Stockton

I've been reading a bit about edge cities and exurbs lately. In early 2009, I began to suspect that there were deep connections between the latest (last?) frontier of suburban fringe development, rising oil prices, and a housing-bubble-led financial crisis. To the extent that oil prices are going to stay perpetually high, the American model of dispersed urban development subsidized by cheap gasoline will not be viable. To the extent that our current financial system is built upon (speculative) housing investment, it will not be able to resume its normal (marginally non-parasitic) role without suburban growth.

In other words, it's not an accident that the housing market crashed when oil prices rose drastically in 2008.

The NY Times had a very good article on "the death of the fringe suburbs" the other week. However, it roots this phenomenon in changing consumer tastes much more than resource scarcity:

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

I'm not totally comfortable with this analysis, but there it is on the op-ed page of a major paper.

Meanwhile, Alex Schafran at Polis Blog has an excellent response that examines the unpleasant racial dimension of foreclosure in the Bay Area's fringe. He takes us through an impressive array of data that shows that African-Americans spent the last 20 years migrating out of the inner city and into outer suburbs that are now consumed with foreclosure and cut off from cheap transit. I won't bogart his maps but I do want to quote his conclusion:

I agree that sprawl was a bad idea, that growth on the fringe helped bring the economy down and that urban centers are the heart of our global future. We've known this since suburbanization began in earnest two generations ago. But we failed to stop it.

Now the "fringe" in Northern California alone is home to millions. And in the 24 Bay Area cities in the 50/5000 club, almost half a million of the 850,000 residents are not white. These are generally hard-working families who followed the same suburban path the white masses went down a generation or two ago — except much farther from city centers and with worse debt, less job security and no real mass transit. This is a generational raw deal hatched at every scale of our urban development.

The foreclosure crisis is a national tragedy that hand-wringing about the failures of sprawl will not undo. Predicting the "death of the fringe suburb" is reminiscent of the harmful language used to describe cities in the days before urban renewal, when we labeled the neighborhoods of the working classes and communities of color as "slums" and "ghettos," bulldozing what we could and redlining the rest. This massive and exceptionally racist failure of urban policy in the post-war era laid the groundwork for this crisis more than a half century ago. While we were busy destroying inner cities and building nice suburbs, we denied African Americans the right to move out as well.

Sprawl is now a lived reality for the exceptionally diverse community once called the American middle class. We must deal with what we have wrought where we have wrought it, not call for a demise that would heap further misery upon communities that certainly do not deserve it, no matter how much we wish it had happened some other way.

The good news is that we can prevent the slum-ification of the Stocktons of the Bay if we choose to. There are deep problems with the urban design of most of these new suburban developments. (I grew up down the road, after all.) They're amenable to automobility and social isolation in some pretty fundamental ways: difficult to walk around, difficult to get from home to work to school to shops, difficult to put efficient transit networks through.

However, if you buy my underlying analysis - that rising oil prices, rather than changing tastes, have thrown these areas into crisis - it's possible to design interventions to halt or reverse their economic decline. So you'd be looking at doing some pretty obvious things - extending full BART service to Stockton, densifying downtown areas and supporting future mixed-use development, fostering bus networks and cycleways, etc - to reduce oil-dependence in the exurbs.