Geography

Job Dispersion in Major US Metropolitan Areas: 1960-2010

Wendell Cox — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:38:50 -0400

The continuing dispersion of employment in the nation's major metropolitan areas has received attention in two recent reports. The Brookings Institution has published research showing that employment dispersion continued between 2000 and 2010, finding job growth was greater outside a three mile radius from central business districts between 2000 and 2010 in 100 metropolitan areas Note 1). This assessment probably underestimates the extent of job dispersion, since it includes some suburban centers as central business districts (such as West Palm Beach, FL and Palo Alto, CA).

Recently I showed that employment dispersion has reached a point that there is a virtual balance of jobs and housing in suburban areas, which contrasts with the continuing excess of jobs in core municipalities relative to resident workers. After that article was published, Richard L. Forstall forwarded me research he presented to the Southern Demographic Association in the 1990s that examined employment trends in core municipalities and suburban areas between 1960 and 1990. At the time, Forstall was at the United States Bureau of the Census. He also spent years supervising Rand McNally international metropolitan area population estimates (Note 2).

Major Metropolitan Job Dispersion: 1950 to 2010 and

Forstall provides detailed information for the 35 major metropolitan areas as of 1990 (over 1,000,000 population). This article augments the Forstall research with data from the 2010 census (Note 3).

Consistent with both national and international trends, the half century between 1960 and 2010 indicated significant dispersion in metropolitan areas. This, of course, was a continuation of a trend that accelerated from the first quarter of the 19th century, when early mass transit systems allowed people to live in larger spaces, farther away from their work.

The movement of residents from the urban core to the suburbs followed the even greater exodus from small towns and rural areas. But it was not long before residents of the homogeneous bedroom suburbs of the 1950s began to find more nearby employment opportunities.

In 1960, 54% of the employment in the 35 major metropolitan areas was in the historical core municipalities, with the balance of 46% of the jobs in suburban and exurban areas. By 2010, the corner municipality share had dropped to 30%, while suburban and exurban areas contained 70% of the employment (Figure 1). Between 1960 and 2010, 88% of the new jobs were in the suburbs and exurbs, leaving only 12% of the growth in the core municipalities (Figure 2).

Dispersion Greater in Metropolitan Areas with Pre-War Non-Suburban Cores

However, even this distribution appears to mask an even greater dispersion. Among the metropolitan areas with "Pre-war non-suburban core municipalities," (such as San Francisco, Baltimore, Providence, New York, etc.) a full 102% of job growth was in suburban and exurban areas. Core city employment accounted for a minus two percent of employment growth (in other words, it declined). These are metropolitan areas with core cities that were virtually fully developed before World War II and which have added little to their land areas by annexation.

The other metropolitan areas have core cities with large swaths of suburbanization and some, like Phoenix and Sacramento are virtually all suburban. In these metropolitan areas, approximately 25% of the job growth since 1960 has been in the core cities (Figure 3).

Pre-War Non-Suburban Core Municipalities Losses and Gains

Among the 18 metropolitan areas with "Prewar non-suburban" core municipalities, two thirds experienced losses in their core cities. The Rust Belt "ground zero" core cities of Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo all lost 40 percent or more of their employment, and were joined by second tier Rust Belter St. Louis. The core city of Pittsburgh, typically one of the Rust Belt's big four, did much better, losing only five percent of its employment. Across the state, however, the core city of Philadelphia did much worse, dropping 23 percent of its employment. The core city of Chicago lost 20 percent of its employment.

Perhaps most notable was the core city of Hartford, which lost 9 percent of its employment between 1960 and 2010. According to data in the Brookings Institution Global Metro Monitor, Hartford has emerged as the world's most affluent major metropolitan area (measured by gross domestic product per capita) over the same period. All of Hartford's job growth was in the suburbs and exurbs.

The core city of New York did the best among the metropolitan areas with "Pre-War non-suburban" cores, attracting 16 percent of the employment growth over the half-century. Washington (DC) also did well, with a 12 percent share of new employment.

Urban Dispersion and the Quality of Life

The dispersed metropolitan area, along with its comprehensive roadway networks, has served the US well, especially in two important measures of the quality of life --- housing affordability and mobility. Major metropolitan areas in the United States have some of the most affordable housing in the high-income world. The US has shorter work trip travel times than Canada or Western Europe and much shorter than the major metropolitan areas of Japan (with the most comprehensive rail systems in the world) and East Asia.

This advantage was reiterated with the recent release of the Tom Tom Congestion Index, which showed traffic congestion in the metropolitan areas of Australia and New Zealand to be far worse than in US metropolitan areas of similar size. For example, Sydney is as congested as Los Angeles, despite having only one-third the population. Auckland (New Zealand) has worse traffic congestion than any US metropolitan area of similar size.

Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson spotted this advantage nearly two decades ago (See Are Compact Cities a Desirable Planning Goal?), before there was international traffic congestion comparison data. Based upon their review of national travel surveys, they concluded:

Suburbanization has been the dominant and successful mechanism for reducing congestion. It has shifted road and highway demand to less congested routes and away from core areas.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

-------

Note 1: The Brookings Institution report indicates that employment within a 3 mile radius of downtown (the central business district) increased in number and share only in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. However, this may not indicate an increase in central business district (downtown) employment. The large, nearby, but suburban employment centers of Rosslyn, Crystal City and downtown Alexandria may be located within the three mile radius (the report does not indicate the point from which the radius is drawn). The three mile radius used in the report is useful and represents the best reported data. However, it may not be representative of central business district employment encloses a huge area (28 square miles), which is more than 25 times the typical central business district geographical size and larger than the land areas of the core cities of Providence and Hartford and nearly two-thirds the size of the core city of San Francisco. Transit commuting to such nearby employment centers is routinely far lower than the share that ride transit to downtown.

Note 2: Forstall is co-author (with Richard P. Greene and James B. Pick of seminal research that estimated the population densities of the largest metropolitan areas in the world (Which Are the Largest: Why Lists of Metropolitan Areas Vary So Greatly). Normally, metropolitan area densities cannot be validly compared because of widely varying criteria between nations. Further, in the United States, metropolitan area densities are nonsensical, because their building blocks vary in size too much. With its County-based definitions, US metropolitan areas include building blocks ranging from half the size of Orlando's Walt Disney World (New York County, or Manhattan borough) to the size of the nation of Costa Rica (San Bernardino County). The use of such a crude building block results in the inclusion of huge amounts of rural territory that is outside the labor market or the commuting shed (metropolitan areas are typically defined as labor markets). Forstall and his coauthors applied criteria that was both consistent and rational. This exhaustive process limited the number of metropolitan areas for which they were able to make estimates to 28.

Note 3: This analysis differs from Forstall's approach in defining core cities using the historical core municipality classification. It should be noted that there have been changes in metropolitan definitions over the 50 years.

Photo: Suburban employment in Chicago (by author)

Tokyo Dust: The Geography of Pollen

Todd Crowell — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:38:12 -0400

TOKYO – The weather here is turning warmer, the cherry trees are blossoming and the waiting rooms in clinics that specialize in nose and eye problems are filling up with people suffering from runny noses, sneezing and bloodshot eyes.

Tokyo is known for many things: the Imperial Palace gardens, cherry trees in the springtime, super-crowded commuter trains. But it has a more dubious distinction. It is also the world capital for allergies, especially for hay fever, known to the Japanese as pollen sickness.

Of course this is no secret to the bulk of the people living here, especially the estimated six or seven million who are prone to pollen allergies (based on general rule that 15- 20 percent of the Japanese population suffers from hay fever).

Tokyoites know that by the time the plum trees start to blossom in March, it's time to stock up on antihistamine tablets, eye drops, herbal medicines and face masks. Those most susceptible to pollen sometimes also avail themselves of allergy shots and other more exotic remedies.

One might wonder, why Tokyo? The answer goes back to just before World War II, and just after its end. In those hardscrabble years, people denuded the forests of the nearby mountains to repair burned out homes, keep warm and cook food.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Japanese government undertook a successful reforestation program, planting millions of cedars, a cheap, fast-growing native tree and a prodigious pollen producer. Unlike the US, where ragweed is the main pollen source, most of Japan's suffering is caused by cedar and cypress trees.

It was expected that these trees would be cut to produce timber, but Japan has found it more economical to import lumber from the US and Canada, so they have been left standing. Now 40 to 50 years old, they have reached their pollen producing peak, pumping literally tons of the irritant into the atmosphere.

The cedar pollen season peaks in March, but just as it dies down the pollination of the cypress trees begins to kick in. So for those who suffer from both pollens, there is an unbroken period of sneezing and sniffling through the end of April.

Ironically, it is Tokyo’s urban nature that compounds the problem, since the pollen particles fall on asphalt pavements or on the roofs of buildings rather than being absorbed in the soil. From there, they are picked up and blown around in little invisible eddies and whirlwinds.

The inexorable march of suburbia to the west has eliminated many of the farms and windbreaks that had once helped keep much of the pollen from reaching the city. But now the urban area of Tokyo extends to the very foothills of the mountains.

The forest agency, which had planted 4.5 million hectares (11.1 million acres) of cedar trees, now proposes to cut them down and reseed the areas with different broadleaf trees that produce less pollen. The goal is to halve the number of cedar trees by 2017.

Hay fever is thought to have a measurable impact on Japan’s economy, both in a negative and a positive way. The Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Research Institute estimates that the economy lost about $3 billion due to absenteeism in the memorable hay fever year of 2005. On the other hand, Dai-Ichi Life also estimates that Japanese spend more than $6 billion a year on hay fever prevention products, such as eye drops and face masks.

Dust that originates in China’s Inner Mongolia province and other parts of Central Asia and is blown east in prevailing winds is called "yellow dust" by the Japanese. In recent years, the hay fever season has merged with the yellow dust peril to aggravate the woes of allergy sufferers.

When it settles, cities are bathed in a kind of yellow haze, similar to smog, and the dust particles get into everything. Weather reports on local television stations plot the approaching dust and recommend that people refrain from hanging washed clothing out of doors. In more extreme cases, the yellow dust can cut visibility to the point where airports close temporarily.

Of late, the yellow dust has been augmented by real smog from China. In Fukuoka city on Kyushu, the average amount of particulates is estimated to have reached 50 micrograms per cubic meter. The air pollution from China has caused the first official smog alerts in Japan.

This being Japan, various exotic remedies have been proposed over the years to lessen the burden. One pharmaceutical company touts its olive leaf extraction as a way of alleviating hay fever symptoms without causing side effects such as drowsiness.

An institute associated with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries touts a new kind of genetically engineered rice. Eating it may produce an immune tolerance. The rice is said to produce an amino acid that mimics the cedar pollen and helps produce immunities.

However, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has been slow to classify the engineered rice as a safe food, disappointing many sufferers who had hoped it would be available from this year’s harvest.

Several Japanese companies are increasing the production of face masks for sale in Japan. One firm, Ohyama, has developed an improved mask to screen out micro particles. The masks are made in Dailin China.

At this time of year newspapers carry stories filled with tips on how to prevent, or at least alleviate, the symptoms of hay fever. They all seem to boil down to the same piece of advice: find and wear a good face mask or stay indoors.

Todd Crowell is a writer based in Tokyo.

Flickr photo by OiMax: Yellow Dust , Tokyo, Japan

The Beauty of Urban Planning from the Ground

Wendell Cox — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:38:38 -0500

In a piece called The Beauty of Urban Planning from Space, the Sustainable Cities Collective highlights views from space of uniquely designed street pattern designs in various cities around the world. There are ten examples that illustrate the zenith of urban planning.

As attractive as the street patterns are, they highlight the inevitable inability of designers, or anyone else for that matter, to influence much more than small changes in the overall urban form.

The Incomplete Street Patterns

This point is evident in eight of the 10 urban areas illustrated, where the unique street pattern comprise only part of a much bigger city. The eight are Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Brasilia, Brazil, Washington, DC; New Haven, CT; La Plata, Argentina; Jaipur, India; Adelaide, Australia; and Canberra, Australia.

The best known example may be Washington, DC, where L'Enfant's street pattern served most of the city for more than a century, which is probably a world record for a growing urban area. Yet, today, L'Enfant's design covers less than five percent of the urban area that today has more people than the nation at the time L'Enfant received his position.

In La Plata (See end note on La Plata) the street design comes the closest to covering the whole urban area (Figure 1, from Google Maps). Taking design a bit further, every street is numbered in this city that was planned to be the capital of Argentina's largest province (Buenos Aires, which is separate from the provincial equivalent city of Buenos Aires). Three other of the examples were also new cities planned as capitals, including Brasilia, Canberra and, of course, Washington.

Stagnant Cities

The other two examples are a dying mining town (El Salvador, Chile), which has lost more than two thirds of its population and an Italian medieval fortress town, Palmanova. The latter is more a museum than a dynamic urban area. It is confined to its original area and its population could fit into London's Royal Albert Hall (approximately 5,000).

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

The Belo Horizonte Centro (Note on Belo Horizonte) street pattern is unique. It was part of the inspiration for my Urban Tours by Rental Car website (rentalcartours.net) and a map of Centro was incorporated into the logo (Figure 2).

Figure 2

In Centro, diagonals are superimposed on a conventional north-south/east-west street pattern (Figure 3, from Google Earth). However Centro's street pattern covers less than one percent of the Belo Horizonte urban area, three square miles out of more than 400 (five square kilometers out of 650). Figure 4 shows Centro in red, engulfed by the much larger urban area, outlined in yellow.

The first rental car tour described the Belo Horizonte Centro street pattern:

Belo Horizonte represents both the best and worst in urban planning. The core has, at least from map inspection, a pleasing street layout. In a flair that outdid L’Enfant’s Washington diagonals, Belo Horizonte Centro has a grid of streets on which is superimposed a grid of diagonals. Of course, the resulting eight street intersections make traffic more of a difficulty than with the four that are usual or the grade separations of Brasilia. Centro has a number of wide boulevards, many with green, treed medians and, in the Brazilian style, some with four roadways --- center express lanes and outside local lanes. These “three median” streets, give a pleasing feeling. The overall result is an impression similar to that of Barcelona, and a particularly attractive core that would do most European cities proud.

But, not far from Centro the randomness begins. To the north is the river, and clearly no attempt
was made to continue the pattern beyond that. To the south are hills that would have precluded expansion of the plan. Nor does the pattern extend far to the less challenging east or west

Unscrambling Means and Ends

Street patterns from space provide no indication of urban planning's effectiveness, nor of urban policy of which planning is a part. Planning is a means, not the end of cities.

Over the past two centuries, billions of people have moved to cities. They did not move for the fountains, architecture, or museums (otherwise they would all live in the ville de Paris or Manhattan). In short, urban planning principles of any era have had little impact in the growth of cities.

Urban planning's current "top-down" genre is rather new. Until the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 and similar measures, planners contented themselves to design street networks (which the Sustainable Cities Coalition highlights so well) and other necessary infrastructure, such as water and sewer networks. Their handiwork is obvious in the 19th century designed street grid of Manhattan, the straight streets of Phoenix and the modified grid of the Toronto metropolitan area. These are the broad functions emphasized by New York University Professor Shlomo Angel in his Planet of Cities.

Now, urban planning can work against the very justification of cities, the prosperity of its residents.

Successful Cities

The success of urban policy (and urban planning) can be judged by how well the purpose of the city is served – the reason people moved there in the first place. The purpose of the city was well articulated by former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud: Large labor markets are the only raison d’être of large cities. Cities are much more about economics than aesthetics. (See end note on Sustainability).

The successful city will facilitate greater affluence – higher discretionary incomes – among its residents.

Regrettably, there are notable failures in this regard. For example, the urban containment policies of smart growth, which ration land and raise the price of housing relative to incomes, have been adopted in cities from Sydney to Toronto and Portland. As a result, residents have less money to spend after taxes and paying for necessities and are less affluent than they would be without such policies. In his introduction to the 9th Annual Demographia Housing Affordability Survey, New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister Bill English pointed out that higher house prices that occur when land is "made artificially scarce by regulation that locks up land for development."

Another problem is evident in excessive traffic congestion and slower travel times. Getting around town quickly contributes to greater economic growth and discretionary incomes. Public policy must facilitate mobility throughout the urban area. The mode --- the means --- is not important, the access is. Transit services are appropriate where time competitive with the automobile, such as to the largest downtowns (See Transit Legacy Cities). However, because of its unparalleled ability to provide rapid mobility throughout the urban area, public policy must also ensure a minimum of traffic congestion and effective access by cars and commercial trucks. The evidence is clear that the higher densities preferred by modern urban planning impede rapid mobility throughout the urban area (see Urban Travel and Urban Population Density).

Finally, by facilitating housing affordability and more free-flowing traffic, the important objective of alleviating poverty is served (an objective that cannot sustainably be served without economic growth)

The Beauty of Urban Planning from the Ground

The "beauty of urban planning" is reliably appreciated from the ground, not from space. The test is how well people live, not what the city looks like. The subject is people, not architecture or urban form (see Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Policy, Planning, Transport and the Dimensions of Sustainability).

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

-----

Note on La Plata: La Plata is in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, approximately 35 miles (60 kilometers) south of Centro in Buenos Aires. However, it is a separate urban area because of a comparatively break in the continuous urbanization between La Plata and Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires province is by far the nation's largest provincial level jurisdiction, with a population five times as great as the city of Buenos Aires. Much of the population is concentrated near the city of Buenos Aires, with which it forms one of the world's megacities. The Buenos Aires also has the largest land area and would rank 6th if it were in the United States (nearly as large as New Mexico).

Note on Belo Horizonte: Belo Horizonte is capital of the state of Minas Gerais. Belo Horizonte is Brazil's third largest urban area, after Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with a population of more than 5 million --- approximately the population of the Miami urban area (which stretches from southern Dade County to northern Palm Beach County)

Note on Sustainability: Urban policies that would artificially constrain urban expansion (such as with urban growth boundaries) and discourage automobile travel have often been cited as principal strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, important reports indicate little potential for greenhouse gas reductions from these policies, with the overwhelming share resulting from improved fuel economy. Moreover, recent research in England suggested that such policies should not "automatically be associated with the preferred growth strategy" (see Questioning the Messianic Conception of Smart Growth).

Photo: Belo Horizonte Centro from Nova Lima (by author)

Dispersion in the World's Largest Urban Areas

Wendell Cox — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:14:21 -0500

No decade in history has experienced such an increase in urban population as the last. From Tokyo-Yokohama, the world's largest urban area (population: 37 million) to Godegård, Sweden, which may be the smallest (population: 200), urban areas added 700 million people between 2000 and 2010.

Nearly one in 10 of the world's new urban residents were in the fastest growing metropolitan regions (see: Definition of Terms used in "The Evolving Urban Form" Series), which added nearly 60 million residents. They ranged from a an estimated increase of more than 8.5 people in Karachi (Note 1) to 3.9 million people in Mumbai (Figure 1). The average population growth in these 10 metropolitan regions was 6 million, approximately the population of Dallas-Fort Worth or Toronto, which were fast-growers on their own in comparison to other high income world cities.

By comparison, the largest growth over any single decade over the past half century in US metropolitan areas has been less than one half of the 6 million average: 2.43 million in New York (1920s) and 2.37 million in Los Angeles (1950s). Only Tokyo-Yokohama (1960s) and Shenzhen (1990s) have added more than 5 million people in a single decade before the last decade.

Growth has been overwhelmingly concentrated outside the urban cores (Note 2) in these 10 fastest growing metropolitan region. Excluding Karachi (for which sufficient data is unavailable), approximately 85 percent of the growth was outside the urban cores (A 42 million increase in the suburbs and 8 million in the urban cores).

Dispersion in World Megacities

This is consistent with the findings of The Evolving Urban Form series, which is now two years old. These analyses have generally demonstrated that urban spatial expansion (pejoratively called "sprawl") is world-wide and contrary to some perceptions, not limited to the United States. Cities expand geographically as they add population, though this organic tendency is sometimes contained by urban planning. Peripheral growth is virtually always at lower densities than in urban cores, which means that as cities grow they tend to become less dense (Note 3).

This process ironically is sometimes accelerated by planning decision-making. London's greenbelt ---which banned the extension of housing into the near periphery of the city --- has result in even greater sprawl to far outside the principal urban area. This trend since World War II, has forced commuters to travel longer times and distances to the urban core (All of metropolitan London's growth has been suburban for 100 years, with a loss of 1.8 million in inner London, while the suburbs and exurbs grew by 10.5 million).

The Evolving Urban Form has now covered 23 of the world's 28 megacities (Note 4). As the Table indicates, population growth has been strongly oriented away from the urban cores and toward more suburban areas

Table
Summary of Megacity Population Trends
URBAN AREA	CORRESPONDING METROPOLITAN REGION
Bangkok	10 Years: 55% of growth outside core municipality
Beijing	10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
Buenos Aires	60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core municipality
Cairo	16 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core governate
Delhi	10 Years: 90% of growth outside core districts
Dhaka	10 Years: 50% of growth outside core municipalities
Guangzhou-Foshan	10 Years: 75%+ of growth outside core districts
Istanbul	25 Years: 100%+ growth outside core districts
Jakarta	20 Years: 85% of growth outside core jurisdiction
Kolkata	20 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipality
Los Angeles	60 Years: 85% growth outside core municipality
Manila	60 Years: 95% growth outside core municipality
Mexico City	60 Years: 100%+ of growth outside core districts
Moscow	8 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
Mumbai	50 Years: 98% of growth outside core districts
New York	60 Years: 95% growth outside core municipality
Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto	50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities
Rio de Janeiro	10 Years: 95% of growth outside core districts
Sao Paulo	20 Years: 2/3 of growth outside core municipality
Seoul	20 Years: 115%+ of growth outside core municipality
Shanghai	10 Years: 99% of growth outside core districts
Shenzhen	10 Years: 70%+ of growth outside core districts
Tokyo	50 Years: 95% of growth outside core municipalities

In US examples, New York and Los Angeles, 95 percent and 85 percent of growth respectively of their corresponding metropolitan region growth has occurred outside the core municipalities since 1950. But these US regions are joined by middle income Buenos Aires and Mexico City where all growth has been outside urban core since 1950. In lower income Manila, 95 percent of the growth has been outside the urban core since 1950.

The world's largest metropolitan region, Tokyo-Yokohama, has experienced a virtual monopoly of suburban growth over the past 50 years, as has Japan's second largest metropolitan region, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto.

Over the past quarter century, all of Istanbul's growth has been outside the urban core. The urban expansion has been going on for much longer, as is illustrated over the past 60 years (Figure 2). Cairo's urban expansion is similarly substantial (Figure 3). In one of the developing world's poorer megacities, nearly all population growth in the Mumbai region has been outside the urban core for 50 years

For the last 20 years, more than 115 percent of the growth in the Seoul-Incheon metropolitan region has been outside the core city. In the world's second largest urban area, Jakarta (Jabotabek), growth is also strongly suburban, accounting for 85 percent of growth over the past two decades. In Kolkata suburban growth has been 95 percent over the same two decades.

The same tendency is evident in the other megacities. Over the past decade or two, nearly all population growth in China's four megacities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou-Foshan and Shenzhen), Delhi and Rio de Janeiro has been outside the urban cores.

Dispersion in Other Large Urban Areas

The Evolving Urban Form has also examined smaller urban areas. The same pattern of dispersal is evident there as well even in traditionally compact cities. Zürich, for example has had all of its growth outside the core city since 1950. All of the growth in Barcelona and Milan has been outside the core cities for 40 years. Even high density Hong Kong has experienced all of its growth outside the urban core for three decades. Low income Addis Abeba indicates a pattern of urban expansion is not unlike that of Istanbul or Cairo (Figure 4). In megacity wannabe Chicago (1.4 million short), 125 percent of growth since 1950 has been outside the core; this number reflects that the central city has been shrinking even as the periphery expands. Even in fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth, more than 80 percent of population growth over the past 60 years has been outside the city of Dallas (which itself is largely suburban in form, see Suburbanized Core Cities).

The one notable exception to the peripheral growth model is Quanzhou (Fujian, China), which is developing under an even more dispersed pattern, described by Yu Zhu, Xinhua Qi, Huaiyou Shao and Kaijing He at Fujian Normal University. Typically, urban areas expand from an urban core on the periphery. Quanzhou is experiencing "in situ" urbanization, the spontaneous conversion of rural areas into urban development that does not expand from the urban core. The result is a sparsely developed urban area (especially for China), with plenty of land for potential infill development in the future.

The Future of Urbanization

It is likely that urban areas will continue to expand as they grow larger, consistent with what appears to be both economic pressures and market preferences for lower cost, more spacious housing. For example, fast growing Ho Chi Minh City is expected to see virtually all of its population increase over the next 15 years outside the urban core. Not surprisingly Shlomo Angel, Jason Parent, Daniel Civco, Alexander Blei and David Potere at the Lincoln Land Institute project significant expansions of urban land by mid-century. And, Angel, in his Planet of Cities, notes how important it is to allow the expansion, in order to improve the quality of life for the majority of people, who deserve to live as well as people in the West.

----

Note 1: Incomplete results of the 2011 Pakistan census have been reported by media in both Pakistan and India. However, no official announcement of the results has been identified from Pakistan census authorities. The Karachi population increase would be the largest metropolitan region 10 year rate of increase in history.

Note 2: Urban cores are generally the core historical jurisdiction, which often contains substantial non-core areas, even outside the United States. Core district data within these jurisdictions is used where available. Thus, this estimate over-states the urban core population increase.

Note 3: The driving factor in declining densities is principally transportation advances. Substantial urban expansion began with the coming of mass transit in the 19th century. However an even greater expansion began occurring with the availability of the automobile. As automobile orientation replaces transit orientation, densities tend to decline until it nearly all travel is by automobile. Even among automobile oriented urban areas, there can be large differences in urban densities. For example, transit's market share in the Boston urban area is substantially greater than in the Los Angeles urban area. Yet the Los Angeles urban area has a population density of 7000 per square mile (2,700 per square kilometer), more than three times that of the Boston urban area, at 220 per square mile (850 per square kilometer). The difference is that in Los Angeles residential development has largely occurred densities determined by the market, with single-family housing being typically built on 1/4 acre lots. In Boston, suburban lot sizes were forced higher by urban planning requirements for large lot zoning. The result is much greater land consumption than would have occurred if people's preferences (the market) had driven development. If Los Angeles had been developed at the same low density as Boston, its urban land area would equal that of the state of Connecticut.

Note 4: Megacities are urban areas with more than 10 million population. Five megacities remain to be described in The Evolving Urban Form (Karachi, Lagos, Nagoya, Paris and Teheran). Corresponding metropolitan regions are used for this analysis, since historic urban area data (areas of continuous urban development) is not available for most nations.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

-----

Photo: New detached housing, suburban Tokyo-Yokohama (by author).

Our Dysfunctional Housing Market

Roger Selbert — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:38:44 -0500

This is the story of how elites prospered while killing the singular trend that built America, and all that you proles got in return was a dysfunctional housing market. In a reversal of more than 100 years of American history, the unique force that built the United States and the wealth of its inhabitants – geographic convergence – has been stopped. Based on labor mobility and the income convergence it engendered, geographic convergence was our great equalizer, our economy’s ace in the hole: even in the worst of times people could always move from where they were to somewhere else to improve their prospects. Well, they can’t anymore, and the reason is housing.

Who killed geographic and income convergence? Well, we wealthy, older, property-rich elites in desirable zip codes did. Call us the new landed gentry if you like. I would like to say we’re really, really, sorry but I don’t see us doing anything to correct it. It wasn’t on purpose; it was an inadvertent, unintended consequence of well-intentioned laws and regulations concerning land use, zoning, building codes, permits, property taxes and the like. We didn’t undertake those restrictions on building and development specifically to exclude you people (wait – did I really just say “you people?”). Why heck, we’re concerned as all get-out about rising inequality and income disparity, just not in our own neighborhoods, okay? And besides, residential segregation is voluntary, isn’t it? Didn’t you read Bill Bishop's “The Big Sort”? We all naturally prefer to cluster with the like-minded and socioeconomically similar, don’t we?

We used to have a housing market that consisted of buyers, sellers, and the supply of homes for sale. Today, the housing market is artificial and even fraudulent — it's anything but a free market in which inventory is allowed to clear. Millions have defaulted, and millions more are in the pipeline to do so. Because of this massive shadow inventory of underwater and foreclosed homes that is only slowly being leaked out to market, there are millions of people who can’t sell the houses where they live, millions who can’t buy houses where they want to live, and millions who may never get a foot on the housing ladder at all.

The government response — bless ’em, they do represent us — is to do everything possible to keep housing prices inflated. Interest rates are kept absurdly low (if you can qualify, and we do!), and the federal government now guarantees 90% of all mortgage loans (defaults and delinquencies are staggering, but so what?). Inventory is being constrained by banks which have not only been bailed out, but given the ability to rewrite accounting rules, for example, suspending mark-to-market and taking years to move on non-performing loans. Some of your neighbors haven’t made a mortgage payment in years but have yet to receive a notice of default. The result? In some markets, housing mania has returned. Flippers and non-resident investors are flooding in and crowding out people who actually want to buy homes in which to live. We’re inflating the bubble again. Thank you so much — don’t mind the feudalism!

All of this allows us to continue to buy expensive homes with low down payments and monthly payments (relative to income, of course, and ours is larger than yours), max out the tax deduction on the back-end, and escape capital gains taxes on the first $500,000 of profit on the sale of a home. Sweet. I guess they’re trying to goose consumption, but with your flat household incomes, it doesn’t seem to be working.

How We Got Here - In a recent working paper two Harvard economists, Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, explain how geographic and income convergence started to slow in the 1960s, when rich people in rich places started constraining land use through regulation. This limited the housing supply in those places, which forced prices up, and started to squeeze out those with lower incomes.

Housing prices have always been more expensive in high-income places, but the difference now is unbridgeable. The result is that people can’t get on the upward mobility ladder, thus increasing the inequality that these same elites bemoan. But they don’t see or understand the connection between this income divergence and their own regulations and restrictions.

What to Do? - I recently had the opportunity to contribute to a symposium hosted by CORE (National Community Renaissance), one of the largest nonprofit affordable housing development corporations in the United States. As a catalyst we used an article by Joel Kotkin and Steve PonTell, CORE’s President and CEO, “Is the Dream Dead? Housing’s Next Challenge.” The authors note that homeownership is at a 15-year low, despite the fact that owning a home is now cheaper than renting in most of the top 100 metro areas, but that lower housing prices have not done much to improve the conditions for lower-income people. Indeed, as people who would normally own housing become renters, price pressure has actually worsened for renters.

Housing has traditionally been the main way Americans accumulated assets, created wealth, raised families, became part of communities, and contributed to social stability. But housing is only one factor squeezing lower and middle income Americans. The real culprit has been stagnant and even declining incomes. The authors conclude, as I read it, that if you want to champion those less well-off, the way to do it is with solutions that are less government-centric: not to give them housing and income, but to take away the barriers to housing, allow the construction of new, market-friendly housing, and boost wealth creation through economic development.

What If Housing Declines For A Generation? - A strong case can be made that the fundamental supports of the housing market – demographics, employment, creditworthiness and income – will not recover for a generation, and that housing has lost its status as the foundation of middle class wealth, not for a generation, but for the long term.

Charles Hugh Smith has written that rising rates of home-ownership require five conditions: favorable demographics, rising household formation rates, a large cohort of creditworthy potential buyers, an economy that generates rising incomes to support home-ownership, and an unshakable belief that owning a house is a favorable and secure investment that will rise in value in the decades ahead.

If the first four conditions have eroded, then the belief in the permanence of a rising housing market will also erode. And they all have in fact eroded:

Today's demographics are not favorable to housing on a number of fronts.
Household formation is in a long-term decline.
Labor's share of the national income has plummeted to historic lows, and
income has declined, especially for young workers.
Part-time jobs and temp jobs do not generate enough stable income to support a mortgage. It's easy to qualify people for a mortgage. The hard part is making sure that they will have enough income and faith to service the mortgage for the next 30 years.

Arnold King of George Mason University has argued that home ownership subsidies have imposed costs on the economy and society that are large and clear, while the benefits of such subsidies are, at best, small and vague. His conclusion: Who needs home ownership?

I’m more worried about Smith's conclusion, which is an idea that few are willing to entertain: the possibility that housing is no longer the foundation of middle class wealth, and that its decline is structural, not cyclical. What if he’s right?

Dr. Roger Selbert is a trend analyst, researcher, writer and speaker. Growth Strategies is his newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends. Roger is economic analyst, North American representative and Principal for the US Consumer Demand Index, a monthly survey of American households’ buying intentions.

Flickr photo by Sean Dreilinger: For Sale signs posted in Lake Oswego, Oregon

South Pacific Island "Undiscovered" by Scientists

Seamus Murphy — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:38:55 -0500

Have you ever tried to visit a South Pacific island near New Caledonia called Sandy Island? A team of Australian scientists attempted just that and found no sign of the supposedly sizeable landmass. Instead, the team from the University of Sydney were greeted by open ocean and nothing more.

In the 21st century, stories like this are rare. Exciting tales of exploration surface from time to time, like Curiosity’s ongoing scientific expedition to Mars. Such occurrences on Earth are now fleeting – it feels like we have discovered almost everything there is to discover. So, maybe it shouldn’t prove too surprising that the Australian scientists actually ‘undiscovered’ some charted and documented territory.

Sandy Island was located somewhere between northern Australia and New Caledonia, albeit closer to the latter. Supposedly, it measured 24 km by 4 km and has been ever-present in maps and publications for the last ten years. Praised continuously for its reliability and accuracy, Google’s mapping program also prominently featured this phantom island. According to statistics released in April 2012, Google Maps is the most popular travel website in the United States.

The entire story seems extremely bizarre – nobody can account for the origin of Sandy Island nor its inclusion on countless maritime charts, maps and online navigation programs. According to Australian news sources, the island would sit within French territorial waters but no trace of it can be found on French government maps.

A marine research vessel named ‘The Southern Surveyor’ was in the region documenting fragments of the Australian continental crust under the Coral Sea. Passing near Sandy Island, navigational charts displayed the considerable depth of 1,400 meters, generating a sense of curiosity amongst the Australian scientists onboard. They investigated further and were quite surprised by what they found…or more specifically, what they did not find. Instead of a white sandy beach lined with palm trees and coconuts, they found the clear undisturbed waters of the Coral Sea.

Dr. Steven Micklethwaite was present on the ship and he shared his views with the Guardian on the expedition to find Sandy Island: “We went upstairs to the bridge and found that the navigation charts the ship uses didn't have it. And so at that point we thought: Well, who do we trust? Do we trust Google Earth or do we trust the navigation charts? This was one of those intriguing questions. It wasn't far outside of our path. We decided to actually sail through the island ... Lo and behold there was nothing! The ocean floor didn't ever get shallower than 1300 metres below the wave-base. There's an island in the middle of nowhere that doesn't actually exist."

Apparently, the captain of the Southern Surveyor was concerned about running aground as his ship approached the phantom island. Once they were sailing through it, however, the entire crew had a laugh at Google’s expense. The search engine giant said it always welcomes feedback on its maps and “continuously explore(s) ways to integrate new information from our users and authoritative partners into Google Maps”.

Experts seemed equally puzzled by Sandy Island’s undiscovery, but most agreed it was probably down to human error or oversight. While some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to avoid copyright violations, maritime charts are usually made as accurate as possible due to the hazards of navigation on the open ocean. Some analysts pointed out that this kind of mistake would never happen in a busy international shipping lane, but due to the immense isolation of the Coral Sea, it escaped attention.

It is quite possible that Sandy Island does exist somewhere nearby – somebody might have just placed it in the wrong location. People have been making maps for thousands of years and many older charts were compiled through the use of watches and longitude measurements. Before that, sailors travelled using the stars, a technique which can still be used today if our GPS systems and maps somehow fail us.

Even though there may be one less island in the world today, the map is constantly changing anyway. New island chains sometimes appear and disappear through volcanic activity, so this certainly won’t be the end of the discovery versus undiscovery topic. Even though the mistake may seem embarrassing for Google, it’s nothing compared to the disastrous debut of Apple’s mapping software which, among other things, was missing Israel’s capital and gave the incorrect address for Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. At the end of the day, a small uninhabited island in the South Pacific is just a tiny speck of dust on a massive picture of the world.

Seamus Murphy grew up in Limerick, Ireland and has since lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. He has a background in public relations and teaching and has become an enthusiastic blogger. Seamus enjoys writing about international affairs, communication, technology and environmental issues at Trenditionist.com. He is a keen fan of traditional Irish music.