Tag Archives: suburbs

Mapping how wealthier suburban voters helped deliver the House to Democrats

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The Washington Post has a story with great maps that illustrate how suburbanites helped swing the 2018 House elections toward Democrats:

In Tuesday’s election, House districts on the outskirts of major American cities were the site of electoral shifts that propelled Democrats to power.

Wealthy and middle class voters delivered the suburban votes for enough Democratic pickups to secure a majority. In several cases, the battleground districts were wealthy and highly educated places that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, exposing the vulnerability of those Republican lawmakers.

The addition of quality mapping data in recent years to stories about election results is great. It helps highlight the clear patterns from recent elections regarding where the two parties have stronger bases, Democrats in cities and close suburbs and Republicans in rural areas and further suburbs.

Death knell for Republicans in Illinois’s 6th congressional district?

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Democrat Sean Casten unseated Republican incumbent Peter Roskam in a House race in the 6th Congressional District in Illinois. Does this signal the end of Republican dominance in this suburban district? Some points to consider:

  1. This has been a Republican district since the early 1970s. Before that, the District was represented by a Democrat since the late 1920s and dominated by Republicans between the Civil War and 1911. Long-time representative Henry Hyde passing the seat to Peter Roskam may be the recent history but the district has more variation over the years.
  2. The demographics of these suburban areas has changed quite a bit. Like many American suburbs, the Chicago suburbs have become increasingly non-white and more diverse in terms of social class. The area covered by the district today is not the same white, middle-class swath that it may have once appeared to be.
  3. Redistricting and changing boundaries has happened with the 6th in the past and could happen again in the future. Read more about Illinois redistricting efforts in the 1970s and early 2000s. Some background on this particular district:

Roskam replaced conservative icon U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde in Congress, but much of his old territory in eastern DuPage County is now represented by U.S. Reps. Mike Quigley of Chicago and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg, both Democrats.

4. The patterns of voting in the Chicago area suburbs mirror larger trends about suburban voters. The 6th district as well as several other House districts are comprised of the middle ground between Democratic voters in the big city and close suburbs and Republican voters in more rural areas and outer suburbs. These are the battleground areas and this will likely continue in future election cycles.

All this said, there are no guarantees in this district. Multiple factors could sway voters in this district in the near and far future including changes in what the national parties stand for (and what presidential candidates are leading the way), increasing diversity in the suburbs, possible redistricting, and particular concerns and issues that may resonate voters in the middle suburbs. As the suburbs continue to be important areas for both parties to try to pick up seats, expect this district to continue to be contested for at least a few elections to come.

Suing for more suburban housing

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A California law makes it possible to sue communities regarding housing:

Pro-housing activist Sonja Trauss, a pioneer in the YIMBY movement, was reading about a controversial 315-unit affordable apartment project in Lafayette in 2015 when she learned about a 1982 state law she’d never heard of before: the Housing Accountability Act.

The law said municipalities must approve a housing development as long as it is consistent with local zoning rules and general plan objectives, would not create a public health hazard or take water from neighboring farms, and would meet state environmental standards…

The California Renters Legal Advocacy Fund, or CaRLA — a group Trauss and her YIMBY allies formed in 2015 — is waging the sue-the-suburbs campaign. CaRLA has used the Housing Accountability Act to sue on behalf of developers in Sausalito, Berkeley, San Mateo, Sonoma, Dublin and Lafayette…

While the lawsuits will eventually result in some increase in the Bay Area’s housing stock — none of the projects in question have opened yet — the bigger impact so far has been to make municipal officials aware that violations of the Housing Accountability Act could result in expensive litigation.

How long until California changes the law to give communities more say over these matters? Not surprisingly, the end of the article mentions a counter group that a co-founder says is “not NIMBYs or anti-housing; for us the issue goes back to democracy and local control.” Suburbanites do like their local control.

This certainly would not be the first time the courts have been used to allow new housing construction in wealthier suburbs. It may be the only way to force compliance from suburbs that would rather not have cheaper housing and different kinds of residents. Unfortunately, it can be a very slow process within specific cases and overall progress is limited. Perhaps the threat of lawsuits and several successful cases in the past could force suburbs to move more quickly but I would guess some would still aim to drag out the process as much as possible.

Final thought: it would be interesting to track what happens to these developments allowed by the courts over time. Do communities eventually accept the housing units and residents? Would a positive response to a new development than encourage the community to pursue other similar developments? Or, does a court victory lead to hardened resistance?

Suburban efforts outside Atlanta to secede and form a new community; about race and income or business development?

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Voters yesterday in unincorporated suburbia outside Atlanta voted on a proposal to create a new suburb:

The proposal to form a new city, up for a vote on Tuesday, has roiled Henry County, raising tense debate about racial and economic disparity and voting rights. Once a sleepy rural, predominantly white region, the county has seen an influx of minorities and a solidification of black political power as its population has exploded in recent years. In 1980, whites made up more than 80% of Henry County’s population, but now they have dwindled to less than 50%…

If Eagle’s Landing manages to wrestle away the southern portion of Stockbridge — a section that includes its most affluent residential pockets as well as its main commercial corridor that brings in nearly $5 million of the city’s $9 million annual revenue — Ford has warned the city would be forced to impose a new property tax on remaining residents…

Backers of Eagle’s Landing counter that their aim is nothing more than to lure new fine dining and retail to a freshly coined community with a median household income of about $128,000 — more than double that of Stockbridge. Imagine, they tell their neighbors, a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s, a California Pizza Kitchen or a Capital Grille…

For more than a decade, rich, white pockets of metro Atlanta have led a national movement to form new cities out of unincorporated land in an effort, they say, for greater control, more efficient government and lower taxes. But this could be the first time a new city would take an existing city’s land without all the residents of the existing city having a vote.

Perhaps both arguments could be true: there is a race and class component to the proposal for a new suburb and backers of the change are interested in unique business opportunities that might come to a wealthier suburb. This reminds of the argument Freund makes in Colored Property. By the late 1960s, conservatives realized they could no longer object to non-white residents in or near their communities based on race. They instead switched over to economic arguments to justify ongoing residential segregation: people with fewer resources simply could not access nicer communities.

The matter about annexation law in Georgia is strange. The annexation of suburbs to big cities was fairly common in the late 1800s in the Northeast and Midwest as suburbs saw advantages in joining the big city. But, as cities changed, suburbs in those regions became less interested in being annexed. Laws usually reflect this: people being annexed or affected by annexations generally have to agree to the changes.

Even if race was truly not a factor (and it certainly sounds suspicious here), it also sounds like some growth machine activity is taking place. Local officials and businesses (developers?) see possible profits at stake in a suburban area with little wealth thus far. They get the state legislature to make some special regulations. Who exactly will profit here? How much of the money will come back to the (new) community?

Suburban voters, voting and acting out of fear

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The much-discussed suburban voter of this election cycle may have multiple motivations for voting. One factor that appears present now is fear. Are our lives at risk? Will the country will be ruined if the other party is in control?

A little thought experiment: does this easily play into suburban anxieties and fears? Here are some fears scholars have suggested suburbanites face on a regular basis:

1. Fear of the “other,” usually referring to people of non-white races and ethnicities. This manifests itself in multiple ways including exclusionary zoning and gated communities.

2. Fear of losing a middle-class or upper middle-class status. This leads to trying to gather resources for just their family or community.

3. Fear that either their children are not going to succeed or that they are at risk. After all, the suburbs are supposed to be a safe place for which to launch them to excellence.

4. This dates back more to the early decades of postwar suburbia but a fear of losing their individualism and being pushed into conformity to suburban norms.

There are counterarguments to each of these as well as a general claim that suburbanites move to the suburbs because they wanted to, not because they were all fearful.

But, if there are indeed numerous fears in suburbia, does marketing politicians and policies on the basis of fear an even more effective tactic for suburban voters?

Who owns large apartment complexes in downtown Wheaton?

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The national and international flow of capital in real estate is a well-established phenomena in the biggest cities but it is recognized less in suburbs. Here is an example of this in Wheaton, Illinois:

In the bigger deal, San Francisco-based FPA Multifamily acquired Wheaton Center, a 758-unit property in downtown Wheaton, from Edge Principal Advisors of New York, according to a statement from HFF, the brokerage that arranged the sale.

It’s unclear how much FPA paid—the statement did not include a price and FPA and Edge representatives did not return calls—but the property was expected to fetch about $135 million, according to Real Estate Alert, a trade publication. At that price, the sale would generate a big profit for Edge, which paid $44 million for Wheaton Center in 2014 and invested about $40 million in a major renovation.

The seller of the other property might want to forget about Wheaton altogether. Invesco, an Atlanta-based pension fund adviser, sold Wheaton 121, a 306-unit apartment complex that opened in 2014, for $72 million, according to Connor Group, the Ohio investment firm that bought the property. That’s nearly 25 percent less than the $95.8 million Invesco paid in 2015 for the complex, 121 N. Cross St.

The main culprit: property taxes. Wheaton 121’s taxes rose so much after Invesco bought it that the added expense significantly depressed the property’s value, according to people familiar with the complex. A jump in the property’s assessed value pushed Invesco’s 2018 tax bill up to $2.0 million, a whopping 47 percent increase from 2016, according to DuPage County records.

I suspect most suburbanites know little about who owns major pieces of land in their community, let alone who owns large apartment buildings (which may be more or less common depending on the suburb). Unless the owner makes a big deal of their ownership with signs or presence in the community, daily life just moves on.

But, this infusion of money from far away could have a significant influence on a suburb. Local developers may not be interested in sizable projects or may not be able to access the same amounts of capital. At the same time, a local developer may be more attuned to local conditions. Presumably, all the owners of nicer properties want to be seen as good actors in the suburb but they may have varying levels of involvement and commitment to the exact community.

Contested House races in educated suburban districts

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The road to political success for the national parties continues to run through middle suburbs:

On one side of that divide is growing Democratic strength in white-collar suburbs recoiling from Trump; on the other is continued Republican dominance in rural places and blue-collar communities that flocked to Trump in 2016 and haven’t wavered much since. These divergent forces explain why Democratic opportunities are expanding in well-educated suburban districts around major metropolitan areas all over the country while the party is still facing an uphill climb in almost all the House seats outside metropolitan areas that it hoped to contest this year.

The Washington race between first-time Democratic candidate Kim Schrier, a pediatrician, and Republican Dino Rossi, a three-time GOP nominee for statewide office, is one of several contests that capture both of those dynamics inside the same district. Democrats this year are mounting serious challenges for Republican-held seats that sprawl from suburban into rural areas around Richmond, Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa; Topeka, Kansas; Columbus, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and parts of upstate New York, among other places.

Republicans have controlled each of these districts for years, typically posting comfortable margins in both their rural and suburban areas. But the results in them this fall will pressure-test the electoral trade that Trump is imposing on his party: growing strength in small-town and rural communities offset by growing skepticism and resistance in many white-collar suburbs, particularly among women. The intensely divisive confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh appears poised to magnify the trends on both sides of that line.

The main contours of the political battle continues to hold: Democrats get votes from big cities and close suburbs, Republicans get votes from rural areas and exurbs, and the two parties fight over the middle suburbs characterized by relatively educated and wealthy residents with some pockets of poorer residents as well as various levels of racial and ethnic diversity. This was the pattern in 2016 (see earlier posts about Clinton winning in the Chicago suburbs, Trump losing ground in suburbs, and changes in suburban voting patterns) and it appears to be true in the 2018 elections (see recent posts here and here).

Why hasn’t the area south of Chicago developed into suburbia?

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Two points of data hit me recently about the asymmetrical suburban development of the Chicago region:

1. I recently made a trip down I-355 from I-88 down to I-80. Once you are south of I-55, there is limited development. There are some signs of subdivisions and warehouses but still plenty of open land available.

2. I discussed the boundaries of the Chicago suburbs in a recent post and noticed on the map from the expert that the northern, western, and southeastern suburbs of Chicago extend far into the country but the southern suburbs do not go far. Indeed, suburbia goes further into Indiana or Wisconsin than straight south into Illinois beyond I-80.

Why is it that this area has not developed? In a region that expanded tremendously after World War II and that currently has need for affordable housing, why is this land relatively empty? A few quick hypotheses:

1. The area to the south and southeast of Chicago may have been more industrial earlier on. This would discourage residents from locating nearby. (On the other hand, residential locations close to work could be very valuable in such a large region where jobs and residents do not always line up.)

2. Given the history of race and ethnicity in Chicago and the region, these areas are associated with more black residents and whites wanted to live elsewhere (north suburbs, west suburbs, Indiana).

3. A cultural and economic mismatch between the area south of the city and the region. While Chicago expanded with its reach into the agrarian upper Midwest, the areas south of the city may have had stronger affinities with central Illinois and less urban areas.

4. These suburbs to the south are hesitant about approving development. In a region with little open land left for development (that has not been taken for green space by Forest Preserves or private landowners), this more rural feel gives these suburbs a unique feel. Adding hundreds of mass-produced homes may not be what these particular suburbs desire.

Determining the complicated boundaries of the Chicago suburbs

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Prompted by the discovery of Green Oaks, Illinois earlier this week, I went searching for a list of all of the Chicago suburbs. Instead, I found a discussion about where exactly the Chicago suburbs end. Here is an expert talking about this very issue in summer 2018:

The best definition of where the “suburbs” are, according to Ellis, is probably the boundaries of the Chicago-Naperville-Joliet Metropolitan Statistical Area…

But calling everything inside those boundaries “the suburbs” is probably too simple…

So, Ellis said, the suburbs end to the west at the Fox River, to the south along the Lincoln Highway, and stretch along the train lines as far south as Michigan City, IN and as far north as Kenosha, WI.

The second map probably also conforms to cultural understandings in the region about what is really a suburb. There are places that could be within the far-flung orbit of Chicago but do not think of themselves or are not regarded by others as true suburbs.

This is an issue for many metropolitan regions, particular due to two changes:

1. Suburban areas keep developing further from the central city.

2. More people commute suburb to suburb rather than into the central city on a regular basis.

With more housing available further from the city as well as the presence of jobs in far-flung job centers, more residents can be part of a metropolitan region even if they rarely make a trip into the big city or do direct business with the big city.

Still discovering the existence of some Chicago area suburbs

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I recently ran across a news story about a Chicago suburb I did not recognize. Where is Green Oaks, Illinois? Here is the front page of the community’s website:

GreenOaksWebsite

The Census characteristics of the community suggest it is small (roughly 3,600 residents), white (over 85%), wealthy (median household income just over $160,000), and educated (over 63% with a bachelor’s degree or higher).

Given the population of the Chicago region (over 9 million residents) plus Illinois’ penchant for local governments and taxing bodies, perhaps this is not surprising. It is easy to miss a community of less than 4,000 people with a community name that comes out of the mad lib list of Chicago suburb names (Oak, Forest, Park, Green, Hills, cardinal directions, etc.).

At the same time, as someone who studies the Chicago suburbs, not even being aware of this community is a point to file away…