New Geography

Category: housing

  • Addressing Housing Affordability Using Cooperatives

    Our country is six years into the Great Recession, the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. It’s been replete with reports of home foreclosures, collapsing commuter towns, and young people struggling to become home owners. The term “generation rent” is often used in the media to describe the struggles of aspiring young people.  

    This is really a problem of upward mobility, and  how little the political system has responded to this problems of “generation rent” and those who have lost their homes. The current lack of action can be contrasted with the two very different periods in our economic history – the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.

    When discussing home ownership, many often bring up the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. FDR called a nation of homeowners “unconquerable.”  But his administration really built on the ideas of previous administrations. Herbert Hoover, while serving as Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, lent his support the “Own Your Own Home Campaign” of the Federal National Mortgage Association. This campaign touted the benefits of home ownership to the American people. And when Hoover became president, he created the Federal Home Loan Bank Board which chartered and supervised federal savings and loan institutions and created Federal Home Loan Banks to lend money to finance home mortgages. The purpose of this bank was to make homeownership cheaper for lower income people. It also represented a portion of Hoover’s efforts to fight the depression, and those efforts often went unrecognized by the American people both then and now. Hoover said home ownership could "change the very physical, mental and moral fiber of one’s own children." 

    After being elected president, Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration which insured homes made by banks and other lenders. The agency made it possible for people to pay for homes over three decades, before this period most homes were paid for through a three to five year loans. This program, followed up by Harry Truman’s support of veteran’s home loans and the home mortgage interest deduction, helped turn a nation of urban tenement dwellers into a nation of suburban home owners. Today, the federal government spends billions in subsides to ensure people have the opportunity to own their own homes. 

    Urbanist Richard Florida discusses the issue of home ownership in the 2010 book The Great Reset. In his interesting but misguided book, he correctly points out that too many people attained loans in the housing bubble and that high rates of homeownership hobble the labor market, as owning a home makes it harder for the job seeker to move. He also faults the Obama Administration for trying to do too much to prop up the mortgage market and recommends that the government quit supporting home ownership and start supporting renting to a greater extent. He said Fannie Mae has already taken steps in this direction by allowing people who experienced foreclosure to rent their houses. 

    But Florida is overstating the importance of renting in the lives of the American people, as we have a strong heritage as an upwardly mobile, ownership society that stretches back to the homesteading legislation pushed by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But there’s no doubting that we’re a more mobile society than in the homesteading days. While FDR built on the work of his Republican predecessors, today’s leaders also have a template in the cooperative housing movement. According to the National Association of Housing Cooperatives, cooperative housing is defined as when “people join together on a democratic basis to own and control the housing or community facilities where they live.” Each month those who live in a housing cooperative pay their share of the expenses while sharing the benefits of the cooperative. According to the NAHC, 1.2 million families live in cooperative housing in the United States.

    What if we could create more forms of cooperative housing to make sure families have the opportunity to own a home and at the same time have a certain amount of mobility? Could a new Cooperative Housing Authority, with funding from Fannie Mae, buy up foreclosed houses and charge a monthly below market rate to a family? All such houses could be considered a part of the CHA and the family in the house would share in the profits of the authority. If and when the family moves, they’ll be entitled to those profits which could be used for rent or a down payment on a house. Such a program would help commuter towns who are suffering from high gas prices and foreclosures. 

    But a Cooperative Housing Authority would also be a conduit for affordable housing in America’s big cities and the surrounding suburbs, as the added supply of new housing forces the cost down. This would be an asset to certain cities where the supply of affordable housing is dwindling due to gentrification. Like most cooperative housing, the housing could take various forms: condos, townhomes and single family homes. I would suspect single family homes would be the most popular because they are the preference of most Americans. 

    A Federal Community Land Trust could be along with a CHA another way to deal with affordable  housing shortages. Like any land trust, it could add civic buildings, commercial spaces and community assets to the areas where the housing exits. This would ensure mixed/use type neighborhoods where residents would have access to shopping and civic life nearby. 

    Returning to FDR’s administration, during the 1930s the government constructed what was called garden suburbs outside of major cities: Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin. The garden suburbs were intended to house rural people who were migrating to the city as well as poor urban workers. The project was a two way street, as the government provided the road grid and cheap credit for the suburbs while aspiring families provided the mortgage payments.  These garden suburbs – designed to be suburban with some green (trees and parks) – provided a template for the mass automobile suburbanization that occurred in the 1950s.

    Of course, urbanists have never quit critiquing this suburban development model since it emerged. Like many in the city planning world, Lewis Mumford was horrified at the way suburbanization played out after World War II:
    "The planners of the New Towns seem to me to have over-reacted against nineteenth-century congestion and to have produced a sprawl that is not only wasteful but–what is more important–obstructive to social life."
    Mumford advocated the regional city – a city that included an urban core surrounded by well-planned suburbs, as he also rejected the densely packed cities of the decades before the war.     

    Could a FCLT and CHA work to create family friendly suburbs with mixed use development, and in turn save families money on energy and at the same time spare the environment more greenhouse gas pollution? I think that it could, and if these developments were to become a reality, Lewis Mumford’s vision of a regional city might look like a reality. 

    Jason Sibert is a freelance writer who has lived in the St. Louis Metro Area since the late 90s. He worked for the Suburban Journals for a decade and his work has appeared in various publications over the last four years.

    Chicago housing cooperative photo by Jennifer D. Ames.

  • Housing Market Fringe Movement

    A year or two ago, pundits and planners, in California and elsewhere, proclaimed – and largely celebrated – the demise of suburbia. They were particularly heartened by a report, financed by portions of the real estate industry, that predicted the market for single-family homes in the state was hopelessly flooded, with a supply overhang of up to 25 years. The "new California dream" would supplant the ranch house with a high-density apartment, built along a transit or bus line.

    So much for the grand theory. As the economy has begun to recover from its nadir, single-family home sales have taken off, both in California and across the country. In 2012, prices rose by 6 percent nationwide, and pent-up demand has spurred interest among investors and buyers.

    In California, the new dream imagined by planners, pundits and their real estate backers is being supplanted by, well, a more traditional aspiration. In our state, hard hit by the most-recent housing bubble, single-family home prices surged 24 percent over the past year as inventories dropped precipitously. In some particularly desirable areas, such as Irvine, the supply constraints are at levels lower than experienced even in boom times.

    We are beginning to see a resurgence – which we were told never to expect – in new projects. The government reported recently that housing permits, still well below their peak, surged in February to their highest level since June 2008, an increase of nearly 34 percent from a year earlier.

    In Southern California, prospects for new single-family home construction are beginning to gear up. Toll Brothers, for example, recently bought into a new 2,000-home development in Lake Forest. Developers are turning over land across a vast portion of the state, particularly in places like Riverside-San Bernardino, which were at the epicenter of the housing bust but are now showing signs of recovery.

    The media’s surprise at these developments reflects the disconnect between the perceptions of planners, academics and some developers and reality on the ground. In the past decade or two, a huge industry has arisen, proclaiming the end of the single-family home and heralding the rise of densely populated urban cores. Yet, an analysis of the 2010 Census shows that growth in the suburbs, as opposed to core cities, actually rose from 85 percent to 91 percent from the previous decade.

    So, too, did the proportion of detached single-family homes, which grabbed 80 percent of the market during 2000-10, leaving 20 percent for multifamily buildings and townhouses. And now, with the market recovering, single-family homes in 2012 accounted for nearly two of three homes sold. Overall, sales of single-family homes in the past year were roughly seven times those for co-ops and condos nationwide.

    What’s behind this? It may have something to do with a little thing called consumer preference. Overall surveys tend to show that roughly 80 percent of adults prefer single-family houses, usually in either suburbs or exurbs.

    Of course, many insist that, in the aftermath of the 2007 housing bust, Americans now are finally unlearning their bad habits. In 2010, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, pointing to the flood of foreclosures in suburban reaches of Phoenix, claimed that the die, indeed, was already cast. "We’ve reached the limits of suburban development," Donovan claimed. "People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities."

    Yet, although the Great Recession certainly slowed overall migration to suburbs, numbers for 2011, the most recent available, showed domestic migrants continued to head away from core counties and toward those in the suburbs and exurbs. Now that the economy is improving, this trend seems likely to continue, or even accelerate.

    Core cities may be reviving, but this is still a suburban nation; conservative estimates indicate than more than 70 percent of residents in major metropolitan areas live in suburbs. To be sure, areas within three miles of an urban core grew 4.7 percent in the past decade, or 206,000, a nice reversal from previous declines. Yet this represented less than one-half the metropolitan growth rate of 10.6 percent. Further, this growth was more than negated by a 272,000 loss of people living from two miles to five miles from the urban core.

    Contrast this with fringe growth. Over the past decade, for example, areas five to 10 miles further from the core expanded their populations by 1.1 million. Areas further out, 10 to 20 miles, added 6.5 million residents. Areas beyond 20 miles from the urban core saw the largest growth, 8.6 million – 40 times the growth in the urban core and nearly four times the percentage growth (18.0 percent).

    It does not appear that the Great Recession reversed these trends. An analysis of population growth in 2011-2012 by Jed Kolko, chief economist for the real estate website Trulia, found that the old patterns reinforced themselves, with strong, but numerically small, growth in the core, but the most robust expansion at the fringes. "The suburbanization of America," Kolko suggests, "marches on."

    In Southern California, this also is the pattern. From 2000-10, the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area added twice as many people as did Los Angeles and three times that of San Diego. Overall growth in Los Angeles has been strongest toward its urban fringe. Although media coverage has focused on the growing residential population of Los Angeles’ downtown, which expanded from 35,884 to 51,329 over the decade, this population is actually smaller than that of the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Sherman Oaks. It is also more than 5,000 fewer people that in the Riverside County community of Eastvale, once primarily an area of dairy farms that incorporated only in 2010 and whose population has increased eight-fold since 2000.

    The geography of the post-crash economy, despite the strong losses in suburban industries like manufacturing and construction, also has remained much as it was before the recession, and may begin to assert itself more in the future. A new report from the urban-core-oriented Brookings Institution found that the percentage of jobs within three miles of the urban core dropped in all but nine of the nation’s 100-largest metropolitan areas; only Washington, D.C., saw strong relative growth in its core.

    Overall, the periphery is now the dominant job center in metropolitan America, with more than 65 percent of all jobs in the largest metropolitan areas and with twice as many jobs 10 miles from the urban core as in the core itself. This undercuts the assertions by planners and retro-urbanists that we can cut commutes by coercing people to live closer to the core. The real trend is that many historically bedroom communities are nearing parity between jobs and resident employees. The jobs/housing balance, which measures the number of jobs per resident employee in a geographical area, has reached 0.89 (jobs per resident workers) in the suburbs of the country’s 51 major metropolitan areas, according to American Community Survey 2011 data.

    This proportion is greater in Southern California, where numerous job centers compete with downtown Los Angeles, which holds barely 3 percent of the region’s employment. Instead, many of the region’s strongest job centers – Ontario, Burbank, West Los Angeles, Valencia – are themselves suburban in nature. Overall, the strongest office markets remain in places like around John Wayne Airport and West Los Angeles, which have recovered much more than downtown Los Angeles, despite that area’s much ballyhooed "vibrancy."

    If the goal is to reduce both commute times and energy use, perhaps these dispersed centers may offer the best hope. In Irvine, for example, by 2000 there were three jobs for every resident; roughly two in five residents worked in the city. Commutes for Irvine residents are among the shortest in the Los Angeles basin, notes Ali Modarres, chairman of the Geography Department at Cal State Los Angeles.

    There’s also a danger that policies seeking to restrict construction of single-family homes could further inflate housing prices and thus also create a potential oversupply of the multifamily product that the planners and many developers want to push. This is particularly true here in sunny Southern California, where the single-family house represents, in historian Sam Bass Warner’s phrase, "the glory of Los Angeles and an expression of its design for living."

    Given these deep-seated preferences, perhaps it would make more sense if our planners, and some developers, would awake from their dogmatic slumbers. Their job should be to facilitate the quality of life that people seek, not to tell them how to live. That means admitting that the future of both America and, particularly, Southern California, is likely to remain largely suburban for years to come.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared in the Orange County Register.

    Suburbs photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Millennial Lifestyles Will Remake American Homes

    As Millennials, America’s largest generation, enter their thirties in ever greater numbers, their beliefs about how and where to raise a family will have a major impact on the nation’s housing market. This follows as their media and political preferences have helped shape how we entertain ourselves and who is the president of the United States.   A 2012 survey indicated that seventy percent of Millennials would prefer to own a home in the suburbs if they can “afford it and maintain their lifestyle.” Now a new survey of 1000 18-35 year olds conducted for Better Homes and Garden Real Estate (BHGRE) by Wakefield Research provides a much more detailed picture of the type of home Millennials believe best fits their needs and desires.  


    Reflecting their overall attitudes about spending their hard-to-come-by money, Millennials look more for value than “pizzazz” in a new home. Seventy-seven percent told BHGRE they preferred an “essential” home over a “luxury” model. And more than half (56%) believe the technological capabilities of a house are more important than its “curb appeal.”            

    Millennials are known for their fascination with technology.  The BHGRE survey demonstrates that tendency in reference to their home buying decisions. Almost two-thirds (64%) would not want to live in a home that wasn’t “tech-friendly.” Not surprisingly, almost half (44%) focus on the technological sophistication of the family room rather than other rooms in the house in making that determination. In fact, almost as many (43%) would rather turn their living room into a home theater with a big screen TV than use it in more traditional ways. Even in the kitchen, a solid majority (59%) would rather have a television screen than a second oven (41%).

    Another constant concern of Millennials, security, is also reflected in their technology preferences. Almost half (48%) named a security system as one of the technological essentials in a home and about a quarter (28%) would like to be able to control such a system from their smart phone.

    In addition, befitting the generation that first popularized social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook, most Millennials want a house that can be customized to their individual preferences. Forty-three percent want their home to be less a “cookie cutter” offering and more capable of allowing them to put their own finishing touches on it. Almost one-third (30%) would prefer a “fixer upper” to a “move-in-ready” home, and seventy-two percent of those surveyed thought they were at least as capable of making those repairs as their parents. Almost all (82%) of this supposedly “entitled” generation say they would find a way to handle the cost of these repairs themselves rather than borrowing the money from Mom or Dad.

    Millennials also take their concern for the environment into account when choosing a home. Almost half (45%) don’t want a home that wastes energy. Reflecting this, an energy efficient washer and dryer topped their essential technology wish list (57%). A smart thermostat was important to 44% of those surveyed, placing it third on the list of Millennial housing essentials.

    These preferences aren’t the only reason that Millennial homes will reduce the nation’s carbon footprint in coming years. Millennials see their home as a place to “do work,” not just a place to return to “after work.” Already one in five Millennials say that “home office” is the best way to describe how they use their dining room. The generation’s blurring of gender roles as well as its facility in using digital technologies means that Millennials will likely work as much from home as “at work,” as they share child rearing responsibilities based upon whose work responsibilities require which partner to be away from the house during the day.

    The cumulative impact on America’s energy consumption from this shift could be dramatic. A study by Global Workplace Analytics suggested that, if half of American worked from home, it would reduce carbon emissions by over 51 million metric tons a year—the equivalent of taking all of greater New York’s commuters off the road. Eliminating traffic jams would save almost 3 billion gallons of gas a year and cut greenhouse gas emissions by another 26 million tons. Additional carbon footprint savings would come from reduced office energy consumption, roadway repairs, urban heating, office construction, and business travel.

    By the end of this decade the Millennial generation will comprise more than one out of every three adult Americans (36%). Just as the Baby Boomers influenced the housing market when they started buying homes and raising families, the Millennial generation’s overwhelming size will place an indelible stamp on the nation’s housing market. Its numbers will produce a boom in demand for housing that will help heal this critical sector of the nation’s economy. 

    This may affect boomers and other old generations. Every seller of houses will have to adjust their offerings to accommodate Millennial preferences for the type of home in which they want to raise a family. The end result will be more family friendly neighborhoods where homes serve as the hub for their owner’s economic activity, simultaneously lowering the nation’s  carbon footprint and improving  the civic health of its communities.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

    New home photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Triumph of Suburbia

    The “silver lining” in our five-years-and-running Great Recession, we’re told, is that Americans have finally taken heed of their betters and are finally rejecting the empty allure of suburban space and returning to the urban core.

    “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan declared in 2010. “People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.” Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City and Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion—widely praised and accepted by the highest echelons of academia, press, business, and government—have advanced much the same claim, and just last week a report on jobs during the downturn garnered headlines like “City Centers in U.S. Gain Share of Jobs as Suburbs Lose.”

    There’s just one problem with this narrative: none of it is true. A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

    Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.

    To be sure, our ongoing Great Recession slowed the rate of outward expansion but it didn’t stop it—and it certainly didn’t lead to a jobs boom in the urban core.

    “Absent policy changes as the economy starts to gain steam,” report author and urban booster Elizabeth Kneebone warned Bloomberg, “there’s every reason to believe that trend [of what she calls “jobs sprawl”] will continue.”

    The Hate Affair With Suburbia

    Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

    Today’s planning class has adopted what I call a retro-urbanist position, essentially identifying city life with the dense, highly centralized and transit-dependent form that emerged with the industrial revolution. When the city—a protean form that is always changing, and usually expands as it grows—takes a different form, they simply can’t see it as urban growth.

    In his masterwork A Planet of Cities, NYU economist Solly Angel explains that virtually all major cities in the U.S. and the world grow outward and become less dense in the process. Suburbs are expanding relative to urban cores in every one of the world’s 28 megacities, including New York and Los Angeles.  Far from a perversion of urbanism, Angel suggests, this is the process by which cities have grown since men first established them.

    In the U.S., the hate affair with suburbs and single-family housing, even in the city, dates to their rapid growth in the American boom after the first World War. In 1921 historian and literary criticic Lewis Mumford described the expansion of New York’s outer boroughs as a “dissolute landscape,” “a no-man’s land which was neither town or country.” Decades later, Robert Caro described the new rows of small, mostly attached houses—still the heart of the city’s housing stock—built in the post-war years as “blossoming hideously” as New Yorkers fled venerable, and congested, parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan for more spacious, tree-lined streets farther east, south, and north.

    In the 1950s, the rise of mass-produced suburbs like Levittown, New York, and Lakewood, California, sparked even more extreme criticism. Not everyone benefited from the innovation that allowed the Levitts to pioneer homes costing on average just $8,000—African-Americans were excluded from the original development—but for many middle- and working-class American whites, the housing and suburban booms represented an enormous step forward. The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”

    The urban gentry and intelligentsia, though, disdained this voluntary migration. Perhaps the most bitter critic was the great urbanist Jane Jacobs. An aficionado of the old, highly diverse urban districts of Manhattan, Jacobs not only hated trendsetter Los Angeles but dismissed the bedroom communities of Queens and Staten Island with the memorable phrase, “The Great Blight of Dullness.” The 1960s social critic William Whyte, who, unlike Jacobs, at least bothered to study suburbs close up, denounced them as hopelessly conformist and stultifying. Like many later critics, he predicted in Fortune that people and companies would tire of them and return to the city core.

    More recent critiques of suburbia have focused as well on their alleged vulnerability in an energy-constrained era. “The American way of life—which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia—can only run on reliable supplies of cheap oil and gas,” declares James Howard Kunstler in his 2005 peak oil jeremiad, The Long Emergency. “Even mild to moderate deviations in either price or supply will crush our economy and make the logistics of daily life impossible.”

    Too often, the anti-surbanites seem to take a certain perverse comfort in any development, no matter how grim, that “helps” protect Americans from the “wrong choice” of aspiring to space of their own. The housing crash of 2007 was cheered on in some circles as the death knell of the suburban dream, as when theorist Chris Leinberger declared in the Atlantic that soon, poor families would be crowding into dilapidated McMansions in the “suburban wastelands.”

    For retro-urbanists such as Richard Florida the reports, however premature, of the death of the suburbs, confirmed deeply held notions about the superiority of dense, urban living.  He summarily declared the single-family house archaic, and the quest for homeownership one of the “countless forms of over-consumption that have a horribly distorting affect on the economy."

    The Real Geography of America

    But the simple fact remains that the single-family home has remained the American dream, with sales outpacing those of condominiums  and co-ops despite the downturn.

    Florida has suggested that simply stating the numbers makes me a sprawl lover While he and other urban nostalgists see the city only in its dense urban core, and the city’s role as intimately tied with the amenities that are supposed to attract the relatively wealthy members of the so-called “creative class,” I see the urban form as ever changing, and consider a city’s primary mission not aesthetic or simply economic but to serve the interests and aspirations of all of its residents.

    Clearly the data supports a long-term preference for suburbs. Even as some core cities rebounded from the nadir of the 1970s, the suburban share of overall share of growth in America’s 51 major metropolitan areas (those with populations  of at least one million) has accelerated—rising from 85 percent in the ’90s to 91 percent in the ’00s. There’s more than a tinge of elitism animating the urban theorists who think that urban destiny rides mostly with the remaining nine percent matters. Overall, over 70 percent of residents in the major metropolitan areas now live in suburbs.

    Surveys, including those sponsored by the National Association of Realtors, suggest roughly 80 percent of Americans prefer a single family house to an apartment or a townhouse. Only 8 percent would prefer to live in an apartment. Yet just 70 percent of households live in a single-family house, while 17 percent live in apartments—suggesting the demand for single-family houses is still not being met. Such housing may be unaffordable, particularly in high-cost urban cores, but there is a fundamental market demand for it.

    To be sure, the Great Recession did slow the growth of suburbs and particularly exurbs—but recent indicators suggest a resurgence. An analysis last October by Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate website Trulia, reports that between 2011 and 2012 less-dense-than-average ZIP codes grew at double the rate of more-dense-than-average ZIP codes in the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Americans, he wrote, “still love the suburbs.”

    The Future Demographics of Suburbia

    Ultimately the question of growth revolves around the preferences of consumers. Despite predictions that the rise of singles, an aging population and the changing preferences of millennials will create a glut of 22 million unwanted large-lot homes by 2025, it seems more likely that three critical groups will fuel demand for more suburban housing.

    Between 2000 and 2011, there has been a net increase of 9.3 million in the foreign born population, largely from Asia and Latin America, with these newcomers accounting for about two out of every five new residents of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. And these immigrants show a growing preference for more “suburbanized” cities such as Nashville, Charlotte, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. An analysis of census data shows only New York—with nearly four times the population—drew (barely) more foreign-born arrivals over the past decade than sprawling Houston. Overwhelmingly suburban Riverside–San Bernardino expanded its immigrant population by nearly three times as many people as the much larger and denser Los Angeles–Orange County metropolitan area.

    Clearly, immigrants aren’t looking for the density and crowding of Mexico City, Seoul, Shanghai, or Mumbai. Since 2000, about two-thirds of Hispanic household growth was in detached housing. The share of Asian arrivals in detached housing is up 20 percent over the same span. Nearly half of all Hispanics and Asians now live in single-family homes, even in traditionally urban places like New York City, according to the census’s American Community Survey.

    Nowhere are these changes more marked than among Asians, who now make up the nation’s largest wave of new immigrants. Over the last decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by about 2.8 million, or 53 percent, while that of core cities grew by 770,000, or 28 percent.

    Aging boomers, too, continue to show a preference for space, despite the persistent urban legend that they will migrate back to the core city. Again, the numbers tell a very different story.

    A National Association of Realtors survey last year of buyers over 65 found that the vast majority looked for suburban homes. Of the remaining seniors, only one in 10 looked for a place in the city—less than the share that wanted a rural home. When demographer Wendell Cox examined the cohort that was 54 to 65 in 2000 to see where they were a decade later, the share that lived in the suburbs was stable, while many had left the city—the real growth was people moving to the countryside. Within metropolitan areas, more than 99 percent of the increase in population among people aged 65 and over between 2000 and 2010 was in low-density counties with less than 2,500 people per square mile.

    With the over-65 population expected to double by 2050, making it by far America’s fastest-growing age group, they appear poised to be a significant source of demand for suburban housing.

    But arguably the most critical element to future housing demand is the rising millennial generation. It has been widely asserted by retro-urbanists that young people prefer urban living. Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) have little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” 

    To bolster their assertions, retro-urbanist point to stated-preference research showing that more than three quarters of millennials say they “want to live in urban cores.” But looking at where millenials actually live now—and where they see themselves living in the future—shows a very different story. In the nation’s major metropolitan areas, only 8 percent of residents aged 20 to 24 (the only millennial adult age group for which census data is available) live in the highest-density counties—and that share has declined from a decade earlier. What’s more, 43 percent of millenials describe the suburbs as their “ideal place to live”—a greater share than their older peers—and 82 percent of adult millenials say it’s “important” to them to have an opportunity to own their home.

    And, of course, as people get older and take on commitments and start families, they tend to look for more settled, and less dense, environments. A 2009 Pew study found that 45 percent of Americans 18 to 34 would like to live in New York City, compared with just 14 percent of those over 35. As about 7 million more millenials—a group the Pew surveys show desire children and place a premium on being good parents—hit their 30s by 2020, expect their remaining attachment to the city to wane.

    This family connection has always eluded the retro-urbanists. “Suburbs,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, “must be difficult places to raise children.” Yet suburbs have served for three generation now as the nation’s nurseries. Jacobs’s treatment of the old core city—particularly her Greenwich Village in the early 1960s—lovingly portrayed these places as they once were, characterized by class, age, and some ethnic diversity along with strong parental networks, often based on ethnic solidarity.

    To say the least, this is not what characterizes Greenwich Village or in Manhattan today. In fact, many of the most vibrant, and high-priced urban cores—including Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle—have remarkably few children living there. Certainly, the the 300-square-foot “micro-units” now all the rage among the retro-urbanist set seem unlikely to attract more families, or even married couples.

    The Persistence of the Suburban Economy

    As Americans have voted with their feet for the suburbs, employers have followed.

    Despite the attention heaped on a handful of companies like United Airlines and Quicken Loans that have moved “back to the city,” the suburbanization of the overall American economy has continued apace. Historically, suburbs served largely as residential areas, so-called bedroom communities, but their share of steadily.

    Job dispersion is now a reality in virtually every metropolitan area, with twice as many jobs located 10 miles from city centers as in those centers. Between 1998 and 2006, as 95 out of 98 metro areas saw a decrease in the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown, according to a Brookings report. The outermost parts of these metro areas saw employment increase by 17 percent, compared to a gain of less than 1 percent in the urban core. Overall, the report found, only 21 percent of employees in the top 98 metros in America live within three miles of the center of their city.

    This decentralization of jobs was slowed somewhat by the Great Recession, which hit more dispersed industries like construction, manufacturing and retail particularly hard. Yet an analysis of jobs in 2010 by the Rudin Center for Transport Policy and Management found that dispersion had continued. Between 2002 and 2010 only two of the top 10 metropolitan regions (New York and San Francisco) saw a significant increase in employment in their urban core.

    Some observers claim that job growth is coming to the urban core in response to the changing preferences of younger workers, particularly in high-tech fields and as much media attention has been given to a few prominent social media start ups in New York and San Francisco. Similar pronouncements were  made during the great dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and burst along with the bubble. In fact, the number of urban core country tech jobs actually shrank over the past decade, according to an analysis of Science, Technology, Engineering and Management (STEM) jobs by Praxis Strategy Group.

    While companies in walking distance of big-city reporters make news out of all proportion to their importance, virtually all the major tech concentrations in the country—including Silicon Valley—are suburban. San Jose is a postwar suburban core municipality, having experienced the vast bulk of its growth since 1940. Virtually all the nation’s top tech companies—Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle and even Facebook—are located in suburban settings 45 minutes or more from San Francisco. Apple’s recent plans to construct its new corporate campus in bucolic Cupertino elicited anger from the Environment Defense Fund and other smart-growth advocates, but reflects the fact that the vast majority of the tech industry is located, along with the bulk of its workforce, in the suburbs.

    Apple employs many experienced engineers, many of whom have families and prefer to live in suburbs. In 2012 San Francisco had a significantly lower share of STEM jobs per capita than Santa Clara County. And the new rising stars of the tech world—Austin and Raleigh-Cary—are even more dispersed and car-dependent than San Jose. 

    What Really Matters

    While they’ve weaved a compelling narrative, the numbers make it clear that the retro-urbanists only chance of prevailing is a disaster, say if the dynamics associated with the Great Recession—a rise in renting, declining home ownership and plunging birthrates—become our new, ongoing normal. Left to their own devices, Americans will continue to make the “wrong” choices about how to live.

    And in the end, it boils down to where people choose to live. Despite the dystopian portrays of suburbs, suburbanites seem to win the argument over place and geography, with far higher percentages rating their communities as “excellent” compared to urban core dwellers.

    Today’s suburban families, it should be stressed, are hardly replicas of 1950s normality; as Stephanie Coontz has noted, that period was itself an anomaly. But however they are constituted—as blended families, ones headed up by single parents or gay couples—they still tend to congregate in these kinds of dispersed cities, or in the suburban hinterlands of traditional cities. Ultimately life style, affordability and preference seem to trump social views when people decide where they would like to live.

    We already see these preferences establishing themselves, again, among   Generation X and even millennials as some move, according to The New York Times,toward “hipsturbia,” with former Brooklynites migrating to places along the Hudson River. The Times, as could be expected, drew a picture of hipsters “re-creating urban core life” in the suburbs. While it may be seems incomprehensible to the paper’s Manhattan-centric world view by moving out, these new suburbanites are opting not to re-create the high-density city but to leave it for single-family homes, lawns, good schools, and spacious environments—things rarely available in places such as Brooklyn except to the very wealthiest. Like the original settlers of places like Levittown, they migrated to suburbia from the urban core as they get married, start families and otherwise find themselves staked in life. In an insightful critique, the New York Observerskewered the pretensions of these new suburbanites, pointing out that “despite their tattoos and gluten-free baked goods and their farm-to-table restaurants, they are following in the exact same footsteps as their forebears.”

    So, rather than the “back to the cities” movement that’s been heralded for decades but never arrived, we’ve gone “back to the future,” as people age and arrive in America and opt for updated versions of the same lifestyle that have drawn previous generations to the much detested yet still-thriving peripheries of the metropolis.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared in the The Daily Beast.

    Suburbs photo by BigStock.

  • Density Boondoggles

    Is it density or migration? Venture capitalist Brad Feld weighs in:

    The cities that have the most movement in and out of them are the most vibrant.

    The densest city in the world won’t be as vibrant as the city with the most talent churn. Yet planners and urbanists tout the former over the latter. We’ve reached the point of density for the sake of density. It is an end instead of a means to an end. The art of the density boondoggle:

    The following is the conversation held at every regional summit on Long Island:

    Advocate: Let’s keep our young people from leaving! There’s a…brain drain!

    Public: How do we stop it?

    Developer: Build denser housing! Let’s make it…affordable! Walkable! Let’s make it…mixed-use sustainable smart growth…with a downtown, pedestrian-friendly feel.

    Municipality: Development approved!

    What’s the question? Greater density is the answer. It will plug the brain drain. I promise. But plugging the brain drain will reduce talent churn. Long Island will be less vibrant.

    There is a name for the Cult of Density. It now has its very own -ism. All hail Vancouverism:

    Vancouverism is, at the root, a movement to go from low density, to higher density, to make Canadian and North American cities about people once again.

    Making cities all about people sounds great. All I hear is the chant of the Underpants Gnomes:

    Phase 1: Create a cool city.
    Phase 2: ?
    Phase 3: Retain talent.

    That will be $500,000. Thank you for your patronage, Memphis. Consulting is fun!

    Development approved. That’s the story line playing out in downtown Las Vegas with Zappos. Density is king. Don’t listen to Brad Feld. Talent churn doesn’t matter.

    If Vancouverism were harmless, then I wouldn’t blog about it. The misplaced emphasis on density has negative impacts. Vancouver is more about people, those who are young, single and college-educated:

    ‘Revitalizing,’ but leaving seniors behind

    Last July, Vancouver city council unanimously approved a three-year Chinatown Neighbourhood Plan and Economic Revitalization Strategy. More than a decade in the making, the plan focused on economic revitalization, after two-thirds of businesses surveyed in Vancouver’s original Chinatown reported declining revenues between 2008 and 2011 — blamed mainly on losses to newer Chinese-language communities in suburbs like Richmond.

    The revitalization plan envisions new residential development, "to connect with younger generations and reach out to people of all backgrounds to ensure Chinatown is increasingly relevant to a more multi-cultural Vancouver." At the same time, it acknowledged that in a neighborhood where 67 per cent of households are low-income — more than twice the City of Vancouver average — such redevelopment "can displace low-income residents." What is good for old Chinatown’s businesses, in short, may be less so for its poor and isolated elderly.

    S.U.C.C.E.S.S., Vancouver’s primary provider of culturally- and linguistically-supportive housing and services for Chinese seniors, is providing a partial answer. It operates a single multi-level care facility in old Chinatown for people with cognitive impairments or who require round-the-clock nursing. But its 103 beds, soon to be 113, are about one-tenth of what the UBC Centre for Urban Economics anticipates will be needed over the next 15 years to house Chinese seniors.

    Meanwhile, the support it offers seem a world away from Rosesari and her neighbours living in privately operated SROs like the May Wah Hotel. Yet the women are spirited and resilient. "I’m happy and I’m healthy," Rosesari told me through Pang’s interpretation. Both she and Lin say they like living in Chinatown. They feel at home here, where the language spoken is the one they know.

    They are also in their 90s. As time goes on, they and others may no longer be able to manage the May Wah’s staircases, its lack of mobility aids, and its communal bathing facilities. The alternatives available to them then are in terribly short supply.

    Welcome to the dark side of the obsession with wants and needs of the Creative Class. Vancouverism is boutique urbanism, catering to a specific demographic at the exclusion of all others. People are either displaced or fall into the cracks. Bike lanes and food trucks trump the needs of seniors.

    Jim Russell is a talent geographer with particular interest in the Rust Belt. Read his blog at Burgh Diaspora, where this piece originally appeared.

    Downtown Vancouver photo by runningclouds

  • Green Office Towers Cast Shadow Over Sydney

    Known for her spiky hair, studded-collar and heels, Sydney’s Lord Mayor is the epitome of progressive chic. For a green activist, though, Clover Moore attracts some surprising company. Landlords owning 58 per cent of the CBD’s office space have rushed to join her Better Buildings Partnership, an alliance “to improve the sustainability performance of existing commercial and public sector buildings”. At first glance, the property industry’s enthusiasm for ‘green building’ seems strange.  Shouldn’t they be insisting on less costly design and materials?  Or despite their hard-nosed reputation, are they out to save the planet after all?

    As it turns out, the lure of green building has more to do with cash than climate. By virtue of the soft economy and creeping “sustainability” measures, green-rated office towers are a gilt-edged opportunity for investors fleeing stocks and bonds. The wave of change rolling over central Sydney displays a certain logic. Meddling officials get to wrap themselves in virtue while big landlords – local and global investment trusts and fund managers – get a new premium grade rating for their properties. How better to protect asset values in an unsettled world? It’s a cosy, CBD-boosting deal, even if it distorts job and investment flows in outlying parts of the city.

    The floor-space revolution

    Even before the crash of 2008, banks, insurance companies and other financial services were under pressure to extract higher value out of every inch of floor-space. The global debt meltdown only accelerated the process. Aggressive cost-cutting saw Australian banks reduce their cost-to-income ratios from around 60 per cent in the late 1980s to around 45 per cent today. This priority is turning Sydney CBD’s office core inside-out, a trend reinforced by pay-offs from the green-rating of building stock.

    One recent headline summed it up neatly: “Martin Place exodus”. The article describes how major banks like Westpac, ANZ and Commonwealth are all vacating large office blocks in stately Martin Place, “the heart of Sydney’s financial centre”. Linking George Street, the CBD’s commercial “spine”, to the city’s government office sector along Macquarie Street, near state Parliament House, Martin Place has hosted the cream of Australia’s banking and insurance houses since the nineteenth century. The Reserve Bank is based there as well.   

    Sydney’s traditional office core enclosed Martin Place within Clarence, King and Macquarie Streets and the waterfront at Circular Quay. In line with conventional CBD morphology, this lies just north of the longstanding, but expanding, retail core bounded by York, Park, Elizabeth and King Streets, where large department stores are concentrated around the conjunction of George and Market Streets, the CBD’s peak land value intersection (PLVI).  

    Driven to economise on floor-space, larger financial and professional services firms are leaving the traditional office core for outer blocks, which until recently were, in the parlance of CBD theory, “zones in transition”, low-grade areas on the periphery of the office and retail cores with potential for higher value functions. Some “see the axis of the Sydney central business district changing.” Typically, landlords are now expected “to work with Sydney tenants to address their concerns around relocating or redesigning … and help minimise costs and increase efficiencies in their work environment.”  Lest this be dismissed as penny-pinching, a new “workplace philosophy” has been invented to sell the floor-space revolution, and, predictably, that old chestnut “sustainability” has been pressed into service.

    Spreading from banks to insurance companies to professional services and other large white-collar workplaces, “activity-based working” (ABW) has been treated to rapturous media coverage. “Gen Y shuts door on open-plan century”, is how one headline put it. In progressive outlets, ABW is depicted more as a reaction than an initiative, a revolution forced on employers – and indirectly on property developers – by green, socially aware, tech-savvy Gen Y office workers. As the narrative goes, they reject confinement in the “assigned desks” of open-plan workstations or offices. 

    At one prominent bank, staff are “free to roam and work where and how the mood takes them.” Usually, we are told, “they start the day at an ‘anchor point’ where their locker is and which they share with about 100 other workers … they might stay around that area for the day, with a choice of work situations ranging from quiet spaces to conversation areas, or they may set up somewhere else depending on who they need to see.” Equipped with laptops, i-pads, mobile phones and wi-fi, they “can move from space to space and hardware isn’t an inhibitor.” Some organisations “have been … expanding a whole range of tools from [their] internal social-media platform to crowd-sourcing …” Spaces come in all varieties, including meeting rooms, “hush” rooms, discussion pods, team tables, cafes, “floor hubs”, “touch-and-go area[s] for short stays”, even “funky kitchens”.

    And topping off the semblance of a white-collar wonderland, ABW adapted buildings often have glass lifts and “a central atrium allowing views to other floors”, so “you really do feel part of a bigger whole, you can see everybody.”

    Touted in near-utopian language, ABW unites the high-end circle of developers, architects, interior designers, building managers, real estate agents and progressive media. Most of all, we are assured, it’s about values, lifestyles and the coming generation, invariably presented as model progressives. According to a Colliers International report, Generation Y “prefer to work for an organisation with a commitment to social causes than one without … [i]n relation to the built environment, being green as an office occupier will become more of a ‘must have’ than a ‘nice to have’ in order to attract and retain staff.” Amongst other things, this means “creating less hierarchical workplaces, which facilitate collaboration, personal accountability and flexibility.”

    Such are the times, that if a business announced ABW-type reforms to improve its bottom line, raise productivity or increase returns to investors, it would be damned as a “slave to neo-liberal dogma”. But if the very same measures were dressed-up in the garb of “sustainability”, it would be showered with awards and accolades.

    Notwithstanding the pushy New Age rhetoric, ABW is more an economic-cum-technological opportunity for employers, than a revolt by the young and restless. Focus on costs is inevitable when economic conditions are so tight, and information and communications devices so ubiquitous and portable. A popular measure of office space efficiency is the workspace ratio, explains a researcher at Jones Lang Lasalle, or the number of square metres occupied by each office worker. The typical ratio is 15 square metres per person, but technology is freeing up workers to leave the office, so occupancy is typically now between 40 and 50 per cent, which translates, on average, to each worker occupying 37.5 square metres. “That’s expensive space”, he says.

    Other research found that in a traditional office, between 55 and 85 per cent of desks are not used at any given time. Yet other studies indicate that “trading off individual territory for shared areas” can reduce floor space requirements by 20 to 40 per cent. This all leads directly to the bottom line. By cutting the amounts paid for rent and outgoings, says a Colliers researcher, ABW could reduce a firm’s total cost by up to 30 per cent.

    That’s reason enough to drive large organisations out of their digs in Martin Place and the old office core, mostly for state-of-the-art towers designed to accommodate ABW floor-plans and facilities. “Macquarie Bank was an early mover (to Shelley Street), as was Westpac to its vertical campus in the western central business district”, report Jones Lang Lasalle on the major banks, and “[m]ore recently, the Commonwealth Bank has moved to Darling Quarter and ANZ will soon move to Pitt Street.” One way or another, the larger financial institutions, whose head-office functions were scattered throughout the CBD, have “implemented strategies to consolidate their space requirements and build in [ABW] flexibility.”

    This isn’t happening to satisfy worker demands for “sustainability”, but recourse to “green ethics” no doubt helped prise the sceptical from their desks.

    Green-star trek

    Nor have landlords failed to gain from the floor-space revolution. Large and institutional players like real estate investment trusts and fund managers profited from a wave of demand for innovative, capital-intensive building stock. More unexpectedly, they encountered a rising class of green-tinged activists, designers and architects, whose obsessions with energy-saving and natural power came in useful. As climate change crept up the political agenda, progressives across all tiers of government soon turned to the built environment, churning out laws and regulations that defined and mandated ‘green building’ standards. The property industry’s peak bodies embraced the concept.    

    This is somewhat paradoxical. Despite its obsession with all sorts of metrics, ratios and indices, the property sector doesn’t seem to care that the object of these standards is unmeasurable. Their effect on the global climate system can never be known (it was always fanciful to suggest that Australian building styles would affect the climate, but anyone who believes it after Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban and Rio is deluded).

    On the other hand, the financial benefits are rather more tangible. The key is NABERS, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System. Administered nationally by the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, NABERS is a rating scale from a low of 1 to a high of 6 stars (the “Green Star”) applicable to buildings or tenancies, based on criteria like energy efficiency, water usage, waste management and indoor environment quality. The federal and some state governments have mandated at least a 4.5 star rating for public sector offices, and 4.5 has generally become the minimum for image-conscious corporates. A building or suite designed or refurbished for ABW will naturally score well.

    The Commonwealth Bank’s new campus-style headquarters at Darling Quarter is in the CBD’s “western corridor”, formerly a “zone in transition” near the disused docks and freight yards of Darling Harbour. It achieved a coveted 6 star rating. Coming up with two curved-roof buildings of six and eight stories, “the designers have emphasised the natural light, air quality and water recycling … with features including a full-height atrium, single-pass ventilation, blackwater recycling, trigeneration power and passive chill beam air-conditioning.” Westpac’s new campus further up the corridor at 275 Kent Street achieved 4 stars, and the three towers underway at Barangaroo, a futuristic, mixed-use precinct at the corridor’s northern end, meet 6 star specifications. ANZ’s new headquarters at 242 Pitt Street (161 Castlereagh), towering over the CBD’s “mid-town” south of the retail core, also aims for 6 stars.

    The most vaunted 6 star tower is the oval-shaped, “flagship” tower at 1 Bligh Street. Using 3D software called Building Information Modelling or BIM, the designers conceived an edifice with “gas and solar panels reduc[ing] electricity consumption by as much as 25 per cent, while water recycling reduces mains water by up to 90 per cent …” But its “principal sustainability feature is a fully glazed doubleskin façade made from clear glass panels … allow[ing] for automated sunshading that dramatically reduces the heat load on the building, which means [it needs] less airconditioning and can have … better natural light.” First-tier law firm Clayton Utz is the building’s anchor tenant.

    To the extent that creative designers, developers and landlords have combined to meet a demand in the market, these buildings are impressive enough. That’s how markets should work. But on the pretext of “sustainability”, activist politicians and officials have, effectively, codified the product and marketing strategies of the most powerful players. NABERS does that by granting official recognition to a system mirroring the star scale long used in the hotel industry. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of square metres of non-rated office space was downgraded. Rent-seeking opportunities for the owners of rated space proliferated, to the detriment of smaller, more marginal players, their tenants and peripheral regions. “While the NABERS rating of a building is not the sole factor for corporate tenants”, said a CBRE director, “it is playing a significant role in selecting suitable office space.”

    Clover Moore, whose jurisdiction covers capital-rich Sydney CBD and surrounds, has actively boosted the interests of large and institutional landlords with a grab-bag of lucrative benefits. There’s the CitySwitch Green Office program, which assists landlords leasing more than 2000 square metres of office space to achieve a mandatory NABERS rating; there are “green loans” for “sustainable retrofits” to be repaid as a levy on council rates; there’s a scheme under the Better Buildings Partnership that enables commercial property owners to enter Environmental Upgrade Agreements (EUAs) and share the cost of green building upgrades with tenants; and there are exemptions from a levy on new construction for green initiatives. 

    All in all, NABERS effects have proven a boon to the high-end property industry. Particularly for listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) and fund managers, but also many unlisted investors, which value stable capital growth as much as income, and continually trade or “recycle” assets to manage their portfolios. By allocating capital efficiently for market-oriented purposes, these investors can play a positive role in urban development, as long as green distortions (amongst others) don’t get in the way.

    An Australian Property Institute study at the end of 2011 found that office buildings with a 6 star NABERS rating enjoyed a premium in value of 12 per cent, those with a 5 star rating 9 per cent, those with 4.5 stars 3 per cent, and those with 3 stars 2 per cent. In May 2012, the IPD green property survey found that “prime office buildings with high NABERS ratings – from 4 stars to 6 stars – outperformed the broader prime office market over the past year … the greener buildings delivered an 11.3 per cent total return compared with the overall CBD office return of 10.8 per cent.” Further, buildings with a high NABERS rating “significantly outperformed assets as having a NABERS rating of 3.5 stars or less … better-rated assets delivered 11.8 per cent compared with 8.7 per cent for the lower-rated properties.”

    Capital growth conscious REITs and funds must have been pleased to hear, from a principal of the IPD Green Property Investment Index, that “owners who improve the sustainability attributes of their buildings are more likely to experience relatively stronger growth in capital values and will mitigate downside risk in asset values.” That’s a bonus for such local and global investors who have poured billions into the “safe haven” of Australian – especially Sydney – commercial real estate for other reasons, like the diminished standing of other asset classes, stock market volatility, a relatively sound economy, a reputable legal system and links to the booming Asia-Pacific region. Sydney was the world’s fourth most popular destination for cross-border property investment in the 18 months to June 2010, while the spreading use of NABERS culiminated in November 2011, when a rating became mandatory for space above 2000 square metres.   

    This is how a mayor can spend her life cultivating a progressive persona, only to end up the unwitting tool of some canny fund managers.

    Regressive recentralisation

    Green building is promising to be a goldmine for the well-placed, and a dead weight for almost everyone else. In an April 2012 Market Overview for Parramatta, a second-tier CBD servicing Sydney’s western region, Knight Frank explain that “the gap between economic rents and market rents remains a constraint on new [office] supply.” In other words the cost of land acquisition, planning and building processes, construction and fitting out, and a profit margin, on a square metre basis (economic rent) exceeds the rent obtainable from prospective tenants (market rent). Not all the gap between economic and market rents can be pinned on green standards, now essential for investor interest. But they are an undeniable factor. On one estimate, by consultants Davis Langdon, achievement of a 4 to 6 star NABERS rating can add between 3 and more than 11 per cent to construction costs.

    If supply constraints are serious in Parramatta, where the federal and NSW governments have relocated several agencies and departments, apparently they are acute in more suburban locations. According to a newspaper report in April 2011, “the trend across the Sydney metropolitan markets is falling [office] supply … this is evident across all key markets including North Sydney, St Leonards, Parramatta, North Ryde, Rhodes and Homebush … at present there is no speculative development across these suburbs, so the problem of reduced A-grade space will only increase during the next couple of years, putting pressure on rents and incentives.” The only speculative office block started at the time was at Norwest, says the report, a specialised business park in north-west Sydney. The building was designed for a 4.5 star NABERS rating.

    These weak conditions have various causes, but green standards shouldn’t be underestimated. Investors have lost interest in non-rated projects, and the economics of rated projects are trickier beyond high-rent centres like the CBD or business parks. According to a CBRE director, as of June 2011 there was “more capital looking to invest in the office sector than was evident before the global financial crisis … however, the majority of this capital is only chasing prime assets with very few groups willing to consider smaller secondary assets and non-central business locations.” For their part, more demanding tenants are also retreating to the green citadels and ABW theme-parks of Sydney CBD. Noting the CBD’s low office vacancy rate, Jones Lang Lasalle explain that “any downsizing that has occurred in the financial services sector has been offset by tenant centralisation … [a]s companies continue to look to improve the environment and amenity for staff as a means of attracting and retaining the best talent.” They detect a “trend to centralisation”.  Similarly, a Colliers director observed that “tenants were being driven out of metro markets by tight vacancy rates for quality space and are attracted by a greater ability to attract and retain staff if located in the CBD.”

    Phrases like “attract and retain staff”, of course, suggest NABERS rated buildings adapted for ABW. The portability of communications devices should be liberating workers from fixed locations, not just assigned desks. ABW advocates love phrases like “work is a thing you do not a place you go” and “work is becoming a process not a place”. But green imposts are having a countervailing effect.

    This withdrawal of capital and tenants is bound to choke-off a range of suburban and peripheral businesses, the small to medium sized service operators, start-ups, microbusinesses, consultants, franchisees and sole traders which rely on freely-available space and low rents.  

    To all but the greenest ideologues, it should be clear that the decentralisation of offices – as well as factories and warehouses – over recent decades has fuelled Sydney’s prosperity, enabling the city to absorb an extra 1.5 million people since the mid-1980s. Equally, it should be clear that decentralisation offers better outcomes on access to affordable housing, traffic congestion and employment dispersion. On average, peripheral Local Government Areas (LGAs) still experience higher unemployment rates than central LGAs. That’s why the centralising forces unleashed by green planning and building codes pose serious dangers to economic vitality across the greater metropolitan region. Plenty of attention has been lavished on the pampered few in their ABW playgrounds. Some should be spared for the vast majority who seek to make a life in Sydney.

    John Muscat is a co-editor of The New City, where this piece originally appeared. 

    Photo by Christopher Schoenbohm.

  • Why British Prosperity is Hobbled by a Rigged Land Market

    The British have the least living space per head, the most expensive office rents and the most congested infrastructure of any EU-15 country. Thanks to a rapidly growing population –  the result of a healthy birth-rate and immigration – these trends are worsening steadily. At the same time, the British economy is languishing in a prolonged slump brought on by a collapse of demand. The answer is obvious: Britain needs to build more. Unfortunately, the obstacles to development are formidable. Britain’s supply-side problems are of a different character to those holding back other struggling European economies, but arguably no less serious.

    Britain is generally considered a flexible, economically liberal economy, in which insiders have few opportunities to rig the system for their own benefit. To the extent that supply-side problems are considered a significant obstacle to economic growth, attention generally centres on the country’s patchy skills base. A high drop-out rate from secondary school and weak vocational training are no doubt real constraints on the UK economy, but there is an equally, if not more, serious one. Housing, commercial property and infrastructure are central to a country’s economic and social well-being. The UK’s essentially rigged market for land and its restrictive planning system are as big an obstacle to economic growth as restrictive labour markets and protected professions are in Southern Europe.

    The number of new homes built each year in Britain has lagged far behind demand from a growing population for 30 years. Despite faster population growth, house construction is currently running at half the level of the 1960s. At the same time the average size of homes built in Britain is now the smallest in the EU. The result of these two trends has been a steady fall in the amount of living space per head. Property prices relative to average household incomes have come down a bit since 2007, but remain very high. Moreover, the problem is not just restricted to the residential sector: Britain has the highest office rents in the EU. Firms in cities such as Manchester pay more than in Frankfurt or Milan. And transport infrastructure is very expensive to build in Britain, which is one reason why there is too little of it.

    Britain is small and densely-populated, but does not suffer from particularly acute land scarcity. Around 13 per cent of the UK is built on, a lower proportion than in countries with a similar population density such as Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands. Britain’s problem is that the supply of new housing and commercial space is uniquely unresponsive to increases in property prices. Alone among the countries that experienced a house price boom in the run up to the financial crisis, Britain had no construction boom. The number of houses being built picked up only slightly, despite UK house prices rising by more than in any other developed countries except Ireland.

    This situation has far-reaching economic and social consequences for the UK. Massive house price inflation has aggravated the UK’s already high levels of inequality by shifting wealth from the young (and property-less) to the old (and propertied). The poor availability of affordable housing undermines labour mobility – people are unable to move to where jobs are available because they cannot afford accommodation. Those on welfare are discouraged from working (as they then lose access to subsidised housing).  Congested, expensive infrastructure combined with pricey commercial property pushes up the cost of business, depresses investment and holds back economic growth.

    The two reasons for Britain’s land-use woes – a complex planning system and insufficient land for development – are inter-related. A major constraint on the supply of land is the existence of a protected ‘greenbelt’: land around cities on which development is very tightly controlled. There are also strict controls over building on other so-called green-field sites. The market for land is essentially rigged in favour of landowners, who pay no tax on their land holdings and hence pay no penalty for sitting on it, waiting for the artificially-created scarcity to push prices up further. With no revenue from land taxes, local authorities are unable to capture any increase in the value of land that takes place when planning permission is granted. As a result, they have little incentive to open up land for development. 

    The UK should, of course, redevelop so-called ‘brownfield’ sites – vacant or derelict buildings and land. But this will only ever comprise part of the solution to its land use crisis. By its very nature, brownfield land is concentrated in parts of the country where people do not want to live. And it is often very expensive to redevelop, not least because the government has stipulated that 60 per cent of new homes must be built on brownfield sites. There is no alternative to building on the green-belt, much of which is neither beautiful nor green. The greenbelt was originally established to combat urban sprawl, but is now an obstacle to sensible development. For example, allowing London to expand by between two and three miles in each direction would easily solve the city’s land-use problems. Increasing that proportion of the UK’s surface area under development by between 1 and 2 percentage points would address the country’s  land constraints  and would not involve concreting over England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. Urban sprawl could easily be prevented by good quality town planning.

    The sanctity of the greenbelt, and green-field land more generally, has much to do with vested interests perpetuating a system which rewards speculation. Many Britons have profited from land scarcity (and the tax-free property price gains it has led to), and are determined to defend those gains. They may complain about their children being unable to buy a house, but at the same time will staunchly oppose new development. For their part, landowners are a powerful and politically well-connected lobby; many of the biggest sit in the House of Lords (the country’s upper house). They have a big stake in inflated land prices and are well-placed to resist the taxation of land.

    A land tax would involve property owners paying a percentage of the value of their land in tax each year. If the value of their property rose, so would the amount of tax paid on it. This would achieve a number of things. First, local authorities would have a financial incentive to change land from agricultural to residential (and commercial) use as they would profit from the increased value of the land this would cause. Second, it would make it more expensive to speculate on future rises in land values, and some of those gains would be captured by the government. Third, construction companies would not be able to sit on large amounts of land (so-called land banks), and drip feed the market, maintaining prices at artificially high levels. Instead, land would have to be developed or sold, which together with the increased availability resulting from the freeing up of greenbelt land, would bring down the price of developing land and with it the cost of housing, commercial property and infrastructure. Lower land costs would also increase competition by reducing barriers to entry to the construction sector: for example, at present housing building is dominated by a small number of big players.

    Supply-side measures are rarely a quick solution to a demand-side crisis. That is certainly the challenge facing other struggling European economies. Spain and France suffer from inflexible labour markets, Germany from over-regulated product and services markets, Italy from both. Academic research shows that addressing such problems improves economic performance in the longer term, but it provides no immediate boost to demand. However, the UK is almost certainly an exception. Addressing Britain’s biggest supply-side problem (its rigged market for land) could provide a more immediate economic stimulus by releasing massive pent-up demand, as well as lift growth potential.

    Britain should turn its weaknesses into strengths. Other struggling European countries have a surfeit of housing and infrastructure and poor demographics. For example, boosting construction in Spain would do no good – Spain has far too many unsold houses and it is now suffering from net emigration (more people are leaving the country than arriving). In Italy and Germany, populations are stagnant, although there is more scope to boost spending on infrastructure than in Spain. France’s population is growing, but as a result of persistently strong public investment, it already has very good physical infrastructure. And thanks to a rational planning system and plenty of land, it does not suffer from a housing shortage. Unlike Britain, these countries have few low-hanging fruit.

    Far-reaching reform of the greenbelt and the introduction of land taxes could open the way for a boom in housing and commercial development. Local authorities and the national government could agree to set aside a proportion of the funds raised through land taxes to fund investment in infrastructure. Moreover, land taxes would make the tax system fairer by taxing unearned income. And by redistributing money from the wealthy (who save a high proportion of their income) to construction sector workers (who save little of it), it would provide a further boost to economic activity. The current Conservative-Liberal government has pushed through modest reforms of the planning system, but has shied away from opening up the greenbelt and has no intention of introducing a land tax. 

    An economy in which speculation is rewarded and wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of those with property risks stagnation. It faces an uphill battle to hold on to its young or attract skilled immigrants. Britain needs to strike a better balance between the interests of existing property-owners and the rest of the country. This includes acknowledging that the value of land is determined by the activities of society as a whole and not the landowner, and hence needs to be taxed accordingly.

    Simon Tilford is chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, where this piece originally appeared.

  • Sydney to Abandon Radical Urban Containment Policy

    The New South Wales government has proposed a new Metropolitan Strategy for the Sydney area which would significantly weaken the urban containment policy (also called urban consolidation, smart growth, livability, growth management, densification, etc.) that has driven if house prices to among the highest in the affluent New World (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States) relative to household incomes.

    According to the Australian Financial Review, the state’s Liberal-National government plans to allow the building of more than 170,000 new homes, with the vast majority being on greenfield sites, largely beyond the current urban footprint. Premier Barry O’Farrell and his party had promised in their electoral campaign in 2011 to liberalize land-use regulation and to moderate the previous Labor government’s quota that required 70% of new houses to be built within the current urban footprint and 30% on greenfield sites. In fact, however, under the Labor government’s administration, new house building had been produced at a well below demand level.

    Among the major New World metropolitan areas rated in annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Surveys, Sydney has been the most unaffordable, along with Vancouver, in recent years. Sydney and Vancouver have had among the most stringent urban containment policies in the New World, and the resulting unaffordable house prices under such circumstances are consistent with economic principle.

    Premier O’Farrell told the Sydney Morning Herald that the government wanted to "make home ownership a reality again." He continued, "The more blocks of land (lots) we can release, the greater downward pressure we can put on housing because it’s been so high for so long." In a press release issued by his office, the Premier recalled that “Before the election, I said I wanted to ensure owning a home wasn’t a fading dream for young families" and noted that the massive housing package "will go a long way to delivering on that commitment."

    In the longer run (by 2031), the government intends to provide for a total of 545,000 new homes, while abandoning the practice of allocating locations based upon planning theory. Planning and Infrastructure Minister Bradley Hazzard told the Sydney Morning Herald that the government intended to “look further afield” than the presently planned greenfield suburban growth centers. He continued: "We’re trying to [be] less constrictive and restrictive and what we’re saying is the marketplace should have far more of a say in what the mix of housing is and where it should be,” adding that ”it doesn’t matter” what percentage was delivered in greenfield and established suburbs. He concluded: ”No one should be preoccupied by particular prescriptive formulas.”

    The government also indicated its intention to encourage one half of employment growth over the next 20 years to be in Western Sydney. Western Sydney is virtually across the urban area from the central business district. This dispersion of employment, along with roadway improvements in the area, is likely to improve the metropolitan balance between jobs and housing.

    The plan for greater job dispersion would, if successful, bring Sydney more into line with urban best practices, which are exhibited by the location of most new jobs in edge cities, as well as throughout the entire urban area. Sydney has among the longest work trip travel times in the New World. The one-way work trip travel time is newly reported in the Metropolitan Strategy to have reached 35 minutes. Work trip travel times are worse only in Melbourne, at 36 minutes. By comparison, Dallas-Fort Worth, with a larger population, a much lower urban area density and a mere fraction of the Melbourne or Sydney transit work trip market share has a far shorter one-way work trip travel time (26 minutes).

    The Sydney developments are the latest in a trend toward liberalizing urban land use in four nations.

    In October, the New Zealand government announced plans to liberalize land-use amid growing concern about the extent to which that nation’s urban containment policies have destroyed housing affordability. In the introduction to the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, Deputy Premier Bill English said:

    Land has been made artificially scarce by regulation that locks up land for development. This regulation has made land supply unresponsive to demand. When demand shocks occur, as they did in the mid-2000s in New Zealand and around the world, much of that shock translates to higher prices rather than more houses.

    Recent polling has shown support, by an almost 2 to 1 margin for government action to improve housing affordability, with even higher stronger support in the 18 to 34 age group, where the margin was more than 3 to 1.

    The United Kingdom Cameron government is also embarked on a program to liberalize that nation’s restrictive land use policies, which former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member Kate Barker found to be the cause of severe housing unaffordability in a report commissioned by the Blair Labour government. Planning Minister Nick Boles has characterized the unaffordability of housing as "the biggest social justice problem we have."

    In 2011, Florida repealed its statewide smart growth mandate and closed the administrative bureaucracy that had overseen the program. Before that, the government of the Australian state of Victoria substantially expanded the urban growth boundary of the Melbourne urban area.

  • Gentrification and its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans

    Readers of this forum have probably heard rumors of gentrification in post-Katrina New Orleans. Residential shifts playing out in the Crescent City share many commonalities with those elsewhere, but also bear some distinctions and paradoxes. I offer these observations from the so-called Williamsburg of the South, a neighborhood called Bywater.

    Gentrification arrived rather early to New Orleans, a generation before the term was coined. Writers and artists settled in the French Quarter in the 1920s and 1930s, drawn by the appeal of its expatriated Mediterranean atmosphere, not to mention its cheap rent, good food, and abundant alcohol despite Prohibition. Initial restorations of historic structures ensued, although it was not until after World War II that wealthier, educated newcomers began steadily supplanting working-class Sicilian and black Creole natives.

    By the 1970s, the French Quarter was largely gentrified, and the process continued downriver into the adjacent Faubourg Marigny (a historical moniker revived by Francophile preservationists and savvy real estate agents) and upriver into the Lower Garden District (also a new toponym: gentrification has a vocabulary as well as a geography). It progressed through the 1980s-2000s but only modestly, slowed by the city’s abundant social problems and limited economic opportunity. New Orleans in this era ranked as the Sun Belt’s premier shrinking city, losing 170,000 residents between 1960 and 2005. The relatively few newcomers tended to be gentrifiers, and gentrifiers today are overwhelmingly transplants. I, for example, am both, and I use the terms interchangeably in this piece.

    One Storm, Two Waves

    Everything changed after August-September 2005, when the Hurricane Katrina deluge, amid all the tragedy, unexpectedly positioned New Orleans as a cause célèbre for a generation of idealistic millennials. A few thousand urbanists, environmentalists, and social workers—we called them “the brain gain;” they called themselves YURPS, or Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals—took leave from their graduate studies and nascent careers and headed South to be a part of something important.

    Many landed positions in planning and recovery efforts, or in an alphabet soup of new nonprofits; some parlayed their experiences into Ph.D. dissertations, many of which are coming out now in book form. This cohort, which I estimate in the low- to mid-four digits, largely moved on around 2008-2009, as recovery moneys petered out. Then a second wave began arriving, enticed by the relatively robust regional economy compared to the rest of the nation. These newcomers were greater in number (I estimate 15,000-20,000 and continuing), more specially skilled, and serious about planting domestic and economic roots here. Some today are new-media entrepreneurs; others work with Teach for America or within the highly charter-ized public school system (infused recently with a billion federal dollars), or in the booming tax-incentivized Louisiana film industry and other cultural-economy niches.

    Brushing shoulders with them are a fair number of newly arrived artists, musicians, and creative types who turned their backs on the Great Recession woes and resettled in what they perceived to be an undiscovered bohemia in the lower faubourgs of New Orleans—just as their predecessors did in the French Quarter 80 years prior. It is primarily these second-wave transplants who have accelerated gentrification patterns.

    Spatial and Social Structure of New Orleans Gentrification

    Gentrification in New Orleans is spatially regularized and predictable. Two underlying geographies must be in place before better-educated, more-moneyed transplants start to move into neighborhoods of working-class natives. First, the area must be historic. Most people who opt to move to New Orleans envision living in Creole quaintness or Classical splendor amidst nineteen-century cityscapes; they are not seeking mundane ranch houses or split-levels in subdivisions. That distinctive housing stock exists only in about half of New Orleans proper and one-quarter of the conurbation, mostly upon the higher terrain closer to the Mississippi River. The second factor is physical proximity to a neighborhood that has already gentrified, or that never economically declined in the first place, like the Garden District.

    Gentrification hot-spots today may be found along the fringes of what I have (somewhat jokingly) dubbed the “white teapot,” a relatively wealthy and well-educated majority-white area shaped like a kettle (see Figure 1) in uptown New Orleans, around Audubon Park and Tulane and Loyola universities, with a curving spout along the St. Charles Avenue/Magazine Street corridor through the French Quarter and into the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater. Comparing 2000 to 2010 census data, the teapot has broadened and internally whitened, and the changes mostly involve gentrification. The process has also progressed into the Faubourg Tremé (not coincidentally the subject of the HBO drama Tremé) and up Esplanade Avenue into Mid-City, which ranks just behind Bywater as a favored spot for post-Katrina transplants. All these areas were originally urbanized on higher terrain before 1900, all have historic housing stock, and all are coterminous to some degree.


    Figure 1. Hot spots (marked with red stars) of post-Katrina gentrification in New Orleans, shown with circa-2000 demographic data and a delineation of the “white teapot.” Bywater appears at right. Map and analysis by Richard Campanella.

    The frontiers of gentrification are “pioneered” by certain social cohorts who settle sequentially, usually over a period of five to twenty years. The four-phase cycle often begins with—forgive my tongue-in-cheek use of vernacular stereotypes: (1) “gutter punks” (their term), young transients with troubled backgrounds who bitterly reject societal norms and settle, squatter-like, in the roughest neighborhoods bordering bohemian or tourist districts, where they busk or beg in tattered attire.

    On their unshod heels come (2) hipsters, who, also fixated upon dissing the mainstream but better educated and obsessively self-aware, see these punk-infused neighborhoods as bastions of coolness.

    Their presence generates a certain funky vibe that appeals to the third phase of the gentrification sequence: (3) “bourgeois bohemians,” to use David Brooks’ term. Free-spirited but well-educated and willing to strike a bargain with middle-class normalcy, this group is skillfully employed, buys old houses and lovingly restores them, engages tirelessly in civic affairs, and can reliably be found at the Saturday morning farmers’ market. Usually childless, they often convert doubles to singles, which removes rentable housing stock from the neighborhood even as property values rise and lower-class renters find themselves priced out their own neighborhoods. (Gentrification in New Orleans tends to be more house-based than in northeastern cities, where renovated industrial or commercial buildings dominate the transformation).

    After the area attains full-blown “revived” status, the final cohort arrives: (4) bona fide gentry, including lawyers, doctors, moneyed retirees, and alpha-professionals from places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Real estate agents and developers are involved at every phase transition, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always profiting.

    Native tenants fare the worst in the process, often finding themselves unable to afford the rising rent and facing eviction. Those who own, however, might experience a windfall, their abodes now worth ten to fifty times more than their grandparents paid. Of the four-phase process, a neighborhood like St. Roch is currently between phases 1 and 2; the Irish Channel is 3-to-4 in the blocks closer to Magazine and 2-to-3 closer to Tchoupitoulas; Bywater is swiftly moving from 2 to 3 to 4; Marigny is nearing 4; and the French Quarter is post-4.

    Locavores in a Kiddie Wilderness

    Tensions abound among the four cohorts. The phase-1 and -2 folks openly regret their role in paving the way for phases 3 and 4, and see themselves as sharing the victimhood of their mostly black working-class renter neighbors. Skeptical of proposed amenities such as riverfront parks or the removal of an elevated expressway, they fear such “improvements” may foretell further rent hikes and threaten their claim to edgy urban authenticity. They decry phase-3 and -4 folks through “Die Yuppie Scum” graffiti, or via pasted denunciations of Pres Kabacoff (see Figure 2), a local developer specializing in historic restoration and mixed-income public housing.

    Phase-3 and -4 folks, meanwhile, look askance at the hipsters and the gutter punks, but otherwise wax ambivalent about gentrification and its effect on deep-rooted mostly African-American natives. They lament their role in ousting the very vessels of localism they came to savor, but also take pride in their spirited civic engagement and rescue of architectural treasures.

    Gentrifiers seem to stew in irreconcilable philosophical disequilibrium. Fortunately, they’ve created plenty of nice spaces to stew in. Bywater in the past few years has seen the opening of nearly ten retro-chic foodie/locavore-type restaurants, two new art-loft colonies, guerrilla galleries and performance spaces on grungy St. Claude Avenue, a “healing center” affiliated with Kabacoff and his Maine-born voodoo-priestess partner, yoga studios, a vinyl records store, and a smattering of coffee shops where one can overhear conversations about bioswales, tactical urbanism, the klezmer music scene, and every conceivable permutation of “sustainability” and “resilience.”

    It’s increasingly like living in a city of graduate students. Nothing wrong with that—except, what happens when they, well, graduate? Will a subsequent wave take their place? Or will the neighborhood be too pricey by then?

    Bywater’s elders, families, and inter-generational households, meanwhile, have gone from the norm to the exception. Racially, the black population, which tended to be highly family-based, declined by 64 percent between 2000 and 2010, while the white population increased by 22 percent, regaining the majority status it had prior to the white flight of the 1960s-1970s. It was the Katrina disruption and the accompanying closure of schools that initially drove out the mostly black households with children, more so than gentrification per se.1  Bywater ever since has become a kiddie wilderness; the 968 youngsters who lived here in 2000 numbered only 285 in 2010. When our son was born in 2012, he was the very first post-Katrina birth on our street, the sole child on a block that had eleven when we first arrived (as category-3 types, I suppose, sans the “bohemian”) from Mississippi in 2000.2

    Impact on New Orleans Culture

    Many predicted that the 2005 deluge would wash away New Orleans’ sui generis character. Paradoxically, post-Katrina gentrifiers are simultaneously distinguishing and homogenizing local culture vis-à-vis American norms, depending on how one defines culture. By the humanist’s notion, the newcomers are actually breathing new life into local customs and traditions. Transplants arrive endeavoring to be a part of the epic adventure of living here; thus, through the process of self-selection, they tend to be Orleaneophilic “super-natives.” They embrace Mardi Gras enthusiastically, going so far as to form their own krewes and walking clubs (though always with irony, winking in gentle mockery at old-line uptown krewes). They celebrate the city’s culinary legacy, though their tastes generally run away from fried okra and toward “house-made beet ravioli w/ goat cheese ricotta mint stuffing” (I’m citing a chalkboard menu at a new Bywater restaurant, revealingly named Suis Generis, “Fine Dining for the People;” see Figure 2). And they are universally enamored with local music and public festivity, to the point of enrolling in second-line dancing classes and taking it upon themselves to organize jazz funerals whenever a local icon dies.

    By the anthropologist’s notion, however, transplants are definitely changing New Orleans culture. They are much more secular, less fertile, more liberal, and less parochial than native-born New Orleanians. They see local conservatism as a problem calling for enlightenment rather than an opinion to be respected, and view the importation of national and global values as imperative to a sustainable and equitable recovery. Indeed, the entire scene in the new Bywater eateries—from the artisanal food on the menus to the statement art on the walls to the progressive worldview of the patrons—can be picked up and dropped seamlessly into Austin, Burlington, Portland, or Brooklyn.


    Figure 2. “Fine Dining for the People:” streetscapes of gentrification in Bywater. Montage by Richard Campanella.

    A Precedent and a Hobgoblin

    How will this all play out? History offers a precedent. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, better-educated English-speaking Anglos moved in large numbers into the parochial, mostly Catholic and Francophone Creole society of New Orleans. “The Americans [are] swarming in from the northern states,” lamented one departing French official, “invading Louisiana as the holy tribes invaded the land of Canaan, [each turning] over in his mind a little plan of speculation”—sentiments that might echo those of displaced natives today.3 What resulted from the Creole/Anglo intermingling was not gentrification—the two groups lived separately—but rather a complex, gradual cultural hybridization. Native Creoles and Anglo transplants intermarried, blended their legal systems, their architectural tastes and surveying methods, their civic traditions and foodways, and to some degree their languages. What resulted was the fascinating mélange that is modern-day Louisiana.

    Gentrifier culture is already hybridizing with native ways; post-Katrina transplants are opening restaurants, writing books, starting businesses and hiring natives, organizing festivals, and even running for public office, all the while introducing external ideas into local canon. What differs in the analogy is the fact that the nineteenth-century newcomers planted familial roots here and spawned multiple subsequent generations, each bringing new vitality to the city. Gentrifiers, on the other hand, usually have very low birth rates, and those few that do become parents oftentimes find themselves reluctantly departing the very inner-city neighborhoods they helped revive, for want of playmates and decent schools. By that time, exorbitant real estate precludes the next wave of dynamic twenty-somethings from moving in, and the same neighborhood that once flourished gradually grows gray, empty, and frozen in historically renovated time. Unless gentrified neighborhoods make themselves into affordable and agreeable places to raise and educate the next generation, they will morph into dour historical theme parks with price tags only aging one-percenters can afford.

    Lack of age diversity and a paucity of “kiddie capital”—good local schools, playmates next door, child-friendly services—are the hobgoblins of gentrification in a historically familial city like New Orleans. Yet their impacts seem to be lost on many gentrifiers. Some earthy contingents even expresses mock disgust at the sight of baby carriages—the height of uncool—not realizing that the infant inside might represent the neighborhood’s best hope of remaining down-to-earth.

    Need evidence of those impacts? Take a walk on a sunny Saturday through the lower French Quarter, the residential section of New Orleans’ original gentrified neighborhood. You will see spectacular architecture, dazzling cast-iron filigree, flowering gardens—and hardly a resident in sight, much less the next generation playing in the streets. Many of the antebellum townhouses have been subdivided into pied-à-terre condominiums vacant most of the year; others are home to peripatetic professionals or aging couples living in guarded privacy behind bolted-shut French doors. The historic streetscapes bear a museum-like stillness that would be eerie if they weren’t so beautiful.

    Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of Bienville’s Dilemma, Geographies of New Orleans, Delta Urbanism, Lincoln in New Orleans, and other books. He may be reached through richcampanella.com, rcampane@tulane.edu, and nolacampanella on Twitter.

    ——–

    1 The years-long displacement opened up time and space for the ensuing racial and socio-economic transformations to gain momentum, which thence increased housing prices and impeded working-class households with families from resettling, or settling anew.

    2 These Census Bureau race and age figures are drawn from what most residents perceive to be the main section of Bywater, from St. Claude Avenue to the Mississippi River, and from Press Street to the Industrial Canal. Other definitions of neighborhood boundaries exist, and needless to say, each would yield differing statistics.

    3 Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge and New Orleans, 1978 translation of 1831 memoir), 103.

  • In California, Don’t Bash the ‘Burbs

    For the past century, California, particularly Southern California, nurtured and invented the suburban dream. The sun-drenched single-family house, often with a pool, on a tree-lined street was an image lovingly projected by television and the movies. Places like the San Fernando Valley – actual home to the "Brady Bunch" and scores of other TV family sitcoms – became, in author Kevin Roderick’s phrase, "America’s suburb."

    This dream, even a modernized, multicultural version of it, now is passé to California’s governing class. Even in his first administration, 1975-83, Gov. Jerry Brown disdained suburbs, promoting a city-first, pro-density policy. His feelings hardened during eight years (1999-2007) as mayor of Oakland, a city that, since he left, has fallen on hard times, although it has been treated with some love recently in the blue media.

    As state attorney general (2007-11) Brown took advantage of the state’s 2006 climate change legislation to move against suburban growth everywhere from Pleasanton to San Bernardino. Now back as governor, he can give full rein to his determination to limit access to the old California dream, curbing suburbia and forcing more of us and, even more so our successors, into small apartments nearby bus and rail stops. His successor as attorney general, former San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris, is, if anything, more theologically committed to curbing suburban growth.

    Sadly, much of the state’s development "community" has enlisted itself into the densification jihad. An influential recent report from the Urban Land Institute, for example, sees a "new California dream," which predicts huge growth in high-density development based on underlying demographic trends – like shifts in housing tastes among millennials or empty-nesters rushing to downtown condos.

    Yet it’s not enough for the planners, and their developer allies, to watch the market shift and take advantage of it. That would be both logical and justified. But the planning clerisy are not content to leave suburbia die; it must, instead, be cauterized and prevented, like some plague, from spreading.

    Ironically, it turns out that the "new California dream" is more widely shared by planners and rent-seeking developers than by the consuming public. During the past decade, when pro-density sentiment has supposedly building, some 80 percent of the new construction in the state was single-family, a rate slightly above the national average. Over time, Californians continue to buy single-family houses, mostly in the suburban and exurban periphery. They do it because they are like most Americans, roughly four of five of whom prefer single-family houses, preferably closer to work but, if that proves unaffordable, further out.

    This includes both working-class and upper middle-class markets. The more-affluent, including many largely Asian immigrants, have been willing to buy high-priced homes closer to employment centers in places like Irvine or Cupertino, near San Jose. Meanwhile, the less-affluent of all ethnicities continue to move further out, to places like the Inland Empire or the further reaches of the Bay Area. These peripheral areas have continued to represent the vast majority of growth in both greater Los Angeles and around the Bay Area.

    Meanwhile, some of the urban-centric residential construction now being put up will, as occurred in the housing bust, may be fashionable but, in some cases, not so profitable over time. Construction is being driven mostly by tax breaks, Uncle Ben’s essentially ultralow-interest money for wealthy investors and, in some cases, subsidies. Overall, the Wall Street Journal notes, the rental market is beginning to "lose steam," as people again start looking into buying homes. This may suggest that new speculative building in places like downtown Los Angeles – where there’s good evidence that rents and occupancy levels are, if anything, getting weaker – may end up in tears.

    To date, the anti-suburb jihad has been somewhat constrained by the recession and the collapse of the housing bubble about five years ago. But now that there’s an incipient housing recovery in parts of the state, including Orange County, the constraints could be problematical, particularly for younger buyers about to start a family or for people migrating into the state.

    The impact may be felt first in Silicon Valley and its environs. The planners now dominating the Bay Area want only highly dense bus-stop- or train-oriented development in the valley. Yet, notes real estate consultant John Burns, this does not reflect market realities marked by what they describe "as a resilient and ongoing preference for single-family homes."

    Even more fanciful, they are promoting high density in areas, far distant from current employment centers, in dreary locales like Newark, south of Oakland, claiming workers there will take public transit to jobs in the Valley. The belief among planners and some gullible developers that aging millennials will choose to live in high density, far from costly San Francisco or Palo Alto, and commute to work by transit is somewhat north of absurd; today, a bare 3 percent of workers in Silicon Valley get to work by transit, and downtown San Jose, the logical terminus of any transit strategy, is home to barely 26,000 of the region’s 860,000 workers.

    Some tech workers may put up with a few years of high rents and shared apartments in San Francisco or Palo Alto, but not many will want to live in expensive towers far from both Silicon Valley’s primary employers and the amenities of the big city. Apple’s plans for a new headquarters in Cupertino has drawn criticism from green-minded urbanists precisely because they rest on the sensible presumption that Apple’s workforce will remain largely suburban and car-oriented. One can also wonder the effect on the start-up culture when workers have been forced to live in places lacking the proverbial garage or extra bedroom that historically have nurtured new firms.

    More important still, forced densification, by denying single-family alternatives, is likely, and in some places, already is, spiking prices, which are up $85,000 in Silicon Valley in a year. This, over time, will force millennials, as they age, to look for other locales to meet their longtime aspirations. Generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, in their surveys, have found more than twice as many millennials prefer suburbs over dense cities as their "ideal place to live." The vast majority of 18-to-34-year-olds do not want to spend their lives as apartment renters; a study by TD Bank found that 84 percent of them hope to own a home.

    Much the same can be said of Asian immigrants, who are now driving much of the new-home sales, particularly in desirable places like Orange County or Silicon Valley. Nationwide, over the past decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by almost 2.8 million, or 53 percent, while the Asian population of core cities grew 770,000, 28 percent. In greater Los Angeles, there are now three times as many Asian suburbanites as their inner-city counterparts.

    If California is not willing to meet the needs of its own emerging middle class, there’s no doubt that other states, from Arizona and Texas to Tennessee – although not as fundamentally alluring – will be, and are already, more than happy to oblige.

    Rather than seeking to destroy our suburbs, California leaders should expend their energy figuring out how to make them better. Rather than some retro-1900s urbanist vision, they need to embrace the multipolarity of our urban agglomerations. They could look to preserve open space nearby, when possible, or cultivate natural areas, parks, walking and biking trails that would appeal to families as well as to singles.

    Instead of attempting to force employment into the center city, it would make more sense to expand home-based and dispersed work in order to cut down or eliminate commuting times. These moves would create both healthier suburbs and reduce carbon emissions without devastating the natural aspirations of most California families.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared in the Orange County Register.

    Suburb photo by BigStockPhoto.com.