New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Los Angeles: The MTA’s Bus Stop Strategy

    Those who run the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority evidently believe that, since the Consent Decree that forced it to improve service to its bus riders has expired, they are free to rewrite history to justify Metro’s elimination of nine bus lines, its reductions in service on eleven more, and its overall elimination of four percent of its bus service hours by attempting to show that MTA bus service is little utilized and not cost-effective.

    The Consent Decree followed a decade of reductions in bus service and increases in fares while the majority of transit spending by the major LA transit agencies went to rail. As a result of a Federal Title IX (discrimination in utilization of Federal funding) legal action, Labor/Community Strategy Center v MTA, in 1996, Metro agreed to the CD. It was forced to eliminate the effective doubling of fares that it had imposed, to return to offering the monthly passes that had been highly utilized by low-income transit riders, and to commit to a relief of overcrowded bus service. Those of us who fought for the CD, and who fought Metro to make it live up to its commitments, believed the CD to be an incredible success.

    MTA has always felt otherwise.

    To see how MTA characterizes the CD as a failure, and thus justifies bus service reductions, go to the source… literally. The Source is MTA’s blog:

    “After the late 1990’s, Metro increased bus service by more than one million hours. Although overall Metro ridership has increased over time, bus ridership has fallen or been flat in the past two decades.”

    This is a wonderful example of the creative use of statistics.

    The latest National Transit Database data is for 2009, when there were 386 million bus boardings. In 1989, twenty years earlier, there had been 412 million. So, yes, Metro bus ridership fell over this two decade period.

    However, a more relevant way of looking at this is to compare 1996 – the year before the CD went into effect – to 2009. From 1996 to 2009, mostly as a result of the CD, bus vehicle revenue hours were up 20.2%, miles were up 14.6%, and bus boardings were up 14.5%.

    What the CD was intended to correct, more than anything, was Metro’s history of reducing overall ridership, bus and rail, by an average of 12 million a year in the eleven years that followed its start of major rail construction in ’85. The measure of the CD’s success was the turnaround: Once it went into effect, Metro ridership increased 12 million a year for the next eleven years until it expired.

    Metro did increase bus service substantially after the CD, and utilization of this service increased at right about the same level. Again, from The Source:

    “How full are Metro buses today? Overall, Metro buses are running at an average of 42% capacity.”

    The 42% figure is evidently derived by dividing Metro’s FY09 bus average passenger load – passengers-miles/vehicle revenue miles – by the average number of seats on Metro buses. The figure looks low, doesn’t it? Think about all those empty seats.

    However, unlike an airline flight from LAX to JFK, Metro buses make many stops along their routes to pick up and drop off passengers. Bus scheduling is developed around the maximum carrying capacity of a bus at the peak load point of the route during the peak ridership period. This means that, for much of the day, and for most of even the busiest bus trips, there are a lot of empty seats. That’s the nature of the transit business.

    And compare Metro bus service to its 20 largest peers. For 2009, Metro was had the second highest average passenger load of the group, at 17.1, beaten only by MTA-NYCT, at 17.9. The average of the results of the Top 20 was 11.3. That 42% starts looking pretty good . In fact, a ratio this high actually suggests that a lot of Metro bus lines should be examined for overcrowding.

    “At present, Metro subsidizes about 71 percent of the cost of each passenger’s bus ride, an amount higher than most other large transit agencies.”

    More commonly, this ratio is turned around, as in: Metro has a 29% farebox recovery ratio.

    How does Metro bus rank up against its Top 20 peers? Seventh, and the average of the Top 20 is 27%. However,farebox recovery ratio can be a very misleading metric. Direct subsidy ratios are a more significant indicator, particularly taxpayer subsidy per passenger and per passenger-mile. Metro’s subsidy/passenger was $1.74, third in the Top 20, against the average of its peers of $2.49; its subsidy/passenger mile of $.44 was second best, against the average of $.68.

    So, rather than the bus service financial performance being sub-standard, it is actually outstanding, providing good value for the riders and great value for the taxpayers.

    Instead of Metro telling the world what a great job it is doing, and taking pride in what it has accomplished, why is Metro leadership explaining how wasteful it is, and why service must be cut?

    “As to whether [these] will be the final bus service changes, Leahy said that he wasn’t sure. ‘But, if we don’t do these things, the capital program is not sustainable.’”

    For those not familiar with MetroSpeak, “capital program,” when applied to transit, primarily means building more rail.

    This is the central issue: Metro is in the business of construction of transportation infrastructure, and money wasted on actually moving people takes away from what is available to build new guideway transit corridors.

    As of this writing, Metro has Chatsworth Orange Line extension (BRT) and Expo Light Rail Phase I in construction, Expo Phase II approaching construction, and a design/build procurement for Phase 2A of the Pasadena Gold Line is underway.

    Metro is also in various stages of planning and obtaining funding commitments for East San Fernando Valley North-South BRT lines, Sepulveda Pass Transit Corridor, Westside Subway Extension, Downtown Regional Transit Connector, Crenshaw/LAX Transit Corridor, Eastside Transit Corridor, Green Line LAX Extension, South Bay Green Line Extension, and West Santa Ana Transit Corridor. Plus, it’s the majority partner for the seven Metrolink commuter rail lines.

    Clearly, Metro is so short of operating funds that it is cutting service on a bus system that is the best value to the taxpayers and riders in the nation. It cannot afford to operate its current bus system, and it is attempting to get Congress to front-load massive construction funding against the thirty-year half-cent sales tax passed in 2008. Given Metro’s less than stellar record of bringing in capital projects on budget, and considering its failure to provide for the very large capital renewal and replacement costs of the current rail lines as they age, exactly how does it expect to pay the operating costs of the expanded system it is rushing to construct?

    As Will Rogers said, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

    Tom Rubin has over 35 years in government surface transportation, including founding the transit industry practice of what is now Deloitte & Touche, LLP, and growing it to the largest of its type. He has served well over 100 transit agencies, MPO’s, State DOT’s, the U.S. DOT, and transit industry suppliers and associations. He was the CFO of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the third largest transit agency in the U.S. and the predecessor of Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

    Photo by biofriendly, Metro Bus Campaign, Los Angeles

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Dallas-Fort Worth

    The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (Note 1), which corresponds to the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area, provides a casebook example of expanding urbanization. Dallas-Fort Worth has been one of the fastest growing major metropolitan areas in the nation for decades. Dallas-Fort Worth was among only three US metropolitan areas adding more than 1,000,000 residents between 2000 and 2010. Only Houston’s addition of 1,230,000 exceeded that of Dallas-Fort Worth, which grew by 1,210,000, a 23.4 percent growth rate. Atlanta was the third metropolitan area to add more than one million residents, at 1,021,000. During the 2000s, Dallas-Fort Worth passed Philadelphia to become the nation’s fourth largest urban area, with a population of 6,372,000. Only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are larger.

    On an international scale, the United Nations estimates indicate that only Singapore, Houston and Atlanta had greater percentage growth between 2000 and 2010 among high-income world urban areas that exceed 4,000,000 in population.

    The Core: The core of the metropolitan area experienced the earliest growth and has since seen its share of growth and its growth rate decline significantly. Dallas County, which includes the historical core municipality of Dallas (Note 2), had a growth rate of 6.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, approximately one third less than the national growth rate of 9.7 percent. Nearly all of the growth in Dallas County was outside the city of Dallas, which added only 0.8 percent to its population, less than one-tenth of the national rate. The city of Dallas added 9,000 residents, while the suburbs within Dallas County added 140,000 residents.

    Overall, Dallas County accounted for 12 percent of the metropolitan area’s growth between 2000 and 2010. This is down from 41 percent between 1950 and 2000. Between 1900 and 1950, Dallas County accounted for an even larger share (66 percent) of growth (Figure 1). Dallas County’s annual growth rate fell from 4.1 percent between 1900 and 1950 to 2.6 percent between 1950 and 2000 to 0.7 percent in the last decade (Figure 2).


    Inner Suburban Counties: During the 2000s, the greatest growth was experienced in the inner suburban counties (those abutting the core county, Dallas). These six counties (Collin, Denton, Ellis, Kaufman, Rockwall and Tarrant, where Fort Worth is located) experienced a population gain of 38.9 percent. Inner suburban counties now contain 56 percent of the metropolitan area population. Between 2000 and 2010, the inner suburban counties captured 82 percent of the metropolitan area, up from 53 percent between 1950 and 2000 and 38 percent between 1900 and 1950. The inner suburban counties grew 1.7 percent annually from 1900 to 1950, increasing to 3.2 percent between 1950 and 2000 and 3.3 percent in the 2000s.

    Outer Suburban Counties: The outer suburban counties represent a comparatively small portion of the metropolitan area’s population. These five counties (Delta, Hunt, Jasper, Parker and Wise) accounted for only 7 percent of the metropolitan area population. The 2000 to 2010 growth rate was 20.9 percent, somewhat below the metropolitan area rate of 23.4 percent, and more than double the national population growth rate of 9.7 percent national growth rate.

    Between 2000 and 2010, the outer suburban counties captured 6 percent of the metropolitan area growth, the same share as between 1950 and 2000. However, perhaps surprisingly, their combined 1950 population was 19 percent below that of 1900. This illustrates the declining fortunes in the early part of the 20th century of counties that were dominated by agriculture, as the farm population and population of many small farm dependent communities declined. Of course, the 1900 to 1950 losses have since been compensated many times over by the post 1950 suburbanization. Nonetheless, one outer suburban county, Delta is unique in continuing to lose population through the 2010 census. Delta County’s 2010 population of 5,200 is approximately one third of its 1900 population of 15,200.

    The outer suburban counties lost 0.4 percent of their population annually from 1900 to 1950, but turned around to gain 2.1 percent from 1950 to 2000. Between 2000 and 2010, the growth rate fell back to 1.9 percent.

    The City of Dallas: The historical core municipality of Dallas illustrates of the dynamics of aggressive annexation policies. In 1910, Dallas covered only 16 square miles (41 square kilometers) and had a population of 92,000. Even at this early date, the city of Dallas was not very dense, with 5,700 residents per square mile (2,200 per square kilometer). The city reached its peak density of 7,300 (2,800 per square kilometer) in 1940, after having expanded to 41 square miles (106 square kilometers) and a population of 295,000.. Even at this peak density, the city of Dallas remained well below the densities of other core cities, especially in the East and Midwest, most of which had densities exceeding 10,000 per square mile (3,900 per square kilometer).

    By 1950, the city had expanded to 112 square miles (289 square kilometers) and with a population of 334,000, the population density had fallen to 3,900 (1,500 per square kilometer). Larger annexations were to follow, with the city reaching 343 square miles (885 square kilometers) by 2010. With a population of 1,198,000, the population density was 3,500 per square mile (1,350 per square kilometer), less than one-half the 1940 peak. Virtually all new owned housing was built consistent with the post-World War II suburban form, as occurred in metropolitan areas around the nation. The city’s addition of 9,000 residents between 2000 and 2010 was far less than the 182,000 gain between 1990 and 2000. By 2000, there was little greenfield land left to develop in the city and the population could be peaking. Indeed, the population could decline in future censuses, as has happened in geographically constrained urban cores around the world. Any such decline could, however, be counteracted by immigration, as has occurred in some urban cores.

    Ethic Trends in the Metropolitan Area: As would be expected in a state bordering Mexico, the Latino population of Dallas-Fort Worth grew substantially between 2000 and 2010, at a 43 percent rate. Overall, Latinos accounted for 42 percent of the metropolitan area’s growth. The Latino population increase was nearly 520,000, more people than live in the core city of Atlanta.

    However, unlike a number of other metropolitan areas, there was strong growth in the African-American population, which added 33 percent to its count. African-Americans accounted for 19 percent of the metropolitan area’s growth.

    This growth was strongest in the core county of Dallas, where Latino and African-American growth made up for a decline in the rest of the population.  In the inner suburban counties, 53 percent of the growth was Latino or African-America, while the lowest share of Latino and African American growth was in the outer suburban counties, at 30 percent.

    Overall, 75 percent of Latino growth and 69 percent of African-American growth took place in the suburban counties, which is a substantial change from the past (Figure 3).

    The Urban Area: Urban area data has not been released from the 2010 census. However, it is clear that Dallas-Fort Worth has become less dense since 1950. Between 1950 and 2000, the population density of the urban area declined approximately 10 percent.   Even so, it is surprising to some that the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area, with its low-density reputation, was only 12 percent less dense that Portland urban area in 2000, despite the aggressive densification strategies employed by Portland.

    The Expanding Metropolitan Area: The story in Dallas-Fort Worth is little different (Table) from what has emerged in metropolitan areas around the world, in places like Seoul, Mexico City and Mumbai. Dallas-Fort Worth also illustrates a trend only now becoming more obvious, that middle-sized and smaller metropolitan areas are generally growing faster than the megacities within their own countries (see the report by the McKinsey Global Institute). The United States has two megacities, the New York metropolitan area, which grew 3.1 percent from 2000 to 2010 and Los Angeles, which grew 3.7 percent. Dallas-Fort Worth’s far higher growth rate of 23.4 percent translated into an actual population increase of 175,000 more than the combined increase of the two megacities, despite their having five times the population.

    Dallas-Fort Worth: Population Trend by Sector and County 
    1900-2010
    1900 1950 2000 2010
    CORE COUNTY
    Dallas County       82,756    614,799  2,218,899  2,368,139
    INNER SUBURBAN COUNTIES    222,747    527,281  2,596,623  3,585,286
    Collin County       50,087      41,692    491,675    782,341
    Denton County       28,318      41,365    432,976    662,614
    Ellis County       50,059      45,645    111,360    149,610
    Kaufman County       33,376      31,170      71,313    103,350
    Rockwall County         8,531        6,156      43,080      78,337
    Tarrant County       52,376    361,253  1,446,219  1,809,034
    OUTER SUBURBAN COUNTIES    149,302    120,754    346,022    418,348
    Delta County       15,249        8,964        5,327        5,231
    Hunt County       47,295      42,731      76,596      86,129
    Johnson County       33,819      31,390    126,811    150,934
    Parker County       25,823      21,528      88,495    116,927
    Wise County       27,116      16,141      48,793      59,127
    METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA    454,805  1,262,834  5,161,544  6,371,773

    The Future? It is an open question whether the rapid growth of Dallas-Fort Worth will continue. As it continues to grow, the stagnation that now afflicts the nation’s two megacities and its near-megacity, Chicago could spread to Dallas-Fort Worth. On the other hand, Dallas-Fort Worth has advantages that could permit its growth to continue for multiple decades into the future. Texas has a favorable business climate, low taxes and less heavy handed regulation than New York, California and Illinois. Dallas-Fort Worth has plenty of developable land as well as a political culture not cowed by development. The economic advance of its growing population, particularly the burgeoning Latino population, depends upon public policies that favor housing affordability and urban expansion. If it continues on its current course, Dallas-Fort Worth could pass the Chicago metropolitan area in population by 2050 and could even challenge Los Angeles later in the century.

    —-

    Note 1: As currently defined by the Census Bureau. Officially titled the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area. Metropolitan areas are essentially labor markets and include a principal urban area and rural (non-urban) areas and may include smaller urban areas.

    Note 2: Fort Worth is not considered a historical core municipality, based upon the discussion in Perspectives on Urban Cores and Suburbs, though the Census Bureau considers Fort Worth and Arlington to be principal cities (which are a different thing). The "Dallas-Fort Worth" terminology is used because of its wide acceptance and to make the geographical expanse of the metropolitan area more clear.

    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”

    Photo by Trey Ratcliff

  • China, Detroit, and Houston: How Ghost Properties Compare

    Learning about China’s property boom and its “ghost” cities has given me a whole new perspective on my four decades in the building, land development and consulting fields. During these periods our economy has had various ups and downs. In ‘up’ times, the rise in construction of new housing and growth in commercial developments has been quite obvious. What I have always had a problem understanding is why there seemed to be new housing projects and commercial projects that sprouted up during the bad times.

    Unlike this current recession — and I do believe that it is still current, despite the rhetoric that it’s over — past economic downturns were localized. As an example, I lived in Detroit in 1973 during the first gas crunch, when there were long lines to fill up. Unemployment in Detroit was a huge problem, and there was no work for a young ‘planner’ for new suburban developments, nor the prospect of anything turning around soon.

    I eventually decided to move to the south, where it was thought to be better. As I crossed into Texas, there weren’t any more gas lines. It seemed the entire State was booming. I drove through to Houston, picked up a phone book, and made a phone call to Paul Lederer Land Surveying and Engineering, which had a display ad that stuck out. Paul answered, and when I explained that I wanted to work as an apprentice to expand my knowledge into his field he hired me over the phone. I settled down, and after a year was ready to buy a home of my own.

    Detroit was still in economic hardship, with housing requiring a 20% down payment for a mortgage. At the same time, in Houston, homes were so much in demand that we had only minutes to make an offer once a home we wanted came on the market. Financing required only a 5% down payment.

    When a wealthy Detroit businessman heard that I could buy homes with only 5% down in a market that was escalating in sales and pricing I was offered a business proposition. I was asked to buy 50 homes at 5% down, and then resell them to a shell company for at least 10% more than our original purchase price. The homes would then be re-financed elsewhere with 5% down. The shell company would then default on the loans, and we would split the profits.

    In other words, if we paid an average of $30,000 each for 50 homes, we would have $1,500,000 in real estate, for which we had put $75,000 down. In theory, if I sold the homes to a shell company for $2,000,0000 with a $100,000 down payment, we would each walk away with $200,000 profit (roughly $790,000 in today’s dollars after inflation) if we defaulted on the loans. I was not interested in something that I considered fraud for a quick dollar, but it would not have been difficult to do this in real estate at that time.

    A few years later, Detroit was still in an economic downturn, and another person I knew was building large residential and commercial projects. These were new developments with hundreds of units and high-rise office towers.

    I mentioned to someone close to this developer that I was unimpressed with a venture to build at a time when there was not a market for either condominium buyers or office tenants, and curious as to why it was being pursued. A 20 story office tower would impress me if it were leased out; one sitting empty would not be so impressive.

    The answer was a lesson in economics. It was explained to me that the office tower was built for $10 million, but financed for $20 million, made possible by some inventive appraisals. Yet the bank needed only $1 million down. In other words, if the developments failed spectacularly there were still millions to be made, even if the properties went back to the banks. Ironically, Detroit in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s recovered somewhat, and the developments in question became financially viable and successful.

    I have no doubt that every industry, not just the development of land, has stories of financial shenanigans, but these are two examples of only a few that I have been exposed to during my 43 years in the development business.

    So today, whenever I see areas with aggressive construction that exceeds market potential, it makes me wonder…

    In light of this history, see what you think about development in China. Check out this 15 minute video from a major Australian broadcaster on China’s ghost cities.

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

    Photo: Expensive waterside apartments in Shekou Shenzhen by DC Master.

  • Local Stakeholders Debate Changes to San Francisco Neighborhood Demographics

    Despite one of the highest population densities in California and a prohibitive cost of living, San Francisco keeps packing them in. Figures released by the U.S. Census last month show that “the City” added 28,502 people during the last ten years, a modest population bump of 3.7 percent from 2000.

    The racial composition of the city changed significantly during the “naughts.” The 2010 Census numbers indicate that the city lost nearly a quarter of its black population with 14,000 fewer residents than in 2000. Although still the largest group as described by race, there were 48,000 fewer white residents than in 2000, a 14 percent decrease. Both the number of Asian and Hispanic residents increased by 11 percent, constituting 33 and 15 percent of the city’s population, respectively.

    Additionally, San Francisco saw its already small percentage of children sink further: there were 5,000 fewer residents under the age of 18 residing in the city than in 2000. Although the former head of the city’s Department Children, Youth and Their Families believes that this number is low due to the number of undocumented children, the findings confirm the anecdote familiar to all San Francisco residents that there very well may be more dogs than children.

    Although the Census has not yet released data more specific smaller geographic units to help decipher the precise demographic shifts, Castro neighborhood stakeholders believe the area has changed in the last ten years. Despite the findings of the Census, many neighborhood observers have seen an increase in the number of children in the area, anecdotally suggesting that the increase in youngsters was absorbed by decreases in other neighborhoods. Perhaps families who can afford to raise children in such an expensive city are choosing to do so among the plush hills and restored Victorians of the Castro and nearby areas – nearby Noe Valley has long derisively been called “Stroller Valley” by the city’s hipsters.

    “The Castro has always been diverse in a number of ways,” Supervisor Scott Wiener said. “I think the biggest demographic changes over the past decade have been an increase in the number of parents, gay and straight, with children, and fewer young people because of the cost of housing in the neighborhood.”

    The 2000 Census showed the 94114 zip code with markedly different demographics than the rest of the City. For instance, 83 percent of the population was white, compared to nearly 50 percent citywide in 2000, and nearly 60 percent of residents in the zip code were male.

    “I do think that the area has become more diverse,” Mark Dicko, a realtor based at Herth Real Estate on Castro Street, said, agreeing with Wiener.

    However, the realtor did not share the same opinion on the area becoming grayer. “I’ve seen quite a few younger people moving into the area, many of the Google, Facebook, Apple employees have been able to purchase homes and condos or just want to rent in the area to be in the city. I have seen all ethnicities and sexual orientations deciding that they want to live in this area which is just fantastic.”

    “Certainly up in Buena Vista Park in the last 10-15 years, many families who had been there for a long time have moved out,” Richard Magary, chair of the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, said. “Lots of upper-middle class houses changed hands to families with kids. It’s nice to see the fresher and younger families coming in.”

    Overall, the state added almost 4.5 million new residents, an increase of 10 percent from 2000. Much of this growth occurred in the Inland Empire and other counties in the San Joaquin Valley.

    Nationwide, the population grew by 9.7 percent to nearly 309 million.

    A version of this article was originally published in the Castro Courier neighborhood newspaper in San Francisco. Andy Sywak is the former publisher of the Courier. He now lives in Sacramento.

    Photo by stephanie vacher

  • Cities and the Census: Cities Neither Booming Nor Withering

    For many mayors across the country, including New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, the recently announced results of the 2010 census were a downer. In a host of cities, the population turned out to be substantially lower than the U.S. Census Bureau had estimated for 2010—in New York’s case, by some 250,000 people. Bloomberg immediately called the decade’s meager 2.1 percent growth, less than one-quarter the national average, an “undercount.” Senator Charles Schumer blamed extraterrestrials, accusing the Census Bureau of “living on another planet.” The truth, though, is that the census is very much of this world. It just isn’t the world that mayors, the media, and most urban planners want to see.

    Start with the fact that America continues to suburbanize. The country’s metropolitan areas have two major components: core cities (New York City, for example) and suburbs (such as Westchester County, Long Island, northern New Jersey, and even Pike County in Pennsylvania). During the 2000s, the census shows, just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6 percent represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4 percent. The New York metropolitan area was no outlier: though it did better than the national average, with 29 percent of its growth taking place within New York City, that’s still a lot lower than the 46 percent that the center region saw in the 1990s.

    This may be shocking to some. For years, academics, the media, and big-city developers have been suggesting that suburbs were dying and that people were flocking back to the cities that they had fled in the 1970s. The Obama administration has taken this as gospel. “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development,” Housing and Urban Development secretary Shaun Donovan opined in 2010. “People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.” Yet of the 51 metropolitan areas that have more than 1 million residents, only three—Boston, Providence, and Oklahoma City—saw their core cities grow faster than their suburbs. (And both Boston and Providence grew slowly; their suburbs just grew more slowly. Oklahoma City, meanwhile, built suburban-style residences on the plentiful undeveloped land within city limits.)

    All this suburbanization means that the best unit for comparison may not be the core city but the metropolitan area, and the census shows clearly which metropolitan areas are growing and which are not. The top ten population gainers—growing by 20 percent, twice the national average or more—are the metropolitan areas surrounding Las Vegas, Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Riverside–San Bernardino, Orlando, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, and Atlanta. These areas are largely suburban in form. None developed the large, dense core cities that dominated America before the post–World War II suburban boom began. By contrast, many of the metropolitan areas that grew at rates half the national average or less—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, New York—have core areas that are the old, dense variety. Planners and pundits may like density, but people, for the most part, continue to prefer more space.

    If you do look at cities themselves, rather than at larger metropolitan areas, you’ll see that the census reveals three different categories. The most robust cities, with population growth over 15 percent for the decade—Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, and Orlando—were located within the kind of metropolitan area that urbanists tend to dislike: highly suburbanized, dominated by single-family homes, and with few people using public transit. That’s partly because these cities developed along largely suburban lines by annexing undeveloped land and low-density areas. This has been the case in virtually all the fastest-growing cities. Raleigh has expanded its boundaries to become 12 times larger than it was in 1950; Charlotte and Orlando are nine times larger, and Jacksonville an astounding 25 times larger.

    At the opposite end of the spectrum are core cities, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast and often land-constrained, that have continued to shrink. These include longtime disaster zones like Detroit and Cleveland as well as newer ones like Birmingham in the South. They include Pittsburgh, a city much praised for its livability but one that is aging rapidly and whose city government, based disproportionately on revenue from universities and nonprofits, is among the nation’s most fiscally strapped. They even include Chicago, which lost some 200,000 people during the 2000s, its population falling to the lowest level since the 1910 census. The reasons aren’t hard to identify: despite all the hype about Chicago’s recovery and the legacy of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the Windy City is among the most fiscally weak urban areas in the country, its schools are in terrible shape, and its economy is struggling.

    Finally, there are cities that have grown, but not quickly. New York City’s population, for example, inched to a record high in the 2000s, but that growth was less than the national average. The population of Los Angeles grew a mere 97,000—the smallest increase since the 1890s. Many of the slow-growing cities (New York, San Francisco, and Boston, for example) suffer from high housing costs, which inhibit population growth. But they also host high-end industries—finance, technology, and business services—and enough well-paid workers in these industries to afford pricey housing and sustain a small rate of growth. The cities also attract already wealthy people from elsewhere.

    The census provides information on a smaller level, too, telling us not just which cities have grown, but where the growth has taken place within cities. Often, it has been in and around the historic downtowns. This is a trend in many cities that otherwise differ starkly (New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles), and it reflects a subtle shift in the role of the downtown. Rather than reasserting themselves as dominant job centers, downtowns are becoming residential and cultural—a change that H. G. Wells predicted when he wrote that by 2000, the center of London would be “essentially a bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous.” What may have been an office, industrial, or retail zone morphs into a gentrified locale attractive to the migratory global rich, to affluent young people, and to childless households.

    This downtown recovery (which many cities subsidized heavily) was partly why so many urbanists and developers identified a broader back-to-the-city movement; but in reality, the phenomenon was usually limited to a relatively small population and a relatively small area. Since 1950, for example, St. Louis has lost a greater share of its population than any American city ever boasting 500,000 or more residents. The area from downtown to Central West End experienced strong growth during the 2000s, however, adding more people than Portland’s Pearl District, a favorite of urban planners. Yet this gain of 7,000 people was far from enough to offset the loss of 36,000 in the rest of St. Louis.

    It’s also worth noting that in economic terms, downtowns are losing their hold. For example, though the residential population of Chicago’s Loop tripled to 20,000 in the past decade, that famed business district lost almost 65,000 jobs; its share of the metropolitan area’s employment also fell. Los Angeles’s downtown, whose population has likewise grown, lost roughly 200,000 jobs from 1995 to 2005. Manhattan is losing employment share to the other four boroughs, as it has been for decades; but as a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future reveals, the process accelerated over the last ten years. From 2000 to 2009, Manhattan lost a net 41,833 jobs, while other boroughs saw net increases. This employment dispersion is even more evident in the suburbs. Of commuters who live in the inner-ring suburbs (such as Yonkers and East Orange), 60 percent work in their home counties and only 14 percent in Manhattan. Of commuters from such outer-ring suburbs as Haverstraw and Morristown, 73 percent work in their home counties and 6 percent in Manhattan.

    What, in the end, does the census tell us about America’s cities today? Certainly not that they’re dying, as they threatened to do in the 1950s, but equally certainly that they aren’t roaring back. Cities remain a successful niche product for a relatively small percentage of the population. Most people, though, even in the New York metropolitan area, continue to move toward the periphery rather than the core. That said, New York’s continuing growth over the past decade suggests that its recovery will likely prove durable. As for Senator Schumer’s “another planet” allegations, the census is simply confirming the fact that terrestrial Americans continue to disperse, both within and among metropolitan areas. So far, there’s little that planners, policy makers, and urban boosters can do about that.

    This piece originally appeared in City Journal.

    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.

    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”

    Photo by caruba

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Mumbai

    The continuing dispersion of international metropolitan areas is illustrated by recently released 2011 Census of India preliminary data for the Mumbai "larger" metropolitan area. The historical core, the "island" district of Mumbai (Inner Mumbai) lost population between 2001 and 2011, while all growth was in suburban areas outside the historic core. Indeed, since 1981, Inner Mumbai lost 140,000 residents, while suburban areas gained 13.2 million.

    The larger metropolitan area is defined by district boundaries, the census division level below that of the state. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority has a more "tight" definition, composed of smaller administrative units (municipalities), however that data is not yet available on the internet (Note). The larger metropolitan area includes four districts, two of which compose the city of Mumbai, Inner Mumbai (the historic core), and Outer Mumbai. The larger metropolitan area also includes the district of Thane, which is to the east and north of Mumbai and the district of Raigarh, which is to the south of Mumbai. The overwhelming majority of growth outside the city of Mumbai has been in Thane, which is accessible by land and bridge to Mumbai. Raigarh is less accessible from Mumbai and requires travel through Thane to reach.

    The historic population trends of these four districts are described below. The evolution of the Mumbai urban form is illustrated by the following:

    (1) The population growth rate peaked first in the core, Inner Mumbai, Outer Mumbai later and then fell substantially. Recent growth has been concentrated in the outlying districts of Thane and Raigarh. Figure 1 shows the population growth rate by district for each decade since the 1901 census.

    (2) Much of the population growth was in Inner Mumbai until 1961. From 1961 through 1981, the bulk of the population growth moved to Outer Mumbai. By the 1981 to 1991 period, Thane emerged to virtually equal Outer Mumbai in its share of growth and has been dominant since 1991. Figure 2 indicates the share of the larger metropolitan area growth by district since 1901.

    (3) The population of Inner Mumbai has risen comparatively little since 1961, with nearly all growth occurring first in Outer Mumbai and later in Thane. These two suburban areas now account for 90 percent of the larger metropolitan area population, double the 44 percent of 1961. Figure 3 illustrates the actual population, by district, of the larger metropolitan area from 1901 to 2011.

    Inner Mumbai: The historic core (Inner Mumbai) registered 3.146 million residents, down from 3.327 million in 2001. The historic core now contains only 12 percent of the larger metropolitan area population, down from 40 percent in 1961, adding approximately 375,000 residents during that forty year stretch. Overall, since 1960, the island district has captured only 2 percent of the larger metropolitan area growth. This contrast with the period before 1951; Inner Mumbai had captured approximately 60 percent of the larger metropolitan region population growth between 1931 and 1941, and 49 percent between 1941 and 1951. However, Inner Mumbai’s share dropped to a 26 percent share in 1951 to 1961 and an 11 percent share in 1961-1971. This is consistent with the overall trend in urban core population growth in metropolitan areas around the world, with population stalling or even declining once there is little greenfield land remaining for development. Inner Mumbai had lost population in the 1981-1991 census period, however recovered to reach its population peak in 2001. The 2011 population for Inner Mumbai was the lowest since the 1971 census. These population losses have occurred despite an unprecedented building boom of high-rise residential towers.

    Outer Mumbai: The Mumbai Suburban district (Outer Mumbai) became a part of the city of Mumbai through a 1950 consolidation. As Inner Mumbai became fully developed, population growth shifted sharply to Outer Mumbai. By 2011, Outer Mumbai grew to 9.33 million residents, an increase of 7.95 million from its 1961 total of 1.38 million. Outer Mumbai captured 41 percent of the larger metropolitan area growth from 1961 to 2011. However, as the supply of greenfield land has been reduced, Outer Mumbai’s growth has also slowed considerably. In each of the three decades from 1941 to 1971, Outer Mumbai grew by more than 100 percent. Outer Mumbai attracted only 19 percent of the larger metropolitan area growth, down from a 58 percent peak in the 1971-1981 period. The 2001-2011 increase of 744,000 (8.7 percent) was the lowest since the 1951-1961 census period, and was substantially below the 27.2 percent from rate from 1991 to 2001.

    Thane: During the last 10 years, Thane has become the largest district in the Mumbai larger metropolitan area, with a population of 11.1 million, passing Outer Mumbai. Thane is now the largest district in India. In 2001 Thane had 8.1 million residents in 2001 and grew 35 percent to 2011. This, however, is down from a 55 percent growth rate between 1991 and 2001, reflecting a decline in the overall growth rate of the larger metropolitan area (see below). Thane has steadily increased its share of growth in the larger metropolitan area, from 24 percent between 1961 and 1971 to 55 percent between 1991 and 2001. Thane reached a peak in the 2001-2011 census period, capturing 74 percent of the larger metropolitan area growth. Since 1961, Thane has captured 49 percent of the growth in the larger metropolitan area and added 9.4 million residents. In each of the last two census periods, Thane has added 2.9 million residents, equal nearly to the population of the urban core, Inner Mumbai.

    Raigarh: More remote from the core, Raigarh has experienced considerably slower growth than Thane, and until recently slower than Outer Mumbai. Raigarh grew 19 percent, from 2.21 million in 2001 to 2.64 million in 2011, an increase of 19 percent. This was the only census period since 1901 in which Raigarh grew more quickly than Outer Mumbai. Raigarh accounted for 11 percent of the larger metropolitan area growth between 2001 and 2011 and 8 percent since 1960. Raigarh added approximately 1.575 million residents from 1961 to 2001, more than four times that of larger Inner Mumbai (the urban core).

    Overall Population Growth: Consistent with the general population growth rate declines witnessed in less affluent nations, the Mumbai larger metropolitan area is growing less quickly than in previous decades. Between 2001 and 2011, the area grew 17.3 percent, which is down from 30.9 percent between 1991 and 2001.  The greatest growth had been between 1941 and 1951 (49 percent), with rates from 30 percent to 39 percent in each of the decades from 1951 to 1991 (Figure 4).

    Mumbai: Penultimate Density, Yet Representative: The core urban area (area of continuous urban development) of Mumbai represents approximately 80 percent of the larger metropolitan area population. Mumbai is the third most dense major urban area in the world at nearly 65,000 residents per square mile (25,000 per square kilometer), trailing Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Hong Kong. Yet even at this near penultimate density, Mumbai exhibits the general trends of dispersion and declining density that are occurring in urban areas around the world, from the most affluent to the least. In the two Mumbai city districts, as in other megacities, housing has become so expensive that population growth is being severely limited. Overall, the Mumbai larger metropolitan area may also be experiencing slower growth as smaller metropolitan areas outperform larger ones, a trend identified in a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Finally, the over-crowded, slum conditions that prevail for more than one-half of the city’s residents could be instrumental in driving growth to more the distant suburbs of Thane and Raigarh.

    —-

    Note: This "larger metropolitan area" definition is consistent with the cruder US Bureau of the Census delineation for metropolitan areas, which is based upon counties (in 44 states), rather than tighter definitions, such as municipalities or census tracts.

    Photo: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, Mumbai (by author)

    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”

  • The Problem With Megacities

    The triumphalism surrounding the slums and megacities frankly disturbs me. It is, of course, right to celebrate the amazing resilience of residents living in these cities’ massive slums. But many of the megacity boosters miss a more important point: that the proliferation of these sorts of communities may not be desirable or even necessary.

    Cities may be getting larger, particularly in the developing world, but that does not make them better. Megacities such Kolkata (in India), Mumbai, Manila, Sao Paolo, Lagos and Mexico City — all among the top 10 most populous cities in the world — present a great opportunity for large corporate development firms who pledge to fix their problems with ultra-expensive hardware. They also provide thrilling features for journalists and a rich trove for academic researchers.

    But essentially megacities in developing countries should be seen for what they are: a tragic replaying of the worst aspects of the mass urbanization that occurred previously in the West. They play to the nostalgic tendency among urbanists to look back with fondness on the crowded cities of early 20th Century North America and Europe. Urban boosters like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s John Timpane speak fondly about going back to the “the way we were” — when our parents or grandparents lived stacked in small apartments, rode the subway to work and maintained a relatively small carbon footprint.

    Unfortunately such places were often not so nice for the people who actually lived in them. After all, they have been moving from higher to lower density locations for over fifty years, a trend still noticeable in the new Census. As my mother, who grew up a slum-dweller, says of her old Brooklyn neighborhood: “Brownsville was a crappy neighborhood then, and it’s a crappy neighborhood now.”

    My mother considers herself a tried and true New Yorker, but she and my late father chose to raise their kids on Long Island. She now lives in an apartment in Rockville Centre, somewhat farther out on the Island. One could imagine many slum-dwellers in developing countries would also choose a less crowded environment for themselves and their children, if that option existed.

    Most slum-dwellers, at least from what I have seen in India, move to the megacity not for the bright lights, but to escape hopeless poverty in their village. Some argue that these migrants are better off than previous slum-dwellers since they ride motorcycles and have cell phones.

    But access to the wonders of transportation and “information technology” is unlikely to compensate for physical conditions that are demonstrably worse than those my mother endured.  At least Depression-era poor New Yorkers could drink water out of a tap and expect consistent electricity, something not taken for granted by their modern day counterparts in Mexico City, Manila or Mumbai.

    More serious still, the slum-dwellers face a host of health challenges that recall the degradations of Dickensian London. Residents of mega-cities face enormous risks from such socially caused maladies as AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, urban violence, unsafely built environments, and what has been described as  ”the neglected epidemic” of road-related injuries. According to researchers Tim and Alana Campbell, developing countries now account for 85% of the world’s traffic fatalities.

    One telling indication of the difficulties the newcomers face is the relatively low level of life expectancy in the city — roughly 57 years — which is nearly seven years below the national average.

    Even with solid economic growth, these megacities are not necessarily becoming better places to live. In 1971, slum dwellers accounted for one in six Mumbai-kers; now they constitute an absolute majority. Inflated real estate prices drive even fairly decently employed people into slums. A modest one-bedroom apartment in the Mumbai suburbs, notes R. N.  Sharma of the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences, averages around 10,000 rupees a month, double the average worker’s monthly income.

    Traffic congestion is also worsening. Nearly half of Mumbai commuters spend at least one or two hours to get to work, far more than workers in smaller rivals such as Chennai, or Hyderabad. Fifty percent of formal sector workers expressed the desire to move elsewhere, in part to escape brutal train or car commutes; only a third of workers in other cities expressed this sentiment.

    What does this say about the future for megacities?  When conditions become oppressive enough, people generally respond by finding a better place to live. Poor village dwellers in Bihar may not all stay in the countryside, but they — and many better-skilled immigrants — may find other, less intense urban options.

    Recent research suggests that these immigrants will increasingly move to the urban fringe or to smaller cities. A massive research effort published earlier this year for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that since 1990 “built-up area densities” have been dropping by roughly 2% a year, including in the developing world.

    An impressive new study by the McKinsey Global Institute, called “Mapping the Economic Power of Cities,” has found that “contrary to common perception, megacities have not been driving global growth for the past 15 years.” Many, the report concludes, have not grown faster than their host economies.

    McKinsey predicts these cities will underperform economically and demographically as growth shifts to   577 “fast growing middleweights,” many of them in China and India.  We can see this already in the shift of industrial growth to smaller cities in India. There may be an additional 25 million jobs added to the Indian auto industry by 2016, according to recent estimates, it appears most will go to other states, such as Gujarat, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, enriching cities such as Chennai and Ahmedabad, nut not Mumbai.

    These realities lead some advocates in developing countries to question the logic of promoting megacities. Tata’s Sharma notes that as manufacturing and other industries move to smaller, more efficient cities, they remove many middle-income opportunities. Instead, the gap between the megacity’s rich and poor expands more rapidly.   “The boom that is happening is giving more to the wealthy.  This is the ’shining India’ people talk about,” Sharma says. “But the other part of it is very shocking, all the families where there is not even food security. We must ask: The ‘Shining India’ is for whom? “

    Ashok R. Datar, chairman of the Mumbai Environmental Social Network and a long-time advisor to the Ambani corporate group, suggests that Asian megacities should stop emulating the early 20th Century Western model of rapid, dense urbanization. “We are copying the Western experience in our own stupid and silly way,” Datar says. “The poor gain on the rich. For every tech geek, we have two to three servants.

    Datar suggest that developing countries need to better promote the growth of more manageable smaller cities and try bringing more economic opportunity to the villages.  One does not have to be a Ghandian idealist to suggest that Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” concept — conceived as a response to miserable conditions in early 20th Century urban Britain — may be better guide to future urban growth.

    Rejecting gigantism for its own sake, “the garden city” promotes, where possible, suburban growth, particularly in land-rich countries. It also can provide a guide to more human-scale approach to  dense urban development. The “garden city” is already a major focus in Singapore, where I serve as a guest lecturer at the Civil Service College. Singaporean planners are embracing bold ideas for decentralizing work, reducing commutes and restoring nearby natural areas.

    These ideas may be most relevant to cities on the cusp of rapid growth, such as Hanoi. As we walk through the high-density slums on the other side of the dike that protects Hanoi from the Red River, Giang Dang, founder of the nonprofit Action for the City, tells me that rapid growth is already degrading the quality of Hanoi’s urban life, affecting everything from the food safety to water to traffic congestion. Houses that accommodated one family, she notes, now often have two of three.

    Expanding Hanoi’s current 6 million people — already at least twice its population in the 1980s — to megacity size — say between 10 million and 15 million — may thrill urban land speculators but may not prove  so good for city residents.  Like Datar, Dang favors expanding conditions both smaller cities, and the Vietnamese countryside.

    “The city is already becoming unlivable,” she  insists. “More people, more high-rises will not make it better. Maybe it’s time to give up the stupid dream of the megacity.”

    Such voices are rarely heard in the conversation about urban problems.  But the urban future requires radical  new thinking.  Rather than foster an urban form that demands heroic survival, perhaps we should focus on ways to create cities that offer a more a healthful and even pleasant life for their citizens.

    This piece originally appeared in 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 Dey Alexander

  • California: Club Med Meets Third World?

    On March 25th, the Bureau of Labor statistics released a report that showed that California jobs had increased by 96,000 in February.  The state’s cheerleaders jumped into action. Never mind that the state still has a 12.2 percent unemployment rate, and part of the decline from 12.4 percent is because just under 32,000 discouraged workers left California’s labor force in February. 

    Unfortunately, the cheerleaders are likely to once again be disappointed.  It is unwise to build a case on one data point.  Data are volatile and subject to all sorts of technical issues.  For example, the estimate of California’s job growth is seasonally adjusted data and subject to revision.

    More importantly, even if California did see 96,000 new jobs in February, that pace is unlikely to be maintained.  California’s economy is just too burdened by the State’s DURT: Delay, Uncertainty, Regulation, and Taxes.  Instead of enjoying the truly vibrant recovery one would expect given its climate, location, natural resources, university network, workforce, and natural and manmade amenities, California’s economy will grow far below its potential, burdened by its DURT. 

    People often ask me to identify the most important impediment to California’s economic growth, but there isn’t just one.  Every business is different.  One may be most impacted by regulation, another by taxes.  Instead, it is the total cost of the DURT.

    Taxes are certainly one component of DURT.  The Tax Foundation ranked California 49th in business taxes and Kiplinger ranks California worst in retiree’s taxes, which serves as a good proxy for individual tax burdens.  No doubt, California’s taxes are high, but that alone wouldn’t be too big a problem.  People happily pay to live in California.  Higher taxes and home costs are just the beginning.

    California is in its own class when it comes to regulation; nothing is unimaginable in a state where bulk of the executive leadership comes from the San Francisco-Oakland area.  Today, there are two regulations that are particularly hurting California’s economy, AB32 and SB375.  AB32 is California’s attempt to unilaterally solve the planet’s global warming problem.  It will have serious implications, all of them detrimental to economic activity.  SB375 attempts to advance its global warming  goals through regional planning mandates.  Here’s a sympathetic analysis of SB375 from a smart guy.

    Those are just the most onerous regulations.  California has thousands of regulations and more come daily.  California had 725 new laws come into effect on January 1, 2011, and the state has over 500 constitutional amendments, averaging over four new constitutional amendments a year.

    Which brings us to uncertainty.

    Uncertainty about the future regulatory environment is detrimental to economic activity.  It is extraordinarily difficult to plan when the regulatory environment is in such a state of flux, and nothing is unimaginable.

    Regulatory uncertainty is far from California’s only source of uncertainty.  California’s local governments are notoriously fickle, particularly in the generally affluent coastal areas.  I know of one project that spent four years in planning, only to be denied by the City Council, even though the project was supported by the planning department.  That’s just expensive.  Developers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on architects, engineers, and planning consultants while jumping through the hoops set up by the planning department, neighborhood groups, environmentalists, and other special interest groups.

    This type of story is all too common in Coastal California.  Some California communities, such as Santa Monica, require that prior to building a new house, you must use two by fours, string, and flags to provide the outline of the proposed structure for up to 90 days.  This is to facilitate neighbor complaints before the project is built.

    The previous story also relates to delay.  Delay in California is legendary, a result of regulatory hurdles, demand for studies, and legal action.  California newspapers often describe projects as controversial, but this is redundant.  Every project is controversial in California. 

    Want to rebuild an aging bridge?  Someone will sue you and claim the old bridge is a historical landmark.  Want to put in a solar farm?  Someone will sue you because the land is home to endangered rats, turtles, salamanders, toads, fairy shrimp, or something.  Endangered species are everywhere in California.  Want to put a condominium project in a depressed part of town?  Someone will sue you because it doesn’t match the neighborhood.  Want to build a house?  Someone will sue you because it will block their view.

    All these things and more happen in California.  It’s no surprise that businesses find California a very challenging place to be profitable.  California’s markets are huge.  No doubt about it.  So, some business will operate in the state.  California’s location on the Pacific Rim and it ports also compel some business to be in California, even if costs are high.  California is a fantastic place to live.  So, people who can afford to will live here.  Some business owners will locate businesses where the owner wants to live.  But, most businesses are too competitive to give up profits to live in California.  Many keep their headquarter s here while shipping their new jobs to other states, or abroad.

    Even so, California is unlikely to become Detroit.  It, sadly, is also unlikely to achieve its potential or regain its previous economic vigor.  The cost of California DURT is just too high.  Instead, the place will become increasingly divided.  Coastal regions, for the foreseeable future, will become even more affluent, heavily white and increasingly Asian.  Hosts of unseen, less fortunate people support them, often commuting from more hardscrabble interior locations.

    Considerable poverty will coexist uncomfortably in California’s coastal paradise.  Working class families already crowd into housing units designed for one family, and this will likely only get worse. 

    What Coastal California won’t have is much of a middle class.  Lack of opportunity and high housing costs makes the most pleasant parts of California an unattractive place for people who define quality of life by opportunity and affordable housing, young families.  Domestic migration is likely to continue to be negative.

    For its part, inland California is already depressed, 27 counties have unemployment rates over 15 percent.  Eight have unemployment rates above 20 percent.  Even during the boom, many of California’s inland areas had extraordinarily high unemployment rates.  Central California’s poverty and blight will only get worse.

    All this is courtesy of expensive California DURT.  Because of it, California’s economy will lag.  More importantly, California seems to be morphing into almost a Hollywood caricature.  The self-absorbed hedonistic wealthy live side by side with the poor, like  a combination of a Club Med and Leisure Village in a third-world country.

    Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

    Photo by chavez25

  • Bicycle Commuting: A US System and A World-Wide Guide

    To my pleasure, there is now a United States Bicycle Route System that goes more places than Amtrak and Greyhound do. Have a look at the proposed map of the national corridor plan.

    The goal is to create clearly marked north-south and east-west routes, as romantic as the Oregon Trail or as functional as the Erie Canal. The trail of Lewis and Clark is on one of the routes.

    I can only hope that the plan serves as an inspiration to would-be cyclists and every-day bike commuters. To be fair, it takes years to master the dark and often wet arts of cycling. My riding-to-work garb includes reflective gear from London, Alaskan socks, a headlight from San Diego, a lock from Amsterdam, and a rain jacket from Ohio. On my first commute, after a year of wondering of “whether I could do it,” I searched so hard to find a safe route that I got lost.

    Serious bike commuting requires owning two or three bikes, as one or two will always have flats or breakdowns, and, you need a rain bike. Plus, strategic wardrobe planning can take hours. But bike commuters get to have the satisfaction of passing cars stuck in traffic, and tired legs at the end of day leave you feeling more virtuous than Mother Teresa (if you want more inspiration, there’s a cycling jersey with her picture).

    Just to be clear: No one behind the car wheel likes a cyclist, because bicyclists run red lights, hop up on curbs, pound on hoods, drop F-bombs, and give drivers the middle finger salute. Politically, cyclists fall on the spectrum somewhere between Greens and Anarchists. In some 300 cities — it’s a global movement— to protest local (car-inspired) injustices, they have formed into Critical Masses that parade around like errant storm troopers.

    I am surprised that no one has articulated a bicycle foreign policy — in German it would be Fahrradweltanschauung — given that there are more bikes in the world than cars and they are used more often. Fifty million bikes are manufactured annually worldwide, versus twenty million cars. China’s market share is 400 million. But many American states and counties fight having a bicycle coordinator on their payroll.

    Here’s a highly personal comparison of where some cities and regions currently stand in relation to a world of bicycles:

    Geneva: My hometown, so I know the roads well. The city is trying to expand its bike lanes and trams. Whenever road construction is completed, a new bike lane emerges from the rubble. Biking works in Geneva, despite the hills, wind and rain, but many bike lanes are stopped by dead ends or traffic. I am forever lifting my bike over curbs, cobblestones, or rails, and searching for a better way around the medieval town.

    New York: I can thank former New York mayor Ed Koch for converting me into a bicycle romantic. In spring 1980, he decided to accept a strike from New York’s Transport Workers Union that, for eleven days, mothballed the city’s buses and subway. (Koch referred to the strikers as “wackos.”) The only way to get around New York was to walk or ride a bike. I dusted off my childhood Raleigh Grand Prix and rode off to work, never looking back on a life that did not involve bicycles.

    Although I no longer live in New York, I still like riding there. The West Side, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge are bike friendly. If you want to understand why George Washington lost the battle of Harlem Heights (as I do), a bike is the only way to get there. But, as much as biking has improved in and around New York in the last thirty years, it remains a “car” city. Cyclists are an afterthought, and poorly represented by messengers flying down Seventh Avenue, no hands on their bars, talking on their cell phones, flipping off confused pedestrians.

    The administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed a master plan of 900 miles of bike lanes around New York, up from 400 miles, bringing out pools of angry car drivers who hate sharing the road with cyclists and haunted pedestrians. A New York Magazine cover story called it “Bikelash.” But 100,000 riders mount a bike every day in Manhattan.

    Hanoi: In 1993, before the Politburo began importing waves of noisy scooters and small motorcycles, to bike around the old French quarter and West Lake (past General Giap’s house and Ho’s mausoleum) was a delight. Everyone rolled at slow speeds, and no one stopped at the intersections; the bike traffic just melded together, like DNA. In the Vietnam War, bikes beat B-52s.

    Berlin: It’s expansive, like Los Angeles, but flat as a dish and with many bike lanes, all of which go to places of historical interest: the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, the remnants of the Berlin Wall, or Checkpoint Charlie. Each time I am there, I rent a bike, and it takes me everywhere. The only downside to Berlin biking is the weather, which has a lot of cold rain. Bikes make Berlin.

    Amsterdam: I find the biking to be hair-raising. The Dutch power through intersections or along bike paths as though they were in a bonus sprint on the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix (the famous bike race). Yes, the lanes go everywhere, and bikes in Holland — at least those not stolen and thrown into the canals — are sacred objects. But think about wearing some body armor.

    Beijing: My favorite bicycle city. To be in the saddle enables you to go almost anywhere. Bike lanes are wider than many Western boulevards, and you can bike around Tiananman Square, to the Forbidden City, down to South Station, and out toward the Marco Polo Bridge (where World War II began in China). The way to see the hutong — ancient alleys — is on a bike. Beijing treats its citizens with more respect when they are cycling than it shows them at other times.

    London: Cyclists wear reflective vests, stretch rubber bands on their pants legs, and blow strange whistles at anything in their way. Coming out of the mist, they look prehistoric and think nothing of biking in rain, sleet or snow, doing battle with buses, cars, and pedestrians, or riding bikes that look like they survived the Blitz. The London mayor has introduced a fleet of shared bikes that can be used around town, based on annual membership. Because traffic is on the “wrong side,” I find biking in London scary, but it delivers the goods.

    Suburbia, USA: I have spent more time that I would have wished biking around suburbs, exurbs, malls, highways, and developments. It’s the least satisfying bicycle experience. I grew up in the suburbs, with baseball cards in my spokes. Suburban drivers hate cyclists. Integrating bicycles into suburban life, with its SUV panzer divisions, will be a national challenge.

    Toronto: Canada’s guerrilla team, the Urban Repair Squad, goes out at night to paint bike lanes onto city streets. (“They say the city is broke. We fix it. No charge.”) So effective is their painting that the city of Toronto maintained the counterfeit lanes for two years, thinking they were official.

    Southampton, New York: Southampton prohibits riding a bike through town. It’s fine to thunder through the Potemkin village of million dollar boutiques in a gas-guzzling, tinted-windowed pimp mobile, but God forbid that anyone should roll through on their own power. It gets my vote as the worse bicycle town in America.

    ***

    Like all bikevangelists, I dream of highways given over to cyclists, and see cycling as the way wean the U.S. from Middle Eastern oil and solve every problem from global warming to obese children. Consider this: Compared to the costs of high-speed rail and highway construction, the U.S. Bicycle Route System requires only maps, sign posts, imagination… and strong legs.

    Photo by the author: “My bike in Beijing. One gear. Heavy as bricks, but very smooth”.

    Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical essays. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. He lives and rides in Switzerland.

  • The End of the Line: Ambitious High-speed Rail Program Hits the Buffer of Fiscal Reality

    A well-intentioned but quixotic presidential vision to make high-speed rail service available to 80 percent of Americans in 25 years is being buffeted by a string of reversals. And, like its British counterpart, the London-to-Birmingham high speed rail line (HS2), it is the subject of an impassioned debate. Called by congressional leaders “an absolute disaster,” and a “poor investment,” the President’s ambitious initiative is unraveling at the hands of a deficit-conscious Congress, fiscally-strapped states, reluctant private railroad companies and a skeptical public.

    The $53 billion initiative was seeded with an $8 billion “stimulus” grant and followed by an additional $2.1 billion appropriation out of the regular federal budget. But instead of focusing the money on improving rail service where it would have made the most sense— in the densely populated, heavily traveled Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington— the Obama Administration sprinkled the money on 54 projects in 23 states.

    Some of the awards are engineering and construction grants but many more are simply planning funds intended to plant the seeds of future passenger rail service across the country. Only two of the projects could be called truly “high-speed rail” because they would involve construction of dedicated rail lines in their own rights-of-way where trains could attain speeds of 120 mph and higher. The remaining construction money will be used to upgrade existing freight rail facilities owned by private railroad companies (the so-called Class One railroads) to allow “higher speed” passenger trains to run on track shared with freight carriers.

    Many of the proposed improvements will result in only small increases in average speed and in marginal reductions in travel time. For example, a $1.1 billion program of track improvements on Union Pacific track between Chicago and St. Louis is expected to increase average speeds only by 10 miles per hour (from 53 to 63 mph) and to cut the present four-and-a-half hour trip time by 48 minutes. A $460 million program of improvements in North Carolina will cut travel time between Raleigh, NC and Charlotte, NC by only 13 minutes according to critics in the state legislature.

    Shared-track operation has raised many questions in the minds of the intended host freight railroad companies. Railroad executives are concerned about safety and operational difficulties of running higher speed passenger trains on a common track with slower freight trains and they are determined to protect track capacity for future expansion of freight operations. Their first obligation, they assert, is to protect the interests of their customers and stockholders. This has led to protracted negotiations with state rail authorities in which the private railroads are fighting Administration demands for financial penalties in case passenger train operations fail to achieve pre-determined on-time performance standards. In some cases, negotiations have hit an impasse causing the Administration’s implementation timetable to fall behind. In other cases, freight railroad companies have reluctantly given in, not wishing to alienate the White House or fearing its retaliation.

    A serious blow to the presidential initiative was delivered by a group of three determined, fiscally conservative governors who rejected billions of dollars in grant awards because they were concerned that the proposed passenger rail services could require large public subsidies to keep the passenger trains operating. In the U.S. federal system, the governors and state legislatures have the final say concerning construction and operation of public transportation services within state boundaries. The refusal of the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida to participate in the White House HSR program thus took much wind out of the sails of the Administration initiative.

    Perhaps the most serious blow was delivered by Governor Rick Scott whose state of Florida was supposed to host one of the Administration’s showcase projects: an 86-mile true high-speed rail line, built in its own right-of-way in the median of an interstate highway between the cities of Tampa and Orlando. A score of international rail industry giants converged on Florida in the expectation of participating in a rich bonanza of contract awards and a chance to bid on a future rail extension from Orlando to Miami.

    But they came to be disappointed. A study conducted by the libertarian think tank, the Reason Foundation, convinced Governor Scott that the project could involve serious cost overruns and the risk of continuing operating subsidies. This caused the Governor to decline the federal grant, thus putting an effective end to the project. A last-minute effort by rail supporters to challenge the Governor’s decision was stopped in its tracks when the state supreme court upheld unanimously his right to veto the project.

    This left the Administration with just one true high-speed rail project: California’s proposed 520-mile high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles with Northern California’s San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento. The origin of this venture dates back to 2008 when voters approved a $9.95 billion bond measure as a down payment on the $43 billion system. Since then the project became mired in multiple controversies. One relates to a lack of a clear financial plan, another to what critics, including the state’s official “peer review” panel, claim to have been overly optimistic forecasts of construction costs, ridership and revenues. Then came a report raising questions about the escalating price tag for the project which now is estimated at $66 billion. This is occurring in a state that is staggering beneath a $26 billion deficit.

    In the face of fierce opposition that developed in the wealthy Bay Area communities lying in the proposed path of the rail line, the sponsoring agency, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, decided to start construction in the sparsely populated and economically depressed Central Valley, where land is relatively cheap, unemployment is high and community opposition was expected to be minimal. The decision was spurred by demands from the Obama Administration that its $3.6 billion grant result in a rail segment that has “operational independence.” The first 123-mile stretch, to be built between Fresno (pop. 909,000) and Bakersfield (pop. 339,000), was quickly derided by critics as a “railroad to nowhere.” Even in the low-density Central Valley, the expected disruption caused by the project to communities, farms and irrigation systems has stirred political opposition. Its future – as indeed the fate of the entire $43-66 billion (take your pick) venture – is shrouded at this point in uncertainty.

    The same can be said of President Obama’s high-speed rail initiative as a whole. Just as the proposed £32 billion high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham has been called an “expensive white elephant” and a “vanity project,” so the White House high-speed rail initiative is being criticized as a “boondoggle” and derided as a monument to President Obama’s ambition to leave behind a lasting legacy à la President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. Editorial opinion of major national newspapers has turned critical as have many influential columnists and other opinion leaders. A number of senior congressional leaders – including the third-ranking Republican in the House, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and the chairman of the influential House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, John Mica, have likewise openly criticized the initiative as wasteful and poorly executed.

    Even elected representatives from states that would potentially benefit from the government’s largesse have been skeptical about plans for high-speed rail in their states. “Blindly committing huge sums of money to this project will not make it worthwhile, and to do so at this time would be premature and fiscally irresponsible,” wrote one member of the congressional delegation from the state of New York. Members of the North Carolina legislature have introduced a bill to bar the state department of transportation from accepting $460 million in federal high-speed rail funds, pointing to the meager trip time savings resulting from the proposed rail projects and the potential need for operating subsidies.

    As this is written, Capitol Hill observers give the high-speed rail program only a small chance of obtaining additional congressional appropriations in Fiscal Year 2012 and beyond. A March 15 report in which the congressional House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure discusses its views of the forthcoming Fiscal Year 2012 transportation budget, the Obama Administration’s proposed $53 billion high-speed rail program is not even mentioned. Turning off the spigot of federal dollars next year would effectively starve out the Administration’s rail initiative.

    The President’s proposal came at a most inopportune time, when the nation is recovering from a serious recession and desperately trying to reduce the federal budget deficit and a mountain of debt. In time, however, the recession will end, the economy will start growing again, and the deficit will hopefully come under control. At that distant moment in time, perhaps toward the end of this decade, the nation might be able to resume its tradition of “bold endeavors” — launching ambitious programs of public infrastructure renewal.

    That could be an appropriate time to revive the idea of a high-speed rail network, at least in the densely populated Northeast Corridor where road and air traffic congestion will soon be reaching levels that threaten its continued growth and productivity. For now, however, prudence, good sense and the common welfare dictate that we, as a nation, learn to live within our means.

    Ken Orski has worked professionally in the field of transportation for over 30 years.