http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?rip_id=%3CD9VM0F8G0%40news.ap.org%3E&ps=1018 (http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?rip_id=%3CD9VM0F8G0%40news.ap.org%3E&ps=1018)
QuoteFor the first time in a century, most of America's largest cities are growing at a faster rate than their surrounding suburbs as young adults seeking a foothold in the weak job market shun home-buying and stay put in bustling urban centers.
QuoteThe last time growth in big cities surpassed that in outlying areas occurred prior to 1920, before the rise of mass-produced automobiles spurred expansion beyond city cores.
QuoteNew Orleans ... saw the biggest rebound in city growth relative to suburbs in the last year, 3.7 percent vs. 0.6 percent. Atlanta, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, N.C., also showed wide disparities in city growth compared to suburbs.
Other big cities showing faster growth compared to the previous decade include Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Seattle
QuoteShepard said. "There's a bigger focus on building residences near transportation hubs, such as a train or subway station, because fewer people want to travel by car for an hour and a half for work anymore."
Jacksonville will you get ahead of this curve or will you ignore it and stay 15 years behind your peers, or at least what USED to be your peers.
Jax is already behind. We're still struggling finding the need for bike lanes or understanding that quality of life is more important than having cheap taxes when it comes to economic development. We were already a decade behind 10 years ago. We'll be 20 years behind by the end of the decade if things don't change soon.
This doesn't seem to be the trend in Jax or most of the rest of Florida; suburban counties continue to grow faster than the urban areas.
It's the trend in Miami for over a decade. However, the City of Miami covers less than 40 square miles of land area.
It's not the trend in Jacksonville because we bend over backwards to make it easy for developers to acquire vast swaths of undeveloped land out in the suburbs. We have made it cheaper for developers to build tract homes in the hinterlands than to embrace infill development. Of course, as has been discussed on here before, the developers get to acquire cheap land while us taxpayers are left footing the bill for the true cost of that development. But since the developers and builders own City Council, I don't see that changing.
Quote from: Tacachale on June 28, 2012, 09:57:36 AM
This doesn't seem to be the trend in Jax or most of the rest of Florida; suburban counties continue to grow faster than the urban areas.
Yeah, but Florida is bubble-based lala land. So is a lot of southern cities & even places like California, who all seem like they're following the same patterns. None of them IMO are future-proof, esp in times of contraction & economic downturn. As other cities & states seem they are getting their shit together, states like ours fall further behind.
It's definitely the trend in Miami...the two crowds living along Brickell are wealthy foreigners and young professionals...and each has a major presence.
Suburbs will always have a place as most people simply can't afford to live in the city, have families to raise and need better public schools, get tired of lugging groceries up stairs/elevators, desire more space...etc etc.
In Jacksonville the two main differences to the city's former peers in the South/country are:
1) The city doesn't bring enough jobs or GROW enough jobs in the city that pay well enough and require a certain subset of skills and experience that young professionals have, need, desire and look for when scouting around. Creative class is surprisingly taken care of by its own grassroots nature...at least in contrast to a Charlotte or Raleigh.
2) The city doesn't have sufficient plans/regulations to grow its suburbs in a more sustainable way.
Arguably, the third wheel is that in addition to lack of jobs, the city doesn't provide the quality of life many in their 20s/30s are looking for...and the ultimate question is a chicken vs egg (which comes first...quality jobs or quality of life).
I think the last two decades have proven that the quality of life comes first.
Quote from: simms3 on June 28, 2012, 12:17:43 PM
Suburbs will always have a place as most people simply can't afford to live in the city, have families to raise and need better public schools, get tired of lugging groceries up stairs/elevators, desire more space...etc etc.
In a well-designed city, there is no reason the suburbs would be cheaper than the city. The land may be less expensive, but all the other needs (multiple vehicles, need to travel distances for all things, meds for depression because your zombie-like suburban existence is horrible, etc). Give a $$ value to quality of life and the comparison isn't even close. Also, better schools in the suburbs is not a rule. Its true here and in many other places, but it is not a symptom of density of residences.
Space, I will give you. However, the city offers a density of people and programs for children to get involved/play with. While it might be nice to have a catch with your son in your yard, he'd much rather be playing with 10 of his closest buddies in the park, at a school, or even in the middle of a little-used street. With prevalent and well-maintained park facilities, the city life can't be beat. The idea that the suburban lifestyle offers any sort of advantage over city life in terms of economics or quality of life is mere delusion. The suburbs aren't even better for cycling.
Quote from: PeeJayEss on June 28, 2012, 01:45:25 PM
The idea that the suburban lifestyle offers any sort of advantage over city life in terms of economics or quality of life is mere delusion.
+1
^^^90+% of the country's population is wrong, then, and have therefore been making bad decisions, economically and in terms of what's right for their families. ::)
This thread is about young adults, anyway. Those aged 18-34. In Jacksonville that's kind of limited to 18-24 since everyone gets married so soon and has kids, but beside the point I'm sure even in Jax the average age of marriage is following the nat'l trend.
There is actually nothing new here. When my parents left college, each worked in a major city. My mom went to NYC (she's from Chicago and could have very well stayed there) and my dad went to Miami. This was back in the 70s. It's no new phenomenon that postgrads find jobs in big cities. What the difference now is the choices. Atlanta wasn't really a choice then. Houston wasn't a choice then. Portland certainly wasn't a choice then, and neither was Denver. Now even smaller cities are logical and decent choices for postgrads, like Charlotte, Raleigh, Austin, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, etc etc.
I think that's one of the major differences. The other difference is the amount of people educated now. 2 of my grandparents went to Penn and 1 to Univ. of Chicago (1 to Stockholm) and that was a big big deal back then (granted those schools were cheaper than private grammar school nowadays). Now educational attainment is a lot less exclusive and a lot more competitive. My grandparents worked in a manufacturing based economy. Our economy now is service based and requires more people with more knowledge based skills rather than labor skills. You're no longer "in the club" so to speak if you have a college degree; you're simply able to find a job more easily. Former industrial cities like Pittsburgh have made the ultimate transition to cities based on 21st century economies and knowledge. Jacksonville is still kind of all over the map and hasn't refined its specific strengths yet.
Quote from: simms3 on June 28, 2012, 04:23:00 PM
Jacksonville is still kind of all over the map and hasn't refined its specific strengths yet.
Jacksonville's specific strength is electing dingbats to the City Council. ;D
Quote from: simms3 on June 28, 2012, 04:23:00 PM
^^^90+% of the country's population is wrong, then, and have therefore been making bad decisions, economically and in terms of what's right for their families. ::)
Is your assertion that 90+% of the country's population live in the suburbs? A pretty dubious point given the difficulty with which suburbs are defined. I'm sure the 16% or so of the US population that lives in the much easier to delineate rural areas of the country would have a problem with your math. As would the apparently -6% or less that live in urban cores. But, in response to your question: Yes. I'm comfortable saying that a high percentage of my fellow countrymen make bad decisions on a regular basis. The prevalence of fast food chains alone should be sufficient evidence. Add that more of the poor now live in the suburbs than city cores, and that poverty rate is climbing in the suburbs versus the city core (while population growth is the reverse) and I think your generalization of my previous comments is fair.
And (here's a sweeping generalization!) all filled with a population that puts more time and effort into maintaining their lawns than improving their communities.
Quote from: simms3 on June 28, 2012, 04:23:00 PM
Jacksonville is still kind of all over the map and hasn't refined its specific strengths yet.
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, and I will add that I don't think "the City" is actually trying to. ;D
I would love if you guys could do an article on: What makes a suburb a suburb (psychologically)? I get the conceptual meaning, but can you have outlying areas that are dense, walkable, and express good urban planning. I mean you look at LA, which is really dense, but does not feel urban- at least to me if compared to northeastern cities?
What is more affordable to developers? I think that even if Jacksonville built dense urban neighborhoods, they would be gated communities connected by deserted blvds (towncenter as example). Such neighborhoods would feel suburban. I believe it is cheaper for developers to build dense, but I am not sure as this is not my field. Maybe Simms you can help on this.
^^Loaded question and too much for any one man to answer. Typically it's cheaper to build in lower density areas or cities with low barriers to entry, but it's much easier to get burned in those environments, too, so cost of capital is most likely elevated, if it is there in the first place. Also, you have just a few groups who can take down an asset or put up a new development in places like Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco. Price drivers are complicated. Why is NYC expensive when Chicago is so cheap (relatively)? Again, complicated. How is Austin so expensive when it is growing so fast and there is still so much land available? Why is Toronto just now in the midst of a condo explosion? Why is Jacksonville falling behind? These are all questions that require researched expertise/experience and cannot be generalized.
Gated communities are a factor of demand and nothing else. Look who moves into gated communities. Northern transplants. Where do northern transplants move? FL/South. Where are the gated communities? FL/South. And technically condo towers are no different from gated single family housing communities. Both are governed by homeowners associations and are secured from the general public. Demand for gated SFR communities has waned, however, and that is coupled with the fact that many homebuilders are no longer in existence, those that are left don't have the capacity to develop lots on an efficiently large scale, and banks have billions of dollars of undeveloped lots on their books shutting off that lending spigot.
My definition of urban has become more in-line with those who define it in larger cities. It's all relative. People who live in Manhattan or Brooklyn might not consider Queens urban at all when its density is 20,000 ppsm. I visit a lot of larger cities, so for me I limit true urbanity to just a few places in America. I work on a condo development/2 ground level retail condos in Midtown West, and it is near tons of other 50 floor condos/apts yet for most New Yorkers it might as well be no-man's land. It's certainly more urban than nearly anywhere else in America and has the foot traffic to boost, but 2 blocks over is Times Square/Broadway which is the real boundary of Midtown Manhattan and anything west is in the middle of nowhere (FTR 600 SF studios in our building are $700K+ and 2,000 SF 3 BRs are $2.5M++..."middle of nowhere" NYC pricing).
http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/mapping-the-recovery-nycs-fastest-and-slowest-recovering-neighborhoods/
And to point out the complexities of real estate...there is a ~800 ft tower in a shoddy part of Lower Manhattan designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry (same as Disney Concert Hall in LA since it seems you've been to LA). It's sold out, I believe. I read somewhere that the average income on the first 50 floors is north of $500K, and on the last ~30 floors it is over $1M.
To top it off, there is a 90 floor building going up in Midtown where units range in price from $2M for a lower 1 BR with no view to well over $100M for upper floor units. I believe it is mostly financed with equity. There is another similar tower on Park Ave breaking ground over 1,000 ft high that will be nearly completely financed with equity.
Contrast that to Chicago...Trump Tower. This thing was completed nearly 4 years ago at this point and it has just taken forever, relatively speaking, to sell the condos, and I hear that the condo portion has generally been a failure. You're talking the most prime location, most luxurious and best finishes, highest views in Chicago and the top penthouse might go for the $20sM. This 14,000 SF penthouse would look down, literally, on any penthouse in New York. River North and Midtown Manhattan are pretty on par in terms of density, but the two markets are worlds apart.
Walk score and density. I'm not sure what my cutoff would be on either measure, but on those two metrics alone it would be pretty easy to develop an index.
very interesting and complicated I see. Carnegie 57 and Beekman Tower? Yeah I just left the NE when Beekman was just being completed. Well thanks so much for the reply. Amazing knowledge you have about the issue!
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/urban-or-suburban-growth-us-metros/2419/ (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/urban-or-suburban-growth-us-metros/2419/)
QuoteWe already know big cities in the U.S. are growing, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Places like New Orleans, Austin, and Denver saw above-average population growth rates between April 2010 and July 2011.
To add a little context, Brookings Institution demographer William Frey dug through the data to break down this estimated growth in terms of cities and suburbs. According to his analysis of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people, the primary cities in those metros grew an average of 1.1 percent, compared with 0.9 percent growth in the suburban areas of those metros. Metros like New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. saw their urban populations grow faster than their suburban populations, while metros like Baltimore, Detroit, and Jacksonville saw higher growth in their suburban areas than the central cities.
Metropolitan growth is both urban and suburban. These maps show by how much each metro's urban growth outpaced suburban growth (or negative growth, in Cleveland's case), or vice versa.
Higher Rate of Urban Growth
(http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/06/29/20120628-citygrowth2.jpg)
Higher Rate of Suburban Growth
(http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/06/28/20120628-suburbcitygrowth4.jpg)
Interesting to note that according to this Brookings Institute study: Orlando, Tampa and Miami's urban growth is growing faster than suburban growth... which is the exact opposite of Jacksonville.
I'm going to comb through the numbers over the weekend when I have some time, b/c Detroit and Cleveland have seen significant growth in their urban core neighborhoods... so I want to validate this study with my own numbers on some specific metro areas in the rust belt which has become a more attractive product than in years past in my world.
Better for commuter rail service! Now we just need a strong, employee dense Downtown.
I'd be interested to see how they defined Jacksonville's "urban" and "suburban" areas. Are the Jax Beaches defined as suburban even though they are for the most part urban? Is St. Augustine defined as a suburb?
Also it appears that they may be basing Jax figures on city limits vs. St. Johns County, Clay County, etc. If that is the case it could hypothetically be completely inaccurate. For instance, the population of Jacksonville's suburbs within city limits (Mandarin, Arlington, SS, Westside, etc) could be decreasing at a rate of 20%, yet the urban neighborhoods (Riverside/Avondale, San Marco, Northside, DT, Springfield, etc) could be growing at a rate of 15%, thus not painting an accurate picture.
With our consolidated city, the only way to accurately gauge suburban growth vs. urban growth is to break down growth by census tracts or smaller and then add it all up. That would be a very time intensive study for 51 different Metro's and I'd be surprised if they dug that deep.
City Limits appears to play a role...Duval County has not been growing very much, even though it is nearly entirely suburban in nature. SJC, Clay and Nassau are where the growth has been concentrated.
It's really quite sad because most of Jacksonville even around the core is not very dense at all and there are plenty of sites available for infill. I recently read a comparison of Austin to Houston, and Travis County is really quite large, but the core of Austin has filled up so quick that there aren't many development sites left and barriers to entry in Austin are significantly higher than in much larger Houston.
Quick relativity:
1. Jacksonville 747 Sq. Mi. 821,784 1,100ppsm 0.6% SUBURB
2. Oklahoma City 606 Sq. Mi. 579,999 957 ppsm 0.2% URBAN
3. Houston 600 Sq. Mi. 2,099,451 3,499 ppsm 0.1% SUBURB
4. Phoenix 517 Sq. Mi. 1,445,632 2,796 ppsm 0.4% URBAN
5. Nashville 475 Sq. Mi. 601,222 1,266 ppsm 0.3% SUBURB
6. Los Angeles 469 Sq. Mi. 3,792,621 8,087 ppsm 0.1% SUBURB
7. San Antonio 461 Sq. Mi. 1,327,407 2,879 ppsm not on
8. Indianapolis 361 Sq. Mi. 820,445 2,273 ppsm 0.6% SUBURB
9. Dallas 341 Sq. Mi. 1,197,816 3,513 ppsm 0.3% SUBURB
10. Fort Worth 340 Sq. Mi. 741,206 2,180 ppsm not on
11. Louisville 325 Sq. Mi. 597,337 1,838 ppsm 0.2% SUBURB
12. San Diego 325 Sq. Mi. 1,307,402 4,023 ppsm not on
13. Memphis 315 Sq. Mi. 646,889 2,054 ppsm 0.2% URBAN
Austin's suburbs are actually growing faster than the urban area(according to my numbers by more than double) for a variety of reasons... by far the most important of which is land use policies that severly limit what a developer can do in Austin's downtown area and the historic in-town areas to the south and west of downtown.
Now Austin is a unique situation whereas the urban area has had one of the most impressive growth spurts in terms of adding residents to it's urban core and in-town neighborhoods in the nation over the past decade. But the burbs are still growing immensly faster. Austin's new growth plan is addressing things like encouraging higher density growth (one thing they are finally considering is adjusting height limits and going to zero parking requirements) in the historic core and looking at a suggestive kind of form based code in certain surburban areas (something the Southside of Jax could benefit highly from IMO).
It appears the Atlantic Cities figures aren't taking into account consolidation, since Jax, Indy, Lousiville, and Nashville are all show as having faster suburban growth.
It also appears to depend on how you parse the information. By my counting the City of Orlando is growing at a slower rate than the rest of Orange County and Osceola County. Additionally, it looks to me that the counties surrounding Tampa and St. Pete are growing much faster than either of those cities. And while downtown Miami is growing quickly, what are they counting as "suburbs"? Suburban/exurban Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie counties are growing rapidly.
Quote from: Tacachale on June 29, 2012, 03:08:24 PM
And while downtown Miami is growing quickly, what are they counting as "suburbs"? Suburban/exurban Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie counties are growing rapidly.
The Miami metro area doesn't include Martin and St. Lucie Counties. Coincidentally, that is possibly part of the reason that the city of Miami is growing faster than the suburbs in its Metro area (because the growth is happening just outside the MSA). A lot of people have left Broward and Palm Beach for Martin and St. Lucie, and a lot of growth that in the past would have gone in Palm Beach is happening in Martin/St. Lucie.
Miami is having somewhat of an urban renaissance, but I suspect a lot of the recent downtown residential growth is due to the ridiculous deals people are getting on highrise condos.
I think it makes perfect sense that "suburbs" would still be growing faster than "urban" areas. Suburbs are where most people live, where there is more room to build/grow, and where most people still wish to live. Not to mention the poor and lower middle class are being priced out of cities and moving to the burbs.
In Jax I don't think virtually any net "growth" is occuring in the core. There is no new construction, some gentrification (which actually lowers population without constructing higher density units), etc. All the new garden apartments and low density SFR communities are still going up on the SS and in outlying counties.
Raleigh is growing more rapidly in its burbs (not surprising), but seriously it has TONS of infill UC right now. It probably has a higher proportion of urban growth than nearly any other city relative to what it already has.
Atlanta is seen as an urban growth city (tops actually), but frankly there are other things going on here. The city itself has stayed relatively flat in terms of population, yet anyone who visited 10 years ago and came back today wouldn't recognize the place with all the new contruction. The difference is the projects have all been torn down and sorry to say it, but poor blacks have been priced out and are up and leaving while wealthier whites are moving in...to larger condos and apartments. One year doesn't tell the whole story there and by the end of this decade Atlanta will still probably be within a similar population range it was in 2010 and 2000, but it will be majority white (it is actually I think a tad more white now than black, first time in generations), and slightly older demographically than 1990/2000 (getting to be too expensive for all 20somethings).
Finally, the thread/article title suggests that it is some phenomenon that young adults seek out cities. This is definitely nothing new. Perhaps there was a small point in time (1990-2000) where young adults found jobs in suburbs. However, pre-1990 anyone who went to college then moved to one of 5 cities in America to find a job (NYC, Chicago, SF, LA, Boston). Now it's one of 25 cities. That's the only difference. The jobs for the creative class and the college grads have ALWAYS been in the cities, but now more cities have been able to sprout the same jobs that could at one point only be found in NYC.