Former Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut used to like to say that “you can’t be a suburb of nowhere.” This is the oft-repeated notion has been a rallying cry for investments to revitalize downtowns in America for three decades or so now. The idea being that you can’t have a smoking hole in your region where your downtown is supposed to be. This created a mental based on a donut. You can’t let downtown become an empty hole. For reason that will become apparent soon, I call this model “the old donut”:
These efforts have paid off to a certain degree. Most big city downtowns have done very well as entertainment and visitor districts, eds and meds centers, etc. More recently we’ve seen an influx of residents, even in places where the overall city or even region has struggled or declined. Cleveland added about 4,000 net new downtown residents in the 2000s. St. Louis added 3,000. With most cities in some stage of an apartment building spree consisting of a few thousand units, these numbers should only improve.
Key weaknesses remain in private sector employment (declining in most places) and retail (not enough high income residents yet). And other than the tier one types of cities like Chicago, few places seem to have reached a sustainable market rate development level yet – pretty much everything is getting public assistance. Yet its pretty evident that most larger downtowns have made huge strides and are experiencing overall reasonable health.
In short, the donut hole has been filled in. Where does that leave us? I’d argue with a paradigm I call “the new donut”:
You see this in the population figures. Wendell Cox cranked the numbers and found that major metro areas gained 206,000 residents in the two mile radius from the center, but lost 272,000 residents from the 2-5 mile ring. Growth picked up strongly beyond that arc. This is the new donut area, though the start and end of it vary by metro and some have thicker rings of challenge than others.
We’ve got three decades of experience in downtown revitalization, but much less in dealing with this newer challenge zone. I’ve said that suburban revitalization may prove to be the big 21st century “urban” challenge. This is where it is happening in many cases. These areas have an inferior housing stock (often small post-war worker cottages or ranches), sometimes poor basic infrastructure, and are sometimes independent municipalities that, like Ferguson, MO, are often overlooked unless something really bad happens. Unlike the major downtown, they are often “out of sight, out of mind” for most regional movers and shakers.
What’s more, while downtown provides a concentrated location for massive public investment, this more spread out area is too big to fix by throwing money at it. And how many stadiums and convention centers does a region need in any event?
This is where we need to be doing a lot of thinking about how to bring these places back, look at what’s being done, etc. And also, given the inequality in the country, to try to think about ideas that don’t involve gentrification. One project that appears to be in this kind of zone, for example, is Atlanta’s Beltline project, though there’s a gentrifying aspect to this one. Regions that figure this one out will be at a big advantage going forward.
This is a challenge that Nashville is experiencing. Most of our pre-WWII neighborhoods are seeing significant resurgence and gentrification. This is pushing lower-income households to 1950 – 1980 suburban environments. Our bus system has difficulty covering these areas in an exhaustive manner such that a car is a necessity for groceries, work, etc.. We are also a low-tax environment that fights infrastructure projects like bus-rapid transit. So it will require some strong leadership to guide our city to equitable efforts. Our planning department is an active leader in seeking ways to retrofit suburban environments – and that is very encouraging.
Unlike the inner cities, many of the older, inner-ring suburbs lack the critical mass of management skills and philanthropic funding needed to diagnose problems and carry out innovative solutions. Like the inner cities the preceding three decades, many pursue me-too strategies, notably town centers that appeal to community pride but often lack a basis in market demand. Most notably, many lack the jobs that both bolster commercial property values and provide the lunch trade necessary for mid-priced restaurants. In an age when most people get their entertainment off the net, movie theaters are not going to do it, either. The only real solution is to think competitively, to focus on the skills and interests of the people who work there, and to leverage whatever regional location advantages they have.
Houston faces this issue in spades. Vast, vast areas of 1950s to 1980s (or some in cases even more recently built) suburban areas in the “middle ring” are essentially totally unappealing to educated professionals, who have been moving here in droves to fill well-paid jobs. The schools in the middle ring, except for a narrow corridor directly west from downtown to the outer ring, are almost uniformly low-performing – this is the biggest problem that keeps them from attracting higher income and more well-educated households. Plus some of these areas have a significant crime problem, or are perceived to. Thus most educated households, if their workers are employed in the urban core, prefer to drive 20-30 miles to the outer ring so they can be among folks more like them (heaven forbid their kids attend school with working-class children).
Over time the undesirable middle ring seems to be subsuming areas of the outer ring, prompting housing growth for educated professionals to locate even further out rather than closer to the urban core. There’s a great deal of existential fear among outer ring residents that their neighborhoods could become middle ring, forcing them (at least they feel they’re forced) to flee to the exurbs.
This all has a huge follow-on effects for office and retail uses, as the better, higher-tax-generating stuff continues to move out to the outer ring, while the middle ring deteriorates with little hope, except for the portions adjacent to the urban core / inner ring that might have a chance at gentrifying.
How does this play out politically? In Cincinnati the hostility toward downtown/midtown neighborhoods that are receiving a sea change in investment from inner suburbanites is intense. Will inner suburbanites seek to tear down increasingly successful inner areas or create more
Aaron, I wonder if the big cities such as New York, Philadelphia (its Northeast has a large Levittown belt), LA (San Fernando Valley), Chicago (bungalow belt), or the newer consolidated cities such as Jacksonville, Nashville, Louisville, and Indy will be the laboratories for this issue?
This is certainly one reason I work in community development in one of Indy’s (unconsolidated) middle suburbs. Our field has a grip on how to rebuild/gentrify the close-in urban form neighborhoods. Middle ring 50s suburban, not so much.
Rehabilitating older suburbs is an enormous issue, but I see the suburbs dividing more into sectors than rings (the favored quarter phenomenon). In Washington & LA it’s east vs west, on Long Island north shore vs south shore, in San Francisco coastal counties vs east bay.
Chris, Ben: New York already has this issue. It doesn’t have much of a favored quarter pattern – or, rather, it has three separate favored quarters (due north to Westchester and Fairfield Counties, northeast to the North Shore, and due west from South Orange westward), in addition to some rich suburbs in Bergen County. And even in the favored quarter directions, there’s often a lot of outer-urban poverty: between Manhattan and Westchester lies the South Bronx, and between Manhattan and South Orange lies Newark. The rule is that both the inner and outer limits of the poverty ring are expanding outward, so in that sense there is a donut problem.
Myron Orfield has been working on this issue in the Twin Cities since the early 1990’s, organizing a caucus of inner-city suburban legislators to push for redirection of capital spending away from favored-quarter suburbs like Minnetonka, where the spending on a single freeway interchange can vastly outweigh the total spending in older places. Sometimes older places can argue for money through the metropolitan transportation commissions of their regions, which allocate state and federal dollars and which usually include representatives of every municipality. The real authority of Portland’s regional government comes from this power of the purse.
Could one strategy be to acknowledge that many of these most troubled inner ring suburbs (even single-family detached residential dominated streetcar suburbs) are some of the earliest products of complete stasis in development due to zoning regulations? It seems that no matter how depressed these places get, it’s still too expensive to demolish/redevelop/renovate most of these homes to the same low level of density to which they were built, because greenfield economics don’t apply anymore. Thus the only place to go is up, but that’s not allowed because of zoning.
I won’t pretend that’s the only issue, but allowing more infill, apartments, townhouses, etc., might be just enough to prime the pump in these neighborhoods, so to speak. If that’s not the issue at all, then nobody will take advantage of the upzoning anyway, so no harm no foul.
Jeffrey:
I think the issue is less zoning than perception of investment potential, both personal, among homeowners, and professional, among real estate investors. To be worth the time and money, there needs to be significant upside. When a community seems to be sliding down, there’s no reason to look farther at individual properties.
Totally agree, Aaron. Great analogy. It’s certainly better than having a huge hole in the middle, but still presents problems and challenges.
In fact, it may be that urban neighborhoods will in the future go like many fads have-in the 60’s Victorian housing was considered gaudy, now it’s classic. Mid-century Modern is all the rage in furniture the past few years-the housing stock hasn’t quite come around yet, but maybe in another 20 years folks will look at those little cape cod bungalows as charming. After all, the demographics are changing, and many smaller families and singles may see value in those middle ring areas, especially as prices in downtowns keep going up.
Unfortunately the quality of the construction of some of these postwar housing tracts was questionable. I don’t think throwing a stadium in these areas make them better. I think they will need different solutions.
I would quibble that the exurbs have highly varying quality in housing, so some areas may have very high end “country estate” properties that are not low quality. In big cities these still face challenges due to higher gas prices.
We are seeing this trend here in the Quad-Cities, which is by no means a large urban area. However, downtown Davenport is seeing unprecedented residential growth – most of it actually market rate at this point – and has about 500 more units coming on line in the next two years (in a city of almost exactly 100,000). This is being followed up by the long-awaited return of some new Class A office sites in the works.
Meantime, the far north and eastern portions of the city are also seeing good single-family home growth as well as new office complexes.
But the neighborhoods in between downtown and the edge are continuing to deteriorate. That includes both older neighborhoods AND formerly busy commercial districts. Adding to the problem, no one seems to have a good, coherent plan to address this secondary donut.
Thanks for the article.
I would quibble that the exurbs have highly varying quality in housing, so some areas may have very high end “country estate” properties that are not low quality. In big cities these still face challenges due to higher gas prices.
I agree about varying quality. But I think Aaron may have been referring to the “drive til you qualify” exurban subdivisions, which have large houses (in terms of square footage) that may have been above the median new-house selling price when built, but which are cheaply built nonetheless (brick half of the front side, the rest vinyl).
I don’t know about Columbus, but Indy’s far-out exurbs seem to have at least as many units of that sort as of true “high end” estate-type houses. As in Columbus, those exurban estate houses have to compete with the favored quarters inside the outer belt (in Columbus, Upper Arlington, Worthington, Bexley; in Indy, Meridian Kessler, Butler Tarkington, Meridian Hills, Irvington). Except for Detroit, there aren’t many examples of these sorts of high-end places falling off a cliff in value.
By contrast, the low-quality exurbs of today simply replace their counterparts one ring in…they don’t have real competition because the new ones today have “better” schools and newer strip malls. For 10 or 20 years.
@Tory Brecht, from what I’ve seen “market rate” descriptions tend to refer to the rents being charged (i.e, not to low income renters under special affordable housing subsidies), not the lack of a government subsidy. Though I’m sure those involved are happy if people assume that’s the case.
Correct, many of the downtown projects here have involved Tax Increment Financing and other incentives. However, I’d argue that in these cases, it has most often been a wholly appropriate use of such incentives, as this was a downtown area nearly destroyed by the urban exodus in the 70s and 80s, and compounded here by the dual shocks of the farm crisis and the general hit to “rust belt” areas. However, several of what would be considered ex-urb areas here have used TIF for large, cheaply built single-family home tracts in greenfields, which I find abhorrent.
Re “estate exurbs”: gas prices won’t even hurt them. Wealthy and high-income people can afford hybrid luxury SUVs and Priuses. They can keep their gasoline spending constant with mileage improvements gained through vehicle replacement.
@Chris Barnett
I think places like Bexley have more going for them than just higher housing quality. Often one also has a better street grid and enough mixed use density to (Or partly support) support local shopping districts.
Poor quality housing can be slowly upgraded if the general community design has appealing qualities.
Most likely, poor quality older housing stock, reflects a place where people haven’t bothered to upgrade.
I live in one of the new donut holes — Oak Lawn, Ill., which borders the cops-and-firefighters Chicago neighborhood of Mount Greenwood, and is surrounded by other white-flight suburbs that originally blew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Oak Lawn is not distinctive in a way that other inner-ring burbs like Oak Park, LaGrange, Evanston and Skokie are, but it’s holding its own relatively well. It might help that it’s larger (50-55,000 people, historically), has a major hospital in its borders (Advocate Christ, the major trauma center for the South Side) and has kept its standing as a retail center (particularly for cars) for the area. Also, Oak Lawn (like a lot of Chicago suburbs) makes you pay a tax if you sell your house and buy another outside of town, so that might have put the brakes on some moves. Still, it faces the same challenges of aging housing and infrastructure that any other inner-ring suburb has to deal with, along with major six-lane main streets that bull through town.
However, one break for some of these suburbs has been the housing crisis. Now that it’s not so easy to trade up, you have people staying, or people considering your town instead of someplace farther out because you’re more affordable. It seems like if you have a suburban government with some vision, you can take advantage of this to attract people to move in.
Assuming your suburb hasn’t completely fallen apart, you can highlight that (despite the stroads) you have walkable neighborhoods with sidewalks. Unlike with, say, city of Chicago schools, you have access to a decent education without sweating out the process of testing/charter/neighborhood school reshuffling. If you want to go downtown, you have relatively easy access by train or bus.
I’m not confident, though, that a lot of suburban governments can put together this kind of vision. While Oak Lawn from time to time has done a good job with that, the infighting, small-time rivalries and favoritism can get so toxic it’s hard to get a vision together. It also requires being ready to accept some changes, and an inner-ring suburb still full of many who remember fleeing to get away from black people shudder when anyone mentions the word “change.”
Oak Lawn could reach that echelon if its particular Metra line (Southwest Service on Norfolk Southern tracks) had better Weekend/non-peak service. The bones of TOD are very strong south of 95th near that station. Not sure if the design template fits the overall climate, but the 95th corridor from Ridgeland on toward Pulaski reminded me of the Dadeland Mall area in SW Miami, with the Target-in-a-garage and the more contemporary storefront styles. Might it be that Oak Lawn, in choosing this “sunnier” facade, resigned itself to a less stark form of “change” (Middle Easterners – who actually have moved even more southwesterly since they came on the scene in the 1980s), Hispanics instead of blacks)?
Anchor institutions…hospitals and colleges and museums…will be crucial. Especially a busy 24/7 hospital, as these provide a ready investor in growth, services, and amenities as well as a pool of potential residents.
Atomic ranches have gained a bit of hipness over the last decade. ’60s kitsch, done right, is cool. So there’s that. I also think we need to reach a point where we’re allowed to view the abundant space in older suburbs as an opportunity. Right now, zoning is too strict, but eventually struggling suburbs will be forced to drop the pretensions.
Inner ring strip malls usually aren’t all that different in form than a single-story urban retail strip, for example, EXCEPT there is a parking lot in front. That parking lot is open space we can use for all sorts of creative ends if we view it as an asset for people instead of cars. You could have a grocery store with its own urban farm in front, and an infill apartment. Already, we’ve been seeing old malls and strip malls converted into semi-urban lifestyle centers – perhaps we just need to be bolder.
Inner ring suburbs have oodles of untapped potential, I think. You usually have fairly good proximity to the urban core, and density levels aren’t so low as to be unsalvageable. Imagine if we stopped treating front yards as labor intensive plots of grass, and instead took an Olmsted approach and considered how we could create lawns appropriate to the natural environment that simultaneously allowed nature to do the heavy lifting. I think you could create some really beautiful settings.
Bottom line is, we built the inner ring suburbs, so we have to figure out a way to deal with it. Just like we built urban neighborhoods and had to find a solution for those areas as American tastes changed. We have no choice if we want sustainable urban areas.
Philadelphia is also experiencing this new donut hole effect. inner Northeast Philly and West Oak Lane are changing with white flight (replaced by new immigrants) also some of the inner suburbs in DelCo and lower Bucks county. As well as towns bordering Camden like Pennsauken, with the exception of Collingswood.
Levittown Pa is now a mix between poor whites and blacks with the roads poorly maintained. Willingboro (Levittown) NJ changed decades ago from middle class white to poorer black. It never did very well do to its poor out of the way location.
All this is occurring while Center City (downtown) is booming with expensive new housing, retail, restaurants, office buildings, and new ped infrasture. The growth of downtown is pushing out in all the directions and making once undesirable neighborhoods middle class and attractive. This growth is improving the city’s finances and increasing the overall population, for the first time in decades.
I believe that the real problem at play here isn’t so much a failure of urban planning or gentrification, but the failure of our economic system to provide good working class jobs. All urban planners and architects know how to do is make an area attractive to live, and perhaps affordable. Beyond that, it’s up to the business community and economists to fix the problems of poverty.
It’s no surprise that the poor are finding themselves living in the unpopular neighborhoods. It makes sense. Perhaps it disappoints some urban planners because they mistakenly conflated their profession with social work. They thought they were addressing the “problems” of the inner city by making it more desirable. But they weren’t.
Fixing those sorts of problems means creating well-paying working class jobs. Density and walkability have nothing to do with that.
Interesting discussion, with lots of great insight. I would agree with those who mention zoning issues (Indy is finally revising its codes after 45 years), economic issues and issues of race. I would argue that an economy that produces more wealth across the board and raises more people out of poverty would be a great place to start. A citizenry that doesn’t feel compelled to flee when black people show up would help as well. In other words, less fear and more fairness.
But this is the real world, right? Still, Aaron is smart to raise the issue and open a discussion of what is becoming not a new problem but a problem that has only moved to a new zip code and proliferated. While many of our gentrification projects can work wonders for one area, the poor and/or blacks they displace have to go somewhere. And that somewhere is usually to the inner-ring suburbs. But that shouldn’t relegate them to the dustbin. We should care what happens in their neighborhoods (as evidenced, thankfully, by discussions on this board) and how those neighborhoods reflect on and interact with our cities as a whole. After all, a city is the sum of its parts.
If we as a society (individually and through our government structures) were to put as much effort into helping people of all kinds climb out of poverty (instead of demonizing them) and truly supported equal opportunity for all, we would go a long way toward addressing these kinds of issues. Yes, that would, in many cases, require political solutions, but I’m not here to argue politics.
I believe most people want to succeed and to live in a nice, safe neighborhood. And, thankfully, we see evidence of that in lots of places. But we need to value and encourage those efforts as much as we value our TIF districts and $250 million road projects.
I’ve worked extensively on revitalization strategies for various “first ring” suburban areas in the Sacramento area, including Rancho Cordova and Foothill Farms there. These are relatively easy to get to, have small homes that are about right for today’s budgets, and few parks or social amenities, to say nothing of the latest chain restaurants. The big challenge I’ve seen is the multiplicity of service districts. Even if the city wants to do something about it, and has the power of and capacity for tax increment financing that can make infrastructure investments, the city usually has no control over the schools, and it is generally the schools that make or break these places. Homeowners, in looking at where to buy, and perhaps raise their families, don’t make the same distinction that government agencies do, about where the money comes from or who makes decisions to spend it. To the homeowner, it is all one tax bill, and a “package” of public services. That package includes not only fire, police and schools, but also parks, recreation, senior services, libraries, highways and transit service, sewer and water, community colleges, economic development and even social services. Big, well run cities (yes, there are a few of these), have an easier time collaring the quality control on all these services, particularly when this involves bringing back a central city neighborhood with few social or educational needs. Providing the same good package of public services in a first-ring suburb probably requires getting three or more public agencies to prioritize the area and change how they do business.
Chicago mostly has sectors instead of rings, but one interesting exception is that you can see the “new donut” entirely within the western suburbs.
Instead of downtown, you have a few pre-war suburbs with good public transit (some of them are even on the L) and high density. Oak Park, of course, and Forest Park, which in many ways is an economy Oak Park. Berwyn(!) is apparently a trendy place to live now, and Riverside has always been elite. Cicero is the exception, but it works really, really hard to be as terrible as it is (thank you Larry Dominick!).
Head west across the river and things start to get dire. Maywood and Bellwood are essentially an extension of the West Side ghetto that jumped over the now-trendy (and historically racist and exclusionary, though the current residents would disavow it) inner suburbs. Problems are starting to spread to some of the neighboring communities – Broadview and Berkeley come to mind. Even in La Grange, an elite community that hasn’t seen much in the way of demographic, economic or crime change, they’re starting to panic (source: my idiot, loudmouth, racist second cousin and her friends).
Cross another line – the Cook-DuPage county line – and everything seems to be fine again. The corporate campus cluster/pox upon the earth that is Oak Brook provides jobs, there are big houses, lower taxes and everybody’s fine with driving everywhere.
Starting from the lake it’s donut (downtown), hole (the West Side), donut (transit suburbs), hole (aging Cook suburbs with poor transit), donut (middle-ring suburbia with big new houses and corporate campus jobs). There’s more past that but I don’t know what.
The weird thing is that some southern cities formerly known for sprawl are doing a better job at adopting inner ring suburbs.
Atlanta’s Belt Line revives an inner loop area about the same distance from downtown as Indy’s troubled neighborhoods. Fears about apartments, mixed use and density seem to be slim.
I think, metro Atlanta ranked higher than Pittsburgh in walkability since about half of all new development is considered pedestrian friendly.
The DC area pretty much leads in regional TOD development.
Hysterical attachment to Euclidean zoning seems to be more common in the Midwest.
I’m a little surprised, Aaron hasn’t posted on this.
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/study-atlanta-ranks-no-8-for-walkable-areas/
DC’s metro was ranked higher than NY for walkable urbanism.
“Atlanta comes in eighth place. And that’s not all. Our region is ranked No. 5 for future walkability, indicating a demand for denser development and redevelopment both intown and in the suburbs.”
Atlanta scored above Pittsburgh, where walkablity is concentrated in the city.
Based on development trends the study predicts Atlanta will jump to the fifth most walkable metro in the country.
“More interesting than the current rankings are the projections for future pedestrian-centered development. “This is the most significant trend in development since the movement toward drivable suburbs in the 1950s,” said Christopher Leinberger of LOCUS during a briefing call with reporters yesterday. In Atlanta, for example, 50 percent of the hotel, retail, office, and apartment space developed between 2009 and 2013 was in walkable areas,”
Amazingly, the study seems to drop Chicago out of the top 10 future walkable metros.
The “new donut” is a good analogy for the Cleveland area. Fixing the outer areas of Cleveland proper, the neighborhoods furthest from downtown, will be extremely difficult. For example, even though billions have been thrown into the Cleveland public school system, it continues to suffer the consequences of serving mostly impoverished neighborhoods. This forces many families to move to the inner-ring suburbs where the schools and crime are not quite as bad.
The problem of poor schools, poverty, and crime has slowly moved out, only a few suburbs (Shaker Hts., Cleve Hts., Lakewood) have been able to hold their property values and even then not everywhere. They’ve done this with strict zoning and significantly increased taxes (property and income) to support strong police/fire/EMS departments. Even tactics like outlawing home for-sale signs have been used – although eventually overturned by court order. Another commonly used tactic is the point of sale inspection – you want to sell your home, fine, you fix $4000 worth of sidewalks and exterior/interior deficiencies and then you can sell.
So Aaron’s challenge is how to fix this ever-widening ring of despair. We have seen that throwing billions at the problem (school levies, property taxes, income taxes, federal monies) and waiting decades for “solutions” to take hold – has not worked. I could list two dozen Cleveland suburbs where this problem has worsened in the last 30 years. These problems were attacked by politically powerful and smart people – and yet they have failed.
My only idea is to maintain tighter control on infrastructure extensions (water, gas, electric, sewer, roads.) If you want to move further away from the density of the urban core then you must pay a higher price to extend the infrastructure. A much higher price, as in you pay for the roads, power poles, etc. I also think we need much stricter EPA standards on stormwater collection that are enforced both by the Federal and State EPAs. Until we see something like this, we might as well build another stadium – at least we get something for our money.
Aaron – as you suggested, this one’s not easy.
What?
“If you want to move further away from the density of the urban core then you must pay a higher price to extend the infrastructure.”
Actually sounds very easy.
I’ve always thought of this as the three ring problem. The point about the great erosion of well paying, stable working class jobs is well taken.
Without some serious public intervention, this seems like it will play out pretty differently in different regions. In places like San Francisco or New York, with strong and expensive cores, reasonably well off people are pushing into outer city/inner suburban neighborhoods. But in a place like Saint Louis, there’s much less impetus for that. In a relatively cheap market, the inner suburbs get stuck between a resurgent core and newer housing on the fringe.
This problem in my experience is much more prevalent in the Midwest than northeast, the two areas I know well. Not that the northeast is immune, but the availability of land in the midwest tends to increase supply and therefore reduce overall values.
Real Estate has a tipping point past which you see its value drop off a cliff. This is because 1)it costs a lot to maintain and 2) its value is linked to the general wealth of an area. So if an area is not producing enough income to support the existing and new housing stock, you will see some areas drop in value. As George V said, this is a function of our failure to provide working class jobs.
But I would also argue that it’s more complicated than this. I think there’s also a failure to understand or acknowledge real estate economics. An area that is losing income can maintain a good portion of its housing stock if it isn’t adding significantly to the supply. Additionally, social factors (see white flight in the 60’s-70’s) also add to the mix. It’s a complex issue.
“An area that is losing income can maintain a good portion of its housing stock if it isn’t adding significantly to the supply.”
That’s just the thing. In depressed cities, the construction (sprawl-building) industry is about all that’s left. So they have even more of impetus to build new subdivisions out on the fringe. In a growing region that new supply of sprawl adds to the total, but in the declining region it’s merely supplanting the inner neighborhoods that then go “offline” so to speak. It’s a rather insidious force in the struggling cities. As Kunstler would put it, it’s entropy made visible.
George Mattei is on the money pointing out excess supply. If you look at Metro Detroit, for example, it never really stopped growing until the 2000s. Yet Detroit declined precipitously while suburban counties bragged about “growth”. The Midwest has been cannibalizing itself for decades to fuel suburban lifestyles. It’s an obvious truth that isn’t pointed out enough.
@Lou – I don’t think you can call Levittown an inner ring suburb of Philly. Maybe of Trenton, but Trenton isn’t really big enough to support the burbs. It also is 5+ outside Philly’s core.
I think The West Philly, North Philly, SW Philly struggles are much more instructive. Development is pushing out from the downtown core to the outer areas of Philly because increasingly it’s too expensive in Center City, but there are probably limits. There has been development in areas outside the core when they are based around distinct neighborhoods and resources. Manayunk is 3-5 miles from downtown but booming and a SEPTA trip from downtown. If cities focus on urban villages in the inner ring maybe it can provide focus and opportunity to these areas. The key is linking these areas to the downtown (see Philly and DC in the MontCo burbs) and people seeking more affordable living will look here rather than farther out. If the only interconnected areas are in the core and the only development is high end rental units, many people who can’t afford those prices will go farther and farther out.
The biggest hindrance to a Cleveland compared to a Philly has got to be jobs. You can do all the urban planning you want, but there must be work to attract people and too many urban areas still struggle to attract higher paying employers. If we only talk about TOD, tax incentives for building housing units in the core, etc. and not jobs this conversation will be academic. A lot of the jobs in Cleveland aren’t downtown. The biggest employer, the clinic isn’t even downtown it is in a somewhat suburban style massive campus east of downtown. Considering that the growth is impressive, but not clearly sustainable. Retail job growth to support the residents won’t support sustainable downtown growth.
Shouldn’t the “New Donut” be called “The Target”? It does, after all, resemble the Target symbol 😉
@Brian
Your view is probably the exact opposite of the truth.
Yes, Cleveland’s downtown is pretty weak in the jobs department- probably weaker than most. But, the Cleveland Clinic, Western Reserve, hospital & college complex is absolutely huge- and only a few miles west of downtown. Jobs are also well mixed into neighborhoods like the Flats and Ohio City.
What is weird is how long it has taken Cleveland to create viable livable neighborhoods around this area. Abusive eminent domain tactics, racism and anti urban thinking undermined what should have been a slam dunk.
http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20140816/SUB1/308179998/university-circle-building-a-neighborhood#
The Lakewood suburb described by Paul W actually ranks as Ohio’s most walkable “large city” according to walk score.
Ooops, I mean East of downtown. About 3 miles east- but some growth is pushing west.
Rod re-iterated a huge point – the public schools tend to make or break a suburban area. A suburb made up entirely of lower income households is going to have a near-impossible time fighting off decline and social ills. But getting higher-income households to willingly mix into these places is also near-impossible unless there’s some other value-generating proposition. You’d think a radically reduced commute would be enough, but it’s astonishing how much commuting time and distance educated professionals are willing to spend to avoid having their kids mixing with working-class and low-income kids in schools (and that cuts across ethnicities too – educated professionals refuse to locate among “white trash” areas for the same reason). Basically these suburbs are screwed until (1) working class and low income areas create a track record of high-performing non-selective public schools and (2) higher income households start to trust lower-income households in terms of academics and behavior. I don’t hold out much hope for either in the near future.
@SRSTX
Why are private schools not a big part of your thinking?
The magnet school/ school choice concept was pretty much born in NYC. As with almost everything else, density multiples options if this is allowed.
The hidden truth is that private schools are a major reason many urban core’s are attracting wealthy families. Can these options be expanded?
The last hard core defenders of the public ed status quo are lower density wealthy suburbs and teachers unions.
Cities have been decaying in concentric rings, with a few excepted sectors, from the inside out for many decades. And when the neighborhoods in and nearest downtown eventually hit rock bottom, gentrification will slowly begin to occur. As gentrification finishes in the inner-core neighborhoods, I see no reason to doubt that it will push out to these wider rings of decay, just as the original sons and daughters of the inner neighborhoods typically moved out to newer neighborhoods a few miles out from their parents. It is worth questioning though whether these most recent rings of decay might be less attractive for private sector reinvestment because of the dominant housing type and lack of urban amenities and infrastructure. Perhaps, where housing supply far exceeds demand, gentrification will leapfrog over some of these areas in favor of slightly newer neighborhoods with larger homes, and in some cases, better infrastructure.
As others have mentioned, the key to interrupting this “natural” decay of older neighborhoods would be to limit the supply of new housing and new land. Older neighborhoods and older housing stock would be better maintained and would hold their value, but this would be at the expense of allowing as many people as possible to enjoy a brand new house as far away from older houses and their inhabitants as possible. While strict urban growth boundaries are not likely to be approved in most sprawling metro areas anytime soon, increased impact fees reflecting the true long term cost of urban/suburban growth could reduce the quantity of new housing enough to increase demand for the ring of the existing housing 2-6 miles from downtown that is becoming all but abandoned in some cities. I’d argue though that in many cities public money will be needed in the form of infrastructure upgrades to address these neighborhood’s longstanding deficiencies of sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, etc. But without a decrease in housing supply, relative to demand, some of these areas might remain the least desirable, and thus, additional public investments in infrastructure might not bring about the expected revitalization/gentrification.
@ John Morris
Private schools play a role, but most of the quality institutions are very pricey. Unless you’ve got a really high income (as opposed to merely affluent), wouldn’t you rather finance a perceived higher-quality education for your kids through your mortgage (and associated tax deduction) than out-of-pocket? Plus there’s no guarantee your kid will be admitted – whereas buy in the right public school zone, your kid’s place is locked in (excepting instances of rezoning in high-growth areas).
I may be off, but I keep thinking of Arlington County and seeing the answer to the Inner Ring suburbs being in Transit Oriented Development. Giving these regions a very easy commute into the improving downtowns, while also providing a community identity and covering their needs.
I dont know if this is an actual term, but the concept of the bulls-eye zoning or planning to allow a higher density along the transit corridors but keeping or building the lower density single family homes gradually away from these transportation hubs. My reasoning for this is that eventually especially in low density places like Indianapolis the cost of land will be on the higher end and with no geographical limitations what is there to stop them from going out to the suburbs. By providing an easy commute and potentially lower land prices in the inner ring suburbs it could be more economically feasible for them to remain.
SRSTX-
Texas may be somewhat unique in that there doesnt seem to be the same reliance for high school education on the “Academies” (as in the Southeast) or the basic Catholic high schools (as in the Midwest and Northeast). Could one factor be that since the property tax is a larger share of a Texan’s tax burden (due to no state income taxes), there is a feeling to use what you have or about to spend serious money on? A lot of Texans that have indignation about this-or-that occuring demographically or curriculum-wise in the public schools say “Now, I’m going to home school”, whereas their counterparts elsewhere “NOw I’ve got to send the kids to private school”.
@SRSTX
Your thinking reflects the current paradigm in which most money flows into monopoly public school systems.
Suppose that was flipped and people really could choose with their own money? The natural advantages of urbanism would lean towards denser areas.
It seems like we are taking current policies as eternal instead of questioning them.
If subsidizing, sprawl infrastructure cause problems- Stop it.
If single use zoning causes problems- stop it.
If parking mandates undermine cities- get rid of them.
If public school monopolies contribute to segregation and urban decline- get rid of them.
urbanleftbehind-
I don’t sense that it’s the amount of tax burden, though Texans know that it’s relatively high on a percentage basis. And property tax bills, unless you have a super-expensive home, are still low relative to annual private school costs. I think it’s more that home values in most suburban areas (and certainly around Houston), and the associated potential for price appreciation (investment potential) and value protection during downturns (protection of principal), are highly associated with perception of school district quality. And the higher quality private schools tend to be pretty selective too. These factors tend to strongly bias educated professional homebuyers away from the inner/middle suburbs and toward the outer suburbs, where they can have much closer to a 100% chance that their child will go to school with kids of a similar family background and thus receive a “better education.” (I can’t vouch for the latter point, it’s just the dominant strain of thinking here.) And without the private school out-of-pocket cost. Even if you don’t have kids, the prevailing wisdom is that your home will hold its value better if you’re in one of the desirable school zones. Is this just a Texas phenomenon? It’s difficult to overstate how much this affects local housing markets in the larger metro areas (more choice allows more differentiation in local markets) – and thus whether areas are improving or declining, based on whether those who can afford housing choice are willing to buy a home there. (By the way, for the most part, the rental properties in these suburban areas track the perceived desirability of the single family too – even if a large quantity of jobs are close by.)
Seems to me that in many older, “street car” suburbs like Cleveland’s school choice could become a killer advantage.
Lakewood, Ohio ranks as a place where most kids can walk to school. An ideal place for school choice.
Shaker Heights is home to the elite Hathaway Brown, Laurel and University Schools. Cleveland itself has St. Ignatius in Ohio City and Cleveland Central Catholic. John Carroll University in Cleveland Heights has a pre college program.
Are there others? I assume some type of school could be linked to one of the major colleges like Case Western. Add in a few magnet schools and you start to make a dent.
The Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland Institute of Music are considered pretty elite.
Compare this to one size fits all situation of most exurban districts where if the school goes down you have to move.
The comments around the importance of quality schools are good ones, but are not always tied to distance from the urban core or ethnic homogeneity. There are some examples of ‘inner ring’ suburbs with aging housing stocks, a mixture of affluent and middle class homeowners and excellent schools. In the DFW area, I would cite Plano and Richardson as good examples. And let me assure you, these are not homogeneous towns – Plano schools are ~40% anglo and ~25% economically disadvantaged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Independent_School_District).
A key enabler for the non-homogenous character (both racially and economically) of these towns is their low cost of living: a family can buy a house for <$250k in the same school district which supports $1m mansions (and in TX, $1m buys a lot). Rental properties start at <$1000/month. My experience is that it is in areas like metro Boston (among others), where the cost of living drives the middle class far out from the city center, that the towns with good public schools end up being very homogeneous by class (and sometimes race).
Are Plano’s schools mixed within schools, particularly economically? Or is it a school-by-school situation, where one part of the district has economically homogeneous schools that perform well with corresponding thriving residential and commercial development, and another part that’s homogeneous at a lower economic level, with a more stagnant real estate economy? In my experience, it seems the high school zone matters most, more so than the overall district boundaries, particularly for relatively large sized districts such as Plano. If they truly are mixed at the individual school level (and are maintaining that mix), that bodes very well and could serve as a “positive role model.”
It seems that school zones that are both well-reputed and relatively closer to the urban core get quite expensive and appreciate very rapidly if the regional economy is strong, because good non-selective public schools in a close-in location are seen as a rare commodity.
John Morris, I get what you’re saying, but private and magnet options have a hard time making up for well-reputed non-selective zoned public schools, at least when it comes to the impact on the real estate market.
“but private and magnet options have a hard time making up for well-reputed non-selective zoned public schools, at least when it comes to the impact on the real estate market.”
That’s the way it is now but the history in really dense transit oriented cities like NYC show a different future is possible.
The communities near University Circle in Cleveland had a strong hand of cards they played poorly. They have a strong job base, reasonably walkable communities and once had good transit service.
School choice between communities and collaborations with the elite colleges and museums can create a huge advantage.
We could start by being honest about education and the way monopoly systems weaken communities. Which is more realistic- waiting and hoping every old district becomes great- or creating a market of choice?
I support choice, but for a real estate impact, any household looking to locate somewhere would have to know that their child would definitely get into a desirable school at little or no extra cost, and also preferable a not-to-distant commute to the campus – comparable to the situation under the current zoned system. Just offering a choice of schools that a child has to either pay, wait list, or test into isn’t good enough.
@SRSTX
There actually is a recent study on how school choice may affect housing prices in NYC.
It seems complicated and I haven’t digested it yet.
http://repec.umb.edu/RePEc/files/2014_03.pdf
The city stopping zoned schools in the last 10 years and the study period ends in 2003. Choice in one form or another is probably more common in NYC than any other large city.
My guess is this partly explains the huge price advantage in neighborhoods with good transit where a transit card creates many options.
@SRSTX, Plano schools are reasonably mixed across the school district, although not perfectly evenly so (is anywhere?). There are only 3 Senior High School zones, each with ~1500 students per class year, which prevents too much segregation at that level.
The DFW area is not immune to inner-ring issues, but is helped by long-tern population growth which has prevented any area from really shrinking or being abandoned. And a “let’s get the dirt flying” attitude towards development has kept the cost of living low (not to mention the lack of terrain limits). That said, some of the inner ring suburbs are doing notably better than others and the school districts are both a cause and reflection of that.
It probably goes without saying that Plano is overwhelmingly suburban in form, although there are a few self-consciously “new urbanist”-style neighborhoods that are doing well. Even in this patch of unrepentant suburbia, there is some interest in walkable, restaurant/entertainment-oriented development; even those who don’t live in them like having them nearby.
NYC schools are now often the country’s most segregated.
The upside however is that the neighborhoods are often less divided by class. Choice options seem to create self segregation.
My guess is a lot of options allow neighborhoods to survive bad schools and gradually adjust.
I worked in Arlington, Texas, half way between Dallas and Fort Worth, trying to rescue a partnership between the city, the chamber, the schools, the community college and UT Artlington. All of the pieces seemed to be in place for turning around what has become a lower middle class place aspiring to lift itself up by its bootstraps, including good top management at most of those entities. One central entity lacked this management, however, and it kept the other institutions from coming together effectively. Removing and replacing that management would have required elevating the public importance of the project to the extent that it could swing elections. Maybe that’s the real point here: if you want to make important change, that change has to be the top public priority.
Why don’t we have the same problem with supermarkets and dry cleaners?
Why should an entire community be hostage to the quality of a monopoply school system? Create a place with walkability and basic transit and let the people choose their favorite product.
John,
I think capitalism works well for building a tiered offering of say – automobiles. To suggest the same forces can build a tiered educational system is open for debate.
There are several Charter school offerings in Cleveland, mainly in and around downtown (Tremont/Ohio City) and Univ. Circle. There is much debate on how much public funding these Charter schools should get and how much they dilute the student base of the public system. Are we segregating along class lines now? Are we pushing the lower class even lower as we weaken their options? It can be argued that this has a negative impact on the neighborhoods further from downtown as families have less options and the public school system now has to compete with the Charter schools for adequate funding.
Capitalism uses Adam Smith’s invisible hand to kill inferior products in the marketplace – and thereby giving us better automobiles, toasters, and the like. But as it plays out in our cities, the invisible hand is slapping entire communities, families, and particularly the more vulnerable.
East Cleveland did not get where it is due to bad management or inferior product. It got where it’s at because people had choice on where they lived and the federal government greased the wheels by making it easy to have choice. This is going back 70 years or more – one can easily argue that East Cleveland has inferior product or bad management today.
So let’s at least keep the market fair and keep the government out. No more funding of highways to the exurbs, no more free water and sewer line extensions, etc. As for how we move forward with the inner city school system – I don’t have the answer. Maybe Charter schools are the answer but it’s going to be long wait and a rough road.
Poor people have to live somewhere. They can’t afford the property values and transportation costs of the suburbs (or $2,000/year for a kid to be in marching band), and skyrocketing rents have driven many of them away from their old haunts in now-trendy downtown areas. Americans prefer to pretend that we live in a classless society, but gross income inequality, while uncomfortable to discuss, is at the root of many of these symptoms, and it spawns all sorts of other issues, some of which extend across generations.
Derek – That’s good to see, I wouldn’t expect any school to be a perfect statistical reflection of the overall district. In my observation, more affluent, educated parents seem to have a ceiling for “reduced/free lunch” somewhere between 20-30% of the student body – above that ceiling, they look for other schools even if it means a longer commute. In Houston at least, this is a very very important phenomenon driving the problem that is the subject of Aaron’s post.
What I wonder is, if you’re a parent who actively leads your children to achieve academically and behave themselves, is it that risky for your child to attend school with working class kids? I understand not wanting to send your kid to a school with metal detectors etc. in a drug war zone, but most educated parents aren’t even willing to buy a home and send their kid to one that has a large share of blue collar / service worker household children. As long as some AP classes etc. are there, why would you be afraid? This fear gets to the core of the issue – and all of the follow-on real estate impacts afflicting these declining suburbs.
“and the federal government greased the wheels.”
The government “greases the wheels” through loans and subsidies in a mixed or Fascist economy, not a Capitalist one.
Yes, the neighborhoods near University Circle have had to progress against the headwinds of government policy which has offered loads of “free parking” and undermined property rights through eminent domain seizures.
Even now, they plan to create (destroy) another opportunity corridor for suburban commuters at the expense of poor residents.
In spite of this, some of these areas seem to be attracting investment again.
No surprise that educational choice is developing in the denser, more urban parts of town.
Boston is more like a chocolate chip cookie…
also – lack of growth doesn’t always equal decline… it can also mean gentrification…
I think this problem of demographics driving parents away from schools has been over-simplified. Most parents don’t check the school lunch numbers, nor do most check the racial percentages. They know places by reputations. And the bottom line is whether the school districts themselves perform.
It’s true that demographics affect achievement levels, explaining up to 85 percent of the difference. But great school programs can overcome that. In terms of languages spoken, the most diverse school district in the United States is Tukwila, between downtown Seattle and the airport. 175 different languages spoken, many of them by poor immigrants working in service jobs at the malls and airports. But Tukwila also has a magnet school, Aviation High, backed by companies like Boeing, that has a waiting list to get in, with kids from all over Puget Sound on that list. Create a good school and they will come.b
I don’t think the elite Bronx Science high school is in a great area.
NYC has broken the strong link between real estate and schools. You usually have to have a decent local elementary school, but beyond that school choice tends to play a big role in the parts of town with good transit.
Yes, if you have more than one great elementary school and a great Junior high like Forest Hills, housing prices will be very high.
But, NYC has a lot of areas like Park Slope that started with pretty questionable middle schools and improved over time. The difference is probably the wider amount of private and magnet choices available.
Houston ISD was a pioneer in the development of magnet schools and has some of the best in the nation. Yet because your child is still not a guarantee to get in at one of those – they have wait lists and entry testing – it doesn’t mean as much as being zoned to a positively perceived school. This is still a huge difference. In NYC, are you guaranteed to get your child into a good magnet (provided the child doesn’t have disciplinary issues)? Then I can understand how the real estate link would be broken.
Rod pointed out that demographics explain up to 85% of school achievement, and I have heard from school administrative professionals that test scores are extremely correlated with household income. Parents seem to know this – and thus equate school reputation and quality largely with the demographics of the students. Still, the question is, why do they think their child will receive a worse education at a school zoned to cheaper housing? If you think about it, it’s really astounding how much cost – in terms of both housing prices and commute – they are willing to burden themselves with in order to skip over the inner and middle suburbs so that they can put their kid into a school with the right demographics. If you’re an effective parent, is there really that much of a difference for you to make such a drastic real estate decision?
And I should point out, in these inner and middle suburbs, housing – including new housing – is usually much cheaper than what you get in the desirable outer suburbs – a huge departure from the usual cone-shaped urban economic model (locations closer to the center are more expensive). Part of this is the average age of such housing, which is older with housing stock less adapted to current tastes, but if these areas were in demand, that stock would be updated or redeveloped.
“In NYC, are you guaranteed to get your child into a good magnet (provided the child doesn’t have disciplinary issues)?”
No, to a large extent people are gambling that their kids can get in. But, a dense neighborhood on a good transit grid like the Upper West Side might offer, 8 reasonable public and private options within a 40 minute subway ride.
Clearly, NYC and Houston are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Money plays a big role in many neighborhoods.
My guess is people are deluding themselves about these suburban schools. If your kid isn’t doing well they will likely be tracked into the dumpster classes and you will likely have very few alternatives. If the school goes down, there goes the house investment.
SRSTX:
The interesting question to me is what will happen next with young people returning to the center city: will they stay there as they begin having children and those children enter the middle school grades, where they will be mixed in with children outside their immediate and gentrifying neighborhoods, or will they move to the suburban neighborhoods with better schools? Of all government agencies, school districts seem to the most resistant to change, and, short of large groups of parents pressuring inner city school districts to vastly increase the number of their magnet schools, or create a wholesale overhaul of their middle schools, large numbers of young, largely Asian and white parents employed in the tech professions are about to run into the politics of inner city school districts, where many of the other parents (and childless homeowners) have a professional background and education very different from their own.
P.S. Sorry about that run on sentence. There were two thoughts there: the resistance of school districts to change, and the very different backgrounds of the newcomers and existing city residents.
@SRSTX
Many NYC kids are already educated by what I would call an a-la-carte model where a parent selects local tutors, dance classes and specialty classes.
This model will become more common.
http://schoolleader.typepad.com/school-leader/2012/12/education-a-la-carte-is-this-what-the-high-school-of-the-future-will-look-like.html
The problem is that it only really works well in places where the density allows many choices to develop. Online alone can only do so much.
My guess is this partly explains the huge preference for transit oriented neighborhoods in NYC.
@ Rod:
Yes, I have the same question, but this topic was about inner and middle ring suburbs. In most suburban areas, value is very heavily driven by schools, as opposed to urban convenience, transit availability, trendiness/hipsterism, walkability, etc. that can bring other aspects of value to a center city area. If you’re one of those suburbs where schools are all you’ve got, especially in the near term, and they’re being passed over by those who can afford housing choice, what do you do? A lot of folks talk about TOD, but my guess is that most of those places don’t have that as a realistic option because their transit is weak or doesn’t exist, and in the Houston region they’re often starting from a poor street grid layout (hard to make walkable). So you go back to schools – can you get the more affluent and educated demographic that you need for revitalization to come back to places they’re so determined to pass over now?
@SRSTX
The short answer is probably not, which points out how vulnerable these communities are.
But, in many cities the older suburbs do have decent street grids to build on. Lakewood, Ohio is probably a good example of that.
@ Rod
Yes, those Lakewood-types of communities (probably developed prior to WWII I’m guessing?) may have some advantages when it comes to revitalization. They’re much rarer in the Sunbelt, however.
They are rarer, but not entirely rare in many places.
Atlanta, for example has a lot of pretty well designed old streetcar suburbs. About 50% of new investment in the region is in walkable areas.
@SRSTX
I am thinking about it more and you may be right.
I sort of remember how things worked in the 1980’s. Schools zones were distorted to create diverse schools. The large affluent Forest Hills area was broken down with the south side integrated into a poorer Jamacia based high school and the north absorbing hispanic students from Corona.
Differences between primary schools could be huge but usually evened out at the higher grades.
This helps explain why zoned high school quality didn’t determine real estate prices. It probably also resulted in top students shooting for magnet schools.
Now the city has no mandated zoned schools but many more magnet programs and charter schools.
I am from Minneapolis and believe we will see rampant gentrification and white infill as out light rail system gets built out. Several “struggling” inner city neighborhoods are both close to downtown and will soon be well served by light rail, streetcars and BRT. I am rather certain prices will skyrocket and the current residents will depart for first ring suburbs. Minneapolis will thrive, but it will be at the cost of tremendous displacement and challenges for these first ring suburbs. I think part of the answer will be investing in orbital light rail loops connecting the first ring suburbs. The path to being prosperous, sustainable and equitable will be difficult to find, but I think we can do it. We can’t if we just let developers do what they want to do. It will take public policy and public
investment.
Magnets do allow middle class people to cherry pick neighborhoods just as private schools allow high income people to do the same.
When I divorced my son was in Indy’s math science magnet. My only criteria in choosing a new home were budget/affordability, reasonable public safety profile, and within the Indianapolis Public Schools district. That actually gave me a lot of choice.
He has since graduated from a B1G state ag-tech university on scholarship and has launched his career. (The experiment worked, Aaron 😉 )
Right, in large parts of NYC, neighborhoods are less divided by class and race, while schools are often more divided.
People are self selecting schools like they do other products and services in a dense transit linked area.
Hence the fight to keep free student Metrocards.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-york-city-students-free-metrocards-article-1.185668
One thought is the Gen X and Y who are moving back in with their baby boomer parents. The old house then becomes multi generational and the more people end up having to maintain an older house. The best of a bad options.
I read this article with interest, as well as all of the comments, and have been thinking for several days on whether the new donut applies to Milwaukee. It does in that the downtown has been revitalized, and it now the target for nearly all of the highest value developments in the metro area. The decline of the urban core of the City of Milwaukee applies as well, in particular for the north side and far northwest side. There is a fundamental difference in geometry associated with the presence of Lake Michigan, its long-time role as an urban amenity combined with a general lack of historic industrial development along Milwaukee’s lakefront. As a consequence, the downtown was never surrounded by a ring of blight, but has always been connected to a more or less continuous band of desirable urban neighborhoods extending north and south along the lakefront. The downtown was therefore abandoned to a lesser degree than many other cities, and quicker and easier to revitalize. The inner ring suburbs also don’t fit with the new donut pattern. Almost without exception, all of the inner ring suburbs have been improving simultaneously with the downtown. This includes industrial suburbs such as West Allis and West Milwaukee, which faced many of the same deindustrialization challenges, as well as suburbs such as Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Glendale and Wauwatosa, which continue to have some of the region’s highest ranked schools, and where the limited number of historic industrial properties have largely been replaced with attractive residential or mixed use development. The combination of traditional street grids and urban features, highly ranked schools, together with a 5-10 minute commute time to downtown have enabled these inner ring suburbs to remain highly desirable. The outer ring suburbs and collar counties generally seem to be holding their own as well, but less well than inner ring suburbs that offer the 5-10 minute commutes to downtown. The downtown and historic neighborhoods bordering downtown are definitely doing the best of all.
I don’t know if there is a broader lesson to be learned from Milwaukee’s example, but I do see the relative slow growth of the metro area as a whole having resulted in a greater emphasis on brownfields redevelopment throughout the metro area, which is helping to simultaneously improve downtown, some urban core, inner ring and outer ring suburbs.
Milwaukee sounds like Seattle. Here as well the distinction is between north and south. The neighborhoods next to or north of downtown are doing very well, with prices now past their 2008 peaks.
The southern neighborhoods, which are separately by rivers and topography, are doing more poorly for several reasons. One is that they are not linked into the center city’s park system. Second, the schools are bad and most of the students are poorer Asian immigrants. Third, the road, transit and bicycle grid are interrupted by Boeing field and associated industrial areas, the freeway, the Duwamish River, and steep bluffs. One neighborhood near Lake Washington, with one of the largest parks in the region, is doing quite well. A light rail line through a valley is slowly bringing back a corridor there, but at great cost in terms of route detour and travel time to the airport.
Right, filling the donut in many cities has a lot to do with adopting old industrial zones- some have which have been “obsolete” since 1920’s.
Time to just grow up and let the market decide how to reuse these spaces- which may or may not include manufacturing.
Neighborhoods like Homewood and Larimer in Pittsburgh are gaining investment because formerly empty or under used industrial areas are occupied by Google and other tech companies.
In Atlanta, the Beltline fills the donut between downtown and streetcar suburbs.
The assertion that the Atlanta Beltline transits an area that should equal the ‘middle suburbs’ is inaccurate. At 3+ miles out from the center of the city Downtown) it is in the heart of urban Atlanta– areas for the most part that are flourishing. Owning to Atlanta’s size (it is large and spread out) and its linearity (Atlanta’s densest (Downtown?)area is 6 miles long, centered on the Peachtree ridge) the models described here are prone to geographic inaccuracy– The true middle suburbs are now in DeKalb county, parts of Gwinnett county, Sandy Springs, etc– all declining to some degree, and in need of revitalization. These are places that just a few years ago were the new (affluent) suburban frontier–
I never said it went through the “middle suburbs”, but this former industrial ring was where “the donut” started in Atlanta.
In this case, filling the donut- connects Downtown/Midtown with old and often already popular old streetcar suburbs like Virginia Highland and Inman Park.
You are right- even Virginia Highland is within easy walking and biking distance of Midtown. I walked down Ponce to The High Museum when I was there.
@David
I think the confusion is that I describe places like Inman Park as “streetcar suburbs”, which they were. Of course, now they are part of the urban core.
http://inmanpark.org/
This is similar to Pittsburgh, where former streetcar “suburbs” like Shadyside, Squirrel Hill and Highland Park are now part of the urban core.
Almost everywhere, we now define former streetcar suburbs as part of the urban core, owing to their pre-automotive urban form.
Yes and no- usually for the same reason.
Shaker Heights is clearly walkable, urban and transit oriented by normal standards and is very close to Cleveland’s core. However, since the former industrial belt never adjusted well and became a hole- it is usually considered a “suburb”.
I find this study very interesting, but I’m looking for the data to be presented in terms of raw numbers of people, as well as the percentages of the nose counts.
If the populations by mile are roughly the same, that has one meaning, but if they vary significantly, it could be interpreted very differently.
Tom Rubin
I lived in Charlotte for five years, 2009 to 2013. I believe this theory has merit, but the uniformity that the donut shape implies is not evident there. The width of the ring of undesirability varies from 2 to 10 miles wide around most of the city, but is almost nonexistent between a wedge bordered by I-77 and US-74. Coincidentally, this pattern is repeated by the distribution by race represented in the 2010 census demographics.