Tag Archives: metropolitan regions

The most and least sprawling US metropolitan areas

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Here are new rankings of the most and least sprawling metropolitan regions:

Measuring Sprawl 2014 [PDF] looks at 221 metropolitan areas and 994 counties around the country, giving them number grades (higher is better) on a “Sprawl Index” by using four factors: density; mix of uses; strength of “activity centers” and downtowns; and accessibility of the street network.

The top 10 “most compact” areas nationally, regardless of metro size, were:

  • New York/White Plains/Wayne, New York/New Jersey
  • San Francisco/San Mateo/Redwood City, California
  • Atlantic City/Hammonton, New Jersey
  • Santa Barbara/Santa Maria/Goleta, California
  • Champaign/Urbana, Illinois
  • Santa Cruz/Watsonville, California
  • Trenton/Ewing, New Jersey
  • Miami/Miami Beach/Kendall, Florida
  • Springfield, Illinois
  • Santa Ana/Anaheim/Irvine, California…

The list of top (or bottom) “most sprawling” areas was dominated by places in the Southeast. In order from lowest scoring (worst) to highest, they were:

  • Hickory/Lenoir/Morganton, North Carolina
  • Atlanta/Sandy Springs/Marietta, Georgia
  • Clarksville, Tennessee/Kentucky
  • Prescott, Arizona
  • Nashville-Davidson/Murfreesboro/Franklin, Tennessee
  • Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Riverside-San Bernardino/Ontario, California
  • Greenville/Mauldin-Easley, South Carolina
  • Augusta/Richmond County, Georgia
  • Kingsport/Bristol/Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia

Among large metro areas, “The biggest success story is surprisingly Los Angeles,” says Reid Ewing, a University of Utah professor who was the lead researcher on the study. “Los Angeles has actually densified substantially.” The famously car-dependent California city ranked seventh among metro areas with populations over one million. The report attributes some of L.A.’s high score to development around transit stations and an ordinance that allows developers to build denser projects in exchange for affordable housing.

Interesting to see all of these Sunbelt locales in the most sprawling list, places where a lot of their growth has likely taken place in the last 50 or so years. This likely leads to more suburban (less dense) areas with streets less likely to be on a grid and with very separate land uses. In contrast, the least sprawling cities are more of a hodgepodge including old American cities (New York), a college town amidst cornfields (Champaign-Urbana), and a few Sunbelt cities (including Santa Ana/Irvine/Anaheim).

The article goes on to note that sprawl is linked to a number of negative outcomes:

The researchers found that sprawl correlated with higher rates of obesity, traffic fatalities, ozone pollution, lack of social capital, vehicle miles traveled, physical activity, and residential energy use.

While the full report shows the scores for each metro area on the four criteria, it’s too bad it doesn’t show how these different life outcomes differ across metro areas.

Crediting New York if this year’s Super Bowl goes well, blaming New Jersey if it does not

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Gregg Easterbrook points out the interesting game of geography playing out in the upcoming Super Bowl to be played in New Jersey in a stadium used by two New York teams and with lots of media coverage of the Super Bowl happening from Manhattan:

This year’s Super Bowl will be played in New York, which, for NFL purposes, is located in New Jersey. Since the media, politicians and celebs will downplay the New Jersey angle, TMQ will play it up. In solidarity with the state of Thomas Edison, “The Sopranos” and toxic waste, TMQ will offer a weekly Road to the Swamps item during the runup to the game…

Both of the NFL’s “New York” teams not only play in New Jersey, they practice there and are headquartered there, too: neither the “New York” Giants nor “New York” Jets has the decency so much as to maintain an office in the Empire State, which today has one NFL team, the Buffalo Bills. NFL officials, media types, club-goers and politicians love New York and look down their noses at the Garden State. Should all go well, New York officials will take the credit. Should the game or the bus-based logistics be a fiasco, New Jersey will be blamed.

Three years ago, the Super Bowl was held in Dallas, which for NFL purposes is in Arlington, Texas, and ESPN’s local set was in Fort Worth, 35 miles distant. These things happen in modern life. But the “New York” Super Bowl will take cartographic challenges to an extreme. Though the game will be held in New Jersey, all three networks will report on it from across the Hudson River in Manhattan. The ESPN local set will be at Herald Square, the Fox and NFL Network local sets at Times Square. For media purposes, New Jersey will be located in New York.

Officially the Super Bowl will be played at a field called MetLife Stadium located in a town called East Rutherford, N.J. In order to encourage tourism, that town should change its name to The Swamps of Jersey, New Jersey. Springsteen fans would flock. The stadium should change its name to Somewhere Field, which has a nice numinous quality. Then as the big game begins, broadcasters could say, “Welcome everyone to tonight’s Super Bowl from Somewhere, in The Swamps of Jersey.”

The real issue here is that the game and media coverage is all happening within one metropolitan region surrounding New York City. Plenty of stadiums are located outside of the central city and media facilities are located all over the place. (Think of the world’s media sports center in Bristol, Connecticut – home of ESPN.) Yet, this particular metropolitan region crosses state lines. Yes, Fort Worth is not the same as Dallas which is not the same as Arlington or Irving but at least they are all within the same Metroplex. Moving between New Jersey and New York City (and also Connecticut – though there are no sport facilities there, perhaps for the same NIMBY reasons that didn’t allow the United Nations to locate in suburban Connecticut – and upstate New York, which probably has the same relationship with NYC as downstate Illinois has with Chicago) is a big deal. New York City, particular Manhattan, is the number one global city in the world. It is the center of media, entertainment, and the financial industry. In contrast, New Jersey is industrial, working-class, and The Sopranos.

One other question: can Chris Christie take some credit for this New Jersey Super Bowl or do the New York politicians get to take all the credit?

Purchasing a home in 25 different American cities

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Here is a quick look at the estimated incomes it would take to buy a home across American cities:

HSH Associates, a New Jersey-based publisher of mortgage industry data, took a stab at what it would take, incomewise, for buyers in 25 metro areas to be able to purchase a median-priced home, based on the demands of principal and interest payments.

Coming out on top (or on the bottom, depending on how you look at it): Cleveland, with an income of just $22,348 needed to put a set of house keys into your palm…

In calculating its ranking, HSH took the National Association of Realtors’ third-quarter median home price data, as well as its own figures on average interest rates for 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages, to estimate what homebuyers in 25 major metros would need to earn to purchase the median-priced home, he said…

At the top of the expense range was San Francisco, with an income of $125,072. Skipping around the middle of the list, HSH pegged the base line salary for Chicago at $37,078 (11th place); Minneapolis, at $37,115 (12th); Baltimore, at $46,623 (16th); Seattle, at $63,145 (19th); and New York, at $71,255 (22nd place). The full list is at hsh.com.

Quite a difference across cities. There are a lot of factors involved here including the availability of housing, the quality of housing, jobs available in the metropolitan regions, and incomes. Even then, there are huge differences within specific regions.

While these figures aren’t surprising, it is also a reminder of the difficulty of making cost-of-living calculations for the entire United States. On one hand, it might seem obvious to adjust for region or city because of the big differences in housing costs, which typically comprise a sizable amount of expenses. On the other hand, people do have some ability to move so they aren’t necessarily locked in to certain expenses. Yet, the ones who can best weather these cost-of-living differences are already wealthier and have more options.

Analyzing the SuperZips of the Washington D.C. region

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There are a lot of wealthy and educated people living in SuperZips around Washington D.C.:

Clarksville sits in one of the nation’s “Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees…

A Washington Post analysis of the latest census data shows that more than a third of Zip codes in the D.C. metro area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for income and education. But what makes the region truly unusual is that so many of the high-end Zip codes are contiguous. They form a vast land mass that bounds across 717 square miles. It stretches 60 miles from its northern tip in Woodstock, Md., to the southern end in Fairfax Station, and runs 30 miles wide from Haymarket in Prince William County to the heart of the District up to Rock Creek Parkway.

One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered…

Yet many who live in these rapidly evolving communities do not think of themselves as rich or elite. The cost of living, particularly for housing, eats up a large chunk of the two incomes it typically takes to afford a comfortable home in a good school district.

Interesting look at social class today in America; those on the upper end tend to argue they worked hard to get there, deserve what they have, and they aren’t really rich (though comparisons to much of the U.S., let alone most of the world, suggests otherwise). As the article goes on to note, a number of people are concerned about what the lack of interaction with others might mean down the road.

This is a story that has developed in recent years. For example, a number of people have noted that a large number of the wealthiest counties in the United States are in the Washington region. While conservatives tend to tie this wealth to the growth of big government (and the businesses associated with it), how come scholars haven’t looked at this more closely? There have been some studies of a few areas in the Washington metropolitan area, such as Prince George’s County and its large suburban black population or the growth of the edge city of Tysons Corner or responses to growing immigrant populations in Prince William County, but little look at the region as a whole. Perhaps this is a lingering artifact of American urban sociology’s emphasis on some “traditional big cities” like Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia and not paying as much attention to newer big cities like Washington D.C., Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and others. Do we need something like a “Georgetown School” or “Brookings Institution School” of urban sociology?

The of effects tech company shuttle buses from San Francisco to Silicon Valley

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A number of Silicon Valley workers live in San Francisco and a number of the biggest tech companies offer private shuttle buses for employees. This has led to changes in a number of San Francisco neighborhoods:

Take the public transportation provided by corporate shuttle buses from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. It’s not news that these shuttles, and the big digital tech companies that run them, are changing the fabric of San Francisco as we’ve known it. What feels new is that it’s not enough to say that change is coming soon. It’s already, very much here…

On one hand, some have called the shuttles “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area” because they allow the “techy progeny” of Silicon Valley to be “launched into SF proper.” That the shuttles are “alienating everyone who isn’t in technology” — or that there’s simply too much tech for one city to take.

Others are of the mind that it’s simply time to get over it and recognize a new reality; cities change, neighborhoods rise and fall. That in fact a paradox of Silicon Valley is in its “distributing meaningful equity” to ordinary people who wouldn’t otherwise access such wealth. (And then there’s the logic that wonders whether public transportation is yet another bit of infrastructure that should be upended by the Valley’s “meritocratic“ spirit.)…

What we’re talking about isn’t simply the replacement of presumably authentic recent immigrants by their presumably younger, whiter, or better educated new neighbors. What we’re talking about is the replacement of an entire system of urban inter-relationships, built up over generations and stratified in ways that make sense within an urban context — now short-circuited by the inexorable demands of the (suburban) digital technology landscape.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. The arrival of “the creative class” is not just a positive occurrence. This is a group many big cities would love to have for their wealth (think of the tax money!) as well as their innovative and creative spirits. Yet, as the term gentrification describes, this group can at the least change the character of places and more problematically push out existing residents.

2. This hints at the interdependence within metropolitan regions. Tech workers may like their jobs in Silicon Valley but San Francisco offers a more exciting, urban, and cultured place to live. And, San Francisco benefits from its business connections to Silicon Valley. It would also be interesting to consider the role of San Jose which offers a bigger city closer to Silicon Valley but one that has less of a reputation for social life.

With these changes, it puts officials in San Francisco in an interesting position. Existing urban residents tend to resist major changes to their neighborhoods. But, as noted above, cities have a hard time turning down new money.

“The United States Redrawn as Fifty States with Equal Populations” leads to interesting names in the Chicago area

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Here is a fun map/solution/art project regarding reforming the American electoral college: have all the states have equal populations.

electorally reformed US map

Here is the methodology for the map:

The map began with an algorithm that grouped counties based on proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns. The algorithm was seeded with the fifty largest cities. After that, manual changes took into account compact shapes, equal populations, metro areas divided by state lines, and drainage basins. In certain areas, divisions are based on census tract lines.

The District of Columbia is included into the state of Washington, with the Mall, major monuments and Federal buildings set off as the seat of the federal government.

The capitals of the states are existing states capitals where possible, otherwise large or central cities have been chosen. The suggested names of the new states are taken mainly from geographical features:

  • mountain ranges or peaks, or caves – Adirondack, Allegheny, Blue Ridge, Chinati, Mammoth, Mesabi, Ozark, Pocono, Rainier, Shasta, Shenandoah and Shiprock
  • rivers – Atchafalaya, Menominee, Maumee, Nodaway, Sangamon, Scioto, Susquehanna, Trinity and Willimantic
  • historical or ecological regions – Big Thicket, Firelands and Tidewater
  • bays, capes, lakes and aquifers – Casco, Tampa Bay, Canaveral, Mendocino, Ogallala, Salt Lake and Throgs Neck
  • songs – Gary, Muskogee and Temecula
  • cities – Atlanta, Chicago, Columbia, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Washington
  • plants – Tule and Yerba Buena
  • people – King and Orange

The words used for names for the name are drawn from many languages, including many American Indian languages.

Interesting naming conventions. However, I don’t understand what is going on in the Chicago area. While it makes sense to name Chicago and some of the nearby suburbs “Chicago” (though I’m guessing a number of these suburbs would not want to be lumped in with Chicago), why in the world would the new state made up of the outer regions of the current Chicago area be called Gary? I’m sure people would ask why an industrial boomtown now ghost town (it isn’t quite this bad yet this is the sort of reputation Gary has), an exemplar par excellence of the Rust Belt, would lend its name to a full state. Gary has a bad reputation (which other suburbs, particularly the wealthier ones, would not want to be associated with), it is not the largest city in the area (Milwaukee, Rockford, Joliet are larger), it is located on the eastern side of the new state so isn’t exactly central, and Joliet is the named capital.

It is also interesting to see the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan regions are also split up. However, they don’t appear to be quite split on the lines of concentric rings like the Chicago area.

New analysis shows more poor people in suburbs than cities

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Several Brookings Institution scholars released new analyses showing more poor people now live in suburbs than cities:

As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.

In the Chicago area, the number of poor in the suburbs increased by 99 percent in the last decade, from 363,966 to 724,233…

More poor people moved to the suburbs, pulled by more affordable homes or pushed by urban gentrification, the authors said. Some used the increased mobility of housing vouchers, which used to be restricted by area, to seek better schools and safer neighborhoods in suburbia. Still others, including immigrants, followed jobs as the booming suburbs demanded more workers, many for low-paying, service-sector jobs.

Change also came from within. More people in the suburbs slipped into poverty as manufacturing jobs disappeared, the authors found. The housing boom and bust also walloped many homeowners on the outer ridges of metropolitan areas, hitting pocketbooks hard. On top of that, the booming numbers of poor people in the suburbs were driven, in part, by the exploding growth of the suburbs themselves.

The shift caught many communities by surprise, the authors found, with public and private agencies unprepared to meet the need in suburban areas.

 

This analysis is part of a new took titled Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.

This is not new for those who follow suburban trends: the suburban population has become increasingly diverse in terms of social class in recent decades. In fact, there have always been pockets of working-class residents in suburbs since suburbs began in the United States. However, there is a longstanding image of suburbs as mainly wealthy places as those with means left cities.

One other thought: even with the increasing number of poor people in the suburbs as a whole, poorer residents are not likely scattered evenly throughout suburban regions. Take the Chicago area for example: how many poor residents are in places like Kenilworth or Barrington or Lake Forest or Oak Brook versus places like Harvey, Addison, Waukegan, and Elgin? Some of the residential patterns of social class in suburbs then mirror some of the issues American cities have faced for decades, poorer areas isolated from wealthier areas, but with a twist: while all of these city neighborhoods may be under one government, suburbs have varying layers of government, making it more difficult to provide services to pockets of poorer residents. Additionally, wealthier suburbs have effectively limited affordable housing in many of their communities, restricting where poorer suburban residents can live and find opportunities.

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.

Correlations that get at why big cities lean toward Democrats

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Richard Florida discusses several reasons, based on correlations, why big cities now so clearly lean toward the Democratic party:

Density played a key role in the metro vote. (To capture it we use a measure we of population-based density, which accounts for the concentration of people in metro). The average Obama metro was more than twice as dense as the average Romney metro, 412 versus 193 people per square mile. With a correlation of .50, density was an even bigger factor than population (where the correlation is .34). The reverse pattern holds for the share of Romney votes; the negative correlation for density (-.51) was significantly higher than that for population (-.33)…

The chart below plots the relationship between a metro’s share of college grads and its share of Obama votes. The line slopes steeply upward showing how the share of Obama votes increase alongside metro density. The share of college grads in a metro is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.42) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.44)…

The chart above shows the relationship between the share of the creative class and the share of Obama votes across metro areas. The line slopes steeply upward, indicating a considerable positive relationship. The share of creative class workers is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.40) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.41)…

Republicans may still be the party of the rich, but most of the country’s more-affluent metros lined up squarely in the Obama camp. The correlation between the average wages and salaries of metros and the share of Obama votes is positive (.50) and it is negative for Romney votes (-.51). This makes sense too, as larger metros have greater concentrations of knowledge-based talent and industries and are wealthier to begin with. (The associations we find are even more substantial for metros with more than one million people, with the correlations increasing to .71 for Obama and -.72 for Romney.) This follows the “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State” pattern identified by Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, who infamously found that while rich voters continue to trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic.

Florida argues this is evidence of class-based differences in American life, specifically, differences between the creative class and those in knowledge industries compared to the rest of the United States.

However, this raises a few questions:

1. The analysis here seems to be done across metropolitan areas while some of these voting patterns break down as we compare cities versus suburbs. For example, there are those who suggest it is really about cities and inner-ring suburbs that vote Democratic while more further flung suburbs and exurbs vote Republican. See earlier posts about the analysis of Joel Kotkin – here and here.

2. Making claims with correlations with tricky. Florida acknowledges this before he rolls out the analysis: “As usual, I point out that correlation points to associations between variables only, not causation.” But, then why stop the analysis at correlations here? Looking at the relationships just between two variables at a time ignores the complex relationships between factors like race, class, location, jobs, and more. Why not quickly run some regressions?

3. If this analysis is correct (and we need more in-depth analysis to check), why are Republicans so bad at appealing to the creative class?

No one-size-fits-all approach for building a downtown baseball stadium

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A new study examines the divergent outcomes after the construction of new baseball stadiums in downtown Denver and Phoenix:

That Coors and Chase Fields had diverging fates is no accident but rather the result of poor planning, write Arizona State researchers Stephen Buckman and Elizabeth A. Mack in a recent issue of the Journal of Urbanism. Phoenix’s attempt to copy Denver’s success shows that sports stadiums are not a one-size-fits-all solution to downtown redevelopment efforts. On the contrary, Buckman and Mack argue, these projects must strongly consider the natural form of the city to avoid failure:

A key consideration that is often overlooked in the planning phase of these projects is the historical urban growth patterns and resulting urban form of the cities in which stadium development projects are proposed.

Buckman and Mack conducted a point-by-point review of both stadiums in their effort to determine what factors contributed most to their success, or lack thereof. They quickly found that population differences weren’t the source of the difference. Phoenix and Denver had similar demographic profiles at the time the fields were being proposed, with no marked variations in age of the potential fan base or ability to pay for tickets.

Where they began to see a clear difference was in urban form. Metropolitan Phoenix is a widespread area without a distinctive downtown core. Its satellite cities of Glendale, Tempe, and Scottsdale all have significant attractions and downtowns of their own that create what the researchers call a “centrifugal effect” on potential visitors to downtown Phoenix. By some estimates, Phoenix has the least developed downtown core in the country.

Denver, on the other hand, has a historic core that dates back to the city’s founding in 1858. In addition, the city itself is far less expansive: encompassing only about 150 squares miles, to more than 9,000 for metropolitan Phoenix. The result of this urban form, for Denver residents, is a considerably more convenient proximity to the stadium.

More broadly, it sounds like having key structures in and near the baseball stadium is very important, perhaps even more so than the particulars of the stadium itself. In other words, building a stadium with little already existing around it might have little impact on the surrounding area. Downtowns work because they are clusters of activity; there are not just office buildings but also nearby residences, restaurants, and cultural institutions that help insure a broad range of visitors to the downtown. Baseball games then become another activity that people want to go to because the games are part of the scene of the whole area.

I visited Coors Field for the first time this past August during the 2012 American Sociological Association meetings. Since I was staying near the Convention Center, we had to walk about 15 minutes to the stadium. The walk was pleasant in itself; Denver has a nice scene between these two destination points. Unlike some other major cities where the downtown is dominated by large buildings, this area has primarily low-rise buildings. People are outside walking around or eating. The stadium itself seemed to be at the edge of the downtown area closer to I-25 but it was clear plenty of other fans were also walking through the surrounding LoDo neighborhood and enjoying the night.

Another question I would ask as a baseball fan: could attendance be boosted in a more dispersed region if the team was winning? Or do parks like Wrigley Field win at attendance with little effect of record because fans want to have the experience?

By the way, here is a picture from my seat. While Coors Field might be more successful than Chase Field, the team was not good last year and there were plenty of empty seats as well as cheap seats online.

CoorsFieldAug2012