Could the success of Columbia, Maryland be replicated elsewhere?

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Columbia, Maryland is often held up as an unusually successful suburb:

But as Columbia marks the 50th anniversary since the first residents moved in, it has become clear that Rouse got some important things right. As progressive urban planners have turned their attention to the suburbs, they’ve striven to achieve a lot of the same things Columbia already has. The unincorporated town of 100,000 is prosperous and more varied racially and economically than many revitalized urban neighborhoods in cities like New York, Washington and San Francisco, which have become islands of extreme wealth. It turns out that stable, diverse, flourishing communities can exist without short city blocks, warehouses-turned-lofts and beer gardens — and Columbia is the proof…

The “Columbia concept” was innovative in a number of other ways. Instead of having churches or temples, religious denominations shared interfaith centers. (Rouse thought each denomination getting its own plot was a waste of land.) There was even a community health plan that was an early version of an HMO. To maintain open spaces and public facilities, Rouse established the Columbia Association, a nonprofit whose board is elected by residents. The association acts as a quasi-government for the unincorporated town, with hundreds of employees paid through resident dues.

The town was organized but diffuse. Six loosely formed villages, each with a small shopping center and high school, were arranged around the Town Center, whose nucleus was the mall. The village centers catered to residents’ everyday needs, with grocery stores, barber shops, dry cleaners and recreation facilities. Tall signs were forbidden, and power lines were buried to preserve the land’s bucolic appearance. Apartments and townhouses, which were uncommon in suburbs at the time, drew singles, young couples and people with lower incomes than their neighbors in the split-levels and ramblers, a conscious attempt to foster what Rouse and his team called “social mix.” And Columbia was not simply a bedroom community: Rouse Co. executives wooed employers such as General Electric to open offices there.

Not everything worked out perfectly: At one point, Rouse thought he could get corporate executives to move to Columbia alongside their workers, but they largely didn’t. And some of the experiments, such as a minibus system, pilot day-care centers and a women’s center, didn’t pan out. Rouse also fell short of his goal of 10 percent subsidized housing. Still, by 2011, Columbia, flaws and all, had managed to surge past another target of his: a population of 100,000.

Aside from the things cited above, two things stand out to me from this article:

  1. Few developers or builders get an opportunity to plan an entire community. This requires a lot of effort: acquiring land, obtaining permission from local governments, and then seeing a long process through. Instead, much of suburbia is constructed in patches with a developer building a subdivision here while another builds an office park there.
  2. Much of the story of Columbia rests on the shoulders of the developer: James Rouse. Here, he is credited with forward-thinking ideas. He anticipated what might help suburban communities thrive rather than just focusing on profits. (However, I’m guessing he still made a good deal of money.) As noted above, not all of his ideas worked out but many of the key features were his.

On the whole, would it be worthwhile to take these two lessons and apply them to future suburbs? What might happen if developers were given (1) thousands of acres to work with in order to create a full community and (2) the developer had the ability to craft and put into practice a particular vision?

I would venture that some of these master-planned communities would be successful while others might not. Indeed, some of the success might be out of control of the developer and local residents. For example, if the template for Columbia was transported to the Houston region in the 1960s, would it be so successful? Or, if it was plopped into the Bay Area today? Not necessarily given changing regional forces, different demographics, and varied reactions from local officials.

It is interesting to think about how the public narratives regarding urban planning in the last century or so often involve powerful people: Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, the Levitt family, James Rouse. These narratives are either triumphs or disasters depending on how much influence the person wielded (and how they used it) and how their projects operate decades later. Would a structural view of these individuals as well as urban planning as a whole help us better understand how to contribute to thriving communities?

“Tiny Houses Are Big” – with 10,000 total in the United States

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Tiny houses get a lot of attention – including this recent Parade story – but rarely are numbers provided about how big (or small) this trend really is. The Parade story did provide some data (though without any indication of how this was measured) on the number of tiny houses in the US. Ready for the figure?

10,000.

Without much context, it is hard to know what to do with this figure or how accurate it might be. Assuming the figure’s veracity, is that a lot of tiny houses? Not that many? Some comparisons might help:

–Between February 2016 and March 2017, there were over 1,000,000 housing starts in each month. (National Association of Home Builders) Within data going back to 1959, the lowest point for housing starts after the 2000s housing bubble burst experienced about 500,000 new housing starts a month. (Census Bureau data at TradingEconomics.com)

–The RV industry shipped over 430,000 units in 2016. This follows a low point of shipments in recent years back in 2009 where only 165,000 units were shipped. (Recreation Vehicle Industry Association)

–The number of manufactured homes that have shipped in recent years – 2014 to 2016 – has surpassed 60,000 each year. (Census Bureau)

–The percent of new homes that are under 1,400 square feet has actually dropped since 1999 to 7% in 2016. (Census Bureau)

Based on these comparisons, 10,000 units is not much at all. They are barely a drop in the bucket within all housing.

Perhaps the trend is sharply on the rise? There is a little evidence of this. I wrote my first post here on tiny houses back in 2010 and it involved how to measure the tiny house trend. The cited article in that post included measures like the number of visitors to a tiny house blog and sales figures from tiny house builders. Would the number of tiny house shows on HGTV and similar networks provide some data? All trends have to start somewhere – with a small number of occurrences – but it doesn’t seem like the tiny house movement is taking off in exponential form.

Ultimately, I would ask for more and better data on tiny houses. Clearly, there is some interest. Yet, calling this a major trend would be misleading.

 

Fighting McMansions with higher densities in Sydney

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Australia has a reputation for McMansions but some Sydney neighborhoods and suburbs have seen a shift in recent years toward higher densities:

But while Sydney’s Hills District has been synonymous with the Great Australian Dream – life in the suburbs with a large backyard and Hills Hoist – it is quietly carving out a new identity.

Five years ago, in nearby Rouse Hill, 90 per cent of homes were houses. Today, it’s 60 per cent, census data shows. Houses in these suburbs regularly sell for Sydney’s median $1.15 million, while five years ago the prices were below $700,000.

Signs of change came as early as the opening of Rouse Hill Town Centre in 2008. At the time, there were plans for mixed-use apartments, but not all the locals were sold on the idea…

“Developers prefer the small lot subdivision, townhouse and apartment-style dwellings over the mansion style lots because there are more buyers than can afford them,” he said.

It sounds like the shift toward more housing units is not a backlash against McMansions per se but rather a high demand for more housing. Why build one McMansion when several townhomes could fit on the same lot?

In the long run, creating more housing units has multiple advantages: more people can access these communities, the townhomes are a better use of land opposed to detached houses and large lots, and higher population densities could support more vibrant street life. But, there could be one downside: how much will the new units help make housing more affordable? On the whole, more units in the metropolitan region should help reduce housing prices. However, if these new units are primarily concentrated in hot and/or desirable neighborhoods and the townhomes are more of luxury units rather than starter units, swapping McMansions for townhomes might not help many of the regions average residents.

Final thought: numerous people have suggested replacing McMansions with higher densities through a variety of means (teardowns, subdividing existing homes, building fewer McMansions in the first place) but Australia seems to be ahead of the United States in this regard.

Evangelicals and sociology: possibilities

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The last two posts have explored the patterns in how evangelicals approach sociology and the problems with those patterns. In the third post of the series, here are some ways that evangelicals can begin to solve the problems they have with sociology:

  1. Encourage more conservative Protestants to study, read, and apply sociology. If evangelicals are serious about engaging society, a better understanding of social groups and interactions could prove very helpful. For example, ministry work is more than just theological knowledge and often involves much interaction with people. Couldn’t a required sociology course help prepare Christians going into all fields to better love their neighbors?
  2. Don’t just cherry-pick sociological findings that confirm an evangelical perspective. This is difficult for any group or individual to do as we tend to seek out information that supports our view of the world. However, interacting with sociological work beyond what immediately seems useful would be a good thing.
  3. In recent decades, there have been a number of respected Christians doing sociology whose work is well regarded in the discipline. At the same time, I don’t think sociology as a field has had a transformative figure for conservative Protestants like a James Dobson in psychology. I don’t know the full history of psychology but the field became safe for evangelicals because one of their own helped them see it differently. (Psychology might be unique in other ways; since it is less interested than sociology in groups and societies, psychology might fit better with an individualistic approach favored by evangelicals.)
  4. Develop a stronger idea of what Christian engagement with sociology would be. The approach should be developed further than Christians simply doing sociology or Christians doing work that supports Christian perspectives.
  5. Strive to see the world from a structural perspective. While this may be unusual for many American conservative Protestants, one way to do this would be to try to read the Bible the way those who originally read it would read it. Western modern notions of individuality were not really in play for the original recipients of the sacred texts. Another option to combat the individualistic perspective would be to listen more to Christians around the world who share theological beliefs but interpret scripture through a more structural lens.

In sum, the divide between sociology and conservative Protestantism is not an unbridgeable one even as the two groups often have different purposes and see the world from different perspectives (structural vs. individual, politically liberal vs. politically conservative).

Note: these observations are based on years of interaction with conservative Protestant congregations, institutions, sermons, media, and individuals.

 

Evangelicals and sociology: problems

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Yesterday, I discussed five patterns I’ve observed in how evangelicals interact with sociology. Here are some problems with these patterns:

  1. The patterns ignore significant areas of research that affect the lives of evangelicals and their organizations on a daily basis. This ranges from research on organizations (why do so many churches and organizations try to reinvent the wheel?) to social problems that evangelicals hope to address (such as development, poverty, health issues, etc.).
  2. Sociology could help evangelicals address certain blind spots. For example, numerous academics as well as evangelicals have written about the group’s problem with race and how an individualistic approach fails to appropriately grapple with structural realities. Sociology written by Christians and non-Christians could help evangelicals move forward in this area.
  3. Sociologists are also interested in the improvement of society. Thus, casting them as enemies may create unnecessary with people who could be helpful to evangelical causes. Evangelicals, more so than fundamentalists, want to engage society. In recent decades in the United States, this has involved taking more public roles and pushing for certain policies and behaviors (at a variety of levels from the federal government to non-profit organizations). Sociologists may have some different end goals than evangelicals but both want to engage society and not succumb to societal apathy and withdrawal. Are there areas in which sociologists and evangelicals could partner (outside of the typical culture war or conservative issues to which evangelicals devote much attention)?
  4. The suspicion of sociology tells evangelicals that is an area unworthy of study. This is odd given the group’s claims that God can work through everything (including non-Christians), there are concepts like common grace, and all truth is God’s truth.
  5. Conservative Protestants sometimes have a limited interest in seeing society as complex and difficult to understand. They can often be reductionistic about social ills, attributing the issues to sin (even as the various forms of sin as well as the consequences can be multifaceted) or bad individuals.

Tomorrow: possible solutions to these problems.

Note: these observations are based on years of interaction with conservative Protestant congregations, institutions, sermons, media, and individuals.

Evangelicals and sociology: patterns

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Based on my experiences with conservative Protestants, discussions of sociologists or sociological research tends to follow several patterns. (A typical caveat applies: these are not true in all circumstances.) Here are some ways this plays out:

  1. Sociological work on religion tends to be cited more than the work of other subfields. This makes sense for people of faith yet fails to acknowledge the place of sociology of religion within the discipline of sociology (it is a low priority and not very influential) and ignores a lot of useful work in other areas.
  2. Sociologists who are known conservative Protestants or Christians receive a lot of attention. This includes people like James Davison Hunter, Christian Smith, Mark Regnerus, and Peter Berger. It is as if their status as Christians makes their work (a) safer – they are not secular researchers – and/or (b) more valid – they are insiders who understand what it is to be a person of faith and the threats evangelicals face.
  3. Sociological research that supports evangelical perspectives is championed. The work of James Hunter on the culture wars is a good example: as a religious group that wishes to engage society, Hunter helped evangelicals make sense of the broader American cultural landscape and the forces they perceived as pushing against them. Another example is Christian Smith’s work on moral therapeutic deism: Smith’s suggestion that many American emerging adults have a vague and self-serving religiosity fits with the evangelical view that many Americans need a stronger and more exclusive faith. A third example involves research that could be used to support nuclear families and abstinence outside of marriage such as research undertaken by Mark Regnerus and Brad Wilcox.
  4. Sociological research can be useful for pragmatic purposes including bringing people to faith and growing the church. Pastors, in particular, are often interested in wanting to interpret societal trends for their congregation and sociologists can help identify these trends (though this is often restricted to #2 and #3). Outside of particular evangelical aims, sociological research may have little use.
  5. Outside of the way sociology is used as identified in the four patterns above, sociology is often perceived as a field full of liberals, secularists , and postmodernists who if are not actively hostile to conservative Christianity are to be at least held at arm’s length.

On the whole, these patterns appear to serve one purpose: to further the perspectives already held by conservative Protestants. Sociology is a tool that can be used to support the aims and beliefs of people of faith. But, a conservative Protestant must choose wisely which aspects of sociology to apply.

Tomorrow: the problems with these patterns.

Note: these observations are based on years of interaction with conservative Protestant congregations, institutions, sermons, media, and individuals.

More findings on poverty in the suburbs

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Following Confronting Suburban Poverty in America published in 2014 comes a new book – titled Places in Need and also published by Brookings – with additional findings regarding suburban poverty:

Allard spent years studying Census data and speaking with social service providers across the country, and discovered that while concentrated poverty is still a stubborn issue in cities, it’s also becoming a much larger issue in suburbs. In 1990, there were 8.6 million poor people in the suburbs and 9.5 million in the city. In 2014, the numbers had shifted; 17 million poor Americans living in the suburbs, while 13 million poor were in cities. And it’s not just in the inner-ring suburbs; roughly two-thirds of poor suburbanites live in communities built after 1970, and poverty is growing fastest in suburbs built after 1990…

Allard also found that concentrated poverty was on the rise in the suburbs. He looked at areas with a 20 percent poverty rate, lower than the traditional 30 to 40 percent poverty rate used in many studies, and found many more people in traditional suburban areas falling into this threshold. At that point, there are serious problems, such as discrimination from labor market opportunities, public safety issues, and access to quality housing…

Allard says that sometimes, people mistakenly assume that the poor in suburbs have come from elsewhere and are new arrivals to the neighborhood, a preconception that has made it harder for suburban regions to find the political support to tackle poverty issues.

His research shows the opposite, especially since the Great Recession, which he says hit the suburbs much harder than the rest of the country. The housing crisis hit the mortgage and real estate industry as well as the home improvement business, and the changes in poverty actually became more severe in the suburbs after the larger national recovery started. Grocery markets and retail shops were having a harder time staying afloat in hard-hit suburban regions. The impact inspired the book’s cover image: a strip mall filled with closed or vacated commercial space.

If the poor do become more visible in suburban communities – either because of their numbers or because of increased attention from academics, local officials, and nearby residents – it will be interesting to see how suburban communities and residents respond. Given the exclusionary nature of American suburbs, there could be several possible responses:

  1. Ignore this as long as possible. Suburbanites are not exactly known for their social interactions with a broad range of people so if those living in poverty are outside their immediate social circles, perhaps it can simply be ignored.
  2. Not provide many social services to the suburban poor. This might be with the goal of ignoring the nearby poverty or hoping that the residents go away. Or, communities might refuse to do much on the local government level and wait for non-profits and state agencies to respond.
  3. Move away from communities where there are visible numbers of suburban poor to wealthier suburbs. If this happens, the process of white flight continues as the wealthy just keep moving away from poorer residents.

It will be worth checking in a decade or so down the road to see how exactly suburban poverty has been addressed.

Zillow defines McMansions but doesn’t really capture their essence

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The recent Washington Post analysis on the return of the McMansions depends on Zillow’s definition of a McMansion:

(Since a “McMansion” is in the eye of the beholder, Zillow doesn’t have a targeted way of tracking them nationwide. For this article and the video above, they approximated the category by focusing on houses built after 1980 that were greater than 3,000 square feet but less than 5,000 square feet. They also looked for houses located on streets where the homes are similarly sized, on similarly sized lots, and built within six years of each other, to isolate cookie-cutter communities.)

This definition has several key aspects:

  1. A time period after 1980. The term McMansions arises in this era.
  2. A certain square footage. Once a home is too large, it is no longer a McMansion.
  3. The large homes are built as part of a development of similar homes.

This definition of a McMansion would seem to primarily capture suburban McMansions. Indeed, the analysis spends more time discussing general suburban trends than it does McMansions:

Many casual onlookers have forecast the death of the suburbs in recent years, especially as younger renters and buyers turn an eye to city centers. Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow, says that young people today have far more interest in living in urban environments. “That’s where jobs had been growing fastest over the course of this economic recovery over the past five years,” says Olsen…

Their decision is also supported by cheap energy costs, which make it affordable to commute. in mid-June, the nationwide average price of regular gasoline was $2.32 a gallon. Like the McMansion and the pickup in the housing market, it’s another source of deja vu. After remaining elevated for years, oil prices are now roughly the same as they were June 2000, when adjusted for inflation.

This definition leads to two major problems with defining what homes are McMansions:

  1. Not all suburban houses are McMansions. It may be easy to conflate the two – the majority of McMansions are likely located in the suburbs – but they are not the same.
  2. The Zillow data provides little insight into the architecture of the home. A home of that time period and square footage in a cookie-cutter neighborhood is not necessarily garish or poorly proportioned. Such homes might be more likely to be McMansions but it is not a guarantee.

Zillow may be limited in the architectural data they can access. For example, they may be able to know how large the garages are on these homes but it doesn’t really know how exactly these garages are presented. Yet, painting McMansions with a broad brush may not be very accurate and fall into the trap of painting most of suburbia as filled with McMansions.

Washington Post declares that McMansions are back

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The second largest economic crisis of the last 100 years was not enough to kill off the McMansion:

If there’s anything that typifies the boom times before the Great Recession, it is the McMansion. These sprawling houses proliferated around the country in the 2000s, as banks shelled out easy credit to fuel a housing bacchanalia they thought would never die…

As Americans have started building and flipping houses again, they are once again buying McMansions. Since 2009, construction of these homes has steadily trended upward, data from Zillow, a real estate website, shows. The median home value of McMansions is also rising, at a pace that eclipses the value of the median American home…

Many casual onlookers have forecast the death of the suburbs in recent years, especially as younger renters and buyers turn an eye to city centers. Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow, says that young people today have far more interest in living in urban environments. “That’s where jobs had been growing fastest over the course of this economic recovery over the past five years,” says Olsen.

Yet younger people who are starting families are still moving to the suburbs for more room, she says. About half of all millennials that purchased a home last year did so in the suburbs, according to Zillow data.

In recent years, the media has vacillated between McMansions are dead (see a summary of my posts on this here) and McMansions are still alive. This new analysis in the latter category uses a similar framing as the earlier stories: McMansions arose to prominence at the end of the late 20th century and interest in them waned after the housing bubble burst. This might be technically true since housing starts did decrease significantly in the housing bubble. At the same time, the construction of McMansions never stopped – indeed, the proportion of new homes over 3,000 square feet actually increased (see earlier post here). And this is with the withering criticism that often accompanies McMansions. The story above follows in this line with the primary analysis coming from the creator of McMansion Hell. Still, the analysis hints that McMansions have a longer shelf life than many would want and a good portion of Americans – not really discussed in this article – are willing to consider them as a viable housing option.

 

Naperville has 11 Starbucks locations

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The recent move of the downtown Naperville Starbucks to a larger location led to a quick mention of the numbers of Starbucks’ location in the suburb:

A favorite place to stop for coffee is on the go in Naperville as two of the 11 Starbucks stores in the city are preparing to move.

Naperville has collected many accolades over the last two decades (see earlier posts here, here, and here) and this may be another one: having this many Starbucks suggests the community has a certain level of wealth and quality of life. Certain businesses can set a community apart and many suburbs would love to have multiple Starbucks not just for the money they generate (think of the drip, drip, drip of sales tax revenues) but for the prestige they confer.

Here are the locations according to Google Maps:

StarbucksNaperville

Not surprisingly, the majority are located along major transportation corridors: Route 59, Ogden Avenue, and 75th Street.