Tag Archives: cities

Getting used to living next to Chicago’s L

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WBEZ summarizes how several Chicago residents who live right next to the L tracks have adapted:

Maybe most surprising of all, everyone we spoke to says they’ve adapted to the noise and the shaking the train brings. And there’s a kicker. One expert tells us residents (neighbors to the tracks or not) should expect the CTA train lines to eventually get quieter, as the agency updates to newer train models and lines are revamped with noise mitigation in mind.

I’m not surprised. It is something you notice immediately if you are not used to it but it eventually fades away. I spent 10+ years growing up in a house within 500 feet of a major railroad line. There were 70+ trains, freight and passenger, per day and the noise and vibrations were quite noticeable. Yet, outside of having to turn the TV and radio up or down depending on whether a train was nearby, it just became part of normal life.

Perhaps the more interesting question here is whether these properties have reduced values. If so, and given the ability of many nearby residents to adjust, perhaps these properties are hidden gems?

“Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings”

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It is fun to see the efforts of seven well-known architects as they highlight the better points of some buildings disliked by many. Some summary statements:

Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be. [Tour Montparnasse]

At a distance, the scale of the skyline exudes a sense of identity and strength for Albany, while at the pedestrian level the Plaza plays an important role in the community. I know that others find it too brutal or forbidding, but I think it’s beautiful in its monumentality and starkness. Monumentality always suggests supreme power, and that’s scary. I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile. [Empire State Plaza, Albany]

Monuments, if you trace their ancestry, can reveal disturbing things about the past. Nonetheless, they have enduring qualities which, viewed on their own merits, are perhaps an example to us. [Templehof Airport, Berlin]

It was the first building with an observation deck — that way of engaging with the city was actually pioneered by the tower. It had a restaurant that wasn’t particularly expensive. High rises today are about exploiting the skyline for private gain. But Londoners are capable of being nostalgic too: We have a power station that is now a modern art gallery. I wonder if the satellites and antennae shouldn’t be reinstated to communicate its purpose as an enduring symbol of the moment in the 1960s when technology propelled Britain onto the international stage. It’s a reminder. [BT Tower, London]

Who exactly gets to decide whether a building is loved or hated? Who are the real gatekeepers? This is actually an issue for many cultural objects in the modern world. There are always opinions from the experts, whether from architects themselves who can better understand the process to architecture critics who often write for influential media and can have their opinions heard by millions to the public who can now share their opinion via social media and other public forums. But, architecture is slightly different than say music or other media because it has a real permanence. If a major public building or skyscraper is viewed as ugly, it is not likely to be torn down or remade quickly. (The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis is a rare example where it was occupied for less than twenty years and its destruction was viewed by “the death of modernism.”) The seven buildings in this particular article are here to stay and, oddly enough, may just become targets for historic preservation in the future because they are important and old.

“The Psychology of Living in Skyscrapers”

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What are the effects of living in a very tall building?

Why should we even think that high-rise living has an effect on us? One does not, after all, see detailed psycho-architectural studies of ranch houses. The primary reason may be sheer novelty. “Given the age of our species, living more than a few stories up is a very recent phenomenon,” writes Robert Gifford in Architectural Science Review. “This tempts one to conclude that high rises are unnatural, and some would argue that what is unnatural must be, in some way, harmful.”…

So how to square this with a body of research that seems to conclude that most people find high-rise living less satisfactory than low-level living; that tall buildings seem to breed more crime than their lower-situated counterparts; that small children seem to develop (by reading and other measures) less quickly the higher up they live; that tall buildings might even invite suicide? Could an architectural form really do all that? Architecture is never more than a container for social relations. And so high-rise sociology is troubled by larger factors—who is living in the high-rise, and under what conditions? Pruitt-Igoe became synonymous with the problems of high-rise housing; it was considered the death knell of modernist social planning and modern architecture all at once. The backward, revisionist look has been more nuanced…

Much of the research about the problems of tall-building living is really research about, as the sociologist Gerda Wekerle put it, “the problems created by concentrating multi-problem families in housing stigmatized by the rest of society.” Other studies have looked at the populations of places like dormitories, which are themselves hardly representative. The high-rise form is endlessly skewed by social extremes. As Wekerle argues, “Pruitt-Igoe is no more representative than is the John Hancock Center of high-rise living.” And then there’s context. In places like Singapore or Hong Kong, tall-building living is not only the norm, it is considered socially prestigious. A friend who grew up on the 19th floor of an Upper East Side New York City apartment building (and who, interestingly, grew up to be an architecture critic) finds nothing odd, in retrospect, about his upbringing; most of his friends, after all, lived in similar circumstances, if not in the very same building. Why would you need a suburban lawn, he suggested, when Central Park was five minutes away? In terms of building height, he notes: “I don’t think it really had much effect one way or another, perhaps because so many of the neighboring buildings were of relatively equal height, so there wasn’t a sense of vertigiousness.” For the record, he seems to read very well…

One wonders what psychological effects there might be to this earthbound living in the sky. As the architecture critic Joseph Giovannini observed, “Living on the 60th floor is different. There are no earthly sounds, no close-up details outside, not even trees—just the long view and then the drop.” Astronauts on NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, asked to draw three-dimensional cubes, drew them with shorter vertical dimensions when in the zero-gravity of space. Might living in the sky also subtly influence one’s perspective of space, distance, and height? Studies have shown that children, at 25 months of age, can transmit information gleaned from aerial views to make ground-level wayfinding decisions; at 21 months, however, they cannot. Would children whose homes come equipped with aerial views have an edge? It is known, for example, that people with a fear of heights—or even those without when shown images of people falling—will overestimate actual heights.

Some interesting speculation yet the final paragraph ends with this summary: “For now, we must still rely largely on anecdote.”

A few other thoughts:

1. While these buildings may seem normal now, it is important to remember that they are relatively new in human history. For thousands of years, people barely got off the ground, let alone flew in airplanes or lodged or worked 600 feet up.

2. If an academic thought something was here, it doesn’t seem that difficult to design some experiments to see if there are differences.

3. If there were differences, how would architects, residents, and others adapt tall buildings?

4. There are a number of ways these buildings could have a psychological effect. You don’t have to live in them to be affected if your sunlight is blocked or you are consistently walking in concrete canyons in places like Manhattan. Even in the world’s biggest cities, there are still spaces relatively close that allow one to get away from skyscrapers and get back to a more normal sense of scale.

5. As a sociologist, I tend to agree that the differences in living in such buildings is probably due more to social interactions promoted by such buildings rather than the architecture or design itself.

A number of city-dwelling Americans say they live in suburbs

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A new survey from Trulia shows some city residents see themselves as living in a suburb, highlighting the blurry lines between urban and suburban areas in some cities:

To develop a standard definition of suburban that reflects what residents experience, the online real estate site Trulia, where I am the chief economist, surveyed 2,008 adults from across the U.S. We asked them to describe where they live as urban, suburban or rural, and we purposely did not define these terms for them. We also had each respondent’s ZIP code, which we used to identify his or her city, metropolitan area and state of residence. For this research, we treated ZIP codes as neighborhoods even though many ZIP codes encompass more area than what people may think of as a neighborhood.

It turns out that many cities’ legal boundaries line up poorly with what local residents perceive as urban. Nationally, 26 percent of Americans described where they live as urban, 53 percent said suburban and 21 percent said rural. (This comes close to the census estimate that 81 percent of the population is urban if “urban” is understood to include suburban areas.) Within “principal cities” of metropolitan areas (the census designates one or more cities in each metro as “principal”), respondents split 47 percent urban, 46 percent suburban and 7 percent rural, though those percentages include people in many small cities and metro areas. Looking only at respondents in the larger principal cities (those with a population greater than 100,000) of larger metropolitan areas (those with a population greater than 500,000), the breakdown was 56 percent urban, 42 percent suburban and 2 percent rural. That means close to half of people who live within city limits describe where they live as suburban.

Our analysis showed that the single best predictor of whether someone said his or her area was urban, suburban or rural was ZIP code density. Residents of ZIP codes with more than 2,213 households per square mile typically described their area as urban. Residents of neighborhoods with 102 to 2,213 households per square mile typically called their area suburban. In ZIP codes with fewer than 102 households per square mile, residents typically said they lived in a rural area. The density cutoff we found between urban and suburban — 2,213 households per square mile — is roughly equal to the density of ZIP codes 22046 (Falls Church in Northern Virginia); 91367 (Woodland Hills in California’s San Fernando Valley); and 07666 (Teaneck, New Jersey)…

Furthermore, the new census population data shows that the fastest-growing large cities tend to be more suburban. Among the 10 fastest-growing cities with more than 500,000 people, five — Austin, Fort Worth, Charlotte, San Antonio and Phoenix — are majority suburban, and a sixth, Las Vegas, is only 50 percent urban. Only one of the 10 fastest-growing, Seattle, is at least 90 percent urban.

Several quick thoughts:

1. As this article notes in addition to a number of scholars, it is difficult to measure exactly what the suburbs are. The Census Bureau definition put the suburbs between central cities in metropolitan areas and rural areas though geographically limited by county lines. As this survey notes, there are official geographic boundaries but then there are also the lived experiences of residents.

2. It is not surprising that Sunbelt city residents may be more likely to see themselves as suburban. These cities are often much bigger than cities in the Northeast and the Midwest which were hemmed in by more restrictive annexation laws around the turn of the 20th century.

3. This gets more complicated in surveys if you allow people to choose that they live in a small town as many suburban residents would choose that option.

When government policy reinforced and added to residential segregation

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The federal government may today be viewed as a party that wants to end residential segregation (see a recent argument by conservatives) but this was not always the case:

On how the New Deal’s Public Works Administration led to the creation of segregated ghettos

Its policy was that public housing could be used only to house people of the same race as the neighborhood in which it was located, but, in fact, most of the public housing that was built in the early years was built in integrated neighborhoods, which they razed and then built segregated public housing in those neighborhoods. So public housing created racial segregation where none existed before. That was one of the chief policies.

On the Federal Housing Administration’s overtly racist policies in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s

The second policy, which was probably even more effective in segregating metropolitan areas, was the Federal Housing Administration, which financed mass production builders of subdivisions starting in the ’30s and then going on to the ’40s and ’50s in which those mass production builders, places like Levittown [New York] for example, and Nassau County in New York and in every metropolitan area in the country, the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans.

Both of these policies had long-term effects that helped lead to poor urban neighborhoods and whites moving to the suburbs. The federal government had enforcement power and resources to do things that other parties could not.

But, the federal government wasn’t the only force at work. Take Chicago, for example. Local government units, such as the city or the Chicago Housing Authority, made decisions about segregated public housing projects (a few projects were initially all white while the majority were non-white) and where they were to be located (largely in existing poor areas and as a burden to punish certain aldermen). Realtors weren’t exactly open to showing housing to blacks outside of the Black Belt. Residents tended to react angrily for decades when blacks moved in with little interference from police or local officials; see cases from the late 1910s to the 1951 case in Cicero where white mobs made their voices known. This all happened even until the late 1960s where Martin Luther King Jr. was opposed in fighting for open housing during the summer of 1966 and Wheaton was the first Illinois community with an open housing law (passed July 3, 1967 – as a point of comparison, this was nearly one year before Oak Park in May 1968).

It wasn’t just a tyrannical or misguided federal government that promoted residential segregation or that still continues to promote similar ideas today…

Argument: regionalism = “play[ing] Sim City with residents’ lives”

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One critic charges new regional plans in Minneapolis-St. Paul threatens a democratic way of life:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”…

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area…

The Thrive plan’s most radical element may be to evaluate all future development policies through the “lens” of climate change. Over time, this could give the council a license to dramatically remake the entire metro area…

Once implementation begins, however, Twin Cities residents will likely realize that Thrive MSP 2040’s centralized decision-making and Orwellian appeals to “equity” and “sustainability” are a serious threat to their democratic traditions of individual liberty and self-government. Let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.

This is an argument several conservatives (another example here involving the UN) have made in recent years: the government wants to use urban planning as a means to control people’s lives, forcing them to live in denser areas with people they would not choose to live near. It violates property rights, individual liberty, local government, etc.

Here is an issue with these arguments: they tend to ignore the real issues present in metropolitan areas that involve both cities and suburbs. Adopting a free-market approach to planning, growth, and mobility leads to the outcomes we have today: ongoing residential segregation (both by race and class, affecting everything from school districts to health outcomes to location mismatches between employees and jobs), a lack of affordable housing, local governments that are numerous (and possibly inefficient), often can’t agree with each other and thereby hold up helpful projects or promote unhelpful competition (like a race for the bottom in tax breaks), transportation options that are expensive (whether maintaining a car or trying to make mass transit work in the suburbs), and a general defensive crouch of not wanting to deal with any problems outside of one’s immediate community. All of this reinforces existing inequalities in society: those with resources can afford nicer communities while those with less live in places where it is more difficult to move up.

Is there some middle ground here? To be honest, government is already heavily involved in local and regional decisions and conservatives probably like some of this (such as zoning). And some of the regional options allow for higher levels of efficiency by leveraging certain resources in effective ways. Maybe the real issue is that few residents of urban areas – whether conservative or liberal – want to live near public housing or affordable housing and/or want to retain the right to use their money to move to a more advantageous location should something not work out (like the neighbors).

As a final note, earlier versions of SimCity didn’t allow much control over the lives of individual residents. Similarly, the game was geared toward more urban environments as sprawling communities were more costly and didn’t provide the kind of density that would lead to better things.

Rising development costs in American cities

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It is getting more and more expensive to build new developments in American cities:

Land costs in the urban cores have dramatically escalated, making it difficult for developers to find developable parcels that pencil. Adding to the issue of expensive land prices, in December 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that construction costs are rising faster than the inflation rate: the U.S. Labor Department’s consumer price index had risen only 1.3 percent above the previous year, while the construction index was higher by 5.2 percent.

Land is scarce and expensive

In most major U.S. urban markets, the cost of land has risen aggressively, in line with the greater demand for urban living by millennials and empty nesters. In Los Angeles, for example, land for industrial developments—many of which are changing from industrial use to residential mixed-use—have averaged approximately $23 per sq. ft. at the beginning of 2014 and  by year‘s end, asking prices were as high as $32 per sq. ft. There has been and continues to be keen competition for every developable site, with the urban core expanding into previously blighted areas.

Current shortage of construction professionals and skilled labor

Construction employment was disproportionately affected by the recession. As a result, many construction professionals—both labor and management—left the industry. Across the country, there are 1.4 million fewer people employed in construction than there were at the peak in 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many in the construction industry who lost their jobs during the recession have found new careers, and many skilled tradesmen left the industry all together. Compounding the shortage is the lack of high-quality training available to young people entering the construction workforce today…

Materials costs have little impact

Countering some of the rise in construction costs is the fact that most materials costs, apart from glass, have not greatly increased. Associated Builders and Contractors Inc. reported in April 2015 that, although concrete products prices are up 4.1 percent on a yearly basis, total input prices have fallen by 3.6 percent since the same time last year. For example, iron and steel prices are down 11.5 percent and softwood lumber prices are 7.4 percent lower than one year ago. Current crude petroleum prices are down 55 percent and crude energy materials prices are down by 43.7 percent from the same time last year.

If this is the case, this could have negative consequences in a number of areas including: it might take more to get the construction industry going to overcome these costs; this limits the incentives for developers to construct cheaper or affordable housing (such as starter homes); and only the really wealthy can purchase and utilize urban land.

Time seems to suggest urban politics = dealing with crime

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The latest issue of Time has an article on how the 2016 presidential contenders are tackling urban issues. Yet, the article only discusses crime and violence:

It’s an improbable plot twist after two decades of Republicans and Democrats embracing the tough-on-crime mantra of more cops and tougher sentencing. And like most political shifts, it’s driven by calculation as much as courage. As crime rates tumbled and budgets tightened, concern has grown over the financial and human cost of mass imprisonment. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that 77% of Americans now favor eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, while 73% support allowing nonviolent drug offenders who have served their sentences to vote.

In response, nearly every candidate this year has jumped into a new national debate about how to reshape the criminal-justice system. “It’s an incredible political shift,” says Inimai Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute at New York University School of Law…

Urban politics has been fraught for liberals for the past 25 years, and arguably longer. The scars of the 1988 election were slow to fade: a generation of ambitious Democrats had watched Michael Dukakis get pilloried as a wimpy, soft-on-crime liberal, and they vowed to avoid the same trap. “You have moderates in the Democratic Party who frankly have been raised up with this deep faith that their political success is dependent on them being tough on crime,” says Ben Jealous, the former president of the NAACP. “You’re asking them to challenge an article of their political religion, and it’s very scary for them.”…

Of all the 2016 hopefuls, perhaps nobody else grasps the complexities of urban policy like O’Malley, Clinton’s closest rival for the Democratic nomination. The former Maryland governor spent two terms as Baltimore’s mayor, transforming the crime-ridden city into a laboratory for urban policy, wielding data-driven crime-fighting techniques like CompStat and a zero-tolerance approach to community policing. Crime plunged. But in the eyes of some critics, his tactics laid the kindling that was set ablaze when 25-year-old Freddie Gray died April 19 of injuries suffered in police custody. (Six officers have been charged in connection with his death.)

In an article that is supposedly about how more politicians are now getting it right (turning to the large issue of the criminal justice system/mass incarceration), they miss the boat in tying urban politics to dealing with crime. Cities are only about crime and violence? Doesn’t this just feed the same stereotypes of urban areas that have been held for decades and are consistently portrayed through the media?

If politicians were serious about tackling urban issues, how about they start with these two issues:

1. Residential segregation. A century or so of separating where people can live based on race (and class) has long-term consequences. Read American Apartheid by Massey and Denton again, particularly to see how white-black relationships have been shaped by residential patterns.

2. Economic opportunities. Globalization and deindustrialization have devastated numerous urban neighborhoods as jobs – particularly in manufacturing – disappeared. Read William Julius Wilson’s work in The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears. How are jobs and capital going to flow to poor neighborhoods?

What about American mid-sized metropolitian areas with 500,000 to 1 million residents?

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The biggest American cities get a lot of attention but what about the population changes in smaller big cities? Here is a look at population trends among the 53 metropolitan areas that have between 500,000 and 1 million residents:

The United States has 53 mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations from 500,000 to 1 million. These metropolitan areas together had a population of nearly 38 million in 2014, according to the most recent Census Bureau population estimates (Table). In number, they match the 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1 million population), though they have only one fifth of the population (178 million). The mid-sized metropolitan areas are growing somewhat slower than the major metropolitan areas, at an annual rate of 0.81% between 2010 and 2014, compared to 1.00% in the major metropolitan areas. Combined, the major metropolitan areas and the mid-sized metropolitan areas have two-thirds of the US population…

The 10 fastest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are from every major region of the country except for the Northeast. Cape Coral, FL was the fastest growing between 2010 and 2014. Its growth rate picked up substantially in 2013 to 2014. Cape Coral (formerly called Fort Myers) was hit particularly hard by the real estate bust of the late 2000s. The core municipality itself has not only the usual street system, but an extensive canal system (photo above). It is hard to imagine a metropolitan area that feels less urban…

Virtually all of the slowest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are former industrial behemoths that lost out in the competition for survival in the Northeast and Midwest. A visit to any of these cities will reveal either a relatively strong pre-World War II central business district or the remains of one. Each of these has a built form that looks more like Louisville or Cincinnati than the dominant pattern for new metropolitan areas that developed with a far more modest density gradient and with much weaker cores…

The list of mid-sized metropolitan areas is fluid. As noted above, a number of mid-sized metropolitan areas could move into the major metropolitan category before 2020 or 2030. On the other hand, there will be new mid-sized metropolitan areas. Three seem likely to be added by the 2020 census (Lexington, KY, Lafayette, LA and Pensacola, FL). There should be a rush of new mid-sized metropolitan areas between 2020 and 2030, at current growth rates. This could include Visalia, CA; Springfield, MO; Corpus Christi, TX; Port St. Lucci, FL; Reno, NV; Asheville, NC; Huntsville, AL; Santa Barbara, CA; and Myrtle Beach, SC.

A lot of this seems to mirror broader trends: continued Sunbelt population growth, declining populations in the Northeast and Midwest, big effects of the economic crisis and housing bubble, and slow but steady population growth overall.

While the population data is interesting, it all raises some interesting questions that I know some scholars have taken up even as the lion’s share of attention rests on the bigger cities:

1. Is the experience of living in these cities and regions qualitatively different than living in a larger city? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

2. How does the size of the region affect all sorts of things including a region’s resiliency or ability to grow? In other words, are these places simply scaled down versions of bigger cities or are they something quite different?

3. Given the proclivity of Americans to choose small towns as their preferred places to live, would these kinds of cities offer a preferred lifestyle? (Of course, people still need jobs and want certain amenities so if they had to make tradeoffs between that but a manageable size, does that lead residents to cities like these?

Comparing the overall diversity of cities versus neighborhood diversity within cities

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Nate Silver looks at how large cities can be diverse overall but still have high levels of residential segregation:

This is what the final metric, the integration-segregation index, gets at. It’s defined by the relationship between citywide and neighborhood diversity scores. If we graph the 100 most populous cities on a scatterplot, they look like this:

silver-segregation-scatter

The integration-segregation index is determined by how far above or below a city is from the regression line. Cities below the line are especially segregated. Chicago, which has a -19 score, is the most segregated city in the country. It’s followed by Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington and Baltimore.

Cities above the red line have positive scores, which mean they’re comparatively well-integrated. Sacramento’s score is a +10, for instance.

But here’s the awful thing about that red line. It grades cities on a curve. It does so because there aren’t a lot of American cities that meet the ideal of being both diverse and integrated. There are more Baltimores than Sacramentos.

Furthermore, most of the exceptions are cities like Sacramento that have large Hispanic or Asian populations. Cities with substantial black populations tend to be highly segregated. Of the top 100 U.S. cities by population, 35 are at least one-quarter black, and only 6 of those cities have positive integration scores.

So perhaps the Chicago School was correct: it is really neighborhoods that matter, even within cities with millions of people. This is what an interesting recent map of Detroit showed where there are clearly clusters of the city that have traditional neighborhoods while other parts are more vacant urban prairies. The sociological literature on poor neighborhoods that emerged starting in the 1970s gets at a similar concept: there are unique conditions and processes at work in such neighborhoods. And, Silver’s analysis confirms sociological research on residential segregation that for decades (perhaps highlights most memorably in American Apartheid) has argued that black-white residential segregation is in a league of its own.

Based on this kind of analysis, should sociologists only use city-wide or region-wide measures of segregation in conjunction with measures or methods that account for neighborhoods?