Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon


 

Baconometer

Warming up

Inflection Point

 

The mega trends are turning in favor of central cities like Richmond and against the aging inner suburbs. Virginia may be entering an age of urban renaissance and suburban decay.


 

If all you had to go on were the headlines in the Richmond Times-Dispatch or the scolding on local talk radio, you’d easily conclude that the city of Richmond was in terminal decline. City council members have been under indictment or resigning in disgrace. Kickbacks and corruption are all too common. The murder rate, after dipping mercifully in the late 1990s, is climbing again. Schools fall perennially short of meeting the Standards of Learning (SOLs).

 

The headlines are true, all too horrifyingly true. But there’s more to Richmond than scandal and conflict. Believe it or not, the city is on the mend.

 

Like every inner city in the United States, Richmond has its share of highly visible social and political problems. But economic and demographic tides have shifted solidly in its favor. White flight, which afflicted the city for three decades or more, has ended. Virtually unnoticed, affluent citizens from around the metropolitan region have been moving back into the city. In many neighborhoods, incomes are rising faster than the regional average. Despite the city’s best efforts at self-sabotage, the tax base is stabilizing.

 

Equally significant, and unnerving, the pathology of poverty is seeping into the surrounding counties. Aging shopping centers and dowdy neighborhoods in Henrico and Chesterfield Counties are showing the same signs of decrepitude that inner city precincts did four decades ago. Higher-income households are leaking from Richmond's inner suburbs where there’s nothing – no charm, no public spaces, no pedestrian comforts, no architecture worth preserving -- to hold them. Large swathes of the counties’ tax base are eroding.

 

The trends unfolding in the Richmond region are national in scope, replaying in city after city. Similar changes can be seen in urban regions as large as the Washington metroplex and as small as Charlottesville. But it’s here in Richmond that the phenomenon has been carefully documented by two University of Virginia urban planning professors, William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips, in a census tract-level of study of incomes and housing types.

 

“Our forecast is that in the period from 2000 to 2020, much of Richmond will recover, perhaps very strongly,” wrote Lucy and Phillips in a report to the Richmond Urban land Institute last fall. “In contrast, much — perhaps most — of Henrico and Chesterfield will stumble and some parts will collapse — as parts of Richmond collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s.”

 

The driving force behind these tectonic shifts is a relentless quest for better housing. As incomes have risen over the past two decades, Americans have sought bigger, more comfortable homes. Nationally, the median size of a house was 1,100 square feet in 1950, according to Lucy. With each decade, the average size grew. By 1970, the median reached 1,375 square feet. By 2000, the size reached 2,000 square feet. Most of the houses being built today are larger than the median, Lucy says.

 

In Richmond, people moving up to bigger houses have tended to do one of two things: Migrate to the urban periphery where new subdivisions are being developed and the biggest houses are being constructed, or move back to older urban neighborhoods where houses either had been renovated or offered the potential to be renovated.

 

Newness is what sells in the newer neighborhoods. Houses come with all the latest amenities – sprawling decks, home theaters, three-car garages, giant kitchens with granite countertops, whatever happens to be in fashion among the upwardly mobile professionals. What sells older houses, despite the frequent difficulty of retrofitting them to current Yuppie standards, is a combination of architectural elegance, structural integrity and neighborhood ambience – in particular a pedestrian-friendly environment and a finer-grained mix of houses, shops and offices.

 

By contrast, most housing built in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s has little to recommend it, Lucy notes. The sheen of newness has worn away. The houses are small, the architecture undistinguished, and the neighborhoods lacking in charm. What's more, notes Lucy, “Suburban neighborhoods are inconvenient. There is little to walk to. Every activity requires driving, and driving is not as much fun as it used to be when there was less traffic.”

 

By default, lower income households move into the smaller houses and less desirable neighborhoods that the more affluent families vacated. It's a fact of life that poor people have to live somewhere. No one is building new dwellings for them -- builders encounter ferocious resistance to “affordable housing” projects that might bring in "undesirables." So, poor people move into the houses no one else wants -- increasingly, small, single-family dwellings in the aging suburbs.

 

As a consequence, although poverty is still concentrated disproportionately in the city of Richmond, poverty rates starting nudging down in the 1990s. Poverty, by contrast, ticked upwards in Henrico and Chesterfield.

 

Family Poverty Rates
  1990 2000 % Change
Richmond  17.4 %   17.1 %   -1.7 %  
Chesterfield  2.9 %   3.3 %   +13.8 %  
Henrico 3.9 %   4.5 %   +15.4 %  
Source: Lucy and Phillips

 

A similar trend can be seen by identifying those census districts where income gains lagged the metro-wide average by 10 percent or more. In the 1970s, census tracts that were losing ground were concentrated in the city of Richmond. In the 1980s, decay had clearly shifted to the inner suburbs: There were more declining census tracts in Henrico/Chesterfield than in the city. By the 1990s, twice as many census tracts were on the downhill slide in Henrico and Chesterfield as there were in the city!

 

Declining Census Tracts

(Decreasing in relative average family income by 10 percent or more)

 

Total tracts

Number in decline

% in Decline

1970-1980

Richmond  65     

26

40 %
Henrico  69     

6

10 %
Chesterfield 60     

14

23 %

1980-1990

Richmond  65      33 51 %
Henrico  69      23 39 %
Chesterfield  60      28 47 %

1990-2000

Richmond  65     

21

32 %

Henrico  69     

27

46 %
Chesterfield   60     

23

38 %
Source: Lucy and Phillips

 

By definition, if some neighborhoods are losing ground compared to metro-wide averages, others are gaining. When Lucy and Phillips examined the hottest census tracts, where income gains exceeded metro average by 10 percent or more, they found major shifts over time. In the 1970s, the hot, fast-rising income tracts were located in the suburbs. The 1980s still leaned to the suburbs, though not as emphatically. In the 1990s, however, the number of hot census tracts in Richmond outnumbered those in Henrico and Chesterfield combined.

 

Rising Census Tracts

 (Increasing in relative average family income by 10 percent or more)

 

Total tracts

Number Rising

%

Rising

1970-1980

Richmond  65      12 18 %
Henrico  69      32 54 %
Chesterfield 60      8 13 %

1980-1990

Richmond  65      12 18 %
Henrico  69      7 12 %
Chesterfield 60      14 23 %

1990-2000

Richmond  65      19 29 %
Henrico  69      6 10 %
Chesterfield 60      7 12 %
Source: Lucy and Phillips

 

These positive trends do not mean that Richmond is out of the woods. In the 1990s, Richmond still counted more fast-declining census tracts than fast-growing ones. That trend was still evident in 2001-2002 Internal Revenue Service numbers indicating that taxpayers moving out of the city earned $4,300 less than taxpayers moving into the city. (See my column, "The Silent Migration," Sept. 8, 2003.) But the fact remains that there is a two-way migration. Affluent people are moving back into the city in significant number.

 

(An outflow of affluent households also afflicts Henrico, where taxpayers leaving the county earned $2,577 more than those moving into it. Chesterfield, with fewer older neighborhoods and more brand-new neighborhoods, is still experiencing a positive influx, in which newcomers earned $2,982 more than taxpayers who left.) 

 

Popular perceptions do not match these dramatic demographic and economic shifts. But it seems reasonably clear that Richmond and other central cities across the U.S. have reached an inflection point. The inner city's decades-long decline is bottoming out -- indeed, many central cities are rebounding. At the same time poverty, with all of its attendant problems, is seeping into the suburbs. If the 20th century was marked by the the decay of great American cities and the rise of the suburbs, the 21st will experience the long hoped-for urban renaissance. And it won't be long before national news magazines and presidential candidates are decrying the decay of our aging, desolate suburbs.

 

Old housing, once Richmond's greatest liability, is now its greatest asset. According to Lucy, less than 10 percent of the region's housing stock was built before 1940 -- and most of that is concentrated in the city. Nobody's building any more of the old stuff. In fact, nobody's building anything that remotely resembles it. The traditional pattern of development -- grid streets, back alleys, public spaces, architecturally prominent public buildings, pleasant intermixture of houses, shops, restaurants and residential-scale office buildings -- has been all but outlawed by contemporary zoning ordinances.

 

Traditional neighborhoods aren't for everyone, but Lucy suspects that popular tastes are changing and they're coming back in favor. As Richard Florida observes in his work The Rise of the Creative Class, members of the so-called creative class -- the artistic, scientific and entrepreneurial innovators -- crave "authenticity," or a strong sense of place. Another body of theory also suggests that in the Knowledge Economy, creative professionals prefer physical environments that stimulate personal interaction and the exchange of ideas. Older cities meet the test; cul de sac subdivisions and office-box Nerdistans in the suburbs do not. 

 

A city like Richmond enjoys immense advantages over the suburbs. It has character: monuments and statues, developable waterfront along the James River, and neighborhoods with history and distinctive architecture. It has institutional anchors, like the state capital complex, Virginia Commonwealth University and a host of museums. All the suburbs offer is vacant land for new houses, new malls and new office complexes. Much of the commercial space, financed with with 20-year depreciation schedules, is designed for planned obsolescence. Once the newness wears off, there's nothing left to hold customers or businesses, who migrate to the latest and newest project.

 

It also turns out that the scattered, low-density development so typical of the suburbs has immense drawbacks -- most visibly, the impact on traffic congestion. Sadly, suburban elected officials appear oblivious to the problems. Suburban politicians, though not as corrupt as some of their city counterparts, are every bit as misguided. Indeed, short-sighted policies pursued in suburban counties will only accentuate the reverse flight back into the city.

 

Between 1992 and 1997, the Richmond region developed 58,000 acres for subdivisions, office parks, highways, parking lots and other uses, according to a recent report issued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. ("Where are We Growing? Land Use and Transportation in Richmond.") That voracious pace of land consumption outpaced the rate in sprawling, land-hungry Northern Virginia (49,300 acres) and Hampton Roads (43,300 acres), both of which have significantly larger populations. Indeed, Richmond can lay claim to being one of the fastest-sprawling New Urban Regions in the entire country.

 

That scattered, low-density growth puts an immense strain on public services, increasing pressure on otherwise efficiently administered local governments to raise taxes. Sprawl also puts intolerable stress on the transportation system. Richmonders are among the most auto-dependent citizens in the United States, according to the SELC report. More than 92 percent of all commuting trips involved driving, and only 10.4 percent of those were carpools. Only two percent of commuters used transit, and only 5.5 percent walked to work, rode a bike or worked at home.

 

Richmonders commute farther on average -- 26.5 miles per person in 2001 -- than residents of larger urban regions such as Northern Virginia (22.5 miles) or Hampton Rods (22.7 miles). As a consequence, Richmond roads are getting increasingly congested. The mean travel time to work rose from 21.4 minutes in 1990 to 24.3 minutes in 2000 -- a 13.5 percent increase. Total hours lost to travel delays in the region increased 10-fold between 1982 and 2001, to 7.1 million hours, the SELC noted.

As suburban driving becomes increasingly hellish, life looks better and better in the city center. Although the population is denser in the city of Richmond, traffic is not as congested. Driving distances are shorter -- and walking, biking and buses are credible alternatives to hopping in a car.

There are no obvious solutions to the suburban plight. Suburban counties cannot undo sprawl. They cannot make small houses bigger or more attractive to affluent home buyers. And they cannot easily rip down strip malls and cul de sacs subdivisions. What they can do -- but show no sign of doing -- is acknowledge the wounds that they are inflicting upon themselves through misguided zoning and planning policies, and begin thinking how to encourage redevelopment of the asphalt dystopia they've created over the past 40 years.

The job for city officials will start getting easier as the trend of the past 10 years -- the out-migration of poor households and the in-migration of affluent ones -- continues to play out. If Richmond council members simply refrain from graft and corruption, the rest will take care of itself.

-- January 19, 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire back!

 

You can berate Bacon at jabacon@

baconsrebellion.com

 

Or read his profile here.