Tag Archives: suburbs

Gallery of 2010 Smart Growth award winners

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“Smart growth” is a popular term. It typically implies an antidote to sprawl and a quest to construct or design more people-oriented, mixed-use, and sustainable places. Here is a gallery of images that show the winners of the EPA’s 2010 Smart Growth Achievement award. Read more about the award winners (and see some more pictures) in the EPA’s explanation of the award and the winners.

These look like attractive places. One of the projects was described as “an outdoor public living room” while a number of the other projects reduced the barrier between people and streets.

It is interesting to note that these winners were all in large cities (New York City, Baltimore, Portland, San Francisco) or in small towns (a corridor of Maine communities). Were there any suburban places in the running for this award?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Side effect of housing slump: lots of property tax appeals

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With property values dropping in recent years, one side effect is that more homeowners are appealing their property tax bills. This has led to some problems in local government as officials try to keep up with the increased number of requests:

From Los Angeles to Atlantic City, the New Jersey gambling resort whose credit rating Moody’s Investors Service cut by three levels last month, property owners are demanding lower taxes after real-estate values plunged. The disputes over billions in dollars come as municipalities are already slashing services such as police and fire protection and may depress revenue further as communities try to recover from the longest recession since the 1930s. In Michigan, Governor-elect Rick Snyder has warned that hundreds of towns face financial crises…

Oakland County, the Detroit suburb with Michigan’s second- highest median income, didn’t previously pay much attention to Tax Tribunal cases because any losses were covered by new construction gains, said Robert Daddow, deputy county executive. Now, about $3.9 billion in taxable value, or 5 percent of the county’s tax base, is under review, he said.

Cities and towns across Michigan had property-tax collections plunge as much as 20 percent in the past year, the steepest drop since a 1994 rewrite of state levies, forcing scores to decide whether to borrow to pay bills or risk default on bonds.

Municipal budgets “tend to lag economic conditions” by 18 months to several years, according to a National League of Cities report in October that Pagano co-wrote.

The consequences for local municipalities could be staggering: less tax revenue means fewer services and in the long run, unhappy residents. And this is not just a short-term problem – economic recessions like this can have a long effect as the communities must rebuild budgets and restart development projects. I particularly like the example from Oakland County: when times were good, these sorts of appeals didn’t matter much because new development covered whatever appeals for lower taxes were approved.

One of the hallmarks of suburban development after World War II was the interest many communities had in promoting tax generating land uses. Additionally, many residents desire low property taxes. When population growth and housing construction was on the rise, even residential properties, which bring in property tax dollars but also require outlays for increased levels of services, were seen as a good. But in worse economic times, communities will have to double down even more on this issue: what land uses generate the most money for the community at large?

Innovative (or strange) mall designs

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Many shopping malls are not that exciting to look at: they are functional in providing retail space and enough amenities to keep shoppers coming back. When critics talk about the blandness or homogeneity of suburbs, shopping malls are often included in the analysis: if you have been in one shopping mall, you have been in them all. But what if architects and designers took the shopping mall in a new direction? Popular Mechanics highlights “the world’s 18 strangest shopping malls.”

Some questions: do these different designs increase retail sales? Do shoppers have a better overall experience in these places?

h/t Instapundit

The methodology behind Money’s 2010 best places to live

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Every year, Money magazine publishes a list of “the best places to live.” I’ve always enjoyed this list as it attempts to distill what communities truly match what people would desire in a community. The winner in 2010 (in the August issue) was Eden Prairie, Minnesota

But one issue with this list is how the communities are selected. In 2009, the list was about small towns, communities between 8,500 and 50,000. In 2010, the list was restricted to “small cities,” places with 50,000 to 300,000 residents. Here is how the magazine selected its 2010 list of communities to grade and rank:

746
Start with all U.S. cities with a population of 50,000 to 300,000.

555
Exclude places where the median family income is more than 200% or less than 85% of the state median and those more than 95% white.

322
Screen out retirement communities, towns with significant job loss, and those with poor education and crime scores. Rank remaining places based on housing affordability, school quality, arts and leisure, safety, health care, diversity, and several ease-of-living criteria.

100
Factor in additional data on the economy (including fiscal strength of the government), jobs, housing, and schools. Weight economic factors most heavily.

30
Visit towns and interview residents, assessing traffic, parks, and gathering places and considering intangibles like community spirit.

1
Select the winner based on the data and reporting.

A couple of questions I have:

1. I agree that it can be hard to compare communities with 10,000 people and 150,000 people. But can the list from each year be called “the best place to live” if the communities of interest change?

2. I wonder how they chose the median income cutoffs. So this cuts out places that might be “too exclusive” or “not exclusive enough.” Are these places not desirable to people?

3. Some measure of racial homogeneity is included in several steps. How many home buyers desire this? We know from a lot of research that whites tend to avoid neighborhoods with even moderate levels of African-Americans.

4. Weighting economic factors heavily seems to make sense. Jobs and economic opportunities are a good enticement for moving.

5. I would be interested to see what kind of information they collected on their 30 community visits. How many residents and leaders did they talk to? How does one measure “community spirit”? If a community says it has “community spirit,” how exactly do you check to see whether that is correct?

Overall, this is a complicated methodology that accounts for a number of factors. What I would like to know is how this list compares with how Americans make decisions about where to live. Do people want to move up to places like this and then stay there or is the dream for many to move on to more exclusive communities (if possible)? How many Americans could realistically afford to or possibly move into these communities?

(A side note: the four Chicago suburbs in the top 100 for 2010: Bolingbrook at #43, Naperville at #54, Mount Prospect at #56, and Arlington Heights at #59. Naperville used to rank much higher earlier in the 21st century – I wonder how it has slipped in the rankings.)

More financial problems in Chicago suburbs: underfunded police and fire pensions

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If the federal government is short on money and so is the state of Illinois, then financial problems were eventually going to trickle down to individual communities, even those who would usually be considered wealthy. The Chicago Tribune details how many suburban municipalities have fallen behind in funding police and fire pensions:

Of the 300-plus pension funds across the region, only about 20 are rated by the state as fully funded…

The flaws and excesses were long masked by a strong economy, when big investment returns pushed average funding levels to nearly 80 percent a decade ago — which many experts consider to be healthy. The latest figures from 2009 show suburban public-safety pension funds, on average, have just 52 percent of the assets needed to be fully funded.

Though the true cost will vary from place to place, the unpaid tab averages nearly $2,700 for every suburban household. A strong economy could boost investment returns and lessen the liability, but experts say the financial sins of the past are too great for pension systems to merely invest their way out of them.

As lawmakers consider reforms, town leaders and unions point fingers. Unions complain towns haven’t saved enough and lawmakers failed to force them. Suburban leaders complain lawmakers required them to offer lucrative benefits without the cash to pay for them. The one thing they agree on: The recession made the problems far worse…

The state doesn’t compile figures of how many towns have done that, with such findings usually buried in individual fund audits. The Tribune reviewed every audit the state would provide — 153 of them in metro Chicago — and found regulators cited a third of their taxing districts for not providing enough cash to their pension funds.

A couple of things stand out to me about this story:

1. One issue appears to be that of fragmented suburban government. Illinois, specifically the Chicago region, is well-known for its many taxing districts and municipalities. If each community, big or small, was to provide a pension fund, there were bound to be problems when some of these communities cannot meet their obligations.

2. Residents are not going to be happy about this. There are a couple of places they might direct their anger: toward local officials who didn’t properly fund these pensions or toward police or fire unions (a common issue in more conservative locations). Residents are also likely to be unhappy if fire and police personnel, people who many citizens feel keep their communities livable and safe, are let go.

3. How would local communities explain their actions regarding funding pensions? Can they or local officials be held responsible, outside of voting against them?

How location, particularly living in the city, affects health

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Two sociologists argue that location, particularly living in poor neighborhoods in large cities, can lead to more negative health outcomes:

“When trying to understand a person’s health and well-being, we believe that their zip code may be just as important a number to their physical health as their blood pressure or glucose level,” Fitzpatrick says in a statement.

Fitzpatrick and Mark LaGory of the University of Alabama at Birmingham have authored, “In Unhealthy Cities: Poverty, Race, and Place in America,” about high-poverty urban neighborhoods and the health of Americans…

For example, there have been numerous studies on how a concentration of fast-food restaurants in poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods impacts the health of the residents, while other studies show many of these poor neighborhoods may not have a single grocery store offering fresh, nutritious food or safe places to exercise.

“Some parts of the city seemed to be designed to make people sick,” the authors say.

These conclusions are not surprising though they may contribute to the growing field of the sociology of wellness. I particularly like the last quote: “Some parts of the city seemed to be designed to make people sick.” This leads to a question: how could cities or neighborhoods be designed to make people healthy?

Reading about this reminded me about some of the rationale used by some of the first suburban residents in England and the United States. Among other factors, the suburbs were said to be healthier and have cleaner air. The big city, particularly by the late 1800s, was viewed as dirty and crowded. The single-family home allowed families to spread out and take in more of the country air.

I would be curious to see if this study, or other studies, could provide estimates of life expectancy for people with similar socio-economic status living in different locations.

Battle over downtown land in Brookfield: private owners wants a church versus village’s long-term downtown plans

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The Chicago Tribune has a story about a battle over one area of possible development in downtown Brookfield, Illinois. Though it may be an relatively small development in a relatively small community, it illustrates a classic struggle in older suburbs: a property owner versus a community’s long-range plan.

On one side is a local resident who bought a significant piece of downtown property because she wants to build a larger building for her Methodist church and provide a place for families and teenagers to hang out. On the other side is the village who has a long-term plan for the downtown that includes using this land for tax-revenue generating purposes.

Here is some more detail about the discussion between the property-owner and the village:

After the vote Francis said she was disappointed but undaunted. She has invested more than $1 million and owns the 14 parcels of empty land and vacant buildings that form the triangle between Grand Boulevard and Washington Avenue, and she vowed that the church/community center will go there even if it takes years…

And village staff and the planning commission stressed that the project does not comply with the long-term 2020 plan. That plan calls for a mixture of businesses to attract customers and boost sales tax revenue along with residential development that would provide customers to those businesses during the day and evening hours.

“I just cannot bring myself to say this is a good project for that area of town,” Trustee Michael Towner said before the vote.

He acknowledged that new development has been slow in coming to the area, but said that just because it is the only proposal doesn’t mean it should be approved.

Both of the proposed uses for the land could be good: new businesses would bring in new tax revenues while a church/community center could help bring people into the downtown area as well as improve the chances for this church.

But in the end, Brookfield seems very concerned about not letting the property go off the tax rolls. How long will this woman fight the village or could they come to some compromise?

Interactive maps of metropolitan America

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The Brookings Institute has put together a website with interactive data maps of metropolitan America. The data comes from the 2009 American Community Survey (done by the Census) and one can look at all sorts of variables across cities or metropolitan areas.

The best feature, in my opinion, is the tab that lets you compare suburbs alone across metropolitan regions. Very quickly, you can find that the suburbs of Syracuse, New York have the highest percentage of non-Hispanic whites (93.1%), the suburbs of San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California, have the highest median household income ($96,478), and the suburbs of Modesto, California have the highest percentage of commuters traveling more than 90 minutes to work (7.2%).

Battle over outdoor lighting in Barrington Hills really about the character of the community

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On one hand, it seems like a silly fight: people in Barrington Hills, Illinois, a wealthy community known for its large lots and wealthy residents, are battling over a proposed ordinance that would limit outdoor lighting. On the other hand, this debate appears to be about much more than just outdoor lights: it is a discussion about whether Barrington Hills can retain its character or whether it will slowly just become another suburb.

A little background about the community:

Barrington Hills has kept a worried eye on the encroaching masses from the time of its incorporation in 1957. A local history says the village was conceived of in the locker room of the Barrington Hills Country Club by men who vowed to prevent their estates and gentlemen’s farms from being sliced into tract housing.

The village set its zoning code so that properties must be a minimum of 5 acres, a trait it has kept despite booming development in the surrounding communities of Algonquin, Barrington and Carpentersville. Even South Barrington, a town with traditionally large lot sizes, had to allow a subdivision in order to settle a lawsuit.

But Barrington Hills got a glimpse of an unhappy future a decade ago when a developer sought permission to build hundreds of homes in the village’s northwest corner. Turned down by the trustees, he sued and won the right to de-annex the land (to date, though, nothing has been built).

The defeat has lingered in the minds of some village leaders, and some say it plays a role in the lighting feud.

Two years ago, Barrington Hills updated its comprehensive plan — a blueprint meant to guide a town’s future development — and among its recommendations was the adoption of “light control standards to preserve dark skies and rural atmosphere.”

That had been a longstanding concern in the community, Knoop said, and the Village Board approved the plan without controversy. The trouble started when some trustees tried turning light control into law.

So this debate places two values in opposition: the ability of suburban homeowners to light their home as they wish versus the ability of the community to control its own destiny. Both of these are powerful forces: many people move to suburbs, and particularly exclusive suburbs like Barrington Hills, so that they don’t have people telling them what to do. But at the same time, people move to places like Barrington Hills because it doesn’t have sprawling subdivisions and busy roads.

In my mind, there is little surprise that some small issue could become such a big debate: it is not about the lights but rather about whether Barrington Hills can retain its character against the pressures that threaten to turn it into just another suburb. Such debates are relatively common in many suburbs as both political officials and residents consider how proposed changes to laws, zoning, and development patterns might alter the feel of the community. In this particular community, we could ask: why did this discussion develop around outdoor lights instead of another issue or is this a long-running (yet punctuated) debate that the community has been having for decades?

Richard Florida cited by UK Conservatives

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The Economist takes a look into the background of urban thinker Richard Florida, who has recently been cited by leading British Conservatives. Here an excerpt about Florida’s background:

Although less well-known in Europe, he is as close to a household name as it is possible for an urban theorist to be in America. In his best-selling books, highly paid speeches and frequent television interviews, Mr Florida has extolled one core idea: that the creative sector is the growth engine for Western economies as menial work migrates to developing countries.

Mr Florida’s definition of creative goes beyond the obvious artists and musicians to include anyone open to new ideas. He says businesses must give space and flexibility to these freethinkers, and that cities must attract lots of them to be successful. This means they must be green, clean, tolerant and cultured, typically with large gay and ethnic-minority populations…

His superstar status, as much as his ideas, have made him enemies. One Canadian newspaper columnist, fed up with his high profile after he became head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at Toronto University three years ago, started handing out badges that read “Please stop talking about Richard Florida”. More seriously, other academics have denounced his “snake oil economics”, his use of statistics and his confusion of causation and coincidence. Joel Kotkin, another writer about cities, points out that over the past 20 years far more jobs in America have been created in boring suburbs than in the multicultural city centres beloved of Mr Florida.

He describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

There are some interesting things to think about based on this story:

1. How much evidence is there that Florida’s ideas can bring about a “quick fix” to depressed locations? In England, are they looking to his ideas for a quick turnaround or is this a long-term project?

2. I’ve seen and read some of this criticism of Florida by other academics. Some of it did seem based on envy of his status and money-making abilities – his books have done well, he is an expensive speaker, and he has had the ear of a number of politicians. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about whether his ideas work in the real world. I’m particularly struck by Kotkin’s criticism as noted in this story – job growth in America has been primarily in the suburbs.

3. In another part of the story, The Economist hints that politicians who court thinkers or adopt ideologies can often be left struggling to convey or act upon these ideas. On one hand, it is remarkable that Florida gets so much attention from politicians – few academics ever draw this kind of attention. On the other hand, when social scientists and urban thinkers do have a chance to influence politics, what are the outcomes?

h/t The Infrastructurist