New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Despite Transit’s 2008 Peak, Longer Term Market Trend is Down: A 25 Year Report on Transit Ridership

    In 2008, US transit posted its highest ridership since 1950, a development widely noted and celebrated in the media. Ridership had been increasing for about a decade, however, 2008 coincided with the highest gasoline prices in history, which gave transit a boost.

    Less reported was the fact that despite higher ridership, transit’s market share (of transit and motor vehicles) has fallen since the 1950s. In 1955, transit’s market share was over 10%. By 2005, transit’s share had dropped to 1.5%, but recovered only to 1.6% in 2008. Transit’s all time peak ridership was in 1945, driven up by World War II and gas rationing. It is thus not surprising that national transit ridership (boardings) declined 3.8% in 2009 as gasoline prices moderated.

    Market Share by Major Urban Area

    Demographia has released urban area roadway and transit market share estimates for 2008, based upon Federal Transit Administration and Federal Highway Administration data. The table below compares 2008 with 1983 market share data for 56 urban areas with a corresponding metropolitan area population of more than 900,000 (complete data).

    Urban Areas: Roadway & Transit Market Share: 2008
    Ranked by 2008 Transit Market Share
    With 25 Year (1983) Comparison
        2008 1983 Roadway Share % Change
    Rank Urban Area Roadway Share Transit Share:  Roadway Share Transit Share: 
    1 New York 89.0% 11.0% 87.7% 12.3% 1.5%
    2 San Francisco 95.0% 5.0% 93.7% 6.3% 1.4%
    3 Washington 95.5% 4.5% 96.1% 3.9% -0.6%
    4 Chicago 96.1% 3.9% 94.2% 5.8% 2.0%
    5 Honolulu 96.2% 3.8% 93.2% 6.8% 3.2%
    6 Boston 96.7% 3.3% 97.5% 2.5% -0.8%
    7 Seattle 97.2% 2.8% 97.6% 2.4% -0.4%
    8 Philadelphia 97.3% 2.7% 96.0% 4.0% 1.4%
    9 Portland 97.7% 2.3% 97.6% 2.4% 0.1%
    10 Salt Lake City 97.8% 2.2% 99.1% 0.9% -1.3%
    11 Los Angeles 98.1% 1.9% 98.1% 1.9% 0.0%
    12 Denver 98.2% 1.8% 98.5% 1.5% -0.3%
    13 Baltimore 98.3% 1.7% 97.7% 2.3% 0.6%
    14 Pittsburgh 98.6% 1.4% 97.3% 2.7% 1.3%
    15 Miami-West Palm Beach 98.7% 1.3% 98.8% 1.2% -0.1%
    16 Atlanta 98.8% 1.2% 98.0% 2.0% 0.8%
    16 Cleveland 98.8% 1.2% 98.0% 2.0% 0.8%
    16 Las Vegas 98.8% 1.2% 99.6% 0.4% -0.8%
    16 Minneapolis-St. Paul 98.8% 1.2% 98.8% 1.2% 0.0%
    16 San Diego 98.8% 1.2% 99.3% 0.7% -0.5%
    21 San Jose 99.0% 1.0% 99.0% 1.0% 0.0%
    22 Austin 99.1% 0.9% 99.7% 0.3% -0.6%
    22 Houston 99.1% 0.9% 99.0% 1.0% 0.1%
    22 Milwaukee 99.1% 0.9% 98.3% 1.7% 0.8%
    22 Sacramento 99.1% 0.9% 99.0% 1.0% 0.1%
    22 San Antonio 99.1% 0.9% 98.7% 1.3% 0.4%
    27 St. Louis 99.2% 0.8% 99.0% 1.0% 0.2%
    28 Buffalo 99.3% 0.7% 98.5% 1.5% 0.8%
    28 Providence 99.3% 0.7% 98.9% 1.1% 0.4%
    30 Charlotte 99.4% 0.6% 99.3% 0.7% 0.1%
    30 Cincinnati 99.4% 0.6% 98.7% 1.3% 0.7%
    30 Dallas-Fort Worth 99.4% 0.6% 99.4% 0.6% 0.0%
    30 Hartford 99.4% 0.6% 98.7% 1.3% 0.7%
    30 Orlando 99.4% 0.6% 99.7% 0.3% -0.3%
    30 Phoenix 99.4% 0.6% 99.4% 0.6% 0.0%
    30 Rochester 99.4% 0.6% 98.9% 1.1% 0.5%
    30 Tucson 99.4% 0.6% 98.9% 1.1% 0.5%
    38 Detroit 99.5% 0.5% 98.8% 1.2% 0.7%
    38 Fresno 99.5% 0.5% 99.3% 0.7% 0.2%
    38 New Orleans 99.5% 0.5% 97.4% 2.6% 2.2%
    38 Norfolk-Virginia Beach 99.5% 0.5% 99.2% 0.8% 0.3%
    38 Riverside-San Bernardino 99.5% 0.5% 99.6% 0.4% -0.1%
    43 Columbus 99.6% 0.4% 98.6% 1.4% 1.0%
    43 Louisville 99.6% 0.4% 98.9% 1.1% 0.7%
    43 Memphis 99.6% 0.4% 99.4% 0.6% 0.2%
    43 Tampa-St. Petersburg 99.6% 0.4% 99.5% 0.5% 0.1%
    47 Bridgeport 99.7% 0.3% 99.8% 0.2% -0.1%
    47 Jacksonville 99.7% 0.3% 99.4% 0.6% 0.3%
    47 Kansas City 99.7% 0.3% 99.4% 0.6% 0.3%
    47 Nashville 99.7% 0.3% 99.4% 0.6% 0.3%
    47 Raleigh 99.7% 0.3% 99.9% 0.1% -0.2%
    47 Richmond 99.7% 0.3% 99.1% 0.9% 0.6%
    53 Indianapolis 99.8% 0.2% 99.3% 0.7% 0.5%
    54 Birmingham 99.9% 0.1% 99.5% 0.5% 0.4%
    54 Oklahoma City 99.9% 0.1% 99.9% 0.1% 0.0%
    54 Tulsa 99.9% 0.1% 99.6% 0.4% 0.3%
    Unweighted Average 98.7% 1.3% 98.3% 1.7% 0.4%
    All Urban Areas Combined 98.4% 1.6% 97.5% 2.5% 0.9%
    Based upon passenger miles
    Core urban areas in metropolitan areas with more than 900,000 population in 2009.
    Derived from Federal Transit Administration and Federal Highway Administration data
    Los Angeles and Mission Viejo urban areas combined
    San Francisco, Concord and Livermore urban areas combined
    Historic transit market share data at http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-usptshare45.pdf
    Maryland commuter rail (MARC) assigned to Washington, DC

    In 1983, transit systems started receiving support from federal taxes on gasoline. This was also the first year that the National Transit Database reported on the same annual basis as it does today. One justification for using funds from road users was the hope of attracting people from cars to transit. The national data above and the urban area below show that the overwhelming share of new travel has, nonetheless, continued to be captured by motor vehicles rather than transit. Among the 56 urban areas, 13 experienced gains in transit market share from 1983 to the peak year of 2008, while 37 posted losses and six had no change. Transit was able to capture only 0.9% of new urban travel between 1983 and 2008, while roadways captured 99.1%. (Note 1).

    The Top 10: Still a New York Story

    #1: New York: The nation’s predominant urban area remains New York, with an 11.0% transit market share. In 2008, 41% of the national transit ridership (passenger miles) was in New York, with much of it either in or focused upon New York City. The New York City Transit Authority, and a host of local public and private systems, principally serve New York City destinations and account for a remarkable 38% of the nation’s transit ridership. Even so, transit’s market share dropped from 12.3% in 1983. As a result, the roadway market share in New York increased 1.5% between 1983 and 2008, the fourth largest gain in the nation. Transit attracted 8.7% of the new demand between 1983 and 2008, while roadways attracted 91.3%.

    #2: San Francisco: San Francisco had the nation’s second highest transit market share in 2008, at 5.0%. This is a decline from 6.3% in 1983. Nonetheless, San Francisco moved up from 6th place in 1983. This produced a 1.4% increase in the roadway market share between 1983 and 2008, the fifth largest gain in the nation. Transit accounted for 2.2% of the new demand, while roadways attracted 97.8%.

    #3: Washington: Washington placed third in transit market share in 2008, at 4.5%. This represents a gain from 3.9% in 1983 and an improvement from 6th place. Washington was the only urban area among the top five to experience an increase in transit market share. Much of Washington’s transit increase was on its expanding Metrorail system and the MARC commuter rail system (most of the ridership on this Maryland based system commutes to Washington. Overall, transit in Washington has attracted 5.1% of new travel over the past 25 years, while roadways attracted 94.9% of new demand.

    #4: Chicago: Chicago ranked fourth in transit market share, at 3.9%. In 1983, Chicago had ranked 3rd, with a market share of 5.8. The roadway market share in Chicago increased 2.0% from 1983 to 2008, the third largest road travel gain in the nation. Transit attracted 1.3% of new demand over the period in Chicago, while roadways attracted 98.7%.

    #5: Honolulu: Honolulu ranked fifth in transit market share, at 3.8%. This is a significant drop from 1983, when Honolulu ranked 2nd in the nation, with a transit market share of 6.8%. Honolulu’s roadway market share gain was the largest in the nation between 1983 and 2005, at 3.8%. Transit ridership also dropped in Honolulu from 1983 to 2008, so that roadways accounted for all new travel.

    #6: Boston: Boston ranked sixth in transit market share in 2008, at 3.3%. This is a gain from 2.5% in 1983, when Boston ranked 9th. Much of Boston’s increase is attributable to its commuter rail expansion. Transit captured 4.1% of new demand, while roadways attracted 95.9%.

    #7: Seattle: Seattle’s principally all bus transit system ranked 7th in 2008 with a market share of 2.8%. This is an increase from 2.4% in 1983, when Seattle ranked 10th. Transit captured 3.1% of new travel over the past 25 years, while roadways accounted for 96.9%.

    #8: Philadelphia: Philadelphia slipped from the 5th largest transit market share in 1983 (4.0%) to 8th in 2008, at 2.7%. Philadelphia’s transit system, one of the most comprehensive in the nation, captured just 1.4% of new travel over the last quarter century, while roadways captured 98.6%.

    #9: Portland: Portland ranked 9th in transit market share in 2008, at 2.3%. This is a decline from 2.4% in 1983 and occurred despite opening the most extensive new light rail system in the nation over the period. Transit attracted 2.2% of new travel over the period, while roadways attracted 97.8%.

    #10: Salt Lake City: Salt Lake City, at 10th, is a new entrant to the top 10 transit market share urban areas, with a share of 2.2%. In 1983, Salt Lake City ranked 34th, with a transit market share of 0.9%. Even with this increase, however, roadways captured the bulk of new travel, at 96.2%, while transit attracted 3.8%, due to transit’s small 1983 base.

    Other Urban Areas: There were also notable developments among the urban areas that did not place in the top 10 in 2008 transit market share.

    Las Vegas: Las Vegas improved its ranking more than any other urban area, moving from 49th in 1983 to 16th in 2008 (in a tie with Atlanta, San Diego, Cleveland and Minneapolis-St. Paul). In 1983, Las Vegas had a transit market share of 0.4%, which improved to 1.2% in 2008. This was an especially notable achievement, because Las Vegas experienced substantial population growth over the period. During the period, Las Vegas established a 100% competitively contracted transit system, the only such transit system in the nation and has seen ridership expand by more than 10 times. Nonetheless, as in other gaining urban areas, such as Salt Lake City and Washington, the transit ridership base was so small that roadways captured nearly all the new demand, at 98.6% (transit obtained 1.4%).

    Atlanta: Atlanta both (1) was the fastest growing larger urban area in the developed world between 1983 and 2008 and (2) built the second most new rail capacity in the nation, in its expansion of the MARTA Metro (trailing only Washington’s Metro). Yet, Atlanta’s transit market share fell from 2.0% to 1.2% between 1983 and 2008, with transit attracting only 0.9% of new travel.

    New Rail Urban Areas: Transit market shares generally failed to increase in urban areas opening new light rail or metro systems over the period (excludes urban areas with new rail systems that were not open at the beginning of fiscal year 2008).

    • Six urban areas with new rail systems experienced market share declines, including Portland, Baltimore, Houston, Sacramento, St. Louis and Buffalo.
    • Four urban areas with new rail systems had static transit market shares, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Jose and Dallas-Fort Worth.
    • Three urban areas with new rail systems experienced transit market share increases. The largest increase was in Salt Lake City (and the largest of any urban area). Denver and Miami-West Palm Beach also experienced increases.

    Where from Here? It might have been expected that transit would have attracted far higher ridership numbers when gasoline prices achieved such heights. Yet, nationally, transit market share increase was only from 1.5% to 1.6%, even as roadway demand was declining modestly.

    Transit’s principal marketing problem lies in its problem serving destinations outside downtown. Downtowns typically account for only 10% of urban area employment. Some trips in an urban cannot even be made on transit. For example, Portland’s extensive transit system connects only about two-thirds of the jobs and residences within the (Tri-Met) service area (Note 2). Further Tri-Met’s award deserving internet trip planner shows that some trips to outside downtown destinations can require more than two hours, even when light rail is used.

    Note 1: This data relates only to passenger transportation. Urban roadways, unlike transit, also carry a substantial amount of local and intercity freight, which is not reflected in this data.

    Note 2: According to Metro’s 2004 Regional Transportation Plan, 78% of the residences and 86% of the jobs in the Tri-Met service area were within walking distance (1/4 mile) of a transit stop. This means that approximately 67% of residences and jobs are within 1/4 mile of a transit stop (0.78 * 0.86). Metro’s plans envision this figure dropping to 59% by 2020 (this data does not include Clark County in Washington, part of which is in the urban area).

    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.”

  • Millennial Surprise

    The boomer’s long domination of American politics, culture and economics will one day come to an end. A new generation–the so-called millennials–will be shaping the outlines of our society, but the shape of their coming reign could prove more complex than many have imagined.

    Conventional wisdom, particularly among boomer “progressives,” paints millennials–those born after 1983–as the instruments for fulfilling the promise of the 1960s cultural revolt. In 2008 the left-leaning Center for American Progress dubbed them “The Progressive Generation.” The center contrasted them favorably to the Xers, a cohort of 20 million fewer, and their “conservative views.”

    The case for the millennials’ left-leaning views can be traced to when the oldest millennials started to vote, in 2004. That year big loser John Kerry took the 18 to 29 vote by nearly 10 points. In the last election millennials supported Barack Obama over John McCain by a staggering 30 points. He outperformed McCain in every ethnic group, winning 54% of young white voters and a remarkable 76% of young Hispanics. Obama may still have won without millennial support, but only narrowly.

    This vote was shaped by important and perhaps lasting attitudes. Authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais identified among these young voters a strong communitarian ethos, generally liberal social views and somewhat of a “green” agenda. They wrote that millennials’ embrace of the Democratic Party in 2008 could foreshadow a long-awaited leftward realignment paralleling that which occurred in the 1930s.

    Yet there are signs that millennial voters, if not shifting to the right, may have lost some of their progressive ardor. Recent polls suggest that younger voters are far less likely to vote this year than in 2008. Gallup reports that nearly half of voters ages 18 to 29 are not enthusiastic about turning up at the polls this November, a far higher number than senior or boomer voters.

    One reason for such a dramatic shift is likely the economy. The current recession has been very hard on younger workers–unemployment hits around 20% for workers between 16 and 24. The brunt of the recession has hit blue-collar, high school educated youths, but even the college crowd, the core of the Obama constituency, faces what appears to be dismal prospects in the years ahead.

    Not too surprisingly, a May Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor survey of voters 18 to 29 found only 45% of millennials still solidly behind the president’s economic agenda. This could have a depressing impact on the leftward lurch among millennials. Indeed one recent Harvard survey found only half of all young voters planned to vote Democratic for Congress this year, compared with 60% in 2006.

    If the downturn persists, we could see some changes in generational politics. In the 1970s a similarly dismal economy accompanied the boomers as they were entering the workforce in huge numbers. Then, as now, long-term unemployment and underemployment seemed the wave of the future.

    The hard times of the 1970s changed the politics of the boomers. The bungled presidency of Jimmy Carter did not do much for the credit of the Democratic Party. Boomers, who sided with Carter in 1976, ended up voting for Ronald Reagan in large numbers four years later. The relative prosperity of the Reagan years painted a basically conservative tinge to boomer voters, something that benefited both Republicans and more centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton.

    This change could occur again, but other factors may slow a rightward shift among millenials. Republican nativism–exemplified by the Arizona immigration law–may be a boon with boomer voters, who are overwhelmingly white (only one in four are non-white). In contrast, roughly two in five millennials are minority group members. The age group 18 and under is already majority “minority.”

    Another big factor will be social liberalism. On a host of critical issues–from interracial dating to gay marriage–millennials tend to be far more “progressive” than earlier generations. According to a recent Pew study, 63% of millennials believed society should accept homosexuality compared with only 48% of boomers.

    Millennials also tend to disapprove of such things as prayer in school compared with boomers or older generations. Although most express some religious commitment, there are more unaffiliated and basic non-believers than in previous generations. The GOP’s long-term embrace of a hard religious right positions will not pay off among millennial voters.

    Perhaps most troubling for Republicans–and this is a point emphasized by Winograd and Hais–are millennial views on government. Two-thirds, according to Pew, currently favor an expanded government role in the economy compared with roughly 40% of boomers. Not surprisingly, tea partiers, at least for now, are more likely to come from the older set than younger voters.

    Yet there is no lock for the Democrats. For one thing, expansive government is likely to be more attractive to those who are not yet paying taxes. As millenials head into their late 20s and early 30s, they may adopt different somewhat views. If the current public sector expansion proves ineffectual in creating jobs–after all not everyone can work for Uncle Sam–they could, like their boomer forebears, embrace a more private-sector oriented approach.

    More than anything else, both liberals and conservatives need to understand that this emerging generation may prove far less predictable than either side expects. Many “progressive” urbanists, for example, expect that most millenials will be happy to live in dense multifamily housing–largely as renters–as they enter their 30s. This is probably not altogether the case.

    Hais and Winograd argue that millenials may be more attracted to urban settings–as is often the case for younger, unmarried and childless people–than boomers and older generation. Yet their research also shows that more than twice as many–some 43%–identify suburbs as their “ideal place to live.” They embrace suburbs even more than boomers.

    Similarly, this generation also shares with the boomers a strong interest in homeownership–refuting the claim of some urban boosters that renting is the wave of the future. Instead they appear surprisingly traditional in terms of wanting marriage, kids and believing in following the rules. They may change things up, but still very much embrace the desire to achieve the “American dream.”

    In these and many ways, millennials are likely to continue redefining our society in ways that neither currently boomer dominated party will appreciate. Given the mess the boomers have left them, that may prove a difference worth celebrating.

    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 rjason13

  • Planning’s Cultural Cringe?

    First it was Portland, Oregon, touted as a poster child for urban planning in Australia. Now, Vancouver, Canada, is the comparison, and are we seeing another incarnation of Australia’s infamous cultural cringe?

    Advocates of higher density and the “brawl against sprawl” in Australia frequently cite overseas cities as model case studies. Portland, Oregon, was for a long time cited as a good example of pro-density housing strategies which sought to limit ‘sprawl’, to promote public transport by investing in things like light rail, and to promote cycling and a range of other planning ‘solutions’ that would sound remarkably familiar in Australia.

    The truth about Portland, however, didn’t match the hype of its city planners. Much of the boosterism focused on the mostly downtown area of Portland. Like Melbourne, or Sydney, this is its own municipality, with its own Mayor and its own planning officials. As they aggressively sold a story about the virtues of their planning strategy for the city core, they omitted the inconvenient broader metropolitan facts as they went.

    The story of the real Portland, including the surrounding suburban areas, is different than what these policy promoters would have you believe. Portland today, despite hundreds of millions invested in a new light rail system and the promotion of inner city housing density, has fewer public transport trips as a percentage of total travel than in 1980. Urban Growth Boundaries introduced by Oregon State in the 1970s led to housing price pressures which eventually excluded the middle and working class. Leading US city demographer Joel Kotkin describes it as an ‘elite city’ which is ‘remarkably white, young and childless.’ And as international housing market expert Wendell Cox has pointed out, the suggestion that Portland has much to crow about in terms of urban consolidation doesn’t match the official statistics. Portland is as guilty of ‘sprawl’ as Los Angeles.

    The same can be said of Vancouver. Touted by its city officials as a paragon of virtue in planning policy, the Vancouver story is almost entirely limited to its geographically confined downtown. Here, in the wake of overbuilding of office properties in the downtown core, city officials rezoned excess commercial capacity to permit high density residential housing in what we would call the CBD. This ‘living first’ strategy produced a wave of new residential development which saw the core population grow by 20,000 people to around 60,000, and to potentially 90,000 by 2015. Redundant waterside areas have been coverted into residential precincts, and commuting by public transport, cycling or walking are favoured over private vehicles.

    Taken in isolation, the Vancouver story could start to sound convincing. But there are some glaring omissions. The City of Vancouver is home to around 600,000 people. The downtown area – the subject of much of the planning hype – is home to 60,000 people. The broader metro region, based on the same sorts of urban definitions we might use for Brisbane, or Sydney or Melbourne, is home to 2 million people. There is precious little said about the lives of the 1.4 million people who aren’t residents of the City of Vancouver, or the more than 1.9 million who don’t live in the revitalized urban core.

    For these Vancouverites, life isn’t a rosy as the planning hype would have you believe. The most glaring omission about life in Vancouver is that it also happens to be one of the world’s least affordable cities in which to live. According to both the Reserve Bank of Canada and Demographia, Vancouver’s housing rates as severely unaffordable, eating up some three quarters of the region’s median pre-tax household incomes. The problem is so chronic that it has prompted an online game “Crack Shack or Mansion” where visitors are asked: “Can you tell the difference between a crack shack and a Vancouver, BC mansion, listed for one or two million dollars?” Play the game yourself, it’s an eye opener. [A Crack Shack, for the uninitiated, is a den of inequity where illegal drugs are produced].

    That’s hardly the sort of model city you’d want to tout as a planning example we could learn from. The other glaring omission from the planning fairy tale of Vancouver is that life in the city core is vastly different from the overwhelmingly suburban conditions of the vast majority. To the south of Vancouver’s downtown lies an endless suburban grid of detached housing, with limited parklands or open space. Check it out for yourself on Google Maps or Google Earth. Jump into Google Street View and take a walk down a typical Vancouver street. Do that with a housing price list from “Crack Shack or Mansion” in hand and then convince me this is a model for any Australian city.

    A final glaring omission is the climate. This from the official Living in Canada website: “Snow depths of greater than 1 cm are seen on about 10 days each year in Vancouver compared with about 65 days in Toronto. Vancouver has one of the wettest and foggiest climates of Canada’s cities. At times, in winter, it can seem that the rain will never stop.” Summers aren’t so bad though: for two months of the year, the average daily maximum even exceeds 20’c!

    So Vancouver as the next poster child of planning for any Australian city is looking shaky. It’s hopelessly unaffordable (and we have enough problems of our own in that regard), the quality of its majority suburban environment is lower than the standards we already enjoy, and the climate could not be less similar.

    The same can be said of other city-regions often described as examples of how Australian cities could develop. Copenhagen, Paris, or Venice have all in their time been selectively extolled as models for Australian urban planning.

    Maybe this fascination with irrelevant urban models stems from a form of cultural cringe? Whatever the reason, the analogies can be dangerous, especially when they omit the more essential economic or lifestyle based criteria such as housing affordability, share of economic wealth amongst a city/region’s residents, or climate and lifestyle factors.

    It might instead be more helpful if Australian planners referring to overseas examples also kept in mind some of these pragmatic metrics. For example, benchmarking cities with more affordable housing markets than ours and with strong local economies where wealth and standards of living are enjoyed across a wide spectrum of society would produce some very different case studies. Factor in similar climate patterns (which largely dictate recreational and lifestyle behavior) to our own and the choice of comparable cities reduces further.

    We might even start to find that our own cities offer plenty of examples of ‘getting it right.’ Instead of this cultural groveling we could start to define the things we like most about our own existence and plan ways of replicating that, rather than imposing on our cities forms of existence that, appealing as elements might be, are incapable of replication in the Australian context.

    Ross Elliott is a 20 year veteran of property and real estate in Australia, and has held leading roles with national advocacy organizations. He was written and spoken extensively on housing and urban growth issues in Australia and maintains a blog devoted to public policy discussion: The Pulse.

    Photo by ecstaticist

  • 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:

    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.”

  • The Suburban Exodus: Are We There Yet?

    For many years, critics of the suburban lifestyles that most Americans (not to mention Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Australians) prefer have claimed that high-density housing is under-supplied by the market. This based on an implication that the people increasingly seek to abandon detached suburban housing for higher density multi-family housing.

    The Suburbs: Slums of the Future?

    The University of Utah’s Arthur C. (Chris) Nelson, indicated in an article (entitled “Leadership in a New Era“) in the Journal of the American Planning Association. that in 2003, 75% of the housing stock was detached and 25% was attached, including townhouses, apartments, and condominiums. By 2025 he predicts that only 62% of consumer will favor detached homes, (Note 1). He also predicts a major shift in consumer preferences from housing on large lots (defined as greater than 1/6th of an acre) to smaller lots (Note 2). This, he suggests, would create a surplus of 22 million detached houses on large lots.

    This predication is largely made on the basis of “stated preference” surveys which the author, Dr. Emil Malizia of the University of North Carolina (commenting on the article in the same issue), and others indicate may not accurately reflect the choices that consumers will actually make. Dr. Nelson’s article has been widely quoted, both in the popular press and in academic circles. It has led some well-respected figures such as urbanist and developer Christopher Leinberger to suggest in an Atlantic Monthly article that “many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.”

    The Condo Market Goes Crazy

    Misleading ideas sometimes have bad consequences. The notion that suburbanites were afflicted with urban envy led many developers to throw up high-rise condominiums in urban districts across the country. Sadly for these developers, the Suburban Exodus never materialized, never occurred. As a result, developers have lost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and taxpayers or holders of publicly issued bonds could be left “holding the bag” (see discussion of Portland, below).

    This weakness has been seen even in the nation’s strongest condominium market, New York City, where one developer offered to pay purchaser’s mortgages, condominium fees and real estate taxes for a year as well as closing costs.

    But the damage is arguably worse in other major markets which lack the amenities and advantages of New York.

    Take, for example, Raleigh (North Carolina), where low density living is the rule (the Raleigh urban area is less dense than Atlanta). The News and Observer reports that the largest downtown condominium building (the Hue) “considered a bold symbol of downtown Raleigh’s revitalization,” has closed its sales office and halted all marketing efforts. The development’s offer of a free washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, and parking space were not enough to entice suburbanites away from the neighborhoods they were said to be so eager to leave.

    This is not an isolated instance. Around the nation, condominium prices have been reduced steeply to attract buyers. New buildings have gone rental, because no one wanted to buy them. Other buildings have been foreclosed upon by banks; and units have been auctioned. Planned developments have been put on indefinite hold or cancelled.

    Miami: Of Little Dubai and Cadavers

    Miami’s core neighborhood (downtown and Brickell, immediately to the south) has experienced one of the nation’s most robust condominium building booms. More than 22,000 condominium high rise units were built between 2003 and 2008. Miami could well have more 50-plus story condominium towers than any place outside Dubai.

    As a result, Miami has suffered perhaps the most severe condominium bust in the nation. According to National Association of Realtors data, the median condominium price in the Miami metropolitan area has dropped 75% from peak levels (2007, 2nd Quarter). By comparison, the detached housing decline in the metropolitan area was 50%; the greatest detached housing price decreases among major metropolitan areas were from 52% to 58% (Riverside-San Bernardino, Sacramento, San Francisco and Phoenix).

    The most recent report by the Miami Downtown Development Authority indicates that 7,000 units still remain unsold. The Brickell area is home to the greatest concentration and largest buildings and has the highest ratio of unsold units at 40%.

    Icon Brickell (see photograph above) may be the largest development in the core. Icon Brickell consists of three towers, at 58, 58 and 50 floors and a total of nearly 1,800 units. Despite opening in 2008 and offering discounts of up to 50%, barely one-third (approximately 620) of the units have been sold, according to the Daily Business Review, which also reported on May 13 that the developer had transferred control of two of the towers to construction lenders.

    One building, Paramount Bay, was referred to by The New York Times as a “47-story steel and glass cadaver” with a lobby “like a mortuary.” A real estate site indicates that only one of the buildings 350 units has been sold.

    More recently sales have inched up in the core but due not to any suburban exodus. According to The Miami Herald, huge discounts that have lured Europeans, Canadians, and Latin Americans to the core. The real estate and consulting firm Condo Vultures notes that more than 1,000 of the sales are to a few bulk buyers, a market segment some might refer to as “speculators.”

    The latest data from the US Bureau of the Census confirms that there is no fundamental shift away from detached housing in the Miami area, as housing trends point toward more detached housing. In 2000, 48.1% of residents in the Miami metropolitan area lived in detached housing. By 2008, the figure had risen to 49.2% (Figure 1). Essentially, the Suburban Exodus remains a mirage.

    Portland: Gift Certificates for Distressed Developers

    If developer greed was the motive in Miami, government subsidies have been the driving force in Portland. The city of Portland will soon have issued nearly $450 million in urban renewal bonds, provides 10-year tax property tax forgiveness, and reduced development fees, which the Portland Development Commission (PDC) has called “gift certificates” for developers (Note 3).

    Gift certificates have not been enough to cure Portland’s sickly downtown condominium market. The Oregonian reported that prices were down, on average, 30% over the year ended the first quarter of 2010. Remarkably prices in the much ballyhooed Pearl District are plummeting even more than those in the rest of the Portland area. According to DQ News, the median sale price of a house in the Pearl District dropped four times the average in Multnomah County and an even greater six times decline relative to suburban counties over the past year.

    There is more. Just this year, the Pearl District has seen its Eddie Bauer, Adidas, and Puma stores close.

    One condominium building the Encore, is reported to have sold only 17 of 177 units. A recent auction of units at the largest building in the city, the John Ross brought prices “far below the replacement cost” according to The Oregonian’s Ryan Frank, who noted that “it will likely be years before there’s a new high-rise condo built.” Late last year, the Pearl District’s Waterfront Pearl was reported to have sold only 31% of its units and had not sold a unit for a year.

    The Portland Development Commission itself has become part of the condominium bust story. PDC had indicated it was considering relocating its offices to a new 32-story mixed use tower (Park Avenue West), which was to have included condominiums, offices, and retail stores. For more than a year, the proposed 32-story tower has been an unsightly hole in the ground, with construction suspended. PDC decided to stay put in its older, less expensive offices. Even before PDC decided not to locate in Park Avenue West, the developers eliminated the plans for 10 floors of condominiums, doubtless because it made no economic sense to add to an already flooded market.

    In Portland, like in Miami, the fact remains that suburbia has not been abandoned. Despite the high density over-building in the Pearl District and elsewhere in the core, detached housing has become even more popular in the region. According to data from the Bureau of the Census, the share of households living in detached housing in the Portland metropolitan area rose from 63.7% in 2000 to 64.5% in 2008 (Figure 2).

    High-Rise Condos: Slums of the Future?

    To say that the high-rise condominium market has fallen on hard times would be an understatement. The condo bust in New York has become so acute that Right to the City, a coalition of community organizations has called upon “the City to acquire the tax delinquent buildings through tax foreclosure and convert vacant units into permanently affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers.” In a report entitled People without Homes and Homes without People: A Count of Vacant Condos in Select NYC Neighborhoods, Right to the City points out that there are more than 4,000 empty condo units in 138 buildings, with owners delinquent on nearly $4 million in taxes to the city.

    Owners of new condominiums around the nation who paid pre-bust prices for their units may not be inclined to stay around if they are surrounded by less affluent renters who have been attracted by desperate building owners and lenders.

    Are these dark towers of discounting the slums of tomorrow? Only the data and time will tell and it’s too early to know, but preliminary findings show little of the predicted shift toward higher density living (Figure 3). Certainly national data indicates, if anything, a slightly strengthening market for detached, rather than attached housing (Figure 4).

    • Between 2000 and 2008, the share of households living in detached housing rose from 61.4% to 63.5%.

    • A similar trend is shown by the national building permits data. Between 2000 and 2009, 75.2% of residential building permits in the United States were for detached housing. This is up strongly from 69.6% in the 1990s and nearly equals the highest on record (the 1960s), when 77.7% of residential building permits (housing units) were detached houses.


    Looking at the data, there remains little evidence that the stated preferences on which the predictions relied have been translated into the reality of a shift in preferences toward smaller lots in cores or inner ring suburbs. Domestic migration continues to be strongly away from core counties to more suburban counties. Core cities are growing less quickly than suburban areas. Exurban areas are growing faster than central areas, including inner suburbs.

    Clearly, the Suburban Exodus has not begun and there is little reason to believe that it will anytime soon.

    Note 1: In estimating the 2003 share of detached housing (75%), Dr. Nelson uses “one-unit structures” data from the 2003 American Housing Survey Table 2-3. US Bureau of the Census American Housing Survey personnel responded to my request for clarification, indicating that “one-unit structures” includes … single detached housing units, mobile homes, and single attached housing units (such as a townhouse).” Thus the 75% detached estimate is high because it includes mobile homes and single attached housing. As is indicated above, data from the US Bureau of the Census data indicates that the share of detached housing of detached plus attached housing in 2000 was 61.4%. This figure, coincidentally, is virtually the same as the 62% Dr. Nelson predicts for 2025.

    Note 2: The assumption that consumers prefer small lot detached housing may not be sufficiently robust and may even be exaggerated. Dr. Nelson appears to principally rely on research by Myers and Gearin (2001) (in the journal Housing Policy Debate) for concluding that consumers prefer small lot rather than larger lot detached housing, defining small lot development as 1/6th of an acre or less or less than 7,000 square feet. Yet neither figure appears in Myers and Gearin. Moreover, a National Association of Home Builders commenter (also in Housing Policy Debate) questions how its data was characterized by Myers and Gearin in justifying a finding of preference for smaller lots (the survey is unpublished). Without access to the original surveys referenced in Myers and Gearin, it is impossible to judge what respondents may have had in mind as the dividing line between large lots and small lots.

    Note 3: This characterization was on the Portland Development Commission website (accessed January 2, 2007). It was cited in our report, Zero Sum Game: The Austin Streetcar and Development and subsequently removed from the website. A large share of Portland’s urban renewal bonds are insured by Ambac Financial Corporation, which has reported losses exceeding $1 billion in the last two quarters. Ambac indicated that it has “insufficient capital to finance its debt service and operating expense requirements beyond the second quarter of 2011 and may need to seek bankruptcy protection.” Ambac was the insurer of State of Nevada bonds to build the Las Vegas Monorail, which has already entered bankruptcy and is unable to pay its bonds.

    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.”

    Photo: Icon Brickell, Miami

  • 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.

  • Twenty-first Century Electorate’s Heart is in the Suburbs

    Even as the nation conducts its critically important decennial census, a demographic picture of the rapidly changing population of the United States is emerging. It underlines how suburban living has become the dominant experience for all key groups in America’s 21st Century Electorate.

    While suburban living was once seen as the almost exclusive preserve of the white upper-middle class, a majority of all major American racial and ethnic groups now live in suburbia, according to the newest report on the state of metropolitan America from the Brookings Institute. Slightly more than half of African-Americans now live in large metropolitan suburbs, as do 59% of Hispanics, almost 62% of Asian-Americans, and 78% of whites. As a result the country is closer than ever to achieving a goal that many thought would never be achieved: city/suburban racial/ethnic integration. This is particularly so in the faster growing metropolitan areas of the South and West.

    The trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. A majority of Millennials live in the suburbs and 43% of them, a portion higher than for any other generation, describe suburbs as their “ideal place to live.”

    The nation’s one hundred largest metropolitan areas have grown twice as fast as the rest of the country in the last decade. That growth was heavily concentrated in lower density suburbs, which grew at three times the rate of cities or inner ring suburbs. At the same time, one third of the nation’s overall population growth was due to immigration. As a result about one-quarter of all children in the United States have at least one immigrant parent. In 2008, non whites became a majority of Americans less than eighteen years old, a demographic milestone that underlines just how fast and how dramatically the country is changing. Any political party that wants to build a lasting electoral majority must align its policy prescriptions with these new demographic realities to attract the votes of a younger, more ethnically diverse population, most of which now lives in the suburbs.

    Economic opportunity continues to be the major driver in determining where people want to live and work. Five of the six fastest growing metropolitan areas in the last decade were also among the top six in job growth according to data from the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed by the Praxis Strategy Group. The same five metropolitan areas – Phoenix, Riverside (CA), Dallas, Houston and Washington, D.C – also ranked high in the diversity of their population, differing only in the degree of educational attainment their residents have achieved.

    With America experiencing the first decade since the 1930s in which inflation adjusted median income declined and job creation slowed to levels not seen in decades, this movement to where the jobs are located is likely to intensify, as current migration to economically buoyant Texas cities and Washington, DC suggests. This crucial factor is often overlooked by urban planners who argue that cultural amenities and sport complexes are the key to attracting new residents. In fact, metropolitan areas that focus on job creation for Millennials (young Americans born 1982-2003) and minorities have the best chance of gaining population in the next decade.

    Clearly providing higher quality public education experiences is a key part of any such economic strategy. The arrival of stealth fighter parents at local school district meetings across the country only reflects the passion among young families about the quality of education their children receive. They are unwilling to allow Boomer ideological debates to delay the changes needed to properly prepare their children for a higher educational experience that increases the odds of economic success. The traditional separation between municipal partisan politics and nominally non-partisan schools is increasingly outdated when so much of a city’s economic success depends on the quality of the education its residents receive.

    Safe neighborhoods of single family dwellings with a surrounding patch of land continue to attract families of every background to the nation’s suburbs. Metropolitan areas that provide such an environment to all of their residents are the furthest along in achieving a more integrated society. Los Angeles, for instance, which is often decried by non-residents as simply an aggregation of suburbs with no central core, has a suburban population whose demographic profile almost exactly matches the city’s population. The fact that most of its housing reflects the tract developments of the 50s and 60s, as well as the city’s low crime rates – down to levels not seen in five decades – are two key reasons for this polyglot profile.

    Rather than fighting this desire on the part of America’s 21st Century Electorate to live comfortably in the suburbs, politicians of all stripes should find ways to embrace it and advocate policies that reflect our new economic realities. For instance, rather than insisting on higher density housing and light rail systems as the only answer to the nation’s appetite for foreign oil, the federal government should adopt tax incentives that encourage telecommuting and continue policies to foster more energy efficient automobiles. If all Americans worked from home, as many Millennials prefer to do, just two days a week, it would cut that portion of our nation’s gas consumption by more than a third. The FCC’s recently announced broadband policy will help put in place the infrastructure required to make such a lifestyle possible and even more productive.

    Three out of four commuting trips involve a single individual driving their car to work and this isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future. But putting as much emphasis on making our nation’s highways “smart” as in creating a smart electrical grid would make it possible for the existing highway system to shorten commuting time and reduce the quantity of fuel used in such trips. Recent developments in mobile technology makes this a practical, near term solution if state and local governments are prepared to invest in upgrading an infrastructure that is already designed and deployed to connect people’s homes to their workplace.

    Aligning the message at the heart of a party’s programs with the values and behaviors of America’s 21st Century Electorate is the best road towards achieving political victory –for either party – or years to come.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of the New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the 10 favorite books by the New York Times in 2008.

    Photo by delbz

  • Zoning and Sprawl

    Matt Yglesias has been making the case recently that zoning and land use laws encourage suburban sprawl, and if we did away with them we’d have a greater number of dense, walkable neighborhoods. Cato’s Randall O’Toole took exception, so Matt condensed his argument into PowerPoint form:

    • Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
    • Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
    • Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

    There’s a lot I could say about this, but that’s a mistake in a blog post. So I’ll stick to one main point: these regulations aren’t something that’s been imposed by “government.” They exist because people really, really, really want them.

    I need to be clear here: I’m neither praising nor condemning this, just describing how things are. To get an idea of how strongly people feel about this, you really need to come live in a suburb for a while. But failing that, consider the balance of power here. Corporations would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. Wealthy land developers would like to be able to build wherever and whatever they want. And local governments hate single-family neighborhoods because they’re a net tax loss: they cost more in services than they return in property tax remittances. And yet, even with corporations, wealthy developers, and local governments all on one side, suburban zoning is ubiquitous. This is a triumvirate that, under normal circumstances, could get practically anything they wanted, but in this case it’s not even a close fight. Suburban residents have them completely overwhelmed. That’s how strong the desire is for suburban sprawl. Read more

  • 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

  • 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.