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  • Governments’ Oil Windfall

    We are reading a lot about the windfall coming to consumers due to falling gas prices now that oil is under $50/barrel. But cheap energy also represents a windfall for governments, including governments who are hard pressed for cash.

    The US uses nearly 20% of the world’s energy consumption every year. That spending includes households, businesses, industries and governments. Households in the US spend nearly $450 billion on gasoline alone to fuel their 2.28 vehicles. Energy for transportation represents about 50% of US consumer spending on average and climbs to nearly 70% in the summer when there is more driving. Governments spend money on gasoline, too.

    Not just the federal government, but government at every level – federal, state, county, city – all of which have fleets of cars and trucks that use gasoline.  We could not locate data on fuel spending by state governments for either gasoline or heating/cooling. The Bureau of Economic Analysis tables lump spending at gas stations in with “Other retail” which includes furniture and appliance stores and places like home depot. We did locate the numbers of cars owned by governments and police. Governments in the United States own about 1.5% of all vehicles on the road. That includes military vehicles, cars and trucks owned by the federal, state, county and local government plus police vehicles.


    Data is from www.rita.dot.gov, sourced as www.automotive-fleet.com as of Nov 26, 2013.

    Whether we extrapolate from the number of vehicles and use the “per car” savings estimates or estimate the savings based on the governments’ share of vehicle ownership, we guess that governments across the US will be sharing in at least $1 billion this year. And that is just on gasoline alone.

    They could also be saving on heating bills for real property. The Federal government alone owns almost 400,000 buildings located throughout the country. According to the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, the US Federal government spends up to $610 billion annually on energy consumption. Every 1% drop in the prices could mean a $6 billion windfall for Uncle Sam.

    Don’t be surprised if he expands spending instead of using the savings to reduce the national debt or to balance a budget.

  • World Megacities: Densities Fall as they Become Larger

    There is an impression, both in the press and among some urban analysts that as cities become larger they become more densely populated. In fact, the opposite is overwhelmingly true, as Professor Shlomo Angel has shown in his groundbreaking work, A Planet of Cities. This conclusion arises from the fact that, virtually everywhere, cities grow organically so that they add nearly all of their population on the urban fringe, which has considerably less expensive land. As their physical form of cities (the urban area) expands, the residents per unit of developed area generally falls.

    Previous Analysis

    Two years ago, we analyzed growth patterns among the 23 world megacities that had been described in the Evolving Urban Form series. Megacities are urban areas with more than 10 million residents. This article extends the analysis to the other 11 megacities that will be included in the soon to be published 11th edition of Demographia World Urban Areas.

    Sadly, historical data is simply not available for the most urban areas. Urban areas are designated in some countries, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, India, and the Scandinavian countries. The census authorities in only a few countries, such as the United States and France have produced reliable information over a number of decades.

    Perhaps the most notable historical international effort was that of Kenworthy and Laube, whose global project produced estimates from 1960 through 1990 for a number of urban areas. In some cases, academic efforts have produced consistent urban land area and urban population data for specific cities, such as Lahore, one of the new megacities described below.

    Estimating the Density Dynamics of Cities

    Where historic urban area data is not available, an effective alternative is to compare core area population growth to areas outside the core in the corresponding metropolitan areas. Areas outside the core typically have lower population densities and the addition of more people outside the cores will normally indicate that the urban density is falling. In some cases, this can be indicated by huge core area losses, such as has occurred for decades in London and Paris, as well as Osaka and Mexico City, described in the previous article (see Table).

    Table
    SUMMARY OF MEGACITY URBAN POPULATION TRENDS
    MEGACITY General Growth Pattern
    Bangkok 10 Years: 55% of growth outside core municipality
    Beijing 10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
    Buenos Aires 60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core municipality
    Cairo 16 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core governate
    Chengdu 10 Years: 55% of growth outside core districts
    Delhi 10 Years: 90% of growth outside core districts
    Dhaka 10 Years: 50% of growth outside core municipalities
    Guangzhou-Foshan 10 Years: 75%+ of growth outside core districts
    Istanbul 25 Years: 100%+ growth outside core districts
    Jakarta 20 Years: 85% of growth outside core jurisdiction
    Karachi 20 Years: Estimated density decline 15%
    Kinshasa 20 Years 65% of growth outside core districts
    Kolkata 20 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipality
    Lagos 15 Years: 90% of growth outside core districts
    Lahore 40 Years: 70% urban density decline
    Lima 15 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core districts
    London 110 Years: core districts decline 30% (Inner London)
    Los Angeles 60 Years: 95% growth outside core municipality
    Manila 60 Years: 95% growth outside core districts
    Mexico City 60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core districts
    Moscow 8 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
    Mumbai 50 Years: 98% of growth outside core districts
    Nagoya 40 Years 90% of growth outside core municipality
    New York 56 Years: 45% urban area density decline
    Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto 50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities
    Paris 50 Years: 25% urban area density decline
    Rio de Janeiro 10 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
    Sao Paulo 20 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core municipality
    Seoul 20 Years: 115%+ of growth outside core municipality
    Shanghai 10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
    Shenzhen 10 Years: 70%+ of growth outside core districts
    Tehran 15 Years >95% of growth outside core districts
    Tianjin 10 Years: 85%+ of growth outside core districts
    Tokyo 50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities

     

    Many core municipalities have been expanded to include areas that are functionally suburban, rather than the intense urbanization that was more usual in pre-automobile sectors of the city. This is not just an American phenomenon. In Canada, there are large areas of functional suburbanization (lower residential densities and majority automobile use for motorized transport) in core municipalities, such as Toronto, Ottawa, and Calgary. There are other examples elsewhere in the world, such as Auckland, London, and Rome.

    As a result, functional urban core and suburban characteristics are poorly defined by analyses using municipal jurisdiction boundaries (such as core municipalities versus suburban municipalities).
    Urban core populations and densities are best analyzed using functional urban core and suburban characteristics, such as higher residential densities and unusually high reliance on transit, walking and cycling, as opposed to automobiles.

    The use of census tracts for this finer grained analysis has been undertaken for the metropolitan areas of Canada by Gordon and Janzen. Following their general model, I have applied functional urban core and suburban characteristics at the Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) level in the United States, see From Jurisdictional to Functional Analysis of Urban Cores & Suburbs). A number of issues have been covered in articles (City Sector Model index). One article shows that, among the core municipalities of the major metropolitan areas, those with more than 1,000,000 population, only 42 percent of residents live in functionally urban core districts. Virtually the entire core municipality is functionally urban core in New York, Buffalo, and San Francisco. A number of core municipalities simply have no functional urban core (such as Phoenix and San Jose).

    Megacity Density Trends

    The previous article indicated that population densities were falling in each of the 23 megacities analyzed. A similar conclusion applies to the 11 additional megacities analyzed in this article. All of these trends are indicated in the table.

    Paris: It may come as a surprise that the ville de Paris (the core municipality) accounts for little more than one-fifth of the urban area population and less than 1/20th of the continuously built up land area. Further, the ville de Paris has experienced a population decline as significant as many American core municipalities, dropping from over 2.9 million in 1921 to 2.3 million today. The population density of the Paris urban has dropped by more than one-half since 1954 and by nearly 85 percent since 1900. The inner four districts (arrondissements) have lost nearly three-quarters of their population since 1861. The losses may have started earlier, but comparable earlier data is not available.

    London: The London urban area has just achieved megacity status. London forced much of its post-World War II population growth outside its newly created greenbelt following World War II. Between World War II and the 1990s, the London urban area lost population. Most, but not all of the London urban area is composed by the Greater London Authority (GLA), over which Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have famously presided.

    However there has been a significant population increase since the 1990s. The Greater London Authority recently celebrated a "peak population" day to note having exceeded its 1939 population peak.  Virtually all of London’s metropolitan area (Note 1) growth has occurred outside the greenbelt, in the exurban areas. Approximately 3.3 million residents have been added to the first ring counties abutting the greenbelt between 1951 and 2011. Inner London, which roughly corresponds to the pre-1964 London County Council area, lost more than 450,000 residents in the same period, while Outer London (also in the GLA and inside the green belt) gained more than 400,000.

    However, even with the greenbelt, today’s London urban area covers more land area. At the 2011 census, the London urban area had fallen to nearly 15 percent below the Kenworthy and Laube estimate for 1961. Since 1900, London’s density is estimated to have dropped by two-thirds. Inner London, which roughly corresponds to the pre-1964 London County Council area, remains approximately one-quarter below its 1901 population, even with recent growth. All of the GLA growth has been in outer London.

    Other Megacities: Pakistan’s two largest urban areas, Karachi and Lahore are growing at among the fastest rates in the world, averaging approximately three percent annually. Interpolation of data from academic papers indicates declining population densities in both cities.

    Lagos continues to grow rapidly. More than 90 percent of its recent growth has been in suburban districts, with their lower, but still high, densities. Kinshasa, one of the new megacities, has the fastest growth rate according to United Nations data. Kinshasa is growing over four percent per year, with nearly two-thirds of its recently reported growth outside the densest areas in the core districts.

    Tehran’s core districts are now experiencing only modestly increasing population. Nearly all growth (98 percent) has been outside the core districts.

    China has recently added two cities to the megacity list, Tianjin and Chengdu. Approximately 85 percent of Tianjin’s recent growth has been outside the core districts. In Chengdu, the areas outside the core districts have captured 55 percent of the growth.

    Over the past 40 years, 90 percent of Nagoya’s growth has been outside the core municipality.

    Lima is another new megacity. In Lima, core district population is declining and all growth has occurred in suburban districts over the latest 15 years for which there is data.

    The Limits to Urban Density Declines

    There are limits to urban density declines. As people become more affluent and car use increases, city densities decline toward those of automobile orientation. Once that has occurred, there may be modest density increases, but not sufficient to restore the much higher urban area densities from the past and now found only in pre-automobile urban cores.

    However, as lower and middle income cities, from Lagos to Sao Paulo grow and achieve greater affluence, urban growth is likely to continue to be on the lower density periphery.

    Note: The metropolitan area is the economic form of the city. The metropolitan area includes rural and urban territory from which commuters are drawn to employment in the principal urban area.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Depiction of Lagos built-up urban area

  • U.S. Economy Needs Hardhats Not Nerds

    The blue team may have lost the political battle last year, but with the rapid fall of oil and commodity prices, they have temporarily gained the upper hand economically. Simultaneously, conditions have become more problematical for those interior states, notably Texas and North Dakota, that have benefited from the fossil fuel energy boom. And if the Obama administration gets its way, they are about to get tougher.

    This can be seen in a series of actions, including new regulations from the EPAand the likely veto by the president of the Keystone pipeline, that will further slow the one sector of the economy that has been generating high-paid, blue collar employment. At the same time, housing continues to suffer, as incomes for the vast majority of the middle class have failed to recover from the 2008 crash.

    Manufacturing, which had been gaining strength, also now faces its own challenges, in large part due to the soaring U.S. dollar, which makes exports more expensive. Amidst weakening demand in the rest of the world, many internationally-oriented firms such as United Technologies and IBM forecast slower sales. Low prices for oil and other commodities also threatens the resurgence of mainstream manufacturers such as Caterpillar, for whom the energy and metals boom has produced a surge in demand for their products.

    Left largely unscathed, for now, have been the other, less tangible sectors of the economy, notably information technology, including media, and the financial sector, as well as health services. In sharp contrast to manufacturing, energy, and home-building, all of these sectors except health care are clustered in the high-cost, blue state economies along the West Coast and the Northeast. As long as the Fed continues to keep interest rates very low, and maintains its bond-buying binge, these largely ephemeral industries seem poised to appear ever more ascendant. No surprise then that one predictably Obama-friendly writer called the current economy “awesome” despite weak income growth and high levels of disengagement by the working class in the economy. If Wall Street and Silicon Valley are booming, what else can be wrong?

    Should the whole economy become more bluish?

    One consistent theme of blue-state pundits, such as Richard Florida, is that blue states and cities “are pioneering the new economic order that will determine our future.” In this assessment, the red states depend on an economy based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl. By this logic, growing food for mass market consumers, building houses for the middle class, making cars, drilling for oil and gas—all things that occur in the red state backwaters—are intrinsically less important than the ideas of nerds of Silicon Valley, the financial engineers of Wall Street, and their scattered offspring around the country.

    But here’s a little problem: these industries do not provide anything like the benefits that more traditional industries—manufacturing, energy, housing—give to the middle and working classes. In fact, since 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the information and technology sectors have lost more than 337,000 jobs, in part as traditional media jobs get swallowed by the Internet. Even last year, which may well prove the height of the current boom, the information and technology industry created a net 2,000 jobs. And while social and on-line media may be expanding, having added 5,000 jobs over the last decade, traditional media lost ten times as many positions, according to Pew.

    In contrast, energy has been a consistent job-gainer, adding more than 200,000 jobs during the same decade. And while manufacturing lost net jobs since 2007, it has been on a roll, last year adding more than 170,000 new positions. Construction, another sector hard hit in the recession, added 213,000 positions last year. The recovery of these industries has been critical to reducing unemployment and bringing the first glimmer of hope to many, particularly in the long suffering Great Lakes region.

    These tangible industries seem to be largely irrelevant to deep blue economies. A prospective decline of energy jobs, for example, does not hurt places like California or New York, which depend heavily on other regions to do the dirty work. Overall, for example, California, despite its massive energy reserves, created merely 15,000 jobs since 2007, barely one-tenth as many as in Texas. Energy employment in key blue cities such as New York and San Francisco has remained stagnant, and actually declined in Boston.

    Similarly, a possible slowdown in manufacturing—in part due to an inflated dollar, depressed international demand, and the loss of industrial jobs tied to energy—will affect different regions in varying degrees. Since 2009, the manufacturing renaissance has been strongly felt in traditional hubs like Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Louisville, as well as energy-charged places such as Houston and Oklahoma City. All saw manufacturing growth of 10 percent or more. Meanwhile New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston all lost industrial positions.

    Finally, there remains the housing sector, a prime employer of blue collar workers and the prime source of asset accumulation for middle class families. Sparked by migration and income growth, construction growth has been generally stronger in Texas cities but far more sluggish in New York and California, where slower population growth and highly restrictive planning rules make it much tougher to build affordable homes or new communities. Last year at the height of the energy boom, Houston alone built more single family homes than the entire state of California.

    If you think inequality is bad now …

    The new ephemera-based economy thrills those who celebrate a brave new world led by intrepid tech oligarchs and Wall Street money-men. The oligarchs in these industries have gotten much, much richer during the current recovery, not only through stocks and IPOs, but also from ultra-inflated real estate in select regional areas, particularly New York City and coastal California. As economist George Stiglitz has noted, such inflation on land costs has been as pervasive an effect of Fed policy as anything else.

    Even in Houston, some academics hail the impending “collapse of the oil industrial economy,” even as they urge city leaders to compete with places like San Francisco for the much ballyhooed “creative class.” Yet University of Houston economist Bill Gilmer notes that low energy prices are driving tens of billions of new investment at the port and on the industrial east side of the city. This growth, he suggests, may help offset some of the inevitable losses in the more white collar side of the energy complex.

    The emergence of a new ephemera-led economy bodes very poorly for most Americans, and not just Texans or residents of North Dakota. The deindustrialized ephemera-dominated economy of Brooklyn, for example, has made some rich, but overall incomes have dropped over the last decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Similar patterns of increased racial segregation and middle class flight can be found in other post-industrial cities, including one-time powerhouse Chicago, where areas of  concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years.

    Nowhere is this clearer than in ephemera central: California. Once a manufacturing juggernaut and a beacon of middle class opportunity, the Golden States now suffers the worst level of poverty in the country. While Silicon Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco, have flourished, most of the state—from Los Angeles to the Inland regions—have done poorly, with unemployment rates 25 percent or higher than the national average. The ultra-“progressive” city now suffers the most accelerated increase in inequality in the country.

    Similar trends have also transformed Silicon Valley, once a powerful manufacturing, product-producing center. As the blue collar and much of older middle management jobs have left, either for overseas or places like Texas or Utah, the Valley has lost much of its once egalitarian allure. San Jose, for example, has long been home to the nation’s largest homeless encampment. Black and Hispanic incomes in the Valley, notes Joint Venture Silicon Valley, have actually declined amidst the boom, as manufacturing and middle management jobs have disappeared, while many tech jobs are taken by predominately white and Asian younger workers, many of them imported “techno-coolies.”

    In contrast, the recoveries in the middle part of the country have been, to date, more egalitarian, with incomes rising quickly among a broader number of workers. At the same time, minority incomes in cities such as Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Phoenix tend be far higher, when compared to the incomes of Anglos, than they do in places like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. In these opportunity cities, minority homeownership—a clear demarcation of middle income aspiration—is often twice as high as it is in the epicenters of the ephemeral economy.

    To succeed in the future, America needs to run on all cylinders.

    The cheerleaders of the ephemeral economy often point out that they represent the technological future of the country, and concern themselves little with the competitive position of the “production” economy—whether energy, agriculture, or manufacturing. They also seek to force the middle class into ever denser development, something not exactly aspirational for most people.

    Nor is the current ephemera the key to new productivity growth. Social media may be fun, but it is not making America more competitive or particularly more productive (PDF). Yet there has been strong innovation in “production” sectors such as manufacturing, which alone accounts for roughly half (PDF) of all U.S. research and development.

    What is frequently missed is that engineering covers a lot of different skills. To be sure the young programmers and digital artists are important contributors to the national economy. But so too are the many more engineers who work in more mundane fields such as geology, chemical, and civil engineering. Houston, for example, ranks second (PDF) behind San Jose in percentage of engineers in the workforce, followed by such unlikely areas as Dayton and Wichita. New York, on the other hand, has among the lowest percentage of engineers of major metropolitan areas.

    To be sure, an aerospace engineer in Wichita is not likely to seem as glamorous as the youthful, urbanista app-developers so lovingly portrayed in the media. Yet these engineers are precisely the people, along with skilled workers, who keep the lights on, planes flying and cars going, and who put most of the food on people’s tables.

    The dissonance between reality and perception is most pronounced in California. The state brags much about the state’s renewable sector to the ever gullible media. But in reality high subsidized solar and wind account for barely 10 percent ofelectrical production, with natural gas and coal, now mostly imported from points east, making up the vast majority. In terms of transportation fuels, the state has a96 percent dependence on fossil fuels, again large imported, despite the state’s vast reserves. Los Angeles, although literally sitting on oil, depends for 40 percent of its electricity on coal-fired power from the Intermountain West.

    Equally critical, the now threatened resurgence of the industrial and energy sectors could reverse trends that have done more to strengthen the U.S. geopolitical situation than anything else in recent decades. Foreign dictators can easily restrict a Google, Facebook, or Twitter, or create locally-based alternatives; for all its self-importance, social media has posed no mortal danger to authoritarian countries. In contrast, the energy revolution has undermined some of the world’s most venal and dangerous regimes, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Russia and Venezuela.

    In no way do I suggest we don’t need the ephemeral sectors. Media, social and otherwise, remain important parts of the American economy, and testify to the country’s innovative and cultural edge. But these industries simply cannot drive broader based economic growth and opportunity. Part of the problem lies in the nature of these industries, centered largely in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, which require little in terms of blue collar workers. Another prime issue is that these areas can only import so many people from the rest of country due to extraordinary high housing costs.

    Under current circumstances, the centers of the ephemeral economy such as New York or San Francisco cannot accommodate large numbers of upwardly mobile people, particularly families. These, for better or worse, have been vast gated communities that are too expensive, and too economically narrow, to accommodate most people, except those with either inherited money or elite educations. This is why Texas—which has created roughly eight times as many jobs as California since 2007 and has accounted for nearly one-third of all GDP growth since the crash—remains a beacon of opportunity, and the preferred place for migrants, a slot that used to belong to the Golden State.

    As a country, we stand at the verge of a historical opportunity to assure U.S. preeminence by melding our resource/industrial economy with a tech-related economy. Our strength in ephemera can be melded with the power of a resource and industrial economy. In the process, we can choose widespread and distributed prosperity or accept a society with a few pockets of wealth—largely in expensive urban centers—surrounded by a downwardly mobile country.

    The good news is America—alone among the world’s largest economies—has demonstrated it can master both the ephemeral and tangible economies. To thrive we need to have respect not for one, but for both.

    This piece first appeared at The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • Obama Pushes the Pace of Policy

    With his recent series of executive actions on U.S. policies ranging from climate to energy, immigration and, most recently, Cuba, Barack Obama is working to fulfill his long-held dream of being a “transformative” president. By decisively circumventing Congress with bold decrees, the president has won the plaudits of his core media supporters, with predictable “amens” from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post and from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who described him as a more “transformative” president than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.

    From his earliest days in office, Barack Obama made no secret of his desire to be a “transformational” president. And in Washington’s alternate reality, many in the media still revere Obama, a president with approval numbers in the low 40s, according to RealClearPolitics.com. One giddy CNN commentator even compared our chief executive to “Superman.” Obama insiders have little doubt about his greatness. Former campaign manager Jim Messina calls him not only “transformative” but among the “all-time great presidents.”

    Yet, despite these huzzahs, it seems that voters are less than impressed. One reason: Americans may want some change – and may even be willing to sacrifice some to achieve it – but appear less enthusiastic about being “transformed.” They seem more comfortable with change done through the evolutionary swamp of congressional politics, reaching consensus on important issues and being presidential the old-fashioned way.

    The most recent transformational president, ironically, was George W. Bush. In his case, this was less a matter of ambition (or even narcissism) than a reaction to the events of 9/ll. Bush’s transformational reordering of American foreign and military policy left us with a persistent mess that his successor, and, likely, Obama’s successors, will have to clean up.

    Foreign Policy

    Likewise, it’s hard to see this president’s “transformative” foreign policy ideas as particularly successful, or even well-considered. In many ways, notes Harvard’s Joseph Nye, our best foreign-policy presidents – such as George H.W. Bush or Dwight Eisenhower – are “transactional,” while rejecting what he calls “the cult of transformative leadership” pursued by such idealists as Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

    When he took office nearly six years ago, Obama was determined to “reach out” to the Islamic world. Given his own multicultural background, not to mention his famously silvered tongue, Obama seemed sure to turn the Islamic world into our ally. But, as is so often the case, in reality, the U.S. has become steadily less popular since his election. It appears that Muslims have been no more mollified by Obama’s words, not to mention his drones, than by George W. Bush’s bolder bombs-away interventions.

    Another exercise in transformational futility has been Obama’s much-hyped “pivot to Asia.” He’s ended up pivoting in circles while China begins to construct its own version of wartime Japan’s imperialist “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” As China’s military capacities grow, the president is stripping down, something that terrifies our friends in East Asia.

    Climate Change

    Perhaps no issue has less resonance with ordinary Americans than climate change, ranking consistently at the bottom of voters’ expressed concerns. In survey after survey, economic issues such as unemployment, the economy and the federal budget resonate with voters, while climate change barely registers.

    But among those closest to Obama, and to the gentry liberals who are his primary funders, there is no issue more “transformational” than climate change. After all, only a transformative president, like a modern-day Moses, can keep the waters from rising over us as we flee the evil pharaohs of the fossil fuel industry.

    This is not to say climate is not a concern, even if you are skeptical about some advocates’ more hysterical claims. It is probably a good idea to address carbon emissions, if for no other reason than pollution is bad and that the scientific “consensus,” although far from unimpeachable, is strong enough to suggest taking steps not to overheat the planet. So the question is how to best address this issue, and at what cost.

    Unfortunately, the president’s transformational addiction has led to some poor, and likely counterproductive, decisions. This actually hurts the green cause, as most Americans, according to a recent study appearing in the journal Nature Climate Change, are more interested in adapting to climate change than radically reorienting their lifestyles to prevent it. They may fear a changing climate, but not so much that they want to disrupt their lives in the kind of radical ways suggested by many environmental activists and their business backers.

    One thing Americans are not enthusiastic about is – in the name of climate change – sending more of their jobs to developing countries. Obama’s recent much-ballyhooed pact with China on emissions allows the world’s fastest-growing polluter, with a terrible record on this issue, to reject scrutiny of its efforts to limit carbon emissions until 2030. India, another rising greenhouse emitter, refuses even to set a similarly bogus deadline.

    This all leaves America, and its even more clueless European allies, slouching toward the nirvana of an energy base dependent on “renewables.” In Germany, and here in California, radical steps have raised energy prices and pushed industries to seek out places with less-Draconian regulations. Sadly, neither greens nor the administration has embraced the more evolutionary approach: substituting natural gas for far-dirtier coal. This switch has already helped the U.S. reduce its carbon emissions faster than any major country, far more, indeed, than the self-righteous Europeans, whose expensive and inefficient green policies have left them burning more coal.

    Immigration

    As with climate change and foreign policy, good intentions no doubt underpinned the president’s recent orders affecting undocumented U.S. residents. But the way the measure was carried out – after the election, and without the support of Congress – all but guarantees deeper conflict over immigration policy in the coming years. Although most Americans support some form of legalization, most, including many Latinos, also opposed using executive authority to do so.

    Getting legislation through Congress may well be painful, and slow, but there is something worthwhile in achieving broad support within both parties. This is particularly true when the opposition, as it does now, has a near-record degree of control of the House and a solid majority in the incoming Senate. The Reagan 1986 amnesty plan had its critics, but it allowed this critical issue to be handled in a bipartisan way. Reagan, clearly a more transformative president than either George W. Bush or Obama, still followed the basics of the Constitution, and acknowledged the importance of getting broad congressional buy-in on his policies.

    But, given the imperial manner that Obama employed, immigration policy can be dismissed by some as little more than an effort to expand big government’s – and the Democratic Party’s – client base into the next century. One can argue that this strategy is, indeed, transformational, but in a way that threatens to exacerbate ethnic tensions and worsen the economic plight of citizens – Latino and otherwise – already in the country.

    Back to Evolution

    The president’s bids, without popular or congressional support, to achieve transformation by decree represents a dangerous turn for the entire political process. This is unhealthy in the long term, not only for Republicans and conservatives, but, down the road, likely for liberals as well. Liberals like law professor Jonathan Turley believe his fellow liberals may someday “rue” their support for Obama’s “uber-presidency” when a conservative president, citing the Obama precedent, also rules by decree.

    The overall growth of transformational politics endangers the country. If conservatives sometimes overreach in terms of military affairs or regulations in the bedroom, modern transformational liberalism sees itself as blessed by the gods of science, while, of course, ignoring those things – such as the efficacy of natural gas or the need for GMO foods – that are not compatible with their worldview. These polarized positions leave as many as three in five voters, according to Gallup, wishing for a third party.

    A healthy political system, of course, changes, but needs to do so – outside of a major emergency – at a pace that the population can absorb. Every significant change in recent years – from growing legalization of marijuana and gay marriage to bold experiments in educational reform – has come, as it should, from states and localities. This allows change to occur congruent with the values of specific locales, and go national only when this stance appeals to the majority of legislators and voters.

    As we know from nature, evolution is often messy, and sometimes how it works is surprising. But, with patience and time, natural systems, like political ones, tend to be able to rebalance and adapt. By jettisoning evolution for transformation, President Obama, following a predecessor seen by many as inept, has made this adjustment process far more difficult and contentious than it would otherwise be.

    This piece first appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Barack Obama photo by Bigstock.

  • Roadmap to Surprises of the Rustbelt

    Back in New York, no one quite believed my accounts of urban renewal across the Midwest, through a piece of the Rustbelt, and then back — that St. Louis is the Brooklyn of the heartland, or that even downtown Buffalo has charms. I tended to be on safer ground when I described Targeted small towns in Ohio, or drive-by shootings in Chicago.

    Despite the skepticism I knew I would eventually encounter, my idea was to go intercity with mass transit and to get around locally with my bike. I found that the downtown areas of many Midwestern cities are vibrant, rust free, and often ideal for biking, as well as for hotels, trendy restaurants, and funky businesses.

    It’s on the periphery of these Potemkin-convention cities that the bright lights dim on the porches of ramshackle wooden frame houses. That’s where the new ghettos look less like rundown public housing and more like rural shanties that have washed up in earlier working-class suburbs.

    Does it work to travel from Chicago to New York with a folding bike on trains and buses? Give or take, I managed fine. Amtrak grudgingly accepts folding bikes as normal luggage (it is easier to take a gun on board Amtrak than a full-sized bike), and intercity bus drivers (many are cheerful souls) are indifferent about baggage stowed below.

    The bigger problem in my planning was that few trains other than freights cut across the heartland from St. Louis to Cleveland. While buses do make the connections — say, from Terre Haute to Bloomington, Indiana — many of my departures took place between 5 and 6 a.m., the time that a friend calls o’dark.

    Nor were the intermodal connections seamless. Routinely, I was dumped off the bus at a Hardee’s in Nowheresville. Between Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri, the only place open at lunchtime was an adult superstore, but I hadn’t worked up an appetite for lace underwear.

    Herewith, by city, are some observations from behind the handlebars:

    Chicago: I went all over Chicago on the bike, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s show-homes in Oak Park to the South Side slums (where that weekend twelve people were wounded in assorted shootings). I also made it to the old stockyards, Haymarket Square (of anarchist fame), and the Hyde Park home of President Barack Obama, which now is unpleasantly hidden away behind tall trees, concrete anti-terror barriers, and snarling guards, giving it the air of a Beirut embassy.

    Beyond the elegant Loop, lakefront, university districts, and various solid neighborhoods, Chicago has endless stretches of abandoned warehouses—no man’s lands between the city and suburbs, belts in search of manufacturing.

    I felt better when I found where the Marx Brothers had lived when they were still playing vaudeville; Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood home (when he sported curls in what he famously called that place of “broad lawns and narrow minds”); and a magnificent bike lane that sweeps along Lake Michigan. I even found myself agreeing with former vice president Dan Quayle, who said “It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.”

    St. Louis: Few city downtowns are as pleasant as that of St. Louis, which struck me as having a perfect mix of parks, restaurants, stadiums, hotels, and office buildings converted into residential lofts, many with views of the Mississippi and the Gateway Arch. I biked out as far as Clayton, Missouri, through the incomparable Forest Park, and looped around several universities, hospitals, and museums, all of which add to the city’s infrastructure luster.

    Most of what I saw was white St. Louis, as gracious as a southern plantation, although coming and going I went through northern and eastern satellite suburbs — Ferguson is one of many — where the local economy seems to revolve around selling tires, check cashing, and all-night convenience stores.

    Indianapolis: On the way from St. Louis to Indianapolis, I stopped in Springfield (part of a Lincoln haj) and Terre Haute. My bus into the Indiana capital left me at the “downtown transit center,” a dreary cave of broken vending machines, now that the former railroad station is an elegant hotel.

    The rest of downtown Indianapolis sparkled, and I spent the best day of my travels ducking into the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, drinking coffee on sunny terraces, following bike paths, exploring the canals, and touring the city’s many universities, Butler and Indiana-Purdue among them.

    Only when I went out on the bike that night looking for the boyhood home of writer Kurt Vonnegut did I find the other Indianapolis, which is camped out in dilapidated wooden frame houses or low-rise housing projects, clearly off the convention-city grid. No wonder Vonnegut wrote “So it goes.”

    Canton: So poorly is Ohio served with public transportation that I was forced to rent a car to go from Dayton Trotwood (a sad shopping center where the Indianapolis bus dropped me) to Canton and Cleveland. I stuck mainly to the secondary roads, often clogged with traffic and slow lights. Unless someone can add a dome, Astroturf, and The Gap to Hometown USA, it will be lost.

    Canton was the saddest city on my travels. Not even the presence of the Pro Football Hall of Fame or William McKinleyism can put a positive spin on the vacant lots and boarded-up storefronts.

    Cleveland: I was back on the bike, and loved much of what I saw downtown in the canyons of Art Deco office buildings.

    Cleveland is more of an extended suburb than a city — if not a state of mind with a football team — although it can quickly change from blocks of lakefront mansions to rows of seedy body shops… emphasis here on the word “body”.

    Buffalo: On my night bike ride into the city from Amtrak’s suburban Depew Station, I passed through a series of depressing slums and at one point had to out-sprint a highwayman who wanted to steal my rig. (“Give me that fucking bike,” is how he introduced himself.)

    The new ghetto arose from the old working class neighborhoods; a nether world in the shadows of subsidized convention centers and urban renewal towers. Buffalo at night is a ghost town, although I loved riding north along Delaware Avenue to the state university.

    In upstate New York, I made a loop around the Finger Lakes through such rustbelt stalwarts as Corning, Binghamton, Syracuse, and Auburn. The delight was Elmira, with its local college that has the Mark Twain writing studio in which he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Ithaca is a labyrinth of universities and dead-end streets that gets my vote for the most confusing city grid in America.

    Syracuse at night — on the bike or waiting at the bus station — felt like the set of a sci-fi movie in which everyone has been vaporized. Binghamton aspires to hipness, but, well, it’s Binghamton. At least Auburn has the prison, and at midnight its strange aurora borealis of klieg lights made my bike vest glow like medieval chain-mail.

    A series of buses and commuter trains took me down to New York City. I had booked on Amtrak, but its Lake Shore Limited was routinely seven or more hours late. One conductor blamed the delays on the weather from the previous winter, although my seat mate said impoverished locals robbed the copper from the track signals.

    At the end of my riding, I think I came across as someone as morose as the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who took what he called “a Hoosier holiday,” at a time when, as he wrote, “America was in the furnace stage of its existence.” But I defy anyone who doesn’t take heart from a Lake Erie sunrise.

    Photo by the author: Downtown Cleveland from Lake Erie

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most recently, of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2015. He lives in Switzerland.

  • Bicycles and Race in Portland

    The flashpoint for the gentrification conversation along Portland’s North Williams revolves around the bicycle. The cultural appetite for what the creative class likes and enjoys is in stark contrast to that of the African-American community. “North Williams Avenue wasn’t hip back in the late 1970s. There was no Tasty n Sons. No Ristretto Roasters. No 5th Quadrant. Back then, it was the heart of the African American community. It was wonderfully colorful and gritty.” As the black community saw their own businesses close down through economic disinvestment, they weren’t replaced with new businesses that they regarded as desirable. In the several hours I spent today at Ristretto I have seen roughly a hundred patrons come in and go out, plus others sitting outside on the patios of one of several nearby restaurants. Only three were African-American. As I mentioned earlier, the buildings that surround this coffee shop are home to many African-American families. And yet these new businesses do not appeal to their cultural tastes.

    This all came to a head over a road project to reconfigure North Williams and Vancouver Avenue. Both are one-way roads a block apart that carry a high volume of bicycle traffic. Vancouver’s southbound traffic flows carry cyclists towards the Lloyd Center and downtown Portland and so sees its heaviest usage in the mornings. Williams on the other hand carries northbound traffic away from the city center which means its highest use is in the afternoons and evenings when bicycle commuters are heading away from the city center. But the focal point of all of this controversy is specifically tied to North Williams Avenue because this is where most of the new businesses are coming in.

    A New York Times article featured this stretch of road including one of the business owners who opened up the beloved Hopworks BikeBar. “North Williams Avenue [is] one of the most-used commuter cycling corridors in a city already mad for all things two-wheeled. Some 3,000 riders a day pass by Mr. Ettinger’s new brewpub, which he calls the Hopworks BikeBar. It has racks for 75 bicycles and free locks, to-go entrees that fit in bicycle water bottle cages, and dozens of handmade bicycle frames suspended over the bar areas. Portland is nationally recognized as a leader in the movement to create bicycle-friendly cities.” Other national newspapers and magazines have also picked up on all of the buzz happening along North Williams. In Via Magazine, Liz Crain writes, “With 3,000 commuters pedaling it every day, North Williams Avenue is Portland’s premier bike corridor. Visitors, too, find plenty worth braking for on two blocks of this arterial, including two James Beard Award–nominated chef-owned restaurants and a slew of hip shops and cafés.” Sunset Magazine has several features on North Williams including: “Go green on Portland’s North Williams Avenue: Enjoy a low-key urban vibe thanks to yoga studios, indie shops, and cafes.”

    With images of happy (white) hipsters pedaling bicycles, doing yoga, and eating gourmet food, the nation is given a taste of inner N/NE Portland that is not reflective of the reality of the neighborhood nor the tension surrounding gentrification. These magazines showcase things to see, do, and eat along North Williams with helpful hints like, “Scene: A low-key urban vibe, courtesy of yoga studios and green indie shops and cafes … Dress code: waterproof jacket and jeans with right leg rolled up … Native chic: A waterproof Lemolo bike bag … The Waypost: Creative types come to this coffeehouse for locally produced wine and beer, as well as live music, lectures, and classic-movie screenings.”

    However, not all of the residents are necessarily in favor of these changes taking place. And there are certainly other national media outlets who have picked up on the “other side” of the North Williams story. “Located in a historic African-American community, the North Williams businesses are almost exclusively white-owned, and many residents see bicycles as a symbol of the gentrification taking place in the neighborhood.”

    The tensions of racism and gentrification have culminated in ongoing debates over North Williams’ status as a major bicycle thoroughfare. Sarah Goodyear of The Atlantic Cities (CityLab) writes, “Sharon Maxwell-Hendricks, a black business owner who grew up in the neighborhood, has been one of the most vocal opponents to the city’s plan for a wider, protected bike lane. She can’t help but feel that the city seems only to care about traffic safety now that white people are living in the area. ‘We as human beings deserved to have the same right to safer streets years ago,’ she says. ‘Why wasn’t there any concern about people living here then?’” This picks us on the tension surrounding the North Williams project in general, and in particular the controversy surrounding repainting the traffic lanes to incorporate new designs which cater to the growing number of bicyclists who use this corridor.

    Goodyear goes on to lay out both sides of the controversy:

    Jonathan Maus, who runs the Bike Portland blog and has reported extensively on the North Williams controversy, thinks the city should have stood its ground and gone forward with the project, but wasn’t willing to do so in part because of the political weakness of scandal-plagued Mayor Sam Adams, who has been a strong biking advocate and is closely identified with the biking community.

    “There’s been too much emphasis on consensus,” said Maus. “I’m all for public process, but I also want the smartest transportation engineers in the country on bicycling to have their ideas prevail.”

    Maus, who is white, says the history of North Williams shouldn’t be dictating current policy, and that safety issues for the many people who bike on the street are urgent. “At some point as a city, you have to start planning to serve the existing population,” he said. “The remaining black community is holding traffic justice hostage. It’s allowing injustice in the present because of injustice in the past.”

    In light of this, why is North Williams the flashpoint for controversy? The tension and angst is about more than simply repainting a roadway; it embodies the most visual representation of gentrification in inner N/NE Portland. For longtime African-American residents, as expressed above by Maxwell-Hendricks, she and others felt that they had simply been neglected for decades. This negligence took the form of economics, housing, and general concerns of safety. Their frustration is that it wasn’t until middle-class whites began moving into the neighborhood that these issues began to be addressed and rectified. This notion of systemic racism helped created this area and these same forces are at play in gentrifying this once predominantly black neighborhood.

    The African-American community feels it has been slighted once again. The initial citizen advisory committee revealed the imbalance: “Despite North Williams running through a historically African American neighborhood, the citizen advisory committee formed for the project included 18 white members and only 4 non-white members.” This is why the push for safety along the North Williams corridor has caused such an uproar. “The current debate about North Williams Avenue––once the heart of Albina’s business district––is only the latest chapter in a long story of development and redevelopment.”

    For many in the African-American community the current debate over bike lanes along North Williams is simply one more example in a long line of injustices that have been forced upon their neighborhood. Beginning in 1956, 450 African-American homes and business were torn down to make way for the Memorial Coliseum. “It was also the year federal officials approved highway construction funds that would pave Interstates 5 and 99 right through hundreds of homes and storefronts, destroying more than 1,100 housing units in South Albina.” Then came the clearance of even more houses to make way for Emanuel Hospital. For more than 60 years, racism has been imbedded in the storyline of what has taken place along North Williams.

    For many, the North Williams project is more than repainting lines. As Maus reported, “A meeting last night that was meant to discuss a new outreach campaign on N. Williams Avenue turned into a raw and emotional exchange between community members and project staff about racism and gentrification.” In his article, Maus noted the painful history of Albina as the primary catalyst for the tension today.

    Lower Albina—the area of Portland just north and across the river from downtown through—was a thriving African-American community in the 1950s. Williams Avenue was at the heart of booming jazz clubs and home to a thriving black middle class. But history has not been kind to this area and through decades of institutional racism (through unfair development and lending practices), combined with the forces of gentrification, have led to a dramatic shift in the demographics of the neighborhood. The history of the neighborhood surrounding Williams now looms large over this project.

    It was at this meeting that a comment from one of those in attendance changed the entire trajectory of the evening as the conversation quickly moved away from the proposed agenda. One woman said, “We have an issue of racism and of the history of this neighborhood. I think if we’re trying to skirt around that we’re not going to get very far. We really need to address some of the underlying, systemic issues that have happened over last 60 years. I’ve seen it happen from a front row seat in this neighborhood. It’s going to be very difficult to move forward and do a plan that suits all of these stakeholders until we address the history that has happened. Until we address that history and … the cultural differences we have in terms of respect, we are not going to move very far.”

    The crux of the conflict is not about bicycles nor bike lanes nor even new businesses and amenities. It is about racism. The push for creating a more bikeable and bike-friendly commuter corridor has raised the ire of longstanding residents who had felt neglected and voiceless for decades. “The North Williams case study is an example of the City inadequately identifying, engaging and communicating with stakeholders.”

    Now that more whites are moving in are changes taking place. “Some question why the city now has $370,000 to pour into a project they say favors the bike community while residents for decades asked for resources to improve safety in those same neighborhoods. To the community, the conversation has polarized the issue: white bicyclists versus the black community.” But is this issue completely race-related? Portland has been and continues to expand its bicycle infrastructure throughout the city, not just in N/NE Portland. There are also several other main bicycle corridors that receive a high volume of bicycle commuters, but since they do not go through any ethnic neighborhoods they have not created this much controversy. This does not minimize the tension and angst over the North Williams project; nor does it downplay the role that racism has played throughout the history of that community.

    Note: Footnotes in the original text have been removed. Some hyperlinks have been added.

    This is a condensed chapter excerpt from The Bohemian Guide to Urban Cycling.

    Coffee and bicycles define Sean’s urban existence who believes the best way for exploring cities is on the seat of a bicycle as well as hanging out in third wave coffee shops. Sean is an urban missiologist who works in a creative partnership between TEAM as the Developer of Urban Strategy and Training and the Upstream Collective leading the PDX Loft.

  • Peak Oil, Yes and No

    I have an Australian friend who works on an oil drilling platform off the coast of Tasmania. He sent these photos from his phone. Pretty cool, huh? These photos got me thinking about the Peak Oil meme. For the uninitiated there are two camps on the subject.

    One camp says there’s an unlimited amount of oil, natural gas, and coal in the ground and new technology will always be able to bring it to market. Since global demand is insatiable there will always be money on the table to incentivize new supply. This camp tends to shrug off environmental concerns and puts people and economic growth first.

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    The other camp says there’s a fixed amount of fossil fuel in the earth’s crust and at some point the cost and complexity of wrestling the last sour crumbs to the surface will hit a wall the market can’t bear. Concerns about environmental degradation and social justice loom large in this camp.

    When oil reached $147 a barrel in 2007 the Peak Oil folks felt victorious. They also insisted that record high fuel prices, not merely financial chicanery, precipitated the economic crash of 2008. Today fracking, shale oil, and new deep water discoveries have created a glut of supply with significantly lower energy prices. There’s currently a lot of, “We told you so” from the other side.

    My view on the subject is colored by my experiences growing up during the oil shocks of the 1970’s and the resulting economic repercussions. Those shocks were caused by geopolitics in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. They had nothing to do with any physical lack of oil in the world – just supply chain disruptions. But those disruptions were devastating to my family in ways that many people don’t necessarily remember clearly today.

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    My parents had just purchased their first home in suburban New Jersey the year before the oil crunch hit. I was seven years old. Like many young couples my parents had put every bit of their savings into the down payment and were stretched very thin in terms of the monthly payments. Everyone in our extended family was working class with middle class aspirations so home ownership was at the top of the must-have list. New York City was falling apart back then so they drove an hour and a half south until they found a four bedroom fixer-upper on a quarter acre lot in a good school district that they could afford. The house wasn’t perfect, but my folks were convinced that it could be improved over time with sweat equity. Their mortgage was $203 a month. At the time that was a heavy burden relative to their modest income. (Adjusted for inflation that would be the equivalent of $1,153 today.)

    Economy

    We had oil heat like most people in New Jersey back then. A 300 gallon tank in the back yard would keep the house warm for about a month. From early fall until late spring we burned up six tanks on average per year. When we first moved in heating oil sold for 24¢ a gallon. 24¢ x 300 gallons was $72 (or $409 today). That was the number that my parents used when they put together their household budget before buying the house. At the worst point in the oil crisis heating oil sold for $1.20 a gallon. That’s $360 a tank compared to the mortgage payment of $203 (or $2,045 vs. $1,153 in today’s dollars). Think for a moment about your own mortgage or rent. Now think about what would happen to your personal finances if your utility bill unexpectedly became almost double that sum for half the year.

    At exactly the same time that our household budget collapsed under the weight of that heating bill, the cost of nearly everything else also rose significantly. Oil is used in the manufacture and transport of just about everything from beef and milk to lawn mowers and toilet paper. As fuel prices rose that additional cost rippled through the entire economy at the precise moment people had the least ability to absorb the increases. Consumer demand for many discretionary items collapsed, people lost their jobs, and the overall result was a considerably lower standard of living. That process played out over an entire decade and did serious damage to my family.

    Today most heat in New Jersey comes from natural gas which is cheaper, cleaner, and produced domestically. Problem solved, right? Well… I’m not so sure.

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    The US still imports large amounts of natural gas and oil from other parts of the world – primarily Canada and Mexico along with Venezuela, Columbia, Nigeria, and the Arab nations. These things are priced in a global market so in spite of the “America is the new Saudi Arabia” talk prices can become volatile based on events in other parts of the world. The Bakken shale oil coming out of North Dakota is priced right along with the oil coming out of that oil rig off the coast of Tasmania. If even a small amount of the global oil supply were to be choked off for any reason (the Strait of Hormuz gets shut down due to war, or the Ras Tanura oil terminal is disabled by terrorists) the price of oil would skyrocket worldwide. Natural gas is harder to transport across the seas so that market might appear to be more insulated than the oil market, but if the price of oil jumped it could cause more of those economic ripples that were so troublesome in the ’70s. If you’re unemployed due to an oil shock and you lose your home to foreclosure it may not help that domestic natural gas remains relatively affordable. Peak Oil doesn’t have to be real for me to be concerned about energy and my household security.

    I never ever want to find myself in a similar position as my parents so I organize my affairs as if Peak Oil is a legitimate possibility, regardless of the particulars. Listed below are some of my personal rules. Notice, this isn’t a conservative or a liberal list. There’s no mention of bomb shelters or gas masks or firearms to defend against zombies. Nothing on this list will make anyone poorer or less happy. If life continues to be endlessly prosperous and bountiful no one will be missing out on anything. And by the way, these are all things that our great-grandparents did as a matter of course.

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    Keep debt to an absolute minimum. Live below your means in a smaller less expensive place than you can actually afford. Get that mortgage paid off entirely as soon as possible. Unless you have six kids you don’t really need a 2,600 square foot house with a three car garage and a bonus room. Think about the debt you will take on for a fancy kitchen remodel so you can keep up with the Joneses – and then think about how nice it would be to not have a monthly payment of any kind instead. The fancy kitchen is fine if you can pay cash, but that old Formica might look a whole lot better in a mortgage free home. If the economy gets funky and you lose the house to foreclosure the bank could end up enjoying those granite counter tops while you pack your bags and move in with your crazy brother-in-law.

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    Live in a place where you can actually walk or ride a bicycle to all of your daily needs including work, school, the doctor’s office, the post office… This doesn’t mean you have to give up your car or stop driving. It just means you’ll have options and flexibility. And this doesn’t have to be Manhattan. Lots of small rural towns and some older suburban areas still have these qualities. Don’t let the grand double height entry foyer out in the McMansion subdivision off the side of the highway distract you from what’s really important in life. It ain’t chandeliers. 

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    Figure out how to keep the house heated and cooled with the minimum amount of fuel of any kind. Start with the low hanging fruit by adding lots of insulation. Then think about adding modest extra sources of heat such as a small south-facing greenhouse addition or a back up wood stove. If you have the money you could spring for some technological bells and whistles like solar panels, but that’s very last on the to-do list after the cheaper more effective conservation stuff is done. Remember, Denmark is the most energy efficient, most “green” nation on earth with 20% of it’s power coming from windmills, but the other 80% of their energy still comes from dirty old fossil fuels like coal. They just use it very sparingly. First get your household consumption way, way down. Then think about green power to supply what little you do use.

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    Find cost-effective ways to secure a plentiful supply of water that isn’t dependent on mechanical pumps or distant supplies that you have no control over. Rainwater catchment off your roof is one such option. Water security is especially important for people who live in a desert or a region that suffers from long periods of drought.

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    Pantry storage room


    Keep a really well stocked pantry to help ride out future difficulties. Mine can make a Mormon grandma blush. Maintaining a well stocked pantry is a sensible form of insurance and a hedge against future inflation, unemployment, or temporary shortages.

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    Produce useful things. Plant a big veggie garden and some fruit trees.  Keep chickens. Keep honey bees. Keep meat rabbits. If you have enough space for a dog, then you have enough space for a couple of small dairy goats. If you’re a vegan pacifist you can adjust by ramping up the garden even more. If you’re a skilled hunter you can fill the freezer with venison.

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    Cook. (Nuking a tray of Lean Cuisine doesn’t count.) Learn to bake a loaf of bread from scratch. A pot of bean soup is ridiculously inexpensive and dead easy. If your kids will only eat pizza then learn how to make it at home. In fact, teach your kids how to make it themselves as a family project. This stuff isn’t rocket science. While you’re at it learn to sew or knit or do woodworking. These skills can be rewarding unto themselves as hobbies, and you never know when they might actually become necessary. 

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    Get to know your neighbors and build relationships of trust with like-minded people in your community. These associations can be extremely helpful in a crisis. If Peak Oil never occurs you’ve lived a comfortable, affordable, secure life surrounded by good people. How cool is that?

    John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

  • Looking Back: The Ideal Communist City

    Over time, suburbs have had many enemies, but perhaps none were more able to impose their version than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In its bid to remake a Russia of backward villages and provincial towns, the Soviets favored big cities – the bigger the better – and policies that were at least vaguely reminiscent of the “pack and stack” policies so popular with developers and planners today.

    Some of this took the form of rapid urbanization of rural areas. Under Joseph Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, scores of “socialist cities” were founded near new, expansive steel mills. These steels mills were built to speed up industrialization, in order to produce vast amounts of weaponry. These, notes historian Anne Applebaum, represented the Soviet communists “most comprehensive attempt to jump-start the creation of a truly totalitarian civilization”, by bringing the peasantry into the factories to grow Russia’s working class.   Built from the ground up, these factory complexes, notes Applebaum, “were intended to prove, definitively, that when unhindered by preexisting economic relationships, central planning could produce more rapid economic growth than capitalism”.

    As is sometimes asserted by urbanists today, the new socialist cities were about more than mere economic growth; they were widely posed as a means to develop a new kind of society, one that could make possible the spread of Homo sovieticus (the Soviet man). As one German historian writes, the socialist city was to be a place “free of historical burdens, where a new human being was to come into existence, the city and the factory were to be a laboratory of a future society, culture, and way of life”.

    Elements of High Stalinist culture was evident in these cities; the cult of heavy industry, shock worker movement, youth group activity, and the aesthetics of socialist realism. This approach had no room for what in Britain was called “a middle landscape” between countryside and city. Throughout Russia, and much of Eastern Europe, tall apartment blocks were chosen over leafy suburbs. Soviets had no interest in suburbs of any kind because the character of a city “is that people live an urban life. And on the edges of the city or outside the city, they live a rural life”. The rural life was exactly what communist leaders hoped their country would get away from, therefore Soviet planners housed residents near industrial sites so they could contribute to their country through state-sponsored work.

    With this assumption, Soviet planners made some logical steps to promote density. They built nurseries and preschools as well as theatre and sports halls within walking distance to worker’s homes.   Communal eating areas were arranged. Also, wide boulevards were crucial for marches and to have a clear path to and from the factory for the workers. The goals of the “socialist city” planners were to not just transform urban planning but human behavior, helping such spaces would breed the “urban human”.

    As is common with utopian approaches to cities, problems arose. Rapid development, the speed of construction, the use of night shifts, the long working days, and the inexperience of both workers and management all contributed to frequent technological failures. Contrary to the propaganda, there was a huge gap between the ideal of happy workers thriving in well-managed cities and the reality.  

    If today’s architects sometimes obsess over the quality of production and design, the Soviet campaign to expand dense urbanism was less aesthetically oriented. Less than a year after Stalin’s death, in December 1954, Nikita Khrushchev set a campaign to promote the “industrialization of architecture”. He spoke highly of prefabricated buildings, reinforced concrete, and standardized apartments. He did not care for appearances, instead focusing on just building housing because that is what the people need. Prefab tower blocks, called Plattenbau in German and panelaky in Czech and Slovak, were constructed all over the Soviet Union and their satellite states. Originally, these apartments were to house families working for the state.

    In 1957, a group of architecture academics from the University of Moscow published a book called the Novye Elementy Rasseleniia or “New Elements of Settlement”. This team of socialist architects and planners — Alexei Gutnov, A. Baburov, G. Djumenton, S. Kharitonova, I. Lezava, S. Sadovskij— became known as the “NER Group.”  In 1968, they were invited to the Milan Triennale by Giancarlo de Carlo to present their plans for an ideal communist city. In cooperation with a group of young urbanists, architects, and sociologists, they created an Italian edition of their book under the title Idee per la Citta Comunista.    

    Alexei Gutnov and his team set to create “a concrete spatial agenda for Marxism”. At the center of The Communist City lay the “The New Unit of Settlement” (NUS) described as “a blueprint for a truly socialist city“. Gutnov established four fundamental principles dictating their design plan. First, they wanted equal mobility for all residents with each sector being at equal walking distance from the center of the community and from the rural area surrounding them. Secondly, distances from a park area or to the center were planned on a pedestrian scale, ensuring the ability for everyone to be able to reasonably walk everywhere. Third, public transportation would operate on circuits outside the pedestrian area, but stay linked centrally with the NUS, so that residents can go from home to work and vice versa easily. Lastly, every sector would be surrounded by open land on at least two sides, creating a green belt.

    Gutnov did acknowledge the appeal of suburbia — “…ideal conditions for rest and privacy are offered by the individual house situated in the midst of nature…”, but rejected the suburban model common in America and other capitalist countries. Suburbs, he argued, are not feasible in a society that prioritizes equality, stating, “The attempt to make the villa available to the average consumer means building a mass of little houses, each on a tiny piece of land. . . . The mass construction of individual houses, however, destroys the basic character of this type of residence.”

    The planner’s main concern was ensuring social equality. This was seen in their preference of public transportation over privately owned vehicles, high-density apartment housing over detached private homes, and maximizing common areas. These criticisms of suburban sprawl have some resonance in the   writings by planners advocating “smart growth” today. Both see benefits to high density housing. For one, they argue it is more equitable so everyone, no matter what social class they belong too, can live in the same type of buildings. Some New Urbanists do also like the idea of mixed-income communities. In addition, they both see their ideal community utilizing mixed-use developments, with assuring people easy access to public services such as day care, restaurants, and parks, creating less of a need for private spaces. Similarly, New Urbanists also claim that their planned developments would foster a better sense of community.

    Source: Gutnov, Alexi, Baburov, A., Djumenton, G., Kharitonova, S., Lezava, I., Sadovskij, S. The Ideal Communist City. George Braziller: New York. 1971.

    Of course, it is easy to go too far with these analogies. Even at their most strident, new urbanists and smart growth advocates do not enjoy anything like monopoly of power than accrued to Communist leaders. And also, not all the ideas of new urbanists, and even the creators of the Ideal Communist City, are without merit. The ideas of walkability, close access to amenities and services, are adoptable even in privately planned, suburban developments. But the dangers of placing ideology before what people prefer are manifest, whether in 20th Century Russia or America today.

    Alicia Kurimska is a research associate at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. She is the co-author of “The Millennial Dilemma: A Generation Searches for Home… On Their Terms” and deputy editor of New Geography, a website focusing on economics, demographics, and policy.”

    Lead photo of Krushchev-era apartment buidlings in Estonia, “EU-EE-Tallinn-PT-Pelguranna-Lõime 31” by Dmitry G – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

  • International Housing Affordability in 2014

    The just released 11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows the least affordable major housing markets to be internationally to be Hong Kong, Vancouver, Sydney, along with San Francisco and San Jose in the United States. Honolulu, which should reach 1,000,000 population this year (and thus become a major metropolitan market) was nearly as unaffordable as San Francisco and San Jose. An interactive map in The New Zealand Herald illustrates the results.

    Rating Housing Affordability

    The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey uses the "median multiple" price-to-income ratio. The median multiple is calculated by dividing the median house price by the median household income. Following World War II, virtually all metropolitan areas in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States had median multiples of 3.0 or below. Since that time, housing affordability has been seriously retarded in metropolitan areas that have been subjected to urban containment policies. This includes virtually metropolitan areas of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and some markets in the United States and Canada.

    Housing affordability ratings are indicated in Table 1.

    Table 1
    Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey 
    Housing Affordability Rating Categories
    Rating Median Multiple
    Severely Unaffordable 5.1 & Over
    Seriously Unaffordable 4.1 to 5.0
    Moderately Unaffordable 3.1 to 4.0
    Affordable 3.0 & Under

     

    Table 2 summarizes housing affordability ratings for the 86 major metropolitan areas in the nine nations covered. Apart from China (Hong Kong), the least affordable nation among the major markets is New Zealand, at 8.2, followed by Australia at 6.4. Both nations (and Hong Kong) are rated severely unaffordable. 

    Table 2
    Housing Affordability Ratings by Nation: Major Markets (Over 1,000,000 Population)
     Nation     Seriously Unaffordable (4.1-5.0) Severely Unaffordable (5.1 & Over)    
           
    Affordable (3.0 & Under)  Moderately Unaffordable (3.1-4.0) Total Median Market
     Australia 0 0 0 5 5 6.4
     Canada 0 2 2 2 6 4.3
     China (Hong Kong) 0 0 0 1 1 17
     Ireland 0 0 1 0 1 4.3
     Japan 0 1 1 0 2 4.4
     New Zealand 0 0 0 1 1 8.2
     Singapore 0 0 1 0 1 5
     United Kingdom 0 1 10 6 17 4.7
     United States 14 23 6 9 52 3.6
     TOTAL 14 27 21 24 86 4.2

     

    Least Affordable Major Markets

    Hong Kong registered the highest median multiple out of the 86 major markets and also in the history of the Survey, at 17.0. Vancouver reached 10.6. Sydney had its worst recorded housing affordability, with a median multiple of 9.8. Adjacent metropolitan areas San Francisco and San Jose had median multiples of 9.2, while Honolulu’s median multiple was 9.0. The ten least affordable major metropolitan areas are shown in Figure 1. In nine of these markets, housing was affordable before adoption of urban containment policy (Hong Kong data is not available).

    Affordable Major Markets

    All of the affordable major markets are in the United States. This includes perhaps the most depressed market, Detroit as well as Atlanta, which has spent most of the last three decades as the fastest growing larger metropolitan area in the high income world. At the same time, Atlanta has consistently been among the most affordable. Detroit’s median multiple is 2.0, while Atlanta’s is 2.9.

    Comparing Demographia Results to The Economist and Kookmin Bank

    This year’s edition includes a comparison of housing affordability multiple data from The Economist’s survey of 40 metropolitan areas in China and Kookmin Bank’s survey of major metropolitan areas in South Korea. The least affordable major markets are in China, New Zealand and Australia, all with severely unaffordable median multiples. The most affordable major markets are in the United States and Korea, both rated as moderately unaffordable (Figure 2).

    Perspective

    Hugh Pavletich, of performanceurbanplanning.com and I have published each of the annual editions, which began in 2005. The perspective of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey is that domestic public policy should, first and foremost be focused on improving the standard of living and reducing poverty. This requires policies that facilitate both higher household incomes and lower household expenditures (other things being equal). Housing costs are usually the largest component of household expenditure and it is therefore important that public policy both encourage and preserve housing affordability.

    Housing Affordability and Urban Containment Policy

    However, in recent years, land use policy has not been focused on this concern. Conventional urban theory sees urban containment as a necessity. Yet, urban containment policies are associated with the loss of housing affordability, due principally to their rationing of land for development. This effect is consistent with basic economics – restricting supply of a desired good tends to drive up prices – that has been long established.

    Some of the most important contributions have come from Sir Peter Hall, et al (see The Costs of Smart Growth Revisited), Paul Cheshire at the London School of Economics (New Zealand Seeks to Avoid "Generation Rent") and William Fischel at Dartmouth University (The Consequences of Smart Growth). Donald Brash, former governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand attributed the housing affordability losses to "the extent to which governments place artificial restrictions on the supply of residential land" in his introduction to the 4th Annual Edition.

    The Importance of Urban Expansion

    This year’s introduction is provided by Dr. Shlomo Angel, leader of the New York University Urban Expansion Program. Dr. Angel reminds us that "where expansion is effectively contained by draconian laws, it typically results in land supply bottlenecks that render housing unaffordable to the great majority of residents."

    He describes the Urban Expansion Program is "dedicated to assisting municipalities of rapidly growing cities in preparing for their coming expansion, so that it is orderly and so that residential land on the urban fringe remains plentiful and affordable." Urban Expansion Program teams are already working with local officials in Ethiopia and Colombia to achieve this goal. Angel’s previous work documented the association between urban containment policy in Seoul and large house price increases relative to incomes (see Planet of Cities).

    Policies seeking the same goals of plentiful and affordable land on the urban fringe are just as necessary in high income world metropolitan areas.

    As time goes on, the negative consequences of urban containment policy on housing affordability and the standard of living have been increasingly acknowledged. Christine Legarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund said that "supply-side constraints will require further measures to increase the availability of land for development and to remove unnecessary constraints on land use." in a recent statement on housing affordability in the United Kingdom.

    Similarly a recent feature article in The Economist (see PLACES APART: The world is becoming ever more suburban, and the better for it) noted that the only reliable way to stop urban expansion was to stop them forcefully (such as through urban containment policy). Yet, The Economist continued, "But the consequences of doing that are severe" and cites the higher property prices that have been the result:"

    The Economist continued to note the effect of the policy on households: "It has also forced many people into undignified homes, widened the wealth gap between property owners and everyone else…"

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Exurban London

  • Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Sprawl (Sort of)

    I’m a longtime advocate of walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income, transit-served neighborhoods. But lately I’ve been having impure thoughts about suburbia. Let me explain.


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    What often passes for a neighborhood in America is a low grade assemblage of chain convenience stores, big box outlets, franchise muffler shops, multi-lane highways, and isolated cul-de-sacs. Even when it’s physically possible to walk or bike from Point A to Point B it’s not pleasant, safe, or convenient. I bet there are big parts of the town you live in that look like this.

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    Here’s what’s happened to the housing stock in previously desirable post war suburbs. They’ve aged and were passed over in favor of new development farther out on the edge of town. The homes are out of fashion. They’re too small. They don’t have the right modern features. There are questions about the quality of the local schools. And there’s a general perception that the kinds of people who remain may not make good neighbors. These properties sell at significantly lower prices relative to the larger region. It’s often assumed that they’re unlikely to appreciate in value so they’re considered a poor investment.

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    This is what the commercial building stock is like. Cheap disposable plywood and cinder block boxes and industrial sheds set behind a patch of asphalt parking lot. These photos happen to be of Portland, Oregon, but they could be from a thousand other places. They’re all the same. This actually looks a lot like where I grew up in New Jersey.

    Sure, the sleek new Pearl District and Historic Pioneer Square are fashionable and urbane. But the vast majority of people will never live there. Most of Portland, like most of America, is sprawl. Forget what you’ve heard about urban growth boundaries, streetcars, and jack booted liberal thugs who make you live in a shoebox apartment and take away your car. The reality on the ground is that most of Portland is indistinguishable from everyplace else.

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    But here’s the fascinating thing to me – and the source of my recent epiphany about aging sprawl. I always assumed that these neighborhoods would all devolve into the new slums – and many certainly are doing that. Ferguson, Missouri anyone? But it doesn’t have to go that way. These forgotten suburban neighborhoods can just as easily be the new sweet spots for small enterprise and a renewed middle class.

    I stumbled on the intersection of 42nd Avenue and Killingsworth (see all photos above) and thought, “What a crap hole.” But then I started to poke around for a couple of weeks. There’s more going on than immediately meets the eye.

    Here’s the deal. In the 1970’s and 80’s the cheapest real estate was in America’s abandoned downtowns and industrial zones. They were colonized by people looking for freedom – economic freedom from high rents and mortgages, as well as regulatory freedom to do as they wished without the Upright Citizen’s Brigade shutting them down. Now those places have all been picked over by high end developers and transformed into luxury “lifestyle” centers. The same is true of many close-in historic streetcar suburbs like Portland’s Alberta Arts District here. So if you either can’t afford, or simply don’t want, the premium city condo or the deluxe outer suburb McMansion… where do you go to do your own thing on a tight budget?

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    This is Pollo Norte here on a miserable intersection where two busy roads collide. A friend brought me here for take away dinner one night and the food was simple, but spectacularly good and it was served by charming people. We arrived at 6:30 on a Tuesday and the place was packed. We were lucky to get the last whole chicken and some side dishes just as they sold out. The place is open until ten but they were overwhelmed by many more customers than they expected. This was their first month in business and they couldn’t keep up with demand. Aside from the great food, the customers all seemed to know each other and were in good spirits even though there wasn’t enough food to go around. They were celebrating the success of a great new local spot. Good beer and companionship were their consolation prizes. Now the owners need to ramp up production and work with their local suppliers to obtain more of the organic free range ingredients in keeping with their mission statement about quality and regional sustainability. This is a good problem for a new business to have.

    Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 1.01.19 AM Google

    By the way, I pulled this image off Google Street View. This is what the building looked like before the Pollo Norte folks scrubbed it clean, gave it some paint, and infused it with new life. It’s still a piece of crap concrete block bunker, but these buildings can be reinvented to good purpose with the right attitude and community support.

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    Here’s another tiny concrete bunker a few blocks down the road. It’s owned by a woman who runs a 550 square foot commercial kitchen called Dash here. She rents out space to a variety of small scale producers who need an inspected facility in order to comply with health codes. When I dropped in I was able to speak with Nikki Guerrero as she was readying her Hot Mamma Salsa for market in local shops. here. Nikki started out selling small batches of salsa at farmers markets and now has expanded to several local grocers. She’s successful enough to support herself with the salsa. I don’t think Dash was intentionally organized as an incubator per se, but it serves as the next step up after people are ready to graduate from home cooking (Oregon has a cottage food law here) and street vending. This is not only profitable for the woman who owns the building and cost-effective for people who rent space, but it also cultivates community among various small business people as they share the space. The beauty of this business model is that any cheap ugly building in any uninspiring location can work so long as zoning and NIMBYs don’t get in the way. When your neighbors are industrial sheds and no name convenience stores you don’t get any push back.

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    Miss Zumstein’s Bakery across the street here is owned by Anja, a native Portlander who finds it difficult to afford property in the trendy parts of town now that the city has become much more expensive than in her girlhood. She recently opened her bakery/cafe on 42nd Ave. because so many of her friends have recently colonized the neighborhood. Price has pushed people into places to live that they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen otherwise. Now the big task at hand is how to make the ugly traffic corridor a proper walkable Main Street on a tight budget. She said the new Pollo Norte is a great indication of the kinds of small independent businesses she’s working with to carve out a new business zone in an otherwise not-so-great location. Anja was very supportive of the people at Dash (Hot Mama Salsa et al) and was thrilled that a new bicycle shop opened up nearby. Cheap ugly space and lots of enthusiastic like-minded people are their primary resources. 

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    This is Cat Six Bikes here. Two bike guys just opened up shop seven months ago. They were working for someone else in a more established neighborhood and finally decided to do their own thing. There are so many cyclists in Portland that if there’s a three mile stretch without a bike shop it’s actually a problem for a lot of people who need parts and service. They identified this location, realized it was more affordable than other more fashionable parts of town, and decided to fill the need.

    They almost rented the building that the Pollo Norte people are in now, but the current location was ultimately a better deal. The dentist who owns the building and runs his practice next door provided a deep discount on the rent because he lives in the immediate neighborhood and wanted to help establish more independent businesses in the area. The alternative probably would have been a check cashing place or a cell phone outlet. The guys were able to pull together their business and populate their initial stock and equipment for $10,000 which they had in savings. There was no need for a loan. They’re both handy and were able to do the carpentry and interior work for the shop themselves.

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    But here’s the other thing they mentioned that got me exploring the rest of the neighborhood. The guys share a house – one lives with his girlfriend upstairs and the other lives downstairs. The house is nearby in the Cully neighborhood where little post war homes often have pretty large lots. Many neighbors do varying degrees of urban agriculture – some for a livelihood. This is absolutely not an option in the city center.

    Of course they ride their bikes to work since things are relatively close compared to the far more disbursed newer suburbs far from the downtown core. They were confident that over time they would be able to convince the city to implement road diets that would calm car traffic and make it safer and more pleasant to walk and ride bikes in the area. The primary factor in their favor is that highway expansion and car-oriented improvements are fantastically expensive, while bike infrastructure is ridiculously cheap. They also decided that what the neighborhood lacks in big city urban amenities it makes up for in gardening and door-to-door domestic community as well as significantly lower cost. Many of their friends had already moved to the area so they weren’t alone.

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    And what about all those tragic little post war ranch homes? Well, it turns out that they’re radically less expensive than either a condo downtown or a McMansion in the newer suburbs. With a little love they can be transformed into something to be proud of. They’re bigger than an apartment, they have a garden, and they’re a whole lot closer to the city center. They’re also a short walk or bike ride to the emerging 42nd Ave, business cluster.

    I’m not saying that all, or even most, aging suburbs will blossom. But it’s at least a possibility. The real question to me is… what pushes a neighborhood down vs. what lifts it up? So far what I’m seeing is that a dead downtown contributes to even deader close in neighborhoods. A thriving downtown attracts more people to the city and creates an economic incentive for people to get creative with the reinvention of not-so-fabulous nearby areas. So if you want your struggling suburb to succeed, support your downtown.

    John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.