Tag Archives: suburbs

Common narrative: bucolic suburbs surprised by deviance

Posted on by

A recent revelation in the Baltimore suburbs is a common story across media platforms: idyllic suburban communities are shocked by hidden deviance and crime that is suddenly exposed.

The hills in Clarks Glen are gently rolling, the homes McMansions. And the lawns are mowed to the near-perfection a country club groundskeeper might envy.

It’s the very model of affluent suburbia, hardly a place where anyone thinks the man next door would be stopped by customs agents on his way to China with the makings of missile detectors in his bags.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Zhenchun “Ted” Huang, a longtime resident of the Clarksville subdivision in Howard County, pleaded guilty this month to federal charges that he tried tofraudulently obtain electronic devices that can be used in fabricating missile detectors and other high-grade military equipment…

In Clarks Glen, the development where he lived for at least eight years, former neighbors were astonished to hear the news. They saw Huang, an electrical engineer, as anything but the cloak-and-dagger type.

Instead, they said, he was a taciturn man who mowed his lawn once a week, whether it was needed or not, and rarely socialized.

On one hand, people in the suburbs are genuinely shocked by such stories. They often move to nice suburbs to escape such issues like crime and international espionage. Nobody wants to think that a sex offender is lurking down the street where they let their kids play. These sorts of things are problems more often associated with cities or less affluent locales.

On the other hand, reactions like this sound like a TV show. Oh wait, is this an episode of The Americans or a Hollywood movie or a John Keats novel about the hidden problems of suburbia? One shouldn’t be completely naive about what can be lurking in any community, let alone suburbs. I’m not advocating for paranoia or hypervigilance – this isn’t the best way to promote social ties or community life – but people everywhere are capable of dastardly deeds. The reactions of neighbors like those quoted above might say more about how well suburban neighbors know each other (often not very well) than the overall actions of suburbanites.

Perhaps the issue here is the overselling of suburban life over the decades. If suburbs were and are often marketed as escapes from social problems (there is a long history of suburban developers suggesting such things as well as suburban residents and leaders), places that are perfect for children and offer private space, the American Dream, then any actions in contrast to that are viewed quite negatively.

“Conservatives should embrace [New Urbanism] too”

Posted on by

The sprawling suburbs have been associated with Republicans for decades but one writer suggests they should embrace New Urbanism:

“Whenever I start mentioning any kind of New Urbanism items — for conservatives and Republicans who I talk to who don’t know me personally — I’m instantly branded a Communist,” said Decker.

Burgess tells me he came to support New Urbanism after he heard James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 TED Talk. During the presentation, Kunstler showed slides of urban and suburban sprawl, and then declared, “These are places that are not worth caring about [and] when we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s not worth defending.”…

Ironically, government regulation (the tax code, zoning, a federally financed highway system, and so on) helps explain America’s post-WWII push for sprawl. What is more interesting, though, is that conservatives so readily embraced this modern fad as being tantamount to the American dream.

At what cost, nobody can really quantify. There’s no telling how many marriages were broken up over the stress of suburb-to-city commutes — or how many hours of the day children were deprived of their parents who, after all, were in the car making a big sacrifice so that little Johnny could have a huge yard, live in suburbia, go to a supposedly nice school, and have “rugged individualists” as parents. It’s also hard to quantify the spiritual and psychic cost associated with endlessly frustrating commutes, disconnection from a community, and ugly buildings. And there is certainly an economic cost of taxpayers maintaining low-density areas and infrastructure that yield relatively little revenue.

Interesting argument. Based on what I’ve seen in recent years from conservatives about cities, there seem to be two major concerns:

1. Voting patterns in the United States have broken down generally with cities serving as Democratic strongholds, exurbs as Republican bases, and contention over middle suburbs. Thus, cities are simply viewed as homes to Democrats.

2. There is fear that liberals want to take away the suburban way of life (your own land, space between you and your neighbors, a private life) and make conservatives conform in cities.

But, New Urbanism emphasizes the importance of community life, the ability (which may not work as well as advertised) to design a place in such a way to encourage social interaction. This does sound somewhat like the idyllic small towns conservatives talk about, places where people work together and share common values (but generally have less diversity of ideas, peoples, etc.).

Perhaps the real issue here is the “true” definition of being a conservative: is it being more libertarian where people leave each other alone or about creating moral, tight-knit communities?

Naperville responds to the claim it is a snobby mid-sized city

Posted on by

Movoto recently named Naperville the 4th snobbiest mid-sized city in America. Here is their short description of the suburb:

If this place seems like a bit of an odd man out on our list, don’t be fooled. Naperville had the second highest household income, and over 66 percent of locals had a college degree, so these are some world-wise and wealthy people. Plus, they’re able to congregate together in their seventh place country clubs, probably to sample wine and discuss recent stock market trends.

This city may not have the highest ranking in refined restaurants, but it does have a somewhat refined palate. If you don’t believe me, you can try the cuisine at Morton’s The Steakhouse and you’ll know for sure you’re in a place all about class. Just be sure to bring a well packed wallet, these savory steaks do not come cheap. Who ever said the best things in life are free? It definitely wasn’t Naperville.

And here are two responses from Naperville residents:

1. Naperville Mayor George Pradel said:

Longtime Mayor George Pradel, considered by many to be the city’s most ardent booster, took a glass-is-half-full approach to news of the city’s snob ranking.

“I’m taking a positive attitude toward that. Actually it puts Naperville on the map again,” Pradel said. “Naperville is a great city. I think we are very fortunate to have us be recognized.

“If you look at their statistics, the background, homes, income, education, one could assume that this could be a snooty area. But it’s not until you actually get out in the community when you find out that’s really not what’s happening here,” he said. “That’s just kind of looking at it on the surface. You find that this is a very, very friendly city and people care about each other.”

Pradel echoes a claim a number of city leaders have made over the years: Naperville may be large and have money but what really sets it apart is its community spirit. Often invoked is the community’s efforts to build Centennial Beach in the early 1930s and then the volunteers that started the Riverwalk in the late 1970s. In other words, Naperville still has the spirit of a small town even though it no longer looks like one.

2. A Naperville resident wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune that took a different tack:

To those of us who know the real Naperville, this is character defamation. Naperville, now a bustling suburb, was filled with rows of corn and old barns just 20 years ago. I’m in my late 20s, and the Naperville I grew up in was open land peppered with old strip malls and newish subdivisions. There is now less open space and there are more McMansions, but the Naperville I know is still comparable to most Midwest suburbs — packed with minivans, soccer practices, block parties, well-manicured lawns and chain restaurants.

Naperville isn’t North Shore affluence. Many label Naperville as “new money” — and this seems at least partially true. A majority of my classmates and friends from Naperville had parents who came from humble beginnings and worked hard to achieve their place in an upper-middle-class income bracket. This sounds more like the American Dream than snobbery…

Movoto ranked only “midsized cities.” The top snob list only includes towns with populations of 120,000 to 220,000 people. That means Chicago suburbs such as Hinsdale, Winnetka, Lake Forest, Glencoe and Barrington weren’t contenders in the competition. Just saying.

Also, Movoto is on a ranking spree. The site has ranked the happiest, most exciting, safest and most creative cities in America and is now doling out these individual rankings state by state. It recently dubbed Rolling Meadows and New Lenox as the “most boring” towns in Illinois. Well, who crowned Movoto as the all-knowing king of rankings? Not fair, I say. I bet people in New Lenox have fun sometimes.

Instead of appealing to the great community, this op-ed applies a scattershot defense. First, Naperville isn’t really that different than many suburbs because it still had open land nearby several decades ago. There may be some truth to this – as late as 1980, Naperville had just 42,000 residents so much of the explosive growth has happened since then, particularly by 2000 when the suburb had over 128,000 residents. Second, Naperville isn’t like old-money snobby Chicago suburbs, whether that is small North Shore suburbs or other pockets west of the city. Third, one could question the methodology of determining whether a suburb is snobby.

All together, I would suggest Naperville is unusually large and wealthy for a suburb. Traditionally, wealthier suburbs have been small, geographically-restricted areas where residents can protect their zoning and community character. But, Naperville has both size (around 144,000 residents over 39 square miles) and wealth (median household income over $108,000), drawing upon white-collar businesses and research facilities that moved in or nearby after World War II and annexing a lot of land. But, whether all of this makes a community snobby is much harder to measure. On the ground, suburbanites have perceptions about which communities are more or less snobby and as the op-ed above suggests, Naperville residents might often look to other suburbs as more snobby.

Just to note: this isn’t the first time such claims have been made about Naperville. I remember seeing one response to similar claims a decade or so ago that asked whether it was so bad that Naperville residents just wanted the best in life and in their community.

Millennials move into suburbs and less dense big cities and other urban population shifts

Posted on by

A new report from Trulia looks at where millennials and Baby Boomers moved as well as population growth in cities:

Extrapolating from the census data, a separate report from San Francisco-based real estate research firm Trulia Inc. showed where different age groups lived in 2013. Contrary to popular thought, millennials – Americans 20 to 34 years old – actually moved more into big-city suburbs and lower-density cities rather than dense urban areas. The three fastest growing millennial metropolitan areas were Peabody, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston, Colorado Springs, Colorado and San Antonio.

Americans 50 to 69 years old also flocked most to the “second quartile of counties,” wrote Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko, or big city suburbs and lower density cities. The fastest growing areas for baby boomers were Austin, Texas, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas – all places that already have high concentrations of young people. In fact, Austin has the highest share of millennials than any other large metropolitan area, the Trulia report showed…

“The trend in the past year was that boomer growth [took place] in millennials’ favorite places,” Kolko says.

The population of the youngest Americans, or those ages 5 and younger, grew fastest in big cities like Washington, D.C. and New York. Frey has studied demographic changes in New York and says since 2010, there’s been a growth in the under 5 population in all of the boroughs except for Staten Island.

The biggest surprise here seems to be that more millennials moved to “big-city suburbs & lower-density cities.” At the same time, the population growth differences between the four quartiles of counties are not that large – the analysis shows roughly 0.2% differences.

Another note: the South and West continue to lead the way (all those less dense cities due to different zoning rules, annexation policies, and waves of development) in this analysis with the occasional city from elsewhere sneaking in occasionally.

Ikea is raising pay to help workers but many who need jobs can’t easily make it to their suburban locations

Posted on by

Jamelle Bouie points out that Ikea is doing a good thing in raising wages but their jobs aren’t easily accessible to many who need them:

With that said, it’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes. Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes.

What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations make them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods…

The result is that, for both groups—but low-income blacks in particular—there is a “spatial mismatch” between neighborhoods and employment opportunities.

Put simply, the greater the sprawl of jobs in an area, the less likely it is that black residents will have easy and reliable access to them. Or, as UCLA professor Michael Stoll writes in a 2005 paper for the Brookings Institution, “Blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas regardless of region, metropolitan area size, and their share of metropolitan population.” And this isn’t an accident: “Metropolitan areas characterized by higher job sprawl also exhibit more severe racial segregation between blacks and whites,” he writes.

All of this is exacerbated by our shoddy, car-centric transportation policy. To get to any job in a place like Virginia Beach, Virginia—where 10- to 15-mile drives are a fact of life—you need a car. Yes, there is a public transportation system, but it’s irregular (the agency had a rate of 18 missed trips per day in March), limited in scope, and unreliable for most workers who need to be on time. But cars are expensive, and black and Latino households are much less likely to own cars than their white counterparts. What comes next is predictable: Plenty of low-income people can’t find or keep jobs because they are isolated from opportunities.

All correct though the increasing number of lower-income suburban residents may be closer to some of these Ikea stores. At the same time, most suburban residents will still need cars to get to the store, vehicles that are relatively expensive parts of household budgets.

Additionally, this helps highlight some of the contradictory nature of Ikea. On one hand, it is a quirky store in the American landscape, exposing Americans to interesting designs and promoting a more DIY mentality. On the other hand, it is just another big box store with locations near major highways, big parking lots, and lots of square footage.

Bad suburban architecture that can give you acne

Posted on by

The BBC TV show Orphan Black features a character who makes occasional humorous observations about the suburbs. Here is one of Felix’s quotes about suburbia from Season One courtesy of a recap:

It’s nine o’clock and Sarah pulls up to Alison’s house as Fee moans in the seat beside her. “You know I would never have gotten in if you said we were going to Suburbia.” He freaks out as she stops the car. “Don’t stop! Someone might speak to us!” Heh. Sarah peers out the window at Alison’s house. Fee frantically checks his complexion in the visor mirror. “You know, my skin just breaks out every time I leave downtown.” He demands Sarah look at his newly developed acne. “Right there! Tiny little suburban stress zits emerging in direct proximity to bad architecture.”

Felix is the classic antithesis of a suburbanite: gay bohemian artist who lives in a loft in a seedy-looking building. He sees suburbia as a bland place of conformity, a place that stifles creativity. This is illustrated by Fee’s quote above: the architecture of single-family home squeezed next to single-family home leads to acne.

Humorous quote but this critique is nothing new in the annals of suburbia. Concerns about conformity and bad architecture truly blossomed after World War II and continue to this day. Canadian subdivisions may often just heighten these concerns: the homes are often even closer together due to an interest in containing sprawl. In fact, these concerns are often reinforced by television shows and other narratives that play up the stereotypes of uptight, stuck-in-the-rat-race suburbanites versus free and uninhibited urban dwellers. While the show Orphan Black may have an unusual storyline, it is perpetuating a common suburban trope.

“Which [Chicago] suburbs are income tax givers and takers?”

Posted on by

The Daily Herald looks at income tax info to figure out which Chicago suburbs are giving or getting more money:

As a whole, the suburbs are more giving than Chicago and much of downstate when it comes to redistribution of income taxes, but individually the suburbs are a mixed bag, based on a Daily Herald analysis of Illinois Department of Revenue and U.S. Census Bureau data.

That’s because taxes are paid to the state based on wages earned, but the amount returned from the state is a fixed amount per resident…

This state’s income tax redistribution policy means some suburban areas like parts of Aurora got back more than 25 percent of what residents paid in income taxes, while other areas like Oak Brook and Barrington received less than 2 percent of the income taxes workers there paid…

Taxes on higher incomes cover not only the local share but also a bigger portion of the cost of operating the state. The distribution of the income taxes helps ensure all parts of the state have the resources to operate effectively, experts said.

The article makes it sound as if the experts generally agree that this is the way it should work: income taxes are paid and then the money redistributed to help provide services for others. Yet, isn’t this sort of analysis suggesting that this may not be “equitable”? The real question lurking here is what would be equitable and whether people should be getting back in services exactly or close to what they paid in. There is some disagreement here, illustrated by one Oak Brook official:

“Every municipality hopes to receive more than it currently does,” said Art Osten, Oak Brook’s interim village manager. “The reality is that the distribution of taxes collected by the state is a political question. We hope the determination of need and reallocation is done in a reasonable and equitable manner and that Oak Brook receives its fair share of what its residents contribute.”

On one hand, communities all want more tax money back and discussions in Illinois to lower the amount returned to municipalities would be met with resistance. On the other hand, Oak Brook wants its “fair share.”

Addressing suburban poverty in Naperville, Lehigh Valley

Posted on by

Two recent stories show the increase in suburban poverty is being addressed in Naperville, Illinois and Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania:

From modest beginnings, Naperville’s Loaves & Fishes food pantry has gone from serving eight families in 1984 to helping feed 18,564 last year and greatly expanding its range of services…

In addition to the 4,606 households served last year, Loaves & Fishes also provides job search assistance, public aid, and skill classes in computers, finances, nutrition and the English language…

“There’s poverty everywhere and people in peril,” said State Sen. Michael Connelly, a Naperville resident and volunteer. “Loaves & Fishes provides that safety net as people transition to another stage of their lives, thanks to that spirit of volunteerism here in Naperville.”

And in Pennsylvania:

But amid its McMansions, backyard pools and pristine parks lies a different Parkland, one that has long been hidden but is emerging, family by family, into view. It’s the Parkland of the poor…

Over the past five years, the district has seen a dramatic rise in the number of students living in poverty. A total of 1,605 students — about one in five — qualified this school year for free or reduced-price lunches, the benchmark for determining the level of low-income students in schools. That number could fill more than half the district’s eight elementary schools…

Parkland, East Penn, Salisbury Township and other districts have tackled the trend with new and enhanced programs designed to provide basic necessities — toothbrushes, bookbags, food — and supply the extra academic, emotional and social support that may be lacking at home…

In the Lehigh Valley, where the median household income is about $55,000, the biggest poverty spikes have been seen in traditionally wealthier suburban schools, where free and reduced-price lunch eligibility has jumped by 70 percent or more in a number of districts over the past six years.

Numerous suburban communities are facing such issues and trying to figure out how to address them. At the moment, many suburbs don’t have the kind of social structures or social services to serve larger populations. At the least, schools have to tackle the issue even if wealthier suburbs think poverty is an issue for other places to handle.

Drawing Israel’s sprawling “urburbs” in the sand

Posted on by

Urban sprawl is not limited to the United States; a new installation in Israel looks at that country’s sprawl in the last half-century.

The State of Israel was created in 1948, with a population of around 800,000. Today, 8 million people live there—a tenfold increase that happened over the course of just a few decades. That kind of growth sparks a ravenous demand for land and housing, and in Israel has led to a housing sprawl that a group of designers, architects, and artists have coined the Urburb: neighborhoods that aren’t quite urban (they’re outside metropolitan areas) but not quite suburban (they lack the pockets of commercial businesses that define most suburbs).

To convey the notion of the Urburb, this group—comprised of architect Ori Scialom, artist Keren Yeala-Golan, designer Edith Kofsky, and professor Roy Brand—created an installation at the Israeli Pavilion for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Inside the sunlit space, guests will find four large patches of sand. Atop each is a sand printer, a machine built by the group specifically to trace blueprints, Etch-a-Sketch-style, of Israeli neighborhoods into the sand. After the sand printer has drawn one plan, it wipes the sand clean and draws another. The four printers trace city plans of Jerusalem, Holon, Hadera and Yahud, and in succession, they show how Israel’s neighborhoods became what they are today…

This wasn’t by design. In 1951, when the nation was still in its infancy, a Bauhaus-trained architect named Arieh Sharon created a housing plan for Israel that advocated a dispersed approach to development. Unfortunately for Sharon, people gravitated towards the coast, Israel saw an influx of immigrants, and the plan didn’t take. Units went up quickly to accommodate a booming population, without much regard to architectural integrity. (Yeala-Golan describes the residences as “cookie-cutter houses.”)

Lousy aesthetics aside, the sprawl has also created a commuter culture that’s bad for the environment: Residents have to drive into the nearest city for practically everything—groceries, schools, entertainment, and so on—since commercial properties weren’t built into the neighborhoods.

Urburb is a unique term that seems most like bedroom suburbs in the United States that are primarily about residences.

There are perhaps some parallels here to American sprawl patterns. After World War II, facing rapid population growth, both countries allowed/promoted more sprawling development. In the United States, this was often tied to millions of returning veterans who encountered housing shortages when returning from the war and in Israel it was related to immigration. “Architectural integrity,” an interesting term in itself, was not a priority as people needed housing. When looked at in hindsight, this has its drawbacks.

An interesting question to ask may be what would lead countries like the United States and Israel to promote more sprawling policies while other countries have tried to contain growing populations in more dense urban centers. In the United States, you had a combination of government support (changed mortgage rules, Interstate construction) alongside a developed frontier and individualist ideology and stirrings of sprawling growth in the booming 1920s. Other countries have much longer histories of valuing the urban center. Perhaps where this is most pertinent today is in places like China that in several decades have moved from largely rural to largely urban. What are the political and cultural dimensions of that sort of rapid change?

Examining the claim that “conservatives prefer suburban McMansions while liberals like urban enclaves”

Posted on by

The new report from Pew on political polarization reaffirms there is an urban/suburban divide in the electorate:

With disquieting predictability, 10,013 adults — respondents in the largest survey the Pew Research Center has ever conducted on political attitudes — answered according to their ideology. Seventy-seven percent of “consistently liberal” adults went with what sounded like the urban milieu: the dense neighborhood, the compact home, the “walkability.” Fully seventy-five percent of “consistently conservative” adults went with the polar opposite.

“It is an enduring stereotype – conservatives prefer suburban McMansions while liberals like urban enclaves – but one that is grounded in reality,” Pew concluded in the report released today.

Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 5.41.50 PM

This is corroborated by other data: Democrats are centered in cities, Republicans in exurbs and more rural areas, and the parties fight over suburban votes.

Two interesting points from the tables above:

1. The first question describing more spread out areas versus cities is a double- or triple-barreled question that supposedly contrasts more suburban versus more urban areas. Maybe. Take the larger or smaller house part of the question. Plenty of wealthier urban residents own single-family homes or large condos or apartments – but these neighborhoods aren’t going to be as sprawling as many urban neighborhoods. But, even there, you would get some big differences between denser cities – the Northeast, Midwest, San Francisco – versus more sprawling city neighborhoods in places like Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and other Sunbelt locations.

2. In the second chart, the real difference between conservatives and liberals is not that they have different opinions about suburbs: that holds relatively steady at around 20%. The bigger differences are between preferring cities versus small towns or rural areas. I’ve seen enough other data about small towns on surveys to think that there is quite a bit of overlap between suburbs and small towns. In other words, they are not mutually exclusive categories. Even some rural areas might still be suburbs, depending on their location within a metropolitan region or their proximity from the big city.

All together then, the suggestion that it is suburban McMansions versus cities is a bit misleading. Adding the label McMansion gets the point across about larger houses but it also adds a pejorative element to the mix.