The New York Times today ran this story about Pfizer leaving New London, which used its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy housing for an “urban village” development. Now that Pfizer is leaving without delivering the development, people are understandably bitter.
I have to say it out loud: I really hate eminent domain. I know we need it for land assembly, but…states that do not respect property rights past a certain, reasonable point are bad regimes.
I need this house. If the government bought me this house, I would Invest in America. I would Stimulate the Economy. I would Pursue Sustainable Development. I would Live Right.
I really, really, really would. Really.
Dealing with the black dog today–thus, no real content.
My colleague Richard Green noted that he saw a good presentation from Irina Telyukova on whether elderly households will downsize for the sake of downsizing. I’d like to get a copy of Telyukova’s paper, as this is a particularly thorny problem for transportation.
There is a great deal of faith in the planning world that the aging of America (and western Europe/Australia) will boost up public transit, as eventually seniors give up driving. Sandi Rosenbloom has a couple of nice papers which discuss this issue [1,2]. The news is not good. Past trends suggests that as we get older, we stay put. We age in place, until we can no longer manage on our own, at which point the decline comes quickly. Part of this has to do with a discussion that Richard and I had: he and his wife have worked very hard; they are both professionals; they are very successful, they have raised their children, and yet they bought a house they really really really love even though it’s technically too big for them. I am reminded (as I am often) of my friend David Forkenbrock, who built his dream home–a fantastic place he loved so much that outside offers couldn’t blast him out of the University of Iowa despite the ghastly winters.
These seem reasonable enough things to want to enjoy into your latter life. Why not? A place for the grandkids to stay, for the kids to use for long visits.
Are there any reasons to assume that the boomers will buck trends? There is part of me that says “perhaps” but I suspect the change will be marginal. However, I’ll skylark a bit about why they might differ:
1. Boomers have to date been the most mobile and global generation; they’ve had money and comfort and a great deal of political power due to their numbers. They may have less need to rely on their housing for equity than previous generations of seniors due to their wealth, and they may have less concern over the transactions costs of moving, again due to wealth. However, these are all factors that may, in fact, allow them to age in place more readily as they may be able to afford homecare and lawncare and all sorts of services that make single-family home living easier when you get older.
2. Because of their wealth and their lower demand for services like schools, it may be that the TOD trend becomes more focused on retirement and lifestyle communities. Trust me; if my experience as a professional planner means anything, it’s that developers love residential density and neighbors hate it. If you can convince the neighbors that you’re moving in a bunch of old dears who won’t drive, park, party or take up room in their kids’ classroom, density gets easier to build. See above comment about political economy.
3. Seniors may be particularly responsive to new taxes, which I think we will see, that make suburban living relatively costlier. They may not be, but they may be.
All that said, I think I’m stretching. It’s easier to drive than it is to take transit; if it weren’t, then all of these “transit and walking fight obesity” people can’t be right. As Rosenbloom points out, this generation of women, in particular, were far more mobile than their mothers. The numbers on transport side do not suggest that seniors are going do much different than they have before.
[1] S. Rosenbloom, C. Katz, and J. Monk. Women’s travel at various stages of their lives. In Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course, pages 208–242. Routledge, London, 1993. Book, Section
[2] S. Rosenbloom. Sustainability and automobility among the elderly: An international assessment. Transportation, 28(4):375–408, 2001. Journal Article.
One of my gripes about the New Urbanism is that the architects who promote it are long on social mission and short on actual, well, design. There are an awful lot of Calthorpe developments that are very well-intended but in another 10 years are going to wind up looking like rather a shabby and cookie-cutter set of multi-family units, painted in pastels, around what will be a nice streetscape of then-mature trees.
However, the paradigm-shifting nature of the New Urbanism has led those with more edge and gusto to thinking about density–which brings me to Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. Take some time to play around their website–it’s very nice. You’ll maybe remember Lorcan O’Herlily as the architect who built this structure next to Schindler’s iconic house in WeHo.
1140 Formosa has gotten a lot of ink. It’s in Dwell this month, for example.
This is four stories with 11 units of lofts than run about 1,500 square feet. There is a park provided on the property, and the exoskeleton of red metal is meant to absorb heat. Behind that are walkways meant into increase social interaction.
Some writeups and descriptions:
The architect suggested it was “like living in a dorm.”
What do you all think? Lovely? Heinous? They almost had me until the dorm comment. Did other people enjoy living in dorms? I live in a very expensive building now, and we smell pot way too much from the trust fund kids down the hall. And then there was the time Andy encountered a loud fight between the pot-smoking trust funder (I think his dad was an NFL player) and his girlfriend about whether he wanted to allow her to video them…you know… what Paris Hilton got famous for videotaping. I repeat: this argument occurred in the hallway. Isn’t that a discussion one has inside? Like in hoarse, outraged whispers so the neighbors don’t hear you? (To the young man’s credit, he was the one saying ‘no’ to the exercise; but I think we can say this is the sort of thing one doesn’t necessarily want one’s pudgy, middle-aged professor neighbors knowing about one, right? Right?)
However, as I said to a group of real estate developers last week, density and infill are here to stay in LA, which caused a loud round of complaints about how government needs to use eminent domain to assemble property for them; I strongly suspect they would rapidly grow uncomfortable under such a loose property rights regime because it would eventually affect what they could sell for, at the very least. Governments that do not respect private property tend not to be ones that behave all that well; there are a few examples of good middle ground between individually held and collectively held rights. The major questions to me seem how do you make design something we can afford in housing, given that something like Formosa 1140 goes for luxury prices already, and given that we do have problems with land assembly.
Slate has a set of pieces by Daniel Brook on Mohamed Atta’s urban planning thesis. Except for the self-conscious throat-clearing at the beginning where Brook spends way too much time blithering on about how he knew the thesis was important when others overlooked it, this is a nice, insightful look at the ideological ramifications of urban planning. It is an unavoidably normative profession. Think about “Smart Growth.” Nobody is in this because they want “Dumb Growth.” The same is true of policy. People don’t study because they want to help foster bad government. Those of us in the policy/planning/management and, perhaps to a lesser degree, development, are here because we think those things can be done better.
The window into Atta’s thesis that Brooks provides helps us understand the terrorist’s worldview. There is a fundamentalism present in his work on Aleppo, though few contemporary urban planners would see much to fault in his grand vision to tear down freeways and high-rises to restore the Islamic vernacular. This is the danger of grand plans that planners can not cover with any amount of New Urbanist gloss: major social change is hurtful. It takes time and healing, even when it is ultimately for the good. It was wrong to build highways on communities, as French planners did, and chances are just as good that Atta’s grand vision of demolishing high-rises would also hurt in ways other than just the bricks, mortar, and glass and Westernism he intended to. In urban planning, like everything else, two wrongs seldom make a right.
This is a cautionary tale. I’m about ready to go to ACSP where I will be regaled with would-be philosopher kings explaining to me how high-speed rail will save the planet and make fat people, like me, walk more so we will be thin. I doubt any one will tell me about the significance of bus benches. We do not think small, we philosopher-kings, and as a result we miss those kinds of details and, depending on the context, can cause enormous hurt.
See it here. Very interesting, and nice, clean thematic map work.
Raphael Bostic, one of my favorite colleagues at USC, was confirmed yesterday as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Raphael is one of the reasons why I always laugh at the evil/petty/egotistical professor characters that inevitably show up on tv. Raphael is the whole package: he’s brilliant, hard-working, funny, and generous. I hope they appreciate him at HUD because we miss him around these parts.
Despite the various and asundry assertions that “it’s all getting much better now”, delinquencies on payments of home equity loans hit a record today along with bank card delinquencies. Both of these are signs of overextended families and, notably, job loss.
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