Tag Archives: suburbs

Some band had to eventually take the name “Mcmansions”

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If you can play lead guitar, you can join the band with the great name “Mcmansions.”

Mcmansions seek lead guitarist (Marietta Ga.)

We are primarily an original band based out of Marietta,Ga. We sing about Love, Loss, sadness, insanity and yes redemption. all of us are over the age of 40 and prefer the same.We are acoustic guitarists/lead singer,bass/backup vocals, and drums. We enjoy live performance and recording,mostly on weekends.We are actively seeking you electric guitarist to make our music even better. We all have obligations but nonetheless we live to write sing and play and will quit when we are dead. Our arrangements are not difficult we just need an energetic new friend to fill in all the blanks with stylistic embellishments to whip the band up into a frenzy of rock n roll bliss.

And the style or ethos of the band?

We are proudly playing a distinct original blend of lightly salted alternative Rock/Americana self styled tunage The music speaks for itself We have a 60s garage sound in our music that draws from the Rock, soul, pop ,punk,country and gospel that we have all come to love Actually we have a lost Identity covered with kudzu, rust and condemned asbestos habitations with chipped lead paint…

Given the criticism the McMansion has taken in the last 15 years, there is a lot of sadness and insanity to explore here with this particular band name. However, I’m not sure audiences would be ready for love and redemption stories regarding McMansions…

Two other thoughts:

1. Even with their many problems of the suburbs according to critics (including a lack of community and poor design), there are a good number of music artists who have emerged from this social space in last half century. Perhaps it provides teenagers lots of time, space, and social connections for putting together a group? Perhaps it is because people in the suburbs get some decent music training as kids or have access to instruments and time? Perhaps suburban ills push people toward music as a way to escape?

2. McMansions may not be appealing to some but they offer a lot of space for music equipment and practice space. Imagine how much sound it takes to fill that two-story great room. Or the way that the loud noise of a rock band might just rattle the poorly constructed abode.

Dilemma: replace older housing with “cheesy apartment complexes” or McMansions?

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If older housing is going to be torn down, would you prefer it be replaced with apartment buildings or McMansions?

McMansions are going up one after another in my neighborhood on the Burbank hillside. Unattractive boxy additions are being built, leaving little yard space, and houses are being torn down to make way for bigger two-story barns. The reason for this may be because of the need for more room to accommodate today’s lifestyle — computers, media rooms, etc. It does spoil the whole appearance of the neighborhood. However, what’s worse it that ever since the ’60s,charming old cottages have been razed to make way for cheesy apartment complexes. Older apartment buildings with space and courtyards have been replaced by bigger apartment blocks with no outdoor areas. Maybe McMansions are the lesser of two evils.

Of course, these aren’t the only options available in many places. Yet, if land is expensive, McMansions and apartments could be appealing to builders and developers: the first can maximize square footage and have a higher selling price while the second increases the number of housing units (which could also help provide more housing in places that struggle with higher housing values).

If I had to guess, more Americans would choose to live next to a McMansion than an apartment complex. McMansions receive a lot of criticism, particularly in older neighborhoods where the new homes don’t fit the character or architecture. Yet, apartment complexes may be disliked even more by many suburbanites, even in the abstract, let alone next door or down the block. Apartments are perceived to attract different kinds of residents – lower class, different racial and ethnic groups, more prone to crime, more transient, less invested in their housing unit and the community – compared to suburban single-family homeowners.

Thinking more broadly, what housing options might be disliked more than apartments? Maybe trailer parks. Or group homes. Or public housing, whether in larger concentrations or scattered-site.

Suburban sunbelt population soars again

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Was the economic crisis just a blip in the ongoing growth of the suburban Sunbelt?

The unavoidable takeaway from the Census report is that Americans have resumed the westward suburban ho of the early 21st century, before the Great Recession came crashing down. None of the 20 fastest-growing metros are in the northeast. Rather, they’re in the sunny crescent that swoops from the Carolinas down through Texas and up into the west toward the Dakotas. Americans are back to sun-worshipping…

The story of immigration is slightly different. The list of cities with the greatest foreign-born influxes since 2010 includes some of these warm metros, like Houston and Dallas, but also filling out the top-ten metros for immigrants are areas where more native-born Americans are leaving, like New York (#1), Los Angeles (#2), Boston (#7), and Chicago (#9).

But the upshot seems to be that even as the recession sparked interest in an urban revival, the metros that seem to be winning the population lottery are suburbs of warm metros—including many of the very Sun Belt areas that seemed devastated by the recession.

Suburban sprawl continues…

And who are the people moving to big cities?

This is a tight feedback loop. The densest cities tend to be the most educated cities, which are also the richest cities, and often the biggest cities. They’re gobbling up a disproportionate share of college grads. And, as a result, they are becoming richer, denser, and more educated.

Both patterns can be going on at the same time: large numbers of Americans continuing to move to the Sunbelt suburbs while a good portion of educated young adults moving to hot neighborhoods in the biggest cities.

Suburbanites who don’t like proposals for affordable housing in the Twin Cities region

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The Metropolitan Council for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is working on plans for affordable housing but a number of suburbanites are not pleased with where the affordable housing might go:

The Met Council sees a growing problem. Its own newly available data suggest that annual production of affordable housing has dropped by hundreds of units since 2010, even as market-rate housing has rebounded.

An advance peek at the Met Council’s proposed goals, to be released late Monday, shows that communities considered to be prime locations for adding affordable units include upper income suburbs, such as North Oaks and Eden Prairie, and cornfield’s-edge fringe communities such as Minnetrista and Lake Elmo…

The target numbers — released this week for public comment, with adjustments possible from now to July — are part of a once-per-decade planning process that will begin in every city this fall. Each must start to figure out how to accommodate the additional units.

The Met Council is under heavy fire for allegedly pushing too much affordable housing into areas with plenty of it already, intensifying concentrations of poverty and perpetuating racial segregation in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The region has a history of metropolitanization, a rare occurrence in American cities, as well as an openness to immigrants, yet advancing affordable housing units in middle- to upper-end suburbs may be going too far. As some of the suburbanites in the article note, they moved to these communities to escape issues like this. But, the quality of life concerns they tend to express (good school, low crime, sense of community) seem to be inextricably linked with race/ethnicity and social class. Just a reminder that part of the benefits of having money in the United States is that one can move to such a place that insulates you against interacting with others.

Perhaps the drop in property values in Ferguson could prompt change

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The fallout from last year’s events in Ferguson, Missouri continues including this look at the changes in property values:

For the city’s 2014 budget, approximately 20 percent of the city’s revenue came from the city’s courts, and 17 percent came through property taxes. But after a Department of Justice report found the courts were profiting off racial discrimination, the State of Missouri took over to implement reforms. Couple that with rapidly falling property values (which are used to calculate owed taxes) and it seems like key parts of the city’s business plan are falling out from under it…

The average selling price of a home in the city has been on a steady decline since the shooting of Brown last August, according to housing data compiled from MARIS, an information and statistics service for real estate agents. Prior to Brown’s death, the average home sold in 2014 was selling for $66,764. For the last three and a half months of the year, the average home sold for $36,168, a 46 percent decrease.

The trend has continued on through this year, with the average home selling for only $22,951 so far in 2015. Another negative indicator: in the eight and a half months leading up to Brown’s death, the average residential square foot in 2014 was selling for $45.82. In the eight and a half months since Brown’s passing, the average residential square foot in the city has sold for $24.11. That’s about a 47 percent downtick in one of real estate’s core indicators.

In the suburbs, where quality of life (including factors like crime, the quality of the houses, performance of the local schools) is paramount in (1) influencing housing values and buying and selling real estate and (2) building a tax base through attracting businesses and organizations, infamy is not a good thing. But, given the patterns of local treatment of people by police in the area, it is hard to see how this wouldn’t affect housing values and the tax base. When given options across the suburbs of St. Louis, how many homeowners or companies would choose to move to Ferguson? And, if we’re honest, hitting suburbanites where it really matters – property values and their tax base (the double whammy of housing and land values going down while property taxes may need to increase to close the gap) – may be what is needed to prompt change.

Suburban communities add business district taxes but what are developers doing with the money?

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A number of Chicago suburbs have instituted business district taxes that partially funnel money to developers:

The business district tax is becoming more common as municipalities struggle to recover from the Great Recession and loss of shoppers to the Internet. Leaders in both Roselle and Villa Park initiated 1 percent business district taxes within the past year, the maximum rate on districts that cannot exceed 1 square mile. In some suburban locations, the additional business district tax can raise the sales tax to 9.25 percent, equal to the sales tax in Chicago…

Bloomingdale has two such districts. One adds a 1 percent sales tax to purchases inside Stratford Square and another adds the same percentage at Indian Lakes Resort, where it’s used to help pay off $4.8 million in village-issued debt that went to the resort for improvements…

Last year, the village paid the owners of the mall $1,199,151, which is more than 95 percent of all the money generated by the business district tax. Since the tax was implemented, the village has paid the mall owner more than $8 million. According to village finance records, the mall owner still is owed more than $11 million…

Lombard has a similar deal with its mall owner. The village instituted a 1 percent business district tax almost a decade ago. It helps push the sales tax rate at Yorktown Center mall to 9.25 percent.

Lombard’s deal allows up to $25 million in business district taxes to be rebated to Yorktown’s owner through 2024, in exchange for an addition that was built onto the mall where an abandoned Montgomery Ward once stood. So far, the mall’s owner has received almost $4.2 million from the business tax…

Taxpayers in Oakbrook Terrace are the ones with skin in the game. The city borrowed nearly $8.2 million to spur development of the Oakbrook Terrace Square Shopping Center. City officials did not return calls seeking comment about the city’s stake in the shopping center. However, according to the city’s budget documents, the investment has yet to pay off.

Given the problems facing the American shopping mall as well as the financial difficulties facing many suburbs, perhaps these suburbs think such taxes are necessary to help keep sales tax generators in the community. Yet, if the extra money generated is given to developers who then line their own pockets, how much is the local taxpayer helped? This raises similar questions to giving corporations tax breaks to locate their headquarters or facilities in suburban communities. Few politicians or residents want to lose a potential tax revenue generator – especially a large shopping mall, even if they are relatively ugly and detract from local businesses given their reliance on chain stores – but there is often little public discussion of the trade-offs involved with the tax breaks.

Are there suburban shopping centers that don’t have such a tax and if not, do they advertise to this effect?

Should tranpsortation also be covered by social services?

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With the geographic spread of poverty to the suburbs, should transportation be considered a necessary social service?

“One thing that’s pretty incredible, if we start to think about it, is that transportation has been outside of what we define as a human service,” says Alexandra Murphy, a sociologist who studies poverty at the University of Michigan. “Even though it’s widely acknowledged that transportation creates opportunity and hardship.”

This week, however, saw the launch of one of the U.S.’s largest-ever subsidized bus-fare programs. King County, a Washington State county that includes Seattle, will now allow low-income residents to ride buses, trains, and ferries for $1.50, when standard fares can be more than $3. Other U.S. cities will watching closely to see if the program works, the New York Times reported…

“Transportation agencies don’t often have a poverty mission at their core like health and human services agencies do,” says Scott Allard, a public affairs researcher at the University of Washington. Providing lower-than-average fares “has typically not been in their mandate,” says Howard Chernick, an economist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute of Research on Poverty.

Human services departments may be reluctant to take on transportation because of liability issues that don’t exist with food and housing, Murphy, the University of Michigan sociologist, thinks. What if someone driving a subsidized car gets into an accident? “It’s the perception that it’s a quagmire that people don’t even want to walk into,” she says.

 

Owning a car is not cheap and with more jobs and poorer residents in the suburbs, cheap and reliable transportation becomes a bigger necessity. Public transportation options in the suburbs are often limited (hours, perhaps only bus or train) or do not go all the places with jobs. I don’t see why it would be difficult to provide some sort of credit or voucher for public transportation based on income limits. While this might limit employees to living in existing public transportation corridors, it would be a start.

This reminds me of a program I remember hearing about a few years where the state of Wisconsin was piloting a program that provided cheap yet reliable cars for lower-income residents.

Did we already pass “peak urban millennial”?

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Joel Kotkin discusses the demographic data that shows the bulk of millenials are near their 30s – and possible lives in the suburbs.

Some of this simply reflects the aging of millennials. As Jed Kolko at the real estate website Trulia has pointed out, the proclivity for urban living peaks in the mid-to-late 20s and drops notably later. Over 25 percent of people in their midtwenties, he found, live in urban neighborhoods; but by the time they move into their midthirties, it drops to no more than18 percent.

The impact of the aging process – the maturation, however delayed, upon millennials – will soon become acutely obvious to all but the most emotional retro-urbanist. In 2018, according to Census Bureau estimates, the number of millennials entering their 30s will be larger than those in their 20s, and the trend will only get stronger, with the numbers tilting ever more in favor of the thirtysomethings. Kolko suggests that we may already have passed “peak urban millennial.”

And then Kotkin goes on to try to bust other stereotypes about millennials. Both he and the other side – such as those who tend to argue that smart growth will inevitable win out behind the tastes of younger Americans – can cite some data and make some predictions. Perhaps Kotkin has the easier selection: he suggests millennials will follow the geographic inertia of their ancestors (even if they do have some other social differences) while his opponents are looking for a big break from the past.

But, it is interesting to note that we may only be a few years away from settling this debate if the bulk of millennials are then in their thirties. Unless emerging adulthood keeps getting extended for this group, they will be expected to have made their “adult” decisions soon. Will they choose cities and denser suburbs or will they continue to prefer more space relatively far from dense population concentrations?

Paris planning to add millions in the suburbs to its boundaries

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Plans for metropolitanization in Paris are well underway:

The new Métropole du Grand Paris, or Metropolis of Greater Paris, will include nearly seven million people, more than triple the population now living in the central city. It will swallow rich suburbs to the west. But it should also provide better access to jobs and to business hubs and, if it really works, a greater sense of belonging for millions of immigrant families who live in poverty and isolation on the city’s southern, northern and eastern fringes. Resources would be redistributed, in particular those dealing with housing. The complexion of Paris would change…

As much as any struggling suburb, this one shows how urban development across decades, even centuries, has failed millions of immigrant families and contributed to what France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, recently denounced as “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.” His remark provoked a lot of hand-wringing in France. But, as all sorts of French planners, architects, historians and political scientists point out, a legacy of belonging and exclusion, center and periphery, inside and outside, is baked into the very layout of Paris and of places like Grigny, which has nice old houses and woods but is a de facto warehouse for tens of thousands of mostly poor, disenfranchised Muslims.

In essence, Paris Métropole promises a new regional council to coordinate housing, urban planning and transit for a greater Paris. The idea evolved from a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy, who as president imagined business hubs and a high-speed train linking them to the city’s airports. That morphed into a more complex rail system serving poorer suburbs.

Pierre Mansat has spent years helping to put the plan together. He said the other morning that taxes on businesses, and, France hopes, billions more from Europe, will pay for Paris Métropole. Who knows whether right-wing and left-wing politicians from suburbs and city neighborhoods will actually cooperate, but Mr. Mansat stressed that “it’s above all about creating a new image of Paris as more inclusive, integrated, fluid.”

This sounds like an interesting confluence of factors. On one hand is inequality in the French suburbs which has been surfacing for quite a while. Urban images are important, if at the least for France’s international reputation and Paris’ thriving tourism, as are aiming to give all residents opportunities for a better life. On the other hand are the practicalities of comprehensively tackling urban issues – like housing and transportation – that require the cooperation of a range of communities. Cities can do a lot on their own but many of their needs are tied to the fate of nearby communities that can either join cities in pursuing common goals or pursue their own.

Of course, the article suggests it isn’t clear how successful the metropolitanization attempt might be. This is a long-term project and it will be interesting to see how other major cities learn from this process.

Are the suburbs the heart of the anti-Common Core movement?

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The claim here that backlash to the Common Core is based in the suburbs may be true but lacks hard evidence:

Now, amid all the backlash, an unlikely subculture appears to be emerging in the anti-Common Core world: suburban parents. Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has taken note of the trend, who last November told a group of superintendents that “white suburban moms” were resisting the implementation of the Common Core. His theory? “All of a sudden … their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

I happen to live in a middle-class suburb outside of New York City—one that could easily be considered the capital of “white suburban moms.” And I’m realizing Duncan was on to something: Their wrath is real, and it’s based largely on misperception and widespread fearmongering perpetuated by the Tea Party skeptics and anxious state policymakers…

So, why are suburban parents suddenly taken with test anxiety? Duncan reasoned that “white suburban moms”—and, presumably, dads as well—fear their children will perform poorly on the Common Core tests. But based on my conversations with parents and school administrators, as well as my observations of local school-board meetings, I believe parental fears are broader and more complex than Duncan made them out to be.

A typical suburban parent, like all parents, has an intense, natural instinct to protect his or her kids. We parents are hard-wired to protect our babies from the unknown—and for the most part, this is a good thing. After all, protection of offspring and suspicion of outsiders have kept the human species alive for millions of years. But this instinct sometimes takes parents in the wrong direction. Just look at the anti-vaccination movement: Though the instincts of anti-vaccination parent activists are pure, their actions have resulted in what’s arguably a public-health crisis in the country.

Many parents view the Common Core and the accompanying tests as a threat to their ability to keep their kids safe in a hostile world. Suburban parents, who are known for being particularly involved in their kids’ education and traditionally enjoy a good deal of influence on district policymaking, are frustrated by not being able to convince their local school boards to alter the standards or testing requirements. They worry that they won’t be able to help kids with homework, because the new learning materials rely on teaching methods foreign to them. They worry that, ultimately, their kids will be unemployed and living in the basement in their 20s…

Tea Party conservatives and suburban parents might not have a lot in common, but they seem to increasingly share a distrust of bureaucracy, so-called experts, and federal rules. The sources of their opposition, of course, are entirely different: For Tea Party conservatives, it’s about ideology; for parents, it’s about protection. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, indeed.

Does that mean urban and rural areas are the ones supporting the Common Core? Here is why this argument without much evidence bothers me: it sounds like the decades-old suburban critiques that haven’t changed all that much since the mid-1900s. It is easy to stereotype all the suburban population as white, conservative, individualistic, unable to see past their own interests. There is some evidence that would seem to fit with this argument: the exurbs tend to vote Republican, wealthier suburban communities (those likely with better schools) tend to be whiter, American suburbs have been all about raising children for a long time, and suburbs idolize local control in all sorts of areas. Yet, the suburbs were never that monolithic and certainly aren’t now with increasing non-white, poorer, and immigrant populations. Do inner-ring suburban parents view the world the same way as exurban parents?

If this story wanted to be more accurate, it might go a few directions:

1. Use some data. There certainly has to be some survey data regarding opinions on the Common Core. Many national surveys include a measure for living in urban/suburban/rural areas.

2. Don’t paint all suburbanites with broad strokes and instead limit the claim to certain groups. Perhaps the author is really talking about wealthier parents. Or moms. Or suburban conservatives.