Category Archives: Places

More housing vouchers now being used in the suburbs

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A new report from the Brookings Institute suggests that more housing vouchers are now being used in the suburbs. Here is a quick summary of their findings:

This study analyzes the changing location of HCV recipients within the nation’s largest metro areas in the 2000s and finds:

  • Nearly half of all HCV recipients lived in suburban areas in 2008. However, HCV recipients remained less suburbanized than the total population, the poor population, and affordable housing units generally.
  • Black HCV recipients suburbanized fastest over the 2000 to 2008 period, though white HCV recipients were still more suburbanized than their black or Latino counterparts by 2008.  Black HCV recipients’ suburbanization rate increased by nearly 5 percent over this period, while that for Latinos increased by about 1 percent.  The suburbanization rate for white HCV recipients declined slightly.
  • Within metro areas, HCV recipients moved further toward higher-income, jobs-rich suburbs between 2000 and 2008.  However, the poor and affordable housing units shifted more rapidly toward similar kinds of suburbs over that period.  By 2008 about half of suburban HCV recipients still lived in low-income suburbs.
  • Between 2000 and 2008, metro areas in the West and those experiencing large increases in suburban poverty exhibited the biggest shifts in HCV recipients to the suburbs.  Western metro areas like Stockton, Boise, and Phoenix experienced increases of 10 percentage points or more in the suburbanization rate of HCV recipients.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise as more poor people now live in suburbs than big cities. But this could help explain how some of the poor are moving to the suburbs. As the US government has moved away from funding high-rise housing projects to providing housing vouchers, more people have decided to use these in the suburbs where there may be more housing and jobs.

These findings could also bring up some interesting issues regarding how suburban communities and residents feel about the use of housing vouchers in nearby housing. I think it is safe to assume that many suburban residents would not necessarily want to live near poorer residents but the voucher program makes this a bit more anonymous. If people knew that their community was a popular site for the use of housing vouchers, what would they do?

I would also suspect that the use of these vouchers in clustered in less wealthy suburbs, not very spread out throughout the metropolitan region.

Asking “why aren’t Americans moving to the city”

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Even as the percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs has increased over the decades, one writer asks “why aren’t Americans moving to the city?”

Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs…

Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit…

For the Millenials, the showstopper was jobs, or lack thereof. They managed to survive the last few years of college, but lacking paying work in the city, they’ve moved back in with mom and dad. So now they’re all kicking it in the TV room back on Deerhaven Drive, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.

There are other factors that have slowed down the great urban migration that predate our recent economic woes: Crime rates are down nationwide, but that has done little to diminish the perception that cities are dark, violent places. Poverty, addiction, and blight still haunt many urban centers. Then there are the kids. The Millenials aren’t the first generation of young people to get all stoked about the city. The ones before them continue to pick up and leave as soon as Junior hits school age.

Of course, much of this is the result of ill-advised investment: We’ve poured money into unsustainable suburban development while starving the urban centers. (One writer on this website recently argued convincingly that subsidized sprawl is a giant Ponzi scheme.)

But I think there is a deeper force at work here. Here’s another headline that reads like it could have come out of the Onion: “Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else.”

It’s actually from USA Today, and the accompanying story looks at a 2009 PEW Research Center poll that found that 46 percent of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”…

Listen, I don’t mean to belabor this point. This is all just to say that the urban renaissance is not fait accompli.

This seems like a reasonable argument to me: there is no guarantee, as some critics have suggested, that Americans will see the error of the suburbs and flock back to the city. For many Americans, the suburbs seem to offer the best alternative to other living options: it combines some of more rural living (a bit of land) and more urban living (amenities nearby). Attacks on the suburbs won’t necessarily change their minds though higher costs of living (gas prices, less valuable houses) might.

The cited survey is also interesting. The Pew website about the survey is titled “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” Are Americans simply afflicted with an itch to be somewhere else? Is this manifest destiny in action? Also in this survey:

Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.

If you combined the small town and suburban percentages, you would get almost the exact percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs. So when people responded that they would prefer a small town, do they really mean a suburban small town or a more rural small town and living in a rural area is more of living on a farm or five acre plot of land far from a big city?

Chicken regulations in Naperville

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More suburbs have had to deal with this issue in recent years: should suburbanites be allowed to keep chickens? Here is the latest from Naperville:

The majority of Naperville council members voted Tuesday to make no changes to an existing ordinance that governs the keeping of fowl in the city, which states the birds must be kept 25 feet from neighboring homes and cleaned regularly.

City staff presented a proposal Tuesday that would place further regulation on chicken coop keepers, requiring them to obtain a permit for the birds and construct larger perimeters around the livestock. But council members opted to maintain the status quo that has regulated chicken ownership for years…

While both residents — neighbors, in fact — who spoke during public forum were on opposite sides of the fence on the issue, they agreed the council’s decision came as a surprise…

But the council’s decision has no effect on those who live in subdivisions, some of which have their own bylaws that govern the keeping of livestock.

While the article suggests at the end that there are only a few formal complaints about this a year, I suspect this is an issue that will continue to pop up. This is a classic NIMBY issue: will nearby property values decrease if a neighbor keeps chickens? It is also interesting to note that Naperville’s guidelines don’t apply to subdivisions, presumably because they have Homeowner’s Associations that already tackle this issue. (Naperville has an unusual number of HOAs – noted builder Harold Moser helped pioneer this in the city.)

This reminds me of My Blue Heaven, a study of the working class Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. In the early days of this suburb, it was common for residents to own animals and build their own homes. I suspect this sort of activity would not go over well in more middle or upper class suburbs.

If you are curious, here is what Naperville’s municipal code says about “fowl and livestock”:

1. Housing: All fowl and livestock shall be kept within a pen, coop, building or other enclosure sufficient in size and strength to confine such animals to the owner’s property, except that livestock may be tethered securely to a fixed object outside the enclosure, but only if the animal is so confined to the owner’s property.

2. Zoning: Fowl and livestock may be kept in any area in the City except as otherwise provided by this Chapter or the City’s Zoning Ordinance.

3. Restrictions:

3.1. No livestock shall be kept, housed, maintained or pastured within a distance of two hundred (200) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.2. No pen, coop, building or other enclosure used for the purpose of housing fowl (with the exception of homing pigeons) shall be erected or maintained within twenty-five (25) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.3. Every person maintaining a pen, coop, building, yard or enclosure for fowl or livestock shall keep such area clean, sanitary and free from all refuse. Such areas shall be thoroughly swept at least once every twenty-four (24) hours and the dirt and refuse shall be disposed in a clean and sanitary fashion.

3.4. All feed for fowl or livestock shall be kept in containers that are rodent-proof until put out for consumption of fowl or livestock.

Another report suggests Naperville is somewhat unusual in not regulating this issue more closely:

Homeowners on both sides of Laird’s Rivanna Court property are urging the Naperville City Council to re-examine a decades-old city law that puts no limits on the number of chickens one can have, as long as the pen is cleaned once every 24 hours and is kept at least 25 feet from neighboring homes.

Naperville is one of a few municipalities — including St. Charles, Batavia, Oak Park and Chicago — that allow residents, with a few conditions, to raise chickens at home. But in an email to council members, Laird’s neighbors stressed the city is “no longer a rural farming community but residential with nice homes and smaller backyards.”

I wonder if this is one of those issues in Naperville where formal regulations are unnecessary as social pressure would keep too many people from having chickens. One resident in the story suggests that his chicken coop was opened at night by others. I would guess that could be a lot of disapproving glances and talk if someone started building a chicken house.

Finding new ways to store your bike in the city

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With space at a premium in many cities, some people have developed innovative ways to store bicycles:

Fortunately some cities have responded to the challenge with exceptional ingenuity. Japanese engineers have developed a multi-level “cycle tree” — perhaps more appropriately named a “cycle cave” — that stores bikes in an elaborate underground system. Riders feed their bike into a mechanized rut that sends it down into a designated spot, retrieving the bike later with a simple swipe of a card. One “cycle tree” in Tokyo, considered the world’s largest, holds some 6,500 bikes.

A truer bike tree can be found in Geneva, where riders can watch their bike raised high above the hands of thieves while remaining protected from the elements. In that same anti-theft vein, German designers have created a bike lock with inline wheels and a small motor that enables riders to power their bikes high up a street pole. Seoul, Korea, is working toward a system of bike hangers that cling to the site of residential buildings; riders can park for just $15 a year, though they have to pedal to retrieve their bike. A slightly less advanced version of this concept has been implemented already by some riders in the East Village…

Those who don’t mind cramming their bikes into their apartments have a growing number of options as well. These range from basic wooden wall mounts to simple, cheap wall hooks to stylish, colorful hanging nodes to elegant bike storage furniture that, in the words of Freshome, “unite cycling culture with interior design.” A Times slideshow from a few years back showcases some other space-saving solutions. These include a wall device that lifts bikes off the ground with a hydraulic spring, a freestanding rack made of oak, an incredibly compact and sleek wall hook, and a similar structure that, while bulkier, provides space for helmets and other equipment.

Many city dwellers, conscious of their limited apartment space, are now looking for bike storage devices that serve a double purpose. Knife & Saw recently introduced a hanging bike shelf that also acts as a small bookshelf. Less costly variations are starting to appear as well. Those with a balcony might consider a bike-shelf-birdhouse combination that holds a helmet as easily as it holds a helmetshrike. The most innovative, though perhaps also the least comfortable, design goes to Store Muu Design Studio, which conceived a sort of hybrid bike-desk, wherein the bike seat doubles as the office chair.

Some fascinating pictures to look at. You can even find out a little more about what happened to the foldable bicycle.

Ten ways to bring about more open/park space to Chicago

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After a report last week that Chicago was lacking in open space compared to other major American cities, architecture critic Blair Kamin proposes ten ways that Chicago could help rectify the problem:

The open space shortage is pervasive, with 32 of 77 community areas, home to half of Chicago’s 2.7 million people, failing to meet the city’s own modest requirement of two acres of open space for every 1,000 residents. And the stakes associated with relieving it are huge. Parks can help the city’s neighborhoods attract and retain residents, promote public health, boost real estate values and draw together people from different walks of life…

Although Emanuel has thrown his support behind a grab bag of open space initiatives, such as boathouses on the Chicago River and a new park in an unused area of Rosehill Cemetery, he has yet to produce the visionary plan he promised in his transition report.

In the absence of such a vision, here are 10 ideas that show what architects and the architects of public policy can do to relieve Chicago’s chronic open space shortage.

There are some interesting ideas here and many sounds relatively simply to institute.

When I saw the earlier story, I had a thought: should people have a right to public space? In the suburbs, perhaps this doesn’t matter as much as the common American goal is to purchase your own land. But in the city, where the population density increases and residents expect to be outside of their dwelling, should people have a guaranteed amount of public space? Do people have a human right to parks, to open land?

This question also is pertinent in light of the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zuccotti Park in New York City. This is a weird sort of public space: it is privately owned but the owners have an agreement with the city to operate it as public space. This sort of arrangement is spreading to other cities: San Francisco has a number “privately owned public spaces” (POPOS) that few residents or tourists would ever know are actually privately owned. This might be helpful in that cities don’t have to do all the maintenance for these spaces but what happens when the private owners don’t like what is taking place on supposedly public property?

John Malone: Largest US landowner with 2.2 million acres

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I’ve never seen a list of the biggest landowners in the United States until now:

According to the newly released 2011 Land Report 100, which ranks the top land barons, John Malone is now America’s biggest individual landowner. The 70-year-old cable pioneer and chairman of Liberty Media now owns 2.2 million acres, after purchasing more than 1 million acres of timberland in Maine and New Hampshire earlier this year.

The purchase, which drew fire from plenty of environmentalists in New England, vaulted him past the longtime number one, Mr. Turner, who owns slightly more than 2 million acres. Mr. Malone and Mr. Turner are longtime friends and fellow cowboy-hat wearers from the cable world…

Mr. Malone told the Land Report that his love of land is due to his Irish genes. “A certain land hunger comes from being denied property ownership for so many generations.”…

Some might worry that Mr. Malone’s purchase may ease America back to its more feudal days when the rich owned most of the land. Environmentalists fret about an era of “Kingdom Buyers.” Others may see them as the most responsible long-term stewards. Either way, the wealthy are likely to continue looking at large tracts of land as the safest long-term, hard assets at a time of extreme market volatility and low borrowing costs.

Can there be a new cultural value of “land hoarding”?

According to the Land Report 100, it doesn’t sound like Malone wants to ruin the land:

Malone is an ardent conservationist, an ethic he shares with Turner. While the duo’s ends are the same, their means differ somewhat. “I tend to be more willing to admit that human beings aren’t going away,” Malone says. His 2011 Maine and New Hampshire purchase, which was brokered by LandVest’s Timberland Division, saw him acquire robust sustainable forestry operations from private equity firm GMO Renewable Resources. He intends to keep them in place. He applies this philosophy to his western properties, such as the Bell, where he raises cattle and horses. Ultimately, he plans to put all of his land in perpetual conservation easements.

Here is the top 20:

  1. John Malone
  2. Ted Turner
  3. Archie Aldis Emmerson
  4. Brad Kelley
  5. Irving Family
  6. Singleton Family
  7. King Ranch Heirs
  8. Pingree Heirs
  9. Reed Family
  10. Stan Kroenke
  11. Ford Family
  12. Lykes Bros. Heirs
  13. Briscoe Family
  14. W.T. Waggoner Estate
  15. Holland Ware
  16. D.M. O’Connor Heirs
  17. Drummond Family
  18. Phillip Anschutz
  19. J.R. Simplot Heirs
  20. Robert Earl Holding

In terms of land comparisons, these 2.2 million acres are significantly more than Rhode Island and more than Delaware.

If some of the American public has thoughts about people having too much money, are there similar thoughts about people having too much land? Obviously, it takes some money to have this much land: John Malone has a net worth of $4.5 billion and is #69 on the Forbes 400 list. How much is this land worth?

In order to deal with issues like health, don’t focus on race but place and residential segregation

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Researchers examined health in two Baltimore neighborhoods and argue that it is not race that leads to different health outcomes but rather the places themselves:

LaVeist and several colleagues tested this idea by examining the counterfactual: If society weren’t segregated, would health disparities still exist? They identified a low-income community in Southwest Baltimore, spanning two census tracts, that is fairly equally divided between black and white residents (out of deference to the neighborhood, LaVeist doesn’t name it). The median household income in the area was less than $25,000 during the 2000 census. It has no pharmacy, no practicing physicians or dentists, no supermarkets, and no banks.

Within this integrated community, the researchers found that health disparities all but disappear. There was no significant difference in diabetes rates, or obesity rates among young women (a metric on which large gaps exist nationally). There did remain a difference in hypertension rates, albeit it a much narrower one than national data shows. The lone exception: Whites in this community smoked at a significantly higher rate than blacks.

This suggests that what the national statistics are really telling us is that minorities live in much higher numbers in unhealthy neighborhoods. And that means that in trying to address health disparities nationally, we’ve been looking for the answers to the wrong question. We should be asking what’s going on in these communities, not what’s going on within minority populations.

“Solutions to health disparities are likely to be found in broader societal policy and policy that is not necessarily what we would think of as health policy,” LaVeist says. “It’s housing policy, zoning policy, it’s policy that shapes the characteristics of communities.”

While this sounds like interesting research (though it only covers two neighborhoods?), haven’t sociologists been talking about this for years? In fact, Massey and Denton made just this point in American Apartheid back in the early 1990s:

Our research indicates that racial residential segregation is the principal structural feature of American society responsible for the perpetuation of urban poverty and represents a primary cause of racial inequality in the United States.

If as a country we really wanted to deal with disparities in education, jobs, opportunities, health, and more, then the problem of residential segregation is the one that needs to be tackled. Local decisions about zoning and resource allocation also matter. Simply dealing with the health concerns without addressing the whole neighborhood can only get us so far.

Looking for sidewalks in Tyler, Texas

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A “news app developer” who moved to Tyler, Texas has found that it is difficult to walk around the community due to a lack of sidewalks and development that revolves around the automobile:

Several people insisted I couldn’t live without a car in Tyler–and they were absolutely right. When I landed at Tyler Pounds Regional Airport I hadn’t driven a car in four months. Since I landed, I’ve driven nearly every day. (Mostly ferrying my son to school and various activities.)

I very carefully selected the house I’m renting–an eccentric, hundred-year-old single-story in the Charnwood neighborhood–so that I can get to as many things as possible without driving. It’s within a mile of:

  • 2 parks (Children’s Park and Bergfield Park)
  • 2 coffee shops (Brady’s Speciality Coffee and Downtown Coffee Lounge)
  • 2 hospitals (Trinity Mother Frances and East Texas Medical Center)
  • 1 bookstore (Fireside Books)
  • 3 bus lines (the red, green and blue)
  • Tyler Public Library

Interestingly, it seems like the city knows about the problem. But addressing the issue won’t necessarily be easy:

Now that I’ve been out and walked the streets of Tyler, I have to say I think the plans laid out in Tyler 21 are impressively on-target. Tyler needs to build a lot more sidewalks. However, I also foresee a few challenges that just building more sidewalks won’t solve:

  • Tyler’s downtown is a food desert. It is impossible to live within walking distance of a grocery store. Getting a green market as a downtown anchor should be a very high priority.
  • The lack of pedestrian signals makes travel on foot unsafe. Front and Broadway have some of the longest continuous sidewalks in the city, but crossing either one on foot is nearly impossible. (The tunnel under Broadway at Hogg Middle School is a notable exception.)
  • Too many bus stops lack shelters. Nobody wants to stand on the corner and look lost. If there isn’t a shelter, there effectively isn’t a bus stop.

This sounds like the sort of place James Howard Kunstler would love to visit so that he could bemoan its unfriendliness toward pedestrians. As this writer points out, Tyler would have to undergo some major changes to make it truly walkable. The infrastructure of sidewalks needs to be there but there also need to be places for people to want to walk to. Building the sidewalks doesn’t necessarily lead to a street culture. Can a regional center like this effectively revive itself through building sidewalks and encouraging businesses and residents to take advantage of these new public spaces?

Second, isn’t the bigger issue here who is going to pay for all of this? Perhaps Tyler has some money set aside for this but this could be expensive and particularly in an era of economic crisis, some would argue that the money could be spent elsewhere. (To be fair, some people could always argue that the money could be spent on something more necessary than sidewalks.)

I don’t know much about Tyler, Texas but wouldn’t this plan also involve convincing people to move back into the denser parts of the city rather than living on the fringes in typical suburban neighborhoods? What would be the selling point?

On the whole, it sounds like there is a lot of work to be done.

French suburbs moving away from mainstream French culture

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The American suburbs are pretty unique compared to suburbs in other countries. For example, a new study shows that residents in French suburbs are moving away from mainstream French culture:

Local communities in France’s immigrant suburbs increasingly organize themselves on Islamic lines rather than following the values of the secular republic, according to a major new sociological study.

Respected political scientist Gilles Kepel, a specialist in the Muslim world, led a team of researchers in a year-long project in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, two Paris suburbs that exploded in riots in 2005.

The resulting study ? “Suburbs of the Republic” ? found that religious institutions and practices are increasingly displacing those of the state and the French Republic, which has a strong secular tradition.

Families from the districts, which are mainly populated by immigrants from north and west Africa and their descendants, regularly attend mosque, fast during Ramadan and boycott school meals that are not “halal.”

American culture is dominated by suburban themes and values while this study suggests the suburbs of France are the alienated portion of society. The study also looked into why the alienation is present, particularly following the 2005 riots:

While the resentment in the poor suburbs has social roots, essentially the residents’ virtual exclusion from a tight jobs market, the rioters expressed frustration in a vocabulary “borrowed from Islam’s semantic register.”

Islamic values are replacing those of a republic which failed to deliver on its promise of “equality”, and the residents of the suburbs increasingly do not see themselves as French, the researchers said.

American culture has some similar issues: we talk about equal opportunities, which is something different than “equality” in the French sense – compare “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Of course, this doesn’t exactly happen: the American system is set up so that certain groups have fewer opportunities over time. The disconnect between official rhetoric and the actual situation on the ground tends to lead to problems at some point.

So which country will effectively tackle these issues first: the French dealing with immigrants in the suburbs or the United States with poor inner-city neighborhoods? Does either country have the political will to truly tackle the root problems rather than simply treating the symptoms?

A proposal to unite the Great Lakes region

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The idea of the megapolis describes uniting metropolitan regions. But what about bringing together an entire region? A Chicago architecture firm has made a proposal to bring together both the American and Canadian sides of the Great Lakes:

The bi-national blueprint from Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill is still in its infancy, but the concept has garnered support from several mayors in Canada and the United States. The proposal calls on the two nations to re-imagine the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River region as a shared space, where Canadians and Americans work together to protect waterways, ease traffic congestion, promote tourism and develop new economic ventures…

The bi-national vision, presented this week at a global green-building conference in Toronto, isn’t so far-fetched. The Brookings Institution in Washington and Mowat Centre in Toronto have been studying the idea, consulting 250 business, government and community leaders. The public-policy think tanks will present their regional blueprint at an international Great Lakes water-quality meeting in Detroit next week…

The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River region is massive, encompassing Ontario, Quebec and eight U.S. states. It contains about 84 per cent of North America’s fresh water and almost 18,000 kilometres of lake frontage. Nearly a third of Canadians and about a tenth of Americans live here, in more than 15,000 towns and cities…

But with the manufacturing sector waning in many parts of the Great Lakes and glum forecasts of a deepening economic downturn, Mr. Hjartarson says the region should forge closer ties to capitalize on its assets. Those would include top-notch educational institutions, a wealth of corporate head offices and a population of 105 million people. New industries could be created through stronger co-operation. Mr. Enquist, the urban designer, points to renewable energy and green technology as possible opportunities for the region.

This article seems to suggest that environmental concerns, such as clean water and air, would provide the backbone for this partnership with later opportunities for joint infrastructure and economic initiatives.

My biggest question: how in the world could all of the government bodies agree so that things could get done within this partnership? Take the Chicago region as an example: there are many separate taxing bodies so putting together regional plans is very difficult. This proposal would up the ante, putting together many metropolitan regions, Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Toronto, Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, Hamilton, Montreal, Quebec, and more. And this doesn’t even account for two different nations that would need to make concessions for the region rather than national interests.

On the other hand, this sort of proposal  should be applauded for pushing a new way of thinking about things even if they may be difficult to implement. It could lead to some interesting questions. Again taking Chicago as an example: is Chicago more tied to other Midwestern cities like St. Louis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Omaha or more to Great Lakes cities?

It is also intriguing that this proposal comes from an architecture firm. Have urban planners or government types not thought of something like this?