Category Archives: Places

A reminder that all politics is local (and cultural): avoid the barbecue third rail in North Carolina

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National political candidates or officials often have to make sure that they can adapt to many different cultural contexts. Witness this example of Rick Perry and North Carolina barbecue:

And now Perry’s in hot water in North Carolina for a remark he made all the way back in 1992, when he was Texas agriculture commissioner and Houston was hosting the Republican National Convention.

Last week, in the Raleigh News & Observer’s “Under the Dome” politics blog, staffers Rob Christensen and Craig Jarvis wrote:

According to “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue,” in 1992 when Perry was a promising Texas politician but not yet governor, he tried some Eastern North Carolina barbecue from King’s of Kinston, which was served at the Republican National Convention in Houston.  “I’ve had road kill that tasted better than that,” Perry was quoted as saying…

“Holy Smoke” co-author John Shelton Reed, a retired University of North Carolina sociology professor, said Monday that people in his state do not mess around with this form of cooking. “Barbecue,” he said, “is the third rail of North Carolina politics.”

I don’t envy the task of politicians who have to continually switch gears on the campaign trail to keep up with all of the local cultural quirks. However, I wonder if these politicians have some sort of database or chart that alerts them to these local “third-rail” issues to avoid. What would an outsider have to avoid in coming to Chicago or the Chicago suburbs?

If anything, this story illustrates some basic sociological concepts. Residents of North Carolina rally around barbecue, among other things, and see it as a critical part of their state identity. When an outsider comes along and makes the comment that their prized food tastes worse than roadkill, they band together to defend their barbecue, reassert their group identity, and reestablish the symbolic boundaries that separate the group from other groups. It is not that different from sports fans reacting to perceived attacks from the outside, such as the reaction of a number of Chicago Bears fans to a new biography of Walter Payton that reveals his more human side. Even an outsider who might be telling the truth (though I’m willing to bet the barbecue was better than roadkill) still will have difficulty “attacking” one of the sacred features of the group.

Chicago couple moves into trendy West Loop area, mad when it attracts new developments and changes

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This could be the cynical alternative headline one might apply to the front-page story of Friday’s Chicago Tribune Business section. Here is a quick overview of this story titled “West Loop project building discontent“:

In recent years, the West Loop has become a magnet for young professionals like Dore who like a balance between urban convenience and peaceful suburbs. But as Dore reached an empty parking lot on the southeast corner of Madison and Green streets, he glared at what he and his neighbors fear will be the end of their peaceful lifestyle — a parking lot that soon could be the site of a 22-story hotel.

“I’m just disappointed,” said Dore, who earlier this year became the reluctant leader of a group of neighbors who fought a losing battle against the high-rise. The first phase of the project, a three-story retail building anchored by a Mariano’s Fresh Market grocery store, is expected to break ground next month.

Their arguments that the project will block views, increase traffic and change the neighborhood’s dynamic have been made by residents in up-and-coming locations for years. As neighborhoods like the West Loop, the South Loop or the Near North Side grow, residents can be at odds with business owners, developers and city officials over the kind of development they want in their communities…

Dore and his wife, who moved to their three-bedroom condo in May 2009, say they are disappointed. Two years ago, they thought they had found a neighborhood close to the Loop that was also an ideal place to raise a family. Five weeks ago, their daughter, Anna, was born. But they are not sure they will stay in the West Loop.

The general argument here is not unusual: residents move into a neighborhood, whether in the city or suburb, the neighborhood starts changing, and residents are unhappy and start making NIMBY arguments. But several things struck me about this article:

1. I’m always somewhat surprised when residents act like the neighborhood can’t change. Particularly in this case, they moved into a trendy West Loop area. They like what this gentrified area has become. But other people and businesses want to move there as well. City neighborhoods often change rapidly and not only is this one trendy, it is relatively close to the Loop. Proponents of the new development suggest that the retail stores are needed and could be profitable. Did the residents really think that the neighborhood was going to be frozen in time?

1a. The site in question was formerly a parking lot. This unattractive use is preferable in a neighborhood? In many cities, parking lots are simply holding spaces until the owners can find a more profitable use. The money in parking lots is not the daily parking but rather waiting for the land to become really valuable and then selling the lot for big money.

2. The residents followed a typical path: form a community group, show up at public hearings, and let your local politicians know about your opinions. Just because their opinions were not followed doesn’t mean the system is broken.

3. At the same time, the article sounds like a classic example of the political economy model of growth. The neighborhood has succeeded to the point where bigger businesses now want to make money in the neighborhood. Politicians like these projects because they bring in more money in terms of jobs and property and sales tax revenues. I don’t know that there is much that the residents could have done to slow this down.

4. This really is written more as a human interest story rather than an overview of the development process. The perspective the newspaper readers get is that these residents have a legitimate grievance. Only later in the story do we hear the reasons why some want the new development to happen. Are we supposed to think that these city residents should be pitied because their West Loop paradise has been lost? The story could have been told in a completely different way that wouldn’t have made this one couple out to be victims. I’m kind of surprised this leads off the Business section because it really is a negative story when it could have highlighted how this neighborhood continues to thrive and attract development.

Fermilab closes Tevatron; what’s the effect on nearby suburbs and the Chicago region?

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The need for the Tevatron, a particle accelerator, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known commonly as Fermilab, has been drastically reduced after the construction of the Large Hadron Collidor in Europe. Therefore, the Tevatron is being shut down and Fermilab is looking to transition to new areas of physics research. My question is this: what effect this will have on the nearby suburbs and the Chicago region?

The article says that several local politicians want to keep research at Fermilab going:

Fermilab will still have star quality, and the estimated 2,300 scientists there will continue playing a critical role in particle physics. The lab could even re-emerge a few decades from now as the leader, officials say.

However, one daunting hurdle remains: obtaining what may be hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding that officials say is needed to guide the lab’s work into the next generation of research via two projects, known as Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment and Project X…

Over the decades, the cost of upgrades at Fermi could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, a frightening prospect in this troubled economy. But U.S. Reps. Randy Hultgren of Winfield and Judy Biggert of Hinsdale said the funding is crucial. On Wednesday, the two Republican congressmen held a round table on the underground particle-physics program at Fermi.

“I think basic science is the most important thing that will help us to compete in the global economy,” Biggert said. “We have to realize that basic science really drives industry and creates the jobs our children and grandchildren will enjoy.”

I assume most places would want to get federal money and remain competitive globally. The Chicago region, as a global city, needs research facilities like these.

But what about the local jobs and the greater impact on nearby suburbs? Several researchers, including Michael Ebner, have suggested that Fermilab played a crucial role in the development of the area. This 2006 overview of Naperville in Chicago sums up this perspective:

With the creation in 1946 of Argonne National Laboratory (near Lemont, about 15 miles southeast of Naperville) and the establishment, in 1967, of the National Accelerator Laboratory-now called Fermilab-in Batavia (about 15 miles northwest of town), Naperville was on its way to becoming “Chicago’s Technoburb,” as Lake Forest College history professor Michael Ebner later dubbed it. Bell Labs, Amoco, Nalco Chemical, NI-Gas, and Miles Laboratories were among the corporations that set up facilities in Naperville during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

In particular, Ebner argues that this facility plus Argonne National Laboratory meant that scientists and other staff moved to Naperville and then pushed for better schools. While Naperville was still relatively small in the 1950s and 1960s, this influx of educated residents gave the city a world-class educational system, helping to contribute to Naperville’s later growth. Here is one of the outcomes that could be tied to this from the Naperville District #203 website:

In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat (1999 TIMSS-R), District 203 eighth graders achieved the highest score in science and sixth highest in mathematics among the 38 participating nations and consortiums worldwide.

I am somewhat skeptical of this argument. One, I’ve never seen hard figures that show how many Fermilab or Argonne researchers actually settled in Naperville. If these researchers also lived in other communities, did their school districts experience the same changes? Two, I haven’t seen evidence that these people directly influenced school changes in the community. Third, I would argue that the 1964 announcement that Bell Laboratories was locating a facility just north of Naperville was much more consequential in understanding Naperville’s growth.

Additionally, Fermilab has often been included in promotional materials as part of the Illinois Technology Research Corridor, providing the research and development foundation to the many notable corporations that have located along I-88 between Oak Brook and Aurora. This article from summer 2011 briefly recognized the impact of the corridor:

While the top-five states were unchanged from 2010, rankings 6 to 10 saw a few surprise movers. Illinois gained 8 spots (14/6) from last year, bumping Pennsylvania down to 7th place. What happened?

As it turns out, Illinois’ improvement is the result of the amount of scientific grant money awarded to the state — $185 million to be exact — from the National Science Foundation to the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign.

While many know the state for politics and sports, Illinois’ Technology and Research Corridor is a major scientific hub in northeastern Illinois, linking intellectual capital and corporate innovation.

Big name companies such as Motorola Solutions and Mobility, Boeing, and Telephone and Data Systems spacer among others are headquartered in Illinois in large part to benefit from the concentration of technical expertise.

I assume the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, DuPage County, and nearby suburbs would like Fermilab to continue to be scientifically relevant as this brings in federal money, jobs, businesses, and educated residents. Whether the transition Fermilab makes to new research areas also includes these benefits for nearby communities remains to be seen.

Does the failure of urban renewal necessarily mean that the free market could solve the problems of poor neighborhoods?

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Reason looks at what happened to one New York City neighborhood in the name of urban renewal:

In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives – “urban renewal” –  destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes. Overall, about half of urban renewal’s victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin’s famous quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal.”

New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.

The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment. In the early 20th century, Manhattantown was briefly the center of New York’s black music scene. A startling roster of musicians, writers, and artists resided there: the composer Will Marion Cook, vaudeville star Bert Williams, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond, muralist Charles Alston, writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Billie Holiday (whose mother also owned a restaurant on 99th Street), Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame, and the actor Robert Earl Jones.

Designating West 99th and 98th Streets a “slum” was bitterly ironic. The community was founded when the great black real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton Jr. broke the color line on 99th Street in 1905. Payton, also credited with first bringing African Americans to Harlem, wanted to make it possible for a black man to rent an apartment, in his words, “wherever his means will permit him to live.”

While Reason is a conservative website, there are plenty of others on the other side of the political aisle that also agree that urban renewal had a negative impact on many neighborhoods. Ultimately, this policy was used to clear “slums” and to use that land for more profitable development, typically for wealthier residents and businesses. Additionally, what actually counted as “blight” or as a “slum” was contentious as it tended to frown upon cheaper, ethnic or non-white neighborhoods. Blacks weren’t the only ones displaced; Herbert Gan’s classic work Urban Villagers looked at the fate of an Italian-American neighborhood which was ripped apart by urban renewal.

Since this comes from Reason, I assume that this is a critique of liberal policy and of eminent domain: you can’t trust the government with these kinds of powers as they will use it to trample people they don’t like. But can we swing all the way in the opposite direction and suggest that the free market will eventually get rid of the issues that poorer neighborhoods face and that lead them to be ripe for urban renewal?

I would argue no. Left to its own devices, the free market can also result in harmful policies that hurt less than wealthy neighborhoods. Here are a few examples:

1. Redlining. This was based on the practice of marking urban neighborhoods in terms of the security of their real estate by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation which arose out of the New Deal. But this practice really took off when private lenders and institutions adopted the government agency’s markings and then only made loans to the better neighborhoods, effectively shutting out poor neighborhoods from mortgages.

2. Exclusionary zoning. After the Fair Housing Act of 1968 ruled out discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, exclusionary zoning became a hot topic in the 1970s. A number of court cases looked at how the zoning guidelines of communities and counties effectively kept poor people out of suburban locations. By only allowing higher priced housing or certain kinds of housing (like single-family homes on a minimum of 2 acres), these zoning guidelines were very effective in maintaining the exclusivity of certain areas.

3. Still existing discrimination in obtaining mortgages and other loans. There have been plenty of studies that show when equally matched whites and blacks apply for a mortgage or a car loan or another loan, blacks are rejected at higher rates. Similar research has shown this also applies to jobs. Read an overview of this research in a 2008 Annual Review of Sociology article.

4. The ongoing presence of residential segregation in the United States. Many of our major cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are still very segregated. View maps of some of these cities here.

5. Gentrification. While the influx of residents may “improve” a neighborhood, it often has the effect of pushing the poorer residents into other poor neighborhoods because of increased housing prices and property taxes.

So urban renewal was not the answer. But it is unlikely that a completely unfettered free market is as well. So perhaps the real question to address is how to craft effective public policy that provides aid to neighborhoods and their residents so that these neighborhoods truly improve, add jobs, and experience revitalization. The key here is “effective,” policy that does not become cost prohibitive, works with local residents and organizations rather than just applies a top-down approach, and achieves attainable and worthy objectives while minimizing unintended consequences. This is likely a difficult task but swinging the pendulum all the way to the free market side isn’t the solution.

Was the popularity of the Kennedy mystique a rejection of 1950s American suburbs?

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The Kennedy mystique has been well established in American culture: John F. and Jackie Kennedy swept into the White House, bringing in the television age, the space age, and jumpstarting the 1960s. But I hadn’t connected this mystique to what critics saw as the bland American suburbs of the 1950s:

In the normal course of the apparat’s work, elevating the Kennedys requires the denigration of the Eisenhowers, the 1950s, and the supposed dullness of the country that the Kennedys rescued us from—“our country of suburbs and Ozzie and Harriet, poodle skirts and one kind of cheese,” as Diane Sawyer oddly put it, while the screen showed a golden brick of Velveeta. Jackie by contrast wore clothes by designers who would have gone into a dead faint at the sight of a poodle skirt. When the Kennedys moved in, added the court historian Michael Beschloss, “we had a White House that looked like a bad convention hotel.” The Kennedys brought French cuisine to the White House, Diane Sawyer added. “No more Eisenhower cheese sauce and cole slaw. .??.??. In our middle-class nation, it wasn’t easy for us to fathom this first lady.” Jackie herself is heard complaining about the marks that Ike’s golf shoes left in the flooring. Dwight Eisenhower, lumbering ox.

This view of the suburbs fits well with a set of suburban critiques that began in the 1950s: the suburbs were bland, about conformity, and were populated by people who couldn’t really act like those nice suburban families on TV and who had popular tastes. In comparison to the Eisenhowers and Ozzie and Harriet on TV, the Kennedys were the cultural elite, the fashionable who had refined tastes and opinions. This same argument can be heard today and still pits two sets of people against each other: the urban intellectuals versus the middle class suburbanites, progressives versus conservatives, fashionable and novel versus bland and predictable, novel versus boring, upscale shoppers versus Walmart (or maybe Target on the slightly higher end) patrons. Perhaps it all goes back to those arguments in the early years of America when Thomas Jefferson advocated for a more rural America and Alexander Hamilton pushed for the capital to be in New York City.

Chicago looks at 63 ways to raise revenue

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Following up on a report this week that says American cities are facing falling revenues, a new report for the City of Chicago looks at 63 different ways to raise revenue. According to the powers that be, some of the ideas have merit while other are “non-starters”:

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Emanuel — who must present his budget plan next month — said several of Ferguson’s ideas are “promising” and will be given serious consideration. But the mayor said “raising property taxes, income taxes or the sales taxes is off the table. And asking drivers on Lake Shore Drive to pay a toll is also a non-starter.”…

Ferguson’s report also suggests imposing a $5 London-style congestion fee on for driving in the downtown area during rush hours. The fee would be collected in an area bounded roughly from North Avenue south to the Stevenson Expressway, and from Halsted Street east to Lake Michigan, although it extends as far west as Ashland Avenue between Lake Street and the Eisenhower Expressway…

In addition, Ferguson also suggests creating a 1 percent Chicago city income tax, much as New York City imposes, for new revenues of $500 million per year. In suggesting the tax, Ferguson’s report points out that the State of Illinois increased its income tax to 5 percent last year, but froze the amount distributed to municipal governments, thus effectively reducing the percentage of the tax that cities receive…

Ferguson also suggests eliminating the city’s more than 160 Tax Increment Financing Districts, where property tax dollars for schools, parks, and other taxing districts are frozen for at least 23 years, so that all property tax increases afterward to go into a fund to improve struggling neighborhoods. Although TIF districts generate about $500 million a year, Ferguson says $100 million in new revenues could actually be generated by eliminating them and returning all property tax revenues to the city and other taxing bodies.

It would be interesting to see look at this document to see how many of the proposed options are already in place in other cities. Additionally, how many current revenue generating schemes in Chicago are used elsewhere? Why not learn from the “best practices” (or “necessary practices”) in place elsewhere?

A number of these ideas would generate significant conversations/controversies. There a number of people who have suggested congestion pricing for big cities but actually putting this into practice and selling it to the car-hungry American public is a difficult task. The smaller options, like changing the garbage system, would probably prove more popular or at least easier to implement but they probably wouldn’t have the kind of financial impact necessary to help the city fight a $635.7 million budget shortfall.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may have impressed people so far but can he survive this upcoming budget battle?

American cities continue to face falling revenues

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A new report shows that American cities continue to face falling revenues, leading to changes in city budgets and governments:

Belt-tightening continued in cities across the United States in 2011, as fiscal crunches forced local governments to cut back. City revenue is projected to decline 2.3 percent by the end of 2011, according to a new report from the National League of Cities released Tuesday, marking the fifth straight year of declines.

One of the main factors contributing to the decline in revenue is a drop in property tax collections, which are projected to fall by 3.7 percent in 2011, the second straight year of declines. Last year’s drop of 2.0 percent was the first year-over-year decline in city property tax revenue in 15 years. To make up for the shortfalls, cities cut jobs, canceled infrastructure projects, cuts services such as libraries and parks and recreation programs and modified health care benefits for employees.

Hiring freezes were the most common personnel-related cuts made in 2011. Half of cities reported salary reductions or freezes and nearly one in three reported laying off employees or reducing health care benefits. Other actions included early retirements and furloughs.

Even in good times, cities are often concerned with boosting property and sales tax revenues. Commercial and residential development proposals are often scrutinized to see how much they might bring into local coffers versus how they might require in new services. But in times of economic crisis, municipalities and residents, worried about possible rises in property taxes, look even more closely at this issue. Additionally, it is more difficult to obtain federal or state monies when those governments have their own budget concerns.

The belt-tightening will continue unless the economy posts a remarkable reversal. In the meantime, cities big and small, from the size of Chicago and a looming $600 million budget shortfall to smaller suburbs, will continue to look for ways to maximize revenues. In many places, this will lead to some interesting conversations about whether the local government should dig itself out of the mess or whether the residents should help makeup some of the loss of revenues.

“Zoning bigots” holding Americans back from how they really want to live?

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It is not too often that one sees opinion pieces about the current state of zoning in America. But here is some provocative commentary (“zoning bigots”?) based on zoning in the Los Angeles area:

You could make a decent case that the campaign to harass and remove property owners is no less bigoted than Mayor Mahool’s quarantine proposal. Although blacks, whites, and Latinos have all been targeted for nuisance abatement raids, these folks share one characteristic: They don’t meet the standards of respectability set by the political class and large urban landowners. In some cases the county’s lifestyle demands shade into bias on religious grounds. Oscar Castaneda, a mechanic and Seventh Day Adventist minister who was ordered to tear down his entire property, lives in the high desert because his faith impels him to a rural, self-sufficient life.

Los Angeles zoning practice is bigoted in other ways that are often overt. A city (not county) ordinance preventing residents from keeping more than one rooster on a property is clearly aimed at Latino homeowners. A maze of restrictions on convenience stores and fast food joints applies in South L.A. but not in tonier areas. During the jihad against “McMansions” a few years ago, the popular term for large properties was “Persian Palaces”—a swipe at L.A.’s Iranian-American community.

“There’s definitely an attempt to squeeze out of Angelenos the very things that make them Angelenos and not New Yorkers or Bostonians,” says Chapman University urban theorist Joel Kotkin. “There are two forces at work: One is the effort to re-engineer people into wards of the state. The other is urban land interests who want to force people to live in ways they don’t want to live.”

Or to live somewhere else. Many of the Antelope Valley homeowners we spoke with for a recent reason.tv report have given up the struggle and are planning to leave California. What Antonovich (who refused requests for an interview) has in mind for their vacated properties is not clear. Educated guesses include a plan for massive wind-power generation and a scheme to turn the half-horse town of Palmdale into a high-density, smart-growth hub for the California high-speed rail project. If you know Palmdale you know that the notion of turning it into a hipster paradise would be funny—except that this pipe dream is destroying the lives of real people. They’re just not the right sort of people.

A few thoughts while trying to sort out this argument:

1. Good point: zoning can be a tool used by the powerful (politicians, those with money, etc.) to control development. The political economy model in urban sociology is based on this idea: the elite are able to push development that helps make them money.

2. Odd point: this argument about “bigoted zoning” is somewhat different from a more common argument about “exclusionary zoning.” This argument is predicated on the idea that zoning takes away the rights of all individuals, regardless of race/ethnicity or social class. It is simply a tool of the upper classes, interestingly, a Marxist type argument. Exclusionary zoning, the subject of a number of court cases, argues that zoning takes place to exclude certain groups of people, typically minorities and the lower class from suburbs. So all individuals who are not the upper class are being discriminated against in this Marxist/populist argument?

3. Somewhat intriguing argument: these zoning guidelines limit people from doing what they really want to do, like buy McMansions and raise chickens. In this line of thinking, Americans all want the suburban lifestyle where their home is their castle and they have a little bit of land to play around with. The government is a bogeyman, trying to force people into denser developments (like nice New Urbanist developments or high-rises downtown?) and generally trying to squelch suburban life.

This argument misses some of why the suburbs even exist in the United States today. On one hand, there is some cultural impetus to this all: from the beginning, Americans have had debates about urban vs. rural life, the Thomas Jefferson’s who wanted “gentlemen farmers” versus the Alexander Hamilton’s who wanted to live in thriving cities. Americans like open space and retained the British emphasis on property rights. This cultural spirit is still with us today: we love cars and our big homes.

However, this was all made possible and encouraged by some other factors. To start, developing technologies, from the railroad to the electric streetcar to the automobile, opened up areas for development. More importantly, developers and businessmen saw these transportation lines and the adjacent land as opportunities so they sold homes and land to make money. Then, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, the government made a concerted push to promote the suburban lifestyle, privileging highway construction and longer-term mortgages that helped make the suburban dream possible. Without this profit seeking and government support, would the suburbs have still happened? Perhaps. But not likely to the scale we know now.

To argue now that generally government is opposed to the suburban life is silly. Most of the policies, even during this time of economic crisis, have been about maintaining the suburban middle-class lifestyle: limiting their tax burden, helping them keep their homes, ensuring a quality education and a college degree, etc. Yes, this current administration has suggested some new ideas like high-speed rail but this isn’t a total assault on the suburbs. Indeed, it would be tough for any party right now to assault the suburbs too strongly: they probably can’t win without suburban voters, particularly independents.

4. Flip this around: what might happen if there is no zoning? Does this really empower individual land owners? Zoning helps ensure that certain uses are not next to other uses. For example, zoning for a suburban subdivision typically means that a single-family home will not end up next to a coal power plant. Or a school next to a sewage treatment plant. Yes, zoning can be draconian and it can be used by people in power but it can also be used well.

There are cities that have less or no zoning. Houston is a classic example in urban sociology and as one might suspect, its development patterns look a bit different than other major cities.

Is no zoning really the answer? While homeowners might not like some of the plans in the Los Angeles region, doesn’t it also protect them at other times? In a world with no zoning, wouldn’t the more powerful actors almost always win out over the average homeowner? How would homeowners protect themselves from other homeowners?

One way to retain zoning but turn it toward different ends would be for citizens to get themselves on zoning boards and then starting voting how they like. Zoning boards may not be flashy and it can be difficult to get on them, particularly in places where it is about political connections, but this would be the place to start fighting back if one was inclined to do so.

The “suburban depression”

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The ongoing economic crisis has hit a lot of sectors of American society. Some new data suggests the economic crisis has particularly hit the suburbs, the proverbial “land of milk and honey” in American life:

There has not been so large a portion of Americans in poverty since 1993. But this time the growth in poverty is different, hitting whites and suburbia harder than it did during the early 1990s slump…

The suburban poverty rate is 11.8 percent, a level not seen since 1967…

A key factor in the rise in suburban poverty may be the fact that the housing market has played such a central role in the economic slump.

Many suburbs have seen a vast amount of wealth erased by declining housing markets and mortgage foreclosures, resulting in a great deal of economic dislocation. Since white Americans are more likely to own homes than African Americans, this could also explain why whites have fared worse than they did in the 1990s while African Americans have fared better.

The interpretation here is that with homes losing a significant portion of their value, an investment vehicle that many suburbanites had relied on has proven to be a hindrance instead. I would want to see more data: how does the growth of the poverty rate in the suburbs compare to cities and rural areas? If you look at the Census 2010 figures, the poverty rate for central cities is 19.7% (14.8% for metropolitan regions) and it is 16.5% outside of metropolitan areas. While falling housing prices may be part of the problem, what about jobs – are a higher percentage of lost jobs suburban jobs? I haven’t seen anyone write about this jobs link.

This data also affects two other larger ideas narratives about suburbs:

1. Life in the suburbs is not supposed to get worse; rather, it is supposed to always get better. Have we simply reached the point where the standard of living and incomes simply can’t rise much more?

2. There is evidence from recent years that more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities. While the percentages of poor people are lower in the suburbs, the absolute numbers are higher. This is part of a growing trend: the suburbs aren’t just (and never totally were) where wealthy whites can live.

Comprehending the office and retail space in an edge city

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After explaining the concept of an edge city to my American Suburbanization class, a discussion arose about how much space these places really have. When defining the edge city, Joel Garreau had these as two criteria (out of five total): “has five million square feet or more of leasable office space” and “has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space.” This is a lot of space, as much as a smaller big city, but can still be hard to understand.

For example, there is much more commercial and retail space in the exemplar of the edge city: Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Around 2007 Tysons Corner had 25,599,065 square feet (2,378,231.0 m2) of office space, 1,072,874 square feet (99,673.3 m2) of industrial/flex space, 4,054,096 square feet (376,637.8 m2) of retail space, and 2,551,579 square feet (237,049.4 m2) of hotel space. Therefore Tysons Corner has a grand total of 33,278,014 square feet (3,091,628.7 m2) of commercial space.

How do we put this in more manageable terms?

1. Garreau compares this suburban space to the office and retail space in existing cities. The 5 million square feet of office space “is more than downtown Memphis.” While we may have traditionally associated this much office and retail space only with the downtowns of big cities, now concentrations of this space can be found right in the middle of the suburbs. This is unusual because suburbs are often portrayed as bedroom suburbs, places like people live and sleep but have to work elsewhere.

2. Compare this space to large buildings. The Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago has 4.56 million square feet of space, 3.81 million rentable. So an edge city would have at least slightly more space this notable office building though perhaps it is difficult to visualize this space since it is a skyscraper and each floor seems smaller. An ever bigger building, The Pentagon, has 6.5 million square feet, more than the lower threshold for an edge city. Therefore, Tysons Corner has nearly 4 Pentagons of office space. Comparing this edge city space to shopping malls, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois (an edge city itself) has 2.7 million square feet while the Mall of America has a total of 4.2 million square feet.

3. We could measure edge cities in terms of square miles or acres and then compare to bigger cities. Square miles make some sense: Tysons Corner is 4.9 square miles while Memphis, a city Garreau says has downtown space similar to that of an edge city, is 302.3 square miles (on land). Acres are a little harder to interpret: a common suburban house lot is an eighth of an acre, a square mile has 640 acres (hence the dividing of the American frontier into 160 and 640 acre plots), and an acre has roughly 43,500 square feet. Then, an edge city with 5 million square feet of office space has about 115 acres of office space. Perhaps acres are best left to farmers.

In the end, I think Garreau made the right comparison to demonstrate the office and retail space within an edge city: we have some ideas about the size of downtowns of smaller big cities and the image of this amount of space existing in the suburbs is jarring.