Kotkin Omnibus
With the three hundred millionth American here, ubiquitous and insightful urbanist Joel Kotkin is thinking ahead to the next 45 years, and how to house the hundred million additional Americans expected by then. He thinks that both the smart growth set and the free marketeers are "doomed to fail."
He accuses the smart growth planners of being, "driven more by wishful thinking than practical realities," arguing that, "the idea of enforcing density… suffers from a fatal flaw: only ten to 15% of Americans want to live in a city." On the other hand, "a blind faith in market forces [amounts to] sprawl, with all its attendant ills: long commutes, excessive fuel consumption, pollution, and the proliferation of formless, soulless communities."
(While Kotkin is right that sprawl is primarily population-driven, it is not entirely a free market development. As public policy consultant Linda Morrison has noted, public highway and infrastructure subsidies push sprawl beyond where the market would otherwise extend.)
Kotkin argues for a new model, a network or archipelago of self-sustained, mixed-use Suburban Villages that would function as communities, not strictly residential commuting bases. Telecommuting, which allows the dispersed village to stay connected to the broader culture, allows for "a return not to the streetcar suburbs of the industrial revolution but to the older tradition of scattered self-sufficient, self-governing townships and villages."
The implications of this shift extend well beyond economics. Drawing work closer to the home, or into the home, undermines the very foundation of the traditional bedroom suburb. Most important, the postindustrial village promises to restore the balance between work and family originally shattered by the industrial revolution. “The biggest jolt the industrial revolution administered to the Western family,” suggests historian Peter Stearns, “was the progressive removal of work from the home.”
Kotkin elaborates on the need for the Suburban Village in this article from the Christian Science Monitor:
"If you look at the survey data, even the nice cities are losing population," says Mr. Kotkin. "It's San Francisco, Boston, and Minneapolis, not just Cleveland and Philadelphia. The population growth of even the most robust cities is much less than the surrounding areas."
The key question, says Kotkin, is: "Do we manage this growth in an intelligent way and figure out how to make it environmentally benign?"
"The other way is to try and become like Europe, stop having babies and stop having immigrants, and become kind of a museum society," says Kotkin, who extols the economic and social virtues of what he calls the "new suburbanism." "That is not in the nature of Americans."
On a separate note, there's an interesting interview with Kotkin in the September issue of The Planning Report, in which he offers his take on the economic future of Los Angeles once the housing boom ends:
L.A. has three great assets. One is the port, which is the lynchpin of the economy, although not well appreciated. Second is entertainment. I would call entertainment the media, fashion industry—that whole cluster of industries that depend on the fact that L.A. is a trend-setter of one sort or another. The third is this vast, diversified, largely immigrant-driven economy of companies that are here just [because] people emigrate here and want to start businesses.One million new people are projected to be residing in Los Angeles in the next decade. Are there enough jobs to support those people; and, who will be creating the new jobs needed?
Right now I don’t see anything remotely close to creating the jobs for those people. First of all, many of the people coming to Los Angeles now—as well as many kids in our public schools—do not have much in the way of marketable skills. Many of them are first-generation immigrants willing to work at low wages because it’s better than, for example, being in El Salvador. The problem is that I don’t think their children are going to have the same feelings.
Are we generating high-wage employment? We are doing OK in business services; we’re not getting hammered the way we were in the early 1990s. But, the industrial sector continues to shrink. A lot of jobs have been created in construction, and I think that is going to decrease pretty seriously although the infrastructure bonds may help to ameliorate it. I don’t see an emphasis by local leadership on: What are going to be the drivers of this economy? How are we going to make it easier for the industries that are already here to stay here? And how will we make it easier for new industries to form?
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What is critical now is to get an idea of what the entrepreneurs and the immigrant businesses doing, what are they thinking, and how are we going to get them to expand here? Businesspeople may keep their head office here, because they live here and want to be here, but they are going to expand elsewhere. That is bad news on the job front. And if you look at the numbers—Mike Shires at Pepperdine has done a great job with this—L.A. County is now much more dependent on small business as a driver than Orange County or the Inland Empire.
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The discussion about the L.A. economy is more about real estate speculation than anything else….Part of it may be that the real estate bubble has created a false sense of wealth, particularly among the middle and upper-middle classes: “Hey my house is worth $1.5 million—eh, what do I care?” I think we are going to have a rude awakening when we realize that $1.5 million house is really $1 million and you’re leveraged to the hilt.