Curbside parking in the suburbs was seen as déclassé

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Benjamin Ross in Dead End includes this interesting tidbit about restricting street parking in suburbs:

As is common in zoning matters, status motivations lie hidden behind the stated rationales for parking minimums. Large-lot subdivisions where curb space is plentiful are rarely exempted. Indeed, early off-street parking rules, which mandated one space per house, could shrink the supply of parking. A one-car garage furnishes one space, but that space goes to waste when the owner is away from home. Its driveway eliminates a curb space that was usable twenty-four hours a day.

Curbside parking was disfavored because it was déclassé, suggestive of old neighborhoods with no garages and cars lining the roads. A 1969 planning text says that homeowners often object to on-street parking “from the purely aesthetic standpoint.” Aesthetics, here, is best understood as a euphemism. Parking is still allowed on driveways, and any given car is no better-looking there than on the street. But one’s own BMW in the driveway is entirely different from someone else’s Toyota at the curb. (p. 51)

Three quick thoughts:

1. Social class and status underlies a lot of activity in the American suburbs (as well as in other settings). Few people would admit such a thing but there is little reason to move cars to driveways outside of status.

2. Many communities, including my own, have restrictions on parking overnight on the street. What good reason is there for this?

3. Parking on the street actually could make streets safer. New Urbanists argue that having cars parked on both sides of the road makes drivers more cautious and attentive, leading to fewer accidents. Take parked cars away and throw in extra-wide streets like there are in many suburban neighborhoods and drivers will go a lot faster.

“The Myth of a White Minority”

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Sociologist Richard Alba wrote a NYT op-ed in June about the fluidity of being white in the United States amidst a growing multiracial population:

But the forecast of an imminent white minority, which some take as a given, is wrong. We will seem like a majority-white society for much longer than is believed…

Some of the mixed children now classified as minorities surely will think of themselves mainly as whites when they grow up; researchers have already found a significant group of American adults who declare themselves as non-Hispanic whites to the census, but acknowledge having some Mexican ancestry. Others may have mixed or even minority identities, but will be “sociologically white,” integrated into white communities and family networks and seen as essentially no different from anyone else.

According to the new Pew report, adults from mixed white and Asian backgrounds feel they have more in common with whites than they do with Asians; almost half have friendship circles that are mostly made up of whites; and two-thirds live in mostly white neighborhoods. Two-thirds of the multiracial Americans in the report who have some white ancestry are themselves married to whites.

We can grasp these emerging social realities by remembering our history of assimilation. At midcentury, religious boundaries were highly salient in white America. Catholics, Jews and Protestants were distinct populations, whose social lives were largely confined within their own group. Yet in only a few decades, the differences faded, and interaction across the boundaries proliferated. It was not that people ceased being Catholic or Jewish. But the public faces of those identities became much more muted and rarely intruded on everyday life. The Jewish intermarriage rate, around 10 percent in 1950, climbed to 58 percent by 2013.

What racial and ethnic categories mean are not static. And if white continues to be a privileged status, some will want to identify with it among their options and other might not. And, of course, existing whites might contest these dynamic boundaries. For example, would southern whites accept as white a growing number of Latinos who have both Latino and white heritage?

This all makes measuring race and ethnicity more interesting moving forward. The Census Bureau is already thinking of changes for the 2020 decennial census.

Ah, another story of an overzealous Census surveyor

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Worried the Census Bureau is going to force compliance in answering its surveys? Here is another story of a zealous employee:

An East Dallas woman is outraged after she claims one U.S. Census worker showed up at her door for a housing survey and would not take “no” for an answer…

“She’s ringing the bell, knocking on the door. And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to participate.’” Said Platz. The East Dallas resident said it started with a series of three letters from the U.S. Census Bureau. A few days later after receiving the third later, a census worker showed up. Her husband verbally declined.

But a few days later, a different worker showed up at their home and would not leave according to Platz…

The census worker sat on the bumper of her van for the next 30 minutes. Sonia said the worker would only get up from the back of her van every few minutes to see if she had changed her mind about taking the housing survey…

It was a real federal census worker according to the regional office that covers Dallas. A supervisor confirmed more than 100 other workers are out in the area conducting the same work. The regional office said employees are encouraged to be “pleasantly persistent” and never take “no” for an answer at first.

I would guess that at least 95%+ of Census workers don’t cause such problems. But, an occasional case of Census workers who really want survey responses may be enough to keep people worried. And it would be interesting to hear how the Census Bureau deals with such employees.

To be snarky about it, perhaps people shouldn’t worry too much about the zealous Census worker as the NSA could just gather the relevant information without anyone knowing…

Three reasons Millennials are driving less and going fewer places overall

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A new study attributes less driving among Millennials to three factors:

The truth might be a little of this, a little of that, and even some of the other. That’s the takeaway from a new analysis of Millennial driving habits from transport scholar Noreen McDonald of the University of North Carolina. Writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association, McDonald attributes 10 to 25 percent of the driving decline to changing demographics, 35 to 50 percent to attitudes, and another 40 percent to the general downward shift in U.S. driving habits…

What makes McDonald’s work especially useful and compelling is that she compared the travel patterns of Millennials (born between 1979 and 1990, by her definition) with those of Generation X (born 1967-1978) at the same age. So she looked at driving data (both trips and miles) from tens of thousands of individuals in 1995, 2001, and 2009 alike.

But, it isn’t just that Millennials are driving less – they are going fewer places overall.

This analysis provides evidence of a long-term decrease in automobility that started in the late 1990s with younger members of Gen X and has continued with the Millennial generation. The decrease in driving has not been accompanied by an increase in other modes of travel or a decline in average trip length, meaning that younger Americans are increasingly going fewer places.

Those smartphones are media gadgets are pretty compelling and make accessing the rest of the world easier. Perhaps there is less need to wander and display independence by leaving the house. Maybe all those fears about crime out there have crept in for a whole generation.

If local mobility is reduced, does this mean this newer generation of Americans will have less geographic mobility within the United States (fewer moves or significant moves throughout their lives)?

Why can’t suburbanites see the destruction and ugliness of sprawl?

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Benjamin Ross, transit and environmental activist, makes his position on the suburbs clear in the Introduction to his 2014 book Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism.

Yet lively, stable, and economically diverse neighborhoods remain hard to find. Decay and gentrification keep nibbling away at what escaped the wrecking balls fo the mid-twentieth century. Builders hasten to transform old factory districts into city neighborhoods. But with their wide streets, condos, and chain stores, the new urban quarters still seem less appealing than places built a century and more ago.

Meanwhile, ugly suburbs still spread outward, consuming rural land and carrying the failings of their predecessors to new extremes. Cheap townhouses, tony high-rise apartments, and pretentious McMansions scatter across the landscape, entangled in an ever-expanding web of highways and parking lots…

I puzzled over questions with import far beyond my own suburbs. Why is our nation still addicted to sprawl, so long after experts raised the alert? What is the compulsion that keeps us building what so many revile? Why are urban streets, so much in demand, so rarely supplied? Why do attempts at cure so often worsen the disease? How can we break free of our addiction, and create the cities we desire? (p. 3-5)

A clear position and I suspect a perspective that Joel Kotkin would dislike. Even with the truth that is present in Ross’ opening statements – Americans have politically and socially supported using more land, building bigger houses, privileging the car over other forms of transportation – this does seem to carry a familiar refrain from suburban critics: why can’t the suburbanites just see all those ugliness and destruction? Why don’t the experts carry more weight? That story is a complicated one and presenting someone with the facts of suburbia likely isn’t enough to change their mind. That single-family home with a lawn and the dream of a better life is hard for many Americans to imagine elsewhere.

I’ll post about a few more interesting points from Dead End in the next week or so.

The doomed black suburb of Lincoln Heights, Ohio

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Here is a look at an early black suburb outside of Cincinnati that has fallen on hard times in recent years:

Then, as Lincoln Heights residents waited to incorporate, the county allowed white landowners in nearby Woodlawn to incorporate, giving much of the western part of what would have been Lincoln Heights to the white town. Then the county gave much of the eastern part of what would have been Lincoln Heights to another new white town, Evendale, including the land where the Wright plant was located. The residents of Lincoln Heights challenged this move in court but lost…

When the county finally allowed the city to incorporate, in 1946, the boundaries were radically different than black residents had once hoped, encircling about 10 percent—one square mile—of the original proposal. The village now included no major factories or plants and no industrial tax base…

But over time, Lincoln Heights residents found it more difficult to maintain that sense of community. For one thing, the jobs in nearby towns in factories and chemical plants started to disappear as American manufacturing began to shrink in the 1970s and 1980s. As unemployment rose, Lincoln Heights lacked a tax base deep enough to underwrite community development and other social-welfare programs. Soon, it became obvious to anyone who grew up in Lincoln Heights that if you wanted to make something of yourself, you had to get out. People who grew up in Lincoln Heights and were lucky enough to go away to college didn’t come back. Those who stayed largely were the ones who couldn’t get out…

Last year, two nonprofit groups, the Cincinnatus Association and Citizens for Civic Renewal, put out a study that concluded that Cincinnati and its suburbs needed to cooperate—consolidate local governments and share services—to thrive. The idea was supported by an editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which argued that cooperation could reduce inequality.

This is a common story among American cities and suburbs: when annexation boxes in communities, they lose the possibility of enlarging their tax base through acquiring more land and development opportunities. See David Rusk’s work in Cities Without Suburbs for more about how elastic cities – those that could annex because of different state laws (primarily in the South and West as compared to the Rust Belt) – have more positive social and economic outcomes. Any suburb would have a hard time recovering from the loss of major job centers and that it was a black community only made it worse.

This case also contradicts the argument that minorities moving to the suburbs is necessarily a positive thing. There are many poor non-white suburban communities and it may be even more difficult to provide social services and pursue economic development there.

For a look at some of the early black suburbs in the United States, see Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own.

Houses cursed when can’t sell at original asking price?

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Here are brief descriptions of two large Chicago area homes that might be “cursed”:

It’s not the only house in Chicago afflicted with bad juju, but it’s one that has it all: an overspending celebrity (former NBA player Antoine Walker, who built it for his mother), a house way bigger than anything anywhere around it, floods both before and since the foreclosure, and now a series of unconsummated sales. There’s even a lawsuit, which Mack filed in December against a buyer who was under contact to purchase the house last summer for $900,000 but backed out…

The years-long saga of the mansion took yet another twist last year, McClelland said, when a sprinkler on the top floor broke, spilling water down the main staircase and into the kitchen and other rooms. A sizable chunk of the rehab work was ruined, McClelland said…

The Tinley Park manse is not the only snake-bit property around. A three-acre property in Schaumburg that includes a Tudor-style ranch house and an adjacent guest castle complete with three-story turrets and battlements has been on the market since 2009, originally priced at $2.4 million. Several years ago, seller Christopher Kowalski acknowledged that what began as a whimsical project “got out of hand.”

The property has been under contract twice, in 2012 and this past April, but in the end neither buyer has gone on to wear the crown. When the April sale fell through, it was relisted June 29, now at $759,000. The listing agent, Nelson Avila of Accord One Real Estate, did not respond to a request for comment, and Kowalski could not be reached.

I get the idea that housing going for a much reduced rate is not something that realtors like. But, I don’t think “cursed” is the right word here for two reasons:

1. There are not guarantees that houses should retain their value. Granted, most people don’t expect to lose money when they purchase a home. (Hence the angst over the burst housing bubble of the late 2000s.) Yet, these two houses seem to be unusual for their area and there are only so many wealthy buyers.

2. I suspect many readers would read “cursed” as “haunted” or some other horror story descriptor. Ghosts? Violent crimes? Weird sounds and noises? Oh, you mean the house just won’t sell anywhere near an older value? That’s something different than cursed.

 

New Federal website shows complaints about mortgage lenders

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Thanks to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, there is a new website for narratives of consumer complaints regarding mortgage lenders:

The bureau logs each complaint by category in a publicly viewable database and gives the company that is the subject of a complaint time to respond via a nonpublic online portal connecting it with the consumer through a bureau intermediary. In the past three years, according to the bureau, it has received and worked on more than 627,000 complaints. They range from alleged harassment by debt-collection attorneys, to foreclosures, student loan defaults and poor treatment of customers by loan servicers. Roughly 28 percent of all complaints filed to date have been about mortgage issues — the largest single category. What’s been missing, though, has been any real detail about the troubling circumstances that triggered the complaint in the first place expressed in the customer’s own words.

Starting in late June, that all changed. The bureau began posting what it calls “narratives” that name the bank or company involved and go into sometimes excruciating detail. Allegations get pretty serious — charges of lending fraud, violations of federal regulations and illegal overcharges. Some are heartfelt, such as one from a Virginia homebuyer whose closing was repeatedly delayed by the bank: “Who compensates us for the loss of income for the days taken off from work (to attend closings)? For the movers that have been scheduled? For the pre-move-in renovations that cannot now be done because the contractors are fully scheduled for the rest of the summer?” (To see the narratives, go to http://tinyurl.com/phnkq99)

The first batch of 7,700-plus narratives was posted June 25, including hundreds of mortgage complaints. The consumer’s name and address — other than state of residence — are redacted, as are all details the bureau or the consumer considers ?private.

Lenders are not permitted to post their own narratives, but instead must use one of several stock responses, such as “company can’t verify or dispute the facts in the complaint” or “company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law.” Lenders can also decline to participate in the narratives process by saying, “Company chooses not to provide a public response.”

The article suggests two large threads emerge from the complaints: dislike of being placed in customer service hell without getting answers from anyone and problems with escrow accounts.

Not surprisingly, lenders are not happy with this information on the website. The issue is similar to that which plagues many online reviews: how can businesses or readers be sure that the story or review is credible? Yet, this certainly puts more information on the side of consumers and this is needed in an industry that holds so much debt for so many people.

These narratives posted online would make for some good coding opportunities for social scientists…

To see recent spike in murders in big cities, you have to see the decline before that

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New data suggests murders are up in some major American cities. Yet, to see this spike, you have to acknowledge the steady decline in previous years:

Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., among others, have all seen significant increases in their murder rates through the first half of 2015.

Homicides in St. Louis, for example, are up almost 60% from last year while robberies are up 40%. In Washington, D.C., 73 people have been killed so far this year, up from 62 last year, an 18% jump. In Milwaukee, murders have doubled since last year, while in nearby Chicago homicides have jumped almost 20%…

Criminologists warn that the recent spikes could merely be an anomaly, a sort of reversion to the mean after years of declining crime rates. But there could be something else going on, what some officials have called a “Ferguson effect,” in which criminals who are angry over police-involved shootings like that of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by a white police officer in August, have felt emboldened to commit increased acts of violence.

It is hard to have it both ways by complaining about high crime rates before this year and then now complaining about a spike. Crime rates were down for nearly two decades in most major cities prior to this year. Yet, this wasn’t the perception. Thus, we might see this spike as “Crime rates were high and now they are even higher!” or it could be “Crime rates declined for a long period and now this is a spike.” These are two different stories.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. This story is unclear about whether this is true across the board in major American cities or just in the places cited here.

2. It is hard to know what this spike is about as it is happening. What will happen in a few months or in the next few years?

American culture wars to move next to fighting over the suburbs?

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Joel Kotkin is back with the claim that the next American culture war will be over the suburbs:

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently…

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners…

Progressive theory today holds that the 2014 midterm results were a blast from the suburban past, and that the  key groups that will shape the metropolitan future—millennials and minorities—will embrace ever-denser, more urbanized environments. Yet in the last decennial accounting, inner cores gained 206,000 people, while communities 10 miles and more from the core gained approximately 15 million people.

This is one long piece but provides a lot of insight into what Kotkin and others have argued for years: liberals, for a variety of reasons, want to limit the spread and eventually reduce the American suburbs in favor of more pluralistic and diverse urban centers. I would be interested to know which issue Kotkin is most afraid of:

1. Maybe this is really just about politics and winning elections. The split between exurban Republican areas and Democratic urban centers has grown with the suburbs hanging in the balance. Perhaps conservatives fear moving people to cities will turn them more liberal and hand all future elections to Democrats. Of course, lots of liberals had fears after World War II that new suburbanites were going to immediately turn Republican.

2. This may be about the growing teeth of the environmental movement operating through legislation but also agencies and others that are difficult to counter. Suburban areas may just take up more resources but Kotkin and others don’t see this as a big issue compared to the freedom people should have to choose the suburbs. Should there be any limits to using the environment on a societal level?

3. Perhaps this is about maintaining a distinctively American way of life compared to Europeans. Some fear that international organizations and the United Nations are pushing denser, green policies that most Americans don’t really want. The suburbs represent the American quest for the frontier as well as having a plot of land where other people, particularly the government, can’t come after you. This ignores that there still are single-family homes in Europe – though on average smaller homes on smaller lots.

Or, maybe this is a combination of all three: “If the suburbs go, then what America was or stands for dies!” Something like that. Imagine “Don’t Tread On Me” making its last or most important stand on the green lawns of post-World War II split levels.

I have a hard time seeing this as the next big culture war topic that reaches a resolution in a short amount of time (say within a decade), primarily because so many Americans do live in the suburbs and the suburbs have such a long standing in American culture. But, perhaps a movement could start soon that would see fruition in the future.