Tag Archives: Joel Kotkin

Should thriving Sunbelt cities like Houston seek a denser core?

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Joel Kotkin points out the growth in a number of Sunbelt cities and then raises a debate within urban circles today: should these thriving Sunbelt cities try to replicate the cores of older American cities?

Finally, they will not become highly dense, apartment cities — as developers and planners insist they “should.” Instead the aspirational regions are likely to remain dominated by a suburbanized form characterized by car dependency, dispersion of job centers, and single-family homes. In 2011, for example, twice as many single-family homes sold in Raleigh as condos and townhouses combined. The ratio of new suburban to new urban housing, according to the American Community Survey, is 10 to 1 in Las Vegas and Orlando, 5 to 1 in Dallas, 4 to 1 in Houston and 3 to 1 in Phoenix.

Pressed by local developers and planners, some aspirational cities spend heavily on urban transit, including light rail. To my mind, these efforts are largely quixotic, with transit accounting for five percent or less of all commuters in most systems. The Charlotte Area Transit System represents less a viable means of commuting for most residents than what could be called Manhattan infrastructure envy. Even urban-planning model Portland, now with five radial light rail lines and a population now growing largely at its fringes, carries a smaller portion of commuters on transit than before opening its first line in 1986.

But such pretentions, however ill-suited, have always been commonplace for ambitious and ascending cities, and are hardly a reason to discount their prospects. Urbanistas need to wake up, start recognizing what the future is really looking like and search for ways to make it work better. Under almost any imaginable scenario, we are unlikely to see the creation of regions with anything like the dynamic inner cores of successful legacy cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco. For better or worse, demographic and economic trends suggest our urban destiny lies increasingly with the likes of Houston, Charlotte, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Raleigh and even Phoenix.

The critical reason for this is likely to be missed by those who worship at the altar of density and contemporary planning dogma. These cities grow primarily because they do what cities were designed to do in the first place: help their residents achieve their aspirations—and that’s why they keep getting bigger and more consequential, in spite of the planners who keep ignoring or deploring their ascendance.

It is clear what side Kotkin is on – we might call this “free market urbanism.” Kotkin suggests cities are all about freeing up individuals. This is not the common urbanist view that typically suggests cities are about community life (what can be accomplished through cities is greater than what individuals can do as individual parts) or about vibrant and diversestreet life (think Jane Jacobs).

But, Kotkin is not the only one who suggests there are some major differences between older American cities and newer Sunbelt cities. For example, the Los Angeles school of urban thought held up decentralized LA as the way cities were going. But, their analysis was more Marxist than free market and involved a thorough critique of capitalism and its effects on major cities.

In the end, it remains to be seen what happens to these newer Sunbelt cities as they could go all sorts of directions. If they continue on their current path, they will continue to be decentralized and sprawling. But, social or economic changes might encourage more density, new land use policies, and new visions about what the city should be.

Fastest growing American cities between 2000 and 2012 still bunched in the Sunbelt

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Joel Kotkin discusses the recent release of data about the fastest- and slowest-growing cities in the United States:

An analysis of population data by demographer Wendell Cox, including the Census report for the most recent year released late last week, shows that since 2000, virtually all the 10 fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States are located in Sun Belt states. The population of the Raleigh, N.C., metropolitan statistical area has expanded a remarkable 47.8% since 2000, tops among the nation’s 52 metro areas with over 1 million residents. That is more than three times the overall 12.7% growth of those 52 metro areas.

Austin, Texas, and Las Vegas also expanded more than 40%, putting them second and third on our list. The populations of the other metro areas in the top 10 all expanded by at least 25%, or twice the national average. This jibes nicely with domestic migration trends and growth in the foreign-born population, both of which have been strongest in many of these same cities…

So what do these trends tell us about the demographic evolution of our major metropolitan areas? Certainly sustained economic growth, low density and more affordable housing all clearly continue to push the center of population gravity toward certain Sun Belt cities, primarily in the Southeast and Texas. It turns out that neither the Great Recession, the housing bust or a much hyped preference for dense urbanity is turning this around.

Kotkin wants to use this data to show that Americans are not flocking to denser cities in the Northeast and Midwest as much as some pundits want to claim. Regardless of the debate over which cities are better for Americans, the data seems to suggest that the Sunbelt is still growing the fastest.

I have another idea of why these Sunbelt cities are growing faster compared to the more established Midwest and Northeast cities. What if there is some tipping point, perhaps a particular population or the space available for development in a region, where urban growth slows? Regions can only grow so much before suburban commuters on the edge are not willing to go too far – megacommuters are not too common.

Kotkin: Obama coalition now about urban professionals, not blue collar workers

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Joel Kotkin writes about the shift in the Democratic coalition under President Obama away from blue collar workers and toward urban professionals:

The gentrification of the Democratic Party has gone too far to be reversed in this election. After decades of fighting to win over white working- and middle-class families, Democrats under Obama have set them aside in favor of a new top-bottom coalition dominated by urban professionals—notably academics and members of the media—single women, and childless couples, along with ethnic minorities.

Rather than representing, as Chris Christie and others on the right suggest, the old, corrupt Chicago machine, Obama in fact epitomizes the city’s new political culture, as described by the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark, that greatly deemphasizes white, largely Catholic working-class voters, the self-employed, and people involved in blue-collar industries…

The traditional machine provided him with critical backing early in his political career, but Obama owes his success to new groups that have taken center stage in the increasingly liberal post-Clinton Democratic party: the urban “creative class” made up mostly of highly-educated professionals, academics, gays, single people, and childless couples. It’s a group Clark once called “the slimmer family.” Such people were barely acknowledged and even mistreated by the old machine; now they are primary players in the “the post-materialistic” party. The only holdovers from the old coalition are ethnic minorities and government workers…

Focused on the “upstairs” part of the new political culture, the administration—confident in minority support—has done very little materially to improve the long-term prospects of those “downstairs.” Minorities, in fact, have done far worse under this administration than virtually any in recent history, including that of the hapless George W. Bush. In 2012, African-American unemployment stands at the highest level in decades; 12 percent of the nation’s population, blacks account for 21 percent of the nation’s jobless. The picture is particularly dire Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where black unemployment is nearly 20%, and Detroit, where’s it’s over 25 percent.

Fascinating. If correct, this could be a boon for the powerful in big cities, people interested in big ideas and big projects and big returns, but not necessarily for those in the struggling neighborhoods. It’s too bad Kotkin doesn’t link this approach to specific policies Obama and the new Democrats have pursued – what exactly does this look like? Have the first four years provided concrete evidence that these Democrats are opposed to the suburbs, as conservatives suggest? On the other hand, we might look at the lack of policies directly aimed at the urban working and lower classes and draw conclusions from that.

I’ve suggested before that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a pragmatic kind of Democrat in the mold of Bill Clinton, liberal but clearly pro-business and interested in things like public-private partnerships. If Obama is more interested in the “upstairs” of the Democratic Party, does he approve of Emanuel’s moves and kinds of actions?

Kotkin on American population shifts: away from California, into “heartland” growth corridors

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One of the biggest (and unsung) shifts in American life since World War II is the population movement away from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt, an area stretching from the Southeast over to California. Joel Kotkin suggests some of these trends are changing, particularly an increase in the flow of people out of California:

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families…

So if California’s no longer the Golden land of opportunity for middle-class dreamers, what is?

Mr. Kotkin lists four “growth corridors”: the Gulf Coast, the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, and the Southeast. All of these regions have lower costs of living, lower taxes, relatively relaxed regulatory environments, and critical natural resources such as oil and natural gas.

Take Salt Lake City. “Almost all of the major tech companies have moved stuff to Salt Lake City.” That includes Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle.

Then there’s Texas, which is on a mission to steal California’s tech hegemony. Apple just announced that it’s building a $304 million campus and adding 3,600 jobs in Austin. Facebook established operations there last year, and eBay plans to add 1,000 new jobs there too.

Kotkin attributes a lot of this to political and social change in California that is threatening the middle class. I wonder if we could look at this in a more positive light rather simply in the negative light Kotkin, a self-admitted “Truman Democrat,” paints California: these other states and areas may just have competitive advantages that they didn’t used to have. For example, the story behind California’s growth is well-known: gold rushes, available land, the rise of Hollywood in the early 1900s, government help such as the opening of military bases and defense contracts and highway construction, the growing connections between the United States and East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, etc.), and the weather. Places like Texas and Salt Lake City have learned how to compete against these factors and offer a different vision of the “good life” that is now appearing more attractive to residents and corporations.

I also wonder if there is a cultural story here. California was the place to go for decades. It was the land of sun, innovation, and fortune. In other words, it was “the cool place to be.” This same story isn’t as appealing today, particularly to conservatives who think of California as a liberal bastion. I don’t think Salt Lake City will acquire the same kind of cultural allure as Los Angeles but it is appealing to some who are looking for a different American narrative. Additionally, places like Austin and other “creative class” communities (Birmingham, AL as another example) offer enough “cool” without having to go to California.

h/t Instapundit

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

Claim: 2012 election will be decided by “Walmart Moms”

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Each new election cycle seems to bring about claims about a previously underappreciated demographic group that candidates need to pay attention to. Several pollsters argue that “Walmart Moms” will help decide the 2012 elections:

From the Hill: “Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Margie Omero are going shopping at Walmart. For voters. The pair told attendees at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning that a key demographic in 2012 will be a group of voters they call Walmart Moms. The successors to Soccer Moms and Hockey Moms, Walmart Moms are female voters with children 18 or younger who shop at the discount retailer at least once a month. According to Newhouse and Omero, these women make up 14% of the electorate.”

Laugh at their clothes. Laugh at their fashion faux pas. They’ll see you on Election Day.

I wonder how much these “Walmart Moms” line up with the suburban independent demographic that Joel Kotkin argued has determined the outcome of the last few national elections.

More on what “Walmart Moms” care about when voting:

Walmart Moms are more interested in microeconomic issues such as college affordability than macroeconomic concerns such as the debt ceiling. The literature the pollsters distributed at the breakfast said, “It will be important for candidates to clearly communicate how their policies or ideas will personally impact these women and their households for the better.”

So it is about household economics and basic middle-class consumer items (groceries + college educations). Is there a politician that could effectively link these micro and macroeconomic concerns so that the American public understands the relationship between the two?

h/t Instapundit

The continued rise of the American suburbs

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A short piece in the New York Times discusses the continued trend toward the suburbs:

Still, for all the buzzy talk of knowledge industry synergy and urban appeal, census figures show that UBS’s return would be bucking the demographic trends rather than reflecting them and that the suburbs, however unloved by tastemakers and academics, remain where the growth is.

Joel Kotkin , a writer who specializes in demographic issues, says that the 2010 census figures show that during the past decade just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in city cores. The rest took place in the suburbs, which are home to more than 6 in 10 Americans.

The 8.6 percent is even lower than in the 1990s when the figure was 15.1 percent. New York City did better than the national average, getting 29 percent of the growth in the metropolitan area, but that was down from 46 percent in the 1990s. Of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, only three — Boston, Providence, and Oklahoma City — saw their core cities grow faster than their suburbs. And the growth is hardly the mono-dimensional suburbia of hoary stereotype.

In 1970 nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white, Mr. Kotkin writes. Now minorities constitute over 27 percent of the nation’s suburbanites.

Several questions could be raised:

1. Kotkin’s figures show the rise of suburbs. Others have suggested Kotkin’s figures disguise the real divide between inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. These inner-ring areas are suburban but also are more city like with higher densities and city issues (infrastructure, crime, aging housing, etc.).

2. Sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the classic The Levittowners, is cited saying that people are still moving to the suburbs because they are cheaper. This seems a bit simplistic: some suburban homes may be cheaper, particularly on the edge of suburban development, but homeowners end up paying more in transportation costs, commuting, and governmental bodies subsidize sprawl by paying for highways (and giving less to mass transit). The real question is what would happen if the costs of urban and suburban living were similar and people knew this – would they still choose the suburbs? I think they would, particularly for cultural reasons such as chasing the American Dream and looking for safe, well-educated neighborhoods for their kids.

3. The article cites data that says Millennials are more interested in living in the suburbs than their parents. This may be the case though what exactly these suburbs look like is unclear: exurbs full of McMansions or denser, walkable suburban communities?

Debate over whether cities or suburbs are gaining population

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As the 2010 Census figures trickle out, some commentators are debating about how to interpret this data: “are cities gaining or losing population?” While it seems fairly clear that more people are moving to the suburbs and out of central cities (a long-running American trend), it is less clear if they are moving to the land of single-family homes on the metropolitan fringe or to denser suburban areas (which might be considered cities in their own right).

Looking to secure the suburban vote

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Joel Kotkin argues that both major American political parties would do well to develop a strategy that would consistently appeal to the suburban vote. Here is how one journalist describes Kotkin’s view of American politics at the moment:

Demography in the US favors the Democrats. The fastest growing parts of the electorate don’t look good for Republicans.

Job creation will be the biggest public policy theme for some time to come, and Republicans haven’t quite gotten this issue right even as Democrats botch it.

Class, more than race, will determine America’s political future. The wide swath of largely suburban, skilled workers is up for grabs, and neither party has a vision for improving their quality of life – which is why they keep wreaking havoc on each Party’s plans.

Republicans have failed among Latinos and millennials and will pay for it for some time to come if they don’t reverse the trends they’ve helped start.

Kotkin has been talking about this for a while – he suggested right after this last election that the results went against the “creative class” and more middle-class suburbanites voted for Republicans.

So what would a successful suburban strategy look like? When I looked at all the campaign material that came to my house and listened to candidates talk leading up to the last election, many of them were going after the middle class vote: making homeownership a priority, talk about job creation, keeping the American Dream alive. But if Kotkin is right, the middle class swung one way in 2008 and then another way in 2010.

One way to approach this would be to think what suburbanites have historically sought in moving to suburbs: some space, getting away from the city (the noise, health issues, crime, “others”), owning a single-family home, good schools, good jobs, safety (particularly for kids), and a suburban lifestyle. It seems like both parties could approach these issues, though they might do so from different angles.

h/t Instapundit

Kotkin: election results “the smackdown of the creative class”

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Amongst pundits sifting through the election returns, I have only seen Joel Kotkin explore how votes broke down by broad location categories: cities vs. suburbs. Before the election, Kotkin suggested that both parties were fighting over middle-class suburbanites (and the Democrats were losing at this). Afterward, he continues this argument and suggests the creative class and bourgeois bohemians were overwhelmed by the middle-class, suburban vote:

More than anything, this election marked a shift in American class dynamics. In 2008 President Obama managed to win enough middle-class, suburban voters to win an impressive victory. This year, those same voters deserted, rejecting policies more geared to the “creative class” than mainstream America.

A term coined by urban guru Richard Florida, “the creative class” also covers what David Brooks more cunningly calls “bourgeois bohemians”–socially liberal, well-educated, predominately white, upper middle-class voters. They are clustered largely in expensive urban centers, along the coasts, around universities and high-tech regions. To this base, Obama can add the welfare dependents, virtually all African-Americans, and the well-organized legions of public employees…

But the real decider–to use George W. Bush’s unfortunate phrase–remains the much larger, more amorphous middle class. Given the economy of the past two years, the subsequent alienation of this group should pose no mystery. Suburban swing voters didn’t suddenly turn into racists or right-wing cranks. Instead they have seen, correctly, that Obama’s economic policy has to date worked to the advantage of others far more than themselves or their families. Until the Democrats and Obama can prove that they once again can serve the interests of these voters, they will continue to struggle to recapture the optimism so appropriate two years ago.

I would love to see some actual numbers on this. It seems like Richard Florida could post some maps like he has recently been doing on Atlantic.com that would correlate voting patterns with the presence of the creative class.

I wonder if Kotkin would suggest this is a continuation of the older “culture wars” idea (progressives vs. conservatives, religious vs. non-religious, etc.) or a new trend (the creative class vs. middle-class suburbanites).

More broadly, how big will the creative class in America grow to be? Is it possible, or even desirable, that a significant number of Americans become part of the creative class or the bourgeois bohemians?