NewGeography.com blogs

When I moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago, Ocean Front Walk in Venice Beach looked like a hippie parody.  It had a counter-cultural veneer, but didn’t rate as an authentic bohemian hot spot.

Contrast, for example, with New York’s East Village with its revolutionaries, junkies, artists and various iconoclasts living side-by-side.

The weekend spectacle at Venice – vendors, performers and “street people” showing off to crowds of tourists – struck me as self-conscious and phony. Plus, I could never call Ocean Front Walk a “board walk” because (unlike Brighton Beach and Coney Island) there was No Board.

Since then, of course, New York has been “cleaned up.” Now Tompkins Square is family-friendly and the old walk-ups are inhabited by urban professionals worried about layoffs and declining property values.

Times have changed.  The gulf between haves and have-nots is widening.  Living on the edge is not just a life-style choice.  “Drop-outs” need somewhere to go.

These days I see Ocean Front Walk in Venice as more a refuge than a counter-cultural carnival.  With overnighters climbing out of their sleeping bags each morning, it’s a pretty good location for people without money.

Where else should they live?

I understand why local residents are advocating that something be done to make Ocean Front Walk safer and more sanitary.  With some calling for a police “crack down.”

But now that the “tune-in, turn-on, drop-out” sub-culture is a history text book sidebar, I’m glad there is, at least, someplace warm for the dispossessed to hang out.

Here at Venice Beach, where the continental U.S. ends, could be the last stop for these new bohemians.

Editor Sommer Mathis over at The Atlantic Cities has taken to making stuff up. In a recent post she reported on a dispute in the city of Seattle over minimum parking requirements relating to multi-unit buildings. She said:

Defenders of suburban-style development like Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin would argue that these young people just don't understand how their lives and desires are going to change once they start families. Single-family, detached homes with a quarter acre of land and two cars in the garage are suddenly going to look a lot better to all these idealistic, bicycle riding twenty-somethings once the reality of parenthood sets in.

Kotkin and Cox also worry that developers and city planners rushing to meet the youth-driven demand for denser housing options that don't necessarily include parking are shooting themselves in the foot.

The only problem is that I have never commented on minimum parking requirements. I checked with Joel Kotkin and he advises that he has never covered the issue.

Mathis continues (after an citing a quote by Joel Kotkin article in Forbes):

What's funny about these assumptions is their total lack of faith in the free market.

Of course, since our alleged positions on minimum parking requirements are figments of Mathis' imagination, her "free market" conclusion misses the mark. Indeed, the most destructive impact on urban land markets today is urban growth boundaries and "winner picking" land use restrictions that deny people their preferences (as my Wall Street Journal piece, California's War on Suburbia, argued on Saturday). I am most concerned about these because of their potential for hampering the metropolitan economy, interfering with upward mobility and increasing poverty (I suspect Joel would agree). Moreover, young households soon figure out that they need more than the 4th floor (or 40th floor) balcony to raise a child.

We are used to dealing with jurisdictional boundaries when assessing and comparing cities. These are often either municipal areas or metropolitan statistical areas (which are based on entire counties). But these can have little relevance to the amount of area in a given city-region that is actually urban in nature. This makes apples to apples across regions difficult.

Once a decade though the Census Bureau gives us a more detailed look. They release definitions of so-called “urbanized areas” that attempt to look at just the amount of land that is actually urban in form. In theory this would allow for better apples to apples comparisons between regions. Unfortunately, most data is not sliced this way, so we only get this glimpse. Here’s the map of the new 2010 urbanized area definitions:

Wendell Cox has a breakdown of the largest urbanized areas that includes density. He also published a historical review that tracks urbanized area population and density since 1950 for the largest city regions. For more thoughts on urbanized areas, see Nate Berg’s take over at Atlantic Cities.

I don’t want to try to offer a complete analysis of this right now, but one thing that really jumped out at me was the very low densities of some southern boomtowns like Atlanta (1,707/sq. mi) and Charlotte (1,685/sq. mi.). Contrast with even Houston (2,979/sq. mi.) and Dallas (2,879/sq. mi) and see the difference. Atlanta is already showing serious signs of weakness vs. the Texas mega-metros and I wonder if this is part of the reason why. It also makes me wonder if Charlotte might someday suffer in a similar manner if its growth ever flames out.

Like most Americans, I was bombarded by sound-bites and blog-bytes surrounding an amendment to an Act of Congress that would require a woman to submit to and review the results of a trans-vaginal ultrasound before receiving an abortion. This amendment was covered ad nauseam by everyone from the Huffington Post to the nightly news on broadcast television. I don’t mind admitting that I’m past the age where this Act of Congress would have an effect on me personally.

What really bothered me was that no one talked about the core problem of how deranged our political process has become in Washington. The real issue here that impacts all of us is that this amendment was attached to a transportation funding bill – TRANSPORTATION, not a Health Care Bill or a Health Insurance Bill or even an Equal Opportunity Employment Bill but a TRANSPORTATION funding bill.

All of these journalists are as at fault over the issue as the bunch of Congressmen who tried – once again – to slip one past the balance of powers and our democratic form of government. The guilty parties in Washington DC start with:

In the House of Representatives, Mr. Fortenberry (NE), Mr. Boren (OK), Mrs. McMorris Rodgers (WA), Mr.Scalise (LA), Mr. Tiberi (OH), Mr. CONAWAY (TX), Mr. Lamborn (CO), Mr. Walberg (MI), and Mr. Lipinski (IL) who introduced  “H.R.1179 -- Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011” on March 17, 2011. By the time the bill was attached as an amendment to the highway funding bill, the number of co-sponsors had risen from 8 to 221.

In the Senate, Mr. Blunt (MO), Mr. Rubio (FL), and Ms. Ayotte (NH)) introduced S. 1467 on August 2, 2011. The cosponsors in the Senate went from 2 to 37.

That’s a total of 260 elected representatives who will be responsible for the continuing deterioration of highway infrastructure in the United States. The current Federal authorization for funding surface transportation programs ends March 30, 2012.

The current funding authorization is just the most recent in a long line of temporary extensions that have been strung together since the last 5-year plan expired in 2009. The highway funding bill in question – to which this healthcare amendment is being attached – would authorize funding of $109 billion over 2 years. If nothing is done by March 30, if no action is taken to fund US highway infrastructure, the Department of Transportation (DoT) will have to furlough workers and stop paying contractors, according to Humberto Sanches of Roll Call. Last summer, DoT sent home 4,000 FAA employees and 70,000 private-sector workers because Congress failed to act on funding.

The process for highway funding is already convoluted and inefficient – watching the current Congress add abortion amendments to the funding bill gives us a peek into how it got that way. In the meantime the United States’ infrastructure is crumbling and the rest of the world is getting ahead of us. No wonder we’re deranged.

This morning the US Bureau of the Census released data for urban areas in the United States. The urban population of the US rose to 249.3 million in 2010, out of a total population of 308.7 million. Urbanization covered 106,000 square miles, representing 3.0 percent of the US land mass. Overall urban density was 2,342 per square mile (905 per square kilometer).

The Los Angeles urban area was again the nation's most dense, at 6,999 per square mile (2,702 per square kilometer), a slight reduction from the 7,068 figure (2,729 per square kilometer) in 2000. The most dense urban areas with more than 1,000,000 population were Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, New York and Las Vegas (in that order).

Overall, the 41 major urban areas had an average density of 3,245 per square mile (1,253 per square kilometer). The table below provides data for the major urban areas and overall data.