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)

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?

“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.”

Tourism that arises organically from the history, culture, architecture and natural assets of a community, I would argue further, make our communities more desirable places to live. They improve the quality of life and economic opportunity in ways that transcend the tourism sector. In effect, they become magnets for human capital.

McMahon proffers nine recommendations:

1.  Preserve historic buildings, neighborhoods and landscapes. McMahon quotes travel writer Arthur Frommer: “Among cities with no particular recreational appeal, those that have preserved their past continue to enjoy tourism. Those that haven’t receive almost no tourism at all. Tourism simply won’t go to a city or town that has lost its soul.”
2. Focus on the authentic. “Communities should make every effort to preserve the authentic aspects of local heritage and culture, including food, art, music, handicrafts, architecture, landscape and traditions. responsible tourism emphasizes the real over the artificial. It recognizes that the true story of a place is worth telling, even if it is painful or disturbing.”
3. Ensure that hotels and restaurants and compatible with their surroundings. “Tourists need places to eat and sleep. Wherever they go, they crave the integrity of place. Homogenous, “off the shelf” corporate chain and franchise architecture works against the integrity of place and reduces a community’s appeal as a tourist destination.”
4. Make your story come alive. “Visitors want information about what they are seeing, and interpretation can be a powerful storytelling tool that can make an exhibit, an attraction and a community come alive.”
5. Protect community gateways: control outdoor signage. “Protecting scenic views and vistas, planing street trees, landscaping parking lots all make economic sense, but controlling outdoor signs is probably the most important step a community can take to make an immediate visible improvement in its physical environment. Almost nothing will destroy the distinctive character of a community faster than uncontrolled signs and billboards.”
6. Enhance the journey as well as the destination. Getting there can be half the fun. Encourage the development of heritage corridors, bike paths, rail trails, greenways and scenic byways.
7. Get them out of the car. If you design a community around cars, you’ll get more cars, but if you design a community around people, you’ll get more pedestrians. It is hard to spend money while you are in a car.”
8. Create a “trail” with neighboring communities. “Few rural communities can successfully attract out-of-state or international visitors on their own, but linked with other communities, they can become a coherent an powerful attraction.” McMahon points to the example of Journey Through Hallowed Ground, which promotes nine presidential homes, numerous Civil War sites, more than 30 historic Main Streets and other historical and natural attractions.
9. Ask yourself, “How many tourists are too many?” “Tourism development that exceeds the carrying carrying capacity of an ecosystem or that fails to respect a community’s sense of place will result in resentment by local residents and the eventual destruction of the very attributes that attracted tourists in the first place. Too many cars, tour buses, condominiums or people can overwhelm a community and harm fragile resources.”

This is an excellent list. I would add only one important observation, as a corollary to “get them out of the car.” The way to get people out of the car is to create places where they can walk, bike or take mass transit. From Manhattan to San Francisco, Barcelona to London, people love spending time in places where they can immerse themselves in history, culture and architecture in a walkable setting. It is those very same characteristics that make those places among the most desirable in the world to live and do business.

Virginia does a creditable job at building organic tourism. McMahon points out wonderful instances from the Virginia Creeper Trail to the Richmond Slave Trail, from dancing to bluegrass music at the Floyd Country Store to the Hampton Inn chain’s conversion of the old Co. Alto Mansion into a 76-room hotel near historic downtown Lexington. The article is a “must read.” McMahon has contributed the freshest, most original thinking about economic development in Virginia that I have seen this year.

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.

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)

Former Police Chief Rodney Monroe, who implemented community policing in Richmond, is widely credited with bringing down the city’s sky-high crime rate. Can his approach be replicated in suburban Henrico and Chesterfield?

by James A. Bacon

Community policing is key to the war on crime, agreed top law enforcement officials yesterday at a public forum hosted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Community policing gets police out of their cars so they can patrol neighborhoods on foot, interact with residents and build trust. “I do think the relationship piece … is the critical piece,” said Henrico County Police Chief Doug Middleton.

The reversion from police-by-patrol-car to community policing is credited with much of the downturn in crime in recent years, along with adoption of the “broken windows” theory of crime fighting, which advocates going after smaller crimes, and the use of statistical tools to predict areas where crimes are more likely to occur. In the city of New Haven, Conn., community policing has coincided with a 30% decline in serious crime since 2012, according to a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal today.

Community policing is back in the spotlight since a U.S. Justice Department probe into law enforcement practices in Ferguson, Missouri, where the police killing of a young black man triggered rampant protests. The suburban locality’s community-policing efforts “have dwindled to almost nothing in recent years,” the report said. Police had lost “the little familiarity it had with some African-American neighborhoods.”

This passage in the WSJ article has particular resonance in the Richmond region:

Walking the beat isn’t feasible in spread-out, rural or suburban areas. It is more labor-intensive than assigning officers to police cars that can zip from neighborhood to neighborhood, and officers on foot can’t always respond as quickly to crimes. Budget cuts also have made it harder for some police departments to justify the cost of walking the beat.

Community policing is a fine strategy for the City of Richmond, where urban neighborhoods are reasonably compact. But it’s more problematic in Henrico and Chesterfield County where an increasing number of poor people are living. For two or more decades now, poverty has been leaking across municipal boundaries into old suburban neighborhoods of ’50s- and ’60s-era ranch houses in low-density, cul-de-sac subdivisions that do not lend themselves to walking, biking or community policing.

Cul-de-sac subdivisions worked fine for mostly law-abiding, middle-class people who, if they engaged in criminal activity, it was more likely to be check kiting or embezzling than drug dealing or shoot-outs. As those neighborhoods are increasingly occupied by poor residents experiencing social breakdown and a higher proclivity for crime, Henrico and Chesterfield county police face a real challenge in implementing community policing. While everyone agrees in theory that building strong ties to the community is critical, the experience of Ferguson and other suburban jurisdictions shows that it may be difficult. Let us hope that Richmond-area police are up to the challenge.