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  • China and the Future of Hong Kong

    Last week Hong Kong’s new leader Leung Chun-ying was sworn into office by Chinese President Hu Jintao. The ceremony coincided with the 15th anniversary of the British handover of Hong Kong to China so there was plenty of rhetoric about ‘strengthening ties with the motherland’. Yet not far from the ceremony, tens of thousands of Hong Kong citizens marched in protest showing discontent with growing inequality and what they perceive as Beijing’s increasing assault on the territory.

    The relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China is complex. Beijing for the most part has kept its promise to uphold the ‘one country, two systems’ mandate. Officially, Hong Kong is considered a ‘Special Administrative Region’ (SAR), which means that it is treated as a separate country from an immigration standpoint and continues to circulate its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar. Hong Kong also retains an independent legal and judicial system inherited from the previous British rulers.

    Most importantly, Hong Kong has avoided the draconian media censorship common on the mainland. A free press is consistent with its reputation as a global center of banking and commerce. Hong Kong’s ease of trade and doing business frequently leads it to being named one of the world’s freest economies.

    So if Beijing continues to hold up its end of the deal, why do so many Hong Kong residents march in protest? The relationship is more nuanced than it appears on the surface. Politically, Hong Kong residents do not have the freedom to elect their leader (CY Leung was appointed by a 1,200-person electoral college made up primarily of pro-China business leaders), although democratic elections are set to commence in the next five years. Underlying this frustration is what Hong Kong residents see as an infiltration of growing mainland influence on the city.

    On the ground, Hong Kong experienced a huge increase in mainland tourists to the city since the handover. Hong Kong doesn’t have the same high tax rate on imported goods that mainland China does, so mainlanders flock to the city primarily for shopping, hunting for bargains on electronics and luxury fashion brands. It is not uncommon to see long queues of mainland tourists in front of shops of famous fashion brands like Gucci, D&G or Prada. The droves of mainland shoppers spending money in Hong Kong are great for the local economy, but many locals decry the constant flow of tourists as invading ‘locusts’.

    Yet more significant than what is happening on the ground is what is taking place high above in the sky. The phenomenon of wealthy mainlanders purchasing real estate in the city has driven   housing prices to astronomical levels, approaching the market just before the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. For well-off Chinese mainlanders, Hong Kong real estate is seen as a safer long-term investment than China’s still somewhat risky real estate market and unpredictable stock market. A severely limited land supply coupled with the fact that a handful of powerful real estate oligarchs control the market for new development means that prices will probably stay high barring another economic crisis.

    Land-use policy is perhaps the most critical factor in determining both the future of Hong Kong and the mainland. As anyone who has been to the city can attest to, Hong Kong has some of the best infrastructure in the world, including a first-class international airport, extensive rail system and a booming seaport. Much of that infrastructure comes from the city’s land-auctioning system, which is the government’s primary source of revenue. This is also what helps keeps taxes low.

    Furthermore, unlike in the U.S., where infrastructure is traditionally financed publicly, Hong Kong’s infrastructure is increasingly built with private funds. For instance, the city’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation, founded as a public entity, went fully private in 2000 and is traded on the Hong Kong’s stock exchange. In addition to operating and maintaining the city’s existing rail system, MTR Corporation is responsible for building new lines. What makes MTR Corporation different from most other transit authorities is that its primary earnings do not come from passenger ticket sales but from developing the land on top of and around its metro stations.

    Cheung Kong Holdings, led by Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-shing, is not only one of the city’s largest property developers, its business interests also include Hutchinson Port Holdings (a port operator that handles 13% of the world’s container traffic) and Hutchinson Telecommunications Limited (which builds and operates mobile phone networks). Sun Hung Kai, another powerful Hong Kong property developer also owns stakes in logistics and telecommunications businesses (although its founders, the Kwok brothers, were recently arrested on corruption charges).

    The mode of urban development in mainland Chinese cities is heavily influenced by Hong Kong. Yet instead of powerful corporations, State-Owned Enterprises (SOE), large entities owned by the government, dominate urban development related businesses. China’s land auctioning system is far from perfect, with well-documented instances of corrupt land seizures and the unfair advantages government backed SOEs have in the bidding process over private developers. But with virtually no property taxes in mainland cities, land sales remain the primary source of revenues for local governments to support infrastructure development.

    There is growing evidence that suggests China plans to alter the direction of its development model in the coming years by consolidating and privatizing its SOEs. Already, Hong Kong property developers are active in the mainland real estate market with Chinese companies eager to learn from their expertise. The cozy relationship between Hong Kong developers and mainland SOEs is a cause for concern by Hong Kong citizens, as they see their local developers as more interested in appeasing Beijing authorities than providing affordable housing for its own citizens.

    Yet this is inevitable. The city of 7 million cannot expect to forever be completely independent of a country of 1.3 billion to which it is now irrevocably attached. This is true even in spite of Hong Kong’s role as an international center of trade.

    Throughout history, Chinese culture survived through its sheer mass and cultural osmosis. When CY Leung gave his inaugural speech last week, it was in Standard Mandarin, the official language of China. Although the citizens of Hong Kong are also Chinese, their official language is Cantonese, a completely different and not mutually intelligible dialect. Leung’s move was seen as a slight to the people he was chosen to serve, yet given who he has to report to in Beijing, it made perfect sense.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is an architectural design professional from California. In addition to his job designing buildings he writes the China Urban Development Blog.

    Follow him on Twitter: AdamNMayer

    Hong Kong photo by BighStockphoto.com

  • The Cities Where A Paycheck Stretches The Furthest

    When we think of places with high salaries, big metro areas like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco are usually the first to spring to mind. Or cities with the biggest concentrations of educated workers, such as Boston.

    But wages are just one part of the equation — high prices in those East and West Coast cities mean the fat paychecks aren’t necessarily getting the locals ahead. When cost of living is factored in, most of the places that boast the highest effective pay turn out to be in the less celebrated and less expensive middle part of the country. My colleague Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group and I looked at the average annual wages in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas and adjusted incomes by the cost of living. The results were surprising and revealing.

    In first place is Houston, where the average annual wage in 2011 was $59,838, eighth highest in the nation. What puts Houston at the top of the list is the region’s relatively low cost of living, which includes such things as consumer prices and services, utilities and transportation costs and, most importantly, housing prices: The ratio of the median home price to median annual household income in Houston is only 2.9, remarkably low for such a dynamic urban region; in San Francisco a house goes for 6.7 times the median local household income. Adjusted for cost of living, the average Houston wage of $59,838 is worth $66,933, tops in the nation.

    Most of the rest of the top 10 are relatively buoyant economies with relatively low costs of living. These include Dallas-Fort Worth (fifth), Charlotte, N.C. (sixth), Cincinnati (seventh), Austin, Texas (eighth), and Columbus, Ohio (10th). These areas all also have housing affordability rates below 3.0 except for Austin, which clocks in at 3.5. Similar  situations down the list include such mid-sized cities as  Nashville, (11th), St.Louis (12th), Pittsburgh, (13th), Denver (15th) and New Orleans (16th).

    One major surprise is the metro area in third place: Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich. This can be explained by the relatively high wages paid in the resurgent auto industry and, as we have reported earlier, a huge surge in well-paying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math-related) jobs. Combine this with some of the most affordable housing in the nation and sizable reductions in unemployment — down 5% in Michigan over the past two years, the largest such drop in the nation. This longtime sad sack region has reason to feel hopeful.

    Only two expensive metro areas made our top 10 list. One is Silicon Valley (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara), where the average annual wage last year of $92,556, the highest in the nation, makes up for its high costs, which includes the worst housing affordability among the 51 metro areas we considered: housing prices are nearly 7 times the local median income. Adjusted for cost of living, that $92,556 paycheck is worth $61,581, placing the Valley second on our list.

    In ninth place is Seattle, which placed first on our lists of the cities leading the way in manufacturing and STEM employment growth. Housing costs, while high, are far less than in most coastal California or northeast metropolitan areas.

    What about the places we usually associate with high wages and success? The high pay is offset by exceedingly high costs. Brain-rich Boston has the fifth-highest income of America’s largest metro areas but its high housing and other costs drive it down to 32nd on our list. San Francisco ranks third in average pay at just under $70,000, some $20,000 below San Jose, but has equally high costs. As a result, the metro area ranks a meager 39th on our list.

    Much the same can be said about New York which, like San Francisco, is home to many of the richest Americans and best-paying jobs. The average paycheck clocks in at $69,029, fourth-highest in the country, but high costs, particularly for housing, eat up much of the locals’ pay: adjusted for cost of living, the average salary is worth $44,605. As a result, the Big Apple and its environs rank only 41st on our list.

    Long associated with glitz and glitter, Los Angeles does particularly poorly, coming in 46th on our list. The L.A. metro area may include Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Malibu, but it also is home to South-Central Los Angeles, East L.A. and small, struggling industrial cities surrounding downtown. The relatively modest average paycheck of $55,000 annually, 12th on our list, is eaten up by a cost of living that is well above the national average. This creates an unpleasant reality for many non-celebrity Angelenos.

    Many of the metro areas that rank highly on our list have enjoyed rapid population growth and strong domestic in-migration. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Austin all have been among the leaders the nation in both domestic migration and overall growth both in the last decade and so far in this one. In the past year, for example, Dallas led the nation with 40,000 net migrants while Austin’s population growth, 4 percent, was the highest rate among the large metropolitan areas.

    In contrast, many of the cities toward the bottom of our list — notably the Los Angeles and New York areas — have led the country in domestic outmigration. Between 2000 and 2009, the nation’s cultural capitals lost a total of over 3 million people to other parts of the country. Although migration has slowed in the recession, the pattern has continued since 2010.

    And how about the future? Income and salary growth has been so tepid recently that few large cities can claim to have made big gains over the past five years; there has been continued volatility as some regions that did worst in the past decade — for example San Francisco — pick up steam. Unfortunately any growth in such highly regulated areas also tends to increase costs rapidly, particularly for housing. In California, this is made much worse by both soaring taxes and a regulatory regime that drives up costs faster than income games.

    Similarly these high prices seem to have the effect of driving out middle-class workers; places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have extraordinary concentrations of both rich and poor workers but fewer in the middle. As we pointed out in our annual job and STEM rankings, many technology, manufacturing and business service jobs are heading not to the hotspots but more to the central part of the country.

    Over time, it seems clear that, for the most part, the best prospects for the future lie in places that both experience income and employment gains but remain relatively affordable. These include some cities that didn’t crack the top 10 of our list but appear to be gaining ground, such as Nashville, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Antonio and New Orleans, a once beleaguered city that has experienced the nation’s fastest per capita personal income growth since 2005.

    Maintaining affordability and a wide range of high-paying jobs many not be as glamorous a metric for success as the number of hip web startups or the concentration of educated people. But over time it is likely to be about as good a guide to future prospects as we have.

    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.

    Houston photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

     

    Note: The table below was updated with 2012 data, so it may not match the narrative above discussing 2011 data. Contact Mark Schill at mark@praxissg.com.

    Metropolitan Pay per Job 2012 – Adjusted for Cost of Living
    MSA Name 2012 Avg. Annual Wage Unadj. Rank 2012 Adj Annual Wage Adj. Rank Rank Change
    Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX $67,279 7 $75,256 1 6
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA $107,515 1 $71,534 2 (1)
    Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI $60,503 16 $64,571 3 13
    Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX $60,478 17 $62,867 4 13
    Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX $58,103 19 $62,679 5 14
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR $53,069 36 $61,780 6 30
    Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC $57,506 20 $61,636 7 13
    Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA $58,836 18 $60,844 8 10
    Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA $67,225 8 $60,237 9 (1)
    Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN $54,683 26 $59,828 10 16
    Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN $53,928 30 $59,787 11 19
    Birmingham-Hoover, AL $52,773 37 $59,563 12 25
    St. Louis, MO-IL $54,112 29 $59,398 13 16
    Columbus, OH $53,634 33 $59,395 14 19
    Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO $62,021 11 $59,068 15 (4)
    Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV $79,852 2 $58,672 16 (14)
    Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI $62,746 10 $58,477 17 (7)
    Pittsburgh, PA $55,004 24 $58,021 18 6
    New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA $54,636 27 $57,151 19 8
    Salt Lake City, UT $53,901 31 $56,978 20 11
    Raleigh-Cary, NC $53,243 34 $56,762 21 13
    Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI $55,434 22 $55,825 22 0
    Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ $53,835 32 $55,788 23 9
    Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI $61,515 14 $55,645 24 (10)
    Oklahoma City, OK $50,641 42 $55,345 25 17
    Jacksonville, FL $51,763 40 $55,126 26 14
    Richmond, VA $55,065 23 $55,010 27 (4)
    Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL $50,462 43 $54,969 28 15
    Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN $50,385 44 $54,945 29 15
    Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT $67,826 6 $54,787 30 (24)
    Kansas City, MO-KS $54,378 28 $54,706 31 (3)
    Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD $63,615 9 $54,372 32 (23)
    Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH $54,701 25 $53,946 33 (8)
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH $73,267 5 $53,363 34 (29)
    San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA $79,137 3 $52,988 35 (32)
    San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX $49,219 47 $52,867 36 11
    Rochester, NY $51,798 39 $52,533 37 2
    Baltimore-Towson, MD $61,542 13 $51,759 38 (25)
    Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY $50,013 46 $50,723 39 7
    Las Vegas-Paradise, NV $50,378 45 $50,328 40 5
    New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA $77,640 4 $50,169 41 (37)
    Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA $56,134 21 $49,414 42 (21)
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC $51,693 41 $49,091 43 (2)
    Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL $52,357 38 $48,012 44 (6)
    Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL $46,481 48 $47,771 45 3
    San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA $61,149 15 $46,822 46 (31)
    Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA $61,634 12 $46,411 47 (35)
    Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA $53,071 35 $42,254 48 (13)
    Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA $46,084 49 $41,000 49 0
    Indianapolis-Carmel, IN $53,839 No data
    Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA $59,200 No data
    2012 wage data: EMSI Class of Worker, 2012.3
    Cost of living data: C2ER

  • Modern Families: Fact from Fiction

    I sometimes struggle with our willingness to look straight through evidence to see only what we want to see, or what we believe we should be seeing. Some recent interpretations of the Australian census and conclusions about housing form and consumer choice regrettably fall into this category.

    Early results from the Australian census may have disappointed some boosters who have actively promoted the view that the typical family household is a thing of the past. The argument has had many forms but usually includes one or more of the following:

    • that single person households are the fastest growing household type; that lifestyle choices mean that more people want to live closer to city centres;
    • that the suburban housing block is an environmental calamity and is no longer even suited to what households want;
    • that high density, multi-level housing with high reliance on public transport is a preferred housing model for the ‘new’ generation of family types.

    And so it goes.

    Sadly for the promoters of rapid social change, the census reveals that the facts aren’t on their side. Indeed, in terms of housing form and family type, nothing much has really changed. There have been movements at the margin and movements in both directions, but nothing I would interpret as conclusive evidence of fundamental social change.

    Housing form

    Across Australia, 73.8% of us live in a detached house. In the last census, it was 74.3%. That’s hardly a seismic shift. In 2011, 14.6% of us lived in apartments compared to 14.7% five years earlier. Townhouses account for 9.9% of households versus 9.3%.  Don’t hold the front page, nothing much has changed.

    There are regional differences. In Sydney, detached housing is at 58.9% from 60.9% while apartments represent 27.6% of households against 26.4% five years earlier. This higher proportion in apartments comes as little surprise given the highly restrictive planning policies of NSW in that period and prior (which included a virtual prohibition on suburban expansion), combined with the long established tendency of Sydney to accommodate more people in apartments than other capitals. But for all the hype about Bob Carr’s ‘brawl against sprawl’ and subsequent planning regimes, the actual change in housing has been minimal. (Instead, what happened is that the industry stopped supplying much of either).

    In Melbourne by contrast, detached housing represents 71.1% of housing from 71.6% five years earlier. Apartments are 16.6% versus 16.4%. Melbourne, and Victoria generally, has had a less deterministic approach to planning whereby detached suburban expansion hasn’t been as vigorously opposed, so the higher dominance of the detached house is no surprise. But it also shows little change over recent times, which doesn’t support the view that a majority of consumers would prefer higher density over lower.

    In Brisbane, detached housing is at 77.6% versus 78.7% five years earlier, which is a very small change and also one of the highest proportions of households in detached housing in the country. Once again, the evidence isn’t pointing to massive social change. It isn’t even pointing to modest change.

    Family type

    Also regrettable for the promoters of widespread social change has been the fact that family types have remained largely unchanged. There are 43% of people living as a couple with children (it was 43.3% five years earlier) and there are 39.5% living as couples without children.  Remember also that ‘couples without children’ includes couples in the pre-family formation stage (young, and starting out in life in the main) and also ‘empty nesters’ (parents whose children have left the family home). A further 16% are single parent families. 

    The Census this time also went into some detail about same sex couples. But set aside the media and political hype and the facts show that the proportion of same sex couples across the country is 0.7%. There’s been a lot of media comment and public policy attention recently about that 0.7%.

    The inevitable conclusion from this evidence is simply that the overwhelming majority of people in Australia remain families who either have children, who plan to have children, or who have had children who have left home, and that this proportion hasn’t changed to anywhere near the extent promoters of social change might have wished.

    This also has implications for housing choice and style. There will be a market for higher density, inner city housing but our policy makers need to keep in mind that the detached home remains the overwhelming preference for families as a place to raise children. That also includes couples planning to raise children (not all of whom live in apartments until the first child comes along – many prefer to plan ahead) and it also includes couples with children who have left home but for whom a third or fourth bedroom is needed for grandparent child minding or children returning to the family home.

    However, the evidence hasn’t stopped some sections of the media or social commentators from reaching entirely different conclusions. “Up not out for housing” declared one writer who wrote: “Australia is increasingly favouring higher density living, according to the 2011 census.” Really? Based on the same evidence above? You’d be seriously pushed to draw that conclusion. Add to this that supply side policies have restricted the choice of detached housing in preference to the promotion of higher density, which means that increasingly housing choice has been restricted, and what there is of it, much more expensive. To conclude anything about ‘favouring’ one type of housing or another, without assessing the supply side policy constraints which limit choice, is a bit like saying more people prefer mangoes in summer than in winter. Duh.

    The Grattan Institute is another that seems committed to turning the evidence on its side to support pre-determined points of view. In this opinion piece, Grattan Institute cities program fellow Peter Mares concluded that: “that despite paying significantly more to put a roof over their head than they were five years ago, many are not ending up in the kind of housing that best matches their preferences.”  Describing the “popular view that we are wedded to the suburban block” as a mismatch, the conclusion is that ‘we’ (being, I presume, the unelected policy makers)  need to have “a serious, if difficult, conversation about what type of housing we should build and where it should be built.”

    Well, that would be difficult if it means imposing a form of housing on a population that might prefer to make its own choices about what type of housing it ‘should’ have and where they ‘should’ be living. 

    These aren’t the only examples and as more Census data becomes available, plenty more commentators will seek to extrapolate minor changes at the margin into claims this represents evidence of fundamental social change. It doesn’t and we can only hope our policy makers know the difference between evidence and a sitcom.

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

    Family illustration by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • rivate development strategy, I id

  • Coney Island’s Invisible Towers

    When crowds thronged Coney Island for the annual Nathan’s hot dog eating contest on July 4th, they found a boardwalk amusement strip that was, for the umpteenth year in a row, undergoing a summer of change and transition.

    There is the new: go-carts and a new roller coaster for the "Scream Zone" that the Luna Park amusement park added last summer; and the start of a new pavilion alongside the Parachute Jump, where the old B&B Carousell (second "l" now enshrined as a historic typo), relegated to storage since 2005 and painstakingly restored at city expense, will once again whirl next spring.

    There is the disappeared and the disappearing: Henderson’s Music Hall, where Harpo Marx made his stage debut, was demolished two winters ago by landowner Thor Equities; this spring, it was replaced by a nondescript one-story structure that, lacking tenants, was instantly boarded up with plywood. And barring an unforeseen reprieve, this will be the final summer for both Denny’s ice cream and the Eldorado bumper cars, each of which is expected to see its Surf Avenue storefront razed for new construction — or at least occupied by new businesses — in the near future.

    It’s another step in the remaking of the Brooklyn beachfront that began in 2003, when the city launched a rezoning process to transform the diminished yet still-popular summer destination into what it hoped would be a year-round hot spot for both residents and entertainment-seekers. In the years since, what seemed like the beach’s inexorable slow slide into decay — a bathhouse burned down one decade, a derelict rollercoaster razed the next —turned into a whirlwind of change, as developers and longtime neighborhood property owners alike began smelling greenbacks in the air, and the 46-year-old Astroland amusement park and many longtime boardwalk businesses were pushed out in the rush to make way for promised glitzier attractions.

    Yet amidst all the noisy mermaid-filled debates that accompanied the rezoning battle, it’s been easy to forget that the amusement district proper — a beachfront strip of rides, carny games and skeeball parlors that over the decades has shrunk to a relict dozen or so acres — was never the main target of the city’s rezoning efforts. Though the storefronts along Surf (including the homes of Denny’s and Eldorado) were slated for high-rise hotels on the city’s rezoning renderings, much of the focus of the Coney Island Development Corporation (spun off by the city Economic Development Corporation in 2003 to oversee redevelopment plans) was to the west, where the city’s stated intent was to bring mixed-use housing and retail towers to the vacant lots that have littered Surf Avenue since they were cleared for urban renewal in the 1960s. Click here to see a map of the rezoned area.

    "It’s a neighborhood with a significant amount of poverty, very few jobs and lots of abandoned lots," said city Economic Development Corporation (EDC) president Seth Pinsky after the rezoning was approved by the City Council in 2009. The hope at the time was that by dropping some high-end residents into Coney Island, as well as new storefronts along Surf Avenue that could host restaurants, movie theaters and other year-round attractions, local residents could finally have access to more than the seasonal jobs that have traditionally accompanied the summer beach season.

    Three years later, though, there is little sign of the condo messiah arriving anytime soon. A single apartment building on the boardwalk at West 32nd Street was begun two winters ago, but today remains unfinished. Nearby, Coney Island Commons, a mixed-income coop complex that will include a new YMCA-run community center, has blown past its original summer 2009 target completion date — thanks to delays in finalizing financing and community agreements, according to developer Jerome Kretchmer — and is now slated for an opening in 2013.

    Among the actual lots rezoned three years ago, meanwhile, Thor’s plywood-bedecked single-story building is the only sign of new construction. In particular, the "Coney West" lots just west of the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium, which in city renderings appeared as modern glass-and-brick towers fronting tree-lined boulevards, remain much as they have for decades: empty expanses of dirt and gravel, used as ad-hoc parking lots if anything at all.

    Some of this, no doubt, can be blamed on the collapse of the housing bubble, which struck just as the city put the finishing touches on its rezoning plan. Yet even if demand for beachfront condos rebounded tomorrow, many longtime residents warn that it would still take years, if not decades, of sewer and electrical upgrades before Bloomberg’s residential dreams could become reality.

    "Before they put up one major building, they basically have to rip up the entire peninsula, and put in stormwater lines and sewage lines," says Ida Sanoff, a former Community Board 13 member who has become the beachfront’s most dedicated environmental watchdog.

    It’s an investment that the city says it’s willing to make — eventually: The EDC is now openly talking about a "30-year plan" for redevelopment. The price tag, according to city figures, could run close to half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive city redevelopment projects of the Bloomberg era. And even then, it’s an expensive gamble by the city that the promised construction will ever arrive.

    * * * *

    If Thor Equities’ Joe Sitt was the developer that Coney fans loved to hate — the man who evicted Astroland, who threatened to build high-rise apartment buildings and hotels right on the boardwalk — then Taconic Investment Partners were the designated good guys. With none of Sitt’s bluster, the real estate investment firm quietly bought up several blocks of vacant lots along Surf Avenue — one, bought by Sitt for $13 million, cost Taconic $90 million less than a year later — and announced plans to work with the city to bring in mixed-use condo towers at a respectful distance from the amusement zone.

    Taconic officials were amiable and readily accessible at the time, but have since all but disappeared from public view; company officials did not return numerous calls and emails for this article, and its websitenotes only that "Taconic is in the process of evaluating the economics of a planned development for some or all of our holdings."

    The city, meanwhile, is moving slowly on the infrastructure upgrades that it will take to support the new buildings, when and if they arrive. The first phase — a set of new storm sewers and ungraded sanitary pipes along W. 15th St. and a short stretch of Surf Avenue — is currently in the design phase, with work set to start in the fall and a target completion date of 2015. Two more phases will expand into surrounding blocks, but not until 2022. A total of $140 million has been budgeted for new sewer and water lines between West 12th Street and West 21st Street, according to EDC.

    But the peninsula’s infrastructure needs, according to longtime locals, go far beyond the few square blocks around the Taconic properties. "Everything south of Surf Ave., there’s no storm water lines in," says Sanoff. "You’re going to have a lot of paved surfaces, and where is all that stormwater going to go?" Already, she says, "If you walk the beach here after a heavy rain, it’s just littered with poop bags" that dog owners have thrown into the sewers — and which have popped back up when stormwater backs up.

    "The whole peninsula is in need of [infrastructure work]," says CB13 district manager Chuck Reichenthal. "You can’t put up highrise hotels, buildings, or anything else, when what exists now has flooding problems."

    Brian Gotlieb, who served as chair of Community Board 13 from 2002 to 2006, says he expects that the city would have moved more quickly on sewer upgrades if developers were champing at the bit to put shovels in the ground. Even so, he worries that sewers are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to needed infrastructure upgrades. "Coney Island has always had problems with brownouts and blackouts," he says, predicting a need for major electrical upgrades. (EDC says these will be handled by ConEd on an as-needed basis.) And then there’s the eventual demand for schools to educate the children of all those condo dwellers if and when they arrive.

    What the total cost would be, no one can say. The city Independent Budget Office projects a total city expense of $277 million on land acquisition, park and boardwalk reconstruction, and other neighborhood capital projects through 2013; add in the $140 million budgeted by the Department of Environmental Protection for sewer work, and the total price tag is at $417 million. (If you include the $39 million Keyspan Park and $250 million Stillwell Avenue subway terminal — first put in motion when Rudy Giuliani was touting Coney Island and as the next Times Square — total public expense on the rebuilding of Coney rises to more than $700 million.) And that’s not even factoring in any increased costs of protecting a newly developed beachfront from the ravages of climate change: In 2007, Rohit Aggarwala, who was then running Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC project to plan for the city’s future growth, called a five-inch rise in water level by 2030 "a moderate scenario"; a University of Arizona sea-level mapping toolprojects that in a worst-case scenario, Coney Island could be reduced to three disconnected islands by the end of this century. (The rezoning does require that local streets be raised to guard against sea-level rise, according to EDC, but specific plans—and budgets—will be worked out only "as sites are developed.")

    This is par for the course in city redevelopment efforts, says Hunter College planning professor Tom Angotti. "I don’t know of anyone who systematically calculates costs in New York City," he says. "The infrastructure that does get built is a very pragmatic response to either developer needs or community opposition." In other cities, he notes, "when you have a significant negative impact, then there’s a whole discussion of whether new infrastructure is needed — here, it doesn’t get discussed."

    * * * *

    If there’s an upside to the city’s deliberate pace, it’s that if the market for Coney condos never recovers to pre-crash expectations, then taxpayers save the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to build the infrastructure to support the influx of new inhabitants. (The $95 million the city spent to relieve Sitt of his stretch of the amusement district, though, is a sunk cost.) The downside is that then the last ten years of upheaval on Coney Island has failed to achieve its primary goal.

    It would also mean the death of hopes that the rezoning drama will ultimately produce jobs for the impoverished blocks to the west, a cul-de-sac known as the West End that sports some of the highest unemployment rates in the city. During the rezoning battle, a coalition calling itself Coney Island CLEAR, made up of representatives of several city unions and a handful of locals (most prominently Rev. Connis Mobley of the West End’s United Community Baptist Church), lobbied for job guarantees for local residents as part of the rezoning.

    Gotlieb, who served on CLEAR’s board, says that the hope was that new development would bring not just jobs — which in Brooklyn as often as not employ people outside the immediate neighborhood— but training opportunities to help residents plan for careers. And while the CIDC has helped some people get building certifications, he says, so far there’s been little to build. "Once the economy took a turn that it did, nobody was doing a heck of a lot."

    For now, the city is publicly professing patience, with an EDC spokesperson saying that an timetable for the Taconic properties "is determined by the private developer," adding, "We’re less than three years into a 30-year redevelopment plan and significant progress has already been made. We’re confident the 2009 rezoning lays out a practical pathway going forward."

    Looked at another way, though, this round of predictions of a reborn Coney Island has been going on for almost a decade, and its biggest booster is only a year and a half from departing City Hall. If the long history of failed plans for the neighborhood — from the post-war urban renewal plans that first created today’s vacant lots to Ed Koch’s late-’70s promises of beachfront casinos — tells us anything, it’s that in Coney Island, nothing is a sure bet.

    This piece originally appeared at The Brooklyn Bureau.

    Photo By Pearl Gabel.

  • About Me

  • Misreferencing Misoverestimated Population

    I know the media confusion story of the past week is all about the momentary misreporting that got the story of the Supreme Court ruling backwards. Yet there was some real misoverestimating across the nation over the latest census numbers that were released recently on municipal population estimates for 2011.

    Here are some recent headlines:

    LATimes: U.S. population in cities growing faster than in suburbs

    Chicago Tribune: Census sees Chicago’s population inching up

    Boston Herald: U.S. population in cities growing faster than in suburbs, figures show

    AP: Big US cities boom as young adults shun suburbs, census estimates show

    Lots more just like those. Guess what… Pretty much all of those stories are wrong, or at the very least baseless when you really look at the data.

    The census data reported was the 2011 population estimates for incorporated places across the US. So basically cities, towns, boroughs, and townships. We went through this yesterday, but if one read the actual census methodology for this particular data they were quite clear. The subcounty (i.e. municipal) population estimates are mostly based on an estimate of the change in housing units at the municipal level. The census changed their methodology on how they computed housing unit change for this particular data and as they explain:

    “To produce subcounty housing unit estimates, we distributed the extrapolated county estimates down to each subcounty area within a county based on 2010 Census proportions.” (emphasis added)

    Which means basically that there was very little 2011 data that went into these numbers. Without using new information it begs the question of how much the results should be interpreted. They basically took the estimated county level population data and allocated it to smaller municipalities based on the 2010 Census. They also just assumed that all the growth was even within counties. That assumption, that center cities grew the same as their immediate suburbs, produced the results being reported on everywhere. There appears to be no other supporting analysis for the assumption, it is just an assumption. Other than that, there is no new information here to lead to the conclusions making their way into the headlines. It may have even tripped up the experts out there because the Census folks explain they changed their methodology just for this particular data release, and are likely to change it again before next year’s update. But you have to read into their methodology notes to realize the changes for just this year. This is all probably an example of why some of us have the bad habit of reading footnotes first.

    Was there any new growth in cities? Not at all. Or at least there is no data in any of this to tell us one way or another. The Census basically took the growth that likely continued to be mostly in the suburbs and just assumed it was spread evenly between center cities and suburbs within counties across the nation. The result was that it all of a sudden appeared cities were growing faster (or in some cases shrinking less) than they have been in other data. In reality, the new patterns were no more than an artifact of the temporary change in the Census Bureau’s methodology for this data. If they had ever used the same methodology in the past, namely taking county-wide population changes and distributed growth evenly across municipalities the results would have come out the same. If these municipal estimates had been calculated this way over the last decade, they would have wound up being very much different from the eventual decennial census enumeration.

    So the headlines may be ok if there is data on ‘cities’ that are in themselves counties, but those areas are few; or in the case of New York City, multiple counties. For most cities are only parts of larger counties. Other than Allegheny County I looked at Cook County which includes Chicago and indeed both the city of Chicago and most all of its Cook County suburbs are being reported as having nearly identical growth rates since 2010. I bet that is no more true there than it isn’t here.

    The only caveat to any of that is that the data reported does seem to have some new 2011 data on group quarters population incorporated into it, as their methodology says it should. So where there was a recent change in the population of college dorms, military barracks, prisoners are related types of institutions then you are seeing population changes different from the county-wide averages. That appears to me the main source of the disproportionate growth the 2011 data is showing for the City of Pittsburgh. So real growth for sure, but I would be careful in explaining its causes.

    So this all may not be as egregious an error as the news cycle we once had in 2000 when population ‘growth’ Downtown was attributed to a big new influx of young people living in the Golden Triangle in the 1990’s. The truth was that the Allegheny County Jail was rebuilt and expanded in the 1990’s and that expansion more than accounted for a nominal reported increase in Downtown’s residential population. The eventual increase in Downtown’s population would come mostly a decade and several hundred million dollars in subsidies later. Nonetheless, this misuse of Census data is certainly more widespread and likely be misreferenced for years to come.

    Chris Briem works at the Program in Urban and Regional Analysis at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research. This article originally appeared at Nullspace on June 29, 2012 and The Urbanophile on June 30, 2012.

    Photo by Flickr user quinn.anya, accessible online.

  • Will New York’s Economy Strangle Itself With Success?

    Big cities have been on a bit of a roll in recent years. But sometimes you can have too much success, as we may be seeing in the case of New York. This week the New York Times reported that finance firms are moving mid-level jobs away from Wall Street to places like Salt Lake City and Charlotte.

    There’s a lot going on here. First, a lot this is driven by New York’s success, not its failure. New York is increasingly valuable as a site of high end production. As a result, lower value activities get squeezed out and replaced with higher ones. Despite the exodus of Wall Street jobs, New York City has been booming, and a stat from last year showed that the city was within 60,000 jobs of its all time employment high. This sort of churn is somewhat normal when high value and lower value economic geographies come into contact within the same physical space, as I noted regarding California in “Migration: Geographies in Conflict.”

    It might be tempting for city leaders to actually celebrate this, but they shouldn’t. In a city that is desperate for middle class jobs, these are white collar middle class positions that are being lost. New York has stunningly high levels of income inequality – Joel Kotkin has noted it is the same as Namibia’s – and this can’t be making it any better.

    Also, is there any precedent for a city being successful and dynamic, over a longer term purely as a production center for ultra-high end activities (with perhaps an associated servant class)? Sure, places like Aspen can do it. Imperial capitals seem to have been able to do something of the sort. Perhaps that’s how New York’s leaders like to see their city, but they are taking an awful risk.

    New York is too concentrated in high end activities already, notably the high end of finance, as Ed Glaeser noted in his article “Wall Street Is Not Enough.” This renders it extremely vulnerable to downturns in that sector.

    It might seem like exporting finance jobs would be part of that re-balancing, but when they are lower end positions, all you are doing is re-concentrating finance at more elite levels. Because to these types of businesses cost is almost literally no object, they have driven the cost of New York real estate through the roof.

    When one industry becomes super-dominant in a neighborhood, Jane Jacobs noted it could lead to a situation she called “the self-destruction of diversity,” where a particular type of user – generally banks – gobble up the land and ultimate sterilize what formerly drew them to the area.

    I wrote about this in regard to Chicago in a speculative piece called “Chicago: Corporate Headquarters and the Global City” in which I note a flow of corporate headquarters back into global cities, albeit reconstituted executive headquarters only).

    This puts the bigger cities in a tough spot. They have to continue to go up the value chain because smaller cities are rapidly eroding their competitive advantage at lower ends. Ultimately we’ll see where this leads but I don’t think it’s healthy in the long term at all. Figuring this out is just one piece of the rebuilding our overall economy for the 21st century that needs to be accomplished.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. This piece originally appeared at The Urbanophile

  • Localism As An Anti-Depressant

    Are we heading into a new era of local solutions?

    Western economists and governments usually measure the health of the job market by unemployment percentages, with unemployment defined as less-than-full-time employment. But the reality for many Americans today is more akin to the rest of the world. Dad may not have a full-time job, but instead works several part-time jobs – auto mechanic when there are customers, store clerk on the weekends, and perhaps furniture repair guy for the neighborhood. Mom probably has a few part-time jobs also: housekeeper at a nearby hotel, caterer, and babysitter. Children old enough to work may do odd jobs.

    This kind of economy may be more prevalent than economists think. It breeds neither hope nor health, especially since most remember the before-times.

    Active resistance to this dark vision likely means more local solutions to economic problems. Instead of the turnaround coming from above, it may instead come from below. Big oil, big finance, and their floundering politicians are not the place to look for answers anymore. This may come as no surprise to anyone who has watched the last four years worth of turmoil, but the media, which is caught up in this game, is missing a much bigger story.

    A good example from recent history is the turnaround performed by Boston’s North End neighborhood. Before World War II, this neighborhood was a classic immigrant community, and considered unhealthy, dangerous, and poor. After the war it was blacklisted by bankers who refused mortgages for home buyers, and the North End was cut off by the Central Artery highway running through the city. It became Boston’s odd, leftover district.

    But a mysterious thing happened to the North End. The nation’s great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, visited it in 1959 with the director of the Boston Housing Authority, who wanted to show her the neighborhood before it was razed in the name of urban renewal. What she saw was a vibrant, robust street life, beautifully restored buildings, tenements that had been repurposed for middle-income flats, and a sense of pride in the neighborhood. After researching the area, she discovered it had the lowest crime rate, disease rate, and mortality rate in the city. Jacobs successfully staved off the bulldozers, and the North End still exists as one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in America today.

    Because the North End was cut off by institutional investors, the neighborhood became economically introverted. Construction work was done on a cash or barter basis, and people made slow, incremental changes to their residences as the money became available. Instead of relying on banks for big credit infusions, North Enders relied on themselves.

    By the standards of mainstream economists like Paul Krugman, the economy seems to be unraveling. A different way to view this phenomenon is to see it as multiplexing: different channels are being created. When only one channel is effectively being considered, other channels are developed without much scrutiny.

    Tippy Perez is a typical example of someone who has tuned in to a local economic channel. As a paralegal for a large Orlando corporation with thousands of employees, Ms. Perez had job security, benefits, and the signature suburban lifestyle of the mainstream economy. Last year, however, she quit her job. “It was a dead-end job that wasn’t worth the fight anymore,” she stated. Between uncertain job security and the increasingly vicious corporate politics that come with the territory at such a large firm, her mainstream economy job simply could not hold her. After she quit Ms. Perez began a neighborhood pet-sitting service. Within a few months her home-based business has taken off, and she will never look back.

    It’s busy and demanding, and lacks such mainstream amenities as a 401K, vacation, and sick leave, and Ms. Perez left a fine professional career for the service industry. This move, however, has much greater appeal to her because she can regulate the pressure. The income, although smaller, comes with less stress. Corporate downshifters starting bike shops and farms have been around for some time, but those are usually stories of escape from an urban location. Ms. Perez is part of an increasing population that has chosen to stay in the same place, but to downshift out of the mainstream into the local economy, sometimes as local as the immediate neighborhood.

    Food trucks are another example. The restaurant world, so overrun by big brand franchises and chains, has been seriously challenged by a new form of dining with little overhead and a spicy, independent spirit. The popularity of these trucks comes from the fatigue we are suffering from the high prices and industrialized food production typical of so many restaurants today. Alert neighborhood organizations are combining food truck rallies with local farmers’ markets and other events to create new forms of public involvement. Without the regulatory burden that comes with public accommodations, food trucks are a sign of this new economy.

    The hallmark of each of these phenomena is its localism. As in the North End, no one is waiting for the big banks to come in and fix things. Instead, people are turning local needs into opportunities at a scale that is small enough that outside help is not needed. Under our very noses, a new economy is being born. Our towns and cities will adapt to this form long before it is noticed by the mainstream. The ingenuity and ambition of individuals will be the factors that bring us out of the Millennial Depression, and create a new economy for the future.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Flickr photo: Boston’s North End by P Medved

  • Pakistan: Where the Population Bomb is Exploding

    In much the developed, as well as developing world, population growth is slowing. Not so in Pakistan according to reported preliminary results of the 2011 Pakistan census. Here population is growing much faster than had been projected. Pakistan’s population stood at 197.4 million in 2011, an increase of 62.7 million from the last census in 1998 (Note 1). The new population is 20 million more than had been forecast in United Nations documents. Some of the additional growth is due to refugees fleeing Afghanistan, but this would not be enough to account for the majority of the under-projection error.  

    Pakistan: Moving Up the League Tables

    As a result, Pakistan has passed Brazil and become the world’s 5th most populous nation, following China, India, the United States and Indonesia. Pakistan’s 11 year growth rate is estimated at 34.2 percent, nearly double that of second ranking Mexico, at 18.2 percent, where the birth rate (as indicated by the total fertility rate) is projected to drop to under replacement rate by the end of the decade. Perhaps most significantly, Pakistan’s growth rate is more than double the rates of India (15.9 percent) and Bangladesh (14.1 percent),which have long had reputations for strong growth (Table and Figure 1). At this growth rate, Pakistan could become the world’s fourth most populous nation by 2030, passing Indonesia.

    Table
    10 Most Populous Nations: 2000-2011: Population Trends
    Rank Nation 2000 2011 Change % Change
    1 China    1,278.0    1,348.0        70.0 5.5%
    2 India    1,071.0    1,241.0       170.0 15.9%
    3 United States       285.5       313.1        27.6 9.7%
    4 Indonesia       216.2       242.3        26.1 12.1%
    5 Pakistan       147.1       197.4        50.2 34.2%
    6 Brazil       176.9       196.7        19.8 11.2%
    7 Bangladesh       131.9       150.5        18.6 14.1%
    8 Russia       146.1       142.8         (3.3) -2.3%
    9 Japan       125.9       126.5          0.6 0.5%
    10 Mexico         97.0       114.8        17.8 18.4%
    Population in Millions
    Population data from UN, except for Pakistan (from Pakistan census)
    2000 Pakistan population estimated from 1998-2011 growth rate.

    Remarkably, while much of the world has seen a reduction in fertility rates and population growth, Pakistan’s growth rate has increased. Between 1991 and 2001, Pakistan grew 25 percent, a rate that increased by more than one third (to 34 percent) between 2001 and 2011 (Figure 2). Pakistan’s total fertility rate (TFR — the number of live births the average woman has in her lifetime) is reported by the UN to be 3.2. This is well above India’s rate of 2.6 and far above the Bangladesh rate of 2.2 (which is only barely above the generally accepted replacement rate of 2.1). Pakistan’s fertility rate is the highest of any of the largest countries and one of the highest in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa.

    Not surprisingly, the average household size is very high, at 6.8. This is a slight decline from the rate of 6.9 in 1998. By comparison, more developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, tend to have average household sizes of from 2.2 to 2.6.

    Karachi: World’s Leading Urban Area by 2030?

    Pakistan’s largest metropolitan region and capital of Sindh province, Karachi, grew even faster. Between 1998 to 2011, Karachi grew from 9.8 million to 21.2 million, adding more than 11 million people (115 percent). No metropolitan region in the world has ever grown so much in so little a period. This 13 year growth rate, adjusted to 10 years, is 8.7 million. Until the last decade, only Tokyo, among the larger world metropolitan regions, had ever grown more than 6 million in 10 years (6.2 million from 1960 to 1970). Between 2000 and 2010, Jakarta grew 7.4 million, Shanghai grew 7.0 million and Beijing added 6.0 million people.  (See Figure 3.)

    Mexico City and Sao Paulo, with their reputations for explosive growth rates, are now expanding at only 3 million (or less) per decade, and their growth is slowing. The fastest growing metropolitan regions in regions in Europe and North America peaked at similar numbers. New York’s greatest growth was 3.4 million between 1920 and 1930, while Los Angeles grew 3.1 million from 1980 to 1990.

    The early census results indicate an urban area (area of continuous urban development, a part of a metropolitan area) population of approximately 19.5 million, which would rank Karachi as the 7th largest in the world. With an urban land area of approximately 310 square miles (800 square kilometers),  Karachi has an average population density of approximately 63,000 per square mile (24,000 per square kilometer), making it more dense than any "megacity" (urban area over 10 million population) except for Dhaka (Bangladesh) at 115,000 per square mile (44,000 per square kilometer) and  Mumbai (80,000 per square kilometer and 31,000 per square mile)

    Karachi’s strong growth now places it among a group of large and rapidly growing urban areas that could challenge Tokyo to become the world’s largest urban area in 20 years. Indeed, should Karachi’s now 6.0 percent growth rate fall to 4.0 percent, Karachi would still be the world’s largest urban area in 2030, followed by Jakarta, given its present growth rate. With Tokyo likely to begin losing population by that time, Delhi may pass Tokyo by 2030 as well.

    At the same time, Karachi is densifying in an unusual way: it is increasing its average household size. While the average household size is dropping modestly in the nation as a whole, Karachi’s average household size rose from 6.7 to 7.3 between 1998 and 2011, meaning that nearly 10 percent of any recent density increase is within housing units (it is not known whether this is due to higher local fertility rates or "doubling up" of family units in housing units).

    As the largest metropolitan area of one of the world’s largest nations, Karachi draws residents from the rest of the nation (and outside) to take advantage of its economic opportunities. Pakistan is not a rich country, with a gross domestic product (purchasing power parity) of less than $3,000 per capita in 2011. This compares generally to rates of $30,000 to $40,000 in the larger European Union economies, $40,000 to $50,000 in Australia, Canada, United States and Hong Kong and $60,000 in Singapore. However, incomes are higher in Karachi than in the rest of the country.

    As huge numbers of people have migrated to Karachi, many have been forced to live in informal settlements (slums), as squatters. In 2000, it was estimated that approximately 5 million of Karachi’s residents (nearly 50 percent) at the time lived in slums.

    Hyderabad

    Hyderabad (Pakistan, not India) is the second largest metropolitan region in the province of Sindh. Hyderabad’s claim to fame is that it is growing even faster than Karachi. Between 1998 and 2011, Hyderabad grew from 1.4 million to 3.4 million, or 129 percent.

    Other Areas

    So far, the reported census results are limited to the provincial data and local data in the province of Sindh. However, in view of the strong growth rates around the nation, it seems likely that the count in the nation’s second largest urban area, Lahore, will surpass 10 million.

    Urban Growth in Pakistan

    Finally, any review of suburban and exurban land use on Google Earth suggests that Pakistan is taking the advice of the United Nations in its State of the World Population Report 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, which said (Note 2):

    (a) expanding their city limits; (b) planning for road grids in the areas of expansion; (c) locating
    the required 25- to 30-metre-wide right-of-way for the infrastructure grid on the ground

    Radiating both from Karachi and Hyderabad, there are new grids of streets for housing and other development of a type that will allow the burgeoning cities of Pakistan to grow and perhaps even breathe at the same time.

    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: Map of Karachi by Wikipedia user Nomi887

    Note 1: This population includes the areas of Kashmir administered by Pakistan (and claimed by India) and excludes the areas of Kashmir administered by India (and claimed by Pakistan).

    Note 2: This concept was pioneered by Professor Schlomo (Solly) Angel of New York University and Princeton University, who proposed that developing world urban areas provide grids of dirt roads to accommodate their rapidly growing populations. This would ensure a better planned urban area and lead to more healthful living conditions (and avoid the necessity of high-density slums or shantytowns).