Tag Archives: cities

Study: white flight led to increased homeownership rates for blacks

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A new study suggests one positive outcome of white flight from American cities: more opportunities to purchase homes for blacks.

Historic data suggests, however, that the mass exodus of the white middle class from central cities had one positive result for the people left behind: Suburban white flight helped boost black homeownership in America. And the extent of the effect is striking. Economists Leah Boustan of UCLA and Robert Margo of Boston University have estimated that for every 1,000 white households that moved out of central cities for the suburbs between 1940 and 1980, about 100 black households became homeowners.

In a fascinating paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics, the researchers argue that the two trends didn’t simply occur in tandem. One directly helped cause the other. Between 1940 and 1980, a period during which Boustan and Margo examined data in 98 cities, the share of white metropolitan households in the U.S. living in the suburbs nearly doubled from 35 percent to 68 percent. Over that same time, the homeownership rate among black metropolitan households rose from 19 percent to 46 percent – a jump of 27 percentage points that had been unprecedented in American history…

By their calculation, 26 percent of the nationwide increase in black homeownership between 1940 and 1980 can be attributed to the white exodus to the suburbs. As white families left for newly created housing – following newly paved highways into the suburbs – demand (and prices) dropped for single-family homes in the city. As the cost of homeownership then declined, more blacks who had previously been renters – a group that now made up a much larger share of would-be home-buyers – were able to buy a home for the first time.

The effect was particularly strong in cities that had a large stock of existing single-family homes conducive to ownership, and in those central cities that had a relatively large black population. In New York City, for example, only 15 percent of the housing stock was owner-occupied in 1940. As a result, Boustan and Margo model that every 1,000 white household departures led to just 50 new black homeowners. But in Birmingham, Alabama, with its large black population and numerous detached single-family homes, 1,000 white departures generated 450 new black homeowners.

Interesting claims though it sounds like white flight only accounts for 26% of the rise in black homeownership. What were the other factors?

Also, this article says little about how we might reassess white flight. Does this suggest white flight was partly okay because it led to new homeownership opportunities? Even if blacks were able to purchase these homes, wasn’t it still the case that a massive amount of wealth, financial and social, left urban neighborhoods? It seems like this research could be used to highlight the paradoxes of homeownership – it isn’t a perfect good even if it is a American social ideal.

The most used subways in the world and American complaints about crowded mass transit

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Check out this list of the subways with the most riders. This is the top 10: Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing/Moscow (tied), Shanghai, Guangzhou, New York City, Mexico City, Paris, and Hong Kong. Here is how the story describes these subways:

While vital to both big-city residents and visitors, subway systems can inspire a love-hate relationship, with overcrowding blamed for much of the frustration. While we may not love riding in sardine-like train cars, we do appreciate the efficiency and even beauty of many of the world’s most popular subway stations.

I’m not sure why there is consternation about the crowded nature of these subways: are there more efficient ways to move millions of people in some of the densest areas humans have every known? If everyone could have their personal space, like in cars which Americans prefer, it becomes really hard to have cities with densities like those in the top 10. If we operate with the assumption that all humans would prefer to be in less crowded spaces if they could afford to, then this might make sense.

I wonder if such complaints in the United States about crowded mass transit betrays American sensibilities for privacy and space. While people in other countries might choose mass transit over the costs of cars (and they are expensive to operate, in addition to the space, infrastructure, and resources they require), Americans work in the opposite direction: they would prefer a car until it becomes too difficult. For example, see this discussion about getting wealthier Americans to ride buses.

Rust Belt cities look to attract immigrants to help turn things around

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Rust Belt cities have struggled for decades but are now welcoming seeking out immigrants:

Other struggling cities are trying to restart growth by luring enterprising immigrants, both highly skilled workers and low-wage laborers. In the Midwest, similar initiatives have begun in Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Lansing, Mich., as well as Detroit, as it strives to rise out of bankruptcy. In June, officials from those cities and others met in Detroit to start a common network.

“We want to get back to the entrepreneurial spirit that immigrants bring,” said Richard Herman, a lawyer in Cleveland who advises cities on ideas for development based on immigration.

The new welcome for immigrants reflects a broader shift in public opinion, polls show, as the country leaves behind the worst of the recession. More Americans agree that immigrants, even some in the country illegally, can help the economy, giving impetus to Congressional efforts to overhaul an immigration system that many say is broken.

Concerns about uncontrolled illegal immigration, which produced strict curbs in Arizona and other parts of the country, have not been an issue in Dayton. Officials here say their goal is to invite legal immigrants. But they make no effort to pursue residents without legal status, if they are otherwise law-abiding.

Read on for more information on what happened in Dayton, Ohio which has welcomed thousands of Turkish immigrants. This will be worth watching in the long run.

Three other thoughts:

1. The article doesn’t say much about this but recent immigration debates have been marked by two opposites: more opposition to less educated and skilled immigrants and more interest in educated, wealthier immigrants. Perhaps it doesn’t matter much in Dayton.

2. A student asked me recently where Middle Easterners fit into typical American definitions of race and ethnicity. For example, where do they fit in Census categories? The article suggests the immigrant residents haven’t encountered much opposition in Dayton but they do occupy an unknown sort of racial and ethnic space. (Also see discussions in Europe about Turkish immigrants as well as whether Turkey should be allowed in the European Union.)

3. This article hints at a broader reality: population growth in plenty of places, including a number of suburbs as well as the United States as a whole, has depended heavily on immigration.

Fastest-growing American counties are suburban

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Joel Kotkin highlights the fastest growing counties large counties in the United States:

Yet an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of the counties with populations over 100,000 that have gained the most new residents since 2010 tells us something very different: Suburbs and exurbs are making a comeback, something that even the density-obsessed New York Times has been forced to admit. Of the 10 fastest-growing large counties all but two — Orleans Parish, home to the recovering city of New Orleans, and the Texas oil town of Midland— are located in the suburban or exurban fringe of major metropolitan areas.

Fastest Growiing US Counties: 2010-2012
Counties over 100,000 Population
Rank County Equivalent Jurisdiction    Growth
1 Williamson, TX 7.94%
2 Loudon, VA 7.87%
3 Hays, TX 7.56%
4 Orleans, LA 7.39%
5 Fort Bend, TX 7.16%
6 Midland, TX 7.14%
7 Forsyth, GA 7.07%
8 Montgomery, TN 7.04%
9 Prince William, VA 7.04%
10 Osceola, FL 6.97%

What these findings demonstrate is that more people aren’t moving “back to the city” but further out. In the last decade in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, inner cores, within two miles of downtown, gained some 206,000 people,  while locations 20 miles out gained over 8.5 million. Although the recession slowed exurban growth, since 2011, notes Jed Kolko at Trulia, suburbs have continued to grow far faster than inner ring areas as well as downtown. Americans, he concludes, “still love their suburbs.”

Rather than an inevitable long-range shift, the post-crash slowdown of suburban growth seems to have been largely a response to economic factors. The retro-urbanist dream of eliminating, or at least undermining, suburban alternatives depends very much on maintaining recessionary conditions that discourage relocation, depress housing starts, as well as lowering marriage and birthrates.

Where incomes are growing along with rapid job growth , suburban and exurban growth tends to be strong.  The metro regions that contain our fastest-growing counties — Austin, Houston, Nashville and Northern Virginia — all epitomize this phenomenon. For example, nearly 80% of all housing growth in greater Houston takes place in the areas west of Beltway 8 (the outer beltway). A similar pattern can be seen in the D.C. area, where the number of units permitted in Loudon has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 permit issuances were the highest since 2005, and the vast majority were for either detached or attached single-family houses.

Kotkin’s conclusion is that the economic crisis slowed suburban growth for a few years, not a growing American move to cities and denser suburban areas. Some of this can’t be known until more time goes by; if Kotkin is right, recent years will be a blip and the kinds of places that were the fastest growing counties from 2010 to 2012 will continue to be fast-growing places.

There might be another approach that would allow both Kotkin and proponents of cities to both be able to claim some victory: outer suburbs might continue to grow as might attractive big cities (think Richard Florida’s creative class moving to the city) while inner suburbs who often have big-city problems, older housing stocks, and tax bases that have a hard time supporting suburban services languish.

When you build a Walmart in Chicago, you better make sure public transit goes there

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A new Walmart under construction on Chicago’s South Side has a problem: public transit doesn’t make it all the way to the store.

CTA bus routes No. 106 East 103rd and No. 111 111th/King Drive currently stop at Cottage Grove Avenue, which is several blocks from the store that is part of a $135 million development.

Beale said he is outraged and he threatened to convene public hearings on the CTA bus routes if the situation is not rectified by the time the Wal-Mart opens this week.

The alderman said the retail developer built the site to accommodate buses with a bus turnaround and nearby sidewalks for commuters. He said CTA officials told him it would cost $680,000 a year to extend the two bus routes to the Wal-Mart. But Beale said the costs would be offset by the additional riders making trips to the store.

CTA officials, acknowledging that they signed the 2011 contract Beale described, said late Monday afternoon that the transit agency is working with the developer and Beale and will implement service “as soon as possible.”

It sounds like the CTA is behind on this one. At the same time, this provides an interesting contrast to the typical suburban or exurban Walmart which relies on a large parking lot full of drivers. Big box stores are still relatively rare in denser big cities, even as companies like Walmart and Target (their first Manhattan location opened three years ago) are looking to expand. Thus far, the Walmarts in Chicago are more on the edges of the city, lending themselves to driving.

It would be interesting to hear how the companies themselves, local residents, and the city describe how the big box experience changes in an urban area. This would be ripe for participant observation as the store opens and both changes and is influenced by the surrounding urban neighborhood.

Do private schools keep wealthy families in American big cities?

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In response to last week’s argument that bad people send their kids to private school, Megan McArdle suggests urban private schools have kept wealthy families in big cities.

However, I think that Benedikt isn’t thinking through what would actually happen if everyone felt a moral obligation to send their kids to public schools. What would actually happen is that Allison Benedikt wouldn’t live in Brooklyn, because New York, like most of the rest of the U.S.’s cities, would have lost all of its affluent families in the 1970s — the ones who stayed largely because private school, and a handful of magnet schools financed by the taxes of people who sent their kids to private school, allowed them to maintain residence without sending their kids into middle- and high-schools that had often become war zones. Anyone with any choices left that system, one way or another. But because New York had a robust system of private and parochial schools, they didn’t necessarily need to leave the city to leave the violence behind…

Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire (and neither, I imagine, would Benedikt). If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move. That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems; any resident who had any means at all picked up and moved outside the city’s borders, beyond the legal limits of busing so that there could be no question of bused students importing these problems to their kids’ schools…

Benedikt’s dictum makes sense only if parents can’t move. If they can — and bid up the value of real estate in good school districts — then making parents send their kids to the local schools probably doesn’t mean that all the parents in mixed-income neighborhoods will put their children, and their effort, into the local school. It probably means that they’ll leave the mixed-income neighborhood, taking their tax dollars with them.

This is nominally public schooling, but in fact, as I once remarked, parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.

Cities need and/or desire to have wealthy residents because they provide tax dollars. Perhaps this is the deal cities make with such residents: we need you so we will provide you with the opportunity to spend your money how you wish regarding the education of your kids. So, cities and politicians try to support public schools but also allow space for private schools, setting up a two-tier system where wealthier families can buy into the second track.

Another thought: McArdle’s argument makes the assumption that schooling is the primary factor that pushes families out of the city into the suburbs. Schools are a huge factor but not necessarily the only one. Her argument also highlights an interesting feature of middle/upper-class American society: do all you can for the children.

It would be interesting to look for data to test McArdle’s argument but it seems like you would need a city or a few cities where private schools weren’t available in order to make a comparison.

h/t Instapundit

“The Best Map Every Made of America’s Racial Segregation”

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This is a lofty claim about a map but these maps clearly show racially divided neighborhoods in American cities. What makes these maps so good?

1. Data and mapping software that allows for mapping at smaller levels. Instead of focusing on municipal boundaries, counties, or census tracts, we can now get at smaller units of analysis.

2. The colors on these maps are visually interesting. I don’t know how much they play around with that but having an eye-popping map doesn’t hurt.

3. Perhaps most important: there are clear patterns to map here. As documented clearly in American Apartheid twenty years ago, American communities are split on racial and ethnic lines.

Is Chicago’s flag “a much bigger deal than” the flags of other big cities?

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Here is an argument for “why Chicago’s flag is a much bigger deal than any other city’s flag“:

As reporter Elliott Ramos suggested in a 2011 post for WBEZ, Chicago’s love affair with its flag seems to have taken off in the 1990s, with an influx of young adults into the city. Michael, a kickball player featured on the Chicago Flag Tattoos website, explains why he felt compelled to have the flag permanently emblazoned on his arm: “After moving to Chicago and living here for a few years, Chicago really kind of took a place in my heart, so I thought it’d be a good thing to do.”…

Symbolism aside, the flag’s simple, bold design is the reason it caught on. On his Urbanophile blog, Aaron M. Renn wrote: “In the United States, I’d have to rate Chicago far and away #1 in the use of official civic symbols (maybe the best in the world for all I know), and also note the overall high level of design quality of these objects … If you come to Chicago, you’ll notice that the city flag is ubiquitous.”

It’s enough to make you wonder: Is this a unique local thing? How do other cities’ flags stack up against Chicago’s?

Turns out, many are bland, and a few are downright appalling. Even the good flags aren’t necessarily well-known by the people of their cities.

When the North American Vexillological Association (vexillology is the study of flags) conducted a survey in 2004 ranking the nation’s best city flags, Chicago’s flag received a stellar 9.03 out of 10 possible points. But that was only good enough to land Chicago in the No. 2 spot. No. 2? Who could possibly beat us?

There is some limited evidence here: anecdotal tales that Chicagoans seem to display the flag often and the flag is rated highly by a flag group. But, there are several issues at work here. One, Chicago’s flag might be “better” than other flags. This is more of an aethestic or design consideration. This is where you want to appeal to outside, impartial groups like the North American Vexillological Association. Second, Chicagoans might like their flag or identify with it more than residents of other cities. Perhaps it indicates that Chicagoans have some decent levels of civic pride. This could be addressed by survey research. Third, Chicagoans might display the flag more often. This is probably the easiest to quantify and observational data could provide better evidence (perhaps easier to do these days with Google Street View).

Given the evidence presented in this piece, I’m not convinced any of these three options are true…

Saskia Sassen on three possible futures for cities: optimistic, dystopian, articulation

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Sociologist Saskia Sassen shares three possible visions for cities in the future:

ArchDaily: What will cities be like in the future?

Saskia Sassen: Well I have two scenarios: a very optimistic one and a very dystopian one. The dystopian scenario is that we will have a lot of private cities. Abuja is de facto a private city. It is how not to be in Lagos in Nigeria. The mechanism is very simple. Everything is super expensive. The milk, the houses, everything. It de facto eliminates all kinds of people. But I think we’re going to take it further. Songdo is sort of a private city. There are now big firms that sell you a city. They will build you a city. And some of them will rent you the city. So that’s the dystopian scenario. That’s the dystopian scenario; in other words we will have vast settlements with probably many toxic conditions, where a lot of people—modest, middle-class people—will be living in slums. In a country like Brazil, many people who are in the civil service of the government live in the slums. Same thing in India. This is contrasted with these brand new perfect cities that aren’t really cities in that full robust sense of the term.

At this end, my utopia is that when so many new people come to cities there is going to be a lot of making—making of sub-economies, not the economy. Making of urban agriculture, making of buildings that work with the environment. People of modest means will use their imaginations; they will understand how to make air circulate so that mosquitos are less likely to come in. They will work and have that knowledge—that is my optimistic scenario. So even a modest, poor slum will have people that know that the shack that they are building is part of larger systems. Then of course, the rich will be the rich and the upper-middle class will be the upper-middle classes. I think the modest middle-classes will keep on splitting up. The splitting up of the middle class has been happening for 25 years. I wrote about it in the late 1980s and people didn’t believe me. They said, “That’s not happening. We’re all becoming richer.” Well, no. Now we know that.

On a larger systemic map about cities, I think that the desirable, optimistic format is multiple articulations of the territory—not one endless metropolitan zone. I think we will have understood that the vast metropolitan area does not work.

The option is articulations. China is building all of these cities so they build nine small cities around Shanghai rather than letting Shanghai become an endless stretch. In my optimistic view, I see a different way of articulating the urban with territory. Moving away from metropolitanization.  Now, my Dutch, practical sense tells me that we’re not going to be able to do that. We’ll build something unmanageable and then the elites will move out and build a new private city.

The three visions: private cities where the wealthy can control everything versus cities where all, or most, people will be able to make things that improve their lives (though the scales of these improvements will likely differ) versus smaller big cities that are more manageable. To some degree, all of these are happening now so its unfortunate Sassen doesn’t go on to explain how these three scenarios might play out and under what conditions.

Something refreshing in this brief analysis: it sounds like Sassen is thinking about cities around the world and not really thinking about American cities. American urban sociology would do well to keep considering the changes to major cities elsewhere in the world…

Is a bohemian lifestyle still possible in New York City?

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Given the high cost of living and the other changes in society, can residents live as bohemians in New York City?

Is it still possible to be a bohemian in today’s New York City, where average rents now surpass $3,000 a month? Or are the rents just too damn high? And — if they are — what does this mean for the future of artists and intellectuals of the sort who have long been as much a part of the natural order of the city as pigeons and locust trees?

These are some of the questions provoked by an article in the Spring issue of N+1 magazine on “Cultural Revolution” signed by “The Editors.” There’s far too much Trotsky in the piece for my taste, but it does raise some interesting points about the arts and the way we think about social class. The piece is the latest item in a long New York tradition of articles describing the status anxiety and actual difficulties of people with top-shelf educations who are among the minority of their college classmates to take on risky individual creative ventures that are not particularly remunerative…

I’m not saying any of this is good, only that it is hardly new. This great New York Times piece on Gabby Hoffman growing up in the Chelsea Hotel illustrates perfectly the great class disruption of life in bohemia, where high culture meets low incomes.

Of her childhood, Hoffmann says now: “We lived in a classless society. We’d spend a summer at Gore Vidal’s house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare” when she was a baby.

Or read Patti Smith’s Just Kids. God was she poor when she came to the city. “New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling,” Smith told the New York Observer in 2010. “New York City has been taken away from you … So my advice is: Find a new city.” Her recommendation then is now back in the news: Detroit.

I wonder what Richard Florida would say about this. While he pushes a sort of modern bohemia idea through his concept of the creative class, that group is not lower-class in the same ways as bohemians. They may be creative types but they are primarily white-collar workers with means who have found ways to translate their creative expression into a certain professional lifestyle.

This could be extended to a broader question: is there much room in most global cities for those with less means, whether they are bohemians or immigrants or lower-class? And then going further, if there is some room for them, how much can they really participate in city life and influence decisions that affect them and the entire city?