By Kathy Young, Director of Operations.    Though it seems like summer only just began, Market Street is already looking ahead to an exciting end-of-summer event, the American Association of Chamber Executives (ACCE) annual convention . This year the convention will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and already has hundreds of Chamber professionals from around the country – and world – registered for the four days of peer-to-peer meetings and engaging seminars. As the national...

By Matt Tester, Project Associate.   …is increasingly called a bicycle.   American cities are warming to the idea that bike-sharing systems are a valuable means of generating downtown activity, providing viable alternative transportation, and encouraging healthy living. And this, despite their European roots! Several major cities debuted or announced major downtown systems in 2010, and some recent federal policy changes could continue building bike-sharing momentum. ...

By Ellen Anderson, Director of Research.   University of Phoenix. Argosy. DeVry. Kaplan. You see their commercials on television and likely see their buildings alongside interstates. These universities and others like them represent the growing market of for-profit colleges. Earlier this year The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the sector’s remarkable growth:   Enrollment in the country's nearly 3,000 career colleges has grown far faster than in the rest of higher...

By Alex Pearlstein, Director of Projects.    In an interesting confluence of events, the 2010 World Cup began the same day the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the United States will soon be a “minority majority” country, with non-whites comprising over 50 percent of our population. Many of these minorities are represented by ethnic groups originating from all countries of the globe. It’s trite to say that the U.S. is a “nation of immigrants,” but it’s true nonetheless. My family emigrated...

By Ranada Robinson, Project Associate. One of the long-term effects of successful economic development is decreased poverty rates. We know that poverty is the state of having insufficient means to attain necessities such as housing, nutrition, transportation, clothing, etc. Market Street uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau to compute poverty rates for our client communities. Poverty rates help us to ascertain how well a community is doing socioeconomically. They also help to inform new...

By Will Corbin, Project Associate. I recently read a very interesting article (see footnote 1) regarding the association between numeracy (the ability to reason with numbers and mathematical concepts) and people who fell behind on their mortgage payments during the recent housing meltdown in the United States. According to a working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (see footnote 2) , even when accounting for differences in income levels, credit scores, and attitudes towards...

By Christa Tinsley, Project Associate   Last week I dined on shrimp étouffée in southern Louisiana and fried flounder on the Alabama coast. I enjoyed a Mobile-style gumbo full of oysters and shrimp and caught blue crabs off of Perdido Bay. These seafood meals were bittersweet with the anticipation that the expansive oil spill contaminating the Gulf of Mexico would probably wipe out much of the varied wildlife that contributes to one of the most delicious and treasured...

By Matthew Tarleton, Project Associate.    Around this time last year, I was sitting in a rocking chair at the Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, looking down at what had become a pathetic excuse for technology in this day and age: my four year old cell phone. My father and stepmother were sharing all the new conveniences in their life born from their recent iPhone purchases. I had seen the commercials and heard the testimonials, but once I started exploring the Apple store...