Brookings Report: The End of Black-and-White Urban Planning

White flight may be over. But when it comes to our ideas about suburbs vs. the city, the picture is still all black and white.

The news coming out of Brookings Institution's massive new report, "The State of Metropolitan America," is that young educated, white workers have headed back into the cities in the past decade, looking for job opportunities and a lively social environment. The suburbs, meanwhile, are getting poorer and more diverse.

At least that's the takeaway from urban-based outlets, always ready to pit lily-white suburbs against the true grit of the cities. "Suburbs Losing Young Whites to Cities," crys the headline on the AP story that ran on Huffington Post. "Bright Flight: Affluent Leaving Suburbs, Moving to Cities" seconds the Wall St. Journal's blog "The Juggle." Told this way, the story sounds like the burbs are getting their comeuppance.

The situation the Brookings report describes is somewhat subtler. Young whites have been moving downtown since the 1990s, lured by better infrastructure and the drop in crime. What Brookings says is that the "bright flight" accelerated in the 2000s (to the inner-ring burbs as well as the urban core) because of the recession and the collapse of the housing bubble. The jury's still out on whether the recent migration to the cities is a long-term reorientation or a recession-based "bounce."

Meanwhile, the growing poverty in the burbs is not a white/minority "switcheroo" as the eco-blog Grist has it, but a rechanneling of immigration patterns during the suburban boom of the previous decade: lower-class, unskilled workers have streamed to the suburbs because that's where their jobs were, and for the most part still are, as manufacturing firms left the cities.

The sum effect is not a simple reversal of white flight, but a blending of city and suburban reality that's been going on almost since white flight began. For years, Brookings analysts have been calling for a smarter, less balkanized approach to urban planning and management. Says the Brookings report, "governance must begin to transcend the parochial 18th-century administrative borders that frustrate shared approaches to increasingly shared challenges."

Suburban authorities have begun breaking down their municipal barriers, forming regional planning committees to solve common problems. The next step is for cities and suburbs to overcome the mindset neatly summed up by Grist's tidy but insufficient recommendation that "let's half of us fix the cities and half of us fix the suburbs."

Can Car Sharing Fly in the Suburbs?

Car sharing has made serious inroads in cities, where a lack of parking, plenty of public transportation, and general walkability make renting a car for an hour or a day far more practical than owning. Zipcar and other car sharing companies find their services are economically unsustainable in the suburbs, where conditions are just the opposite: walking is rarely a choice, getting to their cars often requires a car, and there's parking everywhere you look.

A new concept in car sharing makes it possible for suburban car owners to capitalize on their parked cars--literally, by renting them to strangers. Relay Rides, now operating in the Boston area, allows car owners to rent their vehicles during those hours when they aren't using them. Owners post their car's availability and location on a website where renters sign up for drive-away and return times. Relay Rides installs a push-button device in each car that gives the renter access--no key-swapping necessary--and tracks the car. The company also provides insurance for duration of the rental and checks on the driver's safety record.

Environmental advocates love the idea of car sharing because it reduces the number of cars in the world. So far, the personal carsharing model has been limited where it's needed most because in several states, like California, renting a noncommercial vehicle automatically invalidates the owner's insurance. Yesterday, a bill pushed by California assemblyman Dave Jones changed that, clearing the way for Spride Share, a car sharing company in the San Francisco area, ready to jump in with a system similar to Relay Rides.

By matching renters with cars sprinkled across the burbs, instead of at Zipcars central locations, car sharing companies may now map the Internet's fluid, multiple-node network onto the suburbs' troubling traffic patterns. The question now is whether suburbanites are willing to be that democratic--and capitalistic--about their rides.

photo by Andrew Currie

Times Square Bomber Gets a Crumbling Surbuban Facade

As they grope to make sense of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged failed Times Square car bomber, the newspapers are going with the "suburban time bomb" angle, playing on the fact that Shahzad owned--and left to foreclosure--a house in Shelton, Connnecticut, a former factory town on the Housatonic River north of Bridgeport. (photo by Professor Bop) This narrative line nicely ties together paranoia about the placidity of the suburbs--"it's quiet out here, a little too quiet--with the ravages of the real-estate boom.

The New York Times' front page sets the tone with the headline, "A Suburban Father Who Gave No Warning Sign," though there's little in the way of suburban angst in the story that follows. Instead, realty-obsessed New Yorkers get a rundown on the property's descending fortunes. Shahzad bought his new-construction, single family home in 2004 for $273,000 with a $218,000 mortgage, the Times reports, before kicking at the alleged mass-murderer for trying "to cash in on the real estate boom." Listed for $329,000 in 2006, the house finally sold within the past year for $284,500.

By that time, Shahzad had long since abandoned suburban life. In June of 2009, he stopped paying his mortgage and moved his family to Pakistan, where he may have gotten some terrorist training, according to reports.

This isn't the usual route to the heartbreak of foreclosure, but that doesn't keep The Danbury News Times, presumably with better local sources, from spinning a deeper tale of suburban desuetude: "American Dream faded quickly for accused terrorist" reads the paper's headline.

The NT's contribution to the real-estate story is that Shahzad bought the home four years before he married--just one of the 52 percent of singletons choosing the burbs over city life that Coldwell-Banker has been touting in recent weeks. The local paper also turns up a $65,000 home equity loan taken on the property in February 2009, leading a University of New Haven professor to speculate that Shahzad was struggling to keep up with the Joneses. "Maybe he was starting to see the hopes of living the good life in America die and he began feeling like a failure," says clinical psychologist and criminal-law prof James Monahan.

Maybe. Or perhaps the frame of suburban economic and spiritual shipwreck doesn't fit the picture. Maybe three months before he left for Pakistan, Shahzad was already turning toward terrorist activity and was looking to suck funds out of a property he was intending to walk away from. We'll never know--that's the way it is with these mild-mannered suburban madmen.

Inside the Beltway Thinking on AIDS

More than 5,500 individuals in Prince George's County, Maryland are infected with HIV/AIDS, according to a study of AIDs in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, released this week (pdf). Of those, more than 600 are not receiving treatment. The study, which blamed a lack of a coordinated response to the spread of the virus, prompted suburban officials to step up diagnosis and treatment, and promote awareness in schools, as has been done in D.C.

The study didn't focus on Prince George's--it had the same advice for all the Washington burbs, which harbor 46 percent of those in Metro D.C. area. But let's stick for a moment with Prince George's, which is home to nearly a million people in 10 cities, 17 towns, and more than 50 unincorporated areas. Comparing this glut of community types, governing bodies, school districts and legal jurisdcitions to D.C.'s unified hierarchy is not even "comparing apples and oranges," as Dale Schacherer, program manager for HIV client services in neighboring Montgomery County, called it. It's comparing one apple tree to a field of grapes.

The study, funded by the Washington AIDS Partnership, is a followup to a 2005 survey of Washington itself, which proved a critical tool in fighting infection rates in the city. "We were able to provide a blueprint for action," says the partnership's executive director, Channing Wickham. But one blueprint won't serve all of Prince George's County, much less the six counties and four cities that surround our nation's capital.

Photo by wyfurasko

Michelle Obama: Desperate Housewife?

The Burbist doesn't ordinarily rise to defend suburbia. As Gregory Rodriguez's fuzzy broadside in the Los Angeles Times last month shows, attacks on the suburban mindset usually misplace the blame for vaguely defined wrongs, like a guy kicking the cat after a bad day at work.

When Michelle Obama told Fox News in February that her household is "news free," Rodriguez, a Times op-ed columnist, took out his frustrations on the suburbs. "Her statement ... represented the culmination of the suburbanization of the American mind," Rodriguez wrote. Why he thought is so wrongheaded as to invite a reply.

The First Lady's admission, on Mike Huckabee's show, came during a discussion about her "Let's Move" initiative, aimed at raising awareness about children's fitness and diet. After a commercial break, Huckabee asked Mrs. Obama whether she watched Fox News. "I try to keep home kind of a news-free zone," she responded.."When you work above the shop, you can't just bring work home."

Rodriguez doesn't say exactly how the White House is representative of the suburbs--despite its spreading lawns, it stands dead center in our 27th largest city--or of any typical American lifestyle. Rodriguez says that Mrs. Obama's no-news policy exhibits a slightly paranoid suburban tendency to think that "members of the single family unit are their only allies." This nails, no doubt, what it must be like to live in the Washington bubble. But the dynamic has little to do with life in an anonymous suburb, where, if anything, family cohesion is atomized by commitments outside the home, Mom's work schedule and book group included.

Rodriguez's complaint is not only with our emotional state, but with that of our minds. Suburbanites' physical remove from the city, he writes, is paralleled by an intellectual distance. He blames a mentality of "escapism"--a notion he borrowed from a Harper's magazine article from 1946. Ergo, we avoid bad news.

Nevermind that most suburbanites today have escaped from nowhere but are, like Rodriguez, suburban natives; his evidence that we are becoming a "newsless" nation comes from a 2008 Pew Research Center study that found that a third of Americans under 25 get no news during a typical day. There's no indication that Pew's young people are primarily suburban. Indeed, the suburbs, given the predominance of elders among both newspaper readers and homeowners, are likely to consume news at a higher rate than urbanites.

Not that reading the news these days qualifies as an intellectual pursuit--not as long as trash-talking is passed off as serious argument.

Suburban Baseball: Build It and They'll Commute

John Branston, writing on the Memphis Flyer's "City Beat" blog yesterday, marked the beginning of a new baseball season by pointing out a sour truth for diehard fans: "basketball and football have better claims than baseball on being the national pastime."

Nothing is more representative of baseball's slide than President Barack Obama's first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, which would have sailed over a left-handed batter's head. That same evening, during the NCAA basketball tournament final, CBS showed Obama looking much more at ease shooting hoop at the White House with basketball broadcaster Clark Kellog.

But there's a caveat for suburban baseballs fans and city planners alike. Basketball and football are king, Branston writes, "unless you are white and live in the suburbs or small towns." In Memphis city high schools, the best athletes play football and basketball, he says; when those schools' baseball teams leave their home turf, "the slaughter rule is usually invoked after three innings."

Branston praises the expense and effort ploughed into AutoZone Park (above, photo by meadowsa), the home stadium of the Memphis Red Birds in downtown Memphis, by its owners, Dean and Kristi Jernigan. After ten years, however, the novelty of the place has worn off and ticket sales are off. Meanwhile, lighted baseball fields have been built in Memphis outliers like Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Cordova. "Somebody is playing," says Branston, concluding, "The people who said a suburban stadium would have drawn better might be right. It certainly would have been closer to the market."

No Rush to Reform in Melbourne

Will the success of the real-estate market endanger smart growth in the suburbs? Outside Australia's city of Melbourne, politicians are siding with developers against the growth management group Melbourne 2030, according to a recent article in The Age, an Australian national newspaper. The capital of Victoria, Melbourne is Australia's second largest city, with a population of 3.2 million that grows by some 1500 people each week. Melbourne also boasts one of the lowest density rates in the world, with less than half the density of London (11 lots per hectare versus 25, but don't ask us what a hectare is.)

The authorities in Victoria have formed a commission to deal with the city's future growth called Melbourne 2030--named for the year by which Melbourne will have added another million people. The commission's goal is to study the best way "to comfortably absorb up to 620,000 extra households ... while protecting and enhancing our existing suburbs." This entails familiar steps like restricting suburban development to 40 percent of new building (from the current 60), and promoting commercial centers in residential areas that will encourage density and discourage the use of cars.

The usual objection to this sort of planning is that Australians--every bit as bent on upward mobility as Americans--won't give up their dream of owning their slice of the homeland and be shoved into apartments. And no less of an Ausssie icon than actor and Melbourne burber Geoffrey Rush (above; photo: Ken Irwin) has joined the opposition group Save Our Suburbs in protesting suburban high-rises. (S.O.S. has proposed that Melbourne 2030 leave posh burbs east of the city alone and direct its do-gooderism to the newer towns to the west.)

But local planning experts say the bigger threat to Melbourne 2030's plans is that politicians have become spoiled by unbridled growth. "The Government’s primary objective is to keep the building industry going because it’s essential to the Victorian economy," observes Bob Birrell, Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Bear this dynamic in mind as the U.S. housing market comes back from the dead in the next few months: its arguable that the building boom here forestalled for nearly two years the downturn we're experiencing now.

Dallas's New (Old) Boomburbs

Not so long ago, Dallas's inner-ring suburbs were going the way of the dodo bird. Young couples, tired of long exurban commutes and flush with realty-boom dollars were moving downtown, "buying up 60-by-140 foot lots and stacking them with 4,000 square feet of living space," Nathan Halsey, a Dallas-area builder told House & Garden magazine in 2006. Fighting back, residents of suburban redoubts like Lakewood and Vickery Place formed conservation districts to protect early 20th century cottages and Modernist slab houses, many of which had been only recently reclaimed from years of neglect.

So it's nice to see a piece like this weekend feature in the Dallas Morning News, about the centennial celebration happening in Winnetka Heights, a nabe in the Oak Cliff area of the city. Founded in 1908 and sold by developers as "an ideal suburb," Winnetka Heights is a mix of grand homes and Craftsman cottages, earning it an historic designation in the early '80s. (The area was also home to the Southland Ice Company, the first store in a chain that became 7-11.) That vote of confidence from the city encouraged homebuyers to restore the larger dwellings that had been broken into apartments to single-family homes, and A combination of good schools, diverse population and a "live-and-let-live" attitude, according to one resident, make it emblematic of a suburb that's adapted succesfully to urban pressures.