Tag Archives: metropolitanization

60+ Chicago suburbs lose population in recent years

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Population loss may not just be limited to Chicago; dozens of Chicago area suburbs have lost population in the last few years.

From 2010 to 2014, Chicago and 73 of the suburbs saw their populations increase.

But the trend reversed from 2014 to 2016. In that time, Chicago and 61 suburbs saw their populations shrink…

Decreases were sharpest in the Cook County suburbs closest to the Chicago. Towns including Rosemont, Des Plaines, Elk Grove Village, Mount Prospect and even Hoffman Estates experienced declines of a full percent or more during the past two years…

But now, both the city and its suburbs are losing population, which is troubling to researchers. “That’s not really typical for us,” said Elizabeth Schuh, principal policy analyst at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “Many regions often tend to lose from the central city as residents migrate to the suburbs. When you’re losing from both is when you see regional decline.”

From the maps, it is not as simple as closer suburbs are losing population and further suburbs are gaining residents. Instead, there seem to be pockets of suburban growth: the far west suburbs, two southwest corridors (though not Joliet), and some communities in eastern DuPage County and southern Lake County. Are these just communities that have had new development or are there particular features of these growing suburbs that are attracting residents (like access to trains or a high quality of life or a mix of housing options)?

The suggestion from the article that this is a regional issue could lead to some fruitful discussions: how does the third largest region in the country work together to attract more residents and businesses? It is easy to cast this as a problem with just Chicago but the city and suburbs are intertwined. A regional approach where multiple parties can win – and not just fight over businesses or residents moving from the suburbs to the city or vice versa – could be the better way to go.

Indianapolis’ Univgov only worked because schools were not included

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The Univgov created in Indianapolis in 1970 may have only gone forward because it didn’t unite all local governments; it intentionally left out school districts.

The celebrated unified government, or “Unigov,” law brought together about a dozen communities in Marion County into a single large city in 1970. The idea was to put a bigger, more powerful Indianapolis onto the national map, simplify city services, and grow the city’s tax base. Indianapolis was not the only city in the country to merge with its surrounding county at that time—but it was the only one to explicitly leave schools out of the deal…

The judge who ordered the busing, Samuel Dillin, stated bluntly that a merged city that left 11 separate school districts was racially motivated. At the time, a majority of the region’s African American and minority students lived in the city center while the surrounding school districts primarily enrolled white students.

“Unigov was not a perfect consolidation,” then-Mayor Richard Lugar said. He went on to be one of Indiana’s most legendary political leaders as a six-term U.S. Senator. “A good number of people really wanted to keep at least their particular school segregated.” Lugar said he knew the 162-page Unigov bill would die in the Indiana General Assembly if schools were included. But he still thinks the merger was worth it, despite the effects it has had on schools…

Unigov’s legacy for Indiana education is mixed at best, but neither Lugar nor Cierzniak think a future Marion County school district merger—one way some scholars say segregation can be reduced—is likely. Township districts have grown considerably, and the state legislature has heard district consolidation plans over the years that have repeatedly failed.

Uniting metropolitan governments is a difficult task, primarily for reasons like this: wealthier, whiter, often suburban residents do not often want to share their resources – particularly schools – with those who are not as wealthy and white. When the middle-class and above look for places to live, they often prioritize the school district and if it has a record of higher performance, will fight to keep others out. These wealthier residents want their tax dollars, especially those based on their better housing values, to go to their children and community. And the white-black divide is often the most difficult line to cross in such situations.

As another recent example, see the case of when Ferguson, Missouri students were given the chance to leave their unaccredited school district. Some parents in the new school district do not react well.

Balkanized suburbs and declining local revenues

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A story about several suburbs outside Philadelphia highlights a problem facing many suburban communities: how can they counter declining revenues when residents and businesses move away?

Pennsylvania’s Delaware County is a crazy quilt of municipalities. Just to the west of Philadelphia, it is home to some of the oldest suburban communities in America. It is dense, with more than half a million people packed into townships and boroughs as small as a half square mile. Such tight confines can make governance difficult under any but the best conditions.

If a neighborhood starts to change in a way its middle-class residents don’t like, they can move a few miles to a newer house, a better school district, and lower property taxes. The communities they leave behind are faced with the impossible math of declining revenues, rising taxes, and an increasingly needy population…

But Hepkins’ most attainable plan is his ongoing effort to lash Yeadon together more tightly with its neighboring municipalities. He dreams of creating a non-profit 311 call center that could cover the six eastern Delaware County municipalities served by the William Penn School District. This centralized office could connect residents with immigration, veteran, and senior services…

The mayors of Lansdowne and East Lansdowne have been receptive to Hepkins’ advances, but his other three counterparts are hesitant. Even if the local politicians do overcome their own parochial interests, it’s an open question how much resource-sharing between six struggling municipalities would accomplish. A system incorporating the region’s more prosperous communities would be far more advantageous, akin to the revenue-sharing policies utilized in the Twin Cities metro region. But nothing like that is being seriously discussed in the Philadelphia area.

Several thoughts come to mind:

  1. This is a reminder that suburbia is much more diverse than the standard image of white and wealthy communities. Suburbs have increasing numbers of non-white and poor residents and there are various types of suburban communities ranging from bedroom suburbs to industrial centers.
  2. Local governments are often very reliant on property taxes. And Pennsylvania has a lot of local taxing bodies though it trails Illinois. Thus, suburban communities are very interested in wealthier residents as well as businesses that can bring in money through property taxes and sales tax revenue. This creates a kind of competition that is difficult for everyone to win.
  3. A number of metropolitan regions and urban communities in the United States have considered ways to band together to tackle common economic and social issues. This can be hard to do because one of the features people like about the suburbs is having more local control. Moving local revenues to another community – even if it is needed or might benefit the region as a whole – can be a hard sell, particularly in better off suburban communities.

I suspect we’ll see more and more stories like this in the years to come.

Hoping to retire the myth of widening roads to reduce traffic

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Eric Jaffe provides a reminder that traffic is not lessened if there were just wider roads:

“Wider Roads = Less Traffic”—The most enduring popular traffic myth holds that building more roads always leads to less congestion. This belief is a perfectly logical one: if there are 100 cars packed into one highway lane, then building a second should mean there’s 50 cars in each. The problem, as transportation researchers have found again and again, is that when this new lane gets added the number of cars doesn’t stay the same. On the contrary, people who stopped driving out of frustration with traffic now attack the road with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.

While residents of heavily congested metro areas have a suite of four-letter words to describe this effect, experts call it “induced demand.” What this means, simply put, is that building more road eventually (if not always immediately) leads to more traffic, not less. Fortunately, local leaders are starting to distinguish reality from myth when it comes to induced demand. Unfortunately, the best way to address it—congestion pricing—remains all-but politically impossible in the U.S. That pretty much leaves one thing to do: deal with it.

A congestion tax is one way to deal with the issue: make people think twice about driving into heavily trafficked areas. At the same time, broader solutions could be employed: planning communities and regions that don’t rely so much on solo driver trips (such as through denser development); increasing funding to mass transit and providing more regular service and/or more options; and finding other ways to cut incentives on driving such as increasing gasoline taxes or paying per mile for driving. Of course, these broader approaches may be asking too much as Americans still like the option of driving. But, it may take some bold politicians and municipalities to try congestion pricing and show that it can work before it is widely adopted.

In other words, you may be able to show studies that demonstrate how this myth isn’t true but perhaps Americans dislike the truth – and the solutions that go with – even more.

A Chicago congestion tax reveals regional issues in addressing traffic

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Looking for revenue and to reduce traffic, a congestion tax may be on the table in Chicago:

According to Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Alderman Ed Burke recently persuaded Mayor Rahm Emanuel “to study the feasibility and logistics of collecting a congestion fee from suburbanites who drive into the city.” The move could raise millions for the city and keep cars off city streets, easing congestion.

A panel has since been tasked with determining how such a fee would be collected, where it could be collected, and the costs of operating such a program…

In the Sun-Times, Burke was quoted as saying a congestion tax has been “extremely successful” in European cities such as London. There, drivers pay a charge for being able to enter certain zones from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays. Cameras monitor the zones and drivers who don’t pay are fined.

About 194,000 vehicles drive to Chicago’s main business district each day from elsewhere in the city and the suburbs, according to a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning study conducted before Feb. 2010.

Traffic is a major problem in the Chicago region; see a recent report as to how many hours are lost each year. A congestion tax could be part of a comprehensive answer to this. However, it would be silly to expect this tax on its own to solve all the problems. Having effective mass transit across the region would help. If you want people to drive less, they need to have viable train and bus options. Having denser development near job centers throughout the region would help. Promoting Chicago’s core may be good but it also means concentrating more people from throughout the region on a single place. Promoting more bicycling and walking would help. Simply adding more lanes and roads does not necessarily help.

The other interesting part of this story from the Daily Herald are the predictable negative reactions from suburban leaders. They don’t want suburbanites to be penalized for going into Chicago. Yet, solutions to these issues have to be at the regional level. If suburban leaders don’t want a congestion tax, what are they willing to give to improve transit throughout the region? Can everyone contribute some money to help all residents of the region? The efforts of individual communities – even Chicago if it is just acting alone – won’t be enough.

Can IL, WI, and IN work together to promote the region?

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Efforts to cross state lines to promote the Chicago region have not produced much:

With Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner threatening to “rip the economic guts out of Indiana” and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence admitting to “a playful penchant to poach business from Illinois,” efforts to forge alliances within the tri-state metro area have been consigned to scholarly conferences and countless committee meetings, with scant tangible results…

In the global competition to attract business and talent, regions that collaborate to establish a brand, develop industry hubs, streamline transportation, foster a cultural scene and revitalize neighborhoods have a competitive edge, experts say…

Formalized regional collaboration is paying off for a number of major metropolitan regions, helping to stoke their economies and lure new residents. Denver-area taxpayers have anted up repeatedly for cultural and transit projects that have revitalized the city. Portland and its suburbs worked together to rev up exports. Metro Minneapolis’ tax-sharing strategy has helped reduce the gap between rich and poor communities. The communities lining the southern coast of Lake Michigan comprise the nation’s third largest economy. They are home to a rich assortment of businesses, an educated workforce, respected universities and a massive, if overloaded, transportation system.

But greater Chicago’s tepid growth rate is outpaced by a number of metropolitan areas with cohesive regional strategies. Denver, for instance, ranked No. 6 in economic performance among the nation’s 100 largest metros since its pre-recession peak, while Chicago was No. 77, according to Brookings Institution data.

This is a good example of how relatively arbitrary political boundaries limit the ability to operate within day-to-day social boundaries. The Chicago region exists as an interdependent whole and it cross state lines into Wisconsin and Indiana as well as includes hundreds of Illinois municipalities. Yet, politicians are elected to represent their particular geographic area and don’t get much credit if nearby areas also do well. Voters don’t have broad views of regions – efforts to support metropolitan institutions and bodies are often voted down across the United States – and prefer to exercise local control. Thus, politicians hunker down and do what they can to boost their particular chances even if what they can do is affected by what these nearby leaders do. For example, see Indiana’s ongoing effort to attract Illinois businesses. In contrast, see what a 2012 OECD report said could be done across the Chicago region.

Given the issues facing the region (from mass transit to stormwater management to poverty to affordable housing to jobs to population decreases and more), one would hope that the various leaders and governmental bodies will start working together before it might be too late to do anything productive.

Argument: regionalism = “play[ing] Sim City with residents’ lives”

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One critic charges new regional plans in Minneapolis-St. Paul threatens a democratic way of life:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”…

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area…

The Thrive plan’s most radical element may be to evaluate all future development policies through the “lens” of climate change. Over time, this could give the council a license to dramatically remake the entire metro area…

Once implementation begins, however, Twin Cities residents will likely realize that Thrive MSP 2040’s centralized decision-making and Orwellian appeals to “equity” and “sustainability” are a serious threat to their democratic traditions of individual liberty and self-government. Let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.

This is an argument several conservatives (another example here involving the UN) have made in recent years: the government wants to use urban planning as a means to control people’s lives, forcing them to live in denser areas with people they would not choose to live near. It violates property rights, individual liberty, local government, etc.

Here is an issue with these arguments: they tend to ignore the real issues present in metropolitan areas that involve both cities and suburbs. Adopting a free-market approach to planning, growth, and mobility leads to the outcomes we have today: ongoing residential segregation (both by race and class, affecting everything from school districts to health outcomes to location mismatches between employees and jobs), a lack of affordable housing, local governments that are numerous (and possibly inefficient), often can’t agree with each other and thereby hold up helpful projects or promote unhelpful competition (like a race for the bottom in tax breaks), transportation options that are expensive (whether maintaining a car or trying to make mass transit work in the suburbs), and a general defensive crouch of not wanting to deal with any problems outside of one’s immediate community. All of this reinforces existing inequalities in society: those with resources can afford nicer communities while those with less live in places where it is more difficult to move up.

Is there some middle ground here? To be honest, government is already heavily involved in local and regional decisions and conservatives probably like some of this (such as zoning). And some of the regional options allow for higher levels of efficiency by leveraging certain resources in effective ways. Maybe the real issue is that few residents of urban areas – whether conservative or liberal – want to live near public housing or affordable housing and/or want to retain the right to use their money to move to a more advantageous location should something not work out (like the neighbors).

As a final note, earlier versions of SimCity didn’t allow much control over the lives of individual residents. Similarly, the game was geared toward more urban environments as sprawling communities were more costly and didn’t provide the kind of density that would lead to better things.

Ferguson doesn’t get much revenue from the Fortune 500 companies in town

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Many suburban communities give tax breaks to corporations so that they locate in their community. Ferguson, Missouri is one such case where Emerson Electronics and other businesses don’t pay as much as they might in local taxes:

In 2014, the assessed valuation of real and personal property on Emerson’s entire 152-acre, seven-building campus was roughly $15 million. That value has gone up and down over the last five years as Emerson has sold off some buildings and built others, but it has not exceeded $15 million in the period since the data center was completed. So what happened to that brand-new $50 million dollar building?…

For tax purposes, Emerson’s Ferguson campus is appraised according to its “fair market value.” That means a $50 million dollar solar-powered data center is only worth what another firm would be willing to pay for it. “Our location in Ferguson affects the fair market value of the entire campus,” Polzin explained. By this reasoning, the condition of West Florissant Avenue explains the low valuation of the company’s headquarters.In fact, the opposite is true: The rock-bottom assessment value of the Ferguson campus helps ensure that West Florissant Avenue remains in its current condition, year after year. It severely limits the tax money Emerson contributes to the Ferguson-Florissant district’s struggling schools (Michael Brown graduated from nearby Normandy High School, a nearly 100 percent African American school that has been operating without state accreditation for the last two years), and to the government of St. Louis County more generally. On the 25 parcels Emerson owns all around St. Louis County, it pays the county $1.3m in property taxes. Ferguson itself receives far less. Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants.

St. Louis County doesn’t just assess Emerson a low market value. It then divides that number in three—so its final property value, for tax purposes, ends up being one third of its already low appraised value. In some states, Ferguson would be able to offset this write-down by raising its own percentage tax rate. Voters would even be able to decide which services needed the most help and raise property taxes for specific reasons. But Missouri sets a limit for such levies: $1 per $100 of property. As Joseph Pulitzer wrote of St. Louis during the first Gilded Age, “millions and millions of property in this city escape all taxation.”…

Emerson Electric isn’t the only business on Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue. The street is also home to a number of big box stores including a Home Depot, a Walmart, and a Sam’s Club, located at the city’s northern limit. These companies all came to town in 1997 through something called tax increment financing—known (to the extent it’s known at all) by the acronym TIF. Along with low appraisals and tax abatements, TIF districts are one of Missouri’s principal tools for encouraging new development.

The conclusion here is that these tax policies reproduce the economic inequalities in Ferguson. Hence, the community has to find alternative sources of revenue, such as targeting motorists.

Here is where this gets trickier: if Ferguson didn’t offer these deals, could it have attracted these businesses? If many suburbs participate in the game of tax breaks, wouldn’t someone else offer good tax breaks? Where race matters here is that communities like Ferguson – lower income, transitioning from white to black over recent decades – have to offer even better tax breaks to compete. But, for all of these communities, it is a race to the bottom as a better deal to attract a corporation means less revenue for the city. Still, local politicians can sell the jobs created or the prestige generated. But, as this article points out, the jobs and prestige may not help much in the long run.

What you might need here is a metropolitan wide policy against such tax breaks or TIF districts to reduce the competition. Or, perhaps some tax revenue sharing program where sales tax and property tax dollars are partly redistributed to reflect who shops at or works at these facilities (they all don’t come from the community in which the firm is located). Yet, such policies require a lot of political will and again encounter the problem of race as communities, especially wealthier ones, will not want to share their revenues with others.

Suburbanites who don’t like proposals for affordable housing in the Twin Cities region

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The Metropolitan Council for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is working on plans for affordable housing but a number of suburbanites are not pleased with where the affordable housing might go:

The Met Council sees a growing problem. Its own newly available data suggest that annual production of affordable housing has dropped by hundreds of units since 2010, even as market-rate housing has rebounded.

An advance peek at the Met Council’s proposed goals, to be released late Monday, shows that communities considered to be prime locations for adding affordable units include upper income suburbs, such as North Oaks and Eden Prairie, and cornfield’s-edge fringe communities such as Minnetrista and Lake Elmo…

The target numbers — released this week for public comment, with adjustments possible from now to July — are part of a once-per-decade planning process that will begin in every city this fall. Each must start to figure out how to accommodate the additional units.

The Met Council is under heavy fire for allegedly pushing too much affordable housing into areas with plenty of it already, intensifying concentrations of poverty and perpetuating racial segregation in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The region has a history of metropolitanization, a rare occurrence in American cities, as well as an openness to immigrants, yet advancing affordable housing units in middle- to upper-end suburbs may be going too far. As some of the suburbanites in the article note, they moved to these communities to escape issues like this. But, the quality of life concerns they tend to express (good school, low crime, sense of community) seem to be inextricably linked with race/ethnicity and social class. Just a reminder that part of the benefits of having money in the United States is that one can move to such a place that insulates you against interacting with others.

Paris planning to add millions in the suburbs to its boundaries

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Plans for metropolitanization in Paris are well underway:

The new Métropole du Grand Paris, or Metropolis of Greater Paris, will include nearly seven million people, more than triple the population now living in the central city. It will swallow rich suburbs to the west. But it should also provide better access to jobs and to business hubs and, if it really works, a greater sense of belonging for millions of immigrant families who live in poverty and isolation on the city’s southern, northern and eastern fringes. Resources would be redistributed, in particular those dealing with housing. The complexion of Paris would change…

As much as any struggling suburb, this one shows how urban development across decades, even centuries, has failed millions of immigrant families and contributed to what France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, recently denounced as “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.” His remark provoked a lot of hand-wringing in France. But, as all sorts of French planners, architects, historians and political scientists point out, a legacy of belonging and exclusion, center and periphery, inside and outside, is baked into the very layout of Paris and of places like Grigny, which has nice old houses and woods but is a de facto warehouse for tens of thousands of mostly poor, disenfranchised Muslims.

In essence, Paris Métropole promises a new regional council to coordinate housing, urban planning and transit for a greater Paris. The idea evolved from a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy, who as president imagined business hubs and a high-speed train linking them to the city’s airports. That morphed into a more complex rail system serving poorer suburbs.

Pierre Mansat has spent years helping to put the plan together. He said the other morning that taxes on businesses, and, France hopes, billions more from Europe, will pay for Paris Métropole. Who knows whether right-wing and left-wing politicians from suburbs and city neighborhoods will actually cooperate, but Mr. Mansat stressed that “it’s above all about creating a new image of Paris as more inclusive, integrated, fluid.”

This sounds like an interesting confluence of factors. On one hand is inequality in the French suburbs which has been surfacing for quite a while. Urban images are important, if at the least for France’s international reputation and Paris’ thriving tourism, as are aiming to give all residents opportunities for a better life. On the other hand are the practicalities of comprehensively tackling urban issues – like housing and transportation – that require the cooperation of a range of communities. Cities can do a lot on their own but many of their needs are tied to the fate of nearby communities that can either join cities in pursuing common goals or pursue their own.

Of course, the article suggests it isn’t clear how successful the metropolitanization attempt might be. This is a long-term project and it will be interesting to see how other major cities learn from this process.