“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

“The New Suburban Poverty

By Lisa McGirr. March 19, 2012

In many of America’s once pristine suburbs, harbingers of inner-city blight — overgrown lots, boarded up windows, abandoned residences — are the new eyesores. From the Midwestern rust-belt to the burst housing bubbles of Nevada, California and Florida, even in small pockets of still affluent regions like Du Page County, Ill., the nation’s soaring poverty rates are visibly reclaiming last century’s triumphal “crabgrass frontier.” In well-heeled Illinois towns like Glen Ellyn and Elgin, unkempt, weedy lawns blot the formerly manicured, uniform and tidy landscape.

The Brookings Institution reported two years ago that “by 2008 suburbs were home to the largest and fastest growing poor population in the country.” In the previous eight years, major metropolitan suburbs had seen poverty rates climb by 25 percent, almost five times faster than cities. Nationwide, 55 percent of the poor living in the nation’s metropolitan regions lived in suburbs.

To add insult to injury, a new measure to calculate poverty — introduced by the Census Bureau just last year — darkens an already bleak picture: nationally, 51 million households had incomes less than 50 percent above the official poverty line, and nearly half of these households were in suburbs.

Why is poverty soaring in the suburbs? Part of the answer, according to the Brookings Institution, is simple demographics: More Americans live in the suburbs, so there are more poor people there, too. But the recent downturn has also had an outsize impact on suburbs, with the decline in certain categories of jobs and an end to the housing boom that drew many urbanites and immigrants to the suburbs in the first place.

While suburbs have always been more diverse economically and culturally than popular imagination would have it, soaring poverty rates threaten the very foundations of suburban identities, suburban politics and the suburb’s place in the nation’s self-image. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” the midcentury caricature of suburban conformity, materialism and consumption has given way to a new suburban normal of making ends meet, with many formerly middle-class families in detached single-family homes struggling to pay mortgages and utility bills, and to repair aging cars.”

Via: The New York Times

Photo:  In a development in the Cleveland suburb of Warrensville Heights, seven of 14 homes were in foreclosure and boarded up last fall. Dustin Franz for The New York Times

” Is Growth a Prerequisite for Long-Term Community Health and Prosperity?

By David Morley, AICP
APA’s Planning Advisory Service Coordinator

For most planners the obvious answer to the title question is probably no. But if this is the case, why is it so hard to articulate a realistic and compelling vision for community health and prosperity for a city with a declining population?

The answer, in part, is that the dominant planning paradigm in the United States has always been growth oriented. In other words, communities typically make plans to accommodate or manage demand for new development. Moreover, local planning programs frequently depend primarily on private development for plan implementation. If that development never happens, the community’s vision will not come to fruition.

This doesn’t mean the dominant planning paradigm fails to acknowledge the potential for a decline in demand. On the contrary, many local planning programs focus great attention on neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment and decline. However, the proposed solution for struggling communities almost invariably involves public investment to spur catalytic private development, with the ultimate goal of reigniting demand. This approach is perhaps best typified by the massive slum clearance initiatives of the urban renewal era or the arms race over state-of-the-art downtown sports stadiums in the decades that followed.

The fundamental problem with the classic, growth-oriented planning paradigm is that it simply doesn’t work for the hundreds, if not thousands, of cities in the U.S. who’ve suffered decades of depopulation and disinvestment due to sprawl, deindustrialization, or Sun Belt migration.

Yes, I’m talking about ruin-porn pinups like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, but I’m also talking about smaller cities like Saginaw, Michigan, or Dayton, Ohio, that receive less attention but are nevertheless facing the same challenges.

As authors Joseph Schilling and Alan Mallach, FAICP, explain in the new PAS report titled Cities in Transition (PAS 568), growth-oriented planning hasn’t just failed post-industrial shrinking cities; it isn’t working for many inner-ring suburbs like Euclid, Ohio, or Orange, New Jersey, either. These aging suburbs have inherited many of the problems associated with their central cities; however, they frequently lack assets like regional employment centers or cultural institutions that remain bright spots for many traditional urban centers.

Perhaps more surprisingly, growth-oriented planning may have run its course both in smaller cities that have undergone rapid demographic shifts due to in-migration from other countries and in a number of Sun Belt cities that can no longer pin their economic hopes on new home construction.”

Via: APA Sustaining Places

Image: A new family tree of planning. Freely adapted from Kaiser and Godschalk 1995.

“ROAD TO RONKONKOMA

A Long Island suburb fights sprawl.

While the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) debates assorted new shapes for suburban density in its new show Foreclosed, Long Island’s Ronkonkoma is just doing it. A redevelopment project at the Long Island Railroad’s Ronkonkoma Station in Brookhaven will use a form-based zoning code overlay. That’s a first on Long Island, and a possible model for growth there.

On February 7, Tritec Real Estate Company of East Setauket was named master developer for the Ronkonkoma Hub Transit-Oriented Development. Now a dispiriting patchwork of parking lots, light industry, and fitfully occupied storefronts, the site will get between 600 and 800 housing units and around 150,000 square feet of retail and offices arrayed across 54 acres.

But mixed-use by itself doesn’t guarantee good placemaking. The zoning overlay’s purpose is to yield “an urban sense of place,” said architect Stephen Gresham of Niles Bolton Associates, who is working on the project with Tritec. “Creating a street frontage, using build-to lines to eliminate huge suburban setbacks, and using architectural form descriptors” will also be part of the code, he added. Brookhaven supervisor Mark Lesko, a project champion, said, “I want that Main Street feel—bars, restaurants, coffee shops—where young folks want to go.”

Eventually, this transit village could be the center of a much larger node. There is a new technology park being planned across the tracks in Islip. In December, Empire State Development awarded $4 million for the design of a regional sewage treatment plant to serve both the technology park and the Ronkonkoma Hub.”

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: REDEVELOPMENT AT THE LONG ISLAND RAILROADDS RONKONKOMA STATION IN BROOKHAVEN WILL USE FORM-BASED ZONING. COURTESY TOWN OF BROOKHAVEN

“Can This Suburb Be Saved?

 At MoMA, curators and architects seek a way out of the cul-de-sac.

By Justin Davidson

A few years ago, an architect with a global reputation was walking me through his busy studio, boasting of his exhaustive experience. I asked if he had ever designed in the suburbs; he looked at me as if I were out of my mind. Architects tend to treat the zones where half of all Americans live as a backward, inhospitable wilderness. The suspicion is mutual: Who needs a fancy designer when builders all over the country know how to construct a peaked-roof single-family house?

The Museum of Modern Art’s small but magnificently ambitious new show “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” makes an overwhelming case that the two camps need each other now. Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. It’s got its own new set of dysfunctions: boarded windows and weedy lawns, acres of sparsely used parking lots flanking clogged roads, immigrant workers jamming by the dozen into houses conceived for the Cleavers, household food budgets eaten up at the gas pump. Then there are all the old urban ills of poverty, violence, drugs, and racial friction, which have migrated to places that were designed for escaping them.

Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of MoMA’s architecture-and-design department, and Reinhold Martin, director of the Buell Center at Columbia University, believe that architects can help by rethinking the whole concept of what a suburb is, whom it’s for, and how it works. For several months, five teams of architects, economists, engineers, lawyers, landscape designers, and other specialists took up residence over at P.S. 1 and fantasized about how best to fix up a disparate selection of troubled suburban sites. Their presentations were critiqued, videotaped, tracked on a MoMA blog, then whipped into shape for “Foreclosed.” Now visitors can wander into a single gallery on the museum’s third floor and encounter inventive solutions to formidable problems they may have thought little about. Bergdoll has used the museum’s clout to create a glass think tank, a place where the public can keep an eye on experts at work.

Some ideas in the show sit on the border between bold and silly. You might be skeptical of the wisdom of introducing African elephants to a Southern California subdivision, as Andrew Zago has proposed. Maybe you doubt that Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith’s notion of filling in the streets of downtown Orange, New Jersey, with apartment buildings would strengthen the community. Or you wonder how much enthusiasm residents of Keizer, Oregon, could muster for living atop the smelly compost-to-methane-fuel plant that Amale Andraos and Dan Wood would build there. Fair questions, all.

As a whole, though, the show merges daydreams with pragmatism. Bergdoll nipped at the visionaries’ heels when they strayed too far into speculative territory. He handed them a statistics-rich research report prepared by the Buell Center and insisted that teams ground their reveries by figuring out what fire codes and zoning laws would have to be rewritten, what financing mechanisms would make projects feasible, where the residents of these brave new suburbs would work, how they would commute, and how much energy they would consume.”

Via: New York Magazine

Image: MOS Architects

” ‘Pocket Neighborhoods’ For Sustainable Suburbs

Kaid Benfield.  Jan 3, 2012

When talking about reducing the footprint of our living patterns on the landscape and the earth’s limited resources, I always stress that this does not necessarily mean high-rises or even multi-family living at all. Those can be perfectly accessible pathways to sustainability for people who prefer them, but one can also have sustainably designed neighborhoods of single-family homes on moderately sized lots.

The lots can be even smaller without sacrificing access to the outdoors if ample shared green space in integrated into the setting. Ultimately, more sustainable living patterns need to be about a diversity of choices within a community, rather than the ghettoes of identically sized and styled housing products typically offered during the recent heyday of sprawl.

For over a decade now, these beliefs have drawn me to the work of architect Ross Chapin, who has pioneered smaller-scaled home designs placed in beautiful community settings. He and I have never met, but my co-authors and I profiled his Third Street Cottages in Langley, Washington, in our book Solving Sprawl, and I featured the small infill development again in a 2008 article. I use images of the Third Street project often in my speaking engagements, because they are not only functional but also amazingly photogenic.

Third Street Cottages placed eight small homes around a shared common green, on about two-thirds of an acre in a walkable small town setting. To my eye, they look fantastic. To be sure, the small structures aren’t ideally sized for a large family, but their scale works for a significant part of the housing market, and the concept – a compact footprint around shared common space – can be and has been applied to groupings of larger homes that still conserve land and resources while increasing walkability.

Chapin calls the concept “pocket neighborhoods,” and he is currently marketing a book of the same name, subtitled “Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World.”  I haven’t yet seen the book, but I’ve seen its outline and am familiar with many of the projects and approaches it describes. I have also spent a great deal of enjoyable time perusing the accompanying website.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Pocket Neighborhood/Karen DeLucas

“Urbanizing the Suburban Street

Kaid Benfield. Dec 20, 2011

We’ve made such a mess of the suburbs we constructed in the last fifty or so years that one wonders whether they can ever be made into something more sustainable. Strip malls, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions, diminished nature, almost no sense of outdoor community. We all know the drill: there are nice places to be in America’s recently built suburbs, but we have to know where they are and drive to them through a visual and environmental mess to get there.

One of the most challenging aspects of suburbs, and of the prescriptions for improving them, is the character of their roadways. Most of us take the poor design of our streets – the most visible part of most suburban communities, if you think about it – so much for granted that it never occurs to us that they actually could be made better for the community and for the environment.

Consider, for example, main “arterial” streets so wide that pedestrians can’t cross them, even if there is a reason to; little if any greenery to absorb water, heat, or provide a calming influence; or residential streets with no sidewalks.

This is where Montgomery County’s new street-scape initiative comes in. Just northwest of Washington, D.C., Montgomery has had its ups and downs accommodating and managing tremendous growth. But there is no question that it has done some things right, including thepreservation of much of its farmland – in part by channeling growth into the central districts of Bethesda and Silver Spring, both served by D.C.’s rail transit system, and more recently by encouraging walkable redevelopment along the notoriously sprawled-out Rockville Pike corridor.

As a result, Montgomery has actually been in the business of “retrofitting” or “repairing” the suburbs (very gradually, to be sure) since before planners began to call it that. Now, it has undertaken a pilot study on two stretches of roadway in the county to evaluate the use of green infrastructure – strategically placed vegetation and other methods that reduce polluted runoff by using or mimicking natural hydrology – along with measures to better accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists. One is an arterial road that goes through residential areas, the other a wide commercial street. Both showed there was much potential, and Montgomery is now planning to integrate more environmental features into its streets.”

Via: The Atlantic

Image: 5vR Design

“Building a Better ‘Burb, With Envy

Emily Badger. Dec 12, 2011

Long Island was initially built out in the years following World War II, when it helped define for much of the rest of the country the idea of suburbia. As that idea has aged, though, the island has more recently struggled to hold the interest of young professionals not particularly enamored with mass-produced ranch houses and tidy but dull Cape Cods (or the job prospects and affordability issues that have grown up around them).

“We are the original Levittown. So much of the island is just like that: it’s sprawl, sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ann Golob, director of the Long Island Index, which has been tracking the exodus. Today, the island has roughly 100 distinct towns, which Golob describes this way: “Some of them are beautiful little villages, some of them are really falling-apart little villages, and some of them are just a memory of like, ‘yeah, there used to be a village here.’”

Young people have in recent years been leaving these villages at a much higher rate than New York’s other neighboring suburbs, a problem not helped by the fact that as little as 17 percent of Long Island’s residential real estate offerings are rentals. The Index has been studying why people leave, what exactly they’re fleeing, and what might be put in place to keep them here – all while allowing local businesses and communities to grow without up-ending the island’s culture as a distinctly non-urban place.

“We did statistic after report after map,” Golob says. “We thought we were just so cool showing all these different data points about what was going on.”

The group counted 8,300 acres of land on the island ripe for denser, mixed-use redevelopment, all within just half a mile of the village downtowns. Surface parking lots sit on 52 percent of that land, a prime opportunity to try something new. Residents weren’t quite getting what that new thing should be, though, so last week the Index launched a different strategy:buildabetterburb.org.

The project dispenses with all the statistics and reports and maps and goes straight for the suburban eye candy: beautiful photos of actual communities across the country who are redefining a modern suburb where actual 20-somethings might want to live.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: www.buildabetterburb.org