New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Bubble Opportunity: A New Life for Public Housing?

    The globalization of housing markets stood at the center of the vast, now unraveling, economic change of the past decade. The creation of new investment vehicles in the 90s diverted vast amounts of capital into housing markets around the world. The results were many and varied. Design features began to converge, with gated communities following shopping malls into cites in Latin America, China, Turkey and most other countries. Home prices began to rise, with The Economist even publishing a table of global house prices, indicating those with the most inflated costs (Spain and the UK usually led this undesirable ranking).

    It’s been clear for the last few years that housing was becoming the primary investment vehicle for many American families, who otherwise had a negative savings rate. Everything that happened up to 2007 was built on that premise. So here we are in 2008, facing an unraveling not just of the housing market and its financial networks, but much more besides. As the cliché has it, the devil is in the details, and those are getting much less attention. Obsessed with design features and public-private contrasts, it is hard for many urbanists to return to the old-fashioned concern for what is happening ‘on the ground’. Long gone are the days when researchers tramped the streets; now Google and GIS have replaced shoe leather.

    This is unfortunate, because there is a ‘new geography’ emerging from the wreckage. During the bubble, home buyers would purchase larger and more expensive homes because that was how they maximized the returns on their investment. And, for several years, that worked. Now, as I roam around in my neighborhood, I see that it’s the newest and largest homes that are standing empty.

    Why? In large part these were speculative constructions, and the speculation went awry. Elsewhere in this relatively affluent part of Phoenix, small subdivisions are standing virtually idle, the construction workers long returned to Central America. But this is one of the costlier parts of town. In the blue-collar West Valley, the impact has been hardest on the new master planned communities of relatively affordable homes. These were examples of what is sometimes termed in the trade ‘qualifying by driving’—that is, the homes are cheap because they are a long way from job concentrations. Many first time buyers were lured into home ownership with the teaser rates that have been replaced by higher monthly payments, along with higher gas prices. The result: whole developments with a forest of ‘for sale’ signs.

    Most discussion of the mortgage crisis has been at the elite level — where it impacts banks, Wall Street investment houses, interest rates, liquidity. But on the street level, there are other, less obvious, consequences. Animals are abandoned as owners decamp; untended swimming pools breed mosquitoes. Abandoned dwellings in far suburbs don’t attract vagrants but they do get used by human smugglers as drop houses, since there are few neighbors to notice. Owners stop paying their HOA dues and maintenance is neglected, even as the dues escalate for those who stay behind. And much of the time there is no-one to do the work, due to the disappearance of the Latino labor-force.

    So what happens now as the current crisis blows through suburban neighborhoods and some form of federal bailout comes into place? If a new Resolution Trust agency begins to buy up hundreds of thousands of single family homes, we could find ourselves face to face with a new form of public housing that hasn’t been seen since the end of the First World War. In the UK, for instance, local government built many thousands of duplexes, in what are now inner suburbs, for returning soldiers. These were high quality dwellings which provided excellent accommodation for decades, until they were sold off, at suitably inflated prices, by the Thatcher government. Over time, this design experiment was forgotten, as public housing across Europe and the US became associated instead with the construction of vast apartment complexes that turned into visions of hell, strewn with burned out cars. Only in Singapore was this kind of failure avoided, for very specific social, political and cultural reasons.

    So, we may be on the verge of reconnecting with that original vision of public housing, one that emphasized homes in neighborhoods rather than vast and anonymous apartment blocks. For this to happen, the impulse to scoop up these bad mortgages and dump them back on the market at fire-sale prices will have to be avoided.

    Instead, the Federal government should venture back into the public housing sector by keeping these bad mortgages and re-letting the properties that it accumulates. There are two good reasons for this. First, they are, in the main, desirable homes of acceptable quality, so there will be no stigma attached to public housing. Second, because no-one will be building publicly-owned houses from scratch, they will not be concentrated in public housing enclaves. Rather, they will be diffused across the city, concentrated in some neighborhoods to be sure, but not to the exclusion of other forms of tenure. Of course, some existing owners will be less than pleased to find renters living next door—but at least the grass will be mowed and the pool will cease to stink.

    How to prevent this crisis from reoccurring when things get better? Rules need to be observed. Three times your income dictates your mortgage, and you can’t buy a home in an HOA if you aren’t going to live in it. This would greatly restrain speculative frenzy. And let’s take advantage of this crisis by making affordable homes available to families in a variety of forms—as permanent rentals, as leases, or as leases-to-own. And most important, this new public housing will not be concentrated in the inner cities, far from most employment opportunities, or in dense Stalinesque apartment complexes. For years, planners have been wringing their hands about how to get low-income housing into desirable neighborhoods. Perhaps fate has now shown them the way forward.

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

  • The future of suburbs? Suburbs ARE the future

    I entered the field of futures research in 1981. No, not futures – contracts to deliver a certain commodity at a certain price at a date certain (God, I wish I had) – futures research, as in scenarios, trends, strategic planning and market planning. Unfortunately the place was soon lousy with what I call “futurism”: extrapolations of the unsustainable to make the improbable look inevitable.

    A current example: suburbs are doomed because of high energy prices (peak oil!), the housing bubble, the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine, and yes, global warming (and what hasn’t been blamed on global warming?). Besides, the urban renaissance is underway; people want to live in the city for the culture, food, music and hipness, don’tchaknow. This is what I read in the Freakonomics quorum on the future of suburbia (New York Times, 8/12/08), and in The Atlantic magazine (“The Next Slum,” Christopher Leinberger, March 2008), The International Herald Tribune (“Life on the fringes of U.S. suburbia becomes untenable with rising gas costs,” 6/24/08), and elsewhere, ad infinitum.

    Well, I could be clever and say that predictions of the demise of suburbs are premature, be in fact they are just plain apocalyptic and absurd. Suburbs are the nexus of American life, have been for decades, and will certainly remain so (because, like, where else are we going to put the next 100 million Americans). Suburbs are where the majority of Americans today, and in the future, live, work, shop, create, consume, recreate, educate and, perhaps most importantly, procreate.

    Suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a plurality of American families. Suburban population, business and job growth each outpace those of cities, have done so for decades and will likely continue to do so. In fact, from 2001 to 2006:

    • 90% of all metropolitan population growth occurred in the suburbs (American County Survey, US Census Bureau)
    • Job growth in suburbia expanded at 6 times the rate of that in urban cores (Praxis Strategy Group)

    A small recent surge in mass transit won’t really change this. Of the 130 million Americans who commute to work every day, 41 million – by far the largest number and share – commute within suburbs (i.e. to the same or another suburb). Only 18 million, or 14% of commuters, commute from a suburb to a central city. To put it another way, 60% of commuting is suburb-related in some way. [IAC Transportation (July, 2008)] By the way, 75% of all commuters drive alone in their cars.

    Repeat after me: “multi-centered metropolitan region.” This is the model that characterizes most city/suburban regions in the US, where the urban core is just one of several nodes of development or centers of economic, residential, office, industrial, educational and recreational facilities and life. This is the model that, planned or unplanned, has evolved in the United States. It works, we like it, we’re keeping it. I know, congestion is horrible, but it’s horribly unnecessary: as explained by both Roth in Street Smart and by Stanley and Balaker in The Road More Traveled (both books published last year) [can we find a link to sites for these books] , we have the knowledge and means to reduce or even eliminate traffic congestion (more capacity, and more rational use of current capacity), but we don’t have the political will to deregulate, privatize and build.

    Repeat after me again: “mixed-use.” OK? I’m not talking about New Urbanism or smart growth, which are concepts whose utility and desirability are debatable. I’m talking about the availability, in a suburban setting, to access services and amenities, or what Wally Siembab calls “smart sprawl” – retrofitting suburbs of any density so that residents can shop, obtain services and work all within a mile or two of their home.

    One last point: Telecommuting, small home-based businesses and self-employment make suburban living all the more plausible and sustainable. If you add the number of part-time and full-time telecommuters plus home-based businesses, you’re talking about 36 million Americans, more than a fourth of the workforce.

    Welcome to the future: suburbia.

    Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He lives in Los Angeles, edits and publishes the newsletter Growth Strategies, speaks and consults [www.rogerselbert.com]. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1973, missed his graduation ceremony and has yet to return. But he thinks Brunswick, Maine was a great college town.

  • The future of urban settlement? Look in the suburbs

    Let’s look at general urban settlement and suburbia from a geographic and demographic, not a planning or ideological viewpoint. There’s really no point to the fruitless and unscientific harangues about how people ought to live or about allegedly better or poorer forms of settlement. This is really trying to understand what is happening in the metropolitan level of settlement, agglomerations of at least 50,000 and their commuter hinterlands — where at least 80 percent of Americans live.

    Definitions: I will use terms precisely. The central city is the historic, largest core incorporated place (OK, there are a few with 2 or 3 core cities). Suburbs are the rest of the urbanized area and may be usefully be differentiated between older, inner and newer, outer suburbs. Exurbia is the area of intense commuting to the urban core from beyond the urbanized area boundary, and it can be differentiated between rural territory (a.k.a. “sprawl”) and satellite towns.

    As of 2000 “central cities” had 70 million persons (25 %) of the population, suburbs 120 million people (43 %) and exurbia up to 36 million (12 %). That puts the suburban and exurban share to well over 50 percent of the US total population, not even including the suburbs or smaller towns and cities.

    Even worse for urban boosters, the suburbs — and particularly the exurbs — is where the growth is. In the Seattle metropolitan area, which is under unusually strong growth management restrictions and has a stronger than usual urban core, growth continues to head outwards, with inner, outer suburbs, as well as exurbs easily adding many more people than the central city.

    The question now is whether this pattern will hold for a longer term or whether significant change can be expected. My sense is that these trends will broadly continue —that suburban and exurban growth will continue to be greater than central city growth, despite the passing of peak oil, the passion of anti-suburb intellectual currents, the energy crisis and new urbanist planning policies. But central cities will probably do somewhat better than they have in the last 20 years. So it is sensible to ask: what are forces for and against central city, suburban and exurban growth; and, as important, how will the character of these components of urban settlement change?

    Demography

    The combination of many suburban empty nesters, later marriage and fewer children for generation X’ers (those born 1965-1981) should foster selective central city growth . But this appears to apply only for the subset of more glamorous cities with a well-developed amenity structure. . But these cities often suffer housing price inflation and strong anti-growth lobbies which constrain may constrain growth. Many, perhaps most, cities lack the appeal to attract population in from lower-density areas.

    Older inner suburbs represent a zone of significant change between and the traditional newer middle class family suburbs and the gentrifying or stagnant central cities. Some are receiving the displaced poor and minorities; some have matured into quality communities, and, like parts of the central city 50 years earlier, are still attractive to families, with or without children, as well as many recent immigrants.

    Housing prices and taxes vary greatly across the US, which will like push movement toward lower cost places, including to non-metropolitan small towns and rural areas. This may be particularly true for those with adequate retirement income. But middle class families remain a huge demographic component for far suburban and exurban living (see market forces below).

    On balance, demographic forces seem to reinforce existing patterns rather than favor either central cities or suburbs, or more rapid non-metropolitan growth.

    Economic factors

    Economic changes are even more uncertain. The vast expansion of producer services to replace the huge decline in primary and secondary (manufacturing) jobs clearly is in some jeopardy, as evidenced by the problems evident finance and insurance sector. The key is whether American entrepreneurs can partially restore a greater industrial base. In general, suburban and exurban sites are likely to be cheaper, more politically pliable and more available than central city sites, particularly compared to more elite gentrified core cities. A partial recovery of production in some less glamorous cities with available idle plant could occur but does not seem very likely.

    Energy, technology, environment, and cars

    Most observers concerned with the “end of oil” and with global warming argue that these will inevitably drive people to denser concentrations of settlement in central cities and older inner suburbs. They even predict a decline in far suburban and exurban settlement. US technological history, however, suggests that if innovation and investment take place anywhere, it will likely be on alternative energy sources, conspicuously including the continued popularity and dominance of trucks and cars. Nevertheless, persistent high energy prices could yield some acceptance of moderately higher densities for housing and business, and a slightly higher growth in central cities and older inner suburbs.

    Market forces

    Markets refer to preferences and needs, and the willingness to pay among households and businesses. There is relatively little uncertainty as to preferences. Even in the biggest metropolises, no more than 30 to 40 percent of households prefer denser urban settings and enjoy apartment or townhouse living. For the nation as a whole, the share is only 10-15 percent! Those who prefer it tend to be younger, unmarried persons and empty nesters without children and are (or will be) more educated and professional than the US norm. But 60 to 70 percent of households, and not just families with children, prefer single family homes and cars. These households will pay or MOVE in order to act on these preferences. At the same time perhaps 35 to 45 percent of jobs thrive in dense urban settings, as downtown towers, leaving 55 to 65 percent to seek less dense suburban and exurban settings, often by logistic necessity. These are the continuing and overwhelming facts that created and will sustain suburban living.

    Planning

    Intellectual hatred of suburbia is a century old and has been especially fervent in the last 60 years. From the late 1970s the planning profession has embraced what has come to be called “new urbanism,” advocating urban containment, urban redevelopment, densification, urban villages, and a new wave of rail transit, now under the broad rubric of growth management. These efforts often have been strongly supported by environmental groups concerned with the loss of open space as well as by central city political and business interests.

    Several metropolitan areas are becoming increasingly regulated by such planning ideology. But to date the movement has not been successful at significantly slowing suburban or exurban growth. A few central cities, such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Portland, have gentrified, but have not grown much in population, since the mass of new housing is occupied by much smaller non-family households. Costs of growth management include displacement of minority and less affluent families, often to the older suburbs or to other neighborhoods of the core city.

    Conclusions

    Market preferences have prevailed. Businesses as well as households have resisted substantial concentration or been priced out of the gentrifying core. So the suburbs persist. But they have changed, especially in those more regulated metropolises. The older inner suburbs have become more central-city like, with more diversity in ethnicity and class. But this has not slowed the long-standing trend of net growth of housing and of jobs at the suburban edge – even in the most growth managed cities, and even in the most recent 2000-2007 period.

    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).

  • Suburbs will decide the election

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    Suburbs may not have cooked up the mortgage crisis, but they absorbed much of initial damage. Now that Wall Street and the big cities are also taking the fall, suburbanites might feel a bit better — but there’s still lots of room for anger out in the land of picket fences, decent schools and shopping malls.

    Widely demeaned in the media and academe, suburbs still exercise their power at election time. Home to roughly half the country’s population, and likely a greater share of its voters, suburbs seem destined to remain — to borrow from that great wordsmith George W. Bush — “the decider” in this election.

    Indeed, as the campaign has evolved, the critical position of suburbs seems to have grown. Barack Obama’s stranglehold on the urban vote seems unshakeable — even against a maverick “moderate” such as John McCain.

    At the same time, after seeming unsettled, the rural and small-town electorate appears to be returning to the GOP fold. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s place on the Republican ticket and, perhaps even more, the mainstream media’s snooty reaction to her, may have sealed the GOP deal in the countryside, at least at the presidential level. One sure sign: The small Obama strike team sent to reliably red North Dakota this summer has departed for more competitive terrain in nearby Minnesota and Wisconsin.

    So now it’s really up to the suburbanites, who come from the only geography that has grown faster than the national average over the past 30 years. But it’s critical to recognize that suburbs themselves have changed, becoming more reflective of America’s diversity, just as cities have grown more bifurcated between rich and poor. Once lily white, suburban America is now roughly 21 percent minority.

    Voting behavior among suburbs overall also has changed over the years. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan carried the suburbs in the key swing states by between 20 points and 40 points. Bill Clinton ended this dominance, essentially battling the GOP to a suburban standoff. He even beat the Republicans in the peripheral communities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri and Florida.

    In 2000 and again in 2004, President Bush recovered some of the Republican edge, running as much as 10 percent better than Sen. Bob Dole’s weak 1996 effort. But in the 2006 congressional elections, Democrats regained much of the ground Clinton had carried.

    As of now, polls suggest McCain, who lagged in the suburbs into the summer, has pushed back some of the Democratic momentum. He now enjoys, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll, a 10-point edge among suburban voters, not far from what Bush garnered in those parts of the swing states. If McCain can combine this suburban group with his rural and small-town base, he could be in striking distance of staging an upset.

    But this may not be so easy. Democrats’ recent gains seem to be solidifying, particularly in older, metropolitan suburbs. Fairfax County, home to one out of seven Virginians, has been trending strongly Democratic in recent years, even supporting John F. Kerry in 2004.

    McCain, who appeals more to independents than Bush did, should be able to erode some of this advantage in such communities. But Palin’s social conservatism could turn off many generally well-educated, middle-of-the-road voters who are so prominent in many of the most upscale suburban communities.

    At the same time, Palin — herself a former mayor of an Anchorage exurb — could help McCain consolidate Bush’s gains in the fast-growing exurbs, which tend to be more heavily composed of traditional families and generally less ethnically diverse. In his 2004 victory, Bush won 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties with roughly 63 percent of the vote. If McCain can duplicate that feat, he will be well-positioned.

    Several factors, notably the financial crisis, could work against these efforts. Foreclosure rates in many of these exurban suburban counties are well above the national average, particularly in Florida and the Virginia suburbs of Washington and also outside Denver, Detroit and Cleveland.

    The mortgage crisis affects not only foreclosed homeowners, but also homeowners who are still above water. First, foreclosures lower everybody’s home values and bring on the possibility of renters replacing owners — not a good development in a suburban context. Second, particularly in exurban counties, construction has often been the basis for a lot of job growth in this decade, because construction jobs and other employment related to the real estate industry has been centered there.

    All of this makes suburbs a theoretically good target for Obama. In places like Pennsylvania, as longtime Republican activist Dennis Powell suggests, Obama should try to duplicate Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell’s wildly successful performance in 2002 in the so-called collar counties around Philadelphia. By winning those counties, in addition to building up a huge margin in his native Philadelphia, Rendell built a margin of more than a half-million votes that helped him win, even while he was getting thrashed throughout most of the rest of the state.

    In 2004, Kerry also won Pennsylvania’s collar counties, not by a large margin but by enough to secure his victory in the state. If Obama does as well as Kerry in the collar counties, he will win the state — perhaps not at a Rendellian scale, but comfortably enough.

    For his part, McCain needs to emulate the success of maverick Republicans, such as Sen. Arlen Specter, who have won by winning the Philadelphia suburbs. If McCain can replicate Specter’s performance and add some of the disgruntled Clinton Democrats in the rural south and west of the state, he could pull off a game-changing upset.

    McCain also has an opportunity to win in the Detroit suburbs, where Obama’s ties to disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick could hurt him. Bush won those areas in 2000 and 2004, but not by enough to capture the state’s electoral votes. As in Pennsylvania, McCain needs to forge a rural-suburban coalition to capture this traditionally blue-tinged state.

    For Obama, suburbs in wobbly red states such as Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and Missouri offer similarly critical opportunities. Even traditionally conservative exurban voters may feel that under Bush they have been led down the bubble path only to have it pop painfully in their faces.

    Ultimately it may all come down to “body language.” In our estimation, Obama’s weakness stems not so much from his race — he may well run better in suburbia than did the very white Kerry — but with his close identification with Chicago and Mayor Richard Daley’s Democratic machine. Having spent his adulthood in college towns and big cities, Obama seems to lack the instinctive Clintonian understanding of the suburban mindset. You never got the sense that Clinton was too urbane to wolf down a Big Mac or get a Slurpee at the local strip mall — and he really seemed to “feel the pain” of an overstressed homeowner.

    In contrast, Obama and his team, including campaign manager David Axelrod, reflect the mentality of a totally urban political culture. Obama’s intellectual and media supporters also include elements — ensconced at publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly as well as within the leftist Netroots — that often regard suburbs and their denizens as a form of social and environmental pestilence.

    Obama is simply too smart, as a candidate and perhaps also as a president, to publicly give in to this mindset. He’s certainly trying to appeal to suburban voters who are too concerned with issues such as health care and foreclosures to worry about his lack of geographic empathy.

    If he can convey this message effectively, Obama could benefit from the suffering now taking place in suburban communities. There may well be enough disgruntled suburban voters, even in the more peripheral areas, to blunt McCain’s suburban lead down to manageable numbers.

    If so, McCain’s rural and small town base will not be enough to win the critical swing states and the election. If the Republicans can hold their 2004 suburban base, though, McCain could yet triumph. Whatever the result, one thing is clear: Suburban voters will be the deciders.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. Mark Schill is a principal at Praxis Strategy Group and the site’s managing editor.

  • How Low Can House Prices Go?

    There is much speculation among economists and others about how close we are to the bottom of the collapse of housing prices. This is, of course, an important question, and goes to the heart of the wisdom or folly of the proposed $700 billion government bailout of financial markets, which is a consequence of their own profligate lending practices.

    You would think that the experts would look at history. We have decades of experience with housing prices. Indeed, for at least the past six decades, median house prices have tended to be around three times an area’s median household income. It bears looking at where house prices are today compared to that standard.

    And looking at it from the perspective, we may have a long way to go. As late as 1999, there was only one major metropolitan market among the top 100 with a median multiple (median house price divided by median household income) exceeding 5.0 (Honolulu), according to data compiled by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The national median multiple was less than 3.0. By 2006, 23 markets, all highly regulated, had median multiples of more than 5.0.

    Last week, we estimated that the aggregate value of the owned housing stock in the nation had risen nearly $5.3 trillion since 2000. Approximately 85 percent of that figure – $4.5 trillion – had occurred in metropolitan markets with severe land use regulations (strategies often called “smart growth”). These areas accounted for only 30 percent of the nation’s population. The large, more traditionally regulated markets experienced an estimated value increase approximately $200 billion, while outside the major metropolitan markets, the increase was approximately $500 billion.

    If you accept this logic we may not be close to the bottom yet in many markets. Based upon an analysis of housing price declines from the peak, it appears that the losses in the highly restricted markets have taken back between one-third and, at most one-half, of the unprecedented house price increases relative to incomes.

    If the economists and analysts had been paying attention, they might have looked at what happened in the last bubble, in bubble-land itself, California. From the middle 1980s to the housing bubble of the early 1990s, median house prices rose nearly 40 percent relative to household incomes in California’s largest markets (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Diego and Sacramento metropolitan areas). By 1996, after a particularly deep recession in the early 1990s, the median house prices had declined to their previous household income relationship.

    Yet there the bubble of the 2000s dwarfs what happened in the 1990s, a decline set off by a severe economic decline, particularly in Southern California. In the latest run-up California house prices doubled relative to household incomes in the five largest California markets by 2007. In effect the present bubble topped out at about a 2.5 times increase from pre-existing prices relative to the previous bubble. In 1985, the median multiple in these Golden State markets was 3.7, not much above the historic norm. By 1990 the median multiple had peaked at 5.3 and fell to 3.9 by 1996, rising to 4.2 by 1999. By September of 2007, the median multiple in these markets had risen to 9.1, far above the 1990 peak of 5.3.

    It is not inconceivable that history will repeat itself – that prices will fall to the equilibrium level that has been the rule for so long. That would mean that the bottom may not yet be in sight. Moreover, it could well mean that the house prices reached at the peak of the bubble will never return except in another bubble, or in a hyper-inflating economy (another potential consequence worthy of concern).

    In the next few weeks there will be no shortage of speculation about whether or not the bottom has been reached. Before house prices began to collapse in the highly regulated markets, many analysts gleefully reported on the unprecedented house price increases as if could continue without relation to the economy. The law of gravity appeared to have been repealed.

    But my guess is Newton is still a very relevant person. If so, we should expect additional price decreases of 30 percent or more could occur in already declining markets such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Miami. Similar declines from now could take occur in places like New York, Boston and Seattle, which have only recently experienced a downturn in prices.

    Of course, it is always possible that smart growth regulation in these markets might have created a new floor that prevents prices from falling to historic norms. That would be good news for the owners of real estate – largely older and Anglo – in these areas. On the other hand, it would be disastrous news for millions of households and the next generation, many of them younger and minority, who will now have to remain on the sidelines of the housing markets of their choice. For many the choice may be moving to one of those places – like Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth or Kansas City, Houston or Atlanta – where the opportunity to own a home still will exist for those without trust funds and elite occupations.

    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.”

  • How to Protect Main Street While Saving Wall Street

    The current discussion in Washington can either lead to a rapid processing and recovery at the local level or a long drawn out destruction of local economies. This is particularly true of regions – Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Bernardino-Riverside, much of Florida – that have been hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

    The current discussion is being limited to maximizing the yield on the securities that the Federal Government would acquire and then sell at auction nation wide. The disconnect that needs to be bridged lies with the focus on securities. In reality, these mortgages, however arcanely packaged, represent residential real estate. The smoke and mirrors of securities too complicated to understand must be cleared away. Otherwise, a few Wall Street interests will do even more damage and reap all the returns.

    The key issue, then, is not how the paper gets marketed but how to maximize real estate values locally. If the Feds dump securities that then lead to high levels of absentee ownership in local communities for example, many neighborhoods will be seriously damaged. If local regions can manage the disposition of these assets – higher returns will be realized and goals such as home ownership and local economic development can be advanced.

    We have seen this before. In the 1980s, the Federal Home Administration dumped large numbers of foreclosed homes on the market in San Bernardino. Instead of finding buyers, speculators preferred to rent these residences out. The result was a long-running decline in parts of the city, one that could now be further exacerbated.

    Again in the 1990s, the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation dumped apartments, commercial, office and Industrial properties. Depressing real estate values in local economies, it killed many deals and devastated local property taxes.

    But this time the Inland Empire will not be alone. If these securities are purchased nationally, Wall Street speculators could transform significant parts of formerly middle class suburban areas into largely renter-dominated badlands.

    What we need is a locally controlled intermediary – perhaps a Regional Asset Value Recovery Corporation (AVRC) – that would seek to maximize asset value by taking full advantage of local real estate knowledge. Such a regional public-private partnership could help retain value for real estate assets while stabilizing communities, and minimizing the fiscal impact on the taxpayer.

    These local groups – using both government and private matching funds – would be able to use the crisis to bring new life, and new homeowners, to these communities. This is something we are already working on in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, geographically known as the Inland Empire. This area is among the most impacted regions in the country.

    San Bernardino and Riverside county governments, along with more than 15 city governments within those counties and over 30 business owners, are prepared to come together to manage the acquisition and disposition of properties. The group would manage the unraveling of income streams so that packaged mortgages can more suitably be restructured for the benefit of homeowners. It would also capture other current Federal resources, for instance the New Market Tax Credits, and fully utilize them in order to “prime the pump” of housing recovery.

    Among the priorities of this entity would be to ensure the housing stock is maintained or renovated to meet basic health and safety standards. Abandoned housing stock is posing a serious public health risk. Addressing those risks has a direct impact on federal, state and local governments and on asset value.

    It would also work to create opportunities to meet low and moderate income housing needs. On the one hand, not everyone can buy. Making units available to rent in the right areas would be a good way to maintain and support value. On the other hand, eventually, price stability and performance by tenants makes those same tenants candidates as future homeowners. The AVRC would be the right vehicle to undertake those efforts.

    Another primary focus would be to maintain local property taxes and critical services. Depressed property values have an obvious ripple effect on local government’s ability to provide basic government services. Local communities stand ready to partner to protect our economy, their communities, their taxpayers, and their homeowners. We cannot leave the health of our communities solely to the discretion of either Washington or Wall Street.

    Tony Mize
    President, Workforce homebuilders

    Jeff Burum
    President, Inland Empire Opportunity Fund
    Chairman, National Community Renaissance

    Steve PonTell
    President, La Jolla Institute
    Germania Corporation

  • Getting Beyond the Quadrangle: Rethinking the Reality of Town and Gown

    In the spring of 2003, I chaired an Urban Land Institute Advisory Services Panel focused on strategies for continuing the revitalization of downtown Birmingham, Ala. As in many cities this was driven by the stock of historic downtown buildings slowly being converted to either new office buildings or loft condominiums, supported by a handful of downtown cultural assets and public spaces. Our tour host proudly invited to the panel’s attention that three of the four buildings anchoring downtown’s “100 percent corner” were the high-rise headquarters of three regional banks.

    No one on the panel was prepared to share with our hosts what many of us were thinking at the time: That these regional banks would inevitably be swallowed up by much larger national banks, their staffs pared down substantially, and most downtown operations relegated to “back-offices” in much less-expensive suburban office park locations well outside the downtown area.

    What was, however, truly remarkable was that a mere eight blocks away from the “100 percent corner,” the real economic engine for the future of Birmingham–the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB)–seemed all but ignored by the city.

    This stark contrast between perception and reality prompted me to focus on the relationship between urban colleges and universities and their “host” jurisdictions.” Universities need to be seen as the primary source of “knowledge workers”–the smart, creative, and skilled people forming the foundation of successful companies in a region. They need to outgrow their medieval culture of isolation and become better integrated into the cities and towns where they are located.

    The ULI Birmingham panel reflected a tendency I have since noted to find fault with the way the cities handle growth issues regarding urban campuses, imploring Birmingham to “get out of UAB’s way.” Yet it is also very true that colleges and universities often have trouble getting out of their own way. In fact, playing nice with others outside of their own ivy-covered walls is not generally in the DNA of most academic institutions. They tend to be introspective to a fault while believing they are always “the smartest people in the room.”

    And yet, it may be just as much in their economic interest as that of their surrounding communities for colleges and universities to learn to work cooperatively with their host jurisdictions. At the same time many states are beginning to realize that the relevance of academic endeavors to commercial enterprises has increased exponentially since World War II. Similarly, the business community has embraced the concept of lifelong learning, often providing tuition reimbursement and sabbaticals to employees to encourage them to return to school.

    We already can cite a few academic institutions where we see this synergy wholeheartedly embraced with marked success. Campus Partners, the result of a true collaboration between the city of Columbus, Ohio, and Ohio State University – and the public-private partnerships it has spawned – has resulted in the dramatic transformation of previously underdeveloped and/or distressed neighborhoods on the periphery of the OSU campus into vibrant new campus gateways.

    One area that faces dramatic physical, economic, and sociological distress are the East Baltimore neighborhoods surrounding the educational and research campus of Johns Hopkins University. The East Baltimore Development, Inc. (EBDI), a collaborative effort between the City of Baltimore, Baltimore Development Corporation, the Johns Hopkins Institutions, local foundations, and others are making progress in creating a new economic engine for the city in an 80-acre assemblage of land surrounding the Hopkins medical campus.

    And in West Jackson, Miss., UniDev has been working with Jackson State University (JSU), an historically black university, the JSU Foundation, the city of Jackson, and the State of Mississippi, to acquire and transform approximately 50 acres of distressed and dilapidated housing to create a new gateway between the city and the JSU campus.

    These examples also suggest a need for colleges and universities to emerge from ingrained planning practices, including the 600-year-plus dominance of the campus quadrangle. As iconographic as the campus quad is, its preeminence is being challenged by the university town center, a new physical form that only now is emerging through a confluence of circumstances that could create a new paradigm for the relationship between the “academic village” and the outside world.

    A university town center combines housing with non-residential uses designed to bring the student population, institutional functions, and the surrounding community together for common purposes. lt may complement or even replace the traditional student union building as the locus of campus life. It also can foster closer social, cultural, and, most important, economic ties between the academic institution and the surrounding community, as well as with the local government. The selection and mix of uses of the university town center need to be designed to maximize synergies among the academic and nonacademic populations.

    Ultimately it is critical to open urban college and university campuses to their surrounding communities. In the information age the historic separation of town and gown is not only antiquated but a detriment to both parties.

    More often than not, the challenge in achieving this kind of transformative change within academia is reminiscent of the old joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” Only one but the light bulb must want to change. The same can be said of the majority of our urban colleges and universities.

    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.

  • The Kids are All Ride

    My eldest child tells me that when she arrived at an East Coast college her classmates—many of whom had never visited LA—would ask, “Does your family live in the city, or outside of it?” Her answer, she says, was always long — really long — and of eye-glazing complexity.

    Anyone who has raised kids in the middle-class neighborhoods of multipolar LA might chuckle at the thought of trying to define urban or suburban. In “inner” San Fernando Valley Barbecue Belt communities like Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, your family can call for a Deli delivery at 2AM. You might run into entertainment industry executives or movie craft workers lunching at the local coffee shop; many of their offices and studios are right in the neighborhood, as are numerous other “knowledge worker” businesses. And you’re spitting distance (in LA terms, less than a half hour on the freeway) from downtown Hollywood the Getty, or UCLA. If you judge by the restaurant/ workplace/ club scene/ museum index alone, this part of town should qualify as “city,” not “suburb”.

    But you’re also likely to enjoy an unattached home: ranch (modest or luxurious), bungalow (tiny and deteriorating or spiffy and renovated), or McMansion. If you’re in an apartment, it’s likely to be garden style, not a high rise.

    The best of both worlds. Two geographies, joined at the hip? Not quite: it’s a marriage of convenience with a few downsides. First, you can’t talk about being an LA parent without talking transportation. Whether you are in the less dense communities of the valley, the hills, and the beach areas, or in the more urban-feeling neighborhoods like Hollywood, if you’re an LA parent you are tethered to your car.

    When the suburban car-dependent culture melds with urban fear of crime and nightmarish traffic, the end game can be the worst of both worlds.

    Everyone knows that LA’s geography sprawls, and one result has been limited public transportation. To take the subway, we need to drive to the station (8 miles, in our case), and then find parking. Buses are more prevalent, but often stop far from a journey’s start or finish.

    Think it’s just another LA whine about a walk further than curb to car door? I’m a native New Yorker who—I believe—feels more positively about public transportation than many who write for this site. But I challenge you to walk three quarters of a mile on a 108 degree day with a couple of little kids to catch a bus.

    For adolescents, a certain lack of independence is an inevitable result; for parents, the urge to infantilize is rampant. I can say without exaggeration that our first daughter never once stepped out our front door and walked to a specific destination. We lived in the hills — no shops or friends within a couple of miles — surrounded by country-like winding roads… packed with high speed commuter traffic. The local school was only about a mile away, but it was down a sidewalk-free canyon, often littered with dead dogs, cats, coyotes, and the occasional deer, mowed down at the nexus of city and country. Like many LA parents, we drove our kid everywhere.

    We tried a different approach with our second daughter: a street close to busses and the neighborhood’s main drag. Initially, the strategy didn’t work too well. Few of her fourteen-year-old friends would ride a bus. Some had never crossed a commercial street and were afraid to try, and a couple were not permitted to do so (yes, there’s a crosswalk and traffic light).

    The parental DDQ (Daily Drive Quotient) here is magnified by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which does not provide school buses for local kids to reach their district schools. A four mile round trip can become a 40-minutes-twice-a-day time warp. Walk? Sure, if your route has sidewalks; many don’t. Car pool? There’s a reason that school driveways are clogged with Navigators, Yukons and Suburbans. Working parents often need to get to work on time. That translates into the sought-after one-drive-per-week carpool. But only the biggest SUVs can accommodate five families. And for those with kids in two or three different schools, it’s two carpools and all chauffeuring all the time.

    Long commutes to school are a plague in many remote locations. But in Los Angeles, the school system is at the same time famously beset with typical urban education problems: a large poor and non–English speaking population, aging physical plants, and a mind-boggling administrative bureaucracy.

    Our kids attended public elementary school in Bel Air. Sounds classy, doesn’t it? Check out the rest rooms; make that singular (the second one did not function during either of their stints). The principal claimed that she could not find a janitor willing to drive to the relatively remote site for the part time job. Our kid’s second grade teacher asked parents to please bring in writing paper because “I would like them to do creative writing, and if everyone pitches in we can make it happen.”

    How could LAUSD be anything but dysfunctional? It’s a behemoth. The student population has now dropped to just below 700,000, but it still has more students than Vermont, Alaska, or Boston has total residents; its population is about twice that of Cincinnati.

    Los Angeles has numerous poor neighborhoods, but you don’t need to raise your children in Beverly Hills to incur the stratospheric costs common to elite cities. Many LA neighborhoods may look like déclassé small towns from the perspective of Malibu or Beverly Hills. But in a ‘real’ small town or city, a teenager on a night out might pay $3.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich with fries (I have a 2008 Wilkes Barre, PA receipt as documentation), instead of about $10 here. And housing costs here, even in extremely modest neighborhoods, and even during the current real estate cataclysm, soar above the national average.

    It’s not just the economics of child-raising in LA that suffer from a clash of suburban and urban. The social blend of the two geographies can also be uncomfortable. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and truly love many aspects of life here. But “it takes a village” are fighting words in a place where it can be a challenge to identify—let alone mobilize—the people next door.

    A neighbor on our street recently won a brand-sponsored contest for an ice cream Block Party. We walked over with our daughter and discovered that, as we had suspected, several other teenagers lived within a few houses.

    The older residents explained that ‘everyone here used to know each other, when we all had little kids the same age.’

    The teenagers, of course, went to a variety of schools; parents here often move their kids between private schools, public magnets, and district schools. They had a friendly chat and discovered some friends in common. But I don’t think they will ever meet again. If they do, it will undoubtedly be through some social network that’s irrelevant to the geography of this LA street.

    Zina Klapper is a writer and editor based in the Los Angeles area. She is a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones.

  • The Phoenix Lament (with apologies to J. K. Rowling)

    Fifty years ago, Phoenix was Tiny Town in the Desert, smaller than Oshkosh or Santa Fe today. Now, it is larger than Philadelphia and the metro area has the bulk of Arizona’s population. That does not mean it gets any respect; on the contrary, it is, to many, a joke, with all of Los Angeles’ traffic and smog but without the ocean, the celebrities or the Lakers. When it surpassed the City of Brotherly Love, Pennsylvania newspaper columnists waspishly described the Valley of the Sun as ‘‘a loose accumulation of crummy vinyl-sided houses occupied by sunburned retirees who happen to share a zip code.”

    They went on to note that “Phoenix has no downtown. . .and neighborhoods? None to speak of… [it] doesn’t rate as an actual city. . .it’s more like a place where a lot of people happen to live. Phoenix would kill to have a walkable city the way we do.’’ More recently, an anonymous commentator in The Economist reported that crime and other social ills were turning the city into an inhospitable and ungovernable mess. Time to roll up those sidewalks and move on—oh, that’s right, there are none. The worst opprobrium is generally reserved for the audacity, or insanity, of growing a city in a desert. As a blogger on the Grist site recently wrote, Phoenix is “a poster child for environmental ills.”

    Phoenix is hardly perfect, and it certainly violates most traditional urban principles. A city of over three million, it possesses virtually no corporate headquarters. In a globalized world, Phoenix seems a nonentity, with virtually no corporate financial institutions. Home to the world’s sixth largest airport, it has few direct links to the rest of that world with the exception of a handful of daily flights to Toronto, Mexico City and London. This is the same airport that closed one summer when the temperature reached 122 degrees.

    So then, why do people keep moving here? It is usually best to follow the advice of sociologist Juliet Schor and try not to start with the assumption that people are idiots. So, let’s rationally examine what keeps the place growing. The first factor is the weather. There is none. For half the year, it is warm, and for half it is hot. It rarely snows, and there are no tornadoes or hurricanes. It rains and it floods, but the water disappears by the next day.

    The ground may be hot, but it’s also securely tethered—the earthquake risk is about as high as that for ice storms. This may seem trivial, but consider that liabilities from natural catastrophic events throughout the U.S. have exceeded $300 billion since 1988, and nearly three quarters of that can be attributed to tornadoes and tropical storms. Viewed this way, lots of people live in the wrong place but Phoenix is not one of them.

    But what about the folly of living in the desert? How sustainable is that? Well, more so that you might think. A home in Minneapolis has to be heated from zero 60 degrees to maintain comfort, and must use energy for six months, 24 hours a day. A home in Phoenix needs to be cooled for less than five months, typically for 12 hours a day, in order to bring the temperature down from 110 to 80 degrees. Cooling devices are more efficient, and use less energy.

    Research undertaken by Michael Sivak shows that the most energy efficient cities, like San Diego and Miami, are coastal, although these are also among the most vulnerable to catastrophic natural events. The least efficient are cold—Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver. In addition, Phoenix and Las Vegas come in right in the middle of the pack.

    What about water? Like its neighbor Las Vegas, Phoenix loves to display fountains and other water features. The largest of these is the Tempe Town Lake, an entirely artificial recreational pond that evaporates the equivalent of five-acre feet each day. Where does this water come from? Largely from the development of agricultural land devoted to intensive irrigation, which consumes far more water per acre than suburban houses. Of course, this cannot go on forever—if nothing else, evaporation is a waste. But when water is properly priced, creating a natural incentive for conservation, it will be used more appropriately.

    And what about the fundamental criticism, namely that Phoenix is a dreadful example of sprawl? Clearly Phoenix epitomizes a large, low-density city. But sprawl also occurs when people leave the downtown and move to the suburbs, as we see, for instance, in Detroit. In Phoenix, a growing population is filling up Maricopa County; we have few of the neglected areas that are common in many Northeastern and Midwestern cities.

    Overall, the average journey to work is comparable with other American metro areas. And most important, low-density development is cheap development. Phoenix remains one of the most affordable large housing markets in the country, even after housing speculators from California took their equity and drove up costs in Arizona and other parts of the West in 2005-07. Current estimates suggest that when the dust settles, the median new house price will once again fall below $200,000.

    Sprawl is perhaps one of the easiest insults to fling at any city. It is associated with everything from the collapse of civic life to the rise of obesity. Yet in Arizona, low-density development, which involves building large number of homes on raw land, is cheap development. Sprawl clearly involves the cost of new infrastructure, but that has to be placed against the high costs of renewing infrastructure in existing urban neighborhoods, which can involve deep excavation, specialized equipment and higher risks (like the cranes that keep collapsing in New York).

    In the end, Phoenix’s growth machine succeeds in offering a commodity that people need—an affordable home. Few families want to live in small expensive apartments—many want the amenities of a low-cost house, and in Phoenix, that can mean as little as $150,000. It is easy to demand an end to sprawl, as has been tried in California and Oregon, but the result frequently is to price single family homes out of reach for most households. In a society that offers little to its working and middle class in terms of necessities like health care, it seems uncaring to demand an end to affordable single family housing as well.

    Phoenix and its desert neighbors do not match up to the 19th century city. They lack the grand rail termini, the city halls, the cathedrals and the parks. The grandeur of the modernist era does not extend to these experiments in low-density private space—malls, office parks, homeowner associations. Yet they succeed brilliantly as bastions of successful low-cost development for middle class families. In the future they can also serve as laboratories for alternative energy usage, water recycling and, in time, more efficient transportation. The challenge is to let them change on their own terms, not make a vain effort to reconstitute them along the lines of older cities like New York, Chicago and Paris.

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

  • Thoughts on the Future of Seattle: A Vision of 2040 for Pugetopolis

    I have been attacked as a defender of ‘sprawl’ although I consider myself a man of the left, with a political-economy philosophy that is ‘social democratic – far to the left of the contemporary Democratic party. I view global warming as very serious, but consider continuing global warfare over resources, land and religion, and increasing national and global economic and political inequality as even more critical.

    As a realist/naturalist/skeptic, rather than idealist, I believe a scientist’s goal is to understand and explain the rich variety of actual needs, motivations and behavior of individuals, groups and institutions. I chose geography instead of planning, because I am uncomfortable with a normative approach of telling people how they ought to behave (in the absence of adequate theory and evidence).

    In my long career in planning I have become skeptical about many things that are widely considered “progressive.” This includes disbelief in two icons of a normative New Urbanist planning: urban growth boundaries and rail transit. In my original testimony to the Growth Strategies Commission 20 years ago, I warned that use of a crude geographic tool (growth boundaries) would lead to land and housing price inflation, leapfrog development and would benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Sadly, this proved to be the case. Rather than use zoning to create open space, I believe fairness dictates it be acquired through public purchase for public use.

    On rail, my skepticism grew out of considerations of class fairness, since it squanders limited public resources for limited results, and again benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. The real transit problem is not capacity but accessibility to people and jobs. I like trains and have been on dozens of rail or subway systems around the world, many successful, others relative failures. Unfortunately, the geography of Seattle militates against rail’s success here.

    Before we try to guess what greater Seattle might or could (not “should” or “will”) look like in 2040, we must be clear about the nature of the geographic setting, and needs and preferences of its people. For example, there are distinct populations who prefer denser urban living (structures and neighborhoods), and those who prefer less dense living (single-family homes and neighborhoods). Some economic activities require dense agglomerative settings; others need greater horizontal space or external connections.

    In the immediate Seattle region currently about 40 percent of people and jobs are at the denser more agglomerative and 60 percent at the less dense, more dispersed end. Unfortunately for New Urbanist idealism, far more than half of people do not live within walking or biking distance to work or school. By 2040 the share of people preferring or accepting denser urban living in the close in areas could rise to 50 percent (for demographic and land cost reasons) but that will still leave 50 percent or 2.5 of 5 million people preferring a lower density environment. Planners should have learned that many people need private space (yards) as well as public (parks and playgrounds). And it is truly difficult to envision a higher share of more agglomerative jobs; costs of transportation will likely bring residences and workplaces closer to the peripheral communities.

    Another inescapable reality is that trucks will remain the dominant mode for goods transport and that the car, personal transport, will still, yes, be the dominant mode of person movement. Transit (and walking and bicycling) could rise to 25 percent and carpooling could become a lot higher, but cars, far more efficient and greener, will still be the rule. It is absurd to imagine otherwise – this is precisely the kind of innovation that at which American technology excels.

    Most political leaders and senior planners know these “realities” perfectly well but seem to have trouble reining in the their often overly idealistic staff. Yet an intelligent view of what will be in 2040 rests on facts and people’s demonstrated preferences, not on New Urbanist theorizing.

    So what does 2040 look like? The population will likely grow but the forecast of a 50 percent increase is far from sure. The odds are better than even that growth will be moderately less, because of demography (aging population, lowering fertility of past immigrants), and the high cost of Seattle for residence and for business. Instead we likely will see growth spill over to less costly and restrictive cities like Spokane, Bellingham, Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

    We don’t know the likely degree of housing affordability and of the relative severity of constraints on the land supply. Again based on history and demography/education, I’d say the odds are in favor of continuing constraints, over-regulation and housing unaffordability.

    Personal transport will still prevail in 2040, but much of transport technology and policy is uncertain. There will probably be new trains, because people seem to want them, although their contribution to mobility will be modest.

    Smaller communities around Seattle would be well-advised not to allow themselves to be pulled too closely into a downtown-centric transit network since, as Nobel economist Paul Samuelson showed in 1956, this almost guarantees that the outlying centers will lose high level functions and income to the central node. Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue would each be better off developing themselves than subordinating their destiny to downtown Seattle. Bellevue’s success as a competitive edge city is because of the barrier effect of Lake Washington!

    So given these considerations, what will Seattle and its region look like in 2040? Look around you because the future city will look and feel amazingly like the present city, just as the city today is much like the city of 1975. It will be somewhat denser, especially in the core region but overall the urban footprint will grow only slightly and begrudgingly. Instead, most substantial growth in Pugetopolis will occur in satellite towns and adjacent counties and beyond, which is not necessarily a bad thing but may offend many planners.

    In this new configuration, the central city of Seattle will do fine – due to its popularity, site and situation benefits (and the high land prices). There will be continued gentrification, dominated by the childless affluent, and displacement of the less well off to some of the older, less amenity rich suburbs. Inequality will remain high and segregation by class will probably increase. Transportation congestion and substantial long distance commuting will not have lessened, despite trains or the implementation of demand management, because of likely over-investment in large glamour projects, and the continued separation of residences and jobs.

    Experience suggests to me that the future Pugetopolis will continue to be the uneasy compromise between the idealist visionaries of the golden city and the dictates of the human condition and the economy. This is not a pessimistic forecast, rather a realistic one. The metropolis of 2040 may well be a somewhat better place than it is now, but just not very!

    Richard Morrill came to Seattle 53 years ago for graduate school, and after stints in Illinois and Sweden, returned to the University of Washington Geography department in 1961, where he has taught for 44 years.