Sunday, January 24th, 2010
The Core Vitality Imperative
What does a healthy urban core mean to a region? Maybe the difference between success and failure. Here’s a look at urban core and regional job growth for selected cities*, ranked by percentage job growth in the core county from 2001 to 2009.
| City | Job Change – Core | Pct. Job Change – Core | Job Change – Metro | Pct. Job Change – Metro |
| Austin | 21,500 | 4.0% | 79,000 | 11.8% |
| Portland | (17,300) | (3.9%) | 10,300 | 1.1% |
| Columbus | (46,500) | (6.6%) | (11,757) | (1.3%) |
| Cincinnati | (64,200) | (11.5%) | (24,400) | (2.5%) |
| Cleveland | (95,600) | (12.1%) | (108,700) | (10.1%) |
| Detroit | (181,200) | (21.3%) | (382,800) | (18.7%) |
Notice a pattern? Clearly, for these cities at least, core county performance is an excellent proxy for overall regional performance. I’m not making a statistical claim here, but the data for these cities is suggestive. I think it also foots with our common sense view. How many thriving metro areas have a core city/county that is going down the tubes? I can’t name one.
The Dynamics of Growth and Decline
It might be easy to dismiss cities like Cleveland and Detroit by simply calling them dysfunctional. But that misses the point. Of course they’re dysfunctional. All struggling cities and organizations are dysfunctional, or they probably wouldn’t be in that state. What’s more, rather than just dysfunction causing failure, which is sometimes true, it’s also true that failure causes dysfunction. As a city (or company or other organization) starts into decline, it fails to attract customers, top talent leaves, and operational and financial issues creep up. In this regard the civic dysfunction noted in places like California is as much as product of decline as its cause.
Growth and decline are both positive reinforcement cycles. During growth, economies of scale drive unit cost efficiencies, and there’s rising wealth to fund investments that generate more wealth. As places like Phoenix and Florida attest, even the raw construction that accompanies growth can generate its own bubble.
Similarly for decline. Scale economics go into reverse, there’s no money to invest, people start fleeing. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser attributes a lot of this to an inelastic housing supply. As people leave, the quantity of houses stays the same, which drives prices down. This scares more people into leaving, attracts poor people, which cause more middle class people to leave, which cause prices to decline further, etc.
The Imperative of Preventing Core Decline
Given these dynamics, it is imperative to prevent decline from taking hold. I identify four basic states of regional growth: Hyper-Growth, Moderate Growth, Stagnation, and Decline. Austin is Hyper-Growth, Portland and Columbus are Moderate Growth, Cincinnati is Stagnation, and Cleveland and Detroit are Decline in this scenario. (Assignment not entirely based on job growth).
I posit as a hypothesis that these states don’t exist as a pure continuum, but rather behave more as discrete quanta, with forces that tend to keep cities in their present state. What’s more, I’d suggest that transitions from one state to another occur as a result of a sort of “punctured equilibrium” that occurs when growth, or more likely decline, in the core reaches a tipping point. Or as Dietrich Dörner put it, “‘Catastrophes’ seem to hit suddenly, but in reality the way has been prepared for them. Unperceived forces gradually eat away at the supports necessary for favorable development until the system is finally unable to resist any longer and collapses.”
Why the core? Because it seems that decline in a region first becomes evident there. The implication is that we should would keep a very close eye on core city and core county demographic trends (population growth, domestic and international in-migration, and educational attainment) and economic statistics (job growth, income growth, output growth). It seems unlikely that core counties are likely to have net in-migration as they are structural exporters to the suburbs. But if they aren’t attractive to international immigrants, are losing jobs, etc. that’s definitely a very bad sign. These negative trends might not be obvious or be ignored because of the stickiness of the current growth state – until it is too late.
For example, even ostensibly healthy cities like Columbus, Ohio might have underlying trends that put it as risk. How likely is it that the Columbus region will be long term successful if Franklin County loses 50,000 jobs per decade? Not very. That’s the city’s tax base slowly bleeding away. And with Columbus very dependent on commuter taxes, that’s doubly true in this case.
Don’t Hate the Suburbs
It might be tempting to view the suburbs as the “bad guy” here. I reject that view. In a growing community, it isn’t reasonable to believe that all the new residents and businesses are going to land in a fixed area. And clearly, despite an optimistic trend towards urban living being back in fashion, the suburbs continue to have a hold on the desires of large numbers of Americans, particularly families with kids.
I want to bring the central city up, not pull the suburbs down. A great city needs great suburbs. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s room for regional solutions or other matters. But especially in a struggling region like the Midwest, we need every part of a region to understand its role on the team and bring its “A game”. Pitting city and against suburb is like beggars arguing over table scraps. The real competition is between, not within regions, on a global basis. And even that competition need not be a zero-sum game.
If we start taking an antagonistic point of view towards the suburbs, especially in regions like the Midwest and South with strong suburban traditions and little political demand for pro-urban policies, we’re just asking to fail, practically speaking.
I think we need to focus on maintaining core vitality, without worrying that the suburbs are growing too. Even Austin has most of its growth in the suburbs, but the core county is still growing as well. Portland has moderate core decline, but that may be a temporary state due to its under performance in the recession. And Portland has the problem of being on a state border, which leads to tax and policy arbitrage with nearby Washington – a tough challenge. Still, the policies Portland has put in place has kept its core significantly more healthy than those of the Midwest. As long as the core stays strong, that’s a good thing.
And, of course, as these numbers show, perhaps the best way to boost the suburbs is to boost the core.
What’s Your Policy?
So how do we keep our urban cores successful over the long term? That’s a tough challenge. Frankly, it’s a nut America hasn’t cracked, other than for the tier one global cities, and even there, the story is very overplayed.
On the one side are those that cite high costs and poor services in the city. The recipe here is cutting costs, improving schools, and reducing crime. But as readers of my blog know, this, by itself, will never save the core. Cut costs and taxes? By all means, let’s be as efficient as possible. But we’ll still have higher taxes than the suburbs. Reduce crime and improve schools? Sign me up. But no matter what, the city will still fail to measure up to the average suburb. Cities are structurally higher cost and and structurally weaker providers of education, public safety, and some other services than the suburbs. This strategy, by itself, isn’t enough.
On the other hand, promoters of urbanist solutions du jour – light rail, bike lanes, “green” projects, stadiums, etc – often fail to make the case for how their projects will actually change the game. Rather, they rely on cookbook policy and talking point advocacy.
What’s more, success is often measured by eye candy rather than hard data. For example, people visit Chicago and gawk at the skyscrapers and crowds without considering that the area tourists and even many residents see is only a tiny part of the city or region. People visit Portland and see crowded street cars and sidewalks in the Pearl District, but discount job growth if they even consider it. I can read urbanist blogs all day long and rarely ever come across the word “job”, unless it is some reference to the green economy.
That’s not to say that Portland or Chicago are failures – far from it – but the impression given by visiting or a glowing magazine article is certainly not the whole story.
The Way Forward
For me, I think the first imperative is still to convince people of the importance of the urban core to overall regional (and state and national) success. Too many people still don’t get this. Our cities are still often resented more than loved. As they are often home to the upscale amenities, high end jobs, and may wealthy residents, this reinforces the notion that they are already privileged, when as the data above shows, this is really not the case. And of course, cities are often Democratic strangleholds, which makes Republicans take a skeptical view of pro-urban policy. It’s a hard argument to make, but we’ve got to figure out how.
We also need to remember the importance of the basics. Things like costs, taxes, regulatory policy, crime, and schools do matter. We simply can’t take our eye off the ball here, or ignore costs. We need to remember that sustainability includes demographic, economic, and fiscal sustainability.
On the other hand, cities do have to offer a differentiated product. They can’t try to out suburb the suburbs. That’s a sucker’s game. Rather, they do need to strengthen their core urbanity, make diversity into an asset, and find ways to make targeted investments that are aligned with an urban strategy, tailored to the local context, and for which we think we can generate good ROI.
It’s a tough balancing act and a hard challenge, one we haven’t figured out yet. But we’ve got to go beyond dogma and ask the tough questions. Because if we fail to keep our urban cores healthy, we’ll end up in a place we really don’t want to be. I plan to keep exploring how we get to a better place in this blog.
Related from the Columbus Dispatch: When will Ohio’s economic plunge end? (Answer: When its urban cores return to health)
Post Script: Suburban-Only Job Growth
Lest someone thing I’m trying to disguise the suburban-only growth, here it is for the cities in question. Note that other than Portland, the rankings don’t change.
| City | Suburban Job Growth | Percentage Suburban Job Growth |
| Austin | 57,540 | 44.1% |
| Columbus | 34,800 | 19.2% |
| Cincinnati | 39,800 | 9.4% |
| Portland | 27,600 | 5.3% |
| Cleveland | (13,100) | (4.6%) |
| Detroit | (201,600) | (16.8%) |
* Data is from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Q1-2001 to Q1-2009, which was the maximum year over year range available for easy download from the BLS at the time I started pulling data. I originally intended to include all my Midwest metros, but the BLS took the database offline for multiple days in the middle of my queries. This isn’t the first time that happened. Their database query uptime is highly suspect, so caveat emptor if you ever need BLS data.
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My interpretation of this data is that the current recession is so deep, and the previous years of growth were so weak, that job-wise the US had a lost decade; thus in places that didn’t grow very rapidly, the number of jobs hit a multi-year low in 2009. The employment to population ratio in Q1 of 2009 was 60%, and has since fallen to 58.2%. In 2001 it was 63.7%, and it was probably higher in Q1, when the recession just started. A city or region would have to have had strong population growth between 2001 and 2009 (I think 5%) just to break even on jobs.
Your epigram, “you can’t be a suburb of nowhere,” is arguably contradicted by several places in California, such as Orange County and Silicon Valley, where core cities are so attenuated and/or distant that you can encounter serious disagreement about which city is the core city. But it does have a certain logic in the midwest.
I wish suburban forces read your blog — perhaps you need a parallel “Suburbanophile” for such things? Or has Joel Kotkin already cornered that market? Suburban cities are at least as likely to claim to control their economic destinies as urban ones are.
A common example of both of the above is arguments about the name of an urban region. Recently, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority was renamed the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority, as though it were just a patch of coast with no central organising feature.
“Austin is Hyper-Growth, Portland and Austin are Moderate Growth’” – I think you mean Portland and Columbus are Moderate growth. Good post though.
Here’s the problem with the “families love suburbs” argument… if you look at a city like Cleveland, there are people who want to live in the core; it’s just that their alternative isn’t the suburbs. Go to any of Cleveland’s universities and ask people about where they’d like to live, and the response will likely be something like, “well, if I stayed in Cleveland, I’d choose to live in urban neighborhood X or Y”. They key word, of course, being “if”.
Here are the facts: Americans are getting married later than at any time in our history. Americans are having their first child at a later age. Americans are having fewer children. There are all demographic shifts that should help cities. When you don’t have kids, things like schools matter less, crime matters less, dwelling-type matters less. In fact, these demographics do help some places, like Austin, the city that was self-selected to prove the author’s point.
When the ‘where to live’ discussion occurs among people of older generations, it’s usually a question of ‘city or suburb’ (within the same metro). When this discussion occurs among people in younger generations, it’s increasingly a question of ‘city or a different city’.
Lastly, there’s no distinction being drawn here between older inner-ring suburbs and new sprawling suburbs. In the former case, some of these neighborhoods have existed for a hundred years or more; in the latter case, many popped up as the result of highways and government policies. To say “A great city needs great suburbs” is a blanked statement that makes it seem as though development in a suburb 8 miles from the CBD in the urban county is fundamentally the same as development in a suburb 30 miles away and two counties over.
Jarrett, I think the California urban agglomerations are special cases by the standards of historic cities. Modern-day Houston, Atlanta and DFW probably hew more and more to the Cali model, though.
In SoCal, clearly the original “urban centers” were LA and Long Beach but now there are so many (formerly) exurban clusters that the individual municipality and county boundaries are insignificant to economic evaluation. Likewise in the Bay Area, which started off with SF, San Jose, Oakland, and Berkeley before they all grew together.
And Rob, I agree there’s significant difference between 100-year-old “streetcar suburbs” and post WW2 “developments” regardless of their distance from the CBD. But in today’s world, those dense streetcar suburbs are considered urban neighborhoods, not suburbs.
This is a good topic to tackle. I suspect if you extend this data to include more cities through middle America and for the past 20 to 30 years the trend would be consistent.
There is a level of blight in or near many urban cores that scares too many who might consider moving their residence or business in the CBD. In lieu of stadiums and massive transit hubs I would consider more numerous, cheaper strategies of improving asthetics and aggressively improving or eliminating blighted structures (esp those with little historical value) in the cores. The goal is to improve demand for the area. The improved tax base that comes with that would hopefully usher in an era of growth. (This is already happening but to a too small degree.)
Though expensive to move, Indianapolis has foolishly kept two jails in the CBD despite attempts for massive development of the blocks inbetween. Those blocks though 3 blocks from the center piece monument circle are gravel parking lots and a boarded up drug den. I would have never imagined the impact to be THAT consequential, but clearly it has been. Similarly near the downtown canal project only one block east and for over a 1/2 mile is a stretch of very low density, low tech industry and storage. It is the type of place you would find a welding supply distributor or a machinist shop. It’s insane given the degree to which the city dotes over the canan.
Economist Richard Voith drew similar conclusions in this very good paper published in 1992.
The interdependency of cities and their suburbs is, I think, reason enough for a move away from the Tiebout Model and to a more regional form of local governance.
“So how do we keep our urban cores successful over the long term?”
Annexation?
One of the traditional problems is jurisdiction arbitrage, where one jurisdiction leeches off the benefits provided by another but refuses to pay for it. The traditional solution is to give cities annexation or merger powers suitable to prevent this.
The problem of the city getting too big to actually pay attention to the neighborhoods only arises when the city gets *very* big (New York, for instance), and could be best addressed by some form of two-layer region-and-neighborhood government (like London has ended up with).
It is not necessary to do any of this when the ’suburban’ jurisdictions are happy to help the city out, which has happened in some smaller towns, but seems to be less common in larger cities.
–
Of course, Detroit is an outlier — everyone knows why it collapsed: total dependence on one industry, concentration within that industry to three companies, and totally incompetent operation of those three companies. On top of that, Detroit sabotaged all attempts to make the city more attractive to people *not* in the auto industry — and blew through their money doing so. The whole state of Michigan is depopulating, and the government is only barely beginning to accept that.
Cleveland is not doing nearly as badly as people think. It’s simply suffering declining population. This could be managed to make it a more attractive place. It isn’t being done, really, but Cleveland is still not the wasteland that Detroit is, and it’s not bankrupt either. It retains a relatively diversified economy. Frankly Columbus is a *much* more depressing and unattractive place.
“There is a level of blight in or near many urban cores that scares too many who might consider moving their residence or business in the CBD.”
Yes. I saw that in Columbus. Not in Cleveland.
“On the other hand, cities do have to offer a differentiated product.”
And that’s what Cleveland hasn’t got. It’s a perfectly nice place, but if you compare it on *any* given set of standards, there’s some city which is nicer. So people and businesses move out.
Would someone forward this to Mayor Daley?
Will someone please forward this to Mayor Daley?
Why is Columbus classified as moderate growth if we lost 46,500 urban core jobs? Did I miss something?
Perhaps someone living closer to The Forest City can answer this question better than I, but wasn’t Cleveland one of the few cities that had gentrifying urban neighborhoods in the late 1990s that are now back in decline a decade later? I’m thinking of places like the Flats, but also, more recently, Slavic Village (pummeled by the foreclosure crisis, so perhaps not an apt comparison). Or Little Italy and Tremont. The Flats is an interesting case study in itself: a district with many of the right ingredients to revitalize, but from what people have told me, it never really took hold.
I’m no doubt one of many who wish that Rob’s postulate above were closer to the truth than I believe it actually is. But those young people in Cleveland’s universities do eventually turn 30, and, overwhelmingly, return to the suburbs.
I’m no doubt one of many who wish that Rob’s postulate above were closer to the truth than I believe it actually is. But those young people in Cleveland’s universities do eventually turn 30, and, overwhelmingly, return to the suburbs.
Sure, the suburbs of whatever metro they’ve moved to… that’s the point that seems to be missed. If you focus on families as they exist today, you overlook families that will exist 5 or 10 years into the future.
Imagine two transplants to a popular singles city. They meet and get married and have kids. They can either a) stay where they are or b) move back to where one of those people came from. The confirmation bias makes it easy to think that more people move back than actually do. I suspect that most simply stay in the metro where they met.
Thanks for the comments. Alon, there’s no doubt, the 00’s were lousy – no job growth nationally.
jt, that’s one reason I give Columbus a pass. The national economy was terrible and generated no net jobs over the decade. Columbus’ core job declines are bad news, no doubt about it. But, the region had above average population growth, net in-migration, and has remained below average in unemployment for the most part. Not bad given the environment we are in and being in the region of the country that’s really struggling.
Jarrett, California metros are strange beasts, no doubt. However, the Bay Area is two MSA’s: San Francisco and San Jose. If Santa Clara County – the core county of the San Jose MSA collapsed, it would be bad news. But again, very strange stuff in LA and SF to be sure due to the unique geography of those metros and the unusual county sizes.
Rob, the core county encapsulates inner ring suburbs generally. They are often struggling too. Frankly, even the newer suburbs are likely to run into challenges once they get “full” and get old.
I would challenge all of us who love cities and find the idea of moving to the suburbs unattractive to look beyond our own personal preference and look at behaviors out the world. There are families in the city, but there are also plenty of young singles in the burbs. I watched the mayor of Carmel, Indiana give his state of the city address. During his 3+ years in office, he said the median age in Carmel had dropped by 7 years. That’s astonishing. As they built more condos and apartments, younger people started moving in. Obviously they found something they liked.
There does seem to be a nascent back to the city movement. I’ve noticed some modest upticks in central city populations even in the Midwest. (Indy’s Center Township has gained population the last few years, for example). The demographic changes you might might reinforce this, but I think we’re along way from being able to declare the age of the suburb over.
anon 11:16, for the record, Indianapolis/Marion County lost 39,000 jobs over that time frame – a decline of 6.7% – almost exactly the same as Columbus.
AikeaGuinea – thanks for the link.
Nathaniel, annexation is tough. Columbus has pulled it off, but there isn’t another Midwest city besides C-bus that has any annexation gas left in the tank. Even city-county consolidation won’t solve the problem, as generally the entire core county is either in decline or heading that way. And as you note, size comes with its own disadvantages.
I know you aren’t keen on the Urban Growth Boundary idea as a solution, but what about a multi-tiered boundary system. You have a UGB and then a Suburban Growth Boundary farther out.
Graeme, it strikes me as practically difficult to implement at UGB in most places. Also, UGB’s, by restricting land supply, raise housing costs.
I would prefer different solutions like tax value taxes to discourage land banking and inefficient utilization closer to the core.
Some perspectives on Cleveland neighborhoods. What most people call the “Flats” is one street, with a strip of bars. It was never residential, and not even really a neighborhood. The bars were fun for a while, but got dated. It needed to be refreshed and was on course until the credit crunch. There are plenty of nice bars two blocks up the hill in the warehouse district.
Slavic Village is an ethnic neighborhood anchored by a Catholic Church. I don’t think it ever had huge potential as a young adult neighborhood. It was quaint, and might have made it as a local tour stop (antiques and bakeries). On one side, there is heavy industry and on the other, there are horribly depressed, blighted areas. A combination of fly-by-night mortgage brokers and housing advocacy groups brought thousands of people from the blighted neighborhoods into the village. When the easy money ran out, they promptly went into foreclosure.
Among Cleveland’s challenges is that it doesn’t have a “favored quarter,” more like a “less-disliked strip.” This follows the lake and then goes toward the university:
Lakewood, Edgwater, Detroit-Shoreway, Ohio City, Tremont, Downtown (China town/design district/midtown/no man’s land/health line) University circle, Little Italy, Conventry. In addition to scattering the young professionals, making it hard to have a critical mass anywhere, it means every cool neighborhood borders one or two blighted neighborhoods. I’m curious if other cities have this problem?
P.S. Tremont and Little Italy are doing quite well. Tremont made tremendous progress since 2000.
Aaron, I apologize for being Mr. Correction on this posting, but I get easily confused. When you say in comment 19 “tax value taxes”, do you mean “land value taxes”?
While the current situation makes Detroit a special case for one reason, I think you’ll find that the Detroit area in the 1980s and maybe even 1990s was a special case then in that the suburbs were experiencing job growth while Detroit was not.
The young single demographic in the suburbs can likely be attributed to those suburbs embracing a measure of density and urban-ness and realizing that young people previously lacked housing options to stay, particularly in wealthier suburbs.
For city dwellers with children, the deciding factor remains: can their children get a good education without breaking the bank. If no, time to move to the suburbs.
The same is true for zoning restrictions mandating parking minimums, maximum densities, and setbacks. It doesn’t mean people don’t engage in them.
Anon says, “In addition to scattering the young professionals [around Cleveland], making it hard to have a critical mass anywhere, it means every cool neighborhood borders one or two blighted neighborhoods. I’m curious if other cities have this problem?”
What you describe is pretty common in Columbus, Ohio too, but don’t think it hinders growth. Columbus’ Short North Arts District are German Village areas are both bordered by the struggling neighborhoods. The exception is the Grandview area, which is bordered by an affluent neighborhood, two rivers and an elevated highway (I-670). The highway separates a poverty stricken area from the Grandview area.
I don’t mean to derail, but I often wonder if the reason the struggling neighborhoods are bordering the so-called desirable neighborhoods is because they were once one in the same, but higher rents pushed less affluent residents out.
I live in a mixed-use “village” in Columbus that contains 20% public housing and I love the diversity in my neighborhood!
Dave, feel free to post any corrections! Alas I don’t have the budget for a copy-editor.
Alon, right.
Yes, I wandered away from the discussion of growth to comment on the neighborhoods.
If we’re trying to position our urban core better relative to exurbs, or midwest cities better relative to the rest of the country, who are we trying to attract or help grow?
What industries appeared or grew this decade? Maybe a few high tech companies. A few online retailers. But the jobs they added are dwarfed by the jobs lost in other industries.
Are we talking about how to grow fastest? How to not lag as much behind others’ growth? Or just how to lose jobs a little more slowly?
Seems like a very good post with some good points but….
“On the one side are those that cite high costs and poor services in the city. The recipe here is cutting costs, improving schools, and reducing crime. But as readers of my blog know, this, by itself, will never save the core. Cut costs and taxes? By all means, let’s be as efficient as possible. But we’ll still have higher taxes than the suburbs. Reduce crime and improve schools? Sign me up. But no matter what, the city will still fail to measure up to the average suburb. Cities are structurally higher cost and and structurally weaker providers of education, public safety, and some other services than the suburbs. This strategy, by itself, isn’t enough.”
I’m not an expert on cities but as a mostly lifelong resident of NYC, it was pretty clear the city, even though not wonderfuly run has huge embedded advantages over less dense areas.
A lot of these advantages come from the variety of choices density itself offers, as well as what should be much fixed costs per person for things like infrastructure. People move into the city to lower their property taxes.The fact that these roads are primarily funded by the state and Federal government has let us evade these costs.
Jane Jacobs lessons about the role density and eyes on the street can play in safety are proven more valuable every day.
Also, to get grim and honest about it– dense cities offer the chance to escape poor city services like poor schools. In fact, a school choice system or total elimination of public schools might be the best posible way of quickly reviving many cities.
Blowing off the lessons from tier one cities is just madness. Also, you don’t mention the dense cities of Asia once.
John, what you say about New York is true. On the other hand, how would you suggest other US cities go about replicating New York in their town? Or the dense cities of Asia?
Well, I guess the first thing is to acknowledge that those places are important and we can learn from them.
I take the Jane Jacobs view that typical American City has been sacked by poor urban planners most of whom are opposed to the existence of everything cities are about—freedom, convenience and self organizing diversity.
Once one gets that down, you just take 90% of what we’ve done over the last 60 years and work in reverse. For example–why on earth would a rational mayor want highways dumping into his city? Why would he offer free parking garages at taxpayer expense? Why wouldn’t he advocate for more getting rid of car oriented zoning laws?
John, focusing only on cities when dealing with metro or regional problems is shortsighted in the extreme. Cities and city policies can’t solve complex metro/regional tax and infrastructure issues. Nor can city policy deal with the demonstrated preference of half (give or take) of US metro-area residents to live in suburban settings. As Aaron often points out, it’s a fool’s errand for cities to try and “out-suburban” the suburbs.
We who care about cities can’t afford to ignore the typical metro spatial distribution (i.e. half urban, half suburban) that is the result of “freedom, convenience, and self organizing diversity” at work for the past 100 years.
To borrow a line from Pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is us. It is quite fashionable to paint “planners” (Robert Moses) and urban redevelopment of the 50s, 60s and 70s as villains. The fact is, vast numbers of people fled the cities of their own free will.
While misguided by today’s standards, that old-style “bulldozer urban redevelopment” with superblocks surrounded by greenspace was a response to the notion that someone had to do something to reenergize our cities by removing blight. All it did was to provide proof that building something that looks like a densified suburb won’t work. (That such pushes were tainted with either overt racism or a white plantation mentality is a sad artifact of US social history; we do have laws and regulations in place to guard against such discriminatory actions today.)
A path to a solution: Unified city-county governments were shown to work in NYC, Philadelphia, SF, and more recently in Toronto and Indianapolis…until the metro outgrew the core county or counties.
And like suburbs, cars aren’t going away anytime soon. That said, I agree that the pendulum needs to swing back to a balanced mix of living and transportation options…but in the end, people and companies choose what makes personal and economic sense.
Growth will most likely mean more suburbs and more cars along with larger and denser urban cores…not one or the other exclusively. Ignoring the built-up choices of three or four generations is done at our peril.
Just to put this in context, low estimates are that 500,000 NYC residents were forcibly relocated and their homes and communities destroyed by Robert Moses’s projects alone.
As to just how many people are making the choice to live in car oriented sprawl–lot’s of people want free things other people are paying for.
Be back with more thoughts. I guess the real question for an urban mayor is what’s in it for us? Why do we need to interact with people who for the most part are very reluctant to share revenues with the city and often are built as little more than a tax dodge.
I want to make it clear that I’m a Libertarian but one who believes cities have proven their efficiency and value.
It’s not like a decent symbiotic relationship between urban and suburban can’t be built. It’s what we used to have with streetcar suburbs and mass transit oriented design.
Has anyone read the transcripts from Governor Strickland’s latest speech?
He proposes “hubs” of innovation in Ohio’s major cities as well as an R&D-Edu partnership with P&G. Strickland also insisted on the implementation of better cooperative-education systems, which was presented as one of multiple components to these R&D-Edu partnerships.
If the policy works the way it is intended, I think it could create the sort of urban-core health that you’re proposing. I make this assumption on the basis of the newer post on place-based-clusters. Essentially OH is looking to move cluster strategies to a regional level.
Lastly, he made mention of the out migration of young people from Ohio (Makes me wonder how I’m 24 and still in Ohio when everyone acts like we have a lost generation) and indicated that these programs would capture those out migrants. Perhaps the indirect effect of these ‘hubs’ would be to retain young people (providing new jobs in sectors that aren’t manufacturing should hopefully do that, lets call it a positive externality), but I’m unsure how a direct effect of these policies would recapture young out-migrants.
It really does seem like I’m on to something with this. Just look at who favors and who opposes things like congestion pricing in NYC. Suburban politicians even put their two cents in about local street closings. They see the city as a parking lot–period.
Look at what’s happened in Pittsburgh. The city is under a financial control board because of it’s finances and the first thing suburban members who control the board did was to make sure the city lowered it’s parking tax.
John:
I agree with you about the “Parking Lot” perspective cities have. I don’t think that will change in the mid-west, or most places, without pushing public transit a little harder. Density is an obvious solution, but one that flies in the face of our libertarian property system.
My hometown, Columbiana, OH, is a bedroom community (with good schools to boot!) serving as a base for commuters traveling to Pittsburgh and Cleveland DAILY. As much as I don’t care about their costs of parking in the city, I do care about providing alternative modes of transportation to them without having to uproot entire populations away from good schools.
“A path to a solution: Unified city-county governments were shown to work in NYC, Philadelphia, SF, and more recently in Toronto and Indianapolis…until the metro outgrew the core county or counties”
Um, for the most part this didn’t just “happen”. It happened after literally trillions of mostly federal and state dollars were poured into cities often to unelected Czars like Robert Moses, who had almost godlike powers to seize land, and destroy or relocate anyone at will. It happened largely because federally backed loan programs almost exclusively backed single family homes and because of volumes of regulations and local zoning codes made it happen.
Now the country is broke and we have a vast overhang of badly planned and thought out infrastructure. We have a choice to keep on pouring cash down a rat hole or changing course.
FYI, I think if they had a chance, Nassau County in NY would vote to become part of NYC to escape astronomical residential property tax burden.
…But we’ll still have higher taxes than the suburbs. …Cities are structurally higher cost and and structurally weaker providers of education, public safety, and some other services than the suburbs.
Is this true? In my experience, cities typically have lower property taxes than suburbs. The sales taxes are often higher though, so maybe that makes up the difference. Still though, I can’t help but think that the commercial tax base of a city give it an advantage. Its density should also help reduce the costs of services (e.g. fire, gov’t administration) per capita.
I completely agree though that you can’t out-suburb the suburbs. I think cities should focus on creating the types of places that are lacking in the suburbs, namely walkable, transit-friendly places. This will attract people that are not attracted to the suburbs. I also think cities can win on schools by offering a huge array of choices. Chicago has succeeded with this strategy by creating magnet schools like Walter Payton and North Side Prep. Columbus has good schools like the Columbus Alternative High School and Fort Hayes Arts Academy. More choices than those available in the suburbs (possible due to the density of the city) – public, charter and private – will go a long way towards retaining people who have a choice.
Bingo, I mean just imagine– )and I know it’s hard in America) a city with a traditional dense structure and a high level of personal and economic freedom.
Basically, that’s a fictional breed in the USA, but it’s very possible, just look at Hong Kong or Singapore.
Simple logic dictates that dense cities should be able to crush most suburbs on a cost vs benefit level for most people. That they don’t is much more a reflection of how they are run.
As to the school choice issue; this is a killer advantage most cities have but it’s almost never mentioned or aggressively pushed, IMHO for P.C. reasons. Would a mayor in plain english say that there are many more alternatives to the public schools in a city? This is a dirty big secret. I mean when NYC came back, it’s deluxe base of private school alternatives was a big factor. Then came the magnet and charter schools.
OK, personal freedom in Singapore can be pretty limited in some absurd ways– I think you can chew gum now.
John, for the most part I find some sense in what you write. However, I think it’s time to bury both Moses and Jacobs. It’s history, and no one would do what Moses did today.
Frankly, suburbanites seem to want easy, default choices: safe, moderately appreciating subdivisions surrounded by safe, nationally-branded shopping, and served by safe, upscale suburban schools and good highways into the city.
Living in a city with school choice (Indianapolis is one) is clearly the harder parenting choice. To choose from the options, one must have a good understanding of the schools and of one’s children, as well as a willingness to send children from the same family off in different directions at the start of the school day. This doesn’t comport with a rural, small-town, or suburban mentality where life proceeds upon a defined track.
(These observations stem from a life spent growing up in the suburbs and an adult lifetime spent in cities raising kids.)
“This doesn’t comport with a rural, small-town, or suburban mentality where life proceeds upon a defined track.”
Right, it certainly sounds like that type of person is not a good prospective resident for most cities. Of course no two cities are the same and perhaps one might find a place in a city with a 500 square mile footprint.
I guess the core question for the hypothetical mayor of a more typical city of say 100-150 square miles with a marginal downtown that has some potential and perhaps some rivers, lakes or physical barriers is just how much of their land and quality of life they need to compromise to accommodate your demographic.
Speaking of Pittsburgh, It’s a city with a very small land area of only 55 square miles, of which a good chunk is reserved for parks or has steep hills. Even so the city still is home to a lot of the regions best jobs and good potential synergies are developing around it’s colleges. It has some very viable areas like the South Side, and many like Shadyside, Bloomfield, Friendship, Oakland and Point Breeze that are very close to hitting critical mass. The job base is heavily dependent on colleges, the government and medical non profits who don’t pay taxes.
Allegheny County in which Pittsburgh is located is made up of over 150 separate municipalities and in spite of nearly 100 years of waiting, the chances for significant consolidation are very slim.
So you want some nice fat highways driving into Downtown or Oakland where most of the jobs are. How many lanes? But, that’s just the beginning. You have to park that car somewhere and get to and from your parking space. Do you want free parking? And so it goes on after that. If we want you to get to stores we need more parking and highways and then there’s always the hope you will watch a Steeler, Pirates or Penguins game. ( so we set aside 20% of the land for that)
At every critical place in the city there’s a big conflict between the walkability, transit and density that would be good for actual and potential residents and the needs of mostly non tax paying commuters. I don’t think it’s crazy to put residents and those who come into the city on mass transit first.
Of course, If you are a compulsive gambler, Rivers Casino will comp you.
It’s a myth that Singapore bans chewing gum. Chewing gum has never been illegal there, and people who travel often bring gum from abroad. It banned selling gum, on the grounds that some youths were sticking gum on the laser eyes on the subway determining when it’s safe to close the doors.
In any case, Hong Kong has none of those restrictions.
As for school choice: the evidence that putting middle-class kids in middle-class-only schools helps them in any way is scant. Charter and private schools’ entire advantage in performance comes from selection. The same is true for suburban schools. Simply put, white middle-class parents pay a premium for not having poor people and minorities in the school. The government indulges them by not ruling school district boundaries unconstitutional even when the only reason they’re still there is to maintain racial segregation.
Well OK, they banned the sale of chewing gum. Obviously this became a national embarrasment they didn’t need.
As to school choice, I pretty much agree that self selection is likely the biggest single factor at work. I also agree strongly that a major, major, major motivation behind the growth of suburbs as we know them is to separate your kids from people not in your race or class.
I certainly don’t agree we can ban personal choices in anything short of the most draconian dictatorship. However, given what we can generally see about the real effects of sprawl– should we be working to actively subsidise and support it?
First do no harm should be the general rule when it comes to public investments. Seperating yourself from differences is really really hard in a dense city. I mean, how far is the upper East Side from east Harlem?
You don’t need a draconian dictatorship to ban school segregation. There’s really no good reason to say that people living on one side of a dividing line can go to a good school, and people living on the other side have to go to a worse one.
The best school choice program would be one letting parents choose any public school in the region. Harlem has successfully implemented a neighborhood-wide program, and a metro area-wide program would be even better. At the very least, school funding should be distributed equally per student nationwide, with appropriate caveats for living costs, ESL kids, and so on. This would remove one of the incentives for sprawl, which is the self-selection of the school district taxes; all else being equal a rich district can maintain a better school at lower taxes under the current system.
The Upper East Side and East Harlem are very close, but there’s very little social intermingling. I have ideas why but I’m not completely sure.
“You don’t need a draconian dictatorship to ban school segregation. There’s really no good reason to say that people living on one side of a dividing line can go to a good school, and people living on the other side have to go to a worse one.”
I see your point, sort of but the reality in an awfull lot of places is that what you have is not a clean dividing line, but areas separated by miles of sprawl that makes it very hard to get a kid from one area to another. In case you didn’t notice, not much of America looks like Harlem. That was my point, choice of this type is only practical in dense walkable urban areas with good transit.
I mean in NYC and a few other areas of old cities, it’s that easy and in most of those cases you have magnet schools and more active school choice at work.
Of course, not much of this is accidental. If one did what you said, a lot of folks would just pile in the moving van and drive down the free road to the next issolated subdivision. (stopping that would require a draconian dictatorship)
“The best school choice program would be one letting parents choose any public school in the region. Harlem has successfully implemented a neighborhood-wide program, and a metro area-wide program would be even better. At the very least, school funding should be distributed equally per student nationwide, with appropriate caveats for living costs, ESL kids, and so on.”
By the way, as far as I know at least on the High School level, all of NYC schools are now open to applicants from accross the city. You now are only put in your zoned school if you don’t get into your other choices.
Are you a unionized public school teacher? I mean, we all know vast amounts of money are spent by many of the nation’s worst school systems. Equalizing funding will not fully fix bad schools.
Be careful not to mistake a correlation with a causality. While I agree that there is probably a link between central city health and overall regional health, the post seems to suggest that a healthy downtown can create a healthy metro area. The reverse might actually be true-a healthy metro area adds jobs everywhere, including downtown. It only makes sense that downtowns, with thier high job concentrations, would suffer if the metro area loses jobs.
This is an excellent article and discussion. As a parent with young children in an urban area (South Lake Union in Seattle) we’ve been playing out these scenarios ourselves as have our friends. By and large our friends who formerly lived in hip urban neighborhoods like Seattle’s Capitol Hill or Belltown have indeed moved out: to Seattle suburbs or back to the midwest to be closer to family, though interestingly one family chose to settle in urban Chicago (Lincoln Park) instead of the actual hometown. We’re priced out of buying anything within an easy commute for me, so decided to rent a nice apartment right across from a playground, and I can easily walk to work. I have more time with my kids and we’re in a far more interesting neighborhood than we could afford in the suburbs, though the calculus would probably be different depending on workplace.
Seattle actually has a decent number of neighborhood playgrounds, so if apartments with family units continue to be built (ours is about 6 years old) I bet there will be a bump in middle-class renting families. The city has a Family-Friendly Urban Neighborhoods Initiative including open space, arts, etc., though school improvements will have to be done in partnership with our independent school district (though the mayor has threatend to seek takeover authority from the state). All the major attractions for children (science museum, zoo, aquarium, Center for Wooden Boats) are in the city.
Peering into the future of schools 20 years out (when my kids would be done) is worring no matter what the choice. Our friends who have chosen suburban school districts are currently dealing with budget cuts and worried about growing opposition to school levies from a aging suburban population, not to mention curriculum battles. Seattle Public Schools remains largely a mess, but with some very strong individual schools and specialist or gifted programs. Many older streetcar neighborhood schools actually are actually overcrowded in the younger grades.
John Morris, the unionization of public school teachers is not a problem of outsized compensation leading to draining resources from education.
Education is one field where a deluge of underpaid teachers can be used to break the back of the union. In fact, many areas of the U.S. had a shortage of teachers despite the compensation that was available.
Furthermore, if union pay or rules were the biggest problem in education, public schools would be universally lousy. Public schools, even suburban and exurban ones, are generally unionized. Suburban public schools with union teachers will still turn out higher-performing students.
Conversely, Southern states are right-to-work, in which union membership is required by law to be optional. Given that workers who don’t wish to be in the union don’t have to join, that would mean Southern schools would lead the nation in student performance. It doesn’t; schools in the South are routinely at the bottom of performance.
Achievement correlates strongly to demographics, not pay.
Student achievement is tied to the education and income levels of their parents more than anything. Both public and private schools tend to have a homogeneous demographic race and class profile, so the high and low achievers are clustered in the same school.
John, in the Rust Belt there often isn’t much separation between good and bad districts. Even in the suburbs, you often find a top-quality district right next to one people are afraid of.
The magnet school program in New York isn’t actually very good at promoting equity. Because the program covers the entire city, which includes such high-income neighborhoods as the Upper West Side, the students at the magnet schools are disproportionately white and Asian. Of the three main magnet schools, none has a large Hispanic population, and only one (Brooklyn Tech) has a large black population.
A better magnet program would be restricted to large-scale neighborhoods or small cities. For example, take the one in Yonkers, population 200,000. The magnet school there, Yonkers High School, is ranked the best in Westchester and among the best nationwide, but unlike the New York City magnet schools, its demographics is in line with the predominantly black/Hispanic, low-income population in the district it serves. Such a program could be replicated on the level of Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, Gary, and South Central LA.
Yes, some inner-city school districts have high spending – though the spending isn’t that high once you adjust for living costs. But the surrounding suburban districts always have much more spending. In 2001, New York City’s per student spending was half that of its favored-quarter suburbs. Since then the disparity has rapidly decreased due to increases in city spending; at the same time the city’s school performance has improved. However, part of the problem of low spending is underinvestment, which takes time to equalize, so results take some time to come.
(No, I’m not a unionized teacher. I’m a non-unionized grad student. The issues we’re talking about here are orthogonal to those of interest to teachers’ unions; the unions argue for experienced teachers and high teacher retention rates over short-term programs such as Teach for America.)
John, in post 27, you mentioned that one alternative to school reform — school choice or abolition to public schooling — you may be on to something.
Required schooling, though, must be mandatory and it must be the libertarian nightmare: compulsory and funded by compensatory taxes.
School choice, though, is definite.
Consider the California paradox.
California’s public schools have poor achievement despite the tankerloads of money poured into the system. It’s a demographic problem of tightly grouped race and income cohorts in each schools, along with a regime that encourages promiscuous governmental jurisdictions — especially for schooling.
Now how does that reflect in our state universities?
The two California university systems are crown jewels. They are widely available, take in out-of-state and foreign students in exchange for the unsubsidized student tuition rates, and they haven’t driven elite private colleges like Stanford and USC out of business.
There is another component that’s the secret weapon: the California community college system.
The UC and CSU were founded on the basis of providing social mobility to all Californians who have demonstrated academic abilities. The ideal was that any student who could at least show a 3.0 GPA deserves a college education, and that cost shouldn’t be a hurdle.
The community colleges, though, have another hurdle: You need to be able to fill out an application and be at least 18 or have a high school diploma or GED.
The enrollment fee for residents is $26 a unit (no tuition). An entire year of full-time education, accounting for all costs, can be had for less than $1,000.
This doesn’t mean community colleges are the loser schools. They manage to have the most socioeconomically diverse student body of any state institution.
Also, community colleges manage to undo 13 years of damage in the K-12 system in just two years! :>
The California community colleges have features that the primary education system ought to consider.
Some of the features:
*California community colleges are “open borders.” Students are not required to attend the community college district of their city residence.
*Despite locally elected community college boards, all curriculum and enrollment fees are set at the state level. Local boards can set their own fees for health services and parking, but the $26 enrollment fee is a standard rate at all 110 colleges.
*Community colleges must accept all applicants. Pretty much the only people a college can legally deny are those expelled from a community college or those who are delinquent in fees.
*A fee is involved. This would be unacceptable at the K-12 level. We as a society need to figure out how to provide an education for the poor without turning them away for a lack of funds or shackling them with debt. On the other hand, the community college fees provide a beneficial selection bias. Community colleges don’t become “loser schools” because generally, those who feel they won’t do well in college won’t risk the funds to attend. There’s also a motivation to do the best in school since part of the class is already paid for.
*It is public. The state community colleges show how there can be high public achievement in school to anyone who desires it. It also has a structure that corrects the equity biases in the K-12 schools.
Note the dual authority structure. Community colleges are funded at the local level primarily through property taxes, yet the state forbids any enrollment restrictions. Also, the state controls the basic enrollment fees, so local districts cannot price undesirable students out of their system. As for the variations in locally imposed fees, increases are voted on by the student body or in the case of parking fees dictated by operating costs and demand.