Category Archives: Places

Census data visualization: metropolitan population change by natural increase, international migration, and domestic migration

Posted on by

The Census regularly puts together new data visualizations to highlight newly collected data. The most recent visualization looks at population change in metropolitan areas between 2010-2011 and breaks down the change by natural increase, international migration, and domestic migration.

Several trends are quickly apparent:

1. Sunbelt growth continues at a higher pace and non-Sunbelt cities tend to lose residents by domestic migration.

2. Population increases by international migration still tends to be larger in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

3. There are some differences in natural increases to population. I assume this is basically a measure of birth rates.

However, I have two issues with this visualization. My biggest complaint is that the boxes are not weighted by population. New York has the largest natural increase to the population but it is also the largest metropolitan areas by quite a bit. A second issue is that the box sizes are not all the 50,000 or 10,000 population change as suggested by the key at the top. So while I can see relative population change, it is hard to know the exact figures.

Contingency plans being developed for the bankruptcy of Detroit

Posted on by

A number of municipalities have experienced fiscal troubles in recent years but the issues in Detroit may be pushing it to bankruptcy:

The working concept, still evolving, assumes that the state’s financial review would find severe financial distress in Detroit, that Mayor Dave Bing and City Council would be unable to push through overdue restructuring, and that the process would culminate in appointment of an emergency financial manager under Public Act 72.

The case would be filed under Chapter 9 of the federal bankruptcy code, according to two ranking sources familiar with the situation, following efforts to reach prenegotiated settlements with as many key creditors — unions, vendors and pension funds among them — as possible before any filing…

The evolving bankruptcy scenario is a clear signal that Gov. Rick Snyder and Treasurer Andy Dillon have lost confidence in the ability of the mayor, his management team and council to honor their commitments under the eight-month-old consent agreement with the state, or to make any meaningful progress on restructuring.

Over recent years, a number of suggestions have been thrown out regarding Detroit including the city should be contracted and it is an ideal site for urban farming and reclaiming the land from unused and/or vacant buildings.

I wish the article spent more time discussing what would then happen to Detroit moving forward. How will this affect city services and residents? After a managed bankruptcy, where does this leave the city? Realistically, what plans could be pursued that would put Detroit on a better financial footing and with some hope for the future?

Mapping Chicago by taking a photo at every major intersection

Posted on by

Planner Neil Freeman found an interesting way to map Chicago: take a photo of every major intersection. A post on Atlantic Cities describes the map:

Freeman’s first project, called “Chicago mile by mile,” created an unconventional city map of the city based on 212 photos of strategic “mile” intersections. It was inspired by Chicago’s unique grid system, in which every eight blocks measures a full mile, and the city’s corresponding address system, which advances (for the most part) in increments of 800. If you begin at the zero-points of Madison and State streets and go west a mile, for example, you’ll reach the corner of Halsted Street at 800 W Madison Street.

“This arbitrary address system ends up defining what it means to live in Chicago,” he says. “These arbitrary systems that end up underlying our built environment of our daily life are really intriguing to me.”

On the webpage with the map, here is how Freeman describes the map:

 

Chicago mile by mile

Neil Freeman, 2002
213 color photographs
114 x 104 inches

These photographs maps Chicago’s uncomprimising street grid into 212 4″x6″ snapshots. The photographs document every intersection of mile streets, major roads on section lines. The entire city is traversed by this network of arterials. Photographs were taken in January 2002.

It would take a while to look at the thumbnails of all the photographs. However, I think doing so might start to reveal patterns. In other words, are the major intersection on the North Side more alike or different from major intersections on the South Side? Are there patterns across all intersections? I suspect there may be as these major intersections would tend to attract certain kinds of functions and organizations.

Extending this project in three possible ways could also add a lot of information. One way to expand this would be to start filling in more of the intersections between these major ones. A second way would be to track these intersections over time. If Freeman took all of these photographs again in 2012, how much would have changed? A third way would be to collect data on how people experience and visual these intersections and compare this to the photographs. How exactly do residents and visitors perceive these intersections?

Increase in McMansion construction in Australia

Posted on by

The real growth in McMansions may be taking place in Australia:

But research reveals that while the size of Australian families is shrinking, our appetite for McMansions has supersized, with construction of six-or-more-bedroom homes jumping 21 per cent during the past five years.

And the number of five-bedroom McMansions increased 20 per cent over the same period, according to the 2011 Census data.

Demographer Mark McCrindle said despite forecasts of a McMansion glut in Australia – similar to parts of the US – the McDonald’s of housing is a vision of things to come rather than a relic of the past.

“McMansion popularity is being fuelled by the Sandwich generation, multigenerational households where parents have grown-up children and their own parents living at home,” Mr McCrindle said.

“It’s about affordability. The McMansion is efficient for homebuyers looking for big, cheap housing, it’s also about floor space that is flexible and adapts to a family’s changing needs.”…

Mr McCrindle said while new land blocks are getting smaller, Australians are building the largest houses in the world on those blocks. The average size of a new home is 10 per cent larger than the average new American home.

This raises several questions for me. One, will the fate that befall the United States that was partly attributed to McMansions also befall Australia? The argument made by some in the US is that the overconstruction and overconsumption of McMansions inevitably led to a housing and economic crisis. Is this necessarily the case or are there other factors in Australia that would change the outcome? Second, are these McMansions as bad as critics suggest if a good number of them are housing multigenerational families? McMansions are often criticized for being resource-hungry homes but some may be operating as more affordable housing (for some).

 

Developer’s son wrong; Naperville residents and leaders made decisions long ago that mean the suburb can’t go back to the 1950s

Posted on by

Naperville is considering a new project, the Water Street Development, but the developer’s son is not happy with the opposition to the project from the Naperville Homeowner’s Confederation. In a recent email, here is how he made his case:

In his email, Bryan Bottarelli said the council has been “politically intimidated by a group of old-economy thinkers who call themselves the Naperville Homeowners Confederation.”

“This group claims to represent all the homeowners associations in Naperville. But in reality, it consists of a handful of older residents who are bored — and who have nothing better to do than to try keeping Naperville the same exact way it’s been since the 1950s,” the younger Bottarelli wrote. “They’re afraid of change — and they’re using fear tactics to red-light this project. And be honest — what they’re doing has been working. They know how to work the local political system to their advantage.

“And, since they have so much extra time on their hands, they’ve committed their days to bombarding city council with emails, letters, and phone calls in complete opposition to this deal.”…

“The confederation is disappointed at the tone of the email by Mr. Bottarelli’s son,” President Bob Buckman said in a written statement. “This is not in keeping with the tradition of respectful public discourse in Naperville that we all value. It is unfortunate that his description of us does not in any way represent the confederation’s members, or our many contributions to civic life in Naperville. Since 2006, the confederation board and its members have carefully studied, dissected, looked for alternatives, met with the developer, submitted a comprehensive report in 2007 and testified at plan commission and now at city council on this proposed development.”

Here is the problem with his argument: regardless of what current residents want, Naperville can’t turn back the clock to the 1950s. Naperville is little like what it was in 1950 and residents have been part of the process in changing Naperville. I know Bottarelli mentioned the 1950s but a number of the changes to Naperville started occurring at the end of this decade so I’ll make a comparison to 1950. Indeed, my research on the topic suggests Naperville, leaders and residents, have made numerous decisions over the decades to pursue growth.

Here is how Naperville was different in 1950:

1. It had a population of 7,013 in 1950. Today, Naperville has around 142,000 residents. This means the population has expanded by a factor of 20.

2. Along with a significantly larger population, Naperville has significantly increased in land size. Today, the city is over 39 square miles and it can take a while in certain traffic conditions to drive from one end to another. The size is large enough that the city added a second city hall-like facility, it now has two commuter railroad stations, and the city has sought ways to create social space and a community feel on the southwest side because it is a distance away from downtown (for example, planning for a commercial node at the northwest corner of Route 59 and 95th Street).

3. Basically none of the post-World War II subdivisions had been built by 1950. Harold Moser, the local developer who was responsible for a large percentage of the subsequent growth, was just getting started. The homeowner’s associations Battarelli is disparaging didn’t even exist in 1950.

4. Naperville’s downtown is quite different today. There is a renowned Riverwalk. There is a municipal center and Naper Settlement. The downtown has a number of national retail stores. There are plenty of restaurants and bars. There is a new performing arts center (in conjunction with North Central College) along with a carillon tower. In short, the downtown is a suburban entertainment hub. Even if the Water Street development gets turned down, it is not because Naperville hasn’t wanted to have a successful and vibrant downtown.

5. I-88, the highway that runs alongside the north side of Naperville, hadn’t even been built yet in 1950. It opened in the late 1950s and the first major facility, Bell Laboratories, was built near to the Naperville Road interchange in the mid-1960s. The moving of this facility near town helped kicked off Naperville’s rise as a white-collar job center which also helped fuel some of the other changes.

6. The Naperville of 1950 was not known for being one of the best places to live (Money in the mid 2000s), having a top 10 library, or the other accolades Naperville has accumulated in the last ten years or so. In 1950, the community had a small liberal arts college, a swimming pool converted from a quarry, the Kroehler furniture plant, and was known as the community that was once the county seat of DuPage County before Wheaton took the honor in the 1860s.

In other words, the Naperville of 1950 bears little resemblance to the Naperville of today. The cow is already long gone out of the barn on this one. Over the years, Naperville has consistently chosen to annex land, approve development, and grow even as it tries to retain its small-town charm. So if this particular project doesn’t succeed, this doesn’t mean Naperville residents or leaders want to live in the Naperville of 1950: even with some heated discussions over the decades about how much Naperville should grow and whether the new changes would irrevocably change the character of the community, Naperville has consistently pursued growth and change.

A downtown law firm no more

Posted on by

A law firm in Austin, TX is leaving its downtown location for the suburbs:

Law firm Bowman and Brooke LLP [website] is vacating its current location at 600 Congress Ave. and heading to more suburban digs southwest of downtown [about 6 miles away, map here]….“Yes, price was a consideration but we’re not getting a tremendous difference in rent costs. There are other things that entered in like tenant improvement costs, and parking had a significant impact,” [Michelle Bailey, chief of operations] said.

The company had no parking allocation downtown and at its new location it will have 96 complimentary spaces for 44 employees — more than enough.

The article notes that “finding large blocks of office space [in downtown Austin] is somewhat akin to going on a treasure hunt” and suggests that lawyers “are now being challenged for territorial rights by emerging technology and energy firms.” In other words, plenty of businesses still want a downtown presence, and rents are being bid up by new entrants. This sounds more like a story of urban revival than suburban sprawl to me, though the two are clearly linked here.

Perhaps a more fascinating revelation, however, is Bowman and Brooke determination that it “wasn’t necessary for its attorneys to be downtown, close to other law firms and courthouses” because “[w]e tend to be a national firm with our attorneys flying all over the country” and “we don’t have a lot of local interaction.” What does it mean to practice law without significant local interaction, especially when one is “a nationally recognized trial firm that defends corporate clients in widely publicized catastrophic injury and wrongful death claims“? While simply having a downtown (rather than a suburban) office location may do little to humanize a corporate law firm, it seems telling that Bowman and Brooke seems to place such a low priority on engaging its local community.

A tiny house community in Washington, D.C.

Posted on by

The Stronghold neighborhood of Washington, D.C. now features a small community of 200-square foot tiny houses:

The group behind Stronghold’s tiny-house community calls itself Boneyard Studios. “As property values and rents rise across the city, we want to showcase this potential option for affordable housing,” the group writes on its Web site. “We decided to live the questions: Can we build and showcase a few tiny homes on wheels in a DC urban alley lot? … Not in the woods, but in a true community, connected to a neighborhood? Yes, we think. Watch out left coast, the DC adventure begins.”

There’s one problem: The city’s zoning laws don’t allow residential dwellings on alley lots unless they are a minimum of 30 feet wide, or roughly the width of a city street. D.C. is currently discussing lifting the 30-foot restriction. So, as Boneyard Studios continues to advocate more progressive zoning laws, it is using the property to showcase what could be…

Although the diminutive homes are made of high-quality materials, they are priced for a flagging economy. They sell for $20,000 to $50,000, less than the down payment on a two-bedroom condo in a trendy D.C. neighborhood…

Despite the fact that tiny houses are, well, tiny, affordable-housing advocates are researching the possibility that attractive micro homes could one day complement or replace stigmatized trailer parks and low-income housing, especially in places such as the District, where they could be built in unused vacant spaces such as alleys.

This sounds like an interesting project. Still, these tiny houses could face a number of issues before being approved as affordable housing. Besides their size, how many people can fit in each tiny house, and how long each house might last, how many property owners would want to live next to these tiny houses? Even if these houses don’t have the stigma of trailer parks, residents and neighborhoods tend to worry about property values. Simply having smaller and cheaper houses nearby might lower other housing prices.

Additionally, how might these tiny houses be grouped or placed – would they be in rows, scattered in an open space or bigger lot, or on individual lots? Would a concentration of tiny houses fit under the same residential zoning categories as single-family homes or multi-family housing because of a greater density?

I imagine the neighbors will ask some of these questions and want good answers. Interestingly, the article does not cite any neighbors to the Stronghold colony of tiny houses.

Rahm Emanuel: Chicago the model for pro-growth policies

Posted on by

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday where he explained how his city could show America the way toward growth:

While infrastructure improvements have been neglected on a federal level for decades, Chicago is making one of the nation’s largest coordinated investments, putting 30,000 residents to work over the next three years improving our roads, rails and runways; repairing our aged water system; and increasing access to gigabit-speed broadband. We are paying for these critical improvements through a combination of reforms, efficiencies and direct user fees, as well as creating the nation’s first city-level public-private infrastructure bank. Democrats should champion these kinds of innovative financing tools at a national level.

If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed, we must continue the push for reform that the president began with Race to the Top, bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals.

Chicago has adopted its own Race to the Top for early childhood education, allowing public schools, Head Start, charters and parochial schools to compete for dollars by improving the quality of their pre-kindergarten programs. In addition, this year Chicago Public Schools put into effect a 30 percent increase in class time, which means that when today’s kindergartners graduate high school, they will have benefited from 2½ more years’ worth of education.

In partnership with leading private-sector companies, we reengineered our six community colleges to focus each on skills training for jobs in one of Chicago’s six key growth fields. Democrats can be the party that closes the nation’s skills gap by making our community colleges a vital link between people looking for jobs and companies looking for skilled workers.

The strength of these investments is proven in the number of people we’re putting back to work: Chicago is first in the nation in terms of increase in employed residents, and for several months we have led the nation in year-over-year employment increases. We added 42,500 residents to the workforce in the past year alone — 8,000 more than the next highest U.S. city…

If Democrats develop innovative policies that help Americans compete in a global economy, we will outperform Republicans on Election Day. It’s that simple.

I’ve made this argument before (see here): Rahm Emanuel is more of a pro-business Democrat. As he notes in this article, he is in the mold of Bill Clinton who was willing to do what it takes to add jobs and fuel growth (illustrated by his recent push for digital billboards on city property alongside busy highways). And thus far, Emanuel has been able to push through his agenda in Chicago.

However, two things might hold back his arguments on the national level:

1. How much do Democrats and other Americans want government  to work closely private firms and corporations? Emanuel is a fan of public-private partnerships but people on both sides may not like this idea much.

2. Critics will charge that Chicago is hardly a model for others to emulate. Crime? Residential segregation? Massive budget issues? Battles with local unions? Underperforming schools?

I imagine some other big-city mayors might argue their cities could provide better models for the whole country. It would be fascinating to see a number of them respond with different visions.

(One last question: how much of this argument is simply boosterism from the mayor of the city’s third largest city?)

Argument: individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities since they require contributing to the “public good”

Posted on by

After looking at the Democratic vote advantage in cities for the 2012 election, here is an argument about why individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities:

If Republicans are ever going to earn real votes in cities in the future, though, they’ll have to do more than just talk about them differently. The real problem seeps much deeper. As the Republican Party has moved further to the right, it has increasingly become the party of fierce individualism, of “I built that” and you take care of yourself. Cities, on the other hand, are fundamentally about the shared commons. If you live in a city and you think government – and other people – should stay out of your life, how will you get to work in the morning? Who will police your neighborhood? Where will you find a public park when your building has no back yard?

In a good piece on the GOP’s problem with geography earlier this week, The New Republic’s Lydia DePillis interviewed Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse, who made this point succinctly: “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

The real urban challenge for conservatives going forward will be to pull back from an ideology that leaves little room for the concept of “public good,” and that treats all public spending as if it were equally wasteful. Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).

Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics. There’s no reason why the Democratic Party should have an exclusive lock on this idea. Investing government money efficiently – as Republicans want to do – is also about focusing on how it’s spent in cities. While Republicans are mulling this over in the next four years, it may help to look at Howard’s map. What is going on in those dark blue dots? What does it mean to live in those places – and to live there and hear from politicians that “government should get out of the way?”

This reminds me of some of the observations of early sociologists about the transition from more rural village and farm life to urban life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Cities aren’t just different because there are more people who are living and working closer together; this changes the social interactions (think of Simmel’s talk of the blase attitude in cities) as well as the social interdependence (think of Durkheim’s discussion of the division of labor).

One way Republicans could positively argue about cities: along with their surrounding metropolitan regions, cities are economic engines. A thriving economy needs thriving firms in these regions that encourage innovation, provide jobs, and interact with and operate in nearby communities.

Are there cities that are more individualistic than others? Can you have a global city that has a more individualistic ethos?

Trial of 220 square foot apartments moves forward in San Francisco

Posted on by

A trial run of “micro-apartments” has been approved in San Francisco:

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors tentatively approved Tuesday a trial run of 220-square-foot “micro-apartments” — carefully designed compact living spaces that have become all the rage in urban development. Pending ratification and mayoral approval next month, the plan beats, in smallness, Vancouver’s 226-square-foot “micro-lofts,” and make the 275-square-foot units under trial in New York look like airplane hangars…

Depending on your perspective, the tiny living spaces are either a much-needed option for single people crushed by climbing rents, or community-destroying crash pads for young techie weekenders. Either way, the competition is fierce for creative floor-plan designs that do more with much, much less. The San Francisco measure requires of a minimum of 150 square feet of living space, plus a bathroom and kitchen, though the kitchen can be integrated into the living area. The trial approves 375 units total.

For a clue to what the micro-apartments will look like, Wired toured San Francisco’s new “SmartSpace” micro-apartment complex, which was unveiled last week by developer Patrick Kennedy — an advocate for the new, smaller limits. SmartSpace crams 23 units into its footprint, each 285 to 310 square feet. The floor plan is similar to the even smaller units Kennedy plans to build now that the new measure has passed, he says.

SmartSpace contains narrow rooms with a bathroom at the front, a wall-mounted TV over a computer workstation, and a window seat with a hydraulic pop-up table. (They call it “SmartBench.”) In some units, a fold-up bed reveals an integrated dining table. A closet near the bathroom was designed to hold a washer and dryer and some appliances, including a small convection oven. There’s a dishwasher, but no oven under the small, two-burner electric stove. High ceilings, says Kennedy, were key, noting that they had a grad student live in a 160-square-foot prototype in Berkeley, and made some significant design changes based on her input.

It is interesting to note the opposition these apartments have faced in San Francisco. It sounds like there are a few issues: do the units meet some basic requirements for living space, how will they affect the affordable housing market (and who will end up living in the micro-apartments), and where these units will be located and how the residents will interact with the surrounding community. But, if this size of apartment has worked in other cities, why couldn’t San Francisco look at the best examples and set tough regulations?

Also, I was struck in looking at these plans that more space could be created by transforming the unit more. For example, the small spaces in the IKEA showrooms tend to have a loft bed so it frees up more space. Or other small apartments utilize moving walls or space at a slight step-up. These particular plans look more like traditional apartments that have simply been shrunk to the bare essentials although this may be a function of cost.