Mall Life

What kind of life is this? -Newport on the Levee

I Wouldn't Live There If You Paid Me To

These words often enter my thoughts. Listen at your own risk.

Shift Toward Urbanism Predicted

Harvard Business Review says shift toward urbanism is imminent and business must plan for it:

...companies are getting a jump on a major cultural and demographic shift away from suburban sprawl. The change is imminent, and businesses that don’t understand and plan for it may suffer in the long run.

...“In the 1950s, suburbs were the future, the city was then seen as a dingy environment. But today it’s these urban neighborhoods that are exciting and diverse and exploding with growth.”

.. partly a reaction to real problems created by suburbs. Their damage to quality of life is well chronicled...

..the trends ... are part of broader recent changes businesses already accept: the shift to an experience economy, consumers’ and employees’ demands for greater corporate social responsibility, an emphasis on work/life balance, and the importance of interaction between companies and their customers. The demographic aspect is simply the newest part of an ongoing conversation. Companies that recognize the larger trend, however, and seize the opportunities that it presents will contribute to its social impact—and may gain a competitive advantage in the process.

Decade of Reckoning?

More news on the changing suburbs:

Huffington Post and Yahoo News

...analysis of 2000-2008 census data by the Brookings Institution highlights the demographic "tipping points" seen in the past decade and the looming problems in the 100 largest metropolitan areas...
...
"A new metro map is emerging in the U.S. that challenges conventional thinking about where we live and work," ..."The old concepts of suburbia, Sun Belt and Rust Belt are outdated and at odds with effective governance."

...The suburbs now have the largest poor population in the country. They are home to the vast majority of baby boomers age 55 to 64, a fast-growing group that will strain social services after the first wave of boomers turns 65 next year.

..."What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into 'bright flight' to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction."

... the old urban stereotypes no longer apply...

Calling 2010 the "decade of reckoning," the report urges policymakers to shed outdated notions of America's cities and suburbs and work quickly to address the coming problems caused by the dramatic shifts in population.

Among its recommendations: affordable housing and social services for older people in the suburbs; better transit systems to link cities and suburbs; and a new federal Office of New Americans to serve the education and citizenship needs of the rapidly growing immigrant community. ...

Question Comforts of Your Youth

Q: What do you think it is about the suburbs...that people find comfortable?

A: I think they don’t actually find it comfortable — but everyone is nostalgic for the shitholes of their youth. When we’re young and isolated we don’t know if a place is lousy or not- it’s ours and we are of it, and so we feel a weird closeness. But just as some kids who are abused and beaten think that’s just what growing up is, we ex-suburbanites naturally assume that everyone shared our experience. Many did, but not all.

- David Byrne on bicycles, Atlanta’s sprawl and burying highways

A: ...The thing about many cities — and getting out of the tin bubble — is that they facilitate random encounters, inspirations and connections. That’s how people, being the social animals we are, flourish.

What??

National Suburbs Museum!

The Kansas City Star
...You know that shopping center at Interstate 35 and Johnson Drive in beautiful downtown Merriam where no stores have ever opened?
...
You mean tear down the Circuit City-that-never-was and start over?

No, he said. Keep the shopping center. But have an architect add to the design, something to make it iconic...

The decision was to operate a facility focused on a national rather than just a local audience, the way the World War I Museum has.

“I think we can tell the national story of suburbia here,” consultant Guy Hermann said...

Return to Noplace

Times to Remember, Places to Forget
By DANIEL GILBERT, NY Times

...maybe we’ve reached nostalgia’s end. “Nostalgia” ...is literally a longing for the places of one’s past. And lately, it has become harder and harder to find things to miss about America’s places.

Downtowns were once collections of local businesses...Today,... The banks and burritos and baristas on one city block are replicated on the next — and in all the malls, in all the cities, in all the states. Americans can drive from one ocean to the other, stopping every day for the same hamburger and every evening at the same hotel. Traveling in a straight line is no longer much different than traveling in a circle...

A Film - The City - 1939

I found this old film through James Howard Kunstler's website. The words to the film were apparently written by Lewis Mumford. The first few minutes showing farm life aren't that interesting, but the scenes of the city and the actual living conditions of a city which appears to be Pittsburgh are fascinating, as are the huge traffic jams filmed in the 1930s. These are a pretty interesting demonstration of the way people saw the problem of the American city in the early 20th century.

Clip 1, from bucolic farms complete with basket making and loom weaving to sooty dangerous factories:


Clip 2, The fast city:


Clip 3, cities going crazy, traffic jams and crowds:


Part 4, the planned alternative, the suburbs (with magically no cars):


If you are interested, you can watch these videos overlaid with a running commentary by Jim Kunstler here.

New American Dream: Renting

Article from Wall Street Journal requires a subscription to view in its entirety.

It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition. By Thomas J. Sugrue

...Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a "comfort" in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair....

... One third of respondents don't believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don't own one now, believe that they'll never own one again.

...In France, Germany, and Switzerland, renting is more common than purchasing. There, most people invest their earnings in the stock market or squirrel it away in savings accounts. In those countries, whether you are a renter or an owner, houses have use value, not exchange value.

... the story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It's not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It's a different kind of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation.

We are a nation of homeowners and home-speculators because of Uncle Sam.

It wasn't until government stepped into the housing market, during that extraordinary moment of the Great Depression, that tenancy began its long downward spiral. Before the Crash, government played a minuscule role in housing Americans, other than building barracks and constructing temporary housing during wartime and, in a little noticed provision in the 1913 federal tax code, allowing for the deduction of home mortgage interest payments.

Until the early 20th century, holding a mortgage came with a stigma. You were a debtor, and chronic indebtedness was a problem to be avoided like too much drinking or gambling. The four words "keep out of debt" or "pay as you go" appeared in countless advice books. As the YMCA told its young charges, "If you can't pay, don't buy. Go without. Keep on going without." Because of that, many middle-class Americans—even those with a taste for single-family houses—rented. Home Sweet Home didn't lose its sweetness because someone else held the title.

In any case, mortgages were hard to come by. Lenders typically required 50% or more of the purchase price as a down payment. Interest rates were high and terms were short, usually just three to five years....

...Herbert Hoover signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in 1932, laying the groundwork for massive federal intervention in the housing market. ...Frankin Roosevelt created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation... created the Federal Housing Administration, ...instituted 25- and 30-year mortgages, and cut interest rates...and created the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) which created the secondary market in mortgages...

Easy credit, underwritten by federal housing programs, boosted the rates of home ownership quickly. By 1950, 55% of Americans had a place they could call their own. By 1970, the figure had risen to 63%. It was now cheaper to buy than to rent. Federal intervention also unleashed vast amounts of capital that turned home construction and real estate into critical economic sectors. By the late 1950s, for the first time, the census bureau began collecting data on new housing starts—which became a leading indicator of the nation's economic vitality.

... Tens of millions of Americans owned their own homes because of government programs, but they had no reason to doubt that their home ownership was a result of their own virtue and hard work, their own grit and determination—not because they were the beneficiaries of one of the grandest government programs ever. The only housing programs prominently associated with Washington's policy makers were underfunded, unpopular public housing projects...

Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home, and in the process, gutting inner cities, whose residents, until the civil rights legislation of 1968, were largely excluded from federally backed mortgage programs. Of new housing today, 80% is built in suburbs—the direct legacy of federal policies that favored outlying areas rather than the rehabilitation of city centers. It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.

But by the 1960s and 1970s, those who had been excluded from the postwar housing boom demanded their own piece of the action—and slowly got it. The newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development expanded home ownership programs for excluded minorities...

During the wild late 1990s ...New tools, including the securitization of mortgages and subprime lending, made it possible for more Americans than ever to live the dream or to gamble that someone else would pay them more to make their own dream come true..

... If there's one lesson from the real-estate bust of the last few years, it might be time to downsize the dream, to make it a little more realistic. James Truslow Adams, the historian who coined the phrase "the American dream," one that he defined as "a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank" also offered a prescient commentary in the midst of the Great Depression. "That dream," he wrote in 1933, "has always meant more than the accumulation of material goods." Home should be a place to build a household and a life, a respite from the heartless world, not a pot of gold.

UPDATE: here are a few studies about the effect of apartments on nearby
housing values:

Apartments Have Positive Impact on Property Appreciation Rates

Effects of Mixed-Income, Multi-Family Rental Housing Developments on
Single-Family Housing Values

America's Working Communities and the Impact of Multifamily Housing

National Multi Housing Council has resources about "Apartment Myths":

Demolishing New Suburban Homes

Found at Mish's Global Trend Analysis.

Here is a map of the approximate area being filmed:

View Larger Map

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal writes about this story (1 week later).

Stop Building Suburban Slums

As the suburbs continue to be overbuilt, housing prices decline in many suburban communities. As the prices get low enough, they begin to attract more and more poor people, who previously only lived in the city, near services and transportation.

....In 2005...suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time.

...America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia...

... "Suburbia is overbuilt and yet we will keep on building there. Most policymakers don't see the consequences, and those who do are denying reality."

...suburbia's least desirable neighborhoods - aging, middle-class tract-home developments far from city centers and mass transit lines — are America's emerging slums, characterized by poverty, crime and other social ills. ...

... suburbs are losing favor because they make little sense, forcing people into their cars, limiting social interaction and discouraging racial and socio-economic diversity. ...

The displaced poor find value in the aging, outer-ring tract-home developments that once promised easy living far from the city's hustle and bustle. ...

Miami real estate broker... said he's witnessing the spiral, even within newer tract-home development ... many early middle-class buyers in these transition neighborhoods are desperate to sell but can't.

..."The isolation can be both physical and emotional, the frequency of interaction with neighbors declines, social networks break down...

.... Most of the homes he expects to exist in 2025 have yet to be built. He said planners can reduce that oversupply by crafting long-term growth policies that reflect a careful assessment of regional demands ....What they will find, he said, is a preference among all income groups for denser, mixed-use communities with access to mass transit.

..."I wouldn't add another new road in American today,"...

Mass Transit Consequences

I am a big fan of mass-transit. I would love to see the city lay some light rail, and the streetcar seems to be a pretty cool idea. I know it is considered one of those "city" ideas, but I never understood why folks in the 'burbs would not be more behind it. Being able to take light rail to and from work seems like a brilliant idea to me. I spent 3 months working in Osaka, Japan, and using the subway to commute is one of my favorite memories. Now obviously Cincinnati is a smaller city, but I still like the idea.

Here is the kind of post that might be the source of some of the fear. Stephen Dubner (co-writer of Freakonomics) posted about some unintended consequences on the Freakonomics blog. He is blogging about an article in Riverfront Times.

His conclusion:

If the incoming President can find the money, there will surely be renewed efforts to expand public transit in a lot of cities.

There are obvious gains: environmental, less road congestion, fewer accidents, etc. But if St. Louis’s experience is at all indicative, there might also be at least one unintended consequence worth thinking about.

It is interesting to read some of the comments posted on this. I think Public Policy is often implemented without sufficient consideration of unintended consequences, but to use this as a rationale to not implement better mass transit misses out on a ton of positives, imho.

What are your thoughts?

Classic Town Branding

A campaign in Philedelphia to re-brand some older, first ring suburbs as "Classic Towns might be a good idea for Cincinnati neighborhoods such as Cheviot, Mt Healthy, Silverton, and many others?

...They are places that have been long suffering as homebuyers the past few decades have opted for more spacious homes on large lots in new subdivisions on the suburban fringe.

The result has been crippling to the region's so-called first suburbs, left to struggle with declining population, aging infrastructure, and loss of industry that once bolstered their tax base.

...If you live in these walkable mixed-use communities with convenient access to public transit, you probably can get rid of at least one car in your driveway.

While planners have been advocating for years a return to older communities as a way to curb suburban sprawl, Seymour said, "I think now with gas prices, the market is finally catching up to those policy objectives."

...The plan calls for converting many of the tired shopping centers ... into mixed-use complexes of retail on the street level, topped with apartments and condominiums.

Shrubbery not Suburbanites

"We should have a countywide goal to tear down two houses for every new home," said Paul Oyaski, Cuyahoga County's development director.

Shaker Heights' move runs counter to urban planning a decade ago, when officials urged development to boost property taxes, income taxes and business traffic. Now, Shaker Heights is at the forefront of a national movement to keep the cleared lots populated with shrubbery, not suburbanites.

-Foster's Daily Democrat, Portland, Maine

Discontent and Disconnected

Came across this post from a mom, disgruntled at where she finds herself in her suburban life. Yesterday her post was much longer, (and much more pro-Chicago and anti-Cleveland), but she apparently had second thoughts and shortened it.

...I am having a difficult time living life from the sidelines of manicured suburban Ohio lawns. I would desperately trade in each one of my thousand feet of living for a tiny slice of city. I want to be closer to my family, I want my children to be more than just visitors in the city. Our house here is obnoxiously big and incredibly beautiful and picture perfect in every way. But I feel as if life is passing me by so fast.

I think there are more city wannabees out there than we know.