New survey suggests 66% of millennials (who want homes) still prefer suburbs

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Perhaps that generational shift back to the city will take some time: a new survey shows a majority of millennials would prefer to live in suburbs.

Some demographers and economists argue that the preference of millennials, also called Generation Y, for city living will remain long lasting. And surveys of these young urban residents have tended to show that they don’t mind small living quarters as long as they have access to mass transit and are close to entertainment, dining and their workplaces.

But a survey released Wednesday by the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group, suggested otherwise. The survey, based on responses from 1,506 people born since 1977, found that most want to live in single-family homes outside of the urban center, even if they now reside in the city…

The survey, which was released at the association’s convention in Las Vegas, found that 66% want to live in the suburbs, 24% want to live in rural areas and 10% want to live in a city center. One of the main reasons people want to relocate from the city center, she said, is that they “want to live in more space than they have now.” The survey showed 81% want three or more bedrooms in their home…

The survey results, though, could be skewed because they included only millennials who first answered that they bought a home within the past three years or intended to do so in the next three years. That excluded young people who intend to rent for many more years, which is a large and growing group, in part because of hefty student debt and the tight mortgage-lending standards of recent years.

Interesting twist there at the end – of those who have or intend to buy homes, the suburbs are still the place (and only 10% wanted to live in a city center) to go.

I do wonder at the three categories presented: city center, suburbs, and rural areas. While the last one is pretty easy to define, what is the boundary between the city center and suburbs? If I’m thinking about Chicago, does living in the city center include every part of the city of Chicago (which has a lot of neighborhoods of single-family homes) or does it refer to living in the denser Loop and right nearby?

Debate the data: are millionaires leaving New Jersey in large numbers?

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A new report suggests some millionaires have left New Jersey:

New Jersey lost roughly 10,000 millionaire households, but those affluent families who remain still account for 7 percent of the whole state, the researchers said…

A high tax rate for top earners may have led to some migration out of the state, according to David Thompson, the lead researcher.

By losing those 10,000 millionaire households, the Garden State returns to third, where it was ranked from 2010 through 2012. Since the last report, Connecticut lost only 1,000 millionaire households, as it vaulted to the second spot, the group said.

And alternative interpretations:

“If millionaires were truly trying to flee NJ’s top income tax rate, we probably would have lost a lot more when the rates were higher,” Whiten said. “But during the 2000s NJ almost doubled the number of tax filers above $500K at a time when the tax rate was increased on them, twice.”Wealth has been reported leaving the Garden State before, however. In 2010, a Boston College team found that in a five-year period some $70 billion in total wealth left for other parts of the U.S.

Last year, a report by the Morristown-based Regent Atlantic wealth management firm released a report entitled “Exodus on the Parkway” that claimed so-called “tax migration” began in 2004, with the state’s passage of the “millionaire’s tax.” The report found that a couple with an income of $650,000 who moved to Pennsylvania would save some $21,000 per year in taxes, adding up to $1.65 million over 25 years, if invested. Most families with incomes of $500,000 per year or more were departing New Jersey for either the Keystone State or Florida, the Regent Atlantic authors added.

“The phenomena is there, that people are leaving – but people in New Jersey have high incomes,” said Joseph Seneca, professor of economics at the Edward Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

My interpretation: no one really knows whether 10,000 millionaire households leaving is a big number or not. If the true figure was 5,000, might those who oppose higher taxes still argue that taxes are pushing a large number to leave? And if the true number was 15,000, would this be enough evidence that taxes really are making a difference? Because this appears to be an ideologically laden debate, each side can look at the 10,000 figure and make a reasonable interpretation.

Here are two ways around the issue that both make use of comparisons. The first way would be to compare the New Jersey leavings over the years. Is the 10,000 figure more or less than years past? The second would involve comparing the leaving rate across states. This new report looks at millionaires per capita across states but why not compare the leaving rate per capita across states? Then, people in New Jersey could decide whether they are concerned with having similar or different rates compared to states with other policies.

O’Hare Airport now officially world’s busiest airport again

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Occasionally status anxious Chicago can breathe a little easier: O’Hare was just certified the world’s busiest airport.

While 2014 traffic at O’Hare was down by 0.2 percent, it lost less traffic than the Atlanta airport, where traffic declined by 4.7 percent, according to new FAA data. O’Hare had 881,933 arrivals and departures; Atlanta had 868,359.

But the Atlanta airport is likely to retain the title of busiest airport for passenger traffic.

City officials have said international passenger volume have helped O’Hare totals. In the last 18 months, O’Hare and Midway airports added six new international airlines and dozens of destinations, according to the city.

O’Hare regains bragging rights to the title it had mostly owned since the dawn of the Jet Age, when it surpassed the number of flights at Midway Airport, which had been the leader.

As a transportation center, this looks good for Chicago. Yet, there are two more negative signs: Atlanta may still have more passengers (which number matters more?) and flights were down (Which may have more to do with airlines consolidating as well as trying to cut costs by filling existing flights). Additionally, the lead over Atlanta isn’t that big. I’m guessing this means the competition will continue for years to come and I am curious to know if Chicago and/or O’Hare have some plans in the works to keep their regained lead.

Happenings since Canadian National purchased the EJ&E tracks in 2008

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Here is a recap of what has happened since the 2008 purchase of the EJ&E railroad tracks by Canadian National:

In December 2008, the Surface Transportation Board approved CN’s request to buy the smaller EJ&E, which extended in a half-circle from Waukegan to Joliet. Suburbs traversed by the EJ&E fought the plan, citing extra freight train traffic. The board agreed with CN that the purchase would reduce regional freight congestion but imposed numerous conditions on the railroad as a result and included a period of federal oversight until Jan. 23, 2015.

Last month, the STB extended the monitoring period until Jan. 23, 2017, citing concerns about additional freight traffic in the region.

Mongeau said the railroad’s acquisition of the EJ&E “gave CN what it was looking for — a route around Chicago,” that has a trickle-down effect on other railroads by taking its trains off other crowded tracks.

The railroad has spent $700 million on upgrades and safety improvements since 2008.

Twenty-eight out of 33 towns affected by the merger signed mitigation deals with CN, Mongeau noted. Holdouts included Aurora and Barrington, which fought against the merger and campaigned to extend the monitoring period.

In October 2014, there were 1,620 blocked railway crossings lasting 10 minutes or more on the EJ&E. In October 2009, early in the acquisition phase, there were just nine, according to CN data….

On tracks between Lake Zurich, Barrington and Hanover Park, traffic on the EJ&E grew from about five daily trains prior to the merger to 17 in October 2014.

This was a big issue for a number of suburban communities in the mid-2000s as they wondered how the purchase would affect freight traffic as well as block crossings, create more noise, and potentially harm property values. It sounds like the monitoring is intended to keep tabs on these changes and help ensure the railroad and communities work together. Yet, it is still important to keep the big picture in mind: moving traffic onto the EJ&E tracks can help alleviate freight traffic elsewhere, addressing the problem of the railroad bottleneck in the Chicago region. This sort of issue makes the case for metropolitanization where communities and government could come together and solve problems facing numerous municipalities.

Pace wants to “change the suburban transit environment” with new bus routes

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Pace has an ambitious proposal intended to link important areas in the Chicago area via bus:

A wide-ranging network of suburban bus routes could transform the way people commute and shop, connecting people to job centers in Naperville, Elgin and Elk Grove Village, according to an ambitious $2.3 billion plan shared by Pace on Tuesday.

Express buses with high-tech amenities would take riders from the south suburbs to O’Hare International Airport. Or from McHenry south to Oswego via Randall Road. Or from Evanston to O’Hare along Dempster Street.

And buses would travel on the shoulder of the Jane Addams and Edens expressways, bypassing car traffic…

Pace has submitted its plan for an innovative suburban Rapid Transit Network to Congress, which asked for candidates for a program called Projects of National and Regional Significance. The agency revealed details of its proposal to the Tribune on Tuesday…

The network is composed of two service types: arterial bus rapid transit and suburban expressway service.

Mass transit that connects suburbs is sorely needed in the Chicago region. The current system of buses does little to add on to the existing hub-and-spoke railway system that connects the suburbs to downtown. New buses provide a flexible form of transport compared to railroads; rather than having a fixed track and sunk infrastructure costs, buses can take advantage of existing important roads and highways.

However, I suspect this plan has a lot of hurdles to overcome even beyond the federal funding they are seeking.

1. How do you get suburbanites to consistently ride the bus? Trains are one thing but buses seem to have a different status.

2. Can schedules between mass transit options be lined up?

3. Can the buses actually get people to places rather quickly and at most times of the day? The current bus system tends to take long amounts of time compared to driving.

4. Perhaps the most important question: is there enough density along the proposed lines to have consistent numbers of riders who need to go where the buses are going? Density contributes to riders which leads to more buses which leads to more options. Going to the airports makes sense – both Chicago airports are busy (O’Hare may just be the busiest in the world again) – as does more highway buses to Chicago but linking residences and businesses is a more difficult task. Downtown Naperville may be lively but how many live near there who would commute by bus elsewhere? Are there concentrations of people living along Randall Road? I wonder if there is any way to encourage denser developments – apartments, condos, townhomes, rowhouses – near such bus lines to help provide more potential riders.

MLK streets in the US contained in a “nation within a nation”

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Many American cities have streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. and many are located within black areas:

Across the country there are 730 streets named after civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr…

For his book “Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street,” author Jonathan Tilove visited nearly 500 Martin Luther King streets across the country. In his book, he described a “nation within a nation” as “a parallel universe.”

“For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost,” Tilove wrote. “For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.”

And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drive in Chicago has its own complicated past:

Instead, a South Side designation was boosted by Mayor Richard J. Daley. It was a move Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor describe as “disingenuous” in their Daley biography “American Pharaoh.”

Foes when King was alive, Daley, by supporting the renaming, was attempting to portray himself as a forward thinker on race relations ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the biographers said.

In dedicating the street, Daley “invoked King’s devotion to nonviolence in a verbal formation that made it sound as if Daley had the idea first,” Cohen and Taylor wrote.

Par for the course in a racialized country: where the effects of race extend even to street names. That said, I wonder what would happen in some major cities if there were efforts to extend MLK street into white and/or tourist areas…

“Using a Real Life SimCity to Design a Massive Development”

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As a massive SimCity fan, I find this use of predictive urban models intriguing:

596 acres, 50,000 residents, $4 billion dollars and even a 1,500-boat marina: Everything about the proposed Chicago Lakeside Development, developer Dan McCaffery’s massive micro-city being built at the former site of the U.S. Steel Southworks Plant, is on a different scale. It follows that the design process for this mixed-use project requires a different set of tools, in this case, LakeSim, an advanced computer modeling program. Developed as part of a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and McCaffery Interests, this program functions like a customized SimCity, analyzing and simulating weather, traffic patterns and energy usage to help architects and designers plan for a site that may eventually contain more than 500 buildings.

“A lot of the Big Data approaches tend to be statistical in nature, looking at past data,” says Argonne scientist Jonathan Ozik. “We’re modeling a complex system of interactive components, running the data forward, so what we end up having is your SimCity analogy, energy systems interacting, vehicles and people moving. What we’re doing here is using a complex systems approach to tackle the problem.”…

The challenge for planners is predicting how so many different systems and variables will interact. LakeSim gives them a framework to analyze these systems over long timelines and run millions of scenarios much quicker than past models — hours as opposed to days — asking “hundreds of questions at once,” according to Ozik. The program is a step forward from similar modeling software, especially valuable at a site that in most respects is being built from scratch.

This seems quite useful at this point but it will be necessary to look at this down the road once the site is developed. How much time did the model save? How accurate was the model? Did relying on such a model lead to negative outcomes? If this is a predictive model, it may be only as good as the outcome.

Interesting to note that the commenters at the bottom are wondering where all the people to live in this development are going to come from. I assume that demand is appropriately accounted for in the model?

Sales of McMansions up 21%; remaining 99% of market down 7.6%

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At least one statistic suggests the housing market is still split into two divided camps: one that is thriving and one that is not.

Consider this incredible statistic from the research analyst Redfin: through last April, sales of the McMansions of America – the top 1% of homes by price – rocketed up 21% compared to last year. But sales of the other 99% of homes were down 7.6%.

It’s not even clear that rising home prices – traditionally a way to measure a recovery – would be good for the middle class. Price increases harm the affordability of homes, particularly for first-time homebuyers, who have not returned to the market at their historical level. This is an important group: first-time homebuyers drive the entire market, allowing sellers to step up into bigger homes…

When prospective homebuyers are actually asked about their biggest obstacle to purchasing, a majority cites “rising home prices” and “quality of inventory”, meaning the lack of decent homes in the buyer’s price range. So it’s not surprising to see a drought in lending, and a reduction in homeownership rates from 69% in 2006 to 65% in 2014. It has nothing to do with bank regulation; it has to do with purchasing power.

In the words of senior loan officer Logan Mohtashami, “we simply don’t have enough qualified home buyers to have a true housing recovery in America.”

While I’m not sure that the top 1% of houses are all McMansions – the term tends to refer to certain styles of homes rather than just the price – the data seems fairly consistent in recent months: the housing market has not fully or evenly recovered. More expensive homes are hot as are particular locales, such as luxury condos in New York and Miami. The slump continues at the lower end of the market where builders aren’t that motivated (why build cheaper housing units when there are bigger margins on those luxury units?) and potential homebuyers don’t have the savings to move in or up and also may still be trapped in their current mortgages.

Pseudo equation/PR attempt to label the most depressing day of the year

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Yesterday may have just been the most depressing day of the year if you believe one argument:

The idea of Blue Monday dates back to a 2005 campaign by Sky Travel. The company wanted to encourage people to take January vacations, so they reached out to Arnall, who developed his equation to find the most depressing day of the year.

Media, the public, and even other companies latched onto the idea. A U.K. group started a website dedicated to “beating Blue Monday.” Another group, bluemonday.org, encourages acts of kindness on the date.

Scientists, however, say there is no evidence that Blue Monday causes any more sadness than other specific days of the year. Burnett has been outspoken on the topic, publishing multiple blogs in The Guardian dedicated to dispelling the myth…

Burnett blames slow January news cycles, general post-holidays discontent, and “confirmation bias” for the term’s endurance.

“(People) feel down at this time of year, and the Blue Monday claim makes it seem like there are scientific reasons for this,” Burnett said in an email exchange. “It also breaks down a very complex issue into something easily quantifiable and simple, and that tends to please a lot of people, giving the impression that the world is predictable and measurable.”

And what is this equation?

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/01/19/today-is-saddest-day-year-and-there-blue-monday-equation-that-explains-why/?intcmp=latestnews

This is almost brilliant: come up with an equation (everyone knows equations make things more scientific and true), put it out there in January (dark and cold already), and the media eats it up (every morning show host ever hates Mondays). And the scientific data? Lacking.

That said, it would be intriguing to more into mass societal emotions around different times of the year. Is Christmas an excuse for many just to be happy for a month between Thanksgiving and the end of the year? I remember seeing a suggestion from someone that we should move Christmas later, perhaps to the middle of January, so we can enjoy the Thanksgiving high a bit longer before being pressed into another holiday. Or, what about those arguments that we need a national holiday the day after the Super Bowl? Given the amount of interaction people today have with the mass media (something like eleven hours of media consumption a day on average), couldn’t publicly displayed emotions have some effect on how we feel? Perhaps this has little or no effect compared to the effect of the emotions from the people nearby on us in our social networks.

Academics summing up the evils of suburbia

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In looking at the new book Global Suburbs: Urban Sprawl from the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro, I was struck by the opening statement by the series editor, sociologist Sharon Zukin. Here is her opening (page ix):

In Global Suburbs: From the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro, Lawrence Herzog exposes the dystopian underside of the suburban American dream. A house of one’s own, on a little plot of land, is no longer a place of domestic comfort, spiritual renewal, and communion with the green space and clear air of nature. Instead, the mass suburban habitat that Americans pioneered features oversized McMansions stuffed with giant TVs and electronic gadgets, to which their owners commute in gas-guzzling SUVs, enduring stressful journeys on traffic-clogged roads, leaving neither space nor time for pleasure.

This human habitat, Herzog warns, is neither a happy nor a healthy place. It is, instead, a treadmill of over-consumption that burdens our bodies, our spirits, and the natural environment. Obesity, anxiety, toxic air: how can we think this is a good life?

Most important, the suburban dream that Herzog describes now spreads throughout North and South America…Every metropolitan area in the Western hemisphere bears a tragic cost: Overbuilding reduces the water supply, destroys the trees and insects on which all life depends, and creates an eco-disaster.

Naming these issues can be important as many suburban residents don’t consider the implications of consumption, their impact on the surrounding ecology (particularly if the rest of the world consumed at similar levels), and whether such a suburban life truly offers the be-all-end-all of existence. Yet, this description tends toward the over-the-top suburban critique that has been leveled for decades. Here we have another citing of McMansions and SUVs together – key symbols of excessive consumption – even though many suburbanites have neither. How anxious and stressed are these suburbanites – if the milieu is so toxic, why did they keep moving there for decades? (They are either dupes tricked by someone or have misplaced priorities.) Was there once a golden age of suburbs that wasn’t about over-consumption and truly was about “domestic comfort, spiritual renewal, and communion with the green space and clear air of nature”? (There is evidence of this but it tended to be limited to the wealthy, provided limited opportunities for women, and also had a view of a certain kind of nature.)

On to the rest of the book…