New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • The Luxury City vs. the Middle Class

    The sustainable city of the future will rest on the revival of traditional institutions that have faded in many of today’s cities.

    Ellen Moncure and Joe Wong first met in school and then fell in love while living in the same dorm at the College of William and Mary. After graduation, they got married and, in 1999, moved to Washington, D.C., where they worked amid a large community of single and childless people.

    Like many in their late 20s, the couple began to seek something other than exciting careers and late-night outings with friends. “D.C. was terrific,” Moncure recalled over lunch near her office in lower Manhattan. “It was an extension of college. But after a while, you want to get to a different ‘place.’”

    The “place” Ellen and Joe looked for was not just a physical location but something less tangible: a sense of community and a neighborhood to raise their hoped-for children. Although they considered suburban locations, as most families do, ultimately they chose the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Joe had grown up.

    At first, this seemed a risky choice. While Joe was growing up in the 1980s, the neighborhood — a mixture of Victorian homes and modest apartments — had become crime-infested. The old families were moving out, and newer ones were not replacing them. Yet Joe’s Mom still lived there, and they liked the idea of having grandma around for their planned-for family.

    In a city that has been losing middle-class families for generations, the resurgence of places like Ditmas Park represents a welcome change. In recent years, child-friendly restaurants and shops have started up along once-decayed Cortelyou Road. More important, some local elementary schools have shown marked improvement, with an increase in parental involvement and new facilities.

    Even in hard economic times, the area has become a beacon to New York families, as well as singles seeking a community where they will put down long-term roots. “There’s an attempt in this neighborhood to break down the city feel and to see this more as a kind of a small town,” notes Ellen. “It may be in the city, but it’s a community unto itself, a place where you can stay and raise your children.”

    The Decline of the Urban Middle Class

    The rise of neighborhoods like Ditmas Park suggests that cities can still nurture and accommodate a middle class. Yet sadly this trend continues to fight an uphill battle against a host of forces from high taxes and regulation to poor schools, highly bifurcated labor markets, and the scourge of crime.

    These problems can be seen in the migration numbers. A demographic analysis conducted by my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group over the past decade found that New York and other top cities — including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston — have been suffering the largest net out-migration of residents of virtually all places in the country, albeit the pattern has slowed with the recession.

    It’s astonishing that, even with the many improvements over the past decade in New York, for example, more residents left its five boroughs for other locales in 2006 than in 1993, when the city was in demonstrably far worse shape. In 2006, the city had a net loss of 153,828 residents through domestic out-migration, compared to a decline of 141,047 in 1993, with every borough except Brooklyn experiencing a higher number of out-migrants in 2006.

    Since the 1990s virtually all the gains made in the New York economy have accrued to the highest income earners. Overall, New York has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study; its proportion of middle-income neighborhoods was smaller than any metropolitan area, except for Los Angeles.

    Much the same pattern can be seen in what has become widely touted as America’s “model city,” President Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago. The city has also experienced a rapid loss of its largely white middle class at a rate roughly 40 percent faster than the rest of the country.

    Although there has been a considerable gentrification in some pockets around Lake Michigan, Chicago remains America’s most segregated big city. In contrast to the president’s well-integrated cadre of upper-class African Americans, Chicago’s black population remains among the poorest, and most isolated, of any ethnic population in America.

    And like other American cities, Chicago now has a growing glut of “luxury” condos, a pattern that became evident as early as 2006 and has now, as Chicago magazine put it, “stalled” as a result of a “perfect storm” of toughened mortgage standards, overbuilding, job losses, and rising crime.

    Yet there could be some good from the current crisis. Considerable drops in urban rents and residential housing prices should ease the burdens on those who struggle with extremely high prices and taxes. Younger people, including families, may now be able to consider whether a home in Brooklyn, Chicago’s Wicker Park, or Los Angeles’ Studio City might now be affordable and desirable enough to eschew the move to the suburbs.

    The Cost of Being Urban

    In doing scores of interviews recently for a report on New York’s middle class, my coauthor Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future and I ran into many people who were considering moving out of the city or had friends who had recently left. This seems particularly true in the remaining middle-class enclaves in the outer boroughs.

    “Almost all the friends I grew up with have moved to Mahopac or Yorktown [in the Hudson Valley],” says Jimmy Vacca, a member of the City Council who represents communities in the Northeast Bronx such as Throgs Neck and Pelham Parkway. “There’s a flight out by many middle-class people because of the schools. A couple gets married and by the time their children gets to age five, they move.”

    Costs, particularly relating to child-raising, are killing the urban middle class. Urban residents generally pay higher taxes and more for utilities, insurance, trash, and sewer than those living elsewhere. Manhattan is by far the most expensive urban area in the United States, with an average cost of living that is more than twice as much as the national average; San Francisco, another city that has seen large-scale middle-class flight, ranks second. The Washington, D.C. area, Los Angeles, and Boston also suffer extremely high living costs.

    These costs are most onerous on the middle class, particularly those with children. This can be seen in the rapidly declining numbers of students in most urban school districts, including such hyped success stories as Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Washington, and San Francisco. Over the past seven years, for example, Chicago’s school system, which was run by new Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has declined by 41,000 students.

    America’s core cities — including the borough of Manhattan in New York — boast among the lowest percentage of children under 17 in the nation. Although Manhattan had a much discussed “baby boomlet” (the borough’s number of toddlers under the age of 4 grew 26 percent between 2000 and 2004), once children over 5 are taken into account, Manhattan’s under-age population is well under the national average. This indicates there may be a process of exhaustion — both mental and financial — as the costs of raising children drain family resources.

    The real issue for the urban middle class is not having babies but being able to sustain their families as the children age and as families expand. One reason: many middle class urbanites spend tens of thousands of dollars a year in additional expenses that those in other cities as well as surrounding suburbs often avoid. For instance, since most middle-class families in big cities today need to have two working parents just to get by, child care becomes a necessity for those without grandparents or other relatives to look after young children. In places like Chicago, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles these costs typically run from $13,000 to $25,000 per child annually.

    Later many of these same families, if they choose to stay, must then contemplate shelling out considerable sums to send their children to private schools, particularly after the elementary level. This can add from a few thousand dollars to $30,000 a year to their annual costs — and with no tax benefit.

    Do Cities Need a Middle Class?

    Ultimately, in good times or bad, cities have to want a middle class to have one. And politicians, if asked, will genuflect to the idea of maintaining a middle class, yet their actions — on taxes, regulations, schools, development — suggest otherwise.

    Indeed, in reality most urban areas have focused on creating what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously dubbed the “luxury city.” To pay for often inflated public employee costs, the luxury city can only survive off the wealthy and on other groups — empty nesters, singles and students — who demand relatively little in the way of basic services like schools and public health facilities.

    City planners and urban developers favor the unattached: the “young and restless,” the “creative class,” and the so-called “yuspie” — the young urban single professional. Champions of the unattached suggest that companies and cities should capture this segment, described by one as “the dream demographic,” if they wish to inhabit the top tiers of the economic food chain.

    Another key group coveted by cities are the legions of baby boomers who have already raised children. No longer cohabiting with offspring, they are expected to give up their dull family existence and rediscover the allure of a fast-paced, defiantly “youthful” lifestyle. The new retirees, suggests luxury homebuilder Robert Toll, “are more hip-hop and happening than our parents.” They are more interested in indulging “the sophistication and joy and music that comes with city dwelling, and doesn’t come with sitting in the ’burbs watching the day go by.”

    A Demographic Dead End?

    This whole approach has severe limitations. Despite an enormous amount of publicity about empty nesters moving back to the city, surveys conducted by the housing industry find that most aging boomers — upwards of 70 percent — are aging in place, mostly in the suburbs. The numbers moving back into the urban core remain negligible, except in the pages of urban booster publications like The New York Times.

    The young singles provide a more promising demographic for cities. But even here time may be running out. This will be even more evident between 2010 and 2020, when the millennial generation hits their 30s and early 40s and enter the prime years for family formation. Surveys of the cutting edge of this group — the other large age cohort in the population — show that most prefer a single-family home and, like their parents, seem most likely to head to the suburbs.

    But perhaps most troubling of all is what this means in terms of the historic role of cities as incubators of upward mobility. Back in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs could still predict that Latino immigrants to New York, mainly from Puerto Rico, would inevitably make “a fine middle class.” Yet four decades later in the Bronx, the city’s most heavily Latino county, roughly one in three households lives in poverty, the highest rate of any urban county in the nation.

    On the other extreme, in Manhattan, where the rich are concentrated, the disparities between the classes have been rising steadily. In 1980 it ranked 17th among the nation’s counties for social inequality; today it ranks first, with the top fifth of wage earners earning 52 times that of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.

    The University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark, one of the most articulate advocates for this new urban pattern, says cities should focus on acting not so much as vehicles for class mobility, but as “entertainment machines” for the privileged. For these elite residents, the lures are not economic opportunity, but rather “bicycle paths, beaches and softball fields,” and “up-to-the-date consumption opportunities in the hip restaurants, bars, shops, and boutiques abundant in restructured urban neighborhoods.”

    In this formulation cities become the domicile primarily of the young, the rich (and their servants), as well as those members of the underclass who persist in hanging around. What emerges, in the end, is a city largely without children, particularly of school-age, and with a diminishing middle class. Ironically, these are places that, despite celebrating diversity, actually could end up as hip, dense versions of the most constipated suburb imaginable.

    This shift will also limit the economic functions of certain elite cities. Cost pressures, for example, have already helped Houston to replace New York and Los Angeles as the nation’s energy capital; in the future, although now humbled by the collapse of Wachovia, more middle class-oriented Charlotte, as well as other cities, could continue to gain jobs in the post-bust financial sector. Charlotte real estate developer John Harris suggests the city can compete against an expensive metropolitan region not only at the top levels of management but across the board. “It’s hard to be a mass employer in San Francisco,” he notes.

    Joe Gyourko, a real estate professor at the Wharton School, suggests this elite model of urbanism will spread to other favored places such as Portland, Seattle, and possibly Austin. In all these places, we may be seeing the emergence of a European-style pattern of elite urbanism in the core, with a growing concentration of low-wage workers in the least favored parts of the urban periphery.

    The City of Aspiration

    Even if such a model proves sustainable, it certainly means a major change for American urbanism. Unlike most urban cultures, that of the United States has been dominated not by the dictates of princes or priests, but by the efforts of ambitious entrepreneurs and migrants.

    American cities have been driven by a protean, ever-shifting commercial and middle-class culture, willing to break the bonds of tradition. As the great sociologist E. Digby Baltzell noted, the population in New York and other American cities has been “heterogeneous from top to bottom.” Social mobility, Baltzell said, constituted the fundamental reality of American urbanism.

    In this country, cities emerged as the principal North American bastion for those who sought to improve their lives. As historians Charles and Mary Beard noted, “All save the most wretched had aspirations.”

    Such cities often were not inherently pleasant or culturally edifying. Although its wealth would propel it to one day become the world’s cultural capital, visitors from more genteel Philadelphia and Boston often regarded 19th-century New Yorkers as crass and money-oriented.

    The new cities on the opportunity frontier — Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati — were, if anything, even more egalitarian. After two years in Cincinnati, British writer Frances Trollope deplored how “every bee in the hive is actively employed in the search for honey…neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from their pursuit.” Chicago, a Swedish visitor commented in 1850, was “one of the most miserable and ugly cities” of America.

    Yet these places were ideal for taking advantage of new technologies from mass manufacturing to trains and the telegraph. They created dynamic societies that provided huge opportunities for vast waves of immigrants, who by 1890 accounted for as much as half of the nation’s urban dwellers.

    The newcomers were joined by others from rural America, including, by the early 20th century, many African Americans. The “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural south, noted Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, created “a fundamental redefinition of the Negro’s status in America.” Urban life had its horrors, but in the cities it became increasingly difficult to restrict a person into “tight caste boundaries.” African-American migrants from the South may have been different in many ways from newcomers from Italy, Ireland, or Russia, but their fundamental aspirations were often very much the same.

    The Key to a Middle-Class Comeback: The Power of Plain Vanilla

    Compared to the dismal decline in the 1970s and early 1980s, urban prospects have improved, particularly in primary urban areas such as Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Yet, if these and other cities are to sustain their momentum, they need to look beyond “the luxury city” to the potential of less glamorous neighborhoods that can attract the middle class and people with families.

    These “plain vanilla” neighborhoods include many places that managed to resist the urban decay of the 1970s and in many cases have begun to enjoy a steady resurgence. These include, for example, large swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as the lovely, park-blessed sections of south and west St. Louis, or scattered Los Angeles neighborhoods in places like the San Fernando Valley.

    But these communities can only grow if cities focus on those things critical to the middle class such as maintaining relatively low density work areas and shopping streets, new schools, and parks.

    This would require a massive shift in urban priorities away from the current course of subsidizing developers for luxury mega-developments, new museums, or performing arts centers. To maintain and nurture a middle class, cities need to look at the essentials that have made great cities in the past and could once again do so in the future.

    The New Urban Middle Class

    Perhaps the other key question is what constitutes the economic base for the people who might settle and remain in cities. It’s clear that many traditional industries — heavy manufacturing, warehousing — as well as middle-management white collar jobs will diminish in the future. But it is possible to imagine the rise of a new kind of urban economy built around people working in small firms, or independently in growing fields such as information, education, healthcare, and culture, or as specialists in a wide array of business services.

    These are professions that continued to grow in many older cities, even as other fields declined. In San Francisco, for example, by 2006 there were an estimated 70,000 home-based businesses and a thriving culture of self-employed “Bedouins” working in post-industrial professions. These self-employed people, noted one study, were critical to helping the city withstand the ill effects of the post-2000 dotcom collapse.

    Similarly, the close-in communities of the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles are home to large contingents of entertainment industry workers, many of them self-employed. According to studies by California State University’s Dan Blake, up to 60 percent of all L.A.-area workers in this highly dispersed industry reside somewhere in this sprawling urban region made up largely of post–World War II single-family houses. Workers in media, graphic arts, and other specialized services have also been among the few groups of middle and upper-middle income earners to see rapid growth in New York’s outer boroughs.

    These post–industrial age artisans — along with more traditional parts of the middle class such as civil servants, teachers, nurses, and other service workers — could provide the critical residential base for the plain vanilla urban neighborhoods’ work. Neither rich nor poor, these artisans could use the new telecommunications net to access clients who may exist in the sprawling suburban rings, throughout the United States, or overseas.

    Cities of the Future

    You can see this emerging reality in places like Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Nelson Ryland, a film editor with two children who works part-time at his sprawling turn-of-the-century Flatbush house, suggests that the key to an urban revival lies not in the spectacular but in the mundane. “It’s easy to name the things that attracted us — the neighbors, the moderate density,” he says over coffee in a house close to that occupied by Ellen and Joe. “More than anything it’s the sense of community. That’s the great thing that keeps people like us here.”

    This “sense of community” will become the key currency of sustaining urban communities. Such middle-class sensibilities get short shrift by urban scholars such as Richard Florida, who argue that in the so-called “creative age” places of residence should be “leased” like cars. In his mind, single-family homes, the ideal of homeownership, should be replaced “by a new kind of housing” that embraces higher forms of density without long-term commitment to a particular residence or location.

    In fact, the sustainable city of the future will depend precisely on commitment and long-term residents. It also will rest on the revival of traditional institutions that have faded in many of today’s cities. Churches — albeit often in reinvented form — help maintain and nurture such communities. Similarly, extended family networks will be critical to future successful urban areas. As Queens resident and real estate agent Judy Markowitz puts it, “In Manhattan people with kids have nannies. In Queens, we have grandparents.”

    The modest and mundane ties between people that exist in such places represent the key to reviving America’s urban regions in the coming generation. It is in our urban neighborhoods — not in the glamour zones and high-end downtowns — that our country’s cities can find a new life and purpose in the 21st century.

    This article originally appeared at American.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Suburbs and Cities: The Unexpected Truth

    Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.

    It is true that suburban areas have been growing strongly, while core cities have tended to grow much more slowly or even to decline. The predominance of suburban growth is not just an American phenomenon, but is fairly universal in the high income world).

    This is true in both auto-oriented and transit oriented environments. Suburbs have accounted for more than 90 percent of growth in Japan’s metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 residents, both those with high transit market shares and those with high auto market shares, The same is true in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

    In Western Europe, where vaunted transit systems carry a far smaller share of travel than cars, all growth and then some has been in the suburbs, as overall core city populations have declined. Indeed, the same trend is well underway in middle and lower income world urban areas. In such places as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Manila, Shanghai, Kolkata, and Jakarta, nearly all population growth has occurred in the suburbs, rather than the core cities.

    As the world faces a more expensive energy future and as efforts are intensified to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is sometimes suggested that people need to “move back” to the cities. This is a dubious and needless strategy, which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of metropolitan growth.

    Most suburban growth is not the result of declining core city populations, but is rather a consequence of people moving from rural areas and small towns to the major metropolitan areas. It is the appeal of large metropolitan places that drives suburban growth.

    Larger metropolitan areas have more lucrative employment opportunities and generally have higher incomes than smaller metropolitan areas. This is particularly the case in developing countries. As a result, the big urban areas attract people seeking to escape what are often the stagnant or even declining economies in smaller areas.

    There are, of course, significant individual exceptions. Virtually all of the first world core cities that have achieved a population of more than 400,000 – if they have not expanded their boundaries and did not have substantial empty land for development – experienced losses to 2000. Yet even in most of these cases, the majority of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan areas, rather than from the core cities. For example:

    • St. Louis is a champion among the ranks of population losers, having lost the greatest percentage of its population of any large municipality in the world, (dropping from nearly 860,000 in 1950 to 350,000 in 2000). Indeed, it may be fair to say that St. Louis has lost more of its population than any city since the Romans sacked Carthage. Yet, even in St. Louis, 60 percent of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area, rather than from the city.
    • Few core cities have lost the nearly 1,000,000 residents that have fled Detroit since 1950. Yet, even in Detroit, 65 percent of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area, rather than from the city.
    • The city of Chicago lost 725,000 residents between 1950 and 2000, yet 82 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area.
    • The city of Philadelphia lost 550,000 residents between 1950 and 2000, yet 76 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area (See lead picture of Philadelpia downtown).
    • The central city of Paris lost approximately one-quarter of its population from 1965 to 2000 (675,000), while the suburbs gained nearly 3,850,000 residents. More than 80 percent of suburban Paris growth came from outside the region.
    • The central city of Lisbon experienced a 30 percent population decline from 1965 to 2000. Yet suburban Lisbon’s growth was 80 percent from outside.
    • Stockholm was another losing core city, yet more than 90 percent of the suburban growth came from smaller towns and cities.
    • Despite Zurich’s nearly one-quarter population loss 83 percent of the suburban gains derived from outside the region.
    • The core city of Tokyo (which really doesn’t exist except as 23 separate subdivisions or kus of a city abolished during World War II) lost more than 700,000 residents from 1965 to 2000. Tokyo’s suburbs, however, attracted more than 90 percent of their growth from region.

    In some metropolitan areas, smaller towns and rural areas contributed less to suburban growth. In Amsterdam, 50 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area. In Copenhagen, the number was 40 percent of the suburban growth while in Birmingham (UK) only 30 percent of the suburban gain was from outside.

    In a few cases, both the core city losses were greater than the suburban gains, such as in Pittsburgh, Liverpool and Manchester. In these cases, it is fair to attribute all of the suburban gains to core city losses.

    Unlike the cases above, however, most core cities gained population. This includes all in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many in the United States. As a result, none of the suburban growth in the corresponding metropolitan areas can be attributed to an exodus from the city, because there, on balance, was no exodus.

    Suburbanization is often characterized as reducing densities, but in fact it has done just the opposite. Most suburbanites come from smaller places; they may prefer suburbs because they are less dense, safer, or simply more manageable than the core cities. But they are also, almost invariably, more dense than where they lived before. Suburbanization is thus a densifying dynamic, albeit one that is less dramatic than preferred by many planners and architects.

    In this sense, suburbs have to be seen not as the enemies of the city, as just a modern expression of urbanization. They are neither the enemies of the city, nor are their residents likely to move “back” there. You cannot move back to someplace you did not come from.

    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.”

  • Smart Growth? Or Not So Bright Idea?

    Smart Growth and New Urbanism have increasingly merged into a loosely aligned set of ideas. The benefits of this high-density housing viewpoint are fast becoming a ‘given’ to planners and city governments, but studies that promote the advantages often omit the obvious disadvantages. Here are some downsides that show a much different story:

    Smart Growth or Dumb Idea?

    One goal of Smart Growth is to move our society away from dependence on cars, and many Smart Growth plans intentionally make it difficult to drive through the neighborhood, making walking more inviting. Smart Growth planners advocate short blocks in a grid pattern to distribute traffic (vehicular and pedestrian) evenly within a development. These short blocks produce a multitude of 4-way intersections, and add a multitude of those trendy “turnabouts,” to make a bland site plan look more interesting.

    But all of this together destroys “flow”. On the other hand, in a grid planned neighborhood you might drive a straight line with an occasional turn, giving the impression of a much shorter drive than a curved subdivision. But with short blocks, a driver must stop completely, pause, then when safe accelerate through the intersection onto the next intersection, then repeat… multiple times. This scenario uses a tremendous amount of energy; the car eats gas.

    To understand this point clearly, go out and try to push a modern car. All the safety and convenience features, even in the most basic car sold today, add weight. Even a Toyota Prius is just under 3,000 lbs. While a given model may get great mileage the bulk of energy consumed is in getting the thing moving from a full stop. Should a vehicle maintain a constant flow (at any speed), the energy usage plummets, compared to stop-and-go traffic patterns that intentionally force conflicts.

    To make matters worse, the majority of vehicular vs. pedestrian accidents occur at intersections. Smart Growth designs have many more intersections than conventional suburban plans . Even more dangerous, Smart Growth walkways are placed close to the where the cars turns. Check out Traffic by Vanderbilt for an understanding of the psychology of driving.

    One may argue that cars will become more efficient. So what? This stop and go scenario also consumes time.

    Rooting Out Tree Issues

    Nobody can argue against the character of a tree-lined street… no one, that is, except the city Public Works department that must maintain structures being destroyed by trees growing in close confines to concrete walks and curbs. Smart Growth/New Urbanist compact front yard spaces are typically 10 feet or less. This simply cannot provide for enough room for tree growth when there is a 4’ wide walk typically a few feet away from the curb, the area where street trees grow. Without trees to define the street, these solutions have very little organic life to offset the vast volume of paving in front of each porch.

    Now and in the near future there will be a new era of solar heat and power, most of which will be mounted on the roofs of homes. Guess what blocks the sun’s energy? Yep – street trees! High density means that the proximity of trees to roofs will deter the sun’s energy from reaching those solar panels.

    Get Real About Presentations, Porches and People

    Typically, when a high-density development is proposed, the renderings show large green common areas bounded by homes with grand porches. The presentations usually show only a few cars parked along the street, and plenty of residents enjoying the spaces lined by mature trees that have had about 20 years of growth. This misrepresentation helps to win over councils, planning commissions and concerned neighbors. What is not shown in the presentations for approvals are claustrophobic, intense areas, such as the typical street most residents will live on, or perhaps the views down the alleys.

    There may be some neighborhoods that are built as represented, but architectural and land planning consultants are likely to stretch the truth more than a wee bit to gain approvals. Where can we see the original presentation images compared to what actually gets built?

    Those inviting large porches where neighbors sit and gossip in the presentation: Do they ultimately end up as stoops hardly large enough to fit a standing person? Those large mature trees: Are they actually just seedlings? Does the real streetscape have people walking on the typically narrow 4 foot wide walkways? How many people are walking along the roadway instead? Are the streets lined with just a few cars, as the renderings show, or are they packed with unsightly vehicles, while the nice cars are likely stored in the rear garage?

    The Evolution of Pavement

    Suburbs have changed during the last few decades. For example, in Minnesota thirty years ago an average suburban lot would have been 15,000 square feet and 90 to 100 feet wide. Today, 8,000 square feet and 70 feet wide would be more typical. In a conventional suburban plan, there weren’t any alleys, and the front loaded driveways were appropriately tapered. There were few side streets. The lots might have been 20% larger than in a Smart Growth high density plan, but the street layout might have had about 30% less linear feet of street compared to a Smart Growth grid layout. In the south, where the typical suburban lot is about the same size as that high density lot, the numbers favor the conventional layout even more; the total paved surface area could be 50% or more lower. So, the Smart Growth/New Urban plans place a greater burden on the tax payers to municipally maintain (more) paved surfaces.

    A Final Consolation…

    In reality, fire and police departments, as well as traffic engineers, review suburban development plans. And often the original high-density narrow street proposal doesn’t make it all the way to approvals. With or without the popularity of Smart Growth and New Urbanism, a much wider paved section or a compromised width is often the ultimate result.

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable. His websites are rhsdplanning and prefurbia.com.

  • Austin’s Secrets For Economic Success

    Few places have received more accolades in recent years than Austin, the city that ranked first on our list of the best big cities for jobs. Understanding what makes this attractive, fast-growing city tick can tell us much about what urban growth will look like in the coming decades.

    Austin’s success is not surprising since, in many ways, it starts on third base. Two of its greatest assets result from the luck of the draw; it’s both a state capital and home to a major research university.

    Our ranking of the best cities for job growth includes many college towns–from Fargo, N.D., (home to North Dakota State) to Athens, Ga., (University of Georgia), Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., (Duke and University of North Carolina) and College Station, Texas (Texas A&M).

    Being a state capital also helps. Baton Rouge, La., home to both the state government and Louisiana State University, ranked seventh on our list of the best medium-sized cities for employment. This confluence of institutions also accounts in large part for the relatively decent rankings of two Midwestern cities, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, in spite of the generally sad situation in that region.

    That’s because colleges and state governments offer stable employment–since they cannot or will not outsource jobs to India or China. These places also tend to be inhabited by reasonably well-educated people whose stable incomes makes them less vulnerable to contractions in competitive industries like finance, manufacturing, construction or information.

    “We’re pretty close to recession-proof,” suggest Chris Bradford, a local attorney and blogger in Austin. “It’s almost anti-cyclical. In bad times, the students want to stay here.”

    There is a third factor, however, that adds to Austin’s special sauce: the fact that it is located in Texas, the one fast-growing mega-state. With low taxes and low regulation at the state level, Austin–no doubt to many locals’ consternation–is a great environment not only for public sector employment but also private sector growth.

    Its success contrasts dramatically with the relatively poor employment status of capitals in business-unfriendly states (such as Sacramento, Calif., which ranked 60th among large cities) as well as other college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., home to one of the nation’s best public universities, the University of Michigan. (Among medium-sized cities, Ann Arbor came in 93rd.)

    Austin, essentially, reaps the benefits of being a deep blue, Democratic island in a red-state sea. The university and state government employ large numbers of people who might want higher taxes and greater regulation–but they can talk the redistributionist’s game without feeling any of the pain.

    This is not to say that Austin itself–that is, its urban core area–does not try to trot out its blue, and “green,” trimmings. Like every college town, Austin likes smart growth, mass transit and high density.

    But in reality, Austin is not a dense region. In fact, its metropolitan population per acre puts it in the middle of the nation’s largest areas, well behind not only Los Angeles and New York but also Houston and Dallas.

    Even central Austin seems rather spread out and suburban compared to traditional East Coast cities. Smaller, older homes–mainly cottages–dominate neighborhoods close to downtown. Recent attempts to go high-rise have not been notably successful, as the auction signs on the sides of some new towers suggest.

    Yet the urban center increasingly represents less and less of the area’s total employment and houses fewer and fewer of its residences. Today, the city itself is home to well under half the metropolitan population of 1.5 million.

    As in many regions, notes blogger Bradford, over the past decade the strongest growth has occurred in Austin’s periphery. Even as the city itself has enjoyed strong job and population growth, the biggest increases have taken place in suburban outposts outside city limits, like Williamson, Bastrop and Hays counties, as well as parts of Travis, the county that is home to Austin. In fact, Williamson was the nation’s sixth fastest-growing county last year, while Hays ranked 10th.

    Surprisingly, these suburban areas are the places most driving Austin’s economic success. Why? Two reasons: affordability and livability. By Texas standards, the city is not cheap. It costs between $350,000 and $400,000 for a nice three- or four-bedroom house in a good school district, say, 20 minutes from downtown. However, a similar place in the ‘burbs of Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston or Irvine would run at least twice as much.

    Local Realtor and blogger Shannan Gonyea-Reimer adds that, a bit further away from town, home prices can drop as low as $150,000. “People come from California, and they are shocked,” she says.

    This price structure, along with the human capital attracted to the University of Texas, has in turn propelled the rapid expansion of the non-governmental economy in places like Cedar Creek and Round Rock, home to Dell. A recent Brookings study estimates that central Austin employment grew by almost 13% between 1998 and 2006. The number of jobs more than 10 miles from the central business district increased by 77,523, or 62%, according to the study.

    Austin has seen remarkable overall employment growth–almost 34%–in the last decade. With that figure, it leaves its major hip tech rivals in the dust. Over the same period, for example, San Jose/Silicon Valley has lost 6% of its jobs; San Francisco, around 1.6%. Boston, Austin’s other big high-tech competitor, enjoyed only a 1.2% gain.

    Again, this growth stems in part from the unique combination of both an appealing city center and attractive suburbs. The city’s lively urban core remains a lure for affluent professionals, young singles and, of course, students. However, unlike places like New York, Boston and San Francisco, the sprawling ‘burbs provide an affordable place for people to move to when their hardcore clubbing days are over.

    “California might work well for the apartment-dwelling, single-guy lifestyle person, but when you get married, you can’t afford Los Gatos,” says former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Shultz, the CEO of Infoglide, a software firm headquartered on Austin’s outer ring. “In Austin, the same person can grow up, move into a reasonable house and have a reasonable life.”

    This does much to explain why Austin has enjoyed a migration pattern unlike that of its primary competitors. Its residents may start off hip and cool, but the city also accommodates their often inevitable evolution to Ozzie and Harriet. This allows individuals and companies to plan to stick around. One doesn’t have to have the short-term mentality so common in the Bay Area, L.A., Boston or New York.

    Ultimately, it is this combination of a “cool” downtown culture–with excellent restaurants as well as great music–and a more sedate, affordable periphery that makes Austin a home run.

    “It has a hip cool side to it,” Shultz observes, “but it’s also a great place to raise kids.”

    A caveat to all this: We also have to consider scale. With roughly 1.5 million people, Austin simply offers more convenient choices than a megalopolitan behemoth like Los Angeles, New York or the Bay Area. In Austin, nice, single-family homes within walking distance of cool urban streets are not uncommon or absurdly expensive–and even a larger, more affordable house out in the suburbs is usually less than a half an hour from downtown.

    Additionally, Texas, unlike its main rival California, is not teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and is instead a stable long-term bet in this recession. Rather than haggling with bankers or public employee unions, it is busy building its future: attracting new comers, investing in its university and building new transportation infrastructure.

    “Austin is off the charts livable, but it’s in a state that makes it viable,” says Shultz, the entrepreneur. “You can’t say that about California and many of the other places where our competitors are.”

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • America’s (Sub)Urban Future

    Cities today have more political clout than at any time in a half century. Not only does an urbanite blessed by the Chicago machine sit in the White House, but Congress is now dominated by Democratic politicians hailing from either cities or inner-ring suburbs.

    Perhaps because of this representation, some are calling for the administration and Congress to “bail out” urban America. Yet there’s grave danger in heeding this call. Hope that “the urban president” will solve inner-city problems could end up diverting cities from the kind of radical reforms necessary to thrive in the coming decades.

    Demographics and economics make self-help a necessity. Despite the wishful thinking of urbanophile pundits and policymakers, central cities have little realistic chance to reclaim their pre-1950 role as the dominant arbiters of American life.

    Short of a catastrophic change, the country will remain predominately made up of suburban, exurban and small town residents. Since 2000, more than four-fifths of metropolitan growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. Economically, we see a similar pattern. According to a recent Brookings Institution study of 98 large metropolitan areas, only 21% of employees work within three miles of downtown. The report found that only three regions avoided the decentralizing trend.

    The Brookings report and many others decry all these trends as promoting “sprawl,” but name-calling will not assure that urban areas can impose their political hegemony over the long run. The Obama administration may try to boost cities by imposing barriers to suburban growth, but these seem doomed to failure given both the preference of most Americans for lower-density lifestyles and the president’s demonstrated ability to count votes.

    Rather than waiting for Barack, urban boosters should instead take up the New Testament injunction to “heal thyself.” Cities should have a chance to grow based on the roughly 10% to 20% of Americans who tell researchers they would like to live in a dense urban environment. With an extra 100 million Americans coming on line by 2050, cities could look forward to accommodating upwards of 20 million more people in the next few decades. As my grandmother would say, that’s not exactly chopped liver.

    Yet in order to enjoy this repast, cities will need to address three fundamental and inextricably related issues: public safety, business climate and political reform. Of these, public safety is the most critical. From the earliest times, security has represented a critical pre-condition for urban success. The huge surge in urban crime during the 1960s, for example, played an enormous role in the precipitous decline of cities in the ensuing decades.

    Conversely, improvements in public safety after 1990–notably in New York and Los Angeles but also in other large cities–helped slow the out-migration from urban cores and attract new residents, mostly young educated professionals and immigrants. Now urban crime may be on the rise, and could again threaten new growth.

    This is worrying because urban crime rates, notes demographer Wendell Cox, remain still three times higher than those of surrounding suburbs. Almost all the highest crime areas in America can be found in urban settings, while the safest places tend to be in suburban towns.

    Even the president’s much-celebrated hometown of Chicago suffered roughly a murder a day last year. On the city’s MTA trains, robbery soared 77% between 2006 and 2008. Now there’s also more than a stickup a day.

    Hard economic times may exacerbate these problems, with an estimated 250,000 more Chicagoans predicted to fall into poverty by the end of the year. More widely, unemployment among core urban populations–young people, minorities and immigrants–is on the rise, even more than in the general population. Indeed, for the first time since the mid-1990s, the foreign born now suffer a higher rate of joblessness than the native born.

    Yet even in the face of a tough economy, few cities seem to focus on long-term middle-class job creation. Most seem to prefer to indulge in marginally useful taxpayer-subsidized prestige projects like convention centers, arts complexes, ball parks and arenas. Meanwhile, the core issues stifling growth–high taxes, stiff regulatory burdens and sometimes corrupt governments–remain largely ignored.

    Recently while researching the middle class in New York, I met many otherwise committed urbanites considering leaving to less costly, lower-tax and more business-friendly locales. Up until recently, this problem was somewhat obscured by spectacular earnings on Wall Street, which engendered the growth of an extensive “luxury economy” largely insulated from high costs. But even Timothy Geithner won’t be able to bail out this favored segment of the economy ad infinitum.

    Instead cities, including New York, will have to diversify to less gilded industries. Increasingly cities will need to rely on small companies, micro-enterprises and self-employed high-tech artisans to drive their economies. To keep them there, they will need to attend to basic services–education, police and transportation–while managing to curb taxes and regulations.

    This will necessitate confronting the largest source of high city costs: public employee salaries and pensions. This problem is not unique to core cities, but tends to be more severe in urban areas where public employee unions often dominate local politics.

    Finally, cities need to address their educational systems. Despite all the talk of urban educational reform, the urban dropout rate, according to a recent study of the nation’s largest cities by America’s Promise Alliance remains around 50%, roughly 20 points higher than the rate for suburbs. Poor-quality urban schools drive out both the middle class and the most upwardly mobile segment of the working class.

    Even more money from Washington won’t solve this problem. Cleveland, with a 38% graduation rate, spent far more on students per capita than Ohio’s statewide averages. In contrast, the surrounding suburbs enjoyed an 80% graduation rate.

    Are cities capable of changing their governance for the better? In the 1990s, the emergence of tough, reform-minded mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani, Indianapolis’ innovative Steven Goldsmith, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles and Houston’s hard-driving Bob Lanier all sparked urban revivals in their cities.

    Today, however, there are few such personages; Houston’s Bill White is one glaring exception. Yet without an infusion of bold new leadership, the future of American cities, although not universally bleak, will not be nearly as bright as it should be. Rather than a constellation of strong, reviving cities, we can envision the emergence of a less promising set of scenarios.

    One archetype will be the Bloombergian “luxury city,” a very expensive urban area dominated by the wealthy and their servants, students and nomadic young workers as well as the poor. The affluent will drive this growth, but only in a relatively few neighborhoods in attractive places like New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis.

    San Francisco may presage this urban form. Already middle-class families are becoming scarce in the city by the bay. The place seems increasingly something of a Disneyland for privileged adults, exempting of course the large homeless population. “A cross between Carmel and Calcutta,” jokes California historian and San Francisco native Kevin Starr.

    At the opposite end of the spectrum lie those cities consistently at the bottom of our Worst Cities For Jobs ranking. Despite some zones of gentrification, such once-great cities as Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, Baltimore and Philadelphia could continue to suffer persistently high rates of poverty, diminished populations and high crime rates.

    Not that this has to be. These areas could stage a real resurgence if their governments determine to throttle criminals, improve basic services and nurture small businesses. Low housing prices, cheap land and, in some cases, strategic locations could attract businesses as well as some of the millions who will be seeking out an urban lifestyle in the coming decades.

    Currently the brightest hopes for America’s urban future lie with newer, “aspirational,” middle-class-oriented cities such as Houston, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte and Orlando. Although some are now suffering from the recession, these places will benefit from both lower costs and more business-friendly regimes. Primarily suburban in nature, many of these cities have worked to develop attractive dense urban districts, which could expand much further over the next few decades.

    There remains nothing pre-determined about the urban future. Some cities may surprise us by reviving strongly while others may continue to disappoint. Success will depend not on Washington, but on how each city addresses the basics of safety, economics and governance. Grasping this fundamental truth constitutes the first step towards creating a sustainable long-term urban resurgence.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • How Austin’s Rise Became a Tale of Two Cities

    Austin has enjoyed healthy growth during its 150-year history. As a rule of thumb, its population doubles every 20 years, and has done so since it was founded. It continues to grow at a healthy clip: from a population of 345,000 in 1980 to 656,000 in 2000; the Census Bureau estimates it had nearly 750,000 residents in 2008.

    But if the city of Austin has grown briskly, its suburbs have exploded. Williamson County to its north was the sixth fastest-growing county in the United States between July 1, 2007 and July 1, 2008. Hays County to the south was the tenth.

    This is not a recent development. Williamson and Hays Counties have outpaced Travis County (Austin) and Texas for years:

    The figures for individual suburbs reflect this spectacular growth:

    • Between 1990 and 2007, Round Rock, ten miles north of Austin and home to Dell Computers, tripled from 31,000 to almost 100,000; its population grew by 50% between 2000 and 2007 alone.
    • Pflugerville, just south of Round Rock, grew from a tiny village of 4,000 in 1990 to 34,000 in 2007.
    • Cedar Park and Leander grew tenfold and sevenfold, respectively, between 1990 and 2007.

    The scale of rapid growth is noteworthy, but the distribution of growth is hardly unique. After all, American cities have been suburbanizing for the last 60 years (and in some cities, for much longer). Austin’s suburbanizing growth merely mirrors the national trend.

    But Austin’s growth evinces another pattern. As Austin and its suburbs have grown, families with children have left central Austin for its fringes, ceding central Austin to singles and couples without children.

    Central Austin is typically defined as the area urbanized by 1970, delineated by a perimeter of highways and lakes. But there’s an alternative definition: Central Austin is where the families with children are not.

    The map below tells the story. It depicts, using 2000 Census data, the percentage of households consisting of married couples with children. Darkly-tinted regions have a relatively high percentage of such households; lightly-colored regions, relatively few. The area bounded by the heavy, black line – the lightly-tinted region in the center of the map – is central Austin.

    This map excludes the suburbs in Williamson and Hays Counties. Needless to say, these cities would also be colored brown and deep-orange. For example, 45% of Cedar Park’s households in 2000 consisted of married couples with children. In Pflugerville, the figure was 48%. Over the last few decades, Austin has sorted itself into two cities: suburbs populated by families with children, and a central core populated largely by singles and childless couples.

    Why?

    This might seem a trite question at first blush. This pattern has repeated itself in one American city after another for many decades.

    But Austin’s case is interesting because many standard explanations do not hold. Austin’s families have not had to flee the central city to escape crime, or dense, overcrowded neighborhoods, or failing schools, or the pollution and blight of old, abandoned industrial sites. Nor have they had to abandon the central city in search of jobs.

    Austin historically has had a low crime rate with one of the lowest homicide rates in the country. And many of those crimes occur outside the central city. Austin’s slums are not located in central Austin, but in the aging suburbs just north and southeast of the urban core. Central east Austin – where African Americans and Latinos were banished for much of Austin’s history – was, and to some extent remains, an exception. But even that area has gentrified rapidly in recent years. And, in any event, neither east Austin’s problems nor a racist desire to avoid people of color can explain the flight of families from the historically “whiter” parts of town.

    Central Austin certainly has plenty of bad schools. But it also has plenty of good schools, and a liberal transfer policy. Moreover, many of the central schools began to deteriorate after they were abandoned by middle-class families. Thanks to declining populations of children, the Austin school district has been forced to close several small, neighborhood elementary schools, even as it strains to add classrooms to the burgeoning suburbs. Austin includes many of its suburbs – it grows rapidly through annexation – and AISD covers these.

    Families also did not have to flee central Austin to escape dense, overcrowded neighborhoods. The typical central Austin neighborhood is no denser than a typical suburban neighborhood. Most central Austin neighborhoods consist almost entirely of single-family residences. Indeed, in some, nearly 90% of the residential acreage is set aside for single-family housing, with multi-family developments relegated to busy streets. And yard sizes in suburbs are frequently little larger than the yards in the central neighborhoods.

    Nor did families flee central Austin in a quest for green space. Austin’s great parks are concentrated in its core. These include Zilker Park – Austin’s equivalent of central park; Barton Springs, fed by springs bubbling up from the Edwards Aquifer; Lady Bird Lake, neé Town Lake; and more green belts than a die-hard hiker could cover in a summer.

    Central Austin has no pollution or industrial blight. Austin has never been a manufacturing town. Its employment base has always been the University of Texas, the state government and, more recently, high tech.

    The high-tech job growth has blossomed in Austin’s suburbs. Austin styles itself “Silicon Hills,” and virtually all high-tech jobs have spring up in the rolling country west and north of the downtown. But the addition of jobs to the periphery does not explain why families have been abandoning the central city. Austin’s core has not only retained its jobs, it has seen healthy growth. A recent Brookings study estimates that central Austin employment grew by almost 13% between 1998 and 2006 According to the Brookings study, the number of jobs more than 10 miles from the CBD increased by 77,523, or 62%. Obviously, this was incredible growth. But this does not explain why families abandoned the central core when it, too, was adding jobs.

    In the end the key reason people have been moving to the suburbs lies in a mundane reality. Austin families have been moving to the suburbs because the suburbs have bigger, better and cheaper houses.

    Austin’s inner neighborhoods may be packed with single-family housing, but they are small, old and increasingly expensive. The central neighborhoods were built before 1970 and, in most cases, before 1960. The houses are usually no more than 1200 or 1400 square feet. And these houses are expensive (for Austin) and often fixer-uppers to boot.

    By contrast, the suburban stock is much newer and larger. Between 2000 and 2006, for example, the average new home in Circle C, a prominent suburb to the south, had 3,965 square feet; the average new home in Steiner Ranch, a western suburb had 3,915 square feet. And these houses were and are much cheaper than central city houses. One might find a 3,000 square-foot home in the suburbs for $250,000. The same home in central Austin might cost $750,000. Many suburban subdivisions have much smaller homes, of course, but a middle class family only able to afford an 1,800 square foot house in the suburbs is not likely to pay $400,000 for a smaller house in central Austin.

    Families want space, and the central housing stock is either too small or too expensive. This basic reality has transformed Austin into essentially two largely successful cities: a central core left to small households and suburbs that offer either larger housing, or smaller housing at much cheaper prices.

    This trend may have been slower if developers had been allowed to continue replacing small bungalows with larger, more modern houses. But this trend prompted an outcry from central Austin residents, who pushed the city council to enact a “McMansion” ordinance to “protect” central Austin neighborhoods. The title was a clever bit of marketing. The word “McMansion” evokes an enormous, pretentious structure – and who wants that? But Austin’s stringent ordinance takes aim at much more modest homes. Depending on lot size, a home with an attached two-car garage may be limited to 2,000 square feet, smaller than the typical new American home. The ordinance imposes other complicated limitations, turning modest home additions into a complicated, extensive ordeal. A homeowner who wants to add a second story, for example, must ensure that the second story fits within an elaborate “building envelope” – a complicated calculation unless the addition is centered in the lot – and new setback lines calculated as a rolling average of neighboring setbacks. (Incidentally, the new setbacks and square-foot limitations have all but eliminated granny flats.) The only option for adding a significant amount of new space is often the construction of a basement buried completely below grade; basements do not count against the square footage limits.

    Austin’s McMansion ordinance will ensure that its central Austin neighborhoods remain the domain of small, aging bungalows – and people without children – for the foreseeable future. In this way, it will reflect the demographic realities of many prosperous, “hip” cities from San Francisco and Boston to Seattle and Portland.

    Yet there’s an ironic side to this. Alarmed by the decline of families in the city, the same city council that enacted the McMansion ordinance created a new task force a few months later to determine why central Austin has now so few families with children.

    Chris Bradford is a 1992 graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. He is an attorney at Clark, Thomas and Winters, P.C. in Austin, Texas. Visit Chris’s blog at austincontrarian.com

  • The Republican Party, Pennsylvania and Arlen Specter

    Senator Arlen Specter switched parties. A five term Senator switching parties is certainly news, but it also represents a far greater statement about the challenges facing the Republican Party in Pennsylvania going forward.

    Pennsylvania has been a dependable “Blue State” in presidential races since 1988. Currently, Democrats have a 1.2 million voter registration advantage. Less than a decade ago the margin was less than 500,000. What changed over the past decade?

    The changes in the political and demographic make-up of the five county Philadelphia region forced Specter’s flip. Specter’s base had been eroding as a result of other popular Democratic politicians seeking statewide and national offices and needing moderate Republicans to switch parties to support them in tough Primary Elections.

    It began with now Governor Ed Rendell who faced a fierce Primary Election in 2002 against Bob Casey, Jr. – the son of a former Pennsylvania Governor. The former Philadelphia Mayor needed a strong turnout in the Philadelphia area and he managed to flip more than one hundred thousand Republicans for the primary.

    Rendell defeated Casey by 162,648 votes statewide, but his victory total was 305,641 in the five county Philadelphia area where he won 81.3% of the vote and 56.5% of his total vote statewide.

    The 2002 primary proved the central role of the Philadelphia region, especially the suburbs. Rendell was able to win even while losing the total vote in the other 62 counties of Pennsylvania. The shift in moderate Republicans in the suburbs to Rendell was the critical factor.

    This was again the case in the general election; Rendell would carry this region by 515,000 votes on his way to winning his first term as Governor by 323,827.

    The 2002 election marked a turning point in Pennsylvania politics. From that point forward no candidate for statewide office could win without carrying at least one of the four suburban Philadelphia counties. All were becoming increasingly Democratic in voter registration.

    In the 2004 Primary, Arlen Specter faced conservative ex-Congressman Pat Toomey. Specter likely underestimated the impact of the change is southeast voting patterns. He was overconfident that his moderate Republican suburban base would carry the day. They did, but more narrowly than most suspected. Specter won the election by 17,146 votes statewide but he carried the southeast by 41,719 votes.

    Like Rendell in 2002, Specter lost the rest of the state but won in the five county region by enough of a margin to secure victory statewide. Unlike Rendell, his total in the southeast region only accounted for 31.4% of his statewide total votes as compared to Rendell’s 56.5%.

    Also, significant was the fact that he only defeated Toomey, who is far more conservative than former Senator Rick Santorum, by 34,669 votes in the four suburban counties. The moderate base was shifting to the Democrats, leaving the remnants of the GOP more conservative. This was a harbinger of Specter’s diminishing prospects as a Republican.

    Specter won the primary with 166,944 votes from the southeast region. Two years earlier in the primary, Mike Fisher, the Republican candidate from Pittsburgh who was running for Governor without opposition, won 161,103 Republican votes in this region. Fisher outpolled Specter’s 2004 vote in 2 of the 5 counties. It was only the last minute support Specter received from President George W. Bush and Senator Rick Santorum that saved Specter from defeat in 2004.

    In the General Election, Specter walloped his Democratic opponent Joe Hoeffel, a former southeast Congressman and Montgomery County Commissioner, by nearly 600,000. He would carry all five counties in the southeast by wide margins mainly because he had significant support from Democrats and Independents.

    The trend of greater Democratic power – and Specter’s dependence on them – continued to build. In 2006, Bob Casey defeated incumbent Senator Rick Santorum by 17.4 percentage points statewide despite the fact that Santorum would spend $31 million and was the number three in Republican Senate Leadership. Casey would carry all five counties in the southeast region proving that conservative Republicans could no longer win in this critical area in a contested General Election. By 2008, Barack Obama put the icing on the cake. The President racked up huge margins in the southeast repeating what Rendell had done in 2002. The change was now complete.

    It is safe to say that Arlen Specter simply could not win a Republican Primary Election in 2010. This said it is also safe to say that he would have likely won the General Election with relative ease regardless of who was the Democratic candidate. This is the dilemma that faced a Republican Party increasingly alienated from Specter, but facing increasingly stiff odds in its former suburban Philadelphia strongholds.

    The question now is will the Republican Party stand with conservative Pat Toomey to challenge Democrat Arlen Specter in the General Election? With promised support from President Obama, Vice President Biden and Governor Rendell the likelihood of a primary challenge for Specter is remote in his new party.

    Revenge is rarely as sweet as anticipated. It seems unlikely that a conservative Republican can win statewide without support in the Philadelphia suburbs. But data and history show that this is highly unlikely for a conservative Republican. There’s a cost to party purification. Unless the Republicans can find a way to appeal to the wayward suburban voters, it will take a major shift in the political dynamic – perhaps a more decided Democratic move to the left – to put Pennsylvania back in play.

    Dennis M. Powell is president and CEO of Massey Powell an issues management consulting company located in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

    Photo: KyleCassidy

  • Sydney: From World City to “Sick Man” of Australia

    Americans have their “American Dream” of home ownership. Australians go one step further. They have a “Great Australian Dream” of home ownership. This was all part of a culture that celebrated its egalitarian ethos. Yet, to an even greater degree than in the United States, the “Dream” is in the process of being extinguished. It all started and is the worst in Sydney.

    Sydney is Australia’s largest urban area, having passed Melbourne in the last half of the 19th century. With an urban area population of approximately 3.6 million, Sydney leads Melbourne by nearly 300,000.

    The “Great Australian Dream” in Sydney: Sydney incubated and perfected the Great Australian Dream. New housing was built in all directions from the central business district. The most expensive was built to the east and north, while the least expensive – the bungalows and other modest detached houses – rose principally to the west and the south. Western Sydney is the culmination of the Great Australian Dream for perhaps more middle and lower middle income households than any other place in the nation.

    Of course, Western Sydney was not planned in the radical sense of the word currently used by contemporary urbanists. In fact, most have little more regard for Western Sydney than for the shantytowns of Jakarta or Manila. Yet, the people of Western Sydney, like the people of countless modest suburban areas around the world, are proud of their communities and of their homes.

    Rationing Land, Blowing Out Land Prices: About three decades ago, Sydney embarked upon what was to become one of the world’s strongest “smart growth” programs (called “urban consolidation” in Australia). Aimed at concentrating population closer to the core, urban consolidation sought to restrict and even prohibit new housing on the urban fringe. Sydney developed its own equivalent of the famous Portland urban growth boundary. The result is that every land owner knows whether or not their property can be developed, and the favored understandably take advantage by charging whatever price the highly constrained market will bear.

    Reserve Bank of Australia research indicates that the price of raw land – Sydney urban fringe land for building a house that has not yet been fitted with infrastructure (sewers, water, streets, etc.) has now risen to a price of about $190,000 for a one-eighth acre lot. In the days before smart growth, the land would cost about $1,000. Needless to say, adding an unnecessary nearly $190,000 plus margins to the price of a house makes housing less affordable.

    But even where development is nominally allowed, government restrictions make building almost impossible. For years the state government has promised to “release” land for new housing on the western fringe. Yet despite announcement and re-announcement, there have been interminable delays.

    Destroying Housing Affordability: As a result, Sydney is now the second most expensive major housing market in the six nations in our Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, trailing only Vancouver. Sydney’s Median Multiple (the median house price divided by the median household income) is now 8.3. It should be close to the historic norm of 3.0 or less. Indeed, if land prices had risen with inflation from before urban consolidation, Sydney’s Median Multiple would be less than 3.0. As a result, households entering the housing market can expect to pay nearly three times as much for their houses than was the case before. This will lead to an inevitably lower standard of living compared to what would have otherwise been.

    Forcing Density: Urban consolidation is destroying not only housing affordability, but also the character of Sydney itself. Sydney is an urban area of low density suburbs. It is also an urban area of high rise living. These two housing forms have combined with one of the world’s most attractive geographical settings to create an attractive and livable urban area.

    The planners, empowered by the state of New South Wales government, are changing all of that. From the suburbs of Western Sydney to the attractive and more affluent North Shore suburbs, high-rise residential buildings are being thrust upon detached housing neighborhoods. One of Sydney’s great strengths is that the urban area has many local government areas (municipalities), empowering local democracy. These local governments have done their best to resist the state government densification mandates, in response to opposition from their citizens.

    Raw Exercise of Power: One of Sydney’s greatest weaknesses is that the state government exercises undue control over the municipalities and is using its power to “shoe-horn” high density into places where it makes no sense. High density is fine in the Toney Eastern suburbs, but has no place where detached housing is the rule. Unfortunately, the planners seem to presume communities with detached housing have no character worth salvaging.

    Urban Consolidation: Infrastructure Costs: Further, there is an inherent assumption that densification has no costs. The planners routinely exaggerate the cost of providing infrastructure on the urban fringes (failing, for example, to understand that much infrastructure is included in the price of the house, without government involvement). However, the infrastructure built for lower density detached housing is not sufficient for higher densities. As a result, there have been sewer overflows in densifying areas. Huge expenditures have been made for sewer upgrades. Tony Recsei, president of Save Our Suburbs, a community organization seeking to limit inappropriate densification, blamed recent power failures on an electricity infrastructure that was not built for high density in an April 7 Daily Telegraph letter, noting that “Cram in more people and overloading must result. That should not be too hard for people to understand.”

    Greater Traffic Congestion: And, of course, insufficient road expansion has been undertaken to accommodate the inevitable intensification of traffic congestion. The planners like to say that higher densities mean less traffic. In fact virtually all of the evidence, throughout the first world, indicates that more intense traffic congestion is associated with higher densities.

    Sydney is no exception. The average one-way work trip now takes 34 minutes, which equals that of America’s largest urban area, New York, which has more than five times the population and the land area as well as the longest travel time of any major urban area in the nation. Sydney’s planners delight in comparisons with Los Angeles, frequently suggesting that their regulations are necessary to ensure that Sydney does not “sprawl” as much as Los Angeles. Actually Sydney sprawls considerably more in relation to its population. The Los Angeles urban area is a full one-third more dense than the Sydney urban area. And despite the fact that nearly half of the planned Los Angeles freeway system was not built, Angelinos spend one hour less each week getting to work each than Sydneysiders. Even in Atlanta, with a pathetic freeway system little better than Sydney’s and one-third Sydney’s density, people spend an hour less commuting to and from work every two weeks and spend less total time traveling than in Sydney.

    The Economic Cost: There may also be an economic cost. Bernard Salt – perhaps Australia’s leading demographer – has predicted that Melbourne will overtake Sydney in population by 2028. Moreover, there has been substantial domestic migration from New South Wales to Queensland. At current growth rates this could lead the Brisbane-Gold Coast region being larger than Sydney by mid-century. Salt blames Sydney’s declining fortunes on its overly expensive housing.

    Sydney: World-Class City Status Threatened? Research in the United States has associated restrictive land use regulation with lower levels of employment growth in US metropolitan areas. In a more colorful finding, Australia’s Access Economics characterized the economy of New South as “so sick that it is at risk of adoption by Angelina Jolie.” A few decades ago, the English economy was referred to as the “sick man of Europe.” Sydney may well be on its way to becoming the “sick man of Australia.”

    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.”

  • Where are the Best Cities for Job Growth?

    Over the past five years, Michael Shires, associate professor in public policy at Pepperdine University, and I have been compiling a list of the best places to do business. The list, based on job growth in regions across the U.S. over the long, middle and short term, has changed over the years–but the employment landscape has never looked like this.

    In past iterations, we saw many fast-growing economies–some adding jobs at annual rates of 3% to 5%. Meanwhile, some grew more slowly, and others actually lost jobs. This year, however, you can barely find a fast-growing economy anywhere in this vast, diverse country. In 2008, 2% growth made a city a veritable boom town, and anything approaching 1% growth is, oddly, better than merely respectable.

    So this year perhaps we should call the rankings not the “best” places for jobs, but the “least worst.” But the least worst economies in America today largely mirror those that topped the list last year, even if these regions have recently experienced less growth than in prior years. Our No.1-ranked big city, Austin, for example, enjoyed growth of 1% in 2008–less than a third of its average since 2003.

    The study is based on job growth in 333 regions–called Metropolitan Statistical Areas by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which provided the data–across the U.S. Our analysis looked not only at job growth in the last year but also at how employment figures have changed since 1996. This is because we are wary of overemphasizing recent data and strive to give a more complete picture of the potential a region has for job-seekers. (For the complete methodology, click here.)

    The top of the complete ranking–which, for ease, we have broken down into the two smaller lists, of the best big and small cities for jobs–is dominated by one state: Texas. The Lone Star State may have lost a powerful advocate in Washington, but it’s home to a remarkable eight of the top 20 cities on our list–including No. 1-ranked Odessa, a small city in the state’s northwestern region. Further, the top five large metropolitan areas for job growth–Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Ft. Worth and Dallas–are all in Texas’ “urban triangle.”

    The reasons for the state’s relative success are varied. A healthy energy industry is certainly one cause. Many Texas high-fliers, including Odessa, Longview, Dallas and Houston, are home to energy companies that employ hordes of people–and usually at fairly high salaries for both blue- and white-collar workers. In some places, these spurts represent a huge reversal from the late 1990s. Take Odessa’s remarkable 5.5% job growth in 2008, which followed a period of growth well under 1% from 1998 to 2002.

    Of course, not all the nation’s energy jobs are located in Texas, even if the state does play host to most of our major oil companies. The surge in energy prices in 2007 also boosted the performance of several other top-ranked locales such as Grand Junction, Colo., Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodoux, La., Tulsa, Okla., Lafayette, La., and Bismarck, N.D.

    Looking at the energy sector’s hotbeds, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. Another major factor behind a city’s job offerings is how severely it experienced the housing crisis. There’s a “zone of sanity” across the middle of the country, including Kansas City, Mo., that largely avoided the real estate bubble and the subsequent foreclosure crisis.

    Still other factors correlating with job growth–as evidenced by Shires‘ and my current and past studies–are lower costs and taxes. For example, the area around Kennewick, Wash., is far less expensive than coastal communities in that same state, and residents and businesses there also enjoy cheap hydroelectric power. Compared with high-tech centers in California and the Northeast, such as San José and Boston, places like Austin offer both tax and housing-cost bargains, as do Fargo, N.D. and Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.

    College towns also did well on our list, particularly those in states that are both less expensive and outside the Great Lakes. Although universities–and their endowments–are feeling the recession’s pinch, they continue to attract students. In fact, colleges saw a bumper crop of applicants this year, as members of the huge millennial generation, encompassing those born after 1983, reach that stage of life. More recently, college towns have emerged as incubators for new companies and as attractive places for retirees.

    Specifically, the college town winners include not only well-known places like Austin and Chapel Hill, but also less-hyped places like Athens, Ga., home of the University of Georgia; College Station, Texas, where 48,000-student Texas A&M University is located; Morgantown, W.Va., site of the University of West Virginia; and Fargo, the hub of North Dakota State University.

    Democratic states are glaringly absent from the top of the list. You don’t get to a traditionally blue state–in a departure from past years, Obama won North Carolina–until you get to Olympia, Wash., and Seattle, which ranked No. 6 among the large cities.

    But political changes afoot could affect the trajectory of many of our fast-growing communities–and not always in positive ways. It’s possible that the Obama administration’s new energy policies, which may discourage domestic fossil fuel production,could put a considerable damper on the still-robust parts of Texas and elsewhere where coal, oil and natural gas industries are still cornerstones of economic success.

    By contrast, the wind- and solar-power industries seem to be, as of now, relatively small job generators, and with energy prices low, endeavors in these areas are sustainable only with massive subsidies from Washington. But still, if these sectors grow in size and profitability, other locales that have not typically been seen as energy hubs over the past few decades may benefit–notably parts of California, although Texas and the Great Plains also seem positioned to profit from these developments.

    Another critical concern for some communities is the potential for major cutbacks on big-ticket defense spending. This would be of particular interest to communities in places like Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia where new aircraft are currently assembled. Over the years, blue states like California have seen their defense industry shrivel as the once-potent Texas Congressional delegation and the two Bushes tilted toward Lone Star State contractors.

    These days it’s big-city mayors and big blue-state governors who are looking for financial support from Obama. Northeast boosters are convinced more money on mass transit, inter-city rail lines and scientific research will rev up their economies. Boston–No. 16 on the list of large cities and a leading medical and scientific research center–could be a beneficiary of the new federal spending.

    The most obvious winner from the recent power shift should be Washington, D.C. The Obama-led stimulus, including the massive Treasury bailout, has transformed the town from merely the political capital into the de facto center of regular capital as well. Watch for D.C. and its environs to move up our list over the next year or two. Already the area boasts one of the few strong apartment markets among the big metropolitan areas in the country, which will only improve as job-seekers flock to the new Rome.

    Yet Washington is an anomaly, because most of the places that stand to benefit from this unforgiving economy are ones that are affordable and therefore friendly to business, reinforcing a key trend of the last decade. It also helps regions to have ties to core industries like energy and agriculture, a sector that has remained relatively strong and will strengthen again when global demand for food increases.

    Some areas have attracted new residents readily and continue to do so, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Over time this migration could be good news for a handful of metropolitan areas like Salt Lake City, which ranks seventh among the big cities for job growth, and Raleigh-Cary, N.C., which was No. 1 among large cities last year and No. 8 this year. Over the last few years, these places have consistently appeared at the top of our rankings and are emerging as preferred sites for cutting-edge technology and manufacturing firms.

    Below these winners are a cluster of other promising places that have already managed to withstand the current downturn in decent shape and seem certain to rebound along with the overall economy. These include the largely suburban area around Kansas City, Kan., perennial high-flyer Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Greeley, Colo.–in part due to their ability to attract workers and businesses from bigger metropolitan centers nearby–as well as Huntsville, Ala., which has a strong concentration of workers in the government and high-tech sectors.

    In the end, most of the cities at the top of the lists–whether they are small, medium or large–have shown they have what it takes to survive in tough times. Less-stressed local governments will be able to construct needed infrastructure and attract new investors so that job growth can rise to the levels of past years. If better days are in the offing, these areas seem best positioned to be the next drivers of the economic expansion this nation sorely needs.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Can Sacred Space Revive the American City?

    By Richard Reep

    During most business downturns, nimble private business owners search for countercyclical industries to which they adapt. During this business downturn, the construction industry finds itself frantically looking for anything countercyclical. Private construction, almost completely driven by the credit market, has stopped, and public construction, driven by tax revenue, has also stalled. Religious institutions, however, seem to be continuing incremental growth and building programs, giving evidence to some people’s answers to spiritual questions being asked today.

    Christian congregations surged in the 1990s, building megachurches in mostly suburban neighborhoods throughout the country. In some cities, mostly in the South, the urban megachurch also became common. Fundraising for these followed patterns that made lending a fairly straightforward risk; many were financed by a combination of patron contributions and lending from local or regional banks. By the early part of this decade, the growth of megachurches was a well-established pattern, and had become a sophisticated niche within the booming development and construction industry, as reported by Forbes Magazine in 2003.

    Churches seem to remain one of the few work sectors for construction firms, architects and planners. This comes at a time when there appears to be very little new development, either private or public in Central Florida. Even small private projects that were funded by cash or private equity have been postponed or cancelled, as the money sits on the sidelines. Yet Christian churches continue to expand, forcing them to accommodate the needs of their worshippers.

    Unlike in the past decade, much of this expansion is taking place in smaller congregations, and is funded mostly by donations, pledges, and bequests. “Our church task force is looking at creative ways to raise money for facility expansion,” commented Scott Fetterhoff, President of Salem Lutheran Church. “We have to have faith however that our congregation, and those looking for spiritual growth in a society with eroding values, will support worthwhile causes.”

    Fetterhoff also displays a very worldly sense of pragmatism. ”Our expansion and outreach program will simply adjust to fit the available budget,” he adds. “On the bright side with a construction industry looking for work, that might allow us to do more for less.”

    This is one example of several recent interviews with local church leaders who are considering a construction project, and all are echoing similar themes. Salem’s expansion includes new classroom space which seems part of a growing interest to provide flexible multi-purpose space for church-based education and community use – largely in lieu of public education. No one in Florida can ignore the continuous stream of news reports of its legislature’s continued reduction of funds for Florida’s public education system, and many in Florida are trying to find alternatives for their children.

    Salem’s decision to expand is emblematic of other stories in the region. This incremental growth may signal a consolidation of sacred space into people’s lives, as we cope with the changes in our secular, consumer-driven culture. Salem Lutheran, and others like it, use the general uncertainty of our economic times to re-focus on faith based relationships. This is a true grass-roots trend.

    On a larger scale, the evangelical movement continues to encourage church construction on a more global, top-led basis, in what is termed “church planting” by its leadership. The surge of interest in nontraditional forms of churches in the Western Hemisphere is well-documented and remarkable, as this Christian movement is supplanting traditional denominations, particularly Catholicism. Religion remains formidable in America, but much of it reflects more of a shift from one form of Christianity to another.

    One organization, Capernaum Ministries, is developing a retreat for Christian pastors and ministers to provide leadership training to church leaders. Its founder, Jim Way, sees his mission as creating “a laboratory for building effective relationships between leaders of various denominations and independent ministries.” Way, a minister and founder of Capernaum Ministries, has affiliations with over 3,000 churches. “I see this as an opportunity to study, and solve, the problem of how the decline of the denominational church influence is affecting American culture”.

    As cities have grown in the past several decades, the well-documented lack of sacred space has been notable as governments meticulously avoid any tangible form of religious expression, and mainstream religions find themselves in retreat. While public space in American cities has always been constitutionally secular, sacred space usually evolved with the development of cities, towns and neighborhoods.

    Sadly, this has been missing from private development for some time. Church growth in the suburbs usually occurs after the fact, not as part of a planned community, for developers are loathe to forfeit profits on a choice parcel of land.

    Church building has historically been a narrow niche market avoided by most design and construction professionals who have preferred more lucrative building types, like hotels or hospitals. If one believes in the organic model of city growth and development, this has been a serious deficiency.

    But now, amidst lower costs for construction and more need for their services, some congregations seem to be taking stock, making plans, and acting. Salem Lutheran, like many, has members who come from the design and construction industries. These congregants know how to efficiently deliver a building, and are offering these skills to their congregations, while their regular businesses sit idle.

    Whether global or grass-roots, the development of sacred space will need to overcome the substantial obstacle of financing, difficult in the best of times, using new means and methods. Nontraditional means including volunteer labor, outright donations, in-kind donations, and bartering will bring costs down to more affordable levels. As projects are realized, alternative practices to achieve affordability could result in interesting innovations.

    If the current economic crisis begs some larger spiritual questions in people, then there may be a countercyclical trend towards investment in sacred space. Faced with lowered expectations and a lost sense of prosperity, people naturally long for some aspect of their lives that transcends the material. Church building, however incremental and small, demonstrates that sacred space is important to enough people to do something about it. Their actions speak loudly in these uncertain economic times.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.