A sharp divide by race in urban residence for young adults

Well-educated young whites are increasingly living in central cities, while well-educated young African-Americans are shifting increasingly to the suburbs

For some time, we’ve been tracking the location decisions of a group we call the “young and restless”–25 to 34 year olds with a four-year college degree.  It’s fair to call them restless, because well-educated adults in their late twenties and early thirties are the most geographically mobile segment of the adult population. The movement of talent to particular metropolitan areas and within those metro areas to close-in urban neighborhoods was the subject of our 2014 City Report.  These smart young workers fuel economic growth, because they’re the dream demographic for fast-growing knowledge-based companies, who are increasingly locating in urban centers to tap this growing labor pool.

Last month, The New York Times Upshot published an interesting bit of data journalism, highlighting the racial characteristics of neighborhood change in the US.  They found a widespread pattern of suburbanization among people of color, and also flagging a contrasting (and much smaller) movement of whites into historically black neighborhoods.

That got us thinking:  How do these patterns play out for young adults?

To get a quick look at the patterns of change, we turned to the indispensable University of Minnesota IPUMS website, which provides a convenient on-line tool for using micro-data from the Census Bureau to quickly tabulate data for custom-selected sub-groups of the population.

For this analysis, we focused on young adults, aged 25 to 34, living in metropolitan areas.  The Census Bureau codes metropolitan area residents as either living in a central city (usually the largest, first named city in a metropolitan area), or living elsewhere in the metro area (in a smaller city or unincorporated area).  It’s a far from perfect disaggregation between “city” and “suburb,” but for a first cut analysis, we’ll let it suffice.  We’ve also restricted our analysis to two racial categories, black and white.  We also tabulate the number of young adults in each geographic/race category by educational attainment, focusing on the top and bottom of the educational spectrum (those with a high school diploma or less, and those with a four-year degree or more). To get a sense of long term changes, we compare data from the 1980 Decennial Census of population with the most recent five-year tabulation of data from the American Community Survey, covering the years 2013 to 2017 (which we’ll identify using the mid-year of the sample, 2015).  So think of this analysis showing the generational change in residential location over a 35 year period, from 1980 to 2015.

Here’s the data:

This table shows the fraction of 25 to 34 year olds who lived in the central city of a metropolitan area by race and education level in 1980 and 2015. The two right hand columns of the table show the change in the share, in percentage points, for each race/education group between 1980 and 2015. The bottom row of the table shows the ratio of the share of college educated 25 to 34 year olds living in central cities compared to the share of high school educated 25 to 34 year olds living in central cities for each year and race.

They show a couple of things, right off:  Squarely fitting our stereotypes in both 1980 and 2015 black young adults were more likely to live in central cities than their white counterparts.  In 1980, about two-thirds of black 25-34 year olds lived in central cities, in 2015, roughly half did so.  About a third of white young adults lived in cities in 1980.

Second, consistent with the findings reported by The New York Times, black young adults are much more likely to live in suburbs now than in 1980.  Roughly two-thirds of black young adults lived in central cities in 1980; by 2015, young black adults were about evenly split between central cities and their suburbs.

Third, the pattern for white young adults is mixed, and varies dramatically by educational level. White young adults with a just a high school diploma or less education were less likely to live in the central city (share down 8 percentage points) and more likely to live in the suburbs in 2015 compared to 1980.  On the other hand, white young adults with at least a four year college degree were more likely to live in center cities (share up 6 percentage points).

Finally, and most interestingly, there is a sharp contrast between locations of well educated young blacks and whites.  Relative to their less well-educated peers, blacks with at least a four-year degree are slightly more likely to live in suburbs (about 10 percent more likely–53 percent vs. 48 percent).  In contrast, well-educated young white adults are about 60 percent more likely to live in center cities (41 percent vs. 25 percent) than their less well-educated peers.

What this seems to signal is that–as Pete Saunders argues– suburbanization is still aspirational for young black adults, and that it is not for white young adults.  Better educated white young adults are dramatically more likely to live in central cities than less educated peers; Better educated black young adults are somewhat more likely to live in suburbs than their less educated peers.  There’s a sharp divergence in trend by race among well-educated young adults, over time; well educated white young adults are becoming more likely to live in central cities; well-educated young black adults are more likely to live in suburbs.

The varied racial pattern of urban location by education has important implications for understanding neighborhood change. In part, it fits with a stereotypical view of gentrification, fueled by well educated young whites. But it also shows that young black adults, especially better educated ones, are moving to the suburbs. As David Rusk has pointed out, the suburbanization of the most successful black households has contributed to the growing economic polarization of black neighborhoods.

Road pricing is inherently fairer to the poor because it speeds up buses

As economists, we’re keen on the idea of road pricing. The reason we have congestion and delay is because we charge a price for peak hour road use (zero), that doesn’t come close to covering the costs of providing roadway capacity and reflecting the delays that road users impose on others with their choices of when and where to travel.

Invariably, though, we’ll hear claims that charging a price for the road, however small, poses an undue burden on the poor. (Strangely, we seldom hear these same people arguing that, in the interests of fairness, we ought to make bus travel free, but we digress).

Superficially, that argument sounds plausible:  a road user charge would impose a higher burden on a lower income driver than on a higher income driver.

But that claim misses some much larger points. As we’ve documented at City Observatory, low income workers are far less likely to drive at all, and much less likely to drive to work during peak commuting hours than are high income workers. The average income of peak hour car commuters in Portland, for example, is $74,000, compared to $45,000 for transit riders.  Many other aspects of how we finance are road system are far more inequitable than road pricing.

An even larger issue has to do with buses. A recent analysis from the New York City Riders Alliance looked at the effect of the upcoming pricing of roads in Manhattan, using Charles Komanoff’s Balanced Transportation Analyzer. It shows that pricing Manhattan roads will increase travel speeds 20 percent in the central business district and about 7 percent elsewhere in the city.  This will mean faster travel times for city buses, and makes a big difference for this with long bus rides. For those who use express buses to commute into Manhattan from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens–a group that predominantly includes people living in neighborhoods with limited subway access–this analysis shows that road pricing will save them an hour or more of travel time each week.

But we don’t have to rely on models alone–real world experience shows that pricing roadways makes buses run faster.  The most recent evidence for that comes from Atlanta, where new high occupancy toll lanes on I-75, are enabling area commuter buses to move much faster. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reports that Georgia’s State Road and Tollway Authority is going to have to revise its commuter bus schedule, shaving about 15 minutes off of peak hour travel times.

Right away, these time savings translate into real benefits for these bus commuters–who tend to have far lower incomes than those who can afford to travel by car into Manhattan. Regardless of whether the money raised by road pricing is spent on transit or not, the faster speeds enabled by road pricing are a direct benefit to transit riders, especially those who are dependent on the bus system.

And that’s not all:  the productivity and cost of the bus system is directly tied to how rapidly it delivers riders to their destinations.  A bus that can travel faster has higher driver productivity (more rider miles per driver hour), lower bus costs (again, more fare-paying passengers per service hour). And because it delivers better service, it’s more likely to attract riders, creating a virtuous circle where faster bus service lures more people out of their cars.

Think of tolling as the the fastest way to invest in a more productive, more attractive transit system: Getting (at least some) cars out of the way is one of the fastest, cheapest ways to make bus service better, and tolling allows that to happen without building expensive dedicated right of way.

The tragedy of the commons on the streets of New York has been that the limited, shared and un-priced space on the streets has been overwhelmed by demand, most recently by the advent and growth of ride-hailed vehicles. As we’ve noted at City Observatory, the growth of ride hailing is directly associated with the decline in average street speeds–and notably bus speeds–in Manhattan. The problem isn’t so much the ride-hailed vehicles themselves as the fact that street use isn’t priced; ride-hailing has simply circumvented the economic limits on the number of vehicles circulating in Manhattan due to the combination of expensive and scarce parking spaces and a tight lid on the number of taxi medallions.

The real equity issue on road pricing is that those who are dependent on buses for transportation–which typically include the lowest income citizens–bear the brunt of the costs of un-priced roads. They pay the same fare for their bus ride, and get worse service. The way to solve this problem is to price the use of the roadway at the peak hour. The buses will travel faster and that will be inherently more equitable to those with the least income and the fewest options.

A hat tip to Streetsblog New York for highlighting the New York Riders Alliance analysis.

What City Observatory did this week

1. The idea of cities and the city of ideas. What cities do is bring people together, and the heightened interaction among people invariably generates friction, but also new ideas. City Observatory’s Joe Cortright delivered the annual Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture on Economics at Portland State University on May 2, on the topic of “Cities and the Knowledge Economy.”  As we look back to the earliest great cities, like Athens, their greatest contribution was the generation of new knowledge. That’s still the case today:  what powers city economies, and makes them so important to our overall well-being and long term growth is that they can be the places that continually generate new and better ways of living.

2. We add more voices to the chorus of national experts decrying Portland’s proposed half billion dollar freeway widening project and other road expansion efforts. Portland has for a long time prided itself on its pioneering transportation reputation, based on removing downtown expressways, investing early and extensively in transit, and successfully promoting cycling. That makes the current plans to spend half a billion dollars widening the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway, and spend half of a proposed multi-billion dollar regional transportation plan on even more roads come as a stunning shock to national experts.  In recent weeks, Jeff Speck (author of Walkable City Rules) and Transport Politic blogger Yonah Freemark, have added their voices to those of other national experts telling Portland it’s now headed in the wrong direction.

Must read

1. Brussels muscles cars out of its center, creating more room for pedestrians.  CityLab’s Fergus O’Sullivan has an on the scene report from Brussels, which is midway through a plan to systematically remove car traffic from much of its urban core, including both narrow streets and squares and axial boulevards. The news is:  it’s working. Moreover, concerns that traffic would be displaced and worsened in the area just outside the pedestrian zone haven’t been realized.  Just as in the case of Seattle’s closing of its Alaskan Way viaduct, removing road capacity lessens overall car traffic, the hopeful inverse of “induced demand.”  When we make more room for people instead of cars, cities flourish.

2. We’re gradually becoming more integrated.  The very data savvy New York Times Upshot team has been on a tear lately with their analysis of Census data on the racial and ethnic makeup of US neighborhoods.  Their latest effort chronicles the overall decline in segregation in the US.  As recently as 1980, fully a quarter of US Census Tracts had populations that were composed of a population that was 97 percent or more non-Hispanic white, and a third of the white population lived in such neighborhoods.  In recent years, that figure has declined to about five percent.

3. Portland’s inclusionary zoning law appears to be reducing new multifamily housing construction.  Portland’s Daily Journal of Commerce reports a number of developers are holding off from moving forward with new apartment construction projects in Portland due to the cost of complying with the city’s inclusionary zoning law. While some projects have moved forward under the inclusionary requirements, the overall pace of development is waning rapidly. Several developers have said that project’s in Portland no longer “pencil out”–the financial returns from expected rents don’t provide a sufficient profit margin to attract the financial investment needed to move forward. Two downtown towers which have made it all the way through the city’s design approval process are stalled. Given the long lead times to develop and build new apartments, the slowdown in construction now is likely to lead to a renewed housing shortage in a couple of years. The bad news–for renters–developers expect that shortfall to push up rents enough to cover the added costs of complying with the inclusionary zoning requirements.

In the News

BikePortland cited City Observatory’s Joe Cortright in its coverage of efforts to use a proposed Albina Vision re-development project to provide political cover for freeway widening.

What City Observatory did this week

Exit, hope and loyalty:  What’s behind neighborhood change? America’s neighborhoods are always changing, and it’s often a question of whether change is driven more by hope or despair. We offer a slight tweak to Albert Hirschman’s trinity of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to explore the choices and decision-calculus confronting neighborhood residents. In struggling neighborhoods, long-term residents often have to choose between their loyalty to a particular place, and the potentially greater opportunity that they can realize by leaving. What mediates their decision in many cases is the hope or expectation that despite its current problems, that a neighborhood may get better. Almost all neighborhoods have loyalists, who will stick things out no matter what happens, but most, when they see decline, and lose hope, will move on. This dynamic makes it imperative that urban leaders provide a clear path to improvement, if they’re to reverse steady and self-reinforcing decline.

Must read

1. The unsustainable economics of single-occupancy vehicles.  The Economist has a thoughtful essay on the deep subsidies that prop-up automobile transportation. The recent initial public offerings of Uber and Lyft have pointed up the stupendous billions of dollars of losses the company’s investors have underwritten to attract riders. As The Economist points out, these are just the venture capital equivalent of what the public sector has been doing for decades:  insulating travelers from the actual cost of operating private vehicles, particularly in dense urban environments.

2. Travel demand modeler’s can’t even see they have a Ben and Jerry’s problem. There’s a very wonky website/list-serv for traffic modelers called “TMIP” (the Travel Model Improvement Portal) which explores the quite arcane details of how one builds complex mathematical models of road systems and then tries to forecast the behavior of travelers using the system. A recent discussion wrestled with the question of how to deal with induced demand–the idea that adding more capacity to roads in dense metropolitan areas simply tends to trigger additional driving on those roads. There’s a lot of debate about what causes induced demand (is it new trips, or just a reallocation of trips in time, between mode or across space), and some hair splitting rhetorical arguments about whether it ought to properly be called “induced” or “latent” demand.  To the economist, however, this is mostly and irrelevant side-show:  travel modelers are obsessed with computing travel behavior for a system that effectively charges zero price.  Just like Ben and Jerry’s on free ice cream day, the number of ice cream cones “demanded” will always be large, and outstrip the store’s capacity.  The modeling profession has so thoroughly internalized the “free ice cream” model that it really can’t talk about demand in a coherent way.

3. Jenny and Matt explain American’s housing problem(s).  The Brookings Institution’s Jenny Schuetz sat down with Vox’s Matt Yglesias to talk housing, and the result is well worth a read–or better, a listen. Housing is really a series of inter-connected problems, including high rents, low incomes, and a lack of supply.  Schuetz outlines seven distinct steps we ought to be taking to address housing and housing affordability:  these include more universal and automatic rent assistance for low income households, greater housing supply, especially in high demand regions and neighborhoods. There are important steps for federal, state and local policy makers, key among them will be measures to change the way state’s delegate authority for development decisions to local governments.  As Yglesias puts it:

The most socially and economically valuable place to build new housing would be in the most expensive, most affluent neighborhoods and suburban towns — but to make that happen, state governments will have to override local zoning regulations.

We rarely recommend podcasts and interviews:  The time commitment is often large, it’s difficult to glean the highlights quickly, and the information density is just less than in well laid out web pages or documents.  This is an exception:  In less than an hour with this podcast, you can get a crash course in housing economics from one of the smartest scholars in the field, interrogated by a well-informed host. It’s well worth the time spent.

New Knowledge

Car ownership, income and density. Trulia economist Issi Romem has a new analysis of Census data on the patterns of car ownership, and how they vary across metropolitan areas, based on neighborhood income and population density.  Romem has tabulated and mapped zip code level data. In general, we know that car ownership is positively related to income (households with more income are more likely to own cars, and own more cars per household member); and that car ownership is inversely correlated with density (people who live in denser neighborhoods tend to own fewer cars.  Romem’s analysis shows how these two general tendencies play out in different metropolitan areas.

Here are charts showing the relationships between income, density and car ownership for four major US cities:  Boston, New York, Houston and Los Angeles.  In these charts, density is shown on the vertical axis (densest zip codes are higher), and income is shown on the horizontal axis (higher incomes are to the right).  The color of dots on the charts correspond to the number of persons per vehicle, with darker colors indicating lower rates of car ownership per person.

The there’s a striking difference in the patterns for the two sets of metro areas.  New York and Boston show a pattern of horizontal stripes–car ownership varies by density for people of all incomes.  Even wealthy people in dense neighborhoods own fewer cars.  In Los Angeles and Houston, the stripes are nearly vertical:  car ownership varies almost entirely by income, and very little by density.  If you have income, you own a car.  It’s also worth noting that very few neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Houston exceed about 50,000 persons per square mile–the level at which both high and low income households are very likely to own few cars, according to Romem’s analysis.

Romem helpfully provides zip code level maps and data for all of the nation’s large metropolitan areas, so you can examine where your city falls on this spectrum, and look at values for particular neighborhoods.

Issi Romem, Trulia, “Getting around, or just getting by:  Where people live with fewer cars,” May 16, 2019.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Who bikes? Discussions of investing in bike infrastructure are often fraught with arguments about who benefits, with oft-expressed fears that bike lanes chiefly benefit a spandex-wearing elite.  How does cycling correspond to income.  There’s a misleading claim floating around the twitterverse that the single largest group of bike commuters is from households earning less than $10,000 per year. That’s not correct, but our analysis of the most recent census data on daily journeys to work shows that it is actually the case that workers lower income households are more likely than most American’s to commute by bike.  Those earning less than $10,000 are about three times as likely to be bike commuters than the typical worker.  In general, the more income you have, the less likely you are to commute by bike.  While there is a slight uptick in bike commuting for those from households with incomes of more than $100,000, workers from high income households are still much less likely to commute by bike than workers from low income households.

2. The constancy of neighborhood change.  There’s a subtle bias in the way we talk about neighborhood change. Many discussions seem to assume that neighborhood populations are fixed, and un-changing, and that absent some dramatic external event–like gentrification–they’ll tend to stay just as they are. But all neighborhoods are constantly changing. We review a recent study that looks at the dynamics of population change in neighborhoods and finds:

• The population of urban neighborhoods is always changing because moving is so common, especially for renters.
• There’s little evidence that gentrification causes overall rates of moving to increase, either for homeowners or renters.
• Homeowners don’t seem to be affected at all, and there’s no evidence that higher property taxes (or property tax breaks) influence moving decisions.
• While involuntary moves for renters increase slightly in gentrified neighborhoods, there’s no significant change in total moves

For most neighborhoods, the question isn’t whether they’ll change, but how. As we noted in our study, Lost in Place, high poverty neighborhoods that didn’t improve materially hemorrhaged population, losing 40 percent of their residents over four decades.

Must read

1. Updating London’s Congestion Charge. For the past two decades, London’s central area-congestion charge, a fee charged for vehicles crossing a cordon in Central London, has been hailed as one of the pioneering efforts to priced congested urban roads. The charge has helped moderate traffic entering the central area, and provided funding to improve transit. But the charging scheme, which is based on decades-old technology, and which is riddled with exemptions, is, in that quaint British-phrase “no longer fit for purpose.” Or so argues a new report from the Centre for London, which calls for updating the congestion charge, and integrating all of the systems for paying for urban transportation. Under their proposal, payment for car travel on city roads would be combined with charges for public transit (i.e. the current Oyster card), with all private vehicles paying per kilometer of travel, and with charges varying according to place and time of travel.

Our fundamental recommendation is for London to move to a more sophisticated and comprehensive distance-based road user charging scheme, closely integrated with the rest of the capital’s transport system. The aim would be to replace the various charges currently spreading across the city with a single scheme that reflects all impacts of a journey.  The scheme, which would apply to all motor vehicles every day and at all times, could be extended gradually, with charges first applied only to the most congested and polluted areas of the city. In return for any charge 16 incurred, drivers would benefit from improved traffic flow and journey time reliability, enabling TfL to offer a guaranteed level of service and potentially refunds for excessive journey delay – on the same model as ‘delay repay’ for trains. All funds raised would go back into maintaining and investing in London’s roads and streets, public realm and public transport.

2. German economists urge road pricing in cities to reduce pollution and congestion. The widespread adoption of diesel vehicles has aggravated urban air pollution in Germany, and some cities are responding with bans on polluting vehicles. A group of German economists argues that banning some vehicles (while allowing others, like electric vehicles) is unfair to those who can’t afford cleaner transport, and is inefficient.  Instead, they’ve urged German cities to set up road pricing systems which would allow everyone to access city centers by vehicle when they needed to, provided incentives for lower pollution travel.  Revenue from the charge could be used to improve public transport services, cycling infrastructure and subsidize less affluent citizens in using cleaner transport modes. They write:

. . . a city toll, i.e. a charge for using a car in the city, would be the socially fairer and economically much more sensible alternative. More environmentally friendly and traffic-relieving alternatives to cars would become more attractive and municipalities could benefit from additional revenues. [And] nobody who needs to rely on car transport would be banned from driving in the cities.

Hat tip to the Clean Energy Wire.

3. We used to do this everywhere. Strongtown’s Daniel Herriges has just returned from a visit to New Orleans French Quarter and asks a question that’s always been top of mind for us: How have we forgotten how to build great urban spaces? Walkable, interesting, human scale settlements are so rare that they’ve become tourist-saturated anomalies.  Why, if with the much lower incomes (and public infrastructure budgets) of the 18th century were we routinely able to build such places, and yet we find it impossible to build them today? Herriges points out that attributing the urbanity of the French Quarter to the french is a bit of a misnomer, as the design principles for New Orleans were handed down largely in the era of its Spanish governance, when the colonial “Law of the Indies” prescribed development patterns. Those rules, which were applied throughout Spanish colonial America laid out cities in a familiar pattern, with a central square, usually bordered by important public buildings, a grid of surrounding narrow streets offset from the North-South axis to maximize shade. Those principles are apparent today in cities in Latin America, as well as in older cities in the US Southwest. This story reminds us of the importance of land use planning:  just as the maxims of the Law of the Indies produced enduring walkable spaces, our current land use laws which widely separate land uses, mandate parking and building setbacks, and build infrastructure primarily to expedite car movement and everywhere produced spaces that are as thoroughly hostile to human enjoyment as these older towns were (and are) conducive to it.

New Knowledge

The health of the air. While we’ve made substantial progress over the past several decades, air pollution remains a major health challenge in many US cities.  New York University’s Marron Institute has a new report on the health effects of two key sources of air pollution:  fine particulates and ozone. The good news is that we’re continuing to make progress in reducing fine particulate matter, with the number of estimated deaths from this source of pollution declining from about 12,000 per year to about 6,000.  But we’ve made less progress on ozone, and despite overall improvements, both forms of pollution are still disproportionately severe in some locations.  The Marron Institute report flags these hot spots with data and maps for states and metropolitan areas the levels of fine particulates (particles smaller than .25 mm) and ozone, and the number of deaths and illnesses associated with pollution.

Among US cities, the health effects of fine particulates are most severe in Southern California, with Los Angeles, Riverside and Bakersfield ranking first, second and third in most excess deaths per capita from this pollutant.  Los Angeles and Riverside also top the list for most excess deaths associated with ozone.

Marron Institute, Health of the Air, 2019, (https://healthoftheair.org/)

In the News

Writing at CityLab, Richard Florida laid out his take on the ongoing debate about whether upzoning cities would help improve housing affordability, quoting City Observatory’s argument that answered that question strongly in the affirmative.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Will upzoning help housing affordability?  Housing supply denialism–claims that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to housing markets–have a ready audience in the NIMBY community.  The latest study to make the rounds comes from Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Michael Storper, with an added boost from CityLab’s Richard Florida. This study claims that building more market rate housing in high cost cities will somehow only make inequality worse, citing, among other things, a Washington Post article from last year, which we de-bunked at City Observatory.  What this, and other similar critiques leave out, is any explanation of how failing to build housing in markets where there’s obviously overwhelming demand for it is going to alleviate any of the social, economic or environmental problems we see in cities today.

2. Inclusionary zoning’s Wile E. Coyote moment.  It’s been two years since Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirements took effect, and to date, there have been few apparent negative effects. In fact, what happened was that the law triggered a land rush of development applications, and that surge of new construction has actually cause rent inflation to drop precipitously. But now that developers have worked through the backlog of grandfathered projects that were exempt from the inclusionary rules, there’s growing evidence that the development pipeline in Portland is drying up. While the city’s housing bureau denies anything is amiss, they’ve already backed off from a scheduled increase in the inclusionary requirements that was to take place last year. The problem now is that if the city signals it may have doubts about the program’s success, that will prompt developers to postpone investment, hoping for some relaxation of requirements, which would actually worsen the housing problem.  Like Wile E. Coyote, the inclusionary zoning program may really start falling when it looks down and sees it’s no longer standing on firm ground. The problem with investment markets with long lags is that problems can become quite serious, and go largely unrecognized until its too late to do anything about them.

3. The Young and Restless in Black and White.  City Observatory has long tracked the residential location of the nation’s college-educated 25- to 34-year olds, who’ve increasingly moved to large metropolitan areas, and within those metro areas, to close-in urban neighborhoods. But how do those location patterns diverge for different racial/ethnic groups?  We took a quick look at data from the American Community Survey to compare the historical pattern of urban location of well-educated black and white young adults. Historically, college educated young white adults are disproportionately concentrated in suburbs, while their black counterparts are disproportionately concentrated in cities.  Since 1980, the locations of these two groups have trended in opposite directions:  young white adults with four-year degrees are now much more likely to live in central cities, while young black adults with four year degrees are more likely to live in suburbs. While suburbanization is no longer aspirational for many well-educated white young adults, it seems like it continues to be alluring for well-educated black young adults.

Must read

1. Why the price tag is the least important part of any infrastructure package. Washington is all abuzz with talk of a bi-partisan deal on infrastructure which could amount to as much as $2 trillion.  While we’re not holding our breath that anything will happen, we think Beth Osborne of Smart Growth America has some very sage advice.  In an op-ed at the Washington Post, Osborne argues that its bad policies and misplaced priorities, rather than a lack of funds that is the biggest problem with American infrastructure.  We’ve got a system that is still obsessed with building more capacity, even though it routinely fails to maintain what its built, and makes us steadily more dependent on driving, killing an increasing number of Americans and endangering the plant.

So what would a reimagining of federal transportation policy look like? We could set enforceable goals to prioritize improving the safety and condition of our roads and bridges first. Then we should talk about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and providing better access to jobs and services. Congress should guarantee measurable benefits and hold states accountable for fulfilling those promises before giving them any more money.

2. The elusive definition of “gentrification.”  Slate’s Henry Grabar is on a roll.  He has a trenchant article pointing out that no one can seem to agree on what constitutes gentrification, and that conspicuously includes, not just journalists, but also the academics who’ve studied the subject. While the data show that gentrification, by almost any definition, is rare that doesn’t stop virtually every community from deploying concern about gentrification as the basis for opposing new development.  As Grabar explains, the widespread colloquial and academic ambiguity of the term is helping to fuel an increasingly incoherent and destructive debate:

Being more precise is important, because the specter of gentrification is invoked by communities on all ends of the income spectrum to forestall new housing as the country is building fewer homes per capita than at any time since World War II. When the Beverly Hills City Council is arguing that permitting small apartment buildings within city limits would “directly contribute to gentrification,” it might be time to finally come up with a clear-cut definition of the term. . . . There’s a well-documented false consciousness in the United States in which everyone thinks they are middle class. It has a neighborhood corollary: Everyone thinks their neighborhood can gentrify. If they’re right, the word is useless.

3.  Why we need full data from ride-hailing firms. The newly publicly-traded Uber is making some of the vast trove of its data on travel system performance available through an application called “Movement.” For example, current versions of Movement provide data on variations in travel speeds on city streets by time of day.   It’s indicative of the kind of richly detailed information that is generated from the smartphone backbone that monitors, routes, and bills ride-hailed trips.  But as the Transit Center notes, city’s shouldn’t settle for just a subset of the data provided by Uber and Lyft, but instead should insist on data that will show how the ride hailing firms patterns of activity impact traffic congestion at different times and locations.

New Knowledge

New research on gentrification and displacement. One of the biggest challenges in researching neighborhood change is constructing what economists call a “longitudinal” data set–one that tracks individuals, rather than one that just compares  snapshots of the overall demographics of a neighborhood at different times. New York University’s  has a new study using administrative data from the Medicaid program to track the residential location of kids born in New York City over a period of years.  Because this data captures each child’s location a birth, and their residence in subsequent years, it provides exactly the kind of longitudinal data that’s often missing from other research. Dragan, Ellen and Glied use the Medicaid records to compute how likely kids from poor families were to move to other neighobrhoods over time, and compares the difference in migration rates between families living in neighborhoods that gentrified and those that didn’t.

The report has two key findings:

First, consistent with other research, they find that poor children living in gentrifying neighborhoods are no more likely move than children living in non-gentrifying neighobrhoods, although when they move, this study finds they move slightly longer distances.

Second, the study finds that those who move out of gentrifying neighborhoods do not end up moving to neighborhoods that are any worse than the destination neighborhoods of poor children moving out of non-gentrifying neighborhoods

 . . . among children who moved during the 7-year period, we see no difference in poverty rate changes between those who start in neighborhoods that gentrify and those who start off in neighborhoods that remain persistently low-SES. Indeed, children who move from gentrifying neighborhoods move to somewhat safer neighborhoods. .

As the authors point out, moving is common among low income households, especially in expensive housing markets like New York City.  There’s little or no evidence that neighborhood gentrification plays a substantial role in escalating the rate at which poor families move out of gentrifying neighborhoods.

Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, Sherry A. Glied, “Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data,”
NBER Working Paper No. 25809, Issued in May 2019

In the News

The Portland Tribune featured City Observatory’s analysis of Portland’s inclusionary zoning law in its article, “Group blasts Portland’s inclusionary policy.”

Correction:  Last week’s Week Observed incorrectly identified Rachel Bogardus Drew, author of what we called “a Rosetta Stone for gentrification studies“–the excellent tool for comparing the practical, on-the-ground meaning of competing definitions of gentrification.  City Observatory apologizes  for this error.

This post has been updated to correct a typographical error in our summary of the commentary “The Young and Restless in Black and White.”

What City Observatory did this week

1. The limits of design thinking. Really good design can frequently improve the utility and performance of everyday objects, and there’s little question that the attentiveness to software design and user experience has made smart phones indispensable adjuncts to our lifestyle. But while design thinking can improve many things, not all problems are susceptible to solution by design tinkering. For example, Ford hired design firm Ideo to reconceptualize the transport experience, leading them to do a side-by-side test of ride-hailing, transit and bike-share, to better understand user experience en route. What that misses is the way the density and layout of the urban environment determines how many trips we have to take, and what our options are. Too narrow a focus on optimizing the experience of getting from A to B often blinds to the importance of making sure that the As and Bs in our world are laid out in a way that minimizes the need to travel.

2. Why road pricing is inherently fair: It makes buses run faster. One of the most widespread myths in transportation policy is that pricing roads is harmful to the poor.  That argument ignores the fact that high income households are far more likely to be peak hour car drivers who might pay a toll, but more importantly, road pricing is the one fast-acting, sure fire way we have to make buses run faster–which disproportionately benefits low income riders.  The latest evidence for this come from Atlanta, where the implementation of priced lanes on Interstate 75 is enabling the state to shave 15 minutes off the scheduled travel time of buses. That has the added benefit of making bus travel more attractive and cheaper to deliver (a driver can carry more passengers per hour worked), potentially enabling transit dollars to provide more service.

Must read

1. Noah Smith on gentrification: Yes, some black neighborhoods in most US metro areas are seeing new white neighbors, as reported in the New York Times last month, while the reverse of the much noted white flight of previous decades, it’s still a tiny trickle.  And strikingly as Bloomberg’s Noah Smith reports, its not causing places to “tip” into majority white neighborhoods–neighborhoods that become more diverse tend to stay more diverse. Concentrated poverty is a much larger, and more pernicious problem than gentrification, yet as Smith argues:

This is dangerous, because excessive worry about the potential harms from gentrification might cause some policy makers to discourage investment in poor minority communities, out of fear of displacement. But discouraging that investment would cause many more problems than it would prevent.

2. The Frog Ferry Fantasy.  There’s a glib and glitzy proposal to initiate a ferry service between Vancouver Washington and Portland Oregon. The main roadways between the two cities are frequently congested at the rush hour, and the hope is that ferry boats can avoid crowded highways. Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker painstakingly describes the needed ingredients for successful urban ferry service: population and job density at ferry terminals, short, direct water routes, limited competition, and great interconnections with existing transit service. The proposed “Frog Ferry” would ply a circuitous 13-mile route along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, would take as long, or longer than current car trips, and have terminals distant from population and job concentrations and weak transit connections. (At 5.30 pm, this past Monday, Google Maps reported a car trip would take about 40 minutes, and transit less than 50 to travel between Portland’s waterfront park and downtown Vancouver; the Frog Ferry would need to make an improbable 20 knots or more just to equal that travel time dock-to-dock).  A careful reading of Walker’s analysis could save the City of Portland $200,000 the Mayor’s budget has proposed to chip in for a feasibility study.

3. The Highway Trust Fund is going broke even faster than we thought.  The Congressional Budget Office released new financial projections for the next decade, and now forecasts that the Highway Trust Fund will have a deficit of about 176 billion by Fiscal Year 2029.  The Eno Foundation’s Jeff Davis has a detailed examination of the forecasts. Overall, it is it clear that the claim that roads are paid for by users is a fiction–the Highway Trust Fund has been bailed out by more than $100 billion in the past, and looks on path to continue to need similar infusions into the indefinite future.  And of course, this is just the direct cost of building and maintaining roads, to say nothing of the prodigious external costs they create in injuries and deaths, pollution traffic congestion and the destruction of urban space.

4. Induced demand, yet another chapter. In Los Angeles, the state Department of Transportation spent five years and a billion dollars to add an additional travel lane to I-405 over the Sepulveda Pass, in yet another vain attempt to reduce traffic congestion by increasing freeway capacity. Just as with every other urban freeway expansion, it failed. Travel times on the wider I-405 are now even longer than they were before the project was built–the only thing that has increased is vehicle miles traveled and carbon emissions.  Curbed Los Angeles reports:

For four years, from 2015 to 2019, Inrix measured the length of commutes along the widened stretch of the 405 during a four-week period between January and February. In that time, average commutes in both the north and southbound directions worsened or stayed the same during all hours of the day. Average vehicle speeds also dropped or stayed the same during both peak- and non-peak-hour periods

New Knowledge

A Rosetta Stone for gentrification studies.  Rachel Bogardus Drew of Enterprise Community Partners has delivered a major boon to everyone who studies or tries to understand neighborhood change. While there are a host of studies of gentrification, and various statistical schemes for discerning which census tracts have gentrified, based on a look at changes in incomes, home prices, education levels and racial/ethnic composition, each author (it seems) has chosen their own data sources, time periods and–critically–definitions, to classify places as gentrifying or not.  Another frustration of many (though not all) such studies is that while they present their summary metro or national level conclusions, it’s hard to discern whether any particular neighborhood is classified as “gentrifying” or not.  The Babel surrounding gentrification makes it difficult to interpret the findings of individual studies, and almost impossible to sort out the varying claims made by different studies.

What Drew has done is take three major published studies on gentrification (one from Columbia’s Lance Freeman, a second from Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU and a third from McKinnish, Walsh and White, and using a common data set (one stretching from 1970 through 2010) to show how the different schemes classify city neighborhoods. Drew’s on-line comparison tool lets you select a metropolitan area, and see, side-by-side, how each of the three different definitions classify city census tracts, whether they’re eligible to gentrify (this definition varies by author, too) and whether in fact, they gentrified in a particular neighborhood.  A table integrated into the tool tells you how much agreement or overlap there is in the three definitions for the city and time period you’ve chosen.  In the graphic below, the darker colored tracts represented Washington DC neighborhoods that gentrified, according to each author, between 2000 and 2010; while lighter colored tracs are the areas “eligible” to gentrify.  It’s apparent that each definition produces a different set of places subject to gentrification.

There’s little doubt that the term gentrification is one of the most fractious and elastic terms in the social science.  A lack of clarity about how it is defined has contaminated the policy debate for decades.  Drew’s comparison tool is a terrific first step in sorting out the various assumptions, theories and claims that are often concealed by the technical workings of many academic studies.  As Drew takes pains to point out, her work doesn’t resolve the question of what constitutes the “right” definition of gentrification (good luck with that, everyone), but instead brings a degree of clarity to the debate that simply hasn’t existed before.  This is a genuinely useful bit of statistical work:  Going forward, anyone who offers up their own definition of gentrification and a statistical analysis of the phenomenon ought to figure out how to add their data and rubrics to this comparison tool.  Famously, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, with its parallel translations in Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphics was a key to deciphering previously opaque Egyptian symbol-writing.  Maybe this will serve the same purpose for gentrification research.

In the News

Archinect News summarized City Observatory’s commentary on all the things we blame for causing gentrification in an article entitled: “ABC’s of Gentrification.”

Correction:  The original version of this note incorrectly identified Rachel Bogardus Drew–our apologies for this error.

The most difficult design challenge is asking the right question

Not long ago, a feature article at the New York Times described how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future.

IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to a restaurant a few miles away via different transportation modes, so they could assess the challenges each faces: the subway (too smelly), Divvy bikeshare (too dirty), and Uber (too expensive).

The hope is this exercise sheds light on how will enable IDEO to brainstorm clever new ways to get from point A to point B in the future. (We’re pretty sure the solution will involve apps.)

In our view, this is an epic fail for several reasons. First, it just gets certain things wrong. For example, according to the article, one of IDEO’s big complaints about the subway was the lack of cellphone reception—a problem the CTA had already announced it would be fixing when they took their ride in October, with full coverage in all subways rolled out in December.

But there’s a more fundamental problem: Is the optimal place for a quick work lunch four miles from IDEO’s office? If it is, isn’t the real problem here that a company has located its office in a place where its employees have to travel four miles just to get lunch and have a meeting? And isn’t the restaurant’s problem that it’s located in a place where its customers are four miles away?

And in fact, IDEO has already solved this particular design problem for itself. Fork and Tine, the restaurant they chose, might be four miles away, but there are dozens and dozens of restaurants within a quick walk of its downtown offices. City Observatory’s Chicago bureau chief, Daniel Hertz, spent an afternoon walking around IDEO’s West Loop neighborhood to find a bite to eat in the name of research. A five minute walk in one direction is Greektown, where you can get a quick gyro or souvlaki. A few minutes north of there is Randolph Street, one of the premier dining destinations in the city, with everything from high-concept burgers to Indian curries. Or, just about ten minutes straight north of IDEO’s offices is the French Market food court at a major commuter rail station, a hugely popular workday lunch spot. Not to mention that you pass at least a couple places to eat on every block on your way to any of these destinations.

It’s not a coincidence that there’s so much to do within a quick walk of IDEO’s offices—that’s almost certainly a major reason they chose to locate in the West Loop. Indeed, it’s a big reason that Chicago’s downtown has seen a steady stream of companies opening new or relocated offices there.

In other words, the issue here has at least as much—if not much more—to do with the design of cities than the relatively superficial features of different transport modes.

With rows of restaurants down the street from the IDEO offices, they don’t have to travel at all, save to walk a few hundred feet, saving them bundles of valuable time. So being in a dense urban location turns out to be the optimal design solution: relying as it does on the healthiest, least expensive, lowest carbon and most fully deployed transport technology in human history: walking. IDEO already knows this: that’s why they pay premium rents for their tidy, exposed-brick office space in the West Loop.

One of the subsidiary tasks IDEO assigned its testers was schlepping a couple of large shopping bags—to simulate, in some way how a busy person might have to mix some domestic errands with their business lunch. Fair enough. But if one lived in a mixed use neighborhood, where there was say a corner store or bodega down the block, one might easily handle all one’s shopping with more frequent but much more convenient walking trips to buy just a handful of necessities, rather than having perforce to carry a week’s worth of groceries because it was several miles to the big box store.

If we think about it correctly, dense, mixed use urban spaces are the ultimate design solution to our transportation problems. They provide low-cost, no-carbon, time-saving access to all manner of things that consumers want and need in their daily lives.

The real failure in design thinking here is IDEO viewing this task as primarily choosing between different transportation modes. Of course, they are free to frame this question however they—and their paying client—would like. But from a broader policy perspective—and from the perspective of citizens and consumers, we’d all be a lot better off if we’d make the design conversation about how we arrange our cities. And the design lens is often blinded by the look and feel of things, rather than comprehending basic, systemic issues: the quality of bus service, for example, has much more to do with schedule frequency, and running times, than the features of the transit system’s arrival time notification app: we think bus riders would be much more impressed with buses that arrived every ten minutes and made the trip faster thanks to dedicated lanes, than they would be by an app that told them the next bus was exactly 22 minutes from now.

Just focusing on transportation ignores and rules out the very substantial gains that could be made by better designing our cities for living. It’s hard to get the right answers under the best of circumstances. It’s just impossible to get the right answers if you ask the wrong questions.

A version of this commentary originally appeared at City Observatory in February 2016.

Cities have always been about bringing people together and creating new ideas

Editor’s Note:  City Observatory Director Joe Cortright will be giving the Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture in Economics at Portland State University on Thursday, May 2.  His theme will be “Cities in the Knowledge Economy.” As a prelude to that lecture, we’re offering this 2015 commentary based on a visit to Athens.

Though the local economy is still in turmoil, Athens is still awash in the steady tramping of tourists.  Compared to your correspondent’s last visit to this city three decades ago, the distinguishing mark of tourism is no longer the long lines of foreigners looking to exchange deutsche marks, yen, pounds and travelers checks for drachmas, but rather the parade of latter day Narcissus, with smart phones appended from selfie-sticks dutifully capturing the ancient sights as backdrops of a digitized odyssey.

Credit: Galería de Faustino, Flickr

As ever, the Parthenon looms over the city, a visible reminder of the sublime accomplishments of the Ancient Greeks.  The building is a ravaged remnant of its former self, but is nonetheless majestic, and its image, like so much of what the Greeks created is still deeply imprinted on our collective conscious—which is probably why the city remains such a compelling destination.

The Greek original seems so familiar because it has been so widely copied. In my own American hometown, as in countless others, the headquarters of the local bank copies in proportions, details and material the design of the Parthenon—it is the temple of money.

But the imprint of Greek culture on current life, of course, runs much deeper than architecture.  So many of the concepts that guide or define modern life were either devised or at least given names here:  our notions of democracy, the polity, the agora, as well as enduring contributions to art, science and mathematics.  And Greece was fundamentally structured as a series of city-states.  The Greek nation was a purely modern invention; Ancient Greece was always a constantly shifting, often warring set of cities, occasionally–but always temporarily–welded together by invading empires (or the threat of invasion).

As Ed Glaeser says in Triumph of the City, cities are mankind’s greatest creation.  And much, though certainly not all, of what we treasure about cities can trace its routes to the city-states of this region, most notably Athens.  But there was a flowering of cities in this part of the world two to three millennia ago.

Some of the earliest known human settlements trace their roots to this region, in fact.  As Jane Jacobs famously relates in her book The Economy of Cities, the excavation of one particularly ancient settlement Catal Huyuk, in Asia Minor—modern day Turkey—provides a compelling insight into the importance of cities to civilization.

The generally received wisdom about cities is that urbanization and permanent settlements were the accidental, or perhaps incidental by-product of improvements in agriculture:  that our hunter-gatherer ancestors stumbled upon or made some advances in crop raising that led them to settle permanently in some locations, and that as agricultural productivity improved, people had more time for alternate pursuits and managed to develop other skills.  Jacobs turns this agriculture-led creation myth on its head.

In her imaginative tale of how things could have happened, Jacobs describes the development of a settlement she calls New Obsidian, which begins as a place of assembly for nomadic groups where bartering of diverse commodities and crafts, leads to the establishment of a permanent settlement. The settlement then becomes a place, not just for trade, but also for animal husbandry, inadvertent cross-pollination of grains, the refinement of crafts and tool making, and ultimately increasingly sophisticated production. In Jacobs’ story, the creation of “new work” in cities leads to higher productivity in agriculture and stimulates development.

Ultimately, that process of developing more advanced technology, more complex economies, successively larger cities and the institutions needed to organize and govern them led to the city-states whose remnants we see today, in places like Athens. And that process continues apace today.  Cities are even today steadily creating the “new work” that propels economic growth and improves our standard of living.  There’s little reason to believe this process has reached its culmination.

As Paul Romer provocatively argues, we should be thinking about new cities as a way to tackle the problems of improving the living standards of the billions of people who still lag the most advanced nations. In his proposal for “Charter Cities” Romer argues for innovative institutional arrangements that would allow for experimentation with policies to deal with development, transportation, criminal justice and global warming.  Romer comes to cities from an interesting perspective:  in the 1980s, he authored two seminal papers on “New Growth Theory” that pointed to our ability to continually create new ideas as the driving force behind long term economic growth.  In recent years, he’s turned his attention to cities as the venue for devising new institutions that can easily give rise to and apply new ideas.  You can read a recent interview with Romer here.

There’s much glib talk of “Smart Cities” with an excessive focus on how new technologies – from the so-called “Internet of Things” to autonomous vehicles will reshape city life.  It is likely that these things will emerge, evolve  and be applied in cities.  And it will be the cities that bring people together, that promote the free flow of ideas, that exhibit a certain democracy in their affairs, that are likely to be the most successful in realizing these technologies.  And while the technologies would amaze the ancient Greeks, the kind of values that such a community would embody would not seem unfamiliar to them.