10
 
The Kind of Cities We Want

“You can’t have a society without cities,” Edward G. Rendell, the mayor of Philadelphia, told an annual meeting of the Wharton Real Estate Center. It was 1996, and the mayor had just been reelected to a second term. He was known for never turning down an invitation to speak, whether to address a social gala or a neighborhood cookout, and especially not a chance to pitch his city to a roomful of developers, investors, and real estate mavens. Rendell spoke about his, and Philadelphia’s, recent record in cutting costs and trimming the municipal bureaucracy. He ruefully admitted that on the basis of pure economics his city still had difficulty competing with the surrounding suburbs, but he appealed to the real estate industry’s better nature. He pleaded—“We need your help.” He cajoled—“We can do business together.” He threatened—“We can’t afford to ignore urban poverty.” Rendell is an effective orator, with a raspy voice that adds to his eloquence. But he closed on an air of what appeared to be resignation: “We can’t simply let our cities decline. After all, you can’t have a society without cities.”1

Of course, Rendell is right. The only societies without cities are pastoral or nomadic—Sioux Indians and Kalahari bushmen. Otherwise, towns and cities have always played a central role in the development of human civilization. Without cities, epoch-making events such as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution could not have occurred, for ideas develop best, and fastest, when large numbers of people congregate in one spot. This remains true even in an age of online social networking.

The history of the United States has been bound up with cities. Although the first British settlement on the Atlantic seaboard, Jamestown, was “modest in scale and primitive in character,” as John Reps put it, later communities while still small were distinctly urban.2 New Haven, Williamsburg, and Savannah were never villages; they were towns—albeit tiny—from the start. Another unusual aspect of towns in the New World was their ambition. Colonial Philadelphia was to be the size of contemporary London, which was then the largest city in Europe. L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C., was equally vast. The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for the future expansion of New York City laid out a grid of streets and avenues that was more than seven miles long. All three plans took the best part of a century to realize, but the expectation of growth was there from the beginning. Years later, as Los Angeles grew into a major city, it also took an expansive shape. Instead of a grid, however, its sprawling layout followed the meandering Pacific Electric streetcar lines up and down the coast. The streetcar lines, and later the freeways, produced an urbanism that was unlike anything previously imagined.

American cities continue to surprise. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the five largest cities in the United States were New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Boston. A hundred years later, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Boston are off the list—Philadelphia edged out by Phoenix (which in 1900 had barely five thousand inhabitants), Saint Louis no longer among even the top fifty largest cities, and Boston, despite its vaunted comeback, dropping to twenty-third place. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has risen from twenty-eighth to second place, and Houston, which in 1900 was smaller than Fort Wayne, Indiana, is now number four. The population declines of older cities such as Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Boston, coupled with the unrelenting growth of suburban areas, might suggest that Americans no longer want to live in cities, that we have become, in the words of a recent book title, a “suburban nation.”3 A happy suburban nation, according to a 2008 Pew Research Center national poll. Pew asked Americans if they liked where they lived and found the level of satisfaction among suburbanites (54 percent) to be considerably higher than among city dwellers (44 percent).⁴ But while more Americans are happily living in suburbs than ever before, more are living in cities, too. In 1900, a time often described as the heyday of the American city, the United States had only 38 cities with populations larger than one hundred thousand people, and these cities accounted for 14 percent of the total population. By 2006, no less than 258 cities had populations larger than one hundred thousand, and accounted for an impressive 27 percent of the population. This increase was not just a question of the country’s growing larger. Over the last twenty-five years, the increase in the proportion of the population living in cities larger than one hundred thousand is almost twice as great as the increase in the population as a whole during the same period.⁵

The question is not whether we want to live in cities. Obviously, a growing number of us do—otherwise we would not build so many of them. The real question is in what kind of cities do we want to live? Compact or spread out? Old or new? Big or small?

The answers to these questions are complicated by a blurring of the traditional definition of exactly what constitutes a “city.” Not so long ago, big cities were easily distinguished from small towns and rural areas by their quality of life; there were city slickers and country bumpkins, with all the differences that those old stereotypes convey. Today, the nature of suburbs and exurbs makes it difficult to define exactly where the city stops and the countryside begins. Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, looks like a small town, but it’s really an extension of Manhattan, as are large parts of the lower Hudson Valley and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The demographic concept of the “metropolitan area,” which groups a city, or even several cities, with surrounding suburbs, was supposed to capture this new reality, but it tells only a part of the story. Forty years ago, the late Irving Kristol pointed out that in terms of the quality of people’s lives, it no longer much mattered where they lived. “For the overwhelming fact of American life today,” he wrote, “whether this life be lived in a central city or a suburb or a small city—or even in those rural areas where something like a third of our population still resides—is that it is life in an urban civilization [emphasis in original].”6 According to Kristol, “Cities are nothing new; the problem of cities are nothing new; but an urban civilization is very new indeed, and the problems of an urban civilization are without precedent in human history.”⁷ Thus, the question is, what kind of cities does an urban civilization want?

Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the twentieth century, one answer of the marketplace is unequivocal—Americans want to live in cities that are spread out. Decentralization and dispersal, the results of a demand for private property, privacy, and detached family homes, have been facilitated by a succession of transportation and communication technologies: first the railroad and the streetcar, later the automobile and the airplane; lastly the telephone, television, and the Internet. In addition, regional shopping malls, FedEx, UPS, and the Home Shopping Network have helped people to spread out. Even environmental technologies—small sewage-treatment facilities and micro power plants—have allowed people to live in more dispersed communities than in the past.

This is not simply suburbanization. All the cities that have experienced vigorous population growth during the second half of the twentieth century—Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, San Jose, Atlanta—have grown by spreading out. These are horizontal cities, with generally low population densities, typically less than ten people per acre, compared to fifteen to twenty people per acre in the older, vertical cities. Horizontal cities depend on automobiles for mass transportation, and on trucks for the movement of goods. In a horizontal city, the difference between city and suburb is indistinct. People in both live chiefly in individual houses rather than in flats or apartment buildings, and the houses are organized in dispersed, semiautonomous planned communities that are different from the urban neighborhoods of the past. Versions of the dispersed city can be found in large cities such as Los Angeles, small cities such as Las Vegas, and in the metropolitan areas surrounding all cities, old and new.

The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America, a 1995 report of the federal Office of Technology Assessment, concluded, “Given the technological and economic trends toward decentralization, America’s central and inner cities are unlikely to regain their earlier dominance.”8 Decentralization suits an economy that depends on flexibility, adaptability, and rapid change. Dispersal also suits an increasingly heterogeneous society, which is the exact opposite of what is implied by that misleading term global village. Despite living in an urban civilization, Americans are not more alike today; they are more dissimilar, and dispersal accommodates these differences.

Horizontal cities have another characteristic—they tend to be new. During the industrial era, advanced infrastructure, good ports, and large workforces gave established cities a head start. In a postindustrial era, however, being old is no longer an advantage; a new community needs but lay down fiber-optic cables, build a walkable downtown, and entice a Whole Foods and a Target to be competitive. I am always struck, returning from Seattle or Denver to my home in Philadelphia, by the urban contrasts. It is not just a century’s worth of accumulated industrial grime compared to unsullied newness, or that so much of Philadelphia’s infrastructure—the stone viaducts, the narrow turnpikes, the commuter railroad lines—are relics of the past. In Philadelphia, the new always seems slightly makeshift, shoehorned into an old mold that doesn’t quite fit. The past is part of the city’s charm—and what keeps me here—but it exacts a price in terms of efficiency, convenience, and endless maintenance. An old city is like an old car: it still runs, it will get you there, but it doesn’t have the safety features, conveniences, and efficiencies of a newer model.

Creating an urban infrastructure from scratch has many benefits. The Las Vegas–Clark County Library District, for example, which serves 1.5 million residents, does so efficiently with only twelve branches. The library district is able to put all its resources into exceptionally well-equipped branches because, unlike most older cities, it does not have the burden of supporting a large (and often sparsely attended) downtown library. The Las Vegas–Clark County Library District, which was chosen 2003 Library of the Year by the Library Journal, is also effective because it is not a city department but an independent institution, with its own payroll, financial management, and even its own taxing authority. This financial autonomy is important, as shown recently in Philadelphia, where the city government, facing a fiscal crisis, threatened a “doomsday budget” that would have required laying off three thousand municipal employees and closing all the public libraries.

Newness has other advantages. New cities generally have new, and often streamlined, building regulations, new social compacts between management and labor, and new ways of doing things. Houston’s absence of zoning, its less restrictive building regulations, and its lower construction costs, for example, mean that, according to the 2006 census, the average owner-occupied dwelling cost $126,000, compared to $496,000 in New York City.9 Since incomes in greater Houston are only slightly lower than in New York, that makes the city much more affordable for the middle class and, according to Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser, accounts for Houston’s greater appeal; between 2000 and 2007, the city grew by 19.4 percent, compared to just 2.7 percent for New York.¹⁰ The presence of a large middle-class workforce also explains why Houston has more blue-collar manufacturing jobs than New York.

Another answer to what kind of cities we want seems to be “warmer.” A 2008 national survey of the major metropolitan areas that appealed most to people found that the favorites—Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, and Tampa—all shared “warm weather, a casual lifestyle and rapid growth.”11 In fact, all of the top ten cities on the list were in temperate climates, seven in the West and three in the South. It also helps if a city is close to attractive natural amenities such as lakes, mountains, beaches, or the desert. Given the popular interest in the outdoors, and outdoor activities, nearby wilderness areas have become important urban amenities. As David Brooks put it, “These [favorite cities] are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage—filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.”¹² Industrial cities didn’t need beautiful settings; postindustrial cities do.

Virtually every technological innovation of the last fifty years has facilitated, if not actually encouraged, urban dispersal. But the long-term effects of new technologies are often unpredictable. The telephone is, on the face of it, a decentralizing device. Yet telephone communication made working in high-rise office buildings practicable, which in turn produced the concentrated central business district. When people started commuting in cars, an unexpected fallout was the death of the evening newspaper, which used to be read on the streetcar trip home. People couldn’t read in their cars, but they could listen to the radio, and that moribund medium found new life. Who could have foreseen that the combination of car radios and cellular phones would give rise to a new format, talk radio, and a new and potent political force, the talk-radio host? Laptops, personal digital assistants, and cell phones are held to be the tips of a great dispersal iceberg, but the migration of work to the motel room and the home office has been accompanied by a countervailing trend: the need for face-to-face contact. That is why there are more conferences, retreats, and conventions than ever before. That is also why so many industries—finance, publishing, entertainment, high tech, and communications—cluster together geographically.

Thus, even as dispersal appears to be the order of the day, concentration is making a comeback. Sometimes concentration takes new forms: power centers, office parks, theme parks, and villagelike planned communities in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes the results of concentration are more familiar: downtown entertainment districts, historic neighborhoods, waterfront esplanades, and urban parks. All such gathering places are evidence of the age-old desire for human contact, crowds, variety, and expanded individual choices. This desire has breathed new life into many small cities, especially college towns, which, with their attendant research facilities, office parks, university hospitals, and cultural amenities, have blossomed and are among the fastest-growing and most attractive places to live and work.13 Part of this blossoming is the result of technology. Cable television, regional airlines, catalog shopping, and the Internet have brought big-city conveniences to small cities. But when college towns succeed as attractive and vital places to live—and by no means all do—the result is a potent synergy between higher education, information-age industries, and people’s preferences for smaller, more intimate communities.*

Wilderness areas as urban amenities: the Wenatchee Mountains and Wenatchee, Washington.

The appeal of the college town as a place to live and work is part of a larger trend that Kristol identified as early as 1970. “If we are a ‘nation of cities,’” he wrote, “we are also becoming to an ever greater degree a nation of relatively small and middle-sized cities.”14 That was true then and it is even truer today. In 1970, slightly more Americans lived in small (between 25,000 and 250,000 inhabitants) cities than in big (larger than 250,000) cities, reversing the situation of a decade earlier, when big cities dominated, as they had done for years. By 2006, although the total urban population had increased, the gap had considerably widened, and more than half again as many people lived in small cities as in large. Indeed, since 1970 the proportion of the urban population living in large cities has steadily declined, while the percentage living in small cities has grown, suggesting that what Americans don’t want is to live in large metropolitan areas.15 This was confirmed by a 2008 Pew poll, which found “not a single one of the 30 [largest] metropolitan areas was judged by a majority of respondents as a place where they’d like to live.”¹⁶

The attractions of the small city in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Thus, for many Americans, the answer to “What kind of cities do we want?” seems to be not just dispersed, new, and warmer, but also smaller. In some cases, much smaller. In 2007, the fastest appreciating residential real estate values in the nation were not in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City, but in Corvallis, Oregon (population 53,000); Grand Junction, Colorado (population 46,000); and Wenatchee, Washington (population 28,000).17 These small cities are examples of what Joel Garreau has christened the Santa Fe effect, referring to the New Mexico city that, while small (population 62,000), has a variety of big-city amenities including many restaurants and shops, an opera company, a chamber-music festival, and a renowned film festival. Places such as Wenatchee, a hundred miles from Seattle at the eastern foot of the Cascade Mountains, are characterized by attractive natural surroundings (deserts, lakes, mountains, rivers), moderate climates, and a degree of urbanity that belies their small size and their often remote location. “The core premise of the Santa-Feing hypothesis is that the same kind of choice is now available to millions of Americans,” writes Joel Garreau. “Today, people of means are attracted by this scenario of dramatically different settlement patterns that feature new aggregation—dispersed.”¹⁸

In a recent international ranking of global cities, New York had a preeminent position, and Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., were highly rated in categories such as business, human capital, and information exchange.¹⁹ All are large cities, a reminder that although small and medium-size cities are outstripping big cities in the American public’s favor, big cities still have a role to play. They are breeding grounds for budding entrepreneurs, for example, and start-up businesses continue to fuel the economies of New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. Big cities are not just large concentrations of people, they are also concentrations of knowledge, skills, and information. That is why the largest employers in many big cities are universities, hospitals, and medical research facilities. As Glaeser puts it, “Spatial proximity may no longer be important for the delivery of widgets, but it is vital for the transfer of ideas.”20

People come together in big cities for specific reasons. Some of these reasons are the same as they’ve always been; some are different. People come to work—not to sew clothing or to build locomotives, as they did in the past, but to do brain-work. Big cities with well-educated workforces (Seattle, Boston, San Francisco) continue to be the best places for financial and communications work, as well as for creative enterprises. People also visit big cities to play, to spend time in a casino, tour a museum, go to an IMAX theater, to rub shoulders with their fellows—to simply be part of a crowd. Whether working or playing, people want safety and convenience. They want cities with good policing, transportation, and sanitation. They also want downtowns that are lively—the Jane Jacobs imperative.

Developers have learned that urban vitality is the product not only of commercial and retail activities, but also of residents. That explains the success of mixed-use downtown developments such as Battery Park City, which respond to a relatively new phenomenon: people want to live downtown. This desire is more complicated than the media, which regularly trumpet the “revival” of this or that downtown, suggest. A recent study of forty-four downtowns found that the residential populations of different downtowns vary considerably.²¹ Some downtowns are home to a lot of people, some to few; some downtowns are dense, others are sparsely occupied; and some are growing, while others are stagnating. The guarded conclusion of the study is that following two decades during which the number of downtown residents declined—sometimes precipitously—these populations in some cities appear to be modestly growing. The detailed picture is uneven, however. Between 1970 and 1990, a period of slow economic growth, most downtowns lost population, although the downtown residential populations of a few cities (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Portland, Oregon) continued to grow. During the booming 1990s, some downtowns—Baltimore, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and Detroit—showed little sign of revival, but several (Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Cleveland, Phoenix, and Denver) recaptured some—though not all—of their earlier loss. Downtown Houston, which actually gained population between 1970 and 1990, lost some during the following decade. Most downtowns have grown less quickly than their suburbs, but the growth of seven—Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Norfolk, San Francisco, and Seattle—has outstripped that of their surrounding metropolitan area.

Clearly, downtowns are not created equal. To be viable, a downtown requires a critical mass; it takes a certain number of people to support a variety of supermarkets, hardware stores, bakeries, bars, and restaurants. Ten thousand inhabitants is often cited as the minimum population for a viable neighborhood, but a successful downtown must be much larger than that, sufficiently large to be a magnet for the surrounding city and the region. Probably a downtown residential population closer to fifty thousand is the minimum required to achieve a truly urban way of life. Only six American downtowns currently have this critical mass: New York City (which has Midtown and Downtown), Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. Los Angeles is close, so is Washington, D.C., but such highly touted examples of downtown revival as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, are well below the line; so are Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Downtown Dallas, which experienced rapid growth during the last decade, will take another fifty years at the present rate to reach forty thousand; Denver, which is often cited as another model of downtown revival, will need almost twice as long.

In addition to a minimum critical mass, a successful downtown also needs density; it’s no good having a lot of people if they are spread out. The gross population density of Midtown Manhattan, for example, is more than eighty people per acre, which is unusually high for an American city. Downtowns such as San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia have gross densities in the neighborhood of twenty people per acre, which probably represents the threshold necessary to support an active street life as well as viable mass transit, which are both requirements for successful downtown living. However, when the population density of a downtown drops to suburban levels (below ten people per acre), people are living too far apart—or there are too few of them relative to the area—to create the requisite urban atmosphere or to support an urban infrastructure. Atlanta and Dallas have relatively large downtown populations, but their densities remain extremely low. Phoenix and Houston, with small downtown populations and low densities, likewise have a long way to go.

Downtowns can’t be spread out. They are typically about four square miles in area; that is, the edge is about a twenty-minute walk from the center. Walkability is important since it is one of the competitive advantages that downtowns offer compared to suburbs. However, the concentration of a downtown also produces high land prices, which together with labor costs, congestion, government bureaucracy, and taxes increases the cost of downtown housing. As a result, most lively and attractive downtowns have become wealthy enclaves—of the upwardly mobile and the retired well-to-do.

Downtown living does not contradict the general American preference for small communities. Garreau observes that face-to-face places are not necessarily only small cities but can also be neighborhoods and downtown districts embedded in large cities. Residential neighborhoods such as Chelsea and SoHo in New York, Society Hill in Philadelphia, or Adams Morgan and Georgetown in Washington, D.C., could be described as (very prosperous) small towns located within big cities.

The desire of some Americans to live downtown must be put in perspective, however. In 2000, the forty-four largest downtowns (ranging from Midtown Manhattan, Chicago, and Philadelphia, to tiny Albuquerque and Austin, Texas) were together home to fewer than 1 million people.22 In other words, the number of Americans who actually live downtown is only 0.3 percent of the entire population. Downtown residents are also untypical of the population at large; according to a recent study, 90 percent of people living in downtowns across the country are single, unrelated individuals sharing an apartment or childless couples.²³ “Today, elite cities often attract tourists, upper-class populations working in the highest end of business services, and those who can service their needs, as well as the nomadic young, many of whom later move on to other locales,” writes Joel Kotkin. “This increasingly ephemeral city seems to place its highest values on such transient values as hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability.”²⁴

Some people want to be fashionable, some people don’t want to live in cities at all. There isn’t a single answer to the question “What kind of cities do we want?” because different people want so many different things. While the majority of us appear to prefer dispersed small cities, a significant minority want to live in concentrated big cities, and a tiny fraction is prepared to pay the price of living in the very center of things. Most of us want lively downtowns, at least to visit if not to live in. Nor is it simply a question of individual preferences; we want different things at different times: an exciting big city when we are young, beginning a career, and looking for a mate; a dispersed small city close to nature when we are raising a family; a culture-rich downtown when we are empty nesters; and a walkable small city in a warm climate when we retire. If cities are shaped by popular demand, one can expect them to exhibit a variety that is no less rich and diverse than the variety of Americans themselves.

*Scale is critical. Large universities, as Jane Jacobs observed, are self-sufficient, single-function entities that disrupt the small-scale heterogeneity of a city. This often has a negative effect, whether it is a large city (West Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania) or a small one (New Haven and Yale).