Tag Archives: suburbs

Austerity in the suburbs: turning off and ripping out the lights in Highland Park, Michigan

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As many suburbs face budget shortfalls, some have instituted new measures. While California communities drew attention last year for contracting out services previously provided by the city, the Detroit suburb of Highland Park is trying another option: turning off and ripping out the street lights.

But when the debt-ridden community could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials not only turned off 1,000 streetlights. They had them ripped out — bulbs, poles and all. Now nightfall cloaks most neighborhoods in inky darkness…

Highland Park’s decision is one of the nation’s most extreme austerity measures, even among the scores of communities that can no longer afford to provide basic services.

Other towns have postponed roadwork, cut back on trash collection and closed libraries, for example. But to people left in the dark night after night, removing streetlights seems more drastic. And unlike many other cutbacks that can easily be reversed, this one appears to be permanent…

The city’s monthly electric bill has been cut by 80 percent. The amount owed DTE Energy goes back about a decade, but utility executives hesitated to turn off the juice…

Most of the 500 streetlights still shining in Highland Park are along major streets and on corners in residential areas. DTE Energy has listed the city’s overdue bill as an uncollectable expense.

It would be interesting to hear what else the community has had to do or has considered in order to lessen the $58 million budget deficit.

While it is certainly a shock to have street lights torn out, I wonder how much of an effect this will actually have. It sounds like lights have been retained at certain places for traffic safety. I vaguely recall reading a piece at The Infrastructurist that suggested street lights on residential streets are there more for nervous residents than actually for reducing crime or improving traffic safety.

The description of Highland Park, losing more than half of its population between 1980 and 2010 plus a 42% poverty rate, suggests that this is an inner-ring suburb. While Detroit is notorious for struggling, many inner-ring suburbs are facing similar issues: once prosperous, the issues facing big cities have moved beyond their boundaries. These suburbs often have limited tax revenues and increasingly poor residents. How can they compete with the big city (if it happens to be at least somewhat thriving) or suburbs further out that have more modern amenities and wealthier populations? This is why people like Myron Orfield suggest that we need more metropolitan revenue sharing in order to help these communities survive and have hope for turning their fortunes around.

Of the suburbs that have had to turn to more drastic measures to close budget shortfalls, how many of them are inner-ring suburbs? Do these places share other characteristics? I would assume many wealthier suburban communities haven’t had to consider such options yet.

Census data shows increase in people living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty

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New Census data shows that the population of the “poorest poor” in America has grown (about 20.5 million Americans), particularly in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty:

After declining during the 1990s economic boom, the proportion of poor people in large metropolitan areas who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods jumped from 11.2 percent in 2000 to 15.1 percent last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis released Thursday. Such geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990, following a decade of high unemployment and rising energy costs.

Extreme poverty today continues to be prevalent in the industrial Midwest, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, due to a renewed decline in manufacturing. But the biggest growth in high-poverty areas is occurring in newer Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Riverside, Calif., and Cape Coral, Fla., after the plummeting housing market wiped out home values and dried up construction jobs.

As a whole, the number of poor in the suburbs who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods rose by 41 percent since 2000, more than double the growth of such city neighborhoods.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings, described a demographic shift in people living in high-poverty neighborhoods, which have less access to good schools, hospitals and government services. As concentrated poverty spreads to new areas, including suburbs, the residents are now more likely to be white, native-born and high school or college graduates — not the conventional image of high-school dropouts or single mothers in inner-city ghettos.

Two things to note: the percentage of people living in poverty concentrated areas is back at 1990 levels and these areas themselves have shifted to new places like the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Are we any better off in addressing this issue than we were when scholars called attention to this like William Julius Wilson in the 1980s and Paul Jargowsky in the 1990s?

It is interesting that there is very little in current political or cultural discourse about the “poorest poor” as most of the current talk centers on the middle class or perhaps the working class. Even Occupy Wall Street seems to be about the middle and working classes. Perhaps much of this group’s anger is driven by the middle-class who now feels the pinch of the economic crisis but the “poorest poor” have been dealing with similar and/or worse concerns for decades.

More on increasing poor population in the suburbs: 53% increase between 2000 and 2010

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The New York Times reports on the growing population of the poor in the American suburbs:

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010…

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

This shift has helped redefine the image of the suburbs. “The suburbs were always a place of opportunity — a better school, a bigger house, a better job,” said Scott Allard, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who focuses on social welfare policy and poverty. “Today, that’s not as true as the popular mythology would have us believe.”

Since 2000, the poverty roll has increased by five million in the suburbs, with large rises in metropolitan areas as different as Colorado Springs and Greensboro, N.C.

While these are interesting figures (and I’ve noted them before here and here – the original report from September is a month ahead of this Times piece), arguably the suburbs have never completely fit the Ozzie and Harriet image. While many suburban places were retreats for wealthy and middle-class whites, there have also been working-class suburbs and some non-white suburbs. There is indeed a “popular mythology” – but I wonder if suburban critics have also been interested in pushing this image.

A few other thoughts:

1. Do most Americans today even know the show Ozzie and Harriet? In its time, the show had a long run: 402 radio episodes (1944-1954), 435 television episodes (1952-1966). Even with a lot of episodes, this show seems to have been syndicated less than some other shows.

2. If a greater percentage of the poor in metropolitan areas are now in suburbs, is this considered a positive thing for big cities?

3. Do we have any data on what happens to the poor in suburbs – do they have higher levels of social mobility than the poor in the city or rural areas? Additionally, the article suggests jobs and housing have helped increase the suburban poor population but what is the exact data on this?

KPBS San Diego on Proposition 13

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The great property tax revolt of 1978 in California has had a big impact on American politics. KPBS in San Diego put together a number of reports on the history and legacy of Prop 13. You can also find a number of other interesting videos if you search YouTube. The Wikipedia entry gives a decent overview.

When I showed one clip to my American Suburbanization class, I was struck again by how much of the rhetoric from both sides matches current political discussions: a desire to cut lard from the government and save the middle class versus providing needed money for social services and asking people to pay their fair share. This is an issue that still hasn’t been decided and is particularly pertinent today in an era of budget shortfalls.

More housing vouchers now being used in the suburbs

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A new report from the Brookings Institute suggests that more housing vouchers are now being used in the suburbs. Here is a quick summary of their findings:

This study analyzes the changing location of HCV recipients within the nation’s largest metro areas in the 2000s and finds:

  • Nearly half of all HCV recipients lived in suburban areas in 2008. However, HCV recipients remained less suburbanized than the total population, the poor population, and affordable housing units generally.
  • Black HCV recipients suburbanized fastest over the 2000 to 2008 period, though white HCV recipients were still more suburbanized than their black or Latino counterparts by 2008.  Black HCV recipients’ suburbanization rate increased by nearly 5 percent over this period, while that for Latinos increased by about 1 percent.  The suburbanization rate for white HCV recipients declined slightly.
  • Within metro areas, HCV recipients moved further toward higher-income, jobs-rich suburbs between 2000 and 2008.  However, the poor and affordable housing units shifted more rapidly toward similar kinds of suburbs over that period.  By 2008 about half of suburban HCV recipients still lived in low-income suburbs.
  • Between 2000 and 2008, metro areas in the West and those experiencing large increases in suburban poverty exhibited the biggest shifts in HCV recipients to the suburbs.  Western metro areas like Stockton, Boise, and Phoenix experienced increases of 10 percentage points or more in the suburbanization rate of HCV recipients.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise as more poor people now live in suburbs than big cities. But this could help explain how some of the poor are moving to the suburbs. As the US government has moved away from funding high-rise housing projects to providing housing vouchers, more people have decided to use these in the suburbs where there may be more housing and jobs.

These findings could also bring up some interesting issues regarding how suburban communities and residents feel about the use of housing vouchers in nearby housing. I think it is safe to assume that many suburban residents would not necessarily want to live near poorer residents but the voucher program makes this a bit more anonymous. If people knew that their community was a popular site for the use of housing vouchers, what would they do?

I would also suspect that the use of these vouchers in clustered in less wealthy suburbs, not very spread out throughout the metropolitan region.

Asking “why aren’t Americans moving to the city”

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Even as the percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs has increased over the decades, one writer asks “why aren’t Americans moving to the city?”

Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs…

Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit…

For the Millenials, the showstopper was jobs, or lack thereof. They managed to survive the last few years of college, but lacking paying work in the city, they’ve moved back in with mom and dad. So now they’re all kicking it in the TV room back on Deerhaven Drive, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.

There are other factors that have slowed down the great urban migration that predate our recent economic woes: Crime rates are down nationwide, but that has done little to diminish the perception that cities are dark, violent places. Poverty, addiction, and blight still haunt many urban centers. Then there are the kids. The Millenials aren’t the first generation of young people to get all stoked about the city. The ones before them continue to pick up and leave as soon as Junior hits school age.

Of course, much of this is the result of ill-advised investment: We’ve poured money into unsustainable suburban development while starving the urban centers. (One writer on this website recently argued convincingly that subsidized sprawl is a giant Ponzi scheme.)

But I think there is a deeper force at work here. Here’s another headline that reads like it could have come out of the Onion: “Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else.”

It’s actually from USA Today, and the accompanying story looks at a 2009 PEW Research Center poll that found that 46 percent of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”…

Listen, I don’t mean to belabor this point. This is all just to say that the urban renaissance is not fait accompli.

This seems like a reasonable argument to me: there is no guarantee, as some critics have suggested, that Americans will see the error of the suburbs and flock back to the city. For many Americans, the suburbs seem to offer the best alternative to other living options: it combines some of more rural living (a bit of land) and more urban living (amenities nearby). Attacks on the suburbs won’t necessarily change their minds though higher costs of living (gas prices, less valuable houses) might.

The cited survey is also interesting. The Pew website about the survey is titled “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” Are Americans simply afflicted with an itch to be somewhere else? Is this manifest destiny in action? Also in this survey:

Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.

If you combined the small town and suburban percentages, you would get almost the exact percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs. So when people responded that they would prefer a small town, do they really mean a suburban small town or a more rural small town and living in a rural area is more of living on a farm or five acre plot of land far from a big city?

“Suburgatory” picked up for a full first season

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Based on the audience for the first three episodes, ABC’s new show Suburgatory has been renewed for a full first season. The number of viewers for the first three episodes has been impressive: 9.81 million, 9.11 million, and 8.92 million.

I haven’t had a chance to see an episode yet – perhaps its popularity is really due to the fact that it offers something new? It does have a nice time slot between The Middle and Modern Family. Interestingly though, Episode 3 had a 3.1 rating, slightly higher than The Middle (2.9 rating) but below Modern Family (5.9 rating). Episode 4 airs tonight.

Chicken regulations in Naperville

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More suburbs have had to deal with this issue in recent years: should suburbanites be allowed to keep chickens? Here is the latest from Naperville:

The majority of Naperville council members voted Tuesday to make no changes to an existing ordinance that governs the keeping of fowl in the city, which states the birds must be kept 25 feet from neighboring homes and cleaned regularly.

City staff presented a proposal Tuesday that would place further regulation on chicken coop keepers, requiring them to obtain a permit for the birds and construct larger perimeters around the livestock. But council members opted to maintain the status quo that has regulated chicken ownership for years…

While both residents — neighbors, in fact — who spoke during public forum were on opposite sides of the fence on the issue, they agreed the council’s decision came as a surprise…

But the council’s decision has no effect on those who live in subdivisions, some of which have their own bylaws that govern the keeping of livestock.

While the article suggests at the end that there are only a few formal complaints about this a year, I suspect this is an issue that will continue to pop up. This is a classic NIMBY issue: will nearby property values decrease if a neighbor keeps chickens? It is also interesting to note that Naperville’s guidelines don’t apply to subdivisions, presumably because they have Homeowner’s Associations that already tackle this issue. (Naperville has an unusual number of HOAs – noted builder Harold Moser helped pioneer this in the city.)

This reminds me of My Blue Heaven, a study of the working class Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. In the early days of this suburb, it was common for residents to own animals and build their own homes. I suspect this sort of activity would not go over well in more middle or upper class suburbs.

If you are curious, here is what Naperville’s municipal code says about “fowl and livestock”:

1. Housing: All fowl and livestock shall be kept within a pen, coop, building or other enclosure sufficient in size and strength to confine such animals to the owner’s property, except that livestock may be tethered securely to a fixed object outside the enclosure, but only if the animal is so confined to the owner’s property.

2. Zoning: Fowl and livestock may be kept in any area in the City except as otherwise provided by this Chapter or the City’s Zoning Ordinance.

3. Restrictions:

3.1. No livestock shall be kept, housed, maintained or pastured within a distance of two hundred (200) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.2. No pen, coop, building or other enclosure used for the purpose of housing fowl (with the exception of homing pigeons) shall be erected or maintained within twenty-five (25) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.3. Every person maintaining a pen, coop, building, yard or enclosure for fowl or livestock shall keep such area clean, sanitary and free from all refuse. Such areas shall be thoroughly swept at least once every twenty-four (24) hours and the dirt and refuse shall be disposed in a clean and sanitary fashion.

3.4. All feed for fowl or livestock shall be kept in containers that are rodent-proof until put out for consumption of fowl or livestock.

Another report suggests Naperville is somewhat unusual in not regulating this issue more closely:

Homeowners on both sides of Laird’s Rivanna Court property are urging the Naperville City Council to re-examine a decades-old city law that puts no limits on the number of chickens one can have, as long as the pen is cleaned once every 24 hours and is kept at least 25 feet from neighboring homes.

Naperville is one of a few municipalities — including St. Charles, Batavia, Oak Park and Chicago — that allow residents, with a few conditions, to raise chickens at home. But in an email to council members, Laird’s neighbors stressed the city is “no longer a rural farming community but residential with nice homes and smaller backyards.”

I wonder if this is one of those issues in Naperville where formal regulations are unnecessary as social pressure would keep too many people from having chickens. One resident in the story suggests that his chicken coop was opened at night by others. I would guess that could be a lot of disapproving glances and talk if someone started building a chicken house.

Suburbs not prepared to provide for growing poor population

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With more suburban residents seeking assistance, many suburban communities aren’t prepared:

Suburban-based social service agencies have been swamped. A survey of non-profit social service providers in suburban communities in the Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, conducted in 2009 and 2010 by researchers at Brookings, found that roughly nine in ten were seeing increased numbers of people seeking help compared to the previous year. Many had suffered cuts in financial support, prompting them to lay off staff and place needy people on wait-lists.

“In many communities, there just aren’t the organizations needed to provide job training, counseling or emergency assistance,” said Scott Allard, a political scientist at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and the lead author of the survey. “Poverty is a recent phenomenon.”

One key piece of data from the survey underscores the corrosive effects of suburban poverty on the American identity: Nearly three-fourths of the suburban non-profits were seeing significant numbers of people turning up who had never previously sought help.

Several thoughts:

1. The problem is perhaps even worse than just growing numbers as more budgets of suburban communities have tightened. Where in municipal budgets is there money for this?

2. This reminds of a talk I heard from a homelessness researcher some years ago who suggested that a good number of the homeless who go to shelters are people who are temporarily homeless. On one hand, there is a persistent minority of the homeless who are always homeless but most are there because of temporary circumstances like a job loss, eviction, or medical costs. Will this be the case for the suburban poor – are these long-term poor residents or would these numbers shrink considerably if the economy picked up?

3. How dispersed is the poor population in the suburbs? I have not seen any maps or measures where exactly the suburban poor live. Knowing American residential patterns, we might suspect that the suburban poor tend to cluster in less wealthy/more affordable suburbs while wealthier suburbs have barely seen an increase in the number of poor residents, particularly since wealthier suburbs would not want such residents.

Looking for sidewalks in Tyler, Texas

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A “news app developer” who moved to Tyler, Texas has found that it is difficult to walk around the community due to a lack of sidewalks and development that revolves around the automobile:

Several people insisted I couldn’t live without a car in Tyler–and they were absolutely right. When I landed at Tyler Pounds Regional Airport I hadn’t driven a car in four months. Since I landed, I’ve driven nearly every day. (Mostly ferrying my son to school and various activities.)

I very carefully selected the house I’m renting–an eccentric, hundred-year-old single-story in the Charnwood neighborhood–so that I can get to as many things as possible without driving. It’s within a mile of:

  • 2 parks (Children’s Park and Bergfield Park)
  • 2 coffee shops (Brady’s Speciality Coffee and Downtown Coffee Lounge)
  • 2 hospitals (Trinity Mother Frances and East Texas Medical Center)
  • 1 bookstore (Fireside Books)
  • 3 bus lines (the red, green and blue)
  • Tyler Public Library

Interestingly, it seems like the city knows about the problem. But addressing the issue won’t necessarily be easy:

Now that I’ve been out and walked the streets of Tyler, I have to say I think the plans laid out in Tyler 21 are impressively on-target. Tyler needs to build a lot more sidewalks. However, I also foresee a few challenges that just building more sidewalks won’t solve:

  • Tyler’s downtown is a food desert. It is impossible to live within walking distance of a grocery store. Getting a green market as a downtown anchor should be a very high priority.
  • The lack of pedestrian signals makes travel on foot unsafe. Front and Broadway have some of the longest continuous sidewalks in the city, but crossing either one on foot is nearly impossible. (The tunnel under Broadway at Hogg Middle School is a notable exception.)
  • Too many bus stops lack shelters. Nobody wants to stand on the corner and look lost. If there isn’t a shelter, there effectively isn’t a bus stop.

This sounds like the sort of place James Howard Kunstler would love to visit so that he could bemoan its unfriendliness toward pedestrians. As this writer points out, Tyler would have to undergo some major changes to make it truly walkable. The infrastructure of sidewalks needs to be there but there also need to be places for people to want to walk to. Building the sidewalks doesn’t necessarily lead to a street culture. Can a regional center like this effectively revive itself through building sidewalks and encouraging businesses and residents to take advantage of these new public spaces?

Second, isn’t the bigger issue here who is going to pay for all of this? Perhaps Tyler has some money set aside for this but this could be expensive and particularly in an era of economic crisis, some would argue that the money could be spent elsewhere. (To be fair, some people could always argue that the money could be spent on something more necessary than sidewalks.)

I don’t know much about Tyler, Texas but wouldn’t this plan also involve convincing people to move back into the denser parts of the city rather than living on the fringes in typical suburban neighborhoods? What would be the selling point?

On the whole, it sounds like there is a lot of work to be done.