Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday we saw that Brookings’ study, Where Did They Go? The Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods in Metropolitan America, based its whole analysis on the census tract, a very small area (4,000 people, one-quarter of a square mile, and in my city of Cambridge, there are thirty of them). 

 

Does a ‘census tract’ represent a distinct sub-community walling itself off from its abutting neighborhoods?

 

Let’s see those yahoos from Somerville get over this!

 

After all, all thirty of Cambridge’s neighborhoods elect the same city councilors; they have the same integrated school system; the same real estate tax base.  Cambridge has its share of transients (we call them ’students’ or ‘undergraduates’) and it has its share of very long-time residents — like me, who’s lived in Cambridge for 35 years now, in four different neighborhoods (not counting ‘group quarters’), in a rent-controlled apartment, a condo, and first one house and then another. 

 

In a granular city, people can rise step by step, moving among neighborhoods without having to relocate out of town.  (If you plotted my neighborhoods, they’ve steadily risen socio-economically — shocking, shocking.)  Indeed, wouldn’t the worst neighborhoods, the least economically mobile, be those with very tight income homogeneity, where if you want to rise, you have to move? 

 

The Brookings study says that increased residential segregation by income can remove a fundamental rung from the nation’s ladder for social mobility: moderate-income neighborhoods with decent schools, nearby jobs, low crime and reliable services.

 

‘Can’ remove, emphasis on the conditional.  But consider the large metropolitan city, the very ones about which Brookings frets.  Doesn’t granularity imply that some very rich people have chosen to live in that city, and therefore to care about its schools, police, and municipal services, because their real estate taxes are paying those salaries?

 

Consider the income distribution of three Brookings-selected cities:

 

 

Of those three cities, which one do you think has the most upward mobility?  Which one is the most income-segregated?

 

City A, where three out of four neighbors are solidly middle-class and only 1 in 40 is ‘very high’ income (meaning making more than $70,000 annually), or City C, where 1 in 5 is ‘very high’ and 1 in 3 is low or very low?

 

 

City A is Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Brookings’ ‘best’ (#1); City B is Mobile, AL, and City C, that den in income diversity, is Los Angeles, on whose sun-bleached head both Brookings and the Post pour scorn:

 

 

In Los Angeles — the most hollowed-out metropolitan area in the country over the past three decades — the share of poor neighborhoods is up 10%, rich neighborhoods are up 14% and middle-income areas are down by 24%.

 

Where have all the middle classes gone?

 

Let’s be clear as to what this says, and doesn’t say.  Instead of being predominantly middle-class, Los Angeles‘ population has distributed both downward and upward; Los Angeles has more poor people than it did thirty years ago, and more rich people. 

 

Isn’t that simply another way of saying, wider income distribution within the same community?

 

In a pattern that is the mirror opposite of what is happening in the Midwest and Northeast, there is a chronic undersupply of housing in many cities on the West Coast. But it, too, has contributed to a decline of middle-income neighborhoods, said Berube, the Brookings demographer.

 

He said rapid population growth in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle combines with rigid geographic and legal restraints on construction to limit housing supply.  In Los Angeles, for example, the population grew by 11% between 1990 and 2002, but the number of housing units increased by just 5%.

 

That has pushed up the price of housing in mixed-income neighborhoods. Gentrification often pushes the poor away to less-desirable suburbs.

 

Yet that is not, repeat not, the Los Angeles data presented above (City C).  Los Angeles hasn’t become solely an enclave for the rich.

 

The major problem with Brookings’ study is its observation units: census tracts and MSA’s.  One is too small, the other too large.

 

If your frame of reference is skewed, things appear too big or too small.

 

In an urban context, the census tract — 3,000 people covering one-quarter of a square mile, 30 of them in Cambridge alone — is a very small community unit, and one smaller than most urban-dwellers’ political action or decision vision.  (There are only 9 city councilors, for example.)  While I think of what the census calls Cambridge 3536 as ‘my neighborhood,’ I have no loyalty to it to the exclusion of other Cambridge neighborhoods.  Economically and politically, if I act at all, I act at the Cambridge level, nothing smaller.

 

Meanwhile, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) are too large.  The Los Angeles MSA — basically, Los Angeles County:

 

Azusa, Beverly Hills, Compton, Hermosa Beach, Inglewood, Irwindale, Malibu, Monrovia, Pasadena, Pomona, Santa Monica, West Hollywood …

 

– contains 88 municipalities, ten million people, more than the entire nation of Sweden.

 

)

 

Somehow the Brookings authors have concluded that Los Angeles, with its breathtaking scale and diversity, has secretly clustered its income groups in ways invisible in the Brookings published data.  Los Angeles is highly diverse, with pockets of great wealth a handful of miles from pockets of great poverty, but the MSA income distribution will not reveal that. 

 

Los Angeles has become more granular, and the major driver of its granularity has been the return of rich people to the cities.

 

That’s is the big story here. 

 

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

 

Fifty years ago, the informed consensus of liberal intellectuals was the mortality of cities.  Wealth was fleeing to the suburbs, and the cities were doomed.  As with most gloomy conventional-wisdom scenarios, that one never materialized, in fact quite the reverse, as demonstrated (if not trumpeted) by this Brookings quote:

 

The central cities in our 12-metropolitan-area sample lost families in the aggregate over the three-decade study period.  In 1970 they were home to 3.3 million families, 41% of the metropolitan total.  By 2000 only 3.0 million families lived there, just 27% of all metropolitan families.

 

That data is more than fascinating.

 

“Fascinating.”

 

In 1970 the cities encompassed 8.1 million families, 41% of them in the center; by 2000 the MSA’s had expanded to 11.1 million families, a 38% rise, while center cities shrank.  (Household size has also shrunk in this interval, so the population gain may not have been as high.) 

 

Evidently, the major movement was of the middle class from the center out toward the suburbs, leaving the poor behind and opening parts of the city for a higher-income class.

 

Because like seeks like, the richer immigrants probably migrated to the larger lots, bigger houses, better locations, so the result is increasing neighborhood granularity.

 

Indeed, it would be astonishing if the census tracts hadn’t become more granular, because the census originally drew them for homogeneity. 

 

At the start, all census tracts are similar.

 

Any tightly bounded cluster of independent actors disperses over time, so a shifting of granularity compared to the original grid is inevitable.

 

Who wins the rubber ducky race?

 

Yet neighborhood granularity is another word for city socio-economic diversity — and isn’t income mixing the Holy Grail of urban planning?  Doesn’t the data show that income mixing is in fact happening?

 

In conclusion, the Brookings study is frustrating — its findings do not mean what its authors claim them to mean, nor do they support the authors’ hand-wringing conclusion:

 

This decline in middle-income neighborhoods raises significant challenges for policy toward lower-income people and places.  For instances, programs like Moving to Opportunity (MTO) and similar rental subsidy programs aim to aid poor families by helping them move to more economically viable and diverse areas. 

 

If successful, that will reduce the middle-income percentages than Brookings touts as indicators of healthy communities.  How does the conclusion follow from the predicate?

 

Increased economic inequality among neighborhoods, and shrinking numbers of middle-income communities, may reduce the number of areas to which these families could potentially relocate.  Upper-income areas where homeownership predominate, while perhaps desirable destinations, might not provide, and may resist more strongly, low-cost rental units in which these families could live.

 

Six conditionals in two sentences.  Could that be more speculative?

 

Return now to our chart of three city groups.  Which one do you like best, and least?

 

 

Group 1 is Brookings’ five most middle-class neighborhoods (rank 1-5); Group 2 is the average (numbers 48-52); Group 3 is the least middle-class (96-100). 

 

Notice anything else about the Group 1 cities?

 

 

Group 1 cities generally have very low growth, a lot of stasis.  All alike, and all being left behind.

 

Maybe city granularity — income diversity within a community — is a good thing.

 

Send post as PDF to