Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Nice Suburbs, If You Can Get There

Business Week has released its list of the "25 Best Affordable Suburbs," a curious sort of beast that has no outright winner—no one, presumably, is going to up and move to a faraway suburb based on its ranking, as they must do in response to the Best Places to Retire or Best Cities to Live In. Instead, the list identifies the most appealing suburb in each of 26 metropolitan areas, from New York City to Iowa City, working with crime rates, cost of living, home prices and school stats. For a list of national scope, the 25 Best Burbs turns out to be frustratingly parochial.

What's stranger still is the monstrous chip the magazine wears on its shoulder about haute-suburbia: "For hedge-fund managers, plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, and other people who earn millions a year, choosing a suburb is not about affordability but convenience and, frankly, prestige," snarls writer Mara Roney in her introduction to the list. Has convenience ever been made to sound so wretched? "Sure, you might own the cheapest house in a top suburb," she chastises suburban wannabes, "but is that really worth it?"

The correct answer, is No, nothing is worth living next to an Iowa City hedge-fund manager. The list, with its metro area in parentheses, follows:


Sandia Heights, N.M. (Albuquerque)
Roswell, Ga. (Atlanta)
Columbia, Md. (Baltimore)
Sharon, Mass. (Boston)
Mattews, N.C. (Charlotte)
Lake Zurich, Ill. (Chicago)
Evendale, Ohio (Cincinnati)
Flower Mound/Lewisville, TX. (Dallas)
Castle Rock, Colo. (Denver)
Weston, Fla. (Fort Lauderdale)
Sugarland, TX. (Houston)
Noblesville, Ind. (Indianapolis)
Coralville, Iowa (Iowa City)
Shawnee, Kan. (Kansas City)
Santa Clarita, Calif. (Los Angeles)
Lakeville, Minn. (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
Livingston, N.J., (Newark)
West Nyack, N.Y. (New York)
Elkhorn, Neb. (Omaha)
West Chester, Pa. (Philadelphia)
Folsom, CA. (Sacramento)
Kaysville, Utah (Salt Lake City)
Mukilteo, WA. (Seattle)
Saint Charles, Mo. (St. Louis)
Herndon, Va. (Washington)

Monday, November 27, 2006

Suburban Schools' Catch-22

Public schools drive the suburban housing market: the better the schools, the higher the prices. But there's a catch: the better the schools, generally, the higher the taxes. "That's the whole point," says a suburban parent in a recent New York Times article (abstract only), "you pay the high taxes, but you get the good schools."

Except when you don't: the Times article tells the sad tale of families who moved to high-priced suburbs, only to find that the public schools are too crowded and too "bare-bones" for their kids, whom they drag back into the city to attend private schools, on a daily basis as commuters or by moving them back in.

But other recent reports say suburban public schools are anything but barebones. In the July/August issue of The American Enterprise, a former Wilmette, Ill., school board member says “spending on special programs, technology, and ‘enrichments’ actually crowds out time for math, reading, writing, geography, and history.” The magazine blames wealthy school board members acting in cahoots with unionized teachers to lower class size and upgrade extra-curricular programs, granting the parents prestige and the union more teaching spots.

Whether suburban public schools are too stripped down or too buffed, both the liberal Times and the conservative American Enterprise seem to agree that parents aren't getting their money's worth in the burbs, and that's more than a shame. "Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren studied bankruptcy filings in America," says one American Enterprise article. She found "that the biggest squeeze on middle- and upper-middle-class families came from high mortgage payments and escalating property taxes on homes in towns with desirable public schools."

The common sense solution may be to shop for housing in communities with low- to middling house prices, close to private schools. By saving on both mortgage and school taxes, you'll be able to afford a private school that delivers a solid education. Chances are, you'll get more house for your money, in an area that needs your renovation dollars.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

It's the Suburbs, Stupid

The suburbs have spoken, but last week's seeming rebuke to the GOP may not be the burbs last word. Despite the Republican's Suburban Agenda, promising attention to schools, college costs and other domestic matters, the suburbs were mostly responsible for the drubbing the GOP took. "A majority of the seats the party gained in taking control of Congress were either wholly or partly suburban," said Newsday columnist Lawrence C. Levy, pointing out that it was the first time the suburbs nationally didn't go Republican.

In Illinois, the suburban districts west of Chicago, historically strongly Republican, instead gave the Democrats a "supermajority" in the state Senate in Springfield. (The Illinois suburban GOP also lost, in the resignation of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose career they jump-started in the early 1960s. But this story says they lost him long ago.)

In Washington state, "the drubbing was so complete that seats flipped in Spokane and traditionally Republican Puget Sound suburbs," reported the King County Journal. In New York, incumbent Sen. Hillary Clinton won in Long Island's rock-ribbed Republican suburbs, where she was tromped in 2000. In Massachusetts, governor-elect Deval Patrick scored his biggest wins in the tony burbs west of Boston.

But the Democrats, according to Levy, didn't lure suburbanites left as much as the GOPs presumed too much. Levy portrays the suburban rebellion as not an extreme reaction to either the war or the deficit, but a reaction against extremist politics. "Suburbanites are not anti-change, just anti-extremism of any stripe," he wrote. "They're not anti-government. Many people move here for more and better government services. And they're not anti-tax. They're willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they're getting good value."

And the suburbs may be growing more conservative. In Dallas, Republican judges lost last week not in the anti-Iraq tsunami, but because their conservative Anglo constituents have been moving out of the city to the suburbs, as they have in other southern cities. And in other places, a suburban/exurban split is developing. In Oregon, "Washington County … long-considered the state’s bellwether, seems to be trending blue, largely thanks to the explosive growth in its close-to-Portland suburbs over the last decade," reports the Gazette Times. Clackamas County, with its fast-growing exurbs—20 miles or more from downtown Portland—is still up for grabs, analysts from both sides say."

The fight for the suburbs, in other words, has just begun.