“City defender: if cities were more compact and walkable, people wouldn’t have to spend hours commuting in their cars and would have more free time.

Suburb defender: but isn’t it true that in New York City, the city with the most public transit in the U.S., people have really long commute times because public transit takes longer?”

But a recent report may support the “city defender” side of the argument. Replica HQ, a new company focused on data provision, calculated per capita travel time for residents of the fifty largest metropolitan areas. NYC came in with the lowest amount of travel time, at 88.3 minutes per day. The other metros with under 100 minutes of travel per day were car-dependent but relatively dense Western metros like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and San Jose (as well as Buffalo, New Orleans and Miami).

By contrast, sprawling, car-dependent Nashville was No. 1 at 140 minutes per day, followed by Birmingham, Charlotte and Atlanta. *

How does this square with Census data showing that the latter metros have shorter commute times than New York? First, the Replica data focuses on overall travel time- so if you have a long commute but are able to shop close to home, you might spend less overall time traveling than a Nashville commuter who drives all over the region to shop. Second, the Replica data is per resident rather than per commuter- so if retirees and students travel less in the denser metros, this fact would be reflected in the Replica data but not Census data.

*The methodology behind Replica’s estimates can be found here.

The post Do People Travel Less In Dense Places? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Strong Towns does good work and I was a dues-paying member for several years. But their argument against low-density growth is well into its second decade and is being spread widely enough to be taken seriously, which means asking hard questions and demanding rigorous accounting.

If Strong Towns or other Ponzi-supporters can’t bring the receipts, they can still retreat to some better-defended heights:

• Growth may hurt central cities and inner-ring suburbs left behind by decamping residents and commerce;
• Throwing tax subsidies at growth is usually a bad idea;
• Growth may be fiscally unsustainable in a place where population is not growing; or
• The federal tax-and-spending system is biased in favor of new construction.

But a retreat is a retreat. If Strong Towns falls back on these positions, the general “bailey” claim that “suburban growth is a Ponzi scheme” is torched.

The post Interrogating the Strong Towns “Ponzi Scheme” appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Let’s take as a given that sprawl is “bad” urbanism, mediocre at best. Realistically, it’s rarely going to be transit-oriented, highly walkable, or architecturally profound.

So the question is whether outward, greenfield growth is necessary to achieve affordability. And the answer from urban economics is yes. You can’t get far in making a city affordable without letting it grow outward.

Model 1: All hands on deck

Let’s start with a nonspatial model where people demand housing space and it’s provided by both existing and new housing. Existing housing doesn’t easily disappear, so the supply curve is kinked.

A citywide supply curve is the sum of a million little property-level supply curves. We can split it into two groups: infill and greenfield, which we add horizontally.

If demand rises to the new purple line, you can see that the equilibrium point where both infill & greenfield are active is at a lower price & higher quantity than the infill-only line. The only way to get some infill growth to replace some greenfield growth, in this model, is to raise the overall price level. And even then, the replacement is less than 1-for-1.

Of course, this is just a core YIMBY idea reversed! In most U.S. cities, greenfield growth has been allowed and infill growth sharply constrained, so that prices are higher, total growth is lower, and greenfield growth is higher than if infill were also allowed.

At the most basic level, greenfield growth is simply one of the ways to meet demand. With fewer pumps working, you’ll drain less of the flood.

Model 2: Paying for what you demolish

Now let’s look at a spatial model where people will pay more per square foot when they are closer to downtown. (If the jobs are evenly dispersed everywhere, the place with the best job access is…the center. So the math is the same for a job-seeker.)

Of course, builders won’t supply new housing unless the price comes in above their construction cost. In general, more intensive types of building cost more per square foot. And building on large greenfield sites costs less (both via scale efficiencies and ease of access/staging) than small-site, infill growth. Finally, infill growth usually has to replace an existing land use.

Taking a specific transect across the city, let’s suppose that the existing value of parcels* as built is shown by the brown line.

[*existing value here has to be expressed in dollars per hypothetical square foot of the parcel as redeveloped. This is weird, but not hard to calculate in a model.]

To generate growth, the cost of development has to fit between the black willingness-to-pay line and the brown existing-value line. And infill typologies are often more expensive, per square foot, than greenfield ones.

What will infill housing cost? First, it will cost more than housing at the fringe, but that’s OK – the people at the core are benefiting in terms of commute time and job access. Paying more to be close to downtown is like paying more for a bigger house – you can’t complain.

Second, infill housing won’t be able to push the price per square foot of new construction below the cost of construction plus the value of existing development. As infill development runs out of abandoned warehouses and parking lots, that wedge will rise.

A successful YIMBY strategy via infill would run into a shrinking gap between falling prices and a rising existing-value wedge. If it got that far, I’d actually be surprised and impressed – but the point of this second model is that the price floor is higher.

Model 3: The tyranny of circles

What neither of the first two models could really tell us is how much greenfield matters as a quantitative matter. The first model shows how all supply channels are additive, the second shows that infill has a higher price floor. The final boss is the circle.

Back in model 2, it looked like there was about as much room for new development at that sharp dip just to the left of downtown (an old warehouse district, say) as in the greenfield areas at the edges. But cities don’t exist on a line – they usually approximate a circle.

In this map of DC, there’s a circle about 2 miles from the center and another about 20 miles from the center. How much more land does the outer one contain?

You don’t need pi for the answer: the outer circle is 100 times bigger in area. And it’s not even at the fringe in most places.

In most debates about the merits of the infill and greenfield, there’s an implicit “acres to acres” comparison – a parcel here versus a parcel there. But that misses the forest: the power of greenfield development is the incredible amount of land that is available for relatively low-cost conversion.

Counterarguments

Don’t greenfield infrastructure costs make it more expensive? If we didn’t subsidize sprawl, wouldn’t it mostly stop?

There are certainly gains from re-using existing urban infrastructure. But the dominance of horizontal growth across civilizations using a huge range of transportation technologies, taxation schemes, regulatory approaches, and infrastructure norms belies the idea that horizontal growth is mostly a subsidy phenomenon.

Cities also come with significant infrastructure costs that intensify with built and human density. I’m skeptical that a full, accurate accounting of costs can be done at the micro level. And the macro-level indicators, like overall tax rates, certainly don’t suggest large savings from density.

Can’t we build greenfield development that’s fully urban and transit-oriented?

There’s a huge variation in the quality of greenfield growth, and we can all applaud developers who are doing interesting things and building suburbs that have the bones for continued growth. But in American cities, transit is almost utterly useless to people living at the edge. It’s the tyranny of circles again: How many transit lines would need to reach the 20-mile radius perimeter to put everyone within a mile of transit? And how long will those commutes take?

Can we allow housing at the urban fringe but ban new highways?

This is just a recipe for stroads. Places like Northern Virginia that failed to build a network of limited-access highways instead have 6-lane arterials with traffic lights that mean they always run at half capacity. For a major city with serious demand pressure, building new highways or parkways is a good and necessary part of greenfield growth.

This is just part of a bigger principle for greenfield growth: Your suburb is never the last one. Much U.S. sprawl is built badly in the specific way that every town, every subdivision pretends that it will always be the last thing before farms and forests.

Yes In My Greenfield

The YIMBY movement is and should remain focused on re-legalizing infill growth. Strong Towns offers good principles for fiscal responsibility in moderate-demand places. There’s room for another policy movement focused on greenfield growth – getting the financing and governance right, planning for future growth, learning from successes and failures, promoting quality design that’s cheap enough for low-end development, and so on. If and when that movement arises, YIMBYs should greet it as a friend and ally: both are important to a future where housing is affordable.

The post The urban economics of sprawl appeared first on Market Urbanism.

He’s right- if you define “suburb” broadly as “everything that isn’t downtown.” A downtown that isn’t surrounded by neighborhoods is just a small downtown.

But that isn’t always the way Americans understand suburbs. If you think of suburbs as “towns outside the city with a different tax base that are usually much richer than the city” , suburbs aren’t good for the city at all. Because of the growth of suburbs, cities have stunted tax bases because they have a disproportionate share of the region’s poverty, and have to pay for a disproportionate share of poverty-related government programs. By contrast, if cities resembled the cities of 100 years ago that included nearly all of their regional population, they would have stronger tax bases. (This may seem like a pipe dream to residents of northeastern cities trapped within their 1950 borders, but plenty of Sun Belt cities include huge amounts of suburb-like territory).

Similarly, if you think of suburbs as “places where most people have to drive to get anywhere” their existence is not so good for the city. When suburbanites drive into the city they create pollution, and they lobby for highways that make it easier for them to create even more (while taking up land that city residents would otherwise use for businesses and housing). And when jobs move to car-dependent suburbs, that devalues city living, either because carless city residents are frozen out of those jobs, or because city residents have to buy cars to reach those jobs (which sort of defeats the point of city living, insofar as short commutes are an advantage of city life).

To put it another way, a city needs neighborhoods outside a central business district. But it benefits far less than it otherwise would if those neighborhoods are car-dominated or outside city limits.

The post Do The Cities Need The Suburbs? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Similarly, I’ve seen some articles recently that were anti-anti-NIMBY*: they acknowledge the need for new housing, but they try to split the difference by focusing their fire on YIMBYs.**

A recent article in Governing, by Aaron Renn, is an example of this genre. Renn agrees with “building more densely in popular areas like San Francisco and the north side of Chicago, in other cities along commercial corridors, near commuter rail stops, and in suburban town centers.” Since I am all for these things, I suspect I agree with Renn far more than I disagree.

But then he complains that YIMBYs “have much bigger aims” because they “want to totally eliminate any housing for exclusively single-family districts- everywhere.” What’s wrong with that?

First, he says (correctly) that this would require state preemption of local zoning. And this is bad, he says, because it “would completely upend this country’s traditional approach to land use.” Here, Renn is overlooking most of American history: zoning didn’t exist for roughly the first century and a half of American history, and in some places has become far more restrictive over the last few decades. Thus, YIMBY policies are not a upending of tradition, but a return to a tradition that was destroyed in the middle and late 20th century. To the extent state preemption gives Americans more rights to build more type of housing, it would actually recreate the earlier tradition that was wiped out. Moreover, even if the status quo was a “tradition”, that doesn’t make it the best policy for the 21st century. For most of the 20th century, housing was far cheaper than it is today, so local control of zoning was far less costly than it is today.

Second, he seems to think changing single-family subdivisions is somehow bad, but he doesn’t say why. Instead, he uses emotionally loaded sentences like “YIMBYs have a target on the back of every subdivision in America.” Clearly he wants readers to believe that allowing a fourplex next to a single-family house is bad, but he doesn’t want to tell them why it is bad.

Third, he raises an ad hominem argument, claiming that “The YIMBY claim to be concerned about high housing prices is undermined by the fact that many YIMBYs support urban growth boundaries and other forms of urban containment that raise housing prices…Many YIMBYs appear to have simply repackaged the age-old opposition to sprawl and a desire to encourage more people to live a denser urban lifestyle into a new libertarian marketing program ostensibly aimed at prices.”

Yet in the preceding paragraph he says: “If the houses on either side of a single-family home in the suburbs were torn away and replaced with four-plexes, most YIMBY activists would undoubtedly celebrate.” So on the one hand, YIMBYs are bad because they want fewer people to live in suburbia, and on the other hand they are bad because they want fourplexes in suburbia, which means that MORE people would live in suburbia. These points of view seem inconsistent.

Perhaps Renn is trying to say that suburbs should grow, but only through sprawl rather than infill: that is, through development in areas that have no neighbors to object. But if that’s what he wants, he should say so more clearly.***

*For those of you unfamiliar with this piece of zoning jargon, NIMBY is an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard” and, read literally, refers to people who are willing to support new housing or public works as long as it is not near them, that is, in their “back yards”. However, it is somewhat of a misnomer, since some people don’t really see the need for new housing anywhere, or at least not anywhere in their city.

**YIMBY is an acronym for “Yes In My Back Yard”. Despite the reference to back yards, YIMBYs are not just people who want housing next to them; rather, the term usually is used to refer to people who want lots of new housing in all kinds of places.

***I think this policy has a variety of disadvantages: First, it increases transportation costs for everyone, because more people will need cars and will have to drive them farther. Second, it leads to more pollution of all types, because more cars lead to more pollution. Third, it freezes nondrivers out of jobs and other opportunities, as development spreads to places without public transit. On the other hand, any increase in housing supply does hold down prices, so from an affordability statement outer-suburb housing is better than no housing at all. However, allowing new housing everywhere would increase housing supply even more.

The post An Anti-Anti-NIMBY article appeared first on Market Urbanism.

American (and European) YIMBYs point to Tokyo as an icon and model – proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability even when demand is very strong. But this body of work is over-reliant on a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it’s time to go deep – books deep – into the fascinating details of Japan’s land use institutions.

Essentials

As with any complex social phenomenon, we are tempted to essentialize Japanese zoning. It works because it’s top-down. It works because Douglas MacArthur imposed strong property rights. It works because of Japanese traditions of impermanence. (If you’re a planner rather than a YIMBY, replace “it works” with “it’s broken”).

Sometimes – often – essential simplifications are useful. And there’s no type of book more boring than the one that promises to tell you how “everything you know about X is wrong,” and then proceeds to offer a bunch of minor caveats to the basically-correct narrative you already knew. Thankfully, this isn’t that kind of book.

Instead, what you come away with is an appreciation for how wrong each of these narratives is: Japanese land use is a delicately-balanced synthesis of centralized and scattered power. If you take away an essential story or lesson, it should be the contingency of outcomes. It works because the central planners were powerful enough to preempt local government but not powerful enough to sideline landowners. It works because local governments encouraged modernization but never had enough funding to execute urban renewal. It works because otherwise strong property rights coexisted along with Land Readjustment. It works because the postwar US and Japanese authorities did not fully enforce their own edicts. It works because of the mini-kaihatsu loophole.

It works because a very specific sequence of institutions rose and declined over a very eventful century, and none of them had the time, power, or money to fully execute its vision.

In the next sections I will draw four notable episodes or themes from the text. This is not a synoptic review – the closest you’ll get to a full narrative is the “it works” section above.

The MacArthur Myth

First off, let’s go all Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur. One of those essential stories is that the postwar U.S.-written constitution imposed strong property rights. This isn’t just incomplete-wrong, it’s wrong-wrong.

As Tsuru (1993) carefully explains…the American draft of the article on land rights was strongly resisted by the Japanese government. The original Article 28 in MacArthur’s draft read, “The ultimate fee to the land and to all natural resources reposes in the State as the collective representative of the people.”

Wait, what? “Reposes in the state”? Did the Soviets get there first?

This approach of the MacArthur draft was eventually replaced by the following wording suggested by the Japanese side which is now Article 29 of the Japanese constitution: “The right to own or to hold property is inviolable. Property rights shall be defined by law, in conformity with the public welfare…” Tsuru (1993:27) suggests that this wording is basically identical to the old Article 27 of the Meiji constitution, and is much more conservative in its protection of the rights of landowners and its weak conception of the public interest than the initial American draft.

Sorensen, p. 156.

Inviolable!

Land Readjustment

A country with inviolable property rights wouldn’t let a two-thirds majority of landowners force the minority to give up their land for a joint development scheme, would it?

¯\_(?)_/¯

I told you it was a delicately balanced synthesis.

The basic structure of LR is that two-thirds of owners representing two-thirds of land can vote to pool a specified area of land, overriding holdouts. Public ways and land are then laid out and the remaining land is redivided among the original property owners.

Planned growth in Japan has relied on Land Readjustment (LR) to an extraordinary degree. With no need for up-front funding and landowner votes as a check on bad ideas, LR may well be superior to eminent domain or land assembly for laying out new neighborhoods.

Sorensen characterizes suburban Japan as a patchwork of planned spaces, where LR succeeded, and “sprawl”, where uncoordinated rural development preceded planning via loopholes and political meddling.

Mini-kaihatsu, here and there

One American myth of Japanese land use is that national bureaucrats keep local planners on a leash, preventing them from zoning more strictly. Where that’s correct, it’s almost accidentally so. National bureaucrats, in Sorensen’s telling, have consistently pushed for greater regulation. But when prefectures had the choice of setting a key regulatory threshold at 500 or 1,000 square meters, “only a few” took the stricter option (p. 236).

That 1,000 square meter threshold became the “mini-kaihatsu loophole”. In rural fringe areas, a development below 1,000 square meters did not need development permission.

A typical mini-kaihatsu development consists of 12 houses fronting on a narrow 4 metre lane running at right angles from an existing road.

Sorensen, p. 238

A common size for rice paddies was, “conveniently”, one tan, or 992 square meters.

Here’s a picture of a typical mini-kaihatsu:

Oops, wrong photo. That’s Houston. Here are some Japanese examples from Google:

The concept is the same, and it’s no coincidence that both arise in places with light regulation, strong demand, and little public streets funding. As I wrote about Houston:

Houstonians achieve privacy by orienting many new townhouses onto a share courtyard-driveway, sometimes gated, which creates an intermediate space between the private home and the public street…
The courtyard-driveways also provide a shared play space, as evidenced by frequent basketball hoops. Despite what Jane Jacobs may have told you, city streets are not viable play spaces for 21st-century children. But cul-de-sacs can be. Houston’s courtyard-and-grid model may be the ideal blend, unlocking the connectivity of a city while delivering the secure sociability of a cul-de-sac to a large share of homes.

Ancient alleys

Cul-de-sac alleyways played an important role in pre-modern urban Japan. Sorensen calls them “back-alley nagaya” (shacks or tenements) and notes that the “landowner would often manage and live above a shop fronting the street,” while their employees, or poor artisans lived in the rear areas accessed by a narrow covered lane.”

Other authors have put a more romantic gloss on the alleys. Jinnai Hidenobu says that “designs displayed a sensitivity to what Maki Fumihiko has called ‘hidden depth'”.

[New] groups of urban dwellers, such as factory workers and low-wage white-collar workers, also made their homes in the backstreets. At the entrance to the alley, a wooden wicket was placed, clearly demarcating the main street (public) from the backstreet (semi-public) spaces… In such backstreets, not only could landlords and tenants form a trusting relationship, but tenants themselves lived with one another on the most neighborly terms.

…In Edo, it was in such micro-spaces that a certain degree of self-government took shape; it was in these same back alleys that the foundation of stable society was laid.

Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, pp. 124-125.

Jordan Sand’s Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects includes a chapter on how alley exploration and appreciation helped form one neighborhood’s identity in 1980s Tokyo.

Most recently, Almazan and Studiolab’s Emergent Tokyo profiles Tsukishima, a modern neighborhood “famous for its narrow roji alleyways.”

[Roji] are often used almost as an extension of the domestic space. As in so many Tokyo neighborhoods, in Tsukishima one sees subtle transitions along the spectrum of public to private space rather than a hard division between the two.

Almazan & Studiolab, p. 172

American urbanists generally hate cul-de-sacs, which prevent connectivity. But residents, especially those with children, love them. And even New Urbanists have re-invented them, calling them “cottage courts.” The “Houston mini-kaihatsu” is a proven economic model for an urban form too universal to be dismissed.

The planner’s gaze

It isn’t just alleys that Sorensen judges more harshly than other writers do. In fact, he has a hard time finding anything good to say about Japan’s land use.

Sorensen’s virtue is his stolid Canadian insistence on presenting facts clearly and with a minimum of emotion. As a reader, one senses that Sorensen’s prejudices seep into the text against his will. (And one trembles to think what unreadable diatribes would have been produced by someone with his sensibilities but not his restraint).

A key example comes on pp. 222-223, where Sorensen nets up the effects of Japan’s zoning code, which allows very mixed uses. He has a long paragraph noting the positive effects – but the words are all in others’ mouths. He cites Jane Jacobs, Jinnai, and six others who point out “very positive consequences of Japan’s radically inclusive approach to land use zoning.” In the next two paragraphs, however, he provides the counterpoint – in his own voice, with only one citation.

It is hard not to feel that Sorensen is favorably disposed toward anything planned and skeptical, if not hostile, to anything unplanned. To Sorensen, “sprawl” denotes unplanned, “haphazard” growth (p. 326). Planned growth, at the same densities, in the same areas, is not sprawl. The same bias pervades his (otherwise excellent!) 2001 article, Building Suburbs in Japan.

He rarely defends his planner’s-eye view. He doesn’t holistically compare planned to unplanned areas and find the latter lacking. Nor does he define key metrics of urban success (e.g. pollution levels, commute times, and housing costs). Instead, he seems to have an intuitive desire to see plans made and brought to fruition, regardless of the merits.

In an era when Tokyo stands as “humanity’s greatest urban achievement,” the institutions that created it deserve a little more credit. But even if Sorensen doesn’t like them, he reports their workings faithfully – and that makes his book a must-read for Tokyophile market urbanists.

The post Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan appeared first on Market Urbanism.

I suspect not, for a variety of reasons. First of all, Census Department estimates have, in recent years, tended to underestimate urban populations, at least in some cities. For example, in 2019 the Census estimated Manhattan’s population as 1.628 million, while the actual count of 2020 showed 1.694 million residents- an underestimation of over 65,000 people. The Census estimated Brooklyn’s population at 2.559 million, but the actual count showed 2.736 million- an underestimate of over 150,000. (On the other hand, the 2020 population count was actually a bit lower than the 2019 estimates for Washington and San Francisco).

Second, even the 2020 Census probably undercounted cities more than it undercounted suburbs. How do we know this? Because according to the Census Bureau itself, it undercounted Blacks by 3 percent and Hispanics by 5 percent, while slightly overcounting whites. These groups tend to be more urban than suburban (at least compared to whites) – so if the Census undercounted these groups, it probably undercounted urban population generally.

Third, the timing of the Census Bureau’s estimates does not quite make sense to me. By July 2021, rents had already began to rise in Manhattan; the low rents of February and March were already disappearing. This suggests that by July, population (and thus demand) was increasing.

Fourth, even if the Census Bureau’s population estimates were valid for the summer of 2021, they certainly aren’t valid any more. How do we know? It seems pretty obvious that in New York City, rents have skyrocketed to pre-COVID levels and beyond. According to streeteasy.com, rents in New York City bottomed out in January 2021, reached pre-COVID levels in December 2021, and have continued to rise. If rent is rising, it seems likely that demand is rising as well.

The post Reasons to be a Census skeptic appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The relationship between blacks and whites in the residential subdivisions out beyond the suburban ring suggests that middle-class people of both races recognize each other as equals. Among middleclass Americans, at least in the special circumstances of these Pennsylvania communities and others like them around the country, the terrible burden of race has been lightened greatly.

We know there are large and persistent gaps between the principal racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Those gaps feel especially stark to people who live in gentrifying neighborhoods, which punch above their weight in national discourse.

But are there diverse places in the U.S. where racial differences among residents are small enough to be undetectable to a typical resident? Places where Roger Starr’s ideal of “integration without tears” might be a reality, where people of different races socialize as equals, share culture and priorities, and work in the same range of occupations?

I don’t have enough data to drill down to neighborhoods. But the American Community Survey allows a comparison of Public Use Microdata Area (PUMAs). Here are the national results:

I investigate white, Black, and Latino heads of households (HH) in PUMAs in which at least 20% of HH are white and at least 25% are Black or Latino. I measure inequality as the sum of log differences between whites and nonwhites across several dimensions:

• Income at the 25th and 75th percentiles, for HH age 30-65
• High school-or-less education, for HH age 30-55
• Homeownership share, for HH age 40-70
• Home value, for all homeowning HH
• Median age, for all HH

These were intuitive choices to me, and the age cutoffs are intended to avoid compositional effects driven by age differences. The final dimension, age, differs much less than the others across racial groups.

At 100,000 people or more, most PUMAs are big enough to contain several towns and many neighborhoods, some of which might be quite diverse and others monochromatic. But the results can at least tell us where we might be likely to find diverse-and-equal neighborhoods. The rest of this post zooms in on a few regions.

Atlanta

There’s only one PUMA in the nation that qualified as fully “equal” according to my rubric, the area around Stockbridge, Georgia, in the southern Atlanta exurbs. There are some differences among the races here, but they cancel each out. Whites have higher incomes and homeownership rates than nonwhites, but lower educational attainment and home values.

Because Atlanta has a large Black population, it has many diverse PUMAs, including 3 (out of 15 nationwide) that I rated as “nearly equal”. Atlanta shows the pattern I expected to find in many metros: highly unequal centers, relatively equal exurbs.

Texas Triangle

Texas cities are similar to Atlanta in some ways – diverse Sunbelt cities with rapid exurban growth. But in Texas, Latinos are the principal minority. And the central-exurban pattern breaks down. The “extremely unequal” sections of Houston and Dallas are not downtown; they’re the elite neighborhoods stretching west and north of downtown, respectively for quite a distance. Unlike in Atlanta and most other U.S. cities, though, those elite neighborhoods allow plenty of cheap multifamily housing at their edges. As a result, they have large enough nonwhite populations to get onto the map. What shows up as a concentration of extreme inequality could be reframed as extreme diversity.

San Antonio is quite unlike Dallas and Houston. It has a wide swath of nearly-equal northern suburbs. A potential reason is that white San Antonians are less affluent. The Houston-San Antonio median income difference is $16,000 for whites but only $2,000 for Latinos.

The great white North

This analytical approach also highlights how little diversity exists in northern cities, relative to national averages. Another map, showing white population share, can be a useful reference. But in cities from Boston to Seattle, this exercise is not very useful. Instead, it’s a reminder that “diversity” is contextual.

Bringing it home

This exercise was partly inspired by my children’s rarified experience of race in America. Their playmates, at church and our homeschool co-op, are racially diverse but appear relatively equal in other regards. So I was chagrined to learn that our home PUMA is 26th highest for inequality among the 803 diverse PUMAs.

The District of Columbia is even more extreme, and it shows the age inversion common to affluent urban cores. In most PUMAs, white HH are slightly older than Black and Latino HH, but the difference is small. In central D.C., Baltimore, and similar cities, the pattern is inverted: white HH are substantially younger (median age 38) than their Black neighbors (57) in the Northeast DC PUMA.

Integration without tears?

Since diversity and equality have strongly positive connotations, it would be easy to identify the green areas on the map as “good” and the brown areas as “bad.” But the kind of equality profiled here implies a lack of diversity across non-racial dimensions.

Reducing national inequality implies lifting people up; reducing local inequality implies keeping them out. I began this article with a Roger Starr quote. It’s worth noting that his praise of woodsy Monroe County, Pennsylvania, came in the context of his increasing pessimism about integration in urban neighborhoods.

Whatever Starr’s other faults, he knew what he was looking at. In this exercise, I found that his Monroe County has the greatest similarity between races of any PUMA in the country.

The post Are there places in America with diversity *and* equality? appeared first on Market Urbanism.