New Geography

Category: Small Cities

  • Density, Unpacked: Is Creative Class Theory a Front for Real Estate Greed?

    “The heresy of heresies was common sense”—George Orwell

    The stories we tell affect the lives we lead. I do not mean to be abstract here. I mean, literally, the stories that are told make up a kind of meta-reality that soaks in us to form a “truth”. This “truth” affects policy, which affects investment, which affects bricks and mortar, pocketbooks, and power. Eventually, the “truth” trickles down into a more real reality that defines the lives of the powerless.

    The story du jour in urban policy is one of density. The arc of the story is that cities are places where “ideas come to have sex”. The lovechild is innovation. The mood lighting is creative placemaking.

    The Kama Sutra of density reads this way: creative people cluster in cities that are good at lifestyle manufacturing. The more people that are sardined the higher likelihood there will be “serendipitous” encounters. The more serendipity in a city the better chance the next “big thing” will occur. The next “big thing” will lead to a good start-up, which will lead to an agglomeration of start-ups, termed an “Innovation District”. Detroit becomes Detroit 2.0 then.

    The story of density is a seductive story. Society-making is sobering and full of harsh realities. The story of density is seamless, velvety. It is no wonder the story gets sold, implemented, and then told and re-told, despite the validity and logic of the story being pretty awful.

    Take the recent New York Times piece entitled “What It Takes to Create a Start-up Community”. In it, the writer interviews urbanist Richard Florida. “Population density, [Florida] said, allows for the serendipitous encounters that inspire creativity, innovation and collaboration,” reads one key passage in the piece.

    The story goes on to highlight the emerging tech hub of Boulder as the exemplar of the story of density. One problem: Boulder, a city of less than 100,000, isn’t dense, with a population per square mile of 3,948. The writer moves the goal posts a bit and says the city “is an unusual case of density”, before going on to question whether a start-up community can be created in a city like Detroit that “lacks density”. Yet Detroit, despite being a land mass comprised of one-third vacant land, is denser than Boulder, at 5,144 people per square mile. In all, Aristotle would have a field day with the piece.

    Such illogic peppers the story of density, particularly as it relates to the correlation—to say nothing of the causation—between household clustering and tech growth. For instance, in a recent analysis of America’s top “high tech hot spots” by the Progressive Policy Institute, the top 25 counties experiencing the highest percentage of tech job growth reads like a “Where’s Waldo” list, if Waldo was Thoreau-like. There’s Madison County in Alabama (417 people per sq. mile). Utah County in Utah (258 people per sq. mile). Denton County in Texas (754 people per sq. mile). Fayette County in Kentucky (1,043 people per sq. mile). Snohomish County in Washington (342 people per sq. mile).

    To be fair, also on the list are San Francisco, Boston, and New York. In the case of Boston and San Fran, the tech clustering is a legacy asset—including large venture capital funds — from decades prior, not the result of the story of density. New York, under Mayor Bloomberg, has supposedly gone whole hog on the “idea-sex in the city” script, yet tech is but a speck on the universe that is New York City’s economy.

    For example, Kings County, home to Brooklyn, numbers 25 on the list of places with highest percent of tech job growth, yet Brooklyn’s Job Index—calculated as new tech/information jobs between 2007 and 2012, as a share of 2007 total private sector employment—is just 0.4, meaning the number of new tech jobs in Brooklyn represents less than half a percent of total private employment. Given the information sector as a whole is hemorrhaging jobs according to a recent Harvard Business Review, the scaling of fledgling tech towns is unlikely. This is especially true for cities like New York that—while enriched with the chattering class buzz stoking the story of density—simply lacks the engineering talent of Boston, Silicon Valley, Houston and yes, Detroit , to make the “scene” something than just that: a scene.

    But let’s play along anyway, as that’s the power of the story of density: reality doesn’t bite. So, say Brooklyn can become the next Silicon Valley. This likelihood depends on two assumptions that define the story of density: “cooling” a city will draw top tech talent, and then packing them in to luxury condo towers and mixed use districts will form creativity incubators.

    First, the idea that manufacturing cool spurs a start-up scene is spurious at best. I mean, has this ever worked? Please don’t say Austin, or any number of college towns or state capitals or places with boutique streets that depend largely on transfers from taxpayers — and parents! — to their privileged burgs. Many of these place, like Austin and Raleigh, are themselves far from dense urban nodes, but are exceptionally spread out.

    What about Boulder? In the piece “How Boulder Grew Into a Hub for Start-Ups”, the writer questions venture capitalist Brad Feld, a huge player in the Boulder tech scene, about what brings entrepreneurs to communities like Boulder. Feld throws his hands in the air:

    “People want to live where they want to live. You should figure out where you want to be and build a life around it. Different geographies attract different people.”

    Why did Feld move to Boulder?

    Actually, I moved here in 1995 because Amy said "I’m moving to Boulder – you can come with me if you want." And I did.

    There are things that do appeal to innovators, however. Affordability is an appeal, so says a recent survey of London techies who are decamping from the capital, if only because outrageous rents prevent a “start-up” of anything.

    Over in Berlin, the tech scene is struggling despite the “Berlin geek chic” culture that unfolded. The city’s tech leaders think Berlin needs to be more conventional than cool. “[T]he jury is still out on whether [Berlin’s] a great place to truly grow that company into a mature startup," notes Marc Strigel, head of SoundCloud. "Both the authorities and startups could do much more in promoting Berlin for families, for these world-class talents we definitely need."

    The second assumption relates to the idea that sardining people will ultimately lead to serendipity and innovation. I smell underpants gnomes. Specifically, in an episode of South Park, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone expose the blind loyalty attached to the façade of “expertise”. The episode goes like this: the characters need a presentation for class. One of the boys talks about a group of gnomes that inexplicably sneak into his house to steal underpants. There’s got to be a reason, right? They confront the gnomes who, claiming to be business experts, explain their business plan as thus: Step 1: Collect Underpants. Step 2: ?. Step 3: Profit.

    The story of density has the same logic gap. Step 1: Population density. Step 2: ?. Step 3: Innovation. Density gurus will claim Step 2 relates to serendipity. But serendipity is chance. How do you plan for chance? Even if you could, creative classification is largely a process of homogenization by class, age, and profession, which, according Rita King of Science House, erodes the possibility of meaningful chance encounters. “Artists bumping into other artists or business people bumping into other business people or Mormons bumping into other Mormons, etc., isn’t real serendipity,” notes King. San Francisco in many ways is more a monoculture than the highly diverse suburbs that surround it.

    Okay, so if the story of density really isn’t about innovation then what is it about? The answer can be found in a recent article entitled “Urban Prophet” in the real estate trade mag Property Week. The piece quotes Albert Ratner, chairman of US real estate firm Forest City Enterprises, on his reading of Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Classes, the first book in the story of density. “You have given real estate developers the playbook,” notes Ratner.

    Put simply, the point of sardining is to make as much money as possible for those who already  have the most . This is the raw truth that fuels the hype, and of course pays for it as well. But it’s a tough sell to neighborhoods and cities increasingly experiencing the negative effects of real estate wealth jamming, and more broadly wealth inequality. Enter the story of density to make another “truth”.

    In reality, the story of density is a fiction and it’s high time we start rewriting the book.

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

  • There’s Real Economic Development Gold in El Dorado—Arkansas

    For centuries, explorers searched for the legendary golden city of El Dorado, seeking instant wealth in the jungles of South America. But today’s treasure trove may be found much closer to home; cities like El Dorado, Arkansas, for example, that have successfully linked their economic development strategy to improving the educational attainment of their residents.

    El Dorado, a city of about 20,000 people that was at the heart of Arkansas’s oil boom in the 1920s has been hard pressed to reprise that economic growth experience in this century.  Instead of chasing after the fool’s gold of becoming cool, it has found a way to attract new residents and increase its economic vitality by promising its public school students a free college education if they graduate from high school with good grades. That promise has the potential to provide the critical glue in holding together a broad based economic recovery not just for cities such as El Dorado but for entire states or even the country.

    The El Dorado Promise is a scholarship program established and funded by Murphy Oil Corporation, the town’s largest employer. Modeled after a similar program in Kalamazoo, MI, It provides graduates of the city’s high school a scholarship covering tuition and mandatory fees that can be used at any accredited two- or four-year, public or private, educational institution in the US up to an amount equal to the highest annual resident tuition at an Arkansas public university.

    Since its inception in 2007, 1239 students have taken advantage of the offer. Over 90% of them have completed at least one year of college. The first high school class to enjoy this benefit has graduated after five years from college at a rate almost 40% greater than the state’s higher education student population. These gains in acquiring the skills necessary to be competitive in today’s global economy have been achieved by virtually all of the city’s high school students, over 90% of whom graduated from high school last year.

    Furthermore the culture of a college-bound student population is now permeating throughout the school district, with a recent study finding that students in grades three through eight in the city scored significantly higher than their matched peers in nearby school districts in both math and literacy. The greatest gains have come from those who were the youngest when the Promise was announced.

    The goal of the El Dorado Promise was not just greater educational attainment, however. The visionaries who established the program also wanted to use this program to improve the community’s economic vitality and quality of life. They have clearly done that.  Enrollment in the city’s schools was up 5% in just the first four years of the program’s existence. As the Promise website says, “the prospect of an increasingly educated workforce gives economic development leaders new tools to attract businesses to the region.”

    The first such Promise was made in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2005 by still anonymous benefactors seeking to restore the reputation of a city made famous in 1942 by the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s hit tune about a “gal” who lived there. Rather than raise taxes to balance the city’s budget, those who established the Kalamazoo Promise offered a fully paid four-year scholarship to any public institution of higher education in Michigan to any student who went to the city’s high schools for all four years. Under the terms of the Kalamazoo Promise, students have no obligation to repay the money or even to reside in Kalamazoo after they graduate from college.

    The results are very similar to those of El Dorado. Kalamazoo’s student population is up 17.6% and dropout rates have been cut in half. Ninety percent of the city’s female African-American high school graduates have gone on to college. On the economic front, the proportion of residential construction in the city rose sharply from around 30% to nearly 50% of all permits issued in the greater Kalamazoo area. The community’s careful tracking of the results has identified 1600 families who say they are living in the city because of the Promise.

    The economic challenges that caused El Dorado and Kalamazoo to up their game in getting local residents to graduate from high school and go on to college are no different than the challenge facing the country as a whole  in trying to create a competitive workforce in today’s increasingly global and technology driven economy.  For example, the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that 62% of the jobs in the United States by the year 2018 will require at least some college education – for example a certificate for a specific skill – and that more than half of those jobs will require a bachelor’s degree. Unless the nation wants to fill those jobs with immigrants from other countries, it will have to do a much better job of giving each American who graduates from high school a chance to pursue a two year skill certificate or a baccalaureate degree. 

    A promise that rewards good academic performance in high school with a scholarship that pays for four years of college tuition has demonstrated it can make a major difference in achieving our educational and economic goals. Now it’s time for the rest of the country to find the gold that Kalamazoo and El Dorado have already discovered. Just as the country, as part of its overall economic development strategy, once expanded access to a universal free education first for primary schools and later for high schools, it must now find ways to make these two pioneering cities’ promise to their young people America’s Promise to all of its youth.

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

    Graduation photo by Bigstock.

  • Where Are The Boomers Headed? Not Back To The City

    Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

    Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real–estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.

    But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.

    If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers.

    Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone.

    Where the boomers move is critical to the real estate industry, as well as other businesses. This is a large and relatively wealthy generation. Boomers account for some 70% of the country’s disposable income, and their spending decisions will shake markets around the country.

    Given the importance of this market, why has the analysis of it proved so wrong? One factor may well be that most boomers generally do not really want to move if they can help it. Three out of four boomers want to “age in place,” according to a recent AARP  study.

    Part of the problem is one found commonly in press reporting on demographic trends; reporters only tend to know what they see, and mostly they work almost exclusively in urban cores. They encounter empty nester who moves to Manhattan or even downtown St. Louis, but not the ones who moves to the desert, lake, the mountains, the woods or into an adult-oriented community on the urban fringe. Out of the core, these people often fade into media oblivion.

    However, as people age, they turn out to be not, as one developer suggests, “more hip hop and happening” than more likely to seek remaining not only close to home, but attached to the workforce and the neighborhood. A recent series in the Dallas Morning News tracked where local empty nesters were moving — largely to low-crime, well-maintained suburbs and exurbs. What were they looking for? The paper found the biggest concern by far to be safety, followed by affordability and quiet.

    So if boomers aren’t flocking to inner cities, which of the 51 biggest metro areas are gaining the largest share of them? The top gainers are all relatively low-cost, low-density Sun Belt metropolises, led by Las Vegas. Its boomer population expanded 20.2% from 2000 to 2010, with a 12.2% decline in the five-mile inner ring and 36.3% growth outside it. In second place, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., up 11.5% (-8.3% in the five-mile zone, +13.5% outside); followed by Phoenix, whose boomer population rose 11.3% (-22.8%, +15.0%). In contrast, more expensive, denser cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., saw the worst boomer flight, suffering double-digit percentage losses.

    What are the implications of these findings? For cities, time to forget the long-anticipated “back to the city” trend among seniors as something that can save their downtowns. To be sure, there may be some ultra-affluent urban districts that may attract wealthy older investors and buyers, many of them part-time residents, such as Chicago’s Gold Coast and parts of Manhattan. In some elite Manhattan buildings, full-time residents constitute as little as 10% of the total.

    A  little further out from these hot spots, boomers are fleeing. The five-mile zone around the City Hall of New York lost about 20% of its boomer population in the past decade, while in Chicago the corresponding area lost 26%.

    Ultimately, some downtown places might be a “wonderland,” as The New York Times puts it,for a small group of highly affluent residents. But for most they are outrageously expensive. At an age when capital preservation if often paramount, in New York, the senior best positioned is one living a long time in a rent-controlled apartment.

    Cities need to understand that, for the most part, their appeal remains primarily to young, largely single people, students and couples before they have children; cities’ real challenge, and opportunity, lies in trying to keep more of this youthful cohort in the city as they age and expand their households. Boomers and seniors may be able to support luxury apartment developers in parts of Manhattan, but not in most cities.

    The boomer population in the five-mile radius of the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas fell by roughly a million from 2000 to 2010, out of a 2000 population of nearly 6 million, or 17%. The boomer population outside the five-mile zone in these metro areas also fell, but at a much lower rate: 2%, or 800,000 people out of a population of 39.5 million in 2000.  Away from the major metros, smaller metropolitan areas and rural areas gained nearly 450,000 boomers. However, there was an overall loss of about 1.3 million boomers, principally due to deaths.

    Given the trends, suburbs will likely persist as a primary arena for aging populations. This suggests these communities will have to ramp up services to accommodate them, such as shuttle buses and hospitals. They should cultivate  downshifting boomers as new consumers for local stores, and particularly on Main Streets, and as sources for capital and expertise.

    Perhaps the biggest impact, however, may be on smaller metropolitan areas and the less expensive Sun Belt communities. As more boomers achieve “empty nester” status they could bring investment capital, and broader connections to smaller cities that could much use them.

    One early sign of this trend may be the recent rise in migration to Florida. After a brief recession-driven hiatus a net 200,000 people have moved to Florida in the last two years. New Census numbers also suggest a  large number of people continue to leave the Northeast, the Midwest and California.  Also likely to benefit will be some emerging boomer magnet communities in Idaho, Arizona, Uta­h, the Carolinas and Colorado.

    For real estate developers and investors, the ones often most entranced by the “back to the city” story, the lessons are very clear. It makes more sense to follow the numbers, and understand the logic of senior migration, than swallow the snake oil so many have been carelessly imbibing. There are great opportunities in the expanding senior market, including in some uniquely attractive urban districts— but the bigger plays are in outlying areas, and, increasingly, smaller towns.

    Baby Boomer Population (35-54 in 2000/45-64 in 2010)
    Comparison: 5 Mile Radius of City Hall v. Balance of Metropolitan Area          
    51 Major Metropolitan Areas (2010 Popultion over 1,000,000)            
    In thousands (000)                
                       
        POPULATION   % OF POPULATION
        2000 2010 Change %   2000 2010  % Change
                       
    5-MILE RADIUS     5,895     4,890   (1,005) -17.1%   7.1% 6.0% -15.7%
    BALANCE     39,352   38,575      (777) -2.0%   47.5% 47.3% -0.4%
    MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS (MMAS)   45,247   43,464   (1,783) -3.9%   54.6% 53.3% -2.4%
                       
    OUTSIDE MMAS   37,579   38,025        446 1.2%   45.4% 46.7% 2.8%
                       
    UNITED STATES   82,826   81,489   (1,337) -1.6%   100.0% 100.0% 0.0%
                       
    Calculated from Census Burea data

     

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

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

  • You Say You Want A (Metropolitan) Revolution?

    [Book Review] The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley. 2013, Brookings Focus Book

    It’s now decades after deindustrialization, and several years since the Great Recession supposedly ended. Yet too many American cities are still struggling to recover from the losses of jobs, population, taxes, and identities. Detroit’s declaration of bankruptcy in July drew new attention to the problem, and it helped fuel the extensive marketing campaign for The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution, published just a few weeks earlier. The book quickly became a cause célèbre garnering high praise from various media outlets.

    Katz and Bradley highlight the emergence of “trading metros” with “innovation districts,” clusters of universities and local businesses, hospitals, museums, and advanced technology and manufacturing industries held together regionally with housing, retail and transit networks that seem to promise a better economic future. The book’s strength lies in its attention to metros, rather than cities, as the unit of urban settlement and economics. The authors encourage planners and government officials to develop new strategies based on “Emergent Metros” rather than “Legacy Cities.”

    This attention to metropolitan areas is welcome, but the book’s outline of the future is overly optimistic. Describing deindustrialization and disinvestment as part of an evolutionary process and a “revolution unleashed” is hyperbole reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. More critically, The Metropolitan Revolution can be read as a neoliberal sales pitch. In fact, Katz and Bradley have “doubled down” on an approach that has not only dominated economic thought since the 1980s, but that has actually contributed to the urban crisis today.

    Neoliberal theory hypothesizes that small government, deregulation, global production networks, free trade agreements, labor market flexibility, abandonment of full employment policy, cost shifting, and capital mobility improve corporate competitiveness and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, and increase productivity. These ideas have been applied to corporate restructuring over the last 30 years, informing changes like downsizing, outsourcing, and rightsizing. In another example, neoliberals argued that the housing bubble and the subsequent Great Recession resulted from federal government intervention in the housing market, which encouraged home ownership for the unqualified, and from a national liberal monetary policy. Even when neoliberal economic policies have failed, proponents have continued their unwavering critique of “big government” and regulations.

    Using the language of neoliberalism and corporate restructuring, Katz and Bradley write that the metropolitan revolution is “exploding the tired construct” about the role of the federal government. Now, they say, it is the cities and metro areas that “are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risks, making hard choices and asking for forgiveness not permission.” Their metropolitan revolution sees power relations being restructured, as metros and cities take greater responsibility for their economic growth, and as federal government power devolves: “The metropolitan revolution has only one logical conclusion: the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the US.” But, we should ask, inversion for whom? Their examples all seem to suggest shifts from elected government officials to unelected business and economic leaders and non-governmental organizations.

    Katz and Bradley borrow heavily from neoliberal architects who claimed that, in the corporate world, restructuring would result in greater local and regional cooperation and in independence for the new businesses on which future growth would be based. But corporate restructuring promised more than it delivered, as corporations were downsized, outsourced, and resource starved. Instead of cooperation, restructuring often led to an increase in internal predatory activity and greater control by corporate headquarters, under the rubric of the ‘survival of the fittest’.

    Much like the early supporters of corporate restructuring, Katz and Bradley make an overly optimistic case, citing cherry-picked metros that seem to have accepted current conditions and neoliberal strategies as part of the natural economic order. But, constrained by state and federal neoliberal defunding policy, cities that lie within metros, especially in the Rust Belt, are hoarding or fighting for resources in a zero sum game of economic and regional development. Just as in the corporate sector, local and regional collaborations are largely ineffective. As Harvard economist Stephan Marlin has suggested, it may be that thinking like an economist can undermine a real sense of community.

    Rather than Katz and Bradley’s view of metro areas as collaborative communities on which future growth could be based, we might better see them as urban archipelagos, autonomous islands of self-interest, and rational calculators in a neoliberal sea.

    Northeast Ohio, for example, is an area optimistically viewed by Katz and Bradley. It’s a place where community officials have historically ignored regional economic plans unless they were directly impacted by them. Instead, they pursued localized development efforts, often competing rather than cooperating within a metropolitan region. Greg LeRoy, director of the public policy group Good Jobs First, found that between 1996 and 2005 many small and medium sized firms received lucrative tax breaks to move to new locations… all within the Cleveland metro area. The average distance moved in this metro cannibalization was five miles. A new regional sustainability plan for Northeast Ohio has now been funded by a $4.25 million grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and a consortium of regional foundations. But the plan has garnered only limited support among the 375 cities, townships, and regional agencies in the metro area. Most observers see little chance of the plan being adopted on any meaningful scale.

    Katz and Bradley’s book may end up being more of a distraction than a revolution for many metros. It dilutes the distinctly urban crisis. Racial and class polarization, and growing inequities in education, housing, health care, and infrastructure mark this urban crisis. The book essentially offers platitudes about economic growth for cities and first rings suburbs that have suffered from the neoliberal crisis, rather than offering suggestions for how to rebuild and reclaim urban neighborhoods and schools and prevent further decline. While praising sympathetic NGOs, Katz and Bradley fail to acknowledge the populist revolt in many metros, cities, and neighborhoods. In fact, they are contemptuous of grass-roots efforts such as the Occupy Movement. Their census-defined metropolitan revolution is “reasoned rather than emotional, leader driven rather than leaderless, born of pragmatism and optimism rather than despair or anger.” Despite claims to the contrary, the book is another indicator the economic divergence between Main Street and Wall Street.

    John Russo is a visiting research fellow at the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Tech, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, and professor (emeritus) in the Williamson College of Business Administration at Youngstown State University. He is a board member of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (Youngstown-Warren), and the co-author, with Sherry Linkon, of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown.

  • America’s Fastest-Growing Counties: The ‘Burbs Are Back

    For nearly a half century, the death of suburbs and exurbs has been prophesied by pundits, urban real-estate interests and their media allies, and they ratcheted up the volume after the housing crash of 2007. The urban periphery was destined to become “the next slums,” Christopher Leinberger wrote in The Atlantic in 2008, while a recent book by Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher, The End of Suburbs, claimed that suburbs and exurbs were on the verge of extinction as people flocked back to dense cities such as New York.

    This has become a matter of faith even among many supposed development professionals. “ There’s a pall being cast on the outer edges,” John McIlwain, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute, told USA Today. “The foreclosures, the vacancies, the uncompleted roads. It’s uncomfortable out there. The glitz is off.”

    Yet an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of the counties with populations over 100,000 that have gained the most new residents since 2010 tells us something very different: Suburbs and exurbs are making a comeback, something that even the density-obsessed New York Times has been forced to admit. Of the 10 fastest-growing large counties all but two — Orleans Parish, home to the recovering city of New Orleans, and the Texas oil town of Midland— are located in the suburban or exurban fringe of major metropolitan areas.

    Fastest Growiing US Counties: 2010-2012
    Counties over 100,000 Population
    Rank County Equivalent Jurisdiction Growth
    1 Williamson, TX 7.94%
    2 Loudoun, VA 7.87%
    3 Hays, TX 7.56%
    4 Orleans, LA 7.39%
    5 Fort Bend, TX 7.16%
    6 Midland, TX 7.14%
    7 Forsyth, GA 7.07%
    8 Montgomery, TN 7.04%
    9 Prince William, VA 7.04%
    10 Osceola, FL 6.97%

     

    Not surprisingly several of these fast-growth areas are in burgeoning Texas metro areas. The population of Williamson County, on the outskirts of Austin, has expanded 7.94% since 2010, the strongest growth in the nation over that period. Far from turning into a slum, over the past 25 years the county’s residents have enjoyed the Lone Star state’s fastest rate of income growth and the sixth-highest in the nation. With a strong tech scene – Dell is headquartered in the Williamson town of Round Rock — the county has increased employment by 73% since 2000, the third highest rate in the country.

    Another Austin outer suburb, Hays County, ranks third on our list, with population growth of 7.6% since 2010 and 67% since 2000. Also impressive has been the growth of another Texas exurb, Fort Bend County, to the west of Houston.

    Since 2010 the county’s population has grown 7.2%, and since 2000 employment has increased 78%, in part due to the expansion of energy companies outside Houston. Fort Bend County is now home to 625,000 people, considerably more than the total population of most major core cities, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Baltimore and Portland. Like many of the boom counties, Fort Bend is alsoincreasingly diverse, with a rapidly growing Asian population that is approaching 20% of the total. It is now the unlikely home to one of the nation’s largest Hindu temples.

    In second place is Loudoun County, 25 miles from Washington, D.C., where the population has expanded 7.87% since 2010 and the number of jobs has grown 83% over the past decade. Much of this has come from tech and telecommunications companies, as well as growing numbers of jobs tied to Dulles Airport as well as the nation’s capital.

    They are not on the road to “next slum” status: Loudoun is one of the nation’s wealthiest counties. Another D.C. exurb on our list in ninth place, Prince William County, Va., ranks among America’s 10 wealthiest counties in terms of per capita income.Most of the other fastest-growing counties have a similar profile, attracting large numbers well-educated residents to the fringe of urban regions.

    What these findings demonstrate is that more people aren’t moving “back to the city” but further out. In the last decade in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, inner cores, within two miles of downtown, gained some 206,000 people,  while locations 20 miles out gained over 8.5 million. Although the recession slowed exurban growth, since 2011, notes Jed Kolko at Trulia, suburbs have continued to grow far faster than inner ring areas as well as downtown. Americans, he concludes, “still love their suburbs.”

    Rather than an inevitable long-range shift, the post-crash slowdown of suburban growth seems to have been largely a response to economic factors. The retro-urbanist dream of eliminating, or at least undermining, suburban alternatives depends very much on maintaining recessionary conditions that discourage relocation, depress housing starts, as well as lowering marriage and birthrates.

    Where incomes are growing along with rapid job growth , suburban and exurban growth tends to be strong.  The metro regions that contain our fastest-growing counties — Austin, Houston, Nashville and Northern Virginia — all epitomize this phenomenon. For example, nearly 80% of all housing growth in greater Houston takes place in the areas west of Beltway 8 (the outer beltway). A similar pattern can be seen in the D.C. area, where the number of units permitted in Loudoun has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 permit issuances were the highest since 2005, and the vast majority were for either detached or attached single-family houses.

    This doesn’t mean the central areas of  thriving Washington or Houston are in decline; both core areas    enjoy modest population growth not seen in many more hard-pressed cities. But this highly visible and relentlessly promoted growth has not altered the fundamental pattern of faster development on the fringes.  As the economy strengthens, these trends will become evident in other areas.

    It now seems clear that the preference for single-family houses did not change in the recession, but was just stunted by it. With construction starts up again— more than two-thirds single family — this trend is beginning to re-assert itself. Mortgage lending is now at the highest level in five years.

    Indeed suburbia — or sprawl to use the perjorative term — is back even in the anti-suburban stretches of the San Francisco area, where suburban and exurban developers are once again pushing plans to develop new housing for the area’s expanding workforce. In long-suffering areas such as the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, there has been a steady housing recovery, leading to talk of new development.

    Other signs suggest that the widely predicted dense city nirvana may need to be put on hold. For example, car sales  — automobiles dominate transportation in most suburbs and exurbs — have been on the upswing, hitting a record in August. And despite predictions that the size of new homes would shrink, the median home size in the country has continued to rise, reaching a record high in 2012.Even shopping malls, long seen as doomed, are experiencing something of a resurgence.

    Demographic forces should accelerate suburban and exurban growth. As the economy has improved, we are starting to see an uptick in the birthrate, and household formation.

    Given the tendency of families to move to suburbs, this should spark further growth there in the future. High-density neighborhoods and the densest U.S. cities may be good for many things, and certain individuals, but not so much for families. During the last decade, suburbs and exurbs accounted for four-fifths of all household growth, a pattern that does not seem likely to change.

    Indeed, what we are seeing now is not the “end of suburbs” but the end of a brief period in which peripheral development was quashed by the severity of the Great Recession. With the return of even modest economic growth, we can expect that most demographic growth will continue to favor suburbs and exurbs, as has been the case for the better part of the last half century.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

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

    Georgetown, Texas Town Square photo by Jeffrey W. Spencer.

  • Book Review: ‘The End of the Suburbs,’ by Leigh Gallagher

    Suburbia has been a favorite whipping boy of urbane intellectuals, who have foretold its decline for decades. Leigh Gallagher’s “The End of the Suburbs” is the latest addition to this tired but tireless genre. The book lacks the sparkling prose and original insights one could find in the works of, say, Jane Jacobs or Lewis Mumford. Indeed, Ms. Gallagher’s book is little more than a distillation of the conventional wisdom that prevails at Sunday brunch in Manhattan.

    The author restages many of the old anti-suburban claims, and her introduction’s section headings easily give away the gist of the argument: “Millennials hate the burbs”; “Our households are shrinking”; “We are eco-obsessed”; “The suburbs are poorly designed to begin with”; and so on.

    Ms. Gallagher, an editor at Fortune magazine, fails to persuade. For starters, her focus on the recent past distorts her argument. She starts with reporting about a dismal home-building conference in Orlando in early 2012, when the housing market was still close to its post-bubble nadir. She portrays those dark times as the harbinger of a new reality that will see suburban living fade away. She quotes real-estate economist Robert Schiller saying that suburban home prices won’t recover “in our lifetime.” But given that prices have indeed risen, and are now reaching precrash levels in some markets, such predictions should be viewed skeptically.

    There isn’t much room for contrarian viewpoints here. All the usual anti-suburbanite suspects are marshaled to support the book’s thesis: Al Gore suggests suburbs will die because they aren’t green enough; the critic James Howard Kunstler makes exaggerated claims about how “peak oil”—the notion that we are running out of fossil fuels and that their cost will skyrocket—will bankrupt suburbanites; other experts claim that young people will desert suburbia for their entire lifetimes and that empty-nesters will abandon their stale suburban lives in favor of urban density.

    Today barely 11% of Americans live in densities of more than 10,000 people per square mile, which is about the level of an inner-ring San Fernando Valley suburb, one-seventh of the Manhattan level and almost one-third of the five boroughs. Four out of five prospective home buyers in the U.S. prefer single-family houses, according to a 2011 survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors and the advocacy group Smart Growth America. In short, most of America isn’t about to densify itself along Gothamite, or even Los Angeles, lines.

    The author ignores most of these findings. She believes cities are poised to become the main beneficiaries of the suburban decline she projects. “To see that cities are resurgent centers of wealth and culture, all you need to do is set foot in one,” she writes. To be sure, some American urban centers, most notably New York, San Francisco and Washington, have experienced modest population growth over the past decade or two, although still well below the national average. And even in these cities, there are many neighborhoods that sophisticated urbanites wouldn’t really want to “set foot in.” In newly hip, and now increasingly expensive, Brooklyn, nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. The borough’s artisanal cheese shops and trendy restaurants are charming, but one in four Brooklynites receives food stamps. The urban renaissance is even less obvious in places like St. Louis, Cleveland and Detroit, which have lost residents in significant numbers over the past decade and whose gentrified zones are tiny.

    Having misunderstood the past, Ms. Gallagher is likely off in her predictions of a high-density future. She insists that young people overwhelmingly want to live “in urban areas and don’t want to own a car.” But most millennials entering their 30s, according to surveys, are likely to get married and eventually have children. That is when they will start to seek out single-family houses in lower-density areas. They may well experience suburbia differently than their parents. More of them will work at home or close to home, or drive fuel-efficient cars on their commutes. Even so, most aging millennials can be expected to seek out homes in affordable areas with decent schools, meaning either the suburbs of older cities or lower-cost, economically vibrant regions like the Southeast, the Gulf Coast or the Mountain West.

    Much the same can be said about the other key emerging demographic group, immigrants and their offspring. Nationwide over the past decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by almost 2.8 million, or 53%, while that of core cities grew 770,000, or 28%. In Los Angeles, the region with the nation’s largest Asian population, the suburbs added roughly five times as many Asians as the core city.

    One reason: Immigrants are more likely to have families than the native-born. They don’t share the conviction, held by many anti-suburbanites such as Ms. Gallagher, that we are seeing “the end of the nuclear family.” The family, like suburbia, has been written off numerous times. But as Margaret Mead once observed, it “always comes back.” High-density cities generally repel families, and they aren’t conducive to middle-class aspirations. In New York City and Los Angeles, for example, the homeownership rate is 20% less than the national figure of 65%. Things are even worse for working-class and minority households. Metropolitan Atlanta’s African-American homeownership rate is approximately 40% above those of San Jose and Los Angeles, approximately 50% higher than Boston’s, San Francisco’s and Portland’s, and nearly 60% higher than New York’s.

    Many of those migrating to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and other low-density, lower-cost cities come from denser, more expensive areas. Between 2000 and 2010, 1.9 million net domestic migrants left the New York area, 1.3 million left Los Angeles and 340,000 left San Francisco, while 230,000 left San Jose and Boston, according to Census Bureau data. The death of the suburbs may suggest a pleasant prospect for the New York and D.C. urbanist crowd, but for most, the American dream remains a suburban one. As long as the American family and the national aspiration for a better life persist, the suburbs are likely to retain their pre-eminent role.

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

    This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal.

  • Suburb Hating is Anti-Child

    Sure, suburbs have big problems. Their designs force their inhabitants to drive in cars, instead of walking and bicycling. This diminishes face-to-face interactions, physical health, and the quality of the environment. Aesthetically, many of them, particularly those dreaded “planned communities,” are quite boring. People who live there tend not to have much contact with people who aren’t like them, so suburbs reinforce racial, religious, and class segregation.

    A large proportion of intellectuals and politicians, including President Obama, decry these problems with suburbs as reason to hate them and advocate for their elimination, in favor of dense, big cities.

    Yeah, I get it. I agree that all these problems exist, and they bother me a lot.

    There’s just one big problem with suburb hating. The alternative to suburbs in metropolitan areas, cities, are much worse for children. Sure, adults can have a great time in hip, dense city centers like Manhattan or San Francisco. In fact, if my wife and I never had kids, we’d still be living in San Francisco, going out practically every night.

    However, it’s clear that cities are worse for kids than suburbs.

    Why do I say this?

    First, just look at where newly married urbanites choose to live once they have children. They leave cities in droves. The hipper and denser the city, the more likely are parents to flee to the suburbs.

    20-29_table

    Richard Florida made his name over a decade ago writing about how cities should attract the “creative class” – a code name for childless urban hipsters. In his book, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, he lists cities he thinks are best for different groups of people. The table here shows the percentage of total population in the United States that is school-aged children (age 5-17) versus that for large cities that Florida lists as best for 20-29 year-olds.

    The only two cities that are even close to the national average of 17.5% are Los Angeles and New York. Los Angeles covers an awful lot of land area, and I suspect that if I could get data for what Florida really means by “Los Angeles,” the percentage would be much lower.

    NYC_boroughs

    New York is also quite large and diverse, but there, fortunately, I have data for what Florida really means by “New York.” I’m sure he’s thinking of Manhattan when he thinks of “creative class.” There, as you can see on the table here, Manhattan’s percentage of the population that is school-aged is 11.8%, far below the national average.

    In her suburb-hating book, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving, Leigh Gallagher gushes that Manhattan “has become overloaded with families.” To back up this assertion, she points to US Census data that there were 2,600 more married families with children 0-18 in 2010 than in 2000. Actually, that’s unimpressive for two reasons. First, the census data show that Manhattan’s total population actually increased by more than the population of children, so children as a percentage of the total population actually dropped. Second, even if the percentage of children had increased, the 11.8% figure for school-aged children is horrifically low.

    The New York Times contributed to this gushing sentiment for children in Manhattan in a 2005 article. It pointed to a small surge in children under 5 in Manhattan’ census data between 2000 and 2004. Unfortunately, this trend did not extend to school-aged kids.

    This disparity hints at the major reason why families leave big cities: public schools in large cities are, by and large, awful. So, for the most part, families that have the means to move out of cities when their children reach school age flee to the ‘burbs. Most middle and upper-middle class families that do stay send their children to private schools. 30% of San Francisco children go to private schools, and my guess is that the figure for Manhattan and other dense, hip urban centers is close to that.

    So, to some extent, when you hear people complain that cities are too expensive for families, they are calculating private school into the cost of living there.

    But private schools not only cost a lot of money. They also destroy neighborhood life for children. In big city neighborhoods where many or most children go to private schools, children who live on the same street hardly know each other because they tend to go to different schools that their parents choose.

    Beyond running bad schools that force families with the means to go to private school, some big city school systems put the final dagger into neighborhoods by forcing or enticing children to go to a school outside their neighborhoods.

    For example, San Francisco has done this for decades in an effort to forcibly integrate students of different races and backgrounds, but instead, what it’s done is destroy neighborhoods and push more families into private schools than any other city in America. In the last year or two, that city has made a small change in its policy in an apparent effort to make it more possible for children to go to school in their own neighborhood, but this change hasn’t gone nearly far enough to pull neighborhoods together.

    So, big cities are left with neighborhoods where children spray out to all parts of the city to go to school every day. When school’s over at the end of the day, playing in their neighborhoods isn’t an option because children there don’t know one another.

    The families that do flee for the suburbs leave a diverse place where parents like them have a small amount of political power and huge teachers’ unions dominate, to a more homogeneous place where most residents are like them, in terms of socio-economic status, and parents wield great power over schools. Left behind are the less fortunate kids, with their families.

    The other primary problem that families have with cities is space. Yes, while it’s trendy these days for urban planners to advocate for dense development, families with children flee from density. Every large city in the United States that has high density – including those in the Richard Florida list above and other dense cities like Miami and Philadelphia – have very low percentages of school-aged children.

    To put it simply, play requires space. If all kids have outside their crowded apartment building is a sidewalk, they can’t play a game of soccer, nor can they play even less formal games like hide and seek or tag. Also, sidewalks are a lot less complex, and therefore they’re a lot more boring for kids, than yards that have grass and bushes with hiding spaces.

    As Richard Louv writes so eloquently in his book Last Child in the Woods, children really do love being in nature. They’re drawn to play among trees, bushes, grass, and creeks rather than sidewalks and brick walls.

    Those who tout the attractiveness of city life for children always cite the importance of public parks. Parks are great for families that live right next to them, but unfortunately, we’re never going to put a park in every other block. The fact is that children don’t roam very far on their own these days. In fact, most preteen children don’t roam on their own more than a few feet from their front doors, whether those front doors are to their single family homes or to their apartment buildings. So, parks are of very limited use, even to most city dwellers. While kids and caregivers go there together, kids hardly every go there on their own to play freely.

    Clearly, children can get a great deal of value from a yard outside a single family home, which is one important reason why so many families aim to move to the suburbs. Yes, most families don’t exploit their yards nearly enough once they move there, but that’s a problem with how families live in suburbs. It’s not a blanket condemnation of suburbs.

    So, we need to fix suburbs and the way families utilize them. They should be far more pedestrian friendly, and not favor cars so much. Residential yards should be used as social hangouts, not merely admired from afar for their manicured shrubs and flower beds. I’ve written a great deal about these fixes on my blog and in my book Playborhood.

    But what we shouldn’t do is try to force families to live in dense city centers. Most families don’t like it there, with good reason.

    Suburb hating hurts children. Politicians who advocate anti-suburb policies are hurting children. They are, dare I say, anti-child.

    Mike Lanza is author of the parenting book Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place For Play, and blogs at Playborhood.com.

    Suburbs photo by Bigstock.

  • E-Shopping Bubbling While Retail Bums Along

    We recently explored the post-recession tsunami of online retail and discovered that e-shopping’s future is anything if not bright. According to a report by Forrester Research, by 2016, not only are 192 million U.S. consumers projected to be be clicking “checkout” (up 15% since 2012), but those 192 million will also be spending an average of 44% more.

    But does this mean we should expect traditional retail to flatline? Well, no. As we showed here, the flourishing of specific retail subsectors (e.g., warehouses/supercenters) certainly cheers up total gloom-and-doom predictions.

    Nevertheless, traditional retail and e-shopping scream for comparison. Whatever their destiny, they could hardly differ more in size, stability, and growth patterns so far, and so let’s take a look.

    A Comparison

    Here’s how the two industries break down:

    Traditional retail: NAICS 44-45, except for electronic shopping and electronic auctions

    E-shopping: electronic shopping (454111) and electronic auctions (454112)

    A quick comparison between retail and e-shopping shows two very different stories. Traditional retail, of course, has been around forever with its ups and downs, while e-shopping is still technically a teenager — and like a teen, it’s growing wicked fast.

    Chart - Traditional Retail Jobs 2002-2013

     

    • Retail jobs declined 1% from 2002 to 2013. The industry grew 3% from 2002-2007, then tanked 7% from 2007-2010 and has yet to recover even its 2002 status.
    • The industry had 15.7 million jobs in 2002 and now has 15.5 million (loss of 200,000 jobs).
    • The average annual earnings per job is $32,433.
    • Jobs multiplier: 1.32. This means that every job in retail creates a third of another job elsewhere — or, put another way, every three jobs in retail create one job in another industry. (Note: We excluded induced effects in our calculations to avoid the double-counting that comes when looking at spending at the national level.)
    • Department stores have taken a colossal hit, dropping almost without respite from 811,000 jobs to 489,000 (40% loss).
    • In an age when manager positions are stepping on the gas, it’s troubling to see that within the retail industry, general & operations managers have declined 15% the past 10 years (a loss of 35,000 jobs).

    Chart - E-shopping Jobs 2002-2013

    • E-shopping grew 161% from 2002 to 2013 (averaging 15% a year). The industry has spiked 42% just since 2009, coming out of the recession when it still managed to inch up 4%. In fact, e-shopping isn’t far behind the fastest-growing industry sector of the past 10 years — mining, quarrying, and oil & gas extraction (NAICS 21), which has grown 60% since 2002 and 26% since 2009.
    • With 173,737 jobs, e-shopping’s labor force can’t even compare with traditional retail’s.
    • On the other hand, the jobs pay significantly more: $65,000 (annual average).
    • Jobs multiplier: 1.46, slightly higher than traditional retail’s, which is a little surprising. (Again, we left out induced effects.)

    One thing we notice is the huge discrepancy in jobs between these two industries. Traditional retail, for all its loss, is still 90 times the size of e-shopping, whose growth is not quite as jaw-dropping, perhaps, as it might seem at first. Sure, it’s booming, but then, it’s always easier to top 160% growth when you start out so tiny.

    No, the most interesting fact here is not how many jobs e-shopping is adding to the economy, but how many jobs it isn’t. It creates good consumer prices, serves more customers, makes more dough, and has completely changed the way we view products (literally and figuratively). And it does all these things with a smaller workforce.

    This trend of online-based business and a smaller, more tech-based workforce is well illustrated by the Kodak vs. Instagram conversation (read more here and here). At its peak, Kodak employed 140,000 while Instagram, at the time that it was purchased by Facebook in April 2012, employed a mere baker’s dozen. In short, the American economy has always been obsessed with efficiency. If we can do more with less, we will, and the internet is apparently accelerating that process.

    The Story in the States

    Let’s take a closer look at the top states for job growth and decline for both these industries.

    States for Top Job Growth and Decline - Traditional Retail

    Retail jobs have flourished the most in North Dakota (21%), Nevada (15%), Utah (11%), and Arizona (10%). Each of those states, it should be noted, have fast-growing populations and/or economies. The worst decline has taken place in Michigan (15%), Ohio (14%), Rhode Island (13%), and Wisconsin (10%).

    States for Top Job Growth and Decline - E-shopping

    For e-shopping, it’s mostly just a question about where it has grown a lot and where it has grown a ton. Only two states have seen an actual decline in jobs. Idaho leads the way crazy 3,370% growth (from 40 to 1,400 jobs), followed by Utah (800%, from 700 to 6,200 jobs), and Indiana (780%, from 670 to 5,900 jobs). The states that have done the least well are Alaska (20%, from 80 down to 60 jobs), South Dakota (3%, from 92 to 89 jobs), Virginia (mere 5% growth, from 2,000 to 2,140 jobs), and New Mexico (11%, from 127 to 141 jobs).

    Here’s a complete look at the growth/decline of each industry in all 50 states (plus Washington D.C.), as well as how they rank:

    State % Change in Retail Jobs Rank % Change in E-Shopping Rank
    North Dakota 21% 1 85% 37
    Nevada 15% 2 140% 31
    Utah 11% 3 804% 1
    Arizona 10% 4 37% 45
    South Dakota 9% 5 -3% 50
    Texas 8% 6 68% 42
    Idaho 7% 7 3368% 1
    Florida 7% 8 74% 39
    District of Columbia 7% 9 652% 4
    Arkansas 6% 10 134% 33
    New York 6% 11 179% 26
    Alaska 5% 12 -19% 51
    Hawaii 5% 13 125% 35
    North Carolina 4% 14 198% 24
    Washington 4% 15 271% 17
    South Carolina 1% 16 135% 32
    Tennessee 1% 17 114% 36
    Colorado 1% 18 307% 12
    Oklahoma 0% 19 277% 15
    Montana 0% 20 72% 40
    New Mexico 0% 21 11% 48
    Delaware -1% 22 126% 34
    Oregon -1% 23 456% 8
    Virginia -1% 24 5% 49
    West Virginia -1% 25 189% 25
    Vermont -1% 26 298% 14
    Wyoming -2% 27 68% 41
    New Hampshire -2% 28 334% 11
    Louisiana -2% 29 275% 16
    Georgia -2% 30 146% 29
    California -3% 31 156% 28
    Alabama -3% 32 53% 44
    New Jersey -4% 33 218% 23
    Massachusetts -4% 34 220% 22
    Missouri -4% 35 220% 21
    Iowa -4% 36 246% 19
    Kentucky -5% 37 455% 9
    Maryland -5% 38 435% 10
    Nebraska -5% 39 242% 20
    Pennsylvania -6% 40 76% 38
    Maine -6% 41 146% 30
    Minnesota -6% 42 554% 7
    Illinois -6% 43 65% 43
    Mississippi -7% 44 171% 27
    Connecticut -7% 45 13% 47
    Indiana -7% 46 781% 3
    Kansas -8% 47 21% 46
    Wisconsin -10% 48 304% 13
    Rhode Island -13% 49 634% 5
    Ohio -14% 50 572% 6
    Michigan -15% 51 255% 18

    E-Shopping Hot Spots

    E-shopping has also developed quite a few hot spots across the nation, and a handful of MSAs have very high job concentrations. Here are the MSAs where e-shopping’s concentration (measured in terms of location quotient, LQ) is highest:

    MSA 2013 Jobs 2013 Avg. Earnings Per Job 2013 National LQ
    Fernley, NV 710 $55,306 48.05
    Hannibal, MO 590 $13,789 26.83
    Galesburg, IL 426 $27,766 12.17
    Grand Forks, ND-MN 748 $43,981 10.27
    Mexico, MO 114 $22,497 9.27
    Ottawa-Streator, IL 538 $21,666 7.31
    Hood River, OR 111 $26,422 6.46
    Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 14,515 $120,560 6.39
    Thomasville-Lexington, NC 328 $36,346 6.02
    Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH 759 $30,910 5.53
    Americus, GA 84 $22,717 5.5
    Salt Lake City, UT 4,277 $64,051 5.17
    Moultrie, GA 98 $31,360 4.9
    Chico, CA 463 $68,168 4.88
    Provo-Orem, UT 1,046 $48,062 4.05
    Indianapolis-Carmel, IN 4,430 $41,354 3.96
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 4,608 $240,899 3.87
    Bend, OR 312 $32,260 3.72
    Port St. Lucie, FL 604 $22,611 3.72
    Meadville, PA 137 $39,731 3.34
    Mankato-North Mankato, MN 208 $18,374 3.09

    Seattle, home to Amazon.com, stands out for its sheer number of jobs (14,500). So too does San Jose, eBay’s headquarters, with 4,600. These two MSAs are also where most of the earnings are pooled.

    We should also note Indianapolis, where job growth since 2009 approaches 4,000 and tops 500%. In fact, e-shopping is Indianapolis’s fastest-growing industry of the past 10 years, climbing 4,500% since 2002. (Indiana, remember, is third in the nation for e-shopping growth: nearly 800%.)

    The city with the highest concentration of online retail jobs is Fernley, Nev., home to an Amazon distribution center. Currently the town of 53,000 is 48 times the national average for e-shopping. Moreover, about 6% of the town’s workforce (710 out of 12,800 jobs) are in the e-shopping industry.

    However, this isn’t as golden as Fernley was back in 2007, when e-shopping’s concentration was 107 times greater than the national average. During the recession, Fernley lost 30% of its e-shopping jobs, and has yet to recover them.

    Galesburg, Ill., has a similar recession story but bounced back quickly. The town of 32,000, with a concentration 12 times that of the national average, has rapidly regained its jobs — and then some — over the past year.

    E-shopping - Fernley vs. Galesburg

    For towns like Fernley and Galesburg, perhaps the lesson is that e-shopping is much less place-bound than traditional retail. All these small towns with high concentrations run a certain risk with e-shopping if the big companies were to move operations elsewhere.

    The map and table below show the 2009-2013 job performance of online retail in the towns with the highest job concentrations (containing at least 100 e-shopping jobs). We see both huge gains and huge declines (in terms of % growth):

    MSAs - 100+ E-shopping jobs


    MSA 2009 Jobs 2013 Jobs Change % Change 2013 Average Earnings 2009 LQ 2013 LQ
    Akron, OH 150 174 24 16% $34,974 0.60 0.49
    Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY 79 102 23 29% $29,447 0.23 0.22
    Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ 177 357 180 102% $32,915 0.67 0.95
    Ann Arbor, MI 50 128 78 156% $32,806 0.32 0.55
    Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA (12060) 1,655 2,454 799 48% $56,564 0.92 0.94
    Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX 737 1,666 929 126% $48,277 1.19 1.75
    Baltimore-Towson, MD 432 478 46 11% $73,551 0.42 0.32
    Baton Rouge, LA 111 125 14 13% $46,293 0.37 0.30
    Bellingham, WA 118 158 40 34% $33,482 1.73 1.64
    Bend, OR 191 300 109 57% $33,132 3.60 4.02
    Birmingham-Hoover, AL 167 218 51 31% $35,155 0.43 0.40
    Boise City-Nampa, ID 377 895 518 137% $56,366 1.77 2.89
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 1,709 3,054 1,345 79% $67,988 0.89 1.09
    Boulder, CO (14500) 376 561 185 49% $48,869 2.88 2.89
    Bremerton-Silverdale, WA 53 116 63 119% $46,891 0.69 1.12
    Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT 1,017 898 -119.00 -12% $111,274 3.02 1.88
    Brownsville-Harlingen, TX 103 128 25 24% $21,781 0.98 0.83
    Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY (15380) 185 258 73 39% $26,681 0.45 0.45
    Canton-Massillon, OH 36 128 92 256% $41,449 0.28 0.69
    Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL 176 194 18 10% $37,279 1.09 0.83
    Charleston-North Charleston-Summerville, SC (16700) 86 137 51 59% $35,397 0.37 0.40
    Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC 277 571 294 106% $50,665 0.42 0.58
    Charlottesville, VA 191 102 -89.00 -47% $29,774 2.41 0.93
    Chattanooga, TN-GA 94 164 70 74% $31,012 0.52 0.63
    Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI 2,580 4,557 1,977 77% $59,758 0.77 0.96
    Chico, CA 243 458 215 88% $68,695 3.98 5.42
    Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN 1,009 1,625 616 61% $39,261 1.30 1.49
    Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH 770 785 15 2% $54,287 0.98 0.71
    Coeur d’Alene, ID 31 118 87 281% $22,609 0.71 1.94
    Colorado Springs, CO (17820) 233 366 133 57% $27,687 1.01 1.10
    Columbia, MO 93 153 60 65% $36,494 1.33 1.48
    Columbia, SC 59 104 45 76% $35,458 0.21 0.26
    Columbus, OH 3,094 3,324 230 7% $34,355 4.33 3.22
    Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 2,950 3,334 384 13% $51,152 1.27 0.96
    Davenport-Moline-Rock Island, IA-IL 107 186 79 74% $50,847 0.75 0.91
    Dayton, OH 111 175 64 58% $26,891 0.38 0.43
    Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL 179 157 -22.00 -12% $36,650 1.42 0.88
    Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 1,465 1,936 471 32% $54,863 1.49 1.33
    Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA 143 148 5 3% $35,543 0.56 0.40
    Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 712 826 114 16% $47,384 0.53 0.42
    Eau Claire, WI 131 194 63 48% $29,794 2.14 2.16
    El Paso, TX 514 791 277 54% $17,522 2.17 2.28
    Elkhart-Goshen, IN 18 124 106 589% $34,131 0.24 0.99
    Eugene-Springfield, OR 94 177 83 88% $25,883 0.81 1.08
    Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR-MO 88 162 74 84% $42,470 0.56 0.69
    Fernley, NV (22280) 704 710 6 1% $55,306 72.77 53.93
    Fort Collins-Loveland, CO 147 186 39 27% $39,192 1.35 1.16
    Fort Wayne, IN 54 207 153 283% $48,876 0.34 0.91
    Galesburg, IL 277 424 147 53% $27,835 12.45 13.61
    Grand Forks, ND-MN 268 746 478 178% $44,038 5.99 11.51
    Grand Rapids-Wyoming, MI 693 765 72 10% $85,872 2.47 1.79
    Greensboro-High Point, NC 255 177 -78.00 -31% $36,448 0.95 0.47
    Hannibal, MO (25300) 413 590 177 43% $13,789 31.34 30.11
    Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA 136 209 73 54% $31,602 0.55 0.59
    Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 283 486 203 72% $30,435 0.59 0.72
    Honolulu, HI 116 228 112 97% $30,149 0.29 0.40
    Hood River, OR 65 110 45 69% $26,564 6.20 7.16
    Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 1,442 1,809 367 25% $40,959 0.70 0.58
    Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH 181 759 578 319% $30,904 2.04 6.21
    Indianapolis-Carmel, IN 698 4,367 3,669 526% $41,569 1.03 4.38
    Jacksonville, FL 328 484 156 48% $39,193 0.70 0.72
    Kansas City, MO-KS 671 865 194 29% $38,886 0.86 0.78
    Knoxville, TN 115 226 111 97% $38,606 0.44 0.61
    Lakeland-Winter Haven, FL 97 105 8 8% $39,221 0.62 0.48
    Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 1,128 2,013 885 78% $56,095 1.71 2.15
    Lexington-Fayette, KY 177 280 103 58% $38,517 0.90 0.96
    Lincoln, NE 68 339 271 399% $48,179 0.52 1.80
    Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR 85 123 38 45% $30,742 0.32 0.33
    Logan, UT-ID 85 135 50 59% $22,246 2.10 2.30
    Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 7,839 8,519 680 9% $60,101 1.74 1.32
    Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN 126 201 75 60% $38,956 0.27 0.29
    Madison, WI 258 516 258 100% $58,625 0.97 1.36
    Manchester-Nashua, NH 280 353 73 26% $60,692 1.83 1.64
    Mankato-North Mankato, MN 60 206 146 243% $18,459 1.45 3.44
    Medford, OR 107 176 69 64% $39,243 1.63 1.90
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 284 319 35 12% $34,885 0.59 0.47
    Mexico, MO 12 114 102 850% $22,497 1.54 10.40
    Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 2,647 3,210 563 21% $54,616 1.47 1.23
    Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI (33340) 804 1,162 358 45% $34,887 1.28 1.30
    Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 611 1,130 519 85% $41,066 0.45 0.57
    Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN 498 785 287 58% $36,789 0.82 0.85
    New Haven-Milford, CT 110 183 73 66% $68,783 0.38 0.44
    New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA (35380) 160 212 52 33% $35,863 0.38 0.35
    New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 7,402 13,923 6,521 88% $76,745 1.13 1.47
    North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL 177 174 -3.00 -2% $37,516 0.88 0.62
    Ocala, FL 57 104 47 82% $39,066 0.75 0.97
    Ogden-Clearfield, UT 291 557 266 91% $39,442 1.84 2.39
    Oklahoma City, OK 97 163 66 68% $48,017 0.21 0.24
    Omaha-Council Bluffs, NE-IA 654 824 170 26% $53,708 1.80 1.60
    Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL 544 1,001 457 84% $53,066 0.70 0.88
    Ottawa-Streator, IL 297 535 238 80% $21,722 6.43 8.16
    Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA 209 272 63 30% $42,119 0.81 0.74
    Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL (37340) 143 217 74 52% $42,583 0.92 1.00
    Peoria, IL 58 149 91 157% $36,634 0.42 0.75
    Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 1,335 2,372 1,037 78% $50,131 0.63 0.80
    Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ 3,332 4,062 730 22% $62,002 2.42 2.03
    Pittsburgh, PA 1,077 1,002 -75.00 -7% $50,314 1.23 0.80
    Port St. Lucie, FL 93 561 468 503% $22,448 0.92 3.87
    Portland-South Portland-Biddeford, ME 188 214 26 14% $44,201 0.88 0.72
    Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA 1,202 1,944 742 62% $37,203 1.47 1.63
    Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY 169 136 -33.00 -20% $35,261 0.84 0.49
    Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA 279 306 27 10% $23,727 0.52 0.41
    Provo-Orem, UT 556 961 405 73% $49,202 3.72 4.18
    Racine, W 91 110 19 21% $28,197 1.57 1.32
    Raleigh-Cary, NC 378 537 159 42% $49,990 0.94 0.90
    Redding, CA 117 134 17 15% $57,004 2.22 1.88
    Reno-Sparks, NV (39900) 661 386 -275.00 -42% $40,630 4.29 1.81
    Richmond, VA 294 221 -73.00 -25% $36,861 0.61 0.32
    Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 649 1,003 354 55% $38,227 0.63 0.69
    Rochester, NY 238 271 33 14% $33,405 0.62 0.50
    Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA 770 1,016 246 32% $40,959 1.06 1.01
    Salem, OR (41420) 182 225 43 24% $29,941 1.42 1.28
    Salt Lake City, UT 2,006 2,654 648 32% $63,187 4.10 3.60
    San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX 1,594 926 -668.00 -42% $62,759 2.26 0.89
    San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 1,504 2,132 628 42% $62,877 1.34 1.32
    San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 2,919 4,010 1,091 37% $87,280 1.79 1.67
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA (41940) 810 1,459 649 80% $102,195 1.14 1.37
    San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA 139 205 66 47% $39,356 1.59 1.53
    Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA 122 132 10 8% $48,521 0.79 0.60
    Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA (42220) 111 175 64 58% $41,602 0.72 0.80
    Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, PA 247 403 156 63% $31,560 1.25 1.46
    Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 7,570 14,226 6,656 88% $120,821 5.45 7.03
    Spokane, WA 408 502 94 23% $60,997 2.38 2.09
    Springfield, MA 88 102 14 16% $41,527 0.37 0.30
    Springfield, MO 165 136 -29.00 -18% $30,943 1.09 0.62
    St. George, UT 143 162 19 13% $30,715 3.74 2.85
    St. Louis, MO-IL 1,102 2,260 1,158 105% $50,619 1.07 1.56
    Tallahassee, FL 95 149 54 57% $40,553 0.72 0.82
    Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 2,990 1,252 -1738.00 -58% $44,406 3.34 0.98
    Thomasville-Lexington, NC 10 241 231 2310% $40,154 0.30 4.97
    Toledo, OH 88 335 247 281% $29,519 0.38 1.01
    Tucson, AZ 468 373 -95.00 -20% $31,186 1.56 0.89
    Vallejo-Fairfield, CA 42 127 85 202% $18,672 0.40 0.85
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC 301 241 -60.00 -20% $43,710 0.47 0.27
    Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 1,250 1,639 389 31% $64,473 0.53 0.48
    Wichita, KS 287 114 -173.00 -60% $28,774 1.22 0.35
    Wilmington, NC 65 188 123 189% $42,190 0.57 1.17
    Worcester, MA 278 653 375 135% $38,345 1.09 1.77

    Conclusion

    There’s no doubt we should keep an eye on the exciting growth in e-shopping. Yet we should also be aware that individual online companies do tend, by their very nature, to be smaller and less sturdy than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. They fluctuate rapidly and often drastically, which could be a little unsettling for towns where e-shopping is heavily concentrated.

    Gwen Burrow is an editor at EMSI, an Idaho-based economics firm that provides data and analysis to workforce boards, economic development agencies, higher education institutions, and the private sector. Contact her here.

  • Fantasy Baseball Leagues: Let the Cities Compete!

    When a city bankrupts itself on the debt service of municipal bonds that were issued to keep some local pro team from bolting, residents and fans get the worst of both worlds. Losing teams and crippling interest payments are the signatures of bad deals in Cincinnati, Miami, Phoenix, and Cleveland, which collectively have taken on more than $1 billion in stadium debt to keep the Bengals, Marlins, Cardinals, and Browns in their loss columns.

    Nor, nationally, is the debt burden more manageable. According to Bloomberg, American taxpayers are on the hook for $4 billion in stadium subsidies of the total $17 billion outstanding in bonds, which only mean jobs for ushers, investment bankers, parking lot attendants, and team owners.

    The major-league losers are the municipalities. Hostage to the private fortunes of professional teams, these cities are saddled with billion dollar white-elephant stadiums that, in some cases, get used 20 days a year.

    Most new billion-dollar stadiums do nothing for city neighborhoods. For example, the new stadiums of the Yankees and Cowboys (price tag $3 billion) might as well be on offshore islands, for all that they contribute to neighborhood development.

    Nor can most local fans afford the prices to the big-league games. In many venues, tickets and hot dogs for a family can cost hundreds of dollars. Major league baseball publications say a family of four can go to a game for $62, although it must define “go to” as the cost of parking.

    To level the playing fields of major-league oligopoly, here are few ideas for professional sports that put fans and cities first:

    Create a city league: Given that the World Series is named after a New York newspaper, not the globe itself, I propose a City Series that will group each city’s sport franchises into a formula that can be ranked alongside the results of other cities.

    For example, into this formula for New York would go the results of the Mets, Yankees, Giants, Jets, Rangers, Islanders, Knicks, and Nets, and each time a team won or lost a game, the city ranking would change. Newspapers and web sites could track the city standings (with appropriate credit to New Geography, of course).

    The calculation would have to take into account that Cincinnati only has the Bengals and Reds, and that Los Angeles is without a football team. Green Bay and Milwaukee might pool their resources. Divisions could be created around the number of teams in a city.

    One simple way to rank each city might be according to the average winning percentage of each professional team (weighted by the number of games they play each season). This would prevent big cities from being favored over smaller ones. Perhaps the Super Bowl could be awarded to the winning city?

    Handicap the standings in each city according to population size, so that New York is not given an unfair advantage over Kansas City.

    The goal would be to show at the end of each year which American city is the best at professional sports, and to give incentive to teams, such as the Jacksonville Jaguars or the Charlotte Bobcats, that otherwise find little reason to try at the end of their dismal seasons.

    Imagine the enthusiasm in September if the Cleveland Indians needed a few wins to boost the city average, and its opponent was the Houston Astros. Normally, such a game would draw about 4,000 fans on a cold autumn night on Lake Erie. Maybe now each game would count.

    Repeal antitrust exemptions: The reason sports teams can hold their home cities hostage — for sweetheart cable and stadium bond deals — is because Congress made the mistake of giving football and baseball exemptions from antitrust legislation. Are they such precious commodities that we need to limit competition? Under the outdated laws, the leagues, as opposed to the fans, decide which cities deserve a pro team.

    Supply and demand ought to govern the number of baseball teams, not the guild of MLB owners determined to limit supply and drive up the prices of sky boxes. Without this cabal, would the hapless New York Jets be worth an estimated $1.2 billion?

    Let the market play: With an increased supply, it would not be necessary for cities like Oakland to fear the departure of the A’s to the warmer climes of San José. The team would be free to join whichever league suited their budget and aspirations.

    Ideally, many leagues would operate like European soccer, which “relegates” those franchises at the bottom of the tables and allows improving teams to “move up” to the next level.

    In such a federation, the Houston Astros and Kansas City Royals might be relegated to Triple A, while the Indianapolis Indians and Durham Bulls would move up to the majors. Right now in most major leagues, losing has no consequences, especially when revenues are shared.

    Allow pro sports to be covered as news: Because of the antitrust exemption, teams own their own broadcast rights, which they flog off to friendly networks or use to create a cable empire, as in the case of the Atlanta Braves (Turner Broadcasting, but now owned by Liberty Media).

    Under the current system the leagues regulate the video supply, which explains the monopolistic pricing that allows the Yankees to pay Alex Rodriquez $27 million a year for hitting on more starlets than fastballs.

    If, however, the results of sporting matches were treated as news (not unlike elections or town meetings), all media would be allowed to cover the games. Without the closed shop of the current arrangements, anyone with a hand-held camera could upload the action.

    In this unregulated market, team revenue would collapse in many sports, but the same money would, I believe, be spread more equally among a greater number of players and teams. All we have now is professional oligopoly.

    Flickr photo by John Dalton: The Bronx from left field at Yankee Stadium, August 2009.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His next book is Whistle-Stopping America.

  • Kid-Friendly Neighborhoods: Takin’ It To The Streets

    Planners and parents have been concerned about two widely reported, and most likely related, trends: the increasing percentage of overweight children, and the growing number of hours that kids spend looking at a screen, be it a television or a laptop. These two activities take up most of the free time kids have after school. Add on the tendency for kids to be driven or bussed to school, and the result is what has been called a “nature deficit” — a disconnect to natural surroundings. Over the long run, the outcome could be a generation of physically unfit and socially maladjusted young adults. The warning statistics are all around us. Is there a way out of this unhealthy cycle? One answer may rest with our planning decisions. Can neighbourhoods be laid out so as to avoid these unwelcome results?

    Evidence from research pronounces an unequivocal ‘yes’. Many pieces shape the puzzle that forms the complete answer. The first element of a community friendly to outdoor childhood activity is its ability to draw people — adults as well as kids — out of their houses and prompt them to socialize with neighbours. Since 1980, several studies have shown that the great inhibitor to socializing on a street is traffic. The heavier the traffic, the less the socializing. When there’s not much socializing, adults and kids make fewer the friends, and the motivation to get out of the house goes down. A 2008 study on this showed that people who lived on cul-de-sacs had four times as many friends and two times the number of acquaintances as residents on through streets with heavy traffic did. It seems intuitive, and research confirms it.

    A second clue can be found by looking at the kinds of streets young kids play on most often. You may have guessed that research shows it’s the cul-de-sac. Kids on cul-de-sacs spent 50 percent more time playing actively than kids on other streets. Importantly, the benefits to kids who play on the street continue. Other studies have shown that play and exercise in the early years build an affinity for activity that can last a lifetime, and that, through friendships, these kids also develop the spirit of a beehive at work.

    The third puzzle piece needed to create a kid-friendly place is the presence of magnets in the surroundings. These are factors that pull kids out of their homes and send them walking to school, the corner store and other destinations. And one study found that of all the elements that would attract kids of all ages, the strongest common force was the presence of open space.

    How parents feel about letting kids play on the street, walk to school, or ride their bicycles plays into the result, too. Justified or not, parental fear and unease limits the range of activities that kids engage in, and builds unhealthy habits.

    This knowledge from the field provides a sketch of the essential elements of a kid-friendly neighbourhood and, beyond that, a child-friendly district. Which elements are most essential?

    There shouldn’t be any through streets in an area about the size of about ten city blocks. That feature gives kids plenty of room to move around in a low-traffic, low-speed environment. Parents socialize and kids play; parental insecurity fades. The easiest way to create this is by using connected cul-de-sacs and crescents.

    Every kid-friendly neighbourhood area should have at least one open space, whatever its size. That grants a safe haven for play — a magnet. Its land value will be recovered through higher values for the homes around it. Real estate research shows that homes near cul-de-sacs and open spaces command higher prices. And where there are bike and foot paths separated from the road, with few road crossings, parents are more likely to let their kids walk or bike ride.

    Can all this be achieved with a layout? Yes, by selectively fusing well known elements of available community plans. A number of examples of this fusion exist, and plenty of advice is accessible; check out, for example, Taking the Guesswork Out of Designing for Walkability.

    These techniques are not just for planning new neighbourhoods. Existing places can also be transformed to create child-friendly environments. Initiatives in many cities have changed neighbourhoods with positive results.

    How can you know when a neighbourhood has succeeded at incorporating these creative elements? One of the sure tell signs is chalk hopscotch marks left on the pavement! It signals that the kids have taken possession of a street, and are having fun. Every new family that moves into the neighbourhood will be heir to its physical and social benefits.

    Fanis Grammenos is the founder of Urban Pattern Associates (UPA), and was a Senior Researcher at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for over 20 years, focused on housing affordability, building adaptability, municipal regulations and sustainable planning. Research on street network patterns produced the innovative Fused Grid. He holds a degree in Architecture from the U of Waterloo. For additional references on the studies mentioned here, please e-mail the author at fanis.grammenos@gmail.com.

    Flickr Photo by Joe Duty, Little Kid Down the Road chalking the sidewalk.