Category Archives: Demographics

More Sensationalism about Gentrification

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The ordinarily responsible Governing magazine is running a study of gentrification on its website; the study purports to show high levels of gentrification in some cities. For example, the study claims that 29 percent of New York’s poor census tracts have gentrified.

But the methodology of this study is a bit suspect. It measures gentrification not by income or poverty, but by two criteria: (1) rising home values and (2) the growth of college graduates. The first method means that if people are growing poorer due to high housing costs, their neighborhood must be growing richer. It seems to me, however, that a neighborhood is not richer just because it is experiencing a housing bubble, or because it did not suffer a housing bust.

To be sure, there is some relationship between housing values and gentrification: other things being equal, higher incomes lead to higher demand lead to higher home prices. But other things are never equal: for example, in a small census tract with only a few houses, one or two condo buildings can skew average values upward.

The second element is also a less than ideal measure. In 1970, only 10 percent of Americans over 25 were college graduates—a percentage that nearly tripled over the following 40 years. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of college graduates increased in every single state. As college educations have become more common, I suspect that even the poorest places probably have more college graduates than they did a few decades ago. So if more college graduates=gentrification, one will naturally find gentrification everywhere. Continue reading →

Is Mismanagement the Cause of Legacy Cities’ Decline?

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When I was arguing with someone about sprawl in declining “legacy cities,” I ran into the following argument (loosely paraphrased): “The reason places like Detroit are declining isn’t because of sprawl but because of municipal corruption and mismanagement. Fix that instead of worrying about suburbia.”

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). Continue reading →

The Economist and Suburbia: A Fistful of Myths

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The Economist magazine recently ran a series of articles trying to defend suburbia, along the same lines that were common in the 1990s; rather than trying to deny the harmful social and environmental impacts of suburban sprawl, the articles argued that sprawl is popular and inevitable. Much of the article is about developing nations such as China and India; I lack the expertise to discuss suburbanization in these places. However, it seems to me that many of the articles’ statements are irrelevant to the United States and Canada. To name a few:

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. Continue reading →

Not A “War on Suburbia” Election

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(cross-posted from cnu.org)

According to Joel Kotkin, this month’s elections were really about the “progressives’ war on suburbia.” According to Kotkin, the Democrats lost because they are “aggressively anti-suburban.” Since I didn’t vote for President Obama, I leave it to his supporters to defend him.

However, I do think it is worth pointing out that cities and suburbs moved in the same direction this year. The Republicans gained several governorships this year (Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts). I couldn’t find city election statistics for Arkansas, but I was able to find city board of elections statistics for the other three states. In each, the Republican candidates for governor improved on their 2010 showing. In Massachusetts, Republican Charlie Baker gained 30 percent of the Boston city vote, up from 23 percent in 2010. This 7 point gain was equal to his 6.5 point statewide gain (from 42 to 48.5 percent) and exceeded his 4 point gain in suburban Middlesex County.

In Illinois, the Republican vote share increased from 17 to 20 percent. Kotkin asserts that this is a “laughably pathetic” vote share, but in fact the Republicans gained almost as much in Chicago as they did statewide. They gained 3 percentage points in Chicago, and almost 5 points statewide (from 46% to 50.8%). (To be fair, the Republican gained a little more in the Chicago suburbs, but that may reflect the fact that he is from suburban Chicago while 2010 nominee Bill Brady is from downstate).

In Maryland, the Republican vote share in Baltimore city increased from 16 percent to 22 percent, a 6 point shift, more than the vote shift in Prince George’s County near Washington (4 points) and almost as much as the 7-point vote shift in Montgomery County. (However, the Republican gained more votes in the Baltimore suburbs, which by Kotkin’s logic means that they must have revolted against a “progressive war on Baltimore.”)

In sum, Republican candidates gained votes in suburbia- but they gained votes in cities as well, often in roughly equal proportions.

Hope for the Burbs

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Ellen Dunham-Jones

Ellen Dunham-Jones

by James A. Bacon

While urbanists trumpet the resurrection of America’s core cities, the nation’s inner suburbs are seeing a lot of action, too. In fact, the transformation of the burbs may be more radical. While cities are seeing more of the same — gentrification that restores decaying neighborhoods, in-fill development looking a lot like the existing development — real estate developers are reinventing suburban structures from the inside out. Shopping malls surrounded by seas of asphalt are being converted into town centers. Big box stores are becoming public recreation centers. Fifty-year-old shopping centers built over streams are being torn down and the waterways restored as greenways.

This is a time of tremendous opportunity for “suburban” counties that developed since World War II, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architecture professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, co-author of “Retrofitting Suburbia,” and a leading light of the New Urbanism movement. What she did not say in her enthusiastic, up-beat speech at Virginia Commonwealth University last night is that it is also a time of peril for counties that don’t embrace a strategy of selective urbanization.

Change is not only desirable, it’s necessary, Dunham-Jones contended. The low-density suburbs consume two to three times more energy per capita than central cities, making them vulnerable to upward spikes in energy prices. Local governments are suffering fiscal stress from the burden of maintaining a sprawling infrastructure. Poverty is an increasing problem as poor people, either immigrants or poor people leaking from inner cities, move into older, run-down suburban neighborhoods. At the same time, housing affordability is becoming a middle-class issue as rising transportation costs kill the old “drive ’til you qualify” housing model. Last but not least, Dunham-Jones cited suburbia’s automobile dependency as a public health issue. Infectious diseases (despite the ebola virus hype) are not a major health hazard in the U.S. The real problem is chronic disease stemming from obesity and sedentary lifestyles, which leads to diabetes and heart disease. Continue reading →

Learning from Kansas City

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Kansas City, Missouri (where I am a visiting professor for the current academic year) is a medium-demand city: a city with more successful neighborhoods than Cleveland or Detroit, but one still dominated by its suburbs to a greater extent than more successful cities. One reason the city keeps losing people to its suburbs is the low reputation of the city’s school district. In the city’s affluent southwest side, only 27 percent of K-12 children attend public schools. Moreover, many people who would otherwise live in those neighborhoods have moved to Kansas so they can send their children to the overwhelmingly white public schools of Overland Park, Leawood, and other suburbs. Why are Kansas City’s schools so unpopular?

I recently read Complex Justice, a book by political scientist Joshua Dunn about Kansas City’s schools. While much of Dunn’s work focuses on litigation strategy and judicial decision making, he also makes a few points relevant to the problems of urban school districts.

In particular, Dunn shows that some of the city’s public schools became all-black almost as soon as desegregation took place. For example,Kansas City’s Central High School was almost 90 percent white in 1955, and by 1965 had only 16 white students (out of over 2000). Similarly, Paseo High School was 6 percent African-American in 1959 and 97 percent African-American in 1969. So it appears that Kansas City’s whites were ready to move out as soon as blacks moved in—a fact that suggests that whites decided that a school was “bad” as soon as a critical mass of African-Americans moved in. Continue reading →

A Myth Exploded

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Every so often I read the following argument: “We shouldn’t upzone popular urban neighborhoods, because if we freeze the status quo in those areas, the people who are priced out will rebuild our city’s devastated neighborhoods.”  This argument has a conceptual flaw: Most middle-class peoples’ choices aren’t limited to rich urban areas and poor urban areas, because they can always move to suburbia.

A recent blog post by Chicago blogger Daniel Kay Hertz makes the point decisively. He shows that Chicago has been so effective at limiting redevelopment in its affluent lakefront areas that such neighborhoods actually lost population in the late 20th century. If people priced out of rich urban areas inevitably moved to poorer ones, then Chicago’s traditionally poor south and west sides would be growing and gentrifying. Instead, many such areas have lost more than half their 1950 population.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)