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.

Kotkin sees an America polarized between child-friendly suburbs and child-hostile cities, But in reality, there seems to be a kind of convergence between the city’s affluent central neighborhoods and the rest of the city—while the urban core is becoming more child-oriented and outlying areas (especially poorer outlying areas) are becoming less so. The percentage of households with minor children decreased from 38.1 percent to 29.3 percent in Central Harlem, from 40.8 percent to 29.4 percent in Washington Heights/Inwood, and from 38.1 percent to 29.3 percent in East Harlem. Similarly, the “households with children” percentage increased from 25.1 percent to 27.1 percent in affluent Park Slope, while declining in low-income Brownsville and East New York (two parts of Brooklyn especially far from Manhattan). New York is not unique: in Washington, D.C., the number of children increased in the city’s most affluent areas and decreased in the city’s poorer areas.

Kotkin correctly points out that despite widespread commentary about gentrification, even cities with lots of rich people (such as New York and Chicago) still have plenty of low-income areas. He therefore reasons that cities are perfectly fine for the very rich and the very poor, but not for the middle classes. However, he overstates this trend by relying on some statistics that might not support his case. In particular, he relies on a Brookings Institution study listing the most and least unequal cities: according to Kotkin, the most compact, walkable cities are the most unequal. However, Kotkin, by comparing central cities alone, misses one relevant fact: most of these compact cities are trapped within their 1950 city limits, while, according to the Brookings study itself, the low-inequality cities are usually “Southern and Western cities with expansive borders, and either include many ‘suburban’ neighborhoods alongside a traditional urban core, or are themselves overgrown suburbs like Mesa, Arizona and Arlington, Texas.” It logically follows that if 46-square-mile San Francisco was compared to the inner 46 miles of Omaha or Oklahoma City, the latter cities might seem somewhat more unequal, and San Francisco might seem less exceptional in comparison.

Despite my quibbles, Kotkin is on to something: it is true that large cities tend to be more unequal than their suburbs. But unlike Kotkin, I don’t treat this as an inevitable fact of life. Some cities are too expensive for middle-class families, but that is a result of public policy rather than some force of nature. Because older cities are more likely to be “built out,” those cities are less likely to be able to add housing to meet increased demand. So to retain the middle class, a city must go out of its way to encourage new housing. Instead, many cities have restrictive zoning that artificially limits housing supply, thus causing prices to rise. And when cities attempt to solve this problem, they sometimes do so by trying to build or mandate the creation of low-income housing, which may help the poor more than the middle classes. If cities had less restrictive zoning, perhaps more housing would be available for the middle class.

By contrast, Kotkin believes that cities are inherently undesirable because families in urban apartments today, says Cornell researcher Gary Evans, generally have far weaker networks of neighbors than their suburban counterparts, a generally more stressful home life, and significantly less social support.” However, the study that Kotkin links to says nothing of the sort. Evans does not mention the word “urban” at all. Instead, he claims that the “number of people per room [is] the crucial variable for measuring effects of crowding on children’s development.” This means that an apartment with one child living in one room is less stressful than one where four children live in two bedrooms. Evans also focuses on noise pollution, such as traffic noise.*

Kotkin writes that because urban centers are (allegedly) only for the childless, “the central city offers at best only a temporary lifestyle.” It appears to me that Kotkin is assuming that “desirability” and “desirability to 35-year olds with small children” are the same thing. This may have been the case in the America of the 1950s. But delayed marriages, an aging society, and plunging birth rates mean that “35-year-olds with small children” are a much smaller group than in the United States of the 1950s. In 1960, almost half of all households were families with children under 18. Since then, this number has fallen to under 30 percent. In 1960, only 13 percent of households included just one person; that number has more than doubled, to 28 percent. In sum, thirtysomething families no longer dominate American housing markets, and their preferences no longer need govern the majority of American construction.

*Kotkin may have been thinking about a portion of the article stating “families living in high-rise housing, as opposed to single-family residences, have fewer relationships with neighbors, resulting in less social support.” But since the sentence is in a paragraph that doesn’t even mention Evans, it is not clear that this sentence even refers to Evans’ research, or to some other research. Moreover, “urban” and “high-rise” are not synonymous, nor are “apartment” and “high-rise.”

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

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

NOT REALLY FALSE, BUT (1) THE ARTICLE KOTKIN LINKS TO (BY WENDELL COX) DEFINES “INNER CORES” REALLY REALLY NARROWLY (BASICALLY, AS JUST DOWNTOWN), AND (2) COX HIMSELF WRITES, IN THAT VERY SAME ARTICLE, ” THE CENTRAL CORES OF THE NATION’S LARGEST CITIES ARE DOING BETTER THAN AT ANY TIME IN RECENT HISTORY. “

(Cross-posted from mlewyn.wordpress.com)

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)

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)

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.

Similarly, the new graduates have caused the total urban population to increase from 3,500 (500 downtown, 3,000 in the rest of the city) to 4,350 (3,500 plus the 250 new downtown residents plus the 600 new non-downtown residents). So another completely true headline could be: Millennials Cause City Population to Increase By Over 20 Percent.

But nevertheless, the majority of recent graduates (900 of the 1,750) live in the suburbs. Thus, the headline College Graduates Mostly Move to Suburbs would be just as true as the first two headlines. But even so, the graduates would be more likely to live in the city than the rest of the population; only 51 percent of them live in suburbia, as opposed to about 70 percent of the region’s other inhabitants.

So even if a minority of millennials (or any other group) choose city living, that group can create a considerable increase in urban population. And if urban housing supply is not rising rapidly enough to accommodate this increase, prices may rise more rapidly in desirable urban neighborhoods than in suburbs – a fact which may explain why housing costs are rising more rapidly in urban neighborhoods and other walkable areas.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

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)

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.

In Norfolk, where the distribution of young military-age people in military facilities is determined largely by the location of military bases, the shift is less evident.

While the change is preference is dramatic, it is important to note that a large number of young people still resided miles from the city center in 2012. It’s not as if the suburbs are emptying of young adults. But even a modest shift in locational preference can drive the demand for new construction.

Juday, a Millenial himself, suggests a couple of reasons for the shift. Millennials have worse job prospects than previous generations at the same age and are saddled with greater student loan debt. As a consequence, they are less likely to take on mortgages for single-family dwellings in the suburbs. They’re also postponing marriage and child-bearing, which diminishes the incentives to move to suburban school jurisdictions with better schools. In keeping with their more modest economic prospects, Millennials place less emphasis on home ownership, automobile ownership and driving; they prefer walkable urban neighborhoods.

At first glance, this argument seems appealing: after all, one former mayor of Detroit is in prison, and Detroit’s low level of public services is certainly highly suspicious.

Nevertheless, I am not sure the argument is provable, because there is no easy way to quantify mismanagement; thus, there is no objective way to verify that Detroit is any more mismanaged than more prosperous cities.

There appears to be little evidence that Detroit is unusually corrupt: more affluent cities and suburbs have had equally scandalous governments. For example, Atlanta has gained population for two decades in a row, despite having a mayor who served prison time for tax evasion and a major scandal in its public schools (involving over 100 teachers and principals who rewrote students’ incorrect answers on standardized tests).

Fast-growing suburbs have also had questionable leadership: Orange County, California declared bankruptcy in 1994 because of some foolish investment decisions and has a former sheriff who in 2009 collected over $200,000 in pension payments despite a felony conviction.

Detroit’s decline also should not be blamed on fiscal liberalism: although Detroit’s spending level in 2011 ($5,437 per capita in direct expenditures) exceeded the national urban average, it spent about the same amount as Atlanta ($5,408) and less than Nashville (just over $6,200) or San Francisco (which spent over $11,000 per resident) (NOTE: more details are available in this database).

It seems to me more likely that Detroit’s inadequate public services and fiscal problems are a result rather than a cause of its decline. When a community has an extremely poor population, it will, other things being equal, spend more money on poverty-related social services and have a weaker tax base. So, other things being equal, a resident of a low-income city such as Detroit will pay more and get less from government than a resident of a more middle-income city or a rich suburb. Similarly, a poor city should, other things being equal, have worse political leadership than a richer one, for the simple reason that when most of a city’s middle class has fled to suburbia, its electoral talent pool should be smaller.

Some commentators have made the decline of Detroit a partisan issue, blaming Detroit’s problems on 50 years of Democratic mayors. But this argument might confuse cause and effect: a city that loses its middle class will usually lose most of its Republicans, thus creating one-party rule. In fact, Detroit is an excellent example of this political shift: Detroit had Republican mayors from 1950 to 1962, who (like many Democratic mayors) bulldozed much of the city to build expressways to suburbia, thus facilitating Republican migration into the suburbs and destroying their own political base.

(cross-posted from Planetizen.com)

1. “[A]lmost every city is becoming less dense.” This is the old “everyone does it” theory of suburban sprawl: its just a worldwide trend, nothing we can do about it. Of course, this sort of argument completely overlooks distinctions of degree. Does anyone really think there’s no difference between Vancouver and Phoenix, or between Amsterdam and Detroit?

2. “The simple truth is that people become richer they consume more space.” So, logically, as American wages have stagnated over the past several decades, suburbia should have stopped in its tracks long ago. (Somehow this failed to occur, at least until the last decade or so). Moreover, if this were true, our nation’s declining industrial regions, like Buffalo and Detroit, would have become hubs of urbanization, while rich regions, like San Francisco and New York, would have turned into huge versions of Phoenix. In fact, the richest regions have growing central cities—and were it not for restrictive zoning, these central cities would probably be growing more far more rapidly. By contrast, central cities in stagnant regions, such as Detroit and Buffalo, generally continue to lose population decade after decade (though even these regions are starting to experience downtown growth).

To be fair, there may be some truth in this argument in the developing-world context: perhaps people use more wealth to buy more space up to some minimal level of affluence. But the sprawl/wealth correlation does not seem so strong in the United States.

3. “American city centres sometimes seem to revive, as Chicago did in the 1990s, only to fall back again; meanwhile, their suburbs continue to expand.” First of all, out of 131 incorporated places with over 175,000 people, only 14 fit this generalization (expanding in the 1990s, losing people in the 2000s). Most of these 14 were suburbs or small cities: only one other city with over 500,000 (Memphis) was one of them.

Even as applied to Chicago, this argument depends on the meaning of “city” and “suburb”: does “city” mean areas really near a region’s urban core (i.e. downtown), or does it mean anyplace that happens to be within the same municipality as that core? If you use the former definition, not only is Chicago reviving, but even cities like Cleveland that are continuing to lose people citywide. The parts of cities that are “falling back again” are usually more suburb-like areas further from downtown.

4. “suburbia, at its heart, is the embodiment of compromise.” I think the article was trying to say here that suburbanites balance commuting distance and affordability. But wait a minute—if people live in the suburbs because they can’t afford the city, then how is it the case that suburbia is a result of wealth (see claim 2 above)?

5. “An often-overlooked aspect of suburbia is variety.” Maybe in London (and in a few American regions with lots of commuter-train suburbs) this claim passes the straight-face test. But in most of the United States, sameness has become one of suburbia’s weaknesses: in too many metropolitan areas, almost every suburb shares the same huge, unwalkable streets, the same strip malls and big boxes behind yards of parking, the same cul-de-sac subdivisions. In most metropolitan areas, if you want to avoid automobile-oriented sprawl you have to live in your region’s central city.

As the article points out, suburbia is changing, and new urbanist and pseudo-new urbanist developments are becoming more common in suburbia. But these developments are still quite rare.

Over the past few years, I’ve read my share of articles and blog posts alleging the inevitable downfall of suburbia—and given the limits (both political and physical) on urban infill, I think these claims are a bit overstated. On the other hand, The Economist articles may have bent a bit too far in the opposite direction.

(cross-posted from planetizen.com)