Walkability

[finehoe]

Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk?

By Will Oremus

| Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 12:44 PM ET

Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t_americans_walk_more_the_crisis_of_pedestrianism_.html), I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom fourâ€"Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worthâ€"went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?

You might think it’s a simple matter of size: Big cities lean liberal and also tend to be more walkable. That’s generally true, but it doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are among the nation’s ten largest cities, but they’re also among the country’s more conservative big cities, and none cracks the top 20 in walkability. All three trail smaller liberal cities such as Portland, Denver, and Long Beach. And if you expand the data beyond the 50 largest cities, the conservative/liberal polarity only grows. Small liberal cities such as Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, Ca., and Paterson, N.J. make the top 10, while conservative cities of similar size such as Palm Bay, Fl. and Clarksville, Ten. rank at the bottom.

Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. As they grew, their borders were constrained by those of the smaller cities and towns that surrounded them. That’s not the case with many Southern and Western cities. Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, for instance, are vast in terms of land area, encompassing suburban and even semi-rural neighborhoods as well as urban ones.

That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. I see four possible categories of explanations. 1) Liberals build denser, more walkable cities (e.g., Portlanders supporting public transit and policies that limit sprawl). 2) Liberals are drawn to cities that are already dense and walkable (think college grads migrating to Minneapolis rather than San Antonio, or young families settling down in Lowell, Mass., with a walk score of 64.1, rather than Fort Wayne, Ind., with a walk score of 39. 3) Walkable cities make people more liberal (by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors and to rely on highly visible city services such as parks and subways). 4) The same factors that make cities dense and walkable also make them liberal.

My guess is that it’s mostly 4), with some of the other three thrown in, depending on the situation. What do dense, walkable cities have in common? Besides being older, they also tend to be on the coasts. New York (#1), San Francisco (#2), and Boston (#3) sprang up as port citiesâ€"hubs of international commerce and immigration. That leads to both dense development along the coastline and to an atmosphere of diversity and tolerance. Those three cities top the list because they’re both old and coastal. The others in the top 10 are mostly one or the other. Seattle (#6) and Miami (#8) are diverse coastal ports. Chicago (#4), Philadelphia (#5), and Minneapolis (#9) aren’t coastal, but they are ports, and more importantly, they’re relatively old and industrial.

Look at the walkability map and you’ll see that unwalkable cities are concentrated in the South. While the northern United States developed an industrial economy, the South was dominated by agriculture until the last few decades. Whereas industry breeds density, immigration, and social mobility, agriculture requires vast plots of land and leads to an entrenched social order dominated by the large landowners.

The historical perspective might help explain why cities such as Houston, which today is one of the nation’s largest ports and a magnet for immigration, remain relatively unwalkable. As Houston becomes increasingly diverse, it is already becoming more liberal. Harris County went narrowly to Obama in ’08 after going consistently Republican for decades before that. In theory, it should be getting more walkable as well. The problem is that once a city has an infrastructure built around cars, it’s harder to build support for density and public transportation funding. That is, it may be easier for a city to turn liberal than for a city to turn walkable.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/04/17/_.html

[thelakelander]

I think he's put to much effort into this.  I'd say this liberal vs conservative viewpoint over complicates the situation.   At the lowest common denominator, the two things that come into play are:

1. Age of municipality

Any city that had a good 100,000 people before WWII is going to have denser cores than those that sprouted up after WWII.  Even locally, the 30 square miles of pre consolidated Jacksonville remain three to five times denser than the majority of today's 767 square mile city/county.  Why?  It's because those 30 square miles were developed before the automobile became this country's dominant transportation option.

2. Square mileable of municipality

If those pre WWII municipalities have not annexed considerable amounts of developable suburban land in the last 50 years, they'll typically rank higher on the walkability list.  Their suburbs (where the density is lower) also tend to be their own separate incorporated communities (ex. Detroit's Dearborn, Southfield, etc.).  So the amount of land annexed after WWII can dramatically sway the ultimate results.

Looking at the top 20 walkscore list, since when did cities like San Jose, Milwaukee, and San Diego become liberal bastions?  In addition, nobody has flocked to Cleveland in decades, as it continues to bleed people.  Walkscore simply bases their city rankings on the square mileage of each respective municipality.

That's how you get a New Orleans coming in at 56, while a Miami is listed as 72.  Miami happens to be 36 square miles of land area while New Orleans covers 180 square miles (its boundaries are the same as Orleans Parish), most of which are undevelopable bayou.  However, only a fool would suggest that Miami is more walkable than New Orleans.

The larger a community's boundaries are, the more likely it has annexed a considerable amount of land in the later half of the 20th century when autocentric based development patterns overtook the entire country. 

Imo, political leanings tend to be irrelevant as far as Walk Score goes.

[Dashing Dan]

And then there's Council Member Don Redmond.

[Dashing Dan]

Imo, political leanings tend to be irrelevant as far as Walk Score goes.

The Walk Score methodology is badly flawed.

[thelakelander]

^I agree.

[finehoe]

I think the key takeaway concerning Jacksonville is this:

The problem is that once a city has an infrastructure built around cars, it’s harder to build support for density and public transportation funding.

[Dashing Dan]

I think he's put to much effort into this.  I'd say this liberal vs conservative viewpoint over complicates the situation.   

CM Redmond notwithstanding, I think that there is a valid correlation between walkability and liberalism.

Compare Riverside to the area around 9A.

[thelakelander]

I think the key takeaway concerning Jacksonville is this:

The problem is that once a city has an infrastructure built around cars, it’s harder to build support for density and public transportation funding.

I also think because our municipal limits are countywide, we try to bite off more than we can chew, as well as find support from areas that are typically unlikely to give support for environments they don't necessarily desire.  Jacksonville can overcome this problem incrementally by first focusing on areas that are already built to support density and public transportation.  In addition, before extra funding is needed, a complete redesign of what we already offer may make more sense to better utilize the funds already in hand.  This approach allows support to build and expand over time. 

Salt Lake City is a great example.  Their initial fixed transit line was a 15-mile LRT corridor in 1999.  Now they have 35 miles of LRT, 44 miles of commuter rail and a streetcar, more LRT and commuter rail under construction.  In the last decade, billions of dollars of TOD has been developed along these corridors and as a result, downtown Salt Lake City has enjoyed a huge economic boost.  Needless to say, you have to start somewhere.  We need to get a decent starter segment off the ground even if it means it only connects a few urban core communities initially.

[thelakelander]

I think he's put to much effort into this.  I'd say this liberal vs conservative viewpoint over complicates the situation.   

CM Redmond notwithstanding, I think that there is a valid correlation between walkability and liberalism.

Just not from walkscore methodology.