New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • UK Moves to Reform Planning Disaster

    This piece originally appeared at Macrobusiness.

    The United Kingdom (UK) housing system is arguably the worst in the world because of a myriad of policies that work to severely restrict supply, pump demand, and make renting a highly undesirable substitute for home ownership. These policies have led to the UK housing market experiencing:

    1) a higher level of house price inflation than most other European nations:


    2) Relatively expensive housing on a price-to-earnings basis:


    3) Extreme house price volatility:


    4) Which has also increased the volatility of the economic cycle due to the positive effects on consumer spending of equity withdrawals from rising home values and heightened austerity in the bust phase:



    At the core of the UK’s housing problems is the straightjacket that was placed on housing supply following the passage of the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, which nationalised development rights. Essentially, the pre-existing right of landowners to build-on or re-develop their land was removed and handed to the state, thereby requiring land owners to seek planning permission before anything other than minor renovation work was undertaken.

    UK housing supply effectively became a centrally planned system whereby government bureacrats would attempt to predict some years ahead the required numbers of dwellings that ought to be built in an area to meet demand. However, as explained brilliantly in a detailed paper by the Policy Exchange, the key outcome from the UK planning system has been a housing market that has delivered some of the oldest, smallest and most expensive homes in Europe of a type that are least preferred by households. Put simply, UK households are paying more for housing than their European counterparts and receiving less in return:

    Central planning attempts to ensure that what is thought best for the people by the central planners is what is produced. So, as we showed earlier, the system currently attempts to produce exactly the number of dwellings which are estimated to be required from calculations of need, calculations involving assessments of demographic change, household formation, household splits, migration, deaths, births, etc. Built into the system is a pressure at all levels to provide the minimum. Using green field sites is politically problematic. The cry goes up that the countryside is being buried under tarmac. And anyway, as we have shown, the system adjusts. If too little housing is provided, house prices rise and housing becomes expensive. When it is more expensive, people can afford less and so buy smaller homes. With smaller homes, more dwellings can be provided on less land because homes can be built at higher densities, namely flats or houses with tiny gardens.

    But is this really what people want? In March 2005, a widely reported survey carried out by MORI on behalf of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment found that over 50 per cent of those questioned wanted a detached house and 22 per cent preferred a bungalow. Only 2 per cent per cent expressed a preference for a low rise flat and less than 1 per cent a flat in a high rise block. But since detached houses and bungalows use more land than other kinds of house, fewer and fewer are built each year. And many are also demolished to make way for terraced houses or blocks of flats. So while as recently as 1990 only about an eighth of newly built dwellings were apartments, by 2004 the proportion had increased to just under a half…

    So whilst people may not want to live in them or want them built where they live,more and more blocks of flats of just this type are being built because the central planners think that they should have them, and because the production norms are filled more easily in this way than by building houses or bungalows…

    The British planning system means that the most important thing the developer has to do is to obtain planning permission. Once this has been obtained, given the demand for housing, whatever is built can be sold. So the way to make the greatest profit, having obtained permission, is to produce the permitted dwellings at the lowest possible cost. Adding good design is an unnecessary expense because whatever is built will sell. So the constraints imposed by the planning system work against the achievement of a better architectural environment, something which might be achieved with less pressure to build at the lowest possible cost. Competition between developers on design becomes largely unnecessary because they know that they will be able to sell whatever they produce.

    So the current position is that what people want, when asked, is lower density housing. What they get, what the planning system now insists upon, is high density development, much of it in the least desired form – blocks of flats…

    British housing tends to be older than elsewhere in Western Europe. Because they are older their efficiency, in terms of heating for example, tends to be less. The houses [also] tend to be smaller… New houses tend to be even smaller on average than existing houses. In addition, house prices rise faster in the UK so that, year on year, housing in Britain has been getting more expensive relative to that in the rest Europe…

    If fifty years of planning has achieved one thing… Britain [now] has the oldest, pokiest, housing in Europe.

    Compounding the above regulatory constraints on land/housing supply are the greenbelts that have been errected around all of the UK’s major housing markets, which have excluded large swathes of agricultural land from urban development and helped to push-up land prices. A map of the UK’s greenbelts is provided below:


    In addition, the overriding planning objective in the UK has increasingly become one of ‘urban containment and ‘densification’. In the 1990s, the Central Government explicitly required that 60% of all new land for housing must be brownfield land – i.e. land which has already been developed for some other purpose.

    This 60% in-fill requirement necessarily meant the restriction of land supply and higher land prices. It has also produced some perverse outcomes owing to the fact that many brownfield sites that come onto the market for redevelopment are not necessarily located where there is demand for housing. Key amongst these perverse outcomes are the construction of high density developments in poorly located areas as well as ‘leapfrog’ developments far away from the existing urban fringe:

    In southern England, where demand is great, the brown fields norm is complied with by constructing high-density developments whenever and wherever the land has become available, whether centrally, in the inner suburbs, in the outer suburbs, or in the middle of the country miles away from public transport. So the site of a house or hotel in the middle of the London Green Belt may be redeveloped to provide more houses or a larger hotel. The development is on a brown field site so that fulfils the production norm, to be sure. But the development neither preserves the countryside, nor does it reduce the use of private transport. Indeed, it actually increases it above what might have been achieved on a green field site bordering the town.

    A final related roadblock to housing supply in the UK is its centralised fiscal system, whereby local authorities – which are the primary decision makers on development and have statutory obligations to provide services for new houses – receive very little revenue from increased population and housing. As such, these local authorities tend to be biased against development.

    Combined, these regulatory constraints on new housing construction have meant that housing supply in the UK has been incapable of responding quickly and efficiently to changes in demand, thus placing upward pressure on prices and creating expectations of future capital growth.

    According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) Housing Market Taskforce report on reducing volatility in the UK housing market, only an average of around 180,000 homes per annum were completed in the UK over the past two decades – only slightly above construction volumes in Australia, despite the UK having nearly triple the population (around 62 million).

    And as shown below, despite the massive run-up in prices between 2000 and 2007, there was only a minimal supply response towards the end of the latest housing bubble, confirming that UK housing supply is highly unresponsive (‘inelastic’) to changes in demand.


    More worryingly still, new home construction has reportedly fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s, with just 105,000 new homes completed in 2010.

    The supply constraints present in the UK housing market ensured that the extra demand arising from the UK’s deregulated mortgage market – where lenders were offering 100% plus LVR (i.e. no deposit) mortgages to first-time buyers at the height of the most recent housing bubble – manifested into escalating prices rather than new home construction. By contrast, in the wake of the global financial crisis, UK lenders rationed credit and demanded higher deposits (reduced LVRs), which contributed to the falling prices.

    In a similar vein, the UK’s deregulated rental market and lack of security of tenure (whereby six month leases are the norm) has ensured that renting is a second rate option, thereby encouraging residents to strive (and borrow big) for owner occupancy. With this extra demand for owner-occupied housing not met by increased supply, the inevitable result has been ’panic buying’ from first-time buyers when house prices are rising and the opposite when prices are expected to stagnate or fall.

    Change in the air?

    The concerns about the UK housing situation appear to have come to a head, with the Central Government moving to reform the planning system by:

    1. streamlining the development process by reducing more than 1,000 pages of regulations and red tape to just 52 pages; and
    2. implementing a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”, which has the potential to open up the greenbelts to new housing development.

    The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has described the planning system as “slow and bureaucratic” and argues that reform is essential. He also laments the fact that the average first-time buyer without parental help in the UK is 37 years of age.

    However, conservationists and NIMBY groups have rallied against the changes arguing that the reforms risk concreting over the UK’s precious country side and robbing the nation of productive farmland – a ridiculous claim when you consider that:

    1. only around 8% of UK land is urbanised, which is lower than the Netherlands (15%), Belgium (15%), Germany (13%), and Denmark (9%); and
    2. the proportion of UK land used for agriculture is among the highest in the old European Economic Community: 78% compared with an average of 64%.

    According to Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich, an economist and planning expert at Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies, concerns that the UK will concrete over the country side if the proposed planning reforms are implemented are misguided:

    Dr Oliver Hartwich, an economist with the Centre for Independent Studies, who has studied the British system, believes that without the postwar planning system, the UK would only “look slightly different, but not much”.

    Instead, he suggests the real impact of the green belt has been to fuel house price inflation and push development further into the “real” countryside beyond the green belt, leading to more commuting, fuel use and stress.

    “No-one wants to concrete over the countryside,” he adds. But British cities are overcrowded.

    “What this sort of planning does is encourage a system where bubbles are likely. The idea that you need to get into the property market in your early 20s is very harmful but it’s something that this planning system promotes.”

    Dr Hartwich is particularly well placed to comment on the UK planning system given that he was born and educated in Germany – a country regarded as having one of the best planning systems in the world – before residing in England in the 2000s. He has also written detailed studies of planning systems from around the world (for example, see Why Some Countries Plan Better than others).

    Whether the UK Central Government will ultimately succeed in reforming the UK planning system remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it is heartening to see it taking on vested interests and fighting the good fight.

    Photograph: New, smaller exurban housing in the London area (by Wendell Cox).

    Leith van Onselen writes daily as the Unconventional Economist at MacroBusiness Australia. He has held positions at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and currently works at a leading financial services company. Follow him @leithVO.

  • Are 20th Century Models Relevant to 21st Century Urbanization?

    Analysis of the state of the world’s cities 2010/2011 by UN-Habitat focused on the narrowing urban divide, with 227 million people moving out of slum conditions over the preceding decade.  While acknowledging uncertainty over cause and effect, the report notes that:

    urbanization … is associated in some places with numerous, positive outcomes such as technological innovation, forms of creativity, economic progress, higher standards of living, enhanced democratic accountability and women’s empowerment. … the report calls for policy-makers and planners to understand that urbanization can be a positive force for economic development, leading to desirable social and political outcomes.

    The North Atlantic solution

    The report acknowledges the diversity of urbanisation[1], making its authors’ somewhat singular approach to managing it (more density) incongruous.  Their prescription is based on resisting urban sprawl, reflecting the experience of North America.  They also suggest that sprawl is a sign of “divided cities”, translating into

    an increase in the cost of transport, public infrastructure and of residential and commercial development. Moreover, sprawling metropolitan areas require more energy, metal, concrete and asphalt than do compact cities because homes, offices and utilities are set farther apart.

    The report denounces sprawl in suburban zones of high and middle income groups and in extensive slums on the city edge.  On the latter, they invoke issues of governance, saying it occurs because

    authorities pay little attention to slums, land, services and transport. Authorities lack the ability to predict urban growth and, as a result, fail to provide land for the urbanizing poor.

    Can one size fit all?

    It is difficult to accept prescription predisposed to a particular view. Urbanisation is not a single condition. Differences in the stage of urbanisation, vastly different physical, cultural and economic settings of “urban” settlement, and different institutional arrangements belie the idea of a universal response or that any particular form is best for all cities. 

    Apart from anything else, “western” cities [2] don’t really feature in 21st century urbanism.  Consider the figures.  In 1950 western cities accounted for 43% of the world’s urban population.  This was down to 23% in 1990 and 18% in 2010. UN projections have the figure down to 15% in 2030, accounting for between just 3% and 4% of all urban growth between now and then.

    What Size City?

    This post looks at some more numbers that help illustrate the diversity of urbanisation – the size of urban settlements. 

    According to UN figures,  8% of the world’s population lives in 53 cities housing over 5 million people; 12% in 388 cities of between 1 and 5 million; and 31% in cities of under 1 million. Any prescriptions for urban governance and urban form need to reflect quite extreme divergence between the few megacities and the many smaller settlements where the majority of urbanites live.

    The Urban Growth Trajectory

    Urbanisation experiences vary, also.  The different national experiences of the past 60 years can be illustrated using ten quite different countries (Chart 1).  By 2010, Brazil, US, UK, Mexico, and Iran were all heavily urbanised.  But the level of urbanisation changed little for the US and the UK over thelate 20th century, while it grew rapidly in the others.

    In yet another trajectory, erstwhile rapid urbanisation in Russia stalled after the mid 1980s. 

     

    Chart 1: Urbanisation Trends, Selected Nations, 1950-2010

    Urbanisation is accelerating in China, but has flattened off in Indonesia.  It has been increasing steadily in Nigeria and slowly but still steadily in India.

    Most people moving into smaller cities

    Chart 2 shows shares of growth by city size groups over the last twenty years. (Russia is omitted because urbanisation actually declined by 5.5%.) 

    Cities of under 1 million residents dominate gains, strongly favouring developing countries.  They accounted for 90% of urban growth in Indonesia, 71% in Nigeria and 66% in Iran. 

    US experienced growth more or less across all size categories, although Chicago went from the 7m-8m to the 8m plus category, reducing down the former.

    Chart 2: Where Populations Grew – Cities by Size Category, 1990-2010

    Brazil, China, and Indonesia saw significant growth across the most size groups.  There appears to be a contrast within these countries between the centralising influence of few large cities and dispersed urbanisation in many much smaller settlements.

    (The picture for the UK reflects a gain of around 1 million people in London — to 8.6m — shifting it between categories.  Smaller cities actually accounted for 82% of the net UK gain in urban population, suggesting a duality between the growth of the capital and decentralisation through growth in smaller settlement). 

    So where are the big cities?

    The US has five urban agglomerations with a population of more than 5m, centred on New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit (Chart 3).  Compare this with China, with twelve cities of over 5m, and five cities of more than 8 million people (Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou); or India, with eight over 5m and three over 8m (Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai).

    At the same time, China has 90 cities of between 750,000 and 2m, India 44 and the US 66.  Mexico has 15, Russia 14 and Brazil 13. 

    Chart 3: Number of Cities by Size Category, Ten Nations 2010

    Primacy – a mixed picture

    Single centres that dominate national populations are termed “primate”.  Their rise and fall may be symptomatic of national economic fortunes.  Excessive primacy may increase economic volatility because the contrast between a rich centre and poor periphery is politically destabilising. One centre dominating financial, human, and intellectual resources may also increase national vulnerability to structural decline.

    The picture is mixed across our sample (Chart 4).  Mexico City and London stand out.  High levels of primacy are also evident in Iran and Indonesia, but have been easing, contrasting with Nigeria where it is increasing.  It is least pronounced in the countries with the largest urban populations – China and India — suggesting a strong population pull from a number of state or provincial capitals, as well as a host of much smaller cities.

    Chart 4: Population Share of Largest City, Ten Nations, 1990 and 2010

    So what does all this mean?

    The data confirms huge diversity in the sizes of cities people live in across and within nations.  It generates more questions than answers, though, the main one being whether it is relevant simply to transfer urban governance, management, or planning models from one place to another.  Apart from contrasts within and between nations, it is clear that the west is no longer the focus of urbanisation and is unlikely to hold many of the answers to today’s urban growth challenges.

    The evidence also indicates a tendency for urbanisation to take place in small, dispersed settlements rather than mega-cities.  More modest scale makes different demands on infrastructure and institutions.  It may also help manage urbanisation and ensure that benefits can be better accessed by larger numbers of people.  Small cities, sub-centres in large cities, and districts of modest scale may be better suited to adaptable and innovative planning and management than large scale, extensive cities with their more centralised, remote, and inevitably bureaucratic political and administrative systems. 

    Very large agglomerations do exist, even if they are not as dominant in the wider urban picture as their size and profiles might suggest.  The question they raise is whether they should continue to dominate national and international agenda for urban growth and management.  Dispersed urbanisation may better reflect the resources and capacities needed to support an exploding urban population in the 21st century.

    Phil McDermott is a Director of CityScope Consultants in Auckland, New Zealand, and Adjunct Professor of Regional and Urban Development at Auckland University of Technology.  He works in urban, economic and transport development throughout New Zealand and in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific.  He was formerly Head of the School of Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University and General Manager of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney. This piece originally appeared at is blog: Cities Matter.

    [1]  The lowest level of urbanisation incorporated by the UN depends on the conventions of individual nations but may refer to settlements with as few as 2,000 people.

    [2] Treated here as North America, Northern Western and Southern Europe, and Australasia

    Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

  • Private Investors Shun Brazil High Speed Rail Bid

    In April of 2011 the California High Speed Rail Authority held a meeting of potential investors and vendors interested in participating in the proposed Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed rail project. Project sponsors have insisted they could gain substantial private investment for the project. The Authority indicated that the meeting drew 2000 attendees at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which supporters indicated was proof of the interest of private investors in the project.

    Apparently believing the claims that high-speed rail is "profitable," the Brazilian government set about planning a line stipulating that private investors would build the infrastructure and operate a line, at their own risk.

    The federal government offered private investors the opportunity to bid on a concession for the proposed Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo and Campinas high-speed railroad (Trem de Alta Velocidade). None of the Los Angeles attendees or any others submitted a bid for the concession. It is also reported that two previous opportunities attracted no bidders.

    In reviewing the project documents for the high-speed rail line in Brazil, it is easy to understand why the 510 kilometer (310 mile) route drew no interest. In Brazil, investors would be required to put their own money at risk with no revenue guarantees. Rising capital costs could be a problem as well since California’s high speed rail costs have doubled in just three years, a line that virtually everyone understands will require heavy public subsidies, despite being far richer than Brazil.

    Capital Costs: The winning bidder in Brazil would have been granted a 40 year concession and would have been required to provide substantial funding toward the $20 billion (34 billion in Brazilian Reals) capital cost. If the international experience holds in Brazil, that cost could escalate to $40 billion (70 billion Reals) or more.

    The Rio de Janeiro to Campinas line would not be easy to construct. The mountains south of Rio will be challenging. Unlike California, little of the route is as flat as Kansas. The line would operate through two of the world’s megacities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as well as two other large urban areas, Campinas and San Jose dos Campos. Unlike Los Angeles and San Francisco, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro do not have well placed existing rail corridors that can (at least theoretically) be expanded to handle the fast trains. The urban densities are much higher in Brazil than in California, which means that the construction will be more disruptive. The Los Angeles and San Francisco urban areas have densities of from 6,000 to 7,000 per square mile (2,100 to 2,700 per square kilometer) while those in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro range from 15,000 to 18,000 per square mile (6,000 to 7,000 per square kilometer).

    Protecting the Taxpayers: Interested in protecting Brazilian taxpayers, the government has required that any cost overrun be paid for by the winning bidder. This, combined with the requirement to support the capital costs and debt service out of passenger fares and other commercial revenues seems, likely to have discouraged bidders, who in other places – from France and the United Kingdom to Korea – can rely on taxpayers to cover the inevitable cost overruns.The lesson of Taiwan, where private investors have already lost most of their capital is likely fresh in the minds of potential bidders.

    Responsibility for Cost Overruns: Moreover, it is not realistic to expect a private concessionaire to have sufficient capital to pay for the extent of cost overruns. If there a concessionaire is ever selected for the Rio to Campinas line, it will likely be a limited liability firm, specifically designed to shield investors from the very kind of risk that the Brazilian government expects it to shoulder.

    Thus, as would likely have been the case in Florida if Governor Scott had not canceled the Tampa to St. Petersburg line, taxpayers can expect to pay for cost overruns, despite the best intentions and good faith of the Brazilian government. No private concessionaire has funds stashed away for losses like that.

    Ridership and Revenue: The ridership projections for the line appear to be aggressive. This is typical of the international experience in high-speed rail projects, where ridership projections average 65 percent higher than eventual ridership, according to investment grade research by Bengt Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, Nils Bruzelius of the University of Stockholm and Werner Rottengather of the University of Karlsruhe (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition). Ridership is forecast to be greater than the widely criticized California projections.

    Nonstop fares between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are projected at approximately US$100, similar to the fares that would be charged in California. The demand for travel at such a price is likely to be considerably less in Brazil, where the incomes are a fraction of those in California. Project documents indicate that large numbers of people will switch from other modes of transport.

    Two such modes, the car and bus, are used by people needing to travel as inexpensively as possible (whether in Brazil or the United States). The project assumes a unprecedented 50 percent of car travel would be diverted to the train. Reality is likely to be a small fraction of this. The potential for attracting bus riders was also exaggerated, projecting that 65 percent of this less affluent market would pay two to three times as much as current bus fares to ride the train.

    Next Steps: The government intends to restructure the bidding process and try again. Brazil had hoped that the high-speed line would be running in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup (soccer) and then be available for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Even 2016 may even prove an impossible challenge at this point.

    China Daily caught the reality of the situation in commenting on the missing bidders for the Rio to Campinas high speed rail line:

    ….the high-speed rail dream may be one area where the government will have to assume more of the risk … because of the long term investment and delay in making a profit.

    In a nation in which 11 of the 26 states have a gross domestic product less than the cost of the train, "investment" in high speed rail might not be the top priority. It is not surprising that no private investor is willing to take the risk for the potentially enormous losses, nor should taxpayers.

    —-

    Photograph: Avenida Paulista, Sao Paulo (by author)

    Wendell Cox served as a member of the Amtrak Reform Council. He authored high speed rail feasibility studies in Florida (The 1997 Evaluation of the FDOT-FOX Miami-Orlando-Tampa High Speed Rail Proposal for the James Madison Institute and the 2011 Reason Foundation report, The Tampa to Orlando High Speed Rail Project: A Taxpayer Risk Assessment) and North Carolina (Should North Carolina Add More Piedmont Trains, 2011,for the John Locke Foundation) and was co-author of the Reason Foundation’s The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report, with Joseph Vranich (2008).

  • The Demise Of The Luxury City

    The Republican victory in New York City’s ninth congressional district Sept. 13 — in a special election to replace disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner — shocked the nation.  But more important, it also could have signaled the end of the idea, propagated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of New York’s future as a “luxury product.”

    For a decade, the Bloomberg paradigm has held the city together: Wall Street riches fund an expanding bureaucracy that promotes social liberalism and nanny-state green politics. Indeed, Wall Street’s fortune — guaranteed by federal bailouts and monetary policy under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — has been the key to the mayor’s largely self-funded political success. Under Bloomberg, Wall Street’s profits allowed city expenditures to grow 40% faster than the rate of inflation. Bloomberg was also able to buy political peace by bestowing raises two to three times the rate of inflation on the city’s unionized workers.

    Now this calculus is falling apart. Layoffs are mounting on Wall Street, while bonuses — the red meat that fuels everything from high-end condos to expensive boutiques and restaurants — are expected to drop 30% from last year.

    The newly Republican ninth district — stretching from south Brooklyn through the upper-middle-class strongholds around Forest Hills, Queens — reflects growing unease in the non-luxury parts of the city. The area is decidedly middle class, but with a median income of $55,000 it is the city’s least wealthy white district. For the most part, its residents have not benefited from Bloomberg’s management nor from Obama’s economic policies.

    Rather, the district reflects the kind of anxiety that is sweeping middle class areas across the country. “These people are worried about their kids and their future,” says Seth Bornstein, executive director the Queens Economic Development Corp. “The fire may not be in the backyard, but it’s around the corner.”

    Like many native New Yorkers, Bornstein sees Manhattan — the epicenter of the “luxury city” — as something of a “fantasy land,” inhabited by those who, despite living in Gotham’s historic core, are “not really New Yorkers.” Most Manhattanites, he notes, did not grow up in New York, and a majority live in single households. They largely either go to school, work in media or Wall Street, or make their livings servicing the rich.

    The ninth district is different socially as well. It is family-oriented. Barely one-third live in single households, compared with a near majority in Manhattan. Unlike the tony Upper East Side or trendy Soho, there are few celebrities or multi-millionaires. Although some of the ninth district’s inhabitants do work in the financial sector, many are tied to industries such as garments, work as professionals, such as doctors or accountants, or own their own small businesses.

    Some Democrats like California Rep. Henry Waxman have another explanation for the vote: greed. “They want to protect their wealth,” he explained, “which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah of such views from a man who represents Beverly Hills.

    Waxman, of course, is wrong. This election was driven not by desertions of the rich but by the shift to the GOP among largely middle or working class voters. In many ways this election followed the pattern established by Sen. Scott Brown’s stunning 2009 Massachusetts victory, which came largely from middle-income voters. The ninth district’s new representative, Bob Turner, won big in modest Middle Village and South Brooklyn, while losing decisively in the wealthiest precincts such as Forest Hills and some minority, immigrant-oriented enclaves.

    The big story here, as Bornstein suggests, lies in the growing unease about the national and New York economies among large sections of the city’s beleaguered middle class. Despite the enormous wealth generated on Wall Street, New York’s middle class has been fleeing the city at breakneck speed for decades.

    According to the Brookings Institution, New York has suffered the fastest declines of middle class neighborhoods in the U.S.: Its share of middle income neighborhoods is roughly half that of Seattle or the much maligned Long Island suburbs. Twenty-five percent of New York City was middle-class in 1970, but by 2008 that figure had dropped to 16%.

    Even the young, who so dominate parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, do not appear to be hanging around once they get into their 30s, particularly after their children reach school age. One reason: Bloomberg’s much touted school reforms have been, for the most part, ineffective in turning the bulk of the city’s public schools around.

    Ultimately, the basic truth is this: Bloomberg’s luxury city has failed most of its citizens. Despite its self-celebrated “progressive” image, New York has the most unequal distribution of income in the nation. The bulk of the job growth has not been on Wall Street, where employment has declined over the decade, but in hospitality and restaurants, which pay salaries 60% below the city average. In fact, restaurants are now the largest single private employers in Manhattan, with more people serving tables than trading equities.  As the New York Post quipped: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — as a waiter.”

    It gets worse for the poor. One in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. Black male joblessness hovers at around 50%. Overall, New York’s household income, based on purchasing power, ranks 21st in the nation, behind not only such rich areas as San Francisco or Washington, but also places like Houston, Dallas, Indianapolis, Kansas City and even Pittsburgh.

    Ultimately, suggests Jonathan Bowles, president of the Center for an Urban Future, the future of New York’s middle class depends on reducing dependence on Wall Street.  The city needs to focus on industries and niches outside finance, including education, health, design, high-tech services, media and smaller businesses, many of them owned by immigrants.

    Bowles suggests diversification needs to speed up particularly now that Wall Street, the very engine of the “luxury” economy, is sputtering. Such a change will require a new political climate.  Voter engagement and political choice in New York have atrophied under the Medici-like Bloomberg, who has managed to pay off many interest groups with a combination of his own and the city’s money. Combined with a union-financed get-out-the-vote, the choices offered by the city’s once contentious politics have become increasingly constricted.

    But something is stirring in the boroughs.  The district’s voters not only embarrassed their civic betters by voting Republican, but they also demonstrated that New York’s middle class, politically quiescent under Bloomberg, may need to be taken seriously again.

    This gives hope for what Bornstein calls “the real New York” — a place that is neither particularly glamorous nor severely bifurcated between the rich and those who service their needs. With a more diversified economy and family orientation, this unexpected rebellion could represent the first step toward restoring New York’s roots as a city not of luxury but of aspiration.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo by flickr user zoonabar

  • What Boomers Are Choosing

    In 1989, a man came to my office and introduced himself as the vice president of development for the Del Webb Corporation.  He retained my firm to prepare a master plan for their first active-adult community outside of their typical desert southwest market. 

    This led me to an exploration of what made a successful active adult community.  I learned they required unique and distinct considerations quite different from those used in more conventional master planned communities.  During the information gathering process, I toured each of the Sun City projects, interviewing staff and visiting residents to understand the qualities and features which attracted buyers and provided the lifestyle sought by retirees. 

    Since that initial project, I and my partners have had the opportunity to plan and design over 60 active adult communities, many of which were realized and built out over the past 10 years.  We have also worked with existing active adult communities to expand or enhance their amenities and programming to remain relevant to the changing needs of the boomer resident and buyer.

    Over the past several years, our firm began working with small towns and rural communities utilizing our insight and knowledge of the retiree market and desired community amenities to create or enhance their position as a retirement destination.  Additionally, we have assisted them in establishing programs to recruit retirees as an economic development strategy that taps into economic, social, educational and professional attributes of the boomers. 

    Through my work with both the active adult and rural/small town communities I have observed changing trends in the retiree market as the Eisenhower generation gave way to the boomers.  The following are some of the patterns and behaviors which are vital to the boomer home buyer as they make decisions on their retirement living.

    Trend 1 – When making a decision regarding retirement housing, boomers are savvy consumers, typically having purchased between 3 – 9 homes in their lifetime.  These are buyers who know what they want and are reluctant to compromise their selection criteria.

    Trend 2 – Recreation preferences have shifted significantly over the 35 years I have worked in this market.  In the late 80s, virtually all active adult communities relied on golf as the primary community amenity.  Now golf ranks 8th as the preferred amenity of retirees and continues to decline in popularity.  Walking facilities are by far the most requested amenity in retiree focus groups followed by fishing, bocce, tennis and pickleball.

    Trend 3 – The preferred design of single family homes sought by retirees remains one-story living with no steps between parking and front door.  The size of individual dwellings is smaller but still well constructed and featuring no reduction in amenities.  However, specialty rooms are being replaced by multi-use space.  My favorite analogy is the comparison of a Cadillac to a BMW.  There is also increased demand for design and construction techniques which enhance the conservation of water, electricity and natural gas.

    Trend 4 – Community size is smaller, ranging from 10,000 to 2,500 units.  The trend now reflects a growing demand in the market for smaller, more intimate communities.  Finance and entitlement issues further support this trend.

    Trend 5 – 65% of boomers desire to continue their education through formal and informal means during retirement.  This preference drives the decision to purchase a home in towns with a college or an established academic program.  Communities which do not have higher learning institutions have brought in private education, on-line and community educational entities.  Senior University in Georgetown, Texas was established to meet this demand by the residents of Sun City Texas.

    Trend 6 – Historic residential sales patterns show that the “resort-style active adult community” appeals to only 7% of the age and income qualified boomer market.  Small towns and rural locations, however, are finding themselves the preferred destination for boomers in retirement.

    Trend 7 – We know there are many factors which are essential to attracting retirees including affordability, health care, transportation, established social fabric, significant retention of visual history and moderate climate.  However, there is a much greater emphasis on proximity to family, especially grandchildren.  This is driving the relocation decision for many boomers.  Additionally, safety and security have been identified by a greater portion of focus group participants. This preference has become more difficult to realize due to a growing reluctance by municipalities to allow private roads and secure entry gates as a facet of the community’s security program.  The requirement for connectivity is also complicating this trend.

    Trend 8 – Boomers are not flocking en masse to multi-family dwellings in urban cores.  Robert Charles Lesser and Company recently reported that only 4% of affluent empty nesters indicated they would move to a condo downtown in their current metro area while 3% would chose a condo in a suburb of their current metro area.  Essentially, there is little migration of retirees from rural communities and the suburbs to the urban core, contrary to widely held beliefs.

    Overall, the boomer market is diverse and no one solution will appeal to the entire market.  A knowledgeable developer or small town councilman must formulate their plans on local preferences and values.  And remember that many of the myths perpetuated by the media – notably the return en masse of boomers into the city – are just that, a myth.

    Joe Verdoorn, a Principal at SEC Planning, LLC, has over 40 years land planning and development experience working with clients such as Pulte/Del Webb, Motorola, Apple and Hunt Investments.  He is a pioneer in the field of active adult community design who continues to research the retiree market to understand their evolving wants and needs. 

  • Being Dense About Dwellings: Check the Numbers!

    Recently I suggested that in New Zealand we are heading into the perfect housing storm. Now we have news that house prices and rentals are on the climb again, although stocks remain tight, as an annual inflation rate of 5.3% hits a 21 year high.  The economists are suggesting this is good news, although it means interest rates may have to be pushed up sooner than expected.

    Well the bad news is that the housing crisis might just have worsened. 

    Sure, its not an across-the-board crisis, but it is very real to large and important sections of our population.  Lack of housing affordability remains a threat to social sustainability and economic recovery.  So how are we responding to the threat — or perhaps now the reality — of a perfect housing storm?  What provisions are we making in our urban plans?

    Smaller boxes – bigger footprint
    Urban planners are still more preoccupied with fitting more dwellings into smaller areas than they are with responding to people’s needs for housing.  It might help shift this fixation to point out that the preferred compact city solution is not only socially destructive, because it doesn’t reflect need and does nothing for affordability, but it is also environmentally short-sighted.

    Think about the metrics.

    Take 100 people and house them at 1.5 residents per dwelling.  That’s arbitrary, but it reflects a widespread expectation that most new dwellings will house smaller households in central locations. 

    In the interests of sustainability, let’s assume the resulting 67 dwellings are small, so that we can fit more of them onto less land.  Say, 120 sq meters per dwelling.  That totals 8,000 sq metres or thereabouts (more if we count the common areas in apartment buildings), 80 sq metres per person.  It’s also 67 kitchens, 67 lounges, maybe 67 media centres, at least 67 bathrooms, maybe some additional lighting for common areas and even some lifts.

    Now take 100 people and fit them in at 3 people per dwelling, terraces, duplexes or fully detached houses.  Let’s make the dwellings bigger, say 200 sq metres.  We now need only 33 dwellings, 6,600 sq metres of dwelling, or 66 sq metres per person.  Less space per person, sure, but that’s okay because now we need just half the kitchens, bathrooms, lounges and media centres.  However we look at it, we’ve used a lot less resources and have a spare 1,400 sq metres for open space, extra gardens, courtyards, whatever.  And with the capacity for extra bedrooms, we have much more flexible housing stock.

    So which is the more sustainable?  Surely bigger dwellings with higher occupancies.  Surprised?

    Can we plan for higher occupancies?
    Now, we can’t engineer household size, can we?  Well, actually we already do.  With a housing shortfall we now require young adults to stay longer with their parents, force singles to move in with others,  require couples to take on boarders, or even promote multi-family living, all boosting occupancies.

    So let’s at least understand that building more, smaller dwellings, especially medium- or high-rise apartments, does not necessarily deliver sustainable urban settlement, nor does it provide the flexibility to make the higher occupancy "solutions" we force on people easy to live with.

    Larger dwellings do allow for diverse living arrangements, but its more multi-generational living, more non-family households, more sharing.  Like them or not, such arrangements are likely to increase, if only in response to the affordability issues we seem intent on entrenching.

    So what’s happening to demand?
    So why are planners trying to put more people into smaller dwellings anyway?  How relevant is the expectation that average household size will be smaller in the future than it has been in the past?

    Most forecasts of housing “demand” simply extrapolate diminishing occupancy across demographic projections.  Its all about the coefficients, and the assumption that household structures won’t change much in the medium to long-term. 
    Well, it’s not that simple.

    Things like an unexpected boom in the dissolution of relationships over the past three or four decades, the rapid growth in migration, and the recent stabilisation and even reversal in occupancy rates undermine the conceit that we can accurately forecast the structure, preferences, and behaviour of households 20 or 30 years hence.  If that’s the case, why are our prescriptions for housing increasingly rigid?

    Projecting household types
    To understand this let’s stay with the current ”best”  projections of what households might look like in the future, and think about the implications for housing.

    Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) medium projections to 2031 indicate that families with children will account for a minority of household growth in our main cities (see chart).  The figures may even shrink in Wellington and Christchurch.  According to this projection, they will make up 28% of new households in Auckland, though, so we could still need over 71,000 new dwellings for families there.  It’s reasonable to expect that detached housing will still work best for them.

    Household Category Projections, Statistics New Zealand

    Couples will account for more growth, though, maybe 36% of new households in Auckland according to SNZ, and singles for 32%.  So let’s think about the preferences of the small household segment. 

    So what will the small household segment look  like?
    To get a feel for this, I divided the SNZ age projections into four (setting aside the main family age cohorts) : young adults (aged 20-29), empty nesters (the kids have left home, aged 50-64); early retirees (65-79), and later retirees (80+).  These are the groups most small households will come from.  But they have quite different housing preferences, so the nature of future demand for smaller dwellings depends on which ones grow the most.

    Age-Based Housing Demand Segments (based on SNZ Projections)

    So who will dominate growth?
    Empty nesters and retirees will dominate the demand for new houses.  And these are not usually people who want to move into small, centralised apartments, at least not as a primary residence. 

    Many of them have significant financial equity in their existing homes and emotional equity in their neighbourhoods.  If they move into smaller dwellings, they won’t be that small!  They will expect them to be well appointed and well located, probably close to where they already live. 

    They won’t want high or even medium rise.  And they are  likely to seek three or four bedrooms.  They will need the space to maintain active  lives into their seventies and eighties, more so than past generations.  They will be accommodating visiting family and friends; they will need offices, hobby areas, workshops, and storage. 

    Here’s a model to take seriously if we are serious about sustainability
    And as the baby boomers eventually become less independent, we might expect them to head into retirement villages, already a booming – and highly sustainable – form of housing.

    In fact, we should look seriously at retirement villages if we want to understand the sorts of arrangements that could dominate new housing demand over the next 30 years.  Here, the market seems to have got it right. 

    They offer varied living arrangements – detached and semi detached housing, terraces, apartments, and even on-site nursing facilities.  They offer medium density living with plenty of green space and gardens; common areas and shared facilities for recreation and leisure; plenty of on-site activity to cut down transport needs but also on-site parking to reflect the realities of modern living.  They achieve density and sustainability with style.  And – there must be a lesson here – they do it overwhelmingly in suburban if not city edge localities. 

    So let’s not assume that rising house prices mean a return to business as usual.  Far from it – freeing up the housing market must remain a top priority if the economy is in recovery mode.  And let’s start looking to the suburbs and beyond for the housing solutions that might just help it stay that way.

    Phil McDermott is a Director of CityScope Consultants in Auckland, New Zealand, and Adjunct Professor of Regional and Urban Development at Auckland University of Technology.  He works in urban, economic and transport development throughout New Zealand and in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific.  He was formerly Head of the School of Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University and General Manager of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney. This piece originally appeared at is blog: Cities Matter.

    Photo by flickr user: Adam Foster.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Milan

    Italy’s population growth has been stagnating in recent decades, but has turned around during the last decade, with the annual growth rate increasing 16 times (from 0.04 percent to 0.69 percent). According to United Nations data, Italy added more international migrants in the 2000s (3.8.5 million) than it added people in any ten year period since 1960. Some of the strongest growth has been in the Milan metropolitan region, which has begun to grow again after years of stagnation. This is not due to any increase in Italian birth rates but principally because of surging international migration.

    Much of this has to do with the enlargement of the European Union (EU) from 15 to 27 member states, and the consequent removal of all legal barriers to internal migration. The Milan metropolitan region, occupies much of Lombardy, Italy’s most populated region. Milan added 634,000 foreign residents in just six years (2000 to 2008, the latest year for which data is available).  The largest share, 103,000, was from the EU’s Romania, with 50,000 from Albania, 47,000 from Morocco, 30,000 each from Ecuador and Egypt and 27,000 from Ukraine. Over the period, more than 80 percent of Lombardy’s growth has come as a result of international immigration.  The key to this lies with the region’s economy, which is the strongest in Italy and all of southern Europe.

    International migration has also fueled large population increases elsewhere, especially in both northern and central Italy, such as Rome and Turin. Further south, however, growth (such as in the Naples area) has continued to be comparatively slow (Figure 1).

    The Urban Area: The Milan urban area is the largest in Italy. The Milan urban area stretches from the core of Milan northward to the Alps and includes development in the provinces of Varese (photo), Como, and Lecco (Photo: Lecco) as well as Monza and Brianza. The province of Como is home to the picturesque Lake Como, while Varese sits at the foot of the Simplon Tunnel (of "Venice Simplon-Orient Express" fame) and the highway over Simplon Pass to Brig in Switzerland’s Rhone Valley and the Matterhorn.


    Varese


    Lecco: Northernmost suburbs

     

    There is also considerable development both to the east and the west in the province of Milan and more limited development to the south. Overall, the urban area has a population of approximately 5,400,000 (Note 1), covering approximately 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) for a population density of approximately 6,700 per square mile (2,500 per square kilometer).  This is similar to that of Los Angeles or Toronto.

    Growth in the Metropolitan Region: Until the recent increase in international migration, the Milan metropolitan region was growing slowly and more recently even losing population. Between 1991 and 2001, the metropolitan region lost one percent of its population. However, since 2001 the metropolitan region has gained 9.0 percent, an improvement from the minus 1.1 percent between 1991 and 2001. The last decade’s growth was at an average annual increase rate of 0.96 percent which is slightly more than the United States (0.94 percent) and slightly less than Canada (1.04 percent). 

    The Inner City: The commune of Milan is the central municipality of Milan metropolitan region. The population of Milan peaked in 1971 at just under 1,700,000 people. By 2001 the population had fallen to approximately 1,250,000 people, a loss of approximately 25 percent and its lowest population since before the 1951 census. The central municipality of Milan continued to lose population to 2001. From 1991 to 2001, Milan lost more than 100,000 people and nine percent of its population. Milan is not unusual in this decline. Declines have been characteristic for virtually all Western European central municipalities, except where there was substantial greenfield space to accommodate new suburban development (such as in Rome).

    However, the commune of Milan has begun to grow again. Milan’s population has increased by nearly 70,000 people or 5.4 percent. Milan now has a population density of 18,600 per square mile (7,200 per square kilometer), slightly higher than that the city of San Francisco (Photo: Milan). Even with the recent increase, however, all of the growth in the Milan metropolitan region since 1991 has been in the suburbs and exurbs (Figure 2) and 87 percent in the last decade (Figure 3).


    Milan

    Much of the commune’s population increase has been the result of international migration, since many Italians continue to migrate to the surrounding suburban and exurban areas, as is the case in a number of European metropolitan regions.  Domestic out-migration continued from the commune of Milan, while the suburbs and exurbs attracted domestic migrants (Note 2).

    Inner Suburbs: The inner suburbs of Milan include portions of the province of Milan outside the commune of Milan and the (single) province of Monza and Brianzia, which was separated from the province of Milan earlier in the decade. The inner suburbs also lost population between 1991 and 2001. This was reversed between 2000 and 2010, when the inner suburbs added approximately 230,000 people, and grew at an overall rate of 9.4 percent. The inner suburbs have a population density of approximately 5,000 per square mile (1,900 per square kilometer), somewhat less than the Sydney urban area and 1.5 times that of Portland.

    Outer Suburbs and Exurbs: The outer suburbs and exurbs stretch north to the foot of the Alps, as well as to the south of the province of Milan. The largest population is to the north, with a far smaller population to the south, in the exurban provinces of Pavia and Lodi. Unlike the commune of Milan and the inner suburbs, the outer suburbs and exurbs have grown in each of the last decades.  Between 1991 and 2001, the outer suburbs and exurbs accounted for all the growth, though at a modest rate of 2.5 percent. The growth has substantially increased since 2001 with the addition of more than 245,000 new residents and a growth rate of 10.4 percent. International migration accounted for 93 percent between 2002 and 2008, 93 percent were foreign (202,000).

    Where the Immigrants are Moving: As might be expected with strong international migration, most of the new entrants have moved to the inner city and inner suburbs. Between 2002 and 2006, 97 percent of the population growth was from international migration, with an addition of 202,000. The overall foreign population increased 119 percent from 2002 to 2008. Yet, the percentage growth was much stronger in the outer suburbs and the exurbs, where the foreign population grew 171 percent (125,000). However, this represented a smaller share of the overall growth (67 percent), which is likely to be an indication of strong outbound domestic migration from the inner city and the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs and exurbs. There was also strong foreign population growth in the balance of Lombardy, with an increase of 147 percent, which constituted a somewhat higher share of overall growth, at 84 percent (Figure 4).

    Decentralizing, Diversifying Milan: Like the other international urban areas (Note 3), Milan continues to suburbanize, though growth has also resumed in the historic core municipality. At the same time, international migration is changing Milan and Italy. United Nations (UN) data indicates that the number of international migrants to Italy was 10 times higher in the 2000s than in the 1990s. The UN projects that the inflow will drop by 50 percent between 2010 and 2015 and then to approximately one-third the 2000s influx to beyond 2050. Whatever the result, because of its strong economy, the Milan area will doubtless continue to attract a disproportionate share of the new arrivals.

    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”

    —–

    Note 1: Milan is one of a small number of large urban areas that is often dismissed as being much smaller than it really is. This is because data for metropolitan regions is not routinely produced in Italy and Milan. As a result, analysts often referred to the population of the historical core municipality which has only 20 percent of the metropolitan population. Similar problems of national reporting occur in Germany’s Rhine – Ruhr (Essen-Dusseldorf) metropolitan region and Jakarta, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. The Rhine-Ruhr does not appear on the United Nations urban agglomeration list of all over 750,000, despite the fact that it has 7 million people in close proximity, at near average Western European large urban area densities (7,100 per square mile or 2,800 per square kilometer, compared to the Western European average of 8,000 per square mile or 3,100 per square kilometer)

    Note 2: More detailed data is not available on the internet from the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica Italia, Italy’s statistical bureau.

    Note 3: See additional reviews in the "Evolving Urban Form" series, at : Beijing, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Manila, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Seattle,  Seoul and Shanghai .

    Photo: Duomo (Cathedral), Milan. Photographs by author.

  • The Ambiguous Triumph of the “Urban Age”

    In its State of the Population report in 2007, the United Nations Population Fund made this ringing declaration:  “In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas.”

    The agency’s voice was one of many trumpeting an epoch-making event.  For the last several years, newspaper and magazine articles, television shows and scholarly papers have explored the premise that  because most of the world now lives in urban rather than in rural areas things are going to be, or at least should be, different.  Often the conclusion is that cities may finally get the attention they deserve from policy makers and governments.  This optimism dovetails nicely with a sizeable literature of urban advocacy chronicling the rejuvenation of central cities and extolling the supposed virtues of high-density city living, even predicting the withering away of the suburbs.

    This supposed triumph of the urban is fraught with ironies, however.   The first is that, rather than a simple rush of people from the hinterlands into the centers of high density cities, there has also been, within almost every urban area in the world, a significant move of the population outward, from dense city centers into peripheral suburban areas and beyond them into very low-density exurban regions.   

    We can use Paris as a typical example.  The city of Paris reached its peak population of nearly 3 million in the 1920s.  It has lost nearly a third of its population since then.  What remains in the city is a smaller and wealthier population.  At the same time the suburbs, accommodating both families of modest income forced out of the city as well as a burgeoning middle class,  have grown enormously, from two million to over eight million.  And this does not count a great deal of essentially urban population that that lives in a vast ring of exurban or “peri-urban” settlement.  Certainly the majority of “urban” dwellers in the Paris region do not live in the elegant apartment blocks along the great boulevards familiar to the tourist.   They live in houses or small apartment buildings in the suburbs and use the automobile for their daily transportation needs.

    In fact, Paris is a good example of an even more fundamental irony.  At the very moment when urban population has been reported to surpass the rural, this distinction has lost most of its significance, at least in many parts of the affluent world.  Two hundred years ago, before automobiles, telephones, the internet and express package services,  cities were much more compact and rural life was indeed very different from urban life.  Most inhabitants of rural areas were tied to agriculture or industries devoted to the extraction of natural resources. Their lives were fundamentally different from those of urban dwellers. 

    Today the situation has changed radically.  Most people living in areas classified as rural don’t farm or have any direct connection with agriculture.  They hold jobs similar to those in urban areas.  And although they might not have opera houses, upscale boutiques or specialized hospitals nearby, the activities that take place in these venues are available to them in ways that they never were before.

    I can confirm the way the distinction between urban and rural has broken down by looking out the window of the house in Omro, WI where I am staying this weekend.  Omro, population about 3000, is located 8 miles west of Oshkosh and is  legally a city under Wisconsin law.  It is also an “urban” place according to the Census Bureau which, like those of other countries, defines urban largely by density standards.   In the case of the US, this means, in simplest terms, a density of at least 1000 people per square mile or just under two people per acre. 

    At one time this 1000-people-per-square-mile figure did provide a logical demarcation line.  Above those densities were places that could afford urban services like public water and sewers, sidewalks, streetlights, municipal fire departments and libraries.  Below that level were places that either didn’t have these services or had to depend on faraway county governments.  Unless you were closely associated with agricultural production or other rural economic activities or you were wealthy enough to provide your own services, it was quite inconvenient to live in rural areas. 

    Today, the automobile, rural electrification, the internet and the rise of alternate and privatized services has transformed what it means to live in rural areas.  “Country living” today has few of the drawbacks that made it inconvenient for middle class residents as recently as fifty years ago, and the migration of so many urbanites into the country has blurred the distinction between urban and rural.

    The view out my window bears this out.  When I look one direction what I see are city streets and houses on land that is technically urban.  Of course, Omro, with a single main street, two traffic lights and only a handful of stores, is not at all the kind of place that most people associate with the words “city” or “urban.”  Like the majority of small urban places in this country, its densities are lower than those found in the suburbs of larger cities.   When I look out the other direction I see mostly fields beyond the city limit.  But, unlike the case in the past,  there is no sharp divide.  There has been a significant increase in the number of houses out in the area that is technically “rural.”  Some of these used to be farmhouses, but there are few farmers anywhere for miles around.  Most farming is now done under contract or  as a large industrial-scale operation.   

    Most of the houses in the “rural” area around Omro have been built in the last decade or two and never housed anyone with any direct connection to farming.  They are suburban in appearance and mostly inhabited by people who work at home, are retired or commute some distance to jobs spread across a vast swath of urban territory that stretches from Fond du Lac south of Lake Winnebago to Green Bay where the Fox River meets Lake Michigan. 

    The result is that today, as you drive outward from the center of Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, Appleton or Green Bay, the number of houses per square mile diminishes, but there is no clear break between city and country.  It is a crazy quilt of agricultural, residential and other uses.  Commuting patterns, if charted on a map, would form a giant matrix of lines running in all directions.  Whether one is in the center of Oshkosh or 50 miles away, however, one can still live an essentially urban existence.   

    This same diffused urban condition holds true for very large swaths of the United States wherever there is enough underground water to allow wells. It is particularly conspicuous in the older and more densely settled eastern part of the country.  A state like New Jersey exhibits a pattern of dense older cities, radiating suburbs, vast exurban territories and farmland and open space, overlapping in ways that confound traditional notions about what is urban and rural. In places like New Jersey, the census distinction has lost almost all of its meaning.

    I don’t mean to suggest that that the news that the majority of the world’s population is now urban has no significance.  In fact this move from the countryside to urban areas has been one of the defining events of world history over the last several centuries.  Although this process was mostly finished in Western Europe and the United States decades ago, it still continues in most of Latin America, Africa and Asia and accounts for a great deal of the dramatic upward surge in income throughout the world.

    Nor am I suggesting the demise of the great cities of Europe or America.  Far from it.  Many rich families in particular will probably continue to choose high-density neighborhoods like those on the Upper East Side of New York or the 16th arrondissement in Paris, although often with a rural retreat as well  As the world gets wealthier, more people may make a choice to live in this way.

    However, current trends give no reason to believe that places like Manhattan or central Paris are going to increase in population and density as part of a “back-to-the-city” movement.    As cities gentrify, they undoubtedly become more attractive, but increased demand leads to higher prices keeping out many families who might choose to live in them.  Furthermore, the gentrifiers tend to have smaller families than those they replace, and they also tend to demand  more room, larger and better equipped housing units, more parks and open spaces.  Because of this, the gentrifiers, citing the need to preserve existing neighborhoods, frequently put up all kinds of barriers to new development and increased population and density, particularly by less affluent citizens.  For all these reasons,  existing city centers in the affluent world are unlikely to accommodate a significantly larger percentage of the population.

    Even in the developing countries, as urbanist Shlomo Angel has shown, most cities are spreading outward at ever lower overall densities just as cities have been doing for many years in the affluent West. For those who don’t have a lot of affluence, and even some who do, low density suburban- and increasingly, even lower density exurban- living, remains alluring for many in both the affluent and the developing world.   In fact, we might even be seeing the initial stages of a major reversal of the kind of urbanization that characterized industrializing cities in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The sharp increase in houses outside Omro may presage at least a partial return to a pre-industrial condition seen, for example, in nineteenth century America when people were more evenly spread across the landscape. 

    This continuing urban sprawl is, of course, deplored by many of those who celebrate the supposed triumph of the “urban age. “ Yet  as I have argued in my book Sprawl:  A Compact History, this phenomenon is by no means as bad as most anti-sprawl crusaders imagine it to be.  Continuing to spread the population could conceivably result in a more equitable, more sustainable pattern of living, particularly as renewable energy and other resources are harvested close to home with less need of the giant systems necessary to maintain our dense industrial-age cities.  In any case, despite all of the planning regulations put in place in cities throughout the affluent world to control growth at the edge, the periphery continues, inexorably, to expand almost everywhere. 

    Nowhere does the evidence suggest that we are witnessing the final triumph of the traditional high-density city.  In fact, the much-ballyhooed urban majority might be in great part a statistical artifact, a way of counting the population that over-emphasizes the move from country to city and fails to account for the powerful counter-movement from the city back toward the countryside.  Indeed the emerging reality of overlapping patterns of high density centers, lower-density peripheries and vast areas of very low density urban settlement, all of them interspersed with agricultural lands and protected open spaces, threatens to upend altogether the traditional notion of what it means to be urban.   

    Robert Bruegmann is professor emeritus of Art history, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

    Photo by urbanfeel.

  • Waging a Green Jihad on Suburban Homes

    It seems rarely a month passes without some new assault on the lifestyle and housing choice preferred by the overwhelming majority of Australians: the detached suburban home. Denigrated by a careless media as ”McMansions” or attacked as some archaic form of reckless housing choice which is suddenly “no longer appropriate” (according to some planning or environmental fatwa), the detached home is under a constant assault of falsely laid allegation and intellectual derision.

    The latest of these assaults is the form of a proposed ”green star” rating scheme for ”McMansions” which critics claim cost could cost homeowners thousands of dollars in devalued prices.  While the critics’ suggestions of financial hardship might be taking the possible impacts a bit too far, it is reasonable to challenge this obsession of regulators and green crusaders which view the detached home as some form of modern environmental vandalism.

    The very first (and what should be obvious) fact that escapes our planning cabal’s attention is that houses, or home units, or even office buildings for that matter, don’t use energy. Only the occupants in them and their behaviour consume energy. The dwelling itself can be designed for more efficient energy use by the occupants, for sure, but remember always that it is people who consume power, not buildings.

    That point was brought home, embarrassingly for our rampaging environmental and social crusaders, by no less than the Australian Conservation Foundation in 2007. Their “Consumption Atlas” revealed what came as a surprise to many, but which should have been widely understood from the start: that wealthy people who can afford to live in the expensive home units and townhouses of trendy inner city areas use much more energy, and have bigger carbon footprints per capita than their suburban counterparts.  More than that, it also revealed that inner city areas are “consumption hotspots” and smaller household sizes have greater environmental impacts than larger (chiefly suburban) households.

    The significance of those findings has been studiously ignored by the advocates of environmental engineering who claim that a leading virtue of wholesale change in housing type from detached suburban to high density inner urban  will be good for the environment. The facts, however, show that it ain’t necessarily so. If a large family of five, for example, (mum, dad and three kids) living in a four bedroom house with two cars in the suburbs produce a smaller carbon footprint than the DINKs and yuppies living in their city apartment, why aren’t the media, environmental and planning advocates asking more questions?

    At the time the ACF report was released, I was running the Residential Development Council, and  can still recall hearing the ACF’s key findings mentioned in some very early radio news bulletins on the ABC.  For some reason, the story quietly petered out but the ACF kindly had a version on-line and once I sent a copy to Demographia’s Wendell Cox, it went on to infamy. Wendell prepared a report analysing its “Housing Form in Australian and its Impact on Greenhouse Gas Emissions” online findings.  

    There have been other reports too, which have either been ignored (where their evidence doesn’t suit the cause) or attacked (if the evidence is clearly getting too close to the truth). If you’re remotely interested in some of the facts (as opposed to the parade of rhetoric in the mainstream media) have a look at the evidence in this study called ”The Relationship Between Housing Density and Built Form Energy Use”’ which you can find online here.  There’s a graph on page six which shows the dwelling operational energy (blue part of the bar) for apartments is roughly three times that of detached homes.  The suggestion that occupants of high density apartments will be less likely to use private transport is yet to be borne out by evidence, with the ACF report admitting that higher incomes allowed inner city residents more opportunity to drive despite the presence of convenient public transport and also (heaven forbid) to fly to places, than households with lower incomes.

    Common sense also comes into play. Consider the basic design of apartment buildings as opposed to the detached house. Cross flow ventilation in apartments is harder to achieve (unless it’s a penthouse occupying an entire floor) than in the detached home with windows on all sides. Then there are the energy uses that the apartment more or less makes essential. There is no room for a solar powered clothes dryer (a washing line) in the backyard. Instead, energy guzzling clothes dryers are practically essential, as are air conditioners, not just for individual apartments but also for common areas throughout the building (foyers and corridors). Lighting in common areas is also almost always permanently on. Lifts to move people up and down also consume energy – taking two people from ground to level 25 in an air conditioned lift produces a lot more carbon than walking up a flight of front stairs into the detached home, after all.

    I’m not proposing that the leftist green agenda which is waging war on the detached home turn the blow torch of blame to the wealthy, nor am I suggesting that there’s anything wrong with apartment and townhouse developments. But what’s wrong with letting market forces play more of a hand without the overt moralising and environmental hand wringing that seems to accompany decisions on urban planning policy? Is it really necessary to malign the detached suburban home, in order to make the alternative more attractive?

    We are talking about middle Australia – and their counterparts in the USA, UK and elsewhere – which is under the barrage of assault for having the temerity to choose a form of dwelling that actually suits them. The fact is that people prefer, in the main, to raise children in houses rather than apartments. They often like to keep pets and have a garden around them. The children tend to like backyards to play in. The cars these families drive aren’t a ”love affair” but a necessity – getting from suburban home to suburban workplace and picking up or dropping off children on the way isn’t very practical with public transport. But you get the strong impression, reading the constant digest of anti-suburban living parading through mainstream media, that mainstream Australians are a reckless bunch of self-interested misfits whose behaviour and choices need to be controlled by people wiser than them.

    And there’s one of the great ironies in all this: those who advocate denying housing choice and enforcing apartments over detached homes, public transport over private, and inner city density over suburban expansion, invariably seem to do the opposite of what they preach.  Next time you come across one of these green jihadists waging war on the suburban home (and the people who live in them), ask them if they live in a house or a unit, how many children they have, ask how many cars (or homes) they own, and ask what their power bill is like.

    In my experience, all too frequently the answer reveals itself as a case of “do as I say, not do as I do,”  which is just plain hypocrisy.

    Ross Elliott has more than 20 years experience in property and public policy. His past roles have included stints in urban economics, national and state roles with the Property Council, and in destination marketing. He has written extensively on a range of public policy issues centering around urban issues, and continues to maintain his recreational interest in public policy through ongoing contributions such as this or via his monthly blog The Pulse.

    Photo by yewenyi.

  • Beyond Words: A 9/11 Remembrance

    On September 7, 2001, a Friday, the communications staff of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gathered to plan for the week ahead. I had joined the Giuliani administration the previous April as a speechwriter, one of three on the mayor’s staff.

    The biggest event on the schedule was the primary election on Tuesday, September 11, when New Yorkers would choose each party’s nominee to succeed Giuliani. The mayor would be casting his own ballot at Public School 66 on East 88th Street at 7 a.m., followed by a fairly routine round of staff meetings.

    In the evening, he was scheduled to give remarks at the black-tie opening night performance of the New York City Opera, which was to debut its season at Lincoln Center with Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Concurrently, there would be an election-night party at the Dylan Hotel on East 41st Street. The mayor might drop in on either of these events, or both of them, or so we all assumed on September 7.

    Four mornings later, I got off the subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station. Looking up, the sky was a bright blue, with one exception: running across it, like a ribbon stretched taut, was a thin but dense cloud of grey. This surprised me a bit, because no one had predicted a storm.

    Up on the sidewalk I kept my eyes on the pavement, lost in my own thoughts. Finally, after a good 70 yards or so, it occurred to me that the street was different today. There were countless people out, as always, but instead of rushing around in their usual morning bustle, they were standing still. Something about this felt weird, displaced, transfixed. It momentarily reminded me of children huddled outside a school during a fire alarm.

    Then I looked up. Ahead and to the right, four blocks to the southwest, the Twin Towers were burning. Keeping symmetry even now, each tower had a gash of yellow flame from which black smoke blew upward in tight veils.

    City Hall was a whirl of confused, frightened activity. The mayor was not in the building. He had gone to the towers. In the frenzied buzz, reports and rumors flew. Someone said a hijacked plane had hit the State Department; someone else added that another plane had struck the Pentagon; another jet, its intentions unknown, was said to be heading for New York.

    Then speculation stopped, and there was only sound.

    It penetrated like the blast of close thunder, but it was not instant. This was a terrible unfurling of sound, a prolonged cascading roar with a shrieking undertone of metal. Then, an ashen cloud – a swirl of chalk-white, grey and brown – hit the glass front doors of City Hall like a wave. Shadows appeared in the cloud, and hands thrust out from the billows, grasping at the doors.

    “Let them in! Let them in!” someone shouted. But a security guard had raced across the rotunda floor and held the doors shut. The ash cloud covered the front of City Hall like a curtain, blinding us to the world outside.

    After a few minutes, we learned that the building was being evacuated. Someone handed me a paper respiratory mask as we went out the front doors. The air was hazy, and the plaza in front of the building was coated in white ash, as if snow had fallen.

    We boarded a city bus that had been detailed to get us out of Lower Manhattan. But then we saw police officers and firefighters in full bunker gear running up the street toward us, as if in flight from something. Because the pall at the World Trade Center was still so thick, we couldn’t see what was going on back there. We just scrambled off the bus and ran. As we did, there was another terrible roar.

    After a few dozen yards, we stopped running. We joined the hundreds of other people walking uptown. We soon came to a scene from another era: A throng of New Yorkers huddled around a radio on the sidewalk, listening for news from the front. It was there that I first learned that the Twin Towers had been completely destroyed, dissolved, along with anyone still inside them. This was an astonishing fact to absorb, a vast and sudden elision of prior understandings. There was nothing to do but keep walking uptown.

    So we did. Almost everybody seemed calm, orderly, reasonable. There were exceptions. One woman in the middle of the sidewalk wasn’t walking anywhere. She was just standing there, facing uptown and then downtown, screaming the same thing over and over again: “This is Jesus’s will!”

    We tried to determine where the scattered members of the mayor’s staff were reassembling. At Union Square, which had a subterranean police station, we learned that the mayor and his team were gathering at the police academy on East 20th Street between Second and Third avenues.

    The police academy served as mayoral headquarters for a few days following September 11. Then operations moved to Pier 92, a shipping terminal on the Hudson River at 52nd Street.

    This huge interior space housed not only the mayor’s office, but also the operations of many city, state and federal agencies. At the end of the terminal was the river. On the banks, soldiers in green camouflage stood at sandbagged gun turrets, as armed patrol boats worked the currents.

    ***
    Mayor Giuliani conducted meetings on the rescue and recovery effort in a small conference room upstairs from the main floor of the makeshift command center. This room, really just a small, rectangular space set off with partitions, was where the mayor brought together the heads of the relevant agencies to talk about every aspect of the city’s response to 9/11.

    At a large table, the mayor sat in the middle, typically with Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen and Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik close by. Other officials – a shifting cast that included New York Governor George Pataki and visiting national politicians – would also attend, with aides taking up chairs along the wall or standing near the doorway.

    I valued the opportunity to sit in on these meetings. It was heartening to see a roomful of public officials address an acute challenge with civility and seriousness. In the meetings I witnessed, grandstanding was at a minimum – no small feat, considering that the individuals around the table were accustomed to supremacy within their administrative domains.

    One day, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry walked into the conference room. Giuliani interrupted the meeting to welcome the Democratic senator, and graciously invited him to sit at the table. Kerry just as graciously declined, and remained standing near the doorway as the meeting continued. It was a nice interaction, instructive in its way, though much of what it represented would soon pass.

    ***
    In the spring and summer months leading up to 9/11, Mayor Giuliani’s speech schedule had stuck to the standard big-city ceremonial fare: ribbon cuttings, ethnic festivals, the occasional policy address. Only once during this period did anything jar the normal rhythms and knock all other priorities off the board.

    On June 17, Father’s Day, a Queens hardware-store fire killed three firefighters – John Downing, Brian Fahey and Harry Ford, all fathers themselves. For the next week, researching and preparing the funeral speeches was more or less the sole focus of our office.

    The message was clear: When a firefighter or police officer dies in the line of duty, giving his life in service to the city, all other demands on a mayor’s attention come second. That the mayor would personally attend the funeral – upending any prior commitments, no matter how important – went without saying.

    The sheer scale of the September 11 attacks meant that the process of civic bereavement would have to be handled differently: 343 firefighters were dead, along with 23 New York City police officers and 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD).

    There was no way the mayor could attend each uniformed service member’s funeral. Several would be taking place at once: a dozen were on the schedule for Friday, September 28; there were 21 listed for the following day. The funerals would be held in all five boroughs, the Long Island suburbs, New Jersey, and southerly “upstate” New York counties like Dutchess and Orange.

    The mayor would attend as many services as he could, but some other senior municipal official – typically a deputy mayor or the head of a major department – would be representing the city at most of them. This arrangement satisfied no one, including the mayor, but it was the only way to proceed under the circumstances.

    The mayor’s speechwriters wrote for any official who spoke for the administration at the funerals. There were four of us now – John Avlon, Owen Rounds, Matt Lockwood and myself. The directive remained the same as it had been after the Father’s Day fire: Recognize the uniqueness of each firefighter or police officer who had died.

    If anything, this rule was especially important now, since many surviving service members and civilians would be attending multiple funerals and hearing a lot of eulogies. We did not want these speeches to seem in any way rote or impersonal. Some repetition of certain general sentiments from one eulogy to another was unavoidable, but we tried to individualize the speeches as much as possible.

    This involved learning all we could about the lives of those now dead. We did not contact the families, but relied instead upon the public-information staffs of the FDNY, NYPD and PAPD, who were generally thorough, timely and gracious in providing necessary biographical details. The daily work of gathering these details and writing the eulogies gave us an ongoing introduction to a community of men and women who had all been taken from this world prematurely, brutally, and more or less simultaneously.

    FDNY Battalion Chief John Moran, who had directed rescue efforts at the Father’s Day fire, was among the dead on September 11. So was First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan. He had been the first person in the history of the fire department to hold every possible rank, and it was said that he knew the location of every hydrant in the city.

    Gone now, too, was Lieutenant Joseph Leavey, who was laid to rest on what should have been his 46th birthday. Like many firefighters, Lieutenant Leavey had an esoteric field of interest. He was an avid student of New York architecture, and had a fascination with the Twin Towers, taking numerous photographs of them.

    NYPD Sergeant Timothy Roy, 36 years old, had served in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He earned praise for his efforts to ease tensions between blacks and Jews following the 1991 riots in that neighborhood. Sergeant Roy was last seen alive in the main concourse of the 5 World Trade Center building, helping someone who had suffered severe burns.

    I was drawn to a particular group of the fallen, the officers of the Port Authority Police Department. For many Americans, the abbreviations FDNY and NYPD were synonymous with the lost rescuers of 9/11. Those totemic letters were everywhere in the months following the attacks – t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, even the flanks of missiles in Afghanistan. There were few such references to the PAPD, despite that department’s grievous losses and the bravery of its officers.

    In a way, this was in keeping with the nature of the PAPD’s mission, which involves patrolling airports, bridges, tunnels and harbors in New York and New Jersey, as well as the Port Authority’s namesake bus terminal on Eighth Avenue. This is essential, life-protecting work, but not quite the stuff of television dramas.

    September 11 was a many-layered tragedy for the Port Authority. This was the agency, after all, that had built the World Trade Center in the first place, as a 1970’s downtown-renewal project. Its headquarters were there. Soon after the planes hit on 9/11, PAPD officers from both sides of the Hudson River sped toward the Twin Towers. At least one, Officer Kenneth Tietjen, commandeered a taxicab to reach them. PAPD Captain Kathy Mazza, a former operating-room nurse, assisted the evacuation of Tower One by shooting out glass walls in the mezzanine.

    Officer Tietjen and Captain Mazza were among the PAPD officers killed at the World Trade Center, as was the department’s police superintendent, Fred Morrone. In addition to the heavy toll on its police force, the Port Authority lost 47 civilian employees, including its executive director, Neil Levin. The agency’s role in the rescue effort was both noble and underappreciated, and I sought to write the eulogies for its members whenever I could.

    ***
    Just as the number of casualties on 9/11 altered the city’s official mourning process, so too did the nature of the violence. The steel-buckling forces of fire and gravity that drove two skyscrapers into the earth made the recovery and identification of the dead especially difficult. As of early October, for example, only five PAPD officers were confirmed dead, with 32 still officially counted as missing.

    Recognizing the inevitable, relatives of the missing began to hold memorial services. As the recovery team at Ground Zero gradually found more remains, several families had second ceremonies to mark their return. The funerals would take place through the end of the year, as the recovery team continued its work.

    Researching and writing the eulogies was a daily reminder that the September 11 attack was the murder of thousands of individual human beings. It is easy to remember that day as a collision of mass forces, of crashing planes and clashing civilizations. Yet 9/11 was not just the death of an era, or of our innocence, or of a relatively quiescent phase in geopolitics.

    It was also the death of Officer Antonio Rodrigues, 35, husband of Cristina; father of Sara and Adam; son of Jose and Cecilia; brother of Marisa; four years with the NYPD; one with the PAPD; a landscape artist and trained aeronautical engineer; a native of Portugal.

    One man, gone a decade now. To pause on a single life lost is – as it was then – to consider the numberless possibilities of stolen years, and to fail in the attempt to multiply the unknowable by thousands.

    The author was a senior speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani from April to December of 2001. He returned to his hometown of St. Louis, where he worked for Mayor Francis Slay as a speechwriter and crime-policy aide, and then joined the Progressive Policy Institute as director of policy development. He is now the senior communications advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon.

    Photo by Ennuipoet * FreeVerse Photography (David Bledsoe): 9/11 Memorial; September 11, 2010, Floating Lanterns. At Pier 40, New Yorkers gathered for an interfaith memorial, including floating paper lanterns with messages from New Yorkers written on them.