The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama will be our first president whose heritage is from the central cities since Grover Cleveland, who left the office in 1897. Prior to becoming president, Cleveland had been a reform mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York. I think they missed one: Theodore Roosevelt grew up in New York City and represented part of the city in the legislature. But presidents since then have been from suburbs or small towns.
Obama, however, was born in Honolulu, went to school in Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York, and got his famous job as a community organizer in Chicago. His only “suburban” time was getting his law degree in Cambridge, MA.
From one perspective, the war on sprawl is really a war between central cities and suburbs. The central cities see the suburbs growing and want some of that growth (and the tax revenues that come with it) for themselves. By demonizing the suburbs, at the very least they have a chance to grab more than their share of federal and state funds for housing and transportation.
So, will Obama be biased in favor of the cities over the suburbs? One hint is the announcement that he is going to have a “White House chief of urban policy.” Technically, urban includes both cities and their suburbs. But to many central city residents — particularly those from big cities like Chicago — the suburbs are little more than a hostile wasteland.
Always research cialis cheap generic into the best dosage level for you. Symptoms and viagra cialis store Treatment If your testosterone levels are low, you may experience, among other things, a diminished sex drive, low energy levels, irritability and mood swings, loss of lean muscle mass with increases of body fat. Causes for Erectile Dysfunction: Numbers of causes play significant role behind the line viagra scene of ED. ED can be due to many causes levitra properien http://seanamic.com/thank-you-david-pridden/ such as heart problems, diabetes, obesity, stress, depression etc.
Former Secretary of Housing & Urban Development Henry Cisneros, and his former chief of staff, Bruce Katz, think Obama should broaden his scope to metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas, “have become the engines of national prosperity,” they say, so Obama should “shift from an outdated focus on ‘urban policy’ to an expansive, asset-driven perspective of ‘metro policy.'”
Just what do they think metropolitan areas are? The Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas as urban areas plus all the rural land that happens to be in the same counties as the urban areas. Those rural lands are no more “engines of national prosperity” than rural areas in counties that don’t have urban areas. But lots of data are presented in terms of metropolitan areas rather than urban areas because county lines are easier to define than the somewhat ambiguous line between “urban” and “rural.” In other words, the difference between “metro” and “urban” is a statistical artifact, not some “asset-driven” trend towards greater inclusiveness.
Cisneros and Katz go onto say that an Office of Metropolitan Policy “would actively engage the true metropolitan experts — local corporate, civic, and government leaders — in the design and implementation of new, cutting-edge policies.” In other words, they think the people with their hands out for federal bailouts and other pork are the “true experts.”
We’ll know more when Obama announces selections for such offices as secretaries of transportation and HUD and director of the EPA. If he picks people like Cisneros or Katz to head some office, he will be getting people who have great credentials but don’t really understand what is going on.
NEWS FLASH: Homeowner Associations Declare War on Suburbs
Wanna paint your house purple? THINK AGAIN!
Wanna conserve water by letting your lawn turn brown during the summer? NOT!
Wanna get one of those cute little mailboxes with animals painted on it? FUHGEDDABOUTIT!
Freedom is under attack in pro-America suburbs across America, where real Americans like you and me are seeing their American liberties taken away one by one by Anti-American, Nazi-like homeowner associations that hate the freedom of Americans to decide for themselves what color their house should be, whether to build a treehouse for their kids, etc.
That’s right: homeowner associations are telling Americans how to live their lives, and are forcing Americans to live a certain way by imposing freedom-killing rules and regulations on American homeowners across this great nation. And to protect themselves from personal liability under the law, homeowner associations must enforce the rules aggressively and inflexibly. Plus, homeowner have little financial incentive to avoid indulging in rigid and arbitrary behavior that is needlessly offensive to residents; unless people begin to leave in droves, it will have little effect on the value of a board member’s home.
And that’s not all! Homeowners associations often compel homeowners to pay a share of common expenses. Homeowner association boards can also collect special assessments from its members in addition to set fees, sometimes without the homeowners’ direct vote on the matter. These greedy associations now rake in billions of dollars per year from homeowners in the US! Billions! Such payments only serve to make housing less affordable, which is particularly harmful for minorities and low-income residents. Plus, The AARP has recently voiced concern that homeowners associations pose a risk to the financial welfare of their members.
Increasingly, homeowner associations handle large amounts of money. Embezzlement from associations has occurred occasionally, as a result of dishonest board members or community managers, with losses up to millions of dollars.
And since homeowner associations are non-governmental entities, they are not bound by constitutional restrictions that apply to governments. They’re not bound by the constitution!!! And if a homeowner thinks the association is doing something wrong, their only recourse is to sue, at their own expense!!! Homeowners must pay out of pocket for any case they bring to court and risk being personally liable for any judgment and/or association’s legal fees as well as their own!!! In some U.S. states, a homeowner association can foreclose a member’s house without any judicial procedure in order to collect special assessments, fees and fines. They can take your house!!!
Plus, neighborhoods with homeowner associations are notoriously elitist. Voting in a homeowner association is based on property ownership. Only property owners are eligible to vote in elections, and voting by renters is prohibited.
A wise man once said, you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists. He could have just as easily have said, you’re either with us, or you’re with the homeowner associations.
Homeowner associations reduce freedom. Homeowner associations make housing less affordable. Homeowner associations are bad for minorities, low-income Americans, and senior citizens. Homeowner associations rake in billions of dollars a year, and are often corrupt. Homeowner associations can take your house if you don’t do what they want you to do.
Homeowner associations have declared war on suburban America, and on your choice of house color. The only question now is, will you stand and fight, or will your colors run?
(Special thanks to Wikipedia for much of the factual information contained in this treatise)
I don’t think Obama is going to declare war on things like his predecessors, he seems to have more tact than that. I like the idea of the “Metropolitan Policy” as opposed to Urban policy. I’m not sure we have to use the Census Bureau statistical definition to define the areas however. Weather this policy approach will result in a “war” on suburbs is yet to be determined. I hope that suburbs are reformed and improved, just as there urban counterparts. There is no doubt that the traditional form of the suburbs have significant negative implications on infrastructure, in particularly roads and traffic. Now if you think there is nothing wrong with the burbs, then you will see the reforms on their negative impacts as a “war.”
As for HOA’s…
Just another example of why the Antiplanner mission will always fail. People WANT to control the “private” sectors (including private property). If you take out growth management, HOA’s will just fill the void (in a weird way). It’s hard to trust free enterprise to do the right thing (see ENRON, mortgage backed securities, etc). You see, for every Hill, Ford, and Kaiser, there are 100 scumbag m-effers. This is why people plan and let the government plan for them, to protect them from the private interest.
I agree with The Antiplanner that currently rigid single-use zoning codes should be substantially loosened, particularly in areas where there is demand for land uses besides single family houses and sprawling shopping centers, given sufficient infrastructure such as adequate road AND transit capacity.
However, I also agree with the direction of this thread so far that the notion of property owners associations being adequate replacements for local government. Local governments certainly suffer from the too common plague of “little Napoleons” but so do private organizations, the latter usually with far less recourse.
I also don’t see property owner associations EVER obtaining 100% membership, particularly from the recalcitrant property owners who may want to develop at higher densities. Certainly the only way 100% compliance could be obtained is through coercion (e.g., gummit!), power no one in their right mind would give to a strictly private organization. For example in the County where I live, I can assure you I’d never “sign the contract” because I know a lot of Little Napoleons!
How many people these live in the suburbs versus central cities according the census bureau?
First lets clarify some thing.
Suburbs aren’t bad, it’s just that there are a lot of bad suburbs.
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=CD119514-E2C9-61CC-4DBDD0C5DACDB722
Suburbs don’t have to be planned as oppressive sociopathic wastelands.
“Suburbs don’t have to be planned as oppressive sociopathic wastelands.”
Then where are all the oppressive sociopaths supposed to live? 😉
Answer: Portland
That was bad, still funny.
http://milemeter.com/
“Freedom is under attack in pro-America suburbs across America, where real Americans like you and me are seeing their American liberties taken away one by one by Anti-American, Nazi-like homeowner associations… “
Not so fast. People sign contracts that bind them to these HOA’s. So their ‘liberties’ are not ‘taken away’. They are forfeited when they buy a house in a HOA controlled subdivision.
But you have a point in that it’s ironic that so many conservatives who supposedly value individualism and individual civil rights seemingly so glibbly sign away their property rights to these HOA’s.
It’s puzzling.
My explanation is that in many people’s hearts, there is a desire, even a need for outside control in their lives. Which would explain the popularity of HOA’s, mega-churches, and zoning laws and nuisance laws up the wazoo, etc ….
It boils down to a need to be absoved of responsibility for decisions, which is also odd for people who claim to support ‘personal responsibility’.
If there are only 3 choices of house color, then you are absolved of responsibility for that decision. So no one can criticize your choice of house color.
But you see the same thing on the other side of the fence as well in form of fashion slaves. Peoplw following the latest trends in fashion, home decor, etc. There is safety in numbers. If you dress yourself and your home more or less like everyone else, then you’re ‘safe’ from criticism.
I see this everyday in my architectural practice. People are afraid of innovation, afraid of something too different, and deathly afraid of color.
Some people are still able to stand on their own even in crowd.
D4P wrote:
Flash to D4P: Nobody has forced anyone to live in a home that’s part of a homeowners’ (or condominium) association. Don’t like an HOA? Don’t live in one!
As for affordability and accountability, consider this:
Because streets, sidewalks and parking lots belonging to an HOA are (at least in states I am familiar with, particularly in the East) private property, the local government that would normally be responsible for such things are not, as they belong to the HOA (and are maintained by same), thus “saving money” for that local government.
With an HOA, responsibility for some services that would normally be with local government are devolved to the HOA – in my HOA the trash is collected by a contractor hired by the HOA, not the local government.
Finally, if you don’t like the way that your HOA is run, join its board of directors!
Antiplanner, while the incoming administration might be more pro-urban, it’s not likely to be anti-suburban, for one simple reason – most of the votes cast in favor of the Obama/Biden ticket were almost certainly cast by people living in areas that I would consider suburban (though I have not seen the data tabulated – yet).Note well that suburban in some cases means neighborhoods that are part of a central city, which makes it hare to come up with an accurate tabulation. Examples of this include:The San Fernando Valley, most of which is part of the City of Los Angeles;Many neighborhoods within the corporate limits of the City of San Diego;Large parts of Houston, Texas;Though its total land area is small, there are significant parts of Washington, D.C. (I mean places within the corporate limits of the District of Columbia) that have the look and feel of suburban neighborhoods across the line in Maryland; and The West Ashley area of Charleston, S.C.On the flipside, there are “suburban” jurisdictions that have attempted to densify parts of themselves into “urban” areas, such as:The Friendship Heights area of Montgomery County, Maryland; The “central” area of Silver Spring (also in Montgomery County); The Tysons Corner area of Fairfax County, Virginia (additional densification is pending);Much of “suburban” Long Beach, California; andThe Parole area of Anne Arundel County, Maryland (just outside of the City of Annapolis, much to the irritation of elected officials in Annapolis)
Antiplanner, while the incoming administration might be more pro-urban, it’s not likely to be anti-suburban, for one simple reason – most of the votes cast in favor of the Obama/Biden ticket were almost certainly cast by people living in areas that I would consider suburban (though I have not seen the data tabulated – yet).Note well that suburban in some cases means neighborhoods that are part of a central city, which makes it hare to come up with an accurate tabulation. Examples of this include:The San Fernando Valley, most of which is part of the City of Los Angeles;Many neighborhoods within the corporate limits of the City of San Diego;Large parts of Houston, Texas;Though its total land area is small, there are significant parts of Washington, D.C. (I mean places within the corporate limits of the District of Columbia) that have the look and feel of suburban neighborhoods across the line in Maryland; and The West Ashley area of Charleston, S.C.On the flipside, there are “suburban” jurisdictions that have attempted to densify parts of themselves into “urban” areas, such as:The Friendship Heights area of Montgomery County, Maryland; The “central” area of Silver Spring (also in Montgomery County); The Tysons Corner area of Fairfax County, Virginia (additional densification is pending);Much of “suburban” Long Beach, California; andThe Parole area of Anne Arundel County, Maryland (just outside of the City of Annapolis, much to the irritation of elected officials in Annapolis).
Flash to D4P: Nobody has forced anyone to live in a home that’s part of a homeowners’ (or condominium) association. Don’t like an HOA? Don’t live in one!
Just as nobody has forced anyone to live in Portland. Don’t like Portland? Don’t live there!
bennett said:
“It’s hard to trust free enterprise to do the right thing (see ENRON, mortgage backed securities, etc).”
Ladies and gentle this is what you call a strawman argument.
When a government program fails an anti-free marketers solution is of course to blame the free market and propose a government program to fix a problem caused by a government program.
Though with a condo, you’re more like share holder of a corporation.
For an area with HOA, it’s more like being part of a commune.
To properly compare HOAs to Smart Growth one would have to make an example along the lines:
Imagine a statewide mandate that requires that every home in an suburban area must belong to a HOA, that the general purpose of that HOA will be to enforce architectural and chromatic uniformity and thus forbids HOAs that do not conform to these goals and, finally, that the funds for achieving adherence to the HOA mandates will be taken from, say, mass transit fares.
Then you would have an analogy to a Smart Growth directive.
Ode: “When a government program fails an anti-free marketers solution is of course to blame the free market and propose a government program to fix a problem caused by a government program.â€Â
And indeed what was the people’s solution to Enron? Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) which according to some sources is costing US companies as much as 1.4 trillion . Even half that amount is equivalent to several Enrons per year.
If Obama does wage a war on suburbs, I hope Gresham, Oregon is first. That place really sucks.
…SOX adds costs [1] not to one but hundreds of industries. Is it unlikely that for some industries, which have already lost most of their competitive margin to, say, foreign competition, this added cost will not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and pushes yet another industry over the edge into collapse?
And what will be the collectivist solution then? Another industry bailout? One sees the deceptive vicious cycle of dirigisme.
What fallacy hopes that government committees of experts can fully evaluate such side effects, even if comprised by a group of very smart people (which often they are not)?
And this to address a problem which was on its way to being mitigated by the Enron debacle itself anyway. How? By making investors more careful and preferring companies with more transparent accounting practices, by employees who would now be avoiding working for companies that put a significant portion of their retirement funds in company stock etc. In a few words, after Enron, changes to accounting practices would have happened voluntarily anyway – simply to attract investors and competent employees who have more choices.
A free market alternative? You can let demand develop a cornucopia of standards similar to SOX, and let participation be voluntary. Then let the cumulative analytical intelligence of the market players determine where the risk/reward equilibrium lies, which BTW, also provides more choices for everybody on the risk/reward spectrum.
[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=956987
Housing average prices and new Jobs
Houston vs San Jose
1970 Equal +-
1974 San Jose instituted Urban Growth Boundary
2007 Houston 158,000 San Jose 900,000 +-
Houston 100,000 new jobs San Jose 5,000
2008 Houston home prices 147,500 San Jose 600,000 +-
New Jobs require reasonable priced housing and the ability to commute.
1. Why did San Jose institute an Urban Growth Boundary?
2. Why didn’t Houston?
D4P wrote:
> 1. Why did San Jose institute an Urban Growth Boundary?
> 2. Why didn’t Houston?
I do not have the facts to answer those questions, but Paul Krugman of the N.Y. Times might have – as far back as 2005, when he wrote a column about the housing bubble. Please pay special attention to his use of the word flatland and the phrase zoned zone.
That Hissing Sound – http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html
According to Krugman,
flatland “occupies the middle of the country”
zoned zone “lies along the coasts”
According to Antiplanners, the only relevant difference between flatland and zoned zone is that zoned zone has land use regulations, and flatland doesn’t.
Good luck with that argument.
Smarth growth came about as a response to a distorted market.
“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” Plato
NPWeditor Says:
“If Obama does wage a war on suburbs, I hope Gresham, Oregon is first. That place really sucks.”
Do you want Tom Gresham going postal?
Of course we have the editorial leaning trumpeted in the headline of this post: Suburbs is Great!!!!
Now. Economic and ecological efficiency dictates that overall cities must densify. The preferred ‘L’ argumentation here – “me first and society last” – must result in less money in the public trough. So that means less infra. That means new stuff closer to infra, unless something happens to reality and developers will take the risk of ponying up for big pipes for everyone.
But No One will bulldoze the suburbs to put gun-toting Patriot-Americans in TODs. Get real. Put your widdle fears aside.
What may come out of this Office is the real-costing of roads, pipes, large lots. You’ll pay a premium to obtain them, just as the ~1.5M people have paid a premium to obtain attractive, walkable SG neighborhoods (due to the cr*ppy Euclidean zoning paradigm in this country creating cr*ppy, unattractive suburbs).
DS
Dan, you made some interesting points, but remember that exurban sprawl took a lot of social engineering.