Redrawing The Map Of America
Joel Kotkin makes the case for the coming decline of dense, coastal metropolises and the rise of second- and third-tier suburban cities of the Sunbelt.
Citing affordable housing, strong employment growth, and a high quality of life, Joel Kotkin argues that cities in middle America are poised to overtake the star cities of east and west coasts -- a trend that he warns planners are largely ignoring. While one-fifth of Americans lived in the 30 most dense counties in 1920, only one ninth do today.
"The movement to the exurbs and beyond tells us something important about how most Americans
prefer to live. Contrary to the constant trumpeting of "a return to the city" and the madcap downtown condo explosion (which affects only a tiny proportion of U.S. families, though a big chunk of the chattering classes), most Americans—about four out of five—still want to own a single-family home."
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Don't make assumptions for people's desires.
Is it really that surprising that new population growth is located in the sunbelt or middle America? It's the natural spillover of growth pressures along our coastal regions. Kotkin likes to believe that people choose middle America over coastal regions. I don't think it's a choice based on preference of geographic location or even urban form, as he suggests. 4 out of 5 may prefer a single family home, but I bet 5 out of 5 would prefer a single family home in a place like Santa Barbara. The movement to middle America is instead based on a _lack of choice_ in our housing options. Housing is not affordable in our coastal regions - or even many sunbelt areas, for that matter. What else is there to choose from in our second and third-tier cities other than your standard tract homes? The boom of sunbelt cities and middle America was more of a compulsive phenomenon, but Kotkin takes that trend to support his own ideological beliefs, taking the podium for all who moved to exurbia, and makes assumptions for everyone's desires.
Kotkin's sloppy math
Once again, Kotkin shows himself to be more of a cranky old man than a social scientist. He cites as evidence of declining cities the Census Data for Minneapolis, San Franciso and Boston which show slight declines in population. The decline for Minneapolis, which is disputed by regional agency's statistics, is 10,000 people, or 2.5% of the population, an insignificant decrease. San Francisco and Boston show decreases of 5%, slightly larger but still not worrisome considering none of these towns have increased their borders in 80 years. Considering all three of these cities have seen an increase in the number of housing units in the same amount of time, the numbers indicate not that people don't want to live in the city but only that people don't want to raise children in the city. Anyone else see some fishy numbers in Mr. Kotkin's article?
Re. Kotkin's Sloppy Math...
For the record, here are the population figures for San Francisco (city proper) since 1930 (from US Census):
1930 - 634,394
1940 - 634,536
1950 - 775,357 (rapid post WWII growth)
1960 - 742,855
1970 - 715,674
1980 - 678,974
1990 - 723,959
2000 - 776,733 (height of dot-com boom)
2005 - 739,426 (est.)
From these numbers, I'm not sure one can extrapolate (as Kotkin does) that SF's population is in long-term decline and that (we) are all going to flee to Modesto. Seems the opposite, in fact. Also, keep in mind, that San Francisco proper has occupied the same 45 square miles for all of these 75 years. The city is surrounded by water on three sides, and hemmed in by another county to the south, and thus has not extended it's corporate limits in well over a century. This is in contrast to places like Phoenix, Albuquerque, Houston... even near-by San Jose, or nearly every other SunBelt city, where they annex every subdivision of tacky new tract houses, in part in order to inflate their population figures, so get more Federal $$$ for the municipal coffers.
San Francisco's 2005 population estimate shown above was probably a low point, in fact, following the dot-com bust, as the local economy has picked up once again, with strong growth in the info-tech, bio-tech, and retail sectors. Most projections show San Francisco's population continuing its slow growth again... certainly not at all the urban-hell-death-spiral claimed by Kotkin... makes me wonder if Kotkin has ever even looked at any actual population nos. (at least for SF), or does he just spout off like the angry, reactionary old man he seems to be...?
Yes... yes... housing is expensive in SF, and as any idiot and Kotkin ought to know, that is because demand is greater than supply (what does that tell you about the desirability of living there...?). Moreover, San Francisco, along with New York, Boston, Vancouver, etc., have world-wide appeal as places to live (e.g "Super-Star" cities), such that comparisons with places such as Phoenix or Charlotte are irrelevant and even kind of silly.
As the Bush-Cheney-Condoleeeeza Administration implodes and the "Conservative Right" falls into disrepute, perhaps the influence of cultural ideologues like Kotkin will also wane. Let's hope so. We may even be so lucky that Mr. Kotkin will never again be invited by the Southern California APA to be a keynote speaker at it annual gabfest.
Kotkin's purposeful math.
I agree with your comment.
I would not, however, characterize Kotkin's approach as "sloppy math", rather, it appears to me to be "purposefully selective use of numbers to support an ideological worldview". On bad days, I'd shorten it further to 'mendacicization'.
Best,
D
distortions
- Kotkin portrays the move to the suburbs and the regional segregation of the USA as purely a consumer choice. Anyone who has done their urban history knows that this is only part of the story, leaving out racial restrictions on mortgages, mortgages only going to new home construction, massive federal funding of highways, and of course flight from the black families that were moving into the cities from the south in the 40s,50s and 60s.
- What's up with his portrayal of "wealthy, self-satified" Boston? The rich Bostoners can't grow their city because "they feed of old accumulations of capital, unconnected to the fate of the local economy." Not sure why Bostoners would be unconcerned about their local economy...this all just sounds like someone who is bitter and disturbed by the East Coast's cultural position within the USA.
- incredibly dense, defined places like NYC are so built out that they can't grow that fast anymore, so I would never expect to see growth rates like 30%. NYC also doesn't have the ability to annex adjoining, high growth, parasitic suburbs like many western cities do (or did).
The Joel Kotkin Apocalypse
If we follow Joel Kotkin's advice, Americans will keep moving to auto-dependent suburbs in the sunbelt -- until we make global warming so severe that the sunbelt becomes ininhabitable.
Once again, Joel Kotkin repeats the distortion that runs through his writing. He supports auto-dependent development by claiming that planners talk about a return to the city and don't realize that "most Americans—about four out of five—still want to own a single-family home."
As we all know, the New Urbanist planners (who Kotkin loves to attack) have actually spent most of their time designing neighborhoods of single-family homes.
Charles Siegel
1/5 = 20%
He seems to like that "four out of five Americans prefer SFDs" statistic and has cited that elsewhere. Of course, "20% do not prefer SFDs" would be saying exactly the same thing but in a way far less suitable for Mr. Kotkin's argument. (20% of Americans = about 60 million Americans.)
More Conservative "Think Tank" Ideology
Pay no mind to Kotkin...
He's just a libertarian, Milton Friedman style, free-market economics wacko. All he is attempting to do is to bash liberal, socially-conscious planners, many of whom congregate on the coasts. By contrast, he is attempting to shine a supposed bright light on all the "hard-working" Americans who have fled those coastal urban environs for cheaper real estate in places like California's Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley and the Rocky Mountain states. Keep in mind, those are the very same places which are experiencing the highest rates of bankruptcy and foreclosure given the current real estate decline. This is because many of its residents got in over their heads by financing their homes with "adjustable rate" mortgages, attempting to flip the properties soon afterwards, and taking on too much bad debt.
Mr. Kotkin, in his defense of suburban sprawl and decentralization of urbanized areas (like Robert Bruegmann in his book, "Sprawl: A Compact History), is justifying and advocating for "white flight" to intensely conservative, and racially/ethnically homogeneous places such as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Reno. And Kotkin intentionally does not acknowledge the political and economic forces at play which have historically segregated our cities and led to suburban flight in the first place, such as redlining, low interest FHA mortgages, and the interstate highway system.
His is not an intelligent critique of urban spatial patterns in the United States any more than it is a reflection of his own intensely partisan and conservative think tank political ideology. Turn on CSPAN 2 "Book TV" some time and you can see dozens of clones just like him speaking about their recently released books on the "horrors of the left" at Washington, DC-based conservative think tanks such as: The Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Center for Policy Research.