New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Let L.A. Be L.A.

    Victor’s Restaurant, a nondescript coffee shop on a Hollywood side street, seems an odd place to meet for a movement challenging many of Los Angeles’s most powerful, well-heeled forces. Yet amid the uniformed service workers, budding actors, and retirees enjoying coffee and French toast, unlikely revolutionaries plot the next major battle over the city’s future. Driving their rebellion is a proposal from the L.A. planning department that would allow greater density in the heart of Hollywood, a scruffy district that includes swaths of classic California bungalows and charming 1930s-era garden apartments. The proposal—which calls for residential towers of 50 stories or more along Hollywood Boulevard, where no building currently tops 20 stories—has been approved unanimously by the city council and will now probably be challenged in court.

    That proposal isn’t the only densification plan making its way through city hall. Another is a “wholesale revision” of L.A.’s planning code that would strip single-family districts of their present status and approve the construction of rental units in backyards and of high-density housing close to what are now quiet residential neighborhoods. “We are going to remake what the city looks like,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the New York Times in March. Richard Abrams, a 40-year Hollywood resident and a leader of SaveHollywood.Org, puts it differently: “They want to turn this into something like East Germany. This is all part of an attempt to worsen the quality of life—to leave us without backyards and with monumental traffic.” The rebels gathered at Victor’s note that many of the density scheme’s most tenacious advocates, such as councilman and mayoral aspirant Eric Garcetti, live in leafy residential areas removed from the traffic nightmare that the new development would bring.

    Despite public outcry, Los Angeles’s political, labor, and real-estate elites almost unanimously support what Villaraigosa calls “elegant density,” pushing for the transformation of the city’s low-rise, multipolar, and moderate urban form into something more like vertical, transit-oriented New York. Dissenters from this view are often called “antiurban.” But to activists like Susan Swan, who leads the Hollywood Neighborhood Council, it’s really about letting L.A. remain L.A. As she notes, New York and Los Angeles have evolved in radically different ways. New York, particularly its urban core, was built largely before the automobile age. Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs are transit-dependent: 56 percent of commuters take public transportation. By contrast, L.A. remains overwhelmingly car-oriented, with only 11 percent of commuters using public transit, despite the $8 billion invested in rail lines over the past two decades. Los Angeles’s downtown is nowhere near as important as New York’s; just over 2 percent of L.A. metropolitan-area employment is downtown, compared with about 20 percent in greater New York. Instead of revolving around one mega-center, L.A. boasts commercial centers in each of its major neighborhoods, many of which are close to single-family homes and low-rise apartments.

    This dispersion creates an aesthetic rarely appreciated by density boosters, enabling residents to enjoy fully L.A.’s unique ambience—its superb Mediterranean climate, lush foliage, tall trees, and, most of all, magnificent light. Even when you walk down Hollywood Boulevard, what’s most striking is not the skyline but the steep hills, framed by palms, rising toward a clear blue sky. For a glimpse of the Hollywood imagined by Villaraigosa and his confederates, take a look at the much-reviled Hollywood and Highland Center, home of the Dolby Theatre, which hosts the Academy Awards. Instead of brilliant light and blue sky, visitors confront a boxy hulk that obscures the hillside views.

    Swan and other activists deny that opposing mass densification is synonymous with opposing development. With many nearly abandoned blocks and downscale businesses around its core, Hollywood certainly could use a face-lift. But local community activists want development to be congruent with the area’s architectural traditions. “There is real dismay in our community that the opportunity to make Hollywood a world-class destination is slipping away to these ‘Manhattanization’ fantasies,” says Swan, a retired bookbinder. “We have always said that we love Manhattan—in New York.”

    Demographics also make a mockery of the densification argument. With the exception of downtown, most of the central parts of Los Angeles have either stagnated or lost population over the last 20 years. Hollywood, for example, shrank from 213,000 residents in 1990 to 198,000 today. Within the last decade, Los Angeles County’s growth slowed to barely 3 percent—roughly one-fifth the rate that it enjoyed during the go-go 1980s, a period of extraordinary prosperity in the region. Yet Garcetti, Villaraigosa, and their allies continue to base their grands projets, as the French would call them, on outmoded assumptions of exploding economic and population growth. Particularly revealing is the experience of the Residences at W Hollywood, a luxury-condo project located a stone’s throw from the proposed new high-rise towers in Hollywood. According to recent reports, only 29 out of 143 units have sold since the project opened in May 2010, despite prices that have been slashed by more than half. The market, in short, is unwilling to embrace density here, “elegant” or otherwise.

    Yet the city keeps planning big, as though hordes of the well-heeled were eager to move to L.A. It has offered massive subsidies, accounting for nearly $640 million in tax breaks, to three hotel projects. Public bonds are also underwriting expansion of L.A.’s convention center and a new football stadium, which received unheard-of exemptions from state and local environmental laws even though the city currently has no football team. “Everything we are doing, like the mass build-out of transit and density, provides an excuse for creating things people don’t want,” says Cary Brazeman, founder and president of L.A. Neighbors, a citywide alliance of neighborhoods, and a candidate for city controller in 2013. “To build this city back, you have to approach things in ways that enhance the gloriousness of L.A. Sunshine, it’s transcendental. You take away the sun, hell, I’m leaving my condo.”

    Without backing from rent-seekers or unions, Brazeman’s campaign runs on a shoestring. His better-funded opponent, former police officer Dennis Zine, epitomizes L.A.’s dysfunctional political system, drawing both his generous police pension and a city council salary of $178,000, the highest in the nation. Though he represents a largely residential area in the San Fernando Valley, Zine has proved a reliable vote for the elaborate “incentives” that encourage large, often uneconomic, building and ever-greater spending on transit projects. A more serious challenge to the existing order could come from Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Yaroslavsky hasn’t declared his candidacy for mayor yet, but he is known to be skeptical of the proposed remake of L.A. The question is whether he’s too comfortable with the status quo to take on the “elegant density” agenda.

    For now, the best hope for Los Angeles resides with the activists who meet at Victor’s. They may not scare the political incumbents or the real-estate developers, but they do represent a motivated opposition to the effort to recast the city. “Los Angeles started because people want to live here,” Abrams says. “We are not a cut-rate New York and don’t want to be. The developers and the politicians want to take away all that makes us unique and get rid of us tomorrow. It won’t be so easy.”

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

    This piece originally appeared in The City Journal.

  • America’s Future Is Taking Shape In The Suburbs

    For nearly a generation, pundits, academics and journalists have written off suburbia. They predict that the future lies in the cities, with more Americans living in smaller spaces such as the micro-apartments of 300 square feet or less that New York and San Francisco are considering changing their building laws to allow. Even traditionally spread out cities, such as Los Angeles, are laying out plans to create greater population density, threatening the continued existence of some neighborhoods of single-family homes.

    Yet wishing something dead does not make it so. Indeed, the suburbanization of America is likely to continue over the next decade. The 2010 Census — by far the most accurate recent accounting — showed that over 90% of all metropolitan growth over the past decade took place in the suburbs.

    Some central cities, notably New York, enjoyed decent population growth, but their increases were still below the national average. The Joint Center for Housing at Harvard notes that, only five metro areas —Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Calif., and the Florida cities of Cape Coral and Palm Bay — saw an increase in the share of households living in core cities relative to their suburbs and exurbs.

    To be sure, the Great Recession slowed the growth of suburbs, as many Americans lost the ability to achieve their dream of owning a single-family house. “Back to the city” advocates have seized on Census estimates for the past year that suggested that urban core growth has actually been a tad faster than that of suburbs.

    However, the Census Bureau numbers may be less accurate, and certainly less predictive, than many suggest. University of Pittsburgh urban analyst Chris Briem points out that in the last decade, some Census Bureau city estimates turned out to be vastly exaggerated compared to the actual 2010 Census. This was particularly true in Chicago and New York, where constant lobbying by city officials — after all, federal aid is distributed based on population estimates — meant that optimistic urban estimates turned out to be hundreds of thousands of people off.

    More amazing still, the Census Bureau essentially assumed that growth was even in all municipalities in a county. This bizarre practice projects that growth, say, in the city of Los Angeles, is equal to that of newer communities like Santa Clarita, or that suburbs of Alleghany County grew at the same rate as the city of Pittsburgh. This surely can’t be the case.

    Reporters concentrated in Manhattan and the District of Columbia didn’t look seriously at these numbers. They repeated the assumption that this was the result of mass migration, particularly among the young, out of suburbs and into cities.

    Yet in reality, there was no evidence of that trend. In fact, the Census Bureau’s core county estimates (which are demonstrably more accurate than the municipal estimates) showed a slight core county loss in domestic migration over the past year. The real story of the estimates has to do with the recession, which has led to record-low levels of mobility. Inter-county migration has fallen almost half from its 2006 level. Essentially, a historically weak economy has boosted the city share of population growth.

    So what can we expect in the future? Some cities will grow, but the vast majority of metropolitan growth will continue to take place in what are still car-dominated suburbs like areas areas. This can occur only the economy again get on a full-fledged growth cycle. Here some basic reasons not to write off suburbia.

    Inter-Regional Growth Patterns

    All 15 of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas of the past decade — led by places like Las Vegas, Raleigh, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth — are sprawling and have low-density cores. Metropolitan areas with far denser cores, such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, tended to display below-average growth.

    These fast-growing cities tend to be suburban in form, dominated by single-family homes, automobile commuters and with dispersed economic centers. The growing central cities of Phoenix or Houston look more like places such as Long Island or Santa Clara than Manhattan or Chicago.

    Economic Shifts

    Many urban boosters cite a Santa Fe Institute study claiming that density creates productivity and economic growth. However, the study clearly dissociated itself from this argument, claiming that it did not matter if a region was shaped like Los Angeles, Atlanta or Houston, or New York or Boston. The source of productivity lay simply in a growing metropolitan population, the authors claimed.

    Overall, it’s questionable whether city economies perform better over time than the suburbs. Indeed, over the last decade, 81 percent of the population growth of core cities was among the poor, compared to 32 percent in suburbs. Poverty anywhere is a bad thing, but the claim, made repeatedly by some pundits that it is worsening more in suburbs turns out to be, well, just another urban legend. Overall poverty accounts for nearly one in four urban residents, twice the rate for suburbs.

    Energy Costs

    Ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s, pundits have predicted suburbanites would be forced to give up their cars. But higher energy prices have not slowed the suburban trend. With the current growth in new energy finds both here and abroad, the much heralded dawn of “peak oil” appears to be about as imminent as a balanced federal budget.

    Some terrified urbanists, like Bruce Fisher, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at Buffalo State College, fear the new oil rush means “suburban real estate development will once again enjoy a comparative advantage over center city development.” In what some see as a catastrophe for both planet and urbanity, the car will remain dominant for the foreseeable future, despite three decades of massive spending on new transit systems across the country.

    Demographic Trends

    The advocates of a dense urban future usually point to demographics. Yet the formerly fashionable theory that retiring boomers would head en masse to cities turned out to be largely false. The last census showed the vast majority of aging boomers remained in the suburbs or moved further out into the periphery. “Back to the country” actually far outweighed “back to the city” in terms of boomer migration.

    Then there’s the other large generation of Americans, millennials, who are said to prefer an urban lifestyle. Yet surveys of millennials show a strong, often even more marked, preference for homeownership and suburban living than their parents.

    This will prove critical as many now urban millennials begin to enter their 30s and 40s over the next decade. Once they marry and start to have families, they will emerge, as the Harvard housing study notes as “the primary driver of new household formations over the next two decades.” Along with the other powerful force, immigrants, most seem likely to end up in suburban locales, if they can.

    Preferences Matter

    This does not counteract the fact that many young people will chose to settle in dense urban areas for their 20s and early 30s. Some urban cores, notably New York, Boston and San Francisco, will likely grow and get denser. But most others will see only modest, often fitful growth; despite massive public investment, for example, downtown Los Angeles, according to Zillow.com, has foreclosure rates worse than virtually anywhere else in the region.

    Preferences are the key here, particularly paying attention to what people want as they age. The 2011 Community Preference Survey, commissioned jointly by the National Association of Realtors and Smart Growth America, found that only a small minority — less than 10 percent — favored a dense urban location. Some 80 percent expressed preference for a single-family home.

    Over time, in a market-based economy, consumer preferences matter far more than those of pundits, professors or, for that matter, rent-seeking real estate developers. The only things that can kill off future suburban development would be forced densification by government edict or a continued miserable economy that entraps millions of the unwilling in dense urban areas.

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

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Suburbs photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Density is Not the Issue: The Urban Scaling Research

    The "urban scaling" research of Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuhnert on cities has attracted considerable attention (references below). They have provided strong quantitative evidence, based upon voluminous econometric analysis that cities tend to become more efficient as they grow in population.

    Specifically, West, a theoretical physicist, and his team show that measures such as gross domestic product per capita and income per capita rise, on average, 15 percent with each doubling of city population. They draw parallels with the animal kingdom, noting that larger animals tend to be more efficient than smaller ones, and comparing elephants, efficient because of their size, to cities.

    This is all very attractive, especially the elephant analogy, which appropriately suggests that cities are organisms.

    The Urban Organism

    Yet the research has been widely reported to suggest that density as opposed to size is the key to urban productivity. West et al look at cities as "integrated economic and social units," at the "level of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs); in the European Union, larger urban zones (LUZs); and in China, urban administrative units." This is the economic, or functional manifestation of the urban organism (the urban area, the area of continuous urbanization, is the physical manifestation). In so doing, West, et al demonstrate a familiarity with urban geography that is all too rare, even among analysts who have studied cities for far longer.

    The key issue here is what constitutes a “city”.  New York is a good, example, as headquarters to the national media, a world class city and as urban as it gets in the United States. But the New York metropolitan area, the "integrated economic and social unit" is not Manhattan or even five boroughs. It stretches from a bit west of Blooming Grove Township, in Pike County 25 miles west of Port Jervis, a city 90 miles from Manhattan located in western Orange County, NY, to Montauk Point in Suffolk County and from north of West Point, in Putnam County to Egg Harbor Township, in Ocean County, New Jersey (that’s nearly 30 miles south of Toms River). Suffice it to say most of this vast region is not dense at all.

    Divining Density

    Yet, some analysts have characterized the West, et al research as being about higher densities, Richard Florida wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

    Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have been able to demonstrate that bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life.

    That’s only half right. The research was about city size, not density, as the authors indicate (below).

    All too typical of the way that suburbanized America is disparaged by the media, Jonah Lehrer, of The New York Times sputtered that:

    In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences.

    In reality, the kind of suburbs found in Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino will be found surrounding every one of the nation’s core cities, including New York, an urban area that covers  more land area than any urban area in the world at 3,450 square miles (8,935 square kilometers), according to the Census Bureau. That’s twice the expanse of the Los Angeles urban area. Granted, New York’s Hudson Valley suburbs are greener and more affluent than most in Phoenix, but their population density is nearly the same. Moreover, neither Phoenix nor New York (think Staten Island or much of Long Island) should be ashamed of attracting "working class families who want their own white picket fences." Why demean aspiration?

    Urban blogger James Withow refers to their "remarkable findings" that "raise interesting policy issues on density." Another analyst wrote "West offers data that shows cities create economies of scale that suburbs and small towns cannot match." This is patently absurd since, as noted above, West did not study any part of the urban organism below the metropolitan area. There was no attempt to make a distinction between the productivity of say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, to White Plains or even Blooming Spring Township. No core city or suburb is an "integrated economic and social unit."

    West et al on Density

    Indeed, West et al make it very clear that their findings have nothing to do with urban population density. They tested for correlations population growth and income, patents and violent crimes, and found "no significant trend exists between residuals for income, patents and violent crime and population growth or density." They further note their equations showed an "R2 consistent with zero" (in every day English, that means they found no relationship between density and the other variables).

    This conclusion was correct, though comparing metropolitan area densities is less than ideal. Just to check, we reran the equations with urban density data and found that this approach too produced an "R2 consistent with zero," not only for income, patents and violent crimes, but also gross metropolitan product.

    West et al pointed out that:

    The shape of the city in space, including for example its residential density, matter much less than (and are mostly accounted for by) population size in predicting indicators of urban performance. Said more explicitly, whether a city looks more like New York or Boston or instead like Los Angeles or Atlanta has a vanishing effect in predicting its socio-economic performance. (emphasis by author)

    In other words, the same improvement in urban performance would be predicted from doubling the population of Atlanta, with an urban density of 1,700 per square mile (700 per square kilometer) as in New York, with more than three times Atlanta’s density or Los Angeles’ with more than four (Los Angeles is highest density large urban area in the United States).

     It turns out – counter the misunderstandings of some urbanists – that higher or lower density simply does not matter according to the West, et al research.

    It’s About Density Thresholds and Efficient Labor Markets

    Cities (integrated economic and social units) are created by reaching urban density thresholds. They tend to become more productive as they grow, so long as they are not too large to function as a labor market. Density doesn’t matter particularly. Indeed, the general tendency is for cities to become more dispersed (less dense) as they grow, as indicated by longer term data in the US, Canada and around the world.

    For example, the Seattle and Houston urban areas have population densities much lower than those of Paris, London, Hong Kong and even Los Angeles – yet they still rank higher among the most productive metropolitan areas in the world, according to the Brookings Institution Global Metropolitan Monitor 2011. Brookings rates Hartford as the most productive metropolitan area in the world, yet its urban population density is nearly as low as Atlanta’s.

    Finally, the Brookings list excludes the world’s most dense major city, Dhaka. That’s because the economic output of its 15 million people is insufficient to make a list that includes cities one-tenth its size. Dhaka combines the highest population density in the world with perhaps the lowest per capita economic output of any megacity in the world.

    Allowing Organisms to Grow

    As West et al suggests, cities, like elephants, are organisms. Both expand (dare we say "sprawl") as they grow. This should be cause for concern, given planning dictates that would restrain urban organism, such as urban growth boundaries. These restraints are akin to depriving a large mammal of sufficient space to roam and feed. That’s no way to treat a productive organism, or a great city.

    ——-

    Reference Materials:
    Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
    Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities
    2010 US Urban Area Data

    ——-

    African Bush Elephant photo by flickr user nickandmel2006.

    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.”

  • Predictable Punditry Down Under

    The New South Wales Government has been following an extreme version of currently fashionable planning doctrines based on higher population densities. These policies have resulted in exorbitant housing costs and increasing traffic congestion.  A Liberal/National Coalition Government has come into power in New South Wales, replacing the previous Labor Government. In its election platform it promised to change planning policies for the better. These include fewer additional dwellings to be forced into Sydney suburbs, more fringe land release, decentralisation and giving planning powers back to the community.

    The New South Wales Department of Planning bureaucracy is consequently ostensibly devising a new housing strategy.  As the main feature in a community discussion on this new strategy, the Department organised a presentation by Harvard Professor Edward Glaeser in Sydney entitled “Triumph of the City”, The promotional description read

    “recognised as the world’s leading urban economist, Harvard University’s Professor Edward Glaeser, along with four of NSW Government’s planning and infrastructure experts, will discuss fresh approaches to meeting Sydney’s biggest challenge now and into the future — planning for a population that is expected to increase from 4.2 million to more than 5.6 million by 2031”.

    Previous consultation exercises for planning strategies had proved to be tokenistic and mere public relations exercises.  Unfortunately this event proved to be no exception. It promoted the current high-density policies with no discussion of alternatives or fresh approaches.

    Professor Glaeser spoke about how cities evolved as engines of development and wealth creation. He portrayed cities facilitating people getting together, sharing ideas and building on previous innovations. He described how the advent of popular means of transport — from horse drawn transport to cars — allowed cities to spread and maintained that low density areas are associated with longer car journeys and larger homes that consume more energy. To facilitate the person to person contact he considers necessary to sustain innovation and to reduce energy consumption he advocated ever higher-densities closer to the city core.   

    He implied this is especially important so as to set an example to highly populated China and India in order to limit the otherwise huge escalation in energy usage in those countries.

    Throughout the proceedings the conference facilitator promoted the concept of high densities by such statements as “We need to re-examine the suburban model, living more like urban model” and “Go up, not out.  Can we do that? How do we do that?”
    The overwhelming impression given by the consultation proceedings was that high-density is the only possible strategy worth considering and that Glaeser’s USA perspective can be applied to New South Wales.

    Yet the argument that high density means more innovation seems flawed. In the United States of America the greatest innovative activity takes place not in crowded Manhattan but in regions of densities similar to that of Sydney, the urban area of which has 2100 persons per square kilometre (5,500 per square mile).  The San Jose urban area in Silicon Valley, with a similar population density, has a booming world-changing local technology industry including Cisco Systems and IBM. It also is almost totally dependent on automobiles, with only a small share of people taking transit.

    Companies operating in Hillsboro in the Portland urban area (population density of 1400 per square kilometre or 3600 per square mile) include Yahoo!, Credence Systems, Synopsys, Epson and Sun Microsystems.  Seattle, the home of Microsoft and the initiation of Boeing, has a population density of 1,200 per square kilometre, or 3,000 per square mile. The densities in these dynamic areas are equal to or less than that of Sydney and a far cry from the Manhattan or even Hong Kong type of density of 25,000 (67,000 per square mile) or more that Glaeser seems to prefer.

    Although high-density living may not be for everyone, apparently, particularly those with kids. Glaeser, like another prominent advocate of rapid densification, David Owen “copes” with living in suburbia.  I guess dense housing is for other families.

    The claim by Glaeser that high-density is superior environmentally also is not borne out in Australian studies.  A publication of his finds emissions in low-density suburbs in several United States cities to be higher than in high-density suburbs.  Australian data does not show this.

    A study of energy-related emissions at the final point of consumption finds per capita energy usage in a group of low density Sydney suburbs (96 GJ per annum) to be lower than in high-density suburbs (169 GJ).  One of several factors accounting for these differences is there are more people per household in the lower density areas. Glaeser models emissions on a “standard household” of 2.2 people; many, if not most suburban households, have more than that number, although city households frequently don’t.  One wonders whether possible differences in the number of people per dwelling in high-density and low-density areas can be adequately catered for in such models.

    For another thing, the Australian climate is very different and that is probably a significant reason for higher densities to be more energy intensive. If dwellings are too close they are more difficult to cool whereas it is easier to heat them.  Also, cooling technically needs more energy than heating as a much larger volume of air needs to be circulated (NOTE 1).

    Glaeser’s advocacy of high-density to reduce transport emissions needs special consideration.  In Australia such reduction, if any, is trivial.  Transport greenhouse gas emissions account for only a small proportion of household emissions and higher-densities reduce these to a minimal extent. (NOTE 2) 

    It is not only in Australia where evidence for significant environmental benefits from high-density planning is lacking.  As a result of studies testing the relative performance of spatial options in England, Echenique et al conclude: “The current planning policy strategies for land use and transport have virtually no impact on the major long-term increases in resource and energy consumption. They generally tend to increase costs and reduce economic competitiveness. The relatively small differences between options are over-whelmed by the impacts of socioeconomic change and population growth”.

    The Department of Planning-sponsored Glaeser presentation was not a genuine consultation. It promoted existing government policies with no attempt to consider their downside or to discuss alternatives.  It is extraordinary and downright arrogant to expect Sydney communities to change their preferred mode of life to live in tiny apartments perched in towers (see picture) in the unproven expectation that this will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is yet even more extraordinary to presume that such a transformation would influence policies in China and India in any significant way. The days when these great countries looked to the West for models has already passed; and look where many people from these countries settle when they get to the United States or to Australia: the suburbs. Classic cases include the San Gabriel Valley East of Los Angeles, the Santa Clara Valley communities of Silicon Valley, large swaths of northern New Jersey and to Sydney’s North Shore in Australia.

    The proceedings proved to be an attempt to promote a particular point of view, so perpetuating previous approaches of trying to manipulate opinion in the guise of consultation.

    It appears clear that in spite of a change of government there will be no change in planning policies.  The new government looks like having been captured by the bureaucracy and its cult of densification that has no more chance of changing its views than the College of Cardinals is likely to eschew the Papacy. 

    (Dr) Tony Recsei has a background in chemistry and is an environmental consultant. Since retiring he has taken an interest in community affairs and is president of the Save Our Suburbs community group which opposes over-development forced onto communities by the New South Wales State Government.

    Photo: Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Public School Parent Trigger Laws: Something’s Gotta Give

    In the mid-1950s, the McGuire Sisters’ version of Johnny Mercer’s song about what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object made it to number five on the record charts. Their prediction, that “Something’s Gotta Give,” provides an apt description of the outcome of today’s battle between the parents of Millennials who want more say in their children’s education and the teacher unions and school district administrators who refuse to give up a smidgeon of control over the public schools they run.

    One of the hottest battle fronts in the war between these two forces has been debates over whether to adopt “Parent Trigger” laws, similar to those passed in California in 2010. Such legislation empowers the majority of parents in any school district deemed to be “failing,” according to the federal No Child Left Behind standards, to essentially reconstitute the school according to parents’ desires either by turning it into a charter school or removing and replacing all current teachers and administrators.

    Since 2010, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana have passed similar legislation and it is up for debate in major industrial states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York. In Florida, the idea came within one vote of passage in the State Senate thanks to the enthusiastic support of former Florida Republican Governor, Jeb Bush. At the same time, such Democratic stalwarts as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and liberal Congressman George Miller (D-CA) have expressed their strong support for the concept. Most recently, the bi-partisan U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution in support of Parent Trigger laws.  Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, chairman of both the Mayor’s Conference and the upcoming Democratic National Convention, led the charge for the resolution’s passage, aided by strong support from Democratic Mayors such as Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Kevin Johnson of Sacramento.

    None of this has softened the resistance from teacher unions, historically a bulkwark of Democratic support. Often led by unreconstructed Boomer liberals from the 1960s, they see the law’s emphasis on parental prerogatives as the ultimate threat to their control of the classroom and educational budgets. In the most recent battle, unions were able to pressure Change.org, a for profit, grass roots website “staffed by some of the most talented progressive organizers in the country,”  to bar StudentsFirst, an advocacy group run by Democrat Michelle Rhee, the former Washington D.C. School Superintendent, that supports giving parents more control over the schools their children attend, from using its website.

    And when the chief press person for Parent Revolution, the non-profit that is the primary driver behind the adoption of Parent Trigger laws, was announced as the new education media spokesperson by Obama’s re-election campaign, teachers’ unions threatened to withhold their support of the president.

    In the long run, the implacable objections of the unions to parents having more say over the type of education their own children will fail. They will prove no match for the irresistible force of generational change that is already sweeping away existing institutional power structures in schools across the country.

    One of the distinguishing characteristics of Millennials, born 1982-2003, is the intense interest their parents take in every aspect of their children’s lives. This desire to constantly hover over their offspring earned parents of older Millennials (those now in their twenties) the sobriquet, “helicopter parents.” The younger half of the Millennial Generation, which  accounts for most elementary and all secondary school students today is primarily parented by members of the more entrepreneurial Generation X (born 1965-1981). These parents replaced their Boomer predecessors’ tendency to hover and talk with a desire to take action and change bottom-line results.

    Millennials are the largest, most diverse generation in American history, and many of them are now starting to have children of their own. When those children begin arriving in the nation’s schools, Millennial Generation parents will bring the same dedication that their own parents exhibited to making sure each school serves their child’s interests first.  As a result, it won’t be long before the same rights California, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana parents now have are given to every parent in the country. As Ben Austin, the founder of the Parent Revolution points out, “the old coalitions don’t apply here; it’s a cause that unites parents from upper-middle-class and working-class backgrounds—white, black, and Latino alike.”            

    The type of generational change America will experience over the next few decades   will drive the transformation of America’s educational institutions and overwhelm those who attempt to keep parents from deciding what kind of school their kids go to. When push comes to shove, something’s gotta give. And, in the end, that means that those who stand for the status quo in our nation’s schools will have to give up their traditional prerogatives and let parents choose the educational experience they think is best for their own children.  

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

    School bus photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Rise of The 1099 Economy: More Americans Are Becoming Their Own Bosses

    While the economy has been miserable for small business, and many larger ones as well, the ranks of the self-employed have been growing. According to research by Economic Modeling Specialists International, the number of people who primarily work on their own has swelled by 1.3 million since 2001 to 10.6 million, a 14% increase.

    This rise is partially reflective of hard times, and many of the self-employed earn only modest livings in fields such as childcare and construction. However the shift to self-employment is likely to accelerate in the future, and into higher-paying professions, for reasons including the ubiquity of the Internet, which makes it easier for some types of business to use independent contractors, as well as the reluctance of large firms to hire full-time employees with benefits.

    Urban analyst Bill Fulton, who has looked into this issue, concludes we may be seeing a fundamental change in how the economy operates. “Even though there may not be jobs in the conventional sense, there is still work,” Fulton notes. “That’s the whole idea of the 1099 economy. It’s just a different way of organizing the economy.”

    If the 1099 economy is the wave of the future, which regions and industries are currently at the forefront? We turned to EMSI for the data. We looked at the change in self-employment numbers for the nation’s 30 largest metropolitan statistical areas from 2001 to the present, and also from 2008, when the economy first nosedived and people started to scramble.

    The results of EMSI’s research are fascinating, and somewhat surprising, perhaps giving us a glimpse of where the future of economic growth may be taking shape. The biggest changes have taken place in four metro areas where the number of self-employed workers expanded over 10% growth between 2008 and 2012. Two of them, Houston and Seattle, have done very well in our previous rankings of economic performance, and the other two, Phoenix and Riverside– San Bernardino, Calif., suffered grievously from the housing bubble.

    In the case of Houston, its 12% rise in the number of self-employed workers reflects not only widening economic opportunity, but also structural changes in the energy industry, the metro area’s prime economic driver. Since 2005, self-employment in the energy industry has grown 35% (and a remarkable 75% for support activities for oil and gas operations). At least part of this influx, EMSI suggests, could be attributed to land owners cashing in on royalties after leasing their property for drilling, but also to the demand for the increasingly specialized, and often high-tech, services required by that industry.

    The entrepreneurial drive in Houston is clearly not a response to economic disaster – the city has a culture that encourages striking out on your own, and low costs and lighter regulation make it easier. Indeed over the past decade, the Texas powerhouse also led the nation in the growth of its 1099 economy, which expanded by a remarkable 51%.

    Like the energy industry, the burgeoning high-tech sector also has become more dependent on the 1099 economy. Encompassing people writing apps, doing technical consulting,  and working in the information sector, the numbers have surged over the past five years. This may help explain the double-digit increase in self-employment over the past five years in Seattle (up 10%) and San Jose (up 11%). In some cases this may be young people working on their own; in others it could be older techies who may have lost full-time jobs but are now consulting.

    Perhaps the most intriguing shift to the 1099 economy can be found not in hotspots like Silicon Valley, but in areas pummeled in the “housing bust” that are only now showing signs of recovery. This includes two areas, Phoenix and San Bernardino-Riverside, Calif., usually disdained by “creative class” pundits as backwaters, that have seen their number of self-employed grow 12% since 2008.

    One contributing factor may be the migration of people to these areas from Southern California, says Rob Lang, a leading expert on economic trends who teaches at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. For much of the second half of the 20th century, Southern California was, as historian Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute aptly put it, the nation’s “capitalist dynamo.” Unlike Houston with energy, or Seattle and San Jose with technology, the Southern California economy was broad based, spanning everything from aerospace and garments to homebuilding  and fast-food restaurants.

    Over the past generation, many heirs to this entrepreneurial tradition have decamped to the Sonoran Desert region, which stretches from California into Arizona, Lang says.

    Of course, Lang notes, Phoenix has long been disdained by urban aesthetes as environmentally “unsustainable”and doomed to economic decline. Its fate, according to accounts during the worst of the housing crash, was to be surrounded by “zombie sub-divisions” that would remain empty for years, perhaps permanently as the desert encroached.

    Yet as the strong self-employment numbers demonstrate, Phoenix may well be on its way to recovery. Brookings recently estimated its rebound since the Great Recession to be the fifth best of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. Its unemployment rate has dropped from 12% in 2010 to around 7.5% in May 2012. Bankruptcies have fallen dramatically and the housing market is clearly on the mend.

    One clear sign of improvement is foreclosures have dropped 53% over the past year and are now below the national average.   Meanwhile net migration into Phoenix as well as the rest of Arizona is once again on the rise.

    This recovery, notes local economist Elliot Pollack, follows the typical cycle for Phoenix, led by entrepreneurial activity.  “Greater Phoenix is a small business town,” notes Pollack. ”Historically, during periods of growth, there is substantial new business and self employment formation.”

    Phoenix’s self-employment boom suggests that the Valley of the Sun is primed for a comeback. But not all of the top 30 metro areas are seeing anything like this level of new entrepreneurial activity. The 1099 economy has grown at less than half Phoenix’s rate in such “creative”  hotbeds as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. Self-employment is flat in many cities, including St. Louis, Cincinnati and Cleveland, and as actually declined in Kansas City, Chicago and Atlanta.

    It may be too early to declare which economies will finally rebound fully from the ravages of the Great Recession. But for my money, I’d look to those places where people are taking the leap to go out on their own as the ones most likely to reinvent themselves when the economy begins expanding robustly again.

    Rank Region Growth in Self-employed, 2008-2011
    1 Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 12.2%
    2 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 11.8%
    3 Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ 11.5%
    4 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 10.0%
    5 Baltimore-Towson, MD 8.6%
    6 San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX 8.1%
    7 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 6.5%
    8 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 6.3%
    9 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 5.6%
    10 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 4.9%
    11 Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 4.7%
    12 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 4.6%
    13 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL 4.4%
    14 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 4.2%
    15 Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA 4.2%
    16 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 4.1%
    17 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 4.1%
    18 Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA 4.1%
    19 Pittsburgh, PA 2.9%
    20 Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO 2.9%
    21 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 2.8%
    22 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 1.3%
    23 Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH 0.6%
    24 Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN 0.5%
    25 St. Louis, MO-IL 0.3%
    26 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 0.3%
    27 Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 0.2%
    28 Kansas City, MO-KS -0.7%
    29 Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI -2.4%
    30 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA -6.5%

     

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

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Self employment photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: London

    The 2011 census results show that London (the Greater London Authority, which is Inner and Outer London) experienced its greatest percentage population growth in more than 100 years (1891 to 1901). London added nearly 1,000,000 new residents since 2001. That growth, however, is not an indication that "people are moving back to the city." On the contrary, National Statistics data indicates that London lost 740,000 domestic migrants between 2001 and 2011. The continuing core net domestic migration losses have been replicated in other major European metropolitan core areas, such as Milan, Vienna, Stockholm and Helsinki.

    Instead as typical in major European core municipalities, the vast majority of the growth in London has come from net international migration. London added 690,000 residents between 2001 and 2010. This pattern has become more prevalent since European Union enlargement, when Eastern Europeans began moving in much larger numbers to the United Kingdom and other richer areas of the old EU-15.
    London first became the world’s largest urban area in the first quarter of the 19th century, displacing Beijing. At that time, London was approaching 1.4 million residents, living in an urban area of approximately 15 square miles. Today, Inner London, the Outer London suburbs and two rings of exurbs spread 10,500 square miles (27,000 square miles), with a population of 20.3 million. Beijing, meanwhile, has grown so fast that it may once again surpass London in the next decade. However, other metropolitan regions are much larger, such as Tokyo and Jakarta.

    Meanwhile, the urban area (the continuous built up area), circumscribed for more than one-half century by the Greenbelt, appears to have a population of 9.5 million, which would place it 27th in population in the world.

    Over the past century, London has experienced substantial ups and downs in its population and still remains below its 1939 population, even with the large gain over the past decade. Over the same period, Inner London lost millions of its residents and only recently has begun to gain some back, largely due to net international migration gains. Outer London gained in the first half of the 20th century, plateaued and then also gained strongly in the last decade. The exurban areas virtually monopolized growth for most of the post-World War II period (Table) until recently.

    London Region: Population 1891-2011
    Year London Region London (Greater London Authority) Inner London (Historical Core) Outer London (Suburbs) Exurbs (Outside Greenbelt) 1st Exurban Ring (Historical Counties Adjacent to Green Belt) 2nd Exurban Ring
    1891 7,752,000 5,574,000 4,432,000 1,142,000 2,178,000 595,000 1,583,000
    1901 8,931,000 6,507,000 4,898,000 1,609,000 2,424,000 691,000 1,733,000
    1911 11,526,000 7,162,000 5,002,000 2,160,000 4,366,000 2,365,000 2,001,000
    1921 12,071,000 7,386,000 4,978,000 2,408,000 4,684,000 2,553,000 2,131,000
    1931 13,229,000 8,111,000 4,898,000 3,213,000 5,119,000 2,805,000 2,314,000
    1939 8,617,000 4,441,000 4,176,000
    1951 14,832,000 8,193,000 3,680,000 4,513,000 6,635,000 3,891,000 2,744,000
    1961 15,911,000 7,997,094 3,492,881 4,504,213 7,918,000 4,720,000 3,198,000
    1971 17,028,000 7,453,000 3,031,000 4,422,000 9,659,000 5,894,000 3,765,000
    1981 16,644,000 6,713,000 2,498,000 4,215,000 10,035,000 6,127,000 3,908,000
    1991 17,139,000 6,393,000 2,343,000 4,050,000 10,746,000 6,497,000 4,249,000
    2001 18,313,000 7,172,000 2,766,000 4,406,000 11,141,000 6,773,000 4,368,000
    2011 20,256,700 8,164,000 3,222,000 4,942,000 12,092,700 7,318,700 4,774,000
    Sources
    Census except 1939
    Greater London Authority, 1939

     

    The London Region

    The London region is composed of the Greater London Authority (GLA), which includes Inner London, the historical core municipality, covering approximately the same geographical area as the old London County Council from the 1890s to the 1960s and Outer London, the great suburban expanse consisting of detached and semi-detached housing.

    GLA is surrounded by the Greenbelt, established to contain the expansion of the urban area after World War II, and, at least at first, to decentralize London’s unhealthy and overcrowded conditions. Beyond the Greenbelt are the East of England and the Southeast, which are composed of a first exurban ring of historical county areas, adjacent to the Greenbelt, and a second ring of historical county areas in the East and Southeast, beyond the first ring. Virtually all new urban expansion in the London region was forced into the exurbs by the Greenbelt. As a result, all of the London region’s growth (6 million) since World War II has been outside the Greenbelt (Figure 1).

    Inner London

    Inner London has been a population growth miracle over the past two decades. The 2011 population was 3.2 million, up more than 450,000 from 2001 and nearly 900,000 since 1991. However, the 1991 figure of 2.3 million was more than one-half below the 5,000,000 peak reached in 1911. Even though historical core city losses are typical (where geography is held constant), Inner London’s loss was huge, at more double those sustained in Chicago (since 1950) and Paris (since 1921). The core of Inner London was developed as a walking city and expanded substantially with the coming of transit.  At approximately 26,000 residents per square mile (10,000 per square kilometer), Inner London is less than one-half the density of the ville de Paris and far less dense not only than Manhattan but even less dense than the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx.

    Yet despite the recent increases, inner London’s 2011 population is lower than counted in the 1861 census (yes, 1861) Even  with the population increase Inner London lost 390,000 domestic migrants (Figure 2) to other parts of Great Britain between 2001 and 2010 (the detailed 2011 data is not yet available at this level).

    Tower Hamlets, one of London’s 32 boroughs, is an example of this population roller-coaster. Tower Hamlets is located just to the east of the Tower Bridge in Inner London on the north bank of the Thames. It is home to substantial new development spurred by the rapid growth of the financial services industry both in the "square mile" ("city of London) and Canary Wharf. Tower Hamlets grew to 254,000 in 2011, a nearly 80 percent increase from the 142,000 registered in 1981, less than its 1801 population (Note: London Boroughs). But like Inner London, Tower Hamlets used to be much more populous, reaching a record for a London borough at 597,000 residents in 1901. It then lost more than 75 percent of its population over the next 80 years.  

    Outer London

    Outer London, which was combined into the Greater London Council in 1965 (and the Greater London Authority in 2000) also grew strongly, from 4.4 million to 4.9 million and is now at its peak population. Outer London’s population density is 10,000 per square mile (4,000 per square kilometer), approximately the same as the District of Columbia. Like Inner London, Outer London also lost domestic migrants, with a net 310,000 residents leaving for other parts of the United Kingdom (Figure 2).

    The Greenbelt

    Since World War II, the London urban area (principally composed of Inner and Outer London) has been surrounded by the Greenbelt on which development is not permitted. The Greenbelt ranges from 10 to 20 miles wide (25 to 50 kilometers) and covers more than three times the size of the Greater London Authority. The Greenbelt has been cited, along with related policies, with substantially raising house prices and contributing to London’s longer commutes than Paris, where there is no greenbelt.

    Exurban London

    Despite their more modest growth in the last decade, the exurbs have been effective in attracting net domestic migration. From 2001 to 2011, three was a net inflow of domestic migrants of 320,000 (Figure 2). Much of this appears to be people leaving London. During the last year, more than 50,000 residents of London moved to the exurbs. Net international migration to the exurbs had been fairly small earlier in the decade, but increased substantially in the later years. By 2009-2010, two thirds of the London region’s net international migration was to the exurbs, and only one-third to London.

    First Exurban Ring

    The first exurban ring includes the historical counties that border on the outside of the Greenbelt. These areas added approximately 550,000 residents between 2001 and 2011 and reached a new population peak, at 7.3 million.

    Second Exurban Ring

    The second exurban ring includes the counties of the East of England and the Southeast that are outside the first ring. These areas added more than 400,000 new residents, and reached a new peak population of 4.8 million.

    London and England

    In contrast to the 1991-2001 decade, the 2001-2011 decade indicated a significant slowdown in the share of England’s population growth in the London region. In the previous decade, all of England’s growth occurred in the greater London region. In the last decade, 50 percent of England’s growth took place around the capital. Overall, the core of London (Inner London) population has steadily fallen relative to the rest of England England’s while the suburbs and exurbs have grown to include one-third of England’s residents (Figure 3). So as Japan is moving to Tokyo, England is still moving to London, but not nearly so fast.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

    —-

    Note: London Boroughs: The 32 boroughs of London were defined after the creation of the Greater London Council in 1965 (which was abolished in 1986). The Greater London Authority provides data to show the historical population figures for the boroughs, going back to the initial census (1801). The new Greater London Authority was established in 2000, with less power than the previous Greater London Council. The 32 boroughs continue to operate, providing local public services.

    Photograph: London Suburbs (Outer London) by author

  • State of Chicago: The New Century Struggle

    This is the second installment in my “State of Chicago” series. Read part one here.

    Last time I looked at Chicago’s 70s and early 80s horrible struggles followed by rebirth and robust out-performance during the 1990s. Today we turn our attention to the first decade of the 21st century. During the 2000s, Chicago experienced a bit of a two-track performance. Parts of the urban core continued to grow robustly, fueled by the real estate bubble and perhaps the greatest urban condo building boom in America. The culinary, cultural, and other scenes in Chicago only improved. Yet while there was a solid core of health at the center, the overall city and region stumbled badly with aggregate statistics that were, bluntly, awful in most respects. I’ve detailed these elsewhere already so won’t go in depth, but let’s review. These are metro area statistics unless otherwise noted.

    Population

    I already discussed how Chicago got shellacked in the 2010 Census. It was the only one of the 15 largest municipalities in the United States as of 2010 to lose population. The cities of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco hit all time record high populations. Philadelphia and DC grew for the first time since 1950, and Boston continued growing. But Chicago has now rolled back its population clock a hundred years and stands at its lowest population since 1910.

    Chicago’s metro population growth of 4% was less than half the national average, and virtually all of that came at the exurban fringe. Chicagoland ranked 40 out of 51 large metros for population growth, though it did beat New York, LA, and Boston on a regional basis, which is positive.

    International Population

    This previous data was all from previous writings. I want to highlight a couple of other areas of demographic weakness though. First is international population. Chicago’s percentage of foreign born residents is 17.6%, which beats the national average, but trails New York and LA by over ten percentage points. It ranked 5 out of the 10 largest US metros. On a growth basis in foreign born population, Chicago did beat New York and LA. Those three were at the bottom in the percentage growth category, most likely because they all started from relatively high bases of total foreign born population. On a total change basis Chicago ranked 7th, with New York #1, but sick man LA brought up the bottom, a stunning change of fortunes for them.

    The city of Chicago itself seems to have lost its allure to immigrants. The foreign born population of the city actually declined during the 2000s. Even during a decade of huge Hispanic population growth nationally, Chicago barely grew its Hispanic population. The city of Indianapolis, about a third of Chicago’s size, added nearly twice as many total Hispanic residents. To the extent that immigrants now see Chicago as an opportunity zone, it appears to be suburban Chicago.

    Education

    Chicago’s college degree attainment is in the middle of the pack for the top 10, ranking #5. Considering it came from an industrial heritage, I think this is pretty good.



    However, Chicago only ranked 8th out of the top 10 in the growth in population with bachelor’s degrees.



    This hardly suggests that metro Chicago is a talent magnet. If you look at the numbers vs. other large Midwest metros, Chicago is healthy, but not looking like it is pulling away from the pack. I don’t see anything to suggest that Chicago is hoovering up all the college grads in the Midwest.

    Economy

    Chicago lost 323,000 jobs during the 2000s, or 7.1%. The was the worst performance on a percentage basis of any of the 10 largest US metros:



    One of the stats that took some flak from my City Journal piece was that private sector employment in the Loop had dropped by 18.6% during the 2000s. This seems at odds with the massive skyscraper boom and other improvements. This wasn’t my stat. It came from a Chicago Loop Alliance report, and they commissioned a credible analytics firm to do the work, and the data was also reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, so I believe it is solid. A few things to consider:

    – This figure is for the Loop, not the Central Area (a bigger construct). The Loop does have the majority of the Central Area jobs, however.
    – Much of the construction was residential, not commercial. Also, things like the booming Loop U probably brought in more students than jobs.
    – Keep in mind that 2000 was the peak of the dotcom bubble. For reasons I’ll explore later, I believe this hurt Chicago badly. So there’s a tough comp (also why the Bay Area and to a lesser extent Boston look bad on comps vs 2000).
    – Consider major Chicago companies that totally went out of business: Arthur Andersen and Whitman-Hart come to mind.
    – Also consider that pledges of added jobs generally are trumpeted to the sky, while jobs are often cut silently as much as possible.

    Looking at unemployment rate in our Chicago vs. NYC/LA chart from before, we now see that Chicago is no longer winning, though is beating LA:



    Chicago is a large economy, but not a particularly high value added one. Out of the ten largest metros, Chicago ranks 8th in per capita GDP. (Chicago is 3rd among large Midwest metros on this figure)



    Chicago also ranked eighth in real per capita GDP growth over the decade.



    Chicago ranked 5th out of 10 in per capita personal income, beating LA:



    But Chicago ranked only 8th out of 10 in PCPI growth:



    On the whole, this is a rather uninspiring collection of economic statistics for the Windy City, particularly after it did so well in the 1990s.

    Fiscal Crisis

    No discussion of Chicago’s problems in the 2000s would be complete without a review of its fiscal problems. However, as I already gave the numbers in my City Journal article, I won’t repeat them here. If anything, the problem has only gotten worse since that went to press. While Chicago may not be the worst municipality in terms of fiscal issues, Illinois is the worst state, and that will continue to be a drag until it’s addressed.

    Crime

    Among the biggest complaints about my article was that I didn’t address the crime problem in Chicago. Without a doubt, crime is a problem. Murders are up 38% or so just in 2012. The city of Chicago has a much higher murder rate than the cities of New York or Los Angeles. There has also been a national headline grabbing series of high profile attacks in affluent areas like the Gold Coast and Streeterville. The strength of the Chicago Police Department is somewhere between 500-1000 officers short of where it should be.

    I’m not the best equipped person to talk about crime, but I actually think the crime problem is overstated. Yes, it’s serious. The murder rate especially is troubling. But analyses I’ve read suggest that overall crime isn’t spiraling out of control in Chicago. Also, flash mob type attacks are happening across the country, in places ranging from Philadelphia to Portland. This isn’t a unique to Chicago situation. So I don’t want to claim that Chicago’s crime problems are uniquely bad, though they shouldn’t be minimized.

    Without a doubt the incredible collapse in crime in New York perhaps more than any other single factor fueled that city’s comeback, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it were a big factor in that city’s out performance in the 2000s. Mark Bergen cited some interesting research that suggested that for every murder in your city, 70 people move out. If Chicago had matched New York’s crime performance, it would have held steady or even gained population based on this relationship. If true, wow.

    Regardless, public safety is job #1 for any mayor, so Rahm Emanuel is rightly feeling the heat on this even if he can’t necessarily be blamed for what’s going on.

    Schools

    Others have cited Chicago’s poor public school system. Again, I’m not sure Chicago’s schools are any worse than any other big city system, and there are a number of magnet and neighborhood schools that are now attracting the children of the well-off. I’d have to see something that suggested Chicago took a turn for the worse on schools in the 2000s on a comparative basis.

    Conclusion

    There are more statistics that could be given, and if you want them, I suggest reading the very data rich OECD Territorial Review of Chicago.

    On the whole I think it’s pretty clear that there was trouble in Chicago during the 2000s – and more trouble than most large cities experienced during what was a tough decade nationally.

    Some rightly noted that I discuss the divergent performance of Chicago in the 1990s vs the 2000s, but that my structural factors that weaken Chicago were probably the same in both decades. So why the difference? I want people to know I plan to address that in a future post shortly, but next up we’ll have a look at Chicago’s present day strengths before moving on.

    Read part 1 in this series.

    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.

    Photo by smik67.

  • The New Geography Of Success In The U.S. And The Trap Of The ‘New Normal’

    This year’s presidential election is fast becoming an ode to diminished expectations. Neither candidate is advancing a reasonable refutation of the conventional wisdom that America is in the grips of a “new normal” — an era of low growth, persistently high unemployment and less upward mobility, particularly for the working class.

    Certainly recent economic news of slowing growth and job creation bolster the pessimists’ case. But Americans may face far better prospects than portrayed by our dueling presidential mediocrities. Let’s look at those states that have found their own way out of the “new normal,” in some cases reversing all the losses of the Great Recession and then some.

    The states that have added the most jobs since 2007 — Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alaska – are located in a vast energy and commodities corridor extending from the western Gulf to the northern tip of the Continent. New York and Washington, D.C., prime beneficiaries of monetary easing and a growing federal government, have also clawed back.

    But the big winners are in the central energy corridor. Since 2007, Texas has created almost five times as many jobs as New York; California is still down almost 900,000 jobs and Illinois is off close to 300,000.

    This should represent what Walter Russell Mead calls “a new geography of power,” the anointing of new places Americans and business go to find opportunity. One example: five of the six best cities for starting over in 2012, according to TheStreet.com, were in the Dakotas, Utah, Iowa and Nebraska.

    Why the energy and agriculture states? Since the onset of the new century, much of the sustained growth in the world has taken place not in the financial or information capitals, but in regions that produce basic commodities like energy and food. In the high-income world, the consistently best-performing countries since 2008 have also tended to be resource-rich ones such as Norway, Australia and Canada.Blue social policies work best when financed by petro-dollars and minerals sales.

    Domestic and European demand may fall in the next few years, but increasingly global commodity and energy markets are driven by the expanding needs of the major developing countries. This has helped keep energy prices high, particularly for oil. Being good at exploration and drilling has been more profitable than social media. Texas alone has added nearly 200,000 jobs in its oil and gas sector over the past decade and Oklahoma some 45,000. The Lone Star energy sector created twice as many jobs as exist in the software sector in San Jose and San Francisco combined. These jobs have been an outstanding driver of high-wage employment, with an average salary of upwards of $75,000, and located usually in less expensive areas.

    Choice plays an important part in the growth. The energy boom has supercharged the economies of the states that have welcomed this growth, including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska. It has not been much help to New York and California, which are reluctant to crack rocks to extract even relatively cleaner carbon-based fuels like natural gas. In contrast, long-suffering Ohio and Pennsylvania, where there have been significant new finds of shale oil and gas, appear to have decided that Texas, not California, is the model for spurring growth.

    The energy-producing states can look forward to a bright future in the long run. U.S. oil and Canadian reserves now stand at over 2 trillion barrels and constitute more than three times the total estimated reserves of the Middle East and North Africa. Observers such as the New America Foundation’s Michael Lind believe that new discoveries, particularly of natural gas, mean that we might actually be living in an era of “peak renewables,” and at the onset of a “very long age of fossil fuels.”

    Growth of these sectors — along with construction and manufacturing — could prove critical to our beleaguered working class. There’s not much respect among the university-dominated pundit class for people who work with  their hands or have specific tangible  skills. Instead they need to lower their expectations and seek, as Slate recently suggested, to find work “in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class.”

    In this neo-Victorian society, the “new normal” means a society dominated by  “innovative” or “creative” masters and their chosen, lucky servants. Leave your job and family in the Midwest or Nevada to become a toenail painter in Silicon Valley, San Francisco or Boston. Besides losing any sense of one’s independence, it’s hard to see how a barber or gardener can live decently, particularly with a family, in such expensive places.

    This bleak reality may not inevitable, though. In many places construction employment is on the rise from its nadir in 2010. This recovery has been a nationwide phenomena but is, not surprisingly, most evident in growth states like Montana, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and Utah.

    At the same time over the last two years the nation has added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs, led by the industrial states hit hardest by the recession. Though these gains are small compared to the losses earlier in the decade, the growth is encouraging; automakers and other industries already are complaining about severe shortages of skilled labor. Maybe, after all, life as a dog-walker and hostel denizen in Palo Alto is not the best one can hope for if you can make enough to afford a nice suburban house outside Columbus or Detroit.

    The pundit class may be ready to write off the American dream but many Midwest states are working to restore it. Over the past two years Michigan and Ohio have experienced the biggest drop in unemployment of any states in the union; Michigan leads the way with a drop of almost five percentage points, while Ohio comes in second with a nearly three-point decline. Other key Great Lakes battlegrounds—Wisconsin, Indiana and arguably Missouri—have also seen two-point drops in their unemployment numbers.

    Why is this happening? A lot of it has to do with business-friendly state regimes. Unlike Illinois, increasingly the sad sack  of the Midwest, these states have cut taxes, worked to increase the availability of skill training and streamlined regulations. This has allowed them to take advantage of new opportunities.

    Improving the business climate represents the third critical element for overcoming the new normal. Most rundowns of the states with consistently favorable business and tax climates – as judged by executives — start with Texas, Utah and South Dakota. Many states that are recovering best from the recession, like Louisiana, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Arizona, all have been improving their rankings in business surveys over recent years.

    But this should not be seen as an exclusively red state phenomenon. Some blue states as well, notably Washington, have worked hard to keep taxes tolerable and have promoted a rapid expansion of their  industrial sector. Democratic-leaning Colorado, under the leadership of pragmatic Gov. John Hickenlooper, has also strived to main a good business climate and promote growth.

    What works, it appears, is not the mindless embrace of GOP or Democratic ideology, but a model that drives economic growth. It’s not rocket science: sensible regulation, moderate taxes and investments to spur job creation and productivity. “There is no Democratic or Republican way to sweep streets,” legendary New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once remarked and the same is true of economic growth.

    The stories of the successful states tell us the key to success lies  in promoting basic industries like energy, agriculture and manufacturing — which then create business service and high-skilled jobs — combined with a broad agenda favorable to entrepreneurs of all kinds. If only one of our presidential candidates would get the message.

    For more about how states are defying the "new normal," read the 2012 Enterprising States: Policies that Produce report, authored by Joel Kotkin and Praxis Strategy Group.

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

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Auto manufacturing photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Housing Affordability Protests Occurring in “Livable” Hong Kong, Not “Sprawling” Atlanta

    The Economist has published another in its city rating series, under the headline "The Best city in the World." This one was the result of a contest examining ways to elaborate on its rating system. The winner, Filippo Lovato, added a spatial dimension to the ratings, which included a 5 point rating of "sprawl," a pejorative term for the natural expansion of cities (which in this article means urban areas, areas of continuous urban development). Much of the urban planning literature is pre-occupied with combating urban sprawl, though urban expansion continues virtually everywhere around the world, as cities add population and become more affluent.

    Livability for Whom?

    As Jon Copestake, the Editor of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Cost of Living and Livability surveys and I discussed in front of a Property Institute of Western Australia meeting, The Economist livability ratings are not aimed at average resident households, but rather at an international audience, such as corporate executives and corporate relocation services. This distinction can be important.

    Hong Kong was top ranked for livability in the new Economist list. Doubtless this is accurate for well paid executives posted temporarily, who are granted substantial housing allowances by their employers and who can live in luxury condominiums within a short walk or taxi ride to their jobs in Central (the core of the Hong Kong central business district).

    For local residents, livability is measured differently than for jet-setters or corporate executives.

    Hong Kong: Smart Growth Model

    With the developed world’s highest urban area density and lowest automobile market share, Hong Kong beguiles anti-sprawl "smart growth" crusaders, for whom these two characteristics are the "two great commandments."

    The entire  Hong Kong urban form (urban area) is as dense as Manhattan at 67,000 per square mile (25,900 per square kilometer), but is more than twelve times the density of the New York urban area: the city and its “sprawling” surrounding suburbs (5,300 per square or 2,100 per square kilometer). Similarly, Hong Kong is somewhat more dense than the ville de Paris, but seven times the density of the Paris urban area (9,800 per square mile or 3,800 per square kilometer). This hyper-density combined with one of the world’s strongest central business districts give Hong Kong a nearly 80% mass transit share of motorized travel, nearly 10 times that of the New York urban area and more than three times that of the Paris urban area (Figure 1).

    "Livable" Hong Kong?

    To its permanent and unsubsidized residents, though, Hong Kong’s spatial Nirvana does not provide much in terms of livability.

    Excessively Long Commutes Hong Kong’s high density indicates that jobs and houses are relatively close to one another, which should indicate that commute times would be short. Not so. Commutes are among the longest in the developed world – only Tokyo residents take more time to get to work. (Figure 2)

    The average one way commute is 46 minutes in Hong Kong, well above the developed world average of 33 minutes for urban areas over 5,000,000 population. By comparison, commuters in similarly sized Dallas-Fort Worth (26 minutes) and "gridlocked" Los Angeles (27 minutes) get to work much faster. Commuting also takes longer in Hong Kong than in Paris (34 minutes) and London (37 minutes).  Lengthy commutes impose an economic price and make Hong Kong less livable.

    Exorbitant House Prices: Hong Kong’s housing, the largest household budget item, is profoundly unaffordable. The 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey rates Hong Kong as the most costly out of 325 metropolitan areas. The median house price in Hong Kong’s is 12.6 times the median annual gross household income (the "median multiple"), which leaves little more than a pittance in discretionary income for many households. Perhaps this is why Hong Kong’s fertility rate has fallen to rock bottom levels near the lowest on the planet – people cannot afford kids.

    Even during the housing bubble, coastal California never became so unaffordable. Hong Kong housing is nearly twice as costly as San Francisco (6.7 median multiple) and more than four times as costly as Dallas-Fort Worth (2.9), Houston (2.9) or Atlanta (Figure 3).

    Concern about housing affordability has become so intense that it is an issue in public protests, which The Economist reports to have drawn up to 400,000 people earlier this month (link to photo). Exorbitant house prices make Hong Kong less livable.

    "Sprawling" Atlanta

    Things are much different in "sprawling" Atlanta, which The Economist’s spatial list ranks as the worst among the US entries. Atlanta is at the opposite end of the density spectrum from Hong Kong, with the lowest urban population density of any major developed world urban area.

    Short Commutes: Atlanta’s low density would suggest that jobs and houses must be so far apart that commute times are very long. Again, not so. Atlanta commuters have among the shortest travel times (29 minutes) in the world among urban areas of similar size (see Note: Jobs-Housing Balance). Shorter travel times make Atlanta more livable (Figure 4).

    Other similarly sized US urban areas do even better, such as Dallas-Fort Worth (26 minutes) and Atlanta’s leaders know that traffic congestion need to be eased to improve Atlanta’s competitiveness. But the political process politics has offered a dysfunctional plan that would spend more than half of a new tax on mass transit, which is used by only the one percent. Less than one half of the money would be spent on the roads that the 99 percent use (Figure 5). Any strong growth will overwhelm the stingy highway improvements, and if the voters approve the July 31 referendum, Atlanta’s travel time advantage over Hong Kong could narrow.

    Affordable House Prices: Despite being the bane of planning orthodoxy, Atlanta’s has far better housing affordability than Hong Kong. The median multiple is 1.9, compared to Hong Kong’s 12.6. Hong Kongers pay six times as much of their income for their houses (which are also two-thirds smaller than in Atlanta). So far, there have been no protests against Atlanta’s low house prices. Better housing affordability makes Atlanta area more livable.  

    The Hong Kong Model

    Hong Kong’s high density (more than double that of any other large developed world urban area) is an accident of history, the result of geo-politics, not urban planning. Further, China’s impressive new cities are being built at a small fraction of Hong Kong densities. Yet, Hong Kong has given much to the world. Not least is the fact that its market oriented economy served as the model for economic reform which has radically improved livability for hundreds of millions of people in China.

    Further, Hong Kong is attractive as one of the world’s premier tourist destinations. For aficionados of cities, like me, Hong Kong is intensely interesting. It is the ultimate in urbanization. It is a wonderful place to visit and to live – if someone else is paying the bills.

    However, the interplay between Hong Kong’s hyper-dense urban form and its transportation system burdens Hong Kong residents dearly, both in time and money. For them, Hong Kong is hardly a model of livability.

    ——————-

    Note: Commuting in Dallas-Fort Worth: Larger Dallas-Fort Worth has faster average work trip travel times than Atlanta, at 26 minutes, which are principally are aided by its much superior freeway (motorway) systems and arterial street (non-freeway boulevard) systems. Transit carries about one-half the share (0.6%) of travel in Dallas-Fort Worth as in Atlanta.

    Note: Jobs-Housing Balance: One of urban planning’s principal goals is to achieve a jobs-housing balance, wherein jobs and housing are so close that people can walk to work or use transit, minimizing travel times and distances. Hong Kong is best in this, with its small urban footprint. Yet, despite having achieved the ultimate, it takes Hong Kongers much longer to get to work than Atlantans. The comparison of Hong Kong and Atlanta shows this theoretical measure to be of little importance. A better indicator of the jobs-housing balance is practical – how long it takes to get to work.

    Note: Travel Times by Car and Transit: Mass transit has substantially longer average work trip travel times than cars in nearly all of the world metropolitan areas for which data is available. In Atlanta, the average work trip by car (single-occupancy) was 29 minutes in 2007, compared to 54 minutes for mass transit.

    ———-

    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: Kowloon, Hong Kong (by author)