How many stories have you read in the past few years about people moving back into downtowns, leaving suburbs and exurbs to wither on the vine? Joel Kotkin says it ain’t true. Excerpt:
Housing prices in and around the nation’s urban cores is clear evidence that the back-to-the-city movement is wishful thinking. Despite cheerleading from individuals such as University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida, and Carole Coletta, president of CEOs for Cities and the Urban Land Institute, this movement has crashed in ways that match–and in some cases exceed–the losses suffered in suburban and even exurban locations. Condos in particular are a bellwether: Downtown areas, stuffed with new condos, have suffered some of the worst housing busts in the nation.
Take Miami, once a poster child for urban revitalization. According to National Association of Realtors data, the median condominium price in the Miami metropolitan area has dropped 75% from its 2007 peak, far worse than 50% decline suffered in the market for single family homes.
Then there’s Los Angeles. Over the last year, according to the real estate website Zillow.com, single-family home prices in the Los Angeles region have rebounded by a modest 10%. But the downtown condo market has lost over 18% of its value. Many ambitious new projects, like Eli Broad’s grandiose Grand Avenue Development, remain on long-term hold.
The story in downtown Las Vegas is massive overbuilding and vacancies. The Review Journal recently reported a nearly 21-year supply of unsold condominium units. MGM City Center developer Larry Murren stated this spring that he wished he had built half as many units. Mr. Murren cites a seminar on mixed-use development–a commonplace event in many cities over the past few years–as sparking his overenthusiasm. He’s not the only developer who has admitted being misled.
Behind the condo bust is a simple error: people’s stated preferences. Virtually every survey of opinion, including a 2004 poll co-sponsored by Smart Growth America, a group dedicated to promoting urban density, found that roughly 13% of Americans prefer to live in an urban environment while 33% prefer suburbs, and another 18% like exurbs. These patterns have been fairly consistent over the last several decades.
I have surprised myself by how much I’ve fallen out of love with idea of living in the city, over the suburbs. With kids, it’s just too exhausting. I’d have to make a lot more money than I do now to make it worthwhile. Whenever we get ready to buy our next house, it’s not going to be in the city — here in Philly, there’s a four percent tax added to your wages — but in one of the suburbs. I’d be lying if I said schools weren’t a big part of it. We can’t afford private schools where we live now, and the urban public school in our neighborhood leaves much to be desired, for the usual reasons. We’re homeschooling, so that’s not a big deal now. But the fact is, we don’t have any practical options now but to homeschool. It wouldn’t be that way in the suburbs. Besides, life with kids is just easier in the suburbs. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. The older I get, and the older my kids get, the less tolerance I have for the kinds of things that I didn’t much mind when I was younger and in love with city life. Meh. But the important thing is I had an onion tied to my belt, because that was the style at the time.
UPDATE: OK, let me expand on this post, which I tossed up yesterday before our dinner guests came. Let me explain what’s on my mind. I haven’t reached any hard conclusions, and certainly nothing that would justify a headline saying, “Crunchy Con: ‘Run to the suburbs!’”. I do think it’s important to re-examine one’s beliefs and assumptions in light of the evidence of one’s experience, and that’s what I’m trying to do here.
Erin brings up the old house thing in the combox thread, wondering if I’d changed my mind about the desirability of old houses since writing my book, which I completed in the first months of living in our old house in Dallas. Yes, I have. I really loved our old house in Dallas — I mean, really loved it – but I have to say we’re going to think twice about buying an old house again. It’s entirely about the expense of maintaining them. As Erin indicates in her comment, these old places, for all their charm, can be very expensive. We had problems with the house that had everything to do with its advanced age, and which really cost us some money. The $18,000 to $20,000 we lost on the house was all in necessary improvements and basic maintenance beyond what we would have had to put into a newer house. And the cost of cooling and heating a house insulated so poorly, relative to modern houses, was significant. Yet we so loved that house, and its deep charm. I would by no means rule out living in an old house again, but we will definitely be more careful before signing on for one. If I were more handy around the house, or handy at all, that would have made a difference.
My views on suburbia are changing along similar lines. (Go below the jump for that discussion…)
It’s not at all that I’ve decided, or am moving toward deciding, that suburbia is utopia. I firmly believe the way we Americans built our suburbs was foolish and not amenable to human flourishing in community. Our old Brooklyn neighborhood, Cobble Hill, was pretty fantastic. You could walk everywhere you wanted or needed to, and you could see people all the time. I talked to my mom the other day and told her how where we live in Philly, we can walk to buy almost anything we need. She said that sounds great to her. Happily, the New Urbanists and their ideas are re-engineering suburbia to take advantage of the lessons urban living have to teach about the way our physical spaces enhance our individual and common lives.
But we cannot afford to live in a New Urbanist enclave, and we cannot afford to live (except as renters) in the kind of urban enclave (e.g., Cobble Hill) that provide us with the kind of middle-class life that we like. In Dallas, we lived in a gentrifying neighborhood, and loved our neighbors, but we’d see gang tags from time to time on our sidewalks, and sometimes we’d lie in bed at night and hear gunshots in the near distance. This is not conducive to bourgeois serenity, especially if you have kids. As I’ve gotten older, and as my kids have aged, I’ve come to appreciate the virtues of basic social order more than what you might call “vibrancy” in my community. I would love to have both, but it seems to me that in many large cities, if you are going to have both, you have to be willing and able to pay a premium.
And it’s not just about money. It was one thing to be able to zip around Cobble Hill with a baby in a stroller. I wonder, though, how we’d do now with three kids, all 10 and under. We visited NYC en famille two summers ago, and though Julie and I knew well how to get around the city, we were exhausted by how stressful it was to do it with three small children. I’m sure one gets used to it, but it did make us wonder if we’d have it in us to live like that again, given how exhausting it is simply raising our children, especially the one whose particular needs provides us with a particular challenge to our parental patience. That said, living in the city as I now do, I have a much shorter commute to and from work than my suburban colleagues (depending on their suburb, of course) — and it’s hard to put a price tag on what I save in time and frustration daily by not having to join the daily freeway exodus.
It should be said that in a newer American city like Dallas, the whole idea of “city” and “suburb” is largely meaningless. We lived in what some call, with justice, “inner-city” Dallas. Yet our life was in most respects wholly suburban. You can’t walk to anything; you have to drive everywhere. Unlike, say, Center City Philadelphia, or Brooklyn, NY, downtown is relatively dead in Dallas. They have lots of expensive condos and lofts for well-off childless young people and retirees, but there’s not a lot to draw families there, and there’s not much infrastructure to support ordinary daily life (the one grocery store stays alive because the city government subsidizes it). In nearly every respect, there was little difference between the lives we lived as residents of inner-city Dallas, and the life we would have lived in an inner-ring suburb (e.g., Richardson), or an outer burb like Frisco. We had to depend on our car for everything — and that’s the most distinguishing aspect of suburbia, the thing that people like me decry.
But there were differences, and important ones. The educational choices were more appealing. The government was more rational (Dallas city government sometimes seems like a bargain between the poor and the rich to squeeze out the middle classes). No place is an Athenian republic, but considering the dysfunction of the Dallas city council, and the prospect that city taxpayers were going to be paying more taxes for fewer services, and the guarantee of dysfunctional government, I developed a Strange New Respect for the boring dependability and competence of suburban government. The restaurants were often better (far from being a franchise-eatery wasteland, the ‘burbs often have the best ethnic restaurants). The idea that American suburbs are white-flight havens is antiquated and false; a colleague at the News who covers the Dallas suburbs showed me census stats showing that the suburbs are highly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity; it’s just that they’re all middle-class people. Because of that, crime was much further away. Nobody lays in their bed in Plano and hears gunshots half a mile away.
That means something, and not only in terms of safety for oneself and one’s family. I have a friend in Dallas who is, or was, quite the idealistic liberal. She bought her house a decade or more ago in a gentrifying neighborhood. She prized the vibrancy of her neighborhood. But at some point, the crime lines shifted, and she found herself a single woman living alone in what had become once again a bad neighborhood. She was pretty much trapped in her house, not only in the sense that she couldn’t get out of her house in the evening, because the neighborhood was too crime-ridden (to say nothing of the fear she lived in at night), but also because she couldn’t sell her place. She was miserable there, and that fact corroded her idealism about urban life in “vibrant” enclaves. Now, as someone who just sold his house in what is now a pretty solid gentrifying neighborhood, but which is not so far away from a crime-ridden part of town, I think about this. Keep in mind that I just spent six months consumed by anxiety over not having sold that house, and worrying that we wouldn’t be able to sell it in this market. That experience has focused my mind intensely on risk, and has made me, at least for now, quite unwilling to easily take on that kind of risk again. I mean this: when I get ready to buy another house, I’m going to be more wary of where I choose to invest. Back when we bought our Dallas place, the neighborhood was very much on the upswing, and we thought we were getting a bargain — and we absolutely were … if the neighborhood continued its upward march. Then came the economic crash, and everything stalled everywhere. I worried for a while, living in that house, if the tide of crime and urban decay would turn against us, and reclaim our neighborhood (one couple who lived next to us had moved there during the 1980s, and told us jaw-dropping stories about how you couldn’t even sit on your front porch at night back then, for all the drug and gang activity). What would we do if that happened again? I wondered. What would my obligations to my family be? Would we be able to sell and leave, if it came to that? Could we sell and leave under those conditions? How great would our financial loss be? And so forth.
The point I’m trying to make is that I’d never considered how risky our investment in the city was; I, too, had bought unconsciously into the idea that everything was going to get better and better. But that always was foolish, and I’m not going to make that mistake again. Mind you, there’s no such thing as a sure thing, but at my income level, the house I can buy in the random suburb is signficantly less of a risk than the one I could afford in the city. To find a city locale where I’d undertake a similar relatively low level of risk that my investment would suffer would be beyond my financial ability to pay.
Does this make sense? It seems to me like a personal defeat, of sorts. I haven’t suddenly decided that suburbia is utopia, not by any stretch. In the end, when we get ready to buy again, we may find a place inside city limits that makes sense to us. We may find a suburb that makes more sense to us. The main point I want to make here is that my experience and assessment of risk, and my willingness to assume it, has changed over the past few years, in a way that makes suburbia more appealing to me in theory than it used to be.
James Poulos has some thoughts on the matter. Patrick Deneen, as always, writes beautifully and compellingly against the way suburbia as a way of organizing community life deadens us. But again, I’m coming to believe things are a lot more complicated than my idealism would have had it. Last night, we had some new friends over to dinner, a couple moving here with their kids from the Midwest. They’re house-hunting now, and told us how hard it was to leave their suburban neighborhood, a place where everybody knows each other, and the thing people do is to open their garages up in the evenings, and everybody comes together to sit around eating, drinking, talking and being neighborly. I’ve never lived in a city where I saw something like that, and there are certainly many suburbs where you don’t see things like that. But it happens in their suburb. Secondly, several colleagues who live in the Philly suburbs, and who read my bit about the incivility, potential danger and resulting anxiety from the Fourth of July fireworks celebration downtown pointed out that they had gone to their local suburban town’s Fourth of July celebration, and it was very communal and peaceful and pleasant. It sounded great. You can bet that if we’re still in this neighborhood next Fourth of July, that we’ll take our picnic blanket and go out to one of the burbs my colleagues mentioned. Why would I have to go out to a suburb to have the kind of communal festival experience I want, rather than in the city, where, according to my theory, this sort of thing should be more possible? I think about that … and will think more about that when my wife and I start thinking once again about investing in a house.
Once again: I have not concluded that suburbia is utopia. I don’t believe in utopia. I think any place that makes you car-dependent is bad for your soul and the community’s soul. The way we built suburbia in the 20th century was foolish and destructive in a number of ways. But we are where we are, and the flaws of suburbia don’t obviate the flaws of urban life for middle-class families in the year 2010. As I’ve tried to discuss in this rambling blog post, I have had my illusions challenged since I published my book in 2006 … and suburbia-extoller David Brooks has had his illusions challenged too since he published his 2004 encomium to the burbs. From the NY Magazine profile of Brooks:
“I’ve changed my view of suburbia,” he says. We’re sitting at the Best Buns Bread Company in the Village at Shirlington, a sort of prefab town square in Arlington, Virginia, designed to be quaint and homey. The streets are fresh red brick. The lampposts are faux antique. The trees are evenly spaced. A color-coded map explains the area’s layout, like a mall. The neighborhood’s culinary diversity–Aladdin’s Eatery abuts Bonsai Restaurant abuts Guapo’s–is matched only by its patrons’ ethnic lack thereof. We are sipping coffees and munching on identical Ginger Crinkle cookies, when it occurs to me: I am in a David Brooks book. We are Bobos. This is Paradise.
“In my last book, I was pretty pro-urban/suburban sprawl,” he explains. Pro is an understatement. On Paradise Drive, released in 2004, was a satirical, pop-sociological exploration of American suburbia, but also a celebration of it. Consumerism wasn’t just empty accumulation; it was how Americans express themselves. In the ever-expanding exurbs, he wrote, every man creates his own private bubble, “an aristocrat within his own Olympus.”
“Now I’m much more skeptical,” he says. For the last three years, Brooks has been researching and writing a book on neuroscience. At least that’s his shorthand for it. It’s basically about how unconscious processes–in short, emotions–shape our behavior, and what that means for public policy, all told through the stories of two composite, pseudo-novelistic characters. (A working title was How Success Happens, but he dismissed it as too Gladwellian.) Good policy, he argues, should understand that people make decisions emotionally, not rationally. It should also try to foster good habits with “communitarian” solutions like pre-K education, or zoning laws to prevent Wal-Marts from taking over neighborhoods. In other words, says Brooks, “the more contact with other people, the better.” Hence his newfound beef with suburbia.
I would love to know more about Brooks’s thoughts here. In describing how my thinking has changed, it’s not that I have suddenly decided that suburbs are great after all. I think I still recognize the problems with them, and believe that I discerned them long before David Brooks did. What I would say, though, is that just as Brooks has become skeptical of suburbia as a way of life, I have become more skeptical of, uh, urbia as a way of life, for all the reasons I outline here. As ever, I welcome your thoughts, as long as they’re civilly expressed.
posted July 9, 2010 at 4:58 pm
University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida
Is he any relation to Randy California? Gary Indiana? Bob Montana? Felix Arizona? Georgia Brown? Noam Alaska? K(entuck)y Jelly? Henry Sumner Maine? The eminent Chesapeake jurist Maryland Chambers? Mississippi John Hurt? Dusty or Cecil Rhodes? Tennessee Tuxedo? Texas Pete? Utah Phillips? Vermont Royster? Virginia Slim? Minnesota Fats? Wisconsin Dell? George Washington?sh
posted July 9, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Miami, Los Angeles and Las Vegas are pretty much the loci of the housing meltdown, it would be surprising if the downtown real estate values were doing anything but cratering in those areas. Whether they are doing better or worse than their neighboring suburbs doesn’t really say much of anything. Just the fact that the author of this piece had to pick such abnormal locations to make his point strongly suggests that he is cherry picking. He is also equating urban living with condos, there are other alternatives, I live in the midtown area of Kansas City, in a standalone house on a small lot, you don’t have to live in high-rises to live in the city.
posted July 9, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Very true re the dearth of good public schools here in Phila! There are around two.
This has limited our house search to a very small area. However, most studies show that parental involvement–or the lack thereof–is more important than the actual school. Also, just because a school is in the burbs doesn’t make it top notch; many emphasize sports over academics and class sizes are too big. If the burbs didn’t put us to sleep and prevent us from walking anywhere, we’d probably move the kids out there! Until those conditions change, though, I’ll gladly forego fancy cars, vacations and 3,000 Sq feet to pay for a quality education.
posted July 9, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Miami and Las Vegas are the poster children of what happens when investors and second-home buyers drive a market. Not particularly indicative of nationwide trends.
posted July 9, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Hey Rod:
If you want to go the expensive elite private school route (you may not), they often give great scholarships for multiple kid families. A good friend of mine who put two kids through private high schools and private colleges on a modest income says that it’s the really expensive schools who have the most financial aid, not the cheaper ones.
I’d say homeschool as long as you can. We have a little hippie Catholic Montessori school in our inner-ring suburb that we just love, and which strives to be affordable.
Captcha: improved, altered (wow!)
posted July 9, 2010 at 5:54 pm
As arguments go, this is a pretty weak one. Kotkin doesn’t really support his underlying thesis, beyond using the examples of cities that have been devastated by the housing crisis. He might as well have tossed in Detroit. I find a lot of Kotkin’s work is plagued by this kind of analysis.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Downtown living is a great idea if you can get work downtown. The whole point of living in such an area is to cut down on sprawl and to make it convenient for folks to live and conduct business without being so heavily reliant on cars. But a lot of businesses and government agencies have moved out of downtown same as the people. You’ll see masses of empty buildings on the now mis-named “Main” streets in most of our mid-size cities. You can still make out the ghosts of signs on some of them – that used to be Macy’s, that used to be Kohl’s, all of that was banks, the old Federal building was there, that was the TV station. Streetcars used to run right by all of it, and I’m talking about cities with fewer than 200,000 residents, not NYC.
My ciy has revitalized several streets downtown along the river. The place is jumping, mainly with restaurants and bars. On the north bank of the river, nearby townhouses have done fairly well. On the other hand, there are a TON of empty condo and loft rentals as folks still prefer to live out. In no small part due to convenience. Sure, it’s nice to be able to step out your front door and eat out. But it’s a hassle to drive through all of that out to your worksite in the near suburbs.
I love reCaptcha. Today, it’s zen-like wisdom states “Thing enables.”
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Hey, my last comment got held for approval.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Kotkin’s argument here seems solely based on condos, which are overpriced, usually built in “upcoming” neighborhoods (no amenities yet), and whose living (not investment) market is young professionals, a group that has been devastated by the recession.
Developers’ building too many cookie-cutter condos does not downtown make.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Wow! From Crunchy Con to flee to the suburbs! Changes.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:28 pm
At least here in DC, there is indeed a boom in urban living, but the people who are moving in are young professionals and empty nesters. I have seen more white babies in the last two years in close-in urban DC neighborhoods than I have seen in the previous 15 years. That said, when those kids turn 5-6, unless their parents really start raking in the dough, they are vamoosing to the suburbs, pronto, Michelle Rhee’s magic notwithstanding.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I grew up in Manhattan. Being a 6-12 year old kid there isn’t so great, but it’s got a lot to offer a teenager. You don’t need a driver’s license or a car, just a few bucks for mass transit, and you can do and see all kinds of things. Of course, if you don’t go to a private or competitive public school, and you have any intellectual aspirations at all, you’re up s***s creek in a barbed-wire canoe.
posted July 9, 2010 at 6:36 pm
This is not a myth, and you can’t debunk it with housing price tales, since housing is falling all over the country (or nearly so). Now I absolutely understand why people with children aren’t interested in living in cities, but people without (minor) children are now a majority. Many cities now have a “happening” district or two where there are few vacancies and where rents/prices are as high as in the toniest suburbs. Here in much-decried Baltimore it’s Federal Hill (home of Jenna nee Bush since her marriage) and Canton.
We might also want to clarify what is a “city”. Only the biggies? What about mid-sized cities? Some of them are booming. Is Ann Arbor a city in its own right, or a Detroit suburb? (I vote for the former, and statistical extracts treat it that way too). What about Annapolis? Fort Lauderdale? St Pete? Especially if you include the mid-sized cities you’ll find that there is an urban boom.
posted July 9, 2010 at 7:07 pm
back in the rural area where my family is from, the model 75 years ago was that the poor folks lived in ‘the country’ and the more affluent lived ‘in town’. today it is the complete reverse. ‘the country’ has been bought up in 200 acre chunks by urban empty-nesters looking for a quiet place to retire to. and the houses in town are largely occupied by younger poorer mariginally-employed people who need to be near the town school, and who can afford to rent (or maybe maybe buy) one of the old houses within city limits, but not land outside of the town limits.
so maybe, it will just shake out as a fact of life that different geographic areas will forever naturally segregate themselves along lines of class and culture. and that an error of the new urbanists may be to idealize the populating of a city setting with quintessentially suburban people (ie kids, strollers, dogs, frisbees).
maybe the city of the 21st century really is for childless hipsters and immigrants. and that we should just be cool with that. creative hipster? just arrived in america 22 months ago? go to the city, it’s great. if you go to the suburbs, you will be lost and hate it. soccer practice, minivan,just wanna go home and watch netflix? well, your paradise awaits . . the suburbs!
so rather than making a crusade of trying to urbanize the burbs with coffeehouses and corner markets, and suburbanize the city with dogparks and 1,800 sf homes, maybe we should just be cool with the idea that they are two different things for two different demographics. and it’s not a matter of one model being ‘better’ or more valid than the other.
posted July 9, 2010 at 7:34 pm
America’s not got much love for high-rise condo living, but the inner-ring suburbs of the pre-McMansion days have a livability that’s very attractive if you don’t need all that space and a three-car garage. While my small hometown is more like CAP’s — the posh people tend to live on acreage out in the country — I live in ’50s neighborhood where I can manage to park my car after work Friday and have an active enjoyable weekend without even picking up the keys until Monday morning. That and a yard — what’s not to like?
posted July 9, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Kotkin is reliably, some believe rabidly, anti-urban.
One thing I love about living in and raising kids in the city is that I get what I call a reputation discount on everything. That is, all the advantages have an extra discount because they are undervalued by people who are afraid of my neighborhood for irrational reasons.
The education options are much wider than in the suburbs, at least here in Boston. Some of the public schools are fine, there are a number of good charters, and parochial schools that cost about what it takes to keep a car on the road annually. It’s all about priorities.
posted July 9, 2010 at 7:53 pm
I think more people claim to desire urban living than actually do because its politically incorrect to like suburbs and there is much social censor for being politically incorrect.
It like how everyone says their all for diversity and how diversity makes for a vibrant culture. Yet, when some of that diversity comes into your neighborhood and, especially, the kids’ school, its time to high-tail it to the exurbs.
Nobody wants to be “uncool” by uttering uncool opinions. Yet, when push comes to shove, people do what they really want no matter how “uncool” it might be.
posted July 9, 2010 at 8:12 pm
The more interesting question is why supposedly hard-headed developers would be caught up in the hype. Kotkin likes to blame urban planners, but in my own hometown I’ve watched planners push new-urbanist, mixed-use-oriented downtown projects for years — but they ideas go nowhere until a developer’s willing to bet on them.
Houston hammer
posted July 9, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Rod -
You made my Friday with that Simpson’s reference. And since no one else seems to have appreciated it, I thought I would provide the link to the clip. Everyone enjoy: http://drchurch.blogspot.com/2008/09/so-ive-noticed-trend-with-google.html
posted July 9, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Around here, the “urban migrants” are mostly families with very young children, and wealthier retired or partly-retired people. They want access to cultural amenities, doctors, good hospitals, mass transit. The city of St. Louis’s school district, in the meantime, has gone from about 75K students a decade ago to about 33K now.
BTW, suburban school districts commonly thought of as “good” haven’t shown any dip in price, recession & housing bust notwithstanding. WRT real estate, it’s all about schools, schools, schools.
posted July 9, 2010 at 8:55 pm
For years I lived in Cambridge and reverse commuted to the suburbs to work. It’s actually a much easier commute than the other way around. Cities have a lot of services that make living in them worth while. Lately I’ve been living in an exurb which is a sweet spot between a city and a suburb. I can walk to do errands, but we have a small lawn.
posted July 9, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Rod, when I read “Crunchy Cons” it was the chapter titled “Home” that I had the most trouble relating to–not that I don’t love charming older in-town homes, but because I have vivid memories of what those homes can mean (such as the lovely late 1800s Queen Anne my parents bought in a town in Ohio, spent tons of time and money on, and ended up bearing the financial burden of a water main break to the street–ouch!). Recently you wrote about thinking twice about an older home, and now this post suggests you may be headed to suburbia, which makes me wish you’d revisit that chapter (so to speak) and talk about how your ideas have changed, or how, perhaps, the philosophy is still there but the realities are different, etc.
posted July 9, 2010 at 9:56 pm
That 4% tax and the lower overall school quality are direct results of the higher wage earners in cities moving out to the suburbs which, because of the relative affluence of their residents plus not needing to support the services necessary to the urban environment where most of the people still need to go to work, can artificially lower their tax rates, while the cities are left to support themselves on the incomes of those that can’t afford suburban property values and transportation costs.
Cities really need to start adjusting their tax structures such that the people in their suburbs can’t continue to freeload off of the convenience without helping to pay for the resources that it takes to support them. I’d be willing to be that Philly could cut its tax rate in half and still come out better off if it applied it to everyone who worked in the city (or for a company based in the city) regardless of where they lived- and it would cut down on overall flight because the people to whom tax rate was an actual factor would be taking a hit if they moved out of the city and had two bay taxes to two localities instead of one.
posted July 9, 2010 at 10:15 pm
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Condos in suburbs have been buried as well. Condos are not a very stable form of ownership. Here is a good comparison of median prices.
Metro Multiple Listing Service’s Tuesday report on first-quarter 2007 existing-home sales in the four-county market showed the impact on prices:
• An $18,155 average price drop in Ozaukee County, to $288,777 from $306,932 a year earlier.
• An $11,039 average price drop in Washington County, to $219,063 from $230,102 a year earlier.
• A $16,288 average price drop in Waukesha County, to $290,056 from $306,344 a year earlier.
Milwaukee County bucked the downward trend, posting a $12,719 average price gain, to $185,388 from $172,669.
Ozaukee County, Waukesha County, and Washington County are the 52, 53, 100 highest income counties in the country respectively.
posted July 9, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Rod,
Have you considered University City? It’s one of these “street car suburbs” where lot sizes are larger and it’s no problem to have a car, but it’s walkable and you can also be downtown by trolley in 20 minutes. It’s a nice compromise between the city and the suburb.
The K-8 public school is supposed to be very good (the high school is bad, although they’re working on it). It’s a latte liberal sort of neighborhood, which overlaps a lot culturally with crunchy connism. I don’t know how much you’re looking to spend, but it is a lot cheaper than many other neighborhoods in the city.
Of course you are still on the hook for the wage tax.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:10 am
I’m with Joel and Erin: what ever happened to Mr. Crunchy Con? Sounds like your principals have changed, Rod.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:18 am
And maybe your principles, too. lol.
Captcha: in porticos
posted July 10, 2010 at 7:23 am
Streetcars used to run right by all of it, and I’m talking about cities with fewer than 200,000 residents, not NYC.
A little off-topic perhaps, but check out an excellent documentary on the demise (or rather murder) of the streetcars called “Taken For A Ride”. You can watch it on Google Video free of charge.
posted July 10, 2010 at 7:48 am
Karl, in Ohio the city income tax applies to both where you live and where you work, however you credit one against the other, so ultimately you end up paying the higher rate, but not both together. If you work in Akron (2%) but live in Cuyahoga Falls (1.5% — that’s a made-up number), 1.5% of your tax goes to Cuyahoga Falls and .5% to Akron. Annoying aspect of this: you have to fill out forms for both cities (here in Maryland the city income tax is simply piggy-backed on the state tax so no extra forms to fill out). For years after I moved to Florida Akron kept sending me my yearly income tax form to my new address, not sure what part of “St Petersburg Florida” was unclear to them. Did they think I was commuting?
posted July 10, 2010 at 8:12 am
This is not the only principle that will change as your children go to high school, college, move out, move back, start families, grandchildren come. Go to high school-most significantly now will be your opinions about public school systems. Pennsylvania is in for some harsh realities as it looks for ways to change from its property tax system of funding public schools. You think their Liquor Control Board isn’t a good system. And the public schools in Delaware and Montgomery counties have tried valiently but unsuccessfully to keep up the quality of the past. They now keep up a front, but the actual situation in classrooms has deteriorated. You would have to go further out to get to Chester, Berks, or Bucks county to put your children in an environment that still maintains enough stratification to benefit your children. PA Dept of Ed tried to obliterate tracking, and the good schools had to disguise it in their system. Looking for the gifted department or advanced placement opportunities is just the beginning. Choose wisely.
posted July 10, 2010 at 8:50 am
We might also want to clarify what is a “city”. Only the biggies? What about mid-sized cities? Some of them are booming. Is Ann Arbor a city in its own right, or a Detroit suburb? (I vote for the former, and statistical extracts treat it that way too).
I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio (where they are probably scraping “birthplace of LeBron James” off the city limits signs as we speak). Akron is a medium-sized city whose population dropped from almost 300K in 1960 to about 200K by 1990 and then stabilized there. It’s close enough to Cleveland that for the most part it doesn’t have its own TV stations (odd for a city of that size) and is part of the Cleveland media market, and Clevelanders have always treated it as an appendage out in hicksville. I once heard a comedian remark that Akron was the only city that people from Cleveland (which was then the butt of everyone else’s jokes) could make fun of and feel superior to. When I was growing up, in many ways Akron felt in many ways like a suburb of Cleveland. Yet Akron has been doing far better than Cleveland for some time now. It certainly isn’t booming, but it’s made a real effort to diversify its economy since tire manufacturing moved out, and the University is thriving and has succeeded in repositioning itself as a center for polymer research. Cleveland has really taken an economic beating and continued to lose population (it’s now the third largest city in Ohio, behind Columbus and Cincinnati; in 1950 it was probably one of the 10 largest cities in the country, and it’s lost more than half of its 1950 population since then). Akron, on the other hand, seems to have succeeded in stabilizing itself, more or less. Again, it certainly isn’t booming, but compared with Cleveland — and Youngstown, but that’s another story — it’s hanging in there.
posted July 10, 2010 at 9:23 am
Cities have the advantage of having more cultural offerings/shopping available. On the other hand, you have less space and less safety. I don’t have kids so that isn’t a consideration for me, but I think the best place to raise kids is probably in a town about the size where I now live, which is about 50,000. It’s a university town large enough to have the height of what I consider civilization, the Barnes and Noble store. There are summer arts and sports camps nearby for children, enrichment classes offered by the local museum, the local library, the university and the public school system. There are beautiful parks with tennis courts, volleyball courts, a walking path, a Girl Scout camp, a shooting range outside the city limits, multiple athletic fields/tracks where the university and school host events. There are multiple churches ranging from Baptist to Catholic to Lutheran to Greek Orthodox, most with individual youth groups that do things like go to mission trips in Mexico. There is a city-wide, nondenominational Christian youth group. Kids complain that there is nothing to do, but kids here really do have a variety of options if they’re so inclined to keep them out of trouble. The city also has a fairly good medical system, grocery stores that serve vegetarian foods like can be found in Whole Foods, which is a plus for me, and it is safe enough that I think nothing of going for a walk alone in the city park at dusk. We average less than one murder per year and that murder is usually domestic violence or over some drug deal gone back. There was one stranger related homicide a few years back but it is very rare indeed. The drawback is the dearth of jobs that pay a living wage and rising housing costs, but I’d still rather not leave. My nephews are being raised in a similar sized city with similar demographics and offerings. Larger cities may have more offerings but I doubt they’re as safe or as pleasant as where I live. On the other hand, truly rural settings truly have little for kids to do except drink and cruise Main Street and have sex too young.
posted July 10, 2010 at 10:15 am
Here in Minneapolis, a lot more people are considering urban living, and I do think this reflects a nationwide trend. As alternative schooling options become more mainstream, people no longer feel tethered to failed school systems (and Minneapolis pubic schools are a prime example). I’ve never even considered the possibility that our children would endure public school.
On the flip side, many of the properties located in or near city centers are cookie-cutter condos crafted to appeal to a very narrow demographic. That demographic is growing older, and requiring more space, which they can get at half the cost, minus association fees and parking hassles.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of single-family homes in most cities, and plenty of those are empty. I predict that they will fill out, especially in lower income communities, and that the city center condo barracks will become the new ghettos.
posted July 10, 2010 at 10:20 am
Just as a warning, people need to be very careful with Richard Florida. He likes to manipulate data. He likes to selectively use data. As I noted in above, when we look at median sales price, places like Milwaukee have held up much better than its suburban counterpoints.
posted July 10, 2010 at 10:28 am
The line toward the end of my friend Rod’s column… that stood out for me & I believe is telling… was, “The older I get, and the older my kids get, the less tolerance I have for the kinds of things that I didn’t much mind when I was younger and in love with city life.”
Rod is 42 with pre-school children. When I was going to Bonham Elementary in Dallas, many of our grandparents were in their 40s. It’s none of my business when people procreate, but I think this is a vote for beginning a family earlier in life. As they say in the city; do the math.
The big reveal? Rod came from the rural small town country America & any infatuation-being-called-love he has ever had for cities was undoubtedly post-college, pre-fatherhood. Early-onset manhood; a young man first away from home on his own, wide-eyed. Pre-children/marriage/middle age. A Phase. A circumstantial chance. But as life settles in, after 40, who we truly are is what we actually become.
In Dallas, where I came to know Rod well, he never really used what Dallas offered & I told him so constantly; didn’t ever see the State Fair, never went to the Performing Arts Center, toured the buildings, etc. He skipped the King Tut road show even though I swore (for all its ‘flaws’) it would make his 12 yr. old Mathew happy. Rod never let me show him the expansive Trinity Forest, world class garden Arboretum, the internationally acclaimed Audubon Center. Rod isn’t urban by nature & I suggest that, were he unmarried & childless…living in a city…, he’d become a workaholic recluse. He sorta is anyway.
But yes… the points made here by Klein or Rod about children & schools & suburbs aside, there’s no invalid point here. But my flip side aside? For everyone who loses their sea legs & becomes alienated by the city culture as they age, there are those of us who know that urban rhythms are an elixir of sorts. Anyone who ever saw Rod & I together knew who the younger man was. He’d tell himself, it was me although I was old enough to have been Rod’s father. That’s because I use this city, corner to corner, end to end. Night & day. I relish the buffet & thrive upon its options.
Meanwhile I have watched my sister, who shares my same urban DNA…(we were raised by working urban artist activists)…slowly but surely alter in her 12 years away from the city. Less & less are we able to talk about things from the same vantage. She has lost her edge, cannot know the subtleties of change as a new generation is whipped into the mix. More and more, she depends on me to be the one whose interesting stories nourish the part of her that is atrophying w/o the pulse of interactive visual stimuli unique to cities, however flawed.
posted July 10, 2010 at 10:39 am
Dunno, anecdotally at least it seems like the re-urbanization thing IS happening, and it seems inevitable that the dominant economic trends now favor it.
BTW, Rod seems to be unaware that Kotkin is what you might call a “suburbanist.” He’s a glorifier of the American burbs, that’s his shtick. So his writing on these matters is going to be tendentious.
posted July 10, 2010 at 11:05 am
johnrey,
Econonic trends favor city living only to the extent that people work in cities. Many people do of course (raising my own hand). But there are plenty of offices and so forth out in the suburbs too, and it makes little sense for those workers to move to the city if the goal is a short commute. Also two problems present themselves: The first is that when there are two people working in a houeshold their jobs may be located rather distant from each other. The second is that jobs tend not to stay put– people may need to find new jobs or the place of employment itself my pack up and move. The latter has happened to me several times; and my sister’s factory was originally two miles from her house but in the late 90s its relocated to the next county, giving her a nasty 25 mile (one-way) commute.
posted July 10, 2010 at 11:13 am
I love this thread. Just that.
I have been a resident of Philadelphia for all but two years of my entire adult life, which by my accounting started in 1976. I state that for contextual clarity, not for any sense of authority of voice. Aisha and tscott have important points of view well worth listening to.
I never, in my single days, paid much attention to the neighborhood to which I looked to rent. My first priority was being able to walk to work. Thus, I explored the varieties of West Philly, including the University City mentioned above. A family must have both a very close acquaintance with the community as well as a philosophical bent towards that sort of atmosphere, and being ready to sit corrected I don’t think Rod and Julie fit that mold. I do believe, were they just married and not yet preparing for a child, that UC or Spruce Hill would have been an exciting place for them to live on many levels. Lots of Pagans there, too. (big, evil grin!)
Point of reference: I grew up in Upper Darby, one of the Delaware County near-suburban school districts struggling mightily to maintain their veneer of prior quality (nicely put, tscott). The heyday of my K-12 experience is long gone.
About Philadelphia public schools: My wife has been a teacher here for over 35 years, and we raised three children K-12 in this district (our youngest starts her senior year at Central HS in September). We have as accurate a view of the state of schooling here as anyone can, and I’m quite willing to offer that view if asked. Our bias is in favor of the children, so don’t expect us to disagree with complaints about politics, the negative effects of unions and similar topics. We are not boosters, we are realists.
posted July 10, 2010 at 11:19 am
Hi David,
I lived in Akron for four years (99-03) and I recall the sense that it was the ugly step-brother to Cleveland. Though Akron of course could still look down on Canton, a sort of poor cousin even further down in the sticks.
I get back there maybe once a year, as I still keep up with a friend in Canton, and like to drop in to St Elias (my former Akron church) once in a while as I very much miss their lovely choir. Akron does seem sadly diminished from what I remember, though the Univrsity of Akron has become a lifeline for it. Cleveland meanwhile, after a brief renaissance in the late 90s, has definitely gone down the tubes.
posted July 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
Karl G:
“I’d be willing to be that Philly could cut its tax rate in half and still come out better off if it applied it to everyone who worked in the city regardless of where they lived”
The Philadelphia wage tax is 4% for city residents and 3.5% for suburban commuters. Its also applied to visiting athletes and celebrities who perform at the city stadiums and arenas. It could only be cut if (a) economic activity and employment in the city picked up significantly, (b) the city property tax was increased. Philadelphia property taxes are about 1/2 the level in the PA suburbs on average, and 1/4 the level of Jersey suburbs. The biggest problem with Philly city property taxes is the low level of recently gentrified neighborhoods around Center City. I have friends who pay under $1000 per year for a house valued at over $300,000, and which should be paying $3000+ when compared to rates in normally valued neighborhoods. These trendy nieghborhoods (Northern Liberties, Fishtown, Bella Vista, University City, Fairmount, etc.), which house about 10% of the city population, desperately need to be reassessed. The resulting tax revenue would probably allow a 10-20% cut in the wage tax if taxed fairly.
posted July 10, 2010 at 11:51 am
I do not have a huge stake in this debate…but here’s my experience living in the No. VA/DC area the past year or so. Housing prices are completely out of sight the closer you get to the metro and to D.C. Arlington and Alexandria are completely ridiculous. $150-200k will get you a 700-800 sq. ft. condo–most likely with thin walls, floors, and ceilings (especially as you get closer to the orange line). You can get a decent sized home in an up and coming neighborhood in Indianapolis for that much money (perhaps even less). Furthermore, my impression is that many of the people who are able to afford this are wealthy professionals, often who delay child rearing into their mid-forties and have double incomes. That’s a hard road to travel, IMHO. Some of the modest homes I walked by on my daily trek to the metro would probably go for 100-300k in Indy–but easily go for over $1M a piece here.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this area, but Rod, let’s be honest about what a lot of this back to the city stuff really is–an extremely expensive endeavor limited to upper and upper middle class individuals.
One word about race–Arlington is much touted for being progressive and tolerant, and I will say that there is a great deal of truth to that. With that said, much of the discussions that pass for race have to do with social status and economic class–start busing children from SE D.C. to the pristine public schools in this area and you see a much different story.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm
I have just posted a long addendum to the initial post, and I’ve addressed y’all’s questions about how I’ve changed my thinking somewhat about suburbia, based on my experience (I’ve also answered Erin’s question about old houses — the two issues are related). Click here to read the new stuff.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Arlington is much touted for being progressive and tolerant, and I will say that there is a great deal of truth to that. With that said, much of the discussions that pass for race have to do with social status and economic class–start busing children from SE D.C. to the pristine public schools in this area and you see a much different story.
That’s true, but also a little unfair. I live in Arlington, but in a neighborhood that racially mixed. The schools my kids have attended have never been majority white, although the minorities tend to be Latinos and immigrant Africans as opposed to African-Americans. And Arlington has strived to make those schools as successful as the schools in the most affluent parts of Arlington (probably near where you live).
As inner-ring suburbs/urban communities go, Arlington is pretty idyllic. Housing is expensive, but salaries are higher in DC than most places. I bet if you had the same job you have in DC you had in Indy, you’d make a lot less in Indy. Yes, DC is expensive and it does have social/class issues.
Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/07/the-myth-of-the-downtown-boom_comments.html#ixzz0tIYf8TXr
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:48 pm
I grew up in the burbs, I live in the burbs. Life is good. There’s a certain romance attached to life in downtown. I lived in D.C. and loved it, but that was when I was a twentysomething single.
Cities are now fun to visit.
This thread reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in which she held forth on the wisdom of density and things like neighborhood pubs.
Turns out neighborhood pubs are actually a terrible idea that encourage the riff raff to hang about in the wee hours to make trouble. Many of the assumptions of the New Urbanist movement are under increasing scrutiny, because they don’t always lead to the “good life” they’re supposed to.
Same for Richard Florida, whose “Creative Class” definition is overly broad, but also strangely tinged with his own political leanings.
It’s a bit like the extreme localvore movement that basically produces really expensive food.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:53 pm
WRT the question of old houses, I suppose it comes down to what your values are.
Yes, old houses often need stuff brought up to date. They’ll have older appliances that will need to replaced. They may even have stuff like knob-and-tube wiring that will require some extensive electrical work to bring up to where it ought to be.
On the other hand, I’ve looked at a lot of newer houses, particularly those built in the last ten years. Yes, it’s nice not having to spend money on them as soon as you move in. But lots of people who’ve bought into these places are discovering that even the good builders simply “don’t build ‘em like they used to.”
Many of these new developments (even the very expensive ones) look like they will be at best slums and at worst completely dilapidated and unlivable without major upkeep put into them. My partner does some home renovation and maintenance work and the new developments, where the homes are just out of warranty, have consistently been among the biggest money-makers in that department. They really are cheap, disposable construction.
It seems to me that one of the parts of “crunchy-conservatism,” especially the parts of really creating that sense of place (something that I look upon with great admiration and some envy) means that it’s important to be good stewards of family property over the long term, even if the family ends up not living there down the road. And part of that means buying goods and property that will last.
We’ve put a ton of money (at least as far as our incomes are concerned) into our place as well. But because it was built in 1928, we know that the structure is sound and the materials much better than anything we’d get today and we’ll probably enjoy the improvements we’ve made over a long time.
And yes, the back bedroom does get too hot in the summer and needs more insulation, and there are quirks and problems with the place. It’s smaller than a new place would be (although there’s plenty of space for a family…four bedrooms counting two in the finished basement and two bathrooms). But all in all, these are the kinds of problems I’d much rather have.
posted July 10, 2010 at 12:54 pm
“That’s true, but also a little unfair. I live in Arlington, but in a neighborhood that racially mixed. The schools my kids have attended have never been majority white, although the minorities tend to be Latinos and immigrant Africans as opposed to African-Americans.”
Peter–I’ll defer to your judgment on the schools. Again, a benefit of this area is its diversity. I only point out that dealing with many immigrant groups is somewhat different that some of the more troubled inner-city areas. What prompted my comment was a friend who moved from NOVA to Indianapolis, and noted with disdain some of the issue with tolerance. I just want to note that there are very different problems, many of them more economic in nature (i.e., the presence of a permanent African American inner city underclass).
posted July 10, 2010 at 1:09 pm
PS:
I always love how people tell me that the only way to afford living in the city is to be rich. (Not talking here about kids, private schools, etc. strictly houses/housing). What they never realize they are saying is, unbeknownst to them: Location, location, location means white, white or at least anything but black’ in which case ‘diversity translates to Asian, Indian, whatever multi-cultural-religions, yadayadayada…. but not middle class or lower middle class black. Period.
Well folks, I have lived for 26 years on a street that is roughly 35% black, 40% Latino & 25% Anglo ‘white’ & the quality of life has been idyllic for much of that time. My house, because of the mixed race quota, would only sell for $100,000 max & my property taxes last year were under $1000. So be honest with yourselves when you talk about the city being only for the well-to-do or the underclass. I beat the system because I was in fact putting my money where my mouth is; buying where the crime was low & the values high but where being a white minority was unthinkable to my otherwise ‘Liberal’ brothers & sisters who are farther left than I but have NO black family neighbors unless that African-American family is like the Cosby Show. Your ignorance? My bliss.
posted July 10, 2010 at 1:31 pm
As to the risk of home pricing, I’d think it wold be higher in newer suburbs. In older neighborhoods, you can see decades of trends.Is the neighborhood on a slow, steady increase? Does it go up and down? In my older neighborhood, prices have not gone down. They leveled off. Sellers have to put more work into making the houses pretty. But I’ve never seen a house sell for less than it previously sold for. This is one thing I’m very grateful for.
But in newer neighborhoods, there is less pricing history, which means the prices were set by fewer sales and by people with less historical information. In those places, what your house is worth to you today could be very different than what people think three years from now. Plus, as Dreher has pointed out, in higher income areas people are more willing to default on their home payments, and foreclosures really kill an area’s real estate market.
One thing that I think is counter-intuitive for many conservatives is that in my area, places with higher property and income tax rates have higher home values. People tend to like the services they get with the higher taxes, especially schools. Areas that don’t tax themselves enough to get good schools suffer. Yes, it’s possible to overtax for under-performing government, but it’s pretty much impossible to get excellent government service without significant taxation. And people who pay more in taxes demand more in accountability, which is easier on the local level.
posted July 10, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Rawlins:
In Dallas, where I came to know Rod well, he never really used what Dallas offered & I told him so constantly; didn’t ever see the State Fair, never went to the Performing Arts Center, toured the buildings, etc. He skipped the King Tut road show even though I swore (for all its ‘flaws’) it would make his 12 yr. old Mathew happy. Rod never let me show him the expansive Trinity Forest, world class garden Arboretum, the internationally acclaimed Audubon Center. Rod isn’t urban by nature & I suggest that, were he unmarried & childless…living in a city…, he’d become a workaholic recluse. He sorta is anyway.
Now Rawlins, let’s see. True, I never went to the State Fair, because I hate State Fairs. Julie took the kids every year, usually with other moms and their kids. The State Fair wasn’t an urban vs. suburban thing. I did take the kids to the museums downtown; I didn’t go to the King Tut thing because I’d heard such bad reviews about it. But all my kids have seen the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Nasher, and the Crowe Asian museum, multiple times. True, we only once took advantage of the symphony space, and that’s when I took Matthew to hear a Beethoven concert. Performances there, and at the Performing Arts Center, were not really affordable for families. Julie took the kids to the Arboretum all the time.
You were always gigging me about not wanting to go to the Trinity Forest, but that’s not a problem with urbanity; it’s a problem with the fact that I don’t find the outdoors fun when it’s super-hot, as it is for much of the time in Dallas. Besides, I’m not much of an outdoors person anyway. Here in Philadelphia, we joined the arboretum, and I love going there. The climate is much more tolerable for me here than in Dallas.
As to urbanity, I think just about the happiest I’ve ever been living in a place was the five years Julie and I lived in New York City — a year in Manhattan, four years in Brooklyn. Really, it was magical. But we knew it was sustainable only because we were in a certain time of our lives that was rapidly coming to an end. I well remember one night pushing the stroller back from dinner in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and Julie saying, “Living here is like living in Disneyland: everything is unbelievably great, but it costs 10 times as much as it does in the real world, and you know that eventually, you’re going to have to leave.” That was so true. The world of the city and the world of the suburbs look very, very different depending on whether or not you have kids, and how old they are.
posted July 10, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Richard Florida’s take
http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2010/06/25/urban-revival/
Which pretty much confirms, it depends on where you are
Centres of High education continue to grow, Centres where there is a vibrant art life mostly continue to grow. Centres where pink dollars flock, continue to grow. Other places, not so much.
posted July 10, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Far enough, Rod. And thoughtful to boot.
A couple of side bar ironies. When I was a kid, that’s when suburban-ism began in earnest. Postwar Eisenhower, 1950s. People were moving then for essentially the same reason(ing) until the 1960s post civil rights legislation in which case ‘white flight’ a la Suburbia was born. Today, many black families are beginning to move to the suburbs because of schools, etc. In which case, who knows what the trend will ultimately be. On my street, two black families with children are sending their kids to private schools or to suburban commute claiming residency at Grandmama’s house in the suburb (Duncanville).
posted July 10, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Rod, I really love your update–such a thoughtful reflection on how the realities of life sometimes make our principles change.
When I read the “Home” chapter, I found some parts of it frustrating, because we were as a family where you are now about ten years ago–that is, we’d just sold an older (but not extremely old) home in a rural area (having convinced ourselves that either city or country was good, but not suburbia), and had been unpleasantly shocked when the septic system didn’t pass inspection, and when the repairs we had to make for the new owners ate all the profit we thought we’d made on the sale of the house.
So when we came here to Texas, while I was still enamored of older homes (we offered on one that would have been a money pit; luckily the sellers had already accepted someone else’s offer), in the end we had to be realistic. We had a limited price range (and yes, we know all we’re really doing is renting a home from the bank–but at least our “landlord” can’t capriciously hike our rent), and little savings, which meant staying away from homes that needed–oh, a floor in the master bedroom to cover the open hole leading to a basement to which there were no stairs, to give an example from the home we almost bought. We also had three very young children which meant our time for fix-it projects was going to be very limited. The clincher for us was that my husband’s company was in the process of moving his division from downtown offices to their headquarters in the suburbs, located less than a ten-minute drive from the suburban neighborhood where we bought our home.
The thing is, it’s easy to romanticize or demonize anyplace people end up living. Is the city vibrant and engaging, or expensive, unsafe and exhausting? Is the country real and close to nature, or so dull that meth labs spring up like wildflowers? Is suburbia bland, lifeless and inconvenient, or safe, clean, neighborly and community-oriented?
The answer, like so many answers, is: it depends. And the things it depends on are as varied as the part of the country, the age of the neighborhood, the commitment of people to their homes and community, and even one’s own tolerance for greeting an acquaintance on the street with a friendly smile and a kind question as to how their roof repair is going (and would they recommend the contractor)?
posted July 10, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Terrific essay, Rod. I can’t think of a thing to criticize about it. I’m really glad you’re thinking all the time — I learned a lot from this post.
posted July 10, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Can you really count on a suburban subdivision not suffering a crime and drugs influx? Maybe if it’s a really hoity-toity place ruled by some neo-fascist HOA. But I can think of perfectly decent working class neighborhoods in Michigan that ended up in pretty ugly shape as the economy soured and the sorts of dysfunction one finds in the poor began creeping up the social class ladder.
Re: Dallas heat. I visited the Dallas Botanical Gardens on July 4 2001– when it was 102 degrees. I felt like the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’m mellllting!”) and wanted to jump in the fountain despite the “Do not wade in fountain” sign. The gardens are beautiful, and I did visit again in October a few years later for a much more $enjoyable ramble, but yes, Dallas is one of those place you just don’t do outdoor stuff in the summer.
Rawlins: My Baltimore neighborhood is about one half bvlack. Interestingly enough most of the blacks are better off than the majority of the whites, many of whom are working poor while the Black folk are often middle class people looking for an affordable but safe neighborhood to raise children in. The black guy next door went to the University of Michigan just like me. Silly white people need to realize that there is such a thing as a Black middle class where there are intact families and educated folks with good jobs– and their neighborhoods are as safe to live in any white neighborhood.
Re: Turns out neighborhood pubs are actually a terrible idea that encourage the riff raff to hang about in the wee hours to make trouble
Well, maybe. But it’s vastly worse to have that same riff-raff driving home drunk instead and possibly killing innocent people on the way.
posted July 10, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I’ve lived in Baltimore almost all my life, with the exception of infancy near the Norfolk Naval Base and five years college in a suburban setting, and live only about two miles from the house where I grew up.
One thing I’ve seen in Maryland is that suburbs, especially those built in the 1950s and later, collapse faster into slums than older rowhouse style neighborhoods. The neighborhood I live in, Hampden, is largely the same as it was 40 years ago when I was a teenager. It has significantly gentrified in the last twenty years, but still retains many of the residents who have lived there for 3 or 4 generations since their families came up to work in the WW2 defense plants. People are reluctant to leave the homes that their grandparents bought. On the other hand, people who bought the fresh houses of the 1950s and 60s saw no reason to stay when the neighborhoods started looking a little less attractive and moved a little further away as fast as they could. Many Baltimoreans of the 1960s now live in York County, Pa., 50 miles away.
As pointed out above, there have been some innovations in home construction in the last couple of decades that have turned out not be improvements. Craftsmanship is often not as good as in older homes and homes are very often designed with the assumption that AC is going to be used when the temperature gets above 80. Whereas homes built before AC were designed to facilitate cross ventilation and take advantage of summer breezes. (I was told by my father that whole neighborhoods in Baltimore are on a NW-SE axis to take advantage of the prevailing breezes from the harbor).
The AC issue leads to the larger problem with suburbs — in most cases they are designed to require the ownership of a car for every driving age family member. In an era of uncertain energy resources this is going to be another factor pushing against conservation. And yes, Jon is quite correct that the urban pub whose patrons live within walking distance is far better than the suburban drinking establishment that’s five minutes away — by car.
posted July 10, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Rod, I come late to this thread, and I confess I haven’t read most of the comments. My “crunchy thing” involved moving, 11 years ago, from a city (300K) to deep rural America, where I live on a gravel road, more than half an hour from the nearest small town, in a big old rambling house built in 1880. I love it here. I love the local culture. I love my neighbors. I love my house. I can’t see living in the city again. I can’t see moving from here in the foreseeable future. And did I mention, I love it here?!
You mention the expense of an old house. I haven’t run into diddly-squat in the way of expense, apart from heating in the winter; though I suspect I’ve been lucky. Some of my neighbors still heat their homes by burning wood, and a few are off the grid completely. Though just within the past five years, several of my neighbors have torn down their old houses, about the same age as mine, and replaced them with modular homes brought in on a couple of trucks and assembled on the spot. Ugghhh! I can’t imagine that, no matter what. But they explain to me that the cost of maintaining those old houses just got too high, to the point where it was good throwing good money after bad. So they tore down those old houses, which had been in the family for several generations, often running into timbers from the original log cabin in the walls in the oldest part of the house…
Meanwhile, I’m snug as a bug in a rug where I am. Of course I’m on into my 50s, never married, no kids, which simplifies life immensely. But I can’t see moving from here. My parents still live in the city from which I moved here, and they like it fine (though they have not the slightest interest in the cultural amenities thereof, ahem). Me, though? I can’t see going back to the city. I’ve hit on something like paradise, right where I am.
posted July 10, 2010 at 4:41 pm
rawlins comment makes me think of hamilton park.
growing up in dallas in the sixties, i lived in what seemed like a quintessential beaver cleaver environment. moms and dads, and mowing the yard, and playing dodgeball at cookouts at friends’ houses. the only thing different from the cleaver’s neighborhood is that a lot of the moms making hot dogs and the dads mowing lawns, and the kids playing dodgeball were black.
it wasn’t til i was an adult, that i learned that the hamilton park neighborhood, which was across forest lane from my neighborhood (which didn’t really have a name) was a planned black middle-class community that was created by the white power structure (so-called ‘business leaders’) just a few years before my parents bought a house nearby.
as the civil rights movement was spreading, and a black middle class was growing and beginning to test it’s influence, well-off white folks in dallas began freaking out that those middle-class blacks would want to move out of the ‘ghetto’ neighborhoods. and into theirs!
so the solution proposed, was to develop a quintessential post-war suburb with all of the typical ranch houses and barbecue grills and a library and yadda yadda. but just to put the black folks in. (remember; this is pre-civil rights act.) so, it was like a south african homeland in dallas.
well after desegregation, the line between black and white was no longer codified. and more black families began to move into ‘our’ neighborhood, which aesthetically and economically was about the same as the ‘black’ hamilton park. and thus, the two began to merge somewhat (though it should be pointed out, that few whites moved hamilton park, while many blacks moved beyond it.)
and though i didn’t appreciate it at the time (we moved out of dallas when i was 12), a lifetime of racial attitudes was founded by that brief novelty of real estate/segregation in dallas, texas. because i grew up around kids who had moms and dads like me. and lived in a nice ranch house like me, and lived pretty much just like me. except that they were black.
so to this day; ‘black’ to me, is not some automatic euphemism for inner city. or ghetto. or gangs. and drugs. and crime. and danger. it was locked into my head as a little kid that black was pretty much equivalent to white. except that their houses smelled funny. (and my black school friends would say our house smelled funny!)
and so what this means to this discussion, is that (like rawlins) i have for decades now, enjoying the economic and cultural benefits of living in majority-minority neighborhoods. because i was never brought up to have a hang-up about being around people who were a different race or ethnicity than me, i have been able to live where the real estate is cheaper, it is more convenient to downtown attractions, there is always a huge variety of cheap, fresh (albeit ethnic) groceries. and people are much much nicer! because if you are white, and don’t exude that white people’s arrogance that so many folks unconsciously project, then people automatically assume you must be cool, and are really cool back to you. (every neighborhood shop that i practice my horrific portuguese or kreyol in, seems really smitten that i am even trying, and remember me, and are extra friendly the next time i’m in.)
so if you can break the wall of your racial and ethnic preconceptions and fears, i’m telling you . . there can be great city living on the other side! affordable, convenient, neighborly; these are all tangible quality-of-life issues. and they are all right there to enjoy.
but! you gotta get over that race thing.
posted July 10, 2010 at 5:46 pm
@CAP, thanks for sharing that.
A PS: A 2010 Update From Your Old Hood:
My friends who who live on Malabar street, which is about half way between Central & Hillcrest on the west side of Central I-75 where you grew up, tell me that no one in their ‘area’ “ever goes on ‘that’ side (meaning the old Hamilton Park side) of the expressway even though the gasoline is average 15 cents a gallon cheaper.”
Does that take the cake or merely the sand tart?
I rest our case(s).
posted July 10, 2010 at 6:27 pm
hey, their loss!
where i live now;
marinated boneless chicken breast from the little brazilian mart around the corner – 1.99 lb.
marinated boneless chicken breast from whole foods market three miles away – 5.29 lb.
posted July 10, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Rod:
1. 6036 Avonhoe Rd.
Philadelphia, PA 19138
2. Seriously consider Franklin Evans offer to let you pick his brain over Philadelphia schools and property locations. Your families are actually neighbors and Philadelphia is unbelievably unique for outsiders to understand.
posted July 10, 2010 at 9:01 pm
the address is an active real estate property
posted July 11, 2010 at 1:25 am
Very interesting comments by Rod. Beginning to understand the decisions that are assumed with family. And to Rawlins, the Dallas metroplex is a deeply divided metropolitan area. It goes beyond ethnicity. There are cultural divides throughout. Fort Worth and Dallas. One originally a “cattle town”, the other a “cotton town”. (Difference of Western and Southern.) To the north of City Dallas, the northern suburbs. Without question, completely different. Majority of inhabitants of other parts of the nation-i.e. primarily from the Upper Midwest. The cultural chasm is immense. (A certain viewpoint in the Dallas Morning News of Dallas Mayor Laura Miller proved evidence of that chasm. Perhaps Rawlins Gilliland remembers the piece.)
posted July 11, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Rod
A phenomenon you may not be aware of is how suburbs are working hard to revitalize their downtowns. We just finished a major planning effort in Round Rock, Texas, where we are aiming for the best of both worlds. New urban design (Walkable, great parks, dining and shopping) in a safe city with fantastic schools. Go to http://www.roundrocktexas.gov/downtown to see our vision.
posted July 11, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Last year we moved from North Dallas to Monmouth County NJ. Our town is population 5000 and many people I have met assume that we came from a more rural area because it was Texas. I feel like I moved to Mayberry. Also our neighborhood, church, school etc were much more ethnically diverse in North Dallas than they are here (unless you consider Irish/Italian or Mets/Yankees diversity). This part of NJ does seem to be an idyllic place to raise a family, but financially all of these small towns are proving to be an unsustainable model. Say what you want about the screwed up Dallas City council and the DISD board but at least the elected members, board appointees and employees are not all related.
posted July 12, 2010 at 9:56 am
May I just point out that several of you have used phrases like “young adults and empty nesters” when discussing downtown condos. You say that as if it’s the historic norm, but until very recently the phrase would have been simply “young adults.”
I’d love to see data on how many empty nest boomers are actually moving to urban apartments—I can’t help wondering if this perceived trend is real. But it is certainly something different.
And I say that as someone in her fifties who loved city life in my twenties, raised my kids in a small city and a college town (for job-related reasons, not by choice—but it was good). Now I read the condo ads from the nearest city and ache with a longing to be there. Is it urban life I want or my own youth? Probably both.
posted July 12, 2010 at 11:27 am
I’ve lived in cities, in suburban sprawl, and in older suburbs and currently in a small village.
Personally, I don’t think I could have handled having more than one child living in the city. The logistics of getting on and off of public transportation with strollers and toddlers; the safety concerns; and the fact that everything is so dang expensive would steer me away from ever living in a city again until the kids are a LOT older.
But I also feel completely trapped and constrained visiting my in-laws in a typical suburban area. You can’t walk to anything interesting; the traffic is unbelievable; you have to wrestle kids into car seats to go ANYWHERE; and no one is around during the day because all the families seem to be two working parents and kids in daycare.
The places I found the most pleasant to live are towns and old-timey suburbs which were built before automobiles were common. Those usually have a good balance of personal space AND walkability, and since they were built before modern restrictive zoning laws came about, you have easily accessible shops and downtowns rather than massive suburban neighborhoods that are miles from anything. From my house, I can walk out the door and cross the street to hike on miles of trails through the old “commons” which are now woods; or I can walk half a mile to the shops, beach, restaurants, etc.. Almost everything is within two or three miles so it’s easy to get by without using the car much.
The sad thing is that so many people comment on how they couldn’t live here, because the houses are small and there is limited parking. Seems everyone these days is brainwashed into thinking that you need at least 2500sf homes and three car garages, and that it is downright unthinkable to raise a family in a 1400sf house without a garage. I try to explain you need a lot less space INSIDE the house when it is easy to go somewhere OUTSIDE the house, but they just don’t get it.
posted July 12, 2010 at 2:56 pm
City living encourages lower birth rates. It is probably because it is harder to several tow small ones (is it easier when they are teens?) around on public transit or walk around. I see latino mothers struggling with two kids and a stroller on the bus and the train. It is easier when they have an older kid who can help, but when they are small, it looks like a major effort.
However an example of how the city can be pro-family sticks in my head. A friend lived in the city with his wife and 3 kids. He worked in an office in the far suburbs (changed jobs after they bought the house). When he came home from driving and dealing with traffic he was a grump and needed some time to wind down before dealing with his children and wife. His jobsite changed to something closer in so he could ride the subway. He read on the train and came back home in a mood that his wife said was 1000% better. Okay maybe that says more about the need to work close to home when you have small kids.