New Geography

Tag: Los Angeles

  • Rethinking the American Alley – Examples from Baltimore and L.A.

    Dark, narrow and usually neglected, the alleyway is not one of the more beloved landscapes of the American city. Out of sight and mind, the “dark alley” is the unseemly home to noir nightmares and urban misdeeds in the popular imagination – the sort of place where Batman surprises his criminal victims.

    And yet, planners across the nation are beginning to rethink the alley, re-imagining it as urban parkland. The LA Times ran a piece today about the attempts of academics and planners to recreate trash-and-graffiti strewn alleys as green space. The slide show from the article shows this better than the prose.

    In Baltimore, where alleys and murder are more plentiful, gating alleys to decrease crime and increase public space has won public money. Groups like Community Greens are helping to lead the charge.

    An interesting union of groups here: gardeners, academics and neighborhood activists.

  • The Kids are All Ride

    My eldest child tells me that when she arrived at an East Coast college her classmates—many of whom had never visited LA—would ask, “Does your family live in the city, or outside of it?” Her answer, she says, was always long — really long — and of eye-glazing complexity.

    Anyone who has raised kids in the middle-class neighborhoods of multipolar LA might chuckle at the thought of trying to define urban or suburban. In “inner” San Fernando Valley Barbecue Belt communities like Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, your family can call for a Deli delivery at 2AM. You might run into entertainment industry executives or movie craft workers lunching at the local coffee shop; many of their offices and studios are right in the neighborhood, as are numerous other “knowledge worker” businesses. And you’re spitting distance (in LA terms, less than a half hour on the freeway) from downtown Hollywood the Getty, or UCLA. If you judge by the restaurant/ workplace/ club scene/ museum index alone, this part of town should qualify as “city,” not “suburb”.

    But you’re also likely to enjoy an unattached home: ranch (modest or luxurious), bungalow (tiny and deteriorating or spiffy and renovated), or McMansion. If you’re in an apartment, it’s likely to be garden style, not a high rise.

    The best of both worlds. Two geographies, joined at the hip? Not quite: it’s a marriage of convenience with a few downsides. First, you can’t talk about being an LA parent without talking transportation. Whether you are in the less dense communities of the valley, the hills, and the beach areas, or in the more urban-feeling neighborhoods like Hollywood, if you’re an LA parent you are tethered to your car.

    When the suburban car-dependent culture melds with urban fear of crime and nightmarish traffic, the end game can be the worst of both worlds.

    Everyone knows that LA’s geography sprawls, and one result has been limited public transportation. To take the subway, we need to drive to the station (8 miles, in our case), and then find parking. Buses are more prevalent, but often stop far from a journey’s start or finish.

    Think it’s just another LA whine about a walk further than curb to car door? I’m a native New Yorker who—I believe—feels more positively about public transportation than many who write for this site. But I challenge you to walk three quarters of a mile on a 108 degree day with a couple of little kids to catch a bus.

    For adolescents, a certain lack of independence is an inevitable result; for parents, the urge to infantilize is rampant. I can say without exaggeration that our first daughter never once stepped out our front door and walked to a specific destination. We lived in the hills — no shops or friends within a couple of miles — surrounded by country-like winding roads… packed with high speed commuter traffic. The local school was only about a mile away, but it was down a sidewalk-free canyon, often littered with dead dogs, cats, coyotes, and the occasional deer, mowed down at the nexus of city and country. Like many LA parents, we drove our kid everywhere.

    We tried a different approach with our second daughter: a street close to busses and the neighborhood’s main drag. Initially, the strategy didn’t work too well. Few of her fourteen-year-old friends would ride a bus. Some had never crossed a commercial street and were afraid to try, and a couple were not permitted to do so (yes, there’s a crosswalk and traffic light).

    The parental DDQ (Daily Drive Quotient) here is magnified by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which does not provide school buses for local kids to reach their district schools. A four mile round trip can become a 40-minutes-twice-a-day time warp. Walk? Sure, if your route has sidewalks; many don’t. Car pool? There’s a reason that school driveways are clogged with Navigators, Yukons and Suburbans. Working parents often need to get to work on time. That translates into the sought-after one-drive-per-week carpool. But only the biggest SUVs can accommodate five families. And for those with kids in two or three different schools, it’s two carpools and all chauffeuring all the time.

    Long commutes to school are a plague in many remote locations. But in Los Angeles, the school system is at the same time famously beset with typical urban education problems: a large poor and non–English speaking population, aging physical plants, and a mind-boggling administrative bureaucracy.

    Our kids attended public elementary school in Bel Air. Sounds classy, doesn’t it? Check out the rest rooms; make that singular (the second one did not function during either of their stints). The principal claimed that she could not find a janitor willing to drive to the relatively remote site for the part time job. Our kid’s second grade teacher asked parents to please bring in writing paper because “I would like them to do creative writing, and if everyone pitches in we can make it happen.”

    How could LAUSD be anything but dysfunctional? It’s a behemoth. The student population has now dropped to just below 700,000, but it still has more students than Vermont, Alaska, or Boston has total residents; its population is about twice that of Cincinnati.

    Los Angeles has numerous poor neighborhoods, but you don’t need to raise your children in Beverly Hills to incur the stratospheric costs common to elite cities. Many LA neighborhoods may look like déclassé small towns from the perspective of Malibu or Beverly Hills. But in a ‘real’ small town or city, a teenager on a night out might pay $3.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich with fries (I have a 2008 Wilkes Barre, PA receipt as documentation), instead of about $10 here. And housing costs here, even in extremely modest neighborhoods, and even during the current real estate cataclysm, soar above the national average.

    It’s not just the economics of child-raising in LA that suffer from a clash of suburban and urban. The social blend of the two geographies can also be uncomfortable. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and truly love many aspects of life here. But “it takes a village” are fighting words in a place where it can be a challenge to identify—let alone mobilize—the people next door.

    A neighbor on our street recently won a brand-sponsored contest for an ice cream Block Party. We walked over with our daughter and discovered that, as we had suspected, several other teenagers lived within a few houses.

    The older residents explained that ‘everyone here used to know each other, when we all had little kids the same age.’

    The teenagers, of course, went to a variety of schools; parents here often move their kids between private schools, public magnets, and district schools. They had a friendly chat and discovered some friends in common. But I don’t think they will ever meet again. If they do, it will undoubtedly be through some social network that’s irrelevant to the geography of this LA street.

    Zina Klapper is a writer and editor based in the Los Angeles area. She is a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones.

  • Los Angeles & Chicago’s Summer Homicide Numbers

    With 84 homicides, Los Angeles just recorded its lowest number of summer homicides since 1967. Overall, numbers are down this year compared to last year – which saw the fewest homicides in the city in 40 years. Made infamous by Rodney King just over 15 years ago, the LAPD is rising to the task of stemming violent crime.

    Contrast this with Chicago, a city with a million fewer people than LA, which saw 123 murders this summer. What gives?

  • Are Housing Declines Evenly Spread? – An Examination of California

    To read the popular press, one gets the impression that the collapse of the housing market is concentrated largely in the suburbs and exurbs, as people flock back to the cities in response to the mortgage crisis and high gas prices. A review of mortgage meltdown “ground zero” California indicates the picture is far more nuanced.

    California’s metropolitan areas have seen the greatest median house price decreases in the nation. Each of the four largest metropolitan regions, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and Sacramento have experienced median house price decreases of more than 25 percent over the past year (see Methodology Notes below). These decreases have not been distributed in a way that belies much of the ‘Back to the City’ hype.

    Los Angeles: In the broader Los Angeles metropolitan region, the smallest house price declines have been in the inner suburbs — generally those jurisdictions between 10 and 20 miles from downtown. The inner suburbs have seen a median house price decline of 20 percent. These include wide swaths of employment-rich areas like West Los Angeles, the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

    Somewhat surprisingly — particularly given the hype — the central areas of LA have suffered a somewhat higher rate of decline, at 22 percent. This includes areas close and around downtown Los Angeles, which has been among the ballyhooed “renaissance areas.” These numbers, significantly, do not include the many new units that were supposed to become condos but, due to lack of qualified buyers, have been thrown onto the rental market.

    It is true, however, that, if the condo-to-rental trend is left out, an even higher decline has taken place in the outer suburbs, at 30 percent. The outer suburbs include eastern Los Angeles County, eastern Ventura County, much of Orange County and the Riverside-San Bernardino area. The largest declines of 34 percent were in the “exurbs” — areas generally far from LA’s archipelago of employment centers and often over mountain ranges. The exurbs include the Antelope Valley, southwestern Riverside County, and the desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

    San Francisco Bay Area: The situation is somewhat different in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to one of the nation’s most vibrant urban cores, the city of San Francisco. House prices declined less than five percent in the city, a remarkable affirmation of the place’s continued appeal for affluent people.

    Overall, the central area — generally within 10 miles of San Francisco City Hall — experienced a median house price decline of 15 percent. However, central areas outside San Francisco experienced a price decline of 24 percent, which is only marginally less than in either the inner or outer suburbs. The inner suburbs, which include much of the East Bay, including Oakland and most of the peninsula, experienced a decline of 28 percent.

    Outer suburbs — those beyond 20 miles from city hall, including eastern Contra Costa and Alameda counties and Santa Clara County — experienced the second lowest decline, at 26 percent. Overall, the largest decline was in the exurbs — the counties in the San Joaquin Valley to which so many households had fled seeking affordable housing. There, the decline was 44 percent.

    San Diego: The San Diego area indicates a fairly constant rate of decline, regardless of distance from downtown. The lowest decline was in the inner and outer suburbs, at 26 percent, while the central area experienced a median house price decline of 27 percent.

    Sacramento: Sacramento indicates the most unexpected results, with the central area experiencing by far the largest house price declines, at 42 percent. The lowest house price declines were one-half that rate, in the outer suburbs (generally more than 10 miles from downtown), at 21 percent, while the inner suburbs experienced a decline of 29 percent.

    Overall, within the central areas, inner suburbs and outer suburbs of the major metropolitan regions, price declines have been consistent, all at minus 26 percent. The major exception has been the city of San Francisco. However, it is well to keep in mind that the city represents barely 10 percent of its metropolitan region population and is a unique case.

    What does all this indicate? Perhaps most of all, it is a further demonstration of the growing irrelevance of what economist William T. Bogart calls the pre-Copernican view of the cities. Most people no longer work in the urban core and living in the suburbs does not necessarily mean longer commutes. This was evident in our previous analysis of metropolitan New York, where the greatest jobs-housing balances are in the suburbs. In fact, the price declines throughout the principal urban areas making up California’s largest metropolitan regions have not been materially different.

    Things have been tougher n the far flung exurbs, where the greatest price declines have occurred. This was to be expected. These are places that people fled to find lower-cost housing that had often been precluded in the over-regulated jurisdictions in the principal urban areas. Many such households bought their houses in the most recent cycle, largely because of the unprecedented relaxation of credit standards. The difficulties in the exurbs been exacerbated by the fact that employment bases there have not yet had a chance to catch up with their residential gains.

    Notes on Methodology: The data is calculated based upon the change in median house prices from July 2007 to July 2008, based upon data published by DQNews.com. Sector medians are is weighted by the number of house sales. All jurisdictions or geographies are included that had 25 or more house sales in July 2008. Generally, the data is based upon municipal jurisdiction, except in the city of Los Angeles, where geographical data is available and in the case of counties wholly within a zone (central, inner suburbs, outer suburbs or exurban).

    The central areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are considered generally to be located within a radius of 10 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs are between 10 and 20 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 20 miles from downtown. The exurban areas are described in the sections on the particular areas above. In San Diego and Sacramento, which are considerably smaller, smaller geographic radii are used. The central areas are up to 5 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs from 5 to 10 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 10 miles from downtown. Because of their smaller geographic sizes, exurbs are not considered in this analysis for San Diego and Sacramento. The city of San Diego is excluded from this analysis because major parts of it are in each zone.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris since 2002. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

    Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002).

  • Portland and L.A: Not Exactly Long-Lost Brothers

    One of these cities is the perennial Cinderella to urban planners; the other the ugly sister who always crashes the party. One is the well-planned “City of Roses” (no, not Pasadena), a bastion of mass-transit and controlled development along the Columbia River while its gargantuan sister to the south eschews all such enlightened principles.

    That’s the gist at least from this paean to Portland in the LA Times today about what the city could learn from its lithe Northern cousin.

    A few key differences between these two:

    • The vast majority (90%) of job growth in Portland has been in the suburbs

    • Portland is actually far less dense than LA

    • It has a tiny population of immigrants and poor vis-a-vis LA

    • The city is losing families and children and rivals San Francisco for having the lowest percentage of its population under the age of 18 of any major U.S. city.

    And he doesn’t mention Portland’s greatest comparative advantage to LA: amazing beer!

    One thing both cities have in common right now: two of the most dynamic music scenes in the country.

    —-

    Here’s Joel Kotkin’s piece about Portland a few years ago.

  • Wondering About Skid Row: Whatever Happened to Work?

    I found myself in separate, private discussions with a couple of high-ranking city officials recently. They were pleasantly challenging exchanges, especially because both of my conversation partners displayed intellectual curiosity and willingness to consider divergent viewpoints. Those are wonderful qualities in general, and encouraging when found in individuals who have some influence on public policy.

    The subjects of poverty and crime in the Skid Row district of Downtown Los Angeles came up in both talks. The conversations covered various causes and effects—a changing economy, substandard educational systems, racism, the erosion of the family unit, our consumer society’s penchant for marketing violence as entertainment. It wasn’t all sociology, though—the fact that some individuals simply choose crime as a shortcut in life also came up.

    The talks served as reminders that any genuine improvements in Skid Row and other hard-pressed locales will require our entire society to work on a circumspect and well-reasoned plan.

    Los Angeles might appear to be in the first stages of such a plan with its efforts to rid Skid Row of the violent crime that has plagued the area for years. The program has had some success, but there’s still far more poverty and crime in Skid Row than would be tolerated in most neighborhoods. Indeed, it has become apparent that law enforcement can only keep a lid on things. It’s clear that the rest of us—and other public agencies—must work toward a next step or remain stalled on a recently achieved plateau that falls well short of other worthy goals.

    That’s where it gets tough, because I came away from the recent talks with the two high-ranking city officials filled with the feeling that too few of their colleagues have given much thought to a next step for Skid Row. I now wonder whether the most recent efforts to forge improvements have stalled because the tactic of fighting crime on Skid Row is not part of any larger strategic plan. That sort of stall might be happening before our very eyes, because most of us continue to view the poverty and crime of the area from a distance safe enough to preserve misunderstandings.

    Sure, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is knee-deep in crime-fighting efforts inside Skid Row. Various activists are busy keeping an eye on the LAPD. A roster of social-service providers offers stop-gap shelter and patchwork health care.

    Meanwhile, the dynamics surrounding Skid Row have not changed much. Some folks want the cops to clear the poverty and crime away—and some of them don’t care how the job gets done. Another contingent views the whole thing from a few blocks away, anxious to somehow hear a magical “all-clear.” Some sit farther away, concerned only with keeping whatever is going on in Skid Row from bumping against their neighborhoods.

    It struck me—after I had a chance to reflect on the recent conversations with the two city officials—that any progress on poverty and crime in Skid Row will require one key ingredient that hasn’t gotten much attention lately: Jobs.

    When is the last time you heard anyone talk about work when the topic turned to Skid Row?

    I realize that some folks there won’t be able to work. There has been too much chemical and emotional damage, and they will be wards of the larger society for the rest of their lives.

    There are, however, many in Skid Row who would welcome a chance to earn a living, willing to do what it takes to make that possible. That means rehabilitation and training—and incentives for employers willing to serve as a bridgehead for workers who will likely be special cases for a period of time on the job. Someone will have to figure out what sort of employers might consider such an idea. We’ll have to determine what it will take to draw jobs to locations in or near Skid Row, or entice employers already in the area to do more local hiring.

    That’s a next step into another multi-tiered challenge. It’s a challenge that must start with jobs—or at least a requirement that the concept of work returns to the conversation when we talk about “cleaning up” neighborhoods such as Skid Row.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen.

  • Questioning Conventional Wisdom: Should Poor Folks Stay Put?

    There is reason to think again about the now-current idea of dispersing the population of poor folks in the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles and similar precincts in other cities across the U.S.

    There’s cause to pause over notions such as mixing “affordable housing” that’s priced in the range of working-class or poor folks alongside spiffy market-rate units.

    There’s some research going on that combines data analysis in the law-enforcement profession with efforts in the social sciences, and it’s far enough along to raise questions about some commonplace assumptions among policy makers.

    One questionable assumption is the notion that it’s best to do away with old-fashioned, densely developed centers of subsidized housing – places such as Skid Row, or the many areas of cities across the U.S. known as “the projects.” Conventional wisdom currently holds that such clusters on the low end of the socio-economic scale are best relegated to history and replaced with scattered sites.

    Here’s a simpler way of putting it: Recent years have seen government authorities ditch the old “projects” model – literally blowing them up, in some cases – in favor of programs that shift poor residents from the inner city to residences in outlying areas. They don’t bunch the poor folks together, at least not in the cheek-by-jowl way of the old neighborhood. The idea is to mix things up and put a relatively small number of poor folks into any given middle-class neighborhood that is safer and has better schools. The presumption is that spreading poverty out will give the poor a greater chance to work their way up the socio-economic scale.

    Such thinking bears a similarity to efforts by some public officials in Los Angeles who aim to make similar shifts possible based on regulations requiring builders to subsidize lower rents for certain numbers of units in their developments.

    It’s not exactly the same, and you can argue the finer points. But the truth is that the efforts to change the residential patterns of poor folks – and the talk of dispersing the social service agencies that serve low-income residents of neighborhoods such as Skid Row – aim for a goal that’s similar to the top-down approach of blowing up the projects and moving folks to places beyond the city’s center.

    Also similar is the reason behind some of the efforts to move poor residents out of the downtown areas of many cities: gentrification. Cities want to spruce up their historic cores. They want new retail and residential developments that will generate more tax revenue than any densely populated housing project or collection of low-rent residence hotels will ever provide. Public officials have often presented such efforts with a two-birds-with-one-stone argument – poor folks get to go off to nicer, safer neighborhoods and the city gets a shiny new trophy in a redeveloped downtown.

    There’s an article in the current issue of the Atlantic that looks at recent developments in Memphis, Tennessee, where sociological researchers have been comparing law-enforcement data on crime trends to recent programs to relocate poor folks from the inner city to outlying areas. Some of the findings have the researchers leaning toward a different two-birds-with-one-stone argument on subsidized housing. They think it might just be that both the folks who were shifted from those hard-pressed areas and their new neighbors far away from the inner city are worse off for all the manipulations.

    The research has not reached any definitive conclusions, and there are plenty of variables that must be considered with care. Still, there seems to be enough to raise serious questions about a trend in urban planning and public policy that has gone nearly unexamined for some time.

    The Garment & Citizen yields to the Atlantic on this matter, urging anyone who is interested to give careful consideration to the piece, “American Murder Mystery.”

    We also urge all involved in the debate to ask themselves a few questions:

    What is a neighborhood? Do common economic circumstances bring a sense of community that is necessary to any neighborhood? Is a poor neighborhood necessarily a bad neighborhood? If so, why?

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen.

  • In Praise of Manufacturing & Industrial Zones

    My father made the huge piece of art that sits proudly on display at the entrance of the Daley Center Plaza in Chicago. Pablo Picasso designed this particular sculpture—or conceived it…or bent it with artistic vision…or however you want to put it.

    But my father made it.

    I’ve believed that since I was a small child. It’s a belief based mostly in filial pride, but there is some truth to it. Picasso, as I understand it, ordered the material for his untitled sculpture from the steel mill where my father worked at the time.

    My father handled the job as iron ore mixed with heat and sparks and sweat and swear words on the way to becoming steel. Picasso only took over after things had cooled down.

    I think of this as city planners ponder what to do with the industrial zone that sits on Downtown’s eastern edge. I can’t help but wonder why Los Angeles County’s role as the largest manufacturing center in the U.S., with approximately 470,000 jobs, so often goes overlooked.

    Sure, the manufacturing sector has shrunk over the years – and it will likely shrink some more in the future. But you could cut the local manufacturing sector in half and it would still be a giant engine of our economy. It gets bigger when you consider that manufacturing jobs tend to pay more than many service-sector jobs. That means the manufacturing jobs put more dollars in circulation to help finance a lot of those service-sector positions.

    Manufacturing also brings benefits that defy statistical analysis. Making things – objects or materials that can be touched, like the steel in a sharp sports car or the clothes on your back – is different than providing a service.

    Here’s what happens with services: The burger is made and consumed. The bed is made, slept in, and made again.

    Here’s what happens with manufactured products: The steel is used to build a grand cruise ship that steams into the harbor between trips to exotic ports and spills stories that will live for generations. The chair is purchased for some hearing room at City Hall and allows visitors to sit and gather their thoughts before standing up to take part in our democracy. The plastic is fabricated in a way that protects our astronauts as they set out on some historic mission of exploration.

    And here’s a simple fact: Making things makes people proud – and that’s the best thing you could hope for a city’s populace.

    I realize that the new lofts that have sprung about around Downtown – including some in the industrial zone – are pretty. I also understand why some land might be more valuable – at the moment, anyway – as a residential development instead of a metal-bending plant or a tool-and-die operation.

    I also believe, however, that Los Angeles is fortunate to have a major industrial center Downtown. I believe all involved in the current debate over its future should consider that seriously.

    Yes, manufacturers will continue to face challenges. One of the biggest will come from offshore markets with plentiful and cheap labor.

    But anyone who thinks industry is done in Los Angeles or the U.S. should keep Italy in mind. The Italians have been at a disadvantage on labor costs since somewhere around the 13th Century. Yet Italy has carried on as a manufacturing center, turning out everything from fine textiles to high-performance motorcycles. Italy long ago made a virtue of design and matched it with manufacturing processes that cannot be easily knocked off in low-wage markets thousands of miles away.

    It’s time for some enterprising city in the U.S to bring the same virtue to manufacturing – and Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to do exactly that. This will require some land – and history shows it will work best if various manufacturers are clustered together near a lively landscape with a plentiful labor pool and available housing stock.

    Sound familiar? I hope so – and I hope all involved will see the wisdom of maintaining a healthy and sizeable industrial zone Downtown. After all, some kid’s father might just make a famous artwork for City Hall someday.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of Los Angeles Garment & Citizen.

  • Suburbs Will Adapt to High Gas Prices

    Will high gas prices doom the suburbs? The short answer is no. America’s investment in suburbia is too broad and deep and these will drive all kinds of technological and other adaptations. But the continued outward growth of new suburban housing tracts and power centers is unsustainable.

    It is, of course, risky to predict anything, particularly the future. No one can predict with certainty the direction of gas prices, let alone how they will reshape our landscape. While the long-term trend for oil and gas is almost certainly rising prices, volatility will continue to make short-run bets risky either way.

    But whether gas prices plateau, spike or even decline in the next five years, larger forces will reinforce the shift to greater reinvestment in older urban areas – and towards reinvention of existing suburban areas, particularly those with strong economies.

    There will still be some “greenfield” peripheral development, but unplanned “sprawl” will wither. New development will be look more like New Urbanist new towns. There will be a revival of the integrated planned community, like Reston in Virginia, the Woodlands near Houston or Valencia and Santa Margarita in Southern California.

    The forces converging to curb sprawl go beyond gas prices. There will be regulatory and market pressure to cut carbon emissions to address global warming, but the most serious threat to outward sprawl will be the private and public shortage of financing for new infrastructure, which is likely to be chronic. Given the deepening crisis in the housing and lending industries, in the long interval building resumes, new development will be very different from what we’ve seen in the past fifty years of most conventional suburbia.

    Of course, even if we adopted a universal program of “smart growth” across America tomorrow, it would be decades before we had repaired and reshaped our landscape and economy to a more sustainable model. In the meantime, there will be tremendous pressure to exploit existing and new energy sources to maintain the suburban model we live in. But we can’t ignore the pragmatic economist Herb Stein who first observed, “Things which can’t go on forever, don’t (known as Stein’s Law).”

    In part, because of legislation such as AB 32, the “Global Climate Solutions Act,” California may be one of the first test cases of this transition. Whether you think this is the greatest threat to our planet in human history or you think this is environmental hysteria, global warming legislation is now a political reality.

    We can’t meet reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – the fundamental goal of the legislation – without reducing vehicle miles traveled. With transportation producing 40 percent of the problem, improved fuel efficiency will help – and so will switching to alternative fuels and increased telecommuting. But those gains will be essentially wiped out by the offsetting increases in population and mileage that people are traveling.

    While the costs of retooling new growth to be more sustainable will be significant, so are the opportunities. This year alone, according to the Economist, the oil importing nations will transfer two trillion dollars to the oil exporting nations. That’s money that will not be go to improve our infrastructure, protect our environment or educate our youth. It goes out our tailpipes.

    Here in California, the $20 billion transportation bond that voters approved in 2006 comes nowhere near to closing the $100 billion dollar gap in transportation infrastructure needed to address auto congestion and goods movement by truck. There is no way California’s government or economy can afford to continue to pay that cost. But it has taken gas at nearly $5 a gallon for people to wake up and smell the fumes.

    But halting sprawl is not the same as reversing it. Gas prices, AB 32 mandates, highway spending deficits and environmental concerns all conspire against more red-tiled roof subdivisions in Palmdale and Victorville. Yet growth pressures will fuel new demand down the road, so older suburbs and cities have to find ways to develop family-friendly housing and attract jobs that have been flowing to the suburban edge.

    These are two different, but related challenges. Older suburbs have to find a way to gracefully urbanize by strengthening or creating walkable centers and adding more population along commercial/transit corridors. They need to transition from auto-dependence to a wider range of real transportation alternatives. Above all, they face the challenge of persuading residents that reinvention of the suburbs can improve their quality of life and standard of living.

    Planners make a mistake if they try to tell suburban residents to give up what they like about suburbia in terms of space, privacy and safety. Acceptance of higher densities in existing suburban communities will only come if design of more urban housing improves and new development offers residents tangible improvements in amenities such as pedestrian-friendly districts, parks, bikeways and opportunities to work close to home.

    Older cities, on the other hand, already have much of the physical framework in place, but need to improve their parks, schools, libraries and neighborhoods. They must make themselves attractive to retain working and middle-class households, especially families with children. The key challenge will be to overcome the entrenched special interests that dominate urban politics to focus on the efforts that make a city hospitable to residents and businesses and be less dominated by the interests of developers and public employee unions.

    All across the state there are promising examples that suggest suburban and urban communities are getting the point. in the short run, the weak economy and awful financial market, both for public and private sectors, will slow change. But California has shown incredible resilience over the past 150 years. Our growing population and changing demographics will open up a huge market for reinvesting in our older communities.

    Now is the time to prepare for that time. Remember during the last deep real estate downturn, former Governor Pete Wilson abandoned his promise to tackle statewide growth management. His excuse was, “I wish I had some growth to manage.” The tragedy of that missed opportunity was that it wasn’t long before growth again overwhelmed our capacity.

    What if we’d not only put in place a coherent growth management strategy like Oregon, New Jersey or Maryland – but we’d established the collaborative regional structures in place like in metro Denver, Salt Lake City or Portland? Today, we’d be finishing the Subway to the Sea, the Gold Line extension to Ontario Airport and we’d have regular commuter rail between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Maybe then, $5 gas would be a little less painful.

    For too long, we’ve viewed cities and suburbia as natural antagonists. But the future may lie with greater convergence. Cities can become greener and more attractive to population growth. Suburbs can begin to urbanize in graceful and sustainable ways. Both are due for reinvention and reinvestment. The challenges we face will give us the opportunity – and the necessity – for doing just that.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Suburbia’s Not Dead Yet

    While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of — the demise of suburbia.

    In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday’s new suburbs will become “the slums” of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburban aesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain in suburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.

    Not so fast. The “out of the suburbs, back to the city” narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families — and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.

    The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb,” who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburban growth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars and companies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times. Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

    But today’s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highest ever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soon are slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the cities would seem ideal once again.

    Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurringin suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.

    The flat condominium markets in most large urban markets are another sign that people are not streaming into cities from the suburbs and buying. Many condo projects in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Diego have either been canceled or converted into rentals, with many units remaining vacant. As a Southern California condo developer told me recently, lower house prices are not going to make people more disposed to buying apartments.

    But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not following the script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do with employment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not only because it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions — by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisure activities.

    The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.

    A desire to live closer to their jobs doesn’t mean that people have to move to the inner core, particularly if that’s not where the jobs are. Of the 20 leading job centers in Southern California by ZIP Code, none are downtown. The central core does remain an important job center, but it accounts for barely 3% of regional employment. Among those who work downtown, some may shift from cars to public transit, although many will simply buy a more fuel-efficient car and stay put in the suburbs.

    For residents who live in suburban areas with large concentrations of employment — Burbank, Ontario and West L.A. — commutes to work can be shorter than those experienced by their inner-city counterparts, according to Ali Modarres, a professor of geography at Cal State Los Angeles. Commutes in these communities, on average, are less than 25 minutes, while in high-density areas, such as Pico-Union, they average 35 minutes.

    The relative and continuing health of these suburban employment centers would seem to preclude any large-scale flight to cities. But urban areas with limited or shrinking employment opportunities, and suburbs that bet on housing to sustain their economies, will continue to have trouble attracting residents either because of a scarcity of jobs or long commutes at a time of expensive gas.

    The suburb-to-the-city narrative faces other obstacles. By the early part of the next decade, the large millennial generation born since the early 1980s will begin to form families, and they will, as have previous generations, probably seek open space and good schools for their children — and that means they will settle in the suburbs. And there is no census evidence suggesting that immigrants have reversed their decade-old pattern of moving to the suburbs.

    The growth of telecommuting, fed by technological advances, further ensures that suburbia has a future. By 2006, the expansion of home-based workers had grown twice as quickly as in the previous decade. And by 2015, according to demographer Wendell Cox, there will be more people in the country working electronically from home full time than are taking public transit.

    More numerous will be those who work at home part time. Nearly 29 million Americans telecommute at least once a month, according to WorldatWork, a nonprofit consultancy. At many companies — IBM, Sun Microsystems and AT&T among them — upward of 30% of their employees work from home. In some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, almost one in 10 workers are part-time telecommuters, according to a 2004 study done by Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank.

    Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation’s geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don’t want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive editor of NewGeography.com