On issue with the city is that, frankly, it does not like middle-class people, and doesn’t have very good options for them. This wasn’t always the case, as I’ve read a fair deal about New York’s interesting and twisted history. In the past, the middle class made up the bulk of NY population, but that’s no longer the case. They were, frankly, more or less driven out, because they couldn’t pay enough for decent housing. Now they either live way out and commute long distances, or more often find work in businesses which are relocating to be near the workforce.
One issue is that, as the middle clas was forced out, they became less a voice within the city, and consequently NYC was less inclined to consider middle-class issues. As such, there’s something of a bifurcation within the city. According to people who’ve lived there and told me about it, almost everything is either really good, or really crappy, and priced to match. Middle-class zones do exist, but they tend to cater more to upwardly-mobile young professionals or tighter-knit ethnic groups, and they ain’t all that big. Most such zones exist on the fringes between other areas.
Rent control no longer plays much role within the city, but it was a significant issue during the middle-class exodus.
Anyway, I don’t claim to be a personal observer who could explain things based on first-hand accounts. I just read a lot and have listened to various NY expats. Some loved the city, some frankly though it better to visit than to live, but they were fairly consistent in what they said about it.
These are great questions that I don’t think get asked nearly enough. Population growth is usually a good indicator of a city’s success, but it’s not the whole story. If the goal is sustainable urban living (an important idea, given that more than 50% of the world’s population live in cities), then constant growth should not be a sub-goal, because it’s most likely not sustainable.
If the Rust Belt cities have taught us anything, it’s that shrinkage is a possible (perhaps even inevitable) reality. Detroit, for instance, had fantastic growth throughout the early 20th century, ultimately expanding its city boundaries to such an extent that we could fit Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan neatly within. The city’s subsequent population decline has proven that such growth wasn’t smart in the long-term. And now, without enough property tax income from bodies in buildings, housing stock is being razed (or set ablaze) and city services are being cut, while local economies search for a raison d’etre.
But, just because a city like Detroit is shrinking, does not mean it’s a failure. Optimistically, urban areas with population decline are attempting to find a sustainable equilibrium that unchecked growth bypassed long ago. It seems to me that city planners should be finding ways to fit the city to the population, rather than the other way around (with capital-G “Growth”). I hope that NYC’s population is still increasing (mildly) towards that equilibrium. I think it is, and so would hesitate before changing things around to encourage more rapid, unnecessary growth.
Anyway, I’m glad the OP started this thread, and agree that urban living is an important component of sustainable occupation. But I would rather the ultimate goal be finding a way to sustain already successful cities while encouraging population growth (or decline!) in presently unsustainable cities/suburbs, rather than changing one city’s zoning laws to encourage limitless solitary growth.
Something to keep in mind in the US (and most of the Western world) is that population loss is very different from household loss. Because households are much smaller now than they were even 30 years ago, especially in dense central cities, a population growth of 2 percent may translate into a 5 percent growth in households and dwelling units.
I find it hard to believe there is great demand for growth in NYC. In Manhattan where space is very limited, the real estate values are very high. But in the outer areas of Brooklyn and Queens the properties are no more valuable than in the adjacent suburban areas, less in some cases. Growth is high in those suburban areas when they aren’t limited by space themselves. The entire NY metropolitan area is growing, and the outer regions are just as much part of the NYC economy as the city proper. Seperating any one borough, or even the entire city from the tri-state metropolitan area just can’t be done. And it should be noted that these suburbs pay a significant percentage of the cost of maintaining the city through city and state taxes.
I can tell you are not a personal observer, since you don’t seem to understand much about New York politics. Anyone driving through Queens, Staten Island, and much of Brooklyn and the Bronx will see plenty of middle class people. Elections in New York do not only include Manhattan, but all these boroughs also. Even in Manhattan not everyone is either rich or poor, though if you read the Style section of the Times I can see how you would get that impression.
What is middle class depends on where you are. I don’t know what apartments go for in Soho, or Noho, but they might be expensive but middle class. Here in Silicon Valley I live in a middle class neighborhood where houses are a minimum of $500K. And they are nowhere near being McMansions.
My dad was from New York, and I have spent a lot of time there. I also lived 8 years in Japan in big cities, including 7 in Tokyo and Yokohama.
In both New York and Tokyo, you have sky-high real estate values, but you also have horrendous use of land. It confuses me how this is possible, with the market supposed to function and all.
An example. My friend in NYC lives on 44th and 9th. Hell’s Kitchen, a stone’s throw from Times Square. Expensive real estate. I forget exactly where, but a few blocks from his apartment there is a large, junky, basically unused building that my friend says is owned by some old guy who is just storing crap in there. This thing is like a whole city block or a large portion thereof!
Same thing in Tokyo. You can have a beautiful skyscraper with a hovel next to it. Or whole sections of Shinjuku, a major area, which are full of bottom-barrel-level hooch and ramen stands. It boggles the mind.
If the demand for apartments in Manhattan is high, which it certainly is, why not just build another Empire State Building full of one bedroom condos or something? And if that sells out, build ten more. (These do get built in Japan, and how!) Now you can say regulations this and that, but new housing does get built in Manhattan. I just don’t see why the market has not caused there to be more built. Seems like a no-brainer.
So I am sympathetic to the OP’s thoughts here. I do not see why the status quo is as stable as it is.
I’m not saying that nothing is getting built, I am questioning whether it’s enough or if it is being done in a manner to create sustainability.
It would be nice if that was true, but it obviously isn’t. Or did Detroit chose to lose more than half their population and become a crime and poverty ridden city?
Not all cities grow, many shrink. The “be satisfied with where it is today” is not realistic. Everything develops one way or the other, and a city can not be a museum and still stay alive.
Regulation is not good or bad in itself, it depends on the context. Having more regulation will in fact often lead to exactly the “big-box strip mall” that you don’t seem to like. It’s about having better regulation, not more or less regulation.
Yes and the challenge is how to optimize growth within those constraints.
Not even close, IMHO. NYC is the only city in the USA that has a high population density, and it’s nowhere near the global top. Even just a quick glance at NYC shows plenty of potential for good densification. Boston and Washington even more so. Not even Manhattan is “fully developed”.
On the contrary it is the lack of building, together with the high desire to live there that is driving up prices and pushing out lower income residents. Even though a new residental building won’t be feasible for a low income family, it will take pressure off the housing market, helping keep other dwellings affordable.
The growth can be in rural, urban or suburban enviroments. Urban enviroments are remarkably more sustainable than both rural and suburban areas, so from that perspective we should do what we can to steer the growth to the most sustainable urban areas. Unfortunately, we have a massive bias towards suburban sprawl.
Detroit focused on heavy infrastructure and a vertically integrated economy. This was successful during the industrial era, and a massive failure in the post-industrial era. They did close to everything wrong when it comes to building a sustainable city and considering the current standard of living there, I don’t think anyone can argue that the Detroit way is a viable alternative.
Yes it does mean it is a failure. A living enviroment that is losing life is by definition a failure, and since Detroit has lost more than half its life it’s a huge failure. There is no such thing as an equilibrium, there are just different strategies for handling different rates of growth (from very negative to very positive).
It seems counter intuitive to me that we should put resources where they do less good. I think we should look for ways to make successful and sustainable enviroments even more successful and sustainable, which includes making them available to more people (ie: growth). Failed enviroments, such as Detroit, are doing a pretty good job of depopulating themself and I think it is a bad idea to invest in failed enviroments.
To me, that shows that there is a great demand for growth in Manhattan at least…
Guess who’s never heard of Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens, and even Brooklyn outside of Greenpoint/Billyburg/Park Slope. Who the hell do you think lives in Rockaway, fer chrissakes?
Sustainability in what sense? There are 8 million people living in the city, growth is slow but positive, and it’s an important city in terms of culture and media and business. Even if growth turns negative at some point in the future I don’t see how it’s going to collapse. U.S. population growth is also low, so I don’t think New York is particularly lagging.
Detroit’s problems are connected to the struggles of the U.S. auto industry and then the collapse of manufacturing in the U.S. New York City doesn’t rely on a single industry that way.
I’m not sure what you are basing this on. Most of the highest-population density areas in the U.S. are in that Eastern BosNYWash corridor. If Manhattan were its own city, it would have the highest population density in the U.S. and the 11th-highest in the world ahead of cities including Mumbai and Cairo (but with more wealth and higher quality of living, I’m guessing). Two other NYC boroughs (Brooklyn and the Bronx) would be fifth and sixth in the U.S. I believe I’ve heard it said that all 310 million people in the U.S. could live east of the Mississippi River if we all lived with the level of density you see in Brooklyn. Overall New York is the fifth-highest population density area in the U.S. and 14 of the top 20 cities in terms of population density are in New York and New Jersey. NJ has the highest density population in the country on the state level. So yes, this is a very developed area.
So when you say NYC isn’t very dense in terms of population, I am wondering what you are comparing it to. The density of the city is about the same as the most-dense places in Europe, and Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Bronx are much more dense. There are around 30 cities in Europe with higher population density than NYC overall because Queens and Westchester have lower density, but all of those cities except Moscow are much smaller than New York. Moscow has 11 million people in triple the land area of NYC. New York City has almost four times as many people as Paris living in about half the square acreage.
Could it be more dense? Yes, I am sure it could and it will get more dense because the population is growing and dense new buildings are going up. But at a certain point this seems to involve destroying a lot of smaller and older buildings that give the city a lot of its character and replacing them with more giant apartment buildings. I don’t see the appeal personally and I think a lot of people who live here agree with me. I doubt a lot of people want the city to look like Tokyo and I’m not sure how feasible that would be in any case. And hey, we’ve got this huge park in the middle of the city that nobody lives in. Lots of opportunities for densification there, I bet.
As I understand it, New York is a rare exception- people are moving into the city from the suburbs.
Growth seem to be overflowing from very sustainable areas such as NYC to unsustainable suburbs such as Houston and Phoenix. A person chosing to live in a Houston suburb instead of NYC will have a much bigger ecological footprint, so from my perspective it’s negative. The overflow causing this seems to have to do with absurdly high relative housing costs. $200000 will get you a magnificent house in a Houston suburb, or a shitty one in NYC. Houston and Texas is extremely prodevelopment (too much so IMHO), whereas NYC is very restrictive (basically anti-urban IMHO).
And that was a chosen strategy that was viable in the industrial era. My point was that communities don’t neccessarily make intelligent decisions. In fact they very often don’t. I should know, I’ve been doing it for 6 years.
I actually said: “NYC is the only city in the USA that has a high population density”. You claimed that these areas were “fully developed”, I say that not even the most developed of the areas (Manhattan) is fully developed. I’m also not sure where you get the Paris information from, I think Paris and NYC have pretty simmilar density, Paris having if anything a higher population density.
Of course you don’t see the appeal and of course those who already live there don’t see the appeal, a new building that uses the land more effectively isn’t to appeal to YOU, it’s to appeal to the rest of the world who don’t have the privilidge of already living there.
It also appeals to me, who won’t live there, because it lowers the enviromental impact. However, there’s an absurd amount of densification that can be made before you have to even think about tearing down buildings.
The “look like Tokyo” comment made me laugh. I’ve so often heard people who are against development in my town say they don’t want the city to look like New York/Manhattan But in all seriousness, the Central Park thing is a strawman. As I’ve said, plenty of brown areas.
The global trend is towards urbanisation, New York is not a rare exception. My point is the opposite, New York, being one of the most sustainable and attractive cities in the US should be growing much faster. But something is holding it back. My guess: zoning board regulations and preservationism/NIMBY.
I think your second point is interesting. A well functioning mass transit system, which is something most enviromentalists praise, can also be an incitament for sprawl.
The city.
Doesn’t matter, I’m talking about structures, not objects. Whether there is an oil refinery there or somewhere else doesn’t really matter from my perspective.
Where would you build this new housing? I’d say in neighborhoods with lower income people. And to build more you’d have to build up, and if you have ever been to the Village with low rise housing and the upper East Side, with high rise housing, you’ll know that not having massive apartments is a plus for at least some neighborhoods. I think you’d have to increase the supply by a lot to decrease prices any.
Ah, but there’s the rub, as mentioned by others why ***should ***it be growing faster than it is? At some point you’d risk growing beyond sustainability. Growth for growth’s own sake is not self evident.
Ahh, I think I understand the situation here. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Think in terms of a modern chicken farm versus an old-fashioned mom-and-pop one. You as an Urban Planner see that modern chicken farm with its more efficient use of land, easier maintenance, and higher productivity per chicken, and see that as the obvious way to run a chicken farm. The residents, however, see things from the point of view of the chicken, note the higher quality of life from the chicken’s point of view, and are migrating to those old-fashioned farms.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that cities should follow a Detroit model. My use of Detroit as an example was to show that constant population growth is not always realistic, and that perhaps urban planners should focus less on courting new residents and more on improving the lives of current ones . A bit off-topic, but I wanted to question your growth=good assumption.
But a lot of people still live in Detroit. It’s still an urban environment, and there’s value in small-scale urbanism. I’m beginning to suspect that your idea of a successful sustainable environment is a megacity. If New York (already considered a megacity) were to continue growing rapidly, it could soon succumb to slums, over-crowding, pollution, homelessness and other ills that extremely high population densities bring. In which case, losing some “life” would be a good thing.
As for the whole equilibrium thing: surely you can imagine a situation in which a city has too many people, just as you can imagine a city with not enough. There has to be an ideal population range for every city, which I rightly or wrongly called its equilibrium.
Yikes. Your “rich get richer, poor get poorer” viewpoint seems even more counterintuitive. If you truly think growth is the answer, and want many Americans to move back to cities, you’ll need to provide access to multiple successful urban environments. Which means investing in Cleveland, Detroit, Rochester, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Flint, Syracuse and other shrinking “failures”.
> Instead of successful urban enviroments withing a sustainable infrastructure,
> the growth becomes suburban sprawl.
You do realize, don’t you, that suburbanization is no longer the dominant trend that it once was? There are now more people moving from the suburbs to the cities than from the cities to the suburbs:
Starting about the 1920’s, when it first became possible to commute into a city from its suburbs, suburbanization was the main trend. This started to turn around by at least the 1970’s, as gentrification became a significant force. In about 2010, gentrification actually became more common than suburbanization. Various reasons are given for it in the link above, but I think most of those reasons are consequences rather than causes. I think the main reason is that it’s increasingly too expensive and too time-consuming to commute, either from the suburbs into the city or from one suburb to another. The near suburbs are often nearly as crowded as the city and the far suburbs are too distant to be an easy commute. It appears that for the next few decades at least, the cities will continue to grow and there will be less growth in the suburbs, especially the ones that are too far for a reasonable commute.
Because growth is when more people get access to the successful enviroment and the ability to improve their lives.
At some point you’d risk growing beyond sustainability.
Hang on a minute here now my friend. My critisism is that this is what is happening right now. Growth that COULD be happening in sustainable enviroments (such as NYC) is instead being pushed to unsustainable enviroments (such as Houston). NYC has grown by only 2.1% the last decade, Houston has grown by 7.5%. NYC has the smallest ecological footprint per capita in the US, Houston has among the biggest in the world.
Cute analogy
However, the chickens are not migrating to old-fashioned farms. They are migrating to low-priced unsustainable suburbs. I think that is a problem and my goal here was to get a discussion going on that. How to make sustainable urban enviroments more available to more people.
Do not waste time arguing against positions that nobody holds, would be my advice. Population growth is an indicator of the success of the enviroment, and is a zero sum game. People move away from Detroit because it is a failure. Of course not all enviroments can grow in population.
No my friend. First of all a lot of people do not still live in Detroit. Very few people do. The city housed 1.8 million in the 50’s, and is now home to only 700k. It’s lost almost 60% of its population. By no measure does “a lot” of people still live there. It’s more than half way to a ghost town.
It is also NOT in ANY way an example of small-scale urbanism. It is an example of LARGE scale INDUSTRIALISM in an urban enviroment. And it is an example of how large scale industrial urbanism is a failure in todays society.
Yeah, ok. Firstly, as I’ve pointed out, from an ecological standpoint there is just no doubt about it that the “megacity” is a boon to the enviroment. Density is the main factor in reducing the enviromental impact, and becomes even more effective when coupled with diversity. NYC has less than a third of the emissions per capita compared to the rest of the US.
Homelessnes is a question of supply and demand and really, in this thread I seem to be the only one who is advocating what seems to me to be the only sollution: building more homes.
Successful cities have poor people because successful cities are good places to be poor in. They attract poor people that hope to become successful, and they are also generally better places to be poor in. Being poor in NYC is probably a lot more fun than being poor in Boisie Ihaho.
You state that high population density bring specific ills, but that is just not true. People don’t become poor because of high population densities (in fact, they become rich), but high population densities attract poor people. High population densities don’t create slums, the areas with high population densities aren’t slums, they are usually the most successful and attractive areas of the cities.
High population density does have some drawbacks however. The same way that information spreads quickly in a dense area, diseases do as well. They are also more dependent on working infrastructure. Many of the ills ascribed to high population density is however nonsense, and for some reason the incredible benefits seem to be ignored or taken for granted. The “dark ages” was a period of ruralism where Europe moved away from the high density communities of Rome. All or humanities progress has basically been achieved because of cities abilities to connect giftef people with eachother, something that requires density.
Not really. Only if you assume that cities are static could that be true. They are not. If a city has “too many people” another way of describing that is that they have “too little housing and infrastructure”. You can then either get rid of the population or adjust the city to accomodate them. Since people are becoming more and more mobile and flexible, cities will have to become so as well.
There already is a HUGE access to the urban enviroment of Detroit. The supply is massive, incredible, huge! Incredibly low housing prices and free infrastructure. Shrinking urban enviroments don’t suffer from lack of supply, they’re suffering from lack of demand. That is why they are shrinking. They have failed.
The wrong thing to do would be to now subsidize these failures. You should not invest in failed infrastructure. Detroit doesn’t need more infrastructure of buildings, they need less. They shouldn’t be building, they should be demolishing. They’re paying for a structure that could support 2 million people, but this cost is carried by 700k low income people. They need to scale down, not up.
My viewpoint isn’t “rich get richer, poor get poorer”, I mean jesus, by US definitions I’m almost a socialist. There’s a difference between places and people. I have no sympathy for poor and unsuccessful places, I reserve my sympathy for people. The reason I am against supporting failed places is that it stands in the way of supporting people, as well as being a disaster for the enviroment.
Yes I am aware of this, and I am actively working to speed up this trend. However, my analysis is that cities are growing DESPITE policies and incentives, simply because of the inherent benefits of density and diversity.
What policies and incentives are you talking about? Are you talking about the fact that the cost of renting or buying a home is now increasing at a faster rate in the cities than in the suburbs? Well, of course it is. Sellers always charge everything the market can bear. As people moved out of the cities into the suburbs from the 1920’s to the 1970’s, the cost of renting or buying a home didn’t increase as fast in the cities as in the suburbs. Often the prices even dropped in the cities. That was because the people selling houses in the suburbs could charge more, since people wanted homes in the suburbs more. From the 1970’s till a couple years ago, this slowly turned around and the rate of increase in prices in the cities caught back up to that of the suburbs. Now the prices in the cities are actually increasing faster. This is exactly what you expect to happen. People charge more for homes because they can charge more. This isn’t stopping people from continuing to move into the cities.
Are you talking about zoning laws? Well, what do you expect cities to do? Do you think they should give up on zoning and let people build anything they want any place they want? They are making what they think are the rational decisions about what their city should look like. They may of course not be making the best decisions, of course. On the other hand, what you want cities to look like may not be the best. We all get to vote for what our cities look like.
Why did you write this?:
> Growth seem to be overflowing from very sustainable areas such as NYC to
> unsustainable suburbs such as Houston and Phoenix.
If you know about the turn-around where movement into cities is now greater than movement into suburbs, you should know that this is increasingly less true.
Actually I think it IS stopping people from moving into the cities. THAT HAS BEEN MY POINT THE WHOLE TIME. The prices of living in the cities are too high, forcing people into suburbs. City cores and cities are being gentrified due to increasing demaning and lacking supply.
Yes I am talking about for example zoning laws. And yes, most people make what they think are rational decisions. All bad policies are usually made for good reasons. Most cities have very irrational zoning laws based on 19:th century english policies and preservationist lobbying.
What is your point? That there is voting? That there are no objective truths? I don’t see where this line of argument is going.
I wrote it because it is true and I think it is relevant, the reason for most everything I write. Last year was (according to your linked article) the first year since 1920 when suburbanisation wasn’t stronger than urbanisation. 90 years of massive suburbanisation, 1 year where urbanisation is stronger, but there is still suburbanisation. This is not reason for me to say “Ok, that’s fixed then, let’s all go home”.
I’ve so often heard people who are against development in my town say they don’t want the city to look like New York/Manhattan 