Tag Archives: cities

Finding the world’s “coolest neighborhoods” and considering their “nowness”

Posted on by

One publication just released a ranking of the coolest neighborhoods in the world:

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Pexels.com

If you’re daydreaming about the most exciting local spots in your next city-break destination, global listing guide, Time Out has you covered with its latest roundup of the “world’s coolest” neighborhoods.

Topping the 2025 rankings is a corner of Tokyo that Time Out calls a “bibliophile nirvana.” Jimbōchō is home to some 130 vintage book stores — Time Out highlights Isseido Booksellers and Kitazawa Bookstore as great starting points for a day of bookish exploring — as well as its coffee-shop culture and delicious curry houses.

Time Out’s annual list is compiled from nominations made by its global network of editors and writers. The selections are then ranked against criteria including culture, community, livability, food and drink and what Time Out describes as “that hard-to-define sense of ‘nowness.’”

A Chicago neighborhood is a little bit down the list:

Rounding out the top five is the highest ranking US spot — Avondale in Chicago, highlighted for its wine bars, wellness studios and music venues. The neighborhood is also praised for its quirky small business scene, which includes retro bowling alley Avondale Bowl and antique mall-themed bar Consignment Lounge. Jeff Wilson, managing partner at Avondale Bowl, told CNN Travel that “seeing many of Avondale’s local, small businesses be included in a list with so many other communities around the globe really shows how many amazing things are happening right around us.”

I have multiple questions after reading about these rankings:

  1. Rankings of places often have to account for a lot of communities. Here, we could start with the many cities in the world. And then each city has numerous neighborhoods, depending on how their size is defined. There are a lot of neighborhoods to choose from.
  2. How long does “nowness” last? What is the half-life for a cool neighborhood? There is something unique about the neighborhoods at the top of list. The activity and meanings present in these neighborhoods might continue at a similar rate over time yet the neighborhood might become less cool to those experiencing the neighborhood.
  3. This list seems geared toward seeking out places to visit. But what these visitors might find attractive could differ from people who live there. Visitors want to find something unique, experience something new. How does this relate to the supply of local housing or job opportunities? Does being identified on such a list lead to more tourists, which then might alter the day-to-day life in the neighborhood? To play off the idea of Chicago as “a city of neighborhoods,” could a traveler be a connoisseur of novel neighborhood experiences?

Condos, investment properties, and limited demand in Canada

Posted on by

Can condos help people find reasonably-priced housing and achieve homeownership? Maybe but viewing them more as investment properties for years means there may now be less demand for condos in Canada:

Photo by Amit Batra on Pexels.com

It didn’t take long to figure out why there were so many empty units on the market: it turns out nobody wants to rent a condo, and nobody wants to buy one either. Condo rents have dropped over the past two years, and according to a recent report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, condo sales have fallen by 75 percent in the Greater Toronto Area and 37 percent in the Vancouver area since 2022. The market has become so dire that buyers of pre-construction condos are having difficulty closing their purchases. Banks lend money depending on the present value of the property, and some condos are worth less now than they were when the buyers made their first deposit. As a result, developers have been cancelling construction projects. Some experts say we should have seen this coming…

The simple answer is that many condos built between the late 2010s and early 2020s were constructed not for living but for investment. Since 2000, there has been a steady increase in the proportion of condos used as investment properties. To my surprise, most of the investors were not faceless corporations or foreign investors. Research done by Statistics Canada shows that the typical condo owner is a middle-aged, middle-class Canadian couple. The reigning logic for the middle class was that buying a condo, renting it out to pay for the mortgage, and eventually selling the unit was a solid way to make money. This was especially true in the late 2010s, a period of low interest rates and weak rent control policies. Steady demand for housing, partially caused by increasing immigration, made real estate seem like a sure bet.

Developers knew that most pre-construction buyers were investors rather than people looking to live in the apartments themselves. As a result, they focused on quantity over quality. Vishakh Alex, an architectural designer working in Toronto, said that the directive from developers in the late 2010s was to squeeze in as many units as possible. It is telling that between 1971 and 1990, the median condo in the city was approximately 1,000 square feet, but between 2016 and 2020, the number dropped to roughly 650 square feet…

Yet, as city populations continue to grow, there’s nowhere to build but up. It hardly bears repeating that there is a housing crisis in Canada. Young middle-class people looking to buy their first homes can rarely afford the kinds of houses that they might have grown up in—a cute triplex on a tree-lined street in Trinity-Bellwoods, Toronto, for example, or a townhouse in Kitsilano, Vancouver, with a view of the ocean. And so it is to the condos we must go.

But it is also true that condo living does not have to be, and perhaps should not be, defined by the biggest developers looking to squeeze every drop of profit from mom-and-pop investors and homebuyers.

This shift toward investor properties sounds similar to what has happened in the United States in recent decades with homeowners increasingly viewing their properties as investments and expecting certain returns.

One difference here is that more of these condos might have been second homes. In Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves, sociologist Meaghan Stiman explains how only a second home influenced how property owners viewed places and themselves with consequences for communities where these second owners were sometimes present.

If people in cities in Canada and the United States have concerns about investors buying too many properties, whether investors from other countries or institutional investors, what do they make of middle- to upper-class residents buying condos for investments? As the author notes above, these cities clearly need housing. American cities and metropolitan regions need housing. Should certain kinds of investors have limits or should developers be limited in how many investment properties they can construct?

One upside could be that the glut of investment condos does provide some attainable housing. The prices might not fall too far given their initial cost but what if investment condos and homes start becoming options for residents for whom they were not originally intended?

An ongoing negative Trump narrative about cities

Posted on by

President Trump and his political allies continue to discuss cities in particular ways:

Photo by Moneer Ibrahim on Pexels.com

When President Donald Trump declared his third presidential candidacy in 2022, he saved his most colorful language for America’s urban areas, bemoaning “the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” and adding that “the cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood.”

Later in his campaign, Trump called Milwaukee “horrible” and described Washington, D.C., as a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” More recently he said, “These cities, it’s like living in hell.”

Other Republicans have seized on similar dystopian urban images. When Vice President JD Vance visited New York several years ago, he compared the city to a zombie apocalypse, posting: “I have heard it’s violent and disgusting there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”

As Trump ramps up the military presence in Washington — and hints that he may move to take over other cities — his crackdown punctuates a frequent Republican message that American cities embody chaos, lawlessness and immorality, despite widespread recent drops in violent crime. With cities increasingly liberal and rural stretches ever more conservative, Republicans have a growing incentive to attack urban areas as the epitome of all that is wrong with America…

Trump’s rhetoric culminates a long history of American politicians casting cities as hotbeds of vice and social disorder, said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History.” Left-wing populists have often been dismayed by the vast wealth inequality on display in cities, he said, while right-wing populists have recoiled from the elites, immigrants and minorities who live there.

This resonates with some Americans because there is a broader and longer history of criticizing cities in the United States. From the beginning, a number of Americans have idealized small town or rural living. The growth of major cities was accompanied by numerous concerns. When asked today, many Americans say they would prefer to live in small towns.

At the same time, it is hard to imagine the United States today without its big cities and the good things that came with them. A United States without New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago? Or San Francisco, New Orleans, and Cleveland?

Even if voting patterns by geography seem fairly set in American national elections, it would be interesting to hear more politicians articulate messages that cross these boundaries. Are people living in cities, suburbs, and rural more different than they are similar? Breaking through the existing patterns might just require addressing issues that Americans face or care about regardless of where they live.

Housing issues are incredibly local – and they follow patterns across places

Posted on by

The issues of housing in the Chicago region are very local. How Chicago selected public housing sites and later handled the demolition of public housing high-rises. The discussions of affordable housing go in suburbs and the protection of single-family homes from perceived threats. Municipalities get to set their zoning maps, local officials make decisions regarding development, and residents weigh in.

Photo by Dmytro Koplyk on Pexels.com

But at the same time, these are not just local issues. There are patterns across places. What happened with public housing in Chicago may not have been exactly the same as what happened in other major cities but the effects of federal legislation and monies and public perceptions about public housing influenced numerous cities. Suburbs have unique characters but types of suburbs – say edge cities or inner-ring suburbs – can have similar experiences and trajectories. The ways zoning is used to privilege single-family homes and exclude people and undesirable uses is common. National ideologies regarding desirable and undesirable housing influences leaders and residents.

Figuring out how to link these two realms regarding housing – national and state-level policies and meanings and local action and sentiment – is very important to addressing any large-scale housing issues. Abandoning larger-scale efforts because all housing is local is not helpful. Focusing efforts only at the state or national level can ignore complexities within communities and regions.

Pumping water from the ground leads to sinking American cities

Posted on by

A new study finds American cities are sinking:

Photo by Alexander Zvir on Pexels.com

The new research, published in the scientific journal Nature Cities, built on previous work using satellite measurements to paint a detailed picture of rising and falling land. It also closely examined the connection between changes in land elevation and changes in groundwater, using data from individual monitoring wells.

Water pumped from wells isn’t something that people think about often. “You just turn on your tap, do what you need to do, and you go on your way,” said Leonard Ohenhen, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study.

But extracting more water than can be replenished “can have a direct relationship with what happens on the surface,” he said. “You can cause the ground to sink significantly.”…

Other factors also influence land elevation. For example, a vast expanse of bedrock beneath parts of the country, pressed downward by enormous glaciers during the last ice age, is slowly rebounding back into place. But over time it creates a sort of see-saw effect that today is adding 1 to 2 millimeters per year to subsidence rates in much of the northern United States.

If pumping water from directly underground leads to this issue, what could happen next? Here are a few ideas that come to mind:

  1. Getting water from further away. At least then if it is pumped out of the ground it does not affect cities and metropolitan regions – the issue is pushed off elsewhere.
  2. Somehow pumping something back into the ground to refill what was depleted.
  3. Factoring in sinking ground at initial construction. This would lead to boosting the elevation of new sites in anticipation of what might happen in the future.

Or not much might happen until one city experiences dire effects from this sinking. Imagine a whole neighborhood or an important development sinks to a point where the land becomes unusable. Would that prompt urgent action?

Would Americans view cities differently if the current drop in violent crime continues?

Posted on by

Crime appears to be down in a number of American cities:

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

Nineteen people were killed in Chicago last month, which is the fewest murders the Windy City has experienced during any April since 1962. In Baltimore, there were just five murders in April—the lowest number in any month since 1970. Three other major cities—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Detroit—recorded their fewest first-quarter homicides since the 1960s.

Criminologists tend to speak in caveats, with warning of reversion to the mean and admonitions to wait for better data, but even they must admit: These are some eye-catching numbers. “It’s really encouraging,” said John Roman, a crime researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “It’s worth taking a moment and noting that we are approaching the numbers in most crime statistics we haven’t seen since the 1960s. In these cities, if you’re under 55, this is probably the safest moment you’ve ever lived in. That’s great, and it should be celebrated.”

The early 2025 crime decline builds off numbers from 2023 and 2024 and appears to include not just homicide but also robberies, rapes, burglaries, and auto theft. In many respects, we are returning to a pre-COVID world of public safety, with profound implications for residents of neighborhoods tormented by gun violence, the police who are supposed to solve the problem, and the politicians who love to campaign on the issue.

For decades, many Americans have associated big cities with crime. This can be in comparison to the settings in which they live – and a slight majority of the country is suburban – and can persist despite fluctuations in the actual crime rate.

But this is also connected to long-standing anti-urban sentiments. In a country that idealizes small-town life and where many love the suburbs, cities can look unappealing. Any reports on crime – whether crime is up or down – could feed into this broader narrative.

This goes beyond politicians trying to make political points by playing up particular issues cities face. How about the media and how it reports crime? How about the ways Americans perceive safety? How about police? And so on. There are facts about crime and perceptions about crime. For a long time, Americans have connected crime to cities. It might take a long downturn in crime for that connection to be broken.

When the pedestrian mall swept across American cities

Posted on by

Part of the story of the American shopping mall included in Meet Me at the Fountain is the rise and fall of the pedestrian mall in cities:

Photo by Alexas Fotos on Pexels.com

From 1959 through the early 1980s, more than two hundred American cities closed blocks of their downtowns to car traffic. B 2000, fewer than twenty-four of those original malls remained. (89-90)

As people and shopping moved to the suburbs, larger cities responded by trying to create something like an outdoor mall on busy urban shopping streets. But the experiment did not work:

By 2000, fewer than twenty-four of these original malls remained. The design intervention that was supposed to bring people back from the suburban mall had, instead, exacerbated the very problem it was trying to solve, turning downtown into car-centric, retail-first monocultures rather than pedestrian-first, mixed-use places. (90)

Many cities thought this was the answer but it turned out not to be; few of the pedestrian malls survived even a few decades.

Two thoughts hearing this account:

  1. Cities did not know what to do regarding the millions of Americans who moved out of big cities and to the suburbs after World War Two. Were they moving out of cities in part because of shopping opportunities? This was not the biggest issue but cities hoped they could at least attract more visitors with pedestrian malls.
  2. The copycat nature of retail development across places is interesting to consider. As malls proliferated, often borrowing architecture and techniques regardless of location, many communities also jumped on the pedestrian mall bandwagon. And then when they did not bring about the desired changes, they disappeared en masse as well. It makes sense that cities and developers would look to each other to see what works but it also seems like it can lead to fads and trying to shoehorn generic solutions to what can be complex local settings.

Seeing the relative decline of small Rust Belt cities by looking at the early years of the NBA

Posted on by

On a recent trip, I found out that the Tri-Cities Blackhawks – based in Moline, Illinois for several years – were once a professional basketball team.

They played in Moline for 5 years before moving and becoming the Milwaukee Hawks (later the St. Louis Hawks and the Atlanta Hawks).

Having a team in Moline would not fit in the modern NBA where teams are located within the largest cities in the United States. Even at the start of pro basketball, many teams were in large cities. But, Moline was not alone in having an early pro basketball squad. Here are some of the other Rust Belt cities that had early teams:

-Providence

-Pittsburgh

-Fort Wayne

-Rochester

-Syracuse

-Anderson, Indiana

-Sheboygan, Wisconsin

-Waterloo, Iowa

What does it mean that all of these cities are out of the NBA within a few years? It could be part of a larger restructuring and expansion of professional sports around this period. More cities in the West and South gained teams. I recently read that the St. Louis Cardinals were the furthest south and west team in baseball for a long time; this is hard to remember when all pro leagues stretch coast to coast.

But it could also be partially due to the relative decline of the Rust Belt. These places that were once sizable and/or important places fell behind as other cities grew in population and status. Or the region itself, stretching from the middle of New York and Pennsylvania through the eastern Great Plains, fell on harder times.

Pro basketball may have started in small big cities in the Midwest but it did not stay there long as the sport and other places grew.

Immigration enforcement operations taking place in cities – and suburbs

Posted on by

It is easy to find headlines regarding cities and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. But, reading a number of these stories shows these are also happening in suburbs. This one story detailing locations across the United States includes these suburbs:

Dallas, Texas, its eastern suburbs, and Lake Ray Hubbard by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

-Tucker, Georgia

-Irving, Arlington, and Collin County in Texas

-Federal Way, Washington

-Wilsonville, Oregon

Or see this story of operations in Chicago area suburbs.

These are suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Cities may be the target of particular political ire but there is less recognition that many people who come to the United States live in suburbs (or rural areas).

And how will suburbs respond to these federal efforts? When migrants were sent to suburbs of Chicago in 2023 from other locations in the United States, few suburban communities were interested in having them stay (see posts here, here, and here). A number of big cities have announced how they will respond but there are thousands of suburbs in the United States.

These city sidewalks were not made for talking

Posted on by

A new study suggests Americans are interacting less with others on city streets:

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

Are city streets places for pedestrians to hang out, or are they routes to be traversed as quickly as possible?

Americans are increasingly treating them as the latter rather than the former.

That is the striking implication of a recent interdisciplinary study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Applying modern artificial intelligence techniques to old video footage, the researchers compared pedestrian activity in 1980 and 2010 across prominent locations in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. Their unsettling conclusion: American ambulators walked faster and schmoozed less than they used to. They seemed to be having fewer of the informal encounters that undergird civil society and strengthen urban economies…

Salazar-Miranda said that video analysis alone cannot explain why pedestrian behavior changed, but she sees several possible factors. Since average incomes rose among those who lived and worked near all four locations, individuals’ higher value of time could deter them from engaging in leisure activities like casual conversation or strolls that now carry a higher opportunity cost. City dwellers might be having fewer social interactions of all kinds, a phenomenon that has been linked to rising rates of loneliness. And some of the pedestrians observed in 2010 could have been socializing remotely: By then, 80% of US adults had cellphones. Mobile devices may be inducing people to hang out online instead of in person. Salazar-Miranda suggested those who do get together might opt for climate-controlled, pay-to-enter “third spaces” like coffeeshops that she said have become more widely available.

I have heard some similar research presented before and I like the methods of comparing videos of city streets decades ago to observations today. Changes over time are important to consider as cities and societies change.

At the same time, I wonder about how to think about fewer interactions on city sidewalks to societal changes overall. If broad arguments in Bowling Alone and similar work are correct that Americans are engaging civically less over time, would we expect to see fewer interactions on city sidewalks and in suburban parks and rural communities? If phones are everywhere, are they affecting people in different places in different ways? Showing that city sidewalks were once one thing and are now something else is important but what if social interaction between strangers or in public has dried up in all places? Is this evidence similar or different to conversations about kids of the 1970s playing outside all the time and big changes since then?