Tag Archives: suburbs

The state of public transit in the 100 largest American cities

Posted on by

The Brookings Institution just released a new report, Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, examining the mass transit systems in the 100 largest American cities. Here are some of the findings:

Nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind…

The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes…

About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries…

Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that rank highest on a combined score of transit coverage and job access are in the West…

With the primary focus of the report on jobs, there is a lot of interesting data. Here are a few things I noticed in going through the full report:

-Page 3 highlights three trends for metropolitan areas: “metro growth and expansion” with both city and suburban growth during the 2000s, “employment decentralization” (with a figure that only roughly 20% of metropolitan jobs are within 3 miles of the city center), and the “suburbanization of poverty.”

-Page 4 notes some of the problems of mass transit in today’s metropolitan regions: “old hub and spokes” which don’t work as well since “39 percent of work trips are entirely suburban” (a problem in the Chicago region, hence the need for the Star Line), “serving low-density areas” (a problem in many suburban areas and a recurring problem in the western suburbs of Chicago such as Naperville), and “spatial mismatch and the costs of transportation” (the idea that the people who work in certain jobs/industries don’t necessarily live near these jobs).

-Page 13 has an explanation for why they chose a 90-minute one-way commuting threshold in the study. If you change the threshold, the percent of jobs available changes quite a bit: “[A]cross all metro areas, the typical worker can reach about 30 percent of total metropolitan jobs in 90 minutes. At a 60-minute commute threshold, only 13 percent of jobs are accessible for the typical worker. For a 45-minute commute, the share drops to 7 percent.” This seems to be quite a high threshold but as they note, more than half of metropolitan commutes are longer than 45 minutes (according to 2008 American Community Survey data).

-Page 18 has a graph comparing the availability of high/medium/low skill jobs within 90 minutes by city or suburban setting. Interestingly, a higher percentage of jobs accessible from the city were high-skill while a higher percentage of accessible suburban jobs were low-skill.

-Pages 20-21 look at some of the differences between the West, with the most accessible mass transit and higher percentage of accessible jobs, and the South, the region at the other end of the spectrum. The findings about the South are not too surprising as it is known for sprawl but the finding that the West dominates the list of cities (15 of the top 20) is interesting. Does this suggest that these Western cities have made much more concerted efforts to provide mass transit?

If you look at the more specific data for the Chicago region, it appears to be fairly average compared to the other 100 metro areas.

Men’s Health on the isolation of suburbia

Posted on by

One can find commentary about suburbs almost anywhere, including at a Men’s Health blog. Here are their thoughts about the isolation of suburbia:

Researchers note that urbanites find liveliness, other people, and diversity more satisfying than those in the suburbs do. Suburbanites seem to find more satisfaction in economic status…

In the process, we replaced urban “stoop culture” with isolation. “Immigrants and other urbanites used to have casual interactions on a daily basis,” she says. “But once people started moving to the suburbs, they lost that sense of spontaneous social interaction.”

Sure, suburbanites technically could have walked the distance to their neighbor’s house. But the focus was more on individual households—partly due to the decline of the extended family. “Moving to the suburbs also meant moving away from your extended family into single family households,” Park explains.

This made our individual—fenced in—households the focus of our lives. Not just that—our new neighbors had different backgrounds and we had less in common with them, meaning forming new relationships took even more effort. (Fortunately, we finally had the TV to turn to instead!)…

The problem isn’t really suburbia itself; it’s isolation, which can affect anyone. (Fess up, city dwellers. Do you really even know who lives next door?)

On one hand, this post trades in some common images of suburbia: isolated homeowners who really live in “Disturbia, USA” (in the headline) and a thesis that asks “what’s wrong with the modern suburb?.” On the other hand, this issue of isolation is a commonly-cited problem in American life today. Interestingly, the last part of the post I cited above suggests the problem of isolation is found in both cities and suburbs. So is the problem really suburbia or is suburbia simply a symptom of larger issues of individualism and status-seeking within American culture?

Witold Rybczynski on McMansions, American housing, suburbs

Posted on by

With the continued housing slump (and a story going around that the $8,000 homebuyer credit of recent years only masked the issues of the housing market), a number of commentators have shared their thoughts about the future of housing in America. Witold Rybczynski weighs in with his prediction for the near future in a piece with the headline of “McMansions dead at last?“:

Owning single-family houses represents a long-established tradition that the U.S. shares with many countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway), but 10 years is long enough for traditions and behavior to change. It is likely that in the future multifamily housing will represent a larger share of the American housing market than the one-in-five new dwellings that has been the historic norm.

What about single-family houses, which will still remain for many people the home of choice? There is some evidence that urban townhomes and infill housing are more popular, as rising gas prices increase the cost of commuting. Higher energy costs also affect heating and air conditioning, which may have the effect of discouraging homebuyers from purchasing large houses with soaring entryways and expansive family rooms. While the evidence is fragmentary—the current reduction in average new house sizes has more to do with the preponderance of first-time buyers than an overall shift in demand—it is clear that the long recessionary cold-shower will dampen the exuberance that characterized the boom years of 2000 to 2005. That will mean smaller houses closer together on smaller lots in inner suburbs, fewer McMansions, and fewer planned communities in the distant hinterland. An alternative scenario is that American optimism will prevail and it will be business as usual, as happened during the boom of the 1950s following the Great Depression, or during the period following the Energy Crisis of 1973, when car buyers, after a brief flirtation with Japanese compact cars, embraced minivans and SUVs. But I wouldn’t count on it.

It sounds like Rybczynski thinks the American housing market will be denser and smaller in the future as a reaction to the last few years. He also makes the point that one big issue plaguing the housing market is more demographic in nature: household formation has slowed down as more people are living with other people rather than starting their own households that require a separate home.

Two other things also seem noteworthy:

1. Rybczynski suggests the reduction in home size is more due to having more first-time buyers than anything else. What about downsizers, particularly Baby Boomers who are retiring or whose children have left the house, that others have talked about?

2. Rybczynski also suggests that we will have fewer planned communities. I assume he is referring to larger planned communities/suburbs that simply may not be possible with low housing demand. But what about a possible uptick in smaller planned developments done by New Urbanists and others who can offer a denser form of suburbia?

Perhaps the fun part about reading pieces like this now is that we likely have years before we can really assess whether something has changed. In the meantime, we can wonder how low home values might go.

Architect discusses Bin Laden’s McMansion

Posted on by

I’ve continued to track the meme of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad house being a McMansion and a new mentions trickle in each day. Here is an explanation of the Bin Laden-McMansion connection from an architect at Architect magazine:

It may be unfair to tar your typical New Jersey Neo-Colonial with the brush of a Pakistani compound, especially since Bin Laden’s crib seemed to be home to a multigeneration community of interest and family. It made better use of sprawling space than most nuclear family–inhabited American homes, and I hate to say that it looks from the photographs to be more honestly modern than most of our fake palazzos and palaces.

The bin Laden compound was also not like a true McMansion because it was not about flash. There were no fancy cars in evidence, no landscaping that was put in place every spring and ripped up again in the winter, no garish colors. There was, for heaven’s sake, not even an Internet connection–how did they play games? How did they get onto Groupon?

We have made Osama Bin Laden everything we are afraid of. It is fitting that evil turns out not to lurk in caves, which would be so last millennium, or live in a tent, which would be so the millennium before that. It lives in the suburbs. It turns out that our fear of cities and our distaste of others was something he shared while fostering the paranoia that we might be in danger if we leave our cocoon through his and his cohorts’ murderous programs. So we, or at least the government that many of us do not want to pay for, swooped in, surgically extracting the emblem of that fear. I note that, unlike in so many other operations against our enemies, we left the McMansion standing.

A few things stick out:

1. There are a number of jabs here at McMansions. So we don’t like Bin Laden and we don’t like McMansions – why not put the two together? Seriously, the argument here is that McMansions are emblematic of sprawl, have poor architecture/design, are full of tacky people (who use Groupon! and have garish landscaping!), and they are all about flash.

2. There is another story referred to here: Bin Laden was found in the suburbs, the last place Americans would expect and one that goes against all our fears of people who live in caves or cities. I’ve already written about this and still find it a bit strange to claim that Bin Laden was living a suburban lifestyle in a suburban home when this particular community seems somewhat unique as a miltary community.

3. Additionally, it is claimed that Bin Laden, like Americans, was afraid of cities and others, hence, the need to live in a compound/McMansion in a suburb. Americans do have quite an anti-urban bias and occasional fear of others. There is likely some truth to this but I wonder how the average American might respond to being equated to Bin Laden.

4. Is it safe to presume that the last sentence indicates that the author would have preferred that this particular raid have destroyed the Bin Laden McMansion? If so, is it more because it was home to Bin Laden or because it is a McMansion?

Overall, this a good piece for illustrating the common critiques of McMansions.

Indicators of suburban poverty at food banks

Posted on by

Amidst recent news and research that more poor residents are moving to and living in the suburbs compared to previous decades and the typical image of wealthy suburban communities, use of suburban food banks may also be an indicator of these trends:

Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity with a network of more than 200 food bank partners, says there is a growing problem with suburban poverty, “where new clients are individuals who have never needed to rely on the charitable food system.”…

At the end of the economic boom in 2007, 13 million people or about 11% of all households were considered “food insecure,” the official term used by the government to define one’s inability to access an adequate amount of nutritious food at times during the year.

“Not everyone who is food insecure is literally going hungry,” says Mark Nord, sociologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. “Some are able to head off hunger by reducing the quality and variety of their diets. But if food insecurity is severe or prolonged, it is likely to result in hunger.”…

With that has come the increase in need among groups that were historically less vulnerable to hunger, according to the USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States annual report.

It would be interesting to see more specific data about the claims this article is trying to make: just how prevalent are hunger, food insecurity, and food stamps in the suburbs versus other areas? Without this data, this article is more about hunger in America and the already widely-reported statistic about food stamp usage. Ultimately, the article is just able to hint a possibly interesting story that would shed light on the changing nature of American suburbs.

Of course, one could go look at the USDA report cited in the article. With a quick search for the word “suburb,” here is what turns up in the 2 mentions:

Food insecurity was more common in large cities than in rural areas and in suburbs and other outlying areas around large cities. (p.6)

Across the metropolitan area classifications, the prevalence of food insecurity was higher for households located in principal cities of metropolitan areas (17.2 percent), than for those in nonmetropolitan areas (14.2 percent), and in suburbs and other metropolitan areas outside principal cities (13.2 percent).  Regionally, the prevalence of food insecurity was highest in the South (15.9 percent) and West (15.5 percent), intermediate in the Midwest (13.9 percent), and lowest in the Northeast (12.2 percent). (p.17)

Here are the figures about food pantry use:

Use of food pantries was higher in principal cities of metropolitan areas (5.0 percent) and in nonmetropolitan areas (5.9 percent) than in metropolitan areas outside of central cities (3.9 percent). The percentage of households that used food pantries was higher in the Midwest and West than in the  Northeast and South. (p.43)

It would be helpful to have comparisons to past data to see whether these figure for the suburbs has risen over the years. And while the percentages are lower for the suburbs, since more Americans live in the suburbs, there are probably larger absolute numbers of people dealing with food insecurity in the suburbs. (Quick calculations with a rough population estimate of 300 million: since at least 50% of Americans live in suburbs vs. 30% in cities, the food insecurity figures would translate into roughly 15.5 million in the cities and 19.8 million in the suburbs).

The important step taken toward American interstates on May 7, 1930

Posted on by

I am a few days behind in celebrating anniversaries in American transportation history but this post from The Infrastructurist highlights an important highway commission that was founded on May 7, 1930:

This past Saturday marked a little-known anniversary in the long-running contest between American highway and train establishments. On May 7, 1930, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to form the United States Motorways Commission, a twelve-person group — two Senators, two Congressmen, and eight presidential appointees — whose job was to consider a proposal for a national road network strikingly similar to the Interstate Highway System that emerged decades later.

The concept of a truly national road system was, at this point in American history, truly novel. The particular idea to be considered by the motorways commission sprang from the mercurial mind of an engineer named Lester Barlow. The Union Highway, as Barlow first called his system, would be a four-track expressway stretching from Boston to San Francisco. It would have fast lanes and slow lanes, access ramps to eliminate grade crossings, a partition between traffic flows to prevent U-turns, special sections devoted to gas stations and food stands — in short, all the definitive markers of expressways as we know them…

All seemed to be going well after the Senate voted to create the motorways commission on May 7, 1930. Then suddenly the legislation ran into problems. The House of Representatives trapped its version of the bill in a committee, and New York lawmakers did the same. Attempts to revive the plan in subsequent sessions, both federal and local, failed again and again, until the idea faded away.

Tilson later revealed to Barlow the real reason for legislative inaction on the proposal for a national highway system: it had been blocked by the mighty railroad lobby, which feared the loss of passengers and freight to road travel. This reason was confirmed to Barlow at a gathering of New Haven Railroad officials in the fall of 1930. As Barlow later recalled, John J. Pelley, then president of the New Haven, told those in attendance that a poor highway system was in the railroad’s best interest, and that it should do whatever it “practically” could to prevent the development of expressways in America.

This is an important story as it sounds like this commission laid the framework for the Federal Interstate system that began in the mid 1950s. As sociologists, historians, and others would tell you, this Federal shift toward highway construction had a profound impact on suburban development after World War II.

It would be interesting to hear more about the gap between this commission and the Federal Interstate Act of 1956. Of course, there was a Depression and a massive war. But during this time period, a number of government agencies started planning and building roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was built in this gap and the states of Ohio and Indiana started constructing connections to this Turnpike. In the Chicago region, a number of highways were under construction by the mid 1950s as the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago recognized the need for such roads. Beyond historical circumstances, was it primarily the railroad lobby that held up Federal support of interstate construction prior to 1956? If so, what was the state of the railroad industry in 1956 and was the Federal government actually behind the times in funding the Interstate system?

Zoning smaller lots in western Australia leads to fewer McMansions

Posted on by

Here is a report from western Australia about a way to limit the construction of McMansions: approve smaller residential lots.

The McMansion is likely to become architectural history as small blocks take over as the more popular housing lot size in WA.

Research by the Urban Development Institute of Australia said 60 per cent of blocks approved in Perth and Mandurah this financial year were less than 500sqm.

In 2004-05, only 30 per cent of all approvals were for blocks of this size. The increase has become pronounced in recent months, with 2130 small blocks approved in the December quarter compared with 1462 in the three months to September.

UDIA chief executive Debra Goostrey said the change had been driven by land prices, and a greater acceptance of small properties amid changing demographics.

It sounds then like development is becoming denser and houses are becoming smaller in this part of Australia. And there is also information on the lot size and house size trends over time:

A typical 1940s home had 125sqm of floor space on a block that was 1150sqm, or a quarter acre.

In the 1950s, block sizes fell to about 750sqm and homes were typically 150sqm in size.

The extravagant 80s brought in the era of the McMansion, with the floor spaces of homes blowing out to 300sqm and this became more extreme in the 1990s, with homes typically covering 350sqm of floor space on a 650sqm block.

It is interesting that this story emphasizes the size of the lot. Of course, this would have some effect on the size of the home that can be built on the lot but not necessarily. One issue that frequently comes up in American communities with teardowns is that the new owners want to build a relatively large home compared to the relatively smaller size of the lot. This can lead to situations where the new home, often dubbed a McMansion dwarfs older single-family homes. In response, many communities have developed guidelines about the new home including height restrictions and how much of a lot the new home can cover.

The article suggests that lots are becoming smaller because of prices and “changing demographics.” Is any of it due to larger concerns about sprawl? Compared to the typical quarter-acre lot of the 1940s, many of the lots today are less than half of that size. There is also mention in this article of an interest in more infill development. It sounds like there could also be some zoning issues going on as governments pursue denser forms of residential development.

The rankings of liveable cities

Posted on by

Architecture critic Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times asks why the most livable cities in the world, such as Vancouver, are not necessarily the the most loved cities.

This is another argument that deals with methodology: how exactly does one determine which cities are the “most liveable”? If just one or two factors are tweaked by certain publications, the list changes. Just like college rankings (recent thoughts here), such lists should be viewed with some skepticism.

Additionally, the criteria used by publications is not necessarily the criteria used by citizens who have some choices about where to move. Indeed, such lists seem to presume that these are the choices people would make if they had equal opportunity to move within their own country and/or around the world. Of course, most people have more restricted options due to job availability, price, personal preferences, location of family, and more.

In reading about this, it also strikes me that lists of liveable cities also might not make sense to many Americans: why would they want to live in a city when a majority have already chosen a suburban life?

h/t Instapundit

The importance of property values to NIMBYism

Posted on by

NIMBYism is cited as a common American issue as homeowners often fight hard to protect their pristine homes and neighborhoods. I was reminded of this by an article looking at seven neighbors that damage property values:

Here, the seven suprising neighbors that can reduce your home’s value:

Power Plants. The data is fairly clear on the impact of power plants on nearby home values — it usually hurts them. A study from the University of California at Berkeley shows that home values within two miles of a power plant can decrease between 4% and 7%.

Landfills. A study from the Pima County (Arizona) Assessor’s office shows that a subdivision located near a landfill (and all other residential factors being equal, like house size, school quality and residential incomes) loses 6% to 10% in value compared to a subdivision that isn’t located near a dump.

Robert A. Simons, an urban planning professor at Cleveland State University, says that if you live within two miles of a Superfund site (a landfill that the government designates as a hazardous waste site), your home’s value could decline by up to 15%.

Sex Offenders. Living in close proximity to a registered sex offender is one of the biggest downward drivers of home values. Researchers at Longwood University’s College of Business & Economics conclude that the closer you live to a sex offender, the more your home will depreciate. In the paper, Estimating the Effect of Crime Risk on Property Values and Time on Market: Evidence from Megan’s Law in Virginia, Longwood researchers say, “the presence of a registered sex offender living within one-tenth of a mile reduces home values by about 9%, and these same homes take as much as 10% longer to sell than homes not located near registered sex offenders.”

Delinquent Bill Payers. One surprising way that neighbors can bring down the value of surrounding homes, especially in town home or condo communities, is by not paying their maintenance fees or their mortgages. “Bad neighbors bring values down by not paying their maintenance fees, in some cases their mortgage payments, and not maintaining the home’s appearance,” says Pordes. “These homeowners usually do not care about real estate values.”

Foreclosed Homes. Perhaps the biggest single factor that drives nearby home values down is a foreclosure. A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that a neighbor’s foreclosed home can slash the value of homes within 250 feet of the foreclosed properties by an average of 27%. Says Federal Reserve Governor Joseph Tracy recently in his economic outlook for 2011: “The growing inventory of defaulted mortgages continues to weigh down any recovery in the housing market… Problems in housing markets can impact economic growth.”

Lackluster Landscaping. Studies show that lawn care has a big impact on surrounding home values. Virginia Tech University released a report stating that pristine landscaping can jack up the value of a home by 5% to 10%. But if the lawn looks like it just hosted the world rugby tournament, it can be a green thumb to the eye of local home prices.

Closed Schools. Sometimes, neighborhood problems can stem from local government action. For example, if a cash-strapped city or town closes a neighborhood school, that can easily steer home values south. The National Association of Realtors says that 75% of home shoppers, the quality and availability of schools in the neighborhood is either “somewhat important” or “very important.”

As the article notes, what an individual homeowner can do about these situations might be limited. Perhaps the best way to avoid this is simply to do one’s homework before moving into a neighborhood to assess what has happened or might happen in the future. This could involve checking community websites, reading local news, and talking with current residents. But, there are always trade-offs involved in this process. If someone desires a cheaper home, perhaps they might move into an area that has one of these conditions.

At the same time, there are plenty of land uses or neighbors that are not cited in the article where homeowners band together to protect their community. Here are a few recent situations in the Chicago region: a battle over affordable housing in Winnetka (with an update here), Naperville residents opposed to Show-Me’s and Evanston residents opposed to a Tilted Kilt restaurant, and a debate over lighting in Barrington Hills. Compared to a power plant or landfill, these uses seem much less obvious and yet are important concerns for residents of wealthier communities.

On the whole, this article illustrates that one of the primary goals of a homeowner is to protect and/or grow their property values. In order to do this, a homeowner may have to be in opposition to larger neighborhood or community goals. After all, power plants and landfills and sex offenders have to be somewhere. But, if you have the economic means in the United States, you generally move to nicer and nicer neighborhoods where these NIMBY concerns are likely reduced. It would be interesting to track how people’s neighborhood or suburban moves over the years progressively place them further and further away from such property value lowering uses.

Finding Bin Laden in the suburbs

Posted on by

There has been a lot of commentary about where Osama Bin Laden was found in Pakistan. On one hand, there has been a lot of interest in his house, including people dubbing the compound a “McMansion.” (However, reports yesterday and today have suggested that the house was less unusual or prominent as was first suggested.) On the other hand, he was found in an unusual military town. Here is one take that suggests that Bin Laden was found in the unlikeliest of places: a suburb.

We now all know that, of course, bin Laden was not in a cave. He was hiding in plain sight in a million-dollar mansion in a posh suburb of Islamabad.

Not only that, the suburb was a military complex described as Pakistan’s West Point. And the mansion apparently was built expressly for him – as though he were some chief executive officer cashing in on his bonus options, so he wasn’t being especially discreet.

He apparently had been living there undisturbed for six years, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). He was a suburbanite enjoying the pleasures of a life of leisure – behind 12-foot walls.

This was so far beyond our expectation of how the world’s most wanted terrorist would be living that no one, apparently, bothered to look for him outside the mountains. Terrorists just don’t live in the suburbs.

I’m not so sure this community was a suburb. It was at least an hour outside of Islamabad. It was also a military community, not necessary a resort community. However, there have been reports that a number of wealthier military officials live in this community. And Bin Laden was living a life of leisure when he was possibly in the same room for five years? Bin Laden is comparable to a CEO “cashing in on his bonus options”? In terms of thinking that this community is like a typical American suburb outside of Los Angeles or Chicago and Bin Laden was the typical suburban head of household, this is not quite the case.

The story goes on to cite the sociological idea of “lifestyle enclaves”:

Back in 1985, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his cohort, in their seminal book “Habits of the Mind,” coined the term “lifestyle enclaves” to describe the way Americans had begun to cluster on the basis of “shared patterns of appearance, consumption and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles.”

These enclaves were self-selected – you gravitated toward others like you. In the sociologists’ view, they were increasingly replacing real community in America with these superficial bonds of similarity.

There are dozens of these enclaves today – from members of the National Rifle Association, to upwardly mobile young married couples, to outdoorsmen, to the very wealthy. Enclaves have become a primary way we define ourselves.

But I doubt that Bellah and the others ever thought of terrorists as a possible enclave back when they were writing the book. Yet the concept of people who choose to live with others who look like them and think like them is now so deeply embedded in our consciousness that the idea of a terrorist enclave apparently did cross the mind of the intelligence community today.

The conclusion of the piece is that Bin Laden was found because he didn’t play by the “lifestyle enclave”/suburban rules. So all of the residents of Abbotabad were terrorists?

All of this seems like a stretch in order to connect to the average American suburban reader. The basic premise could be interesting: the suburbs (or more rural/military town suburbs) are supposed to be the land of safety, not the place where terrorists (or any people who commit violent crimes) actually live next door. But to suggest that Bin Laden was similar to a typical suburbanite and was caught because he didn’t fit in seems kind of silly. Projecting the image of the American suburbs on Abbotabad, Pakistan may not be the best way to understand a complex situation.