Tag Archives: suburbs

Building suburban subdivisions around farms, CSAs, and food production

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Over 200 new subdivisions feature a new amenity that the neighborhood is built around: a farm or food production operation.

It’s called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA. In planning a new neighborhood, a developer includes some form of food production — a farm, community garden, orchard, livestock operation, edible park — that is meant to draw in new buyers, increase values and stitch neighbors together.

“These projects are becoming more and more mainstream,” says , a fellow with the Urban Land Institute. He estimates that more than 200 developments with an agricultural twist already exist nationwide…

After World War II, Americans escaping crowded cities flocked to the suburbs. Most suburbanites didn’t want to be right next to a farm, and so restrictive zoning pushed livestock and tractors out of new residential areas. Now, says Lindsay Ex, an environmental planner with the city of Fort Collins, municipalities are being forced to change their codes…

The marketing of these new neighborhoods appears to be working — at least at Bucking Horse, where the developer says 200 single-family lots were snatched up within days of going on the market. Values of existing homes have jumped 25 percent since construction began on the agricultural amenities.

My question: does supporting a local food source within your suburban subdivision offset the evils of sprawl and suburbanization? A farm might help mitigate the results of sprawl including needing to drive for food (now it is closer by, maybe walkable), there is open space (though it is used for food production – so a different version of “fake”/human-influenced nature), and farms can help provide a center for community life. On the other hand, such developments take up more land, it is unclear how productive or effective the CSAs are (they may not have to be that productive – as long as the neighbors like it), and this still skews toward wealthier residents who can afford the land and the setting (price premiums to live near a farm, just like living near a golf course?). In other words, is this just another suburban trend that is primarily available to certain middle- and upper-class Americans so that they feel better about their food sources and being green (neither of which are necessarily bad things)?

Combine these farm ideas with New Urbanism or retrofitting existing developments that didn’t work out and there could be some interesting outcomes here.

Sociological musings about American culture in “It’s A Wonderful Life”

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This talk by a sociologist about It’s A Wonderful Life serves as a reminder that the film provides a nice window into modern American life. Although it is a holiday movie, here are a few sociological ideas that still resonate today:

1. Mr. Potter is the evil banker and the primary villain. While hero George Bailey just wants to help his family and others in the community, the banker only cares about money. Could be connected to discussions of inequality, the wealth of bankers, and the role of the finance industry in helping to build communities.

2. Hero George Bailey wants to build suburban-like homes in a new subdivision in his community. The movie came out at the beginning of the post-World War II suburban boom and anticipates that many Americans simply want a home of their own.

3. The movie is set in a relatively small town where George Bailey and his family can know lots of people. Even as Americans look to private single-family homes, there is still often a small-town ideal where everyone gets along and helps each other (and often the assumption that we have lost this over time).

4. George Bailey seeks meaning in his work and life. When he doesn’t find it, he considers suicide. Bailey wants to provide for his family and friends and struggles when he cannot do this.

5. George’s life is saved by an angel. Americans tend to like angels even as more Americans say they are not religious. Angels fit with a spirituality where God generally wants people to succeed.

6. The celebratory ending of the film comes as George is surrounded by his family and friends. The emphasis on family life is not unusual in American stories but this also highlights the small town coming together. Bailey has the American Dream at the end: a home, a loving family, helpful friends, and is optimistic about his future.

Of course, this film has been analyzed plenty as a classic sitting at #20 on the AFI’s top 100 movies. Yet, it is an important moment as America started seeing itself as the prosperous superpower.

Older workers left behind when companies move back to the city?

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As some companies choose to return to the big city, are older workers left behind?

After decades of big businesses leaving the city for the suburbs, U.S. firms have begun a new era of corporate urbanism. Nearly 200 Fortune 500 companies are currently headquartered in the top 50 cities. Many others are staying put in the suburbs but opening high-profile satellite offices in nearby cities, sometimes aided by tax breaks and a recession that tempered downtown rents. And upstart companies are following suit, according to urban planners. The bottom line: companies are under pressure to establish an urban presence that projects an image of dynamism and innovation…

For longtime employees, however, corporate moves to the city mean longer commutes and disrupted schedules and family life. And the corporate quest for youth and innovation can leave some workers feeling slightly unwelcome.

“We joked about the older suburbanites being excluded from the new [business] model,” said Jon Scherf, age 42, a marketing professional who left Hillshire shortly before its December 2012 move to downtown Chicago. “They would’ve been happy to have me but they’re also happy to bring in new blood.”…

For longtime employees, it has been a more complicated switch. Melissa Napier, treasurer and senior VP of investor relations at Hillshire, bought a house in Downers Grove in 2007 and lives there with her husband and two sons. While she now attends more social and networking events downtown, her commute, once a 10-minute drive, now gets her home at 7:30, an hour later than before…

But the employers that sought them out in the city are unlikely to follow them back to the suburbs, said Mr. Phillips of the Urban Land Institute.

Now that I think about it, I don’t remember Richard Florida, known for analyzing the young creative class that wants urban amenities, discussing the possible impact on older workers. I suppose the argument could be made that attracting young workers, wherever they might work, would help raise all boats. But, as long as the perception continues that suburbs are better places for raising families due to their schools and safer spaces, this divide between younger/urban workers and older/suburban workers may continue.

More than hunting needed in considering having too much nature in the suburbs, city

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A recent Time cover story called for hunting to thin out the wildlife that is now flourishing in many American suburbs and cities. While the story focuses more on the resurgent populations of deer, Canadian geese, and other animals that have thrived because humans have changed the setting (often removing the predators, providing easy food sources, etc.), the story presents a chance to have a larger conversation about the intersection of nature and suburbs.

The formation of the first suburbs, in England in the late 1700s and in the United States in the mid-1800s, was driven in part by a desire to be closer to nature. The growing cities of the Industrial Revolution, places like London and New York City, were home to an increasing number of polluting factories and more disease. Interestingly, the nature in the early suburbs was often still quite curated: building around central parks or building winding streets to take advantage of natural ridges and groves. As suburbs expanded, lots were generally smaller and nature was reduced to smaller lawns. Of course, these lawns today can’t be “natural” – most places have regulations about the height of the grass as the appearance of a well-manicured lawn. Similarly, suburban critic James Howard Kuntsler makes fun of some of the “natural” features of today’s suburbs, like the trees in the middle of big parking lots outside big box stores.

The best book I’ve read on the subject is The Bulldozer in the Countryside by historian Adam Rome. Many suburbs and cities today are plagued by the consequences of running roughshod over nature in matters like dealing with stormwater or residents hoping to save open space or Forest Preserves now trying to acquire land.

Recent book details the “new swing states” of suburbia

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Richard Florida describes the findings from a recent book titled The Political Ecology of the Metropolis that looks at the swing votes available in American suburbs:

Sellers and his colleagues analyze the political characteristics of cities and suburbs across many advanced nations. Sellers’s own chapter covers the U.S., and it includes some eye-opening insights. While most previous research has looked mainly at states and counties, Sellers has developed a detailed data set on the municipalities that make up America’s metro regions. He tracks the political geography of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections across twelve U.S. metros with populations of at least 450,000: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fresno, Birmingham, Syracuse, Wichita, and Kalamazoo.

Democrats have a “decisive” advantage in dense, urban localities and poorer, majority-minority suburbs. In the affluent suburbs, Sellers explains, “Republicans enjoy an analogous, if less dramatic” advantage. He notes that “a pervasive divide separates the Republican low density areas of metropolitan peripheries from the Democratic urban centres and minority suburbs.” At the broad metropolitan level, votes follow the same red/blue, rich/poor pattern identified by Larry Bartels and Andrew Gelman at the state level. Sellers found that municipalities with educated and affluent voters tended to vote with their state’s winners – they voted more Republican in red states and more Democratic in blue states.

With these bases locked down, the key political footballs – the new “swing states,” so to speak – are the swelling ranks of economically distressed suburbs, where poverty has been growing and where the economic crisis hit especially hard. There are now more poor people living in America’s suburbs than its center cities, and as a recent Brookings Institution report found, both Republican and Democratic districts have been affected by this reality…

America’s new metropolitan geography is overlaid by one additional factor: voter participation. Turnout levels have ranged between 52 and 62 percent over the past several national elections. Even though Democrats have the clear advantage in raw numbers, Republicans dominate the kinds of communities where people are more likely to actually vote. Turnout, Sellers finds, tends to be higher in GOP strongholds – the more affluent, highly educated suburbs and low-density rural and exurban areas, all places with higher levels of home-ownership.

See earlier posts on Joel Kotkin’s analysis of swing votes in the suburbs. The candidates should know this as well and we should see a lot of visits in the future to such suburbs.

These economically distressed suburbs, often inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities but also more far-flung places that are more working class and not as dependent on white-collar and professional work, may hold more than just the political key to metropolitan regions. While wealthier residents batten down the hatches in nicer suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods, what happens to the majority of residents who face fewer prospects?

Convincing suburban drivers that downtown parking is available

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The Chicago suburbs of Wheaton and Glen Ellyn are looking for ways to convince residents that there are plenty of parking spots in their downtowns:

For years, officials in Glen Ellyn have been hearing from residents about a lack of parking in the downtown, despite studies showing plenty of spaces available for customers…

“It dawned upon us that it isn’t a lack of parking, but addressing the perception of the lack of parking,” Glen Ellyn Police Chief Phil Norton said at a recent village meeting. “We’re going to shift our focus and start working on addressing the perception. You can go anywhere and be within a block or a block and a half of convenient parking.”…

The changes include creating 12 “Customer Only” parking spots where parking meters were removed in the Main Street and Pennsylvania lot. It also includes making the Union Pacific lot at Crescent and Main customer parking only, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, and making Schock Square customer parking only, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays…

In Wheaton, parking was one of the issues addressed in the final draft of a downtown strategic plan and streetscape plan recently released by the city’s consultants. A parking analysis shows there is enough parking in the city’s downtown, despite a perceived parking issue reported by residents who participated in the survey, officials said.

In the plan, consultants recommended the city consider adding differentiated time limits on certain spaces such as 15 minutes, 1 hour and two hours. That will encourage employees to park in other areas and free up spaces for customers, consultants said.

It would helpful to know why exactly residents think there isn’t much parking. Is it because the parking isn’t right in front of the store? Is it because the parking is more difficult to get into, say angled or parallel parking, than a large parking lot? Is it because the streets or narrower or they can’t perceive they can walk to multiple stores? Some of these issues might seem plausible yet people are willing to endure walks in large, crowded parking lots for big box stores or malls.

The interesting thing to me is that this is a decades-long problem for these downtowns. It dates back at least to the 1950s when downtowns had to start competing with new strip malls and shopping malls which offered multiple stores as well as free parking (as opposed to having parking meters). Even though downtowns might offer plenty of stores within a short distance, I suspect suburbanites perceive that it is more congested and more difficult to get to, even before they know whether parking is available.

Another creative solution: apps or websites that display available parking spaces downtown which gives people real-time information as well as combats percetions that parking isn’t available.

Anger directed at urban cyclists and city bike lanes really about fears that younger Americans don’t want sprawling suburbs?

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Complaints about urban biking and new bike lanes might be less about biking and more about what younger Americans don’t want: the sprawling suburbs.

All this sounds like a nightmare scenario if you live in the suburbs. Gas prices rise and housing prices fall, eating into liquid capital and equity. Families with the ability to move return back to the city, depressing housing prices even further. Declining property tax revenues and a fleeing upper-middle-class undermine previously excellent schools. At best, suburbanites take a huge hit on depreciating houses; at worst, they’re stranded in decaying neighborhoods, cut off by isolating new infrastructure…That’s where I see an undercurrent of Millennial resentment (we’ll spot Kass a decade or so on “grunge;” when you’re out across the county line, the news travels slower). The boomers escaped cities in decline, investing sweat equity earned in office parks into a house and two cars, the gas taxes they paid into epic interchanges, and their high property taxes into excellent schools.

And the little bastards who went to those excellent schools don’t want that inheritance. They want to ride their car shares from their rented apartments to mass transit, making the last-mile commute on shared bikes (they don’t even own bikes!) to virtual startups in work-share spaces.

From the perspective of postwar America, it looks like a whole lot of nothing, an unsettled and rootless future. Where they’re going, they don’t need… roads…

But it’s the future we’re being promised by a lot of people in position to make it happen, who threaten to reverse—to invert—what their parents spent a lifetime building. It’s scary, and not just on a merely economic level. And the people out there who are so angry about it aren’t just trying to outrun a few three-speed, step-through shared bikes; they’re trying to outrun the future, and you’re in the way.

Moser is arguing the bike lanes are just a sign of bigger trends at work, as suggested in books like The Great Inversion and The End of the Suburbs. This is really about a changed way of life, a different way of thinking about the American Dream, trading suburban spaces for new iPhones and exciting urban experiences the creative class desires. I think Moser is right to be skeptical; these changes will take time as well as a lot of collective action. At the same time, there is a lot of conversation about denser suburbs and returning to cities. Of course, this doesn’t mean such moves solve all the problems; there are still plenty of poor urban neighborhoods and suburbs that are left behind in the movement of what might be largely middle- to upper-class residents who can afford these changes.

How much irony is there here that the suburbs might have actually provided the “unsettled and rootless future” that younger Americans may now not want? Think about classic suburban critiques like American Beauty or the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. The suburbs were viewed by many as the places to escape the problems of the city – everything from corrupt morality, dirtiness (factories, pollution, horses in the street everywhere, etc.), new populations – and yet the suburbs clearly have their own problems.

Should all suburban teeangers want to experience the big city?

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A Hollywood actor who grew up in Naperville argues suburban kids should want to explore the big city:

Right there on Wikipedia, Odenkirk said that he grew up “hating” Naperville because “it felt like a dead end, like Nowheresville. I couldn’t wait to move into a city and be around people who were doing exciting things.”

We contacted the co-star of the hit TV series “Breaking Bad” (he plays sleazy attorney Saul Goodman) and Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed domestic drama “Nebraska,” opening Nov. 22, and asked for an explanation for this unabashed Naperville bashing.

“Well, you have to remember I was 16 years old when I was in Naperville,” said Odenkirk, 51. “I felt like I was offstage when I wanted to be onstage. I felt like I was watching from afar all the people who were movers and shakers, the people who were living exciting existences. That’s what I wanted to do.”…

“I didn’t want to be in the suburbs when I was 16 and 17 and 18,” Odenkirk continued. “I couldn’t wait to get out and go to Chicago or some other big city. New York intimidated me. Frankly, Chicago intimidated me, but I wanted to be there! Come on! Doesn’t every teenager feel that way?”…

“I would worry if my teenagers said they liked (the suburbs), that they didn’t want to experience the big city.”

One of the critiques of American suburbs involves their lack of opportunities for teenagers. This can take several forms. One issue is with urban design. In spaces designed around cars, if you can’t drive, you are in trouble. Similarly, if you live in isolated residential neighborhoods that are not close to important areas, like school or shops or parks or friends, teenagers can’t go very far. A second issue is with the suburban mindset that tends to focus attention on the local level. The complaint here is that teenagers aren’t exposed much to the wider world, to interactions with people much different from themselves.

Cities offer solutions to both issues: there is a variety of mass transit option in many big cities and walking or biking can actually get you to somewhere interesting. They also tend to contain more diverse populations and opportunities compared to suburbs. Yet, the perception is that cities are not as safe for children/teenagers and this might limit their ability to explore big cities.

All that said, compared to other suburbs, Naperville has the sort of factors that can help make suburbs more exciting for teenagers – a lively downtown with restaurants, stores, and the Riverwalk; good schools; plenty of recreational activities and learning opportunities (good libraries); a growing non-white population. So, if it doesn’t appeal to teenagers, what suburb does? (Note: Odenkirk was 16 in 1978 Naperville, a time when the community was growing but didn’t necessarily have all of the amenities it does today.)

Atlanta Braves bucking the baseball trend by moving to the suburbs

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While the new baseball stadiums of recent decades tend to be located in urban neighborhoods, the Atlanta Braves made an announcement that they are moving 15 miles outside of the city:

On Monday, team president John Schuerholz and two other executives told reporters that the franchise will build a new stadium in Cobb County, roughly 15 miles away from Turner Field, and begin playing there in 2017, after their current lease expires, with construction to start in mid-2014.

That’s a shock, in that the Braves have only been playing in Turner Field — which was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics — since 1997. Such a move will make it the first of the 24 major league ballparks to open since 1989 to be replaced, and buck the trend of teams returning to urban centers. The proposed park is in the suburbs and closer to the geographic center of the team’s ticket-buying fan base, a much higher percentage of which happens to be white. US Census figures from 2010 put Fulton County at 44.5 percent white and 44.1 percent black, while Cobb County is 62.2 percent white and 25.0 percent black…

So instead of sinking $350 million into fixes to modernize Turner, the Braves are spending $200 million for a new park, with much of that cost likely to be covered by the development of the surrounding area and the sale of naming rights. Notably, Turner is one of just eight venues that doesn’t have such a deal in place. According to a New York Times piece from July, the Atlanta Hawks get $12 million a year for the naming rights to their venue, currently known as Philips Arena. The largest baseball deal is that of the Mets for Citi Field ($21 million per year), though the dropoff from that figure to the second-largest, Houston’s Minute Maid Park ($7.4 million), is steep.

The new venue is at the intersection of Interstates 75 and 285, said to be a major traffic snarl, “the place so congested we Cobb Countians know to avoid if at all possible,” as the Journal-Constitution‘s Mark Bradley described it. The county has resisted the expansion of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) into its domain since its inception in 1971, so it’s not served by light rail, and while the team claims “significantly increased access to the site” via Home of the Braves, it offers no specifics on the matter.

While this goes against ballpark trends, it also fits some other trends:

1. Suburban expansion in Sunbelt cities. Many of the new ballparks have been built in Northern cities, Rustbelt places where downtown development is needed. Think Camden Yards in Baltimore or Jacobs Field in Cleveland or PNC Park in Pittsburgh. In other words, Sunbelt cities have different settlement patterns including beltway highways around the city and not that dense of an urban core to begin. Turner Field wasn’t exactly in an urban neighborhood and other reports suggested it would have been quite difficult to expand parking and nearby amenities.

2. Matching ballparks with nearby development projects that can also bring in money. A baseball team can be profitable but developing nearby real estate can be even more profitable. For example, look at the deals suburbs tried to make with the Cubs earlier this year: you can have land and access to transportation and we would be more than happy to develop land around your ballpark. And the Cubs are trying to do this with Wrigley Field as well by developing nearby properties into a hotel to increase their revenue streams.

3. It sounds like Cobb County is giving the Braves a good deal by financing some of the project. This is a longer trend: companies, sports or otherwise, moving to where they can get a good tax deal. This has happened with urban ballparks – cities have financed parts of those stadiums because they can’t afford to let the team out of the city. In this particular case, it sounds like the Braves thought they got a better suburban deal whereas other cities have pushed harder to keep teams with incentives.

I suspect this is a more isolated case of ballpark construction in the suburbs.

Chicago good at attracting the creative class, not good at keeping them

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Recent data suggests Chicago attracts a good number of the creative class – young, college graduates – but they don’t stay in the city long-term:

And still the 20-somethings swarmed to the city. If you drew a circle with a 2-mile radius around Chicago’s City Hall, as the Census Bureau did, you’d find the population in that ring had grown by 48,288 residents — 36 percent — between 2000 and 2010, even as the overall population fell. Census researchers measured the growth within similar rings in other metro areas. Chicago outpaced them all…

Chicago demographer Rob Paral points out that the 25- to 34-year-olds counted from 2007 to 2011 are even better educated than those in 2000. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey found 46 percent of the residents in that age bracket had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 36 percent in 2000. Among America’s top 10 cities, Chicago recorded the highest percentage of young college grads and the largest increase since 2000…

Then what? This is a demographic with choices. If the city looks less appealing once the babies come along, many of them will leave. Big-city crime is sometimes the explanation, but in truth most of these young adults live in neighborhoods largely insulated from the violence of the South and West sides.

More often, the deal breaker is the public schools. Staying in Chicago can mean spending thousands on private tuition, or working the system to get the kids into one of the city’s selective-enrollment high schools. Suddenly it’s easy to see the attraction of smaller suburban districts, their tax collections enriched by higher property values…

How can the city hold on to those families? One way, it turns out, is to suffer a massive recession. Census data show that from July 2010 to July 2012, Chicago’s population inched up again — by about 19,000 residents — as out-migration slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, two decades of double-digit exurban growth lurched to a near standstill.

Since having a recession isn’t a good long-term growth strategy, the city will have to try something else. Most American big cities would love to have more young college-educated adults, particularly those involved in industries like the technology sector or those willing to move into and improve less well-off neighborhoods. Yet, this article highlights a second issue: how exactly do all these cities then retain these adults as they age? One irony not noted in this article is that many American urban neighborhoods offer the ability to own a home, even a single-family home with a yard. But, getting over this idea that cities are not good for children is more difficult. Whether it is an issue of schools (and Chicago has some of the highest-performing schools in Illinois) or safety and crime or a perceived need to interact with kids like them, these will be tough to overcome. Additionally, fighting these perceptions might include creating and maintaining kid-friendly pockets in the city, but this leads to other issues such as very different experiences of urban residents (for example, compare the life chances of kids from Lincoln Park in Chicago versus those from Englewood) and this is still different than fleeing to an exclusive suburban community where the wealthier and more-educated don’t have to interact with anyone other than them.

I don’t remember Richard Florida, the main proponent of the creative class, talking much about this issue…