An Inconvenient Truth

The New York Times tells the story of one suburbanite's battle against the injustices of immigration as they play out on his block in Elmont, on the Nassau/Queens border on Long Island. Patrick Nicolosi is an idealist posing as a realist: he wants immigration and housing laws enforced strictly, in order to keep a lid on school taxes, which have risen 57 percent in four years to accommodate, in part, illegal immigrant families. The article does a good job of showing how the injustices cut several ways, and of portraying the divided sympathies of the neighborhood—which was first settled by European immigrants last century. If the point of the piece is the fruitlessness of trying to solve the immigration problem one block at a time, it also impartially shows the frustrations of homeowners who want to keep the suburban nature of their neighborhoods intact.

Dropping Out of Sight

According to the the Brookings Institution, exurban sprawl shows no sign of stopping. Matching data from the 2000 census with building permits issued since, the Brookings researchers found growth patterns, predictably, in the South and West, where new McMansions are eating up former farm and ranchlands.

The second-day story was more interesting, and perhaps more hopeful, despite the somber headlines than ran atop them: "U.S. Losing Its Middle-Class Neighborhoods" said The Washington Post. Buried in its tale of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer was this mysterious line: "The Brookings study says that much more research is needed to better understand why middle-income neighborhoods are vanishing faster than middle-income families." Could a clue be found in what the study called "increasing heterogeneity in some neighborhoods"? Is it possible that some of those missing middle-class families are ending up in marginal suburban neighborhoods?

The anecdotal evidence has been building for some time that younger homebuyers—and homebuyers are getting younger all the time—are ardent gentrifiers. Marketing studies from building supply companies like Andersen Windows and Doors say Gen Y is looking for homes with architectural character, avoiding McMansions and the pristine newer exurbs they grew up in. Gen Y might also be called Gen DIY: they like to remodel and refurbish, say the big box stores.

In many places, as the Post story notes, suburban buyers are undoubtedly running to far-off exurbs for more space and quiet. But as the experts, these abdicators might be better described as newly affluent, not solidly middle-class. It bears checking to see if young middle-earners might be dropping off the radar by dropping down a rung for a home they can afford to love.

The Drive Time Belt

The costliest place to commute by car is Atlanta, according to Sperling's Best Places, a research company, who based its study on the expenses of households where two people drive to work. Atlanta, whose residents pay $5,772 annually to sit in morning traffic, beat out the traditional winner, Los Angeles, as did six other southern cities. In all, eight of the top ten costliest commuting cities are in the Southeast, including four in Florida: Orlando, Jacksonville, Pensacola and Cape Coral.

'Real-Estate Agents, Wake Up!'

On Gather.com, a fan of California's historic bungalows—and self-confessed open-house addict—rants against real-estate agents who don’t know the architectural value of the homes they are selling. "I've heard agents counsel prospective buyers that beautiful red oak interior trim would be 'livened up by a coat of Varithane'," Moe Hong writes, or that colored mylar can "create a stained-glass effect in a 1909 Spanish Revival home." Hong urges the nation's Realtors, "learn a bit about the local architectural tradition, and don't rely on what you've picked up by osmosis to sell houses. You may be only in it for the money, but you are the guardians of your own town's architectural heritage."

Where the Jobs Are

More than half of the immigrant population in the Chicago metropolitan area now lives in the suburbs, according to a study by professors at the city's Roosevelt University. Immigrants follow jobs, and James Lewis and Rob Paral at the university's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs say most new jobs are in the suburbs. Between 1990 and 2000, their study says, immigrants increased their share of suburban jobs to 17 percent from 10 percent.

Today's Dire Prediction About McMansion Prices

The Wall St. Journal leads today's Weekend Journal (subscription required) with a big article on the McMansion Glut. Like most phenomena with catchy names, this one bears scrutiny. The article's point is that as Baby Boomers mature and heating prices rise, the real-estate market is trending toward smaller homes. As a result, the inventory of gaudy, overlarge domiciles is growing against lower demand and poor McMansionnaires are having to cut prices. One family cited in the article had to toss a life-size Spiderman statue and a dog bowl into the deal to get their Loudon, Va., house sold.

There are a couple of holes in the Journal's logic. The shift to smaller homes as been going on for well over a year, predating the serious rise in fuel prices. And if Boomers are downsizing, their children are just gearing up for their childbearing, income-producing years, as this week's Harvard study on real-estate prices points out. (The good news for the suburbs seems to be that those Boomer-babies are buying older homes in the inner-ring burbs.)

No doubt McMansions are stacking up on the market. (Memo to WSJ: all kinds of houses are.) But according to brokers, a cooling realty market often pushes buyers away from overblown architecture (the Journal shows a Phoenix pile with landscaping fit for a waterpark) toward more conventional colonials, tudors and even modernist boxes. And when you do the math, even the homeowners who gave up Spidey aren't doing so bad: they cut their price from $1 million to $820,000, after buying the house for $515,000 six years ago. That's an average of more than nine percent a year on their money. Where were they get that return on investment?

The Real Estate Journal has a seeming companion story on Microhouses, the anti-McMansions.

Threat to the Ash Spreads in Midwest

The Emerald Ash Borer, an insect already responsible for the destruction of 15 million trees in Michigan, has been spotted near Chicago, in a leafy subdivision called Windings of Ferson Creek, in exburban Kane County. Believed to have come from China in wooden packing crates, the ash borer was first discovered in the Detroit suburbs in 2002. Illinois is the fourth Midwestern state to report a sighting, along with Ontario province in Canada.

The loss of trees in Michigan already puts the ash borer ahead of last decade's scourge, the Asian longhorned beetle. Arborists fear the bright green borer's destruction will outpace Dutch Elm disease, which all but eradicated that species beginning in the 1950s. Ashes are thought to make up at least six percent of the Midwest's tree population.

The adult borer nibbles only leaves, doing relatively little harm. The bug's larvae, however, eat their way through the bark, killing the tree over two to three years. Leaving smaller holes higher up the tree than Asian beetles, borers are harder to detect. The adult found in Kane County this week was trapped in a spider web.

Drenching the soil at an infested tree's base with Bayer Advanced Garden Tree and Shrub Insect Control can stop the borer, as can implanting insecticide "bullets" below a tree's bark. But arborists are preparing for the worst, gathering healthy seeds of the four main varieties of ash to replant in case grown trees vanish from our woods and streets.

Reorienting the Strip Mall

Johnson, Arkansas may sound a bit remote to serve as the cradle for a suburban architectural revolution, but at the American Institute of Architecture's national convention in Los Angeles last week, Marlon Blackwell's Srygley Office Building in Johnson, near Fayetteville, was honored as "a wonderful argument to banal suburban office parks." Blackwell is recognized internationally, but his best-known buildings are in the South, and he has gained a reputation as an architect-laureate of the Ozarks. (His modernist redesign of Arkansas House in the state's northwest corner was also cited in L.A.) He is fond of "plunking down industrial-strength structures in these bucolic settings," according to ID magazine, which made him one of their young architects to watch in 1995.

His strip-mall building in Johnson is a vaulting box of concrete and corrugated metal with a bent for nature. It turns its back on traffic to face a creek, with native grasses planted where cars are normally parked. In the two-story wing of the building, shown above, employees can cook, relax and take in views of the wooded scene from two decks. Most suburban buildings, don't make use of where they sit, he says. "They're boilerplate buildings plopped down on site."

This Week's (Less Dire) Prediction About Housing Prices

Divorce, porous borders and a gradual slowdown of the U.S. economy: all good news for home owners and bad news for those waiting for a crash in real-estate prices before buying their dream homes. So says a Harvard study reported by today's Financial Times. Harvard's study—one of those data-mulching reports that valiadate backyard barbecue scuttlebutt—concludes housing prices are likely to stay high, though slower sales will calm the frenzied speculation and double-digit percentage profits that characterized the past few years. It seems that "accelerated household formation"--increasing fracturing of family units—is helping to drive demand for houses, as is the rise in financial fortunes of the enormous immigrant influx of the '90s, who are finally in a position to buy their stake in the American Dream.

The disappointment in the Financial Times's article is nearly palpable. "The Harvard study concedes that a slowing housing market could take a heavy toll on growth, as Americans become less able to use their houses as ATM machines," it notes, but even a slowdown has a silver lining: "This could help rebalance the US economy, reducing demand for imports and so stemming the growth of the trade deficit."

Big Bang for Suburban Gangs

For years gang problems have hidden in the suburban small towns, because their crimes were spread across various jurisdictions. In burbs dominated by established white residents, locals assumed gangs drew only Hispanics and other minorities and were therefore a transient problem. Increasingly, though, suburban gangs are gaining footholds in suburban high schools, attracting white teenagers, including girls--a development guaranteed to get suburbanites' attention.

Accordingly, suburban officials are educating themselves about gangs whose names are well known to urban law enforcement, talking with state police and cooperating among themselves to identify and fight gang activity. In Westchester, north of Manhattan, last week, a seminar on "Gangs in a Suburban Community" drew county bosses,teachers, police and youth workers to hear local law enforcement describe the signs of gang infiltration, including "hand signs, graffiti, tattoos, mysterious bruises and a stark change in attitude" toward education, parents and violence, according to a Mount Vernon, N.Y., detective. He was joined by former gang members who urged them to find ways to engage teens in after-school programs, judged the best way to keep them out of gangs.

In Massachusetts, where small cities outside of Boston like Lynn and Lawrence have had active gangs for years, the state police are concerned that gangs are broadening their area of activity and are already cracking down. A conference held in Topsfield in Essex County will address how local and state authorities can work better
together.

Saving the Dinosaurs

As yesterday's post shows, suburbs and their cities relate like parents and children. In some places, the children are grown and still living at home. In others, the parents are moving in with the kids. In Milwaukee, the parents are looking for a little financial help in their old age.

As the population, and attendant tax revenues, have moved to the burbs, older cities are having a hard time keeping up parks, zoos, arts complexes and other attractions that, they argue, benefit surburban residents as much as downtowners. A study group Milwaukee commissioned to look for solutions suggested a regional "cultural" sales tax that would sustain the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, the Milwaukee Public Museum (above) and Art Museum, and Milwaukee County's parks.

Milwaukee isn't the first to discuss a regional tax. New York City used to charge suburbanites a commuter tax to defray transit expenses. A 0.1 percent sales tax tacked onto retail purchases in the Denver area helps foot the bill for the city's botanical garden, a zoo, and two area museums. Other cities, including Detroit, are looking at similar solutions.

So far, suburban county officials in Wisconsin have said no, suggesting instead that the state prop up wobbly cultural institutions, or, says the Waukesha County executive, make them pay for themselves or close—an ultimatum Waukeshans offered their public-funded nursing home. If you're willing to put your own old folks on an ice flow, you're more than happy to do it to your city.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

In Canada, Montreal city officials are engaged in a nearly impenetrable squabble with several surrounding towns, after the towns were spun off into proper suburbs. The fight, which has been going on for months, centers on accusations by the de-merged towns' mayors that Montreal has overcharged them for city services.

Suburban expansion has created the same problems to the south. The nabobs of Nashville, Tenn., are trying to force 10 suburban cities to pay more for the sewer service they buy from the city. Those towns, in return, are saying that Nashville needs to measure their flow better to make sure the suburbs don't end up footing the bill for city residents.

There's more than one way to stop the financial drain of clinging suburbs, however. Indianapolis annexed its suburbs, soaking up the tax revenues generated by the development boom for itself, and creating a small-city superpower that is the envy of its Midwestern neighbors.

Could Your Grass Be Greener?

Americans invest more than $40 million a year (and some 80 percent of their water) in their 20 million acres of lawn. Most of those dollars are spent for gasoline: 800 million gallons go to run power mowers each year, and with fuel prices rising, homeowners and lawn-care companies are beginning to feel the pinch.

Is there a better way? Ted Steinberg, author of "American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn," notes in this article in The Contra Costa Times, that healthy, attractive lawns don't have to be Wimbledon-ready swards. Nor do they have to be "environmental" lawns that leave bare patches and use only organic additives, though Steinberg says these lawns are growing in popularity. (We have a stat for that, too: an acre of grass is dosed with 10 times as much pesticide as any acre of farm.) A relaxed approach--avoiding chemical fertilizers and keeping grass long enough to inhibit weeds by depriving them of sunlight--produces a lawn that is natural and durable.

If even relaxed sounds like too much work, there is always synthetic turf. AstroTurf, the Monsanto product that made indoor sports possible is an antique in the world of fake grass. For about $5 a square foot, J.M. Synthetic Grass, a two-year-old New Jersey company, can cover your freehold with a plastic, shown above, that has the look, and, according to owner Jeff Mitnick, the feel of real grass. You can find a host of faux turf providers on Synthetic Grass Blog, a site that looks suspiciously like a sales gimmick. But even S.G.B. admits that "if you are the kind of person that likes to play in your grass with your bare feet so you can feel the tingle of the blades between your toes, then don¹t bother with synthetic grass!!"