure of home price affordability uses median prices. However, the median home sold—that is, the one where half the homes sold were more expensive and half less expensive—changes from year to year depending on which homes are sold. Here, to smooth out that variability, our starting point will be a single base year median home for these cities. This analysis uses the year 1990 as a base year. The results are not sensitive to the choice of year. Looking at pairs of cities—one in California, the other elsewhere—we can compute the ratio of the California city’s home price to the competing city’s home price to create a measure of the relative price between the two cities.

For example, in 1990, the median price of a home in Los Angeles was about three times the median price of a home in Austin ($213,000 versus $70,000). Between then and now, Los Angeles home prices increased by 333% and in Austin they increased by 534%, dropping L.A.’s relative price ratio of 3 to 1 down to 1.66 to 1. Houses are still cheaper in Austin, but relatively less so. 

During the last ten years, home prices increased in Boise by 294%, in Las Vegas by 232%, in Phoenix by 204%, in Austin by 169%, and in Seattle by 166%. Each of these increases is greater than the price increases of 148% in San Francisco, 138% in Los Angeles and 105% in Orange County. And the median home prices in Boise, Austin and Miami are now not too different from Sacramento and Riverside. The relative price of these California cities has fallen, and their relative affordability has increased.

It is still the case that you can sell a home in California and buy a larger home in one of these other cities, but it will be a smaller or a less well-appointed home than the same transaction would have brought a decade ago. The change in the relative price should make it less attractive to move out of California for reasons of housing affordability.

These six cities are properly characterized as up-and-coming; they were relatively small until people began pouring in. Austin’s population grew by nearly 30% over the last decade and Phoenix’s by 18%. What about the evolution of relative home prices when we compare California to cities that were more mature in 1990, such as Dallas and Atlanta? In both of these cases, Los Angeles’ relative price over the last decade has remained more or less constant—and net migration has slowed to a trickle. Between 2014 and 2018, just 6,000 fewer Texans moved from Dallas to L.A. than Angelenos moved to Dallas. And from 2011 to 2015 the net migration from L.A. to Atlanta slowed to 391. The relative price appears to have settled into an equilibrium that has not induced significant migration one way or the other.

Clearly, changes in job opportunities, amenities, government regulations or the lack thereof, and local lifestyles can upset this equilibrium. And they frequently do. But the point is that relative prices matter.

As cities grow and mature, the relative cost of housing stabilizes to reflect the relative attractiveness of the cities. And the one-way migration process induced by housing affordability comes to an end—in very much the same way as a price differential between shave ice flavors pushes one to choose rainbow over coconut. What we are seeing is not the end of the California dream with a mass exodus to points east, but rather simple supply and demand at work, adjusting to relative price differentials.

So, while California housing may be becoming less affordable, it is becoming relatively more affordable.

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That’s the best advice I can offer from my own career working in museums to connect the arts to different people, communities, disciplines, and places. The art of arts engagement flows from this recognition: Because the arts connect to so many things, artists and arts organizations need to always be trying new things.

I’ve tried everything from giving museum tours in the middle of the night to using artworks to help medical students develop their powers of observation. Experimentation naturally produces failures. But experiments are also fun, and allow you to experience, over and over, the three stages of learning once outlined by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: romance (as you pursue a new idea), precision (as you learn how your experiment works in practice), and generalization (as you extrapolate from the results of your experiment to broader lessons).

My interest in experimentation may be the result of a peripatetic life that allowed me to see all kinds of arts in all kinds of places. I grew up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an artists’ community back in the mid-20th century. We lived across the street from the Walker family, who established the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and my parents took me to art museums on the East Coast. Because I am dyslexic, reading is not my preferred method for learning, and that made museums even more special—because they excel at educating through observation, listening, and imagination.

I joined the museum profession in the early ’70s, when there was a mandate to increase the educational role of institutions. I worked in Winnipeg, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, and got to see even more museums during the 12 years that I spent on the accreditation commission for the American Alliance of Museums. I also spent time at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

By the early 1990s, I had drawn some conclusions: Museums had become isolated from their communities as the country had become more diverse and sprawling, and museums didn’t know what to do about the lost connections. In 1992 I prepared a report called Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. It argued that museums needed to start trying new strategies to build new communities of support. To do that, they would have to restructure themselves, breaking down internal divides (among curators, educators, fundraising and marketing professionals, etc.) so that everyone was collaborating with a shared mission to serve the public. This wasn’t a popular idea then—I got chewed up by critics all over the country for a couple of years.

The entrance of the Dallas Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Edward Larrabee Barnes/Flickr.

Then in 2000, Jack Lane, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and his board gave me the opportunity to create change in their museum and community.

It took a while to understand why more people weren’t coming to the museum. I conducted 42 town meetings—informal gatherings really—around greater Dallas to understand what the museum was doing or not doing. We also received funds from a foundation for a comprehensive study, lasting seven years, of how people interact with the arts and the museum. How, we needed to know, do we take a community that barely knows we are here and have them fall in love with the possibilities of the museum?

We needed the entire museum on board. We brought together everyone—curators, educators, marketing, researchers, development, even the security guards—to meet and come up with experiments. Whenever we got a new report on the survey, every single person on the staff received the results. We needed to make many small changes, starting with putting up more signs outside and around the museum, since we learned that many people couldn’t find it when they came to downtown Dallas. But we also tried new approaches to exhibitions, education, programming, and marketing. The idea was to try things that would be comprehensive across the museum.

At the beginning of the study, we had a standard museum audience—older, white, and interested in art. Years later, after changing the way we presented and engaged our audiences, we carefully studied people who came to our popular J.M.W. Turner exhibition and learned that it drew a younger and more diverse audience than the normal museum show. Demographics were not the defining issue for engaging our audiences. Instead we learned that our audience consisted of four different clusters or groups, distinguished by different ways they came to engage with the art in the museum. Those four groups were the Tentative Observers, the Curious Participants, the Discerning Independents, and the Committed Enthusiasts. We sought to reach and engage them all.

There were too many experiments to mention them all here. (The DMA documented its research and experiments in a publication, Ignite the Power of Art: Advancing Visitor Engagement in Museums, in 2010.) We brought chamber musicians and poets into the galleries. We presented joint programs with the symphony and theater companies. Members of our local Indian community, with the help of Hindu priests, assisted us in dressing statues of Shiva and performing and teaching dances. We invited in people who collect gold to share their samples and knowledge about this metal in front of art from ancient America.

And we experimented with museum hours. One of our most successful efforts involved opening the museum until midnight monthly. We would stay open for 48 hours to celebrate the closing of a major exhibition. I enjoyed this personally—I’m a late-night person, kind of an insomniac. I gave tours on many nights between midnight and 2 a.m., and had 75 or more people in the group. We would roam all over the museum and visit my favorite things in it. You’d get these incredible collections of people at that hour—parents with colicky babies, bus drivers and taxi drivers, physicians, and more than a few people with cancer or health problems that made it hard to sleep.

When we celebrated our 100th anniversary in 2003, we were open for 100 hours without closing the doors. Indeed, our trustees manned the doors, working as greeters and guides for the occasion. During that stretch, we hosted 150 programs, of all types, in which local people shared expertise that related to the museum and its art in some way. Some 45,000 people attended during those four straight days of open doors. After that response, we did even more with artists and the community. Once we had an opening with 600 artists involved. Many gave presentations. Family and friends came. These were joyous occasions and they created what engagement is about—a visceral connection between art and people.

Yes, I went too far, more than once. I’ll never forget the time we booked an African drumming group. The drummers wandered through the whole museum; their thunderous sound filled the entire place. The sound disturbed some visitors—and it threatened the art, since I had failed to brief the drummers on the fact that they needed to stay at least 3 feet away from the paintings.

There was so much more to do with the amazing and creative staff of the museum, but I developed chronic illnesses and had to leave the museum in 2012. Today, though, I still experiment with new ways to connect art to the world around us. For the past eight years, I’ve made a practice of doing something new every day and writing about it. Museums are great places to do something new—which often involves the celebration of little things, making new connections, and finding creativity. (You can follow this practice on my Instagram.)

I’ve also tried to take advantage of my deep familiarity with the health care system by looking for ways to combine art and health. After leaving the museum, I joined the University of Texas at Dallas as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, where my work is focused on art and medicine. I’m researching and developing new programs for patients and caregivers at the Dallas Museum of Art, Baylor Health Care systems, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Some of this involves bringing artists into hospitals and other health centers so patients can enjoy art and even make their own. There is evidence that art helps patients feel less pain and stress and thus need less pain medication.

I also teach a course on the “Art of Observation” to UT Southwestern medical students, using art to enhance their ability to observe, make visual inspections, and describe what they see—to help improve their diagnostic skills. I take students into my old museum and have them look at an 18th-century painting, The Abduction of Europa, by the French artist Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre. We study the painting for 45 minutes, and then I have them turn their backs and write down, without looking, answers to various questions about the painting. They learn that observation isn’t easy, and that different people see the same work of art—or the same patient of course—very differently. These students have work to do. In a class of 30 to 35 med students, typically only two or three notice which figures in the painting are looking directly at them.

The real beauty of art involves not just a connection between an arts institution and a person, but real moments of convergence within a community. For all the progress that’s been made, people who work in the arts are still figuring out how to make such moments happen. We need to know more—especially about the social interactions among people when they come together to experience art.

Which is why we need to keep experimenting, now more than ever.

The post Want to Find New Audiences? Keep Trying New Things appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I recall watching the ‘boys play, in the 1970s, I was knee high to him, paying more attention to the gun case where he kept his Purple Heart and the loot he’d collected from dead Nazis. As the men in blue and white jerseys and silver helmets with those big blue lone stars on the side would line up on gameday, they reminded me of the helmeted protagonists from the old war movies I’d watch with my grandfather—Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach ever the hero as he launched missile after missile into the end zone. His famous arm led his team to four Super Bowl appearances (winning two), helping the Cowboys earn the moniker “America’s Team.”

And I was in good company. As the nickname suggests, much of the country began rooting for the Cowboys with me that decade. Spectators across America filled stands and fixated on their TV screens, in awe of Staubach, the team’s clean-cut Navy veteran QB, the always-stoic head coach Tom Landry in his fedora and, of course, the Cowboys cheerleaders.

Dallas managed to exude both class and swagger, not to mention exquisite timing: The Cowboys won their first championship in January of 1972, the same year a Gallup survey first crowned pro football America’s most popular sport. The team’s icons became emblematic of the sensation the game was to become, a sensation filling Texas Stadium with fans in blue and white last Sunday afternoon as the Cowboys faced off against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC division playoffs.

Watching the Cowboys with my family felt like going to church on Sunday morning. Prayer always followed third down, or whenever the ref made a bad call. It was a family tradition to follow the Cowboys religiously. Though our fandom rarely was reflected in our dress, like other Cowboys fans, there was no doubt which team we cheered whenever game day arrived.

The Cowboys cheerleaders fascinated me as a teenager in the ‘80s. They looked like Charlie’s Angels in cowboy hats, always smiling and, to my amazement, doing flips like warriors from the American Ninja movie series I obsessively watched on VHS. They were the brainchildren of Texas Earnest “Tex” Schramm. A former sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman, he served as general manager of the Cowboys from 1960, when they first became an NFL franchise, until their purchase by owner Jerry Jones in 1989. Schramm pioneered several league innovations over the 29 years he served as general manager: the use of instant replay in the officiating of the game, referees’ microphones, shortening the play clock, and developing the wild-card playoff system. He also helped to coordinate the 1970 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League.

That the Cowboys gained such a loyal following wasn’t just about Lone Star pride, it was about Texas showmanship. Schramm understood that professional football was more than just a sport, and transformed the Cowboys cheerleaders into a squad of professional dancers, with the help of Texie Waterman, one of the top dancers in America at the time.

When the NFL decided to offer a second game on Thanksgiving in the mid-1960s, Schramm jumped at the opportunity to host the holiday games that many NFL teams at the time wanted to avoid. He knew the Cowboys playing on a holiday when many around the country gather to celebrate would increase the team’s national exposure and help cement its All-American image.

Though Schramm’s marketing prowess and Landry’s brilliant coaching drew a national following, it was NFL Films that officially anointed the Cowboys “America’s Team.” During the 1978 season, the television studio’s camera crews noticed that the Cowboys could always count on an unusually large contingent of fans on the road. When Bob Ryan, who produced and edited every Cowboys highlight video for the NFL, wrote the opening to the season recap voiced by legendary baritone voice of John Facenda, he penned what amounts to Cowboys marketing scripture:

“No matter where they play, their fans are there to greet them. Their faces are recognized by fans all across this country. The sum total of their stars are a galaxy. They are the Dallas Cowboys … America’s Team.”

The Cowboys not only became a beloved franchise as the NFL was coming into its own, but also as the city of Dallas was in sore need of a boost. A decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Texas metropolis was still best known to many Americans as the “City of Hate.” Schramm himself was mindful of the need to associate the city with something other than the tragedy, having once told the Chicago Tribune that he was well aware that in the aftermath of ’63, Dallas had become a “bad word” across the nation.

The Cowboys helped rebrand the city in the eyes of the nation, and gave our ever-sprawling metropolis a much-needed sense of being on the same team, a shared story and rooting interest. It would be wrong to dismiss a professional football team as just that—more than 40 years after my grandfather introduced me to the Cowboys, I am struck as a journalist working in Dallas by how much the team, and all its ups and downs, helps bind our community together. A narrative thread linking Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett to Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith now reappears in the impressive rookie duet of Dak Prescott and Zeke Elliott.

The past two decades have been disappointing to Cowboys fans, and the division playoff loss to the Packers would seem only more disheartening. But the story of last Sunday’s defeat, with the two leading rookies bringing the ‘boys back from a 15-point deficit to tie the game with only minutes left on the play clock, only then to lose to a last-second field goal, will become part of the lore that gets handed down from one generation to another. And that’s especially true if, as I suspect, this generation’s team is on the verge of becoming another dominant dynasty deserving to be called “America’s Team.”

The post When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By way of comparison, if everybody would express their opinions about how to improve the medical profession, we as the larger public would not be so accepting of everyone’s opinions. Many of us would vigorously challenge anecdotal accounts and “solutions” based on personal experience and videos seen on the Internet. Because we see medicine as a real profession, with nationally accepted professional standards, we tend to leave it to real experts to express their views on how the profession might be changed.

Treating policing as some sort of haphazard trade, about which everybody can have a valid opinion, is not helping policing or our current national conversation about it. Indeed, it aggravates the problems faced in policing. As a former police officer and somebody who has written many books and articles about the police profession over the decades, I resent the current rush-to-judgment environment and the ubiquitous pontification about the solutions. The overwhelming majority of police officers in this country mean well and take their jobs seriously, risking their lives to protect others, most of the time for meager pay. They certainly deserve better tools to hone their skills and much respect from the public they serve.

It is remarkable that very few academics who actually study policing and police-community relations are part of the discussion in public and in the media. We academics hear public officials quote out-of-context statistics, repeat catch phrases like “community-oriented policing,” and fuel the anger. For example, national and reputable media outlets often quote the number of people killed by police officers in a given year as an example of police use of force or brutality—an alarming figure, but one that would also include homicidal criminals like Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas sniper who killed five officers on duty at last week’s Black Lives Matter protest.

Almost 20 years ago I started teaching a course about police training, and the scarcity of available resources prompted me to write my first book, Critical Issues in Police Training. Published in 2002 and based on years of fieldwork and research, I identified five main areas that are extremely problematic for policing: recruitment, selection, training, supervision, and discipline. And I outlined four topics to address these problems: leadership, an approach to police-community relations called “Open Communication Policing,” multicultural policing, and stress management for law enforcement.

Fast forward almost 15 years, and we are now talking about all the same problems and topics—as if they were new and we still need to study them and create commissions to identify what needs to be done. This is wrong and a dangerous waste of time for both officers risking their lives and communities living in fear of their local precincts. Research is clear: we know quite a lot about what needs to be done—we need to transform the way police organizations operate. We just need to do it.

It’s gratifying to hear so much in the conversation about the need to change how we train police to reduce violent encounters with citizens. But I can’t help but stress that how we recruit and select officers should come first, before training.

For over two decades, research has shown a direct correlation between the emotional maturity of officers and their problem-solving capacity. Yet, as if deliberately ignoring the scientific research finding, most police departments in the United States continue to recruit and select their officers at the very young ages of 19 or 20.

In their late teens and early 20s, these men and women are expected to display wisdom, maturity, judgment, and social and emotional intelligence that most of us do not display until our late 20s and beyond. In some departments, some recruits are even exempt from the basic requirement of finishing high school if they possess some characteristics that would qualify them for special waivers. (Albuquerque, New Mexico is one such department).

Instead, we should be identifying the highest standards for recruitment and selection of officers. These standards must be expressed in something the U.S. has never had for its police: a standardized, mandatory curriculum of training for all our law enforcement agencies. This would cover not only the use of force but also other essential tools of effective and impartial policing like leadership, multiculturalism, stress management, and open communication. Each department would then be free to add as much or as little to this mandatory template, based on their needs.

This training must cover a minimum number of hours that will approximate, at the very least, a two-year college degree. Don’t we owe it to our communities to give the officers we charge with guarding our lives at least as many hours of training as beauticians and hairdressers?

We would not have to invent such standards. We already have the templates, primarily from other countries. Take, for example, Finland, which has the sort of comprehensive standardized training that makes experts like me envious. The Police College in Finland offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its police force. Completed in about three years, the bachelor’s degree is composed of 180 credits and qualifies the person for the position of police officer—or to act independently as an expert in police work. And the program is just the beginning of lifelong study that encourages police officers to seek new approaches and best practices in their profession.

While we have some police departments trying to transform recruitment, selection, and training (Dallas PD is one of them), we have close to 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country, most of them smaller than 50 sworn officers. The IACP (International Associations of Chiefs of Police) does much to further the culture of training but, unfortunately, it cannot mandate a standardized training. It can only recommend. And the time for recommendations has passed. We need mandates. Teaching de-escalation techniques at the NYPD or the Dallas PD academies did not change the behavior of officers in Louisiana or Minnesota. If we want change nationally, we need to institute a standardized mandate for all.

So, who and what are standing in the way of this change? The obstacles are federal and local. On a federal level, a transformational change would require revisiting the autonomy of the states to determine their own standards for police forces—the sort of changes politicians don’t want to touch. On a local level, sometimes unions oppose raising the standards. (Last year, I testified in front of the local council in Suffolk County, New York in favor of requiring a bachelor’s degree for its force, but was very strongly opposed by the union). Sometimes local politicians fear they will lose control over the hiring process. And many times, there are concerns about the lack of money; most of the police budget is allocated to salaries and there is very little left for recruitment and training.

Yes, many police departments around the country have gotten better at recruitment of ethnic and racial minorities, but diversity is not a stand-in for emotional maturity. Nor does having a department where members of minority communities are in the highest leadership ranks of the police, as in Dallas, change the perception that policing is a profession that is inherently racist and discriminatory in its application of the law.

It is impossible to convey here, in a short essay, the importance of perceptions about policing that are based, at one end, on centuries of oppression going back to the Southern Slave Patrols, and, at another end, a tsunami of social media visuals—of beatings, shootings, and victims’ dead bodies. Such visuals, with enough repetition, become etched in people’s minds not as a single event but rather as a series of events that represent a norm. Opinions are then derived from these perceptions, and actions from these opinions. In the absence of uniform policing standards based on scientific evidence, it is easy to misinterpret legitimate uses of force that from time to time accompany police officers’ day-to-day interactions with an error of judgment or actual abuse of the rights of their office.

It’s also easy to mistake the relative success of a few departments in training and recruitment with the nationwide sea change we need. I don’t know about you, but I cannot live with the notion of the authority to use coercive force against me being discharged by people who are not recruited, selected, and trained to the highest possible standard. The promise of this moment is that we can raise those standards, and reach the goal that any use of force must be necessary.

But to get there, we can’t rely on opinions. We need to start with the many things we actually know about policing. We need to let the real experts in this field drive the transformations of policing. And then we need to pray for the right leadership to enable these changes.

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