I’ve been reading predictions of the imminent demise of the suburbs for nearly 50 years.
The ever-provocative Joel Kotkin, an urban futurist, calls attention to some of the latest:
This past weekend the New York Times devoted two big op-eds to the decline of the suburb. In one, new urban theorist Chris Leinberger said that Americans were increasingly abandoning “fringe suburbs” for dense, transit-oriented urban areas. In the other, UC Berkeley professor Louise Mozingo called for the demise of the “suburban office building” and the adoption of policies that will drive jobs away from the fringe and back to the urban core.
Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”
Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.
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In fact the media reports about the “death” of fringe suburbs seem to be more a matter of wishful thinking than fact. If the new urbanists want to do something useful, they might apply themselves by helping these peripheral places of aspiration evolve successfully. That’s far more constructive than endlessly insisting on — or trying to legislate — their inevitable demise.
Claims of decline may be overblown, but that doesn’t mean Kotkin’s getting it right either. He’s written on this before and been called out for loose definition of “suburb” and selective inattention to certain data.
Also, Yonah Freemark has done a good job of distilling the “return to the city” mantra to something more representative of actual data. People are moving *away* from the least urban neighborhoods in cities, yes, but they are flocking to the most urban neighborhoods (many are going to sprawly suburbs as well, of course). Here’s Yonah’s piece.
Finally, Kotkin has never made a convincing rebuttal to the charge that suburban growth is spurred on by massive transportation subsidies and highly restrictive land use policies. There are no market distortions in the Kotkin version of real estate development and urban growth. Some defenders of suburbs are worthwhile and cogent, but not Kotkin.
Ben L
I don’t view Kotkin as a defender of suburbs – rather more as a debunker of anti-suburbanites. Finding isolated instances where his generalizations lead to imprecision doesn’t undermine their validity on a broader basis.
Freemark’s piece does nothing to challenge Kotkin’s data that a disproportionately large number of people are moving to suburbs, exurbs and rural areas compared to the number moving to urban cores.
I’ve never seen any data to back up the notion that people moving to dense city areas are moving there for the reasons that new urbanists assert that they are. For all anyone knows they may be moving for right-sized new construction housing with a good mix of in-unit and in-building amenities in a safer neighborhood rather than for a walkable lifestyle or access to public transit.
Market distortions and government subsidies cut in all sorts of directions, not simply in favor of suburban sprawl. Chicago’s downtown is a prime example of subsidized growth.
“I’ve been reading predictions of the imminent demise of the suburbs for nearly 50 years.”
And for 50 years, you have had inexpensive gasoline and a workforce with larger families.
Demographics trump everything.
Kotkin’s not a defender of the suburbs? He’s certainly a defender of their close ancestor, the garden city (although he confuses Singapore with garden cities, which seems pretty inaccurate).
Kotkin also notes that developing countries account for 85% of traffic fatalities and prescribes more auto-oriented development as a cure.
Kotkin absolutely has an ideological agenda behind his analyses of urban-suburban population shifts (as, its worth noting again, lots of pro-urban folks do). Posting one article where he gets things wrong is not an “isolated incident” because he *consistently* mischaracterizes, misunderstands, and misrepresents.
Ben L,
I see a lot of rants against Kotkin, since he doesn’t quaff the new urbanist Kool Aid. I don’t see many specific challenges to his facts.
Help us out here. What, exactly, has he mischaracterized, misunderstood or misrepresented in this article?
One specific example is paragraph 5. Here Kotkin misrepresents commuting mode shifts by comparing an overall number (8 mil single drivers) to a percentage (transit mode share stuck at 5%). If he had compared percentages, the picture is much different (0.9% gain for drive alone, 0.3% gain for transit, and 1.3% gain for the non-driving modes of transit/walk/bike/work at home). At best, comparing two different types of numbers is sloppy accounting.
When he compares busts in the urban condo market to the suburban housing bubble, he uses the former as an example that preferences remain firmly suburban while chalking the latter up to being “hard-hit by the recession–in large part [consisting] of aspiring, working-class people who bought late in the cycle.” Kotkin never considers that condo developers could be victim to the same trend in the article he links .
I agree that a lot of the anger directed at Kotkin is merely because he disagrees with whoever’s doing the ranting, and this is disappointing. My problems with him are mainly (1) that he disguises his ideology behind a shroud of objectivity and (2) that his analysis is often very sloppy. I’d recommend Ed Glaeser and especially Ryan Avent as individuals who do much better on both counts.
Side note: I’m glad you’re able to clean up my posts with hyperlinks instead of leaving them scattered with these ugly full links.
Ben L,
Urban condos have failed because nobody wants to live in the city.
Suburban subdivisions, on the other hand, are a superior product “stuck” in a mortgage crisis.
You didn’t know that? The Kospel (what I like to call Joel Kotkin–a merger of the words ‘Kotkin’ and ‘gospel’) speaketh the truth.
Ben L
You’re making my point of unfair Kotkin bashing for me.
Your last post links to an article written by Wendell Cox, not Joel Kotkin, and I believe you’ve distorted its argument.
In paragraph 5 of the piece I quoted from Kotkin doesn’t misrepresent mode shifts by mixing numbers and percentages in the way you suggest – he links to an article by Cox that clearly states both the numbers and the percentages, both of which support his statement. His point remains valid.
Here’s a restatement of Kotkin’s reference to the Cox numbers: from 1990 to 2010 the market share of “drove alone” commuters increased from 73.2% to 76.6% while the share of commuters using public transit decreased from 5.1% to 4.9%. During that same period more than 20 million additional commuters drove alone to work while fewer than 900,000 more commuters got there by public transit.
That’s a great restatement of Kotkin’s reference to Cox’s numbers. It would be even greater if you didn’t have to restate it for him, and if he had compared discrete numbers to discrete numbers and percentages to percentages. But he didn’t. You and I needed to do it for him.
Ben,
Kotkin didn’t need either of us to restate the numbers.
His point was clear, and valid. The fact that he didn’t phrase it as either of us might have has no bearing on its validity, which is all that should matter.
YoChicago’s at a glance apartment list for Lincoln Park lists 44 apartment complexes east of Halsted that allow cats. In contrast, only 32.3% of apartment complexes located in Lincoln Park west of Halsted allow cats. The fact that I am not phrasing these numbers in a way that allows for a meaningful comparison has no bearing on their validity, which is all that should matter.
The validity of Kotkin’s argument aside, framing it on a comparison between percentages and discrete numbers is not clear at all. Or maybe I’m wrong, and somebody can tell me what percentage of apartment complexes in Lincoln Park east of Halsted allow cats (no peeking allowed!).
Ben L,
Kotkin not only allowed peeking, but encouraged it with a link. And the link contained both on-point numbers and percentages.
If our list had stated both numbers and percentages of cat-friendly buildings in each area, and you had linked to it, your comparison would be apt. Sadly, it’s not, and you’re engaging in a reach too far.
You’re beginning to sound like all too many a new urbanist who can’t dispute the data and falls back on attacking the messenger or the manner in which the message was delivered.
Oh BTW from Curbed Chicago this morning:
“It’s the sixth consecutive year of declining value in construction contracts, although multi-family contracts were up 33% from 2010. According to the study, multi-family is doing much better in Chicago than the nation as a whole, and should continue to, but single-family is going nowhere fast. [Crain’s]”
6 years?
For the construction industry; that’s not a blip, that’s a paradigm shift.
Furthermore, suburban corporate campuses are dead money. That’s why interest in downtown office space is on the increase and Sears is doing a Kabuki dance about moving to a more “business-friendly” state.
Oh that’s rich!
Joe,
Even an old man needs to grow up eventually.
If you can’t see both sides of any issue, then don’t draw people into senseless “debates” which you already have won in your mind.
It’s really that simple.
Please consider:
“Says Shaun Donovan, Secretary of HUD, “The ghost towns of the housing bust are places that lack transportation options, that aren’t walkable. The average family spends 52 cents of every dollar they earn on housing and transportation combined, so the biggest opportunity is in development around transportation”
Indeed. That would mean that most of the SunBurnBelt is played out.
tup,
Life has been good to me. If my luck holds I’ll never grow up to your satisfaction.
Please consider:
“Birndorf says companies look at the cost of the property, where new recruits would want to work, and proximity to clients. She says young people by and large want to be downtown.”
You don’t say?
Joe – I’m not sure, well, I’m sure, that you are using “new urbanism” correctly in the context of suburban vs. urban being discussed here. New Urbanism is specifically related to “urban” style suburban developments – which are really recreating small town environments of a nostalgic sort primarily (predominately, though there are some exceptions), not dense urban developments in existing urban areas – it is most patently not related to existing urbanism.
SheridanB,
Unless I’m not seeing something I wrote, I didn’t use the term “new urbanism” at all – only referred to new urbanists.
Joe – new urbanism or urbanist is a specific term for a design movement, which you used in one of your replies, rather than for an anti-suburban movement.
SheridanB,
I’m aware of what the new urbanism movement represents – but think it’s fair to refer to new urbanists as such when they’re not strictly propounding the theories of new urbanism. Not so?
Joe – the problem is that “new urbanism/ist” has become a reference for or to a specific style of both architecture and planning, thus it makes it difficult to separate out people who are just pushing for a more “urban” style – generically I guess (I don’t think I’m really phrasing things right here).