[T]he Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports today that in 2013, student debtors between the ages of 27 and 30 were less likely to own a home—or, specifically, to have a mortgage—than their peers who were student-debt free. Homeownership rates have fallen fast among all young adults since the recession. But, as shown below, they’ve dropped most precipitously among those who borrowed for school.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
There’s one key detail this graph leaves out, however, which the Fed shared in a separate report from early last year (and which I’ve written on before). It turns out that, at the end of 2012, borrowers who were current on their student loan payments were actually more likely to take out a mortgage than other young adults. Borrowers who were delinquent on their student loans, however, took out barely any mortgages at all. In other words, young people who already couldn’t handle their debt simply weren’t in the market for houses.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
A key point: having college debt doesn’t completely stop mortgage originations. So, reducing college debt (and look at the median, not the average) could help free up the housing market but it isn’t the only problem.
I wonder if there isn’t another way to think about this: more young Americans are willing to trade a college degree for homeownership before they are 30. This could be due to a variety of reasons including earning potential due to a college degree but also a decreased interest in owning a home as opposed to accomplishing other goals like living in an exciting place or establishing themselves in a career. In other words, this issue may not really be about college debt holding people back but rather about the relative interest young adults have in owning a house.
I stumbled across a potentially fascinating website titled Spurious Correlations that looks at relationships between odd variables. Here are two examples:
According to the site, both of these pairs have correlations higher than 0.94. In other words, very strong.
One issue: using dual axes can throw things off. The bottom chart above shows a negative relationship – but this is only because the axes are different. The top chart makes it look like the lines really go together – but the axes are way off from each other with the left side ranging from 29-34 and the right side ranging from 300-900. Overall, the charts reinforce the strong correlations between the two variables but using dual axes can be misleading.
Architects, planners, engineers and citizens, it contends, are increasingly using massive amounts of data to analyze urban issues and shape innovative designs…
But data, the show argues, is useful as well as ubiquitous. We see some classically gritty Chicago stuff to back this up, though it’s not quite powerful or precise enough to be fully persuasive…
More convincing are the show’s examples of “digital visualization,” which is geekspeak for using digital technology to present and analyze urban planning data.
Take a monumental, crowd-pleasing map of Chicago, 15 feet high and 30 feet wide, which presents the footprints of thousands of buildings, even individual houses, and color-codes them by the era in which they were built. We see the impact of the city’s three great building booms, from Chicago’s earliest days to 1899, from 1900 to 1945, and from 1946 to 1979. The recent surges that filled downtown with new skyscrapers look puny by comparison.
Also worth seeing: Video monitors which display data for Divvy, the city’s bike-sharing program. They offer neat tidbits: Divvy’s most popular station, for example, is at Millennium Park.
Sounds interesting. Big cities are complex social entities who could benefit from large-scale and real-time data collection and analysis. Of course, as Kamin notes at the end, there still is a human side to cities that cannot be ignored but getting a handle through data on what is happening could go a long way.
Another dimension to this is how to best present big data. While the online presentation of maps has grown popular, how can this be done best in person? I look forward to seeing this exhibit in person as I already like what the Chicago Architecture Foundation has done with this space. Here is part of the gallery a few years ago:
This is a great free place to learn more about Chicago and then choose among the cool offerings in the gift shop or sign up for one of the architecture tours that cover all different aspects of Chicago.
The findings revealed that while many study participants “successfully” escaped dangerous and stressful neighborhoods at first, most did not escape income poverty, and many ended up living back in high-poverty areas after a few years…
The experiment was conducted in five U.S. metro areas: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. While the experiment showed that it was possible to dramatically improve quality of life for the poor, helping them escape poverty was another matter. “Many of us underestimated the barriers to employment, for example, for this highly disadvantaged group, and how small a difference relocation alone would make,” says Briggs, an associate professor of urban studies and planning…
The barriers were the greatest in sprawling Los Angeles, Briggs says. “The physical distances are so enormous, and many jobs are not accessible by public transportation. We spent time with moms who were getting up at 4 a.m. and driving 25 miles in one direction to leave their kids with a family member, and then 30 miles in another direction to work at a job where they might be put on a different shift, on a moment’s notice. The job itself was insecure, volatile, and poorly compensated. Lining up housing, work, and child care, and keeping them aligned, was immensely difficult.”
On the upside were dramatic changes in safety and security, particularly for young girls. They fared better overall in these new neighborhoods, escaping the predatory climate of their old neighborhoods. And parents in the study saw major reductions in anxiety and depression, and improvements in mental health, likely because of increased security and “freedom from fear.”
Casting aside long commutes, higher home prices and often mind-boggling property taxes, some Illinois residents are branding themselves as Hoosiers, and more Chicago-area builders are thinking of expanding into Lake County, Ind., to capture that business. Their arrival will change a housing market dominated by local companies for generations and prompt municipalities to act to make sure the growth comes on their own terms.
Three years ago, the region caught the attention of D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder by revenue, and it began buying lots in established subdivisions and building homes. Finding success, the Fort Worth, Texas-based company this spring is seeking the zoning necessary for it to move forward with a deal to acquire about 90 acres of former farmland on the east side of Interstate 65 in Crown Point for a 200-home subdivision…
Between 2007 and 2011, a net total of more than 5,600 people relocated from Cook County to Lake County, Ind., according to census figures. More than 55,000 residents of the northwest Indiana county worked in Cook County in 2012, according to state figures obtained by Metrostudy, a housing consulting firm.
Commuting may become easier in years to come. Last week, Illinois and Indiana signed an agreement regarding the development of a 47-mile toll road, the Illiana Expressway, that would connect I-65 near Lowell, Ind., to Interstate 55 near Wilmington.
A few quick thoughts:
1. As the article notes, this might require Illinois residents to rethink their stereotypes of Hoosiers. I enjoyed living in the South Bend area during graduate school but I do remember being struck by the number of people who drove pickup trucks and smoked when I first moved there.
2. There are certain areas of the Chicago region that still have plenty of room for growth: northwest Indiana as well as south and southwest of Chicago in Illinois (roughly between Plainfield and Chicago Heights).
3. This article focuses on areas further in Indiana like Crown Point. According to Google Maps, driving from Crown Point to State and Madison in Chicago is just over 47 miles. That is quite a trip.
4. How much does the presence of Gary affect the willingness of people to move to northwest Indiana? Despite efforts to revive Gary, it still has a negative reputation. Imagine Gary and the surrounding area were nicer suburbs – how many people might want to live that close to Chicago as well as be near the shores of Lake Michigan? Instead, there is a community known for industry, depopulation, and a poor quality of life.
Intrigued by the rising middle class in these fast-expanding economies, Adolfsson visited 44 model homes in eight different countries. All displayed strikingly similar characteristics and seemed to be taking their lead from architectural and structural ideas popularized across the U.S over the last century.
And why do McMansions have appeal around the globe?
Adolfsson said he believes people in emerging nations are drawn towards projects such as these because they believe they evoke an image of success, wealth and affluence.
“What I think we’re seeing is an upper middle class that has been growing fairly rapidly over the last two decades accompanying the economic expansion in these countries,” he said…
“What we are seeing is essentially the American suburban dream,” Adolfsson said. “This has been brought to people through movies, through soap operas, through magazines for decades. That’s really what people see as something desirable.”
If this is the case, then McMansions have a similar appeal in other countries as they do in the United States. They are often viewed as markers of success, showing the ability to purchase land and a large, modern home (and the needed car to travel from this home to other places).
Two difference in these global McMansions. Adolfsson notes that these neighborhoods of McMansions stand out as outliers compared to the surrounding area. Additionally, many of these McMansions are in gated communities. This may happen occasionally in the United States but it is not necessarily common.
Another thought: I don’t know that many Americans think of the global export of their housing styles.
This is not an indictment of Cobb County in particular. Rather, what’s happening in Cobb is a microcosm of the dilemma facing suburbs nationwide: a rapid spike in the number of poor people in what once were the sprawling beacons of American prosperity. Think of it as the flip side of the national urban boom: The poverty rate across all U.S. suburbs doubled in the first decade of the millennium—even as America’s cities are transforming in the other direction, toward rising affluence and hipster reinvention. If the old story of poverty in America was crumbling inner cities and drug-addled housing projects, the new story is increasingly one of downscale strip malls and long bus rides in search of ever-scarcer jobs. We can’t understand what’s working in America’s cities unless we also look at what’s not working in the vast suburbs that surround them.
And there’s a lot about Atlanta’s suburbs that isn’t working. Suburban poverty exploded here between 2000 and 2011, rising by 159 percent. Now, 88 percent of the region’s poor people live in suburbs. On its face, there is nothing remarkable about that statistic; after all, metro Atlanta is huge (8,300 square-miles, about the size of Massachusetts), and its population keeps rising (it’s now almost 6 million, equivalent to the population of Missouri). But fewer than 10 percent of us live in the city of Atlanta itself. So it would stand to reason that most poor people are suburbanites; most metro Atlantans are suburbanites, period…
For suburban Atlanta, as in suburbia nationwide, this shift presents some vexing problems. Designed around a car-centric culture of single-family homes clustered in cul-de-sacs served by strip centers and shopping malls, and fueled by jobs reached by commuting to downtown or suburban office parks, suburbs like Cobb County have struggled to respond to denser populations, increased congestion and, as a result of the 2008 recession, a decline in the middle-class jobs that made it all possible. Suburban Atlanta voters, including in Cobb County, have consistently rejected mass transit that might relieve their car dependency. And county zoning ordinances have continued to favor single-family housing over denser development, exacerbating the problem for the poor who are clustered there in ever greater numbers…
Here’s the most complicated problem with poverty in the suburbs: It’s almost invisible. There are 86,000 people in Cobb County who live below the poverty level. But you could live in Cobb your whole life and never see them, or at least not knowingly. Cobb County covers 339 square miles and is home to 717,000 people. Its poor residents can be lost in the crowd—and lost in all that space.
An interesting look at the myriad problems that makes addressing suburban poverty harder: lack of transportation options besides cars, limited social services that tend to be spread out, race and class differences that get reified through political and economic decisions, and limited recognition of suburban poverty.
Just a note: we need more sociological research on suburban poverty and suburban patterns in Sunbelt metropolitan regions that may be less segregated than Northern cities but are also more sprawling.
Lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow dissolution and limit municipalities’ stay in the state’s distressed program. Thirteen cities have been stuck with that designation for at least a decade, and fragmentation at the local level makes it harder to turn them around, said Matt Fabian, managing director at Concord, Mass.-based research firm Municipal Market Advisors…Some localities have shrunk so much they may be unable to operate, according to Ross. The communities are stagnating as Pennsylvania’s economy is falling behind, with job and population growth trailing most states, said Standard & Poor’s…
In Pennsylvania, every square inch of land must be incorporated, preventing dissolution. Municipalities in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Vermont also restrict dissolution, said Michelle Wilde Anderson, who studies distressed communities as an assistant professor at University of California Berkeley School of Law…
The path of merger or consolidation is often unavailable because municipalities are reluctant to take on neighbors, which may be distressed.
This sounds like a two-step process:
1. Providing the legal means for dissolving local governments. Residents may not think about it much but a group of local residents can’t simply declare themselves an incorporated community or start collecting local taxes – this process has regulations and procedures.
2. But, even if such moves were legal, the article hints at another difficult issue: getting communities or governments to agree to merge with others. Americans are generally unwilling to give up local control, even in difficult financial times, or to take on the problems of nearby local entities that might threaten their quality of life. As an example, see the shift in the late 1800s as suburbs stopped desiring annexation from big cities.
Given the financial difficulties a lot of local governments face, I suspect stories about this will be more common in the coming years. Yet, consolidation or dissolving is not a quick process and generally requires consent from all parties involved.
Nearly a quarter of all songs on Spotify get skipped within five seconds of starting.
More than a third are skipped within 30 seconds.
Nearly half of all songs are skipped at some point…
Lamere then broke this down into the last-second-listened frequency. If you’ve made it past the 12th second, you have demonstrated amazing commitment…
Lamere concludes:
“When we are more engaged with our music – we skip more, and when music is in the background such as when we are working or relaxing, we skip less. When we have more free time, such as when we are young, or on the weekends, or home after a day of work, we skip more. That’s when we have more time to pay attention to our music. The big surprise for me is how often we skip. On average, we skip nearly every other song that we play.”
One interpretation: people simply don’t take much time to decide whether they like a song or not. Those opening seconds are crucial.
A second interpretation: another example of shorter attention spans today. Quickly moving through songs, scanning Internet headlines and viral videos, always have to be entertained…
A third interpretation: services like Spotify make skipping easier. Spotify has over 20 million songs and it is easy to just move on to another track.
A question: It would be interesting, however, to see if people consistently skip the same songs when presented with them – how much of this is dependent on their immediate context versus a skip representing a longer-term dislike for the song? Or, if people had to listen to a song for a longer period of time – like it was playing in a store they were shopping in – would they come to like it?
And additional living spaces are springing up everywhere, providing affordable housing without changing the feeling or texture of established neighborhoods the way high-rise developments can…
Eric Engstrom, a principal city planner, has seen these small structures become increasingly popular during his 16 years working for the city. And as he put it, “Given the low vacancy rate, when they’re done, you can rent them out in about an hour.” Which means that adding an accessory dwelling unit, or A.D.U., increases the value of a piece of property.
Since the 1990s, Mr. Engstrom said, zoning laws in Portland have been slowly changing to accommodate the buildings. “There’s been a lot of pressure on us to allow them,” he said.
But it was in 2010 when the biggest changes took place. That was when the city relaxed the limitations on size and began offering the equivalent of a cash incentive by waiving the hefty fees usually levied on new development. Other cities in the Northwest have been moving in this direction, but Portland is the first to offer a significant financial benefit and one of the few that does not require owners to live on the site, provide additional off-street parking or secure the approval of their neighbors — all of which have proved to be obstacles elsewhere. Apart from Santa Cruz, Calif., and Austin, Tex., where secondary dwellings have long been allowed, Portland is alone in this country in its aggressive advocacy of the units.
Seems like this approach could be a reasonable solution in many communities: allow small dwellings that can be used for multigenerational family space, generate a little extra income, provide more affordable housing opportunities, and/or expand the inhabitable space for the household. Yet, the article says little about why this has moved forward in Portland and a few other places but hasn’t caught on elsewhere. Is it seen more favorably in cities with limited space and relatively high real estate prices? Does it require more progressive politics?
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
