Category Archives: Places

“Sustainability thinker” suggests sprawling suburbs can’t really be green

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A common target of those concerned with being green and sustainability are American suburbs. While some might suggest that suburbs can become more green (read here and  here), Alex Steffen, a sustainability thinker, suggests it really isn’t possible:

What’s a sustainability trend that you wish would go away?

Shallow redesigns of suburban life. You see a lot of proposals these days that seem to suggest that all that open space is perfect for farming, or that we can power our McMansions and cars with solar panels, so even the suburbs can “go green.” The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs—and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs—aren’t just a bit unsustainable, they’re ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

Unfortunately, it isn’t really clear what Steffen means by this. What constitutes a “shallow redesign” versus something more substantive? Would Steffen agree with New Urbanists that suburbs can be redesigned in ways to promote green behavior? This statement is also interesting: “nothing we know of will likely stop their decline.” They may be in decline now due to financial concerns (the budgets of local communities, the ability of homeowners to purchase large new homes) but does that mean that they will be on the decline forever? Could we have the same type of sprawl with just more green single-family homes (like LEED Platinum homes)? What sort of suburbs, if any, would he be in favor of?

As I read Steffen’s comments, I thought about the trade-offs those interested in being green and sustainability might have to make regarding American suburbs. Given the popularity of suburbs in American life, both as an ideology and an actual destination of a majority of Americans, can this movement really claim that suburbs as a whole are bad? Instead, most arguments seem to be incremental: suburbs can be modified in ways, such as having LEED homes or more mass-transit or more fuel efficient cars, that retain some of their key attributes without turning it into city life. But even with these sorts of incremental arguments, I wonder how many of the commentators really wish that suburbs would just disappear but can’t admit such things because the American public would react negatively.

What happens when even the schools in well-off sububs don’t meet the NCLB standards?

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With the increasing standards in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Department of Education recently suggested that the number of schools that are not meeting standards is likely to dramatically increase:

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students’ proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law’s mandates.

According to this “Fact Check,” schools are not labeled as “failing.” Rather, there is a process such schools would go through if they do not meet the NCLB increasing standards:

Obama’s terminology wasn’t quite right, though. There is no “failing” label in the No Child Left Behind Act. And schools that do not meet growth targets — aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014 — for one year are not subject to any intervention.

Those unable to do so for two or more consecutive years are considered “in need of improvement.” The consequences then become stiffer each year, starting with offering students an opportunity to attend another school, and escalating if the targets remain unmet.

As more schools are unable to meet these standards, what happens when suburban school districts in fairly well-off suburbs don’t meet the standards? Many of these communities use their well-performing schools as a selling point. Suburban home buyers and businesses are influenced by school performance and perceptions about school districts.

Having schools labeled as “not meeting standards” (or in possible public jargon, “failing”) would be a blow to the idyllic image and high status of a number of suburban communities. Beyond schools, suburbs are supposed to be places where Americans can be safe and at least their children can get ahead. Suburbs could try to give a more technical explanation for the NCLB data but this could prove tedious or difficult to understand.

One possible outcome  of all of this (suggested to me by a colleague outside my department) might be that this is when NCLB will truly be done: when monied suburbs realize that the legislation says their good schools are not making adequate progress.

Describing a “baseball McMansion”

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The term McMansion is generally a pejorative word, typically referring to the size or the poor architecture of a home or the cookie-cutter nature of a suburban neighborhood. Occasionally, it gets applied to others structures, even baseball stadiums.  In a review of Scottsdale Stadium, the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants, a writer suggests that another spring training facility, Salt Water Fields, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, is more like a McMansion than a home:

Salt River Fields, someone said later, “isn’t spring training.” It’s a baseball McMansion. Scottsdale Stadium just feels like home.

Here is a little more of the description of the two ballparks. Scottsdale Stadium is described as, “intimate and evocative of its sport,” “the Cactus League’s quaintest stadium,” “The place blends into the landscape as if Frank Lloyd Wright had come back from the grave to assist the architects who replaced the old wooden park 20 years ago,” and “There is no such thing as a mediocre seat.” In contrast, here is how Salt River Fields is described: “The world up there seemed so different, the trip should have required a passport,” “Salt River Fields sits next to a Target and movie multiplex. Concrete rules the landscape, offset by some sprouting trees and cactus gardens,” “The parking lot and the walkways at the new stadium consume more space than the entire Giants facility,” and “Shade, like everything else, is more abundant than at the Giants’ park.” Overall, Salt River Fields is more suburban, bigger, less intimate, and features more space (particularly in the parking lots) while Scottsdale Stadium is more like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.

It would be interesting to find out how fans respond to these two settings. Both offer certain amenities. Not everyone likes cozier, more intimate facilities like Wrigley Field. While Cubs fans tend to like the place, many others (including other teams) complain about the lack of space and outdated facilities (like the bathrooms). Additionally, we could ask whether Scottsdale Stadium really is authentic or simply borrows architectural and design features from other successful ballparks and tries to put them all together.
Ultimately, will baseball fans go in greater numbers to Scottsdale Stadium because of its design and atmosphere and avoid Salt Water Fields with its McMansion nature?

Contracting Youngstown

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With dwindling populations in Rust Belt cities (as an example, population loss in Chicago), some have suggested that urban contraction would be the best option. Youngstown, Ohio, which has dropped from a peak population of 170,002 in 1930 to 66,892 in 2010, has been demolishing empty houses and encouraging people to move to neighborhoods where more people live:

In 2006, the city abandoned all that. And Youngstown walked away from the most fundamental assumption of economic development and city planning: The idea that a city needs to grow…

But without the dream of growth, Youngstown just had a bunch of empty houses that no one was ever coming back to. So the city started demolishing thousands of empty houses…

The problem with shrinking cities is that they don’t shrink in a smart, organized way. It’s chaotic. Thousands of people will leave one neighborhood, and maybe a dozen people will stay behind.

So Youngstown has been offering financial help for those people left behind, offering to move them to a place with more neighbors.

The twist to this story is that a number of people were not interested in moving as they talked about how they had lived in their homes and neighborhoods for years. Due to this, the contraction plans have slowed down a bit. This is not too surprising: many people are attached to their homes and settings, even if presented with what outside observers would see as better options.

You can read more about this on Youngstown’s website. In their Youngstown 2010 plan, the first statement of the Vision talks about seeing the city as a smaller place:

1. Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city.

The dramatic collapse of the steel industry led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and a precipitous decline in population. Having lost more than half its population and almost its entire industrial base in the last 30 years, the city is now left with an oversized urban structure. (It has been described as a size 40 man wearing a size 60 suit.) There are too many abandoned properties and too many underutilized sites. Many difficult choices will have to be made as Youngstown recreates itself as a sustainable mid-sized city. A strategic program is required to rationalize and consolidate the urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner.

If all goes well in Youngstown over the coming years and the city successfully transitions to a smaller city, they may just serve as a model for a number of other cities facing similar concerns.

It would be interesting to know how communities reach a point where they are able to truly realize that growth is not going to happen. Youngstown has been losing population for 50 years; what pushed them to the point of action in the mid 2000s? This is an important point to reach: cities and suburbs are supposed to grow over time. We have less clear ideas about communities that are on a slow decline – what do we do with the people there? Should we try to revive these communities? Can we admit that something went wrong? Is it acceptable or right to perceive places with massive population loss as “failures”?

Victor Davis Hanson on the autonomy of the American suburbs

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In a column about how disasters can particularly affect complex centralized nations like Japan, classicist Victor Davis Hanson discusses how autonomy and decentralization is a primary feature of American suburbs:

I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain…

While a disaster comparable to Tokyo is certainly possible here in California, Americans are by nature less prone to rely on centrally provided resources, and are still uneasy with high urban densities. We forget that the suburbanite — ranch house, three cars in the garage, and distance from the urban center — is not just an energy waster in comparison with his Euro apartment-dwelling, single Smart-car-driving, train-commuting counterpart, but a far more independent-minded, free, and self-reliant citizen as well. Again, I hope our technological future is not in grand mass transit projects thought up and operated by a huge federal government, but in cleaner, more fuel-efficient, private cars; not in massive power plants, but smaller, more dispersed local generators, be they powered by nuclear, solar, wind, or fossil fuels; and not in vast agricultural hydraulic regimes, but in family-operated, more intensively worked farms that are the anchors of rural communities — as idealistic and naive as that may sound.

In a wider sense, America’s strength has always been found in the self-reliant, highly individualist, even eccentric citizen.

An interesting argument that perhaps comes down to which is the higher value: avoiding the problems of suburbs including not wasting energy and the other commonly-cited ills of suburbia such as a lack of community, consumerism, a place primarily available to those with money, etc. vs. suburban (and more rural) citizens that are “independent-minded, free, and self-reliant.”

I can imagine some of the responses to Hanson’s claims about suburbanites:

1. Are they really free and self-reliant? Even with their single-family homes and relative autonomy, suburbanites are highly dependent on others for goods like roads and relatively cheap oil that make such suburban life possible. What about the need in the suburbs to “keep up with the Joneses” and perhaps slavishly pursue the newest update of the American Dream? Is the autonomy primarily due to the location and its lower population densities or because many suburbanites have the means or wealth to do what they wish (as do wealthier city dwellers)?

2. Are the problems of centralized systems in the face of major disasters enough to outweigh the benefits of more centralized systems in less troubled times? If a major disaster were to hit a major American metropolitan region and its suburbs, would the average citizen be better equipped to handle the situation?

Green nimbyism

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NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitudes are typically associated with suburban sprawl and McMansions. So what happens when NIMBY is associated with more eco-friendly projects?

Nimbyism is nothing new. It’s even logical sometimes, perhaps not always deserving of opprobrium. After all, it is one thing to be a passionate proponent of recycling, and another to welcome a particular recycling plant — with the attendant garbage-truck traffic — on your street. General environmental principles may be at odds with convenience or even local environmental consequences.

But policymakers in the United States have been repeatedly frustrated by constituents who profess to worry about the climate and count themselves as environmentalists, but prove unwilling to adjust their lifestyles or change their behavior in any significant way…

Robert B. Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University who studies environmental behaviors, points to two phenomena:

Humans hew to the “normative” behaviors of their community. In places where bike lanes or wind turbines or B.R.T. systems are seen as an integral part of society, people tend not protest a new one; if they are not the norm, they will. Second, whatever feelings people have about abstract issues like the environment, in practice they react more passionately to immediate rewards and punishments (like a ready parking space) than distant consequences (like the threat of warming).

Based on Cialdini’s ideas, perhaps it will just take one or two of these neighborhoods or locations adopting these projects so that it becomes normative. But who will be willing to go first? And what is the critical mass when such developments become normal?

While some might take this as evidence that certain people aren’t willing to sacrifice for green projects, I think we can take a broader view: in general, Americans don’t like two things that could possibly occur with the construction of something nearby.

1. The state in which they purchased their home or housing unit is altered. The idyllic scene they once bought into may not last forever. Whether this is due to a nearby condo building blocking the view or a new subdivision taking away a once-open field, Americans do not these sorts of changes. They paid money for a particular setting and want to maintain that setting as long as possible.

2. Their property values might be reduced. Because of the amount of money invested in homes plus hopes that many have about making at least some money when selling their homes somewhere down the line plus the amenities that come in living in places with higher property values, property values drive a lot of development decisions.

Developments like these green projects can be difficult to push through, particularly when those in opposition have money or status. Research has shown that typical dirty types of development, like power plants or landfills or public housing projects, tend to get placed in poorer areas where the people are less-equipped to fight back. Could these green projects be headed for similar places?

Two Italian film directors describe Roman suburbs

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Two Italian film directors discussed their new film Et In Terra Pax, which is set in a “Roman council estate” in the Roman suburbs.  Here is how they described these Italian suburbs:

?MB: I was thinking a lot about a story set in the Roman suburbs…

MB: We live in part of Rome both close to the centre and the suburbs, which was useful to observe without being involved. We like Roman suburbs, and we think that in suburbs you can breathe the real Rome. The centre is great but it’s for tourists, rich people or to spend Saturday nights. Real live [sic] is somewhere else…

Can you talk about the idea of the housing complex being like a prison?

DC: A lot of suburbs in Rome are characterized by this kind of view: big grey buildings, a kind of ghetto filled with people. A city can’t grow in this way because the risk is that people can be excluded from the rest of Rome. We consider the building we chose like another character, a metaphor for loneliness. It looks like a prison but it’s full of life and ready to explode (in a good or bad way) at whatever time.

Et In Terra Pax is not an international audience’s image of Italian life. Was it important to show this side of life?

DC: Sure, we think it’s very important to show the dark side our country, not only for international audiences but also for the Italians too.

Compared to the typical American portrayal of suburbs, the land of single-family homes, lawns, and kids running around, this is a different image: large apartment buildings built away from the vibrant city center and illustrating the “dark side” of Italian life.

This discussion hints at how some European suburbs differ from their American counterparts. While most Americans see suburbs as the refuge of the wealthy, some European suburbs are where the low-income apartment buildings are built. The center of the European city is the place to be, not the outskirts of a metropolitan region as in the American case.

I am also intrigued by the idea that the apartment building is treated “like a character.” Elsewhere, they say the building they filmed in was about 1 kilometer in length, housed about 14,000 people, and features “strange, fascinating and disturbing architecture.”

“Why is there no looting in Japan?”

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With news continuing to pour out of Japan regarding the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, one journalist asks, “Why is there no looting in Japan?”

And solidarity seems especially strong in Japan itself. Perhaps even more impressive than Japan’s technological power is its social strength, with supermarkets cutting prices and vending machine owners giving out free drinks as people work together to survive. Most noticeably of all, there has been no looting, and I’m not the only one curious about this.

This is quite unusual among human cultures, and it’s unlikely it would be the case in Britain. During the 2007 floods in the West Country abandoned cars were broken into and free packs of bottled water were stolen. There was looting in Chile after the earthquake last year – so much so that troops were sent in; in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina saw looting on a shocking scale.

Why do some cultures react to disaster by reverting to everyone for himself, but others – especially the Japanese – display altruism even in adversity?

This is an interesting question that I am sure a number of sociologists could respond to. This sounds like a Durkheimian issue about social coherence: what holds Japanese society together, even amidst disaster, while other Western societies have less social coherence in the presence of a disaster?

Interactive map of migration into and out of American counties in 2008

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Forbes has an interactive map where you can click on any US county and see where people from that county moved to and where people moving into the county moved from during 2008. Very cool. It would be even better to have more years of data available and be able to see exactly what happened in a place like Cook County in the 2000s with Chicago’s overall population loss.

One complaint: it is hard to distinguish the red lines (outward population movement) from the black lines (inward population movement) when looking at the same county. For example, if you look at the line between DuPage County, IL and Los Angeles County, CA, the line is red even though 252 people moved from LA County to DuPage County and 309 moved in the opposite direction.

h/t Instapundit

New ABC pilot: Suburgatory

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Here is a short description of Suburgatory, a new comedy pilot for ABC:

Suburgatory has been dubbed a satirical look at life in the suburbs that centers on a New York City woman who moves to a cookie-cutter community only to realize that life there is much more frightening.

Hasn’t this “satirical look at life in the suburbs” been done a number of times before? From The Stepford Wives (review of the original and the remake) to Desperate Housewives, this seems like well-traveled territory. What will set this show apart and how frightening can the suburbs get? This could be just another piece in the suburban genre.

The premise of the show seems to go against what most Americans have sought in suburbia. For many, the city is the frightening place and the suburbs represent safety, good schools, and more space. This is not to say that the suburbs don’t have their problems; they certainly do. But to go so far as to say that life is “more frightening” in the suburbs seems strange.

And if the suburbs are a place like purgatory, where exactly would a show like this (and other stories like it) say heaven and hell are located?