New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • What is a City For?

    The attached report is derived from a speech given last spring in Singapore at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. The notion here is to lay out a new, more humanistic urban future, not one shaped primarily by large developers, speculators and transient global workers. Singapore was a particularly difficult case to look at since it has no room to spread out, something we still have in much of the rest of the world. Yet the city has been very innovative in the development of open space, and its public housing agency, the Housing Development Board, has worked hard to accommodate the needs of families. I have been struck by how people in different countries want the same things: safety, space, privacy, convenience, and affordable housing. The speech is a call to reconsider our urban priorities and make the city responsive to its denizens.

    Download the full .pdf document.

    Introduction

    What is a city for? In this urban age, it’s a question of crucial importance but one not often asked. Long ago, Aristotle reminded us that the city was a place where people came to live, and they remained there in order to live better, “a city comes into being for the sake of life, but exists for the sake of living well” (Mawr, 2013).

    However, what does “living well” mean? Is it about working 24/7? Is it about consuming amenities and collecting the most unique experiences? Is the city a way to reduce the impact of human beings on the environment? Is it to position the polis — the city — as an engine in the world economy, even if at the expense of the quality of life, most particularly for families?

    I start at a different place. I view “living well” as addressing the needs of future generations, as sustainability advocates rightfully state. This starts with focusing on those areas where new generations are likely to be raised rather than the current almost exclusive fixation on the individual. We must not forget that without families, children, and the neighbourhoods that sustain them, it would be impossible to imagine how we, as a society, would “live well.” This is the essence of what my colleague, Ali Modarres and I call the ‘Human City’.

    Living well should not be about where one lives, but how one lives, and for whom. Families can thrive in many places, but these bearers of the next generation are not the primary focus of much of the urbanist community. I am referring here to urban neighbourhoods like in Singapore or in the great American cities, as well as the country’s vast suburbs. These are not necessarily the abodes of the glittering rich, or the transitory urban nomadic class, who dominate our urban dialogue, but a vast swath of aspiring middle- and working- class people. They are not necessarily the places that hipsters gravitate to, or lure people thinking of a second or third house.

    Download the full .pdf document.

    Published by the Lee Kuan Yew Centre For Innovative Cities

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving

    Barrels of ink and money have been devoted to predictions of where Americans will migrate, particularly younger ones. If you listen to big developer front groups such as the Urban Land Institute or pundits like Richard Florida, you would believe that smart companies that want to improve their chances of cadging skilled workers should head to such places as downtown Chicago, Manhattan and San Francisco, leaving their suburban office parks deserted like relics of a bygone era.

    A close look at recent migration data shows that a significant number of younger people do indeed prefer urban life and can endure, temporarily at least, the high housing costs that go with it. However, the data also show that as they age, Americans continue, in general, to shift to suburbs, and later smaller communities, looking to buy homes and start families. Last week we explored an expert analysis of these trends by demographer Wendell Cox that showed distinctly different migration patterns from 2007 to 2012 among different age groups. (See: “The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs“) In this article we will look at the metro areas that they went to.

    Our analysis is based on 15-year age cohorts of the working-age population: people who in 2007 were 15-29, 30-44 and 45-59. We looked at the changes in the population numbers of these cohorts five years later in 2012 in the 51 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas with a population over 1 million.

    Youth Magnet Cities

    Most attention tends to go to the youngest of these cohorts, which aged from 15-29 in 2007 to 20-34 in 2012. It includes students, the unmarried and childless — people in the earliest stages of their careers. This is historically the age group most likely to move from one region to another. Although the vast majority of this cohort live in suburbs or smaller towns, our research does show sizable increases in their numbers in many of the larger, expensive cities, particularly those with strong economies.

    From 2007 to 2012, tech-heavy cities generally saw the biggest growth in numbers in this age group. The San Francisco metro area placed first among the largest U.S. metro areas with a 20.7% increase in its population in this age group. Young people, it should be expected, tend to be less sensitive to ultra-high rents (particularly if they work for a successful company or their parents subsidize them). It was followed by Seattle (20.3% growth), Washington, D.C. (18.1%), and Austin, Texas (18.1%).

    But tech centers were not the only gainers. Some up-and-coming metro areas, notably Orlando, Las Vegas and New Orleans, also registered high levels of youth migration.

    In contrast many of the country’s large “hip and cool” cities did not fare nearly as well. Despite its endless self-promotion as a youth magnet, New York placed 19th (8.6% growth, though in absolute numbers in gained the most in this demographic, 323,000), while Los Angeles was 31st and Boston 22nd. Chicago, the much hyped (and hoped for) magnet for the young promoted by the Urban Land Institute in a recent Wall Street Journal article, places 41st – its population in this demographic actually dropped 0.6%. The lowest rungs are dominated by the traditional Rust Belt hard-luck cases: Cleveland (47th), Buffalo (48th), Rochester (49th), Detroit (50th) and last-place Riverside-San Bernardino, which lost 9.4% of its population in this age cohort from 2007 to 2012.

    View Full List Gallery at Forbes: The Cities Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving

    But Where Do They Go After 35?

    As we explained in the last article, perhaps the most important group to watch is the one that aged from 30-44 in 2007 to 35-49 in 2012. This is the group just ahead of the millennials, and the one most likely to provide hints of where the millennials will move as 20 million enter their 30s over the next decade: the dreaded (at least for some) age of marriage, settling down and, in most cases, starting families. This group has shown remarkably different proclivities than the younger cohort. For one thing, they are not going to San Francisco, which drops to 30th place in this cohort – the city lost a net 0.7% of the age group from 2007 to 2012. Other high-cost urban areas also did very poorly with this demographic, including Boston (40th, -2.3%), New York (45th, losing a net 3.9%, or 161,000 people), San Jose (46th), Los Angeles (47th) and Chicago (49th, -5.2%).

    Who wins this group may be critical, since these are people entering their prime who earn more than younger cohorts, particularly in this economy. Census Bureau data indicates that average household incomes are 28% higher where heads of households are 35-45 years old than those in the 25-34 cohort. The gap grows to 34% against householders who are 45 to 54. This group seems very sensitive to both job markets and housing prices. With the exception of the Washington, D.C., area (No. 6), whose government-driven economy continues to flourish, virtually all the top 10 cities enjoy strengthening private-sector economies and relatively low housing prices. At the top of the list is the New Orleans area, whose population in this age group rose 19.3% from 2007 to 2012. The Big Easy’s gains are related, at least in part, to the return of people who fled after Katrina, but it also reflects a newfound demographic vitality backed by substantial economic improvements. It is followed by Miami, San Antonio and Raleigh. Houston and Oklahoma City also did well.

    These are the cities that will appeal most to aging millennials, suggests generational chronicler Morley Winograd. Older millennials, he notes, tend to be very interested in home ownership, family and being good parents. The tough economic times they face, plus often crushing college debt, will force many of them to move not to “luxury cities” where they could never afford a home suitable for child-raising, but to places that are, as he puts it, “less expensive and certainly downscale from the places where they grew up.”

    Mature Adult Markets

    The migration patterns are similar, although not uniformly so, in the next cohort, aged between 50 and 64 in 2012. Mostly still working, and earning close to peak wages, this generation tended to move to less expensive cities as well. New Orleans also ranks first, with a 7.9% gain in this cohort from 2007 to 2012. Low housing costs are another factor in New Orleans’ rebound. You can say much the same for other Sun Belt metro areas, such as San Antonio (third in this demographic with a 7.3% gain), No. 4 Tampa-St. Petersburg (5.0%), No. 5 Austin and No. 7 Oklahoma City.

    Interestingly, the California rankings in this cohort are almost the mirror image of the youth brigade. Riverside-San Bernardino, last in the youth list, for example, ranked second, while Sacramento, 43rd on the youth list, seems to get more appealing as people age. In the 30something group, the area rises to 32nd, and boasts a strong ninth place ranking in growth in the 50-64 cohort (+2.0%).

    Editorialists at local papers, such as the Sacramento Bee, are obsessed with increasing density and luring hipsters. Yet the California capital region, while not drawing many younger people, does very well in luring adult migrants from the far more expensive, and denser, Bay Area and Los Angeles-Orange County. In contrast, in this cohort, San Francisco ranks 40th with a 4.4% decline in population, Los Angeles-Orange County 44th (-5.6%), and San Jose 49th (-7.3%).

    The Upshot For Investors And Companies

    A look at these three working-age cohorts suggests a far more complex, and possibly perplexing, challenge to both companies and regions. our demographic analysis suggests the movement of the youngest workers to “hip, cool”cities that is so celebrated by ULI and other professional urban boosters faces some serious time constraints, particularly as workers age.

    High-profile companies such as Google (itself located in very suburban Mountain View) seek outposts in places like downtown Chicago or New York, where youthful labor, often less expensive, is readily available. But most companies in technology — particularly those with an engineering focus as opposed to social media — depend heavily on older, skilled workers, most of whom live in suburbs. Much the same can be said of professional services, and finance and industrial companies.

    This may explain in part why, despite the claims made by urban boosters, office space construction and absorption is currently considerably stronger in suburbs than in the core cities. A recent Costar report says suburban San Jose, Sacramento, San Jose, Austin, Kansas City and Charlotte are enjoying particularly strong net office absorption. This trend, largely ignored in the media, may accelerate in the future.

    The key again is millennials as they enter their 30s. Like previous generations, many will end up either living in suburbs, or moving to less expensive cities as they get ready to buy homes and start families. The notion that “everyone” wants to move, and more importantly stay, in expensive core cities no doubt appeals to journalists based in places like Washington, D.C., San Francisco or Manhattan. But the actual reality is far more complex and more favorable to the continued dispersion of the workforce. Banking on the shifting tastes of 20somethings only works for so long; in the end, only a minority of workers remain Peter Pans, living their youthful urban dreams well into their 40s and 50s.

    View Full List Gallery at Forbes: The Cities Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Unemployed woman photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Greater New York Expands

    The term “Greater New York” was applied, unofficially, to the 1898 consolidation that produced the present city of New York, which brought together the present five boroughs (counties). The term “Greater” did not stick, at least for the city. When consolidated, much of the city of New York was agricultural. As time went on, the term "Greater" came to apply to virtually any large city and its environs, not just New York and implied a metropolitan area or an urban area extending beyond city limits. By 2010, Greater New York had expanded to somewhere between 19 million and 23 million residents, depending on the definition.

    Greater New York’s population growth has been impressive. Just after consolidation, in 1900, the city and its environs had 4.2 million residents, according to Census historian Tertius Chandler. Well before all of the city’s farmland had been developed, New York, including its environs, had become the world’s largest urban area by the 1920s, displacing London from its 100 year predominance. Yet, even when Tokyo displaced New York in the early 1960s, there was still farmland on Staten Island. 

    New York became even larger in two dimensions, as a result of geographic redefinitions arising from the 2010 census.

    The Expanding New York Metropolitan Area

    The New York metropolitan area grew by enough land area to add more than 700,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, even after the decentralization reported upon in the metropolitan area as defined in 2000. The expansion of the metropolitan area occurred because the employment interchange between the central counties and counties outside the metropolitan area in 2000 became sufficient to expand the boundaries by more than 1,000 square miles (2,500 square kilometers).

    Summarized, metropolitan areas are developed by identifying the largest urban area (area of continuous urban development with 50,000 or more population) and then designating the counties that contain this urban area as “central counties.” Additional (“outlying”) counties are included in a metropolitan area if 25 percent or more of their resident workers have jobs in the central counties, or if 25 percent or more of the employees in the outlying county live in the central counties (There are additional criteria, which can be reviewed at 2010 Office of Management and Budget metropolitan area standards). In addition, adjacent metropolitan areas can be merged into a combined statistical area at a lower level of employment interchange (see below).

    For example, one of the counties added to the New York metropolitan area in the 2010 redefinition was Dutchess (home of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library). A resident of Dutchess County who works across the county line in Putnam County (a central county) would count toward the 25 percent employment interchange with the central counties of the New York metropolitan area. Contrary to some perceptions, metropolitan areas do not denote an employment interchange between suburban areas and a central city, even as major an employment destination as the city of New York.

    The OMB concept of “central” counties is in contrast to the more popular view that would consider the central counties to be Manhattan (New York County) or the five boroughs of New York City. In fact, out of the New York metropolitan area’s 25 counties, all but three (Dutchess and Orange in New York and Pike in Pennsylvania) are central counties. Sufficient parts of the urban area are in the other 22 counties, which makes them central.

    The Expanding New York Combined Statistical Area

    OMB has a larger metropolitan concept called the "combined statistical area." The combined statistical area is composed of metropolitan and micropolitan areas that have a high degree of economic integration with the larger metropolitan area. Essentially, adjacent areas are merged into a combined statistical area if there is an employment interchange of 15 percent. This occurs where the sum of the following two factors is 15 percent or more: (1) The percentage of resident workers in the smaller area employed in the larger area (not just central counties) and (2) The percentage of workers employed in the smaller area who reside in the larger area.

    On this measure, New York became greater by more 1 million residents as a result of the changes in commuting patterns. The addition of Allentown (Pennsylvania – New Jersey) and the East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania metropolitan areas expanded the New York combined statistical area by another 2,700 square miles (7,000 square miles), bringing the population to 23.1 million. Altogether, the metropolitan area and combined area land area increases added up to 3,700 square miles (9,700 square kilometers). The 35 county New York combined statistical area is illustrated in the map (Figure 1).

    Organized Around the World’s Largest Urban Area (in Land Area)

    The New York combined statistical area is very large. It covers approximately 14,500 square miles (37,600 square kilometers). From north to south, it measures 235 miles (375 kilometers) from the Massachusetts border of Litchfield County, Connecticut to Beach Haven, in Ocean County, New Jersey. It is an even further east to west, at more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Montauk State Park in Suffolk County, New York to the western border of Carbon County in Pennsylvania (Note 2). Despite containing the largest urban area  in the world, at 4,500 square miles (11,600 square kilometers), more than 60 percent of the combined statistical area is rural (see Rural Character in America’s Metropolitan Areas).

    Dispersion of Jobs and Residences

    The dispersion characteristic of modern metropolitan regions is illustrated by the extent to which jobs have followed the population in the New York combined statistical area. In all “rings” outside the city of New York, there is near parity between resident workers and jobs. The greatest employment to worker parity (0.97) is in the metropolitan and micropolitan areas outside the New York metropolitan area (Allentown, PA-NY; Bridgeport, CT; East Stroudsburg, PA; New Haven, CT; Torrington, CT; and Trenton, NJ). There is 0.94 parity in the inner ring suburban counties, which include Nassau and Westchester in New York as well as Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Passaic and Union in New Jersey. The outer balance of the New York metropolitan area has slightly lower employment to worker parity, at 0.87 (Figure 2).

    The lowest employment to worker parity in the New York combined statistical area is in the four boroughs of New York City outside Manhattan, at 0.70. The greatest disparity is in Manhattan, where there are 2.80 jobs for every resident worker. Combining all of New York’s five boroughs yields a much more balanced 1.17 jobs per resident worker.

    Example: Commuting from Hunterdon County

    Hunterdon County, New Jersey provides an example of the dispersion of employment in the New York area. Hunterdon County is located at the edge of the New York metropolitan area. It is well served by the commuter rail services of New Jersey Transit. With a line that reaches Penn Station in New York City, approximately 55 miles (35 kilometers) away. Yet, the world’s second largest employment center (after Tokyo’s Yamanote Loop), Manhattan south of 59th Street, draws relatively few from Hunterdon County to fill its jobs.

    Among resident workers, 45 percent have jobs in Hunterdon County. Another 36 percent work in other outer counties of the combined statistical area. This leaves only 19 percent of workers who commute to the rest of the combined statistical area. The New Jersey inner suburban counties attract 16 percent of Hunterdon’s commuters and Manhattan employs just three percent of Hunterdon’s resident workers (Figure 3). Fewer than 0.5 percent of Hunterdon’s commuters work in the balance of the CSA, including the outer boroughs of New York, the other New York counties and Connecticut). The detailed area definitions are included in the Table.

    DISTRIBUTION OF COMMUTING FROM HUNTERDON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
    To Locations in the New York Combined Statistical Area (2006-2010)
    NY CSA Sector Commuting from Hunterdon County Areas Included
    Hunterdon County 45.0% Hunterdon County, NJ
    Outer Combined Statistical Area 35.6% Monmouth County, NJ
    Morris County, NJ
    Ocean County, NJ
    Pike County, PA
    Somerset County, NJ
    Sussex County, NJ
    Allentown metropolitan area, PA-NJ
    East Stroundsburg metropolitan area, PA
    Trenton metropolitan area, NJ
    Inner Ring (New Jersey only) 16.1% Bergen County, NJ
    Essex County, NJ
    Hudson County, NJ
    Middlesex County, NJ
    Passaic County, NJ
    Union County, NJ
    Manhattan 2.8% New York County, NY
    Elsewhere 0.4% Bronx
    Brooklyn
    Queens
    Staten Island
    Dutchess County, NY
    Nassua County, NY
    Orange County, NY
    Putnam County, NY
    Rockland County, NY
    Suffolk County, NY
    Westchester County, NY
    Bridgeport metropolitan area, CT
    Kingston metropolitan area, NY
    New Haven metropolitan area, CT
    Torrington metropolitan area, CT

     

    From Commuter Belts and Concentricity to Dispersion

    Metropolitan areas are labor markets, as OMB reminds in its 2010 metropolitan standards, which refer to metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas, and combined statistical areas as geographic entities associated with at least one core plus “adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties. ”

    Yet metropolitan areas have changed a great deal. Through the middle of the last century, metropolitan areas were perceived as monocentric with core cities and a surrounding “commuter belt” from which the city drew workers to fill its jobs. However, metropolitan areas have become more polycentric, as Joel Garreau showed in his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In more recent years, metropolitan areas have become even more dispersed, with most employment located in areas that are hardly centers at all. Of course, some people still commute to downtown and edge cities. Others work even further away, but most find their employment much closer to home. That is the story of New York and, which has just become greater, and other metropolitan areas as well.

    ——

    Note 1: OMB revised its metropolitan terms in 2000. The term “core based statistical area” (CBSA) is used to denote metropolitan areas (organized about urban areas of 50,000 population or more) and micropolitan areas (organized around urban areas of 10,000 to 50,000 population). The former “consolidated metropolitan statistical area,” was replaced by the combined statistical area, which is a combination of core based statistical areas. OMB also notes that the term “urban area” includes “urbanized areas” (50,000 population or more) and “urban clusters (10,000 to 50,000 population).

    Note 2: Part of the reason for this large geographic expanse is the use of counties as building blocks of core based statistical areas. If the smaller geographic units were used (such as census blocks, as in the delineation of urban areas), the geographies would be smaller, though populations would be similar.

    ——-

    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.

    Photograph: 59th Street, Manhattan (by author).

  • Suburban Corporate Wasteland

    I was a guest on the show “Where We Live” on WNPR radio in Connecticut this week. The theme was “Suburban Corporate Wasteland” – the increasing numbers of white elephant office campuses in suburbs. Apparently Connecticut has several of these and some buildings are actually being demolished because there’s no demand for them.

    The entire program is worth a listen, particularly if you are someone trying to figure out how to redevelop one of these things. Several local officials join to talk about efforts to do that in their towns. If you want to just hear Yours Truly, I’m on for about 10 minutes starting at 38:30. Follow this link to listen to the show.

    There are a number of challenges converging to put pressure on suburban office campuses in some places:

    1. Decentralization has run its course. There was a massive wave of suburbanization in the post-War era that has finished. That’s not to say things are going to be re-centralizing. Rather, the massive move from the core to the periphery is largely complete. The development pattern of the United States will continue to be decentralized, but it will largely be driven by organic growth rather than relocations. I think something similar happened with driving. The factors driving VMT growth above the rate of inflation – more cars per household, women entering the workforce, and such – are pretty much played out in terms of driving huge additional travel miles.

    2. Corporate M&A and industry restructurings have dampened demand in some areas. In Connecticut specifically, a number of the complexes in question were from pharmaceutical and insurance companies. There has been a lot of consolidation in the pharma industry, for example. And with a challenging environment for new drug development, pharma companies are now really focusing on cost cutting and reducing overhead, not building massive new office parks.

    3. The nature of work is changing. There was a popular trend for a while towards massive suburban office HQ campuses. For example, Sears moved from its namesake tower in downtown Chicago to a big campus in Hoffman Estates. These campuses had tons of free parking and lots of onsite amenities like gyms, dry cleaners, cafeterias, day care, etc. They also offered an idyllic, almost pastoral setting in some respects. Workers could spend their days cocooned inside the campus. Today’s firms are less vertical integrated and more networked. They are heavily globalized and collaborative. They’ve also figured out that people who don’t get out and engage with the world around them end up cut off from information flows, leaving them a step behind. Workers are also demanding more flexible working conditions. And of course there’s cost cutting pressures. This leads to things like hoteling, co-working, and telecommuting – no massive suburban office park needed.

    4. In select industries and cities, there has been a resurgence in the fortunes of downtown offices. This has particularly been the case in high tech. Google’s second largest office is in Manhattan. Salesforce.com’s Exact Target unit employs a thousand people in downtown Indianapolis. Amazon is building a large urban campus is Seattle. Many companies in Chicago have relocated downtown from the suburbs. I’ve probably seen more announcement of these types of moves in Chicago than anywhere else. I’d caution that in most downtowns the trends in private sector employment have remained negative. But in select locales and industries, things have been looking up. In industries where there’s a need for proximity to high end business services or where there are unique clustering or labor force issues, downtowns will retain an appeal.

    Put it all together and it’s clear office space demand is weaker than it used to be. Joel Kotkin recently surveyed the same trends and suggests that the US may have hit “peak office”. The idea is not that office space will actually decline, rather that it won’t be growing at the same rates as in the past. This will affect both urban and suburban markets.

    It’s easy to see how these trends combined to pound a place like Connecticut. It’s next to NYC, the premier central business district zone in America. But it is also far enough to make commuting to most of it a pain (even the express train to Stamford takes about an hour). And it’s an expensive and business hostile environment to boot. Large scale employers who want a suburban footprint can find many better places.

    We are in fact seeing this happen in finance. Goldman Sachs is booming in Manhattan, but has what I believe is their second largest US office in Salt Lake City, presumably housing back office functions. Deutsche Bank is building a big facility in Jacksonville. JP Morgan Chase has a huge presence in Columbus, Ohio, where its former Bank One unit was based. A place like Connecticut is the odd man out. Suburban Chicago is probably set to be another loser. But in smaller cities the suburbs will do much better.

    Also, don’t be too quick to write the eulogy for the suburban office campus, even in the tech industry. A recent article in Der Spiegel featured Silicon Valley’s new “monuments to digital domination” – including Apple’s $5 billion Norman Foster designed campus, Frank Gehry’s campus for Facebook, and others for Google, NVidia, and Samsung. In Houston, Exxon Mobil is putting the finishing touches on a three million square foot campus that will employ 10,000 people. But unlike Google moving 2,500 people to downtown Chicago, projects like that don’t make national headlines.

    I don’t think there will be a massive back to downtown wave, and the suburban office park is not dead. But there are headwinds facing suburban office space, particularly in expensive, mature markets.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

  • Downsizing the American Dream

    At this time of year, with Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas, there’s a tendency to look back at our lives and those of our families. We should be thankful for the blessings of living in an America where small dreams could be fulfilled.

    For many, this promise has been epitomized by owning a house, with a touch of green in the back and a taste of private paradise. Those most grateful for this opportunity were my mother’s generation, which grew up in the Great Depression. In her life, she was able to make the move from the tenements of Brownsville, Brooklyn, first to the garden apartments of Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, and, eventually, to a mass-produced suburban house on Long Island.

    This basic American dream of upward mobility may not, according to the pundit class, planners and many developers, be readily available for my children. Indeed, in the years since the 2007 housing bust, there’s been a steady stream of commentary suggesting a future that resembles the past, where most people were renters and, in urban centers, lived chock-a-block in crowded apartment buildings.

    The advocates for a return to this not-so-great past are a diverse lot, spanning the ideological spectrum from the free-market Right to the green, regulation-loving Left. Many on the right, such as economist Tyler Cowen, suggest that the era of the “average” American is now past, and that most of us will have to dial down our expectations about how we live, particularly in costly places such as California. The blessed 15 percent might aspire to live high on the hog, and even in luxury, but for the rest of us it’s eating rice and beans, and living small. Goodbye, Levittown, and back to Brownsville.

    Some in the financial community also salivate at the possibilities contained in downgrading the American dream. The very people who rode the mortgage boom and left millions of homeowners to deal with the consequences, now hail the ushering of what Morgan Stanley’s Oliver Chang has dubbed a “rentership society.” Rather than purchasing a home, the middle class is now being downgraded into either renting a foreclosed home snatched by the Wall Street sharpies or being stuffed into small, multifamily housing.

    In either case, the financial hegemons win, since they, essentially, get to have someone else to pay their mortgages. As for society, it’s a losing proposition. Rather than the yeoman with his own place, and the social commitment that comes with it, we now have the prospect of a vast lower class permanently forced to tip its hat to – and empty its wallet for – its economic betters. This is the fate ardently hoped for by many urbanists, who see a generation of permanent renters as part of their dream of a denser America.

    One would expect that this diminution of the middle class would offend liberals, who historically supported both the expansion of ownership and the creation of a better life for the middle class. But today’s liberals – or progressives – share Wall Street’s enthusiasm, albeit for different reasons, for renting and ever-greater densities.

    This reverses the policies of the New Deal and its successors. Half of postwar suburban housing, notes historian Alan Wolfe, depended on some form of federal financing. In fact, the progressive position increasingly is worse than that of free-market conservatives and their Wall Street allies. The Right sees profit in densification and renting, but would likely support other options if they seemed advantageous. In contrast, the progressive Left increasingly sees the single-family home and ownership – what made middle-class people like my mother lifelong Democrats – as outdated, even destructive.

    This can be seen in the writings of progressive thinkers like Richard Florida, who, in the midst of the mortgage crisis, proclaimed homeownership as “overrated” and urged Americans to give up the dream of owning their own digs, particularly in the much-disrespected suburbs. In Florida’s “creative age,” the proper aspiration is to live in a dense, expensive city, such as San Francisco or Manhattan, where only a fraction of the population can conceivably own their residence.

    To accommodate this vision, we inevitably get back to a world that looks similar to that of the tenement era. Already, in part due to regulatory policies making new construction prohibitively expensive, there is severe overcrowding in New York, the Bay Area and throughout Southern California. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their incomes on housing, along with 35 percent in the San Francisco metro area and 31 percent in the New York City area. The national rate is 24 percent, itself far from tolerable.

    What we are witnessing today is oddly reminiscent of the Brooklyn of my mother’s childhood. She and her four siblings generally lived in three or fewer rooms, sharing her bed with her sisters until she got married. Yet, over time my mother’s generation did well, and all my relatives were able to ascend into the middle class, or even better, by the late 1950s. Most bought homes on Long Island, although one purchased a co-op in Brooklyn.

    Today, our cognitive betters embrace a more déclassé vision, with fewer families, more singles and less focus on upward mobility. Indeed, some, particularly among the environmental community, actually embrace downward mobility. Millennials, by not buying homes and cars, and perhaps also not growing into family life, are portrayed by the green magazine Grist as “a hero generation” – one that will march willingly, even enthusiastically, to a downscale future.

    How will we live in this brave new America? It won’t be exactly a return to the tenements that housed Depression era families, but will involve much smaller, less-communal arrangements. To serve the hip and cool youthful urban crowd, planners embrace microunits of 200-300 square feet. These are either being built or planned in such cities as Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Portland. Soon, they will become something every second-tier wannabe burg will want to duplicate in their often madcap drive to ape cool cities’ hip urbanism.

    Such units may make developers’ mouths water with anticipation of ever more profitable cramming. But in the process, they will be further encouraging the shift away from housing for married couples, not to mention, children. Families do not make up the prime market for dense housing; married couples with children constitute barely 10 percent of apartment residents, less than half the percentage for the overall population.

    And what if you can’t afford a trendy “pad” in a hip downtown? The urban advocates embrace another dismal back-to-the-future solution: the boarding house. It’s time, argues the Atlantic recently, to jettison our “middle-class norms of decency” governing housing and bring back the boarding house of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

    All said, this is a dismal future being dialed up for the next generation, largely by boomer ideologues and their developer allies. It’s not clear, fortunately, that the millennials will willingly go along. This gives us hope that, when families celebrate the holidays decades from now, they still will have as much to be thankful for as did my mother’s generation, or for that matter, my own.

    This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • Suburban End Games

    Are America’s suburbs facing end times? That’s what a host of recent authors would have you believe.  The declaration comes in variety of guises, from Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion (2012), to “the peaking of sprawl” pronounced by urban planner  Christopher Leinberger to, most recently, to Leigh Gallagher’s The End of Suburbs(2013).  Suburbs and sprawl have joined the ranks of “history” and “nature” as fixtures of our lives that teeter on the verge of demise—if we’re to lend credence to this latest clamor from journalists, planners, and academics. 

    When you declare the “ending” of a place where you acknowledge over half of Americans now live, just what does that mean?  One sure bet is that their demise won’t prove nearly as definitive or thorough-going as advertised. Looking around the Long Island neighborhood and town where I’ve lived for the last twenty years, I don’t see them vanishing any time soon. Moreover, from my own perspective as a long-time resident as well as historian of such places, the particulars grounding this narrative point to something very different: the rise of conditions, as yet only starting to be realized, for a new suburban progressivism. 

    This media wave of talk about suburbs or sprawl “ending” mirrors an earlier one in the decades after World War II, which fleshed out a rise of “mass suburbia.” That earlier wave turned out to be well-nigh mythological in its selectivity, its choice of emphases and its silences.  Embellishing the idea of suburbs as more than just a place, as an entire, distinctive way of life, it built upon age-old notions of suburbs as simply the edges of cities, also a change commencing over two hundred years ago among cities in the industrial West.  Cities began to grow less through the spread of a discrete and distinct rim than via a widening transition zone between city and countryside.  But only after World War II did the idea of “suburbia” congeal into a solid stereotype: those subdivisions of lawns and single family homes occupied by a white middle class.    

    Among the earliest discoverers was 1950s Fortune correspondent William Whyte, who found in the suburbs an entire generation of upwardly mobile, affluent, younger families, in search of the American dream.  Journalists concentrated mainly on places that fit this story line, the very largest and newest housing developments around the very largest of cities.   Early coverage celebrating these suburbs classless-ness was quickly followed by more critical accounts.  Commentators such as Whyte and Frederick L. Allen distinguished this “new suburbia” from an older one they preferred, quieter and smaller and more securely elitist.  Sociologists taking a more even-handed approach, such as Herbert Gans and Bennett Berger, also questioned the “myth” of these places’ classlessness, by highlighting more working class homeowners and communities.  The great majority of those moving into such places had also been white, and as the racial imagery of a white “donut” surrounding a black core consolidated with the urban and busing crises over the 1960s and 70s, an ambivalent imagery of postwar “suburbia” stuck.  At once affluent, middle class, and white, but also vaguely declassé, suburbs were self-satisfied and reactionary places that deserved the progressive city-dweller’s disdain. 

    As current-day Fortune correspondent and professed “city girl” Leigh Gallagher, makes clear, such attitudes are alive and well, for instance, at cocktail parties where those hearing her book title offer “high fives and hurrahs.”   Today’s literature on suburbia’s end has the distinct ring of wish fulfillment for a long tradition of city-bound suburb-bashers, of a piece with their eagerness finally to declare downtowns “resurgent [as] centers of wealth and culture.”  But just as most characterizations of “suburbia” in the 1950s ignored the pockets of poverty and minority enclaves in its midst, so even the most balanced of today’s expositors of suburbs’ end can be quite selective.  For instance, even though the Charlotte metro area’s 42% growth between 2000 and 2013 came through a momentous build-out of subdivisions and malls, even though the city itself has eagerly annexed nearly 25% more suburban land since 2000, Ehrenhalt dwells solely upon its reconstruction of the downtown.  We hear nothing about how, even with its expanded limits, this city still contains only 31% of the population of this urban region.

    While these authors do leaven their arguments with a lot more demographic yeast than their 1950s predecessors, they still leap to generalizations that, in an era of soaring income inequality, bear more scrutiny than they get.   When Gallagher refers to how “we rebuild once or twice a century in this country,” just who is this “we” she means? It is not hard to draw some unsettling answers. As an editor at Fortune, as avowed resident of Greenwich Village, whose one-bedroom rentals are the most expensive in Manhattan, she seems heavily identified with affluent, especially the movers and shakers in the development community.  Whether singling out recent failures of building projects in outer suburbs or exurbs, concentrating on suburban malls that have been abandoned or are being retrofitted, or homing in on downtown reconstructions, “end of suburbs” authors often tacitly adopt a financial standard for future promise: where the most real-estate money is to be made. 

    By the same token, this literature of suburbia’s end offers astonishing little reflection on the implications of its favored trends for the ways in which our cities divide the wealthy from the rest.   Today’s declarations of an “end of suburbs” come just as rents in places like Manhattan are hiking out of reach of the merely middle class, generating anxieties tilled, most recently, by Bill de Blasio’s successful campaign for mayor. Yet when Gallagher sweepingly contends that “millenials hate the suburbs,” she doesn’t even ask how many young people are actually going to be able to afford living in cities. And at this point, as well, her definition of “suburbs” itself suddenly narrows: just the subdivisions and malls, not the new “planned community” or the “urbanized small town or suburb” that may lie nearby.

    The trend of urbanizing suburbs offers the most compelling angle of this reputed “end” for us actual suburbanites. For a good while in suburbs like my own Long Island, proponents of smart growth and the New Urbanism have pushed for multiuse, for bringing apartments into old town centers, for recreating walkability there.  Having watched and participated in the political rows stirred by such projects, like Avalon Bay’s plan to build an apartment complex near the Huntington train station, I can say this: those people most likely to see these projects as an “end of suburbs” are their opponents.  For the rest of us, their supporters, they look more like diversifying: taking us away from the old “suburbia” stereotypes, but not by leaving subdivisions behind.  All those stores, restaurants, and events available in walkable downtowns have the virtue of enhancing the suburban experience for those of us who remain homeowners, even as they furnish living quarters for renters who might otherwise leave: twenty-somethings, singles, and the elderly.  

    That suburbs are also becoming societal repositories for newly arriving immigrants, blacks and other minorities, as well as poverty, does undermine that old “suburbia” imagery, but in ways that stir hopes for suburbs’ future. Largely because of these trends, indexes measuring metropolitan segregation have been gradually declining—and that’s a good thing.  Of course, suburbanites’ reputation for racial animosity is still plenty justified:  just look at Atlanta’s Gwinnett County as depicted by Ehrenhalt, or the hostility found on Long Island to undocumented immigrants. But there’s an as yet little-told story of how suburban opposition to these attitudes has also emerged. When a homeless camp of mostly immigrant workers was discovered in Huntington Station in the early 2000s, a remarkable coalition of social service agencies and churches cobbled together a program for housing and feeding them over the winter that involved over a thousand volunteers. This outpouring crossed lines of class and race, drawing many from the suburban church I attend, which itself is pretty evenly split between blacks and whites.  I don’t think my fellow travelers there, or in pro-immigrant groups like Long Island Wins, would surmise as Gallagher does that ours is some “suburban experiment” that has “failed.”

    “The end of suburbs”—it’s a dramatic claim, and as mythological as that old “myth of suburbia,” especially for those of us living in the places that are supposed to be ending. I prefer another narrative, with a more positive spin. The demographic and other changes underway in our suburbs may well wind up breaking the old stereotype in another way, by building the basis for a newly inclusive and forward-looking politics in the suburbs. 

    Christopher Sellers is a Professor of History at Stony Brook University and author of Crabgrass Crucible; Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (2012), He is now writing on, among other things, the historical relationship between suburbanizing, race, and environmentalism around Atlanta. 

    Home illustration by Bigstock.

  • Rural Character in America’s Metropolitan Areas

    Looking at a map of the metropolitan areas of the United States, it would be easy to get the impression that “urban sprawl” had consumed most of the nation. Indeed, as Figure 1 indicates, one could drive from Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco to the Arizona-New Mexico border without ever leaving a metropolitan area. This more than 1,000 mile trip (1,600 kilometers) would take nearly 15 hours, according to Google Maps. New Jersey is shown as all-metropolitan, as well as Delaware. But looks can be deceiving. According to US Census data from 2010, the land area of New Jersey is 60 percent rural, while Delaware is 80 percent rural.

    Given the multiple terms used to describe urban and rural geography, confusion is not uncommon. It begins with the fundamental matter of terms. For starters, “metropolitan” is not the same thing as “urban,” and “rural” does not mean non-metropolitan. In fact, most rural residents in the United States live in metropolitan areas. 

    Urban Areas

    All land within the United States is either urban or rural, without respect to whether it is in metropolitan areas. The Census Bureau defines urban areas using “census blocks” to which minimum population density criteria are applied. Census blocks are very small neighborhood units, which are far smaller than virtually all municipalities. This approach produces an urban area defined by land use characteristics, without regard to jurisdictional (city or county) boundaries. Urban areas contain no rural land.

    In 2010, 19.3 percent of the US population was in rural areas, which covered 97.0 percent of all land. The other 80.7 percent of the population was urban and lived in only 3.0 percent of land area (Figure 2)

    Rural Population of Metropolitan Areas

    Metropolitan areas always have large areas of rural land. This is due to the very nature of metropolitan areas, which are designated by the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Metropolitan areas are labor markets, defined by commuting patterns. People commute to jobs in metropolitan areas both from within the core urban area (such as the New York urban area) and from areas outside the core urban area that remain in the metropolitan area, such as the non-urban parts of the New York metropolitan area (examples are much of Orange and Dutchess counties in New York as well as Sussex and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey).  

    Each metropolitan area is organized around “central counties” that include a core urban area (area of continuous urban development). The core urban area must have at least 50,000 residents for an area to qualify as metropolitan. “Outlying counties” are also included in metropolitan areas if 25 percent or more of their resident workers commute to the central counties. This central counties and core urban area approach reflects the evolution of US metropolitan areas to the more dispersed employment and residential patters that have materially reduced the influence of the historical core municipalities (sometimes called “central cities”). On average, only about 10 percent of employment in the 50 largest urban areas was in the formerly more dominant downtowns in 2000 (central business districts).

    The land area in America’s metropolitan areas is much more rural than urban. More than 90 percent of metropolitan area land is rural. In 2010, 28 percent of the nation’s land area was metropolitan, but the urbanization in metropolitan areas accounted for only 2.6 percent of US land area. In 2010, 32 million of the nation’s 60 million rural residents lived in metropolitan areas (Figure 3).

    Major Metropolitan Areas

    On average, 81 percent of the land area in major metropolitan areas (0ver 1,000,000 population) is rural, not urban (Figure 4). There is a wide variation among the major metropolitan areas. All but one of the major metropolitan areas has more rural land than urban land. Boston has smallest rural land area share at 43 percent. The New York metropolitan area clocks in at 52 percent rural, Philadelphia at 54 percent rural and Tampa-St. Petersburg stands at 55 percent rural. At the other end of the scale, the Salt Lake City metropolitan area is 96 percent rural, followed by Riverside-San Bernardino at 95 percent, Las Vegas 94 percent and Denver 92 percent (Table).

    Table
    Rural Population & Land Area in Metropolitan Areas
      2010 Rural Population 2010 Rural Land Area # of Counties
    Atlanta, GA 11.1% 67.4% 29
    Austin, TX 12.8% 85.6% 5
    Baltimore, MD 9.0% 64.8% 7
    Birmingham, AL 28.8% 88.7% 7
    Boston, MA-NH 5.5% 42.6% 7
    Buffalo, NY 11.9% 73.0% 2
    Charlotte, NC-SC 18.5% 75.8% 10
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI 2.6% 61.9% 14
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 14.1% 78.2% 15
    Cleveland, OH 8.1% 58.7% 5
    Columbus, OH 16.5% 86.9% 10
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 7.4% 76.1% 13
    Denver, CO 5.7% 91.8% 10
    Detroit,  MI 6.8% 60.0% 6
    Grand Rapids, MI 25.0% 85.4% 4
    Hartford, CT 12.2% 56.8% 3
    Houston, TX 6.5% 75.5% 9
    Indianapolis. IN 12.4% 81.2% 11
    Jacksonville, FL 11.2% 80.1% 5
    Kansas City, MO-KS 12.3% 88.9% 14
    Las Vegas, NV 1.3% 94.4% 1
    Los Angeles, CA 0.5% 59.8% 2
    Louisville, KY-IN 17.1% 85.8% 12
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 15.3% 89.0% 9
    Miami, FL 0.4% 75.2% 3
    Milwaukee,WI 6.6% 59.2% 4
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 12.4% 84.4% 16
    Nashville, TN 24.1% 87.6% 14
    New Orleans. LA 7.2% 87.3% 8
    New York, NY-NJ-PA 2.7% 52.4% 25
    Oklahoma City, OK 18.3% 91.0% 7
    Orlando, FL 5.4% 74.4% 4
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 5.1% 53.7% 11
    Phoenix, AZ 4.1% 91.0% 2
    Pittsburgh, PA 17.8% 80.1% 7
    Portland, OR-WA 9.9% 91.1% 7
    Providence, RI-MA 9.5% 56.9% 6
    Raleigh, NC 17.2% 73.1% 3
    Richmond, VA 20.3% 89.1% 17
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 4.7% 95.1% 2
    Rochester, NY 21.9% 87.8% 6
    Sacramento, CA 7.2% 88.3% 4
    St. Louis,, MO-IL 13.2% 86.0% 15
    Salt Lake City, UT 1.8% 96.1% 2
    San Antonio, TX 13.8% 91.0% 8
    San Diego, CA 3.3% 81.9% 1
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA 1.0% 65.8% 5
    San Jose, CA 1.8% 87.2% 2
    Seattle, WA 5.6% 81.0% 3
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 4.4% 55.5% 4
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 8.7% 78.2% 16
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 7.8% 73.1% 24
    Major Metropolitan Areas 7.1% 81.0% 436

     

    The most important reason for the difference in rural area size within the major metropolitan areas is the differing sizes of counties. In the East, Midwest and South, counties tend to be much smaller than in the West. For example, the New York metropolitan area has nearly 20 million residents, distributed among 25 counties. In contrast, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with 13 million residents, is composed of only two counties.

    The metropolitan areas with the most rural area are largely desert and mountains (see top illustration of the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area). Large counties in Utah extend the Salt Lake City metropolitan area 100 miles westward to the Nevada border. Riverside-San Bernardino’s two large counties include a land area nearly equal to that of Ireland, stretching more than 200 miles to the Nevada and Arizona borders and including part of Death Valley National Park. In both cases (and a number of others), large counties require metropolitan areas to be far larger than any reasonable commuting shed. This size variation renders population density figures for metropolitan areas nonsensical (building blocks would need to be small, such as the census blocks used by the Census Bureau to define urban areas).

    The major metropolitan areas of over 1 million contain nearly 12 million rural residents, or 20 percent of the nation’s rural population. While this is a large number, their urban populations are much greater, at 158 million, or 63 percent of the US urban population of nearly 250 million. These urban residents live in a smaller proportional area, constituting of only one-half of all urban land area (and 1.5 percent of all US land area).

    Other Metropolitan Areas

    The rural portions of metropolitan areas with fewer than 1,000,000 residents cover 94 percent of their land areas. These areas include approximately 20 million residents, or 34 percent of the nation’s rural population. Only six percent of the land area in these metropolitan areas is urban.

    Outside Metropolitan Areas

    This leaves a minority of 27.5 million rural residents living outside the metropolitan areas.

    Micropolitan areas are defined by OMB as labor markets with core urban areas between 10,000 and 50,000, and are not considered metropolitan. Approximately 98.5 percent of the land in micropolitan areas is rural. The rural population of micropolitan areas is 13 million.

    The other 14 million rural residents live outside the micropolitan areas. However, there are still 4.7 million urban residents outside both metropolitan and micropolitan areas, with each of these urban areas having fewer than 10,000 residents.

    Rural Land in Metropolitan America

    Even where America is most urban, a strong rural element remains. This is illustrated in the Northeast Corridor, the “megalopolis” defined by Jean Gottman more than a half-century ago. The urbanization he identified is still short of continuous along the corridor. Rural areas interfere with urbanization in parts of Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Nearly 60 percent of the land area in these adjacent metropolitan areas remains rural (Figure 5). The numbers are even smaller elsewhere. Between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, 80 percent of the corridor is rural. Between Seattle and Portland nearly 90 percent of the corridor is rural. These are among the busiest corridors in the United States, and many more are far more rural. Up close and in context, the spatial urbanization of America, including its metropolitan areas is not pervasive.

    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.

    Illustration: San Bernardino Mountains and Mojave Desert in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area (by author)

  • The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs

    One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit.

    Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) show little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” Manhattanite Leigh Gallagher, author of the dismally predictable book The Death of Suburbs, asserts with certitude that “millennials hate the suburbs” and prefer more eco-friendly, singleton-dominated urban environments.

    Green activists hope this parting of the ways between the new generation and the preferences of their parents will prove permanent. The environmental magazine Grist even envisions “a hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents.

    Less idealistic types, notably on Wall Street, see profit in this new order, hoping to capitalize on what Morgan Stanley’s Oliver Chang dubs a “rentership society”; in this scenario millennials remain serfs paying rent permanently to the investor class.

    But a close look at migration data reveals that the reality is much more complex. The millennial “flight” from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages.

    We can tell this because we can follow the first group of millennials who are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs.

    We asked demographer Wendell Cox to crunch the latest demographic data for us to determine where people have moved by age cohort from 2007 to 2012. The data reveals the obvious: People do not maintain the same preferences all their lives; their needs change as they get older, have children and, finally, retire. Each stage leads them toward somewhat different geographies.

    As it turns out, the vast majority of young people in their late teens and 20s – over 80 percent — live outside core cities. Roughly 38 percent of young Americans live in suburban areas, while another 45 percent live outside the largest metropolitan areas, mostly in smaller metro areas.

    To be sure, core urban areas do attract the young more than other age cohorts. Among people aged 15 to 29 in 2007, there is a clear movement to the core cities five years later in 2012 — roughly a net gain of 2 million. However, that’s only 3 percent of the more than 60 million people in this age group.

    Surprisingly, most of this movement to the urban centers comes not from suburbs, but from outside the largest metro areas, reflecting the movement of people from areas with perhaps lower economic opportunity. It also is likely reflective of the intrinsic appeal of metro areas to younger, single people, as well as the presence of many major universities and colleges in older “legacy cities.”

    Here’s how the geography of aging works. People are most likely to move to the core cities in their early 20s, but this migration peters out as people enter the end of that often tumultuous decade. By their 30s, they move increasingly to the suburbs, as well as outside the major metropolitan areas (the 52 metropolitan areas with a population over 1,000,000 in 2010).

    This pattern breaks with the conventional wisdom but dovetails with research conducted by Frank Magid and Associates that finds that millennials prefer suburbs long-term as “their ideal place to live” by a margin of 2 to 1 over cities.

    Based on past patterns, by the time people enter their 50s, the entire gain to the core cities that builds up in the 20s all but dissipates, as more people move to suburbs and to outside the largest metropolitan areas.

    Similarly millennials have not, as some hope, given up on home ownership, something closely associated with suburbia. Magid’s surveys of older, married millennials found their desire to own a home was actually stronger than in previous generations. Another survey by the online banking company TD Bank found that 84 percent of renters aged 18 to 34 intend to purchase a home in the future, while another, by Better Homes and Gardens, found that three in four identified homeownership as “a key indicator of success.”

    These attitudes, particularly among the older edge of the millennials, is particularly critical, as these are the first of this largest generation in American history to enter full adulthood. Indeed the peak of the millennial generation is already in their mid-20s, and by the end of the decade, the vast majority of the roughly 42 million millennials will be entering their 30s, with some approaching their 40s. This group of mature millennials (adding in the 20-24 cohort) is expected to expand by 22.5 million in the next 10 years. They are likely to prove wrong the argument that, with boomers entering their sunset years, there will be no one to buy their houses.

    In contrast, the next wave of young people — now under 10 — will be about 1.7 million less numerous. These “plurals” are likely to stay in the suburbs for the next five to 10 years, and some wil start moving into core cities as they enter their 20s, but in decidedly fewer numbers.

    Perhaps the most salient fact driving these migratory patterns is family formation. Our analyses of cities around the world have shown definitively that people with children tend to avoid urban cores, even in the most gentrified environments. Manhattan, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle tend to have the lowest numbers of children per capita.

    These trends can be seen on a nationwide basis. Among the cohort of children under 10 in 2007, the number who lived in core cities as of 2012, when they were 5 to 14 years of age, was down by 550,000. Families are the group most likely to move either to the suburbs or smaller towns. This movement, plus the high degree of childlessness in large urban cores, suggests that many of those who are leaving the core cities in their early 30s are parents with young children.

    And what about the older cohorts, notably the baby boomers, who, along with millennials, dominate the nation’s demography? The shift out to the suburbs and to outside the larger metropolitan areas does not stop with the child-bearing years but gains more traction with age, peaking in the early 60s. At this stage, only half as many seniors, on a percentage basis, live in core cities compared to people in their early 20s. Overall, the core cities are home to approximately 15% of the U.S. population, but that falls to under 12% of the population in the 64- to 79-year-old demographic.

    This is not to say that most older people leave the suburbs. Almost 40 percent of seniors remain in suburban areas. Nevertheless there is some movement among the senior population, and among aging boomers, not “back to the city” as common alleged but actually towards the non-metropolitan areas, where costs are often lower and the pace of life slower. Among those now in their 60s, nearly half live outside the major metropolitan areas, four times as many as live in the urban core.

    What do these finding suggest about the geography of aging? First, it makes clear that many people’s preferences change as they age: In aggregate there is a slight tendency toward core cities in the late teens and 20s, and then, to suburbs and outside the major metropolitan after that. Second, it seems clear that older Americans leave core cities all the way to their 70s rather than cluster there, as is often maintained in the media.

    The demographic picture that emerges is complex, but suggests the best way for metropolitan areas to “lure” people — and companies — may be to encourage a wide range of housing lifestyles, ranging from inner city to suburban and exurban/rural. The urban pundit class may never change their preferences or abandon their claims of a secular “back to the city” trend, but in aggregate, people, it appears, do tend to change preferences as they age, something rarely acknowledged but certain to shape our geography for decades to come.

    This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • China Failing its Families

    China’s recent decision to reverse – at least in part – its policy limiting most couples to one child marks a watershed in thinking about demographics. Yet, this reversal of the 30-year policy may prove unavailing due to reasons – notably dense urbanization and high property prices – that work against people having more children.

    China already faces a demographic crisis unprecedented for a still-poor country. By 2050, China will have 60 million fewer people under 15 years of age, while the over-65 population grows by 190 million, approximately the population of Pakistan, the world’s sixth-most populous country. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that China’s population will peak in 2026, and then will age faster than any country besides Japan; most of the world’s decline in children and workers ages 15-19 over the next two decades will take place in China.

    The shift in family-size policy acknowledges these looming demographic changes but may not be sufficient to address them. After all, similar problems have cropped up in other Asian countries, including such successful nations as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. All face tremendous fiscal crises from the prospect of a diminishing workforce insufficient to support swelling numbers of seniors. This “burden of support” crisis applies even in rich, thrifty countries like Singapore or Japan, but is potentially far more destabilizing in much poorer China.

    Perhaps the biggest force undermining both marriage and family – the core institutions of all Confucian societies – can be traced, at least in part, to changes in attitudes associated with urban life. Gavin Jones, a demographer at the National University of Singapore, estimates that up to a quarter of all East Asian women, following the example of women in Japan, will remain single by age 50, and up to a third will remain childless.

    “People’s lifestyles are more important, and their personal networks mean more than family,” notes Japanese sociologist Mika Toyota. “It’s now a choice. You can be single, self-satisfied and well. So why have kids? It’s better to go on great holidays, eat good food and have your hobbies. A family is no longer the key to the city life.”

    Urbanization threat

    Nowhere are these effects more profound, or important, as in China, where 270 million migrants, mostly from the countryside, have moved to the cities – nearly as many people as lived in the United States a decade ago. But once they arrive, many newcomers often live in poor, crowded conditions, that, along with lacking access to schooling, discourage child-rearing.

    The detrimental impact of dense urbanization on family formation is not limited to China, but is especially prevalent in East Asia, where Gavin Jones, Paulin Tay Straughan and Angelique Chan of the National University of Singapore report that “a housing and urban environment unfriendly to children” was a chief reason for women’s reluctance to have children (or more children).

    As China has urbanized, its fertility rate – the average number of births for each woman of childbearing age – has fallen to 1.55, considerably below the 2.1 “replacement rate” required to maintain the population level. But in the rest of East Asia, fertility rates are even lower. For example, Singapore’s fertility rate is 0.79, Taiwan’s is 1.11, and South Korea’s is 1.24 – even without one-child policies. Moreover, China’s fertility rate is elevated because of its higher share of rural population and can be expected to fall as rapid urbanization continues. The depressed urban fertility rates are epitomized by Beijing, at less than 1, and Shanghai, 0.70.

    Reforming the one-child policy alone won’t much change this reality. A host of pro-natalist policies in countries, including Japan and Singapore, have failed to boost birthrates. China-controlled Hong Kong, which now suffers one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet, was never subject to the one-child policy and has tried to encourage procreation, raising tax breaks to $100,000 per child. Yet these steps hardly off-set the high costs of raising childrenin this dense, bustling and expensive city. A recent Hang Seng Bank study estimates the cost of raising a child in Hong Kong at $515,000 U.S. dollars.

    Most damaging, East Asian cities have adopted an urban form almost guaranteed to suppress fertility. Most are usually dominated by skyscraping tower residential blocks and lower-rise residential buildings in which most units have no direct ground access. A 20th-floor balcony is not a substitute for a private yard to play in. Even in Western countries, where cities are usually less-dense, fertility rates are far lower in the urban cores than in the suburbs. Similarly, the birthrates in the urban core of Tokyo are well below those in the suburbs, where yards, though small by Western standards, often are available.

    Then there is the problem of affordability. Housing units in the tall residential blocks cost much more to build than ground-oriented dwellings. High costs, particularly for housing, are one reason nearly two in five Chinese, according to Weibo Sina, the country’s top social media site, feel the law change will not encourage them to consider having more children.

    Child-friendly zones?

    The Chinese government could take steps making it easier for people to have children. One would be to drive growth to less-expensive areas in the country’s vast interior. New government policy reforms have reinforced the commitment for development outside the East Coast, to the center, West and Northeast. Already, interior cities have been made more competitive for manufacturing by connection to the world’s longest interstate-type highway system, as well as the highest-volume trucking and freight rail systems.

    Spreading out development may help, but only if the form of the new housing shifts to a more family-friendly pattern. Building high-density areas, even in second-tier cities – a major source of wealth for local governments as well as developers – essentially exports Shanghai’s child-unfriendly environment to the interior. Instead, a new housing policy that stresses lower densities, more space and greater affordability is a prerequisite for encouraging new families.

    The solution could draw on some of China’s own marked policy successes. Under Deng Xiaoping, China established special economic zones, such as Shenzhen, to test liberal economic policies. Shenzhen’s reforms spread around China and have, literally, transformed the country . More recently, China embarked on a similar program to test financial liberalization, with the establishment of its first financial-services trade zone in Shanghai, and a recent announcement indicates that there will be more.

    These innovative policies could be adapted to address China’s demographic crisis. It could take the form of a few “special child-friendly zones,” established around midsize and large cities. These zones would allow for development of ground-oriented dwellings with yards and could include housing from single-family detached to multistory townhomes. New residents and existing residents could move to these dwellings, attracted by the improved environment for raising the second child.

    For its pilot program, the government could designate suburbs of Chongqing, an interior municipality directly governed from Beijing, as special child-friendly zones. Other interior cities such as Zhengzhou (Henan), Changsha (Hunan), or Xi’an (Shaanxi) could also accommodate similarly designated areas. In the West, including the United States and Northern Europe, birth rates are considerably higher – sometimes by as much as 50 percent – in the suburban periphery than in the city core.

    Some in the West may denounce this as a plan for sprawl, but these more humane, ground-oriented residences would not require substantial additional land. Well-designed neighborhoods of single-family houses on small lots and townhouses can be built at high densities. Further, these residential units are usually less-costly. In the United States, high-rise residential construction can cost more than double per square foot as ground-oriented housing.

    After initial success, child-friendly zones could be extended to other cities, just as the successful Shenzhen economic reforms gradually swept the nation. Of course, such an approach violates current Western doctrine on urban planning, which is obsessively focused on encouraging people to live in ever-higher densities. Yet these doctrines turn out to be expensive and unwise, and undermine the prospects for families. Reforming the one-child policy is a good first step, but China’s best chance to solve its demographic problem lies in developing policies that put families and children first.

    This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    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: Steve Webel

  • Are Special Service Districts a Boon or a Bane?

    America’s cities have been under fiscal pressure for an extended period of time. To cope with this, and better manage assets, they’ve increasingly turned to various forms of special purpose districts or entities for service delivery. Traditional independent service districts such as sewer districts or transit districts were often designed to circumvent bonding limits or to deliver services regionally, so were larger in scale. These newer service districts are much smaller in scope. They consist of two basic components:

    1. A private sector, usually non-profit management agency that operates a public asset or delivers services under contract to the city in a form of public-private partnership.
    2. Special purpose funding sources to finance this entity’s activities. These funds can include private donations, proceeds raised from Tax Increment Financing (usually for capital purposes), and taxes raised from so-called Business Improvement Districts (or BIDs, with special property taxes collected from businesses in a given area on a semi-voluntary basis, generally after a super-majority of property owners vote to agree to impose the tax).

    Examples of these special service districts abound. One of the most famous is the Central Park Conservancy, which manages Central Park in New York under contract to the city.  The conservancy was founded in 1980 to raise funds to restore Central Park.  It received funds from the city budget, but also does significant private fundraising as well, for both capital and operating purposes.

    Another well-known example in New York is the Bryant Park Corporation, which runs Bryant Park in Manhattan.  Once known as “Needle Park” because it was taken over by drug users and deals, today Bryant Park is a lavish showplace right down to fresh cut flowers in its marble restrooms.  Bryant Park is only 9.6 acres, but has an annual budget of $7 million. As Bryant Park Corporation CEO Dan Biederman once noted, that is more than the entire $4.3 million parks budget of the city of Pittsburgh.  This cash is raised from a BID, sponsorships, and commercial concessions in the district.

    A different type of entity is the Chicago Loop Alliance.  As with similar groups in many cities, Chicago uses the Alliance as a downtown management agency, responsible for marketing, beautification, public art, events, etc. in downtown Chicago. It’s backed by local businesses, especially retailers, but also receives funding from a BID (known as a Special Service Area (SSA) in Chicago).

    As a final example, when the city of Indianapolis built the eight mile downtown Indy Cultural Trail, a non-profit called Indianapolis Cultural Trail, Inc. was created maintain and promote it. The trail was the brainchild of Central Indiana Community Foundation President Brian Payne. To ensure that the trail would be well maintained over the long term in an era of tight budgets, he included a maintenance endowment in the original private fundraising to build it.  Additionally, ICT, Inc. raises private funding to supplement this.

    These four examples are different in various ways, but something they obviously all have in common is that they serve prosperous areas or are focused on showplace type amenities. While not all such districts around the country are quite so upscale, in general they tend to be most prominent and effective in central business districts or wealthier neighborhoods.

    These special service districts are part of a trend towards privatized government in America. Given the state of Central and Bryant Parks when their respective organizations where formed, obviously those two have been a success. Many of these districts are very well run because they depend at least in part on private sector cash raising and because as private entities they are free from many cumbersome government rules.

    On the other hand, it’s not hard to see these as perpetuating the move towards two-tier municipal services, in which wealthier areas receive higher services levels than elsewhere. In effect, techniques like BIDs enable relatively thriving areas to purchase better levels of service for themselves without having to help finance similar services elsewhere.  That’s not necessarily a good thing.  For example, New York City has been criticized in some quarters for a lack of investment in outer borough parks.  State Senator Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn said in AM New York, “Large conservancies get millions every year from private donors. But the parks that find it hardest to get that support are the ones that need it the most.” He wants to force the Central Park Conservancy to pass long 20% of its donations to smaller parks.

    However, it isn’t always bad if a central business district, clearly a unique area in a city, has different services delivered there. Its dense concentration of employment and visitors almost necessitates it.  The same is true for special regional attractions. Central Park truly is unique.

    In fact, the move towards privatized services in wealthier areas could be a good thing for the rest of the city if it is used to free up funds for use where there isn’t as much private capital available.  In this case a city could look to move parks, street cleaning, and other items “off the books” via special service districts in areas that can afford to fund such services largely by themselves. The city would then concentrate public funds in poorer or middle class areas. The tradeoff would be that the wealthier areas might be allowed to purchase higher quality services for themselves, but that would be structured in a way that let service quality be raised for others.

    On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how this could evolve as a mechanism for “strategic abandonment” as well.  In this case the city would cut general service levels then allowing wealthier areas to buy them back.  Critics have charged that special service districts are exactly the legal mechanism that will be used to implement planned shrinkage in Detroit.

    In short, how this plays out will depend greatly on the strategic intent (or neglect) of city leaders. But regardless, in an era of financial extremis for cities, the trend towards more privatized government and special service districts is sure to continue.  The key is for the public to demand that these deals be structured as win-wins that don’t just benefit the already thriving areas of the city, but enable investments in struggling areas that are often overlooked.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile.

    Bryant Park photo by Jean-Christophe BENOIST