Tag Archives: suburbs

“The ghetto has moved to the suburbs”

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Several sociologists discuss the patterns of residential segregation in the American suburbs which are increasingly non-white:

Logan found that, despite a decline in racial segregation and improvements in incomes marked by the rise of the black middle class, blacks and Hispanics continue to live in the least desirable neighborhoods – even when they can afford better – and their children attend the lowest-performing schools…

“Moving to the suburbs was once believed to mean making it into the mainstream,” he said. “There is something to this idea that moving on out is moving up … Yet minorities are not finding equal access to the American dream.” When neighborhoods where blacks live are compared to those where whites or Asians live, “the inequality is quite stark,” he said…

But suburban diversity clearly does not equal racial integration. Just over 10 percent of the suburban population was black in 2010, but the average black suburbanite lived in a neighborhood that was more than 35 percent black. And although about 69 percent of suburban residents were white, fewer than 45 percent of the average black suburbanite’s neighbors were white…

“Thirty years ago, it would’ve been in the city of St. Louis, but blacks moved out of St. Louis to this place [Ferguson], and whites fled,” Anderson said. “The ghetto has moved to the suburbs. It’s happening to many places in the country.”

The suburbs are no longer the sole retreat of wealthier whites but they are not exactly equal either. The study discussed here corroborates a lot of evidence that shows that even as the suburbs become less white and less wealthy (more people in poverty than cities), people are not evenly spread throughout suburban areas. Just as cities have wealthier and less wealthy neighborhoods, suburbs have a variety of communities and a number where wealthier residents have found ways to limit the arrival of others. (Property values, exclusionary zoning, gated communities, a lack of affordable housing, a lack of social services, etc.)

In other words, residential segregation is alive and well in the United States even if more people have “made it” to the suburbs.

Three graphics showing more non-whites in the American suburbs

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William Frey discusses the increase of non-whites in American suburbs with three graphics:

These findings are not new though the trend continues: the suburban populations of the three largest minority groups have increased in recent decades. William Frey and others at the Brookings Institution have been tracking these findings quite effectively. Yet, as Frey notes, population growth doesn’t mean that non-whites are evenly spread throughout the suburbs:

While Hispanics, Asians and blacks are now main players in suburbanization, they do not yet have a substantial presence in the outer suburbs and show some clustering in same-race communities, in many cases as a result of quasi-legal exclusionary practices.

Thus, the headline of this piece – “The Suburbs: Not Just for White People Anymore” – might be a bit misleading. This does not mean that wealthier whites and non-whites are living in the same places even if more non-whites live in suburban areas. Given the role of social class in the suburbs where more wealth and money means living in more exclusive communities, many non-whites haven’t exactly attained the same suburban life.

Making something out of hundreds of unfinished subdivisions

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The economic crisis of recent years had broad effects including stalling the construction of hundreds of suburban subdivisions across the United States:

There are hundreds of zombie subdivisions like this one scattered across the country. They’re one of the most visible reminders of the housing boom and bust, planned and paved in the heady days where it seemed that everybody wanted a home in the suburbs, and could afford it, too. But when the economy tanked, many of the developers behind these subdivisions went belly-up, and construction stopped. In some cases, a few people have moved into homes in these half-built subdivisions, requiring services to be delivered there. In others, the land is empty, except for roads, sidewalks, and the few street signs that haven’t been stolen yet. In some counties in the West, anywhere from 15 to 33 percent of all subdivision lots are vacant, according to the Sonoran Institute…

But if roads have been paved or a developer has installed infrastructure improvements, it’s very hard to just revert the space back to farmland. Local governments who try to stop building—even if there is little demand—can be sued for preventing development where it had once been approved…Still, some developers  have come up with creative ways to turn zombie subdivisions into something other than rows upon rows of empty McMansions.

Maricopa, Arizona, for instance, had issued about 600 residential building permits a month during the boom, and then saw many of these developments stall. Rather than just wait to see if demand would ever return, the city hooked up a Catholic church with the owners of an empty development. The church had been looking to erect a new building, and was searching for a site with existing water and infrastructure services. The developer had been looking for someone willing to build. With a little bit of rezoning help from the city, the church could start building on the land…

And in Teton County, Idaho, population around 11,000, where the Sonoran Institute estimates that 68 percent of land parceled into subdivisions was undeveloped, local officials passed ordinances that would allow subdivisions to be rezoned. One development, called Canyon Creek Ranch, changed its plans from a resort with 350 lots to a community project with only 21 lots, shrinking the infrastructure price tag by 97 percent and reducing the environmental impacts.

From zombie pedestrians to zombie subdivisions. It sounds like communities have to hope that someone wants the land – whether a residential developers or some other user – so they can do something with it. As noted, communities might be able to speed that up by rezoning the land for other uses. Perhaps this might lead to some ultra-flexible zoning where these spaces could be residential, commercial, industrial, or other as long as somebody has a plan.

I do wonder how many of these subdivisions would have legitimately filled up. Where were all the people going to come from? If they moved to the new homes, they opened up other units. Are there so many people rooming together or living with family to create the demand for all these new houses?

My suggestion for what these settings can be used for: sets for all of the post-apocalyptic or dystopian TV shows and movies. Studios could likely get cheap long-term deals on these properties and use them however they wish.

Black congregation in Seattle follows its members to the suburbs

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Here is one illustration of the demographic changes in American suburbs: an African-American church heads for Seattle’s suburbs.

The Rev. Leslie David Braxton saw the writing on the wall in 1999. Members of his former congregation at Mount Zion Baptist Church in the Central District were moving south, and in Seattle, the black middle class was already starting to shrink…

A data junkie and sociologist by training, the reverend rattles off statistics effortlessly. In 1999, he gleaned that in 20 years, the Central District wouldn’t be the epicenter of the black community…

He pushed for Mount Zion to open a satellite campus south of the city. After some internal conflicts, he resigned and, in 2005 started his own church, New Beginnings Christian Fellowship, south of Seattle…

“We’re sitting on 8½ acres. There’s no way you’d be able to get that kind of property in the city.” And, if a similar building existed, he said, “it certainly wouldn’t be affordable.”

To Braxton, there’s an upside, however. For many black families, the suburbs offer an opportunity to live out the American dream — good schools, the house with a two-car garage and a spacious yard — far more easily than the city. It’s a reversal, he says, of white flight, common in the East Coast.

Churches can often go where a majority of their members go. The pattern described here sounds similar to that of numerous white urban churches after World War II: as whites moved to the suburbs, so did a number of the congregations. Such moves weren’t necessarily immediate; it took time for some established institutions to leave buildings and neighborhoods where they may have been for decades and/or served multiple waves of white immigrants.

But, the suburbs today have a wider range of residents including more non-whites, immigrants, and lower- and working-class people. Suburban religious congregations already reflect some of these changes and will likely demonstrate these further in the future.

Building for and selling real estate to more diverse suburbs

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Builders and real estate agents are trying new approaches to match Houston’s diversifying suburbs:

Houston homebuilders, developers and Realtors are now trying to cater to this changing suburban demographic.

Realtors are taking classes in feng shui to appeal to Asian homebuyers. Local homebuilders are adding “mother-in-law” suites and casitas to their floor plans to attract Latin American buyers accustomed to multigenerational living.

Last month, Partners in Building, a Houston-based builder, announced plans to construct Mediterranean-style homes with domed roofs, Arabic-style arches and optional prayer rooms in a Sugar Land community.

“The suburbs are going to have to adapt,” Klineberg said. “These big McMansions are going to be less attractive. We need to provide more choices for people.”

Some interesting changes are likely underfoot in suburban real estate. Yet, the proposed changes may not be that large. For example, the sociologist cited at the end suggests McMansions won’t be such hot items. Maybe. McMansions could continue to thrive if they can incorporate some new styles (Mediterranean architecture) as well as new home features (prayer rooms, in-law suites). I’m guessing Klineberg means housing that is more flexible and cheaper to better suit working-class to middle-class residents who can’t afford the big suburban home yet need to be somewhat close to their suburban jobs. Again, that could go different directions: does that automatically mean more apartments and rental units or does it mean more affordable small houses, condos, and townhomes in denser neighborhoods? All together, will such changes be spread evenly throughout suburbs or will they be centered by class and race? I would guess a strong yes given the residential and class segregation present across suburban communities.

Viewing the suburbs from The Floating City

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Sudhir Venkatesh’s The Floating City examines some of the underground economy in New York City but also contains several interesting brief perspectives on the suburbs.

1. As he is introducing one of the main characters early in the book, Venkatesh recalls an earlier conversation at the University of Chicago (p.16):

“How funny would it be if I did a study comparing J.B.’s film business to Shine’s drug business? my mind drifted to a conversation I’d had with a faculty member at the University of Chicago right at the beginning of my academic career. “I want to study the suburbs,” I’d said. He looked at me as if he’d seen a bug. “They’re white and middle class,” he’d said. “What’s there to study?”

2. Later in the book, Venkatesh describes why he studies what he does. In doing so, he compares portrayals of urban and suburban life (p.144):

“As my tone may hint, this is a pet peeve. for the last decade, I’ve been fighting the stereotypes of the poor that began to pervade American society after the publication of the infamous Moynihan Report in 1965, which argued that the history of slavery and generations of single-parent matriarchal families had created a “tangle of pathology” that made it difficult for many inner-city blacks to enter the social mainstream. The truth in this analysis took a backseat to the blaming, it seemed to me. White families had high divorce and addiction rates too, but their entry into the job market wasn’t blocked by patronizing assumptions about their tangle of pathology. Suburbs also bred family dysfunction, not to mention some of the highest rates of alcohol and drug addiction, domestic abuse, and other forms of delinquency, but you didn’t hear people talk about the tangle of suburban pathology. Poverty has been growing faster in the suburbs than in the inner city since 2000, but a dozen years later the cliche of the urban poor remains intact. my argument, based on the experience of my years in the Chicago ghetto, is that the poor are actually more resilient and economically creative because the have much bigger obstacles to overcome – just as a small house built by hand can be much more impressive than a mansion built by experts.”

Both points strike me as having some truth: sociologists tend to see the suburbs as dull and middle-class even as interesting things are taking place both in urban and suburban neighborhoods. And Venkatesh has done much, along with others, to give us realistic rather than stereotyped depictions of poor urban life at the turn of the 21st century.

Yet, I think these two passages contradict each other. The first suggests there isn’t much worth studying in suburbs. Cities are global centers and urban sociology has a long history of examining urban neighborhoods The second passage suggests suburban life has its own issues and more of the “urban” issues – like poverty or increasing presence of gangs or higher proportions of immigrant residents – are now present there. The second suggests sociologists need to be studying both cities and suburbs while leaving behind the urban elitism of the first. Since a majority of Americans live in suburbs and there are dynamic things happening in many metropolitan areas, where are the ethnographers and urban sociologists in training some of the same techniques and analytical lenses on the suburbs?

A continued rise in megachurches?

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Megachurches continue to grow in the United States and around the world:

Even with a growing share of the American population who say they do not identify with any religion, megachurch domination continues to rise. In all, 10% of worshipers attend churches that draw in more than 2,000 people, totaling nearly six million megachurch attendees nationwide each weekend.

And it’s not just the U.S. that catching onto super-sized congregations. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a single church in Korea says more than 250,000 people attend services there. By comparison, Hartford researchers say America’s largest megachurch has an average of 45,000 attendees…

A major driver behind the rapid expansion are often the leaders themselves. As congregations slowly began to swell in numbers, so too did the star-status of the leaders at the church’s helm. Church leaders and televangelists like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson paved the path in becoming household names marketing themselves in the big business of bringing faith to the masses…

Churches built a franchise out of the success, setting up satellite branches just to keep up with the demand. In what critics have called the “Wal-Mart effect,” megachurches are expanding in suburban areas, absorbing congregants from small-town churches and running them dry. To keep up with the demand, megachurches lead multiple services held throughout the entire weekend. For church campuses hosting guest speakers or church leaders from out of town, live video monitors bring services to congregations sometimes held hundreds of miles away.

“Clearly the majority of the people who came to a megachurch were coming from a congregation nearby. Then there’s also a sizable number of folks that say they came to that congregation and they hadn’t really gone to any for a long time,” Thumma said. “If you’re moving to a suburb, the megachurch allows you an almost instant community of people who think like you.”

I’m not sure this article says much new about megachurches. It hits some of the key points: lots of Americans attend, it has spread to some other countries, charismatic leaders often lead the way, and they are typically suburban and draw from across a metropolitan region.

Alas, this article could go a lot further to actually discuss megachurches beyond having a catchy headline. For example:

1. The average size of American churches is actually quite smaller. According to the National Congregations Study, the average church was 75 people in 2006-2007. See wave three of the NCS data here.

2. Just how common are megachurches around the world? The article cites one church – a really big one in South Korea – but doesn’t say anything else.

3. It is easy to focus on superstar pastors like Rick Warren or Joel Osteen or T.D. Jakes. But, is this the primary reason people attend megachurches? Are they primarily drawn by the big name or do the churches offer key features?

4. The satellite church phenomenon is relatively new for a lot of big churches. How effective is this model?

Overall, this is the sort of media piece that rehashes information for readers who don’t know much about megachurches but misses an opportunity to go deeper.

You don’t see many engagement photos set in suburban streets

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One photographer looked to the suburbs for inspiration in an engagement photoshoot but didn’t find much to work with:

Engagement photos are either urban or rural. They are either a former factory or a leafy meadow, the brick wall of a forgotten factory or an empty beach. Never the subdivision. Never the cul-de-sac.

We wanted to capture the ambiance of the American subdivision.

The pictures are what you might expect: a couple standing in the middle of wide roads or cul-de-sacs amidst a bunch of cookie-cutter single-family homes. The locations are somewhat unfair; you don’t often see engagement pictures in the middle of urban or rural roads either. And, you can find lots of pleasant settings in the suburbs, perhaps even in gardens or flower beds in the very same tract homes in the backgrounds of these pictures. But, if you want to find the stereotypical image of suburbs, especially among critics, this looks correct.

Self-driving cars could make sprawl even more popular

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Suburban sprawl has its critics but self-driving cars may just make long commutes more palatable:

As driving becomes less onerous and computer-controlled systems reduce traffic, some experts worry that will eliminate a powerful incentive—commuting sucks—for living near cities, where urban density makes for more efficient sharing of resources. In other words, autonomous vehicles could lead to urban sprawl.

It’s simple, says Ken Laberteaux, a senior scientist at Toyota. If you make transportation faster, easier and perhaps cheaper, then people won’t mind commuting. “What a consumer is expected to do is see what they can gain by moving a little further from the job centers or the cultural centers,” he says. That’s bad news: Urban sprawl is linked to economic, environmental, and health hardships…

Laberteaux’s not the only one concerned about this. Autonomous vehicles should ease highway congestion, and commuters will be able to catch up on work or sleep en route to the office. That limits the incentive to trade your McMansion for a brownstone, says Reid Ewing, director of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center. The implications of this go beyond transportation; in a 2014 report for advocacy group Smart Growth America, Ewing linked sprawl to obesity and economic immobility.

Ewing likens autonomous driving to the construction of “superhighways” during the post-war boom years, which spurred suburbanization. “If you can travel at higher speeds with less congestion and you can use your time productively while you’re traveling in a self-driving car, the generalized cost of travel will be less on a vehicle-per-mile basis,” says Ewing. “Just like when, before the interstate system, people were traveling at 30 miles per hour, there wasn’t nearly the spread of development that there is today.”

The car is a remarkable invention that with adaptation (oil doesn’t seem to be quite running out, alternative fuel sources, etc.) could be around for a long time. So, perhaps the real answer to limiting sprawl is simply getting rid of cars or finding more and more ways to incentive not owning a car.

“Ugliest new build McMansion ever”?

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Take a look at this McMansion in Vienna, Virginia:

A quick analysis of the home based on the four traits of McMansions:

1. Absolute size. This home seems to have at least 3,000 square feet.

2. Relative size. Quite a difference between this home and the mid-20th century ranch home next door. It is hard to know for sure from the picture but this new home could be a teardown.

3. Poor architectural design and quality. The home has some interesting proportions, ranging from the relatively bland sided area above the front doorway to the popping-out balconies at each corner of the front. It is bulging in all the wrong places. (I would be interested to know whether these two second-story corners mean that these are separate suites, each with their own balcony.)

4. Tied to other social issues like consumption and sprawl. The suburban aspect is clearly implied by this picture, particularly with the looming water tower in the background. (The water tower is reminiscent of this famous photo from Plano, Texas.) Compared to the home next door, this new McMansion does look excessive. Sadly, the same angle that helps invite comparison to the home next door and the water tower also blocks our view of the likely large garage in the back.

Is this the worst designed McMansion ever? There are a good number of contenders for this crown. Just look at these 10 McMansions from New Jersey…