New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Reality: Residential Emissions

    In the quest to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is crucial to “get the numbers right.” Failure to do so would, in all probability, mean that the desired reductions will not be achieved. Regrettably, much of what is being proposed is not based upon any comprehensive quantitative analysis, but is rather rooted in anti-suburban dogma.

    Further, ideologically based approaches carry the risk of severe economic and social disruption, which could make it even more difficult, in a political world, to reach GHG emission reduction objectives. Unconsidered attacks on suburbs could also backfire, setting back more reasonable attempts to reduce emissions over time.

    For example, a recent New York Times blog entitled “The Only Solution is to Move” presumed it a necessity to (1) move from the suburbs to the city, where (2) “you are near everything you need” and to (3) abandon cars, which the author contends “cannot be reformed.” This screed provides an ideal point of reference. We start with the comparative GHG emissions efficiency of suburbs and deal with the other issues in future articles.

    The Need for Comprehensiveness: Any plausible attempt to reduce GHG emissions must start with a comprehensive understanding of the issue, including the comparative GHG intensity of various types of living and mobility patterns.

    This requires a “top down” analysis of GHG emissions by mode and locality. Such an analysis must start with the gross GHG emissions in a nation and allocate each gram to a consuming household. A household allocation is necessary, because businesses emit GHGs only to satisfy the immediate or eventual demand of consumers. “Top down” is required because that is the only way to make sure the analysis includes everything. The typical “bottom up” analysis runs the risk of missing large amounts of emissions as analysts highlight their own “hobby horse” sources, while excluding the inconvenient. This is why we have “double entry” bookkeeping – to make sure that the sums balance.

    “Top down” comprehensiveness has been best developed by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) Consumption Atlas, which is the only study I have found that allocates every gram of GHG emissions in a nation to households. That is a minimum requirement.

    Residential GHG Emissions

    Having reviewed the need for comprehensiveness, the balance of this article will deal with residential GHG emissions. Despite all the airtime – and trees – sacrificed for lengthy columns on GHG emissions, it is clear that the state of the research in the United States remains abysmal.

    GHG Emissions: A Function of House Size: Research has been published that suggests the dominant suburban housing form (the detached single-family dwelling) is more GHG intensive than more urban, multi-unit and high-rise apartment and condominium housing forms. However, the entire supposed city versus suburbs advantage relates to house size. The Department of Energy’s Residential Energy Conservation Survey (RECS) data shows that the energy consumption per square foot is 70 percent higher in residential buildings with five or more units (the largest building size reported upon) than in detached houses. Full disclosure on the part of the anti-suburban crowd would require telling people that their conclusions would mean much smaller house sizes.

    Common Area GHG Emissions: There is, however, a far more fundamental problem. The databases usually relied upon (The Bureau of the Census’s PUMS and the Energy Department’s RCES), as cited in the USDOE 2008 Buildings Energy Data Book, do not provide sufficient information to demonstrate any high-density GHG emissions advantage.

    None of these data sources include the GHG emissions from “common” energy consumption in multi-unit residential buildings. Their information is limited to energy consumption as directly billed to consumers. Thus, in a high-rise building, common energy consumption sources such as elevators, common area lighting, parking lot lighting, swimming pool heating, common heating, common water heating, common air conditioning, etc. are not included. Detached housing generally does not have common energy consumption.

    The “common” consumption omission is serious. Other Australian research indicates how inaccurate consumer based inventories can be. Energy Australia has showed that, in the Sydney area, GHG emissions per capita, including common consumption, in high-rise residential buildings are 85 percent greater than in single family detached dwellings. Other multiple unit buildings are also more GHG intensive, while townhouses (row houses) are the best (see Figure).

    The inclusion of common consumption may be a principal reason why the ACF data associates lower GHG emissions with single family detached housing.

    Construction Materials: There is a further complicating factor. The materials that must be used to construct high-rise residential buildings, chiefly concrete and steel, are far more GHG intensive than the wood used in most single family dwelling construction. A 1997 Netherlands study indicates that the GHG emissions per square foot of high rise construction may be as much as five times that of a detached dwelling. In the newest energy efficient housing, the same study finds that the GHG emissions, over a building’s lifetime, can be greater than the emissions from day to day operation. The report notes that construction materials will become more important in residential GHG emissions, because improvements in routine energy consumption are likely to be more significant than those in building materials production.

    Then there is the issue of the GHG emissions in the construction process. It would not be surprising, for example, if heavy cranes could also tip the balance against high-rise towers.

    Dynamic Rather Than Static Analysis: Anyone who has studied economics understands the importance of “dynamic” versus “static” analysis. Dynamic analysis takes account of likely changes, while static analysis assumes that everything will continue to be as it is today. Much of the research on residential GHG emissions is based upon a static analysis. Yet, the housing stock (like the automobile stock) was largely produced during a time when there was little policy incentive to reduce GHG emissions. We are entering what may well be a very different policy environment. The comparatively recent emphasis on GHG emissions is producing a plethora of ideas, research and solutions. A recent Chicago Tribune article noted a surge in university graduates interested in research to reduce the GHG intensity of energy. The zero emission suburban house is on the horizon, which could take housing form “off the table” as a GHG emission issue and render static research to the internet equivalent of rarely accessed library stacks. Dynamic analysis asks “what can be,” not just “what is.”

    Cost per GHG Ton Reduced: All of this raises a question about how to identify policy strategies. The answer is to compare costs. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the maximum costs should be on the order of $20 to $50 per ton. McKinsey has published research indicating that steep reductions can be produced in the United States at less than $50 per ton.

    Yet, the costs of GHG emissions reduction are as absent from much of the present literature as the GHG emissions from elevators in high-rise towers. But costs are important. Economic and social disruption is likely to be greater to the extent that people are forced to change their lives. There is a big difference between requiring people to reduce their emissions where they live versus trying to uproot them – as well as their families and business – to urban cores. The former offers the hope of achieving sufficient GHG emission reductions, while the latter promises to incite a bitter fight between the bulk of the middle class and the regulatory apparatus. All this with a high probability that GHG emissions will not be sufficiently reduced.

    The Bottom Line: Outside some in the urban planning community, there is no lobby for reducing people’s standard of living. At least with respect to residential development and housing form, this does not appear to be necessary. The common area and construction GHG impacts of high-rise condominium buildings could well be greater both per capita and per square foot than those of detached housing. There is no need to force a move into a futuristic Corbusian landscape of skyscrapers. Indeed, it could even make things worse – for households, communities and even the environment.

    Previous posts on this subject:
    Regulating People or Regulating Greenhouse Gases?
    Greenhouse Gas Reduction Policy: From Rhetoric to Reason
    Enough “Cowboy” Greenhouse Gas Reduction Policies

  • The American Suburb Is Bouncing Back

    From the very inception of the current downturn, sprawling places like southeast California’s Inland Empire have been widely portrayed as the heart of darkness. Located on the vast flatlands east of Los Angeles, the region of roughly 3 million people has suffered one of the highest rates of foreclosures and surges in unemployment in the nation.

    Yet now George Guerrero, a top agent at Advantage Real Estate in Chino Hills, says he can see the light, with sales picking up and inventories finally beginning to drop. “There’s been a real surge in sales,” Guerrero says. “The market has come back to where it should be. I think we are ahead of the curve here of the overall recovery.”

    Of course, for the moment, much of this growth is concentrated in foreclosure sales. However, even developers of new properties, such as Brookfield Homes , also report a strong uptick in sales. In his new developments in the Inland Empire, notes Adrian Foley, head of Brookfield’s Los Angeles area office, sales are up 150% since six months ago.

    Although the economy is still hurting, the housing trend has become much more positive. Statewide, existing home sales have jumped 30% over the past year, taking the inventory from an estimated 16.7 months to less than seven months. In Chino Hills, it is down to six months.

    Most encouraging, this activity is taking place exactly where the market was hit hardest in the beginning – in the suburbs and at the lower end of the market, which in the Inland Empire means between $150,00 to $300,000. This could presage the resurgence of the suburbs and the prospects for the middle and working classes once again to purchase their piece of the American dream.

    Nor is this merely a Californian phenomenon. Nationwide, existing home sales – predominately in the suburbs – have been on the rise for the last few months. The strongest growth is occurring in Sunbelt markets in Arizona, Nevada and Florida, as well as in California. These places experienced some of the greatest surges in prices, which forced many buyers to turn to subprime and interest-only loans.

    These loans are largely not available today, Guerrero notes. Instead of financial quackery, lower prices – sometimes as much as 50% below peak – are allowing new buyers to buy affordably. In 2007, Inland Empire median house prices were roughly seven to 10 times the average annual income of potential buyers. Now they are settling close to the historic norm of three times.

    But not everyone will be happy to see life return to the suburban housing tracts. Indeed, for some self-proclaimed urbanists, planners and pundits, this development might seem almost nightmarish.

    Long the Rodney Dangerfield of American geographies, suburbs have never been popular with the country’s intellectuals, academics and planners. The destruction of community, racial segregation, expanding waistlines and a host of environmental sins – from consuming too much gas to helping create global warming – all have been blamed on the suburbs.

    When the mortgage crisis first hit, some urbanists, not surprisingly, were quick to blame the suburbs – instead of Wall Street – for the financial meltdown. With energy prices on the rise, they persuaded themselves and the ever-gullible mainstream media that the long-awaited “back to the city” jubilee was imminent.

    In contrast, the suburbs and exurbs, crowed Brookings’ Chris Leinberger, were soon to become “the new slums.” As the middle classes trudged their way back to Boston and other suitably dense big cities, James Howard Kunstler – the “shock jock” of the new urbanist movement and a leading apostle of the “peak oil” thesis – happily proclaimed, “Let the gloating begin.”

    Yet as George Guerrero could tell them, a dream is not a thing so easily destroyed. The American landscape continues to change, but perhaps not entirely in the ways so eagerly projected by urban boosters and their media claque.

    For one thing, even with the higher energy prices of last year, there seems to be, in fact, no notable shift of population to the urban core. Instead, as demographer Wendell Cox has pointed out, the recession may have slowed migration, but the trend toward the suburbs and sprawling Sunbelt cities has not ended or reversed.

    At the same time, the once-widely ballyhooed market for dense urban living has unraveled. The “gospel of urbanism” may be accepted as such by most of the mainstream press, most notably The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly, but on closer examination the new religion has limited numbers of converts. In many locales – from Massachusetts to Los Angeles – inner-city condominium projects are losing value at least as much or more than suburban single-family houses. In San Diego, for example, condo prices have dropped in some developments by 70% since 2007, twice the decline in the overall market.

    The problem has much to do with timing. In many areas, urban condominium developers continued to build even as the economy soured, largely due to the longer lead times and financing arrangements around such projects. Yet as the prices of houses have dropped many potential condominium dwellers have opted to purchase single-family homes – or are sitting anxiously on the sidelines waiting for prices to drop further.

    As a result, foreclosure rates for condominiums, according to the Federal Deposit Insurace Corp., are on average one-third higher than for single-family residences. You do not have to travel to the outer exurbs to find zones of foreclosures, bankruptcies and the turning of ownership properties to rentals. Towers are either unoccupied or have gone to rental in markets as diverse as Miami, central Atlanta and downtown L.A. Even Chicago, the poster child for urban gentrification, now suffers from abandoned “condo ghost towns.”

    Manhattan, too, which long saw itself as immune to the housing downturn, is now experiencing the most precipitous price decline since 1980. Big urban developers across North America are filing for bankruptcy, including the largest private landowner in downtown Los Angeles, just like suburban builders were last year.

    As someone who lives in – if you consider L.A. a city – and likes cities, I do not greet the urbanization of the housing crisis as an unalloyed positive. Yet one can hope that lower prices and interest rates – as well as the administration’s tax credits for up to $8,000 for first-time buyers – could allow more people to consider an urban option, if that’s what they want.

    However, this will not be where the bulk of the action will take place. Surveys consistently show that between 10% and 20% of people want to live in dense cities. In a country that will gain 100 million people over the next four decades, that’s 20 million, not exactly what you’d call chopped liver.

    But the bulk of growth will continue to be in the ‘burbs. The main reason is simple enough for almost anyone but a planning professor, architect or pundit to comprehend: preference. Virtually every survey reveals that the vast majority of Americans – and around 80% of Californians – prefer single-family homes that generally are affordable only in suburban areas. The fact that jobs have also continued to move inexorably to the periphery – as a newly released Brookings report demonstrates to liberal think tanks’ own undisguised horror – makes living in the ‘burbs even more attractive.

    These trends lead developers like Randall Lewis in Upland, Calif., who has suffered the downturn in the Inland Empire, not to dismiss the suburban future. He takes note of a recent 10% to 20% surge in sales among the 18 projects his company is now working on, all in suburban projects in California and neighboring states.

    “The basics of the suburbs are still there,” Lewis suggests. “Schools are important, but also people like the sense of place. But the basic amenities are children, grandchildren, where people go to church, where their work networks and friends are.”

    Lewis also rightly adds that a somewhat different suburbia will emerge from the crash. It will be a “melting pot,” he suggests, “not just by race, but by ages and lifestyle.” You will see more singles, empty-nesters and retirees as people choose to “age in place” close to where they have settled. There likely will be more smaller-lot, townhouse and other mixed-density developments closer to burgeoning suburban job centers.

    But even as they change, the allure of suburbs – and the single-family house – will not fade and could even grow as they develop more city-like amenities. The fundamental desire to own a place of your own, to possess some private space and a relatively quiet environment has not died. Nor is it likely to without the imposition of a draconian planning regime.

    For right now, it’s all enough to make George Guerrero a born-again optimist. “There’s something healthy just beginning to happen out here,” he says. “This time people with good credit are getting good deals at good prices. It’s a wonderful thing to see.”

    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.

  • GHG Emissions by Type of Geography

    The suburbs, generally a haven for luxury SUVs, regimented lawn sprinkling, and keep-up-with-the-Jones purchases, are not often considered the front-runner in environmentally friendly living.

    However, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s 2007 Consumption Atlas published controversial research that suggested that “dense inner-city zones unleash more greenhouse emissions than car-loving fringe suburbs.” Suddenly, car use is not the prime factor in measuring efficient living, nor can incomes tell the whole story. ()

    While it has been generally accepted that high human consumption is worse for the planet than lower consumption, the study’s main controversy is the fact that the ACF gave the problem a specific geography.

    The quote:

    Rural and regional areas tend to have noticeably lower levels of consumption . . . Higher incomes in the inner cities are associated with higher levels of consumption across the board.

    The ACF has not only pointed their finger at their main supporters (inner-city professionals) but have also invited comments from a variety of sources. The Australian study questions the data used in the past to measure where the worst violators are located.

    American consultant Wendell Cox—long an advocate of suburban development—found that the data suggested that “lower GHG emissions were associated with long distance from the (urban) core, detached housing, more automobile use and lower population density.”

    A team from Queensland’s Griffith University Urban Research Program drew an altogether different conclusion that put simply is, “correlation does not establish causality.”

    GHG emissions are a function of overall consumption and consumption based on low-density housing “doesn’t figure prominently in the composition of aggregate consumption.”

    Urban sprawl cannot be used as an argument or attempt to point fingers at the Hummer drivers. Lowering greenhouse gas emissions will require a commitment by city dwellers and suburbanites alike if we are to alter our future carbon footprint.

    While the study itself has prompted much discussion and debate, if the object is to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, singling out suburbia might not be the first order of business. Spurious data and indeterminate causality make for an argument destined to fail for the lack of a supportable conclusion – unless we wish to overturn logic entirely, which some seem determined to do in furtherance of their long-held anti-suburban agenda.

  • Move to Suburbs Continues in Western Europe

    Despite the assertions of some planners and urban boosters, urban core population loss has been the rule since mid-century throughout the metropolitan areas of Western Europe (see note below). For example, the ville de Paris lost a quarter of its population from 1954 to 1999, Copenhagen shrank 39 percent from 1950 to 1991, inner London (This includes the 13 inner boroughs and the “city” of London, which are roughly the former London County Council area) declined by a third from 1951 to 1991 while Milan‘s population declined by a quarter from 1971 to 2001.

    At the same time, widely ignored by many American observers, Western Europe has been suburbanizing strongly. Since 1965, virtually all major metropolitan area growth has been in the suburbs. Indeed the share of the metropolitan area population gains in the suburbs has been greater in Western Europe than in the United States.

    It is true, however, that there has been a generally modest turnaround in core population trends, with strong turnarounds in the “ancient” losers of Vienna (which peaked in 1911) and inner London (which peaked in 1901). It might be tempting to suggest – as is often done in the United States – that these reversals indicate that Europeans are moving back to the cities from the suburbs.

    To answer this question, we examined all of the available “components of population change” reported by the census authorities of Western European nations. Seven of the 17 (the European Union-15 plus Norway and Switzerland) produce such data at a geographical level that makes metropolitan analysis possible. A review of this data suggests that the new residents are largely international migrants and that the core cities generally continue to lose domestic migrants, while the suburban areas continue to perform better with respect to attracting domestic migrants. This parallels the experience in the United States.

    Vienna: Vienna illustrates the trend. The city of Vienna increased its population from 1,550,000 to 1,656,000 between 2002 and 2007. This 7.3 percent gain is impressive but over the same period, a net 11,000 residents left the city. Virtually all of the population increase was the result of international migration, which accounted for 113,000 new residents. On the other hand, the suburbs of Vienna added 32,000 new domestic migrants and also added 23,000 international migrants. Vienna’s population turnaround can be fully attributed to immigration.

    Inner London and England: Like Vienna, inner London’s gains have not been the result of people moving from the suburbs to the city. Between 2001 and 2007, a net 326,000 people moved from inner London to other parts of England and Wales. The domestic migration losses were even larger than the gain of 282,000 from international migration. The inner suburbs (the outer boroughs added to the city in the 1960s) also lost domestic migrants, but at a rate half that of inner London. The exurbs (the two rings of counties outside the Green Belt) added 126,000 domestic migrants and a somewhat larger number of international migrants.

    Overall, the London metropolitan region experienced a net domestic migration loss of more than 383,000 between 2001 and 2007. However, there were strong international migration gains, in every sector of the metropolitan area.

    Thus, the data indicates that the recent inner London population growth is not the result of suburbanites moving to the city. Inner London’s population growth is being driven by international migration and the natural increase in population (births minus deaths).

    As with inner London, the cores of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds-Bradford all lost domestic migrants from 2001 to 2007. Thus, despite the improved population performance of the largest metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom, people continue to move out of the cores, while people are generally moving to suburban areas.

    Milan and Italy: The city of Milan, the core of Italy’s largest metropolitan area, has experienced one of Western Europe’s most significant population losses since the early 1970s. Yet, in the early years of the decade, Milan has experienced a turnaround, as the population has begun to grow. The pattern was much the same as seen in London, with a net 40,000 residents leaving Milan province to move to other parts of Italy. At the same time, there was a strong net international migration gain of 168,000. Suburban areas, on the other hand, attracted a net 119,000 domestic migrants as well as a strong component of international migration.

    A shorter data series is available for cities (communes) and shows net domestic migration losses in the central cities of Milan, Rome, Naples, Turin, Genoa, Palermo, Florence and Bologna. The suburbs, however, gained domestic migrants, with the exception of Naples. However, the Naples suburban losses were at a far lower rate than that of the city.

    It is thus evident that the core areas of the largest Italian metropolitan areas are not receiving net migration from their suburbs.

    Stockholm and Sweden: Similarly, the city of Stockholm’s recent gains have not been the result of migration from the suburbs. Between 2001 and 2007, the city lost a net 8,000 domestic migrants. This loss was more than made up by the international net migration of 29,000. At the same time, the suburbs and exurbs gained 15,000 domestic migrants.

    Sweden’s second largest metropolitan area, Gothenburg, was one of only two of the 19 cases in which there was net domestic migration to the core (which had been enlarged in the 1990s to include many suburban areas). The city gained 500 domestic migrants and 15,000 international migrants. However, the suburbs gained approximately 13 times as many domestic migrants than the city, again indicating no trend of movement from the suburbs to the city.

    Helsinki: Finland’s capital mirrors the general trend. The city of Helsinki lost 6,500 domestic migrants between 2002 and 2007, which was more than compensated for by an 11,800 net international migration gain. As in nearly all of the other cases, the suburbs and exurbs gained domestic migration, illustrating that there is not a movement from the suburbs to the city in Helsinki.

    Oslo: Norway’s capital was, with Gothenburg, the only core experiencing net domestic migration. Oslo County gained 5,400 domestic migrants. However, the suburbs and exurbs gained domestic migrants at a greater rate, adding 16,000. Thus, despite the core domestic migration gains, there is no evidence of a “return” from the suburbs and exurbs to the city in Oslo.

    Conclusion: The available data from national census authorities provides no evidence to suggest any sort of general movement of the population from suburban and exurban areas to the central cities of Western Europe. This mirrors the situation in the United States, where interests that hold the suburbs in contempt continue to declare their death, while the latest data continues to show the opposite – strong domestic migration losses in core areas and gains in the suburbs.

    There is one other key factor in the European case: the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, which increased the national membership from 15 to 25 (and subsequently to 27) and allowed for the mass migration of people from the east to the wealthier west. Whether the international financial crisis may reverse this trend, with many Eastern European residents moving back to their native countries, remains an open question.

    Note on European metropolitan areas: There is no European standard for determining metropolitan areas (which are labor markets). The European Audit’s “Larger Urban Zones” (LUZ) are the closest approximation, but are not consistently defined throughout the European Union. For example, the Naples LUZ includes only the core and inner suburbs, an area far smaller than the functional metropolitan area. Many other larger urban zones include suburban and exurban areas, consistent with the concept of a metropolitan area.

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

  • Kansas City and the Great Plains is a Zone of Sanity

    Over the past year, coverage of the economy appears like a soap opera written by a manic-depressive. Yet once you get away from the coasts – where unemployment is skyrocketing and economies collapsing – you enter what may be best to call the zone of sanity.

    The zone starts somewhere in Texas and goes through much of the Great Plains all the way to the Mexican border. It covers a vast region where unemployment is relatively low, foreclosures still rare and much of the economy centers on the production of basic goods like foodstuffs, specialized equipment and energy.

    People and companies in the zone feel the recession, but they are not, to date, in anything like the tailspin seen in places like the upper Great Lakes auto-manufacturing zone, the Sunbelt boom towns or, increasingly, the finance-dependent Northeast. Last month, for example, New York City’s unemployment experienced the largest jump on record.

    “That whole swath from Texas and North Dakota did not see either the bump or the decline,” notes Dan Whitney, a principal at Landmarketing.com, a real estate research company based in Kansas City, Kan. “People have a more conservative nature here. It’s just saner.”

    The housing market is one indicator of greater sanity. Kansas City housing prices dropped 7% between 2006 and 2008, compared with 10% in Chicago, 15% in San Francisco, 20% in Washington, D.C., and over 30% in Los Angeles. Houston and Dallas, the Southern anchors of the zone, have seen little movement either way in prices.

    One key measurement is affordability. The median multiple for Kansas City housing – that is the number of years of income compared with a median-priced house – has remained remarkably stable at under 3.0. In contrast, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the ratio approached up to 10 in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as something close to 7 in New York and Miami.

    The result has been that foreclosures – the key driver of many regional economic collapses – have been relatively scarce throughout the zone. This USA Today map reveals how the foreclosures are heavily concentrated in Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada, as well as parts of the old Industrial Belt of the Great Lakes.

    housing_foreclosure_565.jpg

    Analysis by my colleagues at Praxis Strategy Group of the job market’s condition also reveals the divergence between the zone and the rest of the country. Regions from the Northeast, the Great Lakes and the Southeast all have seen significant job losses, and the damage is spreading to the Pacific Northwest, New York and New Jersey. In contrast, the Kansas City area and much of the zone of sanity has experienced only a ratcheting down of its generally steady growth rate. Things are not bustling, but there seem to be few signs of a basic economic collapse.

    unemployment_state_565.gif

    unemployment_country_565.gif

    Sanity, as Whitney put it, may constitute a critical part of the equation. If you discuss why people live in a place like Kansas City, people tend to speak about stability, family-friendliness and the basic ease of everyday life. Many executives, notes Phil DeNicola, who runs Strong Suit Relocation, initially resist a transfer to the region but quickly see the advantages.

    “It is attractive to be here,” notes DeNicola. “You don’t get a lot of highs and lows for years. There is stability instead, particularly for families. It all reduces your stress.”

    Of course, not everyone is satisfied with the status quo. As in many second-tier urban centers, many in Kansas City’s leadership crave being something other than pleasant, affordable and stable. Leaders in the city – home to roughly one in four of the region’s 2 million residents – have been particularly exercised to show that KC can be as hip and cool as New York, L.A. or, at the very least, Chicago.

    “There’s a real kind of self-loathing here,” notes Mary Cyr, a Harvard-trained architect, who works on projects throughout the region. “We feel less than what we are. We do not know what we are as a city. We don’t even realize what we have.”

    Hundreds of millions have been poured and continue to pour into the usual monuments favored by urban policymakers and subsidy-hungry developers – a sparkling new arena, plans for an expanded convention center and a massive entertainment complex called the Power and Light District. Yet at the same time, the city’s budget, like many others, is severely strapped, so much so that City Hall is considering not turning on the city’s iconic fountains this spring.

    Even worse, city and regional issues seem to result in plenty of money for new expressions of wannabe grandiosity. One notable example: plans to build a $700 million-plus light-rail line, the kind of thing that has become the sine qua non for the “monkey see, monkey do” school of urban policymakers across the country.

    This project makes little sense in a region with a well-below-average percentage of jobs in its downtown core – roughly around 7% – with one of the lowest shares of transit-riding residents in the nation. The relative lack of traffic makes a rail system less sensible than could be argued for higher-density urban corridors, where it at least can be imagined that many would give up their cars.

    Ultimately, none of this taxpayer largesse is likely to do much more than replicate the same kind of development that can be found in scores of cities – from St. Louis to Dallas – that have tried it. At best, you get a few blocks of activity but very little in terms of urban dynamism.

    “The growth of downtown is not at all organic – it’s kind of forced,” notes architect Cyr. “They build all those projects in there, and you end up with the huge monumental buildings and the Gap.”

    The problem for the downtown crowd is that Kansas City has remained a quintessential American city, most dynamic in places where private initiative leads the way. Typically the bulk of new growth has taken place in the suburban fringes, but there are several successful nodes within the city, particularly around the lovely, 1920s vintage, privately developed Country Club Plaza area, famous for being the world’s first modern shopping center.

    Similarly, the artist-inspired Crossroads district has also evolved – largely without government help – into a genuine bastion of bohemians, with small companies and locally owned restaurants. With its low-cost commercial and residential space, as opposed to government subsidies, many see the area as precisely the kind of grass-roots urban life with a future in a place like Kansas City.

    Such developments in the city, as well as outside, make it possible to project a very bright future for Kansas City – and across the zone of sanity. Unless there is a massive shift in conditions, the zone should see a return to prosperity earlier than places bogged down with excess foreclosures, shuttering industries, soaring taxes and ever-tightening regulation. Dan Whitney, for example, expects the local housing supply to run out soon – with “tremendous pent-up demand” by the end of the year. If credit conditions improve, new construction should resume within the next 18 months.

    This all reflects the essential attractiveness of cites like Kansas City. Overall, in fact, its rate of domestic in-migration has been higher than much-celebrated Seattle and only slightly below that of Denver. Indeed, since 2000, Kansas City’s regional population has grown 8.6%, more than twice as much as New York, Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

    Unlike the national media, which rarely focus on mundane things that drive most people’s lives, some seem to get the appeal of lower prices, affordable housing options and a generally calm environment. Although never a beacon for newcomers, like Phoenix, Atlanta or Dallas, Kansas City has not suffered the massive out-migration seen in such big metropolitan regions as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago or New York.

    In fact, Kansas City has enjoyed a slow but steady in-migration through the past decade. These newcomers could provide the energy, talent and initiative that a region, known for stability, needs to get to the next level. Attracting more of them – not new prestige projects or subsidized developments – remains the key to the region’s future.

    Instead of trying to duplicate growth patterns that are foundering on the coasts and in countless Rust Belt cities, the denizens of the zone of sanity need to learn how to build on their virtues of stability and affordability. Particularly in hard times, such things count for much more than many – both inside and outside the region – might imagine.

    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.

  • Whatever Happened to “The Vision Thing?”

    When I was in elementary school, I remember reading about the remarkable transformations that the future would bring: Flying cars, manned colonies on the moon, humanoid robotic servants. Almost half a century later, none of these promises of the future – and many, many more – have come to pass. Yet, in many respects, these visions from the future served their purpose in allowing us to imagine a world far more wondrous than the one we were in at the time, to aspire to something greater.

    I am reminded of these early childhood memories not because I lament the loss of my flying car (although it would come in handy every now-and-again in fighting the Washington, D.C. rush hour gridlock) but because, with all of the rhetoric about change and hope, the Obama Administration has failed to articulate a strong, singular vision for what the future of America and the world can and should be. While some would argue that now is not the time for grand visions for the future but, rather, for hunkering down and muddling through these desperate economic travails, the fact of the matter is that at least part of the cause of continuing economic decline in this country, and in many other developed nations as well, is a lack of confidence in the future.

    I was somewhat hopeful during his address to the joint session of Congress in early February – shortly after the passage of the economic stimulus bill – that President Obama was indeed starting down the path of articulating a new vision for America. He recalled in that speech great innovations that had been spurred by prior economic and other exigencies. In that speech he stated:

    “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.”

    And again, later in his address:

    “History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas. In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.”

    Bold action and big ideas: Yet the focus of all of the Administration’s efforts have been on specific “solutions” to the problem set with which our economy is now faced. Some are well-intentioned but arguably poorly executed by Congress while are others rolled out for public consumption with less than full baking time—without any suggestion about what our “brighter future” might look like and how these various solutions might be woven together to help realize a brighter and different future.

    We may indeed be on the cusp of something big: It may be tragic or triumphant depending upon how and how quickly we find our way out of the country’s current predicament.

    After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, some urban planners, architects, emergency management experts, and others were bold enough to suggest that maybe the Ninth Ward shouldn’t be rebuilt; perhaps nature never intended us to put so many homes and so many people below sea level, in harm’s way. Regrettably, that conversation was preempted as soon as it was started by the hundreds of displaced residents who, having been treated with what appeared to be utter disregard by their local, state, and federal government in the face of that tragedy as it unfolded, insisted that at least they deserved to be returned to their homes. Politics and pragmatics trumped bold and broad thinking that could have conjured a different outcome.

    There is so is so little new and dynamic mainstream discourse about where and how we live as individuals and in communities. There is no modern proxy for flying cars and colonies on the moon. And funding billions of dollars in support of “shovel-ready projects” will certainly do nothing to advance the cause of innovative thought about how we would like to see our current communities – urban, suburban, and exurban, and rural – evolve over the next twenty-five or fifty years. What could life be like in America in 2034 or 2059? We should not have to rely upon science fiction writers, futurists, and block-buster sci-fi movie producers to craft all of our visions of the future.

    So here’s an idea for our new President. Now that everyone is relatively comfortable with the notion of spending billions (and even trillions) of dollars, let’s spend a very small portion of that on our future, rather than focusing exclusively on our near-term economic salvation. Make $10 billion available to fund five pilot projects with $2 billion each. Think of is as the “X Prize” for Innovations in Livability. Invite communities throughout the country, without restriction as to size or location, without constraints on the marketplace of ideas, to bring together their best and brightest to craft implementable proposals for how they plan to evolve their community into an exemplar for the future: Then fund the five best proposals. Take the funding decisions out of the hands of elected officials and policy makers, and place it unfettered in the hands of a blue-ribbon panel of experts from a broad range of disciplines.

    Let all Americans and the world marvel at what will replace the flying cars of the 60s.

    Peter Smirniotopoulos, Vice President – Development of UniDev, LLC, is based in the company’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and works throughout the U.S. He is on the faculty of the Masters in Science in Real Estate program at Johns Hopkins University. The views expressed herein are solely his own.

  • Financial Crisis Boosts Local Markets

    By Richard Reep

    The current economic crisis has many mixed impacts, including the shift of grocery customers to low-cost companies like Wal-mart. Yet at the same time we see a shift to local, community markets in an effort to cope with the new economy. While the global players deliver discounts due to their enormous volume, local community markets offer low-priced produce, goods, and services due to their microscopic volume. This common ground between individual efforts and enormous buying machines yields an interesting treasure trove of passion and hope.

    As folks cope with financial turmoil, their choices for purchasing venues seem to be driven by the need for saving, as well as the need for a good experience. The middlemen, such as the regional and national chains, seem to be squeezed in between truly global players like Wal-mart, and the rising tide of localism appearing at a grass-roots level in so many communities.

    The rise of these small, open-air markets is an encouraging sign of authentic social interaction, after so many assaults upon our social network by the forces of the Old Economy. It suggests a new role for local entrepreneurs and for the revival of community spirit. At these local markets, producer and consumer traffic in direct interaction, without the army of marketing consultants, business analysts, merchandisers, industrial psychologists, and the rest of the hangers-on who have transformed the agora into an often dispiriting and uninteresting shopping experience.

    Now, with the Old Economy in shambles, the New Economy appears to be reviving the community element to our American commercial culture. Even a few years ago the Farmer’s Market was considered an anachronism, something found in rural areas and overlooked by cosmopolitan city dwellers. The fact that these are rising up in our urban and suburban culture speaks to our need for freshness, for authenticity, and for some spontaneity.

    In Central Florida, the Winter Park Farmer’s Market is perhaps the grandfather of the Central Florida market scene, having started sometime in the eighties. No one at the City could remember exactly when it started. Ron Moore, Parks and Recreation Assistant Director now manages the market, and he laughed when asked about its success in a recent interview. “Consulting to other municipalities who want to start up their own markets is a part-time job”, said Moore, his latest effort being Eatonville, whose inaugural Community Market was an exciting event.

    Markets on public property are an important trend in our cities, for they signal the revival of public space. All too often public space has been defined by soulless plazas, many of which are deserted most of the time. But, with the rise of the public market, the classic agora has been revived in Winter Park, Maitland, Downtown Orlando’s Lake Eola, Eatonville, and elsewhere in Central Florida.

    Mr. Moore stated that the Winter Park Farmer’s Market’s summer season is typically the slow time, but last summer was their best one ever, and this winter has been the highest attendance ever, with a waiting list of merchants to get in. He is fine-tuning the mix using common sense, watching people flow and traffic flow. This reflects a locally based entrepreneur who is all instinct and good listening skills; he is not a mall merchandiser using industrial psychology and the appeal of sameness to make sales.


    North of Orlando lays the town of Eatonville, America’s oldest African-American incorporated community, and it is sandwiched between the affluent Winter Park and Maitland areas. The Eatonville Market, for its part, is attracting produce, food items, and flowers, and is worth a visit on a Saturday morning. Complete with a stage, shoppers are treated to a vibrant music scene as well as a shopping venue, and as this market takes off, it will attract more and more people to this historically significant community.


    Public open markets are exciting, but perhaps an even more interesting trend is the private-run market. Organizers of private markets can have more authority over the vendors and their merchandise, and can give their markets more style to suit a specific audience. One of the area’s more interesting markets occurs at night – the Wednesday evening Audubon Community Market, occurring at Stardust Video and Coffee. Founded by Emily Rankin, the Community Market strives to bring items produced specifically in Audubon Park.

    This epitomizes the spirit of the new localism. The fact that it occurs at night makes the market scene unique. Ms. Rankin, in an interview, revealed that the Audubon Park Garden District, which she founded, now includes a network of vegetable gardens, and these are showcased at the market. Her cafe, Roots, serves food at this market, and it provides services, locally grown produce, art, music and other handmade items which rotate on a weekly basis.

    There are many advantages to privately run markets. The Winter Park Farmer’s Market has pages and pages of rules and forms. The private Audubon Community Market is direct, paperless, and quick: Ms. Rankin looks at your product and says, you are in or out. Her management of the market has sustained it through a change in location or two, and she is optimistic that the market will grow in popularity as people start looking locally for what they can’t find globally

    During times of financial stability, people often seek to reduce risk and experimentation, clinging to the tried and true. Certainly retail’s global players focus on cold calculation and maintaining shareholder value. Yet at the grassroots, individuals and families also seek a level of comfort and interaction. The consumer response to community markets suggests that there is a widely felt allegiance with these intrepid street vendors who brave the elements for a dollar’s worth of grapefruit. The shifting economy is allowing individual voices to speak and be heard by a wider audience. This is the coarse of true innovation. Those who persevere in the community market scene could well influence our commercial future for decades to come…

    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.

  • SPECIAL REPORT – Domestic Migration Bubble and Widening Dispersion: New Metropolitan Area Estimates

    Returning to Normalcy

    The Bureau of the Census has just released metropolitan and county population estimates for 2008, with estimates of the components of population change, including domestic migration. Consistent with the “mantra” of a perceived return to cities from the suburbs, some analysts have virtually declared the new data as indicating the trend that has been forecast for more than one-half a century. In fact, the new population and domestic migration data merely indicates the end of a domestic migration bubble, coinciding with the end of the housing bubble.

    Metropolitan Area Growth: As usual, the metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population increased above the national rate of 7.8 percent, at 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2008. Smaller metropolitan areas (between 50,000 and 1,000,000 population) grew at the national rate of 7.8 percent. Also continuing a long-standing pattern, areas outside metropolitan areas (including rural areas) grew slower, at only 0.7 percent (Table 1).

    The overall trends, however, mask significant variations. The nation’s two metropolitan areas with more than 10,000,000 population are experiencing growth rates less than one-half the national average. New York grew only 3.6 percent, while Los Angeles – which for decades experienced above average growth, could manage only one-half the national average rate, at 3.8 percent. Indeed, Chicago grew faster, at 5.0 percent. If 2000s growth rates were to continue to 2050, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Phoenix would exceed Los Angeles in population, while Houston would pass Los Angeles shortly thereafter. This is not a prediction – population growth in these fast growing areas will likely slow as they get larger – but is merely offered to show how moribund the Los Angeles growth rate has become.

    The strongest growth was among metropolitan areas with between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 population, which added 12.1 percent to their populations. This was driven by gains of more than 1,000,000 in Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, nearly 1,000,000 in Houston and over 500,000 in Washington (DC). Philadelphia’s growth rate, however, was even less than that of New York or Los Angeles, at 2.7 percent.

    There was also strong growth (9.5%) among the metropolitan areas with between 2,500,000 and 5,000,000 population. This was driven by an increase of more than 1,000,000 in Phoenix and more than 800,000 in Riverside-San Bernardino. San Francisco (3.3 percent) and Boston (2.7 percent) grew at less than one-half the national rate, while Detroit lost population.

    The metropolitan areas with between 1,000,000 and 2,500,000 population also grew more than the national average, at 10.5 percent. The strongest growth was in Las Vegas, which added nearly 475,000 residents. Charlotte, Sacramento and Austin also added more than 300,000. Providence, Milwaukee and Hartford all experienced growth at less than one-half the national rate; while Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Katrina ravaged New Orleans all lost population. Tucson became the nation’s 52nd metropolitan area with more than 1,000,000 population in 2008, having added nearly 20 percent to its population since 2000.

    The largest percentage growth (35.4%) among metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population was in Raleigh, which added 284,000 new residents (This is not Raleigh-Durham, which the Bureau of the Census calls a combined statistical area, consisting of the Raleigh metropolitan area and the Durham metropolitan area). Raleigh displaced recent perennial growth leader Las Vegas, which experienced slower growth due to the collapse of the housing bubble.

    Domestic Migration

    Much has been made of the apparent recent slow-down in domestic migration (residents moving from one county to another) as indicated in the new data. In fact, however, domestic migration was greater in 2008 than it was in 2001. The slow-down should be more appropriately viewed as a return to more normal conditions.

    This can be illustrated by examining the gross domestic migration between metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population. In 2008, gross migration in the metropolitan areas of more than 1,000,000 was 560,000. This is slightly more than the 546,000 in 2001. Gross migration increased after 2001, peaking at 1,270,000 in 2006. This fell to 862,000 in 2007 and then to 560,000 in 2008 (Table 2).

    The Domestic Migration Bubble

    The domestic migration bubble that developed from 2000 through 2007 coincided with the domestic housing bubble. This is not surprising, because housing consumes a major part of household expenditures. The differences in housing costs are much greater between metropolitan areas than any other major category of personal expenditure. For example, transportation, clothing and food have similar costs among the nation’s metropolitan areas. During the bubble, however house prices doubled and tripled in some metropolitan areas relative to incomes. The housing bubble appears to have sparked its own domestic migration bubble, as people moved from less affordable areas to more affordable areas.

    This is illustrated by examining domestic migration trends by housing affordability. The more affordable metropolitan areas had Median Multiples at the peak of the housing bubble of 4.0 or less (The “affordable” and “moderately unaffordable” categories from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey) and the less affordable metropolitan areas had Median Multiples of 4.1 or above (the “seriously unaffordable” and “severely unaffordable” categories from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey).

    The less affordable (higher cost) metropolitan areas experienced both the largest house price increases and a spike in net domestic migration losses. Overall, the less affordable metropolitan areas lost 2.8 million domestic migrants from 2000 to 2008 (Table 3 and Figure). This started in 2001 with a modest loss of 116,000, which ballooned to 514,000 by 2007. The loss dropped to 287,000 in 2008, a figure more than 2.5 times the 2001 net domestic migration loss.

    At the same time, the affordable metropolitan areas experienced substantially lower house price escalation, while gaining nearly 900,000 domestic migrants from 2000 to 2008. In 2001, the more affordable metropolitan areas experienced a net domestic migration gain of nearly 129,000. Domestic migration gains peaked in 2007, at 269,000. Domestic migration gains fell to 184,000 in 2008 in the more affordable metropolitan areas. However, this figure was still far higher than the numbers at the beginning of the decade.

    Suburbs Continue to Gain

    The data also shows that people continue to move to the suburbs and move away from core areas. This can be shown from the county data, which is generally the smallest geographic area for which migration data is produced. One caveat: because many core counties contain suburban areas as well as the historic core cities, a county based migration analysis usually understates the extent of both core losses and suburban gains.

    The core counties improved their domestic migration performance in 2008, but continue to suffer losses. In 2008, the net domestic migration loss in core counties was 314,000, which compares to the 498,000 loss in 2001 and an annual average loss of 580,000 over the decade. Losses of this magnitude can hardly be characterized as a “turnaround.”

    Net domestic migration gains were down to 192,000 in the suburban counties from a 398,000 gain in 2001 and an average gain of 246,000 over the period. However, net suburban migration gains were up in 2008 from 2007 and 2006 (Table 4). Out of the 48 metropolitan areas, suburban counties performed better than core counties in net domestic migration in 42 cases, matching the figure for 2000-2008, the same as in 2007 and up from 38 in 2006. Among the six metropolitan areas where core net migration was greater than in the suburbs, core counties lost fewer domestic migrants than the suburbs (Washington and Virginia Beach), three were areas where the core county typically experiences higher net migration because of its population dominance (Phoenix, Raleigh and San Antonio) and the last was New Orleans, where the core county was much harder hit than the suburban counties by Hurricane Katrina related losses leading to greater gains in domestic migrants as it recovers (Orleans Parish, which is also the city of New Orleans). It is more than “a stretch” to interpret the new data to suggest any move to core areas from suburban areas.

    The 2008 domestic migration data does indicate a slow down or even a reversal in some more distant suburban and exurban areas. This was also to be expected because these areas had experienced a large increase in home ownership and a high volume of high risk sub-prime lending.

    As a result, exurban metropolitan areas like Riverside-San Bernardino, Stockton, Modesto and Merced experienced domestic migration reversals, while distant counties within metropolitan areas (such as Stafford County, Virginia in the Washington area and Pike County, Pennsylvania in the New York area) saw declines in their domestic migration. Much of the growth in such more distant areas occurred because of planning regulations in closer in areas made new development impossible or impossibly expensive. Thus, new housing construction was forced to “leap frog” over developable land, which also imposed higher transportation costs and longer commuting distances on the new home owners.

    At the same time, the better domestic migration performance in some core counties and “closer-in” counties occurred in large part because households no longer had a financial incentive to “cash-out” and move to lower cost areas, since they were often facing negative equity. This removed much of the incentive to move from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Tucson or Portland, where prices were considerably lower (though still much higher than before).

    The Real Story: Widening Dispersion

    Not only are people continuing to move from core areas to more suburban areas, but they are also moving from larger metropolitan areas to smaller metropolitan areas (Table 5). Since 2000, approximately 2,275,000 people have moved from large metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas to smaller metropolitan areas – those with populations of between 50,000 and 1,000,000. In 2001, the smaller metropolitan areas gained 115,000 domestic migrants. These net migration gains peaked in 2006, at 423,000. Following the national trend, net domestic migration to smaller metropolitan areas fell to 144,000 in 2008, still in excess of the 2001 number. Net domestic migration in the smaller metropolitan areas exceeded that of the larger less affordable metropolitan areas by 5.1 million over the period and exceeded that of the larger more affordable metropolitan areas by 1.4 million.

    Despite these trends, most metropolitan areas continue to add population. The domestic migration losses are more often than not made up by the natural increase in population (births minus deaths) and net international migration gains.

    However, households who already live here continue to exhibit a pattern of dispersion. Both within the same metropolitan area and between metropolitan areas, the latest Bureau of the Census data continues to show a clear trend of wider dispersal – from core counties to suburban counties and from larger metropolitan areas to smaller.

    References:Major Metropolitan Area Population & Domestic Migration 2000-2008: http://www.demographia.com/db-2008met.pdf

    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.”

  • Are Farms the Suburban Future?

    More than fifty years ago, Frances Montgomery and Philip O’Bryan Williams bought a 500-acre stretch of prairie north of Dallas as a horse farm. It was designed to be a place for their children to run wild on weekends, ride horses, a family escape light years from the Frette-linen, Viking-kitchen and fully staffed second and third home palaces enjoyed by today’s junior high net worth set. The main residence was a recycled World War II barracks; the one bathroom was the only luxury.

    In those days Dallas was an upstart city just taking control of the Trinity River that flooded neighborhoods to the south, one reason why everyone moved north. As the post World War II building boom spread the population further north, the Montgomery family knew it would only be a matter of time before the family farm was surrounded by development, if not swallowed.

    Yet now what is left of places like Montgomery Farms could become a major testing ground in the future of suburban development. In the urban development world, there are two camps, says Williams’ son, Philip Jr., a former CPA who spends his days nurturing the changes that have come to his family’s land. If development had to come, Williams sought intellectual control and the lightest load. One group wants to re-populate the cities with higher density condos and more urban living – the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU). The other camp looks towards the Conservation Subdivision Development (CSD), integrating farming and urbanism to add vitality to a community. A recent New Urban News story quoted Miami architect Andres Duany as saying that agriculture is looming large for new urbanism:

    “Agriculture,” he said, “is the new golf.”

    In fact, studies show that property viewing or abutting agricultural lands is as valuable as those overlooking the golf-course, maybe more so if residents can grow fresh, pesticide-free foods and reduce long-distance trucking. (Fresh cow’s milk, children feeding baby goats not on field trips but recess.) Organic farms, says Missouri developer Greg Whittaker, could also be a revenue-generating business with sales of bedding plants, pumpkins and Christmas trees. Unless, of course, you live in Connecticut, where state Representative Rosa DeLauro wants to make growing your own food against the law and punishable by a fine of up to $1,000,000.

    At Montgomery Farm, CNU and CSD have met in the middle, says Williams, blending agriculture with sub urbanism – with an added artistic touch.

    As Philip, his sister, and the Montgomery farm team were masterminding their agricultural suburban development, they laid out firm ground rules. Art and conservation would trump development profits. Builders would not erect cookie cutter, “they-all-look-alike” homes or McMansions. The city was to put a road through the farm from Highway 75, slicing one of the more heavily wooded cross-sections of the acreage. A road is not a road in the Williams’ world. Seeking a highway that would be as unique as the lifestyle they were offering, the team gathered a group of Connemara Conservancy artists who, along with civil engineers, sponsored a road design contest in 1996.

    “It was a road with no intersections, which meant no idling cars and pollution,” says Williams. Signage was kept to a minimum and international Dark Sky requirements reduced light pollution. This was a farm, where you wanted to find stars at night, not spotlights. Berms were added along the side to mask the homes and muffle noise, and the street was curved, not a straight-arrow shot with stoplights. The City of Allen provided a variance and footed thirty percent of the cost for Bethany Road.

    What’s wrong with suburbia, asks Williams? Driving. Look at the new Honda Minivans: every seat has a TV, 3 plugs for a microwave, more than one giant cup-holder and even eating trays. It’s as if automakers were trying to put a kitchen and laundry room in the car – why not get a Winnebago? Montgomery Farm was designed for walking and biking: the 52 acre mixed-use Watters Creek development – a creek really runs through it – is within walking distance of the home developments. Kids can walk to school, and everyone can walk to the subway station that can whisk them to the heart of downtown Dallas.

    Further up Highway 75, the Southern Land Company is building a development some Texans might consider sac-religious. Southern aims to bypass 25 years of traditional suburbia and build the way communities were designed and built one hundred years ago: porch and street-centered neighborhood, not just sprawl. Streets are old-fashioned boulevards lined with huge trees sporting medians and open spaces.

    About the time developers were drooling to slice and dice Montgomery Farm’s Allen terrain, Tim Downey, founder and CEO of Southern, had a vision in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1988 he saw that few developers were looking into the future and considering lifestyle and design components, the way residents might be faring ten years after the developers finished their job. Entire neighborhoods were cropping up without conscious design, architectural or horticultural input. Production building was everywhere, it seemed, a mass of rooflines that all looked the same.

    “If we are going to design and build neighborhoods, let’s look at what they did 100 years ago,” says Jim Cheney, Vice President of Communications, Southern Land Company. “Not what they did 25 years ago.”

    In 1996, Southern flew its architecture department from Franklin, Tennessee to one of Dallas’s old, historic neighborhoods with cameras and notebooks, challenged them to find the most charming and enduring architectural styles and re-create them for Tucker Hill, an 800-acre master-planned community about 20 miles north of those homes. The architects were told to design the way their grandparents might have lived, not re-create McMansions.

    They banned repeated elevations and offered expensive landscape packages with each home. And if builders didn’t want to spend $10,000 on trees, they could build elsewhere. It was almost a foreign process to both builders and buyers. Southern had developed three Tennessee communities before Westhaven, outside Nashville, and the Texas property called Tucker Hill.

    “People just have this mindset,” says Cheney. “6000 square feet, large back-yards so I can hide – not be a part of the neighborhood.”

    But if half the Nashville population thought Downey was insane for Westhaven, Tucker Hill was an even gutsier move to pull off in ranch-mentality Texas. Southern puts a tremendous emphasis on the front of the home and its relation to the street. No front-loading garages; backyards are small and made up for by numerous parks and water features designed to get people out and together – think Hank Hill shooting the breeze with his buddies by the lake, not over the barbecue.

    The concept is similar to the Park Cities, home of Southern Methodist University and one of the most solid communities in the country. Property values in Highland Park and University Park have held strong – even risen – through repeated recessions, thanks in part to the community’s strong school system, low crime, walkability, and perception as a family community with numerous parks and fountains.

    For those who find the lots too small, the houses too congested, Southern’s projects may not be a good fit. But for those who truly want to commune, it’s home. In Nashville, the Westhaven community was barely a year old but 700 people turned out for a block party. The diverse age mix ranges from young families to empty-nest baby boomers to retirees who want to live near their children, but not under the same roof.

    Retirees in the suburbs? Urbanites may cringe, but many Baby Boomers grew up in the suburbs and, when given a choice, do not want to live in the gritty city, says Cheney. Now they can enjoy the ‘burbs and live green. Developers such as Phillip Williams and Tim Downey are offering innovative lifestyles that may help re-define suburban development as living light on the land.

    “America’s land is less than six percent developed,” says Philip Williams. “We are developing without regard for what we left behind, constructing 40 year life homes from trees that take 80 years to grow.”

    Almost like a financial world living on credit, and we’ve now seen where that has led us. But perhaps we can also change our suburbs, and our lives, for the better.

    Candace Evans is the Editor of DallasDirt, a Dallas-based real estate blog for D Magazine Media Partners.

  • Is Germany the Planners’ Valhalla?

    Urban planners and anti-sprawl advocates point to Germany as a wonderland of appropriate land use. It is true that Germany has been better at preserving open space between former villages; the non-stop development that seems continuous throughout most of the United States cannot be found here.

    However, this triumph of planning has also come at a cost, in terms of affordability, and has kept a large percentage of the population from being able to own their own home. Germany is expensive because of forced scarcity of land and an extremely unproductive building industry, with certain peculiarities of German culture creating additional costs.

    The reasons for the lack of productivity in the German housing industry stretch back to land holding patterns in the Middle Ages, when the southern and western provinces of Germany were divided into countless small duchies and bishoprics. These small holdings stayed in the families for generations and prevented the consolidation of plots. The large plots common in America are all but impossible to find, depriving the building industry of the economies of scale possible in most of America. This in turns negatively affects the cost of housing, pushing home prices higher than they need be.

    There are also the vested interests of those who have bought into the German Dream and do not want to see their homes lose value. The German Statistics Agency issued a report stating that the average home in Germany is worth 6.1 times the average income. According to demographia.com anything above 3.0 is expensive.

    Blame can be placed on two factors. The first is that the productivity of German builders is far lower than that of American builders. KB homes can produce a house for about $400 per square meter and the cheapest German builders charge $1,300 per square meter (both prices do not include the price of land). A recent New York Times article stated that a passive house filled with expensive high-tech gadgetry only costs about 9% more than a standard German house. No wonder, when a standard German house costs 300% more than an average American house. Not all European countries have such high building costs; the Dutch are actually able to build housing stock at American prices; the problem in the Netherlands is the enormous costs associated with clawing a country from the North Sea. Nevertheless, Dutch builders are able to more easily assemble large plots of land on the reclaimed islands.

    Choices in building materials also play a role. Germans tend to prefer heavy and expensive concrete and brick construction over wood and steel-framed houses. A lot of Germans travelling to the US invariably will express their shock at how flimsy many American houses seem. Many Germans want to have a basement as well, even though the winters are more than mild enough here to allow for simple concrete slabs. The preference for basements and solid construction have a lot to do with owning a building that will not burn down in an incendiary bomb attack and a basement for the family to hide out in should the apocalypse come again.

    The collective trauma of the twentieth century lives on in the contemporary German psyche. Germans have learned their lesson from history and many of them are genuinely ashamed of it. The threat of imminent destruction was only recently lifted: up until 1989 the allied defense plans put the first line of real resistance on the Rhine, meaning that the entire country would have probably been flattened before the Allies could stop the forward thrust of the Red Army.

    Another factor is the huge mobility tax that the German government slaps on its citizens. The German government charges a punitively high tax for each liter of gasoline sold, equal to 80% of the price paid for fuel. Germans still drive a lot: the country invented the freeway and the ease and opportunity that an automobile offers still trumps the government billions spent on public transit. The German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, (the German equivalent of the New York Times) wrote a lengthy article, stating essentially that the automobile has survived every dire threat that it has faced over the last hundred years and will probably remain the king of the road. At least, they added, until a transit approaches the convenience and flexibility offered by the car. As it is, most new construction still takes place in the outer suburbs.

    Germans love the woods. German identity since the time of Tacitus is closely linked with the woods. Herman the German was able to use the cover of the forest to wipe out the Roman legions in the Teutoburger Forest. The folklore costumes that one occasionally sees here are almost always hunter green. Many Germans do not necessarily see nature as the unscathed landscape made to order by God. The forest is not wild here; it is an almost entirely man-made affair. German forests are essentially tree farms but Germans love them. They use these forest preserves as well. They are a ritualized part of the landscape, every Sunday they fill with locals walking off their Sauerbraten.

    In Germany, the natural world is something already conquered; it is viewed as something useful, a garden that the Germans themselves are stewards to. It is not the vast pristine wilderness of America. It is more like a vast public garden. German farmers and foresters have to allow pedestrians the right to walk on their land. Open space is also public space. The positive side is that the livability in many of these communities is much higher for those who can afford it. There is always a forest or a bike path/jogging path somewhere nearby.

    Germany is still rather affordable compared to other European countries, especially those that were caught up in the real estate bubble of the last decade. France, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Ireland have all experienced housing booms that have pushed the median multiple for housing affordability well above 6 to 7 or 8 and in places like Ireland and the greater London area to well above 10. Prices are also shrinking in the East, which is losing people every year.

    The East is actually one of the more interesting markets due to its loss of people and resulting housing price slumps. Government infrastructure investments could turn the Leipzig and Jena areas as well as Dresden into potential growth markets. Certain areas like the east and the Ruhr Valley, where cities like Bochum and Monchengladbach are worse off than some parts of the East.

    Germany, along with most of Europe, cannot be transposed to the US. The sundry factors contributing to its present-day appearance are not replicable in the US. Germany is a place of small plots and inefficient builders with prices severely limiting home ownership. It is not all bad, especially for those already in place. However, it limits Germans ability to improve their quality of life. Germans, like the vast majority of citizens in industrialized countries, prefer the speed, convenience and comfort of the automobile. Germans, for better or worse, saw how the conquerors from the US lived and tried to emulate it in their own lifestyles. Many still see America as a role model, even though that will not stop the cognoscenti here from writing sanctimonious articles condemning America and trying to stop cities from “sprawling”.

    Kirk Rogers resides in Bubenreuth on the outer edges of Nuremberg and teaches languages and Amercan culture at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg’s Institut für Fremdsprachen und Auslandskunde. He has been living in Germany for about ten years now due to an inexplicable fascination with German culture.