Category Archives: Settlement patterns

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 →

In Praise of Organic Tourism

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Which would you rather have in your community.... massive crowds of drunken, puking college kids like Fort Lauderdale....

Which would you rather have in your community…. massive crowds of drunken, puking college kids like Fort Lauderdale….

by James A. Bacon

Promoting tourism is a major part of Virginia’s economic development strategy for good reason. Tourism supports jobs, expands the tax base and helps pay for amenities — restaurants, arts, cultural institutions — that can be enjoyed by the whole community. But it can create problems, too, such as crowding, traffic congestion, noise and tacky, haphazard development. Handled poorly, tourism actually can degrade a community’s quality of life.

It is critical to differentiate between mass-market tourism and what Edward T. McMahon, writing in the May issue of Virginia Town & City, calls “responsible” tourism. Mass market-tourism is all about putting “heads in beds.” It is high volume, high impact but low yield. Think Fort Lauderdale, the “spring break capital” of the United States, which attracted millions of college kids who slept six to a room and spent money on little but beer and t-shirts.

... or a recreational amenity like the beautiful Virginia Creeper Trail?

… or a recreational amenity like the beautiful Virginia Creeper Trail?

“Mass market tourism is … about environments that are artificial, homogenized, generic and formulaic,” writes McMahon. By contrast, “responsible tourism is about quality. Its focus is places that are authentic, specialized, unique and homegrown. … Think about unspoiled scenery, locally owned businesses, historic small towns and walkable urban neighborhoods.”

The challenge for Virginians, suggests McMahon,  a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, is to promote tourism without losing our soul. There is more to building a tourism industry than spending marketing dollars to lure visitors. It involves making destinations more appealing. “This means identifying, preserving and enhancing a community’s natural and cultural assets, in other words protecting its heritage and environment.” Continue reading →

Reinventing the Suburban Office Park

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Sidney Gunst built Innsbrook as a state-of-the-art suburban office park in the 1980s but says he would do it very differently today.

Sidney Gunst built Innsbrook as a state-of-the-art suburban office park in the 1980s but says he would do it very differently today.

Article published in June issue of Henrico Monthly magazine:

By James A. Bacon Jr.

In September 2010, the Henrico County Board of Supervisors put its stamp of approval on a plan to transform the county’s largest office park, the Innsbrook Corporate Center. The idea behind the plan, called Innsbrook Next, was to convert a smattering of office buildings surrounded by parking lots and connected by winding, unwalkable roads into Henrico’s de facto downtown. Planners envisioned millions of square feet of mixed-use development: office towers, parking garages and apartment buildings with stores and restaurants on the ground floors.

Not only would Innsbrook Next breathe new life into Henrico’s largest employment center – between 15,000 to 25,000 people work there, depending on whom you talk to – it represented a sea change in planning policy for the county. Having filled up with traditional, low-density suburban development, the affluent, western half of the county had nowhere to grow but up. To accommodate more growth and more jobs, Henrico had to begin urbanizing. Innsbrook Next would concentrate much of the expected growth into a district that would cause minimal disruption to established neighborhoods.

Nearly five years later, little has happened. A partnership of Markel Corp. and Highwoods Properties submitted a plan to develop the first phase of Innsbrook Next with 2.2 million square feet of mixed-use buildings. The county granted the needed zoning approvals, but the developers backed off. Dominion Virginia Power, a major property owner, submitted plans to convert overflow parking into a townhouse complex. But when county staff balked at aspects of the proposal, Dominion withdrew the project.

Then, earlier this year, the Dixon Hughes Goodman CPA firm announced the relocation of its headquarters office from Innsbrook to downtown Richmond. A prominent reason given was to make it easier to recruit talented young employees looking for urban amenities. Soon after, insurance firm Rutherfoord said it would consolidate offices, including its Innsbrook headquarters, in the new Libbie Mill-Midtown project at West Broad Street and Staples Mill Road, which had gotten the jump on Innsbrook in building what urban planners call “walkable urbanism.”

Across the country, suburban office parks are having a tough time. Built mainly in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, their age is showing. The buildings have lost the sheen of newness. Mechanical systems are wearing out, and maintenance costs are rising. And most challenging of all, young people prefer to work in urban settings where they can walk to restaurants, galleries, music and entertainment. For decades, downtown areas hemorrhaged tenants as companies decamped for the suburbs. Now the reverse is happening: Some businesses are moving back to the city. Continue reading.