Tag Archives: neighborhoods

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.

Advantageously framing a teardown McMansions debate

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A story on Burbank, California residents opposing teardown McMansions illustrates one way to frame the debate:

Put a six bedroom, five bath, mansion, next to a 1940’s three bed, one bath.  Sound a little mismatched?

A group of Burbank residents think so, and they’re urging Burbank officials to regulate “McMansions” from defacing the character of their neighborhoods…

Her dutch colonial home has been carefully remodeled to stay in line with the character of the neighborhood.

Right across the street from her, a historic house was demolished, oak trees were uprooted, all to make way for three huge six bedroom mansions, two sit empty for months at a time and are up for rent.

Here is what is emphasized in this framing: the lives of long-time residents of an established neighborhood are being disturbed by outsiders constructing big homes that serve their personal interests rather than those of the community. Modest homes next to gargantuan homes. A quaint neighborhood character versus a super-sized, garish character. This is a common rhetorical technique utilized by those opposed to teardown McMansions. (This argument may also include financial pitches as older residents have a hard time keeping up with increased property taxes.)

The counterarguments can include:

(1) Individual property owners should be able to do what they want with their property. This includes the rights of current property owners to cash out on their once-modest homes and for new owners to be able to use their resources to build the kind of home they desire.

(2) Neighborhoods are going to change over time. Suburban residents can be guilty of trying to “freeze” their neighborhoods in time, preserving the features they liked when they moved in. (This isn’t just limited to teardown situations. See NIMBY.) However, this limits the “natural” change that might take place in neighborhoods as new residents move in and social conditions change.

Even this article mainly provides the viewpoint of those opposed to McMansions, it also hints at the common divide in teardown discussions: the rights of owners in a neighborhood to preserve what is there versus the rights of individuals and outsiders to change features of the neighborhood. However, this framing as presented here can be quite effective as it suggests outsiders threaten good neighborhoods.

See an earlier post on Burbank and McMansions here.

How much Walter White may have lowered his neighbor’s property values

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Breaking Bad protagonist and meth kingpin Walter White might not have made his neighbors happy:

In his 2011 paper, “The Lasting Effects of Crime: The Relationship of Discovered Methamphetamine Laboratories and Home Values,” Holy Cross econ professor Joshua Congdon-Hohman calculates how much damage meth labs cause to surrounding home values after they’re discovered…Using housing sales data from Akron, Ohio — home to that state’s largest concentration of meth labs  — Congdon-Hohman finds the following:

  • For homes sold within an eighth of a mile after a lab is discovered, there is a 10.5% decline in sales prices.
  • Within the first year of the discovery the decline can be as much as 19%.
  • For homes sold within a quarter of a mile after a lab is discovered, there is a 4.5% decline.
  • The declines persist for at least two years.
  • It didn’t matter if an additional meth lab was discovered — just a single busted cook site can take down several blocks.

Summary: you don’t want meth makers on your street, particularly if you want more money when you sell your house. If reduced property values aren’t enough, I suspect the typical suburbanite also doesn’t want meth makers on their street because they don’t fit the image of a happy, stable, law-abiding neighborhood.

Chicago looking for redesigns for 49 public spaces

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The City of Chicago invites proposals for redesigning 49 public spaces:

Chicago is pulling the next lever in its multi-part bike & pedestrian improvement project, dubbed Make Way For People. After beginning to address critical shortfalls in bicycling infrastructure, easing hazardous pedestrian crossings, and adding new spaces for spontaneous leisure, the City is looking to imaginatively rebuild its 49 public plazas. A Request for Proposals (RFP) has gone out, reports Streetsblog Chicago, and will reward one private entity with a contract to tackle at least 30 of the citywide locations. The project will build on modest interventions like CDOT’s “People Spots” and Architecture for Humanity’s ACTIVATE! design competition that spawned design interventions to a handful of neglected public spaces.

Unlike “People Spots”, “People Plazas” will work with existing gathering spots— spots that could generally use sprucing up, livening up, and year-round attractions. CDOT Project Director Janet Attarian tells Streetsblog’s John Greenfield she suspects the RFP will be most interesting to nonprofit groups and that awarding the contract in bulk will ensure lesser spaces in less desirable neighborhoods don’t get short shrift in the bidding. According to the RFP, the city will give $50,000 in seed money in the first year of the contract to help attract cultural programming to the plazas, with ongoing revenue available through advertising, retail, and grant opportunities. Existing positive activities must be retained (i.e. farmers market) and, obviously, the contractor has to have some maintenance know-how. Proposals must reach CDOT by Monday, September 30.

This sounds like it has the potential to be an exciting program, giving groups with closer connections to neighborhoods the ability to develop spaces that can enhance social life. However, I wonder what kind of groups would have the ability to submit proposals and then carry them out over an extended period of time.

Additionally, this sounds like it be an interesting “natural experiment” by looking at the outcomes for these different public spaces given the different organizers as well as demographics around the spaces.

“The McMansion Man” builds larger houses in the Hamptons

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The Hamptons have long been known as a retreat for the wealthy but the recent actions of one builder suggest the houses are getting bigger and nicer:

“We’re as busy as we’ve ever been,” said Joe Farrell, the president of Farrell Building, during a recent interview and tour of his $43 million, 17,000-square-foot home here. The estate, called the Sandcastle, features two bowling lanes, a skate ramp, onyx window frames and, just for fun, an A.T.M. regularly restocked with $20,000 in $10 bills…

With a customer base composed largely of Wall Street financiers, Mr. Farrell has more than 20 new homes under construction, or slated for construction, at a time, making him the biggest builder here by far. He has plans for more, many of them speculative homes built before they have buyers…

“Houses have gotten smaller over all but not entirely: 8,000 square feet was the norm, now 6,500 is,” Mr. Farrell said. “Everyone wants six or seven bedrooms and their pool and their tennis.”

Where Mr. Farrell built speculative homes that sold for as much as $20 million before the recession, he now specializes in properties that sell for between $3 million and $10 million. “Mostly, though, $3 million to $6,” he said. “I love that market — there are probably 10 times as many people in that market than to buy an eight- or nine-million-dollar house, right?”

I’m not quite sure what the issue is. The Hamptons are for the wealthy and this man builds houses for the wealthy (though they are smaller and cheaper than a short time ago). But, the article suggests there might be several things going on:

1. Even the wealthy in the United States have to be careful to not completely flaunt their wealth. In particular, when economic times are bad it doesn’t look great to keep spending at high levels when other people are struggling.

2. There is an ongoing tension between old money and new money. The older homes, associated with older money, have more character and have been part of the community for decades. The new homes, associated with new money from the finance sector or from celebrities, are seen as gauche.

3. The construction of more spec/mass housing means the whole area will suffer by appearing more generic. Any historic architecture will disappear under a flood of mass-produced McMansions.

These are interesting arguments in themselves but I suspect (1) many Americans can’t relate and (2) there is enough money involved that it doesn’t really matter – just help pave over the issues with some more money. In other words, this provides a small window into how the wealthy view change within their own neighborhoods.

Updated data on continuing residential segregation in the United States

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Emily Badger sums up some recent data on residential segregation: here is a set of maps of residential segregation over the years in a few American cities, a long  infographic on the costs of segregation, and some snippets of data.

    • On average, affluent blacks and Hispanics live in neighborhoods with fewer resources than poor whites do.
    • Census data from 2000, for example, showed that the average black household making more than $60,000 lived in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average white household earning less than $20,000.
    • A longitudinal study run from 1968-2005 found that the average black child spent one-quarter of his or her childhood living in a high-poverty neighborhood. For the average white child, that number is 3 percent.
    • The black child poverty rate in 1968 was 35 percent; it is the same today.
    • Minorities make up 56 percent of the population living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities.
    • Middle-income blacks (with household incomes between $50,000-$60,000) live in neighborhoods that are on average more polluted than the average neighborhood where white households making less than $10,000 live.

All in all, residential segregation is an ongoing issue. Where people live and the consistent sorting that takes place by race and ethnicity matters for life chances. I’d love to see a second edition of American Apartheid…it is its 20th anniversary after all.

Bike sharing programs in Chicago, NYC, Boston, Washington D.C. skew white

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The Chicago Tribune looked at the locations of the new Divvy bike sharing stations in Chicago and found overall they were more accessible to white residents:

By design, the Emanuel administration’s freshly launched Divvy bike-sharing network is centered in crowded neighborhoods. But one byproduct of the strategy is that the new transportation alternative is far more convenient for white residents than those who are black or brown, a Tribune analysis shows…

Federal and local taxpayers bankrolled $22.5 million in seed money for the bicycle system, but to thrive and eventually expand it needs to quickly attract a solid customer base and demonstrate financial viability…

Nearly half of all whites in the city live within a short walking distance — a quarter mile or less — of spots the city has designated for bike rental and drop-off, according to the analysis, which overlaid census data on the locations announced for Divvy stations.

By comparison, fewer than 19 percent of Latinos and nearly 16 percent of African-Americans live within a quarter mile of the bike stations, the data show…

In New York, nearly three times the size of Chicago, about 20 percent of white residents but only 8 percent of blacks and Latinos live within a quarter mile of a docking station for that city’s new Citi Bike system, the Tribune found. The two-year-old Hubway system in the Boston area puts a docking station within a quarter mile of 44 percent of the white population, but just 26 percent of Hispanics and 19 percent of blacks.

The proximity gap closes somewhat in the Washington, D.C., area, where the Capital Bikeshare system places a docking station within easy one-quarter mile reach of half of all white residents, 44 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of African-Americans, according to the newspaper’s analysis.

A recent user survey released by Capital Bikeshare concluded that not only are 80 percent of the responding customers white, but nearly six in 10 are men, nearly two-thirds are under 35 years of age, 95 percent have an undergraduate college degree and 56 percent have a postgraduate degree.

Are bike sharing programs a new strategy for attracting or retaining young professional males in cities? Is bike sharing primarily a program aimed at the Creative Class and tourists? This would not be surprising as plenty of cities are looking to expand their downtown populations of young professionals.

It would be interesting to hear more about the process that went into locating the bike stations in Chicago. How exactly did the city try to balance population figures with economic figures? Now that I think about, we tend not to hear such insider information from Chicago…

Another thought: why not also map the bike locations by social class? Even for whites, are the bikes located more in upper-end neighborhoods or are they aimed at the working class?

The effect of neighborhoods on persistent inequality between races

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A new book by sociologist Patrick Sharkey highlights how neighborhood conditions contribute to persistent inequality by race:

Put more bluntly:

Even if a white and a black child are raised by parents who have similar jobs, similar levels of education, and similar aspirations for their children, the rigid segregation of urban neighborhoods means that the black child will be raised in a residential environment with higher poverty, fewer resources, poorer schools, and more violence than that of the white child.

This might not seem to make sense: education gains have been fairly substantial, so shouldn’t income and wealth follow? The problem is that whites are more likely to lock in gains over generations. Blacks are more likely to be in a higher income centile than their parents than whites (55/50), and less likely to be in a lower one (44/49). But they’re more likely to be in a lower income quintile (53/41) and less likely to be in a higher income quintile (35/45). Whites are more likely to inch down and leap up the socioeconomic ladder; for blacks, vice versa.

By way of explanation, Sharkey points to the work of Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo on the black middle class: “When white families advance in economic status, they are able to translate this economic advantage into spacial advantage by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children. An extensive research literature demonstrates that African Americans are not able to translate economic resources into spacial advantage to the same degree.” In the real world, this is the reality for middle-class neighborhoods like Chatham, which struggle to maintain their economic and residential base while buffeted by violence creeping in from neighboring communities.

This research counters the idea that decreased educational differences necessarily leads to reduced wealth and spatial differences. There are other important factors at work, including the spatial context. Education is not a silver bullet that solves all of the issues related to poverty.

This would seem to line up with research on wealth differences between whites and blacks (see Black Wealth/White Wealth by Oliver and Shapiro). Even if blacks have made educational gains, wealth is partly generational. Wealth really helps with buying a home in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods that then offer better schools, environments, and social capital. And this homeownership gap is still large in the first quarter of 2013 (Table 16): 73.4% for whites, 43.1% for blacks, 45.3% for Hispanics, and 54.6% for all other races.

Countering blanket statements about cities and suburbs

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A Dallas columnist argues typical views of the city and suburbs are outdated:

Yet we seem to cling stubbornly to outdated city-vs.-suburb cliches and mutual suspicions that serve no purpose other than to make people think ill of one another.

On one side are quasi-racist Dallas baiters for whom “urban” is thinly veiled doublespeak for poor, minority, crime-plagued neighborhoods where government is unfailingly corrupt and public schools actually make kids stupider. It’s a segregationist stereotype that by now should be eroded by three decades worth of urban revitalization, crime reduction and development of spectacular public spaces.

On the other are sanctimonious hipsters who use “suburban” as an insult that describes selfish, conformist commuters who drive everywhere in super-sized SUVs, spend their leisure time at the mall, vote like the people next door and think “art” is a Thomas Kinkade print. It’s a myopic definition that hasn’t budged since Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road in 1961.

The truth is that the places we live are as individual as we are, and we choose them based on our individual priorities — entertainment, safety, good schools, friendly neighbors, what we can afford, what we want to see when we look out the window.

I agree with one conclusion but not the other. First, individual communities, whether they are urban neighborhoods with a sense of place or far-flung suburbs, are unique and have different characters. This is particularly true for a number of the people who live there and buy, in terms of housing but also symbolically and culturally, into the place. Both cities and suburbs are assumed to be all alike and this is simply not the case. There are distinguishing differences between these different types, such as population density, the number of nearby jobs and business, the kinds of housing, the history, etc. but it is silly to lump them all together.

On the second conclusion, it isn’t quite as simple as suggesting people make individual choices. This may feel like it is the case, particularly for those with means (money, status), but even those people are constrained by the lifestyles they desire. But, people with less means have fewer choices and then are restricted by cheaper housing options or what is close to jobs. In other words, residential choices tend to fall into patterns based on class and race, whether in the cities or suburbs.