So-called smart cities have an achilles heel: data is biased by the status quo

Streetsblog recently highlighted a new report from Houston’s Kinder Institute, evaluating bike and pedestrian road safety based on user-reported near misses. Kinder got 187 cyclists and pedestrians to record their travel for a week in March, and identify and describe situations in which they narrowly avoided an collison. The idea behind the report is that actual crashes, injuries and deaths capture only a small portion of the actual dangerous situations that active transportation users encounter, and the if we cast our net more widely to look at near-misses, we’ll have a better idea of where danger lies. It’s not a bad idea: waiting for crashes or deaths to find out that a road is really dangerous is unfortunate.

But the Streetsblog article highlights an important caveat to using relying on this kind of data. Because pedestrians and cyclists self-censor their route choices to generally avoid the scariest and most dangerous road segments, even this methodology can produce a kind of “false-positive” giving the impression that a roadway is safe, because there are few or no reported crashes or near misses.  The report’s author, Dian Nostrikasari writes:

The near-misses that bicyclists and pedestrians sometimes experience may affect their future travel decisions and prompt them to avoid roads they know are dangerous. That, in turn, could reduce the number of collisions at particular intersections. On paper, that could make an area seem safe, even if they aren’t.

While it may seem like this is a minor technical issue it isn’t. It reveals a fundamental problem with our over-reliance on data-driven planning methodologies. As we’ve noted at City Observatory, while we have copious metrics for assessing car travel (traffic volumes, speeds, level of service, number of crashes, delay), we have precious few measures of bike or pedestrian use (or safety). This imparts a subtle but pervasive bias to planning processes, and creates the illusion that we’re managing scientifically, when in fact we’re ignoring many aspects of the system for which we essentially have no data. But more importantly, even the bike and ped measures we do have reflect the very constrained levels of activity that occur on a system that for decades has been optimized for vehicles and is hostile to people walking and cycling. As we wrote last year:

An exacting count of existing patterns of activity will only further enshrine a status quo where cars are dominant. For example, perfectly instrumented count of pedestrians, bicycles, cars in Houston would show—correctly—little to no bike or pedestrian activity. And no amount of calculation of vehicle flows will reveal whether a city is providing a high quality of life for its residents, much less meeting their desires for the kinds of places they really want to live in.

This is not a problem that can be solved by more or better data. In our view, that’s a fundamental flaw in the “Smart City” visions we hear so much about. When we gather data about vehicle movement, and parking, and even current bike and pedestrian activity, we largely miss the opportunity to talk about radically different alternatives. As we discussed earlier this year, rather than relying exclusively, or even primarily on this kind of data, we ought to be talking more about the kind of places we want to live in and the way we want to enjoy them. That’ll be a much better guide to the future that an excessive reliance on data.

A hat-tip to Streetsblog’s Stephen Miller for excellent reporting here.

Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with:

1. Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas.
2. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might negatively impact housing values, because homes are an important investment and wealth-building tool.

Having read them together like that, you’ve probably already jumped ahead to the big reveal, which is that these two ideas are almost entirely mutually exclusive. The first essentially says, “Use housing policy to keep home prices down”; the second says, “Use housing policy to keep home prices up.”

It’s no wonder, then, that housing policy is a bit confused. The same municipal governments that require that housing on scarce urban land be taken up only with resource-intensive, high-building-cost single family homes; that use zoning to separate out unwanted apartments, shops, transit lines, and other uses on the grounds that they might hurt home values; and promote neighborhood beautification and other projects on the grounds that they will raise housing values, also issue affordable housing reports trying to understand why home prices aren’t lower, and levy “impact fees” on new development for the alleged crime of, you know, raising home values.

The problem is that, at least in certain contexts, both of these goals are legitimate and important. Of course, especially in the wake of the Great Recession’s housing market collapse, a number of people have expressed skepticism about homeownership as a wealth-building tool; surely there are less risky—that is to say, less potentially ruinous—ways to a retirement income or college fund than investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single asset whose appreciation, as we all now know, is far from guaranteed.

And perhaps, if we could go back to the New Deal and talk this over with President Roosevelt before he inaugurated the era of mass homeownership with a federally regulated and subsidized mortgage market, we would want to make that point. But today, some eighty years later, it’s a bit late. That’s because homeownership has already provided a route to middle-class stability for tens of millions of households—and those households are mostly white. As the Washington Post wrote in a fantastic series earlier this year, public and private housing discrimination has led to a situation where home prices in black neighborhoods—even ones where the vast majority of households have solidly middle-class incomes, or higher—are much, much more unstable than in white neighborhoods.

This inequality is buttressed by the fact that our homeownership subsidies have worked selectively to the benefit of higher-income homeowners: the mortgage interest tax deduction, for example, gives larger tax expenditures to people who own more expensive houses. The more your home appreciates in value, the more benefit you get from the exclusion of home sales from capital gains tax. Ditto the value of excluding imputed rent, and deducting property taxes. The net result, according to the University of Chicago’s Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, is that homeownership has significantly magnified wealth differentials in the US.

One result of all this is that many white families have built generations of wealth through homeownership, while black families have made barely any progress: In fact, The Atlantic reported on a study suggesting that homeownership has been a net financial loss to African Americans since 2000. In 2013, the median white household held $126,000 in wealth from their home, while the figure for the median black household was just $31,000. That gap, in turn, represents a massive difference in the ability of a family to withstand a big financial shock—unexpected unemployment, for example, or a serious medical crisis—that may go some way to explaining why black middle-class workers are much, much more likely than their white counterparts to fall back into poverty.

(And the resistance of many neighborhoods to growing property values is quite strong indeed: look at how much of central and southern Brooklyn has actually lost property value since 2004.)

Giving up entirely on the idea of homeownership as a path to wealth-building would essentially be saying that black Americans have just missed the boat on this one, and will have to remain behind forever. On the contrary, in the relatively few places where housing values finally do go up in mostly black neighborhoods, it represents—at least in part—a kind of justice: giving black homeowners the same access to financial gain that their white counterparts have enjoyed for the better part of a century.  

Unfortunately, that gain also represents a loss for people, especially renters, who can’t afford to pay much more than they already do, and for whom artificially low prices in largely minority neighborhoods meant access to locations that they would not be able to afford in a normal market where race did not play such a major role in housing prices.

So how to square that circle? Well, that’s basically the challenge of housing policy in a nutshell. Perhaps a start would be to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a tension here—that “protecting” or “promoting” property values is the same thing as “making housing more expensive.” It’s somewhat discouraging, for example, when community organizations claim that “affordability doesn’t mean housing values have to remain stagnant,” without acknowledging that if housing values aren’t stagnant—ie, they’re growing—that means they’re also becoming less affordable.

But there is some hope. For one, robust production of housing that isn’t priced by the market, and therefore isn’t affected by rising market prices. That can be accomplished through public housing, privately-developed affordable housing with programs like LIHTC, and housing vouchers. At the moment, few places produce non-market housing at anything close to a scale that would provide broad affordability, but there are encouraging examples: Portland, for instance, has created 2,300 units of affordable housing in its redeveloping Pearl District, adjacent to downtown, supported largely with funds from tax increment financing.

In many places, having a wide variety of housing types and sizes can also make room for people of a wide variety of incomes. My street in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, for example, contains a handful of single family homes, whose value at this point probably reaches into the seven figures; expensive newer condo buildings; older multifamily buildings, some of which have large, luxuriously updated units, and others whose apartments are somewhat smaller, or have less up-to-date finishes; and a few single room occupancy buildings, with minimal accommodations. As a result, there is market-rate housing for everyone from upper-middle-class professionals to working-class immigrant families to low-income elderly adults. Of course, that sort of diversity is typical of a pre-zoning “illegal neighborhood”: a vanishingly small proportion of American neighborhoods allow that sort of mix to be created today, which is a large part of the problem.

We are, in conclusion, profoundly conflicted as a nation when it comes to housing: we want it to be affordable, but we also want its prices to rise fast enough to be valuable as a financial investment. That’s a contradiction we need to acknowledge if our housing policy debate—and, ultimately, our housing policy—is going to be coherent and constructive.

Editor’s note:  City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities.  We first published this post in 2015, but its as timely today as it was then.

by Robert Liberty

For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon.

It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really took off when the streetcar arrived in the first half of the 1900s. (A century later, the old streetcar tracks had to be dug up so they could put down the new streetcar tracks.)

I first moved there in the 1980s by renting a part of a house. Then I moved a few blocks away into a courtyard apartment building of a type built all over the city in the 1940s. There were a dozen one and two-bedroom apartments on two floors around a small courtyard, built on a 15,000 square foot lot (about one-third of an acre, roughly the size of many suburban house lots). There were storage areas and a laundry room in the basement.

Next door to the west was a large single family house, built around World War I. To the south was a one-story three-plex: three tiny apartments slotted into a narrow strip between our building and a large old home.

Kitty-corner across the street was a small restaurant that served breakfast at a few booths and a counter. For a few years, every Saturday, a long black limousine with tinted windows would park near the restaurant and the chauffeur would deliver a hot breakfast to the occupant and then take away the dirty dishes. I never found out who was in the limousine.

Diagonally across the street to the northeast was a warehouse that processed large volumes of “direct mail”—i.e., spam.

Across the street to the north sat another Edwardian house used for offices, a bland three-plex built in the 1970s, and a four-plex that looked like a large single-family home in Dutch Colonial style. I lived in that four-plex happily for many years.

The rest of the street was a mix of large older homes on small lots and small apartment buildings. Both young families and older couples lived in the houses and apartments.

The street was shaded by big trees and it was usually very quiet. The street was so narrow that bigger cars had to queue to pass each other, partly because so many people parked their cars on the street since the apartment buildings provided few or no parking garage spaces.

At the other end of the block was a park that was also served as part of an elementary school’s grounds. The school was built of blond-colored brick and rose three stories. It’s locally famous as being on the migration path for Vaux’s Swifts. Early each fall thousands of the birds would swarm and then spiral down into the decommissioned smokestack of the school incinerator and boiler. Beside the school were some community tennis courts.

Not far from the school was a senior center and some subsidized housing for families of modest means. Scattered here and there in the nearby blocks were grand old houses—some beautifully maintained and very expensive, other cut up into legal and illegal apartments.

Three blocks away was an arterial street, but it wasn’t too much wider than the street in front of my apartment building. I often walked there to buy groceries from a small grocery store and drop off my dry cleaning. Another block or two farther along the arterial was a branch library. Across the street from the grocery store was a small sheet metal fabrication business.

Once, when I was explaining to a reporter how our neighborhood had every possible kind of use and service, I gestured to the sheet metal company to illustrate the presence of light industrial uses. It was then that I realized is was called Schmeer Sheet Metal Works and Fabrication. “See,” I said, “we have the whole schmeer.”

That neighborhood is typical of many older neighborhoods in American cities. And in almost all of American cities and suburbs, that neighborhood would be illegal.

It is illegal to build an apartment building in a district of single family homes. Residential zoning was adopted in order to prevent single family neighborhood property values and families from being degraded by the presence of apartments where immigrants and low-class people lived. (If you think this is an exaggeration read the early history of zoning including the various state and federal supreme court decisions upholding challenges to the constitutionality of residential zoning.)

Residential zoning today has carried class separation to great extremes, which you can see if you travel by air: Over here, big single-family homes on big lots. Over there a mobile home park. In another direction, a pod of apartment buildings. A place of every income, and every income in its (separate) place.

Some affluent cities use their power to regulate development to exclude entire categories of housing from within their border, like apartments and mobile homes.

Typical city zoning makes it illegal to build or operate a warehouse or a light industrial use next to homes and a grocery store. The separation of industrial and commercial uses from residential uses was the very foundation of zoning a century ago.

It is illegal in most cities to build apartment buildings without providing one or more parking spaces for every apartment. The same would be true of grocery stores or office buildings. The neighborhood’s grocery store has fewer than 20 parking spaces.

The street in my old neighborhood does not meet more current design requirements, because it is considered inappropriate to design a street so that car cannot pass each other at any time or location. The street is 27 feet wide, curb to curb. That includes parallel parking on both sides, leaving a travel lane about 12 feet wide. That violates the standards for a local road recommended by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

In most cities, you cannot operate a business out of your home if you have employees or customers arriving from other locations.

In too many places, it is effectively illegal to build subsidized housing for families of modest means. Even when it might be legal, local officials can interpret nebulous phrases like “preserve neighborhood character” or complex regulations in way that such housing is never approved.

A senior center, even though it is not a business, would be treated like a commercial use that cannot be allowed next to single family homes.

The elementary school would probably be illegal too because the school property would be too small to meet many state’s standards. The school is located on about 9.8 acres but many of those acres are occupied by a park open to the public at all times. The school, which has 685 students, would require a site of 11.85 acres in California, Texas and Connecticut, 15 acres in New Mexico and 18-20 acres in suburban Pennsylvania.

And then there is the absence of parking places; according to Virginia’s 2010 school design standards, the school should provide parking for all the staff, visitors and about a third of the students. (Apparently the legal driving age in Virginia is much younger than in Oregon.)

Of course, a jumbled neighborhood like mine would probably be regarded by many residential realtors, local officials, and even prospective home purchasers as a bad investment. After all, it’s about as far from the suburban residential model as possible. But in fact, this neighborhood, while providing many apartments (formerly) affordable by lower-income renters, was and is highly sought after.  According to Zillow, homebuyers in this neighborhood pay more than twice as much per square foot to live here than they would in the region’s suburbs.

One reason the prices are so high is because the supply of this kind of neighborhood has been limited by zoning, parking regulations, street design standards, school design standards, and building codes. We need many more neighborhoods like this all across America, so that all of the increasing numbers of people who want to live in places like this can afford to live in them.

Does that mean do away with all regulations? No. But it does mean that we need to stop assuming that everyone wants to, or can afford to, live in a big-house on a big lot in a residential-only neighborhood.  We shouldn’t be making it illegal to build the kind of neighborhoods, like mine that are increasingly popular and in short supply.

An illegal neighborhood in NW Portland.

Robert Liberty has worked over the last 34 years as an attorney, elected official and university program administrator to help implement plans to create livable, sustainable and equitable cities and to conserve the rural lands and resources we need for food, fiber and wildlife.  He has called Portland home for almost half of a century.

Is the urban renaissance over? 

Earlier this week, The New York Times published an op-ed from Jed Kolko–”Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls, The Myth of the Return to Cities”–offering up another iteration of his long running argument that the urban rebound is overstated.  His key point: in the aggregate suburbs are growing faster than cities, and that the density of most metropolitan areas continues to decrease.

The article is surely refuting something of a straw man: not everyone is moving back to cities everywhere. And some big metro areas in the sunbelt continue to sprawl rapidly. But even if they aren’t absolutely outperforming suburbs everywhere, cities are relatively much stronger than they were a decade (and especially several decades ago), and are disproportionately attracting the best and the brightest. The chief reason they’re not doing even better–as Kolko concedes–is that we’re not building housing in city centers fast enough.

Kolko’s indicated that  the move back to city centers is real:

That revival is real, but it has mostly been for rich, educated people in particular hyperurban neighborhoods rather than a broad-based return to city living. To be sure, college-educated millennials — at least those without school-age kids — took to the city, and better-paying jobs have shifted there, too. But other groups — older adults, families with kids in school, and people of all ages with lower incomes — either can’t afford or don’t want an urban address.

And coincidentally, at the same time The Wall Street Journal summarized a new report from BuildZoom’s Issi Ronnem which emphasized the growing demand for housing in cities.  Ronnem’s work shows that home sales have accelerated closer to the urban core in most cities, and remain depressed in the suburbs.  The takeaway:

While new home sales within 5 miles of the centers of 10 of the country’s priciest and most densely populated metropolitan areas have surpassed levels from 2000, they remain more than 50% below where they were in 2000 when you go more than 10 miles out.

As Justin Fox pointed out at Bloomberg, the we’re bumping up against the limits of supply in cities. More and more Americans, especially young adults want to live in cities, but the supply of housing there is constrained, and growing only slowly–which is why rents have spiked in cities. And while more households may be locating in less dense neighborhoods, the price of housing in suburbs has fallen relative to that in city centers.

We’ll weigh in soon with our own City Observatory analysis of these data, but in the mean time, we think that several of the points that we raised a few weeks back about Kolko’s last round of research are worth remembering. There are several key reasons why no one should be glum about the continuing prospects for urban growth and revitalization.

First, employment and population data aggregated nationally by county don’t reveal much about the most urban neighborhoods.  We’ve made this point before with Kolko’s analysis of job growth.  County boundaries correspond poorly, if at all, with cities or urban density.

Consider Chicago, which gets tarred with the “Biggest Loser” title in earlier Kolko’s tabulations.  While Cook County saw an overall decline in population, the most urban parts of the city, including its Downtown Loop and Northside neighborhoods, continued to rack up big gains.

A more finely grained geographic analysis shows that the closer you get to the city center in most metros, the stronger has been the performance. While its true that the more outlying parts of some cities are losing population, their cores are becoming increasingly vibrant. As we’ve noted, that notion of critical mass at the neighborhood level is one of the defining characteristics of urban growth.

Second, national aggregations conceal local patterns. To be sure, these data show a renewed growth in the sunbelt. And in the biggest sunbelt metros, a big chunk of the growth is in their sprawling suburbs (Houston, Dallas). But the growth in these metros is not representative of what’s happening in many other places.

Third, there’s a baseline issue here.  City growth has decelerated from the past year or two.  But city growth this decade looks far different than it did a decade ago.  While Kolko’s FiveThirtyEight.com post just shows the change in city and suburb growth rates over the past few years (and emphasizes the one-year change between 2015 and 2016), his longer blog post on his own website shows the change in population by type of county since 2001. Taking this longer view, its apparent that growth rates in suburbs have declined sharply since the last decade, while growth rates in urban counties were up.

Between 2001 and 2005, low density suburban counties (gray line) were growing more than 2 percent per year–their growth rates since 2011 are about half that. During that same time, the most urban counties (blue line) were growing sluggishly or losing population–and they’re now growing. While urban counties dramatically underperformed suburban ones last decade, the growth patterns have converged dramatically since then. As a result, when judged against the baseline of the previous decade, more urban counties have accelerated, while more suburban ones have faded.

Fourth, in many places we’re bumping up against the (policy-induced) limits to meeting the market demand for urban living. In the early stages of growth, cities can add population by filling vacant housing. But as vacancy rates fall, the only way to accommodate more people is to add more housing, which is a process that (a) takes time, and (b) is too often unfortunately encumbered by NIMBY building restrictions. That suburbs might grow faster than cities for a time is not necessarily evidence of a declining demand for city living, so much as it is evidence that we haven’t expanded the supply of urban living opportunities to meet that demand.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Dirt Cheap. A number of tech startups are exploring techniques for high density urban farming. In theory, new methods, like vertical farming in plastic tubes, can greatly reduce the amount of land and water needed to grow certain crops, and offers the advantage of much shorter distances to consumers. Still, the big question is whether urban farming can produce food at prices that are competitive with conventional agriculture. Dirt is cheap, and the sunlight falling on it is free. Farmland is generally orders of magnitude less expensive than urban sites, so indoor growing has to be even more efficient to offset its cost disadvantages. A recent  story in Fast Company about Bay Area startup Plenty dutifully echoes the talking points of proponents about technical advances, but is silent on how much this urban produce will cost.

2. The return to the city. In an article in the New York Times, Jed Kolko again challenges the idea that everyone is moving to cities. He finds that many US metros have become, in the aggregate, less dense in the past several years. We look at the evidence on the patterns of population and job growth, and note some of the limitations of county level data in judging these trends. It also seems to be the case the movement to city centers is increasingly bumping up against available housing supply, a trend confirmed by the widespread increase in city center housing prices compared to prices on the suburban periphery: It appears that even more Americans would like to live in the center than we have built housing to accommodate.

3. Just ahead: road pricing? The details of the Trump Administration’s infrastructure proposal seem to be coming into clearer focus. The headline $1 trillion number apparently will count on lots of private, state and local resources, and will actually reduce federal funding for many programs. The highway trust fund may lose its general fund transfers, which will mean less money for roads and transit. One bright spot, in our view: the administration is proposing to greatly liberalize state authority to impose tolls on federally funded roadways. This could encourage states to more widely apply road pricing strategies, which would be much more effective at fighting congestion.

Must read

Dan Savage, who mostly writes a sex-advice column for Seattle’s alt-weekly, weighs “Doing something real about gentrification.” As always, he’s readable and provocative–skewering anti-development gentrification critics–“If I meet one more anti-gentrification activist who moved to Seattle ten minutes ago, I shall scream.” But most of the column focuses on wonky bits that will be familiar to City Observatory readers: “Housing scarcity—exacerbated by the ridiculous amount of this city zoned for single-family housing—deserves as much blame for the displacement crisis as gentrification. More. And unlike gentrification (“a once in a lifetime tectonic shift in consumer preferences”), scarcity and single-family zoning are two things we can actually do something about. Rezone huge swaths of the city. Build more units of affordable housing.” Savage also urges a big increase in transit service and subsidies to low income transit users as a way of buffering the economic impact of urban growth. This is smart, opinionated and readable: share it with your less wonky friends.

Todd Litman, Gentrification for Better or Worse. For a counterpoint–if only stylistically–to Dan Savage’s exuberant essay on gentrification, we turn to the soft-spoken and even-handed Canadian, Todd Litman. Litman, who runs the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, mostly does research on transportation policy, but turns his thorough and balanced analytical approach to the issue of gentrification. You’ll find a two-by-two table that tabulates the benefits and costs of gentrification for existing residents and newcomers, and weighs the relative importance of each. While far less vitriolic than Savage (indeed, not vitriolic at all), Litman reaches many of the same broad conclusions, stressing that its possible to have gentrification without displacement if the housing supply increases, and noting that opposing higher density development in an attempt to prevent gentrification is likely to backfire, driving up rents still further.

Aaron Renn on infrastructure policy. As the discussion of the Trump Administration’s potential one trillion dollar infrastructure policy heats up, you’ll find some very useful background material in Aaron Renn’s essay at American Affairs. He makes a number of very important points that are largely missing from the discussions in Washington. Chief among them: building new infrastructure is unlikely to be a major economic stimulus. “In short, our infrastructure systems are, by and large, built out. There is little need for a major deployment of new infrastructure, or new types of infrastructure. There do not appear to be any huge economic gains to be had from new infrastructure on par with those coming from electrification or building the interstate highway system.” Nor do much vaunted public-private partnerships offer any kind of panacea: private investors want to be paid back, and are adept at shifting risk to the public sector, and maximizing their own profit, often at the expense of taxpayers or system users. The most important tasks in the realm of infrastructure may be prosaic: regular maintenance, competent management, and solvent finance.

New ideas

Are ride-hailing services prompting people to sell their cars? A new survey from Reuters asks recent car sellers if they had replaced the vehicle they just sold.  About a quarter of American adults reported selling (or trading in) a vehicle in the past twelve months. While the vast majority replaced their vehicles, some 9 percent of car sellers said that they had shifted to services like Lyft or Uber, rather than buying a new vehicle. About the same share of prospective car sellers report planning to do the same in year ahead. If this trend holds, it has important implications for urban transportation (as well as the finances of car makers).

What City Observatory did this week

1. Mystery in the Bookstore. In cities around the country, there’s been a noticeable rebound in the local bookstore business. After decades of steady decline, this is a pleasant surprise. One metric, the number of members of the national association of independent bookstores confirms this trend. But broader data compiled by the federal government suggest that overall the number of bookstores has continued to fall. Its a bit of mystery as to why these indicators are headed in different directions. We consider the reasons why this might be the case, and what it says about cities.

Must read

1. Will wealthy parents ever choose to integrate schools?  Writing at The Atlantic, Patrick Wall, asks an important question: will wealthy families, those with the means to choose where they will live, and where they will send their children to school, ever voluntarily choose integrated schools? Wall relates the story of two adjacent public schools in Manhattan, PS 199 and PS 191, who though cheek-by-jowl, have attendance lines that are plainly divided by economic class.With wealthier parents and better supported and prepared students PS 199 is one of the cities best performing public schools, while PS 191 has more children who face learning difficulties and its parents lack the means to add much to the public budget for the school. When the city moved to rectify this imbalance by re-drawing the attendance lines between the two districts to more nearly balance the incomes of the two schools, many wealth parents balked at keeping their kids in the public school system. For them, part of the reason they paid high prices for their homes in this neighborhood was because it entitled them to send their children to a better school. Though this story is just about two schools in one city, it captures in a nutshell many of the problems confronting achieving economic integration, both in schools and in cities generally.

2. Ed Glaeser on reforming land use regulations. Brookings Institution has published a new essay from Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City, and a prodigious scholar on regional economics which offers a non-technical summary of his latest research on the connection between local land use regulations and housing affordability. He and co-author Joseph Gyourko used construction cost data for different metropolitan markets to compute the difference between current market prices and the cost of building new homes. They find that fully 40 percent of American homes are priced below the minimum cost of profitable production, their benchmark for cost. But in a few markets, representing about a tenth of American homes, the average price of home is more than double the estimated cost of production. In such a case, its surprising that the market doesn’t produce more housing. The reason, of course, is that local land use restrictions make it too costly to build new housing. And unfortunately, these markets tend to be among the most productive urban economies in the US, so constraining population growth by limiting housing supply in these markets implies lower national productivity. Glaeser argues for state enacted housing requirements that could override local zoning to allow more housing in high cost areas, and suggests states enact fiscal incentives that would encourage local governments to zone more land for housing.

New ideas

Walking, biking and health: New evidence from the UK.  The British Medical Journal has published a new study–”Association between active commuting and incident cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mortality: prospective cohort study”– of the connection between active commuting and key measures of health. The study followed more than a quarter million 40 to 69 year-old subjects in Britain over 3 years, and looked at the correlation between commuting mode and mortality from all causes, and indicators of cardiac health and cancer. They found that cyclists enjoyed a statistically lower risk of mortality, cancer and heart disease, and that those who walked to work enjoyed a lower risk of cardio-vascular disease. Cycling in particular exhibited a “dose-response relationship” meaning that the more one cycled (as measured by the length of one’s cycle commute) the greater the health benefits. (This was true of the effect of walking on heart disease risk). They conclude that measures to encourage additional active transportation, especially cycling, would improve public health.

A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development:

In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer a lesson we ought to relearn. They recall a city figuring out a way to house its people affordably, without excess. To me, they reflect a lack of materialism, housing built not for profit, but for living in. They reflect a modest approach to life, one steeped in a conservation ethic—don’t use more than you need. Seattle culture needs to find a way to get back to those values, and create a built environment that reflects it.

This is one of the more eloquent expressions of something you might call the “immaculate conception theory” of neighborhood development. This narrative is common all around the country, in communities of many ages—from colonial Boston to postwar Minneapolis—and sets powerful background assumptions about what affordable, friendly neighborhoods can and should look like that inform many of our debates about housing. These assumptions mostly revolve around the idea that older housing was built the right way: ethically, modestly, with an eye to community rather than profit. These older values, in turn, highlight the faults of modern buildings: gaudy and wasteful, disruptive to existing communities, and motivated only by money.

Old building: virtuous. New building: villainous.

The problem with the immaculate conception theory is that, like parents swearing that they would never have behaved the way their kids do, it is conveniently forgetful about what actually happened in the past. Taking, just as an example, the kind of housing that Berger romanticizes—the early 20th century bungalow boom—a closer look reveals that it was defined not by mass affordability, efficiency, and respect for traditional communities, but something very nearly the opposite.

To begin with, many of the arbiters of taste at the Seattle Magazines of the bungalow era believed those new bungalow neighborhoods “ruined” the character of the places they were built, just as new apartment buildings are maligned today. They even had a snappy put-down for it: “bungalow disease.” “Tradition has broken down,” wrote the British planner Thomas Sharp, describing a proliferation of bungalows on both sides of the Atlantic, and “taste is utterly debased…. The old trees and hedgerows…have given place to concrete posts and avenues of telegraph poles, to hoardings and enamel advertising signs.” Closer to Berger’s home, Architectural Record reviewed Seattle’s building boom in 1912 and, in an otherwise positive article, pronounced the quality of its new homes “disappointing.”

Critics accused new bungalow neighborhoods not just of being ugly, but of ripping apart the social fabric of the city. One writer argued that in new neighborhoods full of many separate houses, “each building is treated in isolation, nothing binds it to the next one,” and as a result they lacked an “essential” “togetherness.” Another pointed out that the rise of bungalow neighborhoods coincided with the rise of decentralized business districts, as these sprawling areas—bungalows took up much more space per person than either the more modest single family homes or apartment buildings that had come before—encouraged outlying commercial development and car ownership.

Which brings us to our next point: Far from being based on an ethic of efficiency and conservation, early 1900s bungalows represented a dramatic leap to neighborhoods that required higher energy consumption than ever before. This was true, first of all, because bungalows tended to be much larger than existing homes. While Berger marvels that one 1910 bungalow was just 1,600 square feet, the average home size at the time was closer to 1,000 square feet—making the 60 percent larger home look like a veritable McMansion. In addition, many of these new single-family-home neighborhoods, which were built much further from job centers and at much lower densities than older communities, were enabled by the boom in energy-consuming automobiles, and encouraged their use. By the 1920s, one in every two American families had a car—a figure that was much higher in bungalow neighborhoods—and public transit began losing many of its customers to driving. In the same decade, suburban population growth outpaced that of cities for the first time ever.

Finally, the idea that bungalows represented a housing type that was affordable and open to all—and an ethic that valued community instead of money—simply doesn’t describe actual American cities in the 1910s or 20s. Home prices in the 1920s were rising rapidly, leading many people to talk about a housing crisis in terms not so terribly different from today’s. But as Gail Radford describes in her book Modern Housing for America, bungalows weren’t holding the line on cheap homes: in many cases, they represented the luxury housing of their day. Bungalows were so much more expensive than the more modest homes that had preceded them that while the overall cost of living increased by about a factor of two between the 1890s and 1920s, the cost of an entry-level home had increased by a factor of five and a half. Even before the economic crash of 1929, there was a growing foreclosure crisis, strongly suggesting that “housing costs were simply too high in relation to incomes for many families.”

Moreover, the bungalow era coincided with the development of zoning codes—codes that were essential, in fact, to preserving many bungalow neighborhoods’ all-single-family character. The people who advocated for these zoning codes did so by explicitly arguing that they were needed to protect the property values of homeowners and other landowners. In other words, the denizens of the early 20th century cared so much about their houses as a financial investment that they invented an entire new regulatory infrastructure to ensure that they wouldn’t lose their value.

And of course, “not losing their value” was very closely tied to excluding any kinds of people who might threaten the neighborhood’s desirability. It’s impossible to talk about the development of urban American neighborhoods in the early 20th century without acknowledging that this was the period in which modern residential racial segregation emerged—a system of exclusion enforced by covenants, zoning, and violence carried out by the residents of all kinds of neighborhoods. This isn’t some separate issue from how those who were excluding, rather than excluded, built their homes and communities: it’s an integral part of the story, without which those bungalow neighborhoods may have looked quite different.

Why have we forgotten all of this? Partly because all the people in these stories are gone. We can’t see the developers laying roads and streetcar tracks to open up huge new areas for subdivisions; we can’t see the disproportionately wealthy people who were able to buy homes in a pre-FHA era when required down payments routinely hit 50 percent. We can’t talk to the people who remember, and miss, what existed in these places before bungalows. All that’s left are the buildings, which over the years have lost their sheen of newness, often becoming more affordable in the process, and allowing us to imagine our own stories about where they came from.

The point here is not that bungalows are “bad.” Given what has happened in the intervening century, a return to bungalow-scale living would be a huge win for sustainability and efficient living in the many postwar suburbs and neighborhoods where homes have ballooned to much larger sizes, and development has become much more sprawling. In many urban communities, bungalows today represent a prized architectural tradition, and a form of single-family home that fits neatly into the kind of mixed urban neighborhood—along with small apartment buildings and local shopping districts—that we have long since made illegal.

But there are important lessons to be learned by looking at what the bungalow era actually looked like, rather than our romantic imagination of it.

One is that everything old was once new, and new things often provoke a backlash. We ought to be humble in believing that our opinions represent some timeless, objective truth, looking backwards or forwards. The same bungalows that seem to us quaint and charming were tacky and soulless to many of the people watching them be built; it seems more than possible that the new apartment buildings we vilify today will be thought of sentimentally by future generations who know them only as an important part of their city since they were born.

A second lesson is that American cities have an impressive history of growing to accommodate new arrivals. Berger leaves out of his column, as is frequently left out in “immaculate conception” stories, that the bungalow era was also the fastest period of urbanization in American history: Between 1900 and 1930, Seattle’s population grew more than fourfold, from 80,000 to over 360,000—a rate of growth approached or exceeded by many other American cities at the time. In the process, millions of rural Americans and immigrants were given the opportunity to live in newly industrializing cities where wages and quality of life were dramatically higher. Today, most of our cities have shut the door on that kind of growth. (Seattle’s growth rate today, while much higher than many other central cities, pales in comparison to the bungalow era Berger wishes we would return to.) As a result, our doors are no longer open to as many people, from this country and others, who would like to make better lives by moving to places where job openings and quality of life are high.

Finally, the bungalow era suggests that building new market-rate housing that’s affordable to working-class and low-income people in urban areas is hard, especially if that housing takes the form of single-family homes. And it’s worse today: while the bungalow builders had the advantage of lots of open land relatively close to center cities, today, that “frontier” has closed. And we’re well aware of the costs—environmental, social, and financial—of continuing to push all of our growth out further and further onto the fringe.

An old Seattle neighborhood with both bungalows and small apartment buildings—which were and are much more affordable and energy efficient.

Rather, the deeply affordable and decent homes of the bungalow era were largely in multifamily buildings. It’s curious that, though more than four in ten of the homes built in the 1920s were in apartment buildings, that kind of construction—and those kinds of people—are entirely absent from Berger’s romantic musings about the time. But they were a crucial source of urban accommodations for people of modest incomes. As the Sightline Institute has pointed out, rooming houses and other small, multifamily homes made up a huge proportion of the affordable housing stock in cities around the country in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, a combination of regulations and market conditions has virtually eliminated that stock in most places. If we want to go return to something the 1910s and 20s got right, bringing back modestly-sized homes in multifamily buildings is a good place to start.

The past does have lessons for us—we’ve made a point of championing the now-“illegal neighborhoods” that American cities built up through the bungalow era. But we have to look at it as it really was, and not through rose-colored glasses, if we want to get them right.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there’s a growing understanding of the important role of social capital–the relationships and norms of trust and reciprocity–in making our communities and our economy work better. But measuring social capital is tougher than measuring physical capital (like buildings and machinery). One of the indicators that illustrates the presence of social capital is the extent to which citizens volunteer their time for civic and social purposes. We present data for the largest US metro areas which show the places with the highest and lowest levels of volunteering. Here are some of the high performing cities:

2. Why America is of two minds about housing policy. There’s a fundamental contradiction between two of the most important cornerstones of public policy on housing:  We want housing to be affordable, and we also want housing to be a great investment for homeowners. The first implies that we ought to have few limits on supply and that we ought to encourage home prices (and rents) to stay low, and not increase. The second, in practice, implies the opposite: we enact zoning to “protect” property values, which has the effect of constraining supply, and we have a raft of policies designed to push up home prices. Resolving this contradiction is at the heart of solving our housing problems.

Must read

1. The culprits behind white flight.  Leah Boustan writes at the New York Times about the historical factors that fueled white flight from cities between 1940 and 1970. While there are many competing explanations, Boustan finds that all of them have a bearing on the outcome, a result she describes as comparable to Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” in which all the suspects struck a blow in the crime. Not only did racism fuel white flight to suburbs, but it was aided and abetted by political and fiscal factors, notably the ability of suburbs to enjoy lower taxes for any given level of public services by including higher income households and excluding lower income (and often minority) ones.

2. The disappearance of racial disparities in public housing. A not-unrelated article in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog looks at the role of changes in public housing policies in attenuating racial segregation in US metropolitan areas. They report on the results of a new study from Johns Hopkins University looking at the racial patterns of occupancy of classic public housing and voucher-supported private sector housing. As recently as the 1970s, there was a clear racial division between the two types of housing, with black households disproportionately found in public housing, and white households in voucher supported housing. The latest data suggest that in the aggregate, these racial disparities have all but disappeared. Key factors behind the trend: the demolition of some of the most segregated public housing projects, and the expansion (and apparently more race neutral) availability of housing vouchers relative to public housing.