Jason Segedy tweeted the image below contrasting the amount of urbanized land in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County in 1948 vs. 2002. The county population was identical in both years: 1.39 million.
I’m not a hater on suburbanization. Growing populations require new urbanized land on the fringes. But when population growth is flat or negative in a region, which is the case in Cleveland and many Rust Belt cities, then sprawl has negative effects.
One of the them is the Chuck Banas quip that Buffalo has the same number of people, but three times as much stuff. When you double or triple your urban footprint, the cost of upkeep soars because you are paying to maintain and provide services to a lot more stuff. As we can richer as a society, we can afford to have more and nicer stuff. But it’s hard to make the argument that his has been the case of late in many of these Rust Belt cities where new suburban expansion continues to take place.
Another is that it puts downward price pressure on older developments through filtering. If you keep building new homes but you aren’t adding households, then older homes at the bottom of the scale will be abandoned. And all up the stack homes are devalued. This helps explain why even many inner suburban neighborhoods are falling into serious decay.
As a rough heuristics, development of new suburban footprint should largely be limited to the growth rate in households to avoid saddling a region with excess fixed cost.
I wonder what the average household size was in 1948 versus 2002. I suspect some of the sprawl is due to households having fewer children, and the number of single adults increasing. Also, given the increase in women in the labor force, the ratio of adults with income versus those without has probably also increased.
Great question. I pulled Census data on this issue for Cleveland and several other cities a couple years ago. I have the city data, not for Cuyahoga County, but in 1950 Cleveland’s average household size was 3.43. In 2010 it was 2.37. In 1950 Cleveland had a *1.7%* vacancy rate with only 4,546 vacant units out of nearly 271,000 housing units. In 2010 Cleveland had only 207,000 housing units but had a *19.3%* vacancy rate with more than 40,000 vacant units.
That pendulum swung way, way the other way, and it’s one reason I caution YIMBYists who want more homes built ASAP. Suburban development was the preferred pattern that emptied out and destabilized cities beginning in 1950. Urban revitalization could be the preferred pattern that empties and destabilizes suburbs today.
You are right that the YIMBY “build more houses” thing isn’t a one size fits all solution. It is the right solution in places where there is enormous unsatisfied demand (New York, San Fran, Boston, DC, Seattle). It is probably also a good idea to get more home building moving in cities where there is moderate current demand, but a potential for a future housing crunch unless more sprawl starts happening (Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, most of the Sun Belt). But there are a lot of cities with lots of empty housing stock, namely in the Rust Belt; Cleveland is certainly a good example. In those cities, the effort should be on moving jobs into the city limits to fire up housing demand.
I recently found redlining maps of Cleveland (and Columbus) from the 1930s. Shockingly, It appeared that more than half the city of Cleveland was redlined. Given the redlining and general disinvestment during the depression and WW2, It’s not surprising that so many people moved to the suburbs and abandoned the city once the automobile and highways made new greenfield development in the suburbs accessible and desirable. Now Greater Cleveland, with its stagnant and aging population has huge infrastructure maintenance costs it is unable to afford. It’s creating a negative feedback loop for economic development in that region.
I neglected to comment on the household size data after I referenced it. Yes, suburbia exploded right at the time that Cleveland and cities like it were bursting at the seams. But no one back then could anticipate the other demographic changes that impacted both cities and suburbs — declining marriage rates, rising divorce rates, declining fertility rates, longer life spans — all of which contribute to smaller household sizes. The new context will soon mean that suburbia, at least the Rust Belt version of it, could be viewed as vastly overbuilt and poorly suited to serve the always-evolving needs of buyers and renters. Many of our big cities were able to make a comeback because their housing stock was adaptable; suburbia was built for a particular time and economy and may not hold up as well.
I agree that you have to take declining household size into account in figuring out how many housing units a certain population “should” require. One would have expected at least 30% sprawl over the 60 years even if the prewar compact form had been extended outward…but we all know it wasn’t.
This is actually an argument _for_ the Rust Belt. In the older rust belt cities like Cleveland and Saint Louis and Detroit, there is a much higher ratio of pre-auto neighborhoods to suburban neighborhoods than in Dallas or Atlanta. In 30-50 years, those Sun Belt cities will start to undergo their own problems with decaying suburbs, and they won’t have old grided city blocks to fall back on. If Cleveland and the like can start making an investment in the infrastructure of their formerly dense city areas, they might find themselves much more relatively attractive in 2050.
I don’t know how true this in all Sunbelt cities, or how true it will be 30-50 years from now, but at least where I live in the Sunbelt schools districts are almost entirely organized at the county level, as opposed to the Rust Belt, where they are organized at the municipal level. What this means is that the schools are of a more uniform quality; there aren’t as many superstar schools, but generally speaking the schools are good enough no matter where you live in the county. So that forms at least one impediment to a large scale back to the city (back to north) movement of people to dense neighborhoods in the Rust Belt. There are also the pension costs. While it varies from state to state and city to city, there are definitely parts of the Sunbelt where pension costs aren’t an issue (the state where I live has a 93% funded ratio, which is likely due to the fact that most of its growth has been in the past few decades and so most government employees have retirement accounts, not pensions).
At what density can we afford to maintain the infrastructure of the suburbs? Especially if family size is going down – although the average incomes may be level or higher among the pre-senior set. Maybe the suburbs cannot grow even at the rate of population growth unless they are dense or there is offsetting density built elsewhere to equal out the cost of sprawl.
How will, or have, the unsustainable costs of sprawl become part of popular understandings? That is, how will a workable majority of Americans come to understand that density isn’t a socialist ideological exercise in control that must be escaped to breathe the sweet air of freedom but is instead a competitive advantage in a market economy? For example, do people understand that New York is successful BECAUSE of it’s density?
…and its history, and its wealth. It CONTINUES to be successful because of all three also.
Having lived through the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era, I’d assert that the success of NYC was never a foregone conclusion. What if all the big investment banks and NYSE had moved to Jersey or Connecticut in the late 70s?
the wealth was possible because of the density. It has a history of density. Density isn’t a coincidence. It’s the cause. There was nothing inevitable about New York’s rise and continued dominance any more than there was something inevitable about Detroit’s collapse.
I would suspect that it will happen when denser municipalities offer lower taxes and higher levels of service and better schools.
Increasingly the do offer these things. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/school-choice-may-be-accelerating-gentrification/555971/
Why DIDN’T finance leave NYC? Was it because they COULDN’T replicate the dense web of expertise in New Jersey or Conneticut that they had in NYC? Things were bad in the 70s, in NYC. I’d argue they didn’t leave because they couldn’t leave. Density was just too powerful even when confronted by the combined power of the suburban industrial complex at its peak.
Honestly, it was probably more inertia than anything. Investment banking was not yet the go-go province; the old Glass-Steagal banks were conservative institutions.
The Hedge Fund decamp to Greenwich, CT did not occur until the early 2000 when fund managers sought state border arbitrage, shorter commutes and fear of another 9-11. Those tax advantages have thinned (considerably) and newer shinier locales (upper South Florida) as well as Manhattan habe been gaining back these HQs.
The 00’s decamp was early internet buzz: I can do this from anywhere. Some guys moved to ranches in Montana, too.
My original point was about a day when cities were disfavored by elites and everybody else, it seemed. It was a different era but still within my lifetime, all about suburban growth. To the extent anyone worried about it, it was couched as “loss of tax base”, not loss of urbanity.
Plenty of (growth) companies established light manufacturing, distribution, and office facilities in suburban office or industrial parks in the 70s, and indeed, part of the decision tree was “shorter less aggravating commutes to downtown”. The big computer companies (the Google, Apple, and FB of their day) were in that vanguard; there were never any “IBM Towers” since IBM moved its HQ to Armonk in the 60s. That’s a significant contributor to Silicon Valley being suburban…the “original” Fairchild, RCA and AT&T Labs, Philco, Univac and Xerox PARC guys all worked in suburban environments before Silicon Valley in the 60s. So why didn’t finance leave town too and follow their customers?
In the late 70s, when I was still in school learning about economics and finance, “high leverage” for most was 2:1 or 3:1 debt to equity ratios. (Not the 10:1 and higher that became standard in the LBO era just 10 years later.) Investment banking was still clubby and well-lubricated, so being near the NYSE, The Downtown Club and Ye Olde Walnut Paneled Steakhouse was important to the bankers. And “talent attraction” wasn’t the thing…almost everyone in those days grew their own by starting Ivy League men on the partner track and weeding out the ones who didn’t fit. Conservatism and inertia kept them in Manhattan, IMO.
the “inertia” of density
No. The inertia of sunk cost and “we’ve always done it this way”.
They were lucky that their disruption by the Barbarians at the Gates (Milken, Boesky, Icahn, KKR, et. al.) came pre-Internet.
Yes, they’d sunk their costs into density and they had always “done it” densely. They didn’t believe ‘it’ could be done differently. What didn’t happen can never explain what did happen.
It could very well have gone either way in the late 70s is, and continues to be, my point. Density was not the first, second, or third thing on their list. Proximity, maybe, but the two are not the same thing.
We’ll never know what could have happened, just what did happen. What’s the difference between proximity and density?
It’s like the difference in zoning between density and intensity.
One refers only to the built environment. The other refers to the human activity that takes place in a space.
Density means a lot of building floor in a given space.
Intensity means how many people use a space at once.
Disney World is not a high-density place but it is used intensely. Likewise a still-active suburban mall.
It’s possible to live or work in a low-density environment and be in proximity of other companies, experts, or amenities. As in a suburban “research park” setting such as Research Triangle.
I’m not convinced. Intensity and density seem two sides of the same coin to me. The movement of tech from silicon valley to SF was in search of increased intensity that could not be found in silicon valley because it lacked the density.
But Silicon Valley has been there for almost 50 years as a web of suburban office parks, as has been Research Triangle and Route 128. The VCs weren’t pushing people to go to SF or Raleigh or Boston; that’s a lifestyle thing that is much more recent and I think it is utterly unrelated to the business case and more related to manager and employee preference apart from business.
So, density IS a con. It IS a fad and a fraud that cannot sustain itself. Dallas, Atlanta, and Nashville are where to look for real and sustained economic growth.
My point is that it’s a lifestyle preference, not some fixed law of economics. This follows from the economic and social research showing that people are not necessarily rational actors.
> As a rough heuristics, development of new suburban footprint should largely be limited to the growth rate in households to avoid saddling a region with excess fixed cost.
LVT, VMT. Now.