Our new CityReport dives deep in data; but what does a diverse, mixed income neighborhood look like?

As we explained in our new report–America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods–nearly seven million Americans live in one of the neighborhoods we’ve identified as America’s most racially and ethnically diverse and mixed income. While we’ve got copious amounts of data, and maps showing where these neighborhoods are located, what does a diverse, mixed income neighborhood look like at ground level?

To answer that question, we’ve profiled a handful of the 1,300 neighborhoods nationally that scored highest on our two measures of integration: the racial and ethnic diversity index and the income diversity index. The neighborhoods selected score in the top 20 percent of all urban neighborhoods in the US on each of these measures.

One of these highly diverse, mixed income neighborhoods is Hillcrest, Queens, in New York City. (To see the full neighborhood profile in PDF format, click on this image).

Hillcrest is located on a ridge between Jamaica and Flushing in Queens, and is adjacent to the campus of St. Johns University.

To get a graphic idea of how diverse these neighborhoods are compared to other neighborhoods in the same metropolitan area, we’ve constructed a pair of box-whisker scatter diagrams that illustrate the pattern of income and racial ethnic diversity in each metropolitan area.  In these diagrams, each dot represents a single neighborhood (census tract).  The light and dark shaded rectangles correspond to the two middle quartiles of the income distribution: half of all neighborhoods fall into this range, and the midpoint between the two rectangles shows the median value for the metropolitan area. On this chart, the highlighted orange dot shows the racial and ethnic diversity of Hillcrest compared to all of the other neighborhoods in the New York metropolitan area.

We’ve compiled similar profiles of selected neighborhoods in other metropolitan areas around the country. For example, you can explore the demographics of the St. Mary’s Park neighborhood in San Francisco, the Near South Side in Chicago, and Corktown in Detroit. We’ve also prepared profiles of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Memphis and Akron.  (In the case of Memphis and Akron, the profiled neighborhoods don’t meet both our screening criteria, but do represent what are the most locally diverse neighborhoods, we’ve included these profiles to show what the most diverse neighborhoods look like in smaller metropolitan areas.

Portland’s City Council reversed its denial of one tall apartment building; we commend them

Back in March, we were critical of a decision by the Portland City Council to deny approval of a 17-story apartment building in the city’s growing Pearl District. The building was opposed by neighbors (who lived in other, recently build residential towers), who complained the new building, called Fremont Place, would block their views. The Council decided, ostensibly because the building didn’t fully comply with the cities riverside greenway setback requirements, to deny the approval.

We argued that this use of the city’s discretionary approval power ran counter to the City Council’s stated concern about city housing supply, and that it would send a chilling signal to other developers. The Fremont Place project generated considerable discussion in the media.

Council members, to their credit, re-thought their initial decision. The developers agreed to make some very modest changes to the building’s ground level plan to accomodate a wider walkway along the river, but kept the height and bulk of the proposed building the same. They also reached an agreement to get the local neighborhood association, which had fought the project, to endorse it with changes (and also with the promise of a $35,000 payment to the neighborhood association to cover its legal costs in the matter.

On May 31, the Council voted unanimously to reject the appeal, approving the project moving forward.  Portlander’s should be grateful to the City Council for drawing a deep breath, giving some time for the parties to make some adjustments, and then approving this needed housing.

Two steps forward, one step back?

While this is good news, another land use matter showed that this issue is hardly settled. Across the river from the Pearl District, in Portland’s Walnut Park neighborhood, a different developer sought a zone change to allow the conversion of a church parking lot into an apartment building. The developer was offering to 50 below-market, affordable apartments adjacent to the Alberta Abbey. As in the case of the Fremont Place matter, this decision was one in which the City Council had broad discretion to approve or not approve the project. (This is seldom the case in Portland, where state land use law provides that once an area is designated for a particular land use, such as apartments, the city must approve or deny the proposed development based on a limited set of clear and objective standards). Because this case involved a plan change–redesignating a parking lot designated for lower density use to a higher density, commercial category, it was subject to council discretion.

After a public hearing, the Council declined to move ahead with the needed zone change proposal. According to Portland for Everyone’s Michael Anderson, that means the property’s developer is likely restricted to building a much smaller building with no more than about 28 units. It’s a far smaller battle than the Fremont Place project, but it’s a reminder that Portland’s City Council–like municipal government’s everywhere–is always facing a steady stream of decisions about whether to allow more housing. The fact that rents and home prices are rising, especially in close-in urban neighborhoods,  is a good indication that demand is still outpacing supply, and that the city needs to lean more heavily in favor of making it possible to build more housing.  The change of heart on the Fremont Place project is a big step in the right direction, but the council will have to take many more similar steps in the months and years ahead, if it hopes to seriously address the city’s affordability challenges.

The simple-minded comparison on city and suburb population growth rates is misleading and incomplete

Every year, in the late Spring, the Census Bureau releases its latest population estimates for the nation’s municipalities. That produces a raft of quick knock-on statistical analyses that flag which places are gaining and losing population. Inevitably, these estimates get aggregated to the national level, and pronouncements are made as to whether “cities” or “suburbs” are winning the race for more population.

The Brookings Institution’s Bill Frey published his nearly annual take on the Census Bureau population numbers late last month. His call on the City v. Suburb horserace: “the trend seems to be shifting toward a renewed suburban advantage.” That claim is likely to fuel arguments that America’s love affair with cities is over, that Americans (and especially Millennials) really want to live in the suburbs, and general harrumphing that urbanism is somehow past its peak.

As always, Frey’s math is impeccable. But we have to take issue with the analysis and the conclusions that people are likely to draw from the raw numbers. It’s too early, and this data is too ambiguous and incomplete to make any strong statements about the American desire for urban living. It turns out that municipal boundaries are problematic for making comparisons across space and over time; that when we take a longer-term perspective, the up-tick in city population is still quite noticeable (despite the data flaws), and finally, we ought to be paying much more attention to relative prices than relative growth rates, if we want to understand the value Americans place on urban living.

The limits of city limits

City boundaries are lousy for making these cross metro comparisons. Municipal boundaries aren’t standardized or consistent in any way. Some cities have copious amounts of low density sprawl inside their city limits (Jacksonville, San Antonio), while others are just a fraction of the urban core).

If we want to know the demand for urbanity and dense, walkable, transit-served city neighborhoods, you can’t just rely on aggregating census data for an entire city. What we and others have done to understand the varying spatial character of growth is to use much finer and more consistent measures, such as the 3-mile radius around the central business district. These data show a consistently strong performance for city centers in population and job growth.

This kind of aggregation also hides urban growth booms within cities.  Chicago’s downtown and near North and South neighborhoods are booming, even as the city’s total population decreases (mostly due to declines in the lowest density parts of the city). In addition, population growth is down sharply in the region’s outlying suburbs.

What’s the baseline?

Whether cities are performing well or poorly relative to suburbs also depends on the time period one evaluates.  Just looking at one or two year’s data isn’t necessarily very illuminating of long term trends. So it’s important to be explicit about the baseline for comparison.  As we’ve pointed out before, while growth has slowed in the densest counties it remains above its long term trends there, and while growth has rebounded in less dense counties, growth remains below longer term trends.

Let’s take a closer look at what the Census data show, and how that’s changed over time. Frey (and others) make a lot of the fact that over the past year or two years, suburbs are growing faster than central cities. Here’s Bill Frey:

Now suburban growth again exceeds city growth, though at more modest levels than in the early 2000s, and, for many areas, due more to a city growth slowdown than a suburban growth pickup. It is still the case that city growth exceeds suburban growth in 17 of these 53 metropolitan areas, including Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle, though no longer New York (download table 2 here). Yet between 2010 and 2011, this was the case for 25 of these metros, and the trend seems to be shifting toward a renewed suburban advantage.

So the bad news is that only 17 central cities are outperforming their suburbs, down from 25 earlier this decade.

But consider where we were in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Helpfully, Bill Frey has been tracking this carefully in his Brookings Institution reports, so we went back to his 2012 retrospective on city growth trends to look at these two decades.

In the 1990s, only 7 central cities (in 53 top metros) grew faster than their suburbs: Charlotte, New York, Oklahoma City, Portland, Providence,  San Antonio and San Jose.

From 2000 to 2010, only 8 central cities grew faster than their suburbs:  Boston, Charlotte, Miami, Oklahoma City, Providence, Raleigh, Sacramento and San Jose).

So the way to look at it is this:  How many cities outperformed their suburbs?

• 1990s:  7 cities
• 2000s:  8 cities
• 2010-11:  25 cities
• 2016-17 : 17 cities

So recent performance is a huge improvement over the previous two full decades, even if it’s not quite at the breakneck level of 2010-11. (And again, keep in mind that these municipal population figures are a weak and uneven proxy for whether urban living is becoming more or less popular).  Also:  This list has some what we might call “false positives” where the central city’s growth is really due to the fact that the main city encompasses a lot of low density sprawl (i.e. Charlotte, Oklahoma City, San Antonio), or which grew by annexation (i.e. Portland in the 1990s).

What does this say about the demand for city living?

The deeper question is whether city growth is slowing relative to suburbs because Americans don’t want to live in cities. There’s been a surge of suburban triumphalism, based on a quick reading of the city population data.

The bigger issue is we’re bumping up against the limits of city growth imposed by zoning.  While cities could add population quickly for a few years by reducing vacancy rates, as housing fills up, you can only expand population by building more housing, which takes time, and in some cities (I’m looking at you San Francisco) is extremely expensive. A couple of articles make this point indirectly, arguing that Americans are moving to places where housing is cheaper.

As we’ve repeatedly shown at City Observatory, the premium that American’s are willing to pay for central locations has been steadily increasing. This constitutes what we’ve called the Dow of Cities. What really shows the value American’s attach to cities is the price they play for close-in urban housing, which is steadily rising relative to suburbs, virtually everywhere.

If city population growth isn’t keeping pace with suburbs, its not because Americans are desirous of suburban living, but rather because we have a shortage of cities.

The horse race metaphor makes for easy journalism, but in this case, doesn’t tell us much about the relative demand for city living. We really ought to be paying much more attention to prices.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Handicapping the city vs. suburb horse race. The latest round of Census population estimates for municipalities has led some observers to claim that city growth has faltered. We take a close look at these claims, and identify the critical weakness of using data for city boundaries to trace the demand for urban living. We also note that the data show that, even with these limitations, city growth continues to be substantially faster now than in the 1990s and the first decade of the millenium, with more than twice as many cities outpacing their suburbs now as compared to these earlier decades. And, as we always note, the key limit on city growth now is not a lack of demand, but a lack of housing supply in the dense, urban neighborhoods that command an increasingly large price premium. It’s not a demand for suburbs, it’s a shortage of cities.

2. Sisyphus meets Bob the builder. There’s irrefutable evidence of “induced demand”–that building more un-priced road capacity in urban settings simply stimulates more travel and ultimately greater traffic congestion. On the surface, you might think that this would be depressing news for the traffic engineering profession, engaged as they are in the labors of Sisyphus, pushing the rock up hill one day, only to have it come rolling down again. In reality, engineers are indifferent to induced demand: it actually turns out to be great job security, and congestion is a perpetually renewing rationale for asking the public for more money to build stuff. What we have is a bunch of childish “Bob the builder” types who really don’t care about reducing congestion, just about getting to operate heavy equipment, pour concrete and spread asphalt.

3.  Why integration matters. In just the past few years, a growing body of research has shown the high stakes associated with continuing racial and economic segregation in American cities. Study after study shows that those who live and grow up in segregated neighborhoods experience higher rates of crime and social disorder, have fewer educational and economic opportunities, and have their life chances permanently dimmed. We offer a review of some of the most salient studies from this literature, which taken together show the substantial advantages to be gained by promoting greater socioeconomic mixing.

Must read

1. Jason Segedy’s review of Allan Mallach’s “Divided Cities.” Akron’s planning director, Jason Segedy has high praise for Mallach’s new book, which looks at the challenges facing the American city through the lens of struggling rust-belt cities. The book (and review) emphasize a fundamental point: urban neighborhoods are always in a state of change, and if they’re not improving, it generally means that they are declining. Yet, especially in the Rust Belt, because urban revitalization is so striking (and rare), concerns about gentrification divert attention from the steady decline that affects most poor neighborhoods. As Segedy points out:

. . . the changes that are occurring in a handful of gentrifying neighborhoods in cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee, are on balance, good for these places, and also makes the point that these positive changes are dwarfed by the economic and social decline that is happening elsewhere in these cities.

2.  “Walk-Don’t Walk Signals are car infrastructure, not pedestrian infrastructure. Writing at The Conversation, David Levinson makes the case that traffic signals are strongly biased in favor of cars and against pedestrians. The needs of cars automatically prioritized: induction loops detect cars as they approach signals, while pedestrians have to walk up to “beg buttons,” and often wait a full cycle to get a “walk” sign.  As Levinson notes:

Pedestrians once crossed the street whenever and wherever they wanted. The introduction of signals prioritised the movement of motor vehicles at the expense of pedestrians, which slowed effective walking speed through the city. Pedestrians now spend roughly 20% of their time waiting at intersections. The consequences of making it easier to drive and harder to walk are consistent with the rise of vehicle-dominated cities.

3. You can’t fix public transit by destroying it. Jarrett Walker puts paid to the absurd suggestion published in an article in The Atlantic that New York can fix its subway problem by removing trains and tearing out tracks and replacing them with pavement for autonomous vehicles. There’s simply no way the numbers work: no system of small automated vehicles could ever match the capacity of subway trains, even those operated as badly as New York’s. This idea is so bad that it hardly merits the serious (and convincing) de-bunk from Walker, but it captures, in full-flower, the techno-dilettante perspective on disrupting transportation. Much of what’s going on, Walker argues, is “elite projection,” coupled with willful obliviousness to some pretty basic mathematics. 

4. Scooters aren’t a Scourge, so argues the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times. While there’s a wealth of alarmist, hand-wringing stories about scooters cluttering the urban streetscape, the Times editors have a more clear-eyed view: expanding the range of non-automobile travel choices in cities is the key to addressing many urban problems. There are some growing pains, to be sure, but clean, space-efficient and cheap on demand urban transportation options that don’t increase car traffic are worth exploring and refining. They tell city leaders to keep their eyes on the big picture:

More people using bikes and scooters means fewer car trips, less traffic and less pollution. Scooters are not a scourge; they’re a solution.”

New Ideas

Many Americans are rooted in place. A new survey published by the Federal Reserve has a number of interesting insights about American behavior. One finding caught our eye: A majority of Americans live near the place they attended High School. The study asked respondents to share the zip code of their current residence and of the place they completed high school.

According to the Fed study, moving long distances was correlated both with education and income; those who went further geographically, went further economically. As the study concludes:  “A major predictor of whether individuals move away from their hometown is their level of education. Three-fifths of adults with a bachelor’s degree live more than 10 miles away from where they grew up, versus two-fifths of those who have a high school degree or less.”

There are a lot of other survey insights into other issues, including community satisfaction, the reach of the opioid epidemic, whether workers have irregular work schedules, and the extent to which young adults depend on friends and families for financial support.

In the news

CityLab republished Joe Cortright’s analysis of recent city-suburb growth trends as “Are American’s fleeing cities for suburbs:  Not so fast.”

What City Observatory did this week

1. Closing the Kumbaya Gap. As we documented in our recent report, America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods, a growing number of cities boast neighborhoods with relatively high levels of both racial/ethnic and income diversity. But while people from different demographic groups may live in close proximity in these places, the question remains: does this produce meaningful social interactions. While increased integration may not automatically generate a kumbaya outcome, it is essential, in our view, for breaking down the barriers that tend to perpetuate and intensify social divisions.

2. Portland votes to increase housing supply. In March, we took Portland’s City Council to task for its decision to deny approval for a new market-rate apartment project in the city’s booming Pearl District. We argued that using discretionary approval processes to block additional supply ran counter to the city’s stated concerns about housing affordability. Earlier this month, the council reversed its decision, and approved a face-saving compromise that lets the project go forward. That’s a positive outcome, but it’s a reminder that tackling the housing affordability problem requires a sustained commitment to expanding housing supply.

Must read

1. Blocking housing means more traffic, not less. One of the most commonly offered objections to new housing development is that it will add to local traffic. But a new study from the BAy Area turns this argument on its head. Blocking housing in the center of an economically vibrant area actually adds to traffic, as people travel longer distances, and become more dependent on cars for transportation. The report, co-authored by San Mateo’s Housing Leadership Council and the transportation non-profit TransForm, notes that San Mateo County has built only about one new house for every 19 jobs its added in the past five years. Because they can’t find housing in the community, the added job growth encourages more long-distance car commuting, adding to the region’s already clogged roadway system. More housing closer to jobs would likely reduce the volume of traffic, contrary to the views usually expressed by opponents of new housing.

2. More signs that supply is driving down rents in Seattle. The Seattle Times has a story detailing the range of ways that landlords are offering discounts and give-backs to prospective tenants. On offer, if you’re looking for a new apartment in the Emerald City is everything from free parking spaces, and a month or three of free rent, to gym memberships and $1,500 Amazon gift cards. The reason for this sudden outburst of landlord generosity: hundreds of recently completed apartments sit vacant. And the competition for tenants spills over to the existing housing stock: even owners of older buildings have to offer concessions. This is how expanded supply blunts rental inflation and then drives down rents.

In the news

Cleveland Scene summarized the findings of our new CityReport America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods in an article entitled: “Cleveland boasts the least economically and racially diverse neighborhoods among major metropolitan areas, a new study says.”

Are ride-hailing services adding to congestion in the Portland? The Portland Tribune quotes City Observatory’s Joe Cortright in it’s article: “More ride services, more congestion?”

What City Observatory did this week

1. City Report: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods.  Our new City Report digs deep into the patterns of racial/ethnic and income segregation in US metro areas. We’ve used an array of census data to identify the places with the highest levels of integration along two dimensions (race/ethnicity and income). The report shows which metro areas have the most diverse neighborhoods, where those neighborhoods are located, and which metro areas have the greatest degree of mixing, given their demographic composition. We’ve also got detailed maps that let you drill down to the neighborhood level to see which neighborhoods meet our criteria (and which don’t).

2. Profiles of diverse, mixed income neighborhoods. As a follow on to our deeply statistical report identifying and counting diverse, mixed income neighborhoods, we’ve assembled a series of profiles of typical highly diverse neighborhoods in different metropolitan areas. They’re all different–each diverse in its own way–and they illustrate what lived diversity looks like on the ground. You’ll want to have a look at our profiles of Hillcrest, Queens, St. Mary’s Park in San Francisco, and Corktown in Detroit, among others.

Must read

1. Why don’t roads pay rent? We’ve long posited that the simplest summary of US urban economics is that “housing is too expensive and driving is too cheap.” David Levinson, who blogs at The Transportist offers a provocative look at the implicit rental cost of urban streets and roads. Whether parked or moving, cars occupy a huge amount of urban real estate, but don’t pay rent for the privilege. Levinson works out how much urban space they use, particularly when on the move: he calculates, for example, the volume of space a car occupies as it moves, including both its space and leading and following distances:

[On a freeway] Each moment  a car is in use, it is using 200 m², on which it should pay rent. So for an hour a day, this is 720,000 m² s or 72 ha s.  (The meter-squared by second (or hectare second) is a new unit of measurement (a time-volume) that needs a catchier name).

The fact that we don’t charge rent to cars for the space they occupy is a tremendous public subsidy to car ownership and driving. Because we devote this space to cars (and give it away for free) that means the land (and value associated with it) aren’t available for other uses. We need to pay much more attention to this opportunity cost associated with our road system. If we charged road users rent for the space they occupied, they’d undoubtedly shift travel patterns in ways that would make cities both more efficient and more equitable.

2. New York’s latest transportation report card. Congestion is increasing in the Big Apple, with the result that street speeds are dropping.  Streetsblog has a great summary of key findings from the latest NYC Mobility Report. One that caught our eye: street speeds in Manhattan south of 60th Avenue (measured by taxi GPS data) have fallen more than 20 percent, from 9.1 miles per hour in 2010 to 7.1 miles per hour last year.

Slower traffic means longer travel times for all street users, but particularly penalizes bus traffic; not surprisingly bus ridership continues to decline. Congestion has been amplified by the growth of ride-hailed traffic, which has grown more than 60 percent in the last year. As Streetsblog argues, the data make a strong argument for immediately adopting congestion pricing, and moving forward with plans to improve transit.

3. Is sprawl making walkable places less affordable? Writing at CNU’s blog Public Square, Robert Steuteville argues that our decision to shift from the traditional gridded pattern of urban development to the hierarchical and winding street patterns that characterize most suburban development has, in effect, made it impossible to grow more dense.  Gridded streets more easily accomodate density from the get-go, and also make it easier to redevelop over time. Sprawling suburban development patterns are inherently wired for automobile trips and relatively high speeds; a gridded neighborhood can more effortlessly shift to becoming a pedestrian-oriented environment. The difficulty of re-working the suburban pattern means that more of the growing demand for walkable spaces is shifted to city centers, driving up rents.

New Ideas

Does congestion harm economic growth? It’s a widely touted mantra among highway advocates: if we don’t build more roads, congestion will cause our economy to grind to a halt. While its widely asserted, there’s precious little evidence. The opposite case can be made: congestion is the sign of a healthy economy. A recent paper published in the journal Transportation, “Revisiting the relationship between traffic congestion and the economy: A longitudinal examination of U.S. metropolitan areas,” comes down squarely on the side saying that congestion doesn’t harm economic growth. Authored by Wesley Marshall and Eric Dumbaugh look at data on congestion, productivity and job growth for 89 US metro areas. They conclude:

 . . . the results suggest a positive association between traffic congestion and per capita GDP as well as between traffic congestion and job growth at the MSA level. There was a statistically insignificant effect on per capita income.

A positive association means that productivity (GDP per capita) and job growth both were higher in metro areas with higher levels of congestion. That’s the reverse of what one would expect from what we’re told by highway boosters, and implies that congestion not only does no economic harm, but actually is indicative of stronger growth.

In the news

Our analysis of the comparative population growth rates of the nation’s cities and suburbs (and what these numbers mean) was highlighted by Real Clear Markets.

What City Observatory did this week

Caveat Rentor: the problem with flawed rental inflation statistics. We highlight the continuing problem of erratic and unreliable rental price indices. A recent column by a financial journalist reports an apparent bubble in one-bedroom apartment prices based on an index generated by Zumper. Not only are these data implausible, they’re not at all borne out by other data by more credible rental housing sources (which show little fluctuation over the same time period). As we’ve pointed out before, services that simply calculate median values based on their on proprietary listings are subject to composition effects than greatly bias their results. So when looking at rental markets, be sure that your service has a sensible methodology that produces consistent and plausible results.

Must read

1. Devin Bunten explains how we got in this housing mess. Devin is an economist with the Federal Reserve who will soon join the Harvard urban economics faculty. She’s got a longish think piece in Frank News exploring the roots of our housing problems and their connections to policy and inequality. She weaves together a number of familiar themes–a big investment in highways and housing following World War II, imprinted with some strongly segregationist features, and also unearths some little known facts (as it accelerated funding for single family homes, Congress killed the largest federal program to help underwrite apartment construction). Together, these policies fueled white flight, and the disparate trajectories of inner cities and suburbs led directly to wide wealth disparities between blacks and whites. Now much of this divide is perpetuated by zoning. It’s a reminder, though, of the subtle power of national policy to reshape the urban landscape. (Hat tip to Alex Baca).

2. Another billion dollar lesson in induced demand. The Texas Department of Transportation has just wrapped up a $1.6 billion dollar project widening I-35W through Fort Worth, and still its backed up for a mile most days and sometimes as much as four miles, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Not to worry, motorists, yet another project in a few years will add capacity, and alleviate this particular bottleneck.  But as we all know by now, the addition on un-priced highway capacity in urban environments simply generates more traffic, and congestion soon returns to previous levels.

New Ideas

The downside of peer effects. Those who follow City Observatory regularly will know we’re keenly interested in neighborhood effects–how the characteristics of your neighbors influence your life and prospects. In general, we look at the positive aspects of peers–having a strong set of peers helps provide friends, role models, and networks to advance onseself during life. But there are also negative peer effects. A new research paper from Scott E. Carrell (University of California, Davis); Mark Hoekstra (Texas A&M University); Elira Kuka (Southern Methodist University) explores the spillover effects of attending school with children exposed to domestic violence. They find that exposure to a disruptive peer during elementary school reduces earnings at in ones mid-twenties by an average of 3 percent. The overall effects may be substantial; the authors estimate that exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains as much as five percent of the rich-poor earnings gap.

In the news

A video Joe Cortright’s interview on Portland’s housing market is available at Multi-Family Market Watch.

In its monthly newsletter Housing Reads, DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies highlighted our City Observatory commentary pointing out that we have federal preemption of local land use regulations that interfere with our access to television, but not for affordable housing.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Growth in the center. A new report from New York City’s Office of Planning graphically demonstrates the growing centralization of people and economic activity in the nation’s largest metropolitan area. We highlight two sets of dot density maps that show the overall change in population in the New York region, and the shifting location patterns of prime age (25 to 54 year old) adults. The city’s much heralded population growth has powered the overall expansion of the region since 2010; more than 60 percent of population growth has occurred in the five boroughs of New York City, while some suburbs have recorded population declines. The pattern is even more striking for prime-age adults. They’ve increased dramatically in central locations in the city, especially in neighborhoods with strong rail transit. Meanwhile, there’s been widespread decline of prime age workers in the suburbs. What’s happening in New York is indicative of the shift to a city-centered knowledge based economy, and the growing demand for urban amenities, which, as we’ve pointed out at City Observatory, is producing a shortage of cities.

2. The persistence of racial segregation. Rentonomics economist Chris Salviati has an illuminating new report calculating the segregation rates of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Using the latest 2012-2016 American Community Survey data, he computes the dissimilarity index for metro areas. You can see where your metro area ranks compared to others. In addition, this analysis shows a strong correlation between persistent racial segregation and slow or stagnant metropolitan population growth.  Slow-growing, older industrial cities consistently have higher segregation rates than faster growing metros. This finding ties in with recent social science research that shows that African-Americans moving to a different metropolitan area, are much more likely to move to integrated neighborhoods than those who make within-metro area moves.

Must read

1. Driverless buses:  Not so fast? Despite all the hype about autonomous vehicles, and the well-publicized driverless passenger car testing ongoing around the country, Alon Levy, writing at The American Prospect is skeptical that we’ll see driverless transit buses anytime soon.  Levy correctly points out that driverless bus demonstrations are very much in their infancy, restricted to low speed trials in carefully controlled situations. Most of his critique is equally, if not more applicable to autonomous private vehicles, with concerns about their safety and their ability to reliably recognize pedestrians and cyclists and cope with changing road conditions. Still, it’s worth noting that autonomous transit vehicles would basically need “Level 4” automation (the ability to drive autonomously on pre-determined fixed routes) rather than “Level 5” (the ability to drive pretty much anywhere, anytime). Given the high cost of transit vehicle operators, there are strong incentives to figure out how to automate transit vehicles.

2. The limits of LEED buildings. CityLab has a retrospective on the nearly 25-year history of the LEED building standards promoted by the US Green Building Council. They were founded out of a grass roots movement by environmentally concerned architects, and have grown since then to be a widely known and promoted standard for new construction. Despite LEED’s popularity, there are still strong reasons to question its efficacy.  Critics have pointed out flaws the USGBC’s claims that these buildings save energy, and even the Council admits its done a poor job collecting reliable data to illustrate savings. Just as important, as we’ve pointed out at City Observatory, LEED standards mostly turn a blind-eye to locational issues and the transportation costs embedded in a building’s –which is why we can have, with little sense of irony, a LEED-certified parking garage (at a renewable energy research laboratory, no less).  While LEED has no doubt prompted innovation and promoted awareness of building energy use, it falls well short of being policy that’s fully aligned with saving energy and reducing carbon emissions.

3. Unbundling parking prices. Parking is expensive. It only seems to be free because the cost of parking gets bundled with other prices we pay. This is doubly discriminatory:  First, it means that those who don’t use parking (like shoppers who walk, cycle or take transit to a store that maintains an expensive parking lot) end up subsidizing those who drive. Second, it creates more incentives to drive, and disincentives to use cleaner, greener modes of transportation. Little surprise then, than one of the best ways to fix this problem is to un-bundle parking prices. Mobility Lab highlights a new report from Arlington Virginia on the impacts of doing just that. Separating parking charges from apartment rents allows those who don’t own cars to get more affordable housing.

New Ideas

Where murders are solved, and where they’re not. The Washington Post has a terrific piece of data journalism examining the geographic patterns of homicides, with a focus on where police solve crimes and where they don’t.  Nationally, only about half of all homicides are solved, but the geographic pattern of unsolved murders is hardly random. Unsolved crimes tend to be disproportionately clustered in certain neighborhoods, and the Post’s analysis shows that those neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and either African-American or Latino. A key factor in solving crimes is whether there are strong relationships between the community and the police, and in many of these neighborhoods, there aren’t. This effect is amplified where gangs are prevalent, as the threat of retaliation for cooperating with the police makes in less likely witnesses will come forward. The post piece has on-line maps of solved and unsolved crimes in 50 large cities around the country, and also has a downloadable database of more than 50,000 homicides.

In the news

The Memphis Commercial-Appeal recounted our analysis of the perils and pitfalls of city-supported aquariums:  “When it comes to aquarium success, Memphis will need more than public money.”

Archinect–the online magazine of architecture news–drew its reader’s attention to the same subject in “The risky business of city aquariums.”

Being a smart city should mean something different than a technology fetish

The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the “smart city” banner. But what does that mean?

People tend to see cities through the lens of their own profession. CEOs of IT firms say that cities are “a system of systems” and visualize the city as a flow of information to be optimized. Physicists have modeled cities and observed relationships between city scale and activity, treating city residents as atoms and describing cities as conforming to natural “laws.”

In part, these metaphors reflect reality. Information flows and physical systems are an important part of what makes cities work. But cities are also something more—and their residents need to be viewed as something other than mindless atoms to be optimized.

The prescriptions that flow from partial and incomplete metaphors for understanding cities can lead us in the wrong direction if we’re not careful. The painful lessons of seven decades of highway building in U.S. cities is a case in point. Led by people like New York’s master builder, Robert Moses, we took an engineering view of cities, one in which we needed to optimize our transportation infrastructure to facilitate the flow of automobiles. The massive investments in freeways (and the rewriting of laws and culture on the use of the right of way) made cities safer for long-distance, high-speed—but at the same time produced massive sprawl, decentralization, and longer journeys, and eviscerated many previously robust city neighborhoods.

If we’re really to understand and appreciate cities, especially smart cities, our focus has to be elsewhere: it has to be on people. Cities are about people, and particularly about bringing people together. We are a social species, and cities serve to create the physical venues for interaction that generate innovation, art, culture, and economic activity.

So what does it mean for a city to be smart?

Fundamentally, smart cities have highly skilled, well-educated residents. We know that this matters decisively for city success. We can explain fully 60 percent of the variation in economic performance across large U.S. metropolitan areas by knowing what fraction of the adult population has attained a four-year college degree. There’s strong evidence that the positive effects of greater education are social—it spills over to all residents, regardless of their individual education.

Educational attainment is a powerful proxy measure of city economic success because having a smart population and workforce is essential to generating the new ideas that cause people and businesses to prosper.

So building a smart city isn’t really about using technology to optimize the efficiency of the city’s physical sub-systems. There’s no evidence that the relative efficiency of water delivery, power supply, or transportation across cities has anywhere near as strong an effect on their success over time as does education.

It is in this process of creating new ideas that cities excel. They are R&D facilities and incubators, and not just of new businesses, but of art, music, culture, fashion trends, and all manner of social activity. In the process Jane Jacobs so compelling described, by juxtaposing diverse people in close proximity, cities produce the serendipitous interactions that generate what she called new work.

We don’t have an exacting recipe for how this happens. But we do know some of the elements that are essential. They include density, diversity, design, discovery and democracy.

Density. The concentration of people in a particular place. Cities, as Ed Glaeser puts it, are the absence of space between people. The less space, the more people, and the greater the opportunities for interaction. Cities are not formless blobs; what happens in the center—the nucleus—matters, because it is the place that provides key elements of identity and structure and connection for the remainder of the metropolitan area it anchors.

Diversity. We have abundant evidence that a more diverse population—by age, race, national origin, political outlook,and other qualities—helps provide a fertile ground for combining and recombining ideas in novel ways.

Design. We are becoming increasingly aware that how we populate and arrange the physical character of cities matters greatly. The arrangement of buildings, public plazas, streetscapes, and neighborhoods matters profoundly for whether people embrace urban spaces or abandon them. We have a growing appreciation for places that provide interesting variety and are oriented to walking and “hanging out.”

Discovery. Cities are not machines; citizens are not atoms. The city is an evolving organism, that is at once host to, and is constantly being reinvented by, its citizen inhabitants. A part of the attraction of cities is their ability to inspire, incubate, and adapt to change. Cities that work well stimulate the creativity of their inhabitants, and also present them all with new opportunities to learn, discover, and improve.

Democracy. The “mayor as CEO” is a tantalizing analogy for both mayors and CEOs: CEOs are used to wielding unitary, executive authority over their organizations, and many mayors wish they could do the same. But cities are ultimately very decentralized, small “d” democratic entities. Decision-making is highly devolved, and the opportunities for top-down implementation are typically limited. Citizens have voice (through voting) and the opportunity to “exit” by moving, appropriately limiting unilateral edicts from City Hall. Cities also give rise to new ideas, and when they work well, city political systems are permeable to the changing needs and values of their citizens—this is when many important changes bubble up.

All of these attributes of cities are susceptible, at least in part, to analysis as “information flows” or “systems of systems.” They may be augmented and improved by better or more widespread information technology. But it would be a mistake to assume that any of them are capable of being fully captured in these terms, no matter how tempting or familiar the analogy.

Ultimately, when we talk about smart cities, we should keep firmly in mind that they are fundamentally about people; they are about smart people, and creating the opportunity for people to interact. If we continuously validate our plans against this key observation, we can do much to make cities smarter, and help them address important national and global challenges.