New York Times: “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children”

One big challenge is emerging to the Smart Growth model: how to serve families with young children. In the case of Portland, high housing costs are motivating families to move to the newest edge suburbs, perpetuating sprawl. The New York Times reports (3/24/05):

San Francisco, where the median house price is now about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more dogs than children, was a close second…

Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city – dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary – are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families…

[Mayor Potter says,] “We can’t let Portland become a retirement city or a city without neighborhood schools.”

…From 1990 to 2003 the city added more than 90,000 people, growing to an estimated 529,121 residents, but Portland is now educating the fewest students in more than 80 years…

After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons…

Many Portland families are relocating to the newest edge suburbs, where housing prices are cheapest…

See also:

Metro Portland’s Long Experience with Smart Growth: A Cautionary Tale
Expected home price inflation was found to be greater than expected in most of the states that embraced smart growth, including Oregon, Washington, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Colorado…

Restrictive growth policies actually caused increased suburbanization in Portland, which now has the 10th greatest suburbanization rate in U.S. As home prices went up in the site-restricted metropolitan area, families moved further out to find affordable housing…

There is very little evidence that other aspects of restricted growth policies have reduced households’ costs in other areas to offset the increased costs of housing. In economic terms, it is safe to say that restricted growth policies are not family-friendly…

Small cities surrounded by developable land, like Eugene and Salem, now have housing prices that rival those in San Francisco Bay Area communities, when the purchasing power of local incomes is considered…

Oregon actually has a tremendous amount of available land… Oregon has apparently successfully engineered a shortage of sites in a state with plentiful land…

The New Draft Sustainable Northampton Plan: Balancing Compact Growth Against Taxes, Urban Greenspace, Homeowner Preferences
The Plan calls for high and medium density housing in downtown and the “more densely developed areas”, 12-65 units per acre. (p.13) If zoning rules are changed to facilitate this, it could mean that a parcel of land that represented one buildable lot could come to represent two lots or more. When land can be developed more intensely, its assessed value might rise. If you want to sell, you might be thrilled. If you don’t, however, the main impact on you might be a larger real estate tax bill. As the Plan acknowledges, “increased property values are desirable but not the increased property tax and decreased affordability that comes with increased value.” (p.17)

…The best plans will fail if they don’t appeal to the people. A 1993 Fannie Mae poll showed that “86 percent of American households believed that owning a home was better than renting…and 73 percent preferred a single-family detached home with a yard” (cited in J. Terrence Farris, “The Barriers to Using Urban Infill Development to Achieve Smart Growth”, 2001, PDF). The Sustainable Northampton Plan acknowledges this could be an issue (p.14),  but provides no examples of where American citizens have been persuaded to embrace the denser housing modes it calls for.

Berkeley, California: Cautions on Infill
In 1990, 60 percent of New Yorkers said they would live somewhere else if they could, and in 2000, 70 percent of urbanites in Britain felt the same way. Many suburbanites commute hours every day just to have “a home, a bit of private space, and fresh air.”

…Renters and other high-density residents are expected to do without adequate living space, greenspace, quiet, and cars; and without cars, they lack the freedom, pleasure, and mobility taken for granted by average Americans. This is ethically unacceptable…