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Happiness Is a Low-Density Suburb

By | | Regional planning
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How do you measure happiness? The Antiplanner isn’t sure, but recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all. The effect isn’t as pronounced for especially intelligent people, the researchers concluded, but it was still there.

One reason why people in some cities may be unhappy is the high cost of living there. The Washington Post asks “why it seems impossible to buy your first home.” The paper doesn’t bother answering the question, but the cities discussed in the article–Portland, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Washington, and several California cities–all are under some form of growth management. All but Boston and Washington have urban-growth boundaries, while Boston and Washington are surrounded by counties that have passed highly restrictive zoning codes prevention new home developments.
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In addition to making housing unaffordable, growth management makes urban areas dense. So, the question is: is it the density that makes people unhappy or the unaffordable housing? One alternative possibility is that unhappy people are attracted to dense, expensive areas, but I don’t see why that would be true. I suspect that density itself is not the problem, but things that are often (but don’t have to be) associated with density, such as a higher cost of living and traffic congestion, are the real keys to urban unhappiness.

The Millennial Dream

By | | Housing
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A new survey from Trulia confirms similar surveys in the past: Millennial housing preferences really aren’t much different from those of previous generations. Contrary to claims that most Millennials want to live in inner-city multifamily housing, nearly 90 percent of Millennials aspire to buy a single-family home. Moreover, the vast majority hoping to live in suburbs or small towns, while only 8 percent say they want to live in a central city.

The myth that Millennials want to live in cities is so pervasive that one news report claimed that the results of this survey contradict the “reality” that people are moving to the cities. In fact, as Wendell Cox has shown, central city population growth was slower in the 2000s than the 1990s, for both Millennials and the population in general. Meanwhile, suburbs and small towns continue to grow faster than center cities, even among 20-29 year olds.

While the populations of core neighborhoods in and near downtowns are growing when measured on a percentage basis, this is mainly because these populations were so low in the first place. The 1950s and 1960s saw most major cities evict residents from their downtowns as a part of the urban renewal process, which was the urban planning fad of that era. Now, the same urban renewal tools–tax-increment financing, eminent domain, and other gifts to developers–are used to bring people back to downtowns, which is today’s urban planning fad. While planners have proven that “if you subsidize it, they will come,” this isn’t evidence of a huge and permanent change in housing tastes.
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Most Americans Want a House in the Suburbs

By | | Transportation
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Most Americans are happy with their commutes and would be willing to trade off even longer commutes in order to live in more desirable housing, according to a survey by YouGov. Moreover, the detailed results indicate that these preferences are almost as strong among 18-29 year olds as among older age classes. YouGov describes itself as a “market research and data company.”

Three out of four people in YouGov’s sample of 1,000 drive to work while 14 percent take transit. Since the Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey found that 85 percent of Americans drive to work and only 5 percent take transit, it seems likely that YouGov’s sample was skewed to big cities where transit commuting is more popular. New York, San Francisco, and Washington are the only major urban areas in which more than 14 percent of commuters take transit to work.

This makes YouGov’s other survey results even more striking. The numbers suggest that anecdotes indicating that large numbers of Millennials want to use transit and live close to jobs aren’t supported by the facts. Among other things, the survey found that differences in commuting and other preferences between Democrats and Republicans are greater than between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

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The Suburbs Are Still Alive

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Ho-hum, another prediction that “suburbs are dead,” this time from Fortune magazine assistant editor Leigh Gallagher. Her just-released book, The End of the Suburbs, argues that Americans no longer dream of owning a house with a yard and driving to work and everywhere else.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

As it turns out, however, all the studies don’t show that. Take, for example, the Census Bureau report (previously noted here) that new homes are larger than ever or this survey, which found that three out four millennials aspire to live in a house of their own–and many of them are working hard to achieve that.

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Are Suburbs Authentic?

By | | News commentary
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Andrew Potter, who recently wrote a delightful book on what is “authentic,” has now come out in defense of the suburbs. Potter challenges James Kunstler’s view of the suburbs as having no “sense of place.”

“This is the sort of thing that could only be argued by someone who has either never visited a suburb, or is so enthralled by his own prejudices that black looks white, up looks down, and a thriving community appears to be nothing more than a barren wasteland,” says Potter. In fact, suburbs have “vibrant sociability on every street,” while the cities have devolved “into social and psychological wastelands, full of apartment buildings where people barely acknowledge one another in the elevator.” New Urbanists see cities as “a version of the ‘Sesame Street’ fantasy spun by Jane Jacobs,” but in fact Jacobs’ Greenwich Village “already disappearing by the time she turned it into an urban planner’s fetish dream.”

“The entire case against the suburbs,” says Potter, “is little more than lifestyle snobbery . . . revealing itself as a thinly veiled form of contempt for middle-class tastes and preferences.” While cities like Portland are “increasingly populated by the hip, the young, and the childless,” the reality is that these people are bringing “frankly suburban practices,” such as critical mass bike rides, into the city cores. This “importation of the habits and values of the suburban lifestyle” has actually helped revitalize the cities and is turning even New York City “into one giant homogeneous suburb.” While some may quarrel with that conclusion, Potter’s point is that too much of the debate about the suburbs has been based on phony esthetic ideals.