Tag Archives: community

“An urban slum in the countryside” marked by a lack of McMansions

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McMansions may be everywhere (including Iraq) but one writer notes their conspicuous absence in the suburbs of Cardiff, Wales:

“Out on what were the squelchy red muds, bluebell woods, beech-clad hillocks and bosky blackberry hedgerows of the ancient parish of Llanederyn, prices have collapsed and nothing sells. Few want to live in a no man’s land 40 minutes by bus from the city centre, an unloved, invisible of executive Mcmansions, roundabouts and superstores, sagging lintels and dripping gutters.”

We also learn that Trowbridge is “shabby and lacklustre” and that Llanederyn’s Maelfa indoor precinct is “a post-apolcalyptic boarded-up no-go zone, spurned by market forces uninterested in poor people.

“Thus was created an urban slum in the countryside.”

Some vivid descriptions that evoke a bleak image. It is interesting to compare this description of bleakness with how such things are discussed in regard to American McMansions. Outside of depictions of “zombie subdivisions” due to unfinished developments or suburban neighborhoods ravaged by foreclosures, American critics of McMansions tend to emphasize their emotional bleakness. Having McMansions implies having plenty of money or resources (or at least the means of acquiring debt). Yet, critics suggest neighborhoods with McMansions lack community, are lonely, project images of power but are empty inside. In the future, all those McMansions may suffer the fate of many homes: people who have moved on to newer and better things, the need for many home repairs, and a lack of exterior sheen due to age. The bleakness is not class-based or like urban blight with empty and boarded-up buildings but rather is based on a lack of soul.

Being a better neighbor linked to better heart health

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Be nice to your neighbors because it may just help keep your heart healthier:

For the latest research, the University of Michigan team used data from 5,276 people over 50 with no history of heart problems, who were participants in an ongoing Health and Retirement Study in the United States…

At the start of the project, the respondents were asked to award points out of seven to reflect the extent to which they felt part of their neighbourhood, could rely on their neighbours in a pinch, could trust their neighbours, and found their neighbours to be friendly.

When they crunched the numbers at the end of the study, the team found that for every point they had awarded out of seven, an individual had a reduced heart attack risk over the four-year study period.

People who gave a full score of seven out of seven had a 67 percent reduced heart attack risk compared to people who gave a score of one, study co-author Eric Kim told AFP, and described the difference as “significant”.

This was “approximately comparable to the reduced heart attack risk of a smoker vs a non-smoker,” he said.

“This is an observational study so no definitive conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect,” the statement underlined.

While this research doesn’t establish direct effects, it introduces additional reasons for being a better neighbor. Would conclusive findings that this would help people’s health be more convincing to Americans than civic or moral arguments? Focusing on health could have a more individualistic emphasis – “I’d like to live longer” – though health could also be viewed on a community-wide scale – fewer heart problems mean less community money spent on healthcare.

It is also interesting that this relies on self-reported accounts of neighborliness. Is this fairly accurate? This could be measured in a variety of ways: number of conversations or visits with numbers, participation in local groups, and reports from neighbors about the neighborliness of others. Of course, it could be that perceptions of being a good neighbor matter even more than actual actions. Yet, I wonder how this lines up with the typical shocked accounts suburbanites present when one of their neighbors is accused of a crime.

Bike lanes in Barrington Hills could unravel the whole fabric of the community?

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Feuds between bicyclists and drivers are not uncommon but the recent conversation in Barrington Hills about bike lanes seems like rampant NIMBYism:

Residents say their roads are being clogged by unlawful, unsafe riders of the “professional biking community, clad in spandex.” Bicyclists, they say, flout the rules of the road, block vehicles from passing and, in some cases, have been caught urinating in yards.

Cyclists say Barrington Hills residents have driven them off the road, harassed them and even pelted them with objects as they ride by.

The long-simmering feud came to a head this summer amid talk of adding bike lanes along a village thoroughfare, a proposal quickly shot down by town leaders and upset homeowners.

If there is one thing the two sides have in common, it is an appreciation for the scenery of Barrington Hills. The affluent community of about 4,200 residents features thousands of acres of open space filled with forest preserves, horse farms, riding trails and rolling hills. Homes are built on lots no smaller than 5 acres, and village leaders have fiercely defended the town’s borders against encroachment by development that doesn’t meet their standards…

“We have no obligation to a professional biking community, clad in spandex, who are regularly abusive to our residents and drivers, and urinate on our property,” the website reads. “We have no obligation to out-of-town traffic speeding through our community. It is time we stood up and said NO MORE TRAFFIC!”

This is just an outside perspective but if Barrington Hills residents are so threatened by bicyclists, there are larger issues at work here. Bicyclists could be annoying on relatively low-volume roads. Yet, their level of traffic is minimal compared to vehicular traffic. It sounds more like the residents want to close off their roads to any outsiders.

See a story from a few years ago about arguments in Barrington Hills about how much outdoor lighting residents could have in order to limit light pollution. If lights and bicycles can rip the fabric of your community, I would guess the community is one in which people generally want to be left alone. This is one of the paradoxes of suburban community as pointed out by M. P. Baumgartner in The Moral Order of a Suburb: community is built by leaving your fellow suburbanite alone.

Don’t confuse community-building “little free libraries” for bird McMansions

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Don’t make the mistake of confusing a “little free library” with an oversized birdhouse in your neighbor’s front lawn:

Zooming by in your car, you might mistake them for bird McMansions…

Based on a map on the Little Free Library website and chatter among local “stewards” — people who erect the boxes and maintain them — we’d say the Kansas City area has at least 20 little libraries so far, typically about the size of a recycling bin.

The idea germinated in a small Wisconsin town in 2009, when Todd Bol built a diminutive one-room schoolhouse out of an old garage door as a tribute to his late mom, a teacher. He stocked it with books and put it on a post outside…

“This is just a way to build community, and people can put in books that they love or just want to get rid of,” says Theiss, who’s an actual librarian. She works at Rockhurst University.

Several things are interesting here:

1. People with these libraries still believe in the power of books. How many people in the U.S. would agree?

2. From this article, it sounds like many of these small libraries are in fairly well-off suburban-type neighborhoods. The irony is that such neighborhoods are supposed to have community but need these small book outposts to bring community.

3. While these small libraries may have benefits, does this suggest people don’t want to spend the time to travel to the library? Perhaps this is more about convenience than community?

I’ll be curious to see if this is just a fad or something longer lasting.

Choose teardown “mansionization” over sprawl in suburbs

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Anthony Flint argues that communities should see the positive aspects of teardown McMansions:

Yes, some embodied energy is wasted in a teardown. But the new homes are universally more energy-efficient, and can be made with recycled materials and other green construction methods. What families want is a little bit more room. A recent survey by the National Association of Homebuilders found that most homeowners want something in the area of 2,500 square feet – close to the average size for single-family homes, which has been creeping up steadily over the decades.Sometimes the extra space is for multigenerational housing, a certain trend in the years ahead. The homebuilder Lennar recently touted homes with granny flats and in-law apartments – the kind of flexible housing New urbanism has been advocating for 20 years or so.

There is surely another trend of “right-sizing” and smaller homes and even micro apartments, for empty nesters and singles. But that’s the thing about the housing markets – one size doesn’t fit all. If some homeowners want more size, they’ll find a way to get it. They key factor in the teardown phenomenon is location.

The same NAHB survey found that while a bigger house was desirable, families didn’t want that house to be isolated out in the far-flung exurbs, miles from anywhere. They want to be able to walk to school or to a park, maybe even to a store to get a half-gallon of milk, or at least not spend quite so much time driving all around to disparate destinations.

And so we come back to teardowns and mansionization. Another way to describe the phenomenon is “infill redevelopment.” Builders are essentially re-using an established parcel in an already developed neighborhood. That’s a far greener step than building a true McMansion out in the cornfields. It’s the essence of smart growth – build in the places already built up, and leave the greenfields of the periphery alone.

One argument for teardowns is the rights of individual property owners to take advantage of a market that will pay them more money. However, this argument tends to pit the interests of the neighborhood or community versus those of the individual. In contrast, this argument is much more community oriented. Flint argues that the alternative is not between an individual and their neighbors but rather between suburban sprawl or infill development. These new large homes may not be ideal and communities could provide guidelines for how big they should be and/or how they should match existing homes and styles yet they are better than new subdivisions.

Flint is hinting at another issue that many suburban communities will face in the coming decades: just how dense should desirable suburban areas become? While teardown arguments seem to mostly be about neighborhoods and retaining a certain kind of character, the bigger issue is whether suburbs should be packing in more houses or even building up. This will be a problem for two kinds of suburbs: those who have little or no open land remaining (and this ranges from inner-ring suburbs to ones 20-30 miles out from big cities who have run out of space in more recent years) and those that could attract lots of new residents. Naperville is a good example as it has a downtown and amenities that would likely attract people and it has reached its limits on the south and west after several decades of rapid growth. Indeed, Naperville has received proposals in the past for high-rise condominiums (and turned them down) and the latest Water Street development proposal suggests expanding the denser downtown.

In the end, these suburbs will have to decide if they want denser development. If they hope to grow in population or develop more mixed-use areas (for example, through transit oriented development around transportation nodes), this might require teardowns and denser development.

Sociologist on how urban sprawl contributes to stress, limits community

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A sociologist argues urban sprawl boosts stress levels and inhibits social interactions:

Urban sprawl in Alberta’s two largest cities could be contributing to high stress levels and lack of community ties reported in the province, a sociologist suggests.

Statistics Canada’s age-standardized figures show nearly a quarter of Alberta’s population aged 15 and older perceive most days as “quite a bit or extremely stressful.”

Out of the 10 Canadian provinces, Alberta was second-highest for perceived life stress — second only to Quebec — in 2011.

It also had the second-lowest percentage of the population aged 12 and over who reported their sense of belonging to the local community as being “very strong or somewhat strong” — higher only than Quebec.

Tim Haney, an urban sociology expert and assistant professor at Mount Royal University, said the way Calgary, and more recently Edmonton, are growing outward affects residents’ quality of life.

Difficulty or inconvenience commuting from place to place can impact a person’s relationships and ability develop some sense of community, he said.

This sounds like possible correlations – we would have to see more specific data before making any conclusions. But, these arguments are related to earlier theories and findings. Some of the early sociologists, people like Georg Simmel, worried about how individuals would survive in cities. Simmel didn’t think much about suburbs but perhaps his ideas about “nervous stimulation” in cities could be adapted to suburban settings where there is less regular interaction with strangers but still a lot of movement (particularly driving) amidst populated areas. Also, Robert Putnam argued in Bowling Alone that sprawl contributed to a decline in community life and civic engagement.

If all of this is true and life in sprawl does include a stress penalty, this is an interesting trade-off for Americans: buy a bigger and cheaper house within the sprawl and participate in the suburban good life but have more stress than living elsewhere.

Gated crime-free “private city” under construction in Guatemala

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A new gated community under construction in Guatemala is upfront about being exclusive and crime-free:

Guatemalan developers are building a nearly independent city for the wealthy on the outskirts of a capital marred by crime and snarled by traffic. At its heart is the 34-acre (14-hectare) Paseo Cayala, with apartments, parks, high-end boutiques, church, nightclubs, and restaurants, all within a ring of white stucco walls.

The builders of Paseo Cayala say it is a livable, walkable development that offers housing for Guatemalans of a variety of incomes, though so far the cheapest apartments cost about 70 times the average Guatemalan’s yearly wage. It’s bordered by even costlier subdivisions begun earlier. Eventually, the Cayala Management Group hopes to expand the project into “Cayala City,” spreading across 870 acres (352 hectares), an area a little larger than New York’s Central Park .

Cayala’s backers promote it as a safe haven in a troubled country, one with an unusual degree of autonomy from the chaotic capital. It also embraces a philosophy that advocates a return to a traditional concept of a city, with compact, agreeable spaces where homes and shops are intermixed.

Detractors, however, say it is a blow to hopes of saving the real traditional heart of Guatemala City by drawing the well-off back into the urban center to participate in the economic and social life of a city struggling with poverty and high levels of crime and violence…

Pedro Pablo Godoy, one of the 25 architects who worked on Paseo Cayala, said it is the first project in Guatemala that adheres to New Urbanism, a movement that promotes the creation of walkable neighborhoods with a range of housing types and commerce.

Sounds like a fairly typical gated community that may simply be unusually frank about the reasons it is built and why wealthy residents would want to live there: to avoid the problems of society. I imagine some New Urbanists would not anything to do with such a project that is hardly about mixed-income development or being integrated into the fabric of normal society.

While we could focus on the exclusiveness of this new development, it would also be interesting to study whether and how a community forms in such a setting. It sounds like the developers expect some sort of streetlife, partly due to the architecture and design as well as a younger generation they are hoping to attract that want a lively urban setting. Will this actually occur? Will the perceived safety lead to more vulnerable social interactions? If so, what will this community end up looking look?

This also is reminiscent of plans to build several cities in Honduras that would have their own government and oversight.

The three issues behind an incorporation vote in a Utah suburb

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After writing earlier this week about the decisions of The Woodlands, Texas to not incorporate, here is the story of the Salt Lake City suburb of Millcreek that is considering incorporation on election day:

To supporters, a city would cobble together a few suburban neighborhoods into a more perfect union. After years of living at the whims of county codes and tax rates, residents of Millcreek said they would, for the first time, be able to keep their tax dollars inside their own borders and write their own future…

Opponents say the status quo works fine. Forming a city would heap municipal rules and expenses atop existing layers of county, state and federal bureaucracy. They say a new city would need money for lawyers, accountants, city buildings and other services now provided by the county, and ultimately be forced to raise taxes.

In 2011, an independent study said that Millcreek’s economics, population and geography would make it a “viable and sustainable” new city. But it also said the area was mostly built-out and had few new opportunities for development, raising the prospect that its expenses would outstrip the money it takes in. If Millcreek goes its own way, the surrounding county would also stand to lose $30 million in annual revenues from one of its wealthiest areas, and be forced to cut services or raise taxes on other residents.
If the measure fails, some residents say they are worried the community will be torn apart. At a time when city budgets are strained, they say that Millcreek’s Home Depot, its for-profit hospital and supermarkets would make ripe targets for annexation by nearby cities.

It sounds like there are a few issues present. First is the issue of revenues. Could an incorporated community afford the services it would be expected to provide? Would it increase the local tax burden, something many suburbanites abhor. Second is the issue of annexation. Incorporation typically provides a community more protection against adjacent communities annexing land. this article suggests what is most at stake are revenue sources such as retail and commercial establishments and perhaps job providers as well.

Though not stated here, I imagine there is also a third issue: the tension between individualism and communitarianism that is often present in American suburbs. On one hand, the suburbs offer homeownership, small parcels of land, the idea that individuals have a little space in which to live their own lives. On the other hand, suburbs, even unincorporated ones, require services such as roads, sewers, schools, police and fire protection, and more that is more easily realized when people pool their resources (tax dollars). Can you have a fully developed community life if individualism wins out? Is community, not just services but also strong and weak ties to neighbors and others in the community, desired by a majority of American suburban residents?

Quickly, some Census statistics about Millcreek: it has just over 62,000 residents; the median household income is $57,385 (about $1,000 above the median for Utah), is 87.2% white and 8.4% Latino, and 41.9% of adults have a bachelor’s degree.

One other note: the article suggests “the election here next Tuesday is a fight about what happens as America’s suburbs grow up.” This is a typical phase that many suburbs go through though it is a bit unusual, as it is for The Woodlands, for a community to grow so large and still not be incorporated.

Update on public housing residents in Chicago mixed-income developments

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Chicago and other cities have pursued ambitious plans in the last two decades to tear down public housing high-rises (like at Cabrini-Green) and replace them with mixed-income neighborhoods where public housing residents and market-rate homeowners would live near each other. Here is an update of how this is working out in one mixed-income neighborhood in Chicago:

But the common thread that binds many of these theoretical effects is the same: For them to occur, residents of extremely different incomes must connect on a deeper level than hellos in the hallways. And that doesn’t seem to be happening. Joseph, along with Robert Chaskin of the University of Chicago, documented and analyzed the interactions of residents in two of Chicago’s new mixed-income developments. Far from job networking, most of the encounters between residents were paper-thin. Nearly 25 percent didn’t know a single neighbor well enough to ask them a favor or invite them into their home. In the rare instances of deeper exchanges, like “looking out” for a neighbor with an illness, these interactions occurred almost exclusively between people who were in the same income group…

Community building doesn’t need to mean picnics in the park, however, says Joseph. “It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone becoming friends and having dinner. It means a set of neighbors who appreciate the fact that living in a diverse place means having to build common ground with people who are different than yourself.” He calls this positive neighboring.

If positive neighboring is happening at Parkside, though, so is negative neighboring. The day I visited, a sign taped to one apartment window had a picture of a handgun pointed at me, along with the words, “I Don’t Call 911 — No Loitering.”  There have been reports of market-rate tenants being the targets of derogatory name-calling, and subsidized tenants having the police called on them anonymously for hosting parties. A feature in Harper’s magazine reported that when market-rate families felt threatened by large groups hanging out in the lobby at one mixed-use development, the management removed all the furniture. The same article described the fates of two different Parkside families that held loud gatherings at their apartments one night: The next day, the public-housing unit got an eviction notice; the market-rate unit did not. “They can get buck wild, but as soon as we get buck wild, they want to send an email blast to CHA [Chicago Housing Authority] to complain,” said one of the subsidized tenants.

Critics of the model have asserted that this is what happens when cities engage in “social engineering.” But it might be more accurate to say that the social engineering that the city was counting on isn’t happening. Parkside’s residents might have been more interested in a killer deal than building a community. (The market-rate condo prices, in the $150,000s, are a steal for the location, a mile from downtown and steps from the Gold Coast.) “Could it be — and could people be afraid to admit — that market rate buyers simply don’t want to live right next door to government subsidized renters?” asked one Internet commenter.

This seems to fit with other research that suggests that although people may live near each other, they don’t necessarily interact in ways that are helpful to both groups. This is a sort of “black box” still to be figured out by reserachers: in living with more middle- and upper-income residents, how exactly will public housing residents move up to the working class or middle class? Earlier research suggests this may take some time; kids benefit from going to better schools while adults have a harder time crossing pre-existing socioeconomic and social boundaries.

The article suggests that some look at these mixed-income neighborhoods and call them “social engineering.” Deconcentrating poverty is a goal worked at by a number of groups since sociologists like William Julius Wilson started talking about this in the 1970s and 1980s. HUD has pursued or promoted policies like these throughout the country. It is not like the market-rate residents don’t have a choice in this matter; the housing units can often be cheaper than comparable units nearby. For example, some of the market-rate units in the mixed-income neighborhoods on the former site of Cabrini-Green are quite cheaper compared to units in nearby Lincoln Park or other “hot” neighborhoods. Additionally, the city of Chicago is certainly happy that the public high-rises are gone as they attracted negative attention. (Whether the city cares about the fate of the public housing residents displaced from the high-rises is another story.) Overall, however, some social policy is needed in the area of housing as cities like Chicago offer have severe affordable housing shortages.