The New Urbanity
This is a point I’ve made casually before, but it seems Professor Arthur Nelson has a new paper spelling out in detail the implications of demographic change for the built environment. In particular, even if you assume no shift in underlying preferences regarding cities versus suburbs, and no pro-urbanism policy shifts, then the declining proportion of the population made up of families with children still implies a large shift back in the direction of urban infill.
Judged realistically, this should also open up possibilities for virtuous circles. Some people prefer to be surrounded by a lot of space, and others prefer the amenities associated with a denser urban environment, but nobody likes to live in a block with a vacant lot or around the corner from a broken-down shell of a former building. More people shifting into walkable urban neighborhoods allows those neighborhoods to capture more of what’s appealing about walkable urbanism.
24 Responses to “The New Urbanity”
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August 10th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
All this is particularly true of interior post-industrial cities: redeveloping and repopulating some of the currently distressed neighborhoods in these cities will be a relatively efficient way to address the trends predicted by Nelson.
Of course, there is still the problem that some people are deeply hostile to the very idea of public policies that are pro-urban. This is an ever-shrinking group, but they have also largely captured one of the two national political parties.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
There are two national political parties? Still?
Are you sure about that, DTM?
August 10th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
In particular, even if you assume no shift in underlying preferences regarding cities versus suburbs
Can we stop with this false-dichotomy suburb/city thing?
August 10th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
There are two national political parties? Still? Are you sure about that, DTM?
Fair point, and I do think that unless the GOP finds a way to become a urbanist (or at least not anti-urbanist) party, it is doomed to regional status.
Can we stop with this false-dichotomy suburb/city thing?
Agreed: suburbs of a certain sort are perfectly consistent with the trends predicted by Nelson.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
what’s appealing about walkable urbanism
I can’t think of a worse name for something than walkable urbanism.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Nelson, by the way, is a great scholar.
“Of course, there is still the problem that some people are deeply hostile to the very idea of public policies that are pro-urban.”
That economic equation of boosting the suburbs at the cost of the cities is going to be reversed (indeed, it already has in many places). The economic equation of white flight (1945-1985) was THE central reason why the Reagan Democrats existed (and Nixon). If that economic equation of white flight no longer exists then the motivation for anyone to become a Reagan Democrat-equivalent in the future is vastly smaller.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
“Walkable urbanism” sound like a worthwhile Canadian initiative.
True enough. There is a real dichotomy, but it’s between sprawl and traditional urban design, not cities vs. suburbs per se.
Phoenix is a big city. NYC is a big city. Brookline is a suburb. Levittown is a suburb.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
This may be a little off-topic, but “virtuous circle” is a brilliant turn of phrase. Did you come up with that yourself? I’m going to do my best to add it to my lexicon, and I want to give credit where credit is due.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Did you come up with that yourself?
No, virtuous circle as the opposite of vicious circle has been around a long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_circle
August 10th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
“All this is particularly true of interior post-industrial cities: redeveloping and repopulating some of the currently distressed neighborhoods in these cities will be a relatively efficient way to address the trends predicted by Nelson.”
There are a few problems with this, the major one being that many of these distressed neighborhoods are formerly industrial and require cleanup before anyone can even think about reviving them. That’s not cheap – no developer is going to take that on when there are cheaper alternatives (wherever those are).
And even with the declining (relative) number of families, you still have the problem of urban school quality. Young families would often pick cities, if only the schools weren’t so awful. A lot of suburban choices over the years have been driven by school selection.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
There are a few problems with this, the major one being that many of these distressed neighborhoods are formerly industrial and require cleanup before anyone can even think about reviving them.
No, I’m primarily talking about distressed residential neighborhoods, often former thriving working-to-lower-middle-class neighborhoods, which have significant excess capacity today thanks to post-industrial and white-flight depopulation. Of course brownfield infill is fine too to the extent you are unlocking value in terms of desirable locations, embedded infrastructure, and so on, but it isn’t necessary to the point I was making.
And even with the declining (relative) number of families, you still have the problem of urban school quality. Young families would often pick cities, if only the schools weren’t so awful. A lot of suburban choices over the years have been driven by school selection.
There is nothing fundamentally inferior about urban schools, and indeed we have every reason to think the vicious circles that worked on the way down (perceptions of inferior quality driven by test scores which failed to correct for socioeconomic factors, funding issues driven by declining property tax bases, and so on) will turn into virtuous circles on the way back up. This will particularly be true in places with robust charter and magnet school programs, since those reduce the friction in these positive feedback loops.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I’m all for revigorating urban areas (and yes, even gentrification, if balanced by requiring % of affordable housing in new developments) – neighborhoods without the middle class or people with money to spend become housing projects in short order.
I would like to strike a note for preserving industrial space as industrial space per se. In the coming low-carbon future, the idea of commuting (except, perhaps, by bike or rail) is going to go away quickly, so we have to get used to the idea of neighborhoods with mixed work/live vocations, and even living spaces side-by-side with light industry again.
I can see a future where instead of things being manufactured thousands of miles away and shipped to you, you’ll download plans or patterns and have them made by local craftpeople, mechanics, metalshops, wood shops, tailors…
August 10th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I can see a future where instead of things being manufactured thousands of miles away and shipped to you, you’ll download plans or patterns and have them made by local craftpeople, mechanics, metalshops, wood shops, tailors . . .
Well, odds are these things will be made mostly by machines which take up less space than labor-intensive processes would have, and similarly you will likely need less space for inventory (down to almost none in a truly on-demand world). So while I agree with the idea of leaving some manufacturing space in cities, I think you are still going to need less urban manufacturing space than was required back when these post-industrial cities were originally laid out.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Industrial use is not necessarily the same as manufacturing use. Industrial land is also used for logistics and warehousing, waste transfer facilities, power generation and distribution, auto repair, lumber yards, truck storage, animal hospitals, landfills, film and TV production, etc. There is still a lot of need for industrial land even as a lot of manufacturing gets outsourced.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Industrial labor decline has far outstripped actual manufacturing decline. How do you get folks to move to Flint if they’re still downwind and downstream of a GM stamping plant?
August 10th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Ha! I actually have something intelligent to say about this, because I’m joe from Lowell!
The problem, AJ and Adam, is that so much of the industrial space in older manufacturing cities is completely useless for modern industrial use. No parking, road access via cramped streets, a long way from the highway, relatively small parcels, and whiney neighbors who say things like “Boo-hoo, I don’t want my newborn breathing diesel fumes, wah wah wah!” Industrial facilities – whether manufacturing/assembly, or warehousing – have a lot of traffic and heavy trucks coming in and out. Even if the workers all take the SUPERTRAIN, you still need to have good automobile access to a highway.
Cities like Lowell tried for years, for decades, to keep their obsolete, center-city industrial districts industrial, and it’s a fools errand. Yes, we’d all love the tax and job base, but it’s nah guh happah. Get over it. All you’re doing is guaranteeing that you’ll have a big, vacant, blighted district falling apart, attracting crime and vermin, and dragging down property values right in or next to your downtown.
In any given district, there might or might not be an opportunity for other business uses, like offices, R&D, or recreation. There might be a need for one, single building set aside as subsidized incubator space. For the most part, though, it’s residential or bust for the old mill buildings.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
There is still a lot of need for industrial land even as a lot of manufacturing gets outsourced.
As an aside, we still have (or had, before the recession) growing manufacturing production, and even growing manufacturing wages–we just also had shrinking manufacturing jobs. So that is more a productivity story than an outsourcing story.
But in any event, sure, you aren’t going to entirely eliminate industrial land in these cites, nor should you want to. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that you probably aren’t going to need nearly as much land for that purpose as back in these cities’ industrial peaks. So, there undoubtedly will be some brownfield opportunities in addition to repopulating existing residential neighborhoods.
Industrial labor decline has far outstripped actual manufacturing decline. How do you get folks to move to Flint if they’re still downwind and downstream of a GM stamping plant?
I don’t know about Flint specifically, but in many large post-industrial cities there are plenty of distressed residential areas not particularly near a lot of active manufacturing operations. Part of the reason that is true is that as manufacturing has shifted to less labor-intensive products and processes, it has often migrated to new facilities more suitable for those new processes.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Industrial labor decline has far outstripped actual manufacturing decline. How do you get folks to move to Flint if they’re still downwind and downstream of a GM stamping plant?
Why do people need to move to Flint? I guess I don’t understand your question.
Though as an aside, Genesee County has never suffered a population decline.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:00 am
In some areas, they also want a little “urbanity” in rural areas, as advocated in a new “policy brief” I co-authored at http://www.iira.org/ See link at upper right,
“IIRA Policy Brief: Connecting the Spots: Twenty-First Century Electric Interurban Railways to Meet Strategic Transportation Goals”
This is partially a response to the holes in Obama’s high speed rail policy, a strategy for helping insure HSR patronage actually materializes at levels justifying the investment, as well as helping revitialize
August 11th, 2009 at 2:01 am
In some areas, they also want a little “urbanity” in rural areas, as advocated in a new “policy brief” I co-authored at http://www.iira.org/ See link at upper right,
“IIRA Policy Brief: Connecting the Spots: Twenty-First Century Electric Interurban Railways to Meet Strategic Transportation Goals”
This is partially a response to the holes in Obama’s high speed rail policy, a strategy for helping insure HSR patronage actually materializes at levels justifying the investment, as well as helping revitalize urban AND rural communities.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
[...] Yglesias draws attention to US demographic changes and how they favor urban living – also noting the potential for [...]
August 11th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
All you’re doing is guaranteeing that you’ll have a big, vacant, blighted district falling apart, attracting crime and vermin, and dragging down property values right in or next to your downtown.
This is certainly true for areas like the Rust Belt or old mill towns where the industry has left. Here in Los Angeles, the problem is not that there is no demand for industrial space, but instead that the demand for residential space is higher than the demand for industrial space, so industrial space that is occupied and still viable is in danger of being lost to condo developers.
There are various reasons why we don’t want that to happen — if you note that that industrial areas tend to be more valuable when they’re clustered together, when an industrial zone begins to lose its integrity to residential uses, that amplifies market pressures to convert to residences. Losing industrial space means losing good-paying blue-collar jobs; if we lose those, we lose job opportunities for those without college degrees, leaving them only with low-paying service industry jobs.
The dynamics of this are different, of course, if those jobs are leaving regardless. But if there’s not, then industrial land needs to be actively preserved, because you pretty much never see land conversion in the other direction, residential to industrial.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
I should note my original comment was about “interior post-industrial cities”. I agree that coastal cities like LA are an entirely different kettle of fish.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Sorry, Adam, right you are.
Areas other than cities build before 1900 are labeled “Here There Be Dragons” on my maps.