The Atlantic Cities:

The Next Big Infrastructure Crisis? Age-Proofing Our Streets

Emily Badger. June 11, 2013

We often talk colloquially about the “fast pace of city living,” and that pace actually has a default speed: We’ve long assumed that people cross the street walking at about 4 feet per second.

Crosswalks are timed with this number in mind, so you don’t get clipped by a creeping car when the red hand starts flashing at you midway through an intersection. But the older we get, the more likely we are to slow down. Most 80-year-olds just don’t move at 4 feet per second.

This bit of infrastructure trivia wasn’t all that relevant just a few decades ago. “In the ’60s, a majority of people weren’t living past 70, or 75,” says Hilde Waerstad, a physical therapist and research associate with the MIT AgeLab. As the vast baby boom generation now prepares to age well beyond 75, the demographics of entire cities will effectively age, too. “We’re entering into this new era,” Waerstad says, “that we just have not seen before.”

Image: Mark Brynes

The Atlantic Cities:

America’s Most Diverse Neighborhoods.

Jed Kolko. Nov 13, 2012

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday during the Civil War, in an attempt to restore peace and unity to the United States. In today’s diverse America, Thanksgiving remains widely celebrated and crosses religious, racial, and ethnic lines (though some Native Americans consider Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning), with Americans from different regions of the U.S. and different countries around the globe bringing their own traditions to the Thanksgiving table.

This Thanksgiving, we wanted to see which neighborhoods best reflect American diversity. To do so, we identified the country’s most diverse neighborhoods and metros using Census data on race and ethnicity. We measured diversity as the share of a metro area’s or ZIP code’s population in its largest racial or ethnic group: the smaller the share of the largest group, the more diverse the neighborhood is. For instance, an area that is 70 percent white (the largest group), 20 percent black, and 10 percent Asian is less diverse than one that is 60 percent Hispanic (the largest group), 30 percent white, and 10 percent  black. In this example, the second neighborhood is more diverse because the largest group accounts for 60 percent of the population versus 70 percent in the first neighborhood (see note about Census racial and ethnic definitions at end of post).”

Photo: SVLuma /Shutterstock

“Ready for the Geezer Glut? Then think beyond “aging in place”

Ben Brown. October 8, 2012

Among the Big Issues awaiting communities after we shake off the post-recession blues is what to do about demography. Particularly the part about America’s aging population.

The first-borns among the 76-million-strong Baby Boomer generation reached 65 in 2011. And over the next three decades, the geezer slice of the population pie will swell to 20 percent, compared to a little more than 13 percent in 2010. Take a look at the chart below, compiled from Census projections and pulled from the informative Alliance for Aging site.

That’s more than 88 million folks 65-plus, with the fastest growing cohorts the “oldest-old” segments of 80-plus.

I have a special interest in this topic, given that I’m among those leading-edge Boomers who have reconfigured commerce and culture to suit our tastes over the last half-century. It’s been a great run.

By now, just about everybody not invited to our long-running generational fiesta is tired of indulging Boomer fantasies. Sorry. Since we’re still running lots of stuff and still hoarding most of America’s financial assets, there’s more to come. Currently, we’re in the middle of one of our periodic – and probably our last – reality denial exercises. This is the one where we’re pretending Big Pharma, robots, electric cars and Dr. Oz will extend our playtime into infinity. You know, “60 is the new 40.” Unlike previous Boomer reality ducks, however, this one is going to be tough to buy or lie our way out of.

We’re all gonna die. And before we die, we’re likely to slide into various stages of decrepitude and neediness. We’ve had a glimpse of what that looks like with our own parents. We’re next. So the intricate tapestry of denial we’ve been weaving is already fraying around the edges.

Here’s a taste of how medical professionals are looking at the age wave, courtesy of Ardis Dee Hoven, MD, on an American Medical Association site in 2010:

The statistics are staggering. By age 65, around two-thirds of all seniors have at least one chronic disease and see seven physicians. Twenty percent of those older than 65 have five or more chronic diseases, see 14 physicians — and average 40 doctor visits a year. Situations like these are a nightmare for patients and the physicians who treat them.

Is any community ready for that?

What got me to thinking about this lately were two things. One was a timely diagnosis of the problem, especially as it applies to place, by Linda Selin Davis on The Atlantic Cities October 3 blog. Pointing to “the tainted legacy of age-segregated housing that is a $51 billion industry,” she nailed the unintended consequence of the “retirement community” movement:

We suffer from a severe lack of foresight, a shortage of personal and community planning when it comes to where and how to age. We’ve separated our elders from their extended families without replacing what their relatives might once have provided: a decent quality of life, until the very end.

The other insight feels like a solution, at least in a very targeted way. It comes from organizers of a senior cohousing initiative in Abingdon, VA called ElderSpirit Community. I’ve stayed in touch with them over the last decade because they provide one of my go-to antidotes for cynicism. Starting with few resources and little experience in neighborhood design, finance and development, they’ve assembled and successfully managed the intricate components of intentional community. And they’ve done that while measuring success against wildly idealistic standards. ElderSpirit members committed to a community designed for both physical and financial accessibility, for exploring spiritual purpose in broadly ecumenical ways and for supporting one another’s mental and physical well-being in the final stages of their lives.”

Via: Placemakers

“Cities (Of All Sizes) Lead the State in Population Growth

July 18th, 2012 by Tim Evans

The eight urban centers identified by the State Plan accounted for only 1.1 percent of the state’s total increase in population between 2000 and 2008, but accounted for 11.4 percent of the total statewide population increase from 2008 to 2011.

The story is similar but more dramatic for the 30 cities identified by the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey as “distressed” in their 2006 report Cities in Transition.  As a group, the distressed cities lost population between 2000 and 2008, just as they had lost population for four decades between 1950 and 1990 before managing a modest gain in the 1990s. But between 2008 and 2011, the 30 distressed cities together posted a 2.6 percent population increase, outstripping the statewide rate (1.8 percent).

The pattern is also visible in the group of municipalities that were at least 95 percent built out (that is, that have developed at least 95 percent of all of their developable land (pdf)) as of 2007 – a diverse group of big cities, smaller towns, and older suburbs. These places as a group decreased in population by 1.1 percent between 2000 and 2008 (while the state grew by 3.0 percent) but grew faster than the state between 2008 and 2011.

A Sudden Reversal of Post-World-War-II Trends

In June, New Jersey Future took a look at new 2011 county population estimates and found a dramatic reversal of the population growth patterns of the past half-century, with more heavily urbanized counties actually growing faster than counties on the suburban fringe in the wake of the housing market collapse of 2008. This month, new municipal population estimates offer an opportunity to see whether the same phenomenon is playing out at a more local level.

The Census Bureau and the Associated Press have already noted the turnaround in the municipal data from the national perspective, with cities growing faster than their surroundings for the first time in decades. Is the same thing happening in New Jersey? In a word, yes.

Measured any of several ways, the pattern is clear: Between 2008 and 2011, older, more urbanized, more built-out municipalities generally grew faster than less-developed suburban, exurban, and rural municipalities. Consider the eight “urban centers” defined by the State Plan – Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Trenton, Camden, New Brunswick, and Atlantic City. As a group, these cities had lost population for four decades, through 1990, and then posted a very small gain (+1.0 percent) in the 1990s (vs. 8.6 percent growth statewide). They continued to grow anemically between 2000 and 2008, increasing by 0.3 percent, compared to a 3.0 percent increase (also fairly anemic) for the state as a whole.

But between 2008 and 2011, these urban centers nearly matched the statewide growth rate, growing by 1.7 percent vs. a statewide rate of 1.8 percent. These big cities had not come close to matching the statewide growth rate since before 1930. They managed this feat by gaining, on average, 17 times as many new residents annually from 2008 to 2011 as they had between 2000 and 2008. In other words, the urban centers did not simply hold steady after the recession – they actually started gaining people at a much faster rate.

Just as the Census Bureau found, the “urban” rebound in New Jersey extends beyond the biggest and most identifiable cities to include built-up, densely populated places of all sizes. If we look at all 188 municipalities in New Jersey that were at least 95 percent built out as of 2007 – a mixed bag of cities big and small, older “urban” suburbs, and stand-alone small towns like Freehold, Red Bank, Hightstown, Princeton, Flemington, Riverton, or Penns Grove – we see the same loss of prominence since World War II: In 1940, these municipalities together contained two-thirds (66.4 percent) of the state’s total population, but by the time of the 2010 Census accounted for only 38.3 percent of the state total. Since 1950, these built-out municipalities have grown at a much slower rate than the state as a whole, including having actually lost population in the 1970s (-7.0 percent) and 1980s (-2.5 percent). They collectively lost population between 2000 and 2008, as well.

From 2008 to 2011, however, these 188 municipalities together grew by 2.0 percent, besting the statewide growth rate of 1.8 percent. They accounted for 42.2 percent of the total statewide population increase between 2008 and 2011. (See chart below.)”

Via: New Jersey Future

Photo: Red Bank, one of New Jersey’s rapidly growing small cities. Wikipedia

“The American Dream: Phase II

By Alison Arieff

“Sprawl … It’s the American dream unfolding before your eyes.”

That’s L. Brooks Patterson’s irresistible description of sprawl, proving yet again how masterful the stalwarts of the status quo are at messaging that which they hope to preserve in amber.

In a speech to his constituents earlier this year, Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, Mich., continued to wax poetic on the topic: “I love sprawl. I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it. Are you getting the picture? Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good … [it] is new jobs, new hope and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.”

Patterson’s rousing stump speech for sprawl is emblematic of how we as a culture are far too invested in a vision of the American dream that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century. Over the past 30 years we’ve stripped away the supporting mechanisms of sprawl but have continued to create it.

We’ve built more houses than we’ve needed — and built them farther away from jobs. This has led to longer commutes, which has created more traffic. In response, we built more highways, increasing fuel consumption and, as transportation planners acknowledge, doing little if anything to reduce traffic. It’s a vicious, seemingly endless cycle, and at its core is the notion that the American dream can exist only within the framework of the single-family home on a large lot.

Indeed, we’ve become so fixated on this as the sole delivery mechanism of that American dream that we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of our collective energies (home-) improving it without considering meaningful alternative visions — or devoting at least a smidgen of attention to what’s outside the front door or down the block. Everything in our culture today reinforces this idea of home as castle (or fortress) rather than home as part of a larger whole (i.e., neighborhood). We need to find our way to the latter view, and part of that means finding a better way to talk about it.

The good news is that more and more people are.

It’s true that for years, homebuilders and home-sellers were touting Patterson’s sprawl-friendly sales pitch. If you were to walk into the sales center of any subdivision or master-planned community, from Modesto, Calif., to Tampa, Fla., the first question you’d be asked was, “How much square footage are you looking for?” Not “What kind of community would you like to be a part of?”

But increasingly, many of those looking for places to live found that the market had nothing for them. Houses were too big, too isolated, too generic, too hard to maintain. Or they were designed for the quintessential nuclear family that exists more in our cultural imagination than in reality. Few homes offered options for aging in place, for returning college kids or elderly parents, or even decent home office space. Would-be residents lamented the lack of amenities like a café or a playground within walking distance in master-planned communities of 5,000, 10,000 or even 40,000 homes (!), an absence often explained away with “a community of this size couldn’t support it.” For years, I heard from builders and developers who said they knew there was a market for smaller, more sustainable properties — they just couldn’t get such projects to pencil out.

Now, it seems those pencils have been sharpened.

“The giants of the building industry, the creators for decades of massive communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs” are doing an about-face, suddenly building smaller neighborhoods in and close to cities, noted an article in USA Today last month.

The market slowdown, the article went on to explain, “has given builders time to assess sweeping demographic changes that are transforming the way Americans want to live.”

In short, builders are recognizing that buyers (and renters, too!) value the neighborhood as much as — if not more than — the house. And what they want from that neighborhood might not be McMansions and four-car garages after all. Resale value may not in fact trump all else. Young and old, whether they’re in the city or the suburbs, want to walk to places like restaurants and shops. (And let’s stop talking about the integration of things like cafes, public transit and bike racks as “urbanizing” an area, which only reinforces the divide between two entities that are divided enough already.)

People have begun to wake up to the fact that the more time spent in the car means poorer health and less time with their families — and they’re seeking shorter commutes. They’re interested in smaller homes that are easier to maintain (and less expensive to heat and cool). Young millennials and older baby boomers are also showing less and less interest in car ownership and a corresponding greater interest in public transit, walking and biking. And again, it’s likely that we’re all less interested in continuing to discuss “urban” and “suburban” as dueling polar opposites — and more interested in recognizing there’s mutual benefit to some overlap.

The aforementioned changes point to the fact that a paradigmatic shift in our concept of the American dream is underway. And this shift is not just because of the recession, says Gregory Vilkin, managing principal and president of MacFarlane Partners, quoted in that USA Today piece, “It’s no longer the American dream to own a plot of land with a house on it and two cars in the driveway.”

Via: NYTimes

Photo: Lago Vista, Tex., March 2006 by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar

“D.C.’s growth is fueled by 20-somethings. Can the city grow up with them?

By Jonathan O’Connell, Published: May 25

During the past decade, Washington has become a magnet for ambitious 20-somethings. Not only does the city offer good jobs and better-than-average public transit, it also boasts food trucks and, of course, cupcake shops.

For a recent college graduate, what’s not to like?

It’s been a remarkable deal for the District, too. The influx of newcomers has transformed the city from a symbol of civic dysfunction and drab government offices to a cosmopolitan hub — an urban playground.

The flood of newcomers did not arrive by accident. City planners and developers have bet big on luring transplants to the region. These are the people who will fill the more than 11,000 new apartments expected to be completed in the area in the next 12 months and whose income, sales and real estate taxes are helping the city’s finances fare far better than those of similar urban areas. Long-blighted storefronts and commercial corridors are being rebuilt.

What D.C. hasn’t yet figured out, or even really planned for, is what happens when this raft of newcomers grows out of one-bedroom condo living. What happens when their lives evolve past the urban-playground stage and they are less interested in speakeasies than in parks for their kids?

Caroline Armijo and her husband joined the wave of new D.C. residents when they moved to the 6th Street Flats apartment building in Chinatown in 2005. At the time, so few people lived there that they had to fight to stop the dumpsters from the Chinese restaurants next door from being emptied in the middle of the night. “A lot of the initial issues were just, ‘Don’t pick up the trash at 4 a.m.,’ ” she said.

A few years later, Armijo, now with her infant daughter in tow, attended one of the first meetings of a Penn Quarter parents group. There she met a mother who made her realize that raising her child downtown would involve more challenges than just finding the right school.

“She kind of scared me,” Armijo said. “She said, ‘The first thing that’s going to sort of push you away from downtown is not the schools — not that the schools aren’t bad — but it is that you realize you need a safe place to play.’ ”

Now that her daughter is 3, Armijo said, finding places to take her is a daily struggle; she swings on bike racks like monkey bars, climbs on a sculpture outside the restaurant Zaytinya or runs atop the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Armijo and other downtown parents have begun crusading for a neighborhood playground, starting a petition and bringing their requests to the D.C. Council, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the National Park Service.”

Via: The Washington Post

“Census Breaks the News We Already Knew: The Exurbs Are History

Tanya Snyder. April 9, 2012

Last week, the New York Times and USA Today reported that Census numbers had confirmed the death of the outer ring suburbs, or exurbs. The latest numbers, capturing the year (actually 15 months, April 2010 to July 2011) since the last Census, showed a major shift away from the settlement patterns from 2000 to 2010.

That’s not exactly how it happened. The shift didn’t suddenly happen in 2010. The 2000-2010 numbers encompass a decade whose first two-thirds were the heyday of an economic boom that buoyed greenfield development. The real break was in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the artificially inflated value of the outer suburbs crashed. After all, those houses weren’t near any employment centers or amenities, and the price of gas was creeping terrifyingly upward, forcing exurbanites to pay top dollar to get to work, if they still had a job to go to.

The whole last third of the decade showed a populace flinching back from what was quickly proving itself to be a toxic development pattern. Last year’s numbers are a continuation of what’s been happening since 2007, not a sudden year-over-year change.

What has emerged from the analysis of this year’s Census data, though, is a complicated picture of stalled-out growth in distant suburbs that had developed at a breakneck pace during the housing boom, fueled by overzealous marketing and easy mortgages. Cities have re-absorbed some of those people, but the biggest metros chalked up only modest population increases. And the cities that grew the most were relatively sprawling southern and western cities, like Dallas and Miami, that defy the urbanism of old eastern cities like Boston or Philadelphia.

Fleeing the Exurbs

The Census Bureau itself didn’t actually say anything about exurbs. It focused on the dramatic shift in development patterns over the last decade, highlighting in its press release that the fastest growing areas between 2000 and 2010 were not the same ones that grew the fastest from 2010 to 2011.

So where are the Times and USA Today getting this “exurbs are dying” thing? They’re getting it from William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. He’s been talking about the flagging energy for exurban growth for years, most recently in a report released two weeks ago on the population shift away from outer suburbs and toward metros with diversified, knowledge-based economies.”

Via: Streetsblog

Image: William Frey, Brookings Institution

“America’s romance with sprawl may be over

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA Today

Almost three years after the official end of a recession that kept people from moving and devastated new suburban subdivisions, people continue to avoid counties on the farthest edge of metropolitan areas, according to Census estimates out today.

The financial and foreclosure crisis forced more people to rent. Soaring gas prices made long commutes less appealing. And high unemployment drew more people to big job centers. As the nation crawls out of the downturn, cities and older suburbs are leading the way.

Population growth in fringe counties nearly screeched to a halt in the year that ended July 1, 2011. By comparison, counties at the core of metro areas are growing faster than the nation as a whole.

“There’s a pall being cast on the outer edges,” says John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit development group that promotes sustainability. “The foreclosures, the vacancies, the uncompleted roads. It’s uncomfortable out there. The glitz is off.”

Via: USA Today

Image: USA Today

“Infographic Shows The Shifting Racial Makeup of L.A. 20 Years After Rodney King

Mark Wilson.

OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS, THE DIVISIONS BETWEEN BLACKS, WHITES, LATINOS, AND ASIANS HAVE SHIFTED DRAMATICALLY. BUT HOW MUCH IS REALLY CHANGING?

We hear that it’s white people—who’ve had a pretty good run in the U.S.—who will become the minority of tomorrow. We hear about Asians and Latinos arriving in larger numbers, often taking over neighborhoods once dominated by African Americans.

We hear about it, but we rarely see it.

In a superb piece for Los Angeles Magazine, mapping guru Eric Fischer, who has shown us everything from the world’s distribution of its languagesto its geotags, charted the shifting demographics of the L.A. area.

His visualization is beautiful—a pointillist take on racial population densities—that beyond a legend (white people aren’t depicted in white, and black people aren’t black) needs little explanation at all. Rather than piecing together stats and percentages, you can actually see the changes happen.

Over 20 years, Monterey Park, the first mainland American city with an Asian majority, grows from a field into a forest, dotted in rich green. (See the enlargement above.) There’s a marked red to yellow shift in the pigments around San Fernando Valley, where Latinos are now the largest ethnic group. And you can also see as Latinos take over Compton in what has been labeled “black flight.” Compton was a calling card for an entire movement of black hip-hop artists in the ’90s, and now it’s 65% Latino. A touchstone of black inner-city identity has now been completely transformed:

If there’s one thing that’s particularly depressing about this map, it’s not really found in a story of which race ends up where, but in the fact that, over 20 years of so-called progress, these segregated pockets aren’t melding. Rather, they’re shifting in color. From the map’s perspective, nothing about the socioeconomic structure itself is fundamentally changing. No one is necessarily doing better or worse. And tolerance for one’s neighbors doesn’t seem to have improved.

Our colors aren’t blending. We’re just all switching spots.”

Via: Fast Company