Suburban Ghost Towns

By Stephanie Allen, Project Assistant

A decade ago we were talking about young professionals and empty nesters moving to city centers. Now, it seems like everybody wants to be in town. Urban revitalization. Downtown redevelopment. Gentrification. There are all sorts of charts and graphs that illustrate this trend everywhere you look. Here are just a few.

The following chart shows that housing prices in urban centers have been rising 50% faster than those in less central locations since 2000. When the housing bubble burst, that gap was virtually unaffected and it has been growing again since 2013.

Source: Fitch Ratings via City Observatory

And, the rent gradient, which tracks the change of housing prices as you move away from the city center, has gotten much steeper since 1980. People are willing to pay a much higher premium to live in the city now than they were in 1980, when housing prices 15-20 miles outside of the city center were nearly 25% higher than those in town.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research via City Observatory

There is a strong correlation between increases in home values and Walk Scores. According to Zillow Talk, the 2015 book by the CEO and Chief Economist of Zillow, houses in walkable neighborhoods have recovered most and fastest.
 

Cities, eh? They’re the big thing. Joe Cortright argues that these charts show that cities are becoming more important to the economic health of the country. The 20th century saw a residential exodus from city centers, but the residents have returned en mass in the 21st. There are more people who want to live in walkable, transit-served, urban neighborhoods than there is housing in said neighborhoods. There’s a lot of talk about how to create more great, urban neighborhoods.
 
Here’s what no one is talking about: the ‘burbs. The car-dependent, 1/4 acre lots situated on safe cul-de-sacs, tucked neatly around 18-holes of golf, swim, and tennis; the big-box stores; the economy-sized-box stores; the malls; the shopping plazas; the asphalt seas of parking spaces.
 
The only people who are talking about the suburbs are asking if they have a future.
 
After the housing bubble burst and people abandoned the homes they couldn’t sell or were forced out in the process of foreclosures, we got a glimpse of a future of the suburbs: McMansions with boarded up windows, dead grass, pools full of algae. Empty driveways and garages lead to empty shopping plazas, dead malls, and overgrown golf courses.
 
Is it really the end of an era? Will the suburbs someday look like abandoned gold rush towns? The physical remains of a once booming idea of utopia?
 
Planetizen blogger Michael Lewyn wrote last week that some suburbs do have futures, but only some.
 
So, what about the suburbs? The utopian dream of Frank Lloyd Wright was suburban. The whole point of suburban expansion was an escape from the dirty, crime-ridden city to a dreamland where everyone could have their own greenspace. Who needs a pocket park down the block when you've got a yard?
 
Suburbia was the darling of the urban planning world in the 20th century. Cities were crowded. People wanted space and fresh air. They found it in the suburbs.
 
Now, urban planners seem ready to abandon the suburbs as ill conceived, traffic nightmares where no one wants to live. They think we need to create more great, urban neighborhoods so that everyone can affordably live in the city. Because all the studies show that everyone wants to live in the city.
 
But, that's just not true. Plenty of people like living in the suburbs. Especially people with kids. And, the fact is, cities still have higher crime rates and they're still crowded.
 
So, while we’re thinking about how to create more great, urban neighborhoods, let's not forget about the suburbs, where scores of people choose to live. Can we make suburbia more appealing? Can we bring some of what people love about living in the city to the suburbs and still keep what people value about suburban life? How do we make sure our suburbs don't become ghost towns? That's something we should be talking about.
 
In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I do not live in the suburbs... not exactly. I live in the city of Los Angeles. It's not the golf course subdivision where I was raised in suburban Atlanta and I live in a "very walkable" neighborhood (according to walkscore.com), but I am nevertheless car dependent for some things and I love my yard.

Revisiting The Minimum Wage

By Katie Thomas, Project Associate

Over the next year, it is likely that the topic of the minimum wage will continue to dominate debates at both the national and state levels and in the voting booths. Effective July 2009, the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour. Currently 29 states and the District of Columbia have set minimum wages higher than the federally mandated minimum wage, and many of those increases have happened over the past two years, suggesting a growing demand and need for increased wages for workers at the lowest end of the wage spectrum. As of January 1, 2016, 14 states began this year with higher minimum wages, due either to new laws or to cost of living adjustments.

Today, $7.25 an hour does not go nearly as far as it once did. The real value of the minimum wage has been steadily decreasing since 1968 when the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. According to the inflation calculator that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides, $1.60 in 1968 had the same purchasing power as $10.91 in 2015.(1) Stagnant wages and rising prices have left millions of low-wage workers with less money to make ends meet. The nearby figure offers additional context and shows that not only has the minimum wage not kept up with inflation, the costs for basic survival (food, health care, etc.) have continued to rise at even faster rates. While the price for items like clothing and toys have fallen, the cost for goods and services that improve a person’s well-being have continued to outpace the inflation rate. Further exasperating the issue, many of the tools and services needed to lift oneself out of poverty, such as child care and higher education, have continued to become further and further out of reach.

Change in Prices for Certain Items Relative to The Change in Prices for All Items Since 2005 

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index

It’s common knowledge that individuals with higher levels of education typically earn more money over their lifetime. Yet for many Americans, especially parents, the child care costs coupled with rising tuition rates and stagnant wages make the possibility of attaining additional training and education, well, simply impossible. In 2014, 14.8 percent of the population was living in poverty in the United States, roughly 46.7 million people, and nearly one in five children was living in poverty. In single mother households, the poverty rate topped 30 percent. Further, contrary to some beliefs, the majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers. In fact, nearly 80 percent of minimum wage workers are over the age of 20; 30 percent are over the age of 35.(2)

This information is not new, yet the way that some states and policymakers address the declining value of the minimum wage and the impact of low wages on our communities has begun to change in some areas. There are many opportunities to directly affect millions of low-wage workers through policy changes. I’m hopeful that in the coming year we will see more positive changes and continue to refuse to settle for status quo.

(1) Calculated by using the average Consumer Price Index for all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households.
(2) “Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2014.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. April 2015.

A New Year to Volunteer and Spur Community Change

By Ryan Regan, Project Associate

It is easy to put the ‘season of giving’ mentality commonly associated with December’s holiday season in the rearview mirror as we embrace a new year, but the month of January provides as good an opportunity as any to remember that a giving attitude should be adopted all year long. It is in this month that we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. via a federal holiday on January 18 that is now used as an opportunity to promote community service in places across the country.

Dr. King led a life of service and community activism that few before or after him will ever duplicate. The fact that we use his birthday to encourage volunteering in one’s community is most appropriate, since few other Americans can claim such a legacy rooted in philanthropy as his. Volunteering in one’s community and other forms of civic engagement are also vital for both the planning and implementation of the community and economic development strategies we here at Market Street Services help develop.

Civic engagement and community collaboration are at the core of the work that we do on behalf of our clients. We always emphasize to our clients that we are mere facilitators in the strategic planning process. The strategic plans born out of the processes we facilitate are ultimately owned by the community and implemented via an implementation framework that is rooted in civic engagement. All of our processes are led by a diverse steering committee of community leaders from the public, private, and non-profit sectors who volunteer their time to be champions for community change. It is not unusual to have CEOs of multi-million dollar corporations, elected officials, non-profit CEOs, and other accomplished professionals serving on these steering committees. Their commitment to the process and the expertise these community leaders bring to the table help to transform communities in ways that no single person or entity could accomplish on their own. This “giveback” attitude is what makes civic engagement so powerful, and when this mindset is adopted by the broader community, the sky becomes the limit.

Over the years, Market Street has had the pleasure to work in communities that have excelled at harnessing the power of civic engagement and volunteer leadership to fuel the momentum needed to achieve strategic goals. In Watertown, SD – a town of roughly 22,000 people – Market Street facilitated a community visioning process alongside a volunteer-driven steering committee that was committed to an inclusive process that welcomed the thoughts of all members of the community. Their efforts led to an astounding 2,200 resident responses to an online survey that helped to inform the vision planning process. As a share of the total population, the Watertown response rate easily eclipsed all other online survey response rates in other communities where Market Street has worked. The ability of the volunteer-led steering committee to engage the community in such an unprecedented manner and the willingness of so many community members to participate in the visioning process speak volumes about the civic capacity of this small rural town.

A similar story emerged in Des Moines, IA where Market Street worked with the Greater Des Moines Partnership in 2011 on a five-year vision plan for Central Iowa dubbed, “Capital Crossroads.” The region’s support for the strategy was tremendous and widespread. Key community institutions like the United Way of Central Iowa, Iowa State University, and the Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines were just a few of the initial sponsors of the Capital Crossroads movement. The support of a broad array of regional institutions and the leadership provided by over 50 business and regional leaders who volunteered their time on a steering committee generated a great deal of energy for the process, from kickoff to implementation. A total of almost 4,300 members of the region provided input during the process via two online surveys. The total number of responses is a record for any community where Market Street has worked. In total, some 5,000 members of the region engaged themselves in the planning process by providing input through online surveys, one-on-one interviews, and focus group discussions. The region’s engagement in the process didn’t just stop there. The Capital Crossroads strategy’s implementation was launched in the fall of 2011 and organized around 11 strategic “capitals” – or goal areas – that include within them the strategy’s specific implementation activities. These 11 strategic capitals have been guided by their own committee of volunteers who have devoted countless hours to leading the implementation of Capital Crossroads, all in the name of being passionate civic leaders. Since implementation, some 500 members of the community have volunteered to serve on one of the strategic capital committees.

Some of what I just described can be summed up by what is referred to as “collective impact,” a term first mentioned in a 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article that continues to gain steam in public policy circles. Collective impact can be loosely defined as the process that results when a collection of organizations coordinate together to address complex large-scale social issues and opportunities in a manner that no one organization could have otherwise pursued on their own. It is a process that is engrained in collaboration, community engagement, and goal setting. In other words, it defines much of the community and economic development work that we do at Market Street. Community institutions that pursue their work in independent silos are only handcuffing themselves in an age where social connectivity and globalization reign supreme. The volunteer-driven community outreach efforts and results witnessed in Watertown, Des Moines, and many of our other client communities offer validation to the collective impact model and case study examples for how many of our national and global challenges ought to be tackled.

Despite the success stories we have witnessed over the years of passionate volunteers and communities that place a premium on community engagement, volunteer rates on a national level are lower than they have been in over a decade. According to a report released earlier this year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 25.3 percent of Americans volunteered in the 12-month span from September 2013 to September 2014. The BLS defines a volunteer as any person who performed unpaid work through or for an organization in the past 12 months. Clearly, this trend is worrisome for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that it may indicate that people are becoming less engaged in their communities, and by extension, less invested in their community’s future.

With a new year upon us, we at Market Street would like to thank those volunteer steering committee members and implementation partners who make our work so rewarding. Their commitment to the process and to their community is an admirable reflection on them as individuals and on their communities as places. And as we start brainstorming about our New Year’s resolutions, maybe we can all set aside some time to volunteer more in our community in 2016, in whatever capacity we can. As Dr. King put it, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?”

American Fault Line

By J. Mac Holladay, Founder and CEO

On December 9th, I was fortunate to attend a powerful presentation in Charleston, South Carolina featuring Ken Burns and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The title was American Fault Line: Race and the American Ideal. These two icons previewed the new documentaries they are currently working on and participated in a roundtable discussion. The sold out event was held in the beautifully restored Galliard Center in support of the International African American Museum. Ironically, the date of the event was forty years to the day since the first election of Joseph P. Riley, Jr as Mayor of Charleston. After many many great projects, the Museum project is Mayor's Riley's final gift to his community.

As I listened to the two men speak, I thought about the reality that over 40% of all the slaves brought to the United States came to one single wharf in Charleston. That exact location is that place that the Museum will be built. Unlike anything ever envisioned, the Museum will tell the story of those forced to come here as slaves all those years ago. It will tell their story, not only of all they did to build magnificent buildings across the nation as artisans, but the songs and poetry they wrote and how they survived the awful treatment they endured not for decades but for generations. The Museum will chart all that their descendants have done as professionals, elected officials, community and religious leaders as a key part of American history. As Dr. Gates said, "we must take it all in, that is the value of history." The Museum will create a new inclusive American history curriculum for elementary school students and offer continuing education for all who visit.

As many events in 2015 have shown us, racism is not dead. From the over reaction of a North Charleston policeman shooting an unarmed man in the back to the horrible murder of nine people attending a Bible study class at Mother Emmanuel AME Church across the street from the Galliard, we have seen a strange twist in our recent history. Many more negative events have cascaded across the nation all year long. In 2008, many of us had hoped that the election of Barrack Obama as President would change the past. In fact, the reverse has happened. There has been a real increase in blatant racist activities since his second election. As one young African American farmer in Arkansas stated in Paul Theroux’s new book, Deep South, “The Klan don’t wear sheets. They are sitting behind the desks in the banks.” Today, there are 42 million African Americans in the "middle class" and yet 38% of black children live in poverty. Prejudice has consequences every day.

We have only one history in America, it includes all of us. As Mark Twain said, "travel is the enemy of prejudice." So we must share the culture and facts that make us who we are. We must make sure that our children and our grandchildren know all the history of our country. Celebrating black history should not be isolated to a single month, it should be every day, every week, and every month as their history is ours and part of who we all are.

Words

By Mike Gaymon, Senior Advisor

The Christian Recorder in March of 1862 published that a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church presented the adage of "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me" for the first time in print. 

Most of us will never have sticks and stones thrown at us as was done during this time of our nation's history. It was a different time for sure but today we live in much different times as well.  But we will all experience words that are powerful, sharp and can be as beneficial as they are destructive.

 

Our team at Market Street focuses on using words (with lots of numbers) to tell a story of the past, the present, and glimpses of what the future may hold for cities, counties and states.  These words while always as accurate as possible can be well received or sometimes not welcomed.  After all, most communities don't want to hear the bad news about their previous decisions or future paths unless major changes are made.  Most want to hear about the successes and the great achievements that worked well.

However, in my opinion, one of the foundation blocks of MSS that has never been compromised is "telling it like it is....the good, the bad, the ugly."  Leaders need to be confronted with the reality of where they actually are and probably will be going in community and economic development.  The future workforce will reap the results of the current leadership facing the reality of their decisions.

Words, followed by a committed leadership to execute them into actions, will determine what the future community will become. They will challenge, empower and help to create a vision for the future.  It may be just words but they can be transforming.

The Big Issue at Year-End 2015

By Jim Vaughan, Senior Fellow 

Last year, in December, I posted a blog entitled, Nuggets of wisdom, interest, and of possible value in which I included quotes gleaned from my electronic clippings file that I thought might be of interest to economic developers and city builders. 

I planned a similar wrap-up for this year. Except that one item seemed to overshadow all the others. 

The Paris Climate Accord. 

This agreement is so important that economic developers and city builders must both understand the key elements of the global deal and help develop local plans to support our national climate goals. Going forward, Market Street Services will help our clients develop strategies to capitalize on the new reality of an economy in the post carbon era. 

* * * 

This is not my first post on this subject. I have written three blogs on climate change (Sorry Candidates, Climate Change Is Not a Hoax; Can We Still Do Big Things; and Climate Change: It’s No Laughing Matter) each making the case for action. Today’s post celebrates action. 

Here’s how I see it:

1. There is consensus to act. 196 countries approved the historic climate agreement

“The Paris agreement on climate change is a monumental success for the planet and its people.” — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

2. The agreement provides a broad foundation for meaningful progress

"Anyone who suggests this is a success or a failure is only speaking based on ideology, not reality. Only 10 to 20 years from now, when we look at the implementation of all this, will we really know." — Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program

3. New technology has changed the rules

“Many people still seem to believe that renewable energy is hippie-dippy stuff, not a serious part of our future. The reality is that costs of solar and wind power are close to competitive with fossil fuels even without special incentives. (So) the cost of sharp emission reductions will be much less than even optimists used to assume.” — Paul Krugman, The New York Times, Dec. 14, 2015

4. Businesses are preparing for opportunity

Chief executives of blue-chip companies like Coca-Cola, DuPont, General Mills, HP and Unilever all expressed support for an ambitious deal. BP, the British oil giant, called the Paris agreement a “landmark climate change deal” and pledged to be “a part of the solution.” — Clifford Krauss and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times

“We have the technologies, we have the business incentive, and we have the responsibility. Now all we need is the commitment.” — Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens

5. The climate accord provides confidence for investors

“Investors … will now have the confidence to do much more to address the risks arising from high carbon assets and to seek opportunities linked to the low carbon transition already transforming the world’s energy system and infrastructure.” — Stephanie Pfeifer, chief executive of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Changer

6. This is big, but it’s just a start

“Make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis." — President Barack Obama

* * * 

On behalf of everyone at Market Street, here’s to a prosperous 2016! We look forward to following your successes in the New Year, and encourage you to follow us on Twitter for the latest thought-provoking community and economic development quotes, news, best practices, and innovations.

Quality of Place and the Future of Parking

By Matt DeVeau, Project Manager

In the past few months, this blog has featured a couple of brief ruminations on how automation might drastically re-shape labor markets. It’s a fascinating topic with enormous implications for community and economic development. But despite the enormity of “the future of work” question, I think there are many more ways in which technological advancements might impact our field in some way.

I’m a city planning nerd at heart, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the physical spaces we occupy and the investments and policies that shape them. And I’m increasingly of the belief that technologically driven shifts in consumer behavior may soon lead to fundamental changes in our built environment. Given the importance of “quality of place” in areas such as talent attraction and retention, I thought I’d share one of these thoughts here. This isn’t going to be an amorphous ode to “disruption” or a far-out hypothetical. Instead, let’s start with a trend that is already well underway: ridesharing. 

I think we can by now skip the full “what is Uber?” explainer, but let’s at least pause to illustrate the general concept: you want to go somewhere, you open an app in your smartphone, summon a vehicle to your current location, plug the address of your destination into the app, and off you go. Needless to say, this type of service could not have existed prior to the widespread availability of smartphones and GPS, but once the technological conditions were right, the concept took off. Less than seven years since its founding, Uber has reached a valuation of $62.5 billion, bigger than General Motors. 

To me, the popularity of Uber and other ridesharing services is simple: they are affordable and convenient. So much so, in fact, that individuals in some markets might plausibly forgo car ownership altogether without adding costs or sacrificing much in the way of the freedom and independence available through vehicle ownership. I’ve done a few back-of-the-envelope calculations for Atlanta, and it was a close call depending on how I tweaked assumptions about things like commute distance, desire/ability to use other transportation modes on occasion, etc.

And that’s all with humans doing the driving. As we’ve discussed in this space previously, autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles are well into the testing and deployment stages. It may be quite some time before they are capable of reliably navigating complex and unpredictable surface streets as opposed to relatively simple and predictable travel along freeways. But any advancement in autonomous vehicle technology would serve to make ridesharing more viable.

So what does this all have to do with urban form? Parking. If your primary mode of transportation is a car, think about all the places you park throughout a day – your residence, your job, a store, a park, your place of worship, etc. That’s a lot of storage space, and it adds up. According to one recent estimate, 14 percent of the total land area in Los Angeles County was devoted to parking. 

But if ridesharing continues to advance as it has – and especially if significant headway is made on the autonomous vehicle front – then we could easily see many individuals (primarily but not exclusively in larger urban markets) drop car ownership in favor of “renting” on-demand rides. In this scenario, vehicles won’t sit idle while their owner is working, sleeping, shopping, or eating – they’ll simply move on to the next fare. And in this case, we won’t need nearly as much parking.

The planning and design implications of such a future are too weighty to get into here. And it’s not practical on any level – technological, political, etc. – to suggest an immediate wholesale change in our mindset. (Seriously, if you’ve never been to a commercial or multifamily residential rezoning hearing, stop by some time and see what issue dominates the conversation.) But the way we price and regulate parking has always been kind of a mess and this in turn has driven up development costs, chewed up land that could be economically productive with another use, and generally led to a built environment that is not made for humans. 

In the overall context of thinking about quality of place, communities should think about how attitudes towards things like parking might change in the coming years. Are existing regulations flexible enough for a future where demand for parking may fall and should we let market forces determine the answer to that question? (Imagine that.) Does it make long-term sense to direct public investments toward things like parking decks in the name of spurring private development in the short-run? Should communities begin to think about redevelopment strategies and frameworks should there prove to be a future excess supply of parking? These are all questions that I think are worthy of asking in a changing world.