Category Archives: Places

Argument: Phoenix is world’s least sustainable city

Posted on by

I recently ran into an overview of a 2011 look at Phoenix as the “world’s least sustainable city”:

Phoenix, Arizona is one of America’s fastest growing metropolitan regions. It is also its least sustainable one, sprawling over a thousand square miles, with a population of four and a half million, minimal rainfall, scorching heat, and an insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth and unrestricted property rights.

In Bird on Fire, eminent social and cultural analyst Andrew Ross focuses on the prospects for sustainability in Phoenix–a city in the bull’s eye of global warming–and also the obstacles that stand in the way. Most authors writing on sustainable cities look at places like Portland, Seattle, and New York that have excellent public transit systems and relatively high density. But Ross contends that if we can’t change the game in fast-growing, low-density cities like Phoenix, the whole movement has a major problem. Drawing on interviews with 200 influential residents–from state legislators, urban planners, developers, and green business advocates to civil rights champions, energy lobbyists, solar entrepreneurs, and community activists–Ross argues that if Phoenix is ever to become sustainable, it will occur more through political and social change than through technological fixes. Ross explains how Arizona’s increasingly xenophobic immigration laws, science-denying legislature, and growth-at-all-costs business ethic have perpetuated social injustice and environmental degradation. But he also highlights the positive changes happening in Phoenix, in particular the Gila River Indian Community’s successful struggle to win back its water rights, potentially shifting resources away from new housing developments to producing healthy local food for the people of the Phoenix Basin. Ross argues that this victory may serve as a new model for how green democracy can work, redressing the claims of those who have been aggrieved in a way that creates long-term benefits for all.

Since the population of the United States has shifted in recent decades to Sunbelt cities like Phoenix, tackling sustainability in these more sprawling and hot places seems like it is important. I wonder how much this sustainability push would require curbing sprawl and if there are some critics who would argue places like Phoenix (or even the metropolitan regions of cities like Chicago and New York) can’t really be sustainable unless they severely limit sprawl.

In two trips to Las Vegas in recent years, I was struck each time by the landscape when flying into the city. I always enjoy seeing cities from above but Las Vegas (and presumably Phoenix as well) shows stark contrasts between deserts which suddenly turn into subdivisions, lawns, golf courses, and then opulent casinos. It is a quick reminder that some of these Sunbelt cities are carved out of the desert and this requires a lot of resources to maintain and expand.

Does demolishing buildings in Chicago actually reduce crime rates?

Posted on by

Chicago has pursued a policy of tearing down vacant buildings to help reduce crime but one expert doesn’t think it is making much of a difference:

Today, the city of Chicago demolished its “200th dangerous building” since July 12, according to the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The mayor stated in a press release that demolitions are “preventing criminal activity in our neighborhoods.”

Is this true? “We’ve been knocking down houses since the 1930’s and it’s not clear if this has a significant effect on crime rates,” says Bradford Hunt, a sociology professor at Roosevelt University who studies Chicago housing issues…

The city murder rate has since declined, even still the number of homicides this year has surpassed 2011’s 435 total murders. Last year’s murder rate was the city’s lowest since 1965.

Chicago has traditionally been “more aggressive in doing tear downs than other cities,” Hunt says, citing Detroit as an example of a city that does not allocate crime resources to building demolitions.

In the late 1990’s, crime went down in Chicago during a spree of building teardowns, including public housing projects. But Hunt notes that the ebbing of the crack cocaine epidemic was the main cause for the 90s crime drop. Teardowns and subsequent displacement of residents have not been clearly linked to either an increase or decrease in crime.

Emanuel’s demolitions are concentrated in a few South Side and West Side police districts with high crime rates. DOB spokeswoman Susan Masell says her department works with the police department to pick buildings for demolition, looking at edifices that get a lot of 911 or 311 calls and are “structurally compromised.”

Knowing Chicago’s past regarding demolishing public housing (such as Cabrini-Green as I wrote about here and here), the continued lengthy wait lists for public housing, how the sites for public housing were chosen in the first place (generally located in already-downtrodden areas), and the shortage of affordable housing in Chicago, I suspect this is more to this story. Getting rid of these buildings might be reducing the potential for crime but it also helps clear out unsightly buildings that have little potential for redevelopment. Such buildings might take a long time to rehab or remove otherwise but suggesting they are part of a crime problem makes them an easier target.

If knocking down such buildings is so effective for fighting crime, why aren’t more cities pursuing this option?

The financial reasons The Woodlands, Texas does not want to incorporate

Posted on by

Many communities want to incorporate so they can control land use as well as fund and provide local services. But The Woodlands, Texas has resisted incorporation for financial reasons:

For one, The Woodlands is one of the nation’s best case studies when it comes to weighing the costs and benefits of incorporation. According to Bruce Tough, Chairman of the township’s seven-member Board of Directors, his community boasts an unprecedented level of success when it comes to governance, public services, and environmental excellence. Just 20 years after it was founded, the township had won a Special Award for Excellence from the Urban Land Institute and a LivCom Nations in Bloom Gold Award. Residents enjoy more than 190 miles of hiking and biking paths. A little over 20 percent of the township’s acreage is set aside for green space, greenbelts, and golf courses…

Unlike similarly successful (and now former) townships including Irvine, California, The Woodlands has reliably refused to incorporate as either a standalone city or part of Houston, even as the issue is raised every few years by developers, residents, or the city of Houston, which provides municipal services such as waste removal, water, and local law enforcement from the sheriff’s department. Tough points to the township’s one-of-a-kind public service provider agreement with Houston and the fact that the township is run more like a business than a municipal government as the primary reasons why The Woodlands doesn’t need to incorporate. Houston agrees not to annex The Woodlands during the next 50 years. In exchange, The Woodlands continues to make service payments to Houston.

Among residents, the question of incorporating is primarily a financial concern. Research indicates that becoming a standalone city could raise property taxes in The Woodlands from 32.5 cents up to anywhere from 58.14 cents to a staggering 81.5 cents per $100 valuation. (By comparison, the property tax rate in Houston hovers around 63 cents.) The costs would include road maintenance, setting up new sewage and water provisions, and establishing a separate police department. Estimates for just those few basic services reach into the hundreds of millions, costs residents fear would be added to their annual tax bills…

For now, The Woodlands residents can relax. For its population, the township has one of the lowest tax rates in the United States but more and better services than similar counterparts. There is no local income tax charged in The Woodlands, and Texas is one of seven states without state income tax. The bulk of their tax money comes from sales tax levied against visitors who flock to the downtown promenade and amphitheater.

This is an interesting case but it sounds like the primary reason The Woodlands has not incorporated is because it can afford not to. In other words, it can afford to contract with Houston for municipal services and it can rely on visitors to provide a lot of revenue rather than having to tax its residents at a higher rate. The community of over 93,000 residents has a median household income of $103,229, is 88.4% white, a poverty rate of 5.1%, and 59% of residents have a college degree. Many communities do not have this luxury.

When the economic crisis hits Naperville, life there is still better than in many places

Posted on by

The Chicago Tribune looks at how the economic crisis has led to a “recalibration” for some in the large and wealthy suburb of Naperville:

For Naperville, in some ways the quintessential suburb for middle-class strivers, the latest census data show that the median household income of $101,911 is nearly double the Illinois median. Nearly two-thirds of the adults 25 and older have attained at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30.3 percent statewide.

Young families have flocked to the suburb about 30 miles west of Chicago since the 1980s, attracted by good schools, jobs along the Interstate 88 corridor and public transit to Chicago. With a population of 141,853 in 2010, Naperville was the fifth-largest city in the state. The local government pays attention to details, from maintaining well-manicured parks to coordinating the traffic lights in downtown Naperville during rush hour to ease traffic congestion…

But there are signs that more residents are struggling to get by in a stagnant economy…

People in their 40s and 50s with school-age children felt the brunt of the last recession through the destruction of home equity values and the loss of value in 401(k) accounts. Meanwhile, median family income has fallen substantially over an entire decade for the first time since the Great Depression. And health care costs have grown sharply during the same period.

I think I understand the purpose of the article: the economic crisis is even affecting wealthier communities like Naperville where it seems like many had reached the American Dream. On the other hand, I’m still not sure this article accomplishes its purposes. People the Tribune talked to have suffered setbacks but they are still doing okay compared to many Americans. One family was affected when the husband lost his well-paying job so the wife returned to full-time work. But the husband found a job again and the wife is now not working again. Another family owns a comedy club where business has been tight. However, business is now picking up and they still have their substantial investment in the club. More Napervillians are saving more or focusing more on their families but they can still generally afford to do this.

I’m not downplaying the troubles many in Naperville have faced. However, Naperville residents are not the ones who have been hit the hardest among Americans. Indeed, the median household income, the number of jobs, the quality of life, and the low levels of poverty and crime still make Naperville an unusually well-off place in the United States. Naperville and its residents will weather the storm better than many as long as the community is able to retain its strong white-collar employment base.

State Budget Crisis Task Force: big debt trouble in Illinois

Posted on by

Even if politicians in Illinois don’t talk about this much, outsiders such as the State Budget Crisis Task Force are noticing the debt trouble in Illinois:

For years, Illinois has racked up billions in public debt to plug budget holes, pay overdue bills, and put money into its mismanaged pension funds. And for the people who live there, this has resulted in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America…

The group, led by the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, and the former New York lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, recommended an overhaul of Illinois’ budgeting practices, to make it harder to kite money from year to year and raid special-purpose funds. It also warned that tax increases may be in store…

Illinois has the lowest credit rating of the 50 states and has America’s second-biggest public debt per capita, $9,624, including state and local borrowing. Only New York State’s debt is bigger, at $13,840 per capita. But Illinois has not been able to use much of the borrowed money to keep its roads, bridges and schools in good working order, because years of shoddy fiscal practices have taken a heavy toll, the report said…

While many states have heavy debt burdens and unfunded pensions, the task force warned that Illinois’ problems had been building for decades and were advanced. The state was “insolvent” even before the financial crisis hit in 2008, the report said, but that was hard to detect because “budget gimmicks became a standard practice.”

Not exactly a rosy outlook.

This could relate to the discussion at the national level about how the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other levels of government do. Well, states and other government bodies can still mess up the process even if they are “balancing the budget.”

New developments tower over Mecca

Posted on by

Several new developments in Mecca threaten to dwarf the holy sites:

Shooting 26 searchlights 10km into the skies, and blaring its call to prayer 7km across the valley, the Abraj al-Bait is also the world’s second tallest building. Encrusted with mosaics and inlaid with gold, it is the most visible (and audible) sign of the frenzied building boom that has taken hold of Saudi Arabia’s holy city over the last 10 years. “It is truly indescribable,” says Sami Angawi, architect and founder of the Jeddah-based Hajj Research Centre, who has spent the last three decades researching and documenting the historic buildings of Mecca and Medina, few of which now remain. In particular, the house of the prophet’s wife, Khadijah, was razed to make way for public lavatories; the house of his companion, Abu Bakr, is now the site of a Hilton hotel; and his grandson’s house was flattened by the King’s palace. “They are turning the holy sanctuary into a machine, a city which has no identity, no heritage, no culture and no natural environment. They’ve even taken away the mountains,” says Angawi…

Along the western flank of the city are the first towers of the Jabal Omar development, a sprawling complex that will eventually accommodate 100,000 people in 26 luxury hotels – sitting on another gargantuan plinth of 4,000 shops and 500 restaurants, along with its own six-storey prayer hall. The line of blocks, which will climb to heights of up to 200 metres and terminate in a monumental gateway building, share the clocktower’s Islamic-lite language: a cliched dressing of pointed arches and filigree grillwork plastered over generic concrete shells…

Another development of repetitive slabs, echoing Jabal Omar’s toast-rack urbanism, is slated for the northern side of the Grand Mosque, at al-Shamiya, while a $10bn plan to provide an extra 400,000 sq metres of prayer halls there is almost complete. Standing like a gigantic triangular slice of wedding cake, this building will accommodate 1.2m more worshippers each year, but it has come at a price…

The Kaaba is the holy black cube in the centre of the Grand Mosque, around which pilgrims walk; proximity to it has become the ultimate currency, allowing hotel suites with the best views to charge $7,000 per night during peak seasons. This unique concentricity, with everything determined by its orientation towards the hallowed centre, has spawned a strangely diagrammatic radial urbanism. From above, like a sea of iron filings pulled by a magnet, the whole city appears to crowd round a core, the vortex of pilgrims giving way to an equally swirling current of tower blocks. It is the axis of prayer writ large in concrete.

The contrast seems stark: a holy site versus ultra-modern development. Is this growth machine development, meaning development primarily about generating profits from pilgrims, run amok? That this is emerging in Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be too surprising. Oil money has to be spent somewhere. Plus, cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi have been getting a lot of attention in recent years for their massive developments and I imagine Saudi Arabia would like to match some of that. Yet, Dubai and Abu Dhabi aren’t also known for being major religious sites.

Also, whenever I see stories like this, I am reminded of the amazing pace of development in some cities (particularly in China and oil-rich Middle East nations) around the world: from populated, primarily low-rise cities to massive, tall, expensive developments.

Would you rather have $10 land in rural Canada or houses for under $100 in Detroit?

Posted on by

I saw a story about a small rural town in Canada trying to lure in new residents by offering land for $10:

In an effort to jump on the oil boom in that part of the country, officials are once again selling undeveloped land for a mere $10, an initiative they first started in 2010. Back then they had 14 lots for sale, 11 of which have houses built on them today, economic development officer Tanis Chalmers told ABC News .

That plan was so successful that in September the Rural Municipality of Pipestone, of which Reston is the biggest town (population: 550), decided to put up an additional 10 lots for sale, along with the three left from 2010. Nine remain, “But I’ve had offers on them already from both Canada and the U.S,” said Chalmers, adding that the initiative has been so effective that the local school finally “has a standalone kindergarten class.”…

The plan is pretty straightforward: To purchase a property, wannabe homeowners have to sign an agreement and put down a $1,000 deposit. Once a lot is purchased, owners have 90 days to begin construction, and 12 months to complete it. As soon as the town receives your occupancy permit, they will refund $990 of the original down payment…

As further incentive, the town is offering a $6,000 grant to people who’ve built a new house or purchased an existing home in the rural municipality. The grant, mind you, can be used for anything from home upgrades to a new car. Chalmers says taxes hover around $1,500 to $2,500 per year.

This reminded me of stories in recent years about cheap houses in Detroit. Here is one example:

“I was living in Chicago and a friend told me that houses in Detroit could be had for $500,” said Brumit, a financially strapped artist who thought he had little prospect of owning his own property. “I said if you hear of anything just a little cheaper let me know. Within a week he emails me a photo of a house for $100. I thought that’s just crazy. Why not? It’s a way to cut our expenses way down and kind of open up a lot of time for creative projects because we’re not working to pay the rent.”…A third of the population are unemployed. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in large parts of Detroit over the last three years. The average price of a home sold in the city last year has been put at $7,500 (£4,900)…

Banks are selling off properties in the worst neighbourhoods, which are usually surrounded by empty and wrecked housing, for a few dollars each. But even better houses can be had at a fraction of their former value.

Technically, Brumit paid $95 for the land and $5 for the house on Lawley Street – which fitted what estate agents euphemistically call an opportunity.

I suspect more people would jump at the rural opportunity. While there might be more amenities nearby in Detroit (you mean those winning Tigers can’t boost home prices like winning NFLteams  supposedly can?), the idea of living in Detroit itself would scare a lot of people. What might happen in the neighborhood? Can the city provide basic services? On the other hand, the rural property might be a long way from anything worthwhile but it could offer some access to nature, there probably aren’t as many worries about neighbors, and there is some appeal to starting from scratch. If we wanted to stretch this explanation out even further, this could be a sign of the urban/rural divide in the United States; economically similar opportunities in the big city and the country don’t attract the same level of cultural and residential interest.

Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council tries to project 30 years into the urban future

Posted on by

The Metropolitan Council for the Twin Cities region in Minnesota is working on a new plan that tries to project urban changes in the next 30 years:

For example, he noted, the Twin Cities region will have 900,000 more people, with twice as many elderly. Also, by 2040, 43 percent of the region’s population will be people of color, up from today’s 24 percent.

Big changes are already being seen in housing patterns. The share of building permits issued in developing suburbs has been declining since 2008, when they had 66 percent of the total. But by 2011, less than half were issued in the second- and third-ring suburbs for the first time in a decade…

“But what we’ve seen in the few years is that employment did not increase between 2000 and 2010. Employment dropped in the seven-county area, so growth management isn’t the issue it was before,” she said.

Instead, the new plan will likely focus more on “what the transit system means for our region, thinking out how new light-rail lines will influence new development and thinking about water supplies.”

A quick summary of these predicted changes: a more diverse population, slower or less growth on the suburban fringe, a struggle to create good-paying jobs, preserving local natural resources, and looking to build more effective mass transit that might also boost local development efforts. I suspect a lot of regions, particularly ones without high levels of growth, will have similar concerns. As cities and communities age, infrastructure will cost more, regions will continue to compete with each other for high-tech and white-collar jobs, and new populations might challenge the existing character of places and regions.

A note: if you have read the work of Myron Orfield (for example, see American Metropolitics), you will have heard of the Metropolitan Council. Compared to other metropolitan regions, the Twin Cities has a metropolitan agency with some teeth:

The Metropolitan Council or Met Council is the regional governmental agency and metropolitan planning organization in Minnesota serving the Twin Cities seven-county metropolitan area. The Met Council is granted regional authority powers in state statutes by the Minnesota Legislature. These powers can supersede decisions and actions of local governments. The legislature entrusts the Council to maintain public services and oversee growth of the state’s largest metro area. This agency is similar to Metro in Portland, Oregon in that both agencies administer an urban growth boundary…

In 1967 the Minnesota Legislature created the Metropolitan Council in response to growing issues of septic tank wastewater contamination. During that time, it was recognized there were systematic problems which transcended coordination of any one agency. There were more than 200 municipal agencies in existence then.

Additional acts of the legislature passed in 1974, 1976, and 1994 expanded the role and powers of the Met Council, merging it with transit and waste control commissions to become a unified regional authority.

In other words, the planning being done could have a big impact on the next few decades in the region.

Why New Yorkers and pigeons get along

Posted on by

A sociologist explains the social interaction New Yorkers have with pigeons:

For more than three years, Jerolmack observed the ways in which people interact with pigeons in cities. His forthcoming book, The Global Pigeon, which, as he put it, seeks to examine “our social experience of animals,” draws from that research. Yesterday evening he spoke about our own city’s rather vexed relationship to the birds.

In the 1960s, for instance, Thomas P.F. Hoving, the former city parks commissioner and longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not to mention the subject of a famed John McPhee New Yorker profile from 1967), called pigeons “rats with wings,” an epithet—often wrongly attributed to Woody Allen—that really stuck. Hoving cited the species, along with litterers and vandals, as a plague on Bryant Park. The park’s supervisor at the time, Andrew Petrochko, told the New York Times that “the homosexuals … make faces at people [and] once the winos are dried out at Bellevue, they make a beeline for Bryant Park.”…

Despite their bad reputation, though, Jerolmack noted that our urban encounters with pigeons “are profoundly social.”

“The impulse to feed pigeons is not so different from wanting to chat with strangers,” Jerolmack said, speaking about one of the subjects for his book, Anna, the elderly pigeon lady who regularly feeds the birds at Father Demo Square, the tiny enclave in the West Village where Jerolmack’s research began.

This sounds like it could be a testable hypothesis: do city dwellers have more positive, social relationships with wildlife (not including pets or animals connected to a household) than people who live in suburbs or rural areas? Cities aren’t typically known for their wildlife but perhaps this could be tied to Simmel’s arguments in his piece “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” He suggested there were too many people for individuals to interact with in big cities so they would have to develop blase attitudes to protect themselves. But what if they could interact safely with pigeons (and even ducks and squirrels)? Or perhaps this is tied to romanticized (or real?) notions residents have about needing to connect with nature in the middle of the “concrete jungle.”

How Republicans became the party against cities

Posted on by

After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.