New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Report: Ontario, CA – A Geography for Unsettling Times

    These are unsettling times for almost all geographies. As the global recession deepens, there are signs of economic contraction that extend from the great financial centers of New York and London to the emerging market capitals of China, India and the Middle East. Within the United States as well, pain has been spreading from exurbs and suburbs to the heart of major cities, some of which just months ago saw themselves as immune to the economic contagion.

    Without question, the damage to the economies of suburban regions such as the Inland Empire has been severe. Foreclosures in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties have been among the highest in the country, while drops in real-estate related employment have resulted in the first net job losses in four decades. This has led some critics to suggest that the entire area is itself doomed, destined to devolve along with other suburban regions to “the new slums”.

    Yet our close examination of both short and longer-term trends suggests these perspectives are wildly off-base. For one, it is critical to separate different parts of the Inland region from one another. A place like Ontario retains many characteristics that make it far more able than other locales in the region to resist the negative trends. These advantages include a diversified economy, a powerful local job center, an excellent business climate and, most of all, a location perfectly positioned along the historic growth corridors of Southern California.

    These assets have already allowed Ontario to weather the current storm far better than many other Inland Empire areas. Foreclosure rates, for example, although far too high, have remained considerably below the average for the region, and far below those in communities that lack the same strong diversified economic base and close access to employment.

    More importantly, Ontario remains well-positioned to take advantage of both the eventual recovery of the Inland region and the greater expanse of Southern California. Housing prices – particularly the availability of single family homes – has been a driver of growth for the inland region for decades. As prices fall, the rates of affordability for the region – which had been dropping dangerously – will once again rise.

    Despite the claims of some theorists, the preference of most Californians for single family housing seems likely to be unabated, particularly as immigrants seek a better quality of life and the first generation of millennials enters the home-buying market. These are populations that have been heading east to Ontario, the surrounding “Mt. Baldy region,” and to the Inland Empire as a whole for decades, and there is no reason to suppose the flow will stop.

    As the Inland Empire restarts its growth cycle, Ontario will remain uniquely suited to take advantage. Significantly, despite the current downturn in energy prices, worldwide supply shortages as well as growing political demands for regulation on carbon emissions will lead businesses to look increasingly at procuring goods and services nearby. As the Inland Empire’s premier business and transportation hub, Ontario will be well-positioned to emerge as the epicenter of the entire Inland Region.

    At the same time, Ontario residents generally have short commutes, and the city sits astride the primary transportation routes of the region. Over time, well-planned developments such as the New Model Colony will offer a wide range of residents an opportunity to live, work and spend their spare time within a relatively compact, energy-efficient place.

    Business friendliness is also a key asset. Ontario enjoys a close working relationship with expanding companies in business services, manufacturing, logistics, medical services, and other industries not directly dependent on the housing sector.

    But more than anything, Ontario’s position rests on the city’s fundamental commitment to a balance of jobs and housing, and to a long-standing focus on economic growth. Unlike many communities in the region, Ontario has grown on a solid economic basis. As the fourth largest per capita beneficiary of retail sales in Southern California, the city has a considerable surplus to meet hard times .

    Although the immediate prospects for virtually all communities will be difficult, few places in Southern California can hope to ride out the current tsunami better than Ontario. And even fewer seem as well-endowed to ride the next wave of growth that will sweep through the region – as has occurred throughout the last century – when the economy once again regains its footing and customary vitality.

    See attached .pdf file for full report.

    Primary Authors: Joel Kotkin, Delore Zimmerman
    Research Team: Mark Schill, Ali Modarres, Steve PonTell, Andy Sywak
    Editor: Zina Klapper

    Photo courtesy of Valerita

  • Oregon’s Immigration Question: Addressing the Surge in the Face of Recession

    The men huddle outside the trailer, eyeing the passing traffic. Handmade signs stapled to telephone posts speak for them: “Hire a Day Worker!” The site, a fenced-in lot at Northeast MLK and Everett Street, was launched in 2007, a testament both to Oregon’s recent immigration boom and lack of federal reform.

    Since then, Obama’s historic campaign, several wars and a global recession have pushed the immigration question from the national headlines. But in Oregon – where the surging migrant population is on a crash course with a withering economy – the issue is bound to reignite.

    Oregon’s economic boom, which started later than that in the rest of country, has ended. Unemployment has risen considerably. Oregon’s 9.0 percent unemployment rate was the nation’s 6th worst in December 2008 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    At the eye of the storm have been losses in the construction industry, a major employer of immigrants. The hard times there will put new pressure on local legislators and law officials to “clean out immigrants”. Oregonians should not give in to such misguided temptations. Oregon’s immigrants have played a historic role in enriching the state’s economy and can continue to do so if given the opportunity.

    Oregon’s immigration explosion is relatively new. The state’s foreign-born make up 9.5 percent of the population, with more than 60 percent of the immigrant population arriving after 1990, according to 2005 census data.

    The influx of Latinos to the state is even more recent. Estimates place 75 percent of Latinos coming between 1995 and 2005. Unlike other immigrants who tend to concentrate to urban and suburban areas, Latinos are dispersing across Oregon. Between 1990 and 2000, the Latino population doubled in 21 of Oregon’s 36 mostly-rural counties. Agriculture employment, cheap housing, and existing Latino communities attract the rural migration.

    Within the Portland metro area, the largest concentrations of foreign-born population live in Southeast Portland (Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians), Northeast Portland (Vietnamese, Africans), and Central Portland (Asians, Eastern Europeans), according to a study by the Urban Institute. Notably, more Russians and Ukrainians moved to Oregon’s suburbs between 2000 and 2005 than to any other region in the nation, according to a recent University of Oregon study.

    Currently, immigrants total over 11 percent of the state’s labor force, up from 5.4 percent in 1990. Yet native unemployment did not increase during this time period.

    One reason for this, argues MIT’s Tamar Jacoby in a recent Foreign Affairs article, is that the immigrant workforce should be viewed as complementary rather than competitive to the native workforce. For example, the business owner who can hire housekeepers and landscapers can devote more time to growing his business, and to leisurely expenditures that support other local businesses.

    Oregon’s diverse agricultural industries – ranking third nationally for labor-intensive crops – offer a more concrete example of the complimentary nature of immigrants.

    The state is home to a $325 million dairy and cattle milk production industry, a $778 million nursery and greenhouse industry, a $380 million fruit and nut industry, and a $200 million wine industry. All are primarily staffed by immigrants. In this case, immigrant labor allows Oregon’s agricultural sectors to thrive in the face of fierce import competition.

    Immigrants have historically had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Nationwide, 25.3 percent of technology and engineering companies had at least one foreign born key founder, based on a Duke University study. Often with few resources or formal education, immigrant entrepreneurship can foster new kinds of services. The abundance of landscaping businesses and nail salons is a testament to such ingenuity. In 2005, over 6,000 Latino and 400 Slavic entrepreneurs operated throughout the Portland metro area, according to one University of Oregon study.

    Beyond providing jobs and fueling local economies, immigrant entrepreneurs bring the benefits of globalization to places like Oregon. They encourage trade and investment from their connections abroad.

    Immigrants pay taxes, buy houses, food, cars, and clothes just like native residents. Even illegal immigrants – which many immigration-demagogues label as the real problem – have taxes withheld from their paychecks. They also otherwise bring money to the state through sales taxes on local purchases. A study by the Oregon Center for Public Policy found that undocumented immigrants contribute between $134 million and $187 million in taxes annually to Oregon’s economy. These numbers represent only those coming from undocumented workers and exclude the significant investments made through entrepreneurship, agricultural support and the continual purchase of goods and services.

    Yet serious immigration reform is needed. A large portion of immigrants spends only stints working in the states, frequently sending money back home. The consequences of this go beyond the obvious fiscal drain. The stint worker will invest minimally in learning English, will often share rent in decrepit neighborhoods, and spend as little as possible in order to maximize savings for abroad.

    The problem facing Oregonians is not immigration per se – or even illegal immigration, which constitutes only 10 percent of the migration to the state. The real problem is stint immigrants, who invest little in the long-term health of their new communities and the economy of the state.

    The curious delusion about this point is that current federal legislation includes temporary-worker permits as key to reform. By giving only temporary permits to immigrants who might otherwise be coaxed into permanent stay, Washington is explicitly discouraging acculturation and encouraging capital drains.

    In large part, the real solution to the downsides of immigration lies in the permanent integration of Oregon’s new residents. When these residents feel they may be here permanently – without constant threat of deportation – they will be more likely to invest in their new communities and futures.

    Even the state’s recent job-shedding should not derail Oregonians’ historic acceptance of foreign residents. Oregon’s immigrants will stabilize agriculture and other service industries by providing cheap labor through hard times.

    If the incoming administration manages the recession correctly, Oregon’s economy will soon recover. To rebound quickly, the state will need to employ thousands – natives and immigrants – in the infrastructure and Green packages coming from Washington. Oregon’s post-recession economy, like its pre-recession economy, will depend on immigrant labor.

    A comprehensive understanding of Oregon’s immigration question must go beyond viewing the huddle of men on MLK and Everett every morning as mere numbers, bodies for pay.

    A true understanding of the issue will surface only by looking beyond the numbers to recognize these men’s potential, resourcefulness and culture as indispensable components that once shaped our nation’s identity and will continue to mold its future.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions to non-profits, political campaigns and market-driven clients.

  • Memorialist of Suburbia

    John Updike, the bard of the suburbs, died this week. He was one of the first great American writers to revel in the opportunity, beauty and convenience that the suburbs have long reflected. His voice, first found in the sixties, acted as a reasonable anchor in the tempest of radicalism that swept through the country. He empathized with the American dream rising in the raw suburbs being carved from agricultural land.

    Where ancestors once had wrestled a living from the soil, Updike’s generation found comfort, convenience and a dream. They found plenty where a generation previous only found enough to keep them alive. At a time when academics, avant-garde filmmakers and urban intellectuals scoffed at suburbia, Updike explained it. He understood the obvious reasons – “practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange”. That is still what draws people to the edge of town.

    Updike viewed the miles of identical houses the middle class aspired to as the pinnacle of civilization. He was never condescending. He genuinely loved what the suburbs represented and what they offered the masses moving from the cramped quarters of the ghettos and slums of the pre-war cities. He himself knew firsthand the other source of suburban migrants – the hardscrabble rural environs where life was often both difficult and limited.

    Updike wanted nothing more than the convenience and steady food and work that he could find in the suburbs of Boston. The cold, bleak, boring hell of rural life was not for him. He saw nature as something that his religious sensibilities told him it was: a chaotic force to be tamed for the benefit of man.

    His novels described the lives of characters in the sixties and seventies, caught up in the whirlwind of suppressed and released human desires which challenged these suburban dreamers. His sex scenes were more biological than erotic. They showed the new morality that was being formed in the suburbs, the breaking down of the old structures of the village and the urban neighborhood, which in many essentials were the same thing.

    In Seek My Face he talks of Manhattan by saying that each block represented a village in the old country. That was fine for the first generation, which needed that fabric of support and familiarity but that was not enough of a dream for the next generation. The Dream was the cheap Cape Cods that were being erected by the thousands over the Nassau County line by the Levitt brothers.

    Updike presented the suburbs for what they were to his generation: an escape from the villages and suffocating urban neighborhoods that trapped the previous generation. The freedom they gained was that of the nuclear family structure – the end to the rule of elders, cousins and priests. He celebrated suburbia as it rarely has been – as a peculiarly American miracle. It did not need to be demeaned, but seen as the perfection of thousands of years of evolution, the home to thousands of hoping, dreaming members of the middle class. His description of the car is no less lyrical. It was the convenience but it was more than that. In one short story he describes the purchase of a new car. The rush of excitement associated with the purchase and the affection that forms between a family and a car. He then described the neglect that crept in as the car aged until it lies abandoned in the front yard waiting to be turned in for a newer car.

    The mobility it represented is tempered with the ever present hope for the future that defines so much of what America is. The car is mobility; he describes the manner by which it frees passengers from the landscape just as it frees them from the tyranny of public transit. The car is the cocoon that is an extension of the owner’s personality, a part of who he is. It is a symbol of power and prosperity. It is an object of love.

    Then there was the chance to go to church without feeling like a freak. The multicultural downtowns are filled with houses of worship catering to all classes of people. There are numerous minority churches in Manhattan catering to different races and other houses of worship for the other sundry religions in the immigrant communities, but the middle class churches are being taken over, bought out and torn down in the center. The mainline churches and megachurches that most white middle class Americans call home are on the edge of town. Updike was a master at describing the religious experience of the suburbs. In A Month of Sundays Updike describes the breakdown of a Presbyterian pastor into a nymphomaniac. It is also filled with suburbs, sex and theology. Critics stated that the narrator’s sermons are some of the most eloquent since John Donne and are a wonderful representation of the dichotomy in an America that separates church and state but can never quite get over the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers set up a Theocracy on the banks of the Charles River. The combination of the profane and the divine is apparent on the outskirts of any American city where Wal-Marts abut megachurches; some megachurches were even built in the massive husks of abandoned big box stores.

    He was born in the depth of the depression to parents who dreamed of him being more and he described the quotidian with a lyricism that was an epiphany. The suburbs were a thing of beauty. He was a man who loved America for living in the future tense but constantly looking to the past for guidance. America lost one of its greatest voices in him.

    Kirk Rogers lives in Germany where he teaches languages and American culture at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He has been an avid reader of Updike since his early teens.

  • The Future of the Shopping Mall

    By Richard Reep

    “I had two rules for Christmas this year:
    1. Under 13 years old only;
    and
    2. Internet only.”
    –overheard at Stardust Video and Coffee in Orlando, Florida.

    One of the most distinctive benchmarks of contemporary American life, the classic indoor shopping mall, is now gasping for survival. The two rules expressed above were commonly heard during this shopping season, calling into question whether the 20th century indoor shopping mall will survive in its present form.

    Almost since it was born in the early 1950s, the shopping mall has engendered controversy. Few today recall the enthusiasm which greeted the first malls in the Midwest, giving shoppers something they previously lacked: adequate parking closer to a more varied selection of goods. Malls quickly caught on, and developers repeated this success across the country. The so-called regional mall became a new tourism destination, an economic engine powering local economies, and a cultural marker in which our suburban nation, recently empowered by the mass production of the car, took great pride.

    Malls, however, were decried by urban thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. For one thing, they turned the traditional building inside out, with the unlovely backs of the stores facing the exterior. For another, they required huge seas of asphalt to accommodate parking, necessitating long, arduous walks from the car to the mall door.

    Perhaps more seriously, however, thinkers criticized malls as dealing a lethal blow to the traditional Main Street. To support the development costs of the regional indoor shopping mall, the leasing prices only let large, national chain stores in, wiping out almost any vestige of local identity. Generally speaking, shoppers overlooked this fault in favor of access to a much greater diversity of goods and essentially deserted Main Street in droves.

    Architects and developers quickly gathered empirical evidence about people’s shopping patterns and applied these to the design, so by the 1970s the regional indoor shopping mall was perfected down to a reliable formula that could be applied consistently, with reliable and satisfying economic results to the landowner and his bank. Older malls, such as Lenox Square in Atlanta, underwent drastic renovations to adapt to the formula, increasing visitors and sales, and cementing the place of the regional mall in American culture.

    Yet the mall also had one largely overlooked advantage: its ability to deliver a safe, secure environment for its inhabitants. Being private property, the landowner could afford to eject suspicious behavior and deal with theft swiftly, in a way that police in a public setting could not. The mall could be secured in a way impossible for the traditional city street.

    Malls grew, finally testing the upper limits at over 4 million square feet in Bloomington, Minnesota. However, like dinosaurs, their great size and their slow speed have now limited their ability to adapt to changing times. Malls began to suffer a decline as early as the 1990s. This decline was due to challenges from big-box retailers, and the even more convenient commercial strip mall. Mall developers fought off these challengers by including both boxes and strips within new development tracts, so a new regional mall such as the Brandon Mall in Tampa, Florida opened in 1994 with a brand-new Target store and brick-façade strips flanking its entry. Shoppers parked at the main mall, shopped, and then parked in front of various strips, shopping their way out of the parking lot.

    Yet this model could not rescue malls, so developers started reinventing them as lifestyle centers. Retail was subsidized by dining and entertainment venues, and when the residential boom arrived around 2002 and 2003, condos were thrown in the mix. At the same time, consolidation of mall owners was taking place, and one of the single biggest mall owners, General Growth, was faced with the task of stewarding these giants into the new millennium.

    Yet even as “lifestyle centers”, malls have continued to suffer. General Growth and others like them found themselves fighting a defensive action, as per-square-foot sales of malls softened. At one time, they entertained the notion of adding hotels to malls, imagining that malls remained destinations. Shoppers, however, were getting scarcer, and except for Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and the day after Christmas, it was becoming easier and easier to find a parking place in front of your favorite national department store.

    This year’s Christmas season has further weakened the malls. E-commerce retail, rising since 2000, accounts now for over $34 billion in retail sales, or 3.1% of total retail sales, for the third quarter of 2008 (source: U. S. Census Bureau). This rise continues to penetrate the physical retail environment, and the mall is the most vulnerable to this new form of commerce. Accompanied by a sudden drop of consumer spending, this trend has turned bad times into a veritable rout.

    For companies like General Growth, which has flirted with bankruptcy, tough times are ahead. Adaptive reuse strategies – turning malls back into town centers with residential density – remains one possible strategy. Another may be to retune old-line malls into destinations for fast growing consumer populations such as Hispanics. There are clearly many possibilities.

    In this sense malls represent a huge opportunity for a forward-thinking investor, and this building type should be analyzed for its positive features. Aside from the good portion of commercial debt it represents, the mall usually boasts a prime location within existing suburban infrastructure, and typically sits on level land that would ease redevelopment. A mall in east Orlando has already been changed into Mainsail, a private higher education facility. Others have been made into municipal service centers. The redeveloper may preserve the building and land whole or, like ancient Roman coliseums, malls may be disintegrated so that only fragments of the mall’s original development pattern will be noticeable.

    No doubt some malls will survive in unique pockets – and they could come to represent the new localism – if they have engrained themselves enough into local culture. This may be particularly true in outer suburbs where there was no Main Street and the mall has remained the focal point for local concourse and rendezvous.

    One thing is clear. Given the rise of internet commerce, and perhaps a long-term slowdown in consumer spending, the mall seems destined for a major makeover in the coming decade.

    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.

  • The Importance of Productivity in National Transportation Policy

    For years, transit funding advocates have claimed that national policy favors highways over transit. Consistent with that view, Congressman James Oberstar, chairman of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wants to change the funding mix. He is looking for 40 percent of the transportation funding from the proposed stimulus package to be spent on transit, which is a substantial increase from present levels.

    This raises two important questions: The first question is that of “equity” – “what would be the appropriate level to spend on transit?” The second question relates to “productivity” – “what would be the effect of spending more on transit?”

    Equity: Equity consists of spending an amount that is proportionate to need or use. Thus, an equitable distribution would have the federal transportation spending reflect the shares that highways and transit carry of surface travel (highways plus transit). The most commonly used metric is passenger miles. Even with the recent, well publicized increases in transit ridership, transit’s share of surface travel is less than 1 percent. Non-transit highway modes, principally the automobile, account for 99 percent of travel.

    So if equity were a principal objective, transit would justify less than 1 percent of federal surface transportation expenditures. Right now, transit does much better than that, accounting for 21 percent of federal surface transportation funded expenditures in 2006. This is what passes for equity in Washington – spending more than 20 percent of the money on something that represents less than one percent of the output. Transit receives 27 times as much funding per passenger mile as highways. It is no wonder that the nation’s urban areas have experienced huge increases in traffic congestion, or that there’s increasing concern about the state of the nation’s highway bridges, the most recent of which occurred in Minneapolis, not far from Congressman Oberstar’s district.

    In addition, a substantial amount of federal highway user fees (principally the federal gasoline tax) are used to support transit. These revenues, which are only a part of the federal transit funding program, amounted to nearly $5 billion in 2006. Perhaps most amazingly, the federal government spends 15 times as much in highway user fees per transit passenger mile than it does on highways. Relationships such as these do not even vaguely resemble equity.

    Moreover, truckers would rightly argue against using passenger miles as the only measure of equity. Trucks, which also pay federal user fees, account for moving nearly 30 percent of the nation’s freight. Transit moves none. Taking money that would be used to expand and maintain the nation’s highways will lead to more traffic congestion and slower truck operations – which also boosts pollution and energy use. This also means higher product prices.

    Productivity: For a quarter of a century, federal funding has favored transit. A principal justification was the assumption that more money for transit would get people out of their cars. It hasn’t happened. Transit’s share of urban travel has declined more than 35 percent in the quarter century since highway user fee funding began. State and local governments have added even more money. Overall spending on transit has doubled (inflation adjusted) since 1982. Ridership is up only one third. This means that the nation’s riders and taxpayers have received just $0.33 in new value for each $1.00 they have paid. This is in stark contrast to the performance of commercial passenger and freight modes, which have generally improved their financial performance over the same period.

    It’s clear spending more on transit does not attract material numbers of people out of cars. Major metropolitan area plans are biased toward transit but to little overall effect. At least seven metropolitan areas are spending more than 100 times more on transit per passenger mile than highways and none is spending less than 25 times.

    The net effect of all this bias has barely influenced travel trends at all. Since 1982, per capita driving has increased 40 percent in the United States. Moreover, the increases in transit ridership (related to history’s highest gasoline prices) have been modest relative to overall travel demand. Transit captured little (3 percent) of the decline in automobile use, even in urban areas. Most of the decline appears to be a result of other factors like people working at home or simply choosing to drive less. It is notable that none of the transit-favoring metropolitan area plans even projects substantial longer term reductions in the share of travel by car.

    The reason for this is simple. Transit is about downtown. The nation’s largest downtown areas, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, contain huge concentrations of employment that can be well served by rapid transit modes. Yet relatively few Americans either live or work downtown. More than 90 percent of trips are to other areas where transit takes, on average, twice as long to make a trip – if there is even service available. Few people are in the market for longer trip times.

    These policy distortions are not merely “anti-highway.” They are rather anti-productivity. This means they encourage greater poverty, because whatever retards productivity tends to increase levels of poverty. It would not be in the national interest for people to choose to take twice as much of their time traveling. By definition, wasting time retards productivity and international competitiveness. These are hardly the kinds of objectives appropriate for a nation facing perhaps its greatest financial challenges since the Great Depression.

    For years, national transportation policy has been grounded in hopeless fantasy about refashioning our metropolitan areas back to late 19th Century misconceptions. It’s time to turn the corner and start fashioning a transportation strategy – including more flexible forms of transit – that make sense in our contemporary metropolis.

    Resources:

    Urban Transport Statistics: United States: A Compendium
    http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-usa2007ann.pdf

    Regional Plan Spending on Highways and Transit
    http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-rplantransit.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.”

  • Rust Belt Realities: Pittsburgh Needs New Leaders, New Ideas and New Citizens

    The current recession provides a new opportunity for Pittsburgh’s elite to feel good about itself. With other boom economies from Phoenix to Miami on the skids – and other old Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo even more down on their luck – the slow-growth achievements of the Pittsburgh region may seem rather impressive.

    Yet at the same time, the downturn also poses longer-term challenges for which the local leadership is likely to have no answers.

    In large part, Pittsburgh’s “success,” such as it is, has been based on what may be called a “legacy economy,” essentially funded by the residues of its rich entrepreneurial past. This includes the hospitals, universities and nonprofits whose endowments have underwritten the expansion of medical services and education, which have emerged as among the region’s few growth sectors.

    The other great advantage Pittsburgh has – as do potentially other shrinking Rust Belt burgs – is lower housing prices. That’s the good news. But the lack of a great surge in housing prices during the real estate “bubble” also testifies to the region’s general lack of overall attractiveness and its languid job market.

    The current national economic meltdown now changes these realities, and in ways that may not allow Pittsburgh and other slow-growth burgs as much comfort as they might wish.

    For one thing, the “legacy” economy is almost certain to start shrinking as the portfolio investments of universities, hospitals and nonprofits begin to erode. After all, these institutions rode the boom elsewhere for a long time; they now will reap the consequences of that dependence.

    Perhaps even more important, the great housing advantage seems certain to weaken as a net positive. As prices in Florida, Arizona and even California begin to decline, Rust Belt residents who’ve been thinking of moving to warm weather, more dynamic economies and lively entrepreneurial environments will now have their chance.

    To thrive, Pittsburgh simply cannot rely on being somewhere that is a good place to go to school, get sick or die. It needs to offer restless, entrepreneurial people an opportunity to succeed and do something new.

    As local blogger Jim Russell notes, the real problem with his hometown is not that people leave, but that others do not come to replace them. People always leave places, but exciting locales – Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Houston or San Francisco – also attract large numbers of new people. The immigrants, many of them seeking the “main chance,” are generally the people who shake things up and bring new energy to places.

    Who seeks their “main chance” in Pittsburgh? Certainly not foreign immigrants, who are staying away in droves. Metropolitan Pittsburgh has one of the lowest percentages of foreign-born residents in the nation. Even Detroit, with its sizable Arab population, has some sort of ethnic vibe.

    In the short run, some might argue, not having immigrants relieves the stress on schools and eases potential social tensions. Yet in the America that is emerging, these newcomers represent arguably the most dynamic new element and harbingers of the future. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015 they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Rather than compliment itself on not exhausting itself by running too fast, the Pittsburgh region should think about producing enough of a pulse to attract immigrants and aggressive young people. A place that reassures itself on the basis of its stable, homogeneous and rapidly aging population seems doomed to achieve little better than self-satisfied stagnation.

    City leaders may be proud to see Pittsburgh hailed in the media – most recently by USA Today and the Cleveland Plain Dealer – as a poster child for urban “renaissance,” yet these glowing accounts are clearly not inspiring many people to settle there.

    Indeed, in a nation with the most vigorous demographics in the advanced industrial world, the City of Pittsburgh continues to suffer one of the most precipitous declines in population. Like the former East Germany, the town needs more coffins than cribs. Even the suburbs of Pittsburgh have been losing population.

    More worrisome, there seems no strategy – or even an inclination of needing one – to change this reality. Rather than stimulate the grassroots economy, the region for decades has sought to revive itself by spending billions on new stadia, arenas, convention centers and cultural facilities, sometimes in the process demolishing vibrant working-class neighborhoods or local business districts. Meanwhile, the roads and bridges of the city – which continues to battle bankruptcy – are in a constant state of disrepair.

    Every time I read about or visit Pittsburgh, the powers that be have a new project to prove to themselves that the city actually has a life. Most recently, it’s a lame-brained scheme to create a 1.2-mile, $435 million (at least) transit tunnel under the Allegheny River to connect Downtown’s heavily subsidized office towers to the North Shore’s even more heavily taxpayer-funded pro sports stadiums and a future casino.

    Yet, in reality, Pittsburgh’s “Tunnel to Nowhere” is simply part of the same old brain-dead development strategy that may impress visiting journalists or conventioneers but creates little in the way of good new jobs or long-term opportunities.

    You have to think about what the energetic people who come to a community really want – things like economic opportunities, single-family houses and good schools for their kids. Who but speculators and city officials cares about luring the latest ESPN Zone or Planet Hollywood? These kinds of venues are simply commodities now, with no sense of place and available in any city of decent size willing to subsidize them.

    So what should the Pittsburgh region do differently?

    The first thing would be to consider using its scarce public funds to revive the old urban neighborhoods and leafy suburbs that constitute Pittsburgh’s greatest competitive advantage. These are places that may attract students now, but to matter in the long term, some of these young people must stay after they graduate. This will be particularly critical as the current “echo boom” begins to fade and the now record-high number of students begins to drop.

    Second, the region should target growing small businesses. The era when Pittsburgh was a big-business town is all but over. In 1960, 22 Fortune 500 companies were headquartered there. Now it’s roughly a third that number. High taxes, tiresome regulatory regimes and the enormous burden created by outsized city employee pensions have hit the small entrepreneur hardest. Addressing these issues is more important to them than new arts venues or jazz clubs.

    Finally, the city needs a shtick to call its own. It might look at its historic strengths as an innovative engineering city. Pittsburgh could look also to its hinterland, a region rich in beauty and resources, as part of its competitive advantage.

    All of these things could provide linchpins for a true renaissance – one driven not by public relations and shiny new subsidized edifices, but by the energy of its people.

    That’s what has always made for great cities – and what will do so well after this current recession has passed into memory. Pittsburgh has the potential to catch the inevitable next wave that will emerge after the crisis, but only if it can get past its long-standing celebration of mediocrity.

    This article originally appeared at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

    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.

  • Farmer’s Markets: Reviving Public Space in Central Florida

    By Richard Reep

    Noted architect Daniel Liebeskind, teaching at Yale in the early 1990s, proclaimed “Public space is dead”. A provocative notion at the time, he was simply observing American cultural phenomena, and our evolution away from Main Street into the mall, away from the downtown church to the suburban megachurch, and away from common space into private space. While all this is true, it misses a countercyclical element in our cities, and in the Orlando area, public space is very much alive and assuming a new role in the neighborhoods.

    Human social activities still need to take place, and we are surprisingly adaptable when it comes to getting the interaction we need, when we need it. Public space has hosted political, sacred, commercial, and ceremonial activities for the entire history of the city. This recent flight from public to private is due to the perception of personal safety, and the need to conduct social activities in a secure zone. We simply don’t much care whether the backdrop for our social life is a 19th century town square, or a 20th century suburban shopping mall.

    Crime rose in the last half of the 20th century beyond the level of comfort for most citizens, and although it receded in the late 1990’s (for reasons yet to be satisfactorily explained), crime has resurged. This year, Orlando jumped from a relatively crime-free status to a position within the top 10 in the country for violent crime, and nearly every neighborhood has experienced an increase in various forms of break-ins, vandalism, and theft. Along with our economic lives, our civic lives seem to be going backward at the present moment.

    Thus, private space thrives and public space dies; this has been our only means of control over our personal security. Shopping malls and big box stores are our new Main Streets, and instead of condemning their form, we should be studying them, because they are telling us what people need and crave as part of their daily lives.

    In the public arena, cities cope with the crime trend variously, and it is instructive to look at Orlando’s methods in light of its commitment to New Urbanism as a city growth model. Orlando has recently published Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design via a Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. Aimed at both businesses and individuals, the booklet recommends that private outdoor space be well-defined by gates and clear perimeters, and suggests other design elements to reduce the risk of being targeted by criminals.

    Much of the booklet makes sense and reinforces strategies such as natural surveillance, target hardening, territorial reinforcement, and access control. The booklet also tries in vain to tie new urbanist ideals to crime prevention. For example, speed tables, a favorite new urbanist device to reduce speeding, are cited as a way to tell “potential offenders they had better think twice before committing a crime.” Whether there is a correlation between speed bumps and safe neighborhoods remains to be seen.

    The booklet rightly states that “streets should be designed to discourage cut-through traffic” as a means of natural access control. Ironically, this flies in the face of new urbanist development patterns, which encourage open-ended, straight street grids, and discourage cul-de-sacs as elitist. The practical reality of safety and security necessarily overrides the theory and rhetoric of New Urbanism as it is applied in Orlando.

    We continue to evolve into a city that has troubled public spaces and increasing private spaces, much like the rest of the country. While the crime rate has risen suddenly in Central Florida, however, our public space, far from being doomed, is now hosting scenes of new civic involvement.

    The age-old agora, contrary to reports of its death, is actually alive and well. Weekend markets are springing up in public nooks and crannies around the older, urban core, and in the suburban public parks as well. These markets are scenes of a new American involvement with each other, in a manner similar to the traditional European town square and the historical American village green. “Farmer’s Markets,” “Fresh Markets,” and “Weekend Markets” are becoming popular not just in downtown Orlando, but in downtown Winter Park, Maitland, College Park, and surrounding communities. These markets are exciting because they are growing, despite all the forces working against them: crime, internet commerce, and the accelerated kinetic lives we lead in this new millennium. People are finding something important at these small, crowded, open-air market stalls, and it isn’t just good tomatoes.

    For merchants, they ostensibly cut out the army of middlemen between the customer and contemporary, chain-store retail. Open-air markets are an exciting and interesting alternative to the internet, a medium that prevents direct sampling of a physical, sensual product such as food. And, a visit to the Winter Park Farmer’s Market on any given Saturday would make any mall-store merchant green with envy: hands holding full shopping bags, and lots of them. Business is being done!

    For customers, the thrill of a bargain is supplemented by a sense of community and a shared enjoyment of a vibrant local scene. Maitland, a suburban municipality five miles north of Orlando, recently started its own Farmers’ Market and has already outgrown Quinn Strom Park, and will soon be moving to the larger Lake Lily Park next year. Customers are treated to live music performances, occasional tables of Fresh Art by Maitland Art Center artists, and stalls by masseuses, cheese makers, and ethnic food providers. The informal nature of these markets guarantee spontaneity, an enjoyment of shared community, and an opportunity for relaxed interaction and discourse free of the manipulation of marketers, advertisers, designers, and other enablers of the high art of contemporary Western consumption.

    At least in Central Florida, public space is not dead at all; people seek ways to maintain the tradition of the agora, despite assault upon this tradition. Although safety needs have forced us to flee to malls, supermarkets, big box retail, and the internet for our consumer needs, we’ve traded safety and security for spontaneity and deeper interaction. We are ingenious at finding ways around the slick, sophisticated veneer of chain-store commerce for a more visceral sensory and social experience.

    In Central Florida, these markets are springing up to provide this, and they reinforce locality and pride in our neighborhoods, for they are a reference that citizens are more and more often using to reinforce their neighborhoods’ identity. If this trend continues, these markets may increase in weekly frequency and broaden their involvement by becoming a forum for public speaking and political dialogue. Public space is alive and well in the new millennium, and its new adaptation to this old use can provide an exciting glimpse into the future.

    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.

  • China Should Send Western Planners Home

    For centuries, the West sent missionaries around the world to spread various gospels. It is no different now, though the clerics tend to hold degrees from planning schools rather than those overtly specializing in theology.

    This could also create tragic results as ideologies created in one context are imported into a totally foreign one.

    China, which is creating a new future, needs to forge its own path for urban development. For one thing China is experiencing unprecedented economic growth on a scale unimaginable in the contemporary West. Over the past two decades, living standards have risen at a rate that may be unprecedented in world history. Gross domestic product per capita still remains below high-income world standards, at one-sixth that of the US level. Nonetheless, there is great regional disparity, with incomes in east coast urban areas above that of urban areas in the central and western regions

    Yet in sharp contrast to the west, which has been heavily urban for over a century, China remains substantially more rural than urban. According to United Nations data, China’s population was only 40 percent urban in 2000. This compares to urban rates of over 70 percent in many high-income nations. But now people are moving in large numbers from rural areas to the urban areas, following the pattern of development that has occurred virtually wherever incomes have risen markedly.

    The reasons for the move are also the same as they have been through history: Urban areas offer great opportunities and generally higher standard of living than rural areas. The United Nations estimates that by 2030, 60 percent of the Chinese population will live in urban areas. This represents a staggering migration – the movement of 350,000,000 people – a population greater than that of the United States and Canada combined.

    Already, China has very large urban areas. Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have 10,000,000 or more residents. A number of other urban areas have more than 5,000,000 people. Dongguan, the world’s largest unknown urban area is nestled between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the Pearl River Delta and no one seems to know what its population is – estimates range from 7.5 million to more than 10 million. See Demographia World Urban Areas.

    Western Planners Descend
    To a cadre of western urban planners, developers and architects, China represents the ultimate market. Like the Christian missionaries, they come to China with a sense of both rectitude and guilt about their own countries. They admonish Chinese officials “not to repeat our mistakes.” The primary mistakes, they explain, are urban sprawl (a pejorative term for suburbanization) and automobile use. To go to planner heaven, they must eschew these steps and go straight to the ideal state of smart growth, transit dependence and new urbanist principles.

    Chinese officials visiting the United States, Western Europe, Canada or Australia must wonder at the disconnect between the wasteland described by Western planners and the unparalleled quality of life enjoyed by people in the West. It is not without reason that the Chinese (and for that matter, the Indians, Indonesians, Nigerians, etc. ad nausea) would like to be rich like us. It is not without surprise that the hosts graciously listen, nod and, to their inestimable credit and good fortune of Chinese citizens, largely ignore the bankrupt advice.

    You don’t have to be an American or European to realize that the automobile has created mobile urban areas in which employers and employees have far greater choices or that mobility makes labor markets more efficient. It is not a mistake that housing built on inexpensive land on the periphery of urban areas has made it possible for so many millions to build up financial equity in their own homes, or enjoy the kind of privacy that the more wealthy or well-connected have enjoyed. Nor is it a mistake that nearby inexpensive land has been developed by retailers and other businesses who are, as a result, able to provide lower prices than would otherwise be possible.

    The West has achieved its unparalleled affluence because planners were unable to impose their will to prevent suburbanization and the expansion of mobility. They could not hold back the democratization of prosperity.

    If planners had been in charge, mass low cost, relatively low density housing would not exist. Western nations would now be principally inhabited by renters rather than homeowners. Employees would be limited to those few places they could get on foot or public transport, rather than the whole urban area made accessible by the automobile.

    There would be less wealth and it would be less broadly distributed. “Big-box” stores on the urban fringe would not have emerged, resulting in people paying higher prices with their smaller incomes.

    Indeed, for any who might wish for China to stumble in its competition with the West, it is hard to imagine a more promising strategy than importing Western planning ideas and planners to China.

    China should continue to develop commercial and industrial land on the urban periphery, while expanding the already extensive freeway system to bring production and prosperity to every nook and cranny of the nation. China should continue down the road of allowing people to live how they like, whether it is in the new high-rise luxury condominiums or the lower rise town houses and detached housing (called villas in China) that can be found throughout its urban areas. It is clear that China will continue to become more mobile (and thereby richer and more productive) as car ownership explodes and those who cannot afford cars increasingly obtain the same level of mobility with electric motorbikes.

    The operative word here is “continue.” Generally, Chinese urban planning policies have been a substantial contributor to the nation’s rising wealth. It is to be hoped that the advice of the western planners will continue to be respectfully listened to and largely ignored. The people of China are entering an era of great new opportunity; they should not close the gates just as it arrives.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Rethinking Risk During a Financial Crisis: Learning from Mexico

    Last month I visited a small town in southern Mexico. It is a quiet and modestly prosperous place. Outside some of the homes are older Suburbans, Jeeps and Explorers; the license plates show that their owners have recently returned from the US, driven out by the collapsing economy and heightened nativist anxieties. Almost every family, it seems, has some member who has spent time up north; only a very few of them are still hanging on through the recession.

    For the most part, Mexicans are innocent by-standers in the current financial debacle. They didn’t allow themselves to be talked into strange mortgages or multiple credit cards; whether north or south of the border, this is for them still predominantly a cash economy. Even for those who went to the US, their key goal was to accumulate dollars and send them south, where, as pesos, they provide the basics and even a few luxuries for many families. Until recently, these remittances have been second only to oil income in importance for Mexico; now both are shrinking fast.

    There is something more than a little unfair in the manner in which the recession is hurting our southern neighbor. Mexicans, for the most part, have a personal risk calculus that is the complete reverse of ours. Like most people who have experienced hard times, they are not obsessed with the little things that might go awry; they don’t place little flags around puddles in the grocery store, and most dogs have never received a rabies shot. The sidewalks often look as though a tree is trying to push its way through the ground and electrical cables are frequently visible. It’s not unusual to see a local butcher frying up vast cauldrons of meats in front of his carnecineria, something that would drive American health inspectors to apoplexy.

    In contrast to their wealthier Northern neighbors, Mexicans seem quite happy to take responsibility for themselves and don’t expect to sue someone every time they stub their toe. But their collective view of risk is also the reverse of ours. Property is, for most people, something to live in and not something for speculation. Building one’s own home is common but it’s usually done in stages, whenever there is cash to spare. The results may be untidy, with streets perpetually possessing the appearance of construction zones, but there is no evidence of any foreclosure crisis—forests of ‘for sale’ signs are absent, in Veracruz, at least.

    Nor is that the only visual difference between nondescript Mexican and American cities. Antiseptic zoning is much less common in Mexico, with the result that families live above the store, or behind the workshop, or even on the roof of some buildings. Affluent homes may stand next to literal ruins. In most American cities, this would be evidence of a neighborhood slipping into decay, causing realtors to flee to more ordered areas. But for Mexicans, this juxtaposition simply adds to the sense of being in an organic place rather than on a Disney set. What it means for neighborliness is hard to judge, but it would certainly make an interesting comparative research project.

    Of course, there are some equivalents to the homogenous subdivisions that dominate the American housing market. I saw several large up-scale gated communities that were standing idle, waiting for better times. I was also shown several housing developments, where government agencies were building terraced homes for state workers. What is striking to the visitor is that these would never be offered in the US housing market, as they would be judged to be unacceptably small. At approximately one thousand square feet, they are half the size of the average American home, (approximately 2200 square feet) and significantly smaller than most new houses.

    Even though Mexican families are, on average, larger (with more children and more generations living together), the expectation is not that every member of the family gets a bathroom or even a bedroom. It is also common to buy small and build out, or up, as needs dictate and finances permit. Anyone who has traveled in Asia will also be familiar with this phenomenon, which manifests itself in ground floor apartments that encroach upon the street, balconies that become bedrooms and so forth. High density and modest means lead to invention, if not the kinds of appearance mandated by Home Owner Associations or preferred by the fusspot New Urbanist designers.

    In the past, the Mexican financial system has been criticized for maintaining a tight hold on credit. Even before the current crisis, high interest rates were unfriendly to the consumer, slowing the pace of both urban development and speculation. Given our current crisis, perhaps it’s worth asking whether this points to how the American market may develop in the future. Certainly, we can expect that credit will remain tight for a significant while. The rules for obtaining a mortgage will become more onerous; interest rates will be fixed, appraisals will be exact. McMansions will be of little interest except to large families of means; smaller and older homes will be at a premium. Definitions of overcrowding may change; design expectations will be downsized, and home maintenance will become more usual. As opportunities in the formal labor marketplace shrink, perhaps for an extended period, more Americans will work from their homes and garages, much as occurs in many developing countries.

    There may also be significantly less mobility, with little or no speculative purchasing. This is likely to have the greatest impact on the condominium market. Even affluent parents will be obligated to keep their college-age kids on campus rather than in condos that they hope to flip after graduation. And even when they have a degree, these young adults – with large student loans, minimal credit and no cash for a down payment – will become used to staying with their parents for longer periods, as is frequently the case in Mexico and other developing markets. This could extend into marriage and even family formation. The condos themselves will, for the foreseeable future, revert to rental properties, catering to those who can no longer maintain a foothold in the owner market.

    This does not imply that American cities are going to turn into Mexican ones any time soon. But there is much to be learned by studying the ways that Mexicans calculate risk. We might have fewer families borrowing beyond their means, and continually trying to beat the market. And with less aggregate risk in one part of our lives, we might then view other parts of our daily world with a little less obsession with control. We might be a little more relaxed about who lives next door; we might also be a little more tolerant about the age of their truck or the color of the drapes. After all, they might be Mexican, in which case we know that, if they are there, they can probably actually afford it.

    Andrew Kirby is the editor of the interdisciplinary Elsevier journal “Cities.”This is his 20th year as a resident of Arizona.