Tag Archives: suburbs

Can we expect a multi-family housing construction boom soon?

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Most housing news these days is bad: dropping prices, foreclosures working their way through the system, and a sales slowdown that might continue for some time. But some analysts suggest there may soon be a construction boom in multi-family housing:

But for now, you can see from this chart that overall home building did, indeed, boom during the bubble. Multi-family home building, however, remained pretty consistent between 250,000 and 300,000 structures per year throughout the bubble and declined in late-2009. Single-family building, on the other hand, grew to a rate of about one million homes per year in the mid-1990s to peak close to the rate of two million per year in early 2006. Then, of course, construction plummeted…

From all of this, we can conclude a few things. First, before long, residential construction will have to rise. Although vacancies are high currently, household formation should experience a boom as the economy adds jobs. With it, those vacancies will decline and new homes will be necessary to accommodate the growing population.

Moreover, both reasons for the decline in the rate of household formation indicate a need for more rentals. Young adults who are finally able to move out of their parents’ homes will mostly rent first. They’ll have short credit histories, relatively low wages, and little savings for a down payment. That combination that doesn’t usually spell mortgage approval when underwriting is strict. And those who are living with relatives or friends because they have been unemployed for an extended period will also likely need to rent at first. They might have experienced financial troubles affecting their credit histories, their new wages will often be lower than what they earned before being laid off, and they may have little savings for a down payment if they needed to rely on that money when unemployed. Additionally, all of those millions of Americans who defaulted on their mortgages will have no choice but to rent for quite a while. Banks certainly won’t give them a new mortgage for at least several years.

Now add this into the fact that multi-family construction remained constant during the boom, while single-family construction rose. This could translate into a coming mismatch between the types of housing units available and the specific housing demand that will rise. For the reasons just described, going forward the home ownership rate should fall to and remain at or even below its historical norm, while renting becomes more common. This implies two outcomes. Some single-family homes will need to be converted to rentals and additional multi-family structures need to be built.

The argument here is that the housing slowdown is really about single-family homes since changes in demand, driven by demographic trends including the slowing of household formation, mean that there are not enough multi-family, rental housing units and so we will soon have more multi-family housing construction.

There could be some people who might work against this trend. Recent advertisements from the National Association of Realtors suggest they want to promote single-family homes and homeownership. I wonder how quickly the housing industry could shift to building more rental units even if this is overwhelmingly what consumers desire and would developers and builders reach the profits they want from constructing multi-family units? Additionally, how many suburban communities would approve more multi-family and rental housing that might mar their single-family home character?

Brain scans reveal extra stress of city living

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A number of the prominent early sociologists were interested in how the shift from villages to cities would affect individuals and social interaction. A new brain scan study suggests those living in urban areas experience more stress than those living in rural areas:

Researchers have shown that the parts of the brain dealing with stress and emotion are affected by living among the crowds.

The findings help shed light on why those who are born and raised in urban areas are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and schizophrenia than those brought up in the countryside.

The team of international scientists behind the finding are unsure why city life is so bad for the nerves.

However, past studies have shown that exposure to green space reduces stress, boosts health and makes us less vulnerable to depression. The findings come from the brain scans of 32 healthy volunteers from urban and rural areas.

Several issues come to mind:

1. As the article notes, this is a rather small sample. We would need to see larger samples or more studies to confirm these findings.

2. Do suburban areas count as urban or rural in this study?

3. The article mentions several studies that suggest exposure to green space lowers stress levels. How much green space is needed: does a walk in an urban park like Central Park help? Can people drive through open fields to experience less stress?

4. Are people living in these different areas aware of these differing stress levels? People talk about “escaping it all” when they go on vacations but are they aware of when this might happen on a regular basis?

5. A common argument among environmentalists is that more dense, urban living cuts down on pollution and wasted resources. This may be true but will people on the other side now cite this kind of study as evidence for why urban living is not good?

Dioramas of suburbs and McMansions

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The New York Times has a story about photographers who build model homes and suburban scenes in order to photograph them:

Yet “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them…

James Casebere, meanwhile, shows his photographs but not the architectural models of suburban housing developments on which they are based. By controlling the lighting and printing his images on a large scale, he makes sprawl seem even more aggressive and insidious. In “Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, N.Y.) #8” tightly spaced McMansions tower over a quaint white-clapboard farmhouse.

Mr. Casebere is something of an anomaly in this show because he is so focused on the present. Other examples of model architecture tend to indulge nostalgia, along the lines of Michael Paul Smith’s bland 1950s strip mall and Alan Wolfson’s gritty little slice of 1970s Canal Street in New York…

The trip through all of these microcosms can be tedious: too many shoeboxes, not enough ideas. One exception is a video by Junebum Park, who uses his hands and a rooftop camera to turn an ordinary parking lot into a kind of moving diorama. A simple trick of perspective is all it takes to make him the master of Matchbox cars and ant-size pedestrians.

The article ends by suggesting that too many of the dioramas are similar. What would happen if an artist presented suburban homes in a positive light rather than portraying sprawl as “aggressive and insidious” – would this be different enough or unacceptable?

I am intrigued by the idea that a “bland” 1950s strip mall induces nostalgia. What exactly does this look like?

The struggles of New Urbanist communities outside Indianapolis

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Several New Urbanist communities outside of Indianapolis are struggling to sell homes and fill commercial space:

The Village of WestClay was supposed to be a different kind of neighborhood — one that turned back the clock and led suburban living toward a more community-centered, urban lifestyle.

Along with Saxony in Fishers and Avon’s Village of Turner Trace, this model of “New Urbanism” offered a home where you could leave the family car parked in the garage, trading your big backyard and high fence for a front porch and neighbors you really got to know…

It’s the stores and restaurants, though, that have lagged. About 65 percent of 275,000 square feet of planned commercial space has opened. Clustered together like a traditional downtown, the businesses at the center of the neighborhood have struggled the most…

Nationally, retail has proven to be the hardest part to build, said John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. The Chicago-based think tank advocates New Urbanism as the future of development.

I remember reading about how this also seemed to happen in Celebration, Florida (see Celebration, U.S.A.). Many businesses are unwilling to build or open a location without an already-existing residential base that provides a steady source of customers. But if you are trying to put the New Urbanist pieces together, provide a community with residences within an easy walk of stores and other amenities, you need some businesses to be there from the beginning to help sell the homes. Couldn’t these new developments offer special low prices to businesses for a few years as an incentive?

The suggestion at the end of the article is that these problems could be avoided if New Urbanist principles were applied in cities or denser areas, not in newly-constructed New Urbanist developments plopped in suburbia. We’ll have to see what happens in the lean economic times of today and perhaps more prosperous years in the future.

The continued rise of the American suburbs

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A short piece in the New York Times discusses the continued trend toward the suburbs:

Still, for all the buzzy talk of knowledge industry synergy and urban appeal, census figures show that UBS’s return would be bucking the demographic trends rather than reflecting them and that the suburbs, however unloved by tastemakers and academics, remain where the growth is.

Joel Kotkin , a writer who specializes in demographic issues, says that the 2010 census figures show that during the past decade just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in city cores. The rest took place in the suburbs, which are home to more than 6 in 10 Americans.

The 8.6 percent is even lower than in the 1990s when the figure was 15.1 percent. New York City did better than the national average, getting 29 percent of the growth in the metropolitan area, but that was down from 46 percent in the 1990s. Of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, only three — Boston, Providence, and Oklahoma City — saw their core cities grow faster than their suburbs. And the growth is hardly the mono-dimensional suburbia of hoary stereotype.

In 1970 nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white, Mr. Kotkin writes. Now minorities constitute over 27 percent of the nation’s suburbanites.

Several questions could be raised:

1. Kotkin’s figures show the rise of suburbs. Others have suggested Kotkin’s figures disguise the real divide between inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. These inner-ring areas are suburban but also are more city like with higher densities and city issues (infrastructure, crime, aging housing, etc.).

2. Sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the classic The Levittowners, is cited saying that people are still moving to the suburbs because they are cheaper. This seems a bit simplistic: some suburban homes may be cheaper, particularly on the edge of suburban development, but homeowners end up paying more in transportation costs, commuting, and governmental bodies subsidize sprawl by paying for highways (and giving less to mass transit). The real question is what would happen if the costs of urban and suburban living were similar and people knew this – would they still choose the suburbs? I think they would, particularly for cultural reasons such as chasing the American Dream and looking for safe, well-educated neighborhoods for their kids.

3. The article cites data that says Millennials are more interested in living in the suburbs than their parents. This may be the case though what exactly these suburbs look like is unclear: exurbs full of McMansions or denser, walkable suburban communities?

The financial benefits of not living in sprawl

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Richard Florida argues “The neighborhood you live in can have a huge effect on your ability to spend or save, do the kind of things you really want to, and navigate the ongoing economic crisis.” Cars are indicted here as they require large sums of money to maintain and operate.

Based on this data, Florida argues that we need to rethink what we promote:

There remain some pundits and politicians who continue to believe that we need to get housing back to its former levels. But that won’t work this time. The old Fordist housing-auto-energy economic model which helped bring on the crisis in the first place has reached its sell-by date. Our continued commitment to (and massive subsidizing of) it will only further erode the financial situation of middle-class and working families and hold back the recovery.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the typical tools of monetary and fiscal policy are proving insufficient to sustain the recovery. Our future prosperity requires that we to begin to shift precious resources from houses, cars and energy toward investments in new skills, technologies, and industries that can generate higher paying jobs and improve overall living standards.  And that in turn requires a new geography built around denser (more innovative and productive), more walkable, transit-oriented (more efficient) communities.

If American families and policy-makers don’t see being green or sustainable as reason enough to change the way we live, perhaps seeing the very tangible financial rewards that accrue to those who do will help them change their minds. As the poet wrote, “You must change your life.” The numbers speak for themselves.

In addition to being more green, Florida is making the pragmatic argument that denser, more walkable communities actually help improve the financial situations of residents.

This may be compelling evidence – Americans can be persuaded by financial incentives – but I still think it is an uphill climb against an American culture that prize cars, driving, and the freedom that it represents. Changing this mindset is difficult even with at least 38 years of evidence that gasoline will not always be cheap or plentiful, evidence that suggests long commutes harm relationships, and research showing people aren’t necessarily happy in the suburbs. People are willing to trade a lot for the vision of the dream of the single-family home in the suburbs.

What would help is an alternative, positive vision that would celebrate denser neighborhoods and more urban life. Rather than simply attack the suburbs, sprawl, and McMansions, how about images of more urban life that can combine the best of both city and suburban life? The narratives regarding denser lives tend to be about chaos and a lack of control – think of the recent stories of “flash mobs” and “wilding” in Chicago. This could change with younger generations as they grow up with different aspirations and values. As Florida has argued, younger people are attracted by more exciting urban areas and they have the potential to change social patterns as well as promote new types of policies. But this vision needs to include family life, not just 20-something or single life, in denser areas.

Quick Review: Revolutionary Road

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In my continued quest to watch movies involving the suburbs, I recent saw Revolutionary Road (although I have not read the 1961 book on which the film is based). Here are some thoughts I had after watching the film:

1. The main thrust of the movie is that the couple is unsatisfied in the suburbs. This is not an unusual plot for books/movies/critiques of the suburbs. But I wonder after watching the film whether this couple would be truly satisfied anywhere or doing anything.

2. There are two complicating factors in the story. One, the couple decides to move to Paris in order to escape the suburban doldrums and two, while in Paris, the wife will work and support the husband who will have time to think and relax. These ideas, the glamor of Paris plus the reversal of 1950s gender roles, seem to dog the couple throughout the rest of the film as they are unable to to achieve these goals.

3. I was struck that the lives of the children in the film are quite tangential to the plot. The story suggests the adult couple is stifled in the suburbs but we don’t get much insight into how this affects the children. Or, perhaps this is suggesting that the children don’t matter very much or that if the couple is unhappy, the children are bound to be in for a difficult time as well.

4. Like some others stories in this genre, this film features a mentally ill man who is the only one able to see through the suburban facade. The irony, of course, is that the man who society says is unfit is the only one able to voice the issues that the couple faces. The implication is that those in suburbia are actually the mentally ill.

5. The husband works for a firm that suggests computers are the future. I wish some of this contrast between this machine-driven future and the dull suburban life was developed further: do computers provide hope or another nail in the consumerist, family-oriented suburbs?

Overall, I didn’t find the film particularly noteworthy as you can find a very similar story in a number of other places. The contrast between the suburbs and Paris and the suburban lifestyle versus a life where the wife supports the family could be truly revolutionary but it ends up more of a fleeting, unattainable dream than anything else.

(This film got good reviews from critics: it was 68% percent fresh, 135 fresh out of 198 total reviews, at Rottentomatoes.com.)

Illinois redistricting also about capturing suburban voters

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Much of the press about redistricting in Illinois has highlighted how Democrats plan to increase their seats. But the Daily Herald offers an additional insight by suggesting that the redistricting is really about capturing suburban voters:

But even as political analysts poring over the new boundaries provide slightly different takes, one thing is certain: the suburbs, which saw booming growth over the last decade, were the prime meat in the proverbial fattened calf — filleted to produce congressional districts that would help assure a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation over the next 10 years…

“There’s been a shift in power,” Northern Illinois University professor Richard Greene said. “Because of the population shift, the Democratic core and the inner manufacturing suburbs are losing strength, as the outer-edge suburban communities are gaining substantially in strength.”

Democrats, political consultant Kitty Kurth said, want to continue to capitalize on their base — the largely Democratic voting bloc of Chicago, some of which has moved to the suburbs in recent years.

The new map appears to do just that, in some cases through odd-shaped districts that often start in solidly Democratic Chicago and extend into the suburbs through long, gnarled fingers. That essentially extends Democratic Chicago districts into traditionally Republican suburban ones, but not by so much as to put any Democratic majority at risk.

Traditionally, some of the suburban areas, particularly DuPage County, have been solidly Republican strongholds. While these figures are already changing somewhat, this redistricting might help push  these state offices further away from Republicans.

The article also goes on to note how the second Hispanic district in the state could be located in the southwest suburbs “centered around Aurora and Joliet.”

Such a move to control suburban votes would go along with commentary that suggests suburban voters are critical for national political outcomes.

How a long commute harms you

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The Infrastructurist has a round-up of recent studies that show the negative effects of long commutes: higher rates of divorce plus “low happiness, high stress levels, and loneliness; they even makes us physically unhealthy.”

As they note, enough Americans seem willing to make the trade-off between a better house for a long commute. Is this because people simply don’t know or think about the social costs of long commutes? If not, what sort of organization would or could make this more known?

Chicago area businesses looking to move from suburban campuses

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The suburbanization boom after World War II was not just about the movement of residences to the suburbs: it included a large migration of jobs and business headquarters to suburban locations, often large “campuses.” Crain’s Chicago Business suggests this trend may now be going in reverse as Chicago area business look to leave these suburban campuses:

Fleeing urban decay, companies like Motorola Inc., Allstate Corp. and Sears Roebuck & Co. built fortress-like complexes on the fringes of metropolitan Chicago. Jobs and residential development followed, fueling sprawl and congestion across the region.

Today, Sears Holdings Corp. and AT&T Inc. are looking to escape their compounds in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates. A shrunken Motorola has space to let in Schaumburg. Sara Lee Corp. eyes downtown office space after less than a decade in Downers Grove. Companies from Groupon Inc. to GE Capital hire thousands in Chicago while their suburban counterparts shed workers.

All reflect changes in the corporate mindset that spawned the campuses dotting outer suburbia. Empire-building CEOs from the 1970s through the 1990s craved not only cheap real estate but total control of their environments. They created self-contained corporate villages that cut off employees from outside influences.

As the 21st century enters its second decade, many companies are discovering the drawbacks of the isolation they sought. Hard-to-get-to headquarters limit the talent pool a company can draw on and feed a “not-invented-here” insularity that ignores major shifts in industries and markets.

This article suggests more corporations seek the opportunities that cities provide. Chicago certainly has opportunities – it was #6 in Foreign Policy’s 2010 global cities index. I wonder how much of this is driven by different factors:

1. Young people (college graduates, recent graduates) living in the city. We have some evidence that younger generations want denser environments and cultural opportunities. This would seem to go along with Richard Florida’s “creative class” idea that people and businesses move to exciting, innovative, culturally hip places.

1a. As a corollary, suburban places are no longer hip. These campuses are now decades old and involve stodgy suburbanites driving to stodgy workplaces. This is kind of interesting because the technology that would make instant connections possible may still not be enough to keep companies from relocating to the city.

2. Is there a particular business or city that has spurred this new thinking? If this has been shown to “work” elsewhere, it wouldn’t then be too surprising if other businesses followed suit.

3. Some have suggested that some businesses originally moved to the suburbs because their CEOs had already made the move and wanted their workplace to be closer to their homes. Could it be that CEOs and other important people in these corporations are now living in the city?

4. Tax breaks. This has been in the Chicago news recently with several companies, including Motorola and Sears, threatening to leave if they don’t get a better deal. Do these businesses get better incentives from the city of Chicago? Can increased tax breaks keep these campuses in the suburbs?