New Geography

Category: Policy

  • Gentrification as an End Game, and the Rise of “Sub-Urbanity”

    “It took a bit of wind out of my sails, watching what happened in this neighborhood, watching how it happened…I don’t know how to beat this [gentrification]. I don’t know how anyone can beat this machine.”—From the article The Ins and Outs

    The Generalization of Gentrification

    The forces of gentrification are taking hold in America’s alpha cities. You can check the numbers or see the maps, but to get a good idea of its unprecedented rapidity, I’d suggest the blog Vanishing New York. There, you will see nearly each day the announcement of yet another old-school establishment losing the rent battle: Lenox Lounge in Harlem, Suzies Chinese Restaurant on Bleeker St., the Central Iron and Metal scrap yard below the High Line. And with the small-business soul of the city goes the regulars that gave places like New York City its identity before its global city branding.

    For instance, speaking about the closing of the Big Apple meat market in Hell’s Kitchen, writer Jeremiah Moss vents on the city’s whitewashing:

    The [Big Apple] exterior is wonderfully dreary, covered in graffiti and pigeon shit. Standing here, you could dream yourself into a lost New York. But not for long. It’s all coming down for more glass, more chain stores.

    A couple of years ago, the Times did a piece on Big Apple. The article includes a wonderful slideshow of photos, featuring the sort of person who shops at Big Apple, the sort of person that is also vanishing from New York, replaced by the svelte and distracted, the hollow men and women, tapping away at iPhones in sterilized Whole Foods aisles.



    Courtesy of The New York Times

    This is not a localized thing, as cities everywhere are grappling with the abruptness and consequences of such change. And while gentrification has been occurring here and there for decades, with community capital unwound on a street-by-street basis for higher returns and bigger tax receipts, the sheer push from above, like meat through a grinder, is now so systematic—and no longer personified by the Robert Moses’s of the world but by a kind of faceless force blowing a current of yield and tidiness in—that it has just become what is, with the late scholar Neil Smith referring to this latest iteration as the “generalization of gentrification”.

    In his article “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy”, Smith examines how gentrification has morphed from an unfortunate effect to an outright aim. One explanation for this relates to the ever-morphing private-public partnership in cities in which elected officials have forgone governing for investing, with policy no longer aspiring to guide economic growth but rather being crafted to “fit in the grooves” of market forces, particularly in the realm of real estate.

    Why real estate?

    Part of the reason is that economic leaders now primarily see Americans as consumers as opposed to producers, and so cities—particularly alpha dog global cities—have shifted their focus from payrolls to price per square feet, making real estate an increasingly important productive engine of cities as opposed to the productive capacity of the citizen. Enter, then, the volitional push of attracting as many creative class gentry as possible into the confines of a place, with real estate gimmicks—such as Mayor Bloomberg’s recent microapartment push—aimed at further squeezing blood from areas with far more density than available space.

    Does such wealth-packing inject capital into a given space? Yes. Is it a viable economic growth model? Wrote Aaron Renn in a recent New Geography piece:

    Indeed, all too much urbanism amounts to a sort of trickle down economics of the left, in which a “favored quarter” of artists, high end businesses, and the intelligentsia are plied with favors and subsidies while precious little ever makes it to those at the bottom rungs of society.

    This is not to disown the fact that global cities are economic engines in their own right. They are. It is only to state that their long-term economic growth prospects are being sold down the river at an exorbitant price. After all, people develop, not places.

    Gentrification of the Mind

    Allocating supply is one thing, but stoking the psychogeography of the creative class to want and squeeze into high-priced real estate is another. Historically, the common desire to move to an alpha dog city is to be where the action is. Moreover, NYC, Chicago and the like can graduate you. They can defang your limits while toiling the mind to the experiencing of new people and ideas. Said John Lennon:

    I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening.

    Yet this “if you can make it here you can make it anywhere” pull is arguably not what’s driving the generalization of gentrification. Rather, it is the idea of big city suburbanization, or more exactly: the hybridization of city “vitality” with the comforts of suburbanization, creating for a kind of third place called “sub-urbanity”.

    In many respects, this is not surprising, as the most recent “return-to-city” movement is largely fueled by younger suburbanites who are tired of missing out on big city action. Not the action per se of Charles Bukowski’s L.A. or Patti Smith’s New York, but the action of, well, Chandler, Kramer, and Carrie. Said Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Great Inversion and the Future of American Cities:

    This is the generation, don’t forget, that watched Seinfeld and Sex and the City and Friends – usually from sofas safe in the confines of the suburbs. I think they find suburban life less exciting than urban life. While they are in a single or childless situation, they’re particularly eager to try it.

    And try it they should: varied experiences make varied lives make more richly contextualized societies. But the rub here is that the mentality sewn from “the confines of the suburbs” is not being sacrificed for the beautifully unnerving experience that is “the real” of city life, but rather that creative class enclaves are increasingly being appropriated into the domesticated lifestyle embodied by traditional suburbia.

    Of course John Lennon’s Greenwich Village this is not. And this bodes ill for alpha dog cities in that vanilla-ing a people and a place is a death knell to collective urgency, if only because comfort puts to sleep the burn that has traditionally sparked the next generation of ideas. Writes Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination:

    Gentrification is a replacement process. So it is where diversity is replaced by homogeneity, and this, I believe, undermines urbanity and changes the way we think because we have much less access to a wide variety of points of view. We are diminished by it. So literally, the range of our mind’s reach is much more limited because of gentrification.

    But again: lest we think this is all a mistake, or simply the byproducts of shifting demographics or economic and cultural change. Rather, it is the point. It is today’s path toward urban renaissance. And it’s a path creating for a “sub-urbanity” that is emerging when the generalization of gentrification meets the gentrification of the mind.

    So, what does this mean for the future of urban development? My guess is that there will be a growing unhappiness with sub-urbanity that’s going to create for a lot of people left wanting, be they young suburbanites longing for urban authenticity or indigenous urbanites who are tired of the schtick. As such, cities would do well to prepare for the “return-of-the-city movement”, which means prioritizing urban integrity and community capital against the temptations of the gentrifying machine.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Lead photo by Liz Ferla, flickr user lism.

  • Britain’s Housing Crisis: The Places People Live

    For twenty years British house building has fallen behind demand, forcing up prices and rents. Here’s a series of photos showing some of the things people have had to do to live.

    Victoria Campbell was living in a shed in her parents’ garden in Havant, while she and her fiance saved up for a deposit, but the Council has told her that she has to move out.



    This family in Plashet Park have been living in a shed for some time.


    In East London, council officers are going checking out garden sheds to make sure that they are not being rented out, as they check too to see if houses are over-occupied.

    In Caledonian Road, super-exploiting landlord Andrew Panayi converted unprofitable shops into money-making flats, and decided to convert their cellars into more flats.


    This is the flats’ skylight, outside.



    This is the passage and stairway down to the flats.



    This is the underground landing with the flats’ front doors.



    And this is the interior.

    These garden sheds in Southall have been turned into homes, and ones like them are rented out to labourers.

    Carl Bond and Stacey Drinkwater converted a double-decker bus for somewhere to live.

    In Crystal Palace Laura Park lives in this converted public toilet.

    Many people have tried to evade the planning laws that stop people from building, but disguising homes as sheds or barns.

    Alan and Sarah Beesely built their home inside a barn, as you can see from the skylights. They were told by the council to knock it down.

    Carl Jones built this garage, but building inspectors decided it was really a house, and told him to take it down.

    So too this toolshed in a garden centre in Stroud was found to be a home, and ordered was ordered to come down.

    In the Pembrokshire National Park Brithdir Moor, Janet and Tony Wrench built the Roundhouse, which was also ordered taken down.

    For years now housebuilders in Britain have failed to build enough homes for people to live in.

    We were told that more homes would encroach on the ‘green belt’ and the countryside. Foolish commentators like Simon Jenkins and Tristram Hunt warned – laughably – of a ‘Tsunami of concrete’ threatening the countryside. Powerful lobbies like the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Urban Taskforce and the Green Party did all they could to stop new building. But it turns out that less than one tenth of Britain is developed.

    Instead of developing the land we need government and municipal authorities said that they would ‘build up, not out’, and that they could get more people, into less space, by more compact, smart growth. At the time the development advocacy Audacity told them that this could only lead to overcrowding, and that their ‘smart growth’ would take us back to Victorian social problems.

    Today, more people are willing to acknowledge that there is a problem with a shortage of affordable housing – but too few are willing to grasp the nettle and say we need to build many, many more houses to meet housing need.

    Some commentators have made the point that there should be council housebuilding to meet the need. Others that the planning laws should be liberalised so that private developers can build. Both of those would be a good idea, but neither should be turned into a dogma that must be observed before new homes are built. The issue is that however it is done, Britain needs to build the houses that people need to live in.

    James Heartfield’s book Let’s Build! Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the next 10 Years is available from Amazon.

  • Prescription for an Ailing California

    Only a fool, or perhaps a politician or media pundit, would say California is not in trouble, despite some modest recent improvements in employment and a decline in migration out of the state. Yet the patient, if still very sick, is curable, if the right medicine is taken, followed by the proper change in lifestyle regimen.

    The first thing necessary: Identify the root cause of California’s maladies. The biggest challenge facing our state is not climate change, or immigration, corporate greed, globalization or even corruption. It’s the demise of upward mobility for the vast majority of Californians, and the rise of an increasingly class-ridden, bifurcated society.

    California’s class problem spills into virtually every aspect of our malaise. It is reflected in both the nation’s highest poverty rate, above 23 percent, and a leviathan welfare state; California, with roughly 12 percent of the population, now accounts for roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. This burgeoning underclass exacerbates the demand for public services, deprives the state of potential taxpayers and puts enormous pressure on the private sector middle-class to come up with revenue.

    The growing class chasm also distorts state priorities, creating an inordinate demand for public sector employment – and related jobs in health and education – while inculcating deep-seated resentment among private-sector entrepreneurs and professionals toward a state that asks much of them, but gives increasingly little.

    Conservatives generally have recoiled from a class-based analysis, hoping to play on ethnic or cultural fears to advance their agenda of lower taxes and less regulation. Their incoherence and inability to adjust to changing demographics have left them increasingly irrelevant.

    On the other hand, progressives feel comfortable with class as an issue, but see more regulation and ever higher taxes on the private sector as the solution. Yet the experience of the past decade has shown their folly, as California’s middle class has continued to shrink, and poverty has worsened, particularly in the state’s interior. The dangers of a large permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed should be clear even to the most dreamy progressive.

    Essentially, there is only one practical solution to this dilemma: a program that promotes economic growth. This strategy would transcend the recent reliance on asset-based bubbles that have boosted property markets and technology stocks. Another bubble, whether an investor-driven spike in property values in Newport Beach or a stock mania in Silicon Valley, may provide a temporary boost in revenue but will do very little to improve employment for the vast majority or to stabilize long-term finances.

    The recent surge in tech employment in places like Silicon Valley is neither likely to persist or improve conditions for many Californians. The days of huge employment gains in Silicon Valley – where jobs more than tripled from 1970-2000 – are over. Even in the current boom, the Valley’s employment remains down from a decade ago, and the rest of the state is doing decidedly worse. Social media simply will never be a major job producer or productivity enhancer; Facebook has 4,300 American employees, while old-line firms, like Intel, which have been shifting employment out of the state, have 10 times as many.

    Other proposed bromides, like Gov. Jerry Brown’s promised 500,000 "green jobs," need to be dismissed for what they are – stories we tell our children so they will fall asleep. High-speed rail, another modern-day Moonbeam program, is seen, even by many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, as an "ever more ridiculous" boondoggle based on "jaw-droppingly shameless" assumptions.

    Instead of delusion, California needs policies that can boost economic growth in precisely those areas – construction, agriculture, manufacturing and energy – with the best prospects for creating good, high-paying jobs for both blue- and white-collar Californians. Yet, right now the Legislature and, even more so, the empowered state apparat, seem determined to do everything they can to strangle an incipient recovery in these industries.

    Sadly, much of this is done in the name of the environment, but often based on dubious assumptions. Laws that seek to reduce water allocations to the Central Valley are justified as protecting a bait fish, but create windswept new deserts, along with shocking poverty, in the state hinterland. It is no longer enough to protect the still-wild environment; mankind itself must be pushed away from areas that, in some cases, for generations, has provided food for the world, income for families and revenue to the state.

    Concerns over climate change have justified much of the state’s regulatory tsunami. Yet it is absurd to assert that California by itself can change global climate conditions in any meaningful way, given that the big increases of carbon emissions are all coming from the developing world; overall, America’s emissions already are dropping far more quickly than in other high-income parts of the world, largely due to the natural gas boom.

    Yet such mundanities matter little when our greatest policy goal seems to be to make the regulatory apparat, Hollywood and Silicon Valley moguls and their favored nonprofits feel better about themselves; if it provides job opportunity for zealots or the rent-seeking kind for favored venture capitalists and companies like Google, all the better.

    Worse, the consequences of these policies, such as soaring energy prices, likely will not be felt in Portola Valley, Corona del Mar or Pacific Palisades, but, rather, in Santa Ana, Modesto and Oakland. Our regulatory regime already has cost California the opportunity to cash in on two significant booms – in manufacturing and in fossil fuel energy – that are creating middle-income job opportunities and upward mobility in other parts of the country.

    On the environmental side, these policies could have an overall negative effect by driving both people and industries to areas that, because of climate and regulatory environment in their new homes, likely will expand their carbon footprint. Arguably the best thing California can do to reduce global carbon emissions would be to boost its industrial profile. The state also should be leading the shift to natural gas, which California, a potentially big player, so far largely has refused to join.

    Another great opportunity lies in housing, a key source of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Population growth may have slowed, but the pent-up demand, largely from immigrants and millennials, for single-family homes, remains potentially strong. If the supply was increased, and prices moderated, homebuying would become more attractive for families with children. Emissions could be cut in more family-friendly ways, by encouraging more fuel-efficient cars, the dispersion of industry and, most particularly, telecommuting.

    Sparking the revival of these basic industries and higher-wage employment would enhance California’s budget situation over time far more than increasing taxes on the remaining residue of entrepreneurs and professionals. Energy work, in particular, pays high wages, often more than for many tech jobs, and both manufacturing and construction generally provide higher incomes than the low-wage service work that has become the only option for millions of Californians.

    Getting kids from the Central Valley or East Los Angeles working on housing sites, factories and energy facilities is both the most humane, and practical, way to right our fiscal ship. Growth in these industries would also spur the knowledge sector of the economy; many of the strongest gains in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) jobs in recent years have occurred in manufacturing regions, such as Detroit, or in the energy belt, notably Houston. California’s technical know-how should not be expended simply on developing computer games and social networks; resuscitating the tangible economy would also diversify employment opportunities for the highly skilled.

    Government can play a critical, even determinative, role here. But it needs to shift priorities from redistribution and wealth suppression to providing the basic infrastructure essential for a growth economy. It means transforming our education system from a jobs and pension program for public sector workers and corporate rent-seekers to a focus on providing our economy with the skills – including those used in basic industries – needed for a revived California. It means spending money on the kind of infrastructure, such as gas pipelines, roads, urban bus lines, water and energy systems, that can spur growth instead of misallocations such as high-speed rail and subsidized green energy boondoggles.

    This back-to-basics approach could restore California’s aspirational promise, and not only for a favored few in a handful of favored places, but for the majority of our people, from the mountains to the sea.

    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.

  • Detroit Future City

    Recently the Detroit Works Project released their long awaited strategic plan for the city. This is the one led by Toni Griffin that produced a lot of public controversy because of suggestions it would result in the planned shrinkage or decommissioning (or even forced residential relocations) in sparsely populated neighborhoods.

    Called “Detroit Future City,” this plan doesn’t shy away from facing the tough realities that face Detroit, but its recommendations are somewhat muted with regards to shrinkage. Nevertheless, the message is clear: in a broke, declining city, neighborhood triage is a must.

    The full document is 184 pages. I perused it, but wasn’t able to review at the level of detail I normally like to. Partially this is because it was published in a hyper-annoying “cinemascope” type format that makes it almost impossible to read on screen without magnification and lots of horizontal scrolling. This aspect of the plan’s publication was an immediate knock against it in my view. However, it will share a few observations I gleaned.

    Neighborhood Development

    The plan is notable for admitting that Detroit can never be repopulated. In fact, its only goal is to stabilize population loss 20 years from now, and settle in for a population of 600-800,000 people, or approximately the same as now.

    The plan is frank about the scale of the challenges, including 150,000 vacant and abandoned parcels, empty land equal to the area of Manhattan, and vastly oversized infrastructure relative to the population and industrial base, along with poor service delivery in areas ranging from public safety (Detroit has the second highest violent crime rate in the country) to street lighting (about half of the street lights don’t work).

    Part of that does involve identifying how to deploy infrastructure in neighborhoods. Here’s a graphic on that which will no doubt get some airplay:



    Some areas are slated for upgrades, others reductions, and some perhaps “decommissioning.”

    The strength of the plan, however, is in its approach to development in which the core concept is to develop a multi-nodal network of neighborhoods, and to have neighborhoods that are strategically differentiated from each others. This is very different from the core-centric or “hub and spoke” model that exists today, and is somewhat similar to my “100 Monument Cirles” concept for Indianapolis. Suffice it to say, I like it. What was missing from this was strengthening neighborhood identify, something Pete Saunders identified as a key weakness of the city.

    A lot of the content behind this is disappointingly standard, however. The focus is green infrastructures, transit, mixed use neighborhoods, etc. This is basically planning conventional wisdom that would be at home in lots of different cities.

    I was pleased to see that they de-emphasized rail transit. Only the M-1 light rail on Woodward remains. The rest of the core network would be BRT. I’d argue that reliable and higher frequency “plain old bus service” is the core need, however. There’s the proposed transit map:



    Some may decry this, but in a city that’s over-infrastructured as it is, the last thing you need is more physical plant to maintain over time.

    And perhaps the focus on green is to some extent understandable given the vast quantity of vacant land in Detroit. One of their intriguing concepts is “landscape as infrastructure”, though it didn’t fully connect with me. They did talk about ideas like medium intensity agriculture and new urban forest typologies. The Hanzt Farm example shows this already underway.

    Lastly, the focus, and especially the near term recommendations around, regulatory restructuring is critical. Detroit benefits today from a sort of laissez-faire environment because government is so ineffective. If government effectiveness were restored, it could easily strangle the good things happening in Detroit, which are largely non-conforming. The answer is to get the regulatory system up to date with what we want to see. I would have preferred to see some types of harder targets around this, such as “85% of new development approved as of right.”

    Economic Development

    The plan considers boosting the number of jobs in Detroit as the most important mission. The city today has the 5th lowest number of jobs per resident of any of the top 100 cities in America, this despite large population losses. Jobs in the city are needed both for residents and rebuild the tax base.

    The numbers on this seemed a bit squishy though. The report says that there is one job for ever four residents of Detroit. As there are about 700,000 residents, this would mean about 175,000 jobs. Yet they say there are 350,000 jobs. (If the resident figure included only working age adults, the projected number of current jobs would be even lower than my estimate).

    The goal by 2030 is to increase this to between 2 and 3 jobs for every resident. This implies simply staggering job growth. Their mid-point population estimate for 2030 is still 700,000, so to go from 0.25/1 to 2/1 or 3/1 implies 700-1100% job growth. This is a CAGR of 11-13% – off the charts. To put it in perspective, metro Houston’s job growth CAGR from 2000 to 2011 was only 1.3%.

    I may be totally off base on what they were getting at in these numbers, but having solid and realistic projections is critical, and, alas, all too rare. Unrealistic growth rate assumptions are common in civic plans, as I highlighted in the example of Cincinnati’s Agenda 360 plan.

    [ Update: I was contacted by someone from the study’s technical committee indicating that the 2 or 3 jobs per resident figure was an error in the PDF that was not present in the official version of the plan. There are apparently about 193,000 jobs in the city, with the plans actual goal a doubling of that over 30 years. Still ambitious, but not mathematically impossible. ]

    The job growth is projected to come from four key target sectors: eds and meds, digital and creative, industrial, and local entrepreneurship. These sectors are reasonable as these things go given where Detroit is, but seem unlikely to drive the major growth they seek, excepting possibly entrepreneurship.

    Neither Wayne State nor Detroit’s health care/life science infrastructure is nation leading. Every city and state in America is chasing eds and meds, and as I noted, the great growth curve in these industries may be over. Additionally, the trend nationally seems to be towards more decentralization of health care infrastructure in metro areas. While I’m sure there will be some growth here, I’m not optimistic about major expansion.

    Similarly, digital and creative jobs are the fad du jour. I strongly doubt anyone will even consider there to be categories of jobs called “digital” or “creative” by 2030. These will be absorbed into industry generally. These are also the same types of sectors being pursued everywhere. Detroit certainly has a concentration of these because of its auto design cluster and just simply being a big city. But other than autos, does it really have a competitive advantage here? The big expansion opportunity would seem to be mostly suburban relocations of the type spearheaded by Dan Gilbert. I wonder how much gas is left in that tank, however.

    The other two are more promising. Local entrepreneurship is a catch-all, but clearly indigenous startups are a great way to boost the economy. The report’s focus on equipping and facilitating minority entrepreneurship was especially relevant. Given the collapse of the city, Detroit’s residents have had to become innovative and self-sufficient of necessity. These skills from the school of hard knocks are in many ways worth much more than formal education when it comes to starting a business. If the city can figure out how to marry these “survival skills” of residents with a commercial orientation, it could be powerful. The same recipe of figuring how to do business in unstable and tough environments is common in the Middle East, where there’s a longstanding entrepreneurial and trading tradition. Unsurprisingly, Middle Easterners have been prominent among those who’ve thrived in Detroit. The challenge is how to activate the similar skills in other ethnicities for business purposes.

    Industrial employment would also seem to be a possible area of growth, but not in the way envisioned in this plan. Industrial employment has been in decline, and new industrial facilities have tended to locate in outlying areas, not traditional urban manufacturing zones.

    However, there are types of industrial businesses that can have a hard time finding a home. For places that are willing to welcome them, there could be opportunity. I noted this around the heavy industrial zone in Northwest Indiana.

    This involves being willing to take on more brown than green industry, however. And it raises a whole host of issues around environmental justice, etc. However, Detroit, as this plan notes, is desperate for jobs. Trade-offs at least need to be considered. Rather than “focusing on the look and feel” of industrial areas, as the plan put it, why not roll out the red carpet for businesses like tanneries, scrap metal processing, etc. that are increasingly unwelcome in places like Chicago? Being friendly to to these types of businesses is probably the most likely road to success in industrial employment.

    Conclusion

    On first read, there’s some interesting stuff in here. They plan is less creative than I’d hoped overall, but probably takes the most aggressive line that was politically realistic. The real questions is, what happens next? Can any of this actually be actioned, or will fiscal and other problems effectively render it a dead letter? Only time will tell.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

  • Applying the Urbanophile’s Beliefs About Cities to Houston

    Last month The Urbanophile posted his statement of beliefs about cities, and a lot of them resonated with me about Houston.  Here are some favorite excerpts along with my own thoughts.

    * Great cities, like great wines, have to express their terroir. There is no one-size-fits-all model of urban success. Our cities are as diverse as their citizenry. To succeed, they need to express their own essential and unique character.  

     This is why you always have to be skeptical when somebody says something like "For Houston to be world class we have to do X like city Y."  I believe that especially applies to heavy rail commuter transit in our decentralized, car-based city, but it also applies to recent questions like "Why can’t Houston have downtown retail like Chicago’s Magnificent Mile or New York’s Fifth Avenue?"  Because we’re not like them, and we already have our pedestrian-oriented upscale shopping district: it’s called The Galleria, one of the largest malls in the country, and with plenty of parking and climate control to boot!

    * Don’t try to beat other cities at their game. Instead, make them beat you at yours. Cities are unique – yours included. Instead of fretting about measuring up to the planet’s elite metropoli or trying to emulate them, cities should figure out their unique strengths that other places can’t match.

    Hear, hear! To quote an old post of mine: "Houston starts the 21st-century with a set of amenities 99% of the planet’s cities would kill for: a vibrant core with several hundred thousand jobs; a profitable and growing set of major industry clusters (Energy, the Texas Medical Center, the Port); the second-most Fortune 500 headquarters in the country (26); top-notch museums, festivals, theater, arts and cultural organizations; major league sports and stadiums; a revitalized downtown; astonishing affordability (especially housing); a culture of openness, friendliness, opportunity, and charity (reinforced by Katrina); global diversity; a young and growing population; progressiveness; entrepreneurial energy and optimism; efficient and business-friendly local government; regional unity; a smorgasbord of tasty and inexpensive international restaurants; and tremendous mobility infrastructure (including the freeway and transit networks, railroads, the port, and a set of truly world-class hub airports)."

    * It says something powerful about a city when people vote with their feet to move there, to plant their flag, to seek their fortune. There is no more telling statistic about a place than in-migration. It’s important to know if people are moving into or out of a city–and why.

    The most ignored statistic of the creative class city boosters, because their idols – NYC, Boston, Chicago, SF, LA – fail horribly on it.

    * Moreover, new blood isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential. In an ever-more globalized, rapidly changing, competitive world, a city’s best interests are not served by being populated with people who’ve never lived anywhere else.

     Points for our global diversity.

    * But it isn’t just about the best and brightest, either. Attracting the educated is important, but cities are also where the poor come to become middle class, where immigrants come to build a better future for themselves and their families. Their needs must be taken up, too–and equally.

    Hallelujah for Opportunity Urbanism (and more here).

    * A great city needs great suburbs. To pull our cities up, there’s no need to tear our suburbs down. To be successful in the modern era, its important for every part of a metropolitan region to thrive and bring its “A game”. 

    * “Building on assets” is a trap. The only reason we have any man-made assets in the first place is that previous generations of leaders didn’t follow that strategy. Only building on assets is a strategy about defending the past, not embracing the future. It is the spending down of our urban inheritance. Yes, leverage assets, but also add totally new things to the pot for future generations.

    Absolutely.

    * We need to look forward, not backward. There is no more corrosive force than nostalgia. We should know where we’ve come from and what we stand for. But we can’t become imprisoned by a yearning for an imagined past that never really was.

    * We need to embrace a 21st century vision of urbanism. Urbanism – Yes, but trying to copy Greenwich Village 1950 is not the answer. To find it, we must boldly re-imagine the possibilities of what a city can be and bravely identify what works today-and what doesn’t.

    Yep – time to rethink Jane Jacobs.

    * We don’t know where this ride is taking us. We’re at a pivotal time in America’s urban history. So much is changing, and more change is yet to come. For our own sake, we should not assume that we’ve arrived where we’re headed, or that we have the answers. If there’s one thing we should take away from the urban planning failures of the past, it is a strong dose of humility.

    "Planning for utopia" doesn’t work.  Cities need the freedom to evolve organically.

    This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies.

  • Demographic and Economic Challenges: The 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey

    The just released 9th Annual Demographia Housing Affordability Survey (pdf) indicates that housing affordability has deteriorated modestly in the last year. A number of major metropolitan areas remain severely unaffordable.

    Highlights: Metropolitan Areas

    Among the 337 Metropolitan markets analyzed, Hong Kong remained the most unaffordable, with a median multiple (median house price divided by pre-tax median household income) of 13.5, up nearly a full point from last year’s 12.6. No other housing market has ever reached such an intense level of unaffordability since the Survey began (Los Angeles reached 11.5 in 2007).

    Rounding out the least affordable major markets (over 1,000,000 population) were Vancouver at 9.5, Sydney at 8.3, San Jose (US) at 7.9, and a tie in fifth place between San Francisco and London (Greater London Authority) at 7.8. The most affordable markets were Detroit at 1.5 (Note 1); Atlanta, at 2.0 (Note 2); and Cincinnati, Rochester (US), and St. Louis at 2.5 (Figure 1).

    Rating Housing Affordability

    The Demographia Housing Affordability Surveydefines four housing affordability categories (Table 1), starting with "affordable." Affordable housing markets have a median multiple of 3.0 or less, the upper bound of overall housing affordability that existed virtually across all major markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand before the adoption of urban containment policy (also called densification policy, urban consolidation, compact cities, smart growth, or growth management).

     

    Table 1

    Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey

    Housing Affordability Rating Categories

    Rating

    Median Multiple

    Severely Unaffordable

    5.1 & Over

    Seriously Unaffordable

    4.1 to 5.0

    Moderately Unaffordable

    3.1 to 4.0

    Affordable

    3.0 & Under

     

     

    Highlights: Nations

    Of all nations, only the United States has affordable major markets and a strong representation in the moderately unaffordable category. Six major markets in the United States were rated in the severely unaffordable category, including San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and New York.

    Canada had two markets rated moderately unaffordable, while one half of its major markets were rated severely unaffordable, including Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal. Ireland’s one major market, Dublin, was rated moderately unaffordable.

    One half of the major markets in the United Kingdom were also rated severely unaffordable, including London (GLA), Plymouth & Devon, the London Exurbs (Southeast and East of England), Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, and Sheffield. All of the major markets in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide), China (Hong Kong), and New Zealand (Auckland) were rated severely unaffordable (Table 2).

    Hong Kong and Singapore are the world’s largest city-states. An analysis of a large share of the Singapore market suggests a median multiple of approximately 6.0, which is substantially more affordable than Hong Kong.

    Table 2

    Housing Affordability Ratings by Nation: Major Markets (Over 1,000,000 Population)

     Nation

    Affordable

    (3.0 & Under) 

    Moderately

    Unaffordable (3.1-4.0)

    Seriously Unaffordable (4.1-5.0)

    Severely Unaffordable (5.1 & Over)

     

     

    Total

     

    Median

    Multiple

     Australia

    0

    0

    0

    5

    5

    6.5

     Canada

    0

    2

    1

    3

    6

    4.7

     China (Hong Kong)

    0

    0

    0

    1

    1

    13.5

     Ireland

    0

    1

    0

    0

    1

    3.6

     New Zealand

    0

    0

    0

    1

    1

    6.7

     United Kingdom

    0

    0

    8

    8

    16

    5.1

     United States

    20

    20

    5

    6

    51

    3.2

     TOTAL

    20

    23

    14

    24

    81

     

     

    Longer Term Trends

    Over the years of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, housing affordability has improved by far the most in Ireland. It has also improved in the United States. Affordability in Canada’s major markets was the most favorable in 2004, but has seen large Median Multiple increases in each of the three largest metropolitan areas. As a result, there is increasing concern about housing affordability in Canada.

    Australia and New Zealand have had the most unaffordable major markets, with every market being severely unaffordable in every year, reflecting earlier adoption of densification policy by states and metropolitan areas. Housing affordability has also been severely unaffordable in United Kingdom major markets over the period covered (Figure 2).

    A Competitive Land Supply: Key to Housing Affordability

    Overwhelming economic evidence indicates that urban containment policies, especially urban growth boundaries raise the price of housing relative to income. This inevitably leads to a reduced standard of living and increases poverty rates, because the unnecessarily higher costs of housing leave households with less discretionary income to spend on other goods and services. The higher costs ripple into rental markets, tightening the budgets of lower income households, who already suffer from lower discretionary incomes.

    The principal driver of unaffordable housing relative to median incomes is failure to maintain a "competitive land supply." Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs describes the process, noting that more urban growth boundaries can convey monopolistic pricing power on sellers of land if sufficient supply is not available, which, all things being equal, is likely to raise the price of land and housing that is built on it. This has, more often than not, been associated with urban containment policy and virtually never with the more liberal land use policy that preceded it.

    Recent Policy Developments

    The last year has seen public policy progress. The New Zealand central government plans to expand the land supply and provide alternatives for infrastructure finance, both of which are likely to lead to improved housing affordability. In his Introduction to this years’ Survey, Hon. Bill English, Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand pinpoints the factors leading to the policy changes:

    It costs too much and takes too long to build a house in New Zealand. 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.

    The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition is proposing policies to build housing on more competitively priced land, to improve housing affordability. Planning Minister Nick Boles has called Britain’s lack of housing affordability "the biggest social justice crisis we have," and called it bigger than education and unemployment (video). These proposals have been long in coming. It has been four decades since Sir Peter Hall and associates documented the consequences of urban containment, and nearly a decade since the similar conclusions of Kate Barker for the Labour Government.

    In Hong Kong, facing public demonstrations on issues such as housing affordability, the government has adopted a plan to improve housing affordability.

    However, the policy is deteriorating in California, where state regulations could virtually outlaw new single-family housing on the urban fringe. In the last year housing affordability losses have been substantial and could portend another housing bubble in this state that precipitated Great Financial Crisis with its egregious house price increases.

    Evolving Perspectives

    Planning perspectives could be evolving. New York University Professor Shlomo Angel writes in his book Planet of Cities of the importance of housing affordability and argues against urban planning restrictions that restricting adequate housing to ordinary households.

    A team of UK academic researchers questioned the "default" preference for urban containment policy. This is an important development, since much of urban planning is committed to outlawing more liberal land-use policies.

    The Economic Challenge

    Nations around the world face serious economic challenges. Governments have taken on unaffordable obligations, and repayment continues to elude authorities in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. Future demographic trends are likely to only exacerbate this difficulty, driven by plummeting birth rates and a rising elderly population (See The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future?).

    Urban policy needs a "reset." The emphasis should be shifted away from "designing" urban areas toward facilitating a better standard of living for the people who live in them. In his epic Civilization: The West and the Rest, historian Niall Ferguson, in his Civilization notes that

    The success of the civilization is measured not just in its aesthetic achievements but also, and surely more importantly in the duration and quality of life of its citizens.

    This requires greater affluence and less poverty, both of which require more affordable housing.

    —–

    Note 1: The city of Detroit has experienced a severe economic decline. However, the Detroit metropolitan area (which includes the city, the suburbs and exurbs) has fared much better. The city (municipality or local government authority of Detroit experienced a population loss from 1,850,000 to 714,000 in the last 60 years, while suburban and exurban areas added 2.2 million. There are a variety of theories about Detroit’s municipal decline, involving both "push" and "pull" factors (such as the incompetence and corruption of the municipal government to the not unrelated attraction of suburban living).  Further, the overall population growth rate of the Detroit metropolitan area has not been strong, but exceeded that of the other three worst hit "Rust Belt metropolitan areas, Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburgh (which lost population). Metropolitan Detroit’s growth rate was similar to that of the New York metropolitan area (35 percent compared to 42 percent), which ranked 46th in growth (out of 51) compared to Detroit’s 48th.

    Note 2: At the peak of the housing bubble, affordability deteriorated to a moderately unaffordable 3.1 in Atlanta. Atlanta had been among the high income world’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas for at least three decades, but slowed briefly during the Great Financial Crisis. Growth has returned, with Atlanta ranking third in net domestic migration among US metropolitan areas with more than 5 million population.

    —-

    Photograph: Hong Kong (by author)

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Rust Belt Cities: Invest in Odysseus, Not Barney Fife

    Given its legacy of shrinking, the Rust Belt has issues. The issues arose naturally, and relate to the fact things leave, or that so much has left. Particularly, when things leave, the mind—both the individual and the collective city mind—can get protective and restrictive. Neediness arises. The smell of desperation ensues like a pall that can tend to hang over cities, influencing decision making on all levels.

    Enter “brain drain”, or that term coined to refer to the outmigration of an area’s educated citizens, particularly it’s young. You know the drill: Johnny goes to State college, comes back home for a spell, but then leaves Cleveland, Ohio for Chicago or New York. That is brain drain. And city leaders hate it, spending billions of dollars to stop it—often at the cost of coming off ridiculous, lame.

    For instance, in Pittsburgh, there was a civic booster campaign thought up to keep educated folks from going. It was called “Boarder Guard Bob”. According to researcher Chris Briem, “Bob” was a Smokey-the-Bear-type of public service announcement made into a Barney Fife character, with the billboard-size messaging of “Bob” intended to “stop young people at Western Pennsylvania’s borders before they had a chance to leave for other cities”. And while this particular retention strategy (luckily) never went to print, various “plug the brain drain” strategies persist in one form or another at exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

    But beyond the near-pitiful messaging, there are major problems with the brain drain approach, especially from an economic development perspective. For example, when, as a community, you are intentionally telling your citizen’s not to go, you are asking them to sacrifice personal development for the benefit of a place. To this point, my colleague, Jim Russell—a leading thinker in brain drain boondoggles and blogger at Burgh Diaspora—says it best, stating: “Discouraging geographic mobility is the same as restricting access to higher education”. In other words, it’s like telling Johnny to stick with his high school diploma so as to forego leaving the community for a 4-year degree.

    What’s more, getting people to stay put does little to grow a local economy. In fact it hurts it. Because leaving home is often a rite of passage. It develops a person. I mean, can you imagine if there was no odyssey in the epic Odyssey? If so, Odysseus wouldn’t be the changed man with perspective and experience as he was when he returned back to his homeland, and so there’d be no “there” there. In this sense, the Rust Belt needs to engage their young to embark on their own “Hero Journey” if only to gain skills and broaden geographic connections. This is international economics 101 (see China, India, Brazil, etc.). It should be a domestic economic priority for the Rust Belt, and it would be if only the Cleveland’s of the world could let go of the protectionism that defines their longstanding existential fears of shrinking into one big pile of ruin porn.

    Of course confidently encouraging outmigration is part and parcel with an understanding that many expats will “boomerang” back. But many are, and at a faster rate. To wit: as the alpha cities of the America like NYC get too expensive or creatively-class cute, many Rust Belt refugees are pivoting back from a certain left-wanting lifestyle if only for the opportunity, tradition, and honest-to-god reality that is “Rust Belt Chic”. And when they do, they often become “economic ass kickers”, which is term Russell uses to exemplify the fruits of the Hero Journey that is not only individually experienced, but felt in the local economy as well.

    Take Sean Watterson, the co-proprietor of the wildly successful restaurant the Happy Dog on Cleveland’s Near West Side. He moved back from D.C. because, according to a recent Plain Dealer article, “Cleveland-ness is like Polish-ness or Irish-ness. It’s an ethnicity”. Here, Watterson not only runs a great hot dog business, but uses his establishment to advance a circulation of ideas by hosting a variety of events like “Life, the Universe, and Hot Dogs”, which is a series hosted by researchers from the Institute for the Society of Origins. Another big hit is the live performances by members of the Cleveland Orchestra called Classical Revolutions.

    Cool sounding events, sure. But there is more to it than that, as such happenings spark cross-fertilization between parts of Cleveland—the blue collar West Side and the intelligentsia of the East Side—that have long been divided, often at the cost of Cleveland as a place of cultural and economic innovation. And how exactly does Watterson’s own “Hero Journey” come into play in his self-stated goal to break down barriers “between east and west and between high culture and low culture”? It likely relates to the fact he experienced experience outside of a legacy city bubble that enabled him to see and cross bridges that others have difficulty envisioning.

    Now, does this mean that cities simply need to let people leave to prosper? Obviously not. If the place expats are boomeranging back to is stagnant and disparate, with openness and connection disabled by a collective insular mentality that: “that’s just the way things are done around here”, well, the boomeranging effect won’t hold. And the economic ass-kickers won’t ass-kick.

    The goal, then, of cities should be on fostering return migrant connections, or to know who they are, why they are there, and to help get them together so that their collective unchained perspective can pop bubbles of inert status quo. This need is real. For instance, take this first-hand return migrant account published in Rust Belt Chic by Dana Marie Textoris:

    Funny how your location-based identity, your physical and mental place in the world, can flip like a switch: Before I was a Clevelander managing to make it in San Francisco….right now I feel a lot like a San Franciscan stuck in Cleveland. In either place, I felt just a little bit Other. A bit of a novelty. Just a tad on the outside looking in. Where does that leave me? Where is home? As I type this, I realize, with sort of an internal groan, that the place I’m left in, the guide to what I’m searching for, is probably just right here, inside me, where my two lives — West Coast and Midwest — are now combined. I’m not really a true Clevelander anymore…I’ve picked up way too much San Francisco for that. The balance I’ve become, a little of this and that, is just what I’m hoping I’ll find, one day.

    So, to all Rust Belt cities—this is where your attention must be turned: not on the ones who are leaving for good reason, but on those returning who have not left for good. They have brought the path of their self-discovery back to your doorstep.

    Don’t close the door by screaming at the backs of others.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

  • Demography as Destiny: The Vital American Family

    Recent reports of America’s sagging birthrate ‑ the lowest since the 1920s, by some measures ‑ have sparked a much-needed debate about the future of the American family. Unfortunately, this discussion, like so much else in our society, is devolving into yet another political squabble between conservatives and progressives.

    Conservatives, including the Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last, regularly cite declining birth and marriage rates as one result of expanding government ‑ and a threat to the right’s political survival. Progressives, meanwhile, have labeled attempts to commend a committed couple with children as inherently prejudicial and needlessly judgmental.

    Yet family size is far more than just another political wedge issue. It is an existential one – essentially determining whether a society wants to replace itself or fall into oblivion, as my colleagues and I recently demonstrated in a report done in conjunction with Singapore’s Civil Service College. No nation has thrived when its birthrate falls below replacement level and stays there – the very level the United States are at now. Examples from history extend from the late Roman Empire to Venice and the Netherlands in the last millennium.

    Falling birthrates and declining family formation clearly effect national economies. One major United States’  advantage has long been high birthrates, akin to a developing nation’s, as well as a vibrant family-oriented culture. This was largely because of immigrants and their children, striving first- and second-generation Americans. The United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is expected to have a roughly 40 percent growth in its workforce in the first half of this century, largely thanks to immigration.

    In contrast, the Census Bureau predicts that leading U.S. competitors, notably Japan, Europe and South Korea, will likely suffer a decline of 25 percent or more over that time. Even China, whose birthrate has dropped precipitously under its one-child policy and rapid urbanization, is expected to see a sharp drop in its labor force over the next decade.

    Perhaps the greatest threat from collapsing fertility is the aging of society. Consider “the dependency ratio,” which measures the number of people in the workforce compared to retirees, in effect, how many working people are needed to support those over age 65. In 1960, before the decline in birthrates, that ratio was 9 percent in the 23 most developed countries. Today, it is 16 percent across these advanced countries. By 2030 it could reach as high as 25 percent.

    Countries with the longest history of declines in fertility face the biggest fiscal crises. By 2050, for example, Germany and Singapore  are predicted to have roughly 57 people above age 65 for every 100 workers. In the United States, this ratio will rise by 50 percent, to roughly 35 per 100 workers, even if the current decline is eventually reversed.

    If birthrates continue to decline, Western nations may devolve into impoverished and enervated nursing homes. And without strong families, children are likely to be more troubled and less productive as adults.

    You don’t need a crystal ball to see what this future could look like. Consider Japan. By 2050, there are expected to be three people above age 65 for every person in Japan under 15. In fact, more people are expected to be over 80 than under 15.

    This demographic shift signals a kind of death sentence for that once thriving, but now declining, nation. Not only are Japanese couples having far fewer children, sociologist Mike Toyota notes, roughly one-third of Japanese women in their 30s are not getting married ‑ which, in that conservative society, essentially means they are unlikely to have children. Even teenagers, according to a recent government-commissioned study by the Family Planning Association, seem oddly indifferent to dating and sex.

    Given the stakes, Americans must forgo political squabbles and focus on practical ways to remove barriers to marriage and child-rearing. One crucial component for strong birthrates is steady economic growth. Before the 2008 economic collapse, the U.S. fertility rate  was 2.12, the highest in 40 years. But the tumultuous economic problems since then have helped drive the fertility rate to 1.9 per woman, the lowest since the economic malaise era under President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

    Even amid increasing awareness of the country’s demographic problems, however, political extremes focus on their own ideological spin. Conservatives set their arguments in neo-traditionalist terms, embracing right-wing tropes against gay marriage and abortion while blaming expansive government and rampant individualism. Others on the extreme right link declining fertility rates, particularly among Caucasians, to what Pat Buchanan calls “the end of white America.”

    Yet conservatives must recognize that fertility is not just a white or high-income Asian issue. Fertility and even marriage rates are, for example, declining throughout much of the Muslim Middle East, in some cases below our own levels, as my colleague Ali Modarres has shown.

    Nor is “white America” likely to be demographically overwhelmed by the current dramatic influx of Latino immigrants, particularly Mexicans, as many on the far right insist. Within a generation, Mexican-Americans immigrants’ fertility rates decline to that of native-born U.S. citizens. In fact, as Mexico modernizes, its fertility rates are falling to U.S. levels.

    Conservatives also seem to have a hard time admitting that one major culprit ‑ particularly in the United States and East Asian countries such as Singapore ‑ is modern capitalism. Young workers building their careers can face consuming demands for long work hours and substantial amounts of travel. Many confront a choice between a career and family.

    “In Singapore,” Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz observes, “women work an average of 53 hours a week. Of course they are not going to have children. They don’t have time.”

    For hard-pressed low-wage workers, raising children can be even harder. Indeed, much of the decline in child-rearing in the U.S. can be traced to a fall-off among immigrants, particularly Latinos, who fared particularly poorly in the long recession.

    On the other side, many Democrats praise the rise of “singlism” ‑ demonstrated by  the women in their 40s who never had offspring. This cohort has more than doubled since 1976. Pollsters like Stan Greenberg hail single women as “the largest progressive voting bloc in the country,” and Ruy Texeira, a leading political scientist, asserts that singletons are critical to the “emerging Democratic majority.”

    Progressives also embrace urban density ‑ a residential pattern that discourages child-rearing. Unlike the wave of immigrants or rural migrants who flooded the American metropolises of the early 20th century, urbanites today are not raising large families in cramped spaces. Instead, in virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low marriage rates and fertility rates.

    The causes of this radical change are diverse. But crucial reasons include decline of extended family support networks; erosion of traditional, often religiously based values; and a culture that celebrates individualism.

    We no longer see family-centered urban neighborhoods like those depicted in the Chicago of Saul Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March. Instead, many urban centers today are among the most “child free” ‑ whether in Manhattan, San Francisco, inner London or Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong or Tokyo.

    In contrast, America’s nurseries are in the suburbs, exurbs and lower-density greater-metropolitan areas. The metropolitan regions of Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Salt Lake City have above-average numbers of children. The percentage of children, according to the census, under age 15 in these cities is almost twice that of Manhattan or San Francisco.

    Many progressives don’t seem to care much if the birthrate falls. Some green activists seem to actually prefer it –  perhaps viewing offspring, particularly in wealthy countries, as unwanted carbon emitters. They seem to have taken up the century-old Malthusian concerns about overpopulation and environmental ruin. “A whole lot of people don’t have kids BECAUSE they’re worried about the future,” explains one critic of our report, suggesting that concern for the environment may justify the decision not to have children.

    Before signing on to a low-fertility agenda, American progressives as well as conservatives might want to consider the long-term consequences. The long fertility-rate declines in Europe and Japan occurred as economic growth flagged. Diminishing expectations of the future, painfully evident in countries such as Spain, Italy and Greece, are now further depressing marriage and childbirth.

    As to the culture wars between religious social conservatives and progressives, let’s declare a truce. Spiritual values and traditional families are precious resources to be nurtured. Mormons, evangelicals, practicing Catholics and highly self-identified Jews, all of whom largely favor big families, help make up for the almost certain continued expansion of single, and often childless, people.

    Social conservatives also need to champion more than the narrowly defined “natural family.” Many children, whether because of divorce or diverse family circumstances, must look to someone other than their birth parents for nurturing. Adoptive parents, grandmothers, uncles or aunts or other sorts of extended-family units also need to be cherished as committed caregivers.

    Popular TV shows like Modern Family show the wide range of family types today. The crucial element is that family obligation often extends well beyond “likes” and ties exist over generations. This can be true for gay couples or “blended families” in a way that can rarely be said of people who are dating, or friends, both of the real and Facebook variety.

    Fortunately, the long-term prognosis is not all bad. Pew Research Center reports that the emerging millennial generation rank being good parents, owning a home and having a good marriage as their top three priorities. Generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, in their book Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America, suggest that the younger generation is as family-oriented as their elders, albeit with a greater emphasis on shared responsibilities and more flexible gender roles.

    “No matter how many communes people invent,” the anthropologist Margaret Mead once remarked, “the family always creeps back.” Let’s hope she’s right, not only about the past but the future as well.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared at Reuters.

    Baby photo by Bigstock.

  • “Livability” vs. Livability: The Pitfalls of Willy Wonka Urbanism

    livability: (livable) fit or suitable to live in or with; “livable conditions”.

    “Livability” has been a buzz word in city development for some time, and for good reason, as who doesn’t want livability, outside the zombie cohort? Things get hairy, though, when “livability”—as an economic development strategy—gets unpacked, because questions arise: “Livability” for whom? “Livability” at what cost?

    Making a city “livable” these days largely means appealing to a select group of folks so as to form “an attractive economic place”. This notion of “livability” really came on in the late 1980’s, and was done under the presumption that certain cities offered higher quality of life, read: better lifestyles. For instance, in 1989 geographer David Harvey wrote that cities need to “keep ahead of the game [by] engendering leap-frogging innovations in life-styles, cultural forms, products, and service mixes…if they are to survive.” This was a radical departure from previous societal efforts to make quality of life a priority (think: pollution remediation) in that “life” was swapped out for “lifestyle”.

    You could argue, then, that the original sin of “livability”-driven economic development begins right there. Namely, the emphasis will not be on the people of a city, but on potential consumers, particularly high-valued consumers with means, subsequently referred to as the “creative class”. As for creative class wants? They are, according to Richard Florida, “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros…” In this sense, the idea of “livability” gets precariously slimmed out.

    Nonetheless, this thinking has penetrated mainstream economic development, with cities attempting to one-up each other in their want to attract a slice of the “livability” electorate. The consequences have become predictable: more comfort for some, less comfort for most.

    ***

    Perhaps the city most famous for livability-driven economic development is Portland. It is America’s amenity apex, and a recent study showed it attracts the young by the boatload due to a certain leisure-lifestyle it affords.

    For example, from a recent article entitled “(P)retirement’s new frontier”, the author interviews a 36-year old who is “underemployed on purpose”, as well as a couple who quit their jobs in Austin, sold their car, and have backyard chickens, yet now feel “much richer”. Such folks are referred to by economist Joe Cortright as “lifestyle entrepreneurs”. Part of this entrepreneurial output, touched on in the article, is a website called Badass that rates Portland neighborhoods for amenities like pinball machines, food carts, and access to bike lanes. At times the article reads like Portland was dreamed up by Willy Wonka.

    Here, I half kid. From a description of the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, notice the parallel themes: the Peter Pan motif, an escape from an unsatisfactory reality, and the promise of limitless sensory and savory experiences:

    The Chocolate Room is designed to look like an outdoor landscape complete with trees, flowers and a waterfall, but Wonka has made the entire scene out of candy and chocolate. Charlie and the other children see some doll-sized human beings in the Chocolate Room, and Wonka explains they are Oompa-Loompas whom he saved from the dangerous country of Loompaland. The Oompa-Loompas agreed to work for Wonka and live in his factory in exchange for a safe home and an endless supply of their favorite food, cacao beans.



    Courtesy of Knotworkshop

    Swap out the over-educated and underemployed for the Oompa-Loompas, chocolate for lifestyle amenities, and the Chocolate Room for the concept of “Portland-as-place”, and you got yourself a sequel. But there are problems with such city building: it’s too often defined by the ephemera, or that “transitory matter not intended to be retained or preserved”. And while the ephemera aren’t building blocks to economic growth—but instead represent America’s tendency to fix hard structural deficits with the airy promises of the pleasure principle—they are nonetheless a main cog in the modern day city-making machine. From an article entitled “Placemaking Revolution: the powerful role of ephemera and the arts in our cities”:

    Coletta addressed the question of how ephemeral events can have lasting impacts in cities. “I think you can do temporality with regularity. Some temporary events are so powerful that they stay in the memory for a long time, and spark the imagination.

    But I would argue that now more than ever we need less fantasy in city building than we do reality—as reality can’t keep being handed off to folks who are unable to consume their way to imagining existence as anything but decidedly not livable.

    ***

    “Livability” backlashes are becoming increasingly common across the country. For instance, a piece in Crain’s Chicago questions whether Chicago’s catering to the global creative class is worth the debt it is incurring, and whether the split between the amenity-rich rich neighborhoods and the amenity-poor poor neighborhoods is worth the investment, particularly given the record levels of violence that is tearing parts of the city to pieces. And while Mayor Emanuel’s bike-pathing of the City moves forward because “he wants all of [Seattle’s] bikers”, libraries are closing, red light cameras are ubiquitous, taxes are rising, and the city has a police manpower shortage of 1,000 that can’t be plugged because there’s no money. In fact things are so desperate that the City recently turned to Twitter to fight crime.



    Stop-The-Violence Campaign in Chicago. Courtesy of Metropolis Coffee

    In New York, the President of NYU is under a vote of no confidence for his plans to extend the creative classification of the campus into Greenwich Village. And while this has been ongoing—for instance, one commenter in the book “While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York” states “There are days when I feel like I’m stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena”—the recent city-sanctioned plan to bulldoze and “mix use” a residential neighborhood for “livability” purposes in order to “attract ambitious students and faculty to sustain the region’s economic base and quality of life” has pushed faculty and the community over the edge.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, the plan—and fight for it—comes at a time with Richard Florida joining NYU as a Global Research Professor, with the President commenting on the unison this way:

    There is a certain symmetry here: Richard Florida is joining NYU…at a moment when the University has begun responding to the forces that give rise to his most trenchant insights.

    Even in Portland, the “livability” backlash is present. A September 2012 article entitled “Portland’s livability conflicts: Contradictions of affluence and affliction” states:

    With its tree-lined streets, bike paths and transit options, Portland is beautiful and very safe. But behind that facade, Portland is also a city of contradictions.

    These contradictions, according to the author, involve the discordance brewing between the poverty and “alarmingly large number of hypodermic needle” situation on one hand, and the topographical layering of that “everything is fine” sheen that remains intact for many coming to seek it.

    Others in the community are questioning the theory of livability-driven economic development in its own right. For instance, in a piece entitled “The Portland Question: Livability or Job Growth?”, the author notes the growing worries in the region as to the path Portland is on:

    Last year, Portland’s own catalyst for economic change, the Portland Development Commission, warned that the city’s traditional focus on livability projects such as streetcars and housing had not delivered the job growth needed to stay competitive. That’s a strong statement considering that livability has become what largely defines Portland’s character.

    ***

    Taken together, perhaps it’s time for city leaders and citizens alike to take stock in how cities are being made, and for whom the making is focused. In fact maybe it’s time to drop the “livability” gimmicks that define Willy Wonka urbanism–or to squeeze “the style” out of “lifestyle” so as to expose the highest priority, the highest necessity: which is life.

    So, you wanna make your city “hot”? Then cook the irons of affordable housing, mobility, education, and solid jobs.

    Or, you know: livability.


    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Kauffman Performing Arts Center photo by Bigstock.

  • Is America’s Future Progressive?

    Progressives may be a lot less religious  than conservatives, but these days they have reason to think that Providence– or Gaia — has taken on a bluish hue.

    From the solid re-election of President Obama, to a host of demographic and social trends, the progressives seem poised to achieve what Ruy Texeira predicted a decade ago:  an “emerging Democratic majority”.

    Virtually all the groups that backed Obama — singles, millennials, Hispanics, Asians — are all growing bigger while many of the core Republican groups, such as evangelicals  and intact families, appear in secular decline.

    And then, the Republicans, ham handed themselves, are virtually voiceless (outside of the Murdoch empire) in the mainstream national media.

    Whatever the issue that comes up — from Hurricane Sandy to the Newtown shootings or the “fiscal cliffs” — the Republicans, congenitally inept to start with, end up being portrayed as even more oafish.

    Not surprising then that progressive boosters feel the wind of inexorability to their backs. Red states, and cities, suggests Richard Florida are simply immature versions of blue state ones; progress means density, urbanity, apartment living and the decline of suburbs. Republicans, he argues, are “at odds with the very logic of urbanism and economic development.”

    Yet I am not sure all trends are irredeemingly progressive. For one thing, there’s this little matter of economics. What Florida and the urban boosters often predict means something less progressive than feudalist. The Holy Places of urbanism such as NewYork, San Francisco, Washington DC also suffer some of the worst income inequality, and poverty, of any places in the country.

    The now triumphant urban gentry have their townhouses and high-rise lofts, but the service workers who do their dirty work have to log their way by bus or car from the vast American banlieues, either in peripheral parts of the city (think of Brooklyn’s impoverished fringes) or the poorer close-in suburbs. This progressive economy works from the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class.

    The gentry progressives don’t see much hope for the recovery of blue collar manufacturing or construction jobs, and they are adamant in making sure that the potential gusher of energy jobs in the resurgent fossil fuel never materializes, at least in such places as New York and California. The best they can offer the hoi polloi is the prospect of becoming haircutters and dog walkers in cognitively favored places like Silicon Valley. Presumably, given the cost of living there, they will have to get there from the Central Valley or sleep on the streets.

    Not surprisingly, this prospect is not exciting many Americans. So instead of heading for the blue paradises, but to lower-cost, those who move now tend towards low-cost, lower-density regions like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Raleigh. Even while voting blue, they seem to be migrating to red places. Once there, one has to doubt whether they are simply biding their time for Oklahoma City to morph into San Francisco.

    In this respect, the class issue so cleverly exploited by the President in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism. The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows. If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade.

    If the main focus of progressives was to promote upward mobility, they would deserve their predicted political hegemony. But current-day leftism is more about style, culture and green consciousness than jobs and opportunity. It’s more Vogue’s Anne Wintour than Harry Truman. Often times the gentry agenda — for example favoring higher housing and energy prices — directly conflicts with the interests of middle and working class families.

    The progressive coalition also has little to offer to the private sector small business community, which should be producing jobs as they have in the wake of previous recessions but have failed to do so this time. A recent McKinsey study  finds that small business confidence is at a 20 year low, entrepreneurial start-ups have slowed, and with it, the innovation that drives an economy from the ground up.

    These economic shortcomings are unlikely to reverse themselves under the Obama progressives. An old Democrat of the Truman and Pat Brown, perhaps even Bill Clinton, genre would be pushing our natural gas revolution, a key to blue-collar rejuvenation, instead of seeking to slow it down. They would be looking to raise revenues from Wall Street plutocrats rather than raise taxes on modestly successful Main Street businesses. A HUD interested in upward mobility and families would be pressing for more detached housing and dispersal of work, not forcing the masses to live in ever smaller, cramped and expensive lodgings.

    Over time, the cultural identity and lifestyle politics practiced so brilliantly by the President and his team could begin to wear thin even with their core constituencies.  Hispanics, for example, have suffered grievously in the recession — some 28%  now live in poverty, the highest of any ethnic group.

    It’s possible that the unnatural cohesion between gentry progressives and Latinos will tear asunder. For one thing Hispanics seek out life in suburbs with homes and backyards, and often drive more energy-consuming cars that fit the needs of family and work, notably construction and labor blue collar industries — all targets of the gentry and green agenda.

    Arguably the biggest challenge for the blue supremacists may prove the millennials, a group I have called the screwed generation. They have been vulnerable in a torpid recovery following a deep recession since they depend on new jobs or having their elders move to better ones; more than half of those under 25 with college degrees are either looking for work or doing something that doesn’t require tertiary education.

    For now, millennials — socially liberal, ethnically diverse and concerned with economic inequality — naturally tilt strongly to the President. Their voting power continue to swell as they enter the electorate. As Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have demonstrated, if they remain, as they predict, solidly Democratic, the future will certainly be colored blue.

    But this result is not entirely assured. Now that the first wave of millennials are hitting their thirties, they may not want to remain urban Peter Pans, riding their bikes to their barista jobs, as they age. A growing number will start getting married, looking to buy homes to raise children. The urban developers and gentry progressives may not favor this, preferring instead they remain part of “generation rent”  who remain chained to leasing apartments in dense districts.

    And then there’s the economy. What happens if in two or four years, millennials find opportunity still lagging?  Cliff Zukin, at Rutger’s John J. Heidrich Center for Workforce Development, predicts the young generation will “be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all their life”. One has to wonder if, at some point, they might rebel against that dismal fate. Remember the boomers too once tilted to the left, but moved to the center-right starting with Reagan and have remained that way.

    Of course, the blues have one inestimable advantage: a perennially stupid Republican party and a largely clueless, ideologically hidebound conservative movement. Constant missteps on issues like immigration and gay rights could keep even disappointed minority or younger votes in the President’s pocket. You can’t win new adherents by being the party of no and know-nothing. You also have to acknowledge that inequality is real and develop a program to promote upward mobility.

    Unless that is done, the new generation and new Americans likely will continue to bow to the blue idols, irrespective to the failures that gentry progressivism all but guarantees.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Barack Obama photo by Bigstock.