Tag Archives: suburbs

When the economic crisis hits Naperville, life there is still better than in many places

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The Chicago Tribune looks at how the economic crisis has led to a “recalibration” for some in the large and wealthy suburb of Naperville:

For Naperville, in some ways the quintessential suburb for middle-class strivers, the latest census data show that the median household income of $101,911 is nearly double the Illinois median. Nearly two-thirds of the adults 25 and older have attained at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30.3 percent statewide.

Young families have flocked to the suburb about 30 miles west of Chicago since the 1980s, attracted by good schools, jobs along the Interstate 88 corridor and public transit to Chicago. With a population of 141,853 in 2010, Naperville was the fifth-largest city in the state. The local government pays attention to details, from maintaining well-manicured parks to coordinating the traffic lights in downtown Naperville during rush hour to ease traffic congestion…

But there are signs that more residents are struggling to get by in a stagnant economy…

People in their 40s and 50s with school-age children felt the brunt of the last recession through the destruction of home equity values and the loss of value in 401(k) accounts. Meanwhile, median family income has fallen substantially over an entire decade for the first time since the Great Depression. And health care costs have grown sharply during the same period.

I think I understand the purpose of the article: the economic crisis is even affecting wealthier communities like Naperville where it seems like many had reached the American Dream. On the other hand, I’m still not sure this article accomplishes its purposes. People the Tribune talked to have suffered setbacks but they are still doing okay compared to many Americans. One family was affected when the husband lost his well-paying job so the wife returned to full-time work. But the husband found a job again and the wife is now not working again. Another family owns a comedy club where business has been tight. However, business is now picking up and they still have their substantial investment in the club. More Napervillians are saving more or focusing more on their families but they can still generally afford to do this.

I’m not downplaying the troubles many in Naperville have faced. However, Naperville residents are not the ones who have been hit the hardest among Americans. Indeed, the median household income, the number of jobs, the quality of life, and the low levels of poverty and crime still make Naperville an unusually well-off place in the United States. Naperville and its residents will weather the storm better than many as long as the community is able to retain its strong white-collar employment base.

In the game of extra-local housing politics, call the proposed housing renovation you don’t like a McMansion

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Cases like these happen frequently: a homeowner wants to enlarge their existing home. (This is a different but related ballgame to cases of teardowns.) If the neighbors don’t like it, there is common tactic they can use: dub it a McMansion.

The commission unanimously voted Oct. 9 to allow the homeowner to keep a permit to build a 2,692-square-foot single-family residence on the property located on Huntridge Lane. The project property is located in a standard zoning district, which permits two-story homes up to 28 feet in height. The project was initially approved by the city’s community development director on Aug. 23.

However, the city received several letters, emails and telephone calls from neighbors voicing concerns about the project, with issues ranging from concerns about privacy to the compatibility of the proposed two-story residence in a predominantly single-story neighborhood, as well as the size, bulk, height and mass of the project.

During the public hearing, one neighbor referred to the home as a “monster house” or “McMansion,” and others suggested reducing the scale of project.

City staff stated that the project is consistent with all aspects of the R1 zoning ordinance and other related city ordinances. In addition, the project was not subject to design review by the city since the proposed second floor is less than 66 percent of the square footage of the first floor and there are 15-foot side yard setbacks on either side of the second floor.

It sounds like the homeowner followed the zoning guidelines in the community and made some adjustments to cut back on the project when asked by the city. But, the McMansion tag used by opponents can be quite effective: it suggests the home is garish and unnecessary. It puts the owners and/or builder in a bad light as it suggests they are not looking out for the interests of others. While 2,692 square foot is not that big since the average new home is the US is around 2,500 square feet, it is larger than the surrounding homes which look to be (on Zillow) around 1,200 square feet without any additions. In the end, calling it a McMansion wasn’t enough in this case in Cupertino, California but the same tactic will be used again elsewhere. It would be interesting to see if the neighbors opposed to the project continue to call the particular home a McMansion in the years to come.

Through the magic of Google Street View, you can check out Huntridge Lane in Cupertino, California. The street is about one block and 13 houses long. It looks like (and Zillow also suggests) the homes were built in the early 1960s as single-story ranches. As the news article notes, several homes in the area already have second story additions. Also, Zillow suggests (and this could be a ways off) the homes on this block are worth around a million dollars. Is this one proposed addition, the so-called McMansion, really a threat? Perhaps this should lead to a new maxim: all housing politics are extra-local (usually within a few minute walk in each direction).

How suburbs deal with the loss of a major big box retailer

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Big box stores can provide a lot of tax revenue so when a big box store leaves a suburban community, it can be a big blow:

The unexpected closure — it was announced in April and the store shuttered in May — forced village officials to approve a series of last-minute budget cuts totaling $216,000.The largest savings came by cutting hours for part-time firefighters, a move that limited response times out of one of the village’s two stations. West Dundee also moved its 54 employees to a cheaper health insurance carrier, reduced hours for part-time and seasonal employees, eliminated a community service position in the police department, canceled a National Night Out event and decided to hold fewer board meetings…

But Rolling Meadows officials found themselves scrambling in January 2010 when Sam’s Club abruptly closed after eight years in business, City Manager Barry Krumftok said.

The closure meant the loss of about $600,000 in various annual revenues from the retailer — nearly an 8 percent loss to the general fund…

The city responded by eliminating two part-time jobs and four full-time positions among the police department’s civilian staff, delaying the hire of a finance director, eliminating holiday decorations and glow necklaces for kids at the tree-lighting ceremony, ending a program reserved to commemorate employee and volunteer milestones, and holding off on painting its historical museum, digitizing city records and parkway tree replacement, removal and trimming.

In many cases, big-box stores leave one town to build a bigger, better store just out of the taxman’s reach.

To paraphrase a common saying, if you live by the big box store, you can also die by the big box store. I can see why communities would want big box stores since they generate tremendous tax revenues but at the same time, communities would prefer to have a diversified economy where a single employer or firm doesn’t control a sizable portion of the municipal budget. This hasn’t just happened to suburbs reliant on big box stores; it has happened to communities reliant on single factories or industrial firms that might be prosperous for years or even decades but when business dries up, the community doesn’t have much recourse. It doesn’t sound like the big box stores are as big of a loss as some factories to some towns but a 5-10% revenue loss can be huge, particularly in a down economy.

Once the initial budget adjustments are made, then the loss of the big box store becomes perhaps even more problematic for smaller communities: can they find someone else to lease or buy the property? Should the community continue to pursue big box retailers or does it pursue different directions? In an economy that in recent years has been built on a consumer economy, many suburbs will probably redouble efforts and continue to pursue more white-collar, high-tech jobs but there are not enough of these to go around at the moment.

How Republicans became the party against cities

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After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.

Why Asian immigrants moved to the American suburbs

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There has been a flurry of research in the last few decades on the movement of Asian immigrants to the American suburbs, notably looking at the suburbs of Los Angeles and working with the concepts of “ethnoburbs.” Here is a fresh take on the topic from a researcher looking at what has happened in some of these Los Angeles suburbs:

The homeowners I spoke to who settled in the now-Asian ethnoburbs of Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, or Walnut, said that they were drawn to the country lifestyle. As one white interviewee says, “our house was backed into the wilderness… Diamond Bar looked like a ranch… a nice place to live, to raise children, (and) a clean healthy environment.” Asian American interviewees – many of whom originate from dense metropolitan areas in East and Southeast Asia, and settled in the east Valley in the mid-1980s and beyond – also sought the east Valley’s country lifestyle since the term implied wholesomeness, the setting suggested order and harmony, and the image accompanied with a single-family home connoted the actualization of the American Dream.

While scholars and researchers rightfully problematize political economies, migration patterns, and social dynamics between different racial and class groups in the contemporary ethnoburb, oftentimes post-1965 Asian immigrants moved to these neighborhoods for tangible and banal reasons. Interviewees provided various mundane and frank motives as to why the east Valley sold them twenty or thirty years ago: inexpensive new housing, reputable school districts, easy access to work, distance from urban crime and racial “others,” and by the late 1980s and 1990s, conveniences to ethnic commodities. Though classism, neatly planned neighborhoods, and country living were pivotal aspects in residents’ decisions to settle, “everyday” matters and concerns also informed how a community grew, struggled, and changed. The Asianization of the greater San Gabriel Valley is not slowing down anytime soon as Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jordan Segall demonstrate.

The contemporary emergence of California’s majority-Asian suburb, then, is not solely about Pacific Rim capital, immigrant family reunification, or Asian Americans’ “Model Minority” status allowing them to enter these formerly elite white neighborhoods. It is deeply linked to how immigrants and non-immigrants imagine, absorb, construct, and reinforce popular discourse and imagery of the American Dream, rosy suburbia, and the U.S. West. The salience of these themes influences how individuals or groups envision and build community throughout the U.S. and across generations.

It sounds like the argument here is about adding the lure of suburban culture to the structural arguments. Like others who moved to the suburbs, the cultural values and ideals attached to the American suburbs proved attractive to Asian immigrants even as some of the larger structural forces, like class, made it more possible.

A comparative element might be helpful here: were Asian immigrants more drawn to the American suburbs than immigrants from other places? If so, why?

View from across the pond: Americans don’t interact with people unlike themselves because of the automobile

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Here a sociological take on American social interactions and our love of the car:

A while ago a friend of mine, a leading sociologist, told me that the reason people in the United States seem so conservative and set in their ways, their politics so polarised and full of hate, is that they never meet anybody who disagrees with them, they never encounter a single other person who offers a different way of seeing the world, and so their attitudes become overly rigid.

The reason for this is that their lives are so governed by the private automobile. The average citizen of America lives not in a city where you have to rub along with others, but in a suburb where everybody is ethnically and socially indistinguishable, then they get in their car to drive to work and tune their radio to a station that exactly mirrors their own views and when they arrive at work all the people there share the same opinions.

Three thoughts:

1. This sounds like The Big Sort kind of world where people live with people like them, chalk it up to taste and preferences, and don’t think about the structural factors, like class and race and settlement patterns, that influence these decisions.

2. Mass transit is implicated here: Americans don’t want to ride buses and be that close to others. Instead, we would rather hop into our personal cars – think about all of those single-occupant cars in rush hour traffic.

3. But, we can’t think about mass transit without also thinking about how settlement patterns, generally more spread out in the idealized American suburbs, influences the feasibility of  mass transit.

Put this all together and perhaps there is some merit to these arguments. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans dislike other people. However, it could mean that Americans tend to privilege the lives and actions of individuals before considering community life.

Property values, city finances, and downtown development: controversy over approved senior housing in downtown Wheaton

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New development projects in already-developed suburban areas can attract controversy. Here is an example from downtown Wheaton, Illinois: the city council just approved a senior housing project but some of the neighbors are not happy with the change to the site and there are some questions about funding and whether the city will be left with a bill.

The council voted 4-3 this week to allow construction of a 167-unit facility on a site once slated for luxury condominiums as part of the Courthouse Square complex at the corner of Naperville Road and Willow Avenue…

The approval came after nine planning and zoning board meetings totaling more than 24 hours with testimony from experts, opponents and supporters. In a nearly unanimous vote in August, that board recommended the council deny the zoning plans.

The original proposal for the complex, supported by the council in 2004, called for a mix of townhouses and condos. But developers cited the housing market crash when they pulled the plug on what were supposed to be the second and third midrise buildings. Northfield-based Focus Development Inc. and West Chicago-based Airhart Construction Corp. partnered on the project.

The saga continued when developers asked to amend the plan to allow senior housing, angering some Courthouse Square residents who argued they were promised a strictly residential community when they bought their units.

I’m not sure how this will all play out in court and whether the current residents have a case against the developers. However, here are a few thoughts about this:

1. Senior citizen housing would be helpful in Wheaton. As a more mature community that is relatively wealthy, there are relatively less places in the community for seniors to live in affordable housing. Indeed, when communities like Wheaton do talk about affordable, they tend to be talking about seniors and young people who would like to be in the community but don’t have the resources due to their stage in life to remain.

2. Wheaton has been on a longer program of introducing more housing into the downtown, starting with the condominiums built in the early 1990s across the street from the downtown train station. While higher-end housing might bring in more revenue and people who have more spending power to spread around the downtown, having some development in this space rather than none might be preferable.

3. Like in many suburban debates about development, it sounds like this is partly (mainly?) about property values. The existing residents don’t want their higher-end units to suffer because senior-citizen housing is built nearby instead of other high end units. This could be one of those situations where it would help to take a bigger view: Wheaton would like to offer more affordable housing for seniors and this land is available so perhaps property values can’t or shouldn’t be the overriding concern here.

4. More than ever because of the economic crisis, revenues matter in these situations. Some are concerned that the city, and therefore, taxpayers, might be on the hook if the development doesn’t work out in a certain way. This would be a strike against downtown redevelopment plans; the goal is to generate new revenues, property and sales taxes, not saddle the municipality with new costs.

Do real sports fans live in the big cities like Philadelphia and not in the suburbs?

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A columnist suggests true Philadelphia sports fans live in the city, not the suburbs:

With all due respect to my McMansion-dwelling friends in the bucolic suburbs, there are no Abington Eagles. No Bryn Mawr Flyers. No Drexel Hill Phillies. No Tinecum Township Sixers. These teams all belong to Philadelphia, because we’ve got the grit to handle it…

That’s why, my suburban friend, your blues ain’t like mine.

Sure, you might eat the cheesesteaks and scrapple while rooting for the Sixers and Flyers. But when the Phillies flame out with top-flight pitching or the Eagles lose their fourth NFC Championship, you get to go home and wash your hands of it all. You get to name some quaint suburb when people ask where you live. Me? I have to say I live in Philadelphia, and deal with the laughter of our rivals...

Today, however, it’s not about city versus suburbs, because this week, we’re all Philadelphians. Sure, the Phillies of old have returned; they’re eliminated from playoff contention. But with one quarter of the season over, the Eagles sit atop their division with a 3-1 record. That gives all of us hope … for now.

Don’t worry, though. They’ll do something silly and embarrass us again before long. When they do, my suburban friends, you can do something I just can’t. You can put down your cheesesteak, take off your jersey and tell everyone you’re from Abington.

On one hand, give me a break: aren’t there plenty of suburbanites who are crazy fans? Would the major teams in Philadelphia even be there if there weren’t the suburban fans who also buy tickets and merchandise?

On the other hand, perhaps there is something to this. Perhaps sports teams really are just a hobby for those who live in nicer suburbs. If their teams don’t do well, life isn’t too bad as they likely still have a decent job, a place to live, and a family. (Remember, we are dealing with broad stereotypes here.) In comparison, those in the city may not have as much to fall back on.

On the whole, I’m inclined to dismiss this argument as more unnecessary city versus suburbs, grit versus facade, posturing. Unfortunately, sports fans are often known for such posturing…

“The Great Reverse Migration”: blacks move away from northern cities

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The Great Migration brought more than 6 million blacks to the north from the south starting in the early 20th century but now it looks like the population flow might be working in reverse:

The New York Times noticed in the early 1970s that, for the first time, more blacks were moving from the North to the South than vice versa. Last year, the Times described the South’s share of black population growth as “about half the country’s total in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the decade that just ended.”

Many of the migrants are “buppies” — young, college-educated, upwardly mobile black professionals — and older retirees. Over the last two decades, according to the Census, the states with the biggest gains in black population have been Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Florida. New York, Illinois and Michigan have seen the greatest losses. Today, 57 percent of American blacks live in the South — the highest percentage in a half-century.

Much of the migration has been urban-to-urban. During the first decade of this century, according to Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, the cities making the biggest gains in black population were Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Meanwhile, New York City’s black population fell by 67,709, Chicago’s by 58,225, Detroit’s by 37,603.

Plenty of the migrants have been moving from cities to suburbs, too. “By 2000 there were 57 metropolitan areas with at least 50,000 black suburbanites, compared to just 33 in 1980,” notes sociologist Andrew Wiese. The 2010 census revealed that 51 percent of blacks in the 100 largest metro areas lived in the suburbs. As journalist Joel Garreu describes it, suburbia now includes a “large, church-going, home-owning, childbearing, backyard barbecuing, traffic-jam-cursing black middle class remarkable for the very ordinariness with which its members go about their classically American suburban affairs.”

The article goes on to talk about four reasons why this is occurring: the private sector has been creating more jobs in the south, housing is cheaper in the south, public services in the north like schools aren’t that great, and retirees are looking for better weather.

The suburbs data mentioned above is fascinating: more blacks are in more metropolitan areas and a majority of blacks in the largest metro areas live in the suburbs. While there is some evidence blacks are moving to the south, might there even be stronger evidence that blacks are moving to the suburbs? At the same time, this does not necessarily mean that these suburbs are great places; many inner-ring suburbs face a lot of big city problems and perhaps have even fewer resources to deal with the problem. For example, see this post from last year about blacks moving from Detroit to suburbs that have similar troubles.

This also reminds me of some of the demographic mobility in the United States: 110 years ago, there were relatively few blacks in northern cities. Five decades ago, whites fled many of these cities because they thought blacks were invading their neighborhoods. Now, blacks are moving to the suburbs and back to the south. I have never seen any figures on this but it seems like the United States has a relatively high degree of internal mobility compared to other countries.

Space, the earth’s suburban office park

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Ian Bogost argues that space exploration has become dull, just like a suburban office park:

It’s not so much that the space program is broken in the sense of inoperative. Space is alive and well, for the wealthy at least, where it’s become like the air and the land and the sea: a substrate for commerce, for generating even more wealth. Instead, the space program is broken in the sense of tamed, domesticated, housebroken. It happens to all frontiers: they get settled. How many nights can one man dance the skies? Better to rent out laughter-silvered wings by the hour so you can focus on your asteroid mining startup.

In the 1960s we went to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. In the 1980s we went to low Earth orbit because, you know, somebody got a grant to study polymers in zero-gravity, or because a high-price pharmaceutical could be more readily synthesized, or because a communications satellite had to be deployed, or because a space telescope had to be repaired. The Space Shuttle program strove to make space exploration repeatable and predictable, and it succeeded. It turned space into an office park. Now the tenants are filing in. Space: Earth’s suburbs. Office space available.

I don’t think this is a new argument: others have argued we need a new vision for space travel that involves looking for new frontiers. But the comparison to the suburbs is intriguing. The suggestion is that suburbs are fairly dull places themselves generally populated by wealthier residents where stuff happens (indeed, a majority of Americans live there) but it is rather routine and is done more out of habit than pushing beyond existing boundaries. This is not an uncommon image of the suburbs and it dates back to the early days of mass produced suburbs when critics worried about conformity, homogeneity, and quiet desperation.

Yet, the suburbs have continued to grow and perhaps more interestingly, they have changed in a number of ways in recent decades: new groups have moved to the suburbs (including more immigrants, minorities, and lower-class Americans), a variety of suburbs have come to serve a variety of functions from bedroom communities to center for office and industrial parks to entertainment and cultural hubs, residents, developers, and business leaders have adapted to a changing landscape with some new innovations. Putting this back in space terms, even if we don’t get much further than the moon or Mars in the coming years, can’t we still discover new and important things? Can’t some good come out of just-out-of-Earth’s atmosphere office parks?

One note: I would be interested to hear from Bogost about how new space exploration could be financed. There could indeed be some issues if exploration is limited more and more to wealthy individuals and corporations but what governments have the money to pay for this out of public funds?