Tag Archives: suburbs

“Federal Officials Push to Urbanize Suburbia”?

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Conservatives are still worried the Obama administration is against suburbs:

In its final months, the Obama administration has set up a strategy to bring inner city living to the suburbs by deploying three federal agencies to dictate to states and local communities how to set up schools, housing and mass transit…

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) expanded the reach of its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule to two other federal agencies: the Department of Transportation and the Department of Education…

State and local educational agencies, for example, are urged to develop “boundary-free open enrollment or lottery schools when drawing school attendance boundaries, and selecting sites for such a programs like charter schools or magnet school.”

The three federal agencies also want their local and state education officials to “consult with transportation and housing authorities and housing development agencies” when planning a school site.

The federal authorities want local and state transportation officials to create mass transit plans and more public transportation routes, as well as include local school districts, housing authorities, Head Start programs, community colleges and similar entities in putting together the mass transit plan.

The first two thoughts that come to mind when seeing the specifics here:

  1. It sounds like this applies to communities that receive HUD block grants for redevelopment. So, if suburbs don’t apply for this, the guidelines may not apply.
  2. At the least, the guidelines would encourage more conversations between some important actors – like developers, local officials, school districts, transportation planners, and others – that could build upon and expand existing infrastructure. Instead of doing all of their work independently, a little collaboration could go a long ways.

In other words, wealthier suburbs will still have ways to resist lower-income residents. And isn’t what this is really about? Or, more broadly, suburbs want the ability to have complete local control over land use – which is all about quality of life, property values, and attracting the right kind of people. For example, see this statement from a Westchester County official:

“This document proves what I’ve been saying for six years: The federal government is planning to take control of the American suburb and forever change it in the false name of equality. If HUD gets its way, small town America will literally disappear. It will be forcibly urbanized by Washington social engineers.”

Suburbs are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Plus, market forces may lead to denser suburbs anyway as there is plenty of demand for new housing in attractive suburbs. But, there could be more conflict in the future as wealthier communities want to retain control and regional and federal governments try to spread opportunities around.

Suburbs consider mottos, branding efforts

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In an effort to stand out, a number of Fox Valley area suburbs are considering mottos and branding campaigns:

Oswego is looking for a motto, as well as a logo and marketing strategy, to better identify its image and solidify its place in the region.

Michele Brown, community relations manager, said Oswego wants to be a regional destination for economic development and tourism…

Carpentersville’s slogan is “Building a Better Tomorrow…Today.”

Village officials, including staff and board and commission members, are working on a rebranding campaign with the goal of changing Carpentersville’s public perception…

North Aurora last year went through a rebranding process that came up with a new logo and the motto “Crossroads on the Fox.” This came after months of debate over nine design options with dozens of variations.

Usually, these are pitched as efforts to attract businesses and residents. Think of those Bedford Park or Elk Grove Village ads that run in the Chicago area – having a catchy motto or campaign sounds better in an advertisement. Whether such campaigns work or simply help the community feel better about its efforts is another story. At the least, branding is an effort at local boosterism as businesses and residents can choose among hundreds of Chicago area communities.

But, not every suburb wants such branding:

Some towns, though, have made a conscious decision to not wear the label of a slogan or motto, like Wheaton, Naperville and Carol Stream.

Presumably, these are communities that are more comfortable with who they are and/or don’t feel like they have a negative public image.

Of course, mottos can signal things other than being open to growth like New Lenox which was selling itself in ads as “home to proud Americans.”

Profile of a smaller post-World War II builder

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The efforts of Levitt & Sons are well known but here is a quick overview of a smaller “merchant builder” from the Boston area:

The Campanelli Brothers of Braintree, Massachusetts, were one of these typical merchant builders. When Michael, Joseph, Nicholas, and Alfred Campanelli created a construction company in the late 1940s, they were young and inexperienced. Their parents, Francesco Campanelli and Lisa Marie Colondono Campanelli, arrived in the U.S. in 1915 from a tiny and ancient mountain village in the Italian Apennines; they settled in an immigrant neighborhood in the small city of Brockton. The boys were used to hard work, quitting school after their father died to help support the family by working at the Quincy shipyards near Weymouth. Joseph also worked on some house construction sites before World War II. The three younger brothers served short stints in the Navy during the war.

After they came home, the brothers used an army surplus truck to move gravel to big construction sites, including Logan Airport. Soon they began pouring concrete footings for new buildings. As their assets increased, they built two new houses in Brockton, one for their mother and one for their sister Ann, whose husband, Salvatore De Marco, now joined the brothers’ team. They branched out to small developments near Braintree, Massachusetts, and Warwick, Rhode Island. Success there led them to develop more ambitious subdivisions in Natick, Framingham, Peabody, and other areas near Boston. In the process, they assembled a sizable group of foremen and loyal subcontractors, many drawn from their old neighborhood and earlier shipbuilding work. Their firm rapidly grew into the leading home building enterprise in the Boston area, and later built extensively in Florida and Illinois as well.

The typical Campanelli house was attractive because, as one buyer explained it, it was “a new kind of house” for “a new time.” It discarded the old-fashioned, larger, more monumental look. It had a low-pitched roof, like contemporary ranch houses in California, but still kept shutters or an occasional bow window for a faintly “colonial” flavor. Campanelli houses usually had two or three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a garage. The three-bedroom version was about 1,000 square feet of living space. In the mid-’50s, the firm extended the kitchens to form a “living kitchen” or a kind of a “family room.”

The last brother died just a few years ago and the company the brothers started did a lot of work:

Campanelli Companies built more than 30,000 single-family homes in eight states during the post-war period.

Here is the company – Campanelli – today and how they describe themselves:

Campanelli is a vertically integrated commercial real estate, construction, development and acquisitions company with over six decades of successful experience having developed, built and acquired over 20 million square feet of property. Campanelli has a trustworthy, successful and experienced team that maximizes value, consistently executes on target objectives and provides operational excellence for your company.

I would love to see a study that compares the (1) home styles (2) buyers (3) interactions with local governments and (4) organizational operations of a number of post-World War II builders. Campanelli started small and became a commercial property developer. Though there are differences, it kind of reminds me of the Harold Moser story in Naperville where a former newspaper owner turned lumber store operator started by building a few homes and then ended up constructing a sizable amount of the large city’s homes.

Additionally, are such family business stories like this still possible today or did the combination of unusual housing needs plus innovations in building create a uniquely open market?

Majority of American jobs in the suburbs

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An analysis at New Geography shows the metropolitan locations of American jobs:

The 2014 data indicates that more than 80 percent of employment in the nation’s major metropolitan areas is in functionally suburban or exurban areas (Figure 3). The earlier suburbs have the largest share of employment, at 44 percent. The later suburbs and exurbs combined have 37.0 percent, while the urban cores have 18.9 percent, including the 9.1 percent in the downtown areas (central business districts, or CBDs).

These numbers reveal dispersion since 2000. Then, the earlier suburbs had even more of the jobs, at 49.4 percent, 5.3 percentage points higher than in 2014. Virtually all of the lost share of jobs in the earlier suburbs was transferred to the later suburbs and exurbs, which combined grew from 31.4 percent in 2000 to 37.0 percent in 2014. The urban cores had 19.4 percent of the jobs (8.8 percent in the CBDs), slightly more than the 18.9 percent in 2014.

While Chicago is one of the cities with a higher percentage of jobs in the city, Sun Belt locations dominate the list of cities with more jobs in outer suburbs:

These figures counter claims or stereotypes that (1) suburbs are primarily bedroom communities where people sleep but work in the city and (2) urban cores are the primary job centers of metropolitan regions. Of course, some suburbs are bedroom suburbs and big city downtowns are still important, particularly for certain industries (think global finance). At the same time, it would be interesting to envision some of these Sun Belt cities with no downtown…how different would Raleigh or Atlanta or Orlando really be?

Replicating American style suburbs outside a growing Ugandan city

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In the United States, wealthier and whiter residents tended to leave big cities and their problems for the safety of the suburbs. Is the same process underway in Africa?

In many ways, Akright City, 15 miles from the capital city Kampala, feels like the anti-African city, a polo-wearing, golf-playing suburban inversion of the continent’s teeming metropolises. And that is exactly the point. Akright, like other private cities sprouting up across the Africa in recent years, offers a tantalizing answer to the question of how to fix the continent’s creaking colonial cities: Give up. Start Over.

It’s a trend repeated across the continent, from Johannesburg’s Steyn City — a walled town twice the size of Monaco — to Lagos’ Eko Atlantic, a beachfront cluster of skyscrapers and condos that bills itself as Africa’s Dubai. Private cities are not unique to Africa, but they have special significance on a continent where most urban infrastructure was designed for a long-gone colonial elite, rather than the millions who now crowd in searching for economic opportunity. By some calculations, this is the world’s fastest urbanizing region, and from Dar es Salaam to Luanda, its overtaxed cities are ill-equipped to keep up. By grafting entirely new cities onto the edges of these metropolises, their builders say they can leap-frog the region’s development challenges and create outposts of first-world luxury on the world’s poorest continent…

But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Today, neighborhoods with dreamy names like “California Village,” “New World Village,” and “European Village” stand less than half full. Soaring mansions sit beside gaping construction sites, many on roads that are little more than a gash of dirt cut into the hillside. A lush golf course stands completely empty on a recent afternoon. Midway through the project, the money dried up, and many of Akright’s more grandiose components were abandoned, including a massive call centre that once ambitiously promised to help Uganda displace India as the world’s outsourcing darling. Kamugisha promises the slowdown is only temporary…

“Life is more or less like Europe: it’s enclosed, we don’t see our neighbors, everyone goes away during the day,” says Grace Amoah, who has lived in Akright for a decade and runs a small convenience store here, one of the few businesses open on a recent afternoon. “They want more people to come here, but I think the distances are too far, it’s too expensive.”

I wonder if the lesson is this: it is difficult to develop and maintain American-style suburbs without an advanced economic system that can support lots of private housing away from employment and cultural centers. In other words, this represents an attempt to take a shortcut through the development process by which cities in the United States were successful and then gave rise to suburbs. The sorts of American suburbs we have today couldn’t have developed without the rapid growth of cities from the mid-1800s onward. (This leads to interesting questions for today such as whether suburbs can continue for long periods with a decaying or dead urban core – think the suburbs of Detroit where many are well-off even as the city has struggled for decades.)

Suburbs don’t mind money spent on highways, services that help them

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Alana Semuels looks at who supports the widening of highways even as research suggests building more lanes just adds to traffic:

The support for highways could be because people in the region are moving further from the city center, to suburbs served by the highways. Between 2010 and 2015, suburbs such as Austin grew 25 percent between 2010 and 2015, while Bryant grew 19.6 percent, according to the region’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, called Metroplan. Little Rock grew up 3.1 percent in population, and Pulaski County, where Little Rock is located, grew just 3.3 percent, while Saline County grew 8.7 percent.

Suburbs often grow when highways are particularly robust; if people can quickly get out of the city center to far-flung neighborhoods, there’s little incentive for them to stay in the city. But the causal arrow runs both ways: Once there are robust suburbs, the residents there tend to support projects that will benefit them, and those projects include roads that will supposedly make their commutes faster.

Regional politics often favor spending on resources to suburbs, especially when their populations grow so quickly, according to Joseph DiMento, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied the construction of urban freeways.

“Once people move to the suburbs, they want to be serviced, and historically, the suburbs were wealthier and more politically important, so their votes would go for replacing the freeway and improving it, rather than displacing it,” he said.

But, try to raise tax monies on a regional scale for mass transit and suburbanites are often not pleased as they don’t perceive this as a benefit for them.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a study that shows the statistical relationship between suburban population growth and highway building. What is the strength of the relationship? This is the general argument: after World War II, the government spent money in certain ways and one path that spurred suburban growth was the construction of a federal highway system. Of course, suburbs were already growing at this point but highways certainly helped.

Chicago suburb that may want to dissolve itself

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Many suburbanites like that local communities protect them from other entities but what if suburban residents want to get rid of their own municipality?

Prospect Heights is a unique suburb — a bedroom community of 16,000 residents, many of whom have homes on lots larger than those in neighboring towns. There’s no overall property tax or major retail shopping centers, and some entities — such as Indian Trails Library and Chicago Executive Airport — are already shared with other towns.

But Prospect Heights is independent and proud of it. Parts of it still get water from wells rather than Lake Michigan. Residents have rejected — many times — petitions to become a home-rule community, which, among other things, would permit city leaders to collect sales taxes — and maybe even property taxes — and develop a reliable stream of revenue with which to run the city…

Comparatively, The Initiative is draconian. It calls for Prospect Heights to be broken up and merged into the bordering towns of Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect, Wheeling and Northbrook — or, if all those towns don’t get on board, to essentially merge Prospect Heights with just one neighbor, Wheeling…

Theoretically, though, even without city leadership on board, a bill currently in the rules committee of the Illinois House would make it possible for residents to lead an effort to dissolve their own town or any other government.

It sounds like this could turn into a fascinating battle between residents who don’t want the local government and local officials who want to keep it. Would cost savings or local control and loyalty win out? In the long run, which direction better serves the residents? It is not a wealthy community; Census figures show a median household income around $62,000 and the community is 30% Latino.

Thinking more broadly, I would think it is rare in recent decades to find cases where suburbanites are willing to give up on the community they chose and be absorbed into other communities.

Living as the only Section 8 resident in a wealthy suburb

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Mary Schmich tells the story of Winnetka’s sole Section 8 resident:

In a Chicago suburb where million-dollar homes are common and the median household income exceeds $200,000, Miranda held a rare distinction for a while: He was the only person in town with a Section 8 housing choice voucher.

With his large belly and his mustache, his T-shirt and his jeans, he was a notable presence in the village. He liked to be out and about — staying inside depressed him — and his subsidized one-bedroom apartment on Elm Street put him in the heart of Winnetka’s action, meaning close to the Metra station, a bookstore, a Peet’s, a Starbucks, restaurants and boutiques, most of which he couldn’t afford.

He was often spotted with a big coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other, maybe sitting on a park bench. He liked going to the library and, in the summer, relaxing by the lake…

Having a stable home of his own in a tranquil place offered him some peace that life otherwise denied him.

As much as residential segregation by race and ethnicity is present in the suburbs, this highlights another aspect: segregation by social class. According to the Census, Winnetka has over 12,000 residents, is very white – 94.8%, and also very wealthy – a median household income of over $207,000 and a median value of owner-occupied housing units of $941,800. How much affordable housing is available in places like Winnetka? Previous efforts to introduce the idea have met resistance. Does having any Section 8 residents threaten property values or the community’s image? Suburban residents don’t have to actively oppose such plans to provide space for poorer residents; their zoning and comprehensive plans can make their thoughts pretty clear. Would their opinions change if they met a person like Thomas Miranda? Maybe, but no matter how much they might like him as an individual, too many such residents of a certain status would not be good.

Some NJ suburbanites not happy with Orthodox influx

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The New Jersey suburb of Toms River is up in arms regarding numerous Orthodox families moving in:

These days, though, most homeowners draw the blinds, retreating from brushes with a fast-growing Orthodox Jewish community that’s trying to turn a swath of suburban luxury 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Atlantic beaches into an insular enclave. The rub, a township inquiry found, is “highly annoying, suspicious and creepy” tactics used by some real-estate agents…

“It’s like an invasion,” said Thomas Kelaher, Toms River’s three-term mayor, who’s fielded complaints from the North Dover section since mid-2015. “It’s the old throwback to the 1960s, when blockbusting happened in Philadelphia and Chicago with the African-American community — ‘I want to buy your house. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.’ It scares the hell out of people.”

The upset has its roots in adjacent Lakewood, home to yeshivas including Beth Medrash Govoha, among the world’s biggest centers for Talmudic study. Scholars typically marry young and start large families that maintain strict gender roles and limit interaction with secular society…

The opposition, he said, has nothing to do with dislike of Jews, but with a fear that Toms River will become like Lakewood’s more tattered sections, with cars parked on lawns, overgrown landscaping, trash piled at curbs and residents crowding single-family homes.

As the article notes, this sounds similar to the tactics employed against different racial and ethnic groups in the first half of the 20th century: fear, worries about changing the character of the community and providing new social services, enforcing zoning laws, pushy slash creepy real estate agents, the potential for declining property values. Yet, this story hints that residential segregation is alive and well. Even though Americans regularly talk about the geographic mobility everyone can access, it doesn’t quite work this way as existing residents can be resistant to change and different racial and ethnic groups tend to cluster not just in cities but also in suburbs.

Majority of older Americans want to “age in place,” not move to the city

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An article profiling some suburbanites who moved to the city as older adults admits that this isn’t the path desired by most Americans:

But you didn’t move back into the city, did you? Instead, you’re doing what the vast majority of American adults prefer to do: “aging in place.” According to a recent survey of adults 45-plus by AARP, 80 percent of respondents agreed that “what I’d really like to do is remain in my local community.”

But for those willing to make the exodus, the move into Chicago proper can be extremely rewarding…

Still, the Zimmermans’ move into town runs counter to overall trends. The 2015 data from the National Association of Realtors show that among “repeat buyers” (most likely to be boomers and Gen Xers), only 12 percent are buying in urban areas. An equal number are going to rural areas, 20 percent are going to small towns, but most — 53 percent — are buying in the suburbs.

And here’s a bit of a shocker: Although studies show that a third of retirees don’t expect to move at all, those who do move are not necessarily even downsizing. According to a recent survey by Age Wave, a firm that specializes in research on the aging population, only about half of retirees 50-plus who move after retiring choose a home that’s smaller; 19 percent move to a place of equivalent size, and 30 percent actually upsize.

There are always a good number of stories about urban revivals and people flocking to American big cities for the amenities and short commutes. However, the stories tend to obscure that the majority of Americans do not choose this path. When asked, many Americans say they want to live in small towns than anywhere else.

Particularly for older adults, the move to the city is probably only possible for those with significant means. Additionally, where many of those people want to move – is in nicer neighborhoods with cultural events, access to jobs, and newer construction – as opposed to living in many of neighborhoods of the city.

At the same time, aging in place in the suburbs presents unique challenges with its emphasis on single-family homes and driving. Homes can be difficult to maintain for decades and driving may not be possible at a certain point. Then, the spaciousness of the sprawling suburbs can be a significant hindrance to providing social services.