Small Cities – Page 17 – New Geography

SPECIAL REPORT: Move to Suburbs (and Beyond) Continues

Anyone who challenges the notion that the long predicted exodus of people from the suburbs to the city has been wildly overstated is sure to generate some backlash from urban boosters. Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution contends in a New Republic column that “head counts” better reveal city trends than property trends or the massive condo bust. He points to a Brookings Institution analysis by Bill Frey, entitled “Texas Gains, Suburbs Lose in 2010 Census Review,” which compares trends in major cities and suburbs, but offers not a sentence demonstrating any actual population “loss” in suburbs (his point is that their growth rates have declined).

However, Berube has a point. Head counts are the issue. The annual Bureau of the Census “head count” of domestic migration reveals that the suburban to urban core exodus is as elusive as it has ever been. Gross population totals reveal nothing with respect to movements between the suburbs and the core. There is no doubt that core city population trends have improved, and this is a good thing. However, there is not a shred of evidence that suburbanites are picking up and moving to the cores.

Domestic Migration: This is indicated by a “head count” of migration trends during the decade and during the last year. Each year, the Bureau of the Census estimates the number of people who move between counties (domestic migration) and the number of people who move into metropolitan areas from outside the nation (international migration). The data is estimated at the county (equivalent) level, which means that, except where cities are counties (such as Baltimore, San Francisco and others), individual core city data is not available. Thus, the analysis has to rely on core versus suburban counties in metropolitan areas (Note 1).

In short, the nation’s urban cores continue to lose domestic migrants with a vengeance, however are doing quite well at attracting international migration. Thus, core growth is not resulting from migration from suburbs or any other part of the nation, but is driven by international migration.

The following analysis covers all but four (48) metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population as of 2009. San Diego, Las Vegas and Tucson are excluded because they include only one county, so there is only a core county and no suburban county. New Orleans is excluded due to the special circumstances of the huge population losses from Hurricane Katrina.

Generally, domestic migrants are leaving the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Between 2000 and 2009, a net 1,900,000 domestic migrants moved to areas of the nation outside the largest metropolitan areas (Table 1). Domestic migration losses occurred 24 of the 48 metropolitan areas. In the last year (2008-2009), the net domestic out-migration for all 48 regions in total was 22,000, 90% below the 2000-2008 annual rate. A somewhat smaller number of metropolitan areas, 22, experienced domestic migration losses in the last year. Most observers, including Berube, trace this diminishing loss to the recession, which has made movement in any direction more difficult over the past two years.

Table 1
Domestic Migration: Major Metropolitan Areas

		2000-2009			2008-2009
Core County Classification	Metropolitan Area	Metropolitan Area	Core	Suburban	Metropolitan Area	Core	Suburban
1	New York	(1,920,745)	(1,222,290)	(698,455)	(110,278)	(77,381)	(32,897)
3	Los Angeles	(1,337,522)	(1,102,202)	(235,320)	(79,900)	(76,674)	(3,226)
2	Chicago	(547,430)	(705,403)	157,973	(40,389)	(31,114)	(9,275)
4	Dallas-Fort Worth	307,907	(262,982)	570,889	45,241	(7,494)	52,735
1	Philadelphia	(112,071)	(154,338)	42,267	(7,577)	(5,496)	(2,081)
4	Houston	242,573	(69,736)	312,309	49,662	19,002	30,660
4	Miami-West Palm Beach	(284,860)	(297,637)	12,777	(29,321)	(25,142)	(4,179)
1	Washington	(110,775)	(39,814)	(70,961)	18,189	4,454	13,735
3	Atlanta	412,832	3,243	409,589	17,479	7,579	9,900
1	Boston	(232,984)	(100,485)	(132,499)	6,813	(32)	6,845
2	Detroit	(361,632)	(306,467)	(55,165)	(45,488)	(34,794)	(10,694)
4	Phoenix	530,579	404,840	125,739	12,441	4,651	7,790
2	San Francisco-Oakland	(343,834)	(245,796)	(98,038)	7,977	(207)	8,184
4	Riverside-San Bernardino	457,430	375,055	82,375	(616)	13,174	(13,790)
3	Seattle	42,424	(27,407)	69,831	17,035	11,053	5,982
2	Minneapolis-St. Paul	(22,865)	(138,395)	115,530	(2,503)	(1,989)	(514)
1	St. Louis	(42,151)	(62,990)	20,839	(4,532)	(3,197)	(1,335)
4	Tampa-St. Petersburg	254,650	89,385	165,265	4,663	2,630	2,033
1	Baltimore	(35,938)	(74,328)	38,390	(3,687)	(4,883)	1,196
2	Denver	61,108	(44,839)	105,947	19,831	6,369	13,462
2	Pittsburgh	(49,438)	(57,532)	8,094	1,144	401	743
2	Portland	120,437	3,811	116,626	16,320	7,053	9,267
2	Cincinnati	(18,313)	(87,976)	69,663	(384)	(2,833)	2,449
4	Sacramento	135,038	32,369	102,669	4,733	(1,185)	5,918
2	Cleveland	(133,679)	(151,448)	17,769	(10,191)	(10,875)	684
4	Orlando	218,108	46,341	171,767	(4,279)	(6,275)	1,996
4	San Antonio	175,552	96,856	78,696	18,984	10,797	8,187
3	Kansas City	30,181	(33,910)	64,091	3,929	(417)	4,346
4	San Jose	(233,133)	(226,545)	(6,588)	(5,361)	(4,829)	(532)
3	Columbus	32,087	(36,024)	68,111	5,018	1,907	3,111
4	Charlotte	243,399	104,402	138,997	19,211	8,299	10,912
3	Indianapolis	70,271	(53,039)	123,310	7,034	(1,209)	8,243
4	Austin	224,227	52,842	171,385	25,654	10,484	15,170
2	Norfolk-Virginia Beach	(19,172)	(19,391)	219	(8,052)	(3,559)	(4,493)
2	Providence	(50,151)	(38,129)	(12,022)	(6,736)	(4,939)	(1,797)
3	Nashville	120,684	(20,101)	140,785	10,826	128	10,698
2	Milwaukee	(72,668)	(89,476)	16,808	(2,336)	(3,585)	1,249
4	Jacksonville	125,881	17,866	108,015	1,758	(3,415)	5,173
4	Memphis	(8,834)	(61,325)	52,491	(5,276)	(7,867)	2,591
3	Louisville	33,700	(7,692)	41,392	2,122	262	1,860
2	Richmond	74,650	(4,839)	79,489	2,751	3	2,748
3	Oklahoma City	41,523	(8,164)	49,687	8,798	3,236	5,562
3	Hartford	(9,385)	(22,089)	12,704	(1,847)	(1,949)	102
3	Birmingham	26,420	(26,550)	52,970	2,418	(1,424)	3,842
3	Salt Lake City	(32,760)	(43,779)	11,019	(164)	(911)	747
4	Raleigh	190,438	150,583	39,855	20,095	16,070	4,025
2	Buffalo	(53,191)	(47,780)	(5,411)	(1,711)	(1,806)	95
2	Rochester	(42,163)	(35,354)	(6,809)	(1,937)	(1,224)	(713)

	Total	(1,903,595)	(4,548,659)	2,645,064	(22,439)	(199,153)	176,714

Major metropolitan areas: Population over 1,000,000 in 2009
Core county classifications: See Table 2

The core counties lost domestic migrants, often at very high rates. Between 2000 and 2009, more than 4,500,000 people moved out of the core counties. This is more people than live in the cities of Los Angeles and Washington, DC combined. The suburban counties did substantially better gaining more than 2,600,000 domestic migrants (nearly as many people as live in the city of Chicago), but not enough to negate the core losses. Over the past year, the core counties lost 200,000 domestic migrants, an annual rate approximately two-thirds less than the rate from 2000 to 2008. Suburban counties gained 175,000, a more than 40% reduction from the 2000-2008 annual rate. All of these rate changes are consistent with expectations in a recession, as fewer people move.

If anything, the trends of the past decade indicate a further dispersal of America’s metropolitan population, with an additional 200,000 domestic migrants moving to the exurban counties adjacent to and beyond the major metropolitan areas (Note 2). Reflecting the effects of the recession, exurban areas lost 4,000 domestic migrants in the last year. This one year loss rate is less than 1/10th of the core county domestic migration loss rate over the same period. Another nearly 1.7 million domestic migrants left the major metropolitan areas and their exurbs altogether, moving to smaller metropolitan areas, smaller urban areas and rural areas.

Between 2000 and 2008, 36 cores experienced domestic migration losses, compared to 10 suburban areas. The cores did better in the last year, with 29 losing domestic migrants, while 13 suburban areas lost domestic migrants. Further, more people moved into (or fewer moved out of) the suburbs from other parts of the country than to the cores in 42 of the 48 metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2009 and in 2008-2009.

Moreover, not all urban cores are the same. Some, including most of the fast growing areas, are far more suburban than others. This is illustrated by a classification of core counties (Table 2) based upon the share of owner occupant housing built after 1949 (For for statistical purposes the beginning of automobile oriented suburbanization was with the census of 1950).

Table 2
Core County Classifications (Extent of Suburbanization)

Core County Classification	Share of Owner-Occupied Houses Built After 1949
Dominant Urban Cores	Less than 50%
Moderately Suburban	50% = <75%
Substantially Suburban	70% = <85%
Predominantly Suburban	85% & Over

Data from 2000 US Census

For example, in the core counties of the St. Louis and Boston metropolitan areas, there is little suburbanization, with more than 70% of houses having been built before 1950. Their growth truly reflects the attractiveness of traditional, relatively dense urban living. On the other hand, in the core county of the Austin metropolitan area, less than 10% of the houses were built before 1950, while in Phoenix, the figure is 3%. In these and other core counties that encompass large suburban areas, the vast majority of “urban” growth follows a highly suburbanized, auto-oriented model.

The domestic migration results by core county classification are as follows:

Dominant Urban Core Central Counties (less than 50% of the housing stock built after 1949) lost 1.650 million domestic migrants, or 14.0% of their 2000 population. In the last year, the loss was 87,000.
Moderately Suburban Core Central Counties (50% to 69% of the housing stock built after 1949) lost 1.970 million domestic migrants, or 10.0% of their 2000 population. In the last year, the loss was 83,000.
Substantially Suburban Core Central Counties (70% to 84% of the housing stock built after 1949) lost 1.380 million domestic migrants, or 7.2% of their 2000 population. In the last year, the loss was 58,000.
Predominantly Suburban Core Central Counties (85% and more of the housing stock built after 1949) gained 450 thousand domestic migrants, or 2.0% of their 2000 population. In the last year, the gain was 29,000.

By no stretch of the imagination, then, can it be validly claimed that the overall trend is people moving from the suburbs to the core. The evidence suggests that the more urban the core county, the greater are the domestic migration losses.

International Migration: The real story with respect to core growth is international migration. The 48 metropolitan areas gained 6.4 million international migrants from 2000 to 2009 and 620,000 in 2008-2009. International migration, also impacted by recession, dropped by nearly a 15% drop from the 2000-2008 annual rate (Table 3).

Table 3
International Migration: Major Metropolitan Areas

		2000-2009			2008-2009
Core County Classification	Metropolitan Area	Metropolitan Area	Core	Suburban	Metropolitan Area	Core	Suburban
1	New York	1,075,016	622,538	452,478	100,669	57,674	42,995
3	Los Angeles	803,614	628,303	175,311	75,062	58,557	16,505
2	Chicago	363,134	265,156	97,978	33,363	24,236	9,127
4	Dallas-Fort Worth	323,941	203,732	120,209	31,571	19,785	11,786
1	Philadelphia	122,733	50,761	71,972	12,944	5,560	7,384
4	Houston	289,648	252,098	37,550	27,996	24,371	3,625
4	Miami-West Palm Beach	506,423	318,888	187,535	51,548	32,380	19,168
1	Washington	310,222	23,112	287,110	31,904	2,096	29,808
3	Atlanta	207,238	42,082	165,156	20,288	4,093	16,195
1	Boston	191,014	64,359	126,655	19,250	6,522	12,728
2	Detroit	93,625	44,177	49,448	8,723	4,132	4,591
4	Phoenix	214,067	209,326	4,741	21,833	21,364	469
2	San Francisco-Oakland	257,318	161,324	95,994	24,376	15,373	9,003
4	Riverside-San Bernardino	90,652	46,829	43,823	8,464	4,313	4,151
3	Seattle	126,973	98,983	27,990	12,919	9,971	2,948
2	Minneapolis-St. Paul	84,440	69,262	15,178	8,234	6,756	1,478
1	St. Louis	29,782	11,794	17,988	2,928	1,112	1,816
4	Tampa-St. Petersburg	74,173	42,568	31,605	8,045	4,762	3,283
1	Baltimore	43,949	10,852	33,097	4,604	1,125	3,479
2	Denver	93,916	45,338	48,578	8,738	4,251	4,487
2	Pittsburgh	19,225	16,326	2,899	1,901	1,596	305
2	Portland	70,901	28,755	42,146	6,680	2,677	4,003
2	Cincinnati	22,364	12,754	9,610	2,245	1,260	985
4	Sacramento	64,275	47,169	17,106	6,056	4,420	1,636
2	Cleveland	28,002	20,168	7,834	2,826	1,987	839
4	Orlando	95,500	61,171	34,329	11,720	7,381	4,339
4	San Antonio	31,595	28,157	3,438	3,303	2,940	363
3	Kansas City	34,339	12,613	21,726	3,404	1,262	2,142
4	San Jose	170,452	168,009	2,443	16,347	16,116	231
3	Columbus	39,755	38,261	1,494	4,063	3,915	148
4	Charlotte	48,176	34,522	13,654	4,678	3,332	1,346
3	Indianapolis	27,676	22,058	5,618	2,809	2,239	570
4	Austin	65,958	56,828	9,130	6,406	5,516	890
2	Norfolk-Virginia Beach	421	(1,546)	1,967	867	81	786
2	Providence	34,926	25,547	9,379	3,753	2,741	1,012
3	Nashville	36,570	26,208	10,362	3,850	2,760	1,090
2	Milwaukee	26,814	22,612	4,202	2,706	2,292	414
4	Jacksonville	15,066	12,046	3,020	1,760	1,397	363
4	Memphis	19,845	17,801	2,044	2,093	1,874	219
3	Louisville	16,437	12,778	3,659	1,685	1,291	394
2	Richmond	17,061	4,161	12,900	1,805	440	1,365
3	Oklahoma City	23,717	18,698	5,019	2,394	1,878	516
3	Hartford	30,266	25,871	4,395	3,230	2,784	446
3	Birmingham	14,485	10,644	3,841	1,557	1,151	406
3	Salt Lake City	41,216	39,416	1,800	3,855	3,684	171
4	Raleigh	36,923	32,141	4,782	3,560	3,103	457
2	Buffalo	9,671	8,387	1,284	940	814	126
2	Rochester	12,796	11,657	1,139	1,243	1,123	120

	Total	6,356,310	4,024,694	2,331,616	621,195	390,487	230,708

Major metropolitan areas: Population over 1,000,000 in 2009
Core county classifications: See Table 2

The core counties gained 4.0 million net international migrants between 2000 and 2009. The international migration gains in the dominant urban and moderately suburban core counties were not sufficient to compensate for the domestic migration losses (Figure 3). Surprisingly, the strongest gain in international migration from 2000 to 2009 was not in the more urban core counties, but rather was in the predominantly suburban core counties, at a 6.8% rate compared to 2000 populations.

In 2008-2009, the core county gain was 390,000, approximately 15% below the 2000-2008 annual rate (Figure 4). The suburban counties gained international migrants, though fewer than the cores, adding a net 2.3 million between 2000 and 2009. Between 2008 and 2009, the suburbs added a net 230,000 international migrants, a 12% decline from the 2000-2008 annual rate.

This of course measures only initial international migration. Over time many immigrants likely will head for the suburbs, which now are home to a majority. Core cities may be playing more of a “revolving door” role where they take in immigrants (and young people) for several years, then lose them, but replace the loss with newcomers.

The Exodus: Elusive as Ever: The much ballyhooed suburban hegira has not begun, despite it having been announced repeatedly (Table 4). There is no doubt that the cores are doing better than in recent decades, particularly since the deep recession began. But the relative better urban performance may have more to do with stagnation than anything endlessly alluring about inner city life.

Table 4
Domestic, International & Total Migration: Major Metropolitan Areas

PERSONS	Net Domestic Migration: 2000-2009	Net Domestic Migration: 2008-2009	Net International Migration: 2000-2009	Net International Migration: 2008-2009	Net Total Migration: 2000-2009	Net Total Migration: 2008-2009

Core Counties (Share of Post-1949 Housing)	(4,548,659)	(199,153)	4,024,694	390,487	(523,965)	191,334
Dominant Urban Core (Less than 50%)	(1,654,245)	(86,535)	783,416	74,089	(870,829)	(12,446)
Moderately Suburban (50%-69%	(1,969,014)	(83,099)	734,078	69,759	(1,234,936)	(13,340)
Substantially Suburban (70%-84%)	(1,377,714)	(58,419)	975,915	93,585	(401,799)	35,166
Predominantly Suburban (85% & Over)	452,314	28,900	1,531,285	153,054	1,983,599	181,954
Suburban Counties	2,645,064	176,714	2,331,616	230,708	4,976,680	407,422
48 Major Metropolitan Areas	(1,903,595)	(22,439)	6,356,310	621,195	4,452,715	598,756
Exurban Counties	198,294	(4,053)	364,498	36,740	562,792	32,687
48 Metropolitan Areas & All Exurban Counties	(1,705,301)	(26,492)	6,720,808	657,935	5,015,507	631,443

4 Excluded Metropolitan Areas	19,958	14,553	225,767	23,400	245,725	37,953
All (52) Major Metropolitan Areas & Exurban Counties	(1,685,343)	(11,939)	6,946,575	681,335	5,261,232	669,396

Smaller Metropolitan & Rural	1,685,343	11,939	1,678,369	173,570	3,363,712	185,509

United States	0	0	8,624,944	854,905	8,624,944	854,905

Major metropolitan areas: Population over 1,000,000 in 2009
Excluded metropolitan areas: San Diego, Las Vegas & Tucson (no suburban county) and New Orleans (due to Hurricane Katrina)
Exurban counties of excluded metropolitan areas are included (Las Vegas and New Orleans)

As in Europe, people are moving to the urban cores. But also, as in Europe, they are moving there from across national borders, rather than from the suburbs (Figures 3 & 4). This will surprise urbanites who cannot imagine meaningful lives in the suburbs, but will not shock the many millions more suburban residents content enough not to move. The exodus from the suburbs to the core will not have begun until more moving vans head away from the suburbs than to them. To this point, this is simply not occurring. And when the economy recovers, history suggests that the gap between suburban and core growth rates may begin expanding again.

Note: There is one core county in each metropolitan area, which is the county containing the first named city, except for in New York, where all five counties (boroughs) are included, in San Francisco-Oakland, where Alameda County (Oakland) is also included and in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where Ramsey County (St. Paul) is also included.

Note: The exurban counties are those included in combined statistical areas (as designated by the Bureau of the Census), which have major metropolitan areas as their core.

Photo: Suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

July 13, 2010

The Economic Significance of Village Markets

Flea markets and garage sales have been around for years. But for most New Zealanders, produce markets have been associated with old European villages, or the ethnic markets of Hong Kong and other exotic locations. Village markets focus on locally made crafts, while Flea Markets are essentially centralized garage sales.

At the true Farmers’ Market vendors may sell only what they grow, farm, pickle, preserve, bake, smoke, or catch themselves from a defined area. There are now over 50 “official” Farmers’ Markets in New Zealand. But when all the flea markets, village markets, and less formal markets are tallied up there must be hundreds throughout New Zealand.

When I grew up they simply didn’t exist – unless we count the school “Bring and Buy” and Church fétes. We simply shopped in shops. Why is this? Why did my parents feel no need for such markets? I suspect my parents would have regarded such markets as somewhat old-fashioned and even primitive. This was the sort of thing our forebears left behind in Ireland in the 1830s.

However, they are now a part of our lives. For the last few years I have routinely – effectively every Saturday Morning – shopped at our local market at Mangawhai, a nearby coastal village in Northland. It’s where people sell their own produce, but also sell books, bric-a-brac, power-tools, and other bits and pieces. The market works for me because it is just across the road from my excellent butcher, and next door to the local lending library.

So what’s the new appeal? The conventional theory is that the rise of these markets reflects a desire for fresh healthy food, and fruit and vegetables grown locally, and in-season rather than imported from far away. It’s also considered green to buy local and support local cultivars, and growers of eco-sourced native plants and so on.

These markets are also a good place to meet for a chat, and they also provide a convenient means of selling off numerous “priceless objects” now growing mould in the garage.

Indeed, last weekend, my wife and I decided to win back some space and earn some ready cash. Setting up a stall at the Mangawhai market was easy. We simply phoned the market organizer (from the local Cheese Shop) and booked a trestle table.

We thought our real cash-cow would be the plants and seedlings but the biggest and most regular seller was our collection of vinyl records dating from US pressings of jazz giants from the sixties. Our first major sale was a high-quality Akai turntable. It was fun to see grandmotherly types shuffle up to the table and enthuse over early discs by Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, and Billie Holliday. As a bonus we gave the turntable buyer a 1950s 10 inch LP of Bill Hayley and his Comets – Don’t Knock the Rock.

The last time I thought about these markets was two weeks ago when I wrote the sad story of the urban Onehunga Market that had to close because Auckland City demanded a resource consent that would have cost maybe $30,000 dollars.

I presume our Mangawhai market operates without such costs because it is housed in the Village Hall, on public ground, shared with the Library and the Museum. Consequently our stall space and trestle cost us only $10 for the morning. But if the Council had demanded say $30,000 for a land use consent, then a twenty-trestle market at $10 a trestle would take 150 weeks to recover just the consenting cost. Obviously, there would have to be many more spaces, or the rental would have to be much higher.

On our first morning we netted only about $80. (Being newcomers, we were outside and it rained) But even this represented about $20 dollars an hour – not huge but better than the minimum wage. On the other hand it was an $80 dollar return on our $10 dollar capital investment (using simple “homespun” economics). Remember the stuff we were selling had negative value, and I drive back and forth from the village every Saturday anyhow.
And it was fun. But could such markets become an endangered species? As in so many areas, the culprit is heavy-handed regulation. The high costs of land and development, and the burden of consenting and development contributions already make it nearly impossible for small corner stores to make any return on capital.

Yet, the stall renter’s capital-productivity is massive. But many regulators cannot stand to see such an opportunity slip from their grasp. So the Onehunga market had to close.

These village markets remind us of the “power of markets”. As the heavy-handed regulators drive down capital productivity, entrepreneurs have responded by rediscovering the outdoor markets of much earlier times when capital was scarce and labour was plentiful. Market economies are like water-beds – push down on one corner and they bounce up in another.

We are beginning to see similarly ad hoc responses in the residential and commercial property markets. The regulators have so severely constrained the supply of coastal land in New Zealand that people like my parents, who bought a batch at on the coast at Tairua out of their working class income, no longer have a hope of enjoying the sprint from the Kiwi bach straight into the sea.

Those who have generated this scarcity then complain that only foreigners can afford to buy our coastal land. But many of us really do want to occupy a beach side property for the best weeks of summer, and then return home to our rural dwellings in the regional towns and villages. Enter the motor home.

As farmers become more and more regulated by central planners who know nothing about agricultural economics but instead are determined to ‘save the planet’, enterprising farmers will look for new ways to supplement their incomes.

Well, here’s one way we can solve our mutual problem. First, buy a quality self-contained motor home. Then use Google Maps to find what looks like an ideal bay, with a farm track connecting the main road to the beach.

Then approach the farmer and negotiate a “right to occupy” this little patch of heaven. It could be no more than the right to park on the spot for perhaps eight weeks a year, but could include an obligation to fence off the area to contain any children or pets. No resource consent, no title, no lease – just a right to drive on to the farm, park on the spot, and drive away if it rains.

Farmers supplement their income and Kiwis reclaim the low cost beach. The Environmental Puritans will gnash their teeth at the prospect of so many people having fun – but this time we might be ready for them. Markets and human ingenuity can still win in the long run.

Owen McShane is Director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, New Zealand.

Photo of Mangawhai Village Saturday Market by Sids1

July 4, 2010

Why the Great Plains are Great Once Again

On a drizzly, warm June night, the bars, galleries, and restaurants along Broadway are packed with young revelers. Traffic moves slowly, as drivers look for parking. The bar at the Donaldson, a boutique hotel, is so packed with stylish patrons that I can’t get a drink. My friend, a local, and I head over to Monte’s, a trendy Italian place down the street. We watch a group of attractive 30-something blondes share a table and gossip. They look like the cast of the latest Housewives series.

It might sound like an evening in the Big Apple, but this Broadway runs through downtown Fargo, N.D. A decade ago, this same street was just another unremarkable central district in a Midwestern town: bland restaurants, adequate hotels, no decent coffee. After the local stores closed for the day, the street was mostly populated by a few hard-drinking louts.

That has all changed, part of a transformation that foreshadows the growth of the vast Great Plains region. “I come from a big city, but I like the lifestyle here,” says Marshall Johnson, an African-American who played football for the nearby University of Minnesota, Crookston, and now works for the local Audubon Society. “In a decade this place will be a small Minneapolis. Everyone sees a bright future ahead.”

Johnson may be an anomaly in this still homogeneous state—the population is more than 90 percent white, and Native Americans constitute the largest minority by far—but he senses something very real. Throughout the good times and, more important, the bad of this new millennium, the cities of the plains—from Dallas in the south through Omaha, Des Moines, and north to Fargo—have enjoyed strong job growth and in-migration from the rest of the country. North Dakota boasts the nation’s lowest unemployment rate—3.6 percent, compared with the national average of 9.7—with South Dakota and Nebraska right behind it.

The trend has been particularly strong in urban areas. Based on employment growth over the last decade, the North Dakota cities of Bismarck and Fargo rank in the top 10 of nearly 400 metropolitan areas, according to data analyzed by economist Michael Shires for Forbes and NewGeography.com. Much of that growth has come in high-wage jobs. In Bismarck, the number of high-paying energy jobs has increased by 23 percent since 2003, while jobs in professional and business services have shot up 40 percent.

That’s not bad for a region best known by East Coast pundits for the movie Fargo. It got so bad a decade ago that even local boosters suggested North Dakota jettison the “North” to make the place seem less forbidding. Two Eastern academics, Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper, predicted that the region would, in a generation, become almost totally depopulated, and proposed that Washington speed things along and create “the ultimate national park.” Their suggestion: restock the buffalo.

Certainly, many small towns across the plains—such places as Reeder, N.D., which lost its only school, or Mott, N.D., with its struggling downtown—have withered. Others are likely to disappear altogether. But growth has rebounded in larger towns, according to Debora Dragseth, an associate professor of business at Dickinson State University. She describes places like Fargo—with a population approaching 200,000—as “sponge cities,” absorbing population from rural areas. Just a decade ago, those people fled the region entirely.

The primary drivers of this new growth, says Dragseth, are basic industries like agriculture and energy. Salaries may be low by coastal standards, but so are living costs. And the prices of commodities like beef, soybeans, and grains have generally continued to rise, due in large part to growing demand from China, India, and other developing countries.

But the biggest play by far is in energy, including coal, natural gas, and oil, which exist in prodigious quantities from Texas to the Canadian border. Besides the vast reserves of oil that have made it the country’s fourth-largest producer, North Dakota possesses significant deposits of natural gas and coal, as well as huge potential for wind power and biofuels. These industries are drawing hundreds of skilled workers from places like California and Michigan, who are moving into Bismarck, the state’s capital, and towns to the west.

The energy boom has placed states like the Dakotas and Texas in an enviable fiscal situation. Oil and gas revenues are filling up their coffers, allowing them to eschew the painful cutbacks affecting most coastal states. North Dakota has a $500 million surplus, and next year the cash gusher could rise to more than $1 billion, estimates Dragseth. That could go a long way in a state with barely 600,000 people.

Of course, the people of the plains have seen booms before—commodity prices soared early in the last century, and there was an oil-fired boom back in the 1970s. But growing demand in developing countries could sustain long-term increases of energy and agricultural products. Niles Hushka, CEO of Kadrmas, Lee & Jackson, a growing engineering firm active in Bismarck, sees other factors working for the plains. The public schools are excellent; the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas enjoy among the highest graduation rates in the country. North Dakota itself ranks third and Minnesota fourth (after Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts) in the percentage of residents between 25 and 34 with college degrees.

Nowhere is this potential clearer than in Fargo, which is emerging as a high-tech hub. Doug Burgum, from nearby Arthur, N.D., founded Great Plains Software in the mid-1980s. Burgum says he saw potential in the engineering grads pumped out by North Dakota State University, many of whom worked in Fargo’s large and expanding specialty-farm-equipment industry. “My business strategy is to be close to the source of supply,” says Burgum. “North Dakota gave us access to the raw material of college students.”

Microsoft bought Great Plains for a reported $1.1 billion in 2001, establishing Fargo as the headquarters for its business-systems division, which now employs more than 1,000 workers. The tech boom started by Burgum has spawned both startups and spin-offs in everything from information technology to biomedicine. Science and engineering employment statewide has grown by 31 percent since 2002, the highest rate of any state.

These jobs, and the people they attract, shower cash on Broadway’s busy bars and dining establishments. Both Burgum and his ex-wife, Karen, have been driving forces in this restoration. Karen led the effort to convert the once seedy Donaldson into a stylish downtown hotspot, featuring the work of local artists on the walls and bison on the menu. “People thought I should be put in a padded cell for doing this,” she says. Of course, entrepreneurs like the Burgums will continue to face big challenges to lure customers and workers—cold weather, isolation, and competition from more urban places. But for the first time in generations, parts of the Great Plains have a chance to be great again.

This article originally appeared in Newsweek.

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

Hotel Donaldson photo By jeffreykreger

July 2, 2010

The Declining Human Footprint

There are few more bankrupt arguments against suburbanization than the claim that it consumes too much agricultural land. The data is so compelling that even the United States Department of Agriculture says that “our Nation’s ability to produce food and fiber is not threatened” by urbanization. There is no doubt that agricultural production takes up less of the country’s land than it did before. But urban “sprawl” is not the primary cause. The real reason lies in the growing productivity of American farms.

Since 1950, an area the size of Texas plus Oklahoma (or an area almost as large as France plus Great Britain) has been taken out of agricultural production in the United States, not including any agricultural land taken by new urbanization (Note 1). That is enough land to house all of the world’s urban population at the urban density level of the United Kingdom.

America’s Spectacular Agricultural Productivity

Even with less land, agriculture’s performance has been stunning. According to US Department of Agriculture data, US farm output rose 160% between 1950 and 2008. Productivity per acre rose 260%. In particular , California’s farms – often cited as victims of sprawl – have done quite well. Between 1960 and 2004 (Note 2), the state’s agricultural productivity rose 2.3% annually and 3.0% per acre. By comparison national agricultural productivity rose less over the same period at 1.7% overall and 2.2% per acre.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, from 1990 to 2004 (latest data), California’s agricultural production rose 32% and on less farm land.

Of course, there has been substantial reduction of farmland close to some metropolitan areas, but overall the impact of urbanization nationally has not been substantial. For example, since 1950:

The farmland reduction in largely rural downstate Illinois has been four times that of the vast former rural areas of metropolitan Chicago, which is home to the world’s third most “sprawling” urban area, after New York and Tokyo (see photograph, above).
The farmland reduction in the Phoenix metropolitan area has been 6 times the expansion of urbanization.

In addition, the nation’s agriculture is subsidized to the tune of more than $15 billion annually, which is strong evidence that more land is being farmed than is required. Subsidies increase the supply of virtually anything beyond its underlying demand. This can be illustrated by imagining how much less transit service there would be if it were not 80% subsidized. Suffice it to say, America is not threatened by “disappearing farmland.”

America has less farmland because it has not needed as much as before to serve its customers. Thus, considerable farmland has been returned to a more natural state. Generally, this has got to be good for the environment. Land that is left to nature does not require fertilization, for example. The same interests that have frequently claimed that farmland has been disappearing also decry the loss of open space. In fact, the withdrawal of redundant farmland has produced considerable open space – call it open space sprawl.

Repeat it Often Enough….

None of this has kept “disappearing farmland” from being a rallying cry among those who would construct Berlin Walls around the nation’s urban areas. Yet the extent to which Bonnie Erbe of Politics Daily and National Public Radio embraced the fiction was surprising. Her “Vanishing Farmland: How It’s Destabilizing America’s Food Supply,” was accompanied by “meant to indict” photograph of farm equipment next to new suburban housing.

Ms. Erbe’s principal source was a web page from the American Farmland Trust, which seeks to conserve farm land. In its California Agricultural Land Loss & Conservation: The Basic Facts, the American Farmland Trust argues for more “efficient” (i.e. denser) urbanization and claims that, “One-sixth…” (17%) “… of the land urbanized since the Gold Rush … has been developed since 1990.” That might be an impressive figure, if it were not that the state has added 7 million urban residents since 1990, which is one-fourth (25%) of all the urban population added since the Gold Rush and equal to the 1990 population of New York City.

It is worth noting that California has agricultural preservation measures already in place for farm owners and, finally, that no one can compel an unwilling farm owner to sell their land to a developer or anyone else (except perhaps a government agency through eminent domain).

In California, as elsewhere in the nation, urbanization has not been the principal cause of farm land reduction. According to the US Census of Agriculture, farmland declined in California from 2002 to 2007 by 2.2 million acres. That 5 year reduction in farmland is approximately equal to the expansion of all California urban areas over the 50 years between 1950 and 2000.

Most Development is Not Urban

In the same document, the American Farmland Trust indicates support for the radical urban land regulations. Policies such as in Sacramento’s Blueprint that raise significantly inflate the price of land, make housing less affordable. The agricultural, property and urban planning interests who would ration land for people and their houses have missed a larger targets such as ultra-low density “ranchettes” favored by a small wealthy minority who live in the country, but are not farmers.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, rural, large lot residential development (non-agricultural) covered 40% more land than all of the nation’s urbanization in 2000. These parcels represent “scattered single houses on large parcels, often 10 or more acres in size.” Further, since 1980, the increase in this rural residential development has been one-third greater than the land area occupied by all of the urban areas in the nation with more than 1,000,000 population.

Finally, if there is a serious threat to agriculture, it is from over-zealous regulation that has put farmers at risk. Water reductions in the San Joaquin Valley – mostly the result of environmental demands – likely have taken more land out of production than any sprawl-happy developer.

Declining Human Footprint: An International Phenomenon

The human footprint, as measured by the total urban and agricultural land has been declining for decades, both in the nation and California, where the greatest growth has occurred (Figure 1 & 2). The same is also true of Europe (EU-15), Canada and Australia, where all of the urbanization since the beginning of time does not equal the agricultural land recently taken out of production. Even in Japan, the human footprint has been reduced. It may be surprising, but human habitation and food production has returned considerable amounts of land to a more natural state in recent decades, while America’s urban areas were welcoming 99% of all growth since 1950.

Note 1: This assumption represents the worst case, since not all land on which new urbanization was developed had previously been farmed.

Note 2: State data is available only between 1960 and 2004.

Photograph: Metropolitan Chicago, 2007 (Grundy County)

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

June 11, 2010

Energy’s Other Side

The BP oil spill disaster likely spells the slowing down, or even curtailing, of offshore oil drilling for the foreseeable future. You can take California, Florida and much of the east coast off the energy-drilling map for years, perhaps decades.

But if the oil, gas and coal industries are widely detested on the coasts, people in Bismarck, N.D., have little incentive to join an anti-energy jihad. Like other interior energy centers, people in this small Missouri river city of over 100,000 see their rising oil-, gas- and coal-based economy as the key to a far more lucrative future.

“We have so much work that we don’t know what to do,” explains Niles Hushka, co-founder of Kadrmas, Lee and Jackson, a Bismarck-based engineering firm active in Great Plains energy development. In the next three weeks Hushka’s firm plans to add 70 more people, most of them skilled technicians and engineers.

The problem in Bismarck is not so much creating jobs but filling positions; the city can be a hard sell due to its relative isolation and harsh climate. Still there’s some virtue to having opportunities. Even at the pit of the recession Bismarck has continued to experience job growth. Today its unemployment rate stands at well under 4%, the lowest rate in the country.

This economic record is not unique to Bismarck. Other domestic energy centers like Anchorage, Alaska, and Morgantown, W.Va., also rank high among the strongest job markets in the country.

Many energy towns are not only getting lots of jobs, but they are also becoming richer. One study, done by economist Mike Mandel, finds the highest per capita income growth in regions of Oklahoma, West Texas and Louisiana, where energy growth has driven the economy. Between 2000 and 2008 these areas enjoyed soaring per capita income gains, while many centers of the “creative economy” such as San Jose, Calif., Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and even Austin, Tex., have experienced per capita income declines.

But few areas are enjoying a greater boom than Bismarck and surrounding parts of western North Dakota. It enjoys a vast array of energy resources, from fossil fuels to biofuels as well as prodigious potential for wind power.

The real big action now, however, is in oil. New drilling technologies have allowed for the tapping of oil deposits far deeper below the surface. The U.S. Geological Service recently increased its estimate of North Dakota’s economically recoverable oil–much of it in the massive Bakken and Three Forks formations–25-fold to 4.3 billion barrels. These formations also extend to large swaths of northern Montana and southern Saskatchewan, Canada.

Unlike past oil booms, such as the one that crashed in the 1980s, this one will last a long time. For one thing the voracious demands on energy coming from India, China and other developing countries will keep energy prices high. At the same time resistance to drilling tends to be weaker in remote areas with few residents, notes Debra Dragseth, a professor of business at Dickinson State University.

The prospect of long-term prosperity tied to oil and gas wealth is already beginning to change the long dismal demographics of the area. A long-term boom could attract a new flow of blue- and white-collar workers to Bismarck and other parts of the plains. This is already starting. Long a net exporter of people–the state’s population is less than it was in 1930–today Bismarck and the state of North Dakota enjoy positive in-migration from the rest of the country.

Part of the lure is something North Dakota had previously lacked: a plethora of high-paying jobs. Truck drivers in the industry earn as much as $80,000 a year, and wages for skilled professionals tend to go well over $100,000 annually. Meanwhile the cost of living is low, with housing prices a third or less of those on the coasts.

Of course, work in the oil or gas fields isn’t easy–and it is sometimes dangerous, particularly in the often brutal winters. But opportunities in tough times can prove an irresistible lure to younger people, which is critical for what has been among the country’s most rapidly aging states. “It’s a petroleum land rush,” says 30-year-old Jerry Haas, who now looks for oil sites for the Dallas-based Petro-Hunt interests. “People see it as a great place of opportunity among people my age.”

Haas, a native of North Dakota, sees more and more out-of-staters coming to Bismarck, in search of generally high-paying, energy-related employment. He has helped organize a 200-member young professionals group to lobby for more youth-oriented amenities in this decidedly conservative Great Plains town.

The shifts in migration and particularly income–due largely to energy–represent a huge boost to an area that has long suffered from an exodus of young talent and a dearth of high-paying jobs. The key issue now is finding ways to turn the current boom into longer-term prosperity. North Dakota certainly has an unprecedented opportunity to build up its human and physical infrastructure. While other states struggle with huge budget shortages, North Dakota’s government enjoys an oil-driven surplus that is expected to grow in the next year from $500 million to over $1 billion.

Dragseth believes the energy boom will allow North Dakotans, long ignored or at best dismissed as hopeless rubes, to start dreaming in ways impossible in much of the country. They can envision a future where, for instance, post-secondary education is free and used to lure the top students from around the world. North Dakota could use its good fortunes to gain the human capital it sorely needs. The Gulf disaster may put an ugly face on energy exploration, particularly oil, for many Americans. But in the nation’s oft-ignored interior, the development of new fuels offers the prospect of a previously unimagined prosperity.

This article originally appeared in Forbes.com.

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

Photo by k.landerholm

June 10, 2010

Subdivisions: The Lots-Per-Minute Race

When you get that morning cup of Java, do you desire the minimal flavor? How about your career, do you desire the most minimal pay check or profits or the most mundane of positions? Let’s assume for some reason that you said ‘No, you would always want to strive for something better than the minimum’.

You now have three hats in front of you, one says “planner” on it, one says “engineer,” and the last one says “developer”. When you put on the “planner” hat, your job is to develop and enforce a set of rules that will guide the development of a city. You suggest to the council a set of standards that recommend the minimum dimensions and areas for residential or commercial projects that are brought in for approvals. Council and planning commission members will argue a bit, but eventually they will decide on what the minimum controls will be within the regulations you will be writing…

Under the “developer” hat, you just bought 100 acres from the bank at a steal, yet it still cost over two million dollars, and that monthly interest payment is going to be painful. You cannot begin to sell any lots until you get preliminary plat approval, so until then, money bleeds out, not in. You cannot form a business plan until someone lays out your site. You look at the local engineering firm and see they offer “land planning” as one of their areas of expertise. They have a large impressive office with lots of computer screens flickering away. Obviously, they must be experts on land planning who can deliver a unique land development that will provide a market edge that makes your development as successful as possible. So you just sign here on their contract for services…

Wearing that “engineer” hat, you look over your production floor. It was once bustling with activity, but now those screens are flickering with employees trying to look busy in fear that a layoff is coming. Luckily, you have a developer coming in with that 100 acre project. You really like laying out subdivisions, and you look forward to using that new software you just bought to automate the process. Next week, you’re scheduled to meet with the developer, who is going to present a sketch plan on the site. You’re ready, with your new software that promises an LPM (lots per minute) ratio of up to 250 lots per minute. With this new tool you can easily lay out that new development in just an hour. Since this is only a sketch plan meeting, you just need a quick picture to get things started.

To make sure you are up to date on the latest regulations, you check the web site of the city for the latest minimums to enter into the software. You use Google Earth to trace in the boundary of the site, because you do not have the time to survey the land, nor does the developer want to spend any money at this point until he knows the city will give him sketch plan approvals. Besides, you threw the initial planning in for free to lure in the developer and get those lucrative engineering fees.

After obtaining a rough estimation of the site from Google Earth, you use your latest technology to generate streets and lots almost as fast as you can move the mouse across the screen. Something that used to take days is now virtually instant. Each lot appears at the exact minimum setback, with the exact minimum side yard, and at the exact minimum square footage. Wow! You are quite happy to tell the developer that he’s got 400 lots on his site.

Slapping on the developer’s hat you use the sketch plan to create your financial projections, cautiously of course, because you have not been given sketch plan approval yet. But clearly you are about to make a ton of money.

Wearing the planner’s hat, at the planning commission meeting you present “Oak Ridge”, the proposal for the 100 acres. After hearing complaints about the monotonous design, you explain that Oak Ridge follows the regulations that the planning commission had agreed upon: every minimum has been met. Reluctantly they approve the sketch plan for Oak Ridge.

Wearing the developer hat you could not be more pleased. Imagine the profits that the lot sales will bring, especially because you got the land so cheap! Never in your wildest dreams had you thought you could get 400 lots approved. The next day you put down a deposit to order that Bentley you always dreamed about.

A few weeks later— wearing the engineer’s hat — you sit down with the actual boundary survey, which is much more accurate than the Google Earth data you used for the sketch plan. You find that the boundary was not even close to what you traced. The surveyor points out the wetlands that will take up about a quarter of the land. He also explains that there is evidence of the pipeline easement. What the ^%$#… ? What pipeline easement? Oh, yes, you remember that Google Earth does not show easements, an honest mistake.

You explain to your staff that the developer wants to explore a low impact development with surface flow. They tell you that the software only automates pipe networks; surface flow calculations are not automated. You direct them to forget the low impact stuff, too much liability and it will add too much manual labor time.

Wearing the developer’s hat you sit down, ready to be presented with the preliminary plat of Oak Ridge. It is a wise choice to be sitting down, because the 240 lot preliminary plat comes as a bit of a shock! What happened to the 160 extra lots we got approved? The engineer explains that was just a quick sketch. By the time the actual boundary was provided, and what with the wetlands and the steep slopes, well, it just had to be made to work.

The engineers explain to you they held every lot to the absolute allowed minimum and that 240 lots is not bad at all. Your vision of the plan blurs and an image of your financial partners and lenders appear, along with thoughts how you are going to pay for that Bentley you picked up last week.

No more need of hats. You now have a picture of a scenario that repeats itself all too often in the land development process. We live in a world dictated solely by minimums. The new buzz-phrase is “a forms based regulatory process”. Is this not just another way to assure that there is a minimum relationship between manmade structures? Notice how architecture did not enter this story… That will not be a factor until later on, as the lots are sold – why worry at the onset of the development?

There are a variety of software packages that automate land development and are used by virtually every engineer in the world. These packages have been developed by firms whose main purpose is to automate engineering. It is so simple to throw in automation for lot geometry. Some of the firms that provide this automation are quite large – billion dollar corporations, that earn profits by using those minimum dimensions allowed by regulations and providing tools that cut the process of producing land developments and engineering drawings from months to minutes.

In this process of progress, we got lost. To have the concept of an LPM ratio of 250 lots per minute is like saying we will layout 250 homes at $200,000 each in 60 seconds. This equates to $833,333 in housing for each second. The development is likely to sit for a few centuries or more, and each home is likely to have 3 people living in it. The average home sells every 6 years, so the living standards of 25,000 people will be set in those 60 precious seconds. How much thought do you think someone laying out 4.16 homes per second will give towards reducing housing costs, eliminating monotony, views from the homes, curb appeal, low impact drainage, long term values, ecology, preserving natural contours and vegetation?

If you want to speed towards a completely unsustainable world, join virtually everyone involved in the land development process. They are already doing that quite well, thank you. We need a complete overhaul of the land development process. Smart Growth is a solution for a limited envelope of development. It will make an impact, but the impact will only be a small ripple in a very large pond. A prescribed set of stringent rules cannot apply to every development situation, thus a monolithic strict set of rules is not a fix for both urban and suburban living.

If you do not seek minimum taste, nor minimum income potential or a minimum position in life, then why would you be remotely satisfied living in the minimal development pattern that creates a minimal city?

When we lay out and build new cities and rebuild existing ones, let’s take the time, thought, and consideration to maximize living standards and assure the successful placement of all businesses that will thrive in the developed future. Perhaps then, we could call this maximized future “sustainable”.

Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

June 3, 2010

The Limits Of The Green Machine

Environmentalism is strangely detached from the public’s economic goals.

The awful oil spill in the Gulf–as well as the recent coal mine disaster in West Virginia–has added spring to the step of America’s hugely influential environmental lobby. After years of hand-wringing over global warming (aka climate change), the greens now have an issue that will play to legitimate public concerns for weeks and months ahead.

This is as it should be. Strong support for environmental regulation–starting particularly under our original “green president,” Richard Nixon–has been based on the protection of public health and safety, as well as the preservation of America’s wild spaces. In this respect, environmentalists enjoy widespread support from the public and even more so from the emerging millennial generation.

Conservatives who fail to address this concern will pay a price, even more so in the future. The Bush administration’s apparent clubbiness with conventional energy interests has undermined the GOP’s once-proud legacy on environmental causes. The oil spill could prove a great campaign issue for Democrats assigning blame for the disaster on lax Republican regulators and their oil company chums.

But there’s also a danger for Democrats who tilt uncritically toward “green” policies. Instead of following the environmentalists’ party line, they should adopt a balanced approach adding both economic and social needs to their concept of “sustainability.”

Sadly, many in the administration seem anxious to extend environmental regulation into virtually every aspect of life. Legitimate concerns over pollution and open space preservation, for example, have now been conflated with a renewed drive to strangle suburbia in favor of forced densification.

The administration’s “livability” agenda, as suggested by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, for example, proposes policies that favor dense urban development over the dispersed living preferred by most Americans. This, notes analyst Ken Orski, represents an unprecedented federal intrusion over traditional local zoning and local decisions.

This centralizing tendency supports a wide array of interests, notably big city mayors and urban land speculators, and also is eagerly promoted by many architects, the media and planning professors. Not surprisingly, less intrusive ways to reduce energy use, such as telecommuting or the dispersion of worksites closer to people’s homes, have elicited very little administration support.

Herein lies the Achilles heel of environmentalism–its profound disconnect from public preferences and aspirations. By embracing such a radical social engineering agenda, the greens may end up undermining their own long-term effectiveness.

The first sign of this pushback, notes analyst Walter Russell Mead, can be seen in growing skepticism about climate change policies both here and in Europe. At a time of severe economic challenges, greens and their political allies need to consider how specific environmental costs threaten an already beleaguered middle and working class.

Voters, for example, may support strong penalties and stricter controls of energy giants such as British Petroleum or Massey Energy, but roughly six in 10, according to a post-spill NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, continue to back the idea of expanded offshore oil drilling. Voters may embrace new environmental improvements but they also want to keep their jobs.

This conflict will be on display in the coming struggle over the “cap and trade” proposals in the Senate. Strongest opposition comes from those states and regions most adversely impacted by strict limits on carbon, clustered in the south and Midwest.

Mitch Daniels, governor of coal-dependent Indiana, even has denounced such proposals as Washington “imperialism.” But Daniels’ opposition also is shared by many Democrats from fossil-fuel-rich states such as North Dakota, West Virginia and Louisiana. Cap and trade even manages to offend many on the left, who see it as yet another opportunity for Wall Street to profit from complex federal regulation.

On the state level, more draconian mandates on shifting to renewable fuels, such as those in place in California, could also cause future power shortages, as the state auditor warned recently. Such concerns are routinely brushed aside by environmentalist and their prodigious PR machines who prattle on about our coming economic salvation through the creation of “green jobs.”

In reality, given their dependence on massive subsidies from both taxpayers and rate-payer, it’s unlikely that renewables, as opposed to relatively clean alternatives such as plentiful natural gas, will produce a net positive impact on the economy for years or even decades. Certainly highly aggressive subsidies for wind and solar have not proved any kind of elixir in countries like Spain, where such policies have been long in place but now are being scaled back due to their drain on both the economy and the public budget.

To some extent, the hype over “green jobs” sometimes appears as something of a PR smokescreen. Prominent greens have long been opposed to the very idea of economic growth and wealth creation, particularly in advanced industrial countries. For decades John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, has favored what he calls “de-development” of Western countries in order to preserve natural resources and reduce pollution.

This approach appears to be gaining support even as the pain of economic dislocation has devastated the advanced countries of the West. Boston University sociologist Juliet Schor, writing in the influential left-leaning The Nation, even attacks “progressive economists”- such as those calling for a second New Deal- for focusing on “climate destabilizing growth” as a way to create new jobs and raise middle class incomes.

In the Huffington Post one-time investment banker Ann Lee, now an economics professor at NYU, has called for “a new economic ideology” that focuses on “human dignity, creative and degrees of freedom” instead of following traditional measurements of material well-being. This “new” economy, she argues, would provide greater returns to favored groups like artists and, of course, teachers, who she considers severely underpaid.

This kind of low-carbon academic “esteem” economy appeals to people who already enjoy considerable material wealth and can count on the support of the state. It is not so promising on the West’s aspirational middle and working classes, particularly those employed in the private sector, whose individual strivings would now be compensated by a deadly combination of high taxes and slow growth.

Until the issues of growth are tackled honestly, the green movement will continue to depend on tragic events such as the Gulf oil spill to maintain its public support. But in the long run, environmentalism will not remain politically “sustainable” if it fails to balance a green future with the economic aspirations of current and future generations.

This article originally appeared in Forbes.com.

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

Photo by just.Luc

May 25, 2010

Santa Fe-ing of the World, Bridging the Digital Divide

This is the second of a two-part piece. Read part one.

If we accept that many rich people are going to find attractive this scenario of dramatically different settlement patterns that feature new aggregation – widely dispersed – the question then becomes whether information technology will ever become a global influence on the built environment, shaping the way the middle class and even the working class live, the way railroads, jets, and automobiles did.

I would argue that the answer is yes. “Jet set” used to refer to the wealthy. Horseless carriages were once a luxury. But none of this is any longer true. In fact, this “Santa-Fe-ing” pattern of dispersion plus aggregation looks a lot like the behavior of corporations over the last half century. The only difference is that now, due to Moore’s Law’s continuing precipitous drop in the price of information technology, the benefits have become affordable to a burgeoning number of individuals.

For half a century, corporations have put each piece of their puzzle wherever they find comparative advantage. They figured out that with enough mainframes and toll-free telephone lines, they could put their headquarters one place, their research and development a second place, their factories a third place, their back-shop paper-shuffling a fourth place, their call centers a fifth place, and their salesmen all over the place. This information-technology-driven dispersion contributed hugely to the rise of aggregations we see in the edge cities of places like the Route 128 corridor around Boston, the birthplace of high technology.

Talk to corporate location specialists and they will happily tell you that of the top 100 things their clients look for, the first 99 is qualified workforce. If the facility in question is a sneaker factory, that means people who will work for pennies an hour, and the answer may be Malaysia. If this means advanced innovation, the answer is places where smart people are willing to cluster, like Silicon Valley – and Bangalore, India.

The core premise of the Santa-Fe-ing hypothesis is that this sort of choice is now available to millions, and soon billions. Because of the ability of Moore’s Law to bring technology to the masses at an accelerating rate, similar choices are now available to individuals, who can look to live, work, play, pray, shop and die wherever they see comparable advantage. They are no longer inextricably tethered to huge, centrally located organizations.

At the time of the American Revolution, in the Agrarian Age, more than 95 percent of all people lived outside what then passed for cities, because wresting profit from the land through farming, trapping, forestry and the like was how wealth was created. Today, however, technology has allowed a tiny number of people to farm thousands of acres, and the number of people in these occupations in the U.S. has dropped to less than 2 percent.

Similarly, half a century ago, at the height of the Industrial Age, the majority of all Americans were in blue-collar manufacturing jobs. Today it’s 19 percent and dropping while the number of people in “service occupations” exceed 78 percent. This is not all about a decline in industrial competitiveness. The U.S. steel industry is the most productive in the world. That’s because it has lowered the number of man-hours per ton of steel to very low rates, by the increasing use of Information Age cleverness to make its product. Even automobile manufacturing has used information technology to redraw the map of where it builds cars. Who, a generation ago, would have expected Mercedes to locate its U.S. assembly plant in Alabama?

There’s no reason to think the rest of the developing world is not following the pattern of Santa Fe-ization. But as the cost of enabling technology drops precipitously, this effect is already transforming the built environment worldwide – including in such unlikely places as Croatia and Ecuador that are usually not the favorite subjects of futuristic speculation.

There are already 30 African nations with more cell phones than landlines. If you look at the billboards in a megacity like Lagos, you will be convinced that the three biggest industries in Nigeria are evangelical churches, health food supplements, and cell phones. At this writing, it’s already almost a decade since Filipinos ousted a tyrant for the first time using cell phone text messaging to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people for street demonstrations in under an hour. In developing countries the proportion of people with access to a phone grew an astonishing 25 percent in the 1990s, according to the Worldwatch Institute, an organization devoted to “an environmentally sustainable and socially just society.” One in five of the world’s population had used a mobile phone by 2002—up from 1 in 237 in 1992. This remarkable pattern fueled connections to the internet. In 1992, just 1 in 7,788 of the world’s population had used the internet. In 2002, 1 in 10 had.

To be sure, these patterns are not distributed uniformly. In places capable of great technological sophistication, such as China and Russia, governments who fear their own dissidents – and thus try to control information – have attempted to intentionally slow the revolution. Some Middle Eastern societies recoil at dissemination of Western ideas in general, and pornography in particular. Latin America is hampered by low literacy rates. There are some failed places on earth marked by such outrageous politics, pathetic infrastructure, abysmal annual incomes and few cities that it’s hard to imagine how they will achieve any significant development any time soon. Singapore researchers examining internet uptake in Asia pointed to a familiar list of failed suspects: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos and Myanmar.

Nonetheless, the gap between the haves and have-nots has hardly proven to be hopelessly rigid, as the migration of software-writing jobs to India has demonstrated. The International Telecommunication Union, tallying broad measures of connectedness worldwide, including affordability, found Slovenia tied with France. Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan were ahead of the United States. In the Caribbean basin, access for the Bahamas, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Costa Rica, St. Lucia and Grenada were ahead of Russia. The Eastern European nations of Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Belarus and Romania were ahead of China. The Singapore researchers found that a lack of English-speakers did not necessarily correlate with poor technology pickup. In a post-literate world – in which the internet increasingly becomes something you watch and listen to, rather than read – low literacy rates were less a barrier than one might expect, at least in Asia. The digital divide seems to be narrowing, a University of Toronto study says. The demographic lag between those who use the Internet in developing countries and those who use it in the United States was about five years, the Canadian researchers reported. This technology is getting to the masses a lot faster than did electricity, radio, washing machines, refrigerators, television, air conditioners and automobiles.

The big difference between information technologies and others separating the haves from the have-nots is price. Because The Curve rules, costs drop dramatically. The transformative stuff quickly becomes affordable and ubiquitous, even in developing countries. How can this not have consequences for our material world?

Every urban African I’ve ever talked to would prefer to be living in his or her village. They say they came to the city for economic opportunity, not out of preference. They return to their villages every chance they get.

If, as the price of information technology approaches zero – transforming everything from transportation to markets – at the same time that the problems of megacities become more and more intractable, the value of being someplace that is great for reasons that can’t be digitized will broaden.

If this puts a cap on the growth of megacities by spreading the benefits of urbanity more broadly – the way the automobile drained immigrant ghettos like the Lower East Side of Manhattan into the former cow pastures and potato farms of New Jersey and Long Island during the middle 20th century – I’m not sure that’s so bad.

What started in Santa Fe could transform the world.

Joel Garreau is Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. He is a fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and author of several best-selling books including Radical Evolution, Edge City and The Nine Nations of North America.

May 25, 2010

Santa Fe-ing of the World

This is part one of a two-part piece. Read Part two.

Human settlements are always shaped by whatever is the state of the art transportation device of the time. Shoe-leather and donkeys enabled the Jerusalem known by Jesus. Sixteen centuries later, when critical transportation has become horse-drawn wagons and ocean-going sail, you get places like Boston. Railroads yield Chicago – both the area around the “L” (intraurban rail) and the area that processed wealth from the hinterlands (the stockyards). The automobile results in places with multiple urban cores like Los Angeles. The jet passenger plane allows more places with such “edge cities” to rise in such hitherto inconvenient locations as Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Atlanta and now Sydney, Lagos, Cairo, Bangkok, Djakarta, and Kuala Lumpur.

The dominant forms of transportation today are the automobile, the jet plane, and the networked computer. What does adding the networked computer get you? I think the answer is “the Santa-Fe-ing of the World.” This means the rise of places where the entire point of which is face-to-face contact. These places are concentrated and walkable, like villages. Some are embedded in the old downtowns – such as Adams Morgan in Washington, or The Left Bank of Paris, or the charming portions of what in London is referred to, somewhat narcissistically, as “The City.” Some are part of what have traditionally been regarded as suburbs or edge cities, such as Reston, Virginia, or Emeryville/Berkeley, California.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a remarkable example of this trend. Home to a world-renowned opera, charming architecture, distinguished restaurants, great places to buy used boots, quirky bookstores, sensational desert and mountain vistas and major diversity, it is also little more than a village of 62,000, far from the nearest major metropolis.

This “Santa-Fe-ing” means urbane well beyond the current definition of urban. It means aggregation and dispersal. As with all innovation, its impact is first seen among people with enough money to have choices.

The logic of this hypothesis starts with the question: “In the 21st century, is there any future for cities of any kind?”

After all, some would have us believe that with enough bandwidth, each of us can wind up on his or her own personal mountaintop in Montana, being lured down into the flatlands only to breed.

That’s a preposterous view of human nature, of course. There’s a reason solitary confinement is a punishment. We are social animals. But still, many of the historic reasons for human concentration are gone. It’s been a century since you’ve had to live within walking distance of your factory. Today, you often don’t even need be within driving distance of your office – as anyone with a cell phone knows. You certainly don’t need a metropolis to acquire anything a dot-com is willing to sell – which is a very big deal now and growing exponentially.

Absent a cataclysm of biblical proportions, I think this means the one and only reason for congregation in the near future is face-to-face contact. Period. Full stop. The places that are good at providing this will thrive – think Oxford, England. The ones that are not will die. Cities are not forever. You have not heard much lately from the Babylon chamber of commerce.

There are nearly 100 classes of real estate out of which you build cities, according to William J. Mitchell, the former head of the architecture and planning department at MIT. They are all being transfigured. The classic example is bookstores. If all you want to do is exchange money for a commodity, the path with least friction is often Amazon. In backwaters where, just ten years ago, buying or even borrowing a non-best-seller was a chore that took weeks, hundreds of thousands of titles are now within one click. Does this mean bookstores have disappeared? Of course not. The half of them that have survived and even grown since the ‘90s, however, have morphed. The critical elements are no longer the shelves. They are the couches, cappuccino machines, and cafes. Bookstores have become places to loiter, face-to-face, among like-minded people.

What about grocery stores? What happens when it becomes cheaper for the supermarket to deliver your toilet paper to you than it is to heat, light and pay rent and taxes on its store? Under what circumstances would you ever again get in your car to drive to market again? For me, the answer is that I want to have face-to-face contact with my tomatoes – or anything else you might find in a social setting like a farmers’ market. I’m not sure I’d trust the kid at the dot com to pick out my spare ribs. If the grocer wants to ship me my barbecue sauce, however, I won’t mind. Ninety-five percent of everything one finds in a supermarket is flash-frozen, shrink-wrapped, and nationally advertised. We are in the midst of a burgeoning freight revolution, in which the stuff is coming to us, rather than us going to the stuff – as anybody who has Christmas shopped lately may have noted. In fact, I can’t think of anything in an entire Wal-Mart that I would regret having delivered to me in a big brown van. Visiting a Wal-Mart doesn’t give me enough of a psychic boost to justify a drive now. Of course, if big-box retail migrates into the digital ether tomorrow, we’ll have an enormous challenge figuring out the adaptive re-use of their buildings. What will we make of them? Roller skating rinks? Greenhouses? Non-denominational evangelical churches? Artists lofts? Whatever the answer, I doubt their passing will be mourned.

What about college campuses? Is there any future for those? After all, the University of Phoenix, the online learning establishment, became one of the hottest growth stocks of the early 21st century. Internet MBAs abound from some of the world’s most distinguished schools. Why bother ever getting out of your pajamas to learn?

Again, the answer is face-to-face contact. After all, distance learning is nothing new. Benjamin Franklin engaged in correspondence classes. The United States military is awash in senior officers with advanced degrees from the University of Maryland, which has pioneered its outreach programs to people in remote locations.

However, distance learning will always be everyone’s second choice. It works best for people who do not have the time or money for the conventional academic experience. First choice remains the traditional universities. Getting into them has become insanely competitive and expensive. Why are they so desirable? Because sitting in class absorbing information from a lecturer is only a tiny part of the college experience. College is where many people meet their first spouse. It’s where they develop a network of friends that they’ll likely maintain for life. It’s an entertainment center and an athletic center. Oh, and as for learning – most of the stuff that has stuck with me came out of dorm sessions at one in the morning, engaging in face-to-face contact with smart people.

As we shall see, the impact of face-to-face on urban calculations includes office space, and even home locations. But why is this transformation occurring now?

It all starts with Moore’s Law, first stated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore As the core faith of the entire global computer industry, it has come to be stated this way: The power of a dollar’s worth of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see. Sure enough, in 2002, with a billion-transistor chip, the 27th doubling occurred right on schedule. The 30 consecutive doublings of anything man-made that we have achieved at this writing – an increase of well over 500 million times in so short a time — is unprecedented in human history. This is exponential change. It’s a curve that goes straight up.

For sure, railroads also changed everything they touched. They transformed Europe. North America was converted from being a struggling, backward, rural civilization mostly hugging the East Coast into a continent-spanning, world-challenging, urban behemoth. New York went from a collection of villages to a world capital. Chicago went from a frontier outpost to a brawny goliath. The trip to San Francisco went from four months to six days. Distance was marked in minutes. Suddenly, every farm boy needed a pocket watch. For many of them, catching the train meant riding the crest of a new era that was mobile and national. A voyage to a new life cost 25 cents.

Of course, as railroad expansion ran out of critical fuel – including money and demand for the services – things leveled off, and society tried to adjust to the astounding changes seen during the rise of this curve. The last transcontinental railroad completed in the United States was the Milwaukee Road in 1909. In part, that was because of the rise of a new transformative technology: The one millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1915.

In contrast, the curve predicted by Moore’s Law did not stop. The computer industry still regularly beats its clockwork-like 18-month schedule for price-performance doubling.

The effect of Moore’s Law on the built environment is and will become ever more profound.

For example, will we ever need offices outside our homes? After all, haven’t we all heard plenty about telecommuting?

Sure, but how many of us have discovered with some chagrin that the most productive five minutes of our work day has occurred around the shared printer? Somebody asks what we’re working on. Conversations ensue. “Oh really? Did you know that Jane was working on something like that?” “There’s this guy you’ve got to talk to; I’ll send you his phone number as soon as I get back to my desk.” “I was just reading about that very subject; I’ll ship you the name of the book.”

This kind of casual face-to-face contact is irreplaceable no matter how cheap or immersive video technology gets. Humans always default to the highest available bandwidth that does the job, and face-to-face is the gold standard. Some tasks require maximum connection to all senses. When you’re trying to build trust, or engage in high-stress, high-value negotiation, or determine intent, or fall in love, or even have fun, face-to-face is hard to beat.

This would seem to argue that some old patterns endure, and that’s true. But think of the twists suggested by this new premium on human basics. Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed two days a week. Would that influence where you lived? Would the mountains or the shore start looking good to you? Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good to you?

Residential real estate is being transformed for these reasons. In the U.S., the explosive growth is in places far beyond any metropolitan area, like the Big Sky Country of Montana, the Gold Country of the California Sierras, the Piedmont of Virginia and the mountains and coasts of New England. For eons, when we’ve visited a nice place on vacation, we’ve asked ourselves, “Why am I going back?” Now, however, we have a new question: “Why am I going back?” Santa Fe is more than 800 miles from Los Angeles, yet it is only semi-jokingly referred to as L.A.’s easternmost suburb. To find out why, check out the nearest airport – in this case Albuquerque – any Monday morning.

Joel Garreau is Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. He is a fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and author of several best-selling books including Radical Evolution, Edge City and The Nine Nations of North America.

May 24, 2010

The Real State of Metropolitan America

The week opened with an important report on metropolitan demographics by the Brookings Institution, only to be followed by the Census Bureau’s annual report on migration, which contained a different message than the Brookings report. We offer yet a third analysis, since both the Brookings and the Census Bureau reports classify up to one-sixth of suburban population as not being in the suburbs.

Brookings: The new Brookings State of Metropolitan America report examined trends in the 100 largest metropolitan areas using Census Bureau data between 2000 and 2008 (the census and the American Community Survey). Brookings highlighted findings that some “primary cities” were experiencing an increase in white population, while the rest of the metropolitan area (which it called suburbs) was becoming more diverse. Not uncharacteristically, the core city oriented press took the bait and embellished a bit on the findings. MSNBC characterized the report as indicating that “many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.” Brookings, which largely shares and encourages the urbanist media spin, calls this movement of young, educated whites from suburbs to the cities “bright flight.”

Brookings also expanded is previous finding that the majority of people in poverty live in suburbs to note that a majority of Hispanic and African-Americans now live in the suburbs. This is really not all that surprising, since suburban areas continue to grow faster and comprise the overwhelming share of metropolitan population.

Census Bureau: Just a day or two later, the Census Bureau published its annual analysis of migration in the nation. The basis of this report is the Current Population Survey, which like the American Community Survey is conducted by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau report received considerably less press attention than the Brookings report, perhaps it would be hard to characterize any of its findings as being consistent with the favored “death of the suburbs” line. The previous annual editions back to the beginning of the decade indicate little difference from the 2008-2009 migration trends in the current report.

The Census Bureau analysis indicates that, almost regardless of the category, many more people are moving from “principal cities” to what it refers to as “suburbs.”

Every ethnic group is moving to the suburbs in greater numbers than to principal cities. Three times as many Hispanics are moving from principal cities to the suburbs as from the suburbs to principal cities. The same is true for twice as many African-Americans and Asians. Whites are moving to the suburbs at 1.5 times the rate of their moving to principal cities (Figure 1).
Every age group but one is moving to the suburbs at substantially above the rate of movement to the principal cities. There is strong movement among people aged from 20 to 25 to the suburbs rather than the principal cities (Figure 2). The one exception was that among people over 85 years of age, not exactly the epitome of the “bright flight” cited by Brookings and the media.
The overwhelming migration from principal cities to the suburbs, rather than from suburbs to principal cities was characteristic across all income categories.
There is, in reality, little “bright flight” to report. Among people with college and graduate degrees, nearly twice as many moved from principal cities to suburbs as moved from suburbs to principal cities (Figure 2). While the Census report does not provide mobility information on educational attainment by age, there was strong movement of young adults to the suburbs (noted above).

The trends in the Census report are consistent with the domestic migration trends that we have previously reported.

What is a Suburb? There are significant problems with definition of the term “suburb in each of the reports.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which establishes metropolitan area criteria switched to the “principal city” terminology for the 2000 census, partly to make it clear that principal cities were not inner cities or central cities. The criteria designates as principal cities, the largest in each metropolitan area, any city over 250,000 and any city with more than 50,000 population in which total employment exceeds the workforce.

Among the 52 major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1,000,000 population), OMB designates 230 principal cities. The Census Bureau report calls everything outside a principal city a suburb. In fact, most of the principal cities are themselves suburbs, developed since World War II as urban areas and expanded outward from their cores.

For example, principal city Schaumburg, Illinois is located well outside the core city of Chicago and contains a large suburban employment center (“edge city”). Bellevue, the large suburban employment center in the Seattle area is a principal city and not called a suburb by the Census Bureau. Cerritos, California is one of the 25 principal cities of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Cerritos used to be called Dairy Valley, since it consisted largely of dairy farms until the middle 1950s.

The Brookings report, in recognition of this problem, calls its non-suburbs primary cities and limits them to no more than three for any metropolitan area. Still, many suburbs are designated as primary cities and not counted in the suburban data, such as Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix), Arlington, Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth), and Cary, North Carolina (Raleigh).

Suburban versus core analysis needs to be considerably more precise to be meaningful. It would be best to define the characteristics of the core and analyze metropolitan areas at the census tract level, rather than at the city level. However, the data at the city level is far more accessible and is thus predominantly used.

What is a Core City? Even so, it is important to recognize that there are substantial differences among core cities (which are, broadly speaking, the only parts of urban areas that are not suburbs). Core cities may be divided into three broad categories:

Pre-World War II Core Cities: These are core cities that have essentially the same boundaries as in 1950. There are 21 Pre-World War II Core Cities in the major metropolitan areas (See Table 2 below). These were largely built before the automobile became dominant, and once were predominately walking and transit cities. New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco are probably the best examples.

Pre-World War II Core Cities with Suburbs: Many pre-World War II core cities either included wide swaths of vacant developable land in 1950 or annexed substantial amounts of vacant or suburban land after 1950. These cities have cores that are similar to the Pre-World War II Core Cities, but also include suburbs that are little different than the inner suburbs outside the city. For example, in 1950, Los Angeles contained substantial amounts of non-urban land in the San Fernando Valley, which was eventually covered with suburban development. Other cities, such as Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, Austin and Houston annexed considerable suburban land after 1950. These annexations did not always result in increased population. For example, Salt Lake City doubled its land area between 1950 and 2000, yet retained essentially the same population. Milwaukee nearly doubled its land area, yet lost 40,000 residents.

Suburban Core Cities: A number of core cities developed predominantly after World War II and as a result, have little, if any pre-World War II core. The largest of these is Phoenix, which recently passed Philadelphia to become the nation’s 6th largest city. San Jose, Charlotte, Orlando and Las Vegas are also examples of Suburban Core Cities.

Another Perspective: The following analysis (expanded version available here) is offered to indicate general trends in suburbs when non-suburban areas are defined to exclude demonstrably suburban areas. (This may sound circular, but both Brookings and the Census Bureau define some suburban areas as non-suburban.)

Table 1
Population Trends: Metropolitan Areas Over 1,000,000: 2000-2008 by Geography

	2000	2008	Change	%
Metropolitan Areas	152,382,483	166,564,617	14,182,134	9.3%
Core Cities	43,818,674	45,922,606	2,103,932	4.8%
Pre-WW2 Core Cities	20,172,850	20,219,342	46,492	0.2%
Pre-WW2 Core Cities with Suburbs	18,472,298	19,723,295	1,250,997	6.8%
Suburban Core Cities (Post WW2)	5,173,526	5,979,969	806,443	15.6%
Suburbs	108,563,809	120,642,011	12,078,202	11.1%
Suburbs Classified by OMB as Principal Cities	17,968,287	19,334,689	1,366,402	7.6%
Suburbs Not Classified as Principal Cities	90,595,522	101,307,322	10,711,800	11.8%

Calculated from US Bureau of the Census Data
For classification of core cities, see Table 3
2008 Population of "Suburbs Classified as Principal Cities" is slightly understated because there are no late official estimates for 7 "census designated places." (which are not cities): 2000 estimates used.

Generally, suburbs continue to grow much faster than the core cities (Table 1 and Figure 3). Between 2000 and 2008:

Suburbs added 12.1 million residents, growing 11.1%.
Core cities added 2.1 million residents, growing 4.8%. The greatest growth was in the Post War (Suburban) Core Cities, at 15.6%. The Pre-War Core Cities with Suburbs grew 6.8% and the Pre-War Cities grew 0.2% (Figure 4).

Virtually all of the core city growth was in the more suburban core cities, which is another indication that suburbanization is continuing. Further, the principal cities that are really suburban grew at a rate of 7.6%, more than double that of the core cities. This would seem to indicate that the migration data from the Census Bureau indicating a continued migration to the suburbs is, if anything, materially understated (by classification of some suburbs as principal cities).

At the same time, the demographic trends and prospects in the nation’s core cities are better than in the past. The rampant lawlessness that drove so many out of the cities in the 1970s has been replaced by law enforcement strategies developed under former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani. Core cities would become more attractive to future residents with serious reform of school performance and business regulation. Until that occurs, however, it seems unlikely that the movement from the cities to the suburbs will be reversed.

The city-centric media, with its faith-based demographics, continue to announce the demise of the suburbs. However, until migration data shows a net movement from the suburbs to the core cities, it will remain little more than disingenuous hype. At this point, it is not even close. From 2000 to 2008, suburban counties in major metropolitan areas gained 2,000,000 domestic migrants, while the core counties lost 4,600,000 domestic migrants (Note).

Note: Domestic migration data is reported at the county level and is thus not available for core cities, except where they are coterminous with counties (Such as New York, San Francisco, Baltimore and Washington).

Table 2
Metropolitan Areas and Core Cities

Metropolitan Area	Core City (ies)	Type of Core City
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA	Atlanta	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Austin-Round Rock, TX	Austin	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Baltimore-Towson, MD	Baltimore	Pre-WW2 Core City
Birmingham-Hoover, AL	Birmingham	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH	Boston	Pre-WW2 Core City
Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY	Buffalo	Pre-WW2 Core City
Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, NC-SC	Charlotte	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI	Chicago	Pre-WW2 Core City
Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN	Cincinnati	Pre-WW2 Core City
Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH	Cleveland	Pre-WW2 Core City
Columbus, OH	Columbus	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX	Dallas	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO	Denver	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI	Detroit	Pre-WW2 Core City
Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT	Hartford	Pre-WW2 Core City
Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX	Houston	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Indianapolis-Carmel, IN	Indianapolis	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Jacksonville, FL	Jacksonville	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Kansas City, MO-KS	Kansas City	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Las Vegas-Paradise, NV	Las Vegas	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA	Los Angeles	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN	Louisville	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	Memphis	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL	Miami	Pre-WW2 Core City
Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI	Milwaukee	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI	Minneapolis	Pre-WW2 Core City
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI	St. Paul	Pre-WW2 Core City
Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN	Nashville	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA	New Orleans	Pre-WW2 Core City
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA	New York	Pre-WW2 Core City
Oklahoma City, OK	Oklahoma City	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Orlando-Kissimmee, FL	Orlando	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD	Philadelphia	Pre-WW2 Core City
Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ	Phoenix	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Pittsburgh, PA	Pittsburgh	Pre-WW2 Core City
Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA	Portland	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA	Providence	Pre-WW2 Core City
Raleigh-Cary, NC	Raleigh	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Richmond, VA	Richmond	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	Riverside	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Rochester, NY	Rochester	Pre-WW2 Core City
Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA	Sacramento	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Salt Lake City, UT	Salt Lake City	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
San Antonio, TX	San Antonio	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA	San Diego	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	San Francisco	Pre-WW2 Core City
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	Oakland	Pre-WW2 Core City
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	San Jose	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	Seattle	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
St. Louis, MO-IL	St. Louis	Pre-WW2 Core City
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL	Tampa	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Tucson, AZ	Tucson	Suburban Core City (Post -WW2)
Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC	Norfolk	Pre-WW2 Core City with Suburbs
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	Washington	Pre-WW2 Core City

See: Core City Classification Definitions

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

Photograph: Suburban core city: Phoenix

May 18, 2010

Category: Small Cities