Density

Whenever Maplewood talks about land use policy, density is a main theme of the discussion. Three recent articles are helpful.

A Pioneer Press letter writer neatly illustrates the either-or view:

Preserve the treasure

The recent column about how Americans still have a clear picture of the American Dream (David Brooks, Feb. 19) confirms my belief that the majority of people do not want to live in high-density areas. The column made it clear that mostly young couples without children or young singles choose the high-density urban lifestyle, while most families want a stand-alone home with a yard to enjoy. Given this reality, why do St. Paul's decision makers continue the push to build high-density buildings?

One of St. Paul's greatest assets is the low-density, single-family character of most of its neighborhoods and the neighborhood businesses that serve them. These neighborhoods promote a social structure where residents know and watch out for each other, and people feel that they belong. The high-density urban lifestyle does little to enable this kind of social structure. City leaders should quit trying to create a big-city lifestyle that most people don't want and concentrate on preserving the treasure that they have. [emphasis added]

The letter writer refers to a recent David Brooks column, in which he misrepresents * a PEW study.

The Pew Research Center just finished a study about where Americans would like to live and what sort of lifestyle they would like to have. The first thing they found is that even in dark times, Americans are still looking over the next horizon. Nearly half of those surveyed said they would rather live in a different type of community from the one they are living in at present.

Second, Americans still want to move outward. City dwellers are least happy with where they live, and cities are one of the least popular places to live. Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities "excellent" or "very good," compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of the people who live in rural America.

Cities remain attractive to the young. Forty-five percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City. But cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly. Only 14 percent of Americans 35 and older are interested in living in New York City. Only 8 percent of people over 65 are drawn to Los Angeles. We've all heard stories about retirees who move back into cities once their children are grown, but that is more anecdote than trend.

Third, Americans still want to go west. The researchers at Pew asked Americans what metro areas they would like to live in. Seven of the top 10 were in the West: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento. The other three were in the South: Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio. Eastern cities were down the list, and Midwestern cities were at the bottom.

Finally, Americans want to go someplace new. The powerhouse cities of the 20th century — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — are much less desirable today than the ones that have more recently sprouted up.

The main value of the Brooks piece is to alert us to the existence of the Pew study.

Finally, a long Richard Florida article in The Atlantic, How the crash will reshape America, argues that density is at the heart of prosperity

Some (though not all) of these mega-regions have a clear hub, and these hubs are likely to be better buffered from the crash than most cities, because of their size, diversity, and regional role. Chicago has emerged as a center for industrial management and has rolled up many of the functions, such as finance and law, once performed in smaller midwestern centers. Los Angeles has a broad, diverse economy with global strength in media and entertainment. Miami, which is being hit hard by the collapse of the real-estate bubble, nonetheless remains the commercial center for the large South Florida mega-region, and a major financial center for Latin America. Each of these places is the financial and commercial core of a large mega-region with tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in output. That’s not going to change as a result of the crisis.

Along with the rise of mega-regions, a second phenomenon is also reshaping the economic geography of the United States and the world. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can.... [emphasis added]

He argues that dense places must exist and will drive prosperity. I would add this would be true whether or not you or I personally choose to live in a high density environment at our current stage of life.

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* Mr. Brooks confuses magnitude with proportion when he makes statements like "Americans still want to move outward. City dwellers are least happy...", which refers the total number of Americans and city dwellers, but uses as evidence "Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities "excellent" or "very good," compared with 68 percent of suburbanites...", which refers to proportions.

Since more people live in cities, the actual comparative difference turns out to be insignificant: of 100 people, 16 live in a city and rate it excellent or very good, while 17 live in a suburb and rate it excellent or very good. Similarly 14 live in a city and want to, while 14 live in a suburb and want to.

In general Mr. Brooks over-interprets the study to be about cities, rather than the interaction of places to live and their residents' perceptions of and dispositions towards those places. For example, a downtown Minneapolis resident who is nearing retirement and dreams of fishing all day every day is not saying something bad about Minneapolis if she wishes she lived in Cass Lake.