Tag Archives: cities

Seeing traffic and congestion as a sign of success

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While some might generally consider traffic and congestion to be negative (see examples here and here), here is an alternative argument: traffic and congestion are one sign of urban success.

Congestion, in the urban context, is often a symptom of success.

If people enjoy crowded places, it seems a bit strange that federal and state governments continue to wage a war against traffic congestion. Despite many hundreds of billions dollars spent increasing road capacity, they’ve not yet won; thank God. After all, when the congestion warriors have won, the results aren’t often pretty. Detroit, for example, has lots of expressways and widened streets and suffers from very little congestion. Yet no one would hold up Detroit as a model.

After all, congestion is a bit like cholesterol – if you don’t have any, you die. And like cholesterol, there’s a good kind and a bad kind. Congestion measurements should be divided between through-traffic and traffic that includes local origins or destinations, the latter being the “good kind.” Travelers who bring commerce to a city add more value than someone just driving through, and any thorough assessment of congestion needs to be balanced with other factors such as retail sales, real estate value and pedestrian volume…

This doesn’t mean that cities should strive for congestion, but they should recognize that traffic is often a sign of dynamism. Moving vehicular traffic is obviously a necessary function, but by making it the only goal, cities lose out on the economic potential created by the crowds of people that bring life to a city.

Let me translate this argument into the suburban context in which I have studied. Most suburban communities would love to have thriving businesses within municipal limits. This brings in tax dollars, jobs, and a better image (a good place to do business, a vibrant place, etc.). But, for this to happen, this is going to require more people driving through and into the community. A typical NIMBY response to new development, particularly commercial property, is that it will increase traffic which threatens safety. There may be some truth to this but it is also about an image and whether the location is a residential space or something else. Additionally, many suburbanites assume traffic and congestion are city problems, not suburban problems, and therefore are unhappy when their mobility is more limited. A classic local example is Naperville: I’m not sure too many people in Naperville really desire having large parking garages in the downtown. At the same time, it is good that so many people want to come downtown and spend money. Ultimately, there are ways to limit this auto dependence and congestion in downtowns but you still need to plan for and accommodate the large number of cars.

All this suggests that there may be some contingencies regarding congestion:

1. There is a somewhere between not enough traffic and too much. These standards could be very different in different places. In quieter and smaller communities, I suspect the threshold is much lower. The character of a neighborhood or community is going to impact this decision. Perhaps there are even formulas that can predict this.

2. This is location dependent. Looking at congestion in a downtown area is very different than looking at traffic on collector roads or nearby interstates. Problems arise when transportation needs cross these location boundaries, say, when roads in a downtown are used to get to the other side of the community rather than to visit the vibrant downtown. The solutions for each location may be very different, and one size fits all policies may not be very effective.

Overall, it is unlikely that single suburbs or even small groups of suburbs can eliminate congestion and traffic on their own. It is not about getting rid of cars but rather successfully adapting spaces so that the cars are not overwhelming. We can think about ways to reduce congestion or ameliorate its occurrence in particular contexts, even recognizing that it may be a good sign.

More blacks moving to the suburbs of Kansas City

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I’ve noted this before but here is another story about the increasing movement of blacks to the suburbs:

The emptying out of African-American neighborhoods in the heart of this city is bemoaned by many who are battling the decline. But in an unexpected twist, the flight of blacks to other city neighborhoods and nearby suburbs in Missouri and Kansas has created an unforeseen result that is generally greeted with optimism: desegregation.

Blacks’ move to suburbia has accelerated in the past decade, shifting the racial make-up of urban and suburban neighborhoods across the nation. The change is particularly striking here because of the area’s long history of racial segregation…

“It’s as much the fact that city ghettos are being broken up as the fact that suburbs are beginning to integrate,” says Kansas City native John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who did the analysis. “It’s one of the places that I would describe as a success in the making, after a long history of intense segregation.”

The decline in segregation here is even more striking than drops in Detroit and New Orleans, areas with similar racially charged histories that are losing black populations. Detroit may be less segregated because blacks have left the area in search of jobs in the Sun Belt. Segregation has declined in New Orleans partly because many blacks were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Does this mean that more blacks have joined the middle class and then are moving to the suburbs or is the move to the suburbs motivated by a search for jobs and opportunities in order to join the middle class? And what are the consequences of this for cities?

This is one of the most important trends in suburbs today: more minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs. How this changes the face of suburbia in the next few decades will be fascinating to watch.

(More evidence of this trend here.)

The “theology” of “inevitable suburban decline”

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Joel Kotkin keeps firing at suburban critics:

Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”…

In the past decade, suburbia extended its reach, even around the greatest, densest and most celebrated cities. New York grew faster than most older cities, with 29% of its growth taking place in five boroughs, but that’s still a lot lower than the 46% of growth they accounted for in the 1990s. In Chicago, the suburban trend was even greater. The outer suburbs and exurbs gained over a half million people while the inner suburbs stagnated and the urban core, the Windy City, lost some 200, 000 people.

Rather than flee to density, the Census showed a population shift from more dense to less dense places. The top ten population gainers among metropolitan areas — growing by 20%, twice the national average, or more — are the low-density Las Vegas, Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Riverside–San Bernardino, Orlando, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Atlanta. By contrast, many of the densest metropolitan areas — including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New York — grew at rates half the national average or less…

What about the other big demographic, the millennials? Like previous generations of urbanists, the current crop mistake a totally understandable interest in cities among post-adolescents. Yet when the research firm Frank Magid asked millennials what made up their “ideal” locale, a strong plurality opted for suburbs — far more than was the case in earlier generations.

Is this simply a battle of interpreting statistics? For example, Kotkin says Millennials aren’t completely enamored with the suburbs while others have used these statistics to mean other things. Kotkin says that Americans continue to vote for the suburbs with their actions. When given a choice, Kotkin seems to be suggesting that a majority of Americans, young and old, would choose the suburbs if all things were equal. In contrast, Kotkin suggests that urbanists want people to want the city. This ideology (“theology” in his terms) guides their interpretation of the data and leads to wishful thinking.

This is a bigger debate that isn’t addressed directly here: are the cities or suburbs better for people, society, and the world? Kotkin’s writings lean toward giving people freedom which is found more in the suburbs. Urbanists make arguments the other way: cities are greener, more diverse, and more cultured. Would or could Kotkin make his arguments if most Americans lived in cities rather than suburbs? This is really a discussion about values: should people live in the cities and suburbs and isn’t just about current or future realities.

h/t Instapundit

A consequence of white flight: costs for aging infrastructure born more by minorities

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The phenomenon of white flight in the United States refers to whites leaving urban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II and going to the suburbs to avoid growing minority populations. Several researchers recently uncovered a latent consequence of white flight:

Racial minorities pay systemically more for basic water and sewer services than white people, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, argues sociologist Stephen Gasteyer, but rather the result of whites fleeing urban areas and leaving minority residents to bear the costs of maintaining aging water and sewer infrastructure…

The researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan. The study found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, which refutes conventional wisdom, Gasteyer said…

Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer said. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.

Very interesting: another infrastructure problem to be solved and it happens to fall disproportionally on minority populations. It would be interesting to see this analysis extended beyond Michigan – is this primarily a Rust Belt phenomenon where the big cities have some infrastructure that dates to around 1900 or does this also apply to newer Sunbelt cities?

Overall, it might be helpful for those who argue the United States needs to seriously put a lot money into infrastructure to demonstrate how much this matters to everyone and how much the aging (leaks, potholes, etc.) costs everyone each year. It is pretty hard to live without water and sewers but it wasn’t too long ago that these were not regular amenities. Indeed, 1890 was roughly a turning point when both big cities and smaller suburbs could put together their own infrastructure systems to serve residents. (This also lines up with the period when suburbs started resisting annexation to big cities as they could handle these amenities themselves.) Add roads, electricity, and natural gas to this and you have a system that is vital to modern life but is relatively behind the scenes. If you could add a fairness/social justice dimension to it (the most aging infrastructure is in places that can least afford it), this could be a very public issue.

“City residents still yearn for the rural experience”?

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Beside a story about the declining rural areas of Iowa, a sociologist talks about the link between cities and rural areas:

Even city residents still yearn for the rural experience, says Paul Lasley, the Iowa State University sociologist who founded the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll. He describes a gradual cultural blurring of urban and rural Iowa: Cities are preserving rural culture as a reaction against the “massification” of recent decades.

Consider the boom in farmers markets, he says: 7,175 nationwide this year, a 17 percent jump over 2010, as measured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Iowa claims 237 markets.

A couple of thoughts come to mind:

1. The most noticeable place where the cities and rural areas blur is the suburbs. From the beginning, picturesque suburbs like Llewellyn Park, New Jersey had winding subdivision lanes and big lots that were meant to invoke country life. Even today, many suburbanites can fairly quickly drive to Forest Preserves or out to the metropolitan fringe where there are still some open fields.

2. Are farmers markets really the best evidence that city dwellers want more of the rural life? Don’t these simply make the rural life a caricature or another commodity that can be purchased? There have to be some other ways in which city dwellers really show an interest in rural life.

In the end, I wonder how much city residents really would want to live in rural areas or spend significant amounts of time there opposed to just visit. Surveys like the “2011 Community Preference Survey” show that roughly 30-40% of Americans would want to live in small towns or rural areas but we know more than 50% of Americans live in suburbs and 30% live in central cities (around 80% total). So if preferences don’t exactly match up with realities, what exactly do urban residents, urban or suburban, want from “the rural experience”?

Modern “cities that have vanished”

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Who needs Atlantis and El Dorado if there are interesting tales of modern “cities that have vanished“?

This reminds me that we tend to think that cities and countries will tend to grow in population regardless of what happens. Obviously, this isn’t true in every circumstance. Particularly in situations involving natural disasters or ecological change (the focus of books Collapse by Jared Diamond), cities can become inhabitable. But, this modern lists also highlights that political decisions can lead to vanishing cities.

In more American terms, this could lead to some interesting discussions about whether cities should be contracted or whole areas of development need to disappear. In two hundred years, might people be talking about a mythical Detroit that once was an economic powerhouse?

Australian critiques of suburbia

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As part of a larger discussion about the green (or not-so-green) features of high-density living, an Australian academic describes typical Australian critiques of suburbia:

The intellectual misadventure of high-rise urbanism also perpetuates a pernicious bias in Australian environmental debates in which less affluent suburban dwellers are treated as environmentally unsophisticated “bogans” – a stereotype recently denounced by Melbourne University’s David Nichols.

It fits within a long and regrettably continuing Australian tradition of denigrating suburbia whose recent version sneers at “aspirationals” in suburban “McMansions” driving “monster-trucks”. That complaints about suburban consumption lack objective scientific foundation, raises suspicions that the anti-suburban prejudice serves to deflect scrutiny from the more harmful consumption patterns of wealthier – and typically denser – inner urban households.

Those who criticise high-rise urbanism, though, risk being cast as apologists for urban sprawl. Disagreeing with Sydney’s Barangaroo proposal, for example, doesn’t equate to support for the latest fringe growth area splurge.

More single, detached dwellings in low density estates at the suburban fringe also causes harms. These range from the destruction of bio-diverse habitats to the social isolation of new residents from work and services. My own work on household oil vulnerability clearly reveals the future perils from higher fuel prices already planned into the fabric of many of our car-dependent fringe suburban zones.

The argument here is that being green isn’t so easy as simply saying suburbs are bad and cities are good. Unfortunately, the suburbs tend to receive blanket criticism.

It would be interesting to trace the rise of these attitudes in Australia compared to the United States. The US has a long history of these critiques which emerged quickly after World War II, particularly as examples of mass-produced suburbs like the Levittowns became widely known. Out of all of the countries in the world, Australia might have the most similar suburbs to the US (see a recent debate about McMansions in Australia as an example). Did Australian critics of suburbia simply borrow American critiques or did they develop their own independently? Sounds like a very interesting comparative project.

Describing “suburban bliss” while also pursuing urban planning and living

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A student at Columbia discusses her feelings of wanting to become an urban planner and live in the city while also retaining a warm spot in her heart for the suburbs:

Coming to New York from more suburban hometowns, it’s not uncommon for us to miss our cars, big box stores, and front yards. But for me, the conflict between urban and suburban living is more than simple nostalgia for my hometown. It is a question of ideology, and one that concerns my professional future.

I’ve known I wanted to be a city planner since the tenth grade, when I happened to pick up a copy of Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while doing homework at the Scotch Plains Public Library. I devoured the book in a few days. It was a revelation for me—someone put into words the vitality of urban streets I so eagerly took in anytime I visited New York. As an urban studies major at Columbia, I’ve studied cities in sociology, political science, history, and architecture classes. My studies have confirmed what I felt the first time I read Jane Jacobs: Urban living is the best kind of living.

I’ve read about the racial discrimination that stopped non-white Americans from taking part in the suburban American dream, the urban renewal projects that devastated working class neighborhoods with expressways, the disinvestment in urban centers that led to riots—all the mid-century injustices that remind us of the true cost of our driveways, lawns, and cul-de-sacs. I understand the environmental danger of car (and oil) dependence, low-density housing, and sprawl. I understand how unfulfilling it can be to live in a socially homogeneous town with little street life or walkability. I feel so strongly about these issues that I even want to go to graduate school to learn how to begin solving them.

Yet I really, really like coming home to my car and to my favorite strip mall restaurant on Route 22—a highway that severely isolates my own neighborhood from the rest of my town. In my time here at Columbia, despite my urban-centric curriculum, I’ve also learned that the suburbs are here to stay, and there’s no sense wishing they didn’t exist. I might end up a city planner with a very urban lifestyle, and I most certainly won’t be moving back to New Jersey, but there’s no reason I can’t relish a trip to the mall. Of course it’s not terrible, I told my friend. Home—with all its unsexy suburbanity—always makes me happy, too.

This piece contrasts a professional ideology versus personal emotions. The key here is that the suburbs are equated with home. I wonder if her viewpoint will change after years of living in the city or, perhaps more interestingly, years of working within the field of urban planning where she may not find too many people willing to defend the suburbs.

Of course, this doesn’t always have to be a dichotomous choice: we certainly need people to do urban planning in the suburbs. In fact, one of the complaints opponents of sprawl often have is that it looks like there was little foresight into how suburban developments, subdivisions or big box stores included, affect their residents and how different types of development do or don’t work together. And if the wave of the future is indeed a denser suburban landscape, particularly in desirable locations, there may be room for a number of planners to bring together city and suburb.

The Big Sort continues? Fewer Americans live in middle-income neighborhoods

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Here is another way to look at the gap between the rich and poor in the United States: the percentage of Americans living in middle-income neighborhoods has shrunk in recent decades.

In 2007, nearly a third of American families — 31 percent — lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of American families lived in middle-class neighborhoods in 2007, down from 65 percent in 1970…

For the study, researchers used data from 117 metropolitan areas, each with more than 500,000 residents. In 2007, those areas were home to 197 million people — or two-thirds of the US population.

This study covers about two-thirds of the American population. I assume the study is restricted to larger metropolitan areas because of how the researchers defined a neighborhood but couldn’t they adapt to smaller cities in order to represent more of the US population? Also thinking about the research methods, I hope the researchers used analogous cutoff points for these different classes in 1970 and 2007.

Moving past methodological issues, this does bring to light an interesting issue: how many Americans experience residential segregation based on social class? Of course, race and social class is linked. Do Americans care that people of different income strata live in completely different areas? Based on American history, I would say no: Americans don’t seem terribly concerned about concentrated poverty or pockets of affluence. If you have money, it is generally expected that you go live with people who also have money. You might provide incentives for the classes to mix (example: mixed-income neighborhoods on the site of former housing projects) but this is rare.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown here between cities and suburban areas. Some of the earliest American sociological research focused on these disparities in the city, such as Zorbaugh’s work The Gold Coast and the Slum where the rich and poor lived in incredible proximity but rarely mixed. Is class-based residential segregation higher in the suburbs?

How much it costs to live in the cheaper suburbs or expensive New York City

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Opponents of sprawl argue that while many prospective buyers move further away from work in order to buy bigger yet cheaper homes, there is a cost. One website argues that the each mile closer to work is $15,900 that could be spent on a house:

We all know that driving to and from work every day is costly, but exactly howmuch of a toll does each mile of commuting take on your finances? This True Cost of Commuting graphic breaks it down.

Taking stats and calculations previously mentioned by Mr. Money Mustache, the infographic illustrates just how expensive commuting is. Each mile you live from work costs $795 in commuting expenses per year (assuming a driving cost of 34 cents per mile and factoring time lost with a salary of $25 per hour). $795 a year for just one mile! You could buy a house worth $15,900 more with that, as Mr. Money Mustache pointed out in his article, since $795 would cover the interest on a 5% mortgage rate.

If you don’t want to calculate in the time-is-money factor, each mile (one way) of commuting will cost you $170 a year. It’s a compelling reason to move as close to work if you can (or bike to work or telecommute).

See the large infographic here. I don’t know about Mr. Money Mustache’s calculations but this is a sizable number.

At the same time, there were reports this week that the Occupy Wall Street protestors tend to live in pricier homes. As Megan McArdle notes, this is a consumption choice where people decide to spend more of their income on a home in a great city:

My initial reaction was the same as many people I’ve seen in comments sections: the protest is in New York, which is expensive.  This is hardly surprising.

But on second thought, I don’t think that’s quite right.  At least some of the houses identified by the Daily Caller are in places like Texas and Wisconsin.  But more importantly, I’m not sure we should “discount” these home values for location.  The fact is that living in an expensive city is a consumption choice.
You hear this argument all the time from people in New York.  “Rich?  Hah!  We’ve got four people in 1600 square feet, and our school bills are going to put us into bankruptcy.”  Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from “really rich” people, natch).  Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them “reasonably sized” apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn’t afford to live in New York…
Living in a blue state is a choice.  If coming to New York meant that you had to put four people in a three bedroom apartment that’s uncomfortably far from a subway line, instead of buying a nice little condo in Omaha, this does not mean that you are not “really” better off than your counterpart in Omaha; it means that you have chosen to consume your extra wealth in the form of “living in New York” rather than in the form of spacious real estate, cheap groceries, and an easy commute.

So what people in the Midwestern suburbs might spend on a daily 20 mile each way commute in a SUV translates into a more expensive apartment in New York City.

Both stories cited above suggest consumption is a choice. But is it truly an unfettered choice? What would lead some people to aim for the bigger yet cheaper house in the suburbs and others to spend more money on a smaller place in a cosmopolitan paradise? Perhaps this information would help both sides engage in conversation rather than talk past each other and try to force the other side to follow their logic…

Of course, we could look at the broader trend of American political and cultural discourse on this subject. On the whole, government policies have promoted suburban living while a few big cities, such as New York City, have successful dense, mass-transit oriented living. Cultural discourse, even if it is shifting toward the younger generation’s increased interest in denser living, still privileges the suburban American Dream.