New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Two-Timing Telecommute Taxes

    Telecommuting — or telework — is a critical tool that can help employees, businesses and communities weather the current financial crisis, and thrive afterward. However, right now, the nation is burdened with a powerful threat to the growth of telework: the telecommuter tax. This tax is a state penalty imposed on Americans who work for employers outside their home states and sometimes telecommute.

    Proposed bi-partisan federal legislation called the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would abolish the telecommuter tax. To help assure that the nation can take full advantage of the economic relief telework offers, Congress must pass this bill – either as stand-alone legislation or as part of a new economic stimulus package.

    Relief for Employees

    Working from home (or alternative sites close to home) can save struggling families money on gasoline, parking, train and bus fares, dry cleaning, business wardrobes and work-week meals. They can save on dependent care by providing some of the necessary care themselves during the time they previously spent commuting.

    Telework can also relieve the considerable strain on Americans nearing retirement who have unexpectedly lost their pensions and must now continue working. Working indefinitely may be a hardship for many older employees. Some may not be able, physically, to continue making a daily round-trip commute. Some may need to move closer to their adult children who live out-of-state, either to receive physical help from them, or to help them with child-care costs by baby-sitting. If Americans who have been robbed of their retirements can work from home at least some of the time, they can stay on the job without having to travel as often or live as close to their offices.

    Relief for Employers

    Employers (both public and private) can use telework to slash real estate and energy expenses. When fewer employees work on-site every day, employers need to rent, heat, cool and light less office space.

    Implementing telework can also reduce recruitment and turnover costs: Employers offering flexibility can attract top-tier candidates from a wide geographic area, and generate loyalty among valued employees.

    Telework can reduce business interruption costs when an emergency or other major disruption occurs near the main office. If, for example, a severe storm, fire, bomb threat or transit strike affects the employer’s area, a staff trained to work remotely can keep operations running smoothly.

    And organizations adopting telework can become more productive. Employees can replace commute time with work time; concentrate better because they are less exposed to the frequent interruptions typical in busy offices; reduce absenteeism by completing tasks at home instead of taking whole days off when they have to meet non-work responsibilities, like caring for sick children, and reduce “presenteeism”, the phenomenon of employees showing up at the office when they are too sick to be productive and are likely to compromise the health and productivity of co-workers.

    Relief for Communities

    Telework can bring new Internet-based jobs to rural areas with sagging economies. It can also bring new home buyers to such regions: Americans who want to maintain their high paced, big-city careers in a slower paced, more scenic environment. A significant growth in the population of home-based workers in these communities can also produce growth in businesses catering to their needs, such as home office supply stores and business service providers.

    The Telecommuter Penalty Tax

    Despite the important help telework can provide during and after the financial meltdown, states may punish nonresident teleworkers by subjecting them to a telecommuter tax. New York has been particularly aggressive on this front.

    Under the “convenience of the employer” rule, when a nonresident of New York and his New York employer agree that the employee may sometimes work from home, New York will tax him on his entire income, both the income he earns when he works in New York, and the income he earns when he works at home, in a different state. Because telecommuters’ home states can also tax the wages telecommuters earn at home, they are taxed twice on those wages.

    In some cases, a telecommuter’s home state may give him a credit for the taxes he pays New York on the income he earns at home. However, even in such cases, the employee may be penalized for telecommuting. When New York taxes income at a higher rate than the home state, the telecommuter must pay taxes on his home state income at the higher rate.

    By subjecting nonresident employees to double or excessive taxation if they telecommute, a state like New York needlessly limits the strategies available for coping with our ailing economy.

    Harm to Employers

    By deterring telework, the telecommuter tax frustrates businesses trying to decentralize their workers and prevents them from exploiting telework’s business benefits.

    In addition, the hefty payroll obligations the telecommuter tax imposes on businesses can force companies to relocate. Indeed, The New York Times reported this year on a small business that planned to leave New York because tackling the state’s claims under the convenience of the employer rule proved too draining. (See David S. Joachim, “Telecommuters Cry ‘Ouch’ to the Tax Gods,” The New York Times, Special Section on Small Business, Feb. 20, 2008.)

    Further, by thwarting the growth of telework, the telecommuter tax encourages traffic congestion, a menace to productivity. Excessive traffic can, for example, cause employees to arrive late for work and delay customer deliveries.

    Harm to States

    In addition to employees and employers, telecommuters’ states of residence also suffer under the telecommuter tax. Consider a Virginia resident who telecommutes most of the time to his New York employer. If Virginia grants the telecommuter a credit for taxes paid to New York on his home state income, Virginia forfeits its tax revenue to New York. In so doing, Virginia effectively subsidizes public services in New York (like transportation, police, fire and other emergency services) while it makes the same services available to its resident who is working in Virginia. States currently struggling with steep budgetary shortfalls cannot afford to cede their own revenue to other states. The employee who telecommutes, meanwhile, suffers under a reduced budget for home state spending.

    Even the state imposing the tax loses. In addition to driving business away, New York’s telework tax policy can drive part-time telecommuters away. Because the convenience of the employer rule applies only to nonresidents who spend time working in New York, nonresidents can avoid the rule by avoiding the state: They can increase their telecommuting from part-time to full-time, or take jobs in their home states. When nonresidents stop traveling to New York for work, New York gives up the opportunity to tax any of their wages, and New York restaurants, hotels and other businesses lose the income these teleworkers would have generated on their commuting days.

    The Remedy

    The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would eliminate these ills, prohibiting states like New York from taxing the income nonresidents earn at home in other states.

    The bill has bi-partisan support in both Houses of Congress, including the support of lawmakers from Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi and Virginia. Outside Congress, the measure has been endorsed by advocates for telecommuters, taxpayers, homeowners and small businesses.

    To help assure that the greatest number of employees and businesses can maximize telework’s economic benefits – during the current crisis and afterward – Congress should pass the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act. Whether as an addition to a new stimulus package or in a separate measure, Washington must see to it that telecommuter tax fairness becomes the law.

  • St. Louis Blues

    The night of the election, my husband and I greeted with elation the news that the presidency would go to Barack Obama. Then, seconds later, we hunkered down on the sofa with anxious expressions and asked the talking heads: “What about Missouri?”

    It’s our state, and we want to know just where we stand as residents and in which direction the region is headed, but we also find it embarrassing to live in a red state. Our friends who live elsewhere pay little, if any, attention to what goes on here in St. Louis. In conversation, it’s hard not come away with the impression that they assume we are bereft of cultural institutions, public transportation, nightlife, public parks, ethnic and racial diversity, creative schools or, even, sometimes, vegetables. All of these assumptions are more about the amorphous realm of culture than they are about the bread-and-butter issues that determined this election. Yet, somehow, it is the amorphous that defines who I am the moment that I hear Missouri labeled “red state.”

    So, as it began to look like McCain was going to eke out a victory in Missouri, I did what all upper middle-class people in the United States do when anxious: I went online. My interest was in how the city of St. Louis compared to those cities where many of my friends live and where, frankly, I have often wished to live myself. I looked up the percentage of voters who favored Obama in the counties that included my “destination cities.” And, from greatest to least, here’s what I found:

    Washington D.C.: 92.9%
    San Francisco: 84.7%
    St. Louis: 83.7%
    Philadelphia: 83%
    Brooklyn: 78.9%
    Boston: 77.5%
    Portland: 77%
    Santa Fe: 76.8%
    Chicago: 76.1%
    Denver: 75.3%
    Queens: 74.4%
    Seattle: 71.4%
    Los Angeles: 69.3%
    New York: 62.1%

    That’s right: The city of St. Louis is one of the bluest places in America.

    There, are, of course, several caveats. St. Louis City, as opposed to St. Louis County, which includes the city’s suburbs, is incredibly small. I live in St. Louis County, where a far less dramatic proportion of folks, 59.5%, favored Obama. Yet, the inclusion of comparable areas in other cities, say, Riverside County for Los Angeles, where 50.8% of voters went for Obama, would yield a similar result. And for all the claims that Obama’s victory is ushering in a post-racial era, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that race had some role to play in places with large African American populations like D.C., Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Indeed, Missouri’s own status as red or blue rests on how many provisional ballots state officials will count, and most of those provisional ballots were cast in African American neighborhoods in St. Louis and Kansas City, where voters waited in line long into the night. Nonetheless, even taking into account urban size and white flight, it would appear that people who live in blue cities are often (but, of course, not always) next door to or at least near to, red counties.

    In the 1990s, red and blue state labels were shorthand for the policies that shaped funding for the arts and affirmative action and gay and lesbian rights. To a lesser extent, they were also about health care and education and housing and poverty and the perception of the U.S. abroad, but I can’t say that either set of issues jumped to mind when I heard the term: “red state, blue state.” Instead of culture wars, I more often thought of a battle between cultures of consumption – which cars were on the road, which greens were available at the supermarkets, the density of independent bookstores.

    These are rarely the images that spring to my mind now, nor are carbon emissions or food policy or literacy. For the first time in my voting life, I am preoccupied more by what I can do and less by what I can buy.

    I may have changed my opinions because I’m older, employed, and a parent. Nonetheless, I now think that to be blue on those all-too-simple electoral maps has a new meaning. I think it carries with it a new responsibility to talk to neighbors and to follow those issues that seem to cut through partisan divides, issues like economic security, public transportation, education, health care, and insuring a safe local and global environment.

    I thought about this new sense of responsibility this morning. I headed out my front door, turned right, and walked 110 steps. As red leaves fell, I stood in one of the bluest cities in America.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • No More Urban Hype

    Just months ago, urban revivalists could see the rosy dawn of a new era for America’s cities. With rising gas prices and soaring foreclosures hitting the long-despised hinterland, urban boosters and their media claque were proclaiming suburbia home to, as the Atlantic put it, “the next slums.” Time magazine, the Financial Times, CNN and, of course, The New York Times all embraced the notion of a new urban epoch.

    Yet in one of those ironies that markets play on hypesters, the mortgage crisis is now puncturing the urbanists’ bubble. The mortgage meltdown that first singed the suburbs and exurbs, after all, was largely financed by Wall Street, the hedge funds, the investment banks, insurers and the rest of the highly city-centric top of the paper food chain.

    So, now we can expect some of the biggest layoffs and drops in income next to be found in the once high-flying urban cores. In New York alone, Wall Street has shed over 25,000 jobs – and the region could shed a total of 165,000 over the next two years.

    Not surprisingly, the property crisis once seen as the problem of the silly, aspiring working class and the McMansion nouveaus has now spread deep into the bailiwick of the urban sophisticates. For the first time in years, many Manhattan apartments are selling for well below purchase price, something unheard of during the boom. In Brooklyn, a 24% drop in sales over the last three months even has boosters talking of an imminent “Brownstone bust.”

    Even San Francisco – arguably the most recession-resistant big city due to its large concentration of nonprofits and “trustifarians” – is seeing prices drop for the first time in years. Far more vulnerable are fledgling neo-urban markets like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Oakland, Calif., San Diego, Memphis, Tenn., Miami and Dallas. Sales are down in most of these markets, as are prices.

    Signs of the times: desperate developers offering goodies to buyers. One downtown Los Angeles property owner has even offered to buy a Mini Cooper for anyone bold enough to buy a loft. Others, in Oakland, Boston and Atlanta, are resorting to auctions to offload their product. Foreclosures have taken place in several other markets, including Charlotte, N.C., and Philadelphia.

    Not surprisingly, many new projects conceived at the height of the bubble are being canceled, and some newly minted condominiums converted into rentals. The rental option makes immediate sense but does not help create the ambiance of luxury so coveted by wannabe cool cities. High-end buyers generally do not covet the idea of having a bunch of college-student renters enjoying a similarly granite-counter-topped unit next door. This is not necessarily good news for expensive restaurants or boutiques either.

    In addition, just if anyone is checking, even at the peak of gas prices, there remains virtually no evidence of any massive movement of the bourgeoisie back into the burghs. One assumes that the now plunging oil prices will not hurt suburban commuters.

    In reality, what we have is a market that is stuck in almost all geographies. Rather than shift people into the urban cores, or vice-versa, the mortgage crisis is simply stopping everyone in their tracks. Even if people wanted to move into the core cities, they could not sell their suburban houses to make the down payments.

    Nor is there ample reason to believe the urban migration will pick up in the near future. Crime has soared in some cities such as Oakland and Chicago. (“Obamastan” has suffered more murders this year than much larger New York and Los Angeles.) Overall, urban crime remains three times that of suburbs; a suddenly rising instance of mayhem threatens many urban recoveries.

    And in the end, it’s really all about the economy. The looming massive layoffs in many key urban markets – notably New York, Chicago and San Francisco – cannot possibly help. Finance has remained one industry that has continued to cluster in core cities, even as most others moved to the suburbs and smaller towns.

    Moreover, it is not just New York. Now, as the butcher’s bill for mortgage mania comes due, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco are all facing large-scale layoffs. The office market in the Windy City, for example, is being decimated by cutbacks at JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Wachovia, as well as at the commodity exchanges. So far, the less finance-dependent suburban market appears less impacted.

    A recent visit to Chicago confirmed these trends. The once ballyhooed Trump Tower, once seen as the nation’s tallest luxury condominium, remains incomplete, with a massive crane still perched at its top and troubled by persistent rumors of failing financial support. Another hyped project, Santiago Calatrava’s 2000-foot, 150-story Chicago Spire, is stuck in the ground because the developer has stopped paying his “starchitect’s” bill. All this is not too surprising, given a reported 73% drop in downtown home sales for the first half of the year.

    For a decade or more, city leaders have kept thinking that something from outside – demographic changes, high fuel prices or changing consumer tastes – would create a revival for them. This allowed them to avoid doing hard, nasty things like cutting often-outrageous public employee pensions, streamlining regulations, cutting taxes levied on businesses or improving often-dismal schools and basic infrastructure.

    Maybe the current downturn can be a wake-up call for city boosters. Overall, since 2000, the average job growth in cities has averaged less than one-sixth that of suburbs, according to research by my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group. This has been particularly notable in higher-paying blue collar positions in manufacturing and warehousing, but increasingly applies also to higher-end business services.

    Cities should start realizing that their biggest problem is not a shortage of cultural venues and performance artists but a chronic lack of decent, middle class jobs. And to be sure, older cities do possess critical advantages such as already existing, if often tattered, transportation systems and the best strategic locations. Their old industrial districts possess an existing infrastructure and, in some cases, a residual pool of skilled labor and some decent job-training facilities. If properly prodded, local universities could also become part of the solution by seeding new entrepreneurial ventures.

    But such a return to basics may be nullified by the prospect of an urban Democrat coming into the White House and a Congress dominated by the likes of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel and Barney Frank. This will revive hope that largely suburban middle-class taxpayers will now bail out bloated city budgets and often-absurd projects (convention centers, stadia and associated nonsense).

    City leaders and land speculators may also play the Al Gore card of combating “global warming” to block new roads, single-family housing estates and even the transfer of jobs to the supposedly energy-inefficient suburbs. However, over time, the suburban-exurban majority is unlikely to support this approach. To experience a real renaissance, cities need to learn how to make themselves more congenial again to those – industry, entrepreneurs and the middle class – who have found themselves forced to head to the fringes for almost a half century.

    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.

  • Regulating People or Regulating Greenhouse Gases?

    It seems very likely that a national greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction standard will be established by legislation in the next year. Interest groups are lining up with various proposals, some fairly benign and others potentially devastating.

    One of the most frequently mentioned strategies – mandatory vehicle miles reductions – is also among the most destructive. It is predictably supported by the same interests that have pushed the anti-automobile (and anti-suburban) agenda for years, often under the moniker of “smart growth.”

    Regrettably, these interests have never understood the economic importance of rapid travel – mobility – throughout the nation’s urban areas. Indeed, one of the factors that makes American metropolitan areas so competitive is that, judging by work trips, travel times are the best in the world for their population. The secret to that success is the ubiquitous mobility of the automobile, which allows people to travel from virtually any point to any other in an urban area in a relatively short period of time. It also helps that automobile travel has become so inexpensive that it is available to more than 90 percent of the nation’s households. Restrictions on driving would change that.

    At this point, it is unclear exactly how any attempt to restrict driving might be implemented. It is clear, however, that the consequences will weigh most heavily on the nation’s lower-income, disproportionately-minority households. Any price mechanism would put limits first on the low income households who cannot afford the higher prices. At the same time, attempts to reduce the demand for automobile use by forcing more new development into existing urban footprints (urban areas) would make traffic congestion more severe, increase travel times and intensify air pollution. This approach would fall more harshly on low income households simply because housing prices (and rents) would rise disproportionately in urban areas as the option of opening new suburban developments on inexpensive land is removed or severely restricted.

    Mobility is crucial to the economic viability of urban areas and to their citizens, rich and poor. It does no good to claim that alternative transit services will be provided, because they generally cannot compete. According to data from the 2007 American Community Survey, the average transit work trip takes twice as long as the average single-occupant automobile work trip. This means that the average commuter would spend at least an additional eight hours traveling to and from work in a week.

    For low income households, this could mean the difference between employment and unemployment. How will a low-income single parent, for example, drop children off at day care centers and continue to work by transit? It might be considered a fortunate case if this could be accomplished in triple the time of the automobile commute.

    These dynamics were further demonstrated when University of California Berkeley researchers concluded that African-American unemployment could be substantially reduced if cars were available to non-car households. Brookings researchers put it more directly: “Given the strong connection between cars and employment outcomes, auto ownership programs may be one of the more promising options.” Or, as a Progressive Policy Institute report suggested, “In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car.”

    There is good reason to believe that technological solutions will make it possible for us – including low income households – to continue to live our lives as we do now while substantially reducing GHG emissions. People are already driving less and shifting to more fuel-efficient cars. Volkswagen plans to market 1,000 prototype 235 mile per gallon cars in 2010. They are only two-seaters but could be used for a large share of travel. If, in 2030, one-quarter of US car travel was by such cars, the average fuel economy would be about 75 miles per gallon and concern about cars as a source of GHG emissions would be a thing of the past. And this does not even consider the alternative fuel advances – electric cars, natural gas, hydrogen – that are on the horizon.

    There is a broader problem with the idea of restricting driving. This strategy is less about the environment and more about regulating people’s behavior. It is not people that require regulation, it is GHG emissions. There is a subtle but important difference.

    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.”

  • Turns Out There’s Good News on Main St.

    As the financial crisis takes down Wall Street, the regular folks on Main Street are biting their nails, watching the toxic tsunami head their way. But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won’t be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

    This trend toward what I call “the new localism” has been underway for some years, driven by changing demographics, new technologies and rising energy prices. But the economic downturn will probably accelerate it as individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live – in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns.

    In his 1972 bestseller, “A Nation of Strangers,” social critic Vance Packard depicted the United States as “a society coming apart at the seams.” He was only one in a long cavalcade of futurists who have envisioned an America of ever-increasing “spatial mobility” that would give rise to weaker families, childlessness and anonymous communities.

    Packard and others may not have been far off for their time: In 1970, nearly 20 percent of Americans changed their place of residence every year. But by 2004, that figure had dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since 1950. Americans born today are actually more likely to reside near their place of birth than those who lived in the 19th century. Part of this is due to our aging population, because older people are far less likely to move than those under 30. But more limited economic options may intensify this phenomenon while bringing a host of social, economic and environmental benefits in their wake.

    For one thing, they may strengthen those long-weakening family ties. We’re already seeing signs of that. American family life today may not look like “Ozzie and Harriet,” with its two-parent nuclear family, but it reflects a pattern of earlier generations, when extended networks helped families withstand the dislocations of the westward expansion or of immigration.

    With a majority of married women now working, parents are frequently sharing child-rearing duties, and other family members are getting into the act. Grandparents and other relatives help provide care for roughly half of all preschoolers in the country. As the cost of living rises, this trend could accelerate.

    At the same time, difficulty in getting reasonable mortgages and the realities of diminished IRAs will force baby boomers and Generation Xers both to prolong their parental responsibilities and to delay their retirements. This, too, is already happening: According to one study, one-fourth of Gen-Xers still receive help from their parents. And as many as 40 percent of Americans between 20 and 34, according to another survey, live at least part-time with their parents.

    This clustering of families, after decades of dispersion, will spur more localism, which has a simple premise: The longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with and care for those places.

    This is evident in everything from the mushrooming of farmers markets in communities nationwide to burgeoning suburban cultural institutions. Since the 1980s, suburbs outside such cities as Chicago, Atlanta, Washington and Los Angeles have been building or contemplating new town centers – their own Main Streets, if you will, village squares intended to foster a unique local identity and community focus. Scores of suburban towns have established local orchestras and built playhouses and symphony halls – Strathmore Hall in Bethesda is one example. All this activity has dispelled some of the view of suburbs as strongholds of middle-class torpor.

    “This used to be a place where people went to sleep,” says Patricia Jones, president of the Arts Alliance, a group that helps raise funds for the sprawling, $63 million Civic Arts Plaza in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks. “Now it’s a place where people live, work and find their entertainment. It’s a totally different environment. It’s not boring anymore.”

    Not only that, it’s probably more interconnected than ever before. In suburbs and cities from Los Angeles to New York, Web-based community newsletters have sprung up to keep residents informed of goings-on in their neighborhoods and to provide a sense of connectedness. “There’s an attempt in this neighborhood to break down the city feel and to see this more as a kind of a small town,” says Ellen Moncure, who edits the Flatbush Family Network Web site in New York. “It may be in the city, but it’s a community unto itself, a place where you can stay and raise your children.”

    Bolstering the trend are today’s higher energy prices, which make Americans’ old nomadic patterns less economically viable in more ways than one. Take recreation. More and more, says Tim Schneider, publisher of a magazine specializing in sports travel, people are sticking close to home instead of trekking far and wide in search of fun things to do. “Stay cations,” or vacations near home, are taking the place of trips to exotic distant locales. This means tougher times for such traditional tourist hot spots as Las Vegas and Hawaii, both of which have seen a drop-off in flight arrivals due to airline cutbacks. But there’s a moral for cities, says Schneider: Instead of counting on convention centers and arts and cultural facilities to attract outside tourists, most would do better to promote local “place-branding” events such as festivals, rodeos, sports tournaments and the like.

    Higher energy prices may also refocus local economies in unexpected ways. For generations, most Americans have been buying their food from distant corporate providers. But with shipping costs – and food-safety concerns – on the rise, the trend to buy local is moving into the mainstream. In Maryland, the number of farmers markets has grown from 20 in 1991 to 84 today. In 1977, California had four such markets; today it has more than 500. Higher energy costs could also benefit local manufacturers, bringing, say, clothing manufacture back to the Los Angeles garment district from China.

    The final factor driving the localist trend is technology, which has led to a rapid expansion of home-based work and to companies’ setting up work locations closer to where their employees live. The number of home-based workers has doubled twice as quickly in this decade as in the last and is now about 9 million. Nationwide, 13 million people telecommuted at least one day a week in 2007, a 16 percent leap from 2004. And more than 22 million people run home-based businesses.

    A recent study suggests that more than one-quarter of the U.S. workforce could eventually participate full- or part-time in this new work pattern. And over time, it will accelerate localism. Commuting – which became common only over the past century – has cut workers off from the places where they live. Home-based work, by contrast, gives people more choice about where they work and more time to spend with their families and communities.

    Telecommunication allows people who want privacy, low-density neighborhoods and good schools to live in small towns in a way never before possible. It also allows a firm such as Renaissance Learning, a leading educational software company, to set up headquarters in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., a city of 17,500 whose small-town feeling, broad river and wooded countryside appeal to many workers. “We don’t have any trouble recruiting people here,” says Mark Swanson, the firm’s technical director.

    Yet the desire to stay in the local community isn’t limited to small towns or suburbs. I see it where I live, in California’s San Fernando Valley, or in parts of my mother’s native Brooklyn, where lots of people employed in fields such as the arts, consulting and design work at home or nearby and crowd the coffee shops, restaurants and stores of streets such as Ventura Boulevard in Studio City or once-decayed but now bustling Cortelyou Road in Flatbush.

    In the end, localism is neither urban nor anti-urban. At its heart, it represents something larger: a historic American tradition that sees society’s smaller units as vital and the proper focus of most people’s lives. This made the United States different from Europe, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, has long tended toward centralization of power and decision-making.

    The expansion of the European welfare state has further fostered this trend. But it’s also true that Europeans tend to move less than Americans. And the powerful resistance to the most intrusive forms of European Union integration, such as a continent-wide constitution, suggest that strong localist elements remain imbedded in European communities.

    But if Europe is joining the trend, the United States is likely to be the leader in pushing decentralization. What most impressed Tocqueville wasn’t our large cities but the vitality of our many smaller towns and communities. “The intelligence and the power are dispersed abroad,” he wrote, “and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction.”

    Today’s localist revival reflects this tradition, but with the benefit of the great access to the larger world that technology provides. It offers the prospect of an America that, rather than being “a nation of strangers,” can aspire again to be a nation of neighbors . . . in places that we choose for ourselves.

    This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. He is finishing a book on the American future.

  • “The Not So Big House” Ten Years Later

    It has been ten years since The Not So Big House became a surprise best seller, elevating a successful but unknown Minneapolis-based architect, Sarah Susanka, to the couch of Oprah Winfrey. Shortly after its release, the book became number one on Amazon.com, the force of which wasn’t fully understood or appreciated back in 1998. Since then she’s published five more books in the Not So Big series, but none have benefited as much from pitch-perfect timing. Not only was technology reaching people in new ways, it was reaching the very people for whom Susanka was writing, even if she didn’t know it at the time.

    In the introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition, she admits to being perplexed by the overwhelming response to her “not so big” message, but then she read an article on “Cultural Creatives” by sociologist Dr. Paul Ray, who identified a previously undiscovered segment of the population that was looking for ways to live “responsibly, sustainably, and meaningfully.” While the term “Cultural Creatives” is essentially the New Age version of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” (and equally ill-defined), clearly her book was at the forefront of something – be it a new culture, a new class or a new generation. Most likely a combination of all three, let’s call it the Dwell magazine demographic.

    In the pre-Dwell magazine world of 1998, however, Susanka’s book – if not cutting edge architecturally (her aesthetic draws heavily on Frank Lloyd Wright) – was in sync with this emerging demographic’s tastes. Of course, urban Dwellers have always dealt with smaller spaces and lived “sustainably” whether they meant to or not. But Susanka’s book focused exclusively on the non-urban single-family house, which is where the vast majority of people were and still are living in the United States. Reviewers took note that her message bucked the “starter castle” trend, (a term that has since been dropped in favor of “McMansion”). For those Dwellers not inclined to move to urban areas or fix up older housing in declining inner-ring suburbs, there was little to choose from that emphasized quality over quantity. As the success of her book clearly demonstrates, not all Dwellers were rejecting the suburbs – with its low-density, car-dependent development pattern. For some, it was the housing stock itself that was the problem. It simply no longer fit the way many people actually live.

    “Today’s houses still wear the architectural equivalent of a hoopskirt, even if the accessories seem more contemporary,” wrote Susanka. “While we’ve been busy evolving over the past century, most of our houses have not. Their evolution has been constricted by outdated notions of what we think we need and what the real estate industry says we need for resale. At the turn of the new century, most houses are designed for the turn of the last.”

    How did that happen? The real estate industry is notoriously slow to respond to change, which was well underway in 1998. Globalization and technology were (and still are) changing the way people live and work, but the housing stock was stuck in the industrial era with its emphasis on a division of labor both inside and outside the home. In his 1991 book, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, noted that in the industrial era, cities had become all but unlivable and people retreated into their homes. “The public world of the street was harsh, crime ridden, cold, and above all, confused in its very complexity.”

    To counteract the chaos, he noted, “[t]he private realm sought order and clarity through applying the division of labor to the emotional realm of the family, partitioning its experience into rooms.” Communal areas of the home gave way to activity-specific, divided rooms, with the man in the study, the woman in the kitchen, the children in their own separate bedrooms or play areas: “Separation created isolation in the family as much as it did on the street. . . . The hearth was supposed to give warmth, yet the division of labor [inside the house] gradually cast its own chill.”

    Today’s suburban McMansion is essentially the same isolating nineteenth century home on steroids (although far from urban chaos), and the housing bubble in the first half of the decade only made matters worse. Like a supernova that burns brightest just before collapsing in on itself, McMansion developers went on their final building spree despite the trend that Susanka had identified. One executive in the homebuilding industry told The New York Times in 2006: “We haven’t been as quick to adapt to the market as we should have been.” Why? “Most home builders are reluctant to change the formula that made them so profitable over the past 10 years,” explained James Chung, president of Reach Advisors, a Boston-based marketing firm.

    According to Reach Advisors, among the Dwell demographic who prefer single-family houses, they want smaller homes built closer together with amenities that foster interaction with their neighbors, such as dog parks and walking trails. They would also prefer their private space cultivate family interaction rather than be divided into separate activity rooms. For decades, progressive urban planners have advocated for mixed-use buildings and blocks, but the same could be said for a suburban house. Multi-use spaces are where families interact, and that interaction makes the difference between a house that is merely occupied and a home that is truly lived in.

    But rather than scale down to a more efficient design, McMansion builders just kept adding on to the already bloated floor plans, with the industrial era house at the core and all the new economy rooms tacked on. Media rooms, home offices, and hearth rooms – a poor imitation of a loft-like space, where the kitchen flows into eating and sitting areas anchored by a fireplace – grossly expanded square footage. According to Census data, median square feet of floor area for new privately owned, single-family homes jumped from 1,560 in 1974 to 2,248 in 2006. The typical McMansion is 3,000 square feet or larger. The numbers are not yet all in, but anecdotal evidence indicates that it is these energy-inefficient behemoths built far from job centers that have experienced the most drastic price declines in the current housing market crisis, possibly the worst in American history.

    With prices already down almost 20 percent, home values are on track to decline as much as they did during the Great Depression. According to Robert Schiller, professor of economics at Yale University and an early predictor of the housing market decline, currently there are about 10 million homeowners who owe more on their home than it is worth. And even if the market has hit bottom, after adjusting for inflation, most homeowners will continue to lose money.

    Of course, this is not solely the fault of McMansion builders and buyers. Old neighborhoods in rust-belt cities with small, densely packed houses have been devastated as well. But clearly, the market is not in turmoil because working class people fell victim to subprime loan sharking but in part because developers built and middle class and wealthy people bought way more house than they could ever need or even want. The New York Times recently featured a 26,000 square foot home in Greenwich, CT that has been put up for auction. “We kind of knew even before the house was finished that it was too much house for us,” said the homeowner, Stan Cheslock, a Baby Boomer-aged financial investor. While this is a gross example, would the housing market be in better shape if “not so big” were the predominant building philosophy, and not just a countervailing trend among the Dwell demographic? One could make a case.

    Like the American auto industry rediscovering demand for fuel-efficient cars, in the current housing crisis The Not So Big House still feels highly relevant if no longer revelatory. Susanka took inspiration from the sailboat, where efficiency and multi-purpose space is essential. “Because of this careful, thoughtful use of space, it’s no great exaggeration to suggest that six people can live more comfortably on a 40-ft. boat than they can in a big, badly designed house.” To that end, she emphasized cozy spaces over cathedral-like great rooms; socializing areas that flow together but utilize ceiling height variation and lighting design to delineate spaces; and “away rooms” for private time. She noted that some of her clients discovered the appeal of the “not so big house” when it came to building a second home for summers or weekends. When her clients realized they preferred their second home – with its emphasis on informal comfort and efficiency – they began to rethink their primary residences.

    But for most people, the fact that large formal living and dining rooms go unused for all but a few days of the year, ditto that oversized jacuzzi in the master bath and formerly screened-in porch – which was much loved in the summertime but after being converted to a year-round room became just another underutilized sitting area – is not enough to convince them to choose smaller spaces. So the McMansion explosion happened at the same time the “not so big house” message came to define the tastes of an emerging demographic of homeowners. But 10th Anniversary edition, Susanka doesn’t do much to explain why.

    One clue might be found in a new twist on the theory of conspicuous consumption, as noted in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst, two economists at the University of Chicago, show that a relatively poor group in close proximity to a relatively well-off group will spend more on “bling” at the expense of their own needs and private comforts. While they were studying differences in spending habits of blacks and whites, the same could be applied to the growing gap between the upper middle class and the super wealthy, a relatively new phenomenon. Between 1949 and 1979, income at all levels grew relatively equally, but since then income growth has occurred disproportionately at the upper echelons. The richest 1 percent increased their portion of the national income from 8.2 percent in 1980 to 17.4 percent in 2005. The Economic Policy Institute calculated that in 2004 only the top 5 percent of households increased their incomes, while the remaining 95 percent had flat or falling incomes. It’s not too much of a stretch to apply the “bling” theory to the upper middle class and their McMansion home-buying habits. If your income is stagnant or even dropping, keeping up appearances becomes paramount.

    For the Dwell demographic – which never expected to be super rich – the point is not smaller for its own sake but a shift of emphasis to quality materials, customization and detailing with a technological update. This preference doesn’t necessarily lead to one aesthetic. Dwell readers will not find much in the way of cutting edge design in the Not So Big House, either in the original book or the 10th Anniversary edition. Susanka’s tastes are “Minnesota nice” – a house should compliment, not detract from its neighbors (Susanka now lives in Raleigh, NC). Photos emphasize suburban bliss in warm hues, with lots of woodwork and overstuffed couches. It is the “not so big” philosophy that defines the Dwell demographic with its more traditional middle class emphasis on private luxury in the service of comfort, practicality over bling. Just a sampling of a few Dwell articles over the years: “Affordable Luxury: 10 Homes that Do More with Less,” “Bathrooms 101: Innovative Materials, Cool Products,” “Collapsible Furniture for Cozy Spaces.”

    Despite having defined this emerging demographic’s housing preference, not only does Susanka fail to reconcile the popularity of her book with the McMansion explosion of the past ten years, she claims a little more credit than is probably due. She notes in the preface to the 10th Anniversary edition that the average size of a new home in the U.S. finally leveled off at just under 2,500 sq. feet (an accurate statement) and that over 40 percent of new homes are now built without a formal living room (a dubious statistic). “I think the Not So Big House series has helped to turn this tide,” wrote Susanka. Clearly, that tide was turned by much larger forces.

    Lisa Chamberlain is the author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction and covers real estate for The New York Times.

  • Beyond The Bailout: What’s Next in the Housing Market?

    The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (we’ll call it the “Bail Out”) was signed into law on October 3rd. This, combined with the new reality in capital markets and current economic conditions, will result in some major shifts in the outlook for housing over the next few years. It is always possible that the federal government will try to do even more to fix what will be an agonizing housing problem over the next few years, but seems unlikely even Bernake, Paulson or their appointed successors will be able to change the basic story line.

    The Credit Market
    Let’s set up the dynamics. The era of easy credit, especially in terms of mortgages and home equity lines, is over. The 2002 through early 2006 period will turn out to be an aberration in history. During that period, about all a person needed to do to qualify for a mortgage was to be healthy. For the foreseeable future, we will see the return of such requirements as a down payment and the ability to repay your loan based on income, along with a good credit history, that will allow a person to qualify. The tighter credit and the slow down of the economy already is making it difficult for all but the best borrowers to get mortgage loans. Thus, the housing market will remain under significant pressure and the excess supply will be absorbed only slowly.

    The Consumer
    Consumers have accumulated far too much debt; they don’t have much in the way of traditional savings; are faced with job declines and declines in hours worked and are also facing a reverse wealth affect (i.e. people tend to spend more when they feel richer and less when they feel poorer). In the 1990s, consumers felt wealthier because the stock market did very well. Studies of the wealth effect indicate that people spend about five cents out of every dollar of increased net worth from stock and housing price appreciation over about a three to five year period of time. In the early part of this decade, not only were housing prices rising rapidly, but, almost unbelievably (in retrospect), easy credit allowed people to use their house as a credit card. The result was a boom in retail spending and home buying. In fact, the rate of homeownership in the U.S. went from a long term average of about 65% in 2002, to a high of nearly 69% in 2006. The percentage of people who bought homes, as a percent of total households, reached a record level.

    Supply and Demand
    Today, there are roughly two million more homes for sale in the nation than normal (4.3 million new and resale listings versus the long-term average of 2.3 million homes for sale). In addition, foreclosures are skyrocketing and are likely to stay high for quite some time. Many recent buyers simply were not financially ready for home ownership’s financial realities. Basic demand has diminished significantly as the number of prospects who can qualify has declined. Put all of these things together and you will have a period where not only will there be fewer homes purchased, but there will be high levels of foreclosures, a decline back to the normalized level of homeownership. There will be fewer people moving (i.e. if you can’t sell your house in California, Michigan or Pennsylvania, you are not moving to Arizona). What this implies is that the demographic demand for housing will be lower than normal over the next few years until the excess supply is absorbed.

    How long will this take? Analysis suggests that it is two to four years away nationally and longer in the bubble states: Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada. All this suggests that as the homeownership rate comes down, more people will be moving to apartments, people will “double up” or move back home. As a result much of the housing demand will be absorbed by foreclosures and the excess existing housing inventory, mitigating the need for significant new housing in the near term.

    If you add this all up, this also means slower growth in what were normally rapid growing areas (like Phoenix) where a full recovery could take four to five years for housing. As the home-ownership – including condos – rate moves back to its long term trends there will be a shift back to apartments.

    Overall, there will be fewer single family homes demanded, more apartments demanded, and the homes that are demanded will be more affordable. The most affordable areas will continue to be at the edge of town. In addition, given how difficult it has been to get the entitlements necessary for new apartment construction in areas like Phoenix over the past several years along with the number of condos that are being converted back to multi-family rentals, rents are likely to increase past 2009 or 2010 as the excess supply of rental single family homes, condos and apartments are absorbed.

    Overall homeownership will still be the American dream, but that dream will not again be something people think about until housing prices stop declining and start recovering. It’s going to be a tough ride, particularly in Sunbelt ‘boomtowns’ like Phoenix.

    Elliott D. Pollack is Chief Executive Officer of Elliott D. Pollack and Company in Scottsdale, Arizona, an economic and real estate consulting firm established in 1987, which provides a broad range of services, specializing in Arizona economics and real estate.

  • The Geography of Inequality

    The global financial crisis has drawn greater attention to the world of the super rich and to the astounding increases in inequality since 1980, returning the country to a degree of inequality last seen in 1929 or perhaps even 1913. In the year 2006 alone, Wall Street executives received bonuses of $62 billion. Financial services increased from 10 percent of all business profits in 1980 to 40 percent in 2007, an obscene and indefensible development that now threatens the rest of the ‘real economy’.

    Here’s what happened to income and wealth between 1970 and 2005

    These figures reveal an inexorably growing concentration of income and wealth, which has taken place under both Democratic and Republican regimes. Conversely, given inflation over the last 35 years, lower and middle classes receive smaller shares. Only the affluent – the top 10% – and the rich – the top 1% – have gained ground.

    This pattern of inequality also has a geography with variations across the country between different places (here counties). Generally between 1970 and 2000 the greatest inequality has developed in the largest metropolitan regions and their suburbs.


    Large metropolitan core counties are by far the most likely to have higher inequality. In contrast other geographies have much lower inequality, with small metropolitan, small city and rural counties near the national average. In other words, core metropolitan counties are skewed toward greater inequality (higher shares of very rich and of very poor), while suburban and exurban areas generally exhibit lower inequality (values bunched centrally, with fewer extremely rich or poor households).

    Overall the greatest inequality lies in the very largest metropolitan cores (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston, etc), areas with large racial or ethnic minorities (e.g., in FL, TX, CA and much of the South), as well as in selected large northeastern metropolises (suburb as well as core, as in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC) and across the southern half of the country more generally. Lower inequality occurs mainly in suburban or small metropolitan counties, and mainly in the north.

    Among smaller metropolitan (< 50,000 households) and non-metropolitan counties there emerges a truly dramatic north-south cleavage just around the Iowa border and along the Ohio River divide. A more mixed pattern prevails in the west and in the northeast, where intermediate levels of inequality are common. Especially high rates of inequality characterize racial and ethnic minority areas and Appalachia, as could be expected, but also many environmental amenity areas, especially in the west. Low inequality is fairly extensive in the hinterlands of selected Great Lakes and upper Midwest metropolises, like Omaha, Minneapolis and Chicago. Generally more egalitarian areas boast higher incomes, female labor force participation, more shares in manufacturing, greater incidence of husband-wife families, of whites, of home ownership, but lower percentages of government and service jobs, fewer residents with less than a 9th grade education, people 18-24, singles, single parent families, and less Blacks and Hispanics. High levels of inequality are generally the opposite of the egalitarian areas: more minorities, single parent families, less manufacturing and dependence on government as well as service sector jobs. Inequality varies by both kinds of settlement geography and by the social and economic character of areas. The most obvious and visible attributes that signify greater inequality are social characteristics: racial and ethnic minorities, low levels of education, low proportions of traditional husband-wife families (partly because of fewer earners), and high dependency (many of the very young and very old). Unequal places tend to be those with low concentrations of manufacturing and higher shares of both managerial-professional occupations and service jobs. Geographic impacts vary. Most rural, newer suburban and exurban areas tend to have lower inequality because they tend to maintain middle income homogeneity. Yet rural areas that are isolated and have weak economies, like Appalachia, suffer high inequality. Large metropolitan areas with the highest inequality also tend to have large concentrations of racial minorities and of non-families, especially young singles Overall it is clear that inequality has been on the rise since 1970. This was a time when the nation was prosperous, manufacturing was strong, as were unions, income taxes fairly progressive, while “war on poverty” legislation had helped those at the bottom, the baby boom was still on and families dominant. But if the extent of inequality has grown, its geography has changed far less. Large metropolitan cores had the highest inequality in 1970 and 2000, and metropolitan suburbs and exurbs the lowest, with small cities in between. Yet inequality grew fastest in large metropolitan cores and suburbs. Small metropolitan areas (many were small cities in 1970) had the next highest increase (80 percent) and rural small town areas the lowest (69 percent). Sadly, only a few counties had decreases in inequality. Many were military base counties, mainly in the south. Another group of counties with lower inequality are new suburban counties, which have become more uniformly middle class as a result of significant urban growth, mainly in the South with more rapid urban and industrial growth. Overall, the change in inequality between 1970 and 2000 was substantial and wide ranging. The causes for this tend to be national and structural, including deindustrialization, the rise of a service economy, the decline of the traditional family and tax changes favoring the very wealthy. Areas that traditionally were most unequal – notably the great global cities – have simply become more so. It is here, in the command and communication centers of the economy, that the greatest wealth has been accumulated and where we can see the rise of a new aristocracy nevertheless dependent on a large low wage service class. The next Administration and Congress should start to address these trends or the traditional American dream will become, for most citizens, no more than that. Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • Sprawl is ubiquitous, even in my beloved Copenhagen

    The year I attended the University of Copenhagen as an undergraduate, I lived in a suburb north of the city and commuted to the central city via bus and rail (the famous S-trains). What a great system, I remember thinking as an impressionable ingénue (you could go anywhere, and trains were on time to the second!). When I returned as a graduate student I lived right in the city center and discovered that great public transit did not obviate the need for extensive walking (I must have worn out five pairs of shoes that year). Besides my two stints as a resident, I have been fortunate enough to return to Copenhagen countless times as a visitor for business, scholarship and pleasure, and I am familiar with the place both as a motorist and public transit user.

    In all the 37 years I have been traveling to and living in Copenhagen, it has always struck me that despite one of the best public transportation systems of which I am aware (in terms of coverage, efficiency, ease of use and affordability), and despite the fact that cars are at least twice as expensive as here in the States (the sales tax on cars is 180%), and despite the fact that gasoline is three to four times as expensive as here, and despite the fact that city parking is difficult, non-existent or prohibitively expensive (and parking fines severe) – despite all of this – rush hour traffic congestion is awful (a constant source of grief and complaint), and the endless streams of cars seem to contain, as in so many cities with lesser alternatives, lone drivers.

    It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The city development plan was designed as a hand with five fingers outstretched – the palm as city center and each of the five fingers as a corridor of residential, commercial and retail development (along rail lines, of course). This was smart growth before the term had been invented. It worked, but what was perhaps unforeseen was that development would also occur in areas in-between and beyond the five corridors. As a result, Copenhagen has become, like so many modern cities, a multi-centered urban metropolis. In order to function in this post-industrial economy and society, residents and workers need to travel freely and frequently to many different points around the metro area, at different times of the day, for different reasons, for different lengths of time, for different purposes. Because the existence of the five corridors has created a defacto hub-and-spoke system, it is difficult and prohibitively time-consuming to use public transit for such travel (and ungodly in winter). So of course Copenhagen has become as car-dependent as Los Angeles.

    Another piece of this picture is that Danes, being a free and intelligent people, prefer suburban living in detached single-family residences over enforced residential density, and prefer owning and driving their own cars over taking public transportation (if given the choice!). So despite a very leftist political orientation among elites, media, academia, government and public policy professionals (including urban planners), and despite a highly socialized component to its otherwise free-market economy, the Danish capital’s suburban job, business and population growth has been outpacing its urban growth for decades.

    According to Ronald D. Utt and Wendell Cox, writing on www.heritage.org (in response to a World Watch report, “City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl”), from 1950 to 1990 Copenhagen’s population dropped from 760,000 to 465,000, nearly 40 percent.

    Since 1960, the Copenhagen urbanized area (including suburbs) has dropped in population 14 percent, while its land area has expanded 24 percent. And from 1970 to 1990, per capita automobile usage increased nearly 70 percent in the Copenhagen area, while public transit’s market share declined 15 percent.

    This of course is a problem. People are not behaving according to our plans! According to the report “Urban Sprawl in Europe? The Ignored Challenge,” released by the European Environment Agency (based in Copenhagen, by the way), sprawl is affecting almost all of Europe’s cities: “If this trend continues, the European urban area will double in just over a century. Sprawling cities demand more energy supply, require more transport infrastructure and consume larger amounts of land. This damages the natural environment and increases greenhouse gas emissions.”

    The report identifies the key problem as too much local control of urban development decisions, and calls for “urgent action by all responsible agencies and stakeholders to realize common objectives,” or in other words, centralized planning and control. Among the report’s conclusions is this little chill-inducing nugget:

    “The EU has specific obligations and a mandate to act and take a lead role in developing the right frameworks for intervention at all levels, and to pave the way for local action. Policies at all levels including local, national and European need to have an urban dimension to tackle urban sprawl and help to redress the market failures that drive urban sprawl.”

    It’s all pointless, of course: sprawl is ubiquitous, natural, desirable, beneficial, and preferable. As Edward Glaeser (Harvard, Brookings) and Matthew Kahn (UCLA) document in “Sprawl and Urban Growth” (National Bureau of Economic Research), transportation technologies dictate urban form, and in the 21st century the dominant transportation technology is the car. Hence, the urban form of the 21st century is sprawl, or city living based on the automobile. Isn’t this a bad thing? Quite the contrary, per Glaeser and Kahn: “Sprawl has been associated with significant improvements in quality of living, and the environmental impacts of sprawl have been offset by technological change.”

    Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), would agree. He calls sprawl a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, a pattern of development that has provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. Add Bruegmann, Glaeser, Kahn, Cox and Utt to the growing component of anti-anti-sprawl policy analysts such as John Carlisle (Capital Research Center), Peter Gordon (USC School of Urban Planning), Peter Huber (Manhattan Institute), Mark Mills (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Steve Hayward (Pacific Research Institute), Anthony Downs (Brookings Institution), and Harry Richardson (Cascade Institute).

    Copenhagen remains one of my favorite cities, a marvelous combination of the old and new. It has a great quality of life and in my experience, the Danes know how to live it. The central city is charming, and the urban sprawl adds to the possibilities and potentials for all manner of experience and opportunity. I’m already looking forward to my next trip back.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He publishes Growth Strategies, a newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends, and is a professional public speaker. Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis in Copenhagen, and North American representative for its US Consumer Demand Index.

  • Neither fish nor fowl: Emerging urban enclaves in inner-ring suburbia

    By Peter Smirniotopoulos

    As I was walking my dog the other morning I was struck by the fact that the City of Falls Church, Virginia, the quaintly bucolic suburban “village” to which our family moved in mid-2001, was no longer suburban. It isn’t a city in the proper sense, like Washington, DC or even Alexandria, Virginia, but it is reflective of the trend towards quasi-urban places in the close-in rings – the original turn-of-the-century and pre-Levittown suburbs – enveloping our city cores.

    The City of Falls Church was formed around the middle of the last century by a group of secessionists residing in what was then a sliver of Fairfax County along the Arlington County border. The candy coated version of the city’s history holds that these secessionists were seeking to create a better school system for their children; the more cynical view is that they were creating a segregated, white school system. Whichever version of the truth you prefer, the Falls Church City Public Schools subsequently became the first public school system in the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt the International Baccalaureate (I.B.) curriculum. In 2001, the city’s George Mason High School ranked #5 among the country’s most-challenging high schools, eventually reaching #2.

    Like many other metro areas, the geographic pattern of regional growth in the Washington metro area has been driven in by the successes of its suburban public school systems, with the Fairfax County and Montgomery County, Maryland, school districts being the most notable. A metro Atlanta county executive explained this phenomenon thusly: “People don’t want to live where they can’t educate their kids,” rationalizing why his county, with a well-respected public school system, was growing and thriving while the neighboring county, with a somewhat derided public school system, was not.

    So homebuyers have flocked to the City of Falls Church and its nationally ranked high school, putting sufficient pressure on home prices (primarily single-family detached homes on modest-sized yet verdant lots) to raise the median price precipitously. The high school certainly was a primary motivation for our move from Del Ray.

    Yet when we left our Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria we also wanted to replicate – to the greatest extent possible – our community’s walkability and mixed-use character. Yet these fundamental attributes were not as pronounced in the City of Falls Church, in part because it is bisected by two major arterials: Va. Route 7 (cleverly named “Broad Street,” being four lanes wide), an east-west connector; and Washington Street, also known as Lee Highway or Rte 29, a north-south connector (also four-lanes wide but the name “Broad Street” had apparently already been taken).

    When we arrived in the city the stretch of Route 7 that extends west from this major intersection was characterized primarily by low-scale (i.e. one and two-story) retail and commercial buildings. The predominant commercial building typology along one stretch of Route 7 was one-and-a-half story single-family residential structures fronted by surface parking adapted for commercial uses (palm reading, anyone?), reflecting neither good urban nor suburban values.

    And yet since 2001 things began to change for the better. Local elected leaders had an epiphany that a city of two-square miles is not sustainable. Relying almost exclusively on property tax revenues from single-family detached homes simply does not generate enough money to cover the expenses they generate. The success of similar suburban-to-urban transformations in nearby Arlington County along the Metro line – like Clarendon and Ballston – was both instructive and politically comforting. City leaders and staff began to embrace the concept of denser mixed-use development, although not without taking some political heat from those insisting that their suburban village be protected and preserved.

    Today, Route 7 benefits from four, very urban mixed-use buildings – ranging in height from four to eight stories – adding dramatically to the diversity of the city’s housing stock, helping to diversify the city’s tax base, and putting boots (or at least pumps and loafers) on the street. These new buildings also provide a much better focus for the city’s “Main Street” than the single-story structures they replaced, with the new building heights and strong street walls better modulating the width and traffic flow on Route 7. A fifth new building is currently under construction and a hotel has also been approved.

    In addition, two new, mid-rise, mixed-use projects now anchor either end of Lee Highway, and an ambitious City Center project may finally become a reality, potentially trumping the visual cacophony of the nearby Route 7/Lee Highway intersection (an excellent example of bad urban forms meet typical low-rise, suburban development). Moreover, the attendant broadening of the tax base will eventually insulate the city’s fortunes from the ebbs-and-flows of either the commercial or the residential real estate markets.

    As a result, in terms of physical form and character the City of Falls Church is now much closer to “urban” than “suburban.” As ground floor retail spaces fill in and mid-rise residential units become fully occupied, that evolution from suburban to urban will become more pronounced. Residents in the single-family detached homes and newly minted McMansions lining the neighborhood streets on both sides of Route 7 also will benefit from having many more things to see and do within walking distance of their homes.

    The small-town origins of the city can still play out in somewhat nostalgic events like the Annual Memorial Day Parade (and who doesn’t love to see Shriners in their fezzes and tiny race cars). Neighbors will continue their weekly chats at the Saturday morning Farmers’ Market at City Hall. However, the train has clearly left the station on the question of whether the City of Falls Church is still a classic suburb: The only question remaining may be “What the heck do we call this thing?”

    Do any of you have a good idea?

    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.