Tag Archives: cities

Urban differences: Portland, Oregon has only one doorman

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Here is an example of differences between cities: New York City is well known for its doormen but Portland, Oregon has only one.

[Richard] Littledyke, a tall, fair-skinned blonde of 28 years, has held doors open for Burlington residents for eight months. The previous doorman, Auggie Contreras, reluctantly vacated the position for a higher-paying bellhop gig at the Nines Hotel…

The Burlington Tower is Portland’s only residential building with a doorman. Other apartments have concierges and several hotels have bellhops at the front doors, but Littledyke is unique. Visitors to the area often use him as a landmark to find their parked car…

Both men said Portland’s lack of doormen probably comes down to the city’s size, age and housing stock.

In Portland, where far fewer people are cramped into limited space, people with extra money achieve status with a nice house and a well-groomed yard, Bearman says. New York’s cramped real estate requires doormen to serve the same purpose.

“They are tied into how to create elegance and luxury in apartment buildings, where space is limited,” Bearman says. “They also provide a bridge between the outside and the inside of a building that a yard serves to provide in a house.”

The explanation: when you have higher residential densities, more high-rise apartments or condos, and wealthier residents, doormen become more common as residents want to clearly signal their status and keep the outside world beyond the doors of their building. The suggestion here is that certain kinds of buildings lead to having doormen – I wonder if this is necessarily the case. Could there also be regional differences, places where it might be considered gauche to have a doorman? The article suggests several apartment buildings in Portland have concierges – how does this differ in the eyes of residents and others?

Living alone in higher percentages in Rust Belt cities

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Living alone is not limited to young singles: some Rust Belt cities have higher percentages (compared to the national figures of 27% of single households) of older single households.

Pittsburgh, former capital of the nation’s steel industry, has seen its population drop by more than half to about 306,000 since 1950, according to the 2010 Census. The government said 41.7 percent of households consist of one person, the sixth-highest rate in the nation…Now, about one in eight Pittsburgh households is occupied by a single elderly person, the fifth highest among U.S. cities. Russell said a significant share of the single households consist of elderly women, whom he calls “Rust-Belt babushkas.”…

In the Census data, Atlanta and Washington were tied at 44 percent for the highest percentage of one-person households.

Cincinnati ranked third in the nation with 43.4 percent of its 133,420 households consisting of single people. In 1900, Cincinnati was the nation’s 10th largest city, with a population of about 326,000. In 2010, it was the 62nd largest, with about 297,000.

The city’s relatively high number of singles is probably the result of families leaving for suburbs starting in the 1970s, combined with an influx of young professionals to the central city, where University of Cincinnati and Xavier University students also live, said Jeffrey Timberlake, an associate sociology professor at the former.

This reminds me of Eric Klinenberg’s earlier book Heat Wave that looked at the implications of the elderly living alone in Chicago. There are large social forces at work that can lead to certain communities having larger populations of elderly single people.

My thought: the implication here is that Sunbelt cities (South and West) don’t have as large single populations. What is the primary reason for this: the cities simply aren’t as old and they haven’t seen these cycles of population that the Rust Belt cities have experienced? Is it because Sunbelt cities don’t have some of the same kinds of dense urban neighborhoods and downtowns (and instead have more sprawl)? Are these cities more attractive to families (certain kinds of jobs, values, lower crime rates, more single-family homes in suburban subdivisions, etc.)?

One firm look at a particular subset of singles (they “restricted its analysis to single, widowed, and divorced women age 25-64. Without this cap on the age range, places with higher concentrations of elderly people would show a misleading number of single women.”) argues these are the 10 US cities with the smaller percentages of singles:

People tend couple up more in the smaller towns, though there are big city outliers like Edison, NJ, and Nassau-Suffolk metro area in New York. Many places that view themselves as traditional boast marriage rates above the national average.

A few college cities buck the trend of having more singles. North Carolina cities, Raleigh and Charlotte–each home to a university with more than 20,000 students–are in the bottom 25% by percentage of singles.

Logan, UT, and Provo, UT, both have fewer than 20% singles, the lowest in the country. Texas cities McAllen and Laredo have similarly low numbers of single people.

See their statistics for the 100 biggest US cities here. Since Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are so much further down this list, it suggests that those Rust Belt cities have larger percentages of elderly singles.

 

Quick Review: The Great Inversion

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I recently read The Great Inversion, a book by Alan Ehrenhalt (see an interview about the book here), about how more Americans are seeking denser living areas. This is not a new idea as plenty of commentators have addressed this in recent years but this book attempts to provide a broad overview of the phenomenon. Here are four thoughts about the urban trends discussed in this book:

1. This book is built around case studies. This is both a strength and weakness. As a strength, Ehrenhalt examines several American cities such as Phoenix, Atlanta, and Denver that don’t get as much attention from urban sociologists. Even as urban sociologists admit that the urban landscape in America has changed a lot since the beginnings of the Chicago School in the early 1900s, most studies examine “traditional” American cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. But these case studies seem more impressionistic than anything else; hard data is difficult to find in this book. There are few figures about how many Americans have actually made the choice to move (versus surveys that suggest Baby Boomers and Millennials desire denser homes). The case studies often look at smaller areas of a metropolitan region, such as the Sheffield neighborhood in Chicago, but don’t address the big picture across regions or throughout the United States.

2. Ehrenhalt is careful to try to straddle the middle line between urbanists and suburbanists (defined a few times as people like Joel Kotkin). But the problem with this is that I don’t think he makes his argument very strongly. Here is what he wants to argue: American urban areas will look quite different in a few decades as more Americans seek out denser housing. However, he doesn’t want to argue this too strongly and backpedals from this at points. Here is his conclusion about Tysons Corner, the last case study of the book:

I’m convinced of that because I see all around me a generation of young, mainstream, middle-class adults who are looking for some form of midlevel urban experience: not bohemian inner-city adventure, but definitely not cul-de-sacs and long automobile commutes. There are more of them coming into the residential market every year. They like the idea of having some space, but they aren’t feeling in terror at the mention of density. They aren’t willing to sell their cars, but they appreciate the advantage of having another way to get around. If Tysons Corner is rebuilt on a reasonable human scale and with a modicum of physical appeal, they will go for it, imperfect as it may be.

And then we will begin to see experiments of this sort in suburbs all over the country, launched by developers and local governments that may still be a little nervous about density but will know one thing for sure: If Tysons Corner can be reborn, nothing in the suburbs is beyond hope. If the effort to rebuild Tysons Corner somehow succeeds, it will become a national model for retrofitting suburbia for the millennial generation.

It is less of an argument that there is a strong push for these options and more of an argument that demographics will change urban forms. This may be correct but it seems like Ehrenhalt seems unwilling to push too hard for this.

3. Ehrenhalt suggests our cities will look more European in a few decades as poorer Americans move to the suburbs and wealthier Americans move back to the cities. This may indeed happen but I think Ehrenhalt generally downplays the cultural factors behind American suburbia and the difficulties that may occur in this demographic inversion (see #4 below).

4. This book reminds me that there are a lot of potentially interesting things that could happen in American suburbs in the coming decades. In particular, the densification of suburbs has the potential to change the character of a number of larger and/or thriving suburbs. Many communities might turn to retrofitting out of desperation in order to start generating tax revenues from vacant properties. However, while Ehrenhalt thinks that demographics will push in this direction, I think there will still be substantial pushback in some places. I’m thinking of a suburb like Naperville, a community that definitely could incorporate high-rises in the downtown and along the I-88 corridor but has thus far resisted big projects. Perhaps circumstances could change but I imagine it might take a while for this to happen.

Tying subways to the concentric rings of the Chicago School

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Joel recently noted an academic study that suggests subway systems converge on a similar form. Whet Moser of Chicago argues that understanding subway patterns requires considering how cities grow and the concentric rings model of the Chicago School of urban sociology.

This is where I get skeptical that subways converging towards a “common mathematical space may hint at universal principles of human self-organization.” The subway systems the authors study were built within a relatively narrow band: 1863 (London) to 1995 (Shanghai). But they’re all also very old cities. Shanghai has a dense central business district, dating back to its long history as a port town; Moscow’s rings radiate out from the Kremlin and Red Square, following old fortifications; Beijing grew out from a model of urbanism that way predates Burgess and Park:

Many researchers reached consensus on urban morphology of the Old Beijing from physical composition. It is agreed that the Old Beijing was laid out exactly according to the concept of the Chinese utopia capital city in the book Kao Gong Ji, Notes on Works, written more than 2,000 years ago. The ideal city form is ‘a walled square city of nine by nine li (4.5 kilometers) with nine north/south main streets and east/west main avenues, three gates on each side, the ancestral temple on the left and an altar on the right of the palace, municipal administration buildings in front of the palace and a marketplace behind it’ (Fu, 1998; Liu, 1986).

So: who cares? If it’s just a neat little mathematical model, what’s its relevance? It’s relevant when the model becomes prescriptive, as the authors of “World Subway Networks” write:

In the case of Beijing, Seoul and Shanghai, it seems that their relative ‘youth’ is why they have not yet reached their long time limit.

Translation: since the subways were started after 1971, they haven’t fully converged on that ideal “core and branch” shape and ratio…

In short, Beijing is stuck in Park and Burgess’s concentric zones, and wants to move towards Harris and Ullman’s multiple-nuclei model. At the very least, it’s neat to see these comparatively dated theories of urbanization at the forefront of 21st century development. But the Beijing subway system may be following a multiple-nuclei model…

In other words, urban sociologists started to figure out that the concentric rings model doesn’t seem to fit all cities (though it still seems to overlay nicely on Chicago, it doesn’t fit other places like Beijing or newer Sunbelt cities in the United States). First came the multiple nuclei model in the 1940s and then a whole new paradigm, the political economy approach, started to emerge in the 1960s. The political economy prescriptive relies less on prescriptive models and instead focus on a different mechanism: whereas the Chicago School emphasizes competition for land and cities growing as people seek out cheaper land, the political economy model focuses on the profit motives of developers, politicians, and business leaders.

So if we looked at subway growth and locations in the political economy perspective, we could examine why lines and stops were built in certain places. Using two other forms of mass transportation as examples, we know that a good number of railroad and streetcar owners in the mid to late 1800s built lines to their new real estate developments. In other words, these lines were not built to service existing residents but rather to spur new development. I bet you could find some scholars who would argue that subways may sometimes be built to wealthier neighborhoods rather than poorer neighborhoods because there is more money to be made in these connections.

Using the Internet to meet your neighbors

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The New York Times takes a look at Nextdoor.com, a website that privately allows neighbors to meet each other and interact online:

Nextdoor’s site provides a house-by-house map of neighbors who are members — although members can choose not to have their names attached to their addresses — as well as a forum for posting items of general interest; classified listings for buying, selling or giving away things; and a database for neighbor-recommended local services.

The company, which introduced its service last October, says it has set up more than 2,000 such neighborhoods in the United States, each containing about 500 to 750 households. These mostly follow boundaries defined by Maponics, a supplier of geographic data…

Neighborhood identity has not been destroyed by the Internet. Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, says: “There’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.”…

In his new book, “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,” Professor Sampson argues that worries about the supposed loss of community in cities are nothing new. In 1938, for example, the sociologist Louis Wirth described “anonymous” and “superficial” social relations as essential elements of urbanism. But Professor Sampson says that this ignores the way that a city was, and remains, ordered by distinctive neighborhoods — what he calls “the enduring significance of place.”

Sampson’s comments give me an idea (which I’m sure others have already discovered): the Internet itself is a place/space that is built upon existing places. Another way to think about this is that the Internet is another social layer that both interacts with existing places but also has its own places and rules of social conduct. People can interact more with those who live near them and/or they can choose to interact with people around the world (that were previously unavailable to them). This is not the same as places like “Second Life” – it seemed to me that a lot of academics were really interested in this idea as they were curious to see how people would handle being in a new realm they could help create – as programs like Facebook or Nextdoor don’t let people completely escape from their surroundings and may just enhance existing acquaintances and relationships. Going forward, should we think of Facebook as a new kind of extended neighborhood?

Sampson’s ideas also are an interesting reply to questions like whether Facebook is making us lonely. Sampson is not the only sociologist who is arguing that the Internet does not necessarily isolate people.

100 year old Wilmette L station illustrates suburban exclusion

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A celebration today for a 100 year old L station in Wilmette illustrates some of the issues between cities and suburbs:

The station [today serving more than 315,000 people per year] originally came as an unwelcome overnight surprise. After coming to loggerheads with village officials, a crew secretly worked “under cover of darkness” to create a small depot at Fourth Street and Linden Avenue.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune on April 3, 1912: “During the night the Northwestern Elevated company invaded the suburb with a large force of men. At dawn the evidence of their work was plainly visible.”

Back then, the people of Wilmette enjoyed their lakefront, and their seclusion.

“Exclusive residents opposed the entrance of a new line largely because they believe trainloads of picnic parties will be dumped there in summer,” the Tribune story said.

Some things haven’t changed. During a recent Wilmette Park District discussion regarding a fence to limit access to the south beach at Gillson Park, resident Fred Fitzsimmons referred to nonresidents picnicking lakeside as “freeloaders.”

The period one hundred years ago was an interesting period for relationships between cities and suburbs. Prior to 1900, many cities annexed adjacent suburbs. These suburbs were generally agreeable to this as they needed the infrastructure that cities could provide (sewers, water, fire protection, etc.) and the status of being part of the growing city was exciting. But around 1900, things changed. More suburbs rejected annexation. Building their own infrastructure became cheaper. Being part of the big city, seen more and more as big, dirty, and home to many new residents, was no longer a draw. It was at this point that the size of many cities in the Northeast and Midwest drastically slowed.

Thus, a new L stop was seen as a threat in Wilmette, a means by which the city could still come to the suburbs. Back then, just as today, part of the reason for moving to Wilmette was to get away from the city and its residents, not to have encounter them through public transportation. It is intriguing that the Chicago Tribune ties these old concerns to current concerns in Wilmette. In this sense, the suburban mindset promoting exclusivity has not changed much in a century. (At the same time, I assume many in the Wilmette area see the L stop as a nice amenity since it means they don’t have to drive into Chicago.)

Another thought: could this also illustrate why suburbanites might be opposed to public transportation? There could be more than just the idea that cars are considered more convenient; public transportation could be associated with different kinds of people. If you can afford it in the United States, you generally pay (outside of a few denser cities) to avoid having to ride public transportation.

Fighting for presidential votes in the French suburbs illustrates a different kind of suburbia

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American suburbs are often considered home to a lot of white and wealthy residents who have fled the city. This is not how suburbs work in some European settings: two stories about politicians fighting for presidential votes in France illustrate these differences.

It was here that Marine Le Pen managed to secure the greatest percentage vote for any village in the country; of its 60 residents, nearly three quarters put the far-Right candidate above all others…

“What has worked has been to turn this campaign towards rurality, and the far suburbs, poor France,” said Bertrand Dutheil de La Rochère, one of Miss Le Pen’s campaign spokesmen. “Her people versus the elites seems to have taken root.”…

According to sociologist Christophe Guilluy, these rural areas, along with many middle-sized towns hit by de-industrialisation and layoffs represent, 40 per cent of the electorate.

Here is another report:

But “rural” areas today does not mean villages full of farmers. It means small provincial towns, and the new housing-estate commuter belts being built on the distant outskirts of the cities.

“The rural underclass is no longer agricultural. It is people who have fled the big cities and the inner suburbs because they can no longer afford to live there,” says Mr Crepon.

“Many of these people will have had recent experience of living in the banlieues (high immigration suburbs) – and have had contact with the problems of insecurity.”

In this semi-urbanised countryside, people feel the hopelessness of a life in poverty uncompensated-for by the traditions and structures that would have made it bearable in the past.

In these stories, the wealthy live in cities and inner-ring suburbs while the poor live in more far-flung suburbs (what Americans might call “exurbs”) and more rural areas.

If Americans read about this run-off in France, I wonder how many will notice this difference in suburban life in France compared to the United States. Actually, I wonder if many Americans simply think that Americans suburbs are a common feature of metropolitan areas around the world rather than a more unusual case.

Suburbs: a middle ground between cities and rural life?

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I was making the case in a recent conversation that the American suburbs could be seen as an adaptation between city and rural life. Illustrating this point, here is a testimonial from a mother describing the benefits of living in River Forest, Illinois:

We were house poor in New Jersey and miserable in an Ohio McMansion. In the Oak Park area, we found our ideal town: River Forest is close enough to the city to have some diversity and urban edge, yet distant enough to give us a tiny backyard…

They too logged many miles in the stroller, but they played at playgrounds and the library, meeting other babies with whom they will go to school. Finding playgroups for them was actually easier and less transient than in the city.

The steep price of private education drove us out to the suburbs, but attending public school has been an amazing experience. Our oldest two children have thrived in their public school. They have gym every day, as well as a rich music and art programs, and when they walk to school, the crossing guards greet them by name.

In the suburbs, we’ve been able to make our home the neighborhood hangout house. Our children’s friends are always around: in our house, on our teams, and at our local pool. Our house is noisy and busy, but it’s a happy chaos that lets me really get to know my children’s friends.

Great restaurants and culture are just a few exits away, but being so near Chicago keeps us aware of crime and poverty. Bikes are stolen, shopkeepers are held up at gunpoint and the food pantry has long lines. We enjoy the perks of small town life without losing touch with the urban reality of the Chicago skyline we see from our yard.

I wouldn’t want my children growing up any other way.

Here are the trade-offs:

-Cities provide exposure to culture, diversity, and “real life.”

-Rural areas or small towns provide close-knit communities where people know each other, safety, and more open space.

The suburbs provide a little of both worlds: close access to the gritty authenticity of big-city life but good schools and friendly neighbors. Notice I didn’t say “the best of both worlds” but rather access to some of the characteristics of rural and urban life. They may not be ideal places but a majority of Americans live in these communities.

I wonder how living in River Forest itself affects how one might view the suburban life. According to the Census, River Forest is 84.8% white, 76% of those 25 and older have bachelor’s degrees, the homeownership rate is 89.9%, and the median household income is $116,528. Overall, River Forest may have lost 4% of its population between 2000 and 2010 but this is still a mainly white and wealthy suburb. Sure, it is close to more diversity in Oak Park and Chicago but this is upper-middle class suburbia and this may just skew this rosy interpretation.

More Houston residents want to move from suburbs to city than vice versa

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Data from the most recent Houston Area Survey suggests that more Houston area residents would prefer to move from the suburbs to the city than vice versa:

Thirteen years ago, the Houston Area Survey started asking people who lived in urban areas if they’d prefer to live in the suburbs.  It also asked people in the suburbs if they’d like to move into the city one day. Survey founder Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor, says the survey has revealed a clear shift in opinion.

“In 1999, twice as many people in the city said ‘I want to move to the suburbs,’ than people in the suburbs saying ‘I want to move to the city.’ Those lines have crossed now. And in this year’s survey, significantly more people in the suburbs said ‘I would be interested in, someday, moving to the city,’ than people in the city saying, ‘I want to move to the suburbs.'”

The most obvious reason is the rise in gasoline prices. But Klineberg says shifting demographics are also at play...

And that change in the makeup of households is also reflected in the type of houses people in Houston aspire to own.  The percentage of people who say they’d like a traditional house with a yard in the suburbs has dropped from 59% four years ago, to 47% today. While the proportion who would like a smaller home in a more walkable neighborhood has risen dramatically over the same period of time — from about a third, to more than half.

These findings mirror larger rumblings about where Americans would prefer to live: more people appear to be interested in moving to walkable, denser communities. Are these sentiments primarily coming from those of middle age and above plus young adults?

Two methodological questions:

1. Should we expect that the findings from Houston would be similar to what would be found in other metropolitan regions? Would the sentiments be the same for non-Sunbelt (i.e. Rust Belt) cities?

2. Additionally, how many of those who express an interest in moving from the suburbs to the city will actually follow through on this? Of course, these perceptions matter and could help shape future policy decisions such as building denser developments within the suburbs so that there are pockets of walkability. At the same time, does this indicate long-term behaviorial changes or simply attitudinal shifts at this point of time?

 

“Detroit Suburbs Harder”

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A store in the Detroit suburbs is now selling shirts with this phrase: “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

Detroit Hustles Harder. Three words. A mantra that swaggers at you, bearing an unflinching gaze. A saying that suggests only one answer — just put your head down and work…

Now the Triple Threads t-shirt and printing company in Clawson want some of the myth-making. Thanks to a tip on Facebook, we saw a photo of a new top they’re hawking — “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

There are some obvious questions here.

How exactly does one ‘suburb?’ Does this verb describe the act of enjoying a lunch in downtown Birmingham or raking leaves in Northville? Or is it a political philosophy eschewing mixed-use development and building re-use for more roads and far-flung McMansion developments?

Assuming “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” does that mean that our suburbs are more suburb-y than those of Atlanta? Are we out-suburbing Orange County and Chicagolandia? Was there a contest here I wasn’t aware of?

And if “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” is this shirt a companion wardrobe piece for people in Detroit who already hustle harder, or a philosophical distinction? Is ‘suburb-ing’ now supposed to be the opposite of ‘hustling?’

Perhaps this isn’t the meaning at all but here is a possible sociological/historical answer: Detroit may indeed be a poster city for suburban development in the United States, particularly for Northeastern and Midwestern cities (even as the prototypical region for suburbs is probably Los Angeles). While Detroit tends to garner attention for its Rust Belt demise in the last half century (see here and here), the suburbs have done decently well. In other words, while the core of the region has experienced difficulty, the suburbs go on. Detroit is known for “white flight” and segregation though recent data suggests more blacks are now moving to its suburbs. The fate of urban Detroit may still be bleak (particularly financially) but its suburbs might hold out for much longer.