Tag Archives: suburbs

Lost in the Trayvon Martin story: the mindset behind gated communities

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Lost in the Trayvon Martin story is the location where this all occurred: a gated community. While these are common in some places, particularly in Florida, one author explains the unique mindset in gated communities and how this might have contributed to the situation:

From 2007 to 2009, I traveled 27,000 miles, living in predominantly white gated communities across this country to research a book. I threw myself into these communities with gusto — no Howard Johnson or Motel 6 for me. I borrowed or rented residents’ homes. From the red-rock canyons of southern Utah to the Waffle-House-pocked exurbs of north Georgia, I lived in gated communities as a black man, with a youthful style and face, to interview and observe residents.

The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics. Since you can say “gated community” only so many times, developers hatched an array of Orwellian euphemisms to appease residents’ anxieties: “master-planned community,” “landscaped resort community,” “secluded intimate neighborhood.”

No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls.  A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.

Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.

This account lines up with academic research on the topic: gated communities are intended to be safe places. They are generally in the suburbs and residents move there to feel more secure. While not stated explicitly, these communities are meant to help keep issues like poverty, race, social class, and crime outside the walls and fences.

Here are the three best works I know on the subject:

1. McKenzie, Evan. 1994. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.  

2. Blakely, Edward and Mary Gail Snyder. 1999. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

3. Low, Setha M. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge.

One of the ironies revealed in these works is that these gated communities are rarely completely sealed off from the outside world. The ones that are tend to be the province of the wealthy and have very controlled entry points. For many gated communities, while there might be fences or walls, not all communities have manned gates and there are often multiple entrances into a neighborhood. So the gated nature of the community is more about a feeling of security than an actual sense that no unwanted outsider can get in.

In the end, gated communities do not necessarily lead to more violent action against outsiders. At the same time, the mindset in these communities is explicitly about safety and protection from the outside world.

Economist Robert Shiller: “we will never in our lifetime see a rebound in these [housing] prices in the suburbs”

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Economist Robert Shiller suggests there is a “real chance” we may have a long way to go before the US housing market recovers:

Many young people are choosing to live at home for a longer period of time instead of buying. Moreover, would-be homebuyers are settling into modern apartments and condominiums, further hindering a housing rally. Shiller says the shift toward renting and city living could mean “that we will never in our lifetime see a rebound in these prices in the suburbs.”

A perpetually sluggish housing market, which Shiller believes has become “more and more political,” might push the country in a “Japan-like slump that will go on for years and years.”

I imagine there are a lot of people who hope Shiller is very wrong. If you watch the full video here, Shiller also suggests there is a chance for a rebound. The discussion is based on this data:

Home prices in January were flat compared to the prior month, suggesting stabilization in the market, but home values fell for the fifth-straight month and prices dropped to their lowest levels since 2003, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Housing prices declined 3.8 percent on a year-over-year basis. The index measures the value of home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan cities.

The key prediction here is that suburban housing prices may not rebound for decades. What are the implications of this? I wonder if this means that we may finally witness a suburban growth plateau, meaning that because people will have more difficulty moving in and out of their houses, suburban growth will have to slow. Of course, this may change after a few years as people adjust to their mortgages and either move out of being underwater or pay enough off to make some money when they sell. But there would still be fewer people looking for homes, leading to less demand for new homes.

 

Evangelicals and Catholics first joined forces in the suburbs

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In the middle of an article about how Rick Santorum has appealed to evangelicals, one of the factors mentioned is geographic: evangelicals and Catholics both moved to the suburbs after World War Two.

The plate tectonics of social mobility also figure into the Santorum surprise, note scholars like the political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron. In the post-World War II years, many Catholics moved out of insular urban neighborhoods while many evangelicals left their rural and small-town homes for the suburbs and exurbs. In subdivisions, in office parks, in colleges, the young people of the two religions began to encounter one another as benign acquaintances rather than alien enemies.

It is no coincidence, then, that a Santorum voter like Carissa Wilson has grown up in the suburban sprawl between two cities with strong Catholic heritages, Dayton and Cincinnati. Like the Michigan autoworkers in 1980 who made a break with Democratic tradition to vote for Ronald Reagan, Miss Wilson just may be the embodiment of a new wave.

In other words, evangelicals and Catholics met and learned to like each other in the suburbs. United by suburban values and perhaps a dislike for both cities and rural areas, these two groups settled into the land of single-family homes and found that they could find common ground on some social and theological issues.

This brings several questions to mind:

1. Are Catholics and evangelicals more interested in preserving suburban values than finding common theological ground? Perhaps this is crassly put but the way the argument is written in the article, it suggests that the suburbs came first before the social and theological common ground.

2. How do race and class play into the process? In other words, while both groups came from different places to the suburbs, they were probably mostly white and the educational status of both groups was rising. Does this mean that the older city/rural divide was transcended by common status interests based on race and class?

Argument: the US should move forward by saying “Death to the McMansion”

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Patrick Doherty argues that housing is one area in which the United States can chart a needed course forward through “profound problems in its political and economic system.” The solution? “Resilient communities with smaller homes.”

Boomers and millennials, the two largest demographic groups in the country, are converging in a time-of-life moment where what they want is smaller homes on smaller lots in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Boomers, who have just started turning 65, are empty-nesting and downsizing. But they are going to have to work much later into what they thought would be their retirement, and they fear the fate of their parents, who had their car keys taken away and ended up in the nursing home. Millennials are in the process of getting married and having kids, and according to market surveys, 77 percent simply don’t ever want to go back to the ‘burbs. At the end of the day, traditional subdivisions are isolating and expensive, while millennials are increasingly connected, are more into tech than cars, and are seeing their economic future more like their grandparents’—full of hard work and living on a budget.

Add it all up, and the National Association of Realtors estimates that—today—56 percent of Americans want the attributes of this new American dream in their next housing purchase. Yet only 2 percent of new units being built today fit these attributes. That’s a massive pool of pent-up demand, locked away by federal policy still supporting suburban growth at the expense of all other types of communities. Change the policy—without having to spend a dime—and we’re off to the races with new jobs in construction and infrastructure, plus homes and communities that reflect the way we want to live today. And they happen to be good for the planet, reducing energy, water, and waste by at least one-third.

But there is more. Three billion people around the world coming into the middle class in the next 20 years. When they do (and 200,000 people are literally leaving their villages every day), their incomes go up 300 percent—and so does their resource use. Since we’re already consuming 1.5 planets’ worth of resources, the McKinsey Global Institute is now saying we need a massive resource productivity revolution. That’s especially true in the United States, where we use 50 percent more material per unit of GDP than the top-performing EU countries. That waste could be profit.

America should be the leader of that resource revolution.

The larger argument seems to be this: the United States is locked into political and economic policies that no longer match our world. We need to adjust to two major changes in housing: (1) fewer people want to live in the type of suburbs that were built in force starting in the 1920s and then again after World War II and (2) building sprawling suburbs consumes a lot of resources that could better be used elsewhere.

Several things strike me:

1. Political and economic policies may be made as much or even more so for cultural reasons than for what is most effective or pragmatic.

2. That being said, changing these policies would be difficult to do overnight. There is still an ideology of the American Dream that includes owning a home. However, this may indeed be shifting toward denser homeownership but I think it would take some time (if just for younger generations to get older).

3. I would be interested in seeing a comprehensive national strategy by which this could be pursued. Perhaps this could start with removing the mortgage interest tax deduction. I’ve been thinking in recent days that this is also closely tied to gas prices and how the cost of driving affects where people want to live. Builders might need some incentives to provide different kinds of housing. Communities across metropolitan regions might need to band together to address common issues and stop fighting over residents and corporations. All of this is not easy but I imagine there are better ways to do this than simply talking about a bunch of things at once.

“Black flight” to Charles County, Maryland?

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Charles County, a suburban county south of Washington D.C. has experienced population growth in recent years, possibly as the result of “black flight”:

From 2000 to 2010, Charles County’s population rose by 21.6 percent, going from 120,546 to 146,551, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. At the same time, non-Hispanic whites dropped as a proportion of the county’s total population from 67.3 percent to 48.4 percent.

In a decade, the county went from being whiter than the state of Maryland to being a minority-majority jurisdiction.

“You think about the notion of white flight, there’s also the notion of black flight, or Latino flight,” said Kris Marsh, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who specializes in the study of the black middle class.

“As Prince George’s County moves from a white-dominated county to a black-dominated county, there could be some black households that decide that they don’t want to live in a black-dominated community, so they move out to Howard County … or out to Charles County,” Marsh explained.

“White flight” is a well-known phenomenon that covers the movement of whites away from growing minority populations, particularly in large cities or denser suburbs. I’ve never heard the term “black flight” before though conversation about the movement of the black middle class has generated academic discussion for several decades now. It would be interesting to know how the communities in Charles County, and in some of the other nearby counties which are also mentioned in this story, are adjusting to new populations in areas that still have relatively few people.

Overall, this is a reminder that minority and immigrant populations are growing in suburban areas even though many still think of the suburbs as homogenous white, middle- to upper-class areas.

Forming historic districts in the Los Angeles suburbs

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Los Angeles is often considered the prototypical suburban city: the city and the suburbs sprawl over a wide expanse of land, the population of the region boomed from the 1920s on, and the region has a car culture (see my thoughts about last year’s “carmageddon” as an example). So it may sound strange to talk about historic preservation districts in the Los Angeles suburbs but a historic preservationist provides a quick overview of efforts in the region:

A representative from the Los Angeles Conservancy this week said Burbank’s efforts to preserve its architecture has been at about the C- level. But that will likely improve as the city’s Heritage Commission moves closer to adopting a process for forming historic districts…

While not many homes have been submitted for the historical registry, there has been more interest in the past several months because of increased outreach efforts by the commission, which may improve Burbank’s standing in the preservation community, Vavala said.

Besides, he added, “half the cities in Los Angeles County get an F.”…

“Certainly, there are a lot of great homes scattered through cities throughout the county, but there’s no assurance that five years after you move in, a ‘McMansion’ might go up across the street, which will perhaps lower property values,” Vavala said.

Historic preservation efforts are well known in many other places in the United States so it is interesting to note that it hasn’t quite caught on in the same way in the Los Angeles region. I would want to know what homes in Burbank, Glendale, and other suburbs are ripe for historic preservation: are these homes from the 1920s, 1940s, or later? Is it more difficult to convince Los Angeles area residents that historic preservation is needed? Would the average American know that there are even homes in southern California that are worthy of historic preservation?

Changes to American housing going to come from Hispanics and echo boomers?

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At a recent conference, several experts talked about how two demographic groups are influential for American housing trends in the coming years:

Most of the country’s population growth is happening in minority populations – the same groups hit the hardest by the housing downturn in terms of lost household wealth and declines in homeownership rates.

“That is where housing issues will be addressed or not addressed,” demographer Steve Murdock of Rice University said. “Hispanics are the key to this growth.”

And echo boomers – members of another group hit hard by the recession as they’ve struggled to start careers – will be the generation driving the next wave of household formation.

“In the next 10 years, the echo boomers are almost the entire story,” said Rolf Pendall, director of the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center…

Cisneros said a Hispanic affinity for owning a home may help moderate some of the drive toward renting. “Somewhere deep in our DNA as Latinos is homeownership,” Cisneros said.

Baby boomers, the group that’s long driven trends, still is doing so, but instead of creating McMansions, they will start to influence building of nursing homes.

I assume Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, means that Latinos have a cultural affinity for homeownership. Thus far, this has not happened so much in the United States: for example, in 2008 the homeownership rate for Latinos was 48.9% and 47.5% for blacks compared to 74.9%. However, in Mexico, the homeownership rate is between 80-90% (2004 figures here, 1999 figures here).

Add this to suggestions from some that Generation Y also wants new kinds of housing (previous posts here, here, and here) and it looks like there might be quite a bit of change in the American housing market in the future. Our current system isn’t too different in houses and layout than it was decades ago.

Transit-oriented development in the Boston area

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Transit-oriented development has been popular for years now and here is an update on this development strategy in the Boston area:

“We see a huge demand around Greater Boston. We’re working in communities from Winchester to Lawrence that are all working to develop vibrant urban villages around public transportation,” Leroux said. “An overwhelming number of people want to live in these types of places, and communities that don’t create them are less competitive for residents and jobs.”

Filling the need in Somerville, where the residential landscape consists mainly of three-decker homes, is Maxwell’s Green, which will feature 184 rental units with amenities to rival many downtown Boston luxury apartment buildings.

Near completion and ready for occupancy this September, the $52.5 million development sits on 5.5 acres and is located minutes from the Red Line stop at Davis Square and adjacent to the much- anticipated MBTA Green Line Extension’s Lowell Street station…

SouthField, one of the largest transit-oriented developments in Greater Boston, is on track for South Weymouth at the former naval air station.

The first phase of the project is already complete, with residents occupying both apartments and townhouses. The total cost of the project, including the homes already built, is targeted at about $2.5 billion, which includes 2,800 homes and 2 million square feet of commercial space.

The “urban village” concept has been around now for several decades. They are thought to be particularly attractive for young professionals who want to live in the suburbs or further away from the city core (partly because of cheaper prices), don’t yet want to buy a home (condos being easier to maintain), want mass transit access, and also want to be in more lively areas with some cultural and dining options.

These types of development are very popular in the Chicago suburbs are well, particularly along the railroad lines that radiate out from Chicago’s center. Many suburbs have sought to build multi-use developments (condos plus offices or small retail establishments) near their commuter train stations. While this means that the residents can access mass transit, it also provides more pedestrians and hopefully customers for the downtown. A number of suburbs have pursued these developments as part of a downtown revitalization strategy.

I would be interested to see how studies about how much these developments reduce traffic and congestion. Particularly in a suburban setting, a couple might be able to go down to one car (or none?) if both use mass transit a lot. However, while mass transit access to the city center might be great, there is often a lack of mass transit options across between suburbs.

I also wonder how much transit-oriented development succeeds because it is seen as trendy.

Some housing not so cheap when you factor in transportation costs

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Plenty of people may move to where the cheaper housing is located but this could come with higher transportation costs:

In Chicago’s transit-rich Ravenswood neighborhood, where there is an average of one automobile per household and 42 percent of commuters use transit, monthly transportation costs averaged $751 in the five-year period studied, the center determined.

Households in Marengo in McHenry County incur an average of $1,324 in transportation costs each month, the study found. Each household in Marengo, where transit ridership is less than 1 percent, also logs an average of 24,438 miles per year in their cars, versus 12,150 miles annually in Ravenswood.

When people are looking for a place to live, taking into account housing and transportation costs changes the affordability outlook significantly, said Scott Bernstein, the center’s president…

[From the print edition:] Some 69 percent of neighborhoods in the Chicago area are considered affordable under the traditional definition of housing affordability: rent or mortgage payments consuming no more than 30 percent of household income, the study said. But only 42 percent of the neighborhoods are considered affordable when housing and transportation costs are measured, it said…

The study also found that it is more difficult for a typical household in the U.S. to find an affordable place to live compared to a decade ago because incomes increased about half as much as transportation and housing costs since 2000.

This provides some data to back up Joel’s claim from earlier this week: life is cheaper (and perhaps better?) without a car.

What I find fascinating about this is that this report ties transportation costs to the idea of affordable housing. Typically, we only think about the cost of the housing itself but if you built affordable housing in the middle of a corn field 90 miles west of Chicago, those housing units won’t really help anyone.

At the same time, this is a trade-off many Americans seem willing to make: you pay less for your house and then pay more for transportation costs over time. Perhaps because the house is a significantly larger “one-time purchase” (you have repeated payments but they are somewhat fixed and you have already psychologically taken possession of the house even though you don’t own it) people can justify then paying more for transportation over time because the money trickles out and the costs are more variable. Plus, if you think of the home as one of the key pieces of the American Dream and Americans should love to drive anyway, this all could make some sense.

This is also a reminder that the cost for entry to the suburbs is not just about finding somewhere to live which often requires a sizable down payment and a mortgage. In order to get anywhere, whether it is a job or store or recreation area or church, one needs a car in the suburbs and one needs to have extra money on hand to deal with this. Without being able to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance, and somewhere to park (which is factored into a parking space or the driveway/garage that is factored into the mortgage), there is plenty of extra cost involved with having a car. This reminds me of a story I read recently about an affordable car program in Wisconsin where the state or some agency was providing cheap but reliable cars to people to help cover these growing and important transportation costs.

Argument: class concerns behind zoning laws

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One commentator suggests that activities commonly banned by zoning laws are banned because they don’t meet middle-class or upper-class standards:

1. Clotheslines instead of dryers. Reason: Looks poor. Might suggest you can’t afford a dryer. Plus, you might see underwear that isn’t your own. This is a major cause of sin.

2. No livestock, but large pets are acceptable. Reason: Ostensible reasons are health based, a few even broadly grounded in fact, They ignore, however, that carnivore manures are almost certainly more dangerous than any other livestock manure, and health issues are at least as prevalent from pets. The same is true of considerations of size, noise, etc… – barking dogs the size of ponies are permitted while three quiet hens are not. The real reason is that pets are broadly a sign of affluence, since they cost us money, while livestock are a sign of poverty, because they provide economic benefits.

3. No front yard gardens. Reason: The lawn is a sign of affluence – you have money, leisure and water enough to have a chunk of land, however tiny, that doesn’t produce anything.. It creates in many neighborhoods a seemingly contiguous but basically sterile, often chemically toxic and seeming “public” greenspace that is actually privatized and not very green. Gardens, on the other hand, have dirty wildlife and bugs in them, and might grow food, which is bad because it implies you can’t afford it – even if you can’t.

4. No rainwater collection. Reason: This is mostly in dry places in the Southwest, for fear that the tiny amount of available rainwater might not reach people who can’t afford to pay for it, or strangely believe that water that lands on their roof might belong to them, and who would like to have gardens anyway. A few other municipalities do it for fear of west nile disease because they seem never to have heard of screens or mosquito dunks. Oh, and barrels look like you can’t afford to water your lawn with sprinklers, even when it is raining. While western riparian water rights are an issue, research has shown over and over again that rainbarrels increase net water access and that lost water in storm surge that could have been collected in rainbarrels is a net gain. Fortunately, many cities are finally getting over this one.

5. No commerce that isn’t white collar. Reason – Class. Telecommuters who can make money out of their homes all they want, or upscale white collar professionals with home offices are generally permitted in residential zoning.. This means people who want to sell food, do hair, fix things, cannot hang a discrete sign selling their biscuits or offering their services. This is deemed ugly and bad – and it is a visible reminder that people might not have enough money to keep warm burning it, and might need to earn some.

This seems to get at one of the basic principles of suburban life in recent decades, particularly in places with homeowners associations: legislate against certain behaviors in order to protect your own property values. Voluntarily give up some of your property rights in order to protect yourself from neighbors who don’t care about their property as much as you do. Theoretically, everyone then wins because the neighborhood is protected.

This reminds me of accounts of some early suburbs in the United States where people built their own homes and frequently kept animals. Building your house yourself these days would likely run into all sorts of code concerns (unless you were a proficient plumber, electrician, etc.). Additionally, I imagine the home might look less “perfect” than mass produced housing and these accounts told about how people frequently were adding on to their homes or leaving certain parts in various states of repair.

Many suburbs and communities have faced the question in recent years about residents keeping animals. Some have allowed it, some have not. I assume this is not as much of a concern in wealthier suburbs but it would be interesting to see if there are patterns in which communities allowed animals and which did not.

Overall, zoning is often black and white in its approach and residential zones are meant to be only for residences.