New Geography

Category: Suburbs

  • Long Island Express: The Surprisingly Short Commutes of Suburban New Yorkers

    One of the most enduring urban myths suggests that most jobs are in the core of metropolitan areas, making commuting from the far suburbs more difficult. Thus, as fuel prices have increased, many have expected that people will begin moving from farther out in the suburbs to locations closer to the cores. Indeed, in some countries, such as Australia, much of the urban planning regime of the last decade has been based upon the assumption that urban areas must not be constrained because the residents on the fringe won’t be able to get to work.

    Like many myths, this one has limited conformity with the truth. This can be seen even in New York, the New York metropolitan area (the combined statistical area), which is home to the second largest central business district in the country and by far the most well-developed transit system in North America. Yet, despite this, a close examination of work trip data from the 2006 U.S. Census American Community Survey shows a pattern of shorter work travel times for many of the most far-flung areas while those located closer to the core often experience longer commutes.

    These findings parallel earlier Newgeography.com reports about Chicago and Los Angeles, which indicated a somewhat similar pattern. Although white-collar workers close to key job centers – such as downtown Chicago or west Los Angeles – enjoy relatively short commutes, those living in the close in, but less high-end districts tend to suffer the longest commutes.

    So, somewhat surprisingly, workers who live in the outer suburbs of New York have the shorter work trip travel times, at 29.8 minutes than the New York metropolitan average of 32.9 minutes. Workers living in the inner suburbs spend 30.7 minutes getting to work. Those living in the outer boroughs of New York City have the worst commute times at 41.5 minutes. This contrasts sharply with the 30.1 minute average for workers living in the core borough – Manhattan, home of more than 2.2 million jobs.

    One possible conclusion here is that the best way to balance jobs and housing is not to concentrate employment or residences in any one place. High levels of centralization are extremely convenient for those who can afford to live near the Manhattan core – where there are nearly 275 jobs for every 100 resident workers. But it is far less a good deal for those who live in the outer boroughs with only 68 jobs for every 100 resident workers. Richmond (Staten Island) has the largest deficit of jobs, with 56 per 100 resident workers, while Kings County (Brooklyn) has the lowest deficit, with 73 jobs per 100 resident workers.

    In contrast, and somewhat contradictory to conventional assumption, jobs and housing are mostly in balance in New York’s suburbs. Among the inner suburban counties, there are 97 jobs for every 100 resident workers. The inner suburban counties also demonstrate a balance among themselves. The largest deficit is in Hudson County, with 89 jobs per 100 resident workers – a figure well above any of the four outer New York City boroughs. Bergen County has the highest surplus, with 102 jobs for every resident worker. Virtually all other outer suburban counties for which there is data have jobs-housing balances superior to all of the New York City outer boroughs.

    A similar pattern persists in the outer suburbs where there are 93 jobs for every 100 resident worker in the outer suburban counties. Mercer County, which contains three large employment draws, the New Jersey state capital (at Trenton), Princeton University and the Route 1 information technology corridor, has 126 jobs for every resident worker (only Manhattan is higher).

    The extent to which jobs have become dispersed around the metropolitan area is illustrated by the work trip travel times to job locations, rather than by residence location. The average worker commuting to Manhattan, the ultimate American business district, travels 48.5 minutes one-way to work. This is approximately double the national average. Workers commuting to the outer boroughs of New York City spend 36.9 minutes. The situation is much better in the suburbs. For jobs in the inner suburban counties, the average one-way work trip travel time is 29.3 minutes. Perhaps surprisingly, people working in the outer suburban counties spend the least amount of time getting to work, at 24.8 minutes, roughly the national average.

    These findings suggest that much of the conversation about convenience and location between suburbs and cities has been distorted. The notion of suburbanites, particularly in the outer ring, enduring long commutes needs to be re-examined as should the efficiency of high dense employment centers. The greatest advantages to concentrated employment in New York, it seems, devolves to those who can afford to live closest to the central core, something increasingly out of reach for most New Yorkers. For those who can’t afford a nice apartment in Manhattan, it’s not necessarily the best of all bargains.

    For details see Demographia New York Employment & Commuting: 2006.

  • Sacramento 2020

    Even in the best of times, Sacramento tends to be a prisoner to low self-esteem. The region’s population and economic growth have been humming along nicely for the past decade, drawing ever more educated workers from overpriced coastal counties, but the region’s leaders have often seemed defensive about their flourishing town.

    So perhaps it’s not surprising that the mortgage meltdown, which has hit the area hard, has sparked something of an identity crisis. Yet in trying to cope with hard times, it’s important that the region not lose its focus on what paced Sacramento’s past success: its ability to offer affordable, high-quality, largely single-family neighborhoods for middle class families.

    Sadly, the dominant narrative among many planners, politicians and developers in Sacramento today is to try to shed the family-friendly image. There’s a growing consensus that low-density neighborhoods are passé and that the region’s future success lies in retrofitting the region along a high-density, centralized model. Suburban areas like Rancho Cordova or Elk Grove, some believe, are destined to become the “the next slums” as middle-income homeowners, fleeing high gas prices, flock to the urban core.

    Although a healthier downtown with reasonable density is good for the entire region, the high-density focus does not make a good fit for a predominately middle class, family-oriented region such as Sacramento. Unlike an elite city like San Francisco, Sacramento’s growth has been fueled by an influx of educated, family-oriented residents – the populations that have been fleeing such high-priced places where the housing supply is constrained.

    Long-term demographic trends, and perhaps common sense, suggest that most people do not move to Sacramento to indulge in a “hip and cool” urban lifestyle. If someone craves the excitement, bright lights and glamorous industries of a dense city, River City pales compared with places like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles.

    The fact Sacramento has fared far better than these cities over the past 15 years suggests the region’s recent problems lie not in a lack of downtown condos and nightlife, but with a housing market that, as in much of California, has been totally out of whack. Once a consistently affordable locale, by the mid-1990s Sacramento’s housing prices jumped almost nine times income growth, an unsustainable pace seen in a few areas such as Riverside, Miami and Los Angeles.

    As a result, the refugees from the coastal counties who had been coming to Sacramento for affordable housing stopped arriving. Net migration to the region, more than 36,000 in 2001, fell to less than 1,000 in 2006.

    Ultimately only a housing market correction will again lure the people who have come to Sacramento seeking single-family houses – the type of home favored by about 80 percent of Californians – back to the region. Evidence that these people, or current suburbanites, might flock back to the core city is thin at best. The failures of such high-profile projects as The Towers and the region’s stagnant rental market do not suggest a seismic shift toward denser living.

    One key reason has to do with patterns of job growth. Since 2000, suburban communities in the largest metropolitan areas have added jobs at roughly six times the rate of the urban cores.

    This pattern has had profound and often counterintuitive effects on commuting distances. Planners and journalists tend to think of cities in traditional concentric rings, with distance from the core as the key measurement of distance from jobs. But in most regions, the vast majority of employment is outside the core. Even in Sacramento, a state capital, only about 1 in 10 jobs are in the city center. Exurban employment growth since 2000 has been the fastest regionally, expanding at nearly twice the rate for Sacramento County.

    This means commuting distance – and thus exposure to higher gas prices – reflects more than proximity to the central core. In such diverse regions as Los Angeles and Chicago, the shortest average commutes exist both in the affluent inner-city neighborhoods and those suburbs and exurbs, where much of the employment growth has clustered. People who live in Irvine or Ontario in Southern California, or in the western suburbs of Chicago, for example, actually have shorter commutes than those residing in the barrios around downtown Los Angeles or in the Windy City’s fabled South Side.

    These trends suggest a radically different response to high gas prices than the knee jerk downtown-centric approach now widely supported. Instead of cajoling people downtown, perhaps it would make more sense to accelerate employment growth in those suburban and exurban areas where the region’s skilled work force is increasingly concentrated.

    These suburban nodes, both in and outside of Sacramento County, may very well become more important in the near future. With the state facing a perpetual budget deficit, state government – the dominant employer in the central city – may not expand and even could contract in years ahead. Perhaps a wiser approach would be to focus on the biotech, electronics and other firms, many concentrated in suburban areas, as the region’s best hope for the creation of new high-wage jobs.

    Does this mean the region should invite unbridled, uncontrolled growth to the periphery? Not in the least. Successful suburban communities – think of Clovis outside Fresno or Irvine or Valencia in Southern California – provide a high quality of life to their residents. This suggests the need for greater investments in such things as developing lively town centers, expansive parks, wildlife and rural preserves, as well as maintaining good schools, which are often the key factor for families deciding where to live.

    This vision focuses not on one selected geographic area but on a broad spectrum of places across the region. It concentrates not exclusively on dense urban neighborhoods but on fostering a series of thriving villages from close-in city neighborhoods to places like Folsom, Roseville and even Elk Grove. Ultimately the suburb needs not to be demonized, but transformed into something more than bedrooms for a central core.

    In terms of reducing vehicle miles driven, a greater emphasis on telecommuting, including by state employees, would likely also do more than an expanded, very expensive light-rail system. Although more than 12 percent of commuters to and from downtown take transit daily, less than 2 percent of those commuting elsewhere do so. Given the structure of the suburban regions, with multiple nodes of work and a weak bus-feeder system, notions of turning Sacramento into a transit mecca like New York or even San Francisco are far-fetched at best.

    The central city will continue to maintain important functions, not only as a state capital but as a physical and cultural hub. But there needs to be recognition that “hip and cool” dense urbanity does not constitute the core competence of this region. For the foreseeable future, Sacramento’s advantage against its coastal competitors will lie in providing affordable and highly livable modest-density neighborhoods for California’s increasingly diverse middle class.

  • Guzzling BTUs: Problems with Public Transit in an Age of Expensive Gas

    As gas prices inch up toward $5 per gallon, many environmentalists and elected officials are looking to public transit as a solution to higher transportation costs and rising fuel consumption. A closer look at the numbers, however, warrants more than a little skepticism that public transit can fulfill the nation’s energy conservation goals.

    The US transportation sector is a voracious consumer of fuel, accounting for 28 percent of all energy use in 2006 according to the US Department of Transportation. Petroleum products account for 95 percent of this consumption. Naturally, those interested in conserving natural resources, fossil fuels in particular, would want to focus on reducing oil use. Moving people out of cars and onto public transit seems to make intuitive sense.

    It turns out, however, moving people to transit may not be the best strategy after all. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, a typical transit bus uses 4,235 btu per passenger mile, 20 percent more energy per passenger mile than a passenger car. More interestingly, the amount of energy used by cars has fallen to 3,512 per passenger mile in 2006, an 18 percent drop since 1980. In contrast, the amount of energy used by transit buses increased by 50 percent over the same period, rising to 4,235 btus per passenger mile. Light trucks were not quite so energy friendly as energy use fell by nearly one third to 6,904 btus per passenger mile (although their energy efficiency has remained stable since the mid-1990s).

    The long term trend toward more fuel efficient private vehicles is likely to continue as more and more energy-frugal cars such as gasoline-electric hybrids and electric plug-in vehicles become more popular. The Toyota Prius sold its one millionth vehicle in 2008 as it achieved mass production status. Sixty-five hybrid models are expected to be on the US market by the 2010 model year, nearly tripling the current number available. Moreover, all-electric vehicles such as the Tesla sports car are expected to become more popular as consumers become more accepting of personal vehicles fueled by non-traditional technologies. (Notably, Toyota is experimenting with solar panels on new generations of the Prius.)

    These trends, of course, don’t imply that fuel consumption has declined overall. On the contrary, US motorists are consuming 75.4 million gallons of fuel each year, up 7.8 percent from 1980. Yet, this is remarkably stable trend given the fact vehicle mile traveled have increased by 49 percent since then. Travel demand has more than doubled for light trucks and similar vehicles while fuel consumption by these vehicles increased by just 59 percent. Efficiency gains, then, have effectively compensated for large shares of the increase in travel demand, dramatically reducing the amount of energy used for each mile driven.

    Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for public transit. While transit ridership has increased significantly over the past year, climbing to 10.3 billion trips during the first quarter of 2008 according to the American Public Transit Association, the overall effect on the travel market has been modest. Long-term, transit’s market share for all travel fell from 1.5 percent in 1980 to 1 percent in 2005. Transit’s market share for work trips has fallen to 5 percent overall. Meanwhile, the public transit infrastructure – buses, route miles, etc. – has remained largely intact. That means more buses are transporting fewer people, significantly curtailing public transit’s energy efficiency. Not surprisingly, the energy intensity for public transit increased on average by 1.5 percent per year from 1970 to 2006.

    The story is a little different for passenger rail, which carries about half of the nation’s public transit riders (although national data are dominated by ridership in New York City). Transportation consultant Wendell Cox has calculated the energy intensity for other modes of transit in 2005 and found that commuter, heavy, and light rail transit used significantly less energy per passenger mile (about 40%) than public bus or passenger cars.

    Yet, the prospect for reducing energy use significantly by improving rail transit’s market share of overall travel is slim. Despite double-digit increases, light rail ridership accounts for just 3.4 percent of transit passenger miles nationally . In contrast, commuter and heavy rail ridership growth was just 5.7 percent and 4.4 percent respectfully. Moreover, increased ridership for rail services depend on the availability of other transit services, most notably feeder bus routes as well as urban densities that are difficult to sustain outside a few major cities such as New York, Chicago, or Boston.

    Thus, as a practical matter, public transit is unlikely to provide a meaningful solution to reduced energy use in transportation. This becomes clear after looking at travel behavior in the wake of the increase in gas prices over the past year. Overall, public transit ridership increased just 3.3 percent. If we convert ridership into passenger miles traveled – a distance-based rather than trip-based measure – a 3.3 percent increase translates into 1.6 billion passenger miles over the course of a year. That may seem like a big number, until it’s compared to overall US travel.

    As gas prices went up, US automobile travelers eliminated 112 billion passenger miles from our roadways as vehicle miles traveled fell by 2.3 percent. Even if we assume all the increased transit ridership was accounted for by the migration of automobile travelers to public transit, buses and trains captured fewer than 2 percent of the reduction in automobile-based travel demand.

    Thus, in the end, those seeking ways to promote energy conservation are still relying on market forces to affect behavior and resource use. Higher-income consumers value mobility, and automobiles provide the flexibility and adaptability they demand. As energy prices rise, incentives to provide resource stingy alternatives such as hybrid and electric only vehicles increases, stimulating even further innovation that bring down costs over the long run. Meanwhile, contrary to public perception, as fewer segments of the population rely on fixed route transit systems, the relative energy efficiency of public transit declines.

    Samuel R. Staley, Ph.D., is director of urban and land use policy at Reason Foundation and co-author of “The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). He can be contacted at sam.staley@reason.org.

  • Sprinting Blindfolded to a New Equilibrium

    Everyone except the fabulously wealthy and the truly disconnected knows energy has become much more expensive in recent years, but it’s worth taking a step back and examining just how much it has jumped and what we should (and should not) conclude about the impact on nearly all aspects of modern life.

    The raw data provides a startling enough starting place. Since 2004, the U.S. retail price for gasoline has leaped from $1.53 per gallon to $4.10, and oil has skyrocketed from $28 per barrel to over $140. The retail price of natural gas, largely ignored by U.S. consumers during the summer, has increased from $9.71 per thousand cubic feet to $14.30 (its highest price ever for the month of April), and even coal has risen from $19.93 per short ton to $25.40. Electricity, closely tied to the price of natural gas and coal, has increased from 7.61 cents per kilowatt hour to 9.14.

    Whether this rise in oil prices was triggered by the fundamentals of supply and demand, politics, collusion among oil producers or a lack of investment in developing oil fields around the world (I strongly favor fundamentals), or you think we’re headed toward a peak in world oil production very soon or decades from now (I’m firmly in the “very soon” camp), the bottom line is that the economy doesn’t care about causes or rationalizations, just prices.

    Economics, the study of the allocation of scarce resources, tells us that economies constantly adjust themselves in response to price changes. One company raises the price of the tennis rackets they manufacture, so some customers will buy a competitor’s product or forego buying a new racket this year or take up another sport. Many such events constantly send overlapping ripples throughout an economy, causing the quantities demanded and supplied of many goods and services to rise and fall slightly. In econo-speak, the entire system seeks a new equilibrium in response to a change in the price of one good or service relative to substitutes. Talking about minor price changes for non-critical items is the normal background noise of a healthy economy. But energy, especially oil, presents an entirely different scenario.

    Virtually everything we buy depends on the price of oil to some degree. Raw materials, finished goods, customers, and the people who perform services all need to be transported. Oil and natural gas are also critical components in making plastics and many chemicals and fertilizers, and fossil fuels provide 70 percent of the energy consumed to generate electricity in the U.S. In most applications, trying to find a substitute for fossil fuels on the scale and immediacy we’d prefer is impossible without paying a very high price. (As the old line goes, I can do a job for you quickly, cheaply, or well — pick any two.)

    When the price of such a significant and unique resource rises so much and so quickly we’ve pole vaulted over a mild jostle to the system and gone straight to a deep, pervasive, game-changing shock.

    The sheer magnitude of this shock explains why there is so much talk in the financial press lately about which of the Big Three car companies could file for bankruptcy within a year. Ford, GM, and Chrysler are in a desperate race against time. Can they radically overhaul their product lines to meet the rapidly shifting demands of their customers before they run out of cash?

    Given the high cost and long development time to create a new car model, this is a daunting task, to say the least. By comparison, the commercial airline industry is in far worse shape, as they don’t have the potential to save themselves via converting to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Even using biofuels to run their jets is more wishful thinking than a real-world solution, and is at least a decade away from widespread application. Unless the price of jet fuel drops dramatically and fairly soon, the downsizing and bankruptcies we’ve already seen among airlines will be only the beginning of their “adjustment.”

    So, all is gloom and doom, right? Well, no, and this is the point that’s so easy to overlook. Even though energy prices have been rising for years, we’re still in the very early stages of the U.S. economy’s reaction; what we’ve seen to date is much more the initial impact than our individual and collective response.

    Still, it’s not hard to find media stories about the increased use of public transportation, people driving less overall, and more workers telecommuting or converting to a four-day workweek. Plus, we’re awash in reports of how 2010 will be a sea change in the car business, with several companies offering plug-in hybrid and full electric vehicles in the U.S. A further complication is the virtual certainty that soon the U.S. will overtly begin to rein in CO2 emissions, whether via a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system.

    Beyond that we have the growing challenge of generating enough electricity to meet traditional demands plus the additional burden of recharging electric vehicles, all the while reducing CO2 emissions and finding enough water to cool thermoelectric plants (nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas) in a world where climate change is creating drought in inconvenient places. With so many large and powerful forces suddenly in motion at once, trying to make firm predictions about the quantity demanded or the price of any fossil fuel is a revelation of one’s hubris or insanity.

    The last thing we should do is fall into the trap of making simplistic, linear extrapolations. You can barely Google any energy related topic without finding references to the impending “death of the suburbs,” a topic Joel Kotkin addressed recently and I commented on both here and on my own site. Similarly, you can find numerous other opinions that grossly underestimate the inherent flexibility (and therefore unpredictability) of entire economies. Many of them are based on a fallacy that roughly says: “We use a lot of oil to do X. Oil will get more expensive, so therefore we won’t be able to do X.” These comments almost never mention the possibility that we’ll find ways to do X with far less oil, or that we’ll fill the same need by doing Y, or that savings in oil consumption in other, less critical, parts of the economy will buy us time to change how we do X.

    In more concrete terms, how many people really think that more expensive oil will stop us from making medical supplies or fueling trucks that deliver food? Isn’t it more sensible to assume that we’ll cut back on far less critical uses, like pleasure boating or flying for vacations, and keep the increasingly scarce oil flowing to life-and-death applications?

    Humanity has just begun an unprecedented, expensive, painful, and, above all else, unpredictable journey. The end of the age of cheap energy will no doubt reshape almost everything we do, from decisions about personal consumption to our governments and public policies, to our institutions and businesses, to our cities. Our collective future will be a lot of things, but “dull” isn’t on the list.

    Lou Grinzo runs the web site The Cost of Energy , and is an economist by training, a programmer, technical editor, and writer by profession, and an energy geek by genetic predisposition.

  • Suburbs Will Adapt to High Gas Prices

    Will high gas prices doom the suburbs? The short answer is no. America’s investment in suburbia is too broad and deep and these will drive all kinds of technological and other adaptations. But the continued outward growth of new suburban housing tracts and power centers is unsustainable.

    It is, of course, risky to predict anything, particularly the future. No one can predict with certainty the direction of gas prices, let alone how they will reshape our landscape. While the long-term trend for oil and gas is almost certainly rising prices, volatility will continue to make short-run bets risky either way.

    But whether gas prices plateau, spike or even decline in the next five years, larger forces will reinforce the shift to greater reinvestment in older urban areas – and towards reinvention of existing suburban areas, particularly those with strong economies.

    There will still be some “greenfield” peripheral development, but unplanned “sprawl” will wither. New development will be look more like New Urbanist new towns. There will be a revival of the integrated planned community, like Reston in Virginia, the Woodlands near Houston or Valencia and Santa Margarita in Southern California.

    The forces converging to curb sprawl go beyond gas prices. There will be regulatory and market pressure to cut carbon emissions to address global warming, but the most serious threat to outward sprawl will be the private and public shortage of financing for new infrastructure, which is likely to be chronic. Given the deepening crisis in the housing and lending industries, in the long interval building resumes, new development will be very different from what we’ve seen in the past fifty years of most conventional suburbia.

    Of course, even if we adopted a universal program of “smart growth” across America tomorrow, it would be decades before we had repaired and reshaped our landscape and economy to a more sustainable model. In the meantime, there will be tremendous pressure to exploit existing and new energy sources to maintain the suburban model we live in. But we can’t ignore the pragmatic economist Herb Stein who first observed, “Things which can’t go on forever, don’t (known as Stein’s Law).”

    In part, because of legislation such as AB 32, the “Global Climate Solutions Act,” California may be one of the first test cases of this transition. Whether you think this is the greatest threat to our planet in human history or you think this is environmental hysteria, global warming legislation is now a political reality.

    We can’t meet reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – the fundamental goal of the legislation – without reducing vehicle miles traveled. With transportation producing 40 percent of the problem, improved fuel efficiency will help – and so will switching to alternative fuels and increased telecommuting. But those gains will be essentially wiped out by the offsetting increases in population and mileage that people are traveling.

    While the costs of retooling new growth to be more sustainable will be significant, so are the opportunities. This year alone, according to the Economist, the oil importing nations will transfer two trillion dollars to the oil exporting nations. That’s money that will not be go to improve our infrastructure, protect our environment or educate our youth. It goes out our tailpipes.

    Here in California, the $20 billion transportation bond that voters approved in 2006 comes nowhere near to closing the $100 billion dollar gap in transportation infrastructure needed to address auto congestion and goods movement by truck. There is no way California’s government or economy can afford to continue to pay that cost. But it has taken gas at nearly $5 a gallon for people to wake up and smell the fumes.

    But halting sprawl is not the same as reversing it. Gas prices, AB 32 mandates, highway spending deficits and environmental concerns all conspire against more red-tiled roof subdivisions in Palmdale and Victorville. Yet growth pressures will fuel new demand down the road, so older suburbs and cities have to find ways to develop family-friendly housing and attract jobs that have been flowing to the suburban edge.

    These are two different, but related challenges. Older suburbs have to find a way to gracefully urbanize by strengthening or creating walkable centers and adding more population along commercial/transit corridors. They need to transition from auto-dependence to a wider range of real transportation alternatives. Above all, they face the challenge of persuading residents that reinvention of the suburbs can improve their quality of life and standard of living.

    Planners make a mistake if they try to tell suburban residents to give up what they like about suburbia in terms of space, privacy and safety. Acceptance of higher densities in existing suburban communities will only come if design of more urban housing improves and new development offers residents tangible improvements in amenities such as pedestrian-friendly districts, parks, bikeways and opportunities to work close to home.

    Older cities, on the other hand, already have much of the physical framework in place, but need to improve their parks, schools, libraries and neighborhoods. They must make themselves attractive to retain working and middle-class households, especially families with children. The key challenge will be to overcome the entrenched special interests that dominate urban politics to focus on the efforts that make a city hospitable to residents and businesses and be less dominated by the interests of developers and public employee unions.

    All across the state there are promising examples that suggest suburban and urban communities are getting the point. in the short run, the weak economy and awful financial market, both for public and private sectors, will slow change. But California has shown incredible resilience over the past 150 years. Our growing population and changing demographics will open up a huge market for reinvesting in our older communities.

    Now is the time to prepare for that time. Remember during the last deep real estate downturn, former Governor Pete Wilson abandoned his promise to tackle statewide growth management. His excuse was, “I wish I had some growth to manage.” The tragedy of that missed opportunity was that it wasn’t long before growth again overwhelmed our capacity.

    What if we’d not only put in place a coherent growth management strategy like Oregon, New Jersey or Maryland – but we’d established the collaborative regional structures in place like in metro Denver, Salt Lake City or Portland? Today, we’d be finishing the Subway to the Sea, the Gold Line extension to Ontario Airport and we’d have regular commuter rail between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Maybe then, $5 gas would be a little less painful.

    For too long, we’ve viewed cities and suburbia as natural antagonists. But the future may lie with greater convergence. Cities can become greener and more attractive to population growth. Suburbs can begin to urbanize in graceful and sustainable ways. Both are due for reinvention and reinvestment. The challenges we face will give us the opportunity – and the necessity – for doing just that.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Jerry Brown’s War on California Suburbs

    In the 1960s, California Gov. Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown laid the foundation for building modern, suburban California with massive new highway projects and one of the most significant public water projects in history. The resulting infrastructure gave us broad, low-density developments with room for millions of Californians to have a home with a backyard and two cars in the driveway.

    Those were the good old days. Today, Pat Brown’s son Jerry is waging war on the very communities his father helped make possible. Why? Global warming.

    Jerry Brown has been a fixture of the state’s politics for more than three decades. He was elected governor in 1974 and four years later earned the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” for his interest in creating a space program in California. In 1998, he was elected mayor of Oakland, a working-class city across the bay from San Francisco. And in 2006, he was elected attorney general. Today he is mulling a run for governor in 2010, when he will be 72.

    In the meantime, Mr. Brown is taking aim at the suburbs, concerned about the alleged environmental damage they cause. He sees suburban houses as inefficient users of energy. He sees suburban commuters clogging the roads as wasting precious fossil fuel. And, mostly, he sees wisdom in an intricately thought-out plan to compel residents to move to city centers or, at least, to high-density developments clustered near mass transit lines.

    Mr. Brown is not above using coercion to create the demographic patterns he wants. In recent months, he has threatened to file suit against municipalities that shun high-density housing in favor of building new suburban singe-family homes, on the grounds that they will pollute the environment. He is also backing controversial legislation — Senate bill 375 — moving through the state legislature that would restrict state highway funds to communities that refuse to adopt “smart growth” development plans. “We have to get the people from the suburbs to start coming back” to the cities, Mr. Brown told planning experts in March.

    The problem is, that’s not what Californians want. For two generations, residents have been moving to the suburbs. They are attracted to the prospect, although not always the reality, of good schools, low crime rates and the chance to buy a home. A 2002 Public Policy Institute of California poll found that 80% of Californians prefer single-family homes over apartment living. And, even as the state’s traffic jams are legendary, it is not always true that residents clog roads to commute to jobs in downtown Los Angeles or other cities.

    Ali Modarres, associate director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles, believes the density-first approach is ill-suited for areas like L.A. County, where most residents and jobs are dispersed among subregional “nodes.” Research by Mr. Modarres, co-author of the powerful book “City and Environment,” demonstrates that people living in nodes — Pasadena, Torrance, Burbank and Irvine — often enjoy considerably shorter average commutes than do a lot of inner-city residents. Many of these people commute through tangled traffic to get to jobs on the periphery.

    “I have no problem trying to find solutions on global warming,” Mr. Modarres told me, “but I doubt these kinds of solutions are going to do anything. The whole notion that through physical planning you can get a lot of people to abandon their cars is pretty iffy.”

    Mr. Modarres also points out that forcing developers to build near transit lines, a strategy favored by “smart-growth advocates,” does not mean residents will actually take the train or bus. A survey conducted last year by the Los Angeles Times of “transit oriented development” found that “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during rush hour.”

    There is also little punch behind the science used to justify the drive to resettling the cities — and plenty of power behind the argument that suburbs are better for Mother Earth. Several prominent scholars — including University of Maryland atmospheric scientist Konstanin Vinnikov, University of Georgia meterologist J. Marshall Shepard and Brookings Institution research analyst Andrea Sarzynski — have found there is little evidence linking suburbanization to global warming, pointing out that density itself can produce increased auto congestion and pollution.

    The antisuburbanites also ignore evidence that packing people together in cities produces “heat islands.” Temperatures in downtown Los Angeles sometimes reach as much as three degrees centigrade higher than outlying areas. Recent studies in Australia have shown that multistoried housing generates higher carbon emissions than either townhomes or single-family residences because of the energy consumed by common areas, elevators and parking structures, as well as the lack of tree cover.

    In the short run, while being “tough” on climate change appears popular, an assault on the preferred lifestyle of suburban voters may not. These voters aren’t likely to appreciate being castigated as ecological evildoers, especially by people who generally house themselves in spacious splendor.

    A report by the Los Angeles Weekly’s Dave Zahniser — entitled “Do as We Say, Not as We Do” — found that a lot of prominent “smart growth” advocates in Los Angeles live in large single-family homes, some of them long hikes from mass transit. Mr. Brown himself, not long ago, moved from a loft in crime-ridden downtown Oakland to a bucolic setting in the Oakland Hills.

    At a time when political trends favor Democrats, a hypocritical jihad against basic middle-class aspirations may not be the best strategy. Mr. Brown would be better off embracing telecommuting and other ideas to cut suburban commutes that accommodate the majority’s dreams and preferences. He might have learned that from his father. Instead he’s gone from wanting to launch people into space to opposing people who move to the suburbs.

    This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

  • Suburbs Thriving, Cities Stagnating in Keystone State

    The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer said it all, “Philadelphia’s population shrinking, though region’s is growing.” This in the midst of what is purported to be a condominium boom in its thriving center city.

    But facts are facts: Philadelphia’s population has dropped 4.5 percent. This ranks it first among the top-25 U.S. cities in population loss from 2000-2007. This data causes you to pause and rethink the real impact of major public investments in the city spurred on by a governor who is the city’s former two-term mayor.

    For one, gambling was supposed to bring good jobs to the city. The two winning bidders each created projects on the Delaware River, but these projects are stuck in a protracted political battle and their fate at these riverfront locations is uncertain along with the thousands of jobs they have promised.

    Part of the problem for the casinos is that a new vision has been created for the Delaware Riverfront. The Penn Praxis plan envisions recreation and greenways, not gambling for this area of the city. As a result, the gaming interests are being asked to consider building somewhere else within the city.

    There is also the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The first phase was built into the old Reading Railroad terminal on east Market Street. Supporters contend that it has spurred a hotel and restaurant boom in the city and there is validity to this position.

    But work rules issues have plagued the center since its inception. The result has been that most convention groups have chosen not to return because of arcane union rules that made it beyond difficult to do simple things like set up a booth or get electric power to a display. Negotiations have brought some relief, but problems remain to be solved.

    Despite these problems the convention center is now slated to expand about two blocks west of its current location. The costs have escalated dramatically and now exceed $800 million . This is an increase of nearly $100 million since the deal to move forward was approved and buildings were condemned and razed.

    On July 12, Governor Rendell hinted that he was having second thoughts about the viability of the expanded center when he said that the center is “getting to the point where the cost will outweigh the benefit.” These remarks were made while the governor was signing legislation that would increase the taxes on a hotel room in Philadelphia by more than 15 percent to pay for tourism promotion and the convention center.

    Stadium Economics
    Public dollars have also helped to fund a new football and baseball stadium in South Philadelphia. Citizens Bank Park is a real gem of a baseball stadium – a fun family entertainment venue where the Philadelphia Phillies play 82 games a year. Across the street is Lincoln Financial Field where the Philadelphia Eagles play their games as well as Temple University. There are only 20 – 25 games played there each year. The Phillies stadium cost $458 million and the Eagles complex $512 million, most of which came from public investment.

    What has been the economic impact of this investment? Has the neighborhood been revitalized by this investment? The short answer is no. They are basically commuter stadiums where fans come, see, and go.

    Rick Eckstein, who is a professor at a local university and author of Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle over Building Sports Stadiums, has studied the economic impact of public investment in stadium projects. He concludes, “I have been studying and writing about publicly financed stadiums for more than 10 years and cannot name a single stadium project that has delivered on its original grandiose economic promises, although they do bring benefits to team owners, sports leagues and sometimes players.”

    Over the years billions of dollars has been invested in tourism and entertainment projects and the results are clear: the projects required more dollars than originally thought and the promises of profound economic benefits have never materialized as expected.

    Philadelphia is a lot more fun than it was 20 years ago, but its economy remains stagnant and its core population continues to leave to find opportunity elsewhere.

    There is also another trend resulting from this kind of pubic investment. The more public money that is poured into a region the more taxes and fees follow.

    In Pennsylvania, these kinds of investment go far beyond Philadelphia. Pittsburgh has two new stadiums costing a total of more than $1 billion and a new $375 million convention center that is touted as, “the cornerstone of western Pennsylvania’s hospitality industry.”

    Erie has the Bayfront Convention Center at $44 million and funded it with a new five percent hotel room tax. The Altoona region has Blair County Convention Center & Sports Facility Authority a $50 million project funded with $48 million in federal and state grants. The City of York invested economic and political capital in securing a $28 million revenue bond to fund a minor league baseball stadium. The City of Chester just was awarded a soccer franchise and is planning a new stadium to go along with the new casino as core projects to revitalize its economy.

    When we look back at the billions of dollars that has been spent on these projects and the results, you are left to wonder whether or not these dollars could have been spent more wisely in other areas to build an economy on sturdier foundation.

    The results have not been encouraging. Population growth in Pennsylvania between April 2000 and July 2006 was a mere 1.3 percent. Private non-farm employment decreased 0.1 percent according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Pennsylvania’s senior population continues to be among the highest in the nation at 15.2 percent in 2006.

    Philadelphia lagged behind the national average of the percent of the population with a bachelor’s degree by 4.5 percentage points in 2000; Pittsburgh’s mean household income was nearly $12,000 below the national average. None of the major cities in Pennsylvania gained population during the early years of this century.

    Suburban Growth
    Meanwhile there is a very different story in suburban and rural counties. Montgomery County’s population grew at a rate nearly three times that of the State of Pennsylvania and Bucks County grew by nearly four times. In Berks County, the next county beyond Philadelphia’s four suburban collar counties, population growth was a healthy 7.4 percent and household income exceeded the national average.

    In rural Monroe County, located outside of Wilkes-Barre, population spiked by nearly 20 percent over six years while in Pike County, northeast of Scranton, we saw staggering growth of 25.7 percent and household income exceeding the national average.

    The people of Pennsylvania want what every other American wants for their families: a nice home, good schools, quality government services and a safe community. They are abandoning cities because they cannot keep this promise to their middle-income wage earners.

    However, they are finding what they want in Pennsylvania’s first and second ring suburbs and in rural communities that don’t invest in stadiums, convention centers or entertainment to build their economies. Instead these communities provide a quality of life that attracts people and the jobs are following.

    An economy built on tourism and entertainment provides very few family wage jobs. These funds would likely be better invested in quality of life and infrastructure in order to create high wage, blue collar jobs in the global economy.

    If not, people will continue to vote with their feet as they look for opportunity beyond the casino, restaurant and tourism industries and a better quality of life outside of cities that are increasingly being viewed as opportunity-free zones.

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

  • Where Are the Best Cities to Do Business?

    Our comprehensive annual guide to which places are thriving — even in an economy many consider in recession.

    By Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires

    What a difference a year and a deflated housing bubble makes. Inc.com’s 2008 list of the Best Cities for Doing Business, created in conjunction with Newgeography.com, uncovered some of the most dramatic changes since we started this ranking back in 2004. Five major trends were immediately revealed; trends that are shaping the business environment right now across the country and will continue to over the next several years.

    The list focuses on short- and long-term job growth. It tells us precisely not just where jobs are being created — a sure sign of economic vitality — but where the momentum is shifting. For entrepreneurs, this suggests what may be the best places to locate or expand your business.

    The Bubble and the Fall of the Sunshine Boys

    Since the list’s inception, Florida has been the standout state in each of our size-based categories — small, midsize, and large. But not this year. Now, Florida is the state that fell back to earth. Stung by plummeting construction employment and the mortgage finance crisis, many of our former highfliers across the state are hurting. Ft. Lauderdale, last year’s No. 3 among the large metros, dropped 24 places. West Palm Beach, No. 6 last year, dropped to No. 41. And Jacksonville, No. 12 in the large category, fell seven places.

    The fall, however, was much more devastating for the smaller communities, such as Ft. Myers-Cape Coral. The area ranked No. 1 last year in the midsize category but plummeted 42 places this year. Lakeland-Winter Haven, down 45 places, Deltona-Daytona Beach, down 49, Palm Bay-Melbourne, down 53, and Bradentown, down 65, fared even worse. In even smaller towns, the scenario was bleaker. Ft. Walton Beach dropped 85 places and Naples-San Marco Island, No. 4 last year, plummeted 105 places, the most of any metro in our survey.

    “We’re the foreclosure capital of America,” admits Bill Valenti, founder and CEO of Florida Gulf Bank, founded in 2001 in Fort Myers on the once booming west coast of the Sunshine State. Many of the people that moved into the area bought relatively expensive homes expecting continued asset appreciation to make up for the fact that many jobs in the area pay modest or low wages. Now the area has seen median house prices drop from $320,000 to $223,000 in two years. “Something had to give and it did.”

    Although Florida’s fall was by far the biggest, the housing collapse has also humbled high fliers in other states as well. Last year’s No. 1 among the large metros, Las Vegas, dropped seven places while No. 2, Phoenix, dropped 12; the other big Arizona city, Tucson, No. 12 last year among the midsize category, fell 34 places. Midsize Reno, No. 8 last year and previously No. 1, dropped 21 places.

    Outside Florida, the sharpest pain was felt in California. Property-driven economies in Oakland, Santa Ana-Anaheim, Sacramento, and Riverside-San Bernardino all dropped by around 20 places or more. The big enchilada, Los Angeles, fell another eight places from its already mediocre 48th ranking last year. Almost every city below LA on the list is either a Rustbelt disaster or a perennially underperforming Northeastern big city.

    If this trend continues to play out, California’s problems could be worse than those in Florida. When the bubble corrects, Florida still can boast relatively low costs, no income taxes, and a favorable business climate in addition to warm weather. By contrast, California’s land use laws, high taxes, and massive $20 billion state deficit don’t bode well for the future of the state, suggests Bill Watkins, executive director of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Economic Forecast Project. “There’s a lot of uncertainty,” he says. “If you are expanding or starting a business, there’s not a lot of reason now to come to California.”

    The Texas Ascendancy Continues

    While California is struggling, says Los Angeles-based architect David Hidalgo, Texas is thriving. Hidalgo just completed a large Latino-themed shopping center in Ft. Worth and sees more of his business coming from the Lone Star State. “That’s where the opportunities are,” he says. “Its costs, regulation, and infrastructure drive you to Texas.”

    Our rankings certainly bear out Hidalgo’s assertion. In many ways Texas has become the new Florida, dominating the top of the list. Among the largest metro areas, a remarkable five of the top 12 best places to do business are from the Lone Star State, ranging from Austin (No. 2) and Houston (No. 4) to Ft. Worth (No. 9) and Dallas (No. 12). Among the small cities, Midland, now ranks No. 1, up 10 places from last year. Odessa and Longview, both big gainers, round out the Texas stronghold on the top portion of the list.

    Texas’ boom reflects solid growth in a variety of industries, from energy and agriculture to manufacturing and trade. “The big difference for Texas is we did not rely on the real estate bubble,” suggests Bill Gilmer, a Houston-based economist for the Federal Reserve. “Our gains are based on jobs elsewhere and that has insulated us pretty well.”

    Here Come the Carolinas

    The other big winners this year are concentrated in the Carolinas. Like Texas, these two states are being fed by varied economies. Certainly, technology companies have been a factor here, many of them in Raleigh-Cary, N.C., which ranked No. 1, up six places, on our list of largest metro areas. Finance has played a large part, too, with Charlotte (No. 5), up 18 places, emerging as the big but low-cost, family-friendly alternative to the New York financial center.

    Demographics are a big part of the story here. Our analysis from Praxis Strategy Group shows that Raleigh and Charlotte, are among the biggest magnets for young, educated workers, particularly those in their late 20s and early 30s.

    “People are coming here for basic reasons and taking their families with them,” observes Sociologist John D. Kasarda, director of the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are coming for jobs, particularly from the Northeast, and an affordable quality of life.”

    To some extent, Kasarda adds, Raleigh and Charlotte are well-known success stories, but he points to wider, less documented successes in the region. Driven by gains in tourism, logistics, manufacturing, and technology, more and more midsize Carolina cities are joining the party. These emerging players include Charleston, S.C. (No. 6); Asheville, N.C. (No. 7); Durham, N.C. (No. 11); Greenville, S.C. (No. 18); and Columbia, S.C. (No. 19). These cities made considerable gains over last year and should be seriously considered for new business opportunities.

    The Pacific Northwest-Intermountain West Surge Continues

    Like last year, the northwestern quarter of the country did very well. Three of the top 11 big metro areas in the region between the foggy West Coast and the high mountains, including Salt Lake City (No. 3), Seattle (No. 10) and Portland, Ore. (No. 11), all gained ground. This ascendancy was even more evident at the midsize level, with the success of cities such as Provo-Orem, Utah (No. 1); Tacoma, Wash. (No. 2); Ogden, Utah (No. 8); Boise, Idaho (No. 12); and Spokane, Wash. (No. 14). Small cities, including St. George, Utah (No. 2), Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (No. 3), Bend, Ore. (No. 7) and Grand Junction, Colo. (No. 9), also saw gains.

    In many ways, the gains here parallel those in the Carolinas. Places like Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland, according to the Praxis Strategy Group analysis, all continue to gain educated residents from other parts of the country. The lure, in many cases, lies with strong and diverse job growth and low housing prices compared to coastal California and the Northeast.

    Seattle continued its strong growth, notes economist Paul Sommers, due largely to the success of two companies — Microsoft and Boeing. These companies have been expanding, providing high-wage jobs, and attracting skilled talent to the area. Another key advantage in this high energy cost environment: the Northwest’s prodigious supplies of cheap and clean hydroelectric power. This helps everyone, from people building airplane parts to dot-com firms sucking copious amounts of electricity to run their servers.

    Some of the other areas in this vast region benefit from what might be called “grey power.” Older, often more educated and affluent, baby boomers are flocking to the smaller towns and cities in this region, bringing capital and, in some cases, entrepreneurial know-how. Like the Carolinas, the area between the foggy Pacific Coast and the Rockies seems poised for sustained growth.

    Revenge of the Superstars?

    Perhaps the most surprising shift in the 2008 rankings, and in some ways the most subtle, has been the improvement in a host of very expensive, highly regulated urban regions that Wharton economist Joe Gyourko calls “superstar cities.” For many years these cities — New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston — have clustered at the bottom of our growth-oriented list, all suffering big losses from the 2000-2001 dot-com bust.

    This year has seen the revenge of the “superstars.” Although not surpassing Texas, the Carolinas or the Northwest, these elite cities have made a strong showing. In just one year, New York (No. 22) propelled itself 21 places while San Francisco (No. 29) and San Jose (No. 33) gained at least 25 places, and Boston (No. 40) went up 19 places.

    The main reason for this modest, but significant turnaround, suggests David Shulman, former managing director of Lehman Brothers, is simple: the powerful financial sector expansion of the past few years. These are all cities where big money plays a big role, either financing new dot-com start-ups or simply serving as the places where multimillion-dollar bonuses are spent on a host of high-priced services.

    Yet, Shulman notes, these gains may be short lived. The impact of the subprime and mortgage meltdown hit first in places like California and Florida, and is only beginning to affect the major financial centers. Spurred by the credit crisis, Shulman fears new regulations will limit financial innovation and wipe out whole sections of industries like mortgage-backed securities and some derivatives.

    “A lot of these gains are going to rewind,” suggests Shulman. “New York is losing jobs as we speak. Anyplace with exposure to financial services is going to suffer over the next two years.”

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of Newgeography.com

    Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy

  • Suburbia’s Not Dead Yet

    While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of — the demise of suburbia.

    In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday’s new suburbs will become “the slums” of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburban aesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain in suburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.

    Not so fast. The “out of the suburbs, back to the city” narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families — and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.

    The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb,” who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburban growth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars and companies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times. Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

    But today’s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highest ever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soon are slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the cities would seem ideal once again.

    Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurringin suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.

    The flat condominium markets in most large urban markets are another sign that people are not streaming into cities from the suburbs and buying. Many condo projects in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Diego have either been canceled or converted into rentals, with many units remaining vacant. As a Southern California condo developer told me recently, lower house prices are not going to make people more disposed to buying apartments.

    But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not following the script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do with employment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not only because it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions — by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisure activities.

    The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.

    A desire to live closer to their jobs doesn’t mean that people have to move to the inner core, particularly if that’s not where the jobs are. Of the 20 leading job centers in Southern California by ZIP Code, none are downtown. The central core does remain an important job center, but it accounts for barely 3% of regional employment. Among those who work downtown, some may shift from cars to public transit, although many will simply buy a more fuel-efficient car and stay put in the suburbs.

    For residents who live in suburban areas with large concentrations of employment — Burbank, Ontario and West L.A. — commutes to work can be shorter than those experienced by their inner-city counterparts, according to Ali Modarres, a professor of geography at Cal State Los Angeles. Commutes in these communities, on average, are less than 25 minutes, while in high-density areas, such as Pico-Union, they average 35 minutes.

    The relative and continuing health of these suburban employment centers would seem to preclude any large-scale flight to cities. But urban areas with limited or shrinking employment opportunities, and suburbs that bet on housing to sustain their economies, will continue to have trouble attracting residents either because of a scarcity of jobs or long commutes at a time of expensive gas.

    The suburb-to-the-city narrative faces other obstacles. By the early part of the next decade, the large millennial generation born since the early 1980s will begin to form families, and they will, as have previous generations, probably seek open space and good schools for their children — and that means they will settle in the suburbs. And there is no census evidence suggesting that immigrants have reversed their decade-old pattern of moving to the suburbs.

    The growth of telecommuting, fed by technological advances, further ensures that suburbia has a future. By 2006, the expansion of home-based workers had grown twice as quickly as in the previous decade. And by 2015, according to demographer Wendell Cox, there will be more people in the country working electronically from home full time than are taking public transit.

    More numerous will be those who work at home part time. Nearly 29 million Americans telecommute at least once a month, according to WorldatWork, a nonprofit consultancy. At many companies — IBM, Sun Microsystems and AT&T among them — upward of 30% of their employees work from home. In some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, almost one in 10 workers are part-time telecommuters, according to a 2004 study done by Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank.

    Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation’s geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don’t want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive editor of NewGeography.com

  • Commuting Suicide — the District of Columbia wants to be a residential suburb

    The Washington Post’s recent article about how the District government is making plans to make the city “less-welcoming to suburban cars” is one more example of suicidal behavior that the city is known for.

    Unfortunately, other cities are thinking similarly. In the plan, “City officials say that the moves are part of a policy of putting the needs of its residents and businesses before those of suburban commuters and that they are trying to create a walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented metropolis.” Apparently Washington has decided to become a bedroom suburb. Newsflash: even those don’t exist anymore – much less in the center of a metropolitan region of over five million.

    It is hard to believe that the District could consciously make the city less welcoming to vehicles than it already is – with potholes on every block and roads like I-295 right out of the 1930s with design features for the tin lizzie, or New York Avenue that says “Welcome to your Nation’s Capitol” with neglect apparent on every block. Maybe because they cannot fix those things they decided to turn it into a virtue at least among some segments of the society.

    You would think the District would have noticed that more of their own citizens get to work by car than by transit and about 45 percent of those riding transit are on the roads they want to make worse. This is just an extension of the District’s perennial search for revenue with a tortured way to get to a commuter tax that has been around for decades.

    All it would take is a few minutes on the back of an envelope to recognize how important commuters are to the city. First answer would be a simple thought experiment – would the city be better off with no suburban commuters or with what they have now? Someone in the District government could do a small calculation of the amount of office building space, with the attendant real estate taxes they generate, the restaurants, shops and services, the parking garages and the revenue they earn, the taxes they pay, and the District workers they support, to recognize that the benefits to the City per thousand commuters far exceeds the costs. Without the suburbs even its beloved Metro wouldn’t exist.

    More importantly, it shows that the District once again has failed to recognize its responsibility as the nation’s capitol. Those responsibilities are really not that terribly different from other center cities. This is part of a looming public policy conflict of national proportions. As cities adopt the new mantra of “metro mobility” – which is code for an attack on autos and an assumption that transit needs can be met by walking, biking and mass transit – they only address trips under five miles. This completely neglects the responsibility that every city and metropolitan region in the country has, much less the nation’s capitol, to meet the needs of interstate commerce – whether through access to ports or to major rail or highway routes.

    This is not optional. An area cannot opt out of that obligation. If all areas of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area operated that way, rather than a great region comprised of dozens of counties it would be a series of hamlets adjacent to each other with the obvious decline in market power and productivity that entails.

    The great challenge to the nation in the next few years will be providing access to those workers needed to replace the aging baby boom generation. We will need to expand the commuter market-sheds around our cities not contract them. Congressman Moran got it right, providing a sense of scale when he told reporter Eric M. Weiss, “U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) said … the city should be careful not to chase people away. Like the District, Old Town Alexandria would be a nicer place without all the cars, he said. But there is an economic component to be considered, he said, and people in cars represent customers for restaurants and shops.”

    He also said be careful what you wish for… For a city that lost 180,000 people over the last 30 years the District should listen to wiser heads.