Suburbs

Misunderstanding the Millennials

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 14:24:44 -0500

The millennial generation has had much to endure – a still-poor job market, high housing prices and a generally sour political atmosphere. But perhaps the final indignity has been the tendency for millennials to be spoken for by older generations, notably, well-placed boomers, who often seem to impose their own ideological fantasies, without actually finding out what the younger cohort really wants. The reality, in this case, turns out far different than what is bespoken by others.

Nowhere is this tendency clearer than in the perception of what kind of life – and what places – will millennials find attractive. Generally, the narrative goes like this: Millennials are different, they don’t care about owning homes, detest the suburbs and would prefer to spend their lives in dense apartment blocks, riding the rails or buses to whatever work they might be able to find.

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

Such assessments thrill the likes of real estate speculators, such as Sam Zell, who welcomes “reurbanization” as an opportunity to cash in by housing a generation of Peter Pans in high-cost, tiny spaces unfit for couples and unthinkable for families. Others of a less-capitalistic mindset see in millennials a post-material generation, not buying homes and cars and, perhaps, not establishing families. Millennials, for example, are portrayed by the green magazine Gris as “a hero generation” – one that will march, willingly, even enthusiastically, to a downscaled and, theoretically, greener future.

Read the entire piece 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. 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.

New home photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

What’s This Place For?

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:38:08 -0500

I was recently asked by Gracen Johnson (check out her site here) to elaborate on the possible future of suburbia. How are the suburbs likely to fare over time? This coincided with a city planner friend of mine who asked a more poignant question about the suburban community he helps manage. “What’s this place for?” If we can answer that question we might be able to get a handle on the possible trajectories of various suburbs.

For example, we all understand what a farm town is for. Small rural towns produce food. The people who live in the countryside are actively engaged in the business of feeding society. They take soil, water, plants and animals and convert it all into breakfast, lunch and dinner. For the people who want to live this way there are tremendous benefits: fresh air, open space, privacy, independence, a direct connection to nature, strong family bonds, tradition, and so on. Whatever else we might say about farm country we can be certain that it will carry on one way or another or else civilization will grind to a halt pretty quickly.

We also know what industrial cities are for. They take the raw materials from the surrounding countryside and transform them into finished goods. Grain becomes flour and bread. Timber becomes lumber, then homes and furniture. Iron ore and coal become machinery and power. Crude oil becomes gasoline, petrochemicals, and plastics. There are obvious trade offs for industrial workers, but for many people it’s a pretty good arrangement. If we expect to have manufactured goods in the future these cities will have to continue somehow.

The new post-industrial locus is a bit trickier to pin down. The service economy doesn’t actually produce any “thing” so the workforce is liberated to live just about anywhere in a way that farmers and factory workers can’t. Oddly, well educated highly paid people don’t actually spread out and inhabit a million cabins in the woods as you might expect. Instead they clump up in a handful of regions that provide abundant cultural amenities. At the same time the post-industrial economy exists in a physical world and all those people and electronic components rely on the underlaying farms, factories, and raw resources that support them. The so-called dematerialization of the economy still requires a serious amount of real “stuff” to function.

So what does this all mean for the suburbs? The nature of suburbia has always been consumptive rather than productive. People move to the suburbs in order to purchase and enjoy things: a spacious home, a good school district, security, a clean environment, more respectable neighbors, and so on. The majority of the commercial activity is actually in service to suburbia itself. The mortgage brokers, insurers, real estate agents, landscapers, school teachers, firefighters, orthodontists, pancake houses, and auto body shops are all there to help keep the suburbs humming along. But they’re all consumptive in nature. No one is making the tennis shoes sold at the mall or growing the oranges at the supermarket. This is compounded by the fact that the suburbs are maintained largely through debt. Private debt is required for all the mortgages, car loans, credit cards, student loans, and business loans while municipal bonds prop up many essential suburban government functions. The fact that many people don’t understand the difference between production and consumption is one of the big problems the suburbs are going to have to sort out in the future.

I’m going to get a lot of push back on this concept. I’m sure many of you think that your suburb is full of productive enterprises: the Krispy Kreme, the Jiffy Lube, the dozen Shell and Exxon stations, the Applebee’s, the Foot Locker, the Honda dealership, and the Kroger’s. But these are merely outlets for things that were produced elsewhere. Let me offer another example from my own life. I spent a chunk of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s nearly everyone had some connection to companies like Rocketdyne, Litton, and General Dynamics. Those were the engines of the local economy for decades. And they did in fact produce real physical things. But they were all funded entirely by the federal government. Tax money was skimmed off the national productive economy (all those farms and factories) and then spent on missile guidance systems, satellites, and fighter jets. The same was true in Huntsville, Alabama and Marietta, Georgia. Remember what happened to all those places when the feds turn off the spigot during budget cuts? Money flowed in, not out. There’s a reason Peru doesn’t have a space program. The underlying national economy isn’t productive enough to support such extravagant government spending.

As the material abundance we enjoyed in the Twentieth Century tightens up suburbs will have to become much more efficient places that provide things the outside world needs and is willing to pay for. At the same time internal consumption and debt are going to have to be pulled back. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lower quality of life, but it does demand that suburbs retool and ask themselves, “What’s this place for?”

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.

The New New Thing: Suburban Bunker Buildings

John Sanphillippo — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 10:43:12 -0500

I have a theory about where the next culturally dynamic neighborhoods are likely to emerge and which building types will be the engine of that transformation. It may not be exactly what most people expect.

As American industry receded in the later half of the Twentieth Century it left behind an alluvial delta of redundant buildings that sat vacant for years, no longer useful or productive. All effort was focused on building the new suburbs. These abandoned inner city warehouse districts became so cheap and run down that they were eventually colonized by artists, immigrants, and bohemians seeking cheap rent and an environment where landlords and municipal authorities looked the other way. They weren’t necessarily safe, or clean, or attractive, but they provided a kind of freedom for the people who lived there.

The photos above are of friends in their 8,000 square foot live/work space in Philadelphia. The general dismissive attitude of many suburbanites is that such people exist outside the mainstream and are irrelevant to the lives of “real” people. Contrary to this common misconception all the creative types I know are highly skilled and hold down jobs as welders, carpenters, accountants, and technicians of various kinds. I know a couple who spend half the year in video production making car commercials and then pursue their art during the long hiatus. I know another guy who worked like a dog for a few years after college at a prototype lab for the pharmaceutical industry in order to pay off all his student loans and other debts. Now he’s free to do what he really wants without the burden of debt. These folks simply choose not to spend their money on a mortgage on a suburban home with multiple car payments, but their lives and economic productivity are very real.

Technically, living in an old warehouse involves breaking a hundred different rules and regulations, but they’ve been there for years and no one cares. It’s that kind of space and that kind of neighborhood. Unfortunately, the area is rapidly gentrifying and they may be priced out of the space soon as nearby warehouses are being converted to luxury lofts. That begs the question – where are the cheap funky emerging neighborhoods these days? You can’t live and work this way in a suburban tract home. Neither the physical space nor the local culture will allow it.

A couple of years ago I was in Salt Lake City having lunch with a prominent well-connected real estate agent. She’s the kind of charming knowledgable person I always seek out so it was a pleasure to see her again. I had explored various parts of Salt Lake from the downtown core all the way out to Daybreak in the distant suburbs. She spoke of the urban renaissance, the new streetcar system, and the many new developments in previously blighted areas. But I explained that the part of town that really interested me was the neglected and undervalued areas in the lackluster middle distance just beyond downtown that were neither sophisticated and urbane nor verdant and domestic. These semi-commercial, vaguely industrial, half-assed residential zones were neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl. But they had the two qualities that fascinate me: they’re relatively inexpensive and generally ignored by the Upright Citizens Brigade. They’re close enough to downtown and the university that you could still ride a bicycle to access culture and employment, but just a short drive to suburban conveniences farther out. It’s the wrong combination for people with conventional tastes, but the perfect sweet spot for a certain kind of subculture that needs to be left alone in order to thrive. They need wiggle room that doesn’t exist in the highly supervised downtown or manicured suburbs. And many of these brick and concrete buildings are little bunkers where you could do just about anything within the raw space. They offer the one thing that’s in terribly short supply. Slack.

I sent these photos over to her and explained that these nondescript aging suburban bunker buildings were the next great building type. She was gracious and polite, but she obviously thought I was insane. Now granted, she isn’t the only person to come into contact with me to come to this conclusion – and not just because of my irregular taste in property.

This conversation came back to me this afternoon as I walked past a building that used to house a discount bakery outlet. As a much younger and poorer person twenty years ago I used to frequent this establishment myself to buy day old bread and not-quite-expired donuts. This month the bunker building was transformed into an upscale furniture store with in-house designer services. I poked around and explored the shop. I had no particular interest in the furniture itself and don’t think this kind of business could succeed anyplace other than a prosperous part of town. But it was the bones of the building itself that fascinated me.

It’s a big flexible durable space like the old inner city industrial buildings. The walls and floor are concrete and the ceilings are exposed wood and steel. The former loading docks make perfectly segmented rooms with high ceilings and the ability to adapt to many uses including indoor/outdoor applications. Paint and some inexpensive drywall partitions transform the space very quickly. The front room was mostly glass and open to the parking lot, but the vast majority of the building was entirely private. This is a perfect example of the new new thing. This is where the starving bohemians will end up if they want to continue doing their work in a big, affordable, mostly unregulated spot. In an expensive real estate market people will colonize any vacant building and make their luxury furniture showroom work. But in depressed suburban markets these buildings are ripe for economically displaced artists. Gather enough interesting and entrepreneurial types in one such neighborhood and it could be the social and cultural engine that pulls up an entire dying suburban strip.

The Emerging New Aspirational Suburb

Aaron M. Renn — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:38:29 -0500

Urban form in American cities is in a constant state of evolution. Until recent years, American suburbia was often built without an appreciation for future evolution. This has left many older suburbs in a deteriorated state, and has accelerated claims of a more generalized suburban decline.

The Indianapolis suburb of Carmel represents a response to this historic pattern. While responding to today’s market demands with a new aspiration level designed to make it nationally competitive, it’s also trying to position itself for success tomorrow and over the longer term.

This is a critical issue for many suburbs. Like big cities before them, many older suburbs have now aged, and no longer necessarily meet the requirements of the marketplace.

There are many reasons for this. The early, usually small-scale Cape Cod-style housing common to many 50s vintage suburbs is not what today’s market is demanding. It’s the same for older enclosed malls – today “lifestyle centers” and other formats are preferred – many of which are now vacant, their grim remains featured on web sites such as DeadMalls.com. Many suburban areas were also built out with “infrastructure light” without upgraded streets, sidewalks, etc. leaving a big backlog of infrastructure need.

Across the country many of these older districts have fallen into decay and become increasingly poor, taking on many of the characteristics of the inner city. As the Brookings Institution noted over a decade ago, they “are experiencing some signs of distress—aging infrastructure, deteriorating schools and commercial corridors, and inadequate housing stock.”1 Today, the public is more aware of the trend, and events in Ferguson, MO recently gave a wakeup call to newer and still-thriving suburbs that they too may be troubled at some point.

Like other American cities, Indianapolis has many of these older, struggling suburban areas. In its case, many of them are within the core city limits due to a 1970 city-county merger. As regional growth continues to expand outside the central urban county, newer generation suburbs have a chance to learn from the struggles of many of their predecessors.

Carmel – pronounced like the Biblical Carmel – is the first suburb directly north of the city of Indianapolis. It is an upscale residential and business suburb similar to many others around the country such as Dublin, OH; Naperville, IL; and the Cool Springs, TN area. Its 2013 population of 83,573 made it the 5th largest municipality in the state. While not monolithically wealthy, its 2013 median household income of $100,358 is the 14th highest in the United States among communities of 65,000 people or more.2 It’s a preferred area for the estate homes of wealthy Indianapolis area residents, such as Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. But it’s not just a bedroom suburb; real estate brokerage Cassidy Turley reports that the Carmel submarket has over six million square feet of office space.3

Being located in the center of the favored quarter of the Indianapolis region, Carmel grew as an upscale area. This gives it a leg up in long term sustainability out of the gate.

Yet Carmel has not relied just on its wealth to insure against decline. Rather, it has embarked on a transformation program now nearly 20 years old from which three major themes emerge:

1. Responding to current market forces to build a “state of the art” community that is competitive globally, not just within the Indianapolis region.

2. Building a full spectrum of amenities and infrastructure to create a “complete city” with a high quality of life and intrinsic appeal that is a) not based solely on newness or low costs, and b) which has broad demographic appeal.

3. Attempting to create unique cultural and regional attractions to turn Carmel into a destination in its own right, as much city as suburb.

The primary driver of this transformation has been Mayor Jim Brainard, a Republican currently in his fifth term. Carmel long had top performing schools – it’s the top rated district in the state – houses with generous yards, low taxes, and other standard attractors of suburbia. Previous administrations had put in place key policies such as reserving the Meridian St. corridor for high end office space and banning billboards. But Brainard brought numerous changes in Carmel during his tenure including:

Annexation. Carmel has undertaken a series of annexations – nearly 20,000 acres since 2001 alone.4 With over 47 square miles of territory, Carmel has now largely achieved its desired geographic scale.

Parks. Carmel’s park acreage increased from 50 to 1000 acres and it has spent heavily on building out its parks. This includes building a $55 million Central Park, which includes a showplace community and fitness facility called the Monon Center.5 And the popular Monon Trail, a rail-trail through the length of the city that extended a previous project built by the City of Indianapolis.

Monon Trail at Main St.

Road Infrastructure. Carmel has invested heavily in upgrading the legacy network of county roads that it overgrew. This includes an aggressive deployment of modern roundabouts. Carmel now has over 80 of these, more than any community in the United States.6 It has upgraded miles of collector roads to urban standards with enclosed drainage, curbs, extra-wide travel lanes, landscaped medians, eight foot multi-use side paths on both sides of the street protected by a landscaped buffer zone, and decorative street signs and other detailing.

Roundabout at Main St. and Illinois St. in the fall

An upgraded segment of River Rd. in early winter

Two major state highways passed through the town, Meridian St. (US 31) and Keystone Ave. (SR 431). These were designed as rural style divided surface highways as is common in Indiana. Carmel convinced the state to relinquish Keystone Ave. to the city and give it $90 million for upgrades and future maintenance. Carmel converted this into a mostly free flowing parkway by spending $108 million to replace stoplight intersections with roundabout interchanges. These not only dramatically improved traffic flow, the bridges over the busy highway provided a high quality, safe connection – especially for pedestrians and bicyclists – connecting eastern and central Carmel, which had previously been separated by this “great wall” of a road. The state is currently performing a similar freeway upgrade on Meridian St., the principal office corridor.

Roundabout interchange at 126th St. and Keystone Parkway.

Water and Sewer Upgrades. Part of Carmel previously received water from the Indianapolis water utility. The City of Indianapolis had privatized this utility but sought to repurchase it. Carmel intervened in the process to pressure Indianapolis into selling it the water lines inside Carmel. Carmel has since undertaken significant infrastructure upgrades such as new wells and pumping stations. During a recent summer drought, Carmel, unlike Indianapolis, did not put in place a mandatory restriction on lawn watering.7

New Urbanism. Beyond core infrastructure, Carmel under Brainard has sought to change its style of development to embrace some of the more positive aspects of New Urbanism such as creating more urban nodes and walkability.

Unlike some traditional railroad suburbs or county seats, the historic center of Carmel was very tiny, and its Main Street populated mostly with one story buildings and empty lots. This was the first focus area, and started with fixing the physical infrastructure.

The city rebranded the area as the “Arts and Design District” and utilized Tax Increment Financing to promote multi-story, mixed use development. The result is a mostly occupied and often well-patronized Main Street district. The surrounding historic residential blocks have seen significant redevelopment activity as well.

Main St. at western fountain and gateway arch entryway to rebranded “Arts and Design Distrct.”

Beyond the historic downtown, Carmel has also implemented multiple New Urbanist style zoning overlays, including on Old Meridian St. and Range Line Rd. (the city’s original suburban commercial strip). These promote mixed use development, buildings that front the street, and multi-story structures. Infrastructure improvements and TIF have been used in these areas as well. There’s also a major New Urbanist type subdivision in western Carmel called the Village of West Clay.

Strip mall and traditional suburban development along Range Line Rd.

New Urbanist style development along Range Line Rd.

New Urbanist development and street improvements under construction on Old Meridian St.

The historic downtown was deemed too small to function effectively as the downtown of a city the size of Carmel today. The city thus decided to create a new downtown area called City Center. The location for this is an area south of the historic downtown area in an older suburban industrial zone that had fallen into a blight pattern. Much of it was vacant and what’s now the principal City Center development was built on the site of a failed strip mall. TIF was aggressively used here as well to redevelop the area.

The City Center development is only partially complete. A veterans memorial and other civic spaces are complete, as are several small office buildings, apartments, and a large mixed use complex. The anchor is a publicly funded $175 million concert hall called the Palladium and an associated theater complex with three stages.8 While these are complete, significant development remains to complete the City Center vision. The city also wants to redevelop the area between City Center and the old downtown, which they now label Midtown, but very little has been done to date.

Interior street of City Center development.

The goal of all this development is not the full urbanization of Carmel; this city does not aspire to be dense metropolis, or even Indianapolis. It’s rather about creating more town center type districts with the walkable feel that’s increasingly in favor, but without compromising the fundamental suburban character of the city. It’s also designed to create a city with options. Having a diversity of development styles within the city is part of a strategy of appealing to a more diverse demographic base, including singles and retirees, not just the stereotypical younger family with kids. Traffic flow has been improved, but short trips are now easier to undertake by foot or bicycle, not just by car.

Retro Architecture. Carmel has de facto mandated traditional architectural styles. There’s no one consistent style. Major buildings have been done in Georgian, Second Empire, and Neoclassical type designs. But modernism has been rejected, further differentiating suburban Carmel from urban areas that frequently elect for starchitecture that is unapologetically “of the now.”

The city has also attempted to prevent large corporations from building their standard architectural templates. Brick is effectively mandated, even for big box retailers like Lowes. Retailers like CVS and Kentucky Fried Chicken were forced to build second stories on their structures to locate in certain areas. Another Carmel CVS has an art deco façade.

The city wants high quality aesthetics and a unique sense of place. They also want “timeless” design, though like much New Urbanism architecture it can sometimes come across as pastiche.

Arts and Culture. As part of the attempt to appeal to more arts minded middle aged consumers, as well as members of the so-called “Creative Class,” Carmel has heavily invested in the arts. The City Center performing arts center was paid for almost entirely with public funds (TIF), an investment in the arts dwarfing even that of Indianapolis. The city has also paid for an extensive public art program, mostly statues by Seward Johnson. And it makes operating grants to local arts organizations such as the Carmel Symphony Orchestra.

Interior of the Palladium concert hall. Photo by Zach Dobson.

Seward Johnson is not a favorite of urban sophisticates. His statutes illustrate the type of play it safe art generally featured by Carmel. More sophisticated or cutting edge fare is not as prevalent. And there have even been some complaints by a limited number of citizens about items such as the classical nudes featured on the door handles of the Evan Lurie Gallery.

Brainard is thinking about the long term when Carmel is no longer the shiny new thing. As he put it, “Because we are designing a new city that will be in place for hundreds of years, the responsibility of doing it right falls to this generation…Carmel is a young city – we are still building our parks, trails, roads and sanitary sewer and water systems that will be here for centuries.”9

He’s also keenly aware of global economic competition and the fact that Indiana lacks the type of geographic and weather amenities of other places. He frequently uses slides to illustrate this point. In one talk he said, “Now this picture, guess what, that’s not Carmel; but this picture is the picture of some of our competition. Mountains – that’s San Diego of course, mountains, beautiful weather, you know I think they have sunshine what, 362 days out of the 365…. What we’ve tried to do is to design a city that can compete with the most beautiful places on earth. We’ve tried to do it through the built environment because we don’t have the natural amenities.”10 While the claims to want to equal the most beautiful places in the world may be grandiose, the key is that mayor believes Carmel’s undistinguished natural setting and climate requires a focus on creating aesthetics through the built environment.

What have the results been to date? Economically and demographically, the city has performed well. It has managed to create an environment that is proving competitive for business opportunities that might have previously bypassed Indiana. For example, American Specialty Health relocated its headquarters to Carmel from San Diego, with the CEO of the company personally making the move from La Jolla to Carmel.11 Geico also recently expanded. Numerous other corporations are either based in Carmel or have major white collar facilities there. The income levels are very strong, as noted above.

The city’s demographics have also expanded to become much more diverse. The minority population grew 295% between 2000 and 2010, adding 9,630 people and growing minority population share from 8.7% to 16.3%.12 12% of the city’s households speak a language other than English at home.13 Many of these are highly skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants working for companies like pharmaceutical giant Lilly. Even black professionals are increasingly moving to Carmel, with the black population growing 324% in the 2000s and black population share doubling to 3%.14 Carmel is not a polyglot city today, but it’s far more diverse than in the past.

Carmel has also attracted both national press and national awards. Money magazine ranked Carmel as the #1 best small city to live in 201215, and it’s scored highly in other surveys as well. Drew Klacik of the Indiana University Public Policy Institute notes that in an echo of the transformation of the city of Indianapolis since the 1970s, “Carmel has transformed itself from a desirable community within Indiana to a desirable and competitive community nationally.”16

However, it’s hard to argue that Carmel’s results materially outperform peer cities in other regions. Places like Dublin, OH and Cool Springs, TN have significantly more office space, for example. Many of those places are, however, implementing policies similar to those in Carmel . Most Carmel New Urbanist development continues to require TIF subsidies and is not yet sustainable at market rates. The city has obtained better financial terms in some recent deals, however. And despite major public investment and construction in the central city, many central area census tracts lost population during the 2000s.

The changes have also attracted significant criticism and opposition in some quarters. While the public remains largely positive on the results, there have been many critiques of the way they were done, some of them legitimate. A number of the projects had significant cost overruns. The mayor originally said that the Keystone project could be completed for the $90 million the state gave it. The actual cost was nearly $20 million higher.17 The Palladium was originally sold as an $80 million facility, but ended up costing $175 million. The city also said it planned to pay for ongoing operations by raising a $40 million endowment, but was unable to raise the funds, leaving it on the hook for $2 million in annual operating costs. These are not small misses.

Critics also pointed to state figures showing Carmel with nearly $900 million in total debt.18 While it is a wealthy community that can afford the payments, in a conservative state like Indiana, a suburb accumulating nearly a billion dollars in debt raises eyebrows. Carmel’s tax rates remain among the lowest the state, however.

The way the debt was accumulated has been criticized as well. The Palladium was paid for with TIF funds. Rather than bonds, the Carmel Redevelopment Commission – the authority that manages the TIF program and which was controlled by mayoral appointees – structured the Palladium debt as Certificates of Participation to circumvented the need for city council approval, incurring higher interest rates in the process. The city council later refinanced the debt at a lower rate using a general taxing power guarantee in what some called a bailout. In return for the refinancing, the council obtained more oversight over TIF activity.19

Though some controversy is inevitable and some criticisms are legitimate, ultimately the change program in Carmel has proven popular with the public and the city is booming, a boom that’s lending an increasingly bitter tone to the longstanding hostility Carmel has enjoyed from the region due to its status as the highest profile “rich suburb” in the region.

Yet for all the controversy, many regional suburbs are copying some aspects of Carmel’s approach, with roundabouts now a regular feature in area communities and major park programs and New Urbanist style town center developments as well. This includes the massive sports-oriented Grand Park in Westfield and the Nickel Plate District in next door Fishers’ town center.20

It’s also clear that peer type suburbs around the country are adopting similar strategies, such as Dubin, OH’s Bridge Street Corridor proposal21 or Sugar Land, TX’s $84 million performing arts center.22 Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Carmel represents the leading edge of the emergence of a new type of post-Edge City aspirational suburb. It’s something we may be seeing a lot more of in the future.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal . He writes at The Urbanophile.

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1 Robert Puentes and Myron Orfield. “Valuing America’s First Suburbs: A Policy Agenda For Older Suburbs in the Midwest,” Brookings Institution, 2002.

2 U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey 2013 1-yr”, Table B19013.

3 Cassidy Turley, Indianapolis Office Market Snapshot (Third Quarter 2014), 3.

4 Ellen Cutter. “Explaining the annexation process,” Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly, June 12, 2014. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://www.fwbusiness.com/opinions/columnist/businessweekly/article_f42d...

5 Matthew VanTryon. “Carmel then and now: World’s Apart,” IndianapolisNewsBeat.com, December 16, 2014. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://blogs.butler.edu/multimedia-journalism/2014/12/16/carmel-worlds/

6 James Brainard, transcript of speech at 2014 International Making Cities Livable Conference, June 23-27, 2013.

7 “Why no watering ban in Carmel,” WISH-TV News, July 12, 2012. Accessed January 8, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y51BJYM4Fgc

8 David Hoppe. “The Palladium’s boffo budget,” Nuvo Newsweekly, June 20, 2011. Accessed on January 8, 2015. http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/the-palladiums-boffo-budget/Content?oid...

9 James Brainard, notes for 2014 State of the City Address.

10 James Brainard, transcript of speech at 2014 International Making Cities Livable Conference, June 23-27, 2013.

11 Andrea Muirragui Davis. “Wellness provider beefing up new Carmel office,” Indianapolis Business Journal, October 29, 2014. Accessed on January 8, 2015. http://www.ibj.com/blogs/11-north-of-96th/post/50241-wellness-provider-b...

12 U.S. Census Bureau, calculations by author from Census 2000 and Census 2010.

13 U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey 2013 1-yr”, Table B05007.

14 U.S. Census Bureau, calculations by author from Census 2000 and Census 2010.

15 “CNNMoney Ranks Americas Best Places to Live,” Daily Finance, August 20, 2012. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/08/20/cnn-money-ranks-americas-20-best-...

16 Drew Klacik, telephone interview with author, December 29, 2014.

17 “Brainard seeks bonds to finish Keystone,” The Indianapolis Star, October 18, 2009. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://archive.indystar.com/article/20091018/LOCAL/910180409/Brainard-se...

18 Indiana Department of Local Government Finance. “Local Government Debt Report,” September 21, 2012, 15.

19 Kathleen McLaughlin. “Brainard seeks deal on maxed-out TIF,” Indianapolis Business Journal, March 31, 2012. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://www.ibj.com/articles/33569-brainard-seeks-deal-on-maxed-out-tif

20 Cara Anthony. “New look for the Nickel Plate District in Fishers,” The Indianapolis Star, June 28, 2014. Accessed January 16, 2015. http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/fishers/2014/06...

21 Brent Warren. “Dublin Moves Ahead With Bridge Street Corridor Plans, Connecting Across River,” Columbus Underground, March 23, 2013. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://www.columbusunderground.com/dublin-moves-ahead-with-bridge-street...

22 Rebecca Elliott. “Sugar Land breaks ground on $84 million performing arts center,” Houston Chronicle, December 9, 2014. Accessed January 12, 2015. http://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/fortbend/news/article/Sugar...

Go East, Young Southern California Workers

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 09:15:22 -0500

Do the middle class and working class have a future in the Southland? If they do, that future will be largely determined in the Inland Empire, the one corner of Southern California that seems able to accommodate large-scale growth in population and jobs. If Southern California’s economy is going to grow, it will need a strong Inland Empire.

The calculation starts with the basics of the labor market. Simply put, Los Angeles and Orange counties mostly have become too expensive for many middle-skilled workers. The Riverside-San Bernardino area has emerged as a key labor supplier to the coastal counties, with upward of 15 percent to 25 percent of workers commuting to the coastal counties.

In a new report recently released by National Core, a Rancho Cucamonga nonprofit that develops low-income housing, I and my colleagues, demographer Wendell Cox and analyst Mark Schill, explored the challenges facing the region. Although we found many reasons for concern, the region’s overall condition and its long-term prospects may be better than many might suspect.

Population trends

The region’s once-explosive growth has slowed considerably. From 1945-2010, the area’s population soared from 265,000 to 4.25 million. Already the nation’s 12th-largest metropolitan area, the I.E. could pass San Francisco and Boston by 2020 (unless faster-growing Phoenix does so first).

Yet, contrary to expectations (and, perhaps, hope among anti-sprawl campaigners), the area continues to be a beacon for people from the rest of the region. There is a notion, widely expressed in the mainstream media, that Southern California’s growth will now focus more on the urban core around Downtown Los Angeles. Yet, as is often the case, what planners and pundits desire is not widely shared by the vast majority of people.

People continue to vote for the Inland Empire – and other peripheral areas – with their feet. Census Bureau data indicates that, from 2007-11, nearly 35,000 more residents moved from Los Angeles County to the Inland Empire than moved in the other direction. There was also a net movement of more than 9,000 from Orange County and more than 4,000 net migration from San Diego County.

Several long-standing demographic trends favor a continued shift to the Inland region, according to Cox and Schill. Immigrants and their offspring may prove the critical factor. Over the past decade, the Inland region dramatically increased its population of foreign-born residents, more than three times the number and at nearly 18 times the rate of the coastal counties.

The influx of immigrants and their children is largely responsible for the region’s relatively young population, compared with the rest of Southern California. As recently as 2000, the proportion of population ages 5-14 in Los Angeles and Orange counties stood at 16 percent, the sixth-highest level among the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas. Thirteen years later, that proportion had dropped to 12.8 percent, 33rd among the 52 largest metropolitan areas. In terms of a dropping share of youngsters, the area experienced a 20 percent reduction, the largest in the nation.

In contrast, the Inland Empire remains a bastion of familialism, with 15.3 percent of the population aged 5-14, among the highest levels in the nation. This follows a general pattern; according to recent analysis of Census data, high-cost areas tend to repel families. Of the nation’s most expensive areas, such as the Bay Area, New York and Boston, all tend to have well below national norms in terms of families among their populations.

Perhaps more surprising, younger educated workers also are heading to the region. In fact, from 2011-13, according to American Community Survey data, Riverside-San Bernardino witnessed the 12th-largest increase among the 52 major metro areas in the share of college-educated residents ages 25-34. No major California metro area, including Silicon Valley, could match it. From 2000-13, the Inland region experienced a 91 percent jump in population with bachelor or higher degrees, just less than twice the increase for either Orange or Los Angeles counties.

Overall, the I.E. has become something of a growth area for millennials – basically, adults ages 20-29. San Bernardino-Riverside ranked second among 52 metro areas, adding 50,000 millennials, an 8.3 percent increase since 2010. Los Angeles and Orange counties – older, settled areas with far lower population growth – together registered 18th.

Economic Restructuring

These trends also may reflect improving prospects for the region’s economic recovery. The area remains some 30,000 jobs below its 2007 level, notes California Lutheran University economist Dan Hamilton, but is now growing faster than the rest of the Southland. The region created jobs over the past year at a 2.2 percent rate, well above the 2.0 percent increase in Orange County and almost twice that of L.A.’s 1.3 percent. Foreclosures have diminished to the lowest levels since 2007 and appear back to something resembling normalcy.

One important source of new employment is grass-roots entrepreneurship. Overall, the Inland Empire accounted for a large proportion of the new businesses created statewide from 2012-13 – despite hosting only 7.4 percent of the total businesses in California. A recent report by Beacon Economics suggested that growth will accelerate over the next five years.

At the same time, some of the core industries – such as manufacturing and warehousing – have shown signs of recovery. Industrial vacancy rates have fallen from nearly 12 percent in 2009 to roughly half that level today.

Much of the growth has been for “middle-skilled jobs,” paying $14 to $21 per hour, including positions in medical services, trucking and customer service. Overall, according to one recent survey, the Inland Empire ranked 13th among the nation’s large metropolitan areas in creating such positions. These jobs, notes economist John Husing, are critical to a region where almost half the workforce has a high school education or less.

Even the housing sector, the driver of the post-crash employment decline, has improved considerably. Today, the Inland Empire is experiencing a far greater increase in construction permits than either Los Angeles or Orange counties. This has also helped boost construction employment, although not to anything like the levels experienced a decade before. Construction employment, although up recently, still totals barely half the people it did in 2006.

Some, such as University of Redlands economist Johannes Moenius, express concern that important industries, like warehousing and manufacturing, are increasingly using part-time workers. Positions paying $15,000 to $30,000 annually constitute nearly half of all new jobs.

The ambiguity in the recovery is reflected in a recent survey by Cal State San Bernardino, which found the percentage of those saying the economy was excellent or good had almost doubled since 2010, from 9 percent to 17 percent, but this was considerably below the 40-plus percent seen before the crash.

The Path Ahead

The fate of the Inland Empire remains in the balance. The recovery of the region depends largely on continued widespread population growth, largely stimulated by the production of affordable housing. Yet, at the same time, state regulations, spurred on by the environmental lobby, which seeks to slow, or even eliminate, single-family construction, threaten to force up prices and drive young families outside the state.

Many other core industries of the area – such as warehousing and manufacturing – also face growing regulatory barriers. High taxes and energy costs originating from Sacramento are particularly difficult for industries that require power to operate. Southern California Edison’s rates, for example, are almost twice those found in Salt Lake City, Seattle or Albuquerque.

Some may celebrate these policies that encourage people to say “good riddance” to a region too sprawling and insufficiently cultured. Yet, it’s hard to see how Southern California can continue to add workers – notably, younger middle-class families – without a vibrant Inland Empire. It remains the one Southern California region with the land, and the housing cost structure, to accommodate much of the hard-pressed middle class. Without growth inland, Southern California will be largely relegated to a torpid economy and rapidly aging demographics, a fate that would compromise the aspirations of future generations.

This piece originally appeared in The Orange County Register.

Military Memorials: Is This Really the Best We Can Do?

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:38:53 -0500

I was researching material for a blog post about the town I grew up in (Toms River, New Jersey) and accidentally stumbled on something completely unrelated that I find deeply disturbing on multiple levels. It was a roadside memorial dedicated to a fallen soldier. I looked up his name and realized that he had gone to my high school and his family lived very near the house I had once lived in. United States Navy SEAL Denis Miranda was twenty four years old when he perished in Qalat, Afghanistan. He has two surviving brothers on active duty.

Google

Denis Miranda is currently being “honored” by a cheap metal highway sign at the back of a ShopRite supermarket next to the employee parking lot and a storm water retention ditch. The chain link fence behind the sign is used to pin up banners advertising cold beer on sale. It isn’t dignified enough to commemorate the death of a native son. What exactly is his mom supposed to think as she drives past this sign on the way home from church? Is it comforting? Do his father and brothers meet at the sign to have a solemn moment of prayer and remembrance while summer traffic backs up at the intersection waiting for the light to turn green? Is the placement of the sign meant to inspire passing motorists to think deep thoughts about the nature of war and patriotism? And what does this kind of monument say about the way our society values its fallen? What does it say about the fact that this might actually be the best spot in town to express public gratitude or collective loss?

www.njrunforthefallen.org

Then I realized there was an entire state wide trail of these memorial signs all along the New Jersey coast, each marker representing a veteran who never returned home. The tragedy of all those lost lives and family sacrifices worked on me and I got angry at the memorials themselves. Is this really the best we can do?

The Star-Ledger Archive

Google

This is the sign commemorating the loss of Marine Private First Class Vincent Frassetto who died in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. His memorial is on the side of a cloverleaf intersection near the Ocean County Mall. This same roadside spot is also favored by people placing signs advertising rug sales and warnings about pedophiles who may be lurking in public places. Will anyone ever make a pilgrimage to this sign by parking on the edge of the mall and walking across the grassy cloverleaf with loved ones to ponder the life and death of Vincent Frassetto? Or is the public assumed to be too busy to get out of the car so we better catch them while they’re trapped at a red light? Again, the quality and location of the memorial simply isn’t in keeping with the scale of the sacrifice.

marines.togetherweserved.com

Google

Major James Weis of the U.S. Marine Corps died in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Here’s his home town roadside war hero monument. It got me thinking about the people who organized these memorials – all devoted and well intentioned no doubt. Did they truly believe that these arrangements were appropriate? Were the folks on the committee looking around for a sacred place of honor and decide, “Hey, how about we put these cheap highway signs next to the left hand turn lane by the muffler shop and the Krispy Kreme.”?

So… where exactly should we put memorials to fallen veterans these days? What form should those monuments take? We used to live in the kinds of towns were there were obvious places to erect an obelisk or a bronze statue. Now most of us live in tract home subdivisions, work in office parks on the side of a highway, and shop at strip malls. Could it be that these flimsy sheet metal markers reflect our true values and who we really are? Am I the only one who thinks this is weird and distasteful?

World Megacities: Densities Fall as they Become Larger

Wendell Cox — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:38:08 -0500

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

Looking Back: The Ideal Communist City

Alicia Kurimska — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:38:27 -0500

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.

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

John Sanphillippo — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:38:29 -0500

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.



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.



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.



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.

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?



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.

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.



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.



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.



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.



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.

Don't Boost Cities by Bashing the 'Burbs

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 08:32:21 -0500

There is nothing like a trip to Washington, D.C., to show how out of touch America’s ruling classes have become. I was in the nation’s capital to appear on a panel for a Politico event that – well after I agreed to come – was titled “Booming Cities, Busting Suburbs.”

The notion of cities rising from the rotting carcass of suburbia is widely accepted today by much of our corporate, academic and media leadership. This notion has been repeatedly embraced as well by the Obama administration, whose own former secretary of Housing and Urban Development declared several years back that the suburbs were dying, and people were “moving back to the central cities.”

Some on Wall Street also embrace this notion. Having played a pivotal role, along with regulators, in the housing crash of the late 2000s, some financiers have been buying up foreclosed homes for rental income and also back many high-density projects, which are built to house, in large part, those who cannot buy a home, particularly the younger generation.

As the Economistrecently pointed out, the suburban house, or a house in less-crowded parts of cities, is an aspiration of upwardly mobile people in the United States and around the world. Surveys, including those conducted by Smart Growth America, demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans prefer single-family houses; most millennials seem to feel that way, too, according to both a Frank Magid Associates survey and a more recent one from Nielsen. As the economy improves, and the people in the millennial generation enter their thirties, it is likely that they – as did other generations – will start buying houses as they start families.

At the very least, suburbia clearly predominates among Americans. Roughly 85 percent of people in our major metropolitan areas, notes demographer Wendell Cox, inhabit suburban neighborhoods, dominated by cars and single-family houses, even though they live within the boundaries of the largest cities. They are definitively not moving en masse into the urban core. In the most recent census, from 2010, the urban core, defined as territory within two miles of city hall, grew by 206,000 people. In contrast, areas 10 or more miles away from an urban center grew by some 15 million people.

Nor has this appreciably changed over time. Since the housing bust, the growth rates of core cities and suburbs are now basically even, but the preponderance of suburban population means that the periphery is adding many more people. From 2010-13, the suburbs added 5.4 million people, while the core cities have added 1.5 million, accounting for less than 30 percent of all major metropolitan population growth.

Other recent analyses, such as from the real estate website Trulia, confirm that this pattern continues. Meanwhile, demand for suburban office space, often seen as dying by urban boosters, now is recovering faster than that of the central core, according to the consultancy CoStar.

The boom in U.S. energy production, and the resulting drop in energy prices, could accelerate the suburban recovery. For years, smart-growth advocates counted on pricey “peak oil” to turn suburbs into “remote slums.” Brookings has estimated that every 10 percent rise in oil prices lowers suburban housing prices by several thousand dollars while raising prices closer in. Not surprisingly, cheaper energy does not sit well with the progressive clerisy, as epitomized by a recent New Yorker article, which likens it to “an industrial form of crack.”

No one buys the mindless embrace of higher housing density and expanding rail transit more than urban mayors. At the Politico event in Washington, Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker insisted gamely that transit is “less expensive” than building and maintaining roads, which is not even remotely the case. Transit’s fully loaded capital and operating expenditures per passenger mile are more than four times that of the automobile and road system. Nor is the Salt Lake City area about to become a region of strap hangers: 3.2 percent of workers in the Salt Lake City region commute by transit, down slightly since 2000.

The real Salt Lake City, Becker’s perception notwithstanding, is very much a sprawled one. The downtown may have been spiffed up a bit, largely due to a massive investment by the Mormon church, but, since 2010, the periphery has grown by 48,000 people, compared with 5,000 in the city. In 1950, Salt Lake City accounted for 66 percent of the region’s population; today that is a mere 17 percent.

Another of my fellow panelists, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, is fantastical in his embrace of transit and the future of metropolitan geography. Reed counts on millennials transforming his city, but, overall, the millennial population share in urban cores has dropped since 2010, with strong percentage declines registered in such varied core counties in New York, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., as well as Atlanta.

Reed, something of a darling of the Davos crowd, presides over something around 8 percent of the Atlanta metro area’s population, down from half in 1950. The most recent estimates from the Census Bureau, suggest that Atlanta may have gained 28,000 people since 2010, compared with 209,000 gained in the suburbs. But even this must be taken with a grain of salt; in the most recent census, it turned out that estimates in many cities, including New York, Chicago and St. Louis, were greatly inflated – in metro Atlanta’s case, by over 100,000.

Although poverty has seeped out of central Atlanta and into the periphery, in part due to the relatively small size of its urban core, the poverty rate in the city is close to twice that of the suburbs, which mirrors the national trend. Its crime rate ranks among the nation’s worst, up there with Detroit, Oakland and St. Louis. An Atlanta resident is roughly more than three times more likely than an average Georgian to become the victim of a violent crime. Although worse than most, Atlanta’s metropolitan core is not unusual; overall, the rate of violent crime in urban cores, although down from 2001, is almost four times higher than that of suburbs, where the rate has also declined.

Nor is Atlanta about to turn into a Southern version of successful transit “legacy” cities like New York or even Washington. Despite a massive investment in rail transit, the regional share of transit commuting today, according to Census Bureau estimates, is a mere 3.1 percent, compared with 3.4 percent in 2000. In reality, transit ridership has risen mostly in a handful of “legacy” cities, notably New York, while overall the share of transit commuters nationally is almost a whole percentage point lower than in 1980. In most U.S. metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, more people telecommute than take transit.

To be sure, Atlanta is, in certain spots, looking better. Upscale districts, like Midtown and Buckhead, have rebounded smartly from the real estate crash, but downtown Atlanta has among the highest vacancy rates in the country. The once-ballyhooed Underground Atlanta downtown shopping and entertainment district is widely seen as something of a disaster. Progressive rhetoric aside, Atlanta, according to the liberal Brookings Institution, has the greatest income inequality of any large city in America, even worse than luxury cities like San Francisco, New York or Boston.

To be sure, one can still make a sounder case for Atlanta’s evolution. There is a sizeable youth demographic, particularly students and childless households, who are attracted to such places, and some companies find the central location better than that of the suburban periphery. It is still a liveable city with many nice, relatively low-density neighborhoods that could accommodate middle-class families. It possesses a canopy of trees – leading some to call it “a city in a forest.”

Cities like Atlanta are important, and it’s great that they are doing better than they were three decades ago. But the urban turnaround, more tentative in places like Atlanta than in Manhattan, does not have to be predicated, as the Politico event seemed to suggest, on the projected ruin of suburban aspirations. Despite the hopes nurtured in places like Washington, D.C., and among parts of financial oligarchy, suburb-dwelling Americans are likely to dominate our housing market, economy and demography for generations to come.

Rather than target suburbia for extinction, cities should focus on the hard work ahead of them. Even as pundits worry about the loss of artists in high-cost cities, the urban future really depends on holding onto middle-class families and millennials as they age. To keep them, mayors need to focus not just on the densest sections of the urban core and rail transit, but on improving the roads, reducing crime, improving both neighborhoods and the broad-based economy. And they must radically reform the schools, critical to luring middle-class families with children. Rather than celebrating the supposed demise of suburbia, city leaders like Mayor Reed should take heed of the biblical injunction: “Physician, heal thyself.”

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.