A lot of people moved into suburban homes in affluent-seeming areas in an attempt to cement their well-to-do social status. Alas, that doesn't actually work. When the neighborhood changes and Daddy loses his job, that artifact of social status becomes a white elephant with rapidly falling value to which the family is shackled.
Very creative thinking on your part.
There's a few forums you missed on the way here. And a protest or two on Wall Street.
Originally posted by JusticeZero
So, people who are doing well economically should rent decent apartments in urban neighborhoods plagued by high crime and poor schools so that when the economy tanks, they'll be able to easily move into crappy apartments in urban neighborhoods with even higher crime and worse schools?
The fact is, if you buy a house or apartment anywhere, city or suburb, you always run the risk that you will lose your job and not be able to afford to keep your home. Until recently, however, you were much more likely to be able to sell it for at least as much as you paid for it if it was in the suburbs rather than in the city.
Now, whether a house or apartment is losing value or not really depends upon the area it's in. The people in the fashionable areas where real estate soared wildly in price early in the 2000s are in big trouble, especially if they bought after 2005, because their homes have lost so much value compared to what they paid for their properties. People in less fashionable areas where real estate prices tended to be steadier, are in far better shape as housing in those areas, urban or suburban, has maintained its value or even shown some modest gains.
Last edited by Linda_D; 04 Oct 2011 at 9:25 AM.
But one of the reasons why these neighborhoods have high crime and poor schools is because these people aren't there. Where affluence goes, services follow. No one expects an individual family to make the absurd decision to a move to a location that will give them a lower quality of life. This is a macro-level problem and one that requires an equally macro-level solution (i.e. doing away with the home mortgage tax deduction, for a start).
Of course if too many affluent people move in then its gentrification and poor people move out.
Serious question here. Why don't we support gentrification? It basically recreates the urban neighborhoods planners so desire in one nice package. If planners are concerned about the lower-income residents being forced out (assuming they are renters and not owners - which many are) why aren't those fears offset by the higher property taxes and better services for those who remain? I still believe that most urban planners/agencies completely ignore social conditions and expect everyone to have discretionary income. We build for people with money and we zone for people with money so the downfalls of gentrification can't really be too shocking.
On another note - where I grew up Hispanics and Asians bought buildings with cash, fixed them, up, and brought in businesses or sold them to white people. This seems like an ideal situation for planners worried about gentrification. Isn't this a win/win?
I burned down the church to atone for my transgressions.
Was not the ameican dream at one point to own a home. The development of surburbs at the time made this a pretty easy realization.
Poverty is a necessary component in a capitalistic society and really was not a politcal issue while we were a mfg supergiant. As stated earlier the crux of the problem is that we are transitioning away from being a goods producing 'player' and with that we need to re-invent the american dream. With this unfortunately a whole class of people will be lost.
Looking for Sanity
In this Crazy Land Of Ours
Yup, gosh. Too bad for them. Shame, really. Just an unfortunate externality in the system.
I'm - again - reminded of the title of a Wendell Berry book: "What are People For?" We must remember that the tool serves us. We don't serve the tool.
The critique of gentrification is usually that, instead of improving the situation for the existing residents of an area, that the "right" people are brought in to displace those older, longer term residents who are lower income. In doing so, you really don't solve the problems of poverty, many would argue, you are just pushing the poor around to new locations. The more concrete, but also more challenging solution, would be to engage these areas in economic and community development programs to improve entire areas as a whole. Gentrification just improves the built environment, not the job outlook, training opportunities, education, etc. of the residents.
Situations are different in different areas. Where I live, many of the poor are long time residents (including descendents of original Spanish settlers as well as Native residents) who do own their homes. In some cases this, for lower income residents, this is because it was inherited from a relative. In others, they may be elderly residents on a fixed income. For OWNERS of a poor and/or blighted area, gentrification drives up property values, and therefore taxes. These residents are often forced to move not because the rents have gone up, but because they can't afford the increase in taxes.
There is also here the very strong association with place. We have poor areas of our city that were in fact villages prior to consolidation and some folks have traced their presence there back quite a ways. In the neighborhood where I work and live, its not unusual to find families that have lived in an area for 5 generations. So, when these folks start experiencing these kinds of pressures, the impact is different from other populations that are more mobile and maybe less attached to a particular aea (like my own background).
In these areas, social networks are vast and deep. So, to your question about why the people who can remain in a gentrifying areas don't go along with it so they can enjoy the benefits of improved services, I think that assumes that people are NOT socially connected. I may want improved services, for example, but not if it means my uncle's family has to move out. Sure, maybe they're poor, but it doesn't make them bad people and it doesn't make me not want them around (this is hypothetical - I don't have any relatives in town). I think that would be the response of many of the people I work with.
Again, improving an area through displacement of the exitsting residents really just moves those struggling people to a different part of the city. It doesn't address the underlying endemic reasons for the poverty. Sure, market forces often lead the way for gentrification because an area, while blighted, may be strategically located for example, but I think for a municipality to become too actively engaged in plans that knowingly displace large numbers of the poor is ethically suspect.
I also disagree that any municipality functions with any one mind. So, to assert that a city is planning for and desiring increased revenue from residential property taxes as its primary objective discounts or minimizes the work of that municipality's economic and community development departments, family and community services (which here is involved with affordable housing) and others dedicated to lifting the poor up, and not in driving them off in favor of wealthier residents.
The purpose of life is a life of purpose
The decline of the suburbs is like a ripple of poverty which emanates from the CBD of a metro area. The ripple moves through the inner city and first ring burbs and, like mendelman states, is hitting the 40-60 year old areas as the style falls out of favor and is seen as old-fashioned, obsolete and decrepit. This is generational pattern. The next ring of poverty will be the exurban fringe. The interesting circumstances with this change is the rise in energy costs, smaller families, later marriage, telecommuting, and other technological changes that may make cities cleaner, air cleaner and commuting unnecessary.
Dude, I'm cheesing so hard right now.
Another factor to consider is aging. As the demographic pyramid moves forward, I think one can expect that empty-nesters will increasingly be interested in moving closer to the service-rich neighborhoods at the center of metropolitan areas. In many cases, people moved to the suburbs not only for more space for their growing families but also for (what were) the superior suburban schools.. a moot point if the kids are long-gone.
Arguably the best schools in San Diego are (or were) accessible in a very expensive fourth ring suburb called Carmel Valley (essentialy a propery-developer's marketing name for an area formerly known by the depressing monicker, North City West).. an inland area that consists largely of a series of high density gated multi- unit and semi-detached single family home communities, at between 8 to 24 units per net acre, without any distinguishable character whatsoever, unless you want to develop a criteria based solely on the design of subdivision perimeter walls and creative applications of strip mall parking lot design principles. Carmel Valley's one benefit - and how it funds those top quality schools - is it's abundance of tax-revenue-generating high tech industry and class A office space (unattractively situated in towers and campuses amidst highway interchange ramps... and requiring a death wish of anybody trying to get to them through any means other than a private car).
I see no reason why anybody who lives there would not want to move to one of the more attractive inner ring suburbs once their kids go off to college. Heck, they might even find lower density (but more transit-oriented) accommodations in those inner 'burbs.
You'd be surprised....
I can't speak for the last few years but certainly up till 2005/2006 one of the newest and more popular development trends in East Coast suburbia/exurbia was the "active adults" only subdivisions for childless couples aged 55+. The subdivisions consisted of large attached single or 1 1/2 story houses around a community center with various facilities.
*Some* couples will certainly downside to a condo or a townhouse in a popular urban neighborhood. But many, if not most, won't.
Maybe. I think you'll see more people in houses, especially if this unemployment rate becomes a feature rather than a bug in the economy (and we refuse to change the way the economy works).
You are assuming that there aren't many services available outside of the urban core areas, and that's not true, at least in the East and Midwest. Many older suburbs have transit links and very active senior services programs. Moreover, shopping, medical facilities, and even churches/synagogues are much more available in the suburbs than in many/most inner city neighborhoods. I won't even get into the issue of how vulnerable to crime the urban elderly are, just read/listen to/watch the news.
I agree with PennPlanner about the 55+ communities, too. Their big selling feature is "a house with no outside maintenance". Moreover, various senior care living projects, from townhomes to semidetached to apartments are being developed on the edges of cities as well as in the suburbs and the exurbs. These cater to people who have always lived in the suburbs and have absolutely no interest in moving to the city. As wahday noted, a lot of this has to do with community ties: people aren't willing to give them up to move to some place where they know no one. This is why so many elderly persons want to stay in their own homes despite the fact that some kind of assisted living facility might be a better option. Virtually all of these developments for seniors offer transportation as part of their amenities BTW.
As someone who is facing retirement in a few years (4+), I've been investigating and considering my options. I might move out to the country and raise flowers and keep some critters if my health stays good. That's the dream, but I also have looked into alternates, including some senior developments in rural, suburban, and city edge developments. Those aren't my first choices, but I would never, ever consider moving close to the center of any city, even one as small as Jamestown or Dunkirk, NY.
Actually, I WAS talking about movement of older folks from newer (outer ring) - which lack those amenities - to older (inner ring) suburbs - which have those amenities.. not to downtowns. We're saying the same thing.
I think we're caught up in some semantics here. San Diego calls its downtown Centre City, its 1st and 2nd ring suburbs the "Core Neighborhoods" (as I mentioned somewhere on one of these 'burbs threads in the last few days). Beyond the Core Neighborhoods are the 3rd ring+ (post-Korean War era) suburbs. Generally speaking, the 7 neighborhoods of downtown are S and SW of the park, comprising some 30,000 people. Beyond dowtown, on all sides of it except for the bay are the 29 or so core neighborhoods. This "core" includes both the "inner city" (Barrio, Logan Heights, Sherman Heights, Grant Hill, Stockton, Golden Hill, mostly, all of which are losing population) and the inner ring suburban area, which is fast gaining population. it is inhabitated by some 650,000 people. Post-war Cul-de-sac land is beyond this, comprising another 550,000 people or so in the city proper along 2 radials and some 50,000 on a third radial which actually continues something of the core neighborhood fabric (the bay and beach radial to La Jolla). There are another 1.8 million in other municipalities.
The observed empty nester movement from the 2000 to 2010 census appears to be BOTH from the 4th ring+ to the 1st and 2nd ring core neighborhoods AND to centre city. The downtown phenomenon wasn't what i was talking about, and maybe unique to San Diego, for any number of reasons, but there is certainly some type of movement from the 4th ring+ to the 1st and 2nd rings. The only observable new residential construction these days seems to be in the 1st and 2nd rings, in any case.
Last edited by Cismontane; 05 Oct 2011 at 12:30 PM.
This article might be of interest to people studying these issues:
http://www.newgeography.com/content/...s-more-one-way
Back in the 1970's the newly constucted suburban areas were firmly middle class. By 2005, they were largely lower income areas, with the high income people concentrating themselves around the major transit lines and in the core.
Sorry for jumping in late on this, but I'm wondering what effect the timing of these suburban minis' developments had on this. based on being built before Euclidian zoning and being built after Euclidian zoning. It seems to me like those suburban places built before zoning are now doing much better than those built under the strict separation of uses tenet of post-WWII, and especially 1980s and later, 'sterile' zoning-based development rules.
I also note that in many instances, there are post-WWII SF detached houses on bucolic tree-lined 'suburban-style' streets in the central city (ie, many places in Staten Island, NYC) while there is high urban density with multi-flats, etc, complete with other major urban problems, in nearby suburbs (ie, in some New Jersey suburbs).
Also, what does your crystal ball say about the long-term future of some of these older midwest and western suburbs? Will we be seeing wholesale metro amalgamations in some of those areas (ie, California)? I'm still kind of semi-surprised that we haven't yet seen some of those basket-case inner south Chicagoland suburbs joining the City of Chicago, too, for example.
Mike
I think that the growth of wealthy areas in the central part of the city has a lot to do with the rapid growth of Toronto as well as the redevelopment of many of the older parts of the city. Traffic in Toronto is so horrendous, even on weekends, that being near transit is a key component driving housing market demand. Moreover, the central part of the city closest to downtown has undergone tremendous redevelopment, especially with high rises along the waterfront and up the Yonge/Bloor corridors. This means that rents in older, near-in properties that used to be cheap have risen to the point that very few poor people can afford to live in their old, central city neighborhoods, so they've moved out to declining areas like Scarborough and Etobicoke.
I also found this part of the article interesting:
I have relatives who live in Swansea and Missassauga. I think that they would agree.It is easy for academics to blame a lack of social welfare spending, or suburbanization for the problem. The real problem is the loss of local policy making power resulting from amalgamation. For the most part, the areas losing ground the fastest are the formerly middle class suburbs amalgamated into the city. In contrast the “exurbs” just outside of city boundaries have thrived. This is no coincidence. The real takeaway from this study is that the suburbs have different needs than the central core. By attempting to accommodate the needs of both, the megacity has benefitted neither. Short of de-amalgamation, the only hope for the city is to substantially decentralize policy making. No amount of spending can make up for the loss of local autonomy.
A large problem with poverty in the suburbs begins with allowable development patterns. It always seems more desirable for developers to build in the suburbs than to infill and develop/redevelop in urban areas. Only in the past few years (mainly due to lower taxable values) have municipalities been devising ways to incentivize developing within city limits or within urbanized areas. Also, as stated earlier in this post, as the population ages, people move to other areas and in a lot of instances, the housing is rented, thereby causing more problems to develop.
I think it always comes back to economics.
With regard to new development - developers will build wherever there is the most money to be made. If planners want to control or direct growth in their community they need to find some way to make the places they want more growth to be more profitable, and the place where they don’t want more growth to be less profitable or even completely unprofitable. Zoning does this by making it time consuming and expensive for a developer to fight the city, but if there is still money to be made they will choose to fight. Over the last 60 years suburban development has generally been the most profitable form of new development so that’s what most developers have been building. Only changing the economics of growth will change the way developers operate.
With regard to revitalizing existing developed areas - you need to look at why people move to lower-rent areas in the first place. People generally choose to live in the nicest neighbourhood they can afford. People who live in the lowest rent areas live there because that's all they can afford. If you fix up the lowest rent areas it may improve some people’s lives, but it may also lead to increased rents which means the poorest people have to move to another low rent neighbourhood, even further away from jobs and services. Therefore any improvements should be made using a city-wide strategy. One strategy is to distribute affordable housing relatively evenly throughout the community, which of course means: forcing developers to build low-cost units in places they normally wouldn't; having a community-run housing program to maintain below market rents for these units; and fighting Nimby’s at every turn.
One thing that's been done in many communities around here is to allow second apartments (e.g. basement apartments) in all single-detached neighbourhoods in the municipality as-of-right. This greatly increases the supply of low rent units through-out the community, which helps to keep rents affordable. There are some pitfalls to that, such as parking and proximity to transit issues along with the impact it has on new rental buidling construction.
I think you are right about having a city-wide strategy to address these issues rather than just pushing the poor people around the city. Without addressing the underlying issues, it becomes a game of cat and mouse.
But I think one of the big challenges with affrodable housing development (since that's the area I currently work in) is that it is more expensive to develop, say, 5 houses in 5 different parts of the city than it is to develop 5 units that are together. Which is all to say that if any municipality, state or the feds who want to stimulate this kind of affordable housing expansion HAS to step up to the plate and offer more incentives or subsidies or there will be no developers willing to take it on (even us non-profit developers). At present, affordable housing development is a game of very slim margins and the challenges of keeping rents/home values affordable are many - especially if you venture into the realm of maintaining affordability outside of market values as suggested. I'm not saying it can't be done (that's what we do here, in fact, using a specific affordability model) but just that its damn hard under the current conditions.
The purpose of life is a life of purpose
I think this piece in Wonkette says it all: "POORBURBS U.S. Suburbs Now Just Sprawling Hell-Camps For the Poor".. hehe
http://wonkette.com/455198/u-s-subur...s-for-the-poor
Sorry.. couldn't resist.
On the other hand, I don't know what else one can say about a 54% increase in poverty in suburbia.
I just love the use of percentages as an indicator of how great/terrible something has become! So, the poverty rate in the suburbs has grown 53% since 2000, huh? Does that mean that 53% of people living in the 'burbs are poor? Not hardly, but that's what the propagandist "author" wants the ignorant, uncritical reader to think. If the poverty rate in a suburban area was 4% in 2000 and has grown by 53% that means that it's about 6.1% now. OTOH, if an inner city neighborhood has a poverty rate of 26% (I think that's the poverty rate for the entire City of Buffalo as of 2010 census) and it grows by "only" 5.3% in a decade to 27.4%, which is a more serious situation?
I always like comparisons of population growth in states like Wyoming and Nevada to population growth in states like California or New York, too. A 100,000 person increase in Wyoming is 10%. A 100,000 person increase in New York is .5% because Wyoming has about 1 million people while NY has 19 million.
I do appreciate your outline of innumeracy in this topic, but it is not a stretch to imagine being underwater in a too-big house that you can't sell might be a causal agent here and the numbers - along with the news stories about soup kitchens - might pass the smell test when expanded out beyond one city. Jus' sayin'.
Also not a stretch to believe that gentrification is pushing more poor people out of the inner city into inner ring suburbs. The outer ring suburbs are no doubt still pretty well off but it can definitely be argued that the inner ring ones are at risk.
Quote
