Category Archives: Demographics

Cities, The Middle Class, and Children

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by Michael Lewyn

In a recent article, Joel Kotkin critiques the work of Jane Jacobs; he points out that Jacobs idealized middle-class city neighborhoods, and suggests that because cities have become dominated by childless rich people, middle-class urbanity “has passed into myth, and… it is never going to come back.” He suggests that Americans are “moving out to the suburbs as they enter their 30s and start families” because central cities are only appropriate for “the talented, the young, and childless affluent adults.” This claim rests on a couple of assumptions: 1) that cities have little appeal to families and 2) that the only Americans whose preferences are typical are those middle-class families.

The first claim has an element of truth: families do tend to prefer more suburban living environments. But what Kotkin overlooks is that the tide is turning (at least a little). Although American suburbs clearly have more children than cities, the most desirable city neighborhoods are more appealing to parents than was the case a decade ago.

For example, Kotkin writes that Greenwich Village (where Jacobs lived) “today now largely consists of students, wealthy people and pensioners.” But according to the Furman Center’s neighborhoood-by-neighborhood surveys of New York housing, the percentage of households with children actually increased in New York’s more desirable urban neighborhoods. For example, in Jacobs’s own Greenwich Village, 15.1 percent of all 2013 households had children under 18—lower than in most places to be sure, but higher than in 2000, when only 11.4 percent had children. Similarly, the “households with children” percentage increased from 11.4 percent to 15.1 percent in New York’s financial district, from 14.6 percent to 17.8 percent in the Upper West Side, and from 13.3 percent to 16.6 percent in the Upper East Side. Continue reading →

Kotkin and the “Assault on Suburbia”

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by Michael Lewyn

A recent article by Joel Kotkin tries to stir up a stew of resentment about alleged “attacks on suburbia”.  Kotkin’s article is in black; my comments to the article are in gray.

COUNTERING PROGRESSIVES’ ASSAULT ON SUBURBIA

BY JOEL KOTKIN – July 10, 2015

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly FOUR IN FIVE HOME BUYERS prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, NEARLY THREE-QUARTERS of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

THIS IS BASED ON WENDELL COX’S DEFINITIONS OF CITIES AND SUBURBS, WHICH MIGHT NOT BE YOURS AND MINE.  BY HIS DEFINITION, MOST CORE CITIES (EXCEPT FOR THE MOST DENSE ONES) ARE “SUBURBS.”

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. DENSITY is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

DENSITY CAN MEAN MORE SUBURBAN HOUSING, NOT LESS.  FOR EXAMPLE, IF A SUBURB REDUCES ITS MINIMUM LOT SIZE REQUIREMENTS SO THAT YOU CAN BUILD 10 HOMES PER ACRE INSTEAD OF ONE, THAT’S MORE SUBURBAN HOMES.  Continue reading →

Throwing the Poor Out of Suburbs

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by Michael Lewyn

Much has been written about gentrification and about the specter of poor people being displaced from cities — despite the fact that nearly every central city still has higher poverty rates than most of its suburbs.

But the City Observatory blog has an interesting post about one Atlanta suburb’s attempt to gentrify not through market forces, but by using public money to buy up and destroy an apartment complex dominated by low-income African-Americans.  In other words, the city’s goal isn’t gentrification that might result in displacement — it is displacement as a goal in itself, gentrification or no gentrification.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Maybe Urban Schools Aren’t So Bad

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by Michael Lewyn

It is conventional wisdom that big cities have problems retaining the middle class because of poor schools.  But many older cities labor under a disadvantage that their suburbs don’t have — lots of students from underprivileged background.

A recent study suggests that when one controls for social class, Chicago schools are actually not so bad. This study compared the test scores of Chicago’s elementary schools with those of other Illinois schools with similar poverty rates, and calculated a “Poverty-Achievement Index” (PAI) based on this comparison.  As it happens, 55 of the 100 schools with the best PAIs were in Chicago- which is to say, their test scores were better than those of suburban or small-city schools with similar student bodies.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Do Millenials Opt for Cities or Suburbs? Yes

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by Michael Lewyn

Over the past year or so I’ve seen numerous articles and blog posts asserting that millennials are moving to cities in large numbers, while other articles and blog posts assert that millennials prefer suburbs to cities.

So do millenials prefer cities or suburbs? The right answer is “yes.” On the one hand, it appears to me that millennials are more likely to favor city life than 20- and 30-somethings of 30 years ago. Thus, in a sense it is true that millennials favor cities. On the other hand, it is equally true that most millennials live the same kind of commuting lives as their parents, living in suburbs (or suburb-like areas that are technically within city limits) and driving to work.

How can both propositions be true? Let’s imagine a simple hypothetical. Suppose that there are 1,750 recent college graduates in metropolitan Townsville. Two hundred and fifty of them live downtown, 600 of them live in the city outside downtown, and 900 of them live in suburbia. Let us further suppose that this small region has 500 downtown residents, 3,000 city residents, and 8,000 suburbanites (not counting the above-mentioned millennials).

The 250 new graduates who move downtown have caused downtown’s population to increase considerably, from 500 to 750. Thus, one plausible headline could be: Millennials Cause Downtown Population to Increase by 50 Percent. Even though only about 15 percent of the graduates favor downtown, downtown’s preexisting population is so small that just a few hundred new residents will make the downtown considerably more populated. Continue reading →

The Geography of NYC’s Children: More Evidence of Urban Popularity

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by Michael Lewyn

Conventional wisdom is that making urban cores stronger and more pedestrian-friendly is irrelevant to the interests of American parents, who supposedly want to live in suburbs or faux-suburbs at the edge of cities. But when I looked at the Furman Center’s new report on New York City, I discovered a very interesting table on page 43: The only places in New York City where the percentage of children grew (albeit often from a low base) were (a) the well-off parts of Manhattan and (b) the parts of Brooklyn closest to Manhattan (that is, the least suburb-ish parts of the borough). The more suburb-like, traditionally child-heavy places at the city’s edge (as well as some of the city’s poorer areas in the South Bronx and northeastern Brooklyn) either lost children or gained children more slowly than they gained adults.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org with minor modifications)

Yes, Virginia, the Millennials’ Shift from Burbs to Downtowns is Real

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washington

by James A. Bacon

The debate still rages over the extent to which young Americans, especially members of the Millennial generation, are moving back to the urban core. Data published by Luke Juday on the StatChat blog should settle that question once and for all. The only questions worth pondering is why they are moving, and how many will move back to the burbs.

The chart above shows the proportion of Millennials living at varying distances from downtown Washington, D.C. In 1990, there was a weak tendency for young adults (defined as 22- to 34-year-olds) to live in the urban core but it was not pronounced. By 2012, however, the next generation of post-college young people had shifted markedly to the urban core.

The chart below shows Richmond. Continue reading →