A new national study is making waves for the way it ranks California cities. No matter how pleasant the weather, residents and visitors alike have complained for decades about sprawl. Highways jam with cars. Convenience stores and strip malls occupy block after block. It’s hard to walk to see your friends. It’s impossible to walk to work. 

Are those judgments in for a change? According to Smart Growth America, California metro areas aren’t as afflicted by sprawl as many might think. Their just-issued report, entitled Measuring Sprawl 2014, has urban analysts talking. Not only do the San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz metro areas rank among the report’s top 10 “most compact.” The Santa Ana/Anaheim/Irvine area, often associated with grueling traffic, rounded out the top 10.

Turns out sprawl isn’t just about time spent at a standstill on the freeway. The Smart Growth report uses four criteria to determine city scores. There’s an emphasis on so-called “activity centering,” which the report uses to measure things such as how far people have to travel to work. Density of development factors in. Cities that mix up their land use get better scores. Finally, the accessibility of streets boosts the final figure. That’s why Los Angeles ranked seventh in “densification” among cities with a million or more residents.

Not all parts of the Golden State get such flattering grades. The Riverside/San Bernardino area, informally known as the Inland Empire, wound up among the country’s top 10 worst regions for urban sprawl. That’s no surprise, considering that lower housing costs matched up in the study with sprawling city features.

Notably, Smart Growth America has a particular mission. The organization’s About Us page states it “works with communities to fight sprawl” by mobilizing political support for high-density, mixed-use development that’s close to public transportation. The Measuring Sprawl report helps supply evidence for what Smart Growth already wants to be true. Los Angeles, for instance, is increasing its density and its rail networks. Smart Growth champions that kind of urban policy, so it’s not surprising to see its report reward LA for the effort.

Plentiful housing

Likewise, the report penalizes metro areas where housing is plentiful and affordable, but associated with sprawl. Median housing prices in Riverside or San Bernardino Counties are hundreds of thousands of dollars lower than those in Los Angeles and San Diego counties, but local amenities such as Riverside’s California Citrus State Historical Park don’t fit Smart Growth criteria.

Still, the rankings set forth in Measuring Sprawl could shake up the political debate over urban policy. The kind of cities Smart Growth favors typically are shaped by central planners. Smart-growth advocates commonly believe the “unplanned” growth of car-dependent suburbs imposes costs on the environment and on lower-income residents.

But the Measuring Sprawl report suggests the picture is not so clear-cut. Cities such as San Francisco feature extreme development density and offer extensive public transportation, but housing and rental costs are increasingly prohibitive. Such cities as Los Angeles, meanwhile, encompass a variety of neighborhoods, some more walkable or bikeable than others.

On the one hand, the Smart Growth report associates density with some very positive characteristics, such as economic mobility and life expectancy. On the other hand, its relatively generous rankings for cities with expensive real estate and thriving car cultures suggest that California politics will include a diversity of urban policies for many years to come.

A new national study is making waves for the way it ranks California cities. No matter how pleasant the weather, residents and visitors alike have complained for decades about sprawl. Highways jam with cars. Convenience stores and strip malls occupy block after block. It’s hard to walk to see your friends. It’s impossible to walk to work.

Are those judgments in for a change? According to Smart Growth America, California metro areas aren’t as afflicted by sprawl as many might think. Their just-issued report, “Measuring Sprawl 2014,” has urban analysts talking. Not only do the San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz metro areas rank among the report’s top 10 “most compact.” The Santa Ana/Anaheim/Irvine area, often associated with grueling traffic, rounded out the top 10.

Turns out sprawl isn’t just about time spent at a standstill on the freeway. The Smart Growth report uses four criteria to determine city scores. There’s an emphasis on so-called “activity centering,” which the report uses to measure things such as how far people have to travel to work. Density of development factors in. Cities that mix up their land use get better scores. Finally, the accessibility of streets boosts the final figure. That’s why Los Angeles ranked seventh in “densification” among cities with a million or more residents.

Not all parts of the Golden State get such flattering grades. The Riverside/San Bernardino area, the Inland Empire, wound up among the country’s top 10 worst regions for urban sprawl. That’s no surprise, considering that lower housing costs matched up in the study with sprawling city features.

Fighting sprawl

Notably, Smart Growth America has a particular mission. The organization’s About Us page states it “works with communities to fight sprawl”— by mobilizing political support for high-density, mixed-use development that’s close to public transportation. The Measuring Sprawl report helps supply evidence for what Smart Growth already wants to be true. Los Angeles, for instance, is increasing its density and its rail networks. Smart Growth champions that kind of urban policy, so it’s not surprising to see its report reward Los Angeles for the effort.

Likewise, the report penalizes metro areas where housing is plentiful and affordable, but associated with sprawl. Median housing prices in Riverside or San Bernardino Counties are hundreds of thousands of dollars lower than those in Los Angeles and San Diego counties, but local amenities such as Riverside’s California Citrus State Historical Park don’t fit Smart Growth criteria.

Still, the rankings set forth in Measuring Sprawl could shake up the political debate over urban policy. The kind of cities Smart Growth favors typically are shaped by central planners. Many believe the “unplanned” growth of car-dependent suburbs imposes costs on the environment and on lower-income residents.

But the Measuring Sprawl report suggests the picture is not so clear-cut. Cities such as San Francisco feature extreme development density and offer extensive public transportation, but housing and rental costs are increasingly prohibitive. Such cities as Los Angeles, meanwhile, encompass a variety of neighborhoods, some more walkable or bikeable than others.

On the one hand, the Smart Growth report associates density with some very positive characteristics, such as economic mobility and life expectancy. On the other hand, its relatively generous rankings for cities with expensive real estate and thriving car cultures suggest that California politics will include a diversity of urban policies for many years to come.

By Chris Reed

California’s official embrace of trendy “smart growth” — the policy/religion that assumes it’s best for individuals, communities and Gaia for most people to live in densely packed areas near transportation hubs, so they don’t use devil fossil-fuel cars — was formalized in 2008 with the enactment of SB 375.

Sen. Darrell Steinberg’s brainchild was, of course, reflexively embraced by the L.A. Times’ George Skelton:

The glory that is (not) ‘compact development’

“The measure (SB 375) links regional planning for housing and transportation with California’s new greenhouse gas reduction goal (AB 32) enacted in 2006. …

‘If people are going to drive — and they are going to drive — we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking — not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth — but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.’

“Steinberg wants it to occur within a smaller circle around downtown.

“Basically the bill would work like this: Each metropolitan region would adopt a ‘sustainable community strategy’ to encourage compact development. They’d mesh it with greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board, which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

“And this is the key part: Transportation projects that were part of the community plan would get first dibs on the annual $5 billion in transportation money disbursed by Sacramento.”

Greens: no more growth ‘in the wrong location’

“‘It’s a watershed moment for the environmental community,’ Tom Adams, board president of the California League of Conservation Voters, told the Assembly Local Government Committee on Tuesday as the panel approved the bill. ‘We realized we had to encourage growth, but growth in the right location. Otherwise, we’d get growth anyway, but in the wrong location.’

“Adams calls the measure ‘the most important land-use bill in California since enactment of the Coastal Act’ three decades ago.”

Five years later, the “smart growth” dream has never been realized in California. There are still seminars and press releases and politicians who promise that change is a-coming. Those behind the hype just can’t offer many concrete examples.

Why? The public just isn’t that into “compact development” and prefers to live in the “wrong location.” Even the powerful incentives that SB 375 provides can’t change this fundamental dynamic.

This is from a recent commentary by Chapman University’s wonderful futurist Joel Kotkin that looked at America’s fastest-growing cities since the recession.

“It was widely reported that the Great Recession and subsequent economic malaise changed the geography of America. Suburbs, particularly in the Sun Belt,, were becoming the ‘new slums’ as people flocked back to dense core cities.

“Yet an analysis of post-2007 population trends by demographer Wendell Cox in the 111 U.S. metro areas with more than 200,000 residents reveals something both very different from the conventional wisdom and at the same time very familiar. Virtually all of the 20 that have added the most residents from 2007 to 2012 are in the Old Confederacy, the Intermountain West and suburbs of larger cities, notably in California. … growth is still fastest in the Sun Belt, in suburban cities and lower-density, spread out municipalities. …

“Nothing in the data …  suggests a revival of the older, dense “legacy” cities that were typical of the late 19th century and pre-war era. Most of the fastest-growing big cities since 2007 are of the sprawling post-1945 Sun Belt variety … .

Suburban sprawl routs unpopular, dumb ‘smart growth’

The anti-smart growth pattern was particularly notable in California, Kotkin writes.

“The other somewhat surprising result is the strong performance of more purely suburban cities, that is, ones that have grown up since car ownership became nearly universal. They are not the historic cores of their regions but have developed into major employment centers with housing primarily made up of single-family residences. These include the city that has grown the second most in the U.S. since 2007: Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb close to the Mexican border, whose population expanded 17.7%. It’s followed in third place by the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine (16.3%); No. 7 Irving, Texas; and the California cities of Fremont (13th) , located just east of San Jose-Silicon Valley, and Oxnard (17th), north of Los Angeles.

“…  Americans continue to move decisively to both lower-density, job-creating cities and to those less dense areas of major metropolitan areas particularly where single-family houses, good schools and jobs are plentiful. …

“Migration numbers for 2010 to 2012 alone hammer home that suburban areas are continuing to attract people, and that the more dense core areas do not generally perform as well. Although their growth has slowed compared to the last decade, suburban locales, with roughly three-quarters of all residents of metropolitan areas, have added many more people than their core counterparts. …

“The urban future will continue to evolve in directions that contradict the prevailing conventional wisdom of a shift toward more crowded living.”

Bad news for Darrell Steinberg and the other Stalinist planners who want to dictate where and how we live. Good news for those who believe in the American dream of a single-family home with a car or two in the sprawl that green schemers so hate.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — After the housing bubble burst a few years ago, sending real estate prices through the floor in many places, some influential academics and urban planners celebrated the supposed demise of something they had always derided: the suburbs.

In their view, the kind of homes and neighborhoods many of us live in are tacky, ugly, unsustainable blights. “Suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare and spiritual crisis for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about,” wrote James Howard Kunstler, a prominent New Urbanist writer who calls for the wholesale reordering of our built environment.

New Urbanists such as Kunstler push for a return to the old city model — people living in high rises and apartment buildings, relying on mass transit and shopping at local stores filled with goods produced in the surrounding area. While they make some good aesthetic points, they essentially believe we should all live in ways that they prefer.

It’s easy to chuckle at them, as they seize on every crisis (housing bubbles, rising gas prices, etc.) to warn of impending calamity, much like those doomsday preachers who are sure that the latest event is a signal that the world is coming to an end.

Control

But while most of us think only about short-term real estate issues, these ideologues have been changing the laws and building codes to mandate their long-term vision. Given the enormity of suburbia, it’s hard to discern the impact of this wide-ranging policy change. But pay attention to debates over new construction, and look at the requirements for higher occupancy densities, small or nonexistent yards, construction focused around transit and other common building mandates. They are designed to make the common form of suburbia obsolete.

“I live where a majority of Americans live: a tract house on a block of other tract houses in a neighborhood of even more,” wrote D.J. Waldie in his 1996 book, “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” Waldie spoke June 3 at the “No Place Like Home” conference in Anaheim, where he described his spiritual connection to the modest Lakewood, Calif., suburb where he has spent his life.

Kunstler described Lakewood, where thousands of homes were built quickly across farm fields after World War II, as “the place where evil dwells,” Waldie said. But it is Waldie’s “beloved community,” a place mocked by snobs but where middle-class people raise their kids and share their lives. These days, the new residents often are immigrants who have come from Mexico or Korea, but they share the same aspirations as those who moved there from places such as Des Moines and Pittsburgh.

The conference defended the ideal of homeownership — something the sponsor, conservative philanthropist Howard Ahmanson, argues is particularly important given “the phenomenon [that] has arisen of syndicates buying up houses in the Inland Empire in quantity for cash, to rent out.” Ahmanson’s father built the Home Savings of America empire that helped many Americans afford a home of their own.

A recent Sacramento News & Review article detailed the results of the reinflating housing bubble, in which ordinary homebuyers have been unable to compete for properties with companies that are buying them in bulk. Sellers, the article noted, won’t risk the uncertainty of dealing with someone who needs to obtain a mortgage when they can take cash from big corporate buyers.

Renters

This situation no doubt will pass, but it is a reminder that, in many places around the world, people have no choice but to spend their lives as renters. The planners who denounce suburbia offer as alternative models the big cities and stylish towns where few Americans could ever afford to live. These are nice places, but not realistic models for most Americans.

San Francisco and Carmel, for instance, are wonderful playgrounds for wealthy people, who enact regulatory and land-use policies that inflate the cost of entry and keep out people of middle-class incomes. Then they suggest their lives are superior to ours because they can walk to work and shop only at environmentally friendly local stores. (Note: Despite their pretenses, even trendy San Franciscans pack the big-box stores clustered under or along the 101 freeway in the heart of the city.)

Urban elitists don’t recognize that their policies helped create the “sprawl” that they disdain. It’s not as if middle-income workers in San Jose would choose to live over the mountain ranges in places such as Tracy, but the growth controls and other regulations that make it tough to build new houses in the Bay Area have so inflated the prices of the existing housing stock that people head to the hinterlands to afford a place of their own to raise their kids.

As speakers noted at the “No Place Like Home” conference, the homeownership ideal is the backbone of a free and democratic society in that it gives people a stake in their community. That’s worth remembering as today’s planners and officials deride suburbia and design what they hope will be a different kind of future.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Write to him at steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Californians are fleeing the center of their big cities while suburbs are suffering from slow growth. If it were not for international in-migration, California’s older big cities would be suffering from population decline the same as Detroit. Texas has become the “New California” by figuring out the formula to sustain the population of its older city centers while its suburbs are booming at the same time.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its Census of California metropolitan areas from 2010 to 2012. Every older large city in California is experiencing flight of its long-time residents, who are being replaced by international migrants. If it were not for international migration, the older core of California’s big cities would be in a sudden, massive population decline.  Property values and the property tax base would likely also fall.

Sources of Los Angeles Metropolitan Area In-Migration 2010 to 2012

The older core of Los Angeles lost 122,534 of its older residents from 2010 to 2012. In their place a wave of 118,961 net international migrants moved in.  In San Jose, 7,029 older residents moved out but were replaced by 30,315 international migrants. In Sacramento’s old city core, 2,086 residents moved out and 11,150 international migrants moved in. In Riverside-San Bernardino, 4,421 residents moved out, but 6,649 international migrants took their place.

California suburbs have experienced roughly balanced migration. But unlike Texas suburbs, Golden State suburbs are suffering from slow population growth.

The new Metropolitan Area Census shows 135,545 new migrants to California suburbs, reflecting only a 0.3 percent increase per year from 2010 to 2012.  Of this, 69,744, or 51 percent, were international migrants. California is not experiencing a “return to the city” or a “suburban growth boom.”

This is the opposite of what is happening in the metropolitan areas of Texas, where older cities are experiencing more balanced in-migration and its suburbs are booming from high levels of domestic in-migration.

Texas has more balanced migration in older cities

California needs a large influx of international migration to sustain population levels in its older cities, especially the older core of the City of Los Angeles and in the suburbs of San Jose.  Conversely, older cities in Texas reflect more balanced sources of in-migration.

Sources of Texas Metropolitan Area In-Migration 2010-2012

Unlike California, Texas metropolitan areas had greater domestic in-migration than international migration. 

Texas suburbs booming from domestic in-migration

From 2010 to 2012, Texas suburbs experienced a boom mostly from much higher levels of domestic in-migration than international migration. Eight of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are located in Texas.

One exception to the Texas trend of domestic in-migration in its suburbs were the suburbs of San Antonio. They are attracting wealthy “business-savvy” Mexicans, comparable to Cubans who after Castro seized power in 1959 sought refuge in Miami. Conversely, California is attracting more Asian international migrants, especially to high-tech areas in San Francisco and San Jose.

Markets, not anti-sprawl laws, work best

California’s political economy is based on high tax rates; rent control and growth controls; inflated housing values, but relatively low property tax rates because of Proposition 13; mandatory inclusionary housing and more jobs for teachers, tax assessors, subsidized solar power technicians, urban planners and environmentalists.  Its immigration policies are mostly the symbolic “Dream Act,” anti-deportation laws and “sanctuary cities.”

Texas’ economy is based on low or no business and income taxes, no rent control, few growth controls, higher property tax rates based on lower housing values, inclusionary old inner cities by markets, and tax incentives for private sector jobs. Only El Paso and Houston have sanctuary city policies.  An anti-sanctuary city bill died in the Texas legislature in 2011.

California has passed anti-sprawl legislation to try to halt the out-migration from its older big cities.  The results would have been miserable if international in-migration had not stemmed the outflow of population.

Texas has accomplished balanced in-migration into its older city centers where California has failed. The Texas incentive model is performing better than the California disincentive model as far as sustaining the center of its older big cities while Texas suburbs are booming at the same time.  Texas is accomplishing what 75 years of public housing and lending policies could not in California: an older city core that is attracting a “return to the city” by domestic and international migration and concurrent suburban growth.

Appendix 1:

MIGRATION: California vs. Texas Major Metropolitan Areas Migration

Data extracted from Wendell Cox, “Texas Cities Lead Population Growth.”

Appendix 2, Definitions:

Net Domestic Migration: The difference between domestic in-migration to an area and domestic out-migration from the same area during a specified time period. Domestic in- and out-migration consist of moves where both the origin and the destination are within the United States (excluding Puerto Rico). The net domestic migration rate expresses net domestic migration during a specified time period as a proportion of an area’s population at the midpoint of the time period. Rates are expressed per 1,000 population.

Net International Migration: Any change of residence across the borders of the United States (50 states and District of Columbia). The estimates of net international migration are made up of four sub-components:

1. Net international migration of the international born;
2. Net migration between the United States and Puerto Rico;
3. Net migration of natives to and from the United States; and
4. Net movement of the Armed Forces population between the United States and overseas. The international migration rate expresses net international migration during a specified time period as a proportion of an area’s population at the midpoint of the time period. Rates are expressed per 1,000 population.